Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

Ron DeSantis, the grand wizard, oops, governor of FL.

Innocent people don’t delay justice.

How any woman could possibly vote for this smug smarmy piece of misogynistic crap is beyond understanding.

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

Cole is on a roll !

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Trump makes a mockery of the legal system and cowardly judges just sit back and let him.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Can we lighten up on the doomsday scenarios?

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

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

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

‘Museums aren’t America’s attic for its racist shit.’

“That’s what the insurrection act is for!”

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

with the Kraken taking a plea, the Cheese stands alone.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

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

You are here: Home / Balloon Juice / Meetups and social events / NYC & Maui Meetups – Proof of Life

NYC & Maui Meetups – Proof of Life

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So there were a couple of mini-meetups in September and October.

September 4 in NYC

Here’s NotMax and Layer8Problem  in the harbor.

Rumors that they commandeered the ship above for an afternoon sail were highly exaggerated.

October 8 in Maui

Here we have NotMax, Hkedi [Kang T.Q.] and Sister Golden Bear.  (left to right)

No idea who the handsome fellow in the black hat is!

Looks like a good time was had by all!

Open thread.

 

Reader Interactions

125Comments

  1. 1.

    SiubhanDuinne

    Both meet-ups look like fun!

    I adore NotMax’s T-shirt in the second photo — 0️⃣ Days Without Sarcasm. LOL.

  4. 4.

    WaterGirl

    @Alison Rose: I don’t know, if you had shown me 9 other random photos along with the photo with Sister Golden Bear – and asked me to pick out the one I thought was Sister Golden Bear, I am certain I would have chosen that one!

    But generally, yes, I am with you on that.

  7. 7.

    Tony Jay

    @WaterGirl:

     Well, there’s the next Medium Cool.

    “What do you think, based purely upon their online personas, certain Jackals look like?”

  12. 12.

    Tony Jay

    @WaterGirl:

    Good point.

    “What cultural figures or celebrities do you think, based purely upon their online personas, certain Jackals look like?”

    For example, I think Baud looks like Matthew McConoughey, but entirely bald and with one artificial limb, hence the no-pants rule.

  13. 13.

    AM in NC

    Love putting the faces to the jackals!

    Is anyone up for a meet up in November/December in the Triangle area of NC?  I just had ACL surgery so I won’t be up and about for a bit.

    I know WaterGirl did a meet-up planning thread, but it got so big I didn’t think we’d be able to cull for possibles.

  17. 17.

    HinTN

    South Bay, technically Pacific Coast highway just north of Half Moon Bay, this Tuesday, 17 October 2023, 5:30 PM, at La Costanera. Yeah, short notice, crummy time. So it goes. I have a reservation.

    @WaterGirl: can get you my email and/or cell number.

  19. 19.

    NotMax

    Currently sampling the series Harry Wild on Prime. A show which almost works but never quite gets there as an ensemble performance. The saving grace is it stars jane Seymour (the eponymous retired college professor who gets involved in crime solving; although in her early seventies IRL she looks decades younger than her role would first suggest).

  21. 21.

    Alison Rose

    @Tony Jay: That could be funny, because sometimes people get that way wrong even when the person is right in front of them. I’ve had two people — years apart, different cities, didn’t know each other — tell me I look like Neve Campbell. And I do NOT. Not saying anything negative, she’s very pretty. But like…the only way I resemble her is that we’re both white ladies with dark brown hair. We have different eye colors, different skin tones, different face shape, etc.

  22. 22.

    Steeplejack

    @NotMax:

    I saw a couple of episodes of that somewhere—maybe my local Brit-centric lesser PBS station—and you’re right: it doesn’t quite work. Frustrating to watch, because it’s so close.

  25. 25.

    Tony Jay

    @Alison Rose:

    Yeah, but whatever ‘gait of the features’ it is that Neve Campbell has, that special half-blurred turn of the corner of the mouth that stands out as particularly ‘her’, that’s the bit that reminds them of her when they see you.

    Or… have you survived any masked serial killers? It could be that too.

    For the record, I always used to get Rik Mayall. Now I get Gerry Adams. Aging is cruel. 😂

  26. 26.

    Alison Rose

    @Tony Jay: Hmm…I mean, I do smirk a good deal, since I’m a sarcastic jerk.

    As far as I know, no serial killer survival. I mean, I’m here, but that could just mean that they were so bad at their hustle that I never even knew they were trying.

  28. 28.

    eversor

    @Alison Rose:

    I get Matt Damon all the time and a few Kiefer Southerlands lobbed at me.  Which while I get is flattering I don’t look like either of them.  Nor do they look alike.  Other than being generic dirty blonde haired white guys with busted noses.  If I squint or am not wearing my contacts I can sort of see where it comes from.  But it’s still a mystery to me.

