Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

A Senator Walker would be an insult to the state and the nation.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

Accountability, motherfuckers.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Open Thread: It’s Okay If It Goes Wrong

Open Thread: It’s Okay If It Goes Wrong

by | 55 Comments

This post is in: 

Listening to this and I loved that the commentary is, “It’s okay if it all goes wrong. We’d prefer it to land, but this is a test flight…”

At the time of posting, it’s scheduled to launch in 26 minutes – ish if they don’t scrub it.

A lesson we could all learn. If you’re trying something new, it’s okay if it all goes wrong. I had a friend tell me when I was complaining that I was spending more time on my ass than actually skiing, “If you’re not falling, you’re not learning.”

Open thread

Reader Interactions

55Comments

  1. 1.

    germy

    This looks like it was literally filmed today:

    Nothing has changed – everything has changed. The world’s first cat clip ever from 1899. “Little girl and cat” by the well known French Lumiere brothers. Colorized and speed adjusted. pic.twitter.com/wk5BsTmiHL

    — ArtNouveauDeco (@NouveauDeco) February 1, 2021

  3. 3.

    PaulB

    I still remember my first time skiing. I didn’t have proper ski clothes, so I was wearing a brand new pair of jeans, non pre-washed. Every time I fell, I left a blue dye mark in the snow.

    It’s bad enough when you fall a lot while learning; it’s worse when you’ve got visible evidence that everyone can see as to just how much you fell. And since I’m a real klutz, that was a *lot* of evidence.

  6. 6.

    Fraud Guy

    Well, except maybe the first atomic bomb test, when they thought it *might* incinerate the atmosphere.

  7. 7.

    Nicole

    Your skiing story made me remember the first time I fell/was thrown from a horse, during a lesson. I took the walk of shame to the office, sheepishly said, “That’s the first time that’s happened to me” and the woman behind the counter, without looking up from her paperwork, said, “Three falls make a rider; thirty-three make a horsewoman.”  And I went from embarrassment to, “Awesome! Only 32 left to go!” ?

  8. 8.

    Betty Cracker

    Sounds like Pelosi is fed up with this QAnonsense:

  10. 10.

    Betty Cracker

    @Nicole: Haha! Sounds like she knew what she was talking about!

    A guy I used to work with went on one of those trail rides and got thrown. We asked him if he got back on the horse, and he said, “No! It was a quarter of a mile away!” ;-)

  12. 12.

    Barbara

    @Nicole: That’s why I will never be either!  I was thrown from a horse, in France, and I didn’t get on a horse again for a long while.  Eventually I went back but I have never been thrown from one, nor am I going to do the kind of riding that risks it.  Falling while skiing is bad enough and I’ve done quite a bit of that, but I don’t mind it as much.

  13. 13.

    Brachiator

    @Patricia Kayden:

    NEW: Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has removed all members from the Pentagon’s advisory boards in a sweeping effort to oust a series of last-minute appointees by former President Donald Trump

    These folk are not playing around.

  14. 14.

    kindness

    I ski. I don’t fall very much any more. Am I learning? Some. Have learned not to ski beyond my abilities and hence not to fall. I don’t have the legs I did in my 20’s so……

  16. 16.

    Jeffro

    @kindness: same here…skiing is great, skiing and pushing it to the edge (so that I fall a lot), not so much.

    I missed it this year, but next year, look out!

  20. 20.

    Brachiator

    OT. Some sad news. From the BBC

    Captain Sir Tom Moore has died with coronavirus. 

    The 100-year-old had raised almost £33m for NHS charities by walking laps of his garden…

    He tested positive for Covid-19 last week. His family said due to other medication he was receiving for pneumonia, he was unable to be vaccinated.

    I imagine that Captain Sir Tom fell a few times in his long and productive life.

     

  21. 21.

    FridayNext

    Give me a fruitful failure anytime, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truths for yourself.

    said some dead white guy once

  29. 29.

    raven

    @Nicole: I remember the first time I got back in a van after breaking my back and spending a year if a full body cast. Had ta do it.

  30. 30.

