gattsuru
1d ago
I will caution that the DoD claims that it isn’t true (which they would) and more critically that the PAL was never used for the Minuteman, and the codes for the Minuteman never had eight digits
gattsuru
1d ago
I'm skeptical that even the raw brick of aluminum would be decided by courts, given the Saga of Defense Distributed and its progeny. The breadth of the rule here includes several not-very-subtle indicators around the Coast Runner-style deployments, and the DoJ did not disavow them, and SCOTUS didn't even care here enough to mention it in the opinion proper.
That’s kinda the crux of it. Were it reasonable to pretend that the court case was only over Polymer80, I might have some quibbles about notice and ex post facto laws, but I wouldn’t be anywhere near as frustrated with this case; the line between 80% and 81% lowers had always been a little prone to ATF fudging.
But Polymer80’s dead. Among living competitors among the plaintiffs, BlackHawk’s ‘kit’ didn’t include everything required to make the receiver, pointed not selling the kit and jig under one package (never mind the rest of the gun), and at the other extreme Defense Distributed sells ‘0% receivers’ (aka CNC machines with a block of aluminum) that would be a hilarious joke were the Biden DoJ willing to commit to not counting them too.
Without that, you’re leaving literally tens of thousands of people to retroactively become felons, with the defense that they can bet their freedom on it at any time and maybe win in a half-decade, over behaviors that were well-accepted for literally decades. If the major questions doctrine can’t cover that, it’s not clear what it does cover.
If you don't have dedicated audio outputs from your television (or other device), there are not-awful soundbars that are cheaper than a used 2.1 setup, and sometimes cheaper than just a used receiver for a 2.1 setup. If the comparison was something like a TCL S55H versus a standard receiver, a pair of 8" or 9" speakers, and a sub, you're... probably going to pay nearly twice as much for the not-soundbar setup, even used. For new, even powered speakers are hard to get in your price range without being garbage. If you really just want some bass, it's a hard argument to skip.
The other argument in favor of soundbars is size and convenience. About the only support you need is an available electrical socket and maybe a tiny shelf or table that you're probably setting your TV on anyway. Cabling-wise, the single HDMI (or toslink, or yada) is ... actually still more complex than you'd expect (do you want lossless Atmos? Because then you need eARC, and a compatible HDMI cable), but it's at least less of a spaghetti pile if you don't want to spend a weekend on cable management, even compared to a relatively simple 2.1 setup.
A Great soundbar config's still a little bit more expense than a used standard receiver+2.1 channel configuration (Wirecutter recs this, and they're about the only part of the Times I trust), but it's convenient enough that it's okay, and you can rarely get nicer soundbars with fancier configurations that can approximate a 4.1 configuration without paying too much more or having to route wires through drywall. For someone like me, who's neither an audiophile nor has particularly sensitive hearing, it can be a reasonable compromise. Or at least would, if I didn't use headphones religiously, or lived in an apartment.
For audio quality, yeah, I'll second Rov_Scam. Soundbars only really provide better bang for your buck when you're in the bargain basement, and for a lot of that space you're only going to get noticeable improvements if the television is absolute crap. Even at the higher end of your price range, the used 'standard' speaker market will win pretty quickly. Audio isn't quite like motor behavior -- there are replacements for displacement -- but the parts here are near-universally fungible, and the soundbars have extra constraints.
gattsuru
1d ago
Not much. The court filings mostly has the plaintiffs argue it as vagueness, and the state punting on that question as only relevant for as-applied challenges. If you know much about how milling works it's kinda incoherent -- not just in alloyed makeup, but also heat treatment and method of manufacture -- but I don't think anyone involved really did, or would care if they had.
In the oral arguments there was one aside, but it was heavily focused on metaphors and contradictory:
JUSTICE ALITO: I'm going to show you. Here's a -- here's a blank pad, and here's a pen, all right? Is this a grocery list?
GENERAL PRELOGAR: I don't think that that's a grocery list, but the reason for that is because there are a lot of things you could use those products for to create something other than a grocery list.
JUSTICE ALITO: All right. [crosstalk] If I put out on a counter some eggs, some chopped-up ham, some chopped-up pepper, and onions, is that a western omelet?
GENERAL PRELOGAR: No, because, again, those items have well-known other uses to become something other than an omelet. The key difference here is that these weapon parts kits are designed and intended to be used as instruments of combat, and they have no other conceivable use. And I think the further evidence comes from the fact that Respondents themselves agree that a disassembled gun qualifies as a weapon. So this is on page 37 of the VanDerStok brief.
