a bandana around a dog’s neck delivers the same message as a collar - “yes, this dog belongs to someone” - while delivering the bonus message “the someone this dog belongs to would not collar a dog”
So for the record I’ve voted in 3 presidential elections
In 2004 I wrote in for Condoleeza Rice because she seemed competent and it would be funny if the first black president were an atheist lesbian Republican professor
In 2008 I went Obama because I believed the hype
In 2012 I went Romney because I estimated him at 6.2 against Obama’s 5.7
You know, CPR and the Heimlich Maneuver are pretty cool.
It’s like at several different points during my youth people would set aside an hour or so to tell me all about them and that seemed weird at the time but a decade plus on I feel like I still remember enough to be helpful.
“Save people from dying with one weird trick discovered by a dad”
can’t wait for any branch of the armed forces to switch to any camo pattern as not-ugly as US Woodland so I can get decent surplus pants without having to buy from weird ex-Warsaw Pact reimporters that are probably just passing off shit that didn’t make grade
fuuuuck that pixel shit
like, flat green, or brown, or black, would just be fine
I’m not even in it for the raar manman military thing, they’re just the most competently made pants I’ve ever encountered
(real milspec/surplus though, by now it would probably be in the low $100s - fucking indestructible, totally mobile, you can clean them with a knife, cool in the summer, warm in the winter, the cargo pockets are like a motorcyclist’s glove compartment)
((easiest distinction between real surplus and raar manman knockoffs is pockets - real stuff snaps closed, buttons are cheaper by like $1 each and there you go))
So for the record I’ve voted in 3 presidential elections
In 2004 I wrote in for Condoleeza Rice because she seemed competent and it would be funny if the first black president were an atheist lesbian Republican professor
In 2008 I went Obama because I believed the hype
In 2012 I went Romney because I estimated him at 6.2 against Obama’s 5.7
(I can’t remember if 2004 was Pennsylvania or New York
2008 was California
2012 was Oregon)
You know, the obvious parallel to the situation with Russia and Ukraine is America and Cuba. Like, the latters were officially ~sovereign and independent~ of the neighboring major power, but come on. So when another major power tried to poach them under the guise of ~purely domestic~ “revolution”, naturally their suzerain raised an army (with reciprocal arms-length disclaimablity as “local forces”) to take it back.
Like, the parallel even extends as far as the nearby power not even bothering with the pretense of independence w/r/t the naval base from which they dominate the regional sea.
can’t wait for any branch of the armed forces to switch to any camo pattern as not-ugly as US Woodland so I can get decent surplus pants without having to buy from weird ex-Warsaw Pact reimporters that are probably just passing off shit that didn’t make grade
fuuuuck that pixel shit
Oh, huh. That’s promising.
The suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, says law enforcement met a broad public outcry over the Aug. 9 killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown with “militaristic displays of force and weaponry,” (and) engaged U.S. citizens “as if they were war combatants.”
Hey so Ferguson residents are suing the municipal government, the county government, the police chief, and other police officers over damages during the crackdown. The level of proof required to receive damages is way lower than the level of proof required to put officers in jail, so this suit probably has way more chance of success than any criminal charges. If the residents win compensation, this kind of suit is probably the closest the Ferguson police will come to facing any kind of repercussions.
This is probably the most clever way to go forward here; keep in mind that a successful case would not only “punish” the individuals/agencies concerned and set an example for others but would encourage the tactic otherwise which would probably serve to raise the cost of liability insurance (either for government agencies directly or individual cops, who would probably end up getting it through unions and affinity organizations). Unlike electorates, insurers don’t really give a shit about feels or public opinion in regards to Officer Friendly or the Negro Brute, exist on a broader geographic and chronological frame than any given election, and exert relentless pressure rather than sparking up after a media event and then forgetting about it when they get distracted by the next one. If they crank up rates by 50% and demand changes, training, “best practices”, whatever if you want to get them back down again, people are going to listen.
The downside of insurance companies being soulless economachines is that insurance companies are soulless economachines and will push their costs down however they can; put them on the hook and they’ll start lobbying legislatures, funding campaigns, and spending on cases to generate useful precedents with the goal of shielding police from liability, adding to whatever power police unions and local governments are already applying in that regard.
Tradeoffs.
Hotline was a thing!
In the mid-late 1990s (the realtime)
It was an intermediate step between FTP servers (which were themselves kinda continuous with direct-dialup BBSes) and p2p p2penis
It was an intermediate step between FTP servers (and Archie and… Gopher? I hear Gopher was a thing, that existed) and p2p p2penis
It was initially for Mac which was a distinction becauses in the late 1990s mac and apple shit was always about to die because Gil Amelio was not a Great Man
It was followed by Carracho but that turned out not to matter
On Hotline you would first sign into a tracker. The program came preloaded with 4? trackers but they kinda sucked?
