happybadger

Outside of an elk family, they're probably my favourite animal to encounter in the Rockies. Their dens are choirs of "you stupid motherfucker you get away from my flowers I'll eat your body I. will. eat. your. body."

I haven't even seen any of the ones after Voyager. I tried the first couple JJ Abrams films and it was so unrecognisable that it felt like the new Star Wars films I couldn't name two characters from after watching. DS9 is the height of TV sci-fi, now it's a neoliberal sitcom about badasses.

Yep. At best it has the potential to make a funny meme for a year. Reaction is already organised to seize on a crisis while adventurists aren't. A lifetime in Japanese prison to demolish one evangelical cult, probably replaced by a dozen splinter churches since, is not at all worth whoever he thought would replace Abe. At least from casually following it I haven't even seen a bigger political plan for Abe's replacement, same for both the Trump shooters and the guy who was doing target practice near Charlie Kirk during his fentanyl overdose.

Human cartilage samples taken from knee replacement surgeries also responded positively.

It's always so bleak reading about this phase of clinical trials. Orthopaedic surgery is wildly brutal and these patients were 5-10 years away from being able to avoid the lifetime of trauma that comes with it. lt's a complete roll of the chronological dice whether you'll be the tissue sample that proves a 100% fatal cancer treatment works or the patient in a phase 3 trial with a 50% survival rate or the patient who gets the little beepboop thing that turns it into an inconvenience.

My daddy may be my uncle-brother-grandpa, but my ancestor was the mighty conservative Christian white man Qin Shi Huang.

The Colorado high desert winter typically looks like:

3-5 snow storms per month, the first arriving between September and early November, each leaving at least 5cm~ or more on the ground for a few days. This peaks in April and traditionally ends in early May though, so there's still hope the overall snow season could even out.
Temperatures top out at 0-4C with some sporadic sunny days where it's 12c at most.
Plants start coming to life in early March, the first dandelions and leaves appear around mid-late April.
Birds shift to their breeding season in line with plants, while hatching occurs from May-July

This winter:

Two local snowstorms, the first being the latest-ever in late November. Neither deposited more than 3cm of snow for more than a day. We were in a rain shadow for all of the big storms that the Midwest was getting over the past few months.
Temperatures consistently 10-18C with some sporadic cold days that have dipped to -2C at most, the warmest December in almost a century. I've biked almost every day in one or two layers.
Dandelions are starting to bloom, trees have mature buds and are ready to unfurl their leaves by mid-February. I haven't been up into the mountains to see if the earliest pasqueflowers are similarly off-schedule.
Birds have been doing their Spring breeding routines as early as mid-January. It seems like they're poised for a March-May hatching period where the chicks would normally catch a few more life-threatening snow storms

That whiplash is so scary when it's impacting the most energy-intensive parts of a species' lifecycle. It's so unpredictable that I don't know when to start my seedlings, with swiss chard already healthily growing outside that I would normally start inside in March. Trying to make those predictions as a different species without weather forecasts is an impossible set of conditions.

I like when white supremacy is transparently desperately grabbing at any historical figure that goober can attach to instead of their sibling-parents. It's peak sad.

At the same time, at least to an outsider, Takaichi seems like an even worse version of Abe's politics.

Climate apocalypse is my go-to term for gravitas, but I like polycrisis. You can't separate the environmental from the social or financial, so that term lets you link all of the intersectional issues into one collection of feedback loops.

Since 2020 but especially over the past year, I've entered this weird twilight zone where most strangers I talk to have a radical but nihilistic acceptance. Haircuts, tattoo sessions, random store clerks and clinicians- it's like 50/50 whether they'll preemptively bring up collapse as small talk.

That's the scary thing. It alternates between extremes now. Two years ago it was our wettest spring in half a century, but following a huge drought and fire season so the ground wasn't capable of retaining that water. All it resulted in was landslides, flooding, and creating a huge overgrowth of plants that are now fire fuel.

I've been watching his youtube podcast, Colonial Outcasts, for a while. He has consistently had good analysis of imperialism and wars. It's nice as a day-after-something-happened podcast.

