Uriel238 [all pronouns]

We live in a YAF dystopia that is way less cool than most of the storybook ones.

And while every kid’s story is their chance to veer away from the usual fate of becoming a corporate cog (laborer or soldier) in a billionaire vanity project, most will just end up stuck like Winston without his nook, or will get imprisoned or will just go homeless.

We’re pretty sure it’s the Monsanto pesticide and anyone who suggests it is hit with a litigation threat. Curiously, as we’re speed-breeding domesticated bees the wild bees are dying out faster, so as the bee population dwindles it also becomes more domesticated and less wild. I know that’s a bad thing, but I am fuzzy on the why details.

I’m a brown thumb, and plants wilt as my shadow falls on them, but if you’re a green-thumb, plant pollinators, which will help the bees.

Also plant milkweed for the monarchs.

Yeah, but the police don’t hover over us in Spinners as in Bladerunner. They still have to chopper from helipad to airport and ride off in air traffic, so less in our faces.

Their superfluous greenhouse emissions fit the cyberpunk vibe though.

It my current state of five months into a long-term psychotic break, I have the joy of feeling lonely, walking to where people are, and needing to leave immediately, and feeling lonely by the time I get home again.

What a marvel the brain can be!

I’m glad we got ubiquitous smartphones instead of only rich people having flying cars.

Still, I’m promoting way, way more punk in our cyberpunk.

The point of The Terror was to burn the Révolution into the skulls of generations to come by making it so horrible the ownership class would be terrified into treating the working class nicely (this was before class consciousness, so it was the Petit Bourgeoisie that actually formed the Assemblée nationale representing the third estate. They, too, are ownership class, once Marx sorted it all out.)

This is why heads had to be piled high. We were supposed to be scared into civility. But as the early 20th century demonstrated to us, it didn’t work, and we still have people voting for far-right parties in order to vote against neoliberalism (which is happening a lot in Europe right now, and is a sound explanation of why Trump still got so many votes.)

65% of life forms on the planet engage in parasitic survival strategies. This was a risk we took when we started using agriculture, allowing for specializations other than chieftain and shaman. (Everyone else was a generalist.)

Our instincts are still the same hunter-gatherer stuff from 25,000 years ago. Which includes behaviors antithetical to large, complex civilization.

One of those is a bias towards obedience to authority, and to loyalty to clan, over principle (creeds, laws, codes of ethics). We tend to want to obey the chieftain who commands us rather than challenge them when they demand the unconscionable.

Demagogues, who exploit these biases, were known in classic Athens, hence we have a Greek name for such people, and Athenians tried to recognize and shun them.

The bible has a lot of proscriptions against manipulative tyrants and priests. It also has many decrees to uplift the widow, the stranger, the immigrant, the destitute. This tells us the problem of dudes seeking to consolidate social power (money and authority) and then abuse that power has been a problem throughout known human history.

Obviously we haven’t fixed it yet and still want high tech water, sewage, power and information infrastructure.

We need a movement that is willing to assert its collective power not just for a few concessions but until we have an ironclad social contract that distributes political power widely, and does not tolerate surplus when there is scarcity and need.

I hope he gets messaged every hour about how his name might draw the wrong crowd.

Also that he needs to take pills for a bigger penis.

ETA: And that he might be able to profit from Nigerian princes needing some money laundered through the United States.

Also he should try EA’s FIFA offerings… okay, I’m getting carried away. No one deserves that.

Years ago, I played Homefront: The Revolution which was a ridiculous premise (North Korea magically invents and develops microcircuits in the 20th century instead of the US, and invades the US) but had solid weapons and a really great remote-control car bomb.

Its version of the flying cameras from Half Life 2 that actually identifies you and calls for reinforcements also was spot on.

It also had a pretty cool pause-screen song.

Then it had trouble working with computer upgrades, and I moved on to other things.

Giving the benefit of the doubt, it’s illustrating a process for near-readymade art.

Terraria currently. Satisfactory and DRG before.

This is a much cooler (and much more 3D) bone than the two nodules at each end flat bone.

I get that they flattened it to make it cheaper to stamp, but still. I’m counting at least three peaks at the top.

