oats_son
13hr ago
I am happy to see this same take I have expressed in the wild, though you feel stronger than I do. I think the first one was definitely the strongest, with everything afterwards having some Marvel-like quality about them, but still with pretty decent action scenes, usually with some stupid gimmick.
It's too bad you hated them enough to stop watching them. I wanted to ask what you thought about the flamethrower fight in Ballerina. I thought it was dumb as hell, but everyone around me and everyone online said that it was awesome. It had a bunch of other problems, too, if you ask me.
oats_son
14hr ago
my government did a surprise attack on Iran
Are you the first Israeli that's posted here? I'm not aiming to make any policy suggestions based on this but I think Israel is really cool. The resurrection of Hebrew is super interesting to me. I've seen some mourn the major loss of Yiddish speakers, but there has never been a successful imposition of something like Hebrew that I am aware of. I had thought that the only way to get Esperanto really in force would be to force a bunch of people from disparate backgrounds to learn it, but there's no real great way to force someone to learn something like that, and also it would result in a bunch of horrifying stories. The creation of Israel was not without horrifying stories, but a lot less than my scenario, and it actually worked, which is shocking.
You should definitely stay, if you are able, because you make a lot of great posts and I've seen and spoken to Palestinians online, but I don't think I have with Israelis. Maybe that doesn't matter! I've found that my thinking that non-English speaking peoples would have more unique perspectives on the world turned out to be true, but not that exceptional. Humans are humans, wherever they seem to be.
oats_son
3d ago
I keep thinking that eventually I will start dating, but this list, despite being good advice, looks like a gigantic pain in the ass. Why is it like this? Will it ever not be like this? I don't want to do this shit. What if I just never did it and stayed single for the rest of my life? What if I got in a pretend gay relationship? Fuck this gay earth!
oats_son
7d ago
Dude, grilling! I have been enlisted to grill this weekend for extended family. What a momentous occasion!
The original line of thought was that grandma wants ribeyes, and I have a portable charcoal grill (two of them, actually). Now I'm wondering which foods and how much I should make (and, potentially, if I want to start both grills (probably not)).
- The ribeyes will be seasoned at least an hour in advance. Last time I cooked steaks (also my first steak cooking attempt since my grill awakening), I missed the mark on salt on at least one of them, so I will leave the seasoning to someone else, especially since grandma is sensitive to salt. Shooting for 130F internal temp. I don't have the best thermometer (a serviceable Weber one, not a Thermapen like everyone raves about), but it seems to work okay. If anyone wants something more than medium rare, they can just microwave it.
- Pork chops get seasoned salt an hour in advance, along with garlic powder and ideally a bunch of black peppercorns crushed with a rolling pin. I used to not trust the USDA and always tried to cook to 160F for pork, but this time, I'm going to do 150F, since I know some people who really love pork at 145F and it, apparently, is safe enough. I love pork loin. It is so cheap and the seasoned salt make it create the tastiest juice afterwards.
- Brats are pretty straightforward. 160F is needed.
- I haven't done teriyaki chicken thighs on the grill before, but I am very tempted now, somehow. Apparently you cook it most of the way on the grill, and then add the reduced teriyaki sauce to them and leave them on the indirect side for a bit. 160F. I think a dry salt and pepper brine would be fitting, as that's what Just One Cookbook recommends for before the first round of cooking teriyaki chicken thighs on the stovetop.
Now, the question is: is that too much food? I think we've got 6 people in total. The chicken will likely be three pounds, since that's the package size from Aldi. Pork chops, I thawed out 8 that are about as thick as my palm, so I'm estimating 4 or 5 pounds. Brats and ribeyes have not been purchased yet. Leftovers are okay.
Anyway, what are you grilling? What else should I be grilling? What are you drinking when you're grilling? I like Shock Top's Twisted Pretzel lately.
oats_son
18d ago
Interesting, I thought hair transplants didn't really work once you're a norwood 7. It would probably cost an insane amount of money at that stage, at least.
