gattsuru
22hr ago
For icks, I share celluloid_dream's loathing of the rictus-grin-faced youtube promoter. It's not that they're always bad people! But the entire thing looks entirely less human than Reboot-era CGI.
For the other direction... I don't have the same variation-desire most people seem to have, especially around food. Every time I run into someone that makes a decision around not wanting to repeat something they did the day before and liked, it's a bit of a non-sequitur.
gattsuru
2d ago
Steamrolled Fixfox, a moderately clever take on the standard adventure game. A little less on the endless pixel-bitching, a bit more puzzler. Downside's that your AI helper makes Navi look like a latchkey parent, the pacing's a little slower than it needs to be, and the writing aimed for cozy and hit twee-as-fuck instead. I kinda wish it had leaned into the main gimmick a little harder -- there's a real strong theme about "you can just do things" that the game just barely grazes before swerving into You Must Identify This Toothbrush Before Use -- but it was still decently fun.
gattsuru
2d ago
H1bs are simultaneously undercutting wages but also not actually a replacement for domestic equivalents?
The simple existence of InfoSys is a strong argument against the efficient market hypothesis, the legitimacy of whatever contracting process got them involved, and a kind and loving God. The expectations for that class of ‘IT’ shop are low, but it is very, very hard to understate their competence. They’re banned from contracting with the Indian government. Cognizant and Tara are only a little better, and that’s in the sense that they’ve been caught benching (rather than replacing) employees that were such a liability as to be actively dangerous.
It’s most obvious in IT: a bad employee can absolutely wreck your entire business at the outlier, and cost you five or six times their annual salary at the more common end (go go gadget AWS). But there’s a lot of areas with the tail end risk are extreme.
gattsuru
3d ago
You do realize exactly how persuasive this attempt to wash your alliance's hands of even the possibility of responsibility looks, right?
gattsuru
3d ago
Weird possibility is EMI on the speakers turning the cables into wire antenna. Can eliminate it as an option by playing something normal at a very low volume; if the problem persists even when other things are driving the speakers, it's either not EMI or you're in the path of an active radar system.
Software-wise, I'd also spin up a Linux Mint LiveUSB, make sure the same issue happens from a completely different environment. There are non-malware Weird Driver Problems that can happen, including sporadically.
But the most likely problem's just the mainboard fan bearing. They're supposed to be good for five years MTBF, but especially in dirty environments they can get pretty bad pretty quick, and you'll hear a very characteristic buzzing sound. You can replace the bearing itself for about five bucks, but it's really annoying to do, so I'd just grab a spare fan module off amazon. Should have options under 20 USD. It's a pretty straightforward replacement once you pop the bottom shell off, though would recommend picking up a couple guitar picks to more cleanly pry the shell. Do be careful when unplugging or plugging anything in -- these tiny cable connectors will break off hilariously easy.
If you want to completely be sure that it's the fan module that's the problem, pry the bottom shell off, power up the laptop (on a clean, non-conductive surface), and then gently press down on the top of the fan's middle. A small amount of pressure will usually cause the noise to go away temporarily, and pressing down hard enough to make the fan stop entirely should definitely cause the noise to stop. Obviously not a fix, but great way to be sure before putting in an amazon order.
The sha256 above was calculated from this. I'll skip over a couple inside baseball ones because Amadan has convinced me that they're pretty, but they don't really break the specific metrics and they're easy for anyone who wants to call me out to check themselves:
Not a single person from that RPGNet thread is getting a ban or a warning for it: this is what their definition of A+ means.
Not a huge surprise, here; zero infractions for this entire thread. There's been one person slapped in their Infractions forum in the last week (for fighting over the Superman movie). Trouble Tickets has a thread asking about boycotting people for supporting Kirk; the mods haven't condoned it (though it's happening anyway without their intervention)... because they're worried about brigading and user safety. Today, there's a new thread terrified of the fascism going after Jimmy Kimmell, by an entire forum that's incapable of even noticing what Kimmel said or what the murderer did or was.
To be explicit, that means that there's a mainstream part of the web where "Do not feel sorry for this piece of shit. He, in an absolute sense, got what he wanted. He succeeded. And so laughter, sneers, and a desire to piss on his grave are much more appropriate reactions than grief or empathy. In a real sense, the world has been made better by his death. His killer committed a just act. There will be less tragedy on this Earth because he is underground and cannot commit further harm. And therefore my only reaction is 'good!'." and "I am grateful that his evil influence has been removed." is acceptable and 'Dobbs was correctly decided' is a dire attack.
