What on earth is going on with every "which president was most likely to have done X?" having Grover Cleveland as a surprise strong contender?

Anyways, Washington, Jackson, Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, and Eisenhower all had military careers with battles and such, so like, I think all of them are solid contenders.

For folks unfamiliar with American history, George Washington basically started the Seven Years War, Grant was The Big General of the American Civil War, Teddy Roosevelt fought in the Spanish American War, and Eisenhower was The Big General of WW2. Jackson was notable in the War of 1812, which was a Napoleonic wars sideshow/American Revolutionary War 2.0 from the British being short on sailors to fight Napoleon and being like, "American sailors are basically British sailors, so it's cool for us to impress them into the Royal Navy, right?" and the Americans objecting to their citizens being kidnapped by the Royal Navy.

There is, like, zero chance Jackson and Teddy didn't each have a personal bodycount.

Every single one of them except Trump was active duty military. As mentioned above, along with Bush and Kennedy serving in World War II, and Harrison in Tecumseh's War and War of 1812.

Trump and his Bone Spurs got out of serving... but I wouldn't be surprised if he had murdered Someone.

Yeah, I realized last night that I somehow forgot about Kennedy's WW2 record and Harrison's Indian Wars record. And Bush #1's WW2 service record.

Like, bone spur boy seems pretty unlikely compared to all these military men with combat experience.

How the hell is William Henry Harrison at 1%? That's the obvious answer. Even the other military men that saw direct combat (didn't go straight to officer school or start in command positions) weren't involved in ground raids intermittently over 20 years. Were there other presidents who was campaign-nicknamed after a battle they actually fought in (Roosevelt is the only comparison, but that was like 2 weeks in country to address identity dissonance not a career)?

as someone who boarded on several Barbie movies I can tell you with absolute confidence that the entire crew I worked with would also. like to make Barbie vs predator

The next Predator movie should be set in the movie theater in which you’re watching it. Go to a movie and without warning an alien will hunt you for sport.

I'm so tired

For everyone who wants the explanation:

...also variant covers are once again alive and well and so is the speculation market (for both variant covers and major comic events like character introductions and deaths), meaning that her death is also probably partially fuelled by an attempt to appeal to that market. The comic industry has learned nothing from the 90s and we are all suffering for it.

This is off by just enough to completely frustrate me into writing something. There’s a bunch of little iffy details but the main thing is that it misplaces the real historical roots of Fox's rights to the X-Men, although the information around the impact of this and the looming ret-ret-con are largely correct. Variant covers are a blight, but they only became truly industry health threatening in and of themselves in the 2000s, especially starting 2010-12; before then they were one facet of the event minded beanie baby-mentality - get-cher multimillion-seller, speculator driven pumped up numbers and leave retailers holding the bag.

One notable detail: the meme itself mentions 1986 Marvel variant covers, when the 1986 thing it is referencing is DC’s Man of Steel number one (Marvel didn’t start doing this until 1990), the pertinence of which was being the first comic printed with more than one distinct cover solely aimed at moving more product. That is selling it short, though, as it is maybe more important as an event comic that is part of a broader push in which upselling units by leveraging the in-a-bind retailer's relationship to FOMO addled customers, not variant covers specifically, is what makes it the progenitor of what tanked the market in 1995.

Forget that, though.  If you want root cause analysis that goes back to this historical level, I think you have to start with the nature of Marvel to begin with.

The Merrill Lynch deal that allowed them to use 10 characters as collateral for a loan to start Marvel Studios in earnest (it already technically had been around for eight or nine years) was after Marvel entered a phase of aggressively trying to buy back the rights of as many characters as possible. Iron Man, Hulk, Black Widow, etc. had already been optioned out when the plan was hatched and had to be re-acquired before that deal closed. It’s no doubt that the reason this was doable was that by focusing on the Avengers as a bigger thing than the sum of its parts, the use of the less recognizable characters made it easier to recover rights piecemeal, but it's not like Tony Stark was just laying there.