I wonder what the statistics are on how averse women are to going for their less lucky counterparts while single.
oats_son
21d ago
Haha, this was actually what I was thinking of, I think. Quoting that study exposes you as a redditor. We need less redditor justices!
oats_son
22d ago
From where I sit, I can't really detect any reasoning at all in decisions like this? How could the law possibly fail under heightened scrutiny, given the fact that it's banning a treatment for certain off-label uses for both sexes? Leftist political argumentation baffles me, and looking at all the different ways to analyze things in a conservative way (textualist, originalist, etc), I fail to find any similar differentiation on the left side of the law. This isn't the first time I've felt this way about left wing judges. They seem to be far more activist. In defense of the low IQ remark, I recall Justice Jackson having some really dumb dissents, though I do not recall any right now.
oats_son
22d ago
Haha, I think only a vegan would recommend organic farming out of the blue like that. In the Midwest, not sure how many of those jobs there even are. I have a relative who worked in the farming industry, I helped out a couple days when I was a kid. Working with pig shit sucks. I thought management was something you worked your way up to.
oats_son
22d ago
Genuinely, I don't know. No idea how I would figure it out, either. The idea has been suggested before, but I am at an impasse, because I'm the only one who programs there, so nobody else could judge. I did okay on my projects at school, though sometimes I lost all motivation to work on stuff if it looked too hard, and I had my share of real bad semesters.
oats_son
22d ago
I don't find it bad difficult. I do struggle to comprehend what an actual programming job is like. I don't feel like my codebase is that complex, and when I do figure something out, it feels ultimately simple in hindsight. I use grep a lot to look up related functions, which works out most of the time, though sometimes I miss where something is being modified because it's too indirect to be found by grep.
You know, I think you might be right. I think I will dust it off and find something to put on it and fake it 'til I make it, just head to the library with my laptop. Maybe the industry isn't so bad after all. I guess no one here may know, anyway.
oats_son
22d ago
Well, I have had some limited ability with it. Changing my Discord password to something I can't remember or access at work can help, as Discord is my biggest leech, but the problem is that I can waste time in a lot of different ways. Wikipedia, Google Maps, many things I would have to block that I think would probably not be great to block. I just need to find it within myself to focus, but some days, it's hard.
oats_son
22d ago
If I had to be honest with you, I never really planned out retirement. I figured I'd probably work until I couldn't work anymore and then die somehow shortly afterwards, and let someone else take the money I had put into whatever funds instead of frittering it away on my own failing health. I always just wanted some way to live in a respectable way and live a relatively normal life, passion be damned, just do whatever you can tolerate.
oats_son
22d ago
I don't actually hate it, I just find it difficult, mainly because I have gotten very good at amusing myself over the internet. I feel like I am slow to code and I do a lot of googling and a fair amount of thinking without coding when I am actually focusing on problems and not distracting myself from said problems. I don't know how much of that is normal (I suspect some, but not all, is), because I don't have any coworkers that code. I'm no hand with screwdrivers or drills, which makes me think I ought not look for another embedded systems job.
I don't know that there is much room in the industry for someone like me that has no passion for it, because hiring is getting tight and there is an oversupply of computer science graduates.
oats_son
22d ago
I need some advice; I thought about making an alt and really getting my feelings out, but the more I thought about my problems, the less bad they seemed, somehow, once I accepted that something had to change, and it might turn out to be drastic.
I graduated with a bachelor's degree as a computer science major a couple years ago and got a job relatively in my field a few months after graduating: a programming job locally working with embedded systems. It does not pay a lot ($49k a year before taxes) and not much is expected of me, leaving my mind wandering frequently. I never actually figured out the assembly of the things, but programming them was easy enough. Some of the systems are in C, and some of the systems are in Python and PHP and also some C that I don't have to mess with much. Features are sometimes added, but for the strictly C systems, there's this big directory of code for many specific systems, some of them with very minor changes, and a lot of the time, the task is just to add a feature to a system that was already in another system, making the additions pretty simple. I don't feel like a real programmer. There is an HSA and a "parachute" healthcare plan, but no 401k. Very casual attitude. My boss is a bitch and he's difficult to talk to sometimes because of how petty he is, but he can't program worth a damn and he actually does have some good qualities to him. My commute is approximately 43 minutes, meaning I'm driving for an hour and twenty minutes every workday, and I am doing this because I live at home still with my mother. I work in a small town. I am in my late 20s. I have all my student loans paid off and I have $21k in the bank. I don't have any index funds or savings accounts or anything.
It's honestly not bad money, but there is not really room to grow. The plan was to work here for a bit and get some experience, then join the industry proper, but... well, I feel like I suck at programming, and the industry is shrinking, and I don't know if there will even be an industry, a proper pipeline, in a couple of years. I am really reluctant to start job searching for these reasons.
Given all these facts, I am a little lost on where to direct my life from now on. I'm going to list every option I have thought of so far:
- Move out to be a lot closer to my job. Actually not the worst idea, now that I think about it. It's okay money for a single man, but I would be giving up the career. To be honest, careers seem like they're opposed to human life. Endless competition and bureaucracy, all for more money in an increasingly high cost of living area where you don't actually have a substantially improved living standard.
