The smile of a sadistic sociopath, all too familiar

A sizable and obnoxiously well-funded faction of Americans have been fighting New Deal reforms for almost a hundred years. Rural folks living on astro-turf for generations believing that bootstraps were not a joke. Sacrifices must be made on the altar of capitalism. Same reason MAHA wants people to die of preventable diseases. Thin the herd, cull the weak, fuck the poor, save humanity. "We can't afford it" has always been absolute horseshit. The willpower isn't there, corporate America needs its subsidies, failure is free money. They won't take their own advice and let the free market decide. Socialism for oligarchs, gambling for everyone else.

Someone owes me a new irony meter

I would also warn against coming here for the vomiting risk, there's currently a plague of fascistic bigotritis going around

Don't threaten me with a good time

You can press "No Tip" if you prefer to leave cash in the jar, or want to feel like a jerk for a few hours.

"I love your choice of colors, did you art school by any chance?"

distracted chitters

It's a toss-up between the gladiator who talked like The Rock (Dwayne Johnson) and the Russian pit-fighter Droid from a Star Wars campaign. Both had incredibly annoying voices and mannerisms. We'd tried to have more serious games prior to these, but someone always threw a wrench into the works and ruined them. I eventually stopped trying to be serious with that group.

It starts with five, ten, and fifteen. Ours go from fifteen, twenty, and twenty-five. For coffee.

They just have to wait for Fox to tell them what to believe about it

"Your being is intended through the tool: you are intended to sit still, face forward, and behave"

That's not a design feature of a chair, that's your contextual experience. A chair is designed for seating, but it's culture that determines how you view that experience.

A hammer is ostensibly designed to drive nails, affixing objects to one another, while some hammers are designed for breaking things apart. A hammer is a tool of construction, but culturally you might also recognize it as a weapon of war.

Tools by design have limited purpose, but not universal interpretation. AI is an oddity in that its design does not match its use. A hammer does not fail at the task of driving a nail, until you introduce user error. AI does not appear to be able to solve the problems it was "designed" to address. It doesn't "create" or "think", it performs an autocomplete and frequently fails to deliver usable results. AI is the idea of a tool, wielded in a variety of ways that do not produce consistent reliable results, all at enormous cost. Comparing it to a chair skips past the part where the chair is designed to dump you on the floor 75% of the time no matter how you behave in it.

"Newsmax anchor Rob Finnerty was particularly upset, in part because he seemed to believe that Achilles was a historical figure, not a mythological one."

Hol up. Telling me that the right wing doesn't read, can't tell history from fiction, and judges things based on feelings? Hmm 🤔