dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
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User ID: 583
Is it consensual unless you stab him or call 911? I sympathize with not trying to escalate if you're in a room with a man who could easily overpower you and kill you and be an ongoing source of misery in your life.
That all said, I love how Democrats really badly need a normal salt of the earth white guy who codes blue collar that you could have a beer with, but it turns out those kind of guys don't attend enthusiastic affirmative consent workshops and "I got this Nazi-looking tattoo when I was drunk in the Marines, what's your fucking problem" doesn't travel well among people where symbols can have meanings.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
5hr ago
I didn't know Bourdain apart from his reputation as a chef, and let's face it, celebrity chefs are not role models for stable, happy lives.
He's a role model in the progressive sphere for a lot of reasons. Honest blue collar work in a kitchen, diverse cuisine enjoyer, sneers at McDonald's, successful writer (the only way to get rich without exploitation under capitalism), had a show where he travels the world and advances the multi-cultural project.
All of these things are apparent virtues, but they weren't enough to save his life and maybe did him in instead. Maybe loser is the wrong word, but my claim is that the mental illness <-> lifestyle causal arrow might point both ways. What word would you use?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
5hr ago
Was just an act as a revealed preference, perhaps as the weight of it all caught up with him. But I think it would have ruined his image considerably if Iggy Pop's albums in 70s all included a little card that said "time traveler from the future confirms in 2026, Iggy Pop will be 79, still alive, living ascetically, vegan, no drugs, pursuing the simple pleasures where he values love and connection above all".
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6hr ago
The funny thing is it sounds pathetic in your teens but by middle age in a marriage you're doing well if you have sex once a week.
We've talked about Anthony Bourdain here a few times.
Here's this travel writer's account of following in his footsteps and after Bourdain finally meets with her and validates her, she has a bit of an identity crisis when she realizes he's a sad loser.
Firstly, being a travel journalist is not as glamorous as it looks, having tossed her cookies after eating token cooked goat brain and local fruit
The fast life always slows down, but not how you’d expect. After enough time, you just get used to the pace, then it doesn’t seem so fast.
The next day, I spent the entire afternoon curled up at the base of the porcelain throne, praying for salvation from the unwashed melon. I was going to stop doing drugs, I told myself. Nothing was worth the panic of a comedown. Then again, I’d said that several times before.
I began to realize that going to different countries wasn’t a solution to a life. I had stopped being able to outrun my problems. Eventually, life on the road just becomes regular life. Whereas most people escape for adventure, when you’re a travel writer, you start craving an escape to stability. But people keep telling you that you have a dream job.
With my head over the toilet, I came up with a plan to kill myself. It wasn’t about the fruit. It was about the fact that I was living out my dreams and I couldn’t feel anything. Life was meaningless and I saw only one way out. I was going to get a gun. I wasn’t going to leave a note.
But also, at some point she comes across an episode where Bourdain interviews Iggy Pop, the godfather of punk and his personal idol, and finds that an older and more mellow Iggy had come there from the gym, orders one drink, has the shrimp. Talks about how love and relationships are what sustain him now. It seems to crush Bourdain, who realizes the guy who invented live fast die young was just putting on an act, not leaving an instruction manual to be taken seriously.
Bourdain, who grappled with drug addiction and depression, kills himself at 61 during a bout of unrequited love.
I can't help but make the connection that the punk ethos and the travel-slutting ethos of taking the highs and the peaks and dodging the responsibilities and commitments, they might be a sign of enlightenment, or making the best of a cold uncaring world where nothing means anything, but probably it's an appealing outlet to the mentally ill and we should be skeptical of attempting to romanticize this kind of transience.
