Looks wanky as hell.
We’re starting off with music first today because why not?
“Maybe we don’t need a Blizzcon in 2024”
“Indie devs rally for Palestine with this $8 itch.io bundle” (/barf)
Friday Afternoon Links
About The Author
Riven
[riv-uhn]
noun
1. a gaming, lifting, shooting, intoxicated, ravenous, and happily-taken nerd.
2. often aims to misbehave.
3. and though she be but little, she is fierce.*
And rumor has it that she (and her husband) are also delightful dinner companions. You didn't hear it from me, though.
Maybe make it is for the benefit of the
Palestine Children’s Relief FundUkrainian Corruption Enhancement Fund instead?The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) killed net neutrality back in 2017 under former president Donald Trump, but on Thursday, it brought it back from the dead.
“Killed,” or “decided not to implement because it was a stupid idea?”
I just remember reeling from this before tax cuts finished me off. I’m stone dead now.
Do not go read the comments in that article. Does someone compare opposing net neutrality to killing kittens in the first 5 comments? Yes. Yes they do.
There really is no peak derp.
Or peak asshole.
“You NEVER go full retard!”
Oh yes… yes, they do. Routinely.
I don’t have an account there and no intention of getting one, but I’d love to see the answer to the question of what specifically the Trump-era rules did that was so bad.
We know that the Obama-era so-called “net neutrality” rules clearly helped content providers like Netflix; otherwise he and Michelle wouldn’t have gotten the eight-figure producer deals from the company after leaving the White House.
The worst thing I saw anyone come up with in there is that it lets ISP choose to load the ads as the first content on a webpage. The horror!!!
1) Who doesn’t have minimum 100mb connections anymore, if so it all loads so fast it doesn’t matter.
2) Why are you still using a browser that doesn’t have built in ad blockers?
What happened to ISPs being able to charge to access individual sites as I was absolutely ASSURED would be the case if net neutrality went away. No doubt those greedy capitalist pigs were mere days away from implementing this devious scheme right before the FCC swooped in to save the day!
Go ahead and ask them to explain how VOIP will work (let alone streaming video) if you can’t prioritize certain kinds of traffic.
Hahahahahaha, as if anyone actually runs QoS – just over-provision the link, okay!
/looks at the WFH users I’ve had to support over the past 4 years
For all the people saying that time doesn’t matter, it takes less than a tenth of a second lag time with voice before it becomes nearly unusable.
I spent several years on the transport side saying why QoS was necessary to the apps folks – all who didn’t want to comply with the DoD policy. “Can’t you just give us more bandwidth”?
Clean my room?
I’m having too much fun. I finally forced myself to cut a hole in the floor of the utility/laundry room to reveal the leaky hot water line. I thought for a while it was just the water heater laying down. That’s what I kept telling myself. A veritable geyser, it is. A tee fitting has cracked either from some past freezing episode or just old age. Of course, it’s a thirty-plus-year-old doublewide, so it’s plumbed with that grey flexible water line they use(d) in RVs. I think I’ll go to Camping World and see what they have. It would be really handy if there is such a thing as a “repair” tee with extra long legs to make up for what I will have to cut off to delete the old tee.
Spray some Flex Seal and make a drink!
Era it with duct tape?
*wrap* godammit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9lK_RInD6M
I read that as ‘ruin’ and thought Hell yeah, I can ruin my own life. As if that was a challenge…
I’m assuming that’s how all progs read it as well.
He was lazy but greedy, always begging for money from family and friends who feared for his happiness and sanity. Marx didn’t seem to notice or care. They were simply a means to an end for him. He was so self-centered one wonders if he was on the spectrum. His lechery and drunkenness are well chronicled. But what really struck me is that Marx was a total slob.
Seems to me that today he’s fit right in with the AWFLs, swarthy campus radicals, grifters, and gimmegrants who comprise an important constituency to one political party.
So Marx was a lecherous drunken slob – do we have to focus only on his good points?
Given that his philosophy appeals directly to Envy and Sloth, it is unsurprising how many of the deadly sins he crammed into a single personage.
This gives me a great idea for a Seven sequel. Give John Doe a time machine……
Not to mention the values he lifted from Christianity.
HE IMAGINED A BETTER WORLD!!! /lefties looking in a mirror
Not a Perfect World?
Spray some Flex Seal and make a drink!
I don’t know nothin bout no flex seal. I considered JB Weld.
When a job is too big for Gorilla tape it’s time to call a neighbor. I would have said friend but then I remembered, Glibs and all.
Shark fittings will save you, all hardware stores will have them
They don’t work well with the cpvc and flexible tubing they use in trailers, also not a good idea with the flexible copper tubing, you might get lucky if you hit a nice straight section , but SharkBite (or other press to connect fittings are only recommended for solid copper or pex.
