“Give me the fantasy villain trust-fund baby look.”

“I got you, fam”

I mean, yeah.

However, in this particular case I think the CEO was running this as a pump and dump for nearly a decade, claiming to be fully funded and having no board (because he claimed it was self funded), and giving himself massive raises year over year.

So a private equity firm bought something hollow. I have some guesses about it. Probably a friend of his, probably got it cheap, and is about to gut whatever is left now that the guy who did own it got out with what he could. Why would PE buy it otherwise? There’s no goodwill or name to cash in on like what’s being done with Native Instruments.

Laundry Files by Charles Stross

Like all the incredibly salacious but unsubstantiated docs from when he was running for or already president that were included in this dump. Poison the well so none of it gets taken for truth.

Fly me to the moon, let me play among the stars

Then poop in a bag out there by Jupiter and Mars

In other words, please be true

In other words, massage your poo.

I guess it does depend on what you call a circle. There are maybe a dozen of us in one. In the other there are probably three or four dozen. I don’t know everyone. I got invited because I like genre bending. We’ve got a private forum where we share things.

Even outside of that, there is a place that used to be less private but has now gone private (guess why) where we would do Sunday songwriters. We’d get a topic, record a little something before the next Sunday, then share. After sharing we’d critique, do mashups, genre hop, create genre crossovers, and generally just have fun with each other’s music.

I do not know how prevalent this is. I know of two private places, one of which is very small, and a third place that used to be public (with no expectation of anyone actually seeing it) but went private because of Suno.

There’s already mystery music out there. Small circles of folks putting things out that they don’t expect or want people outside the circle to hear. I’m a nobody and I’m part of two different groups who share music with each other, build on each other’s works, try genre mashups and new shit that may never get done again, many times because it’s a mess but sometimes just because it was a fun one time thing.

I think short term, yeah, I think so. Medium term and I think we’ll see a bunch of model collapse or people will get tired of the same story line repeatedly so it won’t be profitable (or won’t be regaining the money they thought they’d save on actual creative folks). Long term, I have no fucking clue if they’ll get around the fact that training AI on AI makes it even weirder.

Right? It’s weird to think he gained popularity in the 70s.

Depends on how you count it. Northern Marina Islands were annexed in 1986 but they were a territory under our jurisdiction from the 40s and I don’t know much about the history of the place before that. If you’re talking about overthrowing a functioning government and taking the land, maybe Hawaii? McKinley was probably the last big expansionist.

That’s if you don’t count puppets. We’ve got and have recently had a few of those as well.

Reaper, Studio One (although we’ll see what Fender does to it, we all remember the Gibson Cakewalk fiasco), and Bitwig are all native. Kind of depends on what your workflow is and what plugins you’re using. Yabridge is workable for a ton of stuff and not difficult.

He didn’t shut himself away, but this isn’t far off from what happened to The Laundry Files by Charles Stross. He had an ending all lined up dealing with a cold type disease that made everyone stupider. Then COVID happened. He had a storyline about how some shitty British political shit. Then Brexit happened. He stopped writing the main line series for a few years because he couldn’t keep up with how batshit things were getting.

If you like computers, math, Eldritch monsters, dry humor, making fun of bureaucracy, and thinly disguised metaphors for anthropomorphic climate catastrophies, you might enjoy it. He’s got one book left in the main line coming out in 9 days. Thank goodness because I’m going to need him to stop predicting a worse future. He’s moving on to a space opera or some shit so I’m hoping he’ll start writing about how wonderful everything is so we can start heading that direction.

How dare you malign the first female basketball player to visit the moon.

Depending on the position I could see any of them, but I can’t imagine why you’d need all three for one application. Social Media Director of Programming Middle Management?

Straight up porn, and when everyone arrives they start yelling about how awesome the EU is.

I have a pretty good time with New Pipe but I’ve heard others haven’t had the good experience I have.

Who is the offspring of the Nameless Mist. Who is the offspring of Azathoth, the blind idiot. If Azathoth wakes up we’re all fucking goners.

It’s a hierarchy of horrors starting with Boo from Mario Bros, on through The Grinch and Cthulhu, and topped off by Azathoth.

Yep. She’s not publicly eating babies and being carried on a palanquin by the poors. She ain’t good, but her badness is orders of magnitude below some of the mustache twirling villains out here tying people to railroad tracks.

Many vulnerable people, morons, and heavy ketamine users already think it.

To add to your point, Xiaohongshu has plenty of people on it who aren’t Chinese as well. Loads. It’s not like they’re in cultural blackout.