Thread locks too soon
amarillion

I wanted to reply to a thread with zero replies, but it was locked.
Ironically, the thread complaining about thread locks was also locked, so I couldn't add my complaint there.

Could it be that threads are locked too quickly? Maybe it was a useful feature when allegro.cc was very active, but nowadays the pace is slower, and thread locking sometimes makes it impossible to reply.

Karadoc ~~

I also I think they are locked too quickly.

GullRaDriel

I second. Edit: or third.

Chris Katko

It's like you said, the post density here is much much smaller than it used to be and the time limit should be extended (or eliminated). There are so few people here now, we don't really have to worry about the problems that stem from re-sending old posts to the top.

I hope one day things get more popular again. I miss helping new people! Lots of us do--it shows whenever someone new has a question we all jump in as fast as we can.

Matthew Leverton

(Waiting for thread to lock, so I don't have to reply.)

Mark Oates

(Waiting for thread to lock, so I don't have to reply.)

Wish I could "like" that.

jmasterx

If your thread locks too soon, double check your mutex.

Bob Keane
JMasterx said:

If your thread locks too soon, double check your mutex.

Try thinking of old baseball scores. I think threads should be unlocked if new information is found.

Felix-The-Ghost
jmasterx said:

If your thread locks too soon, double check your mutex.

This was more clever than it was appreciated for :)

LennyLen

This was more clever than it was appreciated for

Some of us appreciate silently.

GullRaDriel

I'm gonna sem_post a message to allow the thread to run for some more time.

Chris Katko

I was going to say that if I

amarillion

This calls for a lock-free implementation.

Chris Katko

'm trying to post and it gets locked, I'm going to be sad.

MiquelFire

Yea... this place not be active enough to have the auto lock so quick.

jmasterx

thread.notify();

Chris Katko

I'm saddened that nobody noticed my joke.

bamccaig

I didn't understand it at first. :-/ I suppose you were posting early just in case the thread was locked before you finished, but then what's the point if your partial message doesn't make any sense to anyone?! >:(

Chris Katko

My post didn't have a mutex lock, so it ended up split in half by another process. :-/ ;D

Bruce Perry

This thread is awesome. I want to save it for all posterity, but first I need to take a dump.

Mark Oates

Ash. Makes more sense with the second post. :)

jmasterx

{"name":"2322372.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/4\/74f174c232cad8894058b92061f84b55.jpg","w":500,"h":323,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/4\/74f174c232cad8894058b92061f84b55"}2322372.jpg >:(

Runnable task1 = new Runnable(){
 
    @Override
    public void run(){
        System.out.println("If your thread locks too soon, double check your mutex.");
    }
};
 
 
Thread thread1 = new Thread(task1);
thread1.start();

Elias
new Thread(() -> { System.out.println("Java added lambdas now you know..."); }).start();

Mark Oates

lambdas are so in right now.

;)

Bob Keane

lambdas are so in right now.

{"name":"609793","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/1\/51f8bb92021b66380d4639cd77a19a85.jpg","w":1024,"h":576,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/1\/51f8bb92021b66380d4639cd77a19a85"}609793

Chris Katko

Can lambdas contain other lambdas?!

Mark Oates

We should put threads in our lambdas in our threads.

amarillion

Our servers are still on java 7, so no lambdas for me.

bamccaig
#SelectExpand
1const string s = "\"vgdhukw!hurp!vghhQ"; 2 3new Thread(new ThreadStart( 4 () => new Thread(new ThreadStart( 5 () => { 6 var j = s.Length - 1; 7 8 for(var i=j; i>=0; i--) { 9 var thread = i; 10 11 new Thread(new ThreadStart( 12 () => { 13 while(j != thread) { 14 Thread.Sleep(100); 15 } 16 17 Func<int,char> t = o => (char) 18 (o / 30 > 1 ? o - 3 : o - 1); 19 20 Console.Write(t((int)s[j])); 21 22 if(j == 0) { 23 Console.WriteLine(); 24 } 25 26 j--; 27 })).Start(); 28 } 29 })) 30 .Start())) 31 .Start();

Bruce Perry

I used lambdas to make a list of numbers from 10 to 10, but I accidentally 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10.[1]

jmasterx

This text has nothing to do with the topic at hand :)

Bruce Perry

Whereas a normal person would ask whether this thread stops at this statement, Einstein would ask whether this statement stops at this thread.

MiquelFire

I been watching this thread, but couldn't think of anything good to add.

Still can't think of anything...

jmasterx
Quote:

My fellow programmers, ask not what your thread can do for you, ask what you can do for your thread.

John Deadlock Kennedy
J.D.K

Thomas Fjellstrom
jmasterx said:

John Deadlock Kennedy
J.D.K

John Futex Kennedy.

J.F.K.

Bruce Perry

Miquel, you should definitely join this thread :)

Elias

Noooo, don't join the thread!

Peter Hull

This whole thing is screwed.

Thomas Fjellstrom

I'd tap that.

Gideon Weems
LennyLen said:

Some of us appreciate silently.

And some of us reply silently, contributing to the problem of threads locked too soon.

Indeterminatus
amarillion said:

Thread locks too soon

No, YOU lock too soon. And your sister!

Chris Katko

So is Java like... a dead language? It seems like everyone is trying to lock it away until it dies--like they're doing with Flash.

Chrome has completely disabled the previous plugin interface that all Java applets used which is sad, because I love me my 90's-era Physics Java applets.

OTOH, for a job interview with a very big company running Big Data, I was told they do everything in Java. So maybe it's still a huge corporate framework? But with all of the exploits that come out--practically every week--is that really a safe decision to base your corporate software on?

To be clear: I'm not talking about the merits of the features of the language at all.

bamccaig

The platform and language are extremely popular for Web applications and server-side applications. And probably internally for desktop software. Many companies, such as Google, use it as one of their primary technologies. I imagine that the majority of vulnerabilities mostly affect desktop and browser-based installations. Java remains to be very big.

MiquelFire

Basically, plug stuff is being removed as most exploits use that to infect systems.

Thomas Fjellstrom

Java is as dead as C and Perl. Ie: NOT. It's just not hip.

Elias

The one thing basically all the programming language statistics seem to agree on is that right now Java is the most popular. E.g. up at the top together with Javascript as most questions asked in 2015 on stackoverflow [1], same with most used language on github [2] or some other weighted statistics like [3] or [4].

Thomas Fjellstrom

Given there are billions of Android devices, and probably dozens of fortune 500 companies and governments employing (tens of?) thousands of java developers. No joke. It's probably the most taught language for a decade.

It still isn't hip or sexy though, so people will ask if its dying or dead. ;D.

Mark Oates

It's interesting that C and C++ are polled separately. I guess it makes sense, you could probably find wider differences between those than with some other language.

Peter Hull

It still isn't hip or sexy though,

It was hip and sexy in, lets say, the late 90s/early 2000s. A lot of column inches were written about the Java revolution.

I guess it was Ruby/RoR that opened people's eyes to a more agile, rapid style of programming for the web, and Java began to look cumbersome in comparison. But for larger projects I think its 'engineering' side becomes valuable.

I wonder what would have happened if Sun had been able to get applets working really well (or at least as well as Flash) - they were always really clunky due to the implementation and I think that caused a lot of the 'Java is slow' thing that still hangs over it.

Anyway, once a thing gets a certain amount of momentum, it's hard to displace (COBOL hasn't been hip for 40years and there's still allegedly a lot of it still about.) Maybe Java (or something else on the JVM) will rise again! :o

Thomas Fjellstrom

It was hip and sexy in, lets say, the late 90s/early 2000s. A lot of column inches were written about the Java revolution.

Yup. Thats why it is/was taught a lot, and is used to much. It was the new cool, so everyone wanted to use it.

Thomas Fjellstrom

It was hip and sexy in, lets say, the late 90s/early 2000s. A lot of column inches were written about the Java revolution.

Yup. Thats why it is/was taught a lot, and is used to much. It was the new cool, so everyone wanted to use it.

