We had to book a hotel room last year on a couple hours notice because a contractor accidentally punched through the main waterline to our house and we had no running water. I cannot imagine how much more stressful it would have been if hotels were actively screening us out for being locals.

Well that, um, explains some things.

There’s something delightful about The Economist celebrating Jane Austen’s 250th birthday by writing an essay about how good at economics she was. They know their brand and they enjoy recognizing game.

Truly begging people to stop using capitalism as a synonym for commerce. Exchange of money for goods and services is not capitalism. Unless you’re going to do a Marxist analysis, you can just say consumerism or commercialism if you want to talk about people buying things.

My wife and I just became perilously close to revealing our Reddit usernames to each other. But the crisis has been averted. The sanctity of Reddit anonymity is intact.

Reading A Theology of Liberation by Gustavo Gutiérrez very slowly because I have to stop every 3 paragraphs to whisper “based” to myself.

Even if you don’t know the difference between the annunciation and the immaculate conception, you should be able to catch that your AI thinks Christmas is in 9 months, not 3 weeks, right?

Thinking about FD Signifier’s aside in his most recent video about how anti-capitalist and anti-establishment musicians and genres, especially those popular with (white) men, have been deliberately minimized and subsumed by the music industry.

Savannah and Honda just gave the volume of the Smoky the Bear balloon in black bears, taking the American refusal to use the metric system to new heights.

Picard should have punched Q.

Semi-related, I had to do a “how to use AI in spreadsheets” class a couple months ago for work. The examples mostly revolved around “the AI can take the data and make a chart.” Um. Guess what Excel and Google Sheets already do? Pretty sure Lotus 123 did that in later editions. The value add of AI/

Our brains rebel at the idea that the past was often much worse than today (which also means that today is relatively fortunate). Nostalgia and "nothing ever changes" are powerful emotions

This is identical to Russia invading Ukraine. Illegally invading a country for their resources and likely killing thousands—if not more—is immoral and should not be supported by anyone with any shred of moral conscience.

Brushing my teeth while listening to my wife in the other room viscerally reacting to the second post. I did warn her.

I’m roughly the demographic for Christy. I go to in-person movies regularly. The only reason I knew about it was there was a poster in the theatre hallway outside the auditorium I saw One Battle After Another in. MASSIVE marketing failure.

So it turns out... the US air travel system was incredibly, deeply dependent on federal funding to just run day-to-day all this time, to the benefit of private airline shareholders, when everyone thinks that state-run trains are leeching off the government. Weird!

In the century leading up to 1975, nearly 6000 freighters went down in the Great Lakes. The Edmund Fitzgerald was the last. The last. In 50 years, not a single commercial freighter has been lost in the Great Lakes. Why? It's NOAA. Of course it's NOAA.

The current MSNBC panel is actually vibrant and asking tough questions of guests. If MSNBC were like this all the time, not just Sundays at 10pm I might actually tune in more (no shade @chrislhayes.bsky.social I <3 u)

So what I’m taking away from this specifically is that New Hampshire’s Senators suck.

My family has been without half our income for 40 days. It has been.. very hard. We are willing to feel that pain so people can have health care next year, or to undo these illegal recissions. We are not willing to have been put through this for NOTHING.

I don’t even know what you do in this situation. Pay your rent, pay your healthcare, eat rice and beans, learn to live without electricity?

We’re heading into week two of the cat being completely discombobulated by the time change.

I love that this exists and I love that I will never have to experience it. www.reddit.com/r/DIY/s/Huau...

I’ve changed my mind, Donald Trump needs to annex Canada so that Randy Clarke can run for president. www.reddit.com/r/washington...

Getting really tired of the political side that contemptuously said they were the realists who would “call a spade a spade” for the last thirty or forty years, suddenly becoming the party of “it’s not a tariff it’s a ‘licensing fee’”.

Please for the love of god let this week be the last week any of us have to hear about a Cuomo ever again.

For some reason the Reddit algorithm has started feeding me r/tattooadvice and every one is someone with the gnarliest infection ever asking whether it’s normal or they should see a doctor. If you have to ask Reddit if your tattoo should be oozing green puss, you might deserve to die of sepsis.

Attempting to find even one (1) book on my to read shelf in GoodReads that is actively available through the DC public library system.

Incredible that of all the IP Hollywood keeps rebooting and reviving, we haven’t gotten a second Master and Commander.

So after exhaustive testing we have determined that the cat’s favorite people foods are 1) cheez-its 2) ham 3) ice cream 4) sauce of any variety.

There’s a certain type of woman who doesn’t want to admit (to herself much less anyone else) that she’s actually a reactionary conservative, and boy do they not understand actual left (even center left) women At All.

Me, who has killed exactly one (1) enemy during the Ghost of Yotei tutorial, every time someone in game mentions the Yotei Six: excuse me, it’s the Yotei Five now

Just going to say again that it feels like we’re going through a period uniquely and expressly designed to torture historians.

I continue to be deeply impressed by Hilary Mantel’s dedication to hating Sir Thomas More!

This is how I feel about spelunking.

Watching All of You on AppleTV. Both of these people need serious therapy, Laura moreso than Simon, but still.

A perennial Reddit post: a lonely guy asks for advice on dating/making friends IRL. The standard advice is offered (go to bars, join clubs, take classes, go to church, join a gym, volunteer), and he rejects every suggestion with an excuse for why he can’t make the effort to do any of those things.

Lying in bed at 23:30 reading about the Edict of Nantes like a totally normal person.

Somehow video game business practices are leaking into…checks notes…sewing?? and I don’t like it. www.reddit.com/r/sewing/s/q...

Current theory on The Materialists is that Celine Song strung a bunch of sentences from thousands of Reddit posts together into a semi-coherent mass. Also Dakota Johnson has some kind of magic rock that she keeps in her pocket to suck the acting ability out of her costars.

I’m reading Wolf Hall, and every 20 pages or so I have to put it down and say “damn, Hilary Mantel really hated Sir Thomas More.”

Just watched a man ride by union station on a cabi and shout at the guard “where’s that combat patch? Where’s that combat patch, boys? Don’t got one yet? Ah that’s too bad” and I am glad they were standing behind me when he did because you know I laughed.

Glass Onion and the new Superman, although I think can’t remember if the Elon Musk stand-in dies. Lex Luther doesn’t but he does get arrested for treason.

It turns out that when you live in a city where you regularly see people in the military it’s impossible to tell at a casual glance whether someone in a uniform is a national guard troop doing a fascism or just a guy on his commute.

Well fuck. thehill.com/homenews/sta...

It’s not like Elim Garak is one of the most popular supporting characters in all of Trek or anything.

Please push hard for this, Councilmember Allen! An orange line infill station at Oklahoma and Benning NE would be possibly more transformative for Kingman Park and Carver Langston than the stadium rehabilitation project itself.

Disturbingly, I now find myself old enough to remember conversations in 2006 and 2007 about whether it was even possible for the US housing market to contract.

Screaming “break up! Break up!” at Ashley and Marita on Queer Ultimatum as they stumble through the world’s most drawn-out breakup discussion.