to It would be easy to say this is “yet another example of how boomers destroyed culture,” but it would be more apt to blame how capitalism’s exploitation of baby-boomers destroyed culture.
In the first couple hundred years or so of the middle class’s existance, young people grew up inside an extended family and learned social roles by emulating their elders. Being a good host or hostess, and a good guest, were values that society recognized as skill-based. Hence, elders actively taught those skills and young people actively learnt them. But come along the baby boom, with an unprecedented combination of wealth and relative numbers, and corporations rushed to define a “teenager” market segment that they could profit from directly by separating their demographic off from the more stable “middle class family” demographic. So “teenage culture” emerged, and they myth of the “generation gap”, and baby boomers never learned the more sophisticated skills of being good guests and good hosts. And hence, many of those skills are only available to people who like hiding out in the HM435-HM477 sections of the library stacks. So here are two little hints from my time in the UBC main library, tested and proven over nearly half a century:
1) When you host a gathering, you have a duty of care to your guests. You have a legal duty of care to keep them reasonably safe, and you have a social duty of care to help them be reasonably comfortable. So try to greet each guest as they arrive, remember their name and something interesting about them, and –> introduce them by name to someone else at the party who might find that thing interesting too.<– Sample script: “Bill, I want you to meet Emma. She is restoring a ‘65 Barracuda, similar to the one you restored.” After your guests are mostly finished arriving, keep an eye on your guests and when one is backed into a corner behind the potted palm looking miserable, go fetch them and introduce them to someone else. Sample script: “Oh, Phyllis, there you are! Have you met Toby yet? Toby! You should really tell Phyllis about your pet tortoise!”
2) When you are a guest and you get buttonholed in this way, help out your host by at least pretending to be interested in ‘65 Barracudas or pet tortoises, and asking the other guest something. Ask them anything. Or if you see the guy moping behind the potted palm before your host does, approach them and ask them something. The key is, use the words “what” or “where” or “how” to ask the question, rather than “do/did …?” That way they cannot simply, desperately, answer “yes” or “no” and have to tell you something you can build on. And don’t worry about “not wanting to pry”. People tend to really like to talk about themselves, provided you give them leeway to decide what part of themselves to talk about. Sample script: “Lucky you! How did you manage to get your hands on a ‘65 Barracuda/pet tortoise?” Or if you didn’t get a prompt from your busy host, “What canapés are the tastiest?” or the old standbys Sample script: “what school do you go to/what are you studying/what do you do in your spare time when you’re not at a cocktail party?”
You can actually memorize just one of these open-ended questions and use it in nearly every circumstance; and then follow up by noticing what the answer makes you curious about, and asking that.
i think it’s very sweet that jack and barbossa are undeniably the two worst pirate lords just like in terms of meeting their job expectations
the other seven of them all have full fleets that they command from the sprawling luxury of their estates where they sit atop amassed decades of wealth these two assholes have spent fifteen years fighting over the same oversized dinghy
reverse ‘i knew about it before it was cool’. i refuse to consume it until it is borderline irrelevant.
pros of doing this:
-all the good, classic fanfics have been neatly collated for you on various rec lists by now and you can just go at it like a wild hog with a box of chocolates
-even better, most longfic is either done or went on hiatus enough years back that you aren’t gonna get your hopes up
-no more fandom drama, everyone either grew up or left
-the remaining die-hard weirdos are happy to see a new face around the old place
-it’s never too late for a fandom revival
-did i mention the fanfic
cons of doing this:
-absolutely none whatsoever
omg there’s words for how i engage with visual media
showing up to fandoms five years late with Starbucks is a time-honored tradition. it’s also what informs my fashion sense.
$43 billion for vanity. Elon would turn Twitter into a cesspool.
“Musk says he wants to ‘free’ the internet. But what he really aims to do is make it even less accountable than it is now, when it’s often impossible to discover who is making the decisions about how algorithms are designed, who is filling social media with lies, who’s poisoning our minds with pseudo-science and propaganda, and who’s deciding which versions of events go viral and which stay under wraps.“ - Robert Reich
Make no mistake: this is not about freedom. It’s about power.
We’re watching the Return of the King right now, and got to the part where Denethor is introduced. My husband asks me for the context of why Denethor is Like That, since I just finished reading the book. So I explained how Denethor has been using a Palantir for years to get information, and how Sauron has been manipulating him by only letting him see events that give him a worst possible impression of reality.
So my husband replies “Oh! So Denethor is basically just like your grandpa after he starts getting all his news from Fox.” And honestly, yeah pretty much.
Warn people before you make statements like that. I was not ready.
Despite some of its misses, Firefox still matters. Mozilla is pushing companies to be more private, and its key product is different at its core. The browser market is dominated by Google’s Chromium codebase and its underlying browser engine, Blink, the component that turns code into visual web pages. Microsoft’s Edge Browser, Brave, Vivaldi, and Opera all use adapted versions of Chromium. Apple makes developers use its WebKit browser engine on iOS. Other than that, Firefox’s Gecko browser engine is the only alternative in existence.
“This market needs variety,” Willemsen says. If Firefox diminishes further, there’ll be less competition for Chrome. “We need that difference for open internet standards, for the sake of preventing monopolies,” Willemsen says. Others agree. Everyone we spoke with for this story—inside and outside of Mozilla—says having Firefox flourish makes the web a better place. The trick is figuring out how to get there.
Download and start using Firefox if you don’t already, I made the switch back to Firefox after not using it for years and being a chrome person until 2020 and have never regretted it
I really wish Mozilla would release a full desktop browser for chromebooks, because running the mobile version on a laptop is insufferable.
