Kim Scheinberg
kims@mas.to
<p>Retired speechwriter. Big fan of Peppermint Patty and wooden jigsaw puzzles.</p><p>Ex-Wall St, ex-NYT, ex-dotcom stuff. <br />Ex-New Yorker, now in Las Vegas</p><p>I've been around since the days of usenet (met my husband there, our kids are now in their 20s). Most of my public writing is under my own name on Quora, or elsewhere under someone else's byline. </p><p>She/her</p><p>Header is a fanned out deck of playing cards with NO KINGS</p>
Posts
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@kjhealy@mastodon.social Damn it. She was so good in Breaking Away. She was fun to watch in Barney Miller, too
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If this were bouncing in your Apple dock, would you dare click on it?
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Filling out the online forms for physical therapy. I've gotten through 40 screens of nonsense when I get to the question: Is there any other information regarding your medical history that is important for us to know? I wrote: I've been told that I have dangerously sexy earlobes
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This is just so bleak "Late last year, Marissa Mayer was struggling with what felt like an impossible task. Her daughter Marielle was turning 10, and Marielle’s teacher wanted three bullet points summarizing what made her special. Mayer — the former chief executive of Yahoo and a pioneer at Google, where she was the first female engineer — likes cracking a hard problem. But she felt overwhelmed by the range and complexity of potential answers. So Mayer asked her personal A.I. assistant,...
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I'm at urgent care with my spouse of nearly 30 years. He's been very sick for the last few days and has an extremely hard time standing up (combo of weakness and dizziness.) He's got a 101 fever, and his BP is 89/58 (that was the second read, the first was even lower) Anyway, they need a urine sample and the nurse says she's going to bring him a urinal because they don't want him to risk standing up. She laughed VERY hard when I said, "Awesome! I've never seen hi...
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Okay, this is kinda cool https://my9albums.org/s/56cb88372805
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There's a thread over on Bluesky asking about the first video game you remember playing. I can't help but think the answers would be more interesting here Mine was _Tank_, a sit-down two-player arcade game made by Atari. Our family used to go skiing about an hour north of Montreal every year and we stayed in Le Chantecler Hotel. There was a Tank in the hotel lobby It was 1974 so I was 7. (I had a LOT of pinball under my belt by then.) Between me and my brothers, we probably dumped $50...
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It was worse than a dare My kid insisted that, "You can't go to Tonopah and *not* stay at the Clown Motel!" And yes, on that particular evening I was the only guest in the place
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Hey @mattblaze@federate.social My oldest kid moved to NYC as a student in 2023. We continued to receive ballots for him here as this was still his primary address, and he voted in NV in the 2024 presidential election In 2025 he started working in NYC (while still a student) and voted in the NYC primary as he now considered himself a resident by virtue of receiving tax documents there He never actively canceled his registration here. I am sure he thought it happened automagically once he voted...
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Watching _The Inventor: Out For Blood In Silicon Valley_,, the Alex Gibney doc about Theranos Holy shit. It opens with Dan Fucking Ariely explaining how you need to "understand the journey" and how "if you look at [Elizabeth Holmes] from the beginning, it would be a cautionary tale about all of us" Uh, no Dan. Not all of us
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I hope a bunch of Mastodonians are making time to see _You Can See Everything_ this weekend It's been ~48 hours since I saw the opening day screening and I really need to participate in a 60+ comments thread about it If you haven't seen it yet, try to avoid spoilers/reviews. Watching the trailer is fine, but knowing as little as possible is definitely the way to go with this doc. [And I'm someone who normally finds review embargoes ridiculous] #youcanseeeverything
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@ewen@social.ewenbell.com It happens far more often with the MagSafe cable (which we have tried swapping out) than with the USB, but it still happens with the USB Maybe I should test my wall outlets
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Fun problem with my MacBook Air Even though I've got my power adaptor plugged in, and the Mac acknowledges that the power adaptor is plugged in, it doesn't charge the battery I happened to take this photo when the battery was at 94%, but it also happens when the battery is at, say, 30% Anyone got any guesses?
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A few weeks ago, Elizabeth Holmes' sentence was reduced from 135 months to 123 months. The ~9% reduction is due to a retroactive change in federal sentencing guidelines and earned time through the First Step Act The judge seems understandably angry about this. But this is bonkers: "The hundreds of millions of dollars in losses caused by Holmes's fraud speak for themselves. And though unquantifiable, the echoes of the immense reputational damage that the innovative industry in Sili...
