ragebutt

加爾基 精液 栗ノ花 /Chlorine, Semen, Chestnut Flower by 椎名 裕美子/Shiina Ringo

Pretty influential j pop that is lesser known in the west but is baroque/chamber pop with strong jazz and electronica elements, not the typical sailor uniform stuff (not that that’s inherently bad, but it gets old fast imo).

Layered production (which she did herself for her the first time) with a wide degree of instrumentation including guitar, bass, drums, strings, koto, pipe organ, prepared piano, erhu (a Chinese stringed instrument), mellotron, a conch (like the actual seashell), didgeridoo, her brother’s wife’s vacuum cleaner (actually), etc

There are influences of bjork in her music. There’s some beach boys style production in here. this is, in my opinion, her best work.

The lyrics are filled with tension and provocation, discussing life, purity, and mortality

The albums name was apparently because she overheard some guys in the studio arguing about whether cum smells more like chlorine or chestnut flowers. It was originally supposed to be called something else and this created tension with the label. But anyway some interesting notes if you don’t speak the runes:

The romaji for the album name is karuki zamen kuri no hana

加爾基 - karuki (calcium) this is what gets translated to chlorine. However, these kanji are kind of old school. More typically calcium/karuki could be written with hiragana thuslyカルキ or more typically with katakana カルシウム because it’s a loan word. This was likely a very deliberate choice because these kanji mean things tho:

加 (ka) - add/increase 爾 (ru) - a old super formal you used here for sound 基 (ki) - base/foundation

精液 - this just means semen

栗ノ花 - kuri no hana - a subtle euphemism for basically “cum smell”. Quick backstory here: in Japan it’s pretty common knowledge that chestnut flowers smell like jizz. I had no idea. Perhaps you didn’t either? Now you do.

So you basically have this title that plays into the themes of the album (purity, foundation, reproduction) and has this interesting contrast between a very deliberate almost poetic interpretation of one word to include thematic elements, a very standard delivery of the next, and the final is delivered in a standard way as well but it comes as essentially a double entendre of the second.

Highly recommend

So you were administering systems or something similar? Then sure, I am sure for you and your team it brought you together (and maybe some tension at times). Glad it went well. But society as a whole? Eh

That’s the challenge though. On a micro level it’s easy. I work in mental health and I have similar stories from my days working in hospitals (I do outpatient work now) where our unit staff have banded together for challenges. Covid was like that at the beginning. Then it fell apart because everything became politicized thanks to our dogshit leadership at the time

But finding something that can (for the most part) unite all of society? Even limiting it to just the US that’s a talllllll order. Especially if you also don’t want it to fall apart after a month like the Covid thing

I went to one of their branches to pick up an order for some stuff that was obscenely expensive to ship because it was only like 45m away from me at the time (I’ve since moved, unfortunately). The building was basically just like a desk and then you could see all the logistics going on behind it. Like I don’t think people typically come pick stuff up. It was wild, so much shit going on at once, and gigantic

Were you in an industry affected or are you just reminiscing on being in society

Because being in society for y2k was utterly meaningless. We did nothing. We did not come together, we did not work hard. A small handful of dweebs noticed the issue and fixed it.

The USA, with its burgeoning 24 hour news cycle and coming off such hits as oj, princess di, and columbine, recognized they could blow that shit up. So then America wasted 40 billion dollars and a shitload of fear mongering when basically every other country spent almost nothing for essentially the same outcome. Because the outcome was contingent on patches to windows and the Linux kernel, which were obviously going to happen long before 1/1/2000 and regardless of the government because it was a glaring bug that was found

I do ultimately agree with your sentiment though. A common enemy is not necessary and we absolutely can be unified around a cause. The space race obviously had Russia as a villain. The new deal is something that on paper could unify but in practice saw conservative opposition and liberal criticism that it didn’t go far enough. I still think it’s possible though, even if an example is a challenge to think up

iphone holds its value better I think is what they’re going for

I used to be a supervisor at a psych hospital and had to regularly explain this to staff who were refusing overtime. They wanted to do it, sometimes desperately so because they needed the money, but they were utterly convinced that once they crossed 40 or 45k or whatever they would be taxed higher and make it all pointless. I felt like some just didn’t want to do ot, which was fine, but some legit keep meticulous records of their earnings to ensure they wouldn’t go over the line. I swore to them it didn’t work this way but they never believed me