JUSTICE ALITO: Okay. So that's helpful. So your definition is a group of components that can readily be converted into something and have no other use. They must have no other use in order to constitute that thing?
GENERAL PRELOGAR: In the circumstance
JUSTICE ALITO: In that situation, they already constitute that thing?
GENERAL PRELOGAR: I think that you can recognize that something is a weapon even if it's non-functional if it is clear from objective evidence of --
JUSTICE ALITO: No, I think that certainly is true from the face of the statute because it has to be -- it's sufficient if it's capable of being converted into -- into something that can expel a projectile. All right. Thank you.
JUSTICE BARRETT: General Prelogar, I just want to follow up on Justice Alito's question about the omelet. Would your answer change if you ordered it from HelloFresh and you got a kit, and it was like turkey chili, but all of the ingredients are in the kit?
GENERAL PRELOGAR: Yes. And I think that that presses on the -- the more apt analogy here, which is that we are not suggesting that scattered components that might have some entirely separate and distinct function could be aggregated and called a weapon in the absence of this kind of evidence that that is their intended purpose and function. But, if you bought, you know, from Trader Joe's some omelet-making kit that had all of the ingredients to make the omelet and maybe included whatever you would need to start the fire in order to cook the omelet and had all of that objective indication that that's what's being marketed and sold, we would recognize that for what it is. And it -- it doesn't stretch plain English to say, I bought omelets at the store, if you bought all of the ingredients that were intended and designed to make them, especially under statutory language that refers to something like breakfast foods or things that can be readily converted to make breakfast.
I think the logic would not include raw bauxite ore, in the same way that the hypothetical did not turn to raw wood pulp or a laying hen, but I'd not want to bet on it. Given the incoherence -- something counts if it has "no other use", except if it's marketed the right way it could have other uses -- I don't think anyone's seriously drawn lines for the question of how far they're willing to take the rule.
gattsuru
1d ago
To be fair, we (finally) did get a decision in Gustafson from the PA Supreme Court. After well over four years, and just shy of a year from oral arguments at the state supreme court, it turns out that the commerce clause lets the federal government control interstate lawsuits. Don't worry, though: many, many, different, states different states have taken the intermediate time to drive a truck through whatever interpretations they could find post-Remington.
VanDerStok has dropped.
In 2022, the Biden administration released the "frames or receivers", often known as "ghost gun" rule, reinterpreting the Gun Control Act of 1968. This law controls much of what distinguishes a "firearm" under federal law for purposes such as sale, manufacture, transfer, gunsmithing, and licensing of the above. Notably, it had long had an exception for self-produced firearms, either for Commerce Clause reasons or to avoid crushing hobbyists. There was even a small industry, dating back decades, in producing 'kits', of incomplete firearms or tools for creating firearms that could be manufactured at home or in common workspaces: many got explicit ATF permission.
Though these things could make firearms, they were not themselves firearms... until 2022, where they retroactively were. The previous standard had a concept of "80% lowers", which, though not official, were so well-understood in the business that the ATF has a webpage (still active today, don't take legal advice from the government!) specifying exactly what level of remaining manufacturing would be required to turn a non-firearm into a firearm. While obstinately focused on specific manufacturers with especially easy-to-produce firearms kits, this rule was expansive, poorly defined, and often incompatible with the basic text of the statute: the ATF argued that it could apply to nearly any material, under nearly any conditions, based not solely on the actual product but even on its marketing material or separate tools.
Nor was this rule some minor paperwork technicality. The simple unlicensed manufacture for sale of a firearm can earn five years prison for each count, and the guidelines range with no previous criminal history goes from two to three years. And there's a whole set of downstream regulations and statutes that can add onto that.
What did the court decide?
There, remember, the GCA authorizes ATF to regulate “any weapon (including a starter gun) which will or is designed to or may readily be converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive.” Inhering in this language are two requirements. First, a “weapon” must be present. Second, that “weapon” must meet one of three criteria: It must be able to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive, designed to do so, or susceptible of ready conversion to operate that way. As the Fifth Circuit saw it, §478.11’s provisions addressing weapon parts kits are facially invalid because no weapon parts kit can ever satisfy the statute’s two requirements. We disagree because, to our eyes, at least some kits will satisfy both.
