Daniel Dvorkin @medigoth@qoto.org

I'm done trying to educate these shitheads.

#seemslegit

Huh, most people just call this #decaf.

Oh, Quora.

It would be kind of amazing how many #racist #asshats are still celebrating this pathetic attempt at a country that only existed for fourteen years and ceased to exist before many of them were born, until you consider that many of them are also still celebrating a pathetic attempt at a country that only existed for four years and ceased to exist before many of their *great-grandparents* were born.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure the "#Rhodesians" did, in fact, fucking die.

This one has been flying around my #Facebook friends list. In and of itself, it's true. I have no argument with what it *says*. But there's a lot it's not saying, and I can't help but feel like it's designed to disparage the #15minuteCity concept by that omission.

First, the concept itself. The idea of the 15-minute city ("#15mC") is pretty simple: everything you need for your daily life should be within 15 minutes' #walk. Some definitions have "walk or #bicycle ride," but I think that drastically weakens the concept.

In other words, a healthy, able-bodied adult should be able to get to all the usual destinations in no more than a quarter of an hour, on foot. I would add to this that #children, the #elderly, and people of all ages with #disabilities should also be able to get where they're going via accessible #public #transit, in the same amount of time.

*All* the usual destinations. Which yes, means #grocery #stores, #restaurants, #movie #theaters, etc.—for people who #work there as well as the patrons. And every other kind of #workplace too. Of course you don't *have* to work or eat or shop close to home. But the option needs to be there, and the work has to be able to pay for all the rest.

That's *always* been part of the concept. If the work criterion is not met, you don't have a 15mC; you have a theme park, like the post says. Fair enough.

Yes, and? If you have a #house without a roof, you don't have a house, you have a collection of walls. If you have a plate without #food on it, you don't have a meal, you have #hunger. If you have a #legislature that can arbitrarily kick out its members for voicing their opinions, you don't have #liberty, you have #tyranny. Everyone understands this.

So if we agree that the 15mC is a good idea—I certainly think it is—then let's try to make it happen. This kind of sniping strikes me as less a valid critique and more an attempt to make the whole idea sound impossible.

Maybe that's not the intent, but it's sure how it comes across. Yeah ... don't do that.

Via an old #USAF #medic friend: a picture from my much younger days. My head looks weirdly small. Perhaps I was hoping the jolt would blow it back up to normal size.

I can date this one pretty precisely. It's at the #RAF #Upwood #clinic, where I arrived in June 1990, and shaved off the mustache within a few months. Also, I'm wearing whites, which I only did at the Primary Care Clinic, where I was first assigned. In the Acute Care Clinic, where I was from October of that year on, we wore BDUs. So it has to be somewhere in that time frame.

That kid, he's not me. Better in some ways: energy, optimism, idealism, openness to new experiences. Worse in others: temper, stubbornness, a certainty of his own rightness taken to absurd extremes. It takes some growing up to learn the difference between opinion and truth. Uncle Sam was not always pleased with the process.

But I remember him fondly, and wish him well. Given the number of people who were close to him then and are still here now, I guess they do too. I'm glad.

Fast times at 1600 Pennsylvania.

I think about this a lot, as my own #online record grows ever longer.

The #internet is full of ghosts of *myself*, and friends—some still in my life, most not, an alarming number who can never be again—caught at points of our lives when we were utterly different people. Hell, sometimes spambots still comment on my #LiveJournal posts, and I have to go see what they said, which brings the memories flooding back. Decades of #Usenet and #Slashdot floating around in the ether.

And yeah, it gets exponentially weirder when it's *everybody* who's left similar traces—which is probably close to half the world's population by now, if it hasn't already passed that point. I've been online for forty years or so, continuously for about thirty. Another such span of time, and a solid majority of people on the planet will have most or all of their lives self-documented in a detail that has never before been possible in human history.

My fiancée is a social #historian, focusing on a little over a century ago. There's lots of material, but never enough. So much is irretrievably lost. Her counterparts a century hence will have the opposite probem.

Probably a good thing those teenage #BBS posts are lost forever. Er, I think: maybe they're still on a stack of cassette tapes in someone's basement. If so, I hope they stay in their graves.

Today's "I may be small, but my family will do great things!" not-quite-a-#dinosaur.

