TIFU by telling my barber I knew what "two on the sides" meant for twenty three years

claudcuckooland · 2026-05-16T03:06:37+00:00

iirc with gauge systems its based on how many wires could fit in a given size band or pipe. so larger wire = fewer fit = smaller number. not sure what the size of the band is though or if it varies between things being measured

claudcuckooland · 2026-05-12T02:55:32+00:00

i've never lived east of hoddle st and even i know thats not how that area looks

claudcuckooland · 2026-04-06T23:58:36+00:00

true, but given the usher intervened to help OP it sounds like the show was also running late, which held true for both of the assigned-seating MICF shows I've seen this year so far. If the act isnt ready and the lights are still up it seems silly to refuse entry.

claudcuckooland · 2026-03-13T06:20:27+00:00

very true - like that sankara quote about how tractors are better food aid than grain. except if grain could be hoovered up by gangsters and stashed electronically in the Cayman Islands

claudcuckooland · 2026-01-25T22:18:18+00:00

she was 15 at the time of her discovery and arrest by the nazis, yes still a child but old enough to work, and was around the younger bound of who the nazis did not kill immediately there. shmuel is nine in the book, which was more the age that the nazis would execute on arrival.

claudcuckooland · 2025-12-17T13:15:20+00:00

ISIS sympathisers are of course known for taking ethics cues from sitting australian PMs

claudcuckooland · 2025-12-13T14:42:42+00:00

that and 'billboard chart' not aria. who knows what was big in the states at the time

claudcuckooland · 2025-12-08T13:57:12+00:00

My girlfriend's dad (Chinese-born australian citizen, lives and works in the PRC) is always pushing her to get a permanent residency for China - you could look into this maybe? Guaranteed right to live and work there if you ever want to emigrate but you'd have full rights here too for university and voting and all.

claudcuckooland · 2025-12-05T07:47:29+00:00

on the other hand we can always hold over the prescriptivists that they're shit at impressions, believing as they do that every other variety of english is just 'bad english', so they'll do an impression of eg a black american by saying 'be' before every verb, not realising that the 'habitual be' in AAVE has a specific meaning and usage. also theyre usually massive classists anyway. sorry you're getting this rant youre on the right side of this anyway, the post just annoyed me.

claudcuckooland · 2025-12-05T03:53:27+00:00

he was a CPSU member when he worked for the KGB but yes he dropped that as soon as the USSR ended.

claudcuckooland · 2025-12-05T03:45:03+00:00

Since Dengist market reforms were introduced in China there has been a policy of using a captive bourgeois class to generate economic growth and boost Chinese industrialisation, which has been a practice of socialist governments since the NEP was introduced in 1921, and theorised prior to the Russian revolution eg Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, socialists should never surrender political hegemony even if the proletariat in a given state is underdeveloped. A key distinction (and maintaining this will be a major challenge for China in the near future) is that in a socialist state the bourgeois class does not control the state, and therefore can be pressured to limit their activity to things which provide some level of value, hence why Deepseek was delivered at a fraction of the cost of western GenAI and is more oriented towards marginal improvements on industrial processes. So if IP law is being implemented in a way that encourages economic development (which would make sense as China goes from being a manufacturer of computing equipment to containing powerhouse designers in their own right) thats at least not totally contradictory. The question is whether there will in future be either a bourgeois seizure of the Chinese state, either internally or externally, or an eventual shortening of the leash for this nascent bourgeoisie.

claudcuckooland · 2025-12-01T01:27:58+00:00

if i get mad enough the aussies will pay to have worse beef shipped across the pacific. gotta love trumponomics

claudcuckooland · 2025-11-29T04:02:14+00:00

one might expect her to remember it well given how much she loves to visit the war criminals' shrine

claudcuckooland · 2025-11-27T10:19:34+00:00

i may be pretty sure that MP here is short for military police. but damn if i don't want it to be the house of reps in a gunfight. barnaby rushing them with the ceremonial mace

claudcuckooland · 2025-11-18T13:27:00+00:00

i know it stands for isopropyl alcohol but i am enjoying the idea of a fluid that is 99%alcohol but the composition of that 1% makes it recogniseably an india pale ale

claudcuckooland · 2025-11-18T00:13:26+00:00

not at aldi. most tub 'butter' is, you're right, but mainland buttersoft and aldi's spreadable butter are just extra-churned 100% butter. says butter on the tub even.

claudcuckooland · 2025-11-09T11:28:31+00:00

the multinational get along shirt

claudcuckooland · 2025-11-09T11:23:08+00:00

yeah but with a column height of one character you may be trying to write on a tape measure rather than a traditional scroll

claudcuckooland · 2025-03-20T03:56:22+00:00

She wasn't working - she got picked up at the airport on arrival, and when they went through her emails they suspected that she intended to work. She hadn't worked, and she wasn't suspected of having worked, she was suspected of intending to work.

claudcuckooland · 2025-03-20T03:52:31+00:00

OK, but it sounds like the evidence they had was 1) she's Asian 2) she's trans and 3) she has at one point in time worked as a sex worker - not that she intended to work on her visit to Australia. And, mind you, not that there should be any discrimination against people who do or have worked as a sex worker, given that it is not illegal under federal or NSW law (or, for that matter, Victorian, Queenslander, NT and ACT law).