that pencil necked old dude in succession will be looming, perched up in the set decoration like nose foratu

sheesh

The tale of Fisher Stevens has taken many weird turns over the years, but it is interesting this (3rd? 4th?) stage of his career has been so reliable if low key for him, playing essentially the same character in the Blacklist and Succession, while being a Wes Anderson rep player (the little Grand Budapest Hotel part was the spark that started this stage), in Hail Cesar, etc. I have thought about his neck for many years and, although the Hodgkin's lymphoma at 15 thing seems difficult to corroborate completely and his more recent hair choices/challenges make it easier to see now, I believe the golf-ball-on-tee thing has been there even when he was presaging the Apu accent in unfortunate makeup and cheating on Michelle Pfeiffer with a reported 17 year old on the set of the Super Mario Bros Movie (maybe even got him cast as a humanoid lizard, there). Early Edition was the beginning of his affable but grousingly critical side character work, but I don't think we got to kinda sus neurotic suit until Blacklist (I can't remember his Lost character that well).

Learning that part of Elizabeth Holmes' megalomania was making everyone read "The Alchemist" making me ask:

If you were an egomaniacal tech startup entrepreneur, what book would you foist upon your minions?

I feel like going proper obscure would probably be somewhat incompatible with success as an egomaniacal startup entrepreneur, so in the spirit of going with something fairly well-known like Coelho’s book, I’ll say The Name of The Rose.

youarenotthewalrus

Also a valid answer.

If I were Holmes, it would be Pale Fire. And I'd deny that there was any epistemologic ambiguity whatsoever. Forget Botklin, the book is about needing to explain a poem to stupid people who just don't get it.

The hilarious thing is that as late as the 90′s Boomers were still seen as the generation in the shadow of their WWII-vet parents, whom they selfishly spited by refusing to grow up. Bill Clinton was the first boomer president, literally and figuratively, he liked McDonalds and jazz music and that was enough for some of the old establishment gatekeepers of the time to declare him Unfit to Lead.

And I guess this has just passed from common knowledge to historical curiosity because I see not a hint of irony, or acknowledgement that this just happens every thirty years or so, from people who see boomers as a uniquely privileged, uniquely evil class in American history, the eternal oppressor in the way a 19th century Marxist might talk of ‘the aristocracy’. And yes those people are idiots, but sometimes you have to push back on idiocy.

The interesting thing about this to me is the epicycles. We have a tendency to break down generations in a certain way, but we have gone through a couple of rounds now where one group dominates, and the next group is an echo, and this is true w/r/t the presidency.

One thought experiment is to reduce the greatest generation down to a (as recently used) normal sized generational cohort (let's call it 19 years from 26) to create a slightly different frame. What this means is that you have zero presidents from the lost generation (if unadjusted, that generation still has only two, and both of them were World War II leadership), skipping from whatever was before the lost generation directly to the greatest generation. When Eisenhower (pre-lost generation adjusted) leaves office the next president is 27 years younger, and that only backslides so much. Then when H dub (the 7th consecutive greatest gen president, only 7 years younger than the first) lost to Bill Clinton, it was a 22 year gap skipping the silents entirely. Three of the (to date) four boomer presidents were born in the summer of 1946. That's beyond clustering. We snuck in a silent at the last minute, but that's anomalous in the number of ways.

I think this is related to the fact that we appear to round off these echo generations into whatever's convenient for the point that's being made. This gives these "main" generations a little bit more breathing room to go from young and energetic, attacking the world, to being dominant and oppressive. "OK, Gen-Xer" doesn't have the same ring to it, though I do still see occasional "we are letting the silents off the hook" articles.

Guy who got his news exclusively from John Oliver and refused to read actual news has started sharing Onion articles with additions like "reblog if you agree" or "this says a lot about our society".

Definitely going the add the "Last Week Tonight to complete divorce from reality pipeline" to my world view. Explains so much.

I have heard some things about Last Week Tonight being willing to ignore some studies that say something completely different.

I have to stress that this is a specific guy I know who is extremely politically opinionated but also refuses to look up topics that make him mad in mainstream media. He thinks The New York Times is transphobic for getting away from its Trump era mission of "moral clarity", so he cancelled his subscription. Before, he was subscribed but did not actually read it. He will not seek another source for something he got from YouTuber Shaun_Vids or Last Week Tonight.

