Like a candle in the wind…

The first Fantastic Beasts movie is set in New York, and it makes several appearances in the supporting lore books. Apparently, Americans don’t really like Quidditch, preferring some sort of magical-explosions basketball-ish game. Jeez I wish Joanne weren’t such an awful piece of shit human.

Okay, so I’ll point out that Murray Rothbard and David Gordon are prominent in the “Everything should be completely equal and fair as long as we first enshrine my generations of privilege” Austrian-school economists, beloved of white guys everywhere who never got over their Ayn Rand phase.

Makes it much funnier, actually.

With apologies to the baseball fans in the room…

The definition of woke:

You can’t just be up there and just doin’ a woke like that.

1a. Woke is when you

1b. Okay well listen. Woke is when the woke mob

1c. Let me start over

1c-a. The blue haired liberal is not allowed to say to the, uh, patriot, that prohibits the patriot from doing, you know, just trying to oppress the fringe groups. You can’t do that.

1c-b. Once the blue haired liberal is in the kindergarten classroom, she can’t be over here and say to the patriot, like, “I’m gonna get ya! I’m gonna teach your kids about pronouns! You better watch your butt!” and then just be like he didn’t even do that.

1c-b(1). Like, if you’re about to teach about racist history and then don’t teach it, you have to still teach. You cannot not teach. Does that make any sense?

1c-b(2). You gotta be, pooping in the right bathroom, and then, until you just wash your hands.

1c-b(2)-a. Okay, well, you can have the drag queen, like this, but then there’s the children you gotta think about.

1c-b(3). Okay seriously though. Woke is when the teacher, err drag queen, says or does a thing that, as determined by, when you do a move involving the history and CRT

Do not do a woke please

My buddy’s older brother did the thing where you remove the little filter cylinders from the coax in, I think(?), the curbside junction box. I saw the cylinders and the result, but not the deed.

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-effects-workers-psychological

The article is… fine… I guess.

Have you been privy to any of the discussions about what it means for the show to be set a thousand years later than most of the franchise, like where it makes sense for a previous entry to guide the interpretation, and where it maybe makes as much or more sense to let things go a little crazy. The interplay probably has to drift more toward storytelling realities within the brand than it does gaming-out what would “really” happen over a millennium of Star Trek time.

Honestly, when I think about it, the post-Burn era seems downright conservative in terms of societal change, certainly at least within Starfleet. That’s obviously necessary for it to be recognizable as a property, but it’s kind of funny to think that it’s as static as it seems, like closer to the difference between 426 and 1426 than between 1026 and 2026 CE, and I’m probably understating how different the first two were.

They say they used a paid actor. Of course, even if that’s true, it’s not particularly hard to find someone with a similar pitch, accent, and timbre, and then finish fixing it to make sure it’s as confidently soothing as the NPR voice you wanted to steal in the first place. I suppose in one sense it’s not utterly different from hiring a soundalike, but now the soundalike is damn near perfect (the clips in the article are VERY similar and feel more like the difference in recording equipment than anything else) and doesn’t need to actually be available to perform for new impressions. Yet another example of “withstand motion for summary judgment, string it out, lobby against future guiderails” as the totality of Silicon Valley’s legal philosophy.

I think what they’re saying is that the dissent says out loud the part that the majority would prefer to keep quiet. It’s a clear consequence of the “clever jackass 7th-grader” mindset that comes from the Originalist school of jurisprudence.

You can’t run a modern nation-state or withstand a bad actor in power if you insist that it must all be done exactly as set out in 4,500 words by a bunch of 18th-century provincial lawyers writing by committee, and that anything not expressly forbidden is allowed because… “oh well.” SCOTUS abdicating its role as a backstop of liberty and good sense to instead be a bunch of pedants is a piss-poor reason to send your country to hell, yet here we are.

They’re about to find out what we actually were getting in return.

This is one of the huge under-analyzed aspects of all this. The US “over” invested in defense and foreign aid, and got virtually all the soft power benefits of a hegemonic power, and by simply setting an upper limit on the worst abuses of imperial overlords, it generally had its allies saying “Thank You” for the privilege, with no particular signs that the bloc was weakening.

If the US is not an accessible market or a reliable guarantor of security, or if (for fuck’s sake) it’s threatening the territorial integrity of its own allies and trading partners, then it’s just China with less cheap shit to sell. Hell, even China doesn’t do the last one (offer not valid in Taiwan).

Ahh, but which one? LOL, I’m just kiddin’, they all have serious issues.

I grew up in the suburbs of the Florida one. It’s… fine? Go Jags!

Maybe it can repost racist MAGA slop, creep on the granddaughters of ex-girlfriends, and put private messages into the public feed, just like your dad!

When we were not-quite engaged and doing long-distance, my wife ganked my dumbphone and quickly edited my contact from {her name} to {her name}-mywife, no spaces, no capital letters. So now, twenty+ years later, that’s what it still says, and that’s how I address greeting card envelopes to her.

And both are fucking delicious (and honestly pretty similar, mostly with the tomato being less “in your face” with the murgh makhani).

This is pretty much what I said to my wife while scritching my dogs. First it’ll just be expanded to missing kids and olds, because of course everyone wants to reunite families, but eventually it’ll be something that “law enforcement” can request for whatever the hell they want, because after all they’re the good guys keeping us safe!

But, and hear me out here, it’s also wicked cool.

Ours is more stick-shaped though, and really only good for candle wicks. If we smoked, you might be able to get a cigarette into the arc. It’d probably also work well if your grill’s or gas stove’s spark igniter was broken.

Interesting. These say they’re from Mexico. It would be pretty underwhelming if there’s a blander variety.

But the tart ones are the good ones.

Raspberry for me, though I’m not sure if it’s fully artificial or “just” ultra-processed. It’s also partly because I like that flavor but I’m mildly allergic and about 25% of the time I eat it, my lip swells a bit, so I try to minimize how often I have it.

Deep cut here, but the old Rocky and Bullwinkle had a “Fractured Fairy Tales” that was often pretty fun.