uriel238
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- Comment on Tfw you see two or more strongly monogomous, vegetarian African parrots in the genus Agapornis (family Psittaculidae) which are often kept as pets but they decide to fly away fr fr [Day 36] 3 weeks ago:
Keep food out for them (maybe with a selective feeder). They might come back.
- Comment on It would have been interesting 3 weeks ago:
Jesus with selfie stick and handsome white-guy filter.
- Comment on Do you want me to heat that up in the "Michael Wave"? 3 weeks ago:
As a veteran dumper of useful stuff in the street, this is missing a magical word:
WORKS!
This is especially important during the age of CRT monitors since mischief-makers are glad to assume otherwise and smash the tube.
This magic word makes stuff disappear twice as fast.
- Comment on Way to learn a language 4 weeks ago:
This is an old John Candy joke from Splash
- Comment on Caveman technology 4 weeks ago:
You’re quite welcome. I’m a whodunnit genre nerd so I love talking about it.
- Comment on Family chat be like 4 weeks ago:
Grandma gets it.
- Comment on Billionaire Larry Ellison says a vast AI-fueled surveillance system can ensure 'citizens will be on their best behavior' 4 weeks ago:
On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the wrappings of a cigarette Packet – [Big Brother was] everywhere. Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed – no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.
– George Orwell, Nineteen-Eighty-Four - Comment on Billionaire Larry Ellison says a vast AI-fueled surveillance system can ensure 'citizens will be on their best behavior' 4 weeks ago:
Want in resin pin form.
- Comment on Caveman technology 4 weeks ago:
The closed circle of suspects is a mystery trope that has commonly carried onto the slasher / thriller genre even though it’s not necessary. The purpose isn’t necessarily to limit suspects, but also to keep the victims within the killing box (Fringe examples might be Phone Booth or Speed ).
In cozy mysteries, this was a narrative device not just to box in the culprit and the victims, but also to make it clear to the reader that this is your set of suspects. (Mysteries traditionally were puzzles that the reader was supposed to be able to follow along and solve with the clues found by the investigator… though the authors didn’t always play fair.) The classic example is the bridge between mystery-thrillers and slashers, And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie, in which the trek to the island and an imminent storm really secures the notion that no-one is getting in or out. (Plot point: – 🤓 – Vera Elizabeth Claythorne, a PE instructor is quite fit and a strong swimmer, and might have been able to swim to shore and either outrun or weather the storm. She chooses not to, though.)
This whole exercise was started by a supercut of movie instances in which phone service failed, a narrative device to lock in the participants (killers, investigators and victims alike) and lock out anyone else, and this was during that societal transition as people adjusted from often being separated, to always having a connection handy.
My point for the exercise was to note that instant communication may make a circle leaky, but it adds bunches of cool new tropes, and doesn’t require turning off the phones (or the prior murderer trick, cutting the house phone lines.)
I have a different rant about the police, who, in mysteries go from clever and central to the solution to totally useless without the investigator. But in the 21st century, they can also turn your mystery into a dystopian horror as they SWAT into your home, kill all the minorities (and the dogs) and arrest everyone else for the homicides they committed.
- Comment on Go into debt if you have to 4 weeks ago:
Ima just leave this here, Climate Town’s discussion of Natural Gas (or what we call Methane. Fart gas.)
He explains how it’s a LNG is really fucking everyone over. Some points: ~ NG infrastructure is leaky and causes lots of non-point-source pollution. ~ Methane was supposed to be a transitional energy source as we moved towards renewables, but instead we’re leaning heavily on methane while China is securing all the science patents and materials for solar. ~ LNG is super inefficient. I think like 20% of it is used up in the liquification process, which is required for transit overseas. This is to sell it to nations abroad. ~ Since we’re really trying to get to renewables, everyone buying LNG is a jerk, and everyone selling it is also a jerk. ~ If even one of these supertankers has a rupture incident, it will fuck the Earth, and I’ll be sore as I watch wildfire ravage California, and by east coast buddies get hammered by hurricanes. Also we’ll be closer to permanent drought and then global famine. ~ Seriously, Methane is bad. NG infrastructure should be moved away from as quickly as possible. LNG is really extra super bad, and can ruin our kids’ futures.
- Comment on Caveman technology 4 weeks ago:
Around 2010-ish someone made a supercut of all the times in thriller cinema the phone service disconnected, since writers still felt the need to close the circle.
So I got the idea for a mystery / slasher / thriller called Cell Plan based on the family cell provider plans at the time, where groups were discounted more based on the size of the group.
A group of teens / young adults get a giant group cell plan right before their vacation out at Camp Scream. It’s a great plan with great connectivity, and everyone can even see where everyone else’s phone is on their GPS / Map service.
