I Think The Key Difference Between George Lucas’s Star Wars And Disney’s Star Wars Is That Lucas

My brain can be so exceptionally bad sometimes.

Endless short video feeds are completely inescapable for me; i can't use tiktok, i couldn't use vine, I can't watch youtube shorts. It's the same way I can't play video games - if I engage with them it is impossible to disengage until something physically forces me to look away. I sat for seven hours last night watching videos thinking to myself "I should go get my coffee that I left in the kitchen; I should go to bed; I should go to the bathroom" and I couldn't make myself move until tiny bastard had to go outside.

Anyway. uBlock origin is great because it blocks ads but you can also use it to totally block elements that are tar pits for your brain. The youtube shorts player has now been banished from my firefox.

This is yet another reason that I prefer stuff that can be used in-browser rather than in exclusively in-app. Way too easy to have a stream of content projected directly into my eyeballs with no action or choices needed on my part when I'm looking at the app passively instead of looking at a website where I have to choose the next video to watch.

I'm posting this link mostly for myself, so I can find it again when I go looking, but if other people see it here then that would be beautiful.

I first saw this exhibition in the free art gallery on the campus where I did my grad program. I would walk across the quad on days when I had a free hour or two and just browse the artwork. One day they had a small section with a few pairs of photographs, each pair taken in the same location at different times, with one or more subjects missing from the later photograph. Four boys sitting together, next to a picture of three men in similar poses. Two young men running down a hill next to one old man running down the same hill. Follow the link and you can see for yourself.

I looked at the pictures for a few minutes before I read the description. The collection was called Ausencias Argentinas, chronicling the fallout from Argentina's 'Dirty War' from 1976 to 1983, in which the government 'disappeared' social workers, social work students, militants, trade unionists, writers, journalists, artists and others they thought might be left-wing activists. Their families and friends got no closure, but were simply left to carry on their lives with los desaparecidos conspicuously absent. I had to sit down for a few minutes, overwhelmed, before I could move on.

Anyway, stay safe out there.

Local goat discovers joy of painting

Batman: dystopian fascism

Superman: utopian fascism

Iron Man: techno-fascism

Captain America: nationalism

Spider-man: anarchism

The perfect drink to wash down my ape biscuits

Rome in its Republican period was undoubtedly the predominant military force of its time. Something about its religious and military practices, combined with its republican form of government, made the Romans do war unlike anyone else. For this post, the most important point I want to make is that Rome conquered most of its territory as a republic. In its imperial period, Roman territory did grow some, but ultimately the Empire was unstable and fractured into multiple autocratic states.

In 1789 the Estates General met in France. Called by the king and then elected by the people of France, this body rejected their monarchical mandate to address the state deficit and instead wrote a new constitution for France, establishing a democratic order on the European continent. The kingdoms around France reacted to this affront to monarchical power by bringing troops to French borders. Fired by nationalism and democratic enfranchisement, the new French state mustered an army exponentially larger than any of its neighbors. The wars that dominated the next twenty(ish) years of European history would see the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte and a large expansion of French territory.

During World War II the United States mobilized to an enormous degree to fight European fascist states and the empire of Japan. Huge numbers of young men were conscripted to fight, entire industries were devoted to military production, and all over the nation families rationed food in order to support the war effort. This just twenty years after women were granted the right to vote. At this point the United States was the oldest democratically elected national government in the world, invoking its national fervor for the cause of mass violence. In the half century after and then some, the United States dominated the world economically and militarily.

All this to say that for a very long time democracy and military power have been bound together. The most democratic nations have been the ones able to muster the largest armies, engage the most industrial production, demand the most sacrifice from their populations. On a geopolitical scale, democracy has meant power.

But here's the twist, and what terrifies me about the current moment: with the rise of machines and machine learning, and the consolidation of server ownership into the hands of just a few oligarchs, it's unclear whether that power dynamic still holds. Drones and other remote, even autonomous, technology have made both factories and battlefields less human. The human crowds that filled Roman or Parisian plazas can be atomized and identified by automated surveillance networks. Mao says that political power flows from the barrel of a gun. What happens when the guns aren't in human hands?

I get such a kick out of the prefix 'cis'

getting a book cislated: yup, still can't read it

cisition timeline: just a selfie

cisformation: make a bunch of super saiyan sounds and walk away

cisubstantiation: by the power of god this bread has remained bread

idk its just neat

Kinda feels like George Washington's main leadership traits were tall, charismatic, and handsome. That said, here are some other things he did (and didn't do):

He supported his lifestyle by enslaving dozens of people, claiming to own them and forcing them to work on his plantation.

He got a bunch of people inoculated against smallpox

He released all his slaves only on his and his wife's deaths

He kept together a defensive army for several years without wrecking the landscape or alienating the populace

He was given executive power and ceded it to a democratic(ish) process

He never figured out how to live without enslaving people

He never had a child

He raised up Alexander Hamilton and let him build a banking system

He led a militia force against US citizens in the whisky rebellion

He ordered a 3-year colonial war against native Americans in the Great Lakes region

My Zelda headcanon is that the three main characters are all cosmic actors whisked through time and space to play out their predetermined mythic roles in different settings. Ganon seizes power in the setting, Zelda reaches outside the setting to pull in the player, and Link serves as a vessel for the player who can defy the in-setting odds to defeat Ganon.

So instead of trying to knit together the Zelda timeline, I imagine the three of them in between games hanging out in a breakroom at the Hylian multiverse agency. They're doing whatever (frankly none of our business--they're on break), when suddenly a new game gets released and they each get drawn through a portal to somewhere they can settle in and play out their story once more.

Is John not neutered, or is that just a part of him looking funky because of the weird shave down and such?

He was just neutered on Friday. You’re just seeing his empty sack. The fact that he’s shaved bald doesn’t help either though, there’s no hair to hide those bad boys