Taomeow

When I was doing keto, after about 6 months of no sweets and very low carbs I decided to have a piece of chocolate. Had to spit it out -- it burned my mouth as though it was acid. But that's not because chocolate is bad. Only because bad chocolate is bad. And I can't find good chocolate anymore, anywhere. You can't make good chocolate if you start out by stealing all the cocoa butter from it, processing it with harsh chemicals, and adding either too much sugar or not enough (that last scenario is what you get in "health food stores," overpriced, sandpapery on the tongue and hard to swallow. "Dark chocolate" they call it, 95% cacao they call it, charge you twice the price of the sugary commercial kind. A sucker is born every minute. Real chocolate is 55% fat -- that's the natural content in cocoa beans. So delicious... but it only lives in my memory. Fuckers.)

Silicone and botox inside human bodies and human faces. Many layers of chemical slop on top of that -- primer, foundation, concealer, blush, contouring makeup, powder, glitter, eyeshadows, glued-on eyelashes, lipstick, eyebrow gel, "midday apply a second layer to freshen up, and a third one for the evening." Petroleum derived perfumes, deodorants, moisturizers, sunscreens, body washes, shampoos, laundry detergents, makeup removers, hair styling gels, hair dyes. The visible/smellable tip of the slop iceberg. Things like a full spoonful of microplastics inside the human brains (a recent scientific discovery) are not as noticeable. (Q: "Which is worse -- to be bald or to be stupid?" A: "Bald of course. More noticeable.") The bulk of the slop is inside the bloodstream and in every cell of the body. (Let's pretend it's not there though, considering how the most disturbing part of the overall bulk gets in there.) We may eventually devolve to jellyfish, but luckily jellyfish don't have a brain or a mind so we won't mind. Jellyfish are much less sensitive to chemicals in their environment than many other species. Which makes sense -- slop adapts to slop better than non-slop does.

@Nungali It gets me every time how little professionalism is left in the world. Specialists in name only are all over the place. Full of hubris and full of shit has become the default mode. Not that lay people fare any better when they undertake creative tasks out of frustration with the way specialists do it or for to save money... Know a family of two engineers in my old NJ neighborhood who got frustrated with architectural designers when renovating their home and decided to design their own kitchen. They installed an L shaped counter with drawers on each side of the bend. The drawers aren't flush with the face of the contraption, they elegantly protrude a bit, and then they have those [-shaped modern pulls that stick out even further. Looks great. Only problem is, you can't open any of them, the opening operations on either side are mutually exclusive. I could make a better engineer out of a chlamydia specimen.

Poor Raymond. And here's a sculpture of an electrician saving a stranded cat in Veliky Novgorod, Russia. Based on a true story.

I don't fish for fun, I fish for the survival of the species. Meow.

Catfish are more closely relate to cats than they are to dogfish! In fact, all bony fish are more closely related to all tetrapods (mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians) than they are to all cartilaginous fish. This is because the first tetrapods evolved from a type of bony fish, meaning we are all fully inside that group (even though we don't usually consider ourselves fish.) Similarly unintuitive but true facts: -Bullhead fish are more closely related to bulls than to bullsharks. -Zebrafish is more closely related to zebra than to zebra sharks. -An electric eel is more closely related to an electrician than to an electric ray.

FLIGHT OF THE BRICK Scenario: A brick is flying toward you. Seeing it in flight — this is Enlightenment. Understanding that if the brick hits, it will hurt — this is Wisdom. Calculating its trajectory and the exact moment of impact — this is Knowledge. Dodging in time — this is Intelligence. Cursing out the person who threw it, but in a way that prevents them from throwing another brick — this is Charisma. And if, despite all these qualities, the brick still smashes you on the head — this is Karma.

Alas. I use Chrome on a Mac, like, always. So you just caught the site at one of those junior moments.

It occasionally works, is the best I've experienced. Haven't seen anything this unpredictable and unreliable online since the last century.

When I was 3, I used to play wrestle with a real polar bear's hide complete with the head and teeth and paws and claws.

You are yet to discover the level of un-seriousness Taomeow, Liminal Luke, and (especially) Apech can introduce into a thread. If I wanted to talk about apocalyptic prepping, I would certainly dedicate a different thread to the subject and then guard it like a hawk against (especially) Apech. No, I'm not a "real" prepper ready to live off the grid but neither am I unrealistic or unexperienced with what it entails. The best prep is accurate information and (of paramount importance) the ability to assess and process it in a clear-headed way instead of pegging new information into one's pre-existing pet biases. The rest depends on one's personal circumstances and resources (in the broadest sense).

