Average median voter.

And why innocent people are being murdered in the street and why we don’t have auto emission standards anymore and why the FDA is abolishing disease research.

I’m glad I can use reasoning and deduction to actually figure things out or I would be equally stuck in a black-and-white false dichotomy.

For example, I assumed you’re a bot immediately, then I made a small effort and checked for clues, and found the first mod action performed against you on lemmy was a comment removed for asking about microwaving your balls, which tells me you’re likely a human. But I also know in relatively short time even those clues will be meaningless as tactics get more and more sophisticated. It’s just like always being on guard when you go outside. You can be on guard for danger without always being anxious or paranoid.

See? it’s not so hard.

Ah, another victim of the chaos, flailing and directing energy at an entire narrative spun by people deliberately having dedicated time and energy to making you specifically feel outraged at people who are your ally, filling all the blanks with your worst case fantasies and the lovely opportunity to police your own side.

Get off the internet. https://www.progressivevictory.win/ has people you can support and actually get off your ass and help for local representation and leadership. Nobody is coming. Nobody is saving us. There will be no revolution. Rebuild community and drop the rage.

If the unpopular voices of a random person on the internet are too worrisome and problematic for you to focus on what matters, you’re no good to any of us. I won’t see a reply, I don’t have the energy to deal with .ml’ers right now.

That means it’s the turtleneck guys, or more likely the Celtic fine art equivalent, not gig work graphic designers.

And? That’s fine. The country wants to boost their artistic culture, it has to start somewhere. And honestly, despite me holding it up as a picture of stereotypes, even those “cultural” artists rarely see any measure of actual success despite trying their whole lives to gain some kind of social connection to an art market. Again, this is a matter of deciding if we want art in our lives and where that goal is going to begin.

If celtic sculptors and “art lifestylers” get a UBI, that’s great. It just means the struggling graphic artist is a little closer to also finding some level of support, and the closer the struggling graphic artist gets to social respect and support, the closer YOU get to a broad-scale safety net.

I just will never shit on efforts to socialize our vast resources as a species, at least not until the last billionaire is made into mulch.

Too many people have grown so massively comfortable with discord that entire communities of people just relying on each other for social contact leave their voice chat or cameras running 24/7 so they can be around each other in some capacity.

They would break down having to change platforms, and there are LOT of younger people in this demographic.

Personally I think it’s a deeply sad way to live and socialize, and they would probably largely be healthier if the whole thing shut down, but I recognize how lonely and depressing the world is and how everyone wants to find comfort with others.

Someone said it best describing Destiny 2, that it’s a perpetual feeling of building towards something that’s always just around the corner, but when you get around that corner, it’s just more grinding and pushing premium content, just around the corner. It’s gonna huge bro, I promise. Big stuff coming. Just ahead, just buy one more season bro.

I notice it’s a reoccurring theme for people to go through stuff like that with MMOs.

I think we all have our check-out bottom we will fall to when life hurts too much, some people will just rot in bed and some will watch old movies and some will camp in the woods. We have breaking points in life, and sometimes an online game where people seem to be having normal lives just feels like being someone still connected to the world. When I was little and my parents would go on week-long drug benders and spend the whole time screaming at each other, I would check out into comics and books, so it’s probably where I learned how to do it inadvertently.

The shot reminded me of Elder Scrolls Online at first, and I had that very real PTSD twinge that made my stomach lurch.

When I was going through the worst part of my life, losing everything, burying my family and pets, closing down my business and having my home foreclosed due to family medical issues, I played Elder Scrolls for a couple years for no other reason than to spend time with other people, including someone I cared about a lot. I hated the game, it was exciting for the first couple hours until I realized how far it deviated from the actual franchise and how limited the gameplay really was, how everything was just a funnel towards premium content and skins.

I drank like a fish and laid in trash watching my life fall apart as I sat in Elder Scrolls listening to people chatter and watching them duel, because I didn’t want to be alone because I didn’t trust myself to be alone.

I did start over and everything is a lot better now, but holy shit, that game ruined Morrowind, Skyrim and the entire game world for me.

