Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
Burnt out, over the hill autistic IT nerd and longtime SSC lurker
User ID: 3219
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
6d ago
One of my favorite snarky comments about US foreign policy in the Middle East during the early teens went like this:
So if I have this straight, we've armed ISIS to overthrow Assad in Syria because he's a partner with Iran, and we're seeking Iran as a partner for doing air strikes to overthrow ISIS in Iraq, and now we need to partner with ISIS to overthrow the Iranian-puppet insurgency in Yemen.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
8d ago
Ooh, nice, that sounds lovely and the flavor profile definitely checks out. Indian and SE Asian coffees in general are bigger on the nut and spice notes and have an earthy taste to them that most other coffees don't have. They're excellent coffees, especially for those that enjoy darker roasts. I actually thought a lot about getting an aged Sumatran in my latest order (yeah, I caved, what can one do?) but I'd already loaded up on a bumper crop of good looking Ethiopian beans so I chose a different Indonesian coffee instead. Always good to have some Asian coffee in the mix for variety!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
8d ago
Coffee Haters Club
I'm in the process of trying to roast and drink my way through all of my older coffees as well as testing my olfactory senses versus the expected flavor profile of said coffees. This week's roast is a Rwandan coffee from yikes, several years ago. My first go 'round, I got a lot of "generic good pourover" flavor initially, that mellowed into a more generic sweetness with some citrus tartness on the side. I wondered to myself if my senses were dulling or, more charitably, if they were just a little rusty. The next day, when preparing my coffee, I realized that I had my water temperature set to 200 degrees, which could definitely flatten the more delicate flavors, so I dialed it down to 195 and had my second cup. The initial flavor mellowed more quickly, of course, and again the sweetness was there right away, along with the citrus and some tantalizing fruitiness that I couldn't put a finger on. Okay, time to face the music and compare my own tasting notes to the notes of the cupper and... "base sweetness of sugarcane juice, spiced Darjeeling tea aroma, fruited hints, lemon citrus accent, acidic impressions, elegant pourover."
Huh. I guess my olfactory nerves aren't so badly calibrated after all!
Next up is likely to be an old Guatemalan that I never got around to trying before I disassembled my roaster for cleaning. I'll be doing the same blind tasting and hopefully I'll still be on the same page as the cupper!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
12d ago
I let a MathCounts club nerd-snipe me
Wow, I had no idea that was still even a Thing!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
13d ago
Ground State: Expeditionary Force Book 19 by Craig Alanson; I ended up wanting his brand of humor again more quickly than I'd anticipated!
Come to the dark side, we have cookies optimize All The Things, even the eating of the fruit!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
22d ago
Don't forget that in size and weight they're virtually indistinguishable from a quarter. Were they larger and heavier, like a fifty cent piece or a British pound, I expect they'd be more popular.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
24d ago
The 2016 commons "breaking down" didn't come out of nowhere and didn't start in 2016. It comes out of many reasons, among them a long line of short term decisions being made to solve problems and kicking the can down the road; even a relatively short term view that only considers federal governance alone can be dated back to the LBJ Great Society, the chain from Ford-Carter-Reagan, Dubya 1, the Clinton corporatization consolidation years, Dubya 2's action and then the Obama-era expansion of the surveillance state. That's without talking about money, the economy, the labor and mortgage markets.
Somewhere, FDR is pulling a sad Pikachu face because he was left out of this line.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
25d ago
People don’t want to do things unless they’re ideal.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
26d ago
Started reading Philip K. Dick's Ubik last week.
Let us know how you like it? It's one of his works that I've meant to read but have yet to actually get around to reading...
