I was wondering why we suddenly had so many astroturfers, shills and bots creeping in and fucking up all the conversations. It used to just be dumb but earnest tankies, now we got all kinds up in this bitch.

The skin infections it creates spread outward and leave a ring-shaped scaly red welt that looks like a ring just under the surface of the skin, but it’s actually an inflammation boundary. I assume at one time people thought it was an actual worm under the skin because the welts tend to look very regular and more like a “round thing” than a skin infection.

(A very similar pattern of reaction boundaries was seen and sampled on rocks on Mars recently and appear exactly like the marks left by microbial life on Earth, and so far is one of our best bets for possible evidence of life beyond Earth ever having existed, and the mission to retrieve those samples was canceled as Trump slashed NASA’s budget, you know, so that money goes back into your pocket. Did you get it yet? How about now?)

the picture might have been circulated around 4-chan and other old humor sites, but the text wasn’t added until somethingawful featured it, and it was the mangled punctuation that turned it into a goldmine post.

I am experiencing reverse effluviums and an aversion to revision. What are my chances?

As much as she infuriates us, it’s still NOTHING compared to the millions of needless deaths that are occurring right now due to our ending programs like USaid.

There are people in developing nations who we could have kept fed for pennies a month, watching their toddlers die of infections and starvation because their regular aid visits were cut off, but it’s okay because they get to turn on their old television and see Pam Bondi screaming about the Dow Jones and Democrats saying we need a “less radical” opposition movement.

We are being pulled in a thousand directions at once so we don’t even notice how bad the situation really is. They just rolled back environmental standards for cars and companies hours ago, and that will accelerate climate changes and cause uncountable deaths in the future.

Seriously what is up with these articles?

This is our manufactured society now, as we read this bullshit, the right is reading their own versions that show Pam Bondi heroically fighting back against mean, mean Democrats, carefully edited and clipped to make her look like a Valhalla-worthy warrior.

We let too many people into positions of representation without giving a shit who they were or what they represented, and did nothing to interrupt them as they took donations from companies that want to manufacture our entire world so that they can decide what kind of shoppers they want us to be, and who we’re going to be mad at (each other, they want us to hate each other so we don’t hate the oligarchs and donor-class.)

If anyone wants to know why so much money is being poured into AI, it’s because that’s the tech that will let them micro-manufacture manipulation campaigns for every individual, on an individual level.

We are utterly and totally cooked unless people rise up and stop spending money on useless crap and start focusing on their communities and local leadership.

That’s a very good and honest answer and that can also be worked with, you have an outline for effective change right there:

1. Work on better mental health, starting with non-smoking activities, ideally getting out of the house and trying new things, preferably at first in spaces where you can’t even smoke if you wanted to. Consider talking to a therapist. Change your environment, don’t stop at your computer, clean your whole living space and change things around. Change your career (I know, I know, I gotta throw it out there.) If you are in a rut, change what you can and change how you feel about the things you can’t change. Find something of value you can start tackling in your life like raising a pet, a plant, a new routine like forcing walks.

2. Understand that the addiction is also diminishing your happiness. I like to use porn addiction as the best example of this part, because people often misinterpret why pleasurable addictions are harmful even if they had no health effects - which is, as you engage with activities that boost your pleasure responsonses, your brain will reinforce those pleasure paths and all the other pathways in your brain diminish and wither so that it’s harder to feel happiness from other things. Think of the things you do and think about like roads and highways, the more you pave them and use them, the easier it is for your thought-stream to get on an onramp to flavortown and indulge in the vice, whereas the offramps to other things that used to make you happy start to erode and fade.

So whichever you tackle first, understand that this takes time.

(I never was a smoker, but I did beat a level of alcoholism that took the lives of most of my family, it took a long time and many attempts.)

Actually sure, if we’re going to be earnest I do recommend some tactics for beating addictive behavior.

The most important thing you will ever learn about yourself and reality itself is the sheer amount of delusion your brain puts you in, no matter who you are or how smart you think you are.

We think of our brains as logical, calculating machines inside our heads where all our will and thoughts and ideas come from, but this is an illusion, you are not your brain, you’re not even your language center. Your brain’s primary and only job is to assemble your feelings into a narrative story. That story doesn’t have to make sense, it just has to connect things so your feeling makes sense.

What this means for addictive behavior is that you can find the point where your brain starts reasoning things out that it wants, and cut it off because you know it’s not you, it’s another entity inside your head trying to get a thing it wants. Drugs fire off unnatural pleasure associations which your brain will make up a lot of excuses to keep getting, so learning to identify the stories your brain tells you to engage in behavior you don’t want is key to reducing that behavior.

