WhiningCoil
No bio...
User ID: 269
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
I do wonder if long term Ozempic use won't result in some pretty disastrous unknown unknowns. Personally, if it were my nation, I'd go with diet and exercise. Maybe after your nation tops mine in life expectancy for a generation or two I'll get on the Ozempic bandwagon.
It sucks getting old. After being pretty fit my whole life, doing competitive martial arts, and non competitive cycling, running, weight lifting, kettlebells, etc, but mostly eating whatever I wanted, on my 40th birthday my annual physical came back that I was borderline prediabetic. Lucky for me I have a wife that gardens fresh vegetables, raises backyard chickens, and makes delicious, healthy, homecooked meals. I also got more serious about indulging in sugary foods, limiting it to about once a week or less. Also cutting out most snacking and not eating outside of an 8 hour window, usually except for one day a week.
Honestly, the changes don't bother me. My household long ago transitioned away from eating out, almost ever. We also as a rule don't bring any junk food into the house. No cookies, chips, etc. Out of sight truly is out of mind.
We'll see how that works out for me come my 41st birthday.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
I'm 50/50 on all the pop culture theories about metabolic disruptors, but there is always that.
A theory I could get behind with a lot more support is just sedentary lifestyle, and exercise, for most people, being a thing they were made to do. Most probably in gym class, which few people have fond memories of. Maybe the metabolic disruptors, if they exist, exaggerate the effect of those two factors. But I really believe those are the two leading factors.
It's so, so much harder to get in shape, especially in your 30's and 40's, after spending your 20's or god forbid your teens actively ruining your body believing you can get away with it. Shit just doesn't work. Your mobility is fucked, your knees don't work, your posture is ruined, you have no core stability. It takes like a year of what is basically rehab to get you to a point where you could do some honest to god actual exercise.
And seemingly everything about America is oriented towards making eating wrong and staying sedentary the default. Grueling 2-3 hour round trip commutes in your car due to lack of affordable housing near your work and lack of public transit. Losing 2-3 hours of every single day eats into other activities like exercising or preparing your meals, so you eat out and move less. Eating out is a race to the bottom, with the least nutritious, most palatable food being the ideal.
Circling back to how most people are inducted into "exercise", it's terrible. My experience was in elementary school we'd be let out for recess, and forced to do a lap or two around the track before we could play. It instilled a deep seated hatred of running in me. From middle school through grade 10 we had actual PE class, but it was mostly team sports and more running. Weight lifting was actively discouraged since it could stunt your growth supposedly. A concern that never applied to the underfed manlets on the wrestling teams. Probably also some bullshit safety concerns around barbells and dumbbells that don't apply to running and inflated balls. If my only choices for "exercise" were limited to what I was exposed to from grades K-10, I'd have never exercised again in my entire life.
Lucky for me I was blessed by the urge to punch people, which lead to far better life outcomes.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
Listen, I've been here long enough. You've seen me hold a grudge, probably especially so from the vantage of being a jannie. Tell me you honestly think I've treated Tracings with the same grudging, dogged criticism as I had others.
I don't think they even compare. But I think this episode has more or less concluded, and our peanut gallery has made their determinations about who was more persuasive.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
So, funny story. Took my family to the beach a week or two ago, got nice and sunburnt, played with my kid in the waves a ton, had a great time. On the way back my wife wants to visit a friend along the way and catch up. Lucky for me, next door to the coffee shop they chose, is a used games store. Like, a nice one, with tons of Nintendo games at a reasonable price. Actual NES shit too, it's back catalog doesn't end at the Xbox 360. So I ended up splurging on a Retron 1 HD. It was only $40, and it has HDMI as well as composite out.
You see, I have two cases of old NES games from my childhood, but I had no system to play them on. Now normally I would have researched the living fuck out of this decision, but it was a snap decision while I was bored, so that happened after the fact.
