domain:savenshine.com
Well, I've lived in both equatorial Malaysia and subtropical/temperate Australia. Despite growing up around the equator I could never stand the heat and mugginess; my preference is 15-18C, clear skies with some clouds, light breeze. The shoulder seasons in Australia are actually ideal for this, and they're also the most picturesque times of the year (though someplace like northern Asia would likely have even more stunning shoulder seasons; think cherry and plum blossoms in spring and carpets of fall foliage in autumn. Winter would be far more depressing though).
Personally, I enjoy climates where it doesn't rain often either. Rain is annoying, it stops up infrastructure and makes everything slushy. Petrichor smells like shit too.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
22m ago
but I think there are certain rights that enlightened humans converge upon as being worthy of protection.
Can you name a few? Unless I'm missing something big, your argument for why human rights are different from borders feels like actually arguing for why they're the same, particularly the mechanism for "convergence".
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
23m ago
I guess I have to take the L on not realizing a different genre from fairy tales from parables and other forms of didactic folklore, but apart from the supernatural element, the shoe does seem to fit right in, in particular "usually with simplistic moral themes designed to teach people life lessons".
There's nothing wrong with them, but they shouldn't be the basis for government decision-making.
I disagree, every policy will reflect some moral principles, and these (including liberalism itself) often come from religious texts.
Unions exist solely for extracting rent in the form of above market wages from through the use of various coercive techniques. That's literally their entire point. Similarly, guilds and trades apprenticeships restrict supply to drive up wages through regulatory capture.
I always say it and I'll say it again. Trades are easy. It doesn't take years to learn to wire up a house or install some plumbing. A novice with zero experience and a copy of the code could do it all perfectly, though he'd be a bit slow. But make it so only another plumbing master can grant access to the masters club, and tons of bs hurdles and hazing will suddenly be in the way.
So don't be surprized when people outside the club, which just exists to rob customers, don't hold the club in high regard.
MonkeyWithAMachinegun
Dancing to Tom Paine's Bones
50m ago
So did anyone else watch the Stanley Cup?
I'm not sure how the motte skews in terms of sports watchers, but I for one was rooting for the Panthers. For those who don't pay attention to sports, the Stanley Cup is the annual championship for hockey. No I don't mean "US Hockey" or "North American Hockey" I mean hockey. The best players of hockey from around the world come to compete in the National Hockey League (NHL). Americans aren't even a simple majority of hockey players in the NHL, heck we're not even the largest population in the league! That trophy goes to the Canadians, who make up some 40% of the league and have seven teams representing the frozen north in the league. I would have said "leafs" or "canucks" but both of those are actual NHL teams (Toronto Maple Leafs and Montreal Canadians respectively). There are also Swedes, Russians, Finns, Czechs, Swiss, Slovaks, Germans, Latvians, Danes, Austrians, Belarussians, Norwegians, and one each from France, the UK, Australia, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, and Slovenia.
Anyway, the Panthers were playing the Edmonton Oilers. I was, as I said, rooting for the Panthers because the Canadians won the Four Nations Face-Off, an NHL-affiliated/sponsored event where four of the most represented nations in the NHL (Canada, Finland, the US, and Sweden) competed against each other. It was an absolute riot. Some of the best hockey I've ever watched, hands down. But the Canadians won in the end (honestly Finland and Sweden never really had a chance, it was always going to be the US v. Canada in the finals). So I wanted the American team (somewhat, as I said it's an international sport) to bring home the cup.
I got my wish. For the second year in a row the Oilers and Panthers faced each other in the finals, and for the second year in a row the Panthers won it all. Many of the Panthers players are... somewhat controversial. Matthew Tkachuk (and to some extent his brother Brady Tkachuk) is considered a dirty player, to the point where he has been termed the "Rat King"--meaning he's a very good, very dirty player. Another player to hold the title Rat King is Tkachuk's teammate, Brad Marchand who has previously licked an opposing player's face just to fuck with his head. Seth Jones transferred from the Blackhawks to the Panthers three months ago, saying it was the "#1 destination to [play playoff hockey]" which was received poorly by fans as it looked like he was just chasing a payday. The controversy extends to the "chirps" or trash-talking on-ice, with this being called the nastiest Stanley Cup final anyone has ever seen. I could go on, but you know what's boring? Listing hockey players being hockey players. You know what's fun?
