cool! i never knew

I heat it up and pretend its a hot drink (it is)

Two very different protest songs I heard this year

Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals - The Iron Wall Hen Ogledd - Scales will fall

Don’t listen to people who say it’s not possible to have fun learning about this stuff. It can be. I can be boring, too, depending on your interests. Sounds like you’re worried about wading through things like Capital, Communist Manifesto, etc. Totally warranted – they were written in a different time and for a different audience. That’s not to say that there isn’t good stuff to get out of primary sources, but it’s more difficult.

I recommend listening Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life to get some context as to who he was, what movements he was a part of, the state of the world he grew up and lived in, and a breakdown of the things he believed, things he changed his mind on, etc. It gives you important context. You don’t need to slog through it or do a ton of mental work. Just listen and absorb it. If you don’t understand a section, replay it and try to do some mental work to “get it,” but if it doesn’t click, move on and keep listening. Over time, you will begin to understand.

I also recommend listening to Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds. Very accessible.

Chores for sure. Throw on an audiobook while doing the dishes.

Reading is fun too because you can get a little more absorbed in the world, if you can manage to stay focused.

Watch Baraka.

Go for a walk around the neighborhood.

Wake and bake. If you have a yard, go into it. Look at it. Look at the plants. Differentiate the plants. Take a picture of one. Use your phone to identify it with Google lens or iNaturalist app or something. Find the scientific name (evidently called “binomial nomenclature”, huh). Use bonap.org to find out if it is native to your geographic area. If it is, keep watching it day to day. omg it is blooming. Look at the insects doing stuff on them. realize holy shit that’s their home. they feel peace, like i feel when i hear running water. this is an ecosystem. If it isn’t native, find out if it is invasive. If so remove it as best you can without disturbing your other plants. If it is non-native established or something else, consider keeping it depending on how dominating it is in your yard. Keep watching the natives. Identify others. Read their wikipedia page. Find out they attract monarch butterflies. Prune away the non-natives. Admire your yard. See a monarch and cry with joy. Continue into the fall. Keep taking pictures. Watch the petals turn in and shrivel a little. Witness death. Snow comes. See the stalks remain. They poke out of the quiet blanket. In other places, hard mounds of snow ice envelop. It melts to dirt. Brown yard and sticks are seemingly inert. Somehow it’s all gathering momentum. Imagine next season. Those stalks weren’t there before last summer. They’re gonna explode and even more are gonna pop up. Get excited. Hell yeah. There’s gonna be so many goddamn natives in my yard next season.

I love steam and valves hardware products, but the thing is, I’m not the primary customer in their business model. Steams product is digital shelf space in one of the most popular digital arcades, access to which they charge their real primary customers: independent game devs and publishers.

Whatever their activities are outside that, even the much appreciated proton and contribution to Linux gaming, is in the context of capturing more gamers on their platform, making their real product an irresistible choice for their real customers to release their game on, despite the steep per-purchase cut Valve takes.

That’s not an entirely…erhm…nice business model imo. It’s remarkabley like Amazon, but at least Valve didn’t put a bunch of local bookstores out of business becoming the juggernaut they are.

I’ll go against the grain here. It’s not as much, to me, about whether homeschooling is good or bad. I think it has the potential to be really good and really bad for the kid, depending on the parents.

But people who say, “kids won’t get socialization” if they are homeschooled seem to think that tossing all our socially-unformed people into one location, with little socially-formed supervision, is automatically going to teach the former group how to socialize with others in a healthy manner. It’s not. It just creates trauma for kids all around. Child on child abuse.

Not only that, but you strip kids of agency by putting them in a building where they can’t leave, controlling their movements by a bell, assessing and grading their performance by “objective” measurements, subjecting them to authoritarian teachers – it’s all so degrading and the opposite of what id consider a healthy learning environment.

If schools had more adults integrated into student activities – all the activities – sitting at lunch, class, band, whatever, – removing the barrier of superiority, removing lettered grading system, paying more teachers more, maybe id consider it. But as the school system is in the US (or, at the very least, my locality) now, id never want to send my kid

Edit: obviously not all schools are like this. But they are in my city. Id have to move to a more affluent town to be able to trust the school system.

I’m just so tired of seeing 1984 and Brazil and Idiocracy and every other political warning and satire played out in the real world every goddamn day of my life

Ahhh…Well, in that case, I think you should quietly ask her out. I personally don’t think its wrong of you to do that. I’d keep it on the down low, of course. Who knows, maybe one of you gives the other the ick and it turns out to be nothing more than two platonic coworkers hanging out outside of work (I know, unlikely). If it does develop further romantically, at least you’re now out of the love triangle and into a secret romance…which im kinda inclined to think that is better than a perpetually unresolved love triangle. But yeah, its tough. Wishing you good luck!

How realistic is it for you to be able to talk to Jane about it all? Maybe you could get a clearer picture about her (perhaps, lack of) feelings toward John.

