on a wednesday
YAY ZOHRAN MAMDAMI! What a guy. What a win! Let’s do Zack Polanski next, okay!!
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First the olympians were all younger than me, then the entire England men’s rugby team, then my dentist, and now the Mayor of New York? Growing older is so humbling.
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The ai cats King & McGaw have used in their Andy Warhol cat prints campaign are really buggin’. Why is one of the cats enormous? Did the creator not realise that the pixel-purrfect fur is pulling much more attention than the prints? Is it really so difficult to take a photo of an actual cat in an actual home with the actual products that are for sale??! I’m not sure why I’m so worked up about this, but every time one of the sponsored photos comes up in my feed I want to throw my phone out the window.
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My youngest brother very earnestly shared a video in the family groupchat that was absolutely made by an ai slopfarm focused on content (if you can even call it that) that ✨reveals the amazing truth behind some of the world’s greatest mysteries✨ or some shit. It’s all very National Enquirer, but with a comments section (and oh boy, the comments!). My brother was like, “Look at this cool thing they discovered! I wasn’t able to find any other information about it online, but it’s awesome if it’s real,” and it took everything within me to not reply, “Is your brain on? This is very obviously not real,” but instead I just stayed quiet and did a little breathing exercise and let them get on with living their delulu life because I learned a long time ago that they think I’ve been brainwashed by the woke mainstream media and don’t like it when I call out their bullshit. But I really worry about stuff like this, about how we’re degrading what is real, about how people are so easily taken in by blatantly false imagery and information. I’ve seen so many smart people I respect share articles/social posts/infographics about the hot Louvre thief/thieves, when trueheads know that those mugshots have been floating around the internet since the Buzzfeed days (and one of them is literally Chace Crawford from Gossip Girl). I don’t know how to teach media literacy without constantly being a buzzkill and a scold (which I often am) but it’s just so frustrating. I implore everyone to please do another google before sharing something! Verify your sources! If something doesn’t feel right or seems too good to be true, it probably is!!
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It’s spiritually not right what we’ve done to the LA landscape. Think about it - LA basically has the same landscape as, like, Tuscany, but can you imagine the horror you would feel if you saw an Oppenheim Group office in those Italian hills? A setting that naturally beautiful should be full of stone homes with kitchens designed for slowly cooking down sauces, with yards full of olive, fig and citrus trees and balconies that overlook views so beautiful that you are moved to paint them. Instead, the Hollywood Hills are home to some of the ugliest houses ever shown on television, the defining features being: large plate glass windows (perfect for sun bleaching all your books and furniture), overlooked infinity pools, and completely unshaded outdoor spaces, and we’re told this is luxury. I hope they make a new season of this stupid show every year until I die, I’m being so serious.