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Complex Numbers
Complex Numbers
A complex number is expressed in the standard form a + bi, where a and b are real numbers and i is defined by i^2 = -1 (that is, i is the square root of -1). For example, 3 + 2i is a complex number.
The bi term is often referred to as an imaginary number (though this may be misleading, as it is no more "imaginary" than the symbolic abstractions we know as the "real" numbers). Thus, every complex number has a real part, a, and an imaginary part, bi.
Complex numbers are often represented on a graph known as the "complex plane," where the horizontal axis represents the infinity of real numbers, and the vertical axis represents the infinity of imaginary numbers. Thus, each complex number has a unique representation on the complex plane: some closer to real; others, more imaginary. If a = b, the number is equal parts real and imaginary.
Very simple transformations applied to numbers in the complex plane can lead to fractal structures of enormous intricacy and astonishing beauty.
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Wrapping up June with this one from Cracked...
The title immediately caught my attention (clickbait!) because the 1980s was the decade I started out as a kid and ended up as a kid who was legally allowed to drink. It's hard for me to believe that the food trends of that decade could possibly be worse than the low-fat craze of the 90s, the no-carb fad of the noughties, or the utterly stupid gluten-free bullshit from the 10s. Or, for that matter, the abundance of aspics in the 50s, which, thankfully, I missed on account of not having been born yet.
The ‘80s were a crazy time for everyone, from the most powerful Gordon Gekko clones to those who were just trying to get their groove on but nevertheless had to wear stupid neon pants, and perhaps no one was more confused than food companies.
The only thing "crazy" about the 80s were the people running various world governments, especially our own.
Also, I never have figured out who the hell Gordon Gekko is, and I can't be arsed to look him up now.
Over the course of this decade that was mostly fueled by cocaine and hairspray, they apparently figured that what we actually ate didn’t much matter and took the opportunity to get weird with it.
Well, nothing mattered, because we were about to get nuked by Russia.
As usual, I'm not copying everything here, just hitting the ones that I have something to say about.
15. New Coke
Ah, yes, I remember this one well. I called it the Great Coke Crisis of 1985, and it was truly a dark time. I tried that piss once and spit it right out. It was almost as bad as Pepsi, if you can believe it. I got hooked on Dr. Pepper that summer.
But it's not weird. Unfortunate, sure, but not weird.
14. “Light” Drinks
The success of Diet Coke in 1982 perhaps led the company to fly too close to the sun. It kicked off a whole slew of “light” drinks, like Crystal Light and Bud Light, in response to the burgeoning health craze.
And this is different from today how?
11. Tie-In Foods
The height of commercialism brought with it the height of pop culture or celebrity tie-in products.
These were around before the 80s and stuck around long after.
8. Hubba Bubba Soda
Okay. Okay. I'll grant you this one. I don't think I could have nightmared up a more ridiculous abomination against all that is holy than a soda that tasted like bubble gum. I will say this, though: I lived the 80s, and this is the first I ever heard of HBS.
That, or I gave myself deliberate amnesia about it.
As an aside, I was introduced to the concept of urban legends in the 70s, when there was one going around that Hubba Bubba (whose claim to fame as a bubble gum was that it was soft and chewy, not a brick like the old standby, Dubble Bubble) was made with spider eggs. I mean, come on, even Kid Me couldn't have believed that shit.
6. Tobacco Gum
Okay, look, no, this wasn't tobacco-flavored chewing gum, but shredded gum that was supposed to resemble chewing tobacco (to a moderate extent). I saw it as an alternative to chew, but the Morals Police eventually freaked the fuck out just like they did with candy cigarettes a decade earlier, which I also thought was bullshit. I mean, those things were nasty, regardless of whether they were "training" kids to smoke.
2. The McDLT
You know what? Screw you. Those bastards were delicious.
It was obscenely wasteful, totally unnecessary, and mostly ineffective. It was perfectly ‘80s.
That much, I'll grant.
So anyway, like I said, there's more at the link, but they didn't impact my life in any significant way. Okay, neither did #8 (I swear I had no idea that hippo diarrhea ever existed until I read this article), but that one's notable in that I'd at least heard of all the others.
I'll just end this with the usual reminder: in 40 years, people will be looking back at our food trends today and making them into weird food lists.
They should start with "hard seltzer." Or, they could, if that crap wasn't just rebranded Zima from the 90s. |
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You know how people are always saying "trust your gut?" Well...
Maybe that's what your gut wants you to think.
By now, the idea that gut bacteria affect a person’s health is not revolutionary. Many people know that these microbes influence digestion, allergies, and metabolism.
I mean, the digestion part at least couldn't have been a surprise.
The trend has become almost commonplace: New books appear regularly detailing precisely which diet will lead to optimum bacterial health.
Most of which only contribute to authors' financial health. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with that, but there's a whole lot of nonsense out there when it comes to nutrition.
But these microbes’ reach may extend much further, into the human brains.
*cue evil laugh*
Scientists have found evidence that this assemblage—about a thousand different species of bacteria, trillions of cells that together weigh between one and three pounds—could play a crucial role in autism, anxiety, depression, and other disorders.
*record scratch*
Autism, while technically labeled a "disorder," isn't even in the same ballpark as those other things. I know I'm no expert on the subject, but there's a whole range of behavior labeled as "autism" (which is why it's called a spectrum) and I highly doubt that every diagnosis has the same root cause. Nor is it always a thing to be cured.
Still, a good portion of the article deals with autism, and while I take issue with its description of the condition, it's still some interesting stuff.
For decades, doctors, parents, and researchers have noted that about three-quarters of people with autism also have some gastrointestinal abnormality, like digestive issues, food allergies, or gluten sensitivity.
For a while there, approximately three quarters of the population of the developed world claimed "gluten sensitivity," or at least got the idea stuck in their head that gluten was somehow bad. The sound of the word doesn't help, I'll admit. While that little fad seems to finally be dying out, the result is I automatically don't believe anyone who says they're "sensitive" to gluten (celiac disease, I tend to believe). Similarly, a whole lot of people who claim "allergies" simply don't like certain foods and don't want to seem rude about it. I know I should take it at face value when people mention these things, but it's kind of like when you get those fake service animal tags for your emotional support crocodile: it ruins things for people with legitimate needs.
But okay, for the purposes of this article I'll assume actual diagnoses of these issues.
This recognition led scientists to examine potential connections between gut microbes and autism; several recent studies have found that autistic people’s microbiome differs significantly from control groups.
Yeah, I just hope they got the causality arrow pointing in the right direction there.
Exactly how the microbes interact with the illness—whether as a trigger or as a shield—remains mostly a mystery.
Again, "illness?" And I guess they still don't have that arrow pointing in the right direction after all.
Scientists have also gathered evidence that gut bacteria can influence anxiety and depression. Stephen Collins, a gastroenterology researcher at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, has found that strains of two bacteria, lactobacillus and bifidobacterium, reduce anxiety-like behavior in mice... In one study, he and his colleague collected gut bacteria from a strain of mice prone to anxious behavior, and then transplanted these microbes into another strain inclined to be calm. The result: The tranquil animals appeared to become anxious.
Around this point in reading the article, something occurred to me:
This is mind control.
As I've noted before, science is value-neutral. It can be used for good or nefarious purposes, or both (I brought up nuclear fission as an example recently). If I were inclined to write science fiction, I'd probably put in a story something about using manipulation of intestinal microbiome to make people more pliable for their corporate overlords. Oh, wait, I am inclined to write science fiction.
It's great that they're learning shit about the gut-brain connection, something I've long suspected ever since my mother, who had digestive issues, declined and died of unspecified dementia. That, of course, was a sample size of one; anecdote, not data. And it can absolutely be used for good: calm anxiety, maybe help some more withdrawn people become more social, that sort of thing -- if that's what they want. But I can absolutely see this being used for crowd control.
A paper published in the May 2015 issue of Psychopharmacology by the Oxford University neurobiologist Phil Burnet looked at whether a prebiotic—a group of carbohydrates that provide sustenance for gut bacteria—affected stress levels among a group of 45 healthy volunteers. Some subjects were fed 5.5 grams of a powdered carbohydrate known as galactooligosaccharide, or GOS, while others were given a placebo.
"I never put anything in my body that I can't pronounce." Stop with the willful ignorance. If you'd only seen the word "quinoa" written, not spoken, you would probably pronounce it wrong.
In this case, it's ga-lac-to-ohl-ih-go-saccharide. (We lost something when we quit putting a diaresis, or umlaut, over a second or third vowel to indicate that there's a glottal stop in between, as with naïve). There. Now you can pronounce it. Let's not be afraid of chemicals. Practically everything is a chemical.
Perhaps the most well-known human study was done by Mayer, the UCLA researcher. He recruited 25 subjects, all healthy women; for four weeks, 12 of them ate a cup of commercially available yogurt twice a day, while the rest didn’t.
Thus perpetuating the idea that men don't eat yogurt.
To Mayer’s surprise, the results, which were published in 2013 in the journal Gastroenterology, showed significant differences between the two groups; the yogurt eaters reacted more calmly to the images than the control group. “The contrast was clear,” says Mayer. “This was not what we expected, that eating a yogurt twice a day for a few weeks would do something to your brain.”
And no, it won't make you trans.
It’s not yet clear how the microbiome alters the brain. Most researchers agree that microbes probably influence the brain via multiple mechanisms.
Hence why we do more science on the stuff.
This interconnection of bugs and brain seems credible, too, from an evolutionary perspective. After all, bacteria have lived inside humans for millions of years. Cryan suggests that over time, at least a few microbes have developed ways to shape their hosts’ behavior for their own ends. Modifying mood is a plausible microbial survival strategy, he argues that “happy people tend to be more social. And the more social we are, the more chances the microbes have to exchange and spread.”
Just to be clear: this is speculation. Also, "humans" have probably not existed for "millions of years." Granted, our evolutionary predecessors had a gut biome, but I'm willing to bet it goes back way more than a few million years; the concept of a digestive tract has probably been around for over half a billion years (quick google search), and bacteria since almost the very beginning of life, over four billion years. This is their world; we're just living in their tiny shadows.
As scientists learn more about how the gut-brain microbial network operates, Cryan thinks it could be hacked to treat psychiatric disorders. “These bacteria could eventually be used the way we now use Prozac or Valium,” he says.
See? Mind control. It's not like no one has misused Prozac or Valium to keep people compliant.
Another thing occurred to me while reading this article. Well, actually, it occurred to me a while back, but I got to think about it again because I'm currently bingeing The Umbrella Academy which (not much of a spoiler here) involves time travel.
