PropagandaOfTheDude
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User ID: 726
PropagandaOfTheDude
13d ago
With the right cybernetic chair and daily sacrifices he'll be fine.
PropagandaOfTheDude
1mo ago
Twitter shut down the "disposable account" mechanism that Nitter instances used. Thirty days afterwards, the last Nitter account stopped working.
The Motte automatically converts Twitter/X links into Nitter links, right?
Nitter is dead, and its replicas will die in less than 30 days.
Nitter currently relies on the mass generation of guest accounts, a weird anonymous form of account that was only supported by old versions of the Twitter app. Creation of them was totally disabled today, so every nitter instance will be dead in under 30 days (when they expire). Scrapers apparently also relied on this, as every public nitter instance was being hammered by scrapers earlier. Instances will probably shut down quite soon unless someone finds another way to create tens of thousands of accounts in an automated fashion for free.
(Note: This is a per-account setting, in the "Content" section.)
PropagandaOfTheDude
1mo ago
as well as contractual poly families as described in Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land
You're thinking the of the line marriages and so forth in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress?
PropagandaOfTheDude
4mo ago
We have 2 dogs and 10 cats in my condo right now. This isn't normal right? She also teaches kids math as a data scientist so she is obsessed with helping people. But I feel like there is a certain point where it's insane. Should I crack down and tell her how crazy it is with how many animals live in our condo, or should I just let it go.
You've heard of or read those news stories that pop up, about people who have lots animals, in filthy conditions?
One of the paths that leads to this is that the person or family can foster four pets. Then eight pets. Then twelve, sixteen. It works, for a while.
Eventually some other crisis happens. The household can't take care of them all. But having a dozen or more pets is normalized. Stress accumulates. Quality of care drops, and drops.
Right now I don't think you folks are in a position to cope with a life downturn.
PropagandaOfTheDude
4mo ago
Some hard-core of people exist who, for whatever reason, will always want to transition to living as the opposite sex and will be happier if they do so; but there also exist today people who transition for reasons of social contagion or to take advantage of policies, who would be happier living as their birth-sex.
I found this Tumblr screencap a while back, it stuck in my head, and then it turned up again recently:
i went to go pick up my HORMONES from the chemist today and the guy was quite sweet and very well intentioned but clearly way out of his element... when i was leaving i did the standard "thanks have a nice night" and he responded with "you too enjoy your... (very very quietly obviously realising what he was saying was highly insane) gender..." and tbh i haven't stopped thinking abt being a gender enjoyer since
For me, that's a useful way to view matters. Is a given person a gender enjoyer? Or someone who isn't enjoying anything?
PropagandaOfTheDude
1mo ago
That's not how the game works at all!
How does it work?
Maybe?
I recall playing the original Deus Ex with a stealth assassin. The game took care to provide killphrases for two of the minibosses. And then—whoops!—I had a devil of a time trying to deal with Walton Simons(?) at Area 51 armed just with a sniper rifle. Apparently if I had just spent a moment to knock him unconscious in the previous mission he never would have appeared...
I think the key frustrations for DE:HR boss fights boil down to a couple of things.
- You have to carry along weaponry on mission after mission so it'll be available during the four boss fights. For most of the game, that meant a fully tricked-out revolver, based on wiki advice. Then I added a grenade launcher. They take up room, especially when added to a tranq rifle and a stun gun.
- You'll find the usual game designer trope where your weapons don't really do much until you've dealt with some precondition.
- Pretty much every time I save spammed and retried and then looked on the wiki for hints and then won, I explored the area after the fight. Lots of weapon/ammo caches, and other rooms and corridors besides the main "arena". So maybe they did design them to support hiding and sniping. (Your non-lethals won't work.) But when the cut scene ends and the mini-boss is in front of you, there's a very strong tendency to just start unloading.
There's a DLC The Missing Link where the final boss is just a guy, and sneaking over and doing a takedown works just fine. That was nice.
