5434a
3mo ago
If you spend too much time online following the culture war I think you'll enjoy watching Eddington.
I don't want to say too much about it as it's probably more fun to go in blind.
5434a
3mo ago
What was the climate and weather like? Was it a factor in your timing? Obviously winter is out.
Yeah I'd want to complete a full circuit. Cannes, Nice, Turin, Lake Como, Milan, Verona, Graz, Vienna, Salzburg, maybe Munich, Zurich, Geneva, Grenoble, Aix. Peak Europe, minus the peaks.
5434a
3mo ago
Very cool. I sometimes entertain an idle daydream about cycling around the Alps for my mid-life crisis (around as in around the comparatively lower elevation periphery, not around as in through). I'd definitely want a more road based route than that though.
5434a
3mo ago
poppers
I've tried poppers exactly once. The high from poppers is 1:1, 100% indistinguishable with the high of standing up too quickly. The one minor difference is that standing up too quickly isn't followed with ten minutes of your heart going BOOM... BOOM... BOOM and then two hours of an absolutely pounding headache.
I had strong reservations about that claim, and made a note to check later.
Did you follow up?
5434a
3mo ago
Interesting analysis of dollar cost averaging vs buy the dip at https://ofdollarsanddata.com/even-god-couldnt-beat-dollar-cost-averaging/amp/
5434a
3mo ago
many Western environmentalists are only tooting the horn about climate change as a convenient pretext to instate global communism
I started drafting a top level post last week touching on a related trend but I didn't have enough to round it out. I still don't really, but I think there's something in there. Anyway, last week I saw a poster for an Alternative Pride March in my city. My CW radar was pinged, I looked it up and found out that it's explicitly Marxist ("Pride without cops or corporations!" etc). Events under the same banner are being organised in other cities suggesting it's unlikely to be a grass roots movement.
So now the social acceptance and establishment endorsement of LGBT is... bad? That doesn't seem convincing.
What I think is happening is that Marxists prey on these fringe movements. It's not that LGBT and environmentalists are eager for Communism. I think many of them are sincere that what they want is no more than reasonable policies addressing their defined political interest (gay marriage, say, or clean rivers). I suspect that Marxists court and enter these movements that are made of what are already soft radicals who are acculturated to being unhappy with an aspect of the status quo and begin efforts to turn them into hard radicals who will become convinced that the status quo has to be disposed of wholesale (our revolution is necessary for the sake of your own cause, Comrade).
That is to say it's not environmentalists who are tooting the climate change horn to instate Communism, nor is it LGBTs, it's Communists. The fact that these movements are already socially accepted gives them cover to expand the agenda because now they can condemn resistance to the veiled Communist ideology as eg ecocidal transphobia.
5434a
3mo ago
Recently finished Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte after seeing it mentioned here. Good fun, entertaining.
Now reading Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London. So far it's stuck to interesting reportage and avoided the Road To Wigan Pier trap of segueing into lengthy political rhetoric.
5434a
3mo ago
every gene is equal. No allele is ever "good" or "bad," ever "better" or "worse" than another
If no genes are good or bad then they ought to have no objection to an embryo being edited to have the "bad" genes that produce congenital disorders of one type or another.
The aversion to judging negatively fails when it results in the reluctance to provide any judgements at all. It's an overcorrection. Failure to exercise judgement can be equally as bad as eagerness (thisisfine.jpg).
5434a
3mo ago
Just look at the terminology. Cisheteronormativity. Anticarceralism. Cultural appropriation. Decolonisation. These are not words that Tumblr users, teens or their families create. Teens create words like "yeet" and Tumblr creates words like "otherkin".
I don't think high school teachers were sitting kids down and giving them college level sociology lectures directly. I think outside of school hours terminally online grad students were flexing their wordcel power level on Tumblr among impressionable teen girls, from whom it spread via a few more steps to clickbait columnists and their incestuous codependence with pre-Elon Twitter.
By the time the teens who were on Tumblr got to college they were fully marinated in progressive sociology shibboleths, only without any of the independent thought and critical analysis that university is supposed to encourage.
Academia was always the source, kids were just an influential and early stage vector with low intellectual immunity, especially for the kind of memes that can impart righteous social power to teenage girls (although the claims to righteousness were largely a mask and a multiplier for the underlying social power, without which the memeset would have languished in the obscurity of academia and the post grad blogosphere).
