Category: Random

Make a pact with yourself.  Draw blood.  Break the pact.

Write down 9 essential qualities of mentorship.

Call an old friend with whom you nurse a grudge.  Air it out.

Imagine yourself naked, on a donkey, going where you customarily buy cheese.

— Read on substack.com/@danbern/p-152080379

Smit fell just short of the department’s minimum height of five feet and nine inches, but was able to join the force in 1966 after he had his cousin hit him over the skull with a nightstick, allowing him to meet the height minimum when he was remeasured the following day with the bump on his head.

— Read on en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Smit

This person posted a bunch of images of their dad’s old VHS tapes with lovingly hand-drawn labels indicating their contents. Kids, this is what people did before the internet.

Link

But deep down, what motivates them is the same twitch in the eye that brought me to the subreddit in the first place. “I’m not a very rageful person,” Gatto said, “but for some reason, these lights brought it out of me. And I kind of realized that’s why I had to do something about it. Because no one’s going to come help us.”

— Read on theringer.com/2024/12/03/tech/headlight-brightness-cars-accidents

But now we have a word for it – for outputs driven by metrics and features divorced from the reality they are meant to capture – slop.

— Read on bradleyrobb.net/notes/183/

The best available model of such an event is an ultrasecret 1983 Pentagon war game called Proud Prophet. That game was a nuclear test of sorts, and it provided critical lessons that remain crucial today. It was unique in that by design it was largely unscripted, involved the highest levels of the U.S. military and its global warfighting commands and used actual communication channels, doctrines and secret war plans. One of its great strengths was that unlike any other war game involving the possibility of small-yield nuclear weapons, it ran freely and was allowed to play out to its natural conclusion: global devastation.

— Read on www.nytimes.com/2024/12/02/magazine/nuclear-strategy-proud-prophet.html

The most important story about why Americans have become sad and alienated and rude, I believe, is also the simplest: We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration. Our society has become one in which people feel licensed to give their selfishness free rein.

— Read on www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/09/us-culture-moral-education-formation/674765/

Finally, blue ink is unserious. Use black like an adult.

— Read on www.theverge.com/2024/11/25/24305832/sam-altman-pen-notebook-muji-uniball

Enter: Nerds Gummy Clusters.

The effort seems to have worked. In 2018, Nerds products brought in $40 million in sales. In the past calendar year, the company said, that number jumped to $800 million, a 20-fold increase in about six years.

— Read on www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/us/nerds-gummy-clusters.html

Experts say you should spend no more than 10 minutes on the john.

— Read on www.12onyourside.com/2024/11/12/heres-how-long-doctors-say-is-too-long-sit-toilet/