Friday Ephemera (772)
Relax with a little gardening. || She felt the important thing was to self-narrate. || Mom, I suspect, was not home at the time. || One for the anatomy quiz. || Men With Long Hair, 1967. || The floor is lava. || Ploppy chocolate. || For armchair tourists, a walk around Pall Mall and St James’s Palace. || Some improvement needed. || The progressive retail experience, parts 630, 631, 632, 633 and 634. || “People keep saying that Hamas hates us, but, like… maybe we vibe.” || It helps to have the children afterwards. || The new minority. || Not maddening at all. || Cursor anxiety, a thread ensues. || Our totally balanced betters express their feelings. || Balance shifted. || Belated pushback. || Unboxing video. || No, he doesn’t own a grocery store. || Not sure it fits, love. || Customer feedback.
To enable extra commenting options – including @username mentions, upvotes, and live notifications – scroll down to the black ‘Meta’ box at the very bottom of the page and click register. It’s free and quite painless.
And you can, should you wish, follow me on X.
This blog is kept afloat by the tip jar buttons below.
Unfortunately, and with a heavy heart, I have to go murder the guy who. . .
Almost as dangerous as Calvin’s Duplicator.
“Science bats last.”
How did the glass not shatter?
Enhancement of concern.
Hamas will rebuild Gaza just to have walls to crush these clowns with.
O Canada!
Gradually and then suddenly.
Putting the crazy in cat lady.
“No One Can Bugger the Hedgehog” needed for soundtrack.
Greta? Greta Thunberg? Is that you?
You can just stick her on the rear window.
This map has errors.
WisconsiniteCheeseheadIllinoisianFIBMassachusettsanMasshole@pst314, you’re welcome.
“Interestingly, I think there is an argument to bring back the MRS degree.”
That LGBTQetc.-friendly Koran vid is hilariously wrong.
I like the one who asked Hamas about opening Gaza’s first gender-neutral, vegan cafe.
That’s funny on at least 4 levels, not the least of which is the jihadi trying to figure out WTF that means.
I predict once Hamas figures it out they say okay.
So long as it’s a rooftop cafe.
Was that vid satire or for real?
I’m pretty sure, and pretty afraid, it is.
I was looking for a donor site on one of the forearms, but I honestly couldn’t tell.
And is that necrosis on the belly?
“These boys weren’t kidding. They really do hate taxes.”
No. Just no.
I would not be that patient with her.
Morning, all.
When you want your mouth to look like a padded toilet seat.
Can you tell what it is yet?
[ Slurps coffee. ]
It’s madam’s fairly remarkable conceit that simply saying you don’t have any hidden weapons or other causes of concern should be sufficient to settle the matter. These claims – that everything is fine and nothing is untoward – do rather jar with the whole resisting thing, and filming oneself, and the erratic driving, and generally looking unhinged.
Like all communists he wants everyone else to be his slave.
That would seem to be an obvious implication, albeit one that’s carefully unsaid.
Though he does come quite close, such is his boldness and apparent titillation. The implication being that if after some struggle and sacrifice you manage to create a small business – a modest grocery store, say – then you’re suddenly “the wealthy” and should forgo any return on your labours, so that he and other parasites can have free stuff on an indefinite basis. The screw-you approach.
As someone quips in reply, an important part of parenting is to ensure that one’s offspring do not enter the adult world with this kind of obnoxious, narcissistic worldview. A worldview whose devotees are both smug and imperviously stupid.
Can relate.
From the replies, “Tfw you see beyond the screenwriters.”
Maybe you die.
We have, as you’d imagine, touched on this before.
There’s the obvious stuff – the oddly unelaborated fantasy economics, with Starfleet captains who disdain capitalism and free markets, but who nonetheless, somehow buy and own rather desirable property, large houses for their retirement and such. Or the oddly uniform, strictly racialised aliens – the Klingons who are by default violent and stupid with terrible hair; the scheming, treacherous Romulans; the Avaricious Space Jews – sorry, Ferengi. And umpteen other examples.
And of course, the countless episodes that involve ludicrous moral agonising, which strains credulity much more than warp drive, time-travel or transporters, and in which mortal threats are not treated accordingly but given the benefit of the doubt, resulting in billions of offscreen deaths, assimilations, and so forth, which are, shall we say, not generally acknowledged. See the TNG episode in which Picard applauds himself for not taking a rare opportunity to terminate the Borg.