Time travel may be impossible. But for the sake of argument, say it's not. You know how I know it didn't happen? Doesn't happen. Won't happen. No, not because we'll have to invent new verb tenses. Because every living thing evolves, including bacteria, which includes our microbiome. There's a famous and often-referenced Ray Bradbury short story called A Sound of Thunder, which (it's not a spoiler if the damn story is older than I am) deals with the changes made to the timeline by someone inadvertently killing a random butterfly while... I don't remember, running from a dinosaur or something. Look, it's been a while, okay? Guy goes back to the future and the world's changed. Point is, it wouldn't take a butterfly (did they even coëxist with dinosaurs? Can't be arsed to look it up right now, and it hardly matters because Bradbury was awesome anyway); leaving some of today's gut bacteria lying around in the Jurassic or whatever would leave obvious traces on the evolutionary record.
So, either time travel is impossible, or we wipe ourselves out before inventing it. Or both.
In other words, if you did manage go back in time, you wouldn't have to kill a butterfly to change the present to something unrecognizable.
All you'd have to do is take a shit. |
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Time now for some cultural enrichment, courtesy of a certain dick-joke site.
Ready to be enriched, to bask in the glory of classical art? Good. As usual, you'll have to click on the actual link to see the pretty pictures.
5. The Tuscan Dick-Tree Reveals Medieval Witchcraft And Middle Ages-Propaganda
But dongs were less vulgar and more symbolic in the olden days. So the image isn't just funny, it's historical and educational. One theory says the tree simply represents fertility and good fortune. Booooring.
Yeah, thinking they were always considered obscene is a common phallusy.
Another posits that this is possibly the oldest image of European witchcraft, revealing some interesting thaumaturgy. It may depict something later detailed in a Latin "witchfinder's guide" called Malleus Maleficarum, which sounds hella rad and doesn't disappoint in translation: "Hammer of the Witches."
Which I'm sure I've talked about in here before. Hm, now that I think of it, perhaps there's a metaphorical connection between "malleus" and "phallus." I'd look into that, but I'm afraid I might be wrong. Still, it seems plausible at first glans.
An equally slick theory posits that the scene is political propaganda. Around this time, the Guelphs and Ghibellines were political Bloods and Crips allied to the Pope or Holy Roman emperor, respectively, just like modern street gangs.
I suppose those are better names than Sharks and Jets. I get the feeling one or the other would eventually get the shaft.
Okay, no more penis-mightier-than-the-sword puns. For now.
4. Van Gogh's Café Terrace At Night May Be A Last Supper Shout-Out
Vincent van Gogh moved to sunny, wind-whipped Arles in February 1888 to escape the soul-stifling craziness and pretension of big-city Paris.
Some things never change.
Van Gogh only spent about a year in the bright, Mistral-besieged Provencal city but produced many of his most famous paintings here despite, or perhaps due to, his subsistence on coffee and absinthe.
Hopefully not at the same time. That would be nasty. Also, I'm going with "due to."
Among his most gawked at is the Café Terrace at Night, as it's known today. It was Van Gogh's first nighttime thing, painted in September 1888. Actually, since he painted it on the spot and true to life, as researchers dated the configuration of the stars to September 16 or 17th.
One odd effect of having cataracts was that, whenever I'd look at lights at night -- be they streetlights, passing helicopters, the moon, or stars -- I'd see a cluster for every light source. They reminded me of Van Gogh's paintings, leading me to wonder if dude had cataracts, despite his young age.
Some say it's a symbolic Last Supper, featuring 12 apostles breaking bread and French wine, which the maître d' probably spit in. One figure lurks in shadow, the traitorous Judas. The central figure is Jesus ensconced in a robe, with the light above serving as a halo and the window behind forming a cross.
One of the most annoying habits of literary and artistic interpreters is their propensity to find Jesus everywhere.
Also circa late-September '88, Vincent wrote to his brother, Theo, that he felt a "tremendous need for, shall I say the word—for religion." And was apparently already thinking in apostolic terms of 12, while buying 12 chairs for his no-show painting buddies.
Well, okay, in this case there might be a legitimate argument.
The famed eatery still exists and is now Le Café Van Gogh, a tourist trap piss-nest with a 2.8 rating on Google reviews and worse elsewhere.
Yeah, I'm not going to Gogh there.
(I said no more dick puns. I didn't say no more puns. Also, that one only works in American English; the proper pronunciation of his name was something closer to "cock." ... dammit.)
3. Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire Is An Epic Old-Timey Diss
Sounds like something for Epic Rap Battles of History.
The term Zaporozhian Cossacks refers to a bunch of surly, burly, fighty former peasants from Ukraine.
As I've been saying: history echoes.
The supposed setting: after the Zaporozhian Cossacks gave the sultan's forces a bit of an ass-paddling, Mehmed IV sent a rudely worded missive asking for the Z’s to surrender, which isn’t how war works. The response from the mercenaries was one of the greatest fulminating remonstrations in history, real or imagined, utilizing an assortment of archaic insults that probably deserve a comeback.
Despite the promise of this text, which includes a link to the Wikipedia page on the painting, I can't find a list of said insults anywhere (I write these things in less than an hour and I don't have time for a thorough search). It's too bad; I imagine they would have been glorious insults.
2. Bichitr Exemplifies Mughal Art, Throws Shade At Western Kings
Who?
The 17th-century artist Bichitr is so exquisite it's a shame that most of the seven people who have heard of him call him "Bih-s**tter." He was the finest of Mughal court painters, serving as official immortalizer for two prominent emperors, Jahāngīr and his successor-to-the-throne son, Shah Jahān of Taj Mahal fame.
Oh, that Bichitr.
In the painting, Jahāngīr sits on an hourglass and transcends earthly, mortal time. The dudes on the left are in order of propagandic hierarchy. Up top is the Sufi Shaikh, a hot-shot holy man of the Sufi Islamic mystic faith. Lesser than his holiness is the Ottoman Sultan, and lesser still is a hangdog King James I, depicted in a lowly position with a mighty impotent air. His posture is limp, and his expression as resigned and listless as a brachycephalic luxury cat accepting mortality when dinner is a minute late.
I'm just including this text because it's comedy gold.
1. Caravaggio's Seven Works Of Mercy Is A Counter-Reformationist Easter Egg Hunt
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio is unjustly the Michelangelo of lesser renown. He's named after the town where he spent his childhood, like your homeboy Fat Cleveland. Yet, instead of being known for guzzling tallboys (though he was for that too), MMdC earned his appellation through unbridled artistic excellence and mad-hat bat-shittery. Hell, he'd be the Michelangelo had he been born a bit earlier.
One of the fun things about playing video games and, to a lesser extent, watching shows and movies, these days, is finding all the Easter eggs -- references to other works of art. For example, Fallout 4 includes a setting that perfectly mimics the climactic scene of Blade Runner, as the two works of art share a common theme.
Point being, such Easter eggs are nothing new in art.
Anyway, like I said, you'll have to view the article to get the full effect with pictures of the paintings and all. But I couldn't resist adding my own commentary. Art can be nuts. |
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Final entry for June's "Journalistic Intentions"  [18+]...
This is where a Wide-Eyed Idealist is psychologically beaten and broken down until they become more cynical in their views.
This is better known as "growing up."
Starting out idealistic and ending up cynical and jaded is, in my view, the natural order of things. The other way around, well, it just doesn't work. Too unbelievable. If you have, say, a fantasy story with unicorns shitting rainbow-colored ice cream, frogs singing harmony, butterflies carrying an elephant off into a glorious sunset, and a character who becomes more idealistic over time, the most unbelievable thing about the story would be the last bit.
Now, it's perfectly okay to stay idealistic over the course of a story. That's basically the whole point of Superman, Star Trek and Doctor Who. And back in the old days, before seasons-long story arcs, a character's basic personality hardly ever changed over time, because you had to make self-contained episodes. Even I can appreciate that.
It's also fine to have a character that starts out cynical and stays that way. They can still fight on the side of the good guys; it's a matter of managing expectations.
Best, though, in my opinion, is when you can still see glimmers of hope in the eyes of a character wearing jade-colored glasses. A throwback to what they used to be, as it were. You need a little bit of that in there if the audience is going to believe they actually want to save the day.
So I don't actually accept jade-colored glasses as a trope. No, the character doesn't suddenly start seeing the world through lenses of cynicism and betrayal; they have simply taken off their blinders and can finally see reality. |
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Today we're talking about one of my favorite subjects.
“Yeast has always been the most magical part of brewing,” says Jeff Mello. “It’s the only ingredient that’s still alive when it’s used, and you only have so much control over it.”
Magic, indeed. I'm sure before Leeuwenhoek (not a band name, but the scientist), before we knew what microorganisms really were, it must have seemed magical and/or divine. (Incidentally, Leeuwenhoek came from a family of brewers. )
Also, with a name like Jeff Mello, if he doesn't call one of the yeast strains "Mello Yello," I shall be sorely disappointed.
In 2013, Mello was a homebrewer who had just left nonprofit fundraising. But a trip to Brussels, Belgium, launched him on a new career in yeast innovation.
Lucky stiff actually getting to go to Belgium.
On his trip, Mello was inspired by local brewers’ use of traditional yeasts, techniques, and equipment. “The more I looked into yeast like Brettanomyces or bacteria like Pediococcus,” he says, mentioning two ingredients familiar to brewers, “it became clear that I wanted to pull back the veil on these wild microbes and figure out new ways they could be used for beer making.”
It's very likely (or so I've heard) that the earliest beers used whatever yeast was floating around. Over time, strains were cultivated (even before the whole microscope thing) and standardized. Belgian beers tend to use a different strain than German ones, accounting for the different taste of each. But there's no reason why other yeasts shouldn't be experimented with.
When he got home, Mello set out a mason jar behind his house in Arlington, Virginia...
Anyone familiar with the DC area should recognize that this is a badly missed opportunity for a pun.
Lacking a scientific background or industry experience, Mello describes many early projects as “total disasters” covered with mold.
Hence the term "experiment." Sometimes experiments fail.
While Mello has been a catalyst in expanding interest in new yeasts, Bootleg Biology’s signature initiative, the Local Yeast Project, is only possible thanks to the wider brewing community.
There are, last I checked, around 10,000 breweries in the US alone (the number keeps changing; I haven't checked in a while and I can't be arsed to now, but that one's in the ballpark and it's got a nice bunch of zeros in it). Oddly, most of them aren't cutthroat competitors; they just like making beer. Problem is, with that kind of market saturation, you still have to find a way to stand out. For a while there, the way to stand out was to get your IBUs up as high as possible. Those were dark days. Fortunately, the overhopped bitter beer craze seems to have died down, and they're messing around with a lot more variety.
