2022 July❮❮prevnext❯❯

photos of the month june 2022

2022.07.01

Open Photo Gallery
























via

July 2, 2022

2022.07.02
Click to play feedthebunbun🐰 - latest joint with Cora

(yes the eyes are clipped from Snowball of "The Secret Life of Pets" at her insistence...)
Witches probably have black cats because they don't want to deal with white fur on their clothes
r/Showerthoughts

If SCOTUS accepts The Independent State Legislature doctrine, state legislatures can award their electoral college votes to whichever candidate they want. Republicans are making up bullshit about a "stolen election" in 2020 because they are exploring plans to absolutely highjack elections -- completely dropping any idea of any vote mattering (except for whatever votes, gerrymandered or otherwise, produced the majority of state legislators.)
Donkey Kong when it was going to be a popeye game!

via suppermariobroth


July 3, 2022

2022.07.03
Explain my no vote. (Another voice says, "Yes m'am.") [Heavy sigh] You know, I'm a diagnostic radiologist. And diagnostic radiologists, historically and in many places in this state, *still* do all of the first trimester OB ultrasound. So I am extraordinarily, personally familiar with the development of a fetus in the womb. And for you to sit here and say that at 15 weeks, a fetus has a functional heart; a four-chamber heart that can survive on its own, is fallacious. That is not true. There is no viability. You know, I look around at my colleagues on this committee. I am the *only* woman on this podium right now. I am the only physician sitting on this podium. This bill is a medical sham. It does not follow medicine. It does not even purport to listen to medicine. And for each and every one of my colleagues to be so willing to cast an aye vote, when what you are doing is putting your finger; putting your knee; putting your- a gun to women's heads. You are *killing women* because abortion will continue. Women will continue to have efficacy over their own body, whether or not you make it legal. I vote no and I really, really apologize to the people in Kentucky that we are spending this much time and this much energy when we have families in poverty. We have single women heading households in poverty at a higher rate than any other group in the state. And you all are not addressing that. You all are making it worse. Thank you.
Dr. Karen Berg (via)



I feel that is true about, like, things in general. We can generally muddle though. I don't want to discount traumas that can result, but I don't want to underestimate our ability to fortify ourselves against them, and then recover from them when they do occur.
I was a little bummed to notice I could notice the dark falling a bit earlier. I got to thinking about seasons - I thought I had been told it was was a gyroscopic wobble of some kind, I was googling if it was coincidence seasons lined up with the year... turns out I was thinking of it wrong...

Like this page explains and this diagram shows, the axis of the earth is pointing in an arbitrary kind of way, towards Polaris, and it stays that direction as it goes around the sun, and that's what changes the light/dark balance, not a wobble in the earth itself.

July 4, 2022

2022.07.04
Got sweet talked into marching 2 parades (Hingham and Wakefield) with 2 different bands today, even though my preference would have been "none" for reasons political and laziness. -ical.

Open Photo Gallery


Arrived at parade #2 early, took photos of bees in clover.


Look, tubas floating on their own!


Lady in a wiener suit perched on her wiener mobile.


I don't want to to yuck people's yum on Harry Potter (even if JK Rowling is a big ol' TERF and those goblins are pretty much bad jewish stereotypes) but this article is a pretty good explanation of why the series never clicked for me. I'm really into world building and hate artistic license where things happen just because the author wants them to, and in a lot of ways Harry Potter is nothing but that...

July 5, 2022

2022.07.05
Oh, ideological purity tests for Florida universities, cool, cool, hardly fascist at all.

playlist 2022 june

2022.07.06
Another month another playlist.

What's weirding me out is I haven't added any new songs yet THIS month.




Psycho (feat. GAWNE)
Crypt & Joey Nato
Visiting JZ (one of the few people who can sort of predict my music preferences) in Austin, we caught up on songs including this hip hop bop - fast patter along with scary psycho violins.
Booty Swing
Parov Stelar
Old-timey swing w/ some modern elements (played at my dr's waiting room)



Creep (feat. Karen Marie)
Scott Bradlee's Postmodern Jukebox
Another from my dr's waiting room, retro-cover.



