deathandgravity.bsky.social
53 posts
36 followers
173 following
Discussion Master
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Literal ice? Like, the condensation is freezing up? In that case it isn't tilted enough; a window unit has to tilt back slightly to drain or the primary refer coils will ice. There is probably a little spigot on the back; it should be constantly slightly dripping.
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No, it wouldn’t. The worst thing about Cryptonomicon was Stephenson starting his “male SF write is weird, gross, and confused about sex” phase way early, and the baroque cycle leans into that so hard.
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It is almost certainly a reference to fallout: new Vegas. Which means he doesn’t understand that, either.
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Isn't it implied in _The Sharp End_ that Joachim gets a second chance and potentially some kind of redemption? Its been years, and I'm not a Drake completest, but that's what I recall.
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Same. I definitely clocked the connection as a rural Catholic kid in Oregon in the 90s, so it can't have been that subtle; I was not a worldly adolescent.
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But it really doesn’t start off well. It’s skepticism of government power while being worshipful or private power.
I have very little time for left-anarchists, but they at least have a coherent critique. Libertarians don’t.
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It can be awkward to talk about without being gross, but the reason I can still get laid despite this isn't available to them: I basically like people, I have specific interests I can talk about without being a dick, and I'm almost always sincerely interested in other people.
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Isn't that the problem? They have completely realistic expectations. These are guys who haven't picked up or been picked up by a sober woman in a bar ever in their lives. I ain't much, even in the category "overweight, middle-aged divorced guys," but I baffle these assholes.
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Highschool. It is fundamentally people who are still desperately trying to win at high school. (See also, SF fandom, the het kink scene and a great many others). They are waiting for us all to turn to them at tell them that they were the coolest, all along, and we were wrong not to notice.
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I need a sign I can tap that says "You get what you reward. You do not get the opposite of what you punish."
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Maybe. The one I've played into the ground is ALB, and that definitely isn't APM, at least in single player (and I have negative interest in online multiplayer).
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A thousand times the later. You have a bunch of people who are being fucked over and are about to be tired, miserable, hungry, scared, confused, and armed. We want those people to know who their friends and fellow citizens are.
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I wonder what happens if the governor calls them out first? I mean, this is Newsom, the worst possible man for the moment, so the answer is "They fire on the protestors while hurling anti-trans slurs" but imagine a governor who wasn't a complete waste of space.
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God yes. I did a steroid burst for my arthritis for the first time when I was maybe 35, and it makes you feel like you are 17 again in the worst possible way, most especially bursts of just unmanageable rage. (For me it was probably a mania trigger as well, but I wouldn't know that for years. )
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Gah. BACKout. This is what I get for posting when I should be sleeping.
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Rollback. Or blackout. At least in change management documentation.
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I dunno. It’s certainly not been great for me; it’s gotten so that when I hear certain accents and a gateway area code I just assume scam and try and rush them along so I can be done.
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And (pace Robert Evans, who made this observation about scams years ago) that has to be part of what has turned us into such gullible people. And I wonder if the various off show scam boiler rooms aren’t also making us more xenophobic?
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I’ve avoiding thinking about this hard. But if you are say, 55 and not tech savvy, that means an endless stream of bullshit from someone(s) with an accent mixed with just enough important coms to mean you have to listen each time.
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Somewhat to the side, but looking for work means answering; the phone a lot. And that means 5, 10 times a day, someone with an Indian accent is going to lie to me in an incredibly tedious rote way.
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But that’s just a hunch because the other vector I’ve seen a ton of it from is colleagues from India. And I hate it so so much. It makes me just irrationally angry.
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I got laid off in February, so I get a ton of emails that say “here is a 3 month contract 1500 miles away. please revert back to me with your resume, ssn, and all identifying details and sign this contract to represent you.” But I’ve been seeing it for years; I think it is coming from India?
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Oh god. I’m still fighting a frantic and doomed battle against turning revert into a synonym of reply. And that is somehow worse.
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Wars and movements and the shape of history can only ever be defined retrospectively, by saying later “these things go together”. I don’t think that the failure of the participants to recognize “oh, I’m in the Second World War” right up front very meaningful.
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Sure but… so what? The 7 years war started as a bunch of assholes in the Americas being dicks to… everyone, basically and dragging England kicking and screaming into what became a major global conflict.
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FWIW, I’m personal of the camp “the first of the conflicts that came to be th Second World War started in1937 in China.
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Yeah but… from the point of view of the US government, it also didn’t end until 31 December 1946. I think what you are getting at, and I think correctly, is that the start of a global war is actually kinda murky?
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Honestly? Little fondness as I have for Vegas, given how dry it is, and how cold the nights are, I’m gonna guess cooling isn’t a major problem.
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So the same basic logic as a land value tax, but a different way of gaining the revenue?
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Thanks!
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What is value capture and how have they misappropriated it?
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I think it is backwards for me? I think of bullshit and a deliberate attempt to deceive and horseshit as just completely uninterested in the truth, or, as with AI, literally incapable of grasping what truth is.
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(Also, laundering money is a loss -a cost, basically- for a criminal enterprise. But the actual businesses themselves almost always do. They have to; the falsely smuggled in profits are how you wash the cash. It’s the only failure proof way to run a restaurant)
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What you are describing would be a straight fraud. If what yurtle did is criminal, it’s a fraud. To be laundering you would have to be washing money gained in a different, basically unrelated criminal enterprise.
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Mass Effect; sorry.
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Aren't many of planets in the first ME game procedurally generated? I know they are in Starfield.
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There was a Salon.com article about a woman in SF doing this c. 2000? Mostly the rizzing up part, but it exists. Our weird singularity cult lady has, as is the custom of her people, invented a worse version of a thing that already exists.
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Right? My favorite game from that era is a big RPG from New World Games called Planet's Edge. And it was great, but it was and remains just a buggy mess with at least one planet that crashed the game if you scanned it. And we just... lived with it!
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(That are in IL-9, I mean)
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Did they really move to what, west loop? FFS. There are so many better, nicer neighborhoods in IL-9. Are they afraid of the train for some reason? It feels petty but this makes me just desperately hope I don’t have to vote for this person.
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I have a soft spot for Anethem, but really, NS hasn’t written a good book since Cryptonomicon. It is interesting how his brain worms resemble those of your standard pundit; I never thought i would miss the weird sex shit (Herbert, Heinlein etc).
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It is not just that we live in a high gullibility society. It's that somehow we've turned hyperventilating about the most obvious bullshit into a career move.
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Probably not at the start though; it’s tough to make the timeline work (Dedra, in particular, seems older than 20) but Luthen would have joined the republic army before it became imperial. Partagaz, too. Which makes for an interesting contrast.
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Keep in mind that Bethsoft brought us the story of a horrible war where both sides deployed weapons horrific beyond imagining: armored fighting vehicles and ... cavalry. Beth does some things very well, "writing" isn't one of them.
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I get that. But I realized a while ago that I don't like games that I have to be good at before I can enjoy, and the move toward more micro in RD/WARNO means you have a much higher floor.
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I want to love WARNO so much more than I actually do? I really miss the larger more complex formations from ALB vs. the more penny-packet task force assembly model that started with Red Dragon and continues in Warno. I want my BOAR 1st Infantry grinding through Scandinavia, damnit.
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Its been a minute (although now I know how I'm spending my night) but I always just fall back on Hamar and let the Sovs grind themselves to dust against that town in the center-north part of the map.
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I thought the aliens in _When Heaven Fell_ were faintly insects? Ants that accidentally built an AI? Not important but I have no clue where my copy is and google isn’t telling me.
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We call that Phoenix.
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They are not. Just the PNW.