Jesse Benson

@dumbbitchzine Hübsche Frau..!

Rewatched one of my favorite movies, “Run Lola Run.” The late 90s had so much momentum as the new millennium approached. Creative energy was on high. The aesthetics were out of this world. Everything kind of fell off once we were Wall Street cucked, Obamanated, and electro-clashed. Of course this German masterpiece is about the importance of being on time.

@MoundLore I still have a complete set of Craftsman ratchets, made in the U.S., that I bought new at Sears more than 25 years ago.

A lot of Americans remember Sears as a dying store in a half-empty mall. That’s not what Sears was. Sears was how American factories entered ordinary houses. Kenmore in the kitchen. Craftsman in the garage. DieHard under the hood. Coldspot humming in the corner. Lawn tractors in sheds. Socket sets in drawers that nobody was allowed to lose. It was basements, workbenches, catalogs, part numbers, repairmen, delivery trucks, credit accounts, and old men who could hear a washer struggling before it finally quit. A kid could flip through the Wish Book and learn what adulthood looked like. Tools. Appliances. Work boots. School clothes. A bicycle. Sometimes even a whole house ordered by mail and built piece by piece after the materials came in by rail. That was the part Sears understood. America was full of people trying to build stable lives with practical things. Then the practical world got replaced by a disposable one. The catalogs vanished. The stores hollowed out. Manufacturing moved overseas. Repair got expensive. Replacement got cheap. The people who knew how everything worked got older, retired, or died, and a lot of what they knew went with them. People call it the death of a department store. I don’t. Sears was one of the last national systems that still assumed ordinary Americans should know how to maintain the world around them instead of just replacing it. That’s the strange poverty nobody talks about now. Not having fewer things. Having more than ever and understanding almost none of them.

@JustineBateman @latimes Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?

.@latimes this is silly, isn't it? Your own reporters have printed numerous stories about the demise of LA. This is a very silly, childish clickbait title and article. Los Angeles has become unaffordable, with crazy individuals roaming the streets, potholes and ridges popping our tires, an understaffed police force, an under-equipped fire department, a film and TV production business that is collapsing, and billions of our tax dollars just kind of getting lost in the wind. I suppose if you just moved to LA last year, you've accepted this as some "normal" state, but anyone who's lived here for more than a minute knows exactly what LA is now. It's not a "vision," just fact. Don't be silly.

Current mood.

@SecretSunBlog Oh, now that I can recognize it I am reminded every fucking day.

Remember.

@JosephKahn There's a solution, but L.A. isn't ready for that conversation. Yet.

The problem with LA is the "Everything's Fine" people. These are people that came to LA after its heyday and during its decline after the financial crash of 2008. The more recent the transplant, the less they are aware of what Los Angeles used to be. They have no idea all the areas that used to be lively, or that there was a world class music and night life scene. If you mention there weren't homeless people shitting on the streets everywhere, they call you a MAGA fascist because unhoused people have rights too and Everything's Fine. If you mention entire neighborhoods like the Pacific Palisades did not burn down, they say you should not be blaming the mayor for the weather (which is controlled by global warming Republicans) and Everything's Fine. You can say it's really not normal for so many shops to be closed all over Los Angeles with empty storefronts, and they'll say something about equity and that Everything's Fine. The street vendors on sidewalks in front of KoreaTown restaurants that are shutting down? That's totally fine because that's LA culture (no it fucking isn't newbie). Crime? Everything's Fine. These theater kid transplants from Michigan say why are you complaining, move somewhere else. They don't know what they don't know. Then they drink a $20 Erewhon smoothie thinking that's the height of LA culture. Everything's Fine.

@RamboVanHalen The Pratt for Mayor ads are some of the very best advertising of the last several years.

Perfect🤌

@ihtesham2005 I don’t need a neuroscientist to tell me this, it’s very obvious if you pay any attention.

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper. Her name is Audrey van der Meer. She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth. The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time. Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen. Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task. When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once. The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected. When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely. Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG. Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events. The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem. Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next. Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve. Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews. Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad. Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page. A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched. The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall. The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down. The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page. That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it. Two studies. Two countries. Same answer. Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast. Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth. You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick. The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew. Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

@RamboVanHalen Also the atomized film biz means many don’t have the classic Hollywood training that seems restrictive and inefficient at first but makes sense when you scale up.

Why did the X Files look good? It's because they had a good budget. Because back then more people watched TV. And because more people watched TC, brands paid money more to buy ads. So the networks had more money spend on production. They spent more money so they could attract more viewers and sell even more ads. Today the audience is fragmented. It's harder to focus that many eyeballs in the same place. And network ad revenue isn't even close to what it was in the 90s. So the production budgets are lower. And the productions don't have the time and resources to do it right. It's just economics🤷‍♂️

I know life is worse in some places, times have been tougher, but never has your entire life been upended while everyone around you told you "you're crazy, everything is fine." What weighs most is the psyop that the ship isn't sinking so go ahead and file those taxes and keep applying for jobs; you have to get one soon. In clear wartime, you know it's kill or be killed. You can start or join a gang. You can steal to survive. But this halfway in, halfway out where your mind and actions are not in sync at all, for years at a time, is enough to drive anyone mad.

