2021 December❮❮prevnext❯❯

★ ★ ★ ★	Beatbox The Joshuan Project	Short track with some great human beatbox. Via this tumblr post about cute bugs.
★ ★ ★ ★	Super Mario 3D Land Demo Underground Powerdown Nintendo	The classic Mario song with a fun slow to a halt, via this "small mario findings post, it's an unused track from Super Mario 3D Land.
	Shine On Harvest Moon Betty Carter	Slick torch song. Mentioned in Tom Stoppard's play "Jumpers"
	One More Second (Future Islands Remix) Matt Berninger	Indie Mood Song - really sorrowful breakup piece, I didn't think about the lyrics enough during the month it was playing it. I added it to my playlist "saddest". Mentioned by my friend Leigh on FB I think, by the main singer of The National.
	Let's Get It On INFINITE	Late-90s hip hop, smooth flow, the character select screen music for Street Fighter: 3rd Strike Mentioned on the podcast "How Did This Get Played" -- awesome podcast, having writers/improv people who love games talk about games makes this one the best.
	Technicolour Montaigne	Solid Eurovision song, love that shouty girl chorus stuff... Learned about Montaigne when she did the My Brother My Brother And Me podcast soundtrack, wanted to see if she did something I liked better.
	Destination Calabria Masove, Brendan Mills & Tess Burrstone	(content notice, video is a lot about T+A) Dance hall stuff with awesome fun sax. Some random tiktok.
★ ★ ★ ★	Want It All Back Mai Yamane	Awesome funky R+B song - I love the way it sounds like the singer is singing lower, out of her comfort range. from "Cowboy Bebop", the anime series with a legendary soundtrack, been watching a bit.
	Tokyo Drift (Fast & Furious soundtrack) Teriyaki Boyz	Hiphop, leans heavily into asian stereotypes I think. Mentioned on the hilarious video game podcast "How Did This Get Played", talking about songs from video games, and a few from movies.
	The Magic Bomb (Questions I Get Asked) [Trap Remix] Trap Remix Guys	Electronic/Trap. from a random Tik Tok, where it's considered a good track to dance to while FAQs and their answers appear onscreen.
	Stand By Me Florence + the Machine	Nice sweet cover of the old standby. I guess they used this in a Final Fantasy game soundtrack, via the funny videogame podcast "How Did This Get Played"
	Mannish Boy (Single Version) Muddy Waters	You know, I think this is like the Ur- blues song, that has the rhythm everyone would sing when they were clowning and singing a blues song in the 80s. via Apple news talking about a series of Levi Ads in the 90s with famously great music.

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Amazon Is Helping Researchers Study How to Dim the Sun I feel like "dimming the sun" is a misleading term. Like we're not messing with that nuclear fusion mass' output... we're talking screening it a bit it as it hits the atmosphere...

Secondly, the Matrix "We don't know who struck first, us or them. But we do know it was us that scorched the sky. At the time, they were dependent on solar power. It was believed they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun." is not as close a reference as Snowpiercer's "CW-7 is being deployed into the upper layers of the atmosphere where it will bring down average global temperatures to the optimum levels of the last century. And we are witnessing it!"

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So ya know, "TikTok" as an endless firehose of content doesn't interest me, but, like with Vine (RIP), I'm interested in as a thing, and sometimes there's a theme that really catches my eye.

This "Answer to Annoying and sometimes invasive FAQs" dance is intriguing (the music is one of the songs listed above)


Reminds me of Biff's Question Song by Tom Wilson who played Biff in Back to the Future.

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Three factoids:

From Cracked:

The show [Thunderbirds] was shot using a technique invented by program creator Gerry Anderson called "Supermarionation," where pre-recorded vocal lines triggered sensors in the heads of carefully crafted marionettes and moved the puppets' lips in sync with the dialogue.

(I had heard of Supermarionation (not to be confused with Super Mario Nation) but didn't know quite what it was.

Then two from Tom White's traditional 52 things I learned in 2021:

Until 1873, Japanese hours varied by season. There were six hours between sunrise and sunset, so a daylight hour in summer was 1/3rd longer than an hour in winter.

Now THAT is a beautiful way of reckoning time!

Short afternoon naps at the workplace lead to significant increases in productivity, psychological well-being and cognition. In contrast, an extra 30 minutes sleep at night shows no similar improvements.

