skulblaka

https://xkcd.com/1105/

And America had inflatable tanks during WWII to take attention off of real units. I love dunking on the Russian military as much as the next guy but this is just a good common sense move. The enemy keeps striking your targets? Install fake targets, make their lives just a little more difficult.

Tl:dr: Wendy’s CEO thinks we’re all dumb.

People still purchase Wendy's, he's got good reason to think that.

Conservatives think that

checks notes

Taylor Swift has rigged the Super Bowl in favor of Kansas City and is going to use that event to endorse Joe Biden.

No I'm not kidding.

At this point you can assume that most everything you'll hear about her over the next six months will be conservative astroturfing.

Swift does own a private jet. So naturally everyone who five minutes ago didn't give half a shit about the environment is going to use that as a cudgel regarding the environment. They're safe to ignore.

Honestly, still beats dying of preventable disease because of fear of the bill afterward. At least this way I can die of a preventable disease due to patient backlog.

Absolutely yes, but also, choose your targets. Walmart ain't gonna miss it. The local bodega will.

Zip cuffs are basically impossible to remove without a sharp edge. Metal cuffs are a lot easier to get out of.

Source: my dad's ex cop friend tested this with us at his bar

Facebook is most definitely not fine. However, as far as I know Facebook hasn't pushed known RCE (remote code execution) exploits into their product updates, which TikTok has. Politicians don't care about this but literally everyone else should.

Doom is so fully invested in the fact of his own righteousness, it cracks me up. One of many reasons he's my very favorite character in Marvel.

If anybody's gonna know what will kill you...

Except there isn't, therefore, the repeal of Roe v Wade is, literally, killing women.

It's because the sites refuse to police misinformation in any form. You want attention on that, you have to say something that someone in charge of that cares about. Falsely reporting their death is an easy, legal and fun way to make a content moderator or site owner or CEO pause and say "hey wait a minute"

Yeah and besides, what the fuck are the cops going to do if they did respond to it? Swim out there and catch the boat? They'd have watched it hit the bridge just like everyone else.

I absolutely respect art irrespective of the artist. The problem arises when said artist continues to profit from my respect of the art. Take as a personal example, JK Rowling and her Wizarding World. I grew up with those books. I love that setting. But I'm not buying any of their merch or their video games or going to visit Disneyland to go to Potterworld because I don't want Rowling getting her mitts on my royalties. She created a series of books that captivated me and many others as children and I respect the hell out of that. But I'm not going to continue to fund her tirades because of it.

A movie seems like a similar case.

Literally all he had to do was to shut the fuck up and let his companies make infinite money for him. But no, he's got to have his own personal face in the news. Now here we are, Musk is one of the most hated people on the planet and every single one of his businesses are tanking into the lithosphere.

It would be a lesson on hubris if he was capable of self reflection.

He has not at this point yet fallen in line, however. I believe in giving credit where it's due, and however low the bar he has passed, he has in fact passed a bar that most of his colleagues stumble on. I have high hopes for this guy. I'm by no means a republican, but I'd like to have a political opponent who doesn't outright disgust me with blatant disregard for sanity, law or truth. This man is attempting to move people in the correct direction, currently speaking. We will see what the future holds for him.

Hey I made some fan art of a marvel character, should marvel pay me?

When they use that fan art in the next official marvel movie, yes absolutely they should.

He's also just correct. Just because Trump is such a scum human doesn't make Biden's three star rating into a five star. It just means three stars is better than this opponent's zero.

Remember Longcat, Jane? I remember Longcat. Fuck the post on this page, I want to talk about Longcat. Memes were simpler back then, in 2006. They stood for something. And that something was nothing. Memes just were. “Longcat is long.” An undeniably true, self-reflexive statement. Water is wet, fire is hot, Longcat is long. Memes were floating signifiers without signifieds, meaningful in their meaninglessness. Nobody made memes, they just arose through spontaneous generation; Athena being birthed, fully formed, from her own skull.

You could talk about them around the proverbial water cooler, taking comfort in their absurdity. “Hey, Johnston, have you seen the picture of that cat? They call it Longcat because it’s long!” “Ha ha, sounds like good fun, Stevenson! That reminds me, I need to show you this webpage I found the other day; it contains numerous animated dancing hamsters. It’s called — you’ll never believe this — hamsterdance!” And then Johnston and Stevenson went on to have a wonderful friendship based on the comfortable banality of self-evident digitized animals.

