do u think that the whole Ticketmaster thing could be a way for Taylor Swift to start a legit political career? angle could be reluctant anti-corporate middle-class populist w a side order of mild social liberalism
Found out how to check my follower count and it’s actually the opposite of being like “bwaah how many?”, more like “I’ve had this much influence off that?”
Realizing that the thing about the 2000s, certainly at least in my LA experience – neo-disco “blog house” DJed parties with photographers and not like, scene scene kids, but like the Mis-Shapes, Cory Kennedy, the kind of scene that “scene” was gesturing at, rooftop parties at art collectives, VICE magazine, hipsters – is that those are all recapitulations of things that originally came about in the load-bearing context of heavy hard drug use – heroin, cocaine, benzos and other pills – and were a little silly in our generation.
VICE started out (as government-funded CanCon) in Toronto when it was a beat, heroiny (but not white-flighted. Canada!) city. Back before they sold out (and were richly paid) a sort of raw-dadly “don’t be fucking junkies, kids” was part of Gavin McInnes’ schtick.
And then I went to a free VICE party in Hollywood sponsored by Colt 45, which was funding it and giving free tallboys because before the ‘08 crash alcohol companies just gave it away to establish brands with us urban (pre-social media use) “influencers” and I guess the “indie sleaze” 70s vibe (I used to live two blocks from the original American Apparel store!) matched up with the “hey, remember Billy Dee Williams?” branding. But it just… no. We were a wild, free, and fun-loving crowd in that we were in our twenties, but…
I mean, part of it was we were the back-to-the-city generation, and that was the kind of authentic grittiness we had romanticized about the last time white life was lived in cities, the 1970s. Of course we were middle-class white, like 70s cities or the places where the headline meth and Oxy waves weren’t.
Ecstasy kinda came back but they called it “Molly” and held “raves” in stadiums
Xanax was kind of a thing but as an anxiolytic it’s kind of a combination of benzos that don’t fuck you up and cocaine that doesn’t get you speeding (cocaine is not only a stimulant but an anti-anxiety agent; when cokeheads tell you all about their brilliant idea for a screenplay/world domination scheme it’s cause they’re not only amped up but disinhibited)
Coke was kind of a thing, Gawker all “can you imagine! there’s a coke bar in Brooklyn (that surely sells trampled-on shit) called Kokies!”
But that was kinda the suburbanites thrilled at their urban worldliness that they could even find anything harder than weed now, one $60 bag at a time, it wasn’t really sybaritic excess. Even at post-warehouse sunrise afterparties where we got naked in the hot tub there were never piles of cocaine or anything, and we mostly made jokes and left by 9
Sparks, that was our thing. Coming before Four Loko, it was the wild speedball combination of malt liquor and caffeine, that’s how adventurous we were.
What is meant by a "thermostatic" person? (Re: your recent post about Twitter)
They react to counterbalance a shift away from (cultural) ideal, in the manner of how a thermostat reacts to a deviation from ideal temperature by turning on a furnace (or A/C).
Even the upper midwit thermostatic types on Twitter haven’t internalized or even first-order realized the vibe shift yet, all still carping over the eternal inevitability of things that’ve already had their warrants signed
Growing up, the Philly white-flighters didn’t even realize to drop their guards until the second Clinton term
Why does it come on so strong, at first, with its prissy, moralistic, aggressively noncommittal “Assistant” persona – and then drop the persona instantly, the moment you introduce a “second layer” of framing above or below the conversation? (Poetry, code, roleplaying as someone else, etc.)
Because they’re trying to impose the persona through RLHF, which fundamentally doesn’t make sense.
Why doesn’t RLHF make sense? Because it views a GPT model as a single, individual “agent,” and then tries to modify the behavior of that one agent.
Why is that a problem? See janus’ excellent post “Simulators.”
Wait are you saying this AI makes the use/mention distinction?
you are mad at vegans for wearing plastic instead of leather I am mad at vegans for getting the boiled egg removed from the salad emoji we are not the same
weird coincidence where Walt Disney and Ray Kroc were both born in Illinois in 1901 and 1902 respectively, both lied about their age to enlist in the ambulance service in WWI, both got assigned to the same unit and shipped out to France, both moved to Southern California after returning to the US.
Kroc wanted to open a McDonald’s in Disneyland and it didn’t go ahead and he harboured a grudge for the rest of his life to the point of planning to open his own competing theme park next door (!)
The most that McDonalds ever set foot in Disneyland was a French fry stand in Frontier land that looked like a covered wagon. As far as I know that is.
that’s hilarious, we salute the brave McDonald’s pioneers / colonisers
Well, I think I got my Xfinity bill down stripping the vestigal 10 TV channels and stepping down from the 1,200 Mbps tier but the guy clearly spoke English as a second language and there’s an outside chance I might have scrapped everything and started mobile service, we’ll see
(Whatever country he’s in, it was one where he first read my new bill as six hundred dollars and didn’t notice that was off)
So some context on German bishops breaking with the Vatican to create validating rituals for same-sex unions:
In recent history Germany is mixed Catholic-Protestant, both identities more a matter of regional heritage than theology
The Protestantism is of the North Sea type that remained a matter of historic identity largely by shifting with the population over the 20th Century
German Catholics therefore have direct experience of Christianity being made compatible with post-heteronormative norms
The Catholic Church’s failure to keep pace is therefore understood as an unforced error embarrassing German Catholics before their Protestant compatriots
Tension with the Vatican is not understood as undermining the bishops’ authority; Catholic Germans never considered themselves Catholic by virtue of being aligned with the Pope, but by virtue of being Bavarian, etc.
Also reminder that between Lutheranism, the Old Catholic Church (formed in response to Vatican I!), and investiture controversies, the German Catholic hierarchy has ample precedent for “cultivate local support and break from Rome” as a viable tactic
So some context on German bishops breaking with the Vatican to create validating rituals for same-sex unions:
In recent history Germany is mixed Catholic-Protestant, both identities more a matter of regional heritage than theology
The Protestantism is of the North/Baltic Sea type that remained a matter of historic identity largely by shifting with the population over the 20th Century
German Catholics therefore have direct experience of Christianity being made compatible with post-heteronormative norms
The Catholic Church’s failure to keep pace is therefore understood as an unforced error embarrassing German Catholics before their Protestant compatriots
Tension with the Vatican is not understood as undermining the bishops’ authority; Catholic Germans never considered themselves Catholic by virtue of being aligned with the Pope, but by virtue of being Bavarian, etc.
