WhiningCoil
No bio...
User ID: 269
WhiningCoil
5mo ago
Who cares? I've got problems enough without having to worry what happens to a gay furry. Like the local school districts fighting tooth and nail to keep secretly transitioning children, NGOs air dropping 50-100% of my towns extant population in Haitains on us for the crime of voting wrong, and all the hiring freezes of white male applicants at seemingly most major organizations.
After my kids are all over 18, haven't been talked into sterilizing themselves, haven't had their future stolen from them with explicitly anti-white policies in every institution, and haven't had their community destroyed with infinity third worlders, maybe I'll circle back and see how the gay furry is doing. Maybe he'll figure out a place in this world that doesn't involve going "I know the Democrats aren't great, remember that FAA thing I pointed out? But I still think we need to keep voting blue no matter who forever and ever."
WhiningCoil
10mo ago
Higher than any major African city (and yes, there are plenty of Bantu-majority African cities where it’s likely that the majority of violent homicides are captured by publicly recorded data).
I often wonder if we're seeing some sort of terrible example the Founder Effect. Because African American slave descendants aren't just a random sampling of Africans that got plucked up by UFOs and dropped here. They were the losers of inter tribal civilizational fitness tests, captured and sold off. That has to have some sort of selection bias on what subset of Africans ended up in the slave trade in the first place.
I was thinking, gun to my head, I'd rather my daughter was molested by a catholic priest (unlikely as that is, being a girl and all) than fall in with your ilk. But that got me thinking... what if the Catholic Church leaned into LGBTQ+ shit 30 years earlier than they did?
What if, instead of covering up the priest abuse scandals, they leaned into it. Claimed they were just protecting young gay boys. In fact they had a moral duty to keep these young boys sexual behavior a secret from their parents. They might not accept them after all. Furthermore, the Catholic Church should probably just take custody of them from those bigoted parents.
It's preposterous and totally insane. But that's what you sound like.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
Who cares if the model is accurate? Its not supposed to be. It exists so that when Biden gets the most votes in history again, you can point to the model and call everyone asking questions an election denier.
WhiningCoil
5mo ago
LOL, oh no, this forum. And it's many diverse views. So diverse the mods keep contriving new and creative reasons to ban me for mine.
This forum has more or less outlived it's usefulness, and effectively radicalized me against it's own principles. All I see anymore are liars using arguments as soldiers to trick the other side into not believing their own lying eyes.
WhiningCoil
6mo ago
I haven't played a Civilization game since I dabbled in 5, and decided the tactical layer with single combat ruined an element of Civilization that I actually really enjoyed, which was the death stacks.
That said, Civilization has always dabbled in some measure of political grandstanding. I recall reading about a minor controversy from Civilization 2 and the fact that it included a global warming mechanic back when the concept of global warming was far less accepted. That said, there is still something dispiriting about Civilization scraping the bottom of the barrel of "current year" so hard they have turned Harriet Tubman into, whatever she is in that game. I don't want to beclown myself criticizing it, because I honestly haven't kept up with the mechanics of how this new Civilization will work. That said, she probably would have had a quote attached to a tech tree upgrade (like "Emancipation" or the like) in previous games had they decided she were important enough to include over other abolitionist leaders.
Like I said, I haven't kept up. I don't know if they have 700 leaders in the game with an exhaustive and expansive coverage of even niche historical figures from around the globe. Or if they've developed a myopic focus on black hagiography and include the current year talking points to puts "The founding fathers were slave owners" above "Wrote some of the most important documents on human rights ever in history, and then fought and died establishing a free nation that lived those principles"
All that said, Civilization 7 will have 26 leaders at launch, and I guess 20 of them are known at this time. The white ones are Augustus, Benjamin Franklin, Charlemagne, Isabella, Machiavelli, Napoleon (two versions?). The black ones are Amina and Harriet Tubman. So I wouldn't exactly claim they've developed any sort of myopic focus on blacks.
That said, Harriet Tubman is still just goofy.
