Grading culture is a symptom of something very rotten in the modern consumer economy. There's been a sort of double-move where the once-niche economy of collecting culture has expanded to swallow up more and more while collecting culture itself has kind of evaporated.

Your Canadian Girlfriend@yourcanadiangf.bsky.social · 2d ago

Why? Why must everything we enjoy be sealed up with a "grade"? I get baseball cards being put in plastic because you can still enjoy both sides of the card. But a Blu-ray?

RFKJr claims Lyme disease was created by scientists,which is the closest he’s come to admitting that science exists. Meanwhile, Ötzi the Iceman, who died more than 5.3K years ago, had Lyme disease. Apparently prehistoric humans are part of the conspiracy. Get me off this timeline

Think about it this way: what if your tax dollars were used to buy sophisticated surveillance equipment and guns, and then the cops never killed your dog? Wouldn’t you feel ripped off?

USA TODAY Opinion@usatodayopinion.usatoday.com · 3d ago

Opinion: Mamdani's idea may sound appealing, but it's NYC taxpayers who will take the hit, subsidizing discounts they may never even use.

I'm working on a thing to detect logos in WOC VHS digitizations so I can note the network if it is not already in the file name. It composites a sampling of frames and then tries to match the bottom right corner to a known logo, the pics that come out of it look like shoegaze album covers.

Blogged it. Happy Hater Week. aftermath.site/war-crime-n6...

Do Not Buy The War Crime N64

There's so many ways to play the N64. You do not need to support Palmer Luckey's little project.

aftermath.site

Your occasional reminder that LLMs do not have eyes, can’t actually read, and can’t actually verify confidently stated untruths. They are blind idiots and will repeat anything.

Hetan Shah@hetanshah.bsky.social · 5mo ago

‘I spent 20 mins writing an article on my personal website titled "The best tech journalists at eating hot dogs". Every word is a lie… Less than 24 hours later, the world's leading chatbots were blabbering about my world-class hot dog skills’ www.bbc.co.uk/future/artic... (HT @sambrook.bsky.social)

It is genuinely bizarre that we’ve become acclimatized to right wingers throwing a tantrum every time a black person (particularly a black woman) is cast in something, but are also supposed to pretend that this is not racism but related to some other substantive concern.

There’s a really good, inexpensive Open Source DIY speaker that came out of the ASR forums called the Mechano23 by XMechanik. Measures incredibly well, very affordable. www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index....

The Luddites' actual argument was that automated looms meant expensive, skilled workers were being replaced with literal children, who were then getting maimed and killed, and maybe this is bad.

SlacktivistFred@slacktivistfred.bsky.social · 3w ago

The Luddites were “clinging to horses and carts” because it was the early 19th century and cars hadn’t been invented yet.

To be a historian is to speak ill of the dead and the rest of you should take more history classes and join us.

Mainstream Respectable opinion is that people joking about a bad person's death represents a culture of cruelty, but really it represents a culture of impunity. It's a coping mechanism for watching someone do evil their whole life and never seeing consequences

“Succeed” is an interesting one here. A perfect example that videogame companies don’t exist to make videogames, they exist to make capital. That is the primary goal of which Carmack is actually talking about ‘succeeding’ at here.

Robert / Zeboyd@zeboydgames.bsky.social · 4w ago

Xbox: Guts id Software, firing half the studio. John Carmack: No wait, hear them out. I think Microsoft is onto something here. John Carmack is scum. www.ign.com/articles/to-...

Realizing specialty in-person retail was low-key a jobs program for neurodivergent people. Do you love [decor/fashion/comics/music/film/fabric/yarn/crafts/model [trains/cars/planes]/make-up/tech/[car/boat/rv] parts/toys/travel/etc.]? Do you want to get paid to recommend stuff? Retail is for you!

Rob Sheridan@rob-sheridan.com · 4w ago

It wasn’t just geeky stuff like movies/comics, 20th century brick-n-mortar stores used to employ all kinds of weirdos who knew everything about something and LOVED to help. Radio Shack had circuitry weirdos! Sears had vacuum cleaner weirdos! Shirt weirdos! Garden weirdos! Hat weirdos!

