Folamh3
User ID: 1175
Folamh3
8d ago
When I was in secondary school, I bought Charles Burns's comic book Black Hole (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hole_(comics)), a wonderfully trippy and surreal fusion of body horror, coming-of-age story and 70s nostalgia. It's over 350 pages long, but I found it so absorbing that I read the entire thing in one sitting of maybe 3-4 hours. I read it again maybe two years ago and found it just as good the second time, if not better.
I recently happened across his latest book Final Cut in a bookshop and snapped it up. Last night I read the first chapter. Man's still got it. It revisits a lot of the same motifs as Black Hole: I think it's set in the seventies or possibly the eighties, it's very dreamy and surreal and there's some body horror. But this time it's in colour. I'm sure I'll have devoured the whole thing before the end of the week.
Folamh3
9d ago
I remember this, the infamous "a car" which drove into a Christmas parade. Cars typically have drivers, don't they? Did a self-driving car experience a HAL-9000 moment?
Folamh3
10d ago
why doesn't this happen more often?
Gwern asked the same question years ago: https://gwern.net/terrorism-is-not-about-terror
Folamh3
10d ago
Day 12 of NaNoWriMo, and I've just crossed the 20k mark. I'm really enjoying the whole process, I forgot how much fun it is to get into that creative flow state where the ideas are just pouring out of me.
My initial understanding of NaNoWriMo was that one had to write a complete novel of at least 50k words in the month of November. To that end, when mapping out the structure of the story in October, I'd envisioned it being made up of 5 "acts", each roughly 10k words. But of course, I quickly found that I had much more to say than that: act 1 is already 14k words and it isn't even finished yet, and at this rate a complete first draft will be more in the range of 70-80k words. Fortunately, the rules of NaNoWriMo stipulate that you can use the month to write a 50k-word novel or the first 50k words of a novel, so I'll still win the competition even if I don't have a finished first draft by December 1st.
2020, the year COVID hit: 906 deaths
2021: 1,355 deaths
2022, when the conservative government ended lockdowns: 10,301 deaths
Your comparison is hopelessly confounded by the fact that Australia, unlike the overwhelming majority of countries which enforced lockdowns, is a geographically isolated island nation without land borders, which has far more explanatory power in explaining the country's low rate of Covid deaths than does the strictness of their lockdowns. It's true that Australia ended lockdowns in 2022. It's also true that 2022 was the year the country first reopened its borders after Covid. I guess you could say that these are "deaths caused by a conservative policy" - but are you seriously proposing that Australia ought to have kept its borders shut to immigrants and tourists permanently? All to prevent a few thousand old people dying from Covid every year? A significant proportion of whom, if not an actual majority, would have died of flu or pneumonia within the period if Covid hadn't got them?
I don't think I've ever seen a source that listed less than 90% immunity from the vaccine - what exactly is your standard here?
The vaccines were very effective at preventing serious illness, but practically useless at preventing transmission. Users on this forum have been gaslit for years with politicians and representatives from the pharmaceutical industry claiming after the fact "we never said that the vaccines would prevent transmission!" but we were there and yes they did and we have receipts.
7 million Covid deaths in 4 years VS 42 million AIDS death in 40 years
Not a like with like comparison. By a very wide margin, the vast majority of people who died of AIDS were otherwise healthy adults or young adults between the ages of 15-49 (https://ourworldindata.org/hiv-aids). By contrast, 75% of people who died from Covid were aged 65+, and more than 50% were older than 75 (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#SexAndAge). For a very high proportion of these people, if Covid hadn't gotten them in the last four and a half years, something else would have. Thus your comparison fails from a QALY perspective. A young American man in his twenties dropping dead from an infectious disease is unusual; an immunocompromised 85-year-old dying of a respiratory illness is not even news.
Folamh3
10d ago
If Joe Rogan followed all those rules his listenership would probably be a tenth of what it is now.
Folamh3
10d ago
as was suggested as a possibility in the Dobbs decision
Drop the passive voice. Who suggested it?
Folamh3
10d ago
the far right wants to delay transition until adulthood
Isn't it ironic how Democrats are constantly singing the praises of the European (specifically Scandinavian) ways of doing things? But when progressive European countries across the board are hitting pause on youth gender transition, Democrats stick their fingers in the ear and say that only the far-right wants to do that?
