Ernst-Jan van Melle
@ejvanmelle.bsky.social
150 followers 390 following 120 posts
Artist, miniature botherer, film and game dilettante https://ejvanmelle.com/
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ejvanmelle.bsky.social
My animated short and #GerryAnderson #Supermarionation homage, ENEMIES FROM VENUS: youtu.be/ME7SVM7bwKU?... #animation #3danimation #scifi
ENEMIES FROM VENUS! (~1965) (Surviving clip)
YouTube video by Ernst-Jan van Melle
youtu.be
Reposted by Ernst-Jan van Melle
dieworkwear.bsky.social
You gently run your hand through the rack. You can feel it—pure cotton, rich wool, Irish linen. The plump buttonholes are handsewn; the buttons attached with a firm shank. You flip the price tag over. It's affordable

You buy the jacket and go home, which is only 15 mins away. Your apt is $600/month
Headline reads: Altman says ChatGPT will soon allow erotic for adult users.
Reposted by Ernst-Jan van Melle
notalawyer.bsky.social
the subreddits for luxury watches are some of the darkest places on earth
Rolex subreddit post: 

My uncle has Alzheimer's and is often forgetful of his possessions. One of them is a Rolex Submariner. Would I be justified in taking and caring for it as my own instead of having it left neglected and forgotten in his jewelry box? Thanks.
Reposted by Ernst-Jan van Melle
Reposted by Ernst-Jan van Melle
zeteo.com
Zeteo @zeteo.com · 22h
“When it comes to the almost 2,000 Palestinians who were released by Israel as part of the deal… there has been silence from much of our mainstream media.”

Read five stories about Palestinian hostages released from Israeli detention following the Gaza ceasefire agreement: zeteo.com/p/five-pales...
Reposted by Ernst-Jan van Melle
robdelaney.bsky.social
The angriest I’ve ever been in my life was when the Jeremy Renner app shut down before I could download the last DMs my dad sent me before he died
Reposted by Ernst-Jan van Melle
realgdt.bsky.social
The world lost a genial man, a genius communicator and a supreme artist. I lost a friend - beloved Drew.
awd.bsky.social
Rest in Peace, Drew Struzan
Reposted by Ernst-Jan van Melle
Reposted by Ernst-Jan van Melle
Reposted by Ernst-Jan van Melle
ianmcque.bsky.social
Another day, another ai enthusiast warning me I’ll get ‘left behind’ if I’m not careful. He makes the future of entertainment sound delightful
IG grab featuring an ai arsehole An ai arsehole tries to defend his use of ai
Reposted by Ernst-Jan van Melle
brendelbored.bsky.social
I know it’s the most obvious thing in the world but it’s really sad that so many people have absolutely no desires or dreams in life except to accumulate money and our entire world is becoming a fucking pit because of it
Reposted by Ernst-Jan van Melle
pedsortho.bsky.social
Please remember that the disgust people have over Christopher Columbus is not based on some modern, 21st century “woke” ideology, but rather on contemporaneous accounts of atrocities that make many modern genocides appear quaint in comparison.

Below, are the accounts of Bartlomé de las Casas.
But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had in-vested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.
The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed. After each six or eight months' work in the mines, which was the time required of each crew to dig enough gold for melting, up to a third of the men died.
While the men were sent many miles away to the mines, the wives remained to work the soil, forced into the excruciating job of digging and making thousands of hills for cassava plants.
Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides... they ceased to pro-create. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and fam-ished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desper-ation.... In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk ... and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fer-tile... was depopulated... My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write....
Reposted by Ernst-Jan van Melle
Reposted by Ernst-Jan van Melle
tedmccormick.bsky.social
The antihero Ozymandias is not, in fact, an early modern person
sharonk.bsky.social
thiel, man, what the fuck are you talking about

He describes the plot of Watchmen, a 1986 graphic novel involving superheroes grappling with moral questions about humanity against the backdrop of impending nuclear war:

The antihero Ozymandias, the antichrist-type figure, is sort of an early-modern person. He believes this will be a timeless and eternal solution – eternal world peace. Moore is sort of a late-modern. In early modernity, you have ideal solutions, ‘perfect’ solutions to calculus. In late modernity, things are sort of probabilistic. And at some point, he asks Dr Manhattan whether the world government is going to last. And he says that ‘nothing lasts forever.’ So you embrace the antichrist and it still doesn’t work.

