A reclining nude oil painting of a brunette woman resting by a spring, with her arms above her head and underarm hair present.

paint me like one of your french lesbians

happy lesbian visibility week! if you're not a lesbian, you need to collect 10 of us as friends for your damn quest by the end of the week

Because reel communism has never been tried before.

I have a theory. I believe we can build communism exclusively through Irish trad music.

Now, you might quite reasonably think "but Mira, hasn't that failed miserably before?"

Yes, it has. We've tried many flavours, and none of them went well.

Right. I've often said that the solution is sewer socialism. We didn't stop cholera by shaming people who didn't purify their own water, we built infrastructure that eventually ensured clean water was the norm. We can do that with air quality.

the orange otter pop character used to be an otter in a spiked prussian helmet called baron otto von orange, but the otter pop company has completely scrubbed all mention of him to replace him with little orphan orange

I am very neurodivergent and I found the social and physical isolation of Covid excruciating (even though I did it voluntarily to protect others as I’m not an asshole). Please don’t assume all neurodivergent people are the same.

because like, I did it for the collective good, I don’t regret it, but it also fucking sucked

It is strange to interact with otherwise charming lovely kids' media as a vegan and have Ms Rachel be like "that's right! A cow lives on a farm!"
I'm like... not by choice! That's the prison they live in for forced pregnancy and execution.

Cows SHOULD live in big frickin' tracts of grassland.

only a Kojima game can have you hear things like "we have to synchronize the BB with their stillmother's womb" and then make you wonder "wait, is this lonely prepper Junji Ito ?"

Yet more evidence for the ultimate Mia hot take the white man should not be allowed to farm

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

“It’s clear that AI companies’ initial promise to America — that first it would take their job, and eventually it might kill them — has not inspired a groundswell of public support.”

I hate this a lot. I know so many parents who "ground" their kids from cellphone use but that's the only way they can get hold of anyone.

I learned recently that it’s an insult in Germany to call someone “hobbyless” or to engage in “hobbyless behavior” and it’s become my favorite way to think of assholes who have nothing better to do than to make other people miserable. Get a hobby. Build a model train and calm down.

I'm not reading the Palantir Manifesto for the same reason I wouldn't read the Nestle Bill of Rights.

Another way to look at this is that billionaires have joined a war on professional administrative class of public servants precisely because of their proximity to formal mechanisms of accountability. Civil servants are sworn to uphold the constitution, report wrongdoing to officials, follow the rules. They are in most respects more accountable than our politicians to ethical and legal requirements, and more difficult to buy off. This makes government slower and more irritating for sure, and puts those officials at odds with the Musks, Andreessens, and Karps of the world, whose vision and interests benefits from reduced oversight and accountability.

I think the Palantir attacks on bureaucrats here is ideological - like the similarly despised professors, they are a potential source of criticism.
But it is also practical. The administrative class is tasked with imposing accountability, which Palantir - like the Trump administration - dislikes.

8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive. 9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret. 11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.

The manifesto is incoherent about public service until you realize that Karp is presenting you with two types of public servants: civil servants fired under Trump, and the tech elites who venture into government.
The former deserve your scorn.
The latter merit your understanding and praise.

Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

The manifesto makes a straightforward case that government and Silicon Valley power must be fused in order to defend Western values - which are superior to others - with hard rather than soft power. For many, this sounds like techno-fascism.
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/palantir-w...

I just assume this is a feature of the school shooter type, of which these guys are all extremely vivid examples

Imagine there are two mechanics in your town.

At one, the dude howls incoherently while letting a bunch of rhesus monkeys bang on your car with rocks.

The other mechanic is a normal guy, who actually knows how to fix cars.

Your car breaks, one of these guys will get it working faster.

the fencing visualization system i worked on with rhizomatiks
is coming to los angeles this weekend 🤗

If they use IR frequencies on the tracking LEDs, they'll be invisible to the competitors (which is what you'd want). The rest of the electric scoring is standard competitive fencing gear, no modifications needed; their visualization system would just listen to the scoring system to find out who won.

God this is so fucking cool

THIS is the kind of cyberpunk future bullshit I actually want

I disagree with the flak this app gets. Just don't follow people that make you cringe. Mute them. Follow the funny ones. It's like hanging out in the coloring book section of a bookstore and being like wow this place is for idiots

Europe has racism you’ve never even heard of before. They hate eachother & look the exact same

The 'do you want to see my organs?' bit looked like it was going to go the 'fetish object' route but no she lifts her bodice and it's a fucking mouth in her stomach. A thing that all girls have, obviously.

You know I really cannot say if Francesca is 'good representation' and it's not my lane, but it's nice an anime trans girl gets to be hilarious and evil (but not in an 'author is doing a transmisogynistic caricature' way), and also not cast as a fetishized sex object.

one of the really nice things about this website is that I can post something like this and not have a hundred weirdos show up in the comments to tell me I'm stupid

even before twitter went to shit, that would always happen to me with these kinds of posts

t h e s h e l l i s a t e r r a i n