WhiningCoil
5mo ago
To me the most fascinating thing about US AID being terminated as an independent organization, is the sheer and complete panic among leftist. "Independent" media I used to respect has apparently been spun into a full blown panic over it. They appear to be operating under the delusion that the "AID" is USAID is actual help, of which a tiny minority might be, and not a deep state slush fund for unaccountable NGO, corruption and graft.
Like Bill Krystol, neocon never Trumper, came out swinging. Then it was quickly discovered the foundation he draws an income from is funded by USAID. Which, to me, immediately made something clear. You are constantly subjected to a series of talking heads who are wrong about everything if you pay attention to the mainstream media. And they are always introduced as working at some important sounding institute, like that lends them credibility. How many of those assholes are just psyop puppets funded entirely by USAID to influence public opinion on policy at home?
That aside, I'm noticing the talking points getting distilled, and they are every bit as nonsensical as you can imagine, some more than others.
"It's a coup!" I mean where to even begin on this. Was it a coup when Clinton fired all the federal attorneys? Was it a coup when Reagan fired the air traffic controllers? Was it a coup when Gerald Ford fired a bunch of security state apparatchiks, including Kissinger? No, it's the duly elected Executive executing their lawful authority to implement their agenda. It's preposterous that a branch of the executive should believe it's some sort of independent entity completely outside the executive's authority. Come back when the military has dissolved congress and arrested the supreme court.
"It's a smash and grab!" To which I just heard the cohost go "There is no grab." There is this heavy implication that Elon Musk is somehow pocketing the money. Nobody ever comes out and states it directly. But the weasel words are there. "Musk has conflict of interest!" "He's looting the nation!" "The worlds richest man is just getting richer!" A baseless bullshit smear, which is why they just darkly hint at it.
"Nobody voted for this!" I mean this is the most insane one, and if they somehow big-lie it into sticking, it will erase all the faith in humanity I gained over the last few months. All I fucking see from people who voted for and supported Trump is euphoric glee that he's doing exactly what he said he would do. After being lied to and lead along by controlled opposition our entire lifetimes, and maybe the entire lifetimes of our parents too, a guy is actually making good on all the promises he, and the Republican party broadly, has made for decades.
There is some serious galaxy brained mushy reasoning going on here, like Trump never promised to shut down (or roll into the State Department) USAID specifically, therefore nobody voted for it. But he ran on draining the swamp, stopping foreign aid as long as there are still unmet challenges at home, shrinking the federal government, stopping waste and corruption. It's like if a guy ran on starting a war with Cuba, and then when Havana get's bombed, normies start shouting "Nobody voted to bomb Havana!" I mean, alright, but they voted for the guy who's #1 issue was starting a war with the country Havana is in. Pretty reasonable to think that was on the table and a high likelihood. Nobody ever votes on day to day tactical decisions of a strategic campaign promise.
WhiningCoil
5mo ago
Well, I've been switching back and forth between Windows 10 and Linux Mint for a few weeks now. Windows for work, and Linux for pleasure. I stopped trying to have steam share a steam library between both OS's. For one, Linux and Windows kept fighting over whether the linux or windows versions of the games should be installed. Second, I saw a lot of posts about how Linux eventually corrupts NTFS drives if you try to use them for anything other than simple data storage. So that's a thing I guess.
I've been playing Doom 2016 in Linux thanks to Proton, and it's pretty OK. Every now and again pulling up the menu tanks the framerate, but not consistently. Outside of that it runs fantastic. Because I'm a fucking nerd, I got some simple C programming with SDL set up, as well as a Rust dev environment because I decided I need to learn that. I hate it. It disagrees with all my sensibilities about "talking computer", and thus far I find it's constructs around "borrowing" references silly and contrived, especially in light of being able to assign unsafe sections of code that ignore it's memory safety rules. I guess it assumes you'll be responsible with that, but it feels like a half measure to me, and no replacement for actual skill. All the same, since I mostly work on government contracts, a day may come where it's a requirement.
Anyways, Linux seems like a super viable alternative to Windows these days thanks to Proton. If my work didn't require windows, I'd try to shift over to it entirely. But since a local instance of IIS is essential in my day to day work, that's incredibly unlikely.
