IcedRaktajino

Random thought I had from another post made me curious if what I'm doing is weird or normal.

I don't have my dogs wear their collars inside. Before we go out, they sit while I put their collars on them, and when we come back in, I take them back off. Kind of like a "no shoes in the house" rule.

They're both trained to not bolt out the door (and the "get your collars on" routine definitely helped with that) and the yard is fenced, so I'm not worried if one or both would slip out. They're also both chipped and registered.

Why? I just feel like they'd be more comfortable without wearing them all the time. Plus, my older dog is basically Houdini when it comes to slipping hers off, so it has to be incredibly tight if I wanted to prevent her from slipping out of it.

Don't judge my dinner lol. It was a long day and I wanted something quick and easy. Defrosted the chops, got them ready to coat, and, what's this? No bags? Surely this must be a manufacturing anomaly.

Nope. I go back into the pantry and grab the newer box, open it, and....also no bags.

Had to waste one of the good, gallon-size Ziplocs for this.

How many fractions of a penny did they save (and not pass on to me) by not including the shake bags? Ugh!

In before anyone assumes I'm making a blanket statement: Not all podcasters are crackpots, but all crackpots seem to have a podcast.

Transcript:

Stan: Wait, Steve, give me your meme!

[Stan holds Steve's phone and meme up to the evil AI]

Stan: Does THIS make you feel better?

Evil AI: Stop! Will you?!

Stan: No! You have to look!

Evil AI: 1.6 million views? Who watches this shit?!

Like, would a skyscraper-style datacenter be practical? Or is just a matter of big, flat buildings being cheaper?

Sadly they're unavailable, but I want one of these so badly. I promise to only be minimally obnoxious with it.

Edit: Here's the product page if anyone's interested.

If anyone knows of a similar functional Bluetooth option like this, pleas share.

It’s never been a question of if Coogler would go back to Black Panther, but when: Marvel’s got quite a few heroes waiting on their sequels and have been MIA for a minute. Even so, the two Panther movies have done pretty well at the box office, and Shuri, M’Baku, and Namor are locked in for Avengers: Doomsday and Secret Wars. A third film was all but a given, especially after last November when Denzel Washington teased Coogler was eyeing him for a mystery role, something the director later confirmed.

The industry keeps echoing ideas from bleak satires and cyberpunk stories as if they were exciting possibilities, not grim warnings.

In a recent article published in the New York Times, author Casey Michael Henry argues that today's tech industry keeps borrowing dystopian sci-fi aesthetics and ideas -- often the parts that were meant as warnings -- and repackages them as exciting products without recognizing that they were originally cautionary tales to avoid. "The tech industry is delivering on some of the futuristic notions of late-20th-century science fiction," writes Henry. "Yet it seems, at times, bizarrely unaware that many of those notions were meant to be dystopian or satirical -- dismal visions of where our worst and dumbest habits could lead us."

You worry that someone in today's tech world might watch "Gattaca" -- a film that features a eugenicist future in which people with ordinary DNA are relegated to menial jobs -- and see it as an inspirational launching point for a collaboration between 23andMe and a charter school. The material on Sora, for instance, can feel oddly similar to the jokes about crass entertainment embedded in dystopian films and postmodern novels. In the movie "Idiocracy," America loved a show called "Ow! My Balls!" in which a man is hit in the testicles in increasingly florid ways. "Robocop" imagined a show about a goggle-eyed pervert with an inane catchphrase. "The Running Man" had a game show in which contestants desperately collected dollar bills and climbed a rope to escape ravenous dogs. That Sora could be prompted to imagine a game show in which Michel Foucault chokeslams Ronald Reagan, or Prince battles an anaconda, doesn't feel new; it feels like a gag from a 1990s writer or a film about social decay.

The echoes aren't all accidental. Modern design has been influenced by our old techno-dystopias -- particularly the cyberpunk variety, with its neon-noir gloss and "high tech, low life" allure. From William Gibson novels to films like "The Matrix," the culture has taken in countless ruined cityscapes, all-controlling megacorporations, high-tech body modifications, V.R.-induced illnesses, deceptive A.I. paramours, mechanical assassins and leather-clad hacker antiheroes, navigating a dissociative cyberspace with savvily repurposed junk-tech. This was not a world many people wanted to live in, but its style and ethos seem to reverberate in the tech industry's boldest visions of the future.