Maybe because this “deal” is bound to break down in a matter of hours when Iran launches missiles at the entity in order to retaliate for its relentless slaughter in Lebanon.

Is he the guy who was caught copy+pasting emails from the state department and then passing them off as his own without even bothering to change any of the text?

Trump just giving Iran suitcases of cash. If we had a real president like Obama, this never would have happened. /s

Good 😎

Does the emoji mean what I wrote was good or bad 😑

I liked it. After glancing through various wikipedia pages, I concluded that the movie was about liminal spaces, in-between spaces, not-quite-there-yet spaces, but it’s also about liminal people. The MC is a divorced alcoholic failing small business owner wannabe architect who has no friends or family, only a couple of employees and a therapist, whose only relationships are money relationships—not a full person. The therapist is traumatized from growing up in a backrooms-like environment with her mentally sick mother who eventually got committed, and has found some success in her writing but still feels empty (running away from her own book launch party to pop some kind of pill), and is likewise unable to help or cure her client, who can barely bother to show up to their sessions on time. Her childhood home, all that’s seemingly left of her mother, was destroyed in order to make room for an office building. These are liminal people.

Even outside the backrooms, the environments we see are fairly dead, and hardly better than their backrooms equivalents: the outside of a huge (yet mostly empty) shopping center (which is about pirates but also an ottoman empire, an orientalist mishmash that makes little sense in its own liminal way), a few subdivisions where no one seems to be around, plus what seemed like a hotel converted into low-income housing? The whole world here is liminal. Even the employees are forced to suspend whatever they were doing in their home (fucking, producing offspring, the only thing the proletariat is good for according to the etymology of the term?) to literally kill themselves for a wage in the backrooms. Theseus here is “the hot guy” with the “End Apartheid” shirt, come to free the slaves trapped in the labyrinth, but because he’s no longer a prince, but a wage earner, Ariadne and Daedalus (with his ball of string / rope) can’t help him.

It was pretty obvious to connect this to the labyrinth, with the minotaur likewise being an incomplete liminal person, with the body of a man and the head of a bull, a petite bourgeois with his feet among the proletariat while his head is in the clouds with haute bourgeois billionaires.

Someone also needs to say something about the racial dynamics in the film. The main character is a black petite bourgeois. No one in the film says a word about him being black. The film could have been made with a white actor in his place, and the script could have been the same. Why did the filmmakers choose to make the main character black (especially in our current anti-woke reaction period) and why then did the film seemingly say nothing about race, aside from seemingly being against apartheid? The white male worker has better politics than the black male petite bourgeois…

The movie made me think of The Shining, Cube, Being John Malkovich, Us, Get Out, and others. All of these movies are kind of riffing on these themes.

As a critique of capitalism, the film shows something terrifying to the proletariat: a small business owner on the rampage inside endless inescapable office space that has been created for profit, not use. These kinds of empty office spaces are frightening because no one is there, only our unconscious bourgeois shadow people can fill them, but beautiful natural environments were devastated to build them, communities were bulldozed for them, and workers went there to kill their dreams in exchange for a wage (before losing their jobs to automation, offshoring, stock market collapses, etc.). They’re the latest iteration of the enclosure of the commons: instead of replacing people with sheep for profit, we’re replacing people with office space for profit, especially on the cusp of the nineties dotcom boom. The film is likewise set in San Jose / Silicon Valley, but could have been set almost anywhere. It’s also not coincidental that this creepypasta became popular at the beginning of the pandemic, when returning to the office (to be terrorized by middle manager half-people) could literally mean losing your life.

I did think, as soon as he found the pile of stools the first time he stepped through the wall, was that he should have been like: “hell yeah, free stools!” And he should have tried to sell them. And he should have only gone inside the backrooms to get free furniture to sell, and should have just ignored everything else about them. And also tried to rent them out, having zero interest of any kind as to why they were there. He could have called the police on the “entities” and claimed all the backrooms for himself.

Someone forgot to check the lint trap.

🎂

Not to be confused with the HARADRIC staff which you need to unlock the HARADRIC dildo.

Loves this resource!

Wait, I was under the impression that the entire Iranian navy was at the bottom of the ocean. Do you mean to say that the president has been lying about this?

The beginning of Parenti’s book about the destruction of Yugoslavia sounds, word-for-word, like descriptions of the corporate media’s take on Uyghurs in China. It was legitimately disturbing to read. The American ruling class is doing literally the exact same thing they did in the nineties—“we must protect the Muslim minority in China/Yugoslavia”—and many many people who were alive at the time and who saw the results are falling for it. Thankfully China today is much stronger than Yugoslavia was in the nineties, but we can’t assume that this situation will last forever. Using the market to enrich your country means that you are subjecting yourself to the market’s anarchy. I think the CCP knows this and has seen what happened in places like Yugoslavia (which took on a shitload of debt from the West in the '70s I think, thereby dooming them to eventual collapse), and that they’re doing their best to basically use capitalism to take over the world via the Belt and Road Initiative and many other policies, but it’s a dangerous game and the best laid plans of mice and men etc. etc.