Grant_us_eyes
No bio...
User ID: 1156
Grant_us_eyes
4d ago
Having experienced both, I've found that I much prefer dry heat over wet heat.
The dry air never bothered me much, but I admit I was merely visiting as opposed to living there for a year at a time.
Grant_us_eyes
9d ago
I honestly wish you could remember what historian that was.
I could always use another book to add to my 'to read' pile.
Grant_us_eyes
9d ago
I still recall driving into work and seeing advertisements from various federal agencies on how to snitch - excuse me, inform them on potential instigators and people whom may have attended the J6 protests.
Or posts on my local state reddit celebrating when people were arrested due to being tied to said J6 protest.
I don't recall anything of the sort being persecuted for the BLM riots, or the June 20 riots. This is what I have in my head when people try to claim that left-leaning/associated were treated the same as J6.
Grant_us_eyes
17d ago
A different audience in Europe. London, specifically.
This particular myth tends to annoy me a great deal, because it's a perfect encapsulation of a tactic I've seen displayed by left-leaning types time and time again - the constant, insistent urge to drag politics into areas that it doesn't really belong(ie, entertainment).
This wasn't Cancel Culture. It was a masks-off moment for a bunch of grifting entertainers that were trying to belong to the Cool Kids Club. Surprise, surprise, the group that made them popular from the start didn't take well to being grifted.
Grant_us_eyes
18d ago
Vintage Story has alot of difficulty gates for survival that give you plenty to do in-game, above and beyond acquiring metals - it can also cause some emergent hilarity. Just last night while playing, what turned into a scouting mission for more pine resin flipped into an effort to capture and bring back a female goat for my domestication efforts before quickly devolving down to fighting for my life against a horde of wolves in order to capture said damn goat.
All because if you make sure your diet has enough variety, it increases your health, and I need to work on dairy production.
Fun times.
Grant_us_eyes
18d ago
Looks at his current play-count for saved worlds
Well, as of late, I'd have to say Vintage Story. As for why? It's hard to place down on one single element. There's just something weirdly appealing about making wine and baking pies in a post-apocalyptic lovecraftian eldritch horror setting were your overall goal is to make it to producing steel. Oh, and possibly figuring out the entire reason for all that post-apocalyptic lovecraftian eldritch horror.
Mechanics-wise, it also has a wide plethora of emergent gameplay. Not requiring containers to store things and just being able to put your tools down on the ground or leaning up against a nearby wall has a charm all of it's own.
Grant_us_eyes
19d ago
I really need to stop playing Vintage Story. But the moment I finally get out, they pull me back in...
Grant_us_eyes
20d ago
Susan Cooper's 'The Dark Is Rising' is pure young-adult adventure fantasy and done very well.
CS Friedman's 'Crown of Shadows' series is a personal favorite, and a twisted mix of sci-fi and fantasy and also done very well.
Hell, even the penultimate male-fantasy young-adult book 'My Side of the Mountain' was written by a woman.
I always considered it a bit weird when people bitched about the lack of female writers in fiction, when I turn to my bookshelves for 1970/80s fantasy and flip through female after female writer. If anything, it's the men that are lacking, not the women.
Grant_us_eyes
1mo ago
Yes, Escorts provide GFE-stuff. Of varying types, of varying lengths. I've checked. The point I was trying to make is, such an activity as I described it involves a deep degree of investment on both sides of the fence and a level of intimacy that just doesn't boil down to 'these two fuck every so often'. It speaks of two people actively trying to keep together a household and the long time-horizon that implies.
Can't really get that from an Escort, or an OnlyFans.
Grant_us_eyes
1mo ago
A girl with OF isn't going to hold my hand while we walk into Home Depot to pick out supplies for our weekend project.
...well, not unless I pay her an obscene amount of money.
Grant_us_eyes
1mo ago
A Scandinavian economist once said to Milton Friedman, ‘In Scandinavia, we have no poverty’.
Milton Friedman replied, ‘That’s interesting, because in America, among Scandinavians, we have no poverty, either’
I fear the steps to solve such issues involve impossible tasks. If the first step on your master plan involves 'First, you must become Swiss', we have quite the road ahead of us.
Grant_us_eyes
1mo ago
"I would rather be a temporary fleshlight for a 9 or 10 than a permanent sex slave and housekeeper for a 5." says one woman, and I can only really fucking hope that this is the opinion of an extreme minority.