Bruce Perry

Oh my god! A double post! And what better thread for it to have happened in! ;D

Thomas Fjellstrom

The funny part is that I looked at this thread after my browser failed to post one message, and one was already there. Now there's a second :o

Elias

Maybe Matthew de-activated thread locks in response to this thread - and now you see what it leads to :P

Mark Oates
class ThreadTimeLock;
class LOLsandROFLfilter extends ThreadTimeLock;
class IndianIPsBan extends LOLsandROFLfilter;
class ImTheBiggestLoser extends IndianIPsBan;
class BamCensor extends ImTheBiggestLoser;
class RepeatedPostCap extends BamCensor;
class ArthurSecondInCommand extends RepeatedPostCap;
class ForumPosts extends ArthurSecondInCommand;
class AllTheAnnoyingForumStuffIWantToStop extends ForumPosts
{
   function on_thing_happens(Thing thing)
   {
      global $FIX_IT;
      $$FIX_IT(thing);
   }
};

Thomas Fjellstrom
bamccaig

I wonder what would have happened if Sun had been able to get applets working really well (or at least as well as Flash) - they were always really clunky due to the implementation and I think that caused a lot of the 'Java is slow' thing that still hangs over it.

What lead to the "Java is slow" thing is that Java is slow. Not fundamentally, but the default configuration of client Java is slow. I believe it launches a new JVM for every application and the JVM isn't tuned for the machine it's running on. Java can be fast by using the server configuration (a shared JVM) and especially by tuning the JVM to the specific machine and applications that are running on it. I recall when I was learning Java in college that it seemed to be considerably faster in Linux "automatically". Whereas the majority of people that experience client Java are running Windows... And I found the Windows software was just super slow.

Java is not going to go away. There's inconceivable lines of code written in Java that cannot just be rewritten anytime soon. Much of that software will need to be maintained for the next 10 or 20 years.

Chris Katko

I'll never forget being able to play Unreal Tournament on my atom Netbook with integrated graphics, but freaking Minecraft (EARLY version, no special bump mapped shaders) with some blocks ran at <2 FPS.

"What did they program this in?!" I asked...

"Java they said."

Accurate humor aside, I'm sure Java has many qualities. But I'm curious how Java plans to keep moving forward as an enterprise solution when all browsers are removing it, Android doesn't support Java (it's a subside/alternate Java from Oracle, hence the lawsuits), and if I was running enterprise software and I saw that Java had a new CRITICAL security flaw every week, I'd be raising a suspicious eye as the head of IT.

So to be clear, I'm not bashing Java. But I've never experienced a serious programming language have such a huge backlash so I'm not sure how things are going to keep moving forward.

I mean, flash is going the way of the dodo but the thing is... nobody needs flash.

I wonder if the only reason the sword hasn't fallen on Java the way it has Flash is because tons of enterprise software still runs (still vulnerable) so they can't kill it off as easily and worse still... there is no clear successor to Java the way HTML5 is to Flash. The only comparable alternative to Java is what... C#? Which people are still scared of because Microsoft may yet play an evil card, even with open-source implementations of C# like Mono. There's nothing to guarantee Microsoft won't sue Mono the way Oracle sued Google.

MiquelFire

Most of the security flaws have to do with the browser plugin actually. Once you remove the browser plugin from the picture, the amount of flaws they have to fix will drop by a HUGE amount.

Thomas Fjellstrom

Once you remove the browser plugin from the picture, the amount of flaws they have to fix will drop by a HUGE amount.

The actual desktop client software is like any desktop software. Once you allow it to run, it can do just about anything. It's a completely different beast. It is wide open by design ;)

MiquelFire

A previous draft of my post had, but I felt it was too ranty and wouldn't get my point across. Just forgot to add that bit back in.

Bruce Perry

You have a problem, so you decide to use Java. Now you have a ProblemFactory.

You have a problem, so you decide to use threads. Now you hatwo proveblems.

Thomas Fjellstrom

Hah!

pkrcel

You have a problem, so you decide to use Java. Now you have a ProblemFactory.

You have a problem, so you decide to use threads. Now you hatwo proveblems.

Winner!

Mark Oates

Can I steal that and tweet it?

bamccaig

Old. >:(

GullRaDriel

PLOP. >:(

jmasterx

This is a nice dead thread we have here. Would be a shame if someone revived it.

GullRaDriel

Isn't it ? ;D

Bruce Perry

Hehehehe

P.S.

Quote:

Slow down ... you are over working your fingers, your keyboard, and MY SERVER! :)

Only one post is allowed per 30 seconds.

Andrei Ellman

Maybe old programming languages that haven't been used for a while should be 'locked'.

He said to subtly bring this thread back on topic.

Gideon Weems

Ah, to be a housewife. To be a son. To be wrapped in a warm, blanket of financial oblivion. To see others off to work, off to die in a war. Beauty is not truth; it is the powder on your cheeks, the golden locks of your youngest child. Kiss him good bye. Keep him your own, then let him off to grow--but not now. Now he is you; he tugs at your blanket. The husband goes off to bring back more.

amarillion

From what I see in my work environment, Java is still going very strong. Oracle may have second thoughts about it since they can't figure out a way to extract enough profit. But unlike e.g. Flash, there is not one single company controlling Java anymore, so Oracle couldn't kill it even if they tried.

Java Applets though, are dead and nearly buried. Browsers have made it incredibly hard to get an applet working smoothly in a site for (good) security reasons. At work, we're still using Java on the server side but we've totally given up on applets.

@Gideon: where did that come from?

jmasterx

Bump

amarillion

It's inevitable, this worker thread must eventually be reclaimed back to the pool, once useful work runs out.

Bruce Perry

What, like in that {u,dys}topian future where machines overtake us in all fields of work and, although we have abundance and no longer need such concepts as employment, we have to find a new way to give our lives meaning, and can go swimming a lot?

amarillion

I meant work designated for this thread...

But you raise an interesting notion. I don't think work will run out before Humanity has colonized the solar system and then space. So there is some work to do still.

MiquelFire

There is always work to be done!

bamccaig

"Work" is a measure of physical change. In that sense there is no shortage of "work". In the practical sense applicable to mankind I imagine "work" could run out sooner than later if we could work together instead of trying to stand upon one another. Less "us" than "them", which pretty much just means there is an elite group of humans (men and women) with high social class, wealth, and power that wish to keep it and pass it on to their descendants and are willing to do anything it takes to do so. I imagine a wonderful day when we all just swear off "money" and share with our neighbors. The elite have no real power if their pawns lay down arms and side with the other color pawns[1]. :)

References

  1. As a side drunken note, I wonder how a game of chess would play out if there were 3 independent sides: white, black, and pawns. :o
Johan Halmén

Threads lock because there's no discussion. Move on!

GullRaDriel

Some threads deserve to wait longer before their death.
8-)

Elias
bamccaig said:

As a side drunken note, I wonder how a game of chess would play out if there were 3 independent sides: white, black, and pawns

The pawns would be easy to take out. In the starting position everyone else is behind them, but they are the only ones who can only move forward. So without actually trying it, my guess is in just 8 turns you can wipe them all out.

Pretty much how it would play out in your utopian scenario in reality :)

Quote:

humans (men and women)

You must be very drunk, or something happened to you between now and a year ago...

bamccaig
Elias said:

The pawns would be easy to take out. In the starting position everyone else is behind them, but they are the only ones who can only move forward. So without actually trying it, my guess is in just 8 turns you can wipe them all out.

Yes, probably the fact that pawns can only move a single space forward under normal play would make them little more than meat shields between the other forces. But who knows. There may be a more complex nature to the game. It might be interesting to explore.

Elias said:

Pretty much how it would play out in your utopian scenario in reality :)

In real life the pawns greatly outnumber of the specialized classes and they are far stronger than in the game.

Elias said:

Quote: said:

humans (men and women)

You must be very drunk, or something happened to you between now and a year ago...

I never said women weren't human. I only said they weren't men. :-*

jmasterx

Only on a.cc can a forum thread about forum threads go from programming threads to theoretical chess matches 8-)

I wish Dr. Leverton could pull some statistics on thread derailment >:(.

GullRaDriel

Too soon to die. >:(

jmasterx

Alex: Often used to keep a forum thread alive, this term can also mean snorting cocaine.
Contestant: What is a Bump?
Alex: Correct!
Contestant: I'll take Extending The Lifespan for $1000...
>:(

Gideon Weems
bamccaig said:

I wonder how a game of chess would play out if there were 3 independent sides: white, black, and pawns.

What does the board setup look like?

