5434a
5mo ago
I haven't been following it but other than the comments here that's the only story I've seen about this, and The Telegraph isn't the kind of paper to shy away from reporting whether someone is trans.
5434a
5mo ago
I'm curious what the social perceptions are, whether saving your own brass is seen as normal and expected, or unusual and miserly/prepper-y, or whether the other customers offering to collect it for you are like the firing range version of squeegee men or something more like safety conscious hosts who just want to keep the range running smoothly.
If you went to an unfamilar range that didn't have a rule that all spilt brass is forfeited what would the normal etiquette be?
5434a
5mo ago
What's the status quo for reusing the spent cases? Are they valuable enough that it's assumed people will want to collect them other than maybe the big spenders who let the range keep them as some kind of tip? Or are they so cheap/un-reusable that they go for scrap? Or something else?
As a Brit the nearest thing I have in my experience is finding a giant pile of obviously worthless spent plastic shotgun shells in the woods.
5434a
5mo ago
10 months seems on the short side. Are you taking good care of your pans? The first result for "what ruins non stick pans" suggests 5 years expected life.
If you don't fancy cast iron you could get a stainless steel pan and a suitable metal scrubber.
5434a
5mo ago
I've only read the first Flashman book but it was his unlikeability that made it so enjoyable. The character's utter lack of apology for being so unabashedly self-serving provides a lot of fun.
5434a
5mo ago
Maybe Operation Mincemeat? Wikipedia tells me there have been multiple books and films based on it. I watched the BBC TV programme based on Ben Macintyre's book.
5434a
5mo ago
There are still rare flashes of the old (dot) Reddit. Floating among the river of bravery posts on /bestof recently was this post where an industrial press mechanic answers a question about the shapes on the lids of tin cans.
It feels like that sort of thing used to happen frequently on Reddit. A small insight into some overlooked aspect of modern culture brought to the fore and given a human voice. Of course given the medium much of that was tech adjacent, like a '90s games dev popping up to explain how they exploited the hardware in a console to pull off a novel graphics effect, but also these more unexpected interactions that only happened because Reddit's userbase was so big and broad.
It's a shame that AMAs which began with people like that mechanic (or a pathologically upvote addicted biologist) inadvertently hijacking a thread to spontaneously answer people's questions on a slow work day were formalised and turned into cynical PR appearances for attention starved celebrities.
5434a
5mo ago
major subreddits [...] have all decided to ban links to X/Twitter
The cost is that those subreddits are largely composed of Twitter links and screenshots. Unless the whole ecosystem can coordinate a move to BlueSky they'll be left with little to offer their users. On the other hand coordinating a move to BlueSky is already clearly an item on the establishment agenda so Elon has effectively scored a big own goal here by providing such an exploitable rallying point to them on a silver platter.
5434a
5mo ago
It's a while since I read The Whole Earth Discipline, it was published in 2009 so I'm not sure whether that counts as properly up to date, but the author Stewart Brand is Bay Area hippie royalty and the book is vocally pro nuclear as well as pro genetic modification and pro urbanism.
An official annotated online version is available at https://discipline.longnow.org/DISCIPLINE_footnotes/Contents.html
5434a
5mo ago
Playing a game is a great suggestion, it offers a pleasant distraction and a shared focus for something external to the relationship. Having nothing but updates on how each other's life is going can get a bit monotonous so building up some shared activities will help prevent falling into that.
5434a
5mo ago
5434a
5mo ago
It's a bad metaphor. There's a house, a master, his tools, and the objective of dismantling. Whatever those stand for either the tools are powerful enough to produce a house and defend it from attacks to unseat its master and dismantle it, or they're not. Metaphors-lawyering about which bits are powerful and pertinent or not, and when, and how, for who, all just undermines the metaphor.
It's a counterculture koan. It's purpose is to make you think about The System and sound wise while doing it.
It's ironic that by analysing the phrasing we can neutralise the text. The very tools that the writer used to build this house...
people would pick up location based hobbies
Kind of a tangent but I think there's a widespread problem with people ignoring their locale and imitating the activities of other locales. People who live in the mountains want to be surfers, people who live in the city want to keep a farmyard menagerie, people who live surrounded by pine forests want to make mahogany furniture, etc.
Instead of people grouping around the opportunities that are present and available you end up with people separating and going to lengths pursuing aspirations that aren't present or available. That's fine in moderation but it can diminish the base until there's not enough people to sustain the local activities that require that kind of group.
I feel it's parallel to how people continuously opt for breadth of experiences, whether that's foreign travel or high cuisine or multiple partners, and then lament a lack of depth in their lives when they come to a rest.
5434a
5mo ago
https://novelfull.com/forty-millenniums-of-cultivation/chapter-2771.html
Can you give us a small sample of the better translation for comparison?
5434a
6mo ago
There's a risk of conflating serious danger with personal discomfort and using the first to justify the second, and also a parallel risk of using the second to dismiss the first.
In the first case you end up avoiding everything that isn't immediately pleasant and personally gratifying, and in the second case you fail to avoid a dangerous situation because you haven't given it the chance to prove your intuitions wrong right.
It's not without merit but I think the advice to "trust your fear instinct" is another one of those messages that is more likely to appeal to and reach the wrong audience and reinforce their fearfulness rather than attenuating their fearlessness.