And, unsurprisingly, they have not gotten the ARFCOM treatment from their DNS registrar. There's no boycott of their advertisers, or panicked newscasters diving into their politics, or anti-hate-groups supported by Harvard hacking in to call anyone's employers.
Not a single one of the Discords I've seen tolerate or blast out this sort of advocacy are going to get banned.
The same, and as far as I can tell, not a single one has. Most of them haven't even updated to reality as-is -- the best I can offer is the FFXIV FC that's at least struggling to recognize the obvious.
Julia Ioffe won't be blackballed from every publishing outfit right of TNR.
Ditto.
Neither Megan McArdle nor Conor Friedersdorf will have called out Matt Yglesias on an X page, and I've give 60% odds that they don't have three specific bad actors at all that they've called out.
Obviously on Yglesias, harder to prove for calling out specific bad actors. McArdle has two pieces at WaPo, pretty clearly all without specifics (albeit some humor when she 100%'s her cohost warning about "Democrats are so feckless as an opposition party, more disgruntled young men (and women) will give up on the political process"). Friedersdorf's only post-assassination article is a short piece blasting... Bondi, which fair and technically a name and also a got a fascinating case of dancing around the elephant in the room. Neither look better from their twitter feeds, but I'm open to correction if I missed something.
Nope. He's also promoting a conspiracy theory about some other schmuck's suicide as a racially-motivated lynching, not that anyone cares about disinformation anymore.
The SPLC isn't going to trim back its "hate map" to only focus on actualfa; it's not even going to public recognize that TPUSA didn't fit...
Duh. Also promoting the same conspiracy theories, coincidentally, as the only post on their Apathy Isn't An Option-branded website.
... and none of CNN/NBC/CBS/New York Times will go the full Palin.
Hahahahaha. CNN, NBC, CBS, even now seem to be trying to push hard on the We'll Never Know The True Motive. NYT finally got there despite their own best efforts. I missed them in my list, but ABC had a reporter give the shooter a loving and entirely hallucinated tongue-bath of his own. And that's just for the killer, specifically.
No left-wing or 'centrist' media is diving into rhetorical motivations, and you'd think Trump had banned the word stochastic.
We're not going to get the name of the guy who yelled "Hell No" at the federal house of representatives...
I'm open to correction, here, but as far as I can tell, no.
Pritzker isn't any more likely to get censured than Lujan Grisham was.
Okay, that's less of a prediction than 2+2 = 4. He's in the news now for asking everybody else ratchet down the rhetoric, while (falsely) denying that he called Republicans Nazis. Someone filed a bill of impeachment, and it's going nowhere, and everybody with an IQ above the single digits knows it. (also for taking a photo-op with a different murderer.)
I made some other predictions, in the last week, in PM. On Friday:
Will the DNC censure Ilhan Omar before the Republican Congress does (or will neither)?
The answer is neither; not a single Democratic congresscritter voted in favor of censuring Omar, and four people with Rs after their names refused to as well. I would like to make a contrast.
Will news organization slap down reporters publicly before the
Eye of SauronLibsOfTikTok brings it forward?
Today's conversation is about the government pressuring ABC over a 'comedian' making pretty overt lies, and the only thing remotely funny about it is that it'll end up with ABC's entertainment section having higher standards than their newscorps by a significant amount, and only thanks to harsh pressure. I haven't been able to find a single example of someone coming out of the blue and say they were fired before publication or the conservative outrage; I'm certainly open to correction.
Will any college treat a professor endorsing murder more harshly than they do a prospective student that said the n word, without the threat of conservative oversight?
Hah. There's been firings, but even the most overt calls to evil action by professors has taken direct threat from conservative lawmakers to get anywhere.
Will twitch and youtube start purging Hassan-likes before subpeonas start flying, where they already booted guntubers for such crimes as 'lawfully firing a machine gun'?
No. Hassan specifically got an NYT opinion slot to promote his positions about increasingly punitive rhetoric, and no one on the Grey Lady of Bullshit Record has felt it worth mentioning his less-than-one-month-old call to literally disembowel his political opponents. There is a post of Destiny getting banned from Twitch floating around... and it's from 2020.
