I’ve seen parents pushing toddlers around strapped into a stroller with a tablet mounted on an arm right at the kid’s eye level. Even if the kid wanted to stop looking at the tablet, they’d have a hard time. They’re basically Ludovico Technique-ing their own kids.
Spring:
I listened to an NPR story around Halloween about a young married couple in the early 1900s who moved into an old house.
Right away, the place is clearly haunted. Weird cold spots. Doors that are open that they know they had closed earlier. They hear footsteps sometimes in rooms they know are empty. They awake at night and are aware of malevolent human-shaped dark figures in their bedroom. It’s basically a laundry list of classic haunted house tropes.
They call in a priest, he says some prayers. Weird phenomena continue. House is still haunted.
They call in a gas guy. He fixes a leaky gas pipe. Symptoms go away. House is no longer haunted.
“I’m cutting back on all the online spaces that we used to share.”
“Okay, that’s your right, but it is going to be a hell of a lot harder for us to stay in touch, so if you’re okay with putting up barriers to contact, then go right ahead.”
“WhY iS iT sO hArD tO sTaY iN tOuCh WiTh OlD fRiEnDs As aN aDuLt?!?”
I was at my first gun show with an older friend who knew guns better than I did who I was following around to keep me from making any stupid decisions.
There’s a table with a sign for “Constitutional Carry,” where they don’t think you should need a special license to concealed carry a handgun.
My friend walks up to these two guys at the table, and says “Hey, just so you know, I hope you guys fail.”
The younger of the two kind of bristles, but the older one, a dude with a long white beard, says “Oh, why?”
My friend says “Because I worked in a gun shop for fifteen years, and I helped fill out more concealed carry applications than I can count and…” at this point she gestures around at the huge room behind us, “I wouldn’t trust 95% of the people in this room with any gun at all.”
And the old dude behind the table smiles and nods his head and says “Yeah, that’s a fair point.”
So anyway, that’s the day I bought a Ruger GP-100 in 357 Magnum.
I fully agree with everything you just said. My point was that if you bring so little to the table that you feel you’re in danger of being successfully replaced by a toy, then you need to do some self-improvement.
If you can’t bring more to a relationship than an appliance can, then you’ve got to work on yourself.
From Bag Balm:
Originally, it was used for only cows’ udders, but farmers’ wives noticed the softness of their husbands’ hands, and started using the product themselves.
The Creator would appear as endowed with a passion for stars, on the one hand, and for beetles on the other, for the simple reason that there are nearly 300,000 species of beetle known, and perhaps more, as compared with somewhat less than 9,000 species of birds and a little over 10,000 species of mammals.
-J.B.S. Haldane
“Things that are normal when you’re poor but ‘impressive’ when you’re rich.”
Walking everywhere
Eating simple grains
Hunting / fishing for food
Spending time with your family
It’s consistently interesting to me the way that AI image generators seem to grasp the basic concept of regular repeating patterns, but inevitably get bored and start going all wibbly wobbly. The keyboard and the striped shirt are great examples; it can tell that there should be regular, parallel groups of lines, but it quickly devolves into a dementia patient trying to draw a chess board.
Measuring solids by volume (mostly) doesn’t make sense.
This could be apocryphal, but I seem to recall hearing that a lot of American recipes got established during times of westward expansion, and that it made more sense for people moving out to the frontier to carry a measuring cup and a set of spoons that it did for them to carry a carefully-calibrated scale.
Hmm. Still no resolution on the egg sac question, though.
Image search duck penis. You will not regret image searching duck penis today.