There are some annoying procedural frustrations, here. Neither the questions presented, the cert petition, the response to cert petition, nor the district court opinion mention the challenge as "facial" at all. Only the last brief from respondents uses the word "facial", as the last allowed full filing, and does not do so under the defense that literally any reasonable application of the statute would prevent pre-enforcement challenges to any unreasonable ones. The SCOTUS opinion cites a BlackHawk complaint, but it and an appeals court opinion use the word only in the sense of the regulation being directly in conflict with the statute. SCOTUS does not provide a citation for the principle that APA challenges must show every possible enforcement of a law would be unreasonable; a dissent points out that the nearest similar matters are Salerno, Reno v. Flores, and INS v. NCIR, none of which were APA questions.
The federal government -- under Biden! -- specifically disavowed that "no set of circumstances" standard :
JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: General, I want to know what our standard of review here is, because I can imagine a frame or receiver that is just a block of metal that -- not readily convertible. I can also imagine some part kits that require such tremendous amount of work that it doesn't qualify as readily convertible. So, if I can point to one item that wouldn't qualify, would -- could be swept up potentially by your -- by the new regulation, is that enough to defeat a facial challenge? Is it enough, or is that always an as-applied challenge?[...]
JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: You -- you use the Reno -- you use the I -- our statement in INS versus NCIR, which basically tracks what you're just saying. But, in Reno versus Flores, we used a different standard and said that a respondent, to prevail, must establish that no set of circumstances exists under which the regulation would be valid. You didn't go that route.
GENERAL PRELOGAR: That would be an even more stringent standard [crosstalk] and I think a burden that Respondents can't surmount. But we think, even under the INS standard that we cite in our brief, it's very clear that there's nothing on the face of the Gun Control Act that [crosstalk] prohibits this approach to regulation.
What were the gun makers asked during oral arguments?
JUSTICE JACKSON: [...] Do you concede that under a facial challenge like the one that you've brought, your task is actually to demonstrate that your alternatives are the only permissible ones under the statute?
In theory, this isn't the last word on the matter. This was not a Second Amendment challenge to the regulation; you have to look elsewhere to see how absolutely doomed any such attempt would be. The majority opinion turning the plaintiff's question into a facial challenge does leave open as-applied challenges, should defendants be willing to risk their freedom at the court's pleasure, with the knowledge that even an imminent victory could be mooted and they be left with the bill.
It'd be funny to imagine the Trump admin taking some pro-gun funhouse mirror of the Obama-era suit-and-settle, or to willfully lose suits by arguing them as poorly as possible (Guilliani needs a job something to keep him busy, right?). We had a natural experiment on that, though, last time around. The punch line is that it didn't matter what the settlement said, because the contract was just a piece of paper.
Thankfully(?), there will be volunteers, whether they know it or not: the ATF's rules are so broad that they cover anything but a literal "unformed blocks of metal", and I'm not convinced that even the duration of the Trump admin will keep to the bounds of that rule. But I don't think they'll get anywhere with legal challenges; lower courts willing to defy Bruen are not going to read this opinion within its own four corners, and SCOTUS is punting on everything else anyway. Anyone that thinks the revival of the commerce clause would apply to them is gonna have a bad time no matter how square they are in Wickard v Fillburn territory. Instead, we're going to be stuck in a world where people don't even know the borders of the law that they're defying.
Takeaways:
- The court did not just decide the case for any enforcement of the regulation, but in dicta endorsed a bar that is low: a half-hour to hour of unskilled work with power tools available in normal stores. There's a fun takeaway in the majority opinion about a kit that someone was able to put together in 21 minutes, and perhaps that could be a reasonable bar, but it kinda falls apart when you find out that the guy was a trained mechanic who looked through several video guides beforehand and ended up doing it wrong enough the thing needed to be repaired later. The government didn't actually commit to nonenforcement for marginal cases (for whatever 'commitment' matters), but even had it, there are Actual Industrial Manufacturing Processes that do not require anything unavailable from Home Depot that could easily crank out a couple receivers from raw aluminum billet in that time. And, unsurprisingly, the usual crowd has taken this interpretation to every possible end; it might take a few months for lower courts to run rampant with it, but they'll make a Bungie AI look like a Jetsons character.
- This could be a new era in regulatory overreach, where Trump could write hilariously unlawful regulations and successfully defend them under the 1% of coverage that was actually within a statute, but odds are better this is just another One Case Only special, given the extent the opinion shies away declaring any test proper and leaves open space for the conventional words-mean-things review where Gorsuch hasn't decided that the statute's dead author had wanted to use artifact nouns. Again, months, not years.
- Did I mention Gorsuch wrote this opinion? I think that puts to rest the various claims that his extremism-in-defense-of-virtue rulings like McGirt or Bostock were just the inevitable conclusions of strict textualism: the textual analysis in this opinion is little more than mind-reading about what the writers must have wanted to cover and intended to do.