Turns out the Retron 1 HD is actually a reverse engineered Nintendo on a Chip system, which is part of why it's so cheap. This is superior in some ways to ARM based emulation, but not as good as FPGA emulation. That said, it's got it where it counts, over composite it's input latency is identical to an NES. However it's HDMI scaler is trash and results in a terrible picture, poor colors, and I strongly suspect distorted sound. Because every Youtube video I've watched or listened to in action had color or audio discrepancies my version over composite connected to a CRT does not have, and they all use HDMI on a an HDTV. Supposedly it's also not compatible with a handful of games I never plan on playing, like Castlevania III and Battletoads.
Now I said I have this hooked up to a CRT, but that was an acquisition I only made on Monday. Found some hoarder lady on Facebook ditching a 20" CRT with a built in VCR and DVD player. It works perfectly, and it's been a wild trip to go back and play it all exactly as I remember.
I've only bothered with Super Mario Brothers to start with, because that was the first game I got when my grandmother bought me an NES back in 1987 or whenever it might have been. I actually can't remember the last time I put any serious effort in Super Mario Brothers. After playing a single session for three nights in a row, I was getting to world 5-3. I had largely forgotten most of the secrets I ever used to know, minus the warp pipe in level 1-2. I actually had forgotten there were water levels, or dark levels too!
Anyways, that's been a blast, highly recommend it.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
Probably! I still have an old cart for it. I tested it to see if it still had saves and it did... maybe. Names were there, but I strongly suspect they forgot the actual progress. All had only 3 hearts. So I'll replace the battery I guess.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
Zelda, well... I want to defend it, but you are probably right.
In it's defense, it comes from an older lineage of CRPG. Early Ultima's had a pretty narrow thread of clues you could get from talking to literally every NPC and writing down what they said for later. Might & Magic played similarly. Probably others. Then you start playing early JRPGs like Phantasy Star, Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy, and they are pretty similar, in that it's not always obvious where to go next and what to do unless you talk to everyone and take notes. It wasn't until later those series got put on pretty strong rails.
In that way, many of the important secrets in Zelda have NPCs that will give you the clues. But not all of them. And brute forcing the rest with limited bombs or the once per screen candle is odious. Then again, when I was playing Zelda as a kid, my older cousins had already beat it and helped me find things. And they figured it out with their friends around the school lunch table. Maybe one of them had a Nintendo Power subscription.
I still love it. But I get it.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
When I was a kid playing Zelda, or Mario, or most games for that matter, "beating" them never entered my mind. Mostly because I was terrible at games. So I used them more like a toy clockwork world I enjoyed exploring. I'm under the impression this isn't dissimilar from how a lot of small kids still play games, and now there are tons of open world games without any win conditions that kids especially love.
So all that said, whether Zelda was fair or not, or beatable out of the box without any outside information, didn't matter to me as a kid. I only wanted to explore the far corners of the map, to see if I could even survive that far. Or maybe I'd really go nuts in a dungeon I'd already beat trying to wring every last secret out of it, not for any power gaming aspect, but because the limited technical vocabulary of the game wasn't immediately obvious to me and I thought anything was possible. I remember being particularly excited when I'd stumble onto one of those stairwells that took you to the small sub dungeons that had a side view instead of a top down view. Something good was always in one of those.
I don't know if Nintendo knew any of these things when they made Zelda, or if they tried to make a massive game you were supposed to beat fairly and failed, and lucked into making a fun, primitive, open world game with win conditions you could mostly ignore.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
It is profoundly frustrating. I've been attempting to broaden my literary horizons, but my every attempt at finding "Top X Book" lists is cluttered with current year thinly veiled, Gen Z, political slop. Is no one actually curated a list of classics that have endured through the ages? I recall 4chan put together a list of anon's most recommended reading and it was shockingly more representative than you average list from a "Paper of record".
