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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   2554 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 21, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Many will be aware of the recent death (presumably by suicide) of singer Sinéad O’Connor. I will not pretend to have been a huge fan of her music - I simply haven’t listened to enough of it to have an opinion - let alone her politics, her whole persona, or her approach to life. She always struck me as someone whose aggressive leftism, third-worldist sympathies, and hard-edged “protest singer” aesthetic were simply outward reflections of a profoundly internally unwell individual; certainly her life story bears this out, as she not only suffered from a cocktail of mental illnesses - BPD, bipolar, PTSD - but also debilitating fibromyalgia. She seems to have been merely one link in a long chain of hereditary dysfunction, with her mother having been a total basket case and her teenage son taking his own life just a year and a half before she herself did.

That being said, I’ve always found her rendition of the Irish nationalist folk ballad “The Foggy Dew” particularly haunting. That mournful, keening style seemed to be her strong suit as a vocalist, and it fits perfectly with the Irish folk tradition.

Does anyone know any software that lets you draw floor plans and walk around them in first person? I know SketchUp does, but I really want proper WASD+mouse controls and not what it offers.

I'd suggest using the FPS templates in Unity or Unreal Engine. You'll be able to do that without any coding.

That actually reminds me how many youtubers do their virtual sets in Unreal Engine. I don't think I've seen a single one use Unity.

Frankly, having dabbled in Unity, I'm not sure I can really recommend it for much of anything.

REVIT

You'd have to rebind keys from the arrow buttons, and it's a little jank, but SweetHome3d looks to have that capability built-in.

I'm hoping this is more fun than culture war: Ireland's far-right National Party has been robbed of a considerable amount of gold (for use in the case of a collapse in fiat currency) by one of its ex-leading members.

Somewhere around the start of the year Finland's tiny fringe pro-Russian/Putinist scene was beset by a series of ludicrous scams that weren't connected by other means than mostly targetting Janus Putkonen, probably the loose scene's central figure, by all indications a true believer to Putin and Russia and the SMO and the whole "Z" thing (to such a degree that he actually lives in Donetsk and at least at some point run some sort of a local media operation there, however still also running a Finnish-language media targetted at his former countrymen, and keeping in contact with Finnish operators).

I mean things like an openly flamboyantly homosexual while still apparently fervently Putinist guy running vodka-fuelled tourist trips to Russia and then suddenly just organizing a bunch of trips that ended up not happening while the guy took the money and ran, still mocking his former compatriots for their stupidity. This wasn't the only scam but the one that I remember following the most clearly.

All while this happened, none of this seemed to shake Putkonen's faith to anything beyond the individual actors running the scams being "snakes" and "traitors" and whatsoever. I even asked him on Twitter (without receiving an answer); if you happen to be in a political/social scene where seemingly everyone seems to constantly be trying to rip everyone else (well, him, mainly) off, doesn't that tell that there's something fundamentally wrong with that scene? Might that not indicate an inbuilt flaw within the whole ideology underlying the scene itself? Ye shall know the tree by its fruits, and all that.

Too soon to make jokes about finding him at the end of the rainbow?

Twitter's backseat CEO has announced his intention to rename twitter:

And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds

If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make go live worldwide tomorrow

He then reposted an animated X

There's a delirious, fantasy quality to Elon's management of twitter. Is this a joke? Does anyone know? Why make consequential business announcements on your personal account, mixed with memes and joke business announcements? Either way, it's hilarious.

I wonder how Linda feels about all of this. Does she have much internal responsibility?

I think the rename is a poor business decision, if not that consequential of one - a lot of people really like the 'Twitter' name. And 'X' is not a very distinct name, if that's what he'll rename it to.

Imagining a future neoreactionary tech-CEO deciding to rename the United States during a manic episode

If X is closest in style to anything, it should, of course, be Art Deco

A man of culture...

X.com now points to https://twitter.com/. Interim X logo goes live later today.

Bold!

One of my favorite things about Elon's takeover is that it's a natural experiment on the limits of the network externality. Just how much can an established social media company get away with? So far the answer seems to be: lots.

The bargain bin at my local lumberyard was fully stocked this week, so I grabbed two rough planks of Walnut and two rough planks of Hard Maple for $33. I think I paid less than $2 per board foot all told. The walnut is fucking beautiful after it gets milled. My daughter has been begging me to make her a clock like I made for her grandparents last Christmas, so I finally got around to that. Although I kicked it up a notch with some walnut splines which I didn't have the know how, tools, or resources to do last year. In fact, returning to my clock project was rather illuminating.

