George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
The things you lean on / are things that don't last
User ID: 107
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1mo ago
Hang around a while, here I mean, and you could probably get loads of respondents.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1mo ago
I've made my share of foolish choices, but I like to think one reason was that there was no one waving a red flag at me telling me not to make them. Consider me your waving red flag.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1mo ago
I wonder if we are all really gluttons for our own doom. Or if it's just you.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1mo ago
All maggots are technically flesh-eating. Just screw worms don't wait for the dying part. To answer, I'm living several thousand miles away.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1mo ago
I see. Not how I had read your post. Thanks for the clarification.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1mo ago
I can't imagine how people who actually bust their asses in physical labor and make less than me feel!
Here's how they feel: Integrity is its own reward, as is chastity. Hope those girls know how to save; their half-life is short. Also they better be exceptionally fine at fellating for those fees.
Someday this will all be written about. The courtesans of old Japan (花魁) had many ranks, all the way down to what today might be called lot lizards at truck stops. And all the way up to women rivalling (if perhaps not equalling) the geiko, who were technically not prostitutes but could play your emotions like a shamisen.
These gals in Silicon valley are carving out their own crass niche, if in what seems a disorganized fashion, which will ultimately probably be their undoing. Then again who knows. Anyway I feel like sausage and eggs for breakfast.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1mo ago
While these type of self-reported surveys may be reliable in the statistical sense (eg people will respond the same way no matter how many times they're asked) in validity terms I wouldn't expect much (eg I wouldn't expect to learn what it is you may be hoping to learn, whether and to what degree folks are cheating cheaters) even with the stated clause that responses are anonymized. For all the same reasons as Aella's "research."
I would be at least mildly surprised if we didn't have at least one or two trolls dropping giant infidelity bombs to set ripples going. People aren't honest or particularly good at self-reflection, and often even when they are, aren't truthful.
The above is my opinion of course so who cares, but decades of indecipherable noise in survey research suggests I am not simply cynical.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1mo ago
I was of the mind top-level posts were solicited, that we wanted more top-level posts. I presume people don't do standalone posts because it puts you out there. Like standing up and dinging your fork on the wine glass, as opposed to just commenting at length on some esoteric point like Uncle Fred during the meal, which would be the comments in the usual Weekday Whatever threads. That the mods are "bemused" by top-level attempts is interesting to me. Why would that be?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1mo ago
She is Exhibit A in how no one is safe in a purity spiral.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1mo ago
I find it this whole conversation interesting. It wasn't long ago that people online were linking Chris Rock's video How not to get your ass kicked by the police and sagely nodding that black men simply reacted foolishly to policemen, who were lawfully going about their jobs. Various examples were used as illustrations, including the notorious pepper spray incident. The lesson was, don't be an idiot and you have nothing to fear from law enforcement.
In this thread you have presumably right-leaning posters now suggesting that the police departments have some systemic bias against whites (due presumably to political pressure, a sea change in departmental ethos, or similar). I'm not commenting on this specific case or any of the ones mentioned, simply pointing out an odd irony.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1mo ago
Are we talking like Apu stereotyped or an educated Indian professor or a street vendor in New Delhi who speaks certain phrases?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1mo ago
My decades collide. You're correct of course. Charles Dance always brings it. I do remember Last Action Hero but don't believe I ever saw it.
Since you started this, I'll suggest Nomads (1986). Same year as Well before Independence Day (which I've never seen but will now, thanks, @erwgv3g34 .
Roger Ebert, whose reviews I enjoyed reading usually, absolutely hated it. It has a poor rating on IMDB.
I thought it was fantastic. John McTiernan director, before Die Hard put him on the map. Pierce Brosnan, Lesley-Anne Down. I don't know why I like it so much. The soundtrack seems very dated (a lot of Ted Nugent guitar). And the plot at some point just becomes twisted into a confusing pretzel. I don't care. It was a great movie experience for my teenage self (though is saw it on television a year or two after it was released.) The most distracting thing was Brosnan putting on a French accent, but once you get passed that (if you can) it's a great weird ride.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1mo ago
Well, are you going to keep us in suspense which you ticked?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1mo ago
using GPT to summarize
Do people here do this? That would be disappointing.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1mo ago
Run.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1mo ago
Can I just insert this is one of the most respectful back-and-forths between ppl disagreeing that I've read in a while here between you and @PokerPirate. And about a field I know nothing about (Statistics I know, but not Machine Learning). A lesson to us all.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1mo ago
Pitt was immensely famous already from several films, including Se7en five years prior. You may be right about Statham.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1mo ago
All is well, thank you. At this point I'm projecting forward to what my own sons will deal with. At some point thunderstorm golfing seems viable. Nothing like a lightning strike to end it quickly, and with a bit of oomph, all while sparing one's family from witnessing the slow decline. Just a joke. We, none of us know when the bell will toll.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1mo ago
No good deed goes unpunished, certainly. One has to ask oneself why one does it, of course, and measure that against the act and potential consequences/blowback. My rule of thumb is never be reactive emotionally. I fail at this often.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1mo ago
As someone who has witnessed such an event, what can you tell me about the purported purpose? Is it just young people acting like idiots en masse? Or more of a concerted act of intimidation towards grups? Bonk bonk on the head. Or is it, as I suspect, more a racial-coded black event? Even then, what's the stated point? (As opposed to what people imagine the point is)
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1mo ago
I think your own understanding of the phrase (as well as its typography) is correct.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1mo ago
Fuckin cancer, man. You stay well.
