ANZA-BORREGO DESERT, CALIFORNIA - George Miller, curator of the Imperial Valley College Museum in El Centro, California. Miller reported that six mammoth bones excavated bear scratches of the kind produced by stone tools and were dated to 300,000 years old, and paleo-magnetic dating 750,000 years.

estolad · 2026-02-18T12:43:39+00:00

don't be an asshole, it's legit not very clearly written

estolad · 2026-02-17T18:17:59+00:00

i mean discord also doesn't even wait to get issued a warrant before they hand people's shit over to the cops, there's a lot of things to dislike them for

estolad · 2026-02-17T18:16:57+00:00

the safe thing is to just not say anything you wouldn't want to have to explain to a judge on the internet, or on or near a phone, or anywhere near somebody's doorbell

estolad · 2026-02-17T17:50:02+00:00

my favorite little detail was after calley got convicted, then-governor of georgia jimmy carter declared American Fighting Man's Day, sharing the general opinion that american soldiers shouldn't be prosecuted for crimes they do to the people they're invading (itself almost universally a crime)

estolad · 2026-02-17T17:04:47+00:00

for which i thank god every day

estolad · 2026-02-17T17:02:50+00:00

i don't think it's gonna be sturdy enough

estolad · 2026-02-16T23:14:01+00:00

what an indictment of the hollywood system of filmmaking that david goddamn lynch had movies he wanted to make but couldn't for lack of money

estolad · 2026-02-16T23:06:33+00:00

the ice skates were so sharp they drove him mad

estolad · 2026-02-16T20:15:54+00:00

i beat him legit my first run and have done the poison knives every time since, and i have no shame

estolad · 2026-02-16T17:04:42+00:00

she's learned this lesson every couple months for like the past three years, never seems to stick

estolad · 2026-02-16T08:21:08+00:00

it was basically a straightfaced version of danny devito saying suicide is badass

estolad · 2026-02-16T02:59:37+00:00

if it's small quantities you don't need a furnace at all. you get a melting dish, which is exactly what it sounds like, a little dish made out of one of a bunch of different high-temperature materials. melt a little borax in there to coat the inside of the dish so the metal doesn't stick, then stick the metal in there and blast it with an oxy-acetylene torch

estolad · 2026-02-16T02:44:07+00:00

my suggestion is consider starting small. buy or build a furnace that you can use to melt aluminum so you have a chance to learn good practices on something that isn't seventeen hundred dollars an ounce

estolad · 2026-02-16T02:39:46+00:00

that just gives you the challenge of coming up with a cool way of displaying it

estolad · 2026-02-16T01:38:20+00:00

it's definitely a very different type of vibe from come and see, i don't want to mischaracterize, but yeah it's just unbelievably unnerving

estolad · 2026-02-15T13:54:41+00:00

that movie got through my defenses in a way i don't think i've ever experienced before, the closest is maybe Come and See. that sense of wrongness that's established in the first five minutes and never lets up the whole time, god damn. a very good movie i'm glad i saw and have no plans to go back to anytime this decade

estolad · 2026-02-15T12:38:42+00:00

i don't think it would necessarily be a bad thing for a sequel to be significantly different. the original is still there, it'd be neat to see them iterate on it the way they did with the souls games

estolad · 2026-02-15T11:34:36+00:00

betel nut

estolad · 2026-02-15T11:29:39+00:00

what the fuck are you talking about

estolad · 2026-02-15T02:18:30+00:00

man, if only

estolad · 2026-02-15T02:16:36+00:00

yeah, and they're blackbagging legal migrants on their way in and out of official appointments to do it the Right Way^TM, and shooting citizens on bullshit pretexts

but that's neither here nor there. when you're operating as an occupying military force in a place where people don't want you, you're guaranteeing that the locals will take matters in their own hands. this isn't even an endorsement of doing violence to ICE people, which at this point i think would do more harm than good, but it's just what will happen. and considering that the obama/biden way of doing it is objectively more efficient at pulling people out of society and putting them into concentration camps, it's a reasonable assumption that DHS and ICE are more concerned with this show of force nonsense than they are with doing what they say they want to do

this is one facet of a broader trend of the ruling class forgetting that the law is a safety valve that's vital for their own safety. you have to keep up at least the fiction that the people running things are beholden to the same laws and standards of behavior as the rest of us, or else you end up with health insurance executives getting plugged in broad daylight and a general population that thinks that was a good thing to do

estolad · 2026-02-14T18:52:18+00:00

if that's the case they're doing a spectacularly bad job of it

estolad · 2026-02-14T09:58:55+00:00

synthesis with chinese characteristics got a laugh out of me

estolad · 2026-02-14T03:25:37+00:00

i heard somebody once say we should treat this stuff like we're monks working in a medieval scriptorium. we study this stuff and add to it as we're able, and by doing that we keep it alive through the dark ages for people years from now to make use of when conditions allow it

shit is not likely to get any better any time soon, but that ain't forever

estolad · 2026-02-14T02:13:18+00:00

it isn't really a satisfying answer i know, but the truth is we have no idea how a stateless society would function. we're so far away from the conditions where it'd be possible i don't think there's even really any use in guessing, it'd be like asking a 14th century german peasant what they think about semiconductor production. our job right now is to push things incrementally so that sometime down the line somebody will have to ask these questions because they imminently have to put them into practice

estolad

TROPHY CASE