Friday Ephemera (768)
Scenic toilet. || Hot cube. || Camera-manning. || Less complicated methods may be available. || Somewhat lacking in elbow room. || Lippy fish. || News flash. || Easily done, I guess. || A tribute to the barf bag. || Unwelcome wobble. || Are you bringing the vulva energy to worldwide contentions? || Liveliness incoming. || “Where are my nunchucks?” || On waffle-stomping as an environmentalist’s solemn duty. || On “diversity” and migration, a short thread. || They call it “equity.” Previously. || On stereotypes. || Scenes from T.J. Maxx. || Spaghetti Junction, 1972. || “Pregnancy is not to be defined by biological phenomena… A transsexual theory of reproduction.” Horseshit ensues. || Employee of note. || In surgery. || Close. || “You need to come real fast.” || Oh, and finally, no, it turns out they can’t.
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Does it have to be a goat? I have a list of names.
It’s laminated and everything.
Should I be concerned, based on the number of coats I’ve found on fire in the alley?
A bickering trigger for those who get hot and bothered about Dune.
Typical Guardian dumbassery. Clueless, entitled, and annoying.
I am a great fan of the outside toilet.
Let’s ask the fish what they think.
Hot cube
Instant cube.
YT woman (I think) has an opinion about YT Afrikaners. Always the YT wymxn…
Get your nominations in today!.
It’s been so long since I’ve been on a train, I’ve no idea how exceptional that kind of delay is. But as others point out in reply, if you want transport infrastructure that’s prompt, clean and safe, it’s probably best not to keep voting against efforts to deal with the encrustation of creatures that make the experience so demoralising and whose antisocial behaviour results in frequent disruption.
As contributors to the Guardian so often do.
It’s been a long time, but I have ridden Chicago’s CTA subway/elevated trains: As I recall, they were typically about 15 minutes apart during off-peak hours but much more frequent during rush hours. The frequency directly depends on such key factors as ridership, revenue, and infrastructure maintenance. Socialists have difficulty understanding those things. And then there’s medical/police emergencies, which will stop not only the involved train but all those behind it.
Delays become more frequent when infrastructure is neglected. Curiously, socialists praise “sewer socialism” as a ploy to impose total socialism, but simultaneously neglect the sewers. And don’t get me started on their silence and even denial of crime data and its effect on ridership.
I did, however, have Sunday lunch on a vintage steam train, pootling through Derwent Valley. It was quite fun. Apart from the lack of air conditioning.
At each stop, the passengers would pile out onto the platform, treasure the feeble breeze, then pile back onto the train to perspire some more.
But the onion and cheddar soup was very good.
It’s a long way from Anzac Cove.
Some server-end tweaks have taken place. Let me know if the issue persists.
Ridership also depends on frequency and maintenance of course, so they feed back into each other. If you’re on a line where you have to wait an hour or more if you miss your train, or if your train is regularly cancelled, then you’ll just stop using the train. There’s probably some fancy equation known by the train companies somewhere that models it all, and if there isn’t they really should get on that.
Going to the cinema takes up half a day and isn’t cheap. I’m getting really picky now. We used to go every month. Now it’s more like once a year.
Incoming.
Same here, pretty much. For two of us it’s £50 and, as you say, half a day. So a series of underwhelming experiences does rather chafe. The Other Half is, as he puts it, more or less done with cinema.
In use-of-leisure-time terms, I suppose it’s not unlike repeatedly going out for a meal to a very hit-and-miss restaurant at the opposite end of town. At some point, you start to question the value.
Many years ago I regularly heard from acquaintances about the merits and virtues of eschewing cars. But those virtuous public transportation methods consumed far more time: A few errands that would take an hour by car would consume most of the day by bus and subway. A trip to the next city would take 90 minutes by car, but half the day by commuter train plus Amtrak, and would then leave you dependant on public transit in the destination city.
It was amusing to listen to the virtue signaling from “progressive” people who would occasionally beg for rides because they didn’t own cars.
I wasn’t a fan of the Mission: Impossible film series until Ghost Protocol, which I sort of got dragged to see but enjoyed much more than expected, and then Rogue Nation, which I enjoyed, and Fallout, which is about as machine-tooled as a film of that kind can be. I’ve happily rewatched those three instalments.
But Dead Reckoning was unfocussed, needlessly convoluted, and lacking in narrative momentum – with too many characters, iffy pacing, and a big dramatic moment with a protracted set-up that just fell flat in the cinema. A second viewing at home revealed its shortcomings even more, such that I didn’t bother sticking around to the end.
Perhaps they should have quit with Fallout, which is pretty much the high point. A near-perfect juggling act.
Soap Opera name: The Inference of Butthurt
It’s a long way from Anzac Cove.
/eyeroll
Drama queens.
Think some group was doing that within the States too a bit ago – saying don’t go to Florida or you will be killed or some such stupidity.
She is clearly unwell. And also probably an associate professor at a nearby university.
Yes, yes, I know – no refunds, credit note only.
It is evil – deliberate, systemic, malicious, evil.
Education is often the only way for those looking to better themselves and this bureaucracy – to perpetuate itself – has stolen that from them.
Perfect nickname for a Canada goose.
[ Considers second helping of chocolate gelato. ]
I’m just going to leave this here.
My next band, the Waffle Stompers. Watch for our album, “Gauffre It!”
A million possible causes, but in a shared hosting setup like yours it’s almost always performance related. The database either doesn’t have enough computing power assigned to handle al the connections it’s getting and so some of them are timing out, or else the maximum allowed number of connections is set too low. There’s a good chance your database lives on a server with dozens of other people’s databases, so when one of those gets overloaded it’s bringing down everybody’s connections.
Paul Atreides is a very obvious and intentional allegory for Muhammad. The problem isn’t that “readers didn’t misinterpret the character”, it’s that SF nerds don’t read anything but nerdshit and so have no reference points outside of their own adolescent power fantasies.[1]
It’s true that if you only read Dune and not the sequels and know nothing at all about the history of the Middle East and weren’t alive during the Oil Crisis, you might think Paul is a “tragic hero”. That’s because Herbert assumed you would know what’s coming after the end of the first volume.
Ender’s Game is another good example. Not being alive during the Vietnam War, most readers in the 1980s and on thought Ender was an awesome military badass rather than a child warped into a sociopathic killing machine by a win-at-all-costs military-industrial complex.
[1] Case in point: it is now generally accepted that immoral multi-national corporations more powerful than any national government and constantly up to pointless evil shenanigans is a defining trope of “cyberpunk”. But that’s not actually in any of the seminal works. It’s entirely a fabrication of a tabletop game written by a Seattle proto-antifa.
Proof of womanhood found at last.
It’s been a long time since I read the novel, but wasn’t he seen as a tragic hero because he was trapped in a destiny he didn’t want? That, as the Kwisatz Haderach, he could see the future–or rather, all the possible branching futures resulting from whatever decisions he might make–but that none of the choices he could make would avert the disastrous jihad that his visions foretold?
The hallucinations and lies get stranger every day.
Why do you want a laminated goat? /deliberate misunderstanding
That’s got to be AI considering the signs the people in the background are holding
Don’t harsh my vibe, man. [ Pouts. ]
Although in truth the sign is rather plausible in light of the bizarre racial and sexual claims we’ve already seen
My back yard neighbour spent the better part of yesterday morning with a hose and a broom shooing geese off his roof. The resulting cacophony was almost unendurable. My wife was at the ready, though, with our hose in case the geese tired of my neighbour’s onslaught.
Once the geese have planted their butts for more than an hour, you’ll be stuck with them for several weeks.