I found this fact particularly fun. thanks for sending me down a lil rabbit hole.

I think totally. 100%. If Wikipedia is to be believed

An ethnicity or ethnic group is a group of people that perceives themselves to be different from other groups based on shared attributes. These attributes include having a common language, culture, common sets of ancestry, traditions, society, religion, history, or social treatment.[1][2] The term ethnicity is sometimes used interchangeably with the term nation, particularly in cases of ethnic nationalism. It is also used interchangeably with race.

Then I think that your ethnicity could be based on the internet communities you exist in.

Its directly related to things like the slow dissolution dissolving of regional accents we see due to the internet and the general melting, appropriation, and reappropriation of cultural aspects we see facilitated by the internet.

When i was a kid, my grandma lived with us. She’d listen to this piece of garbage non-stop. She had me parroting the drivel he spouted. Nothing could make me forgive this dude for poisoning her mind, and nothing will make me forget how she helped make me into a hateful little kid. Glad they’re both dead, only hoping my own mother doesn’t take up the mantle with my nieces and nephews. She does not understand the harm and the trauma she perpetuates.

I think learning anything new is like this, yknow? No pain no gain, as they say.

I don’t think there is meaning. I’ve never read Camus or Sartre and don’t really know what determinism is (quick read on Wikipedia, I think I agree with it?), but

I keep living because it makes me feel good for the most part, and because the thought of dying makes me feel bad for the most part.

It has radicalized my previously centrist brother-in-law to the left and continues to do so.

Darktable is a godsend to me for converting film negatives.But I pretty much only use image conversion, RGB curve, then fidget with the exposure and RGB sliders in negadoctor a little more then I’m done. No idea how to do anything else.

I second this – I think installing linux on another hard drive is best. It can be frustrating to jump straight into linux and realize a particular thing doesnt work, not knowing why, and realizing you can’t play games at all before doing work to fix things. Saying this as a linux sysadmin.

For a long time I had a dual boot setup for this reason. I wasn’t sure why Ubuntu always felt so sluggish gaming (especially Rocket League, which requires a very low amount of input lag)

Eventually I found two things that massively MASSIVELY improved my perception of the performance. First, the kernel I was running. Switching to the liquorix kernel with my NVIDIA card made a huge difference in my perceived input latency (please, if someone could correct my verbiage here. Input latency may not be technically correct.) Secondly but almost as important – my desktop compositor. I switched to KDE Plasma so I could manually turn it off and make sure that it was off. I never was certain with Gnome, even though I am more comfortable in that environment. Smooth sailing since then. But it was important for me to be able to reboot into Windows if I wanted to play with friends without running into technical difficulties.

Now, I’m fully off of Windows for gaming and, well, everything. It’s sick.

Recently found dadrock band Geese. So good. And their lead guy, Cameron Winter, also just released a stunning solo album.

another 11th hour reversal

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2025/04/16/cve-program-funding-cut-what-it-means-and-what-to-do-next/

dumbest timeline

If you’re on the fence about watching this in its entirety, I encourage you to give it a shot. The summary below is totally accurate re: “the argument” (thank you, btw, Mr. Bucket) but it doesn’t really do the video justice. It’s actually funny and entertaining. I was kinda skeptical. I am chronically predisposed to overanalyzing “will this be worth my time?” regarding video essays. Watching it at 2x speed made it quicker and funnier for me. Totally worth it.

Ooo shit yeah I actually like this take, I didn’t think about the dating app implications. Like in the sense of highly ironic dating app pics, doing this and hamming it up to the max could actually be hilarious

I think you might be misunderstanding me. I don’t mean to say women aren’t attracted by silliness. I mean to say that a person who tries to be a certain way (can be silly, serious, whatever) because they think it will attract a mate is less attractive, especially compared with than a person who is just a certain way because that’s how they are.

Being your true self is more attractive than trying to be act in a way that you think will attract someone, yknow?

But I agree with you (although I’m a man), silly is attractive. But being silly with the express intent of impressing potential romantic partners? Way less attractive

oop my bad, I wrote out my comment and then deleted my main point. I think you hit the nail on the head, my only differing opinion is that I think at this point, it’s really difficult to change the underlying reason that he’s doing it. At least for me, I wouldnt be able to just “turn off” the original intent of attracting women.

