domain:firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
16hr ago
The galaxy is only 100,000 light-years in diameter. Starships moving at a mere 0.1 c could get from one side to the other in only a million years.
That's peanuts in astronomical time. If you can make a 0.1 c starship you need not worry about biological lifespans. 'Aliens exist but are too far away' doesn't make any sense. They could've shown up 100 million years ago and still be here. There are centuries old engravings of weird shapes in the sky, recordings from egypt, footage from modern jets and sensors.
Furthermore, our understanding of the universe is extremely limited, bordering on pathetic. 95% of the universe is 'dark' to us, we have no clue about it. Logically, that's the most likely place for the bulk of the aliens to be. Not only is it the vast majority of the universe's mass and energy, it provides a simple explanation for the apparent absence of aliens in the tiny portion we understand.
It makes no sense to play around with Dyson Spheres or largescale structures we might be capable of observing, it's not cost-efficient compared to 'dark' enterprises.
We prank the North Sentinel Islanders with drones and occasional plane/helicopter overflights, some missionaries showing up and getting killed. The real estate they control is so small it's worthless. Nobody wants to live on a crap jungle island. It's probably the same with aliens but instead of crap jungle island it's 'entire visible universe'. There's no real serious intent, more like casual observation. The only thing interesting on Earth is us.
My late grandmothers position on tattoos was that the only respectable people who had them were concentration camp survivors.
crushedoranges
16hr ago
Let me demonstrate how irritating you're being.
"Did I strawman the Left? Let's ask Sam Brinton."
"Did I strawman the Left? Let's ask Anthony Weiner."
"Did I strawman the Left? Let's ask Jasmine Crockett."
"Did I strawman the Left? Let's ask AOC."
You are not strawmanning. You are weakmanning. You are not giving your political opposition the benefit of the doubt. I have a whole list of leftist politicians, intellectuals, and academics that have said embarrassing and stupid things I'd like you to defend, if you'd care to play at this particular joust.
Tiber727
16hr ago
Adding onto this, this is an example of the real stupidity of this. For boardgames, it requires making lots of different little pieces. China outcompeted in manufacturing so hard that the only manufacturers left only want to deal in volumes significantly higher than most games would sell. The margins aren't there to set up manufacturing in the U.S., so the boardgame industry will likely collapse or stop selling in the U.S. before it ever does what Trump seems to want people to do.
That's the real stupidity of the tariffs. Even if you think tariffs are good, a blanket tariff doesn't care about the reality of the industries it targets.
The leg has massive arteries to power those big running muscles. Despite what various war and action movies might tell you, you slice one of those and you bleed out fast. That’s also why the arguments that police should be shooting to wound are laughable.
ThenElection
16hr ago
I think Tony Hsieh of Zappos (barely) broke into the billionaires club, and he had a tattoo and threw tattoo parties for employees.
Not sure if that's a strong recommendation.
falling-star
16hr ago
The average hard (cocaine or worse) drug consumer generally doesn't have the patience to wait a few weeks for an order to ship. They likely also lack the IQ, agency, or tech ability to figure out how to use the dark net market and crypto.
eee
16hr ago
Why do you think it makes sense to say that the views of some random politician are emblematic of the "online racialist Right"? During the Biden administration, could I quote some random official and say that their position is the position of online radical leftists?
People accuse you of unfairly representing other groups opinions... because you don't understand their positions and represent them unfairly. And when people point out that you have done this you throw a big hissyfit. Then, you go right back to doing the same thing.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
17hr ago
The fact that very few of the characters actually had any agency at all in Blindsight is a feature, not a bug. You're not reading about plucky oddballs making decisions and saving the world, you're reading about an extended game of 4D chess between two non-conscious gods in which the humans are a footnote at best. Theseus itself is an analogy for how the book says the human brain works, with the conscious actors being irrelevant at best and actively harmful at worst, and the non conscious actors being responsible for almost everything in spite of the fact they’re usually backgrounded in the plot.
Yeah, and this is where I will defend Watt’s writing in these two books, where Blindsight is his masterpiece and will probably go down as a classic of 21st-century science fiction. Sure, his characters are frequently more like plot coupons, but they’re not really the story. The story is about titanic forces moving around in the background, between the lines on the page, which is pretty cool when he pulls it off and the reader figures it out.
