Joe Biden's Vision Pro
Graffiti in LA is a "worldwide issue" according to the cops. Apple doesn't want your spatially-rendered dingaling. The United States is facing a serious POTUS problem. Israel is now bombing Rafah.
LA Graffiti is a "Worldwide Issue"
The chief of police of the LAPD said a thing that is absolutely on brand for someone who is the chief of police of the LAPD: asserting that the recent graffiti bombing of a years-since-abandoned luxury apartment construction project is a "center of mischief and turmoil" and a "worldwide issue."
If you've not yet seen, a bunch of graffiti artists worked together to cover a few buildings in LA in tags. The buildings are unfinished luxury high rise apartments, abandoned by the developer when cash dried up.
The street art has called attention to the looming, empty structure during a homelessness crisis, calling into question… why?
But let's not focus on that. Instead, we need to be aware that the LAPD has arrested some people involved, some of whom are from another country, so that makes this a WORLDWIDE ISSUE.
He went on to refer to the location as, "an iconic location that unfortunately has been taken off track and now been taken advantage by these vandals."
In other news, the worlds biggest square has finally been identified.
A Walled Garden Without Porn
Alright so the Apple Vision Pro is out, and guys (and let's be clear, it's guys) are wearing them around and explaining that we all simply don't understand why this is the future yet. Now, augmented reality is pretty neato and all that. But uh. It's not "$3,500 for a 2-hour battery life device that doesn't actually do a whole lot of AR stuff" neato.
Anyway, you can do a few things with the Vision Pro: you can watch movies, you can set timers… y'know—real advanced technology stuff. But there's also something you can't do: VR porn. At least, not out of the box.
Now, you can look at porn on the Vision Pro, sure. But Apple has disabled the ability to watch "spatial VR porn" on the headsets, requiring users to go through an obnoxious process to actually enable it on the headset.
While porn often drives sales for platforms and mediums, Apple has not historically been one to lean in on that front, opting instead to keep things fairly PG.
And I'm not here to shame you on the VR porn thing. Quite the opposite, I'm just trying to save you from a bad investment, horn-wise.
VR porn a no go for Apple Vision Pro users as capability blocked by Apple
We've Got A POTUS Problem
It's not good right now y'all. I don't like talking about these two old gasbags, but we're staring down the barrel of a Biden v Trump rematch election in 2024 and it's just so not lovely.
In one corner, we have Joe Biden. While dealing with a stutter is a real and serious thing to contend with, he seems to have undeniable problems beyond his stutter.
Democrats are on their back foot after a report came out about Biden's mishandling of government documents, in which the special counsel noted that Biden is exhibiting lapses in memory. While Dems clutch their pearls and call this a politically motivated attack, anyone who has seen footage of Biden recently would be deeply unsurprised.
So Biden got big mad after that and went on to have a bizarre press conference where he yelled at reporters about how good his memory is.
Its giving "person, woman, man, camera, tv."
All of this is set to a backdrop in which the vast majority of Americans think Biden's age is a serious concern. Even Hilldawg has chimed in on that, also echoing the other half of the poll: people think Trump is old as fuck too, just not to the same degree as Biden. Which, by the way…
In the other corner, we have Trump, who is steeped in lawsuits, who has spent his entire life very publicly being a white collar criminal, who would likely do everything in his power to establish himself as a dictator should he get elected again, and now has gone on to say he would encourage hostile nations to attack our allies if our allies don't pay enough into NATO.
Look: I don't stan NATO. At the same time, what kind of morally corrupt sack of shit likens international relations to "paying bills"? Boiling down centuries of history, strife, human suffering, war, rebuilding, everything that has gone into establishing security, then toying with it and treating it like a protection racket? Oh wait. That is exactly Trump's whole shit, and for some reason, scores of sad, soulless, lost people support him in treating money as god and him as our prophet.
We've got a POTUS problem, and no, a third party candidate does not have a chance in hell. I hate to acknowledge that just as much as anyone else, but it's not pessimism. It's just reality. We as a nation are not in a position to organize so broadly as to sway the results of a general presidential election. We are barely winning union drives within specific industries. Getting a critical mass of Americans to vote for a specific third party candidate while the major parties and their funders invest billions into ensuring that does not happen; it just isn't in the cards.
If they're comfortable sending in cops and the FBI to shake up activists in their own homes in Georgia, they'd be comfortable stopping the sudden upheaval of a the multi-billion-dollar American political industry.
So what is the solution? Here's an idea: there isn't one. Not at the ballot box. There is no ideal outcome, and it is a waste of time to look for one or spend that much time, money and energy trying to manifest a solution at the ballot box. There are much easier, cheaper and more direct ways to make an impact.
An Update on Gaza
Content warning: It fucking sucks in the ways you expect it to. Death, child death, genocide.
I do not feel comfortable flowering up the discussion here, but I want to share the current updates with Israel's ongoing genocide against the people of Gaza.
Every time I've opened the article about this, the death tolls have gone up, as Israel is now bombing and attacking Rafah, the southern-most point in Gaza where Israel has, up until now, been telling civilians to flee to for safety. Latest toll I have seen is around 60 Palestinians dead at time of writing, with at least two dozen of them being children. Israel boasts that they secured two hostages back from Hamas during the "operation," here "operation" meaning "airstrikes against civilians used as cover".
Israel apologists will often cite that the only reason Israel has killed near thirty thousand Palestinians is because "Hamas uses civilians as human shields." Israel has made 80% of Gaza uninhabitable, and has routinely told refugees to "head south," then they began bombing points of egress, and now are launching airstrikes against the refugees, using the chaos to mask an operation to save two people. Thirty thousand lives ended, almost half are children, and the massive crowds of displaced souls have nowhere left to go.
There is no upside. That's where the story is left.
Here's a Challenge
At some point today, try to think of your earliest positive memory and try to express it in the best detail you're able to. Be it through writing, artwork, music, or otherwise.
Here's the Weather
More Stuff
(This one had a lot of compound story stuff so this section is a bit lighter than usual)