- Start job searching for an actual industry job. Again, really unappealing to me. The thought of presenting such a false image of myself as someone competent is quite repulsive, and I don't know that I have enough actual accomplishments on my resume to get any chances. I almost feel worse off than when I graduated, but I actually can't say I regret my decisionmaking.
- Do something else entirely. This thought scares me, but I've thought of
- Enlisting as a military linguist. The commitment is terrifying to me, and I find it hard to believe they would take me, since they have a new system to catch all your medical history and I have a suicide attempt from nearly a decade ago on my record.
- Trades. Every computer scientist friend I have has brought this up as an alternative (specifically plumbing and welding), and I am more than a little skeptical. People in the trades seem like they develop substance addictions at a pretty high rate, and it's hard work, and you get shit pay in your first years, and hazing from seniors and I think there's a bunch of accreditation you have to get, and your body potentially gets ruined, and to make the big bucks you have to own your own business which is a risk a lot of people won't want to take.
- Go back to school and get a master's degree in something. If I did this, it would be geology, I think, since you can do that anywhere and it's fun to learn about and I already got all the math I need from computer science and I actually minored in geology. I don't like the idea of going back to school, though, because it was difficult enough the first time. I got pretty sick of college since it took me a long time to get through, with a break when covid hit, and I assumed that my life would get better and the existential crises would stop once I started earning money and being useful. That didn't happen, so I guess that kind of thing is just going to stay with me no matter what I do. That knowledge would actually help bear through college again, I think.
I think I have given up on starting a family, which makes these decisions easier. I know this forum is pretty pro-natal, and I had flip-flopped on the issue for a while, but I tend to forget what abject misery feels like until I feel it again. If it's genetic, I don't want my kids to feel it. I guess I'd be open to adoption, in that case, but that's expensive.
I know the answer for what computer science majors should do now hasn't got a consensus, but any advice I can get would be very appreciated.
oats_son
22d ago
Sorry to hear that about your cousin. I find that it's hard to say much on suicide deaths. They inherently create a lot of guilt in everyone around them, and I frequently hear people say "what a selfish thing to do" or blame them in some other way. Personally, life is just really difficult, and I can't say I don't understand someone who was already having a hard time of it for a long time deciding to check out. It is too bad that he couldn't figure out a better way.
As for snatches: the kettlebell book you linked me mentioned that they tear up hands pretty bad. Is there some reason you're throwing yourself at the goal this hard? The typical test is 100 snatches in 5 minutes, isn't it? Surely there are other ways to target those muscle groups. I think you should take it easy on the snatches.
I haven't actually learned the snatch yet, but I did manage to finally figure out the clean, though I am not using it in the intended way. I clean it once and then do 5 overhead press reps. I follow the previous routine I was doing: 3 sets of overhead press (5 reps) and 3 sets of pull ups (as much as I can manage, 5 intended but I can never do more than 3 good ones) on day A, 3 sets of push ups (10 reps, 20 reps last set) and 3 sets of high pulls (10 reps, 20 reps last set) on day B. My high pull is probably not what Pavel pictured, either; swinging so close to my face scares me, so I just pick it up and pull it high with no horizontal momentum. I am sort of butchering the workouts listed in the book, but it's closer to what I actually want to do for now, so I guess I'm going to keep it. I like the kettlebell a lot.
I thought you were FiveHourMarathon while reading this, which made it surprising when I read his comment below just now.
oats_son
27d ago
This state of affairs reminds me of Kyle Rittenhouse a bit. One guy shooting three other guys? He has to be in the wrong, right? He's so violent. Well, actually, he's only violent because everyone around him is forcing him to be, and they're actually the unreasonable ones. But a lot of people disagree, some of them partly because they don't see the unreasonable ones as so unreasonable.
oats_son
27d ago
It's probably not something I should make a habit of, but I feel compelled to give some support to Israel here. Israel didn't steal any land any more than anyone else won or lost land before and after World War II, but the difference is the reaction to them has been way crazier because they planted themselves in the middle of a sea of extremists based around a nucleus of religious sites (geez, how many holy sites are Muslims entitled to? The Jews just have a few right there, right?). Much blood has been spilled because there was no postwar liberal consensus in the Middle East as there was in Europe. The postwar liberal consensus had to be created by Israel basically all by itself, with limited success, as the situation in Gaza shows. Israel was making some serious progress on a two-state thing, but that whole deal was killed by rampant terrorist attacks, and due to these sustained attacks, the Palestinians have never been farther from their own state. That's never what they wanted, anyway; they want everything, river to the sea.