Watching the Panthers celebrate. Holy shit it is so much fun to watch these guys just goof off. For those not in the know, it is long-established hockey tradition for the winners of the Stanley cup to go on a week-long rager after winning, and the Panthers are doing it in style. With the cup. That's important. The rager occurs with the Stanley Cup for a full 24-hours. This is officially known as the "Players' day with the Cup" and it always, always gets damaged or abused in some way. Which has of course already occurred. In fact it kinda looks like it got shot but oh well. Damaging the cup during the celebration is a tradition as old as the celebration is. The Cup has had several children baptized in it, been shat in (by a baby, allegedly), thrown from a second-story window into a pool, dropped at least once every time it's been awarded, thrown in the ocean, drunk out of (a very serious tradition, the winning team is supposed to drink champagne from it), had cereal eaten out of it, had dogs eat out of it, been thrown in the dishwasher, and has traveled as far afield as an Igloo in the very north of Canada, to Los Angeles, to the White House, to Stockholm, to Red Square, and it even visited Kandahar Afghanistan where it watched over a ball hockey game on concrete in the Afghan desert. It has been drop kicked, dropped into the middle of a frozen canal (because the drop kick didn't clear the other side), left at a photo studio, lost on the side of the road, had the mortgage papers for Madison Square Garden burned in it (which of course led to the Curse of 1940, causing a 54 year win drought for the New York Rangers), had teeth chipped on it, been stolen by angry fans, been dropped in a bonfire, had a Kentucky Derby winning horse eat out of it, been locked in a bar and had every patron drink from it, etc. etc.
Anyway, how are the Panthers celebrating? By drinking themselves silly for a week straight. Here's team captain Barkov dragging Marchand out of a club. Marchand borrowed a fan's jersey, and then paid $200 cash to keep it (technically less than the value of the jersey but the fan certainly didn't mind). Here's Barkov almost catching a face-full from a smoke machine. Barkov and several team members visited a neighbor by prior arrangement at 5am to show him the Stanley Cup, Marchand has been thanking every team that traded or cut a player that ended up on the Panthers, and here's him giving an incredibly touching (no really) rationale for his instagram stories. Marchand has an odd fixation with Dairy Queen (well not so odd) and so served a bunch of blizzards to fans. No seriously, he really likes DQ. No, he really likes DQ, to the tune of $38000. The team (with cup in tow) visited a strip club, and presumably ran up a huge bill. I know a lot of this is Brad Marchand but he's the Rat King, and he is as hated on the ice as he is beloved off it. Here's Marchand biting teammate Uvis Balinskis' nipple. Here's the team riding down the street in a golf cart with the Stanley. Barkov celebrating with arena employees. Panthers and the Cup celebrating to the Pink Pony Club remix.
I could keep spamming reddit links but I think I've gotten my point across. It's just an absolute joy to watch these guys celebrate getting what they battled for, and I really do mean battled. Matthew Tkachuk had a sports hernia and torn adductor on the same side, Barkov had a gash in his hand that needed sutures, which tore out twice, and Reinhart (who scored 4 of the 5 goals in the cinching Game 6) was coming off a Grade 2 MCL sprain.
This got a lot longer than I intended, so I'll end it here with a simple note. I can't wait for next season.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
55m ago
I agree. Now explain how it is more rational to believe instead that "the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice."
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
You would consider you new preferences and habits to be unambiguously superior to before, yes? If so, where is the aforementioned trade-off?