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
26d ago
Yeah, that sounds like my kinda story. I'll have to check it out!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
27d ago
We haven't! Do I need to check it out? Fair warning, I might read book 19 of ExFor first, but then again, Convergence book 5 is still close enough in the rear view that I might not be ready for more Craig Alanson.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
27d ago
Small Town Horror by Ronald Malfi. Side note, I'm happy to report that the end of book 7 of the Twelve Miles Below saga was much more satisfying than the end of book 6!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
29d ago
I second this so, so much. Nothing better than a nice big LAN party with a good FPS for all night mayhem!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
I think you're both bringing up good points, and I'd say that the conversation points towards the ultimate speciousness of elderly care being explicitly designed to be a wealth transfer, POASIWID notwithstanding. I also have painful personal experience in this area and quite current as well, and as a result I have another half-formed effortpost on this subject which this margin is too small to contain, but factor in the pieces that have been brought up, throw in how much more difficult it is to have someone home round-the-clock to watch grandma/grandpa in this age of both spouses working being the norm, as well as how expensive round-the-clock care typically is in general, and add in a side of all of the family dysfunction typically coming out to play and that'll do for the general outline of said post, with a conclusion of eldercare being classically and necessarily a wicked problem, especially given that healthcare in the US is, in and of itself, another wicked problem.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
I was a history major in college, and one of the biggest problems I have with non-professional pop historians (Howard Zinn, Jared Diamond, etc.) and academic historians who actually have formal training is that the former tend to invent just-so stories and compile evidence to support them, as though the truth of a thesis is determined by the number of footnotes. Meanwhile, there is so much counter-evidence available to anyone who does even a cursory investigation that the entire thesis can be dismissed entirely.
Following up Guns, Germs, and Steel with a just-so story of the precipitous decline of Easter Island in Collapse which conveniently ignored, y'know, the obvious and terribly destructive germs part, was peak Jared Diamond.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
IMAO, this sort of thing is where, "the past is a different country," saying gets its teeth. Again, IMAO and all that, but the barriers to tech were higher and different, the PMC hadn't yet metastasized, kids could still fail out of public schools, colleges were not yet degree factories with extra steps, TFR decline wasn't quite a Thing beyond the Doomers, the American monoculture had yet to be fractured by the internet, Western ideology seemed ascendant in the larger world, Social Media had not yet been unleashed upon the world, etc. etc. etc.
Somewhere in my head there lies an ill-formed effortpost on these themes. If I can keep myself from getting too turgid in my prose, I may even write it and perhaps post it.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
I'm actually between books at the moment, having just finished Desperate Measures: Convergence Book 5 by Craig Alanson. I'll probably be starting Path of the Mitespeaker: 12 Miles Below Book 7 by Mark Arrows tonight.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
My favorite part of that trial was when, after the FBI denied having a sniper in place, the defense produced internal FBI communications talking about the sniper and suddenly they were all, oh, you mean that sniper! Whoopsie!
My wife knows a bit better but I think her deal is that she mostly feels like she lives in a sick society and wants to escape to Europe
In this respect, my wife has similar feelings. She now agrees with me that America is in decline and she, too, would love to live elsewhere. (ETA: I'm not necessarily so sanguine on the living elsewhere bit.) However, she has never been out of the country and has yet to experience actual culture shock, let alone any sort of negativity or hostility directed at her for being American.
I get it. Even though she mostly avoids media (we're the usual no TV in house, no subscriptions, she minimizes screen use herself) she still can't help catch politics contagion from her friends and the few times a week she checks FB to see what her local mom's affinity group is up to.
And in this respect, we differ. My wife is informed by her reading of NPR, which she does daily, and her political podcasts of similar vein.
The irony in all this is my goal in my posts to socials isn't to own the libtards! My goal is to try to help people see that we're not living in a fascist dystopia. Billionaires don't matter! Things are improving! The economy is relatively good! Don't believe the hype about declining longevity and health care! Stop despairing all of the fucking time.
And people get so mad about it. (emphasis added)
And this is precisely the part where long experience has taught me not to engage.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
Will do! I'll likely be doing another Coffee Hater's post after I've done a few tastings of my first Gesha roast, and although I told myself that I was going to roast down my stash of green beans before buying more, Sweet Maria's has what looks to be a bumper crop of African coffees and several of the Ethiopians in particular are calling to me...
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
I had to stop posting about this stuff to socials because people were contacting my wife and asking her if she was safe with me.
So I'm not a Social Media bird, and I've talked about this before, but my experience has been incredibly similar in the sense that my wife sometimes checks in because she's afraid that I might be an in-the-closet Fascist White Supremacist Neo-Nazi (and I'm talking genuine uncertain fear here, not performative) because in the past, I've had the gall to point out existing precedents engage in whataboutism sometimes when she wants to conversate in the vein of, "ZOMG Trump/The Republicans did a thing! Outrage!"
Just started re-reading John Dies at the End by Jason Pargin. I scored the sequels on sale for cheap from the Kindle Bookstore and it's been so long since I read it that I really don't remember much of it outside of my enjoyment of it.
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