That pic is top-shelf meme bait.

Last Surprise is the best jrpg battle song of all time.

QA is for cowards who don’t have faith in their code. Real programers can test in prod.

Not trying to break the thread, but this is my favorite PKD that I’ve read.

We can remember dick

Oh, for sure. It’d have been useful information to communicate!

But telling kids to wear two condoms is insane even by American South standards.

I didn’t go to a “religious school,” but I did attend public high school in Texas.

Our health teacher was a coach, and he went over sex education. One day he said that condoms don’t eliminate risk from STDs, they just reduce it by about half. Even wearing two condoms doesn’t really eliminate the risk, it just reduces it by another 50%, so you’ve still got a 25% chance of getting something.

I was a pretty naïve kid, but even I knew that was fucking stupid.

My dad became a Christian Nationalist, but he loved Jim Croce when I was growing up.

He really liked the song Which Way Are You Going, but true to the song he’s got “one hand on the Bible, one hand on the gun.” It could have been written about him, but he still thinks he’s the pinnacle of righteousness.

Your POV:

Cool, I’d hate to live in a place where you can creep on your neighbors.

I bet it’s a pervert’s dream.

You think so? You think you have a right to install your camera on public property?

There are usually peeping tom laws that prevent this kind of thing, and it’s certainly cause for a civil harassment case if the person you’re spying on knows about it.

The real question is: why do you want the ability to film someone’s house like that unless you’re a creeper?

The people I stole it from stole it first. Fiction is like Mexican street food: it’s mostly the same ingredients, the artistry is in the preparation and proportions.

Unless I’m actively listening to something I’ve always got music going in my head.

Good news, there’s a vacuum leak.

You should definitely read the book if it’s a topic that interests you; it’s the best overview of conservatism that I’ve read. I’d say you’re pretty well aligned with what he wrote within, too.

But I’m not sure how to reconcile that with modern “rightists” who want to burn down the system and aren’t conservative in the lowercase-C sense.

The Republican party (and conservatism as a movement) are full-blown reactionaries. I like this passage from Corey Robin’sThe Reactionary Mind:

People who aren’t conservative often fail to realize this, but conservatism really does speak to and for people who have lost something. It may be a landed estate or the privileges of white skin, the unquestioned authority of a husband or the untrammeled rights of a factory owner. The loss may be as material as money or as ethereal as a sense of standing. It may be a loss of something that was never legitimately owned in the first place; it may, when compared with what the conservative retains, be small. Even so, it is a loss, and nothing is ever so cherished as that which we no longer possess. It used to be one of the great virtues of the left that it alone understood the often zero- sum nature of politics, where the gains of one class necessarily entail the losses of another. But as that sense of conflict diminishes on the left, it has fallen to the right to remind voters that there really are losers in politics and that it is they— and only they— who speak for them. “All conservatism begins with loss,” Andrew Sullivan rightly notes, which makes conservatism not the Party of Order, as Mill and others have claimed, but the party of the loser.

The chief aim of the loser is not— and indeed cannot be— preservation or protection. It is recovery and restoration.

And from another section:

There’s a fairly simple reason for the embrace of radicalism on the right, and it has to do with the reactionary imperative that lies at the core of conservative doctrine. The conservative not only opposes the left; he also believes that the left has been in the driver’s seat since, depending on who’s counting, the French Revolution or the Reformation. If he is to preserve what he values, the conservative must declare war against the culture as it is.

I’ve been a bit obsessed with one of Cleopatra’s arias from Handel’s Giulio Cesare, Se pietà di me non senti. She’s bummed that she thinks her brother is going to have her killed.

Se pietà di me non senti giusto ciel io morirò.

Tu da’ pace a’ miei tormenti o quest’alma spirerò.

Just heaven, if you feel no pity for me, I shall die.

I shall give up the ghost if you do not pacify my torment

It blows my mind that some people on my team were excited to watch the commercials during the Super Bowl.

I live my life in a way that minimizes the advertising I’m exposed to, and some people are just mainlining that garbage.

“I told you… (deep breath) they all need to have BENCH SEATS in the REAR! WHAT the FUCK do I PAY YOU PEOPLE FOR??? Don’t you KNOW who I AM???”