Preamble: OP asked for optimism. If you reply to this comment trying to kill the vibe, I will burn your house down. Also, I can only really speak about the US; I live there, and don’t know enough to say much about anywhere else.

These dark times are not natural. They are sustained in no small part by a cult of personality and a gigantic propaganda machine, both sustained by dark money & evil billionaires.

That sounds rough, but it means some good things! The personality at the heart of that cult is wandering off and shitting himself, publicly letting his brain leak out his ears. It is the destiny of all machines to fail; money is powerful, but it can only buy so much. And those same billionaires are unpopular and insane. I fully believe part of the reason things are so bad right now is because the bad guys know things are going to get much harder for them very soon.

Additionally: much ado has been made about polarization these days. And yes, right wing extremism is incredibly visible and dangerous right now. But, good radicalization is also happening. We had some of the largest protests in the history of this country last year. Things like police brutality and class consciousness are inching ever closer to being mainstream issues among voters. Millennial democrats are getting elected more and more often, and they are getting more and more progressive. The fascists may be behind the wheel right now, but you know what fascists are fundamentally? Losers. Small, simple, evil men and the opportunists & sycophants that throw their lot in with them. They actively select against competence.

Look, things are bad right now. People are gonna be hurt, lives are gonna be ruined, and it’s gonna be a big fucking mess to clean up in the future. But we’re gonna beat 'em, 100%.

So try to help who you can, look out for your mental health, and stick around. A better future is possible!

Class war

Pure speculation:

Reality is complicated. Nuance is hard. Fascism dumbs it all down; things were better before, it’s their fault things are bad now, let’s fuck them up to make things good again.

Nihilistic opportunists love it because it’s easy to float to the top amidst a wave of tribalistic idiots. Tribalistic idiots desperately want it to be true; if the problems I face are secretly simple, it means I’m not actually dumb for not understanding what was going on before.

Jesus Christ, yes, I am a comfort hunter. You think I get up at the ass crack of dawn every day for fun? You think I want to push buttons on a computer all day because I’m just weirdly into it?

No! I do this shit because I have to!

Fucking hell. I’ve already accepted that I have to make your company money if I want to live in a house. For the love of all that is good in this world, PLEASE do not make me pretend to like it. I’m already weirded out that you’re so into it.

Disorganized list b/c I can’t be assed to format:

1. The follicles on your face will grow at different rates. Even if you’re going for length, trimming your beard to let the slower hairs catch up can give you a fuller and thicker beard. I will sometimes take some electric clippers and just trim back the faster growing hairs to give my beard a more defined shape.

2. Trim the sides & mustache occasionally. Imagine a line starting a half inch or so away from your face, starting where your hair ends & sideburns begin and going straight down to the ground. Trim the sides of your beard following that line, and trim your mustache to stop the hairs from getting in your mouth. A santa-esque beard is longer than it is wide, so you’ll probably need to shape it that way.

3. Your facial hair will probably wick moisture away from your skin. You’re already out ahead of this with the beard oil, which is great. I personally prefer using a beard butter, but anything that keeps the skin underneath moisturized is important. One time I shaved & it almost looked like my cheeks had been sunburned.

4. This one is personal preference, but I keep my neck mostly shaved. I draw a line starting two fingers above my Adam’s apple, and bring it up to the corners of my jaw. Everything below gets either shaved or at least hit with the clippers on the lowest guard. I also take my wife’s eyebrow razor and clean up the top of my cheeks, to straighten out the top of my beard. Totally optional, but makes it look cleaner IMO.

TL;DR Growing a beard =/= not shaving. Trim it to give it shape, shave neck & the top of your cheeks to give it lines, continue to moisturize / oil it.

I keep getting recruiters sending me in-office jobs on the other side of the country and not even telling me the salary range. You’re asking me to break my lease, uproot my family, and leave behind all my local friends. If your salary is low enough that you don’t want to advertise it up front, why would I ever even consider doing all that?

