Schadrach

For clarity, I am going to use man/woman in reference to gender and male/female in reference to sex.

Always said this is exactly the way to protest those laws. Get the burliest, most masculine trans men you can find and engage in malicious compliance.

The conservatives and the TERFs are totally aligned on this one - and their thinking boils down to a few points:

1. You cannot change your sex.
2. Male persons are evil, dangerous predators.
3. Predators will do whatever they need to to get better access to prey.
4. Sex-segregated spaces are segregated by sex, not gender and exist in order to protect female persons from predators by limiting access to them by male persons while in a vulnerable position.

…and that’s really it. You might notice that trans men are totally irrelevant to all of that, since they only really care about women’s spaces. To them a trans man using the men’s room is only putting themself at risk and doing so by their own choice, while a trans woman is endangering the cis women in the space against their will by existing.

I may be wrong, but I was thinking the Machinarium with 8 gear rooms was the solution to something, and was being vague about it. So Workshop, Security, Utility Closet, Laboratory, Pump Room, Boiler Room, Hall of Mirrors to duplicate one of the above then Machinarium.

As for the drafting studio, that might be a solution. I’ve had bad luck getting it to pull too, only having seen it twice. Been holding off on picking an outer room in recent runs so that if I see the drafting studio again I can burn rerolls to force a shrine to get maximum use out of it.

As for a trophy for drafting 9 of one room, I hope that room is either aquarium or tunnel. I can’t think of another room it might be reasonable to draft that many of in one run.

I mean, they will pay them. And then charge more for product to cover the additional cost. It’s a lot easier to tolerate that in the short term if you’re bigger.

I find it amusing they though they’d be safe from the increased tariffs under a de minimis limit. That’s a thing that could have happened, but that tends to benefit small purchasers over large ones which is the opposite of GOP thinking and is also no something Trump et al had ever mentioned, so I don’t know why they would expect it?

For anyone that doesn’t know, de minimis is a tariff exception for small purchases, basically that it’s not worth the administrative cost of levying the tariff for fiddling small change, so if it’s a small enough shipment they won’t bother.

workers,…not white Americans!

None of them include workers in that list, because most of them are white Americans, but are also workers. The whole point is “I want them to hurt people who are not like me, not people who are me!”

Shit even my in laws say they are centrist, they don’t hold a single view that’s centrist. They vote down ticket republican their whole lives. This is a thing republicans do.

I voted a mixed ticket until 2016. Then straight blue until 2024, and only one exception in 2024 and she was was a city seat that I knew and could knock on her door and yell at in person if she did something I didn’t like.

Or to pick more immediately pertinent examples, RFK is a an idiot, but he supports banning some food additives that are already banned elsewhere for good reasons, Trump is an idiot, but he wants to end daylight savings time. Both are good ideas, despite support from terrible people and being supported by those terrible people doesn’t make them suddenly terrible ideas.

That’s what they said. You get given a choice between “drag things farther to the right” and “do nothing”, with a system designed to always collapse into two functional parties, knowing you’re too terrified of “drag things farther to the right” to meaningfully challenge “do nothing.”

It’s like a political ratchet.

It’s just the End of Days… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RKRO_VssJQ

You may have nothing to fear right now, but you never know who’s going to be in office soon.

The way I always explain it to people - take any additional government power or access to information you either don’t care about or actively support. Now imagine whoever you oppose/hate the most taking office and trying to use that against your interests. Are you still OK with them having that power? Same principle applies regardless of what power or who’s pushing for it.

It’s like due process - you don’t want any category of alleged violation not to be subject to due process, and if you don’t understand why then it’s time to wrongfully accuse you of doing that so you understand the problem.

Fuck it, align=‘center’. That’ll center it horizontally relative to some context and if that’s not good enough then you should have been more precise in your request.

This was not personal interest, though it is an incredibly interesting text. It was fascinating to discover he devoted ~2.5 chapters to the importance of the same kind of simple, yet powerful finger-pointing rhetoric used by right-wing ideologists to this day. I joking say it’s one of the earliest texts on meme theory, and it’s only half a joke.

I still find it funny that just a few years ago a feminist social work journal called Affilia published an article that was essentially a rewrite of a section of Mein Kampf in terms of sex and with some “fashionable buzzwords” included under the title “Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism.” Especially since the bit is spelled out right in the title (for anyone who doesn’t know, “Mein Kampf” literally translates as “My Struggle”). It was part of the grievance studies affair.

I think I have a mutation in a taste bud or something, but Sucralose is really a prominent and nasty taste to me in anything it’s in.