Bob Keane

Back on the original topic. Check out the number of posts on this thread. Is that some sort of record?

bamccaig

What does the board setup look like?

I had assumed a normal board setup. Now things are getting interesting. What if you placed the pawns on the sides instead of in normal formation?

+--------+
| RNKQNR |
|P  BB  P|
|P      P|
|PP    PP|
|PP    PP|
|P      P|
|P  BB  P|
| RNQKNR |
+--------+

The pawns are still fucked, but who knows... ??? Of course, I'm sure there are plenty of ways that you could setup the board. If you put some thought into it you might be able to think up a way to give the pawns a fighting chance.

Bob Keane said:

Back on the original topic. Check out the number of posts on this thread. Is that some sort of record?

Unlikely. Some boards are known to have long running threads. For example, motorcycle forums tend to have "picture challenge" thread where somebody is "it" and posts a wacky photo idea that the players have to try to satisfy (usually something like "your bike next to rare noun" or "your bike doing rare verb"). The idea being that it's a game played in the real world intended to get people out riding their bikes looking for the target of the current game. These threads are usually indefinite so they never close and the forums are often international with thousands upon thousands of members...

Gideon Weems
bamccaig said:

If you put some thought into it you might be able to think up a way to give the pawns a fighting chance.

How about pawn promotion occurring when a pawn meets an opposing pawn of the same rank?

If you're into this sort of thing, I recommend Knightmare Chess.

Andrei Ellman

although we have abundance and no longer need such concepts as employment, we have to find a new way to give our lives meaning

*COUGH*art*COUGH*

bamccaig said:

The elite have no real power if their pawns lay down arms and side with the other color pawns[1]. :)
References

As a side drunken note, I wonder how a game of chess would play out if there were 3 independent sides: white, black, and pawns. :o

Here is a game of chess played out when one of the pawns realises what is really going on - as shown on a Commodore VIC-20 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el9S1GNp4vQ

Bruce Perry

But these artificial brains can do art, and most people can't! What about all the people who can't? ;) Maybe most of those people will be happy just to have pampered lives. Who knows?

In a further thread-prolonging effort, I have a story to tell.

I booked something through airbnb. They told me at the last minute that my quoted price included a 3% currency conversion fee. They didn't offer to bill me in local currency. I can't work out if they're violating regulations. What they did let me do is pay via PayPal instead of using a card directly, and in that case, I could choose the billing country and avoid the fee.

I put my foot in it with PayPal though. Apparently I reached a spending limit with them and had to set up a bank account link to lift that limit (something about verification legally required). I did that, and then the payment worked. What I failed to do was change the default payment method back to my credit card. So, they used the bank account link, and automatically charged me a currency conversion fee very similar to what airbnb would have charged me. I think even PayPal would have passed the charge on in its original currency if using a credit card (as I said, regulations), but presumably when using a direct debit, that option just doesn't exist. I'm sure they knew that when they decided that the bank account link should become the default mechanism once set up, and I wonder how true the "verification legally required" part is.

For a one-off mistake, the amount is easy to forget. It's the principle that absolutely effing pees me off. They did not earn that money from me - they scammed me - and I am livid. It's not even just one company - you can't so much as breathe without every company out there trying to scam you all at once, and one is bound to succeed. OK, I'm exaggerating a little.

I'll balance this by praising easyJet, who very exceptionally waived their flight change fee for me so I could participate in a performance of Prokofiev's Classical Symphony which is this Friday in case anyone's in Cambridge. I've wanted to do that piece for years. Yay <3

amarillion

Currency conversion fees are definitely a way for them to skim a little off the top. And if there are no fees, you know that they screw you by picking an unfavourable currency conversion rate.

I regularly have to transfer between EUR / GBP, and it definitely pays to shop around a little on how you do the transfer.

But the very easiest solution would be for Britain to finally join the Euro. No more conversion fees! Transferring money anywhere within the eurozone is so easy and transparent. Most banks don't even have a separate page for international / national payments anymore, it's all one system.

Ben Delacob

If the pawns were another team, they would probably be used as weapons against the opposing team, and therefore not eliminated immediately. However, it's often opposing pawns that prevent promotion. Assuming the pawns were collaborating and that promotion did not mean defection, I think they would have an occasional chance.

Bruce Perry

I managed to cancel the direct debit instruction with my bank before PayPal managed to collect the funds. PayPal have noticed and e-mailed me to say that my bank account link can now be used to withdraw funds but not to fund things. There's no change to the so-called "completed" payment: it still says paid using the bank account, with my credit card as a backup funding source, and my card hasn't yet been charged.

I did some Googling. Apparently PayPal/eBay scams exist, where people pay using PayPal using a direct debit (whereby PayPal will advance the money and are required to give three days' notice before charging the direct debit), and they then cancel the direct debit and ensure the card will fail too. After something like three weeks, PayPal then recover the money from the recipient who has probably already sent the item. So, if that's anything to go by, the payment should be charged to my card, but if for some reason they don't do that, then I can expect all hell to break loose with my airbnb booking ;D

Thomas Fjellstrom

If you're talking about paypal making a mistake, they didn't make a mistake. That is how they operate. The default funding source is always your bank account unless you change that. And they charge a pretty hefty currency exchange fee on top of their normal fees. I ended up calculating it was about 6% total after all was said and done when i was paid for work via paypal.

Now I have a US bank account that i get paid directly to, then transfer that through xetrade to my canadian account. Over all that ends up being only about 1.5-3% total. xetrade doesn't charge any fees as such. They just quote an exchange rate a little off of market rates (obviously you can't get exact market rates for any arbitrary trade) that are always a little in their favour. It's just how exchanges work. BUT xetrade gives me a MUCH better deal than either paypal or my bank. The only problem is it takes about 5-7 business days to transfer through xetrade.

Bruce Perry

Well, I dug up something else:

Quote:

*What happens if there aren't enough funds in my bank account?*
If the bank returns a response to us that there aren't enough funds in the account, the system will wait a few days and then re-attempt the request**. This is an automatic process that cannot be interrupted. If the second attempt fails, the backup funding source will be charged. It is not possible to switch to the backup funding source after you've clicked to perform the transaction. It's important to review your funding selection to ensure that the one you want to use is chosen. While PayPal never charges Insufficient Funds fees, your bank may potentially charge a fee for each attempt.

That explains why my card hasn't been charged yet. The best I can hope is that since PayPal didn't offer me the choice about currency conversion, they will ultimately charge the card in yen. If they don't, I will contest it with the Financial Ombudsman Service.

By the way, aside from the obvious designed-to-scam behaviour of their system, PayPal did actually make a mistake. I called them during the day after the night when the bad transaction happened. I explained that the money hadn't yet been taken and I wanted it taken in yen from my card, and they said they would effectively remove the direct debit instruction and cause it to revert to the card. They didn't seem to understand the part about yen, and generally said some things that made me think they didn't really know what they were doing, but nevertheless, what they said they would do, they didn't do. I then called them a day later to follow up, and they said I should have called sooner (?!). I think this gives me at least a little bit of ammunition.

For the record, my card offers me 0% markup on the Visa exchange rate, and no flat-rate charge either, for foreign transactions. You can see why I want to use it.

[EDIT]
In other news, we got through the concert with the Prokofiev without anything too terrible going wrong, and I spent most of yesterday completely incapacitated by it :)

Thomas Fjellstrom

Paypal associates funding sources in a specific currency IIRC. When I get charged in USD, they convert using their excessive conversion rates and fees, then my accounts get charged in CAD.

jmasterx

Can't ML just do:

$lockTimeout = 30;//5;

>:(

Bruce Perry

Well, they've now charged my card, and still in pounds. I've complained to the financial ombudsman service about both them and AirBNB. My argument is that PayPal should be required to ask about the funding source (and then the currency if it's a card) when the transaction is done, and AirBNB should be required to accept payments in local currency (which I think are already the Visa regulations), and that both companies should be fined for the money they've made so far through these ruses :P Can't hurt to try, can it? These companies incur enough hate for these practices - it's clearly not just me.

As for me, well, it's a good solid £30, but it's a one-off. Worse things have happened, like the time I was overpaying for my phone contract for months, maybe years ;)

Gideon Weems

This thread is dying. I can feel it.

Mark Oates

That was 100!

jmasterx

That was 100!