This is what I assumed. Assuming its non-injurious, the marble will sting a lot more, on the other hand, I’d be under a bowling ball (or holding it.)

If its at a significantly injurious amount of momentum, there is no right answer.

This raises a valid point. Why is the default bone shape an elliptic cylinder with two symmetrical nodules at each end. Even as a kid (in the 1980s) I noticed this was weird, since no bone we take meat off of or have in our body looks like that.

Money absolutely does buy happiness until you’re in middle class and in a fulfilling job. (If you’re rich but in a shit job, it means you might have the option to work less or look for a better position.)

Money does not buy you happiness applies to people who are already rich and are looking for money to fulfill needs way high on the Maslow hierarchy. In fact, much of the tyranny and cruelty within stratified social systems comes from miserable rich people believing they should be happy due to their vast wealth and power yet are not. And our capitalist society has messages everywhere that promise that a new car, (yacht, vacation, lover, religion, etc.) will totally fulfill them and they don’t.

I mean we’ve had three billionaires shoot themselves into space. If that’s not an obvious plead to the gods or the cosmos for a taste of nirvana I don’t know what is.

Curiously, this is a thing that Jesus (and every other divine-ish wise guy) knew about: If we give away our vast fortune and live simply with that experience and wisdom, fulfillment comes. But it means overcoming greed for wealth and power, which is quicker, easier, more seductive.

ETA: For those of us outside the ownership class, though, money improves our base Maslow hierarchy (better housing, HVAC, better water, better food) and gets us out of precarity (or worse, scarcity) which make us desperate and miserable (which accounts completely for elevated crime in poor neighborhoods). Money buys us out of that hell hole. The only thing better than not being there is to also have the perspective of not being there, which can lead to maybe helping others behind you out… Unless you’re Clarence Thomas. (He’s a very special case.)

There will be a lot of prodigal kids raised in conservative families who stay conservative. But then there will be a lot of kids who will be taught conservative values yet find as they grow up that those values don’t include them or friends, and they end up going through an identity crisis.

Adult children of conservative families grow up liberal or even radical left as they do conservative kids. There are enough unhappy childhoods to assure that’s the case.

We’re seeing this play out in Japan, which not only informs their population implosion, but also their significant rise of demographics like herbivore men who realize they’ve been culled out of the salaryman positions and are not going to be able to follow the path their parents set for them, so they stay single, and live on their own terms, even if meagerly. There is also a strong and rising feminist movement that’s emerged from a majority conservative population.

It’s a good era in which to not have children. Expect a lot of forsaken children.

Also expect some coerced birthing programs such as the Leibensborn program (which was also an excuse to recruit young women as sex slaves for the Schutzstaffel ) and the offspring were supported by the state and raised by the single mothers.

This is the program that inspired the Handmaid program in Margaret Atwood’s Gilead, in A Handmaid’s Tale

And J. D. Vance is super thirsty for it, as is countless other Freedom caucus and MAGA Republican officials.

ETA That said, it might be a good time to get sterilized and commit to not having kids. (That doesn’t mean you won’t have chances to parent)

You’re not alone. Karel Čurda turned in Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš for assassinating Reinhard Heydrich (The naziest nazi of all the nazis, also the chief implementer of the Holocaust. Also the only assassination effort implemented by the Allies). Čurda got the reward of one million Reichmarks for betraying his own sabotage team.

Čurda would then be hanged for high treason in 1947.

Diffusion of Responsibility

It’s a Wikipedia day, today.

Mostly because our ability to organize and unify against the wealthy is overwhelmed by the wealthy’s tools to keep us factioned and distrustful of each other. Hence the necessity of the fascist enemy within rhetoric.

The problem is, we humans are simple emotional beings who are really credulous when it comes to being told stuff we want to hear, and the wealthy have crafted messaging catering to this bias and wishful thinking (hence “you are the chosen people and have to massacre all the others who are spiritual flesh-eating zombies”)

That sounds way cooler to the lumpen-proletariat than “you’re just another commoner, but if we work together we can topple the people who hoard all the stuff and make a fun themepark for everyone!”