chat

This kind of semantic reasoning goes so hard. Sucks that it got picked up by the Atlantic but ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

I wanted to download some A2 or A1 prints of some of my favourite ones and there were a few on etsy. Then I remembered that I hate small businesses (large business too but especially small businesses).

Is there anywhere I can get some suitable hi-res posters and print it somewhere?

So there's this thing people do, it's harmless enough, but it also sort of hints at a completely incoherent style of thinking. It is absolutely unfair to judge people by random shit they write casually, after all I write like 3 geeked out baboons stacked atop one and other and yet I am a noble and refined rat.

Nonetheless I'm a judgy shit so I do. Ok so the thing? It's when people use a quote or situation from fiction as a predictor of what will happen in reality. A concrete example from earlier today paraphrased:

p1: I think blah blah thing will happen

p2: Ah but remember men in black? a person is reasonable, people are dumb panicky animals

me: teakettle noises

The causality is utterly confused, MiB cannot be used as evidence, it is written that way because the writer wanted a character to say that. It's possible a writer wanted a character to say that because the writer believed it to be true, but it's also possible that it was included for many other reasons.

screeeeeeeeeee

Anyway, share your thoughts. Also your own ridiculous rhetoric irritations.

Was it meeting other comrades, or going to a big demo? Or somehow feeling like you were being useful to the movement itself?

So, I work in the agro industry and my boss said she had to make an unscheduled trip to the "land down under", to go to her brother in law's wake. She gave me a bunch of weirdly specific instructions. I had to go inform other company executives (who were also her relatives), and she hinted that she wouldn't be safe there and might need their help to return. Maybe something about the immigration customs? But she made a huge deal out of it, like I had to beg them to rescue her.

The three first I asked laughed at my face saying

Nah, what the hell she doin over there? Bitch had all she wanted above and she also wanted what was below?
We already warned her, I aint rescuing that greedy hoe."

Which, honestly, was perfectly reasonable and sounded like they knew her well. Word came up that she tried to usurp her sister's place as soon as she arrived and had gotten killed (?), but I didn't really believe it and just kept going. The fourth guy was like "Oh no, babygirl's in danger? I'll send two goons to take her back". And he did. And they came back with my boss, unfortunately unscathed. And a goon of the Australian branch. Apparently, someone else had to go to the land down under and take my bosse's place if they were gonna let her back (how did she make herself so essential? She was there three days!). Aussie goon asked if he could take me (excuse me?) but boss said no, because I followed all her instructions (thank you!). So they kept looking among the branch managers. All of them had bought into the stories of her death and made small memorials, minutes of silence, wore mourning clothes... All of that pleased her so none of them were taken away.

Then she found out her husband hadn't been mourning, so she got mad and got the aussie goon to take him away. I would've found it funny if be wasn't the head of the cereal department, the most important one; and he was kinda very important.

Producticity plummeted. The boss eventually let her husband come back, but his sister had to go replace him in the southern branch. Productivity climbed up again, but then she sent him back six month later so his sister could return. Then the reverse six month later, they just kept switching them every six month, and basically, we're only producing grain when the original department leader is here.

This fucking sucks, never work for the goddess of fertility.

/s

Standing in line at will-call at Ferguson this afternoon, I called the office to get a PO number. Its a small plumbing shop so the business tyrants are involved with all things to some extent; since she is answering phones today, she answered when I called to get my PO number.

For some reason I said “OK I love you, bye” when I hung up, like a dumb ass.

I didnt have to call, or go back to the office before I finished my shift today, so I didnt have to hear about it yet. Nobody has texted me or called me either so maybe she didnt say anything. Or maybe she did and theyre all waiting to fuck with me tomorrow.

Anyway, thats my faux pas for the day.

I'm coming up on 14 years of experience in my field, and I feel like because I like to have fun at work and joke around while we work, I don't get treated like an adult. I'm 37. I work circles around some people and I feel like I leave it all on the field every day. I help everyone, I do just about anything they ask, I help get new people up to speed, I come in early often, I don't come in high.. you get the picture.

So my manager has like a year of on the job experience and is just about the worst manager I've ever had. Nothing is ever good enough and I'm always "wrong". I've tried standing up for myself, and I've tried letting it roll off my back. Neither approach solves any of my problems.

Today, my manager waylaid my team member on a break and asked her what I do back there. I'm never not doing stuff and everyone but my manager sees it and knows it. I'm the type of worker that you don't have to worry about.

So I text the manager after she left and asked if she had a problem with my work. Of course not! I'm gods gift to bread! Blah blah blah...

She calls my teammate after hours and discusses why I have a problem.. doesn't ask me why I am upset. Instead I'm the asshole for standing up for myself.

