Castle Magus

I've never had a flying experience quite as bad as the one Woolie describes here, but... I'm not entirely surprised or shocked by his description, either. I mean, it's like, sure, what he said sounds really terrible, but yeah, that tracks.

It could've been worse, of course. At least the plane didn't crash or anything.

(EDIT)

Wait... that was the same airport that this happened, last night. Their podcasts are usually recorded days before the clips are uploaded to Youtube, so that couldn't have been the reason why Woolie had such problems, but still... holy shit...

(EDIT 2)

Actually, I think the clip is mislabeled. This should be a clip from CSB 305, which was only just released yesterday, not CSB 304, which came out over a week ago. The timing is... not great, regardless.

(/EDIT 2)

(/EDIT)

Guh.

Fucking power just went out, around 9:45am EST. Duke Energy website says estimated restoration time is 2pm. Just god damn excellent. Apparently, it seems to be literally impossible to get through a winter season without the fucking power going out for an extended period at least once. I hate this time of year so god damn much. *weary fucking sigh*

(EDIT 10:45am) Almost exactly an hour later, it has come back on. Whole damn thing was just enough of a nuisance to wake my ass up. Fuck everything. (/EDIT)

"Why romanticising your own life is philosophically dubious, setting up toxic narratives and an inability to truly love"

Alternatively: "Why main character syndrome is philosophically dangerous"

A (really good) post on John Scalzi's website.

You know how TERF means "trans-exclusionary radical feminist," right? I'm starting to feel like there needs to be a term/acronym that means something along the lines of "asexual/aromantic-exclusionary (radical?) ...um... LGBT-supporters... ...?" Needs some work, but that would be the gist of it. This is assuming, of course, that there isn't already a term/acronym like that and I'm simply not aware of it. And, with that said, this certainly isn't a new phenomenon or anything.

Take this Polygon article about the most recent Ghostbusters movie, for example. Basically, the article seems to take the stance of "They must kiss/confess love/fuck/whatever, or it just doesn't count at all." Fuck off with that shit. Look, if they made another new Ghostbusters movie involving these characters, and they made Phoebe openly gay, I would be totally fine with that (and if other Ghostbusters "fans" have a problem with that, they can fuck off, too), but at the same time, don't go shitting all over things that don't exactly match up with how you wish they were. "Not every queer romance needs to be clearly spelled out on screen, but..." has very strong "I'm not a racist, but..."/"I'm not a homophobe, but..." energy.

Also... Phoebe Spengler is "so, so queer-coded" because of... her hair and the way she dresses? Uh, so, was Egon Spengler "so, so queer-coded," too, then? Because Mckenna Grace in these new movies was explicitly and intentionally made up to look almost exactly like how Harold Ramis looked in the original movies. I mean, sure, it could be both of those things, but it's way more the latter than the former in intention, though. And I don't recall anyone trying to claim that Phoebe was "so, so queer-coded" in Afterlife (especially considering the chemistry she had with Podcast [a male character] in that movie).

And, lastly, "in case you're lucky enough to have not watched the newest new Ghostbusters movies" (emphasis mine). Implying that anyone who has watched them is "unlucky"? Fuck off with that shit, too. The new Ghostbusters movies (i.e. Afterlife and Frozen Empire, anyway[1]) are fine. Admittedly, I didn't like Frozen Empire nearly as much as I did Afterlife, myself, but it's not "a frankly bad movie" either, and I don't feel "unlucky" to have seen it.

(I don't feel comfortable putting the "homophobia" tag on this because it doesn't really fit, and I don't have an "acephobia"/"aphobia" tag yet [nor do I feel like putting one just on this one post], but if I ever, sadly, find a reason to make another post in the future that would need a tag like that, I'll add it and backtag this one with it as well.)

[1] - I thought the 2016 movie (Ghostbusters: Answer the Call or whatever the fuck they're calling it now) was okay, too (despite the intensely shitty trailers for it), but that's neither here nor there, as that movie has nothing to do with the newer ones, which were actual, passing-the-torch sequels of the originals, rather than a failed attempt at a reboot.

...yet which almost everyone else is seemingly utterly obsessed with, it would probably be "Kendrick vs Drake."

All I know about this topic is that two rappers apparently have "beef," and that's as far as I care to know.

For example. (It's a link to yet another Castle Super Beast podcast clip, but one which I don't even feel like bothering to embed this time.) I started watching that, not knowing anything about it, but at the first mention of "Drake," less than a minute in, my ears did whatever is the ear-equivalent of "eyes glazing over," and I just checked out entirely maybe a minute later, if even that long. This is not, of course, the first time they've touched this topic (neither of which I've even started to watch, because in those, at least, they had the courtesy to put "Kendrick vs Drake" in the titles).

And, obviously, Castle Super Beast isn't even remotely the first or only place where I've heard this topic come up, unbidden. It's starting to approach "twilight bashing" levels of annoyance with me (but still probably has a long way to go before it actually gets there).

(EDIT) The only other "beef" I've ever heard anything about was the old "Eminem vs Insane Clown Posse" thing from a while back, and that was only because I was kind of big into ICP (Eminem is okay, too) for a year or two, about a decade ago, and that one was just as dumb, if not nearly as ubiquitous. (/EDIT)

Basically this post, again, except reformatted to not be a bunch of now dead tweets. I got to thinking about this stuff again, and remembered that I'd already written something about it.

Here is the original post, reformatted to not be Twitter:

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It's funny how the general names given to certain things can sometimes make those things seem much scarier than they really are, e.g. Schwarzchild radius, Cherenkov radiation, Heisenberg uncertainty principle, Fermi paradox, Higgs boson, St. Elmo's fire, Schrödinger's cat, etc. I mean, granted, some of those things actually are a little freaky if you really stop and consider them, but the names can make them seem even scarier, in a strange way. Or they can make things that are completely innocuous sound sinister or at least more grandiose than they are.

Scientific phenomena named after people
List of scientific constants named after people
List of scientific laws named after people

Or maybe it's just that some people have scary-sounding names? I don't know. I mean, I guess the opposite is true, too. You could call something "the Bob effect," or "the Larry principle," or "the Timmy rule," and no matter how scary they may actually be, it still sounds silly.

But even then, if you had something called "Chad radiation," or "Cletus waves," or "the Bubba paradox," or "the Goober-Woody effect," it would still sound at least a little bit ominous, regardless of what it actually stands for. Basically, anything like "<name> radiation" or "<name> paradox" is always going to sound a little creepy, no matter what <name> may be and no matter what it's actually referring to.

Full headline, due to Dreamwidth's inadequate subject field length: "Toxic Gaslighting: How 3M Executives Convinced a Scientist the Forever Chemicals She Found in Human Blood Were Safe"

"Decades ago, Kris Hansen showed 3M that its PFAS chemicals were in people’s bodies. Her bosses halted her work. As the EPA now forces the removal of the chemicals from drinking water, she wrestles with the secrets that 3M kept from her and the world."

(MBFC for Propublica, for reference, since it's a "new" source for me. I'd heard of it before, but that's about it.)

...it's just that I can't think of anything better to replace it, and any other system that already exists now is, at very best, merely a lateral move.