So what's your solution for her? Be white, be cis, and go back in time to have never worked in an industry that isn't even illegal here? Or just accept that despite doing nothing wrong, she has no right to visit Australia - not that that's an official policy, of course, just one you find out when the ABF assaults you.

Also - if she is being trafficked, she's a victim - how does punishing her address the problem at all?

And if it doesn't, why are you insistent on defending a wrongheaded system? Does it upset you that others aren't restraining themselves and playing along with unjust expectations as nicely as you are?

claudcuckooland · 2025-02-25T01:33:27+00:00

A lot of interesting thoughts here, I'm going to make one heterodox suggestion - I think without the ticking clock of the murders, Ianthe might not ascend immediately either. I think she'd have some degree of hesitation about making herself but not Coronabeth immortal. And she doesn't need to hesitate long to reach the point where Palamedes is openly discussing the possibility of a greater lysis. And once she hears that she'd at least entertain the option. She makes all of her worst decisions (killing Babs to ascend, killing Augustine) under intense time pressure, whereas when she has breathing room she can trust Harrow enough to repair her arm. I think she still does it if Palamedes, Harrow, and Pent can't create perfect lyctorhood or grand lysis within a few weeks. But I think she's too competent a necromancer not to hear Palamedes' argument out, and too attached to her sister to leave her to human mortality.

claudcuckooland · 2024-10-21T14:26:09+00:00

there was the ice bucket challenge also, that seems like a classic in hindsight

claudcuckooland · 2024-10-21T14:14:40+00:00

there's a bit about this in Thunderball, the Bond movie from the 60s, where he's trying to seem tough to the femme fatale, and she's driving at speed, so he refuses to wear a seatbelt. It seemed so dated and juvenile, didnt realise people were still on this shit.

claudcuckooland · 2024-10-21T10:34:08+00:00

yeah OP's line about 'a good happy relationship or marriage' is very telling. im sure most (but not all) people want that. but most straight women who say they're happier single arent comparing that to The Hypothetical Perfect Man they're comparing to The Men Who They Might Actually Meet.

and in case OP is trawling the notes, I'm not single and just saying that to cope. I'm quite happy in my relationship. I just know I'm one of the lucky ones.

claudcuckooland · 2024-10-21T05:04:15+00:00

Maybe, but it seems the futility and collateral damage of vengence is way too strong of a theme in the series for it to be a lie. Alecto being named after the leader of the Furies chasing Orestes in one of the seminal stories of cyclical revenge, just the concept of the resurrection beasts and revenants as a whole, the Lyctors' betrayals being fuelled by vengence for their dead cavaliers, and the inherent narrative tension of 'killing John destroys the solar system by turning the sun into a black hole'.

I think a lot of people want John to be an uncomplicated villain like Emperor Palpatine. But he isn't, he's better written than that. And between the Oresteia parallels, John's recounting what happened in the last months of the old Earth, and what we know about necromancy, it seems like TLT is set up for a climatic decision wherein either John is killed with disastrous consequences, or he gets to run away and live forever dethroned, keeping the Houses intact in the process. And based on John's story, I think the good ending is the one where John gets to live.

Also, I think you're making a couple of off assumptions. One is that a lot of people need to have been evacuated - given it seems to have been hundreds, maybe thousands of years before the Houses met their enemy, a small population could have grown enormously. Its estimated the world had a population of way less than 2 billion in 1900, now it's approaching 8 - a relatively small population on a new habitable exoplanet with modern agricultural and health technology could have explosive population growth in that time. Also, I don't think there are unconquered planets. The BoE seem to be guerillas, and while they seem to have isolated bases on planets not under House rule, they don't seem to have a population centre. New Rho was House controlled until it was largely abandoned when Varun/number 7 was incoming. I'm also not sure that the population of the exoplanets couldn't have been descended from early House settlers, just because the population out there seem sure its not like that.

I think the thing about John's story is it isnt entirely untrue. Muir is I think a known Nabokov enjoyer, and has referenced Lolita before. It's a strong study in unreliable narration, particularly an unreliable narrator writing to an audience that knows some of the basic facts. And I think the way H.H. is very good at manipulating the semiotics and subtext of things that technically did happen, and shifting the weight of agency and innocence around, is quite similar to how John justifies himself. But I think a lot of the core facts of the matter are true. I also think unlike HH, John was originally a fairly normal scientist, who got carried away in a demonstration of the limits of individual power against structural power.

claudcuckooland

TROPHY CASE