Notices by Kim Scheinberg (kims@mas.to)

Why is everything an advent calendar now? I see them for whiskeys, Bon Mamman jams, beauty products, jigsaw puzzles...

Is this just hanukkah upmanship?

Palmer Luckey of The Nerd Reich:

"I would try to end the tragedy of divorce with oxytocin doping for marriage counseling."

"We understand mammal pair bonding pretty well. There's a lot of people who want to stay together. Most of the people who don't want to stay together should stay together, especially for their kids."

"And we can, if people think SSRIs are fine, which they're not, but if they were, then oxytocin doping to stay together is definitely fine."

"It's the mammal pair bonding chemical. There's things you can do to increase the uptake, and it's very well understood. Also, totally unregulated, which is great. Unregulated spaces are a lot easier to do. You can go buy a kilogram of oxytocin on Sigma Aldrich Chemical Supply right now, and if you do that, maybe you won't die alone."

I'm pretty sure this was a plot line in _Boston Legal_ back in 2008

These guys are never beating the allegations

@kjhealy
As someone who has never read Berlin, where should I start?

Finally got around to reading the NYT article about The Nerd Reich seeking absolution From religious scholars

This excerpt brings to mind what is probably the best scene in The Sopranos — when Carmela consults a Jewish psychotherapist who tells her to, "take only the children, what's left of them, and go." She sits with it for a bit, then starts musing aloud about arranging lawyers and child support. He cuts her off telling her it's all blood money — he says he won't take Tony's money as payment from her, and she shouldn't take it either

His words fall on deaf ears just as surely as did Rabbi Navon's

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-morals-ai.html

@ai6yr
I grabbed the image you posted, re-uploaded it to Mastodon, used 'add text from image' and it mostly OCR'ed just fine. It only got truly squirrelly when it got to the bar

Here's the unedited OCR output

Captured with a DSLR and a Zeiss 21mm Distagon lens. Handheld (there was no room to set up a tripod).

In 2009, I was fortunate to join a "top to bottom" tour of former Air Force Titan ICBM site 571-7, now preserved as a museum. Titan II missiles carried a nine megaton(!) "physics package" in the "reentry vehicle" (which they emphatically assured me had been removed from this missile, but I still wouldn't advise upsetting them too much).

@kjhealy
<me idly wondering how many hedge fund offers Kieran has to turn down every week>

@farah
Mother to four of his kids, executive at Neuralink, and the woman he's been primarily living with for the last five years

I really could not care less about him, his personal life, etc. but the tone of the message struck me

It took me far too many years to learn that if you see your primary role as being someone's "port in a storm", there is a really good chance that they ARE the fucking storm, and you're better off with as much distance between yourself and them as possible

@zenkat @farah
I'll take that bet

That's the writing of someone heartbroken who doesn't yet recognize that they were in an abusive relationship, written under the influence of a whole pitcher of Kool Aid

Did... did the tree from _The Giving Tree_ write this?

I take ketamine for depression. A couple times a week, I take it 2-3 hours before bedtime in our spare bedroom. I've been doing this for a while

One side effect at my prescribed dosage is that K makes me amorous. I have no idea if this is common to other people or not, but it's a consistent side effect for me

My husband and I have been together for 30 years, We have kids. We have an active sex life. And yet...

On the nights that I take ketamine, we always always have a short discussion before hand. "Yes or no?" We have this conversation when I'm sober, and it establishes consent

If the answer is "no", it doesn't matter how many times I text him while high that I've changed my mind and want to have sex. He will tell me NO and stick to that. If he comes into the room to snuggle, and I reach for his junk, he pushes my hand away and reminds me he'll be available in the AM when I'm sober

I have no idea why it is so hard to teach this to young men

@WilmBoerhout
Long sold out everywhere, but...

https://www.ebay.com/itm/178222777855?_skw=thom+browne+shirt&itmmeta=01KV8ZP392NJH15JTGK23DGGSQ&hash=item297ee7c5ff:g:i98AAeSw8wtpP09S&itmprp=enc%3AAQALAAAA8GfYFPkwiKCW4ZNSs2u11xAWWJU9KpsSA8CTNhuAwcv2QQtjS%2Fu9mg4p4Oh8OcT4XgPCKfRYzBc53YoKkBGLGOoXaJXm6yWzUpbcHXmFhgL4EvOI5YJnpTbx0RMQaJkaLe6BWVwUrrO%2BdtIiozl%2BkYvKGYN8onJJDDBOIaEpvDHRwc2ixIOCf3CXravhlzOdL%2FBBildvpFZ1BpHcLiyx4rZwubPzCRcP4OVPCTlQwY3gDa%2BrOCLFvxlOrEHq32eU3Cg1tRJ3QdbSMuKOG4Ae3WOmwdKpAS6RZMHMG09xF0tG3G6U1jeE1gQMOLLcqe5sDA%3D%3D%7Ctkp%3ABk9SR9i02J_aZw&autorefresh=true

