5434a
4mo ago
You don't have to read it. I often don't, beyond skimming through for posts that show more consideration than simple partisan reaction. If it feels like I've read enough and there's twice as much again left to go I collapse the thread.
Discussions here would be stale without two sides, which is what makes your own presence here worthwhile as someone who often brings a measure of balance to gendered topics, so I encourage you to consider staying on.
5434a
2d ago
I can't remember if it was Your Name or Weathering With You that I watched. I think it was Weathering. I downloaded both of them after reading yet another "recommend some anime for non-anime watchers" thread. Whichever one it was I switched it off unfinished, deleted the other one without watching it, and re-examined my credulity for internet anime recommendations.
One Punch Man on the other hand was thoroughly entertaining even as the joke began wearing thin, but that was recommended to me by a real person who isn't into anime.
5434a
2mo ago
Little by little my Nook ST is beginning to wear out so I'm thinking about what I should look for when it's time to buy a new one. What are some of your must have features / biggest annoyances / missed opportunities in e-readers?
It's table stakes but I still love having an instant dictionary. Instant translation would be nice. Instant wikipedia would be good too. The more quick-look-up reference resources the better.
I like the idea of bookmarks and highlights/margin notes but I don't use them as they're not well implemented, for example when moving books between devices and different software. That raises the issue of software and hardware. Call me old school but I'm a firm believer in removable local storage as a means to preserve data should the device fail.
Not once have I wanted to install additional apps. I also don't particularly care about having a fancy OS/UI since I spend 99.999% of the time inside the book, not outside. I guess that audiobooks could be a relevant feature but I never listen to them and it's a slippery slope to podcasts, music, and just using a fully featured tablet. Ideally there would be a read-out-loud feature that used the ebook as the source rather than a separate audio file, and I imagine it's not far off if it hasn't been done already but again it feels like that would require a much more powerful device for only marginal benefit.
5434a
2mo ago
What is a pajeet? Urbandictionary has it variously as a slur which could refer to Canadian Sikhs, north Indians, Hindus, Indians in general, or any South Asian.
5434a
7mo ago
Is there anything else I can try or steps that I'm missing in remedying a chronically blocked nose?
I don't have a runny nose, a cough, any other sign of infection or the itchy red eyes and puffiness I'd associate with an allergy. I've tried waiting it out, I've tried nasal rinses and steam inhalation, I've tried aromatic decongestants like eucalyptus oil and eating onions and pickled chillies (more effective than I'd expect, and tasty too), and I've tried anti-inflammatories like ibuprofen and paracetamol. So far the most effective remedies have been pickled chillies and paracetamol but it's not healthy to take paracetamol daily. If I stack them all together I can sometimes get it to ease off for a few weeks before it slowly creeps back to where it was.
I think my next move is to try antihistamines to rule out an allergy and then if that doesn't work book a doctor's appointment. I might ask a pharmacist but I'm not sure what over-the-counter remedies they can suggest that I haven't already thought of.
5434a
7mo ago
I recently gathered up all the major 8bit and 16bit Zelda games to play through via emulator. I've tried playing the later games before but lacking the rose coloured glasses of childhood nostalgia meant I couldn't get into them and found them to suffer from the familiar issue with open world games of using a map that is too large for the amount of content. Combined with the Zelda games' approach of making everything a multistep puzzle resulted in time spent mostly travelling from one side of the map to the other searching high and low for whatever tiny clue I'd overlooked to unlock the next level.
5434a
8mo ago
Isn't donating blood supposed to be good for your health too? Within limits, obviously.
5434a
7mo ago
The 3D era games. To be honest I only played Ocarina of Time as it's rated so highly and since I didn't enjoy playing that one I don't see much point in trying any others. I'll admit that I use a walkthrough for handholding when I get really stuck, at this age I don't have the time or the patience, but I like to give the puzzles an honest try first. It's embarrassing to admit but for OoT I literally had to look up a walkthrough just to get out of the introduction and training area after scouring every inch of it, and it continued in the same vein until eventually the telecomms workmen repaired our broadband connection and I happily switched it off forever.