If I went ahead with the plan trying to tell myself, “Well originally it was about getting dates and impressing women, but now its just about having fun,” I feel like I’d still be subconsciously doing it for the female gaze. That’s why I say the jig is up – if I were him, I’d bag the idea and wait for next purely silly fun idea

Edit: Little anecdote to illustrate where I’m coming from. When I was in middle school and early high school, I really wanted to be that guy that played guitar. All the girls would love me. I started learning open chords and practicing simple songs, and I managed to learn a few over a couple months. I could never sing and play, just play a couple licks and tunes. But I soon lost interest because I wasn’t becoming the guy that played guitar, and girls didnt care that I was the guy that was simply learning to play the guitar.

Fast forward to college/covid, I’ve lost interest in being the guy that plays guitar. That dude is cringe anyways. But it would be cool to learn how to sing and play guitar at the same time. That sounds like fun, to be able to really play some music. So I picked up a guitar and I was total shit. Couldn’t do anything I used to be able to. Eh, whatever, the next time I pick it up, I’ll be a tiny bit more comfortable. And I was. I’d accepted I would probably never be a good player. Who cares if I’m good? I just like the feeling of getting a little more fluid. Oh shit! I can play and sing! As long as I play super slowly. Sweet. I start to express myself bit by bit, a little more and a little more, adjusting the tempo, the volume, my vocal delivery. Ooo, that feels good. Huh, look at that! Barre chords are easy now. Hmm…I bet I could go back to that song I couldnt play a while ago and play it now. Oh shit! I can play it! Siiiick. Dang, that was a big bong rip…hmmm what should I do to enjoy this high… looks at the guitar on my wall oh fuck yeah…

And that’s how I became the guy that played guitar, who I wanted to be when I was young. I mean I’m still not good. Definitely wouldn’t play for an audience. But goddamn if its not the most valuable thing I ever learned to do. I can express myself in a whole new way. I look back and think, if I had approached it from the desire to be at the destination, I would’ve lost any motivation I had. It couldnt be about becoming good at guitar, or becoming a guitar player, or becoming a guy who played guitar. I needed to approach it from the pure desire to just fuck around on guitar. Try the thing today that I couldnt do yesterday. Oh shit! I can do it! Hell yeah. For me, I never want to do something if I don’t enjoy doing it. Fortunately for me, I enjoy fucking up and figuring out why and then doing it better the next day. I like learning, and don’t mind being shit at something. No one is good at something the first time.

So that’s why I think OP shouldnt go do the photoshoot, because if it isnt for the pure enjoyment of the thing, if the intent is, I guess, polluted, by him wanting to seem like a certain type of person, he’s more likely to have a bad time.

I think this is the reason he shouldn’t do it. If the whole reason to do it is to attract women, that is pretty unattractive. It would be funny if they just did it for the “fuck it, why not be silly?” aspect of it, but I feel like if the original reason is to attract women, then the jig is up and it is forced and weird.

“Let’s be silly” is cool and attractive. “Let’s be silly so we can attract women” is cringe and off-putting.

It’s weird she’s talking to you as if she were your mom.

There’s a perspective that some technologically literate people have (not all of them, certainly) that enables them a clearer view of what is going on re: tech oligarchs. That is how much we rely on other people’s computers. Most people don’t think about what is going on when they browse a website or post something on social media, set up their own shop on squarespace, sell a product on Amazon, stream music or TV or movies or games.

Giant tech companies own it all. They own the computer you use to do all these things. They own the computers other smaller businesses use to run their companies. You invented a product and want to drive your cart to the market square? Pay a tax to King Bezos, the market square is Amazon. Did you make a game? Pay Gaben and you can sell it at his marketplace. Don’t wanna use these marketplaces? Wanna set up your own shop? You still have to use Amazon’s, or Microsoft’s, or Google’s computers.

These tech oligarchs are more like feudal lords – enclosing lands (computers) and charging the peasants and merchants access to them.

I help people do science and math with their computers. I make around 100k, double the median income in my area. My commute is an hour and a half each way, at least, and sometimes I only have around 3 hours to myself after I get back from work before I need to go to bed. Still, I have it better than most (although, with the current attack on science in the US, uncertainty about clients is rising…)

I think of him as astoundingly stupid. But he ain’t dumb.

Here’s a fun Graeber video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hn78MhPmbCc&t=597s