WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
No bio...
User ID: 269
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2mo ago
I will say, every person I've ever met with more than one tattoo has a weird penchant for self destructive habits/major life choices. One tattoo seems like the gimme. Lots of people get one tattoo. I see lots of people who's singular tattoo is a tribute to someone deeply important to them who passed away, like a parent or child taken too soon.
More than one, and their life choices become totally baffling to me. Not just in the tattoos, but just in all their habits. Bizarre, sudden choices that jump the path of life onto a different (often worse) track. Nightmarish eating, hygiene, spending or drug habits. There is even a peculiar breed of people who get lots of Christian tattoos who are plainly overcompensating for personality disorders that constantly threaten to cause them to break with their faith. It's like they need the words or symbols indelibly scribed on their body in easily viewed places as a reminder not to do shit. This sort of tattooed person is often less bad than the rest, but also tends to be a bit of a powder keg.
I guess if I had to pin a through line of all the people I've ever known with lots of tattoos, its that they are constantly wrestling (or wallowing) in a wide spectrum of self harm.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2mo ago
I was always shocked when I'd goto Boston in March/April, and coming back from a convention at 1 am we'd pass gaggles of scantily clad women without jackets outside some club while we hustle past in thick winter jackets. Some hoes are just a different breed.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2mo ago
The etruscans predominately were not enslaved and conquered
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman%E2%80%93Etruscan_Wars
Rome was the eventual victor in the wars and the last Etruscan resistance was crushed in 264 BC when Volsinii was destroyed after a slave revolt. The Etruscans were assimilated into Roman culture and Rome became one of the Mediterranean superpowers amongst the Greeks and the Carthaginians, though the Etruscan language survived for another 300 years (until the early first century AD).
Maybe you have some rosy ideas about what iron age "assimilation" looked like. But coming from the civilization that made "Vae Victus" a household phrase, I doubt it resembled an American "Melting Pot" too closely. I think it's safe to say they were conquered and had their cultural identity destroyed.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2mo ago
It might be an exaggeration to say they were all genocided, many merely had their cultural identity destroyed through enslavement and conquest.
You win the prize! You are the 3rd person in this thread to tell me something I already know and said! Have a star.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2mo ago
Good luck finding the forest.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2mo ago
Sounds good to me. Like I said, get the medical test, open and shut case from there.
Stonewall about the medical test... well...
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2mo ago
While it hurt me deep in my soul to praise MS, compared to most of the walled gardens which have popped up since 2000, the PC is a rather open platform. Anyone can develop and distribute any game, no matter how disturbing or distasteful."Windows Defender has prevented the execution of Holocaust Simulator 3000.exe because it violates the PC content policy" is not a thing that happens.
Yeah, it's actually worse than that. Go on a retro journey and you'll find so many files that Windows Defender tries to block. Old official game patches, mods, cd-cracks. Now I'm told the cd-cracks are false positives, but I judge the sketchiness of gamecopyworld's array of mirrors not worth the risk. Side note, I can't believe gamecopyworld still exist, virtually unchanged from the early 00's.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2mo ago
My first thought was that she's being sued in Delaware, and in the United States, unlike Europe, truth is an absolute defense against slander and defamation. So getting a medical exam on record is likely to be Candace Owen's first order of business, and then it's over one way or the other.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2mo ago
Modern problems require Roman solutions.
You can't read history without coming across the names of long extinct tribes. It might be an exaggeration to say they were all genocided, many merely had their cultural identity destroyed through enslavement and conquest. All the same, there are no Etruscans, Gauls, Picts, Carthaginians, Trojans, and probably countless tribes, states and empires in regions without a written history. Imagine, for a moment, if they were all still among us, waging their 2000 year old grievances over minuscule patches of barren land the way Israel and Palestine are. Imagine if we were still arbitrating between extant Etruscans and Romans possession of the land north of the Tiber over a 3000 year history?
I won't claim some ability to arbitrate when, where or why genocide is necessary. But if you really think of a world without it, it's terrifying.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2mo ago
I donno, I think I did alright respecting personal boundaries and using a lighter touch. She got better, and we got married and had a kid didn't we?
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2mo ago
7 months ago, but who's counting?
I donno man, everyone is different. Some people have a very "There's no ring on this finger, it's none of your business" attitude, some people have a "My last relationship was 5 years and we've only been together 7 months, who are you to get all up in my business" attitude, some people are moved in and married inside a year, for others a year is still well within scoping this other person out and how long and how serious the relationship is has been more of a slow climb of a smooth gradient than an on/off switch. More over, CriticalDuty might not even be on the same page about the level of concern and commitment (and control) that is appropriate at this point in the relationship.
