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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • “Good” isn’t a natural phenomenon that just needs a little space to establish a foothold. It takes deliberate action, effort, and sacrifice. And society doesn’t magically reach a stable state. That’s ridiculous.

    Each election may have a bad and a worse outcome, but it’s relative. Voting for the less-bad is a strategy that works even when both parties push toward evil. It works even when the choices are a party that supports genocide quietly and one that supports genocide loudly. If the “practical left” is just voting for the less-bad, while shitting on and shunning the people trying to do the hard work because the magical Fairy of Good hasn’t yet shown up to establish that foothold with a wave of the wand, then I question how practical and how left that faction actually is.


  • I felt the same way about the Hulu episodes until Quids Game, which I just straight-up hated, at first. No real connection to the larger premise, just torture porn in the form of weird aliens playing with/killing off the familiar characters.

    Later, it hit me: The episode is a meta-commentary on the Hulu seasons. The “quids” are self-insert characters for the writers, poking fun at themselves. They aren’t doing a coherent storyline with this reboot, they’re just playing with familiar characters in different scenarios, and wringing out a few new jokes in a way that they couldn’t do with the established canon. In a way, it’s Futurama fanfic by Futurama writers.

    From that perspective, I’ve found the reboot a lot more enjoyable. The good parts are a bonus, and the duds are forgettable.




  • Dunno if you’ve noticed, but the POTUS has crested the lift hill on the roller coaster of dementia and is gaining kinetic energy into the first turn. Months ago, he lost the ability to process metaphorical language (like my first sentence), which we saw when he promised to build an actual, literal dome over the United States like the one Israel has over it; or when he described in concrete terms the actual operation of the giant faucet in British Columbia that Canada uses to control water to the U.S. West Coast. The thing about dementia, having seen it first-hand in a family member, is that there will be good days and bad days, so even if we see him appearing to have it together (and it’s not just from a teleprompter), there are days on which a complex issue by itself will totally escape him— much less a complex web of such issues. And those days will be coming much more often as time goes on and he continues to deteriorate.

    That is to say, if your gut feeling was developed during his first term, don’t trust it. He doesn’t have the capacity for that kind of nuanced cunning any longer. If he’s talking about annexation now, take it at face value. Take everything he says as literal now.


  • Eh, continents are entirely a socially-constructed category. I mean, how can Mexican America and South America be one continent when there’s no land route between them, yet Europe and Asia can be two continents? The Americas are on different techtonic plates, which similarly is enough to earn India the designation of subcontinent. And where’s the cut-off between big island and continent? Bigger than Greenland, and smaller than Australia is all we can say.

    Anyway, what I’m saying is that with just a quick redefinition of the continents, which already don’t make sense, Canada can be in Europe.




  • They kind of have a point about blocking roads being ineffective, but for entirely the wrong reason. Having been stuck in traffic caused by protests blocking streets several times myself, I know that for most of the drivers, it’s utterly indistinguishable from all the other traffic jams. Unless you’re right up front to see what’s causing it, it could very well just be another event at the fairgrounds, or one of the regularly-scheduled crashes.

    Put another way, maybe driving is actually a protest against cars? It is pretty damn effective at blocking streets.



  • Bigger picture, what’s your current facial skin care routine? If it includes a lot of cleansing, exfoliating, hot water, strong soap, multiple daily washings, et cetera, dial that all wa-a-a-ay back. All of those things strip away the natural oils quite effectively, which leads to that red, inflamed look in the cold. The best way to keep your skin moisturized is to keep the moisture it naturally has from escaping, and that’s 10 times more important in cold, dry climates.

    Be sure to drink enough water, too. It’s deceptive, you lose a lot of water through breath in cold, dry air, so you can be dehydrated even without sweating.