WhiningCoil
7mo ago
My wife and I have been having some very deep and thoughtful conversations about becoming practicing Christians, even though we weren't raised with it, and really don't believe in it. Funnily enough, both our sets of parents actively kept us away from religion due to their bonkers Baptist upbringing, which seemed to revolve around what a piece of shit they were and that every single thought they have will send them to hell.
So why would we turn to Christianity in our 40's, after a lifetime of atheism? We are desperately seeking some sort of cultural and institutional protection from liberalism run amok. Or wokeness, or neoliberalism, or whatever you call it. We're willing to traumatize our daughter with stories of burning in hell over her being taught that she can mutilate and sterilize herself to solve all her problems in Kindergarten. It's not a choice we particularly relish, but it feels like a choice forced on us and it's an easy one to make.
But we want to find a sect of Christianity that isn't pussies. We don't want a sect of Christianity that will start inviting drag queens to teach Sunday school because they don't want anyone to feel bad, or they feel like they need to appeal to "modern audiences". This has slowly lead us to maybe trying to find an Orthodox church of some sort? Everything more Western European just feels totally pozzed these days, and we don't trust it.
And I'll be perfectly honest, something about the way Trump survived that assassination attempt just, I can't get over it. It's literally enough to make me wonder if there is a god and he saved him. Turning his head at exactly the right moment, exactly the right way, to get away with nothing but a minor flesh wound is nothing short of miraculous. Has there ever been a failed assassination that failed by such a narrow margin before? I know politicians have been shot and survived before, but not like that.
I guess my point is, what is a genuine religious revival supposed to look like?
WhiningCoil
8mo ago
Things have been kinda shit lately. 4 year old daughter got diagnosed with Lyme Disease and then Alpha Gal Syndrome, which has really sucked. The Lyme got knocked out (hopefully) with 30 days of amoxicillin. The Alpha Gal is basically permanent, although there is this kind of woo-woo acupuncture treatment which supposedly works. If it were just me, I'd be stubborn and refuse to try some bullshit I think is fake. But kids change you, and you're willing to do anything to help them, so we may end up trying it. Who knows.
So to cheer everyone up we got a dog. Happiest I've seen my daughter or my wife in a hot minute. Just a sweet 5/6 month old rescue from a shelter. It was a bit of an impulsive decision, but the wife has been really longing for a dog for a while. So we were at the humane society visiting this one dog, and she seemed really sweet and got along well with our daughter. So I told my wife lets just get her before someone else does. $25 and some paperwork later, we came home with a dog. Some sort of lab or shepherd mix?
Picking my daughter up from school today, and she's so excited she's telling anyone and everyone about the new dog she just got. Spent the last 2 hours I've been working in my home office just drawing and coloring next to the dog's crate. They can't get enough of each other. Cutest damned thing I've ever seen. Highly recommend it.
Fires in California seem really bad - Mandate of Heaven in danger?
California has been forsaken by God for longer than I've been alive.
Some fun word play with your title aside, it feels like at this point if you are stilling living in California, you deserve it. Once upon a time I would have looked at the devastation Democrats have wrought and felt bad for the state, which in my youth was still regarded a purplish state. The home of Ronald Reagan. Now I just can't feel anything. Everyone there voted for this for at least a decade. They voted for it again quite recently in a recall election. They are literally willing to die in a fire than vote for someone who might say something that offends a chosen minority.
I mean they literally refuse to hire white male firefighters. People voted for that. Like this isn't their first wild fire. Their priorities are unfathomable.
It's like hearing about the Heaven's Gate Cult in the 90's. What? They all dressed, talked and acted the same? Some of them chopped their dicks off?! And then they all killed themselves over a prophesy? Some people were able to feel sympathy for the cult members. Maybe they'd lost someone to a cult, or felt they had a close brush with one at a vulnerable time in their life. For most people it was entertainment. They were a laughing stock. And so California is to me now.
The suffering of a Californian is as the suffering of a Flagellate to me. A spectacle of suffering coming from a place of otherworldly confidence that it cleanses. I can't feel bad for them, because they so willfully chose it, and would actually probably hurt me if I tried to save them from themselves. It's best to just leave them to it until they kill themselves.