A physically-fit person exercises and eats vegetables and meat rather than ice cream by the tubful. They think that fitness is better than the pleasures of a sedentary life and a nutritionally-poor but flavor-rich diet. They sacrifice the joys of the one to gain the joys of the other, no? I sacrifice things I want, and even some things I want very, very badly, for a chance at things that are better. I sacrifice these things because I believe they are contrary to the will of God, no matter how much they please me, and no matter how much I want them. I could even argue that they are actually permitted, through this loophole or that shaky argument, but that would be rationalization and self-deception. So I have to let them go.
It would, yes. If the word of Christ really is the Way and the Truth and the Light, Christians ought to be far less complacent in their efforts to spread the gospel than they currently are. Should you not rout the disbelievers, those who lead souls astray with false idols and apathetic impiety? Should you not hate the heretics, those who twist revelation into abomination? Your predecessors certainly did, so what changed?
No Christian who has ever lived has succeeded in emulating Christ, in living without sin and in doing perfectly as Christ would do. All Christians stumble and fail, because they are human. Given that we know that all Christians fail to execute Christianity perfectly, it stands to reason that different Christians in different times fail in different ways. Some Christians fail by lacking mercy; others fail by lacking courage, some by lacking love, some by lacking faith. It behooves us to determine which failures we each are prone to and to make a special effort to guard ourselves against the failures we are weak to.
Suffice to say, my personal weaknesses do not include a deficit of hatred. The hard part for me is "Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you," and "Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us," so that is the part I must fortify. Further, Christianity cannot be spread by the sword. That doesn't mean the sword is useless, or that we are required to be pacifists; it means that we must recognize that the ends we can achieve through the tools of this mortal world are strictly limited. Evil, sin, impiety and false idols have always existed and will always exist so long as this present world remains; you cannot kill your way to a Heaven on earth, nor achieve a Heaven on earth by any other means. If we fight, we fight for the mortal aims of upholding justice, defending the innocent, and breaking the power of ascendant evil, and we do so with the understanding that our means must be as limited as our ends. If that compromises our victory or our survival, so be it; Christians have been martyred before and will be martyred again, and our God has promised to wipe every tear from our eyes.
Probably many who called themselves Christians in the past went too far, and were lacking in mercy. Certainly many who call themselves Christians now seem to have gone too far and abandoned everything but mercy, and are lacking in courage, zeal and righteousness. None have us have ever been perfect; many of us have been good enough for the challenges facing them.
I think the Christianity you practice is actually quite different to the old sort, at least in practical implementation. For one, the demons of the earth who possessed the insane, swapped babies with changelings, communed with witches, and who many good Christians thought actually, literally existed have seemingly vanished.
I am skeptical that changelings ever existed, and that witches ever actually communed with the devil. The Old Testament itself condemns empty superstitions:
He cut down cedars, or perhaps took a cypress or oak. He let it grow among the trees of the forest, or planted a pine, and the rain made it grow. It is used as fuel for burning; some of it he takes and warms himself, he kindles a fire and bakes bread. But he also fashions a god and worships it; he makes an idol and bows down to it. Half of the wood he burns in the fire; over it he prepares his meal, he roasts his meat and eats his fill. He also warms himself and says, “Ah! I am warm; I see the fire.” From the rest he makes a god, his idol; he bows down to it and worships. He prays to it and says, “Save me! You are my god!” They know nothing, they understand nothing; their eyes are plastered over so they cannot see, and their minds closed so they cannot understand. No one stops to think, no one has the knowledge or understanding to say, “Half of it I used for fuel; I even baked bread over its coals, I roasted meat and I ate. Shall I make a detestable thing from what is left? Shall I bow down to a block of wood?” Such a person feeds on ashes; a deluded heart misleads him; he cannot save himself, or say, “Is not this thing in my right hand a lie?”
...And that was thousands of years before science and the cell-phone camera. Nor is atheism a novel development; there have been atheists as far back as we have writing. Nothing about the basic questions has ever really changed. "Many Christians" believing in changelings or witches makes no difference to me; I do aim to follow "Many Christians", but rather Christ.
