birb_cromble
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User ID: 3236
birb_cromble
5d ago
Bad Bunny is a weird case for me. I can objectively recognize that he's skilled, but I absolutely loathe music performed in romance languages, and rap maximizes all the things that I hate about it the most.
Something about the linguistic structure of the verbs, along with the comparatively low number of phonemes, makes it feel repetitive and bland in a way that drives me nuts.
It makes me wish we could have somebody perform using one of those Caucasian languages that have 80+ consonants and half a dozen vowels.
plus it's not as robust against AI as I would like
Outside of "surely governments would intervene" or "the world is ruled by an elite cabal that intends to feed 90% of the population into an AI wood chipper and I think finance is in that 10%", what is your rationale for why being a quant is safer than being a programmer?
I'm genuinely asking here. From where I'm standing it seems like they're in similar ecological niches.
birb_cromble
5d ago
Having worked for some Amish families for a while, I'm going to say both.
birb_cromble
5d ago
if you can just laugh at the harmless but shocking foibles instead of getting sucked into their frame of mind about how the latest insult to their tiny person is a catastrophe of truly monumental proportions you'll find them much more entertaining.
For various reasons, I basically raised my younger brother.
When he was a toddler, he had a toy truck with a nine volt battery in it. Once he discovered the latch, he decided he was going to eat that battery. With God as his witness, that battery was going in his mouth. No force on heaven or earth would stop him.
For three solid weeks, I did everything in my power to keep him from eating that battery. Eventually it reached the point where I had to use the bathroom, and when I came out, I saw that he had pushed a chair up to the counter and had scaled the cupboards to grab the toy from the top of the fridge.
At that point I figured that letting him taste the forbidden fruit was probably safer than the lengths he'd go through to get it, so I put the toy on the ground and let him go to town.
Immediately after the contacts hit his tongue, a look of absolute betrayal crossed his face that I have never seen on anyone else before or since. Through tears, he asked why did you do that?
He never tried to eat a battery again, though.
birb_cromble
5d ago
You wouldn't finish a day in the sugar cane fields to come home and suggestively dance with your amor because you'd be too tired and, possibly, injured to do much more than eat and fall asleep
On the other hand, the Amish fuck like rabbits.
If I’m asked to give it up, the question is why
I live on the fringes of an area that is best described as described "as a tiny fortress of blue beset on all sides by an encroaching jungle of red". I rub shoulders with a lot of professors, lawyers, executives, and other PMCs who either don't know about my upbringing and cultural ties, or think I'm "one of the good ones".
There's definitely a kind fetishization, or maybe more charitably, Scott's "outgroup/fargroup" distinction. They hate the people who live outside their relatively wealthy, liberal-progressive bunker. I've seen them laughing at people dying in car accidents. I've heard them wishing for mass casualty events. I've frequently heard that COVID didn't kill enough of them. They're wildly pro-immigration though, despite that the modal immigrant has more in common with the "cousin fucking rednecks" (their words, not mine) than themselves. The thing is, they never have to interact with those immigrants. There's always a clean cut, English-speaking general contractor between them and the laborers. Their grocery stores are far enough from public transit that they never see them there. Their houses aren't anywhere near public housing, so they don't have to hear breaking bottles and polka music at 3am. To them, immigration is an unalloyed good. Heck, it might actually be a good thing, since Cletus is dealing with all of that now, and his suffering is also an unalloyed good.
birb_cromble
5d ago
If you're looking for a similar vibe, check out Prayed for Rain by Paul Cauthen. He does some duets with Peck as well, under the name "The Unrighteous Brothers".
birb_cromble
5d ago
I also like Daytona Sand a lot.
birb_cromble
6d ago
Orville Peck - Let Me Drown
Matt King - Hell's Kitchen
Sturgill Simpson - Sing Along.
If you don't agree that Sing Along is Country, my back up option is K-Mag Yoyo by Hayes Carll.
birb_cromble
6d ago
Sturgeon's law. 90% of everything is crap.
If you actually want something decent, I'd gladly offer suggestions.
birb_cromble
6d ago
You know, I'd completely forgotten that spy thrillers were a genre. I don't think I've read one in over two decades. Maybe I should revisit them.
birb_cromble
6d ago
Unfortunately the nearest boxing gym near me is over an hour away. I'm making due with BJJ right now, but I don't love it. It makes me wish greco roman wrestling were more popular.
birb_cromble
6d ago
Does anyone have suggestions on books or movies that have a positive vision that they're trying to portray through fiction? To elaborate, I don't mean positive in the sense of morality or optimism, but in the sense that they actually want to show something, rather than tear something else down.
As an example, the older Star Trek series did this well. The show wanted to portray a world where humans were mostly post scarcity, and what a society would look like in that environment. It looked like fully automated gay luxury space communism where most people focused on self actualization that incidentally sided society at large. I'm not a gay space communist, but I've always appreciated that they took the concept and ran with it. Banks' Culture novels fill a similar niche.
