This is your monthly reminder to go and operate every water shutoff valve in your home, including the main shutoff if you have access to it – those things do seize up if they’re not operated frequently, and you don’t want to be discovering that fact for the first time while a busted faucet handle is blasting two gallons a minute onto your kitchen floor.
Speaking from experience?
Afraid not. My experience of this particular scenario involves discovering that the kitchen sink had no shutoff valves at all, because the previous occupant was an old school do-it-yourselfer who apparently just killed the main shutoff every single time they needed to change a washer.
(As an aside, whenever you see those statistics about boomer dads having better DIY skills than their millennial counterparts, remember that a. those figures are based on self reporting, and b. boomers as a group vastly overestimate their own DIY competence, as those of us who’ve had to deal with the fruits of their labours can readily attest!)
Mildly amusing as weed becomes legal and regular, places having to come up with replacements for wildly copyright-infringing strain names that’re recognizable enough not to lose built up reputations
As these new weight loss drugs emerge you’re going to see a strange-bedfellows alliance between the “all weight control attempts are fatphobia” people and the “you have to WORK and SUFFER for weight loss or it doesn’t count” people, trying to get rid of them. But they’re going to get fucking streamrolled, because at the end of the day this is something a lot of people want very badly (and because it’s going to make certain pharma companies a metric fuckton of money).
Yeah I’m not sure what to think about the way I went through a period of genuinely miraculous weight loss right when they put that in a pill
In Japanese, I’m told, a slight modification in one word or reference changes a sentence entirely, so that— I don’t know Japanese, I’m making this up— if a syllable changes in one word, then “the crickets are singing in chorus in the starlight” becomes “the taxicabs are in gridlock at the intersection.” I gather that Japanese poetry uses these almost-double meanings deliberately. A line of poetry can be translucent, as it were, to another meaning it could have if it were in a different context. The surface significance allows a possible alternate significance to register at the same time.
does anyone know if this is a real thing UKLG is referring to? if so, word for it, examples?
which looks like is just “japanese has a lot of homophones and poets will use them for artistic effect,” more or less the same as they will in english
Yeah a lot of it is that Japanese (a non-tonal language) repeatedly borrowed words from tonal Chinese, stripping them of tone (so that several words once distinct were now identical) and then re-borrowed the same roots centuries later after meaning and pronunciation had drifted, with the result that there are a ton of words that sound the same and punning is a major feature of Japanese-language culture.
It is huge in Japanese poetry (where the regular suffixed conjugation makes end rhyme trivial), the most honored stuff – even stuff you might be familiar and impressed with – translates poorly because you can only translate one meaning at a time, lacking the centuries of cultural context that would make the others even make sense.
For me, ChatGPT keeps being the most useful in odd, hard-to-pin-down ways that can best be summarized as “you have an all-purpose moderately-knowledgeable-but-not-expert friend, so you don’t have to track down a specific person to ask questions about birdwatching or general relativity or agriculture in Samoa that aren’t the kind of question Wikipedia can easily answer.”
bands in the late 60s were like “due to record company requirements and amphetamines being available OTC in every drug store, we are releasing 2 of the best albums of all time within the space of a year. maybe 3 albums if we really hate each other.”
i think the terfbashing on tumblr is like the “christians, such as the Westboro Baptist Church,” I used to see online in the 2000s
like my limited experience with radfems or radfem sympathetic ppl is like. Idk. Limited. But very different from what you see in tweets people share just to get mad at. Which is what you should expect in all cases
i love battleships named after the shittiest landlocked states in the US
🦈😤
USS Indianapolis (the WWII one) was a cruiser.
Cruisers were (and now, some attack subs and littoral and beach-storming ships are) named for US cities, battleships were (and boomer and also attack subs are) named for states.
Cruisers are now named for famous historic battles, and aircraft carriers for historic leaders (presidents, WWII Pacific commander Chester Nimitz, or Representative Carl Vinson, who arranged the Navy’s mid-20th century buildup from Newt Gingrich’s landlocked Georgia district)
Jimmy Carter, who was a submariner, is a submarine.
I’ve been thinking, as I always am, about the 90s and how we got here from there
And one thing I thought about was the figure we used to have of Your Granddad On The Internet - who would include you and all your brothers and sisters and parents on long e-mail FWD: chains about things that were transparently false on their face, frequently conservative-themed, frequently in ALL CAPS
Because apparently such a critical mass of people on the internet had that exact experience with their exact grandfather that it was a trope. Which brings up two points:
1) “People circulating viral conservative misinformation to their family and friends on the internet” is not a phenomenon of social media, it was there well before
2) Though these people were on the internet, ubiquitous on the internet even, they weren’t of the internet. Little or none of it was made for them and there was a hegemonic Internet Culture that recognized them as outside it.
So what was really going on? Well, let’s try to define the issue by subtraction.
It wasn’t just that he was a granddad - there were STEM professor wizards who’d been on USENET since the early ‘80s, or grey ponytail hippies from The WELL or whatever, and not only were they part of The True Internet, they were its founders.