For starters, I used up some more of the shitty poplar I had purchases at Home Depot of all places. No part of it is quite flat or square. I should have milled it again, but I didn't want to lose even more width or thickness off a relatively meager 3/4" thick, 3-1/2" wide plank. Getting the multitude of 30 degree cuts correct was also much easier with my fancy miter gauge, although I discovered it's probably 0.1-0.2 degrees off. I'm not sure it's worth the effort of recalibrating it, so I'm just going to keep that in mind and compensate when I need the angles to be perfect. Gluing it all up was also much easier when all the pieces are exactly the same shape, versus the frankenstein monster of irregularly eyeballed pieces I had cut last time. Just threw a strap clamp around all of them, and weight them down flat between two heavy objects. Easy peasy.

The splines were new, and I'm not sure I like the method I used. I put together a mostly clamped together jig on my router table, and used a 1/4" up spiral bit to notch out the gaps for the walnut splines. But the jig had too much slop in it, and it wasn't well supported on one side versus the other. So the notches came out ever so slightly irregularly shaped, such that the same thickness of spline didn't quite work for all of them. But I got it close by taking a slightly larger than 1/4" strip of walnut, and then putting it through my thickness planer until it was pretty snug. Then I sanded a bunch of small pieces down until it went each unique notch.

I did two coats of danish oil in the afternoon, and need to wait until at least Wednesday before I do a few coats of shellac, and then probably a few more days before I rub that out and truly finish it with some furniture wax. I did that with my wife's chair and was very happy with the results. Well, except instead of danish oil, I used a stain on hers.

Tomorrow I plan on taking the maple and walnut and making a chessboard out of it. Looks like a fairly straightforward process, so fingers crossed. I won't be staining or oiling any of it, so once it's glued up and sanded, I can move directly to shellac. I'm looking forward to it. If it comes out well I think I have enough lumber on hand to make 2 more and save them as gifts.

How much harder would it be to make a singularity chess board? What sort of technique do you use when the sections are curved?

If you're a master craftsman, a jigsaw. I would use a chisel on the convex parts (or a belt sander if I owned one) and use them to sand down the matching concave parts by hand.

With my limited knowledge, the only way I could figure out how to make it work, and work well without giant seams in the joinery, would be to make the beginning of two chessboards. Which would be gluing alternating strips of light and dark wood together. Now when I did my chessboard, I then crosscut that giant glued up panel of 8 strips 8 more times, and flipped every other crosscut stripe to get the checkerboard pattern.

With this, I'd have to either use a bandsaw and cut those curves very, very carefully, or use a router with a straight bit and a nail in the middle to then make perfect circles. There would be a lot of waste, but between the two boards of stripes I began with, the remainder should complement the circles I routed out of the other.

I don't think I could use just one, because no matter what the kerf of the blade would make a giant seam if I just tried to rotate the two pieces and glue them back together. You can sort of get away with it maybe on shallower curves. Maybe use some sawdust and glue to try to fill anywhere that looks too bad. But the sharper curves towards the center would absolutely show the width of the blade kerf if you tried to use a single boards worth of material.

I'd expect a lot of that chessboard depends on how heavily you're committed to the bit. If it just needs to look right from the top but you want the grain patterns to look intact, that's a great place to rent some time on a cnc to make an inlay or even just use a bunch of veneer or burl and a sharp exacto knife. Would still require a lot of chisel or marking knife work to get those precise corner angles, but it'd save you a ton of material and a lot of really finicky jigsaw work or sanding.

Every time I see someone bust out a CNC machine, I get sad. I can certainly see their utility if it's your business. Not using one basically seems like you are leaving money/productivity on the table. But currently I'm enamored with the craftsmanship of woodworking. Getting my tools perfectly square and flat. Really nailing some perfect miter joints. Things like that.

That's fair; there's certainly a lot more romance and skill to hand tools or conventional power tools, and seeing a full CNC machine used for glorified bowl or crosscut work gets me a little disappointed myself. And it's definitely the sort of tradework that you have to love the process of doing it to really get the most out of a piece, and it's hard to do that when it's all gcode.

Getting walnut in an order and paying $2 board foot seems really excellent to me. Good shopping. Are you making the chessboard with end grain or side grain? Chessboards are such neat gifts! Are you going to make pieces too?

Just face grain. The first glue up is in clamps right now. Trying some new techniques for a really flat panel glue up, so we'll see how it goes. With the butcher blocks I ended up with a lot of buckling and shifting that I corrected by doing it in halves and putting them through the planer afterwards. I'm using some calls this time to try to keep it flat. I also used some winding sticks to try to get the pipe clamps flatter as well. I think the surface I was doing glue ups on was putting a slight twist on everything I glued up.

If I'm lucky, I can have this first board finished tonight. Well, at least the assembly, the finishing might take the rest of the week.

