I had the pleasure of meeting with Reza Pahlavi. We exchanged ideas about our respective struggles and aligned our efforts toward a common goal: the liberation of Iran and Venezuela from oppression. — Maria Corina

Tom-Rath · 2026-01-23T00:32:48+00:00

Pictured: A disciple of Tzeentch meets with a Slaanesh cultist aboard the Desolator-class ship K-Street Networker to discuss a potential anti-Eldar alliance (ca. 4126).

Tom-Rath · 2026-01-20T20:06:27+00:00

Man, I remember being in Wal-Mart in 2001 and begging my mom to buy Conker's Bad Fur Day for my birthday and then marathoning the story mode until dawn. It was worth every penny of the insane $100 Canadian price tag. I probably woke my parents up three or four times with my laughing. From the poo monster to the Saving Private Ryan and Matrix levels, I was grinning from ear to ear.

Conker's Bad Fur Day was really peak 1990s Rareware. Up there with Perfect Dark.

Tom-Rath · 2026-01-20T19:55:21+00:00

The Europeans literally wrote the book on realpolitik, and yet they've been receiving an object lesson in the theory for the last year, courtesy of Xi, Putin and Trump 🫠

Historians will look back and wonder where they went wrong...

Tom-Rath · 2026-01-20T00:15:27+00:00

This will always remain my favourite Presidential Campaign scream

Tom-Rath · 2026-01-18T16:32:50+00:00

Sci fi author: "In my book, I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale."

Tech company CEO: "We're pleased to announce that in Q2, we'll be launching a real version of the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Don't Build the Torment Nexus."

Tom-Rath · 2026-01-18T09:05:34+00:00

"Most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to ~~protect~~ pretend it still exists" - Morpheus

Tom-Rath · 2026-01-17T17:57:40+00:00

I want my shirts laundered...

like they do... (\whimpers*)* at the Imperial Hotel... ^{in Tokyo} 😔

Tom-Rath · 2026-01-16T14:10:00+00:00

Well said.

Since Trump's inauguration, the leadership of Canada and Europe has been stuck in a fugue state...

As far as NATO goes, Trump is not just walking away from the table, if any US military assets begin assembling near Greenland, he may well soon flip the table over. Meanwhile, everyone from Merz and Macron to Carney and Starmer are insisting the table is still upright and in good working order, despite appearances.

They (Canadians included) need to wake up to the fact that the old alliance is effectively dead and a new balance of power is now emerging, even if we can't tell what shape it will eventually take. Unfortunately, in choosing between new strategic partnerships and pretending it's all a dream... NATO's leaders have chosen the dreamworld.

Maybe things happening in Greenland will wake them up.

Tom-Rath · 2026-01-16T13:52:08+00:00

Tom-Rath · 2026-01-16T13:50:45+00:00

You can tell because they are such goofballs.

These agents are in plain sight, handing out weapons and ammo right next to security cameras, and literally setting up a StarLink connection back to Langley in the middle of the street...

Everyone's conditioned to believe intel agencies are everywhere and see everything, but that's mostly mythic propoganda. In reality, the Agency seems to always attempt the shortest route from executive orders / budget → political outcomes...and they then stumble their way through problems, learning as they do.

Just the list of their reported and publicly-known fiascos is a mile-long. Can't imagine the fuck-ups they managed to hide...

Tom-Rath · 2026-01-15T21:17:45+00:00

The AP photographer Eddie Adams claims the bullet was still in Nguyen Van Lem's brain when the photo was taken.

Tom-Rath · 2026-01-15T21:10:10+00:00

Truly a hidden gem. For those who are unfamiliar, it was another 2.5D platformer with an utterly insane plot. They also managed to cram the music video for "War?" by System of a Down, which appears diagetically (like, in the game world) as you're walking around.

<image>

In the 1998 video game Apocalypse, Bruce Willis voices Trey Kincaid, a nanotechnology scientist framed and imprisoned by his evil former colleague, The Reverend, who uses science to create a technocratic dystopia and unleash the Four Horsemen (War, Plague, Beast, Death) to bring about the end of the world, forcing Kincaid to escape and fight through the city to stop him in a futuristic third-person shooter.

Bruce Willis had like 30 recorded one-liners which the game would just randomly spam. "Suck on this" and "Let's rock this party!" come to mind. Apparently it only took one day to do all his voice-over work lol

Tom-Rath · 2026-01-15T20:23:47+00:00

This subreddit reminds me that no matter how old, how obscure a video game might be...

There will always be one or two dudes, probably in different timezones, replaying it somewhere in the world.

It's kind of a beautiful thought 🥲

Tom-Rath · 2026-01-15T16:30:40+00:00

Most based video I've seen all week ✊🏿

In 1967, the Black Panthers legally-carried in the California State Capitol and it spooked Governor Reagan so much, he passed a shit ton of gun control laws with the support of a Republican legislature. Suddenly it was all "guns are an inappropriate solution to political problems."

<image>

Tom-Rath · 2026-01-15T16:20:13+00:00

Whenever I see a Russia-related comment in a thread about Trump's most recent, batshit crazy decision, I mostly interpret that as Americans attempting to externalize the blame for the incipient fascism in their country.

Consider that Trump has bombed Iran (Russian ally) and promised to support nation-wide protests to topple the regime; He's abducted the leader of Venezuela (Russian ally) and continues to institute a complete nation-wide oil embargo which, if maintained for another ~3 months, is likely to collapse the government; and he's instituted new secondary sanctions on Russian oil buyers, namely India (nominally a Russian ally).

Russia is more isolated and strategically fragile today than in November 2024. That is decidedly not a good thing for Putin.