At the age of 49 I received a call from home. It was morning --a Saturday in Japan, so evening in my home state. It was my mom. My dad had begun having petit mal seizures several years before. We didn't know why, or at least the doctors didn't explore why or venture a guess why, though maybe they did in adjusting his medication for what I believe was diabetes, but they ended up giving him carbamazepine as treatment, which he would eventually refer to as his crazy pills: "Your mother is always reminding me to take my crazy pills." My father was over a decade older than my elderly mother at this point, so I tended to have my radar tuned to his zigs and zags. But I never really worried much about his health beyond that. He was robust, actively volunteering to deliver food to "the old folks" when he himself was 80, went to church, took daily walks, all the benign yet pro social activities that suburban old white men do. COVID would change all that but that's an entirely different story. This story is about the phone call from my mom where she told me, in what seemed an almost embarrassed voice (she always tended to laugh a lot, and there was some ghost of a laugh here as well) that she was entering hospice, and that she loved me, and that I shouldn't worry about her.
This was typical of my uncommunicative family, but x 10. Usually in the weeks and months before someone enters hospice care you have visited them bedside in a hospital, or sent them get well letters, or heard about their disease from friends and felt like you really should take them some flowers. But no. My mom had gone to a doctor for back pain I suppose a few weeks earlier and been diagnosed with Stage IV multiple myeloma. They'd given her less than a year, though soon she would find researchers coming out of the woodwork to suggest possible new treatments. She refused them. God would take care of her. Which of course eventually he did, though not as she had perhaps hoped and expected.
And so it was that I flew home and left my work situation dangling, and sat by her bedside in a large room richly panelled in dark wood with a view into a patio dappled in sunlight and small birds. She sometimes just kept the TV on. She wore a wig or headscarf. I had seen her not more than two years earlier planting flowers with my very young (at the time) second son. The whole situation seemed unreal. Bone cancer (yes not solid tumor, but still cancer.) She had never smoked, and probably had no more than five sips of alcohol her entire life. And here she lay, a shell of her former happy self, the same kind of resigned Patience in the face of impossible hardship that I had seen in her sisters, my aunts, when horrible family situations had been discussed in the past. No outright tears, no wailing against unfairness, no anger. Just an acceptance of what, in some form or another, awaits us all I suppose (perhaps not you, @selfie.)
I could stay a week. My mom had stopped eating or drinking, so the hospice nurses were not optimistic about how long she would hold on. The hospice chaplain I knew from childhood --she had been in my Sunday school class and was a year older than I was, but quite beautiful. Blonde, blue eyed, trim, with a calm demeanor; you felt you could lie with your head in her lap and listen to her speaking and never need anyone or anything else. She asked me how I was doing. "Fine. How are you doing?" I asked. She laughed and told me I was terrible. Michelle. That was her name.
The two days before I was to return to Japan someone had brought pork chops to the hospice kitchen. This was a place full of donated food--cookies, key lime pies, doughnuts, fried chicken, cornbread, sometimes fruits, all sorts of soft drinks and coffees and teas. But it took the pork chops and gravy to rouse my mother from what was supposed to be her death bed, her following hand over hand the hallway railing. And she ate.
I came back here. She would last another ten months--my mother was the only person I know whom hospice kicked out. She returned home. From my father's account it wasn't pretty. And in the end, as one does, she succumbed. My father told me he was praying for God to take her at the end. He talked about the death rattle, told me it's not something he ever wanted me to hear, and certainly was happy I hadn't heard it from my mother. Seven years later I'd hear it from him, but that, again, is another story.
Anyway I was 49.
I'm going to approach your question with a hypothetical. Let's say you can increase your wrist size moderately, with minimal affect on the rest of your body (remember there is nothing you can eat regularly/consume/inject that has zero downstream effects beyond the one thing you want it to do). Then what?
In reading your post--and I may be wrong here--it seems you're Steve Rogers looking to be Captain America, and fast. Why the frantic urgency?
There's a reason you see warnings that you should only proceed with xyz under supervision of a doctor. The body is a set of interrelated systems. If you have, say, kidney issues, increasing protein is not a great idea. And you may need reminding that acromegaly is a pathology, not just an interesting condition.
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