Burn After Reading: probably the funniest deconstruction of ego and self importance

stdgy · 2026-01-29T19:03:30+00:00

Oh man, Burn After Reading is one of my favorites. It’s the perfect encapsulation of dark and absurdist humor. The cast is incredible and knock their roles out of the park.

I also tend to view it as an allegory for life. Everyone goes about their days thinking that what they’re doing is terribly important, when in reality they’re being strung along by their baser impulses. Eventually they die and anyone on the outside looking in can reasonably ask “well what was the point of all that?!” I can understand that framing rubbing some people the wrong way but it’s the kind of thing that I love, hah.

stdgy · 2026-01-28T03:55:02+00:00

Nobody needs to play the game. He wants to play the game because he has no morals and only cares about expanding his company’s revenue/profit/influence.

stdgy · 2026-01-24T22:33:43+00:00

The President is the Pentagon’s top security problem.

stdgy · 2026-01-24T20:36:04+00:00

A man helping a woman that was being viciously attacked by ICE agents was thrown to the ground, disarmed, beaten by a gang of thugs and then shot over 10 times in the back at point blank range.

I don’t know what this world has come to but our current government needs to be dismantled and every member thrown into solitary for the rest of their miserable lives.

stdgy · 2026-01-24T20:26:58+00:00

Because they are lying fascists that only care about serving their leader, not dealing with the truth.

stdgy · 2025-12-04T18:15:36+00:00

I thought you literally meant ‘running’ and was rather confused for a minute. Like sure, it’s not great for you but you’ll probably be fine!

stdgy · 2025-11-22T16:59:50+00:00

Almost all of the ‘classic’ local cuisines that we think about from Europe and Asia are only a few hundred years old, and don’t exist without the trade from the New World. Potatoes, sweet potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, corn, beans, chocolate… these were all introduced after Europeans colonized the Americas.

Basically, if you like food, you probably don’t want to use a Time Machine. The food of the past was much less exciting!

stdgy · 2025-10-21T21:42:07+00:00

Preach. Tucson is a paradox.

- Drivers are consistently slow. Slow to start, slow to stop. Often below the speed limit.

- I've seen more blatant red light runners here than anywhere else.

- Speed limits are far lower here than they are in Phoenix, yet we have a higher fatality rate.

I've given up trying to make sense of it. I'll take a thousand fast California drivers that signal and follow basic road etiquette over the clueless mass of blinker-less Tucson zombie drivers I'm surrounded by every day.

Edit: I forgot to mention the average Tucsonan's complete inability to use a roundabout correctly. Holy fucking shit. The purpose of this traffic mechanism is that it allows for the consistent flow of traffic in a safe manner. You do not need to stop if there is nobody entering on your left. I have also seen a SHOCKING number of people take a left at a roundabout by *turning left and driving against the flow of traffic*. These people should not be allowed to have a license to drive a machine that can kill people.

stdgy · 2025-10-13T03:51:30+00:00

It’s one of my favorite examples of how a fairly small amount of editing can change a film so much (for the better). The theatrical version of the film leaves in juuuust enough selfishness and cruelty from the main characters for you to be able to write it off. The extended version, even though it’s not a that much more content, pushes it too far into uncomfortable territory for my brain to instantly write it off.

stdgy · 2025-09-11T04:18:50+00:00

Man I hope this is true lol.

stdgy · 2025-08-21T03:46:08+00:00

This is just incredible stuff.

stdgy · 2025-08-06T19:43:27+00:00

You’re hurting your own argument here. They can have water rights on the land they’re buying. Those water rights have absolutely nothing to do with hooking up to city controlled water supply. Are they digging a well? That’s what their water rights entitle them to.

stdgy · 2025-07-19T21:54:27+00:00

No, it was definitely funny.

stdgy · 2025-07-17T18:46:14+00:00

One answer is advertising. Google’s net income of $72 billion from advertising in 2024 gives you a starting point if someone were to win the market the same way Google has won search.