PropagandaOfTheDude
4mo ago
Years ago I had reason to hear a one-hour job overview, from the head of security of a vast consumer goods warehouse. Security...they're worried about stealing stuff, right? Somewhat, but mostly it was the employees creating a giant, ongoing soap opera.
PropagandaOfTheDude
5mo ago
Only downside is that I went in with a particular playstyle that I enjoy from shooters, and its sometimes been hard to get the cyberpunk leveling to play well with my preferred playstyle.
How well does it handle stealth? I have been a first-person sneaker fiend since Thief.
I recently finished Deus Ex: Human Revolution as...a stealthy hacker.
PropagandaOfTheDude
1yr ago
Six years ago, Sarah A. Hoyt coined "roll hard left and die".
Years ago, watching science fiction magazines and newspapers of various sorts come and go, I identified a process I called “roll hard left and die.”
When a magazine or a newspaper or any news or entertainment media was in real trouble, they went hard, hard left, then died.
It took me a little while to realize this was a sane strategy. In a field completely controlled by the left, when you knew that your job was in peril be it through missmanagement or whatever, your last hope was to go incredibly hard left, so you could blame the failure on ideology. And instead of not being able to find a job, you found yourself lionized by all the “right” (left) “thinking people.” New jobs were assured.
In his December 15th newsletter, Josh Barro wrote the following about Elon Musk:
Some people are spinning out baroque theories of what the underlying business strategy is, but my strong feeling is that there isn’t one. I think what’s happened is that Musk has greatly overpaid for this company, he’s not running it in a way that’s likely to produce financial returns that come close to justifying the price he paid, and leaning into the idea that he is serving a great social mission (vanquishing the proprietors of the “woke mind virus” who were trying to destroy our society) helps him feel better about the unpleasant business position he’s gotten himself into.
If you’re going to lose money, it’s best to feel like you’re losing it for a cause [...]
The difference here is that I can't see Musk's root motivation as "not being able to find a job" when all is said and done.
And if that's the case, it makes me reconsider how much of "roll hard left and die" really does boil down to Hoyt's lifeboat theory, and how much is "losing money for a cause".
PropagandaOfTheDude
5mo ago
Here we are. Director's Cut only.
Reworked Bosses
Now remember that the reworked bosses is incredibly important for this DLC and the main selling point for many fans. The reason the Deus Ex Human Revolution bosses were unfaithful to the original source was that the game itself was outsourced to another company to create the boss battles so it didn't really follow as close to the other work done on the game as it should have. Leading to the bosses being more like a generic FPS instead of having multiple viable options based on how you developed your character.
They did not add ways to avoid bosses completely however they have given you various options on how to deal with them depending on how you progressed with your character.
Hacking is now a viable way to deal with bosses
Boss 1 Example: [...]
Boss 2 Example: [...]
I elided the spoilery bits.
PropagandaOfTheDude
5mo ago
Although the origin of QTE are often attributed to interactive movie laserdisc video games that showed video clips stored on a laserdisc like Dragon's Lair (Cinematronics, June 1983), Cliff Hanger (Stern, December 1983) and Road Blaster (Data East, 1985), these left little room for more advanced gameplay elements.
Ha! Thanks.
I've been playing cyberpunk 2077 Resident Evil: Village. It's the first time that I've played anything labelled "survival horror", and I'm trying to calibrate my expectations.
I'm getting flashbacks to playing Dragon's Lair and Space Ace in the arcade. (Yes, I'm old.) The designers really like to take over your controls so they can show you an "exciting" cinematic, then hand the controls back suddenly to you. (The one indicator is a "[S]kip" prompt at the bottom right corner of your screen.)
Is this an RE:V thing? A Capcom thing? A survival horror thing?
