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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I met a somewhat old man on a Greyhound a few years ago who was pretty delirious and drifting in and out of sleep. Turns out he had been traveling non-stop for three days, heading from Georgia to his home in Oakland. He had been on a roadtrip with his friends in (what he described as) a cursed Mitsubishi which broke down a final time some 2500 miles from home. All his friends took flights back, but our protagonist did not bring any kind of ID with him and couldn’t take a plane. So there he was, having not slept much at all in 3 days, on the i-10 between Tucson and Phoenix.
    He also borrowed my phone to call his wife, who it seemed had not sanctioned his roadtrip at all and was very mad at him. She eventually hung up on him. Handing my phone back to me, he assured me that she wouldn’t stay mad at him after seeing his baby-blue eyes upon his arrival in Oakland.

    I don’t remember so many of the details, but hearing this guy’s life story and about his impulsive cross-country roadtrip was kinda strangely inspiring.



  • Lots of other languages have days named after the sun, moon, and 5 planets or the gods associated with the planets. Obviously we have Sunday and Monday, or lunes in Spanish, but that’s also why in Spanish, Mars = Marte, Tuesday = Martes. Probably most famously in English is Thursday coming from Thor’s day (Þunras dag) with Thor being the equivalent to Zeus or Jupiter, which is where jueves comes from in Spanish. In Spanish though their sun-day got remained to God’s day (domingo) and saturn-day to sabbath (sabado). Probably most interesting is that the connection even applies to Japanese. The days go in this order: 日月火水木金土 which means “sun moon fire water wood metal earth” which are the classical Chinese 5 elements connected to everything from the 60-year sexagisimal calendar to the bagua tao trigrams on the Republic of Korea flag. And if course, they’re also the names of the planets with Mars being fire-planet, Mercury being water-planet, Jupiter being wood-planet, Venus being metal-planet, and Saturn being earth-planet.

    So the planet Jupiter (etc.) is to some degree represented in the Thursdays (etc.) of three different languages. Not really saying that this makes more sense than Portuguese, but I think it’s cool



  • In elementary school I read this book called “Flawed Dogs” and it was unforgettably wild. It’s about a dog who escapes some kinda confinement by jumping over a barbed wire fence and loses his back legs in the process, and then joins a dog gang and does dog gang activities. Also one of the dog gang members was a cat in disguise.
    Honestly I should see if I can find a copy of it and reread it. It was pretty wild.

    edit: I looked it up and maybe I have a lot of the details wrong but it’s still pretty wild



  • I’ve never heard of TemTem before and plugging it into Google Trends, it looks like it’s not even comparable to Palworld. It’s still somewhat big, looks like 500,000 copies sold. But still doesn’t really compare to what appears to be nearly 20 million Palworld players.
    Companies lose rights to protect their IP if they don’t protect it themselves, so it may be in their best interest to go after the big competitors and pretend they’ve never heard of TemTem.





  • “designed to be sung to the tune of ‘Home on the Range.’”
    (1) Oh, give me a clone
    Of my own flesh and bone
    With its Y chromosome changed to X
    And after it’s grown
    Then my own little clone
    Will be of the opposite sex.
    (Chorus) Clone, clone of my own
    With its Y chromosome changed to X
    And when I’m alone
    With my own little clone
    We will both think of nothing but sex.
    (2) Oh, give me a clone
    Is my sorrowful moan,
    A clone that is wholly my own.
    And if she’s X-X
    And the feminine sex
    Oh, what fun we will have when we’re prone.
    (3) My heart’s not of stone,
    As I’ve frequently shown
    When alone with my own little X
    And after we’ve dined,
    I am sure we will find
    Better incest than Oedipus Rex.
    (4) Why should such sex vex
    Or disturb or perplex
    Or induce a disparaging tone?
    After all, don’t you see
    Since we’re both of us me
    When we’re having sex, I’m alone.
    (5) And after I’m done
    She will still have her fun
    For I’ll clone myself twice ere I die.
    And this time without fail
    They’ll be both of them male
    And they’ll each ravage her by and by.

    Source: autobiography of Isaac Asimov