Christopher-McKitterick.com. Science fiction, personal growth, writing, urban wildlife, equality, astronomy, mental health, the human condition - original content and lotsa reblogs. Fandoms include Alien, ATLA, Babylon 5, Leverage, Lilo & Stitch, Mad Max Fury Road, Pacific Rim, Star Trek, Star Wars, & more. SF, poetry, & nonfiction writer - my newest short fiction won the AnLab Reader's Award. Educator, intersectional feminist, autodidact, resto-modder, neurodivergent, astro-guy, animal rescuer, public speaker, & director of the Ad Astra Institute for Science Fiction & the Speculative Imagination. He/they, not gender-conforming. Doing what I can to make our world a little better. I curate tags to serve my students & y'all. Many thanks to generous patrons who support my posts here and on Patreon. Feel free to ask anything!
(1. annie dillard, teaching a stone to talk 2. the deep underground neutrino experiment, a.k.a. DUNE 3. the large hadron collider 4. the sudbury neutrino observatory)
op if you don’t mind the addition:
(the super-kamiokande neutrino detection experiment)
Due to some stuff brought up in recent posts I believe it is time to once again extol the virtues of Ms-Demeanor’s Patented Where Did I Put That Fucking Paper Organizational Binder.
Hello! I am a disorganized adult! This is the system by which I manage my important shit like pink slips for my car and medical records and tax information.
You’re going to need:
A 3-Ring Binder
Transparent Sheet Protectors
Notebook dividers (optional but VERY useful)
A backpack (optional)
So the way this system works is you put the sheet protectors into the binder. You can either use the dividers to divide the binder into sections or you can label some of the sheet protectors to make different sections but what you are generally going to do is make sections of the binder labeled things like “taxes” or “vet” or “doctor” and put a few sheet protectors in each section.
Then all of your papers with important information get crammed in that folder. You don’t organize them, you don’t sort them by date, you don’t alphabetize. You put things vaguely relating to taxes into the sheet protectors in the taxes section. You put things relating to cars in the cars section. You don’t even attempt to make this readable - you’re not using sheet protectors so that you can read each page and keep it legible, you’re using sheet protectors because it’s a cheap plastic bag that will sit nicely in a binder.
You CAN put stuff into the individual sheet protectors when you get it, but let’s be realistic you probably WON’T do that, so just tuck individual papers into the front of the binder until you get to a critical mass of paperwork then take an hour to sit down and sort into categories and put it in the binder once every six months to three years (depending on how frequently you get paperwork). Sometimes these sections will outgrow their original allotted space - since my spouse had a transplant surgery the medical section has had to become its own folder - and that’s okay. If you end up with multiple folders just keep them together (this is why the backpack is an option, and one I strongly recommend).
Because yeah, if my organization system relies on opening up a drawer and putting something where it belongs as soon as I get the paper, I will simply not be organized. It’s not going to happen. But I can handle a messy stack of paper that sits in one place and grows until it is time to shove it into a binder. I can’t organize things for thirty seconds a day every day but I can organize things for an hour once every year or so (maybe two hours every five years when I sort out stuff I don’t need like copies of warranties for parts on a car I don’t own anymore).
When my mom died she had about fifty pounds of paper files in her office that were neatly organized in a system that didn’t make any sense to my dad, my sister, and I. I ended up sorting through those files for twenty hours, tossing out copies of paid invoices from ten years ago and student handbooks from my junior high school. I reduced one filing cabinet, two desk file drawers, and a foot-high stack to a six inch binder that I gave to my dad. My mom died five years ago; two months ago my dad asked me about a medical document and I was able to tell him to go look for it in the medical section of the binder. It was there, because ALL IMPORTANT SHIT GOES IN THE BINDER.
Where is my birth certificate? In the binder. Where is my tax return from 2017? In the binder. Where is the record of my dog’s last rabies shot? In the binder. Where are the records for my life insurance? In the binder.
A lot of what people consider “being organized” breaks down to whether or not you can find the specific things that you’re looking for. Does my binder look nice? Is it aesthetic? Does it have color-coded tabs and papers all laid out neatly? Absolutely fucking not. But if you ask me where to find a paper I know that I can do so within about five minutes of shuffling through the pile of letter-folded sheets that I pulled out of the appropriate section of the binder.
I’ve discussed the Where Did I Put that Fucking Paper Binder before, but now it is time to expand that concept to the Backpack of Important Shit.
