He’s got that ol’ New York City Metropolitan Area Transit Authority Blues again, momma!

Fiennes does seem to come from a posh background, doesn’t he?

Then maybe a commoner trained in Shakespeare can and does develop that poshness, the ability to deliver it effortlessly.
Was, for example, Peter O’Toole a noble or a hoodlum? Because there seems to be a bit of both in him at the same time.

But then I take a look at the full Fiennes family name and oof… there’s some olde stubbornly blue roots in there, in plain sight. The kind of thing you would spy on the guestlist for the weekly Saxe-Coburg canasta evening.

So is Rafe like the black sheep of his family, because he went prancing off to theater school and the bohemian lifestyle instead of a sturdy and dignified profession, like banking?

Well fuck me gently with a chainsaw, I am flabbergasted and illustrated, simultaneously at the same place and from a distance at the same time.

the vast majority of US citizens are abjectly fucking stupid who have no clear understanding how absolutely anything works or any understanding of how consequences follow actions

This happens both equally with the maga batshit crazy voters, and the narcissistic “my vote is a pure and delicate flower”/“bOtH pArTiEs ArE tHe SaMe LoL” non-voters.

Which is of course exploited by bad-faith actors pushing these lazy idiots back down on the couch and stroking their hollow vanity, to not do what they already didn’t want to do - doing the homework instead of just getting their “facts” from twitter or tiktok or whatever, taking the time and effort to register and vote, if just once a year, or at the very least once every two years for the midterms.

These idiots want instant results, have not a shred of a clue as to what political inertia is; just as medieval as maga, they want a political messiah with a magic political wand.

The 2010 midterms proved that these fickle mediocre idiots did NOT have Obama’s back, and lazily initiated a cascade that drowned their own future, rewarded the fascists for their virulent hysterical opposition, and to this day remain mindlessly, narcissistically oblivious to the fact.
Their mediocre motto as a mediocre electoral block is “If at first you don’t succeed, give up.”

So much of the world has rightly lost all faith in the intelligence and decency of the average american. As in - they have none, distractedly and lovingly fondling their purity, then sniffing their fingers and picking their teeth with those nails.

Kessel Run. In less than 12 parsecs.

That’s actually quite an interestingly accurate one, considering that something like 95% of Egyptians live near the Nile River, and anywhere that is NOT near the Nile is desert wasteland.

Other accurate analogies would be anywhere in Canada that is NOT near its’ southern border, or nearly anywhere/everywhere in inland Australia, they call it the Outback for a reason.

Probably the hope, not completely unfounded, that the migration from one “legacy” (from the 00s) platform to a more recent alternative service - twitter to Bluesky - will help inspire people in other legacy platforms to also realize that alternatives do exist now, they are part of a broader conversation that they weren’t a part of even two years ago.

Even a year and a half ago, this place felt like it hadn’t yet installed the drywall, the wiring and tubing was incomplete. Now it feels more seamless, ready for a spurt of growth.

“Hey… Bluesky isn’t all that bad, I’m glad to be out of the clutches of a billionaire asshole, and not feel utterly lost here”, now cue what OP believes a number of people will also think: “Hmm… maybe I’ll check out Lemmy, too. See what the alternative to reddit is like.”

Some of them could have tried it, didn’t like it, might come back and be like: “Hey, Lemmy’s not too bad since last I last looked a year ago”, and here’s a clincher that definitely wasn’t here a year and a half ago: “The app works pretty good”, and there are a lot of new apps, having a choice gives a sense and weight of legitimacy.

Because if it wasn’t Gaza, it would have been another excuse to not lift a lazy goddamned finger and still delude themselves into feeling "morally superior"while sitting on their fat mediocre asses at home.

Before Harris, they also leaned heavily on the “Sleepy Joe” bullshit and “two old white men up for election, who cares”. Once the old “Sleepy Joe” element was removed from the equation, they had to find a way to keep their goddamned stubbornly lazy and ignorant narrative intact.

Now that the election is over, most of these “concerned and outraged” deadweight assholes will never think about Gaza and the plight of its’ people again. And they will keep on feeling smug about themselves.

The crowd that murdoch and limbaugh handed the orange parasite on a platter, does not care about pesky and boring little things like facts and figures. It is an irrational mob fed with bacteria-infested red meat for two decades. They can only be reached via the basest of impulses, ripe pickings only for the most ignorant and/or shameless of conmen. It doesn’t help society that the right-wing toxic propaganda machine operates at full blast 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Because so many trump voters are low-information, rabid and impervious to fact and/or reason. They will vote orange even if he shoots someone on Fifth Avenue to death, or if there are 32-or-whatever felony indictments/verdicts.

Meanwhile, many potential Democrat voters are also low-information in their own way - impressionable, fickle and with little memory retention, they seem unable to act upon a clear and present danger until it punches them in the goddamned face (and by then of course it’s too late), somehow have normalized the orange threat and are easy prey to an algorithm pushing a “both parties are the same” divide-and-conquer propaganda.

The difference between a parasite-laden excrement chip cookie and a raisin oatmeal cookie, “But I wanted chocolate chip! bOtH cOoKiEs ArE tHe SaMe!”

Its’ best days are ahead, not behind. And being a decentralized entity - like Bit Torrent or Bitcoin - makes it an important social media experiment that is worth stoking the flames, and whose outcome will be much different than it was with reddit.

It’s curious, but in my mind these types of mathematical or logical visualizations are the sheep I count, trying to sense the deeper flow and patterns where the emergent oddities even out.

That’s when I know I will soon fall fast asleep, when my mind starts getting abstract.

I would imagine that the area increases significantly, a type of example of what they say about fractal coastlines theoretically being able to have a perimeter of infinite length.

EDIT: it just occurred to me that theoretically, if measuring area with a different scale, a country like Bhutan could claim to have as much surface area as… say Australia.

Or both are infinite, but since one fits inside the other, I’m getting into that weird mathematical study of infinities within infinities.

elon musk / 2024
Where a fat line of idiocy and the learning curve of digital currencies intersect. Wisdom level set at “infantile”.

“doge doge doge doge doge doge doge…”
“Elon’s pumping dogecoin again!”

To top it off, these people most likely mock older generations for falling for the Nigerian prince email scams.

The entire instance seems to be engaged in an opinion shaping campaign

That’s too subtle a statement. It is a willful, bad-faith, full-on attack on objective reality via the rewriting of historical facts, redaction of massive volumes of information and constant aggressive, knee-jerk silencing of voices.

As such, it can also be described as a malicious assault on the mental health of individuals and society as a whole. Their actions a clear example of the type of repressive, miserable society they would have us live in, if given the chance by hook or by crook.

Does this sound like the prototypical clickbait headline title, or what do you say?

I gotcha, I was just thinking how Patreon has been vital for nurturing a vast digital ecosystem of content creators who are in it as a labor of love.

EDIT: typo

The same goes for a lot of YouTube channels.
In fact, I opened a Patreon account just to show a little monthly support for an excellent, criminally underrated creator of videos on astronomy and its’ history, ParallaxNick.

Among other topics, the guy recently finished a four-part series on Galileo, a two-parter on Kepler before that, a single on Copernicus before that. By my calculations, I’m guessing a six-part masterpiece on Newton is right around the corner.

“We need ten painters to train as astronauts.”
“Why not get ten astronauts, then train them to use paint?”
“How about you shut the fuck up instead?”

Fiddlesticks