- There could be a statutory fix. Stranger things have happened, albeit not often. I'd not give it good odds, though, not just that the politics aren't in favor of it passing, but also that were it passed, there's no reason for the ATF to not just find the rule it wants again from the breadcrumbs. Once you endorse the dictionary-writers changing the meaning of words to fit whatever goal the Blue Tribe wants today, this sort of fair-weather textualism can be stretched to whatever one side wants.
- This guts the rule of leniency (at least for the purpose of gun stuff). If any interpretation of a rule can defend every interpretation, with a defense limited to post-jeopardy pleadings, people are stuck stumbling in the dark. There's some serious due process concerns, and they are unreviewable now.
- Maybe we'll get some massive revision in other cases on Second Amendment matters, but the tea leaves aren't looking great. Lower courts have been actively and aggressively defy the explicit text of well-settled law and good policy under nitpicking pretext, and there's been no serious attempts to slap them down. Duncan v. Bonta has dropped for a third time, it got the exact same answer as before the last GVR, it didn't even attempt any of the demanded Bruen analysis, and it's so unnewsworthy that if I had to write it up I'd be stuck focusing more on the VanDyke YouTuber stuff. Maybe one of Duncan, Ocean State Tactical, or Snope will get actual per curium rather than a GVR that lower courts resist, but even the actual cases the court hears get multilated by the lower courts, and SCOTUS clearly isn't willing to provide any protection from any of the multitude of abuses of Heller and Bruen we've seen, years in.
- That's two dissenting judges. This court got two. Yes, Kavanaugh separately wrote a concurrence that quibbles about the due process ramifications of only protected because the law requires "willful" violations, but given the ATF's record here and elsewhere, the court's unwillingness to take challenges to other expansive understandings of 'willful', and his inability to get literally anyone to sign onto that concurrence, that's weak medicine. Dedicated activists can take this, along with endless punting on 'easy' cases that would favor Second Amendment rights as a call to bring undeniable cases or to go VanDyke Or Bust for any future SCOTUS noms, but for everybody else, this makes The_Nybbler's position seem the reasonable one. You aren't going to reform the entire judicial system, state and federal, in any living person's lifetime, and nothing less will actually get your freedom back, while talking heads will pretend it's an unabashed success of the conservative movement that they didn't get everything they wanted the second they wanted it. Where planting fig trees makes for a great metaphor, it runs into problems when an entire political movement has been wildly successful bringing the copper nails around every four to eight years. The soap box, ballot box, and jury box might protect someone doing something, but they don't protect your rights.
For commentary on the internet,
- Paranoia Agent (2004, 13-episode anime), more of a psychological or supernatural horror than cyberpunk, but very focused on the surrealism of modern society. Not a good first anime because so much of it is intentionally unsettling, but fan be fulfilling if you're familiar with what conversations its having. Serial Experiment Lain (1999) falls into a kinda similar boat, though again pre-millenia and imo a lot of its futurist bits have aged far less well.
For general worthwhile classic anime, with some fudging for what range "early 2000s" includes:
- Cowboy Bebop (1998, 26-episode anime) is one of the ones that probably doesn't need recommendation, but any list missing it is incomplete. Technically pre-millenia, but most of the American following only tracked on in 2000/2001. Space bounty hunters undergo various bizarre antics, ranging from the morbid to the ridiculous and back.
- Kino's Journey (2003, 13-episode anime). Excellent animation and sound direction, broadly applicable themes, and strong execution, but the strongest part is simply the tone, which I'd call somewhere around 'The Little Prince, but with a gunslinger and talking motorcycle instead of a space-prince and his rose'.
- Pretty much everything from Ghibli, but Howl's Moving Castle (2004, film) and Spirited Away (2001, film) are probably the strongest 2000s ones, with Princess Mononoke and Kiki's Delivery Service being older great works. About the only one I won't recommend is Grave of the Fireflies, and that's less because of its quality and more because of its motif.
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann (2007, 27-episode anime), the central super robot anime. There's a few meh bits -- episode 4, for example, or the gratituous booba character -- but generally combines strong animation, style, music, and theme. A show that strongly rewards going into it relatively unspoilered, though.
- Dai-guard (1999), Gundam 08th MS Team (1996), or The Big O (1999) are all moderately-good 'realistic robot' anime. Not very realistic, but all good as a turnaround from TTGL.
- Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood (2009). The first anime (2003) wasn't bad, and familiarity with certain scenes are kinda a cost of entry in anime fan circles, but the remake was resoundingly stronger in characterization, in addition to a better budget and direction. There's other okay shonen from this era -- Soul Eater is the only one I can really call worth its time, and that's still in a popcorn sense -- but FMA:B is outright strong in nearly every respect.
- Mononoke (2007, 12-episode anime). The Medicine Seller must track down the cause and drive of various supernatural ailments, though this often focuses more on the moral failings and limits of the humans he's working to protect.
gattsuru
2d ago
Trace highlighted the New College of Florida as a potential example. There's ways that's had an impact, but in turn it's increasingly obvious that this will only last just so long as DeSantis is willing to burn a lot of political capital on it. Not Republicans in general, given the recent immigration enforcement mess, but DeSantis specifically.
gattsuru
3d ago
It’s not like STEM is immune, or even that resistant: the Hirsch-Dias feud is noteworthy only because we actually got to see the denouement in public, and the fraud was ‘replicated’. Had Hirsch not had such a bee in his bonnet, Dias would have ended up just like the Mxenes guys: maybe embarrassed, but Not Actually Proven.
gattsuru
3d ago
Yes. Yes it was.
Falsely.
I’m not gonna say that’s an exception the swallows the rule on its own. The wrong position on the ACA or AWB might be cited as wanting to kill poor people, before found justification for firing, and there’s other times where positions are seen themselves as evidence of disqualificating in capability, such as where just having the wrong background had an academic review board talk about ‘beating that college out of her’ (and, tot’s coincidence, not hiring her) . Of course, most stuff gravitates to race and sexuality as most controversial, regardless of the facts on the ground, and especially if Skibboleth is trying to distinguish ‘criminal justice’ and ‘immigration’, that makes for a self-parody. An RPG forum I once frequented formally banned any support of ICE or defense of antiabortion laws (and informally banned any serious criticism of BLM); there is no position that modern progressives will fail to call racist or sexist or both.
But let’s look again at Skibboleths claim:
The sticking point is basically always about either gender/sexuality or race, and often beliefs that would be considered boundary-pushing even in conservative milieus.
Not ‘understood as’. Not ‘painted as’. Is.
gattsuru
4d ago
Do you want some gun rights examples? Because oh boy do I have gunnie examples; shall we start with the people who did get fired for putting twenty bucks toward Rittenhouse’s defense fund?
Even for gender/sexuality, the progressive taboos are far more often dependent on matters that are not controversial, or worse are only controversial to the opposing direction. There’s fair argument against misgendering a trans school shooter, but it’s not some universal standard, and people did still lose literal careers over (liking a tweet that did) it.
gattsuru
21d ago
In this case, he must mean "I don't think the media is covering this enough", or "the media isn't being adequately sympathetic to Tesla".
Hm...
No, I don't think that's a particularly charitable phrasing on that.
In particular:
There would be mass media hysteria and FBI investigations.
"FBI" (nor "ATF") shows up in those articles, even the paywalled one, and even said 'ominous' report could scarcely be called hysteric. None mention another recent incident that one would consider relevant and is increasingly popular as a reblog target in BlueSky and Tumblr spheres.
gattsuru
22d ago
At the trivial level, it's something that's immediate, either in firsthand matters or in terms of someone they know. Yes, ostensibly these countries usually focus most enforcement on places where other legal jeopardy turns on less objectionable focuses (and actually avoid getting international tourists involved), but it's somewhat sobering to pack for a trip and put back the sex toy or leave behind a fanfic-in-progress after realizing that you'd be depending on that enforcement 'prioritization' to avoid serious jail time or worse.
And while the various polls about progressives thinking everyone in the political party is gay are kinda hilarious, they're downstream of enough of that one-in-twenty-ish that everyone knows a good few pretty closely.
At the more intermediate level, it's something that ends up with epicycles built around it. Russia doesn't just ban The Gays or pride parades, it bans 'propaganda' about The Gays, has a whole bunch of cultural stuff about stuff that hints of gayishness, and then there's an unofficial brigade of people with a lot of practical support among the police that don't mind if individual gays have Particularly Bad Safety Incidents.
It's a bit like how some rightwingers get really focused on HBD or religious freedom or (in my example) gun rights, even if they're not personally in the pinch point, because the support and actions for these policies end up fractally wrong, too. This usually runs into limitations sooner than liberals expect -- Qatar Airlines isn't cutting scenes out of Mitchels v. The Machines, since even if they cared that much they wouldn't see a lot of the subtext or short-of-bright-flashing-lights text -- but it doesn't stop at don't ask don't tell, either.