But then 2007 came, and along with it came I Can Has, and everything was forever ruined. It was hubris, Jane. We did it to ourselves. The minute we added written language beyond the reflexive, it all went to shit. Suddenly memes had an excess of information to be parsed. It wasn’t just a picture of a cat, perhaps with a simple description appended to it; now the cat spoke to us via a written caption on the picture itself. It referred to an item of food that existed in our world but not in the world of the meme, rupturing the boundary between the two. The cat wanted something. Which forced us to recognize that what it wanted was us, was our attention. WE are the cheezburger, Jane, and we always were. But by the time we realized this, it was too late. We were slaves to the very memes that we had created. We toiled to earn the privilege of being distracted by them. They fiddled while Rome burned, and we threw ourselves into the fire so that we might listen to the music. The memes had us. Or, rather, they could has us.

And it just got worse from there. Soon the cats had invisible bicycles and played keyboards. They gained complex identities, and so we hollowed out our own identities to accommodate them. We prayed to return to the simple days when we would admire a cat for its exceptional length alone, the days when the cat itself was the meme and not merely a vehicle for the complex memetic text. And the fact that this text was so sparse, informal, and broken ironically made it even more demanding. The intentional grammatical and syntactical flaws drew attention to themselves, making the meme even more about the captioning words and less about the pictures. Words, words, words. Wurds werds wordz. Stumbling through a crooked, dead-end hallway of a mangled clause describing a simple feline sentiment was a torture that we inflicted on ourselves daily. Let’s not forget where the word “caption” itself comes from: capio, Latin for both “I understand” and “I capture.” We thought that by captioning the memes, we were understanding them. Instead, our captions allowed them to capture us. The memes that had once been a cure for our cultural ills were now the illness itself.

It goes right back to the Phaedrus, really. Think about it. Back in the innocent days of 2006, we naïvely thought that the grapheme had subjugated the phoneme, that the belief in the primacy of the spoken word was an ancient and backwards folly on par with burning witches or practicing phrenology or thinking that Smash Mouth was good. Fucking Smash Mouth. But we were wrong. About the phoneme, I mean. Theuth came to us again, this time in the guise of a grinning grey cat. The cat hungered, and so did Theuth. He offered us an updated choice, and we greedily took it, oblivious to the consequences. To borrow the parlance of a contemporary meme, he baked us a pharmakon, and we eated it.

Pharmakon, φάρμακον, the Greek word that means both “poison” and “cure,” but, because of the limitations of the English language, can only be translated one way or the other depending on the context and the translator’s whims. No possible translation can capture the full implications of a Greek text including this word. In the Phaedrus, writing is the pharmakon that the trickster god Theuth offers, the toxin and remedy in one. With writing, man will no longer forget; but he will also no longer think. A double-edged (s)word, if you will. But the new iteration of the pharmakon is the meme. Specifically, the post-I-Can-Has memescape of 2007 onward. And it was the language that did it, Jane. The addition of written language twisted the remedy into a poison, flipped the pharmakon on its invisible axis.

In retrospect, it was in front of our eyes all along. Meme. The noxious word was given to us by who else but those wily ancient Greeks themselves. μίμημα, or mīmēma. Defined as an imitation, a copy. The exact thing Plato warned us against in the Republic. Remember? The simulacrum that is two steps removed from the perfection of the original by the process of — note the root of the word — mimesis. The Platonic ideal of an object is the source: the father, the sun, the ghostly whole. The corporeal manifestation of the object is one step removed from perfection. The image of the object (be it in letters or in pigments) is two steps removed. The author is inferior to the craftsman is inferior to God.

Fuck, out of space. Okay, the illustration on page 46 is fucking useless; I’ll see you there.

Wizards are, as a whole, pretty damn stupid in that universe to be fair

A horror movie begins with a group consisting of a himbo, his black friend, his ditzy hot girlfriend and his doting grandmother, who dies first?

Anecdotal, but I've never once had a problem with any function of Firefox in the decade I've been using it. On the contrary it's been the most stable browser I've had the pleasure of using, orders of magnitude more reliable in all situations than Chrome or Opera ever was.

This post smells of astroturfing. There's been an awful lot of "why is Firefox so shit?" posts recently, now that Google is proving itself untrustable.

Well, sure hope you haven't done a lot of existing in public lately, because damn near everything out there has my tax dollars in it, and I'd appreciate you not abusing them. Get off my roads, get out of my schools, get out of my parks, unless you're paying into them.