But like I said, I can't presume to know their relationship, it was just a perspective I hadn't seen yet, so I thought it was worth giving.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2mo ago
Coinbase has always been more professionally run that other crypto companies. They brought on experienced corporate lawyers, auditors and executives early, and were probably the most serious and normie coded crypto company. I think they are the only one who's been regularly audited by an accredited outside firm as well, something FTX and Binance and others refused to comply with claiming it was impossible.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2mo ago
I mean, at the end of the day, she's only your girlfriend and it's none of your business. I can't pretend to know your relationship, but imagine if you will she came to you and started taking a deadly serious and negatively slanted interest in something you did? Pathologized how much you played video games, or arguing with people on the internet, or watched porn? If you don't actually do any of those things, replace it with something you do do.
snigger do do.
I guess my point is, even if you are right, you're still just a boyfriend. Probably the latest of many, others of whom never had a problem with this before. This is more of a fight for her family and doctor to wage.
That said, my wife had some eating disorder adjacent behavior that didn't stop until we decided to have kids. After putting a baby in her 6 years ago they haven't re-emerged even slightly.
Not that I'm suggesting you rush anything.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2mo ago
The Coinbase lawsuits were a hoot. At one point the stock was down 90% from the IPO seemingly on the basis that they'd get bankrupted by federal lawsuits. It was a fun and profitable bet to take the other side of. They had assets on the book worth more than their market cap. I'd had this theory that Coinbase would execute a regulatory capture strategy for crypto in the US, as they'd always played well with regulators and generally licked their boots and did whatever they were asked to do to the consternation of /r/bitcoin. I never counted on the feds just having an insatiatable hardon that verged on a medical condition for destroying them on principle. I especially enjoyed the SEC being hoisted by their own petard when the Bitcoin ETFs were approved, effectively by court order.
Sometimes I do wonder what would have happened if the Biden administration hadn't nakedly antagonized so many interest, and driven them into the arms of Trump not out of affinity, but existential desperation. I guess I can be thankful that this once at least, evil did contain the seeds of it's own destruction.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2mo ago
Fascinating. Are you making a wooden headband to replace a busted old one, or did you grab some free range headphone electronics that need a housing?
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2mo ago
You know, I floated that by the wife, and she wasn't a fan. These were really for her, so she gets them how she wants them.
But man, it was fun flexing some craftmanship on those back slots. Used a spacer to make sure they were exactly 24" on center apart to match the studs they'd attach to. Outlined the brackets with a marking knife, hogged out the middle with a router, and then finished up with a freshly sharpened chisel. Was a perfect fit. Probably couldn't slide a playing card in there.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2mo ago
The wife wanted me to take a break from my chairs to put up some wall shelves for her real quick. Now sure I could have gotten some cheap particle board wall shelves with a cheap veneer, from an unpronounceable Chinese brand name that will cease to exist in 3 weeks just to be replaced by another amalgamation of letters that mean nothing. But damnit, what's the fun in that?!
It took some doing, but eventually we agreed on some nice steel J Brackets as the hangers. Then the family headed out to the lumber yard 2 weeks ago to pick out some rustic walnut at roughly $5.50 a board foot. If you've read any of my post by now, it's a fairly straight forward process from there. Mill, cut, glue up panels, sand, finish. Although I was especially proud of the panel glue ups this time, as I did my best job yet matching grain and wood color such that they are barely perceptible. Also, to add just a smidgen of craftsmanship, I took out a slot in the back of edge of each shelf out for the back of the J-Bracket to sit in, and rounded the front edge where the J-Bracket comes up so that it sits perfectly flush. This brings the shelf about a 1/4" closer to the wall, and looks quite nice IMHO. I just finished with a plain danish oil, and gave it a light once over with some #0000 steel wool after letting it cure for a week.
Finished product. Not bad for 2 weeks. We're thinking of maybe adding a few more around the room.
I don't care about the ban, I'm just saying, I don't think that word means what you think it means.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2mo ago
If it weren't for health insurance and my daughter with a chronic condition, I'd consider myself done. It's not a super bad chronic condition, mind you. Honestly it's barely an inconvenience we've gotten so used to it. But... it still exist and could theoretically rear it's ugly head in a major way.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2mo ago
I thought trolling was definitionally disingenuous? As in, he's saying all that shit to fuck with us, but didn't actually believe any of it. Probably isn't even who he says he is? That's what makes trolls so odious, there is no there there. They don't actually believe anything. Mere stubbornness to concede a point does not qualify one as a troll. A person can have odious but sincerely held beliefs, but that doesn't make them a troll.
You're not banned yet! You can totally keep it that way.
