Yeah, talk to the hand, you putrid asshole.

Buh-bye.

The repetition is there because these are primarily oral tales that have been barely edited into something that almost, but not quite, has a coherent narrative.

The tales within Journey to the West come from a very wide period of historical storytelling and are in a wide variety of storytelling traditions. There’s very little consistency from tale to tale, and any overarching theme was added much later in forming the “novel”. (It’s a “novel” in the same way that Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is a novel, right down to inconsistencies from member story to story.)

I’m splitting my attention between The Classic of Tea and The Legend of Darkness. The former is a nice little hardback with trilingual contents (Classical Chinese, Vernacular Chinese, and English) while the latter is a bilingual edition (Classical Chinese, and English).

Do you think that Musk gives any shits at all if Ghislaine gets pardoned or not? Why would he? She didn’t do anything to him, and compassion for her victims is “weakness”.

Mirroring @[email protected], anything I have that has computers in it. I have a USB charger (charger!) that’s more powerful than the computers that guided the Apollo missions in flight. I have some earphones that could take on the computing work of a dozen Voyagers. And in my pocket I have a computer that has more computational horsepower than all the computers on earth back when I was 16. AND it’s connected to literally millions other such computers, many of which are far more powerful than mine.

Going away from tech, however, I have a personal library filled to the brim with ancient works of philosophy, politics, artisanship, and even tea that I could only dream of actually owning when I was 16. I have a personal collection of musical instruments (mostly woodwinds and adjacent, with an intrusive lump of kalimbas as well) that would have probably made me rethink the career path I selected back then. I have silks. Oh so many silks! All because silk is cheap like borscht here, and because world trade, until recently, had been so open that even people half a world away can reasonably afford genuine silks, albeit perhaps not quite as many as I can here.

Oh, and I have a husband-like creature I fondly refer to as SO. At 16 I’d have freaked out hearing that since I swore then I would never marry. (And I haven’t, to be fair, at least in the legal sense.)

I am, yes.

(NEVER appeal to my ego. It does not go well! 🤣)

Individual movies are not useful data. Superman as a concept is very American and has little appeal outside of the Americas and almost no appeal in Asia. For example a search on Taobao for " 超人" (Superman’s name in Chinese) has about 8 entries for electric razors to each entry for something related to Superman. Even Aquaman is more popular: a search for 海王侠 provides a listing where about 90% of the entries are related to the comic character, despite 海王 being a very popular brand of health supplements and Taobao’s search being infamous for throwing anything at you that has even one of the characters you have in your search.

And Spider-Man? Yeah. A search on 蜘蛛侠 gives us so many genuine Spider-Man entries, plus a few that are kinda/sorta related (read: weird knock-offs) that you won’t have any problem finding what you want.

So Superman flopped in China (4th at the box office for foreign films) not because of people hating the USA but rather because the character simply doesn’t resonate with the local populace. I suspect we can find the same in Korea and Japan.

That is, indeed, the key difference.

The populace of most nations the world over has hated the USA and USAnals for decades now. (Hell, Germans hated the USA back in the '80s when I lived there!) But the governments of most nations were always eager to fellate whoever was in the White House for that entire time, with only rare exceptions here and there.

Now the governments are aligning with the views their people held for decades. That is a major change and will not go well for the USA.

If I got a Tesla for free I’d talk to the local fire department and donate it as training material for putting out lithium fires.

And yet not a single channel that I’ve clicked that button on has ever showed up in my recommendations ever again.

I literally screen-captured it doing something.

Keep undermining your cause. Apparently the western left doesn’t learn from over a decade of continued abject failure.

But do it in your own feed, please. (Not that you’ll be polluting mine any further.)

Because I live in reality, not in some bizarre cloud-cuckoo land.

This is also known as “late stage capitalism”.

That curve is bullshit both in its original “hype cycle” formulation and in this one.

Because most things crash and burn in the Valley of Despair. Hyped technologies almost always hit the Valley of Despair and then collapse and fail, never reaching enlightenment or sustainability. And the Dunnning-Kruger version you’ve put here has the very risibly optimistic view that people break out of the know-nothing stage.

You don’t even have to be an expert to spot the insane gibbering. Just ask it about, say, lyrics from a band and watch it generate completely non-existent lyrics. For example:

What are the opening lyrics to The Advert’s song “One Chord Wonders”?

The opening lyrics to The Adverts’ song “One Chord Wonders” are:

“We must be one chord wonders, one chord wonders…”

The song, released in 1977 as part of their debut album “Crossing the Red Sea with The Adverts”, is a self-aware punk anthem about being dismissed as musically simplistic. The track humorously embraces the band’s raw, minimalist style while critiquing critics who underestimated them.

