WhiningCoil
No bio...
User ID: 269
WhiningCoil
2d ago
The wife finally caved and gave me her blessing to just remake the cabinet doors for our kitchen, after our attempts to strip and refinish them failed horribly.
Picked up about $100 in rough hard maple at my local lumber yard, and began the process of marking out my pieces on the planks, breaking it down, milling it, etc. It's the first major job I've put through the jointer I got back in December, and it's easily proving itself worth the money.
See, before I was putting the parts of my project on a planing sled to get one side flat, with hot glue and shims to support the wobbly workpiece and keep it in place. It took forever. Then I'd clamp it down to another sled for my tablesaw and rip off one edge pretty damned straight. This worked but was slow, and involved a lot of extra steps. It also discouraged me from re-flattening a workpiece if it cupped a little after sitting in my detached garage for a week or month.
But man, now that I have a proper 10" benchtop jointer, it's so damned fast! I ended up with 40+ individual pieces for the 9 cabinet doors I need to make, and I just zipped them across the jointer, gave them a few passes through the planer, and I'm good to go. Was relatively frustration free, and extremely straight forward versus testing and retesting the wobble of a board and shimming it on a sled. Probably would have taken me all damned week or more to get through all the pieces the old way.
Side note, someone once asked me if all these tools were "worth it". You know, beyond the enjoyment of having a hobby, or making beautiful things yourself that you can appreciate every day. And that's a hard question to answer when you are making weird custom items. I mean, any sort of custom carpentry is going to cost you, but you rarely compare what you've made against that. You compare it against a retail item, possibly of inferior quality, or maybe some etsy or ebay piece, though that can be all over the place too. Anyways, cabinetry gives me an answer.
The same nine doors I'm making for $100 in material would have cost about $600 at Home Depot or Lowes. They are $60+ apiece. Even including the router bits I bought to do the raised panel, stile, rails and edge profile, and the jig I bought to make the proper holes for the mounting hardware ($300 total), I'm coming out decently ahead. And they will almost certainly get used again. I've had plans for a curio cabinet for miniatures, and probably redoing the top cabinets in our kitchen as well.
The kitchen has been half taken apart for going on 2 months now, while the wife waffled back and forth, and struggled with a lack of motivation. I'm hoping to get the new doors finished and back on in 2 weeks? Probably need this week to finish manufacturing the pieces and assembling them. Then another week to finish them? We'll see, fingers crossed.
WhiningCoil
9d ago
Two things.
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It's not just video game writing. Writing across the board has utterly fallen apart. Characters lack any sort or purpose or core motivation, and mostly just get shuffled to the next artificial point of conflict/drama. Plots make almost no sense, even on their own terms, with characters acting in wildly unbelievable ways to force it along. Or the plot just regularly breaks the rules or themes of the work because it doesn't know what else to do. And that's not even touching on the fact that literally the only themes worked into anything these days is weird demoralization propaganda focused entirely on privilege/oppression dynamics, often in strictly black and white moralistic terms. Zero awareness of the human condition.
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In so far as video game writing was "good", it was good in the sense that it was load bearing. The dialog could be awkward, the prose could be stilted, but if it supported the world that was being built and created the illusion that the game was a more lived in, real place than was possible to actually create or depict given technical, financial or design constraints, people generally say it was "good". I rarely find this to be the case anymore, as weird current year political bullshit immediately collapses the writing under the load a fictional world places upon it.
I do sometimes try to entertain the arguments of people who claim nothing has changed. That video games always had out of place "current year" pop culture references. Or that they were already political. And I know examples abound. I recall reading about one particular Infocom game that was written out of pure spite for Reagan winning a second term.
All the same, what felt like rare exceptions has become the norm, to the point where it crowds everything else out. It hasn't quite reached the level in games that it has on Netflix, where probably half the dialog is weird current year political references and marxist bullshit, and 3/4 of the characters are nonsensically and almost impossibly diverse for the setting. Which is to say, sometimes you encounter a purely ludic game with almost no writing what so ever. But among any game I've seen that has any appreciable amount of writing to speak of, if it's western, or even if activist got ahead of the translating duties, it's all sorts of shit up with current year nonsense.
WhiningCoil
9d ago
Still beats becoming a vassal state of Russia.
Does it? Does it really? I'm not sure I'd choose being extirpated from the land of my birth and replaced wholesale by a hostile and alien culture, over being conquered and turned into a vassal state by a co-ethnic I share a thousand years of history with.