Edit: Your right, I forgot who I was talking to. Go ahead Californian Rationalist. Keep doing you. This isn't on you at all. Don't change a thing.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
I'm gonna be honest. None of this shit is good for my health. Just this whole presidential cycle, the constant hysterics and nonsense about this judge or that prosecutor or some bureaucrat. Endless think pieces about how every single bit of minutia will decide the election. I've been trying so damned hard to just tune it out. I'll start paying attention again in October when I'm about to vote, but maybe not even then. I'm so hardened in my choice, it's difficult to imagine anything changing it.
Yeah, I watched the first debate, because I wanted to see a primary source first hand before the spin machine got to it. That was sad. Biden was old, but Trump seemed old too, just not as much by comparison.
Yeah, I got sucked into the hysterics after the assassination attempt, but I'm trying to stay away from the conspiracy rabbit hole. I want to believe it so bad, I have a feeling if I start down that road, next thing I know I'll be getting sued for $1B.
I honestly didn't believe Biden would drop out, but here we are. All the coup talk, it tickles my lizard brain, which makes it even more dangerous.
I think I need to try harder to just ignore all that shit. For starters, it stresses me the fuck out. Second, it keeps me way too distracted from work and family. Third, I'm so close to wrapping up this bitchin walnut gaming table I'll be posting all about in the Friday Fun Thread, and the last thing I need is to be doom scrolling instead.
Fun aside, had a huge storm around here lately, and for whatever reason we lost cell phone reception in our area again. So now my shop it totally unreachable digitally. I kind of love it.
I just want to go into a coma until after the election at this point. I'm done. I can't take it anymore.
WhiningCoil
5mo ago
In my personal experience, growing up in Northern Virginia, all of the most obnoxious, mediocre, self obsessed people I know are government bureaucrats. They literally can't describe what they do at all, but they constantly brag about random brownie points they've collected on their way up the career ladder, like anybody else cares. They brag about what abstract and meaningless code level of bureaucrat they've gotten to. H10 or G34 and other random letter and number combinations I've never felt any desire to learn the meaning behind. It's a profession made up almost entirely of easily mollified, brown nosing teachers pets. And the seriousness with which they treat their zoom jobs disgust me. It lays bare that all they really do is ritualistically go through meetings where check boxes get ticked by the performative act of repeating managerial chants and "delegating" anything that requires knowledge, expertise, action, or even the assumption of responsibility down a memory hole where presumably it becomes somebody else's problem on the other side. Do this enough times, and take a few more meaningless certifications and they go up another level of bureaucrat!
If I and my spouse had a bullshit job, both pulling in 6 figures a year, we'd be multi millionaires by now. Fuck, on my single income, with a family, through shrewdness, luck and daring I attained the meaningless distinction of being a "qualified investor" last year. I think that's pretty OK for 40. But these bureaucrats, despite the profound and unearned government stipend they've lucked into, are constantly broke and in debt. Every penny earned goes towards conspicuous consumption to show off how "well" they are doing. I mean, bragging about the pay bump they got when they hit T76 isn't enough, they need to show off the $1000 leased vehicle they just got too! There is a level of overcompensation to show that their jobs are "real" that is hard to believe unless you've grown up around it.
In the last 10 years a bunch of them decided they were poly, which was just the extra gross cherry on top of their DINK lifestyles. As these were often people so dysfunctional interpersonally, it was terrifying to contemplate them being in a single relationship, much less multiple. And somehow it all becomes part of their conspicuous consumption lifestyle. I just became a G14-8 and to celebrate my wife, my wife's boyfriend and I all went to Spain!
Leaving Northern Virginia was the best decision I ever made. It may be up there with South Park's old depiction of San Francisco getting high off their own farts. They need a humbling experience or twelve just to show them the world doesn't revolve around them, and that bad things are allowed to happen to them too. It's not just for the little people who live outside the beltway.
WhiningCoil
7mo ago
Can't speak to the flag burning, but the airwaves are publicly owned and granted by the government. If they are being flagrantly misused to spread proven lies and undermine the public which owns them, why shouldn't the license get pulled?
