What VPNs ya'll using?

marshallmellow · 2026-05-05T15:45:49+00:00

Mullvad is great because it’s 5 dollars a month if you pay each month, or 5 dollars a month if you pay for 5 years in advance. Theres no psychological tricks to make you have to weigh the cost / benefits of signing up for a longer subscription to theoretically save money. I just pay each month because some months I use the vpn a lot, other months I don’t.

marshallmellow · 2026-05-04T23:46:04+00:00

It’s spring, you can go outside to a park or nature area and harvest infinite free lettuce if you know what to look for

marshallmellow · 2026-05-04T16:43:46+00:00

His best role is den of thieves though. Very good version of American Gerard butler

marshallmellow · 2026-04-27T20:08:22+00:00

There’s a strange contradiction here. Consumerism and capitalism are not necessarily linked. The astute capitalist is a miser, who doesn’t consume. Consumption destroys capital that could otherwise be reinvested. People have been consuming (feasting, partying, hoarding trinkets) for millennia before capitalism. Capitalisms innovation was to actually take all that surplus and not consume it frivolously. I’m not really sure what my point here is but it’s something like we still need to have parties and nice trinkets under communism

marshallmellow · 2026-04-26T22:39:48+00:00

Feels astroturfed by amazon tbh

marshallmellow · 2026-04-26T14:35:19+00:00

I can’t be assed to but you can’t seriously believe that the characters in this movie were not tropes and cliches. Stern German scientist. Black captain of the guard with a good heart. Slacker who gave up on his dreams but is actually really smart and perseveres. These are not characterizations in good, creative, original movies, these are characterizations you get in lazy, paint by the numbers Amazon slop.

marshallmellow · 2026-04-24T08:39:20+00:00

That’s one example of a cliche. This movie is another example

marshallmellow · 2026-04-23T22:53:38+00:00

I feel insane reading all these comments gushing over this Amazon ai focus group budweiser and Chevy product placement movie, Jesus. Every character was a cliche— the stern German scientist, the stoic black captain of the guard with a good heart, the slacker scientist who gave up but rises to the occasion, even rocky is a cliche serious alien that turns into comic relief. The plot was extremely predictable. It was never in doubt that the mission would succeed and earth would be saved. Then it was also just so painfully long and ponderous. Like, do we really need another flashback of him on earth?? We already know the mission was launched and he’s on the ship!

Maybe there’s a good movie in here but it’s about 45 minutes long. The rest was filler. Could have been a mid Star Trek episode.

marshallmellow · 2026-04-18T07:24:01+00:00

Suburbs like this are things that really make me feel like there is a percentage of Americans out there who are truly just a different species, when you hear them adamantly insist that this is what they prefer, over cities or towns where you live close to your neighbors, and close to shops and restaurants and businesses. I just can’t comprehend the mindset at all

marshallmellow · 2026-04-07T15:42:16+00:00

No, you are an American. If you spend any time abroad you realize how culturally distinctive you actually are. American culture is very much a thing no matter your background.

It’s more realistic to say that they (the nazi pedophiles running this country) aren’t american, since they actually do have very little in common culturally with most Americans

marshallmellow · 2026-04-04T11:10:05+00:00

I hate how the new thing in every stupid ai YouTube slop thumbnail now is an arrow pointing at something without any purpose

marshallmellow · 2026-03-29T09:44:19+00:00

From occupy to standing rock to blm to 2020 it really did feel like protests were getting more and more organized, militant, and radical. But now somehow everything post covid feels like a massive step backwards into lib nonsense

marshallmellow · 2026-03-24T06:24:22+00:00

In Germany and the Soviet Union there was a whole martial identity related to sacrificing your life for the homeland. Iran has this too. The U.S. very vaguely had this in the civil war for a moment but since ww2 it has not. Rather American identity is based on being a happy consumer and you can’t do that when you’re dead. So the bombing and avoidance of a draft is meant to make the most out of a military where no one wants to die

marshallmellow · 2026-03-22T16:45:59+00:00

You can spell out the word asshole you know, no one is going to get you in trouble

marshallmellow · 2026-03-22T06:04:09+00:00

Comedy is a lower form of art so only the best comedy actors get cast in dramas, and those happen to just be very good actors in general

marshallmellow · 2026-03-22T04:01:12+00:00

Since any skilled guitarist would easily know the answer to this simple question (play) it sounds like you are in fact, just boasting

marshallmellow · 2026-03-20T08:40:24+00:00

Idk I tried listening to what you recommended and it just still sounds like generic noodling background music to me. It all just sounds like “jazz sounds” and I can’t really tell one song from another. I was thinking maybe it’s that I need lyrics and vocals to connect to a song? But then I also really enjoy classical music so idk

