• 5 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • I’m convinced that this is it. There’s a dual track effort to defang leftists through first heavily propagandizing the success of “pure” non-violent movements by removing them from their context, then by aggressively stamping out the groups that move past that. The first part is why you see so many people saying “well, why don’t we just march again and wave more signs?” The state has done a very, very, very good job of convincing people that peaceful assembly without the threat of unpeaceful assembly behind it means a goddamn thing.




  • IIRC, there was a study a few years ago that basically shrieked “IT’S THE NEONICOTINOIDS, IDIOT”, and the response seems to have been “well, yes, but we make money selling that, so find something else to blame, dumbass.”

    I’m in central California and our insect populations have cratered HARD. Used to be that you couldn’t drive east-west across the San Joaquin valley without getting the front of your car called in bugs; it hasn’t been a problem at all for about two years now. I’ve seen probably a 95% decline in butterflies and bee-like insects; that is, I see about 1/20th of the butterflies I used to. This is deeply worrying. I had a dude come and offer to flush my lawn with pesticide to get all of the bugs out of it, and I took a moment to calmly talk to him about how he’s contributing to complete ecological collapse.



  • Update: moved to Monday (tonight) because transparency sucked and I was tired.

    Seeing: very little or slow twinkling

    Transparency / Light pollution: Polaris visible, only one of the cup stars of Ursa minor visible to the naked eye. This is actually slightly better than normal for my area.

    Equipment: 12" dob, 1520 mm focal length, 2" 2x Barlow, 2" 34 mm wide field eyepiece.

    What I hit: M44: sketched it from my 10x50 RACI. I love finding M44 because cancer is dim as fuck, and I’ve got a cool trick where I just make a right angle with my left hand, pointer finger touching Pollux, thumb touching Procyon, M44 will be right in the 90 degree angle.

    M65, M66 again. M66 was actually readily apparent to me, for some reason, where M65 took a bit of work to resolve. Did not manage to resolve NGC 3628. I also accidentally resolved another galaxy about three degrees south of and about two degrees below Iota Leonis. Found it purely by accident, couldn’t find it again, looked very slender, stretched almost across the view in 100x (34 mm wide field + 2x Barlow).

    What I attempted: Bode’s galaxy. Spent probably an hour trying to starhop to it with different tricks (I think the thing that got me closest was drawing a line through UmA’s front elbows and shoulders and following that down to the level of Alioth. That got me onto a very neat little square of stars with a trail pointing towards the horizon, which I followed again and again to nothing. Very frustrating. I tried again to hit the owl nebula and cigar Galaxy, also no dice. Not sure if I just suck this bad at star-hopping or if the light pollution is really kicking my butt.

    I spent so long on it that I ran out my clock and had to choose one last thing to do. Bootes was now plainly visible in the mid-altitude east, so I decided to try and hit M3 by making a right triangle with epsilon bootes as one angle, Arcturus as the right angle, and M3 as the last angle. Didn’t work. Tried a few other spaghetti plate strategies to find M3 and got nowhere. I mostly tried slowly slewing over at 100x mag, which I know is low for globs, but I figured it would at least stand out as a kind of weird bullshitty star that I could investigate, but nothing stood out.

    You can’t win them all I guess =/



  • Legend!

    I’ve heard it can be hard to see with the naked eye, and it seems like it would probably get murdered by city lights. Something like some low power, wide-lens binoculars might help collect enough light to make it visible. Also, I’ve heard that cell phone cameras and cameras in general are pretty good at picking up the Aurora over the naked eye, especially on longer exposures.



  • Okay, I’m going to acknowledge that there are protests, yes, but probably what OP is thinking of something more like the BLM protests during COVID where shit started to get real. There’s a few things going on here:

    First: People don’t have the time off like they did during COVID. They also aren’t locked up and less able to ignore the news.

    Third: Resignation. I think this is the bigger of the three parts. I know for my part, I consider this a complete loss of the federal government. Even if we somehow avoid a dictatorship and get control of the government back, the damage that’s been done is so deep and complete that we’ll likely never fully recover from it, we’ll just have to move on with things as they are. My efforts are now focused on organizing balkanization. If Texas wants to be a fucking stupid theocracy with prosperity gospel televangelists and the antichrist at the top, who am I to get between them and a good time? Maybe without having to hear about what Daniel the terminally addicted Fox News viewer thinks about Critical Race Theory, we can get some shit done, fix healthcare, get some fucking trains and bike lanes put up.

    Second: Lack of organization. The federal government has spent the last 100 years stomping any serious leftist movements both here and abroad. There is almost no living memory of what a real leftist movement looks like, or how to get one going, so we’re all having to roll them from scratch, and there’s still a lot of the old high-roading instincts that were implanted in us over the decades. It’s just going to take time.