HorthyMiklosKatonaja
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User ID: 540
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
24d ago
I remember 2014 being the year of Gamergate and Ferguson, but I don't recall anything about ants.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
24d ago
I stopped using cash many years ago because my wallet was getting overloaded with change, and there never seemed to be an opportunity to use exact change for anything (having only the wrong denomination bills).
True in my case. When I was a kid, girls in my class and even grown women would come up to me - sometimes even in the supermarket - and tell me I was "cute". You better believe that stopped the very minute I hit puberty; suddenly I was invisible to half the human race!
Related anecdote: thirty-some years ago I was in a shopping mall, and an attractive woman I had never seen before smiled, with real warmth, seemingly at me. Turns out she was actually smiling at a baby being carried by a woman right behind me! Sheesh, can't win for losing.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
29d ago
My favorites of the Wimsey novels are Five Red Herrings and Have His Carcase.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
29d ago
The galactic Usenet feels hilariously dated nowadays.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
30d ago
You gotta love that the page headed "Leadership Message" is otherwise blank!
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
30d ago
Vanced worked on my android phone until 2023. Seems it stopped getting updated. I guess Google's lawyers killed it.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
30d ago
Bulworth memories.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
30d ago
See also L. Neil Smith's novels where he pretends there were a significant number of female Libertarians. "Mary Ross-Byrd"?? Come on!!
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
30d ago
Anyone old enough to remember M * A * S * H knew about the Korean War.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
1mo ago
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
1mo ago
By around 1900, you did get the sons of rajahs attending English public schools and universities. I'm pretty sure there was still no room for non-noble Indians though.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
1mo ago
Viz. the "trucks of peace" driving into Christmas markets and such, in European cities. IIRC there have been at least a dozen of those over the past decades.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
1mo ago
It's too bad he's gone. He's my favorite hard SF author. I'd kind of like to know the story of Nyjora, how it lost its technology, and what remnants of said tech still existed during the dark ages.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
1mo ago
Maybe we're just the last outpost in the Slow Zone before the Unthinking Depths.
Nail polish is quite arousing for me, but only if the nails are reasonably short (say, no longer than 1/4-inch past the outer end of the cuticle.) To me, it signals unashamed embrace of her femininity. A lot of my female classmates at school had them when I hit puberty 45 years ago. It seems a lot rarer nowadays for some reason.
My heuristic, though, is that the longer the nails are, the lower the IQ. Especially if there's "nail art" or even fake jewels on there, like on an ad for Klarna that was on a display at my local mall for awhile. I mentally picture women with inch-plus nails as having a room-temperature IQ and being obsessed with social media (of which most of her posts consist 75% of emojis, plus those moronic abbreviations like "u" and "ppl").
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
2mo ago
I wonder what would have happened had Duke won election as Louisiana governor. I strongly suspect that the state legislature would have kneecapped every one of his actions and it would just have been boring business-as-usual. Might have been interesting, though.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
2mo ago
I know for a fact I'd be susceptible to "love-bombing", especially if an attractive woman is doing it, because everyone I've ever thought of as a friend, ghosted me after a few months to three years at the outside and I have to assume I'm just deeply defective in some way.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
2mo ago
... or, in your twenties, it's "Sure! I'm really busy at work right now, though, but I'll call you later!" And, thirty-five years on, I'm still waiting for that call . . .
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
2mo ago
Yeah. When a woman just comes up to a man (who's a stranger to her) on the sidewalk or in a mall, 99.999% chance she's selling something, recruiting for a cult, trying to get you to sign some petition, or asking for support for some (almost always left-wing) cause. Or panhandling.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
2mo ago
When I see "Sam Altman", I always think of Mahasamatman from Zelazny's Lord of Light.
It's interesting to read Sidney and Beatrice Webb's 1936 Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? because it shows you how the USSR was supposed to work. According to the Webbs, the true-believers were working toward a future where every peasant, factory janitor and Chukchi tribesman would have a standard of living equivalent to a Western European university professor.
Edited to add: it goes into elaborate detail on the economic planning process, and I think it might even have worked - if it was overseen at every level, down to the individual factory, kolkhoz and shop, by an all-seeing, all-knowing AI, devoid of human frailties like corruption, favoritism, laziness, ego and urge for revenge, and this AI had some way to compel humans to follow its directives!
Hmm, there's a speculative fiction story in there somewhere . . . too bad I've got no writing talent.
I really wonder whether a Patrick Buchanan in 1992 victory would have actually accomplished some paleoconservative goals. He was very big on restricting immigration to Europeans only, and was a committed Catholic; a true isolationist too, which you hardly ever see in national-level politicians these days. RationalWiki calls him a xenophobe (as if that was a bad thing. Heh.)
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
2mo ago
At least partly because the Lebanese state's military power is just pitiful; they can't even stand up to Hezbollah.
Iran will never agree to any treaty which explicitly guarantees Israel's right to peacefully exist. Most of the time the Iranians can't even bear to call Israel by its proper name; it's always "the Zionist entity".
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