An epic story of a frog banished to the desert, stuck in a wet suit, leading a bunch of muppets in rebellion against humans.

“Hi-Ho, Paul Ah-treides here!”

The Kermit’s “oh no” face as the sandworm approaches.

The thumper that calls the sandworm is a rubber chicken that just says “Wakka…wakka…wakka…wakka…”

Yeah, I would watch the shit out of this.

My partner recently started watching her videos and I saw this one. 100% accurate. She’s incredibly self-reflective and really hits a lot of things as they really are. Genuine brilliance wasted by both the Mormons and MAGA because of misogyny.

I grew up in what is now deep red Trump flag territory, and the District 1/12 level of “we’re the hyper-visual freaks focused on image and money, now send me donations, you filthy MAGA monkey!” is severe. Those people rarely see how genuinely grotesque many of these freaks are because it’s all podcasts and talk radio and Fox News, which blunts the extreme elements. Noem and Levitt might be the only two the average person would know, and they’ve only known their mutilated faces, not their real faces.

If you went to a Wal-Mart in any rural town with a game called “ID the MAGA Star!” and gave $100 to anyone able to correctly identify the names of all 6 pre-multination faces, and take $1 per guess, you could go there with no cash on you and leave loaded. I would bet that you’d get lots of totally unironic pushback that Loomer is trans.

I swear, even the porn industry seems less misogynistic than MAGA when it comes to pressure to change your body.

It’s also slow AF. It’s potentially faster to have someone read you text than get it by packet over radio.

Packet over radio does exist, and it’s sloooooooooooooow and there’s tons of loss. Imagine the first modems over phone lines, then slow it down more.

Legally, in the US, it can’t be encrypted, either. A single geostationary satellite would be faster, especially if latency wasn’t an issue.

Language is like a muscle. If you don’t use it, it fades faster than you think.

I didn’t realize he had died and saw a few posts about how weird and self-serving he was, on top of the racism. 3 years ago a bunch of papers dropped Dilbert over him going on a racist rant.

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/26/1159580425/newspapers-have-dropped-the-dilbert-comic-strip-after-a-racist-rant-by-its-creat

He also questioned the Holocaust and a bunch of other wildly weird shit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams#Political_views

Long before this, he made sock puppet accounts online and posed as his own superfan to pump his own shit up. And was quickly found out.

https://comicsalliance.com/scott-adams-plannedchaos-sockpuppet/

His Twitter account says a lot, and Elon defended his 2023 racist rant if that also says anything. Apparently also a Truth Social account as well.

https://nitter.net/ScottAdamsSays

So it’s not just about political leanings, it’s the ego, racism, and being a shitbag and troll online. Typical thin-skinned Conservative on the internet, ultimately. And hey, I don’t know what it’s like to be a public figure (thank the gods), but I certainly wouldn’t have so much ego and so little self-awareness as to go on reddit pretending to be someone else and talking myself up. His descent should be a warning to any of us with parents or grandparents his age.

I think it’s smiling specifically. It’s honestly a stupid thing to rant about, there was a short-lived Dilbert animated TV show where he had a mouth, so this level of nit-picking is simply petty.

As much as I love Cory Doctorow’s work, this is a stretch. The crack in the door only comes once everything supporting the consolidation and oligarchy of the tech industry comes crashing down. The broligarchs have their contingency planning in place already, so a crack in the door might exist one day, but it’s going to take a lot more than EFF and a few niche rights groups to make any change there. The tech money is digging in, and doing so in ways that are edge cases for even digital rights groups.

The post-WWII order is gone, the post-Cold War model of economics is over, and the post-9/11 surveillance state is now wearing a mask with hoses that feed it super-strength drugs. It’s that the costs of the old bargain are double for everyone that isn’t a FANG, and now gone for them. Just like the Western economy, it’s bifurcating towards different planes of existence that know of each other but barely interact IRL. Which is not sustainable, but for how long we’ll wobble, it’s hard to say.

Digital rights and privacy groups need to be proactive and demonstrate uses cases for both, and make use of them while expecting the non-sustainability of the current system to one day give way to something new.

So step 1 is, for now, strap the fuck in and get your house in order. Build skills, teach others. Step 2 one day is going to be on the heels of massive cultural and political change.

Hidden tail.

lol, as if they’d ever let this go to a jury.

Especially when, sadly, we all know DHS will 100% get a Federal judge or SCOTUS to make this LEO-only OK and let them shoot anyone they want driving, walking, or looking towards them.

A few weeks ago I dealt with my deceased Grandfather’s computer. He passed 12 years ago and once Grandma passed, there was no reason left to shrine it all off. He was a prolific artist. Played the piano, French horn and oboe. Painted, did etchings and lithographs, drawings.

He filled up the HDD on his first PC, a 2006 Dell Optima IIRC, and was on his way to filling up a spool of CD-RWs and his 2010 Dell Inspirion when he passed. Pulled the hard drives and connected them to pull what was on there. One part the mind of an artist - folders of 200 pics of clouds and rocks and mountains, paintings and works from the 60’s and 70’s propped up in the front yard (great light!), random pictures of cacti. Then, the mind of a grandparent - my cousins as babies, my youngest aunt younger than I am now writing this, baseball games and holidays. Most taken a decade closer to Gene Ziegler’s words than today. Saved and copied and backed up and copied again and uploaded for one more incarnation.

you may as well reboot and go out with a bang

That’s brilliant

I mean…I’ve very nearly been killed enough times that most of the time I just consider every day a bonus. Kind of the same thing, but not quite.

Let me tell you about how watching the X-Files as a kid made me interested in science - AND the occult!

The symbolism of 60 senators and 60 stab wounds. But, in practicality, by #23, a full freakout was probably going on, so #24 was probably like “Oh, hey, can I just get in here real quick and just… ok, fine! Never mind.”

Apologies, I totally missed the most essential part of this all:

Shut the fuck up, Donny.

Who decides what counts as a “level up”?

Well, you do, ultimately. Remember, you’re talking about a system where there is agency between lifetimes as well. I’m not familiar enough with non-human karmic mechanics to definitively tell you, but in most systems it’s that you a “burning off” the karma of being en evil asshole by being demoted from human to less sentient lifeforms. So sending Hitler or Cecil Rhodes or Andrew Jackson would then indeed spend 40,000 lifetimes being killed over and over again before getting back in the running to have a central nervous system.

Two things:

First, mathematically, It’s sort of a moot concern. Reincarnation comes with the framework that lives are the universe experiencing itself. So There’s no “loss” in going between species as “you” will actually incarnate as everything and everyone once in non-linear time on the backend making “time” immaterial. I am you and you are me. We are all one existence. So you have time.

Second, that reincarnation frameworks usually also include a structure where it’s not random what you reincarnate as next time around. Karma doesn’t usually boot people back down to bacterium right after human. It’s usually more of a leveling up in order to experience deeper and more meaningful lifetimes. But YMMV.

Imagine being the level of asshole that would spend the time to do this. I’m not surprised, just…disappointed.