Friday
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
The subreddit is full of yuppies who live in Mount Vernon or Fed Hill or one of the 5 other safe clean neighborhoods in the city, who will insist up down and sideways that they actually like the city. The food is great! There's so much to do! It's vibrant! There's an art scene! Bullshit. All of it.
I've spent over a decade living in the northeast, bouncing around a few cities while making what most here would consider poverty wages until recently. I've never lived in Baltimore specifically, although I have spent a few years in multiple places with similar demographics and reputations. Maybe your experience is colored by your proximity to the courthouse or something, maybe it's a pre/post-COVID thing but...I've just never encountered things like that? I'd routinely go out every Friday and Saturday night and walk/bike a couple miles through the downtown area to get home at 2-3am completely hammered and nobody ever bothered me. Do you all go out of your way looking for trouble? Do things change when you're significantly older and look like an easy mark? I didn't think I was particularly intimidating, but who knows.
In the last ~2 years there has been a noticeable uptick in the number of homeless people (the opioid epidemic making itself felt?), but they were at first largely confined to the homeless encampment (our equivalent of SF's mission district I suppose). Once that got cleared, they all moved to congregate in a public space which honestly hasn't been any better. At some point, people will get sick of it and I imagine they'll clear it out more aggressively and institutionalize the homeless at a significant cost. In the meantime, my quality of life and lived experience haven't been affected in the slightest - never been mugged, never had anything broken into, never had my bike/car stolen, never been harassed or attacked. I've enjoyed all the cities I lived in and don't have any desire to move elsewhere.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1yr ago
Turniper
1yr ago
I'm central time. Friday is probably worst for me, because I work Sun-Thurs atm to match my fiancee's work schedule, but I could make it work. My ideal would probably be like 2 on thursday.
Doubling up on Monday threads…What about Tinkering Tuesday? Standup Saturday?
You know, I’ve been meaning to make progress on this for years, but maybe this is the time. Maybe I’ll do a better job sticking with it than I did for HighSpace. I’m going to make a spellcasting sandbox. In rough order,
- Move a character around a top-down map with terrain
- Cast spells which create effects on the map
- Affect the terrain
- Choose modifications for spells with a real-time interface
- Construct the spells from a low level with that same interface
- Fight monsters or other players or something
This week’s goal will be completing the Godot tutorial I’ve had open for ages. If I can manage that, I’ll see about a more elaborate plan.
Scheduling The Next Standup Meeting
So, what's y'alls availability this week? I live in CET, @cjet79 is in EST, and last time we had the call around noon EST. These sorts of hours are particularly good for me, since it's late afternoon / early evening, but might not be great for other Yankees. I'm pretty flexible as long as it's not the literal middle of the night here (let's say anything from 5AM to midnight works).
This week Thursday is looking particularly good for me, with Friday being a close second.
How's your availability @Turniper?
gattsuru
1yr ago
Raggedy_anthem went off the mod team and either set their account private or deleted it about three months back, “personal reasons”
Panem
1yr ago
If you know how to fight standing then I think it goes without saying strength matters a lot. But I also did a few weeks of MMA (Friday was like sparring from standing with strikes allowed) I remember going against a person who was vastly superior striker (with my 2x MMA striking, you can imagine my state). But I shot quiet fast and took him down and there it was quiet easy. I imagine, given that she was so good at judo (coming from that background), etc, unless I got lucky or for some reason she just couldn't deal with striking being a part of the game, she would similarly take me down and go to town. As I replied to faceh, similar weight + huge skill imbalance is where you would get a woman absolutely dominate. If she was 20kg lighter (as is usual) I think it would be a very different story.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
1yr ago
Josh Shapiro seeks to downplay his time as IDF volunteer
Considered by many to be a front-runner, it turns out that Governor Shapiro volunteered for the IDF. Will this sink his chances in being selected by the Harris campaign? Or will his selection be yet another demonstration of Zionist influence in American politics? To have a volunteer for a foreign army as the Vice President, a heartbeat from the presidency as they say, seems unconscionable to me, particularly a volunteer for an army that is at the center of violence which is currently bringing the region to the brink. Enter your predictions.
I predict Shapiro will be selected and these articles about his op-ed now being dropped, on a Friday before Kamala's selection, are an indication that Shapiro has been selected by the Harris campaign and this is meant to "clear the air" before the announcement.
It is now Saturday morning here, but inspired by @clo , @AsTheDominoesFall , and @hydroacetylene I decided to go for it and try making gumbo again last night, Friday evening.
