Alt text: an image macro / meme of a still from Futurama. Fry is looking upwards with determination on a backdrop of the city at night. The text says "I have no date, a two-liter bottle of shasta and my all-rush mix tape. Let's rock."

Babe wake up, new Jesse Welles just dropped.

There is promise in the morning

There is power in the blood

folks drink it for the feeling

I just drink jus because

I do what John Denver tells me

I wanna do right, don’t let anyone fail me

Let it be me

And only me

Let it be me

And only me

Let it be me and only me

Who fails me

Alt text: a 50s style illustration of three skeleton mobsters wielding Tommy guns bursting into a room with several people inside posted on a website. The skeletons are wearing classic mob attire, trench coats, fedoras, ties. A user is replying, "Bones Malone and the spooky boys." Another user replies, "RATTLE 'EM BOYS! with a caption making an onomatopoeia of the 'unsettling rattling noises of three skeletons' ".

Alt text for some stupid meme can be challenging lol

Yeah I gotta keep moving

Keep moving on

Almost every night, something ain't right

But I can't tell what's wrong

Alt text: an image of a large silhouetted military aircraft directly overhead, sideways to the camera. The background is a blue sky covered in wispy clouds. The sun is causing a lens flare effect, which is in turn causing the edges of the clouds to appear multi-colored.

I FINALLY GOT IT. Since I got back into photography a few months ago, I've been trying to get a good picture of this sonuvabitch, but I always miss it. They don't usually track military test flights, but for some reason this one was, and I just happened to catch it before it landed for the day. After this shot, it flew out of sight and ended its test flight, but I got it!

Military industrial complex go brrrrrrr, but this is also used for more pleasant things, like FEMA drops and such.

Shot with a Canon Rebel T7, 300mm lens focused at 135mm, ISO 100, exposure 1/250 sec.

Thought this was a fun article to read, wanted to share. I think it's interesting that as societal and political views at large shift in the 2020s, it's good to go back and reevaluate how narratives are portrayed even as recently as 2015.

FTA:

The crucible of how the game treats its profundity is in the relation between its white Founders faction, which is in power, and its rebellious Vox Populi, who are attempting to liberate the oppressed racial and political classes of Columbia. The player stands between these two forces, doing tasks for each in turn, eventually learning that both are insufficient in creating a good reality. As Chris Franklin highlighted in a recent video, this is a common refrain in projects that Levine has worked on: putting the player in the position of a mediating force between two extremes. The player can feel pulled, and compelled, toward different directions while ultimately being forced down a particular path. Playing as a character who is terminally in the middle of the road allows us to point fingers at any insufficiencies we see in the world around us — as King put it, “gamers like to feel smart,” and seeing the gaps of logic in the various worldviews on display can make us feel like clever social analysts. A player uses magic in their left hand while holding a gun in their right hand in a screenshot from BioShock Infinite.

From the vantage of 2024, it seems that one of the key problems of Infinite’s view from nowhere is infinity itself. No matter your viewpoint, Infinite seems to present you with some ideas that might align with your vision of the world and others that might challenge you. This is probably an admirable goal — art can give us perspectives on the world that we don’t yet understand, and that’s one of the many ways that creative expression can change us.

If there’s an issue here that generates the endless debates about whether Infinite is good, it’s that the game does not provoke us with a particular person’s, group’s, or ideology’s perspective. Instead, it just confronts us with the idea that many different ways of existing in the world are real, and any of them taken to their logical extreme will exclude all others. What produces the “both sides” problems of Infinite is a problem of imagination. Infinite is a universe of plural worlds, and if any of them takes over fully, everything goes bad.

Full disclosure, I was disappointed in the majority of the replies this got when I first posted it, and as a knee-jerk reaction I took it down. But I encourage you to at least read the quotes.

Alt text: a close up image of a juvenile leopard gecko. There is a wooden stick to the left of him and a glass jar in the background. Underneath him is a bed of dirt and mulch.

When I come in to check on him, he walks right up to the door of his tank! I guess he knows I'm the food-giver, lol.

Alt text: an image of an Embraer jet airliner banking as it comes in for a landing overhead. It is at an angle with a background of blue sky with wispy white clouds. The American Eagle livery is visible with the red white and blue tail shown.

Man I love living under a landing pattern! Took this last month, and I'm pretty stoked at how it came out.

Canon Rebel T7, 300mm, f/16, ISO 100, 1/250 exposure.