Thursday Ephemeraren’t

. . .and, obviously, a 3D-printed clitoris.
I just spent five minutes typing and then erasing various comments about the above.
Sigh
Instead, I bid you a good weekend.

puzzle book of note
I’ve got a really bad feeling about this.

a game about planets and potatoes,
I’m launching a probetato. Will report back.

a game about planets and potatoes,
That’s going to eat up the whole day, isn’t it?
Time machine.

Apologies for going off the normal Ephemeral track, but I thought this was too good an opportunity to pass up:

Tom Watson said that members of Momentum, the group that supports Jeremy Corbyn, were copying tactics from the 1980s ..
In a letter to Mr Corbyn, he included the text of what he claimed was a guide for taking control of local party meetings that he said was being shared by Momentum activists.
“First, make the meetings boring . . . This turns off the faint-hearted. Those with better things to do — attend to their family, careers or community groups,” the text says.
“Part two: make the event adversarial . . . This behaviour basically reduces the attendance of the remaining sensible types. Then the meeting [is] ours to control.”
The text went on to “the pièce de résistance”: a series of policy motions that would only take place once “troublesome moderates” had left the room.

From the Financial Times.
The Grauniad has a report on the same accusations, which includes this highly amusing and unintentional reference to diarrhoea:

The Socialist party’s leader, Peter Taaffe, a founder member of Militant who has continued to be involved since the 1980s, told the Guardian … “The lava of this revolution is still hot.”

“You’ll never forget your keys again”.

Are the Ainu people of Sakhalin conditioned by the patriarchy to wrap presents well? I doubt it.

Developing
I think I’ve just wrecked the solar system…

I’m slightly pink rather than white, the pink of the sky at the first light of dawn. I used to believe that the first light of dawn was beautiful – I now realize that it’s so ugly because it heralds another day of privilege for pinkies like myself at the expense of my POC humankindred. By POC I, of course, mean non-pink/cream or that faint orange shade of people who have very freckled faces. Henceforth, I’ll consider only shades of indubitable brown to be beautiful because brown represents honesty, truth and the courage to break the pinky-creamy-orangey chains of oppression visited upon POCs. I pray that Sherman’s Potato-Solar System Interaction will turn the dawn brown.

@Mr. X: It’s not every day, even in the Guardian, that you find a sentence in which every. single. metaphor. rings hollow or even backwards. A set of sentences so bad that each item deserves its own fisking:
we are as much sinew as we are symbol
Firstly, “we are symbol” sounds idiotic. Second, “sinew” is used in metaphor typically not to indicate the *being* of a person, rather their strength or structure. c.f. the Book of Job: “My bones are pierced in me in the night season: and my sinews take no rest. ” Kipling: “If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew.” This is the worst imagery to mean a “racism in the blood” that can be imagined. This asinine and angry attempt at assonance achieves an “A” – no, sorry, I mean “F”.
Our whiteness is our skin color
Well, loosely speaking. We’ve been meaning to tell you about that – it’s more of a light tan to dark tan sort of thing. Which will make use of the color white awkward if you try to use it for anything past this point… oh dear.
also a torn sheet draping the dead
Are we trying to assign the color white to a sheet or describing a metaphorical pressing physical object of “whiteness” here? MAKE UP YOUR MIND. Also, since when have “torn sheets” (remarkably, unsullied white ones) been a thing for alleged excess force incidents? Leaving aside this sort of blase “whiteness kills” imputation and all attendant lies, exactly how is this specter of whiteness (I do believe in spooks. I do, I do, I do…) guilty recently of covering up *anything*? Last I checked, any fabrications were meet to advance a narrative, one with no restraint of any kind.
a flag of privilege that will not surrender
Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. The trouble is, again we Can’t Make Up Our Precious Mind as to whether to use a “flag as symbol of an army” metaphor or whether to attempt coyness with the imagery of a white flag. I almost doubt that the irony is intentional simply because it’s constructed so very badly. How does one surrender with a white flag? Find a more white-erer flag?
a town called separateness
Okay, if the town is “seperateness”, does that mean the white people are inside or out? Is it the White People Pillow Fort or is it the White People Ironically Named Concentration Camp For Others? Which entity is segregating and ghettoizing which or hiding out from whom? I do realize the poors and the genderqueer siblings of color would like their chance to get into Castle Hate from which I ride to oppress them every day, and riding out is so tiring to do every day at a column of veteran Corsican shitlords that… wait, that’s a thing I just made up.
Our whiteness is that poisonous sky right before it rains
Saved the worst two metaphors for last, I see. THE CLOUDS ARE POISON HIDE YOUR WOMEN HIDE YOUR CHILDREN. Okay, but if we mean that this omnipresent whiteness is always looming and somehow teeming in poison, what constitutes rain? Horrible white people-ish wetness – oh, like this column then. The folkism of “don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raiing” exists precisely because piss and rain are different things. What disfunctional person hates rain this much? Rain as ominous, sure. Rain (other than acid rain) as corrosive evil, on the other hand…
the color of shame
Oh, absolutely. White in weddings? Absolutely indicates how shamed the bride is of her virginity. Use as a symbol of purity in the majority of religion? SHAME. Use in Asian cultures to indicate soberness and somber feelings toward death – HOW DARE YOU DIE SHAME SHAME SHAME. It’s why people turn red when they’ve had a severe shock and blush with a deathly pallor when confronted with something. Actually this is why black people are superior – their darkness indicates that they’ve never had to be ashamed of anything.
FFS a tenth grader would be flunked for writing this bad.

