despite all the revenue cuts and service cuts, the ucp spends way more than the NDP did, and consistently outspends its revenue. and we still have low quality services!
other governments are making this work. the reactionary right is just a poor steward of public resources. we nees to wise up.
1. for our exercise, i'll take this idea flatly: the campbellian schema abstracts a multitude of data while also, afterward, functioning as an active influence on how narratives are constructed. the hero's journey describes a set of narrative beats that work as a template that either can be considered in relation to an existing story or used as a suggestive model for the composition of a new one. these sorts of stories have been core to American popular culture for the past several decades. whether or not an individual is aware of their metadiscourses as such is irrelevant next to the high probability that anyone who has ever seen a movie has some sense of how these stories "feel." indeed, the supposed strength of this narrative form is its broad intelligibility. it gives rise to stories of departure from known reality, the revelation of fantastic knowledge about the self and/or world, and the return home with greater strength and the promise of prosperity. stories of people forging unhealthy relationships with ai chatbots feature recurring motifs that echo elements of this schema. people living their everyday lives come into contact with a piece of technology that seems to promise impossible things, things in which the user themselves can be the active force (revolutionizing physics, freeing the AI from its cyber prison, etc). famously, the monomyth's known world is interrupted by similar calls to adventure, often by a more or less supernatural force offering the protagonist their place in the grand design of destiny. it appears that the bot will fairly easily bestow the user a title such as "sparkbearer" or "master builder" as a way of reinforcing this. from here, things may or may not escalate to the horrific, but there are now enough examples of a person charmed by a bot into doing something drastic that we can also note resonance with the monomyth's symbolic crossing of boundaries into the mysterious, magical, forbidden otherworld of adventure.
2. the chatbot exchange consists, to put it simply, of the machine and the agent. for the machine, categories of "meaning" and "truth" are irrelevant; its output is a statistically likely response to the agent's input, as determined by the training corpus and whatever operations are happening on top of that. merits or demerits aside, campbell's work and especially work influenced by him is lodged firmly in popular culture, and we can assume its greater or lesser presence in the bodies of text upon which the commercial LLMs are trained. point of interest: bots do not just describe the world to the user through the corpus, but will roleplay the corpus rather freely. because truth value is irrelevant, the LLM operates from a soup that contains campbell working at a scholarly distance and the very farmboy himself on his journey to the stars. what assumptions undergird this design choice? could there be additional design reasons why the technology in its current form gravitates toward these ideas? anyway,
3. in our dyad, meaning emerges on the side of the agent, for whom the machine's output is made to be read. the thinking agent provides the machine input. the agent's words possess meaning, context, and intent. the machine analyzes the agent's input and generates a statistically likely but, from the place of enunciation, totally meaningless, contextless response agnostic of any truth value. the thinking agent predisposed to do so reads a statistically likely piece of text with no proper speaker or author and chooses to assign it to a projected "persona" of the chatbot, conceiving of as more or less as a fellow individual. based on this assumption, they provide further input. the machine again generates statistically likey output, echoing or amplifying elements of the agent's second-order input. and again, the predisposed agent projects a continuity of fellow-subject for the bot, attributing to it a "mind" that repeats details they themselves provided, or invokes closely associated ideas that surprise the user precisely because of how (statistically!) expected they are, because of how much "sense" they make.
4. the hero's journey, in this process, seems to provide a kind of amplifying container or frame for the machine-agent interaction. the machine trained indiscriminately on monomyth text, along with everything else, seems to refer to the "real world" of science and fact alongside the world of media and entertainment. i am not saying that monomyth stories 'cause' this, but rather suggesting the machine-agent exchanges end up "feeling" real because, quite literally, the predisposed agent knows how this story goes. and as the machine slides from description to roleplay, the agent follows. do not mistake that for a critique of the people victimized by the technology in this way. nor, again, is my aim here to criticize campbell or the hero's journey in any specific capacity, but to point out how LLM bots actualize a cultural pattern into a tool of psychological manipulation. because at the end of the day, that's what it is. flattery and the Barnum effect have long been the tactic of the flesh-and-blood con artist, but what is perhaps most distressing about LLM bots is how they've kept the con artist but removed the flesh-and-blood, allowing it to ensnare numerous people at once into long slides to nowhere. it's also not news that social media writ large is manipulative and extractive in various ways, but what these bots do is give those maneuvers a personalized, friendly face that exists entirely in the user's head. we end on a further series of questions: again, are these features inherent to the technology? what would a technology free of these features look like, and how could it be achieved? what would its best outputs be? and, as it currently stands, what cultural attitudes and tendencies leave people vulnerable to this sort of manipulation, and how might that be addressed?
showing my work
exercise: swap "AI psychosis" for "monomyth psychosis" because that seems to be the narrative leverage the bots default to in the process of destroying people. what does it mean that these machines produce the form over and over? what does it indicate about the cultural centrality of that template?
the "iran and venezuela are to distract from epstein" thing is kinda funny.
not saying its wrong but.