Eu Na Rua
Antonio Pinto
from the movie "Nine Days" - very soft and sweet
Sweetie, You're Wild
Flying Girls
Dylan wrote "can either of you tell me why this song is both catchy and unsettling? Is the rhythm on the up-beat? I love it/it makes my brain hurt."
Through the Valley
Ashley Johnson & Chris Rondinella
Get Played podcast mentioned this from the end theme for Last of Us Part 2... femalre voice and guitar with an apocalyptic vibe.
Abla Deme Lazim Olur
Lalalar
Funky grindy pop used in an Apple Keynote (not the part in arabic I guess)



Bridge Over Troubled Water
Johnny Cash
I've been looking for more Johnny Cash ever since "When The Man Comes Around" wasa a little bit too apocalyptic for my taste...
We Ain't Came to Lose
Raekwon & Ghostface Killah
Making the rounds, some of the Wu-Tang doing a track for the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game.
The Good Book (Live)
Tim Minchin
I remember this jokey book about the Bible from wayback when, especially "I know the Good Book's good because the Good Book says it's good / I know the Good Book knows it's good because a really good book would"



Start with Goodbye, Stop with Hello
Eliza Rickman
Kind of haunting, toy-piano song, heard it Courtney's party recently but feel I know it from somewhere else.
Jolene
Me First and The Gimme Gimmes
high energy version of Dolly Parton's classic via My dad is addicted to rock and metal covers of pop songs...
Oh Mary, Don't You Weep
The Swan Silvertones
Old school Doo-Wop... reading up on "Bridge Over Troubled Water", this song was an influence on Paul Simon...
Rolling in the Deep (feat. Monique)
Urban Love
Heard this in a Japanese restaurant in Montreal... it's a Bossa Nova cover, but it's maybe too close to the original...



99 Red Balloons
Nova Bossa Ltd. & Lizette
Another Bossa Nova cover from Montreal... really dig it.

July 7, 2022

2022.07.07
I like the idea that we are fae for animals...
We should probably stop putting people who are prepping for the rapture in charge of anything.
@theliamnissan

July 8, 2022

2022.07.08


Wait, what?

July 9, 2022

2022.07.09
Never forget it was the Patriot movements that took down the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma, killing 168 including 19 kids.

July 10, 2022

2022.07.10

Open Photo Gallery














July 11, 2022

2022.07.11
I do believe time repeats itself. Our lives are somewhat like pendulums, that we start at birth and swing to death, and back and forth throughout all eternity. And that would suit me if I got the cycles of my life through all eternity. I don't want to die and go away entirely, I'd like to come back and come back and come back on almost any terms.
Kurt Vonnegut
Just finished Robert Weide's documentary "Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time", available on Hulu. I've been on a little bit of a book funk lately - thinking maybe I should go through all of Vonnegut's novels.

The quote kinda has a "The Suburbs (Continued)" wavelength....



New photos from Webb space telescope just dropped.

Hot take: a bit too disco and glam.

thoughts on feelings, feelings on thoughts

2022.07.12
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness
Some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
Who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
For some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
Meet them at the door laughing,
And invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
Because each has been sent
As a guide from beyond.
Rumi, "The Guest House"

This poem came up as I was trying to deepen my knowledge of Internal Family Systems (which people point out I refer to a lot.) Specifically, I was wondering if IFS implied you always need to fully person-ify your sub-parts, or if it there were other forms - because sometimes my inner parts feel like a raging infant or poorly trained dog, or worse. But I wonder if IFS would say the point is to let these more elemental subsystems "borrow" the cognitive facilities of other parts of the mind, so that they might more clearly express themselves...

I've been having some good (and ongoing) dialog with John Sawers (a followup to a 4-person party conversation with Cordelia and Melissa) about emotions.

