Andor is probably the last Stars War that I’ll watch unless they come out with another one that learns from it. DS9 took Star Treks seriously and the result was a show that has relevant ideas 30 years later. Until Andor, none of the Stars Wars I’ve seen have taken the universe seriously. They’ve expanded on it in unnecessary detail and obsessed over that detail, but intellectually they’ve all felt flat and liberal. Andor spends three episodes showing the Death Star through Foucault and you get one brief shot of it after a full film-length of watching how a gear is made using slave labour. That dialectical materialist analysis of the empire is so much more interesting than any battle or Jedi scene across the whole canon.

Oceanic acidification means that the kraken can no longer form its shell.

Betting is now open. Winner takes all:

6FingerJoe will survive-

<1 day

1 day

1 week

1 month

Custom: ___

An ex wanted to break up because she was still in love with her ex. Her ex is in prison for decades after going on a rampage against homeless people and critically wounding at least a few. Live happybadger reaction:

seed the habitat that attracts protected native species. In my seed bombs I always include our protected state wildflower and whatever the most productive pollinator plants for that setting are. The more bird species you support, the closer that space comes to being designated a bird sanctuary.

Art of the deal.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deer_Woman

Deer Woman, sometimes known as the Deer Lady, is a spirit in Native American mythology whose associations and qualities vary, depending on situation and relationships. Generally, however, to men who have harmed women and children, she is vengeful and murderous and known to lure these men to their deaths. She appears as either a beautiful young woman with deer feet or as a deer.

Do NOT trust the flavourdeer. The flavourdeer LIES.

Cuba.

We’ll get the Cuban Funko Pop Crisis if all the treats are diverted there. That’s treats too close to the US border.

I was a 9/11 truther because there were so many weird coincidences that day, but ultimately had to accept the accident theory. Shit happens.

Cargo ships are your cheapest paid option. I’ve yet to do it, but contact the shipping companies and see what their passenger policies are. There are also shipping agents who coordinate with those companies as intermediates.

There’s also the potential of crewing a small boat if you have any skills or show them you want to learn fast. I did a lot of sailing around Panama just by sitting in a marina at either side of the canal and chatting with people who are about to sail somewhere. The work was either poorly paid ($50-100 per day) or free in exchange for a bed and food. For transatlantic/transpacific sailing though, I don’t know if you’re going to find as many yachters as I did who were just sailing in the Caribbean. That’s also a fun option if you want to build those skills since they need a certain number of crew to even transit the canal and they’re all going somewhere after.

edit: And for the latter you’ll also have luck on boater forums. I can’t remember which I used, but there was a designated subforum where people would post if they have or want crew work specifically for linehandling.

“But you didn’t” is such a powerful idea in art. The only reason European artists aren’t stuck in strict biblical representation with church-approved colours is that people pushed boundaries. The modernists rejected boundaries altogether and embraced pure creativity to such a degree that their own audience couldn’t recognise it as art. I’ve seen that same Malevich painting in the MoMA and that’s revolution. That’s a communist rebelling against centuries of only realistic paintings of idyllic landscapes and aristocratic portraits being taken seriously. He’s saying a red square is art for the sake of creative expression, an idea that would mature into “common people are alienated from art which is restrained to a professional class. Everyone should be entitled to its production and consumption” with proletarian art. He destroyed the idea of subject as a model of patronage as much as he did as a creative restraint.

Art should do that. It shouldn’t just have a message, but a call to some greater action that enables better art. We wouldn’t have modern music without Wagner violating the tonic as the most sacred principle of European music. Modern music, and especially classical music, is fucking beautiful in completely new ways because someone had the courage to reject centuries of what Serious Adults said was beautiful.

I use two definitions for the two broad intellectual trends in art over the past century:

Robert Hughes on modernism- “the shock of the new”

David Harvey on postmodernism- “The reduction of experience to a series of pure and unrelated presents”

AI fundamentally can’t create modernist art because it recombines what already exists into a crude 3rd stage simulacrum. You’ll never see genuine brilliance from how we understand AI. It’s incapable of creating a new perspective, new consonance out of dissonance, or a societal transformation through art. If the world is a shared historical trajectory where we’re discovering the same common thing, AI doesn’t participate in that. It has no investment in the nature worship of art nouveau or the class politics of constructivism or the physics of cubism. It can’t overcome the 1936 standard of Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction when he was only describing crude printing presses.

AI can create postmodern art but only because postmodernism is ideologically, historically, and financially flattened into artists as bourgeois bloggers. If the world is nothing but commodified individual commentary in a marketplace of ideas with the most valuable commentary coming from wealthy failchildren, AI is a wealthy failchild that can also regurgitate what it learned from scraping art school data while still staying tailored to market preferences.

I don’t personally value the latter or see it as anything more than a counterrevolution against the future we lost in the mid-20th century. There’s no reason I’d ever pay for an AI image if I can generate a more personally-tailored version instantly for free using the same IP it recombined to shit out. It’s inherently Thomas Kinkade kitsch but somehow less valuable because they don’t even pretend to involve creative labour in it.