No, we are not quite at 100 factorial posts on this thread, but I like your enthusiasm :D

Elias

Wow, when was the last time a thread hit 100 posts? I still remember the times when it happened all the time...

Gideon Weems

I would wager that at least three of the most recent five topics with 100+ replies were religious or political.

bamccaig

Pffft, I used to make them crack 300 every other week. >:( Now we aren't allowed to have fun anymore so all we can do is talk about the good old days when we used to have fun. :(

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

Now we aren't allowed

Not allowed, or just nobody is here to actually reply?

Thomas Fjellstrom

Not allowed, or just nobody is here to actually reply?

It certainly is easier to just not deal with BS than to try and actively change it.

GullRaDriel

I'm not gonna give up that easily when facing the great dictator. Wake up, bande de moules !

>:(

bamccaig

This thread will never end. >:( Swear it!

MiquelFire

We will overcome!

jmasterx

Fight the losing supremacy! >:(

Random thought... we could use the al_mind_control_addon on ML.........

Thomas Fjellstrom
jmasterx said:

Random thought... we could use the al_mind_control_addon on ML.........

you're assuming he isn't already using it on you....

MiquelFire

Or at the very least, he didn't sneak something into the code to make himself immune.

Gideon Weems

I wonder what the API for a mind-control SDK would look like. Would there be, for example, a main loop of a certain granularity, with impulses travelling to and from specific locations in the nervous system? Would there be a query interface for knowing which neurotransmitters existed where and in what quantities? With a higher level API, would there be a simple al_set_happiness(float change), taking into account the aforementioned particulars?

Bruce Perry

Right! Time for the next drama :)

I booked some Ryanair flights. :-[

anto80

I wonder what the API for a mind-control SDK would look like. Would there be, for example, a main loop of a certain granularity, with impulses travelling to and from specific locations in the nervous system? Would there be a query interface for knowing which neurotransmitters existed where and in what quantities? With a higher level API, would there be a simple al_set_happiness(float change), taking into account the aforementioned particulars?

Are you suggesting to develop a mind-control utility to:
a) make a thread able to detect your login on a random thread, and thus extend the lifespan of the thread, preventing it to lock?
b) make a thread able to detect your login on a random thread, forcing the thread to lock just before you want to post?
c) make that thread lock and spit a funny message at you?
::)

Niunio
Quote:

This thread will never end. >:( Swear it!

That's not possible, except if PHP and Matt's SQL server increase their integer type size everytime before the forum overloads it...

Gideon Weems

By the time this thread dies, PHP will have become sentinent and increased its own integer size.

Samuel Henderson

Step 1: Increase integer size
Step 2: Post endlessly on allegro.cc
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Destroy the world and/or Profit!

Bruce Perry

Boobuigi, the dot in your sig keeps making me think there's something[1] on my screen :)

References

  1. :ö: <- Bug!
Gideon Weems

;D

jmasterx

:ö: <- Feature!

Niunio

I wanted to answer this thread and I cannot. :( I want to.

GullRaDriel

BUMP. ;D

Gideon Weems

I do not have an good response for this thread but feel it a pity it did not garner more responses before the Thread Reaper had his way.

Chris Katko

So uhh... where is Matt? This is the longest I've seen him go without posting.

jmasterx

He is too embarrassed to admit that he outsourced the development of a.cc and actually has no idea how to change the thread lock time.

bamccaig

In practice this thread just proves Matt's (silent) point. We've kept this thread alive for almost 3 months... :-/:-X

Gideon Weems
bamccaig said:

In practice this thread just proves Matt's (silent) point.

That if we really wanted to keep threads alive, we would assume collective spamming duties?

Bruce Perry

I resent the implication that this is spam! :) #triggered #lightgreypostsmatter

[EDIT] If Matthew ever retroactively creates a hashtag system for allegro.cc, I will be very embarrassed :)

jmasterx

{"name":"Spam_can.png","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/1\/2\/1259697c31f67ba69be1ea2cff309e02.png","w":1050,"h":996,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/1\/2\/1259697c31f67ba69be1ea2cff309e02"}Spam_can.png

Gideon Weems

I need to tell the people in my real-world life that I have no plans on buying Christmas presents. In return, I kindly ask not to receive any. Just let me wear pajamas and enjoy time with family.

This announcement is not important enough to warrant a thread... or even a post, really. Carry on.

jmasterx
Thread.notify(); //>:(

ImLeftFooted

Is that Python or Java? #holdingbackjavaresentment

Peter Hull

Wow, it's Dustin Dettmer! Where have you been and how the heck are you!!?

ps. I can't see this thread staggering on into 2016, can you?

jmasterx

#holdingbackjavaresentment

What's wrong with Java? :'(

ps. I can't see this thread staggering on into 2016, can you?

Yes, yes I can.

Bruce Perry
Quote:

What's wrong with Java? :'(

Too many Muslims.

jmasterx said:

Yes, yes I can.

Especially now.

Chris Katko

The prodigal son returns!

GullRaDriel

I'm your father, Luke.

bamccaig

Yay! :D

Gideon Weems

I saw a wild bunny last night, hopping over cold grass.

jmasterx

I'm your father, Luke.

DON'T RUIN IT FOR ME I HAVE NOT WENT TO SEE IT YET!!!! >:(

Bruce Perry

Our local cinema invited the orchestra I play in to perform the soundtrack live at the unveiling! ;D

But we couldn't do it because they had massively underestimated how much space an orchestra needs ;D

jmasterx

Just saw it and LOVED IT!!!!! ;D

Mark Oates

Can we talk spoilers yet?

GullRaDriel

I SIGKILL you if you spoil. >:(

jmasterx

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Also, Carrie Fisher's daughter makes a brief easter egg cameo.

For those who saw it already:

r = l + x;
r += f;
h = 0;

Bruce Perry

Star Wars discussion probably belongs in its own thread. I've been advised I ought to finish watching the original three before embarking on the new one, so I for one don't want spoilers :)

jmasterx

My New Years Resolution ... will ofcourse be 4K.... but I also plan to use a lot more Global Variables and Global State in my code. Despite what Bambam has lectured about Globals, they are actually incredibly great and lead to less refactoring in the long run and an overall simpler and cleaner codebase.

In fact, had ML used a global $threadTimeout, we would not have needed this thread!
>:(

Gideon Weems
jmasterx said:

For those who saw it already:

I might add:

free(h); // Because h = 0 leads to an interpreter error.
f += r;
atexit(ls);

Bruce Perry

That fills me with joy. Someone sigged me once for saying that most of the arguments I'd seen against global variables seemed to be religious :)

Now, that said, I have the opposite problem. I'm having to work in C++ a bit, and I missed nested methods the other day. So, how did I solve it? I now have four copies of that code, and I condensed each copy into a single line to keep it 'manageable' :P

Chris Katko

C++ a bit, and I missed nested method.

I'm so pissed off at the basic, great features C++ can't be bothered to add. Plenty of them can be nothing more than syntactic sugar and have no real impact on the assembly generated.

jmasterx

I'm so pissed off at the basic, great features C++ can't be bothered to add. Plenty of them can be nothing more than syntactic sugar and have no real impact on the assembly generated.

C++ is supposed to be difficult to learn and use... that's a core part of the language. You have to feel like you're working really hard and need to write huge amounts of boilerplate code to feel that C++ satisfaction!

amarillion

So does this thread now prove that threads actually don't lock too soon? I'm confused?!?!

jmasterx

No, if they did not lock too soon we wouldn't have to create this spam-fest to keep it alive >:(

Point being - Threads have to be kept alive with spam... otherwise, people could just reply when there is something meaningful to say...

Moreover, threads that get locked too soon often cause new child threads to spawn under the same topic because there are too few users on the forum anymore and often 5 days is not enough time for someone to answer a programming or other question...

We're revolting! Vive la revolution! >:(

bamccaig
jmasterx said:

My New Years Resolution ... will ofcourse be 4K.... but I also plan to use a lot more Global Variables and Global State in my code. Despite what Bambam has lectured about Globals, they are actually incredibly great and lead to less refactoring in the long run and an overall simpler and cleaner codebase.

In fact, had ML used a global $threadTimeout, we would not have needed this thread!
>:(

That fills me with joy. Someone sigged me once for saying that most of the arguments I'd seen against global variables seemed to be religious :)

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Mark Oates

Arguments about globals are religious bam, you suck!