I mean, it's like asking me, a 90% British American with roots back to the founding of the the country, if I would rather America be flooded by Africans to the point where white people have been virtually extinguished, or a resurgent British Empire reconquer the USA.
I'd pick this baffling to imagine resurgent British Empire 101 times out of 100. Offers more hope for my descendants than genocide.
A shame that's not a choice actually offered me...
WhiningCoil
5d ago
Notepad++ does this, but it makes it clear when you reopen the application that these are unsaved changes you are viewing. You can press CTRL-R to reload from the file and throw away your changes, among other pathways.
It'd be pretty thrown off if one day Notepad started doing that too without the robust UI changes Notepad++ has around the feature.
WhiningCoil
9d ago
With Metzen... man, I just don't know. I never followed whatever the fuck happened with World of Warcraft past the vanilla experience. The cracks were showing in WarCraft III, at least for me, and StarCraft II was heart breaking in how profoundly stupid and masturbatory the story was. Do a thing, undo a thing, redo the thing. I hated it.
I just don't think Metzen's ability to story craft grew with his ambition to be "epic". He was perfectly able to do some rudimentary world building and a pulp fantasy storyline, largely following Carmack's old formulation that story in games was like story in a porno. When he tried to make the story good for it's own sake he fell flat on his fucking face. Maybe he got lucky with StarCraft, probably the singularly good story he did.
I think this is just part of the broader signs that our culture is dying. Nobody tries to tell a tried and true story with any sincerity anymore. Everything is endless subversion. Heal turns, face turns, pointless soap opera drama. I've come to loath all that deeply. It feels like we can't even create stories anymore, much less anything more substantial.
WhiningCoil
14d ago
I mean, I'm not against this exactly. I just fully expect it to be another tool of anarcho-tyranny where charges like this are rarely if ever pursued against parents of a politically relevant skin tone because disparate impact, restorative justice, blah blah blah.
Maybe not. Maybe I'll be surprised. A case in my state did see a mother of a political salient identity actually get charged, convicted, and sentenced to two years. They are going after the assistant principal for criminal negligence too, and frankly, she deserves it.
I wish I knew more about the process these convictions go through. I know our Republican Governor and Republican DA have been going hard on our out of control schools, and the bureaucrats who've ruined them. Sad to say it'll all probably get undone lickity split as soon as power changes hands again.
WhiningCoil
9d ago
Between this, and the comment below pointing out how most women of child bearing age have fled Ukraine, the outcome seems obvious. We pressured Ukraine into committing suicide. There won't be a Ukraine in 50 years. It will be an economic zone virtually devoid of native Ukrainians. If the world is lucky, it will be relatively well managed by Russian interest (minus the obligatory corruption, not like that is anything new in Ukraine), and mostly function as the bread basket of Europe same as it used to. If the world is unlucky, it will get flooded with sub room temperature IQ migrants by neoliberal NGOs and utterly cease to function in any recognizable fashion.
But the Ukrainians are over. The only question in 50 years will be, who was morally culpable for the genocide? Russia for starting the war, or the US for not letting Ukraine negotiate a peace back when their demographics would merely decline slowly, as opposed to fall off a cliff? If NATO had been hands off and Russia had won the war, there'd probably be more Ukrainians in 50 years than there will be now. I doubt there will be a million in 100 years.
WhiningCoil
8d ago
If the Ukrainian army crumbles, is there any doubt that Russia would roll into Kyiv and Ukraine would functionally stop existing as an independent nation?
It beat's not existing at all. Which is where Ukraine's demographics are heading after sending most of their men off to die in trenches and their women are finding new lives abroad. But I guess Zelensky can pat himself on the back, king of the ashes, when the TFR of native Ukrainians is 0.21 ten years after his "victory". Or when their political future is now determined by the flood of migrants which repopulates the region, as opposed to their coethnics in Moscow.
But sure, "Ukraine" would still be an independent nation, even if no Ukrainians are left in it. Not sure why a Ukrainian today should fight for that future though, being cut out of it completely.
WhiningCoil
16d ago
All the same, I'd be willing to bet if there was a massive social campaign to "normalize" people who want to amputate random limbs, it started being prominently featured in countless shows, and it began getting taught in kindergarten, the epidemiology behind the disorder would enormously change. We'd have countless teen girls experiencing "Rapid onset bodily integrity identity disorder", and often entire friend groups.
