Useless Conversation

[Samwise]

This is pretty cool.  Indigenous restaurant Owamni wins James Beard award for Best New Restaurant.

Owamni’s menu features only those foods that existed on North American soil before European settlers arrived. In place of beef and pork, flour, dairy, and white sugar are thoughtful compositions of Indigenous ingredients, like Cheyenne River bison tartare with duck egg aioli, grilled forest mushroom tacos made with heirloom corn tortillas, and wild rice sorbet.

Just before the pandemic I got to go to the original version of Cafe Ohlone in Berkeley, which is also doing the native cuisine thing but with a very specifically Ohlone (Bay Area) focus, and last year Wahpehpah's Kitchen opened in Oakland with a more pan-American menu.  Feels like this is something that's really been taking off recently and it's a cuisine style that most people haven't even been aware of the existence of unless you count fry bread at state fairs.

[Ashamanchill]

Happy Canada day gang!

[Khaldun]

I like the look of that restaurant.

I fell down an online wormhole the other day and started reading about the history of the James Beard Foundation and then about James Beard himself. Lots of  stuff.

[Khaldun]

oh ffffffuuuuuuuck I hate it when it's almost 10 pm and the temperature is around 88 degrees still and 75% humidity.

[Samwise]

It rained this morning, which is pretty unusual for August in the Bay Area.  I'm not sure exactly how unusual but I wouldn't be surprised if that brief drizzle was more rain than we've had on this particular date in my lifetime.  Not complaining, though.

Totally unrelated, I had an echocardiogram today and that shit is freaky.  I have no idea what the inside of a heart is supposed to look like, exactly, so watching all the different parts (valves?) flap around and wondering if it was good flapping or bad flapping was sufficiently disconcerting that I had to stop watching.  It's pretty cool that they can see inside you that clearly just by prodding you in the ribs with a magic stick though.

[01101010]

It rained this morning, which is pretty unusual for August in the Bay Area.  I'm not sure exactly how unusual but I wouldn't be surprised if that brief drizzle was more rain than we've had on this particular date in my lifetime.  Not complaining, though.

Totally unrelated, I had an echocardiogram today and that shit is freaky.  I have no idea what the inside of a heart is supposed to look like, exactly, so watching all the different parts (valves?) flap around and wondering if it was good flapping or bad flapping was sufficiently disconcerting that I had to stop watching.  It's pretty cool that they can see inside you that clearly just by prodding you in the ribs with a magic stick though.

I had a colonoscopy this past April and was not ready for the discharge papers with high res pictures of each region of my lower intestine/colon. Just strange.

[01101010]

Was chatting with a buddy of mine from undergrad yesterday and just realizing 30 years ago today I was moving my shit into my dorm and orientation began this evening thru the week. Suddenly feeling really old - or maybe not so sudden... 

[HaemishM]

It has a habit of sneaking up on you.

[Johny Cee]

Was reading something on Reddit about the rise in approval ratings for interracial marriage (94%!  Up from less than 50% in the 90s!) and just encountered the term "Lizardman's Constant" and I'm dying. 

It's from 10 years ago and I only just heard it?  I guess that's about when I moved in with my current spouse so didn't waste as much time on the internet.

[Khaldun]

This https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/

runs it down pretty well.

I remember reading a very panicky article in a mainstream newspaper about how ignorant American and British publics seem to be about history where the major part of the story was about Lizardman's Constant kinds of answers and how this showed what a bad state we were in, and I was thinking exactly what Scott Alexander runs down here:

a) it's people who got confused about the question
b) it's people who are annoyed to be asked
c) it's people who are taking the piss
d) it's people who are actively trying to fuck up all polls, who hate polling period
e) it's people who think the poll has a secret agenda by including a lizardman answer and they're trying to play the secret game or be in on the joke--who may in fact understand that if enough people say 'lizardman' that will become the story and they think that's funny as hell and in fact they end up winning because that's a much better story than "Americans think World War II started in 1938", which is wrong but not really that wrong and not at all consequential

With only a very very small number left of people who do in fact think there are lizardmen in charge of the world.

