levy

if you're tired of chatgpt constantly telling you things like, "you're actually doing fine," or "don't be so hard on yourself," and you want to hear something brutally honest instead, try this prompt:

"based on everything you know about me, roast me and don't hold back."

then sit back and watch the ai point out the things you've probably been avoiding about yourself for years.

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today i uploaded a scanned document—a plain white page with text on it—and asked it to "extract the text."

instead, it extracted the text by literally removing all the words and giving me back a completely blank white page.

if it's making mistakes like this on the plus plan, i don't even want to imagine what the free version is doing.

looks or personality?

own republic.

without a doubt one of the best films ever made about war. the thin red line, the film that marked terrence malick's return to the big screen after a long absence, goes far beyond being just an anti-war film and holds deep inquiries into human existence. and indeed, the director's own closeness to philosophy, particularly his engagement with heidegger, is well known to everyone.

a bandit working hard to make sure societies don't talk about their real problems, to make the public fight windmills instead, to keep the actual source of all the trouble, politicians and the rich, off the table. when he had his falling-out with trump, trump revealed that he'd wanted to keep getting government subsidies through the politicians he'd helped get elected by pouring millions into their campaigns.

the windmills here are the culture they've branded as "woke." it's a concept thrown in front of citizens as the enemy while politicians and insatiable types like elon, who want to get even richer through them, rob the public blind. the enemy that used to get pumped into the public through the media they owned now carries on in social media under different labels, courtesy of blue-check trolls.

why'd they make athena black, why'd they cast the sinon character as trans, there's lgbt stuff in the shows... in shows and films full of one-eyed giants, monsters, dragons, and other fictional characters, these are the kinds of issues that don't actually affect people in real life. meanwhile the average citizen in the usa deals with the cost of living, the housing crisis, the immigration issue (which they do talk about, because they can pin the blame on the other side for it), uninsured people being too scared to even call an ambulance because of how brutal the private healthcare system is, mass shootings and high crime rates because guns get sold like candy, the massive student debt faced by people who want to go to college without a scholarship, the country's kids getting sent off to war because the rich keep starting wars to serve their own interests, and so on... these problems just keep on existing. no matter which politician from which party comes to power, since they're funded by the rich, no solution ever gets brought to the table, but the enemy is woke.

it's the scene in the 1970 film they call me trinity where our man terence hill mercilessly plows through a plate of mexican beans out of a cast-iron pan. director enzo barboni starved the guy for a full 24 hours before the shoot, not letting him eat a single bite, so that trinity's state of just coming in from the desert, worn out from exhaustion, and half-crazed with hunger wouldn't look fake but would look real. as if that weren't enough, right before the scene was shot he had terence riding a horse around the desert for hours, the guy's mother must have really cried over this one.

by the time the man starts eating, he's not acting anymore. he digs into the food as someone who's been half-crazed with hunger for 24 hours, blood sugar in the negatives. youtube

you enter unicef's photo contest in your son's name and you win. and then, by pure coincidence, out of all those footballers, the baby gets paired with messi for the photo shoot. exactly 19 years later, that kid turns into a player with almost the same abilities, playing the same position at the club messi used to play for (the club he's a legend of), and one who'll go up against him at the world cup. there's no side to this thing that can be explained by science, reason, or logic. i don't know if the people who don't believe in god feel ashamed. it's flat-out like a movie script, and there's a director up there writing the script for us. and look, i'm not even some extremely religious guy while i'm saying all this.

as someone who's been obese for years, here's my experience: for me it isn't some small calorie deficit, it's flat-out walking around hungry. unless i eat around 1500 calories and put in 20 thousand steps on top of that, the scale doesn't budge. if, keto, low-carb... i tried them all. the names change, but nothing changes for me. my body only gets convinced once it sees a serious calorie deficit.

i left almost nothing untried in this process, including a bunch of performance and fat-loss drugs. some make you feel like they boost performance, some suppress appetite, some speed up fat burning, but at the end of the day none of them take the place of discipline. the moment you quit the diet, the magic ends too. so if you don't have solid motivation, my advice is don't even get mixed up in that stuff.

everybody gets hyped the first week. the real issue is not eating the pizza when you're craving it, being able to say no when your friends order dessert, being able to keep going even when the scale stalls for a few days. if you don't have a reason strong enough to make you do those things, willpower stops being enough after a certain point.

the conclusion i came to is this: there's no shortcut to this. the most expensive drug, the most popular diet, the coolest eating model, they all bring you to the same place in the end. eat less, move more, and manage to keep it up for months.

it's the year 2026, you've made it to the world cup quarterfinal, there are 59-60 thousand people in the stands and a billion eyes watching in front of their tvs. man, there are fifty cameras, there are drones flying all over the place, they put a camera up the referee's ass, there's the referee, the assistant referee, the var referee, the camera setup in the var room isn't even in the louvre museum.

in front of all of this, you're trying to draw a foul like you're diving into a pool, and you're doing it in the middle of midfield, right by the touchline, in an area where it's of no use to anyone. the guy you're trying to get carded doesn't even have a card to his name.

whether the fault is yours or the guy's who trusted you, i couldn't tell you, but if you don't combine that thing called talent with intelligence, the result is some clumsy nonsense like this.

this is a film by a director who, in dunkirk, heroized the british army that had actually been humiliated during the evacuation; who, in tenet, told a story of the world being saved once again thanks to the intelligence agencies of western countries (the usa, of course) and villainized the russians; who, in a film he directed with a totally empathy-void mindset like oppenheimer, glorified that murderous monster called oppenheimer and ignored the japanese civilians; who, even in a film set in a fake universe like the dark knight rises, glorified the institutions that maintain order, meaning the usa, and made fools of batman fans even there with cheap, shallow political subtext; and who, in a sci-fi film like interstellar, pioneered the heroizing of the classic american rural male figure through the cliche cooper character playing baseball and sipping beer on his farm, and once again the "americans save the world" cliche.

let's put this on the record so people know just what kind of person is directing the film. how he'll do it this time is anyone's guess, but nolan is a man who, in this historical film too, will find some way to once again show he's a hollywood puppet. slaves to popular culture and nolan's diehard followers will of course ignore this and keep on defending him. for the sake of inception, memento, and the prestige, i don't want to trash his directing, but this is the reality. even though this guy is british, he's more american than an american. essentially he's become a hollywood puppet. that's exactly the situation. not even spielberg went this glaringly heavy-handed in his career...

that's me. if i'm available i reply instantly. to me this is a matter of respect.

2014, 2015, 2016. one world cup, two copa americas, losing in a total of 3 finals, then quitting the national team. the comeback, getting eliminated again in 2018, and just when the english commentator was saying he'll be 35 at the next tournament, this was maybe his last one, at 35 he steps up in every critical moment, scores in every match after the group stage, and of course wins the world cup as the best player of the tournament. squeezing in 2 more copa americas along the way.

he left europe and went to the mls, which is about the level of a pickup rec league, and just when you're thinking that in practice he was still playing but in theory he'd retired, at 39 he comes back to the world cup again and scores in every match he plays, becoming the tournament's all-time top scorer. in the round of 16 against egypt, in the match where he missed a penalty, down 2-0 heading into the 80th minute, just as you're thinking these are probably his final moments at a world cup, he turns the match around with a goal and an assist.

his career plays out like a movie. an unbelievable footballer. the greatest of all time.

in my opinion the best definition of love ever made belongs to flaubert: "curiosity. you suddenly begin to feel curious about someone, a terrible curiosity. you want to know them, to be born with them, to come into the world all over again with them. that's why the sentence furthest from love isn't i hate you, but i no longer want to know."