I think it might be because the 2D worlds are broken up into discrete screens and so you can mentally map the world to a series of separate tiles that you travel between, each one with at least some kind of distinct feature, while the 3D ones largely just roll on and on in every direction. That works well in an action game but in a puzzle game it ends up feeling like looking for a correct sequence of needles in a haystack.
5434a
10mo ago
This is a good thing. The emoji set is too bloated with these "but I have mid length hair, freckles, and stud earrings, not hoops!" inclusions. A simple 2+2 pictogram is perfectly sufficient. The point of the yellow happy face is that it's happy, not that it's a yellow face.
5434a
6mo ago
I thought it was just my PC being old but my recent experiences of YouTube making my PC sounds like it wants to take off combined with this comment suggesting that it's not just my PC has inspired me to move over to a desktop YouTube client. I've chosen FreeTube because it comes with ad block, SponsorBlock and ("most") age verified videos enabled. Seems alright so far.
5434a
3mo ago
He could reason. Sports mean prizes. Winning means cash. If women were equally good at football you could make a stronger team by replacing the second best men with the best women and winning more cash.
The same principle is more stark in warfare. If women were equally strong then societies would have an advantage if they encouraged women to be warriors to better protect and defend those societies, and women would be similarly self-interested in doing so.
Why are men and women all leaving these gains on the table to be monopolised by men? Because men are oppressing women? How is that possible if men and women are equally matched? They should be able to overpower men the same way they have been overpowered by men, or at least fight to a draw.
As I talk about frequently on this blog, autistic people have a natural tendency to believe that when other people say things they are trying to truthfully communicate what they actually believe. Because otherwise what’s the point?? Several friends say “Yes ok, but you have eyes, right? You can see things yourself?”
Can I? What is it I saw, when I looked around?
I'm not sure I buy into the idea of autism creating these blindspots. Are there two types of autism? It seems like there's one type that says "You utter utter moron, how could you mistake the northern lesser spotted arctic giullemot for its close cousin the lesser spotted arctic northern guillemot! Can't you see the distinctive circle around the eye doesn't fully extend to the beak? What?! Of course it matters!" And then there's this other type that says, I don't know, something like "The television must be true because only the best people are on television, and lying is bad, and the best people don't lie. That's just basic logic".
Can anyone explain this for me?
Low stakes small scale idle curiosity question for the network engineers here: Why does my router (edit for clarity: ADSL router-modem) take so long to connect to the internet? I don't mean a full reboot of the system, just <disconnect> <reconnect>. It takes about 5 minutes. Feels like I could reboot my phone and connect to wireless internet faster than a simple hang-up-redial cycle on a wired connection.
To my naive mind the process should consist of authentication over what is effectively LAN, and then connection/access to the WAN, like connecting to a network switch but with many more users. My little consumer grade network switch doesn't take 5 minutes to start up, it's been a long time since I rebooted it but if I had to guess I'd say it takes less than 30 seconds from a cold start, and reconnecting after pulling the cable and replugging it takes less time than sitting back down. What processes are actually happening?
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
2d 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).
5434a
6mo ago
Helpful tips, thanks. I've added on an addon to block av1 and it's made an improvement but I'm on a 2012 AMD processor with internal Radeon 6550HD graphics so can't expect much, however watching videos is typically the most intensive usage it outside of pending updates for Firefox. What is that about anyway? Until recently the fans revving up would almost always be a sign that Firefox was getting impatient to update and it would settle down again after restarting.
5434a
8mo ago
“I do not want our work to be weaponized,” she said.
By which she means politicised, while herself choosing to act politically both by withholding from publishing and using the frame of threat protection to justify her political choice.
5434a
3mo ago
I'm currently making a foot stool and having my first go at cutting mortise and tenon joints. I don't have a router so I cut the first set of blind mortises with a multitool + chisel and now I'm doing through-mortises with a jigsaw. It's going much better than I expected, and it's a whole lot nicer to make something where I can pick up and rotate the entire piece with one hand than it was building full size built-in bookcases inside the same actively occupied space they were sized to fit. And yes, putting two coats of finish on 8 uprights and on both sides of 36 large shelves did indeed take forever.
