Chinese export instruction manual warning you not to use water hotter than π/3 radians for cleaning

Brooklyn tweeters watching New York officials give press conferences:

So they say if a bear charges you you should stand your ground cause it’ll probably pull up short into a mere threat display.

So what happens if you charge back at it?

Sorry boss

Aw, fuckin’ wonderful, just stepped in a little pile of mouse guts Badger left around ‘cause they were full of shit.

kontextmaschine:

You know, I doubt these guys putting in a retaining wall across the street are licensed and bonded contractors.

At least they look more like alcoholics than methheads, and the one guy seems like he’s handled a mini-backhoe before.

Like, it’s part that their setup looks kinda halfass – a rented micro-backhoe and unmarked white pickup pulling an iffy trailer – part of it’s that the guys don’t look like pros kicking back because they’ve seen this all before and know their relevant part doesn’t really kick off for half an hour, they’re just milling around in Cascadian outerwear trying to find some way they can contribute to each phase.

kontextmaschine:

Arrakis is changing hands! It’s a desert planet, and House Harkonnen used to own it but just now the Emperor gave it to House Atreides! It’s a fucking terrible place to live but Spice comes from there and Spice is some hot shit!

Paul Atreides is a kid. He is the Brandon Stark of this series. He’s the heir of House Atreides and he is coming in on a starship. Starships work because Navigators, who are dudes who’ve done a ton of Spice, Spice here being LSD, can fold space with their minds. They turn in to giant octopuses in tanks though, supported by anti-gravity. Most things hover.

We’re down on the planet and things are cool. Paul is taught by a Space Nun, his mom used to be a Space Nun. He trains in knife-duelling with the head of the family guard, Duncan. There are shields and you’ve got to go real slow to get through them, so it’s all misdirection.

Baron Harkonnen really wants the planet back, also he’s a fat dude into little boys.

People have lasers but if you ever fire a laser at a shield they both blow up like a nuke. Paul and his dad go watch a mining expedition, flying in an ornithopter, which is a helicopter that flaps its wings like a bird. There’s a big sandcrawler that digs up the spice and the problems is that worms always attack. Worms are giant things that live under the sand and have gullets full of diamond teeth, and they will swallow harvesters right up.

There are scout ornithopters and they spot wormsign - a worm under the surface heading for the harvester. This is radioed in, Duke Atreides says ok let’s pull the harvester out, his foreman says no the worm’ll take a while let’s harvest as much and make as much money as we can, eventually the Duke insists and the rescue ornithopter pulls all the mining crew out just as the worm opens his giant mouth below them. Duke Atreides is A Good Leader.

The head Space Nun gives Paul a test, it’s like “stick your hand in this box and it’ll feel like the worst thing possible, if you take your hand out I’ll kill you with my poisoned ring.” Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total annihilation. Paul doesn’t pull his hand out and she’s like “well done, chosen one”.

The Atreides live on a rocky shield, one of the few parts of the world that isn’t sand to the bottom and the worms can’t get to. One of the Duke’s aides is a Mentat, who are the Maesters of this series, but also a bit psychic. Someone tried to hide an assassin robot in Paul’s bed, but he outsmarted it and his mother comforted him.

THE HARKONNEN ATTACK and Paul’s parents die, Duncan hauls him out through a secret passage, flee the castle and blow it up by time-delay aiming a laser cannon at its shield. They flee into the desert.

They meet the Fremen, the native tribe of the planet. The Fremen wear rubber stilsuits that recycle fluids and keep them hydrated. The Fremen take Paul in. The Fremen’s eyes are all blue pupils in blue irises, “blue within blue”, because they do so much Spice. The Fremen call worms Makers. Worms are attracted to sonic patterns and Fremen walk without rhythm so they won’t attract the worm, or they put down thumpers to draw worms away.

There’re some tribal things, Paul goes native and becomes Maud'Dib, The Mouse,Chosen One of the Fremen. He gets engaged to a tribal girl. Paul wins a deadly duel and wins a crysnife, a super-sharp knife made out of worm tooth. The Fremen ride worms by calling them with a thumper and then digging hooks into their segmented skin. You can pull back the segments and the worms will roll it away from the sand to protect the membranes, that’s how you steer them.

The Space Nun shows up and lets on that he’s part of a centuries-long breeding program to meld the masculine and the feminine, and there’s another deadly test for him. Worms turn into the Water of Life as part of their metamorphosis, then this blows up into a Spice geyser to spread the seed. The Fremen have a tiny Maker that they drown underwater to create the Water of Death. The Water of Death will make women trip out and command the universe, but kill men. Paul takes the Water of Death and survives by transmuting it to the Water of Life with his mind.

Space Nun says well done, but Paul wasn’t even supposed to be the Chosen One, rather the chosen one’s father. He has a kid with his girl, and then neglects them for years to go get high on Spice. Spice can show you multiple pathways to the future. Of the ones Paul can see, most of them have him leading a jihad on behalf of the Fremen and most of them he fails. Eventually he finds the right timeline.

