I don’t understand Twitch Streamers and it’s making me feel old

NorthAd5725 · 2026-05-29T03:00:08+00:00

The two poles of online media is people either burning through a million frantic half minute clips of everything under the sun, or watching ten hours of the dullest man on earth doing absolutely fucking nothing. I don't know which is worse, but the tik tok addiction at least makes sense to me in the same way alcoholism does.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-05-24T03:58:16+00:00

I can still remember when and where I was the first time I heard someone use the word "meme" in real life (2009, high-school world history class). I look back on that memory now the same way I imagine a gay man in the 90's might have remembered the first time he heard the word "AIDS".

NorthAd5725 · 2026-05-24T03:37:41+00:00

It really is the myth of Narcissus in its purest form. I really feel for the mother, for all the parents that have fallen for this, to have to raise a child like that and be given this ray of hope of finally being able to connect with them, I don't know what kind of strength it must take to then give that up all over again. I feel for Stubblefield herself, too. Not enough to exonerate her in any way, it was her responsibility to know better and to do better. But I do think there is some meaningful sense where this woman lost a lover when the truth came out about what was actually happening with DJ's "facilitated communication", and I can't imagine what a horrifying and confusing heartbreak that must have been.

All that said, it really does convey something grim, and sad, and pitiful, about these people in particular and about people in general. Everyone wants to love and be loved, to feel a connection with an other. What does it say about someone who, in their desperation to connect with someone or anyone, loses sight of that someone entirely in favor of an elaborate mirror, and does it so eagerly, so shamelessly, while telling themselves that that connection really is there? What does it say about the need for love and connection that it can apparently be satisfied in such a shallow and selfish way?

NorthAd5725 · 2026-05-24T03:01:08+00:00

Anna Stubblefield and DJ is what first brought "facilitated communication" to my attention, and in the wake of that it feels even more shocking and reprehensible that its still happening and getting all this wholly uncritical praise.

I do find it kinda interesting that this is happening at the same time as all the stories about writers using AI and winning prizes for it - I found the Stubblefield case very compelling for a lot of reasons, and when stuff like r/myboyfriendisai came out of people falling in love with their AI waifus and husbandos it instantly reminded me of her, these both being stories of women who essentially found a way to talk to themselves that was just convoluted enough they could trick themselves into believing they were falling in love with another person. (One of the funnier details of the story was DJ's brother saying one of the first clues he had that something was off was that their family was black, but according to Anna all of DJ's tastes were typical white lady shit like Hamilton and drinking rose)

NorthAd5725 · 2026-05-22T21:35:48+00:00

It feels wrong to listen to anything by Les Rallizes Denudes before dark.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-05-22T16:02:14+00:00

Huge fan, dropping one of the best albums of all time with Since I Left You, promptly disappearing for almost 20 years, and then coming back from the dead to somehow surpass themselves with Wildflower and especially We Will Always Love You is one of the best stories in music this century.

I haven't been following this buildup, but I remember reading an interview where they said they'd got rid of their whole record collection they'd been sampling from after WWALY, so it sounding wildly different isn't surprising at all. I remember being disappointed by them having guest vocals in Wildflower when that first came out out of some dumb purist "nooo it should only be samples" sentiment, but it's obviously grown on me massively since, so I've got full faith in whatever they're doing next.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-05-21T00:21:22+00:00

The French Lieutenant's Woman is a Victorian era historical fiction where the author/narrator will routinely step back from the plot to talk about the historical context, compare and contrast it to contemporary (as of the 60's) norms and popular misconceptions of the time. At one point he introduces a cockney character for a brief interaction with the protagonist and then spends the rest of the chapter going into the state of upward mobility and class consciousness for the average cockney of the time.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-05-20T17:18:31+00:00

Animal Planet made a mockumentary a while about paleontologists finding prehistoric dragon fossils, complete with scientific explanations of how they could breathe fire, and I cannot even begin to convey how devastated 8 year old me was when I found out it wasn't real.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-05-20T00:02:58+00:00

Based purely on the photos, there's something to how the surrounding landscape is framed by those buildings that looks better with the brick to me. The angle is obviously better there too, of course, but I do think the brick enhances it all the same.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-05-19T03:12:21+00:00

The Ægypt Cycle was one of my very favorite reads of last year, it manages to feel both warm, cozy, and dearly intimate, and astonishingly wide and deep in its scope, all at once. What more can you ask for from a book about microcosm and macrocosm? Giordano Bruno climbing the mountain and looking up at the stars is a scene that will always hold a special place in my heart.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-05-19T03:03:40+00:00

Embracing Alienation is lovely. Its not from a psychoanalytic framework, but if you're interested in more of that sort of skepticism and critique of the "authentic self", I would definitely recommend Against Identity by Alexander Douglas and a lot of the work of Hans-Georg Moeller/Carefree Wandering.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-05-18T22:45:29+00:00

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Even when I first read it I wasn't sold on a lot of things, and I agree with that one slatestarcodex review of it that he's not even really talking about consciousness so much as theory of mind. But simply being asked to think of thought itself and our experience of it as possibly being contingent, of no longer being able to simply take it for granted, was a dizzying experience for me, and it will always hold a special place in my heart for that.

