The Idaho potato industry is actually an offshoot of Mormonism; the desert-exiled tribe set up farms in the irrigated borderlands to grow the nutritious root vegetables to cater their funerals.
You know, in that after the brain Covid I had to relearn my basic controls both as a person and as a body from scratch (and some of the gameplay mechanics that I still knew on an intact, intellectual level were different) that was kinda an honest-to-God born-again experience, huh?
it actually goes beyond elon musk unbanning the guy who posted CSAM not only are blue checks saying that it’s the right thing to do because the guy is definitely “fighting against pedophilia” by circulating CSAM on social media, but they’re also giving each other tips on how to post more CSAM and bypass moderation!
A weird thing of this whole episode is 2010-web-worker-left-hangover types speaking like, from industry-side experience with user-generated content. Because it’s like
Yes, I think you are definitely on to something here in that QAnon circles are well-exposed to this “CSAM” stuff and in fact hold it central to their subculture not even to jack off to but as sort of a secret guild knowledge that is used to move their passions and justify their self-understanding as the guardians and reformers of social order. And that that is – even if distinct from your stereotypical playground-lurking perv – kind of weird and really does not recommend them.
But, when then you’re like “oh yes these specific images – which we all know but I won’t name – the exact kind of reason why you can’t let allow the enemy-tribe Musk disrupt our regime of control over the public sphere"…
Like, without getting into "equivalency” discourse you have to appreciate that with the strength of your attack you’ve undermined your own position there.
I have for a while said that a major characteristic of the next major cultural shifts will be a move away from post-70s concepts of protecting youth from adult sexuality (and sexual adults) and part of it is they’ve been so deeply incorporated into society that it has been adopted as a core part of the self-understanding of both sides of various fights that at least one is gonna have to make sense of losing
(Whereas last cycle it was something you could transcend divisions to unite around)
the key takeaway mattel got from Barbie movie was that they absolutely must milk all of their IP inthe box office so brace yourself for Hot Wheels, The Movie
You’d think they’d have learned from Hasbro’s recent work with the MLP, GI Joe, and Transformers IP
I mean, I guess the division in charge of He-Man and She-Ra DID
(Fun fact: as a major employer in Rhode Island, Hasbro is the basis for the “Happy-Go-Lucky Toy Factory” Peter worked for in Family Guy.)
Reading an interesting book (actually it’s an essay bound and printed, it’s like 60 pages) about rhetoric and communications in the “post-truth” world, and it’s got an interesting discussion of bullshit. Bullshit is not lying— to lie means your know a truth and are invested in convincing people it’s not true. Bullshit is just saying whatever gets you what you want, and it’s much harder to confront. Because it doesn’t matter if you “disprove” bullshit. It’s conditional to the circumstances in which you’re saying it, and if you’ve already swayed your crowd then it doesn’t matter if it’s true of not
This is kinda what I’m getting at when I talked about autopilot and the allistic sociality – there’s this whole way of like communicatively interacting with people that doesn’t involve consciously choosing words and thoughts that have to be logically reasoned out, it’s kind of like how other characters in dreams have dialogue that had to be generated by your brain somehow, and as far as I can tell it’s mediated by a feedback loop where you ~through woo~ read how it’s being recieved by your audience and lock on to that as a guidance beam?
Anyway its increasingly clear to me that’s what great salesmen and Casanovas (or even Smoove B R&B-cheese characters) are tapping into.
Just left my chair by the side window and went to piss and looked out the bathroom window at the backyard and holy shit, this place is really coming together! Real payoff for not making compromises all those years — or rather, the compromise was putting up with the previous squalor until I had all my ducks lined up to take the next step towards final state.
Realizing from growth rates that the two trees out there in the upper backyard were younger than I’d thought when I moved in, and combining with what I know of the previous residents’ plot arc, “tended by a methhead until he left his methhead girl and kid and she ignored it for a decade” actually explained the shape they were in pretty well.
twitter will expose you to types of guys that you thought were extinct
A funny angle of knowing American history is appreciating that a lot of the foreign papist hordes streaming in to corrupt New England in H.P. Lovecraft’s time would have been Portuguese
This is such a strange way of categorizing US religion. The Baptist movement is so important to the history of religion in the USA, but on this map it’s completely subsumed into Protestantism (I think?).
I mean I kind of get what you’re getting at, that in America “Protestant” groups together European-heritage (or early American built in their model) “mainline” churches, distinct “evangelical” or “fundamentalist” traditions, and even Second or Third Great Awakening and other domestically founded stuff like the Adventists in an unhelpfully reductive way.
On the other hand, the notion of breaking out specifically the Baptist movement from the rest of American Protestantism seems like such an even stranger and more foreign way of categorizing things to me that it makes me wonder if you’re not in a much Baptist-heavier bubble than me that the distinction seems that significant.
“We have a regular high tea. Each month, Lacy Knightly [stages] high-quality burlesque. Sword & Veil produces these immersive dark art experiences.”
The key to the “Dream of the ‘90s” Portlandia '10s was that Portland is just perpetually 17 years behind the curve, culturally, but that’s about the length of one retro cycle so it more or less works.
I Can Eat Glass was a linguistic project documented on the early Web by then-Harvard student Ethan Mollick. The objective was to provide speakers with translations of the phrase “I can eat glass, it does not hurt me” from a wide variety of languages; the phrase was chosen because of its unorthodox nature. Mollick’s original page disappeared in or about June 2004 [but there is an archived version of the website here].
As Mollick explained, visitors to a foreign country have “an irresistible urge” to say something in that language, and whatever they say (a cited example being along the lines of “Where is the bathroom?”) usually marks them as tourists immediately. Saying “I can eat glass, it does not hurt me”, however, ensures that the speaker “will be viewed as an insane native, and treated with dignity and respect”.
One effect of being out every day dumping topsoil (and using off days to take care of other things) is I haven’t had much time to just sit in my chair by the window and appreciate how far along it’s getting.
twitter will expose you to types of guys that you thought were extinct
A funny angle of knowing American history is appreciating that a lot of the foreign papist hordes streaming in to corrupt New England in H.P. Lovecraft’s time would have been Portuguese
Yeah, it was a good day for a break. I don’t feel painfully sore, but it was worse last night than the one before, and that worse than after the half-day before that. Definitely building up strength in terms of how far I can plunge the pitching shovel into a mass of dirt and shove the whole thing forward, if it’s still July even should def. be done in August.
Christ, just now in the shower appreciated how thick my legs are getting.
Like, and I’m not even doing leg day. I guess some of my topsoil pitching uses the legs as a base to dig from, but really part of the testosterone-mediated super-growth is that everyday muscle use that would normally just be enough to stave off atrophy yields gains.
Just finally regained the ability to reach down and touch my toes in bed like two months ago and I’d say I’m already 60% to rehabilitating the stretchiness of my hamstrings.