Paul attacks the Harkonnen in their base, riding a fleet of worms up towards the stone shield wall and jumping them over. He kills some dudes and then threatens to drop the Water of Death into the Water of Life, which will kill all the worms in the world and destroy the Spice economy forever. Somehow, he wins.

THE END

And then there are sequels that are even more ‘70s. Which is a high standard!

Oh relevant is that Fremen don’t use shields, ‘cause shields draw worms, so when Paul wins that crysnife duel he has to overcome the shielded-fighting instinct to slow his deathblows, in what’s a really obvious metaphor for him adopting decolonial resistance idioms of insurrectionary conflict rather than his old within-the-system raising that left him thinking in terms of second-order diplomatic and political effects.

kontextmaschine:

I remember a few years ago when there was a fluff cause the Assassins Creed: French Revolution had a fairly standard Anglophone narrative of “yeah, this was a sequence of guys running their own plots taking advantage of the situation the last guys created”, where unrest is co-opted by a variety of leaders who fall to bickering, division, fanaticism, and Terror, creating an opening for Napoleon Bonaparte to apply the modernizing ideas that allowed him to extract much more power given the same fundaments as anyone else.

And this offended the French, who are taught to understand it holistically as an obvious sequence of progression in the working out of the French people, protagonists of civilization, in inventing liberal nationalism.

(Following the Anglophone over the Francophone narrative being invested with further significance because the developers were Québécois)

Don’t have any further thoughts on that, just remembering it.

Well also there was the part that suggested that at a deeper level the Revolution was promoted by the same forces that had been behind ancien regimes all along because they saw that said liberal nationalism, acting through the “will of the people”, was actually a better mechanism for elite puppetmasters to exercise control of society than feudal monarchy

Long covid. Which doesn’t itself make me lose weight, but somehow screws with the way I draw energy from blood sugar and eaten food so I don’t get enough and I’m slumped fatigued, but by taking creatine I can boost anaerobic energy generation enough to compensate. Anaerobic generation is when your body extracts energy from breaking down stored fat and I’m using a lot of it.

From all the signs and patterns I’ve experienced so far, I think the energy issues – and thus the weight loss from compensating for then – will end in time to leave me weighing somewhat less than unmarked normie “average” (which is by now itself probably below the actual average weight of the population) but to a minor, “slim and fit” degree, currently I put myself as solidly overweight – not on the “fat” or “average” side of that, but only going down.

kontextmaschine:

Things you can do to criminals or intellectual arguments

• Seize
• Apprehend
• Interrogate

PURSUE

kontextmaschine:

You know, I doubt these guys putting in a retaining wall across the street are licensed and bonded contractors.

At least they look more like alcoholics than methheads, and the one guy seems like he’s handled a mini-backhoe before.

Oh, well if I knew that guy was just gonna rip that rose bed out I wouldn’t have bothered weeding it all this time.

You know, I doubt these guys putting in a retaining wall across the street are licensed and bonded contractors.

At least they look more like alcoholics than methheads, and the one guy seems like he’s handled a mini-backhoe before.

kontextmaschine:

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I love that the two things Matt Yglesias is unreservedly enthusiastic about are powder cocaine and the geriatric spice, melange.

Like, within the Manhattan private school world he comes from, cocaine really does still enjoy the “soft drug” reputation it widely had (though even more luxuriously expensive) in the 70s.

kontextmaschine:

Arrakis is changing hands! It’s a desert planet, and House Harkonnen used to own it but just now the Emperor gave it to House Atreides! It’s a fucking terrible place to live but Spice comes from there and Spice is some hot shit!

Paul Atreides is a kid. He is the Brandon Stark of this series. He’s the heir of House Atreides and he is coming in on a starship. Starships work because Navigators, who are dudes who’ve done a ton of Spice, Spice here being LSD, can fold space with their minds. They turn in to giant octopuses in tanks though, supported by anti-gravity. Most things hover.

We’re down on the planet and things are cool. Paul is taught by a Space Nun, his mom used to be a Space Nun. He trains in knife-duelling with the head of the family guard, Duncan. There are shields and you’ve got to go real slow to get through them, so it’s all misdirection.

Baron Harkonnen really wants the planet back, also he’s a fat dude into little boys.

People have lasers but if you ever fire a laser at a shield they both blow up like a nuke. Paul and his dad go watch a mining expedition, flying in an ornithopter, which is a helicopter that flaps its wings like a bird. There’s a big sandcrawler that digs up the spice and the problems is that worms always attack. Worms are giant things that live under the sand and have gullets full of diamond teeth, and they will swallow harvesters right up.

There are scout ornithopters and they spot wormsign - a worm under the surface heading for the harvester. This is radioed in, Duke Atreides says ok let’s pull the harvester out, his foreman says no the worm’ll take a while let’s harvest as much and make as much money as we can, eventually the Duke insists and the rescue ornithopter pulls all the mining crew out just as the worm opens his giant mouth below them. Duke Atreides is A Good Leader.

The head Space Nun gives Paul a test, it’s like “stick your hand in this box and it’ll feel like the worst thing possible, if you take your hand out I’ll kill you with my poisoned ring.” Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total annihilation. Paul doesn’t pull his hand out and she’s like “well done, chosen one”.

