Notices by Trivial Einstein (intransitivelie@beige.party)

Did COVID kill the pope? Because, like, they're not saying it didn't. Seems like you should print the controversy there.

Of course, it's equally likely that he was poisoned by his cardinals. Print that fucking controversy, cowards.

Well fuck, it was Easter and 4/20 and I didn't eat a Jesus edible.

@SRLevine
I'm kind of okay with jokes like this. Back in the day, when corporations didn't all do stupid tongue-in-cheek marketing on April Fools, I enjoyed a few of the ones various companies and individual sites did. And I liked it when Bill Watterson and Berkley Breathed traded comics for the day or whatever. There's room for jokes which aren't really what I'd consider a prank, I guess.

Where I draw the line is if it's misinformation which causes someone pain, however momentary. There's a difference between putting out a press release saying that you're going to switch your pasta products to be entirely tree-grown, and putting one out saying you're planning to murder my mother. If that makes sense? Obvious that's a hyperbolic example.

Here, I'll give a real one: one time I had to take a lengthy bus trip and found myself at the end of it stranded in a location I didn't want to be with no way to get back home. I had managed to arrange it so that I could catch the last bus, which was making a scenic tour of places I didn't want to go before finally taking me close enough to my home that I could arrange a ride from there. But the last bus required me to wait for a while, so I was waiting and worrying. I'm not a great traveler I confess.

At a certain point I got up and asked the station attendant whether the last bus was on time. And he said, "Oh, the last bus left fifteen minutes ago."

My stomach dropped as I contemplated spending the night homeless in an unfamiliar city. After what felt like an eternity but what was probably actually five seconds, he grinned and said, "Nah, I'm just messing with you. It'll be here in ten."

And I laughed with him at myself because what was I going to do, kill him and string his corpse up by his own intestines as a warning to others, with a message of doom to all pranksters written below in his lifeblood?

I digress.

There was a line somewhere and that "joke" crossed it for me. But I acknowledge that my line is much farther back than a lot of people's, so I'm mostly telling this story to try to illustrate my line, not to say that my line is the correct one. It is, but I won't say it 😜

I did manage to make it home, obviously, but it took going to the state prison to do it.

The bus went there, not that I was incarcerated before returning to the bosom of my family. See, that's a momentary misdirection which I think is funny but hurts no one, as with your example above. I sat next to a very talkative gentleman who had just gotten out whose plan was to get home, hop on his motorcycle, and ride to Taco Bell to get himself a giant burrito. I hope he enjoyed it.

If I ever become sick enough to warrant it, I'm getting divorced, I'm applying for every line of sketchy credit under the sun, and I am going to be motherfucking Santa Claus on speed. I will leave absolutely no amount of money unspent and I will die with no heirs or dependents from whom to collect on my debts. If the authorities ask anyone who might be remotely accused of being one or the other of the above, they are instructed to say that I went completely insane and cut everyone out of my life when the [INSERT DISEASE HERE] got to my brain. This is also my funeral plan and my plan to rack up medical debt. My spouse isn't totally on board with this because they believe marriage is important, as do I, but not as important as taking my massive debt with me to Hell (which I don't believe in) so I can give all the money-lenders a big fuck you when I see them down there.

Having a real one today, in case you were wondering.

I just want to buy one of those stupid "Man Cave" signs and hang it over the litter boxes. "What happens in the Man Cave stays in the Man Cave." Maybe I'll add, "until someone cleans the litter."

Witches' tits and gravediggers' asses violate the Laws of Thermodynamics. In this essay I will

If you enjoy my style of writing but would prefer to read it as fiction rather than whatever the hell it is I do on fedi, my profile contains a link to my extremely sporadically updated collection of such fiction. There's also the occasional poem, and some things are funnier than others.

What, you're too lazy to go to my profile (wherein you can verify that I am telling the truth and the collection does in fact belong to me? You want a call to action?

Fine. Visit https://theoppositeofblog.blogspot.com/ and read it. It's a blogspot blog for God's sake. Those are thin on the ground these days. It's retro cool. Plus if you visit in desktop mode, you can click the subheading and it'll change to various random things, so that's a fun way to kill fifteen minutes.

I've never made an original meme, but I feel like this might be the one. I bequeath it to you, citizens of fedi who are awake when I am. I feel like it can be captioned, but it also works well as a response to things. #meme #memes

Look, I'm not telling you what to do, and if you're going to steal the wheels off Teslas, that's fine. But you could be an even bigger asshole and steal all the lug nuts but leave the wheels so they'll fall off as the unsuspecting driver pulls out of their parking spot. After all, lug nuts are much smaller and easier to hide. But since you should still worry about being caught with contraband, why not just loosen the nuts and leave them too? No theft involved. Pretty sure loosening all the lug nuts on a wheel will do unpleasant things to the car at a certain point.

