What do you want to bet that Ritchie Torres personally had a bad experience with losing access to some digital game. If we have someone illegally occupy and auction off his home, then maybe we can shift his position on Palestine as well!

The Twitter discourse among AI tech bros has gotten positively millenarian. They would have you believe that all work will be done by AI powered robots in nine months.

The lack of games was a blessing in disguise. Many of us left it powered off so long that the firmware is out-of-date enough to get hacked.

Modern GW art is severely lacking in Weird Dudes in the background.

I’d say it’s the old phyrexia stuff from the early 00s (EDIT: omg, it’s actually older than I thought, it’s from the late 90s). They actually did pull together a unified style, while keeping the character and soul intact. There are definitely a few good pieces of art in modern times, but in the 90s and 00s I was excited to see the art when I opened a booster pack.

The hand-drawn art of 90’s MTG was so evocative and full of soul. I think it’s not simply the change towards digital art that ruined it, but also WotC’s imposition of corporate style guides that ironed out all the lumps of character that the art had before. It affected the tabletop gaming industry broadly as it become more financially lucrative, you see the same phenomenon from Games Workshop and D&D stuff: the art came to reflect the character of the Business.

Zohran: “I can fix her”

Kids used to have to go to LiveLeak for this kind of content.

Eat bitterness 吃苦

I think people are way too used to driving around in their climate-controlled boxes. Experience the great outdoors!

…but also, riding in the rain does suck. I always sweat under my poncho and get super sticky.

Garages and driveways cost money to build, they cost money to maintain, and it costs money to pay the property taxes on the land they occupy. If you ammortize all those, I could easily see it being the equivalent of $2000 a year in costs.

People who bike everywhere, do any of you live in rural or suburban areas?

I no longer live in the suburubs, but our household had two cars when we did, and it would not have been safe or possible to do our commutes or errands on our bikes. Now we live in the city, and have zero cars.

I bus to work quite often, and I’ll probably do it in the winter more often. Not because of the weather, but because it’s so dark in the morning now, and so I don’t feel safe riding on some sections of my commute. Getting into the industrial park where I work involves a section of strode with no shoulder, and I can easily imagine getting splattered by a semi truck who drifted a few feet off the road.

How do you transport groceries?

We have baskets and panniers on our bikes, as well as a kid’s bike trailer which has a little extra storage in the back. We typically shop for groceries twice a week.

We share a Coscto card with a family member, so we’ll go maybe once a month with them and buy a bunch of stuff in bulk. So in terms in terms of total volume of groceries, there’s an appreciable amount that we transport by car.

We make pretty much all our meals at home too, we’re not suplementing with restaurants or deliveries (who can afford that?!). I see the Grocery Transport Issue being brought up a lot, but it hasn’t been an issue for us.

An outcome we will see repeated in other countries soon enough: massive shakeups as wave elections bring in neoliberal governments masquerading as Change, who are then ideologically incapable of enacting anything that helps their voters. Happened in the USA during Obama (he maintained a high level a personal popularity, but his party crumbled around him). Happening in the UK and Germany right now.

Canada’s next!

Got a bit of time with Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. Slowly working through the 3DS catalogue (it will take the rest of my life at the rate I play games these days).

Good work. This is motivating me to start working on my gutters.

It’s a great look for him, honestly.

Skinamarink is unwatchable.

And yet… I do think it’s an interesting piece of art, and I don’t know what I would change. Those long shots in the near dark evoke the kind of dull fear that you feel being in a situation that you don’t understand and doesn’t feel right, but also isn’t scary on it’s face. Weirdly, I think it works better than Heck (which is more overtly frightening, but which I think is too “external” in it’s study of the child’s distress, and so is less interesting). I saw both of these before I had kids, so I’m curious what my perspective would be nowadays.

I didn’t watch The Outwaters because the person who recommended it to me compared it favorably to Skinamarink, and I would rather do anything else with my evening.

I think the re-election of the Trump admin after an interregnum of “reasonable liberal governance” dealt a terminal blow to the idea that American electoralism fundamentally moderates the USA’s behavior. And because Trump is throwing shit everywhere, other countries can’t help but gain some first-hand experience of the downsides of that situation, and will act accordingly.

Also, the USA’s internal cultural landscape is fracturing, and there is no-longer an implicit coordinate between the USA’s cultural exports, and the goals of the USA’s political leadership. And so, even if the USA remains a cultural export juggernaut (I think it will), that aspect of it’s soft power will no longer be such a direct tool for it’s leadership. And so I expect that the USA will become a lot more hard-edged in the way it interacts with the rest of the world, simply because the cultural influences will not subtly steer other country’s decision making towards outcomes that the USA favors.

My spouse and I play tetris as a way to talk through things. It puts you into the perfect flow state for that, as it engages all the fidgety energy of your mind, clearing the way for conversation. I don’t practice or try to git gud at Tetris, because that’s not the point for me.

Gotta get as much bike and park time in with the kid before it gets cold! She’s been very sweet lately, although still learning some bad habits from the other kids at daycare (shoving, hitting).