Beefalo

I bailed on Netflix when I realized that damn, I’m going like a month with this on my phone and haven’t really watched much, maybe one anime? Can I get something other than shitty anime, Netflix? Fun action flick from the last 5 years maybe? No? Never the good one, always the knockoff, the shitty sequel, nothing at all? Canceled Mindhunter? Because of course. Okay, no more pay money, and then I didn’t miss it. That decision took a shameful amount of time to make.

This was way before the password share thing. I don’t know what the rest of you are even doing. Stuff for the kids I guess.

I guess I do this bullshit, now, for entertainment, but this Suuuuuucks with a capital S, so the next step is to find the government chip that makes me scroll and metaphorically remove it. Fuck socials, too. Fuck all this shit anymore.

Damn I just eat these whole now. I guess it’s all about the presentation.

This sounds like the battery and the charger’s problem to handle, not mine.

All this tech, all this automation for every damn thing, and people keep coming at me like I’m supposed to do everything manually with my fingers and eyes and maybe an alarm or something to keep me on schedule. No. Stop it.

Make the charger handle it, or shut up. Make the phone, the charger, and the battery handle it together, you know, with digital automation. Do not even mention it to me.

I wonder if there’s a “This Side Toward Enemy” onesie you can buy.

This type of relationship is pretty common in war. You and the squad end up “in the shit” and now you have all crossed the boundaries of what civilians call “manliness”. You are free, unimpeachable, the manliest thing, a real warrior, a soldier in battle. The things you do now define manliness, you are writing the rules. They can call you whatever, you will reply with the sort of laughter that silences fools.

People die around you. The sound of another man’s voice becomes poetry to you. How much longer will you hear his voice? Who knows, tell him a shitty joke. Sit on his lap for a gag, do whatever. Drink in his presence, press his flesh against yours, be alive together, try to keep him in your memory, tomorrow we all may die. Has anybody seen those pictures of soldiers from the American Civil War all hanging out and mugging for the camera? Acting all “gay” with each other? That’s what war does to men, sometimes, probably not that often, I fear.

Somebody online with a military background once remarked about the safest he’s ever felt, including in civilian life, was when he was in some tent in a war zone with the rest of the platoon, everyone in their sleeping bags, crammed in the tent together like a litter of kittens in a box. Sure, they were in the death zone, for real, but he was warm and snug, surrounded by armed badasses who would come to his aid at once if anything nasty went down. He said he slept like a baby, that he’s never felt that sense of security since, not even safe in bed as a civilian, later.

It means a lot to me that this book, TLOR, was pretty much written by the Great War. Tolkien went to that war, against his own will, compelled by shame campaigns, not even the law, in spite of his own convictions, and he did not have some safe posting at the base, no, he was at the Somme. He saw the worst of it, probably missed death by inches several times, saw mud and blood, was deafened and battered, only to survive at last, coming home as changed as Frodo.

He watched men charge into machine guns like mice into a blender, watched them die of trench foot and the stupid ways war kills you without even glory or honor to show for it, saw that sometimes courage is just hiding in your little hole and not screaming when the tanks roll over. He saw Mordor in person. No man’s land.

Then he came home, and did he write some edgy darkness? No. He wrote this thing, this fantasy, with its message of hope that evil can be vanquished, and that men can be good, yes, even when they seem utterly lost to goodness. This is somehow the lesson that the War to End All Wars had taught him. He had nothing left to prove, so he made a pretty, frivolous thing, for children, but couldn’t help it, he couldn’t help making something bigger than that. He knew how intimate men become with each other under fire, and it ended up in the book.

That is the only thing he wanted to remember, that unexpected love when suffering and death are right on top of you. I wonder who Legolas was to him? Somebody young and beautiful, who deserved to live a thousand years, but didn’t, probably. They shall not grow old.

We shouldn’t need the machine guns coming at us to hug our friends, that’s probably what he wanted the world to know.

For some reason they all come from Cleveland

This sublemmy has been a fascinating experiment into how your relatives “eat the onion”.

Yes, the tired joke is that reality is getting too ridiculous, but if you’ve been paying any attention to the AI music situation you have come to the glum realization that they can make Johnny Cash sing whatever the fuck they want him to, now. It’s very convincing. The “weird fingers” era of AI music was years ago, but people kinda missed it. Also, it sounded like Wagon Christ, so it didn’t matter. In hindsight, I hope that Bjork got a hook out of it.

Now we’re here, where they can make Johnny Cash sing a jingle for an insurance company if they can, and it just sounds like an outtake of his, maybe. For that matter, they can make your Mom talk, given a decent sample of her voice, and the sample is smaller than you might think. I would venture that a few minutes of her voice would do it. Black Mirror shit. It’s getting kinda hard to write scifi, lately, you have to pitch 1000 years from now and insist on FTL just to buy yourself some time.

This was your official warning, years late, everyone is paying attention to the visual results of AI, but the audio results got better, much sooner, and nobody really got hung up on it because we are visual monkeys, and it just did not strike us as headline news.

I feel like the automagic beat matching and tricks of something like Virtual DJ were part of the cutting edge of this “AI” thing that’s honestly harder to describe the better I understand the son of a bitch. The ability to speed up a recording without changing the pitch, ignoring the limits of vinyl, pretty much demanded making new material where the original artist just performed the song at a new tempo, in real time, on demand, but I was messing around with it as a hobbyist in like, 2015. I did not understand what I was fucking with, at all. I understood BTC well enough in 2012, but my time with Virtual DJ? I did not grasp it. If I had understood it, I would be much wealthier, only now do I understand Nvidia fanboys.

