JustRandomThings

a bathhouse at the edo tokyo open air museum.

I had randomly generated 2 words, which is where “mole interest” came from. I failed to consider that by generating a new tag, it wouldn’t have had enough posts already in it to prove what I now call “the mole interest effect”.

But now it does.

In 2023, we said “fuck it” a la mythbusters and ended up doing whatever it took to get #mole interest to trend. And it did. And it happened to be September 11th that day, and we managed to get #mole interest to trend ABOVE #9/11.

"Smooth edges of screen fonts"

My computer was running hot before I turned everything off; the office I'm in is very warm, I could feel the heat of my CPU through the keyboard. The fans were going, not as loud as they usually get, but they were still blasting.

Y'all.

I can barely feel the warmth through the keyboard now. It's been like 2 minutes. The fan is nearly silent.

Click the Windows key and start typing "System settings", and "View Advanced system settings" will pop up. Then click "Settings" under Performance:

Then you'll see this:

TURN IT ALL OFF.

10AppsManager lets you uninstall bloatware. Winaero Tweaker lets you disable crap like Cortana/Copilot, ads, telemetry, internet search results when you search from the taskbar, and all kinds of other stuff, plus it gives you lots of other little options that are just nice to have (like, it can restore the old MS Paint program in place of Paint 3D). Both are totally free.

Oh, and check your startup programs in the Task Manager tab to make sure your computer isn't automatically starting eight million programs every time it boots. But I think people mostly know about that. (Unless this is me going "they only know one or two feldspars... and quartz of course.")

Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.

So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.

this creature can perceive when I put the treats up on the high shelf. or when I hide stuff behind my back. I can't fool her!! she's always watching me and she shouldn't have this much knowledge!!!

Play Toys

Play Pretend

my SO and i have a projector. our cool neighbors have a vast dvd collection. fundamentally these are toys. we have those neighbors over for movie nights. Play Toys. more broadly shared hobbies fall into this category but it's extra fun if there's Equipment to admire and share.

ttrpgs are obvious but invaluable examples of Play Pretend. HOWEVER your options are not limited to this. i started a local writing group and this is also Play Pretend bc we all talk about our stories together. there are many such creative endeavors in this world.

having someone over for a meal is Snack Time. if you make a lil thing of it and eat at the table and make it nice with dessert and a fancy beverage to share it feels very grown up. and you will feel impressed with yourself for it. but it scratches the same itch as trading fruit snacks and suchlike.

of course these can be mixed and matched. most activities are enhanced by Snack Time if your friend targets enjoy breaking bread together.

and one begets the other. if you Play Pretend with someone for long enough they may eventually tell you about Toys they have and if you want to play too they'll probably let you. if they're nice.

you can do more than one of these if you want

actually, you can do anything you want

- this had an industry-wide impact, and media orgs, from established news, to humor websites, to smaller creators, fire writers and those primarily focused on print, and direct resources to their video creation efforts.

- around 2016, it’s revealed that facebook completely fabricated their original numbers, likely inflating them between 150-900%. additionally, their viewership metric considered 3 seconds of a person watching to be a ‘view’ (whereas youtube had a 30 second requirement for the same metric).

-Having totally restructured in order to pivot to facebook video, many media orgs were unable to recapture hard won (and and sometimes decades old) audiences. College Humor, Funny or Die, MTV News, Vice, Mic, and Vox were among those that were seriously impacted.

and that's not even about keeping the information "privileged" to the library staff, these days they don't even keep a digital record of an item's history of borrowers; once you return a book, there isn't a list of everyone thats ever taken that book out that your name gets added to (though they probably take a tally of how many times it is checked out for circulation statistics).

i think the card system is a remnant of a culture that could only exist in the world before the internet as it exists today, where this identifying kind of information wasn't always readily at your fingertips, even for those at the "information professional" level.

and a special note for any ableds who still want to argue like any of us really have the spoons:

Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.

So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.

Hey look it’s more Family Lore! content warnings: discussions of mental illness, nongraphic and nonmoving video.

