I don’t know if it’s still a thing in the digital age, but having even just a few seconds of dead air back in the analogue broadcast days could mean that “silence detectors” all over the country would start going off and radio engineers everywhere would think there was some kind of problem with their station. So there had to be talking, music, something at pretty much all times.
If you wanted intentional silence you could play comfort noise in the background.
A “carriage house”, in the backyard of some rich couple who were the landlords. I split it with a buddy. Open holes to the outside that we patched with duct tape. The entire thing listed to one side. It smelled like mold. Zero insulation or climate control of any kind. Landlord still stole food from our fridge when we were away.
There’s a ton of these where I live. Probably the most common tick, actually. They are extremely aggressive, especially in the fall. The larva is so small you can’t even tell they’re not a fleck of dirt until they move. So many of them can get on you at once I describe it as a “plume” of ticks.
Trimming trails doesn’t seem to prevent them from crawling across open ground climb on. I wouldn’t know it if I was allergic to mammal meat, but I’ve heard people having reactions to gelatin pill capsules and other sneaky things.
It sucks, but the alternative is I don’t experience the outdoors, so it’s just something to deal with and plan for. All my clothing is treated with permethrin. I’m basically in “tick mode” any time I’m walking around except in the dead of winter.
For the times it is down, the Freetube UI offers an easy way to “open in <video player of choice>” or “open embedded player”, both of which are much better than dealing with the default youtube UI.
The Threads logo looks like a parasitic whipworm.
Apparently its called “Innovis”. I tried to find a few articles but they all read like press releases or AI slop.
There is a blurb on Wikipedia fortunately:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_bureau#Consumer_reporting_agency
People here in the rural USA also think that factory jobs are magically “good”, and that it was factory jobs themselves that created the middle class. As if the factory owner is somehow different and more noble than the owners of other giant corporations.
In reality the unions literally shed blood to make those jobs “good jobs”. Those unions, and class consciousness, have since been destroyed. Even if 20th century style manufacturing did return it would just be another form of resource extraction. Those jobs may save people from the absolute destitution they face having been abandoned by their government but they’re not going to support a healthy community. That’s simply not good for business. When you don’t give a fuck about human beings then what’s actually “good” for business is a desperate, starving workforce.
People here praise Walmart, even though the community is demonstrably poorer. They’ve completely forgotten what was lost. They talk about that one great uncle who was fucked over by the unions the same way they talk about that one second cousin who never wore a seatbelt and was saved from a wreck when he was “thrown clear”. They all believe they will somehow be thrown clear from the wreck that’s been happening for 50 years.
Try to get a really early start so you aren’t spending the last few hours driving in darkness. If you haven’t listened to the “Shit town” podcast, it got me through a long drive once. This was on a 2012 car with no smartphone features besides basic bluetooth, but there was a pairing procedure that got audio to at least play (it was really wonky to setup, I had to look it up).
Edit: Big Caveat to my advice on the starting early, be careful if your trip ends inside a huge metro area on a weekday, as bad timing can land you straight into some horrendous rush-hour traffic.
Yeah, I’ve been fortunate enough to be offered those multiple times as well. I froze my credit with the big three agencies after the third or fourth breach. Recently learned there’s apparently a fourth agency now? Cool. And there’s hundreds of data broker sites…
As a settlement for the wrongful death of your parents you are entitled to 12 months of LifeLock’s DataScrub™ service!
There’s no sleep like class sleep. Five minutes feels like an eight hour rest.
I do a lot of invasive species management. Many of the common names are “exotic” sounding and include “Asian”, “Chinese”, “Japanese” etc because they were marketed this way in the 20th century to appeal to gardeners and land managers who didn’t know better and just wanted fast growing, pretty plants.
Now, in the current atmosphere of sinophobia I have often heard someone imply these invasives were deliberate sabotage. But it was westerners who imported these things. We wanted them, or at least wanted the plant that hosted the insect, or whatever. Also, by that logic we have “sabotaged” China with our invasives.
I feel like as a society we are so inarticulate, hateful, and short-sighted that we no longer have the ability to solve complex problems.
It looks horrific to me. Like a film prop from Cronenberg or Lynch. I think it’s the mix of mechanical motion, a material that reminds me of Jean Jacket’s stomach from Nope, and a structure like a severely prolapsed rectum. No way could I get off in this thing.
If people want to fart around with ffmpeg filters this site is great: https://ffmpeg.lav.io/
Maya and Motionbuilder run on Linux, but that happened before they were hoovered up by the monster. Autodesk just ignores that part of their portfolio. I know a few people who work/have worked on the Maya team and they’re talented, passionate devs, but management just doesn’t give a fuck about Media & Entertainment when Autocad and Revit are making so much money.
This is probably just because it’s DC. The rules get really muddy there. For a long time the highest elected position in DC was head of the school board, and even though ostensibly there’s “home rule” now, Congress still loves to punish the local populace by overriding anything they think scores points with their base back in Idaho. If you get convicted of a felony in DC you actually get transferred to federal prison.
Was also on Trump’s legal team for the classified documents scandal and defended the war criminal Navy seal. All these guys are like shits that won’t flush.
It would be nice if our jobs programs were like the CCC instead of security theater like the TSA, “Homeland Security”, or whatever this is. At least then, at the end of it, we would have a bunch of roads, railways, bridges, housing, canals, etc instead of trillions of dollars in circuit boards and machined aluminum rotting in a missile silo.
I see it as the continuation of a very old problem. Old school engineering didn’t have any standards until a bunch of people died over and over and the public demanded change. The railroads, construction tyremoveds, factory owners, mine operators etc all bitterly fought, and still fight, engineering safety requirements. Computer industries have continued this. They all oppose public action, hide negative information, and try to pin blame for conspicuous failures on individuals rather than systemic rot.
I think also because of the relatively less visceral nature of software catastrophes we don’t have a culture of safety. That’s not to say software errors can’t cause horrific accidents but the power grid going down and causing a dozen people in the service area to die is less traumatic than a bridge collapsing and sending a dozen people into an icy river. That’s an extreme example but my point is that humans undervalue harms that are seen as less acutely, physically brutal and software just seems more abstract.
Most of us aren’t working on power grid either, so when you start trying to quantify our software’s risks you have to speak to “harms” rather than just crimes like negligence, and then you expose this huge contradiction about how responsibility is allocated socially. Like, not only should engineers, pilots, and doctors have higher responsibility to prevent harm, but so should cops, journalists, politicians, billionaires, etc.
So the risks are undervalued and both intentionally and unconsciously minimized. The result is most of us who’ve seen the inside are quietly horrified and that’s the end of it.
I don’t know what the answer is except unignorable tragedies because that seems to be the only thing powerful enough to build regulations which are constantly being eroded.
Jeremy Brett is my favorite Sherlock. It’s like David Suchet and Poirot, he just nails it.