    MisterForkbeard

    Regarding the thread title: When I was in early high school, my dad took my older brother and I aside to tell us that failing was okay, and even could be useful in the long run. The key was to learn from your failures so that you didn’t fail in the same way. Take pride and ownership in what you did wrong so that you can do better in the future, and you have nothing to be ashamed of.

    It made an impression on me. It made a bigger impression on my brother, who’d had a middling high school career and was starting to struggle in his post-high-school life. It gave him the freedom to try new things, go new places. And when he figured out what he wanted to do, he went back to school and became a nurse.

    This idea is one of the more important lessons you can teach a kid. Do your (reasonable) best, but if you fail then don’t freak out. Just look at why you failed and move on.

  31. 31.

    Bruce K in ATH-GR

    @Anoniminous:

    Well, people do need to be reminded their car warranty is about to expire and they need to act fast to keep their coverage before the price increase.

    Those calls are getting annoying, especially since they’re coming in on my Skype number while I’m seven time zones ahead of the East Coast. I once told a caller that the last car I owned was an Alfa Romeo 33 (I don’t think the 33 was ever sold in the United States), from like 1988, way out of warranty, and it was scrapped in 2015 anyway.

  33. 33.

    Grumpy Code Monkey

    At least it was a *different* problem this time, which is good.

    Looks like the second engine may have eaten itself on (re)startup.  Someone in another forum was speculating what kind of weirdness happens when you flip a rapidly spinning turbopump 90 degrees; if there’s any kind of defect in the shaft or blades, you can bet that’s where it will break.

    It took quite a few tries to get the Falcon 9 landings down; I fully expect the next couple of Starships to fail similarly.

  34. 34.

    Bruce K in ATH-GR

    Trying to recall: how many times did they biff the landing on the Falcon lower stages before successfully sticking one?

  41. 41.

    Baud

    ?

    Speaking to The Today Show this Monday, country music legend Dolly Parton said she was offered the Presidential Medal of Freedom two times from President Trump, but she turned him down on both occasions.

    “I couldn’t accept it because my husband was ill and then they asked me again about it and I wouldn’t travel because of the COVID,” she told host Hoda Kotb.

  44. 44.

    LuciaMia

    Punxatawney Phil predicts 6 more weeks of winter? How could he have possibly have seen his shadow?

  45. 45.

    Don K

    I made the mistake of learning to ski at 30 years old, and of course was tentative and nervous, and jealous of the kids zooming downhill because they’re fearless at that age. I’m convinced learning any activity involving overcoming fear should be done in childhood. It’s like watching videos of 5-6 year olds racing quarter-midget cars. They’re going like 30 mph, are really well padded and protected against mishaps, and every spin is a learning experience about car control.

  48. 48.

    Miss Bianca

    @TaMara (HFG): My horse trainer told me the same thing – about my horse! How I had to give her room to fail during training sessions, rather than trying to prevent failure at all, because otherwise she wasn’t learning anything. First time I’ve ever heard any trainer say that – and it’s made a big difference in how I approach working with her.

  49. 49.

    Mike J

    “If you’re not falling, you’re not learning.”

    The very first thing we teach in sailing classes is how to get the boat upright and get back in it after you capsize.

  50. 50.

    Nicole

    @Miss Bianca: Awww… you have a good trainer.  I think horses know, too, and when they’re treated kindly they really want to figure out how to succeed for you.  I remember once trying to do ground rails with my (much-missed-and-much-beloved) Appy gelding.  He kept bumping them with his hooves and I finally said, eh, let’s go back to the barn.  We got 50 feet away and I could tell he wanted to go back to the ring (he NEVER wanted to go back to the ring).  We went back, he did the most perfect steps over the rails a rider could ask for, and then was ready to go home. He had just needed some time to process. :)

  51. 51.

    Nicole

    @Catherine D.:

    I always remember it as two kinds of riders – those who have fallen off, and those who haven’t yet

    Heh.  Makes me think of a T-shirt I saw that said, “Riding: The art of keeping the horse between you and the ground.”

  55. 55.

    moonbat

    TaMara (up top) there is a beautiful essay written by David Duchovny on this very subject in The Atlantic today. I’d link to it but I haven’t learned how to do that yet. :(​​​​

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