WhiningCoil
No bio...
User ID: 269
WhiningCoil
10d ago
Why not both? Look, I haven't taken a chemistry class in 20+ years. But by way of a possibly flawed analogy, you can have incredibly stable molecules that get pried apart in the correct solution. Maybe all it takes is water.
No relationship is perfect or without strife. Culture can encourage people to kill their ego and sacrifice to work things out, or it can encourage them to be purely ego driven and destroy their relationships in pursuit of limitless self actualization.
WhiningCoil
10d 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
10d ago
The fact that I'm a Linux newb and it was supposed to be the most user friendly. I don't think I see myself distro hopping either, I just want something that works, and it does. But who knows, maybe I'll find myself with more time than sense and going down rabbit holes.
WhiningCoil
10d ago
Man... sometimes it feels like I hit bitcoin at just the right time. It was worth enough to make me take it seriously, it was after Mt Gox so lessons from that were in the zeitgeist, and I was zealous enough to never sell and keep DCAing for almost 10 years. Some people have done better buying it earlier and selling the tops and buying the bottoms. Some people have done a lot worse panic selling the bottoms. All in all I can't complain.
WhiningCoil
10d ago
I want so badly to believe in Intel, but it just keeps getting worse. Sorry you got burned.
I'm still happy as a clam with my 5800X3D and an RTX 4070S to go with it. But I'm throwing $50 a month into a "New Computer" fund whenever I decide it's finally time to upgrade. Who knows when that'll be. Since switching to Linux Mint things generally seem much snappier. I know it boots it like 10 seconds versus the 60+ Windows 10 takes these days. Really makes you think how much of that feeling of "Ugh, my computer has gotten slow" is just Windows cruft. Linux Mint feels as fast as the day I first built this thing (when it was a Ryzen 3700X and an RTX 2070S) and was blown away at how much faster a NVMe drive was to boot from.
Stupid planned obsolescence.
WhiningCoil
11d ago
Man, where was I? Making the stretchers for my chairs over again I think?
I had a pretty productive week then I guess. Made the stretchers to the proper length this time. Doing the tenons at an angle was new for me. Starts off the same as any others, but then I had to hand cut the last bits. Fit perfect in the final product this time. The final parts I had to make were the seat bottoms. I got the template done and then routed out the panels I'd glue up last month to shape. Looks fantastic in place. Unfortunately the panels weren't wide enough to give the seats the kind of flourish I would have liked, but they do taper slightly towards the back and round slightly around the front legs.
I decided to tempt fate some, and give the chairs a bit more of a backwards tilt, just 3/4" off the back legs. Adds roughly 2.5 degrees to the tilt of the chair and IMHO made it way more comfortable. I wish this had been built into my template, but I wasn't using CAD software or anything, so I had to figure it out after I had a physical object in my hands. Sadly the best way to cut them was by hand because they were curved and I didn't have a good reference plane to throw it on my tablesaw or miter saw. Also I felt like it would go wrong slower with a handsaw. I think I cut them mostly even. Nothing the felt pads I'm putting on the bottom, or a hand plane and a shooting board worst case, can't fix.
I'm in the end stages of this project. Some light edge profiling, filling in knots and voids with sawdust and glue, sanding, finishing and then final assembly. Probably still going to take me a few more weeks to get through all that. I've decided to finish the parts separately and then assemble them. I don't think having a little shellac around the mortises will weaken them too badly. After all the slot and the tenon are doing most of the work, not the end grain of the shoulder being glued to the work piece. Plus I've just had better luck get a consistent finish when I do smaller parts without inside corners, and then assemble it
WhiningCoil
14d ago
That sounds terrifying. I'm glad your son fully recovered.
Doctors working with outdated information is the most frustrating part. We're seeing a local doctor who's kept abreast of the changes, largely due to so many of her patients having tick born diseases in recent years. My daughter's school does a pretty good job too because several kids there have AGS, including kids of the staff. It's getting kind of out of control in my area if "I never knew anyone who had this and now I'm encountering it everywhere I go" is any measure.
It depresses us to no end the fact that the outdoors feels so threatening now. We're trying to keep up the love of nature too with the hiking and camping. But then our daughter gets another tick and my wife spends a week contemplating selling everything, moving to a concrete jungle, and getting rid of the dog in case she tracks ticks in too.
Supposedly the AGS gets better after a few years, but the big if is that you have to not get bit by more ticks. That's proving incredibly difficult since we've found 2 more on our daughter just from the yard (or the dog) this spring.
