gattsuru
14d ago
In this case, the law requires age verification for a web site run by a commercial entity where one third of the content on the site is 'harmful to minors', or the Texas AG can bring 10k USD/day charges even if no minor has visited the website. There's a lot of speech you do have a right to that can fall under that bar.
Maybe it's close enough to the right policy as to be worth that burden, but it needs to at least be considered in the context of what it's actually promoting, not just what the sticker on the front says.
gattsuru
4d ago
Fair on Jole; like Ethan of Athos it feels like it's putting too much effort into trying to answer Le Guin's 'taking life versus giving it' problem, but without the big narrative tension from a speeding deadline. Flowers felt stronger if a bit more repetitive and is certainly no Memory or Komarr, but I still enjoyed it about the same lines as Cryoburn.
gattsuru
6d ago
Louis McMaster Bujold is always a blast. Sometimes a little preachy in the later works, but great howdunnits. Miles, Mutants, and Microbes is a little weird of an anthology since "Labyrinth" touches on topic the topic but not as heavily on the plot points of the other two works, while Diplomatic Immunity is more
DI can stand alone or as a sequel to Falling Free, but it's an odd editing decision, even by Baen's standards.
You see that Vorkorsigan-like tones more often in fantasy -- Diana Wynne Jones is a little less high social drama but similar -- but it does seem pretty badly underserved in scifi. Maybe some of the Ciaphas Cain series, if you're into Warhammer?
gattsuru
12d ago
With eight people, all older than fifty and some over eighty, facing serious burns, it'll be a minor miracle if there are no fatalities.
gattsuru
12d ago
Hm. Don't remember that phrase. Maybe this or this touch on similar themes, but they don't have that word specifically. And while it's definitely the sort of discussion Balioc goes over a bit, the phrase itself feels more like raggedjackscarlet or the-grey-tribe... except they don't have it either.
Do you remember about how long ago it was linked? Pre-COVID? Pre-split-from-SSC?
siikr.tumblr.com can be better for searching if you know the tumblr's name than either google or tumblr's built-in-search, though it's still not good.
gattsuru
14d ago
"We won't enforce the 10k USD/day, promise , unless it gets too gay" is putting a lot of trust in Ken Paxton.
EDIT: I agree that he very probably won't go after the vast majority of such websites. I also think the only thing limiting him from picking up the weakest-looking inmate and slamming them into the wall is wanting to get some as-applied challenges settled first, and the one-in-one-hundred risk of that will make a lot of changes in behavior.
gattsuru
17d ago
I would recommend using, or picking up, a pair of decent work gloves. I've done four or five car door repairs, and every single time I've either cut up my hands or gloves. Even if it's miserably hot, they'll be worth making sure it's not your fingers.
gattsuru
18d ago
If you know any lesbians and are under the age of 30, you're likely to run into at least a few lesbians who flirt with transitioning or transition.
Even in older circles, there's been a small portion who've long experimented with small amounts of T to go superbutch; some of them have started liking 'sir' outside of the bedroom context, though the majority have largely stayed mum or paved over the matter.
I've also heard of, though never met, "FTM femboys," who as far as I can tell are women who transition to men who dress as women...
It's pretty rare, but yeah, you can run into that a bit. Pantheggon's probably the most comprehensible to straight(ish) non-furs (and contrast Accelo to see what a bi cis femboy looks like, with the caveat that there's some m/m and even the m/f stuff is about as gay as that can get), though I'm just making an educated guess about the artist's actual gender. Haven't run into it in real life, at least as the sorta thing that they've waved as a flag.
... which is again a bizarre way to arrive at basically heterosexuality. I realize that the femboy thing is distinct from femnininity proper -- try calling a trans woman a femboy and see how it goes -- but at some point the irony and the flip flopping just goes so far that I can't even entertain the logic.
There's a criticism that t4m (or even t4t) transmen can end up 'just' straight with more steps, but I dunno if that really matches up to how it goes in reality, and not just in the sense that some transmen like to top. But I'm really not a fan of the whole 'escalating scale where nonconventional is better' thing, either.