John's view (to paraphrase and summarize badly) seems to elevate the importance of emotions themselves; they just have a goal of expression (verbally, physically, or otherwise) and failure to attend to them is what really leads to problems. So I'm left trying to figure out why I am unwilling to treat emotions with similar sacred reverence.

Currently my favorite metaphor for emotion, especially "negative" ones, is that of a flame. An emotion is a flame that kind of wants to burn. The higher mind has some ability to choose how much kindling it puts on that flame - to consciously dwell on the resentments or anger or injustice so that the flame builds and builds. Or to take corrective action. Or to let it go out. But - a repressed flame may seem to be out yet might be smoldering underground, only to cause great problems later on.

(And despite my even-keeled nature, sometimes I enjoy whipping up a big bonfire of anger or even a drenching torrent of sweet sadness. But usually I'm able to control when that happens.)

It's easy for people to think stoic/epicurean philosophies (or even some of Eastern ones) are about repressing emotion, but I think a part of it is the preference of cultivating the flame of gentle, sustained contentment - tranquility, ataraxia. It's an emotion like the other ones that can be curated and cultivated - but sometimes at the cost of other Id-ish emotions that you need in order to change the world in good ways rather than lapse into complacency.

So my thinking now is focused on two observations:

* most negative emotions are rooted in a desire for the world to be different than it is. To me it feels like the core of Buddhist Duḥkha (suffering, or unsatisfactoriness) is about...attachment not just to the world as it is now (and will not be forever) but also attachment to the "similar but better" world we can so easily imagine.

* one of the primary drivers of emotional expression is a need for VALIDATION - either interpersonal (in part so other people might join in your cause to effect change, and so that you are seen as reasonable and responsible person in the community) or even INTRApersonal (so the rest of the mind will act appropriately) An emotion wants to be seen not just as representing the person, but as accurately understanding the world, without which the justification for changing the world could not stand.

For me, that validation is highly intellectualized. When empathy for other's beliefs caused me to lose my Faith in a single revelation being universally true, I became fiercely anti-authoritarian. Like - "Only God Can Judge..." but I'm not sure there is a God. And I don't think any earthly authority is self-justifying. But neither do I go full-on existentialist and think that every person can be their own judge (which is close-cousin to why I have trouble with John's view of the primacy of emotion.)

So I end up thinking that everything that matters is emergent. Every sense of morality and values, the way things "should be", it emerges from groups. And the more people it's emerging from and with, the more LIKELY it is to be universally true. And so I'm more willing than most people to subjugate my personal preferences to the validation I get for being in line with "what's good for the group" - sometimes having to trust the group to take my preferences into account to a sufficient degree.

So one side effect of putting my needs into the context groups I form is that I'm a very reliable person. And I sometimes have trouble refocusing irritation with people when they are less reliable.... but I try and exercise patience because I recognize that most people's value systems do work from the individual's preferences outwards, and since I come from a place of privilege that can put up with a lot without too much discomfort and I have a sense of allegiance to groups that is a bit idiosyncratic (especially since it's still so anti-authoritarian!) I can't expect everyone to have that same group-first way of thinking.

And it also means I have to worry if my emotional curation means I feel things "less", if quiet contentment is a good tradeoff for the passions I might otherwise more likely enjoy, or suffer...



via

July 13, 2022

2022.07.13
This risks sounding like a humblebrag (at least to anyone living with a cat that prefers to keep distance) but I legit wonder why Dean just doesn't hold a grudge about the many pills and meds Melissa and I have to ply him with.

He clearly doesn't LIKE any of it, and will slink away and hide a little when he reads we're getting ready to dose him, and then meow complainingly once or twice when we grab him anyway (but mercifully, not really fight.) But then, 10-20 minutes later - even after the insult of a chemo pill popper he's as cuddly as ever.

Hopefully the simpler answers - he likes us, and likes snuggling - is enough, that I shouldn't be so amazed at his ability to compartmentalize a bit, and it's not like "if I get closer maybe they'll stop this abuse" or anything. (Or maybe the other simple answer... he's not ALL that bright of a cat :-)

Ha... actually his appetite stimulant, Mirtazapine, is also an anti-depressant. Maybe that helps :-D

I mean no need to overthink it now, though understanding it now would maybe help understanding and planning if something changed...

