gru:Bz

I get in at least a few hours of TikTok brainrot every week. It reminds me of Vine for the obvious reasons, only with a bunch of ads, sponsored posts and about the same amount of viral misinformation as Facebook: a metric fuckton. And as a bonus, both collect a nauseating amount of data from whatever devices you’ve installed them on.

But they’re entertaining.

I’m a broken record about this but ever since Twitter went to shit I’ve become pretty comfortable joining new social networks on a whim and deleting my account out of the blue if I get bored or fed up. There are just too many options out there. I’ve built my home base on Micro.blog because of its die-hard indie web roots; just about everything else is for doomscrolling and shitposting as far as I’m concerned.

That said, I fully support the TikTok ban - as long as Meta gets the same treatment.

Both are two sides of the same coin, but an American oligarch owns one half of that coin while China owns the other. If Meta was based in Beijing you can bet your ass it would be on the chopping block for the exact reasons as TikTok.

But it’s not, so it’s going to be fine.

That’s the post.

I’ve never been a big gamer aside from cute Nintendo stuff. When Skyrim came out (what, like 12 or 13 years ago?) the most powerful hardware in my house was a 2011 MacBook Pro.

Everyone was obsessed so I found a… not so legit copy with a janky Wine wrapper so I could play it on OS X, albeit with all the graphics settings turned way down. It was super buggy but I still made it pretty far before I eventually gave up and forgot about it.

Finally picked up a legit copy for the Switch all these years later and it’s still such a good game!

I know the Switch is pretty underpowered compared to other modern consoles but this is a million times better than the first time I played it. Makes me want to revisit Oblivion now too. I don’t even know if they have anything new in the series lol if so maybe I’ll play that in ten years.

I have this delusion where I feel like everyone should be happy all the time. That’s what I was chasing the better part of a decade ago when I was battling with addiction and it’s the illusion I put on every day as a salesguy.

It’s not polite to tell people what you really think or how you really feel. At least not in rural America. It’s easier to pretend like you’re always happy and nothing ever goes wrong. Social media is excellent at amplifying this.

It’s pretty good at rage baiting and pitting us against each other too, but it’s mostly a place where you only show the best parts of yourself. Your best camera angle, the highlights of your vacation, the new promotion you just got.

It’s easy to forget that life has phases and cycles. Everything comes and goes in waves.

It’s okay to be pissed off sometimes, or depressed, or anxious. Everyone does it.

It’s about yin and yang right? You can’t have peaks without valleys.

I was in the middle of writing this post about how, pretty much until the middle of the 20th century, people took the law into their own hands if they saw fit. And they probably got away with it too.

Like this photo I saw on Reddit:

That’s a feel good ACAB justice kinda story, right? I’m not sure of the source or legitimacy of it; I mean after all it was just a random Reddit post, but OP had a little blurb to go along with it:

Farmers “arrest” the sheriff for trying to evict a woman from her farm on behalf of the insurance company. Michigan, 1952.

So basically the sheriff came to evict this sweet little old widow and some farmers from around the way stood up and (violently) stopped the him from going through with it. Back then that was just the end of it, right? There were no records logged in a police database, the cop wasn’t wearing a body cam; it was the 50’s.

…

…and I was just going to ramble on about how easy it was to get away with crazy shit back then compared to nowadays.

But then I actually thought about it. It was only white guys who got away with everything. If you were some old Sam Elliot type with a cowboy hat and handlebar mustache, you could get away with murder. Literally. If you were black? Or a woman? Or a black woman?

Different fucking story.

Segregation wasn’t that long ago. Women didn’t have fuck all for rights until pretty recently. White men ruled everything until pretty recently.

What am I saying; they still rule everything.

And that’s what MAGA wants to really hone in on and refine. That’s the “great” America they’re working around the clock to bring back. The US is a great melting pot alright. One made of racism, sexism, misogyny, and LGBTQ+ phobia hate, “but for a brief moment in time”, we’ll say in our future history books, “we were actually making some progress.”