Also, we have already established that despite ML's exemplary use of object inheritance, he has also seen the way and has released his burden of the spaghetti to the way of the global.

Peter Hull

I'm having to work in C++ a bit, and I missed nested methods the other day.

What are you using that does have nested methods? I thought you were a Java person.

These days I think you can use C++11 lambdas to get the effect of nested methods, can't you?

Pete

bamccaig

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Bruce Perry

What are you using that does have nested methods? I thought you were a Java person.

D :)

Lately I've been mostly C#, since we're working with Unity. It's probably at least two years since I really did any Java (except for finishing Confined off).

And no, C# doesn't have nested methods either. Perhaps I feel more comfortable finding ways around it by making classes in C# because there's less boilerplate involved...

Quote:

These days I think you can use C++11 lambdas to get the effect of nested methods, can't you?

You can. I wonder how well or badly it optimises... (Last thing you want is a function pointer call when a normal function call would have sufficed.)

Chris Katko

These days I think you can use C++11 lambdas to get the effect of nested methods, can't you?

The issues there are because they're designed to solve another problem so:

1 - Possible speed issues, as was brought up.

2 - Restriction issues. A lambda can be passed around. A nested function is supposed to never leave.

Gideon Weems

Pop quiz, hot shot! Without looking, which thread has a higher word count? This one or the Zelda/feminism thread?

  This thread:  1618
Zelda debacle:  4155

Bruce Pascoe

Admittedly though, the Zelda thread seems to be generating far more heat than light.

Erin Maus

Pop quiz, hot shot! Without looking, which thread has a higher word count? This one or the Zelda/feminism thread?

Well, that puts it in perspective. You know, I write something and then add some more, stream-of-consciousness-like. Reword, rephrase, restructure... And then I realize I worded something wrong, or something is too vague, so I elaborate a bit more. Repeat that more times than I care to count... And when I proof it, I realize I just wasted up to half an hour (or more, who knows) writing the post. So simply not posting means the half an hour was completely wasted. But while posting means I did something, I also am adding to a pointless conversation... and oh no, it's happening again!

Gideon Weems

Well, that puts it in perspective.

I thought so, too. I also think that it is unfair (perhaps even unreasonable) to write off recent forum activity as low volume. Rather, with longer, more thought-out (sometimes) posts, we are in a golden age of volume.

And I will always be there with one-line zingers when you need them.

Thomas Fjellstrom

Almost to new years, It's already 2016 in the Philippines. I'm celebrating with my wife right now!

jmasterx

ps. I can't see this thread staggering on into 2016, can you?

>:(

Peter Hull

@jmasterx : I'm basing my assertions on GMT. This may be the last post.

jmasterx

Looks like this thread has broken a.cc
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Page 1? Where are you!?

That or M.L broke the site trying to delete this thread ::)

Mark Oates

I get 4 pages
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but I view 50 replies per page
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Bruce Pascoe

He's right, there's literally no Page 1. I figured it was just cutting off the earlier pages due to being so far in (like most forums do), but even go to page 2 and there's still no option to select page 1.

bamccaig

I view unlimited posts per page like a boss. Who has time or patience for replying to multiple pages when your machine has billions and billions of bytes of working memory? >:(

Mark Oates

Ok, so I was trolling online to look for a gif of a person scrolling a mouse over and over...

...but then I found this actual picture of Thomas Fjellstrom in the Philippines right now:
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;D;D;D

so yea, that was way better. ;D

bamccaig

:D

jmasterx

@jmasterx : I'm basing my assertions on GMT. This may be the last post.

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>:(

MiquelFire

I only have 2 pages myself. Too lazy to see how many posts per page I have my settings at. Mine is set to 100 posts. Also, it seems the compact header eats the pages.

jmasterx

Honestly, the first 2 pages of this thread were not that great. I'm glad they are gone.
609988

Thomas Fjellstrom

...but then I found this actual picture of Thomas Fjellstrom in the Philippines right now:

;D!

GullRaDriel

Plop ! ;D

Happy new year everyone ^^

Gideon Weems

2016 is already off to a great start with that picture of Thomas in the Philippines.

Erin Maus

Today I was seeing how much longer a goal in an MMO, RuneScape, I play would take. I kill a particular monster over and over (that's pretty all I do on the game, actually...). I'd like to get some of my stats (defence/constitution/magic/range) to the "max virtual level" and also get the max xp possible in another (summoning). Pretty pointless, actually...

But anyway, I'd have to kill ~47,000 more of this particular monster. I'd say I'm probably one of the most talented RuneScapers when it comes to efficiently killing said monster, but it would take me at least 300 hours... Assuming I play 2 hours a week (which would actually be above average), that would be just around three years.

To cut to the chase, will this thread be open in three years? Better yet, will the internet as we know it exist in three years :o?

Who knows.

(But I wouldn't be surprised if season 7 of Game of Thrones will be airing and while The Winds of Winter will still be but a dream...).

Bruce Perry

You still play RuneScape? ;D

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Uh oh. I'm now in the Zelda thread, listening to the first video. That's today gone ;)

Dennis

HNY!

Chris Katko

But anyway, I'd have to kill ~47,000 more of this particular monster. I'd say I'm probably one of the most talented RuneScapers when it comes to efficiently killing said monster, but it would take me at least 300 hours... Assuming I play 2 hours a week (which would actually be above average), that would be just around three years.

Somehow... my 50 hours in Skyrim so far feel a thousand times more productive than that.

It's basically a novel... or series of novels... in game form. You enter a town and feel immediately overwhelmed because just talking to everyone and GETTING all the quests will probably take an hour.

But if you need that kind of deep escapism, man, it really fits the bill and I'm thankful one company bothers to make games like that. I've seen a few indie games make a mechanical depth like that, e.g. Dwarf Fortress, but certainly never a game that was a polished modern 3-D experience AND that insane amount of lore and gameplay variety/depth.

And with the insane level of modding support, and huge mod community, people have really fixed many of the problems with the game and help you tune it to "your own game" in major ways. People have customized literally everything in the game and replaced major modules There's a Thief 2: Metal Age mod that adds blackjack/knockouts, water, fire and even rope arrows, and more. I'm going to try that out after I beat it.

The mod community spends tens of thousands of man-hours into improving and adding to the game. I'm blown away. Most "good" mods have over 2,000 man-hours in them. I can't imagine putting that much effort into a mod. I mean, could you imagine how insane it would be to have that many people, that dedicated, to adding to YOUR game? That would be such an honor.

Erin Maus

Somehow... my 50 hours in Skyrim so far feel a thousand times more productive than that.

I've spent over 100x as long playing RuneScape (i.e., over 5000 hours) since I started playing around later summer of 2004. A lot of that was spent multitasking, admittedly, on more AFK things (e.g., training a skill while programming--I learned to program while playing RuneScape, haha).

The monster I kill (Tormented Demons) is more like meditation/relaxing than actually doing anything productive. Pretty much a way to pass time when there's nothing else I can/will do. Otherwise I would probably be staring at a wall or something even less productive... At least I'm working towards some virtual goal, I suppose, that can be tracked and has an end.

It seems the good parts of RuneScape have waned, though. It had some of the best quests and storylines of any MMO (well, in my opinion) all the way back in 2004, but lately quests have gotten more predictable and less diverse. "While Guthix Sleeps" and "Ritual of the Mahjarrat" were simply amazing--worthy of games on their own--and older quests like "Underground Pass" had flaws but were still great...

Oh well. The portions of the game I stick to are still pretty neat, and if I had more patience/time I'd enjoy other aspects of it yet still (some of the newer quests are locked behind various requirements I can't be bothered to obtain).

Like I said, a play a few hours a week at most nowadays. Sometimes I regain interest and spend a couple hours a day, but that's not so common anymore.

Mark Oates

And with the insane level of modding support, and huge mod community, people have really fixed many of the problems with the game and help you tune it to "your own game" in major ways.

What are the main core mechanics of these types of games? That is, games that people want to contribute their time to expanding?

bamccaig

I enjoyed the free parts of Runescape back in the day. I actually got to level 30 or something at one point. No clue if my account still exists. I think I went by something like "seffir auth" or something like that on my latest account. The game was always a subscription trap though. I don't know who can afford those fees, but it isn't me (I have no idea what it costs today). Most of the time you were just painfully grinding collecting resources, crafting, selling, and on and on... It required way too much time to make progress and nothing was ever particularly interesting. It was a nice way to kill time between classes back in the mid 00's though.

