This is the sobering reality for many a hometown hero of physical sports too. Being the best in your city, 1 in a million even, puts you in tight competition in college sports and then worse as a pro.

On behalf of the dads: We used to let you win all kinds of shit and you never knew! Then one day we couldn’t beat your anymore… and we had two choices while you gloated: convince ourselves we let you win or let the mid life crisis begin.

Battle beyond the stars did it 43 years ago, so why not?

Safe to say a lot of the new Disney Star wars stuff is basically seven samurai in space

But hey, the original 7 were technically in space… We’re all in space Morty, literally everything is in space!

Uncle Larry is a pig, he can’t use a phone!

“just out of sight” was an exaggeration. They could be on the other end of the property to release a pig and its going to head towards the feed and the people… Just like a hungry dog would. Also, blinds usually face a single direction.

They are bred with domestic pigs so they have less survival instinct and the clients can find them (i.e. they don't avoid blinds and feeders). One-off clients would give your ranch bad reviews if they didn't see anything all weekend. Meanwhile regular hunters understand truly wild animals can elude you for days. If a visiting group has come up dry all weekend they might even release a sacrificial domestic pig (just out of sight) that will then walk right towards the clients, innocently arranging it's own death. Source: am Texan who hunted pigs.

If you're looking at the Senate it's actually the other way around in the last decade. With the house and other offices it's much harder to say who does it more. I don't think it's any sort of conspiracy or playbook, just something that makes the news and sticks in people's memory when it happens… It's a betrayal after all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_party_switchers_in_the_United_States.

How many molecules in the air the bats are flying through?

One, ah ah ah… Two, ah ah ahhh … Hold on, this might take a while

Accelerando by Charles Stross is a great one. The beginning to mid-book concepts of singularity gone wild are mind-blowing on their own… And then it explores "what would happen a few hundred years after that?" A few times.

Concepts that stuck with me are:

all the AI assisted devices helping you through your day eventually running without much of your input, only needing a human to justify being on: When the protagonists interface gets stolen the street-thief ends up closing his business deals, helpless to all the guidance in his head. Meanwhile the protagonist has an existential meltdown having only his brain to think with.

Economics 2.0: AI markets dominate the earth in search of customers to satisfy. Governments are overrun but poverty no longer exists. People are mixed on whether it is utopia or dystopia.

Father in the future: Mass=computation, so entire solar systems become giant thinking machines. But they are stuck in their local space-time, faced with having to shed mass and get dumber to move. Only smaller intelligences can travel, but they risk being gobbled up as more mass if the system they travel to doesn't care about communicating with the rest of the galaxy.

Father in the future: the universe is a simulation, but through singularities there are simulations that can be reached from within the simulation. One AI has figured out how to send a message back from another simulation, but it means sending a copy of itself to a potentially eternal hell to check it out first.

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.html.

Also available from your friendly neighborhood mega corporate sales site.

In my first weeks with it i had a subdirectory named "home" somewhere in a project directory I was done with. It must have been finger memory but when i went to delete it I typed

rm -Rf /home

That slash ruined my day

I used to flex on the gigabytes my collection required. Now it seems like bragging about the length of your buggy whip. Kinda wish I'd stuck to it though… Now I'm just the curator of a big pre-millennium library.

It's worse than the just Karens. If you don't pay the fines they will put a lien on your property and eventually evict you. This has created a strong market pressure towards swindling people out of their places. Financial groups that manage HOAs wholesale are now the norm and they love encouraging Karens to generate nonsense rules and report offenders… They get a cut of either the fine or the home sale sand get to play the role faceless enforcer. There are no regulations on how high fines can go, nor how high LATE FEES on those fines can go, nor how soon "late" is.

We are way past the time when HOAs were harmless funny people hyperfocusing on lawns… It's a predatory business now.

Well explained. Thanks for spelling it out.

That’s the joke

I think he means The Jesus