Sometimes I wonder if stuff like zero point energy actually ends up being real and everyone has their own tony stark arc reactor how society will just Balkanize into fiefdoms or syndicates of governing groups.

Anyways I spent all day today on a galactic conquest campaign in the ps2 battlefront and now before I sleep imma watch obscure videos from the 80s

I swear to God this is new.

They're always going on about people getting cucked, who does the cucking who gets cucked. A new thing I've noticed is that every right wing man is just an incel now so they talk about how every woman is gonna cuck them.

Why are they like this?

Like, humans who wage war, will do so and then as they develop self awareness theyll see less fruition on it. The ruler class is also living inside a delusion disconnected from reality. Like if i was ruling class rn. I'd be spending my money building my own cyberpunk night city. I'd be a very intelligent long term capitalist. Sure that won't fix systemic issues. But building infrastructure is like the number one way to develop the productive forces. Yeah the system is reinforcing its own illusions but you also have free will. Like, you can choose to do things different even if your capacity is so little. Like imagine if tomorrow some alien from area 51 escaped and said the earth was in a proxy battle between forces of good and evil and gave us blueprints to unlimited energy and the exact schematics and it turned out to be so easy. People would become energy idepentent, cities and towns would become independent. Some communities will be more hierarchical or less. Some more powerful than others. Not all would be equal in material conditions but all would have a very equal ability of attaining energy.

Like. The us empire has dementia, I dont even register it in my radar anymore. I dont even see it as a coherent entity. I see ir more as a collection of federal fiefdoms that Batley talk to eachother. Congress? Who? What's a congress? The most politically active I am is in my local city and all i want are courtyard blocks and new infrastructure projects.

I also can't convince every proletariat to fight for their interests. But I can remind them that several economic chokepoints exist if they ever need tk strongly persuade Washington. (Ports, railways, electronic communication systems, logistics, trucks, farms, factories).

Also people have this idea of soviet style communism in the usa. But the usa will have its own version of socialism if it ever attains it. Theres also the chance that regional areas of the usa will become more interconnected and less interested in the affairs of DC. Like, america becomes less of a country and more of a landmass. Youll have militech style entities and such.

For me, everything looks like an interconnected web of an organism. The earth is an organism. Its evolving, developing, changing, shifting. And I don't doubt local regions will emerge and be like "we dont need or want to deal with you we will do our own thing" and the federal government slowly becomes weaker and weaker and weaker.

I'd see California changing its local laws. I'd see states merging to collect cities together. New borders drawn. And Washington will see that theres too many parts to control. Like, if i woke up and California was independent I'd be like "cool, I'd focus on my local Californian affairs" and personallybthe most pragmatic approach I know is having more infrastructure built.

I'm studying physiscs now and I have big philosophical questions about the material world and stuff. Even with our math we actually don't know what matter is. Like yeah its matter but like... What is it tho?

I also guess my depression and anger left more. More now that I'm away from my negative situation and I realize aside from systemic issues. People have a choice to treat others one way or another. Theres also free will. Not all is determined by material conditions. Its a dual aspect monistic thing.

Ibdoybt the police or military even care about a America more than "haha I get cool gadgets and have power and authority and money" and I think over time that will become more apparent over "usa number one oh yeah"

Honestly I think working locally is the way to go like. The biggest reason I became a leftist was because I got pipelined by urban design and stuff. And I know culture plays the biggest role in systems. Again its a dual aspect thing. Your material conditions and your subjective conditions.

JM very like, chilled rn. Idk. I know a singularity (not ai) is coming. And people will be forced to realize the underlying unity of all things. Sorry if thats woo woo. But, even the physiscs says matter is made of "wavy feild excitations" woooo.

Full of food wrappers dog hair dip cans and fucking diapers. Not pictured is the fucking smell. Cars are such intimate glimpses into a persons life how are you not absolutely devastated hide your face change your name skip town embarrassed to bring your disgusting pig sty to a shop.

I know next to nothing about Digger except that it stars Tom Cruise, it's either good or bad, and that it is not doing well in theaters. I am a Tom Cruise skeptic in the sense that I think he's fine in like Top Gun, The Firm, or the Mission: Impossible movies but he very rarely sticks the landing in anything more ambitious than A Few Good Men. I saw that in Digger he's playing like a Texas oilman or something and now I have serious misgivings about this film. My question to people who have seen the movie is whether or not we are in a Reacher/Interview with the Vampire type situation where he is woefully miscast for the role and it fucks up the whole movie? Before you answer the question please note that if you think Tom Cruise was good in Magnolia you have to disclose that information when answering

I’ll add the extra L in the future if I want but 1. It’s a monologue & not like I got the writing on the wall directly & 2. Didn’t want to deal with 100 comments on how it’s misspelled

What a way to go. I hope someone is punished for the safety failure. But that's why it's always a Nope for me.

i thought you all would enjoy this art project from 2023 that a friend put me on to recently Calculating Empires (zoom and scroll around).

