So I’ll roll my eyes when thought-they-were-winning types whine about editors trying to commission their way into anti-wokeness happening, but it is really funny how much energy went into fluffing up the lower Manhattan thing when the vibe turned without them ever mattering.
It is 2023 and Princess Zelda is the standard reference subject for comparing AI models and prompts with reference to their effectiveness at generating erotic images of girls peeing themselves
I think it’s because there are enough images of various versions of her out there to generate a consistent aesthetic of what Princess Zelda and Princess Zelda’s clothes look like without looking exactly the same each time
It is 2023 and Princess Zelda is the standard reference subject for comparing AI models and prompts with reference to their effectiveness at generating erotic images of girls peeing themselves
Right now on Twitter— oops, sorry. Right now on X— there are Greek-statue-avatar “modern women are degenerates; retvrn” accounts which are partnering with OnlyFans to signal-boost OF models and promote their streams. The models pay the accounts to RT them with “dunks” like “look how fatherless and decadent this is”, and the models see increased signups as a result.
And like… I’m in awe. This is it, this is the entire 21st century neatly encapsulated.
Driving a bedload of topsoil back from the landscaping yard, passing through an up-and-coming neighborhood see a cute mixed girl in neo-2000s hipster style on the sidewalk, realize that after all the changes lately no she’s not out of my league anymore
Weird, largely uncommented unwinding-unto-backlash of repression playing out in sexual culture rn, in how after so long being oriented around the poles of partner-fidelity and the biological threat of insemination from pregnancy and then AIDS, the two big throughlines in today’s sexual culture seems to be creampies (or adjacent, breeding) and like “fuck my wife… please!”
(The latter of which seems increasingly shifting from “cucking” or even hotwifing where the unfaithful sex is at least kind of about the status of the official relationship to kind of a celebration of both how hot it is to have a girl who can pull dick and how satisfying it is to have a partnership that doesn’t inhibit her from self-fulfillment in like, using her cunt to experience the dick of the world, which is the exact kind of fucked-up processing of feminist social change I can dig.)
Just saw a prescription drug commercial say “Ask your doctor. Or go to the emergency room.”
What the fuck?
Like whether that’s them twisting a regulatorily required disclaimer into a sales line or them acknowledging the ER as the front line of basic medical care in 2023, either way it’s fucked up
Aw man planting that lavender under the window next to my sittin’ chair was such a good idea.
Like in general this year in Karafuto has been finally realizing things I had intended for a while and determining they were in fact correct ideal ideas all the while.
This has honestly been a lot of the last part of my life in general for me. Like the 2010s was – well first, coming to Portlandia-era Portland, which was a perfect realization of if the ‘90s had just kept getting better and look the whole culture sees it’s great and they’ll follow our lead and change yay!
But then the national culture turning worse, and okay Portland was a refuge though but then increasingly it wasn’t and and and…
And it getting so bad but what rescued me was – not a fluke, this is actually a defining element of my self-identity – my knowledge of American cultural history, I was like “NO successful cultural turn ever looked like this, but some failed ones kinda did before they backfired proportionally—”
But I was like “but I don’t see the escape mechanism, if Hillary fucking Clinton gets the levers of federal administrative control this stuff’ll get institutionally locked in but how would you pivot to preempt it, you’d basically have to dump the post-Reagan legacy and do Sailer Strategy and kinda recover some of that '80s vim but realize the path forward was the Wall Street crude bros not the Christians, but it’s hopeless the Republicans don’t have anyone lined up to pivot in time…
…and then like a month later the incarnated spirit of the 1980s came down an escalator and I was like "oh”. Come the moment, come the man.
And yeah, that went basically exactly how I expected, and I was like “WOW, I do know this stuff! But… what do I even get for it. Hmm, much to ponder…”
But then I was struck by a falling star and reborn perfected, so there’s my answer and… okay?
Saw for the first time in years a girl who I had indirectly made clear I’d be interested in but she’d indirectly made clear she wouldn’t, and she mentioned that I was looking good while she’s clearly not even in her early 30s anymore, so that was nice.
The open secret that’s been obvious to everyone paying attention is that Trump simply does not give a shit about LGBTQ issues or abortion. Every time he talks about them you can just tell, he speaks in platitudes and never goes into more detail than he has to (compare this to, say, trade, which he cares about a lot). They barely showed up in his campaign book IIRC. I think that was part of the logic of picking Pence as his VP, it was a signal to the Christian right that he’d go along with their pet issues.
In retrospect, this probably actually helped him in 2016. The majority of the public was in favor of gay marriage by 2012-13, but mainstream Republicans still had to run against it in 2016 because the religious right still felt very strongly about the issue. Trump’s refusal to care put him closer to the true “median voter” on that issue than almost any other GOP candidate. It also probably helped build the (obviously false) idea in the public’s mind that Trump was relatively moderate
@sivavakkiyar Exactly right. That comment made it really clear that he’s joining the anti-trans brigade in 2024 purely because he knows some of his fans want to hear it
So if this (unconfirmed!) report is true, then today is the end of Putin being considered a “strongman” leader. The only way that reputation could have survived was by killing or imprisoning Prigozhin. Instead, one of his underlings— literally his former chef!— stood against Putin’s desires and still got exactly what he wanted, without the Russian military ever laying a finger on him. Putin’s forces couldn’t stop the mutiny on their own, he had to address the nation on TV about the fact that the Russian government was being challenged from within, and even still that wasn’t enough to stop it.
The illusion of Putin’s invincibility and singular genius has been damaged in a way that will be tricky to spin for domestic Russian audiences. It’s now been brought out into the open that he operates the way most dictators do: sharing power amongst a coalition of allied stakeholders who possess the ability to alter the direction of Russian policy against Putin’s will.
The madman must have done it. He has no reason to retreat like this unless a deal’s been made, an outcome I’ve previously been assuming the Russian government would try to avoid at all costs because of how weak it makes them look. They would only agree to a deal if they couldn’t find a way to take Prigozhin out. The only questions now are 1) what the deal looks like and 2) if the Russian government still tries to kill Prigozhin anyway once his forces stand down.
It also sounds like a lot of Wagner fighters are unhappy with this outcome, and were hoping to take the fight all the way to Moscow. The most common emoji response to Prigozhin’s retreat announcement is 🤡
83,300 of your private mercenaries have reacted to your withdrawal from your coup attempt with a clown emoji
It sounds as if the Wagner situation might have been defused? Anyhow, I liked this story because the modern world is very complicated and this was one of those timeless sorts of things that everyone understands, you could explain it to an ancient Chinese or Roman military advisor and they’d be like “oh yeah that happens a lot, you guys gotta be more careful”
One interesting thing around Portland these days is no form of personal motorized transport below the Vespa level – this includes underbones, 2-stroke motorcycles, dirt bikes, mini bikes, pedal bikes, rental scooters, e-bikes, and I suppose Segways – has established a norm around not using them drunk.
Wait, no, I bet those guys who go down the street standing with like one wheel between their feet do, they at least wear helmets.