Folamh3
10d ago
During his 2016 campaign he explicitly stated that Caitlyn Jenner can use any bathroom in the Trump Tower that she pleases.
Folamh3
11d ago
Googling this, one of the first results was an NPR article, which is mostly about the damage that lethal injections inflicts on the lungs (it certainly sounds like lungs wouldn't be viable for transplant after a lethal injection, and China carries out 250 such transplants a year), but also mentions the effect on the heart in passing:
Lubarsky warns that if the first drug isn't anesthetizing the inmate, then they're likely to feel not only the suffocating sensation of pulmonary edema, but also the pain of the third drug: potassium chloride.
"It's like a burning cocktail coursing through your veins," says Lubarsky, referring to potassium chloride. "Once it reaches the heart, it stops the heart, and you do die. But in the process there is a period of just intense and searing pain."
Folamh3
11d ago
That's fair. Assuming this is the preferred method of execution in China, they're probably a source of some of the organs transplanted.
Folamh3
11d ago
With death by firing squad, aren't riflemen typically instructed to aim for the heart rather than the head?
Folamh3
12d ago
Just hire Mr. Beast
A man who became famous primarily by creating content appealing to a demographic who are too young to vote?
Folamh3
12d ago
Trump is President-elect for two days:
- Stock market hits record high
- Migrant caravan at our border dissolves
- Hamas calls for end to war
- Bitcoin hits record high
- Putin ready to end Ukraine war
- Qatar kicks out Hamas leaders
- EU will buy U.S. gas not Russian gas
- Putin will sell oil in U.S. dollars
- Zelenskyy phones Trump & Elon
- NYC Mayor ends vouchers for illegals
- Mexico to stop migrants at U.S. border
- China wants to work peacefully with us
- Big U.S. company to move out of China
I repeat: Trump has been President-elect for two days.
Can any of you confirm or deny any of these claims?
Folamh3
13d ago
Bodily autonomy is a fake argument because in practice nothing else follows from it aside from abortion.
And sex work, and medical transition for minors.
Folamh3
14d ago
Last year my girlfriend bought me the book A Hero of Our Time by Lermontov, as I discussed here.
Folamh3
14d ago
nightcore version
Gen Z "listen to a song at the tempo at which it was originally recorded" challenge (this is impossible)
Folamh3
14d ago
I liked "Hot to Go". It inspired a similar reaction as when I heard "Gimme Chocolate" by Babymetal: you can't help but smile at the sheer audacious silliness of the thing.
Listen to the radio. The only reason I've heard Chappell Roan's music is because I recently started a new job in which the office has a radio tuned to a local station playing chart music all day.
Alternatively, join a gym and don't bring your own Airpods. You will hear a lot of chart and dance music.
Or have female friends (this is how I first heard Olivia Rodrigo).
Folamh3
14d ago
All of this is premised on the assumption that Biden is capable of exercising any agency of his own. One would like to imagine that the person or people who were calling the shots in the last two (three? four?) years have some kind of investment in Biden's legacy and might hence be motivated to do something nice for which Biden can get the credit, but I don't know if we have any good reason to believe that's the case. Probably the people calling the shots are some anonymous DNC staffers who have more important things to worry about, like making sure everyone knows that that Orange Man sure is Bad, huh?
Folamh3
14d ago
One of the comments on the video:
Video: Graphic Design is my Passion
Lyrics: Sapphic Desire is my Passion
Olivia Rodrigo
I thought that song "Vampire" was alright, if a bit melodramatic. Can't imagine getting that bent out of shape about some dude you probably didn't even have sex with.
I’ve liked Charli XCX since 2013 and she’s only gotten better since
There were a few songs off the How I'm Feeling Now album I enjoyed, but I found the marketing campaign surrounding brat so annoying and inescapable (not least of which the "Kamala is brat" "endorsement") that I'm refusing to listen to her as an act of protest.
I've been watching Yahtzee's video reviews for a decade and a half, he's put me on to so many great games, but I've never read any of his fiction. Is it any good?
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