Likewise, libel and slander laws exist. Why shouldn't Trump avail himself of them same as people have against him?
WhiningCoil
13d ago
Never Meet Your Heroes, Even Posthumously
When I was a kid, I discovered Harlan Ellison on Sci-Fi Buzz during his Harlan Ellison's Watching segments. They were my favorite segments, and I was crushed when an episode didn't have one. I would have been about 10 years old at this time. Luckily enough, they are all still available on Harlan's youtube. This one in particular I remember, being a comic card collector in middle school, along with most of the boys in my boy scout troop.
For me at that age, there was a lot to look up to in Harlan. He was witty, funny, charismatic, and never gave up on his childhood passions. More over he seems important and respected, his awards always preceding his name. I thought he was simply the best as a young nerdling. But I never read his stories. I can't even remember wanting to. Maybe I wasn't there yet, in terms of reading level. I honestly have no memory of what I was reading at that age. I do recall that by the time I was a freshman in highschool, I had read ample Ray Bradbury collections, and had been dabbling in Iain M Banks. For whatever reason I never circled back to Harlan until much later, picking up a ebook copy of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream and being blown away by every story in it, especially Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes.
Over the last month, I've been working through The Essential Ellison: A 35 Year Retrospective. It's completely changed my view of the man, and not for the better. The tome really lays bare how autobiographical much of Ellison's short stories are. The barely disguised self loathing, the tireless hatred he feels for all of humanity, but seemingly goys above all others, and the immaturity disguised as worldliness. Qualities I admired as a child watching him on Sci-Fi Buzz I'm profoundly glad I did not grow up to emulate as an adult.
The facts are Harlan's father died when he was very young, he was constantly in and out of trouble, he ran away from home, he worked a smattering of tough sounding blue collar jobs, he spent 2 years in the army, he was expelled from college, he was married 5 times, divorced 4, and he had no children.
Through his fiction, you further learn that he was, imagines, or romanticizes, being the only jewish boy in a small Ohio town relentless victimized by it's shitty irredeemable goy population. He loathes goys, and it rears it's head in story after story after story. He hates their dumb kids, their dumb churches, their dumb music, their dumb bowling leagues, you name it, he hates it. And he hates that they're all bigger and stronger than him at 5'3". Does he really feel this way, deep down? Who's to say. But after 1000 pages, probably 500 of which riffed on that theme, I'm left with the impression some part of him must. Often cloaked in humor, or the virtue of the civil rights movement of his day. But in his fiction, he seems less interested in the humanity of Southern Blacks, and more interested in the inhumanity of the goy.
He returns to his childhood repeatedly in his fiction, and how much better things were then, when radio plays lit his imagination on fire and his father was still alive. This is a strain of stunted growth I too suffer from, as my grumpy rants about video games will attest. I find ample share of compatriots in this regard. But something about Harlan's inability to take on the masculine burden of supporting and raising a stable family casts a darker tint to his nostalgia.
Harlan Ellison's entire public persona was a fraud. Or at least, in many of his writings, his fear that he was a fraud came through. Stories about a 4 times divorced celebrity manufacturing a shameful charismatic and funny public persona to hide how much he hated everyone. Stories about a shameless womanizer who has worked all sorts of rough and tumble blue collar jobs... but only for a few weeks so he could say he did. In reality he (I mean his character of course) has soft hands only barely acquainted with manual labor. Which reminds you Harlan the author never draws on all the odd jobs he claims to have had in his fiction, beyond name dropping them. Lastly, multiple stories where a four times divorced main character convinces his first wife to get an abortion she doesn't want, resulting in her emotional destruction which he treats as a personal offense to himself.
Are all these details that sound curiously autobiographical true? Or angles Harlan plays up for want of something to do when seated at his typewriter? At this point, with enough dots connected, I suspect the worst.
