2,317 karma · joined July 9, 2009
Now I own a rowhome in the historic district of the city, we're opening the first floor as a museum within the next year, and I walk everywhere. All forms of transit (bus, trolley, trackless trolley, subway, light rapid transit, train, ferry) take contactless payment (finally) and these days, rideshare fills in the gaps.
Wages are higher in the suburbs, but I can get to a sizable international airport in 15 minutes by car, to the Amtrak station in 20 minutes via $3 subway, and I can walk to grocery/hardware/bakery as well as bars/restaurants/galleries/venues/museums/etc.
A car used to be a very, very important part of my life, and now it's more of a luxurious convenience.
I did get paid in the end, and there was the satisfaction of sticking it to a bully, but financially, it was not worth the effort.
They all went stale before the day was out. She compared the ingredients between what she had made and what came out of the box at the grocery store, and the ones that she didn't use? They were all preservatives.
Choose your battles wisely.
I will concede that the use of sweeteners in everything in the US is unhinged. It's hard to really understand until you've spent enough time out of the country to where you're buying groceries and looking at the ingredients. You come back to the states and everything tastes weirdly sweet. It was a real "fish don't know they're wet" moment for me, which mostly came about from marrying an Australian.
Following this with "What outcome should we expect at the end of this meeting? If there are next steps, what would we like them to be?" helps cut to the chase, and in my experience, things got better across the board. Sure, there were one or two folks who still struggled to create agendas for meetings - but it wasn't long before they were updating their LinkedIn profiles. Accountability can do that sometimes.
But I always think of https://www.theninhotline.com/news/ as a hacked guestbook script.
It's somewhat interesting to me that, according to Wikipedia, the word "blog" as an abbreviation of weblog came into use the month before I started that site.
"Adoption of our Ogg Vorbis format isn't where we hoped it to be"
"Fork me on Git"
I had a Dell Laptop that, when I bought it in 2006, had Windows XP on it. I was able to upgrade it all the way to Windows 10, at no charge. (The beta versions of Windows 7 and Windows 8 both just kind of rolled over into full fledged versions of the OS. Now, even by the time I had Win8 on that machine, it was just for fun. I mostly kept it around because the screen resolution was unusually high for 2006, and for a period afterward, laptop screen resolutions were almost all lower than WXGA+ even on higher end machines. But you could run Windows 10 and modern browsers on a machine built for the WinXP era. Also, I think I paid $700 for that machine, from the Dell Outlet. That's a lot of mileage for the price paid.
So when Windows 10 told me that my 12-year-old Ship of Theseus Dell XPS desktop was unable to take an upgrade to Windows 11, I took a long hard look, and sprung for an M1 Macbook w/ 64gb of RAM. They had a pretty killer deal on these at B&H, and it's the first time I've ever felt like I've had a true "desktop replacement" laptop. I still think Explorer is better than Finder (and I'm not going to argue with anyone about why so don't bother asking), there are things I will miss about having an ATX case, but Apple's abdication on proprietary ports is ultimately what pushed me over the edge. Everything is USB-C. Great! I had gotten a lot of mileage out of Firewire hardware, but I saw this as a pivotal moment to use some of that money I'd saved over the last decade and a half to completely modernize my setup.
If Windows 11 hadn't forced me to consider new core hardware (and if Apple silicon hadn't leapfrogged everything else on the market - using a laptop all day without charging? Phenomenal.) I'd still be using Windows.
I've been using MS operating systems since DOS 3.1, I just have to assume I'm no longer their target market.
A version of this was available in Photoshop for a long time, but I think the feature was deprecated and removed completely this year. I had used it for a few things here and there, but dedicated 3D tools were much better if you were working in that space.
When I became aware of the concept of aphantasia, it gave context to how I work in the visual arts. I was never really great at coming up with an idea and creating it - I always preferred to work off something pre-existing, whether that was painting from a photograph, or doing collage work. This transferred especially well into working in Photoshop, although I never latched on to Illustrator.
