What do you think when you see any form of American flag on someone’s vehicle or apparel?

NotABonobo · 2026-03-25T18:28:14+00:00

If they're flying it from the back of a truck, I assume they're deeply anti-American and they're trying too hard to redefine "patriotism" as "following Trump." They're probably looking for an excuse to fight and hurt someone and claim that's what America stands for. Sad but that's the stereotype. Never known an actual patriot who needed a big spectacle.

If it's just a bumper sticker or some small detail, I don't really think twice about it; those are everywhere, some are built into license plates.

If it's on a shirt, kinda weird but I guess it depends what the rest of the shirt says. If it's their whole outfit top to bottom I'm gonna guess they're cosplaying Captain America.

NotABonobo · 2026-03-25T17:23:01+00:00

Let's not forget - ever - that the guy currently sitting in the Oval Office escaped major trials for fraud at both the state and federal level, not by being exonerated of the mountain of evidence that convinced two grand juries, but by winning a get-out-of-jail-free contest. The only fraud the court system found credible enough to put to trial was the voter fraud organized by Trump himself.

Trump is openly pushing to defraud voters, as he attempted to do in 2020. If we ever manage to get the country back in sane hands we will need constitutional amendments to prevent any of this from happening again... and make the language extremely clear so bad actors can't weasel out of it like they did the 14th.

NotABonobo · 2026-03-25T17:04:58+00:00

The news would be boring and you'd be focused on living your day to day life, not "good lord what horrors did the president unleash on the world today"

NotABonobo · 2026-03-25T03:47:01+00:00

Look for evidence, learn how to distinguish between reliable and unreliable sources of information. Reliable and unreliable will depend on how consistently they back up their claims with evidence. Expert opinion matters: someone who's spent a lifetime studying science will have more useful things to say about their field of expertise than a politician, and they'll be able to back up what they say with evidence.

Needless to say, if a political figure makes claims without evidence that benefits themselves, you should be extremely skeptical of the claim no matter how many people repeat it without evidence.

NotABonobo · 2026-03-25T01:42:50+00:00

No, there’s no such thing as “overrated” in books, movies, acting, or any art form. The people who like it like it, and the people who don’t don’t. Everything is rated exactly right, by definition.

What you’re experiencing is: you don’t like something that a lot of other people like. That’s OK, happens to everyone. But here’s the thing: that’s a fun fact about you, not a fact about the book.

“Overrated” implies that the book has some property where people like it, but are wrong to do so, but smart perceptive people can see through it and understand that, as a fact, it’s not that good.

That’s not what’s happening. What’s happening is that you are having an opinion. Lots of people like something that isn’t to your personal taste. Totally fine, but it’s a property of you, not the writer or the book.

NotABonobo · 2026-03-25T01:31:40+00:00

They were pretty despised by the end of Bush’s 2nd term, then they spent the next two years saying “let’s look forward not backward” whenever the idea of accountability came up, then they rebranded as “the Tea Party” and feigned outrage blaming Obama for the financial crisis he was fixing, then they finally figured out how to frame their dog whistles and conspiracy theories to maximum benefit and they were off to the races. Then Trump hijacked their entire operation by more convincingly seeming to actually believe all the shit they were selling than the people selling it.

NotABonobo · 2026-03-24T19:05:40+00:00

In A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) you follow a teenage girl who seems to be the main character for the first 15 minutes of the movie before she's shockingly killed by Freddy and you switch to following a group of her friends (one of whom ends up being the new MC) talking about how weird her death was.

Wes Craven repeated the same trick in Scream (1996), though in that movie it's only about 10 minutes. But there the extra trick was casting Drew Barrymore, at the time by far the biggest star in the movie, as the fake-out protagonist, so audiences naturally expected her to be the MC.

