Orcocracy [comrade/them]

What book is this image from? It definitely speaks to the massive problem with fragile masculinity in American media - it would be interesting to see what else is said about it.

Bill Clinton statue in Kosovo

Train derailed by wayward car on tracks

Needs more superlatives, that’s what makes writing good.

Oh yeah, in the US they’re still using paper signatures and click-clack machines from 1982.

Fahrenheit is what Americans feel, Celsius is what everyone else feels, and Kelvin is just Celsius +273.

Th DRM is the real issue, especially when viewing habits are taken into account. The most watched shows on Netflix for years have been repeat viewings of old sitcoms. The re-watching of shows like Friends, The Office, Seinfeld, etc is especially energy intensive because of DRM. Viewers download the same episode again and again and again, only for the DRM to automatically delete the downloaded file every time. If Netflix was just a folder on a server of DRM-free .mp4 files it would be very efficient.

But it isn’t. Instead, capitalism demands an inefficient over-engineered mess of a system, with a confusing algorithmically reshuffled interface of self-destructing video files so that people can be charged money every month forever and ever.

Right now the policies most of the NATO-aligned powers have towards boats full of people fleeing war zones to claim asylum is to ram the boats and shove the survivors in prison camps.

I think the Maoists and the Anarchists both have some very good ideas. The Maoists seem pretty serious about doing important reforms, but I think the anarchists would be more fun to have a beer with.

The full-volume American accents in most English dubs break my suspension of disbelief. It just sounds weird.

The US anthem can’t be sung well by the average person (especially towards the end), hence why in stadiums the crowd doesn’t even try to sing along and just cheers and whoops. The UK is about the monarch at the level of the text. But the US anthem is about the same thing in how it functions as a piece of music to create a social situation where the crowd remains passive in its adoration of a single person. There is no collective experience of doing and participatory togetherness. There is only the admiration of the celebrity pop singer as an emblem of the American aristocracy.

But yes the UK anthem is an awful dirge.

Or to put it the other way around: what much of the world considers a warship, the hyper-militarized US uses as a speedboat for lake cops.

AI, algorithms, and the statistics that power them are not that smart. They have no way of knowing for sure what is in your head when you hit the delete button.

Yes, the drone pilots double-tapping weddings sure are heroes.

Hang on, how did a US soldier give Donald Trump the freedom to say stupid shit? Who was going to take that freedom away, and perhaps the most bizarre part of all: why did the soldier stop them from taking that freedom away?

There was a GSM version of that Nokia phone from the original Matrix film sold around the world. Are GSM radio bands from the late ‘90s/early 2000s still in use? If so it would presumably still work for calls and texts in some countries.

The spring activated thing in The Matrix was only in the movie though. On the real phone you had to actually pull that plate down yourself, which made the phone seem like a complete disappointment back in the day when I once met someone who actually had one. This person could sort of fiddle it with their hand to kinda push it out one smooth motion, but it just wasn’t quite right.

I think it’s in the book “Games of Empire” where the argument is made that the worlds in fantasy games are usually just recreations of our modern capitalist world, aforementioned financial shenanigans very much included. These games often have the aesthetics of a kind of mediaeval feudalism, but in-game economies feature very modern things like decimalised currency, auction houses, arbitrage, consumerist alienation, instant payments, and so on, all of which would be very out of place in a feudal world. Fantasy RPGs show us worlds that appear radically different from our own at first glance, but upon deeper examination they are another example of the social imaginary restrained by capitalist realism.

It’s like the money in a fantasy RPG: 100 bronze or copper equals 1 silver, and 100 silver equals 1 gold.

You generally need to go to a bookshop that stocks academic books to find proper lefty stuff.

Hexbear is deeply unserious, but that’s the point, right?