alarajrogers

[alarajrogers]

I don't believe any books should be banned. But I do believe certain works of non-fiction, particularly self-help or books about training animals or raising children, should come with warnings. Like "To Train Up A Child" by the Pearls, which is apparently a child abuse manual masquerading as Christian child rearing advice.

But it shouldn't be banned. Nothing should be banned. The answer to toxic speech is, in most cases, more speech.

“Authors should not be ALLOWED to write about–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“This book should be taken off of shelves for featuring–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“Schools shouldn’t teach this book in class because–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“Nobody actually likes or wants to read classics because they’re–” you are an anti-intellectual and an idiot

“I only read YA fantasy books because every classic novel or work of literary fiction is problematic and features–” you are an anti-intellectual and you are robbing yourself of the full richness of the human experience.

[alarajrogers]

There is actually a lot of information available about Antarctica, one of my childhood special interests which I recently (as in past 4 years) had to research for a story. The behavior of the moon at the polar regions is just insane. Midnight Suns are also wack -- imagine the sun just runs around the edge of the horizon all "night"! There's auroras, and halos, and weird shit that happens when you hit like -70 C... they're very, very cool. Also if you use google maps to research Antarctica you will find that the actual South Pole is blurred out! (Geologic, not magnetic. The magnetic poles move around and aren't where the geologic poles are. Also they move so much that in 2008 the North Pole was at Baffin Island, Canada, and now it is out in the middle of the ocean near Russia someplace. Like, that's within the lifetime of almost everyone on this site. And since I don't know when it left Baffin Island, due to the fact that the reason I know this is an obsession with Magneto from X-Men and a major storyline involving the North Pole and Baffin Island, the time period for the shift could be even shorter.)

feeling a sudden and unexplainable urge to go rabbitholing information and posts about the earth's polar regions

[alarajrogers]

I posted about Pi Day yesterday. It was kind of a depressing Pi Day because I've started a new job, so I was tired and not up to making the cute mini-pies I usually make my family for Pi Day. Instead I made pizza pies, square because pi r square, and then felt too sick to eat pizza. (Wasn't too sick for razzleberry pie for dessert, though. Then the dog tried to steal the apple pie, because I made one of those too, and I managed to save most of it but it ended up more like apple crumble after she almost knocked it off the stove.)

I wanted to make myself a mini pie, a round one, for dinner today because if you round pi up you get 3.15, but not up to it.

I plan on celebrating 2pi Day, 6/28, as well, if I can remember.

Never was a huge fan of history. The Ides of March are cool and all but Pi Day is much more interesting to me, and has a more obvious way to celebrate.

that's it, I can't take this anymore. I'm so fucking done. I feel like a non-Christian person in fucking December. Listen, people: the Ides of March is a FINE holiday, it's fun and nerdy, I like it - but I've seen like 6 memes for it in the last 3 days and not a Single one for its sibling nerd holiday, MARCH 14, aka 3/14, aka

PI DAY

3/14, optimized at 1:59 and 26 seconds, AM or PM (3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399... that's as far as I ever memorized).

Celebrations around the world - as is ONLY appropriate for the one and only celebration of the constant ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter!

And the radius to its area, and the radius of a sphere to its volume and surface area, AND one of the key five numbers in Euler's Identity, aka e^(iπ) + 1 = 0, aka the sexiest, simplest mathematical equation in the world.

There's going to be an HOUR-LONG LUNAR ECLIPSE this year, visible throughout East Asia, Australia, North and South America, and most of Africa and Europe!

It's even Albert Einstein's birthday!

Is Pi Day because math is continuously viewed as the subject it's culturally acceptable to hate, where even "boring" history and "pretentious" literature can be lauded? Does every holiday need a centuries-famous play in order to get attention these days? DO PEOPLE NOT WANT AN EXCUSE TO EAT SAVORY PIES FOR DINNER (PIZZA, SHEPHERD'S PIE, ETC) AND SWEET PIES OF FRUIT AND/OR CHOCOLATE FOR DESSERT??

