Thank you for this moment of Zen.
I don’t have much to contribute, except that I recently got to a see a friend’s backyard. The whole street is built in an old quarry, so the yard abuts a weathered rock wall, which makes it a quiet, secluded enclave. You’d never know that you were in the city if you woke up there, and you’d almost expect to see gnomes and fairies among the maze of trees.
I’m no expert, either, I just read about death grip in Savage Love, and it always made me cringe and wonder, how in the hell? Then I learned more and figured it must have something to do with the skin being able to glide back and forth.
From what I understand, the penis is supposed to have a mobile skin system, so it can glide up and down. The “death grip” is when guys get a tight grip and crank it up and down to get maximum stimulation. Circumcision can (often?) remove the entire mobile skin system, leaving the penis skin as tight as the skin on, say, your thumb.
Get a tight grip on that, and start cranking, and it’s basically trying to rip your dick off.
An attempted handjob by a woman from a country where circumcision is rare, so she went for the death grip.
I’ve heard of Project 2025. It seems like the Democrats in office have not. Heck, just this morning, I read Jennifer Rubin’s op-ed about how Sen. Durbin (chair of the Judiciary Committee) is so peeved he’s almost on the verge of sending a Very Sternly Worded Letter about one of our Supreme Court justices being an insurrectionist.
Indeed. I keep asking what is the plan to stop a fascist MAGA candidate from winning the Presidency in 2028, when the Democrats don’t have incumbent advantage, and the historical pattern is a party flip, and have received only one (joke) answer. I have heard no talk whatsoever about how to handle a Biden win this year, although the MAGA politicians are signaling another attempt to overturn the election. (My state AG is still “investigating” the fake elector scheme from 2020; no way a prosecution will happen before the election, and likely never.) “Vote harder” is not going to be effective.
Depends on the material and construction by my reckoning. If it’s made of just sweatshirt fleece (smooth on the outside face), it would most-precisely be called a “full-zip hooded sweatshirt.” I have also heard of these referred to as a “sweatjac,” though. (Which, IMO, sounds more like an event at the Self-Love Olympics.) Without the zipper, it’d be a “pullover hooded sweatshirt.” If it were constructed with a lining, or from a heavier-duty material (e.g. denim), then it’d be a “hooded jacket.” Garments made from material with two fuzzy faces (or even one fuzzy face on the outside) are “fleeces,” so this’d be a “full-zip hooded fleece.”
No, I don’t claim that it makes sense, it’s just the way I learned it.
Years ago, I downloaded a relaxed-tempo, acoustic version of “Everlong” by the Foo Fighters, that was fantastic. I lost it when my stupid, proprietary NAS decided to re-initialize both RAID disks. I’ve searched repeatedly, but all that ever comes up is Dave Grohl’s solo performance on The Howard Stern Show.
Aww, yeah, I still have the MP3 file that I downloaded from MP3.com back in the day! Less drum machine in that old mix.
ETA: This is the other one of two tunes from that site that I still play often.
Little-known fact: These crabs sometimes camouflage themselves on top of the heads of rabbits.
I haven’t read all of the replies to see if somebody else had said this, but it’s because the Internet was designed to be completely decentralized, whereas the phone system requires your line or device to be registered with the network operator(s). Any device that can get a valid Internet address for the local network can communicate with the whole Internet, but a phone will only work if it’s explicitly known by the phone service provider, and that information shared to all providers.
We could set up a system, layered on top of the Internet, by which each computer could register itself in a central directory each time it connects, and thus be reachable at the same address no matter where it connects, even on a NAT connection. In fact, it’s easy to do with a VPN and Dynamic DNS (both of which require the cooperation some centralized authority). It’s just not universal, because, well, what’s the utility of doing so?
I saw protests in my city first-hand in 2011, and Fox News reported bald-faced lies about them.
It’s funny that you should ask, as I just completed the 2nd portion of an almost-complete cross-country Amtrak journey last week.
In 2012, I bought one of those USA Rail passes, and for the first segment went to Glacier National Park, then to Seattle, Los Angeles, backtracked to Emeryville, then Phoenix (via LA), Houston, and finally home via Chicago. The train was already late getting to Columbus, one of the first few stops out of Chicago, and achieved epic levels of lateness on the way. We had record-high temperatures across North Dakota and Montana, so the rails expanded and buckled. The train could only go 65MPH instead of the normal 85MPH. As others have noted, freight trains had priority, so we sat on sidings to let them pass. In one Montana town, a grizzly bear in the area meant that the railroad workers couldn’t get out of their truck to switch us back onto the mainline for almost an hour. We got to the station in Glacier 6 hours late, at 2AM, so I ended up sleeping on a bench on the platform rather than finding accommodations.
