seething_spendcel
No bio...
User ID: 4215
seething_spendcel
6d ago
Revolvers and guns with exposed hammers are more dangerous because the hammer on the back, when cocked, makes the trigger pull light enough for any infant to use- so if you're investigating the device like a very small child might and are properly fuzz-testing the controls, a 3 year old could easily fire it.
I think you might be right about that, and I hadn't considered it. Seems like the vast majority of those incidents involving children of those ages involve a DA/SA pistol or an SAO pistol. I really am only thinking of this because I own a few guns and having a future offspring shoot themselves with one is terrifying to me, but I also don't want to leave them all completely inaccessible.
My own father kept loaded guns around the house, but I don't recall any safety scares whatsoever... The two semi-auto rifles I can remember were both suspended higher than a toddler could feasibly reach, I think the pistol was stored in disguised Bible case in a drawer. You generally don't keep a round in the chamber on rifles anyway, though. I remember being told not to touch any of them because they were dangerous, but that would have probably been around when I was 6 or so, on account of my being able to remember it at all.
seething_spendcel
6d ago
Obviously, as a real world controller, the world would inevitably end up in the state that the book is in. There simply isn't any reason to not pull a Grand Inquisitor and induce societal heat death, as long as we're talking about stopping coups from ever happening. However, I think that the methods used would probably have to vary a lot more and we'd have to have a lot better industrial capabilities and maybe a better understanding of biology. Sleep hypnosis can't work, we obviously can't grow kids in jars and it might not be possible at all, and I think you'd have to take more extreme measures to eliminate things like hate and jealousy and greed. Like "nerve stapling" like in Alpha Centauri. And people don't like nerve stapling.
I'm more referring to incidents where some gun is left out and a curious infant goes and shoot himself or something else. I wonder how often that happened with bladed weapons. What are the statistics on accidental fatal sword swallowing?
In hindsight, maybe you should condition them to not leave dangerous things out on tables...
seething_spendcel
6d ago
I guess you'd condition them to dislike guns when they're dumb stupid infants that try to kill themselves all the time and then re-condition them to be comfortable with guns or even like guns once they've grown up a bit.
seething_spendcel
6d ago
I just finished Brave New World. Pretty great!
As World Controller, what are some ways you'd like to utilize Pavlovian conditioning on toddlers? Personally, I think I'd do the trick they did in the book where they had toddlers touch books and get shocked and have alarm bells ring and all kinds of other unpleasant stuff, but do it with guns instead. Imagine how much more safe our kiddos would be.
seething_spendcel
19d ago
A half marathon is pretty cool! But I'd never run one. The farthest I could ever imagine wanting to run would be a 10k. Nice time!
I ran a 5k today in 28:27. My best time so far! Though I haven't run very many 5ks. I think this might have been my 5th one. These days, though, if I run more than 2 miles, I get some pain on the inside of my left knee, which is lame. Someday I want to run one under 27 minutes. I probably would have made it under that time if I didn't walk for a minute or so, so the goal is not too far off. Running through the street through downtown is pretty cool.
I guess my current fitness goal is to be able to press the 24 kilogram kettlebell I got.
seething_spendcel
27d ago
Actually, it sounds like something a sane person would say if they recognized they had slaughtered the entirety of their children. Instead, she's in court trying to exonerate herself. If she really felt sorry, she'd have pled guilty. Or better yet, killed herself. Any normal person's life would and should be over in these circumstances, regardless of the reason why they did it.
seething_spendcel
1mo ago
I think meal prepping is probably a waste of time, a lot of the time. Why not just buy mixed nuts (or cashews or almonds or whichever one you prefer) and your favorite fruit? Harder to get easy vegetables, but nuts and fruits are healthy enough and pretty easy. You could do edamame for protein, or protein bars, or the occasional rotisserie chicken.
seething_spendcel
1mo ago
It's a pretty grim future we're looking at when any good writing is getting called out as being written by an LLM. You've read @urquan posts before, right? But you don't recognize any of his rhetorical style? It's AI to use triplets? Is this what every Quality Contributions thread is going to look like in a year or two? Come on, man.
seething_spendcel
2mo ago
Good work. I don't know, but I think if you don't have any sagging skin now, it's unlikely you'll have any in another 4 or 5 BMI lost.
I did Stronglifts earlier this year. My recommendation is to go ahead and try to follow the routine, but if at any point you get tired of it, feel free to switch to a different one, or forget about the gym and do weights at home. Whatever it takes to make the effort easiest for yourself.
seething_spendcel
2mo ago
I sympathize greatly with your situation. It's really quite a robbery that this court win doesn't help you.
