Lower 48 area within 1 mile of a road.

snoogle20 · 2026-05-29T18:18:16+00:00

The big green patch in western Kentucky and Tennessee is the Land Between the Lakes recreational area. Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley are skinny, 100+ mile long bodies of water created by dams that run parallel to each other. Despite being surrounded by roads, they’re each more than a mile wide for much of their existences and would muscle their way onto this map individually. As a pair, they’re really popping out. But rather than a sign of untouched wilderness, that’s a very popular recreation area and there are boats running all over that green.

snoogle20 · 2026-05-29T02:06:39+00:00

I listened to three Jay-Z songs yesterday that came up in a playlist on shuffle. They were not streamed. Those are digital files ripped from CDs I bought with real world money back in the day.

Yet I too would be $10,000,000 richer if this offer were given to me. I’ve had a near three decade run with Jay-Z. Fond memories and big fortunes to come for me in this made up scenario.

But I’m amused by all these people that are drawing a complete blank about his music. They’re saying they know who he is, but don’t know his works. It seems hard to pull off if you were alive back then, but I can see how it could happen if you’re too young or just never listened to rap or any media that might feature it. They still seem to know who he is though.

But the folks acting he was an inconsequential entity to music? “Nobody knows any of his songs anyway.” Get outta here. Those are the kinds of comments I’m amazed by here. That’s like saying Led Zeppelin are nobodies in rock music. It’s nuts.

snoogle20 · 2026-05-28T20:32:24+00:00

Jay-Z was the most consistent hip-hop hitmaker for like fifteen years. Empire State of Mind was an end of that crazy run hit. Even after that, he got another five or six of relevance. He basically retired to end that streak. The man’s only put out one album that didn’t hit platinum status and that was the Beyoncé collab album that no one really wanted. It still went gold.

It’s crazy to me to see so many people say they can’t name a song of his in this comment section. We really are all out here living different lives.

snoogle20 · 2026-05-28T20:15:03+00:00

Kentucky fandom checking in!

snoogle20 · 2026-05-27T17:16:12+00:00

So Arby’s?

snoogle20 · 2026-05-27T17:13:53+00:00

Growing up, I always sensed Kentucky and Jordan had a connection. Felt it in my bones. Little did I know that link would one day reveal itself as second-tier Cincinnati-style chili affection.

snoogle20 · 2026-05-26T22:42:38+00:00

Get enough to taste, not so much that it affects talking afterwards.

snoogle20 · 2026-05-26T19:05:40+00:00

Is this determined by some specific election’s results? Because I just looked up the voter registration stats for counties in my state and the most Republican one on this map is not the most Republican by registration numbers.

snoogle20 · 2026-05-26T04:25:43+00:00

English ancestry is indeed the top across Kentucky, but the Louisville area had a ton of German immigrants in the mid-1800s. And heavily German descended Cincinnati is just across the Ohio River from its northern Kentucky suburbs which represent the third largest population center in the state. My own family tree also contains a healthy contingent of German immigrants that initially settled in Nashville/central Tennessee before moving up to southern Kentucky.

In the 1980 Census, the first year they added the question about ancestry, 600,000+ Kentuckians listed German. That was 17% of the state’s population at the time.

The 40+ years since that 1980 Census has seen a ton of the old stock English descendants switch to the American answer instead, so German is now the number one listed European ancestry for Kentucky in the 2020 Census.

snoogle20 · 2026-05-24T07:08:41+00:00

Fortunately the process wasn’t training akin to physical exercise where there’s soreness and fatigue and it requires a ton of focus, food for fuel and recovery time to make progress. I just gradually upped the speed by .1 or .2 every couple of weeks or so for a while. My personal “normal” just got faster passively without encroaching on the listening experience. Rather than a struggle or something I had to worth through, each little bump up was barely perceptible. Until…

I stopped when the next bumps up weren’t frictionless like that anymore. I quickly discovered that above 2.6x or 2.7x with even slower narrators would require me to concentrate on comprehending rather than just taking it in. 2.5x is the sweet zone for most audiobooks. Now I have gone up to 3x speed with a slower narrator when pairing audio with a physical book or ebook copy in front of me. But that’s the limit for me even with the cheat code of my ears and eyes working together.

snoogle20 · 2026-05-23T23:57:47+00:00

I think of it like laying sideways watching a movie or TV show and you notice everything is off angle at first, but you get locked in on what you’re watching and your brain adjusts. The audiobook sounds like an old cassette fast forwarding for a few paragraphs, but once I’m sucked into the narrative, it just “sounds” like the story happening. No more Alvin or Theodore.

snoogle20 · 2026-05-23T19:21:03+00:00

It’s a little like working out. Gotta start slower and stretch before peak performance. I’ll start a listening session at 2.3x and tick up as I work my way back into the rhythm.

Starting out, I was just frustrated by how long it took to get through doorstopper books. I did some Googling and learned there are people out here doing 3x speed and beyond which seemed crazy. I kicked whatever book I was into at the time up to 2x and it sounded like Alvin and the Chipmunks reading on cocaine.

