• 2 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Even then, cars are simply unattainable. Houses and apartments more so. A computer is the most expensive thing many 30-somethings own, they can’t afford to not live with their parents when there is literally a housing shortage in Canada, and the United States doesn’t offer health care insurance if you get an inconvenient tumor or have terrible genetics.

    We are 30 year olds with a college degree but no job experience competing with 20 year olds who have a college degree and can work an extra 10 years before they get paid pension.


  • The next time I go somewhere where there are anti-homeless benches, I’m destroying the spikes if possible, and the fucking bench if not. I will fight it in court. It is cruel and inhumane, I will not tolerate that level of arrogance by whatever rich fucks decided they want to feel superior at all times, even if I have to burn down an entire downtown district in protest.

    Edit: I will emphasize an unspoken but warranted assumption. I don’t want anyone dead, I just want to destroy billions of dollars that have ultimately only become something rich people get to use.


  • This. It’s one thing to say wokeness is a problem if you live in California or Southern Ontario, it’s another to say wokeness is bad in Texas or Manitoba. There are people out there so consumed by hate that they want innocent people to suffer simply for not conforming, and it doesn’t matter who you are because there’s a brand of extremism for that. People are tired of discrimination, period. They’re sick of being told this is not a dream, of bowing to a Neon God that devours songs, devours innovations, devours even evil and fear by devouring our emotions… This world destroyed itself. Don’t you get that? I feel more at home in a city where “Last night’s body count lottery [sic]” was 30 people because if I met a person and they died, people cared enough to hire someone to avenge them. In a hyper-capitalist dystopia. I feel more fear from a goddamn invincible anomalous lizard than I fear the day my dad dies because I will kill myself when my parents are gone regardless. I can’t live without my only support net.

    And I especially love worlds that are what everyone wishes. Tet was a hero to me, because he rescued the protagonists from a world that didn’t value them at all. Hinobi is not evil to me, even as a relatively shady megacorp, because they’ve owned their mistakes. Why buy a car if you can buy Forza Horizon 5? Why go to Oxford or an Ivy League or CalTech if you could go to Hogwarts?

    Reality is the Matrix, not escapism. It always has been, it just looked like there was a more real world ruled by a God-Machine race about 30-15 years ago. It’s way overdue people start realizing that what changed is that now we’re living in The Matrix Ressurections, that not only is our reality mostly fake (money, power, fame) but our fiction is more fulfilling because it’s a Matrix that we are aware we’re in and that we can do as we please in, while actual reality only offers hollow, empty promises aimed at enriching the rich even more.

    I’m not saying we should give into our vices like it’s nothing. I’m saying we deserve to be allowed to dream and not be told we are unworthy of happiness for being average, or worse, for being mentally disabled. Or worse than even that, for daring to have a unique opinion. If I have to have entire fake worlds on call to feel like I even have the 10-15 years of job experience I need to be employable IRL, I will. Because I’ll never get that experience now. I and my entire generation are unemployable, because a few fucking bankers robbed our parents and then lied to our grandparents that we were lazy.

    Lazy? Or realistic? Math doesn’t add up, assholes. We will never have anything because of the rest of you, you deserve to watch us play games while the world burns.


  • It’s not “can’t”, it’s “usually don’t want to as teenagers”. Teenagers are easily addicted, and everyone reacts to each drug differently. Sadly today’s teenagers generally play only hyper-casual video games because they played Angry Flappy Farmville Mafia Crush as toddlers before moving on to Raid: Gacha Impact of Clans.

    There are gamers that play multiplayer but single player games aren’t the problem. The fact that people can’t afford to live in reality at age 35 because they don’t have 10 years of work experience because nobody was hiring when they had just earned their degree and their student debt was literally a hard ‘no’ to declaring bankruptcy? They lost work experience in their field during the prime of their career because of 2008, that’s irrepairable. People would rather buy a new car in Cyberpunk or a new house in The Sims because the real thing is unattainable to an entire generation. Generation Z has their life ahead of them. The real iGeneration doesn’t. We didn’t get the chance to prove ourselves until our bodies had wasted away and our experiences in the workplace were the same as they were fresh out of college.

    That’s if you could afford college at all. Most of us, myself included, weren’t that fortunate. My younger brother went to college on BOTH of our college funds because I could not make use of mine.



  • It’s as weird as you imagine. Glasses are technically cybernetics, if only because they are a prosthetic. Clothing, glasses, through pocket watches and wristwatches and hearing aids all the way up through smartphones and even into Extended Reality (AugReal and VR) all count as “proto-cybernetics” or “pseudo-cybernetics” or “quasi-cybernetics”. In short, a tool that you wear.

    An internal implant can be properly cybernetic; most such implants are not because the intent is to repair existing organs like bones or heart valves rather than replace. A peg leg does count as cybernetic, but most internal implants are, you know, internal. Like a full mechanical heart replacement, or at least a pacemaker (which is technically an enhancement, a normally-absent “plan B” to save the life of someone with a malfunctioning Central Nervous System or other coronary issue).

