sp3ctr4l

Everything Mel Brooks.

Airplane!

The Producers

Blazing Saddles… etc.

So many of his movies have such memorable lines and jokes that still hold up today.

I think I agree with you but maybe didn’t explain my stance so well.

Putin and his immediate orbit are … largely, but not entirely, successfully creating a hyperreality for everyone else to live in and experience, they purposefully engage in it as an intentional tactic, to sow confusion and chaos around everything, and then at least project into that chaos that they are stability.

Trump and his immediate circle… are too fucking incompotent to engage in creating a hyperreality as an intentional tactic… in the sense that they actually believe in half of the insane bullshit they throw out into the world, and they are not actually capable of projecting themselves as that island of stability.

Putin and co largely do not live in the hyperreality they create, at least not anywhere near to the extent Trump and co do.

Putin usually knows when he’s lying or promoting an utterly dubious notion.

Of course there are some utter nonsense ideas that Putin seems to truly believe, what with his personal idea of how Russo/Slavic history, and identity actually work, and his initial vast overestimation of the capability of the Russian military.

But Trump… doesn’t even know enough, in most instances, to even know if he is intentionally lying or not.

Trump himself is to a much greater extent, completely lost in the hyperreality he initially created, and can no longer wield it as a political/psychological weapon/tactic with intentionality.

To torture a metaphor:

Trump is lost in the sauce, utterly drowning in it, Putin just has a daily foot bath in the sauce.

My only income is Social Security Disability Income.

I am quite literally having a call with a pro bono lawyer from a non profit law firm that specializes in Social Security matters in a few hours, after having gone through their application process last week.

I am just trying to pre emptively set myself for at least some kind of legal counsel… as it now seems inevitable that I will need one, given the insanity going at Social Security, thanks to Musk and DOGE not being able to understand how any of their databases work, and taking a hatchet to staff headcount and shutting down Soc Sec physical locations.

Its hyperreality, as Adam Curtis shows in his documentary mostly focusing on Putin… but the Trump admin is actually too stupid to realize … that that is what it is, they fell for their own bs, sheltered and curated worldviews because they are so, so skilled at (really, privileged enough to be able to) surrounding themselves with yes men and sycophants and cult members.

I mean, a big element of it is falling for much of Putin’s actually intentionally constructed hyperreality… but the Trump admin and MAGA people are actually too stupid to even been correctly just… generally cynical, and the result is honestly more akin to a 1944/45 Nazi movement that has leaders and followers mostly just still in denial/cognitive dissonance and grandiose cult like faith at the same time.

But the MAGA hyperreality … isn’t centrally planned or directed. Its … basically an accidental consensus of a bunch of idiots screaming different kinds of idiocy into the void loud enough, and the kinda sorta generally agreed on hyperreality is whatever ends up echoing the loudest and most clearly.

They can’t even project stability or competency, even as hollow suits, even as a false but semi-convincing front.

Just go look at the last two weeks ish of public appearances of Trump and his cabinet and Elon.

Half of them are having emotional breakdowns, manic episodes live on air, Hohman, whatever, the DHS goon leading deportations… either he was fucking drunk, or his dentures were falling out of his mouth, a reporter/news host asks him a question and he gives like a 75 word rambling response, maybe 10 of the words actually intelligible.

The inmates are running the asylum.

… Oh well, at least I’ve personally passed through the intense despair and depression phase of knowing this was coming, and am now just laughing at how truly stupid and farsical this all is, and how it is honestly, precisely what Americans deserve for either being idiot cult members, apathetic, or placing their faith in an utterly incompetent Democratic party that just still thinks its 1992, or squabbling over inane idpol differences.

We are apparently actually so stupid, irresponsible and/or more concerned with petty nonsense issues that we are just actually going to have to go through the fire of either overthrowing these malevolent morons, or just acquiesce to all becoming true debt serfs and burn to a crisp.

I’ve been saying that Trump and his ‘ideas’ on tariffs are just… completely, fundamentally broken and self contradictory, at every possible level.

He literally just doesn’t get it, he doesn’t grasp what you’d be taught in AP Macroecon or a first quarter of Macroecon at a college or uni.

Yes, of course, more competent oligarchs can profit from an engineered economic collapse…

But Trump and his immediate orbit are literally too stupid to understand why what they are doing won’t work the way they think it will.

These idiots are very largely at the peak of the dunning kruger confidence vs actual knowledge curve, right before you fall off into the abyss of ‘oh shit this is actually really conplicated and i am a moron.’

Of course, they’ll never admit they are morons or were ever wrong, they’ll just keep lying, misdirecting, and inventing new insane conspiracy theories with secret enemies thaf explain why they failed

Ah ok! I didn’t see that. =]

see my reply to sugar_in_my_tea for more of my take on this, but yes I do agree that it is a broad generalization and … well really, either my way or your way of interpreting it, it isn’t really that funny.

… It is alluding to an old and persistent stereotype that gay men are more likely to be highly promiscuous and basically go home with a different dude from the gay bar every night.

This stereotype itself hugely played into the ‘Gay Panic’ during the onset of GRIDS/AIDS. AIDS was originally called Gay Related ImmunoDeficiency Syndrome because it initially popped up mostly amongst gay men, and the media and culture at the time largely presented it as a scourge from God meant to punish the gays for their evil ways.

I have known a good number of gay men, and at least anecdotally, sure I’ve known a few who were quite permiscuous, and they’d be the ones to make this kind of meme/joke with a degree of self aware irony, but the vast majority were monogamous and would basically be either moderately or significantly offended at anyone making this joke, and would say that the aforementioned promiscuous gay guys were doing more harm than good by perpetuating the stereotype by making the joke, even ironically.