Sketchup was a revelation to me, once I got the hang of it. I was thinking about repainting my study, and ended up modeling my whole goddamn house. Sketchup's 3D warehouse is full of Ikea furniture, and I could rearrange my room virtually, try different colors, it was so great.
In trying to imagine what my 18th century home looked like when it was built, I again struggled because of the absence of photography, but ended up building the surrounding blocks in Sketchup and Twinmotion.
So, I think there's a path to the visual arts, to graphic design... it's just a different path, and one that, for me, means I have to lay my own foundations before I start getting 'creative'
And so many things I read about aphantasia are spot-on aligned with my own experience, but put into a comparative context I hadn't really thought about until the word was more or less invented a decade ago, and the idea leaked out into the internet. The line about "weaker autobiographical memories" in this article really hit home for me. I take so many photos now - thank goodness for digital photography - and in the context of this topic, it's no wonder.
I've also struggled to remember dreams, all my life - and also thought the 'counting sheep' thing never made sense, at all.
By contrast, where I live in Philadelphia, developers are not required to perform any archaeological studies before excavating - even along the Delaware River waterfront, where the oldest European settlements are, as well as countless indigenous sites.
Sometimes, before history gets scraped away and sent to the dump, bottle diggers will excavate the trash pits, typically discarding anything that's not 100% intact, and selling the 18th and 19th century bottles on eBay or at flea markets. However, like the axe heads in the article, these artifacts are absent context, removing nearly all historical value. And of course, the stratification of the pits they're extracted from is also destroyed, further reducing the ability to interpret any finds that might otherwise have been saved.
It's only projects paid for by our federal government that are required to do archaeological studies, and when they do, it's not uncommon to find early colonial artifacts, but also remnants of pre-contact Lenni-Lenape sites.
You only really get one shot at recovering history through archaeology. That doesn't mean that preservation holds permanent veto over progress, but a little bit of disincentivization can go a long way in the study of history.
On my Monday morning drive to work, I put on a CD by the band Cake, an album I'd listened to dozens, if not hundreds of times at this point, and would you believe that now, piercing through the mix, I heard the squeak of the drummer's kick pedal. Never noticed it before, but because I was so focused on those frequencies for two days straight, now it was all I could hear.
I switched to listening to purely electronic music that month, and I never noticed squeaky kick drums in studio recordings again.
It's fucking great, I haven't had so much as a runny nose in nearly half a decade.
He's currently building out The Bloop Museum near Baltimore, for video games, computers, and related stuff - https://givebutter.com/bloopholiday
Would you say the difference in income in the places in Asia that you're describing were on the same level as in Manhattan?
There are very poor parts of America where people take more care of shopping carts, there are very rich parts of America where people take more care of shopping carts. But a thing happens when you have a notable population of mentally ill homeless people living on the same streets that New York level wealthy citizens also use. The person I replied to is from Texas, where they round up inconvenient people and either bus them or fly them to other states - including New York. That's certainly one way to level out the income inequality in the region.
>There is better social cohesion and respect for other people's property. Now, there are some oddities in that if they find you lying on the street hurt, most will pass you by and kind of look at you quizzically, but they also do have good samaritans, just not as many.
On that note, comparing "places in Asia" to New York, you're going to also have to factor in the effects of (presumably) thousands of years of culture, vs barely four centuries in a rapidly developed melting pot of capitalism.
But this is a lot we're typing out in response to one person's weird conjecture. My point is that I think it's distasteful for someone from Texas to be giving a blanket statement that people from New York must be horrible people. If they spent any time in New York, with New Yorkers, I would hope they'd have a more informed view.
Officer, I have footage of the person committing assaults, we have several witnesses, including several victims, and oh look, that's him walking past.
"Oh yeah, we know about that guy. If you see something happening, call 911. Nothing I can really do."
