5434a
2mo ago
Finished Martin Amis' collection of short stories Heavy Water. Nothing special, the highlight was the sci-fi entry The Janitor On Mars about a billion year old robot left behind by Martians for no other reason than to gloat about the end of planet Earth. Chosen as a follow up to reading Amis' Lionel Asbo, which was probably a biting satire of contemporary British social mores but I found it simultaneously too smug, too vulgar, and too banal, and written using a type of dialect for dialogue that he exaggerated to the point that it became jarring. Or at least I've never heard anyone talk like that.
Starting on a collection of Gogol's short stories. I like short stories. After reading two Clavells and two Dostoevskys in close succession it's nice to get through a whole story in less than fifty pages.
5434a
2mo ago
You probably don't think "oh wow nothing will ever be the same" in the same way you might after singular discrete events, but nothing will ever. Post puberty you will never be seen the way you were before, and you will never see the world the way you did before, and the change is physically evident and inconcealable in a way that those other changes aren't. Whether we assign it significance or not is moot.
5434a
2mo ago
I found cashew butter to be underwhelming. Peanuts are quite plain and peanut butter is delicious, so seeing as cashews are already delicious I was expecting cashew butter to be even better. Turns out it was kind of plain.
I've always found it odd that radical feminists hold some of the strongest objections to men who voluntarily emasculate and feminise themselves while it reads as a rad fem fantasy.
If the choice were between encouraging men to emasculate themselves at the cost of sharing the label of "woman" with them versus the essentialist position of telling men that they'll never be women so stop trying I would have assumed they'd choose the former.
5434a
2mo ago
Trade. Off.
Either "woman" means something, and men ain't it, or "woman" means whatever men want it to mean. There is no Panglossian halfway point where heckin brave transerinos get to be court ratified Real Women and shitlord chuds have to validate them despite their sexist patriarchal "facts". Either transgenderism is epistemically empty and futile or we're all men and women in nothing more than as much as it suits our personal agenda in the moment.
As the incentives to play this word game and the disincentives not to do so continue to stack up the remaining barriers will continue to be eroded. And if people will play it for the sake of joining a no-stakes casual chat app you can bet they'll play it for the sake of preferential treatment in the courts, but I repeat myself.
5434a
3mo ago
Hummus. Blend up a can of chickpeas with some garlic and tahini, then you'll have something to dip your raw vegetables and pizza crusts in.
Speaking of pizza crusts, flatbreads like pitta and naan are really quick and easy to make too.
5434a
3mo ago
I can see why younger readers might be impressed, it's a moderately clever conceit. It's less impressive if you've experienced any kind of meta-text before. Layering additional meta-texts on top only subtracted from the sum of its parts, which is ironic in the context of writing about a house that is larger than its external dimensions (with the extra irony that the book itself is physically larger than a typical fiction book). Less would have been more.
5434a
3mo ago
House of Leaves is a decent enough idea that overindulges itself in itself. If you reach a point where you've had enough then you've probably had all the meat off the bones and won't miss much by carrying on.
5434a
3mo ago
Very hard to find proper clips that aren't just thumbnail bait but this one is still up https://v.redd.it/hjcwvjomoqhd1
what’s the use in calling a phenotypically female intersex person a “man” due to XY chromosomes?
It's a soldier in the pro vs anti transgender argument war. The person you described, as you noted, is intersex. They're not male, and they're not female. They were born with a very unusual mixture and biological expression of what are typically considered biological male and female characteristics. They're not transgender. Strictly speaking they have no relevance to the transgender debate other than serving as a prompt to explore the issues (read: muddy the waters) of the transgender debate. Transgender debate aside they're also, strictly speaking, not a woman and shouldn't be participating in women's sport. That doesn't mean they're a man either in the same way a mule not being a horse doesn't mean it's a donkey. It's its own thing.
That doesn't mean that men can have vaginas. It means that some vanishingly small number of people were born with phenotypically female sex organs despite having other biological markers of being a male. Society doesn't have a social class that can accommodate those people so they get swept into one of the two bins that they'll never completely fit inside of, and any closer inspection of why they don't fit requires unpacking a biology textbook of initialisms and polysyllables and revealing that there's not even a single class of intersex in the same way I've just found out that there's a second horse-donkey hybrid that doesn't belong with the mules.
If you flip a coin enough times eventually it will land on its edge but we don't ask people to call heads, tails or edges, we say "Holy shit I've never seen that before, is this a magic coin? Also we'll have to flip again to settle the call". That doesn't make a trick coin that has heads on both sides into an edge call, and it doesn't make it worthwhile specifying the precise 0-360 degree Z axis orientation of the edge call when you're arguing about whether a heads is a tails.