July 14, 2022

2022.07.14
[Harold Ramis] once said to me, "Life is ridiculous, so why not be a good guy?" That may be the only religion I have to this day.
Judd Apatow

The answer to the age old half empty or full glass question: It depends on your last action with it. If you drank from it it's half empty, but if you filled it it's half full.
edbuilds in /r/showerthoughts
You know, that's a little corny but actually a little profound? Like I think what's important about ANYTHING isn't isolated internal identity but how it interacts with other things. Everything meaningful - literally, anything with meaning - is emergent from connections and interactions. (Quantum-wise, this might be akin to "observation" being an integral part of... well, kind of everything!)

July 15, 2022

2022.07.15
X-ray of Gymnast doing full Scorpion

from this Pleat Jeans of Fascinating X-Rays
Society collectively forgot about the selfie stick
u/goon22




Semi-binging Lego Masters Series 2 (US version- I've heard the other countries' might be better)...I really wish they'd dive into more technique, like when the judges complement a clever bendy-bit or what not, do a side panel showing what pieces it used and how they were applied. At least the judges' decisions usually make sense (and they don't say it but I think the results from previous episodes weigh in)

from "Another Roadside Attraction"

2022.07.16
Reread Tom Robbins' "Another Roadside Attraction". Like "Still Life with Woodpecker" (which I still rate as one of my all time favorites) it doesn't resonate for me quite as much on rereading, though I love the mystical and evocative squishiness of it all.
...it had long been [Amanda's] theory that human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another.
Tom Robbins, "Another Roadside Attraction"

When she was a small girl, Amanda hid a ticking clock in an old rotten tree trunk. It drove woodpeckers crazy. Ignoring tasty bugs all around them, they just about beat their brains out trying to get at the clock. Years later, Amanda used the woodpecker experiment as a model for understanding capitalism, Communism, Christianity and all other systems that traffic in future rewards rather than in present realities.
Tom Robbins, "Another Roadside Attraction"

Look, America is no more a democracy than Russia is a Communist state. The governments of the U.S. and Russia are practically the same. There's only a difference of *degree*. We both have the same basic *form* of government: economic totalitarianism. In other words, the settlement to all questions, the solutions to all issues are determined not by what will make the people most healthy and happy in their bodies and their minds but by economics. Dollars or rubles. Economy *über alles*. Let nothing interfere with economic growth, even though that growth is castrating truth, poisoning beauty, turning a continent into a shit-heap and driving an entire civilization insane. Don't spill the Coca-Cola, boys, and keep those monthly payments coming.
Tom Robbins, "Another Roadside Attraction"

Now here was Nearly Normal awakening her. He brought a cucumber sandwich and a half-pint of milk. Good. Food would revive her. The bread slices collapsed like movie-set walls beneath her bite; the mayonnaise squished, the cucumber snapped tartly like the spine of an elf.
Tom Robbins, "Another Roadside Attraction"

Meanwhile, Ziller was doing a bit of tasting himself. Amanda was melting from the glory of it. She felt like the frosting left on the spoon that iced the Cake of the World.
Tom Robbins, "Another Roadside Attraction"

As was my custom in such elements I hunkered against the rain, drew my head into my collar, turned my eyes to the street, tensed my footsteps and proceeded in misery. But my hosts, I soon noticed, reacted in quite another way. They strolled calmly and smoothly, their bodies perfectly relaxed. They did not hunch away from the rain but rather glided through it. They directed their faces to it and did not flinch as it drummed their cheeks. They almost reveled in it. Somehow, I found this significant. The Zillers accepted the rain. They were not at odds with it, they did not deny it or combat it; they accepted it and went with it in harmony and ease. I tried it myself. I relaxed my neck and shoulders and turned my gaze into the wet. I let it do to me what it would. Of course, it was not trying to do anything to me. What a silly notion. It was simply falling as rain should, and I a man, another phenomenon of nature, was sharing the space in which it fell. It was much better regarding it that way. I got no wetter than I would have otherwise, and if I did not actually enjoy the wetting, at least I was free of my tension. I could even smile.
Tom Robbins, "Another Roadside Attraction"

"John Paul, didn't you once do a painting on the inside of a parachute? And then repack the chute? So that the only way anyone could enjoy your painting was to jump out of an airplane and look up at it on the way down? What was the purpose of that?"