    All of this is susceptible to a scary-sounding-but-mostly-harmless practice known as “bio-hacking”. Bio-hacking is based on the viewpoint that the human body is technically public domain hardware/software, and that each person has dominion over their own body when it comes to medical experimentation. While biohacking can be a risk, examples that I could recommend are wearing a glove with a magnet in the tip of one of the fingers (you’ll eventually start sensing subtle magnetic fields nearby), and lucid dreaming (oneironautics is essentially the “hamburger which is a genre of sandwich” to biohacking’s “sandwiches are an entire genre of food”). So far, not a single instance of biohacking has been used on unwilling participants outside of preexisting scientific disciplines corrupted by authoritarian governments; individuals can and (IMO) would be well off to experiment on themselves in sane and safe ways, though I’d always recommend discussing it with a doctor to be sure there is no severe health risks.

    Oneironautics alone, while not actually related to cybernetics (at least, not directly) is the most awesome and has the lowest barrier to entry of all biohacking possibilities. No implantation is required, only a desire and belief that lucid dreams can, in fact, happen. Just remember, your unconscious will not hurt you, it wants to help and always has helped. The only reason nightmares and such exist is because it reacts to your fears and stresses by showing you your problems, but if you do not want it to hurt you, it will not hurt you. Just try to talk to it, you might be pleasantly surprised!

    So yes, there very much is a blurry line between “cyborg” and “ordinary person”. The gameplay side of Cyberpunk 2077 is somewhat more accurate than you’d think, IRL if cyberpsychosis were to happen it would be not from over-replacement but a result of tapping into the Central Nervous System in ways that cause permanent sensory damage.

    Additionally, I’m no doctor but psychosis is the medical term for hallunations, it’s barely even related to psychopathy. I have no idea how the implication of cyberpsychosis being a form of psychopathy could work IRL but I’d say it’s unlikely that anyone would be able to prove such a link to begin with. Corporate propaganda aside, people should and do blame car-centric infrastructure for ruining Western civilization, but originally the reason it was unnoticed was because the symptom (overuse of smartphones) was itself a compounding factor and the original cause of traffic jams (inefficient use of space) had never been seen before. “Cybernetics cause psychosis” doesn’t mean “cybernetics cause psychopathy”, it means “cybernetics make you hallucinate things not there”. That means cybernetics are making users panic, not become a form of cybernetic monsters. They’d be scared, unless the corps solved their own problem by (at minimum) providing the real reason cyberpsychosis could affect anyone and how to avoid letting yourself hurt anyone around you. That at least keeps people buying more cybernetics than the bare minimum and is also the truth.

    Actual cyberpsycopathy, if I were to write it, would involve a chip damaging the prefrontal cortex in such a way that their moral inhibitions disappear. However, psychopaths cannot actually fake emotion like in the movies. They have no empathy because they have no feelings, only free will and curiosity. As any mad scientist in fiction (or, say, in the employ of a certain horrific historical dictator between 1939 and 1945) might show, curiosity with no morals can lead to some very disturbing actions being taken, but people with psychopathy are not usually ever allowed power over another person’s fate.

    Cybernetic sociopathy is what I’d call it, except that is best equated to anti-social individuals, either from sociopathy or acting on misanthropic beliefs, who limit all their interaction with other individuals to being over the internet. Disruptive, but not the mass-murderers seen in fiction.

    I think cybernetics are going to be designed with ethics and absolute security in mind going forward. Neuralink was a wakeup call to the medical community that the genie will not stay in the bottle forever, and efforts to make cybernetics meet the much more rigorous requirements of the human body and of human morality need to be the top priorities. Corporations will object, but I urge you not to let them have the primary say. Doctors and patients need to put their foot down and say that cybernetics must be the sole legal property of the individual it is attached to.


  • As long as it does not contain a trademark, or that trademark is of a fictional character who is not themselves advertising a physical product, IMO it is in fact art. The moment you say they’re Doritos specifically (and put the signage in a public space) or another such brand (Tostitos, Aribas, you get the idea) it’s advertising by that specificity.

    This, however, is clearly “generic” homemade donuts. The brand of the store is on the lower part but what trademark does the upper section feature? If the rays of sunshine were painted around the sign, or the kids painted it as a goodwill volunteer effort, I don’t think the town can justify removing it except in a “there’s a rule” way, and honestly? For something like this, screw the rules, we have the spirit of the law to consider.


  • RoRo stations. Roll on, roll off/out. The internet isn’t a highway, it’s a series of bullet trains in tube tunnels.

    I wonder if anyone thinks OpenTTD would be more fun with a cyberspace theme? I know there’s a neon grid grf (mod)…

    Anyway, if this was a suitable solution for WiFi, we wouldn’t need wired connections. That said, you can cut open a drink can to turn a WiFi router’s signal into a focused beam using the aluminum, iirc.


  • Fair enough. I guess I mixed you up with whoever was being a defeatist “only the rich will afford it” about something that has not yet become true. Believing something will come true because “that’s how everything works” just hastens that type of world, because if enough people act like that’s how it works then it becomes the norm. I’m only a pessimist because I like to be pleasantly surprised, but that level of cynicism is… grating, to say the least.

    If it shouldn’t be true, refuse to support the mindset needed to survive in such a world. Otherwise your mindset is already exactly who wealthy assholes want you to be, a wage slave who sells their morals to whoever scares them more. Better to die believing in not hurting people for personal gain, a hero, than to live believing that someone successfully stabbing you in the back is a fate worse than death.

    In short, strength is a weakness if you live only to stay alive, too many people online say they think there is no hope whatsoever, but I confused you with one of them and sorry about that.