Oh for chrisakes. I also donate to The Wikimedia Foundation, feeling secure in the knowledge that at least I could feel good about that one. Time to do some reading I guess.

Thanks, this is super useful context. I was also scratching my head how something broadly positive was coming out of De Joy, who has certainly worked to dismantle USPS from what I remember.

The hilarious part about your comment is you’re the one over-explaining to me here. I’m super familiar with about every way a man can be characteristically shitty, happen to have witnessed most of it first hand over the years, committed some of the milder stuff before I grew up and learned how to behave, but here you are kindly helping me understand things about men. Interestingly, of all the things I have witnessed, what I don’t really see often is “mansplaining”. What I do see sometimes is a dude earnestly doing his best to offer help and someone else being totally uncharitable about that, like it’s some affront. And never to the dude oddly enough, only in a mocking, condescending way to others behind his back. The reason I see those ugly hidden reactions, incidentally, is because my behavior makes it clear I’m a solid ally of the people making those comments, and they trust me.

So I dunno. Way I see it, there’s a catalog of valid complaints about stereotypical dude behavior. But being super critical about sincere (if clumsy) attempts to support or help someone just always strikes me as deliberately nasty, for fun. But you do you.

Don’t bother with the TV sitcoms, please. “Bumbling idiot father who fucks up even the most trivial things constantly and is roundly shit on by everyone including his own children” is a core, continuous joke behind so many shows. And fuck it, often it’s hilarious, I’m not gonna get bent outta shape about it. Your “see, look how toxic, it’s been on TV forever” feels pretty weak.

Can’t forget the fun flip side too, where some guys who know a lot are unwilling to share, because they (being fuckin cowards) feel it’s necessary to protect their job security by being the only one who knows how to do certain things.

Or! The guys who know how to do things - have decided they hate doing some of those things (usually for good reason in my experience) - and therefore pretend they don’t know how to do them. I kinda sympathize with this one sometimes.

But yeah, “likes to teach” as the toxic trait? Anyone who thinks that is the toxic version of knowledge sharing is kinda just revealing how little time they’ve actually spent around men.

That’s true and a great example of what my industry needs.

To make an analogy, in the software industry we call 7 different knee-like things “knees”. Not to be confused with the product, Knee, which is also knee-like, but due to its name either pollutes the search results for other knees OR can literally not be searched, and is only a very specific case of knee anyway!

I wish we had a dialect or subset of English that was intended to be more like computer code, and would be used for precisely specifying things. I have no idea how we’d do such a thing, and it’d never be adopted (and probably it’s been tried!). But trying to write English in a way that can’t be misinterpreted can be a real chore.

I’ve noticed this too.

Completely agree, and I have watched a ton. The quantity of ads is outrageous, and the “ongoing coverage” streams make you watch a pile of ads before you even find out what’s playing.

The video was always stuttering and just shy of unwatchable on the “live” streams, the ads were out of hand, commentary audio was super inconsistent, even the camera work was pretty shit overall. Like, missing critical moments when that was the only thing going on.

I thought NBC / Peacock did a pretty bad job.

I like it, very succinct way to get the point across.

That’s the way these things have always gone and probably always will. Retarded, imbecile, idiot, these were all effectively clinical terms (or whatever best approximated clinical practice in their eras) - they didn’t hold an insulting intention initially. People co-opted the terms to make fun of each other, as we do, and so professionals had to shift the clinical vocabulary so they weren’t using commonly hurled insults when discussing patients. And that means new words people can use to make fun of each other, yay! Which of course they did, necessitating another rotation. Pretty hilarious if you ask me.

The most recent example in my own life - my wife is in her mid 30s, and is pregnant - some medical professionals call this a “geriatric pregnancy”! But because some folks are getting offended by that term, they’re starting to use “advanced maternal age pregnancy”. Bit of a mouthful, I think they’ll get to keep that one.

Anyway. Carlin had a great bit on this phenomena, he’s the one who pointed it out to me.

I just don’t agree that most folks mean the middle panel. It really depends who and where you ask. A lot of people have - for example - a big problem with Affirmative Action because it looks like the middle panel - different help given to different people.

I think it depends a lot on the people using the words. People who don’t believe that the systematized slavery as practiced in the US produced long-lasting generational effects, for example, might say that treating people equally moving forward is best. Under that belief system, everyone starts on ~even footing and gets the same opportunities, so actually it’s less fair to make special cases for folks!

In my view those folks are starting from a deeply flawed premise (and usually one they’ve arrived at in order to justify the worldview they already hold), so their conclusions are worthless. But I think they’d meet the criteria of advocating for equality and against equity, and sincerely mean it. It’s not hypothetical either, I’ve met people like this - depressingly many, in fact.

I wonder about that too. For context, I’ve done it, and I wouldn’t do it again without a harness and clipping in. It’s just such a trivially easy thing to do to protect yourself and the cables are not at all adequate for safety.

