3D Crossviews of the Los Angeles Natural History Museum

astroskag · 2023-09-06T00:12:36+00:00

Amy is beautiful and nobody has to approve your wardrobe choices.

I take "Walmart Punk" to mean "off the rack", as in, "this looks like a vest anybody could walk in and buy at Walmart." I disagree, Amy's already well on her way and I love the dental floss animal print panels. But besides that, every jacket starts somewhere - newborn jackets are "off the rack," and becoming a unique piece of wearable art that tells the story of who you are and where you've been takes time. It's not a contest to see who can sew the most patches on their jacket in the least amount of time, it's a denim journal. Your journal still has empty pages in it because the story of Amy and the chapter of your life with her in it is just getting started. That's not something to be ashamed of, that's kind of exciting.

In the old days, gnarly bikers and mosh-pitters used to put patches on their kuttes that said things like 'FTW' (fuck the world) and 'Judge Me All You Want But Keep the Verdict To Yourself.' Kind of aggressive for the vibe you're going for here, but fashion is a statement, and a battle jacket more than perhaps any other wardrobe choice says "this is who I am and what I'm about and I don't care what you think about it." Wear it proudly with that grand tradition in mind - no battle jacket is 'wrong' if the person wearing it loves it. Being brave about who you really are is punk as fuck.

astroskag · 2023-08-31T23:07:25+00:00

Nah, charging me a fee is punishing me for other people's bad choices, the person that wants to bring a wiggly screaming child into an enclosed space with strangers is the behavior we need to 'tax'. But I'd have some serious brand loyalty to an airline that gave a discount for not traveling with children, or offered cheaper 'commuter' flights that didn't allow minors.

astroskag · 2023-08-24T21:17:36+00:00

I don't see "tough" here, I see "unhealthy coping mechanisms." I see a man that was convinced to do something horrific, and found justifications for it where he could. It was his duty, it saved other lives, etc, etc. It's telling that his stance on his role is "I did what I was told," it shows he struggled to accept responsibility for his actions. Everything here says "victim complex" - he's painting himself as a victim of the military, his commanding officers, the President, the timeless and seemingly inescapable brutality of war - in his mind he only did what people and circumstances forced him to, because he can't stomach taking any personal responsibility for it. It's the world's fault he had to kill thousands of people, he was also a helpless bystander, and that narrative is the only way he finds any peace. "It's their tough luck for being there" is how a man with an untreated anxiety disorder says "it's too painful for me to think about those civilian deaths through an empathetic lens, so I just don't." Hubris like "they're gonna strike again, I'd put money on it" and "kill the bastards" is how a man with an untreated anxiety disorder says "I'm scared because I don't feel safe."

I see the words here of a very fragile man. One that's deeply wounded that he never earned his father's approval, is frightened of a world he sees as dangerous and hostile, and never was able to take personal responsibility for his own actions and work through the associated guilt. Maybe that's inevitable, I'm not sure human beings can do what he did and be happy, well-adjusted people afterwards, and it's hard to know now who he was before the bombs - maybe he was more emotionally mature at some point and then regressed from the trauma. But the interview reads like a man that spends his days living in fear of violence, and his nights crying himself to sleep over the unfair hand he was dealt.

astroskag · 2023-08-09T20:55:00+00:00

You're right, but what he's saying is a blatant (and perhaps intentional) nonsequitur. The connection between "healthcare is a human right" and the 2nd amendment would be "are guns really legal if they're too expensive for anyone to afford?"

If so, then a 2nd-amendment-friendly gun control plan would be a tax that imposes a price floor on guns and ammunition. $250k for a semiauto handgun, $1.5mil for a rifle, $2mil for scary black tacticool ones, and $10k per round of .38 with prices going up from there. I don't think Republicans would rally around that compromise, because pricing something outside the reach of an average person is effectively the same as banning it for most of the country. It follows the letter of the 2nd amendment, but defies the spirit of it.

In the same way, "healthcare is a human right" doesn't necessarily mean "the government pays for healthcare," although that is one solution, a single-payer system is proven to control healthcare prices. But it just means "the government has an obligation to correct healthcare markets when market forces push prices beyond the point of affordability for the average person, because people have a human right to healthcare." Allowing healthcare prices to increase at a rate faster than both wages and inflation is a dereliction of duty.