Israelis are considered more valued by both sides. You can see this based on the prisoner exchanges between Hamas and Israel. Always, Israel releases hundreds or thousands of militants in exchange for a handful of their own soldiers or civilian hostages. Hamas is glad to accept these deals that bear the implication that one Israeli is worth thousands of Gazans, so I can't blame anyone for believing it's true. But disproportionate casualties have always been acceptable in war, which is what this is. Those civilian to militant casualty ratios are not even out of the ordinary for war. Massive assaults on civilians have also always been a decent cause for war, especially ones committed by the literal government of a territory.
If Israel is an ethnostate (it probably is), it's not a very good one. Do you think that Nazi Germany would accept having a populace composed of 20% Jews?
Normally, I find the idea of actual genocide to be pretty terrible. Ethnic groups and DNA and culture are fascinating to me, and to see something like that die entirely is a huge bummer. Gaza tests this value of mine. Never has a people been more problematic than them and never has a people been more determined to reject their lot in life. Basically their entire purpose nowadays is to take back every square inch of Israel, no matter how impossible that is, no matter how many people on their own side and on the enemy side are killed. Before the 20th century, they absolutely would never have been tolerated. They would have been, at the very least, brutally slapped around until a huge percentage of the population was dead and the rest was too weak and scared to retaliate. If this is not done, this conflict will likely never end. Even forcibly moving every Gazan out of the area probably would not fix the problem, because they are extremely intent on getting their territory back, and distance does not stop the likes of the Houthis and the Iranians either.
I am a little fascinated by the right wingers who do not like Israel. For them, it's generally a much more obvious case of antisemitism than it is for left wingers. My father introduced me to the fact that antisemitism is really, really old in Europe. For Christians, it makes a lot of sense; they were a very radically different group that lived in close proximity to them, considered sinners, forced into a universally disliked profession as bankers, and there is some basis for the idea that they killed Christ and called down a blood curse upon themselves. This, plus random grievances accumulated throughout the centuries just from tallying up every negative incident they could find. For the non-religious, I do not know why they would dislike Jews in particular. My best guess is conspiracy reasons related to Hollywood or perhaps certain Holocaust deniers. If anyone here is agnostic or atheist or otherwise not a Christian, and really doesn't like Jews, please let me know your reasons. I'm interested, scientifically. My father really liked Jews before his, uh, awakening, and he hated Muslims. Now he basically loves Gazans and hates Jews, while still mostly hating Muslims in Europe.
oats_son
27d ago
Regarding culture war aspects of this: I predict more Israel Bad posts everywhere. I have already seen some on reddit saying they'd rather that Iran have nukes than Israel because Israel has been the main aggressor in the region since its existence and Iran having nukes would help reign them in. I doubt we'll get huge rallies of people shouting "Free Iran!", though.
oats_son
27d ago
I found out recently that Google Translate, when translating from English to Japanese, will translate "gooner" to "Arsenal fan", no matter the context. I know what you're really doing by being an Arsenal fan.
oats_son
29d ago
Others will have better things to say than me, but I think women like it when you're actually interested in them and eager to bed them. NoFap helps on that front. Any other benefits they claim, I would be pretty suspicious of.
oats_son
29d ago
That's what we started with, remember? No magic. So we are in agreement here.
No, that's actually not what we started with. Did you read this thread in its entirety? I'm not convinced we really disagree with each other, I was assuming you came in here in defense of Tenaz's writings.
Tenaz writes:
I don't believe prayer is guaranteed to achieve results--for that to happen I'd need a perfect understanding of who God is, rather than a pretty good one. I just think it raises the odds, basically proportional to how good my understanding of God is (and reality, too).
Furthermore, he writes regarding the probability of your lost dog coming back:
Human reasoning isn't perfect but I do think it's capable of overcoming this sort of error with enough study. The dog will probably come back eventually, so if you want to use [dog comes back] as your test of prayer then it probably needs to be focused on timing. How long does the dog normally take to come back? How long did it take to come back when you prayed for it? A few of my desired outcomes were this sort of test (though a bit less trivial).
And in this separate comment he linked:
Recently my (quite remote) ward was broadcasting stake conference. There were 3 2-hour sessions to be broadcast, including 2 which would contain highly-anticipated talks (sermons) from a church higher-up. Unfortunately, the broadcast wasn't working. So the wonderful members of my ward sat through 5 hours of screechy whines, the words of the talks only very rarely intelligible at all, and even then only for a second or two at a time. At this point there's only an hour left, everyone looks quite grumpy as they sit and bask in the sound of unholy microphone screeching, and I feel impressed to suggest that we pray for the sound quality to improve... ...So, the congregation thankfully went along with the suggestion, and the static immediately cleared up completely.