I think some of the weirdness is downstream of seeing-as-a-state-dropdown-box problems, but a lot of it's that coherent names get overloaded quick. A lot of these people are what I'd consider central examples of nonbinary (ie, wanting to present as mixtures of male and female) or genderfluid (ie, wanting to present as male some times but female in other times), but because the terms also include a bunch of random junk you end up a dozen different people trying to come up with new terms that aren't, which get jumped on in turn and often have pretty stupid-sounding names. I keeping hoping that the versions with actual surface grip will have enough time and brownian motion to have a sort of brazil nut effect going on, but even with actual physics that's really dependent on pretty specific requirements, and it's more likely than not they won't be present here.
gattsuru
19d ago
Can you give an example of a potential EO rule to change this?
How well-grounded do you want?
I don't think we'd see a Democratic President put forward an EO holding all asylees, once granted asylum, to be treated as having "been lawfully admitted for permanent residence" at the time of their entry, rather than the time they were issued a green card, but that's for political reasons rather than fear of judicial review. A court case would inevitably point to such retroactive adjustments in other contexts (the Cuban Adjustment Act was a statute, and had a portion of "lawfully admitted" happening up to 30 months before registry), but the real power would just come from the courts, and especially SCOTUS, not being able or willing to retroactively strip citizenship from hundreds of thousands of people, no matter how improperly given. A unilateral executive modification of the immigration registry date falls under similar problems -- even if a 2029 Dem admin had unilaterally granted it a green card to someone under this law that couldn't possibly have legally been eligible (eg, having been born after 1986), it's not clear anyone would have standing to challenge it... and it's just as unclear what political results would fall from that.
These are still mechanically possible; both could lead to a large number of people being given American citizenship overnight.
For a more politically plausible path, take something more like a soon-as-possible policy of rubber stamping of asylum claims, followed by a late-in-administration full rule setting a rubber-stamping of asylee-to-green-card-to-naturalization process. The strict read of the relevant statutes has six years, but it's not clear that even a fair-handed judiciary would read it that way rather than five years. This wouldn't get people voting overnight, but it'd be able to naturalize them within a single President's administration. The APA tomfoolery we've seen with DACA applies here; it could well be done with one term if the following administration was forced by courts to keep the old policies running.
There's other options that are more politically possible, but I'm not comfortable discussing them publicly.
Also, hasn't SCOTUS been pretty open to claims of standing by states challenging Federal policy?
Not really. Massachusetts v. EPA's what everyone points to requiring courts give 'special solicitude' to state challenges of federal policy, but that's literally only been used for that one case at SCOTUS, with every following case leaving states high and dry.
gattsuru
22d ago
Even the best Final Fantasy are beautifully flawed -- anyone that thinks VII was perfect can shove it up Guard Scorpion's tail. XII's world always struck me as much more interesting than its plot, just as the combat itself seemed more interesting than the gambit system you end up spending more time working around (though I've long been a Tales of fan so I may be judging the gambit system a little too harshly).
Agreed that the remake is in an awkward place. Like X and XI, it's in that awkward early stage of 3d work that's just high enough quality that it can't cruise on retro feel or imagination, but still so low-res that it's painful to watch and not easily vastly improved with emulation and upscaling... while the remaster also screwed around with enough of the systems that it's not a clear upgrade from gameplay perspectives. I prefer job systems in general, since some of my favorite games in the series have been FFXIV and the original FFT (and arguably Legend of Mana, though handwaves), but it definitely moves away from the learn-and-automate feel of the original. I'd guess that it was set that way under the assumption you'd have played the original enough that it'd just be repetitive? But that's not really right, either.
That said, both the original and remaster seem like they've been big sources of Lessons Learned for other games in the series, so well worth knowing just for that (in contrast to something like FFType0).
Hope you enjoy the Switch 2.
gattsuru
25d ago
Most of the common complaints are about minimum memory and CPU footprint; VSCode takes comparable resources to run as far more fully-featured IDEs. But if you've got the specs these are unlikely to actually feel bad, it's just kinda goofy.
The biggest problems are pretty hardware-specific, but they've been pretty bad when they pop up. I've had VSCode pull 16+GB memory (especially bad on an 8GB-RAM system) or peg multiple threads at 100% core utilization just idling, all with the default configuration, no extensions. A lot of it seems very dependent on renderer, especially since it started defaulting to a hardware renderer even on Intel integrated GPUs, but sometimes 'normal' developer workstations with multimonitor configurations have gone really wonky. While a less common use case, I've seen bigger problems with massive files in VSCode than in VisualStudio, Intellij, Android Studio (which isn't great itself!), or NotePad++, sometimes to the point where I had to shutdown the computer because VSCode was capping out CPU utilization so high that I couldn't use the mouse or keyboard.
