I've participated as a guest in several murder mystery type events. As a category, social deduction games tend to succeed or fail based on the enthusiasm level of the players. If too many people are checked out, or not willing to get fully into character, then everyone's experience will suffer. With that, consider crafting your guest list based on how keen they are about this kind of game, rather than just because they're your usual crew.

Germany recently introduced a new visa program that might make it easier for you to get back there. Best of luck while you're back in the US.

The Song Exploder podcast recently reminded me of the incredible Mohabbet by Arooj Aftab. She won a Grammy back in 2022 for "global music," but I think she's still incredibly underappreciated and deserves more attention for her unique blend of contemporary jazz and traditional Pakistani folk music.

I recently read Slaughterhouse-Five for the first time, as I somehow managed to avoid any exposure to Vonnegut in school. What a book! It's sad to be reading this 55 years after it was written, in the midst of another ground war in Europe. There's a lot of timeless lessons to be learned from this book, and it's a shame we haven't absorbed more of them.

So it goes.

Figures, thank you for the summary. I attempted a 4 week digital detox after reading Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism and mostly failed because I wasn't able to come up with practical alternatives.

I think I've seen more new spam accounts than legitimate users joining recently, so it seems like the current open/growth model is not working.

The site is pretty much already a quiet little club in a corner of the Internet, so this seems to be better acknowledging that reality.

There's not nothing in there, but the book is certainly not useful.

Thanks for the heads up. Too many non-fiction books these days would be better as a magazine article.

I've been playing Caroline Polachek's second album Desire, I Want to Turn Into You on repeat for the last few weeks. It's on quite a few critics' Best of 2023 lists, but I still think she's pretty unknown in the mainstream. Her music is pretty weird to begin with, but you really have to watch the music videos to appreciate just how out there she is. Here's the first track:

Kroger barely carries ingredients.

Trader Joes is a grocery store for people who don't know how to cook. Now that's a store that barely carries ingredients. They'll sell you five kinds of frozen Asian entrees, but not a bag of brown rice.

Man, what is going on in the UK these days?

Dunning-Kruger bias among the mathematically-inclined will result in an inappropriate reliance on Bayesian statistics

Do you think this problem could be self-correcting in the long run? Won't these folks like SBF who are making faulty predictions all wind up losing one way or another?

That money that should have been going towards student loans was saved, used to pay off credit card debt, and spent on goods and services. If anything, it was massively propping up the economy, because borrowers had hundreds of 'extra' dollars per month to support their consumerism.

about 25% of the time ... employees can live anywhere in the U.S. so long as they pay their own way to get to Orrville

This is still grossly exploitative. It would be unreasonable for any job with 25% required business travel to not reimburse employees for all associated expenses. Their own CPO admits that 2 years of work from home was successful, but these facts are clearly being overridden by the feelings of their old-school executives.

If Orrville Mayor Dave Handwerk had his wish, Smucker employees would be back in the office five days a week

Screw this guy. This attitude is unbecoming when it's coming from the mayors of New York City and San Francisco. It is pathetic coming from the leader of a 9000 person company town. He's lucky that Smuckers is still a family-run company, and hasn't been seduced away to a neighboring state with the promise of tax breaks.

Massey ... said she spent much of her time at Smucker in a nonmanagement role, not wanting to take on a leadership position if she couldn’t be in Orrville full-time...

Nicole Massey lives in San Francisco and commutes to Orrville for core weeks.

Good for her for overcoming the backwards corporate culture that was thwarting her advancement. Inflexible policies like mandatory in-office days are known to harm recruiting and retention of women, minorities, and other underrepresented groups. It's no surprise why this lunchroom looks like a bag of marshmallows.

I'm a huge fan of gin, but I've also quit drinking. Any advice on getting started with a project like this?

This music-related documentary rekindled my love for some old-school UK dubstep.

As a result, I've been immersing myself in albums like this:

Those would all be reasonable, nondiscriminatory, legitimate actuarial reasons for these decisions. Since the insurance companies can't claim that's what they're doing though, they're making it seem like something else is going on.

There's a pretty deafening silence of the insurance companies refusing to explain their allegedly legitimate reason for taking subsidized housing into account. It leads one to conclude that the real reason must be discriminatory, or they would be able to offer an alternative explanation.

Your friend has great quads. Sounds like you know how to have a good time.

Once you've installed a brand new roof, its the perfect time to consider installing solar panels. The incentives have never been better in most places.

Congratulations! I hope things work out with you and your ex-girlfriend.

It sounds like you picked out the ring yourself? How did that go?

Cats are ridiculous creatures. They've really got us tricked. Glad to hear you got yours back safely.

This is a tiny aside from your excellent update. But if you're ever trying to look at something on Twitter in the future, there's a great project called Nitter that allows you to do so without creating an account. For example here's one instance of it pointed to the profile of the New York Times.

is this what’s it’s like to be actively living the life you’ve envisioned

hoo-rah! Sure is, bud. I'm glad to hear that you've found your climbing crew.

Now you can show someone blowing someone else's head off in close-up and get a PG-13 but the minute an aureola shows up it's an R.

And people wonder why unprovoked violent attacks are on the rise.

This is a very impressive me-too tech demo that makes the other options on the market look like toys. For all the billions of dollars that have been spent to develop these, they still fail as products, because they don't do anything useful.

Cars serve a (too) necessary function in American society and their harms are externalized. Guns serve a MUCH less necessary function in American society and their harms are a direct consequence of their intended function.

Too true.

I'll still continue my crusade for alternatives to car supremacy until "traffic violence" reaches the same order of magnitude in our public conversation as "gun violence". I'm affected by the former every time I step out of my home, so this is personal for me.

You can tell a lot about a city based on its trees (or lack thereof). I recently moved from a wealthier neighborhood to one with half the median household income, and let me tell you. There's not even close to 50% as many trees here as in the "nicer" neighborhood. Before moving, I didn't realize how much it would bother me, but I can feel the difference, even subconsciously.

no fucking parallel between automobiles and guns

Until you try to suggest even modest reforms that might challenge either of them, and suddenly they're unassailable pillars of our culture, immune from any criticism.

The racists might not be lining up to buy cars, but the car-dependent suburbs they live in are founded on racism, and they seem to struggle to come up with non-racist defenses of that status quo.

Automobiles were the number one cause for a long time, and nobody is up in arms about that. These are all (somewhat) preventable deaths, but we can't agree on anything these days, even clear-cut public health problems.

Why won't anyone think of the children?

Not to say something nice about Rupert Murdoch, but it's no surprise that it was the Wall Street Journal that finally broke the story about the fraudulent claims Theranos was making. As you said, anyone who knew anything about blood testing knew something didn't add up. And yet other 'reputable' publications were too busy tripping over themselves to put Homes on magazine covers to do any sort of journalism about what the business was doing.