One of the most important race tracks in the United States is in Daytona Beach, Florida. The entire motor racing culture of Daytona sprung up because the local beach sand is actually hard, densely packed and worn very smooth by the waves. The earliest car races there used a significant portion of the beach itself as the track.

You need somewhere to piss. What are you going to do, go in the ocean?

Xbox has had what? One half-decent console?

Probably don’t give the dog A1 sauce but yeah make waffle treats for your dog. Sounds like an afternoon of wholesome fun.

I distinctly remember playing Twilight Princess, I was hanging around in Castle Town, having done literally everything. There was that weird unfinished fishing journal thing I had neglected, but I had done every sidequest, found every heart piece, I think I’d even beaten RollGoal. and I was like “I guess I’ll go beat the game then.”

There’s a weird dead feeling video games take on in that state.

Most…is probably The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. That game came out when I was 3, I still have the original cartridge and it still works, and I still play that game to this day.

Least is probably going to be Where The Water Tastes Like Wine. I discovered the soundtrack first on Youtube, and then decided to try out the game. It’s a dialog heavy game, they put a lot of emphasis on the presentation and voice acting, and it’s idiotically slow. It puts a page of dialog up that you’ll have read before the voice actor starts talking. If you open the pause menu and Quit the game, IT TALKS MORE. I hit Alt+F4 and haven’t looked at it s ince.

I had bought two games at the same time, I played one of them for a few weeks before getting around to looking at WtWTLW, so I couldn’t refund it.

When you have enough charlatans trying to push corporate or religious agendas, you’ve got two choices:

1. Every single human being needs to repeat every single experiment they rely on for their work or pleasure because there is no such thing as trust, only the scientific method and the power of repeating experiments to verify results, or

2. We need to have institutions to do this shit for us whose reputations MATTER at the flesh and bone level. What that looks like, at this point I’m not sure, because criminals always win.

I’ve gone to college. I’ve been taught buy people who are supposed to know this shit how to find scholarly sources. I’ve cited such sources in essays. Something I’ve never been shown are those peer reviews. Hell, it seems like half the experiments I was taught about in school come with a “And here’s why we ethically CAN’T repeat this study” like the Stanford Prison Experiment.

The “intellectual elite” did a lot of the damage themselves.

I want you to go watch a youtube channel called The Octopus Lady. She’s a member of Nebula, young woman with some marine biology credentials who zilennials her way through science communication mostly about ocean life. And she does the legwork, or tries to. She makes a running gag out of sounding out all the latin. “Nootfish are in the order pi…pisca…pis-caen-id-ae? And the phylum Pis-caein-in-ae? Piscaieninae.” And it’s not difficult to find an episode where she’ll talk about reading published research papers and completely failing to understand them, because they’re written in space catholic. She’ll read excerpts like “The phyringial jaws are motulidated lantitherally from the up end of the distal and caudal sclipera. When feeding, they linticulate joternimously in a cirratic fashion.” She has a habit of damning basically any scientist in any field other than marine biology to turbohell because she understands their work even less.

“Cite your source.” “Okay. 5.8th dimensional pile of moon runes Hope this clears it up.”

It raises the problem of science-shaped bullshit. The MLA or APA style guides are manuals on how to fake scientific literature. It’s very easy to make bullshit look credible. This happens a lot; industries hold fake scientific conferences where bullshit research is presented before being published in bullshit journals so that you can find the bullshit people cite when lying on behalf of a corporation.

Hell just go to a doctor. Make an appointment months in advance to have someone dead inside prescribe you whatever SSRI their office is wallpapered with ads for as treatment for astigmatism. Women commonly complain of having their problems outright ignored, meanwhile men pretty much just give up and just…live with three knees on one leg out of not unfounded fear the hospital will just maim them further. After all, if you cut a patient’s dick off during a tonsilectomy, you get to charge them for reattachment. The healthcare system managed to make themselves the worst part of a forklift accident.

Universities selling out en masse offering bullshit degrees like Musical Psychology casts a certain “What the fuck are you doing?” shadow over everything they do. But what do you expect out of our nation’s classroom-themed minor league professional sports franchises?

The dotcom bubble was very dumb but I don’t remember it taking the rest of civilization down with it. Some idiots who jumped on a bandwagon they didn’t understand got venture capital for saying a buzzword, they bought expensive office chairs and then lost their shirts, but it didn’t quadruple the price of a cheeseburger.

If that’s true, it’s dumb, Not like Americans ever move from one region of the nation to the other and take their vehicles with them.

Illinois Nazis. I hate Illinois Nazis.

They venn diagrammed too close to the sun. They tried to make a single vehicle appeal to as many people as they could, meaning it’s for basically no one. It sucks at everything.

