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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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  • Well, I’d say 100k to 300k qualifies as more money than I’ve ever made in a single year of my life, more than I’ve made in my entire life if we go closer to 300k…

    But what I meant was that the ultimate hiring process is dictated, signed off on or altered, all the way down, by the wealth holding members of society. The top execs, the board.

    And that the society created, and largely owned, by their policies is essentially gaslighting us every day.

    Have you ever spent an entire year applying to jobs… as a full time job? After having had a career, losing it to a disability, then trying to go back after years of recovery?

    With maybe one reply every few months, despite being qualified for everything you are applying to?

    Becoming depressed as everyone around you spends the first month giving you mindless cheery platitudes, then forgetting you exist, then becoming angry when you tell them you can’t afford to do anything that involves money?

    Then when you finally cave and go work some bullshit job you are immensely overqualified for, everyone blames you for not living up to your potential?

    They made it, it worked out for them, why didn’t it work out for you?

    Even though it never once occured to them to maybe help you out monetarily and avoid going into massive debt, or by putting in a good word for you with their network of contacts.





  • Other posters have already come up with Huey Long, Charles Coughlin, Joe McCarthy, Lyndon LaRouche…

    No American Presidential candidate before Trump has been so widely popular whilst also having a cult following of people who basically believe in an entirely different reality whilst also being so brash and brazen about it.

    There have been demagogues before, with cultish followings, but they’ve not been anywhere near as popular as Trump.

    To attempt to add a few:

    Technically, Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, attempted to run for President back when Mormons were basically what we would now call a domestic terrorist group, and when most non Mormons viewed them as a dangerous cult.

    He was assassinated by a mob, who stormed the jail he was in whilst awaiting trial for treason and other charges, before the election took place.

    Also, you might be able to consider the fairly brief existence of the Anti-Masonic party at least somewhat akin to the living in a totally different reality attribute of MAGA people.

    Basically, following the inciting incident of the Morgan Affair, where a William Morgan was apparently planning to publish a book outlining the evils of a Freemason conspiracy to control government and business in the US, but he was jailed, a bit of a circus trial ensued, and then he disappeared.

    The Anti Masonic party was the US’s first third-party and basically it was built off of what we’d now call conspiracy theories stemming from the Morgan Affair, and called for Masons to renounce their fraternity or to be uprooted from positions of prominence.

    Much like the modern MAGA movement, it was full of highly religious conspiracy theorists, but it didn’t really coalesce into also being a cult of personality around any of their more prominent members the way such reverence exists for Trump.






  • In the same vein, Simon Librande, lead designer of Sim City, decided to pretend that basically all plots above low density just have absurdly huge, invisible (underground) parking lots, otherwise a car centric city very often just turns into half parking lots.

    https://web.archive.org/web/20240506163714/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/the-philosophy-of-simcity-an-interview-with-the-games-lead-designer/275724/

    Geoff Manaugh: While you were making those measurements of different real-world cities, did you discover any surprising patterns or spatial relationships?

    Librande: Yes, definitely. I think the biggest one was the parking lots. When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don’t think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.

    Manaugh: You would be making SimParkingLot, rather than SimCity.

    Librande: [laughs] Exactly. So what we do in the game is that we just imagine they are underground. We do have parking lots in the game, and we do try to scale them – so, if you have a little grocery store, we’ll put six or seven parking spots on the side, and, if you have a big convention center or a big pro stadium, they’ll have what seem like really big lots – but they’re nowhere near what a real grocery store or pro stadium would have. We had to do the best we could do and still make the game look attractive.

    EDIT: I got some details mixed up, corrected and expanded now.





  • Before we can commence with therapy relating to your suspected anxiety, adhd and trauma relating to people consistently extracting large amounts of time and money from you whilst making complicated, conditional, arbitrarily changing promises (involving the complicated, conditional, arbitrarily changing views of multiple third parties you do not personally know) to repay you in some way, which they never do…

    … please allow me to trigger all of your suspected conditions as thoroughly as possible in the name of ethical transparency and consent before we can proceed.

    Don’t worry this will only take 15 minutes to explain adequately if you’re in a good headspace.