You're right about the men-with-vaginas irony but in turn what you're saying could imply that there's no such thing as a woman. IIRC you're a transwoman. I hope you appreciate what showing there's no such thing as a woman would imply for people who claim to identify as such. This is why the intersex issue has no relevance, because it doesn't serve either side of the debate. It's a blind soldier (not even a soldier, more like a conscientous objector) being pressganged into battle and ordered to open fire.
5434a
3mo ago
What good is a definition that doesn't define a boundary? If they're not provable and they're not disputable they're not actually useful for anything to anyone.
The people who campaign for this stuff ignore that they're forging ther own rhetorical weapons out of marshmallows and candyfloss.
5434a
3mo ago
Bottom line is it's always trial and error to a degree, but you'd be foolish not to do the basic book research first. There'll be a database somewhere with climate zones and the corresponding plants/crops/varieties because it's such a perennial concern. If you wanted a better answer than I can give you maybe try looking for a local horti/agricultural college with a friendly librarian. Printed seed catalogues from local vendors are good too and probably a more user friendly format than an online catalogue as they offer more discoverability than a janky proprietary search engine, plus you know they'll be available to buy instead of reading up in a book or blog that you found via Google about what sounds like a perfect plant and then finding that the only people who sell seeds are on a different continent and want $30 for postage of a $2 pack of seeds.
If you wanted to do things The Proper Way you'd start by doing a survey of your plot for soil composition, temps, rainfall, sun/shade aspects etc before even planning what to plant but that might not be practical if you're working around an existing set of planting - it's not worth ripping out a mature ornamental tree just to vacate the best spot for heirloom cabbages. USDA zones are the baseline, you can probably find a map that will show you your average last frost date too.
In common sense terms though it's more like don't get carried away and decide that mangoes, avocadoes and vanilla pods are delicious and expensive so they'd make good home growers. You potentially could techno-fix them so that they would grow (heated glasshouse, supplemental lights, irrigation, frost protection, humming bird mimicry hand pollination, etc) but it will always be more trouble than it's worth. At the other end of the scale for instance where I live blackberries grow like a weed, so although I could grow them very easily I can just as easily gather them from any number of field hedges should I choose to while at home I cultivate tayberries (a raspberry x blackberry hybrid) that I've never seen for sale in a shop. All I do is prune it once a year and it grows so well that the only care it needs is tying up to train and support it.
I don't actually have a lot of experience growing for the table/pantry, I mostly grow ornamentals on a casual sink-or-swim basis, I just get a bit vexed when I see people getting into grow-your-own and they spend their time and resources growing basic staples in a plot too small to ever achieve a fraction of self sufficiency. I like carrots as much as the next man but I can buy a whole bag of them for 50p any day of the year. I like strawberries too, but even at soft fruit farms I've never seen alpine strawberries for sale. They're too small to be remotely economical commercially, but they're so good that they're worth growing at home alongside or even instead of a higher yielding variety.
5434a
3mo ago
My stance is that you should grow things that are expensive, delicious, and/or rare. You shouldn't grow things that are cheap and abundant unless you're trying to be self-sufficient. So don't grow onions and potatoes, do grow soft fruits, fresh herbs, and/or varieties that can't be bought. Throw in some cut flowers too if you like. For pure disproportionately high value to effort it has to be perennial herbs or a mature nut tree. Whatever you choose try to choose your varieties so that they cover early, mid and late season instead of having a glut that lasts two weeks and then nothing for a year.
It's a lot of work up front, and potentially not feasible if you don't have a blank canvas, but I think one of the best investments you can make is to really thoroughly prepare the ground. Ideally you want it to be nice soft fertile material that you can easily dig down to at least 6". It makes everything afterwards much easier and more productive. I suppose the short cut there is getting a pig to dig the ground over while it fertilises it for you. Likewise chickens make for near autonomous organic slug control.
I'd guess that the single highest value per effort is probably in choosing the right plants. If you can find plants that thrive in your garden you'll get a much better result for less effort than any amount of techno-fixes being spent on the wrong plant.
5434a
4mo ago
Custom CSS question: How do I change the colour of the vote arrows after they're clicked?
5434a
4mo ago
nautical attempts at downloading
If you're not averse to piracy look at massgravel. It will point you to legit images, simple ways to confirm they're legit, and the activation process is as easy as pasting one short command into the command line and then choosing "activate windows" from the menu that it loads. After that your Windows is authenticated by hardware ID meaning you could if you choose wipe it entirely and reinstall from scratch to eliminate the possibility of third party shenanigans.
