Semisimian

Ho ho ho, future Santa checking in. Mrs Claus is a hair stylist, so we have some insight into what I’m going to need when the days grow short and the beard (hopefully) grows long.

The biggest thing is: full beards take time. And not just time to grow the length, but time (years) for your face to mature and get those hair follicles in the Christmas spirit. There’s really not much you can do if the fullness isn’t coming in yet but wait. I’m in this phase now. It’s hormones. What are we going to do? Not drugs, not Rogaine: not going to help. Take care of what you got.

But you mentioned you DO have a beard, so maybe you have the stellar volume you need to be St Nick, just not the length. Short answer, skin care IS beard care. Get a good skin care regimen that works for your face and your beard will fall in line. You’ve signed up for an everyday commitment to becoming a touchable beard, and they WILL ALL touch it. Toddlers to Grannies, especially, Grannies.

You have the beard! Now you need the color. This depends on your hair color and how your hair accepts color, so you really should go to a professional. If you want to be a paid, real-beard Santa, a good color job will be the LEAST of your expenses and it will pay off on day one.

Being a good Santa is being a good person. It really is just that. But there is a physical barrier that is conforming to the Coca-Cola ideal of Santa, which is the tutorial I just provided for the BEARD ONLY!

I wish you well and I hope you enjoy bringing hope, magic and love into the hearts of children.

If you haven’t read The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende, put it on your list. Please and thank you.

From the article: “The company claims One UI 8 brings “multimodal capabilities, UX tailored to different device form factors, and personalized, proactive suggestions.” Having used the new OS for a few hours, it doesn’t seem like much has changed with Samsung’s AI implementation.”

If you are curious, the article goes into more detail about the tweaks to the AI layer. I just wanted to provide a TLDR for those keeping up with the general AI shenanigans.

I just watched this a few hours ago. Nothing else to add, just neat.

“Wow, three whole openings!”

This is a total flip of the intention of the source material, but in this moment (in the film) it reads in the character’s voice. I think this is a good message buried in a questionable meme, unless I’m missing something. I’m old, so i used to be meta, but then they changed what meta was, and now what is meta is strange and scary to me.

They’re related, those incestuous, chinless WASPs. Brother takes sister to a formal dance and stops by the pharmacy to get a malt and let Dad get a whiff of sister’s corsage. Keep it in the family!

The Red Room hands out estrogen pills as yet another form of control. If you don’t behave, you don’t get your daily fix. You can tell the non-compliant girls by the lack of secondary sex characteristics. Ol Washboard Wendy over there is a rebel!

They do, and as a Canadian, they should know that fellow Canadian John Hopps invented the 1st pacemaker. He’s even considered the father of biomedical engineering. I dug through trying to find out if he coined the term “heartpacer,” no such luck. It sounds like a Dutch translation to me.

I am outside of the loop and I appreciate your break-down. I am all for paying for useful services, but I have such a backlog of media that I need to watch, I don’t benefit from Trakt. I like a paid business model, though

We should all question a “free” app that lets us spend 1 or 2 or 8 hours a day on their platform. We’ve gotten greedy, thinking that everything should be personal data or advertiser supported. It stinks that Trakt is cutting features while raising prices, all for a pretty simple service, but I think subscription services that protect your privacy are worth funding.

That’s the part of The Hulk we are all just told to ignore.

Do you know where you are commenting? And surely you mean “another Star Trek work place comedy,” because we already have DS9.

It’s a comedy, so I hope so too! I imagine the planet, being a vacation/pleasure planet, will have a lot of kinks that are taboo to the Federation and that’s where you will find the narrative tension as they apply for membership. The planet will have a constitution at odds with the Fed, full of kinks. They might welcome species that have kinks not outlined in said constitution. They might welcome federation citizens that are exploring their non-Fed kinks on this planet.

We’ve seen plenty of criticism of the Federation’s nanny-state. Lately, that criticism has come from the writers of the shows who seem to have lost the narrative that the Federation is our ideal. Sure, it has issues, but none of us should be ashamed of reaching for utopia. I hope the new show is a continuation of the SNW and Prodigy reboot of a less cynical Trek.

Sir, this is a Wendy’s.

Why not 6660 soldiers? Or just one up Revelations and go with 6666 soldiers. The revolution may not be televised, but the end times will.

I don’t mind her noises when she’s in the prime universe, but her mirror universe sex-kitten shtick is very off putting.

Pets help us understand our own mortality in ways that continue to surprise me. When I was young, the first pet I lost was a young cat, just a few years old. I raised her from a kitten that was probably too young to ween so we had a close bond. She was indoor/outdoor and was attacked by a neighbor’s dog during the day when I was gone. Holding her and watching her die broke me, like she waited all day to die in my arms. She was mine and I felt like I let her down. Woof, it hurt. Still does.

But while I was holding her, our family dog (Allison) was next to me. She was older than I was, a feisty Lhasa Apso that had lost her ability to hold her bladder. We diapered her: we’d cut a hole in human diapers to pull her tail through to keep the hardwoods from getting ruined. She died a year later, after living a full life.

I buried both of them in the front yard, under a couple of pines that bordered our neighbor’s pet cemetery. Both times, digging those holes gave me the time I needed to be able to return them to the earth and say goodbye. I learned so much from their passing. It is the last gift our pets give us, their final act of love.

Now, older, with kids of my own, we have Sadie, who I am looking at as I write this. She’s a rescue, probably a golden mixed with some border collie, at least 16 years old. Her sister died last year and it was the first close death my kids experienced. Her passing taught my kids the alchemy of aging gracefully, the privilege of old age. Now, they find charm in Sadie’s rickety hips and excuse her incontinence. Getting old is okay; we are lucky to be able to do it. Watching your loved ones get old is a privilege we should cherish.

Edit: I wanted to thank OP for posting this. Reading your observations of your aging cat brought It all forward.

This article focuses specifically on the warming and the depletion of oxygen in our rivers. I watched the video, but I didn’t read the text. I think it is just a transcript from the video.

The best way to save any part of our environment is to get more people to engage with it. Whether that is fishing on a river, hiking through the woods, or any other outdoor activity. These activities have routinely been proven clinically to improve a person’s health and well-being. If we can get more people participating in this positive feedback loop, we will have more interest and political will to protect our environment.

It’s only mentioned that warming in general is causing the lack of oxygen in the rivers. Well, what is causing the warming? They mentioned sedimentation, but they don’t connect that more large rain events lead to more sedimentation, more sediment in the rivers absorbs more sunlight and holds heat. They mentioned removing old dams to make the water run faster which will keep it cooler. That’s a great thing to do, but we really need to focus on increasing the buffer zones between rivers and development and showing up the banks along our rivers.

So, Bill (after the divorce) buys the ranch as a gift, but the headline circles it back to a unsourced Melinda quote ON YAHOO FINANCE! This is another obfuscating hatchet job to whitewash billionaire behaviour by media owned by said billionaires. Please don’t engage. This is non-news. Down vote this to the sewer where it belongs.

That smile…