The relevant part of your argument seems to be that previous Christians were very much not Materialists, but then I am very much not a Materialist either. Even though the the demons are silent and the miracles have ceased, I take the reality of their respective sources as an axiom, and shape my life accordingly.
But I have a hunch that the sort of casual superstition that past Christians practiced may have been vital (or at least a factor) in avoiding the exact sort of secularization that modernity hath wrought, at least among the common folk. Us gentry might be able to satisfy ourselves with philosophies of the Good, but many don't see the point of belief when there's nothing concrete in it for them.
And this is the crux, one might say. I am not advocating a philosophy of the Good. Sin is very real in the most concrete sense, and its lethal effects can be directly observed. If you let it have its way in your life, it can and will erode your substance until little that is human remains. It was not hard to observe the process in my own life, and it is trivial to observe it doing so in the lives of others.
Nor does it seem to me that the superstitions have ever gone away. At every point through the few centuries of the modern era, superstition has remained as strong and ubiquitous a force as it ever was; only the details have changed, not the mechanism. Science is now dominant, so our superstitions tend to be built out of technobabble, rather than legends and folktales; in both cases, they are built from the available pool of loose information. Humans don't seem to change; we are as we ever have been. There is nothing "concrete" in current beliefs; there is practical knowledge kept honest by constant feedback from reality, with precision both sufficient for and equal to the tools available to implement it, and then there is superstition expanding to fill what space remains. That's the way it's always been, and my bet is that it is the way it will always be, no matter how long we last.
Gaashk
1hr ago
I hadn't heard that, but unless the baby is born in late spring or summer, a woman in America is expected to return to work within three months of giving birth. If she breaks her contract by resigning mid year, that isn't great for her record, though teaching tends towards chronic shortage, so she's likely to find another job sometime anyway.
Okay, so women get unfair perks in the name of ending sexism. We talk about that a lot here. I don't see that having a lot to do with whether or not men can get a date.
the argument would be 'if women are attracted to men who have higher social status, money, property, etc., than they have, and we've created a society which makes women better off than men (at the expense of men), then women will not find the men the society has made worse off attractive and therefore more men cannot get dates and women will only be satisfied with a continuously shrinking pool of men'
Why do you think the 90s legal mores will be a stable equilibrium this time?
Griggs v. Duke power was in 1971. Price Waterhouse v Cooper was in 1989. The 90s saw the CRA of 1991 which put into statute bad court decisions around disparate impact and mixed-motivation being enough to show discrimination under the law. VAWA was in 1994. At best, the 90s were the last hurrah before social institutions had decayed to the point where they could no longer provide guiderails to the radical legal environment which had been created over the last two or so decades. And even if that's not true, there was a reason why these were passed in the early 90s and it's because the 80s wasn't a stable equilibrium either nor was the 70s or 60s or 50s. The legal environment had been pretty bad on this front for pretty long, but it wasn't until social conventions, communities, and institutions decayed to the point they could no longer provide sufficient guardrails that we saw the significant effects of them.
I was only cognizant near the end of the 90s so I don't have much experience with what they were like. When I speak to young people now in the real world about these topics, many of them have views which are similar to how you describe them on all sides of the divide. When I see others discussing the topic on this forum, it just comes off as older people who caught the last train out of the station before the power went off and they're on the right side of the bell curve on top of it. They really do not have a clue how bad it is out there for a whole lot of people.
In the past, older generations thought pairing off the younger generations into prosocial relationships was near the most important thing they could do for their children. Now, the best on offer appears to be "look 'em in the eye and give 'em a firm handshake" boomerisms directed almost entirely at males and general denial about the reality the younger generation is describing to them.
Jiro
1hr ago
The jobs feminine women perform don't care about three year resume gaps if there's a kid involved.
Wasn't one of the big complaints of feminism when it started that such jobs did care about the gap?
I don't generally disagree. Some unsorted thoughts:
- Being a subsistence farmer is even less aspirational than belonging to a trade, unless it's some kind of artisanal hobby farm. It was true in the Middle Ages, and is still true, just there aren't that many subsistence farmers left in the West to aspire to joining a union. My understanding of china is that there are still enough people left who have experience debugging rice fields by hand to be relatively grateful for factory work in comparison.
