Intermediate instructions

In one of Will Eisner's comics about working class life in New York in the 1940s (I forgot which, there's so many of them) there's a bit with two housewives standing in their apartment doors and gossiping. A newly moved in Black kid runs by, and wife A comments, disapprovingly, "So we're going to have a those people living here now." Wife B immediately retorts "Yes, you'd better stay inside and keep your door closed." I always found that inspiring.

There is a pretty significant point here. A strong sign of early dementia is mood changes, specifically getting more angry and mean, because it's frustrating and scary to find yourself not remembering things and not being understood. You might hear "Oh boy, grandma has turned into an asshole, we're going to have to have her checked out." Which would be different from "Grandma has always been an asshole, so she's still an asshole, what's there to worry about?"

I don't know who my intended audience is here, so whoever needs to hear this, I am begging you to learn to participate in conversations that are about things you aren't interested in.

Let me tell you about my friend: She loves to talk. She can go to work for eight hours and then spend six hours talking about what she did at work. Maybe even longer if she doesn't pass out first. Every moment of every drudging piece of routine, what her terrible lying coworkers who I don't know said, how it made her feel, an hour long anecdote about a childhood memory it evoked, how that made her feel, and she has to tell everything as a story, a carefully laid out narrative to evoke to me the exact experience she had. I think sometimes she thinks time stops while she talks and she can easily share in excruciating detail every single thought she has and still have time to relax with a movie or two before dinner. (We meet for dinners about once a week.) One time I was with her when she talked on the phone for three hours to a friend she was going to meet in a couple of days; she only stopped when I reminded her we were both starving.

one of the funniest conversations I ever had with my ex was when they were still getting used to Celsius and asked me "what's 20 degrees?" and instead of converting it, I said "it's the highest your dad will ever let you set the thermostat and when you say you're cold he tells you to put on another sweater, we're not made of money" and they went "oh, 68"

Sure, men tend to be taller than women. They have the advantage in leverage, reach, step length. They can run faster, reach higher shelves and usually lift heavier stuff without training. But what is "strength?" Is it muscle power? A woman has been the world arm wrestling champion many times. (Fun story, I wrestled with Heidi Andersson once, when I was a strong young egg. It was over in a split second.) Or is it endurance? Here humans are uniquely strong among all the animals; we are the best persistence hunters of all time. If you need someone to run for three days straight, do you think a man or a woman is the better choice? With no other information to go on, I'd take a woman actually. They tend to be better at weighing their own skill. Where a man would be liable to overextend and overestimate himself and burn out in a day or two, a woman would be more likely to accurately measure how hard she can push herself to last for that time. She could probably do it carrying a baby on her hip even.

You know the. You know the Femme Fatale "I grew up with 10 brothers so I know how to fight" character?

I'm surprised I didn't say this in the original post but to specify: Roy Mustang grew up in a brothel, specifically he grew up adopted by a woman running a brothel where, specifically, all the women there are in the business of covert information reconnaissance by playing escort to important politicians.

I didn't even know that about the brothel. I thought I had read the whole series quite carefully but I have only the faintest recollection that feels like a false memory I created after hearing about it now. Apparently you can just skim past it.

I'm really enjoying the cosmic horror reinterpretation of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It gets to a lot of the ambient horror of the film - what is terrifying is almost environmental, and the sense that the Sawyer family expresses something bigger and worse and more rotten to the USA than simply being cannibals.

And now they're giving you choices

One of the major ways Elementary stands out from other Holmes adaptations to me is how they wrote Watson. Like it would’ve been so easy to write her like any other Watson, brilliant, yes, undoubtedly, but forever attached to Sherlock. Watson is there because Sherlock wills it so, because Sherlock needs a rock and because Sherlock Holmes is a man forever in need of a partner. Usually.

“Country singer Lee Greenwood, 83, will open the proceedings with his 1984 signature track “God Bless the U.S.A.” — the same song he has performed at Trump events since 2016. Three of Greenwood’s top five songs on Spotify are variations of the same tune. Trump also tapped tenor Christopher Macchio, whom he compared to the late Luciano Pavarotti, to perform classical selections. Macchio currently draws 571 monthly listeners on Spotify and 2,000 YouTube subscribers. Flo Rida, Vanilla Ice, and Freedom Williams of C+C Music Factory have not yet withdrawn from Freedom 250.”

The paper today had an opinion piece titled "Trump still draws bigger crowds than Elvis" and I was like