There's a guy I work with that is basically checked out and refuses to make decisions or small talk. He's a good worker though. He told me one day that I should just turn off my brain and do what management says no matter how stupid and just let the pieces fall where they may. I'm trying. I really am. But the leftist in me is screaming at me to stand up and try to fix it. It's against my nature to prostrate myself to people like this. My new strategy is to turn my brain off and just be a soulless husk of a man at work who just keeps his head down and isn't friendly toward anyone. I'm only going to talk about work and work related stuff.

It's hard to do and it's so lonely! I have to listen to the same garbage music every day hear the same "working hard or hardly working" jokes every day and eat the same bowl of shit every day because the management doesn't pay any attention to the yahoos they pull off the street to do this job that should realistically have some training. It's a daily shit show and me and a couple of people have to "deep state" fix everything behind managements back while they chortle at the wine bar and take credit for all the fires we put out.

I should just quit, right?

My job is recession proof, it pays pretty well and on a good day, I enjoy it. I'm also hitting that age where I'm slowing down a bit and I don't know how to do anything else. I live at least 25 minutes from towns where jobs are, and they all would be a significant pay cut. I'm scared of the trump economy and rolling the dice on a different job.

tl;dr extremely small portion, like the size of a microwave meal and it was overcooked and to add insult to the injury, bland as hell.

I've been cooking my own meals for the past couple of months and I decided to treat myself today and not have to cook and clean up. Fast "food" has taken a nosedive. I'm out $30 from a comrade that could have went towards groceries and I feel stupid and ripped off.

FUCK FUCK

Each month I ask for Sainsburys supermarket vouchers on mutual aid, because I'm going through a benefit appeal and have no money for food, and worry that taking actual money could get me into trouble with the UK's benefit system. My last mutual aid post was answered and someone sent me a sainsburys voucher (thank you!)

I have to order for delivery at the moment due to my foot surgery and busted achilles tendon. I can't drive there as I'm partially sighted. How it works is that I fill the online shopping trolley with items and then at checkout I enter the gift card number. it converts that into an online coupon which then pays for the food.

I had a bit left in an online coupon, and then someone here sent me a gift card last week. Every day for about a week I have been trying to do my usual online shop, filling the trolley with food and then when I get to checkout and try to pay with the coupon or gift card it says "For technical reasons, we have not been able to connect you to the page you requested and we hope to be able to do so soon. Please try again."

This means I can't spend the coupon or gift card right now. I have emailed sainsburys customer services, two of their CEOs (Simon Roberts and Mike Coupe) as well as a customer service email address for someone called Sarah Tipper. The Mike Coupe email was returned as undeliverable and the others have not responded.

I'm stressing out about it a lot. I don't know what else to do and unless someone responds to my new mutual aid post for a different food voucher very soon I will be in trouble. I have already run out of food. I thought surely this technical problem would be sorted by now. And I can't find anything online about sainsburys website having technical issues, what is happening?

[Click play] Hiii, this is <first_name> calling from <Organization_I've_been_waiting_for_a_call_from> if you could call me back that would be great my number is <phone_number>. Thanks!!

Oh good I've been waiting a month for this call...

Huh, why didn't I hear this ring [checks call log] oh it was marked as spam... Great. [Unmark as spam]. Well I better call her back.

[Calls number, robot answers, its a corporate call center] OK so its not YOUR number... Got it. [Your call is important... Your position in queue is 9]

[30 minutes on hold]

Hi this is <not_who_I'm_looking_for>

Hi I'm looking for <first_name>

Oh OK did she say... Why?

No... She said just call her back

OK what is your information

[Gives information]

OK let me see of she is available

[Waits 10 minutes on hold]

Hi, sorry <first_name> is on lunch she'll call you back after lunch OK?

Uh, OK, yeah that's fine.

[Click]

I guess I can wait another... Hour? Who knows...