But it does feel like the Lizardman's Constant has gotten larger, maybe because c) and d) are not only bigger they have become political convictions or a worldview--it's kind of the point that the book Kill All Normies makes, that somehow the Something Awful ethos of stirring up shit for the lulz morphed into believing in the stuff that you're using to stir things up.

[Samwise]

Related, I saw this tweet a week ago and I've been thinking about it ever since.

Idiocy Saturation:
Online, people who don't think before they post are able to post more often than people who do. As a result, the average social media post is stupider than the average social media user.

I'd had the thought more than once that it was irritating how many people online don't seem to think before they open their mouth, and that it seems like it's gotten worse and worse over the last 20+ years, but seeing it phrased like that made me think more about how much the Internet has been accidentally built to amplify that effect simply by optimizing for shorter higher-frequency messages (without even getting into the effects of promoting messages that are more inflammatory). 

Mediums like email, usenet, and message boards tend to encourage you to write a few paragraphs of text at a time and organize your thoughts before sharing them, and since the pre-smartphone expectation was that you might have to wait a day for a reply to something you posted online, there was a lot of built-in incentive toward making sure you did a good job of conveying the message. 

Comment sections were one of the early forms of "let's make it easy to post a short quick thing so we can rack up lots of engagement" and "don't read the comments" became an common adage early on because the Idiocy Saturation effect immediately came to dominate most comment sections.  Twitter is essentially one giant comments section which is why it's such a cesspool (admittedly one with gems bobbing to the surface every now and then).

It makes me think about whether some form of conversational rate-limiting might be one of the ingredients toward building less idiotic social media.

[Trippy]

One of the very early Usenet newsreaders -- 'rn' and it's variants / descendants -- had some version of this prompt that you had to respond to before it would post your message:

This program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the entire
civilized world.  Your message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of
dollars to send everywhere.  Please be sure you know what you are doing.

This was back in the days before Al Gore's "Internet" and its commercialization -- aka before the start of the downfall of civilization. For me, at least, this always gave me pause. And sometimes I would save the draft and come back to it later to see if I still wanted to post it.

A more modern version of this that pops up before you submit anything to social media warning people that their post will never go away and might cost them literally everything (job, spouse, money, etc.) -- maybe not now, but eventually -- might help at least slow down the flood of crap burying us.

[Hawkbit]

There was an idea floating in the early twitter days that tweet character limits should be greater but users allowed to tweet only 1-3 times per day. I sometimes wonder how that would have played out.

[01101010]

A more modern version of this that pops up before you submit anything to social media warning people that their post will never go away and might cost them literally everything (job, spouse, money, etc.) -- maybe not now, but eventually -- might help at least slow down the flood of crap burying us.

I like the optimism in the face of our reality. Shitbags have learned that no matter what they say, it is only very rarely going to bite them in the ass.

[Samwise]

There was an idea floating in the early twitter days that tweet character limits should be greater but users allowed to tweet only 1-3 times per day. I sometimes wonder how that would have played out.

[Khaldun]

Doesn't everybody have a folder of emails written but never sent? I look in on them now and again and mostly it's 'thank god I didn't', every once in a while it's 'man, if I'd only had the balls to hit send...'

[Samwise]

every once in a while it's 'man, if I'd only had the balls to hit send...'

It's never too late.  But that kind of thinking is why I don't keep a file like that.

My mom told me that when she was a kid, my grandpa started a "crank file" of scathing letters he'd type up and then (usually) not send.  Every now and then he'd actually fire one off; I actually have a memory from my own childhood of him laughing over an indignant response he'd gotten to one of his "letters to the editor".  Dude was a seasoned flame warrior decades before the Internet. I strongly suspect he's still got all those letters, probably a full filing cabinet's worth by now if not more.

[Rendakor]

I've certainly typed emails and not sent them, but I just delete them if I can't revise them to something more acceptable.

[Samwise]

I learned a really fun useless fact today: the Duke and Duchess of Sussex (aka Harry and Meghan) live, as near as I can figure it, on the site of the house my great-great-great-grandpa built in the 1860s.

And this is why people who will their nearly-worthless property to their descendants instead of selling it and immediately drinking the proceeds have rich-ass descendants, and the rest of us have jobs.  