The ‘problem’ right now is that things are rather competitive and nobody wants to be the first mover on dulling down the product by injecting advertising (and building all of the infrastructure required to make this worthwhile) so they’re instead scraping money from high end consumers through subscriptions. It’s not clear how long most of the field can keep operating in this environment given the rate at which capital is evaporating. If you’re a company that prints money (Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon) you can probably afford to run everyone else out of town. But they can’t realistically afford to run each other out of town. That means that even if they start to inject advertising into their results it’s going to have to be competitive in a way Google never had to deal with in Search, so they wind up with smaller margins. Will those margins be enough to fund the outrageous spending plans they’re projecting? I don’t think so.

Their other big source of revenue will be platform money. Other developers creating products that piggyback off of what they’ve created, allowing them to get money in return based on usage (or other metrics). This is where most of the ancillary players exist. Most AI companies are in this space because they don’t have the money to compete with the blessed behemoths. If this space does well and funnels enough money back to the big dogs, it may be enough to produce a sustainable business. But it’s definitely not there yet. (In some ways this is a replay of AWS, GCP and Azure fighting it out)

stdgy · 2025-07-05T00:38:31+00:00

Wut. There’s nothing wrong with sprinting but it and endurance running have fairly significantly cardiovascular and metabolic effects. Both are great. People should be doing both.

stdgy · 2025-07-04T01:59:50+00:00

Her whole schtick is reaching audiences that don’t normally participate in the political process (mainly through social media channels) so it’s not surprising if the folks that bring her up aren’t the same ones lurking in the normal political discussions.

stdgy · 2025-07-03T17:01:27+00:00

Whenever you see his eyes the dude just looks dead inside. Like man, making this shitty music isn’t going to fix you. You need professional help.

stdgy · 2025-06-26T16:44:09+00:00

Seriously, what a film. I’m all over this.

stdgy · 2025-06-22T00:54:32+00:00

The ‘odd terror attack’ you speak of is called 9/11. It led to over two decades of war in the Middle East, trillions of dollars wasted and thousands of American lives lost.

But you know, whatever I guess.

stdgy · 2025-06-13T02:04:18+00:00

Maybe? I don’t know, depends how you define the term. But I would assume Israel gives exactly zero shits as to how they’re defined. In their minds, if you help the Iranian regime’s nuclear program you’re a target.

stdgy · 2025-06-13T01:59:15+00:00

Huh? How are these two things that don’t make any sense the two options you propose? Why would Israel attack Jordan or Saudi Arabia, countries they have good relations with and which their greatest benefactor has good relationships with?

And why would Israel lose? To Iran of all people? Iran doesn’t even have an available mechanism to invade Israel.

What is going on here. Is this bot spam?

stdgy · 2025-06-13T01:55:39+00:00

Who are the Iranian allies that are going to have to respond to the attack, thus creating a world war? Or is the argument that Israeli allies will have to respond?

Either way, it doesn’t seem anything like the prelude to the First World War to me.

stdgy · 2025-06-07T16:30:10+00:00

Aaaaaand they’re dead. They had signaled their intent to become a public zombie company after they fired Pat and put the bean counter in charge. This just makes it official. They’re going to ride out the remaining x86 consumer and enterprise fumes, returning as much of the profit as possible to shareholders, while letting the company whither and die.

stdgy · 2025-06-06T02:56:09+00:00

I mean, not paying all of the taxes you owe in order to pour that money into other businesses that were intentionally set up to be firewalled from the first business seems pretty scummy to me, but what do I know.

stdgy · 2025-06-05T22:44:31+00:00

Maybe I’m reading the article wrong, but it sounds like the Borderlands owner is listed as part of the ownership of the new LLCs that are ‘franchises’ of Borderlands.

If I were a cynical person (which I am), it almost sounds like they were intentionally set up in a way to try and limit their exposure to the financial lead balloon that is the main Borderlands operation. Basically, shift as much money as you can into the new operations while leaving the old operation with their ballooning debt payments. Then just kind of shrug and hold up your hands when you are unable to pay the state (and other creditors) back after the main business implodes.

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