I work in 911 dispatch, so I frequently have to go back and relisten to calls I’ve taken to see if I heard something correctly

It was very weird at first hearing my own voice played back at me so much, but it’s something you get used to after a while

But even after 7 years on the job, if I think about it my voice on the recording never sounds quite right to me.

Not standing and walking in front of a car is basically cop 101. “Routine” vehicle stops are one of the most potentially dangerous things cops do, there’s all of the unknowns of who is actually in the car and how they’re going to react, what can happen if they try to flee, dangers from passing traffic, etc.

So they always approach your car very carefully and absolutely do not walk in front of it if it can be avoided.

I really don’t want to make excuses for anything this administration does, and I haven’t looked too much into what the justification of this is supposed to be

But hypothetically if you dumped this new food “pyramid” on my desk, without any other context, and I didn’t know it had anything to do with the trump administration, and asked me to make sense of it I feel like I could come up with something like “whole grains, proteins, and produce are the 3 cornerstones of a healthy diet”

And the pyramid is upside down because no one thing should be the main “foundation” of your diet, it should all be balanced

I kind of feel like the trump/rfk cronies came across a half-finished rough sketch of an idea for a new food pyramid loft in the desk drawer of some competent USDA employee they forced out, threw out the notes they found with it, and pushed it through with their own stupid spin because they wanted to do something showy like coming up with a new food pyramid.

You’re thinking too small: water cool your apartment

Is this like a sex thing for you? Do you get off from being a contrary jackass?

In some small number of cases you may die in a house fire, and I’ll bet you have smoke detectors and fire extinguishers around just in case

If your grandmom cheated on your grandad, your aunts and uncles may not be his kids.

It’s absolutely an edge case, but there are still a lot of wonky family situations out there, people who are estranged from their family for any number of reasons, adoption, people raised by their grandparents under the impression that they were their parents to hide the fact that their sister is really their mom and they were hiding a teen pregnancy, your mom cheated and your dad isn’t actually your father, etc.

And sometimes that all stays under wraps until someone in the family takes a DNA test.

I have a friend with a big family who just recently discovered that most of her aunts and uncles aren’t actually her grandfather’s biological children. She and her siblings haven’t done a test themselves and her father’s dead so the jury is still out on whether she’s blood related to him or not.

But if she’s not, and she finds out who her actual biological grandfather is, it’s not impossible that that may open up a new pathway to citizenship through him.

And laws change, as a hypothetical, let’s say Poland starts getting antsy (well, antsyer) about Russia doing Russia stuff and really wants more people to feed the war machine in case of WWII breaking out, they already have a citizenship by descent option but the proper documentation to qualify can be tricky, but if they decide they really want to increase immigration I don’t think it would be out of the question for them to open up a pathway for someone who can show a DNA test with X% polish ancestry. In that hypothetical it might be kind of an out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire situation, but maybe it would still be preferable to the situation in someone’s home country.

It’s just one more tool in the box that can open up new avenues for people to explore. It may not pan out for everyone or even most people who look into it, but in some small handful of cases it may save their lives.

Kind of funny you specifically call out Irish-Americans, because Ireland does actually have some options for citizenship-by-descent. It’s not quite as simple as anyone with Irish ancestry can become a citizen, but it is a thing.

If you have a grandparent who was born in Ireland you’re eligible

Or if your parent was an Irish citizen at the time of your birth

So hypothetically if you have a great grandparent born in Ireland, your parent could apply for Irish citizenship, even though their parents (your grandparents) weren’t citizens and had never set foot in Ireland

And if they did that before you were born you would also be eligible

And so on down the line to your children, and their children, etc. if everyone keeps on top of it.

There’s actually a decent handful of countries with some sort of citizenship-by-descent, not a majority by a longshot, and of course every country that does offer it has different requirements and restrictions, but for some people it can potentially be a viable pathway to another citizenship.

I don’t think anywhere else is quite as dramatic as Costco but I kind of feel like most places that have rotisserie chickens use them as a loss-leader. At any grocery store around me they cost about the same or less than a raw chicken.

They’re kind of perfect for it. It’s not hard to rub down a chicken with some spice blend and skewer it on a rotisserie, not much else needs to be done there.

And if you’re a grocery store you’re selling chickens anyway. You always have them on-hand, you can rotate out stock that’s getting close to expiring by just throwing it on the rotisserie.

And for someone who just needs a quick dinner, it gets them in the door. Grab the chicken and a couple quick side dishes and you’re in business.

There hasn’t been one around me in a while, but Boston Market’s whole thing is/was pretty much rotisserie chicken, and at least the last time I went to one (probably a decade ago) I remember them running some kind of special that got me like 2 or 3 whole chickens for some ridiculously low price, but of course I also got a few tides with it and I feel like that’s where they made their money.

