The Lemmy Gentle Whisper

Mostly you either went without knowing stuff, or you had to go to the library. I knew a couple of wealthy folks who had their own sets of encyclopedia at home which could cost thousands of dollars.

During lockdown I was jogging my usual route and passed someone walking in full plague doctor getup. Thinking “that’s kinda odd” I turned the corner and almost ran into a lady rollerskating backward entirely in the nude. I live in Florida and see weird shit somewhat frequently but that particular run stands out in my mind.

Toothbrush. In one hand it scrubs food and gunk away and helps distribute fluoride toothpaste around. On the other it’s made of tiny plastic bristles that are probably disintegrating when in your mouth and growing a fun ecosystem when out of it.

Public speaking. I’ve seen surveys where more people are afraid of speaking in front of an audience than they are of dying, which is utterly insane. For the vast, vast majority of scenarios where you might find yourself speaking to a group of people, the risk level is very low. Likewise, in the vast majority of cases, few people are likely to remember much about your performance. It’s just talking.

I wonder if this matrix app was just a honeypot that was named to trick people into thinking they were using the “real” matrix.

The Ancient Greeks had steam engines centuries before Rome existed and mostly just treated them as curiosities (probably because they were too impractical to use as weapons of war)

Obsidian or Joplin. Offline first, clients for every platform, and easy self-host (if you want) syncing options and plugins.

It’s a reasonable technology choice for whenever you need to have a ledger that is shared between multiple parties. Blockchain gives you an immutable (un-editable) history of transactions, including who made it, what it was, and where/when it happened, and gives all of the parties who are allowed to edit the ledger a way to trust in the outcome, even if the parties don’t trust each other.

Would be neat to see deaths or hospitalizations pre/post visualized this way too to really drive home the point for the “measles weren’t really that bad” crowd.

Ooh, I haven’t tried the cannon thing yet… why did I never think of that?c

RIP, Steve. 😢

Xeric Shrubland is definitely a LOTR character.

I’m specifically using Voyager on iOS and MacOS (and in Windows via BlueStacks) because I do exactly this. I block several whole instances (lemmygrad and hexbear), the active politics communities, and also specific keywords (elon, musk, trump, gop, republican, etc.), so I’m even able to browse All without my eyeballs being seared.

I moved to Florida specifically so that I could live at the beach. Go to Hawaii.

Dec/Jan is the Florida high season, so everything is crowded and accommodations will be pricey. If your vacation truly is in Jan though, Hawaii will actually be quiet (end of December is super crowded tho).

If you do go to Florida, look at Naples up to Tampa on the gulf coast, or key west. The people are much nicer than Floridians on the east coast

he aged

The duck’s name was also the inspiration for the blaster’s iconic sound

Air. Can’t go more than a minute or two without it, and there’s enough to share!

I spent my childhood in Brooklyn (just a bridge away from Manhattan) just before the internet was a thing, and it seems pretty normal relative to what friends from other places describe. In fact, better in some ways. It was always easy to get a group of kids together to do whatever. We had pickup baseball (usually stickball), basketball, hide-and-seek and other games. There were 2 nice parks and several pocket parks in easy walking distance. Most of us had and rode bikes everywhere. A lot of my friends went to different schools (because of the density you might walk 3 blocks to the elementary school north of you, or 4 to the one south), so there were always new pools of people to interact with.

Though I moved away my sister still lives there and has kids of her own, and it seems pretty much the same now as it was then. Since the density of the place hasn’t changed too much it actually seems more the same than where I live now, which has significantly changed in terms of population and traffic (and is heavily car-dependent) in just the last 15 years.

One of those liminal spaces. Love it.