Quote our local @coffee_enjoyer back in 2024:
Here is the liberal-individualist boomer par excellence. He tours the world and waxes poetic on the quaint social life, yet considers himself above their primitive family and social ties. He sits down with large families to eat, he attends their communal festivals, and he transmits this all to the solitary Americans in their living room. He is the rootless cosmopolitan, an omni-tourist, an enjoyer of spectacle over substance. Seeing all these wonders of the world, he’s yet unable to internalize their moral significance and necessity. He is self-worshipping; he cooked himself an identity in Kitchen Confidential and was too blinded by pride to ever revise it. Bourdain wanted to be the cool Western individualist loner, enjoyer of all but adherent to none. He attended every place’s ritual meal — each one a eucharist, essential, consuming God — but only as the aloof tourist, the narrator. It was this pride and absence of self-reflection (one’s real needs and obligations) which is the deepest reason. He let his heart be captured by an exotic woman to fulfill his own self-image, the idol he worshipped, which led to his demise.
I am mostly unable to convince people in the progressive sphere that Bourdain's mental illness had anything to do with his lifestyle. Even Claude refuses to admit it. And adding the detail and sober account from this travel writer is met with the similar rejection. Mental illness just happens to people and living like a transient and dropping out of society and rejecting connection is just like, a totally valid way to live and says nothing about the mental state of the people living it, don'tchaknow? I just don't buy it, I guess.
I enjoyed travel slutting (and by this I mean extended tourism) and while I never identified with punk, for awhile I did the psychedelic Timothy Leary adjacent thing of trying to take drugs with numbers in their name and break out of default living, but ... it's kind of hard. And neither of these things are all that fulfilling at length. I'm not sure what's going through the heads of people who say they could just happily tour Europe or drop acid for forever. The fact that Bourdain is not a fringe figure but like a progressive hero meant to be celebrated and emulated is wild.
Say what you will about the lame conformity of marrying your sweetheart and having 2.3 kids and buying the house with a white picket fence and your thrills are drinking a beer, smoking a brisket and giving your wife a creampie every Saturday, but after seeing friends die so young or losing their minds or never really being able to hold a marriage together, to say nothing of the grim meathook reality I've seen traveling the third world, that lame conformist life looks more like a precious gift and I feel sorry for people who get conned into rejecting it.
I thought by Italian brainrot he was referring to Italian TV which would run those maddeningly stupid variety shows that seem like something that the guy's wife in Fahrenheit 451 would be addicted to.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6d ago
The water shutoff and sensors systems are a lot nicer than expected.
I'm not getting this exact system, but I wouldn't be sad if I did.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
7d ago
Okay so I'm moving into a new house with a lot more smart home shit. What's the most util maxxing smart home stuff you can think of? I'm already on board with adding either a moisture sensor or a rainfall meter to my home sprinkler setup to avoid overwatering.
I'm planning to add emergency water main valve shutoff as well if leaks are detected under one of the five sinks we have.
What else?
Internal home surveillance system that does continuous object tracking so we can tell where the kids left orange teddy bear?
Something about this article in The New Yorker, The Billionaires Vagina Club really irks me. As far as I can tell, this doctor is doing God's work in focusing on an under-served area of women's sexual health and promoting the idea that women should be able to have orgasms more frequently and regularly and throughout their later years if they want to. This should be an uncontroversial good, especially if you are a reader of The New Yorker. But I sense the article smacks of condescension and how problematic this all is.
She serves wealthy clients, like the wives of Silicon Valley techbros. She has a concierge practice, because that's the only space doctors are allowed to actually innovate. Oh, she also might be friends with Peter Attia, an allegedly toxic masculinity influencer. Are we sure these are good people? Are we sure they're not doing malpractice? Is this just another way the rich are enhancing their lives somehow at the cost of the rest of us? Are we sure men aren't just demanding their wives continue being interested in sex for their own selfish needs, with good Dr Sally Greenwald as a facilitator for the patriarchy? Really, wouldn't women be happier as lesbians?