My buddy works security at a bar. A few weeks back he sends me a picture of a guy sitting there wearing a shirt with SS lightning bolts on it. The manager wouldn’t let him throw the guy out because he wasn’t otherwise causing any issues (as if a Nazi sitting at your bar isn’t already a big enough issue)

I was at work myself, so in no position to go start shit at this bar. But I also wasn’t about to just let these assholes infest a place I like to go drink at.

I remembered this bar has one of those tough tunes jukeboxes that you can queue songs up on from an app, and as it turns out you don’t actually have to be physically at the bar to use that power.

This bar is also a relatively family-friendly restaurant during the day, so the jukebox selection is a little bit neutered, but I still manage to get a decent little anti-fascist playlist going. I played a couple songs, and when the Billy Bragg & Wilco cover of All You Fascists came on, he apparently got a little visibly frustrated and went outside to smoke.

When he came back in he was greeted with this song.

He then sat there looking around the bar looking around trying to figure out who was playing all of this music that was clearly targeted at him, but of course finding no one because I was about 5 miles away.

At some point in the middle of my little impromptu DJ set, someone queues up a kid rock song, I’m pretty sure it was him. It picked right up after that with a cover of Bella Ciao.

After only about an hour of this he was packing it up to leave.

It wasn’t much, but it’s one of the things I’m proudest of having done in my life. Those touchtunes credits I think were money well-spent.

But I wasn’t quite done yet. I wanted to make sure I didn’t have to do this again. So I fired up a throwaway Google account and left a 1-star review of this bar complaining about Nazi boy. This caused a bit of a stir among the management, and so now my friend is allowed to kick out Nazis.

You know, it’s now occuring to me that I have absolutely no clue what Roblox actually is. It’s been around forever, I’ve been seeing gift cards for it in stores for I’m pretty sure well over a decade, I hear lots of talk about all of the dangers and how addictive it is for kids, etc.

But I haven’t the foggiest idea what the game is actually like. To the best of my knowledge I don’t think I’ve ever even seen a single screenshot of it, at least not one that was clearly labeled as being from Roblox.

And while I’m a childfree curmudgeon in my 30s, I do have a few friends with kids that I see with some regularity, and I’ve never heard any of them mention Roblox even in passing.

I feel like I’m in a really weird bubble of roblox-ignorance, I’m not exactly mad about it, but it feels weird that for as big as Roblox is supposed to be that I’ve never seen anyone talk about the actual game, just how big of a problem it is.

I don’t think growth is a determining factor for imprisonment. If someone is sent to actual prison and is successfully reformed and rehabilitated and able turn their life around, does that mean they were any less a prisoner than someone who didn’t learn and grow from the experience?

I don’t think so, though you may certainly feel differently. I think the defining characteristic is the lack of agency. You are the product of countless choices that you had no say in during your childhood, you are a prisoner to those choices, nothing you can ever do will undo those choices, you can work around them, overcome them, and make the most of them, but ultimately you are who you are because of them.

How much of that is still a reaction to their upbringing though?

Say someone is raised in an abusive situation, and because of that they decide to be nothing like their parents when they grow up and become the epitome of a loving, nurturing parent, or maybe decide to not have kids at all to make sure they break the cycle.

Would that same person make those same choices if they were raised in a more “normal” household?

We can’t really know for sure, but I suspect in a lot of cases the answer would be no.

And of course there’s all kinds of little butterfly effects.

For example, I’ve known one of my best friends since preschool. We attended the same public school from kindergarten through graduation, but after pre school I never had a class with him again until 10th grade. If my parents had decided to send me to a different preschool, it’s very likely I’d have a different best friend, and who knows how that might have affected my life?

Or later in life, when my grandfather was no longer able to drive, my parents ended up with his truck, they could have sold it but instead they held onto it and when I started driving it sort of unofficially became “my” car that I used to commute to community college. If they hadn’t kept that truck, or just didn’t let me use it, I probably would have had to take the bus and would have had to arrange my class schedule differently and never sat next to a guy in a history class who would eventually introduce me to the woman who is now my wife.

So those two little decisions made in my upbringing had big effects on the trajectory of my life. I’m quite happy with where I’ve ended up, but I had no say in either case, so I think you could definitely argue that I’m a “prisoner” to those decisions they made. I’ll never know what twists and turns my life might have taken if they’d chosen differently. Maybe there’s an alternate timeline where my best friend from a different preschool convinced me to buy a bunch of Bitcoin in 2009 and I could be a retired multimillionaire right now.