A few days ago I was at the airport in Barcelona filling out paperwork to get VAT refunds for purchases made in France, Germany, and Spain

The Spain administrivia was handled by a machine scanning a receipt and my passport — the refund hit my credit card before I landed in NYC — but the France and Germany refunds required forms that needed to be stamped, put in envelopes, and dropped in a mailbox right next to the processing area

My oldest (27) watched as I tried three times to lick the envelope before realizing that that is not how envelopes are sealed anymore

Feeling my age, I felt compelled to offer some history lessons, starting with "when I was a kid, luggage didn't have wheels..."

Here's a pic of me and my boys having lunch at 9Reinas

After Anonymous leaked the evidence in the Steubenville rape case in 2013 — including the video of the rapists' friends laughing and joking while the rape was ongoing — I sat down with my oldest (then 14) and made him listen to the audio with me. We talked for a long time about what his responsibilities were if he should ever find himself in such circumstances

That kid, who coincidentally graduated from Cornell a few years ago, is 27 now

Seems to me that a lot of parents missed an easy opportunity to have a hard conversation with their kids about not being bystanders (never mind rapists)

Incidentally, the rapists in the Steubenville case served a collective three years between them and went right back to playing football because boys' lives are sacred and girls matter not even a little bit

https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/23473841/malik-richmond-youngstown-state-penguins-removed-sex-offender-list

https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/13171184/ex-steubenville-player-convicted-rape-joining-hocking-community-college-team

Back in 2016 or thereabouts, my old boss was emailing me from a Board of Trustees meeting at Cornell. They were discussing (among other things) how to deal with reports of sexual assault on campus

Back then, a big part of my job was to keep him from saying stupid shit. He shared his recommendation to me privately in one of those emails, and I told him he should never ever ever make that suggestion out loud where anyone could hear it. Even now I cringe just thinking about it

In retrospect, his idea would have been better than whatever actually got decided in that room

In most ways I think Europe is so much saner and healthier than the US — I would very much like to figure out how to move here — but there is one respect in which I remain the ugliest of ugly Americans:

I am convinced that I could make a fortune selling Charmin and other such luxury toilet paper brands in Paris, Berlin, and Barcelona

I know, I know, Europe has bidets (and older plumbing that makes US two-ply stuff untenable) but I wish I'd thought to pack a roll when I left NYC

This is a thing that I did not know was happening in Barcelona today when I booked our trip

"The correfoc represents the driving out of evil spirits and symbolises the triumph of good over evil with the patron saint providing protection over the city. The fire and noise is believed to purify the strees. The Devils are cultural groups that dress up as devils and parade the streets during certain festivals in Barcelona. La Mercè is one such event. The devils run up the streets with bangers and handheld fireworks. Lots of bangs and fire is the order of the day. Fire breathing dragons (or at least sparkler-breathing dragons) also roam the streets with Devils skipping along with spiralling fireworks held in their hands."

So should I be relieved that I will have all my familiar demons driven out of me, or concerned that new demons will ensoul me?

As an atheist who hates crowds and especially fireworks, this might have been bad planning on my part

https://www.barcelona.de/en/barcelona-la-merce.html

I read this line back in 2017. The US sure seems to have worked out how to turn a significant portion of men into compulsive gamblers

"If you were the GDP, your ideal citizen would be a compulsive gambler with cancer who's going through a drawn-out divorce that he copes with by popping fistfuls of Prozac and going berserk on Black Friday."
-- Rutger Bregman, _Utopia For Realists_

The VRBO we're staying at in Barcelona has a rather cool, unique feature

The architect was a disciple / colleague of Gaudi. When the building went up, it had four stories. Fifteen years later, two more stories were added. The apartment on the sixth floor is (I'm reliably told) the only residence in Barcelona where you can see both Casa Batlló (a spectacular view out the living room window) *and* Sagrada Familia (out the bedroom window)

Bonaventura Conill's grandson owns the unit, raised his kids here, and started renting it out after his kids moved out

It's quite something
https://vrbo.onelink.me/ItNz/3gq1187f

@ChrisMayLA6
Mamdani has a level of charisma that few people -- Andy Burnham included -- can match. Yes, Trump likes winners (and tyrants) but I think what makes Mamdani successful with him is something more innate