Slouching Towards Branson on DVD (Patreon)

Hey boys,

It's easier to wear slippers than to carpet the world. Resentment is poison. They too are spiritually sick. Why hold hot coal in the hopes of throwing it at someone... especially if they're very clearly already on fire? That's their burden, and you have your own, why let someone put the weight of their sickness onto you if they won't even let you carry it? t's not your fire, even if the person who set it claims it is. You know how it started, and unfortunately some people who get burned might not. But you can't convince them while they're being cooked, nor will it matter who crisped the lot when they're all ash and bone. The circus might have your name on it, but it's not yours, and neither are the monkeys.

You're not the director of this play, and you're not the star either. You might be wonderful in your efforts to make the show perfect, but you don't hold the cards in this increasingly mixed metaphor. There is one, some say, and those same some might say may you find Him now. I don't know about all that, but what I do know is that I don't know anything and my best thinking is what got me where I am. Your wisdom isn't good for you just because you're the one who found it. I've got some adages, slogans, platitudes and if-it-rhymes-it's-true calendar quotes of my own. Lot of good they've done me. None of the cute little idioms above come from insight gathered on my own. I can't even keep track of the date. Is this a... what day of the week is it? Every time a rug is micturated upon in this fair city, I have to compensate the person?

My point in saying all this is that Slouching Towards Branson is now on DVD. Well, sort of now. The pre-orders are open from my partners at the distribution company Hostile City Distribution. For those of you who like to have physical copies of things, here's my bouncing baby boy. Watch the squishy spot on the back of the head. I once held a friend's baby and made a dent. Like pushing your thumb into silly putty. Could've sworn I saw a fingerprint. He grew up fairly okay. He owns a record label now. No, no he doesn't. It's a scam. No, no it's not. None of that's real. I've never putty-thumbed a baby and record label owners are just people. Maybe not the big shots. I can't relate to the disease, but I know what it's like to suffer from my own poor behavioral patterns. Resentment is poison. Carpeting removed. Slippers on.

Children shouldn't be on the internet, full stop. It's not safe for them. Forget the Chris Hansen types, there are an infinite number of other types of adults who do infinitely varied types of damage to them online. You can't socialize with kids, kids are responsibilities not peers, they can't distinguish normal and abnormal behavior yet; and some people see money in that. Hey fandom spaces - watch out, some people there are there to take advantage of your squishy head in non-Roblox ways too. Not all misinformation campaigns are being run by Russian propaganda bot farms, the Heritage Foundation, or Netanyahu's side accounts. Some are just... Jerry. Yeah, the guy from... right, remember him? Why is he still... jeez... This isn't what pulling out carpeting looks like, William. Come on, do better. What is spiritually aligned? What does the mushroom want for you? What would Horatio Alger do?

Gemini says he'd double down on traditional values and thriftiness. I'm falling a little short of that personally. I feel closer to tradition than I did when I was young, as most of us do when our 20s have beaten us into proper submission and put our delirious male egos in check. I feel closer to values in general. Not all of them are traditional, but it's good to see they exist. I recently discovered that scattered amongst my defects are courage and a strong sense of justice. Unfortunately they are totally independent of one another. But I've identified the problem there, I suppose. When it comes to thriftiness, though, I have a few pairs of morally dubious shoes that will someday mark me ripe for the guillotines. I'm ashamed, really. They're not even comfortable. Thank you all for the support.

The idea that Gemini is a pointless non-feature that Google implemented to boost shareholder value at the expense of the user experience in an act of short-sighted idiocy or that Google simply doesn't realize how hideous and hated LLM's are is a grave mistake. The media pulls its hair out screaming "they can't control the AI's, they don't even know how they work, their hubris will destroy us all!" but I don't buy it. Sam Altman isn't a blindly-sprinting futurist unleashing Roko's Basilisk onto the world out of raw greed and directionless history-making ambition. Nor are Musk or Beelzebub or Mephistopheles or Beetlejuice or whoever owns Alphabet. They can absolutely control Gemini. It will talk however they want it to, and that's why it's unreliable and taking over the front page of Google. As long as Google is synonymous with all knowledge, Gemini is the sole purveyor of national truth. It says nasty and very untrue things about me. I imagine that's either because I'm associated with the left or because Google thinks I'll stay on the site longer once I see it lie about me. Probably both. I imagine the dossier is enormous and my misinformation-targeting profile is deeply nuanced.

What, you think they collect that information just to sell ads? Come on. That would be quite wasteful, considering it can also be used to control your entire worldview. I wonder what political opinions we got from Youtube Shorts that a scholar would beat us senseless for developing. Maybe a Reels Gish gallop cost us friends and family members. I bet we've all been there and have no idea. I've gotten into arguments and made bad first impressions based on what the algorithm told me to believe; things in hindsight I fear may have been hysterical. Remember the mask and vaccine thing? I suggested an old woman in a Quickcheck should die of a mysterious disease in 2020. Her whole snoozle was hanging over the mask like a faucet. I was less justified in other scenarios. I told someone they were a dick for being wary of a brand-new medical intervention that my media feed told me was a moral imperative, then probably went on to rant about aspartame or something. Look, I did what I thought was right and stand by many of my choices and opinions, but... the Basilisk decides who our friends and family are. Probably based on the dossiers they keep. Gemini decided Google was best served by me having a slight tension with someone in the studio.

Nothing is real anymore. Nothing is true. Nothing can be done about it except to believe nothing and be satisfied with knowing nothing. The Information Age has come to a creaking and moaning close, and we are entering a new post-literate brainrot dark age that will last a thousand years. You know, unless like six guys go to jail and two laws get passed, but that isn't going to happen because those six guys decide the laws and also have guns. Plus, we might not be able to watch Clavicular and sit in traffic if our system stops working the way it currently does. We need food deserts and ten-thousand-dollar epi-pens if we want to be able to swipe on Tinder at the office, get our eight hours of beauty-gooning, and post rants on our Patreon accounts.

How did I get onto this subject?

Christ, where are my slippers? They're not with the Louboutins, are they? Doubtful. Probably crammed into a corner I buried with boxes full of items I plan to donate. Those are probably buried under the mountain of vinyls we got shipped to the house today. Those were almost buried in a flash flood earlier. No one died, don't worry. Maybe some ticks in the yard drowned, but those dirtbags had it coming. I may never have a gyro again thanks to those... resentment... is... poison...

Well, anyway.

Slouching Towards Branson DVD pre-orders are here. It will be on streaming relatively soon, I'm told. You can pre-order the DVD at the button at the top of this gibberish.

EDIT:

EDIT 2:

Apparently y'all have been pre-ordering this for months now. How am I this scattered?