Month: September 2018

Death from Below

Chill Regular-ass Post

This is terrible, but what were they thinking? Open water kayaking is not something for small kids. Most of them just can’t swim that well and they lose body heat so very fast.

Survival time for a 30-pound kid in 60 degree water is like 15 minutes. If you’re not near land, in other words, that kid is as good as dead if something goes wrong.

Also, most people never train how to right a kayak that’s flipped and they were probably unable to do so. It’s not easy, especially if you’re not a water natural. The kids would’ve had problems swimming after just a few minutes at that water temperature. Stupid, stupid, and the kids paid with their lives.

Bic

Chill Regular-ass Post

Goddammit, Jack Ryan “speaks Arabic” is not good enough. Very frustrating watching a show that is poorly subtitled by the creator of the show. None of the dialogue is integral that’s skipped (I think?) but being able to understand it would be much preferred.

I do appreciate a show that doesn’t have everyone just speaking English but I don’t speak Arabic and I definitely don’t speak Turkish, so those subs are kinda necessary.

Splodin’

Chill Regular-ass Post

Instead of dying in the boring and long, painful ways human typically die like cancer and liver failure, I think it’d be better if when it was your time your head just violently exploded.

You know, walking through the grocery store, ka-pow! Brains and skull everywhere. A blood fountain as your heart hammers out its last few beats.

“I guess it was his time,” says a cashier, having seen it all before. And then, into the mic, “Clean-up on aisle nine. Bring some gloves.”

No pain, just lots of bleach afterwards.

Rank prank

Chill Uncategorized

What the hell? This is not a prank. This is just abuse. I’ve got no love for Paris Hilton but you shouldn’t do this sort of thing to anyone. This reminds me of how my mom would “prank” me by telling me horrible things. This is one of the reasons I learned very early on to distrust all adults.

That the first question she asked after the “prank” was revealed is if the person who had fake-jumped was ok makes me like her a lot better.

Banning Fun

Chill Regular-ass Post

I haven’t seen this show yet. I might watch some of it because, having grown up in the South, I like shows that send it up.

This article got me thinking about something again that I was contemplating for a post the other day. The thought I had was that the left is essentially for banning anything fun. I don’t mean that they are explicitly supportive of this, but anything that is humorous or fun has to be transgressive in some way or other, and unless that transgression is very circumscribed the modern left is firmly opposed to it.

Gay and other critics don’t seem able to enjoy that nuance though, and I can’t really fault them for it. They’re stuck looking for brilliance in all the wrong places—formal coherence, good politics. Insatiable isn’t serving any of that. If it were, the show wouldn’t rapidly escalate from pregnancy scare to demon possession, or make one of the sexiest scenes of the show a baptism.

God, that sounds great. The modern left, though, doesn’t really do nuance any longer. The entire society is moving as a whole (both left and right) to authoritarianism so it makes total sense that the left can’t handle anything like this. And no one can seem to look beyond the surface of anything at all these days. Even supposedly-incisive critics like Gay can’t seem to have any more than two-foot-level view of anything.

No Freedom

Chill Uncategorized

There’s always room for more Miley on this blog.

(A singer is really good when there’s no reverb on the mic [often called a “karaoke mic” in the business] and if they sing really close in to the mic, which means that the voice isn’t deep in the mix and the singer is good enough to control her pitch and volume. Singers — good singers, anyway — get told to “eat the mic” because stage microphones like Miley is singing into here are passive, so the closer the source of the sound is to them, the better. But when you are a bad singer, it’s not to your advantage to eat the mic, because you’ll need to rely more on reverb, pre-recorded double-tracking, backup singers, and other techniques to make you sound better. Miley sounds great with no reverb and essentially a neutral mic and board. She has mega talent and perfect control.)

Freaking Spench

Chill Uncategorized

Ouais. The Arabic subtitles are also terrible and this is how terrible they are: I remember very little Arabic, but as I listen to more, more comes back, and through the show I’m like, “That’s not what she said!”

I could understand nearly all the French without the bad subtitles, except one dude who is apparently a fan of the mumblecore school of acting and I could not understand a damn word.

Note that these are the official Amazon subtitles, not some pirate effort. Who translated this? I wonder if it was machine translated from a written script. That seems likely.

ALM

Chill Regular-ass Post

Whatever assclownish megaton-level moron made Windows 10’s shutdown actually hibernate the PC needs to be thrown into a fucking black hole. A small one, so sphaghettification is guaranteed.

This means that when someone “shuts down” their PC and turns it back on again, the same problems are still present because it didn’t actually shut down.

Microsoft: When you think it couldn’t get any stupider, turn to us.

Karl (not Marx)

Chill Uncategorized

Mining some notes I made on my Kobo a while ago. What I love about Polanyi and The Great Transformation is that he does not ignore the cultural impact of economics and vice versa, as in this passage where he describes the true impoverishment of industrial dislocation:

England’s rural civilization was lacking in those urban surroundings out of which the later industrial towns of the Continent grew. There was in the new towns no settled urban middle class, no such nucleus of artisans and craftsmen, of respectable petty bourgeois and townspeople as could have served as an assimilating medium for the crude laborer who — attracted by high wages or chased from the land by tricky enclosers — was drudging in the early mills. The industrial town of the Midlands and the Northwest was a cultural wasteland; its slums merely reflected its lack of tradition and civic self-respect. Dumped into this bleak slough of misery, the immigrant peasant, or even the former yeoman or copyholder, was soon transformed into a nondescript animal of the mire. It was not that he was paid too little, or even that he labored too long—though both happened often to excess—but that he was now existing under physical conditions which denied the human shape of life.

Wish we could’ve preserved this tradition of economics where one actually strives to understand something rather than obfuscating it in math and jargon.

Inevitable

Chill Regular-ass Post

People are now keen on claiming that self-driving cars are impossible. They aren’t only possible, they are inevitable. It’s a tech that so many are working on, that is not intractably difficult, for which most of the worst problems have already been solved.

And it’s not that self-driving cars are great, miraculous tech, it’s more that humans are terrible, inattentive drivers, and nearly anything is better than that.

I remember when smartphones were “impossible,” when rockets that returned to earth and landed themselves upright were “impossible,” when gene editing was “impossible.”

A whole lot of things that people claimed were impossible are now common. Funny, that.

Bese

Chill Uncategorized

One of the most mystifying events I’ve seen in my life is people claiming that you can weigh 300+ pounds and be healthy.

For a human, that is just not a thing.