And that one seems like it might be useful... in theory I have everything I need to add that into my life now, I just need to figure out the optimal strategy...

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From Nick's lips to God's hips.

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Like or Comment when you get it.

Took me a minute and a reverse image search and I'm still just barely pretentious enough to get it.

(hint: think Camus)

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One of your ancestors was alive during every historical event you've ever heard of

Man, that's interesting to think about.

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Not too yuck people's yum but 53,000 people is, like, too many people to have at a convention. Even with just plain delta. Damn.

Poe: Once upon a midnight
Beastie Boys: DREARY
Poe: While I pondered,
Beastie Boys: WEAK
Poe: and
Beastie Boys: WEARY

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Possibly Unpopular, or at least Unhip, Opinion: Splenda elevates homemade glasses of iced tea from "Well at least it's a break from just water" to "Hey this is an ok substitute for diet soda."

(Shout out to my friends back in the "Pop" section of the country. It is absolutely a better term than "Soda")

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kirk.is/memes/ - in exiting from Dropbox (hearing how indifferent they are on making a Mac Silicon version, despite being a Running All The Damn time program, was kinda the last straw.) I decided to put my small meme pile on my site where I can grab things easily.

Throwing together the display script for it PHP made me get around to putting together some thoughts I had in defense of PHP, or at least understanding why people who hate it so much hate it so much.

I just triple-taked at the 3-day spike in Covid-19 signal in Boston wastewater. Back to year-ago levels. Remarkable.

MWRA - Wastewater COVID-19 Tracking

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The state of Missouri commissioned a study to see if mask mandates worked. When the results came in, showing they saved lives, the state blocked publication in order to maintain its attempt to force cities like St. Louis to end their mask mandates.

Ah yes, Missouri, the "Show Me (What I Want To See Only Please)" State.

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It’s much more important to teach our children to have healthy romantic relationships than literally almost anything else.

Found I had grabbed that quote and put it in my To Do about a seasonal letter to future Cora. It's a really interesting point. Like even if it's the option to be ok WITHOUT a particular relationship, that's a lesson too. Melissa and I decorated yesterday... I set up my office with my an eye to what the webcam would see (used the "folk art" tree for my dad then realized heh... there's a big tuba here so I decorated that) and then just the shot I sent my folks of our main, small tree. (Might need to get a topper for it still)

Cheap debt has led to a buyout boom, including in an industry where companies aren't in a position to take on significant amounts of debt, and it's simply easier for the private equity guys to shoplift whatever value they can.

Online feline, relatable feeling.
Still think about Love and Limerence (that crazy-in-love head over heels variety that some people are prone to and others aren't)

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Huh. It's sort of weird that this booster is sounding even more important/useful than I thought it was when I got it. (Still kicking myself for not pushing into Moderna away from Pfizer for the booster tho, mix-and-match seems like the optimal strategy)

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Albert Einstein once said his 2nd-best idea (after the theory of relativity) was soft-boiling an egg at the same time as he was cooking his soup, so he could get two meals and only have to wash one pot.

Do you need a little happy tear to start your Friday? Dogs and Cats, living together... A little bit of LEGO-heavy early Christmas w/ Cora, and a few other shots from the week.

Just saw someone describe crypto as 'Mary Kay for young men' and now I'm dying.

Want to listen to radio stations from all over the globe? Great interface for it!

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In response, the Laclede County Health Department, the New Madrid County Health Department, and several other Missouri health agencies announced this week that they are abandoning all work related to the covid-19 pandemic, including case investigations, contact tracing, quarantine orders, and public announcements of case and death tallies.

"Coronavirus cases have surged in Missouri in recent weeks. The state is averaging nearly 3,000 new cases per day, a 124% increase over the past two weeks, and daily hospitalizations have increased by nearly 50% in that same time period"

Republicans to change state slogan from "Show Me" to "Stick Fingers in Ears".

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Nice optical illusion...

There is a clear and present danger that American democracy will not withstand the destructive forces that are now converging upon it. Our two-party system has only one party left that is willing to lose an election. The other is willing to win at the cost of breaking things that a democracy cannot live without.

Oy. It's not enough that elected Republican Presidents haven't needed to actually get more people voting for them since 2000, thanks to the EC - Republicans are pretending that 2020 had fraud, and working out ways to make their own fraud to get Trump back in.

