FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
If you have a problem with white nationalists and cryptonazis, you can say so: that's a popular opinion in normieland. You don't need to invent fake terms that only you and a particular clique define.
Normies are pretty burned out on accusations of nazi and racist and so forth. Also, the target pretty clearly isn't the normie masses, it's an inter-activist fight within what was until now a big-tent coalition on the right.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
My understanding of the claim was that the proportion of undateable people wasn't changing:
I hate to break it to you, but if you can't get a date now, you weren't getting a date then.
If the proportion of undateable people is increasing, then it's entirely possible that if you can't get a date now, you could have gotten a date before. That's what it means for the proportion of undateable people to increase.
I hate to break it to you, but if you can't get a date now, you weren't getting a date then.
This seems directly contradicted by the various attempts at measuring the frequency of baseline human relationships. My understanding is number of friendships, number of relationships, number of sexual partners, number of marriages, number of young people who've never had sex, age of first sexual relationship and so on are all trending in the same direction, and the trend is not a subtle one. If significantly more people are actually spending their lives alone than previously, it doesn't seem possible to me that this part of your argument stands.
The odds are good but the goods are odd part, though, seems perfectly accurate.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
could be wrong, but I seem to recall tagging that user as a darwin alt.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
In fairness, given your approach, it's possible she mistook you for a journalist.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
If you were pointing to the fascists' claim of the trappings (and it really does seem to me to be the trappings, not the substance) of national history and tradition, I could understand the reference to "premodern modes of thinking". But you tie it directly to centralized power and authority to "protect the tribe", and "very loose rules of conduct for what you can do to the outgroup", and both of these describe the Communists (and the ur-Enlightened French Revolution) perfectly.
I'm not sure what to make of the claim that the Communists or the French Revolution used "a lot more mental gymnastics" to get to the core idea of "we are right, hurt people who seem to be getting in our way". The concept of a Revolutionary Conscience does not seem particularly complicated to me. To the extent that Communist theory is more elaborate than Fascist theory, a claim I'm skeptical of, I don't see why that should matter unless the theory were actually load-bearing in some meaningful way, and my assessment of the historical record is that it wasn't. Marx very clearly preached mass-slaughter of the outgroup, and mass-slaughter of the outgroup was the explicit plan of Lenin and his associates going into the revolution.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
I remember reading Sowell's "Vision of the Annointed". "Nuance" would not have been a word I'd use to describe it, and it seems to me that nuance, as typically deployed, often obscures rather than reveals. Sometimes, things can in fact be relatively straightforward.
On the one hand you had Fascism (“screw the enlightenment, let’s go back to premodern barbarism with industrial Revolution characteristics”) and Communism (“We need to just keep pushing the enlightenment as far as it will go. Real enlightenment has never been tried!”).
Fascists observably loved progress, mechanization, modernization and "rational" materialism. Their behavior was not generally recognized as pre-modern barbarism in advance, and its barbarity was not notably distinct in character from that of the Communists. Likewise, the communists were obsessed with both the industrial revolution and what is very easy to describe as "premodern barbarism"; arguably by the 30s, Fascism was pretty clearly the more "civilized" of the two in observable outcomes.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
Timmy: all fluff, love of the setting. This dragon cards is cool because it's a big dragon that breathes lightning. They are fantasizing about the setting of the game, not the game itself, and as a consequence are usually not very good at the game itself. They want to daydream.
Johnny: Balance of fluff and crunch, and love of the game. This dragon is cool because it enables an infinite loop using these three other cards. They are fantasizing about the game, about the mechanics and their interactions. They want to play.
Spike: All Crunch, with the goal of winning at any cost. This dragon is cool because it gives me an extra win every ten games. They are fantasizing about winning, the crunch is interesting to them only as it helps increase their win percentage, and the fluff is irrelevant. They want to win.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
Insurance
n. An ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.
INSURANCE AGENT: My dear sir, that is a fine house — pray let me insure it.