I hope I'm right. I'm terrified that I'm wrong.
Grant_us_eyes
1mo ago
People seem to trip over the Constitution a fair bit, operating under the assumption that it somehow developed in a vacuum. But if you look at the political science of the time, no, there was a lot of robust discussion involving all points of the Constitution, the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers being just a small part of a larger landscape.
Several politicians of the time make no bones about how the 2nd should be interpreted - that all the terrible implements of the soldier and warfare should belong to all the citizens, barring a few government officials.
Grant_us_eyes
1mo ago
Every time I see arguments speaking for Euthanasia, I recall reading the comic Transmetropolitan, by Warren Ellis.
The first story in said comic series involves a gonzo journalist by the name of Spider Jerusalem in the far future hunting for a story, stumbling across a break-away group being lead by an old companion of his. Said group has taken to utilizing radical body-mods to effectively partially transform themselves into half-human, half-alien hybrids. They're effectively throwing a political hissyfit/riot to get recognized as some sort of special group by the City, so they can acquire benefits and whatnot. Of cource, there's the slight issue that said radical body-modding tech they're utilizing was a failure from the start, hence the hybrid part, as it should have been a perfect transformation, but whatever...
Anyways, the story ends with Spider effectively shaming everyone into calming down and not bashing all the hybrids brains out on the sidewalk, and ends writing a column about the entire circumstance.
One line in said column always stuck out at me, roughly paraphrased from memory, as I lack said comic in front of me to quote verbatim. 'If we were a civilized society, we'd give these damaged people a playground sandbox, a pat on the head, and let them do their own thing in peace'.
If we were a civilized society.
Civilized.
That word, I've always felt, did alot of heavy lifting. Loading bearing, you could call it. If we were civilized. If we lived in a society where a sizable chunk of people that wouldn't take advantage of such a fail-state, that wouldn't abuse the system, that wouldn't twist it for their own ends. If we were mature. Adult. Civilized. If things were only civilized, we could do so many things.
I'm a big believer in personal responsibility. I feel that if people want to do something, that doesn't harm others, they should at least have that option. Suicide included. If you want to check out, well, I personally don't agree with it, and it's not my thing personally, but I can at least understand why some people would want to do so. My odd life has put me in close contact with a wide spread of people, including some older individuals that refuse to change their behavior and have basically decided that if they're going to go out, they're going to go out living life on their terms.
However.
I'll be the first person to play the devil's advocate and note we don't live in a perfect world, that perverse incentives are the quiet ruler that dictates more than I wish, and the road to hell is paved with good intentions. While personal responsibility and choices is one thing, it's entirely another to give authority to the state.
Do I trust individuals to make good, well-informed decisions that have the best outcome for their future? No. But the thing about believing in personal responsibility is that this also includes the fail state to fuck up in a cataclysmic fashion.
Do I want to give that sort of power to the State and Authority as a whole? Fuck no. I could go off on a long rant here about how I feel some laws and societal allowances have a gargantuan knock-on effect on societal development as a whole in a very bad way, but I won't belabor the point, and it would be distracting, anyways.
Am I being cruel, here? Evil, one could argue? Dooming people whom suffer, physically and mentally, in a state of agony that last as long as they live? Perhaps. Is this fair? I don't know. I wish we had better options. I honestly, really do.
If we were just civilized...
But what I do know is that maybe, just maybe, we want to keep that genie in the bottle for a very good reason.
Grant_us_eyes
1mo ago
Well, see, that's the problem.
It's the exact opposite.
The reason the first movie drew so many nerds and geeks to it, despite the majority of them actively disliking said movie and it's resolution is that James Cameron actually put in the work to build verisimilitude. The entire setup and world-building of the first movie - if you do the background research - is actually really, really good. He basically sets up a cyberpunk dystopia in a very subtle way to explain the whys and wherefores.
Some of the background aspects that always stuck with me was the brutal albeit realistic risks that people signing up for a tour on Pandora would take. You weren't signing up for a tour on a vacation world, but a potentially deadly mission to what amounted to a remote Antarctica Research facility, only ten times worse. If your cryo-pod failed during transit, they would quietly euthanized you, as they couldn't spare the resources to keep your sorry ass alive for several years, and you just weren't that valuable. If you got injured past a certain point, again, they just euthanized you. It spoke of a ruthless business with very limited resources that treated thier employees like replaceable cogs, and with the same care. Brutal, albeit realistic and understandable.