In the November 1996 issues of Computer Gaming World, they put together an article for the 150 best games of all time. And unlike modern IGN or PCGamer lists, CGWs was 1996 probably was truly representative of the entire breadth and depth of the computer gaming history at the time. Maybe it was easier, spanning 15 years tops. The PCGamer list only shares Doom with CGW's, and the IGN list only shares Doom and Tetris.
In some ways I get it. I will plant my flag on this hill and die on it, 1997 was an apex year for computer games. Games that came out before 1997 tend to struggle greatly with graphics, sound and usability. Games that came out after are the complete package, and many from 1997-2000 remain the definitive example of their genre. And that is more or less where history largely stops in the IGN list. Why include Simcity from the CGW list when you can include Simcity 2000 from a year later? Why include WarCraft II when you can include StarCraft from 2 years later? Still, some omissions are shocking, like Day of the Tentacle, probably the fondest remembered adventure game ever, possibly only eclipsed by The Secret of Monkey Island. System Shock, #98 just keeps getting remakes, remasters, source ports, etc.
But I've digressed too far...
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
I said fondest remembered, not best selling.
I have never, literally never, heard anyone start a sentence with "Remember in Myst when..."
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
What's the joke? What's the setup? What's the punchline? Explain the humor behind it.
It's a "joke" in the same way someone might be "joking" about your body odor, and then backing off when you take offense. It's plausible deniability for a thing they really believe.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
A) Jimmy Carr has a brand. He's up there with Anthony Jeselnik for dark humor. Dark humor is not even remotely in Tenacious D's wheelhouse.
B) It's nakedly obvious Jimmy Carr doesn't believe 3 million gypsies being killed was a positive. The punchline is the shock value sure, but also playing a character that appears to possess almost every terrible belief you can imagine, void of all morality or social shame.
Tenacious D saying they wish the president had been assassinated as a birthday wish possesses neither of these points in their favor. It's not their brand, and it's not immediately obvious they don't actually believe it. Because lots of people believe it. Especially in their business. They haven't been shy about it for the last 8 years, and no part of it has been joking. All that's changed is that now people aren't tolerating it now that an attempt has actually been made.
It's like being a nazi, being flippant and jovial about the holocaust in 1942, and claiming it was just a joke. Or a KKK member in the 50's being really encouraging about lynching the local black kid who was seen with a white girl, and then backing off and claiming it was just a joke.
I don't buy it.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
This is preposterous. The GOP never gave up trying to stick the knife in Trump's back, along with his policies. They starved MAGA candidates of support in the midterms, and hung that failure around Trump's neck. During his administration his own Republican appointees passive aggressively hamstrung much of his MAGA agenda, often to the jeers of the liberal media who greatly enjoyed writing headlines like "Even the Republican appointed judge/bureaucrat/cabinet member agrees that Trump shouldn't secure the border/pull out of Afghanistan/etc". And even up to this convention, major Republican donors and top party members were hoping to hang some albatross like Nikki Halley around his neck as VP.
The GOP is treating MAGA like an insurgency they must defeat just the same as they treated the Tea Party during the Bush and Obama years. If Trump were killed they'd make public mouth sounds about how terrible it is, and they will embrace Trump's winning agenda moving forward, and then they will quietly return to losing on every major issues their base cares about like it was 1996 again.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
I mean, except for the fact that gun ownership is a constitutionally protected right, and gun ownership has many legitimate uses. Hard to say the same about open air drug markets that permanently break people's brains and fester like a boil on society.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
IMHO this is a crucial period for whether an America first ruling principle takes root, or it doesn't. Trump needs the mandate of heaven and four more years to cement his legacy. Otherwise, as amazing as Tucker, Vivek or Vance may be, they will be relegated to cult crank status like Ron and Rand Paul. Sure, a Freedom Causus exist, and even has some extremely marginal influence in outcomes on the fringe, but otherwise completely feckless no matter how obviously correct they are, or how much their fans really truly love them.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
I don't know if you think you've lived a perfect life and never said anything wrong before, but I know I've certainly said things I shouldn't have. I would like to not lose my livelihood over saying those things.