  32. 32.

    Tony Jay

    @NotMax:

    When I shave and take the glasses off. Weak chin, soulful eyes, bitchiness. Oh yes, oh yes indeed.

    Love Jacobi. I would pay real cash money for a mini-series with that de-aging thing they do with him and John Hurt playing the Master and the Doctor during the Time War.

  36. 36.

    sab

    NotMax isn’t what I expected. Having seen him I ask myself why not. He looks exactly like he should look.

    I am literal minded, so I was expecting Golden Bear to be blonde, not a redhead. Not at all a disappointment, just a surprise.

    @Alison Rose: My college roommate’s cousin (overseas Chinese, got to America by way of Phillipines) always thought I looked like Stephanie Powers, which (unfortunately) I do not. She has lovely visible cheekbones and I do not. White girls with long dark hair. I always thought his perceived similarity was hilarious.

  44. 44.

    Suzanne

    Looks like a great couple of meetups! Good conversation, I am sure.

    I been told, on multiple occasions, that I look like Sandra Bullock. Which, uhhhh, no I don’t, but I’ll take the compliment.

    I’ve also been told that I look like Tina Fey, and that one stings a bit more. Not because I don’t think Tina Fay is fantastic (she is), but because people also said the same thing about Sarah Palin, and I don’t like the implication of the transitive property in this instance.

  45. 45.

    Alison Rose

    @sab: I think it’s interesting when you see someone who really DOES look a lot like another person, someone they’re not related to. It’s like after so many people, God ran out of new face ideas and was like “fuck it, you get this one I already used”.

  47. 47.

    sab

    @Gin & Tonic: Yes. Not an alumna so missed that. My alma mater we were Lords and Ladies. I always loved the idea of field hockey or basketball playing Ladies.

  49. 49.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Alison Rose: At various times in my life, people have told me I look exactly like Ricky Schroder, Larry Bird, Gary Busey, and Chris Elliott. These people look nothing like each other, and the only thing any of them ever had in common with me was skin color and hair. I had a full head of thick blond hair, like those other guys, then I went bald and grew a beard so then I was Chris Elliott. That’s about the extent of it.

  51. 51.

    Matt McIrvin

    (You know who I *actually* think I look like? The YouTuber Mat Taylor aka Techmoan, who makes videos about collecting and repairing ancient audio equipment. I’m balder than he is but otherwise we could pass for each other, until we opened our mouths–he’s got a Yorkshire accent.)

  52. 52.

    sab

    @Alison Rose: Back in gradeschool in Florida one of the GE ( NASA people) moms showed me a picture of her niece (in Connecticut) who did look just like me. It was very weird. I am sure over the years we have changed a lot and neither of us look like our young selves, much less each other.

  53. 53.

    zhena gogolia

    I don’t look like any celebrities, but I used to get mistaken for one of my colleagues all the time. We both have gray hair and glasses, otherwise no resemblance whatsoever. Then she dyed her hair reddish-blonde and the problem stopped. My colleagues are so superficial.

  54. 54.

    kalakal

    @Alison Rose: At various times I’ve been accused of looking like Dave Vanian ( many years ago), Keith Richards, Patrick Swayze, Dennis Leary, and these days (a lot) Jon Bon Jovi. As far as I can tell the only commonality is we all have the same number of eyes.

    That and a lot of hair at various stages of our lives

  55. 55.

    Alison Rose

    @kalakal: That is…an interesting group!

    Once, back in my goth years, a friend tried to get me to let her tease my hair and make it poofy because she insisted I’d look like Siouxsie Sioux. I knew I wouldn’t and also explained that if you do that to Jewish hair, it’s gonna get out of control real quick.

  57. 57.

    kalakal

    @Alison Rose: The Dave Vanian one has always really puzzled me.*

    Ah yes, I worked with a Jewish guy who had that done to his hair, the result was… quite something

    *I could never see any of them, but that one really puzzled me

  58. 58.

    Mel

    @WaterGirl: I pictured Sister Golden Bear with gorgeous fiery red hair like my friend Abigail has, and there she is!

    Beautiful people every one, inside and out.

  59. 59.

    sab

    Kkedi (Tang KQ) for some reason I thought you were Asian.

    I am not much into popular culture. I bet I missed some huge blaring tell.

  61. 61.

    Jay

    Canada Let in Thousands of Former Nazis. Files I’ve Seen Tell Why
    The Hunka affair should lead to finally opening our war criminal archives. I saw first-hand why they are explosive.

