wjrii

3-2-1 Mug Cake is a thing, and it's pretty decent. That said, assuming they're real food at all, none of those three things on the cover ever saw the inside of a microwave, LOL.

For it’s not so much that it’s going to be an unnecessary call than that the person just doesn’t want to collect their thoughts or (worse) doesn’t want to say what they want in writing. It’s usually going to be some ask that’s completely apart from anything I’ve been thinking about in the past 5-10 days, might be sketchy, and they apparently seem to think it’s urgent and/or nuanced, yet they’re just going to completely hold out on providing context and time that would let me be prepared for whatever pile of shit they’re about to dump on me.

If you can’t communicate it to me in a slack message or two, there’s a very real possibility that either you don’t know what you want, or that I can’t help you with it on a cold call.

It's an interesting phenomenon. I think it really hit a family-pleasing sweet spot where it's some kids' favorite, including more boys that one might assume because stabby-stabby, but generally it's a pretty good "introductory text" for exploring intergenerational conflict, self-acceptance, and squaring the circle of conformity vs individualism. The visuals are very of the moment and professionally done; it reminds me a tiny bit of the spider-verse movies in that sense. It's all done well enough for most parents to tolerate replays. Then the songs are legitimately very catchy and sort of took over the role of the "summer jam" this year, prompting yet more rewatches, and finally Netflix in general has leaned into a lot of Korean media, meaning that aspect, watered down though it may be, probably helped with global popularity.

I dunno, kind of like some of the second- and third-tier Pixar and mainline Disney stuff, it's not that it's great, but a huge number of potential audience members collectively agreed it was very good. You can certainly argue it's not even as good as that, but it did the numbers it did, even faced with the fact that it launched sort of semi-quietly, to the point where they had no merch ready for months and had to slap together the singalong to get it a quick theatrical run.

I can literally feel myself deflating when I get these, like it's a huge involuntary sigh accompanied by the classic heart-sinking...

...followed by a deep breath and a "Sure! 👍"

Both things could be true.

7-11 theoretically already has it for their app; you scan with your phone and pay with Apple or Google Pay. The only thing is that you're supposed to sort of wave the completed transaction at the cashier as you go, but the only reason you'd really need to use portable self-checkout is if the cashier is busy, and when they're busy they don't want you breaking in line or to stop what they're doing to see that you're showing them a plausibly legitimate checkout screen.

In a completely, utterly, definitely unrelated story, I got accused of shoplifting by a 7-11 cashier the other day.

It drives me nuts that I can't quite tell if that piece of tongue-in-groove (LOL) flooring is white oak, possibly varnished, or some sort of tight-grained pine.

Also, apparently Professor Hoadley was a really nice guy and very well respected.

I looked into his worldview a bit when the San Francisco lecture happened, and it is deeply, deeply fucked up.

There is a certain allure because it's based on a well-known philosophal thread of "mimetic theory" (filtered through a then-contemporary Nazi apologist, and Silicon Valley hubris) and for all it's "Anti-Christ" talk, it doesn't even 100% require a supernatural belief system, just the commitment to one as an outward-facing and socially enforceable ideology. What makes it so fucked up and dangerous is the almost Foundation-like orthopraxy that it demands.

The gist, IIRC, is that humans want and need something stable to copy from to know what they want, and that modernish (like in the last 300 years) interpretations of major religions, but particularly Christianity, have landed on a perfect balance of giving people boundaries, aspirations, and just enough freedom to keep society going. Therefore, the only way to avoid falling back onto outmoded and dangerous practices like mass scape-goating is to get huge blocks of people invested in that worldview. Ideally it would be the whole world in one ideology, but their nod to reality is to concede that three or four could survive in tension if they're geographically insulated.

So moving onto the Antichrist, anyone or (importantly for the Thiel version specifically) anything that poses an existential threat to this orderly control of society risks chaos and a descent into destruction and with a Christian context can therefore be comfortably called the/an "Antichrist." If Palantir watching literally everyone and everything means the enforcement of "western" values on western populations, then opposing that is dangerous to humanity and therefore a threat. Fighting that threat is a crusade, and even justifies the interim use of tactics that will ultimately be rendered moot by the imposition of a religio-philosophical order, such as mass scaepgoating and pogroms (coughjdvancecough).

Then, just as the classist cherry on top, remember that the supernatural part of this is all just to make sure that the stupids buy into the same worldview as the elites who will preserve society by controlling it and directing it towards self-sustaining power structures. So a Thiel can be gay, and a Thiel acolyte like Vance (we'll look past Musk for now, as I think they probably view him more as a lucky and useful idiot) can marry a Hindu woman from one of the viable global powerbases (though we're seeing cracks in that as current political realities weigh on him), and he doesn't even really have to believe any of the specifically dominionist nonsense he preaches, as long as the MAGA rubes do. What it does give them is a handhold where they can legitimately believe that they're doing what's best for the world by trying to dominate it, and that is fucking terrifying.

As an aside, Thiel's philosophical mentor would have been very nearly as horrified as most of us are by the conclusions he's reached, and this is why you don't let the software engineers think they're the only ones who are smart, simply because it's harder to do calculus than write a B+ Freshman essay. If Girard is "love each other or we all face ruin," Thiel is "love each other, or we all face ruin, but you're too stupid to love each other unless a brutal technostate surveillance apparatus enforces adherence to a love-based religion."

Luke had a pretty decent support system, despite some serious alienation issues to work through, so a hand and part of the forearm were sufficient.

I hadn't actually looked up any numbers on the RAM shortage. Less than a year ago I got 2 8GB sticks of no-name PC3200 DDR4 for less than $25. I didn't even really need it for my use-case, but it was so cheap that "why not" felt like a perfectly viable reason to upgrade to 32GB total. Six years ago I got the original two-pack of 8GB sticks for $75. Now that same amount of old-ass DDR4 would be $90-$100. Jeezus. No upgrades for me for a while.

If it's Americans and an airport gate, it's partly because our boarding groups are large and somewhat topologically random due to various statuses, and carry-on restrictions are loosely enforced. Therefore, being at the front of your herd can mean the difference between getting the overhead space that should be for your seat, as opposed to something that several seats away that's a pain to get to. As boarding continues, it can determine whether you get overhead space at all.

Are those basically fountain-pen-ink rapidographs? I don't follow drafting pens all that much. Looks like a nice set, regardless!