no, they want to feel tough.

they would fold in any scenario where the numbers and odds were actually even, let alone against them.

look how they whine at being in a population where a growing segment simply doesn't respect them.

if most of us were truly hostile to them or threatening, they couldn't move around in teams smaller than 4-6 and they certainly could not get out of their vehicles without support. like a drone watching from above and prepared to make something bang. the entire calculus of "patrol" would change drastically.

no more napping in a car or posting up in a parking lot and playing on the phone. no more walking into a restaurant or getting takeout, unless it's in some kind of Green Zone hardened complex. they would have to radio in everybody who was on a cellphone looking in their direction. they would have to live in a barracks and/or wear a balaclava literally everywhere, in the heat of summer. the job would become taking turns sitting at sluggish checkpoints with jersey barriers and going out to investigate junk on the side of the road that might explode and take a few of appendages.

they have no idea what kind of shitshow it means to actually police a hostile population with no obvious language or cultural barrier.

post 9/11 there was a push to standardize all state IDs (including driver licenses, which is the form of ID most Americans carry) into a uniform standard developed by the feds.

there was enough pushback within certain states from the crank demographic that this was a federal government / mark of the beast conspiracy that many states began to resist it by refusing to comply and conform for years. it was a way to excite the base to grandstand against the federal ID.

eventually, the holdout states were told that their state IDs would not be compliant and could not be used for boarding planes. the workaround would be to maintain a passport, which does work as kind of a universal ID within the US. so this has never affected wealthier citizens in resistant states, who of course have all the right travel documents.

resistant states did ultimately offer compliant state IDs, but they cost extra and, at least at first, required applicants to travel to just one or two cities in the state to apply for one. completely unreasonable and onerous.

anyway, it's hilarious that it is still so cocked up. this is how deeply antagonistic states in the US can be towards working with each other in terms of paperwork. which, considering how deeply evil some states are towards their residents and they ways they prefer to abuse them, is par for the course.

a lot of kids today don't realize what the movie biz was like before streamers and Netflix.

this is what it was like to work at a movie rental place

this is like when you gotta clean a litter box. searching for and diggin up turds just to toss em again.

except these people are making it really weird.

send a pic of a dog drinking out of the toilet and be like "this is u & ur media choices"

a lifetime ago, before the global financial crisis when I was a young man with an OK job and I remember seeing some newly constructed housing for rent.

it was a few miles from where I lived, in a formerly blighted/dead area that had been completely renovated into this little pseudo walkable area of shops, upstairs apartments, a nice movie theater, and some restaurants.

the apartments were like 90% vacant so I looked at the prices. i was currently splitting a 3 bedroom house as a group of 4 people in a pretty chill area and it cost me 30% of my monthly takehome, as I had the best job. my roommates were more like 40% of their monthly takehome.

so these new places were 1 bedroom, very small, and they wanted 200% of my monthly takehome, did not include utilities and I would have to pay 10% on top of that for a single parking spot. no guests.

that was when I began to learn that the future was being built by and for people who do not statistically exist.

the way we can have a housing crisis and this overabundance of mostly vacant luxury housing should be instructive as hell, but the ideological frame we have been conditioned to normalize refuses to see the most obvious and easy solutions.

"The Court is not a cartoon."

says the adult in a silky flowing robe who sits in the highest big boy chair behind the tallest, closed desk facing an audience and using a noise maker to command attention.

the absurd theatricality of a courtroom is matched only by the refusal of its cast members to acknowledge it's absurdity.

"What's the frequency, Kenneth" is about how cool it is being a Gladio asset activated by a numbers station to terrorize immigrant communities.

the character's name in the original script was Harry Buttmouth. in the original draft, Luke and Han took turns effing his mouth.

Lucas originally envisioned a line of sex dolls, but when Hasbro bought the exclusive toy rights from the studio, that original vision was corrupted and merchandising was reoriented towards children to maximize profits.

The original artistic vision was hardcore pornography, and this character is a vestigial reminder.

cool, a good/recent link to use when somebody asks why i deleted myself from the meta family of platforms.

it rarely comes up, and last few times it did, the response was, "yeah, that's smart." then the inevitable network effect justification, "but i have a [depression pact] with my friends & family and its the only way we can all [hate our lives together in the same way]."

I was having a long conversation the other night with a friend from far back in the day. a phone call that was supposed to be about me helping him get his basic household shit together/organized because I am good at that sort of thing. towards the end, he got very animated and borderline frantic about his band. as in, I couldn't say anything for about 10 minutes of his exposition/monologue about how inspired he is by his own creativity lately, the tools he is using, and how he wants to collaborate with me.

