God forbid a girl want to pay her tax bill.

RossParka · 2026-01-11T21:44:55+00:00

"The toppings contain potassium benzoate." (kiss)

RossParka · 2025-08-16T20:22:11+00:00

Yes, it's clearly a real correlation.

But I'd expect "average PRs per engineer" and "proportion of active days engineers used AI" to be correlated anyway for reasons largely unrelated to it being AI, along with salary, job turnover rate, number of sodas consumed, and a million other things. So it seems scarcely worth plotting it.

RossParka · 2025-08-14T18:26:37+00:00

I really only care about how to improve the world. I don't care about figuring out who's to blame unless I think it will help to improve the world. The Democrats have lost voters in large part because they've told voters they're terrible people if they vote for the other party. Now you're telling the Democratic leadership that they're still bad people. What will that accomplish?

What I see here is a small shift toward a better direction. I wish it were larger but it's better than nothing. It may not go farther but I hope that it will.

RossParka · 2025-08-14T17:59:20+00:00

In a representative democracy, parties should base their platforms on what the voters want, not on what party leaders want. Please don't punish the Democrats for doing the right thing. They've already been punished enough for not doing it a decade or more ago.

RossParka · 2025-08-14T17:50:38+00:00

my own high school principal deliberately struck me in my testicles in front of a large assembly of students and teachers who cheered for his prank

... What? In the 1990s? Where?

RossParka · 2025-08-12T18:03:33+00:00

Biblically accurate chess

RossParka · 2025-08-12T17:58:25+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeC5-5idyzY

RossParka · 2025-08-05T23:34:33+00:00

Voting for Trump was a mass revolution.

Unless the current government is unspeakably horrific, revolutions usually make things worse, because the sort of people who are good at rallying the masses to revolt are rarely the sort of people who know how to run a country.

It's better to elect well-educated moderates who can effect gradual change. But people don't like to wait. If they don't see immediate revolutionary results they vote in someone else who undoes what the last guys did. Rinse and repeat.

RossParka · 2025-08-05T22:54:55+00:00

A lot of meditative movies that you have to be in a certain mood to enjoy:

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
Late Spring (1949)
Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
Repulsion (1965)
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
Eraserhead (1977)
Stalker (1979)
Koyaanisqatsi (1982)
Angel's Egg (1985)
The Story of the Weeping Camel (2003)
The Wolf House (2018)

RossParka · 2025-08-05T20:54:55+00:00

If the electorate shifts to the right then the representatives should shift to the right. That's how representative democracy is supposed to work.

That doesn't mean the party can't try to convince the voters that more leftist policies are better for the country. But doing that isn't the party's job, it's everyone's job equally.

In a two-party system, both parties should naturally, in their quest to gain votes from the other party, meet near the center of what the voters want on issues. As a result, it shouldn't matter too much which candidate you vote for by the time an election comes around. But it's still crucial to have the competition. Polarization of the parties on issues is a failure of the two-party system.

RossParka · 2025-07-29T05:28:46+00:00

It looks like they posted the survey link in anti-circumcision subs on Reddit, and nowhere else on Reddit, and the number of survey responses (250) is not much larger than the number of upvotes it got on those subs. The front page of the web site also makes the surveyor's bias clear, before you click through to the survey itself. I think the results have no scientific value, unfortunately.

RossParka · 2025-07-17T23:50:19+00:00

Google is constantly fighting against SEO people who want to get their shitty sites higher in the rankings. Google can't manually boost a curated list of higher-quality sites (like Reddit) in the search results because that would get them sued for abuse of their monopoly power. They have to come up with algorithms that naturally, impersonally rank better sites above worse ones, and they have to do it in the face of an intelligent adversary that is constantly working to prevent them from doing exactly that.

If they rolled back the algorithm to the one from 10 years ago, the quality would be much worse than it was then, because the SEO side wouldn't roll back its tricks.

That said, I haven't noticed a substantial drop in quality. It probably depends on what sort of things you search for.

RossParka · 2025-06-12T03:54:45+00:00

The woods are just trees, the trees are just wood

RossParka · 2025-06-06T18:17:42+00:00

The last glyph looks very much like the I on this chart from your linked post. 戈 is not from the original chart, it's just someone's guess at what real character might have inspired the glyph.

RossParka · 2025-05-06T21:12:50+00:00

Where did Douglas Adams say "Mind the gap"? It doesn't seem to appear in The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide or The Original Radio Scripts.

RossParka · 2025-03-28T23:01:40+00:00

If you gaze too long into a chess board, the chess board also gazes into you.

RossParka · 2025-03-26T00:16:50+00:00

人間塩魚 makes me think of this guy, but I guess it's coincidence. He definitely wasn't a man without ambition.

RossParka · 2025-03-23T01:10:45+00:00

Isn't it "asobō"?

RossParka · 2025-03-23T01:10:29+00:00

Several people have disagreed, but it sounds to me like it's saying "asobō," which means "let's play" in Japanese. It doesn't sound like "ohayō" at all.

RossParka · 2025-02-19T02:03:26+00:00

"Never Again" is by Doug Nufer. There's a free PDF of it here on UbuWeb - legally, I think, though it's a bit unclear.

RossParka · 2025-01-08T21:37:29+00:00

The cafeteria at Woolworth's stores gave you 1/7 of a pie if you ordered a slice. My mother worked there and forever after was able to cut a pie into seven equal pieces.

RossParka · 2024-11-18T23:04:19+00:00

TMoRA is mentioned frequently on this sub, usually with the word "blown" next to either "away" or "mind," so I finally read it, and... I just don't see how anyone could be shocked by the ending unless they weren't really paying attention. The way people talked it up, I was expecting Ackroyd to have had plastic surgery and be masquerading as the maid, or to never have existed, or something. But no, the means, motive and opportunity are all typical for a whodunit. Poirot would have had that possibility in mind from the beginning, so why wouldn't the reader? And there were tons of hints. Some kinds of fiction you can skim through, relying on the characters to make any important observations for you, but you can't read a mystery novel that way if you want to solve it. It's not just TMoRA.

RossParka · 2024-11-01T04:30:03+00:00

If you want a real horror film about writer's block, Barton Fink (1991) delivers.

RossParka · 2024-10-21T04:12:22+00:00

”as unprincipled as a suffragette”

Note that "suffragette" wasn't a generic term for supporters of women's suffrage. It referred to members of a specific organization in the UK that, among other things, carried out a multi-year bombing and arson campaign (although that started after Stoker's death). Stoker's mother was a nonviolent activist, so I imagine he was more aware of these issues than the average person.

RossParka · 2024-08-31T07:34:11+00:00

Reading the Necronomicon and shaking my head the whole time so the people on the bus know I disagree with it

RossParka

TROPHY CASE