Next step is deciding how I'll create the chamfer/roundover without owning a router or a plane. I've seen people do it with rasps but I don't want to tear and chip the soft pine, but I'd also like something faster and less dusty than sanding. I'll have to try out a few methods on the off cuts.
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.
I've seen it used to refer to both a hot Chad whose romantic interest in women extends no further than the tip of his dick and to a pretty boy that a woman keeps hooked on simping for her by using him for her sexual gratification (the female equivalent of a slampig - I haven't watched it but I think the toyboy fantasy film Babygirl with Nicole Kidman probably depicts something like this model), and also to any unappealing men who are more motivated to pursue sex than sitting at home watching porn and complaining online about Stacies.
Is he a boy and is fucking any significant part of the motivation for his actions? He's a fuckboy.
Reading that article though it reads like an attempt to build a stick for hitting men... but I don't see many men who would be particularly offended by the label. Low stakes defensive maybe, but not sincerely offended. What I can see being offensive is calling another woman's boyfriend a fuckboy. In that sense perhaps the fuckboy label is a tool for women to reassert the sort of social policing they're so adept at and that some here in this forum say could alleviate the ills of current day dating culture. Can you imagine if someone told a woman that the new guy she's excited to be dating is a fuckboy? It's a hit at her value - she's giving him her value and not getting compensated (she does it free!). Call a man a fuckboy and internally he'll probably shrug and think DM;HS. It's labelling him as someone who got what he wanted. Beats being an incel or a simp. Tell a woman her bf is a fuckboy and in short order he'll be put on notice that it's time to man up or he won't be getting what he wants any more. You don't need to tell her directly, posting it to the audience of young women reading a fashion blog will probably suffice to start the thought process.
5434a
1mo ago
you don't hear about non-tech companies spending any substantial sums to use it. If they were to start charging a non-trivial amount for it, no one would pay, outside of a few edge cases
I don't see any mention of figures but there was the first regulatory approval of an AI-based law firm in England last month. https://www.sra.org.uk/sra/news/press/garfield-ai-authorised/
Law, medicine and finance are large service industries with notoriously steep fees that would gladly peel off a few billion to become more productive and competitive if they were allowed to. People might be slow to pay for image slop and virtual waifus but they'll happily pay up for things that matter. Will it scale to offset the expense of running the AI server farms? I don't know.
A multi media push for Bluesky is happening today.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=Bluesky&iar=news&ia=news
Currently listening to BBC radio news with guests talking about "is X over?" To their credit the host is offering some criticism of the move and the possible motives.
Is X over? Is this push organic, or coordinated? Are journalists helping contribute to a more positive platform, or are they running away to a hugbox in an effort to punish Elon Musk for supporting Donald Trump?
I don't have much to say but I thought this was worth a post given these platforms' centrality to the internet culture war and its synergies with journalism. For my part I've always thought Twitter was shit, is shit, and will remain shit, and the same goes for any copycats adopting the same format. I lament the drop off of RSS, which suffered from terrible branding/awareness. I didn't understand the value of RSS until it was already in decline, dismissing it as just more icon clutter below a standard format blogpost next to Facebook, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us and send-to-email share links.
Twitter's rise began with journalists hailing it as the beginning of "citizen journalism", plateaued with it becoming a journalism circlejerk of mutual citationogenics they could profitably mine for clickbait from the comfort of their pillows with no need to undertake difficult tasks like research and real world reportage, and is now being abandoned as those same citizen journalists have increasingly turned against the professional journalist class who lauded them. Reap what you sow, Frankenstein's monster, the student has become the master, etc...
Is it a coincidence this is happening on a Friday night? Sunday night is the typical slot for setting a news agenda for the week, but something like Bluesky might be more suited to a weekend when people would be settling down to a relaxing night of shitposting.
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