Or Janeway’s bizarre, immoral decision to fuck over her own crew and strand them 75,000 light-years from home, where they will seemingly die alone, all for the contrived, theoretical benefit of a species she’s only just encountered and knows bugger all about.
You go, girl.
Though I think the most jarring example was the abrupt neutering of Species 8472 in Voyager. Having first appeared in the (rather good) episode Scorpion, these dramatically effective antagonists had to be defanged and radically reimagined, in order to repeat the obligatory hand-wringing and tedious moral agonising. And so, on their subsequent appearance, in the episode In The Flesh, this xenophobic, relentlessly hostile, planet-exploding species was somehow, inexplicably rewritten as another touchy-feely, let’s-all-talk-about-our-feelings pretext. Thereby affirming the conceit that all problems, every conceivable antagonist, can be soothed with sensitivity, dialogue and burblings about inclusion.
Again, the moral contrivances, the need to shoe-horn in some ill-fitting affirmation of a progressive worldview, does rather strain credulity more than any technological woo or spatial anomaly of the week.
And as we’ve noted here before, it’s perhaps significant that one of Star Trek’s most popular and acclaimed episodes – DS9’s In the Pale Moonlight – punctures the usual glib moralising with a rare dose of harsh ethical realism. Real-world trade-offs, writ large. The final exchange between Sisko and Garak is excellent and pokes a sizeable hole in the moral pretensions of the wider franchise.
Best comment: ‘Just don’t take a step back to admire your work.’
“People keep saying that Hamas hates us, but, like… maybe we vibe.”
My uncanny valley is oscillating – I suspect it’s AI generated. Not that I have anything against that.
I was expecting it to be more orange, tho for $180 it’s a steal.
…oh…palace…never mind.
[ Fetches towels, ice pack. ]
A lively exchange of views on a topical subject.
Observation of note.
I have had more pleasant experiences working. Many more. On not particularly good days either.
The incongruity of someone stressed because of a generally unnoticed, and likely intentional slight UI asymmetry while simultaneously misspelling the word ‘cursor’…smdh. Mr. Monk would not approve.
[ Recalls the salt monster in the original Star Trek. ]
That reminds me of conversations I had with libtards back in the 90’s and 00’s:
Me: Muslim immigration means terrorists and supporters living among us.
Lib: Only a small fraction are dangerous. The FBI can keep an eye on them.
Me: 10 percent of one million means one hundred thousand. The FBI cannot watch that many. And do you know how many there are now in the West?
Lib: [ Silence. ]
Me: And do you really want such people on a path to citizenship?
Lib: [ Glares. ] What about right wing terrorists?
Me: Tiny compared to Muslim terrorism. And don’t play “whataboutism” games.
Lib: Racist.
[ Packs breakables in bubble-wrap. ]
Note how I cleverly ducked out after posting that “MRS degree” comment.
I’m a guy and that’s true for me, albeit with regard to bookshelves.
From Unfortunately, and with a heavy heart, I have to go murder the guy who. . .
There’s something not right with electricians. For a profession that does a potentially very dangerous job and thus is willing to follow certain very anal rules that sometimes don’t really matter, they do some incredibly stupid stuff. Even dangerous stuff. In a brand new house I have found red and black wires reversed, chandeliers whose weight was on the ground wire, not the chain, etc.
In this specific regard I needed to fix/replace a bad electrical outlet that was right next to my refrigerator. Came to find out that the outlet was on the same breaker as the refrigerator. It was about the last breaker that I tested. Why would you do that? I could maaaybe see if you had some reason to have the same amperage but what counter kitchen appliance pulls as many amps as a fridge? And even then, wouldn’t you signify that in some way on the outlet? But even that would be ridiculously cheap and dumb.
Also…when I have to go through this BS of finding exactly which outlet goes with which breaker, I write somewhere on the inside of the outlet or the outlet plate what the breaker number is. Seems like that would/could/should be a standard practice but I suppose if you think too long about it someone somewhere, likely a lawyer, can imagine a 1 in 165,076,457 chance that it would be dangerous.
Wanye on dishonest intellectuals:
The machines will save us.
Signs that you may want to consider moving to a nicer area.
And in the world of regional British politics.
As if their games have no real world consequences.
The problem is that only the “little people” suffer consequences–not the intellectuals.
There should be a price.
Among other things, this came to mind. From which,
Tribes that apparently shouldn’t exist.
Also from the above, this:
I’d forgotten how solid that post is. There’s lots packed in there. Plenty to chew.