Orin

Well, I had a different reason for walking out of one. I don’t recall which city it was, but the cinema played Fantasia with the reels out of order.

Mixed among the vitriol in the Politics forum were some posts that didn't center around politics, per se. The problem, though, was that nearly anything that even tangentially impinged on the realms poisoned by partisan rhetoric got sucked into the tornado. So I'm curious whether there's a way to craft a sub-venue here to host those sorts of discussion. In an earlier age, 'salons' served that purpose. So I pose a question: are there aspects of that forum worth transplanting? What sorts of topics of interest to members, which are not political, don't have a place here now?

Delta Sigma Phi, at Florida Institute of Technology, in the early 70s. It being a technical school, pledge tasks were biased towards rewarding imaginative ways of satisfying the challenge. For example, one of the brothers set two pledges the task of 'separating a pile of punch-card chad'. One pledge laboriously sorted them by the numbers printed on them, but then ran into trouble differentiating between the ones with a 6 from those with a 9. The other pledge immediately hatcheted the pile with his hand, and split the one big pile into two smaller ones. During the Greek Week competitions, there was a kite-flying event. My frat decided to make the biggest kite, and worry about flying it later. Materials included 4 tarps, a bunch of wooden quarter-round moldings, u-bolts, and duct tape. When it was completed, and brothers were holding it for launch, one of the crew realized that in a 5-mph breeze at a 10° angle, the force would far exceed the strength of the cord we were using. But that didn't matter, because the people holding the rear didn't hear the signal to release the thing, and it folded up in a glorious mess.

How do you remember someone who has affected so many people in so many ways over so many years? Is it by seeing the ways in which his guidance and support of people he knew through this site's predecessor reflected that influence to others? Is it from a feeling of kinship among people who were once strangers and who have become members of a community? For me, he was, at one time or another, a friend, a fellow programmer, a business partner, a housemate, an adversary, and a fellow traveller on a spiritual journey. He made no secret of who he really was to those he trusted. His flamboyance was epic, just ask anyone who saw him traipsing around Microsoft. But that was just the public version of him. He turned it up to 11 when in character as his clown or drag personnae. You should have seen him in that custom robe with flames.

That's an important observation @Charlie, but we need to generalize it. The hot spell we just went through here was about 30F warmer than normal temperatures for a large area. So, yeah, anyone expecting the weather to be consistent with the climate they've come to know wouldn't be prepared for it. But there have been hints. We moved to WA in early '91, just after the floating bridge sank And since that time we've noticed changes in the 'normal' weather patterns for the area, just not this drastic. But there are other changes happening as well. Sea level has only risen a relatively small amount so far, but it's enough to threaten some islands, and the cities, airports, seaports, and military bases along many coastlines are already seeing high water problems even when there isn't a storm. If weather patterns shift, the areas affected by hurricanes and tornadoes could move, a prospect that people living where such things hadn't happened before won't be prepared for, either. Replicate that around the world. Advance planning is usually done for expected events, so cities and nations won't be prepared to deal with all kinds of events that 'nobody could foresee', except those who did and were ignored. Denial won't help.

Would it help to Follow the thread, and then go to it in the Activity Streams menu item forContent I Follow? Or you can actually bookmark the thread you are reading in your browser, and open to it directly.

Looking at the weather map, it appears that the dome of hot air is pretty much trapped by a very large meander of the jet stream, which drives a lot of weather systems on the northern tier. I haven't read anything about it, but if that river of air behaves like rivers of water, meanders are symptomatic of slowed current. I've read that the Gulf Stream, part of the global network of ocean currents, has been slowing as well. Both of these things may well be a result of warming temperatures, and further changes may be in store.

I'm in a small town near Olympia, WA, and it got to 109 here today, a few degrees hotter than yesterday. We don't have A/C, so it's been open doors and windows, plus fans of various kinds. Even so, I've still managed to get a ~3 mi shirtless walk in early in the morning, while the temperatures were going from 70-something to 80-something. sure, I get the occasional wave, but so far nobody has tried to pick me up.

Makes perfect sense. After all, the whole idea of 'gamification' was to keep people on a site longer so they can be exposed to more ads.

There's an article in Seattle's 'Stranger' right now by Matt Baume about how Disney's villains got coded as gay. But the interesting thing is how it got this way. So, what were the unanticipated results of what Disney did?

That kind of question also opens the discussion to philosophy, and to conceptions of whether there is 'a' future containing your pre-ordained date and manner of death, or rather a panoply of possible futures, in which the details of that event vary depending on how you got there. This can be tricky territory to tread for a reader, because the reader and the querent may have different views about that. I suspect the safest way to couch it might be to say that if events continue along the pathways they are now following, your death will likely be in year 'X', because that phrasing can be interpreted either way. Some readers, including Deb and me, would preface the answer with some words about the future not yet being written: This is a glimpse of things that might be, but we each have the power to make choices, and that could alter which path you follow, leading to a different future.

Let's that that thought a bit farther, then. Since Crowley's Thoth deck responds well to questions about the forces at play in a situation, (as opposed to discrete events and people,) we sometimes engage in what we refer to as future-casting. When the querent is faced with several choices that will pull their life in clearly different directions, we do a series of readings. For each one, the question is framed in the form of 'what will be the result of making [choice X]?' The readings then provide a glimpse of the dynamics that result from each choice. It's a kind of visualization tool that helps to put the querent into different probable futures, enabling them to get a feel for what their life might be like in each case, and that helps them to make their choice. Have you ever tried that sort of thing?

I don't know how you would be storing the HTML part of this, but Filemaker lets you store an HTML page in a container field. Let's give it try.

Just how bizarre is it? Is it a jungle of HTML pages, or is it a database? If the latter, I've used Apple's Filemaker Pro database for doing all manner of obnoxious database conversions over the years. If I can read the data in, maybe I can munch it and spit out something you can use.

The most recent tarot reading I was part of was done by Deb (my wife) and I, as part of our New Year tradition of getting feel for the upcoming year. Notably, it said there would be a death in April, which turned out to be our friend Bill/Daddy/Guy. The first reading she did for me was at college in 1971. She laid out the cards, snatched them up and refused to tell me what they said to her. (And no, it wasn't a ploy to get my interest.) For some people, a reading is mechanical, using the interpretations provided with the deck. For others, that's a starting point, but they look at the imagery on the cards and develop their own interpretations over time. There are even readers who use the cards to help the client focus on their question, and get psychic impressions for each 'position' in the reading that's not necessarily anchored to the card. And each type of deck is different. Some seem to respond better to questions about specific people, places and events. Crowley's Thoth deck, in contrast, provides a reflection of the forces and influences at work in the person's situation, like the political struggle in a family or business setting. There are also different kinds of reading layout. A simple three-card reading can provide the past, present, and future of the situation being asked about. The Celtic Cross layout provides information about various aspects of the person's question, and can be used to focus in on any one of them, but that's a discussion by itself.