Loquat
21hr ago
This is more of a party drink since it makes a lot, but I'll throw it in anyway since it won me some favor when I first met my in-laws: Bourbon Slush. You'll need frozen orange juice concentrate, frozen lemonade concentrate, and some sort of tea with spices and orange peel such as Bigelow's Constant Comment, and bourbon. Brew three or four tea bags, mix in the concentrates and bourbon, maybe add some extra sugar if you like your drinks extra sweet, and re-freeze the whole thing. Thaw until slushy before serving.
Loquat
3d ago
What brand of kit? Woobles are more expensive than similar offerings from other companies, but they have extremely detailed step-by-step instruction videos for n00bs.
Loquat
4d ago
Star Trek Discovery had an event, which the beginning of Academy name-drops, where most of the galaxy's warp drives got wrecked, basically so they could have the Federation splinter apart and then slowly rebuild. Presumably that also did a number on all the Federation worlds that had relied on interstellar trade to keep their post-scarcity societies going.
And pickpocketing can still be quite useful if people carry around little electronic devices that grant them access to things, which is what we see the boy using it for.
Loquat
5d ago
Apparently holograms are their own "race" now? Also they got the guy who plays the Holographic Doctor from Voyager to come back, and they're setting up a mentor-mentee relationship, which makes sense if you can get past the absurdity of a holo-teen student existing in the first place.
Loquat
5d ago
Well, I watched the first episode of the new Star Trek show, Starfleet Academy (free on YouTube if you want to see this thing yourself). Overall I'd say the show seems morally confused. It opens with a sequence that suggests a major disaster has created a crisis where civilians are starving, $Main_Dude's mother got caught up in crime solely to avoid starvation, and jailing her (thus separating her from her son) was a moral wrong so grave that the captain responsible ended up resigning over it. But also, the son himself, age 8 at the time, was already a skilled con artist, pickpocket, and hacker, who expertly escaped immediately after his mother's sentencing, and one timeskip later he's in prison in his own right with a rap sheet longer than your arm, all of which would seem to suggest that he spent his early childhood being explicitly trained in the criminal arts, probably by the mother herself.
Naturally, the aforementioned captain has decided to fix her past "mistake" by tracking this guy down, making a deal to get him out of prison, and forcing him to attend Starfleet Academy, against his will and under protest, and the main plot of Season 1 will reportedly follow his efforts to find his mother, who broke out of prison herself during the timeskip but hasn't been seen or heard from since.
There are plenty of other things to point and laugh at with this show - a non-violent Klingon named Jaden, a hologram who was programmed to act like a socially awkward teenager and attend school instead of just being programmed with knowledge and maturity directly, the Dean of Students being played by Stephen Colbert - but that fundamental confusion just kills it for me more than anything else.
Loquat
12d ago
It's been observed for many years now that all manner of -shaming and even -isms become surprisingly acceptable among liberals when the target is conservative. I'm old enough to remember the more autistically literal online-feminist types getting upset over other liberals attacking Ann Coulter's looks, and getting generally ignored.
Loquat
1mo ago
The county building code put limits on the number of bedrooms based on septic capacity. [...] They found another county code that stated that a room was not a bedroom unless it had a closet.
Not the only only place to have a rule like that - my brother- and sister-in-law had to get their septic tank replaced several years ago, inquired whether they should get a different size, and were told that the existing size/capacity was correct for the number of closets in the house.
Also on the topic of septic systems, my own house did not come with a map of the extent of the leach field, which is an important piece of information when you want to put in fruit trees and a vegetable garden. The county website claimed they had such records on file for all houses constructed after the 1960's, and my house was built in the 80's, but long story short they couldn't find any record of my house having a septic system. I ended up relying on a location estimate from my elderly neighbor who moved in back when the development was newly built.
Loquat
1mo ago
My sister has several books by Jeff VanderMeer, and I've borrowed and/or read-while-visiting multiple times, and always regretted it. I think my most recent encounter, with the story "The Third Bear", crystallized for me the idea that I really don't enjoy the way basically every character in a VanderMeer story is guaranteed some sort of horrible fate, and I hope to start actually remembering this going forward.
Loquat
1mo ago
Ooooh, the original version without the extra CGI Lucas added in decades later? I'm already sold.
Loquat
1mo ago
Oh, there were several pardons that covered "any offenses against the United States" committed from Jan 1, 2014 up to the date the pardon was issued. Hunter Biden got one of those, and so did Anthony Fauci and Mark Milley.