"I wanted to test the art lover's commitment. It might be desirable for museums and galleries to devise a similar test."
Tom Robbins, "Another Roadside Attraction"

Sexuality ringed Amanda the way a penumbra rings a shadow.
Tom Robbins, "Another Roadside Attraction"
(I remember this one, and the spoon line, making a big impression on me in college or shortly thereafter.)
"You people, that fucking magician, I don't know all it is you've got yourselves into. But you wouldn't be in this mess with your government and with the Church if somebody had raised you with a little guts, if somebody had put the fear of God in you."
"You're talking about the fear of authority."
"Authority. Damn right. You never learned to respect authority."
"In order to be respected, authority has got to be respectable." Amanda whipped the custard with a wooden spoon.
"Oh? Our duly constituted authority isn't respectable enough for you."
"The only authority I respect is that one that causes butterflies to fly south in fall and north in springtime."
"You mean God?" "Not necessarily."
Tom Robbins, "Another Roadside Attraction"
Lately I've been thinking on how profoundly anti-authoritarian I am, at least philosophically. The only real authority is the authority of everything.
"Nothing to lose, Marx, and nothing to gain. Nothing to lose and nothing to gain. A man can be as free and happy as he wants to be because there's nothing to lose and nothing to gain."
Amanda in "Another Roadside Attraction" by Tom Robbins



July 17, 2022

2022.07.17
Random family anecdote, dimly recalled: my dad's family would give the kids coca-cola in small juice glasses, but he liked going to his cousins on the farm were everyone got handed out a full bottle. Or as his aunt put it: "goodness Jim you measure pop by the swallow"

Open Photo Gallery

















July 18, 2022

2022.07.18
Finished binging "Lego Masters Season 2" the other day.

Here's an article from Season 1, about the "Brick Pit", the 3.3 million bricks available to contestants, and a little about how they are organized.

But I realized... for non-competitive builders, that's such a foreign experience? Like for 90% of builders, Lego is all about piece constraint, what can you build with what you have on hand - and unless you get really into organizing - which I did once after college, but then realized having to take a build apart back into its pieces is just annoying - it's all about what pieces you can FIND - the sense memory of clackity clack sound and feel of running your hands through a bin of your Lego bricks, hunting for a piece you know is in there somewhere...

I think every challenge, except one mini-challenge where they had to reconstruct a Lamborghini model from the same pieces after only seeing it briefly, offered that unlimited brick access. I would have loved a few more constrained challenges - "here are 3 popular kits. How fast can each team build them from the instructions? Ok, now... which team can build the most imaginative thing from those same parts?"

(And while we're at, why not kick it old school - the all square brick sculpting challenge?)

I mean this season had some interesting builds but everything was geared at spectacle - survive an earthquake plate, a 60 mph wind machine, build far out from a vertical wall as possible, etc, always going for grandiosity, with detail just brought in as "story" bonus points. (Also I wish they had more breakouts... like if the judge compliments a small bit of cleverness, have a sidebar that shows what pieces were used and how!)
One of the things I try to do: memorize the smallest, most mundane and ordinary, unprepossessing, and virtually invisible of physical moments: the look and feel of a certain wall at a certain time on a certain day. Those walls, those little shacks, those cats in the sun: all that is lacking in self-consciousness I seek to hold in vision, memory. (Simple composition, color tints, a wash of light, crumbled brick, cold shadow, stillness, rose-color dirt, a twitching whisker.) Not knowing why, but thinking I may want it later, I try to keep it and I never can.
Michelle Anderson-Binczak, section "Chiaroscuro," in "The Blue-Green Seas of Forever,"




startling tech

2022.07.19
I was thinking about what technologies really startled me, in a "they an do that now?" sense.

A very incomplete list, in rough chronological order: Those last 3... man.