A huge part of this is preparing ahead of time for when you get worn out trying to argue with yourself and setting specific boundaries for your future-self. Get rid of the stuff you want to quit taking, make sure there’s none in the house. Lock your money and credit card in a timed safe after a certain part of the day, because you will have a harder time resisting the “reasoning attack” as it gets later and later in the day, and resist the urge to think about tomorrow or how miserable you’re going to feel as the night, week and year go on. This is why they say “one day at a time” because your brain will wear you the fuck down with debate and “ideas” and bargaining, and if you anticipate that lasting on and on, you will break easier.

All of this requires being very honest with yourself and examining the habit you want to quit, such as looking up the actual risks, the actual data about dangers and the actual amount of money you’re spending on it, and all that stuff your brain really doesn’t like incorporating into it’s mental story-telling.

Understanding your brain isn’t you and it will actually be your worst enemy and will childishly sabotage your whole life to get what it wants, and that it talks to you in your own internal voice so it’s hard to resist, these ideas will be your best mental strategy for quitting because at least you have your actual enemy identified.

They’re fantastic if you keep your blade maintained, it’s honing, not sharpening.

Whetstones by themselves will get your blade sharp real fast, but by themselves all you’re really doing is making a micro-serrated edge every time, and it dulls fast. Smoothing your edge after whetstone with a honing rod smooths the cutting edge and reforms the edge shape after regular use.

If you lose your edge you have to start over from the whetstone, so maintaining the edge with a honing rod will save you time and not take as much material off your blade.

Also, a lot of households have utterly worn-out honing rods in their knife blocks, as the household often will try to use it for actual sharpening and scrape off a lot of the honing texture, and eventually will get so smooth they do nothing.

Nah cynical dipshits on the internet who try to Jordan Peterson every conversation about art theft and AI regulation who are creating division. Have a good one, enjoy your AI titties and shit.

Nah, you ain’t that special, just going to block you and encourage others to do the same. Have fun dedicating your time and energy to such great causes, I’m sure you’ll get rewarded for it.

About as much as I made on my best weeks doing art professionally for close to 10 years, despite having won awards and secured collectors around the world.

I worked harder than I ever had in my life to keep that business running, and eventually closed shop because it’s too much work for too little pay or respect.

Ironic since I’m quite sure most of the sock-puppets and astroturfers baiting this post and whinging about “factory workers” are literal kids who have never actually worked a day in their life.

I did 10 years as a professional artist, it was the hardest I ever worked in my life, and in the end I gave it up because despite winning awards and having collectors around the world after becoming very good at it, it is very hard to manage and maintain an actual art business in a world that doesn’t take art very seriously, especially with rising costs of things like healthcare and general goods needed to produce work.

There’s a reason why when you go to a fine art museum half of the most famous works and most beautiful pieces that changed the culture of art and even our perception of the world, were made by people who died in abject poverty.

It’s wild we read stories like that and say “Wow that’s a shame, I wish we could have given that artist the accolades and support they needed to survive and know how important they were for the world.” But the moment someone says “Maybe we should support artists” suddenly it’s hand-wringing and whinging about “factory workers.”

This isn’t a question if Ireland’s policy makes you feel good or bad, it’s a question whether or not you think there should be art in the world at all and what you’re willing to accept or change or pay to have that world with actual art in it.

You also won’t engage with people who agree this is a good thing without a facade of sarcasm and cynical dismissal, your agenda/actual age is showing.

A lot of people who can’t be bothered to learn anything about viewing or creating art deeply resent people who can do art or people who do appreciate art. This whole post was to attack art and artists because OP and his alts are bitter trolls.

Reminder: Nazi germany also hated many forms of art that didn’t meet their definitions of what was socially beneficial, and despised anything that didn’t “glorify the empire.”

Where is your “AI democratizes art” spiel? Shouldn’t you be launching into it about now or did you decide it’s too much to push at the same time?

Yah actually, why the fuck not.

We have more than the capability with our distributed work and economic systems. I get fuck-all back from my tax money and hard work to support fucking BILLIONAIRES, I think I much rather my wasted income go towards helping my community and people struggling to make ends meet.

Cynical fucks all want a Star Trek utopia but don’t want to actually put in effort and sacrifice to get there.

There are a lot of serious laws in the US about owning, transporting and storing explosives (thank you Anarchist bomber movement last century) as well as requirements for permits and the like, so you would have to prove it was a “gift” and not intended to be used for anything, but even then you would not only face negligence charges/manslaughter if someone was killed, but also various kinds of “aggravated” charges related to public safety. I am not a lawyer but I have a feeling the prosecution would make a pretty heavy case to make an example.

China plans strategies centuries out, they’ve already won, we just haven’t felt the economic impacts yet.

America functions entirely on reactions, and sometimes reactions to reactions. With subway surfers running in the corner.