Hello.
I collected all of the Chaos Emeralds, but stuff still happened.
So what's up?
LA Graffiti is a worldwide issue, says the chief of the LAPD,
which means it's a meaningless statement.
If you haven't already seen, some graffiti artists in LA came together to graffiti bomb
an abandoned high-rise luxury apartment project.
A developer was building a high-rise, and then the money dried up, and then they stopped,
and then she's been sitting there, unfinished.
While there's a homelessness crisis.
And so a bunch of local artists got together and made a statement.
They covered the building in tabs.
It's actually really gorgeous.
But we can't have that because graffiti, bad for reasons.
You know what those reasons are, and you know who gets to decide what's bad.
Anyway, in response to this, the chief of police went on to say that it was a, quote,
iconic location that has been unfortunately taken off track and now taken advantage of by these vandals.
He's complaining that they've had to arrest a few people and that some of them came from
other places to come join in on this.
And he's like, this makes it a worldwide problem.
The graffiti on the abandoned high-rise luxury apartments in my city that is just gripped with issues.
But now this guy with a spray paint can, he's the reason that we're having struggles.
Fuck the LAPD.
Sorry, fuck all of the PDs.
What good is a walled garden if it doesn't have porn?
All right, the Apple Vision Pro is out and a bunch of guys, and let's be clear, it's guys,
are walking around wearing the headset and telling us that we're all missing out, saying that we just don't understand.
This is the future.
Yay.
Look, I'm not here to say whether or not AR or VR is the future.
I think that AR is actually pretty cool.
But it's not $3,500 headset with a two-hour battery life.
Cool.
Also, it doesn't even do all that much actual AR stuff, like disappointingly little.
It just like puts windows in places.
Anyway, one of the AR VR things it doesn't do is porn.
Ha ha, yeah, yeah, yeah, let's all be shocked for a second.
VR porn is a thing.
It's a real, real thing, and it's very popular.
And that's fine.
It's okay to enjoy sexuality, except according to Apple, because you can go actually like look at porn on your headset,
but they don't actually allow you to watch the 3D VR spatial porn, at least by default.
They've turned off the ability to do that, but users of the device have found work around.
And Apple's like, oh, it's a beta feature?
Get it.
Damn, maybe Apple's got a point.
Point is, you spent $3,500 on a headset, and then you have to do extra work to...
Yeah.
Anyway, I'm not here to kink shame.
I'm not here to tell you that you shouldn't go watch VR porn.
I'm just here to tell you that if you want to get off to VR porn, there are cheaper ways.
It is not great right now, y'all, and I don't love talking about these two old gas bags,
but we're staring down the barrel of a 2024 rematch between Trump and Biden, and y'all, it ain't great.
In one corner, we've got Joe Biden, a half-melted ice cream cone of a flavor that you got because they didn't have the flavor you actually wanted.
Biden is currently on his back foot doing damage control after a report came out talking about the government documents that he mishandled,
but more specifically, in the report, they talk about the lapses in memory that he's been exhibiting.
Now, the White House and Democrats at large are clutching their pearls and saying this is a politically motivated attack and blah, blah, blah, blah,
but anyone who has seen footage of Joe Biden would not be surprised.
And so after that came out, Biden held a bizarre press conference where he was mad at reporters yelling at them about how good his memory is,
and then immediately afterwards mixed up the presidents of Mexico and Egypt.
It's giving person-woman-man-camera-TV.
All of this is up against the backdrop of the fact that the vast majority of Americans think that Joe Biden is too frickin' old for another term.
Even Hillary Rodham Clinton has chimed in saying that he's too goddamn old.
She also noted the other half of the sentiment, which is that Trump is too old, too.
Trump's a few years younger than Biden, but hey, what if we went a few decades younger?
But speaking of that, let's talk about who's in the other corner.
Donald Trump, steeped in lawsuits and having spent his entire life being very publicly a white-collar criminal,
here comes Trump for a second attempt.