If you could buy a gun, which one would you buy first? Would it be a handgun or a rifle first?
seething_spendcel
2mo ago
I liked the matcha candy I tasted, but I ordered a matcha latte and it really did taste like really bitter liquid grass, accurate description. It was awful. Never buying matcha anything ever again.
seething_spendcel
2mo ago
Lol thanks for the flashlight recommendation. Recommendations like that are part of why I posted. I guess I also wanted to hear other preparedness, or failures to prepare, that other people had. That flashlight looks pretty great without spending like a hundred bucks because you want the BEST flashlight possible.
Looking more into it, yeah, that radio is probably junk. Apparently the crank is a weak point on crank radios. I guess if I wanted a doohickey like that, there might be better stuff. I'll have to look into it some more. Or maybe I'll just buy that flashlight and forget about the rest of it.
seething_spendcel
2mo ago
I'm not saying you're wrong, but... are you sure? Being duplicitous isn't disqualifying for communists, and communists and Islamists alike share an interest in the destruction of the nation. Personally, I think it's likely that Mamdani is just keeping his Muslim status on the down-low.
seething_spendcel
2mo ago
I've been following the Free Stars development for a while. First there was that huge legal drama with Stardock that got resolved in a really weird way. Now (and admittedly this is much less eventful) every blogpost has some political crap buried within it. I'm not sure if the two original Toys for Bobs devs are super progressive, or their staffers developers are the super progressive ones, but it's kind of funny to have a giant dev progress update and then have a picture of you protesting fascism in front of the Washington Monument and talking about what a shocking year it's been politically.
I hope it gets out of Kickstarter Development Hell. The Escape Velocity Override remake, "Cosmic Frontier Override", was not so lucky. The devs wasted a bunch of time poorly rewriting everything and then apparently Peter Cartwright, the original creator, died while this all was going on. Maybe it'll keep going. The remaining dev is incentivized to keep going, because he somehow made a Patreon account a year or two after the kickstarter to get even more free money to develop freelance.
Or maybe I don't hope it gets out of Kickstarter Development Hell. How can I hope to defeat leftism if I play every game and watch every movie that leftists make? Maybe it's better if they just waste the money of other leftists and desperate 40 year olds. I am also a zoomer who played Ur Quan Masters, by the way. It was really good.
seething_spendcel
2mo ago
Yeah those are definitely good too. I have one, but it's mostly connected to the computers and internet. So the internet worked for a long time, but running a computer makes the battery go out pretty fast.
seething_spendcel
2mo ago
I'm just starting to add consistent cardio, so it might have a decent effect on me in combination with the other stuff I'm doing. But be proud of your shitloads of cardio! I donated blood the other day and my blood pressure was 114/68, which is slightly better than it usually is. Do it for slightly better blood pressure!!
seething_spendcel
2mo ago
My power went out on Sunday at about 8:30 PM and was out until 3 AM. The entire street was pitch black because the transformers in town got knocked out by a severe thunderstorm that came and went in under 30 minutes.
Lights in the house:
- my phone (other phones were low on charge and could not be used for long)
- two OLight Mini 2s (very useful! marginally brighter than my phone's flashlight)
- decently bright thin rectangular flashlight
- an oil lamp
Observations:
- I went out to check on the neighbors a little ways in, and went along the sidewalk to look closer at a fallen tree, and unwittingly I walked in between two downed power lines. Was this a failure of situational awareness, failure to have a bright enough flashlight, or just plain bad luck? The town guys came to look at the damage, and the first guy investigating had a flashlight that was very bright and could light up almost a whole block. The OLight Mini 2 is useful, but its capabilities are limited.
- I really could have used something that could light up an entire room in the house. If I had that, we probably wouldn't have needed the oil lamp. I consider oil lamps to be fire hazards. But they're really useful fire hazards. The kerosene provides a light for a long time.
- Having a nice, organized room helps you find stuff in it even when it's dark. I did not have a clean, organized room.
- The power going out is a good excuse to play card games. Or do the exercise that you were putting off, supposing the exercise wasn't with powered equipment.
- Surge protectors are good investments.
- It occurred to me that the house was uniquely vulnerable, and I didn't have any loaded pistols at that time, and loading in the dark would be awkward. I have a "nightstand gun" with a flashlight, but you typically don't have that in a holster. What I realized was that I could have used a pistol that had a flashlight that could fit in a holster so I could just put it on "just in case" when the power goes out. But I don't know anything about holsters. I have one holster for my CZ P10-C, but if I put a flashlight on the gun, it wouldn't fit in the holster.