((I've also had problems with deployments of VSCode, rather than VSCode itself. Which, tbf, usually aren't even the Electron developers faults, but since it includes things like a 40+ GB electron update, it's still worth keeping in mind before committing to VSCode as a day-to-day dev environment.))
VSCode defends itself in many cases by pointing to issues with extensions, and to some extent that's fair: just as it's not the Electron devs fault that a distro screwed up once, it's not VSCoders fault that a random html/css extension can peg a cpu. You can't build a framework that can contain every sufficiently dedicated forkbomb without making it useless. But you're almost certainly going to need some extensions just handle basic compiling and debug functionality. And some of them are pretty bad! My worst experience have been with the Java variants, with high idle CPU utilization across the board, but that's mostly because VSCode is the 'officially supported' tool for FIRST FRC so I see it on a lot of different non-optimized hardware. I don't do much webdev, but the few times I've run into ESLint, even with a minimal ruleset and properly configured (why is apply-rules-on-typing even an option?!) it's been pretty painful.
gattsuru
26d ago
Anyone have particularly strong feelings about best (or worst) UI libraries? I spent a good part of the weekend trying to take a more serious attempt at familiarizing myself with Avalonia, but I'll admit user interface work is always something I've dabbled with rather than gotten a great understanding of, and at the dabbler's level a lot of great or terrible code gets completely buried by the strength (Visual Studio) or weakness (oh boy, QT!) of IDE-focused tooling, or the difficulty of entry (ia ia OpenGL fhtagn).
The WSJ reports:
Preliminary findings indicate that switches controlling fuel flow to the jet’s two engines were turned off, leading to an apparent loss of thrust shortly after takeoff, the people said. Pilots use the switches to start the jet’s engines, shut them down, or reset them in certain emergencies.
The switches would normally be on during flight, and it is unclear how or why they were turned off, these people said. The people also said it was unclear whether the move was accidental or intentional, or whether there was an attempt to turn them back on.
This is preliminary and unofficial, so this isn't necessarily the real cause; no small part of the Boeing MAX scandal was because original 'leaks' heavily emphasized pilot error over the technical faults.
But if true, this is staggering. NA255 and other takeoff misconfiguration disasters have happened, and typically reflect a long series of systemic failures in addition to pilot misconduct, but each individual step is recognizable and understandable until it was too late. By contrast, the aircraft here could not have taxi'd, or run up, or gotten down the runway with fuel cut off to both engines; they're designed so that neither one could be hit accidentally. There is no failure that would cause pilots to turn them off mid-takeoff, and not even some bizarre reason to want to try.
Which... does not leave a lot of options, and they're all bad.
EDIT: official preliminary report here:
The aircraft achieved the maximum recorded airspeed of 180 Knots IAS at about 08:08:42 UTC and immediately thereafter, the Engine 1 and Engine 2 fuel cutoff switches transitioned from RUN to CUTOFF position one after another with a time gap of 01 sec. The Engine N1 and N2 began to decrease from their take-off values as the fuel supply to the engines was cut off...
As per the EAFR, the Engine 1 fuel cutoff switch transitioned from CUTOFF to RUN at about 08:08:52 UTC. The APU Inlet Door began opening at about 08:08:54 UTC, consistent with the APU Auto Start logic. Thereafter at 08:08:56 UTC the Engine 2 fuel cutoff switch also transitions from CUTOFF to RUN.
I don't think there's any plausible solely-electrical or mechanical explanation that would explain these recordings.
gattsuru
3d ago
To be fair, Mackey's appeal was successful last week, and his case has been directed back to trial courts with orders to dismiss the case.
(Albeit for technical reasons related to trial proof, rather than the obvious first amendment problems.)
gattsuru
13d ago
Apologies, KJA's pretty much my central example of Extruded Book Product; the comparison's not a compliment to either of them.
gattsuru
13d ago
Tchaikovsky's not quite a Zahn or Pratchett-level writer, but he's pretty worthwhile; will definitely second if any of his books grasp you. I dunno that I'd say better than Sanderson -- Children of Time had more interesting characters and core ideas, but the plot and especially denouement was a muddled mush in a way that even the more trite Sanderson stuff (or even some 'better' Kevin J Anderson stuff!) never hits. But definitely at least on the same or similar tiers.
Creative sex toys, generally dildos designed or themed around fantasy monsters. Some front page examples now include Kragg the Rock Dragon and Reggie the Mothman, along with the more typical werewolf or saytr or minotaur.