And to achieve some of that variety sometimes means using different grains, hops, and yeasts.
Homebrewer Harry Peck, who has contributed to the yeast bank, used Bootleg’s kit to capture two strains from the air in his Garfield, New Jersey, backyard. He then made two beers with the same ingredients—except each featured one of the strains. By comparing them, he learned that one of his strains tasted more of bananas while the other featured a taste of clove.
Generally, banana and clove taste overtones are associated with Belgian beers. However, too much banana flavor can be a sign of poor brewing practice.
Mello also sees the project as a way to help brewers succeed in the industry. He notes that local yeasts, when paired with other local ingredients, can help create a local flavor, giving breweries an edge on competition. “At some point, if you focus on local ingredients, you are creating an identity that can’t be recreated, you know? And to me, that’s a no-brainer way of standing out in that way.”
Remember I said there are thousands of breweries? Well, very few of them distribute nationwide -- ones like Samuel Adams, Sierra Nevada, and New Belgium. There are some considered "regional" that can only be found in a limited area. But the vast majority are local, usually set up by some dude who got into homebrewing and figured he could maybe make some money at it. That, I presume, is the target audience.
This is the case with Place of Origin, a beer made by Harding House, a Nashville brewery that passionately supports local farmers and food traditions. Its brewers challenge themselves to only brew seasonally and include a local ingredient in every batch of beer.
Now, there's something to be said for being able to source ingredients from all over the world. It's one of the few benefits of living in the final days of a declining civilization, along with global beer itself. But I do recognize the benefit of staying local, too.
There's a term generally only used in oenology: terroir. It describes the taste derived from the soil of the grapevines' roots. It's most noticeable in lighter wines; with Vouvray, for example, which is a chenin blanc, the best ones actually have undertones of the ancient soil of le val de Loire. You don't get that as much with beer, or with large-batch wines which are designed for consistency. You're not going to get much terroir from the grains used for the malt, but it seems to me that you can get the same kind of effect with these local yeasts.
Now if only I could get out of here again and try a few... |
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Let's see how we're being manipulated these days, courtesy of Cracked.
These are only some of the ones we know about. I've noted before that science can be used for good or evil (the obvious example there is nuclear fission), and psychology is no exception.
You’d think, since we need it to survive and all, food would be the thing that needs the least marketing in the world, maybe aside from boobs and jet skis.
On the contrary. Food needs marketing more than anything. There's plenty of it (for now, and this only applies in more developed areas), so people need to be lured into buying your product instead of someone else's. It's kind of like what streaming services have become.
Also, no amount of marketing will get me to buy a jet ski. To use one, I'd have to be *shudder* outdoors.
But food companies want us eating only the sweetest, saltiest, most addictive food they can wrench from the depths of their nightmares, so they’ve created entire industries and fields of science to keep you mindlessly chewing the corporate cud.
And that's not even going into the bullshit that certain companies pulled to get people addicted to using their baby formula. Or the abomination that is bottled water. Or chicken wings: "We have too much of this stuff to make dog food; what should we do with it?" "Let's put hot sauce on it and call it sports food."
There are fifteen of these examples, but I'm only going to highlight a few.
15. Scent
While most bakeries do their kneading and seeding in the hours that shouldn’t exist to make sure their goodies are fresh every morning, Panera bread does the opposite to make sure the store smells like fresh bread when you walk in.
Calling the doughy crap Panera serves "bread" does a disservice to actual bread. I'm pretty sure there's more sugar in one of their sandwiches than there is in a donut.
14. Colors
Have you ever noticed that all fast food restaurants have roughly the same color schemes? It’s a lot of red and yellow, because yellow is a “happy” color but red is the color of alarms and stop signs and other things that lend a sense of urgency. Basically, they want you desperate to be happy.
Yeah, I'm not convinced here. It could just as well be for a sense of familiarity, and in the case of McDonald's and such, red is for beef and yellow is for delicious, crispy french fries. Yes, I like McDonald's fries; deal with it.
Speaking of which, they used to serve their larger fries in a cardboard sleeve, red on the outside with yellow stripes printed on the inside. It was pointed out to me by a former employee (there are a lot of those) that the yellow stripes were meant to make it look like there were more fries in the sleeve than are actually there.
Well, last time I went to one (I think I've been twice this year so far), I noticed that they'd replaced the yellow stripes with actual graphics of fries. Like they're not even trying to be sneaky about it anymore.
12. Tricks to Make Food Look Good in Pictures
All kinds of things are substituted, like glue for milk or mashed potatoes for ice cream, or added, like Scotchgard on pancakes or soap in carbonated beverages, to food to make it look better on film.
As a former photographer, I learned this a long, long time ago. Nothing's changed. And, I mean, this isn't even a big secret.
7. Misters
Grocery stores mostly let their produce run through the sprinklers for two reasons: so it’ll look better and weigh more.
Back when I did my own grocery shopping instead of paying Instacart to do it for me, the only thing that pissed me off worse than self-checkout were produce misters. I was convinced that someone was sitting in the back watching me on the security cameras, and as soon as I got close to the lettuce, they'd hit a button to make the water spray all over the lettuce and me. That or there was a motion sensor set to "nerd approaching," because this happened 9 times out of 10, but it didn't ever seem to happen to the lady with the three squalling sprogs. It was enough to put me off vegetables.
5. Decoy Pricing
I've gone into this in more detail in previous entries. Here's one: "The Real Decoy"
1. Apps and Kiosks
All those digital kiosks and delivery services aren’t just convenience measures that also cut down on payroll overhead. You’re actually more likely to order more food if you don’t have to look another human in the eye and ask for a double bacon cheeseburger and 20 chicken nuggets and a Satanic mudslide.
I flat-out hate this crap and go to great lengths (usually a drive-thru) to avoid it. In the case of apps, I actually read the TOS, and so I don't install the app. You know what pisses me off more, though? When, instead of a printed menu, you get a QR code you have to scan. Or try to scan; sometimes it doesn't work. That shit was okay for about a week, between "restaurants reopened after the lockdown" and "it turns out that the 'rona isn't spread by touch." Before and after that, it was annoying and frustrating. Also self-defeating, because if I have to charge my card again to get a second beer, I'm not going to get that second beer (at least not at the restaurant), so you're out that revenue. And why would I tip a server for a service he or she didn't actually provide, especially when I'm not convinced that a tip entered into my dumbphone is actually going to them?
In any case, the article has a few more I didn't go into here. While they're not actually "evil," I think it pays to know how they're trying to manipulate us. |
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Want another reason not to go outside?
("But Waltz, if you hate the outdoors so much, why are you linking to Field & Stream?")
("Shut up.")
There is a commonsense rule about wild mushrooms that all outdoorsmen should heed: Avoid them.
As much as I despise the entire idea of common sense (more on that is coming at a later date), I have to admit that in this case it's right. Not just for outdoorsmen, either. Indoorsmen like me. Outdoorswomen. Outdoorsnonbinaries. Whatever.
There are about 10,000 species of fungi out there, of which only a small number will kill you.
Unless, presumably, you're in Australia, where everything is trying to kill you.
As an aside, I've known several people who just plain won't eat mushrooms. Can't stand the taste, the texture, or both. Which is not to say that they couldn't be poisoned by something else. Me, I get my shrooms at the grocery store like God and nature intended.
Often, as in the case of the aptly named death cap (Amanita phalloides), they look like a hundred other mushrooms, some of which are delicious.
Which is aptly named? The common name, or the scientific binomial, which obviously comes from the root "phallus?" ("Both.") Lots of mushrooms are dick-shaped (for various species of dick). That's kind of their brand.
Got a friend who “knows” mushrooms? Great! Just remember that you’re trusting this person with your life and that experts get poisoned, too.
As far as I'm concerned, there are people knowledgeable about fungi. Some of them even moreso than me. But when it comes to putting something in my mouth, well, no one's an expert.
Here are some mushrooms you definitely want to avoid.
Any that don't come from a well-regulated grocery store or pizza place. Farmer's markets don't count. Vegan pop-ups definitely don't count. Your meth supplier does, though, because she's got a vested interest in keeping you alive so you can buy more meth.
Seriously, though, the article includes helpful pictures, and I'm only going to hit the highlights here.
1. Death Cap, Amanita phalloides
It's right there in the name, people.
Famous people who may have died from eating death caps include the Roman emperor Claudis (54 A.D.) and Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI in 1740.
The morel of this story is: don't be roamin'.
Ah, the rare double pun. Pretty proud of that one.
You know, it just occurred to me that this article could double as a guide to How To Kill Someone and Get Away With It.
2. Fly Agaric, Amanita muscaria
This is the one you see in fairytale books with a bright red cap and white spots.
I don't think this one should necessarily be included in the list. While it's not the kind that you'd get from your meth dealer, it has, historically, been used for... you know. Trips. Still, deaths have been associated with it, usually due to overdose, accidental or otherwise. Then again, deaths have been associated with water, too.
Still not picking any up off the forest floor.
3. False Morel, Gyromitra esculenta
This mushroom looks like the human brain, not a morel.
So you're saying it's a... morel hazard?
Look, this one is so ugly (you'd have to look at the article to get the full effect) that I don't know why anyone's trying to eat it in the first place.
4. Autumn Skullcap, Galerina marginata
With a name like that, I'm picturing the cartoon skull you see hovering over characters that have just died.
As a rule of thumb, avoid anything with “skullcap” in the name.
Good advice there. If only it would self-label with its name, like in a video game.
5. Alcohol Inky, Coprinus atramentarius
They’re fine by themselves and absolute living hell if you have booze with them.
Well, I'd be boned.
6. Deadly Webcap, Cortinarius rubellus
If you’re a fan of kidney or liver failure, this is the way to go.
I promise you, there are far more fun ways to experience kidney and/or liver failure than venturing into the not-so-great outdoors and picking shrooms.
7. Ergot, or Spurred Rye, Claviceps purpurea
In a 1976 article in Science Magazine, author, LR Caporael theorized that an outbreak of ergotism caused by Claviceps purpurea may have been the cause of the strange behavior that led to the execution of 20 men and women in the 1692 Salem witch trials.
I'd heard this. It may even be true. The fact remains, though, that "strange behavior" is no reason, on its own, to execute a person. Either way, this isn't one that someone would likely eat on purpose, or mistake for a different but edible fungus.
The really interesting thing about ergot is that, as bad as it is, it's formed the basis for pharmaceuticals.