I think that’s basically the theme he’s always writing about, even his early Rifters series was like a first stab at that idea.
He killed the guy simply by hacking his leg? That's unexpected. Guessing he just wanted to horribly mutilate him but he took too much of the leg off and help took too long to arrive?
Shocking that he had the nerve to call the guy his friend in his court statement. Naturally he was sorry and regretful but not enough to kill himself. Couldn't even take the samurai larp all of the way and disembowel himself.
I'm going to go a step further, for controversy's sake, and say that close to zero tattoos truly look good in practice.
Human skin is just not a great medium for artistic expression. The ones that are hyperdetailed kind of look okay if you look from the right angle, but get up too close and they tend to betray imperfections and from further away they all look like jumbles of random shapes and generally don't look like intentional art pieces.
The ones I might grant as appealing tend to be simple designs or patterns that emphasize the underlying physical features. But most people don't have good taste, and someone willing to permanently mark their body is probably even less likely to have good taste about it.
And time ticks by a few years, colors fade, clean lines get washed out, skin deforms and wrinkles and whatever trendy design you had falls from popularity (mileage may vary by how you care for them).
I make some exceptions for tattoos that genuinely symbolize something meaningful or important in the person's life. It is actually interesting to see a unique tattoo, ask about it, and get an actual story about its significance! That serves a 'useful' social purpose. But then, the signalling value is not in the aesthetics of the tattoo itself!
faceh
17hr ago
Yes, but drill it in a little deeper, the demonstrated ability to wreak havoc on your enemies is catnip for women since in the ancestral environment that was a major signal for genetic fitness, that you would produce strong children and could protect them to adulthood.
That's why I don't quite think that its a failure of risk-aversion (I mean, after the first time he hits her, sure), since on an evolutionary level, there'd be a larger risk to pairing with a guy who was physically incapable of defending you.
But it is bonkers that once they feel attraction the prefrontal cortex isn't able to project the longer term consequences of pursuing the guy. Not just that he might beat her, but that he's got no real prospects for building wealth or raising a family in a stable environment. This is so fucking primal that you see fashion Heiresses getting knocked up by sexy felons and a literal Rothschild leaving her husband to date a rapper.
And yeah, there are counter stories about wealthy men blowing up their lives and leaving faithful women to pursue or marry a stripper or even literal prostitute. No doubt. But far as I can tell that's never socially celebrated or sanctioned or really excused.
I think about this video constantly ever since I first saw it.
The stated admission (that I do not think is a joke!) that even a literal villain who slaughtered her people can instantly win her over by... pointing a sword at her throat.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
17hr ago
One might think that but the guys that go in for special forces are amongst the most violent and aggressive. Fort Bragg has crazy high death rate because of the drug use and violence.
While I am confident US special forces are trained differently to Spetsnaz one can see a little of the 'operator mindset' here: https://x.com/XiaoVilin99/status/1937922190005178389
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
17hr ago
I'd certainly agree that I bet the average guy with knuckle tattoos is more likely to get into a fight than an average SEAL, and that a SEAL is unlikely to get into a fight he doesn't want to get into.
But I think they're much much much more likely to want to get into a fight than the true average man.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
17hr ago
Company I was at made the mistake of hiring a fat woman with tattoos. She gave me a bunch of work but didn't get her side of things done and they fired her after a few months.
While it may be hard to avoid tradesmen with tattoos it's still a bad sign IMO. Tradesmen are notorious for not showing up on time. Or with Hegseth, ideally you want some kind of efficient manager in that role, not a Fox News presenter. Trump seems to be loyalty-maxxing which is understandable but not ideal for efficiency.
birb_cromble
17hr ago
You're right. I can't type for crap tonight. I meant III, which is rated for 7.62x39
faceh
17hr ago
I don't think the 'true' upper class ever really started wearing tattoos, is the thing.
Celebrities, athletes, maybe some actors, but rarely anyone with real 'power.'
I would defy you to find any tattoo worn by an actual human being that actually signals "I am a higher class than you."
I just did a cursory google search and I can tentatively say that ZERO billionaire business magnates have a single tattoo. Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, Dorsey, not even Palmer Luckey. Wait, Jensen Huang apparently has one, but I can only find the one photo and he clearly states he won't get another.
Not even Steve Jobs back in the day had one.
