SwingingTheLamp @ SwingingTheLamp @midwest.social

Posts

5

Comments

1,083

Joined

2 yr. ago

It's even sillier when you realize (hah!) that -or came from Latin, and -our came from Old French, and both had been used interchangeably in English for at least a century when Samuel Johnson decided to use -our in his dictionary, and Noah Webster decided to use -or. So Britons and Yankees are equally (in)correct.

Personally, I'd go with the idea that the Democrats are the ones who fight for brightly-colored warning signs, guardrails, and PPE for the operators of the orphan crushing machine.

I've said this before, and I'll say it again: I believe in due process, so any Republican making a lot of noise about protecting children should in, a just world, at least be probable cause for a search warrant.

It's the New York Post, though. 100% intentional.

A rainbow appearing in the sky over Dublin on the day that Ireland voted to legalize same-sex marriage? A tornado destroying the house of Rep. Joe Harding, who authored the infamous "Don't Say Gay" bill in Florida?

I don't know how much clearer He can get!

Different strokes for different folks, as they say. That's precisely one of the things that I value most in social media— exposure to people and ideas outside of my day-to-day experience. I don't understand the femcel memes, or c/ich_iel, for example, but that's what makes them so fascinating. I was thinking of leaving Reddit even before the API fiasco, because the feed changed daily while not changing at all. I didn't find it valuable to see the same breaking news story posted to 15 different subreddits, nor the same "Men of Reddit: Do you pee through the underwear flap, or over the waistband?" question posted (literally! I watched and counted one day!) every 5 minutes. I didn't replace Reddit with Lemmy, I just stopped using the former when Apollo stopped working. Lemmy drew me in over the course of a couple of months. It's quiet, but you can have conversations instead of shouting into the void.

For me, Lemmy is far more successful.

Brilliant! Just put your pillow in the wash on spin cycle while cooking your risotto to save a lot of effort.

The right wing propaganda machine had been at work on Hillary since even before Bill was elected President in '92, so that could certainly explain it.

That just makes it worse! (From my point of view here.) People behaving reprehensibly because an authority figure asked them to do it? That's just the Milgram experiment, but without any apparent hesitation!

I'm saying that more people voted for Hillary Clinton than her male opponent, which flatly contradicts the claim that people wouldn't vote for a woman. But let me ask the question: If the GOP nominated Kristi Noem as its candidate for president in 2028, would you rest assured that she couldn't win because of misogyny?

The country did vote for a white woman the previous time: Hillary Clinton won the popular vote.

EZ Dock is the brand name, and the company even markets its products for use as floating work platforms.

EZ Dock Floating Work Platforms

The manufacturer markets them for carrying equipment.

It may not be the most poetic, but I'm partial to the word holdfast, which is a biological structure that anchors organisms to surfaces. "Hold fast" was an order given to sailors of yore, telling them to grab tightly onto the ship to avoid being washed overboard in storms. The word suggests images of kelp, mussels, or sponges doing the same, determinedly holding fast against the waves, figurative and literal.

The Milgram experiment. The Zimbardo prison experiment. The bystander effect. At the end of the day, humans are just monkeys with smart watches. As social primates, it's really hard to be the one to stand up against the crowd. Our brains decide how to act based largely on the reactions of other humans around us.

It's disheartening.

They're called "snout houses," because the garage makes them look like they have a big, ugly pig snout.

Usually, the answer is racism. In the case of HOAs, though, I'm going to guess that it's probably racism.

ETA: I looked it up on Wikipedia. The answer is: racism.

I hear a lot of talk about guillotines, but I feel that wood chippers are the sleepers here.

What the hell is it with the Sterling Archer window borders? Y'know, where the active window is black, and the inactive windows are slightly darker black?

Sort of meta, but: Alienation.

Buildings plopped down in a rectangle with a standard layout—boxy building with door facing parking lot—with no ornamentation, no contextual clues about what's inside, and worst, no consideration or design dialogue whatsoever with the surroundings. It's like a city as Lego set, each building on its own bar plate, and they can be shuffled around in any order. Designers talk about design language, and this style says, "fuck you."

Food that just shows up at your door after ordering from an app, made by a "ghost kitchen." Possibly located in one of those boxes-with-a-parking-lot. No connection to other humans. (Or is that a tire distributor's headquarters? No way to tell.)

Company web sites with no information about who runs the company, or where it is, or much about its connection to the community. The product is probably made on spec by an anonymous Chinese factory, so even if you can talk to somebody, they're either in a contract call center serving hundreds of companies, or somebody not paid enough to care.

Speaking of low-paid lackeys, the fast food-ification of the landscape. They're getting rid of dining rooms, so your only human interaction is briefly through a window. If you're lucky. They're working on getting rid of that, too. Then, you're sealed behind a windshield, in cars that get more fortress-like every year, never seeing another human face.

A lot of people say that they're introverts and hate people and like it this way, but we also have a pandemic of loneliness and poor mental health , so...