Rov_Scam
10hr ago
Semi-related: There was a girl I went to high school with who, though I didn't think she was particularly hot, certainly acted like she was. I guess she was reasonably popular and hung out with the popular crowd, to the extent that my school had one, but I can only recall being in one class with her and her just coming off as self-absorbed. Fast-forward ten years later and a couple friends of mine were joking about her Facebook account and what a riot it was. They knew her better than I did, and I didn't have a Facebook account until well after people were sending requests to literally everyone they knew, so I hadn't seen it or thought of this girl in years.
It seems that she had taken the idea of becoming a celebrity seriously. Not that she wanted to be anything in particular, or that she had any particular talent, just that she wanted to be rich and famous. Unlike most people with such aspirations, she actively pursued this pipe dream to hilarious ends. The thing that makes it even better is that she didn't fall flat on her face but had just barely enough success to keep the dream alive. I would also add that she grew up in a dumpy, run down part of the Mon Valley and due to school feeder patterns I didn't know her at all until high school. I will say now that the highlight of her life to that point (and probably to this day) was that she was a backup dancer for Beyonce for some period. I don't know how long this lasted, and as far as I know it was only for one performance. She also released an instructional DVD on hip-hop dancing, which at least means that some production company was willing to foot the bill.
Anyway, after professing my ignorance my friend emailed me some pictures with his own captions added. I'd love to just post them but that seems inappropriate, but I think descriptions with his captions will suffice:
Rov_scam,
See Attachments, I feel by being ghetto, from [school], and constantly posting photos like this (aka starving for attention) that you're good enough to achieve [our other friend's] constant yet private attention via facebook.
- A picture of her in a swimsuit on what appears to be a beach but looks a little suspicious (Photo shop)
- A picture from the same shoot as above (I'd still hit it even though [a friend of ours] already has and normally I wouldn't)
- A picture of her in a bikini tanning in a yard, not styled or made up (not photoshopped and clearly a Mon Valley native)
- A picture of her from behind in a short skirt staring back at the camera. Her hair is done up and she looks really trashy (Ohio Valley maybe?)
- A picture of her on a bed on all fours in a negligee (Tramp)
- A picture of her onstage with Beyonce, complete with a Getty Images watermark (no caption needed)
- A picture of her with short, shaggy hair (not her natural color; possibly a wig), black lipstick, and a black leather jacket, obviously a professionally-designed costume of some sort (Tour de France fan)
She had apparently also recorded some tracks in an attempt to enter the music industry. I had previously been unaware that she had any musical talent whatsoever (she still doesn't). She did not sing in high school. She did not act in high school either, but this did not stop her from attempting an acting career. Her real last name is, shall we say, of the ethnic variety. Specifically, of the Eastern European ethnic variety that, while not unpronounceable, is not the kind of thing you want to see on a marquee. So she obviously uses a stage name. A stage name that, I might add, was obviously not selected with SEO in mind, because it shares enough similarity with an extremely popular website that Googling it will not yield other results. She is evidently unknown to AI either, as Claude didn't know who she was when asked directly. She said she planned on having a million dollars in her bank account by the end of the year, which obviously didn't happen because even if it did one doesn't keep that kind of money in a bank account.
My more recent forays into her current history show that she has had 20 addresses in as many years, all of them in New York, Los Angeles, and now Florida, though I don't know how one's [drawing a blank] career progresses at age 40 i Daytona Beach. And by New York I, of course, actually mean New Jersey, because there's no way she could afford to live in the real New York. She was evidently under management by a modeling agency at some point, though I'm not sure that means anything. Her music career has progressed to "creating" AI songs. She billed herself as a YouTube creator at some point, though I haven't watched any videos and I'm not going to. Somehow it's gotten even more pathetic.
I can see her Facebook posts pretty easily despite not being friends with her, because she thinks she's important enough to have followers. She still posts multiple times per day, mostly pictures of herself. She has a son, and I'd bet dollars to donuts that the father isn't in the picture. She has multiple LinkedIn profiles. All the jobs are suspicious because none of them have ever ended. These include professional dancer, founder and CEO of her own record label, YouTube content creator, and owner/dance instructor of some kind of.. studio? I guess? And she's a Trump supporter to boot, which doesn't make sense for someone whose primary appeal seems to be to the African American community. Though it makes total sense for a ghetto white girl.
I suggested to my friend years ago that we could easily make a little bit of money off of her by starting a dubious consulting agency and offering to triple her exposure for $500. This didn't seem like that tall an order since her exposure was probably so little that tripling it wouldn't be hard. It appears that that ship hasn't yet sailed.
Rov_Scam
11hr ago
Iran is a problem because of:
- Their sponsorship of terrorist groups in other countries
- Their nuclear program
Neither of these have to do with their conventional capabilities, which nobody was talking about until recently. They were already conventionally weak and destroying these capabilities further doesn't accomplish anything, except to possibly exacerbate the existing problems. If you want those problems to go away, you have to either negotiate or control the country. Trump didn't want to negotiate, and due to his recent actions the Iranians aren't going to be willing to negotiate either, so that option is off the table. We already hit their nuclear sites last summer, and Trump said that anyone claiming that it didn't solve the nuclear issue was reporting fake news. 8 months later and they're back to being two weeks away from a bomb. They aren't going to install a new government without some kind of occupation, and they aren't going to be able to get to the nuclear sites without boots on the ground occupying and destroying them. There's no precedent for a country capitulating due to bombing alone, except maybe Japan in 1945 if you only count the mainland. And even then we had total air and naval superiority and still had to both use nukes and send an occupying force of more than 400,000 for a country that's smaller than Iran. I have no idea what Trump thinks is magically going to happen.