Moreover, the cell service never fails throughout the story, even in places that it shouldn’t work (no explanation, nothing supernatural, just that communication blackouts are not part of this story). People might even think it’s bizarre when they’re way out in Whispering Lake or down in the Bloody Mines, in places where service normally cuts out.
And then throw bunches of cell phone tropes that elevate the suspense: The first victim’s phone is found before her body is. One couple who sneaked off together get split up but take each other’s phones. Someone forgets their phone back at the cabin, which is then grabbed by the killer (who then uses it to get close to a victim). The killer is holding someone’s phone and stalking a running teen while another one sees them on the map and is giving directions.
Eventually, they’ll do all the open-circle things: Call the police (they’ll show up an hour or two later), call family, maybe even get help from an expert to get the power on again.
- Comment on Take Your Perks Where You Can 4 weeks ago:
My elementary school in Colorado toured a Wonder Bread factory and yeah nothing is tastier than warm bread fresh out of the oven. We stuffed ourselves with hot-dog bun defects.
- Comment on Beautiful stories like this just make you smile 4 weeks ago:
Here is an odd take:
In the CSI episode Ellie, The eponymous Ellie Brass is caught up in a situation, and Warrick is sent to work his forensic magic. In the end, after dealing with Ellie’s attitude throughout, Brass tells Warrick Ellie is the result of an affair, but she doesn’t know, and believs Brass is her bio-dad.
Ellie was a popular episode, so the character became recurring.
With the population so high, I’m personally not desperate to see my genes perpetuated. It was drilled into me that having kids in poverty is a really bad idea, also I never thought I’d be a good dad (though I get to do dad stuff for my adult stepdaughters and grandpa stuff for their kids so it goes.) For most of my life having kids was off my agenda.
Granted, my wife and I would still have to sort out matters of the affair. If relationship exclusivity was betrayed or communication was lacking, she and I would have to sort that out.
And yet If we were in a position to raise children, then it wouldn’t matter to me if the genes were mine or someone else’s. I would still be a dad or at least a participatory adult involved in raising them. They’d grow up with my values and be witting and deliberate when they rejected them.
Of course I’m mad enough to be a regular at the March Hare’s tea room (🐰🎩🫖☕️) so hopefully I wouldn’t inflict that on them too much.
- Comment on Beautiful stories like this just make you smile 4 weeks ago:
Ain’t no use in calling home,
Jody’s on your telephone.Ain’t no use in going home.
Jody’s got your girl and gone.Ain’t no use in feeling blue,
Jody’s got your sister too.Ain’t no use in looking back,
Jody’s got your Cadillac. - Comment on I never realized this 4 weeks ago:
🤓
To be fair, even before the plagues, workers were way in demand (and hence every single adult that reaches majority, or youth that wishes to pretend). Throughout the agrarian age, societies suffered from a stark labor shortage, which is why even bastard kids were not too frowned upon, and even those with disabilities were sought for anything they might be able to do.
That all changed in the industrial age, when fewer people were necessary to run machines that did work.
In modern day, this is an issue with religious movements (cults whether dangerous or not) who decide to create their own commune. Either the intentional community has too few people to complete all the necessary tasks, or enough that renegade behavior (corruption, antisocial behavior, etc.) becomes a problem, since security details cannot help but become political.
/🤓
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
I love your dad.
- Comment on My favorite 4 weeks ago:
Calling Olive Garden Italian food is like calling Taco Bell Mexican cuisine
- Comment on I never realized this 4 weeks ago:
The reason women take their husband’s name is because they’re property, and rights to their person transfers from their father to their husband.
That’s it.
And right now (at least in the States, maybe in some parts of Europe) there are large far-right movements trying to return society to those days.
Find your crew or your fam, and have them give you your given name. Then choose your surname. Break free.
- Comment on I never realized this 4 weeks ago:
It is weird because we as a civilization believe women are persons and corporations are not. And sooner or later, molotovs will be theown in support of this notion, since silence is being interpreted as consent.
Whoops. That was my outside voice.🪀🪀💣🪀
- Comment on I never realized this 4 weeks ago:
Make up your own surname to assert dominance. Or go by your internet handle.
- Comment on Equal under the law or something 4 weeks ago:
Our ownership class and the institutions that obey them in favor of good governance are due full recognition. Should all acquaintance be forgot, the CIA extrajudicial detention and
enhanced interrogationtorture program was completely developed not because that’s a good way to get intelligence (it’s not) but because some rich people were sore about 9/11 and wanted to see Arab Muslims suffer, whether they were related to the event or not. (Compare and contrast price-tag killings in Palestine.)The escalation of charges against Luigi Mangione to terrorism are not due to any evidence, and in fact prosecutors and attorneys general have already weighed in that Murder One will be difficult to prove (NYC has a tightly constrained definition of M1. Assuming they have sound evidence linking Mangione to the crime – they may not – Murder Two is the the most likely conviction.)