We know he wants to become president again so that he can basically be a dictator and get immunity and pardon all of his friends or let people pay him for a pardon, all that stuff.
We know he's just gonna be a corrupt asshole.
This is part of why I don't like talking about him and part of why I don't stir up stuff about the plans that they've got.
We know that the plans are terrible.
And now recently at a campaign speech, Trump talks about how he would actually encourage our enemies to attack our allies in NATO if they don't pay enough into NATO,
which is a protection racket, which is not at all surprising for Trump.
Now look, I am not a stan of NATO, but you don't go around just saying, hey, friends, if you don't pay me, I'm gonna ask other people to hurt you.
You don't just completely ignore the entirety of all history and the work that people have put in to build up nations and make allies and find security.
Yeah, the world's not perfect, but there's also a whole lot more peace than there is war right now.
And I don't think that the thing that we should be doing right now is indexing even further on who has money and who doesn't.
And yet there are scores of soulless people who seem to praise money as a god and Trump as their messiah.
We don't need to run the country like a business.
We need to run the country like a country.
And so look, what is the solution here? Who do we vote for? How do we fix this?
I will tell you, we don't. We don't fix it at the ballot box.
There is no solution there. Stop looking for one.
The answer is not to campaign for a third party candidate.
I am sorry to tell you, that's not going to happen. That's not pessimism. That's reality.
This is a multi-billion dollar industry pushing for these parties.
And I would posit that the energy it would take to try to get a third party candidate to win
only to hope that that single election of that single president would fix all of our problems,
that energy could be used in much more productive ways.
Direct action, getting involved in local politics, and making sure that the current elected politicians never have a moment of peace in their life
are much more good uses of your time.
A content warning, this next segment is about the genocide in Gaza.
I'm not going to be flowering this up.
That's not a thing I can do here.
As Israel continues their genocide against the people of Gaza, they are now beginning to attack Rafe,
the southernmost place in Gaza that they have been routinely telling people to flee to and seek refuge.
They have made 80% of Gaza uninhabitable and told everybody to seek shelter in one location.
And now they're bombing it.
Every time I check the article, the death toll goes up, so I can't even give you an accurate number.
But the last I saw was 60 people dead, about half of them children.
This was to cover an operation that took two hostages back from Hamas.
So far, on their assault on Gaza, Israel has slain nearly 30,000 Palestinians.
Virtually everyone else in the region is displaced.
There are no homes to go back to.
There are no routes of egress.
This isn't righteousness.
This isn't divine retribution.
This isn't the security of the Jewish people.
This is Western invasions.
This is a convenient excuse that we are using to eradicate natives from a region and establish Western culture hubs.
And, more importantly, military hubs.
All the while merrily fulfilling points of a doomsday prophecy for a religion that's not even involved.
It is gross, and the reason that it seems like they are lying through their teeth constantly is because they know it, and they don't care.
It does not matter.
I wish I could give you an upbeat ending here, and I wish that I could put in jokes and whatnot.
I can't. I cannot do that.
And now for the fun part.
Moving on to a segue back to having upbeat stuff.
Here's a challenge.
At some point today, try to stop and think about your earliest positive memory.
Just the earliest memory you can think of that just evokes a sense of happiness.
Now, try to express it in words, in art, in music, however you want.
Try to get it out there.
Try to be as creatively descriptive as possible.
Put the emotion of that memory into whatever you create.
Lightning round.
I'm gonna be real with you.
I did a lot of putting a bunch of stories into the main stories today, so this is gonna be a quick lightning round.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is seeking somewhere between five and seven trillion dollars for a plan he has with computer chips and the computer chip industry.
And finally for today, Baldur's Gate 3 is going to be getting an update that improves kissing.
I want that update.
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Stuff Keeps Happening.
And the Stuff Keeps Happening dot online for sources, bonus content, and an index of every atom in the known universe.
My name is Endeavorance.
I'll be back on Thursday.
Take care and be well.
A, it's post credits Endeavorance.
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Thank you for listening.
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