Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
All alliterations are accidental.
User ID: 83
So why are you doing this yourself?
I suppose you could consider Homeric Simile to be somewhat rambly? Or the extensive repetitions? It's not how I'd see it, but Homer isn't exactly concise and rigorously structured.
To me it looks like the follow-up came 22 minutes after the previous comment. Must be a space-time anomaly on your end.
Family, mostly — specifically, that the costs of disposing of my remains exceeds my net worth, and they'd be on the hook for the remainder.
Well that sounds like a solvable practical problem. Grab a rubber boat, row or motor out to sea as far as you can, tie an anchor to yourself, knock yourself out via sleeping pills or whatnot (I am not a doctor) but poke a hole in your boat before you fall asleep. It'll all take you down to the bottom of the sea without you even realizing it. Not my idea; just something I read recently.
and may I say thank you for not resorting to the usual clichés about how life is always worth living, suicide is never the answer, yadda yadda yadda. Where else, if not a rationalist-adjacent space like this one, can I get people who will rationally assess whether or not a particular life is worth living? Who might conclude that suicide is the reasonable action (and not just tell me to KYS out of emotional animus, politics-driven or otherwise)?
To be honest, most of the time when someone tells me a story like yours, it's just at some low point in their life and the situation is not as objectively bad as the report makes it sound, and the person in question still has a lot of options. But all I have on you is your post above, so there goes. If you really have nothing left to live for and your continued existence is at odds with your values...
Somehow you're not making any more attempts though, and what attempts were did not succeed.
So, what's keeping you around? Is there family? Friends? A love of leisure? A fear of pain or death?
Obviously I don't know a damn thing about you and it may very well be that you are undergoing a spike of depression and presenting yourself in a fashion that highlights you at your worst, rather than at your usual. But with that caveat out of the way, and taking what you write here at absolute face value rather than as an exaggerating vent - have you considered suicide?
Fair points. We may just be wired differently. For what it's worth, I absolutely despise modern visual art because how the fuck is anyone supposed to get meaning out of three layers of literal shit on canvas? Art to me is mostly literature, with a little music and film on the side, and I am by no means a connoisseur.
Besides, what proportion of art that a person consumes on a daily basis actually has layers of meaning deliberately packed into it, let alone deep or philosophical meaning? 1%? Less?
Well most "art" that people consume on a daily basis is hardly created by one artist or a few working in unison, but industrially produced slop meant to be consoomed and forgotten. If there's any deep meaning in superhero movies, pop music or corporate imagery, it's "you are a well-trained consumer".
Does this sound like an anti-capitalist screed? That's not what I mean. What I mean is that most people just have a media consumption habit in place of taste. Yes I am an unjustified snob - not like I know what I'm talking about.
My grandfather died earlier this year. Almost made it to 90. Even his children and children-in-law who spent the months running up to his death in constant complaints about his demands and interferences were at first glad to be freed from a burden, much quieted down by funeral time and then ended up very contemplative in the following months. Still are, compared to before.
When someone played a role in your life for as long as you can remember, they do not go without taking pieces out of you.
I approach art under the assumption that the Artist has deliebrately and intentionally packed layers of meaning into it that take time and mental effort to dig through. For good art (as I see it) this is true, for bad art it usually isn't and the time and effort are wasted, and for AI art it's categorically never the case. The technical quality of art, which skilled artists achieve through practice, bad ones usually do not, and AI art can do situationally, used to serve as a heuristic for which art is worth engaging with in the first place. Technically competent AI art is still devoid of meaning and intention, so the heuristic becomes worse than useless.
It's probably a matter of taste. Someone who's just out to consume technically competent art regardless of the artist's intention or any potential meaning packed into the artwork can subsist perfectly fine on a diet of AI-generated junk art. A pretentious pseud like me can not, and having my heuristic ruined by AI art is outrageous.
Seems like North Korea is sending soldiers to Russia.
WELT article, German and paywalled: https://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/plus254140716/Putins-Nordkoreaner-Erstmals-seit-dem-Mongolensturm-Wenn-der-Ferne-Osten-in-den-Krieg-eintritt.html
Commentary in NZZ, also German and paywalled: https://www.nzz.ch/meinung/nordkoreas-intervention-im-ukraine-krieg-erfordert-eine-harsche-gegenreaktion-ld.1853967
So I don't actually know a damn thing about it all.
Thanks for asking. Please keep it up; it's expectedly motivational.
Got a good deal done this week, but sadly most of it is firmly in the technical-rabbit-hole category, with practically no progress on the visible-and-interactive goal I had set for myself.
Managed to completely disentangle and sort out which parts of my codebase should be in double-precision and which in single, replaced many old double-precision data types of mine with new and improved ones or the ones Stride ships with, and made sure that no casting between precisions takes place except when talking to the engine. The code's in much better shape now.
I also unified all my mathematical utility classes, and this too has cut down on a good bit of harmful redundancy and made it nicer to work with. So overall I worked on my tools rather than the actual workpiece.