And these are guys that could hire the literal best artists alive to create absolute masterworks for them. And, goes without saying, couldn't easily be fired for getting one.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
17hr ago
Escape from Tarkov just wiped, and I had previously been somewhat interested in playing again, after a prolonged break due to lack of interest and circumstance. I already had about 1700 hours in it over a few years, so I'm hardly a newbie.
Yet, as usual, BSG managed to screw up royally. The game already started out immensely grindy, and only got worse. Half of the actually good guns, gear and ammo was locked behind ball-busting quests. Back when I used to play with a group of buddies from Singapore and Malaysia, we'd cheese the worst of them, 5 or 6 of queuing up at the same time but separately, in the hopes we'd spawn in the same match as 'enemies' and then kill each other for the sake of quests.
And yet, like many things in Tarkov, it got worse. The new patch is supposed to be a "hardcore" one. What does that entail?
Removing 90% of the progression, in the sense you literally can't progress. You don't have access to quests, unlike before, where you could directly queue into maps, now, you have the choice of about 2 or 3 by default, and need to travel within a map to find an exit leading to the next one.
This works... terribly. The game already had abysmal queue times, now you can easily spent 30 minutes waiting for the sake of entering and running through a map for the sake of getting to where you actually want to go.
The game has a feature where you could pay to insure your gear. If your killer didn't loot you, anything left over would find its way back to you a few IRL days later.
Nikita, the owner and lead dev, in his infinite wisdom, made it so that insurance is so exorbitantly expensive that it costs more than buying an entirely new set of gear.
You can't access the player-run market. The sell price to NPCs was gutted, and the price to buy inflated.
There's hardly any actual new content, and you can't access 90% of the old one.
A change last patch made it so that you couldn't use items you didn't personally find in game for upgrades. So if you bought a pack of screws and a drill to upgrade your shelter, now, unless it came with a special found in raid status, it's next to useless.
At one point, they'd finally added a feature that had been teased for years, and which I'd looked forward to - realistic armor hitboxes. Armor plates were modeled, with proper coverage and weak spots. Then they rolled that back next patch.
I could go on and on, but the game has gone from a diamond in the rough to a lead pencil in the shit, aimed at your butthole.
The only good news is that their decisions are being absolutely roasted, with an immediate exodus of the player base. They're starting to roll back some things, but it's too little, too late. Good, fuck them, maybe someone can make a hardcore milsim extraction shooter that respects the player's time and energy.
FtSoA
17hr ago
Can you trust the Soviet investigators who "investigated" Auschwitz?
More than the Nazis who built the place I'd say. But notice that nowhere did I cite Soviet-only information as far as I can tell.
The authors of the Soviet investigation of the Katyn massacre, which falsely blamed the Germans for a crime that they had actually committed,
Funny, that episode is I believe a major reason why the Nazis wanted to burn evidence.
Can you trust the confession of someone that was extracted through physical torture, under duress with no access to legal representation and no access to documentary evidence?
Frequently, yes actually. Especially if corroborated with other forms of evidence. Especially given what Hoss wrote after his interrogations. He never admitted guilt, only following orders.
It's not about trust, it's about weighing the quality of the evidence against the nature of the claims being made.
Ok, sure. Let's agree on that.
Himmler's denial is relevant because Himmler's explanation for the conditions on the Eastern Front aligns with an enormous body of documentary evidence
By default, one expects a criminal to deny the accusation. By default, one expects a clever criminal to tell a lie that is plausible. By default, one expects a coverup if the circumstances allow it.
whereas the documentary evidence for gas chambers disguised as shower rooms performing executions of millions of people is completely nonexistent.
So you just don't understand how coverups work and deny the numerous witness accounts and artifacts? There were public accounts of the Holocaust in like 1942, Allied intelligence collected indications of it (which was not used at Nuremburg), and quite a bit of physical evidence for the whole shebang, including soil readings finding the relevant chemicals.
He also claimed there were gas chambers at Dachau and Mauthausen, which is known not to be true.