Can I buy a chess or go board from you off Etsy

I don't feel confident enough to try to sell my work.

Would anyone be interested in online dungeons and dragons?

I would be down for that :) Also for World of Darkness / Paranoia / Call of Cthulhu if people were interested.

Yes, but KenzerCo’s Hackmaster might be fun too. (Really, I just need to get in with a group as a player, system/world doesn’t matter to me.)

Are we talking just D&D, or are other things like Numenera, Wolves of God, The One Ring, and GURPS also on the (virtual) table?

When you say “online”, what do you have in mind? Are we talking real-time sessions using some sort of VTT like Roll20 or Fantasy Grounds? Or more like an asynchronous text-based RPG format? And which edition were you thinking of playing?

Something that doesn't require us to meet in person was all I meant by online. I haven't actually used any online D&D things. I was talking about it with two other users while playing starship troopers.

Most people who play online use a Virtual Tabletop program - Roll20 is popular and I use it regularly, and I’ve also used Fantasy Grounds - and some people also use Discord for the voice chat, although Roll20 itself has a voice chat that works decently and doesn’t require you to use two separate applications.

I play a ton of D&D - mostly 5E, but I’m experienced with 3.5 and recently started a Pathfinder 1E campaign - but I’m extremely wary of joining anything that would involve me using my real voice in a way that could be connected to this user account. My opsec around here is already terrible enough, and I recognize this as an opportunity to tank it completely if I’m not careful. ☹️

Are you at the level of opsec where it’s infeasible to use a different username and say, “I’m just a Motte lurker” in accordance with the ethics of anon culture?

...kazerad has a tumblr?

Please excuse me while I inhale everything I can get.

It’s quite rat-adjacent, and deliciously full of insight porn. Enjoy.

Yes.

Sure! Caveat: Previous online D&D experience is limited to 2002 NWN+Vent and more recently Roll20+Discord. I'm only really used to 5e but it's DM's choice.

Sure, I'm down to try it.

Yes, second edition AD&D only though.

Cosigned

Username checks out

whys that

I don’t want to reward WotC for any recent abomination.

Oppenheimer Review: 30 minutes of Oppenheimer being a piece of shit, followed by 2 hours of Manhattan Project stuff, followed by 30 minutes of acting like the guy trying to tell Congress that Oppenheimer is a piece of shit is actually the bad guy, as if the first 30 minutes didn’t happen.

The film opens with Oppenheimer’s attempted murder of his lab professor. We are then treated to Oppenheimer attending Communist Party meetings, graphic sex scenes with communists Oppenheimer meets at Communist Party meetings, and Oppenheimer cheating on his wife (a communist) with another communist. The Manhattan Project scenes are pretty good, the best part is seeing all the characters from your college physics textbook show up for their contractually mandated appearance, but thematically the film is all over the place. Are we supposed to feel bad when he gets his security clearance revoked? Not even Nolan’s editing can make us forget about the massive security holes that lead to Stalin getting the bomb in 1949.

The relationship between Edward Teller and Oppenheimer was a high point for me. Oppenheimer’s wife is livid that he shakes Teller’s hand after giving slightly negative testimony, as if professional differences can’t be overcome by working together on the most important project on world history.

Before I even consider seeing it: is Leslie Groves a major character? Like, 25+ mins of screen time?

Yeah, I'd say 25 minutes of screen time is about right

Excellent, that's that's the about the amount of time he should be in an Oppenheimer focused Manhattan project movie.

The Manhattan Project scenes are pretty good, the best part is seeing all the characters from your college physics textbook show up for their contractually mandated appearance

I wanted so much more of that. I honestly couldn't give less of a shit about Oppenheimer's communist orientation, I wanted an actual history of the manhattan project, and I wanted all my childhood physics heroes to actually be portrayed in the film, but all I got was some guy putting marbles in a jar as a metaphor for the enrichment process. I went to see it with my mom who had no background physics knowledge, and she was left hopelessly confused about almost everything (which I guess is normal for a Nolan film). We left an hour before the end.

What do you mean graphic sex scenes? We don't see any full frontal nudity or really any butt. We see some tits a few times and that's it.

Thank you. I’ll still see it in IMAX for the cinematography. As a New Mexico youth, my retired Navy grandfather took me to the Nuclear Museum every year. Nukes show up from time to time in my dreams, most recently, last week.

Extremely exciting week in my suburban neighborhood due to a very evasive goat.

https://www.al.com/news/birmingham/2023/07/goat-on-the-lam-for-three-days-corralled-in-irondale-and-then-breaks-loose.html https://www.wbrc.com/2023/07/18/oh-my-goat-animal-jumps-out-owners-car-window-causes-wild-goat-chase/

Any goofy local news?

