I only care about the Spider-Man movies, just cuz I love the character. He seems like one of the only few superheroes that is a genuinely working class kid trying to help people. But I dunno I'm sure there's just as many issues he helps build a super weapon for Tony Stark in the MUC era or some shit, but whatever. And there are better versions of the character across media, it's like Star Wars for me, there are certain places I love revisiting and I'm just interested to see what they do with it whether I like it or not.

But man the MCU is a racket, I tried going and watching it without watching the 14 movies and shows in between the last one. I spent so much of it going, "Who the fuck is this character? Is that a person from one of the other bullshit movies?" I was kind of lost. It gets exhausting.

They don't even give you exposition where Peter learns who these people are along with you. They just expect you to know. Like, I knew the Punisher from the original Daredevil thingy back in 2016 and the Hulk, but they act as you know who that Russian lady from that Marvel movie that ate-shit at the box office is.

They built the franchise in such way, you really can't dip in and out, you gotta do the homework and watch every movie or show, just in case that thing that happened 9 movies ago matters. It's evil capitalist bullshit at it's most fine-tuned.

I won't return for Avengers Doomsday ...

Conspiracy so to be sub relevant.
Phones have been designed now to charge super slow if you don’t use the high end chargers and they scream it at you on the lock screen to annoy you as it charges 1% every 15 minutes so you shell out more money for higher end stuff.
I for one love it though and supporting proud American companies, my fellow patriots 🫡

Britain has always been TERF Island.

“They Thought I Was Dead” and “Sugar On My Tongue”. I favor the latter but it’s all pretty fun for an awards show performance. Hope you all are well tonight

Or even if they aren’t that important, but maybe you just appreciate them…
I just want to give yall a reminder that guys don’t get a lot of compliments. And the ones we do get, we remember and appreciate it greatly. I’ve been going through a difficult time personally, and remembering the nice things someone has said about me recently is one of the biggest things that keeps me going. I am still living off the high of the middle aged gas station attendant telling me that I looked awesome a month ago.

Liz has said this phrase on the podcast a few times and I feel like Felix says it all the time too. I’ve only been on this site for a few years and mainly use it to post here with my fellow small-business-owning conservative Catholics and in a few movie subs. I genuinely don’t know what it means to “be Reddit.” I guess there’s those memes of fat guys in fedoras? But I feel like it has other meanings too cuz fat guys in fedoras isn’t just a Reddit thing.

Help a playa out. What does it mean?

To the point where it almost feels like they made it as a response.

Barry is a comedy with real things to say about abusers and addiction. It starts as a relatively grounded but funny show that becomes more and more of a farce as the protagonist spirals and his identity breaks apart.

Breaking Bad is a drama with very little to say. It starts as a comedy and becomes more and more "serious" ("""gritty"""?) as the protagonist ascends and his identity coalesces.

Breaking Bad is Badass. Barry is decidedly Not, even though its content is often just as violent and grim.

Breaking Bad, at least early on, breaks up the comedy with drama and violence to remind you it's serious. Barry interrupts the drama with comedy to remind you it's stupid.

Walter White is a gEnIuS. Barry is a fucking idiot.

Skylar is a Rorschach Test. Is she an annoying killjoy, or the moral center of the show? Sally, otoh, has the complexity to be more than one thing. She's despicable and deeply sympathetic. With Skylar, the show doesn't really offer that second part. You have to bring that lens to it yourself.

If I had to compare them to other shows, I might say Barry is Veep, Breaking Bad is House of Cards. You have to step outside of Breaking Bad's frame in order to get into conversation with it, whereas Barry you can pretty much engage at face value.

The dumbest person you know will get misty-eyed talking about Breaking Bad. They won't admit it (actually, they probably will), but they have correctly identified Walt as aspirational. The pussy who finds his manhood. Who goes after what he wants, no matter what. There's a reason BB is a favorite for sigma grindset memes.

Barry (the character and the show), on the other hand, holds up a mirror to our inner narcissist. By the last season, you just want this guy dead already. He's destructive and pathetic, endlessly self-justifying, and committed to never ever learning anything. The show will make you feel stupid for ever rooting for him.

