You ever meet a kid so shitty you’re immediately like “I want to adopt you as my own so I can instill into you the values of dignity and compassion and respect for self and others that your guardians have so obviously neglected, so that you may escape the unhappy future that lies ahead of you with all the smoldering ashes of wasted potential” but also, like. I punt you like a football
Drop the vape u little turd I’m gonna take an active interest in your passions and buy u pants that fit. When was your last dentist appointment. U wanna go to summer camp
sorry for romanticizing the mundane but the fact that laughter is infectious is so incredible to me. like yeah it’s just a reaction to stimuli but the way it feels to hear someone laugh and feel yourself compelled to share that joy is really something. and it’s so simple and requires no skill but it’s so special and important to me.
also re: covid vaccines, people have said this but places like India, Korea, etc are very very very good at medical research and India is the biggest distributor of vaccines. it is not “the us needs to give/donate Poor Countries medicines because they are too stupid to figure it out themselves” it is “the us copyrighted the ingredients of the vaccine and so nobody can make them outside of the country”
which is vastly more insidious than simply not performing charity
Have you ever wondered why bags of microwave popcorn practically scream at you not to use the “popcorn” setting on your microwave? It speaks to a mutual distrust between two classes of high-end professionals.
On one side, you have popcorn engineers: highly-trained food scientists, dedicated to understanding every aspect of how the microwave interacts with preservative-laced corn kernels. On the other lie the microwave engineers: folks who are copying a design invented in the 1950s and handed down ever since due to declining R&D budgets, whose only satisfaction in their job comes from making the brrrrr sound a little bit quieter and to add a couple more buttons to the number pad, so that their boss can ask for an extra $150 at the Walmart checkout.
You might think this exposes a little bit of my bias. It is true that I don’t really understand how popcorn is made, and so I’ve unfairly placed these humble folks (who probably came from Iowa or some shit) onto a pedestal. And it is also true that I’ve worked in electrical engineering departments, where the only remaining person on the floor who doesn’t have a substance-abuse problem is the intern’s intern.
Just to be on the safe side, I went into the belly of the beast and interviewed for a job. Wearing my least-molybdenum-grease-stained dress shirt and something resembling a tie if viewed from 25 feet away or more, I successfully negotiated my way into a near-minimum-wage job in the General Electric microwave-oven division. I couldn’t wait to figure out this mystery, and when they left me alone with a copy of the source code, I immediately did a search for “popcorn.” That set off some kind of alarm in a back room, and two goons emerged to assault me, screaming something about “fucking butter spies.”
Personally, I hope that this gulf is bridged one day. Not only does it represent the failure of Western engineering standards, but it no doubt leads to millions of dollars per year in wasted popcorn, not to mention gigawatts of wasted electricity that would be better off in our vapes. America can’t begin to heal until the average person can trust the “popcorn” button on their microwave to correctly prepare popcorn.
“We could describe what is going on at the moment as a crisis of democracy, the collapse of trust: the belief that our leaders are not just corrupt or stupid, but inept. Action requires power, to be able to do things, and we need politics, which is the ability to decide what needs to be done. But that marriage between power and politics in the hands of the nation state has ended. Power has been globalized, but politics is as local as before. Politics has had its hands cut off. People no longer believe in the democratic system because it doesn’t keep its promises. We see this, for example, with the migration crisis: it’s a global phenomenon, but we still act parochially. Our democratic institutions were not designed for dealing with situations of interdependence. The current crisis of democracy is a crisis of democratic institutions. […] Today, every society is just a collection of diasporas.”
“And if there’s something that I’ve learned this year, it’s this: When you truly love something, you choose it over anything else. No matter what the world will say to make you look the other way you choose it and you choose it ferociously. And then you see where life will take you from there.”
— Juansen Dizon, The Year of Love (via nightlyquotes)
