Was actually looking at these probe thermometers to give as Christmas presents this year… some brands actually advertise that they connect to nothing and need no phone or account to operate.

The protest was about five or six blocks away from my house… Proud Boys and other jackasses were “patrolling” the neighborhoods.

I’m not straight and my neighborhood is low income. Like my neighbors and I are tight, but everyone has guns… i trust them (and they me), it’s folks coming in from outside, especially shit like the Proud Boys who turned up a few years ago during protests.

Even if she’s not renting, like it’s a condo association or co-op situation, do the same thing. Report it. Could be a sign of something worse in the whole system.

Dude, I just got the post-exposure rabies vaccine. Was four trips to the ER at $125 USD co-pay a pop… however, without insurance, I learned it can be as much as like $15k if you don’t qualify for assistance and/or Medicaid.

We really need to take to the streets.

Paying off my credit card and sending the rest to my local LGBTQ+ support/advocacy group.

Funny thing is that, while a similar principle, they’re safer and more ethical than the Star Trek “suicide booth” transporters.

Oh yeah… the poet’s house was dope as fuck.

I would love a series about an “Interplanetary University” that had its campus setup across several dozen planets using Farcasters. That would be an interesting setting in the Hyperion universe.

It was a bit of “handwave-ium” and sentient AI. Here’s the Wiki for the series if you want to compare your concept…

Here’s an article about the Farcasters themselves and here’s the article about the World Web that AI and humanity ran with them.

I love the Farcaster network of the World Web from Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos (for anyone who hasnt read the books, they’re essentially frameless stargates that are always on). Such a cool concept of being able to build a series of them linking the main commercial streets of the biggest cities on different planets together; thus making one gigantic and near endless market across hundreds of worlds… and anyone can just walk from one planet to another across hundreds or thousands of light years.

What I really like about that book series though is that the Farcasters are not the only means of FTL… and that there are sound reasons to use another method over them OR even to oppose your planet getting connected to the Farcaster network. Just seriously good world building.

Computer, show me the warp core!

I’m sure Apple will let everyone know that we’re just holding the phone wrong.

(are they still clergy if they aren’t Catholic?)

Yep, it’s a catch-all term. You can also refer to an Imam or Rabbi as a member of that religion’s clergy.

Lol. Fixed.

I just got back to the states, we also went to that museum but didn’t get the amount of time I’d have liked for the visit. It was family vacation; I was negotiating with like seven other people for what we saw and for how long. Next year, I’ll be back in the UK for about a week (sadly, it’ll be mostly just London) and have already carved out plans for a day trip out to York just for the Railway Museum.

Just switched to Linux for my daily driver laptop!

Oh yeah, totally non-fatal fire, just a church and two homes burned to the ground.

I was so tempted to try their service, but it was always in the back of my mind, inside the part of my brain that was conscious during marketing 101 class in college: “What’s the long term business model here? What happens after they have everyone’s genetic identity?” Then it dawned on me like ooooohhhhh that’s the plan… no thanks.

The automotive manufacturers General Motors and Chrysler were partially nationalized in the wake of the 2008 Financial Crisis as were several banks… these were less a full government takeover and more of a government guided restructuring, but the government owned large stakes in these companies. Before that, the only full nationalization of anything substantial was the bankruptcy of the Penn Central Railroad and subsequent establishment of Consolidated Rail (branded as ConRail) the US’s only national freight rail company.

Conrail was later privatized into what is now the private companies CSX and Norfolk Southern. The collapse of Penn Central was the largest bankruptcy in history until Enron in the 1990’s. Amtrak, our national passenger rail corporation, is also a nationalized entity created around the same time as ConRail, for similar reasons, and is still nationalized (although the Trump admin wants to privatize it).

Leonard Nimoy was a pretty tough celebrity death for me. It was like losing a super cool uncle, a person who’d been in my life for my whole life, but hadn’t seen in a long while, was dead.