In general, however, the advice given at the beginning of the article holds true: if you're tempted to pick up and eat a wild mushroom... don't. Makes me wonder how they figured out that some mushrooms were edible in the first place. |
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The penultimate entry for June's "Journalistic Intentions" [18+]
From that page:
Popular forms include "I'm the Queen of Sheba," "I'm a monkey's uncle," "I'm the Queen of England", and "I'm the King of Siam."
I gotta say, this is one of those tropes that, as long as you make the slightest effort at creativity on this one -- that is, not specifically calling out Sheba, monkeys, England, or Siam as above -- I do appreciate this trope with all its twists. In other words, don't use the popular ones, and do use a comeback that makes sense in-universe.
It's very likely that the first time I encountered this trope was in Star Trek. While the original series got canceled when I was 3, I became familiar with the show as a kid thanks to reruns in syndication. There's an episode (called "Who Mourns for Adonais") where the Enterprise famously gets grabbed by a giant green glowing hand in space and taken to the planet where actual Apollo lives.
The giant green hand in space was exceeded in its absurdity only by the one where they run into Abraham Lincoln floating in the void. Even one of the Abrams movies referenced it, albeit briefly and, if I recall correctly, during the closing credits.
That episode's title is one I always found interesting. Being raised by Jewish parents, I knew that Adonai is the English transliteration of one of the many Hebrew words meaning "God." When you find it in an English translation of the Bible, it's usually translated as "The Lord" as opposed to "God," which is reserved for the many words beginning with the Hebrew word "El," which is itself derived from the generic Semitic word meaning "a god."
Star Trek was -- and still is -- no stranger to adapting its titles from classical works. Often this was Shakespeare, as with the other TOS episode "The Conscience of the King." Turns out that this particular title, though, was adapted from a poem by Shelley (the male one, not the author of Frankenstein), which I didn't find out until much later. Not knowing its true origin, and this being the dark days before the internet, I often wondered if it had been some sort of pun, because I've always loved puns, too. That is to say, there's another cut dude from Greek mythology named Adonis, though, unlike Apollo, Adonis was a mortal in Greek mythology, loved by Aphrodite. I do have a vague memory of reading a misprint somewhere where the title was mistakenly changed to "Who Mourns for Adonis?" (The answer to that one, of course, is "Aphrodite," because Adonis died in her arms, but that's not important right now.)
Well, it turns out that the name Adonis is probably derived from an ancient Semitic language also, so it's no coincidence that it's similar to the word Adonai. Unsurprisingly, the root "adon" can be translated as "lord."
Yes, my love of language and mythology can be traced back to early Star Trek.
Anyway, the actual exchange in that show, which I scanned the trope page to make sure was included, was:
Apollo: I am Apollo!
Chekov: Yes, and I am tsar of all the Russias.
See? Both sarcasm and irony, because in the show, Apollo was, as I said, the actual Apollo (the episode gives a nod to the old idea that ancient cultures' gods were actually aliens); and Chekov never was the Tsar. Unfortunately.
One final thing about that episode. Well, a couple of things. I think it might have been the first real instance of the Theiss Titillation Theory of costume design: "The sexiness of an outfit is directly proportional to the perceived possibility that a vital piece of it might fall off." This is in regards to the skimpy costume that Apollo makes a young, attractive, female lieutenant wear. Said lieutenant was played by Leslie Parrish, who ended up married to famed author and navel-gazer Richard Bach, the author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
I'd say she traded down. He was no Adonis. |
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Not much to say today, but I did want to share this link (sent to me by Turkey DrumStik  , who loves brutalist architecture) because, being trained in civil engineering, I do occasionally have Opinions about architecture.
Save Our Brutalism
Five decades since the craze for Brutalism, most of the discussion about these buildings is about tearing them down. But the radical social vision that drove their rise has largely been forgotten.
In 1966 Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha, a pioneer of postwar avant-garde architecture, built a figurative middle finger in Sao Paulo’s villa district. His creation: two identical geometric houses made of exposed concrete, showing complete disregard for the stylistic norms of his more establishment neighbors.
1) You gotta love architectural terms, even if you don't like the result. "Postwar avant-garde."
2) Some people don't like bare concrete. Me, I'm all about concrete. (It's not "cement." Quit calling it that. It's quite possibly the worst example of synecdoche in existence.)
Today, alas, there is more talk about tearing down buildings in this style than building new ones. But this also reflects a change in the idea of what architecture is for. Far from today’s neoliberal orthodoxy, many Brutalist buildings expressed a progressive or even utopian vision of communal living and public ownership.
Aesthetics aside, I'd think the people into "communal living" are all named Safflower or Prunejuice, and they live in a place without concrete and eat exclusively vegan food that they grow themselves. So they wouldn't be into the whole "box of rock" look.
Today, the battle to protect them is also a fight to defend this social inheritance.
Thing is, architecture, like any art, shouldn't need too much explanation. I'd never have guessed that it was all about "communal living and public ownership" if this article right here hadn't told me. I thought it was pretty much the opposite: a way to dominate the landscape and to spite NIMBYs who insist on having a say in what their neighbors look like.
The name refers not to the adjective brutal, but the French brut, meaning raw.
I'm just including this bit here in case you can't be arsed to read the article (which is fine, but I think it's important to know where words come from).
The root of the term was borrowed from art (Art brut) and from Le Corbusier’s term béton brut (bare concrete). The origin story tells us that during the construction of his Unité d’Habitation social housing complex in Marseilles (1947–52), Le Corbusier was faced with so many overburdened construction companies that out of necessity he decided to leave the huge concrete pillars roughly exposed in bare concrete. He called this method béton brut, and it would be a decisive breakthrough for the formal language of architecture into the 1960s and 1970s. From Corbusier, Banham, and the Smithsons, there thus emerged the building blocks of a Brutalist theory and aesthetics.
One generally associates the French with elegance and subtlety in all types of art, including architecture. Picture la tour Eiffel or Notre-Dame de Paris. Again, I'd never have guessed this polar opposite of elegance and subtlety was a French thing unless it was shoved in my face.
For instance, the telecommunications center in Skopje, Macedonia, looks like an archaic vision of a space station; it openly puts on display its service core, staircases, and concrete support structures. The building’s materials and inner workings were not only exposed, but exaggerated and celebrated.
As an engineer, I tend to value function above form. Not that I don't appreciate a nice form, mind you, but I want to know what something actually is. This, therefore, appeals to me.
The article continues with more history of Brutalism; as I noted above, I don't have much else to say about it, but it's a fascinating read if you're into this sort of thing.
There were also failures that were rightly criticized: overly sophisticated floor plans that tested one’s sense of direction; absurdly segmented flat roof systems susceptible to leakage; inadequate steel reinforcement that caused difficult-to-repair damage to the concrete...
There's an old joke. Well, not really a joke, but a one-liner: Architecture students have to give up many things that other college students take for granted, like weekends, parties, and structural engineering.
The architecture of our parents’ age is slowly becoming the architecture of a generation of grandparents. But with distance comes the possibility of a new, less biased view. In many places, historical preservation has also begun to concern buildings dating to the 1970s. This work is being encouraged and supported by an ever-increasing number of initiatives.
It's been a while, but I've mentioned the life cycle of things in here before. 1) It's new and people ooh and ahh over it; 2) It becomes ordinary; 3) People start to hate it because they want something new, so a lot of it gets discarded; 4) Someone starts liking it again, it's rare now, and there's a mad scramble to preserve whatever's left. This applies not just to buildings, but to pretty much anything. Apparently, Brutalism followed that life cycle.
In the heyday of Brutalism, the architecture of previous generations was widely demolished without much thought. In many German cities, the turn of the century architecture was stripped of its decor or outright demolished at a shocking rate. This inevitably raises the question of whether in fifty years’ time our children and grandchildren will shake their heads and wonder how we could possibly have made the decisions being made right now.
I've mentioned something like this before too. Laugh all you want at the fashion choices of the 1970s; just know that in the 2070s they'll be laughing at our fashion choices just as heartily. That is, if anyone's still around to laugh.
As I've already said more than I intended, I'll leave it at that. The article's there if you're interested. |
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In another case of random number generator coincidence, this Summer Solstice
| For those of us in the proper hemisphere; otherwise it's the winter solstice -- it occurs at 5:13 am today, WDC time |
Yeah, I'm going there.
1) Because we're doomed.
2) Not me. I'm done.
Naturally, I'll be expanding on these points herein.
Climate "doomers" believe the world has already lost the battle against global warming. That's wrong - and while that view is spreading online, there are others who are fighting the viral tide.
Count me among the former number. The time to do something about it was 40 years ago, kind of like if you're going to deflect an asteroid that's heading for Earth, you gotta catch it early on because it then takes less energy to alter its orbit to miss.
As for the fighters, good luck. Truly. I wish you the best.
Charles is 27 and lives in California. His quirky TikTok videos about news, history, and politics have earned him more than 150,000 followers.
You know what's almost as bad as climate change? DikDok. Neither shows any sign of going away anytime soon, however.
In the video in question, recorded in October 2021, he decided it was time for a confession.
"I am a climate doomer," he said. "Since about 2019, I have believed that there's little to nothing that we can do to actually reverse climate change on a global scale."
Well, at least someone on DikDok has some sense. Or "had," given the way the linked article ends.
Climate doomism is the idea that we are past the point of being able to do anything at all about global warming - and that mankind is highly likely to become extinct.
Oh, we should be so lucky as to become extinct. No, that's not going to happen. What's going to happen is that War, Pestilence, Famine, Death, and Inconvenience (the fifth horseman that the others don't talk about) will reduce the human population of earth drastically.
And then maybe the Earth will begin to recover.
The survivors won't have it easy, either. It's pretty easy to glibly say "back to the Stone Age," but the Stone Age was dependent upon readily available resources such as flint, which is no longer readily available because we used all the easy-to-find stuff. Sure, there will be remnants of metals and whatnot from our lost civilization, but how are you going to use them with pre-Stone Age technology?
That's wrong, scientists say, but the argument is picking up steam online.
It's one thing to say "scientists say." Perhaps they're even right. I'm inclined to believe they're right if there's anything approaching a consensus on the subject. But I take this to mean that there are things we can do to stop and maybe even reverse climate change. Sure. We could.
We won't.
Because it's not a science issue. If it were a science issue, shit would have been done 40 years ago, like I said. No, it's a political issue, and that's not in science's wheelhouse.
Alaina makes a habit of challenging climate doomism - a mission she has embraced with a sense of urgency.
"People are giving up on activism because they're like, 'I can't handle it any more... This is too much...' and 'If it really is too late, why am I even trying?'" she says. "Doomism ultimately leads to climate inaction, which is the opposite of what we want."