Really pushing it to call this news, but my local news did put it on the front page...

https://www.wcpo.com/news/state/state-kentucky/how-can-sheep-milk-be-used-in-vodka-one-man-in-kentucky-is-figuring-it-out

Y'know, that sounded insane at first glance, but now that I've read through the description, that's a clever idea.

Not exactly local and certainly not goofy, but California may be legalizing speed cameras soon:

https://www.foxla.com/news/speed-limit-cameras-california-cities-state-assembly-bill-645.amp

It’s hard to think of legislation that I’m more opposed to. I know, I know, safety and all that. But good lord, how much more do we need to milk the middle class via tickets?

Surely one can avoid being milked simply by not exceeding the speed limit, at least not by 11+ mph. Especially given that "The first violation notice would be a warning."

That would indeed be the argument in favor of speed cameras. But I don't personally believe a person should be automatically ticketed for going 76mph on the freeway. I don’t really have a problem with speeding tickets, so long as they are given by actual police officers. But to institute a blanket automated speeding ticket manufacturing facility rubs me the wrong way. There’s no room for nuance, and nuance of the law is a vital part of trust in the law.

I view this as a clear cash grab, similar to privatized parking ticket enforcement. And they justify it by wrapping it under the banner of safety. IMO, there a lot more important criminal issues to focus on than automated speeding tickets.

IMO, there a lot more important criminal issues to focus on than automated speeding tickets.

Wouldn't this free police officers to focus on those important issues?

I view this as a clear cash grab Good. That neans I get more public services, without my taxes increasing.

Doubtful. Police don’t really get out of their cars in California anymore.

Evidence?

Hopefully it ends up being like Colorado where you can just lie and say someone else was driving 🕶️. https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/are-traffic-camera-tickets-valid-in-colorado-38298

Wait, are you telling us there are no speed cameras in California now?

Nope. No speed cameras, no Stop cameras, no red light cameras. It's Fury Road all day out here baby!

There are red light cameras up in Redding. Found that out the hard way.

Some dude sued further south and won, there are cameras on all the lights but they are turned off.

I was trying out Bing Chat's GPT-4 derived multimodal feature to transcribe a handwritten table in a note taking app.

It worked the first try, and did a pretty good job, but when I tried to reproduce its success, with the same prompt and image later, it absolutely shit the bed and began hallucinating based off random UI elements in the screenshot.

Huh. I mean, I've show that it can do it, even with my doctor's handwriting (it's not that bad OK?), now I need to figure out how to do it consistently.

I initially had to redo it because copy pasting broke the markdown formatting Bing was using, and I still haven't figured out a way around it.

Give the google drive/docs scanner a shot also; I've used it for the last couple years with great success. I'm told it's hit and miss for other people though.

I didn't want just OCR, especially since I wanted to preserve tables I'd drawn by hand, but sure I'll check it out!

It preserves my indents and margins if I scan the whole paper, but I've never tried it on a hand drawn table.

Hey, can we get a specific book recommendation thread?

I've been reading too much politics and philosophy and history; I need some Arts and Sciences in there.

I've been going over my copy of The Art of Fermentation; which is a fairly comprehensive pass over world fermentation traditions and a recommended read of your are interested in food history; or want to try some weird ferments of your own.

I'm interested in fiction written after 1980, preferably not sci-fi/fantasy, if anyone has any weird or obscure recommendations.

Not that Iain Banks is obscure but his non-SF novels are iirc less well known but also quite good.

I'm guessing you've read them. Anyway:

My favorite's probably The Crow Road, Complicity and Wasp Factory. The others are good too. Song of Stone is relentlessly depressing and kinda pretentious, if you're squeamish or easily disturbed, give it a pass.

Alt history, but without any SF elements: I much enjoyed S.M.Stirling's 'Under the Yoke'. It's competently written, has a good post-apocalyptic in which an unholy mix of Roman Republic, Taylorism and Sparta is putting the dead European civilization out of its misery in the aftermath of a rather bleaker alternate WW2. Apart from a good dose of S&M which left me cold, It's notable for the author passing the ideological Turing test so convincingly half of the readers think he is some sort of far-right nutcase when Stirling is a garden variety classical liberal.

I’ve enjoyed my brief brush with Lindsay Davis’ “Marcus Didius Falco” series. Vespasian-era Rome as viewed by a cynical, wisecracking private eye. Genuinely hilarious.

This one is sci-fi-fantasy-ish but I highly recommend The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway. It is the most unique book I've ever read.

Colleen McCullough’s Rome series might be what you’re after.

Seconded, absolutely love those novels.