You likely have Important Shit that does not fit in a binder. Some of my Important Shit that does not fit in a binder is stuff like jewelry and the spare key for my car. Other stuff - the reason I decided to bring this up at all - includes my backup hard drive and packaging (including product key codes) for pretty much all of the software that I own. This is also where I store printed out copies of the recovery codes for most of the online accounts that I have.
There’s a lot of weird fiddly shit that we have to have that we might not access all that often. This is the kind of stuff that might end up in junk drawers or under sinks or in disused laptop bags or kicking around under a bunch of papers in a desk drawer.
It doesn’t matter so much when that weird fiddly shit is a set of hex keys or a utility knife or a protractor or a copy of a student handbook but it DOES matter when it’s something that you might need to put your hands on in a hurry. If your computer crashes, you’re not going to want to track down the software in the back of a filing cabinet and the backup drive from somewhere in the bowels of your desk. If you lock your keys in your car you are not going to want to figure out if your spare is in a junk drawer or the old purse where you keep semi-important stuff or the tin on your desk that has buttons and pins and headphone covers. Just put it in the Backpack of Important Shit and when you need it you know where to look.
So anyway, if you are a person who is a minor disaster who has trouble finding important things when you need them please don’t think that you have to get your life together and have a nice organized filing cabinet or clear plastic bins full of documents or a neatly divided storage closet where everything from board games to backup drives has its own neatly labeled place. Just assign ONE LOCATION for important shit and start putting the important shit there. It doesn’t matter if you have a filing cabinet where you keep old copies of homework and printouts of online orders and family history records - you do not need to keep everything that is file-able in one place and depending on what level of catastrophe you are it might be detrimental to you if you try to do that. It doesn’t matter if you have a jewelry box where you keep your collection of gauges and wrist cuffs; if you are going to stress out about where grandma’s ring is when you’re digging through your collection of cheap earrings and silver pendants then *do not keep grandma’s ring or any other Important, Vital, Cannot Be Lost jewelry in with your day-to-day wear*.
I live someplace that has fires. My binder got upgraded to my Backpack of Important Shit when the fires were getting uncomfortably close to the house I was living in and I wanted to have one bag to grab if we had to get out fast. Once I did that, I never took the binder out of the backpack and the backpack has now made three moves with me and has meant that I’ve had my birth certificate handy when I needed it in the middle of a move between two states, I was able to provide a history of my cholesterol panel going back six years to a visiting nurse, and I was able to give the exact names and contact info of my spouse’s previous surgeon to the hospital when I had unexpectedly moved to a new state with three bags and my work computer at the beginning of the pandemic.
Get yourself a backpack of important shit and a folder of where the fuck did i put that paper. It is so much easier to search a backpack for important shit than to go through an entire house and it is so much easier to flip through a binder than it is to dig through a filing cabinet.
Anyway good luck and happy adulting.
Criteria for determining what is important shit:
Was the document difficult to get? Birth certificates, death certificates, deeds, pink slips for cars, etc. Falls into this category. If you had to spend more than an hour getting the document and if you would have to make at least one phone call to replace it, it is an important document.
Was the paper difficult to generate? If you had to sit down and fuck around with a program and look at three other sheets of paper to make the document, keep a copy of the document you generated. This might be a tax return, this might be a college financial aid application, this might be an application for a home loan.
Does it have an account number on it? You do not need to keep EVERY piece of paper with an account number on it, but it is a good idea to keep at least one piece of paper with an account number for accounts that send you paper. You should have one copy of a bank statement or a credit card statement or a life insurance policy number or your retirement savings number. A good way to determine what you should have is by asking “how many steps would I need to take to get this number if I was talking to someone on the phone about it.” Maybe I don’t need to keep a bank statement because it would be very easy for me to get a copy of my account number, but it would be difficult for me to track down my life insurance policy number online so a copy goes in the folder.
Does the paper represent a legally binding agreement? This means is it a lease agreement, an insurance policy, a financing agreement? The whole document goes in the folder because you want a place where you can reference the agreement in case you need to file a claim or something like that.
Is the paper current? It is good for me to have a record of my dog’s rabies vaccines, but I do not need to keep a copy of every vaccine she has ever had in her life; I can discard old copies. It is good for me to have a copy of the insurance for my current car. I do not need a copy of the insurance for a car I no longer own.
What would happen if someone asked for this document and I didn’t have it? If a mechanic asked you for a copy of a receipt for a repair done at a different shop five years ago and you didn’t have it, you would likely not have any problems. If you were asked to produce a copy of your birth certificate in order to get a marriage license and you didn’t have the document, there would be problems.