Depression doesn’t run in my family so much as stampede, and this is the worst time of year for us.  I pretty much live under my 10,000 lux lamp this time of year, and my sister gets into Christmas with an unusual degree of intensity for an Agnostic, to the point where nearly every available surface in the house is covered in garland, and she tried to put wreaths on the dogs last week.  Charlie was his usual confused but accommodating self, and Arwen ate hers.

Out of us, my Mom has it the worst.  She pretty much turns into a shadow of her usual self starting in about November.  The sun lamps and holiday celebrations help, but she’s exhausted and glum, and at her absolute worst on the solstice.

December of 1995 was particularly bad for her- her parents health had taken a dive, work was being a pain, and our regular sitter had cancelled for the entire first week of winter break so  I had to come into work with my parents. (My sister’s preschool hadn’t cancelled, at least. This was at Hewlett-Packard before everything went to shit, and we could be relied upon to sit in a cubicle and draw all day, so her manager allowed it).  She was extremely stressed, to the point of coming home and crying.

Dad decided to do something about this.

They both worked at HP, at the same building, on different floors.  Dad was an engineer, and Mom wrote internal instruction manuals (everything from business plans to repair guides), and would visit each other if they happened to be on the same floor, so it was generally known they were married.

On December 21st of 1995, I went in with him a bit early, and on the way to work, dad turned to me at a red light and said:

“If you can keep a secret from Mom, we’ll get donuts.”

I am easily bribed.

I don’t actually see what the paper-wrapped cone shape he puts in the trunk is, or make a note of the buildings we stopped at that he came out of with envelopes.  I was six and had a chocolate donut.  I had noted that he’d been listening to the same song from an old broadway musical for like, a week now, but I listened to enya on loop at the time, so I wasn’t going to judge.

We arrive at work late, and the envelopes and the paper cone come in with us.  I amuse myself by taking every single one of my dad’s O’Riley Media books off his desk and drawing the animals on the covers.  

At lunch, Dad finally unwraps the cone and I discover he’s gotten a bouquet of a dozen white roses. We go upstairs towards Mom’s cubicle and as we do so, begin to gather a crowd.  

Every year since they’ve been together, Dad has gotten my mother flowers and sung a love song to her on their birthday, and it had become something of an event in the office to see Dad perform for her.  But their birthday is in April, so clearly something special is going on.

We find Mom eating lunch at her desk.  Dad stands strategically behind the cubicle wall to hide the roses.

“May I bother you for a few minutes?”  hes asks.

“Sure.” Says mom as I climb into her lap. The gathering crowd shuffles closer.  Someone brought a video camera.

“You have an audience.”  She observes as he steps out from behind the wall with the roses.  She gasps, delighted and completely surprised.

He then sings the song he’s been listening to and rehearsing for a good week now, “The Shortest Day Of The Year” from Rogers & Hart’s “Boys From Syracuse”  Since I was six and didn’t have my own video camera, you’ll just have to listen to the Broadway recording, but my Dad does have a very nice tenor:

There isn’t a dry eye on the floor, mostly because everyone came over to see what the fuss was.  The women are crying because it’s romantic, the Men are crying because they aren’t nearly as cool and romantic as my dad is, Gay Charles who arranged my parent’s relationship in the first place is crying because 7 years on this is happening. I’m crying because it seems the thing to be doing.

Mom hands the roses to me, gets up and grabs Dad to pull him into a dip for a kiss, which is really impressive because she’s a good 9 inches shorter than him.

“I love you.” Says Mom.

“I also arranged for my parents to watch the kids next week and booked us into that B&B you love for three days after the project is finished so you can have a vacation.”  Says Dad, awkwardly hanging off her shoulders.

“I really love you.” says mom, kissing him again.

*

It’s December 20th 2018 today and it’s another Bad Year for seasonal depression for Mom.  It’s been cloudier and darker than usual, she’s on new photoractive meds right now so she can’t use the sunlamp and current events are what they are.

Dad called me earlier today to ask me order a dozen white roses because Mom gets email alerts on her credit card and he wants it to be a surprise.

He’ll pay me back at christmas, but I’d do it anyway because I’m ridiculously lucky to have these romantic dorks for parents.