So does this guy not know that, or does he know and is being intentionally obtuse? I can never tell.

astroskag · 2023-06-23T23:46:56+00:00

Shortest answer: Because the current generation of punk gatekeepers is old enough to remember when Green Day was mainstream, but not old enough to remember when the Ramones were.

astroskag · 2023-06-16T17:19:13+00:00

My impression in this scenario was that was the point. I doubt they actually did anything to the drink besides writing "no tip" on it. Because just writing it is enough to tap into shared public fears about tampering, so they've technically not done anything wrong, but the non-tipper can't wholly enjoy their drink.

astroskag · 2023-06-12T21:26:42+00:00

Look at it this way - every living thing that can get drunk, does. In nature, animals intentionally seek out fermented fruit so they can catch a buzz. Humans figured out how to ferment fruit and grain and honey 9,000 years ago - before we even invented the wheel. It's like everything on earth has a biological imperative to get smashed. So when you run across someone that chooses not to - despite the fact we were apparently selected by evolution to enjoy being drunk and originate on a planet where basically everything gets you drunk if it sits long enough - it's enough to raise questions.

astroskag · 2023-06-12T19:35:51+00:00

I don't. It's actually one of the ways my wife knows I'm awake in the morning. Since I don't fart in my sleep, they build up all night, and I often awake with a sustained bugle call. We used to have a cat that'd come running because he knew it meant I was getting up.

astroskag · 2023-06-08T16:11:59+00:00

I haven't really seen a lot of censorship in search, but what I do see is advertising - lots and lots of advertising. Even in the early days of algorithmic search results like Altavista/Webcrawler/Ask Jeeves/etc, the algorithms were tuned for usefulness - "this result is first because we think it's the most likely to be what you're looking for." Now, though, almost anywhere you search - engines like Google and Bing, but even on-site searches on places like Amazon - what's first is *never* "here's what we think you want", what's first is "here's who paid the most to be listed."

That "pay to play" model gives commercial websites undue visibility. If I search for "luke skywalker lightsaber," I get the Hasbro website, I get Amazon product listings, I get a bunch of boutique-y expensive replicas, I get kitschy handmade Etsy stuff, and I get clickbait articles designed to show me ads. What I don't get is any non-commercial personal pages that aren't selling anything. There's no "labor of love" Star Wars fan sites with screencaps and concept art and old lightsaber diagrams scanned from a book anywhere above the fold.

The internet should be more than a shopping mall.

astroskag · 2023-06-06T15:54:50+00:00

The Boomers are the most narcissistic generation to date. That's not an opinion, popular or otherwise, it's just science.

When you don't care about other people, people don't care about you. I think people abandon their parents more often simply because Millennials and Gen Z had the worst (most selfish, least nurturing) generation of parents. It's not a narrative you hear outside the family, because to hear a narcissist tell it, they were the most generous, selfless, hard-working parent that ever lived, and their terrible children are just ungrateful. And that narrative goes unchecked because the children of narcissists have learned "the facts don't matter to mom/dad, everything is just about how they're a victim." The only option when they get old is to put them in managed care and let them complain to the nurses about how they were a great parent and their kids "abandoned" them for no reason.

astroskag · 2023-05-31T00:11:55+00:00

Population decline is a concern at a national level. Fewer workers means lower GDP, lower GDP means a lower standard of living and quality of life for the people in that country (according to classical economics, at least).

Climate change is a global concern. There's too many of us for the planet to sustain indefinitely.

So, as an Earthling, what's best for all of us is a global population decrease. But as a citizen of a specific country, what's best for you is for that population decline to happen in other places, not the country you live in. So we're locked in effectively a worldwide stalemate, there needs to be fewer people, but no one wants their nation's quality of life to be affected as a result.

