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Cake day: Jul 08, 2023

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Steve Biko died in prison in 1977. There were a bunch of movies about Biko that came out in the late '80s to early '90s, the most famous was Cry Freedom starring Denzel Washington. Nelson Mandela was famously imprisoned, and released around that same time. My guess is that since most Americans don’t really pay deep attention to the news, especially world news, it just got all blended into a miasma of vague memories about some South African anti-apartheid activist.


I think so? I used to browse the site over breakfast, and one morning, Apollo couldn’t connect. I don’t want to cause trouble by trying to log in, if I’m banned, so I have not tried to log in another way.

🤭


Both the real President and the fake President have a long history of reneging on deals, and not paying up. DGE seized the Treasury’s payment system, so they could remove money from the people’s bank accounts. The tariffs have a good chance of plunging the U.S. into recession, and $1 million really isn’t that much compensation for taking on the risk, especially if inflation gets going in earnest. They’d be on the wrong side of trade barriers with the economic bloc that’s geographically easier to trade with. Would this regime bail them out?

In short, trustworthiness matters.


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.


That doesn’t sound like anything like a problem. We had a similar discussion on a local winter biking group, and there were some people who had issues from washing their face three or more times a day, exfoliating regularly, and such. Yikes!

Hope the hyaluronic acid helps!


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.


Indeed, and I realized in the process of writing that comment that the famous graphs showing the growth of productivity vs. the growth of real wages explain a whole lot more about people’s experiences than the consensus generational divisions.


I think I used to hear that, too, but I searched when writing the comment and found the consensus is now 1981. But then, people I know who were born in 1979 have so much more in common with elder Millennials than Generation X people born in the 1960’s. That’s why I’m skeptical of the whole generations concept. I mean, without looking up her birth date, is Kamala Harris a Boomer, or GenX?


It’s explained on his Wikipedia page. He was an Army captain in the Kosovo War, when a NATO commander (Wesley Clark, who later ran for President) ordered his unit to secure Pristina Airport, which Russian troops had already occupied. Blunt refused to engage them, long enough for the British general get involved to countermand the order, on the grounds that he didn’t want his men to start WW3.


For some reason that reminds me of how the first member of the Wampanoag tribe to greet the Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony, named Samoset, spoke to them in English. Then he came back later with another tribe member, Squanto, who also spoke English.


James Blunt possibly prevented the start of World War 3. (But became best known for the song You’re Beautiful. Reality is weird.)


That sounds like the story in the Oliver Sacks book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat. There was also a story in there about a man who taught himself to see just fine, even though his eyes didn’t work at all. His brain just made educated guesses.


Along those same lines, we’re all blind literally around half the time we’re awake. Our optic processing system can’t keep up with the input as our eyes flit from thing to thing, so we don’t see anything while they move. And they’re moving constantly, even if we’re not aware of it, because only the fovea in the center of the retina has a high enough density of receptors to see details, and also because of sensory fatigue from prolonged static stimulus. In short, we have a tiny field of detailed vision that’s not even working much of the time. That field of vision that feels like a 4K video feed into the mind is a complete lie.

Like the way our subjective experience feels like a continuous, integrated mind fully in control of itself, but in reality, consciousness dips out a couple of times every minute while the brain attends to sensory input.

Even weirder, the conscious mind might not even exist, except as an illusory, emergent phenomenon of sensory experience and memory. There isn’t a place in the brain where it ‘lives’, no part that’s only ever active when we’re conscious.


A couple of factors: Back in olden times, before Douglas Coupland applied the Generation X moniker in 1991, they used to talk about the Baby Bust generation. The Baby Boom was when all of the GIs got back from the war and all started getting jiggy at the same time. Then, the birth rate dropped significantly. In my elementary school, we had combined grades 2/3, and grades 4/5, because there weren’t enough kids enrolled for full classrooms otherwise.

Also, the Baby Boom generation is defined as 1946 to 1964, which is 19 years, compared to the 16 years of what we call Generation X now, from 1965 to 1980.

Granted, is not a huge difference—71 million Boomers and 73 million Millennials vs. 64 million Gen X—but there’s fewer of us. But also, the name and the generational categories are pretty recent developments. When Coupland’s book came out, I was too young to be Gen X, the people he was writing about were adults out into world. I wasn’t part of the classic Gen X disaffected-slacker culture, and its touchstones don’t really resonate with me. It wasn’t until years later that the definition of Generation X definitively included me. That’s why you’ll often see a lot of younger Gen X identify with the Xennial label, because we have a lot more in common with “elder Millennials,” which makes the whole cohort less cohesive.

It’s almost like the generational cutoff years are arbitrary, and that society changes continuously, and not in discrete jumps. It’s almost like, too, that something unspeakably neo-liberal happened in 1980, and the real division is between the people who came of age before they pulled up the ladders to prosperity behind themselves (Boomers and older Gen X) and the people who came of age after (Xennials, Millennials, and so on). Nevermind, sorry, that’s just some anti-capitalist hogwash. /s


If anybody has trouble seeing the absurdity of cars in cities, imagine a hockey game, except each player has a Zamboni instead of skates.


I’m going to remember this question next time I see one of those “BuT cYcLIsTs!” idiots.


No, the “speeding” part is from my own experience. The speed limit here in Wisconsin is 70MPH, but hardly anybody follows it. In any case, a driver who cannot handle a 20-25MPH speed differential should not be on the road, period. Most people can’t even handle going that speed on residential streets, it’s that slow. I propose the following thought experiment to make it obvious:

Two identical highways, both empty. On one, the U-Haul driver following the company’s 55MPH speed limit. (Minimum speed on 70MPH highways is often 45MPH, by the way.) On the other highway, a driver following the speed limit at 70MPH, but is who cannot handle closing in on things at 15MPH. Distraction, eyesight problems, who knows? The slow, 55MPH driver will have no problems. The faster driver has a high likelihood of crashing into things, even without slow drivers in the way.

If speed differentials are that much of a problem, then it’s the faster drivers that are the source of it, and the speed limit is too high.


Case and point: In your scenario, the danger comes from the speeding, inattentive drivers behind you, yet you have displaced the blame onto to the poor sap in a U-Haul box van with all of their stuff in it. What else might the speeding drivers not see in time? If they can’t see a vehicle going 55MPH in front of them in time, what about stopped traffic?


To expand on this, I say that the existence of transgender folks proves that there is biological reality to gender. Think about it, if it was just social conditioning, infants must be an agendered blank slate, with their identity constructed over time by conditioning. But some individuals just know from an early age that the gender that they were presumed to be is wrong. Not just wrong, but wrong, and they are most definitely something else. There’s clearly another force at work than nurture, which must be nature.


Blaming slow drivers for your dangerous driving to pass them immediately and dangerously has the same energy as a rapist blaming what the victim was wearing: The other person made me do it. I have no agency over my own reactions.