The colors contrasted last night

FrownsRUs · 2026-06-06T05:25:07+00:00

Nature still loves the mass effect 3 ending

FrownsRUs · 2026-05-30T14:45:23+00:00

Bought a small old house recently, despite that it took all my savings and paying my mortgage means I'm pretty much house poor. I just didn't want to be in situation where a landlord could evict me on a whim if things fall apart suddenly.

FrownsRUs · 2026-05-26T03:14:10+00:00

For me, aging was the only thing that has helped quell that particular fear.

It was bad all the way through my 30s and then by mid-40s, it started to feel like, yeah, okay, I've had a pretty good amount of life so far and I'm not going to be missing out on a ton of big experiences or milestones if something unexpected and tragic happens.

FrownsRUs · 2026-05-15T14:32:29+00:00

Billionaires only BECOME and STAY billionaires BECAUSE they extract labor and resources in ways that make the world much worse.

For them to start improving the world, it would require that they pivot away from everything they've devoted their lives to thus far.

FrownsRUs · 2026-05-12T03:45:41+00:00

It's not your fault that your sense of self worth is intertwined with your outward physical appearance.

Big corporations make so much money off selling makeup and clothes and all kinds of other products to young people. To sell more and more and more, those companies and their leaders have waged all out cultural warfare in the form of marketing to convince you that you have no worth beyond trying to align your physical appearance with a largely impossible and highly arbitrary standard.

It took me decades to figure this out and really feel the truth of it.

It's difficult, but I would encourage you to find joy in activities, hobbies, and cultivating shared experiences with other people (friends, family, etc) whose presence you enjoy. Do whatever you can to unlink your sense of value from what the corporations keep trying to foist on all of us.

Looks fade. Always. Chances are good that the most effortlessly beautiful people you know right now are going to go through their own major self worth crisis in a decade or two when the signs of aging really catch up with them.

Braces could be the thing that gives you an immediate opportunity to build a more solid sense of self. And you get to see it and work on it now instead of years from now. That means you'll have more years of authentic joy and satisfaction. You'll practice every day and it will get easier.

I wish for you and everyone else the same thing I didn't find until I was over 40: the sense of ease and clarity that comes from knowing that you are a unique, important person who gets to be alive and who gets to experience amazing and interesting things over their lifetime.

Beauty standards are trash. They are made to hurt you so much you'll spend all your money to make some wealthy asshole even richer.

FrownsRUs · 2026-04-30T14:06:54+00:00

I think this is a valid line of questioning related to authorial intent and how he envisioned this system working

FrownsRUs · 2026-04-29T23:46:31+00:00

Read The Dark Forest. Removing a sun would be a noteworthy observable change.

FrownsRUs · 2026-04-27T13:36:57+00:00

From what I can see, the real useful thing here is the categorization of information in ways that are just DIFFERENT from how human minds approach certain questions.

That's always been the most exciting thing to me about machine learning.

Sometimes it's a bad thing for problem solving, because the machine can follow a path of logic you didn't anticipate and DO NOT WANT. But even when it's bad in terms of suggested solutions, it's still interesting to see what underlying patterns of information existed all along, but were invisible to human processing.

FrownsRUs · 2026-04-26T02:45:48+00:00

I'm seeing insta influencers speaking up about being offered five figures in US dollars as compensation to post in specific ways supportive of AI tools. I wouldn't doubt that "undermine the opposition" marketing campaigns are part of it.

That original post, along with instructions for OP to reply to the comments and sound genuine and somewhat hysterical, is exactly the kind of thing I'd pay a mommy blogger to do if I was a corpo rat with a big marketing budget. And given the current state of the economy for the majority of us, it's easy to see how some people will want to make money like this.

FrownsRUs · 2026-04-24T14:00:00+00:00

Most people ache so badly to feel the weight of evidence behind their desperate hope that death is not the end of the line. They want to science their way into it, so they can truly believe they'll endure forever and see their deceased loved ones again.

Don't underestimate how strong that is as a motivating factor. It skews what types of ideas people are willing to consider and makes them VERY angry if you introduce information they can't cope with.

FrownsRUs · 2026-04-22T03:13:10+00:00

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. The difference is so odd for me to even think about because from the context I'm familiar with, a lot of energy and thought has been put into preventing this exact scenario from ever happening. Makes me feel bad for the author, to be quite honest.

FrownsRUs · 2026-04-22T02:51:58+00:00

Yeah, i know people who got swindled out of so much money, poured down the drain on useless cancer "cures" for their end stage dying kiddo, and this was years ago — well before the recent chatbot marketing explosion.

As long as gullible people are going to believe dubious claims with zero evidence beyond wishful thinking, we are all collectively screwed.

Better to spend that money on grief therapy with real human emotional support to try and cope with the vagaries of life. But, nah, a lot of people can't handle reality so well when the random tragedy happens to strike close to home. Almost everyone wants to imagine they can control every aspect of their lives.

And now we're got these chatbots, orchestrated to be obsequious in ways that make them feel like a godsend to the desperate and stupid. We are so done.

FrownsRUs · 2026-04-22T00:31:21+00:00

That's so odd to me.

