celluloid_dream
No bio...
User ID: 758
celluloid_dream
23d ago
Suggest finding out what the locals typically do, and copy that. (probably easier to buy when you get there, if you don't already own gear)
I'm from a rainy city in the Pacific Northwest where people wear their $800 Arc'teryx as fashion. Umbrellas still see play, but if you're walking around with one and not also a rain jacket, you mark yourself as "that kind of person" (not that there's anything wrong with that!).
Biggest thing with jackets, I find, is the hood design. Almost any rain jacket will keep you dry long enough for your commute. Not every rain jacket will keep rain off your face comfortably. A lot of them are designed to fit over large helmets, accommodate ski goggles, etc. etc. You probably don't want all these tradeoffs. You want something with a long brim, zips up past your chin, covers enough side-angle, and doesn't look ridiculous when cinched to fit.
celluloid_dream
1mo ago
It is also rooted in me seeing that the war on drugs turns the banned drugs into a highly valuable and easily produced form of underground currency and thus directly leads to the growth of drug gangs and cartels that are, clearly, responsible for a good share of the street crime that I am seeking to curb.
This doesn't match my model of most street crime.
I'll see a drugged out fentanyl addict (when they're not bent over like this) careen into the supermarket I'm shopping at, wearing about 3 layers too many and know instantly, this guy is going to steal some shit. I make eye contact with the security guard, do a little head nod as if to indicate, "hey, you see that guy? He's going to steal some shit". The guard gives a tired sigh as if to reply, "I fucking know, dude. What do you want me to do about it?", and I shrug and go back to shopping. Couple minutes later, I see the guard following the junkie - now with hoodie pockets stuffed full of batteries - out the door. I guess that's protocol. Junkie shambles off around the corner to the alley and probably sells his whole haul to another drug addict for $10 and moves on to smashing car windows to steal cans out of the cupholders or something. That's the street crime I see.
We have gangs. It's just that they're off in another part of the city shooting each other, and playing cops & robbers with the anti-gang police task force. I'm sure their crime is connected to the druggie stealing Duracells somewhere, but it doesn't feel like it. Maybe it's different in your city.
celluloid_dream
1mo ago
Claude 3.5 has been very good for creative writing - much better than GPT-4 or GPT-4o (which I continually have to slap to stop them from listifying everything). I paid for the Anthropic subscription within a day of trying it, it was that impressive.
Where the OpenAI models are boring and generic, Claude is interesting and specific. It weaves in little details that sell the realism. Like, if I have it write something set in my city, it'll name a minor transit station that only locals would really know about. Or, it'll have a character do something human and weird, like feel a bug on their neck and swat at it, but it was just a strand of hair. Its jokes/sarcasm/wit are close to being funny sometimes (or at least, not totally cringe or nonsensical like 4/4o).
But, this seems to come at a slight cost. You know how when you have an image model illustrate something, it has a tendency to blur bits of the request together? I've noticed it doing this a bit with the narrative when writing. Eg. if Alice is carrying a sword, and Bob a mace, it'll sometimes write that Bob drew his sword. 4/4o never seemed to make that kind of error.
And yes, as you note, it will occasionally take a Strong Stand on Ethics regarding intellectual property, and you have to work around it.
celluloid_dream
1mo ago
celluloid_dream
1mo ago
For every fixable homeless person in a city with expensive housing, there is likely a responsible homeful person living within their means in a cheaper city who would jump at the chance to move, if only housing were affordable.
I don't think you get to (fairly) keep the fixable workers while pushing the dregs out. You either build more housing or you don't, but the current homeless in your city probably all have to go.
celluloid_dream
2mo ago
Depends on the flooring. It's probably fine to wear shoes in this house, but you would never wear shoes in this one.
celluloid_dream
2mo ago
Use the empty lanes to merge in instead of causing a traffic jam on the busy lane. You should not leave any part of the road unused! It's not "impolite" to cut in line, this is not a line !
Sometimes it is a line.
Here is an example. In this case, it got so bad that the city had to paint solid lines to prevent people from merging from all lanes, but imagine they were dotted instead to suit the example. The basic problem is: the bridge gets backed up - sometimes 30 minutes of traffic on either side to merge onto it. The right two lanes are "the line" for the bridge. The left lane is where you drive if you aren't getting on the bridge.
If everyone cooperates, you can have a clear left lane for the people who want to go straight, and traffic jammed right lanes for those that want to get on the bridge. However, if some of the bridge traffic defects and takes the left lane too to "not leave any part of the road unused", then merge right at the end, that screws over everyone who just wanted to go straight.
celluloid_dream
2mo ago
It's not the the direction I'd have predicted that word would go, especially considering the efforts to reclaim it back in the 2010s.
