Industrial: The world is broken and has been for a while so let’s go to the abandoned husk of the inner city, throw a party, and make insane music before it crashes down around our ears.

Eh, gimme something else.

Yeah, that’s pretty awful. The pandemic taught us all that enough people are gross like that.

At this point, I just assume that every airport is packed to the gills with coronavirus. I mask up, avoid eating with my hands, try not to eat much at all, and wash thoroughly. That said, I ate at a sit-down restaruant at O’hare this summer and immediately caught it anyway; my flight was delayed and i was ravenous.

No kidding. Every time I fly I wind up on the same flight with a bunch of people that hit up an all-you-can-eat chili buffet the night before. They proudly let the entire cabin know this the very instant we hit cruising altitude.

The only upside here is that not even first-class is safe. I really feel bad for the flight attendants.

It’s worth mentioning that the flatogenic index of that kind of eating is off the chart. If anyone reading this has a diet like that please, for the love of everything good in this world, get a job that is outdoors.

What really breaks my brain is that the pigment responsible for this purple hue are called anthocyanins. It literally has a root-word for blue in the name, even though that’s not the only color it can make.

Thanks for the rabbit hole. Here’s a youtube video of that screencap.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJerbSVIBEQ

And here’s a (VHS quality) archive of the whole show. It includes all the advertisments too, so it’s quite the time-capsule:

https://archive.org/details/dinnerandamovierockyiii

It’s even better worse if you hear it at a dead mall, with hardly anyone around and almost no open stores.

Oh wow, that is so me. That had better be under… yep, ADHD… yeah, that’s in the right place.

It’s worse when this triggers life-long anxiety about missing future appointments.

Worse still is when you show up a week early by accident, because you had it wrong in the other direction.

Every time.

I have left this as an exercise for the reader.

Fixed:

Not to long ago, I was mourning the loss of the Conversatron 3000. It was a forum site that was nothing but comedy writers, using the medium to tell a flavor of joke and observational humor that could only work on that medium. A lot of it had this formula of “dumb question/observation”, “dumber retort”, “setup”, and finally “witty punchline.” Sometimes, that would just thread on for multiple rounds. Rarely, threads were open to user comments too.

Now I understand why that hasn’t come back. We don’t need it anymore.

IMO, some people think that being educated means achieving mountains of rote memorization, and little else. Some of those people also become teachers.

This may also be why there’s a big row every time someone changes what algorithms are taught in basic maths (in the US, anyway).

Oh man. I was having a good day and everything.

Honestly, this is a golden teachable moment in critical thinking. Jr here is starting to ponder the implausibility of a myth. Encourage more thought, guide away from magical thinking, answer their questions honestly, and reward them for arriving at better answers. Then follow up with a big reward as they’ll probably feel a tad disillusioned when it’s all over.

They’re selling billionaires a bridge to nowhere; and it’s working.

Look, I’m not saying it’s a good thing. In fact, it would be an insanely wasteful use of resources, labor, energy, etc.

That said, folks are all about “eat the rich” and this may very well be the closest thing to that.

PhD level intelligence

Which PhD’s, exactly?

Yes, that matters quite a lot, actually.

But we do have a QA department. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide if that’s humane or not.

Exactly. Once you know about “white box” goods and the robust Chinese manufacturing chains that support it, you can’t unsee it.

What blows my mind is that Amazon is just accelerating this, and at times, embracing it with their own brand. They’ve gone from being a whole-ass shopping mall to end-of-days-K-Mart in just a few years.