Even though I don’t care for Doctor Who, I almost want to watch the season(?) where Billie Piper is the companion, because I do care very much for Billie Piper.
Fuck, I could practice for years and not deliver a performance like those.
The first 10 on today’s playlist:
I don’t know the person’s real name, but I’ve found the first good writer I’ve ever discovered on Tumblr. There were quite a few good writers on LiveJournal I used to read back in the day, but most writers on Tumblr seem semi-literate at best.
as they brought it in, i remember how eerily silent it was. normal raccoons chatter almost constantly. they fidget. they bump around. they purr and mumble and make little grabby-hands at everything. even when they’re in pain, and especially when they’re stressed. but this one wasn’t moving around inside the carrier, and it wasn’t making a sound.
Read it. It’s worth it.
Now, my experience with rabies. At a family reunion, my cousin and his friend found a bat. It was docile. Tame. They played with it. I didn’t; I didn’t because I read books, and what I read in those books is that an unafraid, tame wild animal is not a normal thing and it probably means rabies.
When people tell you that book smarts and street smarts are opposed, that’s not really true. You need both. Books saved my ass on at least two occasions. This was one of them. My cousin and his friend had to get rounds of rabies vaccination shots and were at real risk for rabies. I did not because I never went near the bat, never got within 10 feet of it. Because I’d read books that told me exactly what was up.
The bat was tested at the University of Florida, and it did indeed have rabies.
That the Inuit (there is no one Inuit language, but work with me here) have 50+ words for snow, as the legend goes, is both true and untrue. It’s true in the sense that the word or words for snow can be conjugated and modified in the various related Inuit languages in a way that leads to more than 50 words for snow. Or more than 100 — but that’s because this language family works differently in the method it uses to assemble compound words and verbs than English does (in most cases). I don’t want to get too far in the weeds of it all here, but Inuit languages would be more like German than English.
For instance, we might say something like “the fast snow falling now.” In an Inuit language variant, that’d be all one word, like “fastfallingnowsnow.” So in the context of English, that’s all one word. But in its own context, that’s just a stem to which suffixes and affixes and phonemic modifications can be attached. In other words, the words in our hybridized generic Inuit language work fundamentally differently! They are incomparable in important ways to English.
Thus, that’s why I say that to our eyes and ears it seems like an Inuit language has a whole lot of words for snow but a speaker of the Inuit language would not, for the most part, see it that way.
I’m somewhat smarter than some people, and a lot smarter than quite a few people. But I think that advantages multiply, and the simple fact that I have more hours in my day than most is a huge advantage that makes a great deal of difference. I sleep four-ish hours a day, which means I can both goof off a lot more (vital for mental health) and learn a lot more. In other words, I’d be a lot closer to average if I couldn’t spend hours more a day reading and studying.
I have an extra 4-5 hours every single day as compared to most. Just genetics, I know, but it matters, all those extra hours. Also, I seem to be sleeping even less lately with no consequences. Over the last few months, I’ve slept about 3 hours a day on average. Probably just a natural side effect of getting older. And no, I don’t feel tired during the day and seem to experience no ill effects, just as always.
Even a lot of people in IT have very voodoo/magical notions of how computers and operating systems function. Regular people, I understand. But IT people? Just stay away from me with that.
My girlfriend told me that on the BBC this morning, the Netherlands was accused of not being as liberal as it once was since it has been denying some asylum seekers of late.
My thought on that was that the vast majority of the “asylum seekers” are North African economic migrants. Yeah, they’re not being very liberal by not wanting to wreck their entire society by allowing millions of young North African men into assault women and tear down their institutions. I’ll take that form of illiberalism any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
As much as I hate to say this, long term the only form of a society that perseveres might be a fairly conservative one. Liberalism as practiced in the West is too prone to allowing itself to be eaten away from the inside with clueless libs cheering it all on from the sidelines.
I have to say that “front hole” is the stupidest, most vacuously ignorant neologism I have perhaps ever heard. It makes me want to shit on the whole transgender movement with my back hole. I am guessing millions of people are having that reaction right now.
This is not how you help your movement. This is how you grievously — perhaps irreparably — harm it.
Obama would kiss any corporations ass because he would get money back later on. One of the reasons I find him disgusting https://t.co/6kCvjVVsTL
— James Marsh (@JamesMarsh79) August 28, 2018
I realized partway through Obama’s presidency that what he really cared about most was getting very, very rich post-office. That explains nearly all of his actions: why he was so soft on corporations, friendly to bankers, and even did not challenge Trump in the least when he left office.
It wasn’t about being gentlemanly or doing what’s best for the country. No, none of that. It was about making sure the money train was going stop at Cashing In Station reliably and for a very long time.