The risk to us seems to be primarily from the economic effects of shutting down shipping lanes, which I think is most likely worth the cost.
How can you say that when you don't know what the cost is yet? Should Americans pay $7/gallon for gas for a year for this? Will Iranian insurgent groups periodically drone oil tankers in the Gulf for the foreseeable future? How long will it take global shipping to recover? How much money are you personally willing to lose because of this war?
Rov_Scam
13hr ago
I chose the invasion force numbers based on Gen. Eric Shineski's testimony before congress in 2003, when he estimated that it would take between 200,000 and 300,000 troops to control Iraq. Rumsfeld and Wolfoqitz eviscerated him for this, as they knew that such numbers likely wouldn't fly with the public, whom they were trying to convince that a more nimble operation would be successful. They ended up sending about 150,000 troops for the initial invasion, but those numbers were augmented by 50,000 troops from other countries. I don't know how many troops Israel would be willing to send, but I think it's safe to say that we can't expect much help from elsewhere.
In the end, I don't know why you're bringing up actual troop numbers in Iraq at all, since that's obviously not a war we want to emulate. If we assume that Shineski's estimates were correct, and account for the fact that Iran has double the population and several times the land area, 500,000 seems like a reasonable estimate for what it would take to control the country. I brought up the casualty numbers not because I think any of those numbers are likely, but because we don't know what kind of numbers would be likely. We lost 5,000 in Iraq, but 50,000 in Vietnam and 30,000 in Korea.
I brought all this up because on the one hand you talk about how we weren't willing to fully commit in Vietnam but on the other talk about how this is a fight we can "easily win", and your reply makes it clear that you don't want to commit any ground troops. Well, which is it? Do you want to win, or are you willing to walk away if the air campaign doesn't achieve the objectives (which, it should be said, aren't clear right now). To my knowledge, and correct me if I'm wrong, there has never been an instance where a government has been toppled due to air power alone. Libya fell due to a counterinsurgency, and again, I'm not sure that's an example we want to follow here. What do we do after we've bombed every legitimate target and the regime is still in power? Walk away? If so, that's fine, but it's also evidence that "we really didn't want to win". We may not have 500,000 troops at the ready, but we're certainly able to commit that many if necessary. We've committed more when the population was a lot lower.
Rov_Scam
13hr ago
I assume you're referring to the upcoming spring turkey season. I can't comment about nutjobs because I only ever hunted in the woods behind my parents' house, though a redneck out of central casting stole our flagging pins for a proposed new trail during spring turkey a few years ago, so they're evidently territorial about what other people should be allowed to do in a state park. I haven't done it in a while because it got too frustrating. I'd be over at my parents' visiting and see up to 40 turkeys moving across the back yard, though they all disappeared as soon as the season started. In about five years of semi-regular hunting I got one turkey. The breast meat is fine but I didn't bother with the legs. A friend told me that they're a lot leaner than farm-raised turkeys and tougher as well, so they'd have to be braised for a really long time just to keep them from being inedible. The thing about deer is that you only need to get one to have a freezer full of meat, and my unscientific observations have shown that I'm about as likely to get one deer as I am to get one turkey. I should add the caveat that I gave up hunting over a decade ago when I realized that being in the woods was more enjoyable when I didn't have to carry a gun or worry about being quiet.
Rov_Scam
14hr ago
It's more of a trope than an actual thing, the prototypical example being Al Bundy from the sitcom Married... With Children. The high point of Al's life was the night he scored four touchdowns in one game for Polk High School. In the series he's working in a shoe store where he spends all day cramming fat women into shoes that are too small for them. The bigger part of the joke, though, is that Al and his family are all lazy and misanthropic, and the fact that he feels the need to mention his past football prowess while in his 40s only serves to underscore what a loser he is generally.
The trope isn't so much a reflection of a real-life phenomenon as it is a warning to kids about not getting too hung up on things that don't matter. There's a lot of pressure in high school to be athletic, or smart, or popular, but the minute you take off the mortarboard it all ceases to matter. Take grades, for instance. In high school, grades and SAT scores and the like are certainly something you need to worry about, far more important than popularity. But as soon as that acceptance letter comes in the mail, that's it. They've done their job, and nobody will care about them again. You're first year in college, you're in the same position as the guy in the seat next to you with the B- average. And if you flunk out and spend the next 20 years working as a convenience store clerk, nobody is going to be convinced that you're smart because you had a 4.0 GPA in high school and won the Bausch and Lomb Science Award. When you apply the same logic to things like sports and popularity it seems even more ridiculous. But for kids who don't know any better, it seems important.
In this case very little, since it's worth about five minutes every decade, or about 30 second per year. And that's only because I knew her IRL. It's kind of pathetic, but she hasn't done anything to me personally, and she hasn't done anything to warrant anyone trying to destroy her life. I'm not going to condone anything Kiwifarms does, which is why I'm not posting any real details, even though she's still after attention.
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