The lateness trend continued, such as when the locomotive of the Coast Starlight lost power while climbing the Cuesta Pass, and we had to return to San Luis Obispo and wait for UP to rouse an engineer to come down and hook up a standby locomotive to get us over the mountain. On the Emeryville to Phoenix portion, the Coast Starlight was late getting into Los Angeles, so they had to hold the Southwest Chief for passengers making the connection.
Don’t get me wrong, though, it was a fabulous time. The only place I needed to be was “here,” and the only schedule for getting places was “when I get there.” The scenery was great, the crews were friendly and competent, the trains were in decent condition. The coach seats recline enough to sleep, there’s legroom for days, and a leg rest that can be raised. The onboard WiFi was a cellular service, and out west, there were plenty of portions of the journey with no network coverage. That was fine, I had a Kindle if I didn’t feel like taking in the scenery.
Last week, I took the Lake Shore Limited eastbound to Massachusetts, and it was like the polar opposite of the western trains! The scenery was mostly active industry, or decaying Rust Belt hulks. It was interesting to see, but far from beautiful. The train follows almost the entire south shore of Lake Erie, but at night, so I didn’t see that. However, Amtrak has control of the rails, or priority, on much of the route. On the way out, the train was on-time for every single stop out of Chicago, until we entered CSX territory just before Pittsfield, MA. We had to wait for a freight train, and that put us 8 minutes behind schedule. On the way back, we were maybe 15 minutes late into Albany, but that’s a long stop where the hook up the cars from NYC, so we rolled out on time, and had no more delays. That was good, because I had to make a bus connection to get home to Madison.
In summary, the western trains seemed designed (and suitable) for pleasure rides, while the eastern train felt like all business. In comparison, I’d say fuck the bus. Either type of train journey is ten times better.
Fucking hell, the media can’t even bring themselves to say the word “genocide.” It’s not even that they have to say it as if it is their judgement, it would just be reporting what the protestors allege is happening. I guess the trouble is that the media can’t report the allegations of genocide because they’re too on-the-nose to credibly refute.
It’s not that they accomplish nothing at all, but what they accomplished was evil. From my studies and reading1, I think that zoning law started out with good intentions to keep noxious industry (tanneries, blacksmith shops, livestock, etc.) away from dwelling places. Like so many things in the United States, though, it quickly got co-opted for racism.2 The Supreme Court issued a decision barring housing discrimination, so the Federal, state, and local governments turned to zoning laws to keep Black people out of white neighborhoods by, e.g. mandating minimum lot sizes, and construction methods, that priced suburban houses out of reach for Black families. Nowadays, we have this pervasive myth that such restrictions were to foster a rural aesthetic, for environmental preservation, or the result of auto industry lobbying, and those probably contributed, but the root of it was segregation. This becomes clear when you learn about what happened when some Black families succeeded financially anyway, and tried to move into white neighborhoods, like the Cicero, IL race riot of 1951.
As a Strong Towns article pointed out, solving the problem with cars is not the number of people that drive, but the number of people that drive × the average miles that each person drives.
We can reduce the number of miles that the average person drives without taking away anybody’s car, and make transit more cost-effective by reducing the distance it has to go, by simply putting destinations closer together. Zap the exclusive residential zoning laws. Intermix cafés, shops, restaurants, doctors offices, community centers, and such, with the existing neighborhoods. These things are all quiet, and low-impact, barely noticeable among houses, if they don’t need giant parking lots.
Electric cars are still cars, and come with all of the negative externalities of ICE cars, but for the tailpipe emissions: Danger, noise, particulate pollution, social isolation, and infrastructure costs.
The last one is a big problem. Everybody wants to drive anywhere they want whenever they want, but they don’t want to pay for it. Lots of people believe cockamamie stories about how politicians pocket all of their tax money instead of fixing the roads. But no, roads are stupid expensive, and paying for them is driving most cities into insolvency.
Pepperoni (double p) is a type of salami in my view, but TIL that peperoni (single p) are a type of sweet pepper. I knew that peperoncini are a type of hot pepper.
Honesty, I don’t think that there is a Great Filter. The Fermi Paradox strikes me as not very well-reasoned. A whole hell of a lot of things would have to go exactly right for civilizations to make contact, rather than it being the default assumption. There are lots of filters, not just one Great one.
But the closest to a Great Filter is that space is really, really. stupendously big. The chances of even detecting each other across such distances is vanishingly small, much less traversing them. Add in the difficulty of jumping the metabolic energy gap to become complex life, and that could reduce the density of civilizations down to a level that they’re just not close enough to each other in spacetime to admit even the possibility of contact. And we’re hanging our hat on some highly-speculative concepts like alien mega-structures harnessing whole solar systems to allow detection.
I think a lot of persnickety, smaller filters combine to make interstellar contact between civilizations against long odds. Perhaps the best we’ll get is spectral signatures from distant planets that are almost-conclusive proof of some sort of life.