uriel238

uriel238 , 17 hours ago

Godless Groomers

Um, we totally have way more gods than they do, from My orgies are purely chaste Artemis, or Anything that moves, NO EXCEPTIONS Zeus.

uriel238 , 15 hours ago

I assume Seoul looks a lot like it does in Agents of Mayhem which is to say, one of those futurist curvy paradises of white concrete and vert (flowers, bushes, trees) with pop-out holographic cute Pokémon-like creatures who deliver scientific factoids or PSAs (which didn't inform gameplay, just life in Seoul).

uriel238 , 22 hours ago

Someone moused-over the owl. Click to engage the owl.

uriel238 , 2 days ago

Now do plain-bellied sneeches in a star-bellied concentration camp!

uriel238 , 4 days ago

My second year calculus teacher called me baroque which rended asunder my math career.

uriel238 , 2 days ago

He was referring to the era from which my methods appeared in integration, which is to say there are more modern tricks that I don't fully understand.

Years later, xkcd would be reassuring that it wasn't just me. But it killed my ability to get a comsci degree.

uriel238 , 4 days ago

The Vietnam vets I knew from the US army talked about the weirdly green gravy which was good, just green.

And a WWII Navy vet stationed on a carrier said the food was fine, but it was all piled on top of each other.

uriel238 , 4 days ago

3000 calories is what supply should be prepared to feed each trooper on station.

uriel238 , 4 days ago

Is that really, really dark gothic chocolate cake?

uriel238 , 4 days ago

Situational sexuality.

I remember a recent convo (last ten years) regarding an elderly British couple talking about the rise of LGBT+ issues in politics,

HUSBAND: It's actually refreshing to see the young people openly talking about it.
WIFE: I don't think we've ever known anyone like that. Do we?
HUSBAND: Dear, I was in the navy for ten years.

If you think about it, it's very much a thing in parochial schools as well.

uriel238 , 7 days ago

Could be murderclown.

Could be enslaved Chinese acrobats. Not sure.

uriel238 , 7 days ago

There are examples of thinking zombies in media. Tales From the Crypt had some.

uriel238 , 8 days ago

As I have had a really bad run of terrible dentist experiences, bridges are scary and implants are expensive, I'd really like this to work well, and be reasonably priced.

ETA Or, it could be my superhero origin story.

uriel238 , 8 days ago

This is going to be in fashion in a hundred years. Then with gold bling plates on the front.

uriel238 , 11 days ago

It sounds like because there's a shitload of distrust for workplace managers and HR departments, some workers are being very reserved about what they tell their bosses.

If bosses are going to presume you're lazy for taking breaks and using PTO, it might be better to offer a less triggering explanation.

Very much like if a website refuses to serve Firefox or VPNs, it might be useful to hide your website and VPN use.

uriel238 , 11 days ago

I advise young people that they are, in fact, living in a dystopian YAF novel, and yes, their own parents and teachers and ministers are (often without conscious self-awareness) setting them up to be disposable, replaceable components (soldiers and laborers) in the vanity projects of plutocrats, and the path of least resistance will lead them to this fate of being worked until they're worn out, and then cast aside.

Their story is how they escape this path. If they take too long, it's how they secretly serve the resistance while not alerting the authorities, but that's hard mode.

uriel238 , 12 days ago

I was going to say he looks like the evil propaganda version of an enemy leader, but that would be Mother Night.

uriel238 , 12 days ago

I have legit been confused for a robot on more than one platform in my online career.

In the old days, there were fewer biases, so long as my dialogue was useful. Nowadays they're afraid I'm going to profile them until I can identify them IRL.

I'm not trying to profile people.

uriel238 , 12 days ago

Fuck! Is AI mechanical Turks all the way down?

It's a horror story that never ends is what it is.

uriel238 , 13 days ago

My understanding is Hamas was supplied by Iran to start some trouble in Gaza to provoke Israel into a brutal retaliation, since Netanyahu was already known to be itching for an excuse to go all genocide (as confirmed by the IDF using cluster bombs in excess and blockbusters in civilian-occupied urban areas).

Hamas, emboldened with its new materiel, went hard and Netanyahu was gleeful for the opportunity to massacre more Palestinians, even resort to contrived famine to do it.

All while smart phones on the ground recorded the carnage up close and personal, which leaked to the internet for all to see.

So Hamas is not a military giant, but they played their part with aplomb

uriel238 , 13 days ago

They can curb Netanyahu's capacity to travel, and pressure Israel to vote him out of office, or be thought of as Bibi's little collective bitch.

