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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • The sad part for me was hearing his “I like my sootcase” viral clip. That kid has a strong Slovenian accent, and the only person around him with that accent is his mother. Even if she was his primary caretaker, his accent would have been dulled by the fact that he’s around so many Americans with American accents… But nope, that accent is every bit as strong as his mother’s. The poor kid likely never gets attention from anyone except Melania. He has almost certainly been isolated from everyone around him for a long time, because he has really only picked up on his mother’s accent.

    And that kind of isolation will wreak havoc on a developing child.



  • Yeah, the reintroduction of buffalo to America is the single most successful repopulation effort in history. Buffalo were nearly extinct in America. To start the reintroduction efforts, they had to buy a few breeding pairs from private owners who had captured them for their ranches. If I remember correctly, every buffalo in modern north America came from that group of only 3 bulls and 9 cows. And now the buffalo population has resurged to the point that they’re not even on the threatened list anymore. Their population will never reach the same point that it was at its peak (c.1700, there were an estimated 29 million buffalo in North America), but they’re at least not in danger of going extinct. They reproduce relatively quickly, and babies are likely to survive, so herds grow relatively quickly if left unmanaged.

    The issue with buffalo burgers (and the reason they’re not in more restaurants) is that buffalo are hard to farm commercially. They make bad animal husbandry candidates, because they’re extremely territorial and get aggressive towards people. So farming them is something that needs to be done with a lot of caution, and buffalo farms likely won’t ever reach the same kinds of sizes as modern cattle farms.


  • Most native food is composed primarily of buffalo meat, fish, corn, tomatoes, potatoes, and berries. Basically just whatever they happened to be able to find and/or farm. Buffalo chili is phenomenal, (buffalo is red meat that is much leaner than beef, so it tastes a lot like beef chili without all of the grease) but maybe not something that you’d want to try as your first undertaking.

    Fry bread is quick and easy, but a little bit messy if you’re not accustomed to frying things. Fry bread was often used by many tribes as a sort of base for many of their dishes, sort of like tortillas in Mexican cuisine. It’s dense and fluffy at the same time, because the dough bubbles unevenly as it fries.

    And speaking of Mexican cuisine, there is a lot of overlap between native dishes and traditional Mexican dishes, because many native tribes (especially the ones in the southern US) were proto-Aztecan cultures. Remember how I mentioned tomatoes? Mexican salsa has roots in native cuisine. Hell, my own tribe’s language has the same roots as Aztec, the same way english and German are both derived from the same root language.


  • You may want to look up the study “Speaker sex and perceived apportionment of talk” for a potential explanation of why this could be happening.

    Basically, psychologists did a study where they asked participants to rate excerpts from a play. They started by attempting to control for male and female “role” bias from the script itself; They had university students read the scripts (with “A” and “B” listed as the speakers’ names, gendered pronouns swapped for neutral pronouns, etc) and try to intuit the sex of the characters in the play. So this gave them a baseline on the socially perceived gender of the roles in the script. So if one role was filling a more traditionally feminine or masculine role, had more fem/masc speech patterns, etc, this part of the study was designed to check for that.

    Next, they had actors perform the script, and took some recorded excerpts to play for participants. The excerpts had a male and female actor, and the participants needed to rate how long they believed the excerpt was, and how much they believed each actor spoke, from 0-100% of the conversation. So for instance, if they believed the female actor spoke 40% of the time, they would list 40 for her and 60 for the male actor.

    Virtually every single participant (both male and female) over-estimated the female actor’s participation to some degree. Female participants were closer to reality, but male participants were pretty far off. Some of the male participants began saying the woman was an equal contributor when she was only speaking 25-30% of the time. Interestingly, these numbers were closer to reality (not totally accurate, but closer) when they flipped the script (literally) and had the actors play the opposite roles. So the female actor was now playing the “male” (determined by the earlier script reads) part of the script. So societal role expectation does play some part in the determination… But it’s not the entire reason.

    It could be a large part of why so many terminally online men pipe up about “feminism is ruining my hobbies” whenever more than a token woman is added to media. Because many men genuinely feel like women are an equal contributor when they’re only a small fraction. Does it excuse the behavior? Absolutely not. But it could at least begin to explain it.


  • Yeah, the comment sounds a lot like an American tourist being afraid to step a single foot off of their beach resort in Cancun. In these instances, the fear comes more from the lack of experience, and not knowing some of the biggest pitfalls that locals avoid to stay safe. Things that the locals won’t even think about, because avoiding it is just so engrained as habit.





  • In doing so, they needed to reduce inventory, so they gave away the old laptops (sans drives) to their employees. I now own the same laptop (or a very similar one)!

    Yeah, IT fleet upgrades are a great way to snag some decent hardware for dirt cheap. My Plex server is running on an old HP EliteDesk that came from a cubicle. The hardware itself is often practically new, because corporate drones rarely do anything intensive enough to actually push the hardware. Just give it a quick spray with some canned air, and pop a new drive in.


  • Goodwin was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2015 for 1st degree criminal sexual act and 1st degree sexual abuse, according to state prison records… The victims were a 7-year-old boy and a 9-year-old girl, according to the state sex offender’s registry.

    I’d argue that the article went a step farther and listed the exact crimes he was found guilty of. Your version leaves some ambiguity in regards to the nature of the sexual assault, (first degree, second degree, aggravated or not, misdemeanor vs felony, etc) whereas “first degree sexual abuse” and “first degree criminal sexual act” are terms that anyone can google and find the legal definition for. The article was even more specific than your example, and yet you’re still complaining that they didn’t say he sexually assaulted someone?


  • It says he was convicted of sexual assault. Depending on the state’s laws, that could be different from rape. Even if we colloquially would call it rape, that may not be the legal definition. So any news reporters would potentially be opening themselves to libel lawsuits if they use the word “rape” instead of “sexual assault”. Because again, he wasn’t explicitly convicted of rape.

    Hell, that’s what got Trump off of a rape charge, because the state he was sued in had a very narrow legal definition of the word “rape”. The definition required penis-in-vagina sex. He “only” (ugh) groped and fingered the victim, so the state’s narrow definition didn’t consider it to be rape. Even if we would colloquially call it rape, that’s not what the state’s legal system determined it to be.

    In Trump’s case, the judge later had to clarify that using the word “rape” is socially acceptable for what he did, because it would be what most people would consider rape, even if it’s not what the state has on the books. But the judge only did that because Trump is a public figure who was threatening to sue any news orgs that called it rape. This random rapist wouldn’t get that same kind of clarification from a judge, because their story wouldn’t be likely to hit national news for weeks.