chat

He was always the coolest shonen character to me.

No, laughing at fart jokes and saying piss and beanis over and over isn't funny. Will Hexbear ever learn what good satire is? This place is so unfunny it actually makes me mad.

I am on the precipice of one and don't want that to turn me into a disengaged normies, lib, or chud. I know that a local DSA chapter was financially backed by a person of incredible means, so I wonder what keeps such people left wing or at least SocDem.

I violated my oath and I've failed you all

…because of the thing with the money. And then losing my wallet, and then one of my plushie friends. It’s only going to get worse. I really hope I die before it does.

And in a bit over a week from now it’ll be the 1 year anniversary of the last time I saw my friend, the one who won’t talk to me anymore. One down, the rest of my lifetime to go. I know I’ll never see them again and while I think I’m over the cringey weird shit, I still think about them pretty much every day and it hurts so fucking much.

You know I’ll never get a car or a minivan or whatever. Definitely not before this winter—it gets harder to cope with every fucking year.

Fuck.

Title mostly.

I'm doing fine right now, had an argument with my brother but overall I got my path forward ironed out, but I can't shake the feeling that all of what I do is just some pathological need to stumble forward into what I'm supposed to do but rather than actually being a meaningful calling or direction.

Maybe I'm just depressed.

A bunch of restaurants around me shut down recently and everyone blames the greedy servers for demanding more tips and wages. They're blaming shoplifting too, claiming petty crime simply isn't punished enough. Someone I know claims shoplifting is legal in California.

Americans can't conceive of real estate capitalists squeezing other, smaller capitalists. It's always gotta be taxes or baristas asking for higher wages.

Every restaurant that shuts down around here is 100% the fault of landlords. No restaurant has ever folded because the servers got paid $10 per hour instead of $8 per hour

100lbs of rice and 50lbs of beans just fucking destroyed. These blighted assholes are really making me rethink my "no-kill" trap policy.

The fuck is wrong with this man?

Can't post links here without doxxing myself, but the megachurch wannabe/president of one of the boards of education around here is finally being called out. I've known about unsavory things he's done in the past, but this is the first time one of his victims has come forward. And it was someone that I was relatively close to. I'm so glad to see him finally go down.

His name was Blueberry, he was a blue whale who looked like he was made by the same company as Creamsicle. I only had him a week at the most but I loved him. I’d show you a picture of him but seeing it would be painful.

Whereas Creamsicle is a silly lovable little dumbass, Blueberry’s schtick was that he was a mature adult whale who dispenses difficult to listen to life advice.

Creamsicle will be staying at my friend’s house longer than expected because I never want to lose him, and I know it would only be a matter of time before that would happen if he were hanging out with me. He’s happier there—he just doesn’t realize it, because he’s just a baby whale.

I hope I just left him in my friend’s car, and if not, I hope he’s found by someone who will love him…

Note: I do not actually believe that uhh…you know.

He was dead when I found him. Also found quite a few giant wasps that were definitely not dead.

Yes, I'd get money for referring you, yes it's kinda shit work but it isnt hard or involved and super easy to pad time. Pays weekly with PayPal. Just basically rating responses from an AI to prompts.

Again, I don't wanna shill, but the referral bonus would help me out, and know a lot of people here are looking for something to help. They started me at $15/hour and there is hardly any human contact involved unless I have a question about something.

So yeah i guess holler if this sounds like it's something that'd help. I feel kinda scummy about this post since I would benefit too, but I just wanna pass it along to comrades if it's something needed.

Mods, feel free to delete if you want.

Maybe the solution is to stay off Twitter, but it's very disturbing to see the normalization of slurs happening in real time on there. White people saying the n-word with approval, the return of saying "gay" as a pejorative, lots of casual racism against Indian men, using the r-slur to describe something seen as stupid. I don't know whether this is a larger cultural lurch to the right, or whether it's mostly attributed to Musk's elimination of quality control and monitors on the platform.

This might be old news but it's kinda wild to me.

You might remember Doug Lain from being the publishing manager when Zero Books rose to prominence, back when Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher made a big splash way back when. He moved on to Sublation Media and seems to be doing roughly the same schtick after Zero got taken over by a different parent publisher. (History seems to rhyme for Doug, getting put into his position at Zero Books with the ouster of the old crew when John Hunt took over only for Watkins Media to take over John Hunt, ingloriously booting Lain out in the process.)

Doug has always been a part of the sorta eclectic post-New Left cultural critique, in that milquetoast style of BreadTube broad left "YouTube Killed The TV Star: Adorno, Benjamin, and the desolate media landscape of late capitalism" or "One-Dimensional Marvel: Marcuse and the MCU" style of slop. Y'know, the stuff where it's super pretentious and yet deeply tailist of pop culture trends with a smattering of a couple of the quotes from the key text referenced in the title, the same one that every textbook and every first-year student quotes, in order to give the impression that it's super serious marxist critique when it's actually just 20-60 minutes of anti-capitalist bellyaching combined with the latest fad.

Yeah, that sort of stuff. He's good buddies with Ben Burgis who is a hack that has been trying to position himself as the patron philosopher-saint of the progressive-to-socialish left for years now, to little avail.

Welp, turns out that Doug had Peter Coffin on for an interview a month ago here, where he's uncritically buying into the whole "woke ideology" narrative and all buddy-buddy with Coffin, who is Caleb Maupin's #1 fan (turns out that Peter Coffin isn't handling the divorce well). And apparently Doug has been doing some livestreams on Midwestern Marx and MAGA communism (I thought they abandoned that name, but Doug doesn't really have his finger on the pulse tbh) and he has an upcoming stream on Maupin and Coffin. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to stomach multiple hours of livestreams from Doug Lain about PatSocs and Midwestern Marx to get a read on what his position is.