I genuinely can't. I get that the mod consensus is that I know exactly what I'm doing, and it's all on purpose, and I delight in thumbing my nose at the rules and skirting by with just enough plausibility to avoid punishment. But I honestly try. I really do. It's just that all my life experience is so utterly divorced from your realities, that my heartfelt best behavior effort post like this gets met with sneering dismissal by one of the people who decides when my next ban (which I've been informed will be permanent) happens. Like I said, I wrote and rewrote that post 3 or 4 times, feeling deep in my bones that no matter how I phrased it, while still saying what I needed to say, I'd probably eat that last permanent ban for it for some errant turn of phrase I enjoyed, or being inflammatory, or having "more heat that light" whatever that's supposed to mean anymore. Every post I make I make like it's my last, because I honestly don't know what the fuck I'm doing wrong. It just comes down to our lived realities are too different, and to preserve yours, I'm going to get shuffled out the door at some point.
Edit: I want to elaborate further. I ended my effort post with "So it goes to be conquered." I agonized over that last sentence. I loved it. It was the thesis of the entire post. It was the most important sentence. When I was in school writing essays I always told "Tell em what you're gonna say, say it, then tell em what you said." I must include that sentence. But it's also the most dangerous sentence. Instead of seeing an effort post, someone might just see inflammatory rhetoric, bullshit anecdotes, more inflammatory rhetoric. Permaban. But if I don't include that sentence, there is no point to any of the rest that I wrote. Probably makes them even worse as it's just a series of inflammatory anecdotes with no reason to state them at all.
I can't control how you people read that. Even when I try to include context, half the time the context just gets ignored and a single sentence, or sentence fragment, or single word gets plucked out as being ban worthy. Sometimes large portions of my post are skipped, rewrote or concatenated together out of context to achieve the perception of greater offense than a plain read of the entire post would have produced! There is no fixing this.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2mo ago
Overall my life has been awesome and not filled with much tragedy.
That's the part of it that is hard to communicate. At no part in my story was I the direct victim in any of this, beyond getting beat up by the illegals many years older than me who were placed in a middle school classroom likely based on education level, the county not yet having an ESL program. A mistake that was relatively quickly corrected. This might have been 1996? According to some census data I found the county was only 7% Hispanic then, compared to it's 25% now. Whites declined from 75% to 35%.
The problem isn't personally having illegals hit and run you personally on the road (that was several friends of mine), or murder your family (that was my coworker's brother), or take hostages and burn your house down (that was a row of houses or two behind mine). It's how it feels to see civilization fraying at the edges all around you, chaos growing stronger every day, and the high trust society you grew up in collapsing into a low trust hell hole of all against all. You came from a world where things like this didn't happen, period. A 40 point swing in demographics later, and suddenly it's normal. It's like that "First they came for the..." poem, only instead of methodical Nazi's eliminating problematic groups, it's just raw 3rd world barbarism and high time preference imposing it's consequences all around you, and occasionally picking off someone around you. And for whatever reason, people just keep their head in the sand. They roll to disbelieve, or they pretend this is fine. To notice at all places you on the fringe.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2mo ago
(Also that’s just WhiningCoil don’t worry about it.)
Yeah, he's not wrong.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2mo ago
This is the thing I don't think people grok.
I DID. They lasted about 4-6 years each. That's how much fucking immigration is happening! Every time I have this argument with people, they act like history started yesterday, and the areas that are full of 3rd worlders always were and you should have known better than to live there if that's not what you wanted, and the areas that are still American always will be and are there for you if that's what you want. And if the naked falsehood of that hasn't been made plain by my abridged life story RE: Immigration, I don't know what else I can do to make you understand.
I think gamification is the exactly opposite of what you need. I cycled through a bunch of frankly masturbatory hobbies before I settled on woodworking. I tried to learn guitar, I tried mountain biking, I did martial arts for a long time, I've tried to make video games off and on for my entire adult life, did a smattering of electronics repair. All of them, to various degrees, felt like pissing in the ocean. I think I enjoyed the martial arts and mountain biking the most, but at a certain point going through the motions felt pointless. Especially with martial arts, once I no longer had anything to prove to myself that I could do it, I just wasn't feeling it anymore. I sunk costed through many more years of just showing up, but my drive to put in the extra work evaporated. A lot of what compelled me to put time into hobbies I really wasn't getting anything out of was the addictiveness of the gamification in the learning method.
But woodworking, at least for now, is fantastic. I make beautiful things that go into my home that are exactly what I want, and I don't care one teeny tiny bit how they stack up to what anyone else has done. It's not gamified, it's not competitive, but it's marginally creative and meets specific needs. Plus it's nice having hardwood furniture in my house instead of flat packed sawdust and glue. Mastering a smattering of baking recipes has been similar. I wanted great scones, I didn't like any of the bakeries around me, I figured out a recipe that produces the scones I want and now my family gets to enjoy them.
Human motivation is funny, and in several ways, I suspect gamification has spoiled our brains to expect more rewards for fake task than they deserve. I've found making real things you actually want and need has been a great detox, and doesn't necessarily carry with it the sort of "I'm too tapped out from work to do this" vibe that other more masturbatory and pointless hobbies might. But that might just be me.
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