Icarus Robotics is a startup with at least six million dollars in funding so far. the idea is to train robots on human workers to make space mass production... work. or something.

anyway i don't see any red flags

Sarah and Helen are joined by reporter on the far right Michael Edison Hayden to discuss his new book Strange People on the Hill, about what happened when far right propaganda outlet VDARE bought a castle overlooking a small West Virginia town.

We discuss The Camp of the Saints, a racist novel that has quietly become fundamental to how the right wing talks about immigration.

Also, last week we released a members only episode about the pseudoscience paper repository viXra.

Links to more platforms on our website at https://www.odiumsymposium.com/

archive link: https://archive.ph/ONKkm

contextualizes the topic beautifully. you might learn a lot about how american racism relates to capital and art from this article

highlight: most of these guys are into classical art fascism but one of them, a bitcoin guy looking to build a 450 foot tall statue of prometheus, appears to be specifically into italian fascism. his favorite aesthetic is futurism and he hired a futurist sculptor with this "manifesto" on his website:

strongly recommend giving this one a read to the end

archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20251018152548/https://defector.com/what-world-does-bitcoin-want-to-build-for-itself?giftLink=652b421e2ad5368e496e978045e2337a

introducing speculative assets into the housing market has caused some problems before.

it's for corrupt purposes, of course:

The blockchain idea is being pushed, a HUD official told colleagues, by Irving Dennis. Dennis, the agency’s new principal deputy chief financial officer, is a former partner at the global consulting giant EY, also commonly known by its original name, Ernst & Young. EY itself is involved in the proposal as well: An executive of the firm discussed the idea with HUD officials last month.

a followup story: https://www.propublica.org/article/hud-cryptocurrency-blockchain-democrats-maxine-waters

archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250329193844/https://www.propublica.org/article/hud-considers-crypto-blockchain-stablecoin-housing-urban-development

We all know Elon Musk as the funniest man alive.

but did you know that Musk is also a lifelong gamer? for example, here he is in the chess club of his whites only apartheid prep school.

grew out of that though.

really want to highlight the phrase "understandable when all we had to play with were squirrels and rocks." what the fuck is he talking about?

in any case, he clearly has some issues around the game and I suspect his performance in the chess club. the dude loves to downplay the complexity of the game.

he knows how to tune it up, though.

hmm. fog of war, tech trees, randomized starting positions. that actually sounds a little familiar. could it be...?

OH YEAH BABY! you knew it had to be polytopia!

what the fuck is polytopia?

this is polytopia:

sophisticated Gamers will notice three things here:

1. this is clearly a mobile game first, meaning it was developed to fit into the industry's nastiest shithole: the ios and android app markets. i'll tell you right now that polytopia doesn't have gambling in its microtransactions (which instantly makes it cream of the crop), but you can expect it to be braindead and shallow.

2. this game is for children. look the bright primary colors, the character's huge eyes, and the low poly style, which evokes minecraft.

3. this game looks a LOT like civilization. specifically, it looks like civilization 3:

For those not familiar, the civilization series is the standard bearer for the 4X genre. it's a style of slow, macromanagement focused turn based strategy focused on the "four Xes" of exploration, expansion, exploitation, and extermination. thematically, they present societies as machines for producing imperialism. the civilization games are also fearsomely complex and famously deep.

not so with polytopia:

so yeah, it's baby civilization. but the thing that really kills me is that musk is obsessed with this game. like... really obsessed, according to a story published on yahoo finance.

This puff piece is sourced from "Benzinga," a tech finance news site that seems to mostly post about crypto, ai and tesla. context clues suggest the content is entirely ripped from walter isaacson's biography of musk. I have to emphasize that all of this is intended to be flattering - right in the middle, they take a break from the content to shill some affiliate link I won't click on:

that's the image of musk they want to convey. anything they include is in support of that.

saying "I am just wired for war" because you play a lot of polytopia is classic elon cringe. beating a game's developer is nothing to brag about, by the way. most game developers are terrible at their own games.

i would argue that ragequitting to the parking lot to smack down your employee/mother of your children in a baby game is also not something to brag about:

flexing on mom almost shows up more than once in the article...

... except, twist, for some reason he beat his employee but not his partner???

and yes, he sulked like a little shitbag he when he lost. one has to suspect that if his sycophants weren't constantly throwing polytopia matches against him he'd have turned on it just like he did chess.

before you read this next bit I want to emphasize again that EVERYTHING IN THIS ARTICLE IS INTENDED TO BE FLATTERING.

his brother seems to feel the same way

(and from another benzinga sourced yahoo finance story):

here's what i think: elon musk isn't learning shit from polytopia. he's a profoundly stupid and childish man who likes moving brightly colored blocks around and being told he won. he's projecting the disgusting and wretched pile of deficiencies which is his personality onto a game for babies. as someone who only fails upward and cannot stand to fail, it is impossible for him to learn from reality; doing so would require facing what is too painful to face.

