I have a few of those. I feel bad for them. they must wonder what life could have been. One day I’ll find a peripheral that fits them and they’ll go on the adventure of a lifetime.

Thank you to all geo-politically educated mods on all instances, for keeping my feeds relatively free of US/western propagandist echo-chamber warriors.

You’d think inside your own echo chamber you’d be able to hear yourself.

Say, “What’s the haps, jazz cat?”

I’m as American as the notion that apple pie is American and I use metric all the time. I convert in my head though, I can’t get my brain to completely switch over.

It is super funny that Americans will deign to use millimeters for ammo, considering how much cultural cachet “caliber” has. Or had, I guess, I think it’s less cool than it used to be.

Oh, I was talking about the 25,500 full moons.

Keep an eye out for results from the Roman space telescope, with any luck we’re about to have a buttload of new data about dark matter.

And, predictably, Americans will literally use anything before they use the metric system.

I think it’s “dark” because it doesn’t interact with photons (except gravitationally, of course)

I don’t think it will ever entirely be a thing of the past, because humans are inventive and humans who wish to exercise control over their fellows will continually invent new means to do so, but I think we have a lot of room for improvement in the area of making that as difficult as possible.

One example is in media segmentation. I think one of the things that made Trump able to succeed is the extent to which he and his allies controlled the media diets of his constituency. People outside their control tend to think of American Republicans as ignorant, hateful people beyond reason. That’s not untrue, but it really undersells the massive amount of control Republican leaders have over the lens their constituents have on the world. Outside the see the Fox News histrionics about cities being overrun by drugs, and gangs, and drug-gangs, and we turn to one another and laugh at the idea that anyone could believe such an obviously not true thing. For those deep inside the bubble, they believe it because they never see any contradiction to that narrative, ever. They don’t go into cities that often, and when they do they have been conditioned to be afraid of phantom criminals. They watch the news their parents watched, listen to the AM radio, and read websites they learned about in the church they grew up in, from people they have been taught to trust. They aren’t stupid, at least not all of them. It’s very weird, and very sad, to see up close how decades of uncontested conservative propaganda blasting can warp the fundamental assumptions a person has about the world.

Anyway I think the internet is a pretty handy medium for making inroads into those bubbles. It sounds pollyanna-ish, I think, given the current sickly state of the Internet, but one of the lessons I hope the world pulls from the American trainwreck is one on how to better identify and puncture media bubbles. That shit will kill us if we let it.

The roots are older than any of us. For the US, the line “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” has been a hypocritical fiction since the day Jefferson put pen to paper. When I was a kid I was taught that it was more of an ideal that we were slowly but inexorably marching toward, and I just don’t think “maybe, someday” is an acceptable timeframe for something as critical as equality under law.

I think Jeffs was on the right track, and that holding some variant of “all persons are equal under law” as axiomatic is necessary for democratic government, but in 250 years we have never satisfactorily held ourselves to the standard we claim to hold, and the consequences of that hypocrisy have waxed and waned over the decades as the Rupert Murdochs of the world have sought to exploit it to their own ends, but it’s never not been present in some fashion.

To extend the cancer metaphor, I don’t know that a cure can be trusted to stick, even if we can get the current wave into remission. Countries of a certain age need routine screenings and effective early-stage interventions, and the US has done neither consistently. I don’t really know what working versions of those would look like. I think the origins of fascism have a mutagenic quality that make any one treatment a mere stop-gap until some selfish one finds a way to circumvent it, so maybe it’s more a game of constant vigilance and treating outbreaks as they occur, decisively, than coming up with one all-encompassing solution.

🏆 I love his lil bowtie!

IDK I’ve never heard of a name for this. I think it should be called a popconut.

undesirables

lol yikes. The seating chart brings out a lot of brutal honesty in people. Or brutal passive aggression, in my case. The “leftovers” relative said they “just really didn’t fit anywhere else” but made it clear that these people were only invited because they were doing an act of charity (that wasn’t their decision anyway) and they “didn’t judge, but some people just don’t live Christian” 🙄

In spite of the planning committee it was a pretty fun wedding, and the Leftovers table was a big part of that. I got some cool weirdos in my bloodline.