And then there's the ISV Venture Star, which is one of the most gorgeous ships in movie history. Beautiful thing.
The second movie basically takes all the world-building in the first movie and throws it in the trash. Turns out, no, full-brain uploads and backups are a thing, and can be done in a trivial fashion. Whoops, the head security guy knocked up someone and the resultant child got left behind, despite the previous attitude toward RDA's own employees meaning said child likely would have been aborted without so much as a raised eyebrow or blush.
Avatar 2 basically went full Eclipse Phase without working out the implications of what going full Eclipse Phase actually means. Given all the homework done to make the first Avatar movie reasonably work(compared to other movies, atleast), it points overall that James Cameron likely had nothing to do with the writing/worldbuilding and is basically making shit up for the second movie without thinking it through and going all in on selling a message.
Granted, that's what the first movie did, but it atleast did the work to make it actually interesting.
Whoof. Okay. Glad to get that off my chest. All right, I'm done.
Grant_us_eyes
1mo ago
Is this where we start bitching about how the two Avatar movies make no goddamn sense whatsoever and how James Cameron is a fucking hack who doesn't know how to write?
Because I'll do it. I'll fucking well do it.
Props for the essay, but it's stuff I've seen before. Hell, it's pretty much my original take away from the first movie.
And Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri did it all better anyways.
Grant_us_eyes
1mo ago
It's times like this I wish I could toss myself into stasis for a decade or two for this technology to hit mainstream.
Not that I'd use it myself, but I really want to see what people's revealed preferences would be if they have the option to pick and choose their offspring's traits.
Grant_us_eyes
1mo ago
Straight guy as well, and I'd consider her pretty mid for a normal woman, much less a starlet.
Grant_us_eyes
1mo ago
I find it more interesting that this is a statement I've seen voiced by others in the past few years, that's only come up recently. That we have the Vice President of the United States voicing this aloud indicates... well, it certainly indicates something.
Part of the issue, I feel, with modern immigration is that people have bought into the myth and propaganda, and if you question this, you're, well, a bad person. 'Give us your tired, your huddled masses, your poor' is basically good advertisement, but it doesn't reflect the reality on the ground. 'Melting pot', too, was a statement by a visitor from Europe to describe New York City, and I can't help but feel trying to make all of America look like New York City makes my skin crawl.
As far as mythology goes, again, I feel that people have this mistaken assumption that people just came into the US during the heyday of 20th century immigration and merely stayed and settled. Not true. In truth, it was a two-way free-flow of people that came to the US to make their fortune and then left if they couldn't do so.
Many European migrants who moved to the United States in the early twentieth century eventually returned to their home country. The US government collected official statistics on both in- and out-migration from 1908 to 1923. In those years, the United States received 10 million immigrant arrivals and lost 3.5 million emigrants, a return migration rate of 35% (Gould 1980; Wyman 1993: 10–12; Hatton and Williamson 1998: 9). Return migration rates may have been even higher than the aggregate statistics suggest. Bandiera et al. (2013) found that in order to reconcile micro data on migrant inflows to the stock of migrants remaining in the United States during census years, the return migration rate may have been as high as 70%
More, was serious concern over said glut of immigration, to the point where moratoriums came down to stifle said flow of people because of concerns regarding the people that actually lived there.
More, as someone whom considers himself... well, I can't say 'amateur', I won't grace myself with such a title, so let's call me a 'dabbling fumbler of a historian' - someone who's looked into the past on this topic, the one thing I never see brought up in regards to early 20th century immigration is the one of distance and time. I go to local places that were settled as ethnic enclaves and I put myself back in the days of yore, both in terms of distance and logistics, and I come to a stark realization - people talk of this 'founding myth' of immigration for America as if it perfectly applies to the modern age, and, no, it doesn't - because these were groups of people who basically came to America, staked out a section of land days travel from others in the middle of nowhere, and lived their lives, alone and away from others and not causing any trouble.
We don't have that today. Travel from port city to said settlements take days back then of hard travel now take a few hours at worst. We have a free flow of people undreamt of in the past, over vast distances and in a fairly trivial fashion. What would take places in another section of your own county could be ignored with a fair amount of ease if you so wished - now we need to pay attention to what occurs in other states because the people over there could very easily come over here with all their issues and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it.
