After about fifteen minutes in the sun I feel like something’s wrong. Depending on if it’s nice and overcast, or a bright summer day, I have from ten minutes to an hour before nausea takes over.
I also have a crazy, almost fetishistic thing about consent.
I might be a vampire.
In the aughts George W. Bush signed an executive order instructing the IRS not to enforce the restrictions on churches regarding political speech non-profits are not supposed to endorse parties or specific candidates, though they can talk about issues).
After that dozens of right-wing political action committees and activism organizations redefined themselves as churches, what are now called parachurch organizations that are tax-free and political.
So yes, it is already a laundering business taking advantage of Christian nationalist leadership who believes in loyalty over principle.
If England is gone, Imperial France would have prevailed. Heck the war of the first coalition might have gone to Napoleon.
Granted, buggery and interracial marriage would have been legalized sooner.
Public equality and public liberty are the responsibility and purview of government. If they are not, we can’t really have government by consent. Instead we have hegemony in which the lower strata are governed by force.
Here in the states, the social norm of taking personal responsibility for all our misfortune and lack of career opportunities allows our industrialists to take credit for propelling themselves to greatness (even when their inherited wealth did the heavy lifting).
So yeah, a latchkey kid childhood (in which I was home alone, because all the adults in my house had to work) figures largely into my lifelong major depression. I suspect our intergenerational mental health epidemic here in the states is informed not only by intergenerational dysfunction (each generation taking the abuse of the previous and then abusing the next) but also by the isolation created by nuclear families without strong communities.
Then there’s the matter that we humans tend to blame ourselves for trauma, as seen by studies of mothers who endured a miscarriage, and the disproportionate tendency to blame themselves for circumstances that could not have been affected by behavior (diet, attitude, whatever). Also people who survive the recently deceased often will look to themselves to see how circumstances of the death might have been changed.
The HarleyWing ship is canon, I think, meeeting incidentally or even adversrially and then boning like the entire rabbit population of the warren’s future depends on it before Grayson gets embarassed again and they part ways while Nightwing gets disappointment vibes from Batman.
So it’s entirely appropriate for Harley to make thirsty jabs at Nightwing at any time.
At least Nightwing hasn’t yet been a jerk to Harley.
I remember FD2 in my…thirties, I think, and noting that the pile-up started with the flying logs (which seemed to fly like balsa but hit like tamarack) and was the combination of a lot of things going wrong (which was consistent with theme of death as a petty shit that toys with you before finishing you off.) Really, most of the movies felt more like a vindictive gamemaster, unless the players signed up for being teens in a slasher flick.
On the other hand in the eighties, I remember a 24+ vehicle pile-up on the San Bernadino freeway, my mom investigated as a paralegal. It started as a car stalled in thick fog, and bunches of drivers driving way faster than was safe considering the short visibility. It really showed that the weakest link was, indeed between steering wheel and seat.
That said, industrial accidents are quite normal thanks to the drive of profits leading companies to try to sue OSHA or lobby the department (or lobby congress to defund OSHA), and yes, a lot of them emerge from companies choosing to not adhere to all the precautional requirements, and then having their infrastructure implode like a Seagate submersible.
We have a lot more mad engineering than mad science, though there’s a moral hazard when you hire common workers to take the physical risks.
ETA: Full disclosure, I might be biased in my view of death. In 2011, one of the contestants in an air race in Reno had a malfunction that veered the plane into the grandstands. Bunches of injured. Nine Eleven died, including my cousin, and I had to contend for a long time with the reality that an airplane dropped out of the sky to smack my cousin and kill him. (His son, a boy at the time, and the son’s friend survived because my cousin shielded them with his body.) I write about the incident here, recalling the incident shortly after Alan Rickman and David Bowie had recently died.
Death is not an antagonist, or an anthropomorphic being one can negotiate with or trick or flee. It’s just a thing that happens when your parts can no longer sustain your vitals. Nothing requires sacrifices of life, even when situations might limit survival (such as the Titanic’s lifeboat accommodation of 1,178 survivors, fully loaded, in contrast to a passenger load of 2,209). Life is a thing, and when it can no longer continue, death happens.
Chelsea Manning was having a rough time during her imprisonment after her data dump. So it’s become kind of a common very special episode.
I use mph because that’s what the speedometer reads. But mile/min² is easy to compute by dividing mile/hr/min by 60. Once the starting and ending speed are converted (assuming impulse is a constant) the law of accelleration neatly applies.
I mitigate my personal sense of failure with a corresponding failure of society to allow me (or anyone) a fraction of a chance.
As my cat reminds me, there is no legitimate judge of success or failure: We live, until the moment we cease to live, and then we simply are not.
Sin and crime are artificial constructs of ministerial systems. If you want to worry about right and wrong, do so in context to yourself, your neighbor and your community. This is where real help and real harm occur.
Also no war but class war. We’ve nothing to lose but our chains. ACAB. Etc.
Actuarial consultation, obviously.
At the risk of outing the extreme perversity of my sick mind, I present the following math problems for your edification and enjoyment…
TW: Age-play
All participants are adult, even when otherwise is implied. Cat magic.
Yes, they are real math problems. I wrote up a bunch for a failed scene decades ago.
Enjoy.
Travel: On a road trip daddy is letting Tiffany steer the car. While Tiffany bounces softly on daddy’s lap, daddy is casually accelerating six miles per hour per minute. How far to they travel from the point they’re going 30 mph to when they’re going 90 mph?