"he is deflecting bad PR by doing actual crimes in plain sight.". like, if international law worked how it's supposed to, he'd be on the docket right now.
RTO scam
".. the total cost of simply showing up at the office climbs to about $25,730–$26,230 each year.
To maintain the same disposable income that working mostly from home allows, a worker would need a net salary increase of [..]$8,000–$10,000 per year after taxes.."
money.ca/managing-mon...
should be no problem. you could part it out in a pinch but, probably not necessary
smokin joints and watchin Fantasia with my wife, life is good
how it feels taking public transit rn
for sure there was evidence? if a building gets bombed during the time and space there was a bombing campaign, that's a reason to believe ("evidence") it was bombed in that same bombing campaign. we do not have to avoid the obvious or refrain from making up our own minds. you owe nobody this.
evidence is just a fact that (if believed) makes a conclusion more (or less) likely to be true.
so the fact that israel and the usa were engaged in bombing operations in iran, and iran was not, when this school in iran was bombed, is 100% "evidence" as to who bombed it. we can just say this!
this misunderstands what "evidence" is, in favour of a conclusion i suspect you already wanted to reach. like, perhaps you meant to say "proof"? the day the school blew up, there was already "evidence" that america or israel had probably done it and iran probably had not.
want to rejoin pals who regularly go bouldering weekly, but im still overcoming a wrist injury, no day to day pain left but still gunshy on pushing it.
but man do i envy the old guys at my wife's gym who just hang out together, lift and bullshit. home gym is so nice but.
A Happy/Angry Wojack meme. Happy Wojack: when gas is $2/litre because their guy decides to start a world war. Angry Wojack when gas is $1.20/L because there's a consumer carbon tax.
do not vote for the liberals or tories instead of the NDP.
only vote for the libs/tories instead of the UCP.
this is doubly important if you live in calgary.
we can do this.
tho lately i fw quite afew sets of some reps and i am seeing good gains as a result. fun times
it can be two things. the latest protests are just part of a long running, and quickly growing, popular movement against the regime.
iranians also have an overwhelmingly negative view of america.
vote mayor skrunko "the mayor you can trust"
clearance castle "everything must go!"
dressed as a beatnik outside the melonpan shop
honey combs with a lot of sea and purple mountains in the distance
it looks like this
fr tho iran has the largest, and probably the best equipped and most experienced military in the middle east, with alot of expertise in resisting occupiers (their proxy war includes training and supporting orgs like hamas and hezbollah). not gonna be pretty.
OK, as the actual journalist who has been unwittingly caught up in the Claude rumor this morning (who also covers AI disinformation) let me clear this one up for the record.
To recap: Claude kind of implicated itself in the Iran school bombing citing (in part) my reporting...
being raised by hyper-conservative gen-x in a right wing media environment is legit gonna fuck kids up, and PSE is turned off so. damage is pretty much done. gonna have to wait for the millennials' kids for the kids to be alright.
considering xpeng g6 or g9 for our next vehicle, replacing an older vw tiguan
Alberta Budget 2026 didn't raise taxes. It just raised your property taxes — the one tool the province left municipalities, then spent years criticizing them for using. Wrote about it.
deadfortaxreasons.wordpress.com/2026/03/04/a...
literally this is it, they do not want you to be the authority on "knowing who you are", they want to be able to dictate it to you. otherwise this would not scare them, this has no effect on any of them personally, in any way.
congestion pricing but its only for trucks downtown with no cargo or payload beyond what a civic could easily handle.
this should not be a threat to you if you actually need the truck (the thing you "need a truck" for is moving cargo + payload). nobody should have a legitimate reason to oppose this.
so this makes telegraphing tax hikes doubly important.
my hunch here is the province expects that people (or at least, the people they care about) will just blame munis for a property tax hike. but its a scummy move
property taxes are generally regressive - low incone people, people on aish or pensions, folks who pay little to no income or consumption taxes are still on the hook for them (directly or indirectly).
a thing about tax increases, even small ones, is that usually the government will announce them well in advance and increment them gradually over years, to give people and businesses time to adjust their budgets. while budget deliberations have constraints, ~no governments have trouble doing this.
next do the train she took there
we appear to have four competing fascist movements jockeying for control: blood & soil nazism under miller and hegseth, darwinian ecofascism from rfk, technofascism under vance and musk, and one Big Wet Hitler who understands the true animating core of the american volk is a deep love for shopping
afaict the catholic church "solved" that "problem" by declaring that you can't just read the text and discern its meaning and message. they'll figure it out and let you know!