So help me god I'm going to start making a new Pi Day meme every time I see an Ides of March meme. I'm going to blaze them. PRETENDING TO KILL A DICTATOR IS FUN, BUT IT IS A TREAT BEST PAIRED WITH THE ELEVATION OF SCIENCE!

[alarajrogers]

My brother created Scaroct, the five-legged intelligent zebra who is basically a Dadaist activist; one of his adventures as head of the Wombat Liberation Front (also featuring the ghost hamster Yoshi) was to fight against the beings who were turning the leaders of the world into fruit salad, because those beings had left out the pineapple. Obviously turning world leaders is a perfectly fine and acceptable thing to do, but fruit salad without pineapple is beyond the pale.

Sleipnir doesn’t make sense

One thing I never really understood was Sleipnir (meaning “slippery one” fyi) in depictions of Norse mythology. Sleipnir is an eight-legged horse, the steed of Odin and the son of Loki, and he is commonly depicted like this:

(image not mine)

But why would you depict an eight-legged horse like this? Horses gallop the same way most other mammals run, with all feet leaving the ground at one point, so having extra feet here doesn’t seem like it could make the horse any faster. I’m also not sure it would give it any more stable footing, since it doesn’t have a wider base.

If you want a stable eight-legged form that can reach great speeds for its size, wouldn’t you want to start with what nature has already provided? Wouldn’t you want something more like… this?

(my drawing)

“But wait!” you might say, “Sleipnir was conceived when Loki, in horse-form, seduced another horse! That’s why it looks all horsey, just with extra bits!”

Well, that’s a good point, but consider that Loki as a deity was originally based off the spider, and his name even derives from the old Swedish word for spider (source). Therefore, it’s not too hard to believe Sleipnir inherited his horse half from his mother and the more spidery half from his father. In conclusion:

Spider-Horse, Spider-Horse, He does spider-things of course! Weaves a web, Makes you gawk, Riding round ‘til Ragnarok! Look out! Here comes the Spider-Horse.

[alarajrogers]

Letterman, from the Electric Company.

I was probably not yet four when I fell in love with this character.

The next one was Underdog, BTW.

Ok guys just thought of this what is the first blorbo you’ve ever had/can remember

[alarajrogers]

Man, if I didn't know better, I might think this is a political commentary and not a teaser for the story you're working on...

This is the archangel Michael speaking. We're sending you the world's biggest moron to help solve the mystery of demons in the government.

[alarajrogers]

Not shown: my dog attempting to steal the apple pie thirty seconds after I posted this, leaving the pie literally hanging off the side of the stove, caught on the burner knob. Thank fucking god I just washed that recently, because while the pie is now more like a dump cake, I did manage to save most of it.

Pi Day!

Pi r square, when they're pizza pi.

Razzleberry pi (blackberry and raspberry) and Dutch apple pi.

Pinkie Pi approves of Pi Day!

Tomorrow I might make myself a little round pie, because 3.15 is what happens when you round pi up.

[alarajrogers]

Pi Day!

Pi r square, when they're pizza pi.

Razzleberry pi (blackberry and raspberry) and Dutch apple pi.

Pinkie Pi approves of Pi Day!

Tomorrow I might make myself a little round pie, because 3.15 is what happens when you round pi up.

[alarajrogers]

@thesoftboiledegg Have you seen this?

At my new job, we have pinball machines, and one of them is a Rick and Morty pinball machine. Morty gives you encouragement, and if you die, Rick says "That fucking sucks." It's hilarious. (There's more things they say, but I don't play pinball so I don't remember.)

[alarajrogers]

Dammit, no. You cannot reliably sex baby chickens!

[alarajrogers]

Pennsylvania has its own cuisine, though. Because of the influence of the PA Dutch.

In New York and in Maryland, pigs in a blanket are as described, or they are full on sausages wrapped in a croissant. There is no sauce or cabbage. That sounds absolutely disgusting to me.

Any foods Americans eat that involve a lot of cabbage either come from Germanic cuisine (which is where the PA Dutch get it) or Asian (egg rolls are absolutely chock full of cabbage.) It was probably a big thing in Britain but for some reason we carry the language from Britain but very little of the food. There are Hungarian dishes full of cabbage but Hungarian is a niche cuisine in most places.