Behold the impotent fury and seething resentment
On the day Donald Trump took office in January 2017, pondering what he might do to the country’s democratic norms and institutions, I wrote these words: “Trump will destroy them, if keeping Trump on top requires it. Or try to. He might not succeed. And that is where we rest our hope—on conservative judges who will choose our institutions over Trump. Mark my words: It will come to this.”
That hope seemed not misplaced back in 2020 and 2021, when a number of liberal and conservative judges, some of the latter appointed by Trump himself, handed Trump 60 or so legal defeats as he attempted to unlawfully overturn the election results. But after Thursday at the Supreme Court? That hope is dead. The conservative judges, or at least most of them, on the highest court in the land are very clearly choosing Trump over our institutions. And none more belligerently than Samuel Alito.
How dare they disagree with the progressive consensus?
Was there an extensive list of democratic norms he destroyed or did I miss it?
As your wife might say “you should know”.
“And you should be able to tell me.”
It’s such a wonder that I’m not married…
“I’m stupid. Spell it out for me with short, simple words. Maybe diagrams if you think that would help.”
I could feel the author’s spittle jumping out of the screen and hitting my face as I read that. Please don’t send me back to the TNR again.
*Slams ev car door on the way to Starbucks
All presidents have destroyed our “country’s democratic norms and institutions”…say, how is press access in today’s presidency?
attempted to unlawfully overturn
Court cases were filed and lost — how is that unlawful.
The law says when a Republican loses he (or she) graciously concedes. Only Democrats are allowed to file lawsuits to change results.
So I browsed through the itch.io bundle, mostly to make sure I wasn’t accidentally buying anything from any of those developers. And surprise surprise, what do I find but a game titled ‘HRT Simulator 2023.’ I am not making this up.
I own They Bleed Pixels and Anodyne already – noticed before I got bored of skimming the list.
Oh well.
Sudan, Yemen, and numerous other war-torn countries called. There was no response.
Funny that. There was a song about that made in the 1990s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9r0zm4surY
Well done parody you Scandies, well done.
Stay safe, midwest! Especially Nebraska right about now
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZDOFX_KEL0
I have a bunch of co-workers who live there. So far they are checking in as ok.
Have a friend right there and he sent me a clip from local news for somewhere called Elkhorn with a tornado on the group in the suburbs.
Will Tonio’s thingymatude make an appearance? What about sloper’s sausage? deadhead’s boobies?
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87821224358?pwd=eW55MTRDbDNtQkh2aHd3M1Nmenlzdz09
Consuming my last alcohol for the next 3 to 4 weeks (starting diet on Monday), so I may drop in.
My first day of substitute teaching went well. One student complimented the shirt RJ sent me. I didn’t know what subject I’d be teaching, and it turns out it was gym class. Fortunately, I was hastily reassigned to health/nursing class. Whatever is wrong with FL education, they take vocational stuff seriously. The classroom was well-equipped with all kinds of medical supplies and teaching aids. There was a cooking class next door and a welding class elsewhere on campus. Since their prom is tonight, I had no students for the first two periods and many others were absent. to pass the time, I read some of the teacher’s books, including Make Your Bed by Navy Seal Admiral McRaven.
He pointed out that most of his instructors were combat vets from Vietnam. That’s good, though I think the VC would have more valuable lessons to teach. They endured more hardship and were on the winning side against a much stronger adversary.
I also read What Sets Great Teachers apart. The author started out as a math teacher but said very little about it. It was mostly about his experiences as a principal. I suspect he was not much of a math teacher else he would have written a book about how to do that. The bulk of the book was commonsense stuff that appeals to midwits with unnecessary degrees.
When I mentioned in passing that I was qualified to teach math, a few students asked if I’d applied to their school. I had looked before and not seen any openings. It seemed they were unhappy with their current math teachers. It’s like that I will teaching 6th grade math for the rest of the year at the same school, which sounds good to me. Having a routine for a while would make things easier.
All in all, easy money. Not sure if I’ll work during the summer. There’s only a month left in the school year.
It’s too bad you didn’t get to teach a gym class. Think how many dad jokes you could make. The kids would groan so hard they’d collapse.
I don’t want to see you teaching girls how to nurse. :-p
And Thoreau went out into the woods into his daddy’s cabin on his daddy’s land while his mommy did his laundry and fixed his meals.
I just watched a reel on how kids are not resilient because they’re kept in a cage because sTrAnGeR dAnGeR, and then can’t function once they’re grown and expected to go out on their own.
Why are these manchildren giving advice and why is anybody listening to it?