Okay, let me make an analogy here: You're looking for a job. You want a job. You need a job. You have to get a job or you're out on the street. So you go to interview after interview, and never hear back from any of them.
There is absolutely no guarantee that someone will hire you. That's the opposite of what you want, but it's reality. So what this woman is proposing is unwarranted optimism: If you keep trying, you might eventually find a job. Or you might die starving on the street. If you give up, you'll die starving on the street. People have been trained to be cluelessly optimistic, and I'll admit that sometimes it even works out. But it's not realistic.
Climate scientist Dr Friederike Otto, who has been working with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says: "I don't think it's helpful to pretend that climate change will lead to humanity's extinction."
Again, I don't think it'll lead to humanity's extinction. There's an awful lot of us, all over the globe, and some of us are quite clever and good at surviving (not me, though -- civilization collapses and I'm dead within a week).
In its most recent report, the IPCC laid out a detailed plan that it believes could help the world avoid the worst impacts of rising temperatures.
It involves "rapid, deep and immediate" cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases - which trap the sun's heat and make the planet hotter.
And that's why it ain't gonna happen. If the last two and a half years of global pandemic didn't teach you that, no matter what, some people will never do the right thing, then nothing will. Here's the deal:
Country A proposes "'rapid, deep and immediate' cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases." Somehow, against all odds, they manage to push it through. Perhaps it's an enlightened dictatorship; I don't know, whatever. Country B, on the other hand, keeps going the way they've been. As a slowdown in production reduces Country A's GDP, Country B gains the upper hand and, eventually, invades Country A and starts doing things their way, the financially efficient way, the old way.
After watching what's been happening since late February, don't tell me that's not going to happen.
But even that's not realistic, because here in reality, Country A won't do squattly-dick. Oh, maybe they'll ban plastic straws or promote direct solar power (all of our power right now, except maybe nuclear, is solar power, directly or indirectly, and I'd argue that even nuclear is a kind of solar power because fissionable elements can only be formed in stars -- but I digress).
None of that will make a dent.
"There is no denying that there are large changes across the globe, and that some of them are irreversible," says Dr Otto, a senior lecturer in climate science at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment.
"It doesn't mean the world is going to end - but we have to adapt, and we have to stop emitting."
The world will go on. Minus several species.
Last year, the Pew Research Center in the US ran a poll covering 17 countries, focusing on attitudes towards climate change.
An overwhelming majority of the respondents said they were willing to change the way they lived to tackle the problem.
Which, again, won't do squat, and will pay dividends to anyone unwilling to change the way they live. Because that country scenario I mentioned above? It scales down to the individual level. If I'm living like a hippie, I'll be overrun by mobs of gas-guzzling tank drivers.
"The most apocalyptic language that I would find was actually coming from former climate scientists," Charles says.
Just guessing here, but I'd say they know what they're talking about, but no longer have a vested interest in seeing any proposed solutions come to fruition. You spend your life chasing a rainbow, and instead of a pot of gold you get a bucket of coal. Which you can't even use because it'll release more carbon into the atmosphere. That's gotta wear a person down.
TikTok's rules forbid misinformation that causes harm. We sent the company some videos that Alaina has debunked in the past. None was found to have violated the rules.
TikTok says it works with accredited fact-checkers to "limit the spread of false or misleading climate information".
As defined by the CCP, and we all know that "misinformation" to them is "something other than the official Party line."
Although it can take many forms (and is thus difficult to accurately measure), Alaina says doomism is particularly popular among young people.
Good to know I'm young at heart.
Now, don't get me wrong -- as with the job hunt analogy above, the only way to have any chance of winning is to keep trying. One day, maybe, low probability but maybe, Sisyphus will be able to roll that boulder all the way up the hill. That, I think, is why people push the "yes, there is something we can do" line. And I'm not disputing that there's something we can do.
Just that there's anything meaningful that we will do. Not when there's still a significant number of people who aren't willing to make any sort of sacrifice for the common good. Don't believe me? Look around.
Also -- and this is the important point -- it's not on us. It's on large corporations who are the ones spewing out the greenhouse gases. The same corporations who have been publicly denying climate change for over 40 years. I've said this before, I know, and now I'm saying it again. Even if you do something on an individual level -- and I'm not saying that you shouldn't -- it's taking a cup of water out of the ocean while other people are standing around pissing into the same ocean. Sure, it makes a difference. Marginally. But not enough of us can be arsed to do it, and the pissers outnumber the rest of us.
Fortunately, there is one thing that's almost guaranteed to happen, and that will certainly drop global temperatures to something approaching pre-industrial levels: large-scale war leading to nuclear winter.
Sleep tight. |
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Another entry for "Journalistic Intentions" [18+]
You know, the whole thing about tropes is that while they can be clichés, they aren't usually; they're just storytelling elements. What makes a cliché is something that's overused to the point of losing its impact, which is a very subjective thing. So the whole "person comes home and discovers their antagonist sitting in an armchair brandishing a pistol" thing can still work, even though it gets used a lot, especially if you do something new with it. The Blacklist, for example, does this to great effect -- with the twist that it's almost always the antihero protagonist of the series doing the lurking.
What doesn't work, what has never worked (in my not-so-humble opinion), one version of this trope that doesn't get mentioned on the page, is the jump scare when someone gets in their car and the bad guy suddenly appears from the back seat.
While I don't currently own a car (long story, and I've already covered it here), I guarantee you that if I did and if someone were lurking in the back seat, I'd notice them before I even got into the car. Even assuming I've decluttered it recently (not a safe assumption, by the way), it's literally impossible for me to miss the bulky shape of a human as I'm walking up to the thing, keys in hand. It doesn't matter how dark it is; it's never so dark that you can't at least see the silhouette of a fellow homo sapiens in the back seat. If it ever is that dark, you wouldn't be able to see the goddamned car to open the door. And even if they're lying in the floor well, you'd still see something's off, especially as once you open the door, the frickin light comes on.
If you can't see your enemy sitting in the goddamned back seat, you shouldn't be driving anyway, because your vision sucks.
I can excuse this version of the trope if the vehicle involved is a van or RV, or something else large and with lots of room to hide. Or if the person lurking has some sort of invisibility or shapechanging superpower, in which case, come on, there are other ways for them to jump out at you. Otherwise, you just can't hide a human in the back seat of a car, Border Patrol insistence notwithstanding.
Maybe I've just been conditioned from years of watching movies and shows with the back-seat-hiding jump scare person, so it's become second nature to me to glance into the back seat to ensure no one's lurking there. But every time I see it on a show, whether it's set at night or in the brightest sunshine, it breaks any suspension of disbelief I might have had.
So if you're going to do that, make me believe it. Maybe it's a little person. Maybe they were hiding in the trunk and came in through the rear seats while your attention was on the road. Maybe they do have one of those superpowers.
And if you're doing the standard version where someone comes home to find the bad guy sitting in their favorite armchair in the dark, at least don't telegraph it with scary music. |
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Lasers: not just fun cat toys. Who knew?
First of all, whoever wrote that headline needs to be sent to Gitmo. What are you, six years old?
Second, Long Island Rail Road? On schedule??! 
Okay, with that out of the way, the fun sciency civil engineeringy part.
New York's Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) has struggled for years with decaying leaves on the line during what its president Phillip Eng calls "low-adhesion season."
Which I gather is what normal people call "winter."
Trains can struggle to accelerate or stop on the rails' slick surfaces, sometimes locking their brakes and squaring off their wheels, which forces them to be removed from service for repairs.
You'd think that wheels made of hardened steel would be pretty resistant to wear. You'd be wrong.
As the busiest commuter railway in the United States, the LIRR can't afford delays or service interruptions...
Again:
...and has adopted a novel solution to its traction problems: Burn the rails clean with powerful lasers.
SCIENCE!
LIRR president Phillip Eng reported that train cancellations through November have fallen 48 percent year-over-year versus 2018, and that frequency of lighter, but less capacious, ridership-reducing "short trains" is down 32 percent. Delays are down too: 90.7 percent of trains were on time in November, an improvement of 3.8 percent over last year, and delays of 15 minutes or more are down 30 percent.
Well, okay. Maybe because of LASERS their schedule isn't as crappy as it used to be. After all, the whole point is to improve. And to burn shit with lasers.
Still, saying something is "down 30 percent" is kind of weaselly. If all your trains were delayed 15+ minutes, being down 30% means "only" 70% of your trains are delayed. Towards the other extreme, if only 10 percent were delayed, now 7 percent are -- not an amount any individual rider would ever notice.
"No railroad wanted to try it because... It's not service-proven. Somebody's got to be the first to do it," remarked Eng, who is so pleased with the laser train's effectiveness that the LIRR is reportedly working on leasing the technology for future use, as well as outfitting a second train with the same system.
That's always been kind of a problem in civil engineering (of which transportation is a subset): there's a lot of resistance to change, so innovation is a slow process, unlike in, say, mechanical or nuclear engineering. Not just from the engineers (not to be confused with railroad engineers), but from regulatory entities and the general public.
Take, for example, roundabouts -- which are kind of the polar opposite of laser-shootin' trains because they're actually lower-tech than what they replace. Roundabouts are objectively better than stoplights in almost every way, and they're even an improvement over stop signs.
When I was actively designing intersections and shit, a minimal traffic light installation cost about 100 grand, on top of the actual road construction if applicable. Likely it's double that now, and even more if at least one of the roads is more than 2 lanes. Traffic lights can be designed for efficiency, and the switch to LED lamps certainly made a big difference in maintenance costs, but there are still maintenance costs as well as energy required to run the things. Then you have the road sensors in most cases, also requiring maintenance. On top of that, at a stoplight, at least one direction (usually two) is always stopped, creating fuel-wasting idle time and driver frustration. And don't get me started on what happens when there's two lanes of traffic backed up for a quarter mile at a stoplight and suddenly a wild firetruck appears behind them, sirens blaring. People try to get out of the way, but it's chaos.
Compare that to a well-designed roundabout, where traffic rarely stops, and when it does, it's not for some arbitrary length of time. The installation cost is lower than that of a stoplight (depending on how big a statue of some dead white guy on a horse you want to put in the roundabout -- I had to design one in engineering school and I actually labeled it as such). It takes basically no energy to keep running, and as for maintenance, well, you have to maintain the intersection anyway, occasionally repaving it and whatnot. There's more signage, sure, and they tend to take up more real estate, but in general I think they have a cheaper lifetime cost.
But there's serious resistance to roundabouts (also known as traffic circles) in the US, partly because some of the older existing ones, like in DC, suck; and partly because people are just not used to it so they freak the fuck out.
So, anyway. The points are: 1) don't be afraid to innovate and 2) lasers are cool.