In one respect this development is totally on-brand for Lain, to be chasing whatever audience and principles be damned (the Angela Nagle bullshit didn't faze him - doesn't matter; sold copies, he was quite comfortable hanging out with the stupidpol crowd on Reddit too) but in another respect, his frequent collaborator Ben Burgis has always played at sheepdog to the left by policing the limits to radical left discourse and positioning himself as anti-authoritarian and buying into that anti-communist paradigm so it's kind of a weird pivot.

I think Peter Coffin's angle is pretty apparent - he's just courting a legitimate publisher so that a ghostwriter can do some turd-polishing for whatever he manages to draft, sparing him the indignities of having to self-publish next time around.

But it's still weird to me. Maybe they're proving horseshoe theory true and making a connection between the libertarian faux left of people like Lance from The Serfs, Beau of The Fifth Column, and Ben Burgis with the authoritarian faux left like MWM, Maupin, and Coffin where Doug Lain is the connecting point between those two trends. I guess if they're all on different grifts, and they are, then this would explain how it all fits together neatly.

But on the other hand idk. It feels like the online discourse on the left is reaching a weird inflection point. You have Gabriel Rockhill and his Critical Theory Workshop, Rockhill being closely associated with PSL and someone who should know better, courting the MWM audience. Then you have Doug Lain, who should also know better although I'm not surprised if he doesn't give a damn, doing a similar thing and he's broadening out to openly PatSoc audience and not just confining himself to the crypto-PatSoc MWM audience. It's giving Strasserist vibes tbh.

Luckily it's online and not the real world, I guess?

It's gonna be a really awkward moment when Hinkle, Haz, Maupin, Coffin, and MWM drop the pretense and finally jump the shark to become openly fascist, perhaps taking some of these courtiers with them. Imagine having the tankies screaming for years on end about these clowns being fascist in all but name and orbiting Larouchite cutouts with nobody listening because "tankie redfash", only for this position to be vindicated eventually. Though if history is any guide, those SocDems are gonna find themselves chanting PatSoc slogans side-by-side with the likes of Hinkle, Haz, Eddie and Peter to own the tankies:

We live in interesting times.

Basically, I dress like a punk rock Luffy these days. I was walking home with the corgi wearing my straw hat, and a family was walking past me. Little girl, must have been like 10 or younger, stopped in her tracks when she saw me. Her mouth fell open, and she started excitedly yelling "MOM! ITS LUFFY! ITS LUFFY!"

Made me smile and i wanted to share

don't wanna get filtered because people think I'm some libertarian freak

but also 🤢liberal

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2781613

Do any of you have experience with community mesh networking? It seems like a fun time and a good way to connect with people (socially and technically lol) in the community. Not to mention the possibility of providing at least limited internet access to people who can't access it by conventional means for whatever reason. A community mesh network might also have organizing possibilities - especially because the state or the cops or a company can't just shut it off or look inside it as easily

I don't really know where else to post this, so I figured my comrades at Hexbear might appreciate it.

A couple months ago I was coming back home from the weekly Palestine solidarity rally. On my way back home I needed to somehow obtain a $5 bill to tip the grocery delivery guy that weekend, and thought "Hell, I haven't had a cigar in a while, maybe I'll pick one up". There's a cute little Cuban cigar shop down the road, so I popped in.

The owner is a short Cuban man, and he was rummaging through his cigars doing whatever cigar-store owners do in their down-time. I walk in the door. He looks at me, then looks at my keffiyeh, then back at me, then back at my keffiyeh, and then says "...Palestine?" Not knowing his politics, I reluctantly say "...yes 😬?"

This triggers a 40 minute long discussion, whereupon he goes off on how fucking despicable what's Israel is doing in Gaza is how they are getting away with mass murder in broad daylight, doing "exactly what the nazis did" etc etc. He had clearly been following what's been happening and was sickened by it and I got the impression he didn't have much of an outlet to express his thoughts (as many of us don't).

I wanted to buy two small cigars (the ones on the right in the photo) and he said that he'd give me a discount, and ended up giving me three free of charge, on the condition that the next time that I was out protesting the genocide in Gaza that I "yell a little louder for him" ✊, to which I of course agreed (there are only two in the photo because I've smoked one already) I honestly tried as hard as I could to give him my money but he simply would not accept any.

Although I left the cigar shop without the $5 bill I went in for, I did leave with three exquisite Cuban cigars free of charge.

So, I felt I needed to repay this guy for the ~$100 of free merchandise he gave me. I ordered him a keffiyeh made in the West Bank just like the one I was wearing. When it arrived, I popped back into the cigar shop and said " I have something for you." and put it on his desk.

I will never forget this for the rest of my life. How much did you pay for this?

I lied and said "Only about $60, don't worry about it."

You're lying. What cigars are your favourite?

I insisted that he not give me any more cigars because I was trying to pay him back, but he wouldn't take no for an answer. He ended up giving me four deluxe Cuban Bolivar cigars straight from Havana. On the way out he gave me a fist bump accompanied by a "Free Palestine".

So Hexbears, this is how I unintentionally stocked my cigar humidor with solidarity for Palestine 🇵🇸✊

I'm going to save a spare one so that maybe one day I can smoke it on the beaches of Gaza when Palestine is free.

Link to this beaut

I know this is some boomer tier shit I'm on right now, but im not gonna download snap or discord just to keep chatting, if you're wanting to talk to me somewhere other than an app I'll just give you my number.

I get WHY people would prefer it, keeping a little bit of their info private, but im still not downloading snapchat.

Also this is in the context of ENM/poly stuff