Because the people listening to it only see the mask and the facade, not the grift going on behind the scenes.
Ive had 2 hours alone at the house and I have drank beer, pet a cat, and done jack all. Grass grows like crazy here, I really need to buy a mower.
Yeah, your new state is rather well known for its grass.
Good, then we’ll see
your boobiesyou on Zoom laterI just got to my suite in Prescott AZ,
Cool digs. I’m here to visit Sister and Brother, it’s been 17 years.
Prescott is a nice place. If you’re looking for chow try Guacamayas. Two thumbs up from us.
I’ll check it out, thanks
Head just west of town to Granite Basin and hike in the pines. The obvious cliffs of Granite Mountain are a well-known climbing area.
Whiskey Row along the town square was popular when I lived in AZ.
Or to see some open AZ space try the back roads. The road south from Prescott to Wickenburg (AZ 89) will take you through some spectacular and rarely driven through scenery.
Thanks for a video reminding me of my late twenties, early thirties.
A nice look back on how depressing it was.
I meant earlier to suggest Oliver Heaviside to UCS. In addition to being a self-taught mathematician, he made many improvements to the telegraph.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Heaviside
***
He famously said, “Mathematics is an experimental science, and definitions do not come first, but later on. They make themselves, when the nature of the subject has developed itself.”[11] On another occasion he asked, “Shall I refuse my dinner because I do not fully understand the process of digestion?”[12]
***
True that.
***
Heaviside was an opponent of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.[19] Mathematician Howard Eves has commented that Heaviside “was the only first-rate physicist at the time to impugn Einstein, and his invectives against relativity theory often bordered on the absurd”.[19]
In later years his behavior became quite eccentric. According to associate B.A. Behrend, he became a recluse who was so averse to meeting people that he delivered the manuscripts of his Electrician papers to a grocery store, where the editors picked them up.[20] Though he had been an active cyclist in his youth, his health seriously declined in his sixth decade. During this time Heaviside would sign letters with the initials “W.O.R.M.” after his name. Heaviside also reportedly started painting his fingernails pink and had granite blocks moved into his house for furniture.
***
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So you are saying he was a normal mathematician?
It’s hard to find one that wasn’t half crazy. Euler was the closest. Even after he went blind, he produced a mathematical paper per week til he died some years later.
My favorite eccentric mathematician (redundant?) is Erdos.
***
Possessions meant little to Erdős; most of his belongings would fit in a suitcase, as dictated by his itinerant lifestyle. Awards and other earnings were generally donated to people in need and various worthy causes. He spent most of his life traveling between scientific conferences, universities and the homes of colleagues all over the world. He earned enough in stipends from universities as a guest lecturer, and from various mathematical awards, to fund his travels and basic needs; money left over he used to fund cash prizes for proofs of “Erdős’s problems” (see above). He would typically show up at a colleague’s doorstep and announce “my brain is open”, staying long enough to collaborate on a few papers before moving on a few days later. In many cases, he would ask the current collaborator about whom to visit next.
His colleague Alfréd Rényi said, “a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems”,[67] and Erdős drank copious quantities; this quotation is often attributed incorrectly to Erdős,[68] but Erdős himself ascribed it to Rényi.[69] After his mother’s death in 1971 he started taking antidepressants and amphetamines, despite the concern of his friends, one of whom (Ron Graham) bet him $500 that he could not stop taking them for a month. Erdős won the bet, but complained that it impacted his performance: “You’ve showed me I’m not an addict. But I didn’t get any work done. I’d get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I’d have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You’ve set mathematics back a month.”[70] After he won the bet, he promptly resumed his use of Ritalin and Benzedrine.[71]
He had his own idiosyncratic vocabulary; although an agnostic atheist,[72][73] he spoke of “The Book”, a visualization of a book in which God had written down the best and most elegant proofs for mathematical theorems.[74] Lecturing in 1985 he said, “You don’t have to believe in God, but you should believe in The Book.” He himself doubted the existence of God, whom he called the “Supreme Fascist” (SF).[75][76] He accused SF of hiding his socks and Hungarian passports, and of keeping the most elegant mathematical proofs to himself. When he saw a particularly beautiful mathematical proof he would exclaim, “This one’s from The Book!” This later inspired a book titled Proofs from the Book.
Other idiosyncratic elements of Erdős’s vocabulary include:[71]
Children were referred to as “epsilons” (because in mathematics, particularly calculus, an arbitrarily small positive quantity is commonly denoted by the Greek letter (ε)).
Women were “bosses” who “captured” men as “slaves” by marrying them. Divorced men were “liberated”.
People who stopped doing mathematics had “died”, while people who died had “left”.