    Alvin Finkel YesterdayThe Tyee
    Alvin Finkel is professor emeritus of history at Athabasca University and co-author of the textbook History of the Canadian Peoples as well as The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion and 12 other books.

    https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2023/10/13/Canada-Let-Thousands-Former-Nazis/

  66. 66.

    sab

    @schrodingers_cat: I don’t know what you look like.

    Face shape I expected. If I assume big brown eyes behind the sunglasses then you look like I expected. But I am not good at visualizing people.

  67. 67.

    Mel

    @Alison Rose: Back in the 80s, I heard Stevie Nicks comparisons a few times, but the only similarities that I could see were that we both had very, VERY bad perms and a fondness for grandma shawls…

  71. 71.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Sister Golden Bear:

    Yes, I’m a Cal alumna, and yes it’s a reference it’s a reference to our sports teams.

    I’d always figured your handle was a play off the America song “Sister Golden Hair.”  For that reason I also assumed blonde.  But red looks good on you!

  73. 73.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Suzanne: ​
     

    I’ve also been told that I look like Tina Fey, and that one stings a bit more. Not because I don’t think Tina Fay is fantastic (she is), but because people also said the same thing about Sarah Palin, and I don’t like the implication of the transitive property in this instance.

    Just remember, “A looks like B” isn’t an equivalence relation. :-)

  74. 74.

    Almost Retired

    All my life I’ve been told I look like some celebrity or another.  And as I age, the celebrity comparisons are becoming progressively less flattering.  I’m probably about five years away from being told I look like Wilford Brimley.

  76. 76.

    evap

    When the (obscure) movie Personal Best came out in 1979, a bunch of people told me I looked just like Muriel Hemingway.   Definitely a compliment!  Funny, because she plays an Olympic hurdler in the movie and I was a hurdler on my college track team in those days.   She is just a few years younger than me, I wonder if we still look alike.

  77. 77.

    sab

    @Suzanne: Tina Fey did well acting Sarah Palin, but she didn’t look that much like her. Both pretty brunettes, but not much similarity except actress Tina Fey got Sarah Palin’s whiny voice down pat.

  78. 78.

    Jay

    When I was young and had hair, I got the Patrick Swayze thing, mostly because I had a Roadhouse Mullet.

    When I started to have a receding hairline, I went close cropped and added a goatee, I got comparisons to John Malkovitch not just on looks, but also voice.

    With greater age now, I don’t get compared to anybody.

  79. 79.

    Mel

    @sab: 😺

    When I was a teenager, I tried to dye my (bleached) hair red at home.

    It turned the most hideous greyish-pink shade – not unlike an old pork chop that that has started to go off…

  80. 80.

    Suzanne

    @Almost Retired:

    I’m probably about five years away from being told I look like Wilford Brimley.

    Funny you mention. I dropped off a lamp for rewiring at a local hardware store this afternoon, and I texted to Mr. Suzanne, “Wilford Brimley just helped me with the lamp”.

    I hope he doesn’t have diabeetus.

  81. 81.

    sab

    @Mel: Weird things with red hair dye.

    The cosmetic companies are direly afraid of “brassy” so every hair dye look weirdly red.  Ginger hair does look brassy. That is the point and that is the color. Brass is a light shade of redish blond. Redheads, light or dark  with natural haircolor look brassy not that unnatiral red.

  84. 84.

    WaterGirl

    @Dan B: I am happy to say that I have never seen an uncooked pork chop start to go gray.

    But my mom cooked meat well done, especially pork, so our cooked porch chops always looked gray-white.

  85. 85.

    Suzanne

    @sab: And then people with olive complexions, like me, invariably end up with hair dyes and cosmetics that are too cool and pink.

  88. 88.

    sab

    @Jay: My husband had a weird goatee that looked Magaish. I let him do his own facial hair and beard. He should decide that stuff on his own face.

    He thinks the goatee, although attractive, looks Maga. I agree. So mustache but not the weird goatee.

  91. 91.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @Alison Rose: I got Mom’s body (and her allergies) except for her dark curly. She had the body of her mother, who had the same body as my Jewish great-grandfather. The resemblances in family photos are quite striking. If I wore a dark curly wig and dark contacts, I’d look very similar to Mom when she was my age.

  94. 94.

    Hkedi [Kang T.Q.]

    @Hoppie: My Hkedi name started as “Hirak”, a character I made from a role playing game back in the mid-90’s and decided it would be my online name.  That changed in the early 00’s when “Hirak” became the name of a B-grade villain on Stargate SG-1, and I couldn’t get it easily for whatever site I was signing into. So it changed to Hkedi.

