Loquat
3d ago
The question I have been asking since this whole "mystery drones" thing started: drones with video cameras aren't all that expensive, and are widely available to be purchased. Has anyone tried sending up a drone of their own to follow the mystery drones and see where they go?
Loquat
5d ago
I have seen both baconnaise and duckennaise advertised for sale, though I haven't tried either myself.
You can also make an eggless mayo with a spoonful or two of aquafaba, the liquid from a can of beans.
Loquat
6d ago
You might even want to try more than one, if the first one doesn't give you amazing results. My husband got okay results on semaglutide, then after several months tried switching to tirzepatide and it's doing a whole lot more for him.
Loquat
6d ago
I'm gonna tl;dr your post down to an analogy: the art world is solely composed of high-class restaurants with Very Serious chefs trying to Make A Statement with their food, and then Thomas Kinkade came along and invented McDonald's.
Loquat
8d ago
Oh, you were just talking about age cohorts, not society as a whole. Never mind.
Loquat
8d ago
Once the underclass starts dying off, the demographics of the surviving people...
Wait, what? How?
Loquat
9d ago
The individual would-be assassins [of Trump] just didn't get the kind of outpouring of support this guy is receiving.
I would argue that's mostly because they failed, and were immediately killed/arrested. Had someone managed to actually end Trump's life and then vanish (at least for a couple of days), that person would have been an absolute legend among the TDS types.
Loquat
12d ago
Allow me to reassure you on one point: landscaping fabric would have solved this problem for you for a year or two, but it breaks down over time and bits of dirt accumulate in the gravel on top, and before you know it your driveway is growing weeds again. I've got a gravel walkway at my house with landscaping fabric underneath, put in by a previous owner, and it does absolutely nothing to deter weeds now.
Loquat
12d ago
I decided to Google "ley lines" after realizing I've seen the term used in various fantasy works but never knew where it came from. Turns out the term was invented in the 1920's by a guy who realized that if you look at a map of Britain with lots of historic sites marked on it, it's possible to draw several straight lines that intersect multiple sites each. The original guy thought these lines were ancient trade routes, despite often going straight across difficult terrain, and including sites from totally different historic eras, so naturally this idea didn't really catch on. Then in the 1960's people picked up this concept, connected it to all sorts of stuff like alien landing guides and the ancient Chinese concept of qi energy flowing through the landscape, and now you have modern woo.
So to answer your other question, whether any ley lines intersect at the Finger Lakes depends entirely on who drew the lines and what landmarks they felt like connecting, or in other words it's all made up and the rules don't matter.
Loquat
15d ago
In China, it's real enough that the guy who was head of the Kong family in the 1930's was offered the chance to become Japan's puppet Chinese emperor (he wisely refused and fled) and later got to help draft the constitution for the Republic of China and was officially a senior advisor to the president of the ROC/Taiwan from 1948-2000.
Loquat
18d ago
Funny you should mention that, I was browsing Substack Notes earlier today and saw some rando complaining that Notes kept showing them porn.
(Haven't seen any porn pop up in my own Notes feed yet, tbf.)
Loquat
20d ago
I saw the film back when it came out, and I think it gets about as graphic as a mass-market Oscar-bait film can get away with, i.e. not very. From what I recall we see a doctor sit down to perform an abortion and we see someone revolted after looking into a bucket implied to contain an aborted fetus, but there's very little actual blood on screen.
Loquat
21d ago
Funny you mention that, before Election Day I did in fact see multiple ads promising that Donald Trump would not pass a national abortion ban. Clearly, his campaign recognized it as a vote-losing issue and took steps to try to remedy that.
Loquat
21d ago
My husband's on it, and he's pretty happy with it so far. No serious side effects, he's well below 300 pounds for the first time in many years, and there's a decent chance he'll get within spitting distance of 200 in another year or so.
Loquat
21d ago
I watched a lot of DS9 as a kid, but I default to imagining female-as-a-noun in a working-class black voice because it's in common usage among black people in my area (same goes for male-as-a-noun). Why this is, I could not say.