HOUSE OWNER: With pleasure. Please make the annual premium so low that by the time when, according to the tables of your actuary, it will probably be destroyed by fire I will have paid you considerably less than the face of the policy.
INSURANCE AGENT: O dear, no — we could not afford to do that. We must fix the premium so that you will have paid more.
HOUSE OWNER: How, then, can I afford that?
INSURANCE AGENT: Why, your house may burn down at any time. There was Smith’s house, for example, which —
HOUSE OWNER: Spare me — there were Brown’s house, on the contrary, and Jones’s house, and Robinson’s house, which —
INSURANCE AGENT: Spare me!
HOUSE OWNER: Let us understand each other. You want me to pay you money on the supposition that something will occur previously to the time set by yourself for its occurrence. In other words, you expect me to bet that my house will not last so long as you say that it will probably last.
INSURANCE AGENT: But if your house burns without insurance it will be a total loss.
HOUSE OWNER: Beg your pardon — by your own actuary’s tables I shall probably have saved, when it burns, all the premiums I would otherwise have paid to you — amounting to more than the face of the policy they would have bought. But suppose it to burn, uninsured, before the time upon which your figures are based. If I could not afford that, how could you if it were insured?
INSURANCE AGENT: O, we should make ourselves whole from our luckier ventures with other clients. Virtually, they pay your loss.
HOUSE OWNER: And virtually, then, don’t I help to pay their losses? Are not their houses as likely as mine to burn before they have paid you as much as you must pay them? The case stands this way: you expect to take more money from your clients than you pay to them, do you not?
INSURANCE AGENT: Certainly; if we did not —
HOUSE OWNER: I would not trust you with my money. Very well then. If it is certain, with reference to the whole body of your clients, that they lose money on you it is probable, with reference to any one of them, that he will. It is these individual probabilities that make the aggregate certainty.
INSURANCE AGENT: I will not deny it — but look at the figures in this pamph —
HOUSE OWNER: Heaven forbid!
INSURANCE AGENT: You spoke of saving the premiums which you would otherwise pay to me. Will you not be more likely to squander them? We offer you an incentive to thrift.
HOUSE OWNER: The willingness of A to take care of B’s money is not peculiar to insurance, but as a charitable institution you command esteem. Deign to accept its expression from a Deserving Object.
-Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
I've been an artist in the video games world for more than a decade, but almost all of that time was spent on projects that used fairly lo-fi art, and early on I moved to a stripped-down modelling program. The project I'm current on is wrapping up, and I'm not sure I'll have a job once it does, so I want to brush up on my generalist skills in preparation for a job hunt. I've generally made guns and tanks and spaceships in my free time, but I've always wanted to get deeper into the tech, simply because it allows you to make cooler things; a gun is great, but a gun held by a character is better. A mech is great, but a mech with full texture and rigging stomping around an environment is better.
I've tried to learn Blender before, and it was going somewhat well, but I ended up going back to my old low-key modelling package for work, which killed muscle memory, and I never got back to it. Also, I don't think my approach was nearly organized enough to handle the complexity of Blender. This time, I'm taking a more serious approach:
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First, I'm burning my ships. I'm making a personal commitment to never touch my old modelling package again. Blender or bust.
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Second, I'm being much more structured about my approach to learning. There's a bunch of tutorials online for learning blender, but rather than just working through them, I've set up a google doc and am taking copious notes of hotkeys, techniques and so forth, essentially writing my own manual. This helps a ton with both retention, and with having a quick reference when I forget things.
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Third, there's a ton of "quick tip" content online, showing random disconnected features of the program. I used to see this stuff and think "wow, that's neat", and then forget it. Currently, I'm collecting those links in the same doc, with the goal to work them into my notes and workflow when they become relevant.
Last time I tried learning Blender, the goal was to get to modelling as quickly as possible. This time I'm aiming more to learn the deeper toolset; it's obvious to me that I've wasted a huge amount of time doing things the hard way, when tools are available to make those things much easier, and that's bad both in a professional sense and an artistic one.