Just don't tell me about the swarms of cats chasing the train. I don't want to know. |
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Today's article, from Cracked, may seem at first to be a niche gamer thing, but there's more nuance there than we usually get from the internet's foremost dick joke site. So it might be of interest to even non-gamers (are there any of those anymore?)
Before I get into the article, a bit of history about Baldur's Gate. If you're not familiar with D&D, the eponymous Baldur isn't the Norse god (whose name is more properly spelled Baldr) but a character in a particular D&D setting. Baldur's Gate, in-game, is the name of a large city, named for said character, where surprisingly little of the actual story takes place.
The original BG came out in, I think, 1999? I can't be arsed to look all this shit up. Over 20 years ago. It was based on the mechanics of D&D's 2nd Edition, which had its faults, but with which I was intimately familiar, having DMed in that ruleset for a decade. The interface is a top-down map view (actually isometric, but whatever), not the modern first-person perspective, and even back then it was starting to look a bit dated. Didn't matter. Because the game was awesome.
As usual for single-player role-playing games (there were options for playing in a group, as appropriate for a D&D game), you'd create a character and set them loose in the created world. There, you fight battles and meet NPCs to help you fight the battles. Pretty early on, you meet the greatest game companion character of all time: Minsc the Ranger (and his miniature giant space hamster, Boo). Yes, even better than the girl from Bioshock Infinite. Or Atreius from God of War. Better by far than the famous Lydia from Skyrim (though there's another possible companion in that game that comes pretty close).
And the plot was, apart from some weirdness toward the end, a masterpiece of adventure storytelling. Look, as a writer, that's what I care about, more than game mechanics or graphics.
Couple years later, BG2 came out (there were also some expansions for both), and in terms of gameplay it was better, though the storyline was somewhat less strong. In BG2, you had the option of importing your character from BG1, or creating a new one.
There's a bunch I'm skipping over here, but it's a game series I kept going back to between bouts of more modern style games like Skyrim or Fallout. Many, many years later, after the original game publisher had long since gone the way of D&D 2nd Edition itself, an independent studio combined the two games and their expansions, and added a bridging storyline that... well, I felt it just didn't work as well; a lot of the charm of the originals was discarded in favor of punishing game mechanics.
So this BG3 game -- which I've been avoiding too many spoilers about, but I had to read the Cracked article -- is from yet another publisher entirely, and I will certainly play it when it comes out.
Fortunately, according to my sources, they're including Minsc and Boo. Otherwise, as far as I'm concerned, it's not Baldur's Gate.
Now, on to the article itself.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of the most important games of all time. And it’s not even out yet. While other games scamper to push out a product to meet the demands of their uncaring, non-gamer corporate overlords, Larian Studios remains boldly free and independent of any of the two or three companies which are buying up all the world’s media.
Remember I mentioned Skyrim and Fallout up there? Well, those were made by Bethesda. And Microsoft freaking bought Bethesda. I'm still holding out hope that the creative team stays mostly the same for future games (there's a space adventure from them that was supposed to come out this coming November but got pushed back), but I fear the gigantic corporate influence of Microsuck might defang the more interesting aspects of those games. Microsuck has produced one and only one decent product in all the years of its existence, and that's Excel (and they stole the code for that). And yet I keep using them; the alternatives don't support gaming as well, and I despise consoles.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a high fantasy RPG set in the world of the official Dungeons and Dragons IP owned by Wizards of the Coast, who publishes both D&D and (my favorite game) Magic: The Gathering.
Just to explain this a bit, again since not everyone reading this is as big a game nerd as I am, M:TG, like D&D itself, isn't a video game, but (unlike D&D) a tabletop card game. I'm sure there are online versions of it -- hell, I play D&D with friends online -- but I don't give enough of a shit to find out.
The fact that Larian Studios, a Belgian gaming publisher, remains free from a massive corporation is a good sign. The studio has stated they’re not looking to sell out and they can still work independently with Wizards of the Coast (who is owned by Hasbro).
Hey, maybe some of the pubs in the game will sell Belgian beer.
Incidentally, Hasbro also owns My Little Pony. So, technically, MLP could be used in D&D products without copyright infringement. Just saying.
In Belgium, the work week is legally 38 hours with workers being compensated for any overages.
The article doesn't go into this too deeply, but I think the reason it's mentioned is that it's pretty well known that here in the US, game developers and coders work insanely long hours for... well, usually pretty decent pay, but not great pay.
But there’s a larger cultural reason why this game matters so much. It’s the future we’ve always dreamed of, and nerds are king. We’re the mainstream now. We’ve come a long way from the Satanic Panic surrounding the early days of Dungeons and Dragons.
If you're following Stranger Things on Netflix, which I'm convinced WotC paid lots of money for product placement in, that whole unfortunate and misguided episode gets a nod there. The show is set in the 80s, before WotC bought the D&D intellectual property from TSR, who never gets mentioned, and in the latest season the Satanic Panic is part of the plot (I won't spoil it further).
The irony there is that the greatest danger to kids then was not D&D, but the people screeching about Satan. This sort of thing continues to this day. As a parallel, you know how certain people started bloviating a bunch of lies about how a cabal powerful Democrats ran a child sex ring from the basement of a pizza place in DC? Well, it turns out that a lot of those liars were themselves diddling children (google Southern Baptist pedophilia scandal if you have to). Every accusation from them is a confession.
To be clear, I'm not saying everyone on the other side was innocent. People are going to be good or bad, regardless of politics. Just that it wasn't a grand, overarching conspiracy. Point is, when you look at real outcomes, the real moral hazard in the 70s and 80s was sports, not fantasy role-playing games.
The most anticipated media is all IP which has traditionally been considered “nerd stuff”. Whether it’s the newest Marvel release or the upcoming Lord of the Rings series from Amazon, its nerds all the way down baby.
I knew we'd win eventually.
Who knows, when Grampy Biden leaves the oval, maybe we’ll even have a gamer president.
Trump's not a gamer; he's a player. There's a huge difference. Yes, I think he's going to run again, and win (by cheating; remember, every accusation is a confession). I'm not here to start arguments on that; just making an observation.
Still waiting on that D&D movie though…
They made one, what, decades ago, now? I remember watching it. Probably before this writer's time. It also sucked Mordenkainen's Tiny Balls (that's a D&D in-joke).
Why are we so attracted to these kinds of stories? And in a high fantasy setting particularly? Well, because dragons are cool as hell obviously. And less obviously, because the game allows us to walk a clear moral path. Baldur’s Gate 3 lays out that path even more neatly. We get to be righteous.
That's... one interpretation. One of the best things about the original Baldur's Gate and its sequel was that you could certainly choose to be a force for good in the fantasy world, and most of the story choices rewarded such behavior -- but you could also be evil, and that path works with the story, too. I enjoy playing both kinds in games. Like, sometimes I'll create an absolutely immoral character in Skyrim, like an assassin, just to explore that side of things. To me, this makes for a good game; knowing that you do have the choice, even if you don't take one of the paths. What's the point of being righteous, even in fantasy, if you don't have an alternative?
But yes, I find that in the existing BG games, the best storyline happens when you choose to do good.
Well, I've rambled on long enough when I could have been playing a game. I hope I made some sense. And I look forward to BG3. Minsc and Boo stand ready! |
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Today, we have something about actual storytelling.
I vaguely remember some of these from my childhood, as my parents were old-school and didn't hesitate to try to get me to behave by scaring the living shit out of me through old fairy tales.
Didn't work, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't have tried.
Generations of parents have told their children fairy tales—stories imparting moral lessons that are easier to remember when a princess or evil ogre is involved.
I think these days the push is to not scare the hell out of kids with fantasies to prepare them for a harsh and uncaring world, but I'm not sure that's any better. "Stranger danger" just doesn't have the same effect as "behave or an ogre will eat you."
But there are many weird, quirky, and sometimes incredibly dark stories you may not know. Here are 11 of the lesser-known ones.
Since this isn't Cracked, the list proceeds in ascending numbered order.
1. The Three Spinning Women
This Brothers Grimm tale stars a lazy girl who doesn’t want to work on her spinning wheel. Her mother punishes her.
I'm not sure I remember this one in particular, but I do recall that there was an awful huge number of "spinning" tales. I'm still not sure why. Even when I was a kid, no one spun thread or wove fabric; you bought that shit at K-Mart and later Wal-Mart.
This lighthearted tale shows that, sometimes, laziness does pay off.
On second thought, I must have read it as a kid, because I learned that lesson very well.
2. Hans-My-Hedgehog
A couple wants a child so badly they'd settle for a hedgehog in this Grimm tale.
Yeah, pretty sure my adoptive parents kept this one secret lest I start to identify as a hedgehog.
3. The Ungrateful Son
This short Grimm story teaches the dangers of selfishness when a man decides to hide a giant roasted chicken from view when his elderly father visits his house. After his father departs, the man attempts to resume eating the chicken, but it turns into a giant toad and latches onto his head.
We all have a vested interest in teaching people not to be selfish. Unfortunately, that shit became a virtue in the 80s and stayed that way.
4. Cat and Mouse in Partnership
An extremely dark Grimm tale in which a cat and a mouse decide to live together for the winter.
Yeah, I think we all know how this one's gonna turn out. See also: The Scorpion and the Frog.
5. The Girl Without Hands
This truly Grimm story is, um, a handful, so stay with us.
Unfortunately, there are no fairy tales warning of the hazards of punning.
As for the actual content of the story, what the fuck, Grimm?
6. Hans, Who Made the Princess Laugh
In this Norwegian tale recorded by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen, a beautiful princess never laughs and is uninterested in every man who asks for her hand. The king declares that anyone who can make his daughter laugh will get her hand in marriage and half of the kingdom.
This one reminds me of an old joke.
Skipping a few here...
10. The Red Shoes
In this Hans Christian Andersen story, a little girl named Karen is so poor she walks around barefoot.
Well, she should demand to see the manager about that.
Incidentally, in case you haven't figured it out by now, Hans Christian Anderson was one sick pup.
While I'm not sure about Andersen, it's fairly well-known that the Grimm brothers didn't invent most (if not all) of their stories, but rather adapted them from an older oral tradition -- and cleaned them up a bit in the process. Disney further sanitized a lot of the stories, which is why the seven dwarves didn't take turns with Snow White in the animated movie (Okay, the dwarf sex part was probably left out of the older versions, too, but come on.)
Fairy tales aren't, in my view, meant to be static and unchanging, but rather reflective of the evolving values and trends of society. There's probably no known "original" version of a lot of them, but once they were written down, well, that's why we get all the stories about spinning thread and whatnot. A modern fairy tale should have warnings about too much screen time, the hazards of accepting candy from dubious uncles, or the dangers of putting your personal information on the internet.
