This is my first time running into his work. I intend to dig deeper now that I’ve seen how no-bullshit insightful he is.

I try my best. Thanks for the kind words.

To paraphrase … someone … You can’t unfuck in a single graf what took three prior volumes and an additional 20 chapters in Vol. 4 to lay out. There’s a lot of soul searching that needs to be done before we start moving in the right direction.

I frequently use “therewith,” so I’m a terrible person to gauge such things.

I tend not to think about just how long ago 2006 was, but I lived with my fiancee in a small apartment complex where we pretty much all knew each other … nine units all facing a courtyard. In the summer, I’d roll the large Weber grill out to the grass, light the coals, and anyone who wanted to throw some meat on was welcome to do so.

This was pretty much every night; in exchange for my charcoal contribution, I’d often be offered tri-tip leftovers or a bespoke burger. We were a very diverse group, and I can’t imagine that we’d all agree politically on any given point.

Nonetheless, we’d congregate around the grill, having brought out our camp chairs, and we’d sit there for hours, just shooting the shit, telling stories, playing cards or board games, and laughing our asses off while drinking beer. Bonding over food and drink as humans have for millennia. Smartphones weren’t a thing yet, nor was Facebook.

It was just neighbors hanging out, a chance for social interaction without being overwhelmed. We formed a bowling team with one of the other (redneck as fuck) couples, and politics were just never discussed, because whether you like the president doesn’t affect your odds of a strike.

The suffusion of politics into everything, along with the rise of manipulative social media, has killed these simple moments of humanity. I just want to go join a commune at this point.

This falls into the category of “other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”

News would be Local Jewish Community Totally Fine With Holocaust Denial.

That aside, please stop posting full articles on Beehaw. It opens the site to copyright liability. Excerpts are fine, falling under fair use, but the point of a functional news-aggregation site is to drive views on publishers’ sites so that they continue producing the content being shared.

Let’s be reasonable here … they aren’t running out of options; they’re running out of monetizable options by hosting a centralized repository. Patreon is still an option, as are many others geared toward individual creators.

I shot a fair amount of porn of my then-wife starting in 2010 – predating OnlyFans – and the monetization options were so terrible (she categorically refused to hand over a 40% commission on principle) that we just posted to FetLife for free. Payment processors hold far too much power, essentially being extragovernmental censors

Right, those “caravans” that negotiate the Darien Gap intact and without issue.

With inflation being what it is, I’d aim for $7.99 per minute. You’re leaving money on the table by going for '90s rates.

Man, are people going do be surprised when the camps they’re building “for immigrants” get used for other purposes. Doesn’t matter the level of public support – that only matters in a democracy.

It’s obviously technically possible by going double-sided, but the cooling again becomes an issue.

Scarcely surprising, coming from Gannett. Time was, one kept complete and utter bullshit out of the paper. There’s a reason I bailed years ago.

That was my reference. Rolling Stone didn’t touch on an '80s Canadian sketch comedy for kids that somehow turned into Nickelodeon’s brand.

You’d think there would be all sorts of memories from that show, but I’ve really only retained one. Standard kitchen-table sketch, and the kids get handed boxes of cereal. One advertises a bigger box, and the kid is disappointed that the bag inside is still the same size.

To which the dad says “well, it is a bigger box. They didn’t claim ‘more cereal.’”

You’re missing the underlying issue that these people care about, once again, “celebrities” I’ll never meet. It makes fuck-all difference what their politics are. What am I going to do, get past layers of publicists and show them the light? I’m not L. Ron Hubbard, and times have changed.

“I don’t recall, Senator” goes back to Watergate. Fuck, that seems close to Reagan at this point. I’m old.

Donald Regan was very confusing to me at about that time my memories started to take.

Regardless, Reagan had wildly different ideas on walls.

This guy watched TV in North America in the '80s.

(and likely was as surprised as I that Alanis Morissette was part of the cast)

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to head to my rocking chair.

A free pass? He’s got enough punches on his “free pass” card for 10 more free passes.

Which is a great rationale for how a 3-year-old doesn’t know how the window got broken. The bar should be set a bit higher for the Axis Cheeto.