Will the people -- even now! -- trying to confidently paint the murderer as some Groyper get banned from reddit for disinformation posting?
somethingiswrong2024's still there, and still apparently huffing whippits as hard as possible. Open to having missed anything, here.
gattsuru
4d ago
You mean that became more right after cancelation?
No, I said, specifically:
- "progressive targets of cancel culture" who
- "after getting any support from conservatives"
- "haven't turned around and bit back".
That is, they stayed progressive, and didn't promote censorship against conservatives. I'm sure they exist, somewhere! Maybe, from your list, Williams, albeit not very consistently. But if your defense is that people thrown down the hole with the rest of us (sometimes) don't punch us or call for others to punch us, that's great, but it's not very compelling as an argument.
gattsuru
5d ago
I'd be surprised if the porn and ERP were particularly useful for that. I won't say those spaces keep their jorking material and their political advocacy separate, because they don't (cw: fully clothed trans / hyena fem wearing tight pants from behind), but there's enough difference that a prosecutor is going to have a lot of work to do in order to get a judge to sign off on presenting the smut as evidence rather than the political discussions. Again, not a lawyer, not legal advice, and the rules are pretty open-ended, but this is pretty common a problem.
gattsuru
5d ago
I mean, how do you surprise your live in romantic partner with a political assassination?
The same way you surprise everybody else: keep your mouth shut and your material hidden? We are here on the Devil Sacrament three principled libertarians and a zillion witches website; I know some people here share everything with their SO, but we do realize that it's not the only option, right?
gattsuru
6d ago
I'm very skeptical about re: RICO. The number of predicate offenses isn't that broad, either for the federal or Utah-specific one, it's hard to prove the other traits.
I'd expect the administration to do a scattershot attempt to undermine various pro-trans groups based on proximity, but I'm also skeptical that they actually get anything bigger than Armed Queers SLC, and most of the others will end up benefiting from the attempt.
(which presumably you trust as a fair source since you used it)
remzem
gattsuru
?
I've got an icon on my posts for a reason! And on that specific matter, I specifically and try to caveat YouGov almost anytime I do reference them.
EDIT: I'm also extremely skeptical of YouGov's specific poll question here given the combined use of the Likert scale and literally never showing its breakdown.
gattsuru
6d ago
And then people on this forum will say: but think of all the people killed in BLM, it’s an isolated demand for rigor… and this is chaos speaking through them.
Behold, the rapid ease with which the descendant of Darwin manages to produce certainty that his enemies will act as conveniently as possible.
gattsuru
6d ago
In theory, evidence can't be presented if its more likely to impact the jury over unfair prejudice than by its probative value, and unless the shooter was a big fan of a very specific sort of snuff, it's unlikely that the porn or RP will have much information of value at all. In practice, the actual rules-as-operated are byzantine and highly dependent on which lawyers and what judges you get.
If he had any brain cells worth mentioning, he'd plea guilty. Dunno whether that's likely enough to make the question moot.
gattsuru
6d ago
Wording matters, but "true American patriots" is putting such a heavy thumb on the scale that I'm somewhere between disappointed and impressed by PRRI, and that's knowing some of their other hijinks.
gattsuru
6d ago
Ideology is a sleight of hand. Look, I’m doing this for a reason, I’m committed… but the only commitment seems to have been to violence.
Kirk was both a significant funder and coordination point for social conservatives, along with his outreach and recruitment efforts. As much as progressives are joking about how he'll get replaced by the next Castro Clone, there's a bit of a problem given how far the nearest competitor was. It takes a very specific set of skills developed in a pretty specific environment to get where he was rather than where Crowder is (or, worse, where Milo ended up).
That's the reason. That's the entire reason. It's not hard to guess this; it's not hard to find people justifying the murder because of this. We already have very clear evidence, even if deBoer wants to imitate two out of the three monkeys when presented with it, that's why. It's not the only way deBoer's 'propaganda of the deed' framework is wrong -- the man's vastly moronic, he contains multitudes of stupid claims -- but especially given his background can't possibly be stupid enough to not know this, and he doesn't mention it in the slightest.
Historically, the counterargument has been that such assassinations were counterproductive, because no matter how influential a specific target would be, the backlash would outweigh that. MLK's death cemented the Civil Rights Act, Reagan's near-killing had everyone a Republican for a few days, even Gifford's-this-guy's-actually-just-bugnuts-crazy got the first gun control act in decades passed and was an albatross around the neck of the conservative movement for a decade.
