Castle Magus

"John Oliver discusses why trans athletes seem to be at the center of U.S. politics right now, the nuances around competition and safety, where the conversation could be headed, and what The Rock would do in a barre class."

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Every time Donald Trump was on my screen and talking during this video, his finger-nails-on-chalkboard voice and incredibly disgusting Backpfeifengesicht were increasingly nauseating and rage-inducing.

"Hi. Now that Trump is president... again... we're going to look at how he and his party are always focused on problems that aren't really problems (DEI, immigrants, and censorship) instead of problems that are (climate-enhanced wildfires, oligarchy, and actual censorship)."

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One of the comments under the video: "So is this sense of unreality what Germans circa 1933 felt?" I would say... maybe? Probably. The difference is that we should have goddamn known better, this time. Doubly so, given that we've already endured a hellish four years with Trump as the President of the United States of America before the current, likely way more hellish four years still to come of Trump as the President of the United States of America. It's not going to be great, and we're going to be trying to repair the damage caused by 2025-2029, for much, much longer than just those four years, like how we're still trying to repair the damage caused by 2017-2021 even now. Well, some of us are trying to repair the damage, anyway. Too many of us are actively, maliciously trying to cause the world to burn (both figuratively and literally).

So anyway, yeah, this is an almost hour long video pointing out all the finding out that's happening as a result of all the fucking around that happened in November 2024.

Anyway, in conclusion, to hell with Donald Trump forever, as usual.

(Beware: Warmbo is in the video. Not a lot, but still... a little bit of Warmbo goes a very, very long way.)

The relevant-to-the-video-title discussion doesn't start until around 7:18 in the video, but when it does, boy does it get real depressing real quick. Or, at least, as depressing as any Woolie and Pat discussion in which they're constantly cracking jokes about depressing shit can get, anyway.

For me, I do look at the Google AI blurb thing, but only out of anticipation to see just how ridiculously wrong it can be sometimes. Like, back when I was watching Twin Peaks, I typed a search for something like "how long does the 'james leaves town' subplot last" or whatever, and the Google AI came up with something like "The 'James leaves town' subplot lasts until the end of the series, which is when the dead body of James is discovered. This is a core storyline in Twin Peaks," or some such dogshit like that. (Spoiler alert: James Hurley does not die in Twin Peaks at all.)

Usually, like say 80% of the time, the Google AI blurb is fairly accurate, but for the times when it is not even in the same city where the ballpark is located, it's kind of hilarious how confidently wrong it is... until you remember that random people are seeing this horseshit and taking it at face value that it is accurate.

"Hi. Today we're looking at AI-generated images, why they look like that, why fascists love them, and how corporations want to use them to cheapen the valuable work of creatives."

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Very small aside, I loathe everything about that "based" modern slang bullshit, so Cody mildly mocking it once and loosely associating it with alt-right incel MAGAt dildos in this video brought a vague quarter-smile to my face.

Nothing new being claimed here, really. The gist: The Internet is grossly polluted with AI bots now, and the Internet is grossly polluted with disinformation now, and the latter is being aided by the former.

It's a big part of why 卐 wait I mean X is dead on arrival, despite Elon Musk's assurances of various "only way"s to end bots that he has failed to implement since that time he killed Twitter.

(MBFC for TheConversation, as that one, unlike the other one, actually is completely new to me.)

"Hi. There sure are a lot of media layoffs happening! Let's look at how and why that happened and what we can do to make sure quality journalism doesn't get phased out like National Geographic and Sports Illustrated."

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I almost immediately nope'd out of this episode when I saw that it was going to be yet another one that involved Warmbo (which the video's own captions repeatedly misspelled as "Worm Bow"), but I decided to stick it out, regardless.

The basic gist (or, at least, my own personal interpretation of the basic gist): advertising, marketing, capitalism, and just, like, the greedy pursuit of unsustainable and ever increasing amounts of money is deathly poison to journalismthe Internetthe world as a whole, in general. Also, I typed that previous sentence when I was literally only maybe two minutes into watching the video. Now that I have actually finished watching the whole video, I see absolutely no need to go back and change that prior sentence in any way, because that pretty much was the actual gist of the video. It was, pretty much, a fifty-five minutes and twenty-eight seconds long restatement of the phrase "the love of money is the root of all evil."

Also, all that shit makes this seem like an even more impossible task than I already imagined it to be.

(Really, though, whoever did the captions for this particular episode did a rather piss poor job of it. Did they, perhaps, use an "AI chatbot" to write them or something? Oh well, tangentially speaking, at least Worm BowWarmbo didn't play much of a role in this ep. The fact that he played any role at all wasn't great, but it could've been far, far worse, I suppose.)

"Billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg agreed to a cage match in June, but news has been relatively quiet for the last month."

The absolute best possible case, here, is that they somehow manage to literally kill each other. Whether that's by accident, on purpose, or via a meteorite crashing into whatever venue they use to do this shit, I don't care which. An acceptable case is that one of them kills the other. While I don't like Zuckerberg either and would find him being on the receiving end good enough, I would rather it be him killing Musk than the other way around. The bare minimum acceptable case is that they just, like, make abject fools of themselves on stream or whatever. The worst case is that one or both of them chickens out before the event.

In any case, I won't say that this is the most asinine thing I've ever heard of, because, you know, Donald Trump exists, but it's still pretty high up on the list of most asinine things I've ever heard of. I have zero interest in watching this. At most, I just want a casualty report of the aftermath, fingers crossed.

"Hi. In today's episode, we look at how billionaires often benefit from their supposed altruism and why we can't rely on their "generosity" to solve society's problems."

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"Billionaire philanthropist" is an oxymoron. If they were truly philanthropists, they wouldn't be billionaires.

A post on John Scalzi's website.

(EDIT)

And here's another one, which I'm just going to stick here rather than give it its own post:
"Reader Request Week 2023 #2: The Future of Social Media"

(/EDIT)