Erin Maus
bamccaig said:

The game was always a subscription trap though. I don't know who can afford those fees

It was $5 a month when I started paying in 2005 (I still pay $5 because of grandfathered rates). That's $60 a year, which is the price of a standard console game. The rate is higher now ($90 a year or $9.49 a month). Nowadays you can use in-game money to buy bonds (from players who spent real-life money on said bonds), so technically you don't have to pay real-life money anymore, just in-game time ;).

(It's 24 bonds for a year of membership, and bonds are currently 12m gp per, so 288m gp in total. I make... 7m gp/hr at Tormented Demons on average [since the drops are RNG, but common enough to allow for a nice average like that in a reasonable time], so ~40 hours of moneymaking in game. Though even here in USAland normal membership rate of $90 a year would take 13 hours of a minimum wage job, making the in-game method more expensive by proxy...)

Bruce Pascoe

so technically you don't have to pay real-life money anymore, just in-game time

Wow. I can't imagine how that would ever be sustainable from a business standpoint...

Erin Maus

Wow. I can't imagine how that would ever be sustainable from a business standpoint...

A player has to buy the bonds and sell them to another player though, that's why it's still profitable :P. It's actually more profitable; the 24 bonds gives Jagex (the RuneScape developer) $143.76, while a year of membership is at most $113.88 (and as low as $60, assuming you have grandfathered rates). So Bob buys 5 bonds for $30 and sells them to random players for 60m gp, random players use bonds for membership without using real life money, and still Jagex comes out ahead.

Mark Oates

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MiquelFire

The post will mostly be gone by the time some of you even read this, but let it be known that this thread has gotten spam!

[edit] Actually, I'm wondering how the site handle new user profiles, as I noticed that the post doesn't appear in their profile.

Peter Hull

It had to be this thread, didn't it?

Bruce Pascoe

Aww, I was hoping the thread would die off after Mark's post for irony's sake. But no, some spammer just HAD to discover it...

Andrei Ellman

It seems a tad suspicious that this thread ... of all threads, would be where spam was posted. Maybe it's a sockpuppet account and contains a coded message. I've made only a minimalistic attempt to decipher it, but if we treat 233 2316 803 10 as a sequence of unicode characters, in hex, we get E9 90C 323 A, which gives us "éऌ ̣◙" (the last character is actually a linefeed, but I used the codepage 437 equivalent).

AE.

jmasterx

I bet this is ML in disguise trying to make the point that if the thread had closed when it appropriately should have then the spam would have never been able to be posted ::)

If this were a real spammer, Matts precogs would have caught it well ahead of time...

Elias

Can I be the computer operator?

bamccaig

He's fighting the good fight of keeping this thread going which is really all that matters. >:(

Mark Oates
bamccaig said:

He's fighting the good fight of keeping this thread going which is really all that matters. >:(

;D

MiquelFire

Wow, I'm amazed that spam message was kept so long.

GullRaDriel

The spam is still here, it's part of the topic now ^^

Bruce Perry

So who wants to try the e-mail address out?

I fancy being a Security men and Women.

Johan Halmén

Monty Python is way funnier than Monty Java.

Bruce Perry
 ||
c_)
 o<
<_)

Gideon Weems

Aw, the real spam is gone now. I'm going to miss it.

No!  Don't stomp on teh ducky!!
 ||
c_)
     o<
 →  <_)

Dennis

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Peter Hull

Can I just interrupt the ASCII art to grumble about CMake?

Here it is:

*Grumble*

Thank you, please carry on.

Erin Maus

Can I just interrupt the ASCII art to grumble about CMake?

That's why I use Premake. Simple, small, and still powerful. And it actually has a good scripting language (Lua).

(Premake5 doesn't work on FreeBSD, though, which is a bit of a bother. Going to have to get around to contributing to Premake after using it for so many years... That would be pretty neat, actually.)

Bruce Pascoe

Hehe, that ducky is totally about to get eaten by a lion. Um... yummy? ;D

bamccaig

Duckies can be assholes; and tasty:

video

MiquelFire

This topic was about to die, so here's a story:

I got a Nexus 6 through AT&T back in March. All was good during that time. Come October, Android 6 (Marshmallow) came out, I never got it. November, I get some Lollipop update to apply November security patches, but no Marshmallow, December, same thing. Just before the December update, I found out that if you use a Nexus 6 on AT&T's network (including the MVNOs) you'll end up on a upgrade path that forces you to stay with Lollipop, while everyone else with a Nexus 6 is running Marshmallow.

At some point (first week of January), I did an OEM unlock with the plan to manually flash Marshmallow. Never got around to it because the hassle of doing that (it does a factory wipe) with the backups, I got lazy on doing that. I did however root my device so I can kill of the annoying AT&T boot animation. (Actually, it was more annoying that I had a password required to unlock my phone on boot, so every boot had me hear that sound twice!)

Yesterday, AT&T finally allowed an OTA patch from the December Lollipop to the December Marshmallow (the week before, everyone else got a January update to Marshmallow, so AT&T is still behind, but at least the build is what everyone else got).

Oh but wait, I rooted my phone, since Lollipop, the OTA update actually checks the system partition, so having rooted my system, the update would fail. To fix this I just needed to download the factory image, erase the system bit, and reflash it so it would be clean.

The factory images for the Nexus 6 doesn't include the build I was running, so I used the previous build by do that system thing, downloaded the OTA for getting to the build I was at. Nope, something somewhere still had my at the wrong build. The system was at Y, but other stuff it checked for the OTA update said Z (That's the last letter of the build BTW), so I did a complete flash (without wiping the data) to Y, then OTA to Z, then the new OTA yesterday, then I downloaded the OTA to so I would have the latest version of Marshmallow. From now on, I'll download the OTA and manually flash so I'm not stuck on AT&T's schedule.

Once the phone is paid off, I'm switching to Fi.

Bruce Pascoe

Aw dammit, I was hoping the thread would die with bam's duck video...

And yeah, as much as I like Android, that's the one thing I have to say Apple got right with the iPhone: They control the OS, so you can always get updates the day they come out without having to worry about whether your carrier will cooperate. And no carrier-installed bloatware. :)

bamccaig

If they had gotten it right then neither the carrier NOR the vendor would control the OS. The user would control the OS! >:(

MiquelFire

Funny thing, there's actually no carrier bloatware on this phone (Actually, I remember reading that two apps get installed when you activate the phone with a AT&T sim card, but the trigger didn't get fired for some reason when I got the phone, maybe the play store setting to require wi-fi carried over from my old phone)

Actually, if Apple didn't have the power they did, I could see AT&T block iOS updates.

The Nexus 6 might be the last phone that Google allows other carriers to carry, and to use other carriers with the future phones, you have to buy unlocked. (The price tag on the 6 was too high to buy buy through a carrier for me)

bamccaig said:

If they had gotten it right then neither the carrier NOR the vendor would control the OS. The user would control the OS! >:(

I installed Cyanogenmod on an older phone, and I'm tempted to go there (once they have a stable build at least for the Nexus 6... a little nuts that ). The Nexus line does allow for you to install custom OSes actually.

Bruce Pascoe
bamccaig said:

If they had gotten it right then neither the carrier NOR the vendor would control the OS. The user would control the OS! >:(

That requires the OS to be open-source (which Android is, no?). And most users aren't developers, so there would need to be some update channel for laypeople... which the carriers would want to control, and then we'd be back in the same boat as we are with Android.

So given the choice between the two evils (because there's really no third option, the real world being what it is), I'm much more comfortable with the vendor providing immediate OS updates than being filibustered by the carriers.

bamccaig

The problem with the current ecosystem is that installing a custom OS is not supported by carriers or in some cases vendors. It can certainly be done, but it's considered along the lines of "cracking" and essentially AT OWN RISK. The OS is not a developer tool. It's the pattern of signals that makes the useless paperweight into a functioning tool. Microsoft Windows is equivalent. Not only developers get to install it. Anybody can. In practice, most users are oblivious, and only power users and developers usually tinker with that, but the freedom exists (for the most part, at least where it hasn't been surrendered yet).