The only good work environment I’ve had was a municipal parks department. Not even unionised, paid $17/hour for the same work I could get $25-35/hour for at a private landscaper, no benefits for seasonal workers and few super-competitive permanent roles. But in decoupling from the profit motive, production became based on need rather than financial goals. I worked so much harder than I would at a private company because building a public pollinator garden is ecologically critical work that educates people on important things. Clearing snow at 4am in -10c weather was something I did until the point of exhaustion because I use those same bike trails and sidewalks the moment I get off work and each bike is one less car that might kill my neighbours. I got to do eco-Marxism without having to use any of the vocabulary alongside a mixed bag of liberals and radicals who intuitively understood those ideas through observation.

With strong unions and outright syndicalism, that kind of nuance returns to the incentive structure. It’s productivity based on socio-ecological need instead of production for profit. We cared about getting people their 40 hours per week and if you came up 5 hours short you’d get paid to study and design sustainable landscapes used by your neighbours. If you needed time off you got it, if you needed a break you took it. You got to spend all day making beautiful de-alienating things for your coworkers, wildlife, and community. When my neighbours hold the power instead of owners and shareholders, it’s so much easier to convince them that doing A instead of B will improve our shared conditions.

The largest arboriculture company here is employee-owned but not unionised at a national level. Their stock isn’t publicly traded and each year the permanent employees get to buy shares with a certain percentage of their income. That access to stock options increases with your rank. While they’re the only arborists I’d want to work for and set the industry standards for safety, I don’t like two things about that:

1. Seasonal employees don’t get stock options, nor do new employees without like a year under their belt. This concentrates the internal wealth of the company in upper management and senior employees, making the incentive structure represent them instead of Joe Schmuckatelli risking their life 30m up with a chainsaw.

2. The incentive structure is the same as a public company as a result of that. Make number go up so you get dividends at the end of the year. The only way to make number go up is to do more with less. Productivity is in direct contrast to the welfare of workers because they don’t have a union to represent their safety or rights. If I get a small bonus every year from dividends but I spent that year risking my life unnecessarily to boost the stock price, it’s just gambling on Russian roulette.

Tesla having an oligarchical stranglehold over US EVs is why I can’t affordably own a better brand like BYD. If you want to be idealistic about Tesla’s supposed climate change role, explain it to me in the context of The Purpose of a System is What it Does. Tesla uses public funds to make luxury cars while suppressing the EV industry through its proprietary infrastructure, obsession with private transit, and government influence. The Boring Company is a direct response to California trying to implement high speed rail so that the wealthy don’t have to share space with workers.

Of course I negatively judge someone for owning one. If it’s a cybertruck, they’re feral and I write them off as a member of society. Electrification is dead on arrival as long as they exist.

https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cpdxzjw9p47o

Elon Musk’s appearance at a Trump rally this afternoon is garnering significant attention online over a one-armed gesture.

He made the gesture while thanking supporters for contributing to Trump’s victory. Musk thanked the crowd for “making it happen”, before placing his right hand over his heart and then thrusting the same arm out into air straight ahead of him.

“My heart goes out to you. It is thanks to you that the future of civilisation is assured,” he said.

Several users on X, the social medial platform he owns, have likened the gesture to a Nazi salute.

Musk has since responded, posting on his social media site X: “Frankly, they need better dirty tricks. The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.”

I wish western journalists would have opted to become compost instead. Compost is useful.

Three things stand out to me:

1. The disparity between military and civilian certifications. If you’re a mechanic on a specialised machine, it’s easy to become a DOD contractor on that same platform. If you’re an officer, you can say you’ve managed X people. If you’re a medic, your scope of practice is command-by-command. You might work above an LPN level but leave the military with an NREMT EMT-B certification at most which qualifies you for a minimum wage job way below your scope of practice. There are only a handful of slots for advanced schools that give you any worthwhile certification, and the paperwork required to become an LPN ($55k/year~) is very difficult to amass. If you’re a machine gunner, you spent 4+ years mastering a skill that doesn’t transfer to any civilian job and you can only sell yourself as a whipped horse with a broken back.

2. Military culture itself is traumatic. It’s closer to feudalism than it is anything in the civilian world. There’s a rigid hierarchy and set of standards for every aspect of your life. You have a pathological obsession with being 15 minutes early because your lord can have you arrested if you don’t do everything perfectly. You’re supposed to embrace the toxicity of every part of your day, much less being a cog in the demon machine that hates you as much as it does its victims, and tie your self-worth to that scripted performance. The outlet for dealing with any of that is alcoholism and/or smoking. You can’t afford or make the time for civilian therapy, while military therapists are inquisitors that can have you arrested or end your career.

3. There’s no blueprint for civilian life. The allure of military life is that you know exactly what every expectation is. You can turn your brain off because you know what to wear and how to wear it, what to do and how to do it, and how doing A will result in B for your career. Your chain of command is a line of narcissistic older siblings and parents strictly directing you down that path. You have that stick incentive of being arrested if you violate any part of the carrot plan. All of a sudden you’re removed from that very traumatic environment and it’s replaced by a much more abstract system where nobody follows the rules you’re conditioned into.

Maybe you make that deal with the devil knowing you’re a good fiddler and you get a golden fiddle for it. If you didn’t explicitly do that for that reason and get the right paperwork for that goal, you leave with nothing and probably hate the field you were trained for but not meaningfully certified in.

Practice makes perfect

It’s the youtube algorithm wearing a skin suit to convince children to gamble.