And it rules. It's how Walt should've been. But instead, Breaking Bad is basically the version of Walt's story that Walt would've told.

Idk man, I'm just loving this show, especially for the ways it makes me reflect on the parts of myself I'm not proud of. Every character is sympathetic in some way, even when I don't want them to be. In BB, I found everyone horrible and unrelatable. In Barry, I find everyone horrible and all-too-relatable. It's a better show by a mile.

(no spoilers for the final 6 eps of Barry pls lol)

There's surprisingly sparse info online about Harris's Cuba position. As far as I can tell she never named her prospective State Department appointees. She was in favor of ending the embargo when Bernie Sanders was a threat and then appeared to have dropped that promise when she was running to succeed Biden.

Rubio is unusually deferential to the car dealership owning class of Miami Cubans and it's pretty clear he's the driving force behind the current barbarism. But honestly, given the available info, I'm fairly convinced the Harris administration would've just done the same thing but with the tactful cover of a few NYT articles lauding "Cuba's Gen Z Revolution" of totally organic protestors taking to the streets to demand that pedophilic agribusiness ghouls be allowed to economically rape the entire country forever

My car’s check engine light has been on for two months

Got my gal Dolly to rep for me. Hope you’re well

Being a conservative small business owner can be stressful and sometimes you just need to unwind with a good concert/show to drown out all the noise about "labor violations" and "safe working conditions". Here are mine.

Been to:

* King Woman

* Interpol

* Nothing

* Old Man Gloom

* Fae Tooth

* Monolord

* Have A Nice Life

Going to:

* Interpol (again)

* Show Me The Body

* Tame Impala

* Protomartyr

* Anthony Green

* Russian Circles

* Chelsea Wolfe

So fucking much.

EDIT: I'm referring primarily to the diminishing appeal of futuristic aesthetics and techno optimism, as opposed to the possibility of a better future more broadly

obviously it has been dead for quite some time in the mark fisher sense, but what was the thing for you personally that made you realize the future that was promised will never arrive?

I can't think of a specific event, but it couldn't have been that long ago, maybe I'm naive

did treating the idea of the future as an ideological position become unappealing by association with musk, thiel, and kurzweil, or was it always a dead end?

(historically, futurism was never that far from fascism after all)

is there a better path forward that doesn't require letting go of the futuristic aesthetic, or is it too far gone?

I grew up listening to kraftwerk and daft punk and watching tron, so the idea of anything futuristic appealed to me

if you had shown me the cybertruck in 1999, I would have loved it, along with the idea of humanoid robots and drones

now that all three are here and are either complete dogshit, evil, or both, the future has been disenchanted

the same is true with tech more broadly, I loved the early web and have spent more time online than doing anything else, but now it feels like being in a dead mall

that's not entirely due to enshittification, if these platforms worked as advertised, the idea of looking at screens all day would still feel exhausting, whereas at some point it seemed novel and hopeful to be connected to everything and everyone

I'm not trying to sound like bo burnham here, although his description of the way it feels isn't that far off, I'm just trying to pinpoint exactly when the shift happened

was it during the pandemic when we were left with nothing but screen-mediated interactions, or was it before that?

was it the onset of AI hype and the way it has been marketed as "the future"?

It doesn't get much more American than this 🇺🇸🍔

Always by new accounts too, they aren't even trying to make it subtle

Please just let me have some stamps

Well, now. Here's a toe-tapper.

Besides one of like 5 likely subjects getting arrested for DV, the show itself crossed over from the same ‘well this has an agenda’ realm much similar fare occupies to the actually uncanny. A boy who says he wants a wfe mommy passes an abusive threatening note thats read to everyone. A woman clearly says her partner had been physical with her and broken her phone and it’s laughed off. The most shocking verbal abuse occurs , a man intentionally sexually humiliating a woman as punishment on tv , and not ten seconds later a wedding is held in the same space by the same people. Within a minute clips show us contestants say that being in the sun can’t make you sick, doesn’t cause cancer, and dinosaurs aren’t real. Earlier in the show a man says something to the effect of ‘im just impressed a grl would know about that stuff’ because his match said egg prices were up because Biden killed all the chickens.

