“She’s just one of the girls, she is not one of those one-in-a-million. As if to have and to hold would be holding me down with love and addiction. I think I’ve found someone, I’ve found someone to help me work it out…”

Kind of a soft alternative pop song from the mid-90s. I grew up in the northeast and listened to a lot of TMBG, Violent Femmes, and Talking Heads, so it’s possible that it’s from someone slightly adjacent to them, but it also might have just been on the pop radio station. It’s not “One In A Million” by Bosson, Ne-Yo, Aaliyah, or Trixter. I’m pretty sure I didn’t dream its existence.

“There’s a horse. In the hospital.”

No I don’t! I tell the truth!

“Anyone can become President.”

Me, thinking about Abraham Lincoln or Bill Clinton: “Yeah!”

“Anyone can become President.”

Me, aware of Donald Trump, with Tucker Carlson waiting in the wings: “Oh no!”

I grew up near Calais, Barre, and Charlotte, and none of them are pronounced how you’d think.

The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He’s got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.

When they gave him the job, they gave him a gun. The Deliverator never deals in cash, but someone might come after him anyway—might want his car, or his cargo. The gun is tiny, aero-styled, lightweight, the kind of a gun a fashion designer would carry; it fires teensy darts that fly at five times the velocity of an SR-71 spy plane, and when you get done using it, you have to plug it into the cigarette lighter, because it runs on electricity.

The Deliverator never pulled that gun in anger, or in fear. He pulled it once in Gila Highlands. Some punks in Gila Highlands, a fancy Burbclave, wanted themselves a delivery, and they didn’t want to pay for it. Thought they would impress the Deliverator with a baseball bat. The Deliverator took out his gun, centered its laser doo-hickey on that poised Louisville Slugger, fired it. The recoil was immense, as though the weapon had blown up in his hand. The middle third of the baseball bat turned into a column of burning sawdust accelerating in all directions like a bursting star. Punk ended up holding this bat handle with milky smoke pouring out the end. Stupid look on his face. Didn’t get nothing but trouble from the Deliverator.

There are plenty alcohols, like whiskey and wine, that are supposed to have “oaky” flavors due to the barrels they’re kept in.

In all honesty, it seems like they’ve been trying to make 3D happen every ten to fifteen years since the 1950s. And they tried making VR a thing in the 80s and 90s, too until it went to sleep for a little while.

Think about the ways that information tech has revolutionized our ability to do things. It’s allowed us to do math, produce and distribute news and entertainment, communicate with each other, make our voices heard, organize movements, and create and access pornography at rates and in ways that humanity could only have dreamed of only a few decades ago.

Now consider that AI is first and foremost a technology predicated on reappropriating and stealing credit for another person’s legitimate creative work.

Now imagine how much of humanity’s history has had that kind of exploitation at the forefront of its worst moments, and consider what might lie ahead with those kind of impulses being given the rocket fuel of advanced information technology.

Here’s the thing:

Public housing shouldn’t be any more of a dirty word than public education.

You never actually need to use as much toothpaste as is commonly depicted. A fraction of that will more than get the job done.

Spherical cartoon bombs… kinda existed, but went out of style in the 19th century.

I suppose there might be rare instances at livestock shows where you might see fluffy white cloud sheep, but most sheep I’ve ever seen in person are about as filthy as any other outdoor dwelling livestock, which is to say, fairly.

I’m wondering if I could obtain some kind of old/used android phone, remove all the apps so the home screen is completely empty, transfer via USB or ssh/scp the MP3 files (and metadata + cover art), then have some kind of music player app which would be the only app on the phone/device.

This is exactly what I did. I used an older Moto and uninstalled or disabled everything I didn’t want and only used BlackPlayer EX. It also has halfway decent external speakers so I can just play music directly off the device if I want to. The only thing that doesn’t thrill me is that it’s a full sized phone, which can be a bit awkwardly large at times. It’s been working great, but when the time comes for another device, I might go with one of the little Unihertz models.

There’s RiffTrax. They’re pretty much the only way I can stand to re-watch the Star Wars prequels at this point.

Edgar Rice Burroughs: Tarzan of the Apes Chapter 13: His Own Kind (continued)

The young Lord Greystoke was indeed a strange and war-like figure, his mass of black hair falling to his shoulders behind and cut with his hunting knife to a rude bang upon his forehead, that it might not fall before his eyes.

His straight and perfect figure, muscled as the best of the ancient Roman gladiators must have been muscled, and yet with the soft and sinuous curves of a Greek god, told at a glance the wondrous combination of enormous strength with suppleness and speed.

A personification, was Tarzan of the Apes, of the primitive man, the hunter, the warrior.

With the noble poise of his handsome head upon those broad shoulders, and the fire of life and intelligence in those fine, clear eyes, he might readily have typified some demigod of a wild and warlike bygone people of his ancient forest.

But of these things Tarzan did not think. He was worried because he had not clothing to indicate to all the jungle folks that he was a man and not an ape, and grave doubt often entered his mind as to whether he might not yet become an ape.

Was not hair commencing to grow upon his face? All the apes had hair upon theirs but the black men were entirely hairless, with very few exceptions.

True, he had seen pictures in his books of men with great masses of hair upon lip and cheek and chin, but, nevertheless, Tarzan was afraid. Almost daily he whetted his keen knife and scraped and whittled at his young beard to eradicate this degrading emblem of apehood.

And so he learned to shave–rudely and painfully, it is true–but, nevertheless, effectively.