Then que all the midwits citing the old research under the old social conditions about how "Nobody chooses to do this flippantly, and research shows they are much, much happier after you perform the amputations." I wouldn't put it past the same liars we've been dealing with for the last 20 years, lying about how puberty blockers or cross sex hormones are "completely reversible" might pull some similar nonsense word games about the amputations being "reversible". Or doctors start scaring the fuck out of parents with "Would you rather have a disabled son or a dead son?"
It's more important than ever to say say "no" to this nonsense early, no matter how cruel it sounds. Turns out a lot of these old medical ethics to "do no harm" are load bearing, no matter how many sophist you throw at the word "harm".
WhiningCoil
8d ago
This I can get behind, and says better what I was trying to say below about game writing being load bearing. Game writing is, or was, engineering, just like making the rest of the game was. Both on the level of "How much room do we have on the screen/in memory to fit words" and also "What is the greatest economy of language we can use to maximally support the world being built?" Many times a lot of this writing was only found in the manual.
I'm going to riff off Diablo for a minute. Grabbing my ancient manual off the shelf, it has so many casual hints of a greater world. Like King Leoric sending the warriors off in a war against a northern kingdom of Westmarch. The rogue is from a mysterious order, who's purpose is never disclosed. The sorcerer is just one of many mage clans from the far east. And then of course the bestiary and the history, written from the perspective of an in universe character, vastly flesh out the world.
And what is the actual game? 16 levels of a dungeon in a singled ravage town. Unknown "black riders" recently came through devastating it. Lazarus had just lead a party into the dungeon to be trapped and killed by the Butcher. Now go. 95% of the lore in the manual doesn't directly come into play. It just builds a world hinted at. A world, IMHO, Diablo 3 largely ruins. Never bothered with 4. 2 did alright I guess.
It actually reminds me that a lot of my favorite fantasy novels or CRPGs emerge from home brewed table top RPG settings that the creator steeped in with his friends for years before he put pen to paper for the first time. I believe that's how Malazan Book of the Fallen got it's start. I think Record of Lodoss War as well?
WhiningCoil
14d ago
Ok, the "Big if true" takeaway from this review for me.
India: The Worst Country on Earth inflicts violence of a spiritual and metaphysical variety upon the westerner. If only Samara was crawling out of their TV to kill their physical body, they might die cursing a white girl and their salvation would be assured. Instead India: TWCoE attacks their very soul.
The Westerner MUST identity with the foreigner. MUST empathize. MUST psychically place themselves in the Indian’s shoes. MUST Imagine themselves one and the same.
They must imagine the devoured cow feces in their own mouth, imagine themselves copulating with stray diseased dogs, imagine themselves bathing in manure piles and destroying their environment by choosing to litter on a scale unimaginable, imagine themselves open defecating in the midst of busy cities. They must imagine themselves devouring unhygienic meals seasoned with animal droppings and most revolting products of the human body…
They MUST empathize, and their gag reflexes must activate and they must feel their skin crawl as if beset by parasites and sexual diseases welcomed in through a million disgusting wallowing practices.
They cannot do what Hundreds of millions of high caste indians and upper class third worlders do every day: Stop Empathizing.
Stop looking on them as your fellow man, and instead look upon them as revolting stupid bottom feeding animals, akin to diseased racoons or possums…or various mamilians who wallow in their own filth, or seek their missing nutrition in the droppings of more noble creatures such as the bovine.
For to stop empathizing, so the western thinks, to stop believing “there is only one race the human race” or “that all men are created equal” would be to abandon all that is good and true and transcendent in this world.
Except for the what is obvious to plainly see: it is neither good, nor true, nor transcendent.
It is a lie. A lie overwhelmingly obvious upon mere observation of any of the billions of members of other species and subspecies of human.
So, that's my question. Does the 1/3 or less of India that is not sub 85 IQ, per the stats quoted in this review, regard the rest as subhuman diseased animals? I'm not really predisposed to believe, or not believe it. Though scrounging through my long term memory for supporting evidence, I recall that Google's Indian CEO allowed nearly every anti-white, anti-American agitprop seminar imaginable, but shut down one that was going to talk about India's caste system.
WhiningCoil
9d ago
I think this comes down to the neoliberal obsession with GDP. It completely obfuscates strategic importance and control. It's the sort of myopic focus that allowed us to outsource critical infrastructure to China, and then we got bent over when COVID hit. Because to the neoliberal, if number goes up, who cares who controls a thing? Money is power, not actual physical possession of a strategic resource... right?
Ukraine is the breadbasket of Europe. It's coast are Russia's only warm water port. It's an important strategic buffer between Russia and keeping their enemies less than 2 hours away from their capital. How "poor" Ukraine is, however shitty their stock market is doing, however bad their GDP is changes none of those fundamentals.