Similarly, George W. Bush and his administration can't leave the US for fear of arrest. Despite the Storm the Hague law, the US won't be storming the Hague even if ex-presidents stand trial by internal tribubal.

uriel238 , 15 days ago

Not yet, but they can try to appeal to federal courts. The courts decide if there's a matter worth considering at the federal level.

SCOTUS is more pro-corporation and anti-worker than it is anti-women, thanks to the Federalist Society shills.

uriel238 , 14 days ago

SCOTUS has specifically chosen to take appeals that did not need to be determined at the federal level, but did anyway in order to define things at a national level. In the aughts and 2010s, things involving law enforcement, and precinct interpretation of the fourth and fifth amendments to the Constitution of the United States often made an appeal to federal levels and were accepted, as were reproductive rights issues (specifically laws that obstructed abortion access).

uriel238 , 14 days ago

SCOTUS has specifically chosen to take appeals that did not need to be determined at the federal level, but did anyway in order to define things at a national level. In the aughts and 2010s, things involving law enforcement, and precinct interpretation of the fourth and fifth amendments to the Constitution of the United States often made an appeal to federal levels and were accepted, as were reproductive rights issues (specifically laws that obstructed abortion access).

That said, if we had a supreme court bench pool of one hundred SCOTUS judges, and each case was heard by a handful of them (six to nine is fine) selected by lottery, that would reduce a lot of the problems. It would be difficult to influence enough to steer the court regarding a specific issue, and even if one president appointed five federalist-society shills, it wouldn't throw the balance of the court as much as McConnell's and Leo's shenanigans have. But that's only good for the next new nation. This one we just have to acknowledge the federal court system is the most corrupt of the three branches of government. Few will lose sleep when they are put against the wall or convicted in the Hague, down to the last office clerk.

uriel238 , 16 days ago

You should see how they do things at the Hawthorne

uriel238 , 16 days ago

Where's weed and ganja in this picture? That's what the dealers in the streets called it.

PS; I'm old, but not that old.

uriel238 , 16 days ago

After a string of bad experiences at the dentist (miscommunications, mostly) I got super anxious in the chair, and my dentist offered me nitrous.

So it's still available, if used less.

uriel238 , 17 days ago

When I was a toddler, my dad was one of the mission control guys for the Apollo missions, and my room was decorated with NASA launch vehicle charts dad got from his work.

And I loved it. I thought rockets and space were the bee's knees.

So I don't personally see any issue with setting your kid up with jetfighter kitch if that's what makes them happy.

uriel238 , 17 days ago

Fuselage?
Formation?
Firewall?
Funky Chicken?

uriel238 , 16 days ago

Contrast classic astronaut speak: 「Engine explodes and the lower half of the spacecraft drifts away」Um, we might be facing a contingency here.

uriel238 , 16 days ago

What is scary is how consistently cruel, apathetic and ignorant our plutocrats are, which is exactly why we gave up on monarchy in the first place.

It shows us how capitalism doesn't work and just deteriorates to rule by force (but with more manufactured consent).

uriel238 , 16 days ago

Syd Mead is one of my gods. I'd hoped during the COVID-19 outbreak we'd get so into masks and screens that we'd see some of Mead's anonymity helmets, but there was so much resistance. Someone did create a personal environment with filtered airflow, but it was expensive and posh.

uriel238 , 17 days ago

We are the goon squad and we're coming to town, Beep-beep!

uriel238 , 17 days ago

So are they going as far as to say the Resurrection of Jesus was likely to be ahistorical?

We're used to a post-Newtonian world being free of ghosts, fairies and divine intervention. But recognizing that their own origins are mythical would be a significant step.

It's as much admitted to seminaries, just not to the laity.

uriel238 , 17 days ago

Yes. And hagiography deals in manufacturing a myth by asserting it cannot be disproven with available data.

uriel238 , 17 days ago

I'm also glad to let the Roman Catholic Church render itself obsolete and irrelevant. The participation of the USCCB in the Christian nationalist movement, and the Catholic Federalist Society wing of SCOTUS is going to cause a heavy backlash against the entire church, including the Holy See if it continues to push dogma-driven doctrine and further strip civil rights.

It's really time for religious institutions to resign from their position as the second estate.

uriel238 , 17 days ago

Dr. Fluffywiddlewumperkins

Fluff for short.

uriel238 , 18 days ago

I gave up on Far Cry and Watchdogs not because the games were deteriorating with each iteration (they were / are) but because the sexual harrassment ring on which the upper management fed and HR silenced the victims made supporting the company untennable. At least for me.