Also, keep an eye out for the nice men knocking at the door. They'll be there soon with some questions, I'm sure.

I imagine a lot of places may wonder about this and then kick that can down the road until someone does actually collide with their bridge.

Getting good quality cables can make a difference.

Getting gold-plated cables will not ever. I fucking see you Monster. For $40 a cable that thing better also come with a free handy and an ice cream.

This statement by itself restores a ton of my faith in you. I have no weight to throw around here and ultimately my opinion is more or less meaningless, but in my meaningless opinion, if an actual effort is made to improve on this then I'm happy to have you stay. A simple apology, explanation and promise is more than I've gotten out of 99% of all other moderators I've ever interacted with.

"Could threaten access" what a shit headline. They are already actively denying access in their controlled areas. This isn't a problem that's forming, this is a problem that is already here and already large.

While this is good advice in theory the unfortunate truth is if you block all the memes and news you're going to get like 1 new post a day. Lemmy is mostly memes and politics and Linux right now. We just don't have the population density such that the 28 English-speaking turtle breeders in the world can find each other in a community (or whatever else your hobby is). We're already struggling to fill content for relatively popular video games, for example, I've been subbed to the Deep Rock Galactic communities since day one but I've only ever seen like, two posts in those communities, ever, and both of them were within the past week. (I am well aware of the irony of myself, who has never posted content a day in his life, complaining about a lack of content - I'm more of a comments kind of guy, always have been. I won't go against my nature to post trash memes to communities that I want to see flourish. But I will vote up your trash memes if you want to post some.)

Point being, long story short, et al, etc. - Lemmy needs more users interested in posting more things than just memes and politics and Linux if we want to have an environment containing more than memes and politics and Linux. The future starts with YOU - and if not you then the next guy down the line, and so on until we run out of people with anything to say.

Anyway, I am quite stoned and must be on my way; my people need me. Adiós, amigo, until next time.

I don't know why this fucking image macro of Eminem throwing shit is so funny to me, but damn if it doesn't get me every single time. You could put any object in that frame and I'd laugh at it. I think I'm broken

That word, I don't think it means what you think it means.

Man, the ballots aren't even printed yet and they're already planning their "Nuh-uh!!!!!!!" for when they lose. Truly, this is the strength and fortitude you expect out of your fascist leaders. Very strong and confident.

You can also go to jail for wearing a shiny policeman's badge when you aren't one. This is no different.

Pretty sure Abraham Lincoln said that

The Mouse isn't dead, he is risen anew. Freed from the shackles of his creators, he is now more powerful than he could ever have hoped to be before. The mighty tremble beneath the footsteps of old Steamboat Willie. He is a living sign of a new era, one in which it is possible to strike back against his old captors.

Yeah that's not what it's about at all. Hospitals need funding. Hospitals do not need a profit motive. Remove the profit motive and socialize the costs of healthcare. Just like every civilized country does it.

He sounds like a wacko

He sounds like he knows how the republican party operates. They do shit like this all the time. Literally ALL the time, constantly.

Yeah they won't speed up shit, that requires investment in infrastructure. They'll just slow down all existing lanes by 40%, blame it on something unrelated, and then charge you 2.5x as much as you used to pay to get your original speeds back.

We're about to have a great big shattering of the internet and I'm all for it. Collating the pieces will be a pain in the ass for a couple years but some handful of nerds out there blessed by the spirit of Ritchie will create a tool for it, and what's left of our world will be a better place for it.

But we’ll go farther than Plato. Longcat, a photograph, is a textbook example of a second-degree mimesis. (We might promote it to the third degree since the image on the internet is a digital copy of the original photograph of the physical cat which is itself a copy of Platonic ideal of a cat (the Godcat, if you will); but this line of thought doesn’t change anything in the argument.) The text-supplemented meme, on the other hand, the captioned cat, is at an infinite remove from the Godcat, the ultimate mimesis, copying the copy of itself eternally, the written language and the image echoing off each other, until it finally loops back around to the truth by virtue of being so far from it. It becomes its own truth, the fidelity of the eternal copy. It becomes a God.