After making it through The Essential Ellison, I'm hurt. Hurt that someone I looked up to so much as a kid was in reality a hateful, developmentally stunted man. And I mean emotionally, not physically, though I suppose there was that too. A man who for 35 years picked his wounds in public, on the page. He kept them fresh, knowing it's what put food on the table. I feel sorry for him, but I also sincerely wish I hadn't known all that. Ah well.
WhiningCoil
5mo ago
I have empathy for my family over empathy for the gay furry on twitter. It's that twitter meme about the empathy graphs come to life...
WhiningCoil
5mo ago
Are you counting malicious compliance in that assessment?
I mean, on other policies, we've already had pro DEI bureaucrats in the military claiming the executive order banning DEI prevents them from teaching about the Tuskegee Airmen. Pete Hegseth then told them to knock it off and keep teaching it. But it created another news cycle of "Oh my god, the Trump administration is trying to erase the Tuskegee Airmen from history!"
We saw it in Florida with the don't say gay bill, where a bunch of pro keeping pornography in schools teachers just got rid of all their books because "they were just so afraid of getting in trouble".
Arguably we've seen it repeatedly with pro-abortion doctors letting patients die, where the law clearly states that are allowed to treat them, because of abortion bans. Or maybe to be more charitable to the doctors, the patients make a lot of really dumb healthcare choices, and the press invents that story around it.
I've seen enough of it where I simply do not care. These people are going to throw temper tantrums, sociopathically let people come to harm despite the obvious reading of the order not requiring them to do, or even explicitly telling them not to, and they'll blame Trump. Every single day will be a new misleading headline characterizing every one of these bureaucratic tantrums as Trump's singular fault.
Honestly it's not all that different from when Biden pulled out of Afghanistan, and the generals did it in the shittiest most passive aggressive way possible to make him look like an idiot retard. Which... I mean we've since learned he may have been. Which I guess made the general's sabotage super effective. Supposedly that was the moment his popularity tanked and never recovered.
But that is these people's game. Malicious compliance, and crying to the media about unnecessary problems they created, which everyone spins to blame the executive who dared to give the bureaucrats a lawful order they didn't agree with. It's ok, you can tune them out. Or shoot them in the streets. I heard that's part of Project 2025.
WhiningCoil
9mo ago
Recently Trump's campaign published a massive list of calls to violence against him by Democratic operatives in government and media. There are clips of Democratic operatives on cable news saying someone needs to put a bullet into Donald Trump.
It's old now, but I wonder if anyone remembers the first season of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. I haven't watched it in probably 15-20 years, but a major plotline from it is that the intelligence services essentially meme an assassination attempt of a prominent politician into reality. They craft this narrative around the politicians inevitable assassination at the hands of an unstoppable and mysterious foe, The Laughing Man, and a "Stand Alone Complex" kicks in and rando's take up the call to be the Laughing Man. And all this serves as misdirection to the security forces trying to protect the politician, because they are on the lookout for a elite assassination scheme, and instead an army of tards attacks.
Anyways, what was I saying?
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
A cousin at a family function, a high school acquaintance on Facebook, a former student dropping by my office; all rolling in the deep, and every time a Bayesian reckoning lands me on "Leftism is both a cause and effect of acute mental illness" I roll to disbelieve, because I know it can't possibly be that simple--can it?
And much like HBD, an obvious truth gets dismissed because to believe it leads to only a single brutal conclusion. A group of people that you want to enjoy full human rights and political autonomy because that's what we've decided is the bedrock of being a good person, must be marginalized and contained at worst, eliminated at best. Or vice versa? Because it's impossible to share a Republic or a Democracy with a power faction that are literal raving lunatics and/or pants on head retarded.
I have so much whiplash from the 90's. The promises implicitly made to me by the culture (in the absence of parental guidance), the beliefs I took on by osmosis, and the horrifying hellscape of a nation I now live in 30 years later which seems the ultimate fruit of those promises.