Does anyone believe that's going to happen, here?
gattsuru
6d ago
I think the only saving grace there is that the overlap between the (large) set of armed Americans and the (hopefully smaller) set of radicalized Americans is pretty small.
The scarcity of car ramming attacks in the US, even after the Waukesha attack significantly raised awareness of that particular threat vector (and some conservatives flirted with it accepting it as lawful in some situations), suggest a deeper gap remains for now. And there are several other widely available, and often more dangerous, attack vectors.
We're lucky right now that it's mostly Hradzka's garbage people running in emotional spasms -- they repeat what they've seen before, fixated on something specific they can pretend touched them. Which says something very interesting about this specific attack, especially as we're finding more out about the details for it.
gattsuru
7d ago
Writ large, I'd consider that an example of Mostly Peaceful and Well Intentioned propaganda and PR campaigns which successfully won supermajority support among the American people. And even among those who don't support gay marriage, probably a significant portion have no problem with gay people and just hold some views about the church and sanctity of marriage and whatnot.
But it was largely a campaign won by sympathetic figures you knew in your community, not shitposting on twitter about the hordes of illegal immigrants coming to take your jobs and rape your families. It wasn't won by darkly hinting about how many guns you have, or congressional shenanigans or gerrymandering.
... the problem is that there's two models, here.
One is that the Gay Rights Movement won by a campaign of sympathetic figure you knew in your community, and sometimes even were in your family, showing that People Could Be People. I'd like to believe this is true, and contemporaneously it's the argument I pushed for (admittedly, to a level of slower progress that would frustrate me today).
The other is that it won by absolutely crushing any disagreement. Brendan Eich did, in fact, lose his job, and people did, in fact, beat him in public and years later were quite proud of it. Code Pink would publicly embarrass you, Google would (accept third parties gaming their tech to) redirect searches with your last name to a definition involving scatological jokes, people would shitpost at sizable length about hurting every single person who didn't agree. More critically, entire infrastructure were designed and implemented to make this not just common, or standard, but unchallengable: even before Bostock and Obergfell a wide number of states and regulators held that saying mean things -- defined so broadly as to include religious or philosophical discussion -- were workplace discrimination, even if uttered off-premises and after-hours. Organizations built to foster political debate on the wrong side of the aisle were skinsuitted, and that skinsuiting became something they were required to aid and abet. For the majority of its advocates, and a supermajority of its more palatable advocates, you could not argue the soccon position.
I would like to believe that the former mattered more than the latter. I don't have a lot of arguments that the latter hurt.
gattsuru
7d ago
I would argue that No Man's Sky is an immersive sim (if not a very realistic one) and not a software toy, and conversely that Star Citizen is a software toy (no end game and progression exists almost entirely on player-defined axis) and an immersive sim (it has a defined world with specific spaces where they player exists entirely within a single avatar facing a systems-coherent simulation, makes you feel paranoid that you're missing out on lore/material if you don't search every corner).
I'm honestly not sure where I'd put Space Engineers there.
... the McMichaels recieved some minimal support.
To be fair, you yourself did have to fight against a few chuckleheads here, and more people who were willing to But Arbery Might Have Stolen Something Before. But, yeah, even among pretty extreme parts of the right-wing, the McMichaels were nowhere near the cause celebre that people imagine.
....Existence proven. That is quite the article; I haven't made it through the whole thing, and it took a while to get further than the subheader. @gattsuru, you might get a kick out of this. I might try and do a writeup for it.
Interesting, but I'll note that it doesn't actually call the fed actions Red tribe. Renfo says, instead:
"Humiliated on the national stage following the bloodshed at Ruby Ridge, federal law enforcement agencies “needed a big win,” one Davidian survivor noted. Although the ATF could have arrested Koresh with little fanfare on one of his regular jogs, the agency decided to go big with its February 1993 raid. A massive show of force, agents thought, would stun and incapacitate Koresh and his followers and help to rehabilitate the image of federal law enforcement. In reality, the well-armed Davidians were more than ready for a fight, and they delivered yet another black eye to federal agents."
And the book agrees :
The ATF got its search warrant. Thibodeau claims it was “not coincidental” that the agency had a congressional budget hearing coming up. “They looked like shit after Ruby Ridge. They needed a big win.”"