Am I hallucinating all of this? Are these widespread concerns held by a real audience? I'm left with the alienating sense this article is trying so hard to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
I won't even get into how unfair this article is to Peter Attia, who is cancelled as a toxic masculine Epstein adjacent guy even though he clearly champions women's health. He (e.g.) says repeatedly across many episodes that his favorite videos to watch are of old ladies getting back into shape and quickly working their way up to doing body weight deadlifts. He even had Sally on his podcast last November and she dropped an astonishing amount of women's sexual health knowledge for 2 solid hours, but that's all negated by Attia being surprised that Sally was encouraging even young women to use lubrication and Attia wondered if there wasn't also a risk in too much lubrication reducing men's pleasure. God forbid you ask the sexual health expert if she runs into that concern and how she balances that out. Okay I guess I got into it.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
12d ago
Song repeated words to this effect multiple times throughout the evening, putting everyone there on notice of his intent to shoot at police rather than be arrested.
Okay! If I was going to what I thought was a protest and the leader guy says we're all bringing guns because he's not going to jail I'd be pretty alarmed that this was not going to be an ordinary protest. I have to conclude you're either very dumb or you want to support shooting at cops if not do some shooting at cops yourself. Then you go protest and this protest is kind of rioty and the leader guy actually shoots at police. Looks bad!
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
12d ago
What is the evidence that they were planning to do anything more aggressive than set off fireworks and make noise and vandalize stuff? The guy who shot at the police officer is obviously a dangerous criminal but what about the rest of them? Why couldn't they have all been planning to simply protest? The Wikipedia article says guns and body armor were recovered from the suspects (not clear if they all brought that with them to they protest or they found that at their homes) but how much are we allowed to read into that in Texas?
Good idea. Most of them do, with perhaps the exception of the sprinklers until it's replaced with OpenSprinkler. Once I get my home server rack up and running I'll probably vibeslop a single simple dashboard that uses the drivers from HA. For push notifications I'll probably use a Telegram bot to DM me directly any pics or questions.
Gradually moving into my new house
I got my Linux router and an Omada switch and one AP over PoE going. The one AP seems to cover the whole house and front and back yard well enough that I'm holding off adding more for now until we're more fully moved in and have every device online.
In the meantime I'm legit losing sleep over all of the smart features in this house.
Two things that are making me especially crazy are the sprinklers and the outdoor lighting, both which require cloud accounts to fully control, both have failed in one way or another to transfer from the previous owner. We've spent hours on this now and we are not done.
I'm so sick of this already that I'm going to rip the sprinkler controller out and replace it with OpenSprinkler. That path seems well worn and easy.
The outdoor lights seem more complicated, and offensively stupid to me. There's no physical switch for the outdoor lights, you must use an app. I want to rip the control box and make it much simpler (and not cloud only) but I still need to do more research because it runs some proprietary protocol and the lights themselves might not cooperate, though they possibly can be driven over PWM at their core. A single ESP32 with a buck converter and MOSFET might be all I need. Maybe I can swing some over to a real physical dinner switch too, which would be great for the lights above the BBQ. Not sure why the BBQ lights need to be smart in any way.
Some of the lights are deep underneath floating concrete slabs and seem impossible to service, but getting my phone camera in there suggests it's like a 4" piece of the proprietary LED strip just snugged into a mounting bracket which may not be hopeless. Might be able to fashion my own thing here if I really need to replace them to do a DIY setup without cloud garbage.
The other smart stuff is a bit less horrible but I never would have bought any of it.
The house came with a Reolink doorbell that seems like it could work well with self hosting and blocking from the Internet but I'm not sure I want it at all. I really don't care if someone knocks on my door when I'm not home? If they know me they can text. If they don't they are probably an annoyance. It may be able to work as a security camera but if that's what I want I should just get actual security cameras. Mostly it just spuriously alerts me about squirrels or people walking by. It is not any good for porch pirate deterrence since I live in a blue town where the police completely ignore these videos.
My HVAC system let's me set the thermostat remotely. Not sure this is that helpful? Maybe if I forget to set myself away before a trip I can save a few bucks a day.
The house has Philips Hue lights but I'm so bored of the idea I can't be bothered to install the app. It might be neat if all of the lights shifted towards red after sunset but if it's not easy to instantly override that it might get aggravating.
Meanwhile the two smart features I actually would like the house doesn't have. I would like smart locks so I don't have to dick with distributing physical keys or being home to let service people in.
