You’ve obviously never been an addict.

Obviously.

You can absolutely hate a thing you’re using and feel like quitting isn’t possible.

I’ve been told I’m not an addict. I’ve been told social media is addictive. I’ve been told I’m on social media. I’m rattling around the contradictions.

Addicts can also love the thing and not feel like quitting, because the thing they’re addicted to gives them a feeling of empowerment or a release from anxiety.

Social media fulfills a craving for socializing that humans naturally desire. It offers to fulfill this natural desire through a low-cost, easy-access interface. And it feeds this craving continuously, often artificially through synthetic interactions with no real counterparty. And it does so with the goal of influencing the audience’s understanding of the world and consumption habits, two things humans also natively seek.

Talking about social media like an addiction misses the core drive towards its adoptions and proliferation. You might as well say you’re addicted to food and air as to say you’re addicted to text and video. These are sensory stimulations everyone is always pining for, whether or not a phone screen is the delivery mechanism.

The challenge people face isn’t the social media, it is the absence of non-social media as an alternative. We’re caged animals looking out the window and you’re complaining about “window addiction”.

I haven’t read a word of it, or even seen a preview, but after the opening tomorrow I’m going to turn in the worst review anybody has ever read. And I’m going to close your play. Would you like to know why? Because I hate you. And everyone you represent. Entitled. Spoiled. Selfish. Children. Blissfully untrained, unversed and unprepared to even attempt real art. Handing each other awards for cartoons and pornography. Measuring your worth in weekends Well, this is the theater, and you don’t get to come in here and pretend you can write, direct and act in your own propaganda piece without going through me first. So, break a leg.

How is this not reposted on LeopardsEatingFaces yet? Real missed opportunity to get people angry at you.

be hated

They aren’t hated. They have billions of users (and tens of billions of bot accounts) all rattling around trying to run this same influence model from within the various platforms.

In so far as everyone complains about everything constantly, they are a source of perpetual complaints. But the idea that people can spend hours of their lives on YouTube and then claim “I hate this”… No you don’t. You obviously don’t hate it. You love it. You love your slop.

he made a specific point of praising a demented rapist and lauding the pedophile party as heroes

He made a point of praising a President’s pick for the Antitrust Division of the DOJ. He didn’t praise Trump and he certainly didn’t praise pedophilia.

Slater’s tenure at DOJ was short-lived and unremarkable. So feel free to mock Yen on those grounds. But this has dick all to do with Epstein. It has nothing to do with the bloated ICE budget (which received bipartisan approval) or the assorts nightmarish cabinet appointments, many of which enjoyed supermajority support in the Senate (Rub’em All Out Rubio was appointed unanimously ffs).

he jumped head first into the cesspit for no reason other than he believed it.

He’s a Tech Goon and Trump had a ton of Tech Goons on his team. These people aren’t partisan, they’re corporate lemmings. By 2028, I’m sure Yen will be lining up to brown nose the incoming Dem administration. By 2032, he’ll be back on Team R, shocked at how the party that did everything Tech wanted has betrayed his customers again. Oh, and incidentally, insisting that the only way to protect yourself from Mean Old Big Government is by upping your Proton License to Double Super Secure.

And so, even though our opinions on age verification coincidentally align, he can fuck right off.

He’s endorsing the poison so he can sell the antidote.

Older versions of him work. The newer versions tend to be Wizard in a Gundam.

Band T-shirts are sometimes — or even often — the highest quality T-shirts available.

Small local bands tend to source from local manufacturers and distributors. And as they consider their merch a form of advertising, it pays to invest in material that lasts.

But the bigger and more volume-based franchises tend to get their clothes from the same global production and distribution chains as every other Fast Fashion brand. Taylor Swift isn’t contracting with a dozen different local print shops per venue to fill an order big enough to saturate a stadium. She’s going to the same folks that sell to H&M and Zara.

I had him as more of a Lex Luthor.

Larry Ellison feels like more of a Bond Villain.

Mark Zuckerberg could work as some kind of 80s/90s action movie baddie. I know a good analog is out there, but the best I can come up with is the VP from Robocop or the various evil CEOs from Tron.

Elon Musk feels like a Captain Planet villain.

The nightmare trap of the Two Party System is that you can look at one party cozying up to Big Tech (Obama in 2009) and conclude the other party must be reflexively in opposition.

Trump was fully surrounded by Thiel goons before he’d even left office in '21. And the relationship only got tighter with his Elon Musk Bromance. But hey, if you’d just elected Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney Tim Walz to the White House, I’m sure nobody would be talking about how much of their cabinet was stuffed with Silicon Valley cutouts.

It’s not like a cartel of trillionaires can buy up both parties at once, right?

