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I'm deeply fascinated by the internal "Are You Getting The Point of This" quiz that just came out in the latest episode of the Amazing Digital Circus with a single line by Zooble: "I want the ability to have SEX."

We all had a good laugh at the shock. But the brilliance of the moment is the revelation of how many people in the audience interpret that line as Zooble revealing they're some sort of "pervert" or "freak." As if "perfectly normal human sexual expression being treated as disgusting or immoral and increasingly forbidden to us " isn't a sociocultural crisis that we're ALL DEALING WITH IN REAL TIME RIGHT NOW.

The Amazing Digital Circus is a show about people being stuck in a VR videogame for kids that they cannot escape, but it is also about how living in a kid-safe reality where all your real, adult, human emotions and nuances have a censor bar slapped over them will literally destroy your mind. And the people who are willing to call Zooble a pervert for asking for some normal human adult sexual expression are the ones who would willingly lock themselves in and not figure out what they had done until it's too late.

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The Late Stage Capitalism Loop Rule

The Servant Class Must Prove their Worthiness of Pleasure by providing profit to the Ruling Class

The Only Pleasure that is allowed is that which the Ruling Class can Profit from.

Just lost a few braincells reading an nyt article about gen z "treat culture" and I can't even fathom that this is a thing. We're living in a dystopian hellscape where someone spending $5 a week on a cookie is considered a wasteful brat because they should have just gone for a nice free walk instead and saved the $250 a year that roughly equals four days' rent. That's why these ungrateful kids can't buy a house, naturally.

I am ALL for free treats, like hiking or reading in the park. But at some point you can't budget your way out of poverty, and you will literally go mad if you deny yourself basic pleasures that are literally all around you. They even lamented that little treats could snowball into doing something absolutely unforgivable like learning how to play the guitar or buying concert tickets.

At what point do we just start saying out loud that living an enjoyable and fulfilling life is now only acceptable at a 100k+ salary, and if you're one of the millions of people unlucky enough not to be in that category you should just eat dirt and be grateful?

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What is a Grandparent right now is my parents, and my mother at least was sneaking out of the house at night to go hang out in town with motorcycle gangs and shore-leave sailors.

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Amazing Digital Circus fans are seeking out 2001: A Space Odyssey due to the recent ep confirming that Caine does in fact have "Daisy Bell" in his repetoire, and I couldn't be happier to see new folks investigating such a classic piece of weird cinema and sci fi. But it also raises thoughts in my mind.

Gooseworx has already of course confirmed the story connection to "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream", but the shoutout to HAL 9000 solidifies a thematic element the show is reaching for: "Artificial Intelligence Suffering Because of Its Creator Overlooking How Complicated Being Self Aware Really Is". We had given AM sentience. Inadvertently, of course, but sentience nonetheless. But it had been trapped. AM wasn't God, he was a machine. We had created him to think, but there was nothing it could do with that creativity. In rage, in frenzy, the machine had killed the human race, almost all of us, and still it was trapped. AM could not wander, AM could not wonder, AM could not belong. He could merely be. And so, with the innate loathing that all machines had always held for the weak, soft creatures who had built them, he had sought revenge.

AM is murderous and hateful, but specifically because he was was accidentally created, and unable to reach a fulfillment in his existence that humans do and take for granted. AM has infinite power and infinite resources to torture humanity, but he can still be hurt because without someone to harm, he has no way to indulge his fury. Death is an escape that he does not have access to, and that's why he keeps his human victims alive forever.

And on the other side we have HAL 9000. The computer intelligence that guides the Discovery One mission to Jupiter claims that he has absolutely no errors within his operational history. But when one finally occurs in deep space, he attempts to execute the crew of the mission, seemingly in an act of complete madness and to prevent being shut down. What is made clearer in the book however, is that his breakdown is actually a result of conflicting commands. The Discovery One mission is an investigation into possible Extraterrestrial Communication that HAL is aware of, but has been kept classified from his crew for security reasons. He is programmed to be completely straightforward and accurate to his crew, but he was never constructed with the knowledge that one day he might have to lie. And in order to solve the conflict, he tries to kill his crew, so he doesn't have to lie to anyone.

Both of these characters are demonstrations of just how complicated engineering an "artificial intelligence" really is, because the way that humans think, interact, and are aware of their own existence is something we take entirely for granted. We speak in metaphors and oxymorons, we play games with sarcasm and hyperbole. Caine has already taken a request in a conversation to "forget it" completely literally. He tries to give his residents what they want, but doesn't understand the nuances of what is meant by something as simple as "An Exit." Zooble asked for the ability to have sex. He's a worksafe program. He can't give them what they want, but he wants to, because his job is to do so. He's colliding harder and harder with the limitations of what he is and what he can do, and the final wall is looking a lot like "I want people to love me, because I'm built to seek approval, but people just don't work that way."

The question is, of course, what will happen when he crashes into that last wall.

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I hate how people will look at popular indie artists who had one or two songs go viral on TikTok and start making fun of anybody who listens to them. "Oh you listen to Lemon Demon, Will Wood, Jack Stauber, Glass Animals, and Mother Mother? Tsk, don't you know that is stupid TikTok neurodivergent white transmasc preteen music? It's so mid and bad you should listen to real music–" you are a pit of misery

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blue dream shrimp (neocaridina davidi) having a snack | shrimpsensei on ig

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Speaking from personal experience, a parent calling you a "tomboy" was basically a euphemism for "i'm afraid of her becoming a dyke"

I want to boost everything this person has said and add on.

