seething_spendcel
No bio...
User ID: 4215
seething_spendcel
8hr ago
Could you not say the exact same thing of Talarico? "If Talarico is the best thing Texas Republicans can put forward, they deserve to lose"? He will show support for murderers and blatantly lie about how unjust the system is for particular demographics to get votes from those demographics. Of course, it's all in the eye of the beholder. But considering the red-leaning nature of Texas, it will be profoundly sad to me if they elect someone that is way to the left of the state and deviates significantly in religion and culture, even if Paxton is particularly controversial.
For my predictions, I think Talarico will lose, Ossoff and El-Sayed will win, and Troy Jackson is unclear to me. I guess I'd say he's probably going to win, too.
seething_spendcel
2d ago
Somehow, I feel envious of you. My friends get texts from James Talarico, but I don't. Why don't the Congressional front-runners like me? Am I being too aggressive in my approaches?
seething_spendcel
3d ago
I also tried a cold brew on a separate occasion, but it cost $7 and seemed to taste worse than plain, hot, black coffee. Sad. Next time I go to a cafe I'm going to try a regular latte again, but if I don't start liking it more, I'm probably just going to start ordering plain black coffee too.
seething_spendcel
3d ago
I didn't even consider that somebody could snoot their cock at me for this. Horrifying. I'm never going to a cafe again.
seething_spendcel
3d ago
Funnily enough, drinking plain black coffee every day doesn't mean that you know anything about coffee. I ordered a latte in a cafe a few months ago and was surprised to find it wasn't sweet at all, just creamy and bitter, but I really liked the latte art. It was a leaf.
So, a couple coffee questions:
- When you're in a cafe, what is your go-to order? It would be a wasted trip if I just ordered plain black coffee.
- I have tried espresso a couple times and find I don't really like it that much. Do men commonly get sugar, vanilla, or caramel in their lattes, cappuccinos, and other drinks? Is that the equivalent of going to a bar and ordering "girl drinks"?
seething_spendcel
4d ago
Do you actually think that suicide by long gun is not a practical problem? That's probably what people would use, if handguns were not available. It's quite easily achieved.
seething_spendcel
5d ago
If a teacher is responsible, trained, and willing, I see no reason to prevent them from carrying if they want to. If they lose their gun, it will be like any other private citizen losing their gun: they're probably getting fired.
seething_spendcel
5d ago
Indeed! There are many similar mods. I played "Rune" in the 2000s and early 2010s and there were some RPG mods that I thought were really cool. However, you probably can see how different what you described is from what I described. Basically everything in your Warcraft mode just plays around with numbers in various different ways. It's quite a difference in scale from this, which was what was under discussion.
seething_spendcel
6d ago
No, no, I was just making a joke. Most guys in the military don't see combat anymore, that was part of my joke. The other part of my joke is that it's funny to answer that you're a cringe LARPer even if you actually did see combat and were highly trained besides.
seething_spendcel
6d ago
I think that having a few ex-marines with AR-15s on any school grounds is probably not very effective in the cost per QALY saved.
Maybe not, but clearly there would be quite a bit of demand for it if everyone realized that it was the best way to stop school shootings. I'm sure we've done stupider things for QALY.
Besides, Chads with M4s on school grounds are really cool. Imagine what a role model he'd be. Imagine the alphoomers asking him how many people he killed in the military and him coolly responding that he's just a cringe LARPer who never went overseas.
seething_spendcel
7d ago
I have no idea how the mods would view it, but for what it's worth, "special needs" is pretty much a code word for "retarded". You can make it sound prettier with words like "mentally deficient" or "developmentally disabled" or something, but everyone knows what you mean. But you wouldn't normally expect an imbecile to be able to do anything like this. That's why it's something to note.
seething_spendcel
7d ago
As terrible as the idea sounds, the only thing we can probably do to is to in some form or fashion make sure that the places where shootings are likely to happen have at least someone who is armed. Nothing else will work today and it’s not something we can wait for.
Paul Harrell had a video on this and noted that these kinds of random spree killings tend to happen in places you wouldn't expect to have anyone armed. I agree, this is the best we can do. Supposedly church shootings went out of fashion after enough church shooters got domed before killing very many people.
seething_spendcel
7d ago
... yes?
Obviously they do, but I think that that's a pretty baseless assumption. The type to do this isn't the type to get help. Especially if getting help restricts your life. Voluntary or involuntary psych ward admissions are the kind of thing that can stick with you; if he had any interest in guns, for instance, many states, and federal law, restrict psych ward entrants from buying or owning them. The military checks that, too. As for medicine, SSRIs and therapists can help in some cases, but when you're at the point where you shoot up a school, it's not likely that they can save you.
seething_spendcel
7d ago
Yeah, that was also my first thought upon learning that information. "Just how 'special needs' was he, anyway?" To plan this out and actually commit to it must mean he wasn't that mentally deficient.
seething_spendcel
7d ago
Made a post in 2017 about that
Wow, excellent content! Thank you for linking! If even European countries can't stop this kind of thing from happening, then some amount is always going to happen regardless of if we ban everything or not. For Europe, though, it's easier for them to say "well, we tried." That's probably not worth it for us, if you ask me.