- T-ball? Just looked it up, TIL.
- "Having kids will not fuck up your career [...], or for the vanishingly few female long-haul truckers." If you mean that you can get back into it after a decade or so, I suppose. But what are they going to do, take their toddler in the truck with them? The dad will do all the evening care moms usually do? This seems really unlikely, like they would just get a different job entirely.
- My impression of the trades that don't use a lot of math is that they involve quite uncomfortable conditions, such that men will avoid them when they can. There are roofers out when it's 100 degrees in summer. Plumbers are trying to fit into crawlspaces under houses or around awkward fixtures in sinks (impression from some family members who work these jobs includes yelling and cursing while trying to hold some uncomfortable position and tools that don't quite fit properly). Restaurants involve hot kitchens, cuts, getting yelled at, and unless you're the chef, low pay. If someone is the chef or runs a company, that's totally fine, nobody's asking if he's looking to switch career tracks.
- It will be interesting to see what happens now that technology can replicate emails and spreadsheets, but not holding a tool in an awkward position while water is spraying on it.
Now sure, whatever it is Mackinsey consultants actually do, it's probably more comfortable and easier than electrical linemen. But at a certain point, shouldn't we as a society go 'it takes all sorts to make the world go round, why don't we make the top of every field prestigious, give everyone someone to aspire to.
That's not how prestige works.
American folk culture told a lot of romantic stories about cowboys, lumberjacks, trappers, all sorts of things. The guy who owns the roofing company probably has a wife and kids, and the people in his church respect him. Is that not good enough for him? Some things are harder to romanticize than others, but people have been making beautiful stories about the British navy for hundreds of years, I'm sure it's possible to draw attention to the honor of HVAC technicians. Winter on the Railroad , Landsailor, Logging Song
self_made_human
C'est la vie
2hr ago
Thank you. I try my best to make my existential angst both funny and educational. Sometimes this results in less angst!
self_made_human
C'est la vie
2hr ago
At times, I am dismayed by other doctor's if ignorance regarding base rates, relative risks, and their attitude towards pontification without additional qualifiers towards their patients. Of course, we're only human, fallible, and working with a patient population that isn't necessarily sophisticated enough to follow such caveats. I'm guilty of this myself, even though I strive to be better.
As far as I'm aware, there's no reason to think that finasteride must cause BPH and man boobs in your case. It increases the risk, but that's a quantifiable increase in probability and far from a certain Gu.
AFAIK, Rogaine is just a formulation of basic bitch minoxidil. It's inoffensive, doesn't have very strong effects, but when applied topically, doesn't have significant drawbacks either. We don't know for a fact how minoxidil even works, but the prevailing hypothesis is that it improves blood flow to the local tissues near where it's administered. This ?somehow increases hair growth.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
2hr ago
Nope, must have missed me. Got a link handy?
self_made_human
C'est la vie
2hr ago
My understanding is that this is a contested finding, but even assuming the usual relative risk of ED while actively taking finasteride (~1.5x baseline), the absolute risk is not so high that you need to run away screaming. That being said, unless my hair falls out by the fistful overnight, I would personally take my chances with minoxidil first.
I am weakly agnostic on this claim, but my primary motive was to explain that the claim by this pharma professor half a decade back was hyperbole.
sockpuppet2
2hr ago
I liked this comment. Comments like this couldn't be a regular thing, but I thought it was a good effort at introducing something that may not have otherwise been discussed, with its ineffectiveness most likely being mostly due to meta-discussion.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
3hr ago
It didn't come up, but I'm passingly familiar with what you're talking about. I believe that Scott has written about this a few months back, and the mechanism attributed was venous stasis/insufficiency causing the local hormonal levels to go too high.
Not related to balding as far as I'm aware, and largely out of my wheelhouse. I'll defer to Scott, and limit my commentary to saying that I don't see anything obviously implausible with the mechanism purported.
