Year: 2024

Double Fault

Chill Sex

If a man can’t get intimacy in his relationship, where does this notion of “entitled” come from?

There is a huge double standard here, even if the poster seems a little incoherent. A woman gets huge, blaring sympathy if she says she wants more intimacy and the man in question is not providing it. The man is blamed no matter what the woman does because he somehow must have “caused” it.

However, if a man wants more intimacy and the woman is not providing this, then the man is also invariably blamed, often with the accusers knowing zero details. In their eyes, he also must have somehow “caused” this. In other words, no matter who is complaining about the dead bedroom it is always the man’s fault because he is the only one seen to have agency.

Now why is that? Why must the man always be wholly responsible for the woman’s emotional well-being, even in this context of sex?

I tell you what, we men get tired of all this emotional labor women force us to do. 😉

Dated and Undated

Chill Video, Video (other)

2004 McDonalds Chicken Selects Commercials.

Wow, culture is very static compared to how frequently and drastically it used to change. These ads are twenty years old but they don’t feel all that dated. If the resolution were higher that could be be right now.

Imagine watching McDonald’s ads in 2004 from 1984 (same time separation). Back then, 1984 already seemed like a different world.

So for comparison, here are McDonald’s commercials from 1984-1985. Wow, that’s a whole different, weird universe there1.

Even I had kind of forgotten, though, how heavily McDonald’s ads were aimed at kids back then.

  1. And I was alive in both eras, so don’t even argue here.

Prospero

Chill Rant

I was a reject misfit that had my ass beat pretty badly nearly every day for years. I made it out of that and prospered. Some people have it far worse than I did and still end up doing the same thing. It was probably a mistake to allow 14-year-olds to have opinions on the general internet because that’s where a lot of the, “Your life is ruined if you do one single thing wrong or if one bad thing happens to you!” ridiculousness comes from.

That, and Gen Z is actually really fragile in comparison to past generations due to helicopter parenting, smartphones and social media (the latter two are among the worst cognitohazards in history).

Least Bad

Chill War

If I’d rebooted this blog 3-4 years ago, I would not even have had a “War” category (if it’d had categories then). Now it’s one I post in frequently.

And that’s because war is coming. It’s already here, really. We just don’t acknowledge it yet. Now’s the time to forestall it worsening or if those dogs must be fully unleashed, to make it the least bad possible war.

But mostly, we’re doing nothing. And that pains me.

Chill Quote

M4 ‘eye’ receptors are believed to be exclusive to the eye. Their activation causes constriction of the pupil and accommodation for near vision. Transduction is via G-proteins and a decrease in the second messenger cAMP through inhibition of adenylyl cyclase.

Elisabetta Battista et al., Crash Course Pharmacology (Fourth Edition)

Mappy Yutts

Chill Rant

Listening to Covidians whinge just isn’t fun anymore. They remind me of those yappy little mutts that people drag around everywhere. You can’t for reasons of social decorum just punt those canine carbuncles into the sun, but instead are forced to endure their yipping despite nothing of value lost if the yapper in question were to be flattened by a tractor-trailer.

Though I don’t wish this fate on the Covidians, they are equally annoying when I encounter them. Yip-yap, shut ya trap.

Chill Links

New discovery reveals how diatoms capture CO2 so effectively.

Wired’s Attack on Privacy.

How Scientists Started to Decode Birdsong.

Plankton balloon to six times their size in newly discovered mode of oceanic travel.

Tourism and Erotic Imaginaries in Wartime Paris: French and Germans during the Occupation, 1940-1944.

Trump FCC Pick Thinks Broadband Caps Are Great, Likens Them To Coffee Refills(?).

Ozempic shows promise for alcohol and drug addiction, study finds.

This Race Is Kamala Harris’s to Lose. Here’s Why. It will all come down to turnout. And that, I predict, will mean a Harris-Walz victory.

Six slain hostages were likely Sinwar’s shields, lived for months on energy bars.

Why is New York Times campaign coverage so bad? Because that’s what the publisher wants.

The Vanishing of the Internet.

Finally, Trump’s Derangement Is Breaking Through in the Media.

Ukraine’s first frontline female commander on war, grief – and her hope for the future.

The electoral college has become a gun held to the head of US democracy.

Rule-of-law is incompatible with a sharply polarized two-party system.

Crises at Boeing and Intel Are a National Emergency. Indeed they are.

The Very Real Scenario Where Trump Loses and Takes Power Anyway.

Wave Byebye

Chill War

I’m not bothered by that much, really, but it’s disturbing to see Russian troops passing the charred and dismembered bodies of their dead comrades, heading into another pointless, doomed meat wave assault where all or nearly all of them will be killed for absolutely nothing.

To Russia, those people aren’t worth even as much as a $500 drone. Something is deeply wrong in the Russian soul. Deeply, deeply wrong.