The deeper issue is that it's something that a) has basically zero organized internal opposition within the progressive movement, with only a tiny fragment of often-nutty people willing to tolerate disagreement with mainstream progressive pro-LGBT matters, and b) has external domestic opposition, of which the behaviors of external opponents becomes a useful banner. If Uganda has the death penalty for homosexuality (kinda, insert thirty asterisks here), and American social conservatives can be linked to these positions in general (again, asterisks), you don't have to limit your focus on what domestic policies those social conservatives might actually be trying to implement; you can tell everyone What They Really Want To Do To You (asterisk).
gattsuru
1mo ago
Do you have a link to the text of that grant application, rather than just the objective description?
Because there's a fair complaint about claims made without evidence, but when randomly selected high-profile examples with public evidence available come about, looking deeper into the matter -- and often not having to scratch the surface that hard! -- shows a lot of stuff getting hollowed out and skinsuited.
((And, yes, there's also the bit where UoI does the greengrocer bit:
To live out our land-grant mission, we set high goals for diversity, equity, inclusion, access, and belonging. Those goals permeate our universities and research, our healthcare facilities and the companies we help launch.
But that /could/ have been left off the grant application, and the whistleblower complaints not true. Still, if you have access, I'd be willing to make a bet at some moderate odds.))
gattsuru
1mo ago
China's territorial motivations have to trade against not just its strategic ability, but also the political and social capital necessary to commit to and succeed. And while every country is facing the demographic cliff, China is one of the few that's getting squeezed between the cliff face and the rock of 'our demographic numbers are near-certainly fake and we don't know how fake, too'.
gattsuru
1mo ago
It's less the custody and more the public attention. You could quite imagine someone signing away custody as part of a surrogacy agreement, their name and address leaking, and them getting a ton of media attention.
gattsuru
1mo ago
A lot of surrogates don’t want to get wrapped up in the bullshit, especially surrogates working with higher-profile parents. Many states and surrogacy orgs require the information about biomoms to be available to the kid, and I’m pretty strongly in favor of that. But publicizing the mom* without her permission is inviting a massive amount of public attention onto someone who near-certainly doesn’t want it.
(*or moms, though I doubt Altman bothered with that)
In the more general case, I’d prefer a world where surrogates were closely connected to their kid(s), and there are a lot of policy changes that could make that more accessible — unfucking a lot of the parental rights clusterfuck, reducing the often-serious stigma, employment policies less heavily incentivizing the three-year in-and-out. There’s some awkwardness to a family relationship of dad, papa, and ‘aunt’, but it’s probably better for the kids.
But as a revealed preference thing, there are a lot of women who find a year of surrogacy a lot easier (or even net-enjoyable) than a dozen years of child-rearing. And I’m not sure they’re wrong to think it that way, or that it’s really a solvable problem.
For at least some portion, the question isn’t going to be surrogacy or convention family (or single motherhood); it’s between kids or no kids. And I’d rather push to improve the situation on the margins then close off the entire category.
gattsuru
1mo ago
This sorta concept floats around in furry, therian, and (to a lesser extent) otherkin spaces pretty often, so it's not too odd to see if pop up in Zizian thought since they seemed to pull in whatever slipped through tumblr at a given time. There's been some attempts at extrapolating how much humans map around the concept of having a tail, and it is pretty fun for furries and therians when they can add prosthetic ones (and/or more expressive ears, hackles, so on). There are other behaviors like quadrobics that seem to spontaneously develop without significant public discussion or formal artwork, for better or worse.
But a lot of it's probably just trained or learned: too much falls outside of the space of things that non-furs do.
And, more critically, too much of it's non-falsifiable. A big criticism of 90s-style spiritual therianthropy was how much even the Weird Species therians only wanted to pick up the interesting and fun habits from their totem animal/fursona/whatever, over gross or lesser-known ones. And while that was somewhat overblown (insert a dogs sniffing butts, which was a common highlight, and rimming joke here), it applies as broadly or more broadly here. There's no shortage of Weird Behaviors specific to various lemur species or to most proposed common ancestors; there's not even a shortage of weird anatomy things. ((eg, is that weird 'jump wrong and fly' dream normal people get something something leaping lemurs ancestral memory)). You can pick and choose what you think might show up in a big enough populace, but even if you had a magic wand that distinguished 'this drive is shared and has a historical grounding' from 'this is just something you picked up from watching Zootopia', you could easily pick and choose until you had some summary that matched the real world but had absolutely no predictive power.
