Do you consider yourself a partisan? The pervasive notion that there are “two sides” and you must be on one of them, it results in ordinary citizens viewing one another with suspicion and fear. It’s a useful lie that serves the interests of those who would foster division in order to maintain the cultural status quo.

Not calling you out in particular. Just that I think about this every time something is posted that perpetuates this false “our team, their team” narrative because it’s a powerful, insipid tool of oppression against the common person. True, people differ on contentious issues, sometimes irreconcilably. But if we are made to view one another as dyed-in-the-wool adversaries over that, we will fail to discover our common interests much less promote them through solidarity.

Not denying that the two major political parties in the United States do hold seemingly unassailable dominance in major elections like the one we’re entering, largely due to determining winner by first-past-the-post. And yes, sadly it’s very often the case that a meaningful vote will support one of those parties. But it doesn’t have to be this way forever. In fact, I will be able to vote for city office candidates by ranked choice starting this year!

Sorry for the rant. Not an expert. Just a dude who wants to love his neighbor.

I’m as old as my tongue, and a little older than my teeth.

Came here looking for the tensor tympani rumble cause I know it well; not sure what your thing is! If I notice sounds going quiet on a flight I’ll pinch the nostrils shut and make an exhalation effort till I hear a pop in each ear, then sounds are normal. Almost like the reverse of yours.

Working as a Field Service Technician can sometimes mean being alone for hours on the road in between bouts of installation/service/training/etc.

Thank you for the insight. Having little understanding of the purposes of CAPTCHA beyond what is implied by the acronym, I would be concerned if what seems implied in this comment thread were actually true. Clearly there’s a bit of tongue-in-cheek, but it seems reasonable to me as a layman that some implementations could produce data usable to train autonomous driving systems. I realize it’s possible there’s no simple answer to my original question, and wouldn’t be the first time I’ve overthought something.

$ echo "$((2#01010010)) $((2#01100101)) $((2#01100100)) $((2#01110010)) $((2#01110101)) $((2#01101101))"

82 101 100 114 117 109

Reads ‘Redrum’ in ASCII. A reference to The Shining, I suppose. If there’s a joke it’s lost on me, sorry. Was kinda fun spending 10min decoding that, though :)