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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: January 5th, 2024

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  • Reading A People’s History of the United States put that on my radar. I hadn’t given the idea any thought until a college course assigned this book. I was educated in a standard American public school during the Reagan and Clinton eras, complete with Pledge of Allegiance. The standard schoolbooks omit a lot of atrocities and smooth over the ugly reality.

    Whatever legitimate criticisms you lay on it, Zinn’s takedown opened my worldview and intensified my pre-existing anti-authoritarian streak.

    9/11 happened shortly after and by then I considered Bush an illegitimate president. I watched him wage an unjustified war, and with the whole of our bloody rampage across the globe that clicked neatly into place. “America #1” is a sick joke.


  • The company I work for has a decent professional culture that emphasizes teamwork without any weird gimmicks. But I don’t get paid to make friends with these people. If anything, the people that think they’re there to socialize usually put the work second and make things harder for the rest of the team.

    There’s nothing wrong with sharing jokes and having fun at work. As long as you understand that there’s also value in keeping your personal life seperate.








  • There was a particular easy listening station when I was a kid that played 60s, 70s, and 80s folk, soft rock, motown, and other singer-songwriter stuff that helped me deal with the anxiety of fighting parents and the deathly silence in between.

    These days I listen to old episodes of MST3K or Rifftrax on YT, Best of the Worst, or one of the myriad of “oldies playing quietly in the next room and it’s raining” that you can easily find.

    My mind still races at night. I eventually made a playlist to recreate that old radio station vibe. It doesn’t hit the same way it used to.






  • I stopped watching anything made by their network around the time they started shilling fake boner pills and sweeping scandals under the rug. I never saw RvB but I came in as a fan for a while of Let’s Play and Funhaus, before they acquired it. I even contributed to First for a little while.

    They had a lot of momentum in those days, but I think they tried to grow beyond their ability. Most of the new programming they developed was inferior to the lightning-in-a-bottle stuff they were initially built on. They tried to expand their business while hamstrung by their own internal limitations. They did suffer from some bad luck, but really, they mostly self-destructed in slow motion.

    It’s hard enough to build an internet company based on algorithms and originating on someone else’s platform. They tried to navigate independently as long as they could, but really, when fans aren’t responding exponentially to your investment, you can either sell out or die right away. Props for twenty years of capitalizing on early internet fame. But to me, this is an overdue death. Basing your brand around being a dick was bound to have a shelf life.