Keeping paperwork is not a matter of sparking joy, it is a matter of covering ass. If you had to move to a new state on the other side of the country and establish yourself there for everything from getting an ID to requesting a pet license to applying for a loan or opening a bank account to proving your income history to a landlord, would you have the documents you needed to get it done? If you have those documents, they go in the folder.
June 27/28, 2023 - Angry rioters across France battled police, after cops executed 17-year old Naël M. during a traffic stop in Nanterre, shooting him in his car point blank when he tried to drive away when the cops pulled a gun on him at told him they were going to kill him. The cops tried to say that he tried ramming them, but video showed this to be a complete lie. [video]/[video]/[video]
This is insane and one of the worst things that has happened lately here, and considering all the shit the cops have done lately, it’s saying something.
Some city blocks are exploding like back in 2005. People are really pissed and with good reason. They fucking executed a kid in daylight for not having a driving license. The video is fucking horrible. The cop shoots him point blank through the windshield.
There’s a video circulating too of the paramedic that discovered Nael’s body : he came from the same city, he saw Nael grow up, and he’s screaming at the cop about how he killed a kid over not having a driving license, and he warns him that the block where the kid lives is going to explode after this (and he’s right, not the first time this happens). The paramedic has been jailed for threatening a cop.
Shit is REALLY going bad here. It’s insane.
hey, USA, here’s how to use those fireworks you got for next week
Monitoring 68 pulsars with very large radio telescopes, the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) has uncovered evidence for the gravitational wave (GW) background by carefully measuring slight shifts in the arrival times of pulses. These shifts are correlated between different pulsars in a way that indicates that they are caused by GWs. This GW background is likely due to hundreds of thousands or even millions of supermassive black hole binaries.
Teams in Europe, Asia and Australia have also independently reported their results today. Previously, the LIGO and Virgo detectors have detected higher-frequency GWs from the merging of individual pairs of massive orbiting objects, such as stellar-mass black holes. The featured illustration highlights this spacetime-shaking result by depicting two orbiting supermassive black holes and several of the pulsars that would appear to have slight timing shifts. The imprint these GWs make on spacetime itself is illustrated by a distorted grid.
Man, I hope that girl managed to figure things out.
I distinctly remember during Ye Olde Hellish Childhood Days of being dragged to Baptist churches this one guest preacher that went on and on about how important it is for Christian men to be friends with other Christian men but how difficult it is for men to have friends, because of course when you become friends with another man you will naturally want to have sex with him, so the temptation, y'know? It’s tough, resisting those urges to have sex with all your man friends when you’re a man, all you men know what I mean. It’s so hard. You must be Very Strong In Your Faith before you can handle the responsibility of being friends with another man, so you will be able to Resist The Devil and not have sex with them.
14 year old me sat there in my pew, thinking. I think I know something about this man that he does not know.
There are A LOT of people who deep-dive into conservative faith who think that if they preach it enough, God will help them beat that “temptation.” I was very almost one of them.
I’m much happier now being queer and kinky as fuck.
conservatives would be so much happier if they didn’t reject facts about the world and themselves, stopped feeling guilty about things that don’t hurt anyone, embraced progressive ideas, and taxed the rich
I mean. it’s really very simple, folks
this is why right-wingers hate education and freedom of thought:
if their base learned how much conservatism hurts them and how much progressivism could help them, conservative political and religious authoritarianism would quickly fall, and the rich and corporations would lose political power and wealth
conservatism is self-flagellation that causes huge collateral damage
woke up today and realized that tumblr entirely killed fuck ya life bing bong so here ya go again
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June 29, 2023
Senate Majority Leader Schumer’s Statement on Supreme Court’s Bad Decisions
New York, N.Y. –Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) released this statement on the Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina:
The Supreme Court ruling has put a giant roadblock in our country’s march toward racial justice. The consequences of this decision will be felt immediately and across the country, as students of color will face an admission cycle next year with fewer opportunities to attend the same colleges and universities than their parents and older siblings. These negative consequences could continue for generations, as the historic harms of exclusion and discrimination in education and society are exacerbated.
The Court’s misguided decision reminds us how far we still have to go to ensure that all Americans are treated equally. Nevertheless, we will not be daunted or deterred by this decision and we reaffirm our commitment to fighting for equal educational opportunities for all.
The Great Satan Monsanto sued farmers when seed from their experimental corn blew into farmers’ fields (which they NEVER WANTED) and grew there.
Monsanto filed 144 patent-infringement lawsuits against farmers between 1997 and April 2010, and won judgments against farmers it said made use of its seed without paying required royalties. Many U.S. farmers have said their fields were inadvertently contaminated with Monsanto’s biotech seeds without their knowledge.
