OK, so you guys showed me McDonald's jacked prices at least 130% on the core budget item: the mcchicken. Mentally recalculating McDs as "literally more than twice as expensive is a doozy, sure but what I really wanna know: did they do any shrinkflation on top of that to really wring out the margin? Smaller patties, cups, fries, cheese or something? Or was it all just pure price action?

It just occurred to me, due to a nostr bug, that it might actually be pretty cool to have social media hide *who authored* the posts on your TL to force a kind of double-blind perspective. You'd know the post or reply is (or probably is) from one of the people you follow, but you wouldn't be so quick to agree (and perhaps might even be more willing to disagree) if you aren't just smashing the heart button as a reflex because you like the guy. It might make discussions more communal and disagreements less personal if you knew that you're still talking to someone you generally like and respect, but you don't know whether it's "that one guy on the internet" or, like, your actual Mom. (Nostr, due to ramshackle Tor support, often displays notes from people without correctly fetching their profiles for me, so I find myself liking or replying or following people without having any idea as to their nym or avatar)

🫂

"Stop resisting, Stop resisting!" is one of the most instantly recognizable phrases of the new American century. When you read the words, you can probably still hear them shouted in your head, the echoing memory of a generational trauma, the indelible recollection of the moment that the citizen became subordinate to the state.

Compliance is a dirty word.

Starting to see some nice lifestyle photos on nostr. Gentlest touch of an Instagram vibe, but less commercial. Positive.

Angry about Armenia. Angry about a lot of things. So many feelings, so little to say.

I'm never going to take a "recovered alien body" photo seriously if it looks humanoid. We flatter ourselves thinking they'd look like us. You want my attention, you need to show me a cuttlefish adapted for space. It better not be cute, either. It needs that "long-distance trucker estranged from his family" energy. I need to feel so sorry looking at that poor bastard that I get jet lag by proxy.

yeah the fudge-rounds line was dumb but my man is singing his heart out

I know everybody is dunking on the random governor who decided that she could just wave her hand and unilaterally suspend any right she dislikes simply by hissing the word "emergency," but the problem is that she's only wrong if another political force — the courts, politics, disobedience, or Locke's old Appeal to Heaven — proves her wrong. Enforcing the limits of official power isn't some American $currentYear problem, it's a recurring issue throughout history. The question is why we're suddenly seeing the authoritarian instinct activating so much more openly — and frequently. In prior decades, they had to be cute in how they went about it, often requiring laws and lies. Now they're remarkably comfortable simply stating "because of the 'emergency,' you can no longer {travel | donate | engage in commerce | read | communicate | carry}," and that's the whole of it. The next question is what you're going to do about it.