Based and The-Unparalleled-Adventure-of-One-Hans-Pfaall pilled.

I just remember it being really expensive. I think it was $4 to rent? Plus the looming potential late fees. Whatever it was, at the time it seemed like a fortune. So you couldn’t really fuck around and rent “Mansquito 2: Womansquito” just for laughs because it really was a huge ripoff when a movie sucked, or was damaged, or something. Also the popular movies were never in stock. They would put hundreds of empty boxes on the shelves to make it seem like it was there, but the actual tapes were always gone.

The marginalia of medieval manuscripts are often pretty wild. Just my personal theory, but I always thought it seemed like one of the places where the artists could inject a little of their own ideas, elaborating on the subject or drawing parallels, using symbolism, maybe little in-jokes for the client (hours books were made for one person), etc. Sort of like the extra panel of an xkcd comic.

I’m not sure I buy the McDonald’s worker story, the whole narrative of the arrest seems really bizarre. (Not that I eat their shit food, one way or another.)

At some point in my 40s I started doing that medieval “first sleep” and “second sleep” thing where my eyes just blast wide awake at 2am. I don’t have to pee, I’m not uncomfortable, I just wake up. I read, take the dog out, brush my teeth again… After awhile I go back to sleep and wake up at the normal time.

I guess it is kind of nice to do a patrol around and make sure everything is cool, and the dog loves it. It’s just kind of weird.

It’s from here:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British-Library-Arundel-127_Le_trois_morts_et_les_trois_vifs.jpg#/media/File:British-Library-Arundel-127_Le_trois_morts_et_les_trois_vifs.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Dead_and_the_Three_Living

Yeah, Zip disks suuuucked. I always had to carry two for redundancy because they failed to read so often. Even having every second or third CD burn fail, because you looked at it wrong, was more reliable than Zip disks.

Pre-COVID. I wonder what it’s like now. Anecdotes from people who work in education seem to say it was pretty devastating for child development, but it’s hard to tell if it’s above and beyond the perennial “this new generation is totally fucked” sentiment.

Even the UK foppish sex joke is pretty old. I remember a Dana Carvey special from 1995 making the same joke about the infamous Hugh Grant blowjob.

Huh, found a source from 1683 where a guy named Edward Tyson presented his research on the worm to the Royal Society, and he called it the “joynted worm”. He also refers to it by its Latin name Lumbricus latus which AFAIK just means “flat worm”, and Lumbricus teres Intestinalis which I’m guessing means “round worm of the intestine”.

This is actually a great paper because he’s arguing against spontaneous generation of insects from rotting meat by pointing out that these worms are only found within the bodies of living animals and therefore must be the product of these animals eating eggs or body segments of the worm.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rstl.1683.0020

OK, looks like at least as far back as this they were calling it “tape worm”. This just makes me wonder how old “tape” is:

…And the first is, it’s being flat; hence call’d Lumbricus Latus… and by some in English, the Tape-worm. -page 115

Also failure of public works, like a train crash that kills 20 people, means that trains are bad. Clearly this program isn’t working and should be privatized. But 20 people killed daily on the highways, well those people are just idiots. Never mind the structural issues.

This message brought to you by the people who stand to benefit and also, by coincidence, own the newspapers.

The A. americanum (lonestar) tick larvae are insane this year. I blame the wet summer. At least it’s hot and dry now, and I can imagine them dying by the truckload!

I think some of the Reddit refuges honestly think Reddit sucks because Spez Man Bad. There’s no analysis of what creates Reddits and Spezes, and therefore they don’t recognize who made this platform and why.

I have to believe ultimately some of these people will come around, so that’s good at least.

This is just some library too, not their main application. I know “lines of code” is bullshit but just for reference I looked it up and apparently curl is ~180k lines of code. I can’t imagine how crufty this fucking code must be, assuming this is even real because it seems too ludicrous.

The rampant mental illness in the USA really does make this a negative feedback loop. I’d say a quarter of the roommates I’ve had over the years had some serious mental issues. I’ve had a knife pulled on me, a friend of mine was murdered by his roommate.

After you have a few bad experiences like that the goal becomes to get a small family together and isolate as soon as possible. Any commune here is basically assumed to be a religious cult because nothing else makes sense.

It’d be amazing if they all shared the same cell. Gates and Clinton slap the shit out of Trump because he snores too loud and won’t sleep on his stomach. Trump and Gates thump Clinton because he’s afraid of the shower block and won’t wash his ass. Trump yells at Gates so much about his eye-watering gas that he farts in the toilet out of fear. They deserve nothing less than each other.

I think Americans can perceive how fucked up and corrupt their government is but they lack any theoretical analysis to determine the nature of it. So all they have is a general perception that the government doesn’t work for them and that creates an inherent distrust of any government program, no matter what it does.

So an American might believe that universal healthcare is a good policy, but they also believe that in practice if such a policy were enacted it would mean that money being siphoned off by the ultra rich, with nothing fundamentally changing. They would be paying the taxes of a universal healthcare state, but the actual system would continue as-is, and they would still need to pay ridiculous prices. Thus getting double-dicked for no benefit.

The thing is this is probable. Section 8 is a massive subsidy to landlords. The ACA is a massive subsidy to insurance companies. But if you asked Americans why this keeps happening they would just spout some nonsense about R’s and D’s, or some particular politician, or whatever.

This cynicism spans both “blue” and “red” America. I think it’s the heart of the rot in our society. It’s not really a society at all in the sense that people have lost the belief that we, collectively, can work together to achieve more than what’s possible working alone. When that breaks the only motive people still believe in is the extractive motive of corporations. They believe that only the rich can make things happen, and thus are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy by electing venal politicians who believe the same.

Obviously I’m generalizing here, but just an undercurrent I’ve observed. It’s not coherent, but it is consistent across the “spectrum” of American politics. This ultra wealthy magnify this narrative since it suits them.

I prefer the 300 gallon IBC tote. Then I can unload it from my pickup truck with the pallet forks on my skid-steer and put it straight into the mayo door on the side of my house.

Hell yeah, save by buying a 4-pack.

I don’t know if it’s still a thing in the digital age, but having even just a few seconds of dead air back in the analogue broadcast days could mean that “silence detectors” all over the country would start going off and radio engineers everywhere would think there was some kind of problem with their station. So there had to be talking, music, something at pretty much all times.

If you wanted intentional silence you could play comfort noise in the background.