I'll get right on that one of these days. (I have a couple of articles about procrastination in my queue; I'll get to them eventually.) |
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A fifth entry for "Journalistic Intentions" [18+]
There's usually a reason, in writing, to have the authority figure be unreasonable. It creates conflict. You get one that actually listens, and the conflict has to come from somewhere else, perhaps the other main characters or, as the trope page suggests, an advisor.
But, while reading the description of this trope, my mind went to Star Trek.
This is not surprising; as you all know, I've been a Trek fan all my life. It's not precisely the definition of the trope -- for that, your main characters would have to be non-authority figures so the authority figures (bridge crew or whatever) would be shown as reasonable or not. This is, in fact, what actually happens in the Lower Decks comedy-focused animated Trek series, but that's only been going on for two years, while the franchise in general has been around for well over 50, and apart from that one series, it always focuses on the leaders themselves.
The link to live-action TV from the trope page kind of acknowledges this, presenting examples of reasonable admirals that fit the trope. And yet, in their section on Doctor Who (another long-running franchise that I've seen every episode of), they mention that The Doctor is a RAF.
On a starship, there can be no greater authority figure than the Captain. Even when there's an admiral on board, usually to provide a foil for said captain, the captain is absolutely in charge of his or her ship. So to be complete, any discussion of a RAF. must consider whether the main character is, in fact, a RAF.
There is, and probably always will be, a long-running argument in Trek fandom about who's the better captain: Kirk, or Picard. (Trick question; it's obviously Sisko.) But I submit that a new contender has arisen in the arena: Captain Christopher Pike. And that's precisely because he is the most R of all RAFs. And that's without being a Gary Stu.
Gary Stu is one of the names for a male Mary Sue, which is a trope that itself arose from Star Trek fandom. For those who don't know, early on in the history of Star Trek, a lot of fanfiction got written. This is no different from today, but back then, things were maybe a little more unfocused, what with lack of internet and only one show to pull from. It describes, roughly, a character with no flaws, perhaps even someone nothing bad ever happens to in the story; it's usually a writer inserting themselves into the narrative for wish-fulfillment purposes. The term "Mary Sue" itself is, like many neologisms, often abused and sometimes has misogynistic overtones, implying that the qualities we look for in a male protagonist are unwelcome in a female one ("What do you call a male Mary Sue? A protagonist.")
All of which is to say that Pike isn't a Mary Sue, or a Gary Stu, or whatever. He has flaws and personality traits other than "always being right" (and the best tagline in all of Trek). But he's definitely a RAF
As an aside, for anyone not up to date on all the recent Star Trek shows, Strange New Worlds chronicles the Enterprise's journeys before Kirk took over. It's based on the original pilot, unaired on its own and only shown in a two-part episode of the original series as flashbacks. Pike also figures prominently in the Abrams revised-timeline movies, but in this series, we're back in something resembling the original timeline (which, I will argue endlessly to anyone bored or captive enough to listen, has been irrevocably altered by repeated time-travel fuckery in various Trek series, so shut the hell up about continuity errors already).
Eh, but I've rambled on long enough, and I don't want to point to too many examples lest I spoil the series for someone. The point is that I think it's absolutely a legitimate version of the RAF trope to make the main character one. It can be more fun if their subordinates are incompetent, but of course that rarely happens in Star Trek, because it's basically competence porn. |
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After yesterday's entry, I'm sure we could all use a little less depressing fare. I have eggsactly the thing.
As the site is called Art of Manliness, one might eggspect that the whole page would be "make your wife do it." You sexist pig. You need to know how to do it yourself because she will divorce you with that attitude. No yolk.
There are a bunch of different ways to cook eggs: hard-boiled, poached, scrambled...
I did a thing on hard-boiled just a couple of weeks ago: "Egg Zactly"
...heck, you can even make them in the microwave.
Oh yes, please. Make sure you get it on video. (Seriously, though, it can be done, just not whole eggs.)
When it comes to making an egg sandwich or putting an egg on a burger (and a burger should seldom be without one)...
Lies.
...there’s no question as to which method is best: fried. All the way.
You know, one thing that struck me while comparing this article with the one on hard-boiled eggs: this one makes pronouncements; that hard-boiled egg one did science.
You can fry an egg over-easy, over-medium, or over-hard, depending on how runny you like the yolks. Folks who don’t like any runniness like their eggs cooked in the latter style.
That would be me. There's a lot of things I don't understand when it comes to peoples' tastes, and near the top of that list is the runny-egg thing. Fortunately, I don't have to understand it; I just have to accept it, like I have to accept that some people like anchovies on their pizza or bacon that droops after it's cooked. Just as long as they understand they're wrong.
The full deliciousness of an over-hard fried egg lies in the maintenance of its original architectural composition: a wholly intact yolk, sitting in a wholly intact white.
Eggineering. Not architecture. (You pronounce that "egg-gin-ear-ing.")
Yet getting both parts of the egg to cook evenly, without breaking the yolk, can prove challenging.
The rest of the article goes into the actual method, which, to be clear, is very similar to what I do anyway. But yes, sometimes when I flip the egg I end up with a suboptimal result. I attribute that to not doing it very often, so I'm out of practice. And it hardly matters, since I'm just cooking for myself anyway; still, I have a perfectionist streak when it comes to cooking. And writing. And, okay, pretty much everything.
But that's not the only challenge I face in the kitchen. I have yet to find solutions to these issues:
 Cling wrap. I've pretty much mastered the art of not letting the end fall back onto the roll, thus making it utterly impossible to restart it. But two things elude me. First, being able to get a clean cut after I roll some out; inevitably, it'll tear someplace other than the tear strip thing on the box. Or, usually, start at the right place and then go off on a diagonal somewhere. Second -- and most frustrating -- is that I have yet to be able to pull out any length of cling wrap without the stupid stuff sticking to itself; and then, of course, it never actually clings to itself, or to the container, when I use it for its intended purpose. This is incredibly frustrating and has led me to invent creative curses. And one of these days I'm going to use this in a story: "Her name was Sarah, but we called her Saran, because she was clingy as hell except when you wanted her to be."
Along those same lines, aluminum foil. How the hell does anyone get it to stay smooth? Or even fold nicely? I go to wrap leftover pizza slices in it and it looks like a damn moonscape; that is, if I don't tear it during the attempt.
I'm lazy, so I keep a stash of frozen egg-meat-cheese sandwiches to nuke for breakfast. The instructions are usually something like: Wrap sandwich loosely in paper towel. Microwave on low for 90 seconds to thaw. Flip, nuke on high for one minute to cook. So I do exactly what it says, and half the putain fromage has melted onto the goddamn paper towel. Now, for a while there, I was also having trouble with the wrapping part. If I just folded the paper towel over the sandwich, it would flower open in the microwave and ruin the taste. I finally started to do an envelope-style folding thing (an envelope was what we used to send handwritten letters through the mail when there were handwritten letters and mail). By locking one corner under the other three, I managed to keep the package together -- but this didn't solve the waste-of-lousy-cheese thing.
Ever buy one of those nonstick cookie sheet pan things? Were you able to use that expensive piece of crap more than once? I can't. First thing I bake on it stains it permanently. I'm not talking about a small discoloration here, but a complete ruination of the supposedly nonstick surface. Maybe I'm just buying the wrong kind of cookie sheet, but I have yet to find one that is more than single-use. Because of sunk costs, I usually end up lining the damn thing with crinkly-ass aluminum foil, and then spraying the fuck out of said foil with Pam.
Compared to those frustrations, getting a fried egg wrong is bush-league stuff. It's enough to make me want to overuse Uber Eats. |
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I last linked an article from The Atlantic just a couple of days ago. This one, from the same source, is its polar opposite. I can't snark on it.
Perhaps you feel you've been hearing too much about this lately. Personally, I recently saw a bunch of articles about Anne Frank because the anniversary of her birth was on June 12, the same day I ragged on the happiness article. She'd be 93 now. Not an impossible age. Millions of deaths are a statistic; one is a tragedy.
But, considering that there are still people around who want to exterminate other people for being "other," I for one am not going to let it slide.
"Hey Waltz, what about all the other genocides in history? Why don't we talk about them in the same way?"
Good question. They all suck. The reasons we keep going back to 1930s Germany when we talk about genocides are 1) They were, arguably, the most advanced civilization on the planet at the time, and yet they still committed barbaric atrocities, and 2) there are still people around who want to exterminate other people for being "other," so we have to remember this shit so that history doesn't repeat itself. Which it looks like it's about to.
As for the article I just linked, well, I don't have anything I want to quote from it. You can read it. You might encounter a paywall, especially if you also read the one I linked on Sunday, but there's a way around that (I'll email it to you if you don't know). It's another story of an individual, not a statistic -- someone who, as the title suggests, might have been the first victim of Nazi genocide.
I've heard there were about 10,999,999 more after him. Oh, sure, you've heard the "six million" number quoted. Those were known Jews. The other five million shouldn't be forgotten, either: people of African origin, Romani, homosexuals, political prisoners, those who opposed the Third Reich, etc.
When I was in high school, I was the only Jewish kid in the class when we read the Frank diary, so most people walked on eggshells around me (those that didn't were going to bully me anyway, and took this opportunity to unleash their bigotry). No need for that, though. One time I pointed out the 11 million statistic, and I remember someone being amazed that I would care about the non-Jewish victims.
As if I should only care when I or someone in my subgroup is affected. Caring only about your own community is the problem.
That said, there's a big difference between hating someone for things they have no control over, such as race, and hating them for things they do, like being assholes (fascists, e.g.). There aren't "two sides" here; there's people who just want to live their lives; and then there's people who want to exterminate them for being "other." I don't care whether that "other" is Black, Jewish, Mexican, Muslim, Asian, Christian, atheist, gay, trans, or whatever. Of course, I could make the argument that you can't help being an asshole, because we don't really have free will. But assholes have been known to become non-assholes, whereas you don't stop being your race.
Anyway. Enough depressing shit. I'll write more comedy later. I just felt this was too important to not put in the blog rotation. |
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Entry #4 for June's "Journalistic Intentions" [18+]...
Bars are so obvious that using them in storytelling borders on cheating.
They're usually a semi-public place (hence the name of the British version), so you get all kinds there, and the opportunity for both planned and chance meetings. This is, perhaps, no better illustrated than by the famous cantina scene (a cantina is, from what I've gathered, a bar in a desert) in Mos Eisley in the original Star Wars.
Han shot first, by the way. I have spoken.