While there's a lot of lurid reviews of Cook's work as talking about the Red Tribe's devolution into 'conspiracy theorists' -- and Cook does spend nearly a third of the book on that -- the other two thirds of the book are split between talking about Koresh and the Davidians were fuckups (not always fairly) and how the feds fucked everything up. Which makes the contrast pretty awkward, given the extent the theorists were sometimes right, even in his telling.
That's far from an unbiased or neutral telling, especially if you're familiar with the finer details. Cook takes every Democratic party deflection at face value (and literally mentions Freeh once in the entire book, not merely believes that the Davidians lit the fire but so certain he quotes someone calling any other possibility barmy) to pretend the FBI was manipulating everyone around them, but he does at least mention some of the multitude of lies (no flammable CS gas until oops there was) and destroyed or lost evidence (the steel door and three disappearing cameras are mentioned, though not some other records), and the absolute atrocity of a show trial the surviving Davidians received.
But for all my criticisms, it's also not saying they were Red Tribe behaviors. Cook's story is that they're just The Feds.
I want to say someone making a more dedicated argument specifically about the raid 'really' starting with local Red-Tribe-On-Red-Tribe fighting, though I can't find it in my records and I'm pretty sure it was long enough ago it couldn't have been this specific article or book. The weakman is just that the investigations started under Bush I's ATF (just as Ruby happened before the 1992 election even happened), but that struggles with the extent these orgs were clearly trying to support major policies among the then-ascendant left side of the aisle. Steelman was something about the intra-Davidian battles getting pushed up to the state, and the state indirectly pushing them to the feds, and the feds were stuck holding the bill... but that still runs into the problem of how the feds actually handled things.
Do not confuse this for an argument that we Reds are not entirely willing and capable of coordinating similar violence; the difference is who we've generally aimed it at ("Are those Level Four plates?", "I didn't lose shit", "belt-feds are the only good feds", "the tree of liberty", etc), and the fact that we have drawn and enforced lines that keeps such lawless killing almost entirely (and, arguably, comically) theoretical.
I'd quibble that this is a moderately recent development: there were some parts of the early anti-abortion movement and anti- that were similarly bloodthirsty and tolerated, and it took a pretty sizable effort by both the more moderate bits of the religious right and some lawfare by leftists to shove it into a box. The Days of Rage did also have the MOOVE bombing and some amount of tolerated targeted violence that direction, even if it's often overstated by Zinnian tellings.
gattsuru
7d ago
At least in vanilla, you're usually better served by exploring the outer islands directly instead of refighting the dragon -- a lot of the intent for multiple summonings is to handle multiplayer servers. That said, yeah, there's a lot of players that literally never do it, and another number that consider it where the game starts (since Elytra and Shulker boxes, both post-Ender Dragon, are incredibly useful for creative builders).
Modded can change that pretty aggressively, and it's common to lock 'end-game' or specialized crafting material specifically around the End Dragon's death (either as a direct drop, like old Tinker's Construct end dragon scales, or indirectly like Quark's Biotite). But then again modded will also have other end states, some just checkboxes (GTNH's final Stargate is literally useless by the time you can make it), and some more serious (completing Blightfall's last quest involves purifying the entire pregen map; you can still explore, but it's an entirely different style of play from what you were doing before).
gattsuru
7d ago
To be fair, Toronto, rather than US, but pretty strong evidence.
You still see some of the old guard of gun control debates try it at times, both from the right (and 'right') and the left. SAF and NAGR done a decent job at slapping it out of their spokesmen, but the NRA still has some old guard that leap to it. Been more common with the post-Remington lawsuits, but generally not in ways intended for public consumption (or even to reach a jury).
EDIT... and that apparently includes the governor of Utah.
drawing a comparison between the brutal violence in Gaza which Charlie Kirk implicitly supported and the brutal violence which ended his own life.
"the chickens have come home to roost".
Nope.
EDIT: I absolutely expect to see overextension, here -- 'database of 40k+ incidents' and 'reasonable filtering and accuracy' are less venn diagrams and more completely separate circles -- but it's not very persuasive when the central examples inevitably look like this, instead of this.
For completeness, TheSchism has managed a post on it, the day after I wrote the above and two days after my original "in a week" deadline. I'll leave as an exercise to the viewer where to place it
But if they're not debating whether the shooter was a groyper, still, I suppose they're ahead of the curve.
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