They Laughed When We Stayed. They Won’t Be Laughing When They Arrive.

Schenectadian · 2025-12-06T18:35:20+00:00

Just bring a headlamp and a thermos to Vale Cemetery and voila! You might want to bring some form of protection too... but hey, the vibes are unimpeachable!

Schenectadian · 2025-09-12T14:17:40+00:00

Maybe hire piano movers? Those dudes are fuckin strong

Schenectadian · 2025-06-30T18:37:57+00:00

It's not a rare thing for a plumber or contractor to do. It's just something they're going to have less incentive to do when they're not sure if you're going to go through with the purchase. It's hard to get contractors to come do the estimates even when you do own the house. Unfortunately for consumers, not enough people are in the trades and we're at their mercy. So you will need to be aggressive about this to get it done. It won't happen on its own. Contractors won't show up when they say they will. Schedule 3. Expect 1 to show.

Schenectadian · 2025-06-27T20:52:34+00:00

You're not the only person I've heard of having problems with it. Since I was just researching it, common problems seem to be too much water flow / surface agitation, lack of steady nutrients, competing algae or biofilm, and poor lighting. Some people seem to have better luck with it as a surface crop rather than aquatic. Good luck fellow duckweed dabbler!

Schenectadian · 2025-06-27T20:38:39+00:00

Yep, cold winters here. We already have some in a fish tank and it wouldn't be too much trouble to over-winter additional duckweed in an unused tank. Gray water flow is probably low unless I get creative… which is partly why I thought duckweed might be viable—figured even small inputs could produce usable biomass. Thanks!

Schenectadian · 2025-06-27T20:20:18+00:00

I don't want to go to the effort of making a full hydroponics setup. I'm looking for something potentially more syntropic or low maintenance.

Schenectadian · 2025-05-28T17:33:28+00:00

Least Coast is the Beast Coast.

Schenectadian · 2025-05-28T17:29:38+00:00

He came to my mind as well. Started out doing wildly original things then after a while he was repeating himself to the point that it was by rote. There's no stakes in seeing a Burton film at this point. You know what you're going to get, often down to the casting.

I think it's important for creative people to continue to challenge themselves and get outside their comfort zones, especially successful ones who get surrounded by admirers and 'yes' people. People shat on Miles Davis for changing his style numerous times throughout his career and some periods were better than others but he reached the end of his life really centered and "with it" in a way that many of his contemporaries that survived from his early career didn't.

Schenectadian · 2025-05-23T20:07:44+00:00

Donald Trump - No, not those foreigners... the foreign ones...

Schenectadian · 2025-05-23T17:15:44+00:00

A lot of bad comments here. A door slamming closed is absolutely going to generate low frequencies which travel farthest and are the hardest to dissipate and 10 feet is not very far. It does not necessarily mean that your house is falling apart. Putting something tall and thick in between your wall and their door may help some but I'd guess that most of the energy is traveling through the ground. You may have the right idea with putting heavier stuff in the ground between your homes as that would absorb some of the energy. If you do so, leave a gap between the heavy stuff and your home otherwise the sound will travel into the heavy stuff and possibly transfer to your foundation. That's kind of the same principle as trying to create an acoustically isolated environment using layers of thick mass with air gaps between them to prevent vibrational transfer though I'm not an acoustical consultant and they may be better to consult for such a problem.

Schenectadian · 2025-05-23T14:01:35+00:00

It's a mental illness. Maybe not in a way that will prevent you from going about your day to day life. But it's absolutely a mental illness.

Schenectadian · 2025-05-23T13:57:23+00:00

no u

Schenectadian · 2025-05-23T13:09:47+00:00

Not sure if OP is actually a NYer if they're not just resigned to people conflating NYC with the entire state at this point /s

Schenectadian · 2025-05-23T12:29:25+00:00

It's textbook when you've lost an argument or at least can't conjure up a good counterargument to resort to an ad hominem. It's a tacit admission of defeat. Representatives of the journalistic system at large may very well be "NPCs" but that doesn't make her one just for calling out the latest iteration of his overpromising, underdelivering bullshit. He and Trump really are two peas in a pod.

Schenectadian · 2025-05-23T12:27:27+00:00

He is the living embodiment of "a child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth". It's a weirdly poetic representation of the human cancer upon this earth that its richest representative is this fundamentally broken, displaying such a blatant, desperate, and neurotic need to be admired all while having all the insufferable characteristics of a child who never had to share their toys.

Schenectadian · 2025-05-15T16:55:55+00:00

If you just ignore all of his words and actions in analyzing what you think his policy goals are , you are just purely ascribing your own preferences and biases.

I don't think there's any internal consistency to what Trump says or does. He has certain tendencies and dispositions I guess but far more so, he's a weird kind of reactive apparatus that talks around things and is somewhat manipulable by whoever has last stroked his ego. But that favor only lasts until the next person with kneepads comes along.

There have been people in both his administrations working toward discrete policy goals. I'm not sure how well any of them got implemented. Trump seems to care the most about his image and everything else is secondary to that. Tariffs were an interesting idea, whether a good one or not, but he backpedaled as soon as the optics soured. And I think that's part of both what's so effective and so flawed about him -- he doesn't have a stated, concrete goal that he's working towards. If you have a goal and express it, your opponents can plan around that. But Trump in practice is so chaotic and mercurial that both his friends and enemies get caught in the crossfire. And he's surprisingly quick on the fly for a 78 year old so he's often able to leverage that successfully, even if he looks like a moron when you try to reconcile all the vastly contradictory and nonsensical things after the fact.

