Riding somewhat on what other’s were saying regarding the neutron bombardment experiments: there’s also stuff like the “demon core,” the fissile core for the planned-but-never-made-or-dropped 3rd nuclear bomb. The scientists did create nuclear piles that were subcritical and measured them and such. Those are the “small (and extremely slow) explosions” that led to the big (fast) ones later.

We value “breakthroughs” way too much, for precisely the same reason we overvalue critical “climactic” events in history: we’re storytelling apes and good stories have singular inflection moments that teach lessons. But real life doesn’t have that, real life has incremental change that humans arbitrarily assign a critical moment after some accumulation to in order to make narratives.

Having now read the article, I will also add that this article is exactly emblematic of why Western elites simply do not get this stuff. They don’t even have language to describe it.

Describing these videos as “Trojan horses” is such a bad metaphor. Likewise all the fake-history and myth-making that being politically informative and entertaining are somehow left-wing phenomena invented by Jon Stewart.

People don’t engage with politics rationally, they do it emotionally. Most people engage with most things emotionally; thinking is hard and energy-intensive. Easily absorbed cartoons and entertainment are not “Trojan horses” because there is no secret message. This is the fundamental misunderstanding conservatives have about media: the messages aren’t secret, they are overt and obvious, you just aren’t trained to understand them.

Taking a media illiterate person and flinging complex jargon and symbols at them makes them feel stupid, so they reject it. Feeding them simple symbols (made for children) that speak in the language of simple emotions makes them feel like an insider who understands secrets. This feeling is so good that people start hunting for symbols in things with limited understanding of how to properly do so or experienced knowledge, so they start finding whatever their mind expects to find: demons, angels, enemies, government communist agents, whatever they’re afraid of.

Trump’s camp has become so insular they’ve forgotten that even media illiterate people understand things like not being able to afford food while the president posts a video of himself shifting on you.

Interviewer:

"In your opinion, if anyone around the world wants to take their revenge on the assassination of Soleimani and intends to do it proportionately in the way they suggest — that we take one of theirs now that they’ve got one of ours — who should we consider to take out in the context of America?

Iranian Cleric Shahab Moradi:

“Think about it. Are we supposed to take out Spider-Man and SpongeBob? They don’t have any heroes. We have a country in front of us with a large population and a large landmass, but it doesn’t have any heroes. All of their heroes are cartoon characters — they’re all fictional.”

They’re brilliant: using Lego to create violent short form cartoons. In a very “master-slave dialectic” way, it’s quite apparent that Americans know nothing about the world while the rest of the world understands us all too well.

I liked it, but it does get pretty dull in the end game. Lots of repetitive body management, and you get into a perfectionist mindset where you want to only put top-tier bodies into the ground or to work as zombies, so you end up burning a lot of bodies and grinding for good organs.

Plus, the story goes basically no where even with the expansions. A lot of fun, good for that Stardew Valley itch, but flawed. Hopefully their sequel is a richer game.

I had one I’d been keeping for about 6 years, then suddenly, it bloomed! Now it blooms almost every year, twice sometimes, and it’s offspring have also started after a few years! I love them, all those pretty little bell-blossoms. Mine are more reddish I think, loving the green-yellow of yours, but maybe they’ll redden over time as well.

There are a lot of tools out there not pretending, let alone the AI ones.

URLs use a system called punycode to convert to a subset of ASCII that’s used for DNS resolution. Not sure if typing in non-ascii script in the address bar would auto-convert in most browsers or not though.

man with gyrojet pistol: I am become carrier, deployer of aircraft.