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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • “Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there weren`t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.”

    ― Peter Watts, Echopraxia











  • You made me remember! Yes, this was on a HUGE TV, probably 70", and that in a time when those were insanely expensive, had never seen one in a home. It was like the house walls in Fahrenheit 451.

    “Come look! The White Clown is talking!”

    An LSD party back in college taught me a thing I’ll never forget. There were 3 TVs in the living room and my best friend and I were tripping balls. He pulls me over to where I can see all 3 screens.

    He said, “Notice who the number of people watching is directly proportional to the size of the screen?”

    Mind. Blown.





  • Yep, I lay the majority of our political insanity on Fox’s door. Look, we all know they’re the GOP’s propaganda arm, but how many of you have actually watched a good bit?

    I was stuck with a week of it during the Snowden revelations. In the space of an entire week, I didn’t hear a single word on what was worldwide news. Stunning, and I still can’t explain it, but it happened. Point being, a lot of the lies are in what they don’t say. Early afternoon of 01/06, not a blip on the website. (Which BTW, is far more sane than the TV version.) I checked the wayback machine and FOx reported nothing until hours after kick off. I presume they prayed it would blow over or at least die down. Imagine the spin control behind the scenes! Hell, even Tucker Carlson pleased with Trump to make a sane statement and cut it off.

    After hearing “Obama” thousands of times, over and over and over, I was sick of him! The whole time my friend’s step-mom was screaming at the screen, “The KKK ought to do their got damned JOB!” These people sat in their armchairs 24/7 (never saw them go to their bedroom), smoking weed and watching nothing but Fox. We tried to put on a movie or another show exactly twice and it promptly got switched back.

    One time I was stuck with Fox at the doctor’s office, some kind of round-table show going on. A metric showing black people doing better under the Obama administration came up, something about pay I think. One of the hosts slams his fist of the table and shouted, “Obama’s a RACIST!” Constantly listen to crap like that and you are, eventually, getting brainwashed.




  • “Well this sucks, can’t breathe.”

    Punches hole in roof to get air

    “OK, that works. Come to think of it, that’s how momma did it.”

    The second Jurassic Park book had a neat idea. What if much of the animal behavior we see is taught and not instinctual? The dinosaurs start fouling their poorly made nests and stomping all over their eggs because they didn’t have parents to emulate or teach them. Been thinking on that for over 20 years.