I've disliked these kinds of therapists in the past:

Disengaged, overwhelmed by their caseload, looking forward to lunch or the end of the day or retirement. A therapist should be actively listening better than I can as someone who didn't take classes in that skill. I try to schedule appointments around 0900 or 1300, when they've had their breakfast or lunch but aren't burned out.
Offering wellness solutions, pseudoscience, or self-help like a blog post about being sad. Therapy should be evidence-based and the therapist should understand how your dialectical relationships shape you. If they're selling you placebos or gurus or anything other than the current science's best practices, it's a huge red flag for me.
Not respecting boundaries. Therapy feels more invasive to me than outpatient surgeries I've had. It's invasive when it's bad, it's more invasive when it's good. A bad therapist will only understand your issues clinically instead of as a human responding to inhumane things. They'll probe sensitive things too deeply before you're ready, stick to the strict schedule if you're in a bad headspace for intense therapies, and say callous things.
Being too professional. I've worked in medicine, and inpatient/outpatient psychiatric at that, so I also get trapped in the clinical headspace whenever I smell it. It forces you into a world of customer service voice, corporate restraint, and reciting textbooks to each other in Latin. You have to mute the human part of your brain as a coping mechanism, but the patient shouldn't see that. A bad therapist will be so formal that you just feel like you're being analysed by a computer. There's no conversation, they don't remember any details about you appointment-to-appointment, they aren't easy to talk to like a trustworthy friend.
Liberals. I once had a liberal therapist, in early 2020, tell me that I shouldn't worry about COVID because it's outside of my control and things will be fine. I should take up meditation instead of reading about it. I told her that the difference in our perspective is that I was a destitute student living with six libertarians and she earned at least 5-10x my current income working from home which insulated her from the things I was scared of. Those things all happened, even worse than I anticipated. Class blindness from a mostly bourgeois profession makes liberals in medicine as infuriating as liberals in academia. Not understanding sociopolitical or sociocultural theory makes it really hard to talk about plainly observable things on the level of a hexbear post without them writing it off as paranoia. It's considered bad clinical boundaries, especially in a sensitive field like psychology, to ask them personal questions but their politics should be decipherable from their office/specialty/conversation.

The only therapists I've liked enough to stick with them long-term have been:

A social worker doing EMDR. They don't rush it and try to fit an intense therapy into the rest of my life. Talking with them feels casual and friendly, while every question they ask is sensitive and the right question for that moment. They recommend additional resources and wellness practices, but those things are secondary to a proper care plan around an evidence-based therapy. They're at least radical enough to talk bluntly about the world in ways I can agree with even if I don't know their politics.
A social worker doing Emotionally Focused Therapy. They're a good listener and always have a calm response which challenges me on a deeper level without making me defensive. They don't push for hard sessions on bad days, and they know when they need a sick day. They only push one evidence-based programme and their wellness advice revolves around doing more of what I already do. They're also radical enough to talk bluntly even when I don't know their politics.
Two psychiatrists who balanced the need to try new things with my fear of drug interactions and neurotoxicity/addiction/side effects. They were more formal and clinical, but I wanted Latinslop from them. They did small incremental steps with drugs and always stayed cautious. They didn't recommend drugs that I wasn't comfortable with, and let me try something new when I wasn't comfortable on a higher dose of something that didn't work. They could enthusiastically talk about the science behind those drugs and the brain, but also asked about my dog with genuine interest.

Browsing reddit almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter.

When you let one Nazi into the bar, now you're the Nazi Bar

That doesn't mean it couldn't work. If Hexbear got 100k signatures for a revolution, the US government would HAVE to respond.

A shriveled finger on a monkey paw curled when he said "reddit moderators should be treated like celebrities or influencers". Despite craving power this much, everyone he meets will be able to say "kubrick stare+lips" and make him shrink into a corncob. If he ever tries to gain actual power by running for the lowest local office, the attack ad just needs to be kubrick stare+lips and he gets negative votes. If he tries to adopt a dog from a rescue to feel power over that, they'll google his name and deny him because kubrick stare+lips.

Celebrity status achieved.

Oh yeah, they'd love his story. I've just been mulling over the idea of doing Washington DC crisis PR for the entirety of the 2010s. Every single crisis he could have lied to us about is cartoonishly evil, and they were all legitimised by demons like this playing devil's advocate. It's the worst kind of Guy to be behind one of these astroturfed babyprotests, outside of another Graham Platner Good Mercenary.

Nah, the supply chain is super simple. After the first hour in the air you only need:

3-4 large dumpsters
A backhoe and small crane
A HAZMAT transportation crew and environmental remediation plan for the crash site

Nazis don't care if you hate them. They hate if you humiliate them.

That photo of Lang cowering and crying in a doorway will do more damage to him than any amount of criticism. You can't google Christopher Cantwell without seeing "The Crying Nazi" three times on the first page. Future employers and partners can't, his community can't, half a century from now his inbred grandchildren will be doing a history class report on their ancestry and they'll have to write "The Crying Nazi" next to his name if they acknowledge him at all. Bullying bullies in front of the rest of the playground is the only thing that stops them. Everyone now knows they're too weak to pretend to be strong and be taken seriously.