Social media functions as a kind of gatekeeper for public interactions, not unlike credit scores, driver’s licenses, and college degrees. The absence of a presence on social media is not only socially debilitating (you’re cut out of the information stream for local events and public amenities) but a red-flag for college recruiters and employers. It’s much like how not using a credit card regularly in your teens/20s impacts your ability to access low-interest lending in your 30s/40s. Or not having a driver’s license interferes with your right to vote.

State officials have been searching for a kind of uniform, iron-clad, easily verifiable public ID for ages. Linking your online presence (a thing that you need for a myriad of daily tasks) to your ID becomes a pathway to this goal. Universal, non-transferable digital ID becomes a wicked two-edged sword as it both exhaustively tracks the “documented” individuals and neatly severs the “undocumented” from society.

Between an exploitative streaming economy and a “cost-of-touring crisis,” buying merch is sometimes the most direct way to get money into an artist’s pocket, even with venue cuts. Just ask Taylor Swift, who, according to Pollstar, made approximately $200 million in merchandise from her 2023 Eras tour dates.

The Environmental Impact of Fast Fashion, Explained

Fast fashion companies focus on low-cost garments that replicate the latest fashion trends, quickly pushing them into stores to capitalize on these trends. This means that retailers are able to offer a greater variety of products in large quantities and allow consumers to get more fashion and product differentiation at a low price.

According to an analysis by Business Insider, fashion production comprises 10% of total global carbon emissions, as much as the emissions generated by the European Union. The industry dries up water resources and pollutes rivers and streams, while 85% of all textiles go to dumps each year. Even washing clothes releases 500,000 tons of microfibers into the ocean each year, the equivalent of 50 billion plastic bottles.

It does however set a precedent for other celebrities and people going forward

The precedent is “you need to jump through a series of legal hoops and build up a legal army in order to secure what was already supposed to be yours to begin with”.

It would have been better if it was one of the likeable celebrities. Like Keanu Reeves.

It wouldn’t matter, because we’re talking about an entrenched legal precedent not a likeability contest.

In some sense, it begins to feel like all that sovereign citizenship bullshit. People being fed this narrative that you have to perform an elaborate, esoteric legal dance in order to have your humanity recognized by the state bureaucracy. It creates the (false) impression that there’s One Neat Trick to having your civil rights acknowledged and respected, and you just need to be savvy enough to speak the magic words and perform the ritual dance. In truth, you’re in a boxing match with a gorilla.

But anhedonia often spoils the enjoyment of low-pressure, familiar activities.

What’s more, the activities available are themselves often a source of burnout, stress, and depression. Case in point, alcohol consumption or TV/game binges can be a short-term source of relief but a long term contributor to a sense of isolation and despair.

If you go back to the original development and surrounding white papers that made Google the default search engine of choice, you’ll discover they weren’t bulletproof by any stretch. We had “Google Bombing”, Googlewashing, and other spamdexing techniques for most of Google’s existence.

But I might argue that Google had - for a time - created a virtuous cycle of reinforcing intentional traffic trends and linked search results, such that certain search results and domains considered “trustworthy” got more and more traffic while the junk was increasingly confined to the back end of the search log. Of course, YMMV - there was a strong English Language bias from day one, a lot of the “preferred” results were corrupted through corporate buyouts and manipulations, and Google had its own political agenda that would cause certain information to be particularly hard to find. But by and large, if you searched for “that horse with the white and black stripes that lives in africa”, you got back a bunch of useful links about Zebras. And - at a high level - that’s what Google was supposed to do for its user base.

Post-2018, the corporate heads at Google shifted their metrics for link results from “most popular” to “most recently popular”. Even ignoring the AI results (which I personally think the reaction against is overblown), this has been what’s royally fucked their returns. Now, when you go looking for the “white and black stripped horse”, you get back whatever is currently trending on social media. This reinvents the capacity for Google Bombing and other result manipulation techniques, which Google had ostensibly solved by moving away from its reliance on site self-descriptions. Add to that, the increased demand for revenue in exchange for prominence on the result feed makes non-profit sites like Wikipedia fall farther and farther down the search rabbit hole.

I don’t think this is a natural decay of internet content. This is an effort to undermine the improvements in search result optimization that Google had historically made.

Patrick Rothfuss confirmed greatest author of our age

The outline is like a scaffold for a building. Very helpful early on, but if it’s still standing when you’re done, you’ve done it wrong

This is all good advice

my covid test is positive

“COVID is the problem”

“I’ve got norovirus”

“That doesn’t matter”

except in the context of managing withdrawal symptoms

Seems like one hell of a caveat

Democrat does not equal liberal.

Oh, you scratched yours, didn’t you?