Sometimes he would argue with people because they contradicted his sources. And when I talked to him about what the point of journalism was, he told me that it's good facts. It's not enough for a story to be true. It also has to be edifying, has to be educating, has to be true in the right direction.

He doesn't know anything about Ukraine, and he refuses to look it up.

The "Onion incident" was the straw that broke the camel's back. It's fair to say I used to know this guy now.

This is personal. I'm really fucking upset I lost a friend.

This was all a lot of preamble for @socialjusticefail, and maybe @siryouarebeingmocked and @takashi0. (IF ANY OF YOU REBLOG THIS VERSION OF THE POST, THEN WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU, DIDNT YOU LISTEN) Every time someone of you reblogs my posts, I get a lot of un-fun drama in the notes. I don't want to have to block all the idiots whop argue with your followers, and I don't want to have your followers use the opportunity to get the last word in, and I definitely don't want to get a bunch of people three or four steps down the re-blog chain from you go "yes, and" on a post and act as if I said far more than I actually did. I guess that's just the stress of having high-follower-count accounts pick up my personal post.

This post didn't even get that many notes, but y'know, it's the principle of the thing.

Last Week Tonight is fine to watch. But it's entertainment. It's not news. Even if it is news, if they manage to get s real investigative scoop, it's only news when you can get mainstream media with actual journalistic standards to pick up the story and fact-check it. Last Week Tonight does not run on the editorial standards of a newspaper, it runs on the legal standard of "what can we get away without losing face or being sued". It's closer to Saturday Night Live than to actual news.

And that's fine. It's not a problem if you watch CNN or read USA Today, which is the American newspaper I have actually held in my hands the most of all American newspapers, but never read online, because it's the newspaper of choice at breakfast buffets at cheap American motels, alongside Yoplait no-fat yoghurt, toast from a conveyor belt toaster, and these thick waffles you can make for yourself in one of those heavy hinged waffle makers with multiple degrees of freedom so you can flip the waffle halfway through.

Anyway, Last Week Tonight is not a problem, or a source of misinformation, and neither was The Daily Show. The problem is when people watch Last Week Tonight instead of news.

Over the last years, my former friend has had an increasingly loose grasp on what is going on in the world. At first I didn't understand why. And Last Week Tonight is not even to blame. It's the most news that's left in his media diet.

But you have to understand. This guy feels informed. It's not just news. When I contradicted him on specifcs, he sent me a link to an hour long PhilosophyTube video about something incredibly vague and broad big picture stuff. He would refuse to spend five minutes to read an actual local newspaper article or a history book. He trusted a breadtube video about Jordan Peterson (by a non psychologist) as a source of psychology knowledge over an actual into to psychology textbook.

After the "Onion incident" was the straw that broke the camel's back.

If the alternative is this, then please, do your own research, read papers, read textbooks, read Wikipedia if you have to, and don't just trust infotainment shows. But by all means, watch Last Week Tonight, and play Hogwarts Legacy. I'd be a hypocrite of I told you otherwise. You have my blessing to pirate AAA games and pay TV.

I disagree. This was always where the incentives for The Daily Show were pointing. Each successor, starting with the Colbert Report, moved more in this direction of false-sense-of-knowledge. It’s what distinguished them from other comedy.

Your ex-friend is an extreme case, but this is that media ecosystem working as intended.

Matt Yglesias’ curiosity about the rationalist movement was apparently pretty serious; he sounds more and more like us all the time.

Update: Matt discusses this extensively on the Rationally Speaking podcast.

In addition to talking about immigration and YIMBYism, Julia and Matt discuss the Iraq War, and this part is really fascinating to me.  I think of Julia as certainly being more intelligent than I am, and Matt as possibly more intelligent than I am.  But they both got it wrong at the the time, and not only did I get it right, but if you had asked me at the time, I would have given about 90% of what Matt gives as the reasoning now for why he was wrong.

(In their defense, I was already in graduate school in a foreign policy-adjacent field at the time, while they were only undergraduates, so I would have been less deferential to “a bipartisan majority of the establishment thinks this is a good idea”.)

they supported the invasion of Iraq? exactly how high were they at the time? undergraduates should be smashing metaphorical windows, not being deferential to the establishment’s opinion on committing war crimes!