Is that known? https://www.ushmm.org/search/results/?q=dachau+gas+chamber+door
Best I can tell, there was a gas chamber at Dachau, but it was not used for extermination. The crematoriums did seem like they got some use though.
https://www.kz-gedenkstaette-dachau.de/en/historical-site/virtual-tour/crematorium-area/
Seems the mainstream disagrees with you about Mauthausen, too: https://www.mauthausen-memorial.org/en/News/Concerning-Doubts-about-the-Existence-of-a-Gas-Chamber-at-the-Mauthausen-Concentration-Camp
You've demonstrated to me that I cannot trust anything you say about even the simplest of facts, including representing the "mainstream," so you'll excuse me for wanting you to at least make an attempt prove your assertions by default when you say things like "which is known."
According to mainstream historiography, there were no gassings at all, ever, in Treblinka I, which was a penal/labor camp.
Oh, so you do know what Treblinka I was? That's nice. You know, it is entirely possible one account gets any given detail wrong. As someone with some background in the interrogation business, I definitely agree that's an issue. But here it seems like you're trying to pull a stunt of "well if he got some things wrong the entire testimony is out" as if there isn't evidence the Nazis were using gas chambers for one thing or another since like 1939. Or other confessions. Or other material evidence. The general history seems to be that in the summer of 1941, mass killings started by the SS and they decided to switch to gas instead of bullets. More efficient that way. Cleaner. Thereafter, they built out the extermination program for the Jews in 1942.
We'll never know, but it's entirely possible Hoss witnessed some experimental gassings at Treblinka I. Or his mind was addled and he mixed up the sites (there were three in Operation Reinhard: Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka). Or, actually, his statement need not be read as his visit taking place in June 1941 either. Given the rest of his statements about the extermination of the Warsaw Ghetto Jews at Treblinka II, that aligns with July of 1942. Of course, that seems to conflict a little bit with Hoss also saying that his subordinate Fritzsch came up with the whole Zyklon B idea in August 1941. Hoss also says that at Treblinka the victims knew it was coming, whereas Auschwitz fooled 'em, which conflicts with at least later accounts of Treblinka also trying to fool victims. (But what did happen to all those hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto?)
Here's a historical analysis of Hoss's memoirs: https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/hoess-memoirs/
That's an impressive level of corroboration from multiple other accounts for a conspiracy this large, and over some decades too. I love that Hoss got the estimate of the exterminated at Auschwitz down to merely 1.1 million later on. Weird way to be a coerced witness. "Yeah it was mass murder, but less massive."
There's no documentary record or physical evidence to corroborate the claims of millions of people gassed in secret extermination facilities.
How, on earth, can you say this if you're even remotely aware of the mainstream evidence on the matter? It's all made up? Multiple nations, thousands of witnesses? Hoss is just a total liar, as are the other confessors telling similar stories? The showers with airtight doors are just an outcome of German over-engineering and commitment to hygiene?
Where did all the Jews in those Jewish communities in Europe end up then? Spirited to Heaven? What were these trains doing? https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aau7292
Your view is something like:
The real conspiracy isn't that the Nazis tried to exterminate the Jews, it's that the Allies and Jews created the appearance of the Nazis trying to exterminate the Jews. Which was believable, given how much Hitler and the Nazis seemed to have it in for the Jews. Yeah, sure, the Nazis really didn't like Jews. But the "Final Solution" didn't involve mass murder, let alone with gas chambers and ovens. Just some forced labor. Deaths from disease. Actually, it's better to trust the Nazis denials over any confessions, or eyewitnesses--Jewish or otherwise--or intelligence reports, or aerial photography, or soil samples. Instead, this was all a massive concoction to ...
... to do what exactly? The Nazis had lost the war. No one needed to execute them just for fun.
Reminds me of my favorite antisemitic sentiment (common in the Middle East) is: "Obviously the Holocaust is a Jewish myth; sure would be cooler if it wasn't though."
There have been no excavations of any mass graves on the site. The ground radar has not "found evidence", or any more evidence than the same ground radar evidence at Kamloops Indian Reserve found evidence for the mass graves of children.
I was hoping you'd mentioned the Canadians.
So this is fabricated? https://www.livescience.com/44443-treblinka-archaeological-excavation.html
Last I checked the Canadians hadn't found anything or even pretended to. Also no corroborating evidence.
Frankly I trust the NSA and CIA on this analysis. Would be weird if they, decades after the fact, were still really committed to the bit using previously unpublicized information.
