Do you remember
the Charleventh night of Kirktember?
Chud was changin’ the minds of attenders
While gushin’ his life away

I see no god here.

I grew up in a rural area and have lived in big cities. I always found myself thinking about how the country life is death and the cities are alive. People think it’s the opposite. The country has animals and agriculture and trees and “less crime”, so how can it be death?

I think it’s a combination of things. The towns are just decaying remnants of mid-century America. Main street is pre-war shops built in the 20s and 30s by whatever big industry was local (tobacco for me). You can see post-war spending on various post offices or police stations and schools. In between all this are dilapidated ruins of former economic activity. Abandoned garages because the old man who fixed cars there since he was 20 died decades ago and it’s just rotting where it stands. Rusty metal building for a machine shop that was outsourced before I was born. The big spooky abandoned or half-shut down factory for whatever big industry was local. Tract housing built by the big industry 80-100 years ago. The housing is terrible and falling apart but you can’t update it because you’re grandfathered into not spending $80k. Everything is small. Every restaurant is a mom-and-pop that everyone swears is the most unique and best food in the country but all they do is fry Sysco food. Basically they’re trading in on some family name back when they made bbq or hamburgers in the 50s. Nothing is new. Every time something gets a fresh coat of paint, it’s because someone spent their life savings to open a new business, like a laser wood burning/cutting shop, renovating the space, only to go out of business after a year.

Then when you move out of town, it’s just fields of subsidized crops that nobody uses locally. Random subdivisions in the middle of nowhere because some developer bought the land for $1 from a farmer’s estate. Rusting, aging farming equipment by the road. Yards full of old cars. These little oasis of nice mid-century and late-century homes occupied by some 64 year old who spend most of their adult life in some kind of post-war boom so they can afford to do landscaping. And that’s the other thing, the people. It’s just people who have lived here all their lives, deciding to not go anywhere, or not able to go anywhere. They’re just waiting to die. There’s nothing to do but go out to eat at tex-mex restaurant. It’s just people sitting around doing nothing and working and preparing to be the ones who can afford landscaping in 30 years.

It’s like living in the skeleton of a big dead thing with people who think it’s really cool to prepare for death and die and be dead. They want you be dead like them too. And I don’t tell anyone any of this because it probably sounds unhinged. But I also feel like they know it because they resent you if you have any bit of worldliness or cultural experience outside of morning chat at the local 1970s gas station with 2 pumps older than me and doesn’t take cards. By worldliness I mean the most basic sense that you are a person in a larger world with other people with different cultures or experiences.

It’s not that I hate the country life, it’s just that it has cut me off from so much for so long. Nobody here seems very happy. Everyone seems to be struggling. The past won’t go away because there is no mechanism to build a future. You can say big cities are like that too, but it’s more apparent here. The city feels like it still has a pulse. I concede that it depends on the city because being alive doesn’t imply also being good.

80% chance on polymarket that he says “Flock camera to the polls” in November.

I keep waiting for a politically secular string of terrorist events to happen, where the ideology is based purely on how cringe an annoying public figures are online. I thought it was happening with Kirk but Tyler is, allegedly, too ideological. There has to be a Kaczynski for obnoxious online behavior.

Remember, all these deregulation events won’t be undone if/when Dems get in. It’s been this way since the 90s. Clinton didn’t undo Reagan. Obama didn’t undo Bush. Biden didn’t undo Trump 1.

Our entire food supply is going to be a lazy-fair “at your own risk” roulette wheel where maybe you’re okay but you know people who will die from it. Right now the news is covering every single outbreak because it’s Trump. When it’s not Trump, they’ll stop covering it. Just like when Biden got in they started talking about how covering covid was too much of a downer. Eventually it’ll just be normal and any outbreak information will be relegated to some boring government website that nobody looks at. Eventually they’ll just stop counting minor outbreaks at all because who’s to say why people are sharting themselves for days on end? Probably their immoral lifestyle.