“Calclculating Empires is a large-scale research visualization exploring how technical and social structures co-evolved over five centuries. The aim is to view the contemporary period in a longer trajectory of ideas, devices, infrastructures, and systems of power. It traces technological patterns of colonialism, militarization, automation, and enclosure since 1500 to show how these forces still subjugate and how they might be unwound. By tracking these imperial pathways, Calculating Empires offers a means of seeing our technological present in a deeper historical context. And by investigating how past empires have calculated, we can see how they created the conditions of empire today.”

shit is disturbing. Deleted that shit, look up Cornell 7 and you get dudes saying either:

1. They don’t care about anything because they’re psychopaths, and you’re a simp if you care at all

2. Jane Doe is a lying slut and they're innocent martyrs

3. She deserved it

4. This needs to happen more

5. Death and rape threats

Fuckin Ellison got his wish. That bullshit on TT made me depressed and scared doomscrolling. Useless app, I liked the random horror movies and ghost ship and cat posts before.

TLDR: aging artist doesnt want to work in the service industry anymore but has no other marketable job skills and that makes him sad.

Im going to be 35 at the end of the year. My life by most standards is average. I am a musician who has been working in the service industry since i was 15. A tale as old as time. I have always been happy to work to support my passion for music and art and loved taking on ambitious projects and learning new things but lately i have been having a really hard time getting excited for the future.

I barely got through high school, not that i was a super bad kid or that i didnt try though i had my moments.

I had a hard time finding teachers that understood my learning disability. Got diagnosed with adhd in 2nd grade which was in like 1998 so the standard practice then was give me prescription meth and put me in classes with severely handicapped kids which is not where i belonged at all, which did a number on my self esteem.

I was capable of everything a typical student was tasked with i just went about it in an unusual way and sometimes took longer to do it. Since i had been “red tagged” as i call it i was always removed from lessons or tasks they deemed not suited for me. Or pulled from the few regular classes at had.

This went on all through elementary and middle all the way through high school till around my junior year when i slowly and secretly weened my self off all the stimulants and antidepressants and anti anxiety meds i had been on for basically a decade at this point. Something that still effects me to this day with sleep and GI issues from being on drugs for most of adolescences.

During that time i was able to better articulate to my teachers what it is i was struggling with and it led to me getting better grades (mostly in english and art classes). I went from my teachers talking about holding me back my junior year to being a top student in my creative writing class and leading lessons in my photography class. Which at the time was probably the most sure of my self i had ever been. My teachers also started to advocate for me to be pulled from “resource” classes which never fully happened.

This was also around the time i started playing in a serious band and started touring which kinda cemented who i wanted to be in life.

By the time i was 19 i was on my own living with my band hoping around the country with my best friends on diy tours trying to “make it”. It was the best times of my life. But i had set ridiculous goals for my self that my heavy psych rock band was somehow going to sustain my entire life by the time i was 27. Which clearly never happened and set me up for terrible depression and imposter syndrome for all of my 20s.

By the time the pandemic came around my band was doing ok, we had got signed to a medium sized label in Europe, they were releasing /pressing our record and booking us tours. Which at the time felt like we made it, despite being broke all the time.

Well once the world shut down our big European tour got cancelled , the label basically just forgot about us and we got stuck with 100s of vinyl records we couldnt sell cuz we couldnt tour and they stopped running PR for us.

Then about 6 months into the lockdown, i was feeling lost and defeated , we get asked to take part in this live concert series where essentially 5 bands set up in the middle of the desert and play a live set to no one but the production crew. It was released as a live stream then letter a live record. It was a crazy experience but when it came time to advertise and promote the bands for some reason we got left out and then the guy who put it all on essentially got sued and disappeared for like a year again leaving us with 100s of vinyls and money owed to us.

We all pretty much were done with this project at this point, but we got hit up by a “small movie production”
Out of the blue. They wanted to use our song in their “small indie film” they offered us $500.

We were all stoked and agreed. They ghosted…. After about 3 months of back and fourth.

Then one day our drummer was watching Absolution staringliam nissen and would you believe it our song with in the movie, not the small indie film they told us it was, we also had never got paid.

We essentially had to threatened to sue them for us to get paid and get our mechanical royalties owed to us, but that was kind of a nail in the coffin for that band because we got screwed at every step we took and were just exhausted. We had been a band for almost 12 years at that point.

After this i decided to pursue music video production as i had started making them with my bandmate and we loved doing it and had lots of friends in our music community who wanted cool videos. We started making comedy shorts to keep us busy in between music video gigs. I learned alot and loving filming and editing but i hit a wall and never started up again. Then i wanted to start a production company and hit a wall and never picked it up again.

Rinse and repeat with a few other ambitious ideas i had that never seemed to get traction.

I still make music, honestly more than i have ever made. My ambitions are much more subdued now, i mostly just want to make music and play shows/small tours when i can. Which i fine, i still love it and it affirms my life.

My problem is i have this empty feeling when i think about the future. I used to have all these ambitious goals i was working towards , which gave me hope that my life could improve in the future and just gave me something to work towards.