911, meanwhile, rings out, because of staff shortages.
All this is to say I'm fairly late to the voice assistant party. At some point my wife and I decided to give it a good try. Read up on best practices. Figured it'd been something that had been in market a good long time, maybe by now the kinks were worked out.
The search results were hit or miss. It was not clear where tasks were being saved to.
So for the last few years, here are the voice commands we've used:
ok google, what's the weather today
ok google, play white noise
ok google, stop
...and every now and then, we ask it to search for info on a topic and it fails comically. I'm not surprised to see a big shift here.
Oooh. On my Pixel, I do use "OK Google, Turn off the flashlight" - that IS helpful.
It helps to have a reason to get together. At a certain point early in life, I think most people adopt a "no agenda, no attenda" attitude towards socializing.
I felt like I had discoverability issues with Mastodon, and the culture I kept running into there was abrasive. It's all around much better now than it was years ago, and I do seem to get more engagement from strangers than on any of the other networks, but I struggled to stay interested.
Bluesky reminded me of the kind of slower organic growth that you'd typically find in earlier internet communities. The absence of videos and GIFs is, for me, an enormous positive point that I know will eventually give way to popular demand. I like that it's more text-and-images focused, and it seems to be in my sweet spot in terms of... most of what I see feel like thoughtful posts and replies, and not people nakedly building their personal brand.
None of them are going to have the same social cachet as Twitter. It's pretty incredible to see someone spend billions of dollars to completely squander an ecosystem an internationally recognizable brand like that. A fairly unique resource, obliterated by a man-baby with absolutely no concept of the value of the people on the platform he bought.
I brought my wife over on the 90 day fiancee visa well before there was a TV show about it, and mostly because it was the only way we could hang out. Thankfully we lucked out, and celebrated our 20th anniversary earlier this year.
But to the point: When you're dealing with DHS and immigration, it's made absolutely clear that if you screw anything up, you're kicked out of the country and it's going to be a ballache to get back in. It's not surprising that they were not included in the blanket pardon, and I think that's actually pretty reasonable, even though I also think that incarceration over marijuana possession is absurd and has been pretty devastating to the lives of millions of people and the communities they live in.
The amount of work you have to do to qualify for a visa, and to move between the different statuses (there are fun periods where your status is just... pending. When we went through this, there was nothing you have to show for this except for a generic looking letter from DHS. All your fancy documentation is sitting in a US Gov't inbox somewhere while they make sure you're not a terrorist) and, frankly, if you manage to get arrested for smoking weed while you're on a visa, you're kind of an idiot.
We didn't even travel outside the country until my wife got her full-fledged citizenship. And when she applied for that, they gave her a hard time over the speeding tickets she'd gotten while here.
Whether you agree with the concept or not, visitors to the country are told pretty clearly that the rules apply extra hard to them, and the consequences of not following very basic rules are going to be extra inconvenient. You get caught breaking the law, you risk losing your visa status and losing the ability to ever visit the country again.
It didn't stop me from enjoying her interviews, and even the famously off the rails Gene Simmons interview had me on her side. I'm glad it's not extreme reactions all the time on her show. It's usually good storytelling.
I personally gained a huge amount of respect for radio host interviews when I went on the Kevin and Bean show to talk about Nine Inch Nails. It was a surprise invitation, I figured "why not" but worried a bit that I'd stammer through spouting some dumb fanboy nonsense. But those dudes were like wizards in a way I still struggle to describe. They set me up, very naturally, and somehow extracted good responses out of me. When I hung up, I didn't feel like a socially awkward idiot, but rather felt like I played a part in a performance.
Anyway, I still like Terry Gross, sorry to hear you think she's the worst interviewer you've ever heard.
I get that the art was a no-effort import, but everything else about that damn game is a good illustration of something that only seems simple because it's exceedingly well done.
*arguable, but I think it's interesting if you've ever been involved in a high stakes ecommerce launch