WhiningCoil
14d ago
Man... I had so many dreams of giving my child the same childhood I had. Biking 15 miles to the nearest strip mall with my sister, playing in the woods all day, ranging through countless back yards. Once I found this weird heavily vandalized abandoned cabin in the middle of nowhere. My parents never cared, and it all seemed totally normal in the 90's.
Unfortunately, times have changed. Putting aside the sociological factors, apparently ticks in my area are up 4000% since a decade ago, and my daughter has already caught Lyme Disease and Alpha Gal Syndrome. Any tick bite she gets could make her AGS symptoms worse, and causes my wife to have a week long panic attack. I didn't appreciate how much the world had changed in that regard, and how much worse just playing in the fucking woods was.
Also, I swear to god if the rumors that Lyme Disease and AGS escaped from a bioweapons lab are true you may very well see me on the news.
That said we try our best. Lots of tick spray, twice daily tick checks, tick treatments for the yard. Breaks my heart that she can't play in the woods and the creek I bought. Virtually every time anybody goes into them they come out with 2-5 ticks, so that's not even a hypothetical problem.
That said she fucking loved the 2 acres of yard we do have. Climbs the shit out of trees, plays with the chickens, has her own garden with her mother. She loves to pick herbs and leafy greens to add to her fresh eggs in the morning. Skips around the yard in her night gown saying good morning to the chickens. Makes my heart swell.
Her peers... well... I donno man. A friend of mine has a kid about her age, a boy, tall as fuck. He spends an hour on a tablet at his preschool to get him ready for the tablet as a learning device in elementary. Cause I guess that's what public schools do now? He can't ride a bike, climb a tree, he still has an awkward toddler gait despite being 5, and still has very soft speech. I'm reading Lord of the Rings to my daughter, he's seen all the movies along with Star Wars, The Hobbit, and countless other shows.
My wife and I constantly discuss, is our daughter just "advanced" or have we just not hobbled her with screentime and being locked in a townhouse? We may never know, but the differences we notice are stark.
WhiningCoil
14d ago
I mean, I still just think that's bullshit, even with all the caveats? People were getting away with a literal "free money" glitch by buying liens and then repossessing properties for their full value, as opposed to collecting the debt they may have bought for pennies on the dollar, and then paying out the excess of the sale as should have been legally required all along. I'm indifferent on reversing the lien or foreclosure or any of that. Someone "legally" stole almost half a million dollars in equity from these brothers, regardless of how negligent they were. They should be owed the difference between the value of the home and the debt the estate owed, period, no questions asked.
WhiningCoil
15d ago
The thing that gets me about all this, is that it took a Supreme Court Case to tell the government "No, you can't steal a half million dollar piece of property from someone to satisfy a debt 1/10th of that." And then the shear fucking balls for the government to turn around and go "Ok, well, now we know that... but it doesn't help you"
WhiningCoil
17d ago
How about you give me a list of publications that would count to you, and how many examples you require.
Maybe. Maybe not. Virtually every long form article I read I find out, sometimes years later, was a blatant lie. Or not? Sometime I never really find out.
Case in point, and something that never really leaves my mind. To this day I still don't know if this article in Bloomberg about China using their manufacturing to put backdoors in nearly every electronic device made there is true. It reads like it has tons of companies, if not on record, than with dozens of employees in them speaking of their experience in confidence. They appear to outline the actions numerous manufacturer's have taken to limit or mitigate this threat vector because they've been burned by it.
And yet in aftermath of that article, big splash though it made, virtually every entity named in it denied everything in it. I still have no clue if any of it was true, or they caved to pressure from China. I never heard of any real follow up reporting. And so I find myself almost less informed than if I'd read nothing at all. I have knowledge debt.
Edit: I'm going to double dip on this one actually.
Second example. Bitcoin. I tried for years to educate myself on bitcoin. It seemed interesting. Not one single news article about it told me anything. I was still reading Ars Technica back then, and even their "technical" reporting was lacking in any technical details and just came back to the same conclusion. Bitcoin is a scam. I remember this article in particular, which continues on that theme of seeming to impart negative knowledge. Like it's basically a blog of them setting up and running a bitcoin miner, but their stream of consciousness confusion about every step leaves you with an experience of a very unreliable narrator. And there is zero information what so ever about how any of it works beyond the most superficial ("it calculates hashes!")