Actually, it's odd that "rape" isn't censored in the quote, but "slut" is. Seems possible that it was spelled "sl--" by Hayler himself there.
celluloid_dream
3mo ago
This reminds me of Bryan Caplan's framing: "The left hates markets, and the right hates the left", in that a market creates natural hierarchies. The left doesn't like that, and wants to correct it toward equality as much as possible.
"Generational warfare" was perhaps hyperbolic. I mean that the government is propping up assets that, absent their meddling, should come down in value, if things were at all sane like in the US.
It doesn't help the younger generation of Canadians now if their parents will eventually croak in 25 or 30 years and leave them the house (along with god knows what owed in deferred property tax. Have fun with that, kids! Edit: actually, maybe this is only a BC thing), nor does it help those who can't bank on an inheritance.
Yeah.. some of that is true.
My steelman for the government's actions is that they're doing what they feel is best for the country because something something Century Initiative. Country needs population to support its social program Ponzi scheme (and I mean that with love. Free healthcare is great, but it is expensive. So is OAS). It needs to be paid for with an expanding population's taxes, and where that population lives is not Ottawa's problem. It's not Trudeau's fault most of Vancouver still looks like this.
But no. I don't think the average Canadian benefits from higher home prices. The average voter? maybe. So then you have the PM just come right out and admit it. "Home prices cannot be allowed to fall". It's generational warfare, and our politicians have picked the side their votes come from. The boomers get to retire. You get to eat the bugs.
celluloid_dream
3mo ago
The government says they're targeting 500k a year, but should we believe them?
- 2016-2019, yes.
- 2020 was covid, okay.
- 2021 was on track.
- 2022 made up for the pandemic year. No problem,
- but 2023 .. hold up.
- 2024 .. um . guys? .. stahp
In flagrant violation of the first law of holes, they have not stopped digging. There is a massive housing crisis in the country, and immigration is the first and most available lever the federal government has on the problem. Ottawa (mostly) can't build homes directly, at least not on the scale the country needs. Trudeau's "ambitious housing plan" is a paltry 2 million additional homes across 8 years, with half of that covered by the provinces and municipalities, and that's if it actually goes to plan. If you're bringing in a million people every year.., the math ain't mathing, as the kids say. Even at their target of 500k, it seems like not quite enough.
As for temporary vs permanent, I'm not sure. I've known many temporary residents, all waiting around for PR, some staying long past their expired work permits: my friends and coworkers - good people, for sure, but they have to live somewhere. It also seems like no one really ever gets deported. Famously, you have to kill 16 people, but less anecdotally, the country is only deporting a few thousand a year, equivalent to a few days worth of immigration.
celluloid_dream
3mo ago
I have a sort-of nuanced view of this. I try to keep my nice things nice, but if they suffer wear in the course of fulfilling their purpose, that is fine, or even ideal.
Eg. I like the fading scar on my right wrist that reminds me of getting swept onto some rocks on a beach in Costa Rica. That was a good time. I dislike the fading scar on my left arm where I carelessly walked into the side of a cabinet when I was tired at work one day. That was stupid. My car looks good (to me) with some nicks and scratches from difficult mountain roads, but I hate the key mark on the side from some asshole in the alley where I park.
celluloid_dream
3mo ago
I relate to this post hard.
There's a fundamental personality dichotomy that I'm quite sure I'm on the wrong side of. I deeply envy the kind of person for whom the glass is already broken without having to meditate on it. Meanwhile, I struggle to convince myself every time.
I remember a girl showing me her tattoo of .. I think it was a Jigglypuff smoking a joint covering most of her calf and it was like discovering she was a different species.
celluloid_dream
3mo ago
It's not even close to the scale required to address the problem. The important number is nestled in the middle of OP's post, so you might have skimmed over it. 400,000 people in 3 months. Graph of population increase vs housing completions.
Canada is taking in over a million people a year, and building maybe 1/4 of the housing (not to mention the other infrastructure) needed to support that growth.
In total, Canada witnessed about 800,000 housing starts over the 2021-2023 period, whereas over this same period, Canada’s population grew by over 2.5 million. The fact that the CMHC forecasts fewer than 224,000 starts in 2024 and only 232,000 in 2025 does not bode well for housing affordability in Canada, particularly in the context of continuing rapid population growth.
celluloid_dream
4mo ago
Funny enough, I was hiking in the woods alone last weekend and crossed paths with a woman also hiking alone. She greeted me with a somewhat exaggerated "I'm glad to see you out here!" (I was unaware of bear discourse at the time, so it went over my head).