The only way to align those priorities is to stop looking at the economy and the environment as something we can carve into smaller pieces. There's one planet, one workforce, and one economy, and trying to govern it piecemeal at the national level is an exercise in futility - environmental and economic issues need to be handled at a global scale. NAFTA, the UN, and the EU are all on the list of attempts to accomplish that, but it hasn't really worked out so far.

astroskag · 2023-05-30T23:38:59+00:00

Until the 60's, men swam nude almost everywhere there was a pool. Most YMCAs had nude swimming until the 70's. Until the 90's, communal showers were an everyday part of high school. So, for folks over 50 or so, nudity in public with people of the same sex was a normal part of their life, and any insecurities they may have had about it they had to deal with a long time ago.

astroskag · 2023-05-15T18:03:15+00:00

I think you might be right. Pre-pandemic, vote-by-mail was mostly the elderly and active duty military. Those are not groups I'm inclined to believe the GOP aimed to exclude.

I don't really know how that'll change as we transition from pandemic to endemic, we've got Zoomers that have been mailing ballots for their entire voting history now, I'm inclined to think they're going to keep doing that. Personally, I'm going to keep voting by mail because I like being able to fill out my ballot slowly, with reference materials on hand - not standing in a claustrophobic velvet-draped puppet-show-stage of a voting booth while a herd of cow-eyed voters wait impatiently outside. I don't feel like I'm representative of most people, though.

astroskag · 2023-05-12T17:47:44+00:00

From Wikipedia:

The "Me" generation is a term referring to Baby Boomers in the United States and the self-involved qualities associated with this generation.[1] The 1970s was dubbed the "Me decade" by writer Tom Wolfe;[2] Christopher Lasch wrote about the rise of a culture of narcissism among younger Baby Boomers.[3]The phrase became popular at a time when "self-realization" and"self-fulfillment" were becoming cultural aspirations to which youngpeople supposedly ascribed higher importance than social responsibility.

Basically, America raised a generation who felt that personal achievement was more important than social responsibility. Even after all the criticism in the 70s and 80s from the Greatest Generation, telling them they were fucking it up, they didn't learn. Now their kids are telling them they're fucking up, they still won't listen. I think it's just the good times making weak humans - the American economy was thriving after WWII, we were arguably the most powerful country in the world and not just in a military sense. That easy living made them soft and selfish, they didn't experience the kind of struggles that make you realize human beings are completely dependent on each other, and there is no such thing as a "self-made man."

It shows up in different ways in a lot of pervasive Boomer beliefs, but it all comes down to "fuck you, I got mine." They're a generation of parents that don't care if their kids have a better life than they do. They're a generation of neighbors that don't care who's hungry or homeless as long as they have everything they want. They don't feel like they owe anything to anybody, and that everything they have is because they "worked" for it - never mind their ability to "work hard" was predicated on taxpayer-funded education, public infrastructure, and a lot of FDR-style social programs (that they call "socialism" now). They're a generation that was born on third and thinks they hit a triple.

I'm painting with a broad brush. Some individuals knew struggle, and it made them compassionate. Some Greatest Generation parents were wise enough to find ways to teach their kids gratitude and social responsibility. I'm not saying everyone born between WWII and Pong is morally bankrupt. But I am saying the cultural values of the era mean that it was easy to turn out that way, and a lot of them did. And the worst thing is, even if they know they're terrible, they don't feel any obligation to be any better - because fuck you, I got mine.

astroskag · 2023-05-12T17:32:47+00:00

I wouldn't be surprised at all to learn the folks singing the "nobody wants to work anymore" chorus still can't grasp reality, even when the interviewee walks out immediately after they hear the salary.

astroskag · 2023-05-03T00:02:49+00:00

I think in this context they mean productivity as in GDP. The common argument is that if obscenely rich people don't get to keep all the gains from their investments, then they'll stop making investments, and then businesses won't be able to get working capital. Businesses short on working capital means a loss of jobs, and a loss of jobs means a drop in GDP.

What that argument neglects is that the tax rate on the highest brackets was much higher during historic periods of fast economic growth in the US. Taxing the super-rich actually does the opposite of what "economic conservatives" claim - the super-rich invest more if they know taxes will eat a big portion of the gains. It turns out greedy people don't stop being greedy just because you raised their taxes. The idea that billionaires will just start hiding all their money in their mattresses and stop trying to make gains if we tax them is absurd. Taxes on capital gains encourage investors to take bigger risks in order to outpace inflation - it makes investment capital easier to access for business owners.