The moral argument is... less clear; Zizians aren't (weren't?) as attached to what they perceived as True as you'd expect from the capitalization, even beyond what you'd expect from a group like this. See the mess around dual souls (or Undertale), or even the bit at the end of that piece about a dragonkin. These people aren't making a REVURN argument, and the sheer variety in beliefs or expressions of this take makes it incoherent to attempt it. There just aren't that many lemur therians, and they don't want to start online drama with the LotR elf otherkin.
There's people who do or did, back in the height of online therianthropy, though they didn't often find much commonality with out trans folk of the era, or even into the late '00s. It might return, despite its incoherence, as the least-bad-agreement point for an often wildly-incoherent alliance of varied positions, only because the alternative explanations feel worse. TW's freedom of form as the logical endpoint of freedom of expression, but it's pretty unpalatable for a political sphere that's happy to draw territorial exceptions to those principles, nevermind its contradiction to the likely usable points.
The extent any specific position can switch be switched out for today's goals is... not encouraging, and the Zizians show exactly why, but it's also not a failure mode specific to them, or their political allegiance, or to their specific political fight.
gattsuru
1mo ago
That's a necessity to be hosted on Royal Road, I think (without being age-gated, but it's been a while since I checked)
There are at least some adult content works on Royal Road that do not have any serious age-gating: Blue Core is an example (cw: painfully straight tentacles-on-woman, imo mid-but-complete work). They do have warnings that are moderately well-enforced, but I would not give a pre-teen random access to the site.
gattsuru
1mo ago
I agree with you on the assassination attempt side: along with the various procedural faults and failures to analyze or punish the source of those procedural faults, the post-incident review has not gone well.
On the other...
Anyway, I still don't know why I'm supposed to care so much which one of these two candidates wins. Biden would do some things to hurt democracy, would support Ukraine a bit more, would support Israel a bit less, and would yell at Russia more. Trump would do some things to hurt democracy, would support Ukraine a bit less, would support Israel a bit more, and would yell at China more. The economy would muddle along without either one being able to do much more than just cheerlead when it's good and shift blame when it's bad. Biden would make certain kinds of mouth noises about immigration through the southern border, Trump would make a different kind of noises. At the end of the day probably not much would change because the president has limited power over the issue and Americans like cheap burritos and construction work, and companies like to hire the people who make it possible.
Neither candidate is someone I could imagine ever voting for. Both parties deeply, fundamentally disgust me in different ways. Biden would make one group of annoying people online scream that the world is ending, Trump would make a different group of annoying people online scream that the world is ending. As before, the Internet outrage would overrepresent the kind of person who spends a lot of time online writing about politics and would fail to capture the fact that in the "real world", most Americans don't really care that much about politics.
The only way I can think of that either candidate could truly screw things up as president is by getting into a major war with Russia and/or China. And, while Trump's legacy in office is more peaceful than Biden's, the combination of Biden's restraint from actually directly intervening in Iran, Israel, or Ukraine and Trump's volatile chest-pounding, boomercon love of Israel / hate of Iran, and anti-China rhetoric leaves me not entirely convinced that Trump would actually be less likely to go to war. I do think Trump is probably a bit less likely to go to war, but it's not enough to make me want to go vote for him.
If Trump is somehow actually significantly leading in polls with the election a month away, despite the usual rioting and screaming about fascism from Dem-aligned news outlets that we'll probably see next year, we will be in for an interesting outcome though if Biden wins anyway. I doubt that it would be enough to make the True Trump Patriots (tm) actually get up off their couches and do anything with their gun collections other than post pictures of them online, but who knows.
I think that in reality if elected Trump would probably just spend all day tweeting and failing to implement his promises. However, to many Democrats it is almost as if Trump is a Lovecraftian god the mere mention of whom leads to insanity. Such Democrats view him as some sort of annihilating force the very presence of which in the universe warps and endangers the sane, wholesome building blocks of existence itself. Meanwhile I just see a fat old huckster sociopath who talks a lot of shit but is effectively restrained by checks and balances. Not a savory person, maybe even a rapist, pretty certainly a bad guy, but not some sort of fundamental essential threat to the entire being of American democracy or to sanity.
It is not that I do not believe in evil. But I do find it odd when liberals perceive demonic evil in Trump, yet make excuses for vicious violent criminals (at least, as a class if not always individually) who are enabled by Democrats' soft-on-crime policies.
Would Trump do many harmful things in office? I am sure. Harris would as well. Which one would do more, who knows? I do not see a clear-cut answer to that question. He certainly would be no angel, I am sure of that. But it also seems to me that often, vehement anti-Trump sentiment has little to do with a clear-eyed assessment of the possible harms that he would cause.