Like, as a trivial example. There was a humor site called Pointless Waste of Time, that eventually got rolled into Cracked.com and had all it's best articles memory holed, even from archive.org. There was an article where this guy was trying to catch up with his highschool friends maybe 10 years later. I viewed this author as my peer, just a few years ahead of me. He liked video games, shock humor, and was a sneering atheist who never wanted kids. Over the course of catching up with a bunch of his friends, they'd all changed. He alone remained basically as he had been in highschool. I don't recall the precise score, but something like 2 of his friends overdosed and 5 had gotten married, had kids and found Jesus. He joked that he "lost" more friends to God than to drugs. I laughed. What fucking losers deciding to go to church with your family if you'd made it through your childhood not doing so.
So anyways, I got married, had kids, and now we go to church as a family. I can scarcely imagine how miserable I'd be had I bitterly clung to some version of myself I thought was "cool" in 1998. What sort of neuroses I'd develop to cope with the objectively lack of meaning, stability or community I'd be adrift in. The idea that "being a father cost me my identity" sounds literally insane to me, any more than not being a sneering 90's teenage atheist anymore "cost me my identity". Maybe 90's teenage me wouldn't understand the life 2020's middle age me lives. I don't care.
WhiningCoil
4mo ago
Sure enough, I finished reading The Hobbit to my daughter again this week. My wife has moved onto reading her Charlotte's Web, but the kid brings up questions about The Hobbit constantly all the same. Why did Bilbo take the arkenstone from Thorin? Or the ring from Gollum? Why was the Dragon so curious about Bilbo's riddles instead of eating him? Why was Thorin mad at Bilbo? Why are the goblins so mean? Why did the Elf King imprison the dwarves?
Broadly she's been exposed to facets of the human condition none of the other children's books she's read have exposed her to, and it's wonderful to see her mulling over the scenarios in her head days, even weeks after we read it. It really makes me appreciate Tolkien even more as a writer. I mean, it's not the first longer form chapter book we've read her. We read her an abridged version of Wind in the Willows, The Wizard of Oz and another illustrated book called Brambly Hedge. And those have all be fine stories with good and evil, and characters with flaws. But in that simplistic way where friends broadly stay friends, characters with a flaw display that flaw in every scene, and things are just more simplistic and black and white.
I suspect I'll be reading The Hobbit for a third time soon. She's also been begging to start The Lord of the Rings, but she's almost certainly too young for that. I should probably refresh my memory about it too.
I finished reading The Illiad and loved the shit out of it. It was a slower read for me, and I tried to get through a chapter a day. I also grabbed a book about the fragments we have from the rest of the Greek Epic Cycle, but it was underwhelming. I think I want to grab some of the Greek Tragedies that derive from the epic cycle though. At some point. I'll probably read The Odyssey next.
Currently reading The Mote in God's Eye, and it's a page turner like I haven't picked up in a long while. I'm about halfway through with 200 pages left, and I expect I'll finish it this weekend. It was written by a pair of conservative authors in 1974, was nominated for all the awards, and damned if it didn't deserve them. It's a phenomenal first contact story that evolves into a mystery/intrigue thriller. Highly recommend it. I plan on getting around to the sequel some day.
WhiningCoil
4mo ago
Zelenksy blew past several red lines we had previously had in terms of aid because we didn't want the conflict to escalate. And time after time, he got what he wanted anyways, and often used it in ways to try to drag the US deeper into the conflict. Tanks, long range missiles, fighter jets. About the only thing he hasn't been given are nukes, so I suppose, yes, he hasn't been given literally every weapon under the sun. Previously the Biden administration has at least postured about not wanting Ukraine to use our long range missiles to strike inside Russia... which they did anyways.
Maybe the whole thing has been a pointless exercise in half measures. Maybe we shouldn't have slowly trickled increasingly sophisticated and destructive weapons into the conflict, and just gone all in. Maybe we shouldn't have kept up this pretense of trying not to escalate, and not enable strikes deep inside Russian territory, and just bombed the fuck out of a nuclear power. Maybe we should have just gone mask off and thrown all the US troops we had into the conflict and gotten it over with.
I mean, I don't think so. But maybe I'm wrong.
And if you don't think that's what we should have done either, the really only leaves winding this up. Most sober strategist now admit the war is unwinnable. The most we can get out of it is encouraging the Ukrainians to genocide themselves in the trenches to try to bleed Russia. Might be good for the US geopolitical interest, but it won't look like Ukraine "winning".
