5434a
9mo ago
One of the best ways is while driving. It doesn't require a lot of mental focus but it's otherwise very engaging, plus you can turn it up and listen through some halfway decent speakers instead of headphones. If you don't have a car then computer games are a good subsitute but that can be tricky to balance the audio if you're listening through the computer or you want to hear the game's sound effects but not the game's music, etc.
5434a
9mo ago
That's the emotions-over-reason spirit of the romantic movement though isn't it. It's not supposed to make sense, making sense is for squares. Think about it logically - the less sense it makes the more potent and authentic the emotions must be!
Not practical at all but sleeping outdoors has that kind of invigorating effect. I'd guess it's the combination of cold night temperatures, unlimited fresh air and natural levels of daylight. Probably the closest you could get at home is some kind of techno fix that draws your curtains and opens your windows wide.
5434a
10mo ago
I don't know about hiking in particular but there's a conformity to a lot of these activities that at the most charitable are reflective of status and at the least charitable are indicative of pretense. A reasonable rule of thumb is whether a local could do it cheaply, an outsider couldn't do it without paying, and the modest locals might arbitrage their resource to the wealthy outsiders. The status anxious locals save up to imitate being a wealthy outsider, often somewhere else, and the wealthy outsider is already partially imitating the modest authenticity of a locale. It wasn't a PMC careerist who came up with fishing, horse riding, making wine or any of the other stuff that is typically for toffs and peasants, but PMC careerists do come up with sales plans and can probably demonstrate a level of critical insight into that activity that is potentially more interesting than recycling what they've been told about a wine's terroir.
5434a
10mo ago
I concur with your criticisms but would push back against the doomerism of inevitable failure. While many people misunderstand the concept of freedom intellectually most of them get it intuitively and don't count themselves as suffering unjustly for the restrictions against selling their own children into slavery, dumping their rubbish in the road or using racist language. It's not perfect, it will never be perfect, but there's many ways it could be a lot worse. It works best when people act responsibly.
My point is freedom is not all or nothing, it's how much and who decides. The freedom fetishists are engaged in binary thinking: Freedom vs oppression, self vs everyone else. Of course they want freedom for themselves. Their error is missing how oppressive it would be if everyone else was free of restrictions too. Your presumably rhetorical wish of living in a ball-busting autocracy is a mirror image where it's oppression for everyone else with significant cost to your own freedom. You can walk the streets at night but you will be required to report for assigned work in the morning.
5434a
10mo ago
That bit confused me too. What does "accruing undesirable" constitute? Did people see a better kept park and start monopolising it? Are better kept parks considered fussy and unnatural? Were you encroaching on somebody else's remit?
5434a
10mo ago
Is that the 2 button on a 0-9 keypad? This microwave doesn't have a keypad. IIRC it has +10s, +1m, +5m, maybe +1h, a button to cycle through power levels and a button to cycle through cooking modes (micro/combi/conv). And a start/stop button.
5434a
11mo ago
Thanks, that was pretty much my reasoning too. "I suppose
Your English Vocabulary Size is: 30100 ★★★ Top 0.01%
Bit annoying that it doesn't say which ones you missed. Most of it was very easy but one or two were educated guesses for words I'd never seen before. I can't remember the word (something like "avular"?) but I chose "
5434a
1mo ago
I've been reading more of James Clavell's Asian Saga. I've also been catching up on cleaning and maintaining my garden tools.
In the books every peasant bows and scrapes at the feet of the samurai. My very limited knowledge of martial arts is that those same peasants developed ways of fighting with their gardening tools because they were forbidden from owning real weapons.
So... who were the peasants fighting?
5434a
1mo ago
Go to www.chatgpt.org/chat, you won't have to sign up or log in. Then type in the box.
5434a
1mo ago
Lost Girls is a fun bit of erotica from Alan Moore you could finish in an afternoon. The Sandman is another good Alan Moore piece but as far as I know it's a full length comic series rather than a self-contained graphic novel, but maybe there's a compendium.
For something not involving Alan Moore Transmetroplitan was good fun and from what I remember would probably appeal to the Motte crowd for it's cyberpunk / absurd culture war aspects (sexy Sesame Street!) but it's another full series.
5434a
1mo ago
I read one of each of the gentleman burglar character books (Fantomas, Arsene Lupin and Raffles) and from what I remember Arsene was the best of the bunch.
5434a
1mo ago
I think trans people have shared traits and interests that justify - make useful - the existence of the group term.
So do I when they're grouped as a sub category to a referent super category, but if we call them women the super category ceases to signify anything essential and becomes effectively arbitrary and correspondingly insignificant. (And when it's arbitrary I have no need to justify my opinion beyond it being an opinion that's mine. Back to square one, the circle created by trans rhetoric travels in both directions despite their intention.)
When I say "transwomen aren't even transwomen" I say it to contrast their own rhetoric and demonstrate their dependence on the binary they (selectively) disavow.