Loquat
1mo ago
Skiing, particularly the downhill variety. My husband loved it in his youth, and has recently gotten back into it, but I never touched a ski until middle age, and I was never a particularly athletic person to begin with. I got to the point where I could successfully do the bunny slope from top to bottom without falling down, but I just don't enjoy it at all. My husband likes to compare it to going down a water slide, which I do enjoy, but a water slide demands no special skill or equipment to have fun, whereas skiing really does.
He went ahead and bought me cross-country skis and boots anyway, though. At least that type I can practice in the back yard, and potentially even use in a winter emergency situation.
Loquat
2mo ago
I'm sure there's some inside-baseball explanation for why it makes sense; semaglutide has the same thing going on, where it's Ozempic for diabetes and Wegovy for weight loss.
Loquat
2mo ago
That's not correct, tirzepatide is approved for diabetes under the brand name Mounjaro. My husband's been on it for about a year, officially to treat his type 2 diabetes, but he's been so successful with weight loss that his doctor has lowered his dose and warned him against developing an eating disorder.
Loquat
2mo ago
I believe Ta-Nehisi Coates has an anecdote from when he was a young man, new to the white-collar world, where basically he was ready to physically fight some guy who was arguing with him, and an older guy had to step in to talk him down and also explain to him that starting a fight in that situation would have almost certainly wrecked his budding career.
Loquat
2mo ago
Many of us prefer the improved airflow and sense of space that comes from leaving internal doors open, though, that's why we're all criticizing your plan.
Loquat
2mo ago
I'm with you. My house has this in the master bedroom, where the hallway door opens into the walk-in closet door, and with a closet it's not quite annoying enough to want to do something about, but I can tell I'd hate it with a more high-traffic intersection like a bathroom.
Loquat
2mo ago
It helps that they set up a romanization system, Pinyin, so you can read/write at a basic level even without learning any Hanzi.
IMO the Chinese grammar structure isn't too hard for a native English speaker, and there's no verb conjugation whatsoever, so there are some upsides.
I've been doing Chinese on Duolingo for a couple of years now, only because my husband (who's doing Spanish) bought a family membership. It's only been tolerable because I studied Chinese in a classroom setting several years earlier, and retained a lot of the basic grammar; I would absolutely not recommend Duolingo for a newbie. HelloChinese seemed good, although you do hit a hard paywall before too long.
Loquat
2mo ago
I attempted to have a gentler and simpler version of the "trans ideology is actually misogynistic" conversation with a woman I know recently. (Results inconclusive - at least she hasn't dropped me as a friend.) As best as I can tell, this is one of those issues where my pro-trans feminist mom friends are genuinely unaware there's a conflict of interest because the problems are simply not reported on by mainstream outlets, and most people aren't inclined to sit down and think through the full implications of, e.g. what happens when you abolish psychiatric gatekeeping and let anyone who says the magic words, "I identify as a woman" have full access to all women's facilities.
Loquat
2mo ago
I'm a big fan of Blue Lions myself, though you could probably chalk most of that up to Dimitri being chick-bait. One of these days I should really go back and finish that game, lol.
Loquat
2mo ago
I saw that interview, and I saw her with Colbert, and also with some other journalist whose name escapes me now, and man oh man this lady does not want to acknowledge that anyone could have any legitimate concerns about Biden. It's like watching the Monty Python sketch about the dead parrot - Biden's just resting, see, he's pining for the fjords!
Loquat
2mo ago
I would argue that whether society should protect people from their own bad judgement depends in large part on whether said bad judgement can profit others, who then have an incentive to encourage more of it. I see there's already a discussion of the newly widespread advertising for sports betting in this thread, and I've certainly seen other people publicly worry about the potential for gambling apps to ruin a lot more lives than casino gambling ever did. Idiots starting fights and getting killed doesn't seem to make money for anyone, and nobody runs ads extolling the benefits of waving a gun around in petty disputes.
Loquat
2mo ago
The college application thing not really hurting him, I'd chalk up to a loose combination of:
- People don't really care all that much about a one-time mistake from several years back.
- The application box said "African American", not "Black", leaving some wiggle room for non-black Africans to claim confusion, and for others to believe it.
- Brown Muslim is still generally regarded as a somewhat oppressed class, so it's not the same level of "stolen valor" that a white guy in his place would be guilty of.
Loquat
2mo ago
Generally baggy, or are you talking about the new "barrel cut" trend, which can range from just looking baggy to making the wearer's legs look like those of Yosemite Sam? Because apparently that's the new hotness, and it's at the point where even Target has barrel-cut jeans on display.
Hades 2, aka Hades for the Ladies. New weapons, more complicated between-run levelling, a whole new array of crafting mats to collect, and witches. Lots and lots of witches. Fun times!
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