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Peepzilla

Greylag gosling (Anser anser)
Olympus E-M1 II, Panasonic 100-300 II 300mm, f/7.1 1/400s, ISO 200

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wjrii ,

Geese must be so pissed off at their ancestors for evolving away from teeth, like when you accidentally navigate away from that smart, insightful, humorous comment and it disappears. "FUCK! Now I have to completely start over and it's never gonna be as good."

Now the meta question is, is this version 1 or 2 of my gooseteeth comment?

wjrii , (edited )

Something (maybe Alexandrite") borked the link for me. If anyone else has the same issue, here you go:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaqQJj24yCY_bDQ35jS0Gvw

And yeah, that's nasty. I had to get my earwax flushed out once. It was unpleasant and super gross, and I've used the specialized peroxide solutions a couple of times in the years since. My wife has the dry wax gene, and finds wet wax both gross and confusing.

The only thing I'll add is that having used a cheap camera earwax cleaner, the magnification makes every normal little waxbooger look like a Star Trek brain slug, so while still dramatic (don't get me wrong), the videos always look just a touch more dramatic than they really are.

wjrii ,

Yup. Big-ass syringe full of warm water, possibly with some solution in it (I don't recall that part). It was affecting my hearing in one ear, and the flush fixed it right up.

wjrii ,

So Hubble has 10 useful years left in its current orbit. I say let the private spaceflight tech bro give it a try… in nine years.

The article goes into a lot of good detail about why it might not make sense to let a Friend of Musk pop on up with an undertrained crew and an under-specced spacecraft and try to bolt on some aftermarket hardware.

wjrii ,

If the NSA had an “unused Hubble chassis”, how many were made, and what are the others doing?

It's secret, but not THAT secret, since it requires sending Hubble-sized telescopes into orbit. Looks like there are 6 of that design still in operation.

wjrii ,

...people were upset it wasn’t followed up on in Rise of Skywalker.

Fair warning, I am coming at this as a fan of TLJ who found it really worked for me after falling in love with Star Wars as a little kid in 1983, but one of the great sins of TROS is exactly that.

Every movie before that had its retcons, sometimes pretty significant, but no movie simply rolled back the previous one or refused to engage with it like TROS did. I've been forced to accept that there is pretty significant contingent who didn't connect with TLJ like I did, but Disney and JJ took absolutely the wrong lesson from the backlash in how they responded. The fans who care that deeply view an installment they don't care for as an annoying relative, but one one to be addressed, rehabilitated if possible, explained if not. Dave Filoni built his entire career on this.

wjrii , (edited )

"Mason Classical Academy"

If folks don't know, in the charter school world, "Classical Academies" are often code for right wing indoctrination. The idea is that if you just focus on the "classics" of western education and their direct descendants, then HEY NOW! Suddenly Rudyard Kipling is your best insight into Indian literature, and Joseph Conrad into African. The American founding fathers were totally into Roman republicanism! The King James Bible is literally poetry! What is a Chinua Achebe anyway?!?!?!?!?!?

It's an inherently conservative idea that a viable totality of useful knowledge is contained within books that are all part of the western canon circa 1937, so even if a few schools engage in it in good faith, a watered down version offered at the primary and secondary levels is just catnip for those who want to engage in a little brain washing at the public expense.

Edit: This MCA is likely a little less explicitly creepy than some, but it's an E.D. Hirsch "Core Knowledge Foundation" school that is designed to hammer home a certain set of facts and cultural touchstones, rather than worrying about the emotional well being or broad-based thinking skills that a good modern curriculum will include. It's basically the old story of "old person sees kids don't know everything he was taught, lashes out at schools," if it were from a curmudgeonly English professor. It almost certainly draws the same type of parents and administrators that other Classical Academies do.

wjrii ,

Oh jeez, this is how we get Disco season 6, isn't it?

wjrii ,

No, well, yes but not as the main thing (becuz Star Trek), but they do find inspiration for the S5 arc in old TNG stuff.

wjrii ,

Admit it... you LOOOOOVE whisper-lectures.

