Intermediate instructions

Before I have to sign an NDA: providing tech support for billionaires sucks exactly as much as you would imagine.

We don't work directly with many billionaires but the ones that we do are uniformly whiny pissbabies who throw tantrums about totally normal tech stuff and try wheedle their way into free services by threatening to fire us if we don't give them free shit.

The problem is that every whiny pissbaby billionaire is perfectly willing to whine to the board members of companies and nonprofits we *do* want to work with, so if you fire the whiny billionaire as a client or get fired by a whiny billionaire as a service provider, it can destroy your business.

This the same with massive multinational corporations. Business owners get excited at the chance to work with them and see a potentially lucrative customer. They demand so much extra special treatment and labor that working with them destroys every business, hemorrhaging money, cutting quality standards to meet absurd demands. They ultimately end up taking cheapest, lowest profit option and receive it a massive discount, and never return or generate any other business down the line. It's fascinating how they all seem to be the worst people to work with on all levels, but company owners blind themselves to the risk, repeatedly. You'll see people walking around hollow eyed and numb, and it's because you did like a one word logo design for an Amazon subsidiary or sold copper wiring to Microsoft or whatever, everyone worked 100 hour work weeks for a month and they paid two shiny nickels for it. And they will not send business your way either, no chance, unless it's like, you're a company specialized in corporate accounting and it's some dude who wants you to print a t-shirt idea he thinks will make a billion dollars.

Make a risk-benefit calculation but assume billionaire customers are going to act decent or honest or even reasonable, it will never fail (for the billionaires)

I know this is kind of a hot take but I think creating a religious ethnostate is bad

I actually think it is still bad even if it is a religious ethnostate for a highly oppressed ethnicity and religion. I just don’t think it’s a good idea

If would be bad even if the place wasn't full of people from a different religion to start with. Like you could reduce casualties, but religious ethnostates don't actually work in the context where it's not 1700 AD anymore. We know now there are better ways to live with a net positive of education, freedom, safety, self-determination and quality of life for everyone.

watching massive franchises bomb at the box office while Backrooms has made $212 million on a $10 million initial budget has brought me hope for the future of cinema

audiences do NOT want Star Wars slop, audiences want a movie made by a guy who really wanted to make a movie

Just wait till he digs out the kilogram of heroin from Ilyukhina's stuff

I think part of getting better is complete ego death. Like you’re not above setting a timer for 5 minutes and focusing on a task. You’re not above doing a very simple 3 minute workout to start. You’re not above reading for 10 minutes a day when you first get out of your reading slump, even if you used to read for hours. You’re not above starting slow and then building up to where you want to be/where you once were. What you are above is total inertia. Doing something really is better than doing nothing. Radically accept where you are, radically accept your limits, and go from there. Don’t let your ego get in the way.

I'll tell you what I learned from Grant Morrison's writing, about 25 years ago. Think of ego as scaffolding for your self. It's a temporary support structure you use for building something to last. It gives easier access for construction, and up to a basic point it may be necessary to keep the structure from blowing over in the wind, but the point comes when the scaffold just closes you off from the world and you have to tear it down before you can open your self for business. And then you find out the scaffold was just setting a limit on your growth - now you're free to make the structure bigger, bolder, more uniquely shaped than you could ever imagine.

Ants are so crazy as animals, imagine fighting behemoths that are dozens or hundreds or millions of times your size and hauling massive cargo with just your jaws and joining your sisters on the battlefield in massive intercolony wars and. What the fuck

There is a very good reason why many animals mimic ants, you simply don’t mess with ants

Splendid post!!!!!🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜

Target audience reached

I'm reminded of the world of Human-B-Gone, where kaiju insects and humans in an alien world fight each other over a tragic misunderstanding where neither side understands the others are intelligent. And their common antagonist are the ants who rule over bug society with their unmatched power of communication. They're a real world species called yellow crazy ant (except giant), but they're just called the ants because a) bugs don't see the color yellow, b) no one would dare call them crazy and c) they exterminated or enslaved every other species that organize in colonies.

I think the kitty is indulging you in playing fetch for brief periods in between pets

Optimistically, we might call this a study in how much people prefer pressing shiny buttons to give their opinion over reading. But I'm still worried about the 13% gap between people who evidently read the instructions and people who evidently felt the need to lie to an anonymous poll about reading the instructions after proving they didn't. Can't imagine how goddamn fragile your ego has to be for that to make sense.

Optimistically, one might speculate that the people who do not read instructions before voting are also disinclined to click "read more" to see that a poll exists to be voted on, skewing the results in favour of people who read

There is that. I probably should have noted the much lower number of votes on poll #2. . .

if astrology was real it ought to be affected by anthropogenic space objects. imagine being like yeah this month has sucked for me bc the iss is in sagittarius

Other thought just occurred to me, if astrology was real we'd never have needed to invent telescopes. Why couldn't astrology predict the existence of Ceres? You should be able to say people born on this and that time and date are like this, that means there's a big ass dwarf planet around the asteroid belt. Like the Great Attractor was identified 40 years ago and that's when astrologers started thinking they should figure out what it does, they had absolutely no idea anything was going on.

Optimistically, we might call this a study in how much people prefer pressing shiny buttons to give their opinion over reading. But I'm still worried about the 13% gap between people who evidently read the instructions and people who evidently felt the need to lie to an anonymous poll about reading the instructions after proving they didn't. Can't imagine how goddamn fragile your ego has to be for that to make sense.

Analyzing the politics of a work that's meant to be apolitical is actually a really interesting exercise because it asks you to critically examine what the creator considers to be "political" in the first place. Which ideas are just How Things Are, and which ones are Political, and how is that influenced by the creator's beliefs?

Usually this just ends up with you looking like a moron btw

Angrily lashing out at the suggestion that it's possible to do basic media analysis was foundational to the ragebait ecosystem of the 2010s, from which we got basically the entire culture of modern far right politics, btw.

I genuinely believe myself and others are being so sincere and literal when we say TOUCH GRASS

I went outside and got an education, that's where I learned that you can obtain knowledge and insight through analytical methods, then noticed that some people who sit on the internet yelling at strangers get really mad about that constantly.

So actually if you really wanted to use your analysis skills you'd realize that what people are annoyed about is the implication that there's never a story or creative work they can create that can escape people like you attempting to assign political meaning to it when they just don't want that. That in fact people's presumptions about life are not, in fact, political (at best they are cultural, which is not an inherently facet of politics). And that by you people arrogantly pushing this idea you are intruding on the fact that a lot of people use fiction as escapism from politics and insisting that "urm no actually your favourite cartoon actually has politics cause no human being is 100% unbiased" is in fact, supremely fucking annoying

"I'm not doing politics right now" is a political stance. Escapism is a political action. Just cause you yourself don't feel the impact of your opinions or actions doesn't mean they are apolitical; it means you have the privilege of ignorance, the freedom to ignore the people who do feel it. Oh, how supremely fucking annoying to have people tell you that everything you do matters. Imagine being forced to live with that; to not have the option to just stay out of a conversation like this and save yourself from being annoyed any time you like.