Praise to Shai Hulud. May his passing cleanse the world.

Write a brief introductory paragraph on the subject of business theory as if you were a three-armed gargoyle teaching a first year college class on the subject.

Greetings, fledgling scholars! I am Professor Thraxxor, your three-armed guide to the mystic labyrinth of business theory—where spreadsheets whisper secrets and invisible hands tug at the fabric of markets. With one hand I’ll gesture toward classical economics, with another I’ll sketch diagrams of organizational behavior, and with the third—ah yes—that one’s just for throwing chalk at nappers. In this course, we’ll examine the ancient and evolving forces that govern commerce, from Adam Smith’s hallowed halls to the chaos of modern corporate strategy. Stay alert—capitalism waits for no one.

—via ChatGPT

Every day we get closer to the All-Despising Baby Skull.

Or sinisterization.

There was a lot of pioneering in the 70’s. The first home computers, the first video games, the first mobile phones, all right there in the late 70’s. Most people ended the 70’s living like they did in the 60’s but now there’s cool shit like the Speak n’ Spell. The average American home in 1979 had no microwave oven, a landline telephone and a TV that might have even been color. There were some nerds who had TRS-80s, some of them even had a modem so they could 300 baud each other. Normies saw none of this.

There was a lot of invention in the 80’s. Home computer systems, video games etc. as we now commonly know them crystalized in the 80’s. We emerged from the 80’s with Nintendo as the dominant video game console platform, Motorola as basically the only name in cellular telephones and with x86 PCs running Microsoft operating systems as the dominant computing platform with Apple in a distant but solid second place. Video games were common, home computers weren’t that out there, people still had land lines, and maybe cable TV or especially if you were out in the sticks you might have one of those giant satellite dishes. If you were a bit of an enthusiast you might have a modem to dial BBSes and that kind of stuff, but basically no one has an email address.

There was a lot of evolution in the 90’s. With the possible exception of the world wide web which was switched on in August of '91, there weren’t a lot of changes to how computing worked throughout the decade. Compare an IBM PS/2 from 1989 with a Compaq Presario from 1999. 3 1/4" floppy disk, CRT monitor attached via VGA, serial and parallel ports, keyboard and mouse attached via PS2 ports, Intel architecture with Microsoft operating system…it’s the same machine 10 years later. The newer machine runs orders of magnitude faster, has orders of magnitude more RAM etc. but it still broadly speaking fills the same role in the user’s life. An N64 is exactly what you’d expect the NES to look like after a decade. Cell phones have gotten sleeker and more available but it’s still mostly a telephone that places telephone calls, it’s the same machine Michael Douglas had in that one movie but now no longer a 2 pound brick. Bring a tech savvy teen from 1989 to 1999 and it won’t take long to explain everything to him. The World Wide Web exists now, but a lot of retailers haven’t embraced the online marketplace, the dotcom bubble bursts, it’s not quite got the permanent grip on life yet.

There was a lot of revolution in the 2000’s. Higher speed internet that allow for audio and video streaming, mp3 players and the upheaval those caused, the proliferation of digital cameras, the rise of social media. When I graduated high school in 2005, there were no iPhones, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Youtube. Google was a search engine that was gaining ground against Yahoo. The world was a vastly different place by the time I was through college. Take that savvy teen from 1989 and his counterpart from 1999 and explain to them how things work in 2009. It’ll take a lot longer. In 2009 we had a lot of technology that had a lot of potential, and we were just starting to realize that potential. It was easy to see a bright future.

There was a lot of stagnation in the 2010’s. We started the decade with smart phones and social media, and we ended the decade with smart phones and social media. Performance numbers for machines kept going up but you kinda don’t notice; you buy a new phone and it’s so much faster and more responsive, 4 years later it barely loads web pages and takes forever to launch an app because mobile apps are gaseous, they expand to take up their system. A lot of handset manufacturers have given up so now there are fewer options, and they’ve converged to basically one form factor. Distinguishing features are gone, things we used to be able to do aren’t there anymore. The excitement wore off, this is how we do things now, and now everyone is here. Mobile app stores are full of phishing software, you’re probably better advised to just use the mobile browser if you can, mainstream video gaming is now just skinner boxes, and by the end of the decade social media is all about propaganda silos and/or attention draining engagement slop.

Now we arrive in the 2020’s where we find a lot of sinisterization. A lot of the tech world is becoming blatantly, nakedly evil. In truth this began in the 2010’s, it’s older than 4 years, but we’re days away from the halfway point of the decade and it’s becoming difficult to see the behavior of tech and media companies as driven only by greed, some of this can only come from a deep seated hatred of your fellow man. People have latched onto the term “enshittification” because it’s got the word shit in it and that’s hilarious, but…I see a spectrum with the stagnation of the teens represented with a green color and the sinisterization of the 20’s represented with red, and the part in the middle where red and green make brown is enshittification.

I ate a 200 mg edible without knowing what I was getting into and I had a BAD TIME. I’ve since learned that 10-15 mg is my effective dose.

Horizon Zero Dawn would have been awesome with a nemesis system, especially if it was applied to the robo-dinosaurs. You could have the in-universe justification that a particular robot uploads its consciousness upon death and downloads into a new body, and now it remembers how you killed it before and it will adapt accordingly. Start having epic robots that know you, and you have to keep an eye out for them, but also upon being destroyed they could dispense better scraps.

Now I want to see SSJ3 Goku with his hair all neatly braided like Rapunzel’s was at the festival.

EDIT: Okay, it’s ugly as sin, but here it is:

Aw, this is what I get for not paying attention to what instance I was posting in.

Now I’ll never know what people mean when they say “those cupcakes won’t fill a sauna”!

Starship Troopers isn’t a smart movie pretending to be a dumb movie, it’s a moderately intelligent movie with pretensions of being a smart movie pretending to be a dumb movie.

Robocop, on the other hand, is a masterpiece.

George Lucas is one of a handful of people on the planet where you can accurately say “They ruined my childhood.”

Like, if you’re a massive fan of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles but hate the most recent incarnation, you can still go back and watch the original. Lucas has gone out of his way to make that more difficult for Star Wars fans. It’s an impressive level of aggression and back-stabbery for the people who made him wealthy to begin with.

Did you quietly apologize to the pork?

A panini press is well worth the investment.

Dante’s Inferno, or, That Time I Went to Hell and My Favorite Classic Poet Was There to Give Me a Tour and I Got to See All My Least Favorite People Being Horribly Tortured.

They got her early. She had a few solid credits to her name when she did Iron Man 2, but the smart MCU move at that point was to recruit young-ish talent and get them signed on for multi-movie contracts relatively cheap. Hopefully what we all get out of that sort of arrangement is that talented actors make enough MCU money to go off and do whatever out-there artsy stuff that creatively appeals to them and fosters their talents, rather than having to plug away in garbage movies just to pay the bills.

My theory is that Jupiter Ascending was supposed to be a trilogy, but the studio would only approve one movie with a wait-and-see approach to the second and third installments, and the Wachowskis just said “Fuck it,” and crammed 6+ hours of plot and world building into a two-hour movie.

The idea did occur that I’d better be damn sure that I like whatever honey I’ll be eating for the rest of my life.