(edit: turns out this was not true, just a coincidence where some guy with the same last name owned that land just long enough for the name to show up on some really old records, then sold it and left no further trace of himself in the local histories.)

[01101010]

Moving sucks more the older you get...

Never had this much anxiety for a move when I was in my 20s. Now, I am a complete basket case with organizing the movers and boxing shit up and separating items we will move ourselves. Hopefully this will be the last move into a rental and the next move will be permanent (because I don't think I can do this anymore).

[Samwise]

My most recent move was about 14 years ago.  I remember thinking at the time "man, I hope that was my last move," and I was still a sprightly 20something.   

I think I might have one more in me, but only if I can afford to outsource the entire job to movers and just show up at my new house with all my stuff already there.

[Khaldun]

I definitely only have one move left in me if I have any choice in the matter.

[Samwise]

Happy Black Friday!

Had a small but festive Thanksgiving yesterday.  My brother drove up from LA and we had him and my mom over for dinner, and I managed to assemble a full spread for four people as a mostly solo effort on pretty short notice.  Making myself a workback plan the day before helped a lot when I was juggling six different things over the course of the afternoon.   First time roasting a turkey in the oven and it came out great (dry brine ftw) and now I have turkey sandwiches for days.   

[Sky]

JFC https://frazettaverse.io/

I'm happy Frank's girls are keeping the museum and ability to buy decent prints alive. But they've also been pumping out a ton of garbage merch (keychains, mugs, etc).

Now they've gone "metaverse", NFT and whatever else is wrapped up in that bullshitto. I keep getting errors I don't have a dapp wallet, thankfully...

[Khaldun]

Just in time for everybody running away from NFTs...

[Morat20]

My life's been such a hectic mess of shit the last six or so months, I literally can't recall the last time I was here (oh wait, I can look it up: July). Jeez.

Trying to get my ass out of Texas, which is hard as hell (my whole professional network is down here as well as pretty much my whole family -- the places that I do have family are WORSE than Texas, in terms of political climate). And of course my job won't go full remote, despite it being 100% perfect for it.

Also, hey turns out I'm trans -- pretty sure I hadn't mentioned that here---  which is a fucking HELL of a thing to work through in your late 40s. In Texas.

So it's been a weird six months

[Samwise]

My life's been such a hectic mess of shit the last six or so months, I literally can't recall the last time I was here (oh wait, I can look it up: July). Jeez.

Trying to get my ass out of Texas, which is hard as hell (my whole professional network is down here as well as pretty much my whole family -- the places that I do have family are WORSE than Texas, in terms of political climate). And of course my job won't go full remote, despite it being 100% perfect for it.

Also, hey turns out I'm trans -- pretty sure I hadn't mentioned that here---  which is a fucking HELL of a thing to work through in your late 40s. In Texas.

So it's been a weird six months

Mazel tov!   

[Khaldun]

Congratulations on that important milestone!

[Morat20]

Congratulations on that important milestone!

So far I've gotten an awful lot of "that makes sense" from friends. Kinda wishing someone had pointed it out a decade or two back lol. Not that I've have believed.

[rattran]

Congrats and good luck on everything, but especially getting the hell out of Texas.

[Phildo]

Big news, congrats!  I have a friend who went through something similar in Salt Lake City, if you need help finding any resources I can reach out to her and see if there's anything she can provide.

[Morat20]

Big news, congrats!  I have a friend who went through something similar in Salt Lake City, if you need help finding any resources I can reach out to her and see if there's anything she can provide.

I appreciate it, but one of the few nice things about Houston is a very large and thriving LGBTQ community.

No, my biggest problem is trying to change job fields after 20 years doing aerospace programming. It shouldn't make a difference -- you always have to pick up entirely new domain knowledge, and software engineering is software engineering, but...it does. People think you won't be flexible.

And my professional contacts are all in aerospace.

So I'm working that. :)

[Samwise]

oh snap I just got a check from Equifax for $22

[Rasix]

Site still smells like chemicals. But, it's safe guys! Trust us. 

[Samwise]

RIP.   

Can I have your stuff?