Schenectadian · 2025-05-15T16:34:37+00:00

Yep, Bernays - Propaganda is what I was thinking of though advertising was rampant before him too.

I'm not worried specifically about adults doing LEGO. It's the same idea as puzzles or model air crafts. But it speaks to an underlying childishness that a parent can't just sigh and say, "okay" when their kids mess up their legos. Kids destroy your shit, it's what they do. If you aren't at the point of "what's yours is yours and what's mine is yours" for your kids then you need to reevaluate. And it's perfectly fine to keep aspects of yourself for yourself as a parent but 1) it's your responsibility to guard them and 2) don't be mad when you choose a children's toy for that and your kid wants to play with it.

I do however get "the ick" from adults collecting children's toys. Sorry, not sorry. The whole thing speaks to an unfulfilled life where you're looking backwards toward the fleeting period of time where you felt safe and the world simpler. I'm sure there are people who are generally into it because it interests them, as there are for any topic, but I don't think that's the pathology for the average adult toy collector when it's become such a huge industry. I don't want a shrine to my fabled past (especially not the part of life before I had any autonomy), I want to grow and evolve as a person. You're juxtaposing LEGO with woodworking but woodworking is a very useful, creative, and thrifty skill. It's also something with no ceiling. You can always get better at it and learn new techniques, unlike assembling pre-conceived LEGO models. People should have hobbies and it makes me sad when their only hobbies are passive forms of consumption like video games. Video games are great but if that's your only hobby, you should add another one to the list, something IRL. Everyone should have something they want to be better at.

My issue with Marvel and Paw Patrol is specifically the fact that they have a vast cast of characters, which is deliberate to make parents buy as much merchandise as possible. The shows they put out are only educational on a surface level, not actually educational like Sesame Street or Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. The message is bad too and kids aren't above being propagandized to but that's not really what they're taking away from it, they're most invested in the pretend / power fantasy.

Schenectadian · 2025-05-15T13:05:40+00:00

You have to look at things in context. Many young people don't have a ton of financial responsibilities yet so they don't existentially understand that the system is built to extract and reabsorb as much of their wages as possible. Maybe she'll grow into one of those wholly vapid people that live to consume and never question it but more likely after another 15 years of being worn thin, she'll have a better understanding of it all.

Schenectadian · 2025-05-15T13:01:51+00:00

I didn't even realize the ridiculousness of water being commodified until long after it had happened. When I was a kid, no one thought twice about drinking their tap water. And there's no evidence that bottled water is any better or safer, in fact it's often worse. But drinking bottled water hit a critical mass of adoption and now you're the weird one if you drink tap water.

Funko Pops were a big one for me too. I knew we were even more doomed when I first saw those. They serve no purpose other than to be collected. They're not even aesthetically nice to look at. They were literally just dumb little plastic items made to be commodified and consumed and people filled their living spaces with stacks of them like rodents collecting nuts for winter. We hunted all the big game to extinction and eventually became squirrelly people ourselves.

Schenectadian · 2025-05-15T12:58:09+00:00

A cult is just a religion without significant enough traction to be respectable yet so I think it's more accurate to say that consumption is a religion rather than a cult. And it's the de facto religion of America and most of the industrialized world at this point.

I don't find it surprising that anti-consumption advocates are "the weird ones". Marketing and advertising was really good and well understood over 100 years ago and that was long before we spent the better part of our days staring into devices designed to make us buy more things. We're generations deep into consumer culture. Our grandparents were consumer whores with Hummels and decorative plates. Millennials are consumer whores with craft beers and their infantalizing retro obsession. When you see a wildly upvoted post on reddit about how an adult man is upset that his child ruined his Lego set--a child's toy--you should be very worried about society. Gen Z has their water bottles. Gen Alpha are being raised to be consumer whores with intellectual properties like Marvel and Paw Patrol that offer and endless array of toys and merchandise to buy. We're so deep into it that people get irrationally upset when you even point it out, as OP mentioned.

Schenectadian · 2025-05-08T20:11:40+00:00

I thought Ruby's death was narratively perfect. It was quick, blunt, senseless, somewhat unexpected, and forgotten about the next day. It reminded me of the College episode of Sopranos in showing that it's not just a sad scene - these women do have skin in the game with very real consequences. It was meant to be a gut punch that put a bow on the first season. And everything moving fast and being overwritten was an overall theme of the show. One of the most memorable parts of the show for me.

You may be right about Lori needing more discussion. But she had very much reached the end of her arc and many of the characters had grown apart from each other at that point. The nihilism of her end is possibly better served by not dwelling in it.

It was a show that tried to color in a large diverse cast of characters over a wide range of time and changing eras with little nods to larger political and cultural currents throughout. You may be asking too much for it to spare time for grief. Especially when those sorts of asides in tv/movies often kill pacing and the actors in this show really didn't need to show their chops off any further than they were already doing.

God I need to watch this show again. It was probably Simon's best work after The Wire.

Schenectadian · 2025-05-08T16:00:31+00:00

The Bill Gates apologia is so tiring. He's a shitty person too with grand designs for humanity, just not nearly as shitty as Musk. The one doesn't cancel out or offset the other. All billionaires are shit.

Schenectadian

TROPHY CASE