    Subject appears irrationally angry and violent for no discernible reason, suspicion of psychosis.





  • I’m so sorry! He/She’s (never done that before)/(usually so much better behaved)!

    Said by idiot dog owners who either let their dogs run off leash, or don’t pay enough attention when they are leashed, which then attack people or other dogs.

    If you don’t have enough time or care to raise your dog properly such that it obeys basic commands and is familiarized with the world beyond your apartment/yard, you should be exercising far, faaar more caution and restraint.

    Personally I don’t think such people should even be allowed to own dogs if they can’t train them properly.

    So many people just take their dogs to a dog park and let em loose!


  • Assuming Jesus was a normal human being, one of many wandering apocalyptic Jewish preachers of the era… no, he’s just a dead cult leader who became legendary following exaggerated stories about him becoming popular after his death.

    Assuming you attempt to take any of these stories seriously, it depends on your interpretation and which stories you believe hold precedence over others.

    Paul seems to refer to Jesus as having a glorified spiritual/phantom kind of body, which evidently looks like a person but is capable of flying and either teleporting or phasing through walls. Paul never actually refers to a physical/fleshy Jesus, Jesus is always seen in visions, or encounters which can be read as fleeting appearances of basically a glorious or mysterious ghost, or more sceptically as hallucinations.

    Marcion and his followers embraced these ideas over the later Gospels, and rejected the idea that Jesus had been crucified, that he was physical/flesh whatsoever.

    The Gospels however, refer to Jesus very much having a human body, with holes from his crucifixion, (the doubting Thomas story), who eats and sleeps. so this is more in line with a zombie or lich.

    But, there’s also Jesus’ slew of powers/miracles that basically make him into a conjuration capable mage, a healing capable cleric, a necromancer, who raises the dead, a summoner of spirits (the transfiguration, Moses and Elijah come down from Heaven), and whatever kind of mage type spell is needed to either vanish or fly off into heaven.

    (Also I guess partly Bard as well, if you count telling parables as a Bardly skill)

    So basically he’s a custom or multi or hybrid class going by different kinds of TTRPG rules… ???

    The entities that were almost certainly zombies were all of the dead who rose from their graves upon the moment of Jesus death in Matthew 27 51-53.

    They then waited around the cemetery for the three days it took for Jesus to be resurrected, and then wandered around Jerusalem and ‘were seen by many’.

    Where they went afterward is unclear, they are never again mentioned.

    The nature of Jesus physical form vs spiritual form was part of considerable contention amongst early Christians: Was Jesus God incarnated as a human, or was he a human Messiah blessed by God… or… both?

    Eventually the concept of the Trinity was decided on, but this was after several hundred years of competing sects and stories and texts.

    Early Christian sects varied wildly on … basically everything, from whether or not the old Jewish law and customs needed to be adhered to, to which stories about Jesus were true and which were false…

    The Essenes believed that Jesus was a 96 foot tall demi-god/angelic being and that he had a sister, the Holy Spirit, who was female, and also a 96 foot tall demi-god/angel.

    The Cerinthians, the Valentinians and the Sethians seemed to all follow a line of thought which eventually became the Gospel of Judas, which proposes that Yahweh is actually Yaldabaoth, an evil demiurge amongst a pantheon of other gods, who created this world and all material existence as a kind of prison, and that Jesus was actually ‘from the immortal realm of Barbelo’, come to reveal to us mortals a path to basically escaping the matrix through the enlightenment of learning this and other hidden truths.

    (I use ‘escaping the matrix’ deliberately as the Wachowskis themselves incorporated Gnostic ideas into the movies, as well as concepts from many other religions and philosophers)

    So this Jesus would be less like a zombie and be more like Neo getting up after being shot by Smith: Jesus is but a man, he is a physical incarnation in a world with physical rules, but he can sometimes bend or break these rules.

    His true essence, his Spirit, is a separate entity that is elsewhere, in another realm of existence, and that spirit is basically just piloting the human form ‘Jesus’ as one directs a virtual avatar to move around in a video game.

    There were and currently are so many different sects of Christianity that uh, basically, Jesus is whatever is determined by whichever canon and theology you accept.