Category: thoughts

The Rise and Fall of Branson

Posted on by Phoebe Gleeson

Branson exists, for me at least, as a kind of sign. It’s the abandoned suburban shopping mall of the Ozarks—or at least is fast becoming that. But it’s more than that, and has always been more than that. It’s been a sign for a number of things, the best and the worst things in showbiz and the best and worst things in the American economy.

http://distributistreview.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-branson/

Games to Play With Your Child in Which You Barely Have to Move or Talk

Posted on by Phoebe Gleeson

This does unfortunately involve your child climbing all over you, but definitely there are days when I’m like, “Do I want to actively engage with someone who’s enthusiastically screaming for me to run around like a lunatic or would I rather just lie there peacefully as he steps on my eye?”

Me, just this morning, in fact. ”Feels like a deep tissue massage,” I told myself.

http://www.theuglyvolvo.com/games-to-play-with-your-child-in-which-you-barely-have-to-move-or-talk/

Mesonet Ticker: 64 TRILLION

Posted on by Phoebe Gleeson

64,332,596,941,385 gallons of water. That’s right, about 332 million gallons of water more than 64 TRILLION gallons of water. To put that in perspective, that’s 1 gallon more than 64,332,596,941,384 gallons of water. And most of that fell from April-July and November-December. The other 6 months were duds for the most part.

Gary McManus is so funny. And dayum that is a lot of rain!

http://ticker.mesonet.org/select.php?mo=01&da=12&yr=2016

Sigh. More abuse allegations.

Posted on by Phoebe Gleeson

[Georg] Ratzinger himself had a reputation as a taskmaster, which was not unusual for the culture of the time, in Germany and in the Catholic Church…

In the 2010 interview, Georg Ratzinger said that he, too, would use corporal punishment on the boys.

“At the beginning I also repeatedly administered a slap in the face, but always had a bad conscience about it,” he told the German newspaper. Corporal punishment was made illegal in 1980.

Ratzinger said a slap in the face was the easiest reaction to a failure to perform or a poor performance, and the force of the slap varied widely.

It’s mostly physical abuse in question here, with some sexual assaults mixed in. How awful. Lord, have mercy.

http://www.religionnews.com/2016/01/09/german-church-choir-abuse-claims-hit-close-to-home-for-retired-pope-benedict-xvi/

Undertale is everywhere

Posted on by Phoebe Gleeson

Undertale is a game about choice.

The big hook is that you can choose to never (physically) harm anybody. Over the course of a playthrough’s 6-10 hour runtime, you’ll encounter plenty of battles (random or otherwise), but you don’t have to fight in any of them. You can always pick non-violent, contextual means of interacting with monsters—everything from petting dogs to initiating flexing contests with a douchebro horse man—and spare them in the end.

Faith is SO INTO this game right now.

http://steamed.kotaku.com/undertale-the-kotaku-review-1739735669

http://undertale.com/

throwing darts in lovers’ eyes

Posted on by Phoebe Gleeson

I was disbelieving when Sean told me David Bowie died. “David Bowie? The David Bowie?” as if there was some other one, as if it was a prank. It’s the kind of thing Sean does sometimes, intentionally allowing me to misinterpret his words to comic effect. But no. The David Bowie is dead.

I didn’t know he was sick. Or maybe I did. I knew he’d just had a birthday, and that he was 69, and that he had just released a new album. To be honest I had lost track of David Bowie a bit. The last album I had purchased of his was Earthling, released (wow) 19 years ago. I went through a brief but thorough Bowie obsession in my early twenties, which in hindsight was the last hurrah of an adolescent becoming an adult. I had such a crush! My crush was on an impossibility even moreso than the actual man, of course: I simultaneously desired and desired to be Bowie, specifically the Thin White Duke era Bowie.

I was a coder for Seagate then, right before the turn of the century, and hearing many Bowie songs, especially from Diamond Dogs or Station to Station, sends me back in the way that only music or a familiar scent can. How does that work? I don’t know. I was thin and beautiful and young, and terrifically unhappy, and thought I would always be that way. I had just ended a long-term relationship with my high school boyfriend, and had two intense but poorly thought out relationships that mostly consisted of passionate sex and tearful phone calls.