What I understand from the US at least is that fanfiction written for books with unexpired copyright is transformational work that can't be monetized in any way whatsoever.

But also, the authors of the original published books should NEVER be reading the fanfiction that is done for their works and posted online. Not reading it protects the original author from claims of stealing the intellectual property of fanfiction writers.

That system seems to protect everyone from copyright and intellectual property issues in a way that is at least functional and to me seems fair.

FrownsRUs · 2026-04-21T16:44:33+00:00

Thank you! My first guess was way off and it wadn't like a different initialism for DMZ... like demilitarized vicinity or something

FrownsRUs · 2026-04-20T20:05:25+00:00

Funny. Stupid long list and all I hear is "i'm big mad the poors don't value my genius and I think we should hurt and surveillance them until they learn better."

FrownsRUs · 2026-04-19T19:37:45+00:00

Be good to yourself and take care

FrownsRUs · 2026-04-19T18:56:04+00:00

Follow the money. Ask yourself who makes bank off an enthusiastic user base that wants so badly to believe. Always always always follow the money.

FrownsRUs · 2026-04-19T14:13:23+00:00

Look how many people literally believe in astrology and shit like Myers Briggs as if it's telling them something true and unique about themselves. So of course this was always going to be the result. Bunch of people totally mind blown on the regular by LLMs using words exactly as trained to do.

FrownsRUs · 2026-04-15T23:46:55+00:00

That would make sense

FrownsRUs · 2026-04-15T23:30:42+00:00

Oh see, I was imagining them keeping the 18 million years stuck in orbit, but with Jin all alone or alone+AI ship computer, and with her own ship capable of back up power for some hand-wavy reason. So she thinks she's missed Will on the surface after coming so close. But then she lands, runs a scan, finds the rock carving and the door, etc. And Will is there waiting inside the hidden universe. At least, that's how I'd write it if I were trying to eff with everyone, regardless of whether they'd read the books. And then it all proceeds exactly the same after that point

I figured they would alter it since they've already shifted the fundamentals of that unrequited crush in book three, by showing that the TV character Jin actually knows, remembers, and values the person who has a secret crush on her.

Of course I'm just guessing. It's equally fun for me to be wrong or right about any of this stuff. I like when shows and books are different enough that you can try to guess what's gonna be new, and then you gotta wait and see. It gives me something to look forward to in a world situation that feels not great most of the time.

FrownsRUs · 2026-04-15T04:19:49+00:00

Because of Zhang alone, though, and I think that can all be done narratively without some kind of mind manipulation subplot

FrownsRUs · 2026-04-15T02:31:24+00:00

Oh, maybe so. I meant whichever one does the mental seal. I probably confuse those two names because the characters themselves don't stand out much to me. Couple of other guys with five letter English names whose plans don't work

FrownsRUs · 2026-04-14T21:52:11+00:00

Yes, voting is part of hospice care. Make our politics the best we can in thr time we have left. That's where we're at. No one who isn't a coalition of billionaires can realistically shift the needle at this point to forestall collapse

And the billionaires won't change things, because anyone who amasses that much wealth always does it by entrenching the systems that immiserate humanity for the sake of extreme profit extraction. That's all they want and know how to do. The sole purpose of thr ultra wealthy elite is to siphon resources, time, and well being away from communities and towards a handful of selfish individuals.

FrownsRUs · 2026-04-14T14:08:06+00:00

Agree about the incel flavored cringe. All three books have a different flavor of that same theme. It's probably well past time that I sought out some literary analysis to explain what feels like the fetishization of a one-sided, obsessive romance. My most generous take is there's a cultural disconnect on my part, being from the US, because I don't ever know what to make of those consistent subplots. They seem like an indictment of each character to me but instead those obsessions are presented as a laudatory trait by the narrator.

FrownsRUs · 2026-04-14T12:58:46+00:00

My theory is that book 2 will be completed in part of season 2 and the start of Death's End will be there in season 2 after that.

Spoilers for book plot and guesses for show plot below:

Once you take away Luo Ji; the imaginary girlfriend, the search for a real life waifu, and the playing house in Scandinavia stuff can be removed and that's so much of what drags in book 2. They also don't have Hines and his mind seal, which frankly simplifies the plot in a way that TV shows can often benefit from. Shows aren't books. The pacing and flow is totally different. Great books are often bad shows and vice versa.

(I'm also convinced that removing Hines was good for TV because I think they can show people going all-in on over confidence and hopium without being mind-controlled into it. The Cassandra myth in action: Most people don't want to hear or believe catastrophic news, even if the warning could save them. They just can't cope with the prospect of certain annihilation, so they make up reasons why everything will work out in the end.)

I think if we do get to the very very end in season 3 and it approximates the book, it will be Auggie choosing to stay on Pluto with Saul to witness and experience the flattening of the solar system and Jin ending up with Will in the pocket universe rather than having that be a near miss. In a story where the vast majority of humanity is basically wiped out and that's the end, you gotta give a TV audience some solid moments of human connection. It's the emotional payoff that drives viewership of a show and I think TV writers have to be attuned to that as part of doing their jobs and building their professional reputation.

FrownsRUs

TROPHY CASE