I'm not going to go too deeply into counter examples because this isn't the culture war thread, but it's lately felt like that positive vision is increasingly hard to find, awash as it is in "deconstructive reimaginings".
Can anybody recommend things that fit that description? I'm not particularly concerned about the topic, so much as that the creators own the topic and actually think it through to the point where the settings and characters feel natural.
birb_cromble
6d ago
It's not as extreme, but a coworker had an agent encounter failing unit tests that looked something like this:
assertEquals(Constants.VALUE, class.method());
The agent found the Constants class and redefined the VALUE member so the test passed.
birb_cromble
7d ago
I don't think it's exactly the same cohort; somebody who was active in the Days of Rage would be in their 70s or 80s now.
birb_cromble
7d ago
In all seriousness, psychologically speaking, what on Earth is going on with 50 year-old women right now? Have Democrats effectively weaponized Karenism?
I traveled up to a nearby city a handful of times last year, and every time I had to drive past one of the popular protest spots. The protestors were interesting. I'd estimate 90% of them were old. Gray hair was the most common shade I saw. The average age was clearly 50+, and may have honestly been 65+. The other thing I noticed was that 75-80% of the protestors were women. Of the men, I'd estimate that three quarters of them were there with their wives, and the men were usually sitting on a stone wall that stood next to the sidewalk rather than holding signs and screaming at cars.
I'd also hazard to guess that most of the protestors were affluent. Each individual piece of clothing they wore probably cost more than my whole outfit. The street where they were protesting was lined with parked BMWs and Audis when it would usually be Fords and Hyundais.
I think all those facts might be related. If you're old enough and wealthy enough that you don't have to work anymore, it can be a shock to your sense of identity. What do you do with those extra 2,000 hours a year? Even if you are still working, your risk profile changes a lot when your "I got fired" strategy is to just move on to a life of leisure.
I think it's the same reason that the HOA busybody and Church lady archetypes are usually older. I think all three might be culture-bound expressions of the same thing.
birb_cromble
8d ago
This time, the cause is "the hosting provider lost physical access to and control over their US datacenter".
Is this a legal thing, or is this like when Meta put the key card control system in a data center that didn't have physical keys?
birb_cromble
9d ago
I can already do the v-sit. A planche is out of reach for me at the moment, but I can hold a peacock pose for a while. That's a decent goal. Thank you.
birb_cromble
9d ago
it's clear to me that he has his trigger finger not only outside the guard, but wrapped around the grip
I'll take your word for this and assume that's what's going on. My vision is so bad that I can't tell either way.
birb_cromble
9d ago
Look at the video -- he's not even holding it in a normal firing position, he's got his hand wrapped around the lower grip.
I have watched the video. It's fast enough and grainy enough that my (terrible) eyes can't make out enough detail to see one way or the other.
It does, however, sound like one report is slightly different than the others. That could be an artifact of how cell phone mics work, but it does make me hesitate to discount the "first shot was an ND with Pretti's gun" theory out of hand.
birb_cromble
9d ago
They were actually quite novel - the supreme court decided that.
The closest comparison that might make it not be novel, if you squint and ignore details, would be Jacobson, but that covered the states and not the feds, and predates a lot of other important jurisprudence.
Above and beyond that, using OSHA to try and justify it was literally a thing that had never been done before.
birb_cromble
9d ago
Does anyone have suggestions for indoor exercise when it's insanely cold out? I've been making do with an exercise bike and calisthenics, but they get boring after a while.
birb_cromble
9d ago
This is a pretty weak attempt at dismissing the possibility. I'll contest that it was the likeliest explanation, as Shakes asserts, but you're making a pretty bold claim in dismissing it.
We know ICE isn't particularly well trained. Are you going to tell me that it's outside the realm of possibility that the agent didn't get his finger stuck inside the trigger guard? It was cold enough that he might not even have felt it.
We also know that Pretti didn't exactly make the best life choices. Are you going to tell me that it's outside the realm of possibility that the holster he was using might not have been a high quality holster with good retention and absolutely no gaps around the trigger guard molding? Are you going to suggest that it's a "conspiracy" to suggest that something like an elastic cord or drawstring might have slipped in there?
That's not even getting into "P320s go off by themselves" memery.
birb_cromble
9d ago
but do you really think we're doing better than we've been in recent years?
In 2021 I was hours from losing my job because I wouldn't submit to a medical procedure.
Trump hasn't done that to me yet.
I really do think English is fantastic for singing.
I also enjoy the sound of Swedish a lot, and I think it works surprisingly well for rap. Check out Fel Del Av Garden by Movits for a good example.
Russian also has a really appealing sound. SidxRam and Glucoza have some interesting pieces. I'm not somewhere that I can copy paste names, but a good example of the SidxRam style is a video where they're dressed as demonic Japanese schoolgirls, and the best Glucoza example is the cyberpunk music video where the heroine has to save a dog.
The best way I can describe it is that I don't like songs written in languages where the word endings are highly constrained by the grammer. Rhyming when nearly every word ends in -a or -o feels like cheating.
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