Since then I've found alternative indie projects that have scratched some of those itches pretty well. I don't play Ubisoft, even those games I already own have licenses for.

uriel238 , 18 days ago

I'm pretty sure Jeff Bezos owns WP, but I can't speak to how much he intervenes, or if he has pressured WP to suppress stories critical of Amazon.

Bias-wize, it was pretty solidly neoliberal when I last read it consistently (which ended when the paywall became too hard to circumvent, and I switched to AP and Reuters).

That said, protests are commonly not good for business, especially if they're big and loud. Doubly so if they become a riot.

On the other hand, police brutality almost assures success of the protest in some essential ways, even if its at the expense of protestor life and limb: Bystanders become sympathists. Sympathists become activists. Activists become radicalized (saboteurs and revolutionaries). It shows that the grievance is serious enough that the state needs to suppress it. And when you're lucky, folk songs get written about how The Man did you wrong. ( Tin soldiers and Nixon's coming... )

This figured largely into the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s strategy in the Civil Rights Movement, which was to become a nuisance enough that the police would get violent. And while some protestors got hurt (or killed), it amplified the message and escalated sympathies for the cause. BLM is trying to do the same thing these days, but with the addition of phone cameras, so recordings of violence from the incident gets leaked to the internet, and people can see for themselves how the police treat their fellow Americans in minority and lower-class neighborhoods, hence the 2020 unrest in the US after the killing of George Floyd.

The thing is law enforcement is supposed to know better, as are elected representatives like the Mayor of New York or the Speaker of the US House of Representatives. When they get hawkish about putting down unrest with force, it is a sign of incompetence and a clear disinterest in good governance, which itself fuels even further grievance and unrest from the public.

uriel238 , 18 days ago

Standard haxor uniform for posing for pictures.

uriel238 , 18 days ago

I’m seeing very long form post replies that read very much like what is generated from LLMs.

Oh goodness, as one who has a bad habit of putting responses into essay form, I hope this doesn't refer to me. I'm not an LLM. Honest!

Okay, I'm pretty sure I'm human. It's a damn convincing hallucination.

uriel238 , 19 days ago

Super long spaghetti noodles are dried in coils and are pretty fancy.

uriel238 , 19 days ago

This just makes me think the soldier isn't intending to shoot anyone anyway, say if he's more sympathetic to the local civilians than his political masters.

And if I recall correctly, American troopers often made more friends with chocolate and beanie babies than with bullets.

uriel238 , 19 days ago

It's more that if you own your house, then you can replace that sucky fixture with one you like, whereas if you rent, you're stuck with the sucky fixture, and when fixtures break, they're replaced with sucky fixtures.

uriel238 , 19 days ago

Well, then precarity is also bad for fertility. No one wants to have sex or have kids when they're permanently a month away from homelessness. And that means after the alphas, we might see a severe labor shortage for our landlords and industrialist masters.

Curiously, this was a permanent problem under feudalism.

uriel238 , 19 days ago

Some people need sexual activity, and not all children are intended. Few of the children we have are actually adoptable, though there are safe surrender sites, and it would be interesting to see if they're being used more.

But sexual frustration figures largely in the motivation of the alt-right, also for rampage killers, spree killers, and Ted Kaczynski.

So sure, we can swear off sex, and some do. But it results in hundreds of thousands of War Boys eager to serve Immortan Joe and get witnessed all shiny and chrome into Valhalla.

There's also the problem of how the German Reich dealt with a population implosion. Himmler started his master-race program, arresting and detaining German women for a breeding program. It was highlighted recently in an article about the historical that inspired Margaret Atwood for the atrocities of Gilead in A Handmaid's Tale We're already seeing interest in rolling back women's rights and women's personhood here in the US.

So don't blame the victims.

uriel238 , 18 days ago

Then you don't understand the complex reality in favor of a simplistic view. If that's what you need to do to cope in what is, granted, a terrifying reality, then you do you. But I cannot follow. Do what you will.

uriel238 , 19 days ago

Due to its mode of operation, the court considered the software to be “specifically intended for criminals”

Crime is an action a state doesn't like, not necessarily wrong or evil, but serves interests other than the state. If the state has to authorize everything, then the state is favoring dominance over governance.

When the state has to monitor all transactions it is tyranny.