There's no reason the carrier should care what OS you're running on your phone. The only thing that should matter to them is that you're able to connect to their network and communicate with it. All pretty standard stuff for a handset. There's no legitimate reason that it has to be proprietary or locked down. For additional carrier-specific services you can install an app developed by the carrier by choice if you so desire.

There's also no legitimate reason the OS vendor should be in control of what OS you're running on your phone. They make the software and release it and if you choose to run it then so be it. This is how it should work, and has worked in other markets for decades. It should even go beyond that. Not only the OS, but also the radio firmware should be 100% user-replaceable. I paid $800 for a phone. That should be mine. I should be able to do whatever I want with it, and no other entity should be able to do anything with it that I don't allow. And if I run into difficulties replacing the software I should be able to purchase technical support from the carrier or vendor to get the phone working again.

Bruce Pascoe

On the other hand, suppose everyone is allowed to do all that with no arbitrary restrictions in place... okay fine, but your carrier is now under no obligation to allow you to connect the device to their network as it's out of spec. That's well within their rights, as they own the network.

For the sake of my sanity, I much prefer having things locked down with a vocal minority railing against it (or hacking their way past it, which if you know what you're doing, is a big part of what makes rooting/jailbreaking/etc. fun), versus half the population effectively soft-bricking their phones and causing a massive uproar because their carrier won't accommodate the modified software. And let's face it, changing your OS isn't exactly for the faint of heart. I wouldn't recommend a layperson to install Windows themselves for example, not even Win10 where that process is pretty much seamless now.

If all this makes a large portion of the population sheep for not questioning such a state of affairs, so be it. I'm a pragmatist. Sheep are much easier to deal with (i.e. ignore) than ravenous werewolves.

bamccaig

On the other hand, suppose everyone is allowed to do all that with no arbitrary restrictions in place... okay fine, but your carrier is now under no obligation to allow you to connect the device to their network as it's out of spec. That's well within their rights, as they own the network.

That's absurd. Think about what you're saying. Should I get kicked off of the Internet because my ISP doesn't control my PC? Should the cable company get to install its own software onto my TV? No. Networks define a protocol and nodes within the network communicate using the protocol. There's no benefit to the protocol being proprietary. That will only increase the odds of vulnerabilities and abuse. It has no practical use. With an open protocol defined its trivial for any skilled individual to program a device to communicate with the network. And if that node happens to misbehave the network can signal an error and terminate the connection. It has to do this anyway because nothing would stop Alice from plugging an unauthorized device into the network and misbehaving.

For the sake of my sanity, I much prefer having things locked down with a vocal minority railing against it (or hacking their way past it, which if you know what you're doing, is a big part of what makes rooting/jailbreaking/etc. fun), versus half the population effectively soft-bricking their phones and causing a massive uproar because their carrier won't accommodate the modified software. And let's face it, changing your OS isn't exactly for the faint of heart. I wouldn't recommend a layperson to install Windows themselves for example, not even Win10 where that process is pretty much seamless now.

It's not really about every individual having the skills to customize their device. It's about every individual having the right and freedom to do what they want with their own property. They may be able to do that themselves, or they may have to hire a third party to do that, but the freedom to do so is good for everybody.

If all this makes a large portion of the population sheep for not questioning such a state of affairs, so be it. I'm a pragmatist. Sheep are much easier to deal with (i.e. ignore) than ravenous werewolves.

I think that you're completely in the dark about what government agencies and corporations are doing behind your back. They are able to hack into iOS devices nearly 100% of the time and Droids nearly 50% of the time. Windows is equally weak. You are essentially being watched and manipulated by nefarious characters against your will, at your cost, and for their gain. There's nothing good about the "locked down" state of affairs. The vendors are lazy, relying on security by obscurity, leaving you and your family vulnerable; while your own property fails to function in a way that is most beneficial to you and you're nearly powerless to do anything about it. Open your damn eyes and mind.

Bruce Pascoe
bamccaig said:

Open your damn eyes and mind.

I see this line all the time in one form or another, and I find it not only patronizing but presumptuous. It suggests the person just hasn't done their research and would come around and "see the light" if they just opened their eyes to The Truth(tm). The funny thing is, that's exactly the same thinking that drives religious fervor (the exact opposite of being open-minded). "My worldview is right, and you're all just too blind to see it." It's a stupid argument, like people that blithely call iPhone users "sheep" because they happen to prefer the more popular option. You will never win an argument with me that way.

My eyes are open. I'm one of the most open-minded people I know. I know the NSA and similar agencies exist. I know what they do. I just don't see it as the big issue everyone makes it out to be, given the real-world evidence in front of me. The world isn't as scary a place as everyone makes it out to be. The planet keeps turning anyway, none the worse for wear.

Open-minded people don't try to win converts. They work with the hand they're given.

Anyway, I think that's enough politics for this topic. Here everyone, have an eaty pig:
{"name":"687474703a2f2f692e696d6775722e636f6d2f763563514874562e6a7067","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/6\/2\/62a331b0e02880bd5b1fc8a3df52095b.jpg","w":1023,"h":682,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/6\/2\/62a331b0e02880bd5b1fc8a3df52095b"}687474703a2f2f692e696d6775722e636f6d2f763563514874562e6a7067

Peter Hull
bamccaig

My girlfriend literally scrolls through Facebook on her phone "liking". Every. Single. Post. Rapid fire. Like 1 per second. She insists that she reads them, and she does read very fast, but there's just not that much likable content... It's absolutely stupid. Which is exactly why I don't go anywhere near those services.

Bruce Perry

Ooh, this is promising - the fighting posts might push our word count a bit higher so we can compete with the Zelda thread :)

On the downside, I couldn't face reading them all ;D

MiquelFire

I read a few of them, but there was too much wording for stuff that is pointless fighting.

Edgar Reynaldo

Anymore, when I see posts that big I instantly go into skim or skip mode. :-/

Bruce Pascoe

I gave up myself--it was indeed pointless, so I ended it preemptively with an eaty pig. See bottom of my last post. :)

Derezo

Whoa.. I've been asleep while this thread exploded or something.

Bruce Pascoe

Eh, more of a fizzle than a proper explosion. :P

Mark Oates

Dedicated to all the threads that were locked before their time:

video

:'(

Gideon Weems

The heat death of Google Code happens in less than 10 days.

Peter Hull

From the comments in the post that GW linked:

Quote:

It's like watching Geocities go away.

True. Who here remembers Geocities? I had a website there, can't remember why or what was on it.

Gideon Weems

Who here remembers Geocities?

At one time, the Geocities domain comprised at least 10% of my bookmarks... and yet, the Internet felt less centralized back then.

jmasterx

I made a geocities website when I was in 5th grade! Back in 2002. It was a very basic html page that had some of my friends' names on it.

Then everyone started playing Runescape >:(

Bruce Pascoe

I love how all the comments on the Google Code shutdown post are whiny "noooo please don't do this think of all the projects that will be lost! Waaaahh!!" If it's a project that anyone at all cares about (i.e. Someone actually uses it), there's bound to be copies floating around. And since they're open source...

Bruce Perry

You're telling me the Google code has been available all this time?!

{"name":"XWOuu8G.gif","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/e\/d\/edb3615168441f72356fc7c1a6ca71b9.gif","w":480,"h":360,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/e\/d\/edb3615168441f72356fc7c1a6ca71b9"}XWOuu8G.gif

Bruce Pascoe

The "*boosh* mind blown" meme really annoys me now for some reason... I guess because TV advertisers have picked up on it, which is usually around the time memes earn "dead horse" status. :P

Gideon Weems

I've never seen it before, and I like it. Maybe I'm not Internet enough.

Bruce Perry

I'm so glad we have the BBC ;)

Niunio
Quote:

I'm so glad we have the BBC ;)

We don't. :'(
<edit>
I must to say it again:

Matt, threads locks too soon. I can't log-in as much as I want, an I miss the chance to answer or comment a lot of stuff. :'(

Bruce Perry

Hi Niunio :) Ò¿Ó¬Que pasa?

I wonder if it makes sense for the BBC to receive its licence fee in more of a 'pay wall' kind of way, and for international viewers to be allowed to pay it too. The caveat could be that the BBC is British and we probably want it to feel pressure to appeal to Brits first and foremost, which may change if their funding came from the whole world. But the main thing for me is that they remain ad-free :)

~ ~ ~ INTERMISSION ~ ~ ~

Anyway, this thread reminded me to update you all!

