Or maybe even to consult the pediatrician.

And waking life isn’t real and nothing you do in it matters.

Unauthorized… Toast?

Oh man. I’ve gotta re-watch that. I haven’t seen it since I was a kid.

situation /sĭch″oo͞-ā′shən/

noun

• The combination of circumstances at a given moment; a state of affairs. synonym: state.
• Similar: state A critical, problematic, or striking set of circumstances.
• “We don’t want this minor gaffe to turn into a situation.”
• The way in which something is positioned vis-à-vis its surroundings.
• “the town’s situation on the river.”

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition

Just today, I happen to have looked into what exactly keratin is. (The stuff that makes up your hair and finger nails.) It’s solid protein, made all the more solid (and all the less water-soluble) by the presence of the sulfer-containing amino acid cysteine. And fingernails have more of it than hair. Who knew?

Because white folks already stole everything else from Native Americans.

For sure. But I’ve seen a lot more sins committed in the name of reusing code than in the name of minimizing dependencies.

Anarcho-primitivism: The cows roam free. You and your tribe follow the herd, bringing with you only what you can carry on your back. When you need milk, you form a milking party with your tribe and catch a milking cow by chasing it until it’s too exhausted to keep running.

“A little copying is better than a little dependency.”

I have a friend who literally doesn’t get it. He identifies very strongly as a “leftist”. I don’t know that he identifies with any more specific label, but he’s got a big primitivist streak. (As do I, really.) He’s the one who inspired me to read Ishmael. No way he could be considered a Tankie in the slightest.

We were talking about politics in the U.S. and about how right-wingers, despite major ideological differences, tend to band together to… for instance… elect people like Trump. Just by virtue of being right-wing, they can work to accomplish common goals. The left, meanwhile, cancels each other and themselves constantly and can’t really manage to get any kind of momentum as a result.

He kindof implied that the ideological differences between leftists aren’t consequential and we should all be working together.

And I was like “well… tankies, though, right?” And he’s like “what’s a tankie?”

We’ve been talking about it a lot. I’ve shared lots of examples of tankies defending DPRK and Stalin and stuff. And I think he’s still skeptical that such people even exist, somehow.

It’s not that he’s a tankie who doesn’t get why authoritarianism is a losing strategy. He’s an anarchist who so can’t understand or identify with the tankie mindset that he thinks they’re some tiny group of inconsequential nuts so worthy of being ignored as to not even require a footnote in any discussion of left-wing solidarity.

I envy him, sometimes.

It especially applies to Paw Patrol.

I was on a trip as a kid (probably… I dunno, 9 or 10 years old?) with my family. The hotel had a pool and the family brought me to have a swim. (They didn’t swim, just sat around the pool while I swam.)

It was just us at first, but soon another kid about my age showed up with no parents/supervision. He sat down on the edge of the pool at the deep end and dangled his feet. He conversed a little with me and my family, but otherwise was just there hanging out. He mentioned in passing that he couldn’t swim.

But then suddenly he was in the pool, thrashing and struggling.

My parents honestly had no idea what to do. One ran to grab the life buoy. I don’t remember quite what the other did.

But my swim lessons training kicked in and I did the thing. Jumped out of the pool, ran around to the side of the pool right where the kid was struggling, laid down on the ground next to the pool, and stuck one arm into the pool for him to grab. Worked just as well as my old swim instructor indicated it would.

Once he had me to hold him up out of the water, he was fine, of course. The rest was just a matter of helping him out of the pool.

It was after that that he revealed he had an ostomy bag and wasn’t supposed to be swimming at all, deep end or otherwise. (It was a hospital town and I got the impression he was in town to get some kind of treatment.)

We made sure he got back to his room safely and all.

That’s pretty much the whole story. I don’t know that he’d have died had nobody been there. And my bumbling parents probably would have figured a way to help him even if I wasn’t there. But he had a better chance of walking away from that by virtue of my (admittedly very rudimentary) swim lesson training.

And it was really dramatic being part of it.

Posting conspiracy theories in a community about science? Bold move, Cotton.

I love when I idly wonder something about a post, click into the comments, and the top comment is exactly, specifically the answer to my idle curiosity. Cheers.

“Excuse me, I’m speaking.”

Sometimes the babies eat the mom too. Yes I speak from… I guess second-hand experience. First-hand would imply I was a matricidal cannibal hamster.

3.75 pounds.

Oh wait. “Dose.” Thought you said something else.

You think software developers will finally start optimizing for memory usage again?

“Blue no matter who.”