Usually I am what is in Japan called a "kitchen drinker" and imbibe a nice glass of red or a beer or whatever I can get my grubby hands on while chopping my celery, but this time I settled for this. I only recommend it for the hard-core who do not care what they are pouring down their gullet as long as it seems remotely related to beer (I was in that category as I made the gumbo).
I started, as one does, with a roux of flour and oil. It started like this.. I may have had the heat up too high (it was on the small burner as low as it would go) but I got distracted and the roux burned and I had to scrap it. Undaunted I began again. The new roux looked like this when I considered putting in the trinity which in my case also contained garlic, but I avoided the temptation, mainly because my gumbo is never dark enough. I kept stirring. It eventually looked like this..
You may notice the portion is small. That is for two reasons. 1) I was not sure of success. 2) I am enculturated thoroughly to Japan and thus I think small when it comes to portion sizes. I held off until the roux was darker, ultimately like this though it was darker in reality than this photo shows.
Too much going on for me to take photos of other phases, but I added sausage (unfortunately this means the small, ubiquitous and not that tasty Japanese ソーセージ, shrimp, laurel leaf, and all this..
What I did not add is Tabasco, as although I like Tabasco it makes everything taste like itself. I ate a smallish portion over rice with the actual dinner. It wasn't bad though I expect both the users mentioned above and probably I can do better in the future.
Advice welcome.
bolido_sentimental
1yr ago
People of the Motte, I am engaged to be married. AMA I guess. Reaching this state was a surprisingly long journey - I'll be 35 on wedding day. I have been dating off and on since I was 18, and at that time I never would have imagined that I'd still be playing the game 15+ years later. Glad to be finally be checking out, hopefully for good.
I can't help but wonder how checking Culture War Roundup threads every day for the last 10 or so years, may have contributed to my ultimate change from rootless, callow 20-something to homeowning family-seeker. This was previously a classic path that people tended to follow, but relatively few of my peers ended up following it. I often wonder if being a SSCer/Mottizen has actually been a good thing for me, or whether I'd have been better off never knowing about the things we discuss here. Nevertheless, though you do not know me, there are many of you to whom I'd send a wedding invitation if I thought we had room for it; and indeed it will be an interesting culture war occasion to observe, as many blue tribe + red tribe friends and family will meet for the first time. But of course on the day, I'm going to really try not to think of it in those terms lol.
Anyway, as far as Friday Fun: my fiancée and I have been doing jigsaw puzzles lately, while listening to the "oldies" station on AM radio. I think for many people, if you see this activity on a list of activities to do, your eyes may pass right over it - it seems so boring that it doesn't merit serious consideration. But seriously, it's actually really satisfying when you get the whole border put together, or when you get on a roll with a big section of the puzzle. Are jigsaw puzzles what they call "lindy"? In any case, I realized there must be a reason why they continue to sell jigsaw puzzles in every Target, Wal-Mart, Meijer, Big Lots etc. in America. Consider giving it a try if you want to do something easy and analog for a while, as a nice little break from technological recreation.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1yr ago
212 days sober here.
What's your goal in regards to 'drinking less'? If it's literally just getting the number of drinks over a week / month down, then all you should worry about is tracking your drinks (plenty of apps for that) and looking for a gradual trend down. Eventually you'll find a sustainable level.
But is there something else? Are you worried your drinking is getting you fat and out of shape (it is) or that it's just sort of generally reducing your cognitive sharpness even if you aren't hungover every day(it is) or maybe that it's having a mild negative effect on mood stability? (it is)
If you want to quit. Quit. Hard sober for the rest of your life? Not necessarily. I think a good goal is to do 365 days sober and keep a log of how you're feeling about every 10 days or so. You'll learn a lot. You'll learn how to deal with out of nowhere cravings. You'll understand more about emotional and stress triggers. "Sober Octobers" aren't long enough and I feel like "stay sober for as long as you can including up to forever" creates an all-or-nothing kind of thinking that can lead to hard relapses (fun fact: a lot of programs have definitions of sober that allow for some level of drinking. I think this is absurd, but that's a personal opinion).
In my experience so far, the physical and mental health benefits are obvious and unambiguous. Social situations aren't difficult to navigate after you've said "no thanks" about 10 times. (As another aside, just use "No, thanks" or "I'm not drinking tonight" as your responses. Don't get into any more detail than that - that's when people get weird. Be ready to repeat yourself. A lot. )
The tradeoff is that my life is fundamentally more boring. Alcohol, like other drugs, is a quick hack to emotional regulation. How it manifests will be person dependent. For me, I no longer have any reflex to drink if I am sad, stressed, overwhelmed etc. That's a great thing. I miss drinking now when I am feeling very good. A Big Business Thing happened at work a few weeks ago and, when it did, I really wanted to tie one on on a friday night knowing that not only did I have nothing to do on Saturday, but that I could probably take a few days off the next week because of the big win.
