aramis87

Reminder that Ben Stein was a member of the Nixon White House. So was Diane Sawyer.

I think so too!

Umm, both of those articles are from 2020. He’s making slow progress with The Haunted Chocolatier while he continues to tinker with Stardew; I haven’t heard much about the other game.

I had a doctor’s appointment on Halloween a few years ago. I was getting ready to go out, I put out a bowl of candy (nice mix of different chocolates) and went back inside to grab my purse and my test results for the doctor. I was inside for maybe 45 seconds? During which time I heard a couple kids come up to the porch, say something like “What do you think?”, and a slight scuffling sound. When I exited the house about 20 seconds later, they’d scooped the entire bowl clean and disappeared.

While this may be true, and monitoring your kids’ internet exposure is generally good, can we please not turn the fediverse into Facebook? I hate this kind of alarmist shit.

_ it doesn’t? _

“One of the biggest functions of blocking is giving women the ability to stop weird men from constantly making them uncomfortable and scared,” one user wrote. “So of course Elon had to change that.”

Given how he constantly tries to insert himself and his opinions into everything he sees, it’s clear he has no idea about how consent works, nor why people don’t want him in their lives.

News article: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/02/elon-musk-pac-voter-data-trump-harris.html

There was also trump handing out hundred dollar bills and musk offering money to people to register to vote, both of which also seem to be against the law. Fuck if I know why the government doesn’t seem to take this shit seriously.

Oh, that’s really cool!

Twitter and some other reich-wing places were doing fucky stuff like promoting register-to-vote sites that didn’t necessarily actually register you to vote. This is particularly true in Texas, because all the sites were online but Texas required you to register either in person or by snail mail. But the sites would display success messages and shit anyway.

We’re currently at solar maximum, which means we’ll be getting the most solar storms for the next few months, then they’ll start tapering off before the next solar maximum around 2035 (it’s roughly an 11 year cycle; they’re not entirely sure why, but this one is a few months early). FWIW, here are my aurora links:

Dark Site Finder: shows you where there’s historically more or less light pollution, so you can try to find a better viewing area. https://darksitefinder.com/map

NASA’s Space Weather Center: this is the link to their aurora dashboard page; you can also open up their animated prediction map, to help you figure out if you’re likely to be able to see it in your area. https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/communities/aurora-dashboard-experimental

Space Weather Live: a site with more data, useful if you know a little about what you’re looking for. It includes a helpful moon-phase indicator, because I always forget that’s something you may need to account for, depending on where you live. https://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/auroral-activity/.html

National Weather Service: enter the place you’re thinking of viewing from then, on the results page, click on “hourly forecast” to see how likely it’ll be to have cloud cover, rain, what temperature it’ll be, etc. https://www.weather.gov/

Aurora Borealis Forecast: has a nice predictor saying things like

in 1 minutes, the Geomagnetic Activity level (Kp number) will be 8 – at STORM LEVEL! in 9 minutes, the Geomagnetic Activity level (Kp number) will be 3 – Active.

Those are the actual current numbers. If it’s cold where you are, you don’t necessarily want to be outside all the time (though if you’re in a marginal area, staying outside will help your eyes adjust and you’ll see better). I’m around Kp-7, so I can hang around outside for a few minutes, and when it fades, I can go inside for warmth or at least stop staring at the sky for a bit, then pay attention when it perks back up. They also have a 3-day predictor (less accurate the further out it is). You can also pay for their aurora alert service, if that’s of interest. https://cdn.softservenews.com/

Google News Alerts: Or you can sign up for a Google News alert for things like “solar storm”, “Corona mass emission”, CME etc - those are the things that create the aurora on earth 24 to 48 hours later. (You can set the frequency of the alerts; I’d suggest once-per-day.) That’ll give you enough time to figure out if the weather and moon are likely to cooperate. As it gets closer, you can check NOAA and SoftServeNews to see if it’ll be viewable in your area, and Dark Site Finder to find the best area to view from (I have different areas, depending on how strong the storm is vs how much time I can afford to be away from home). https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/4815696?hl=en

Happy aurora hunting!

The channel announcements and news segments and other stuff that made MTV actually MTV was a lot harder, lol.

Did you look at the internet archive?

GenX tv addict here. I grew up in a time when, if you wanted to watch a show, you need to make an effort to be in front of the tv when it aired. If you missed seeing it, you had to hope that if was repeated over the summer (only about 2/3’s the episodes of a continuing series would be repeated, and if a show was cancelled, that was it). If you missed it on summer repeats, you’d have to hold the show went into syndication, was carried locally at a time you were able to watch it, and then stalk the series because syndication packages were notoriously shown out of order (which is why almost all the episodes ended up with the characters being in the same base situation as they started out in).

It was the same thing if there was an episode or series you loved and wanted to watch again.

VCRs were an absolute game changer. You didn’t have to revolve your life around a tv schedule- you could go out, to go events, go shopping, have a late dinner. You could pause tv to go to the bathroom, you could watch and re-watch episodes that you enjoyed, or verify something you thought had happened earlier instead of relying on collective memory. If you missed taping something, you might still have to wait for re-runs - but there was also the chance that someone else had taped it and could loan you the tape.

Having learned the lessons of broadcast tv, I taped everything I watched, and I kept the tapes of the stuff I liked, or that had actors I liked. I could sit down today and watch all the episodes of David Soul in Casablanca or Billy Campbell in Moon Over Miami, or short-lived shows like Space Rangers or South of Sunset.

I still record and save things locally. The myth of having immediate access to everything ever produced was always just a myth.

FTA: There is risk of a crush when crowd density exceeds about five people per square meter.[a] For a person in a crowd a signal of danger, and a warning to get out of the crowd if possible, is the sensation of being touched on all four sides. A later, more serious, warning is when one feels shock waves travelling through the crowd, due to people at the back pushing forward against people at the front with nowhere to go.

It was Katrina that made me even think of doing it.

Yeah, I’m not in a flood zone, but seeing things like this is why I mounted a hatchet on my attic wall. It’s pretty certain I’ll never need it, but I can live a little lighter with the delusion that I’ll be able to hack my way onto the rooftop instead of dying, unfound, in a sweltering attic.

So, all those videos where the cops are screaming “Stop resisting!” to some person who is laid out on the ground, not moving and not resisting, piled onto with eight cops holding them down - I’m sure the AI chatbot notices and notes down all that nuance, right?

Relying exclusively on body camera audio—not video

Oops, guess not … :(

Last month Musk said that he has had “enough of dodging gangs of violent drug addicts just to get in and out of the building.”

Are the roving gangs of violent drug addicts in the room with us now? Or do they go to a different school?

Imagine hating your own daughter that much. We need more people like Tennant, less people like Musk and Rowling.