I would like under-sink and under-washer leak sensors that auto closed the mains. The house has 3 bathrooms and two additional utility sinks. Odds of leak are actually non-trivial. But nope, sorry.
There's a radon mitigation system. I keep forgetting to check to see if this has an app.
Anyway, in theory smart homes should be awesome and I want it. In practice all of the apps are so enshittified or are such gimmicks I can't help but come off as a luddite.
UPDATE: The lighting controller was actually configured as owned by the installer instead of the previous home owner so he had to be woken up and told to release it to me. The sprinklers required attempting to pair something like 15 times over bluetooth before it worked reliably enough to let us configure the WiFi and acknowledge the new owner. Still angry enough to want to replace them out of spite.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
18d ago
We should encourage Israelis to forget about their ancestral homeland and resettle in Florida and start a new defense hub with a specialty in cyber arms. Also maybe try to improve the food situation.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
20d ago
There are kids at burning man? Like not in the teenagers sense, but actual kids?
Yes, absolutely.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
20d ago
Moreso than Burning Man? I've never come across more people that seem to have rape fantasies and not the cnc kind than at Burner adjacent communities.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
20d ago
My no evidence inclination is that events like Burning Man have lower incidence of child sex abuse not because of any enlightened attitudes about nudity and sex but because it's such a challenging logistical and environmental ordeal to attend that it filters out a lot of low class dirtbags that would do child sex abuse.
Vibecamp is probably a similar demographic argument. I think it's plainly true that no sex tent or nudity would reduce sex abuse further. But I'm not sure the rates meaningfully matter once you've filtered all of the shitty people out to begin with.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
21d ago
If they had secular goals, maybe. But, they're ruled by theocrats trying to advance the Islamic revolution. They're not gonna kill all the Jews and the rest of the infidels with conventional weapons.
So it seems we were lucky to return to the pre-war status quo, even Trump had to tepidly admit that he bit off more than he can chew and Iran's regional dominance is not going anywhere.
Not that this was anyone's plan but we learned/reconfirned some things.
- Alternate oil routes: solid idea.
- Anti-mining tech: in
- Anti-drone tech: in
- If you're going to decapitation strike a regime do it before they brutally suppress a popular uprising
- The Gulf states seem pretty useless
- Europe seems pretty useless
- Starlink: seems easily jammed
- Can we develop alternate energy faster already
- Blockading Iran's blockade: seems like reasonably good counter-leverage
Iran learned some things too
- SOH blockade: surprisingly good leverage, invest heavily in that tech
- Houthi relationship: develop at all costs, must be able to shut down red sea route
- Moar ballistic missiles
- Moar drones
- Hamas attack on Israel: pretty costly!
- Nuclear program: yes
- Internet blackouts: very effective
- China: probably a great economic ally on a lot of gear
- Russia: useless
All in, I think life for Iranians gets steadily worse from here but at least they can say they're scoring points for the Islamic revolution.
Iran can blockade the strait to cause pain but it's not limitless. We can blockade them back and inflict pain too. Eventually both sides lose the will to keep going, but it might be an inconvenience to Trump whereas it's a lot more punishing for Iran.
Anyway, maybe we can try a decapitation strike again in a few years and see if we do any better at
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
23d ago
I'm grinding through a several week long session now. Opus is doing a better than human job but in little bits and bobs, but I was able to switch to Fable a few days ago and it was just chewing through it. It would sit and think for 10 minutes and then rip out a 700 line delta across 6 C++ files that would compile the first time and nail the feature in an iteration or two. It just kept that pace up.
Two days later Fable was yanked away from me while it was in the middle of implementing a feature and Opus couldn't figure out how to finish it with the uncommitted code that Fable had left. It just stashed it and started over and I told it it's late and to go to bed.
I feel a bit of loss over it
Opus has been doing a fine job but after a day or so with it it was clear Fable was significantly better.
We bought a fairly small house for Americans when we first got together and the error of having our bedroom right next to the kid's bedrooms has not been more clear. Next house we are going to be floors apart.
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