Sometimes I think back to like 1996-2002. I couldn’t pick a wallpaper so for windows 95-xp I just went with “blue”. It was exciting to see how the shade of blue changed from 95 to 98, me, 2000, vista, xp

I feel like it went so hard too. Because it was actually just blue. Like on my phone I can set it to a single color but if you look closely it’s not really, it’s a subtle gradient. Because some UI designer decided that looks more elegant then the harsh blue I spent 5+ years staring at in the 90s. So if I want that now I gotta find a wallpaper of it and use that. Ridiculous

Anyway cool wallpaper. I also like minimalist wallpapers is what this long ass post was about

Fuck that and you’re stupid. You’re just falling for their bullshit “save the children” nonsense so they can extend their overreach to ban more media they don’t like

Granted someone who jerks off to toddler lolicon is super gross and should probably talk to a therapist. And someone who is making cp deepfakes is way worse and there is probably an argument for government intervention at this point. And both should maybe not pass a background check for jobs like babysitter.

But giving the government carte blanche to “ban cp in anime”, especially by the wording of this proposal? Fuck that

(1) "Obscene" means material or a performance that: (A) the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest in sex; (B) depicts or describes: (i) patently offensive representations or descriptions of ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated, including sexual intercourse, sodomy, and sexual bestiality; or (ii) patently offensive representations or descriptions of masturbation, excretory functions, sadism, masochism, lewd exhibition of the genitals, the male or female genitals in a state of sexual stimulation or arousal, covered male genitals in a discernibly turgid state or a device designed and marketed as useful primarily for stimulation of the human genital organs; and (C) taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, and scientific value.

If you read that and think “oh yeah, Texas is qualified to judge whether something is justifiably obscene” then I go back to my first statement: fuck that and you’re fucking stupid

Someone already brought up evangelion as an incredible work that wouldn’t pass this morality test and isn’t pornographic but others in the same boat just off the the top of my head: oyasumi punpun, chainsaw man (remember Denji is 16 at the beginning), blue period, o maidens in your savage season, etc. all fantastic works (even if the second season of chainsaw man is mid)

Plus even age appropriate characters in ero doujin that don’t explicitly state their age but perform “perverse” sex acts (eg any) will potentially be grounds for deletion.

This law moves to target deepfake style child pornography. This is probably a good idea but the language needs to be explicitly defined and super clear, especially with the government the way it is right now. And Texas, of all states, is not the one to trust

It’s rude that you would disrespect Aru for such a shitty meme

I work with zoomers and tbf a lot of them play many different varied games but some of them genuinely still play roblox and fortnite into their late 20s/early 30s. But tbf to them there’s the millennials that have been playing shit like wow, eve, and osrs for 20 years

Yet unlike American led LLM companies Chinese researchers open sourced their model leading to government investment

So the government invests in a model that you can use, including theoretically removing these guardrails. And these models can be used by anyone and the technology within can be built off of, though they do have to be licensed for commercial use

Whereas America pumps 500 billion into the AI industry for closed proprietary models that will serve only the capitalists creating them. If we are investing taxpayer money into concerns like this we should take a note from China and demand the same standards that they are seeing from deepseek. Deepseek is still profit motivated; it is not inherently bad for such a thing. But if you expect a great deal of taxpayer money then your work needs to open and shared with the people, as deepseeks was.

Americans are getting tragically fleeced on this so a handful of people can get loaded. This happens all the time but this time there’s a literal example of what should be occurring happening right alongside. And yet what people end up concerning themselves with is Sinophobia rather than the fact that their government is robbing them blind

Additionally American models still deliver pro capitalist propaganda, just less transparently: ask them about this issue and they will talk about the complexity of “trade secrets” and “proprietary knowledge” needed to justify investment and discouraging the idea of open source models, even though deepseeks existence proves it can be done collaboratively with financial success.

The difference is that deepseeks censorship is clear: “I will not speak about this” can be frustrating but at least it is obvious where the lines are. The former is far more subversive (though to be fair it is also potentially a byproduct of content consumed and not necessarily direction from openai/google/whoever)

I know of at least 3 trans people who are in this weird space where their families are actually really supportive but at the same time are die hard trumpers. It’s an amazing level of dissonance

One of them does the “well you’re really trans but all these fake trans ruined it for everyone!” thing but the other two seem to be fully into denial. Like “he’s not that anti-trans” being said like 2 weeks ago. It’s mind boggling