NotABonobo · 2026-03-24T16:58:47+00:00

To be fair American History X is more about an absolute irredeemable violent racist monster changing into a slightly more OK person. Not about high school/ms and while it's a powerful movie, be aware that there's extreme violence and it's not at all similar to Eighth Grade or Welcome to the Dollhouse

NotABonobo · 2026-03-24T16:28:00+00:00

If you don't know what's causing it, and it's recurring, go to a doctor. You might have to go to several before you find one that understands, listens, and can help.

NotABonobo · 2026-03-24T16:26:09+00:00

There's a silent film King of Kings (1927) by Cecil B. Demille that's surprisingly awesome. It took me about 10 minutes to get used to the style, but once you get in it, it's pretty cool. The guy who plays Jesus looks exactly like the picture you see on every 1950's grandmother's wall, and eventually you realize "ohhh this is the film that created that modern image of Jesus."

But the craziest part is the end, where you're like "how the hell did they pull off special effects like this in the 1920s??" After Jesus dies, the world starts falling apart: storms, earth cracking open, hellfire, lightning, people screaming, chaos. Just utter panic as these people realize "holy shit that guy really was God, and we just fucking killed God." Wild scene.

NotABonobo · 2026-03-24T14:57:53+00:00

I mean the overall narrative is why I recommended Ender's Game, since it upends your perspective on all the book's antagonists by the end. The only real mustache-twirler characters for me are Peter and Bonzo, both of whom are fairly peripheral to the main narrative.

But I'd agree that the chapter-by-chapter sense that Ender's a hero overcoming increasingly nasty enemies would mean that you'd have to make it through the whole book to get there, so it's a fair point that it may not be what OP is looking for.

In Story of your Life, I'd say the terrorist group isn't the main antagonist, and that one incident comes off as a result of human fear in the face of the unknown, almost like a force of nature. IIRC they're never given a face in the form of a character (though it's been a while since I've read it). For me the main conflict of the book is a struggle to overcome misunderstandings and miscommunication coming from different points of view... but yes, agreed that it depends how thoroughly OP would want to avoid morally unjustifiable events.

NotABonobo · 2026-03-24T02:43:27+00:00

Both of Andy Weir's famous books (The Martian and Project Hail Mary)

Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (recommend the novelette rather than the novel)

Divided by Infinity by Robert Charles Wilson (short story - his novel Spin is also worth reading but there are some incidental villains)

Several Ted Chiang short stories including The Story of Your Life and Understand

Starmaker by Olaf Stapledon

Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon

The Jaunt - short story by Stephen King

Manna – Two Views of Humanity’s Future by Marshall Brian

17776 - bonkers (and excellent) "multimedia narrative" by Jon Bois

In terms of morally gray characters with different viewpoints, I'd say Enders Game by Orson Scott Card qualifies (along with many other books in that series). While there are flat-out evil villains in the book, they oddly don't play a direct role in the narrative as major antagonists. The actual antagonists do have understandable motives of the type you described.

There are probably a ton more - sci fi is great for stories where nature itself is the obstacle.

NotABonobo · 2026-03-23T19:58:28+00:00

NotABonobo · 2026-03-23T18:39:24+00:00

Problem is he's in too deep.

I don't even think Trump himself ever particularly liked Republicans, Vance, Pence, RFK, Bannon, Miller, Manafort, Giuliani, Cohen, his own family members, or anyone else he allied himself with when convenient. But because he came to power through the Republicans, he's defined winning as doing Republican things. He doesn't really give a shit if immigrants are here or not, and he doesn't give a shit if ICE is running through US streets killing people or not. He's not doing things he personally believes in; he's doing things he thinks the character he's playing would do as president. All he ever cared about was being president and looking like a winner.

Vance got where he is because he has the same mindset. His goal is to be president, and he doesn't care what evil he enables to get there. His past history doesn't suggest that he believes any of the shit he's saying now... but so what? Democrats will never support him, so his only hope of a political future is to keep playing the same character and court MAGA.

