ArtieShaw

Well thanks for reminding me that Captain Proton existed. /s

I disliked all of the mid-century nostalgia episodes. Not that I dislike mid-century nostalgia, but I thought they were poorly done.

I know a guy who is a literature snob and is probably the last person I would have expected to really get into Raymond Chandler novels. Anyway, he was raving about those books so I read a few. It turns out that Chandler was a phenomenally weird wordsmith. Inventive, funny, and unexpected. If you're looking at midcentury American writers, Chandler is hugely underrated. Maybe in a few centuries he'll get his due.

Sure, it's detective pulp. But it's detective pulp that's been given a strong hallucinogen and whacked over the head a few times before waking up in the desert.

I am against earthquakes on principle.

Oddly enough, I just read something today about newly emerging earthquake detection tech. It involved small variations in movement tracked by GPS transmitters, and would give 2 hours (+/-?) before the quake hit. I like the idea of that.

That's not OK

In recent years we've been seeing a scary trend of tornadoes hitting the area overnight. Like at 11:00pm or later. That suuuuccks.

When I was a kid they were almost always a late afternoon or early evening event. Official forecasts were crap, but at least you could look outside and think, "this looks like tornado weather, better check the radio." Now we're woken out of sleep in the middle of the night by the simultaneous klaxon of our phone alerts.

They're also hitting us earlier in the year. My calendar has a repeating reminder for early April: "peak tornado season starts in a few months - start drilling the cats now." We had one in fucking February this year that took out a barn a few miles down the road.

I have an at-home laser hair removal gun. It works best on dark hair and very pale skin because it uses the absorption of UV light to heat and kill the hair. It has a safety feature that makes you validate that "my skin is pale enough to use this" before it will turn on because it will burn anything dark. Hair, skin, whatever.

It won't work on blond or white hair, and there's no real workaround to that. Electrolysis is an option for light colored hair, but I think that's more invasive. Not an option for me, so I haven't looked into it.

They couldn't ask the creeper on the left to move out of the shot?

Cut the Mullet. A classic. And good advice in general. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roxMH07qHmc

For some general Milwaukee style weird, there will always be Wooden Robot. I really liked Wooden Robot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOmtl8Lmeps

I don't agree.

It's early afternoon and you're on the front end of a 48 hour work trip. You just got off a plane in Cedar Rapids, found a rental car, and drove to the hotel. You've been traveling since 7:00am, the water bottle that you refilled at the connection in Chicago and again at the destination in Cedar Rapids is both disgustingly warm and mostly empty. The rental car was hot as fuck because it's Cedar Rapids in July and the rental cars are sitting in an open lot rather than a garage.

Let's Zork this out.

You need to cool down and rehydrate. Do you: a) buy a single use refrigerated bottle of water b) remember that there's a fridge in the room and wait for 2 hours c) go east d) get yourself some bucket ice and tap water

Side quest pro-tip: do not pick up the metal bar

Oh, my parents take the prize.

To pick just one thing, I remember a disagreement about how to re-arrange the furniture my bedroom. I remember saying (and with regret as the words were leaving my mouth), "well, it is my room." Instant shitshow. She announced that since she wasn't needed she would be Running Away From Home.

Even at 5 or 6, I knew that this was the stupidest thing ever, but that she also wouldn't back down unless I cried and chased her and begged her to stay. She got out the front door and slowly walked towards the street, stopping every few feet to look back. She had nowhere to go, obviously. If this were going to be a battle of wills, I held all the cards. I was also six. If I had been 16, I might have thought to lock the front door behind her. In any case, even at that age I knew that if I somehow won this, things could only get worse.

Yeah, I whipped up some tears and ran after her. But she never tried that one again and I like to think that it was because she got all the way to the street before she got her intended outcome.

Glad you saw it! I skipped travelling for it in 2017 because the weather forecast was so dismal.

Southwest Ohio got lucky this year.

It's lovely. We watched from our backyard. And I know my strength is not photography, so thanks for this.

It's hard to describe "it looks like non-directional sunset but there's a deeply uncool eye in the sky."