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/305894?objectPanel=transcription https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/news-features/declassified-documents/cryptologic-quarterly/sigint_and_the_holocaust.pdf https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-D-PURL-LPS92209/pdf/GOVPUB-D-PURL-LPS92209.pdf
You really gotta admire the competence of the international, multigenerational commitment to this fabrication across so many information sources.
Do you have any evidence there was intent and planning to construct such a false narrative?
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
18hr ago
An important ingredient here is that the overwhelming majority of tattoos are just hideous. Aesthetic harm. Visual downgrade. I know of a grand total of one person whose tattoos actually look good, and I think the secret sauce is that he has only a few, and they're perfectly sized to be clearly visible and framed on his body as you would normally look at them. Most people look like either a toddler slapped stickers on them, or like a derelict wall in a shit part of down.
I actually kind of like this interpretation of the plot, that Rorschach initially intended to build another version of itself around the sun but Captain turned it into an advantage for itself instead. Actually a pretty good resolution of the apparent contradiction.
Incidentally, this all implies that almost all of the character actions in Blindsight are irrelevant to the plot, and even actively counterproductive, because the single most important thing occurring is the Captain making sure that Big Ben never susses out that there is another super-intelligence in the mix.
The crew in Blindsight even without this interpretation are mostly irrelevant to the Captain's plan - they spend most of their time following Captain's orders or being manipulated by Captain, and even then much of what they do doesn't end up directly contributing to the resolution of the story. Most of the events in the story were planned by Captain long beforehand. I actually think this is a theme of the story - your amount of actual agency in the plot inversely correlates with your level of consciousness.
Susan James is probably the most conscious individual on Theseus, and Rorschach easily turns her against herself and co-opts her for its own plans. Isaac Szpindel, who boasts a huge amount of augmented senses that elevate his sensory world far beyond an average baseline, gets unceremoniously killed early on in the book before he even has any time to put his skillset to use. Amanda Bates, the combat "specialist", is pretty much entirely useless and is just a glorified safety-catch to make sure her automated drones aren't as effective as they could be without her. Siri Keeton, the famously un-self-aware protagonist who does his job without realising how he does it, ends up being one of the least co-opted or affected by Rorschach, and ends up being a surprisingly relevant part of Captain's plan when it turns out his role is to play stenographer and relay all the information to the public (And how do they get him to do this? They break him to make him more human and more manipulable).
The critical revelation that the aliens are not conscious and are hostile was made by the vampire, who has a reduced level of consciousness compared to your baseline human - or Captain itself, depending on how you interpret their neural link. Literally everything else was planned by Captain, an automaton that likely operates in a manner not too dissimilar to how Rorschach itself does.
The fact that very few of the characters actually had any agency at all in Blindsight is a feature, not a bug. You're not reading about plucky oddballs making decisions and saving the world, you're reading about an extended game of 4D chess between two non-conscious gods in which the humans are a footnote at best. Theseus itself is an analogy for how the book says the human brain works, with the conscious actors being irrelevant at best and actively harmful at worst, and the non conscious actors being responsible for almost everything in spite of the fact they’re usually backgrounded in the plot.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
18hr ago
Yeah, I don't know, chalk it up to small sample size I guess. I only know a couple of these guys and they're both pretty relaxed and have no tattoos at all. I'm obviously aware that plenty of soldiers have tattoos, but I get a completely different impression than I do from the face and knuckle tattoo guys on that front as well.
cjet79
18hr ago
My gaming tastes have changed so much now that I have kids. In many ways the shallowness of the game is a plus rather than a negative. It's just wrapping a bunch of game elements I've played dozens of times into an isometric action game that I haven't officially completed. And that's enough to occupy my brain in my few hours of off time, or during my partial off time when I need to drop the game at a moments notice to handle something happening.
The sailing and exploration is fun. I think I'm getting close to exploring just about every game mechanic it has. I'm not sure I want to grind out the fishing mini-game. It's similar to mining other resources, but with a failure option. I've always hated fishing in games. I'm still confused why devs bother adding it. (Dave the diver was great, but that is mostly spear fishing).
I'll play it for another week and then leave on vacation and forget it/drop it while I'm gone from my PC.
Not sure about this one as IIRC starving people were killed when trying to access grain in warehouses during the Great Leap Forward, and one of the reasons why the famine was so horrific was because Mao and co. continued to export food for political gain and refused foreign aid for at least a year or two.
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