I cleaned out some old home depot boxes in my garage instead. Anti-climactic.
I'll tie it off here. Start at the beginning; what do you want your drinking life to look like?
I have previously commented that I am sloppy about food safety and have never experienced anything that I would consider a meaningful bout of food poisoning. I am here to report that this is no longer the case! As of last Friday, I have become acquainted with the joys of severe gastroenteritis. The vomiting and diarrhea, those I expected to be the case from the reports and I wouldn't surprised. A fever, sure, that's to be expected. The other stuff shouldn't be a surprise if you reason through it, but wow, much worse than I thought! Other adverse effects:
- Sleep deprivation, with my watch recording my lowest Sleep Score ever with only 3 hours of sleep and no deep sleep or REM.
- Absolute exhaustion, owing to that lack of sleep.
- Loss of equilibrium, sketchy balance on the occasions that I did activities as challenging as moving from the bed to the couch.
- Being absolutely disgusted by almost any food or beverage idea for a solid two days and almost every food and beverage option for a third day.
- More exhaustion, this time from not being able to consume a meaningful amount of calories.
I still have the lingering effects from the general gut health damage and lack of nutrition. Weighing myself this morning (well rehydrated at this point, so not at the worst of things) I'm about 8 pounds lighter than I was on Friday. Very bad, actually! On the bright side, this morning was also the first time I felt my strength starting to return and I was able to just do a normal walk with the dog. After days of being unable to summon the strength to go downstairs, that's good progress!
On the whole, I'm not sure that it's quite sufficient to make me rethink my approach to food safety, but I'll say that it was a bad enough bout that it resets how I think about food poisoning and level sets just how unpleasant I would expect it to be.
Westerly
1yr ago
(I’m not the guy you replied to) My mother cried when they canceled Live PD as we used to watch it every Friday night together. Truthfully that is what radicalized her
ulyssessword
1yr ago
A bit of a tempest in a teapot, leading to a tangent:
A manipulated video shared by Musk mimics Harris' voice, raising concerns about AI in politics
A manipulated video that mimics the voice of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris saying things she did not say is raising concerns about the power of artificial intelligence to mislead with Election Day about three months away.
The video gained attention after tech billionaire Elon Musk shared it on his social media platform X(opens in a new tab) on Friday evening without explicitly noting it was originally released as parody.
(emphasis added)
I remembered seeing it in this format, with the disclaimer intact, so I thought it was a classic "don't trust your lying eyes" situation (not helped by the refusal of every site except CTV and Business Insider to actually link to the tweet). But...
Link and screenshot to the tweet in question, and link and screenshot to the post he was retweeting.
X changed its layout recently, and the text of the original post wasn't carried forward in the retweet. Their claim is accurate.
I'm guessing that there was a slow rollout of the new layout, so some people saw it in the old format and some in the new.
I would like for primary research to build common ground off of a shared foundation of facts, but that can't happen if the results are different based on the person looking. You can (presumably?) see it with the website's layout. It happened with personalized Google recommendations here last week.
I'd count when I almost missed half the context in a post last week (not helped by bitrot in the top level post), and noticing all of the intact teleprompters (so Trump's ear wasn't hit by glass in the assassination attempt) as marginal successes in primary research, but who's to say that the next issue won't be "personalized" so I can't actually see what other people are talking about?
Gaashk
1yr ago
Here's an article someone posted elsewhere: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c147yn4xxx4o
On Friday, Mr Vance said: “I wish her step-children and Kamala Harris and her whole family the very best. The point is not that she’s lesser. The point is that her party has pursued a set of policies that are profoundly anti-child.” Mr Vance made similar remarks against Democrats in a 2021 speech at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, in which he also said his criticism was not directed at those who could not have children for biological or medical reasons.
I don't have a strong opinion.
On the one hand, it is in the national interest to be more positive about children, and influence more people to have more children, since we're below replacement levels of fertility throughout the wealthy industrialized world. I would be interested to hear Vance's thoughts on ways the government can encourage more children, especially children in stable, working households.
On the other hand, calling female senators who didn't have children a "bunch of childless cat ladies with miserable lives" doesn't sound good. It sounds like something to say on an anonymous message board, or to your good guy friend in private, but maybe dress it up or change the subject in public spaces?
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
1yr ago
quote
TIL I like Phil Mickelson. That's how I've always fantasized I'd answer a question like that.
"How do you feel about accepting money for $PROJECT from known ism-ist-ophobes? Will you disavow??"