The closest that most of us come to a direct experience of the centerlessness of capitalism is an encounter with the call center. As a consumer in late capitalism, you increasingly exist in two, distinct realities: the one in which the services are provided without hitch, and another reality entirely, the crazed Kafkaesque labyrinth of call centers, a world without memory, where cause and effect connect together in mysterious, unfathomable ways, where it is a miracle that anything ever happens, and you lose hope of ever passing back over to the other side, where things seem to function smoothly. What exemplifies the failure of the neoliberal world to live up to its own PR better than the call center? Even so, the universality of bad experiences with call centers does nothing to unsettle the operating assumption that capitalism is inherently efficient, as if the problems with call centers weren’t the systemic consequences of a logic of Capital which means organizations are so fixated on making profits that they can’t actually sell you anything. The call center experience distils the political phenomenology of late capitalism: the boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR, the repeating of the same dreary details many times to different poorly trained and badly informed operatives, the building rage that must remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object, since – as is very quickly clear to the caller –there is no-one who knows, and no-one who could do anything even if they could. Anger can only be a matter of venting; it is aggression in a vacuum, directed at someone who is a fellow victim of the system but with whom there is no possibility of communality. Just as the anger has no proper object, it will have no effect. In this experience of a system that is unresponsive, impersonal, centerless, abstract and fragmentary, you are as close as you can be to confronting the artificial stupidity of Capital in itself. Call center angst is one more illustration of the way that Kafka is poorly understood as exclusively a writer on totalitarianism; a decentralized, market Stalinist bureaucracy is far more Kafkaesque than one in which there is a central authority. Read, for instance, the bleak farce of K’s encounter with the telephone system in the Castle, and it is hard not to see it as uncannily prophetic of the call center experience.

Slop is for gossip, the only rule for fake news is that it's OC only. I didn't think "Mark Wahlberg Claims Elon Musk’s Botched Penis Implant Wouldn’t Have Gone Down Like That If He Was Attending Surgeon" was going to set off the "I can't actually tell if this is real and that makes me upset" brigade.

So I've started to see what is seemingly Gen AI slop being labeled with an artist's name as some sort of slight of hand or less likely the name of the artist that generated it. I came across one name in particular a few times now, but I'm not sure the 'human artist' even exists.

Anyone else noticed this kind of thing? When I did a bit of searching around, all the references were other people sharing the 'art' of this 'digital painter' or 'digital artist'. There's even a short bio that has been reused across many sites like pinterest, facebook, instagram, etc.

But if you search before 2020, there's much less results. The most legit looking page indicated the 'autodidactic' artist first started putting out works in ~2017, which just happens to correspond to when the first art gen AI was made publicly available.

I'm guessing this is happening at significant scale across different creative domains. I've come across albums on youtube that are also gen AI, but do a pretty good job obfuscating it. At least in that case it did eventually lead to an admission if you dug a bit into the label/artist. This one I'm thinking of also was posing as a 'band' from like 50 years ago, like this was some cool music that had been found and republished.

It's just gonna keep getting worse I guess, that seems to be the trajectory here. Is there a crypto verification scheme proposed already as the solution to this?

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/26/23932288/leica-m11p-camera-rangefinder-adobe-content-authenticity-cai-ai-verification-price-specs

This is from 2 years ago, but I haven't heard much about any other stuff like this yet.

i was checking out and the worker asked if I had my military ID, I figured she was joking so I said no just the hat and she inputted the 10% military discount lmao

ive been saluted by an old man and got the discount, now I just need to be thanked for my service to hit the trifecta

pic of the hat

But like, what's use if grammar if you don't also know spelling and vocabulary? Are there British kids who just go around saying "period, exclamation point, ellipses!"

It seems that as life becomes more expensive, the amount of financial aid available gets drastically reduced. The latest thing to go is Macmillan cancer charity. They used to give struggling cancer patients a grant every 2 years. It had lately gone up to £300 a year. I myself received one of these grants in November 2023, I was due to become eligible for another this November coming and was relying on it. Now I won't get it because Macmillan have decided to save money by no longer giving grants and no longer giving benefit advice to cancer patients (so they can cut staff numbers). Meanwhile there are news reports that they are hiring more managers on inflated salaries.

My local council used to give a £150 cost of living grant to low-income people twice a year. It was a lifeline. Then they cut it down to £100. Now they've scrapped it altogether. Why? Because:

The government decided to cut winter fuel allowance. They used to give all Old Age Pensioners the winter fuel allowance - a few hundred pounds to see them through the winter so they could afford to keep the heating on a bit longer and not freeze to death. Well, the government decided to make the winter fuel allowance available to far fewer pensioners, to save money.

So my local council has decided, instead of giving the Cost of Living Allowance to all low-income people in the area, they are going to give it all to pensioners to replace the winter fuel allowance. So younger poor people get nothing.

Meanwhile MPs, many of whom are millionaires, have given themselves a pay rise worth millions. Just when they're making disability benefits harder to claim too. Money is always being taken away from the poorest and extra given to those who don't need it.

fall in

fall in love

fall in love again

fall in love again and again

fall in love again and again

fall in love again and again

See the previous post for more info.

