Notices by allan (allan@mastodon.club)

@kai he sounds as fascinating and original as I imagined, probably more so.

Unlike most celebrity interviews, which I find tedious, I could read Nicolas Cage's takes on things forever.

@kai it's happened to me once before, where someone got a months old notification again. I don't know why though.

This interview with Nicolas Cage is everything I've ever wanted https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/07/magazine/nicolas-cage-interview.html

@kai 🤷 you did reply tho'

@ink_slinger maybe he was actually busking but you just didn't take the hint at all.

Granted I am biased since I am a vegetarian, and very often people do not respect that at all. Because they don't think my reasons for being a vegetarian are good ones.

I'm just going to say that if someone says they don't eat X, then it's pretty fucking shitty behaviour to serve them that. Even if their only reason is that they just don't like it.

I was reading this thread on MeFi https://www.metafilter.com/182435/Toxic-In-Laws and man, yikes.

There is a weird under-current of trying to stake out the line between legitimate dietary needs and one's the host is free to dismiss and oof.

I've always thought that however it is someone arrives at their dietary restrictions, it isn't up to me to decide whether or not that's "real" 😦

@kai are you saying there's something fishy about my line of reasoning??

I mean especially here, in the middle of the continent, I'm guessing the mystery seafood in the fish sticks you bought at superstore are probably not the most sustainable.

But I also try not to impose my dietary choices on others so you do you.

I mean we often treat it like if any creatures are not within our moral community then it's got to be seafood, and they aren't (typically) raised in abominable factory farms, have minimal GHG emissions, and aren't fish supposed to be especially healthy? Omega-3s or something?

Buuut collectively the world is fishing all major stocks to extinction. So....

I often find it exhausting having to explain why I'm a vegetarian because, for me, there is no single reason. Animal welfare, the evils of factory farming, climate change, personal health, it's also just cheaper. Take your pick, really...and then everyone says, what about fish?

😲

https://thenarwhal.ca/aquacalypse-now-end-fish/

@erinbee it's weird, there's urns and coffins and churches, so you could have a whole emoji funeral, but no final resting place

@mpjgregoire I think a similar thing was true in parts of what is now the Sahara and the Sahel. During wetter times in the past people moved into what had been deserts and made a life for themselves. I think that it ended doesn't negate everything that was created or render meaningless the lives of the people who lived there.

@mpjgregoire maybe the pueblo people of the American Southwest? iirc there was a window of a few centuries wherein the Southwest was much wetter and supported much more agriculture than it does now.

While we remember the end of that period and the return to desert times as (local) climate change destroying a civilization, it was climate change that made it possible in the first place...

@kai I have not been. I make a point of ignoring the US election since apparently it would be "fraud" for me to vote in it.

Relatedly, in The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells he talks about "the planet is warming, but it's not due to humans" talking point and how that is terrifyingly worse.

i.e. how is "the planet is warming and we can do nothing about it" better than "the planet is warming, due to human factors, which we control"?

This is a good take on "but the climate has changed before"

"I have never understood how anyone could find this comforting. The natural climate changes that have shaped human history have almost always been smaller and more regionally contained than the large-scale human-caused change we are currently experiencing. And even these changes have provoked suffering, scapegoating, and the collapse of civilizations."

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/hot-planet/lost-cities-and-climate-change/

@keithzg I also work hard to make sure everything I do spits out a csv or can be accessed as a datasource from within Excel, so nobody has to confront the horrifying reality that it's not actually a spreadsheet under the hood.

@kai I think databases are a great example of where people never invest enough in UI and it ruins everything for everyone. Non-db people only see the shitty UI, come to conflate the two, and think all databases are clunky unusable garbage.