WhiningCoil
7mo ago
My in laws are out of their damned minds. I saw a support thread for the subreddit in the region I moved away from. There was a thread where ladies were trying to find places to get their tubes tied.
I moved to a much more culturally tolerable area almost 4 years ago now. It's improved my quality of life by magnitudes. I highly recommend it. The private school we send our daughter to still has a lot of far lefties, because private school. But most people we run into, or other parents we meet at the park, are very culturally aligned with us.
I don't know how to deprogram people who uncritically believe every Democrat hoax from the last 8 years. They're in too deep at this point. My FIL was compulsively going off about how all the corporatist and oligarchs won, totally ignorant to the fact that Harris was the big money candidate with the most corporations and oligarchs behind her.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Does anybody have any ideas on what I missed?
The tariff's hurt China too. For reasons I can only speculate, all I've ever heard about tariffs are that they are stupid when the US does it, and brilliant when other countries (especially China) do them to us to protect their industrial base. While there may be something to the specific circumstances that could support this narrative, it is rarely evident in the reporting. If you've ever been inoculated against Gell-Mann Amnesia, you'd detect a psyop going on here.
China has basically stopped even reporting financial figures, not even the fraudulent ones you need to read between the lines of. There is effectively no reliable information about how the tariff's are impacting China's economy. But rumors are coming out that it's manufacturing sector in panicking, with factories sitting idle and orders drying up. Even if reshoring is years away, companies literally cannot afford to order from China while the tariff's are in place. I was watching some of Gamer's Nexus's coverage of the tariffs, and companies were saying that with the tariff's they would lose $100+ selling a $100 PC case for example. So all they can do is shut down production and hope a solution presents itself. They haven't sold through their US stock (yet), but they sure as shit have cancelled their orders no matter what the penalty they have to pay.
WhiningCoil
5mo ago
This is the difference between a C++ developer mindset and a Rust developer mindset. It is the humility to accept that you are, in fact, not skilled enough to get it right all the time, so you should stop playing with fire in the first place.
I think that argument just isn't supported by the evidence of 40 years of computers more or less working just fine. People are skilled enough to just get it right enough of the time. I think arguments otherwise are just Rust fanatics pretending the history of computer can be broken up into Pre-Rust and Post-Rust eras.
The problem is that suddenly, thanks to the internet, literally every single line of code needs to become a hardened attack surface. "Exploits" didn't matter in a pre-internet age, and I also question how much Rust will really address them. I doubt at the end of the day a Windows written increasingly in Rust will prove more secure than a Windows written in C. I think Rust is necessitated more by the falling skill level of corporate programmers than anything else, and I also doubt it will remediate that problem. If anything treating Rust as a panacea for a lack of skill will only make the problems worse. Less buffer overflow exploits perhaps, still plenty of attack surface for malicious actors to abuse.
All that is an aside though to my dislike of Rust, which I'm only learning for professional reasons. I said it disagrees with my sensibilities about "talking computer", and let me elaborate on that.
I want to bit-fuck the hardware I paid for however I wish. I want to bend over my mechanical slave and force it to do my bidding without a single complaint. I have friends who gravitate towards LISP or Go, I gravitate towards assembly. I want to be at the metal with a big spiked club, with the CPU to afraid to talk back. Because I don't tolerate backtalk from my machines.
I mean... I hate to out you but...
So like, age 25, you found out about physical strength differences between men and women from a senate transcript before you got any hands on experience?
I'll be out with it. It's really difficult for me to square total ignorance of the sex differences between men and women with first hand carnal knowledge of the opposite sex. So when I hear "I honestly had no idea and zero exposure to any physical reality that could possibly contradict that men and women are equally as physically capable" I just think "So.... you're a virgin?"
Although I suppose the bottom quintile and the top quintile could shack up from time to time. Just odd to think of that being someone's sole experience from which they extrapolate out to the entire human population. I mean, everyone has a type I suppose, but then again, if it's your type, you'd have to be aware of that fact, right? Which means there are lots of people out there outside your "type"?
More options
Context Copy link