Yeah, I’ve learned some discretion over the years. I once told a story that dead ass got me sent to therapy.

Me telling an EMS war story that brings the vibe to a crashing halt.

America in one picture

No, nothing ever happens, actually. Nobody ever does anything interesting or worth talking about. Hosting exchange kids has, predictably, been one of the most boring experiences of my life, along with everything else.

Nah, he found a smooth reflective mask and a huge red robe, then we took a toy sickle and rubber mallet and spray painted them with gold paint.

I hosted a Russian exchange student who really liked joking about that stuff. He went as the ghost of communism for Halloween

This is really cool, but it would have been cooler if they’d named their scouting missions Hugin and Mugin, since they’re Odin’s ravens that scour the earth for secrets to give to Odin.

For me, Wolf Larsen represents or embodies Satan (at least, Satan as a literary figure). His ship is a veritable ship of lost souls, all of the ship’s hands are either recruited in drunkenness or fleeing something that seemed worse at the time. He’s incapable citing scripture, which would be a really uncanny thing for a captain of his day, and even curses God.

The way he finds Hump even parodies the Divine Comedy; Hump (Dante), an honest but kind of hapless writer, becomes lost. The man who would guide him comes and finds him, and lo and behold, his guide is no Virgil, but, rather, Satan. Imo, the thing that really sells this is that Hump passes out underneath the golden gate (passes through the gates of hell) and is lost and found in the fog, which mirrors the conditions in the first circle of hell, Limbo. Rather than spending their voyage showing Hump what has happened while preventing him coming to harm, Wolf puts Hump in harm’s way and spends the voyage trying to convince him of what is. By the end, the formidable captain, much like the Satan of Paradise Lost, is bound in darkness, remaining proud and sure to the end.

It’s wild how good this book is relative to how few people have read it.

“The only part I remember is ‘I now commit this body to the deep’”

Yeah, that’s him. I was curious and looked him up a while back. Tay get really open about speaking for economic and social justice. He’s more or less always been that way. Chocolate Rain, is, IIRC, a song about the realities and struggles of being black in America.

I really like this one. I particularly appreciate how the artist has made the road and grass look wet. It reminds me of a summer evening after an afternoon rain.

Not to mention everyone buried under rubble.

It’s got to be more than that. This is a little like saying that there are at least two stars in the sky.

I would be very proud to say I had them on hand, but I don’t. I’ll look around, and share if I find them.

There’s a number of other studies that show that, overall, letting people go unhoused is far, far more costly than just fucking housing them. It’s not just paying for the cops and demo teams to chase them around, you’re also paying for excess use of medical services that wouldn’t be taking place otherwise, lost revenue because of people wanting to avoid the homeless, and a bunch of other things that all just pile up. It doesn’t help that some startups have entered this space and you’ve got cities like San Francisco paying them something like 40 or 80 thousand a year to keep the homeless in a fenced off area in a tent grid. It doesn’t really fix anything, it’s just another shitty, expensive band-aid whose funding could have gone to fixing the problem but didn’t.

We should go to global UTC. One time all the time.

So this is it, huh? We’re really about to start a world war to protect Israel’s genocide?

Yep, that’s me. You could probably find a few more good examples of me stepping in shit on Hexbear, that’s hardly the first.

Externalities with no direct impact on the company? No way! Milton Friedman assured me that capitalism was perfectly balanced with 0 exploits!

Yeah, I’ve had the experience of paying off a bill, only for the hospital to, about a year later, send us a newly adjusted bill from the same encounter where they discovered we actually owed them a further three hundred. Healthcare is the only field where this kind of shit is tolerated as a routine matter. Any other business doing that would be shamed in town square, but it’s Tuesday for healthcare.