Dr. M. Harris-Peyton

I actually seem to remember this being a thing on the International Space Station, too--I think Cmdr. Hadfield talked about it.

Tortillas produce fewer crumbs.

The term for this historical model is translatio imperii, and it's really dumb.

My most crank history take is that the United States is actually "what if the Khanate was a democracy?" and not "what if Athens but with planes?"

I have a Unity license because I developed one (1) mod for Humankind like three years ago and every email I've gotten from Unity since then feels like it's from a parallel universe run by cartoon villains.

Oh hey, just a note: anyone who compares writing genre fiction to writing code has clearly never written either.

Signed,
--A Weirdo Who Can Do Both

FDRbros…we’re so back

I like that bluesky is just curated enough that someone can say "I experience random intrusive thoughts about the ME3 ending which are occasionally socially visible" and it's a very relatable example.

Your friend just did the "no wheelchairs in Dungeons an Dragons" discourse again but in a new genre and it's like...

are we talkin' diegetic/exegetic narrative explanations for the chair or is the friend just weird about representation in media?

Anyone whose response is "ellie is deranged about this" should work in education for five minutes.

There are a lot of parents out there who are, generously, not good at being a parent--negligent, intermittently abusive, and/or worse--and the results are extremely obvious.

all the kinds of modern Indie Games:

-"roguelike" (slot machine)
-feelings
-unlock/tech tree simulator
-"god we hope northernlion plays this"
-crunchy first person shooter
-morrowind built by a single lunatic

The two ways to interpret this:

1. He drywalled it in and can only get it by punching through the wall in an urgent self-defense situation because of "the element of surprise" or whatever.

2. He stabbed it into the wall while on Special K and can't get it out, so it's A Strategy now.

My primary problem with a lot of more serious literary fiction isn’t that it isn’t well written or compelling it’s just that a lot of it is about “I’m articulate and depressed” and I kind of want like, something to happen, I guess. I suppose I’m something of a philistine in that way.

Ultimately, it is Mr. Fred McFeely Rogers who won the culture war and we are all better for it.

Also if a Mongolian folk metal band performed the halftime show I think the football would get played better.

Both of that lady's thought experiment options would rock, actually.

Witches may need to reconfigure their magic system to use totemic spell objects to circumvent an arbitrarily-enforced Etsy rule about having to sell physical goods.

I feel like, in writing that sentence, I might be the first person to ever put those words in that order.

I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.

So, this post made me realize why I had a 2-for-1 lil smokies coupon at the store this week.

I've been so underwater with work that I legitimately did not make the connection.

"Cooking is a bourgeois affectation!"

(Proceeds to pay indentured laborers to drive a single burrito in a Toyota Corolla through a blizzard to their house.)

This has been my standby bread recipe for about a decade and I can confirm, it absolutely makes you reconsider buying bread ever again.

A good litmus to find This Dude in your institution is "does he erase the board when he's done with the room?"

If no, you probably found him!

I forget who said "that level of power means your life isn't a series of decisions but instead a series of preferences" and that line continues to explain a lot.

The cult's email contains a link to the video "Ten Tips (and two disguised ads) on How to Avoid Being Manipulated by Sociopaths, Composed and Read for You by a Machine with the Moral Compass of Whoever Wrote the Prompt" of course.

At this point any occurrence of the phrase "dark psychology" might as well be a content label for exactly that kind of stuff.

I'm guessing it's not a guy rationally explaining "because you were 41 minutes old and you're not allowed to leave the ward without one" for 8 minutes.

I'd like to file a complaint with the writers of Reality, I have a deadline and meanwhile they've dropped a perfect the-venn-diagram-is-just-a-circle of cursed lore for elder millennials.

we do, in fact, owe each other things. one of those things is accountability for the results of our actions.

it is beautiful how we are having another moment of Bluesky unity. everybody basking in the glow of how Ilhan Omar was very visibly gonna punch that dude in the mouth

Very often, but I think it's a theory of mind thing? Like, I attribute internality to other people and then go "okay so how would they respond to [x]?" and adjust if the sim is off.

Also I think about how to explain the internet to Ben Franklin while showering, so more or less serious depending.

There need to be more studies on why US conservatives think Americans (broadly) are cowed by fear or intimidation, given that we have 250 years of data that consistently shows that in aggregate, they react angrily and do not do what you want.

As if cowardice is presumed in conservative thought.

I went to Wegmans yesterday and I saw a guy with a cart full of chicken breasts and another lady with a mini-cart filled to the brim with cashew butter so...I think they're just making bad decisions.