Semisimian

I think he’s been in some Hallmark Christmas movies, so you might want to continue to avoid those.

Did you just watch 28 Years Later?

This is really fascinating and the article was a good read. I had no idea carvings this adjacent to the ocean could last that long. On that fact alone, this area should be protected and recorded as best we can. What I know of preservation, my first instinct upon reading that a historian was pushing sand into the petroglyphs to highlight them was horror! But duh, what the hell is she doing that the ocean hasn’t been doing for centuries. And the glyphs still remain! So cool, thanks for sharing.

I have two theories. Section 31 was terrible at recruiting covert ops and we’ve seen their blundering over and over again on the small screen. Or, they were very good at covert ops and we’ve only seen the few times they misjudged the morality of their operatives.

I’m a carpenter. If I do my job well, you won’t know I was there at all.

Wasn’t the genome sequencing in 2010 to determine just how the hell he wasn’t suffering from his epic substance abuse? So that we could get some of that Ozzy sauce and party til we drop, of course. Did Keith Richards ever do the same?

The Orville is great!

She just talked with Adam on the Factually podcast this past week, FYI.

There’s no wrong time to cancel Paramount+. Even when they had all the Trek content, the UI was dog shit so you could barely play what you wanted to watch anyway. And now that they’ve made the decision to split their IP, ugh.

I watched the CBS morning show for years. Amongst the morning news, I felt it was the best programming: had long-form investigative reporting, balanced viewpoints, etc. Then they added a shopping segment. Okay, gotta pay the bills. Then they started doing more pop-culture bits, even prompting Nora to ask, in the middle of her prompter read, “is this news?” Then they started to carve out time for at least 1 segment a week for Moriarty to interview a billionaire about their passion projects. And so on. The last straw for me was normalizing Trump’s shtick a second time.

Now the only news I watch is the Weather Channel.

I’ll hang on to 10 as long as they’ll let me, but I am never going to 11. Then it’ll be a distro for dis bro.

Sorry.

Avalon on the island of Catalina. It’s the one and only town on the island and there isn’t really anywhere else to go. People use golf carts to get around. There are no gas stations on the island, so if you do have a car, you have to import your own fuel or use the marina.

Miniscule car infrastructure + laws limiting the number of cars on the island = no car culture. Bam.

As I was reading the article, I had to keep checking the URL to make sure I wasn’t on the Onion. Is the BBC doing satire now?

From the article: “There’s something about the freedom of mobility and there’s something very American about it, and so, I also think that there’s a lot of people around the world that think about American cars, and they think about American road trips, and we want to invite the rest of the world. They’re going to come for FIFA’s club games, or they’re going to come for the World Cup, or they’re going to come for the Olympics, come and see sporting events, but then you can also take a week or 10 days with my family to travel around this great country. Stop at our great restaurants. Stay in our wonderful motels or hotels. Gas up your car with great American energy.”

THIS is actual car-brain thinking. I see a lot of memes in fuck cars attacking individuals and the choices they are forced to make, but this article illustrates issues that we have to fight. It’s got all the delusion you expect from a government source written by car companies: tying car ownership to freedom, oddly thinking that non-americans think about our car culture as a positive experience, and that wonderfully tone-deaf tagline.

Your city likely has some form of a transportation committee. Join it. Go to the meetings. The switch to Zoom has made it even easier to do so. My experience with our local zoning committee has reinforced that you have to fight like hell, even with your own neighbors, to do simple things like decrease parking requirements. Car-brain is real and it’s propped up by decades of propaganda and policy.

And then saying “inflation is down,” as if that has any real day-to-day impact on our travel plans.

“We surveyed the mother-in-laws and high-school bullies of our participants to gauge personality traits.”

The meat of the article: "Overall, people were fairly consistent in how they judged tattoos. Raters tended to agree with one another about what certain tattoo features might suggest about personality. For instance, cheerful and colorful tattoos were linked to impressions of higher agreeableness. Large, traditional-looking tattoos were associated with higher extraversion. Tattoos that appeared low in quality or included death imagery led raters to perceive the wearer as more neurotic or less agreeable.

However, these judgments were largely inaccurate. When the researchers compared how participants were rated with how they described themselves, most of the links between tattoo features and personality fell apart. Except for one pattern: people who had tattoos described by raters as “wacky” were somewhat more likely to score higher on openness to experience in their self-assessments"

A fairly poor quality YouTube link to the episode: https://youtu.be/4rQLnL9FRzI

It’s listed as S07E08 if you want to use the better quality link in the thread.

Finally getting around to Andor S2 (I wanted to devote full attention so I had to wait for a break in my schedule) SPOILER AHEAD: I just watched the Ghorman massacre today. Wow. And so many notes from current events.

Andor S1 did an excellent job of characterizing the start of a revolution, I knew S2 wouldn’t let me down.

I’m 6’4" and have driven tons of cars and owned a few. Stepping into a proper pickup was the first time I thought “oh, a vehicle designed for me.” I’m also a carpenter, so it is essential to my work. Memes like this are low hanging fruit.

Yes, we do have a size problem in the USA. Is everyone that drives one of these trucks a selfish, tiny-dicked, backwards-thinking asshole? No, and honestly, the majority of the people that I know are like me and need a work vehicle like this. More than half of them are in a union. We can point out the absurdity of the size wars when it comes to American vehicle design, but stop picking on pickup trucks.

Before Jenny, there was Pennsylvania 6-5000. From wiki:

“Many big band musicians played in Hotel Pennsylvania’s Cafe Rouge in New York City, including the Glenn Miller Orchestra. The hotel’s telephone number, Pennsylvania 6-5000, inspired the Glenn Miller 1940 Top 5 Billboard hit of the same name.”

And similarly, Transylvania 6-5000, which is where I first heard it.

You just beat me to it. They had to rush the last episode since it was canceled, but overall a solid show that had an interesting take on a common premise.