Some time around 2017 I did my own research, ignoring everything "respectable" publishers were saying about bitcoin. I'm greatful every day since that I did, because I took literal decades off my savings goals by simply DCAing into bitcoin every month for 8 years. Even today the "respectable long form" articles about Bitcoin are probably 70-90% irrelevant smearing, ignorant half truths or malicious lies.
WhiningCoil
17d ago
In an ideal world, these kinds of serious missteps could lead to on the ground reporting being more valued. Put boots on the actual place, talk to actual people. It was already a problem that most "news" is just regurgitating press statements or "reaction" based takes like fake cable news style round table debates or monologing about what you should think about the press release. That was already pretty useless, and people have lamented for over a decade about the death of original reporting.
Shit, one of the reasons I first started watching Tim Pool was that he actually went places and did some original reporting. But that didn't cover the bills and instead he turned into a slop-tuber.
On the one hand I'd like to believe that AI makes this problem so much worse on the ground reporting comes back. On the other hand, even as I've thought more about this post as I write it...how much worse really does AI make the current press release/official lies information environment? More chaotic perhaps. But we're already almost a decade into the MSM's Fine People hoax and it still gets pushed and believed. I find it hard to make a distinction between major political institutions blatantly lying, and an LLM hallucinating information on the receiving end.
WhiningCoil
18d ago
Well, more problems on my chairs.
Some fucking how I cut the stretchers an inch short. Which required me to buy more walnut. Good news, the lumber yard was having a memorial day cook out, and I got to stuff myself with free cheeseburgers before I made my purchase.
So anyways, I got the stretchers remade to the proper length this time. Cut the angled tenons in them which was new for me. Added another mortising guide to my leg making jig to put the mortises for them into the back legs. Things are back on track. I have 6 more mortises to clean up by hand, and after that all the mortises and tenons are done.
Next up are the seats which I think I'll do with a template again. Then comes sanding, finishing and assembly.
WhiningCoil
18d ago
Or shameless hating. Apparently shoeOnHead married and had a kid with a hater who slid into her DMs.
WhiningCoil
18d ago
Maybe.
Then again, the stereotype of that happening is a man rapidly approaching middle age who's had little luck up to this point finds himself in a situationship with a woman who's had her fun already and has run out of options. One thing leads to another, she decides "He'll do I guess" and they live happily ever after in constant seething resentment. Her because he wasn't who she wanted to end up "stuck" with, and him because this lady treats him like something that got stuck to her shoe and constantly humiliates him in public with stories of the sexcapades she used to have in her 20's. But not with him. Eww. She doesn't do those things anymore.
Shit, I ran into five of those couples at a school function last week. Putting aside the insane inappropriateness of bringing up your 20's sexcapades not just in mixed company, in front of your husband, but with your fucking kids not 10 feet away on the jungle gym.
Needless to say, yeah, people can eat shit. People can draw straws lost at sea. But most would prefer not to find themselves in situations where those are there only options.
WhiningCoil
18d ago
Maybe, but on a long enough timeline, and with enough "therapy", a 20 year old woman with "anxiety" becomes a 40 year old woman with BPD and a dissociative disorder. Seen it happen numerous times. From my vantage point the safest thing for a young man is reject any woman enmeshed with therapy culture.
WhiningCoil
18d ago
The rest of the men have to compete for a smaller pool of women, because you can't even suggest that maybe we should make the pool of good women larger.
This is the final boss of gender relations. Somehow breaking women's cartel like behavior where they race to the bottom, crab buckets anyone who tries to better themselves, and acts like anything a woman does is justified because patriarchy. I have no idea how you change the conversation to get women to introspect, consider how they treat men/what they bring to the table, and be better. Our culture is dominated by a zeitgeist where men who have frankly any standards or boundaries what so ever are demonized, and somehow the most reprehensible acts of faithlessness, betrayal and even violence by women are met with sympathy as a floor, and frequently cheers of empowerment.
You know what's been great for my marriage? Turning off the TV, and going to church. There are a pair of Bill Burr bits I remembered as we made the decisions as a family to start going. One where he's talking about how he really doesn't believe any of that shit anymore, and he just quietly stopped going. And then a later interview where he talks about going to church again, because it's just good to be reminded what a piece of shit you are. And that definitely comes across when I started going. The insipid narcissism that infects the core of your being through virtually all of pop culture is insidious. I remember reading The Narcissism Epidemic almost 20 years ago now, and it's impossible to deny that it's kicked into overdrive since then. Trying to repeat the Penitential Act which I don't have memorized doesn't exactly purge the ambient narcissism our culture imposes on us. But speaking personally there has been a lot less ego driven conflict in my household.