One model of intelligence is that it's all metaphors and connections. And computers are really getting there.

I think the future of creative and information based jobs will be learning how to harness these kind of forces. And that's a little scary- both from a "future of work" standpoint, and also because so far I'm not sure if the machines will get better at showing their work, explaining their reasoning... (and right now they sometimes exhibit the racism etc implicit in their training data sets...)


July 20, 2022

2022.07.20
Brilliant twitter thread "Nobody Wants to Work These Days" from the 20th century, and before...

July 21, 2022

2022.07.21
Welp, got my weeping in for the day.

"Over the Road" was an enjoyable podcast series by and about long-haul truckers. In this followup entry Eulogy for a Friend, host Long Haul Paul (musician and trucker) talks about losing his friend and fellow musician Shoestring Waugh to a blood clot - trucking is hell on a body. But before that loss, Waugh lost his son to a drug relapse after 5 years clean and sober. The podcast includes the song "It Comes In Waves", a mourning of that son, which I found deeply moving.

Well it comes in waves
It comes in waves
But I'll be all right
I'll be all right

Absalom
Absalom
My son
My son

She heard a crash...


See how I can deal with it on my playlist...
Good webcomic about the black trucks, punisher logos, and disgraced American flags.



Too I've been meaning to post the podcast where Sam Harris talks with David French - they come from very different places culturally but make a very good dialog. In particular I was struck by the talk of the Southern "Honor Culture".

Honor ties in too with what I've been thinking about authority and culture. I guess in my ideal world it would be conflated with expertise, but in the real world, well, Cartman's "RESPECT MAH AUTH-OR-I-TAAAAY" hit home for a reason.

And another recent tangent I've been pondering... what exactly is "worship"? Or "praise". It seems as nebulous and intangible as "honor" (and is probably related) I guess it's all this realm of "affirm your obsequiousness and commitment to obey, in light of your esteem of". In the case of worship, a higher being (often but not always divine), in the case of honor... it's almost like a demand for similar respect of one's self.



Marc Antony's Speech in an Appalachian Accent - the analysis and comments are really intriguing.

July 22, 2022

2022.07.22


In June 1943, The United States Army Band was ordered overseas to provide musical support; first in North Africa and then in battle-weary Europe, not returning to U.S. soil until June 1945.

Here you can see John L. Latwas (tuba) and Henry Weichler (piccolo) sitting in a slit trench. When The U.S. Army Band was shipped out for deployment in WWII, there were ten Soldiers who were in the original 1922 formation of the band, all of whom were WWI veterans (including Latwas).

#ArmyHistory

todo'ing better

2022.07.23
I was listening to a podcast with Oliver Burkeman, about time management.

While has some suggestions for "todo lists", his main point is more existential; that it is folly to hope you'll get to do all the things you'd like to in life, and maybe misery to try. (The faint and somewhat bitter silver lining to that is "maybe it's the finitude of life that gives our choices value". I'm a little suspicious that's just sour grapes.)

He also makes some good (if oft made) points about procrastination and distraction; most of us look to distractions to divert us from the emotional discomfort of the task at hand. (I know for me it's "this task is either tedious or challenging of my ego".)

But that all this is kind of a tangential framing to my main point, that I'm pysyched about my plans to switch my Todo systems up a bit.

Even back in 2006 I was cataloging systems I was dabbling with: PalmPilot, stickies and a spindle, small text files, whiteboard, graph-paper-sheet-a-day,etc.