Is Mason & Dixon obscure enough? It's pretty absurd, or at least I found it funny. Is Murakami too fantasy? Wild Sheep Chase is my favorite but it's 3rd in a series so maybe not the best entry, perhaps Wind Up Bird Chronicle?

Wind Up Bird Chronicle was my favorite book for years. Really resonated, and I don't know why. Really took off at Lieutenant Mamiya's story. It definitely has fantastical elements though.

After the Quake is a very good book of his short stories, if you've never read it.

Oh I'll keep my eye out for that one. I get all my Murakami at a big used book store, it's always a treat when a new title is there.

There’s usually one every week or two. Do you mean a top level thread?

I’m still working through Mere Christianity, not everything resonates with me but what does is quite powerful. Lewis is surprisingly relevant still today.

If Ayn Rand could have gotten past the “he’s a superstitious old mystic”, she’d have seen he identified the same societal problems as she did. Instead, her margin notes were just insults about his faith. Lost opportunity for a big tent anti-collectivist movement.

Came across this story on Wikipedia while reading a bit about Japan's surrender in WW2 and found it really funny

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_McDilda

Long story short - an american P-51 pilot was shot down over Osaka and captured 2 days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The Japanese started torturing him and threatening to kill him asking questions about "how many atomic bombs does the USA have" - to this pilot at this time, an Atomic Bomb would have been something out of an HG Wells novel, a theoretical science fiction possibility. Imagine a Japanese officer threatening to cut off your head unless you explained how many Warp Drives the USA had..."we have warp drives?" - but not only that, they then demanded that he explain how the atomic bomb works - to which his explanation is actually not half bad in my opinion. He also claims that the USA has 100s of atomic bombs because the guy isn't accepting 0 as an answer, and my understanding is that this intel helped partially lead to Japan's surrender.

He's so convincing that he gets flown in as a VIP to Tokyo where a civilian scientist realizes he's full of crap, but appears to not fully narc him out? I'm just imagining this story, finding out via your captors that some space age tech is real and then being forced to answer questions about it! Kind of funny to imagine

The cherry on top of this story is that his claim of the US having hundreds of bombs makes its way into the pivotal War Council conference on peace terms on August 9. The meeting had been insisted upon by the Emperor - with some grumbling - after the bombing of Hiroshima and the Soviet entry into the war. Halfway through the meeting, news is delivered that Nagasaki has also been destroyed by an atomic bomb. Defence Minister Korechika Anami brings up this claim from McDilda that the US has limitless A-bombs, and immediately discounts it as nonsense. But then he reflected that maybe it would be better if it was true: "Would it not be wondrous for the whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower?"

Reminds me of this scene from The Salvation War:

Throne Room of the Adamant Fastness, Tartaruan Range, Outer Rim of Hell

“There had better be good news.” Belial had had his days on wyvern-back to absorb the news of the death of Asmodeus and there was no upside to that story. One of the greatest Dukes of Hell was dead, killed by humans. If they could kill him, they could kill anybody. They could even kill……. Belial stopped himself, if Satan detected that thought, Belial’s end would be horrible beyond contemplation. “We must avenge Asmodeus.”

“Please tell the court what you told me, about the forges of Sheffield.” Lakheenahuknaasi asked, as sweetly as she could manage following the stunning news of the death of the Great Duke. Her mind was also calculating, if the humans could kill the Great Dukes, then they had to be stopped before they won this war. And if they couldn’t be stopped, wasn’t it time she……?

Captain Shanklin was shaking with fear at the sight of the vast ornate room filled with huge armored demons. Their stares seemed to bore straight into his mind, rendering any notion of backing out now ludicrous.

“Well, m'lords and ladies, you see, all our guns, all our shells are made of steel. You call it 'enchanted iron', not that that's a bad thing to call it of course, since it just be iron with some special additives.”

This caused a minor stir in the court. One of the great armored demons spoke; “Human, do you know the secret of this alchemy? Could you transform plain molten iron into the enchanted iron?”

James gulped. “Perhaps, m'lord, it being the case that I was a foreman at the Bessemer works before the Great War... I would have to see your furnaces...”

As his words trailed off the great antlered demon on the throne spoke in a thundering voice. “I am sure that Baron Trajakrithoth's question was purely hypothetical. Our lord Satan has decreed that hell does not need iron and that no demon shall attempt to make weapons from it. Our furnaces smelt bronze, brass, copper, silver and gold, no iron.” Those words did not seem to be directed at the human, but the next ones were. “Now, what of this 'Sheffield'? It has many furnaces, many forges?”

”Aye, the city of Sheffield makes more steel than anywhere else in the Empire. The best steel too, and many things from that steel, cast and machined.” Despite all that he'd been through, there was still a hint of pride in Shanklin's voice.