Or you could just slash the tires. Hypothetically speaking, of course. Please don't actually slash anyone's tires. Definitely don't attack the sidewall where the rubber is thinner and don't make long cuts perpendicular to the axis of rotation which are impossible to patch. Don't do any of that. History teaches us not to do that in particular.

I am not an anarchist. I have great respect for them but I'm not one. Sorry to disappoint, if that disappoints. I do, I'm afraid, believe in democracy, even if we've never had much of one, ever. Not sure how that's any different from anarchism in that regard, really.

Crowd-sourcing this odd but interesting question:

If you were going to use an air cannon to shoot a payload of seeds, which you wanted to remain fairly concentrated and not shoot out in a short-range spray, how would you do that?

Say, suppose I were looking to plant some seeds at a distance. I don't want a shotgun spray, I want something more like a flechette artillery round but filled with seeds. But with an air cannon, and not a particularly long distance. 50 yards maybe?

It seems like you'd want some kind of arrangement akin to a buckshot round, maybe, but I'm not sure whether the power required to separate the shot from its casing would be too much to use an air cannon (or even better, a PVC-pipe potato gun). Seed also weighs a lot less than buckshot so getting it to go any kind of distance might be difficult. So maybe instead of a shotgun round metaphor, one would want a biodegradable sabot of sorts, but one which would remain intact for long enough to deliver the seed.

Which makes me wonder if stuffing seeds into a potato and firing it via potato gun would work.

Anyway, thoughts. I'd love it if you have experience actually doing something like this, but I'll happily accept hypothetical thoughts as well.

And as an added question, if you were going to seed lawn with something, what plant would you pick which was the most annoying?

Fine, I want to sabotage golf courses. That's why I'm asking.

What would you plant on golf courses which would be the most damaging? My personal preference would be for trumpeter vine because I have an infestation of that, but I suspect lawn-care specialists could handle that. Poison ivy seeds are hard to come by and you can target it with Roundup. Thoughts?

#AskFedi #BoostsWelcome

Boy, I guess all those people who were just asking questions about child healthcare sure will change their tune now, huh?

*puts finger to ear*

I'm being informed that their tune will remain exactly the same, except louder.

via @gwynnion

https://mastodon.social/@gwynnion/114083154656341702

For future reference, since it seems like it might be necessary sooner rather than later, if things come out of the Vatican smokestack:

- Black smoke means there's no new pope.
- White smoke means there's a new pope.
- Red smoke means shit is about to get real at the Vatican.
- Purple smoke means Jimi Hendrix is the new pope.
- Green smoke means it's currently 4:20 at the Vatican.
- Blue smoke means the Vatican is no longer working, please call tech support.
- A shit-ton of smoke means the Vatican is currently on fire.
- Intermittent smoke means, "Help, cardinal currently trapped in Vatican fireplace, send Swiss guard with tub of lard."
- Orange smoke means a rascally cardinal is playing a practical joke.
- Multicolored smoke means the Vatican has invested in some illegal Chinese fireworks.
- Snakes which whisper that the day of judgment is at hand mean it may be time to duck and cover.
- Bats mean the Joker is pope.
- The body of the old pope means buckle up, shit's about to get weird.

If that seagull comes back, I have no idea what that means. Maybe the seagull should be pope.

I'm not saying that LibreOffice is perfect by a long shot but they don't have ads in your fucking word processor.

Imagine if the boy who cried wolf had actually seen a wolf every time, but by crying wolf he scared the wolf away. The villagers would show up, and there's this boy pointing at the forest and saying they just missed the wolf and weren't they lucky he had been there to warn them. And the villagers would probably take that badly, after the first time. They'd probably write a story about it.

Meanwhile, the boy is scared shitless. On the one hand, there's this fucking wolf who is getting more and more brazen. Maybe next time the boy won't be able to scare the wolf away. And then not only will the boy be in trouble, but the village will be in trouble. Meanwhile on the other hand he knows that if he keeps crying wolf, either the villagers will stop showing up at all, or they'll view him as a bigger problem than the wolf. Either way, the boy is going to be in deep shit there too.

You might forgive the boy for getting the fuck out of dodge. Let someone else watch for wolves. See how they like it. But he doesn't. He stays and watches, and the wolf comes back, and this time none of the boy's cries drive the wolf away because the wolf can sense that no one from the village is coming. And the villagers stand by and listen to the boy's increasingly desperate screams until it's too late.

Who's the hero of this story?

Now, if you were a villager who had just committed negligent homicide by wolf, which turned out to have been a very real risk, you could do two things. You could learn from this experience that sometimes warnings should be heeded regardless of whether they seem to be false alarms because it's better to go out to defend the flocks from a wolf a thousand times when there's no wolf than it is not to go once when there is. That's the sensible thing to do, certainly. The money is on overreacting if overreacting is low-cost and the risk of under-reacting is high.

