Annoying

Soul Removal

Chill Annoying, Rant

It’s creepy, all the women with “Instagram face.” They’ve all gotten the same work done on their faces by the same plastic surgeons using the same techniques. And as a result, they all look like Stepford Wives clones. I’m sure men will get the blame for this as women aren’t usually forced to take accountability but trust me, ladies, men do not want this, do not like it, and wish you would not inflict it on yourselves.

The reason I was thinking about this is I saw a photo of Phoebe Cates from the 1980s. This photo, specifically.

She’s very beautiful but even better what makes her face distinctive hasn’t been sanded off, polished, redacted for plasticine pseudo-perfection. In other words, she still looks ensouled. She looks like a real person. And that’s so much more appealing than the power-sanded version of Phoebe would be. Why is this not obvious?

The Blight

Chill Amusing, Annoying

One of the strangest parts of getting older is all the things that people fervently insisit “could never happen” or “did not happen” that used to occur frequently and were just a normal part of life.

I think Gen Z is worse about this even than past generations because we’ve screwed them up so badly, enervated their very souls with social media and smartphone poisoning. They cannot help it because their brains have been blighted. But it’s still annoying.

Roaman

Chill Amusing, Annoying

Were kids in 80s actually allowed to roam around unsupervised, or is that just in movies?

It’s terribly sad that Gen Z folks post this same question on Reddit every few days. The world that was seems to them some impossible phantasmagoric dream.

But yes, almost all kids roamed wherever they liked in the 1980s after the age of 9-10. Not just those with “bad” parents. In fact, the “bad” parents back then were ones who didn’t let their kids outside much. Then that would’ve been considered at least near-abuse.

Deny it as many people do, but the fact is the world has changed immensely since that time. It feels very foreign now even to me and I lived it.

Have the Itch

Chill Amusing, Annoying

Ichetucknee.

It’s pronounced (not gonna use IPA here) itch-(tiny glottal stop)-tuk-nee.

I’ve heard tourists say:

Itchy-took-nee
Icky-took-a-nee
Icky-tuck-a-nee
Itchy-a-tuck-a-nee
Icky-toke-annie
Ict-toke-nay
Itchy-toch-nay
Icky-tock-nay

And many more I’m sure. When I lived near the confluence of the Santa Fe and Ichetucknee Rivers, every weekend we’d get 1-3 tourists asking where the river was. They never pronounced it right. Not a single time.

Also, nearly none of the YouTube videos or pronunciation guides on the internet render an accurate Ichetucknee pronunciation (as North Florida natives do). All of them totally butcher it. Whoa, I found one woman who gets it about 95% right! She says it as close to a native as anyone I’ve ever heard.

The rest are so bad. But if you ever get a chance, do see the Ichetucknee. It’s one of the most beautiful places in the world.

Masc Pol

Chill Annoying, Clowns

I’ve been made fun of by women way, way more often for liking supposedly non-manly things (like women pop stars, clothes, sweet alcoholic drinks, cooking) than by men. Like, it’s not even close.

That includes when I was in the 82nd Airborne Division, which is supposedly a bastion of manliness.

Women police masculinity a lot more assiduously than men do. In my experience at least. Many women treat that like a full-time job. Which they aren’t very good at.

Bubble Pop

Chill Annoying, Clowns

The housing market bubble is about to burst as badly as the Internet bubble.

It’s fascinating to read these comments from 2004, about a year-and-a-half before the housing bubble did in fact burst. Mostly to avoid legal prosecution, a successful propaganda operation was launched post hoc claiming that no one could have know there was a bubble, etc., so now the fact that tons of people (including me) knew in advance has been memory-holed.

About half the people in the comments are claiming that a housing bubble does not exist or that it was impossible to even have a bubble while the other half are claiming — correctly — that the market was a bubble ready to pop.

The level of denial in some is interesting:

And a refusal to believe that bubbles can even exist (common in clownish econ types too):

Deflection

Chill Annoying, Evil

Was I being racist by noting that our company has expanded our off shoring?

No. This talk of “racism” anytime anyone mentions offshoring is a reliable method used by the MBA perpetrators of this trend to shut down any discussion of offshoring and its negatives.

The same thing occurred when NAFTA was being debated, and when China was allowed “Most Favored Nation” trading status. Anyone who discussed drawbacks or harm to Americans was branded “racist” and excluded from the deliberation immediately. And it worked, because both the clownish left and the doltish right were united in this.

Go Play

Chill Amusing, Annoying, Clowns

Wrong. So wrong.

I was vastly ahead of my peers in kindergarten. I could already read at an eithth-grade level. I could tell time on an analog clock1. For this and other reasons, I was vastly bored in school from the start.

I’d also do all the worksheets for all the kids around me because I could complete them 100x as fast as they could. This was so we could go play more quickly.

Kindergartners are definitely not all at the same level. Important differences show up early.

  1. And had my kindergarten teacher get mad because I checked the time off her analog wristwatch. For some reason we weren’t supposed to know what time it was in kindergarten?