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_You Can See Everything_ is the most utterly batshit and amazing film I've see in years. It's three hours long, and as soon as it ended I wanted to see it again I'll be thinking about it for a long time
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Got my flu and covid shots yesterday, woke up this morning feeling like I got hit by a mack truck.The arm soreness isn't too bad, but the chills I could do without Thinking about bringing a gravity blanket to the theater where I'm seeing YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING today. Anyone else have Nathan Fielder and Elizabeth Holmes on their agenda today?
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I have somehow made it to the age of 59 without ever owning a hair dryer. But when I was on vacation last month, the AirBNB we stayed in had a hair dryer, and it made dealing with my hair easier when I needed to get out of the house quickly So when I got back to Las Vegas, I bought a hair dryer. And because I don't really know how to properly use one, I read the directions I am just dying to read the lawsuit that resulted in this particular warning: Never use while sleeping
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Why does the Apple HomeView ad feel like an episode of _Shameless_? Not only is there not a single moment in this ad that makes me *want* the device, there are half a dozen moments where I thought, "If spouse installed this in our home, it would be instant grounds for divorce" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkrYiZ_g9tw
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From the FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) community on reddit, I give you a plan that seems almost impossible on its face here in the Year of Our Kleptocracy Does anyone go to prison (and stay in prison) for white collar crime under Trump? Isn't it more likely to land them an ambassadorship or something? [I'm also a little dismayed by the number of Sorry Astronauts out there]
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Why is everything an advent calendar now? I see them for whiskeys, Bon Mamman jams, beauty products, jigsaw puzzles... Is this just hanukkah upmanship?
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Palmer Luckey of The Nerd Reich: "I would try to end the tragedy of divorce with oxytocin doping for marriage counseling." "We understand mammal pair bonding pretty well. There's a lot of people who want to stay together. Most of the people who don't want to stay together should stay together, especially for their kids." "And we can, if people think SSRIs are fine, which they're not, but if they were, then oxytocin doping to stay together is definitely fi...
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@kjhealy@mastodon.social As someone who has never read Berlin, where should I start?
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Finally got around to reading the NYT article about The Nerd Reich seeking absolution From religious scholars This excerpt brings to mind what is probably the best scene in The Sopranos — when Carmela consults a Jewish psychotherapist who tells her to, "take only the children, what's left of them, and go." She sits with it for a bit, then starts musing aloud about arranging lawyers and child support. He cuts her off telling her it's all blood money — he says he won't take...
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@ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org I grabbed the image you posted, re-uploaded it to Mastodon, used 'add text from image' and it mostly OCR'ed just fine. It only got truly squirrelly when it got to the bar Here's the unedited OCR output
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Did... did the tree from _The Giving Tree_ write this?
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I take ketamine for depression. A couple times a week, I take it 2-3 hours before bedtime in our spare bedroom. I've been doing this for a while One side effect at my prescribed dosage is that K makes me amorous. I have no idea if this is common to other people or not, but it's a consistent side effect for me My husband and I have been together for 30 years, We have kids. We have an active sex life. And yet... On the nights that I take ketamine, we always always have a short discussio...
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A few days ago I was at the airport in Barcelona filling out paperwork to get VAT refunds for purchases made in France, Germany, and Spain The Spain administrivia was handled by a machine scanning a receipt and my passport — the refund hit my credit card before I landed in NYC — but the France and Germany refunds required forms that needed to be stamped, put in envelopes, and dropped in a mailbox right next to the processing area My oldest (27) watched as I tried three times to lick the envelo...
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After Anonymous leaked the evidence in the Steubenville rape case in 2013 — including the video of the rapists' friends laughing and joking while the rape was ongoing — I sat down with my oldest (then 14) and made him listen to the audio with me. We talked for a long time about what his responsibilities were if he should ever find himself in such circumstances That kid, who coincidentally graduated from Cornell a few years ago, is 27 now Seems to me that a lot of parents missed an easy op...
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Back in 2016 or thereabouts, my old boss was emailing me from a Board of Trustees meeting at Cornell. They were discussing (among other things) how to deal with reports of sexual assault on campus Back then, a big part of my job was to keep him from saying stupid shit. He shared his recommendation to me privately in one of those emails, and I told him he should never ever ever make that suggestion out loud where anyone could hear it. Even now I cringe just thinking about it In retrospect, his...
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In most ways I think Europe is so much saner and healthier than the US — I would very much like to figure out how to move here — but there is one respect in which I remain the ugliest of ugly Americans: I am convinced that I could make a fortune selling Charmin and other such luxury toilet paper brands in Paris, Berlin, and Barcelona I know, I know, Europe has bidets (and older plumbing that makes US two-ply stuff untenable) but I wish I'd thought to pack a roll when I left NYC