It’s a pickup truck that has a weirdly high cargo weight rating for the tiny bed you’d have to haul it in. Ideal for those who must move very dense cargo very short distances, like our nation’s many millions of short-haul plutonium deliverymen. I’m sure in 1985, plutonium is available at every corner drug store.

It’s a 2-door 5-seat SUV in a market that already has three 2-door 2-row SUVs: The Jeep Wrangler, the Ford Bronco and the Land Rover Defender. All three of those are pretty serious 4WD offroad machines, all three are available as more normie-fied 4-door variants, and all three sell WAY more 4-doors than 2-doors. Because what the 2020’s American public needs is a full-size sedan, but they want to look rugged and outdoorsy, because if they actually drove a sedan or minivan, in the words of Jeremy Clarkson: “That says 'I’ve had my children and now I’m waiting to die.”

It’s an EV with the frame weight and aerodynamics of a pickup truck. So for it’s battery capacity, it’s got awful range.

It’s an EV that’s also cheap. So it’s got 400V architecture, no Vehicle-To-Load or Vehicle-To-Home, no 110VAC outlet, relatively slow charging despite its relatively small battery, and no heat pump.

So much of its fundamental design is in conflict with itself that it really only appeals to people who have no cargo, no passengers, and nowhere to go. It’ll probably carry home some Stouffer’s and White Claws from the Food Lion every week.

Shame too; I kinda like the eschewing of dashboard tech, the a la carte options list, prominent whatever-the-owner-wants mounting rails everywhere.

Personally? Never have. I know folks with similar trucks who do so daily.

Here’s my thing though: It’s got weirdly high onboard payload capacity, but a small bed. So…how do you load it that heavy? At the same time, it has a low towing capacity, so it’s not great for a contractor pulling a trailer. It’s almost backwards in a way.

It won’t be. But cute idea.

The payload is actually pretty damn good for a truck of its size. Compare it to an S10, most are rated for 999 pounds in the bed. In which I have hauled cow shit, half a ton at a time, from one end of the county to the other. Thing is…I don’t think the Slate can carry 1500 pounds of cow shit, the bed is too small.

Towing capacity is better than they initially said, earlier they quoted 1400, 2000 is lawnmower trailer territory. Compare that to the 5600 pound towing capacity of my S10.

We know.

The only solutions are way better/larger batteries, much smaller cars, or massively expanded charging infrastructure. Unfortunately nothing [affordable] in the market is addressing any of those.

I think the market is addressing all three. The F-150 Lightning is giving way to the Slate and Ford’s upcoming Ranchero. They’re working on battery chemistries, they’ve been getting better. Charging infrastructure HAS been built out.

Gas car owners haven’t seen EV charging stations going in, because they’re often put in out-of-the-way places. They’re not as visually obvious as gas stations, so gas car owners may have been surrounded by them and not realize it. So they don’t feel like the infrastructure is there, when it is. The EV charging industry has done a better job of concealing itself from the American public than the NSA.

I could rant about charging stations being difficult to find, “But use an app” you mean nazi stalker software? We’re in an age where a lot of people want to step back from all that shit because of who’s running it all. I genuinely do prefer to find gas stations by seeing their signs. I could throw my phone in a lake and drive my 2005 Buick to California, right now. I know how the US interstate system works and I know how to find and buy gas without any precise location enabled spyware.

Let’s ignore that for now, and instead: EV prononents like to point out that most charging will be done at home, and charging away from home will be a rare occasion mostly on road trips. Lemme ask you something: You got an app on your phone you only use occasionally? It’s a pain in the ass, right? Go to order your quarterly pizza from Domino’s and the app needs to be manually updated and logged back into and their terms of service have changed…sounds like fun to deal with when you’ve been sent on a 4 hour mission and you need to find a charging station. Phone apps aren’t tools you can get and put in your toolbox until you need them, they rust.

BUT ANYWAY. What they need is better communication of the vehicle’s limitations. The manufacturer spits out a number achieved in ideal conditions. Then you talk to owners and they go “Yeah. WELLLL…it depends” and start listing the conditions where you won’t get that. Start telling me what the machine WILL do, give me ways to predict the vehicle’s performance in non-ideal conditions, or start engineering those limits out.

I’d rather hear “It will do 200 miles between charges.” more than “It’ll do 300 miles. WELLLL…it depends. Maybe it’ll only do 180 if it’s cold out and you’re running the heater.”

Well when Futurama made that joke about the iPhone, the line was “It’s $500” and everyhing was basically true.

It’s $400, there’s no choice of carrier, the battery won’t hold a charge, and the reception isn’t very-