"Every language is valid, regional dialects are a normal and natural part of the evolution of language even on a national scale, the names that other English-speaking countries give things are just as valid as yours" I say to myself through gritted teeth as I listen to Americans describe breakfast foods

[alarajrogers]

Here's what I put:

This entire proposal is stupid.

"Sex offender" is a category that can include a guy who needed to pee and couldn't find a bathroom and got caught trying to pee in an alley, or a woman who turned to prostitution to support her kids. I'd be all in favor of keeping rapists and child molesters from fleeing to other countries, but that's not how the sex offender laws are written. Change this to "violent sex offenses" and I might support that part of it, but as written it's overly broad.

And making people put their biological sex on their passports? How is that going to help identify them? If a trans woman has been on hormones since she was 18 and she has size D cups and an hourglass figure, marking her as male will make it hard for law enforcement to identify her if needed. If a trans man has been bodybuilding and he has been on hormones long enough to grow a shaggy beard, but his passport says F, that would confuse the hell out of everybody. By requiring people to put down their gender, which they can change, rather than their sex, which they can't, you ensure that people's IDs carry the genders that other people can identify them by… which is the only reason to put either gender or sex on identification at all.

---

I read the full text of the thing, which also talked about people having to get a mark that they are on the sex offender registry. Which is stupid for the reasons I put in my above comment.

This is an example of what I call ideological judo. People who would be sympathetic to the idea that people need to identify as their birth sex do not care that this would make life more difficult for trans people. I focused on how much more difficult it would make life for anyone who needs to identify a specific trans person by their passport -- because the majority of trans people dress and behave in a way that is closer to their true gender than their biological sex. I mentioned law enforcement, not because I'm particularly in favor of law enforcement in general as it's done in this country or most others, but because the kind of people who would have agreed with this idea in the first place usually support law enforcement, and the thought that a scary trans woman criminal might get away because everyone is looking for a man based on her passport, but in fact she has big breasts and looks like a woman, might bother them. I also reminded them that many trans people pass, and do they, the people who are creeped out by trans people, want "men" who identify as women to get away from criminal accusations because their passport says they are men but anyone who saw the crime thinks it was a woman who did it? Or vice versa?

These aren't the actual reasons I am personally opposed to this. To be honest I'd prefer no gender markers on any identification at all -- you're supposed to be identifying people from the picture on the ID, not the descriptive characteristics. I don't think it should ever be the state's business what gender you are. (Or sex.) I stand with trans people, and I don't want them to get hassled every time they leave or re-enter the country because their IDs don't match what they look like.

But these people would consider that hassle a bonus, and they don't get how profoundly irrelevant M or F on your license actually is. So instead of making those arguments, I make arguments that would make sense to them.

If I was speaking to a sympathetic audience, I'd have pointed out how the law can redefine marginalized people as sex offenders just because some idiots feel creeped out by them, and that that is why the idea of registering as a sex offender is fatally flawed. Instead I raised the idea of a guy who needs to pee -- probably every guy in the US has peed somewhere inappropriate, sometime, or at least seriously thought about it -- and an "ideal" sex worker, someone who does it for her children. (In retrospect maybe I should have made it more ideal by making it someone who was trafficked and forced into prostitution, but I don't think I can edit now that I've hit submit.)

PUBLIC COMMENTS ARE OPEN FOR GENDER IDENTIFIERS ON US PASSPORTS

Right now, you can submit a comment for consideration on the proposed changes to US Passport law that will include requiring a change from "Gender" to "Sex" on all passports and require that people identify with their sex assigned at birth.

THIS IS THE LAW THAT WOULD BAN TRANS PEOPLE FROM UPDATING THEIR IDENTIFICATION

Please take a moment to click through and submit a comment. This kind of thing is fast, easy, and is one of the many ways to show your support of the trans community to the people that need to know how many of us there are.

[alarajrogers]

Having lived through 50 years of television, I can tell you all that actually modern TV is better than in the past. The number of good, memorable shows coming out now is greater than the number of good, memorable shows coming out historically.

