There’s lots of juicy tidbits to the subway article which I had to cut for length. There’s one rabbit hole in particular I went down that I had to cut entirely: the Pentagon subway station is the only station in DC with a ban on photography.
A federal law bans photography of vital military installations without permission, and the military appears to consider the Pentagon subway station as a part of the Pentagon itself. Existing law doesn’t define what counts as installations very well, and the military apparently has a lot of room to just choose whatever they want the law to apply to. However, the Pentagon security team (PPFA) does not cover security for the subway stop, the regular subway police do.
While reporting the story, I obviously had to take pictures of the ads in the Pentagon station. So I reached out to PPFA to ask for clarification on the rules. They did not respond, and instead directed me to the subway authority (WMATA), who said that I could take pictures of any publicly accessible part of the station.
Wait a minute. The page for the station the WMATA website says “no photography is permitted,” and you have “NO PHOTOGRAPHY” signs everywhere. But the very first time that I ask, you say I can take photographs? Also, even the Pentagon seems to agree that WMATA are the ones actually in charge of the station; if this isn’t really a part of a vital military installation, how can banning photography possibly be constitutional?
I eventually got a clarification from WMATA which essentially said: A) the Pentagon station is considered to be a part of a military installation, the Pentagon just lets us run it (!?!?!?), and B) photography is banned, but the PPFA has the ability to make exceptions whenever they want to. The fact that they forwarded my email along without comment apparently means they had no objections to me photographing the ads.
The truth is explained well by something a PPFA spokesman once said about the policy: it is “more of just a deterrent if something were to happen.” They don’t care about people violating the law in the station nine times out of ten, the rule is just in place so that they can easily arrest someone if they suspect that they’re up to something.
All of that to say, I got a lot of pictures like this
a study came out that might indicate that the benefits gained from medical ketamine are a result of the placebo effect (or as the article makes a purpose of highlighting, “having hope”) rather than any specific mechanism unique to hallucinogens. but the way they did the study was really interesting, as they make the point that its nearly impossible to do blind studies of a hallucinogen because its REALLY obvious whether or not you have a placebo.
additionally interesting is the way that researchers discuss and reframe placebo as a mechanism with actual biological impact instead of its general perception as “haha you got tricked into feeling better for no reason dipshit!” in hindsight it makes perfect sense that there’s actual chemical stuff going on under the hood
“In some ways, none of this is new,” said Boris Heifets, the study’s corresponding author. “Placebo is probably the single most effective, consistent intervention in medicine, full stop. It’s seen in every trial, and we should probably be paying more attention to the factors that give rise to it.” […] “Saying ‘it’s just a placebo’ is really a disservice to what placebo is,” Heifets said. “It isn’t ‘I’ll feel better if I say it enough times,’ and it does not imply that there was nothing wrong with the patient.” The researchers settled on the physiological resonance between the placebo effect – which they describe as hope – and how ketamine exerts its effects. Studies have shown that both affect the brain’s mu-opioid receptors, which process pain. “There is most definitely a physiological mechanism, something that happens between your ears when you instill hope,” Heifets said.
So I finally got my water heater replaced after more than half a year of it leaking and nearly destroying my floor, but that’s not the story. The story is of the handyman that installed it.
Dude’s name is Chris, and he’s your typically midwestern schlub - friendly, apologizes too much, really likes the Cardinals, maybe a little younger than my parents. Hella nice tho, gets the heater installed quickly, and even offers to fix the floorboards it warped (after nearly tripping over the hump it made in the floor twice). Overall, a stress-free experience.
Then, as he’s gathering up his tools - “So, I noticed your, uh, banner. Over your bed.”*
*(The closet where my water heater is is located in my bedroom because I live in a mobile home, dude wasn’t just wandering creepily into my bedroom)
He’s referring to a giant pride flag that’s hanging over my bed, with the words “Sounds gay, I’m in”
My anxiety spikes instantaneously, thinking oh christ I’m about to get hatecrimed or at least microaggressioned.
But then he says “Yeah, my daughter is gay, and I was wondering, like…where do you guys, ya know, meet up?”
What.
“Because she met her most recent girlfriend when she was in jail, and I keep asking why she doesn’t just find a nice lesbian librarian or something and she said ‘dad I know they’re out there, I just don’t know where’. So…like…where do you?”
So I ended up confessing to this nice man who installed my water heater that I don’t know of any real gay culture in our mostly Baptist Missouri town of about 18,000 that routinely freaks out over pride displays in the library (I’m sure it exists but I’m lazy and haven’t gone looking for it). My girlfriend lives in an area with a rather bustling gay community (we just did a face painting booth for their pride festival a few weeks ago), so maybe have her go out there with some friends, and also a lot of queers I know play dnd so maybe find a nice group of them and network. I then apologized that I wasn’t more helpful in getting his daughter settled with a nice, wholesome dyke.
On the plus side, he was not deterred at all, and seemed to be very interested in the fact dnd was so popular amongst the el gee bee tees. I told him the names of some dms I know and told him to go to town. I do not know if the names will be given to his daughter or hoarded for himself so he can join a group and play like he did when he was a teenager and not be called satanic for it.
He’s coming to fix my floor next week.
after all the stories you hear about bad parents, it’s a nice thing to sometimes be reminded that the most common response when parents discover a thing about their children is for them to say “i need to learn about this so i can support my child”
So my Halloween costume this year is Icepick Joe from Goncharov. And I had to get the ice pick from a local hardware store. And I had to look a middle aged man in the eyes and tell him I was looking for an ice pick. He asked if I was planning on killing somebody. The shame I felt saying it was for a Halloween costume. From a movie he had never heard of. Never showing my face in there again.
Whenever I see someone refer to “Victorian era-” for places outside the UK I’m tempted to start saying shit like “Han Dynasty era Rome”, “Soviet era Australia” etc
“Welcome to Soviet America, home of the McDonalds and Cocaine Cola. Long live Comrade Reagan.”
The Civil War, or as I like to call it, Late Tokugawa Period America
I know this is a joke but this helps me put a lot of historical periods into perspective.
“cowboys were a sort of itinerant warrior class common in meiji-era texas”
When I was a teenager, I had this idea for a movie that could never be made. Basically it’d be a small scale story about a girl who lives in a fantasy village, with a small scale conflict that ends with the main character failing and being banished for whatever reason. However, this would only encompass the first 40 minutes or so of the film, it would continue for much longer after that, showing the further adventures of this girl as she wanders aimlessly coming across new dangers and conflicts in an episodic manner. But then even this would begin to dissipate, the conflicts being solved by running away, or hiding, or just getting lost someplace else. Hours and hours would come to pass of almost nothing happening, just following this character wandering through increasingly abstract terrain.
I envisioned it as a representation of what long movies felt like to me when I was very young, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind was so long I could barely hold the ending and the beginning in the same place in my head. I remembered skipping to the end and feeling like I was out in space, someplace I could never have gotten by just watching the movie all the way through. This visceral sense of scale is harder to come by as an adult who knows how long days are. I’ve experienced it a couple times though, like skipping halfway into that video of the windows 7 startup sound stretched to 24 hours and realizing the remaining half-day of sound was literally just the jingle’s reverb tail echoing slowly into the distance, skipping halfway through that 6 hour flat earth documentary and seeing footage of the guy just idly panning through an image of stars & feeling like I was stranded in the middle of the arctic ocean, discovering Bull of Heaven for the first time, etc. It’s a very precious sensation that I cherish every time I get to experience it, a multi hour project that feels immense even in its isolated parts.