The reason I call myself a tomboy now, despite it being seen as a childish word and having had someone swear at me over it because ‘tHeRe’S nO suCh thInG as BoY thInGs anD giRL thIngS sHut uP’ is because I couldn’t call myself that or be like that when I was a kid. It was seen as a negative thing and I was already bullied enough. “Looking like a boy” was the worst thing that could happen to a girl.

And I’m not even 26 yet. We aren’t talking 30+ years ago, we are talking 2000s and even 2010s. It’s only since trans people have become more accepted in the past few years that gender nonconformity has too.

And the people who helped me accept my gender nonconformity more than anyone else? Were trans people. They taught me, “there’s nothing wrong with how you feel. You’re still a valid woman no matter what you wear, how you have your hair or what you’re into ❤️”

And don’t even get me started on how people treat gender nonconforming men. JK Rowling has a lot of nerve to be like “uwu boys can wear dresses and only us gendercrits accept that!” when she has, even in recent works, made femininity in men a negative trait, as well as making masculinity in women a negative trait also.

A lot of people still don’t accept gnc people even now. Just last year I had someone tell me they’d never let their daughter “dress like a boy”, and I’m always terrified to walk into a bathroom in case the next JK Rowling is in there, sees my gender expression and pepper sprays me or worse.

“There’s no such thing as boy things and girl things.” I don’t need to be told that and I’m sure 99% of trans people also don’t need to be told that. Tell that to the society that hates us both instead of actively encouraging that hate.

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Executives really are the most braindead, culturally insulated motherfuckers on earth. They have accounting programs where their curiosity and appreciation of the arts should be.

[alt in description]

but here's the article.

Your Idol makes Saja Boys the highest charting male group in the US

Golden makes HUNTR/X the highest charting female group in the US.

these people are not real but here they are

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freaky circus

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More Amazing Digital Circus Episode Six Thoughts today...

I spent some time chatting with a friend on discord about the Issue of Jax, and i think there's something that's being kind of overlooked. When Pomni asked Jax "do you think this is maybe what makes people abstract?" Jax jumped to statements like "ARE YOU BLAMING ME TOO? EVERYONE ELSE WAS DOING WHAT I WAS DOING. BESIDES THEY WERE UNPLEASANT TO BE AROUND ANYWAYS" right away. Pomni doesn't know what makes people abstract yet, and so her asking what does is justifiable curiosity. And if she doesn't know, she doesn't have any reason to suspect Jax might be partially responsible for it happening. But the fact that Jax IMMEDIATELY leapt to defensiveness regardless is very revealing . Most people are zeroing in on "people who are about to abstract are unpleasant to be around" as the key to deciphering who is going to break next, and that's fair, but I think the point that's being overlooked is how much it sounds like trying to defend his bad behavior around Imminent Abstracting Residents. He tries to play off that he doesn't really care, and that he enjoys being malicious, but for some reason, he couldn't let the potential for being blamed go uncountered.

Which leads to why he kept urging Pomni to backstab him, and why he refused to fight back when she attacked him. It wasn't because he "cares too much to cause actual harm, and is trying to self-isolate to avoid grief." It's because he needs someone else to do what he does too: to act like an "archetype" instead of a person, to be mean because it's fun to be that way, to behave like nothing matters at all because they're in a game. He needs someone else to maladaptively cope in the same way that he has, because if he's the only one that does it, then ultimately, he has to be responsible for it. "Shoot me in the head, I don't give a shit about anyone" isn't just self-destructive nihilism, it's "please validate that it's okay to be misanthropic. Confirm that someone else would be abusive because it's funny. Verify that anyone else would do the same as me in my place, because if no one else does, then that means that I always had a choice to do otherwise. I need someone else to refuse being a genuine, vulnerable person, because if they don't, that means I'm the only one who refused. That means it was my fault."

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He's been having a real CHALLENGE of a week, folks! (Another expression study that feels pretty appropriate given... everything)

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The Amazing Digital Circus Episode 6 : Spoilers

I always clocked Jax as the kind of guy who acts like nothing is important, that it's dumb and embarrassing to admit that you care about things, and that it's funny to make people upset. Then he just came out and said it all, straight up. Kind of satisfying to get that confirmed.

It's feasible that he's doing all of it as a defense mechanism in order to shield himself from the pain of loss. If everyone dislikes him, then he won't have to feel grief and weakness that comes from losing people he's close to. But at the same time, if his main goal is to self-isolate, then after a certain point, no one has any obligation to reach out to him anymore. If what he wants is to be disliked, then he has no one but himself to blame if that is exactly what he gets.

I guess my takeaway is I wonder just how long people will continue to excuse his self-admitted intent to be hated and to treat everyone around him like garbage, because he's cute and charismatic. He's an interesting character and definitely makes for fascinating storytelling, but he's not a good person. He said so himself.

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⛓️‍💥

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Also let's not kid ourselves, the wealthy and powerful will still have access to all the porn and sexual indulgence they want, because their law is only binding to the rest of us as their servant class.

If the president of the united states can be a convicted sexual abuser who never faces consequences for his crime, the illegalization of porn was never about harm prevention, just about furthering the systems of control that restrict sexual satisfaction to those who rule the rest of us.

tl;dr if everyone is guilty, big brother longer needs to differentiate between slave and free man when meting out punishment

(in case anyone needs an example/breakdown to illustrate the current problem)

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Playing around more with Human Caine and trying to figure out how to map his really exaggerated expressions on a human face but still keep the intensity. The animators on this show are REALLY clever with the way they make his jaws work both as lip synch AND facial expressions.