This is permanent and you should be getting ready to live with it the rest of your life or find sanctuary in some blue state that will take on the burden of doing minor food inspections at a state level.

They’ll eat more pickles but they won’t log the fuck off and stop being annoying online.

Shanghai Ravioli Corporation, based in Boston

I mean…

In preparation I finally finished GTAV. I bought it on sale in like 2022 and only finished about 1/3 of the main story. I picked it up again and replayed it. It was very whelming and there’s enough stuff that frustrates me about the game to not treat it like this great cultural artifact. I then started playing GTAO for the first time ever, and realized how much shit was cut from single-player to support this crime MMORPG. But I saw a vision of what R* wanted: a highly popular live service game that overshadows a single player-experience. It’s not even about fun because it’s mostly grinding the typical “drive here, shoot this, deliver this” gameplay but with the added aspect of people who spent $3000 real money on the game so they could grief people as a hobby. But the proof-of-concept for what GTA VI’s online could be is there and it’s kind of frightening.

In fact, the devs said that the game is way more freeform than previous entries. I expect the single-player experience for VI to play a lot like GTAO. And that’s why this game really needs to fail (but it won’t). It’s just setting up another dreary entry in the history of gaming that ends with some kind of live betting cyber-torture VR experience developed by slaves in Saudi Arabia for grotesque “middle class” pod people in the US. If VI were to fumble the bag then we could at least have a long interim of bespoke indie nostalgia slop that’s annoying to talk about but at least not the torment nexus of gaming. The pod people thing is unavoidable though, I’m afraid.

Just purely talking from personal taste: It’s going to be serviceable “drive here, shoot this, deliver this” gaming with lots of detail nobody cares about except youtubers who make their living pointing out how ice cubes melt in the background. As someone who has lived in Miami, this is the first thing I’ve seen that kind of feels like the real thing (except for all the wrong geography). Nothing I saw in the leaks really made it feel like south Florida, it could have been Los Santos again. And it’s obvious we’re getting 2013-2017 cultural references as the main course. That’s the problem with them deciding every entry needs to be modern. IV felt like 2002. V felt more like 2008. With as fast as everything is now, this will not feel like a game set in 2026.

I will treat it like V. I will wait another 5-10 years before I buy it on deep discount and then complain about it online.

Renaming Washington D.C. to Washington America because it’s not a District of Columbia, it’s a district of the United States.

American burger:

• Beef: uninspected
• Lettuce: parasites
• Tomato: ecoli
• Pickle: cut for budgetary reasons
• Bun: cellulose and sugar
• Price: $50 per month subscription (plus tip)

Crimes of the Future (2022)

Instead he plans to make it law to memorialize the real 9/11.

critical support to lack of structural support

She can be financially successful without us but she can’t be authentically “leftist” without us. Her identity as a real leftist, and therefore good person, who is doing enough to save the world, relies on acceptance into this club. She can’t buy her way in with patreon dollars. All she can do is argue, plead, and cajole. She could, as you said, find acceptance in the libs but she doesn’t value their acceptance the way she values ours.

I can’t imagine being one of these people who are so hyped up, thinking this shit is going to be the most detailed and realistic game ever, only to boot up the game and the first mission is driving a rusty El Camino to pick up an NPC. Then a 30 min cut scene of some character who’s entire shtick is that they talk loud and say the satirical things with a huge elbow to your forehead. Driving, not being able to enjoy the 15 years of detail and ambiance because two characters are doing bad “and then…” together for the entire ride.

Also all the monetization is going to be appalling. In-game stores locked behind irl money. Clothes, accessories, cars, colors, character customization, probably player homes. All going to be hundreds of dollars on top of a $100 base game.

woof

wruff

awooo

Dear god man go get a real job.

You’re a big mac

For you

Yes for total petroleum products, no for crude oil. Also iirc we can’t refine our own oil because refineries are tooled for heavy sour crude and not the domestically produced light sweet crude.