Loquat
26d ago
My immediate neighborhood had very few signs, but there were absolutely places within a 15-20 minute drive where loads of houses had signs for one or the other. Roughly speaking, the places with quaint, walkable mini-downtown shopping area had mostly Harris signs, the people who seemed like they frequently used their pickup trucks to actually haul stuff had mostly Trump signs, and nice suburban houses with big lawns could go either way. (Location: Pennsylvania)
Loquat
1mo ago
Upon reading the comments in the reddit thread, it seems that this meme is also a reference to Team Fortress 2 online multiplayer having a "team rebalancing" function that's intended to keep things fun by fixing imbalanced matches but routinely fails at evaluating player quality and thus often makes matters worse.
So the meme-maker was just going a bit wild with that analogy.
Loquat
1mo ago
Related: I went to a college with a high Asian student population, also around 20 years ago, and there was a long-simmering argument over the issue of Asian women dating white men (at a much higher rate than Asian men dated white women). The Asian women were most likely to defend this choice with some variant of "you don't own us", but if pressed or in a spicy mood they would also point out that white men almost never expect a 10/10 submissive housewife, or have a mother who expects a servile daughter-in-law, whereas a non-trivial percentage of Asian men do.
Loquat
1mo ago
IMO the best thing to do to clear up fluoride confusion is to remind people that it is a naturally occurring mineral, and therefore many water sources naturally contain some, without any human intervention. I suspect most of the anti-flouride sentiment would go away if people understood that, and the language question of adding vs topping up wouldn't make much difference.
Loquat
1mo ago
I've been thinking about this as well, Joe Rogan has had a number of left-wing guests over the years and he's sympathetic to many left-wing ideas but he's "part of the right-wing misinformation machine" because he'll listen to right-wingers too. So a "liberal Joe Rogan" would have to: (1) never speak with a known right-winger, (2) immediately push back on any guest that happened to express a right-wing idea, (3) never utter or express sympathy for any right-wing idea himself, and (4) pay close attention to the ever-evolving liberal orthodoxy so he never accidentally violates rules 1-3.
There are guys with podcasts right now who follow all of these rules, but I seriously doubt anyone of that ilk could build a mass following among apolitical men the way Rogan has.
Loquat
1mo ago
Yes, it would be nice if reporters interviewing anti-flouride activists would ask about this. Genuine, hard-hitting reporting is a rare and valuable thing in all sorts of fields, alas.
I do continue to wonder, though, whether your scenario of a town official deliberately adding unnecessary extra fluoride in exchange for kickbacks from the fluoride company has ever actually happened anywhere, and if it did happen how the situation was handled once it became public knowledge.
the claim that we "add" fluoride to the water supply is a lie.
And this is an extraordinarily bad idea. Any time you take a statement which is clearly true in vernacular speech, and try to tell normies it's false because Science(tm) has assigned a different definition to one or more of the component words, you are lowering the general public's respect for science and scientists.
Loquat
1mo ago
Is this an actual thing that happens with any regularity? And even if it is, I'm skeptical that trying to teach the public scientific jargon will fix it.
A much better solution for Dr. Nerd-boy here would be to use vernacular language like a normal person instead of like an idiot. "The town government is wasting money adding extra fluoride to the water supply, when our water already had enough fluoride in it naturally!" Boom, now everybody understands what he's talking about.
Loquat
1mo ago
Just a personal data point: I was leaning Harris when she was first selected, but she lost my vote when all the neocons from the Bush administration came out of the woodwork to endorse her, and she started doing joint events with Liz Cheney. I'd be curious to know if that decision overall helped or hurt her, though I suppose we'll never have hard data on it.
Loquat
1mo ago
Only in the extremely broad vibes sense, in which overly intrusive bureaucracy micromanaging your life "for your own good" is generally associated with the left, and is routinely denounced by the right. Also it happened in the state of New York, which has a Democrat-dominated government at present (governor plus supermajorities in both houses of the legislature).
In the interest of countering selection bias, I'll say we haven't had much this season, and our oldest kid is in elementary school, so we're exposed to everything that goes around. Kids have had some mild sniffles and coughing for a couple of days and I developed a scratchy throat today, but that's all so far. Husband hasn't been sick at all yet, though he'll probably catch whatever it is the kids and I have.
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