No voila I'm afraid. The whole point of a solar powered charger is to have a way to charge my phone when the electrical grid is down. Whether it's winter in a solar-powered home in Finland, hot days of summer in CA when everybody runs air conditioning and the (overworked and inefficient) power supply gets knocked out, a hostile hacker attack on the grid, or a Carrington event (which managed to do damage even in 1859 and might end civilization as we know it should it happen again today), the hanging plant light that needs electric power to work won't work. Absent any such events, I just plug my phone in an outlet.

For some reason, off the top of my head I remembered a novel from the 1990s by Orson Scott Card titled Enchantment, a modern retelling of Sleeping Beauty that blends Slavic folklore, time travel, and fantasy. The protagonist, a Russian-American scholar, discovers and wakes up a princess who's been sleeping since the 9th century Kievan Rus' era. The princess, a smart and resourceful girl, begins adjusting to modernity, yet one thing she can't get used to is food. "Everything is flavored with something else," she complains. She winds up living for a while in modern America, then going there and back and spending some time here, some time there, and ultimately choosing the medieval time for her permanent destination. The scholar of course follows her. Nothing there is flavored with anything else -- it is what it is. One ingredient cottage cheese, one ingredient love, and so on... uncomplicated. And he chooses that.

Tens of thousands of acres of the Amazon rainforest have been demolished to build the road for the climate summit in Brazil. The most prominent and influential attendees will all arrive in private jets.

I have a solar charger for my phone. Which makes me a prepper. Wouldn't work in Finland. But I don't live in Finland. Which makes me sad but oddly reassured.

I've painted only sporadically so I haven't attracted them, but calligraphy gremlins definitely chomp on ink brushes and calligraphy pens. They like pricey Japanese ones.

This might work better than the medication prescribed to Milhouse of The Simpsons -- "Repressitol."

It's not the year of the Cat but it's the month of the Cat -- in the Vietnamese version of the Chinese taoist calendar they borrowed in time immemorial, they still have the Cat which the ancient China also had before it got replaced with the Rabbit. March 5 through April 3.

Interesting idea! The ducks would be fuming though if you told them. What I had in mind was something else though. I was thinking of three things two of which I will reveal here: 1. The ducks traveled all around the world -- in a huge group of like-minded individuals each of whom looks like a duck and quacks like a duck -- on ocean currents that made their routes pre-destined and inevitable. If they could think, perhaps each of them would come up with this idea that they're exercising their free will and choosing to join the group of like-minded peers and move in the same direction toward (or away from) the same coordinates. All freedom-loving ducks go toward ___ and away from ___! This is progress. This is equality. This is duckmocarcy. But in reality not a single individual one of them nor all of them as a group have any control of the ocean currents that carry them -- nor awareness of their existence. And yet those currents, the most powerful of them happening under the surface, are the sole determinant of where they are going. 2. And those same ducks carried by the currents which they have zero control over clearly demonstrate that any phenomena taking place on this planet that is mostly water follow the same patterns, be those patterns pollution or epidemics or mass formation psychoses or fake solutions to real problems. Everything ultimately goes everywhere. And in the universe that is mostly dao, our oceans are but a drop -- if that. Not a single duck can "save the planet," or save the whole group of ducks, or an individual duck, or itself without knowing the flow. And the only way to know the flow is to be the flow. So our separation from nature ("dao patterns itself on nature/on itself") is a guaranteed dead end. Welcome to rubber duckhood, humanity. Also sprach Taomeow.

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The funkiest and funniest folk band

China imported 12 million tons of coal from the US in 2024. The coal was delivered on huge oil-burning ships. China burned that coal to make energy to build solar panels. The solar panels were then exported to the US and delivered on huge oil-burning ships. In 1992, a cargo ship container tumbled into the Pacific, dumping 28,000 bath toys, mostly rubber ducks, that were headed from China to the U.S.. Currents took them, and news reports said some have eventually reached Maine and other shores on the Atlantic. In the following years, they showed up all over the world, Seattle to Alaska to Hawaii and back to China and to the Arctic. Pop quiz: how do you think the two stories are connected? Here they are in Chicago River