Jake Wildstrom

To triumph in a swordfight, you have to at some point do something your opponent won't expect, but despite its high success rate, the Surprise Blowjob never became a popular fencing technique.

Customer in Aisle 1 (loudly, into cellphone): Yes, I’m here, and I found it, but they have a bunch of different kinds and I don’t know which one to get.

Me: Hi, can I help you?

Customer: I need some rat poison for my husband.

Me: OK, no problem. How big is your husband?

(This really happened.)

Fair enough; "grinding meat" would be a lot easier to grow in a lab than a steak or pork chop. Although that's also the market in which plant-based substitutes are working well. I'm fine with us finding multiple different routes to the same satisfactory result, which may be how it ends up.

I'm pessimistic about lab-grown meat ever becoming a competing product for in-vivo meat; texture and flavor seems to come from utilization in the body. I'm reasonably optimistic about substitutes, though: plant-based imitations have gotten better, and tofu has always been tasty done right.

It's funny how the Persian Empire and Egypt and the Islamic Caliphates and the ethnically Semitic people of Mesopotamia and Israel never seem to be considered as part of "Western Civilization", despite fairly obvious ways they were enmeshed into the fabric of European cultural development.

Vader, despite cinematic coding as a big bad, is narratively clearly taking his orders from Tarkin. It seems like blowing up the Death Star should be the end of the Empire (and, indeed, if, as was planned as a possibility, Star Wars had no sequels, that would have been everyone's assumption).

but neither the Emperor nor the Senate is actually onscreen and we have no idea what they are. In the story presented to us, Governor Tarkin is the single highest-ranking political figure, and implicitly the Death Star, where he spends all his time, is the political nerve center of the Empire.

One interesting thing about Star Wars ANH (taken as a standalone work) is that it basically has a provincial worldview. One never gets a good sense of the scope of the Empire and to what extent they actually control anything. There are a few throwaway lines about the Emperor dissolving the Senate,

There's not even such a thing as a British passport. There are UK passports, which establish identity as British (inclusive not only of English, Scottish, and Welsh subidentity, but other citizen residents of Great Britain) or Northern Irish, or Manx. It's a pluralistic society and that's not new.

Fortunately, there's an easy test for VBNMW cheerleaders: what were they saying after Mamdani won the primary? Full-throated support? They're OK. Silence? Mmmaybe acceptable if they're not NY people. Equivocation or opposition? Fuck'em, they're just conservatives who want progressive votes.

GitHub - dwildstr/unbooklet: Split and reorder pages in a PDF from a scanned booklet Split and reorder pages in a PDF from a scanned booklet - dwildstr/unbooklet

I wrote a little tool to solve a problem that was bugging me. Little code solutions like this always bring me joy.

And that, @jaketapper.bsky.social, is why people call ICE holding facilities "concentration camps". No, they don't look much like Auschwitz in 1944. But they look a lot like Dachau in 1938.

Specifically: many did not have a concerted program of extermination, despite a high rate of death from overwork, disease, and guard brutality. Many, especially early on, were not intended for indefinite detention, but were supposed to be preparatory to deportation.

But it is undeniably a story of how a particular concentrarion camp (Dachau) worked at a particular point in time (1938). And the fact that it's different than the normative survivor narrative is why so many people have such a skewed idea of what a "concentration camp" looks like.

Note that "deportation to a willing third country" ceased to be a viable exit strategy in the '40s. It doesn't figure into the narratives of people who were at the work-and-extermination camps at all.

But there's a reason I tell this story. It's not the same story most survivor narratives have.

Anyways, grandpa Bill was detained in a camp which was crowded but not jampacked, with significant frequent disease outbreaks and bad food, but not a lot of heavy labor. He was released in May of 1939, on condition of deportation to a country willing to accept him (specifically, the USA).

BTW, I visited Dachau a few years back, and one thing that impressed me in the historical interpretation is that, in the rebuilt barracks, they recreated the layout a typical room would have had at several different times in the camp's development. The change over time is important!

I offer as a counterpoint my grandfather's experience. Wilhelm Schwarz was arrested in Vienna on Kristallnacht and shortly thereafter remanded to Dachau. So his detention was in 1938, at a fairly large KL which was _not_ Auschwitz. Notably, Dachau never had large-scale extermination facilities.

got out except at what was basically the end of the war. But this means that when people think "concentration camp", their idea is extremely specifically "Auschwitz in 1943–1945". And that's a problem, because concentration camps, both pre-Nazi and as praticed by the Nazis, were much more variable.

To wit: the overwhelming majority of Holocaust narratives (nonfiction or fiction) specifically describe the experience of Auschwitz survivors who were liberated by the allied advance. This is unsurprising numerically: Auschwitz-Birkenau was a huge camp, and after a certain point of time, very few

So, evidently @jaketapper.bsky.social has kicked off a conversation about exactly what is a "concentration camp". This sort of thing _should_ be basic knowledge, but a lot of people have the same misunderstanding of how the Konzentrationslager system worked which I'll call "the Auschwitz effect".

European Parliament Votes Overwhelmingly For "The Full Recognition Of Trans Women As Women" The resolution, though nonbinding, is a significant shot at those who seek to erode transgender rights on the continent.

In incredible news, the European Parliament has voted overwhelmingly for "The Full Recognition Of Trans Women As Women."

Even the center-right European People's Party voted for the declaration.

It will form a foundation for their position at the UN Commission on the Status of Women.

Our latest.

I'm remembering similar objections made to the DC comics character Oracle arguing there was no reason for her not to be "cured". ISTR at some point she said, in story, that people with disabilities (and w/out superhero friends) found her inspirational and abandoning her disability would betray them.

I almost said Connie Chung instead; she was the alum whose name I heard most as a student. Ben Stein, eh, trying not to have him in my head. Dominique Dawes I had honestly forgotten was a Blair alum.

Historically, Goldie Hawn, but @stevevladeck.bsky.social is climbing fast.

Apropos of nothing, remembering that one highly regarded fantasy work of the 70s was "the saga of the guy whose first act in fantasyland is to rape a teenager, and then spends three books punctuating bouts of self-pity by occasionally being sad he's a rapist." Man, I do not miss "the good old days".

Photograph of a white mug, with the text "I think therefore I" followed by a blank space with an underline. All text is in black except the word "think" in red. In the provided blank space, I have written, in black Sharpie, the completion "am thad I don't know how to thwim."

The College of Arts and Sciences gave mugs away to us with Sharpies to complete them at some event a few years back. I still have mine. Maybe there's a reason I don't get invited to A&S social functions anymore.

Every day Mamdani comes out and is like "hey guys, I turned off the orphan-crushing machine. Literally just had to flip a switch. Took less than 5 minutes."

After decades of dem leadership pissing and moaning and fundraising about how complex an issue it is and how difficult the process is etc

They've been at the pool for _weeks_ now, and monopolizing the diving board for much of that. Are they holding up the line of divers? Are they getting all pruney? Is the pool eventually going to close and kick them out?

The most important aspects of data hygiene are: use TLS for all sensitive web access (almost all apps/websites already do this by default); use end-to-end encrypted services for text and voice instead of phone calls or SMS/MMS; if the actual sites you visit are meant to be secret, use a VPN.