One of the worst things about fascism, even among the many putrid things about it, is the public display of cruelty and dominance over the regime’s named enemies.

Among the cruel, power is measured by the ability to inflict suffering, so the regime must show its strength by increasingly extreme public displays of punishment of anyone who threatens their power, whether in fact or in their imagination.

It breaks my heart that we’ve come to this. This in particular, but everything that’s happened in the last ten years that led up to this, and everything that happened and didn’t happen before Trump and Co. that brought us to the place where someone like them could seize power. It breaks my heart, and it breaks my heart that I am all but numb to it. By right I should be stunned and horrorstruck by my government slaughtering a human being for spectacle. I can feel the feeling, deep and abstractly, but not as I should feel it. I’m used to the horrors, or my capacity to feel horror has been intentionally and methodically overwhelmed. I have to work to feel a fraction of it, and the fact that that numbness is engineered by the Russell Voughts of the world is yet another horror on the pile.

At this point I’m grimly determined to see the end of this horrorshow or die trying, but holy fuck does it suck being in the middle of it. Y’all, if your government is corrupted by the influence of the ultra wealthy and the demonization of the helpless, please do yourselves a favor and nip that shit in the bud. I wish I had practical advice on how, but clearly we in the US were not able to stop this before it metastasized. It keeps getting worse long after you think it can’t get any worse. I don’t think the US has seen the worst of it yet.

There was a time in my life where I thought we had figured this one out. Maybe believing it’s figured out is part of the problem. I really didn’t think it could possibly come to this. If I had, I think I would have been more proactive about it :(

Different smokes for different folks

The Sinners’ Table is a fantastic name for it. I’ve heard it called it the Maybes or, less charitably, the Leftovers but this is way more accurate.

It’s not worth the downsides, but a major upside of working for a large tech outlet is getting to pick over the massive amount of tech refuse they cycle through. Being able to snag 2-3 year old pro equipment for free is an undeniably tempting perk.

I buy new equipment when I can and make do with old equipment when I must. All the equipment I’m running at the moment was purchased or salvaged before 2021, much of it well before. When hardware fails, I scale back as needed. But I can run a fair amount of webservice from an old chromebook when the max concurrent users is in the mid-to-high single digits. I am definitely skimping on redundancy these days.

Mental healthcare provider hopping. You don’t really know what a good one is like until you’ve had one. A lot of people try one, work really hard and get nowhere, either because their therapist is a crank, or maybe they’re a competent professional that just doesn’t work for them for whatever reason, so they conclude that therapy is a sham and they stop pursuing it.

I think it’s good practice to evaluate whether what you’re doing in therapy is helping at regular intervals. If it ain’t, talk about it with your provider and if y’all can’t fix it, hit the bricks and find someone who can. If your therapist is worth their salt they’ll be happy to provide you with a reference if you ask. If they aren’t, all the more reason to find someone better.

This picture gives me spine tinglies. ❤️

I like them. I use them infrequently because they’re a bit of a hassle to use with the piefed interface, and I haven’t bothered to install an emoji picker on my desktop, because I use them so infrequently. But I am a big fan of how they augment written language.

I tend to use them as tone carrying punctuation if I’m making a joke or expressing a particular emotional meaning 🙃 It’s rare for me to put an emoji anywhere but at the end of a sentence 🧓 Emotions are hard for me to convey at the best of times, and text-only communication makes it harder 🤷 and emojis can fill in somewhat where tone and cadence would in verbal communication.

It’s not a perfect analog and the medium of emojis is still so new that the meanings vary a great deal, to say nothing of how different emoji “fonts” can convey vastly different meanings. For example, the emoji “😕” can express a wide array of emotional states with particular mouth and eye attitudes, the orientation of eyebrows if they’re included, etc. A comment that says one thing in one font can express something quite different in another. It’s a problem we’ll need to sort out, eventually, but I don’t think it’s anyone’s top priority at the moment. Emoticons suffer less from that problem because the glyphs are more standardized: regardless of font, everyone recognizes “:)” as “generic smiling face”. Between that and the fact that I can render text emoticons without having to open another dialog or application, the vast majority of my emotes are text-based :)