My current project is a gun; I've got a pretty good low-poly model, but I want a high-poly, normal bake, textures and simple function animations, the standard game-ready pipeline. I have a bunch of spaceships I'd like to finish the same way, and I've got some characters/environments/action scenes I'd like to try as well, plus a ton of other stuff; I've got a huge backlog of projects and Ideas that I've never had the chops to really execute on.
This tutorial is a really good introduction to the modelling end of things. It's a bit of a slog, but it handles setting up hotkeys and a number of addons for a more efficient workflow, goes through the basic modelling tools, and dips into materials, modifiers, a touch of simulation, and rendering. Be warned, some of the plugins he recommends (Jmesh in particular) currently don't work, and in some cases you'll need to figure out how to work around them.
This tutorial is a good follow-up, and is the one I'm currently working through. The modelling is more intense, and Jmesh being broken meant I needed to take a detour to learn some other methods for handling circular arrays, but it demonstrates a ton of useful techniques and approaches to a lot of standard modelling problems, and gives good working practice with the modifier system.
I've also been working through overviews of the shader and geometry node types, in preparation for texturing and environment generation. I've dipped a bit into some of the simple rigging, but want to tackle true high-poly > normal maps > texturing > rendering before diving into that.
Overall, the thing that makes me excited about Blender is seeing examples of how it seems to bust the general trend of overspecialization. videos like this one are pretty astonishing in terms of what is actually possible with a deeper understanding of the tools. The multiplication of effort is real, and I've got a wealth of experience of how limiting it is to be stuck with the old, slow way of doing things. An obvious example: I've spent probably hundreds of hours modelling rock over the years for various environments. I'm pretty sure I can spend maybe twenty hours learning the geometry nodes system, and then produce rock environments with ten times the fidelity in a small fraction of the time. I'm tired of doing it the stupid way.
Also, if you're comfortable posting any of your art, I'd love to see it!
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
Still working on learning Blender, health and family allowing, and building a list of thing I want to make as time goes on. Current goal is still the texturing workflow. Made some good progress through the current tutorial this weekend, but finding time has been tough.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
It's approved. Feel free to ping me when you post these, it might help get them up faster.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
or the modern understanding of "God is Love" is wrong, as should be expected from an understanding unquestionably built by flawed mortal men.
Our society continues to function because Reds haven't joined the game yet, and Trump winning the last election is a strong disincentive for them to do so for the time being. But the back-and-forth wrench is obvious and undeniable. The changes to norms are undeniable. Reds will get on the scoreboard eventually; it's a statistical inevitability. When that happens, a large percentage of Reds are going to be running a copy of the current Blue script, and I see no reason to believe Blues in general will accept that or even recognize the irony.
The majority of both sides still seem to believe that the culture war can be won in a way compatible with things generally continuing as they have before, if they just escalate a little harder. at some point, and it is very possible that we are already well past this point, it stops being measured escalation and starts being a runaway uncontrollable chain reaction.
There was the thing where a democratic campaign volunteer attempted to murder as many of the republican congressmen as he could, the FBI covered up the clear political motive, and it was common for years afterward to hear Progressives mock the victims and wish the would-be assassin had done a better job.
There was the time the Antifa guy murdered a trump supporter in cold blood, on video, his antifa buddies publicly celebrated the murder on video, prestige media responded by glazing him, and local progressives shrugged and said it was the trump supporter's fault for engaging in political speech in a blue enclave.
There was Butler, where the evident Progressive reaction anywhere outside formal contexts was sorrow that the assassin had missed, and complete obliviousness that the assassin had in fact killed one man and wounded two more.
There's the multiple other assassination attempts on Trump too, of course.