The only artificial sweetener I get a nasty aftertaste from is saccharine. But I get a really absurdly foul aftertaste from saccharine, I can’t even compare it to anything because it’s easily the worst thing I have ever tasted in my life and I can’t think of anything even sort of similar. Glad basically nothing uses it any more, but it was more of an issue as a type I diabetic kid decades ago. Sucralose doesn’t give me an aftertaste at all though, neither does aspartame or acesulfame potassium.

My preferred sweetener though is stevia (I used to go to the local new age shop and buy just dried stevia leaves for my tea and such during the time it was legal to sell in any amount for any purpose as an herbal supplement so long as you didn’t mention it had a flavor which turned it into an unsafe food additive because fuck NutraSweet corp). It took such a ridiculous time to get approved because of NutraSweet, when stevia really should have fallen under GRAS status for the same reason things like tomatoes did - New World plant used in food forever by the natives, but wholly new to Europeans when they came to the Americas.

Make archives of any important links you intend to reference, because you can’t assume the link will be valid tomorrow?

You never hung out on IRC warez channels getting stuff by DCC or by trading dodgy FTP servers? Young whippersnapper!

We all on here pretending Napster wasn’t the OG? The transition to kazaa was painful.

Napster was feature poor though. CuteMX was much, much better and out while Napster was still running, but it closed down after Napster lost the court case. Feature set was closer to Kazaa, including filters and being able to browse a user’s shares.

If it was obscure, uncommon, niche, and other synonyms, if you did find it 90% of the time it was simply given an incorrect name and wasn’t actually what you wanted.

This is literally how I got introduced to several bands I never would have heard otherwise. Missing one track off one album, downloading…this definitely isn’t the right track, but who is this? And now I need to download another 8 albums by that band…

If AI didn’t exist, it would’ve probably been Astrology or Conspiracy Theories or QAnon or whatever that ended up triggering this within people who were already prone to psychosis.

Or hearing the Beatles White Album and believing it tells you that a race war is coming and you should work to spark it off, then hide in the desert for a time only to return at the right moment to save the day and take over LA. That one caused several murders.

But the problem with ChatGPT in particular is that is validates the psychosis… that is very bad.

If you’re sufficiently detached from reality, nearly anything validates the psychosis.

Headline was inaccurate - they didn’t bomb a place for a gender reveal. Instead they bombed a place that produced blue smoke for some other reason and joked about how it resembling a gender reveal. That’s…not better but it’s an important distinction - one is blowing shit up to announce it’s a boy and the other is blowing shit up to blow shit up and then joking about the color of the smoke.

Again, I think I understand what I need to do for one puzzle, but if I’m right I need to draft 8 specific rooms all in the same run (I’m hoping I’m wrong and can come up with some other answer). That’s…easier said than done barring a lot of luck. It’s very much that I’m pretty sure I know what the puzzle is and what the solution is but the game is unwilling to let me draft what I need to solve it.

I’m pretty sure one of my missing rooms from the directory is some kind of elevated clock room (“High up among all the clocks”, the only “high up” room I’ve really got is the Attic and the only room with a lot of clocks is the Den so it feels like I need a new room), but I’m a few dozen days in and haven’t seen one.

If you’re post room 46 you probably know what puzzle I’m talking about, and I’ve got 5/8 of the keys and the puzzle behind one door solved. The third one I’m missing is almost certainly in one of the lockboxes in the Vault, but that’s a matter of time and luck to get vault, the right deposit box key and enough steps to get from one to the other in the same day. It’s another case where it’s not an interesting puzzle or mystery, it’s waiting on RNG to allow me to do the thing. Getting those keys, figuring out the puzzles behind the doors, and finding the rest of the red envelopes are my current big goals.

And boy do I wish that I’d got the coat check the only run to date where I got all the parts for the power hammer. Currently got the emerald bracelet in mine, which is nice but…

The bill got pulled. And even if it didn’t it’s such a blatant and egregious violation of 1A that even Trump’s pet judges would have to shoot it down out of fear of the precedent it would set and what would happen if ever they lose power for any length of time.

That’s the conversation I’ve been having with some people cheering on Trump’s immigration moves. I’ve pointed out the machine the individual bricks seems to be building, and when they support that too because Trump will only use it on the “right sort of people” I point out that Trump won’t be in power forever, and ask him what he’d think if someone like Harris or AOC had that same power. That’s when they suddenly get it, because the idea that the same machinery could be brought against them is not something they consider.

The first question you should ask when considering “Should the government have this power?” is “If the people I oppose the very most had this power, what would they do with it?” If you’re not OK with the answer to that, then the government shouldn’t have that power.