For a number of year I've been happy with the app "2Do". It did a great job with two things a lot of similar check list apps lack: finegrained recurring events (like being able to specify if something is due every X days, like a bill, or if it's to be done Y days after you last did it, like a haircut) and then categorizing todos, but having the todos for all categories on a single big list, scrollable and so entirely viewable without clicking.

(I supplemented that with a homebrew daily chore list webapp I made, so that the daily grind wasn't blocking the other stuff so much.)

But 2Do had poor syncing (I shelled out for the pricey desktop version, but the syncing was surprisingly meh) and "tap to mark done" isn't THAT viscerally satisfying.

I think I will swing over to using the app Tot. It's a curiously minimal (but reliably syncing across iOS and MacOS, as is Simplenote) set of 7 color coded notes that I've been using to track music to get and shows to watch for a while.

I think having it always at hand on desktop or handheld will help, and that free form text will flow stuff more naturally in and out of other apps.

I might stick to 2Do for the repeating stuff (and maybe move the daily grind stuff back into it, so that I'm checking into 2 apps rather than 3...)

But I'm psyched about this. I've felt dissatisfied with my Todo system for a long while. (Also if you see a lot of random content on my blog and FB, that's why, I'm clearing the deck of old "Oh I should blog that" Todos...)



a list of short stories - I read the Ursula Le Guin "Vaster than Empires and More Slow"
list of maker tools for simple games etc. I liked Beepbox
bitches be like are you far left or far right bitch i'm farTING


human gender and sexuality are very much like animal taxonomy, in that both look structured and simple on the surface, but once you start investigating, it turns out there's actually no such thing as a fish despite the fact that we all know what a fish is, and that's okay

Interesting dialog on how the left and right argue. Like among lefties you'll hear the idea that folks (the unwoke) owe it to the discussion to educate themselves - to just do a little googling to understand the lay of the land of what other people are experiencing while someone on the right might think they are being more courteous by asking the lefty for more information directly.

It's interesting to put this in the context of autority/epistimology I work with. Like, a lot of received lefty framing is consensus based, but its meant to emerge, and receive its justification, from the experience of individuals in various groups. Whereas on the right, to paint broadly, knowledge is personally intuited, or goes well past the group into whatever God and Church has passed down.
Really excellent post on How Poetic Rhythm, Meter, and Rhyme Actually Work! in English.

I've never had a good sense for metered verse; I think because it's so nebulous and fungible, I have a hard time taking it seriously.

the new tower of babel
time lapsed ab workout - s'funny!



Storyboarding Tips from a Simpson's Animator

July 24, 2022

2022.07.24
Lot of Conservatives talking crap but Liberals also love America - but want it to live up to its principles of equality, rights, liberty, opportunity, and democracy.
It's always been comforting to me to know that Pluto doesn't give a shit about what we call it.

July 25, 2022

2022.07.25
Why I need to polish my standup act #529:
"So y'know in 'Fast and Furious' they have that button mounted between the front seats? and they press the button when they need to go faster? my 2004 scion totally has that!!! it's called finally remembering to turn off the parking brake."

July 26, 2022

2022.07.26



My mom sent me this interesting article covering topics like the relationship between jazz and christianity and black/white relations in the music scene.



legit bummed the choco taco is going away?! even though i only saw the legendary best flavor "fried ice cream" once. it was so good.
stork denier




July 27, 2022

2022.07.27


July 28, 2022

2022.07.28
McKinnon told The New York Times that nothing makes her laugh harder than farting. She continued, "It's such an insult that foul gas comes out of a hole in our butt with a sound to announce itself. It's the ultimate bad thing about being a person."

July 29, 2022

2022.07.29


lake george 2022

2022.07.30
good: have a dear friend since middle school days
better: have a dear friend since middle school days that you can have funny great conversations with
good: have a dear friend since middle school days that you can have funny great conversations with who has access to a lake house!

Open Photo Gallery















































July 31, 2022

2022.07.31
RIP Nichelle Nichols! Uhura was an inspiration and at the heart of Star Trek's view of a better humanity.
and Bill Russell! Dang!


2022 July❮❮prevnext❯❯