In fact, one of the reasons for error they give at the time was a) not knowing where to go to find the best arguments against the war and b) hearing really stupid arguments from the metaphorical window-smashers around them.

(The Internet and social media would subsequently drub in the lesson that there is no position so obvious/correct that there is nobody making stupid arguments in favor of it.)

they didn’t know where to go to find the best arguments against the war, therefore they supported the war? how the fuck are they qualified to speak on any topic after admitting something like that? don’t you default to opposing aggressive wars of invasion in the absence of a good reason?

Yglesias is 39 years old! he was 22 in 2003! old enough to know better, and the reasons given in support for the war were surely far stupider than those opposing it.

I can understand supporting it because you’re planning a career in Washington or as a pundit given that Serious People Support Wars, but that just marks you as a craven asshole.

“you should default to opposing aggressive wars of invasion”

you should! and they did! unfortunately for them, and us, the bipartisan majority expert consensus said that it wasn’t an aggressive war of invasion, it was an attempt to free an oppressed populace who needed our help from a cruel criminal dictator who was also trying to kill us. the two of them didn’t know where to go to find arguments against it that weren’t from window-smashing idiots.

probably because the anti-war arguments at that time focused heavily on “this is an aggressive war of invasion where our country plans to loot and impoverish and oppress another nation to appease wicked corporate interests” and that wasn’t true. like we can look back on the past and see “oh, yeah, they didn’t do that.”

they genuinely believed they were going to ge greeted as liberators. they genuinely believed they were going to bring the Iraqis out of oppression and into the freedom and stability of democracy. It was a horrible fucking idea that would never ever work and they only thought it would due to gaping ideological blind spots, but chanting “No blood for oil!” doesn’t work against people who aren’t trading blood for oil. As usual, left-ish messaging of the day focused primarily (not exclusively though, there were people actually talking about what a bad idea it was, though the ones i remember most were comedy and satire people like the Onion and the Daily Show) on assuming the people that disagreed with you believed everything you did, that they also believed that the war was exchanging blood for oil and you just had to tell them not to do that.

I'm sure present company is excluded, but it seems to me that people forget a lot of the long run up to the second Iraq war from the national consciousness perspective. There are several things to consider:

TLDR, we were coming off of a decade of Iraq being an unruly child who didn't take punishment or correction well and had created a huge international and humanitarian problem which was an embarrassment as well as a tragedy. The US was implicated as the party that had led everyone in. The world was amped up already with certain 90s anxieties and after 911 the invasion of Afghanistan wasn't enough to quell this energy to go out and project power in order to solve something. Even when the weapons of mass destruction thing being bullshit became common knowledge (again, not entirely bogus, but more a matter of Chaney, and it was always Chaney in this narrative, choosing to cook the books on something real but largely their propaganda to justify our actions), that just freed people up to admit this was all part of an initiative to establish a beach head for democracy in the Middle East, yada yada yada. It became more about "geez, who thought that would work." The oil thing never really washed, I don't think anyone ever believed it except for the people writing (and their direct readership) really long articles (that Get Your War On guy was just on a podcast recently that I listened to, I had forgot about him). I think everyone was always aware that Halliburton and the other "engineering" firms were getting hella paid, but you know that was just normal kind of corruption/profiteering that we're used to.

also it's wild that literally the only three possible options for what would happen if an object went into space in a straight line as far/fast as it could possible go are:

there are basically no other options and each of these three possibilities is staggering in it's implications

i will also say i consider the second possibility to be basically so stupid as to not be worth considering. the first option is the least weird/stupid, but clashes pretty heavily with the fact that the evidence seems to show that the universe has a finite age. hard for me to imagine the universe being infinitely large if it's not infinitely old.

that leaves "you end up back where you started" as the only really viable option, which is wild to think about, implies the universe is on the surface of a 4-dimensional sphere.

The universe might not have a "beginning". The big bang describes the inflation after the singularity; the singularity might be infinitely old. It might have also already been infinite in volume, just also denser than physics can currently describe.