But i dont feel that any more. None of the art i like making is ever going to be commercially successful enough to make a living, honestly none of the projects i have now even have the same local “success” as my first serious band. I didnt go to college, the only job experience i have is restaurants and bars.

I dont know what to do with my life or what type of upward trajectory i can have bartending for the rest of my life. I dont want to manage a bar , which seems to be my only option but that job seems miserable. I just feel lost and its hard to feel positive and have hope for the future when i feel like that.

That being said i have a wonderful partner, awesome friends , my basic needs are met for now and i get free time to do the things that i love to do. Ill figure it out. Im
Just finding it hard to keep my usual excited outlook of the future.

Sorry for the rant Gumshoes.

I saw my father cry once in my life.

We had a Rottweiler growing up. My dad loved this Rottweiler. He went through some major surgeries and was on workers' comp and disability for a good little bit growing up. Blue-collar labor puts your body through the ringer. He loved this dog. He got this dog when he was going through the surgery and had it for five, six, maybe seven years. It was a family pet. One day it got out of the house, and we had the beeper collar for it, but he got out of range real quick, and then next thing you know, he got hit by a car on the highway. That is the only time I've ever seen my dad cry.

See, I was raised in a very old-fashioned way. Men aren't supposed to cry. Men are supposed to be stoic, handle their emotions, bury that shit, bottle it up. Just the way it is. Like it or not, that's just the way I was raised. That's the sort of masculinity that was espoused to me by a man who really lived that shit.

When the dog died—his name was Rocky—when Rocky died, my dad dug a fucking six-foot hole with a little garden shovel and his bare hands in the rain and wept like I have never seen since. To put this into perspective, when my grandmother passed, I was 16, and he told me straight up that I cannot cry at the funeral. I cannot cry at her funeral because my mother was hysterical. My mother was really suffering from the grief. And so he tells me, "You need to be strong for your mother. You can grieve in private, but when you are at this funeral, you need to be locked in. You need to handle your shit." He didn't cry at that funeral either, and nor did I. But he cried for that dog. He wept for that dog.

Right now my dog is being fostered by a comrade and a member of my DSA chapter. See, this is one of the reasons why you should get involved in a socialist organization. It benefits to have comrades around. But the foster is only temporary, and given my current legal situation, it's very important that I maintain an address, the same address. There's a whole rigamarole to change your address if you go through the court system, and it looks really good, according to my counsel, that I have a steady job with a steady place of living, and that the place of living is owned by my boss.

Well, my boss wanted the dog gone. I work night shift, and he has separation anxiety. So he's loud at night, which is obviously not good. Keeps people awake. So I was given a 48-hour notice to either leave or find a solution to the dog, and now he's being fostered. I haven't found a better solution that doesn't involve me having to rehome my dog or surrender him to the Humane Society.

And so I walk through my door, and, you know... Sorry, I'm tearing up right now, and I know I shouldn't be. You walk through the door when you've had a dog for five years, and you get so used to being greeted. You get so used to getting attention and giving him pets and taking him outside, and now I'm just sitting in this room by myself. And I miss my dog. I miss my Jax.

The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, no business affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property, and no name. Everything in him is wholly absorbed in the single thought and the single passion for revolution.
Nechayev, The Revolutionary Catechism

I keep thinking to myself that I just need to lock in, that I just need to be stoic, that I need to handle my emotions, that I need to put this away, that there's more important things, that I need to be pragmatic. I keep telling myself all these different things, and it's not working. It's not working because even the example of what masculinity is, the man who taught me what I know, wept for his dog.

So what am I to do? There comes a point where what is asked of the working class, what is asked of the proletariat in terms of emotional resilience, far outweighs what the human spirit can handle. And all the capitalist has to say is more weight. More weight. Because if the weight doesn't crush you, that means you're not a witch. And the only way to prove that you're not is to let those stones of sorrow that is living in a class society build up until they break you.

I'm sorry that the last few posts that I've made have been so full of despair. I wish I had something more optimistic to say to keep people going, to keep people motivated, but I don't even have anything optimistic to say to myself.

Yeah let's greenwash a rolling environmental disaster, cool shit GM. This thing was truly hideous to look at, just visually assaulting everyone else as they blow red lights downtown. Fuck car culture so much.

Hello fellow gumshoes. You are all very smart and also God-fearing Christian conservatives like myself so I am coming to you with a request. I would like to learn more about how the internet drives people insane. I know that it does, both from personal experience and general cultural osmosis. But I don't know how or why (though I have ideas on the latter).

Are there any good researchers or writers (books, articles, peer-reviewed journals) you can point me in the direction of that explore this question?

Thank you.

You'd think frat guys would read the room and knock it off for a little while

What are everyone‘s thoughts on just filling government with randos pulled out of a hat rather than electing them? This is a topic debated and discussed ad nauseam on this site, but it has become a mild obsession of mine, and I want to hear my fellow conservatives’ takes.