Russia itself was mocked as being a third world country with a gas station. That hasn't exactly aged well.
WhiningCoil
9d ago
South African demographics are simply not in the cards
I don't see why not. The neoliberal solution to 3rd world poverty seems to be to import literally the entire 3rd world. 10 years ago it was only crazy right wingers that thought, or at least spoke the hate-fact, that America would be minority white in our lifetime. The respectable anti-racist who set the narrative claimed that was a "conspiracy theory". A mere decade later I'm supposed to believe "South African demographics are simply not in the cards." after all the lying and gaslighting I've already been subjected to?
WhiningCoil
9d ago
The Ukrainian news outlet Ukrayinska Pravda reported Thursday that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson used his surprise visit to Kyiv last month to pressure President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to cut off peace negotiations with Russia, even after the two sides appeared to have made tenuous progress toward a settlement to end the war.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/diplomacy-watch-did-boris-johnson-help-stop-peace-deal-ukraine/5792502
“Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement,” wrote Fiona Hill and Angela Stent. “Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.”
The news highlights the impact of former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s efforts to stop negotiations, as journalist Branko Marcetic noted on Twitter. The decision to scuttle the deal coincided with Johnson’s April visit to Kyiv, during which he reportedly urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to break off talks with Russia for two key reasons: Putin cannot be negotiated with, and the West isn’t ready for the war to end.
https://dailysceptic.org/2022/09/01/did-boris-scuttle-talks-between-ukraine-and-russia/
Yet according to Ukrainska Pravda (a pro-Western newspaper in Ukraine) pledging support wasn’t the only reason for Johnson’s visit. “Sources close to Zelenskyy” told the newspaper that Johnson was an “obstacle” to peace talks because he’d brought “two simple messages”.
The first is that Putin is a war criminal, he should be pressured, not negotiated with. And the second is that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not. Johnson’s position was that the collective West … now felt that Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined, and that here was a chance to “press him.”
Fast forward to August, and an article in Foreign Affairs by the self-described Russia hawk Fiona Hill claims that April’s talks did yield a “tentative” agreement:
According to multiple former senior U.S. officials we spoke with, in April 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement: Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.
In the end, of course, no such agreement was reached. But the timing suggests it was Johnson’s visit that scuppered the talks.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
A Map for the Regulation and Destruction of Free Software.
A buddy of mine shared an article about The White House warning people against programming in C or C++ and it teed me off about a conspiracy theory I've been harboring for going on 10 years now.
My baseline assumption is that whatever you choose to call this weird woke, centralized, authoritarian, elite/bureaucratic corporatist conglomerate, they want control. All of it. Over things that you would think have nothing to do with them. They want your wood ovens, your gas stoves, your gamer PCs, they really don't view anything as beyond their purview to "regulate" and make your life infinitely worse by slow degrees.
If you assume these are pathologically controlling busy bodies, which I think you are right to assume, the fact that anybody can program anything probably terrifies them. They barely understand technology to begin with. Just look at any time they haul a tech CEO before congress and attempt to get sound bites for their constituents. It's horrible. But the cat is more or less already out of the bag when it comes to open and free software. How would you put it back in?
By degrees the process is already underway, in the name of security. Most PC's sold today will only boot authorized operation systems, with an option in the BIOS (for now) to turn off that safety feature. Windows warns you every time you try to run an "unrecognized" executable, with the option (for now) of ignoring it's warning. People are far more habituated than ever to closed software ecosystems thanks to Apple and Google and the fact that most people spend more time on phones these days than computers. All it would take is to slowly shave away by degrees until the process of running free and open software is so frustrating that most people don't do it, and the powers that be can "deprecate the feature" under the rationale that it's not used anymore.
Maybe it starts with the big sellers of PCs like Dell, where they just don't have a BIOS that lets you boot unauthorized OSes. And for a while, that's fine, because what self respecting enthusiast buys a Dell? That's probably a perfectly fine security compromise for institutions that don't want to run the risk at all of some unauthorized code hijacking the boot process. Then maybe the feature gets cut from lower end motherboards. But that's fine, if it's still a feature that matters to you, you can always get a high end motherboard. Lots of features are only available on higher end motherboards. And then one day, with little fanfare at all, the feature vanishes.
So now you are stuck running increasingly enshittified versions of Windows and a few select Linux distros. So what?
