See I’ve been in this body a while, I know what it is and how it feels, and I put my hands on my stomach and I’m like “no, this is a half-size cardboard novelty prop, what the fuck?”

Oh man I haven’t got to count seconds between the flash of lightning and the peal of thunder in a while.

kontextmaschine:

Honestly I think the thing is Badger has realized is that once he brings rodents back to show me and collect his bounty he can eat them, so if he’s hungry between meals he can get his own.

First thing he always does is chew through the neck. It’s a crap shoot if he eats the head, but if he wants he can bite through any of the bones including the skull.

Honestly I think the thing is Badger has realized is that once he brings rodents back to show me and collect his bounty he can eat them, so if he’s hungry between meals he can get his own.

Aw, man, that stabbing pain in the upper breast when I cough is back, good thing I split up the last smashing into so many little bites

Theory that in comic physics electricity and magnetism are more distinct, given how characters with one in their power set can sometimes use it as the other as a special trick but not on a casual basis

15 years from now when I find that I actually needed all this iron because the virus was sheathing my bones in “fool’s adamantium”

Uh, so how are the AI-generated finger family kids videos on YouTube I assume are out there doing?

Kinda want to do something where I use “allegate” as a verb (in place of “allege”), and yes that is Joss Whedon dialogue, but it’s the good, TV Whedon dialogue that’s actually largely Jane Espenson dialogue

Looking down my body, the swell of the stomach is distinctly shallower in arc than it used to be. Not shallow, yet, maybe “medium”.

Well one nice thing about Twitter implementing day/night modes is it makes it clear scrolling through my Safari tags which ones I was looking at recently and which have been open for a while.

kontextmaschine:

tsutsifrutsi:

(Required reading: Siderea on Class)

It’s interesting to think about the (many) ways in which the modern “bay-area rationalist techno-libertarian” culture (i.e. Scott Alexander’s Grey Tribe, and to a lesser extent all of STEM academia) is effectively an outgrowth not of the bourgeoisie “entrepreneurial” class identified with the American upper-middle, but rather of the historical-and-present military officer class. Examples:

• seeing things in terms of game-theory, negotiations, and logistics—in est, in terms of strategy;
• breaking debates down into positive vs. normative subcomponents, and then setting out to solve the positive subcomponent; thus, technocratic politics;
• the default assumption of meritocracy, and the belief (against evidence) that organizations with many members from this class will naturally end up meritocratic;
• thinking in terms of capability rather than intent or policy, e.g. “the only thing stopping the state from seeing your data is encryption”, or “the only thing stopping nuclear war is MAD”;
• the whole notion that while the world is suboptimal on a macro-political level, this is fixable through strength of arms: directly through war, or indirectly through technological innovation. Culture is the thing presumed to be immutable and worked around—an attitude foreign to most every other class, who think of culture as the first and only viable battleground for macro-political change;
• an enjoyment of futurism (i.e. speculative fiction, X-risk debates) but also Futurism (the aesthetic of early speculative fiction, of games like Portal and Bioshock, of clean elegant spaceships and “fixed” transhuman genomes.) This is the only class that sees nothing wrong with the concept of a “supersoldier.” (It assumes the advances will turn the crank of genomics tech, which will result in the positive macro-political shifts mentioned above);
• the ideal of Heinlein’s competent man, completely autonomous, able to restart civilization from its bootstraps—not quite a Nietzschean übermensch, since the philosophy and beliefs of the “competent man” are mostly irrelevant—it is instead the skill-set that matters, and its concentration all in one (or rather, every) individual;
• the drawing of a sharp division between “officer-quality” and “enlisted-quality” people, where the distinction comes down not to acculturation into this officer class, but to potential: raw intelligence and willingness to learn, but not to labor (i.e. the ability to be the “competent man”, and then—having gained the knowledge to do so—the desire and analytical capacity to properly delegate to others who have a comparative advantage in those skills, rather than to do them oneself);
• for the above reason reason, the highest likelihood of any class to hire skilled laborers and tradesmen or pay for services, instead of attempting to do “amateur” work themselves. The numerous profitable startups serving exclusively the “rich SV engineer who wants to automate something” crowd can attest to this. (Though, as above, this class first seeks to understand the work that will be done, such that they can then observe and evaluate the performance of the contractor or service. This leads to many a tradesman being “told how to do their job” by members of this class whenever they do something nonstandard);
• the scouting for un-acculturated members, with an explicit path to acculturate them, vis. officer training schools, or coding bootcamps. This is one of the few classes (the only?) that almost universally encourages, and attempts to facilitate entry into it. This class doesn’t see people in the other classes as doing something inherently “bad” that must be corrected. Instead, it sees most people as being in their “proper” class, the one that fits them—but sees the “officer-quality” people who are in some other class as being in the “wrong” class, and assumes they will feel much better when “rescued” by this class. (Which is at least sometimes true; many who were bullied in a differently-classed public school do feel “rescued” when they enter a STEM program in university.)

Remember, Silicon Valley was a DARPA project center first, and the startups there are the diaspora. SV and Bay-area culture is military-officer culture.

If you identify strongly with characters like Miles Vorkosigan and Ender Wiggin, it might do to ask yourself how much of that is a feeling of identification with a member of a class you didn’t realize you were in.

a point to be made this isn’t an “officer class” derived from the old aristocracy and bent under Prussian influence

this is specifically a British colonial officer class

Naval, too

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.

kontextmaschine:

Guy who misunderstands Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life” as “like Frankenstein I did it my way”

(It me, until age 16)

Fuck if I know how I did that with a song released when I was 17, though.

Alright, tidied up the yards in preparation for mowing, mowed the side yard and dumped the clippings on the Blueberry Hill wood, FINALLY FINISHED THE SMASHING, noticed that the long grass had been hiding some seafoam that had progressed as far as the yellow spiky stage, did a pass for it, it was still warm after dark so put on my headlamp and found it made it even easier to make out characteristics distinguishing grass species and did some more filtering on that.

Have to finish mowing and seafoam hunting tomorrow, then… ah, fuck it, I’ll figure out later.

Guy who misunderstands Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life” as “like Frankenstein I did it my way”

(It me, until age 16)

Good thing the arched-foot walking has built my ankles up to the point they’re not as susceptible to rolling anymore because it sure seems to need it, feels like every two weeks I land a foot in a depression or something so off-balance I think I’m gonna snap my leg but I just power through it and shrug it off without even any tweaking.

Misplaced one thing it would be kinda weird for someone else to find in my parlor today but found another.

kontextmaschine:

Since I doubt that I could go directly against his hunting instinct, I’m trying to train Badger out of killing birds by giving him more pieces of reward kibble when he brings home a rodent or a live bird I can release; this DOES mean I’ve woken up to one flapping around my room banging into the window multiple times.

(I catch them by throwing a t-shirt over them and toss them out the window.)

Since I doubt that I could go directly against his hunting instinct, I’m trying to train Badger out of killing birds by giving him more pieces of reward kibble when he brings home a rodent or a live bird I can release; this DOES mean I’ve woken up to one flapping around my room banging into the window multiple times.