Or you could write your story about this boy who fucked around and found out. That makes you look better, I guess. And it relieves you of responsibility for defense of the village and your livelihoods. The boy should have known better.

You may have figured out that I'm not talking about boys and wolves anymore.

We have a whole classic parable on the subject of not crying wolf, to the point where "crying wolf" is something of a dead cliché. In the English-speaking world, pretty much everyone knows what "to cry wolf" means, even if they've never actually heard the parable. We don't think about the story. We make the semantic leap from the phrase to "false positive." And we are taught over and over that crying wolf is always bad.

Which is why we find ourselves in situations like the one in which we currently find ourselves. We are victims of survivorship bias: we only remember the times when the warnings seemed unfounded because if they had been founded we wouldn't be here to notice. Fascism stalks the forest like a horde of hungry wolves, but because we only remember the times when fascism didn't eat us, we think all warnings are unfounded. Never mind that in most cases not only were the warnings founded but the action taken in response to those warnings was what kept fascism at bay.

Look at Y2K, which, if you're too young to remember, was something of a joke. It was regularly held up as a giant cry of wolf because, well, the world didn't end when the clock ticked over. Very little happened, really. So everyone breathed a sigh of relief and immediately set to work making sure that we forgot some inconvenient facts.

Y2K "didn't happen" because a lot of unappreciated work was done to keep it from happening. A lot. Far more than we were told in the general public. This was, after all, the era of Reaganomics, when the Democrat who was in office was about as conservative as a lot of Republicans were, where it seemed like everyone had a hardon for gutting government spending and bureaucracy. So the unsexy work of making sure that the world didn't end was just waste, right?

What about September 11, about a year later? Turns out that there were large numbers of boys who had been crying wolf about Al Qaeda for years, but a lot of unappreciated work was done in an attempt to keep that wolf at bay. It wasn't going in guns blazing, and it wasn't necessarily the ideal way to do it, but it also wasn't sexy so no one paid much attention.

Pandemics past have been averted and turned into jokes. Swine flu? Huge joke. Bird flu? Nothingburger. All wolves which failed to eat us, largely because someone cried and then unsexy work was done because of that warning. But we don't need the CDC. It's a waste of taxpayer dollars. After all, what has it ever done for us? There was never a wolf to defend against.

We teach our children what we want them to know. And what we want them to know is that it's always worse to be an inconvenient Cassandra than a dead Tiresias. It's better to hold your tongue and let the wolf eat everything than it is to give a warning too soon, before you can see the whites of its eyes as it were. Keep your powder dry. Don't be too hasty.

And what's the life of one annoying boy, after all? And another. And another. Something keeps eating the boys you send out to watch the sheep, but as long as they don't cry, you don't have to deal with that. Teach your children silence. There might not be a wolf after all.

[EDIT TO POSTSCRIPT: There's good stuff in the replies. I know that fedi makes it hard to see replies sometimes, and I know that frequently replies are unreadable garbage anyway, but in this case several excellent points have been raised by people other than me which don't really work without context, but you're reading this so you have context, so go read them.]

@timberwraith
Oh look, he said this stuff on Maher; I can safely consign him to the bin and nothing of value will be lost.

I will cheerfully allow people who voted for Trump and have been burned by him and now are anti-Trump to fight him all they want. I might even support them in doing so. But they haven't changed a bit. They've just found out after fucking around, and their new antipathy to him is just as selfish as their old support. I will not trust them, I will not welcome them, and I know that the second they get the chance they'll stick a knife in my back. They're still my enemy, but they're also my enemy's enemy and thus I will do what I can to make it easier for them to be a problem for my enemy. That's the cold calculus of it.

That's normal, everyday people. The people who sat in the halls of power? They're by and large grifters. They'll change their coat on a dime, and right now they see more influence and money to be made as members of "the resistance" or whatever. The Lincoln Project grifters are prime examples of this, but there are and will be plenty of others. Tell them to fuck off until they pay for what they've done, until they do more than say that they're against Trump now. Certainly don't give them any money or influence. Don't give them oxygen as far as I'm concerned. Ignore them. They'll go away.

I give ammunition to my enemy's enemy with enough safeguards that it can't be turned on me. That's all. Let them fight. They're no friends of mine.

I win arguments on the internet all the time. The trick is to block your opponent and claim victory. The first person to do that wins!

Once again I must regretfully inform you that you may say you want a revolution but most people don't and I don't really believe you do either. Anyone who does is either woefully unprepared or selling something. Sorry if that harshes your leftist buzz or whatever. I'm a bad comrade.

I am babysitting/running sound today for a large, disorganized group of people whose first language is Chinese. I don't speak Chinese at all. The only Chinese I know is "Hello" and "Thank you" and I'm fairly sure I can't pronounce them correctly. This is an adventure.