Joined the Mayqueeze.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Hero isn’t a title for life. His willingness to fuck his own life up to reveal NSA secrets to the world was heroic. Him staying in Russia with everything they’ve done more recently is decidedly less so.

    We want to judge him by absolute categories like morals and convictions. And that’s unfair because nobody is that pristinely moral all the time. I get that after his 007-like escape to Hong Kong, he would choose the easier way out now. If that means tacitly approving of Russia’s illegal attack on their neighbor then so be it. I think his morals compelled him to release the surveillance secret to the world. And the experience has sufficiently dulled any moral urges. Combine that with a limited list of choices of where else to go. A true superhuman hero would not want to stay where he once sought asylum if that country was itself responsible for hundreds of thousands of people seeking asylum elsewhere. As I said, hero isn’t a title for life.




  • Bootleg records were a thing in Europe in the days of reel to reel tape as the only alternative. It wasn’t so much that people did it privately but people would try to make a buck through re-sale and especially on flea markets where oversight by the law was virtually nonexistent. Rare records have always been a thing. Bootleggers tried to profit off it.

    I was bequeathed my parents’ record collection of about 200 LPs. One was a bootleg they kept, some rare Beatles stuff. Other ones were thrown away because the quality was bad or would have been deteriorating to a point where it became unlistenable.


  • I don’t think this is about punctuation marks, this is about tone. It’s about “tone.” beCaUse IT’s aBOuT toNE. BECAUSE IT’S ABOUT FUCKING TONE!

    English does a lot with how you say something. I didn’t give her the money. Try saying that phrase and stress a different word each time. If you see it written down, you are missing an awful lot if you’re unlucky

    Air quotes don’t really need an accompanying gesture to make them be understood. Giving the gesture anyways is just making sure people don’t misunderstand it. And we are used to this doublespeak from our elected leaders. So adding “in air quotes” in speech and gesture is often a dig, a comedic device, and a deliberate act to fraternize with the other people who know what’s up.









  • Get a video camera to film you while you write and screen record what you do on your laptop. That way you have proof that you didn’t use models. And I’m only half joking.

    As much as I loathe to suggest this: maybe you should try to prompt some models on topics you write on. Just to see what it spits out so you can avoid sounding alike. Same for visuals it would come up with.

    Or you could see if some industrious fellow student has found a copy of the software the faculty use to do a trial run. It may have fallen off a truck somewhere. Happens all the time! Just make sure you protect yourself.


  • Stop generalizing the US and the West. Is Japan all the same everywhere? I’m gonna say no. Why should an even bigger country be then? Or another somewhat nebulously defined area that’s bigger still?

    What the average Japanese person would think a rowdy crowd is the average American’s idea of enjoying a communal experience. One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist.

    If you go see a kids movie you’ll have some parents on their phones as well. The bad behavior is creeping in in Japan too. Plus, a lot of the movies arrive half a year or so later than a lot of other countries. And it’s more expensive in my experience. Just for some perspective.

    I suspect you look at the term “the West” and you think you’re not part of that. You’re “the East” if anything. If a jihadist screams “death to the West” they include Japan in there. You are a democracy, a developed nation, and you rely on the US for security, and you are not practicing Muslims either. A person in Central Europe could look at “the West” and might include Finland and Sweden in there but maybe not Ukraine or Bulgaria. And what do we do about Russia? West of Japan, east of Europe. Very big and shouldn’t be generalized either. “The West” is an empty vessel people fill with lazy assumptions.