"Well at the time I felt good about it, but now that you're asking, I suppose I'd have to admit that I feel absolutely great about it. Simply thrilled, really. In fact, I think I'll fly back next Friday to have dinner with them and take some photos together for my professional homepage. I'll buy you a plane ticket so you can join me, they love journalists."
I'd have to work on something spicier but you get the gist.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Most sushi is intended to be eaten immediately after being partly-dipped in a mix of soy sauce and green horseradish 'wasabi', so the MSG part's usually covered in that context.
Meat alone-style (sashimi) and meat-on-rice-alone-style (nigiri) are... well, advocates will call them 'subtle' flavors, and if you do have sensitive tastes for meat or fish there are some interesting things better shops do with a light glaze that can't be done with cooked fish, but they're also still going to be pretty bland.
For rolls (maki or uramaki), much of the purpose is to make flavor combinations that wouldn't work otherwise. You could make a plate with grilled salmon, marinated with mango and cucumber, topped with seaweed flakes, served over rice, but it'd be drastically different than the sweet-vinegar rice and uncooked mango common to sushi rolls -- cooked cucumber can't be crisp, mango used in a marinade will be less intensely sweet, and the cooked plate would almost always want a long-grained rice with little seasoning or even a 'wild rice' for flavor. For sushi, the meat is more there to provide a strong base and some mild fatty flavors (modulo smoked salmon in heavily Westernized sushi), while the nori (dried seaweed) and other fillings are supposed to play a bigger role in what you describe as the taste.
((And even smoked salmon rolls avoid the intensively fishy smell of pan-fried or grilled fish. I don't mind it, but a lot of people do find it to detract from the meal.))
Some purists will still complain that Americanized maki goes too hard on, and I'll even agree with them in some cases (Flaming Hot CheetosTM Sushi is an abomination that not even Taco Bell has been willing to accept, yet), but the typical store or homemade maki leaves a lot of space to make it flavorful without making it overpowering.
Alternatively, look for 'poke' bowls, which tend to mix a lot of the same base materials with a lot more fixings, and can give a better intro to the underlying core flavors will still having a heartier feel and texture to them.
Throwaway05
1yr ago
I am a doctor but I am not your doctor. The following is essentially a reminder of the importance of healthy life style.
I find that the medical establishment tends to be rather alarmist about alcohol (not necessarily incorrectly, but perhaps unnecessarily aggressively) but the presence of DM (2, presumably) means that curtailing drinking is a lot more important - people who would never drink six bottles of coke will down a six pack over the course of the evening and not realize it's worse for you than the soda.
Diabetes increases the risk of various things with or without obesity and we routinely advise diabetics to avoid extra "hits" to their health accordingly.
Others point out some other considerations here - the potential concern for genetic predisposition to alcoholism, the important of habits and so on.
If it's really just a slide into an unhealthier habit without addiction I'd advise just stopping altogether for a few months to prove to yourself you can. If you can't, that's evidence, what you do with that evidence is up to you. If you can stop, after a while you can try reintroducing and see if you manage it in a healthier way.
If you want help people in your life are almost always going to be better than strangers on the internet. Doesn't need to be phrased in a scary way "hey honey/bro, for health reasons I want to try and skip my after dinner drinks for a little while, can you help nag me?"
An alternate strategy may be a harm reduction approach - Friday nights only or special occasions, something like that.
No_one
1yr ago
Having one beer with dinner is not 'drinking'.
Worrying about the 'heavy nights' -I get that, if I did that more than once a week socially, it'd start seeming excessive. Since drinking that much on friday is a habit that for me pretty much died after I left high school, nothing to worry about.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1yr ago
I'm gonna be honest. None of this shit is good for my health. Just this whole presidential cycle, the constant hysterics and nonsense about this judge or that prosecutor or some bureaucrat. Endless think pieces about how every single bit of minutia will decide the election. I've been trying so damned hard to just tune it out. I'll start paying attention again in October when I'm about to vote, but maybe not even then. I'm so hardened in my choice, it's difficult to imagine anything changing it.
Yeah, I watched the first debate, because I wanted to see a primary source first hand before the spin machine got to it. That was sad. Biden was old, but Trump seemed old too, just not as much by comparison.
Yeah, I got sucked into the hysterics after the assassination attempt, but I'm trying to stay away from the conspiracy rabbit hole. I want to believe it so bad, I have a feeling if I start down that road, next thing I know I'll be getting sued for $1B.
I honestly didn't believe Biden would drop out, but here we are. All the coup talk, it tickles my lizard brain, which makes it even more dangerous.