People who spiral out overusing LLM chatbots are really just experiencing the kind of brain-damaging stream of unconditional validation that’s always been the norm for the hyper-wealthy, which explains a lot.

Jon Hendry@jonhendry.bsky.social · last mo.

Worse than Twitter, private discussions (text, email, whatever) among like-minded wealthy lunatics who are all surrounded by yes-men who talk like ChatGPT in maximum ass-kissing mode.

Trump is preparing to fire the leadership of the Smithsonian Institution, one of America's most prestigious scientific and historical research and education organizations. He wants in particular to censor the Smithonian's American History exhibits:

White House report brands Smithsonian leadership as radical activists who can't be trusted

The report released late on Independence Day by the White House Domestic Policy Council comes in the midst of Trump’s aggressive campaign to overhaul some of Washington's most sacred cultural and hist...

pbs.org

"We need to make personal control over your media cool again. If you go home with someone and they don't have a Plex server, don't fuck them" —John Waters, probably

Chris Person@papapishu.bsky.social · last mo.

they trained millennials how to use computers too good and napster basically flattened an entire industry. I think that's why they don't even want you to touch your phone's file system now, they can't let kids become that powerful again

it’s so funny to imagine a silicon valley striver getting invited to a top-secret “ideas conference” ready to learn the Secrets of the Elites only to get trapped on an understuffed hotel chair for eight hours while a very sweaty billionaire rants about how the Actual Devil lives inside chinese RAM

cutting physical media save costs for corporations with no benefit passed on at the expense of consumer rights and ownership

I guess these are the games, and memories, I'm stuck with for the rest of my life: aftermath.site/video-game-phy...

One thing I find myself thinking about as we enter Disaster Season (wildfires, hurricanes, etc.) is how we won't know just how much our capacity to anticipate and deal with catastrophe has been diminished until we're in the thick of it. apnews.com/article/weat...

Experts say US weather forecasts will worsen as DOGE cuts mean fewer balloon launches

With massive job cuts, the National Weather Service is reducing vital weather balloon launches in eight northern locations.

apnews.com

I’m just a shitlib, but until the dems are willing to take on the concentrated power of capital and the mechanisms that led to it they’re just painting the titanic a different color. bsky.app/profile/mjsd...

Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc.bsky.social · last mo.

The Supreme Court's second opinion is NRSC v. FEC. By a 6–3 vote, the court guts another campaign finance statute and overturns a 2001 precedent that upheld restrictions on political parties' coordinated expenditures with candidates. The three liberals dissent. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

Did you know that women were banned from baseball after Jackie Mitchell, a 17 year old girl struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gerhig? Babe Ruth cried to the commissioner over it. Anyways. Segregation in sports is always about the insecurities of the dominant group.

person on the left

kate bush’s husband@airbagged.bsky.social · last mo.

Beautiful

For @aftermath.site, the Steam Machine costs too much money because of greedy freaks. But a community has formed around optimizing a low budget alternative made from failed PlayStation 5's that got turned into crypto mining cards and then resold as garbage. aftermath.site/bc250-steam-...

Bless The BC250, The Budget E-waste Steam Machine Alternative

The Steam Machine is expensive due to evil freaks. Let's make a miracle computer out of garbage.

aftermath.site

Chris Person@papapishu.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Purchased an AMD BC-250 crypto mining card and I’m gonna install Bazzite on that sucker for @aftermath.site. Literally just making a steam machine out of a PS5 APU. Please support the site if you like funding this stuff.

Remember folks, if buying isn’t ownership, piracy isn’t theft.

Culture Crave 🍿@culturecrave.co · last mo.

PlayStation is deleting over 500 purchased movies from its customers' accounts 🎞️ • Includes films like 'Terminator 2', 'Rambo', 'Apocalypse Now', 'Hot Fuzz', and 'Moonlight' • No mention of refunds • Comes after a licensing deal ended

Hey, Adios is 45% off! store.steampowered.com/app/1271400/... $10. 2 hrs. One of the best voice-acted games in history. Two men who love each other very much are trying to persuade the other to stand down, because if one of them doesn't, the Farmer will have to be killed.