PropagandaOfTheDude
3mo ago
I haven't seen these, but the first thing that pops to my head by way of analogy is the way that close masculine friendship is now frequently coded as gay. Arab men holding hands? Gay. Two bros hugging it out? Gay. Telling your decades-long friend that you love him? Gay. Slap on the butt or other physical encouragement in sports? Gay. Just hanging out together? Believe it or not, still gay.
John Woo films? Total sausage fests.
The focus on male friendships in Woo's film have been interpreted as homoerotic. Woo has responded to these statements stating "People will bring their own preconceptions to a movie .... If they see something in The Killer that they consider to be homoerotic then that is their privilege. It's certainly not intentional."
That was 1989.
PropagandaOfTheDude
4mo ago
Summoning up the faux anger...
Why didn't you post about Vermis when my wife was pestering me for Christmas present ideas?!?
Bookmarked for when Hollow Press gets back to the office.
PropagandaOfTheDude
1yr ago
One example that I recall was that the classical liberal "You don't like gay marriage? Don't get gay married!" has turned into punitive attacks on cake decorators.
PropagandaOfTheDude
10mo ago
I'm not sure that the movie is supposed to be set in 1996: the jury selection in particular only really makes sense either before Batson or in an alternate universe where it never happened.
Per the novel's Wikipedia page, the events are set in 1984, two years before Batson.
...and I see that you sort of mention that with "plausible for 1984".
PropagandaOfTheDude
11mo ago
"Screed".
PropagandaOfTheDude
7mo ago
"The ship lurched to the port side."
"The ship of state lurched to the right."
PropagandaOfTheDude
10mo ago
Hlynka confusing extroversion with intelligence once again.
The extroverts are the people that you'll interact with when you go to east Africa, so there's some selection bias.
PropagandaOfTheDude
9mo ago
Set up some location where you can put your awake, active child down, and safely not pay attention to your child for a while. Maybe that's one of those plastic fence things in the middle of the room. Maybe it's a dedicated room. (Move all grabbable items out of reach. That may even mean moving electrical outlets up to your eye height.) You have some time before this becomes important, but now's the time to plan.
PropagandaOfTheDude
1yr ago
I'll link to the Status 451 book review that everyone always links to:
What if fanatics made a serious and nearly successful attempt on the life of the President of the United States?
What if those fanatics got into the Capitol building and committed a mass shooting on Congress while it was in session?
What if those fanatics conducted bombing sprees, for years, in multiple American cities?
And what if people really did do every one of those things, and you’d never heard of them? That’s the story of Puerto Rican separatists.
PropagandaOfTheDude
11mo ago
Don't just ask her in a way that suggests that you are excited. Be excited. Pick something that you want to do.
"Hey, I'm going to <EVENT> on <DATE>. If you'd like to come with me, I'd enjoy your company. Let me know by <OTHERDATE>."
Then do it and have fun. Even if she says no, even if she says yes and flakes.
"Are you asking me on a date?"
"If you're there with me, sure."
The upthread discussion about male role models reminded me of a web essay that I can no longer find (damn it). The author was a male English professor for undergrads. His course satisfied a general requirement, so his male student population broadly represented the student body. In the essay, the author observed that when his male students were given an opportunity to select a text or topic to study, the most popular subject was always power.
I don’t recall the author proposing any reason for that preference. We can come up with a couple.
Broke: They know that power is the ultimate aphrodesiac.
Woke: They are already toxically masculine. The professor should focus exclusively on books by queer women of color, who hate power.
Bespoke: They are thinking about the Roman Empire.
I’ll have to expand on that last one.
Ages ago, I came across someone asking why 19th Century Britain seemed to be so obsessed with Rome. One responder said “Britain found itself with an empire unexpectedly. The 19th Century British culture was looking to ancient Rome to give it context. How should they act? What is it like to have an empire? What can they learn?”
That sprang to mind as I was reading the essay. Those teenage boys knew that they were on the cusp of having power, over themselves at least. They should, at least. What does that mean? How should they behave?
My question, then, is: What would you recommend for those boys, to help them understand the power that they will eventually wield?
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