It wasn’t just that he was out of it, on a tech or social level. Maybe your dad was wasting your inheritance chasing his brilliant day trading hunches, maybe your mom was going on Focus on the Family forums to complain about TV shows treating homosexuality as just another way to live. Probably they were both Eternal September AOLers who would ask you troubleshooting questions revealing an astounding ignorance of how computers work and somehow expect a useful answer that respected that absurd model.
But if they weren’t part of The True Internet they weren’t really rogues against it, at some level they got how you were supposed to interact with the internet - you found the site or community that corresponded to your interest and pursued it there. If anything their posts and e-mails too formally followed letter-writing structure, and they may have made dumb or tautological arguments in support of their points but they had the sense they were supposed to make arguments.
It wasn’t just that he was obnoxious - the notion of the “troll” dates to USENET at least, as someone who says things to get a rise out of people, or to bait them into wasting time rebutting something. To “own” them, basically. And annoying or not, this was accepted as part of what the Internet is, one of the signal features of its culture, really. But even when you weren’t sure if Your Granddad On The Internet actually believed something he sent you or just passed it on to signal what side he was on and how fiercely, he wasn’t trying to “own” you, he REALLY WAS on that side, he wanted you to associate him with that position, and ideally join him.
It was probably at least in part being retired and having spare time and no other social outlet, back in the day going online meant going to a specific piece of furniture in a specific room of your home when no one else was using the computer and spending maybe 3 minutes just getting online, it was something you blocked off time to do. The young generation could just come home from school to the cul-de-sac and get online for lack of anything else to do, the parents’ generation was too busy to have enough uninterrupted time to become Extremely Online?
The thing I’m really wondering about is class. What was the cost of being Online back then? Say a new computer and modem every 4 years at around $2400 (Grandpa sure wasn’t building his own, but then he didn’t have to keep upgrading video cards either), $40 for an ISP, ideally $10 for another phone line? That’s $100/month, or alternately $50/mo and the ability to make $2.5k purchases on demand. And the kind of senior citizen who, in 1998, lived separately from his children, could swing this, would think to swing this, has multiple agemate peers and children’s households who did swing this, was a particular group. “Middle-middle” class AT LEAST and probably higher, probably went to college back when only 10% of people did.
BUT that doesn’t make sense. My theory is that this used to be a more marginal behavior on the internet, but if it’s gotten more common since the late ‘90s I don’t think it’s because the Internet has grown more full of wealthy old patriarchs since.
So instead how about this theory: the internet in general was pretty wealth-marked in 1998 (far more than we realized, with our American mythology of universal white suburban middle-classness and “global village” Internet mythology) BUT, of people who were more wealthy in 1998, the most likely to NOT have internalized upper-class practices were the grandfathers from the “Silent” or “Greatest” generations before the postwar “mass middle class”. Our parents were beavery professionals who settled into the suburban cocoon, we knew we were destined for glory (or at least selective colleges) from birth, but THEY were socialized into some pool hall, street gang, farmhand, enlisted man kinda culture where boldness of assertion counted more than patient derivation from shared principles.
And if the Anglophone internet is ::gestures:: like this now maybe it’s cause it’s less of a professional-class preserve? The dividing line maybe being smartphones where “people on the internet” went from “people who specifically spend $X/mo on it as luxury” to “people with telephone service”? That’s a real possibility, that for all the “Global Village” stuff the wondrous effect of the ‘90s internet was to create a cultural space that was MORE gatekept by wealth and education.
That’s… kind of depressing, though. “Haha you thought the world was getting better because you were eliminating elitist barriers but actually it’s cause you were making them higher, which is good because the poor and non-elite are disproportionately idiots with worthless ideas and to the extent they’re on top of things the thing they’re on top of is undermining the basis of a good society, and anyway those times were a phenomenon of a narrow early adopter base and you’ll never ever get them back unless you make the non-elite economically and politically irrelevant.”
Depressing but very well precedented, that’s exactly the arc newsprint, radio, and TV followed before.
I’m still annoyed about this insult: “If you weren’t lucky enough to have been spoiled by the modern world you’d have died long before reaching your current age.” (paraphrased, of course)
Firstly, this is an indictment of the world at large, not of the intended target. Vulnerability is not blameworthy.
Reminder that when you’re contemplating your human heritage the relevant demographic is not “humans who have ever lived” but “humans who have ever reproduced”, and the two demographics actually represent quite different experiences
The neighbor tending the other side of the side yard is a good guy and he’s stepped up his game since I’ve cleared out the weeds that made trying anything there pointless, but he just has no sense of where to plant things, he’s constantly putting saplings of canopy trees in the shadow of established ones or planting things where they’ll grow branches out into the pathway or in the way of other stuff
My current contacts are slightly different prescriptions and I finally put them in the wrong eyes today and it’s thankfully not uncomfortable to do (like, less than putting one on inverted) yet trivial to notice
people like to wank about how great it would be for the discourse if english had evidentials like you don’t just know that everyone would be tagging every single assertion they make with the one for “this is self-evidently true”