On October 17th, a 16 year-old killed 4 in Bend, Oregon, a town of ~100k people.
FACTS KNOWN SO FAR
The shooter was a special needs child. His mother hoped, in 2020 when he was 10 years old, that a return to in-person learning would help him. The weapon he used was a Maverick 88, which is a cheap 12 gauge pump-action shotgun. He got it from his mother, who bought it legally and gifted it to him in August. He looks kind of like a school shooter. The shooter approached the school from the south from an undeveloped lot, evidently on foot. He first shot at a bystander:
The first 911 call came at 12:59 p.m., after the driver of a red pickup truck saw a man approach the school, throw his long gun over the fence and climb over after it, police said Friday. When the pickup driver confronted him, the suspect opened fire, striking the truck at least three times.
At this time, a father of a daughter in the school and concealed carry weapon holder, noticed this shooting and drove into the parking lot and followed the shooter as he took his next actions.
The shooter gained entry by shooting the doors (from the first link):
The suspect then forced his way into the school by firing into the glass panes of an external set of double doors, police said.
He then made his way to the special education classroom just to the left of the entrance and fired as many as 15 rounds. He killed a 5 year old, an 8 year old, and an 11 year old, as well as a 25 year old teacher, and he injured a 7 year old and a 54 year old teacher. A teacher, who remained uninjured during and after this incident, threw his cell phone at the shooter and engaged him physically to try to get the gun away from him; it was during this time that the concealed carry father shot and killed the shooter with a pistol chambered in .40 S&W.
Despite the facts not being as much in favor as it was for the prosecution of Jennifer and James Crumbley in Michigan…
Decades ago, Oregon lawmakers made an exception to gun laws that allow parents to give rifles and shotguns to minors. In many areas of the state, as in other parts of the American West and South, it’s a rite of passage for a young person to receive a weapon for hunting or target practice.
…it is likely that a method to prosecute the mother will be found anyway, though I’m not sure what the point of that is. Most parents don’t suspect their kid will shoot up a school. At the time of writing, I haven’t heard anything about motivations or any potential red flags the shooter had. I think he may have been a child of a single parent; I only ever hear anything about the mom, not the dad.
ANALYSIS
Similar to previous shootings, this shooting seems to invalidate certain gun control arguments. There are no proposed bans that target manual action firearms, as far as I know, and the mother was legally clear to buy firearms in most states that don’t add hoops to jump through before purchasing firearms. I would have expected any obvious red flags from the shooter to come out by now. I forgot about this article about the shooter's apparent connection to "764". I saw a post a month or so ago about that same group. The doors didn’t stand up to a shotgun blast. There was apparently no resource officer nearby to forcibly stop the shooting. There would likely have been more casualties, had there not been a concealed carry holder nearby. Schools are de-facto gun-free zones under Oregon state law, which would reduce the likelihood that a concealed carry holder could stop the shooting.
On the other hand, I’m not sure how you really stop something like this.
-
Uvalde and Parkland show that police officers can fail quite easily.
-
There would have to be a lot of new legislation in place to be able to spy on someone enough to track their pre-crime enough to involuntarily commit them if they’re planning something crazy like this. And obviously, someone like this isn’t going to be interested in committing themselves.
-
I see people say that shootings like these are examples of why America needs more mental healthcare. Okay. How are they supposed to stop this, exactly? Do they think he wouldn’t have done this if he just had the right chemicals in his brain or the right therapist to talk to? But I see people say all the time that they had to try a bunch of different therapists and a bunch of different SSRIs to find the one right for them. Trying multiple therapists and drugs? But I want to shoot kids now! And even with a therapist, I’ve heard it said that the therapist, in the end, can’t really help you directly; you have to want to be helped and you have to do the work yourself.
-
Allowing teachers to concealed carry if they choose to do so could be very beneficial for basically free, but since most teachers and school staff are women, I can’t imagine this would have a very big effect, since women are not very likely to concealed carry, and even when they do, anecdotally, they don't seem very serious about training with them.
-
Along similar lines to the last bullet point:
I assume the teacher that threw the phone and tackled the shooter was probably a male.Confirmed female by one of the CNN articles, but I still hold this point because a man could have done it better. We could probably use more male teachers. If men go for careers and you can't make a career out of being a teacher, maybe we really should have paid teachers more? -
It was a pump shotgun, meaning this shooting could have happened even in the majority of Europe.