I think we’re going to need a little more context on who he is and how he’s using the word “goy”

It comes from Hebrew/Yiddish, so it’s a word used predominantly by Jewish people, and so not inherently antisemitic. It basically means non-jew, it’s roughly synonymous with the term “gentile” that you might be more familiar with if you’ve had a Christian upbringing.

How Jews use it of course varies a lot, plenty just use it without any particular deeper meaning, just a matter-of-fact statement that the person they’re referring to isn’t Jewish.

Some of course do use it with a bit of Malice if they value non-jews less highly than their fellow Jews.

I’ve also heard it used, usually somewhat jokingly, by Jews to refer to other Jews who aren’t acting in a way that they think is in accordance with Jewish customs. I remember one time my one Jewish friend who keeps kosher (kind of, he definitely bends the rules more than a bit) was teasing another Jewish friend who had ordered a bacon cheeseburger or something while we were out grabbing lunch, calling him a goy and lumping him in with the rest of the non-jews sitting around the table. It was all in good fun, just a bunch of guys joking around over a couple beers.

Again, I’m sure there’s some Jews out there who would do something like that and mean it as an actual insult.

If the person saying it isn’t Jewish themselves, that’s where you might have a case for their use being antisemitic.

I’m not Jewish, I could definitely see myself using goy or a handful handful of other jewish words and phrases I’ve picked up when I’m joking around with my Jewish friends. I might even call one of them a goy jokingly like in that bacon cheeseburger situation. Mostly though I’d probably use it to refer to myself, like if they were talking about, let’s say a Chanukah celebration, and I didn’t understand what they were talking about, I might tell them to need to explain it again in “goy” for me.

But if I’m not with friends that I have a good rapport with, I probably wouldn’t joke like that, I don’t want to give the wrong impression that I’m genuinely criticizing them for not being Jewish “enough,” as a non Jew I really don’t think it’s my place to be making that kind of judgement.

And I certainly wouldn’t be using it seriously to criticize Jews. I wouldn’t call Israeli Zionists goys (goyim I believe is actually the proper pluralization) based on their Zionist beliefs, there’s plenty of totally secular terms I can come up with to criticize them.

I could also see an antisemite using Jewish terms like goy in a mocking fashion, which, yeah that’s pretty antisemitic, basically the same thing as a white supremacist making fun of a black person for using AAVE.

And of course, depending on the person, the tone, how they’re using it, their target audience, etc. it could be totally non-problematic.

I work in 911 dispatch, so getting people to calm down, stop what they’re doing, and listen to me is kind of a big part of my job. Things are of course a bit different in-person than over the phone, but here’s generally how I’d approach something like this.

If you know their name, use it. A lot. People respond to their name, that’s kind of the whole reason names exist. It will get their attention which is half the battle.

Getting them to calm down from there is the other half, and it’s not easy, especially if you don’t speak their language. Body language and tone of voice goes a long way though.

Not that they’re going to understand you in this situation anyway, but remember that no one in the entire history of calming down has anyone ever actually calmed down after being told to calm down. Don’t even bother trying that.

Try to get them to take some deep breaths, use some gestures.

Your hospital really should have access to some sort of translation service, either humans on location there in the room with you who speak the language, or some kind of service like languageline (not plugging them specifically, I have a lot of complaints about some of their interpreters, they just happen to be who we use at work) that you can call up and get on speakerphone. Google translate and such are wonderful tools, but they’re not perfect and sometimes you really want that bit of a human touch. I’ve also occasionally had some great interpretors who will chime in with some helpful bits like “they’re saying’this’ but in our culture that usually really means ‘this’”

If you can find an excuse to hand them something, maybe some paperwork, that can also sometimes kind of create a little bit of a break in whatever they’re doing for you to work with. They’ll probably stop screaming for a second to look at what was just handed to them, and then you can try to work on something.

New York has one of, if not the largest steam systems like that. A pretty significant chunk of Manhattan is hooked up to it.

Although it should be pointed out that those systems aren’t without their own risks, there have been a handful of pretty bad explosions and such caused by that steam system. Not saying to knock it, any system where you’re trying to distribute a large amount of energy has the potential for some catastrophic accidents to happen, it’s all about weighing the relative pros and cons.

They’re also pretty common on a smaller scale for college campuses, industrial complexes, etc. places with a lot of different outbuildings and such, it can be easier/cheaper/more efficient to have one central boiler room/house and pipe steam around than it is to have heaters in ever building.

Also, bit of a tangent, but many moons ago my dad was a pipefitter/steamfitter, and worked with a lot of steam systems, and from what he’s told me about those days it sounded like absolute hell having to go into cramped service tunnels around searing hot steam pipes, all kinds of dust and asbestos everywhere, rats, high humidity, etc. that was probably almost 50 years ago, but I suspect things probably haven’t improved all that much since then, so kudos to the people who are willing to put up with all of that.