I think I need to try harder to just ignore all that shit. For starters, it stresses me the fuck out. Second, it keeps me way too distracted from work and family. Third, I'm so close to wrapping up this bitchin walnut gaming table I'll be posting all about in the Friday Fun Thread, and the last thing I need is to be doom scrolling instead.
Fun aside, had a huge storm around here lately, and for whatever reason we lost cell phone reception in our area again. So now my shop it totally unreachable digitally. I kind of love it.
I just want to go into a coma until after the election at this point. I'm done. I can't take it anymore.
Right, but have you ever been the only one dialing into a conference room? Everyone else can see, and all you have is sound.
Sure, and the primary reason that's a problem isn't that other people have visuals, and I do not, it's because other people are present in a 3 dimensional space, and I'm not. The sound that I do get is flattened and muffled, just as the sound that they get from me. We know this, because no one decided that demanding participants state their sex and attire helps to communicate in that situation.
When Bob in network engineering asks me to limit the use of resources on the mainframe on Fridays, I should also consider the mundane reason the most likely one, though it is possible he is training Skynet, the mundane is almost always correct, in my experience.
The big difference is that even though you might choose to trust Bob, his claims are verifiable. People asking that you comply with an arbitrary request, who's utility is not only unproven in the instant, but is fundamentally unprovable, tends is not typically explainable by mundane reasons.
Dean
Flairless
1yr ago
The whole bury it on Friday thing is old-fashioned in our era of 24 hour news
The era of 24 hour news is precisely why the US political ecosystems continues to relies on the Friday news dump to bury bad news: because most people go home for the weekend, and by the time they come back the news cycle has passed on with at least 2x morning-news cycles having passed, minimizing the political impact. Not only the information proliferation muted due to fewer people tuning into it on the weekends, but the coverage is decreased as it's more 24-hour cycles out of date from being breaking.
Choosing to do it Sunday afternoon is the opposite, in that it makes it the primary topic of discussion for Monday morning news, which increases the political impact for shaping perceptions. It's an indicator that the people arranging for the timing didn't see it as bad news.
Rov_Scam
1yr ago
The whole bury it on Friday thing is old-fashioned in our era of 24 hour news and doesn't apply to major stuff like this anyway. Considering the major networks brought in their regular anchors and preempted programming, the day of release probably had little to do with anything. Waiting until today wouldn't have done anything, so they released the news as soon as the decision had been made.
SSCReader
1yr ago
So like during a phone call, where you're not supposed to ask what people are wearing either (unless we're talking about a very particular type of a on me call)?
Right, but have you ever been the only one dialing into a conference room? Everyone else can see, and all you have is sound? Back in the day I used to have to do that all the time and it was legitimately a pain to make out who was talking, where everyone is in relation to each other and the like. I think it would actually be an improvement to try and construct a visualization in that circumstance. Especially if you don't know who is talking. Indeed what we ended up having to do is preface every statement with "This is Dave, department head of consular services, I think we need to consider the cost implications of adding to ambassadorial security" But that was clunky and time consuming. Now for most people particularly nowadays with video calling that is no longer something that crops up much. But if you are blind it is every meeting, every time. Building up a mechanism to help navigate that seems like exactly the thing that you would do in that circumstance.
I would suggest that the mundane reason for blind people needing/wanting better descriptions of who is talking and how to create visualizations to keep track is exactly the one that should be considered the default. When Bob in network engineering asks me to limit the use of resources on the mainframe on Fridays, I should also consider the mundane reason the most likely one, though it is possible he is training Skynet, the mundane is almost always correct, in my experience.
Some of this seems to be about very small microenvironments and whether you stumble across and into them is quite random. Last year, my wife and I visited Milwaukee. I know Milwaukee pretty well, there are a bunch of areas of the city that aren't great, but I typically think of them as being quite easy to avoid if you have any familiarity with the geography. We went to a basketball game, an event at a brewery, then went out to go grab a takeout pizza afterwards. Thus far, all was well! Nothing to see other than people out having a good time. Maybe a few bums panhandling at a couple streetcorners, but nothing really worth mentioning. After we grabbed our pizza, we thought it would be nice to enjoy it at one of the local parks on the Milwaukee River, which is much more scenic than you might expect. To our surprise, the park that seems pretty nice during the day had dozens of vagrants, a couple of which began yelling at us about our pizza literally the moment we stepped off the riverwalk and into the park. We fled pretty quickly - we both felt like we were in genuine danger, not just uncomfortable with some beggars. I still think the city is a generally nice place to visit, but I have revised my opinion on how attentive I should be at night.
On the other hand, Baltimore really is unusually bad, even compared to other Rust Belt degradation.
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