Disco is not really a bad show. It's a bad show, a good show, a kind of decent not-star-trek show, and sometimes all of that in a single season. The whiplash is real.

wjrii ,

It earns a lot of grace with me for its heart, and I also can't help but be entranced by the neverending meta-drama of the writers and producers trying to figure out what they want it to be and committing to absolutely nothing for more than a season.

wjrii ,

LD pulls a bit of The Orville bait-and-switch where the humor never goes away, but there's clearly Star Trek bones under there and over the course of the first season it commits more to that than to being an anarchic romp. Frankly, while I enjoy both, I like LD a lot more than the Orville, which has some of the worst acting I've ever seen on network television, tends to resolve most (though not all) moral dilemmas by just aggressively picking a side, and cannot escape Seth MacFarlane's obsession with American pop culture, circa 1950-2000.

wjrii ,

If you have extended universe stuff, that's lovely. If you reference it, that's fine. If you rely on it, that's troubling. If I only learn about it because I had to google WTF was happening and whether I'd completely missed an episode, that's bad.

wjrii ,

I had to look this up. An indigenous Australian artist, famous by antipodean artworld standards, included an unflattering portrait of the woman who owns the most profitable mining company in Australia and depending on the day, she's usually calculated to be the richest Australian in the world, and sometimes the richest woman.

The company is infamous for doing as mining companies are wont to do, and also specifically for her late father's old-school racism on the topic of indigenous Australians, and then her own actions that suggest she was fine with his attitudes. Frankly, the fact that her portrait looks to have been just a bit more exaggerated than the rest should have been viewed as a minor win that she could ride out, but she decided to raise a stink about it and be the biggest Karen in the world, accusing the national gallery of doing the Chinese government's bidding, even though she is on record saying nice things about them to get their business.

wjrii ,

You don’t really need to know anything else about her for this story.

Well, maybe a liiiittle bit more:

Perhaps the most well known controversy in the history of the company centres around the racist views of founder Lang Hancock towards Indigenous Australians. Hancock is quoted as saying,

"Mining in Australia occupies less than one-fifth of one percent of the total surface of our continent and yet it supports 14 million people. Nothing should be sacred from mining whether it's your ground, my ground, the blackfellow's ground or anybody else's. So the question of Aboriginal land rights and things of this nature shouldn’t exist."
In a 1984 television interview, Hancock suggested forcing unemployed indigenous Australians − specifically "the ones that are no good to themselves and who can't accept things, the half-castes" − to collect their welfare cheques from a central location. And when they had gravitated there, I would dope the water up so that they were sterile and would breed themselves out in the future, and that would solve the problem."

Executive Chairman of Hancock Prospecting, Gina Rinehart, caused controversy in 2022, when she failed to apologise for or denounce comments made by her late father in the 1984 television interview. Hancock Prospecting subsequently withdrew an A$15 million sponsorship from Netball Australia after Indigenous netballer Donnell Wallam voiced concerns about the deal and the impact of the comments, pertaining to a genocide, by "poisoning" and "sterilising" Indigenous Australians to "solve the problem"; as well as concerns about the company's environmental record.

wjrii ,

This quote is from her father in '84, and it was in a televised interview. However, just two years ago she refused to denounce those comments, and pulled millions of dollars from support from Australian Netball's governing body because an indigenous player raised the issue.

wjrii ,

It's odd, they do seem generally more inclusive and less cliquey, but humans are humans, and that means bullying still happens. The really intense stuff has been empowered by internet anonymity (or short of that, a lack of physical presence and the accompanying repercussions), perfect for your prototypical emotionally damaged coward of a bully.

For those who don't go nuclear, it seems like the main thing is exclusion, but it can be hard to decide when that moves from them simply associating with the people they want, to passive aggressive bullying. I'm sure the number of people cruelly left off the "new" group text for some bullshit reason is pretty large though.

wjrii ,

Though Gerald Ford as his model for presidential behavior certainly tracks.

wjrii ,

I feel like "10,000 years" works better as a bit of hand-wavey poetry rather than a serious suggestion for a setting. I know that societies can be more or less static, but damn, 10,000 years ago, people were just beginning to play with the idea of doing cooler stuff with their stone tools.

That said, the cast and production design looks good. I hope this doesn't suck.

wjrii ,

I believe that Herbert intended it at some level, I just don't think it was well-considered as world building.

It is fine though, as a way to handwave anything that doesn't make sense and to underline just how weird this setting and these people's cultures are going to be. This is not to denigrate it. It's just more a storyteller's trope intended to tell the audience to settle in and leave your expectations behind. I guess this show will step in just after the end of the Butlerian Jihad maybe, but the ebbs and flows of human cultural change over 10,000 years means that it's just one more thing he was intentionally not focusing on, and making a very specific prequel about an era that should be almost lost to the mists of time is inviting questions the "Duneiverse's" nerd-infrastructure is poorly equipped to handle.