This is the magic I'm arguing against that I presumed you were arguing for. You think this is not correct, right? Does it make you an asshole who thinks people are stupid to disbelieve this and straight up tell him there was no correlation?
oats_son
29d ago
You make some great points, but not any that I don't already agree with. I fully admit that greater wellbeing and protection against addiction are great things and can reasonably be attributed to belief in God, prayer and everything else that goes with it.
Critically, @Tenaz's posts are going outside the scope of this and claiming that prayer can positively affect factors outside of your control, as long as you're praying for things that God wants. If he kept inside the scope you and FCfromSSC typically stay within when you talk about prayers being more about relationship with God, I would never have posted what I did.
I wish more people mentioned the tower of Siloam as you have. The Christians I have talked to have not noted its significance, and they don't usually have very well reasoned responses to my problems of evil, which goes against what @AnonymousActuary says when he writes
though it seems like you are just hoping bringing up the problem of evil will somehow magically turn someone atheist again like they've never thought about it in their life?
Many of them have not thought about it.
oats_son
29d ago
Are you sure? If somebody prays and becomes a better person, father, wife, child, boss - it is only a selfish benefit or does it have a wider effect?
Of course that's a good thing, and if prayer gets you there, that's great. But it is no magic bullet. I don't really like your magic serum analogy for the same reason. While there are a lot of addicts who find salvation to be the way out, I have to imagine there are many pounds of dead bodies who tried it and found it lacking. And, furthermore, Tenaz's post goes outside of the scope you're setting. He tested more than just addictions, and presumably, material outcomes that didn't depend on himself.
What if the serum only worked for gay people? You should just go gay, right? That's impossible for a lot of people. What if it required you to believe in astrology?
You are assuming winning studies is the only goal anybody could reasonably pursue. For some people, it could be true. But it's certainly not true for all people. There's a lot to life beyond winning studies.
Tell that to the Creation Research Society, bashing their heads against an Old Earth over and over again, presumably for preaching the faith to skeptics who have heard the evolution lie. If they throw themselves at that complicated problem of radiometric dating and rock layers over and over again, they really ought to be throwing themselves at the much easier problem of verifying prayer. It would be super cheap and testable anywhere, compared to copious use of labs for dating of various samples. If it was verifiable, anyway.
Obviously some winning studies would be exceptionally helpful to the faith. Most Christians are tired of losing the battle against science by now.
If people claim there's a thing that works for them, you certainly can disbelieve them and think they are just stupid. But at some point you'd have to ask yourself - what exactly you're getting from believing so many people are stupid? Is that working well for you?
I can't say I get anything out of knowing that prayer has no material effect on outcomes outside of yourself. But sometimes, the truth hurts.
I'm not going to say anyone's stupid for believing it. Many very smart people believe much more plainly false things. I'm probably going to say something if I know it's plainly false, especially on a forum dedicated to searching for the truth. Or as close as you can get to anything called truth.
oats_son
29d ago
Obviously prayer does do something, if you're counting spiritual feeling or literal mouth movements as "something". If you read this far down in the thread, hopefully you remember the original claim causing me to post at all, but since you asked what I meant by "does anything":
But what really brought me back was simple, undeniable, tangible evidence. I decided to try to pray for something (freedom from an addiction I had) and the result was spectacular, far beyond anything I'd have expected. I then set about more formally testing prayer and related things and found consistent, similar results.
It's just plain false that there is undeniable tangible evidence to anyone except the prayermaker themselves. If it wasn't, all kinds of religious organizations would be falling all over themselves commissioning study after study.
I used to pray, and not as a magic ATM, but there's only so much placebo can do for you once you know it's placebo.
Yes, actually 4 is the one I remember the most because of the stairs part. Sorry, that's just awesome. I did also like the top-down thing because I quite like Hotline Miami. I have now defaulted to assuming most of the things shown in John Wick are not true to life, so the Dragon's Breath stuff doesn't bother me much.
Frankly, I will probably see about every John Wick related film for the foreseeable future, because my family likes to see it, and I still think the action is decent enough. Far above pretty much anything else, anyway. My real preference is for high stakes, high lethality stuff, like the hotel shootout in No Country or the crazy car chase scene in The French Connection.
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