Not sure if I'd consider them to be desperate.
Stupid yes, and blatantly open while they could hide the censorship part way better, but they are doing that out of confidence that ultimately nothing will happen, except the distortion of the public discourse. Doesn't matter what they do and how they do it, everything just creates more data for them to check out how to enhance the system of manipulation of the public discourse.

I guess I want to believe that they simple go for it. They know that it's now or never and the resilience people showed in actually never quit the enshitified services, no matter what, proves them right.
The discourse is so distorted and crazy in the mainstream media in the US at this stage that it's mindblowing to watch how people just drown in the mud of the shithole not realizing how distorted they became themselves.

They literally still think that they are fighting the algorithms and can win that fight, doing the good fight, standing up to the policies of twitter inside twitter while training the AI to screw them over even more.
Musk literally went out there and did the Nazi salute repeatedly, yet nobody left, governments, news outlets, reporters, ONG's, they just stayed and stated things like "something that looked like a nazi salute".

It's scandals and madness for decades now, from "they trust me dumbf***'s", over genocide in Myanmar, Cambridge analytica, Brexit, suicides, anorexic girls, canceling or suspension of profiles, force feed of MusX's egomaniac tweets into the streams of everyone .. and the list goes on, and on, and nothing changes. And nobody moves, nobody acts accordingly, draws the line and takes the consequences. What we are witnessing is humans at their best, just paddling along while criticizing and bitching around, inside the platforms while just staying there.
10% switched to bluesky, 1% to mastodon .. who cares, that actually means that those people lost access to the 89% that are left to be induced with the opinions that serve the interests of the owners.
The locked in effect is real, the fact that we write about it and discus how to revert it without finding the key proves it in the first place. And they know and simply work with it.
Right now they need to make it till the midterms, and that means not necessarily survive those elections but to disrupt and manipulate communication and public discourse enough that everything is so distorted that nobody believes anything anymore and that the only thing that's left is a zone flooded so entirely with shit that no specific issue at all sticks out so people and public opinion can't gather around anything specific.

At this stage, talking about Epstein means distracting from assassinations in the streets by a gestapo in construction that doesn't even bother to train before going out into the field. The training is in real life, reality TV for every one, while the message is clear:
"We got your back no matter what!"
Worst case scenario, you get replaced and we send you back to your previous position until the dust settles and public outrage went on to another topic.

War crimes and crimes against humanity?
"They only want to distract from the Epstein files!"
Bribery, destruction of the UN?
"They only want to distract from the Epstein files!"
Dismantling of federal agencies, increase of military spending's, leaving people without health care ..
"They only want to distract from the Epstein files!"

As Bernie said:
"They will entertain you to death!", flooding the zone with BS .. distracting you with the Epstein files!

They just decided that the whole woke or free speech outrage doesn't move the needle if you ignore it and throw another bone so everyone can clickbait around it.

Actually an outstanding real life artwork of Idiocray proof of work, put into motion in plain sight.

The moment when everything is a distraction, nothing matters anymore.

@Hypolite Petovan

¡The goals and the tools, and that the tools are inbetween unnecessary and counterproductive?

hmm yeah well ..
.. I guess it's like probably some kind of mix of rush to at last be able to do everything they always wanted, a rush of empboldend power energy that really overwhelms them, FOMO to not get out of it as much as they can, seeing the aprobation rate tank and pulling all the levers at once, as a lot of them are new. New levers as well as new tools, toys and operators.

I better leave this here, the last comment evolved while writing up to the point that it ended saying something different than what it started with. I'm, and we might all be kinda whisteling out of our pressurecooking neurons valve, and I'm somehow addicted to that state of mind. Creative stumbeling over newly synapsed connections that burst out like strings of the wild unthinking as the Keynsian quote in this profile states.
(perhaps reading all this tomorrow to see if it still makes seens, what part is new and what part is just parroting others is the respectfull and more reasonable way to go)

@lcamtuf There's a higher-res version of the reflection one here: jerrybell.smugmug.com/Misc-flo…

I didn't record a video of taking that one, but this video is roughly the same process: youtube.com/watch?v=pj_Phb0Pm6…

Basically, it's a black glass board with the flower on it and a piece of translucent film behind it with a stobe with the pink/red gel pointed at the film and a large softbox with a strobe directly over the glass board pointed down. The only real editing I did was to blur the line where the back of the glass board meets the film - I picked that up from some fine art landscape tutorials where obscuring the horizon is apparently the in thing.

For the roses and the other plant I posted first, those are rim lit. I didn't record a video of that, but it's the same technique in this video: youtube.com/watch?v=QlmBpXF-tO…

basically, the flower is sandwiched between the camera and a large softbox with strobe pointed at the camera. I add a small black mask immediately behind the flower and in front of the front of the strobe and that causes the illumination for the subject to come entirely from around the sides of the mask, lighting the edges of the subject most prominently - if does a really nice job (IMO) of highlighting contours. I picked that up from a portrait photographer and adapted it for flowers. Those have almost no editing, other than cropping and getting rid of some lens flare that I didn't properly control.