What else is there to say?

All you have to do is open any news app you like and the screen populates with headlines too stupid to even be satire. If anyone would’ve pitched some of Trump’s concepts of plans ideas for the movie Idiocracy, they would’ve said it’s too unrealistic and in bad taste.

Who would joke about the kind of shit Donald Trump is about to do?

One [bid] was from the Jones-affiliated First United American Companies, which offered $3.5 million, the trustee revealed in court Thursday. The other, from The Onion, was lower but contained an incentive by some of the Sandy Hook families to forgo a portion of the sale proceeds and give it to other Jones’ creditors, the trustee, Christopher Murray, said.

[Judge Lopez’s] 20-page order on the sale procedures in September…gave broad authority to Murray to conduct the sale, including the power to reject any bid, no matter how high, that was “contrary to the best interests” of Jones, his company and their creditors.

Maybe I’m just an idiot but isn’t the point of this to liquidate his assets and pay the Sandy Hook families for damages? I get the part about the creditors but who gives a shit about Alex Jones or his company’s best interests? He’s showed absolutely no remorse for any of the misinformation he spread that got him here. He literally talks shit about the entire situation any chance he gets, as if he’s the victim and the families are just obsessed with him for no reason.

Murray had Infowars' website and studio shut down Thursday as he began the process of securing assets, a lawyer for the trustee said in court Thursday. But on Friday, Infowars and its websites were back up and running…Jones told listeners that Murray had told him it was wrong to shut down Infowars before the sale was finalized.

Why do I feel like he’ll somehow weasel his way out of this? The worst people get away with this kinda shit all the time. The judge says there are issues with transparency and the legality of The Onion being picked as the winning bid since it was for less money, and because there was no round of bidding after the initial bids were unsealed. Which the same judge said was optional according to his order.

I guess we’ll see how it goes next week at the hearing 🤞

Source: What happens next in The Onion’s effort to buy Alex Jones' Infowars

I like Charlie’s take on this. Yes; I believe all of the people at the congressional hearing on UAPs were telling the truth, I just don’t think it means aliens. Whether they think so or not. There’s proof of strange craft flying around the skies and we don’t know who they belong to or how they’re able to do these seemingly impossible maneuvers, but that doesn’t mean aliens.

“Has there been to your knowledge any communication with a non-human life form?” Republican Eric Burlison asked. “The term communication is a bit of a trick word because there’s verbal communication, the problem is you also have non-verbal communication, and so I would say definitely yes,” Elizondo said. “When a Russian reconnaissance aircraft comes into US air space we scramble two F-22s, we are certainly communicating intent and capability. I think the same goes with this. We have these things that are being observed over controlled US air space and…they’re making it pretty obvious they have the ability to even interfere with our nuclear readiness.”

In Charlie’s video, he makes the point that we believed the “Wow!” signal from the 70’s was smoking gun evidence of life on other planets but it’s since been debunked.

I, too, believe the universe is far too vast for us to be the only intelligent life out here but that’s just it; it’s so vast there’s little to no chance we’re anywhere near any other life. We have satellites like Voyager and JWST venturing deep into space, snapping a bunch of photos and soaking in all the data they can and yet we’ve still not seen any signs of civilization anywhere but Earth.

I would absolutely love for a society of benevolent aliens to come save us from ourselves and welcome us into The Galactic Federation but that’s just wishful thinking.

Back in 2016 I didn’t have this community. I had Twitter and I think Tumblr? And definitely Facebook.

Facebook is already a shitshow. People fighting and ending lifetime friendships, a few Trump supporters being schooled on what tariffs actually are even though it’s a little too late now.

I’m glad I have a nice place to go and escape the noise and general insanity of the impending fascist regime, even if I am coming here to bitch about it.

I don’t know most of you very well but I’m glad we’re all here.