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Cake day: March 6th, 2025

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  • Pets help us understand our own mortality in ways that continue to surprise me. When I was young, the first pet I lost was a young cat, just a few years old. I raised her from a kitten that was probably too young to ween so we had a close bond. She was indoor/outdoor and was attacked by a neighbor’s dog during the day when I was gone. Holding her and watching her die broke me, like she waited all day to die in my arms. She was mine and I felt like I let her down. Woof, it hurt. Still does.

    But while I was holding her, our family dog (Allison) was next to me. She was older than I was, a feisty Lhasa Apso that had lost her ability to hold her bladder. We diapered her: we’d cut a hole in human diapers to pull her tail through to keep the hardwoods from getting ruined. She died a year later, after living a full life.

    I buried both of them in the front yard, under a couple of pines that bordered our neighbor’s pet cemetery. Both times, digging those holes gave me the time I needed to be able to return them to the earth and say goodbye. I learned so much from their passing. It is the last gift our pets give us, their final act of love.

    Now, older, with kids of my own, we have Sadie, who I am looking at as I write this. She’s a rescue, probably a golden mixed with some border collie, at least 16 years old. Her sister died last year and it was the first close death my kids experienced. Her passing taught my kids the alchemy of aging gracefully, the privilege of old age. Now, they find charm in Sadie’s rickety hips and excuse her incontinence. Getting old is okay; we are lucky to be able to do it. Watching your loved ones get old is a privilege we should cherish.

    Edit: I wanted to thank OP for posting this. Reading your observations of your aging cat brought It all forward.




  • This article focuses specifically on the warming and the depletion of oxygen in our rivers. I watched the video, but I didn’t read the text. I think it is just a transcript from the video.

    The best way to save any part of our environment is to get more people to engage with it. Whether that is fishing on a river, hiking through the woods, or any other outdoor activity. These activities have routinely been proven clinically to improve a person’s health and well-being. If we can get more people participating in this positive feedback loop, we will have more interest and political will to protect our environment.

    It’s only mentioned that warming in general is causing the lack of oxygen in the rivers. Well, what is causing the warming? They mentioned sedimentation, but they don’t connect that more large rain events lead to more sedimentation, more sediment in the rivers absorbs more sunlight and holds heat. They mentioned removing old dams to make the water run faster which will keep it cooler. That’s a great thing to do, but we really need to focus on increasing the buffer zones between rivers and development and showing up the banks along our rivers.






  • When we talk about time travel in fictional universes, almost all of the narratives follow one of three “truths:”

    1. Time is one linear thread. What you do now will have consequence X and if you do something different it will have consequence Y. A simple illustration is the movie Sliding Doors. But the same can be said for Back to the Future or Bill and Ted’s. If you make a change to the prime timeline, it will ripple into the past/future. Your cousins will disappear from the 3x5 photo!

    2. Time has branches, a truly infinite number of universes and possibilities. Really, as far as I’m concerned, the best example of this idea is Rick and Morty. That show has the freedom to both cook our brains about the concept and also hold a mirror to its ridiculousness. You also see it more famously in the MCU, with their multitude of Lokis and such, though the TVA is still hell-bent on a prime timeline. But the multiverse is the natural order, with only 80s inspired bureaucracy to keep it in check.

    3. Time is a combination of the two, which leads us to Trek. Time is linear, so Jake Sisko can tell his dad to dodge a beam that travels at light speed. But time is also non-linear, so… I dunno… most of Voyager. When Seven came aboard with her temporal node all bets were off as far as what could even be considered a prime timeline.

    Moreso, the mirror universe is a parallel to our own, marching along at the same pace and whose characters are developing at the same rate as the prime timeline. So, there is no prime timeline, and no multiverse. Just the clean-shaven and the goatee universes.

    And to answer your question: yes, I think Trek trends toward a “prime” timeline. It’s honestly the way our brains work. With all the posturing of the wormhole aliens, we just don’t work in a non-linear fashion. And maybe more importantly, good stories don’t work that way either, Kurt Vonnegut aside. Time travel is wearing plot armor in EVERY movie and show because no one has a handle on it.

    Thank you for bringing this up. It’s something I think about too much.





  • There are a bajillion, but maybe you are looking for a specific genre that nails it on the head.

    As someone mentioned, there are thousands of social drama films that could’ve easily happened. The success of that type of film is selling a “day in the life” plot.

    Someone else mentioned Office Space. That film is a satire, but it condenses and delivers refined representations of the banality of cubicle life that we all can easily relate to. The characters truly seem to be facsimiles of people we’ve known in our working lives.

    Someone else mentioned Michael Clayton. It’s an excellent thriller with flawed characters with believable motives that yes, it could be real. And maybe something like that has happened?

    What genre will help us answer your question?


  • We all have to ask why this is happening, because it sure as hell isn’t because of immigration or fentanyl. If the powers that be are trying to trigger another Great Depression, what is their end goal?

    In the US, since the 60s, we have been steadily marching towards the complete privatization of all industries. With the current administration clearly dismantling the federal government and saying things like opening up the public parks for private interests, I think this is their end game. The first Great Depression led to strong government intervention; now, with a mere shell of a federal government, the only ones poised to act after a second Great Depression would be entrenched corporations.

    They will buy all the land from bankrupt farmers and carve the US up into smaller corporate States. Individual Americans will own nothing. The corporate States will jockey back and forth to drive profits up at the expense of all natural and labor resources.

    It will be hell.