Then there was Luigi:
Woman inspired by Luigi Mangione planned to kill Trump cabinet members, feds say
Luigi Mangione Musical Is Real, And It's Sold Out
Jimmy Kimmel Makes Stunning Confession About ‘Hot Killer’ Luigi Mangione
What Luigi Mangione supporters want you to know
This is not what the media coverage looks like when they want their audience to leave with a negative view of the subject.
Then there's the open calls for the murder of Elon Musk, together with the coordinated mass violence against properties associated with him, which Tim Walz among others gave winks and nods to on stage, advising Tesla owners to remove the logos from their vehicles.
Then there's the family members, friends, and acquaintances who've opined to me that it'd probably be for the best if Trump or Elon or Vance were just murdered.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
As soon as you start talking about the practicalities of "what happens if a Blue-controlled Federal government decides it is no longer willing to tolerate armed Reds?" everyone agrees that what would stop them wouldn't be the armed Reds shooting back, it would be the lack of sufficient Blue-aligned goons able and willing to enforce the order against trivial opposition.
"Everyone" does not agree with this; I certainly don't. We've just finished two wars featuring the US military operating against insurgents. One was a pyrrhic victory at best, the other was a flat loss. Both were in countries significantly smaller, significantly poorer, and significantly less well-armed than the US. The assessments that generate the consensus you're referring to are based on the idea of pitched battle between AR15s on one side and Abrams tanks and f35s on the other, but it is ignorance to the point of madness to imagine that this is how the situation would work in practice. This failure to understand the nature of asymmetrical conflict was risible ten years ago, when we only had two decades of examples from our two most recent wars to draw from. Given the developments since, it approaches a very black form of comedy. We're literally watching the formation of deep-seated assassination culture in our society right now. The government can't consistently enforce straw purchase laws when the criminals submit a signed confession to federal law enforcement. And these aren't even the worst problems with such a scenario, or even in the top ten!
Blues and the Blue-adjacent have the insane belief that they could plausibly impose their will on Reds and get it to stick. Reds and the red-adjacent have the insane belief that violent conflict with the blues would be short and sharp, and then life would go back to normal. Both of these beliefs are insanely destructive if acted on. Neither side has anything near a proper understanding of just how fragile our Belle Epoch really is: It will pop like a fucking soap bubble, and it will never, ever come back. Please, I am begging you, update your priors!
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
I've had my first significant, positive interaction with AI.
I needed a plugin for blender, bought it off an online shop, went to install it and got a big spew of error codes in Blender's console. I spent thirty minutes blind-googling error codes and various rephrasings of "why doesn't [plugin] install", to no avail. As frustration mounted, I noticed one search had popped up an abbreviated AI answer in the header, and from testimonials here and from coworkers I figured I had nothing to lose, and started feeding the error codes to the AI instead. It correctly diagnosed the problem on the first shot, and within about twenty minutes of feeding it successive results, had the problem sorted and the plugin installed. Given the nature of the problem and the solution, I'm pretty confident I would not have been able to figure it out in daily slices of a late-night hour or two after getting the kids to bed and the chores handled, before simply losing motivation and moving on to something else. AI straight-up saved my butt.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
Well, it all started in 2078, when a rights dispute within Catholic Studios (formerly Universal, prior to their formal registration as a religion for tax avoidance purposes, with the name chosen in hopes of leveraging support from low-information-voters) resulted in both the LA and New York branches claiming control of the organization. William Pope of the LA office claimed the CEO position, while Dean Pope (no relation) of the New York office contesting the claim. Public disapproval for the whole mess resulted in a grassroots "Anti-Pope" movement, and a sudden outpouring of unauthorized, AI-generated bootleg sequels to many of Catholic Studios' popular media properties, particularly the Fast And Furious franchise. By the time the corporate succession crisis was concluded, then-CEO Charles Avignon learned that due to fine print in the copyright statutes IP rights could be voided unless a property maintained "sufficient narrative cohesion between its most popular iterations", otherwise reverting to the status of uncopyrightable "folklore". Many of the fan-made Fast And Furious films had been fashioned with these factors in mind, leaving Avignon with few options but to attack the fan consensus directly by both releasing new films and attempting to scrub the fan-content from the internet through any means, fair or foul. Thus began the information war over the Reunification of the Fast and Furious universe...
