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Cake day: August 16th, 2023

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  • I got bit by this earlier in the year. I needed a smaller TV for the bedroom. I narrowed down the line I wanted. Target and Best Buy were the only two local stores to carry it. BB had the 2023 model, Target had a 2022 model with a sub-designation that was $50 cheaper. I went with Target because I didn’t care if it was an older model, just needed something good enough. Well, it wasn’t good enough, not even close. The color accuracy was so bad that the tint adjustment was useless — it was both too pink and too green no matter what. I dug out my old calibration disk and tried to adjust the color by isolating red/green/blue channels. The best-effort adjustments made it better, but still awful. I even connected it to the network (hardwire only, fuck “smart” appliances) just in case a firmware update helped. It did not, so back it went. Had to wait, multiple times in line and for someone to pull from the back, for like 45 minutes because they “don’t do exchanges” so I needed to do a song and dance to get the sale price on a replacement purchase. Got the replacement home, same deal. At that point I suspected it was leftover Black Friday junk.

    Took it back and went to Best Buy. Spent the extra $50. Perfect color out of the box. Lesson(s) learned.





  • Breath of the Wild on Switch. It had been a long long time since a game felt that immersive. I’d start a session, say to myself, “I’m gonna head towards this objective,” and four hours later I’d be in a completely different direction yet still entirely satisfied. Even the tutorial felt huge and weighty… at least until I was dumped into the wider world with only a suggestion and a general direction in which to go. I loved the hands-off approach. Everything felt organic. I remember being giddy playing Wind Waker at release, excited to get to explore the map once it opened… only to find that the first few far-off places I visited were locked behind items I didn’t have yet. With BotW, it felt like that decades-old disappointment was finally righted.



  • They’re already learning this.

    I am in a solidly blue district. 4 out of the 7 school board candidates, ALL of the non-incumbents, were running on some sort of “family values” or “parents’ rights” platform. A couple of them were within a few hundred votes of taking a seat last year. This year, their statements to media were highly scrubbed because they knew to tread carefully and avoid the dog whistles. And this week, one of them unseated an incumbent (and the only POC in the group). I’m glad the trend is going in the right direction nationally. But I wouldn’t call for a victory lap just yet.



  • As in they don’t know what the damn words mean.

    Most Americans have only heard the words used in the contexts that are being bitched about. And that’s intentional on behalf of the ruling class. It’s a framing of the conversation on a societal scale. More accurate information is out there, but to find it, one would need to either be intellectually curious (a dangerous trait to exhibit in the “wrong” setting) or stumble across it at random AND have the inclination to hear out something that goes against what they’ve been told their whole lives instead of rejecting it out of hand.

    And now we are neck deep in yet another round of anti-intellectualism to further compound the issue. I’m not trying to make excuses, just provide context that tends to get lost amongst the “Americans are stupid” narrative.