     

    the Kang T.Q. part is spot on, after a particularly blasted night on Balloon Juice when  appended nicknames were all the fashion that month.

  95. 95.

    Jay

    @sab:

    my goatee is closely trimmed. The mustache part is trimmed to a #1, the beard part is trimmed to a #2, mostly for the benefits of the soul patch. The edge part is trimmed tight enough to fit under a mask.

    In the US I would look MAGAt, Carharts, T shirt, baseball cap, (not a trucker cap), but here I just look like a worker, logo free.

    It also helps that I always wear a mask in public.

  96. 96.

    CaseyL

    @🐾BillinGlendaleCA:  In my part of Seattle, the viewing was good when the clouds cleared out, on and off.

    A bunch of us stood in the parking lot watching, because there were a myriad “sun shadows” on the ground mimicking the eclipse.  The parking lot was dappled with crescent suns!

    The ambient light was also a little weird: not “golden hour” amber, but variable.  Our complex has, and is also surrounded by, some huge trees, and it was fascinating to see how some of them were bright-lit and others not.  It made for an exaggerated 3D effect.

  98. 98.

    NotMax

    Told the tale here in the past of the time, in the 1970s, when was hanging out in the bar area of the Metropolitan Opera during intermission and was approached by a gaggle of young ladies who shyly asked for an autograph, convinced (according to them) I was an actor on a favorite soap. An actor whose name had never heard of.

    Could tell they didn’t entirely believe my denials.

    Another time (1960s?) a friend had cut out a newspaper picture of a player for the New York Mets and mailed it to me. Not a baseball fan then nor now, but it was like looking into a mirror. Tres spooky.

  99. 99.

    Barbara

    @evap: ​When in high school, my aunts thought I looked like Princess Caroline, and the coloring is right. I was also told by a very drunk person that I looked like Isabel Adjani and I can say definitively that her judgment was affected by alcohol. Creep I was with called me Isabel all night.

  100. 100.

    Gin & Tonic

    @sab: When I tell people I’m Ukrainian, they say “you don’t look it” – expecting Scandinavian/Slavic, I guess. So I ask “what happened there in the mid 13th Century?”

  101. 101.

    Dan B

    @WaterGirl: Ive been cooking pork to medium well ever since the government declared that there was no trichinosis in the US.  I’ve also taken to salting the meat an hour before cooking.  It’s delicious and the texture is excellent

    Often I’ll add Gochuchang.

  105. 105.

    twbrandt

    I must look like a generic older white guy. Every so often someone will ask me if I went to X University or worked at Y Company, and of course I never went near X U and haven’t a clue what Y Company is.

  106. 106.

    Barbara

    @Dan B: ​Yep, salting in advance helps with texture, but so does rubbing in brown sugar, in small doses, which is especially good for pork if you are serving with fruit or sweet potatoes.

  112. 112.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    Warning: Potential for Schadenfreude overdose. Indulge at your own risk.

    A couple of delicious legal commentaries I just watched.

    Some shady deal The Former Guy was putting together to sell Truth Social to a company he owns has fallen through. Investors pulling out. As I understand it, this deal has been dragging on for months because the SEC thought it stunk, and that’s why the investors finally got cold feet.

    Giuliani gets slapped by judge in Ruby Freeman – Shaye Moss defamation case, due to completely ignoring court orders about revealing his finances. Jury will be instructed to assume the worst about everything, and also to kick him in the balls.

  116. 116.

    sab

    @Gin & Tonic: All the Ukrainian Americans or Ukrainian Canadians I know are slightly dark. Not Scandinavian intense blue eyes. Brown or hazel eyes and light brown hair.

  117. 117.

    Pink Tie

    I always got Elisabeth Shue, who is a lot WASPier than me but I’ll take it!

    Today (in Houston) we saw the eclipse during an open house at the school where I teach music, and very considerately the school put out a basket of eclipse glasses near the front door for anyone to take. It wasn’t a total eclipse here, but I did sit down and play the Bonnie Tyler song on guitar :) I was outdoors in the playground for nearly the whole time, and found the shadows from the trees much more enchanting than the eclipse itself!

  118. 118.

    A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)

    @Alison Rose: that’s EXACTLY what I thought too! I was shocked when I saw a red head. WG must think I’m pathetic, when actually I’m a Northern Californian who went to Cal also.

  119. 119.

    A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)

    @Alison Rose: when i was working as a computer person, I got confused all the time with the other woman in the IT department.  We were both women, programmers, and wore glasses. Otherwise totally different.  She was tall, skinny, with straight hair, and I’m none of those things.

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