Shambling Shapes

Not me, had some friends from India and got to see them see their first snow in real life. It was actually more interesting to go snow coat, hat, gloves shopping. Hearing them talk about what thought would be the most important features of winter gear was interesting. For example, I would pay a lot of attention to the quality and function of the zipper, as that has often been the first failure point for me. The one boy just did not want poofiness and got the thinnest, flattest coat he could find. The other wanted a coat with some American baseball team on it, any team, didn’t matter which so long as it was baseball.

No, not a bad thing. Makes for a good pub trivia teammate.

Only a negative if it keeps a person from being able to focus on their job. But that’s beyond just being a dilettante, that’s unmanaged ADHD or something.

They’d have to spend their lives explaining their parents are dumb or weird, then eventually they would either grow to like it or they would go by a nickname that didn’t draw as much attention.

Because Mr Burns did it all the time, it was one of his character traits:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=mr+burns+excellent&iax=images&ia=images&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fi.imgflip.com%2F4ivwqq.jpg

I would go back to 2010 and tell myself, “buy Bitcoin, sell on Dec 17, 2017, buy after it drops and sell again on April 14, 2021. If you still need money after that, reevaluate your life”.

Same as I’ve been doing since he won last time. Stay in my more liberal home state, extend understanding to friends and relatives who live in conservative states, extend invitations to the few who might need to move to keep themselves safe. Keep donating and volunteering with the organizations I’ve been supporting.

I have a friend who is thinking about seeking asylum in the US. I have encouraged her to weigh her other options; there are other countries where she has friends and family that might be more welcoming to her. If Trump gets elected, I’m not sure she’ll even have a viable path to the US.

No change to “not a sin to be gay, it is a sin to have gay sex”. Add on that gay couples are now officially “irregular”.

Wow, great strides there. (👈sarcasm)

This is just removing the previous Pope’s cronies. There’s nothing in the article to make me think the Pope is putting in systemic fixes to prevent his own cronies from worming their way into positions from which they can abuse their power.

I would expect any pope or leader to remove those around him who are loyal to someone else.

Stone paths. I was hiking in a large state park recently and came on a stretch of path that a seriously skilled stonemason built. It was beautiful. I stood there for ten minutes looking at how perfectly they matched the stones together.

I find YouTube is less attractive than a year ago. Ads are more invasive and more difficult to remove. Recommendations skew heavily to the rage-inducing, e.g., I watched one late night comedy sketch making fun of Jordan Peterson and then my feed was full of clips of him spewing his hot trash for weeks.

I gave up on reddit earlier in the year when all the API / sub blackout / forced mod removal stuff was going on.

Freemium apps seem to be pushing ads more and more, which makes me more resistant to using them.

If what I read online is true, the days of investors throwing money at anything tech related are slowing down. Which means some companies that have never had to be profitable before now must find a way to do so. Which means tightening up subscriptions and/or more ads.

The US and UK have both used data from period trackers to spy on women and monitor for “suspicious” miscarriages.

If it it were my instance, as in I run it and mod it, I would boot them. I can’t moderate a language I don’t understand.

If it’s an instance I have a profile on but it’s not mine to run or moderate, I don’t care. I would mute it if there were a lot of posts.

It means his segment was more nuanced than I expected. It’s not “homeschooled = religious weirdos with no social skills”.

It’s rare to run into people who know what HSLDA is, and have an understanding of how different laws in each state create different environments for homeschooling.

Far from the worst overview of homeschooling in the US I’ve seen.

A couple got caught behind the high school. Girl giving the blowie was made to apologize to the school over the PA system and then “encouraged” to go to a different school where she would “fit in better”. Boy got no punishment.