What explains the particular mind-shattering power that Trump somehow inflicts on so many of his political opponents? Interestingly, it largely do not seem to be his actual political counterparts among the Democrat elite who view him as an eldritch destroyer of worlds... the Democrat elite may hate him, may despise him, may say that he is a threat to democracy, but I don't think I can remember any time that any of them acted as if he was a threat to one's very psychological foundation. Maybe their power and their close understanding of American politics generally inoculates them against such a reaction.
gattsuru
1mo ago
Yeah, the second edition of Wolf's book got significant scrutiny because it assumed convictions for sodomy were solely due to sodomy, even where they often revolved around other serious acts (though 'Victorian' England commuted even these crimes to prison sentences in nearly all cases).
There's some risk to overcorrection here -- there were executions for consentual adult sodomy as late as 1835, albeit extremely rare and controversial in their time; there were pressures for people to play up likely-consensual overtures as not when caught; there were social reasons that older men were presumed to be 'converting' and coercing 'youths' and recorded as doing that for young adults -- but it's hard to overstate how much of a mess the scholarship is.
gattsuru
1mo ago
There's at least competition for worse, though I'll admit the spoilers and overall 'Graphics Art Is My Passion' feeling is worse with the one you link.
gattsuru
1mo ago
That's really neat.
It's just at the napkin stage, now, and I don't yet have the programming chops to pull it off. But there's some fun ideas happening in this sphere, and while it'll be a long while before I'm even thinking about that level of design, it's a good way to keep motivation to learn.
I'm still looking for low profile glasses with a decent HUD, maybe those are worth a try?
With the caveat that I've only had them in my hands a day so far, depends a lot on what tradeoffs you're wanting to make, and what your use case is.
The One Lites are lightweight and surprisingly bright, but adjustability is mediocre, especially for very large or very small IPDs. The resolution is about the max of what's relevant for the field of view, but the field of view isn't great (~45ish degrees diagonal), and the lower framerate compared to the Pros or XReals newer offerings is noticeable for gaming (and fixing a virtual object in real space while the user's head is moving). No AR glasses are going to be stylish, but while the birdbath-style optics and Temu-brand sunglasses don't scream 'geek' as much as a Moverio set, the thick frames still look weird (arguably weirder) indoors and the newer generations with waveguide optics are thinner and better quality. The diopter settings are nice if you're nearsighted, but they can't handle astigmatism and you'll still need prescription lenses if you want to see the world too.
That said, it's really hard to beat the price, especially with the very robust used market going around.
It's not a standalone device, so if you're wanting a HUD outside of the office or a commute they're not easy to use. I don't have a compatible smartphone, and compatibility is complicated with any of these glasses. Viture sells a neckband style mini-computer, and it's supposedly pretty lackluster in about every way. Most (Thunderbolt-equipped) laptops work, but if you want to use a desktop computer or raspberry pi it can get more complicated -- the Pro Dock is very heavily built to handle some goofiness with the Nintendo Switch, but it might be useful for some of those cases and isn't an awful deal.
Dedicated devices like the Even Realities stuff might be better if you want an ultrasimple HUD that connects to your phone, and they're low enough profile that I could see them in a normal eyeglasses store, though in turn they're supposed to be a nightmare for hobbyists to develop anything serious around, and the screen specs are (intentionally) pretty crap.
gattsuru
1mo ago
Kinda. I've done a proof of concept that was just a rangefinder using a monochrome SPI oled and some plastic lenses and a different time-of-flight chip, and that did have longer range than this layout will (although you start running into eye safety issues trying to exceed 50m). This one's more intent to be closer-range (the spec sheet says four meters and that's being generous), but gives a reasonable depth map across a wide field of view. Assuming I can get the data off the chip anywhere near the right speeds, the next step's going to be trying to get this into a wiregrid map overlaid on the user's field of view.
If that works with a low enough latency that it doesn't cause an Exorcist revival, mid-term goal is to try to use that map to project virtual desktops or graphics to solid objects, first from a fixed viewer position and then as the user moves.
Most of the current implementations for that sorta stuff depend on fidicuaries like AprilTags (or QR codes) and thus visual-light cameras that have a wide variety of privacy concerns, or solely handle angular heading. I don't think all of what I want to try will work -- these glasses near-universally give up on pinning virtual items in absolute position to the user for reasons, as anyone that's tried to integrate IMU data into position will tell you -- but there's a bunch of things you can do if you're willing to give up the general case and might work.
At least in Abrego-Garcia's case, the proceedings leading up to the October 10, 2019 hearing.
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