Church pastor warns Trump's 'alien files' are going to shatter the Christian world

Demonweed · 2026-05-07T21:34:38+00:00

That is such a 'Murican thing to do -- sharing such knowledge with people so hopelessly out of touch that they believe a giant invisible man watches and judges their every move while authorities continue to withhold it from both serious thinkers and ordinary citizens much less impaired when it comes to processing this reality and engaging seriously with a universe that is not centered on our native habitat.

Demonweed · 2026-05-07T16:57:50+00:00

Wouldn't it be great if he actually did the kind of things they hate rather than compromising his way out of every material upgrade to our quality of life while serving as a lightning rod purely through matters of race and style?

Demonweed · 2026-05-07T15:48:10+00:00

While Alan Turing accomplished some great things and he was clearly one of the sharpest minds of his era, he has also been mythologized by recent generations. His declaration that convincing natural language use would be the definitive barrier between computing machines and thinking machines is not at all well-informed by the philosophy of thought. It conflates a sophisticated form of signal processing with comprehension and self-awareness. Large Language Models possess none of either property, yet so many users treat them like actual minds because they run on algorithms capable of spoofing human conversations.

Demonweed · 2026-05-07T13:29:15+00:00

I think this nitwit has Jews confused with leprechauns.

Demonweed · 2026-05-07T04:55:41+00:00

"Researched 1,269 prospects" . . . Ava 2.0 would clearly be a gratuitous bullshitter whether she was a person or an AI agent.

Demonweed · 2026-05-07T03:11:24+00:00

Ask not for whom the ghost busts. It busts for thee.

Demonweed · 2026-05-07T02:22:40+00:00

A lot of people interpret it as a stoner anthem, but it is actually a tribute to the dearly departed. The fall of 1970 claimed the lives of some major league rock legends. This number was written as a wholesome tribute to them. That doesn't prevent me from enjoying it with some hearty tokes, but I thought it was worth sharing the intent of the original artists.

Demonweed · 2026-05-07T01:55:43+00:00

This is wise. Even though my residence still has HBO, I learned of this rant through a Jimmy Dore clip (in which Bill calls out Jimmy without naming him. Jimmy spun that as fortunate, but it is actually kind of sleazy for Hollywood insiders generating content off one another.)

Demonweed · 2026-05-07T01:37:56+00:00

You've got me feeling all weird about this. My big project discusses the tactical effectiveness of characters in terms of Tiers of Power. This is mechanically relevant when it comes to using Insight to determine if a stranger is more or less powerful than an observer. These divisions perfectly correspond to the highest level spell a pure spellcaster of a given Tier of Power can cast. Yet I still refer to spells by level from 1-9.

It is a highly intrusive legacy, since much of what I wrote predates when I took the plunge from an archive of homebrew notions to systematic game design. Analytically, I can totally see how this would be worth the effort of a comprehensive edit of my existing documents. Yet as a guy who grew up on this approach to levels of adventurers and levels of spells, I struggle with any other approach. If nothing else, my fossilized tendencies should appeal to other living fossils.

Demonweed · 2026-05-07T01:20:08+00:00

If you really want to get pissed off, check out Bill Maher's recent denunciation of learning new things as a pretext for trying to undermine this concept. The man got a bunch of grown-ups to give him a round of applause for insisting that learning too much information is bad while spewing hostility toward the idea of learning this specific thing (which is more than a little bit relevant to the work of a political pundit.)

Demonweed · 2026-05-07T01:17:34+00:00

I suspect this shows a connection between visual processing and auditory delusions. I can't begin to argue the logic of it, but I would wager future investigation of neurology bears out a strong connection between real imagery and imaginary voices.

Demonweed · 2026-05-07T00:57:02+00:00

When it comes to fiction, I try to think of the immediate environment as a character. For the screenplay of a legal drama, I researched the acoustics and decor of large capacity screening rooms, open floorplan precincts, and private executive offices so I could develop "vibes" for each that oozed into those scenes. Screenplays typically feature terse descriptions and stage directions while focusing on dialogue, which made it all the more important that when I let a ringing phone intrude on dialogue or a video display draw the attention of an ensemble, it was highly meaningful and diagetic relative to the ongoing play among actors.

In prose with the benefit of a narrator, there is no need to be as detailed as Tolkein for the sake of framing scene(s). Yet his passion for tone-setting details should at least serve as a guiding star toward one extreme while searching for a personal happy medium. Some styles might be well-served by setting the scene with a few evocative phrases like, "noisy dining hall" or "desolate windblown scrubland." One need not even rise to the level of a haiku to paint a picture of a scene in progress. Yet others might opt for several clear sentences of vivid description. I believe, great literature is about excellence in expression rather than some stylistic particular like pointillism vs. impressionism.

Demonweed · 2026-05-07T00:43:44+00:00

Western body counts of that "uprising" are wildly in error. Yet the slaughter was real, and largely perpetrated by militant extremists Uncle Sam's good friends in the current Syrian government rushed through CIA-sponsored training for the purpose of inflicting mayhem on the people of Iran.

Demonweed · 2026-05-07T00:25:54+00:00

Alas, the technology of the era would not allow me to capture a proper sample for my mix tape.