Vaŭ

In Esperanto

My computer is basically the same computer my wife built around 12 years ago, as she did upgrades over the last decade or so I just saved her old components and eventually stuffed them into a new box. It was a beefy rig when she built it, and still runs most of what I throw at it with (what I think is) pretty acceptable performance and settings.

So that old motherboard and processor aren’t windows 11 compliant and with the windows 10 end of life I decided it was time to make the switch. Don’t quite have the wiggle room in the budget for a major upgrade right now.

And truth be told, even if I were to do a major upgrade, I probably was looking at Linux anyway. I don’t like the AI bullshit and a lot of the other dumb crap Microsoft has been pulling with 11. I want to get away from the corporate overlords in general. I’ve always been pretty big on FOSS, so really it was just gaming that’s been holding me back and I felt like proton and such the state of gaming on Linux has finally reached a place I can be happy with.

And not for nothing, it’s free, and I’ve always felt like MS charges too much for windows. I’m a bit of a cheapskate, if I can save a buck I’m going to. The F in FOSS is a huge draw for me.

And I’ve had half-baked plans to turn this current rig into a home server/NAS whenever I get around to building a new rig, so that meant Linux was in the cards for it at some point anyway, and I might as well start getting my hands dirty with that now in preparation.

I believe you’d still be controlling the player character, you’d just be seeing through the eyes of the enemy

I don’t know how well it would work as a game mechanic, but I could see a cool take on this in a cyberpunk setting where the player character is blind, but can hack into other people’s eyes to see, so you go around seeing yourself from different viewpoints

I imagine it would get weird

You shoot someone and suddenly you can’t see through their eyes any more since they’re dead. Or maybe their bionics are still powered for a while but they’re not facing any useful direction, maybe they fall face down and all you can see is the floor tile they’re laying on, or they’re facing up and all you can see is the ceiling until you walk right over their corpse

Maybe after you kill a room full of enemies you need to lug around a corpse or maybe just a severed head so that you can find the exit because none of them fell looking the right direction.

I’m not normally much of a writer, but that idea actually inspired me a bit, so here’s a little short story I guess

I walk into the lobby and I begin to see through the eyes of the security guard seated at the desk. He’s reading a newspaper - an actual ink-on-paper newspaper. I didn’t know they still made those.

The door chime beeps and his eyes are immediately on me, zooming in, trying to get a read on me. I see my own features, distorted by the fisheye lens of his implants.

These security types always have some high-end bionics- night vision, thermal imaging, zoom, image stabilization, extra-wide field of view, facial recognition, the works. They think they can see everything but somehow they never seem to see it coming.

A notification pops up in his vision “Unrecognized person detected, check ID” the angle changes as he begins to get up. I see the back of his hand as he raises his arm in a “stop” gesture. He’s wearing a wedding band. That’s unfortunate.

I see movement in the bottom corner of his vision. He’s doing something with his other hand but I can’t tell what. Is he reaching for his gun? Is he smoothing out the wrinkles from his shirt? Is he just trying to put the newspaper away?

Maybe that’s why he reads an actual newspaper. He’s supposed to be alert and paying attention, if he read on his phone or tablet like anyone else his employers could track it, they’d know he was slacking off. Smart.

Through my own ears I hear him ask for my ID.

Through his eyes I see myself reach into my coat pocket he zooms in slightly. I love it when they zoom, it makes what comes next so much easier.

I see my gun come out. The angle changes abruptly but strangely smoothly, that image stabilization is doing some heavy-lifting as he tries to duck for cover and reach for his own gun.

His eyes are fixed on it, he’s staring right down the barrel, I can even just about line the sights up through his eyes, he’s making it too easy.

A flash. A loud bang heard through my own ears. Flashing warnings at the corners of his vision reporting critical vital signs.

The angle changes again, I think he’s fallen backwards and is propped up by his chair. He’s not looking straight up at the ceiling, but he’s not looking straight forward at me either. I can catch glimpses of the top of my head here and there as I stumble blindly towards him.

My face comes into full view as I make my way around the desk. I start going through his pockets looking for a key card to let myself into the elevator.

I find a rectangular piece of plastic on a lanyard stuffed into his pocket, and hold it in front of his eyes to confirm that it’s what I was looking for. I tap it on the sensor on the desk and hear the elevator doors slide open.

I point his head towards the elevator so that I can see where I’m going. A message notification pops up in his vision from “Bae💜” asking if he’ll be home for dinner. I see myself sigh as the door closes behind me.

The steel and concrete of the building sever me from his ocular feed as the elevator starts climbing and everything goes black once again.