hrimfaxi_work

Hey there! FYI I really appreciated this comment. The response to my comment here convinced me that Lemmy isn’t really the place for me. I popped back today to look something up, and I wanted to make sure you got a friendly hello after seeing your response.

I totally agree with everything you said. Having shared practices for remembrance and an established “typical” way to demonstrate care for deceased people is a significant part of maintaining social cohesion and so useful for giving individuals an outlet for grief.

The way an entire industry has emerged to capitalize on loss and paij sickens me, but that part is a whole different conversation.

My education is in archaeoligy, and my primary interest was American deathways. I’ve probably spent more time thinking about contemporary death rites and remembrance than I’ve thought about anything else as an adult.

Anyway, I hope you’re well! Keep on being a cool person.

Ritual and ceremony are deeply important aspects of the human experience. What cultures do with their dead is way, way up there with foodways and adornment when it comes to cultural significance.

The increasingly common view in the West that elaborate death rites are unimportant is really new when compared to the rest of human history. It’s probably a postmodern thing? If I’m right about that, that would mean the less reverential attitude towards traditional deatg ceremony is like 110ish years old.

Compared to the 200,000-300,000 years Homo Sapiens have been around (or 45,000 years ago if we only want to discuss the length of time that Northern European-style deathways have most likely been practiced), 100 years isn’t a lot to change that cultural inertia.

Sorry, I know this is a Wendy’s. Just a frosty, thanks.

I’M HIT

powpowpowpowpowpowpowpowpowpow

I noticed on paragraph 3 of this policy-mandated letter that literally no one but me will ever read–and it’s mind-boggling that even I read it–that you referred to “December 2022.”

As it is December 2023, and December 2023 is referred to multiple times elsewhere in the aforementioned letter, can you please clarify to which month this document refers?

Thank you in advance.

Grand Theft Auto 6: Everything We Know So Far

PET THE GODDAMN DOG.

I hate it when someone with these lights is in the passing lane behind you, and their lights reflect off your side mirror directly into your eyes. The worst is when they’re only going like 102% your speed, so they linger there unless you adjust your own speed to change their placement relative to you.

Prison. Immediately.

Two of the derailed cars were carrying molten sulfur, which caught fire after the cars were breached… it is believed that the fire is releasing sulfer dioxide

Sulfer dioxide is pretty nasty on a person’s throat and sinuses to breathe and can make fluid build up in the lungs, and it can have longer-term effects if the exposure is sustained.

A little molten sulfur never hurt anybody!

Add to this that the child is also made entirely of rubber and could easily withstand the train’s impact and experience no measurable hardship. However, the impact of Superman halting the train caused wreckage to fly all over the place and damage the surrounding infrastructure… which in this case is a metaphor for literal fucking infrastructure.

I stole this from somewhere:

We are the only superpredator known to exist. Our best friends are apex predators we allow to live in our homes and treat like children, and we are sufficiently skilled at predation that we have allowed them to give up hunting for survival.

We accidentally killed enough of the biomass on the planet that we are now in the Anthropocene era, an era of earths history that marks post-humanity in geological terms. We are an extinction event significant enough that we will be measurable in millions of years even if we all died tomorrow.

We are the only creature known that engages in group play fighting. Other animals play fight, but not in teams. This allowed us to develop tactics, strategy, and so on, and was instrumental in hunting and eventually war.

We are sufficiently deadly that in order for something to pose a credible threat to us, we have to make it up and give it powers that don’t exist in reality. And even then, most of the time, we still win.

I always buy my local grocery store parking lot hermit an energy drink. We both like purple Rip Its.

Grandma, you can’t limp-wrist a .45 like that. You’re gonna get a busted lip and you’re gonna stovepipe like a motherfucker.

I worked overnights for 7 years in my late teens and early 20s. Pictures of me from then aren’t Saddam 10 minutes out of a hole bad, but they’re still pretty bad.

The real pro gamer move is to aggressively shake the can, breaking the contents into small pieces. Then you can simply drink your Pringles.

I hope it happens during the morning rush hour so my spouse rescue mission kicks off to a sophomoric rock station morning show.

HONKHONKHONK AWOOGA glass smash & cat screech HERBIE AND DINGHOLE MORNING HOUR ON 93X explosion HOW THE FUCK DO SHOWS LIKE THIS STILL EXIST IN 2023? sick guitar riff

Why? Does your local PD have really good music taste or something?

You need to think ahead and make the playlist now, then! OP is trying to help us.

This isn’t a joke. And it’s not just MC.

From 2002-2008, I worked two full-time retail jobs. Overtime was common at both around the holidays. 2006 was insane for me. Like, the number of weekly hours I worked that year sound like I’m lying, and Thanksgiving to New Year’s was crazy in comparison to the rest of that crazy year.

Anyway: Christmas. Retail. I’d work 10+ hours at job 1, then go to job 2 and put on another 8-10 hours, then I’d crash for however long until the next shift. All the while it would be the same 20 or so Christmas songs over and over and over.

Between shifts, there’d still be Christmas music. Gas station? Christmas music. Restaurants? Christmas music. Bank? Christmas music.

Sometimes I’d sleep at my mom’s house between shifts because it was closer to one of my jobs. She’d be up, getting into the spirit by… listening to Christmas music. Even in my sleep, it haunted me.

I can still vividly remember Christmas shopping for my niece and nephew in 2006, standing in line at a Toys R Us holding this big stuffed animal. “Wonderful Chrismastime” by Paul McCartney was on. That fucking refrain penetrated my psyche like it never had before, and I literally began to shake.

“Simply. Having. A wonderful Christmastime.”

I thought I was going to cry. Or just start screaming. Or maybe grab someone and punch them until the police arrived. But I didn’t do any of those things.

I set the stuffed animal on the floor, I walked outside, and I sat in my car, staring blankly at nothing, and I chain smoked a full pack of cigarettes, lighting them off one another. And then I went back to work.

That was 17 years ago, and sometimes I still drop what I’m doing and leave a store if that, or one of a handful of other songs, come on.