I need to sleep I can’t get no sleep

The Weather Man… Cobra Verde… Even though the latter could have hardly ever been called mainstream.

Yeah, the 90s were a good time for movies that could not have been mainstream in any other decade. I’d place Judge Dredd, Demolition Man and Total Recall in the same “corny, but excellent” league as the 5th Element.
Then you had unofficial double features of sorts: Smoke/ Blue In The Face, Casino/ Goodfellas.
12 Monkeys needs to be mentioned as well, it’s probably the most palatable movie on my list.
In the “disconcerting, but unforgettable” league, I’d place As Good As It Gets, The Crossing Guard and, of course, the grisly “8 mm.”

Oh, yeah. It unofficially spawned “Friends,” too. Also, if you watch the music videos of the OST songs, you’ll find many (all?) of them have a “Singles” movie poster hanging somewhere. What an amazing level of coordination.

The next iteration of gaslighting is already here: That it’s no big deal anyway since you can just use an ad blocker. Riiight, let’s all just turn our eyes away to make the monster go away. Surely, it’ll get bored and stop listening and recording, and surely, it will not sell its collected data off to banks, insurance providers, the government, law enforcement… right?

Normative nihilism is going to get us all.

What in the world is going on with Elsie’s hand in the “second of the five photographs?”

Really good movie, BTW. A lot better than expected. Thanks for reminding me.

Are you sure about being ghosted? Or is the app just cutting your connection?
Same thing you described happened to me so many times I’ve lost count. Furthermore, I’ve compared profiles with some women I did met IRL and wouldn’t you know, what you see in your “profile preview” or whatever is not necessarily how anybody else gets to see you. We’ve seen profile pictures being removed or entire profile texts being wiped out, sometimes just before the first date.
Some people became aware of the enshittifaction/ gamification many years ago and resorted to putting their IG handles or phone numbers into their profiles “in case we get interrupted.” When some dating sites starting cracking down on that, too, they started putting this info into their pictures instead.
And that’s not even mentioning the bots and “controllers,” as they used to be called, whose only purpose is to extract private information from you. At least in the EU, dating apps have had to disclose their existence in the TOS for some years. They all do.
TLDR; The game is rigged beyond belief.

Crazy how dated this discussion is already.

Yeah West in his seminal “Scale” kind of corroborates the whole story.

It seems, though, that the molecular changes you are undergoing do not immediately translate into increased mortality, so you’re going to have several more years of - presumably - feeling well until the big drop-off starts for all of us at about 60.
BTW, because of its wide range of topics, its solid scientific underpinnings and its excellent intellectual accessibility, this is one of two books I positively think should be taught at any school, the other one being Solé’s “Phase Transitions.”

Prodigy

I’m a firestatah
Twisted firestatah

After my dad had locked me out of the computer room, I learned how to pick locks. And I’m not even kidding.

The dads of two guys I knew remodelled their entire basements to accommodate “the computer.” Now writing this down, it sounds like they bought VAXes or something, but it was just plain old Pentiums, plus printers and stuff.

So this guy I knew was trading porn. Mostly pics, a few low-res clips. Some warez here and there, too. Most people did not have fast internet yet, let alone a CD burner. He’d lug around these large wooden crates filled to the brim with home-made porn collection CDs. It was totally out there.

It took years for me to really disconnect.

• They introduced, with much fanfare, a mysterious new way of counting votes, and back-propagated it. Suddenly, all upvotes of past and present posts and comments got boosted by a factor of 8-9 or so. Felt hollow, manufactured, disingenuous.
• The founders admitted that in the early days, they made up lots of sock puppet accounts which talked to each other. That eerie, self-congratulatory sentiment never really left the site.
• Proven to tamper with comments.
• That derailed AMA with Julian Assange. It felt 99.9% inorganic.

And so much more.

My Discord registration was denied several times without explanation, so as soon as I discovered Lemmy, I came over and never looked back.

That’s no moon.

Next-level mooning.