Snack Time: Leslie is eating an enormous double-scooped ice-cream cone while Brenda is sucking on a huge Popsicle. Leslie’s long licks up the side and along the top of her two scoops each average 8 seconds and 5 such licks consume an ounce of ice cream. Meanwhile, Brenda’s sucking strokes are only 4 seconds long. But the juice-bar is so big she can only contain 2 inches of frozen fruity goodness in her mouth at a time. It takes 20 such strokes for Brenda to wear away an inch of her tasty treat. If Leslie’s ice cream cone is 16 ounces and Brenda’s Popsicle is 9 inches long, and it takes Leslie just as long to eat the cone as it does Brenda the last two inches of Popsicle, then which girl will finish their snack first, and by how much time?
Sleep Time: On Friday night, Teresa has a slumber party with six other girls. Daddy takes 30 minutes to tuck Teresa in, plus 5 minutes each to tuck in the other girls at the party, except Veronica with whom he takes 45 minutes. Daddy also takes 20 minutes to tuck in Teresa’s little sister, Holly, and an hour to tuck in Teresa’s older sister, Barbie. At what time does Daddy have to start getting girls ready for bed in order to have them all in bed by 10:00 pm?
I’m reminded of a conversation with my Dad.
DAD: <by phone> Let me know if your aunt calls. Otherwise I’ll meet you in the lobby in a half hour.
ME: Roger that. Call you if I hear from Aunty, otherwise downstairs at 10:30.
DAD: <Shows up at 10:30> Hear anything from Aunty?
ME: No joy.
DAD: …No joy in Mudville?
When my quirky personality creates wave interference with your quirky personality.
Yes but then we discovered it makes your calves fabulous.
Then men started wearing full trous, and women started wearing high dresses and skirts, where men wore the shorts and women went full length before.
Deep, deep deep in Scunthorp territory. A human being should have been around to clear that flag.
A quite intentional trans allegory that also stands as exploring a lot of parallel concepts, and since transness is not popular, its better not to admit it and let trans-panic scare away Matrix fans who couldn’t handle it.
The Matrix analogy works better for me compared to my ASD experiences than my midlife enby status.
Gen X here. The great slasher era of cinema started when I was a teen, and was morally inspired by Silent-generation commentary on the boomers and us. It was supposed to warn us If you indulge in sex and drugs and rock-&-roll (Satan approved!) and you’ll come to a bad end.
So Friday the 13th (1980 with Kevin Bacon) was the same as Reefer Madness except for general debauchery and bacchanalia rather than just for cannabis. And mostly the silents were pissed that they didn’t get to party while young with sex and drugs, and instead drowned their sorrows with hard liquor and cigars.
Curiously, the slasher format came not from classic horror but mystery. The Ur-slasher was And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie, regarded as one of her greatest stories, from an author that was prolific like Stephen King.
As per many of Christie’s novels, ATTWN was an experiment in defying the (alleged) rules of mystery writing (e.g. the detective must be beyond reproach ) and still being a valid whodunit. She’s had the story told by the killer before, and this time the narrative followed one of the victims.
Crystal Lake was a closed circle much like Soldier Island, and the neighborhood of Elm Street was made inescapable because everyone sleeps.
Remember also that Jason Voorhees was actually dead, and the slasher was doing the (double-plus grisly) murders for vengeance of camp councilors for their negligence, while they got high and got freaky. So technically it wasn’t about the sex, it was about being AWOL when duty called. (Says the latch-key kid with major depression.)
Also, pre-internet, boobs on screen was one of the few times grown men people who like looking at boobs got to see some that were not their spouse’s / exclusive partner’s (or just their own), and people having sex on screen was an excuse for flying free. Truthfully, until the Skinemax era of late-night cable soft porn, the love scene and the nude scene were commonly different scenes. By the aughts, the obligatory horror titties became only optional and by the age of the internet they almost faded out entirely …until the age of subscription television series like Game of Thrones and Sopranos and nudity came back swingin’
But this cartoon points to a curious reality in the United States: The birth-rate is imploding. Given in 2022, one of the justifications for the Dobbs decision was white babies as a commodity (seriously), they were expecting the new generations to keep churning out new generations of school kids to be indoctrinated into the next working / fighting force. But it’s not happening. Young men and women are just less interested in that old time romance. This is what has J. D. Vance (and his shadowy billionaire masters) freaked out about childless cat ladies.
It’s no wonder, really. 80%+ of the households live in precarity. Employers are skipping the OSHA rules and Millennials and Zoomers are being worked like old-time miners on the truck system ( another day older and deeper in debt… ). Upward mobility is a joke. Wages aren’t enough to sustain one adult, let alone a family. The dream of a homestead? Gone. We can’t even afford a car. Everyone knows they’re going to work and be miserable until they drop dead from exhaustion, where’s the point in having kids? Tommy and Gina, are living on a prayer and on accumulated debt until their limit drives them out of their rental.
Gen-Z doesn’t have time for Crystal Lake, and are glad for a weekend sleeping in. If it’s a holiday, they expect the boss will call them in and then forget to pay them holiday time. The horror zoomers have to face is not slashers in the dark, but the society gone dystopian, making it literally impossible to make ends meet, while tracking you like Big Brother from all the telescreens. Your horror isn’t Jason, but Ingsoc.
And that’s before global agriculture collapses from water shortage, which is expected to happen when you’re middle-aged (in your forties and fifties), at which point your life becomes a Roland Emmerich film. Or Slaughterhouse Five.
Part of the problem is the failure of patent offices to do due diligence. Granted, this was exacerbated by the lack of an electronic database that tracked prior patents, public domain stuff, and things declared too general to be patented by the courts.
The project in the US to transfer old patents to digital and make them searchable is way underfunded and understaffed, and still is expected to take decades to finish.
The thing is, big companies like being able to win IP cases just by outspending their opponents, so they lobby to keep IP law byzantine and draconian, and to install judges who are either ignorant or just will side with the bigger company.
WTF?