Have you sought fortune, evasive and shy?
Drink to the men who protect you and I
Drink, drink, drain your glass, raise your glass high

It’s not the side-effects of the cocaine
I’m thinking that it must be love
It’s too late to be grateful

It’s too late to be late again
It’s too late to be hateful

And then I met Sean, and all my desire became focused quite properly on him, and it has ever since. It was just that sudden, too. I can remember feeling such a deep longing that is now just gone, and has been since late 1998.

But for a time, David Bowie consumed me, and I will miss him.

Students prefer jolt of pain to being made to sit and think

Posted on by Phoebe Gleeson

So unbearable did some find it that they took up the safe but alarming opportunity to give themselves mild electric shocks in an attempt to break the tedium.

Two-thirds of men pressed a button to deliver a painful jolt during a 15-minute spell of solitude. One man – an outlier – found thinking so disagreeable he opted for a shock 190 times.

I have spent thousands of hours doing nothing but thinking over the last sixteen years. Well, I mean, I was holding or nursing a baby, but still. Immobilized and with only my thoughts. These people are lightweights.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jul/03/electric-shock-preferable-to-thinking-says-study

Peppa Pig and its perplexing mysteries

Posted on by Phoebe Gleeson

So, Dorothy and Quine both like Peppa Pig. As children’s shows go, this one is pretty cute, yet puzzling. Because when you watch two hours of it, you have questions like, “Why does everyone live on a hill?” and “Why does Mrs. Rabbit do all the jobs?”

http://www.denofgeek.com/tv/peppa-pig/31729/the-perplexing-mysteries-of-peppa-pig

The question I asked before any play date: ‘Do you keep guns in your house?’

Posted on by Phoebe Gleeson

When Faith and Abby were little, before Bede was born or possibly right after, we visited the home of a family we went to Mass with. They had two boys, a little younger than my girls, say infant and 2 year old. Very active, playful little boys. And, I was shocked to learn, they had (loaded) rifles on the wall in two rooms, and a live steel sword leaning up in a corner, unsheathed. She was maybe just flustered but it seemed more like she was irritated when I asked her to put the weapons somewhere my children couldn’t touch them while we were visiting.

We didn’t go back to their house.

Since then, I have always asked, “Do you have any guns or other weapons, and where do you keep them?” If the answer is not secure enough for my liking, we don’t visit. Kids are so quick, and so clever.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/parenting/wp/2015/03/31/the-question-i-ask-before-any-play-date/

How Long Was Bill Murray Stuck In Groundhog Day?

Posted on by Phoebe Gleeson

Director and fellow ‘Ghostbuster’ Harold Ramis originally stated that he thought Murray’s character had been stuck in Punxsutawney for ten years, however in 2009 he admitted the estimate was far too short.

“It takes at least 10 years to get good at anything,” said Ramis, “and allotting for the down time and misguided years he spent, it had to be more like 30 or 40 years.”

The teens+friends watched Groundhog Day today. It was met with approval, and much discussion afterward about it was had.

How Long Was Bill Murray Stuck In Groundhog Day?

How Facebook’s news feed algorithm works.

Posted on by Phoebe Gleeson

Once a change like Tas’ has been tested on each of these audiences, he’ll present the resulting data at one of the news feed team’s weekly “ranking meetings” and field a volley questions from colleagues as to its effect on various metrics. If the team is satisfied that the change is a positive one, free of unintended consequences, the engineers in charge of the code on the iOS, Android, and Web teams will gradually roll it out to the public at large.

Even then, Facebook can’t be sure that the change won’t have some subtle, longer-term effect that it had failed to anticipate. To guard against this, it maintains a “holdout group”—a small proportion of users who don’t see the change for weeks or months after the rest of us

.

It’s like the 10th Man from World War Z!

Essay about how Facebook shapes the feed. I keep mine set to “Most Recent” and kid myself that I am in control. Ha, ha!

How Facebook’s News Feed Algorithm Works