Thiel later finds biblical meaning in the manga One Piece, discussing how he believes it represents a future where an antichrist-like one-world government has repressed science. He believes that the hero, Monkey D Luffy, represents a Christlike figure.

In One Piece, you are set in a fantasy world, again sort of an alternate earth, but it’s 800 years into the reign of this one-world state. Which, as the story unfolds, gradually gets darker and darker. You sort of realize, in my interpretation, who runs the world and it’s something like the antichrist. There’s Luffy, a pirate who wears a red straw hat, sort of like Christ’s crown of thorns. And then towards the end of the story, transforms into a figure who resembles Christ in Revelation.

Thiel, along with a researcher and writer at Thiel Capital, explored these ideas at greater length in an essay for the religious journal First Things earlier this month.
Reposted by Ernst-Jan van Melle
gralefrit.bsky.social
Perfect posting from Tim Heidecker, 24 hours apart.
What an incredible experience, getting to perform at the Riyadh Comedy Festival. I left feeling grateful and humbled by his majesty's generosity. I'll never forget this memorial experience and all the fun we had. Hope to do it again soon. upon further reflection, there is a small part of me that feels I sent the wrong message, regarding the Riyahd Comedy Festival last night. While, I do think it's important for comedy to have the opportunity to thrive in all parts of the globe, there are some aspects of The Royal Highness, King Salmon and his leadership in the region that i don't agree with entirely, but it's a different culture when it comes to freedom and rights and I gotta respect that we are all different and have different values. My manager is now investigating the possibility of donating some of my fee to a charity for Vetrans of War.
Reposted by Ernst-Jan van Melle
cryptadamist.universeodon.com.ap.brid.gy
new ayn rand just dropped

#argentina #milei #javiermilei #bailout #uspol #aynrand #atlasshrugged #meme #memes
Cover of Atlas Shrugged, but with new title "Atlas needs you to spot him like $20 billion", 1st argentinian edition
Reposted by Ernst-Jan van Melle
samfr.bsky.social
New post just out:

The relationship between Russia and the European radical right goes well beyond Reform's Nathan Gill being bribed.

In this post I trace the history back to the 1990s and look at the threat it poses now.

(£/free trial)

open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/r...
Russia and the rise of the radical right
Marine Le Pen meets with Putin before the 2017 French Presidential election (Photo credit Mikhail Klimentyev/AFP via Getty Images)
open.substack.com
Reposted by Ernst-Jan van Melle
edzitron.com
AI has lost the dunce vote. It’s over
Nate Silver
@NateSilver538 • 5h
•.°
I'm just one person, and my programming needs are somewhat unusual (building various kinds of statistical forecasting models). But I'm just not seeing the consistent productivity gains from LLMs that I would have expected if you'd asked me 6 months ago.
Reposted by Ernst-Jan van Melle
tvaziri.com
if you hear a creative or a creative-adjacent person say something along the lines of “whatever you think about AI, it’s here to stay” they probably just got pAId
Reposted by Ernst-Jan van Melle
ebharrington.bsky.social
What Thiel is saying about tax havens = what Altman is saying about copyright:

"I can't be rich unless you let me steal from you."

This is how Broligarchs differ from oligarchs of yore: the latter tried to hide their thievery; the Broligarchs trumpet their entitlement to steal as a natural right.
Reposted by Ernst-Jan van Melle
Reposted by Ernst-Jan van Melle
Reposted by Ernst-Jan van Melle
phineas.bsky.social
What's getting me is the 'building metaverse' part. We have to expand our dead and abandoned mall! 5X faster!