The amount of horseshit about January 6 here is astounding. "Oh just a peaceful walk in the park by well meaning citizens". No - it was righteous anger stoked by people willing to believe any lies that tell them they didn't just lose, who don't understand that in democracy there is always give and take.

China is basically just a huge company, AFAICT

(in response to China is paying U.S. social media influencers to promote Beijing Winter Olympics and "good China-US relations")

Unfortunately, victims of serial killers will forever be paired together with Google search results, digitally entombing them

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Too little water and you die. Too much water and you die. The right amount of water and you still die, just not from water.

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ahaha f*** eric clapton Jung popped up in some reading I was doing, and along with some vague recollection that maybe he used the term "committee" to describe the mind, I decided to zip through "Introducing Jung: A Graphic Guide".

So, I dunno. From this very limited introduction, he seems to promote yet another sense of duality of self, rather than the more motley assortment of internal players I've been leaning into lately.

Right now, the committee idea is enormously powerful for me: I know that any particular dark or weird thought doesn't represent me in my entirety. And yet, there is no member of the committee that isn't part of me - and I as a whole have to take responsibility for the resulting actions.

But I've sort of given up identifying specific members, at least for now. Like is it always "Id, Ego, and Superego" or "The Rider and the Elephant" or one of them being "inner child", or maybe the cast of specific emotion players from "Inside Out" or what. (Or it might be more of a clamoring multitude akin to Minsky's "Society of Mind".)

I used to think my inner voice, my internal narrative was, like, "all of me" Now I don't even know if it's one of the individual parts sitting in the committee -- perhaps it's more like the podium that various members can take! But that's uncertainty I can live with for now, while still finding the committee concept enormously helpful.

Anyway, back to Jung. I can't say that one morning's reading has given me a real understanding of his ideas, especially the more out-there mystical ones, so I don't have a ton to say... I do think the underlying split in world views (including the synchronicity, collective-unconscious laden ones Jung describes) is if the making of the world is more top-down or bottom-up. Is it closer to created, by some overarching force, or does it emerge from the mundane matter (well, mundane matter fizzing with quantum weirdness.)

While discussing Meghan O'Gieblyn's "God, Human, Animal, Machine" at my Science and Spirituality group the other night, it was asked what is the significance if the world is top-down vs bottom-up, like why do I emphasize it so much? I think the importance is intentionality and meaning. A top-down approach means there might be a singular, definite point to the world, something that should inform every purpose we set for ourselves, a bottom-up approach means that we're more free to find our own meaning, or maybe creatively channel and reshape the meaning that is in the process of emerging.

(btw let me know if you want to join my UUSS Science + Spirituality group. We meet monthly via zoom and discuss a book or other bit of content... (usually we provide excerpts instead of expecting people will read the whole shebang book or whatever, but the conversation is still pretty good.))

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("Jung and Restless" via "The Big Book of American Humor" - I can't believe what an influential tome that was for me.)

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Guess I'm off by a week, but here is my dad lighting the third Advent Calendar 30 years ago for The Salvation Army in Salamanca NY.

(Scanning a pile of clippings and photos my mom had saved.)

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A friend mentioned my band and I were the poster children for the Tom Donahue Roslindale Day Parade calendar...

(askew banner and weird playing-with-left-hand so I can signal with right and all)

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Thomas Sanders really made delightful vines - I love how those are him finding people to "yes, and" with him. I went to see his live show with Liz I think... show wasn't as good as the vines but I appreciate his work.

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Excellent response to "Do your own research":

(Actually I thought it was more "Do my own research? Sure, just let me get my own $9 billion CDC laboratory [...]")

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Pro-Trump counties now have far higher COVID death rates. Misinformation is to blame. Turning vaccines political is such a tremendous self-own by Republicans. Like, for all the conservative idea that liberals put too much trust in institutions and the media, it's their own institutions and media - especial FOX news - that made it a point of pride not to accept what the scientists who have been working their whole damn careers on this stuff - were recommending. Hell, kudos to Trump for "Operation Warp Speed" and clearing a path to vaccines (fewer kudos for not working to release the patents and let the world chip in, and thus be more likely to breed more variants) but then to not lean into getting everyone vaccinated and boosted is just inane. It's the kind of divisioning with partisan allegiance over facts that is literally killing the nation.