The demon lord was clearly pleased and James sagged with relief. “Excellent. Where can I find this city of steel?”

“Why, in Yorkshire, centre of the British Isles, m'lord. Look sixty miles north from Birmingham, or thirty miles west from Manchester, or even twenty miles south from Leeds.”

Belial's expression did not show any hint of recognition at the names of the various British cities, but the rough triangulation seemed to satisfy him for now. “Very good... Jaameshankel.” The count waved his hand dismissively, which Lakheenahuknaasi took as a command to lead the human away.

“You said you had another trai... ah, informant, Euryale? One who knows of the iron chariots?”

“Yes, my lord.” The gorgon queen turned to address another of her retinue. “Present your new friend, Megaaeraholrakni.”

The second handmaiden stepped forward, her clawed hand keeping a tight grip on the shoulder of a short, bald human. The man swayed unsteadily; Megaaeraholrakni had dosed him heavily with her poison, not wanting to risk him having a last-minute change of heart. She whispered into his ear, “these... men... are very interessted in your 'tankss', please tell them what Dee'Troyt can offer them.”

Bob Reed recited his pitch by rote. “Well sirs, if it's quality you're looking for, dee-troyt has the finest workforce and the most modern production lines in the world. No need to worry about capacity either, we built twenty thousand tanks for uncle sam in double-u double-u two. Don't let the guys from cry-slur fool you, with our boys fighting the gooks in core-rea, their lines are tied up turning out em forty sevens for the feds. It stands to reason, if you've got a big order, gee em are the logical choice. We can get a plant switched over for you in...”

The demons were throwing baffled glances at each other. Could this 'uncle sam' really afford three legions worth of chariots for his troops? More likely the human was inflating the figure to impress. 'Tank' seemed to mean 'iron chariot' but what was an 'em forty seven'? Their lord seemed annoyed and that never bode well for the source of the annoyance.

“Enough. Human, you were asked a simple question. Is this 'Dee’Troyt' a major source of weapons for the human resistance?” Belial's tone oozed with the promise of horrible consequences should this question not be answered promptly.

Now it was Bob's chance to be confused. His eyes remained unfocused as he continued; “Why haven't you heard? Detroit is the arsenal of democracy. Eff Dee Arr said so himself.”

Belial couldn't resist taking over. “So Detroit makes all the chariots for the state of Democracy? Which is ruled by Uncle Sam and populated by Feds? And your great general Eff'dee'ar is leading your armies against us, the ones you call the gooks?”

Bob was saved solely by his loyalty to Selfridge's mantra; 'the customer is always right'. “Well, yeah, I suppose you could put it like that...”

The tension was over now that Belial had made sense of it for them. The barons abandoned the hard task of trying to comprehend the insane humans and slipped back into familiar territory; a flattery competition.

“Excellent deduction my lord!”

“Masterful interrogation, Count Belial!”

Belial allowed this to continue for a few more seconds before silencing the court with a chopping gesture.

“You have pleased me...” there was a slight pause as the count pulled the name from the man's mind... “Bobbreed.” He turned to one of his ubiquitous minor demon servants. “Take them both to the guest rooms. See to their needs until I require them again.” The two humans were led away.

“Excellent. Euryale, you have surpassed my expectations. We now have the location of the two most critical arsenals supporting the human resistance. Once they are destroyed, the human armies will find their reinforcements either severely diminished in number or lacking the enchanted weapons that allow them to challenge us.”

Belial had been concerned that the intelligence would be dangerously out of date. The constant stream of unpleasant surprises since the heralds had first arrived on earth had driven home how much the humans had changed since the demons last visited earth in strength. But the first informant had been dead less than two human lifetimes, the second barely one. Save total destruction by war, great cities could not change significantly in a mere handful of decades.

Euryale half-spread her wings, holding the leathery membranes low in folds that touched the ground, and lowered her head. It was a gesture that implied respect and submission without the admission of inferiority that the more usual forms of groveling involved. “I am most glad that my humble efforts please my lord.” she said, with only the slightest hint of sarcasm.

'I shouldn't let her get away with that' Belial thought, 'but I suppose this once she's earned it.'

The gorgon continued, “There were a few other traitors who I thought might be of use to you. They did not seem to know where the enchanted weapons were produced, like these two. But they did claim to know how to make them.”

Belial looked thoughtful for a moment before shaking his head. “Move them to the palace. Keep them isolated and under guard. Perhaps they can be of use to Trajakrithoth, perhaps they are best used as wyvern feed, but that can wait. We have only three days left to meet Satan's deadline.” Actually it was five, but he had already decided to keep the two extra days in hand as his last reserve.