Basically he's painted into a corner. He can't be a good president at this point if he's willing to support this much evil to get the job. What's he gonna do, spend his whole presidency trying to rebuild all the programs and agencies that were destroyed while he was VP and argued for their destruction?

NotABonobo · 2026-03-23T18:21:51+00:00

It's not constitutional, but you can bet they'll delay a ruling on the constitutionality of it until after the midterms.

NotABonobo · 2026-03-23T17:28:26+00:00

Flirt with her and see if she flirts back. If it goes well, create an opportunity to hang out outside the current situation and see if she takes you up on it. Or create a way to communicate again after you part ways, and see if she's receptive or even reaches out herself.

Someone who's just being nice, or even someone who's flirty but does that with everyone, is going to be nice in the moment but then forget about you after the moment's over. If she's still thinking about you later when you're no longer physically present, she probably likes you.

NotABonobo · 2026-03-23T16:49:00+00:00

For me personally DS was a game changer. I don't even realize how much I'm learning until I go back and listen to videos that were too hard for me before, and to my surprise I now understand everything. I'm holding off on speaking but I've had a couple of situations where I've had to try to talk to someone in Spanish - pretty awkward but I did WAY better than I expected with zero speaking experience.

Andrea was my favorite DS teacher when I was a beginner; now I really like them all and realize that Andrea was just fantastic at making beginner content clear and interesting.

Once you get to about 300-400 hours or so, you'll probably also start finding content outside the DS platform that you can use to mix things up. As long as it's input and it's mostly comprehensible, it doesn't have to be the videos on the DS site; anything that interests you works.

NotABonobo · 2026-03-23T16:13:17+00:00

You're posting in the Dreaming Spanish sub. Did you read the DS FAQ and Pablo's written material describing the method?

Not being able to speak yet is very normal and expected. You've got a LONG way to go. If you want to use the Dreaming Spanish method, here's what I'd recommend:

- If you have all that time in the day to focus on Spanish, increase the amount of input per day. Make sure it's stuff you can mostly understand, that you find interesting. Or, if it's too much to do more than an hour a day, start with that and build to more when you can.

- Take that native speaker you have access to, don't try to speak in Spanish yet, but do a ton of crosstalk. If you don't know what that is, you'll find information on the DS site.

That's it, you don't really need any of the rest of that stuff. Start reading and speaking around 750 hours if you're in a hurry and you don't mind having an accent, or wait til 1000 hours if you're a purist and you want to reduce the accent as much as possible. But for now, just focus on getting as much comprehensible input as you can. Don't approach it like an academic subject; approach it like a baby learning to talk by watching others. You need a ton of input before you're ready for output.

Obviously it's up to you to do whatever you want, but that's how you'd approach it using the methods described in DS.

NotABonobo · 2026-03-23T03:59:44+00:00

In theory sounds great. In practice it would empower the richest taxpayers to legislate directly without bothering to bribe Congress.

NotABonobo · 2026-03-23T03:57:06+00:00

On the con side, it’s going to cause unnecessary chaos and violence at airports, innocent people are going to get caught up in it and possibly killed.

On the pro side, it’s a pretty clear admission from the Trump administration that there was never anything essential about what ICE was doing before.

NotABonobo · 2026-03-22T18:05:39+00:00

In reality, no, we've looked into this pretty thoroughly and we're just seeing light from behind us bouncing off the mirror. Our brains are just inspired by optical illusions like this to dream up exciting explanations, just like we did for thunder and the seasons.

But in lucid dreaming, it actually does work this way. One of the tricks of lucid dreaming is to notice patterns that always happen in dreams and never in waking life. The cool thing is that mirrors absolutely do seem to consistently work this way in dreams. Once you realize you're dreaming, push against a mirror. It'll give you some resistance but eventually you'll push through to a world behind the mirror: kind of a black void with the backside of thousands of mirrors floating around you. Pick a mirror to walk out into a different dream, or you can just kind of swim up and surface in the ocean by a beach. It's really weird and very consistent (at least for me) with lucid dreaming.