… It is saying gay men are more promiscuous than straight men.

Straight Guy: 10 sex partners woo!

Gay Guy: (mocking, overly grandiose congratulations)

… The gay guy is just… represented by a picture of a woman, because she is nailing the pose/expression.

Yeah, you are right that it could just be a coincidence, and the image is based off of an actual corpse… but it could also be intentionally altered off of the actual real world source image to extentuate the seeming stoppage of the burn damage to stop roughly where the mask/faceplate/helmet segments are.

My face when the Combine roll up:

Notice how the … dermis is stripped off, right up until about the area the faceplate of a CP/OW stops, and connects into the rear/neck part of their headgear?

This guy is either a dead, former CP/OW, or an early attempt at making a human into a CP/OW that… didn’t work out so well.

… This is basically confirmed in HL Alyx, you can find some OW with… very similarly fucked up faces.

Once the mask goes on… taking it off will almost certainly kill you.

Oh dear, I am reasonably confident I do not want to exist in the world of Kenshi.

I haven’t had a dream I remembered in years, but I do distinctly remember a dream I had as a kid.

Some… Dr Suess book? Features basically an animated, living pair of pants.

The night after I read it, I basically had a horror movie dream (hadn’t seen any horror movies yet)… basically I tried to open my dresser and get ready for school, the pants burst out of the dresser, knocked me over, and I ran through an infinite hallway with the pants chasing me.

In summary, my Freddy Kruger is a pair of jeans.

Tony musta got a job with JP Morgan or Amazon or some cushy government job:

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/white-house/3320030/federal-workers-ordered-return-work-no-office-space/

https://www.benefitspro.com/2025/02/20/rto-reality-check-amazons-office-shortage-exposes-return-to-work-hurdles/?slreturn=20250308-20413

Employer: RETURN TO OFFICE!

Employee: … okie dokie… where’s my cubicle?

Employer: Fuck, wait, we actually need office space after we tell everyone to RTO?

Star Citizen is certainly a gigantic ongoing delusion/scam of development hell…

But it doesn’t really meet the sort of ‘internal corporate contagion’ criteria, it won’t directly tank non Star Citizen teams or games.

While they have contracted out development work at various points… its not a giant conglomerate of different studios working on different projects.

If it finally liquidates and goes tits up, it only kills Star Citizen, and maybe Chris has to sell his yacht or w/e.

Star Citizen is its own special kind of nonsense.

Since Ubisoft introduced us to the term AAAA game with Skull and Bones, my attempt at giving an actual, solid definition to differentiate a AAA game from a AAAA game has had this as a fundamental aspect:

The game gets stuck in development hell, analagous to a movie that keeps needing reshoots and rewrites, and ends up requiring so much money thrown at chasing the sunk cost fallacy that it negatively impacts not only its own development, but impacts the development of other games by the same studio/publisher, and/or the overall financial solvency / employment headcount of the overarching parent company.

Basically, what a AAAA game actually is, is analagous to a bank or large corporation that is Too Big To Fail… but video game companies largely are not going to be bailed out by the government.

So, by that metric, we’ve got:

Skull and Bones

Concord

Suicide Squad

If you go back further in gaming history, you could probably find more games that fit typical AAA criteria (Large-Huge numbers of actual developers, aiming at a high level of graphical fidelity, financed by a large corporate publisher that controls a plethora of studios, all these measured relative to the timeframe of development)…

… and then also hits the AAAA criteria, that the development drags on forever, a sunk cost fallacy mindset sets in amongst management, management then gets high on its own supply, and the game draws in so many manpower and financial resources that it endangers entire other projects and teams not directly connected to this particular game’s development if this Too Big To Fail game does actually fail.

… proceeds to run off at high speed, get their foot caught in a small pothole, causing them to break their ankle and leg, then tumble across the ground at 35 mph, breaking half of the bones in their body.

Completely off topic, but I first read that as ‘DNA’, did a double take.

At this point, an announcement that whoever is in charge of all DNA continuing to work just stepped down or got fired… wouldn’t really seem that out of character for this timeline.

Bingo.

Psycopathy/Sociopathy (They’ve been merged together into ASPD as of the DSM 5) is 100% normalized, actually idealized, often literally worshipped, promoted as the mode of behavior of a successful, powerful person.

… So long as you don’t directly go around murdering and robbing and defrauding people yourself, one at a time, if you can do all that indirectly via commanding or directing a complex, layered, system, then congrats, your psycopathy produces concentrated profits and socialized misery, and tens of millions of idiots will believe you are a role model.

No, come on man…!

What we need…

Is another… open world survival pvp crafting game.

Preferably with zombies.

And season passes.

And 83939583 in game cosmetics.

…

About a month ago, as a joke, I said that like the most frustrating, evil game I could imagine would be basically a game that is nothing but shitty NPC escort quests, through an active warzone with other players in PvP, where the NPC is fragile, annoying and whiney and pretentious as possible, moves slower than you run but faster than you walk…

…and every time they get wounded or just scared or drop something or trip or see a butterfly, you go into a bethesda death stare with them where you have to get through a 10+ step dialogue tree that is different everytime and only has a single success state, all others result in you having to retry…

… and its all still an active real time combat zone while you are locked into this, you and idiot NPC still vulnerable to other players.

The state of video gaming is such that within minutes, someone said this would actually be a game they’d want to play, that its an actually novel idea, sounds fun.

When I read that, my mouth dropped, in a dazed stupor.

EDIT: Fuck, all you’d have to do is call it Puppy Girl Escort Quest, and make the person you’re escorting be varying kinds of kawaii waifus, surprise, the game is actually a harem anime.