Uriel238 [all pronouns] @ uriel238 @lemmy.blahaj.zone

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2 yr. 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.

PS: If anyone is actually connected to a studio or cinema production team or whatever and wants to turn this notion into a script, do so with my blessing. It's just an idea, and I don't like IP anyway.

I've personally lost all sense of masculinity. There's no positive feature I would think men should have and women not, or vice versa.

To me gender norms feel weird and toxic, except there are folk in our trans community that get a lot out of representing as their gender.

But telling people they rock is a good thing I think. 2025 is expected to a lot of bad days.

It improved this fellow's day.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah, when I was fifteen, I came to realize parents and teachers alike were willing to pile busywork on me in order to retain the position that I needed to work harder. I just quit right there, which turned into a PTSA crisis.

Curiously, when I got into clerical work, I noticed the exact same methods were used to keep workers feeling inadequate, either to keep them from asking for wage increases and promotions, or as an internal political mechanism to prevent rising competition.

Oh yeah, our capitalist system works on forcing the working class to compete with each other to get a limited number of jobs (and the economy is managed in order to keep jobs scarce), which is a means of allowing companies to underpay their labor and clerical staff. It also allows upper management to abuse their labor pool while keeping them too afraid to lose their jobs to actually report the matters.

So the whole system is designed so that workers will forever be compensated for less than they're worth. When the communist revolution comes, we really do have nothing to lose but our chains. (And curiously, Marx predicted all these dynamics in Das Kapital )

Here in the states, leading-edge teaching scientists are reviewing the way we've been teaching math for centuries as super ineffective, and are now looking for better ways to teach our kids STEM concepts.

So if your kid is like me and enjoys math but finds some aspects and operations to impenetrable < cough > computing integrals < cough > there is definitely still hope on the horizon.

🤓

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.

/🤓

I love your dad.

Calling Olive Garden Italian food is like calling Taco Bell Mexican cuisine

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.

It is weird because we as a civilization believe women are persons and corporations are not. And sooner or later, Molotovs will be thrown in support of this notion, since silence is being interpreted as consent.

Whoops. That was my outside voice.🪀🪀💣🪀

Make up your own surname to assert dominance. Or go by your internet handle.

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.

So when Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Sorcerer's Stone came out, one of the tie-in toys was a vibrating Nimbus 2000, and I thought that was a totally bold move (knowing something about child development)

On one hand our moral guardians also thought it was a bold move, in fact too obvious and too spicy. All the unsold Vibrating N2Ks got recalled, and the ones left suddenly became super pricey on the secondary market.

Years later when I shared this story with my girlfriend, she had raised three daughters and noted versions of the bumble ball vibrates and is meant specifically for experimentation. We just don't want to market vibrating toys to tweens in the form of a broom you put between your legs. That's a bit too on the mark.

Most powerful man is a monarchist. Being a Nazi sympathizer is incidental and naturally follows.

Because hooking you up with a hot partner is way more ethical.

Apparently our religious moral guardians are terrified of the new Wicked movie.

I lived for seventeen years in a SOPH panhandle Victorian in San Francisco. It was there since before the 1906. All the ghosts lived there.