[...]

“If I could make a request, my lord?”

The count tilted his head, inviting Euryale to continue.

“I have some ideas on how to improve the humans' enthusiasm for their work. But I will require some females. A few dozen should do to start with.”

Belial snorted, a reaction shared by most of the demons present. Tartarus had always levied male humans in return for its wares, as both sexes were equally useful to the torturers but males were obviously far superior manual laborers. There was only one thing Euryale could want the females for and Belial didn't like that notion at all.

“Have you forgotten that we still need the psychic energy of the humans? It hardly matters if we produce a few more tridents, if my serfs are rebelling because your pampered humans no longer give up enough energy.”

“My lord, I am confident that will not be the case. You see, recent events have shown how acclimatized to their condition the humans had become. When a human has nothing left to lose, the quality of anguish we can inflict is limited. For a few decades they rage and hate, but then their minds decay into apathy. By mixing in a little pleasure with their pain, by giving them something to lose again, I will heighten their suffering and inject fresh desperation even as they toil ever harder in your service.”

Again Euryale had caught the attention of the whole court and they were nodding in appreciation of her logic. 'She does have a talent for speeches', thought Belial, 'I will have to find a way to make use of that.'

“Very well. I shall permit you to continue your games... as soon as Sheffield and Detroit have been reduced to glowing slag.” Belial settled back in his damaged throne with a question left unanswered. Why did the humans refer to demons as gooks?

I suppose from a certain historical distance it’s ironically funny…. But it’s distasteful to laugh at someone being brutally tortured in my experience. Most of us here are blessed to live in the developed western world where that’s not a realistic concern.

Killjoy

I’ll accept it. This is the Motte after all ;)

I've been using Brave on and off for years now. It started as an FU to the cancellers and a gesture of support for Brendan Eich, and continued as an FU for Big Tech, but in the end I settled on some fork of Firefox (I think some extension I was using wasn't fully working on Chrome based browsers). I would still fire it up every once in a while (the privacy-heavy fork of Firefox wasn't agreeing with a whole bunch of web-apps like Zoom, Teams, or Slack), and recently, after an update, I see them announcing "vertical tabs". I'm sure it's not their idea, browsers are pretty ridiculously customizable at this point, so someone must have done something like that before, and if not, the layout is reminiscent of GMail. In any case, I freakin' love it! If you compulsively open new tabs, this unclutters the screen to a ridiculous degree. This might be just in my head, but it also feels like it's running smoother than the other browsers I have.

Pretty wild to watch it go from "poor man's Chrome" to something that can stand on it's own.

I used to use Firefox with the tree-style tabs plugin, but ended up switching around for Mac performance reasons. Have currently settled on Brave also - it's nice to have ad blocking and vertical tabs (even if they aren't as powerful as tree-style) without needing plugins.

I'm sure it's not their idea

Indeed.

Proper vertical tabs support was missing in chrome for a long time, but Vivaldi has it now, so either google finally implemented it or someone came up with a clever workaround.
I think chrome is always going to feel faster than (if I understand what you're using) a firefox fork that still uses the old engine.

The browser market share stats for the last 15 years are crazy. Mozilla looks to be on their way to total Internet Explorerfication.

/images/1689971400133344.webp

It's sad that one must use forks of Firefox to get the customization that used to be Firefox's selling point. It seems all they're interested in doing is focusing on privacy and otherwise competing to be Chrome in terms of UX. The enshittification of the web in the last decade isn't enough, so we have to endure shit browsers too?

I settled on Vivaldi. It's a proprietary Chrome-based browser that's sort of a descendant of Opera. It's very customizable, but development is slow. It's frustrating that it suffers from a lot of bugs, but I was simply even more frustrated with Firefox.

I'm trying vivaldi and like it: haven't even needed any addons yet, it's that customizable. But it's got an annoying bug where the browser crashes if you move your mouse too fast in the main menu. It's tolerable because you don't need the menu for much, but wow that's dumb.

It's sad that one must use forks of Firefox to get the customization that used to be Firefox's selling point.

Funnily enough Brave is actually a fork of Chrome. I think with FF you get enough customization that you can actually achieve more or less the same effect, they just don't offer it out of the box. In any case it's pretty telling there doesn't seem to be much happening with it. More surprising is Chrome feels pretty stagnant as well, though maybe there's a whole bunch of behind-the-scenes stuff there that I'm just not seeing.

I think with FF you get enough customization that you can actually achieve more or less the same effect, they just don't offer it out of the box.

Yes, but it requires CSS tweaks which, if you aren't fluent in that language, can take several hours to troubleshoot when an update screws everything up. And in my experience that happened several times a year. Eventually I just stopped updating it, which isn't a good idea for security reasons.