It also isn't curved as far as we can tell. Like empirically. Even so we wouldn't necessarily be on the surface of an n-sphere, we'd just be the surface of an n-sphere.

even if the singularity was infinitely old, or even there's a bang/crunch cycle with an infinite chain of universes before it, wouldn't everything before/during the singularity for all intents and purposes be "before the beginning of the universe"? i think this is a semantic quibble at the end of the day, you can define your terms differently but i only consider stuff after the big bang to be "This" universe.

also you'll have to elaborate on how something can be infinite in volume if it's inflating from a singularity, because i'm not sure i understand.

would we have any tools that could detect that kind of 4-dimensional curvature? (also the 'on the surface'/'be the surface' distinction also just seems like semantics imho)

The issue is you get into things like cyclic cosmology, like Roger Penrose proposes. Previous cycles can theoretically have detectable effects on the current universe, like waves in the cmb for Penrose's cosmology. It also has some implications with regards to the fine tuning problem if something like fecund black holes/evolutionary cosmology pans out; if the universe is fine-tuned to life that's a point to some larger design, but if it turns out we're a side effect of a universe that's good at making black holes that's arguably a point against theism.

To the second part, the universe was *dense* and that caused the singularity. It could have been essentially infinitely dense and actually infinite in volume at the same time. Inflation also didn't expand into anything; if you think of two points on graph paper, it's like expansion is new squares appearing between them. So all the singularity around our point of the singularity would be expanding away as fast as the edge of the full universe, which is far farther away than the edge of the visible universe.

If you're in a curved surface you can actually just detect it through triangulation. A triangle has to add up to 180 degrees in a flat surface, but will add up to more or less if the curvature is positive or negative. Astronomers have measured this (they call it Omega) through a few routes, like some complicated means by measuring energy densities, or some less complicated like measuring propagation of a wave in a gas cloud, and the better estimates put Omega at essentially 1, meaning a flat universe.

I'd also say "in or on a surface" is not really semantics; some theories like string theory really propose something real outside our dimensionality/space time and make predictions based on that, and model the big bang itself as a collision of structures in this outside-the-universe area. Most cosmologies propose that nothing is external like that, and that the seemingly-4 or -5 or whatever dimensional properties are really just properties of spacetime as we know it. This means that they predict different things and are technically falsifiable in different ways (if we prove somehow that there's no extra-dimensions/stringiness to physics, there goes string theory; if we prove there is extra dimensions, that probably means we should abandon causal dynamical triangulation).

As it is, like, the big bang theory is saying we're not expanding "into" anything. That can have some implications depending on how you look at it, like maybe everything in space time is collapsing making it look like the space between things is expanding? Which has led to some serious proposals (together with like, the holographic principle which might hint that we're 2+1 D and not 3+1 D) that we're on the inside of a black hole.

hm it does seem the evidence that the universe is flat is fairly watertight- in that case, assuming a flat universe, i would also assume an infinitely large universe, in which case that in turn leads me to be skeptical of the current narrative on the big bang and the age of the universe. maybe all mater in the visible universe was at one point a singularity that exploded, but i would be inclined to say that this is not all matter in the universe as a whole, and that the big bang was not the beginning of all space and time but just the beginning of all the matter that is currently visible to us, and that the universe as a whole is both infinitely large and infinitely old.

assuming an infinitely old and infinitely large universe in turn leads me to believe there are no parallel universes (though as consolation an infinitely old and large universe leaves a literally infinite amount of room for other sci-fi weirdness to speculate about if you're into that kind of thing). also it causes me to lean my agnosticism a bit more toward atheism than it already was.

also i find the notion of the universe being "fine tuned to life" insulting. if anything life is fine-turned to exist in the universe, but not even particularly well. as a philosophical question is just seems vacant to me, "why do we exist, instead of not exist?" well if we didn't exist we wouldn't be around to ask that question. so. also if we assume an infinitely large and infinitely old universe it makes sense that statistically life would emerge somewhere even if the universe is especially unhospitable to life- but also if there's only one universe, then what are we even comparing it to in order to describe it as being especially hospitable or unhospitable to life? like as far as we know our universe is the only way a universe can possibly be.