I haven't, and I also would like to keep providing for my family. But the only way out is through, and after living in fear in a particularly vulnerable industry as a witch, and already nearly losing my job over COVID mandates, I believe the only way this stop is if the left gets a taste of their own medicine. Rules only exist and are respected among peers with the same capabilities.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
Is it? Then please enlighten me as to the benefits of permissiveness towards illicit open air drug markets.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
Pushing your argument to the extreme means that any politician that isn't pro-social-panopticon deserves to be murdered by the criminals for their soft-on-crime policies.
I mean, as much as people falling out of plains "deserve" to die when they hit the ground. It's less "deserve" and more natural law. You allow more crime, you get more crime, including against the politicians that allowed it.
Admittedly, I may have been too cynical. Biden's obvious mental decline is proving stickier post debate than I thought.
Edit: On further reflection, I think I was correct in how the Biden admin would try to manage it. Try to recover with some very selective, heavily scripted appearances where he has it at least as together as he did pre-debate. They clearly tried to execute on that, with the Holt interview and the "Big Boy" press conference. It's just not working. The vibe shift has been too much. The core of my post, that normies would be put back to sleep, seems to be false.
I guess I could double down, and say be patient, the regime will find the correct narrative xanax and the normies will resume their slumber. I can't rule it out. But that really doesn't seem to be the direction things are going. More over, all their "Trump is a unique evil that must be stopped by any means necessary" rhetoric suffered an enormous blow to it's effectiveness after the assassination attempt. All their dog whistles, or just overt statements, about how it would be justified to murder Trump to save Democracy got a lot too real, and people are recoiling. So that narrative xanax got flushed down the toilet too.
I donno. Maybe they'll still pull something out of their hat. But at this moment, my cynicism with regard to normies seems unfounded for once.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
And why in the name of all that is holy does Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle still have a job?!
It's scenarios like this which make me notice.
Imagine you had a primary care doctor, who hated you, and just more or less entirely quit giving a fuck. Ran test to pretend they were doing something, but then largely just ignored the results and took a very "Whatever happens happens, fuck that asshole" approach. How much culpability would they have when they just passive aggressively ignored that you had a fetal, but treatable disease that goes on to kill you?
Women are far more passive aggressive than men. And everything we learn about the failures around this Trump assassination feed into the stereotypes of vengeful passive aggressive women. Cheatle committed gross negligence of her duties tantamount to pulling the trigger herself.
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
11mo ago
A path to victory? Possible. A path to the most votes ever in history again?
Well, like I said. I'd have questions.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
With a TFR of 1.786, our population of citizens is not increasing. On the other hand...
Like I said... questions.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
That was the argument. I can add 6 paragraphs largely repeating myself if it helps. I've had to resort to ChatGPT to please you guys before, I can do it again. Although I think I still have my copy of Dilbert's Desktop Games which had a bloviator. That aught to be good enough.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
You underestimate how hard it can be. Especially when the evidence is routinely destroyed and/or the people who control the data refuse to hand it over.
In my state, someone did go county by county inspecting voter rolls and identifying non-citizens voting. They made it through a couple counties before the Democratic governor caught on and instructed all offices to stop cooperating with them. Then to add insult to injury, when the incomplete report was released, the Democratic spin machine acted like it was a nothing burger because it "only" found several thousand noncitizens registered to vote, and a smaller proportion of several thousand actually voting, "in the whole state".
Maybe. Or maybe the fact that the Democrat's nakedly lied to the American people about Biden's fitness to serve for years brings shame on the party, regardless of who the candidate ultimately ends up being. They all stink of complicity. Some more than others, granted.
I remember my father, a lifelong Republican, talked about how the only time he ever voted Democrat was for Carter, because of how deeply ashamed he was of the entire Republican party after Nixon. He regretted that vote until the day he died, but he was still demoralized enough at the time to have made that decision.
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