The Atreides live on a rocky shield, one of the few parts of the world that isn’t sand to the bottom and the worms can’t get to. One of the Duke’s aides is a Mentat, who are the Maesters of this series, but also a bit psychic. Someone tried to hide an assassin robot in Paul’s bed, but he outsmarted it and his mother comforted him.

THE HARKONNEN ATTACK and Paul’s parents die, Duncan hauls him out through a secret passage, flee the castle and blow it up by time-delay aiming a laser cannon at its shield. They flee into the desert.

They meet the Fremen, the native tribe of the planet. The Fremen wear rubber stilsuits that recycle fluids and keep them hydrated. The Fremen take Paul in. The Fremen’s eyes are all blue pupils in blue irises, “blue within blue”, because they do so much Spice. The Fremen call worms Makers. Worms are attracted to sonic patterns and Fremen walk without rhythm so they won’t attract the worm, or they put down thumpers to draw worms away.

There’re some tribal things, Paul goes native and becomes Maud'Dib, The Mouse,Chosen One of the Fremen. He gets engaged to a tribal girl. Paul wins a deadly duel and wins a crysnife, a super-sharp knife made out of worm tooth. The Fremen ride worms by calling them with a thumper and then digging hooks into their segmented skin. You can pull back the segments and the worms will roll it away from the sand to protect the membranes, that’s how you steer them.

The Space Nun shows up and lets on that he’s part of a centuries-long breeding program to meld the masculine and the feminine, and there’s another deadly test for him. Worms turn into the Water of Life as part of their metamorphosis, then this blows up into a Spice geyser to spread the seed. The Fremen have a tiny Maker that they drown underwater to create the Water of Death. The Water of Death will make women trip out and command the universe, but kill men. Paul takes the Water of Death and survives by transmuting it to the Water of Life with his mind.

Space Nun says well done, but Paul wasn’t even supposed to be the Chosen One, rather the chosen one’s father. He has a kid with his girl, and then neglects them for years to go get high on Spice. Spice can show you multiple pathways to the future. Of the ones Paul can see, most of them have him leading a jihad on behalf of the Fremen and most of them he fails. Eventually he finds the right timeline.

Paul attacks the Harkonnen in their base, riding a fleet of worms up towards the stone shield wall and jumping them over. He kills some dudes and then threatens to drop the Water of Death into the Water of Life, which will kill all the worms in the world and destroy the Spice economy forever. Somehow, he wins.

THE END

And then there are sequels that are even more ‘70s. Which is a high standard!

I remember a few years ago when there was a fluff cause the Assassins Creed: French Revolution had a fairly standard Anglophone narrative of “yeah, this was a sequence of guys running their own plots taking advantage of the situation the last guys created”, where unrest is co-opted by a variety of leaders who fall to bickering, division, fanaticism, and Terror, creating an opening for Napoleon Bonaparte to apply the modernizing ideas that allowed him to extract much more power given the same fundaments as anyone else.

And this offended the French, who are taught to understand it holistically as an obvious sequence of progression in the working out of the French people, protagonists of civilization, in inventing liberal nationalism.

(Following the Anglophone over the Francophone narrative being invested with further significance because the developers were Québécois)

Don’t have any further thoughts on that, just remembering it.

Yeah part of saying that weight loss is like a matryoshka doll of fatness is it keeps feeling like I “drain the pool” of loose fat around a harder central mass, am left with that alone, and then within days that softens to a looser periphery around a firmer core, and then…

And so yeah, at this point the core is the thicker “spare tire” around the very bottom of the stomach, and the entirety of the old “top roll of fat” is loose periphery to be lost.

Getting harder for me to call out “landmarks” coming up because it’s been so long since I was this thin (and had no muscle) I don’t remember much about from here on and what “surfaces” next.

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I love that the two things Matt Yglesias is unreservedly enthusiastic about are powder cocaine and the geriatric spice, melange.

Reason I can’t just wave off the creatine for now and ride the fatigue back to sleep is without it something happens to make the inside of my mouth astringent and awful-tasting.

kontextmaschine:

Just now, the feeling of sitting back in my chair and crossing my arms across my chest atop my stomach – not the feel of torso on arm or vice versa but the whole gestalt of my overall distribution of mass and force – that’s something I haven’t felt since childhood.

Yeah, the overall sensation of existing in my body now is one that I associate with “being a little kid”, that’s something.

Opinion | We’re Watching the End of a Digital Media Age. It All Started With Jezebel.

The media is still grappling with what Jezebel’s creators helped unleash, for good and ill. The era opened opportunities for journalists and creative people who, by instinct or practice, could blend their identities with the stories they told. The new generation of millennial writers at the Gawker sites, BuzzFeed, Vice and other digital projects challenged stuffy, insular and occasionally deceitful institutions that deserved challenging, but it also lacked, in retrospect, a sense of the value of having trusted institutions at all.

And those of us who came up in the internet media may have missed the biggest story of all. We took it for granted that this was a progressive medium, populated by young people who loved Barack Obama and culminating in some way in his election in 2008. We didn’t expect the true apogee of the new media to come with the election of Donald Trump eight years later.