I am mostly creative in the realm of food, visual design (digital and physical) and like some sculpture with just enough literary shit to be amusing. though he wouldn't really know that, because I don't just launch into my various tinkerings unless something specific or relevant is mentioned. he does know that I used to do a lot of work with digital design, so I believe that's what he wanted to collaborate about.

but before I can even say "OK, sounds fun" he's frantically telling me about how he has some subscription to AI tools and he's been using them to make stills and generated music videos from prompts and how it's absolutely incredible to generate these animations of subjects using styles and how well it goes with his music... and in my head I'm just like "it sounds like you have it all figured out and don't actually need me for anything."

I wanted to say I had made some cool visual stuff that I thought might be cool to have an audio component to match and that he just gave me the idea to use AI to generate some music based on prompts, but that seems kinda cruel and he probably wouldn't even get the hint anyway.

so I just let him go on and on and gave a non committal response about doing shit together in the future, with absolute no desire to follow up.

all I ever think about anymore is how these generative tools are absolutely dulling any cultivation of talent. after a decade of working exclusively with digital, I wanted to start working with physical media. paint, canvas, ink, transfer, dyes/pigments, wood, inlays etc. things I can touch, hold, hang, give away, or place somewhere there isn't a screen.

seeing someone go entirely in the other direction, not just digital, but like prompt oriented generative is like... sad. like nothing is being stimulated and opened, but rather it is being funneled into pre existing categories and boxes.

I left that conversation absolutely uninspired.

for real, that thing rules.

also dig the possibly fake "Pontiac Vibe" situation below the stickers.

people who do wild shit to their vehicles aesthetically enchant me.

one of the most recent times I came back from overseas, after a few weeks of just existing, learning and working outside of Burgerland, I remember waiting at a gate for a connecting flight and there was a digital recruitment poster featuring the USMC scout sniper school, featuring the SS sig rune and a patch with the skull/totenkopf on it. certainly a jarring moment for me, to be reminded of where I was coming "home" to.

I had been traveling with a group of scientists, mostly older and more educated than me. white libs almost exclusively, and we had been in a socialist country where they felt compelled to look for any sign of militarism (there were literally none, hardly even a police presence).

I pointed out the poster to them and said, "well we're back in the states with all this normal death cult shit" and like nobody even blinked. they just shrugged like it was normal, if maybe slightly aggressive to feature literal Nazi symbolism on a military recruiting poster. one guy, who was a spouse (just along for the ride) and had credentials in social science nodded and laughed/agreed, but he and I were the group's weirdos who bother learning things in life that aren't profitable in the labor market.

I don't have any constructive advice. I think people with hysterical racism and reactionary politics brought on by the uncritical, willing embrace of propaganda should be ridiculed, teased, and mocked with complete scorn and derision.

their tears are meaningless while innocent people truly suffer inhumane cruelty under the violent political project they have chosen to embrace.

if they have a big emotional outburst and want to make it about their feelings, tell them to save it for their therapist because you aren't being paid a hundred dollars an hour to help them process the malevolent, hateful garbage they have chosen to ingest.

I hate crybullies.

SELL
\ ✓ 14x Pocket Lint Scraps

this is why I hope they do the biggest military parade in world history for His Dampness' Big Boy Birthday Blowout.

despite there not being an enemy and the event being entirely ceremonial, it will be objectively the worst tactical and strategic defeat in US military history.

I remember when a friend of mine came back from living in some agricultural communities in West Africa. he and his wife were there for ~2 years. he and I had done a lot of farm work together for a year, so when he got back we talked about how things worked there.

one thing I will never forget is that among the big exports was rice. everybody was involved in the production labor side.

he said the rice grown for export was completely different from the rice they grew for themselves. and that the rice they grew for themselves was absolutely incredible quality, beyond what he understood rice could be like in texture and taste. the export was like cheap junk and went to western nations (Europe mostly) with locals saying that it was fine because they didn't know any better and they seemed to like it because they kept buying it.

in the decade+ since, I have found this paradigm to be far more common than not across agricultural products and it is unsurprising to see it exist in other realms of decoupled production/consumption loops mediated by capitalism.

if you want a bill to pass, you shout "Digeridoo!" into the Koala skull on your way to the fighting pit and if you want to vote against it you make an "X" at the feet of the Me Gibson statue commemorating the birth of Holocaust denial science

it's a very modern system.

you must wear your authentic and chipped "Proud Owner of a Soda Stream" patch in public to use public transit, operate a vehicle, conduct business, shop, and pass through neighborhood checkpoints.

an incredible detail is that the Gorgonite "enemy" was originally a distinct proposed toyline of educational, peaceful toys to promote learning and environmental engagement. but the asshole exec was only focused on the military toys and observed "they need someone to fight" so they approved their construction and made them the enemy target of the military toys due to their unconventional appearance and targeted them for genocide.

very poignant.