5434a
6mo ago
This is why I hate the whole idea of "grading on effort." You either got the right answer or you didn't. You either accomplish a goal, or you don't. How much effort you put in is completely and totally irrelevant!
That's exactly why I suggested goals that are trivially attainable, but ironically I suspect you dismissed them because they're too easy and thus not worth the effort. I'll explain my reason why:
If you never achieve your goal despite your efforts it means you were pursuing an unachievable goal, which is a failure and a tragedy and waste, and that's naturally very depressing.
I've read numerous books and articles on depression, and the best explanation I've found wasn't that it was a chemical imbalance, or a lack of daylight or physical exertion. It's that depression is a natural reaction to the repeated failure to achieve a goal. The feedback of failure is what alters the chemicals, and generates the low mood that influences a person to withdraw, whereupon they end up getting less daylight, less exertion, less socialising, etc etc. This is actually rational. Your biological substrate is compelling you to stop wasting its energy on something you/it demonstrably can't achieve.
You can force that away by tinkering with antidepressants and forcing yourself out there, and maybe that kickstarts the process, but it's skipping the most important step which is letting go of, or at least setting aside the goal that you repeatedly failed to achieve and recalibrating your ambition towards something more attainable. Then you have a new reason to get up and get going, because then you can get a successful outcome, and when you get the outcome you get the sweet conscious satisfaction plus the accompanying unconscious mood boosting chemicals. Or maybe you fail again, and the cycle resets, and you try something different until you find something that does deliver success.
Which means nothing if I don't actually get there
TLDR Go somewhere else, get somewhere else, and discover whatever the meaning is of getting there instead of the meaninglessness of not getting where you're not getting.
5434a
6mo ago
I've looked this up before and it has something to do with the Old Reddit Redirect addon.
https://old.reddit.com/r/bugs/comments/15p1ctt/why_does_clicking_any_image_on_reddit_open_the/
https://old.reddit.com/r/RESissues/comments/1bitxq1/stupid_question_why_do_i_get_routed_to_the_nice/
Second link has a suggested userscript patch.
[ping @FCfromSSC @SteveKirk ]
5434a
6mo ago
There are many alternatives.
You are asking about how to deal with demotivation. The implication is that you require some motivation to alleviate the feeling that you're too old and everything is pointless.
You have existing goals and you are losing time. You can choose to advance toward your goals or you can choose to remain static.
ending it all.
Stop thinking about ending and think about completion. "I'm stuck on level 7.2 and Mario has stopped moving. Should I throw my Nintendo in the bin?" No, just plug the controller back in.
5434a
6mo ago
Keep adding entries to my log of things that I did each day that mark material progress.
5434a
6mo ago
Meditate on the mundane truthfulness and wisdom of corny motivational poster bromides that you have to get busy living. That's it. There is no esoteric big brained intellectual construct that will snap you out of yourself, you just have to get so fucking bored of being yourself that you do something differently for a change.
The point of starting something else is that the alternative is continuing on the current path which demonstrated by your post clearly isn't satisfying, so even if the something else isn't satisfying either at least it's novel.
You said below you're writing prose and code. I suggest making something physical. I'm loathe to suggest specific projects because you take them too literally to more easily dismiss them but as an example, get a cheap block of modelling clay, cut it up into 5 pieces, then make five heads one at a time and try to make each one better than the last, 20 minutes per head. They'll suck, it doesn't matter. In fact that's the point. I know, you don't have modelling clay or an eye for faces so carve a large root vegetable into five different platonic solids, or whatever. Just do something very cheap and very easy that you can iterate on, see a measure of progress and then throw in the bin without feeling that the waste outweighs the practice. Something that you can take a before and after photo of the evidence of your action. The worthwhile projects you feel you are lacking are built on a foundation of shitty failed prototypes by necessity of not getting it right on the first attempt. Then pick a bigger project and start failing better.
If you need a less specific, more esoteric guide try something like Eno's Oblique Strategies or buy a copy of Wreck This Journal and give yourself a hard time limit of one week to fill it. You already have a limitations mindset so start using it to prompt some urgency and creativity. Feeling old should give you more motivation, not less. If you want to write prose or code give yourself one day to write something wilfully shitty and amateur, at least it will be finished. Writing is a procrastinator's luxury where you can always find another imperfection that can be endlessly re-re-rewritten. You don't have to abandon your big projects but take a break to recalibrate first because currently you're not actually hitting your own targets.
5434a
6mo ago
It's the way that the hero has to watch on powerless to save him that really decimates your childish optimism.
5434a
6mo ago
Appreciate the kind offer but it's purely inertia and the lack of any significant magnitude in my current dissatisfaction that's keeping me from upgrading. It's more due to choice than necessity. I'll get around to it once I've gotten around a few higher priority projects.
5434a
6mo ago
I stick to 480p on YouTube as I've no need for higher resolution. I'm not motivated enough to drill down into the technical aspects but it definitely seems that the problem is worse or at least only noticeable on YouTube. Other video sites don't seem to cause the same problems even at higher resolutions.
Degree of veracity aside (a small motte in a giant bailey) Alex Jones essentially doesn't care about pollution or about frogs, or about gays. His call to action isn't that we should lobby our governments to fund environmental monitoring agencies, it's that we should send him $200 for a one month supply of proprietary pressed corn starch pills. If anything the gayer the frogs get the more money he can make.
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