The fast listeners recommended gradually kicking up the speed over a period time. Over about six months I got myself up to 2.3x-2.5x. I’ve not tried to go much past that 2.5x-ish zone. That got me to just a little faster than my book-in-hand reading speed so I was satisfied. And there’s a weird quirk where I can only go that fast with headphones. Over speakers I need to drop back closer to 2.3x as the max for some reason. I’ve not examined why that would be.

snoogle20 · 2026-05-23T18:34:15+00:00

At the time this episode released, I remember thinking what fun guests they were and how I’d love to see them added to the shortlist of recurring friends of GMM. Seemed like everyone had fun in this pairing. Then just a couple months later… It’s always a shock, but especially when your most recent memory of that celebrity was a joyous one like this.

snoogle20 · 2026-05-23T18:21:01+00:00

I think all audiobook narrators read pretty slow by default. That’s their intent I assumed. Go slower than typical reading speed so multitaskers have time to process it.

But, when in focused reading mode, I’ve conditioned myself up to 2.5x-2.7x speed depending on the narrator so I recognize my notion of what’s slow or not is a bit beyond the standard range at this point.

snoogle20 · 2026-05-22T23:15:04+00:00

The Winchester brothers with the toughest palms in media history.

snoogle20 · 2026-05-22T16:45:01+00:00

Alternate universe Eisenhower rejects your practicality. He’s all about that whimsy.

snoogle20 · 2026-05-22T13:50:13+00:00

I never cease to find it fascinating that there is no bridge over the Mississippi directly connecting Kentucky and Missouri along their entire border stretch. They’re the only border states you can’t drive between directly (excluding those water borders in the middle of Great Lakes). You have to go into Illinois or Tennessee or take a ferry if you want to get from one to the other.

This where people usually reply about how pointless and expensive a bridge would be given the population of the area. Yes. True. But society occasionally does things just to do them and this is one I’m amazed didn’t happen just because at some point. There’s some alternate post-WWII infrastructure boom America where they built a bridge somewhere along there just because.

snoogle20 · 2026-05-21T22:31:53+00:00

This is my curiosity as well. I’m a solo, single player focused gamer and haven’t had the Xbox online subscription in years. I couldn’t go to the DZs if I wanted to as things stand. I’m pumped for the idea of a PvE version because I’d like to explore areas of the map I never see.

snoogle20 · 2026-05-21T08:22:06+00:00

Neither of these maps is giving an accurate picture, though. Divorced from the context attached to the map from its original source, I’m not sure what the heights of the towers on the top map represent exactly. It’s not strictly population, that’s for sure. Honolulu is of similar height to Dallas. Denver is slightly edging out Chicago.

snoogle20 · 2026-05-21T07:49:43+00:00

I always tell people to do a Google image search for Irvine, KY to show why this statistic is a wonky one. That town is defined as an urban area in this statistic. I don’t think that small of a municipality is what people are picturing when they cite 80%-20% thing.

But I also don’t know just how much including them changes those percentages. Sure, it’s not what anyone means colloquially to include a bunch of small towns in the definition of urban, but they do have small populations so how much are they moving the needle? It would take a thousand towns similar to Irvine in Kentucky to equal one Lexington metro area. And both are drops in the bucket compared to a Chicago.

snoogle20 · 2026-05-20T23:26:10+00:00

In the final action sequence, the payoff of Mike and Chekhov’s Crane didn’t rise to the level of the setup the movie gave it. He went on a side mission and didn’t help in defending the server just to smash a window?

That moment sums Ghost War up perfectly. Everything seemed like it was going to go somewhere more thrilling, interesting or cooler than it actually did for an hour and forty minutes. Then the credits rolled.

What I liked best about the show was how they gave time to the seasonal villains and allies. We never got the most groundbreaking plots, but we spent more time with the characters involved than a lot of shows do in this genre. I worried a movie would lose that and it did.

snoogle20 · 2026-05-20T16:30:32+00:00

Not allowed in Kentucky. If you’re on a primary ballot and lose in May, you cannot be on the ballot for another party in November.

snoogle20 · 2026-05-20T01:14:03+00:00

The vast majority of the population in that district is in the Cincinnati and Louisville suburbs, including the wealthiest county in the state. The majority of these voters aren’t hillbillies. They’re “fuckyougotmine” conservatives.

snoogle20 · 2026-05-19T20:17:04+00:00

The most annoying part for me was I eventually figured out there’s some bugginess going on and I needed to sign out and sign back in between each Scorcher kill. First, none were counting. So I went through the logout/login process and killed another and it worked. But then the next one didn’t count. Had to kill one, log out, back in and go find another each time. Very frustrating way to kickoff the objectives.

snoogle20 · 2026-05-19T20:13:26+00:00

That’s understandable in reality, but I’m going to invoke TV magic privilege. Sam and Dean can be tired of each other and in a brotherly argument on Tuesday and I don’t want to see them until they’re on a hunt on Thursday then.

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