Bad Dragon itself is a specific company that pioneered in the field (and has kinda become the Kleenex of sex toys, double entendre not intended) and runs heavily on the furry theme, but there’s a small industry out there. Because of some worker disputes and BD focusing more on male customers, I’d expect most female novelty-seekers to work with a variety of other companies (or chase the zillions of Etsy shops focusing on the field) as well. See The Wandering Bard, or PhoenixFlame Creations, Primal Hardwere, Weredog,co,uk, or Paladin Pleasure for other examples in the business.
Uh, somewhere private, and only if you don’t mind getting blasted with every imaginable fantasy dick (and a handful of vulvas/tongues/butts). All of these are hugely NSFW.
gattsuru
14d ago
They have to get rid of "content harmful to minors". That's theoretically less expansive in many ways, but in practice it's far broader than all but the softest-core definition of porn.
gattsuru
14d ago
It’s a convention from role playing communities indicating either out-or-character comments or side discussions not attached to the main thrust of the current discussion.
gattsuru
14d ago
I think the implication of the proceedings was that this was not true, clearly wasn't true, and the court didn't want to waste time and money on sorting it so used other procedural grounds to close the matter.
But from a due process perspective, that's an abomination. If the problem genuinely was that the court believed TB had a criminal history or other occurrences of mental health breakdown, TB has absolutely no reason, having read the court's public record, to actually go and find proof on those things. There's not even a reference to what better proof would be about.
((Admittedly, because it's quite possible TB presented perfectly adequate proof, given that the expungement process requires petitioners give permission for a full background and mental health record search, and the law requires the court to ask the committing facility. I don't trust New Jersey judges.))
And more critically, it's trivially resolvable. Assuming without evidence that the court would be crippled by asking for criminal records, it costs the judge mere seconds to write out that the plaintiff needed to provide them. Instead, if he doesn't die or run out of money or patience first, TB's going to back to court with a list of his medications in his pocket, proudly mispronounce every single one, and the judge will find some other excuse that doesn't really matter.
Most principled third parties read about these situations and fear some authoritarian judge taking rights away (which does happen) but the vast majority is "please give me something, anything to work with.....okay I guess you won't."
And if judges want us to believe that, they a) need to actually write it into the public record, and b) have public records giving normal people reason to distrust them.
gattsuru
16d ago
[Note that by "childish and gay", that's "this is how attraction works when your age is only measured in single digits" and "not confident/socially capable enough to trust you can dominate a more feminine woman", respectively. It's also preferring more "universal" traits than specifically masculine ones, if you prefer that framing.]
I won't deny the 'gay' bit (though I like my men with a bit more meat on them), but as much fun as homersoc_ style 'tomboy breaking' can be, a sizable part of the interest for me at least is finding someone who's interested in domming me. I can dom and trust myself to do so; it's just not really my favorite. That's not universally connected to masculine traits -- lipstick doms do exist -- but I'll point to scottieman's Anthology of Rat Bullying as an example of what would otherwise be 'normally' traditionally feminine top (uh, barring the last image, cw: m/f and one m/m/f) framework that becomes tomboyish as much by having the character act as a dom as by any overlapping or shared interest with the subs.
gattsuru
16d ago
A lot of the axis that popularized AGP have been trying to paint furries as autozoophilies. It's objectionable to me in part because a lot of people would round off the 'auto' bit, so it is less palatable than 'tf kinkster'.
((Although there's a few places that -philia that does show up in kink-heavy spheres: vore fans call themselves voreaphiles or endosomaphiles pretty often depending on flavor, and people who buy 'i consent' sleep masks call it somnophilia even if it doesn't fit under the technical definition.))
But it's also objectionable because it seems pretty obviously wrong as a broad model. Yes, there are people who fit the central version of the case: Bailey brings up plushophiles that have a plush tf kink, which is pretty common, but I could link to a guy talking about how he wants to TF into a werewolf, get rawwed by a werewolf, or both at the same time. But there's an absolute ton of people that don't, ranging from human-on-anthro fans, to those who fantasize about being a different species than what they find attractive, to those who only find transformation or becoming an anthro interesting in a nonsexual sense even if they have sexual interests in other parts of the furry fandom, to those with intense sexual interests in a transformation concept so long as it's happening to someone else.