In its report, called Seed Giants vs US Farmers, the CFS said it had tracked numerous law suits that Monsanto had brought against farmers and found some 142 patent infringement suits against 410 farmers and 56 small businesses in more than 27 states. In total the firm has won more than $23m (£14.8m) from its targets, the report said.
You read books and don’t burn them. You embrace science. You are willing to change your mind when new information becomes available. You understand that most issues are not black and white. You believe in true equality for all people. You like to share. You embrace cooperation. You respect others’ rights. You believe culture and the arts has value. You care for the planet and all of its life. /ID ]
idk man Clarence Thomas pulling the ladder up behind him striking down affirmative action yesterday, the fucking gay wedding web design ruling wasn’t even real it was hypothetical someone really said well no one has asked me to design a website for their gay wedding but if they did wouldn’t that be fucked up and the court just went whoa yeah that’s so fucked we can’t let that happen, and then they’re like well we’ve all been receiving bribes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for years but we can’t forgive 20k worth of student loan debt that’s just crazy… like everything is just so absurd I can’t really wrap my mind around it
from the AP (more or less):
Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a dissent, joined by the court’s two other liberals, that the corrupt conservative Republican majority of the court “overrides the combined judgment of the Legislative and Executive Branches, with the consequence of eliminating loan forgiveness for 43 million Americans.”
Kagan read a summary of her dissent in court to emphasize her disagreement.
Roberts, anticipating widespread disgust over his hypocritical opinion and aware of rising public disapproval of the court, added an unusual coda to his opinion, whining about the liberals’ dissent: ”It is important that the public not be misled either. Any such misperception would be harmful to this institution and our country,” the “chief” “justice” screeched.
He then cried as usual when accused of more past crimes [unverified, but probably] as Clarence Thomas rubbed million dollar bills all over his body while mumbling things unfit to print.
Biden pointed out that Republicans had caused the dispute that led to Friday’s “ruling.”
“They had no problem with handing out billions in pandemic-related loans to businesses, and forgiving those loans. But when it came to providing relief to millions of hard-working Americans, they did everything in their power to stop it.”
Unless Biden can do something soon, loan repayment resumes in October, and interest begins accruing in September.
I almost forgot:
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@xoddxphilosophyx points out the solution we’ve all been waiting for Biden to implement:
just add a bunch more Justices, Biden. sure, that’ll make Republicans pee their pants and cease all legislative action from then on, but it’s not like they’re doing anything worthwhile anyhow
During the post WW2 housing crisis, when the US was short ~3.5 million homes (similar to now), President Truman signed a law capping new home prices at $10,000 - the equivalent of around $133,500 in 2022. Rents were capped at $80/month, or around $1000 in today’s money. /ID ]
Eisenhower also had a 52% corporate tax rate and a 92% tax rate on people who earned more than 400k per year, about $5 million yearly in today’s dollars. so when Republicans glorify the post-war era, remind them that it was “good” (fiscally) because those presidents taxed the rich
Having your own personal blog is honestly quite a nice change of pace compared to Reddit. I could put a funny GIF of George Bush getting hit by a shoe on here and the worse case scenario is that no one even notices.
You put that on a big subreddit and you get your eyes gouged out and a heap of political discourse underneath your post.
A fun thing about computer skills is that as you have more of them, the number of computer problems you have doesn’t go down.
This is because as a beginner, you have troubles because you don’t have much knowledge.
But then you learn a bunch more, and now you’ve got the skills to do a bunch of stuff, so you run into a lot of problems because you’re doing so much stuff, and only an expert could figure them out.
But then one day you are an expert. You can reprogram everything and build new hardware! You understand all the various layers of tech!
And your problems are now legendary. You are trying things no one else has ever tried. You Google them and get zero results, or at best one forum post from 1997. You discover bugs in the silicon of obscure processors. You crash your compiler. Your software gets cited in academic papers because you accidently discovered a new mathematical proof while trying to remote control a vibrator. You can’t use the wifi on your main laptop because you wrote your own uefi implementation and Intel has a bug in their firmware that they haven’t fixed yet, no matter how much you email them. You post on mastodon about your technical issue and the most common replies are names of psychiatric medications. You have written your own OS but there arent many programs for it because no one else understands how they have to write apps as a small federation of coroutine-based microservices. You ask for help and get Pagliacci’d, constantly.
But this is the natural of computer skills: as you know more, your problems don’t get easier, they just get weirder.
you know you’ve made it when you’re googling problems and ending up with 0-9 results
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