Today I started getting back to trying something visible and interactive and...you can't see a damn thing. All I get is a grey screen. I'm guessing my approach to keep the whole thing independent of the Stride editor is backfiring on me and now I have two parallel scene hierarchies and somehow my rendering operates on a different one from the one that all my 3D geometry is in. Not sure about the exact cause yet. Will tackle this next.
TIL this takes the form of threads looking like they're deleted. Weird UX, but so it goes.
This thread looks deleted? What's up?
All Cormac McCarthy.
Finished my re-read of The Road, and alright, I have no complaints. It's a book alright. Very good.
Also finished The Passenger. I still maintain that it went over my head, but I found it beautiful nonwithstanding. So much so that I immediately bought the sequel, Stella Maris, on finishing it. Currently reading that one.
I'm not sure why I like McCarthy that much. I suspect it's just some kind of autistic imprinting rather than the actual quality of the literature; after all I'm not even an Anglo and I have no business caring about Anglo literature as much as I do. And my interest is probably a lot more shallow than I think. What do I really know?
Still, if there were something like a Complete McCarthy Collection in good shape and boxing, I'd buy it in a heartbeat and happily starve for a month.
I'm a long-time fan of Titanfall 1, and found the campaign of Tf2 to be...okay? Playable, certainly. But fairly boring compared to the multiplayer.
Redot
It's more alive than I expected. My confidence in it going places is still low, but I do suppose I'm already somewhat surprised.
I recently 100%ed Witchfire. Nice game. Excellent quality. Far higher than many non-early-access titles. Looking forward to the updates.
Ran another quick campaign on Battle Brothers. Always a nice game to return to. Just feels weird how quickly the endgame arrives, and that you're supposed to retire the campaign that early.
Tinkered around a little with Space Engineers. The game is showing its age and is full of infuriating limitations, but overall I still find myself having some modest fun.
Reminds me of a friend who wanted to get slapped in the face before every HEMA tournament fight.
You'll probably need Stride to compile and run it, but don't fret - there's nothing to run yet. With the latest commit the whole thing is ready to compile, but so far all I've done is migrate over whatever was reasonably salvageable from the Godot days and ram it into a Stride project with zero finesse. If you were to compile and run it, you'd get a whole lot of nothing.
Next up is me getting my bearings and putting my code where my mouth was last week, i.e., getting some agents to visibly do things. Until then, there's nothing you could really do with the project. And once there is, I can indeed be assed to build an executable for you so that you needn't bother with Stride or getting your Visual Studio in order.
Venting it works in the short term, but might actually make it build up faster in the future. Not sure about the mechanism, but I recall reading about these dynamics and it largely matches what I anecdotally observe.
I sometimes succeed at channelling it into productive energy, though mysteriously tools seem to be break with unsual frequency in such phases.
Just walking away and cooling off...doesn't really work for me. Not in the long run, anyways.
Ultimately I suppose it's best to remove the cause of the anger from your life.
Also, @ArjinFerman, just for you: https://github.com/Shrugger/F7s
Feel free to make fun of everything in there. Right now it doesn't even compile, and if it did it wouldn't even be so much as a "Hello World".
I don't usually publish repos ever since I had to scrub the entire commit history of one thanks to a prank. Don't make me re-learn that lesson!
Migrated most of my backend code from Godot to Stride. It's still WIP; I ended up leaving out a lot of elements that could not be ported cleanly with big old "// TODO: Redo for Stride." comments; a lot of work that would need to be done to get it all back up and running.
Qustion is - do I want to reactivate all that, or reinvent it from the ground up again? Or should I maybe do something simpler for once, rather than try to build yet another overcomplicated, undervisualized and non-interactive simulation?
Other than that, a recurring theme was which data types (Vectors, Quaternions, Matrices etc.) to use for coordinate systems and geometry. Dotnet types, Stride types, or homebrew types? Each has advantages - the dotnet ones migrate cleanly, the Stride types should have the best performance since no casting is necessary, and the homebrew types migrate cleanly and would be best-adapted to my backend use-cases, but of course probably contain more errors than the dotnet types.
Right now I think using the Stride types is the best option; it will hurt migratability (is that even a word?) for future engine switches, but the performance benefits and reduced need to cast will be valuable. OTOH they won't cover all use cases, since much of my physics backend runs on double-precision, and indeed should continue to do so. I am not confident in my decision.
At this point I have almost completed the migration of my Godot backend to Stride. Over 900 compiler errors fixed. There are holes though. anything that did rely on builtin engine classes got a makeshift makeover that didn't always take prisoners. I have a lot of NotImplementedExceptions on my hands now. I did get some refactoring done on the way, but overall the damages exceed the benefits for now. None of this is going to work without many days of additional effort.
I'm thinking of just fixing the last few compiler errors and then putting together a simplified demo that doesn't require the more borked parts of my backend for now, so I have something visual to tinker with while working on the simulation aspects in parallel.
Ah, sorry, I didn't realize FTL was implied but assumed that the aliens had slow-boated to Earth.
A variation: They did indeed signal back, but light-speed delay means that the signal itself, nevermind any follow-up-action, will not arrive for a very long time yet.
Not to be smug, but...that's advertisement.
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