Merry Christmas, if you’re into that sort of thing!

RIP, Ingvar Kamprad, founder of Ikea. My living room would be mostly empty if it weren’t for your stuff. Here’s a song by JoCo.

Z&T; I second the ‘check the alternator’ advice. Only, if you have any spare cash and a buddy I’d recommend investing in a voltmeter and testing it yourself. You need the buddy because one of you has to run the voltmeter and the other the gas pedal.

It’s good you have a for sure good battery, because you can’t really test the alternator with a bad one.

The only reason I recommend testing it yourself was because I had a battery that went bad and the first battery/mechanic shop I wandered in to tried to special order me an alternator, and it was seriously just the battery.

@ Shadowplay

Illusions is a perfect word for it, and it really pisses me off. If you’re reduced to taking credit for other peoples actions and abilities based on shared gender, or shared skin colour, or shared beliefs – you are wasting oxygen here.
It probably happens, but I’ve never really noticed women doing that. Only men. Don’t know if it’s observer effect – I just don’t notice women doing it – or something more (and am too lazy/busy to dig into it ? ).

It doesn’t really work for women, that’s probably why. Women are the unfavorable comparison group, the pool of people men get to feel superior to by virtue of being men. And there aren’t really any female-coded achievements you could brag about, either. Everything prestigious and competitive is male-coded. By pointing out the kinds of accomplishments that have historically only been possible for men (and if a woman did them anyway, she was quietly forgotten from history), what we’re saying at best is “women can do this stuff too, despite the fact that it’s male-coded in our culture”. That’s more an admission of defeat than a good counterargument, because misogynists don’t argue based on truth. They’re all about optics.

Women still do it to groups less privileged than themselves of course. I’ve seen a lot of white women feeling WHITE PRIDE feels, parroting Nazi talking points about race and intelligence, or about the supposedly superior history of “European culture” to others.
I’m sure TERFs could rub it in trans women’s faces that some cis women give birth, regardless of whether they’ve done it or intend to do it themselves.

In fact, that probably does happen.
Ugh. I wish I hadn’t thought about that, I feel soiled now.

@dust bunny

Thank you. That makes sense, unfortunately.

Sort of wondering if it isn’t a failure defense mechanism. No one wants to be a failure, and accepting that failing is gonna happen isn’t easily learned and accepted. 😛

And sorry about the thought it raised in you. That does happen. Seen it with my own eyes twice (and since I only know 2 trans women well enough to talk freely with in meatspace, it’s not exactly uncommon 🙁 )

Shadowplay:

Sort of wondering if it isn’t a failure defense mechanism. No one wants to be a failure, and accepting that failing is gonna happen isn’t easily learned and accepted.

But it doesn’t work, does it? Boasting about the achievements of others as if you can share their glory really just exposes that you probably have no noteworthy achievements of your own to feel good about. The only people convinced by this effort are others as mediocre as the one attempting it. I suspect that even the self-professed mammoth-hunters and white supremacists mostly know, privately, that they’re not all that.

@ Shadowplay

It’s for the best that I did think about it.
In hindsight, of course it’s really common, and it doesn’t just come from the relatively rare nulliparous TERFs but all cis women. I was just being clueless about the shittiness of cis women because I’m so comfortable in the closet that for nearly all intents and purposes, I’m one of them.

Yeah, I suppose my attempt to imagine myself in the position of people who behave this way is hampered by my depression. I’m used to feeling that I’m shit, so it’s hard for me to imagine unjustifiably high self esteem. But there’s plenty of the latter around, not just in the White House.

DP

(my mouse is also not working right….)

Z&T: yay, we have a flat-battery club!

Today I started my car for the first time since Christmas.

It was a “simple” matter of taking the battery out, recharging it on the trickle charger (in a room the cats couldn’t get to, because I didn’t want to electrocute them), then putting the battery back in.

Simple in quotes because of course the relevant nuts were rusted. Also the battery was frozen solid (-30 C weather has a tendency to do that). Also the engine was encased in snow from all the blizzards that have blown by in the past month.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll even *move* the car. To the shop. To get a new battery and some more major fixes.

@ numerobis,

Yeah I hear you, was hoping maybe car, battery, were just cold.
Not.

@ Diptych,
Hear you on that too.

Our pal T here says: Don’t tell anyone you’re an engineer 🙂

Yeah, really 😀
But so is she and did she fix my car? No.

Car electronics is beyond my scope of understanding.

Oi. At times, I wish I could go live in a cave….

I’m thinking of, once the money is straight and it’ll have to be used too – a truck. Anyone have any thoughts on a basic, smaller, but good in bad weather, pick up truck? In the $10K range? Or any kind of a “utility” vehicle? Any suggestions appreciated.

Kind of like the time Kentucky Fried Chicken changed its name to KFC and everyone forgot it was fried fast food and started thinking of it has a health food place.

Shadowplay – your observation about people who use their family history to lord it over others reminded me. I read years ago about a club for the descendants of famous people. Someone commented on the membership: “what a collection of anticlimaxes.”

If your biggest achievement was being born the child of your parents, you should follow Elan Sleazebaggano’s example and go home to reconsider your life.

Robert – love it! That is so accurate! 🙂