Let’s start with everything and go from there, shall we?

Exactly.

What an idiotic take.

“Celebrity” worship has existed since the dawn of cinema. Star Power is what brings people into the theatres.

People have always wanted to know all the salacious gossip about their favourite celebs, and that’s what makes Hollywood go around; they want to fell like they “know” their favourite actor/director etc…

For example:

• The only reason anyone remembers "Mr. And Mrs. Smith is because its the movie that gave us Brangelina and broke up Pitt and Aniston.
• “The Whale” was a mediocre movie at best that won awards in part because of Brendan Frasier’s comeback after being shunned in Hollywood.
• Martin Sheen being legitimately drunk and cutting open his hand created an iconic scene in Apocalypse Now.

I could go on and on. Point is, actors being themselves into the roles that they play.

You can’t replace that with soulless homunculi that have no life off screen.

Corporations are not your friend. Ethics plays no part in it. It’s economics. If they price themselves out of the competition, that’s their problem, not yours.

Can anyone make out what the piece of paper says?

I vote the Fediverse just invents it’s own fake language, like Esperanto, or French.

No one can tell me that Leavitt wasn’t desperately trying to avoid winking when she said “shots will fly”. That smug look on her face said everything.

They’re super confident and cocky in their incometence. And why wouldn’t they be? No one…literally NO ONE…has called them out on it.

He’s just thinking 'Hey…if she takes a shot to the belly, it’s an easy abortion for Elon’s latest bastard child"

Favourite: Chick Peas

Least: Fava beans

Wasn’t it leaked in a memo that Trump was planning some kind of “confrontation” at the dinner?

Is anyone stupid enough to believe this asshole?

Anything by Bear McCreary.

Black Sails is my personal favourite.

https://youtu.be/XFTcA4QLHw0

But, welp, it’s been a long while since I tinkered with Kerbal Space Program.

My desktop went to the big compost bin in the sky a couple of months ago and I’m just about at the point where I’ve saved enough for a replacement, and KSP is literally the first thing I’m itching to dive into when I do.

In both models, the rings are way to small. The speed at which they would need to spin would create an unacceptably large imbalance between the gravity at the person’s feet and the gravity at the person’s head. You’re astronauts would be puking 24/7.

I’ve had times when I’ve felt exactly the same. And the conclusion that I’ve come to, and the mantra that I repeat to myself is:

“Who you are, What you do, and how you pay your bills” don’t need to be the same thing. And in fact you don’t want them to be.

Two out of the three is fine. But all three being the same should be avoided like the plague.

After 9/11 completely tanked my planned career in Near Eastern Classical Archaeology, I floated around for a bit. Got some IT certs, but mostly have worked a series of crappy retail management gigs. And yeah…for a long time, it bothered the fuck out of me. It didn’t help that I suffered from depression. But I get that same “what’s the point feeling”.

But I’ve also written for my entire life, and I have a number of things that I’m become decent to good at over the years that I’ve used for passion projects. I was bored so I learned video editing and use those skills on other people’s low budget projects. I have a decent level of Blender knowledge and I enjoy flight simming, so I spend a lot of time creating aircraft for X-Plane. Both of those have netted me very minor amounts of money through paypal donations, etc… But that’s secondary to doing something that I love because I don’t need them to pay my bills for me.

So while retail management is how I pay my bills, it’s not who I am and it’s not what I do. In fact I tried doing the freelance writing thing for a bit and I ended up miserable because What I do and How I pay the bills became the same thing and it stopped being fun.

Retail management pays my bills, and allows me the free-time necessary to pursue my passions in my free time.

Long story short, and I apologize if you don’t find this helpful at all, but you’re biggest disservice to yourself is thinking that “working at Walmart” is who you are. It’s not. It’s just how you pay the bills so that you can pursue your actual talents on a full belly.

Exactly. I think this is what we’ve fundamentally lost in our communities. People helping neighbours.

We’re all taught to distrust one another and to be self-sufficient, but that’s never how our society evolved in the first place. Cities evolved because cooperation was needed. Division of labour, etc…

I’m lucky that I live in a small city that still mostly has some of that going on. But it’s getting more rare every year. Elderly lady that lived across the alley from me had too small a backyard for her usual garden, so I said she was free to use mine because I wasn’t needing the space for anything. In return, I got to know my neighbour, and I got veggies come harvest time. She unfortunately passed away two years ago, and the young family that bought the house…haven’t even met them yet; they ignore eye contact whenever we’re both outside.

Maybe I’m just weird because I grew up in the country. We had a small acreage within a cluster of small acreages. And we all knew each other. The family down the way was a mechanic looking at our vehicles for us. When hay baling needed to be done, we would all pitch in and help. My dad was a construction worker, so he’d go help the neighbours build stuff. It’s just how it was for us.

That is very true. However (at least from what I was always taught) the reason employers “require” ANY degree is less about what you learn and more about showing them that you have ability and commitment necessary TO learn.

An employer isn’t generally interested in what you know; they’re always going to teach you their way of doing things anyway.

Employers want to know that you have the focus to actually learn their systems.

So the end result of “fast degrees” will be the opposite of what job hunters think. It’ll just devalue degrees in the eyes of employers because it no longer signifies the very metric they were measuring, which was the ability to pay attention

Even Slenderman needs a break sometimes.

“Paying it forward” is fundamentally the most important weapon we have against the oligarchy, and simply refusing to participate in the endless cycle of new technology.

A long time ago, I kind of stumbled into a habit of “paying my hardware forward”. It started because it was simply a pain in the ass to try to sell something on ebay because your first ten offers are scam artists.

So when I upgraded a drawing tablet that I was using, I had a friend of a friend that was looking to try digital drawing and said “Here you go. The only thing I ask is that when you upgrade, or when you’re done with it, give it forward to someone else who could make use of it.”

Later, the same thing happened again with a camera stabilizer. I had bought one that it turned out was too lightweight for my DSLR. So I had to buy a heavier weight one. Meanwhile, a friend’s son was a budding filmmaker just using his cell phone to make stupid movies with his friends and I said “Hey…he’ll like this. The only thing I ask is when HE upgrades, or whatever, he passes it forward to another person”

Even something as simple as a dog ramp I bought for my aging dog. After he passed, it hung around in my shed until a friend of mine’s dog needed an operation and couldn’t do stairs. When her dog recovered she asked if I wanted it back and I said, no…just pass it forward.

I’ve done it with spare monitors. Old laptops that someone has needed for school, etc…

So what started as me just being too impatient to deal with ebay became something that literally makes me feel good knowing that I’m helping someone out, or even better, supporting another person’s artistic passion.

On the other hand, I would fire someone instantly if they had cheated their degree like this.

But all you’re doing in that case is making them attend a community college with a bunch of wacky misfits for a few years.

My only concern would be a question of retention.

It’s easy to pass an exam if you’re writing it almost immediately after taking in the information. But remembering the information at the end of the school year when you’re writing your final exam and it’s a topic you learned in the first week takes a different kind of study skill.

It boils down to the old Cram for midterms question. How much do you retain?

My take is that retention comes from revisiting a topic multiple times over the course of a year. One and done studying to pass an exam doesn’t leave an imprint on the memory that’s going to last.