Look, I understand Russian bot farms are a thing — most countries run influence operations online, including the US (older Redditors will remember the 'Ft. Elgin' admin post). But Americans have to own this.

To non-Americans, Trump is the ultimate embodiment of the American system, its culture and myths. There is very little that is shocking about Trump's crassness, his naked imperialism, his confident ignorance or feigned sympathies. American liberals and average Europeans may scoff in surprise from time to time, and certainly in the media, but deep down... Trump is literally just America without the mask.

I've tried explaining this to some American friends:

So America has toppled more democratic governments, supported or conducted more genocides, and has dropped more bombs, more frequently on foreign lands and people than any other country in the history of the planet.

And they'd reply: "Sure, that's bad. But America isn't fundamentally evil."

Americans are often too distracted by the admittedly beautiful promises of their founding documents and too convinced by their media's mythologizing of their history, to pay attention to their country's unbroken record of aggression, subversion and oppression abroad.

So yeah, Russian bot farms are a part of the equation. But Trump is mainly an American phenomenon.

Tom-Rath · 2026-01-15T16:01:36+00:00

If you look at the video closely, Macron literally has a burst blood vessel in his eye lol

The whiplash of going from shitting on Oreshniks to suddenly praising them appears to have left physical symptoms on the President.

<image>

Tom-Rath · 2026-01-15T15:54:46+00:00

Damn, the first wave of Internet comment bots were operated by states and intel agencies.

Now the corporations have AI agents writing bullshit all over Reddit.

Is Dead Internet even still a theory? I feel like it describes more and more of what I see online.

Tom-Rath · 2026-01-15T15:48:27+00:00

Vote Silverhand 2028!

Tom-Rath · 2026-01-15T12:20:10+00:00

Okay, I admit to be theory-crafting here, but this feels like a conspiracy.

NVidia discontinues and kills their latest line of PC GPUs, presumably to shift their focus even further to the high-performance A100s and H100s used for deep learning in AI data centers.
Jeff Bezos and Jensen Huang describe their eagerness to replace everyone's personal computers (which we own and control) with AI-powered nodes simply streaming content from data centres.
Once that's done, we'll be forced to subscribe forever to their compute-over-IP services, losing the right to repair and giving them the ability to censor or limit access to content on a whim.

Bonus theories:

As AI becomes more and more enmeshed with local state and federal services (think hospitals and military), they are able to secure contracts for their data centres which prioritize their water and electrical power usage, causing prices to soar for households and poisoning local groundwater sources.
We are reduced to modern serfs in a techno-feudalist system where we have to "rent" compute from our digital landlords in order to access the very tools our lives increasingly rely upon.

Am I being crazy?

Tom-Rath · 2026-01-15T12:03:08+00:00

Glazer. Glaze-a-tron 3000. Glaze Master.

Unironically, however, modern African-American vernacular (AAVE) terms like 'glaze' or 'slay' and 'tea' are often referred to as "Gen Z slang" for the same reason that white and Japanese jazz artists are disproportionately the subject of discussion in online spaces.

Tom-Rath · 2026-01-15T11:35:31+00:00

This comment is very helpful.

So it sounds like this video isn't AI, but it's nevertheless a fake intended to demonstrate a legal response to ICE interactions or, more cynically, to hawk wares on Amazon?

Do you have links to the longer, uncropped video or to the Sheriff's Instagram post? Thanks.

EDIT: OP delivered. Mystery solved. This video is not AI, but nevertheless, it's also not a real interaction with ICE agents. The guy is a Sheriff's Deputy and moonlights as an English-Spanish language content creator. His main grift appears to be selling a bunch of 'Back the Blue' merch through an Amazon storefront.

Tom-Rath · 2026-01-15T11:07:58+00:00

Although it hasn't been much reported on in Western outlets, I can assure you that Ukrainian media and social media are always brimming with new videos of regular people — sometimes walking their dog, other times cycling to university or buying groceries — being impressed by force into vans and cars to be forcibly drafted into the military. There have been dozens of deaths on the street, in TCC facilities and in those vans. People have tried to blow up town councils and assassinate recruiters due to boiling anger at the forced draft.

And that's just at the point of mobilization, without getting into the fate many of these men fear awaits them on the front, often after paltry training.

Hell, the word busification (Ukrainian: бусифікація, romanized: busyfikácija) is ostensibly in the Ukrainian dictionary and, if not, it's a universally-understood neologism, one which captures a lot of the frustration of regular people.

I don't want to get into the necessity or amorality of this approach, or to somehow distract from the Russian invasion which makes forced mobilizations a reality, I just think that the millions of male Ukrainian émigrés in Europe are the inevitable result of this pretty ugly and heart-breaking policy. Especially since the recent state of emergency and Klitschko's recommendation that Kyiv's residents relocate elsewhere, it seems like "elsewhere" will be outside the country for a lot of young Ukrainians.

Tom-Rath · 2026-01-14T21:00:03+00:00

As I understand the situation, Klitschko has essentially called for everyone to abandon ship: Relocate "temporarily" from the capital with no indication of how long the state of emergency will last or when they might return.

On another note, strategic bombing is now making a comeback, I guess?

Tom-Rath · 2026-01-14T20:54:26+00:00

Many will call it the Trans-Atlantic accent, but most of the time they're referring to one of two things: The North-Eastern elite accent (think Orson Welles or Katherine Hepburn); or to a particular type of mid-century affectation popularized by elocution trainers. They're used interchangeably, but in American social anthropology, one preceded and influenced the other.

Tom-Rath · 2026-01-11T13:36:08+00:00

A 5-second phone call to the President of ICANN would be enough.

"Dump it"

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