5434a
3mo ago
tried anything doughy
I'd never considered that you could smoke bread. This is going in my culinary bucket list next to pickled cheese.
5434a
3mo ago
I'll skim or collapse the threads that I'm not interested in. Holocaust relitigation, US Supreme Court cases, Ukraine posts (other than maybe one or two commenters), Israel-Palestine, US internal party politics, Catholic theology, that kind of stuff that's either stale, broadly irrelevant to me or concerning people I've never heard of.
5434a
3mo ago
actually represents something meaningful
It is meaningful to you, of course, but importantly it's equally meaningful to other people (and I'd suggest this is what makes it truly meaningful to you).
The thing about a wedding ring that makes it eminently appropriate for a tattoo is that it communicates an unambiguous social status to other people and that you are identifiably committed to that status.
The same principle operates for prison gangs, football hooligans and tribal islanders. It doesn't work for artsy urbanites who create their own private symbology, sentimentalists who appear to be concerned that they'll forget their most personally significant relationships, or trend followers that want to add visual interest to their appearance.
5434a
3mo ago
69% of people who have a tattoo stated its purpose was to remember or honor someone or something and 47% to make a statement about something they believe in [...] 32% of people stated their tattoo was to improve their personal appearance
I think those reasons are post hoc because they can be achieved by much simpler and more effective means. I'm sceptical that they set out with the idea of honouring someone, making a statement, or improving their appearance and then arrived at a tattoo as the best solution. I suspect they set out to get a tattoo because there's something about the idea of people who get tattoos that they admire and want to be associated with. Maybe it's about being visibly committed to something. I'm not sure what that says about them.
5434a
3mo ago
Tattoos used to signify insiders/outsiders of one variety or another. Now they more often signify people who adopt the latent aesthetic of that signal. They want to be appear special, and different, but not so different that they have to suffer the social costs (unless it's triggering the "squares" which is exactly the crypto benefit they're seeking).
The ticking time bomb is that as time passes tattoos become associated more with middle aged squares than they do live-fast-die-young devil-may-care rebels. Gen Alpha's immediate source of cultural exposure to tattoos is going to be via their mums and their primary school teachers.
5434a
3mo ago
Look through the adult section of downmagaz.net. Assuming that only the most popular titles are uploaded there the big brands are still going and there seem to be plenty of niches being served too.
They're expensive broken ones that snapped at the apex of the curve where it's not conducive to a satisfactory mending job.
The original band is nylon and after exhausting the possibility of finding official spares or eBay parts donors I initially started by looking at 3D printing. I found an stl for this model of headphones on Thingiverse and got some quotes for nylon prints (FJM process if I remember right) but while the quotes were reasonable I wasn't totally happy with the model. It wasn't a 1:1 identical match, and even if it had been the originals were a little tight fitting so I thought it would be a chance to modify the model to my own spec. Turns out that 3D modelling isn't like image editing and I would need the "step" file to edit it, like having the layers for editing a photoshop file instead of printing out a finished jpg. Sadly the Thingiverse model didn't include these. Okay, it's not a hugely complex shape. Maybe this is my motivation to finally learn a bit of 3D modelling.
So after installing FreeCAD, uninstalling and writing it off as a nonstarter I got an account on SketchUp and started drilling the same YouTube tutorial each evening for a week until I could replicate the example bedside drawers without needing to follow the video. Equiped with the basics I started on modelling the headphone band, building up the shape as a flat linear form that I would then curve into shape as the final step. Turns out the curving function is locked behind a premium plugin. Sigh. I could pirate the software but that's a whole other tangent of a tangent.
Anyway, I was sitting here thinking about how I could DIY it when I remembered I have about 10m of beech veneer edge banding gathering dust. It's flexible, it's easy to work, it's near enough the right width, it's preglued and I can build it up to achieve the right amount of flex to rigidity. I had all the measurements I'd taken from the original product that I was going to use for the 3D model so I marked out a form on some crappy old pine board from the scraps box and got the jigsaw out. After that I looked up soaking and boiling times for bending wood (only 2 minutes for material this thin) and progressively clamped more strips to the form after allowing the previous one to dry and set. The strips needed softening with heat and water because the inside half of them have to bend counter to the way they'd been stored rolled up, and all of the layers have a tight dog-leg bend at the ears to accommodate the drivers.