We are about to see Kim Jong Un outsource the country’s desperate need for overhaul to his own daughter to implement radical reforms so the country has a future, and then she will either succeed or more likely get coup’d and murdered horribly by her own relatives and generals and oligarchs who still run the country.

I’m sure Kimmy will be fine where he retires to though, likely it won’t be North Korea, that’s for sure.

deleted by creator

Perfection is the enemy of the good

This is Lemmy, if it’s not the Ultimate Policy that includes everyone, gives every last person exactly what they want WHILE punishing our enemies, WHILE costing nothing and requiring no effort, it’s trash that should be spat on.

doing it just for already-successful artists is a bit random.

I think a lot of people have radical misconceptions about what it means to be a “successful artist” or even what the spectrum of the field looks like for an average creator.

Everyone in this post feeling salty about this whole story are picturing either struggling deviantart furry artists living in their parent’s house making terrible sonic OC’s for sheltered discord kiddies, or snooty dudes in black turtlenecks having showings of abstract nonsense at galleries in upscale neighborhoods, and nothing in between.

Most artists who survive by art are making minimum wage grinding out graphics and designs for like, edges of price-tag-holders on magazine racks at drug-store checkouts and the other millions of tiny details that go into making our world deliberate-looking and designed, and most of those kinds of artists are working contract/gig work and aren’t even full-time employees and have no benefits or safety nets. Employers hate paying artists, there’s a very real stigma and aversion to paying people for creativity and most companies choose either outsourcing small projects at a time, or more and more choosing to just use AI.

A graphic designer can make a logo that redefines a global company’s image and helps launch a multi-billion dollar venture, and make $200 for it. This is why there’s a very real need to fund art unless we want to hand it over to AI entirely and just let the world dissolve into mediocrity and soullessness.

You’re going about it wrong, assume everyone is a bot, because it’s very, very hard to tell now. You cannot tell if I’m a bot.

The best tell is honestly if someone makes a stupid argument, because there are more bots than people making stupid arguments against objective reality and basic human empathy and community and progressive politics, or making radical and dumb far-left calls for revolution, violence or demanding recognition for some obscure and controversial marginalized group to the exclusion of everyone and everything else.

If you understand what they’re trying to do with bot armies and shills working to move culture, you can recognize it a lot easier.

There are also no small number of people who have read these stupid arguments and have unknowingly sided with a bot because it sounds “inclusive” or like proper progressive stances, but haven’t used critical thought. I count them as bots also.

If you’re actually advocating for fairness and things like universal basic income or even social safety nets, the worst way to do it is to whine like a wounded banshee when one segment or demographic gets it and you don’t, that’s been the number one way all of these programs have been shot down in history.

If it’s successful and helps the country’s economics and quality of life, it will expand, it should be encouraged, not immediately have rocks thrown at it from frustrated people going “why not me?”

Figure out what you actually want and how we get there, and decide if you think you can get everything you want all at once, or if we need to build things to get there.

We are most certainly not all artists, the 2020’s have taught me that much.

Don’t be so angry because you weren’t financially successful in your chosen field

Terrible reading comprehension, I am angry at your whinging against an objectively good advancement, I am not an artist anymore and have no stake in this. I referenced being an artist because I know how unfair the field is and how unappreciated it is by people who have never taken the time to learn shit about art or don’t consider it a real career because they don’t take time to notice how much of their lives have been designed by professional and freelance artists.

I was wondering why we suddenly had so many astroturfers, shills and bots creeping in and fucking up all the conversations. It used to just be dumb but earnest tankies, now we got all kinds up in this bitch.

That’s a very good and honest answer and that can also be worked with, you have an outline for effective change right there:

1. Work on better mental health, starting with non-smoking activities, ideally getting out of the house and trying new things, preferably at first in spaces where you can’t even smoke if you wanted to. Consider talking to a therapist. Change your environment, don’t stop at your computer, clean your whole living space and change things around. Change your career (I know, I know, I gotta throw it out there.) If you are in a rut, change what you can and change how you feel about the things you can’t change. Find something of value you can start tackling in your life like raising a pet, a plant, a new routine like forcing walks.