If I had to do it all over again, and I hope I never have to since I love my wife and we've built a great life together and truly grown to complement and support one another, I'd consider trying to find a right minded woman at church. If this proved impractical for whatever reasons, I'd see how open they were to going with me. I have no idea how practical this advice is to a younger generation even further up shits creek than I was trying to navigate what I thought was terminal toxicity in gender relations in the 00's. But where ever you look, it's going to have to be in a subculture that has rejected mainstream American culture at least in part. I don't know, I guess I see a lot of tech bros marrying (I assume) high caste Indian women too.
WhiningCoil
24d ago
This is preposterous. Libby posted an athlete's record. Their literal public performance. Not their phone number, address, social media accounts, criminal record, or any other information that might be publicly available but threatening in the wrong context. Conflating that with doxing is just rank bad faith.
What's next, is a Ellen Page's IMDB page doxing? Is Bruce Jenner's Olympic record doxing?
WhiningCoil
24d ago
When I watched Nvidia's CES(?) presentation it was kind of wild to see all their AI products and/or aspirations. Their concept of having robots tokenize movements to complete tasks the same way LLMs tokenize words to respond to questions was an interesting concept. The part where current laborers have to train the robots was dystopian as hell. But I will derive a sense of deep schadenfreude when some "undocumented worker" or H1B that was trained by his white male predecessor (under duress) then has to train his AI replacement. Hard to imagine AI doing a worse job than 3rd world "elite human capital". And as a share holder of NVDA I'm rooting for it. Even as a nationalist I hope it takes off and is cheaper and has few externalities than the open borders policy our ruling class continually pushes in the interest of cheap labor. It represents a possible means to solving the labor issue that continually undercuts the polity of nations. It at least represents a ray of possible hope over the current status quo where the only solution to the dysfunction of our current society is to feed 6B third worlders through it at the fastest rate possible because "muh gdp".
WhiningCoil
28d ago
Yeah, I don't think Mechwarrior 1-4 are ever getting released again. For a time Mechwarrior 4: Mercs got a free re-release, but the "free license" for that has been withdrawn, and it's no longer distributed officially. MW3 is actually the only one I haven't replayed to completion in recent memory. Perhaps I should make that my next retro project.
WhiningCoil
29d ago
Sure seems too. I had a buddy who lived in a shitty townhome community in a bad part of town, and the HOA rode his ass about the color of his front door (which was picked directly from the HOA's list of approved colors), but didn't seem to care one wit about the broken down vehicles scattered about the guest parking spaces, the litter scattered about by scumbag kids, or any of the other daily inconveniences caused by living among low trust, high time preference demographics.
WhiningCoil
29d ago
I beat the Mechwarrior 5 Clans Ghost Bear DLC. It was short and sweat, with only 12 missions. I can't definitively say it was worth the $20 for everyone, but I'm happy with my purchase. I enjoyed the story, and the whole culture, of Clan Ghost Bear a lot more than the "We're gonna commit awesome war crimes but then try to make you feel bad about it" approach the Smoke Jaguar campaign took. Smoke Jaguar is synonymous with remorseless war crimes god damnit! If you have to lampshade what's coming to them, don't have a bunch of novice warriors questioning how genocide makes them feel bad. Have them mocking the doubters with "What is the inner sphere gonna do? A trial of annihilation?" And then have them belly laugh like you just suggested they start freebirthing too.
Anyways, that's the base game. The DLC was awesome, nothing annoyed me beyond the ubiquity of having all the authority figures be boss bitches. Because current year I guess. Like I know female khans, sakhans, star commanders etc were common in the clans. But their representation in MW5:Clans and it's expansion is like 70-80% of authority figures, and 90% of the "good" ones. Ah well.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
You know, that really strikes at the duality of it for me. I don't want to be fucking around with arduino components like electronic legos, but then the ecosystem of all electronic components is so vast and wide and deep that you really are just adrift.
My dream for a time was to build my own 8-bit computer with some cheap 6502, VGA output and synthesizer audio as a fun learning exercise. But it turns out nobody makes VGA chips anymore? Or audio? Basically everything is SOC, and every project you see along these lines has a legit 8-bit Z80 or 6502, and then uses an SOC as a co-processor for it's VGA and sound, or has you using 20-30 year old salvaged chips.
This has been the political project of the last 50 years, and it's only resulted in the inmates running the asylum.
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