Talk of meritocracy and individualism applied to Immigration is a bad argument from the get go, I feel, because it's based on a host of assumptions that are not historical truth. America was never a melting pot, it was a crucible - one that people could leave and did so. And even if they stayed without being a success, they were not necessarily a failure, as they could simply live their lives without bothering anyone and not being bothered in turn.
That age of history is done and gone. We no longer have that luxury. The myths of yesteryear may speak of something that people want to be true, an ideal to aspire to, but the set of circumstances that allowed for that myth to flourish no longer exist, and it's time people acknowledge that. We can't look to the past for solutions, because the past people expect to find never existed, and the solutions that did exist people don't want to use.
TLDR: While I'm sure there are applicable arguments about Meritocracy and Individualism, I feel this is a bad one built upon bad assumptions and so I'm dismissing it entirely in favor of focusing on other aspects.
Grant_us_eyes
1mo ago
Personal antecedent; A friend of mine(who eventually married) confided to me part of the issue with dating he had was potential gold-diggers who were more interested in his and his family's wealth than an honest relationship.
Another personal antecedent; The same friend finally married a nice brain surgeon who's the only one I've seen capable of keeping up with said friend in all areas, and once she got settled into her job, her paycheck meant they could indulge in all their hobbies.
I think there's a hidden factor not accounted for; that rich, successful men don't have options - not really. That if they're trying to build a family, that their options are actually very limited - someone with a similar outlook, ideas for the lifestyle they want to lead, with a pleasant(or at least compatible) personality. So, while the data is interesting(and I'm not disagreeing with it), I think the host of assumptions are off and thus make things skewed when trying to apply it to the real world.
Grant_us_eyes
1mo ago
I'm curious what you mean by 'low-level', here. I've heard Obsidian described many ways, but I don't think I've heard 'low-level' before.
Grant_us_eyes
1mo ago
Over the years, I've begun to develop a moderate interest in leather shoes - the idea of a long-term solution for footwear that, if properly maintained, could provide good use for potentially decades appealed to me a great deal. This appeal, I suspect, was likely driven by being soured over shoe makers turning out very nice shoes that did an excellent job while only lasting a year, tops - only to find that the newer incarnations of the model were far worse than the originals(I'm looking at you, Merrel).
Red Wing came up while researching the matter - how could it not? - and I, being curious, snatched up weird, mystery pair of used Red Wing Irish Setter Moc Toes that served me disturbingly well over two years of hard use doing damn near everything.
Sadly, this wasn't to last - they finally gave up the ghost, and will require submission to a cobbler and a resole(if possible) to continue their use for years to come, which I plan to do so in the future, likely next month, once I've made my choice of cobbler and sole.
But, given all the walking I do, I found myself in a weird situation where I didn't have a pair of walking shoe/boot to really use. Work, sure - I have another pair of actual Red Wings that are wonderful for some of the heavier stuff I do outside, but not good for walking(they're used, and developed an odd stick in the leather that's rubbing at the ankle that I'm seeing if I can correct through useful of neetsfoot oil and a shoe tree).
So. Off to ebay I go once more. And stumbled across a pair of red wing boots for a measly thirty bucks. The pictures were... something else, but a part of me couldn't hold back the idea of a challenge. The description of said boots called them 'distressed', and once I got them in my hot little hands, well... yeah, I'd have to call that distressed.
Thankfully, after the judicious use of saddle soap and Saphir(with a medium brown dye, to restore color), they're looking far better off. I don't know how they work on my foot while walking, but I'll find out over the next day or so. Hopefully they'll work well enough and last atleast a few months so I can sort out the rest of my footwear situation.
As an aside, if anyone knows of any good online cobblers aside from KW Shoe Repair or Potters and Sons, feel free to toss them out.
Grant_us_eyes
1mo ago
I prefer Obsidian for general organization and note-taking. It would serve well as a way to organize an electronic journal with little fuss.
Grant_us_eyes
1mo ago
No, you stumbled into a weird little internet site that cleaves more closely with old-style forums, with old-style rules that aren't explicitly defined, and the expectation that you at least lurk quietly to adapt to the overall local culture before making yourself known.
If you've been exposed to nothing but reddit and/or twitter for most of your online life, of course this place is going to look weird. You came in expecting an industrial rave and instead got an English Gentlemen's Club.
Stay around a bit. You'll be fine.
I'll ask the obvious question before the admins likely delete your post due to lack of effort.
Who?
Edit: Boy, did I get that question answered elsewhere...
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