Category: Me Myself&I

Seth writes: Rhetorical questions, some easy, some particularly difficult, all worth thinking about:

If your house near the ocean has a beautiful view, should the person who buys the lot closer to the shore be able to build a house on it?

As long as it doesn’t obstruct the view. Get creative! Or don’t build.

If your restaurant needs to empty the dirty oil from the deep fryer, is it okay to dump it on the curb, possibly causing a bicyclist to slip and crash?

It’s late night on a busy Saturday, I’d understand. Otherwise, try as much not to do that?

If your car painting facility exhausts tiny droplets of red paint while doing a job, and the paint floats away and lands on a white car nearby, are you responsible?

Yeah, but you don’t have to brag about it. You can keep working. You can also try to fix the problem.

Is it okay to make money selling building toys made from little tiny powerful magnets? What happens if kids eat the pellets and suffer internal injuries?

Collateral damages. The toys are obviously not meant to kill. Also, parental supervision of toddlers?

Should a factory dump poison in the river, even if it’s legal?

? No; but again, they can and don’t have to talk about it. However they should fix the problem.

Can the architect of a skyscraper specify mirrored glass, even if the glare bothers people in nearby buildings?

He cannot, as he doesn’t work/live there. He could potentially (and should) be viewed as a bad architect for not taking the environment of a new building into account.

What about building a huge skyscraper that casts a shadow all day on the park next door?

Same.

And… is it okay to take a private jet to Scotland, even if the exhaust from that jet will cause distress to countless people who didn’t choose it? What if it takes a long time for the effects to be felt?

It’s not okay but that’s not really the most pressing issue. We need to ship less as cargos pollute more than anything else. We need better buildings, which waste tons of energy for cooling and heating.

No easy answers. But we need to keep asking the questions.

Easy to answer those for me. My rate is $1,000/hr.

Nichelle Nichols.

Bill Russell.

We will never really know or understand what they had to endure to get there. But every single black person on earth today can thank them for progress in inclusivity, even though we’re still going at a glacial pace.

Thank you both. Thank you so much.

Just make those again:

Make them a little bit thinner, call them the Kader IV, thank me later.

Sincerely,

Yes, social media is really undermining democracy

I don’t think social media is really doing this. Rather, the mobile computing era has unleashed the worst of us all.

Social media was available first when we were transitioning from desktop to laptop. That’s when MySpace was dying, FB was nascent and Twitter was starting while Friendster was also dying.

Was social media as terrible then? No. Not necessarily the smartest stuff around but, nothing crazy like we see these days.

The biggest event for social media is us moving to phones.

In the past you had to sit in front of a computer to answer, leading you to introspection. Leading you to softening your typing.

Today you are drunk in public, your boyfriend is annoyingly slow at picking up takeout and you reply to that celebrity with the nastiest energy and most intense sarcasm.

That’s the shift. Of course, algorithms have been tuned for a while to reward people being nasty. But the real shift is us going mobile, which is True Goblin Mode.

No thoughts, only reactions.

Mobile computing has been destroying democracy, but also traffic (here in LA people will stay at stops for 5 seconds to finish watching a clip, I guess), romance, friendship, basic social interactions with strangers, and probably more.

The best way to use phones is to use them to read, only. Take pictures, and of course, organize with friends through text messages. Everything else basically, out.

People, you have to be assertive about this shit. And I know: you are completely addicted to your phone. That’s the issue and you need to work on that.

Please break up with your phone. Democracy and a bunch of human stuff would like that very much.

A 1987 French animation movie. I saw it in the early 90s and I remember thinking that it was pretty great and strange. Just rewatched it, still is. The animation is tight although the style might be a bit slow and corny. It was produced in North Korea apparently? Design is from a comic artist. Of course there’s the classic trope of brown skin being inferior and the very colonialist view of seeing brown folks as nice and servile. The sound design is quite awesome yet sometimes really lame.

There are good ideas and it’s nice to see another aesthetic in animation. The story is pretty smart and engaging. It’s worth watching.

Wondering if my upstairs neighbor is making Pink Sauce at night because it sounds like a centrifuge.

It’s time to admit that kids today are not okay; of course YouTube would take down something shared to 8 fucking million redditors. That’s why you stay quiet about it. That’s why you shut up.

Because it’s all playlists and the same videos IDs, once the videos are tagged and taken down, you can’t really reverse that, and it impacts everything. It’s horrible.

I was enjoying those pixel-ish regular games from the 97-98 Bulls season, still, and now they’re all gone.

All of that because a 30 year old boy was thirsty for Reddit clout. Vain ass bitch.

I am here to report that being nice and doing the work, also pays very well.

Green Flag City. Here I stroll.

Going through this list of cult movies. I love the fact that it lists all cult movies and not just Americans’. So you have this one for instance (a classic with good French people) or this one (even more of a classic with French people with taste).

I hadn’t seen 1982’s The Beastmaster.

Bro! I would have loved it as a kid, I think. The music is fantastic and in terms of production value I mean: live animals, huge props, helicopter cams and all… It’s pretty glorious. And quite bad, of course.

Going through the list I saw Bloodsport being in there so I had to watch it again since probably the early 2000s. Man, it’s hilarious. And bad in a good way.

Bad is fun, fun is smooth. Or something.

It’s a legendary skate spot in San Francisco.

There are so many spots with probably incredible stories. I’d love to hear them all.

The battles with the spot, the ground, the owners, the authority -vigils and cops-, they are part of the unknown.

All we see is one trick perfectly landed, hiding a forest of high variables.

It’s good to see who up’d who, while everyone is respecting each other.

I need more of that stuff, Thrasher. As a matter of fact, you need to do a whole series of those.