The tracker would populate a list of possible servers that you could see in a list this was novel`
When you finally found a good tracker (outlaw) ~outlaw~ outlaw you would find some servers you might actually want to sign into
(you would hear about better trackers on better servers)
You could sign in in particular, username/password or as a guest without
There was a provision to serve you a particular text screen when you signed in this was novel and in continuity with FTP and BBS and in continuity
a lot of times it would tell you the rules to sign in as the ~real~ guest to sign in as
a lot of times this was “go to this webpage, click on this banner ad, use the Xth word of the Nth paragraph as user, something like that for pass”
this was Web 1.0 when a single banner ad click promised to pay out as much as one US dollar, especially if it was for a porn subscription site which had a decent paythrough rate because they were part of an industry that was used to clients (older than me) that were used to paying money for looking at naked women
also often the textscreen would say that by clicking “agree” you admitted that you were not a government police agent and renounced all powers according
I do not believe the government police powers accepted this as binding
there was a chat function, which unlike the flie transfer function (derived from FTP) was derived from IRC
in social terms, who the fuck cares about the underlying code
there was a main channel for each given server and possible side channels, and private messaging and you were expected to have a bot, and a bot user, if you had a server
there were also file directories this was the FTP part it was all about file transfer and this was the era where user-end and server connections where 14.4 to 28.8 to 56k to T1 and T3 (mythical)
cable became a thing it was understood between 56k and T1
people would host servers on T1+ from businesses and colleges on the understanding that this was an unapproved but worthy thing, especially after business hours (5pm local on, this was back when there were “local hours” because the internet hadn’t yet made everything everything)
you would download user-end software mostly games and photo/video/music processing software and also pornography
a lot of pornography
just like early p2p
I signed on as Paperthin, and Silverlight? because of course I did
mostly to Badtz’s happy hardcore server
but also everywhere else for the warez and the porn
“Combine”. more collective activities should take the name “combine”.
When I’m tempted to get upset about the ants that swarm the unwashed dishes in my sink, I try to remember that ants are just machines for turning debris into ant, and from there to spider, and thus to bird, and thus to cat, and I like cats.
I also try to remember to instead get upset at my housemates for never washing the goddamn dishes because even if they’re tired (and drunk) when they get off work and even if I’m around the house most of most days I pay as much rent as them and I’m not their fucking housewife.
If you’re used enough to her songwriting style, you realize that in All Too Well, when she sings
And maybe we got lost in translation
Maybe I asked for too much
But maybe this thing was a masterpiece
´til you tore it all up
the “tore” completely breaks her usual phonemic flow, and even though it’s sung so the word’s kind of spit out for emphasis, it doesn’t even match up with the other cases where she breaks her patterns for effect.
you know what word would have fit perfectly though? “fucked”.
(I also have suspicions about “every one of us has messed up too” in Innocent, even though “messed” doesn’t stand out as much)
Uh, depends on what you mean by “well known” - I’d tend to think of that as being “on the base version of one of the (multiplatinum) albums”, as vs. from the bonus tracks, LPs, soundtracks or the stuff she’s covered live. So, uh.
I’m not too fond of the songs that were clearly written for father/daughter dances - The Best Day and Never Grow Up - but that’s cause they’re clearly not even trying to speak to me and for what they’re doing they’re pretty well done. The duets are all kinda shit - she really is a singer/songwriter, and at her best writing for her voice only and only singing her own words, so let’s say The Last Time.
Now if by “well known” you mean “one of the radio singles”… huh. Apparently The Last Time was released as a single. Didn’t chart though, so let’s not count that.
Shake it Off. I hated it at first, but it’s inescapably catchy and it’s been stuck in my head this last week, same as everyone. ‘cause it’s like 100% hook, which is why it’s my least favorite. Like, I like Swift enough that I can recognize her songwriting quirks? I like Max Martin, too, and I can do the same thing with him. There’s been a few times when I heard one of his songs on the radio and I recognized him long before (if ever) the “artist”.
Like, Katy Perry, Avril Lavigne, Kelly Clarkson? No, it’s a Max Martin song. And Shake it Off is a Max Martin song. Red had a lot of pop production on it but you could hear the Swift songwriting underneath, particularly in the lyrics. Shake it Off has some - the “I keep crusin’/can’t stop won’t stop groovin’” is clearly developed from the same place The Way I Loved You got “you were wild and crazy/just so frustrating” (and I’m probably not giving enough credit to her vocal distinctiveness - she doesn’t have great range, projection, or endurance but she’s excellent at varying affect, for example the subtle hiccuping in the chorus), but it’s thin fucking gruel, man.
On a similar note, listening to Rilo Kiley kind of gave me a crush on Jenny Lewis, like everyone (for some reason almost all my celebrity crushes and none of my meatspace ones have been on redheads) which was mostly just “pretty girl… singing pretty words!”
And what dispelled that was first, living around Echo Park for a while I’d occasionally run across Jenny and Blake in normal life, and you realize they’re both kind of plain, it’s just for shows and shoots she pretties herself up and he uglies himself up
(also I used the bathroom after her once at, what, Casbah Cafe?, and oh god she stunk the place up, that’s a cute way to have someone humanized for you)
And second, listening to their side (well, by that time main I guess) projects - The Elected and Jenny’s stuff with The Watson Twins and realizing, from experiencing their songwriting styles in isolation, the Jenny lyrics I really loved had actually been Blake lyrics
(that’s something, looking back at it you realize that a lot of their songs were one of them singing the other one’s words about their shortcomings as lovers, that must have been a strain - they really were our generation’s Fleetwood Mac)
Also: the current Swedish wave as a revival of the producer-auteur pop tradition that was eclipsed by the one-two combo of The Beatles and singer-songwriter folk-gone-electric, blah blah rockist cult of authenticity blah blah Phil Spector, blah blah Motown, I can’t be arsed to write it out