ABigGuy4U
3hr ago
I’m increasingly convinced Sam is a The Boys from Brazil-style clone of Leon Trotsky.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
3hr ago
Happy Solstice! Enjoy some mead-fueled rambling!
Earlier this week I was gazing into one of the endless amusing abysses of the internet when I stumbled across a post that spoke to me, all out of place. It was a brief meditation on aging and monogamy that echoed some of my own thoughts on the topic (tl;dr: a psychologically healthy man should still find beauty in the grandmother of his grandchildren), phrased and pic-related with a vibe I appreciated.
So I looked at the pseudonymous poster. They seemed to be some sort of TTRPG designer, or at least that's what their recent posts were about. A very brief perusal showed hints of extremely grognard-y concern about weapon minutia and a post talking about having bards be the representation of the gods, which were based on historical pantheons. Gave some extremely low (or even no) magic, gritty vibes, but that was a cool thought, using Bards telling stories of the Gods in the place of the more "mundane" divine power of healing and light spells. Felt like something William H. Stoddard would have put into a GURPS: Hyperborea book.
And, oh, cool, this person has an Amazon author page, let's check that and see what else they've written and-
It's Varg Vikerness.
Holy shit, I laughed my ass off. I really should have seen something like that coming. But it gave me a great excuse to remember one of my favorite memes.
And it gave me a good excuse to look up what happened in the Norwegian Black Metal scene in the early 90's, to at least Wikipedia standards of quasi-reliability, instead of just Shit My Punk Friend Told Me Over A Blunt Twenty Years Ago. There's a bunch of overlapping articles, but start here or here.
The overall picture I see, reading between the lines a bit, looks like a classic purity spiral. Euronymous installs himself as the Prince of Norwegian Black Metal because he owns the record shop and label and talks a very extreme game about how obsessed he is with death and nihilism and being maximally evil and hating everything bright and fair. But he develops a reputation as a poseur, a guy using the aesthetic for personal gain or self-aggrandizement. Meanwhile, newcomers are taking his rhetoric to logical conclusions and start taking actual actions, like burning churches and murdering strangers.
Feeling his position is threatened, Euronymous escalates his rhetoric, confiding specific, private death threats at other members of the scene. But he does this so much, to and about so many people, that rumors get out and one of those newcomers responds and kills him first.
It's an interesting look into the psychology of a subculture. And while I do appreciate some of the music and other elements, it just reaffirms how thoroughly I find that kind to evil-maxing to just be utterly gauche. For fuck's sake, kids, even The Crow is a fundamentally hopeful film!
But it's also interesting to square that nihilism with how Varg presents himself now, as a committed family man espousing a more positive vision of simple living and racialism (for which he was subjected to a Vampetaço).
And as an added bonus to this whole rabbithole, I got confirmation that Kulak is aware of his theme song, which I admit had been bothering me for a bit. You know I don't usually hold with the Abominable Intelligence, but this Imperium Hymn stuff - it's not bad.
Hell, let's be honest. Black Templar's Prayer is a fucking banger, and it's been dominating my gym-time listening for months. I'd shed blood to have Sabaton or Powerwolf fix the soulless bits and cover it.
Finally, hi Chris! Hope you're doing well.
gattsuru
3hr ago
I've fallen down the emulation rabbit hole. Or perhaps it's emulation hardware?
I was looking for a portable and moderately linux-friendly device to host this project that wasn't a stupid phone ... and I'm probably going to end up just using a busted-ass stupid phone, all the non-Apple dedicated 'tablets' are either huge or crap or both, and I had some familiarity with portable gaming handhelds like the Steamdeck and thought 'oh, how hard could it be to figure out one with decent battery life'?
Surely there must be some market between eWaste web browsers and ItCanPlayCyberPunkForFiveSeconds, even if it's a bit of a weird niche--
Who wants to drink from the firehose!