Well, at the same time, imagine how Windows slowly chips away at the ability to run "unrecognized" code. Right now it's an annoying popup, same as it has been since Vista. Maybe one day the default behavior is switched to not letting you run it at all. But it's ok, there is a toggle to turn on the old behavior burried deep in the system settings somewhere. Maybe a security submenu. Then a while later they get rid of that, but if you know what you are doing, there is still a registry setting you can change. Then a while later they only support the feature on Windows Pro instead of Home. Then one day, it just vanishes.
So now you are stuck running enshittified versions of Windows that refuses to run "unrecognized" code. But it's cool, you can probably still do something to get your code "recognized" right?
Anyone who has had to do any web development probably knows about using self signed certs. Often good enough for local use, generally insufficient if you plan on letting anyone outside of your org attempt to use your system. You have to get a signed cert. And often pieces of software just expect a signed cert, and may not have any option at all to override it's refusal to work with a self signed one. I expect much the same will occur with "unrecognized" code.
All code will need to be signed. Maybe you can self sign code you've written on your local system, but nobody else will be able to run it. Unless they go through the added hoops of adding your key to some sort of key store for "recognized" code. But eventually the self signed qualities of the code will catch up to you, and Windows may just refuse to accept self signed code certs anymore. But no fear! Maybe Github or other organization will offer to sign your code for you. Assuming it meets their TOS, nobody on social media has cancelled you, and their AI hasn't rejected your project for hallucinated reasons. But eventually, however well relying on a 3rd party like Github to allow your code to run on your locked down operating system and your locked down hardware starts off, it will become a barely viable solution. And then free and open software is over.
I hope I'm just being overly pessimistic. But I honestly see this happening in my lifetime.
WhiningCoil
8d ago
entirely unaware that he was the leader of the UK and not the US
Yeah, that's clearly the most obvious read there. That I'm completely retarded and can't tell the US from the UK. Not an assumption that Boris was acting on US policy goals despite being a UK politician, with the key quote being that he insisted "The West isn't ready for the war to be over yet". When the US is funding 90% of the war, it's a safe assumption to make that Boris was writing a check the US was going to cash, with their tacit approval.
I didn't bother responding to you then because you taking such obvious liberties with my actual claims, but if you are going to sit back and crow about it like it's some sort of victory, fine, you've gotten my attention.
WhiningCoil
9d ago
we would still be as white as South Africa ever was- not as it is today
I'm astounded you wrote that so unaware of the consequences you accidentally baked into your own "refutation".
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
In another post (which I'm too lazy to link to) I pondered about how to get something like this back up and running today. It's hard for a few reasons; 1) Hunting isn't at all "necessary" the way it was in societies past, so the social honor / social proof reward would be absent for some sort of rec-league hunting team 2) War is a contest of human-techno-logistical systems now and you need committed professionals. As much as I love my Marines, the "warrior spirit" can't help you against guided munitions 3) I can't actually bring myself to be okay with something on the order of 1-2 in 10 young men being permanently maimed / killed for no other reason than to help generally promote good society wide models of masculinity. The closest approximation I came up with is a re-worked National Guard program (male only) that would start at the end of High School with something like quarterly musters until the age of 50. So many legal / logistic problems with that and I don't know if it would actually result in much more than a federally subsidized "guns and bowling" league.
You left out 4) Men aren't allowed to have anything to themselves anymore, ever.
When I was a young man, I went to LAN parties with a bunch of other young men, and we formed intense bonds over deathmatches screaming every racially charged obscenity we could imagine. We tooled out our rigs, lots of us began learning to program or mod games, etc. This all happened in the safety of a basement, largely without internet except in the few houses that had big fancy broadband, and nobody was ever hurt.
Sure, it's not the most traditional of male bonding/rights of passage, but I think it worked, after a fashion, for us.
All this is now verboten. All games have some random fucking girlboss lecturing you about your privilege. There are no more offline servers. All behavior is closely monitored and you get suspended. Mods get you banned. It's the worst fucking dystopia I could have ever imagined being a 90's PC gamer.
I moved over to boardgames in the mid 00's, to continue to bond and compete as a slightly older adult male with my other adult male friends. Sometimes things got heated with our elevated testosterone and trying to find our place in the world. One time I almost came to blows with a guy after he got insanely drunk and made a bunch of outlandish accusations. A few years later I was best man at his wedding.
All this is now verboten. Less controllable, granted. But the last time I was in my old FLGS they almost kicked a guy out of the store for saying, in character, that he'd kill another player in a tabletop war game. Came down on him like a brick of shit, shouting "IF I EVER HEAR THAT LANGUAGE AGAIN YOU WILL BE PERMANENTLY BANNED FROM THE STORE!" Both players were absolutely shocked. They thought it was just banter.
