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dwildstr.bsky.social
Mathematician, tinkerer, crocheter, freelance geek.
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It’s like a coworker coming up to you and saying “hey have you noticed Carl hums really loudly when he has headphones on” and then when you you’re like “yeah I’ve noticed that, it’s kinda annoying” they ask if you want to help burn his house down, they’ve already tied up his family inside.

submitted 3 days ago • 14 comments

This plaque in Prague has been rubbed to a shiny gold because for centuries, passersby have touched the dog for good luck, and also to reassure him that he's a very good boy. 14/10

submitted 33 days ago • 140 comments

Brief vexillological confusion in Göteborg, Sweden. Saw a rally in Järntorget with blue and yellow flags but not the Scandinavian cross. Some sort of anti-Scandi Swedish splinter group? Of course not, and anywhere with different national colors I'd recognize support for Ukraine immediately.

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

hey if you aren't american i'd strongly reconsider traveling to the US for any sort of convention

submitted 7 days ago • 21 comments

Today I learned that The Exciters' most well-known song, "Tell Him", was actually a cover of a Dean Parrish original. The Exciters' biggest original hit was "Doo Wah Diddy Diddy", much better known via the Manfred Mann cover. It always takes two recordings for a song to blossom, I guess.

submitted 17 days ago • 0 comments

I did not know this (although apparently it's been well-known in queer and genderfluid spaces): the halakhic tradition in Judaism identifies at least seven genders (some add an eighth, the _aylonit adam_, which is not in the text but is implied).

submitted 18 days ago • 1 comment

If it were just "hey, it's a fork with extra tines, for your extra-tiney fork needs", I'd say, whatevs, you do you, have as many tines as you like. But the whole "more tines = more manly" assertion is some sort of dispatch from gender-performance bizarro world.

submitted 23 days ago • 0 comments

A dear friend of mine asked me: "Ben ... serious question: What the fuck do we do? We ordinary citizens without access to any real levers of power." I wrote him a lengthy reply which he said he found helpful, so I thought I'd share it here. 🧵 1/

submitted 33 days ago • 31 comments

Dinner at Louisville's best restaurant tonight, having the epiphany that the problem with the very rich is that they don't have things like this. I mean, they can have this exact thing, but it won't feel special for them and they're never going to feel this fulfilled by it.

submitted 30 days ago • 0 comments

It’s not illegal to like this, share it and even copy the picture and make your own post. These are four of the six people that have been gutting the treasury department. They are between 19 and 24 years old.

submitted 33 days ago • 156 comments

On Colombia: we've been sending planes of deportees there for years. But this was an unscheduled military flight, with restrained passengers. Colombia demanded a return to prior practice. After trade skirmish, the US agreed to return to status quo ante. The attempted power projection _failed_.

submitted 40 days ago • 0 comments

Let's talk about resistance when the tyrant is in power. Sharing a blog-formatted version of my thread using this odd little yellow building in Florence to look at resistance that still worked *after* the conquest, and the power of slowing the shifting baseline: www.exurbe.com/6014-2/

submitted 41 days ago • 0 comments

However, despite Roche's reputation for bewilderingly (but often hilariously) incompetent language, the bird thing was actually a paraphrase of a line from Thomas Jevon's comic play _The Devil of a Wife_. It's been educational, but I still don't know how or why a bird is in two places at once.

submitted 44 days ago • 0 comments

Today I had cause to utter a strange nonsensical assertion I remembered without attribution: "A man cannot be in two places at once, unless he is a bird." That turns out to be from Ambrose Bierce's _Devil's Dictionary_, itself quoting malapropism-ridden Irish MP Sir Boyle Roche.

submitted 44 days ago • 0 comments

And in less successful anime analogies, I decided five minutes into the first episode of Dandadan that it was an expressive high school drama like Kare Kano. By the end, I'd concluded I'd chosen the wrong gonzo Gainax boondoggle to compare to: it's much more like FLCL.

submitted 70 days ago • 0 comments

Today Shell suggested we watch Pantheon. Midway through the first scene, even before plot similarities, I was getting Serial Experiments: lain vibes (I think maybe Maddie's backpack reminded me of Lain's pajamas, or something). Apparently I'm not the only one seeing similarities though.

submitted 70 days ago • 0 comments

It took me 44 years to learn of the existence of Rufus Harley (1936-2006), the first (and very nearly unique) jazz bagpiper.

submitted 97 days ago • 0 comments

There's a take-a-poem, leave-a-poem box in Bremerton, and now you can submit poems online! I sent in my bredlik interpretation of William Carlos Williams's "This is Just to Say", because, hey, what else am I going to do with it? indieauthors.social/@garrett/113...

submitted 109 days ago • 0 comments