manish vij (Page 4)

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Why comedy is liberal

Horror is conservative because its essence is fear, comedy’s liberal because its essence is play. Comedy’s puckish, punctures the pompous. Authoritarians love rank, comedy only uses it to punch up. Otherwise it’s flat, you’re as good as your set / script / essay / bit. A liberal horror flick

calendar Featured

A rational calendar

Daylight Savings Daylight Savings Time is so artificial, it’s never even lined up with the fall equinox around Sep. 21. You used to set the clock back in Oct, now Nov 🤦🏽‍♂️ Also shifts solar peak and peak heat an hour off noon and 2 pm (thermal lag). Weird distortions.

horror Featured

‘It Lives Inside’

I generally enjoyed the well-made It Lives Inside, but: You’re a teen out to see a movie during Halloween season. Do you want to see a rote horror flick with a slight cultural twist, or do you want a fresh auteur to really go ham on a novel

‘Count Abdulla’

Count Abdulla is very funny premise-pushing: what would it mean if a vampire were Pakistani from Hounslow? First 3 eps jam-packed with clever jokes. Sags in middle, but way better than yet another arranged-marriage tale. Adds to vampire lore by making them white-supremacist Bullingdon toffs none

Cruise robotaxi near-accident

The crosswalk incident On my first robotaxi ride, the Cruise car almost hit a young couple in a crosswalk at 15th & Mission, SF, trying to beat oncoming traffic on a left turn. The pedestrians were crossing from west to east shortly after 9 pm last night. The car braked

Fasting, part 3

Plateaued in weight on my third fast, several days without significant change. Think I’ve hit my natural adult weight, low end of my college weight range. Done fasting for now. Been eating just ~200 kcal a day, curious how body still mostly maintains weight. One homemade muffin and a

‘Across the Spider-Verse’

Leak: Across the Spider-Verse has a long middle act set in “Mumbattan,” an alt universe with a mashup Mumbai / Manhattan: Indian peeps, Mughal arches on the Brooklyn Bridge, a train to Bronxnagar, billboards for Zomato, the Indian Yelp. Scene opening has Miles Morales falling over Manhattan at high altitude.

Wholesome series finales

Watching the “Ted Lasso” series finale reminded me of why I couldn’t get through the “Parks and Rec” finale. In wholesome, upbeat series, the finale saccharine levels are unbearably high, like cheesy high-school valedictories. Like weddings, graduations and IPOs, they push the illusion that life is about reaching

Bluesky: first impressions

Bluesky first impressions: you don’t have to minimize attack surface on a small forum. Kumail posting politics again, AOC and Tapper sound like normal humans. Hate that Twitter’s dominated by rage bait, mocked up a good news tab in Good Batch re: real sci / tech, econ, social advancements.

Caloric restriction

I tried caloric restriction: one 400-kcal meal a day. Pros * No electrolytes or supplements * Temporarily satisfies food craving * Body isn’t cold Cons * Easy to overeat * Hard to track weight progress since not eating enough to excrete daily * Still high food craving * Lower anti-aging benefits (autophagy, HGH) I’

The Little Mermaid

‘The Little Mermaid’ (2023)

Live-action The Little Mermaid is bizarre when you think about it. Disney takes public domain fairytales, strips the subtext, makes them kid-friendly, runs them through the sparkle princess car wash, and sells them movies, streams, remakes, spin-offs, merch and theme park tickets. It’s a bunch of

High school debate judges

In this silly story by the B— Weiss derpsite, an interesting tidbit: high school debaters can now— look up her judge’s name on Tabroom, a public database maintained by the NSDA… where judges post [their] “paradigms”… Debate judge Shubham Gupta’s paradigm reads, “If you are discussing immigrants in

Fasting

First fast Water fasting works better than just eating less because it mostly turns off the hunger hormone. I’m able to sleep fine after drinking warm water. Your body’s a hybrid with a glucose digestion cycle and a fat ketosis one. You just switch over to your stored

Vivek Ramaswamy

Killing browns

“Kill browns” is the KFC comfort food of American derpers. Deep-brown Vivek Ramaswamy’s slinging it :D De rigueur in the “kill browns” party, but very funny seeing a brown guy donate to a white vigilante killer. Next he’ll lick a pork-dipped Raj bullet. Vivek’s gonna

Tech cycle

The tech cycle through the lifecycle of Twttr: Check out this cute lil site where I post what I had for lunch → Some washed-up reality diva uses it to steal babies and ban Muslims → World’s worst poster turns it into GoFundMe for mass shooters It’s like the

Caveman vs. futurist Musk

How do you reconcile laggard Musk (racist, sexist, white supremacist) with futurist Musk? He moved HQ to TX (oil-run), tells people to vote GOP (oil-run)—it was all a con. A scammer, not a future tech guy. Futurism just has highest # of marks and the highest valuations. Keep

Good Batch

Mastodon / Bluesky client app, in development.