Over the years, for some reason, that store went from staffing men approaching middle age who'd been gaming from before puberty, to a bunch of blue haired high school girls who routinely sneered at my purchases of GMT Games. I cannot comprehend the shift. I stopped going there.
And so it goes with literally every single thing too many men enjoy and bond over. It must be made terminally inclusive, so that women can participate and not have their feelings hurt. Which completely ruins it as a male bonding space. And so there will never be one again ever. At least not in the "free" world.
WhiningCoil
26d ago
This reminds me of the trend I saw of "Men would rather X than goto therapy". Although trying to dig it up now only shows people mocking it, by inserting the stories of great men throughout history and fiction into the format. But I thought I recollected women making earnest posts complaining about the men in their lives deciding to record a shitty album, or taking up intense study of trivial subjects, instead of going to therapy.
Presuming it was ever an earnest meme, and I wasn't just missing the joke...I was utterly agog that these people who never, ever, graduate from therapy would mock men for self actualizing. I can personally attest that whenever I feel any sort of transient depression creeping in, giving myself any sort of self actualizing goal and getting busy is the best and most immediate cure.
I'm actually reminded of the time I posted this funny bit by Denis Leary about therapy to a discord, and some crazy lady in therapy took it so personally they thought I was literally telling them to kill themselves.
WhiningCoil
15d ago
One can do that.
I believed that lie once. I won't believe it again. Especially not in the midst of the medical establishment trying as hard as they can do not do it, under any circumstances, and calling anyone begging them to a bigot, with the full backing of the government's monopoly on violence being used to take their kids away.
WhiningCoil
7d ago
You are reminding me of a childhood where I toted around Blizzard game manuals in my school backpack so I could read them on the tram and show them off to friends.
Are you me? I got yelled at so much in my middle school geometry class for reading the WarCraft II manual instead of paying attention. There were some absolute gems among manuals back then. Blizzard had some of the best, but Interplay and Westwood tried too. I got this Encyclopedia Frobozzica with Return to Zork, had me howling with laughter despite not having played any of the games before. The diary that came with Zork Nemesis that may have been from a version of your character that time travelled into the past and got killed seeded the plot well too.
WhiningCoil
26d ago
Sound like the direction my wife was taking with out daughter, before I put my foot down and said we must discipline her. We don't have to let her act the way she's acting. She'll probably freak out and throw a giant tantrum. It probably won't work, effectively, at least at first. But calmly doling out consequences for actions will work. I wasn't even proposing anything bonkers. Just sending our daughter to her room when she talked back and refused more gentle corrections to cease.
My wife pushed back claiming that sounded "abusive". She claimed nearly all corrective measures were "abusive". She'd swallowed some bonkers gentle parenting bullshit. The problem was, our kid would walk all over her until she blew up at the kid about what a shitty brat she was acting like. This seemed far worse, to me, than just calmly sending our daughter to her room.
I won that argument, one of the few I have won, and after sending our daughter to her room for a week when she back talks, it stopped. For whatever reason my wife, after that resounding success, said she didn't think it worked. I was utterly baffled, and asked why she thought that, our daughter has almost completely stopped back talking. She said she didn't know, she just felt like it didn't work.
Can't win em all I guess.
WhiningCoil
29d ago
I think this is just the most surface level manifestation of a deeper core truth. Liberals exist in a world without cause and effect, and conservatives do. Maybe this breaks down or gets fuzzy at higher and higher levels, like debates over man made climate change. But on personal, practical levels, or levels near them, I think conservatives have liberals absolutely licked when it comes to understanding and acting on practical cause and effect.
Because literally every profession, hobby or past time that exposes people to cause and effect gets accused of "radicalizing" people into "far right conservativism." Video games, exercise, sport, engineering. Programming used to, but these days so much of "programming" is so far removed from actually talking computer, the effect is lessened a great deal. Seems the "tech-bro", that odious, middle class, quixotically conservative in the sense that they believed they earned their success, has been more or less vanquished under the weight of silicon valley's expansive DEI departments. That or the more autistic among them got trans'ed.
WhiningCoil
8d ago
And yet those talks, allegedly, were the closest Ukraine and Russia had gotten to a negotiated peace. "The Ukrainians" would have no more to do with ratifying the peace than the average American has in constantly sending them weapons.
There is always El Salvador?
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