I'm sort of just musing, though. I'll absolutely watch it, and if they tell a compelling story I will smile and shrug and not let it affect my enjoyment.

wjrii ,

I absolutely believe it's been set down. It's just a weird number to have picked in the first place, a full 20k years or whatever into the future. It feels more like Frank Herbert originally just wanted to say "all that happened a long god-damned time ago... don't fixate on it." Yet here we are, fixating on it. If it's a good show, I won't mind at all, but I find it amusing.

wjrii ,

“Made with real juice” does not mean it was made with the juice on the label. For example, a pineapple fruit juice may be more apple juice than actually pineapple juice

This gave rise to an amusing misunderstanding in our house. My wife asked for "Cranberry Juice, but 100% juice, not the cocktail; that's too sweet." I dutifully went to our store and found the Cranberry Juice cocktail, and also the juice that was mostly apple and white grape juice, because that's always what they use here when they can. I thought, surely this must be very nearly as sweet, and kept looking. I eventually found the small, expensive bottle of 100% cranberry juice with no other juices and no sugar added.

This was a mistake.

Pure cranberry juice is not popular as a casual beverage for a reason. It is nasty. It tastes like I imagine the least dangerous acid kept behind the counter at the chemistry lab supply company tastes: safe for human consumption, but just barely and definitely deserving to be there behind the counter.

wjrii ,

Pretty sure. It was a 32 oz bottle on the same shelf as all the cocktails and blends.

Now, to be fair, some people do recommend cutting pure cranberry juice with seltzer or water, but it was not specifically a concentrate.

wjrii ,

Taken as a whole (i.e. not just the undergraduate football players getting Bachelors in the management program that is kept around partially so they will have something to study), it's a world class research institution, currently ranked 36 in the Times Higher Education table of world universities. For reference, it's ahead of schools like the London School of Economics, McGill, and the Sorbonne.

But this guy is an idiot and an ass.

My 4th grader picked a shirt based on her connection to me, with potentially humorous caveats...

So, my 10yo and I have a pretty great relationship. She's smart and funny and curious and all the things I might have hoped I could raise a kid to be. That said, she idolizes her mom. As much as she is like me, Daddy is definitely the "boring" parent, because my job is stupider than my wife's and also much less demanding, so...

wjrii ,

Gladis is latin for 'sword.' There's a militia of a dozen angry boat-sinking orcas with a badass SpecOps nickname, preying on the material resources of the yachting class.

When do we post this one to wholesome news?

wjrii ,

Aussies are great. They're like border collies, but slightly more chill.

wjrii ,

This has been good for us for a different reason. I'm not pathological, but I do have a tendency to keep "useful" things longer than needed. A grocery bag dispenser crammed tight is a decent agreed standard for "we have plenty of grocery bags."

wjrii ,

For a jar opener, go right past the kitchen aisle or page and into hardware. Get a rubber and plastic strap wrench. if you get the two pack, keep the big one int he garage and the smaller one in the kitchen.

wjrii ,

We have a pretty nice Cuisinart air fryer/toaster oven (model is TOA-70 I think), and it is the best. I basically use the "real" oven only for proper baking (very rare) and larger frozen stuff (still fairly rare). All leftovers and "heat and eat" stuff goes into the toaster oven. I also use it for toasting, just to keep the popup toaster off the counter, and as an air fryer I like the results from its tray-like basket much better than the icy-center foodballs that come from trying to get a reasonable amount into the deep but otherwise tiny baskets of cheaper air fryers.

For an actual junk drawer item, we have a 50-foot reel of twist tie (with a little guillotine cutter) that has proven invaluable for lost twist ties, torn garbage bag pulls, arts & crafts, and even the occasional picture hanging until we got a proper reel of that wire.

wjrii , (edited )

Oddly, the one thing that never passes in Texas is school vouchers. The blue areas and the truly rural republicans make common cause. The sparsely populated and absolutely vast rural expanses mean that the surprisingly large rural population both feels very comfortable with their control over their local schools, and views them as the glue of their communities. That's where you actually come into town and see people. That's where you go vote. That's probably the only decent-paying (and I say that fully aware how shit teacher pay is) career if you want to get your college-educated kids to come back, or barring that, someone else's. Beyond those specific jobs, it's likely one of few non-agriculture or mineral-extraction options for steady employment and that money goes into the local community. Generations of local leaders will have gone to the same schools, played under the "Friday Night Lights" and generally associate the school with their community in a very intimate way. They are desperate to keep those schools healthy and subsidized. You'd think that might make them re-evaluate whether their fellow republicans are looking after their best interests more broadly, but nope, it is Texas after all.