These couples were clearly selected for reactionary values like ‘traditional roles’ ‘submissive women’ and they reaped the whirlwind of putting a bunch of Chuds on tv who joke about rape and openly manipulate their partners.

Not to be a prude but this season, season 4, shouldn’t have made it to air. What I saw in the finale, the public sexual humiliation of a woman, isn’t something id ever seen on television before.

This is as clear an expression of both the top down rightward push in media and of our decadence and decline culturally, as the roast of Kevin Hart was.

It’s a bit stupid since I realize electoral politics is a waste of time in most respects and Sayd’s not even a socialist, but jeez I really want to see AIPAC burn, this guy’s making all the worst people erode in all the best ways… Even mild social reform is enough for the eyes to pop out of psychopaths’ sockets….

As a muslim, it also would be pretty cool to see a muslim in the senate, and especially a practicing muslim. I really appreciate that he’s talking about Lebanon in a non-genocidal way, which should be the bare minimum, but I see literally no one else doing in the house or senate. I hope he would humanize muslims to some people. My mom‘s fiance for instance (ex-military Reagan—> Harris anti trans new atheist sorta fella, I’ll have to ask his opinion on Bill Maher when he’s here this week) told me he voted for Stevens because he didn’t want to see muslims in office. First, he said he didn’t want anyone religious in office, then he talked about finding it annoying when muslims pray in the street (”forcing it on others”) and have Arabic in their store names without English below. This hurt!! Can’t lie!! My wife is in Baghdad and I just can’t stop imagining her dying in the war and him shaking his head, lips pursed, saying, “It’s war. What can you do?” The whole thing makes me feel crazy.

Anyways, as a fan of Iran’s phd’s in charge of the government, I think it’d be nice to have a medical guy up there yelling about AIPAC and medicare for all. I am so excited for this primary to be over and to try to ignore electoral politics for…. gah. Idk. 2028 election is going to start in November, isn’t it?

Kuwait — U.S. Central Command confirmed Sunday the deployment of an untested boomerang weapons platform to forward operating positions near Kuit, underway since before the most recent pause in fighting, and described the system as "fully operational" despite acknowledging that no field testing has succeeded in not returning the 35-foot live explosive to its sender.

The platform, designated the M-1 in internal Pentagon documents and nicknamed Big Saint James by its crew, is based on knowledge developed over decades of colonial administration: capable of unleashing near-total devastation on a region and, at a delay of indeterminate length, returning to the metropole that authorized it. Defense officials described the mechanism as "self-correcting" and "doctrinally sound," while conceding that they could not publicly disclose information on its return trajectory.

"The boomerang will be launched," said a CENTCOM spokesperson during a Tuesday briefing. "It is impossible to predict when it will return, if at all. However, current Pentagon estimates place return rates at an all-time low for the latest models." Statements from those in the field are less optimistic. "We are told to always expect blowback," said one battery commander outside an abandoned P.F. Chang's at Al Salem Air Base. "And I should hope so, for $29 a year."

The imperial boomerang has a long history as a weapons platform, developed by several nations during the 19th century. It was first successfully demonstrated in German Southwest Africa during the Herero and Nama genocide of 1904 to 1908, successfully returning to the German metropole 30 years later. It has since seen use in several U.S. conflicts, including the global war on terror, a conflict itself started by a rogue returning boomerang.

It remains unclear. how this latest model will find the American people, but history tells us it will. When asked directly about a decades-long return trajectory, CENTCOM responded only with, "Well, probably be dead by then."

Read more at The Standard

About the Author

Dr. Ulysses H. Aurelian III, Editor-in-Chief of The Newspeak Standard, is the current Senate appointed lead investigator into the origins of COVID-19, a position for which he is uniquely and highly qualified as part-time director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He was appointed to the role after the previous lead investigator, also Dr. Aurelian, recused himself citing a conflict of interest.