(that said, exposure to space travel is extremely unhealthy to human life, which doesn't seem especially hospitable to life to me. like i can easily just imagine a hypothetical universe where the entire universe is filled with a breathable atmosphere. boom, i'm already a way better universe designer at fine-tuning the universe to life than "god" is.)

at any rate, i think ideas like parallel universe/multiverses- and theoretical (or hypothetical) frameworks that support it, like string theory- are given way more credence in the scientific community than they should be because people like storytelling and worldbuilding potential they have despite the lack of real evidence for them. too many physicists got into physics cause they watched sci-fi as a kid and want to use math to prove their favorite star trek plot could really happen in real life (even if that's not actually true). string theory is an especially blatant example, just the most bonkers new age mysticism sci-fi worldbuilding, but being passed off as actual science and taken seriously.

of course, i'm not immune to this myself, my own enthusiasm for the idea of the universe being the surface of an n-sphere is obviously driven in part by my enthusiasm for the sci-fi weirdness of the notion of 4-dimensional objects. in the interest of de-fictionbraining myself, i'm going to conclude on the basis of the evidence of a flat universe that 4-dimensional (or more) objects cannot possibly exist in reality, which is a bummer, but as consolation i get to believe in an infinitely large and infinitely old universe, which is way better than 4-dimensional objects. i can finally breath a sigh of relief after years of believing the universe as a whole was only 13.7 billion years old, an absolutely soul-crushing thing to believe. finally i can bask in the glory of being dwarfed by a universe that is vast and old beyond my comprehension, instead of having to live in a puny inadequate baby universe.

of course i can't completely rule out the notion of the universe being flat but finite, and having some kind of barrier at it's edge. while i do think this is both the lamest and least credible option, it does also have it's own potential for sci-fi weirdness- what is the nature of the barrier? is there anything outside it? this would be the option that would most likely lead me to think there could be parallel universes. on the other hand it would also make me more likely to believe the big bang was in fact not just the beginning of matter in the visible universe but the beginning of space and time as we know it- though the possibility of there being an infinite bang/crunch cycle is still open, which, again, allows for it's own potential for sci-fi weirdness.

at any rate, part of the struggle with trying to perceive the world accurately is resisting the urge to believe in stuff because it's exciting and cool and has good potential for sci-fi worldbuilding and plotlines, and instead forcing oneself to believe the things that are most likely to be true on the basis of the material evidence. but the great thing about the question of the shape and size of the universe is that no matter what the answer is, you get to believe in something which is exciting and cool and interesting and makes for good worldbuilding. so that's nice.

Haven't looked into this, but I think it'd be impossible to experimentally confirm that we live in a "flat, open" infinite universe instead of just a very big "spherical, closed" universe? These experiments are measuring whether parallel trajectories converge, right? If parallel trajectories don't observably converge, that lets you put a lower limit on the size of the universe, but a very big but finite universe is a very (infinitely!) different thing from an infinite universe. You could even argue that most possible finite closed universes are so big that their curvature would be impossible for us to measure (there's a literally infinite number of possible universe sizes that are finite but big enough to have unmeasurably small curvature), so if you live in a closed universe, you should expect it to look like a flat open universe.

One way we could kind of experimentally confirm we live in an infinite universe is if parallel trajectories diverge. Even then, an infinite universe is basically a faith-based belief in the same way a multiverse is, you can never actually observe infinity so it's always possible that it's actually finite in some way (like, maybe it's locally hyperbolic but globally closed and we're like blind microscopic people living on a tree and concluding from observation that the Earth is probably some kind of branching fractal snowflake shape), but at least that way you could say an infinite universe is the most parsimonious explanation of what we observe.

One attraction of the multiverse idea is it lets you easily explain why we live in a cosmos with laws of physics that permit structures complex enough to be intelligent to exist: we live in a habitable universe for the same reason we live on a habitable planet, there are probably lots of universes out there that are full of nothing but monoatomic plasma and so on, but those universes don't have intelligent beings around to comment on their habitability. "It's actually a bit odd that the laws of physics permit intelligent structures to exist at all" arguments get more credible if there's just one infinite universe with uniform physics. Though, as you observe, our own universe is actually mostly inhospitable to life.

