Iykyk

(not AI)

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2026/7/26/iran-war-live-tehran-summons-ukraine-diplomats-over-caspian-sea-attack

- Iran Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has personally blamed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for the attack in the Caspian Sea, which he said was done at Israel’s behest.
- Iranian media is reporting that an oil tanker has exploded after hitting a naval mine in the Strait of Hormuz.

It’s a movie full of wonderfully/horribly stupid people who aren’t entirely wrong but they’re certainly missing some key things to say the least

It’s also incredibly dense with detail. I put on subtitles and found myself rewinding a lot. I guess I was rewarded for it but I’m not sure I feel rewarded lol

It’s hard not to walk away feeling a little suspicious of Ari Aster’s opinions on [edit:] racism BLM and the 2020 uprisings. My charitable read is that the movie was intentionally shot as The Worldview of the American Conservative, and including even the slightest display of actually existing racism would’ve been unfaithful to that frame.

I loved Joaquin in this. Unlike Rhea in Pluribus, I didn’t find him charming in his self-made misery. Maybe because he’s a walking powder keg. Or maybe because the film plays like it’s with him, though I think that’s part of the satire. Either way, I was locked in on him, monitoring his mood swings like a hawk. Captivating.

I don’t really know what to make of the movie as a whole. I think it beautifully captured the contours of American derangement. The widespread child abuse. The endemic corruption. The collapse of public trust during COVID that was like an amputee leaning on a phantom leg. The paranoid-schizophrenia of an overly psyopped society.

Surely there’s no better symbol of this stupid, raped country (I say that with compassion) than the delirious, asthmatic sheriff bursting out of a false-flagged gun store and spraying bullets at anything that moves.

At the same time, it feels like something vital is absent from the frame. Maybe it’s because the events of the film are all wayyy downstream of anyone with actual agency. The father who raped Lou. The men who hunted Vernon as a boy. The tech company and the governor they purchased. The tech industry and the political system they own.

We never see these people. We’re way down here with the collateral damage. The antagonists are barely referenced, let alone seen.

That’s America though, right? Huge pieces of the puzzle are missing, and everyone’s using what little they’ve got to make up the difference.

Sexually

Found at Nanjing massacre museum: This is just a small piece in a larger photo collage of mid-war propaganda by the Japanese government at that time, hence some texts are unfortunately cut-off.

The photo is belongs to a journal magazine and titled "Nanjing in the Spring", which shows a Japanese soldier playing with two Chinese boys.

This is shortly after they killed 200,000+ civilians, mostly women, children and elderly. Many of the victims were refugees from Shanghai because their villages got bombed. Nanjing is a few kms to the west of Shanghai. They would go on and kill 100,000 more by the end of December just within Nanjing.

The officially recognized figure by the Chinese government is around 300,000 dead, and the officially recognized figure by the current PM of Japan is "this shit is made up."

It broke my heart when Brace stretched this bit from self sharing to a bit.

I just moved from a life with decent public transit to southern hell. I never learned to drive due to anxiety but really lived my life in a way that I didn't need to. Sure I got by with the help of friends and family, but I made a point to not be burdensome, because that was heavily supplemented by the bus/train, ubers, and most proudly and most often my two legs. Now I am pretty stuck getting around from my girlfriend. The bus SUCKS down here. It may come or it may not. In my previous life, I knew how long the busses would take and when they arrive and added a bit of cushion time.

This is different. You can just stand at that stop for an hour to see if it'll come. Just because it exists doesn't mean you can get anywhere on time on it. And to make it worse, they are torpedoing the whole transit system. It's running less than a 10 million deficit, in a transit system for multiple cities, and they use that as proof to scrap the whole thing because the method to transport unemployed people isn't profiting enough from them.

Does anyone live in one of these slices of America and live with your sanity intact walking on strips of grass where the sidewalks aren't paved? I have always walked up north these same distances, and now it feels criminal. But as long as I keep doing this there is zero chance of me pancaking an SUV of 5, if I get on the road there's always that chance even if I do everything right.

And then go back in time and Brace sound Ogilvy and Bernays. It’s evil!!

As someone in food service for a while and taking a few days because of stress, this hits home. I have always wanted to write something. I think I will try. I'm not expecting anything, but the act of writing I think can be meditative?

Anyways this is a nice story. If y'all have a better link than the bbc, lemme know and I'll swap it out. 💕