Alcoholic drinks were “poison”.
Music (except classical music) was “noise”.
To be considered a hack was to be a “Newton”.
To give a mathematical lecture was “to preach”.
Mathematical lectures themselves were “sermons”.[77]
To give an oral exam to students was “to torture” them.
He gave nicknames to many countries, examples being: the U.S. was “samland” (after Uncle Sam)[71] and the Soviet Union was “joedom” (after Joseph Stalin).[71] He claimed that Hindi was the best language because words for old age (bud̩d̩hā) and stupidity (buddhū) sounded almost the same.[78]
***
Women were “bosses” who “captured” men as “slaves” by marrying them. Divorced men were “liberated”.
He’s not wrong, is he?
/jk
/This is why there are no libertarian women….
And not many female mathematicians either.
Men tend to be interested in things. Women tend to be interested in people.
They don’t work well with the cpvc and flexible tubing they use in trailers, also not a good idea with the flexible copper tubing, you might get lucky if you hit a nice straight section , but SharkBite (or other press to connect fittings are only recommended for solid copper or pex.
That’s what I’m worried about, but the guy at the big wholesale plumbing supply place said sharkbite is probably my best hope, because the grey stuff (polysomethingorother) has a thinner wall thickness than pex (same O D), so pex connectors are not a good fit. They make some kind of adapter connector, but nobody carries them.
Allusion and innuendo
Blinken, who is wrapping up a three-day visit to China, said he raised in his meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping and other officials that any interference in the U.S. election is “totally unacceptable.”
Such action would mark a violation of commitments Xi made to President Biden when the two leaders met in November in Woodside, Calif., a watershed meeting aimed at stabilizing deep mistrust and competition between the U.S. and China.
“We have seen, generally speaking, evidence of attempts to influence and arguably interfere, and we want to make sure that that’s cut off as quickly as possible,” Blinken told CNN when asked if Xi had violated the Woodside commitments.
Blinken did not address any specific evidence of Chinese election interference, and he did not say that the Chinese government had violated the commitment Xi had made to Biden.
How do you say, “Stick it up your ass, errand boy” in Chinese?
I read the secret NSA history of the Korean War. The Chinese evidently had learned from the experience of the Germans and Japanese in WW2, and so developed a simple and ingenious code. It was never broken, though some details about it were discovered.
In a war with China, the US will not have an intel advantage.
The trip ended with no new announcements on cooperation. Blinken said his trip occurred “at a time of profound tension between our countries” and “with the aim of stabilizing the relationship, reopening and strengthening our high-level channels of communication.”
“And that is why I came to China; to make insulting accusations about the sort of thing we do all over the world, all the time.”
“This cannot be tolerated.”
So dont. It’s just a damned game. Stop playing it.
I would guess it’s more of a drawing a line in the sand and saying “Nope. That’s far too much for far too little.”
Both sides in the gaming culture are loud. Studios (somewhat rightfully) want to raise prices as they’re amazingly sticky (games have generally been $50-$60 for decades, even as budgets and costs have gone up). Those same studios though refuse to discount old games, turn off games with little warning, force onerous DRM (which does nothing except annoy people and cause problems), and kill fan projects. The gamers on the other hand expect that any game purchased will run forever and be supported even if there’s no financial incentive for it, while bitching about any change that goes against their play style while cheering changes that make play styles they don’t like get made worse. On the other hand, there’s lots of gamers doing labors of love to keep those old games running (with and without the studios/publishers blessing).
Me necroposting yesterday: Hrm. I’m being reminded I moved to Thailand this week, five years ago. My birthday is this Sunday, sharing it with Jessica Alba and the execution of Mussolini.
I got a goofy feeling of ‘The Incident was five years ago.’ Certainly a Writing Tingle, but I HIGHLY doubt I’ll be getting one out by then. Many things have happened in the past five years. Many of them, profoundly damaging moments, both personally and professionally. There has been plenty of good splattered in. (See those smiley faces…) BigBig step in my smallsmall life. Full of possibilities and promise. (Yep, along with those perils and pitfalls.) My brain is a prism, scattering all my shot. Kinda fun at the moment. Positive things abound.
“Everyone wants to save the world but no one wants to help mom do the dishes.” – Asshole O’Rourke.
“Everyone wants to slay a dragon but it turns out real dragons are fucking scary and dangerous as hell so they opt for imaginary dragons.” – Asshole Suthenboy
And yes, I do clean my room.
I don’t want to slay a dragon. I just want to take a nice nap every afternoon.
And Claussen’s Hearty Garlic pickles.
Since Ive been spending time in NE Ohio, Ive been scouring stores trying to find them.