At base my argument is that "men who [choose to pursue and increase their femininity, AKA transwomen]" is legible. Each element points to something distinct even where the element might be fuzzy at the boundaries. "Transwomen are women who want to affirm their gender identity as women by pursuing feminine social signifiers" (the most charitable framing I can come up with) loses legibility the more you think about it as each element circles back to itself until the boundaries it depends on collapse into meaninglessness.
My own belief is that they do this because, less charitably, they are men who [want to be women and throw out these convoluted rationales to avoid the distress of acknowledging that they simply can't]. What they can do is increase/maximise their femininity, which is what they're already doing, and which I can't see anyway of discrediting. It's plausible, it's feasible, and it's legible. It doesn't float my boat, but it doesn't knit my brow either.
5434a
1mo ago
I've got a couple of things housemates who worked in similar sectors have left behind but honestly most B2B swag seems kind of shitty, although that might have been due to their entry level positions. Stationery. Toys. T-shirts. Nothing you'd really miss (so you leave it behind), and more like a grown up version of the stuff you would have found included directly inside every box of cereal. I suppose it's a different affair if you manage a multi-million dollar budget.
I refuse any loyalty points scheme more complex than "collect 10 stamps to claim a free coffee".
5434a
1mo ago
That's close, but I mean more along the lines of:
Packet of branded food item (coffee, cereal, yoghurt, soft drink, snack, etc)
"Collect X proofs of purchase and get a free Y!"
And the free Y is something durable and/or worthwhile, and the X proofs is realistic, not triple digits. Or if it's triple digits the Y has real monetary value like a games console. The branded items running the promotion were available in every shop, so it was designed to cultivate brand loyalty rather than loyalty to a chain of shops. Stamps were more agnostic about what you purchased and tend to be limited to one chain or a small consortium.
I suppose most marketing campaigns have transferred to apps, loyalty schemes and other sign up lists, but I get the impression those are focused on discounts and other volume sales promotions rather than straight up material freebies.
5434a
1mo ago
Beat them to the punch and send them a brief message on the day-of to cancel.
I'm joking of course but psychology and dating is so counterintuitive it would probably work.
5434a
2mo ago
I think you're being overly cautious and perfect's-the-enemy-of-good but fair play, you've considered that suggestion and it doesn't work for you. All I'd say is that for any bootstraps enterprise to work you're better thinking of it like a penniless illegal immigrant would approach it, ie bending the rules, delay spending until you've got the work assured, bargain hunting for materials, and starting with the small jobs no one else wants.
Magic man repairs, maybe? That looks like a basic/niche kit could fit in a backpack, there's no end of broken shit for free you can take home to practice on and then throw out again, and people pay top dollar to avoid redoing expensive work. Just an idea.
My underlying point was that identifying practical issues and potentially overcoming them to achieve a material result is more productive and stimulating than reading a book, writing a song, lifting some weights or listening to a preacher. It's about finding something external to focus on that you can effect a direct meaningful change upon. Admittedly that's a lot harder if you need it to be profitable but it's potentially more rewarding too. Chin up.
5434a
2mo ago
I'm content to attribute it to a glitch on my end. Just checked and I do indeed still have an unposted draft reply to another topic in a different tab that was unaffected.
5434a
2mo ago
IIRC from seeing your previous feedback it seemed to happen to you quite often. This was the first time it's ever happened to me, but on the other hand I don't post much.
On the other other hand I sometimes draft long posts that I never submit and leave them for days and they're still sitting there waiting in their tab.
The screen scrolled without me touching it and then when I got back to where I was the comment was gone. Bizarre.
5434a
2mo ago
Other than fees and the technical know-how what's to stop someone swapping from an open blockchain into Monero or another privacy coin and then back again to sever the links? The blockchain might indicate money went into Monero, and came out of Monero, but Monero says "...".
5434a
3mo ago
The point is that exploring our cultural frontiers diminishes the amount of territory left unexplored, and a lot of the charted territory has been marked as being of limited interest and value for more than a generation. We know the extremes are out there and most people choose the alternative not out of ignorance but out of preference.
5434a
3mo ago
If you swapped the newspapers for cardboard boxes I have a box room that's at roughly 3 and that's after over a year of using it as a staging area for de/cluttering projects.
I clean the house to floor level roughly once a week and leave the kitchen clean every night.
When I bake bread I put 7g (one teaspoon) of sugar in ~400ml of water with 600g of flour.
That Pepperidge loaf seems to be 624g, which at the same 1:0.66 ratio would make it roughly 380g flour, 250ml water, of which some part is 48g of sugar.
7/600 = 0.01g sugar per g flour
48/380 = 0.12g sugar per g flour
So roughly 10x as much sugar.
For comparison a can of Coke has 35g of sugar in 330ml. They're making bread with water that is more sugary than Coke.
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