And that is what I would describe as the only kind of miracle I believe can actually happen.

Roughly on par with ‘bailed out of an airplane, crashed through some trees, landed in a snowbank, only suffered a few fractures and actually lived.’

Something like that happened a few times in WW2.

Yeah, I was gonna say, did the pilot live?

Good number of hydroplane/powerboat deaths/maimings over the years…

King of the Hill aired from '97 to '09.

… There are too many episodes for me to be able to pick out exactly which one this is from, what year it aired in…

But uh, fairly commonplace, reasonably affordable smartwatches, with the kind of functionality described… didn’t really become a thing until roughly the mid '10s.

Yes, there were earlier ‘smartwatches’, or things that could be argued to fall into that definition… but they were extremely niche, quite pricey.

Apple’s first smartwatch didn’t come out till 2015.

Smartphones, with touchscreens, did not really even exist at a reasonable price point, with significant numbers of people using them untill the latter third or quarter of KotH’s seasons.

Like I still remember having some clamshell, phyiscal keyboard ‘smartphone’ in 08 - 09.

Boy, you’re gonna carry that wait a long time.

I have no idea what a samurai pizza cat is or isn’t…

But I do have the indicated reaction to the intro of Gunsmith Cats.

I don’t really count as an artist, and I … guess mid 30s counts as old?

But I am finally in a living situation where I am not harassed by mentally unstable, incompetent narcissists, who seemingly invent a new neurosis that is now also my problem every week.

I finally have solitude, and can interact with people on my own terms, at my own pace, and I’ve seriously never had better baseline mental health.

I am loving the shit out of being a recluse!

… Sadly, the first thing that comes to mind, upon reading your comment…

First, we take Manhattan… then we take Berlin.

… I am hopeful that I can make it either to, or at least nearer to Canada, into a blue state, within the next year…

I am fully expecting shit to get very bad, very fast now.

… At least I am white… as sickening as that is for me to say… it does make me less of a target.

…

Spent the better part of two decades telling my friends and family that what is happening now … is the trajectory we are on, and we must enact change now, while we still can, to avert this path.

… I don’t talk to any of them any more, as they all thought I was insane…

They didn’t believe ‘it could happen here.’

And now, it has.

And most of them would either entirely deny that it ‘has happened’, as they are neck deep in QAnon/MAGA insanity…

…or they would tell me that simultaneously they don’t remember me explaining how and why this could happen, how it became more and more likely as the years went by… and also, at the same time, just remember me being hysterical, about something, vaguely, for no reason they can remember.

Welp we’ve got farm labor, cold turkey ‘detox’, no cell phones, communal bunks type rehab camps for… everyone on either hard drugs, or any kind of medically prescribed anti depressant or anti psychotic.

Thats still on the bingo card from RFK, to my knowledge, that hasn’t happened yet.

We’ve also got concentration camps guarded by I guess Blackwater (whatever they’re calling themselves now) for all homeless people, a few miles outside of major cities, and of course a 0 tolerance policy for existing in a major city while homeless.

That hasn’t happened yet, but Trump has outlined that idea a couple of times.

… that one will be super-fun as the economy crashes.

So… Trump has scared off the significant numbers of … well just any kind of immigrant, legal or illegal… farm laborers…

Cancelled a bunch of farmer loan assistance programs…

… And started a tariff trade war that makes it essentially impossible for them to… import needed materiel, export harvests… or even be able to plan for a future scenario with any kind of new established, solid trade paradigm.

… Man we’re all gonna starve, fucking great.

EDIT: Do not know how this did not occur to me initially:

American holodomor, anyone?

Because confirmation bias is a superior substitute to basic research, how else would one inform themselves about the world?

/s

What I’m suggesting is I am asking ChatGPT to validate my idea that all Filipinos have the same beliefs, wherever they are, almost as if their worldviews are entirely determined by their racial/ethnic origin.

Please stop and maybe read the things your write outloud before you post them…

… and you’d be wrong.

It does resemble a terrorist attack…

But if you watched the press conference with the chief of police (or the equivalent title)…

They have the suspect in custody, there were no specific threats to the event before hand, the suspect has a long history of mental illness, and the suspect has had many previous run ins with the police, ‘suspect is well known to the department’… gives me the impression this is a person who is having one kind of mental breakdown or another … every month or other week.

At one point a reporter asked if it was terrorism and the CoP basically says… that would require a political or ideological motivation.

The CoP … you could tell he was doing his best to divulge information he could without divulging information he couldn’t. He paused and tried to rephrase things a few times, openly struggled with … seemingly genuinely being unclear about what he was legally allowed to say.

If the person truly is seriously mentally ill, there may be additional laws in place protecting some extra level of their privacy, at least before charges are actually brought.

Put all that together, and it seems like this person has been just… very very seriously mentally ill for a long time, as in, too mentally ill to be capable of forming a coherent or describable ideology.

Or, at the very least, that seems to me to be what the police are saying.

I’m… I’m sorry clay. It’s not your fault.

Our mites, they just… they’re not compatible.

=(

/s/s/s

Yeeee-up.

… and TIL about eyelash mites.

Because we do not live in a Democracy with regular election seasons.

We live in a fascist oligarchy, which must constantly beam propoganda into the minds of its citizens.

…

Trump basically never stopped campaigning during the entirety of the Biden term, nor even for his fist term… despite being the President.

US political ad seasons are notorious for being … way too long, up to a year… compared to most functional demcracies, where this ad season is often several weeks, not several, or many months.

Trump ratcheted this lengthy American political ad season into just literally all the time.

Before him, a sitting President running ads… during the middle of their own term… I think its literally unprecedented. Sure they’d give addresses and speeches to the public in extraordinary situations… but not run what amount to campaign ads… just all the time.

This is the power of money and media in the digital age.

Tell the lies often enough, and they become real to the enthralled. Literally right out of Goebbels playbook.

It truly now just is cult reaffirming propoganda, in the derogatory 1984/dictator sense of propoganda

Trump has stated many times he’ll serve a third term. Told people they’d “never need to vote again.” He fully plans on being President untill he dies.

Ok, rhat’s … good…?

I’ve mentioned this to other people before over the years, and … basically 99% of other people have never heard of this concept/practice.

… I am a guy, and apparently I have significantly … thicker, fuller, natural eyelashes than most.

Or at least this is what several (now ex) gfs have told me, over the course of my roughly two decades of dating… that they are actually jealous of them. One joked about me being an eyelash donor to her, ala being a kidney donor or something like that.

Also, several of them, independently, as in… different cities, they aren’t in the same social group, come from significantly different backgrounds…

They would ask me to do what they called ‘butterfly kisses’ which is basically just fluttering your eyelashes together, at not quite as close as this range, but basically just 1 cm further back.

… Can anyone tell me if this is a thing that happens to other people, or has my life (and love life) just been very weird?

… Fucking obviously duh, yes, if abled bodied people generally got around via actually safe, seperated bike lanes, or busses, or light rail, or trolleys, or trains, then of course this would generally reduce traffic and generally improve other transit options within an urban area.

But the inciting incident of this whole discussion is:

People should just bicycle tens or hundreds of miles to get to national parks far away from urban areas.

This is still an absurd suggestion, even generally, for most people of average health/fitness/ability.

Ebikes are still not even a sensible solution to this in a practical, affordability sense: Entry level motorcycles have greater ranges, speeds, more comfortable rides at the same price point as an Ebike that has roughly half the range and speed.

Nobody even legally can drive an Ebike on a highway with a minimum speed limit of 50 mph.

Please learn how to read the entire context of a discussion before jumping into it.