Feels kinda silly for him to stay at a job he hates just for someone he hasn’t been on a date with yet…sounds like could be an infatuation situation but im not sure…

definitely juicy though! sorry you’re in the middle of it

edt: phrasing. also, course its not as simple for John as “just leave the job and find another.” surely there are other factors to him staying on board

I hate silicon tips usually but these are my preference too. I have ccx brand ones though.

good luck, I also have a strange affection for that movie

Emperors new groove is the only one up there in snark for me

check out this book

https://interesi.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/technopoly.pdf

Tech is a tool, you don’t need to connect with it in any transcendental way. According to this guy ^ Neil Postman, you may feel this way because we live in a TECHNOPOLY

I’m an admin and using an SSH key is the most common way we log into servers.

Also the most common way I log in to self-hosted servers.

I hear you, especially because there is a lot of pressure from the right to destroy public education outright – But I didn’t really say much about what a school system could/should provide? Only what it currently does not provide, at least in the US. It’s a pessimistic take, for sure, but the reality is so bad here that if I had to choose, my (nonexistent) kid would be home schooled. For sure, the current system could be improved a whole lot simply with more teachers (or adults), I’d guess, taking part in the learning experience – but not completely fixed.

I’m focused on the learning environment because in my view, a schools primary purpose is to impart knowledge through learning. I don’t think that purpose can be achieved without an environment conducive to learning. Throwing all the kids in a community into a building with little adult supervision, where they cannot leave for 6 hours, where they must move when the bell tolls, where they have to deal with the myriad social issues of a young person – that is not a physical environment conducive to learning. A compulsory curriculum with graded assignments and examinations does not, IMO, make a kid (me) open to knowledge – it makes him aware of conditional acceptance and a hierarchy of accomplishment. At best, it makes him want to get a good grade, or be in good standing with the teacher. And he will! But all he’ll learn is, as I said, how to find out what the teacher wants and give it to them.

Now that I’m older, I’m finding I missed out on a whole lot of good books, for example, because I was compelled to read them for a class, rather than curious to find out what was inside them. In classic capitalist fashion, I did the most efficient thing when I was in school: I read a summary of the books online and nailed the tests.

Obviously, there are also the secondary purposes of school, like learning acceptable socialization and conflict resolution strategies, but, as I said, dumping 10 kids to 1 teacher (and even this is a relatively low ratio) in a classroom is not going to be conducive to learning these things. They ought to be learned, for sure, but school as it is now fails and only outputs trauma and a stratified student body – the exact thing you’re thinking school should prevent! The whole structure of public schools here teaches that there are good students and bad students, that the good students are rewarded and the bad students are punished or, at best, ignored. There are parallels there, in my view, with how we treat the disabled, the sick, the imprisoned, the poor, or anyone whose ability does not fit neatly into the structure we’ve provided (capitalism) that our current school system feeds into.

sorry for the novel lol.

I think its because both need to house a large amount of individuals in as small a space as acceptable to the outside society. But also, both are ultimately mechanisms of authority that shirk their supposed goals of education and restitution/rehabilitation.

Related, perhaps unpopular opinion: It’s outright silly how we expect a good learning environment to come out of putting all of our socially unformed minds into one big facility, with little behavioral supervision (10-to-1, 15-to-1, or worse), and compel them to move from location to location by a bell, and to perform rote memorization in order to meet some metric of success. It’s sillier how we expect children to come out of this environment socially well-adjusted, having learned something of value, without psychological trauma, besides the experience of navigating a system of hierarchical authority. You know the wisdom passed down by my liberal (using liberal here in a very strict sense – NOT necessarily left leaning) Catholic father, who ostensibly would defend the value of educating the public (though, perhaps not the value of public education)?

“Find out what the teacher wants and give it to them.”

I’m more partial to a more human Superman

You just found the words for me, thanks! I’ve had trouble explaining to people why I didn’t love the most recent movie. I guess I prefer God-Superman rather than human Superman. I’m glad you liked this rendition though – here’s hoping Supergirl is good too!

I get it works in the context of the plot, the characterization just didnt work for me. When I say he’s underpowered, what I mean is I wish there were more moments where he’s SUPERMAN and not just a super guy. There weren’t many of those WOW moments, to me, where you and all the other characters are just astounded by his raw power. He struggles through the whole movie and that’s just not the version of Superman I like, I guess.

The JLU animated series version is more how I see Superman so that’s kinda the model I judge the live action movies against

I hear you, but weirdly enough I feel the opposite! I do get that the hope and optimism part was severely lacking in MoS, and it’s more present in Gunn’s new movie. But I kinda think of Superman as the wooden goodie-two-shoes of the JLU animated series, and to me Henry Cavill did that better than David Corenswet did. I feel like the Superman from Gunn’s movie is kinda underpowered and a little too “normal quirky funny nerd guy” rather than the straight-edge force of nature I feel like JLU Superman is. I feel like MoS almost got that, but then injected a bunch of sadness and desaturation which brought it down a bit