To be fair, Bailey et all don't claim that autoanthrozoophilia is absolutely universal among furries. But they do everything up to that point in the articles themselves, and in contexts outside of academic papers just imply it really heavily, and indeed go further and suggest that these correlations explain how people became interested or more interested in the fandom, rather than any other possible arrow of causation.
That's a pretty big central part of the disagreement for Blanchard/Bailey's AGP theory, and there it is much more explicitly aggressive: they claim that trans people either fall strictly into one of homosexual transsexual or AGPs, categorically. To the point where any testimony that crosses the margins -- a solely-androphilic transwoman without traditionally-male interests and who masturbates to dressing as a woman, or a solely-gynophillic or bisexual transwoman with traditionally feminine interests who doesn't -- is evidence that the trans person isn't willing to be truthful. This was maybe defensible in the 1980s and 1990s, where various motivating factors lead trans women to present study leads highly sanitized versions of themselves.
But these days we have wide arrays of sources that can't be built around people trying to lie to psychiatrists. There's tons of counterexamples, and even a handful would raise serious questions about whether this behavior was the motivating factor.
gattsuru
16d ago
Yeah, there's seems a pretty weird mix of 'awkward substitutions that probably should just wait for an Amazon delivery instead' (worchestershire sauce), 'not exactly traditional but workable' (fresh chili, green onions, arguably ginger), 'could work as a stir fry, but stretching the limit from americanizing to just bastardizing' (ketchup, that much sugar) and 'what the actual fuck' (breaking the noodles, olive oil, boiling them before pan cooking).
To be fair, he doesn't seem to promoting it as a traditional pad thai and a few other recipes include pretty bastardized versions, too (cacio e pepe e boullion?).
I'm more on Team Gooner, which I'm sure will surprise absolutely no one, but this metaphor seems to occlude more than it illuminates. I've got some complaints about its accuracy, but assuming it for the sake of this discussion:
`1. Why is this 'drug' different from any other over-the-counter one, not just that people want to restrict children and teenagers from having access, or even that the state gets involved in restricting access, but that it's so vital that state restrictions can put sizable burdens on adults doing things entirely away from minors? Things like alcohol or cigarettes have the obvious physical ramifications that you're pretty clearly -- no one's getting cirrhosis of the dick, here. Am I missing some other parallel, or what distinguishes gooner materials from vidya or youtube or people who get way too into painting minatures or spend every weekend at a sportsball game?
`2. Why is this 'drug' so bad for minors such that we're willing to accept onerous restrictions on adults, and yet not something we need to hold against the adults themselves. There are restrictions like alcohol and cigarettes and the entire DEA. Maybe Texas won't end up being that bad, if only by the standard being set so low, or maybe we're just being cautious because it's so dangerous otherwise?
Or are restrictions going to keep going on from children and teenagers to everyone else? Because a lot of people, including the Texas politicians writing this bill, pretty clearly want to restrict it in general.
`4. Why is it so hard for advocates of these restrictions -- either on minors, or on everyone -- to actually focus on this 'drug'? No one was gooning from a single 1970s Playboy or a couple grainy standard definition videos; it's supposedly something specific to modern porn that's so much worse... and yet the Texas law here wouldn't just cover a 1970s Playboy, but even material softer-core or less overtly prurient than that. Even people here treat hobbyist weird content as at best as acceptable side effect.
`5. There's a model of addictive personalities as responding to spaces they can't get fulfilled otherwise, in the same way that mineral deficiencies can drive people to find weird or even inedible things delicious. In addictions with serious chemical dependency or withdrawal it's hilariously wrong, but gooning doesn't seem to have those things, and some gooners even challenge themselves to go long periods without (... usually in November, for acronym reasons).
That old TLP article has a punchline in the middle about how "Pornography is a scapegoat", and while TLP puts it on ego and narcissism because... uh, well, he's a coastal psychiatrist. There's a pretty mindboggling set of statistics about the sorta thing (not-Aella) people usually do before consensual sex, and everything from dating to marriage to mixed-sex casual meetups are all down the tubes.
Is this missing nutrient model wrong, here? If it's right, might it suggest to something else that's driving more of the changes in behavior people think is downstream of a couple hours on an unexciting hobby and a jacked right wrist? Because if there's something broken in relationship formation well before sex (or, uh, handies), removing that outlet might cause people to start putting a lot more effort into working around the break... or it might end up with a stampede of people going over a creaky bridge held in place by one rivet. And given how broken relationship formation is (especially for <18s and <25s), I'm not optimistic about that.
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