The Dark Balloon

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Cows to milk.

I don’t know this young woman’s dad, but he doesn’t seem like a very good one. I’ll provide some anecdotal reference of my own, but I wouldn’t be surprised that many of us would feel better about their father than this asshole.

My pops sacrificed pretty much all of himself to raise our family (nine kids). He was downright selfless about it in all his moments of attending swim-meets or coaching soccer, seeing choir concerts and math bees, selling candy with the Boy Scouts, paying for who-ever’s speeding ticket or insurance, helping out when we fucked up rather than telling us how stupid we are, helping anyone move from apartment to apartment, or when there wasn’t money for rent or food or healthcare. Pretty much anything for his children, with reasonable, well understood limits.

We’re all (my siblings) doing our best growing up, we’ve all moved out and its just him and Mom now. Its all taken a toll on him. He’ll fall asleep at 10:45 watching ‘The Wire’ with her, and wake up early in the morning around 4:30 or 4:35, not knowing what to do. He has completed all his chores. What to do at that time in the morning. No cows to milk or babies to soothe or drunken children to pick up from the police. No news papers to deliver. Less responsibility as a father.

He’ll never be rich, never drive a beamer, never make a name for himself. Maybe he’s a loser or something, but he is one of the kindest human beings I’ve met in my time and I’d pray a thousand fucking rosaries for this young woman to have a father who understands that investing time and money into your family pays in returns that are not countable in any form of currency. And I don’t even own a rosary anymore.

localhuman on MetaFilter.

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Wedding.

(via MetaFilter)

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St. Barbara-Glass.

Monks on Segways, with fire on the top of their heads, playing “Lightning” by Philip Glass. Good night, everybody. We’ll start storyboarding the next chapter of the internet tomorrow because this one just ended.

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Anecdote.

Mike Smith on MetaFilter:

I went to see some live heart surgery yesterday. Sat in a auditorium for three hours watching the queer thing beating, then not beating for a bit, then beating again. Didn’t lose concentration once.

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We didn’t think.

A woman, on the internet, posts about her anencephalic baby online [link omitted] and how she comes to understand it through her fundamentalist Christian faith. Anencephaly is a heartbreaking condition; anencephalic babies are born without “a major portion of brain, skull, and scalp” (Neurology Channel, no pictures). The link makes its way to MetaFilter and atheism.reddit [link omitted]. Both threads turn into disasters.

The mark of a strong community is a common sense of ethics. The ability for MetaFilter to self-police is unparalleled. And, while MetaTalk and the human moderator system seem suspiciously formal and un-internet, their existence prevent the unreadable, repulsive train wreck on reddit where the shit about sex dolls, atheism, and reddit’s own sense of smugness continues even after the woman asks the people to stop.

“I think this is the saddest thing I’ve read today.”

That there’s nobody to moderate reddit, that having comments like those exist on your website with a negative number standing next to it with your tacit approval, betrays a deep misunderstanding about how communities work and how much the people behind reddit are responsible for the monsters they’ve created at the feet of their indulgent, selflish, bullshit laziness.

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Now I want a job.

Two excellent Ask MetaFilter threads about touchy discussion topics when you talk about someone’s job.

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Inside.

David Foster Wallace on why Kafka is funny in a completely different way (PDF). (via Civil_Disobedient)

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Joule’s law.

Obama recently received endorsements from the White Aryan Resistance, the American Nazi Party, segregationists, and anti-Semites. The dumber the world gets, the more I think Terry Pratchett’s Discworld isn’t all that different from our world.

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Working 9-to-5 to put food on gymnasts because even gymnasts have night jobs, and they are tables.

Recently, the denizens and monsters of Ask MetaFilter listed weird but lovable jobs. One person is schoolbus router, and another is a soap documentation writer. “I was an intern at a magazine, and their factchecker was overwhelmed by a fact-filled article.” “Hi, my name is Spatula, and I spam old people.” Suck it, Web 2.0.

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My badger had super-rabies. It would sit and plot in the shadows, and then one day it killed my neighbors.

Biden is perceived as flawed while Obama needs to shrug the mocked stigma of being a flawless messiah. Obama is the insightful, visionary newcomer. Biden is the established attack dog. Obama has compassion; Biden has rabies.

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What we talk about when we talk about simple machines.

The less I say about this, the less I’ll ruin it—but this is always what I wanted The Dark Balloon to be and what I know Digg and reddit will never achieve. “The Wheel” by Drew Meger.

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A promise, not a threat.

“We’re not in the habit of going to homes and shooting peoples’ dogs,” Ellis said. “If we were, there would be a lot more dead dogs around the county.”

Someone get this man a job in public relations. (via MetaFilter)

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Me-ow.

• Brandon Blatcher (in reaction to a cat’s story): God, cat lovers are annoying sometimes.
• loquacious: You must love cats a whole lot, then.

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Whitespace.

(On vasectomies)

The ability to have sex without fear of impregnation makes a vas deferens.