Okay, emulation has taken off. I'd messed around with SNES or PS1 emulators back when they were all the rage, or the GameCube a decade ago, but I'd kinda gotten the impression the late PS2 era had been a brick wall, with only weird specialty projects like Yuzu as successful exceptions that aimed for the low-hanging fruit and getting absolutely clobbered by lawfare. Hardware wise, I'd seen a million different Raspberry Pi compute stick shells, and just slapped the same code on a RaspPi I already had and considered RetroArch checked.
Nope. Gone are the dime-store-3d-print shells. Forget BCM2711s or RK3399 (... mostly). Even the Bricks built for gameboy-level emulation are running on more specialized and capable processors, and some of the higher-end machines can be comparable to desktop machines I would be pretty comfortable playing 2022 AAA-games on. Sure, Nintendo can cost the software developers or website hosts a pretty penny, but you don't even have to run to skeezy AliExpress offers to get giant deliveries of embarrassingly overt piracy... and maybe some software herpes. The PS3, despite its weirdo architecture, seems like it's actually working okay? And on things like the XBox, Microsoft cares so little about it that you can just rip software straight from an unmodded console, with nothing more specialized than a USB spinning rust drive. Who expected the day when M$ wasn't the bad guy when it came to archiving old games?just don't look at their OS. When you can't play something, it's usually a sign of serious software limits some nutjob is willing to work surprisingly hard to solve, or you're emulating a wii game with a prolonged jerkoff joke as a central game mechanic that doesn't translate well.
Now, there's a lot of sketch here. At the high end, you have fun questions like iffy USB-C-PD implementations and driver hell. More often, expect a ton of hardware that cycles in and out in months if not days, from a manufacturer that's apparently colorblind and depending on Kickstarter churn. Even when everything works out fine, commitment to the LGPL is more in theory than practice, and there's a lot of reason to suspect that the Snapdragon8gen2 chips were 'surplus' from conventional projects -- I dislike Qualcomm's resale policies enough to think that's a plus, but from a support and longevity perspective it's a red flag.
And, yeah, a lot of these come with just piles upon piles of piracy. Ostensibly, you could play native games (many newer devices are fairly fully-featured linux/android, albeit with all the !!fun!! involved since most of the cheaper ones are ARM). Ostensibly, you could just rip games you own or collect, and I'm enough of a hoarder collector that I've actually been able to do some of that, but in all honesty? They're built for piracy. You know it, I know it, most vendors are pretty unabashed about letting you pick how much piracy you want and know it, the less graymarket vendors having to explicitly warn you that they aren't doing the piracy for you know it.
There's an optimistic view that's kinda nice. Yeah, it's a little twisted to be so ruled by nostalgia that you're putting as much processing power into a 2002 handheld game as could run a 2022 AAA one. And if everybody could have just bought a 5 USD rip of great games like Grand Theft Auto 3 or Shadow of the Colossus or Okami and run them on their cell phone, we probably wouldn't have gotten remasters of them. But in turn, there's a ton of other games that will never show up again, or where they are remastered get butchered in the process, or get remastered for a console or environment that itself has a shelf life measured in months. The Baptists-and-Bootleggers of Obsessive Weirdos and Literal Thieves haven't just kept a lot of otherwise abandoned games archived and usually playable (oh boy Games for gofuckyourself Windows Live), but they've made a lot of equipment and play options that would otherwise not exist, even if that requires pretty dedicated design and engineering work. If it also means you can get an unlocked Android device that'll accept alternate bootloaders for less than the cost of last generations Nintendo handheld, I'm not gonna complain.
So I dunno. I'm still more of a keyboard-and-mouse gamer, but some of the options are looking pretty good when I'm away from my desk or my documentation or my reading list. And even for normal gaming time, I think it might be worth firing up Megaman Legends or Robot Alchemic Drive again.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3hr ago
why not just blow it all out in a cocaine-and-hookers weekend
Because those are illegal, I don't know where I'd find them in my area, and don't have the money to afford them anyway?
and then end it with a 9mm breakfast?