I don't see what's particularly unbelievable about the idea that the universe is infinite in space but finite in time, or the idea that there are multiple spatially infinite universes (perhaps an infinity of them). Seems about as plausible as anything else.

Right now, I personally favor the idea that we live in a "closed, spherical" very big but finite universe embedded in a much bigger multiverse, but that's more an aesthetic preference than a result of examination of the evidence, so I'm not strongly attached to that opinion.

I was under the impression that current thinking is that it's not a singularity in terms of a point in space (but singularity of some other set of properties) and the big bang occurred everywhere all at once. Inflation is a byproduct of whatever dark energy potential drives the expansion as a consequence of the initial set of conditions and the nature of the space that the stuff is expanding through. The idea of the edge of the universe is some kind of light cone shit, and pictures of "closed" universes are just projections of whatever the cosmological constant says that we can perceive/move through.

I love driving at the exact speed limit and having speeders behind me get frustrated. i will get to my destination when I get to my destination and so will you. im teaching you patience right now. you should be listening & learning.

the general consensus in the notes is that if you drive the speed limit, you are:

I assumed the OP was exaggerating, so I checked the notes and am delighted to report that they are Not.

Other highlights include:

on the one hand, hahaha what the fuck

on the other, yeah this is basically how people operate and why traffic safety organizations push for lane narrowing and that kind of crap. if you want people to drive the speed limit, you need to make them with design.

also "predictability saves lives" hey you know what's predictable? driving the prescribed speed for this road. which everybody will know. and expect.

also, again, hahaha what the fuck.

But I think everyone agrees: driving to teach other people lessons is correct and should be everyone's baseline approach. It's the only way to go!

there's this new scam going around where someone puts your dick in their mouth and gobbles on it until you bust. Obviously this siphons off nutrients and moisture from your body - they walk away with 'em scot-free. Not good, and a lot of people are falling for it. Mostly it's girls doing it but they're not the only ones. Stay frosty out there

They call it a "blow job" on the mean streets but I'll be the first to tell you, it's no career for an honest man

—Lao Tzu

Please explain your reasoning in the tags and may the Force be with you.

Mace Windu, obviously.

Baffled that Mace Windu wasn't included as a poll option.

No Kit Fisto?

Give yourself a point for every city you’ve been to. 

4 :D

Ha a repülőterek is számítanak, akkor 23

Ha nem, akkor 18

Lehetne javítani sokat, ugyanis eddig sem az amerikai kontinensre, sem Ausztráliába nem jutottam még el. :(

Kicsit túlsúlyos az USA városokkal. Amúgy 19

Aki nem amcsi az annyit is er..

15, de szerintem nem arra a Perth-re meg Edmonton-ra gondoltak (Afrikát meg jól kihagyták ha jól látom még egy nyamvadt Cairo se fért fel rá)

41, but 6 of the 7 cities I've lived in are on there (no Baton Rouge)

Tenet

This was not as bad as I expected. Maybe that is because I watched it with closed captions. I found the plot to be rather straightforward, even predictable. You already know that inversion is a thing if you heard anything at all about this movie before you started it, and so it becomes fairly obvious early on where this is going. Then there is an exposition scene that explains inversion. Then action. The big twist wasn’t a big twist, it was well telegraphed, and it fit neatly together. That made Tenet easier to follow than Memento or Inception.

It’s just that… Tenet is so visually bland. Yes, it’s neatly constructed and has a cool premise. It’s a typical Christopher Nolan, a return to form. But at the same time, it’s a long movie full of grey and concrete and muffled voices. It’s visually interesting without being nice to look at. It’s not a movie to enjoy, only to appreciate.

Nolan is a tough one to love, but I do think he deserves to have a place carved out a little bit since we see a lot of filmmakers who approach rational subjects emotionally, rational topics rationally, and emotional stuff emotionally, but we kind of need somebody who approaches melodrama like an engineer. The primary appeal of the guy is that your mechanical thinking brain is always trying to figure out the mumbo while he's busy trying to land a jumbo sized statement about regret. And the physics here is so counterintuitive (there has to be a halo effects both physically and temporally, there's so many things so hard to resolve, but they feel almost resolved or at least resolvable if you just think about it a little harder) that it really does allow for that stuff to sneak in at the edges. The pincer attack is hot garbage, but the movie arrives as the same themes as the Arrival backwards and from the other direction, so there's that.