Restricting firearms might have stopped this one. If the shotgun was bought from an FFL, a gun ban might have dissuaded the mother enough to not find one in a private sale. Of course, that is a very fraught issue, with a lot of collateral damage (such as making millions of felons overnight…) and constitutional challenges.
Which leads me to my next point…
Are we serious about gun control still?
From the New York Times article linked earlier:
Legislators updated gun laws five years ago after a deadly attack during the holiday season at a suburban Portland mall that began when a man stole his roommate’s unsecured AR-15. They stiffened requirements for storage and made it easier to sue parents whose children misuse weapons if they failed to lock up the guns or supervise their use.
Lawmakers opted not to impose criminal penalties in part because similar statutes in other states disproportionately affected parents of color, said Amie Wexler, executive director of the Alliance for a Safe Oregon, a gun safety advocacy group.
Apparently, gun murders are not as important as being antiracist! That dovetails nicely with this other incident where a mass shooter was released to home detention. I wonder if the Moms Demand Action demographic would vote differently if they knew about this particular tendency of Democrat politicians.
Malcolm Gladwell released a book recently on gun violence. He argues that pistols are a bigger source of gun violence, that assault weapon bans don’t really do anything, that we need far more cops, and that black people are wrong in thinking that they’re overpoliced. I think I agree with all that, but he also slips in some things that I don’t agree with, like that the Second Amendment has its roots in slavery, or that drugs and robberies and organized crime aren’t the cause as much as “young men getting mad at each other” is.
Personally, I doubt any politicians listen to him. Regardless of the efficacy of gun control, it will be passed in blue states because that’s “in” right now. Finding some new way to restrict firearms earns you status points on the left. But it’s hard not to notice there’s some friction in blue voters on this issue.
As long as school shootings happen, there will be a pretty sizeable contingent that will want to ban all guns, Australia style (though you can still get shotguns in Australia…). Tradeoffs really do exist, but it’s a tough sell to say that the country is built off of some amount of murdered kids every year. Seems there aren't any perfect answers to this problem.
seething_spendcel
10d ago
seething_spendcel
11d ago
Endless Sky was great! I really liked EV Nova but I don't want to start up Sheepshaver just to play EV Override, I want a real port. It hopefully happens soon. You can already play it in your web browser, but it's not been reverse engineered yet. This site just plays the compiled binary in the browser.
seething_spendcel
11d ago
Yeah aside from game slowdown during text scrolling, it seemed about perfect to me. You can also play it natively on your 3DS or DS, which is what I did.
I don't think so, it's just an adventure of discovery for everyone. A common complaint on Github is that nobody is really contributing to other repos right now, they just start up their new reversing project and fire away. I didn't even know an Oni web port existed until I read about it from some other random user. Also EV Override.
seething_spendcel
11d ago
It's okay, at least the remaining developer is still getting $376 per month on Patreon to do, uh, nothing.
seething_spendcel
11d ago
Automatically reconfiguring existing stuff is an incredible demonstration of capability. Smashing Counter Strike and Warcraft 3 together would never have been done before this because it's really difficult. Decompilations had been done before this, but they took years of effort. That Diablo 1 decompile was done by one guy, who said it took him over 1000 hours. This isn't something you can wave away as "gimmickry" and "plagiarism". If it can do these really difficult things, it can certainly create really good new things, too.
seething_spendcel
11d ago
Yeah, seriously, it's not really even a debate at this point, is it? I even forgot an example, Modern Warfare 2, and in the last hour my attention was brought to Diablo 2 that was uploaded... yesterday. Someone needs to tell the years-overdue Kickstarter scam developers that the jig is up.
And as far as I'm aware, decompilation is a kind of reverse engineering. You use Ghidra or some other decompiler and get the assembly code, and then you write something that does the same thing that the original functions did. The best ones might match byte-for-byte when compiled with the same compiler, but otherwise, a good goal is to get each function to output the same things given the same inputs. The guy who reversed Diablo seems to use the terms interchangeably.
lol you're just now hearing about it? 😄 Pretty sure i mentioned it about these gamecube games being decompiled and 100% matched, such a thing could be used for d2 as well, though it's harder to split and match PC binaries
Edited to add: on your solutions point, there is only so much you can do. Even without AI tools, Red Dead Redemption got cracked eventually, despite its DRM protections. You can always set up a server emulator or your own server, which happened with Club Penguin, and probably will happen with World of Warcraft.
Yeah, I could be wrong. I forgot about his having troubles with the black vote and doing ads targeted towards black people. But it seems like that state is really blue now, with all the protests and all the Muslims.
More options
Context Copy link