2. Understand that the addiction is also diminishing your happiness. I like to use porn addiction as the best example of this part, because people often misinterpret why pleasurable addictions are harmful even if they had no health effects - which is, as you engage with activities that boost your pleasure responsonses, your brain will reinforce those pleasure paths and all the other pathways in your brain diminish and wither so that it’s harder to feel happiness from other things. Think of the things you do and think about like roads and highways, the more you pave them and use them, the easier it is for your thought-stream to get on an onramp to flavortown and indulge in the vice, whereas the offramps to other things that used to make you happy start to erode and fade.

So whichever you tackle first, understand that this takes time.

(I never was a smoker, but I did beat a level of alcoholism that took the lives of most of my family, it took a long time and many attempts.)

Actually sure, if we’re going to be earnest I do recommend some tactics for beating addictive behavior.

The most important thing you will ever learn about yourself and reality itself is the sheer amount of delusion your brain puts you in, no matter who you are or how smart you think you are.

We think of our brains as logical, calculating machines inside our heads where all our will and thoughts and ideas come from, but this is an illusion, you are not your brain, you’re not even your language center. Your brain’s primary and only job is to assemble your feelings into a narrative story. That story doesn’t have to make sense, it just has to connect things so your feeling makes sense.

What this means for addictive behavior is that you can find the point where your brain starts reasoning things out that it wants, and cut it off because you know it’s not you, it’s another entity inside your head trying to get a thing it wants. Drugs fire off unnatural pleasure associations which your brain will make up a lot of excuses to keep getting, so learning to identify the stories your brain tells you to engage in behavior you don’t want is key to reducing that behavior.

A huge part of this is preparing ahead of time for when you get worn out trying to argue with yourself and setting specific boundaries for your future-self. Get rid of the stuff you want to quit taking, make sure there’s none in the house. Lock your money and credit card in a timed safe after a certain part of the day, because you will have a harder time resisting the “reasoning attack” as it gets later and later in the day, and resist the urge to think about tomorrow or how miserable you’re going to feel as the night, week and year go on. This is why they say “one day at a time” because your brain will wear you the fuck down with debate and “ideas” and bargaining, and if you anticipate that lasting on and on, you will break easier.

All of this requires being very honest with yourself and examining the habit you want to quit, such as looking up the actual risks, the actual data about dangers and the actual amount of money you’re spending on it, and all that stuff your brain really doesn’t like incorporating into it’s mental story-telling.

Understanding your brain isn’t you and it will actually be your worst enemy and will childishly sabotage your whole life to get what it wants, and that it talks to you in your own internal voice so it’s hard to resist, these ideas will be your best mental strategy for quitting because at least you have your actual enemy identified.

Nah, you ain’t that special, just going to block you and encourage others to do the same. Have fun dedicating your time and energy to such great causes, I’m sure you’ll get rewarded for it.

About as much as I made on my best weeks doing art professionally for close to 10 years, despite having won awards and secured collectors around the world.

I worked harder than I ever had in my life to keep that business running, and eventually closed shop because it’s too much work for too little pay or respect.

Ironic since I’m quite sure most of the sock-puppets and astroturfers baiting this post and whinging about “factory workers” are literal kids who have never actually worked a day in their life.

I did 10 years as a professional artist, it was the hardest I ever worked in my life, and in the end I gave it up because despite winning awards and having collectors around the world after becoming very good at it, it is very hard to manage and maintain an actual art business in a world that doesn’t take art very seriously, especially with rising costs of things like healthcare and general goods needed to produce work.

There’s a reason why when you go to a fine art museum half of the most famous works and most beautiful pieces that changed the culture of art and even our perception of the world, were made by people who died in abject poverty.

It’s wild we read stories like that and say “Wow that’s a shame, I wish we could have given that artist the accolades and support they needed to survive and know how important they were for the world.” But the moment someone says “Maybe we should support artists” suddenly it’s hand-wringing and whinging about “factory workers.”

This isn’t a question if Ireland’s policy makes you feel good or bad, it’s a question whether or not you think there should be art in the world at all and what you’re willing to accept or change or pay to have that world with actual art in it.

You also won’t engage with people who agree this is a good thing without a facade of sarcasm and cynical dismissal, your agenda/actual age is showing.