Because I'd worry about missing the right spot, and ending up still alive but with seriously incapacitating brain damage — which is why I'm more likely to go with helium and an "exit bag" instead.
And as for why I don't do that, mostly because my family would get stuck with the bill for disposing of my corpse, which exceeds my (SSI-limited) net worth. Once my parents are both gone, though…
Now, you might argue that America's heart wasn't really in it. Is their heart going to be more in it when it's their own homeland they're burning and shelling?
"Outgroup vs. Fargroup" comes to mind here. Fighting a bunch of people on the other side of the world who you are somewhat sympathetic toward, versus fighting the useless, inbred, gap-toothed, room-temperature-IQ, religious fanatic, every -ist and -phobe, Klanazis that make up the hated enemy tribe?
Also, in the GWOT, America's military operated in a foreign land, while their entire support structure, industrial base, and their soldiers' friends and family were perfectly safe on the other side of an ocean.
Which means they had nothing to fear from giving up and going home. When "home" is where you're fighting, it's win-or-die, so the motivation is much stronger.
I don't remember where it was, but I remember a year or two ago reading an editorial online from a retired general, ostensibly about the possibility of civil war in the US (though he ultimately used it to lay out his — IMO ridiculous — position on counter-insurgency), where he gave this as one of the arguments as to why whichever side of a second civil war the military pics simply cannot lose — the US military, since the 20th century, has not been and cannot be defeated, the politicians have merely gotten tired and called it off; but since doing so in a civil war is suicide…
You can get a job being someone's bitch in June. That's what being an apprentice is.
No, seriously, the trades are jobs
They're shitty jobs that nobody would take without the promise of a master card at the end. Nobody will do a phd either without the promise of the degree at the end.
Do you believe that Tim Waltz actually directed this man to kill state politicians to clear up seats for him to run for the Senate?
I am going to say that this is almost certainly a lie. I've been watching the story develop as well, and have been updating against my previous prediction that this guy was a Red ideologue, and in favor of him being a straightforward wacko. I'm not sure how this shifts the calculus; if he were a Red ideologue, claiming Tim Waltz put him up to it makes this an after-the-fact false flag, but it's also compatible with serious delusion.
I would estimate a roughly 0% chance that he is a democrat operative, or that any amount of "training" he received from "elements of the US military" is anything at all resembling the median image evoked by that phrase. If I visit a shooting range with a buddy in the guard, I'm "receiving training from elements of the US military". That doesn't make me John Rambo.
Reporting on his previous activities shows a clear pattern of delusional/manic energy animating his various schemes.
I'd imagine I'm not the only one here for whom this description feels uncomfortably familiar. I've known a few people like this.
This part right here seems illustrative. This guy is not tethered. It does not sound like he understands mundane power, nor what is relevant to that power. He's feeding back the banalities he observes via cable news as the final output of the political process, and he thinks the eight-second soundbite in between anchor waffling is what the actual top-level inputs look like. He's unbearably, excruciatingly naïve
There's the lists of Bad People, and the focus on politicians. Also, complete disconnect from basic reality. The windmill he's tilting at doesn't exist. To a first approximation, hunger does not exist in America. There are food banks literally everywhere. Most grocery store and many restaurants supply them with large quantities of nutritious food.
...The above doesn't sound like a Red Tribe partisan flaming out into violent extremism, and it doesn't sound like a Democratic machine assassin. It sounds like an earnest moderate normie with deteriorating mental health catching a bad case of the currently-endemic madness. The last two personal interactions I had were with Blues, both mentioned their desire for bad-people-murder unprompted. I do not doubt for a second that I could get equivalent expressions from my Red acquaintances. I'm pretty sure large portions of the population are simply marinating in this soup 24/7; fill an echo chamber with "kill the bad guys" enough, and someone's going to take you seriously.
It bears mentioning that the above is from the Press, and one should never trust them. But from the evidence available, it looks like I was wrong and this guy was just a normie psycho with nothing approaching a coherent tribal agenda.
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