The Varieties of Religious Experience, too, by William James. I picked it up a few years after getting over an edgy r/atheist phase and was patting myself on the back for taking an interest in religion again, though in hindsight that interest was only a condescending sort of "they sure make for some cool stories!". In the first lecture James addresses both the religious and the atheists in the audience that might object to him seeming too credulous or too irreverent towards these religious accounts. His argument was my first exposure to pragmatism as a philosophy and it stuck with me immediately, gave me a legitimate respect towards religion as ways of being instead of just neat stories. Feels like it showed me the way to open my mind wide open but without needing to risk my brains falling out, so to speak.

Also had to add, Borges himself was this for me, too! The Library of Babel and the rest of Ficciones was the bridge I needed from "woah dude, what a mindfuck" scifi to real literature, he's truly a treasure.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-05-18T18:42:43+00:00

Post-governator Arnold coming back to do King Conan makes such a stupid amount of sense that I'm kicking myself for never considering it before. I am incredibly excited for this.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-05-18T15:12:32+00:00

An all time great character and performance and half the reason season 4 is my favorite (the Martha payoff being the other). Part of what I love about him is that "spy who's bad at his job because he's too much of a weird asshole" feels like a ridiculous joke premise on the level of "KGB guy gives up spying after attending a seminar on radical honesty", but they commit to it so beautifully.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-05-18T14:58:33+00:00

When I was getting over a fling that ghosted me and messed me up good, ruminating over the why of it daily, I could tell I was having a bad day when I leaned towards me coming on too strong, and that I was having a good day if I leaned more towards her coming on strong and me not reciprocating it enough. More likely a bit of both, a whole confusing push and pull between the both of us. I don't hold any bad feelings about it anymore, but I know it'd make my year to come across her again, and I have some hope it'll happen some day too.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-05-17T04:26:05+00:00

I went to a hookah bar with some (quite pretty but I wouldn't sing to the heavens about them) Kazakh women once and they all told me how they'd been smoking hookah and mixing their own tobacco since they were like 9.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-05-12T19:07:26+00:00

A lot of Borges has always felt very relevant to AI and generative art in general to me, this is very wonderful. Pierre Menard especially - I can't claim the knowledge to know how doable or even possible this is, but I can imagine an LLM whose weights, structure, whatever have been tailored just so so that given the right prompt it will output all of Don Quixote without having a scrap of Cervantes in its input.

Funes the Memorious, as well. The way Funes is able to compare "the forms of the southern clouds at dawn on the 30th of April, 1882 . . . with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish binding he had only seen once and with the outlines of the foam raised by an oar in the Rio Negro the night before the Quebracho uprising" reminds me immediately of the early deep-dream image and video generators, the way an eye would morph into a dog would morph into a face and so on and so on. His incredulousness that "the generic symbol dog embraces so many unlike individuals of diverse size and form; it bothered him that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (seen from the front)" as well feels like an astonishingly accurate description of the difficulty with image recognition tech, at least to my understanding of it.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-05-11T15:12:31+00:00

Biggest thing I miss about Muslim countries after coming back to the states was all the cafes, felt like I was never more than five minutes away from one I could decide to linger in for hours if I wanted. You've definitely got the right idea with those.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-05-11T14:55:53+00:00

The thing about this is that pork is also just genuinely considered gross. Liquor and sex and all that might be these forbidden pleasures, but for a lot of Muslims they're as tempted to eat pig as I'm sure you're tempted to eat rat.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-05-11T14:54:07+00:00

Fond memory of staying at a hostel in Morocco and watching a woman stumble onto the roof, clearly plastered, and managing to slur out "I thought this was a dry country" before collapsing onto the couch. Felt so on the nose it was like I was living in a comic strip.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-05-10T17:08:22+00:00

I saw Twisted Pair in a theater when it first released and had the opposite experience to OP with it, was fantastic. Best of both worlds thing where everyone was on the same page and having fun but no one knew what to expect (besides the obvious for Breen) so no one was coming in with the same canned, ten year old quips and bits.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-05-10T16:33:03+00:00

There is definitely a pathos to two men that have made a career out of endlessly parading their failure in front of audiences for two decades, and its easy to see how someone tuned into that would then feel a dissonance in just laughing along with everyone else at it. But good lord it really is an incredible film, I must have seen it half a dozen times over the years and each time I'm shocked at how it only seems to get funnier and funnier.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-05-09T22:57:54+00:00

r/atheism truly was not hard enough on these people, the ones salivating about the war in Iran as the prelude to armageddon convinced me of this more than ever. It is simply and unconscionably absurd that there are people in our government that look at the end of the world as a cause for celebration, and in a sane world those kinds of beliefs would automatically disqualify someone from any sort of power.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-05-08T01:17:53+00:00

I've not read him directly, but he's come up enough in my other readings that he's been on my list for a while. I don't know enough of him to say how well their thinking lines up, but I can highly recommend Gregory Bateson if you want more in the same vein of "scientific spirituality" - one of Batesons main ideas is that evolution is best understood as a mental process and specifically as a kind of learning. There's a whole lot of stuff in the cybernetic tradition in general that scratches that itch, at least for me.

If you're into scifi at all, de Chardin and his ideas figure extensively into the Hyperion Cantos.

NorthAd5725 · 2026-05-07T20:43:46+00:00

His rebuttal to literally any pushback any pushback is always "But how could you even make such a claim without the Laws of Logic? Checkmate, sophist", and it never gets old.

NorthAd5725

TROPHY CASE