The American experience of being constantly reminded that it only takes one bad roll of the dice to shatter your dreams, derail your entire life, & throw you into years of debt. And every day we roll the dice by climbing into our cars, permitting concealed guns in public, or walking home in the dark

My bad habit is assuming there are boundaries, usually social, where there are none, and causing myself undue stress over-constraining myself

Introduce yourself with 5 concerts you've been to! Blast! Blue Man Group the Colorado Symphony playing Star Wars live with the film George Thorogood Weird Al

Here's hoping tonight's dreams don't fuck me up like last night's...

Caught up on the news today, and am frankly livid over how the govt shutdown ended, but it came with perspective It's never been clearer that the Democratic party is what a multi-party state would call a coalition of too many distinct positions, from real progressive to what conservative used to be

Life is a miracle A freak chance upon 100,000 other freak chances Often squandered by shortsightedness or greed And frighteningly easy to cut short Be kind It costs nothing And means everything

Today I met a man lying in front of a car with a bleeding dent in the back of his skull and a desperate fear of death in his eyes. And we were both powerless to do anything to help. The ambulance arrived within 2 minutes. He was still breathing when it left for the hospital. I hope he makes it.

The reason they want to harvest your data so badly is for targeted ads. Therefore Blocking ads is an act of rebellion that actively hurts the most socially corrosive industry we have. As a nice bonus, it drastically improves your quality of life on the internet, and cuts your data usage in half.

Oh yeah, I'm married now.

Woke up early to drive to the airport, and the whole time, my neurons are dancing. But not in the way people dance, more like how dolphins dance.

Tonight, my good friend gave me some wisdom while I was stressed over my impending wedding. "The alchemy of time's passage is that when an event goes from being in the future to being in the past, all the negative stuff surrounding it just kinda melts away, and you remember the good moments fondly."

Ethiopian food Very good

The trouble is we have a bad habit of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. -Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

What good even are methods without any madness in them?

Your eyeballs do SO much averaging even before your brain gets involved with post-processing.

Use your imagination.

GitHub sent me an email this morning. Google put it in my primary inbox. It didn't go to spam. It didn't go to the Promotions tab. It was even marked as Important. It was an ad for Microsoft Copilot, telling me about all the places they're shoehorning it into everyone's workflows.

YouTube's algorithm seems to think there's some perfect video for me that's a blend of every video I've ever clicked on, and every day it keeps trying to get closer to that by narrowing the range of slop it shows me, incapable of comprehending that that's exactly wrong.

If we continue with letting Republicans get away with the old KGB strategy of flooding public discourse with clear lies while AI slop tools make it hard enough to discern truth that we instead prioritize emotionally inflammatory narratives when voting and writing public policy, where does that lead?

Today, for the first time in my life, it occurred to me that I could've used caffeine to stay awake on long road trips.

Birds is dinosaurs Bones is rocks Bugs is shrimps Hiccups is when your body forgets it's not fish It is fish tho, like all tetrapods Blood is seawater we brought onto land Cephalopods is aliens (not from space) Orcas is smarter than you Words mean whatever we want; dictionaries just keep track

None of our problems are new, they're just moving faster.

Not enjoying the stage of debt where interest starts charging interest on itself.

The colder weather is finally here

No matter how you divide people, you have to have empathy for the ones on the other side of the line. Lawful/criminal, native/immigrant, rich/poor, you will find yourself on the other side of that line one day. Would you be okay with being treated in the manner you voted for?

Being okay is different from being okay with what's going on. Achieving the former in defiance of the latter is necessary to survive. Because it's been over 9 years, and Normal isn't coming back.

The present has arrived.

I don't trust anyone who's incapable of self-deprecating humor.

Never mistake politeness for kindness, tolerance for lenience, arrogance for confidence, cruelty for strength, empathy for weakness, excuses for reasons, punishment for justice, wealth for success, trauma for learning, experience for expertise, talking for communication, or knowing for understanding

We do not need more content

Medium fork

Home is where you find yourself.

Sophistry (n) A subtle, tricky, superficially plausible, but generally fallacious method of reasoning. ex: "Like all sophists, Charlie Kirk never actually debated in good faith; Rather, he used the appearance of debate to give his dangerous rhetoric a veneer of legitimacy."

Having thoughts about how most every other developed country has laws that punish if your home defense strategy isn't proportional to the threat, i.e. killing a burglar stealing your TV. They come from cultural notions that life is more precious than property, but there's more to it than just that.

Religious beliefs are fun to poke at sometimes. The closest I have to any are these: I believe in objective truth, and that facts are what hold up under scrutiny. I believe we are all born with good in our hearts. I believe that to be a good person means to help others and spark joy in the world.

No matter the confidence we project, living life means having worries and facing uncertainty. If you do nothing but hold them inside yourself, they will destroy you and leave behind a callous cynic who dreads their own emotions.

If your definition of "glorifying violence" includes jokes about the death of a man who spent his entire adult life actively inciting it, then this counts too. Issuing this 1st warning now is a slap in the face for laughing at a bully's misfortune after years of suffering at his hands went ignored.

Nothing like a good rainstorm to boost the old mental health

It is sheer hubris on the part is payment processors to think they can just strong arm literally everyone into not buying or selling porn without getting firebombed, shut down, strictly regulated, or nationalized. Digital commerce is a basic public service and should be treated as such.

Man, I'm just extra sensitive to random noises this week. Every little auditory event across the house or in the distance is hooking my attention, especially when I'm trying to focus.

I've just done the math, and I speak a grand total of two languages: 1 entire English 60% of Spanish 35% of Chinese 2% of German And trace amounts of like 10 other languages

Your vocal cords are actually designed to work equally well in both directions, breathing in as well as out. And look, now you're making monkey noises!

It's easy to say that the universe is cold and uncaring But We are here, together We are life We are parts of this universe that care We are the very instruments by which the universe cares

Anyone else spent their entire life honing their subconscious just so they don't have to actively think about a bunch of stuff all the time, only to spend all that thinking effort on being active about the subconscious training?

Republicans already had 6/10 stages of genocide against trans people, and are now calling for 7 & 8: Organization and Persecution, which they already demonstrated on Hispanic people. They will escalate from Alligator Auschwitz to Buchenwald in Baton Rouge. Do not remain silent and complicit. Resist.

Sorry about how much of my feed is digging into right wing social manipulation. I think a lot about it because I have family members I know are good people, yet remain trapped in front of Fox's shadow puppet show. I can't break them out of Plato's Cave without understanding why they refuse to leave.

"Don't trust the experts; because you don't understand the field, you can't understand their motives or trust them." -Fox, et. al. "Because you don't understand a field, you are vulnerable to lies about it. Trusting Joe Rogan over the CDC & WHO is the dumbest thing I've ever heard." -Me 5 years ago

Summer has finally released its grip on the front range. The forecast is entirely highs in the 70s. Gonna enjoy this while it lasts.

"Every accusation is a confession" doesn't quite capture the truth of it. Every accusation is also a false flag, a straw man used as an excuse. Every accusation is as much a declaration of intent as it is meant to fool the masses into thinking it's normal and okay to be that awful.