Wikipedia update of note.
https://mobile.twitter.com/JennaFryer/status/763195195177443328/photo/2

a town called separateness
Is that anywhere near a town called malice?

Stay with it, the ending is good.
That sentence is rife with possibilities for response. (BTW, finished it about an hour ago.)

A new twist in “rape” culture.

250 words you can spell with a calculator.
http://blog.presentandcorrect.com/250-words-you-can-spell-with-a-calculator

Meanwhile, in campus capers:
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/08/11/historic-paintings-moved-to-controlled-campus-rooms-after-university-finds-them-harmful.html

“250 words you can spell with a calculator”
That reminded me of the Boob Poop Machine (AKA the answer to the question, “What would a 12 year-old boy do with a 3D printer?”). Trust me, don’t do a Google (or any other) image search for ‘boob poop’. I had to, because I couldn’t recall where the video was.
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:306139

And generally, yes, that is exactly what’s happened.
Link for above, from Nik. The whole screed is a laughable justification of not being able to form a stable relationship.

The word, and sentiment, missing from Ms. Dreadful’s screed is “commitment “.
Little useful gets done IRL without it.

“I can’t say I’ve ever seen a film studio attack its customers the way that Sony did in response to the film’s horrendous trailer and stillborn debut. Not to mention the Hillary endorsement by the movie’s stars…”
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/241165/

That damn game had me creating a spreadsheet to keep recalculating the best Watt per Power Cost, and how long it would take to get it so I could use my timer and walk away, I think I went mad when I was calculating the upgrades as well. Got to the end though.

The old slapfight video from SF State (IIRC) over the issue of a white guy’s cornrows induced comments to the effect that cornrows have been found on ancient Greek statuary of young men.
So whose culture is it, then?

…cornrows have been found on ancient Greek statuary…
It is common knowledge among the SJWs that everything the white-devil has allegedly made, used, or developed has been stolen from the blacks, or the blacks, Esquimaux, and the Islamic types, but from only their wxymyn.
Sordid, I say! Sordid!
You got that right, I remember clearly all the counseling Kanye West and all the other black guys the Kardashians have dated and/or been married to have gone through because of the discomfort they feel – it is so bad, they are never seen with them.

Potatos. The end. Hmm.
For some reason, this reminds me of the aftermath of draining Earth’s oceans onto the surface of Mars, the whole “Netherlands Interplanetary Empire” thing.. (xkcd What If? http://what-if.xkcd.com/ )
Or maybe it’s just my brain, spinning out of control in David’s absence. Hey, that’s the ticket! From now on, I’m gonna blame all my problems on David!
John D: Did you ever get in to the booze? Are you boozing secretly without inviting your friends?

At first I thought Miss Dreadful had fallen out of bed and, landing on her keyboard, had haphazardly knocked out another piece of incoherent gibberish for filing to her editor.
And generally, yes, that is exactly what’s happened.
This article is almost word-for-word the same as the explanation my pal “Angela” gave me when defending her own polyamorous past: if I didn’t know better I’d swear blind the two were the same person.
What is interesting is Penny’s talking about the non-sexual parts of it: buying birthday presents, text messaging, conversations, etc. I say interesting because Angela was keen to highlight this as well, but her example was about going to concerts and festivals together. However, I pointed out the obvious: “But you can go to a concert with somebody else when in a normal relationship, you don’t need polyamory for that.” And she replied with: “Yes, but you can have sex with them afterwards.” In other words, it is all about sex.
When I told my editor that I wanted to write about polyamory, she adjusted her monocle, puffed on her pipe and said, “In my day, young lady, we just called it shagging around.”
Well, quite.
Unsurprisingly, Angela is 32 and hasn’t been in a functioning, loving, monogamous relationship since she was about 20 when she decided to split with her perfectly normal boyfriend and get into polyamory (probably after reading shit like Penny’s article). Of course she managed to snag herself a US green card in the process of being passed around between various middle-aged men and a handful of women, but her attempts at finding the serious, monogamous, loving relationship she claims she now wants don’t seem to be bearing much fruit. I can’t think why.