Vouchers just suck money out of the system, and no school that you could set up with just voucher money will be any better than the public schools, so the only people who will make extensive use of them will be religious nutjobs who don't need "good" education, the absolutely exceptional outliers who will increase the prestige of any local private school, and the well-to-do who will just treat it as a tuition discount and effectively a tax break at the expense of their fellow citizens. You'll end up with public schools with less money to serve a remaining population with more intense needs, and the whole thing will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I guarantee you the only people who game this out thoughtfully but still support vouchers are the extremely religious and people who directly stand to profit from a collapsing public education system. The rest are just short-sighted idiots. Everyone benefits from everyone's children having access to decent schools, and I hate hate hate assholes with "I don't have kids in those schools, why do I have to pay taxes hurr durr" attitudes.

wjrii , (edited )

Sure, and interestingly, it's right there in the name. Nostalgia is from Greek and could be crudely transliterated as something like "homecoming pain." Even if home wasn't perfect, there is a draw.

Corporate real estate is on a 'cliff edge' as firms race to rethink communal spaces ( www.bbc.com )

As more employees work from home in the hybrid-work era, many companies are finding they need smaller offices. Compared to pre-pandemic floorplans designed to house as many workers as possible, more businesses are looking towards more compact but higher-quality spaces for the future....

wjrii ,

I know conversion of office space to apartments is not trivial (location and "bandwidth" of the building's infrastructure, etc.), but they are buildings that are designed to hold many people for many hours per day, and often occupy some of the best locations for transit and larger parking structures in a given city. At the very least this should result in more residential and mixed-use projects and fewer dedicated office buildings going forward.

wjrii ,

Some of the concerns I've seen are that while electrical should be fine for the type of stuff America uses 110v for, overkill even, the plumbing is all in the wrong places and likely inadequate for how many people will need showers and baths, the HVAC isn't really meant for the granularity people would want, and it would be a challenge to get the ventilation and heavy duty circuitry to every unit to safely allow for cooking.

What I do think they could do is convert to dormitory style housing with shared kitchens and baths, and while that limits your target audience, it limits it to the people most in need of affordable housing. Refurbing existing office blocks is certainly not a panacea, and I am already cringing at some government that thinks it would be, but I don't think we're too far off from denser cities considering it in some cases. I think the bigger opportunity is in new builds and more drastic redevelopments. With very few exceptions, I don't think any urban core needs to be building dedicated office buildings anymore. Seems it would be way easier and sufficiently cost effective to allow for conversion later even if it's not in the plan now.

wjrii ,

do something with the center space

A simple shared courtyard on most floors could be valuable, but yeah, it sounds like one of the biggest challenges is making attractive housing out of them. With real estate being somewhat non-fungible though, that becomes a pricing issue. People would live in the high-rise equivalent of a single-wide or container house for free. They wouldn't for 10 million bucks. Does the inflection point in-between match with the economics of doing the conversion? Every building and every city will have a different calculation.

And yes, there is a nagging sense of boring dystopia going through my brain in all this, though tempered by the sense that we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good safely and affordably housed. When do we force Hiro Protagonist to move into his storage unit?

wjrii ,

I know grackles are not corvids, but I think they've got to be damn near as smart, and twice as bold, and ten times more intimidating.

wjrii ,

That's about right. Was once at a pool and had some fries. Damn grackle was stealing them. I didn't see that it had walked through them or anything, so I thought, "okay I'll throw a napkin over the rest." Nope. Little fucker sauntered up and pulled the napkin right off them.

I have also been intimidated into giving them pizza crust, and I have heard stories of a one-legged grackle landing in a plate of nachos mid-meal and just KA-CAW'ing at everybody until they let him have them.

wjrii ,

At a minimum, we've already heard rumors that she was simply pissed off and embarrassed, and that people were way closer than they should have been to a person angrily wielding a firearm.

wjrii ,

Agreed. I'm willing to allow that the dog was probably never going to be a skilled hunting dog, though I don't trust her to have determined that. It may even have been dangerous, though I rather doubt that had to be its destiny, and, again, we have some credibility issues with our decider.