It was noted on the day of the attack that certain hate crime homicides in NYC were ignored in news media. A fellow was shanked for not being sufficiently white by a white supremacist, and that incident is not being considered grounds for terrorism, even though the hate-crime aspects of the incident are already evident. What’s the difference? Mangione attacked someone of the ownership class, and they have influence enough to corrupt our justice system while we watch.
All I wanna say is that they don’t really care about us
- Comment on A love story 4 weeks ago:
Since when does the CIA care about ethics?
Though the majority of the cold war.
On both sides of the Iron Curtain, field agents played nice with each other, even if the folks they recruited from the locals might be expendable. But disposing of a problematic VIP by diverting them into other interests, or spooking them / bribing them to get lost or whatever was much preferred to killing them. Not just because it was a moral matter, but also because the blowback would be significantly reduced.
Actual James Bond deaths were reserved for moles (that is, double agents, plants in one agency that secretly worked for the other side). Notoriously, a CIA mole in KGB was discovered and the entire floor was invited to watch him fed feet first into a blast furnace. (CIA even then preferred a trick from WWII, namely stuffing the agent in a remote prison surrounded by snow and cliffs where they are instructed to keep sending information to their handler… as long as they want to keep living.)
That all changed after 2001, specifically the 9/11 attacks and the PATRIOT act. The first sign things went foul was the burning of Valerie Plame for political reasons. The kind of true-believer American patriots would never burn an asset for a cheap political retaliation. That’s the sort of thing that gets political loved ones disappeared.
But then CIA started the extrajudicial detention and enhanced interrogation program. (We have far, far better ways to debrief enemy agents, even those who are trained to resist. Sometimes cookies are involved.. Then CIA was burning villages with PMCs. Then CIA was burning them with Predator Drones.
So yeah, CIA lost the plot in the 21st century, though I can’t speak to the ground crew, the analysts and OG field personnel. And to be perfectly fair, CIA had to develop ethics by trial and error, which is to say making a lot of mistakes resulting in blowback, and they still tried to kill Castro, only securing his position running Cuba until he died. But with that history, it hurts being ordered to do black work after we’d long learned not to do black work and learned alternatives.
And then, it was recently revealed that the reign of J. Edgar Hoover is regarded by FBI as a shameful period, since Hoover used the bureau to serve political interests of the administrations rather than to serve justice, something FBI has yet to live down.
- Comment on A love story 4 weeks ago:
Because hooking you up with a hot partner is way more ethical.
- Comment on What's the game you play when nothing else sounds good? 5 weeks ago:
Galaxy’s Finest! 🪨⛏️💎
- Comment on What's the game you play when nothing else sounds good? 5 weeks ago:
Deep Rock Galactic is good even in singleplayer.
- Comment on Startup will brick $800 emotional support robot for kids without refunds 1 month ago:
You don’t pick an adult cat up by the scruff! But – at least for some videogenic cats – they will instinctively relax.
- Comment on Startup will brick $800 emotional support robot for kids without refunds 1 month ago:
A clamp (padded, preferably) on the scruff of the neck will temporarily brick a cat.
Try this only with familiar cats with whom you have rapport.
Don’t leave them for too long. A few minutes at most.
- Comment on ‘Do not pet’: Why are robot dogs patrolling Mar-A-Lago? 2 months ago:
That is the way that the police work in the United States yes.
We’re not talking about the police, we’re talking about the Secret Service protecting the President-Elect of the United States… at a golf park Not only that, but a park where people have to be super rich since access to Trump (leader of the GOP and now President-elect) is figured into the membership fee.
And while the police are happy to gun down the rest of us shlubs, they treat rich people like they treated OJ Simpson after he hacked up Nicole Brown. When they don’t and they actually shoot a rich person, then high-powered (blue-haired) lawyers come and sue the precinct and county for enough money to collapse the GDP.
But I do hear you. Police in the US are bastards to the last.
- Comment on ‘Do not pet’: Why are robot dogs patrolling Mar-A-Lago? 2 months ago:
That’s assuming I actually look like a threat, rather than someone infatuated with the weird robot dog.
It’s a golf park full of rich old people. I bet the dog-hecklers will come dozens per hour.
- Comment on ‘Do not pet’: Why are robot dogs patrolling Mar-A-Lago? 2 months ago:
The ones at Mar-A-Lago are unarmed.
My approach to the armed ones, particularly the tazer-equipped ones used by some US law enforcement departments, would be very different.