Unfortunately, the goal of the best designers is to disappear: the world they create couldn’t be any other way. It looks & feels obvious, but it is the result of many, many decisions and a lot of work by many talented, invisible people. Clint Eastwood said it best about his long-time designer Henry Bumstead: “Henry builds the bridge from what I read in the script to what I see when I look through the viewfinder.”

@MickmickNYC This is specifically the Art Department, a team that compromises a Production Designer, an Art Director, a Set Decorator, a Prop Master and many, MANY support crew members under these leads within the Art Department. Thank you for showing appreciation for the extremely hard work that we do! 🫶 Many people only see the Director, the Camera crew and Talent (actors), with zero understanding of how many extremely talented and skilled Designers and Artists go into making their favorite movies and tv shows, live events, I just wanted to call attention to make sure that people know that the work you’re highlighting (transforming the city and taking it back to times past) is the work of the art department, because the art department is ALWAYS present (on screen) but never spoken of. I’m a film and tv production designer in the Art Directors Guild, this is what I do (design film and tv sets). We build the worlds of your favorite characters. Think Batman’s Lair, the Star Trek Bridge, even digital worlds and environments like the artwork you experience at the Las Vegas Sphere, or things like the Super Bowl, or large scale live events and concerts. Production Designers literally design those worlds/spaces/environments, EVERY SINGLE DETAIL with an amazing team of creatives and artists helping them bring those worlds to life. If everyone knew how much work goes into a single 30 second clip of footage your minds would be blown. But I wouldn’t change it for the world. I get to live my passion (design and the creative process) every day (period pieces - which is what this movie is - are my favorite to design). I wish everyone could experience doing what they love for a living for at least one day. There’s no other feeling like it!

Stepping directly onto the set of HBO's The Gilded Age in Manhattan today, and the production scale is absolutely mind-blowing. To completely transform modern New York City back to the 1880s, the crew laid down massive textured carpets over the asphalt to perfectly mimic historic stone streets. There are over 350 background actors fully dressed in period-accurate costumes, alongside dozens of real horse-drawn carriages filling the block. It is incredible to see how much physical craftsmanship goes into creating just a few moments of television magic.

@LostMyHats "Ashkenaz" was the Hebrew translation for "Scudra", the Pazyryk term for "shooter", meaning mounted archer. The Pazyryks were a nomadic horse-breeding Steppe culture. -from the book "Rulers, Raiders and Traders" by David Chaffetz.

Christians who believe the Ashkenazi's "official" origin story do so because they're drawn to official narratives, or perhaps they're naturally averse to "conspiracy theories." Or maybe they aren't aware that, to believe the official narrative, they have to accept that the Holy Bible is wrong on some very important historical details. If the Ashkenazi are named after Ashkenaz (which one would naturally presume), the grandson of Noah, then 80% of the Jews in the world - from Bibi Netanyahu to Ben Shapiro - aren't related to Abraham. So, they've adopted a different theory, and it requires believing in a lot of weird coincidences. The Ashkenazi official narrative is that a tiny group of Semitic Jews, descended in an unbroken biological line from the ancient Israelites of Palestine, survived the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, wandered into Rome, made their way through France, crossed the Alps, and settled in the Rhine Valley sometime around 1000 AD. But then - here is the part that requires the most imagination - they looked around at the territory and decided to name themselves after the region they settled in, which just coincidentally was already named after the ancestors of Ashkenaz, who had settled there centuries prior. That would be the first time in history that somebody would name themselves after the place - and after somebody else's ancestors - rather than their own. Weird, right? But it gets weirder. They then abandoned their Semitic language in favor of Yiddish, a German tongue with a Slavic influence and no Semitic structure, which is a strange thing for a people fiercely protective of their ethnic and religious identity to do with the language their ancestors allegedly spoke. Gets weirder. They then developed a suite of genetic founder mutations entirely distinct from the Jews they claim to share ancestry with, and those different genetic markers actually originate from a geographical location the Bible says is where Ashkenazi's ancestors settled. Just a coincidence, I'm sure. That is the official story. You are expected to believe it without asking questions, and if you ask questions, you will be called a conspiracy theorist by people who have a great deal riding on your continued credulity. But the problem is that it also requires believing the Bible is wrong about where Ashkenaz's ancestors settled, because Scripture says they settled in modern Armenia in the southern Caucasus, not the Rhineland. Josephus, the 1st century Jewish historian, ALSO says they settled there, not the Rhineland. But their entire origin story requires them to have settled the Rhineland. What happened to the genetic Ashkenazis who supposedly settled the Rhineland long before that tiny group of Semitic Jews got there? Mystery, man. They disappeared! Suddenly, all that remains in the region known as Ashkenaz is the group of Semitic Jews, now calling themselves Ashkenazi, who instead of having the DNA of other Semitic Jews, have the DNA from the region where the Bible and Josephus say Ashkenaz's ancestors settled. See the problem with this? Implausible doesn't begin to explain it. Believing the official narrative requires believing the Bible is wrong. It requires believing that the 1st-century Jewish historian, Josephus, is wrong. It requires believing it's only coincidental that the genetics study done by award-winning Ashkenazi and Israeli geneticist, Eran Elhaik (PhD in molecular evolution from the University of Houston in 2009, followed by two postdoctoral fellowships at Johns Hopkins) shows their DNA comes from the place the Bible and Josephus says Ashkenaz's ancestors settled. What you might not know is that John Gill, the renowned Protestant and Reformed Baptist Bible commentator and predecessor to Spurgeon at the London Metropolitan Tabernacle, looking at all the evidence in the 1800s, said that Jews in the Rhineland territory of Ashkenaz were indeed his blood relatives, meaning, unrelated to Abraham. He wasn't an "antisemitic conspiracy theorist" with a half-cocked theory he read on the Internet. That's where the facts took him. Here's the situation: the claim that Jews have an ancient ancestral land grant to the Promised Land, is not only wrong because the New Testament says that Christians are heirs of Abraham's promise, but even if that weren't the case, 80% of Jews worldwide wouldn't be on that deed, even if it existed. That included Bibi Netanyahu. Ben Shapiro. David Ben-Gurion. Menachem Begin. Yitzhak Rabin. Ariel Sharon. Golda Meir. Ehud Barak. Isaac Herzog. The father of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzyl. The Rothschilds. Wouldn't you give money not to have to hear opinions on Israel ever again from Miriam Adelson, Bill Maher, Sarah Silverman, Harvey Weinstein, Ari Emanuel, Larry Ellison, Sergey Brin, Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, Carl Icahn, Steve Schwarzman, Kenneth Griffin, Larry Fink? Well, you shouldn't have to, because they're not related to Abraham and have no claim to it. Read the evidence at Insight to Incite. Audio version available. Link in bio.

