Sometimes Softly

Kind of impressed that there are apparently so many people that rich living so close to me.

Took a long walk on a trail that passed behind a neighborhood of extremely fancy houses. When I saw the first one up ahead I assumed it was a country club or something and then there were more and more and more of them.

@BarneyFlames Arguably electronic copying makes this much harder tho. I can see an argument that copyright for a work itself makes more sense than copyright for characters and setting.

This is just stupid midwittery, we know commercial cinema existed before serious IP protection, it would just lead to creators tightly controlling distribution making copying impossible. Edison used to own small devices people could pay to watch movies on.

Being told in one state that you can't gerrymander yourself two additional House seats at this particular moment is one of the dumber things to send people into a meltdown about the rising need for violent revolution.

@NMan248 @kitten_beloved After I lost my Google account I had to deal with lots of other accounts where I'd used that one. Steam was definitely the easiest to update.

@kitten_beloved @SometimesSoftly Steam can get my acc back on mere vibes and google (and most companies) somehow cant

I had firstnamelastname@gmail.com, with no numbers or special characters or anything, since I was 18 until a few years ago when I was locked out of the account with no recourse. Still angry about this, btw.

@Stoke0Newington I got signed out of both devices at once. I still had access to my recovery email address, but I recovery phone number was a Google Voice number (stupid of me). So I only had one factor's worth of authentication, and that was that.

@SometimesSoftly I have the equivalent email address. What happened to cause that?

Makes me think about how I'd write the Stepford Husbands. Maybe the robot husbands would have a literal switch between romance-novel-schmaltzy mode and go-away-and-don't-bother-me mode.

Read the Stepford Wives recently and one of the reasons the men like their robot wives is because they don't have annoying time-consuming hobbies.

@Dr_Pichaloca @Devon_Eriksen_ Yeah, that's silly.

@SometimesSoftly @Devon_Eriksen_ I believe the issue here isn't the MET gala itself, its the fact that this athlete lady (who looks beautiful btw) is catching shade for wearing a normal looking dress instead of getting in on the nonsense. She was declared "worst dressed person of the night" or some bs like that

This is what I call "The Death of the Reader". Authors write for readers, who aren't authors. Artists paint for non-artists. Musicians play for non-musicians. This keeps fiction, art, and music grounded. But when any group stops creating for an external audience, and starts trying to impress only each other, they create a weird, self-reinforcing feedback loop. This isn't clothing, or even fashion. It's a costume party. They're all trying one-up each other with something weirder and more eye-catching. So when an athlete, of recent and topical celebrity, who isn't a part of their Bored Billionaires' Club, shows up in a dress that's just a dress, of course they are going to mock her. She's just revealed that she didn't get the memo. That she's not an insider. How she looks to the world at large is not the point. This is why 99.999...% of copies of "Infinite Jest" have never been read. This is why John Cage "wrote" four minutes of silence. This is why competitive bodybuilders from the 80s looked like Greek gods, and modern ones look like gargoyle freaks. It's all the Death of the Reader. Hollywood doesn't make movies for you now. They hate you. They make movies for each other. And then cry about how you didn't buy a ticket, because they think your only role is to pay for their onanistic circle of self indulgence. This game isn't going to stop. It's just going to keep getting weirder until someone's dress malfunctions and catches fire, and the rest of us all have a good laugh.

@GrowLifeBetter @CasuallyGreg ... Scanning groceries at self-checkout is not a difficult skill? I don't know of anyone who has ever failed at it and I'm not certain how you could.

And yet people complain about scanning their own items at a self checkout (while also failing to do a task which requires ‘no skill’). Unskilled is a lie told by people who have zero idea about what the work actually entails beyond seeing the finished product. I’ve had to terminate people with degrees, construction workers, retired medical professionals, former pharmacists, and engineers for performance & skill issues because they came in thinking it would just be an easy job they could just breeze through while looking for their next career. I challenge anyone who thinks there’s any such thing as an “unskilled job” to take one and last until their first review, do everything 100% correctly on time, and get an “exceeds expectations” on all metrics.

No, actually. Unskilled jobs/labor is a descriptor. Those terms refer to jobs that don’t require specialized training, advanced education, or complex skills—things like fast food work, retail stocking, basic cleaning, or warehouse picking.

@BarneyFlames When I say that I've used Spirit a ton and got a lot of benefit, some people are weirdly hostile about it.

Claim that there isn't demand for ULCCs in the US is ridiculous imo, there's a long tail of working class people for whom travel is only possible because of Spirit/Frontier/Allegient.

Why does everyone seem obsessed with the "class" valence of summer jobs anyway? From what I remember of high school, all kinds of kids had jobs and all kinds of kids didn't. Kids with jobs were doing it because they wanted money and not as some kind of signaling maneuver.

My grandmother went back to college in her 60s for a certificate in teaching English as a second language. When my dad asked her about her professors she said "They seem like nice boys."

Reading the Stranger. I know this makes me sound like an attention-span-atrophied millennial since it's a very short book, but it's taking too long to get to the point. Partly it's just that I have a hard time caring about a character who doesn't care about things.

@ASFleischman I agree that there is a theoretical level of required paperwork that would constitute a substantial burden. "Had to describe carefully" and "seemed tense" do not convince me that that level has been reached.

@ASFleischman Describing a behavior "carefully" does not seem like a terrible burden for a doctor. A very common procedure is likely *easier* to describe carefully. The other evidence given that the burden is excessive is that someone thought some other people "seemed tense."

Georgia's draconian abortion laws make it less safe to have a baby here.

I thought we agreed to move on from arguing red button/button to arguing one box/two box. (Answer is one box, by the way).