However, bad shows are forgotten if they are historical. (At least after we reached a certain critical mass of television. People remember Gilligan's Island not because it was good but because of how little competition it had.) Modern bad shows, and mediocre shows, and even good-but-not-great shows, are here in your face reminding you of their existence. So what you're seeing is a 60 year collection of the best of all time, vs whatever comes on television right now. And there is a lot more television right now.

So there's more good shit per year today. But it has to compete with all the good shit from 60 years and all the mediocre shit that's out today. So when you think "shows today", the fact that there are so many more shows masks the fact that there are more good ones per year because there are also more crappy ones per year, and when you think "shows in the past", you only remember the good ones.

(Also sometimes people's opinion of particular aspects varies. I've seen many defenses of the filler show. I do not like filler shows. I find them a waste of my time. I prefer the tightly plotted, nothing-goes-to-waste, format of 8 or 10 or 13 episodes a season, to 26 episodes where half of them are completely forgettable. But other people's opinions of this vary.)

[alarajrogers]

Every time I see the Destiel meme.

[alarajrogers]

Uh, grew up in a suburb 90 min from NYC, went there frequently, and this road or one exactly like it was on my trip from my suburban home to my college in Philadelphia, so... am I city or country?

For the record the only reason this would be scary at 2 am is if you are already falling asleep at the wheel and you're terrified you can't stay awake and you will hit a tree. If you're alert this is nothing to worry about.

[alarajrogers]

Things have gotten vastly better for children since women and minorities got rights. Including white boys, who used to be routinely beaten at school, all schools, everywhere, who never received any sort of protection from bullies except the advice to hit first, and who were more likely to grow up illiterate than they are now because boys have always been more likely to have dyslexia.

White men should consider that they used to be white boys, and life for white boys is overall better since women and minorities got rights. Their likelihood of living long enough to become white men has increased and their likelihood of being abused physically has decreased.

There are probably a million other such things but it's simply pure ignorance not to know that giving women and minorities rights did in fact make life better for everyone, not just women and minorities.

Also, women and minorities make up a far greater portion of society than white men alone, so even if things did get worse for white men, which they did not in the main, it still would have been an overall improvement in human quality of life.

And they wonder why women don't like them. Well, except maybe a few "leopards eating faces" women.

[alarajrogers]

Some kinds of consumer insurance contain within them liability insurance, and thus are... tolerable. Car insurance is well regulated and will, usually, fix your car, even if the accident was your fault. Homeowners' insurance regulates that you do things to protect other people from your home's hazards, which is good, and also protects you from being robbed or your house set on fire. Then they'll drop you and it will be hard for you to get more homeowners' insurance, and in that regard they suck and should be better regulated.

The thing that is truly awful is health insurance. Literally every human being who is born needs health care. "Insurance" as a business model does not work if the people buying insurance are not, on average, paying more than the people being covered. By a lot. It's supposed to be a numbers game. Life insurance is about betting on when you will die, not that you will die. Car insurance is about betting that you won't get into an accident. But you will need vaccines and physicals and routine health care even if you're the healthiest person alive, so health insurance basically has to massively overcharge everyone to make any kind of profit. And the bigger the risk pool, the less they have to charge to make a profit, but a big risk pool means a lot of customers which means it's approaching a monopoly and it's not a competitive business.

Health insurance really only makes sense if it's covering extremely limited possibilities, like insurance for what if I get pregnant, or need an abortion, or get cancer. General health care makes more financial sense for everyone if it's run out of everyone's taxes on a governmental level, where the risk pool is huge, the regulation is at its highest, and there's no profit motive.

Seeing posts saying that insurance companies are inherently bad and adversarial, and I need to point out that insurance companies telling organizations and companies that they’re doing something stupid and at risk of hurting people or the environment and they need to stop or the insurance company will either charge them a lot of money or even stop covering them at all is often the only reason why any precautions are taken.

Torts are where the steel is legally on these types of things, but the insurance companies are how the implications of tort law is communicated.

Like, the church I grew up in only took any precautions against children being molested on site after the insurance company insisted. It’s a bit hard for me to see insurance collectively as all bad all the time after seeing that, when I can point on the doll to where I wasn’t harmed because of insurance.