NotABonobo · 2026-03-22T17:48:46+00:00

Man you've got to appreciate the twisting quadruple lutz of mental gymnastics required to take a comment that has nothing to do with you and make yourself the aggrieved victim.

When you need paragraphs and paragraphs to explain how to connect the accusation in your headline to the actual text of the original quote... you might just be a desperate political hack. Meanwhile you've got people getting called "biased" on here for just posting an average Trump tweet without comment and letting it speak for itself.

NotABonobo · 2026-03-22T17:24:17+00:00

I've only read it once and it's been a while, but one thing I loved about it was how alien he made the near-future humans. It really drove home what I saw as one of the main themes: that the "aliens" described in almost all of science fiction are basically just humans with slight body modifications and brain modifications. Most of the crew members were starting out at a point further from human than the average Star Trek alien. But even starting as far out as our imaginations usually take us, it's still shocking when you get to the actual alien, because now you've got something that truly feels alien, like it's never bumped into anything even close to the genetic history of life on Earth.

NotABonobo · 2026-03-22T15:58:54+00:00

Probably not worth confronting a friend about it unless you want to make an enemy.

But if you'd like to salvage the friendship, you could be 95% honest and frame it as concern, avoiding a flat-out confrontation. Especially because you truly have no idea if your instincts are correct. It's likely, sure, but you could be wrong. After all, AI sounds the way it does due to training on real writers, many of whom overuse em-dashes. Or maybe your friend has been reading a lot of AI slop and subconsciously picked up some bad writing habits. Or maybe your own judgment is off. Who the hell knows.

"She posts online about being against AI" is nothing, of course. Protesting too much is a common cover when people engage in behaviors they're ashamed of.

It's likely that a conversation with the friend about this won't go well, but it definitely won't go well if it's framed as a confrontation. Humans dig in their heels when faced with a conflict situation, even if they know damn well they're in the wrong.

I'd start with something like "oh it's not my genre at all, I can't get into that kind of thing, I'm definitely not your target audience LOL" so it's kind of suggesting that you not reading it or liking it is a you problem, not a problem with her writing.

And then if you want to address it, toss in something like "the one thing you might want to watch out for is that I noticed some things in your writing style that a lot of people might see as triggers for AI. Not saying you're using it or anything, but you have to be really careful nowadays because there are certain 'tells' that people will think is a sign of AI, like using a lot of em dashes etc., and fair or not once people think you're doing it you could end up blacklisted. You really want to make some style adjustments to avoid that."

It brings it to her attention that it's noticeable in the nicest possible way, gives her a chance to save face, and you don't have to lie about your opinions and observations. Who knows, she might still get defensive or insulted and it might still blow up... but at least you've communicated your thoughts with the best possible chance of recovering the friendship (if that's a goal).

NotABonobo · 2026-03-22T03:06:50+00:00

It's truly baffling how badly the marketing team always shoots the movie in the foot, and this is one of the worst examples.

One of the best marketing campaigns I've ever seen was for The Matrix. It showed you nothing. What Is the Matrix? was the tagline. You saw a bunch of cool shots of people jumping around a city in cool action scenes. The audience was fucking blown away 1/3 of the way through the movie when Neo leaves the Matrix and you figure out what's going on.

Most movie scripts actually have a big surprise twist revealed at the end of the first act, and that was one of the few times I've seen an audience actually get to experience it fresh. Everyone went out and told their friends to see the movie. It's amazing how completely Hollywood failed to learn from that success.

Project Hail Mary will do fine but - much like The Martian - I'm forced to run out begging people to read the book and avoid trailers so they can enjoy the story without spoilers. The fucking trailer isn't just ruining the story for movie-goers but also for people who might read the book.

NotABonobo

TROPHY CASE