Anyway, I didn't eat her. She didn't eat me, and we both continued on and didn't die to the best of my knowledge.
celluloid_dream
4mo ago
Isn't it still "alief", just with ¬P instead of P?
celluloid_dream
4mo ago
the profession they are getting a degree for
Well that's the whole damn problem, isn't it? You want someone who went to school for Computer Science, which tends to be mostly theoretical, to have training in the most practical and tangentially related sub-field. Why should they?
I'd argue job training is a role universities are uniquely not well-suited to fill, given the glacial pace of curriculum change, and other structural handicaps, like tenured hedgehog dens.
celluloid_dream
4mo ago
There are further distortions due to the fact that primary residences are exempt, which incentivizes people to save by investing in their primary residences, inflating property values and making housing more expensive.
This grinds my gears. A rational (I think) response to the Canadian housing market doing this would be "don't go anywhere near that! There's something obviously wrong with it", and instead of fixing what's gone wrong, I see the government propping up the bubble by further taxing alternative investments.
In so far as video game writing was "good", it was good in the sense that it was load bearing.
Great game writing is often inseparable from great worldbuilding. If you look at something like Roadwarden, a simple RenPy illustrated text RPG, the game is its writing. It lives and dies on the strength of its worldbuilding so it has to pull that off, or else fail completely.
When the writing is bad though, I find it's less a failure of worldbuilding, or even current year bullshit, but more because of what must be intentional blandness. You don't get Starfield NPCs without trying to be that boring.
celluloid_dream
4mo ago
Sure, I'll grant they reduce auditory awareness, and possibly lead to accidents like this (though, snowboarder should have shoulder checked, and skier should have seen them since they were uphill).
On the other hand, accidents like that happen regardless, and if they're going to happen to me, I want to be wearing goggles that won't shatter into my face like sunglasses, and a helmet that will protect my noggin.
celluloid_dream
4mo ago
"Seven hundred and sixty-six cases of snow sport head injuries were identified over six winter seasons. Of these cases..."
Without going into every study in that review, the obvious flaw is: people who aren't injured don't show up in the data. They're taking people who already have a head injury, and then noting helmet or no helmet.
Yeah, you're still going to have a bad time if you accelerate your head into something solid at a high enough speed, but given that it might happen, I'm 100% going to choose to put foam and plastic in the way to dissipate the impact. If you had to fall onto groomed snow and land on your head, say from a standing position, not even at speed, and I offer you the choice of wearing a helmet or not, would you really prefer not to wear one?
celluloid_dream
4mo ago
This sounds like cope.
I snowboard, fast. I can't count the number of times where I've had "I love helmets" moments on the slopes. Snow is softer than concrete, but it's hard enough that I'm sure I'd have had a concussion if I wasn't wearing one, and instead I got up without a scratch. I appreciate you've linked a study, but my lived experience disagrees.
The objection my European skier buddy always had was "well, you don't catch edges like that on skis, so you don't need one", but no matter what's under your feet, if you bail at any speed, you're still falling vertically at least your own height, then tumbling down the mountain after that uncontrolled. Funny enough, same guy now wears a helmet after slipping on ice and bonking his head hard enough to knock some sense into him.
You can get very light helmets. Most don't obstruct your vision, since the front piece is cut away past where your goggles sit. You can get a glossy exterior that doesn't catch on the snow, and if anything presents more of a smooth surface to glide along and not wrench your head any direction that would hurt your neck.
celluloid_dream
4mo ago
Even there, the street outside was dirty, garbage everywhere, unswept, sandy.
When I get the "oh, you spent a month in India? How was that?" small talk, scenes like this, and a hundred others flash through my mind before I politely lie: "it was fine", and change the subject. The pristine western retail stores with literal rubble half-blocking the entrances.. The designated landfill streets.. The street curs gnawing at their severed paws in the middle of the road.. The absolute state of the power infrastructure (live? wires pulled down to street level and woven into clothesline). The constant smell of rot and pollution and feces. I could go on.
It's not so much the squalor. It's the squalor plus dressing up in shirt and tie, working in an air conditioned office and pretending there's no problem at all.
I don't think that's quite right. The "them" you are telling is a tool, not a person. It shouldn't be expected to exercise any more discretion than your paintbrush does. It's more like they're letting you rent their super-cool paintbrush that can paint whatever you want, including Mickey Mouse and Hillary Clinton.
At no point does another person's discretion come into it. I don't see the argument that they should be made to prevent you from painting those things any more than a brush manufacturer.
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