There are just so many layers between a nippy, excitable working dog that's struggling with the (likely inadequate) training, and shooting it in the head in front of people. Then the goat thing confirms that she isn't isn't some sort of calm and skillful rural badass; she just likes the power inherent in hurting things that don't do what you want them do.

Maybe most of our politicians are a bit sociopathic, but for fuck's sake can we please elect the ones that are more skillful at masking and methodically figuring out what the emotionally functioning humans want them to act like? It's cynical, and a depressing level of low expectations, but that used to be the bar.

USA Lemmies: Where do you live?

I comment a lot on stories having to do with state governments and legislation or regions of the country. It got me wondering how many people I'm accidentally disparaging when I don't mean everyone in said state or region is terrible. So… Please be as specific or obtuse as your privacy filter requires. I'll start:...

wjrii ,

DFW area of Texas. There's a lot that's good here, but the number of people who combine various levels of being small-minded and short-sighted are indeed very frustrating.

wjrii ,

They're right; we're busy seekin'

New life and we're beamin' down!

wjrii ,

Even in the early days, they had a strong stable of songwriters, including folks like Carole King and Neil Diamond. They were a manufactured band, to be sure, but they were manufactured from solid parts.

Apple crushes creativity and its reputation in new iPad ad ( www.theregister.com )

The ad itself depicted a mechanical crusher destroying artifacts of human creativity. A trumpet, guitar, sculpture, piano, drawing board, paints, a metronome, several analog cameras, a turntable, and hi-fi equipment were among the much-loved items yielding to the machine's unstoppable force.

wjrii ,

I just watched it for the first time and... I thought that while the handwringing is excessive, the subtext that all these other emblems of human creativity have to be destroyed to become part of the iPad is unsettling, moreso because the visuals are so decadent in their detail. It makes it feel much more like replacing than supplementing. It's probably worse that I think it was also unintentional. Big miss for me.

wjrii ,

Excellent, reader cases always seem to cost way more than they should, espeically with how fragile they are.

Although, you should know you're supposed to move over to another room to pretend your workspace is cleaner than workspaces ever are, LOL. Then, what are we rocking for the keyboard?

wjrii ,

There is no definite date, but I do love the circa 1750 BCE "oldest customer complaint," so please forgive me.

Now, when you had come, you spoke saying thus: 'I will give good ingots to Gimil-Sin'; this you said to me when you had come, but you have not done it. You have offered bad ingots to my messenger, saying 'If you will take it, take it; if you will not take it, go away.' Who am I that you are treating me in this manner -- treating me with such contempt? and that between gentlemen such as we are.

I have written to you to receive my money, but you have neglected [to return] it. Repeatedly you have made them [messengers] return to me empty-handed through foreign country. Who is there amongst the Dilmun traders who has acted against me in this way? You have treated my messenger with contempt.

And further with regard to the silver that you have taken with you from my house you make this discussion. And on your behalf I gave 18 talents of copper to the palace, and Sumi-abum also gave 18 talents of copper, apart from the fact that we issued the sealed document to the temple of Samas. With regard to that copper, as you have treated me, you have held back my money in a foreign territory, although you are obligated to hand it over to me intact.

You will learn that here in Ur I will not accept from you copper that is not good. In my house, I will choose and take the ingots one by one. Because you have treated me with contempt, I shall exercise against you my right of selecting the copper.

wjrii ,

I fucking hate Mike Johnson. He's a creepy Christian Nationalist who has no business guiding public policy.

I hate MTG and Matt Gaetz even more though, and they may not even know what public policy is.

Study reveals "widespread, bipartisan aversion" to neighbors owning AR-15 rifles ( www.psypost.org )

A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals that across all political and social groups in the United States, there is a strong preference against living near AR-15 rifle owners and neighbors who store guns outside of locked safes. This surprising consensus suggests that when it...

wjrii ,

It's a distinction without much of a difference, though. Apart from auto and burst fire, a modern AR-15 does everything an M4A1 does. The Marines' M4 and M16A4 models don't even go past burst.

If semi-auto rifles are going to be legal at all, they should have a small integral magazine that's non-trivial to modify. The sheer efficiency of these rifles makes them really good for assaulting humans, because that's what they were designed for.

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