That must have been such a wild evolutionary arms race. I wonder how it even began.

With every snake I’ve handled, maybe a dozen species of domestic pets and wild ones, they’ve always been more afraid of me than I am of them. Even the rattlesnakes on hiking trails. One small part of their body is a defensive weapon while I have four limbs and tools. They can’t see well, they’re pretty dumb, and their mouth might not even be large enough to bite me.

They don’t really have mammalian affection but snakes do seek warmth. My chainlink kingsnake was almost 2m long and he wanted nothing more than to hold onto me while I did things. He could have constricted but I wasn’t posing a threat and he was fed regularly on a predictable schedule. On feeding and shedding days I didn’t handle him to minimise that conflict. The reward of having that pet was peaceful coexistence with something I have a mild phobia of and being able to see the behaviours that humanise it. They’re all the fun of an aquarium but you can hold the fish.

Ontologically silly-ass

I take pride in poisonin’ myself and my family as much as I poison my land and biosphere.

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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.

Betting is now open. Winner takes all:

6FingerJoe will survive-

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Custom: ___

Something I wanted to bring up…for aesthetic reasons it’s best if we stick to very neutral colors in our training photos. Black is best but white could be alirght too. Just no more tie dyes. We’re supposed to be scary Nazis.

[Django Unchained scene where the klansmen are arguing about the quality of their masks before being blown up]

the only candidate who didn’t defend paedophiles

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:

It could be the most sophisticated plagiarism machine possible, requiring the most amount of effort to make a coherent image of any of the models, but I challenge you to make the absolute best image on the absolute best model out there. Really pour your heart and soul into it for a sincere amount of time. Make a prompt 10,000 words long with every parameter precisely dialed in. It will take me 30 seconds and an acre of rainforest to make all of that for nothing in a way I can’t do if you snap a photograph out of your window. You sculpt a shitty cup and I can’t replicate it, you paint the most meaningless abstract expressionist piece and I can’t replicate it, you record a cover of Happy Birthday and I can’t replicate it. Not at the level you did without a technical background, not better than you did without significant capital investment or unique talent. If I can do that with AI images using a library computer or cheap smartphone, your investment in making the image is way more than its worth as an instantly genericised jpeg. I can’t feed your cup into a kiln and effortlessly make a better cup, but I’m four clicks away from making a better version of your AI image.

Even if we develop it as open source and community driven, that doesn’t make it gain value it doesn’t intrinsically have. It devalues human art by flooding the space with slop, like it did with Clarkesworld and Spotify. It would still be ideologically futurist and alienating to the artists whose skill comes from years of practice. There’s no communist future where plagiarism is meaningful art when communists now and in the 1930s already saw through it. Would you buy an AI image I make as a Marxist who knows a lot about art theory? Would you buy it for the same price as a napkin doodle I make? This one’s pretty good, reflects my communist values with two decades of studying art nouveau behind it, and I’ll sell it to you for the right price:

My critique of AI is rooted in Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, something it’s fundamentally incapable of overcoming. A photograph can be reproduced, but the print is worth the paper it’s on unless you do the actual labour of adding a signature. Like you said to produce the original takes actual skill and capital and creative intent. Coding a nice-looking website is artistic even though they’re just tappity-tapping at a keyboard. I could not replicate a good website without knowing multiple programming languages and all the fields web design draws from.

Fundamentally that is not there with AI. It is all slop no matter how much tech demons try to inflate their salary by calling themselves prompt engineers instead of someone who does a lower level of data entry than I did working in tech support for an ISP. No amount of precision refinement of the plagiarism machine will overcome the fundamental valuelessness of it. The moment you upload that AI image you spent 40 hours engineering to the web, I’m going to feed it into another image generator with a prompt that tailors it to my tastes. I can say “make this in the style of Van Gogh” and produce something much better than your original image without any of the time you wasted trying to make a coherent picture, and my energy cost is much lower to produce the better version of the same product. I can’t do that with any actual commodity, only something like an NFT which also insists on its own value. Both NFTs and AI images are standard fictitious capital which can be replicated by their own means of production even easier than the “original” product. You right click>save the NFT and suddenly their $1m monkey jpeg is any other jpeg.

Of course capitalists don’t care about it and just see it as a chance to turbocharge the primary contradiction of capitalism, but the closest historical parallel for me isn’t an artistic commodity so much as it is ersatz bread. They’re doing creative shrinkflation and the core limitation of the technology devalues their product to the point that people stop wanting it. There are Disney Adults who will pathologically seek out any slop with a face they recognise from childhood, but the same thing driving capitalists toward AI to save on labour costs is also driving them toward increasing the costs of the shittier product. People only bought into NFTs when the speculative value turned it into gambling just as they currently support AI because it represents a tech bubble. When that bursts, the energy costs of making an AI image will outweigh any amount of value you could get in the short term at the cost of your long-term reputation. Businesses who ratfuck their marketing departments to use it will cause a brain drain that hurts their ability to advertise, artists who use it will be lumped in with slop, and only niche applications like worse VFX in a product with greater actual capital investment will make economic sense.

The neo-luddite position is the only one that makes sense to me because it’s building on two subsequent centuries of Marxist art/tech/cultural theory. We’re not seizing the mechanised looms because they don’t make actual cloth. Pushing a coherent humanistic idea of what art means, universalising its production and consumption with an economic focus on supporting artisans and artistic co-ops, is the way for people to see value in leftist art. The modernists understood this until that future was stolen from us and only building off what they started will create art that’s something other than a spectacle or commodity. AI “art” is purely within the ideological framework of fascist futurism with no place for us.

For what it’s worth, they and other livestock love mycelium from culinary species like Pleurotus ostreatus. The substrate is healthy myceliated straw/grain with the complex carbs predigested by the fungi and it has immune system benefits for them: https://openagriculturejournal.com/contents/volumes/V17/e187433152305260/e187433152305260.pdf

My ideal homestead revolves around multi-tiered green recycling using them. The fungi break down the garden waste that the chickens won’t eat, the unproductive mushroom colonies go to the chickens and pigeon towers, the manure and eggshells go into the vermicomposter and garden. Those mushroom colonies are a major cash crop with a myriad of health benefits depending on what you’re growing.

I can’t tell if this manmade horror beyond my comprehension is more of a Warhammer 40k space marine or a Trench Crusade monster.

the person spraying drinking water and carcinogens on their lawn so they can spray piss on it and make green concrete and look like a psychopath to their neighbours

the person allowing dandelions to bring deep soil nutrients to the surface and clover to fix nitrogen in their biodiverse native lawn with natural rain capture features

We should all aspire to be more like bees.

Your daily reminder that cicadas are edible and he only looks that ripped because he had quality bug protein: https://health.osu.edu/wellness/exercise-and-nutrition/cooking-cicadas

Does the new ARMA have a more intuitive UI and control scheme than ARMA 2/3? That’s what keeps me from recommending it instead. Squad is much more streamlined in that regard without losing the depth, like comparing Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/393380/Squad/

This is my favourite shooter, based on the Battlefield 2 mod Project Reality. Everything feels, looks, and sounds realistic. Matches take several hours and have a lot of coordination between specialised squads. The maps are huge and detailed. I’ve played rounds where I only fire a couple bullets and like PUBG it’s so much more thrilling than an arcade shooter with nonstop action.