- Sleeping was difficult because they were chainsawing a fallen tree through the night and obviously the white noise fans I have need power. Also it was pretty hot and humid without air conditioning.
I watched a Paul Harrell video about three-day-survival-packs, and he showed this product, and I realized that such a device would have been pretty useful for a power outage. I'm weighing that, a very bright and long-reaching flashlight, and certain weapon attachments due to the power outage. Likely, I'll get all that and then the next power outage will come and I'll find I didn't think of something else, too.
Apparently many people just start up their generators when this happens. Meh.
seething_spendcel
2mo ago
That's a pretty good amount of weight! I posted my beer belly in other avenues and was told that I actually didn't need to diet, just exercise, especially resistance training would help shed the ~10 lbs I want to lose. Thus commenced my effort to do 100 kettlebell swings every day, plus push-ups and bent rows for A days, pull-ups and push-ups for B days, plus half an hour of walking every day (at least), plus the complete cessation of the 2-4 hour naps I was taking all the time, plus no coffee after 2 PM (generally drinking about 32 fluid ounces of standard strength black coffee before then), plus eating fruits, vegetables, and (not so highly processed) meat.
I honestly think that the sleep was the best outcome from all this. The naps really were wasting a lot of time and not actually improving my restfulness, and now I feel awake all day until it's bed time. I should have known that would happen; the times I give up eating at lunch, I stop getting hungry at lunchtime. But the regular exercise is pretty great, too. I used to feel like a block of wood on some days, or earlier this year I felt like I couldn't use all of my lung capacity to breathe, but now I feel pretty mobile and my pulse was even under 60 the other day when I measured it. If my left knee didn't hurt after a couple miles, I'd try jogging even longer. I'm wondering if I should increase the kettlebell size, since doing 5 sets of 10 bent rows with 16 kilograms is kind of easy. Overhead pressing 16 kilograms is a bit more difficult, but generally I get a couple sets of 8 in before dipping down to 7 for the remaining 3. I guess swings with 20 kilograms would be better cardio than with 16 kilograms.
seething_spendcel
2mo ago
The one anime film I've seen in theaters (it was Chainsaw Man Reze Arc), there were people shouting at the screen on multiple occasions. I relate to your experience. However bad Hollywood is, these things aren't accepted in showings of western movies.
seething_spendcel
2mo ago
I imagine it can be uncommon in some areas in the same way that some people might not know anyone who owns a truck. As for the guns, though... the point of concealed carry is that it's concealed. You almost certainly have been around random civilians with guns and you just didn't know it. Unless you're in some hell state like New York or New Jersey or something.
seething_spendcel
2mo ago
I think I've seen some people online (not on this site, pocket knives don't come up much) say that fixed blades are better. It kind of reminds me of the old 2DS vs 3DS arguments I've seen. With the old 2DS, you eliminate one of the major structural weaknesses, the hinge. On the other hand, the display itself is exposed, so it could wear out more easily over time. I imagine the same could be said of pocket knives. But to me, it seems a bit impractical; you'd almost certainly need a holster/pouch on your belt for a fixed blade knife, right? Otherwise, you could put your hand in your pocket and cut yourself, or the blade could be dulled by just cutting your pocket up every day. I think the argument for fixed blade knives is best in the case of outdoor, camping, wilderness survival contexts. At least, I think that's the context in which I saw people advocate for them.
seething_spendcel
2mo ago
I shoot my Frankenglock (Grit Grips frame with OEM internals, Brownells Complete G19 slide) pretty well, even though it had quite a few problems at first. Maybe it just had to be broken in, maybe it needs some more oil, maybe it didn't like Winchester white box. I think I need to put a lot more rounds into it to be comfortable with it. I don't really like the trigger, but everything else about it is nice, I seem to shoot it better than most other guns somehow.
I'm probably going to make another gun-related thread in the Wellness Wednesday thread. I had a power outage last night and it made me contemplate my power outage readiness, or lack thereof.
seething_spendcel
2mo ago
Another of my acquaintances carries a double-action only revolver. His arguments for them make sense to me. It's pretty fun too shoot, too. I prefer autoloaders, of course. They're cheaper and hold more shots and the manual of arms are pretty familiar to me by now, and I wouldn't be surprised if certain autoloaders were actually more reliable than most revolvers. But if I carried a revolver, I think I'd want something with a little better accuracy than the snub-nose he's got. It kind of goes all over the paper, no matter who's shooting it.
It was a dumb idea, but some of the best posts on this site are replies to dumb posts. I'm a big help!
If you don't have a holographic sight on the 10/22, I imagine that would make the AR better anyhow. It's not like the recoil on the AR is hugely impactful.
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