My Austrian father-in-law remarked on our last back-roads trip to New Orleans, after seeing tidy farms, little towns and gorgeous vistas: "Who knew America was like this?" I had to explain (in my rusty German) that THIS WAS America, and New York, Los Angeles and other U.S. cities he had visited before were not part of America.

The Knowledge of "how" to drive through America is somewhat a lost art. On the interstates, you can drive coast to coast and see almost nothing but ugliness, gas stations, etc. You need to research and follow the old "US Routes" these are 2 lane roads from the old days.

@orangedog21 @RamboVanHalen They are going up, but not as fast as they did, so they are actually going down. -Every economist pundit

@RamboVanHalen feels like these going up in price when they should be going down

Just bought a new external hard drive and WTF MAN??

@hearinladotcom Another example of people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

paying $128,000 to jail a single homeless person (lao.ca.gov/policyareas/cj…) and provide them food, shelter, and health care isn't socialism? harold isn't alone in believing it isn't, but it sounds like a lot of you need to pick up a few books. regardless of what you want to call it, financially, there are a ton of 1BD apartments hear in LA from $1,100-$1,600. but lets say the city forked over $2k for a 1BD that was pretty good. That's $24k. Even if the city spent $50k a year on food and health services for each homeless person, that's still just $74k a person - or a savings of $54k over sending them to jail. Now, is that inmate more likely to learn a skill in or out of jail? Is that inmate more likely to have access to better mental health services in or out of jail? Is that inmate more or less likely to return to the streets after living like a criminal behind bars? Am I saying the city should place every homeless person in a $2k 1BD apartment at market rate? Of course not. I am saying putting them in jail is like putting them up in a 1BD in Beverly Hills. Spencer Pratt *does* want to jail the homeless, which is way more costly and will only make the problem work. And yes, jailing them is socialism, so if you are against that utterly scary word, you all need to find a different solution for how to treat the poorest among us.

@uncledoomer They should just drop the facade and call it "Non-Player Character Burger".

in every city across the US theres a burger place that the locals swear you gotta try. and theyre all fine. nothing mind blowing. a burger is a burger. its kind of hard to fuck up a burger

@nick_lindquist "Greatest Job Generator Since The Interstate Highway System".

Central Park is great, but it takes up a lot of space and isn’t utilized to its full potential. That’s why I worked with McKinsey on a plan to make it a state of the art data center, complemented by rooftop parking and nuclear power. We can still build beautiful things.

@VirgilHilts01 @theeroamer Dying 😅

@theeroamer In France they call that look 'la belle end'.

Many have never experienced nor seen Dark Europe: there are many parts, especially as you go East, that are pretty bad. Having lived there for many years, I can say that Europe has its own problems, different than the states but just as chronic and structural. But everyone sees the plazas and fountains and castles.

I'm never too aggressive on the USA -Euro debate. I like the USA but I like the atypical parts, the Mexican border, S. Florida, the N. Woods, even the big Cities. If it was a choice between the "Vast Suburb" most Americans inhabit and Europe, I would take Europe at once.

@RamboVanHalen Wait, WHAT?

They never told me😢