I would create a device that could locate any missing object. Go treasure hunting to make a living, and help find missing people / pets when I can.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_pipelines

https://www.militarynewbie.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/TM-21-210-Improvised-Munitions-Handbook-1969-Department-of-the-Army.pdf

Right? Like in my ideal world, guns would be a hobby for weird nerds in the same way fencing is today. The one or two times I have felt like there’s even a small chance I may need to use a gun in self defense were terrifying and stressful.

I think the algorithm just compares the distance between the center and your first point to the distance between the center and each subsequent point. So, for example, drawing an imperfect but centered circle will get you more points than drawing a perfect circle that’s really off center.

Fun toy!

Hard disagree. Randomly murdering fascists does not a revolution make, to say nothing of the odds of winning that fight.

Go to the gym. Be able to do cardio without dying. Work on your fitness and health. Then buy a gun. Train with it. A lot. Organize with like-minded people. Invest in community defense, look out for LGBT / immigrant / marginalized friends and family. Be prepared for violence, but keep it a last resort. When / if bullets start flying, lives with be ruined on both sides of the gun.

Hear, hear! If anything, this election has proven that we need to work on class consciousness and the Overton window. Mutual aid, direct action, protest & strike support, salting, and civil disobedience are all ways we can produce the conditions needed for positive change.

100 girlfriends

The purpose of my jellybean thought exercise was to show that “I don’t know” and “I don’t believe” are not mutually exclusive. Basically:

I do not believe [x] != I believe [not x]

I don’t believe in String Theory. String Theory may be correct for all I know: I am not a physicist, and my understanding of String Theory is cursory at best.

Because I do not have enough evidence to warrant belief, I cannot say I believe in String Theory. But that same lack of understanding means I must also say I don’t believe that String Theory is false.

Say you have a jar full of jellybeans. We know that the number of whole jellybeans in the jar must be either even or odd.

If someone asks you if you believe the number of jellybeans in the jar is even, you can and should say “no” if you haven’t counted them or otherwise gathered any evidence to support that conclusion. To believe something is to say you feel it is more likely true than false, and you can’t say that about the given proposition.

Importantly, this does not mean you do believe the number of jellybeans is odd. The fact that one of those two things must be true does not mean you have to pick one to believe and one to disbelieve. It is perfectly rational to reserve belief either way until you have evidence one way or the other. You do not believe it’s even, nor do you believe it’s odd.

So, if we define “atheist” as “someone who does not believe in any gods”, I think you meet the definition of atheist. Just like the person in the above example does not believe the jellybeans are even & also does not believe they are odd, you don’t need to believe “there are no gods anywhere” to not believe “there is at least one god”.

I feel you in a big way, but to be totally fair: corporations becoming states has probably trended towards the better from a zoomed-out perspective, and political leaders lying all the time has probably only become more visible than ever.

The entities that were doing all the colonialism for the past several hundred years have been private companies, and they did huge amounts of slavery and genocide. Blackwater is bad, but the East India Company was worse. This is not to say that things are good now, only that they aren’t like worse than they’ve ever been.

And I think the present day has a greater expectation of political leaders being accountable to the people they govern than most of history. Back in the days of monarchs and oligarchs, there was no mass media to tell everyone they were lying and no likely consequences for the liars even if there were.

Again, I empathize a huge amount with what you’ve said & I am also disappointed that the world we’ve created isn’t better than it is. I just personally think that the above two are trending in a more optimistic direction, even if they’re still objectively pretty bad.

Thank you for your wonderful and informative comment! I went out back to see if she was still there / look for an egg sack, and snuck another pic. She’s quick! Ran up the fence as soon as she saw me!

RIP Kumoko.

True that! Almost got a face full of this guy earlier this week:

I wonder if spiders put webs in front of windows to catch bugs that fly towards the light, or if they put webs all over a building and we only see the ones near the windows?

Cute comic!

BRONCO IS TAKING HIM INTO THE SCREWS, KENNY!