I helped kick off a holiday on Tumblr. Someone I don't follow made a post saying that if a small fraction of Tumblr users bought the lowest priced digital gift (a crab mini game you can gift to another user for a day) it would make up Tumblr's annual deficit easily. This would presumably extend the life of a mostly neglected website that is struggling to make money without collecting much userdata. This post made it's way to me, essentially through a friend of a friend, and I added on that if it were to work, it would have to be concentrated to a day, and suggested a day two weeks out, July 29th.

In this sense, Crab Day was my idea, though it also wasn't anyone's idea. I didn't think my post would be noticed. None of my followers at the time reblogged my date idea. Crabs by themselves weren't my idea, though I always wanted to be gifted crabs (it's the one item you can't buy for yourself.) But all the same, I, OracleOutlook, invented Crab Day.

The OP reblogged my post, and it became popular. Or at least, popular enough. Now there are many #Crab Day posts and I think at least a few thousand will participate on July 29th. Maybe I'll be surprised and it will be bigger, but there are a lot of negative people on Tumblr who are opposed to giving Tumblr any money at all. I won't go into their reasons too deeply, because this isn't the culture war thread.

I believe that Tumblr isn't collecting or selling data. The ads are the lowest possible value. Tumblr users are shown test ads, things that say, "This is a Test. Do not publish." and other silly things.

My initial contribution to Crab Day was just stating the obvious, without a real belief that anything would come from it. But now I keep defending it as the best! idea! ever! Not because it is, but because I don't want to be the person to tank it. If Tumblr users want a say in how the website functions, they need to be customers. The benefit of an annual crab day would be that Tumblr could use it as a metric of how well their changes are received each year. Crab sales fell by 50%? Revert changes. Crab sales went up 200%? Things are good. Basically create a financial incentive to listen to the database. I don't think Tumblr will ever be entirely user-funded, but if the userbase could be just 10% of their revenue that would give them collectively a seat at the table.

Alright, setting a reminder for crab day, because I have fondness for the blue hellsite, and I want to see the strategy of "make something the users like, and then ask them to give you money" succeed at least once.

Every Friday this month is a multiple of 7 and I find this aesthetically pleasing for some bizarre reason.

I find it aesthetically pleasing when February fits exactly into four weeks.

Every month, there is exactly one weekday that is always a multiple of 7. This August it's Mondays. Neat!

Yes, but somehow only the Friday is aesthestically pleasing to me. Don't care about the rest, don't know why. Yes, I'm sober why do you ask.

Would you say that you don't care if Monday's blue, Tuesday's grey and Wednesday too, Thursday you don't care about me, but Friday, you're in love (with multiples of seven)?

I feel like this is a reference to something but I have no idea what. I can say that Saturday night's alright for fighting.

Damn, I thought everyone knew Friday I'm in love by The Cure. You should give it a listen if you like 80s pop, it's the same sentiment as your post, except about love.

https://open.spotify.com/track/5kifJog1sPvYFg3dQrrvl3?si=ab6b17c34cf445c8

For the artwork, I did something goofy by feeding Stable Diffusion a bunch of prompts like "Justine Musk as drawn by [artist]", "Elon Musk kissing Talulah Riley as drawn by [artist]" etc., then compositing them together in Photoshop. Pretty happy with the end result. It was embarrassingly late in the creative process when I noticed that Stable Diffusion had given Talulah five fingers and a thumb, but fortunately it was a quick fix.

It’s interesting that Musk never had kids with Riley.

I wonder why.

I just looked her up on Wikipedia and:

During Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter in October 2022, text exchanges between Musk and Riley were released where she pleaded with him to buy Twitter, asking "Please do something to fight woke-ism. I will do anything to help! xx".

Just when I thought she couldn't get any more attractive.

Oh so Twitter was their baby ☺️

I wonder why.

I assume she didn't want them, as she hasn't had any and is now 37.

That's a possibility, although I know a married couple who tried for a kid for five years before deciding that maybe it's time we went to a fertility doctor. And it's still not solved though apparently they're doing IVF 8 years in. She's now 36 and they very much want a child.

I'm guessing the moral of the story is if it takes more than twice as long as it should to get pregnant, go see a doctor. But unlikely with Musk, I feel he's the kind of guy who wouldn't delay in trying to figure out a problem.

Based! I highly approve the trend of Mottizens expressing themselves creatively before AI makes us all redundant!

I can't say that much about music though, since you need to log in, and I'm not opening a Spotify account.

Also available on Bandcamp: https://latenightpharmacy.bandcamp.com/track/practice-wife

Goddamn, that's pretty good!

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