#Dromomeron wasn't as tiny as the pen implies (unless that's a really big pen!) but it wasn't large either: about a meter long, of which half was tail, and the whole thing lightly built. You could pick it up and cuddle it, and you know you'd want to.

Probably not on the dinosaurian lineage, but close—one of a number of #avemetatarsalians living in the mid-to-late #Triassic, 220-210 million years ago (mya). Biodiversity had barely recovered from the end-Permian "Great Dying" 250 mya when the climate threw another curveball in the form of the #Carnian #Pluvial Episode 234-232 mya, a Great Flood that makes "of Biblical proportions" seem kind of cute by comparison. The early Triassic biota had looked more like that of the late #Permian, only vastly sparser: it was later in the period, after the rains washed the remnants away, that dinosaurs and their close relatives began their rise.

Into this relatively empty world came Dromomeron and many other avemetatarsalians, all trying to fill open niches along with the crocodilians to round out the archosaur family tree. Only the dinosaurs and pterosaurs succeeded in the long term, but many others had a good run: the Dromomeron genus contains three named species and there were probably more.

Like all the rest, it wasn't a "failure" or a "dead end," except in the sense that everything is a dead end eventually. See it now not as bones frozen in rock, but a thriving animal, warm and active and alive. We can only hope to leave such a legacy.

(Art by Gabriel Ugueto. If you don’t know his work, you should.)

Me too, lion. Me too.

Not posted for agreement, if you share please leave my commentary intact, terms and conditions apply.

Like practically every other man, and every other human being regardless of gender, I'm strong in some ways, weak in others. Saying "strong men are ..." anything in particular is part of the problem: it carries with it the implication that men must be strong, in every way and all the time. Well, I feel good when I'm strong, but I'm trying really hard to learn not to beat myself up about weakness. That does nobody any good, not me and not the other people who want me in the world.

Same for other men: our ruthless enforcement of arbitrary rules of masculinity has a lot to do with why we have much higher rates of alcoholism and suicide. I went too far down that road once in my life. I'm not doing it again, and I'm not pushing anyone else down it either.

The older I get, the more I believe there's no real difference between "good man" and "good person who happens to be a man." Good *people* are protective and loving—when they need to be, and also capable of acknowledging when they themselves need protection and love. Good people also, of course, refrain from abuse and spite. When they feel themselves going in that direction, they try to understand what's driving their anger, and open up to the people who love them. The alternative is bottling it up until they lash out, at which point they're no longer good.

Mr. Aleczander's heart is in the right place, I'm sure. I don't criticize him or any man for struggling to reconcile ancient ideas of manhood with overall human decency. Let's all just try not to repeat the same mistakes.

I particularly love how they keep going with the theme in the fine print.

A friend got this as a #Springer #journal #editor. I expect it will work about as well as #plagiarism detection #software generally does. Maybe worse, since journal writing in particular is known for forcing human* authors into a very mechanical #writing #style. There may be nothing easier to mimic for #ChatGPT et al.

*Presumably.

This is deeply wrong, but it's an interesting *kind* of wrong.

Our perception of the past telescopes: there's the recent past, what we remember; the middle past, what our parents and grandparents remember; the long past, out of living memory but still preserved in familiar stories; and everything else. As I've said before, a lot of Americans' idea of *human* #history seems to go roughly as follows:

1. #Cavemen.
2. #Pyramids.
3. #Jesus.
4. Robin Hood and King Arthur.
5. #Columbus and #pirates.
6. #Pilgrims and George Washington.
7. #Cowboys.
8. World War Two. (One must have happened somewhere?)
9. #Hippies and #Vietnam.
10. The real world begins with the momentous event of my birth.

Nor is this uniquely an American problem—some places have better educational systems than others, but I think people everywhere hold similar mythologized versions of world events leading uniquely and inevitably to their own central place in the world.

So here's an extreme version of the same phenomenon applied to natural history. Most reasonably educated people have some idea that not all prehistoric animals lived at the same time (although poor #Dimetrodon is forever going to be mixed in with #dinosaurs) but they do tend to lump enormous spans of time together: #mammoths and #sabertooths, before that all dinosaurs all at once, and before that ... I dunno ... jellyfish or something.

#Creationists, of course, turn it up to 11.