sp3ctr4l
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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.
As for CPs being just conscripts, wholly unaugmented?
It is commonly believed that CPs never receive any actual augmentation… but I don’t think there is actually any evidence for that within the actual, mainline, canon games.
They are offered ‘non mechanical reproduction simulation’ as a reward for completing their tasks, by the Overwatch voice.
Ok… so… what would that be? A drug or digital/virtual sex simulation? It depends on what exactly ‘mechanical’ means.
Contextually, it could mean ‘involving a machine’, which could mean some kind of weird, combine grown/made, organic version of a fleshlight is offered to them… or it could mean ‘involving mechanics’, where the physics oriented definition of mechanics is … basically as broad as any physical action.
So… if it is a drug that makes you climax, I suppose that could be administered without augmentation. If it is virtual/digital… well that could be just watching porn thats … so good it gets you off with no ‘mechanical’, ie, physical stimulation… or it could make use of some kind of brain-computer-interface, which would be an augmentation, though a minor one by the standards of the HL2 universe.
They are also encouraged to get a full memory wipe as a step toward possible more extensive augmentation into an OW. This could imply that their memories/personalities have already been modified in some way.
We never see a CP take off their mask, beyond Barney, who is obviously a spy/mole/double agent.
Barney’s CP mask is also noticabley larger than all the other CP head/mask models… so that the entirety of his head can actually fit inside it. Could just be minor, unimportant technical detail… could also imply his helmet/mask is custom made, and other CPs heads are… actually altered.
There’s no models of CPs with their mask/helmets partially removed or damaged, afaik.
There’s no evidence that a CP can… ever actually go off duty, return to their family… they are just threatened with the seperation/relocation/destruction of their family should they fail.
All that means is they signed up with the idea that their families would be protected. Maybe they knowingly sacrificed themselves for their families… maybe they unknowingly signed up, thinking they could return to their families one dah, and uh oops, stop-loss is now in effect, forever, you can never go back.
So as I see it, there is 0 actual evidence the CPs are wholly non-augmented, and there is slight, non-conclusive evidence that they may actually be just slightly augmented.
The way I see it is that CPs are slightly augmented, and basically just get more augmented as they progress toward becoming some other, more specialized OW soldier, or the various types of Combine soldiers in HL Alyx.
I admit that is an extrapolation, but at the same time, I don’t think there is actually any concrete evidence that CPs are wholly unaugmented, just humans wearing a fancy suit.
If you can point out some hard evidence that I’ve missed that postivively indicates the CPs are wholly unaugmented, I’d appreciate the correction.
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:
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?
101·2 months agoStar 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.
102·2 months agoCompletely 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.
Yeah, asterisk to indicate multiplication is much, much more common amongst coders.
… And script kiddie DOGE interns.