Now I have six layers clamped in the form and I'm ready to heat the glue and stick them together. After that if the flex feels right there's only a little cutting and drilling to do. I have a feeling I'll have mixed results at best, but I'll be content just to have made something usable while I work on a better solution. Apparently oak is one of the woods that is both amenable to bending and also widely available here and reasonably affordable meaning I can buy a 3' strip of suitable dimensions for a little over £10 in town without having to mail order from a specialist supplier or buy a large board that I only need a fraction of.
5434a
3mo ago
Fair play, I can see the appeal of honesty over artifice.
I'm almost ready to start activating the glue on the replacement headphone band I've been making out of built up layers of edge banding I had leftover from my shelves that I've boiled and clamped on a form. It's only taken me... ohhh, four months. Lol. Gardening takes priority in the growing season.
If that doesn't work out I'll have to buy some solid oak stripwood and try plan B. Getting pretty tired of these dinky earbuds.
5434a
3mo ago
rounded the front edge where the J-Bracket comes up so that it sits perfectly flush
It's too late now but it would look extra nice if they had slots all round so that the bracket fitted seamlessly into the shelf. Could still do the undersides.
5434a
3mo ago
I use OneNote. Linux users seem to recommend Obsidian for similar purposes.
New pages are automatically dated, it has built in search, and you can embed many sorts of media from pics and video to spreadsheets. Decent OCR too for text within pasted images.
It's a lot easier and more versatile and feature rich than trying to do it with text files. Try it out.
5434a
4mo ago
Copy and paste the following to "Custom CSS" in your settings:
.active.arrow-up::before {
color: #bd2130;
}
.active.arrow-down::before {
color: #0062cc;
}
Does anyone know how to hide only my own comment score?
5434a
4mo ago
That movie is equal parts boring and confusing
It took me a while to figure out but I think essentially it's film noir in a sci-fi costume. It's the keyhole effect where you only see small parts of what hints at a much larger and unresolved/unresolvable story occurring off screen.
That's a defence which is open to charges of cope, but it fits. The trouble is you come out at the end confused and wondering wtf is going on, but, like hating Skylar White in Breaking Bad, it's possible that was exactly what the creators wanted you to feel, and it worked as intended because they executed it so well.
That aside it's visually fantastic which makes it very watchable in spite of the narrative issues.
5434a
4mo ago
I suspect there's a common thread of fatherlessness.
Speaking of heiresses and hybristophilia, The case of Constance Marten and Mark Gordon was concluded yesterday. I was reading through the newspaper report of the history of the pair and thinking about yours and @Crowstep's comments and how maybe she disproves my fatherless hypothesis given that she's an aristocrat, surely she had a more stable family structure than most, and then there it was:
She was also deeply affected at the age of nine when her father suddenly walked out on the family.
Voice of @Sloot: "Every time"
And a similar story applies to Gordon.
The youngest of five children, he never knew his father, who refused to meet him or support him financially.
From reading various offhand comments around the internet I get the impression that people without fathers seem to build them up in their minds as infallible role models who are tirelessly dedicated to mentoring their children in learning the skills of how to do every single thing that a real man should be able to do, whether it's something utterly mundane like learning to shave all the way through to how to build a diesel locomotive and expertly butcher a beef carcass with a chainsaw at the same time. And in the absence of this ubermensch role model they seek out substitutes who appear to fulfill some aspect of the superhuman sized hole they've conjured ("if only I'd had a father he would have [done the impossible] for me"). The boring reality is that most average dads are justifiably too busy working to pay the bills and support the family to do too much more than telling their kids to clean their room, do their homework and pull their weight around the house, which in turn provides much more sensible standards for what a normal man should be.
5434a
4mo ago
I tried the first two a while ago and tapped out of them pretty fast too.
The only anime series I've finished other than OPM was Welcome To The NHK. It was overly long but it was darkly comical enough to keep me watching to the end.
I'm not a total non-anime watcher but I haven't found much I like outside of the well known feature length films. Even the popular titles like Evangelion and Blade of The Immortal didn't do it for me. Cyberpunk looked okay but turned into a Joss Whedon-alike by the second episode.
Maybe I'll try Uzumaki again when I hit a dry spell (tipped by the same guy who recommended me OPM).
From what I remember seeing the members were basically normal in terms of looks, just wildly over-invested in the idea/ideal of One True Love romanticism and the childish wish that the way to get what you want is to really really really want it. You don't have to be fat and ugly to to be dissatisfied with being judged solely for your looks.
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