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
Have they considered just pushing a few guided tungsten rods out an airlock before they finish decelerating?
My read is that they have, and there's a really strong taboo on orbital bombardment or other forms of weaponization of interstellar transport. The Succession Wars demonstrated that unrestrained conflict costs more than anyone can afford, so a huge part of the setting is finding ways to keep the violence to a survivable level.
Then actual wars start, and things go all Mad Max...
For those who haven't seen it:
Just when people thought mechs were about done, the charger showed up and punched them into the ground or died trying. I personally feel this crazy cycle kept Mach relevant in this era; it suggested that any Mech was potentially better than none, and if boldly piloted to near certain doom, it suggested that a Mech was a game changer in the right if crazy hands.
Because to some people, the rare few dreamers, those few charger Pilots, the 1 in 10,000, they don't see the world like we do. To them, well, the sky is the limit, and space is the place. They believe that anyone can be a real Warrior of the Wasteland, the ayatolla of rock and rolla, the cream of the crop, the hammer of Justice, the people's elbow, that your Noble Wasteland Mech Warrior can walk into the consecrated holy Battle of Mech Warfare like the third monkey on the plank up Noah's Arc and brother it's starting to rain...
Unleashed as such, the Charger is an assault Mech designed for getting in close and then reminding people that being beat to death with your own limbs is always a legitimate concern to have in a war zone. Without the encumbrance of weapons or any delicate anything to worry about, and being very fast and very big, the charger was in many ways almost perfect for this incredibly barbaric Age of War. The mech that was fast enough to chase down just about anything could absolutely, if the pilot were crazy enough, run around the battlefield punching things until they died or everything else did. It was a magic time to be alive in the inner spere, and by surviving long enough the Charger reminds studious Mech experts that survival isn't about being best but rather actually surviving.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
Berry isn't a marginal figure, certainly more influential at this point than, say, Jonah Goldberg.
This seems like a reasonable statement.
Maybe conservative Catholics should start asking themselves whether "separation of church and state" might be a good idea after all.
Why? I get your general thrust here: Reasonably-influential Protestant reminds us all of the conflict between Protestants and Catholics. You appear to be basing this on the idea that inter-tribal conflict is a problem that is or should be taken seriously, and appear to be suggesting that the Catholic/Protestant split is one that deserves attention, and particularly that this fault and its consequences are significant enough that based whoevers should admit that the "libs" might have been right about something. Your framing of his statement about protestant and catholic conflict in terms of the worst possible example of that conflict seems notably disingenuous to me, but let's leave it be.
What sort of response are you hoping for here? As someone who disagrees with most of this, would you be interested my presenting some examples of what actual serious tribal splits with serious real-world consequences look like in our present context? If not that, then what's the proper way to continue this conversation, in your view?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
I don't think many people, even most of those donating to her, disagree in any fundamental way. If you treat this as an isolated, one-shot prisoner's dilemma, the obvious move is to condemn and deplore.
The problem is that this is not an isolated, one-shot prisoner's dilemma, and in fact is a really, really stark example of how the ability to arbitrarily turn people's memory on and off is not a power one should allow their enemies to control.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
I was heavy into battletech as a kid, but lacking friends with similar interests I spent a lot more time reading the books and designing mechs than I did actually playing the game. There's a lot of stuff in the crunch like this that I really don't get.
...I guess the idea is that it's a cheap extra chance at a critical hit once you've stripped armor?
Blender Progress: Illness and family commitments slowed me down some, but I've completed the high/low poly and unwrapping workflows, and am now starting on texturing. The current fork in the road is whether to go for Blender's Eevee render system, or else marmoset toolbag or substance painter. The latter is to my understanding more of an industry standard, so that's the one I'm looking at.
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