SIIKR tells me I've never told my Memento story on tumblr, which is pretty weird, so I'll write it down here for the record. On Sunday, April 1, 2001 I was living in New York City, and my family decided to go to the movies. We went at about noon to the Times Square AMC where my older (Stuyvesant student) son and I went to see Memento, while my wife took my younger son to see Spy Kids. I knew a little about what to expect and we were cutting it super close (I was pretty sure we would miss the coming attractions) so when I got in the theater and sat down and started watching the movie in progress, it seemed about what I expected. A few minutes later my wife came into the theater and whispered in my ear "do you notice anything," to which I responded "well yeah, it's supposed to be this kind of movie." She said "no, last night was daylight savings time, you missed an hour."

How many people statistically have had this happen to them? So many things had to line up – not just the movie itself, but the fact of the movie was only open in New York and LA at that time, it was an early Sunday screening making it possible for us to have just blown by the fact that we were supposed to reset our clocks, the splitting up, the fact that it happened on April 1 which means there's an extra layer of "wait a minute" to the story (which I swear actually happened), the fact that it wasn't opening weekend and it was pre-wide release ($56.5 K that day = low attendance), I was only a candidate because I happen to live in New York that year, etc. Wild.

The Fabelmans (2022) dir. Steven Spielberg

This isn't a joke article. He actually made this. He's the founder of a weapons contractor company "Anduril".

They make drones. You see where this path leads right?

sorry not to put this in the tags but

what the FUCK

Holy fucking shit levels of not understanding the text of the story, not to mention being a real life supervillain. Fuck

Just so you know, this apparently isn't just him fucking around.

"Despite betting big on defense contracts, a piece of Luckey will always belong to virtual reality. “At this point, it is just a piece of office art, a thought-provoking reminder of unexplored avenues in game design,” he said of his killer headset. “It is also, as far as I know, the first non-fiction example of a VR device that can actually kill the user. It won’t be the last.”"

That's the article.

That's what he had to say.

HE REALLY DID MAKE THE TORMENT NEXUS.

Just so you know, this

apparently isn’t just

him fucking around.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

this kinda slaps though

Lol 'this isnt him fucking around' and proceeds to quote him saying yeah im just fucking around. This is a great art piece and 0% problematic at all, slay.

I could imagine some of these people who do a no-hit playthroughs of Dark Souls using it in a lucrative gamble.

Next James Bond movie except instead of a high stakes poker game as the climax its a VR pokemon nuzlocke challenge with this bad boy, honestly sounds great.

This already happened.

The person who wrote this obviously has never watched any of these movies, simply had it described to them. There's no railing going on. There is a single kiss at the end. Whereas I'm sure there have been a bunch of these with corporate lawyers, that is far from the modal profession, as most of them have to be something imaginarily accessible but aspirational. I've seen more with Podcasters than with people who went to law school.

podcaster checks the boxes on aspirational careers, so fair I guess, but they’ve got movies about professional podcasters now? I don’t think podcasts were in the collective consciousness yet at the time the last one of these movies I’ve seen was produced

The rate of production of these movies increased immeasurably about five/six years ago, such that I think the number of them which have been produced since podcasting was known as a thing you could do that seemed vaguely cool or sexy is probably 10 times the amount ever produced in human history before that. I have seen three I think, and cannot remember the name of any, but I was just picking on that detail for fun. There are many disenchanted CEOs of companies and mid level people-who-have-to-do-proposals whose genius is not fully acknowledged along with the expected writers, planners, etc, just less lawyers (maybe there are and I've just missed those).

The person who wrote this obviously has never watched any of these movies, simply had it described to them. There's no railing going on. There is a single kiss at the end. Whereas I'm sure there have been a bunch of these with corporate lawyers, that is far from the modal profession, as most of them have to be something imaginarily accessible but aspirational. I've seen more with Podcasters than with people who went to law school.