Firefox should be fairly easy to backup. Either look for manual instructions or make a Firefox account. If you want to keep tabs you'll have to look for some way of backing up the session.
Copying your files and folders might be a bit more involved unless you've been prepared enough to store them anywhere other than the C: drive. You could simply buy a new HDD to use as the C: and then reassign your current C: as D: to keep all the files unaltered.
5434a
4mo ago
At keast they're boiling it, I saw a comment a couple of days ago from someone saying they use the hot tap.
5434a
4mo ago
In reluctant defence of Amazon, I bought a cheap HDMI to VGA adapter/converter from one of those brands with a weird Chinglish brand name and it worked flawlessly with no noticeable latency. Very satisfied with that one.
I've also been expanding my tool collection with cheap tools from Lidl, which while not the best are far better than I had assumed such cheap tools from a discount supermarket would be and more than adequate for the light duty use a casual DIYer like me subjects them to. Really handy for filling out the gaps in my kit without spending top dollar for something I don't have many uses for but struggle to do without. It's the only shopping experience I can find these days where I feel like I'm leaving good deals behind instead of trudging around six different shops or a dozen different websites that fail to offer a single appealing purchase between them.
5434a
4mo ago
Perhaps I should have said comprehensible instead of demysitifed. I suspect there's a kernel of "something" in there as a lot of it is reminiscent of things I've heard about meditation, hypnosis, mental illness, anthropology, mysticism, tai chi/yoga, psychoanalysis, placebo and so on.
5434a
4mo ago
the idea that the neoliberal wing of Labour will be some sort of an improvement is absurd to me. You'll get the exact same thing, but more.
That's my expectation. There probably will be some modest benefits if you're a front line public sector worker, and some negligible trickle down in turn to their clients, but the overarching mismanagement and short-termism will continue as it has for the last 20-30-40-x0 years. In the meantime I expect mainstream variety wokery to continue unabated while Labour's biometric-internet-porn-licences style of soft authoritarianism gathers momentum.
5434a
4mo ago
The Complete Psychonaut Field Manual: A Cartoon Guide to Chaos Magick
Thought this was interesting as a simplified demystified introduction to the occult. Not my cup of tea but interesting to get a handle on what they're driving at and how without the extraneous waffle.
The Psychonaut Field Manual, attached in whole below, is a comic book guide to chaos magick created by Bluefluke. It’s an incredible, concise piece of work, demonstrating how to use altered states of consciousness and flexible belief to achieve a greater experience of reality.
5434a
4mo ago
I share your rule. It's only that I feel like I'm passing a point where I'm losing sight of what it was I wanted to do.
Propagating more plants is about halfway down my list. In fact I'm mere days away from discovering whether the seeds that I collected from my garden last year are going to come out with pink, white or blue flowers (come ooooon pink!). On the other hand maintaining and improving the (poorly planned) garden is one (slash many) of the tasks towards the top of the list - and those particular tasks have a tendency to cycle back and regenerate in short order.
I've found taking before and after photos of projects or documenting in other ways to be a good way of keeping some perspective on progress and avoid the feeling of being stuck in a perpetual "work in progress" stage.
Anyway, I texted a friend who I've been putting off catching up with until the weather improved. Drinking beer on a boat will be a nice change. Can't help feeling that it doesn't actually advance matters though. Ehh, trade offs. It's not like I was going to fix everything in one night.
5434a
4mo ago
Is continually deferring gratification a good idea?
I've got a lot of long, boring tasks to do. I've got some less long and more interesting activities I'd like to pursue.
Doing the boring tasks first will create the time and space to fully pursue the interesting activities free from the shadow of procrastination. Diving straight into the interesting activities would mean trying to squeeze them in around the boring tasks, and even if the boring tasks get ignored completely their incompletion will still have an effect on the fun pursuits. Toy example: you can't easily cook a delicious cake in a messy kitchen, and even if you did it would be more laborious and the result is having to eat the cake in what is now an even messier kitchen.
On the one hand the more I defer the gratification the more appealing the gratification becomes (a delicious cake in a pristine kitchen with friends and family and song and laughter). On the other hand the more I defer the gratification the more all I see is additional messy kitchens to be cleaned.
I suppose the sensible thing to do is to look back, reflect on and take some gratfication from what I've achieved already.
This is a good thing. The emoji set is too bloated with these "but I have mid length hair, freckles, and stud earrings, not hoops!" inclusions. A simple 2+2 pictogram is perfectly sufficient. The point of the yellow happy face is that it's happy, not that it's a yellow face.
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