Would you like the full lyrics or more context about the song?

Sure. Let’s see the full lyrics.

Here are the full lyrics to “One Chord Wonders” by The Adverts (1977):

“One Chord Wonders”

We must be one chord wonders, one chord wonders,

One chord wonders, that’s all we are.

We must be one chord wonders, one chord wonders,

One chord wonders, we don’t know much,

But we know what we like, and we like it a lot.

We must be one chord wonders, one chord wonders,

One chord wonders, that’s all we are.

We must be one chord wonders, one chord wonders,

One chord wonders, we don’t know much,

But we know what we like, and we like it a lot.

They said we were one chord wonders,

One chord wonders, that’s all we are.

They said we were one chord wonders,

One chord wonders, but we don’t care.

We must be one chord wonders, one chord wonders,

One chord wonders, that’s all we are.

We must be one chord wonders, one chord wonders,

One chord wonders, we don’t know much,

But we know what we like, and we like it a lot.

They said we were one chord wonders,

One chord wonders, that’s all we are.

They said we were one chord wonders,

One chord wonders, but we don’t care.

We must be one chord wonders, one chord wonders,

One chord wonders, that’s all we are.

About the Song:

The Adverts, a key UK punk band, wrote this song as a tongue-in-cheek response to critics who dismissed punk as simplistic. Despite the title, the song actually uses more than one chord, making the joke even sharper. It’s both a satire of punk’s detractors and a celebration of raw, energetic music.

Would you like any background on the band or the album?

Note that the only editing I did to this was some very minor formatting changes. (LLMbeciles seem to love dividing lines and don’t seem to understand Markdown rules for line separation.) Note also that the “full lyrics” that it cites don’t even resemble the real thing:

I wonder what we’ll play for you tonight

Something heavy or something light

Something to set your soul alight

I wonder how we’ll answer when you say

"We don’t like you, go away

Come back when you’ve learned to play"

I wonder what we’ll do when things go wrong

When we’re half-way through our favorite song

We look up and the audience has gone

Will we feel a little bit obscure

Think we’re not needed here

We must be new wave, they’ll like us next year

(The wonders don’t care) We don’t give a damn

(The wonders don’t care) We don’t give a damn

(The wonders don’t care) We don’t give a damn

So I give it the actual lyrics and ask it to identify them. The confabulation continues with breath-taking gall:

Yes! Those lyrics are from “One Chord Wonders” by The Adverts—but they’re from the longer, alternate version of the song, which includes additional verses not found in the standard album or single release.

Key Details:

• The version you quoted appears on some bootlegs, live recordings, or later compilations (like the “Crossing the Red Sea with The Adverts” deluxe reissue).
• The extra lyrics expand on the song’s themes of insecurity, defiance, and punk’s DIY ethos. The band sarcastically mocks critics while admitting their own struggles (“Will we feel a little bit obscure?”).
• The “We must be new wave, they’ll like us next year” line is a cheeky nod to punk’s evolution and the music industry’s fickleness.

Why Two Versions?

The original 1977 single/album cut is shorter and more repetitive, while this extended version feels almost like a meta-commentary on the band’s place in punk. It’s possible the extra verses were dropped for brevity or punchiness.

Fun fact: Despite the title, the song uses at least three chords (E, A, and B), making the joke even better.

Would you like help tracking down a specific recording of this extended version?

I’m not an expert on early punk. I’m not an expert on lyrics. I’m not really an expert on anything involved in this session beyond being an expert spotter of bullshit. And yet, it was really fucking obvious that it was bullshitting here. (Note that it called the shorter (correct) lyrics the “longer, alternate version”. It even bullshits about its bullshit.)

I swore I wasn’t going to go all girly-girl in this group, but … I think I’ve found my new personal look:

I’m a sucker for brocade, I’m a sucker for the so-called “Hanyuansu” (Han Elements) style, and I love wide waistbands on long skirts. (It’s great for sticking in a fan. Or a dagger.) And this looks mature, more suited to my age than a lot of Han revival styles do.

Like this other one I might have carried off 15+ years ago, but not today. Today I can just stare at the picture and wistfully lust after that outfit:

Wait, you mean techie nerds created new technology without thinking consequences through and it was used to degrade, harrass, and otherwise treat women like shit?

This has never, not even once, happened before!

If it’s on the recommended list at the right you can click on the triple-dot next to the and say “don’t recommend this channel” or some such, yes.

You’re being very disingenuous in applying human rights terminology to something that has sweet fuck all to do with human rights.

Or do you think it’s a human rights violation that an actor, say, be required to know how to act? Or a musician be required to know music? Or a chef be required to know cookery?

Your variety of faux-leftist bullshit is why the left has suffered setback after setback in the past few decades.