So now when they make Johnny sing, it sounds like Johnny. The only real tell is that it sounds like some old classic record of his, and not like whatever crisp thing it would be with his voice like old trees, if he was simply alive now and singing in 2024. But he always sounded like old trees. It just means they can make him sing Yellow Submarine, and you’ll be like shit, did I miss that episode of Sesame Street or something? This is great!

Nossir, I don’t like it.

It’s a graphic design thing? Tumblr and Reddit are kinda infamous for the thing where nobody reads screen names, so you end up reading a post from u/everythingipostisaboutpeopleatingshit so you get got every time you get most of the way through the post, and it’s about somebody eating shit.

Somehow my interaction with The Onion content had managed to slip through that perception filter. I tended to read The Onion articles by going to the website and reading the Sensible Chuckles. So they never really fooled me.

But aha. Reposition the presentation, and give us all a dose of Reality is Stranger Than Fiction, and suddenly here I am, going, yeah, that makes sense. I bet all the fucking phone calls came from call centers in India, kinda thing. Nah, bit right through the skin, like a sheep.

When interviewed he said, “how hard can it be, it’s just burritos, this is my retirement business.”

I just want to say that I appreciate the truly fractal nature of these memes

AH SHIT RUN FRIM THE LIGHTS

Sharks have flooded Shark Infested Waters with shark asshole stink but this time the asshole stink is AI generated and Taylor Swift has a billion dollars for lawyers.

Nextdoor is fucked up because either you’re in it, or your house is probably the house they all talk about.

When I tried to sign up for it ages ago to check it out, Nextdoor wanted me to provide the email addresses of five people, which would have meant a bunch of knocking on stranger’s doors asking for sensitive information. So now I just try to ignore that it exists. They probably use a Facebook group I’m not invited to, anyway, and I do not want to know what any of them think, about anything, ever.

Please tell me you made it talk to a bot.

And then she made a bunch of Jade eggs for your puss puss and sold them.

I gotta get a twin monitor on a proper stand at least if I’m gonna get old on the internet I need luxury and style to do it

Hobbits walking past the hobbit hole in the pic like motherfuckin gentrification buildings brah, this rent is already too high, I gotta use my gun more

Everyone’s being funny about it, but the Dead Internet Theory is looking more and more rational, especially on Reddit. I really don’t have any rational reason to expect that even the dancing TikTok people are real, never mind Reddit comments. I’m fairly certain that I am a living thing, but I have to question everyone else, with all due respect.

Man, Reddit’s weird now. I think it’s just responding to the cookies that it sets as I use it, but I don’t log in and FF dumps cookies every time I close the browser for the night, so when I browse into r/All there’s a new “hot” subreddit every time, and it’s always kind of random. The usual suspects, like JusticeServed and all that fashy shit, those are kind of conspicuously absent, too.

I think Reddit’s on their way out, not because of Lemmy, sorry, but because all the normies getting forced online in 2020 was the last hurrah, and the site is on the way down, finally, I can feel the traffic dropping. Everyone’s either getting sucked into the jet engine of TikTok and Instagram or they’re just using group chats and avoiding social media altogether.

The fascinating thing about modern Reddit is at long last the Americans all seem to have left, and suddenly the site feels like it belongs to the EU, and even South America a bit. So either it’s about to rise with a new flame in this next decade or you should probably buy one share of the IPO as a keepsake and no more. I wonder how long it will take to delist.

My dude, I’ve spent the last couple years really upgrading my finance chops and now I just keep looking around at the variety of internet based things that seem to be winding down like a shitty old clock while going, hah! interest rates too high now! The current internet was only possible in the free money era.

I feel like it’s two separate markets that are forced to share the same big tent known as “gaming”.

I never play AAA games. I’m not on some moral crusade, they just don’t appeal. I do not have the twitch reflexes for FPS, but smaller devs tend to make the sort of gameplay I like.

Right now the only indy game I can think of that’s truly competitive is Battlebit, and that’s only because everyone hates what became of Battlefield. Otherwise it’s just me and what feels like a half dozen other weirdos out here trying to build a bakery so we can feed pie to harpies, while 90% of the world is playing COD like it’s their job. It’s two vastly different people who do not have the same needs, is what I’m saying.

So maybe people need to deal with that and stop honking the “play indy” horn so much. If that was the solution, people would already be on it.

It’s kinda weird how I never had a problem with eating the onion before but now that it’s a part of my media feed suddenly I’m like of course, Disney just throws its IP to the public for fun all the time. I take it the “free use” version of LeFou is already zooming around the internet.

If there was just some obnoxious little T-notch I had to line up on the connector, then I would fumble with it once and after that I could probably get it done in the dark, but apparently it doesn’t matter how many times I use a USB, I’ll never learn to use it on the first try, with the lights on and a flashlight pointed at the situation.

I like that getting it wrong and forcing it also destroys the port, so if it’s a crucial connection, and you’re in a hurry in poor light it’s a great way to kill the whole show trying to insist on that USB going in first try.

Great design, Crowley, you really are a professional. I think it’s better than that awful motorway, this one has touched the world, I can see why that angel loves you so much, what an artist.

Sorry wrong fandom