Fragments

But it has very quickly morphed into making fun of people any time an American draws a connection between our current regime and other examples of authoritarian governments. And like. Guys.

Learning from history is good. Seeing commonalities between your circumstances and the circumstances of people from other places is good.

Do you genuinely want Americans to treat our country as some exceptional land where there are no parallels to be drawn with other places?

Are you so ignorant of history that nothing going on around you ever reminds you of things you've learned about other times and places?

This is like that time on Twitter I watched someone quote Marjane Satrapi's iconic line about how ordinary Americans have more in common with ordinary Iranians than either of us do with our governments --- a thing this person was quoting in order to express support for Iranians being fucked over by US foreign policy --- and someone else responded by questioning their right as a white American man to claim to have things in common with Iranians.

Fuck that.

It's rad as fuck to learn about the jokes that carried other people through their dark times. I hope someday someone going through their own dark times learns about the jokes that bounce around my groupchats on any given day and thinks "That's sounds just like OUR nascent fascist regime!"

It's rad as fuck to see your own circumstances reflected back across time and across borders. It's rad as fuck to situate yourself as part of an endless human tapestry, with a history that doesn't repeat, exactly, but definitely rhymes.

No subscription. Just program.

On your computer. You got to use it forever and ever and never had to worry about it going away.

Because it was physically on your computer. As a program. That you actually owned. Not because you got it separately, but because it was a standard inclusion with your computer.

I'm sorry but I'll just never get over it. I remember when companies cared about their products being usable out of the box. I remember when our things belonged to us.

OpenAI scraped the entire web. All of which had been a labor of love from humans. Wikipedia is the backbone of a lot of LLMs, and that was volunteer human labor. They stole it and now they're selling it back to us.

- Due to storms, they had to evacuate the National Mall grounds. But the MAGA crowd didn't want to leave. They just stood around chanting "USA! USA!" They were convinced liberals were messing with the weather. Reportedly, one of the security guards got so fed up that he threw a chair at them.

- Fox News didn't have anything to share while they were waiting for Trump's delayed speech, so they just showed a feed of him staring at the TV. And he was watching Fox News.

- A bunch of the crowd that was evacuated wasn't even let back in, and they were raging about it on social media. Some of them waited 10 to 12 hours in record-setting heat (102°F) and never got to see anything. All special passes were canceled. So much for money privilege.

- Because the program was running so far behind, several performers were cancelled.

- Trump's speech began at 11:15 p.m., after a sizeable amount of his followers had abandoned the event. It was unremarkable in just like all of his other ones- a bunch of "America is the greatest nation," blaming Democrats for everything bad, and general gibberish.

- The fireworks didn't begin until almost midnight, so they ended on July 5th.

- They wanted to have more fireworks than ever before, but they set off so many that the sky was covered in light, and it just looked like everything was on fire. The finale was not visible due to the smoke.

- Trump appeared to fall asleep during the show.

- The immense amount of pyrotechnics fucked up the air in DC