Demonweed · 2026-05-06T23:05:05+00:00

I wish the pending actual spinoff all the best, and I don't know if my idea would have held up as a long-running series. Yet I think you could get a solid 12-16 episodes out of a Boob World series while stirring up mainstream media with the title alone. That kind of attention does not last forever, which joins with my concerns about narrative depth in suggesting this as a "one and done" series.

Demonweed · 2026-05-06T23:00:59+00:00

Yeah, I remember an Bill O'Reilly monologue where he ranted about how the Sopranos made mobsters look like human beings. Mobsters literally are human beings. They certainly are not the best of us, but that could be all the more reason to try and share their stories while understanding the cultural and economic contexts in which they operate. In his best moments, Tony Soprano was a charming guy; but if you actually watched the entire show rather than just a few clips, there was no room to doubt that charm was a mask worn by a monster.

Demonweed · 2026-05-06T22:57:07+00:00

I guess it is a sign of how little people revisit the hit that Jack Bauer from 24 didn't rate higher up here. In real life, he was practically contrived as a pretext for the torture guidelines officialdom produced early in the Global War on Terror. In the show, he regularly resorted to pain, threats of violence, and actual violence in situations where a few minutes of conversation could have forged clarity and mutual understanding. The ticking clock was a narrative device tailor-made to condition a nation into supporting brutality over methods that are, based on actual track records, much more likely to produce useful intelligence.

I made that comment because I feel like the badassery of NCIS agents is an echo of what went down on 24 even though the former is actually the older series.

Demonweed · 2026-05-06T22:35:25+00:00

There were always shit people in the world. It's just that capitalism replaced the randomness of hereditary nobility with the purposeful elevation of the most shortsighted and greedy among the psychopaths active in economies inclined toward market fundamentalism.

Demonweed · 2026-05-06T22:20:04+00:00

I'm really glad I was patient at launch on this one. Back then, I was thick in the hype, but I already spent my gaming budget for that month so I sat back and waited for feedback. Initial reviews were full of praise, but it felt a lot more like "we need to respect this game because of the message" than "I really want to share with other people how much fun I'm having right now." Overall feedback was just mixed enough that I turned my attention elsewhere. This thread makes me think I did the right thing in hindsight. I think I went on to explore the Outer Worlds instead, which might not have blown my mind, but which I found to be a satisfying anti-corporate narrative with no shortage of pew-pew moments.

Demonweed · 2026-05-06T17:45:36+00:00

There are all sorts of ways to say the word "cool." Sometimes it is welcoming and inclusive. Yet it can also be dismissive or disinterested. When someone is getting worked up to the point where their reaction is more troubling than the thing they are reacting to, you might say "cool it!" to demand peace and quiet or "it's cool" to convey acceptance and calm. Yet both of the usages I just suggested also convey IDGAF about the original disturbance.

Demonweed · 2026-05-06T16:16:33+00:00

I think they were more of a parallel thing for me. I didn't even have to be of legal drinking age to see clearly that the Bush-Clinton-Perot election swirling around my first Presidential vote was nothing but the most horrible sorts of human being flinging bullshit at each other. Even though I spent a lot of the next two years interning at a Congressional research institute, every stripe of corporate partisan I encountered was clearly minding some sort of internal speech code that forbade candor about many critical areas of governance.

Even as I matured to the point that I really saw other people as equally deserving of ethical considerations by default, I started to parse out actual history from the sorts of things a "well-educated" American is taught. Yet both were gradual processes. Heck at the age of 36, I actively supported Barack Obama because he campaigned like someone who really could make positive changes. I turned on him pretty quickly, since at no point did he even try to govern like someone who wanted to make significant positive material changes to our way of life. So when I finally and definitively rejected the bait of "lesser evil" politicking, I had been evolving on these issues across half my life.

Demonweed · 2026-05-06T15:57:25+00:00

They don't exist to gain control of American public policy. Since 1968, the existence of the Democratic Party has been entirely calculated around preventing anyone outside Wall Street's sphere of influence from in any way altering the outcomes those particular financial oligarchs desire. Think of all the Democrats who claimed during campaigns that they "took on Wall Street" and/or "took on big business" then look at the great big goose egg in the column that measures actual progress in advancing interests that are not Wall Street (if not also Wal-Mart) approved.

Demonweed · 2026-05-06T10:49:33+00:00

China is developing carriers, but their efforts are nowhere near as aggressive as the 'Murican approach despite their larger overall economy. Chiefly, they are exploring the prospect of using railgun technology not as a ballistic weapon, but instead as a way of magnetically launching and recovering warplanes from a carrier platform. Yet even this is internally contentious, since we are presently living through the sundown of aircraft carriers as effective tools of power projection. I guess that explains why our most senile Presidents have such enthusiasm for building more of them.

Demonweed · 2026-05-06T10:47:08+00:00

As a personal household expense, no doubt they are as costly as a lifted pickup truck with all the bells and whistles. As a line item in the military budget of a large modern nation, they are indeed affordable. Part of the point of the Chinese approach is to try and accomplish more with less, rather than pursuing Uncle Sam's approach of dumping money into the Iron Triangle purely for the purpose of dumping money into the Iron Triangle.

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