Writing itself is the archetypical pharmakon and the archetypical copy, if you’ll come back with me to the Phaedrus (if we ever really left it). Speech is the real deal, Socrates says, with a smug little wink to his (written) dialogic buddy. Speech is alive, it can defend itself, it can adapt and change. Writing is its bastard son, the mimic, the dead, rigid simulacrum. Writing is a copy, a mīmēma, of truth in speech. To return to our analogous issue: the image of the cheezburger cat, the copy of the picture-copy-copy, is so much closer to the original Platonic ideal than the written language that accompanies it. (“Pharmakon” can also mean “paint.” Think about it, Jane. Just think about it.) The image is still fake, but it’s the caption on the cat that is the downfall of the republic, the real fakeness, which is both realer and faker than whatever original it is that it represents. Men and gods abhor the lie, Plato says in sections 382 a and b of the Republic.

οὐκ οἶσθα, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, ὅτι τό γε ὡς ἀληθῶς ψεῦδος, εἰ οἷόν τε τοῦτο εἰπεῖν, πάντες θεοί τε καὶ ἄνθρωποι μισοῦσιν; πῶς, ἔφη, λέγεις; οὕτως, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, ὅτι τῷ κυριωτάτῳ που ἑαυτῶν ψεύδεσθαι καὶ περὶ τὰ κυριώτατα οὐδεὶς ἑκὼν ἐθέλει, ἀλλὰ πάντων μάλιστα φοβεῖται ἐκεῖ αὐτὸ κεκτῆσθαι.

“Don’t you know,” said I, “that the veritable lie, if the expression is permissible, is a thing that all gods and men abhor?” “What do you mean?” he said. “This,” said I, “that falsehood in the most vital part of themselves, and about their most vital concerns, is something that no one willingly accepts, but it is there above all that everyone fears it.”

Man’s worst fear is that he will hold existential falsehood within himself. And the verbal lies that he tells are a copy of this feared dishonesty in the soul. Plato goes on to elaborate: “the falsehood in words is a copy of the affection in the soul, an after-rising image of it and not an altogether unmixed falsehood.” A copy of man’s false internal copy of truth. And what word does Plato use for “copy” in this sentence? That’s fucking right, μίμημα. Mīmēma. Mimesis. Meme. The new meme is a lie, manifested in (written) words, that reflects the lack of truth, the emptiness, within the very soul of a human. The meme is now not only an inferior copy, it is a deceptive copy.

But just wait, it gets better. Plato continues in the very next section of the Republic, 382 c. Sometimes, he says, the lie, the meme, is appropriate, even moral. It is not abhorrent to lie to your enemy, or to your friend in order to keep him from harm. “Does it [the lie] not then become useful to avert the evil—as a medicine?” You get one fucking guess for what Greek word is being translated as “medicine” in this passage. Ding ding motherfucking ding, you got it, φάρμακον, pharmakon. The μίμημα is a φάρμακον, the lie is a medicine/poison, the meme is a pharmakon.

But I’m sure that by now you’ve realized the (intentional) mistake in my argument that brought us to this point. I said earlier that the addition of written language to the meme flipped the pharmakon on its axis. But the pharmakon didn’t flip, it doesn’t have an axis. It was always both remedy and poison. The fact that this isn’t obvious to us from the very beginning of the discussion is the fault of, you guessed it, language. The initial lie (writing) clouds our vision and keeps us from realizing how false the second-order lie (the meme) is.

The very structure of the lying meme mirrors the structure of the written word that defines and corrupts it. Once you try to identify an “outside” in order to reveal the lie, the whole framework turns itself inside-out so that you can never escape it. The cat wants the cheezburger that exists outside the meme, but only through the meme do we become aware of the presumed existence of the cheezburger — we can’t point out the absurdity of the world of the meme without also indicting our own world. We can’t talk about language without language, we can’t meme without mimesis. Memes didn’t change between ‘06 and ‘07, it was us who changed. Or rather, our understanding of what we had always been changed. The lie became truth, the remedy became the poison, the outside became the inside. Which is to say that the truth became lie, the pharmakon was always the remedy and the poison, and the inside retreated further inside. It all came full circle. Because here’s the secret, Jane. Language ruined the meme, yes. But language itself had already been ruined. By that initial poisonous, lying copy. Writing.

The First Meme.

Language didn’t attack the meme in 2007 out of spite. It attacked it to get revenge.

Longcat is long. Language is language. Pharmakon is pharmakon. The phoneme topples the grapheme, witches ride through the night, our skulls hide secret messages on their surfaces, Smash Mouth is good after all. Hey now, you’re an all-star. Get your game on. Go play.