For me, I didn’t use one because I didn’t realize I’d want it. I knew a ton of people do it daily, knew there wasn’t a lot of discussion or use of harnesses, and I assumed I’d agree with everyone else. And I think for a lot of others there’s that element, plus not even really knowing how easy it is to use one. You certainly are stuck with your decision once you finally make it to the cables, lol.

Not excusing the decision-making that led to this - but I’ve noticed myself that the scarcity of permits for some of these legendary hikes absolutely impacts decision-making. If this has been on your list for years, and you really don’t know when you’ll get another shot, you’ll be more willing to take risks you normally wouldn’t.

The permits need to be limited of course, I’m not suggesting otherwise. The only real solution here is internal. One good idea for situations where you may have to make a decision while emotional is to establish the go/no-go criteria before the emotions hit.

So for example, if pursuing hikes that have killed the unwary time and again, set some rules for when and why you ditch before you ever get the permit. Of course, then you have to stick with that pre-made decision for it to work.

I think another factor about some of these is how many regular (as in, not-outdoor-athlete) people do them every day. It gives an illusion of safety. I’ve done this hike - I’m a former rock climber, very comfortable with heights and exposure, and the cables felt recklessly unsafe to me. I really can’t believe more people don’t fall, and I’d recommend everyone use a harness and clip themselves to the cables.

Honestly between those two factors, the way our brains respond to scarcity / FOMO, and the illusion of safety caused by so much traffic…I think there are many people who believe they’d make a better call who would’ve actually done the same when it came down to it.

Just adding to the “maybe reconsider?” comments. I found it useful and I think it’s trivially easy for annoyed users to simply block it. Why should their laziness remove something many of us like? Idk, maybe allow each magazine’s (community’s?) mods to decide for their specific magazine/community? That would be a lot of effort though, probably.

Whatever you choose to do, cool tool and thank you :)

Wait, this is news to me. My understanding was that it began as effectively a kink with its associated community. Like, I think I recall it being pretty much strictly sexual in every way I heard of it for a long time. And then lately I see that it’s more broad than that - the most clear example I have is when my kiddo’s friend recently named it as one of the cliched “kid archetypes” at their high school, e.g. jock/goth/furry/etc. Maybe it was just never specifically sexual or maybe it’s been through some evolutions.

Ah, those are reasonable points of view to me. I think responsible gun ownership is fairly straightforward and the statistics look that way because of the extremely irresponsible folks who don’t take it seriously, and because suicide is usually included. Proper gun safety really only requires diligently following a few simple rules, make those consistently followed - habitual - and the additional risk drops to pretty close to zero.

But I concede that owning a gun does - at again just a definitional level - create a path of escalation which is almost always inappropriate to pursue, which is not available without that gun, and that’s inherently risky too. It’s not a decision to be taken lightheartedly, but we all face risk at varying degrees and have to make our own decisions about what are good and bad tradeoffs there.

There are a lot of folks (of all political persuasion, which is not to say it’s evenly distributed at all) who are definitely LARPing, and I think their idiot rhetoric is foolish and potentially harmful. I just think the quiet gun-owning left shouldn’t be automatically associated with that group, and if I remember the original comment right, I don’t think the poster indicated any hidden desire for violence.

I agree that we should be discussing and insisting on action for way more substantive and impactful stuff, guns are a ridiculous wedge issue that will never be “resolved”, and our limited time is definitely better spent trying to force improvements that would benefit and be popular with a majority of people.

You seem to be taking an “either / or” approach here. In my opinion the left should do everything possible to avoid violence, and also own guns in case these efforts are unsuccessful. It doesn’t need to be one or the other.

It’s really kind of a matter of definitions to me. In my view, there exist situations where a firearm is about the only way to prevent super bad outcomes for myself. Those situations are uncommon, there are many good ways to avoid them usually, and I hope to never find myself in one. But by definition, if I find myself in a situation like that, having a firearm available is the difference between having agency and having none.

Some people feel that the likelihood of such a scenario is so small that it’s a bad idea to prepare for it. Maybe this is how you feel? I do understand that point of view, I simply disagree. I don’t really understand points of view that seem to argue there is no scenario where firearms are useful, or that we’re magically “past that” as a society (and to be clear, I’m not sure you’re taking that stance). To take one example, just look at the response to Hurricane Katrina as an example of how flimsy our law and order really is. Once a situation is bad enough to overwhelm the existing structures we have in place, all bets are off and rules for behavior evaporate. We’ve seen this happen, in our country, in our lifetimes, more than once. I don’t understand the derision - why eye roll?

Excellent work, and thank you for sharing. What a win! I’m always heartened to hear about straightforward open source wins against leeches 👍

Right, believe I heard that tribes/peoples on other nearby islands were essentially ruined by their contact with modernity, making this a pretty reasonable response.