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No, Academia.edu, while I sometimes like the zennish implication ofthe shortened form of my last name I am not the "K. Is" of 2P062 Heme Binding Affinity of Iron Response Regulator (Irr) and its Regulation Mechanism fame.

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Last night was a VERY good night for Tom Brady schadenfreude... Dallas QAnon Cultists Are Drinking Toxic Chemicals from A Communal Bowl, Family Says - unfortunately, not just a metaphor like I first hoped.

It reminds me of one of my least favorite quirks of fringe belief, or even mainstream religion: expressing strong faith in an outlandish belief is a way of expressing your in-group bona-fides. The ridiculousness of a belief is a feature, not a bug, and the wackier and harder to swallow the idea the better. And ditto for bowls of cleansing chemicals.

I've been playing with the idea that the big dividing line is if a belief system relies on validation through special revelation. (I accept that my sense that any Truth must be potentially universally recognizable might come from my particular anti-Calvinist upbringing, but I still think it's an empathetic view to hold.)

It makes me think of this quote from the Buddha:

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.

That is a great general idea, though where it falls down a little is humans have a very instinctive urge to anthropomorphize; like we're such social creatures and so much happens because other humans wanted/caused it to happen, and since almost all reasoning is via analogies, there's a set of common sense explanations that posit a supernatural entity wanting this world just so (the old "if you found a pocket watch, you could infer a designer" folly.) And atoms are so tiny, and the process of evolution so slow, both so outside the normal scales of everyday existence that we need to build these trust in institutions that have put in the hard work of finding things out and been willing to put their hypotheses to the test - everything lightly held so that if a better idea comes along we can let go of the old belief and accept the new.

(with my friends, I was also putting in the disclaimer "I realize I have a bit of faith in science", and they objected to that use of the word "faith" - like, "trust" perhaps, but faith is something meant to be there, undeterred by contrary evidence.)

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Great Tik Tok metaphor for vaccines - COVID is a test, and vaccines are the cheat sheet, an answer packet with 40-60% of the answers, and from the teacher. And we're graded on a curve, because people not using the answer packet is dragging us down and making us have to take the test again and again.

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Millennial: OK, I've done the 10-day isolation, PCR was negative two days ago, so were both of today's LFTs. I'll walk 14 miles back now for Xmas so I don't have to be exposed to anyone.

Boomer parent: You'll have to speak up, pub's very busy because of the face-licking contest

(I'm not saying my folks are like the Boomer Parents here, but I feel like I'm setting up a Millennial-ish regimen for visiting them for Christmas after a possible exposure over the weekend)

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today was the final 21st day of the 21st year of the 21st century.

Nolan Bushnell dreams of his next big toy by John Schmelzer (Chicago Tribune, March 15, 1984).
via

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Everybody [brings something to Christmas dinner] except for my shady uncle. All he bring is judgement, man. He still can't believe I'm gay! He'll be like "Ugh- ya still into them girls, huh?" and I'm like "Yes, Unk - 'cause women are SOFT and FLUFFY... like hotel pillows and they smell like CUCUMBER-LEMON and STABILITY." I don't want to wake up with no big hairy man in my bed with a bulge at my back... uhh! Y'all rough like bricks and smell like NEWPORTS and EXCUSES, uck!

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Twitter thread on how we're actuall doing under Biden

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Beginning aren't automatically good. Even shitty things *start*!

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"My new Yankee Candle has no scent, 1 Star" - our new COVID tracking system.

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Just watched the new Matrix film - very good. Enjoyable embrace of and trying to fix and build up some of the goofier parts of the earlier films loose-ends.

So much of it is working on several narrative layers at once, especially the metaphors for celebrating the trans journey.

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What today's WFH life would have looked like on Mac OS9
(more background here )

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A Dr talks about giving up medical practice after being assaulted by QAnon-addled idiots.

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Nicholas was older than sin, and his beard could grow no whiter. He wanted to die.

The dwarfish natives of the Arctic caverns did not speak his language, but conversed in their own, twittering tongue, conducted incomprehensible rituals, when they were not actually working in the factories.

Once every year they forced him, sobbing and protesting, into Endless Night. During the journey he would stand near every child in the world, leave one of the dwarves' invisible gifts by its bedside. The children slept, frozen into time.

He envied Prometheus and Loki, Sisyphus and Judas. His punishment was harsher.

Ho.
Ho.
Ho.