Things I'll be sending up:

printed small FALGSC flag

hexbear logo, possibly physical

mack the knife poem by Bertolt Brecht

images: Belly_Beanis's spacebeanis, AstroStelar's "Someday I'll Go To Space", and Deinonychus's curry-space emoji, incremental_anarchist's photo of Gerard way and an image of David Bowie/Wheatley

usernames: oscardejarjayes, cosecantphi, isame, Coolkidbozzy, MikeyChaz, WellTheresYourCobbler

Link to Pitbull - Give Me Everything ft. Ne-Yo, Afrojack, Nayer

If anyone else has something they want me to send up, reply with it.

The launch got pushed back a little, so I've got a fair amount of time to add what you want (the "real" payloads basically done already). Launches are basically never on time, lol.

If anyone wants proof, I'm perfectly willing to DM some Blue Origin stuff that shouldn't be public (it probably shouldn't dox me). I'll be responsive for the next day or two, then probably again in a few weeks.

It’s an arraignment for a 4 year old misdemeanor warrant out of a neighboring county (criminal trespassing). It’s a good sign that they let me out and gave me a court date, when they could have just held onto me, but idk. I’m scared.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/7780189

I will try not to reveal much personal information in order to maintain privacy.

Anyway, I've known Alex for most of my life, they were pretty good for most of it.

In recent years, they've gone down the MAGA pipeline, and it's gotten worse and worse over the years.

At this point: about every day they talk about illegal immigrants and Trump, often even making jokes about it.

They talked about it so much, and I tried to tell them the truth (such as that most undocumented aren't criminals, they can't migrate legally, etc.) and even encouraged them to do research about it, but they refused.

Here's where things start to get crazy:

In recent times, anything they see that goes against their worldview is called "fake news" while they literally unironically called Fox News a reliable source. (Another family member made fun of them for "only looking at Fox News," not knowing how right they were.)

They started to say how scared they are about "Venezuelan gangs" and even said that they check their windows and get scared at every sound because they are literally worried that it's one of the "gang members."

Then it happened:

We discussed the Garcia situation, where a legal immigrant was sent to CECOT without trial. We argued about it.

I asked stuff like, "Where's the fair trial? Where's the due process? Should you be punished for a crime you weren't even tried for and convicted of?"

They kept saying lies like, "They DID get a trial! They're an abuser! They're a gang member! Only the worst criminals go there! You just support mean people and gang members!"

This continued back and forth, until it happened.

They cried about how scared they were of the "illegal immigrant gangs" and being attacked by them. That's right, cried, with tears.

I was disgusted. I felt sad because they bought into this propaganda so much. And I felt amused to the point of laughing, which they didn't like.

That person had various problems in their life. And they decided to cry about "the evil brown people coming after me!!!"

I didn't feel sorry for them at all. That's disgusting.

And that was just the first instance.

Recently:

We were having just a mundane conversation in the car, and they made a joke about CECOT and El Salvador. I said that I didn't want to talk about that. They got angry and talked seriously about El Salvador. I told them again multiple times that I didn't want to talk about it, and they kept continuing. They said stuff back at me like "You know who goes to CECOT? The worst of the worst!" so I was forced to confront them like "They send innocent people there without trial, I don't want to talk about it." I keep saying no, they say "I have a right to say what I believe." I say, "I have boundaries, I want you to respect them. Can you please be respectful?" They say, "I cAn'T bElIeVe YoU sUpPoRt GaNgS!1!1!1!"

I tell them that I never said that and I want due process and don't want to talk about this, they sounded like they were going to cry about "the brown people coming to get me again!!!" and I wasn't in the mood to deal with that. Thankfully, I got to my destination soon after.

It is incredibly sad to see somebody I've known throughout my life turn into...this. Of course, there's much worse that could've happened, but this is unbelievable.

They do see a therapist, and I think I should encourage them to talk to them about it.

Do you guys have any thoughts or stories to share?

And I will refuse to learn to code

I hate that some racist Karen is going to become a millionaire for being racist on camera. And this has happened many times before. Meanwhile I am sitting in a fast food place after spending $13 for some deep-fried slop served to me by people who are probably making $12/hr.

I've been unemployed for a while, using Wall Street to keep bills paid, but honestly I have no interest in working for anyone else at this point. This whole life is a huge scam! How is any of this fair?!? The evil people are celebrated, the worst companies get the highest valuations, the bad guys not only win, but they get ahead of us honest folks. I feel like I woke up in opposite land.

I do a lot of housework, work on my own projects, and am constantly working on self improvement. But those don't have a paycheck attached so I guess I'm a useless, lazy bum according to society.

I'm tired of all this.

My sister recently married into a Central American family and my mother-in-law gave me a bunch of tamales, but I accidentally left them at my Dad's place. I got them today and he admitted he ate one but said the "outer layer was really stringy and tough".

Thing is I'm 90% sure I've had tamales with this man before.