Setting your scene in a bar, especially early on, is a kind of Chekov's Phaser for me: If the rest of the story progresses without a bar brawl breaking out, I'm usually sorely disappointed.
I can only imagine the level of fight choreography that goes into filming a bar brawl. To make them look realistic enough, everyone has to know exactly what they're doing, while making it seem like everything is unplanned. I guess that's why they get paid the big bucks, though. You'd have to time everything just right, and be sure you know the difference between a real bottle and the fake ones used for bopping people upside the head, or the difference between the real chairs and the breakaway ones used for bopping people in the kidneys.
Gotta say, I love a good bar brawl scene, whether it's in a Bad Guy Bar or wherever. I mean, you don't usually get those kinds of fights in a library, or at Wal-Mart, though I suppose someone's probably done it in a movie just for variety's sake.
But sometimes, those scenes just don't work.
An actual melee fight is, by nature, chaotic. If you're in one, you can't keep track of what's going on; you just have to try to avoid getting hit while trying to make sure the other guys don't. Never ask me how I know this. Filming an actual bar fight, for instance from the perspective of a hypothetical security camera, you'd see a lot of flailing around, but there's no focus, and you only get one angle. This doesn't work in a movie, so there needs to be attention paid to the important parts at just the right time, as otherwise you lose the audience.
I've seen bar fight scenes where they don't do that very well, perhaps in a bid to capture the feel of an actual bar fight. Lots of quick cuts, and sometimes you can tell by where things are or what the characters are wearing that it took about seventeen takes and the result is a mashed-up edit of different parts of the footage.
And, other times, I've seen ones where someone, say, throws a punch, but the angle's all wrong, so you can tell it's a stage punch. You know, missing by a mile while the "punchee" twists their neck like they've been socked. How that gets past the editors and director, I have no idea, unless they were spending the entire scene finding the bottles of real liquor and drinking them.
Unfortunately, though, bar brawl scenes give bars a bad name. Of all the purveyors of fine distilled and fermented beverages that I've been to in my life, from sawdust biker dives in Montana up to the Ritz and every level in between, I've never once witnessed an actual fight break out in one. I'm not saying it never happens, but I've been to a lot of bars and I've never seen one. Watch movies and shows, though, and one might get the idea that walking into a bar is like you might as well be carrying a lit match near kegs of gunpowder.
But one shouldn't expect realism from movies. I can't count the number of times I've seen a scene filmed at a rave or concert, and the main characters are just standing there talking without saying "WHAT?" after every sentence the other one speaks. Loud bars are loud. I can't hear myself in them, let alone anyone else. You want to talk to me in a noisy bar? Try using a pen and paper, because my knowledge of sign language is limited to "hello," "thank you," and "up yours." Better yet, just let me enjoy my beverage in peace. I'm not there to socialize or get into fights; I'm there to drink.
And don't get me started on when a character makes a phone call in the middle of a DJ's set. That shit just doesn't work. Texting might, though.
But none of that gives bars a bad name the way fight scenes do. And yet, like I said, I love a good one. |
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Here we go again with "happiness." It's enough to make me grumpy.
How about "Eat a Danish?"
Here’s some very bad happiness advice based on very solid happiness research: Feel important. Be happily married. Be Danish.
Lots of people feel important and yet are angry as hell. Just walk into a store or restaurant and you'll see what I mean.
Maybe become a Great Dane, instead? Dogs seem happy. Too happy, if you ask me.
Based on what they see in the data from experiments and surveys, what should we do that is both effective and feasible for increasing our happiness, starting today?
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I don't believe happiness is, or should be, a goal. It's a byproduct of doing other stuff. Like, I don't drink to be happy, but when I drink, I become happy.
Here are the top 10, in order, with my own assessments as a happiness researcher added in for good measure.
Oh boy oh boy this is gonna be fun!
1. Invest in family and friends. The research is clear that though our natural impulse may be to buy stuff, we should invest instead in improving our closest relationships by sharing experiences and freeing up time to spend together.
Okay, but "stuff" won't let you down. Oh, sure, it eventually wears out or breaks, but it doesn't deliberately ghost you like friends and family do. And then it's easier to replace.
2. Join a club. The “social capital” you get from voluntarily and regularly associating with other people, whether or not you do so through a formal club, has long been known to foster a sense of belonging and protect against loneliness and isolation.
"I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member." -Groucho
3. Be active both mentally and physically. You can make this advice as complicated and expensive as you want. But if you like to keep things simple, just try to walk for an hour and read for an hour (not for work!) each day.
Yeah, right, because... no, actually, I can't snark on this one.
4. Practice your religion.
And this is where I'd stop reading if I weren't dedicated to making fun of shit.
5. Get physical exercise. This is a slightly souped-up version of No. 3 above: Your daily walk should be supplemented with a purposive exercise plan.
Now you're just talking crazy talk. And making up words. (To be fair, I make up words too.)
6. Act nicely. Agreeableness is consistently found to be highly and positively correlated with happiness, and it can be increased relatively easily.
Oh, sure. Yep. Act nice. Be agreeable. Don't stand up for yourself. Don't argue. Plaster a fake smile on your face, and fake it til you make it.
Except bullshit. While I don't think we should go out of our way to be mean or nasty to people, there are certainly times when "be nice" would increase your anger level and decrease your happiness.
7. Be generous. Behaving altruistically toward others rewards the brain with happiness-enhancing boosts of dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin.
Until they start expecting it, when they become mooches.
8. Check your health. Of all health issues, those that create the greatest unhappiness are typically chronic pain and anxiety.
Oh, wow, I'd never have guessed that pain and anxiety might be barriers to happiness. Incredible. I guess it takes a degree in happiness science to figure that one out.
9. Experience nature. Studies have shown that, compared with urban walking, walking in a woodland setting more dramatically lowers stress, increases positive mood, and enhances working memory.
"That's the problem with nature. Something's always stinging you or oozing mucus on you." -Calvin
To be clear, I do love nature, and I very much enjoy watching it from a temperature-controlled, sealed environment. Although I still maintain that the distinction between "nature" and "artifice" is entirely... well... artificial.
10. Socialize with colleagues outside of work. Data have shown that work friendships increase employee engagement, which is associated with both happiness and productivity for workers.
What the... NO. Leaving aside for a moment that prayer to Holy Productivity, who wrote this, a corporate executive?
So here's my version. You knew this was coming, didn't you?
1. Don't have goals. You will only fail them and that will make you unhappy.
2. Waste time at work.
3. Drink.
4. Expect the worst so you can only be pleasantly surprised.
5. Cats.
6. Read (or watch or listen to) comedy.
7. Music.
8. Minimize the amount to which you are dependent upon other people.
9. Stand up for yourself (i.e. don't always be nice, accommodating, or agreeable).
10. Snark on vapid internet articles about happiness.
11. (Bonus!) Drink some more.
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I pick these semi-randomly, and today I get to be controversial. I don't do that often, so fair warning. Won't hurt me if you skip this one.
Let's leave aside for a moment how we probably ought not to be memorializing those who commit heinous crimes by plastering their name all over the place and thus giving them oxygen. Everyone knows this guy's name, though I'm not going to repeat it here (you can go to that link; it's from Wikipedia).
How many of his victims' names do you know? Or their surviving family members or friends?
Me? None. Not a single one.
What struck me when reading that page was how every damn thing there presaged a lot of the bullshit we have going on right now in the US. Not inflation, an impossible housing market, or higher gas prices; but the conflicts about legitimate government, guns, mass killings, the media's role in all this, etc. Nothing ever got resolved, even though another terrorist attack just 3 months later (to the day) put most of us on the same page for about 90 milliseconds before everything devolved once again into civil war.
We'll always have disagreements. We're not supposed to resolve them by shooting, blowing shit up, destroying skyscrapers, or attempting to overthrow a legitimately elected government.
But whatever. No, the truly controversial thing this led me to really think about was the death penalty.
I haven't discussed that in here recently. Long ago, once, and my opinions tend to shift. Yeah, I'm inconsistent and sometimes I contradict myself. "I am large; I contain multitudes." But I did find this bit from a very long time ago:
5. Do you believe in the death penalty?
In theory? Yes. There are some people we Just Don't Need. But that assumes a perfect world wherein we knew beyond the shadow of a doubt (not just "beyond a reasonable doubt") that person A committed a capital crime. But - here's the rub - in a perfect world, no one would commit murder. So in practice? No, I don't think the death penalty is a good idea. Every person's death diminishes the rest of us, whether someone believes it's deserved or not.
I still kinda believe that. But since then, I guess my view has evolved. Not that it matters worth a damn, just like all the rest of my opinions. Considering the number of people executed by some government or other for crimes it turns out they didn't commit, or even jailed for a long time while innocent, I still don't generally like it in practice. Hell, on second thought, don't consider the numbers. I'm not even going to bother looking up statistics, because even one is too many. And capital punishment is pretty damn final.
And yet, in the case above, of which today is the anniversary, I can't say I disapprove. We know the guy wasn't innocent. We know, insofar as we can really "know" anything, that he killed a bunch of people. Better if he'd been stopped first, but then we wouldn't have entire Wiki pages devoted to a non-attack, would we?
Problem is, we're pretty sure that the death penalty doesn't serve as a deterrent. Murderers gonna murder. Some of them do it in a bid to take as many people as possible with them when they suicide. So what purpose does capital punishment serve? Don't say justice; that's some Hammurabi shit right there. Vengeance is more like it. And keeping them off the street so they can't do more murder, but that can be arranged with a life sentence too.
There's also the argument that a state-sponsored execution costs society more than a life prison sentence, but that argument always struck me as incomplete. We could choose to make it cost less if we really wanted, and if, as I argue, such a sentence should be reserved for cases where we know beyond any doubt, there's no reason for endless appeals. Arguing on the basis of the cost is a little bit like arguing that you shouldn't smoke weed because it has bad effects. What are those bad effects? Potential loss of civil rights. Make it legal nationally and that argument goes right out the window. Not a great analogy; I know. But the point is, don't conflate physical laws with government laws.
By far the worst consequence, though, of this penchant we have for railroading certain innocent people into confessing to murder or whatever is not only that an innocent person gets locked up and/or executed, but the fucknut who actually did it is still out there wandering around.
But like I said, that's not the case here.
What we do have, though, is a martyr for his cause. Something for other racist bastards to rally around. Like I said, a lot of the bullshit he spouted is still being spouted to this day, and will continue to be spouted. Would this be the case if he'd received a life sentence instead? Well, that's above my pay grade. Maybe. I don't know. We'll probably never know for sure.
But that's why I'm avoiding the name. No more oxygen to these assholes. |
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