When you negotiate with lying egomaniacal assholes who never say the same thing twice … what do you expect is going to happen?

Almost made it years ago … I’m a recovered alcoholic and one of my recovery options was to be admitted into a facility but I wasn’t that far gone yet so I was able to go through lighter treatment services and go through the 12 step program instead … that was over 30 years ago and these days I feel like I’m edging towards losing my sanity again every day.

I only made the comparison of social media to a mental hospital because just about every day I see more and more deluded realities than ever before. At one end, I have my younger relatives (under 30 years of age) living some kind of weird online life that they try to emulate like a k-pop reality show, a soap opera or a comedy show with a laugh track (meanwhile their real life situation is anything but) … and at the other end, I have older relatives (over 50 years of age) who only ever want to be angry, afraid or semi or fully racist or fascist (when in real life their lives are good peaceful and they would never be openly racist or fascist, or show any support for it!). People keep telling me that maybe it’s just the quality of people I am around … but I look into other social media feeds with family who live in the cities down south, the rural areas, the northern remote areas or the busy suburban areas and its almost all universally the same. And I know a variety of people … poor trailer trash types, northern poor people, native families living on reserves … as well as middle class white people living in cities, upwardly mobile professionals, teachers, office workers, government workers, a few medical doctors and nurses and even a couple of millionaires who live in the city.

I should also clarify that these observations are all about corporately owned social media … and yes I know that they are heavily influenced and managed to be like this … but still, it feels so overwhelming that at one point, it does feel like being trapped in some kind of institution. Sure I can leave but all or most of my family and friends are in there. Most of the people I know are not technically savvy or interested and they just prefer being on FB, IG or TikTok or even X … and whenever I do see them there, I feel like I’m visiting the FB Ward or the TikTok Ward of a giant facility full of deluded people.

Trump making an announcement?

The only idiot in this equation are the people that actually think anything he says means anything

The wheel is also fixed … there’s a giant lead weight on the opposite side of ‘peace’, which means it will never land there

No one cares … most people don’t care … governments don’t really care … companies absolutely don’t care

Mostly because people aren’t dying yet … and even once they do start dying, most people won’t care that much if its just a few people who die once in a while in a few places here and there. The care that the world will have will also be based on the quality of the people who are dying … if they are older white Europeans, especially northern Europeans, then that is a cause for concern … if they are white Americans or Canadians, then that is a concern too … but if they are ethnic in any way, brown skinned or speak some other language other than English, then it doesn’t matter that much … and if they are African or black, then people will just gloss over that and think it’s just a normal rate of people dying in Africa.

No … the world won’t care until we start seeing hundreds or even thousands of people dying everywhere … we won’t care until we start seeing mass migrations of all kinds of people (white, brown, black, Asian, whatever) moving from location to location by the millions to avoid starvation, war and death … we won’t care until we start seeing pictures of mounds of bodies rotting in the open air because they had to be abandoned and survivors were too overwhelmed to do anything about it all.

Nah … we won’t care until our world and civilization itself is collapsing around us. And the generation to survive in the aftermath will wonder why the fuck we didn’t do something sooner to avoid all this mess in the first place.

I always enjoyed it because it’s very significant coming from Isaac Newton. Even he admitted that he had only scratched the surface with all the work that he had done and that there was way more out there in the universe that we don’t know about yet.

No I don’t … but you can also turn around and put your hands behind your back

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

• Isaac Newton

Nah … I just tie people to rails for the fun of it … now turn around and put your hands behind your back

Reminds me of a joke I’ve heard a dozen times at Indigenous conferences from an MC trying to entertain the crowd.

“When the Creator created man, he put together all the ingredients like a loaf of bread and then had to set them in an oven to finish them. On his first batch, he put in the uncooked loaves and took them out without knowing the cooking time. The loaves were undercooked and still looked white … so that’s how he ended up with White people. He made another batch and this time, he left them in longer and when they came out, they were very dark and almost burnt … and that is how he ended up with Black people. On his third batch, he now knew what to do and he put his loaves in and knew the exact time to bring them out and they came out a nice rich golden brown colour … they were perfect … and that is how he created Indigenous people”

At least being number two, you get to be even

At this point in history … we should just just accelerate the spread … because if we aren’t going to be killed by Ebola … we’re going to get killed by capitalism … or global warming (caused by capitalism)

Are we talking about American candy bars or European candy bars? … because if it’s in Texas, the child is going to have instant diabetes and will probably lose both their feet … if it’s in Switzerland, they’ll probably break their fingers trying to snap that many Toblerone bars

Dead meat

Great idea but there’s a reason why people have a hard time getting the GIF train rolling

#1 being that GIF is turning into an ancient internet image standard that is sort of kinda maybe adopted and supported … it was supposed to be retired because it was an old format but it is surviving because of some strange attachment we all have to this format … and any site that offers to host a GIF is often technically not really hosting a GIF but instead a WEBM masked as a GIF … because to host an actual GIF, like the one from the top post of the highqualitygifs community … you have to load a 47MB GIF file from an image website (the same video file for the same or better quality could be contained in a WEBM or MP4 for about 4MB). (Don’t get me started on the whole WEBM / MP4 open source debate) The problems start in first creating the GIF file and to make it as high quality as possible while minimizing its file size … GIF is not very efficient are reducing file size … and whatever blood sacrifice, chicken entrails black magic you can conjure in order to make a great looking video file as small as possible and save it as a GIF is a dying art … and even once you get that magical GIF, you have to find a good hosting service to carry it and display it while also not severely altering it or rerendering it in whatever format is suitable to them because every platform has their own peculiar way of hosting a GIF … and then you run into the issue of which hosting site renders or displays a GIF is compatible with the fediverse platform you want to display it on and whether or not it will get displayed on the website browser or on a phone app (and also which app) or both or neither.

I tried creating GIFs before and it is like pulling teeth from an epileptic shark … and creating it is only the first step … finding a way to have it uploaded and displayed properly on as many platforms and services as possible is akin to trying to pet a rabid hyena.

Or cattle prods … you could hire cowboys on horses to just ride into the office between the cubicles and cattle prod the people out into ‘play pens’ for a 15 min break … then herd them back once they are done.

Me talking to my mirror self: … who are you again and what are we doing?

I’ve read before that dogs can achieve a level of intelligence of a human four year old (or thereabouts).

So your conversations with your dog would sound very monotonous and tiring after a few years. It sounds cute at first … but after telling your friend “everything its OK” for the thousandth time after ten years … and you still have to explain things … it would get pretty tiring.

We could be starting the development of interstellar travel to Alpha Centauri … but instead we’re developing murder bots to get land for rich people and do it all in the name of sky gods written about in books by semi literate superstitious ancestors that lived in the desert 3000 years ago.