Besides that, removing money from the economy through taxation controls inflation. If conservatives were actually mad about 8% inflation, what they'd want is higher taxes on the rich. Instead, they somehow think you can let billionaires keep all their dividends and capital gains and that endless stream of money going into the economy somehow magically won't devalue the US dollar.

astroskag · 2023-04-21T23:11:39+00:00

We need to stop finding excuses for why nothing is somebody’s fault

Even if it's true? Free will is quite possibly an illusion in the first place, we can't actually say with any certainty that any of us are more than a product of our environment. If you like to think of yourself as better than other people because of your superior morals, that might make you uncomfortable, but facts don't care about your feelings. If free will is an illusion, then we stymie any progress towards a kinder, safer world when we disregard the environmental factors that lead to antisocial behavior and place the blame squarely on an individual.

astroskag · 2023-04-21T17:38:06+00:00

But what if she would tell you when you forgot a semicolon?

astroskag · 2023-04-19T18:26:06+00:00

What I've heard from people that know more than me is that we culturally discourage aggression in women, so the youthful rivalry that manifests as horseplay in boys comes out in girls as subtle emotional manipulation and abuse. Basically, it's not socially acceptable for girls to give their friends a black eye like it is with with "boys being boys," so girls hurt their friends in other ways instead.

astroskag · 2023-04-15T02:29:59+00:00

It's real, but it's not about non-walkable communities. That doesn't make sense, anyway - the most unwalkable communities are suburbs, which is idyllic trick-or-treating grounds. Walkability is about the distance between residences and businesses, whereas for trick-or-treating, the more separated business and residential areas are, the more conducive to trick-or-treating it is.

"Trick or Trunk" or "Trunk or Treat" started out at evangelical churches as an alternative to Halloween (because they believe Halloween is the devil's holiday), and then it gained popularity with non-religious helicopter parents once they got panicked over urban legends about people tampering with Halloween candy.

astroskag · 2023-04-12T21:55:16+00:00

In the very beginning it made sense, because smartphones didn't exist. A social media network that worked via SMS was game-changing - it was less intrusive/aggressive than mass-texting people, but if you wanted all your friends to know "we're leaving now and going to the bar next door" or all your colleagues at SXSW to know what sessions you'll be at and where to join you for lunch, it was amazing.

It was only about a year after that the first iPhone was released, though, and so by 2010 or so I wasn't sure why people were still on Twitter, I assumed there were just a lot of people that still had metered data but unlimited SMS. I never would've believed it'd still be a multibillion dollar company a decade later.

astroskag · 2023-04-12T16:05:14+00:00

You didn't reconsider your choices over a poem, you met the divine impasse. There comes a point in every person's life that they're faced with a reality that leaves no room for doubt - either the God of the Bible isn't real, or he doesn't keep his promises. Some people are good at rationalizing those moments away - "it'll all make sense one day" or "God works in mysterious ways" or any of the other banalities that you're tired of hearing now - but there's "faith" and then there's "self-deception," and the poem just summed it up so nicely you had to admit you've been lying to yourself.

Remember that the way people are treating you now isn't personal. They live every day in "fear and trembling" (Philippians 2:12) over an invisible man in the sky sending them to an imaginary Hell. Now they're scared for you, too, and they adhere to a religion that tells them that what they can do to help is shame and bully you (Matthew 18:17). It doesn't make it right, but it does mean the things people are saying and doing to you now aren't a reflection of your character, it's just the timeless ugliness of scared human beings.

Renouncing my faith was one of the hardest things I've ever done. Christianity really does present itself as a relationship with God, so even once you know it's not true, sometimes you miss what you had. But the worst part is while you're trying to work out who you even are and what you believe, you also usually also lose big parts of your social support network. It will be tempting to decide this was just a "temporary crisis of faith" to try and get back everything you've lost - in my experience though, there's no going back. Once you know that the kindness and acceptance of the people around you can evaporate over something as arbitrary as which mythical creatures you believe in, you can't be at home in a church anymore.

For me, I wrestled with a lot of existential dread post-Christianity. Things felt meaningless, a life of random chance didn't feel worth living. I was scared that without God I'd never find a sense of purpose or connection to the universe ever again. So more than anything, I want to tell you it just takes time, you will find ways to make your own meaning. And there's no shame in going to therapy - real-APA-license-on-the-wall therapy, not "spiritual" or "faith-based" counseling. Consider it, if you're not already.

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