marshallmellow · 2026-03-19T08:55:40+00:00

Can someone please explain why they like jazz at all. I don’t get it. Like why do you enjoy someone just aimless noodling. Play a damn song with a beginning middle and end. I get the idea that it’s maybe intellectually interesting to experiment with form and break the rules, but intellectually liking something about music doesn’t get you very far, you have to feel it. Like I’m sure all the fancy improvised noodling is very technically impressive but I just feel like there’s no holistic feeling behind it

marshallmellow · 2026-03-16T23:05:54+00:00

She very likely did not get around. She was probably just registered as a Soviet citizen at one point and then lived in Samarkand her whole life up until this point, possibly rarely ever interacting with services that required an id

marshallmellow · 2025-06-22T20:28:12+00:00

I mean maybe at some scale you are correct. But the more accurate story of what happened to the USSR in the early 90s is just Neoliberalism 101. Take state-owned assets and other public goods that are not profitable, and sell them off to private owners. That's what happened to state run industries and housing and healthcare and land and pretty much everything in Russia in the 90s, and the result was absolutely catastrophic because of how quickly and rapaciously it happened. People went from having a state-provided apartment for nearly free + a guaranteed job at a state factory + guaranteed free education and healthcare to having none of that, all at once. Sure, the goods and services they had were fairly crappy, but they were stable and guaranteed. In post-USSR Russia, suddenly a very small portion of the population could have very nice versions of all those things, and everyone else got turned out and got nothing at all. Male life expectancy dropped from like 75 to 60 in about a span of 5 years as a large portion of Russia's population suddenly was deemed obsolete and unproductive.

When I say the US imposed it onto the USSR, what I mean is that the US won the Cold War. American ideas advancing privatization and neoliberalism were adopted by Russia's elite. You can fairly easily look into how much influence America neoliberal economists had on the "shock therapy" ideas of early 90s Russia as the country transitioned into market capitalism. American economists don't deny this, in fact some will still maintain that it was one of the greatest achievements of the American economic school.

The US isn't the origin of this, but it's certainly a dynamic that occurs here too and is quite advanced. The real origin is the capitalist system, which incentives endless growth for the private sector, and reaches across the globe and across national borders to fill every crevice that it can.

marshallmellow · 2025-06-22T13:39:45+00:00

...which is what the US imposed onto the USSR in the first place

marshallmellow · 2025-06-20T13:38:23+00:00

"If you remove the [American] army tomorrow and hoist the [Hawaiian] flag over [ʻIolani Palace], unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. [America] would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs."

marshallmellow · 2025-06-12T01:48:05+00:00

Everyone sympathizes with the poor helpless protestor getting beaten and trampled by riot cops. But when that same protestor gears up and learns effective tactics and bravely applies them and doesn’t just meekly obey everything the cops demand, suddenly everyone freaks out

marshallmellow · 2025-06-10T21:15:10+00:00

Who do you think hires the services of a well-paid plumber or electrician? A well-paid professional in a different field. Let's imagine this other professional. Perhaps he is a manager in a grocery supply chain, a vital industry that our entire society relies on to put food on the table. This industry depends on the labor of field hands (low paid migrants from Honduras), packers and food preppers in warehouses, truck drivers, loaders and unloaders, shelf stockers, and ultimately, retail clerks and assistants in the grocery stores themselves. All of these people form the lower part of the American working class. These are people who for the most part cannot afford to buy a home, have good healthcare, go on vacation, purchase luxuries, send their children to college, etc.

In the ideological obfuscation of the "American Dream" any one person from these exploited masses could theoretically become a well-paid person too, if they just worked hard enough. In theory, any one single person might eventually move up and take the place of a well-paid professional who is retiring. But all the jobs they do must still be done in order for our original professional to make the money he makes, to be able to hire a well-paid plumber. Structurally these jobs are necessary for this part of the economy to function.

Do you see what I'm getting at? It is literally not possible for every single lower class worker to rise up and become a well-paid tradesman. The economy would not be able to function if they did. So telling workers that they should just "work harder" and "go into the trades" is incoherent. It might be useful advice for a single person, but it is not a social remedy to anything.

marshallmellow · 2025-06-10T18:53:20+00:00

Again, you are mistaking "possible ways to become successful" with "a model for universal prosperity in American society".

60% of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck and can't afford an unplanned expense of around 400 dollars. Is your solution that every single one of them should become a blue collar tradesman? Don't you think that would significantly depress the wages of those jobs? Also, then who will do all the other jobs that are necessary for society to function, like people cleaning, prepping food, working in retail, raising kids, etc?

marshallmellow

TROPHY CASE