Yeah we’re doing exactly nothing. Very annoying holiday. It’s 3:40PM on a Tuesday and I’ve been shitposting and considering wasting money on the steam summer sale basically all day. And I’ve made exactly zero dollars for the week so far, so that’s great. Really looking forward to doing 5 days of work in realistically 3.5 days starting tomorrow.
The only way to stop a bad dog with a roman candle is a good dog with a roman candle. MURICA!
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LOL I just went to my office and did work rather than participate in any group activities on this shit “holiday.”
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I mean even if you hate a holiday isn’t it a pretty good excuse to just…do anything you want that isn’t working?
As noted in the cooking thread, my wife volunteered me to become a grilling guy this summer so I’m making food for people tonight
I can’t speak for riverman’s job, but with mine there’s a finite amount of work that could be done and I generally stay pretty caught up. If I got the opportunity to do 8 hours of work today that would result in my Friday being a 15 minute slack call at 11:30 and 10-15 minutes of quotes at 2-3pm. Unfortunately that isn’t how it works because the source of my work very much did take yesterday and today… so their crazy week to catch up will instantly turn into my crazy week to catch up.
But yeah if I could be working right now I 100% would be.
Yeah I have travel coming and it’s do it now or at a far more annoying time.
This is going to be one of my more relaxed 4th of July’s. Got a good offer for a cheap room on the strip with a good view, going to bring food to our room from my fiance’s favorite nearby restaurant, and watch out the window.
Neither of us wanted to be out for hours in the heat or in a big crowd that could get shot up, so this seems pretty ideal. Other than the 20 minutes watching fireworks, you could confuse it with any other laid back day.
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all dogs are good
My favorite Twitter history professor wrote this a couple years ago for July 4th, getting nerdy about the things that define a nation and how America doesn’t really have any of them (and why that’s actually good):
The problem is when that metonymy (which is using one word in place of another related word, like saying one owns ‘wheels’ instead of an automobile) is mistaken for true, narrow, literal or technical meaning, as if someone thought that putting ‘boots on the ground’ meant that we need only drop some footwear out of a helicopter to solve a problem. One sees this all of the time, where arguments begin from the proposition that there is an identifiable American ‘nation’ (often with an identifiable ‘people’ that excludes quite a number of American citizens) or that the United States is a nation in a narrow sense rather than some other thing, like an ideology. And the error here is simple: by the narrow, technical definition, the United States is not, and has never been, a nation and is unlikely to become one in the near future.
…
So we have our definition of a nation: a people, historically connected geographically coherent territory, with a shared language, culture and myth of common birth-origin. The United States obviously fails this definition. It isn’t even remotely close.
Common history is likewise a dud here, but that may require a bit more explaining. After all, there are certainly a set of historical events related to the American polity itself – the founding, the American Civil War, the World Wars, the Civil Rights Movement and so on – which form a key pillar of American civics. But these stories are connected to formation of the key institutions of the state; they are not stories of personal origins. While stories of the American founding tends to focus on the role of English settlers, only around 20% of Americans claim British ancestry and about half of those hearken back to Irish immigrants who arrived well after the founding. Needless to say, the ‘common history’ may not seem quite so common for those whose ancestors arrived on slave ships, or many decades after the founding, or the 13.7% of Americans who are foreign born, or, of course, those whose ancestors arrived over the Bering Ice Bridge perhaps twenty thousand years ago. For my own part, my ancestors filtered over the Atlantic during the 1800s and early 1900s; to the best of my knowledge, none of my ancestors fought in the revolution.
I could keep going, but the key thing here is that no group is really large enough to demand that their story be the central core narrative. “My ancestors were with the founders” has to coexist with “my ancestors were held in bondage by the founders” has to coexist with “my ancestors got here in the 1800s” with “my ancestors were here before the United States was and were forced in by violence” has to coexist with “my ancestors got here in the 1900s” has to coexist with “hey, I just got here!” For many people, they will have several of those stories in their personal ancestry. There is no single dominant American story, but a collection of American stories, none of which can claim primacy because none of them represent even a significant plurality of the population’s own personal origins, much less a majority. Instead, the core historical narrative that ends up in schools is a civic narrative, focused on the evolution of institutions and key moments shaping the modern idea of American citizenship rather than a national narrative following a specific ethnic group (which is why, despite the United States’ relatively recent origin, that civic narrative is generally not stretched very much further into the past than the colonial era; the history is a history of America, not Americans).
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I dunno, that dude getting a roman candle shot up his ass by fido might disagree.
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Well, I can check off fireworks on the Vegas strip with a view of the fountains from my list. Fireworks themselves get a 6/10, overall view elevates it to a solid 7/10. Overall day with free drinks and “free” steaks (used comp dollars) gets a solid 9/10.
Not having to be out in the heat the entire Fourth of July is a vibe I could get used to.
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Also they lit up the new concert venue at Venetian tonight and showed off its LED capabilities. Very cool looking, but I’ve really got to give it to the branding and marketing department. They dug deep to come up with a name.
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