(Repost from 15(!) Years Ago...)

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My philosophy is if you can't say something nice about someone, kill them.

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Created using still images taken by the Cassini spacecraft during it's flyby of Jupiter and while at Saturn. Shown is Io and Europa over Jupiter's Great Red Spot.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/CICLOPS/Kevin M. Gill

via

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Internal resistance is an attempt to avoid the pain we associate with successfully doing the thing.

So in I liked a lot about this article except this quote... I think for me, internal resistance is more "to avoid the risk of pain if the thing we do turns out to harder than we thought and/or might make us look less competent than we tell ourselves and others."

The beautiful truth of Santa is that we are all Santa.

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All I Want for Christmas is MIDI, Mariah Carey as shoved into a MIDI converter and then back out.

(It is sort of crazy how you can almost hear the lyrics come through)

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My brilliant and talented friend Sophie reminds with this kid-friendly message about why vaccines! (fair disclaimer, she took some punch up ideas for some lyrics I had, so I'm not impartial :-D )

I met an admin on an antique site,

Who said: two vast and broken hyperlinks

Stand in the cyan menu. To their right,

A glitter gif of Mickey Mouse still winks,

Whose pixel smile, and endless looped delight

Tell that its maker well those passions knew

Which yet survive, stamped on this lifeless shell:

The mind that shaped them, and the hand that drew.

And on the header green, pink words appear:

My name is Ozzie Mandias LOL

This is my homepage--come pull up a chair!

Little beside remains. Round the decay

Of QuickTime music tracks, boundless and bare,

The leveled geocities stretch away.

times are starting to feel precedented

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I can't think of anyone who has had a better year than the QR code. What a comeback.

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Individual commitment to a group effort - that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.

(noticed on a sign outside the New Jersey test stop named for him by the meadowlands)

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So, School of Honk decided to mandate bell covers for all brass... and I only have one blank cover (currently with me having drawn in School of Honk with washable markers) so I had to use my (Steve-O inspired?) goofball cover.

If she blinded you with science maybe you should have been following lab safety protocols and wearing your goggles

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Once again I've become overly conscious over the fact that I'm really just a brain with tendrils controlling a meat mecha😔

The right-wing responses it provoked are... something.

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Cool animation of Google Top Trending Searches by state Kind of neat to see trends bubbling through the US. And weird/sad how "power outage" keeps coming up for Texas

I only had 3 rules. To be on time, like if we're gonna have a meeting, everyone's on time. And to pay attention, listen when you're speaking, 'cause if we're gonna teach, you gotta listen, and then play like hell when I tell you to. Play like hell on Sunday.

A cross between a violent insurrection and a chimps' tea party. Terrifying and stupid, like a Muppet reboot of the Vietnam War.

From Netflix' "Death to 2021", a good recap of the year. Getting most of my news over the year in text form, there was a lot of striking and disturbing footage of all kinds of events over the year that I hadn't seen.

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Dance re-enactments of a hydraulic press:

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I swear the only way Gex X pushes through all of this awfulness is that we were absolutely convinced that we were going to have a thermonuclear war in our lifetimes, and this still feels slightly more manageable.

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This twitter thread answers something that has been bugging me for a long time (and it's stupid that the answer wasn't more present) - do rapid tests correlate well with contagious, or what? The answer seems to be yes. And for vaccinated / boosted people, that's a much more important question than "did I ever have it" - "did I ever have it" is essentially becoming an academic question, the focus must be on trying to have fewer people spreading it.

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okay, so, y-yes i do, i do believe in love at first sight but i also believe that you would love absolutely anybody if you knew their story i also believe that th- modern notion of romantic love is seriously misguided and it creates a lot of problems in our modern world i believe that we need to reevaluate this idea that we have of the nuclear family this idea that we have of 2.4 children this idea that we have that it's adam and eve and not adam and steve i believe that uhm it's possible for all of us to be in love all the time with ourselves and with everyone around us

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When I see an artist soliciting commissions and I like their art style I will often order an alien bill... this one by taylorlorae

(More at the alien bill gallery)

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Final year entry for my devblog, I write about the virtual puppet choir I made up that was a great prototype for Sophie's Holiday Vaccine Musical bit...

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Thanks for the vaccines, 2021, don't let the swinging door hit your ass on the way out...

2021 December❮❮prevnext❯❯