why the fuck would anyone want a raisin catalog

lab grown meat is a vaguely EA/rationalist/self IDed neolib meme. in theory it will save the environment (ok) and prevent suffering (yay) in a way that concentrates capital (double yay) and involves a lot of tech magic (triple yay).

hot luigi is a big fan apparently. seeing this discussed reminded me of this excellent article which shreds the concept of mass produced lab grown meat. I haven't really seen this circulate much over the years, but it is really a masterwork of grift dissection. please enjoy

archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20241208141305/https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/

archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20241206205437/https://www.404media.co/brian-thompson-social-media-reactions-reddit-facebook-twitter/

bonus warm fuzzies: https://www.404media.co/multiple-major-health-insurance-companies-take-down-leadership-pages-following-murder-of-united-healthcare-ceo/

bonus HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42014013 :

archive: https://archive.ph/osPSg

i haven't played magic the gathering in ages but i still follow it for some reason. if you're not checked in with the game, here's what's been going on in recent years: it's been enshittifying. i'm fascinated by when gacha games (which this essentially is) start putting the screws to players. here are some of the ways it's gone down

• the game used to have rigorous processes for managing balance, processes which sometimes failed spectacularly, but held up most of the time. empirically, that's pretty much gone. almost all of the cards that have ever been banned in the standard format have come from the last several years, and they printed a mechanic so broken that they errata'd it to cost more. to be clear, this is a game that is played with physical cards that the text can't be changed on. the situation was so dire that they just said "ok everyone should know, ignore the text on the cards, they are too broken the way we made them."
• they thought a bit about how the majority of their playerbase wasn't playing the somewhat competitive 1 vs 1 style the game was originally designed for. instead, most people play several person free for all formats, in particular these days a format called commander. so they've been absolutely shredding these people's wallets and ruining their games by designing rare cards specifically to end up being powerful in commander. recently they printed a commander card so busted in various formats that the former friend of mine who designed it ended up falling on his sword, writing an extremely apologetic essay about how he personally fucked up by letting it slip through.
• there's a whole much larger drama around the commander format that i haven't got the energy to go into here. the most tolerable summary is that they printed a card so ridiculous that the format dissolved and was remade under a wave of death threats when it was banned. i know that doesn't make sense, just trust me, or write your own summary of it.
• they found out that the more cards they come out with, the more cards they sell, so they've just been cranking out designs at greater and greater volume. at any given time there is a massive chunk of cards that are about to hit the shelves, and which they're 'teasing' and fomoing players about. the game is about 30 years old and they've been hitting a pace of printing something like 10% to 15% of all cards ever, every year.
• every once in a while they release joke sets, with weird or silly mechanics like having to yell things or tearing up cards. generally, these cards are not allowed in semi competitive play. well, they thought the most recent one would sell better if that wasn't the case, so they marked as many of these cards as they could as being tournament legal (but to keep the outcry tamped down, not in their standard format). one of these cards in particular, a goblin that makes you put stickers on things, was so miserable to have in tournament play that they ended up backtracking and banning all the joke cards.
• they found out they could make a big chunk of money by ditching their own setting and making cards for licensed IPs. they've been printing ever increasing numbers of cards themed around everything from the walking dead to fortnite to marvel to street fighter to spongebob, which sell like hotcakes. people who are invested in the style and theme of magic the gathering aren't super pleased. again, to placate the haters, these cards are not allowed in the standard competitive format, giving people who want to do wizard shit a refuge.

the last bullet point brings us to today: just kidding, frog boiled, you will now have captain america and kefka fighting each other at your table whether you like it or not. reactions are not entirely positive:

https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/1gc3w97/universes_beyond_will_enter_through_standard/

something that's quite interesting to me is how few people i've seen bootlick for wizards of the coast in recent years. i've looked at reactions to other games enshittifying and always saw lots of defenders of the company in charge, with four lines of attack being most common:

• they have to put bread on the table
• whew i know this seems bad but i would be ok with it if they just gave us 2% more crumbs. it's sooooo close to the right level of abuse
• stop being poor
• bro, just vote with your dollar bro

i've been seeing very little of that in regards to mtg. some people have denied the pot was getting warmer, but mostly, people have just turned into haters. not sure why; perhaps it has to do with the small scale social aspect of magic. if you're playing marvel snap and having the blood drained out of your neck, you don't really have a group of specific people you're experiencing that in concert with; with mtg you do. it could be the strength of small scale personal ties that both keeps people invested in this game, and makes people angry at how that investment is being treated

unfortunately i don't see any reason that this anger is likely to put a stop to things. after all, arch-enshittifier facebook is still making ultrabucks, despite having destroyed its reputation on every possible level and despite constantly enraging its users. you can do horrible things to people and just coast! it works!

EDIT: this is election relevant btw https://awful.systems/comment/5086076

- curtis yarvin

the symbolism is 😗👌

archive link: https://archive.ph/jFO6f

archive link

https://archive.ph/n3Ffq

Judge Mehta’s Google decision is likely to be appealed. “Regardless of who wins or loses, this case probably has a date with the Supreme Court,” Mr. Kovacic said.

ah well