And they STILL won’t let immigrants get full citizanship rights. Guess the birth-rate hasn’t gone low enough.

413 is amateur hour.

Had stinky tofu with curdled pig’s blood in Taipei a while back. The people I was visiting had me try it at a night market. The smell was much worse than the texture or flavor. I could totally see someone who had grown up with it considering it comfort food.

Helped that we had all had a fair bit to drink already.

There’s a divey bar 10m away where people have been watching results the last few years. Might head down there. Pretty sure it’ll be packed.

Alternative is to crawl into bed and wait till January.

Edit: we have a lot of local races (Mayor, City Council, propositions) on the line. Might hit the bar just to watch those and just ignore the national stuff.

There’s no real value to any of it.

Attach free beer to point levels and watch this thing explode.

Fair point.

People who have already early voted may not care so much about going to a rally. Just speculating. Still, not sure crowd size at this stage correlates to any meaningful outcome.

One of the prime rules of storytelling is that the hero has to have a flaw.

Superman is super. He can’t lose. That’s why the writers introduced Kryptonite. Captain America is a super-soldier, but is still mortal. Thor is a god, but can lose his hammer and his powers.

The problem with Superhero movies is that they all got so much power they became invincible, and boring.

Good, classic storytelling beats VFX 10/10.

So many questions…

How is crowd size at a rally a relevant data point for anything?

Yet again, grateful to live in California, where school breakfast and lunches are free to all students. Hands down, best use of my taxes (public libraries are a close #2).

If they show up. Have done phone-banking. Hard to beat apathy.

Fat old Hamburgler vs ripped, brook-no-shit woman.

Good luck with that.

In a previous post, somebody called it a name that will forever live in my head:

WankPanzer.

Who the hell is waiting till 10am?

Losing the all-important male stripper customer base.

Obligatory:

It’s a tough call. Last bit of independence for someone feeling their world getting smaller. Anecdotally, both my father and father-in-law damaged their cars (one hit the highway median after dozing off) and their wives told them they couldn’t afford to replace the cars. Fortunately, nobody got hurt but it could have been a lot worse.

Years ago. Was visiting a client on-site. Meeting ran late and had to race home. Popped into a ‘natural’ food store to get something. Grabbed a package of pre-made ‘fresh’ shrimp spring rolls out of one of those open coolers. Ate in the car.

A 1.5 hour drive turned into a four hour nightmare with all the unplanned stops.

Never again.

Friend of mine used to volunteer for the local chapter of a well-known national non-profit. He tried to explain all the technical benefits of setting up a website, yada yada. The board didn’t care and were bored.

He finally set up a small demo on his own. Just a few screens. Ran a small test. Presented static screenshots, along with charts and stats on viewership and engagements. Had mockups of donation pages, volunteer signup screens, newsletters, etc. That was when people saw the value and got interested.

Nobody cares about decentralized social networks, the technology, or how terrible the other outlets are. For a municipality, you may want to focus on maintaining multiple channels of communications and ways to reach and engage the most users. You could then fold the fediverse into it as one more channel. Something they should keep an eye on. They’ll need a way to post the same content to all those channels with the least effort. Something easy that a trained intern or clerk can do.

Guarantee there will be questions of cost of setup, maintenance, and risks. May want to have some answers and slides ready.