Once I took PayPal to the Financial Ombudsman, I received a message from PayPal's Office of Executive Escalations. Made my day :)

video

They then took the whole four weeks that they were allowed to take, but finally offered me the £30 I wanted "in full and final resolution". I've accepted that. It's good that they didn't try and re-process the original transaction, because the exchange rates have gone in Japan's favour and I would have lost out by a further £15 at least (or when I look today, a further £70 nearly!).

Just goes to show - if you feel there was genuine unfairness at work (you're not just trying to fight for the sake of it), it's worth fighting these things ;)

I also reminded them that adjusting their systems to offer the choice of funding source with each payment would ingratiate them towards customers and increase their user base, helping everyone, especially in today's world where it's never been easier to warn other consumers. I mentioned to them that even Ryanair are making an effort ;D They thanked me for the feedback.

AirBNB do not fall under the Financial Ombudsman's jurisdiction, so... well... that fight hasn't been had. But that was more of a meta-fight. You know, an "I've just realised I'm behaving like a social justice warrior" kind of fight. :o

GullRaDriel

Tu shal not lok ! >:(

Chris Katko

Fus Roh Dah?!

Actually, I wonder what a dragon shout would sound like with a question mark on the end.

Bruce Perry

It probably results in the post, err, person of your choice being violently summoned right in front of you :)

Bruce Pascoe

It causes the dragon to be eaten by the pig from the other topic. Dragons are eaty, and the pig doesn't like competition.

Gideon Weems

The ./ article on the new Linux trojan has a really good comment section, for those of you with a few minutes to burn.

Derezo

The other day I updated a package and it gave me a warning about the root directory having ownership permissions.

I'm glad I didn't throw a -R in there whenever I ran sudo chown bill:www-data /.

>_<

Mark Oates

{"name":"610069","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/a\/a\/aaae45b1fb0373345b2a15a35dd3aab8.jpg","w":420,"h":316,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/a\/a\/aaae45b1fb0373345b2a15a35dd3aab8"}610069

GullRaDriel

Damn too soon bordel de dieu !

Edit: sweet, the slang hider doesn't work for French, haha ^^

Gideon Weems

If you stare at his facial hair long enough, you start making things out. I saw a robot.

GullRaDriel

Blender ! ;D

Peter Hull

It's occurred to me that I don't know what my handwriting looks like any more. I scrawl down things in my work notebook etc. but I haven't written out a full page of anything (like a school essay) for years.

Anyone else do 'writing' regularly?

MiquelFire

Not me.

bamccaig

I went for years without writing anything by hand. When I picked up a pen for the first time in years my hand began to hurt after only a few words (this was a few years back). I began incorporating note taking into my job and now do a little bit more of that (typically I try to write down what I'm working on and any reminders for the future). I still cannot write anywhere near as long as I have in the past, but it's better. My neatness has also improved since that first time back in the saddle, but I must slow down and consciously try to keep things neat if I don't want it to be sloppy (even so, as my hand gets tired/cramped things just become a barely legible scribble).

All of this is using block letters ("printing," as I was taught in school). I do not write in cursive format anymore. I have always preferred writing in block letters. It's neater and easier to read, IMO. It may not be quite as efficient or easy on the hands though. I'm not sure.

In my youth, a childhood friend and I used to compete with each other to write the smallest in grade 5 where we used to have to write 500-word journal entries in cursive format every day. We used to manage to write very tiny, but still neat. The teacher would review each entry and mark them for neatness and who remembers what else. She used to joke (maybe?) that she needed a magnifying glass to read our writing. I miss that. :-/

Gideon Weems

I had award-winning handwriting as a youngster, but the majority of my writing is done through vim now.

Bruce Perry

I do write by hand sometimes, and I haven't noticed my writing go downhill - or at least if it did, I was able to fix it quite quickly :)

Did this thread slow down because the religious one started? That's it - superstar4410 is trying to DoS our thread! Time for a witch hunt :)

Elias
bamccaig said:

When I picked up a pen for the first time in years my hand began to hurt after only a few words

I experienced the same - I had to fill out a lot of forms when applying for my green card, after not having written anything by hand in years. And my hand was hurting after every single form :P

Now the extent of handwriting I do is sign credit card bills. In Europe I only ever used my CC online so never had to sign, so this is new to me. Over here I pay everything with CC, can't even remember when I last needed to use cash. However my signature has degenerated into one straight line and an i dot for my first name and another straight line with an i dot for my last name - so probably doesn't really count as hand-writing.

Gideon Weems

Did this thread slow down because the religious one started?

I noticed the correlation, as well.

This thread has reminded me that I should apply for a virtual debit card. They are the bee's knees. Generate a temporary credit card number, use it once, and burn it.

Johan Halmén

I think one should every once in a while write one page of handwriting. I bet it's good for the brain.

Bruce Pascoe
Quote:

brain

*zombie shambles by* BRRrrrrraaaAAAIIIiiNNNnssss!!! *munch* (the zombie gets eaten by the pig)

MiquelFire

I think the pig is a virus now. Or would it be a worm?

Mark Oates

is a virus now. Or would it be a worm?

It's a pig. ;D

MiquelFire

Oink Oink!

Bruce Pascoe

Remember: If you hear the oink, it's already too late. 🐽

Bruce Perry

And 24 hours later, here we are again, good as new :)

GullRaDriel

Each morning, the sun is here.

MiquelFire

Ow! It burns! Close the drapes!

Chris Katko

My handwriting has always been generally poor. I never had any proper schooling growing up and I never wrote an essay until college. Older gents here will even remember that Allegro.CC taught me a great deal of grammar initially. My First Posts Actually Were Written Entirely Like This with completely wrong apostophes, it's/its/there/their/they're and so on. People like X-G and Miran yelled at me which encouraged me to improve.

Anyhow, I love that our society doesn't give a crap about cursive anymore and even handwriting is less essential. However, I'd still like to improve my handwriting... there's something elegant and professional about writing well, and worse still, something uncivilized and unintelligent about someone who cannot write legibly.

I became much better during my college days with all the required writing but it's still far from average. Thing is... I'm not really sure how to do it. Do I buy a book? Are books useful? Do I watch Youtube videos? I don't know. It seems like one of those "hands on" kind of skills where a teacher would be very helpful. It's a practiced skill with a finesse to it, as opposed to a remembered factoid or concept that one can simply Google.

Bruce Perry

As kids at school, we must have started with precision. There are specific directions to draw all the strokes, and specific rules for which letters to join up and how to do it, and there are some obvious things to aim for (e.g. line up the tops and bottoms of letters), but otherwise, we just went slowly and got the shapes absolutely right. After that, we just found our own ways to speed up, and some did better than others. I wouldn't say my handwriting is anything special - neither good nor bad.

However, when I wanted to, I did write a little bit like this, using special pens:

{"name":"d1a6c238-e898-4766-849f-914b54ac0956.png","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/6\/a\/6a8562c9638f211298a2b1bd9a44dd40.png","w":1024,"h":714,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/6\/a\/6a8562c9638f211298a2b1bd9a44dd40"}d1a6c238-e898-4766-849f-914b54ac0956.png

For example I did this on the fronts of some of my exercise books. I can probably find and scan an actual example later, but it's too late now ;)

bamccaig

We learned to write neatly in school because if we didn't we'd have to do it all over again. :o If you go slow it's not very difficult to write legibly. Especially with practice. If you write daily you get lots of practice. It all comes down to taking your time. It's hard to do that when you have to write lots in a short amount of time, but if you just want to improve the quality then you can define the quantity to match.

Bruce Perry

By the way, we had sessions once where we took a single letter and wrote a whole joined-up line of them. Can't hurt to practise that way if you want to :)

jmasterx

I recently noticed that Google Inc now provides the certificate for google.com
{"name":"610142","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/e\/c\/ec67a8e84923b3335f2918c7f46d1a5d.png","w":360,"h":76,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/e\/c\/ec67a8e84923b3335f2918c7f46d1a5d"}610142
So... isn't that technically a self signed certificate :o

MiquelFire

Google became a CA at some point. That's all.

bamccaig

Still sounds like self-signing to me. >:(

anto80

This is really weird.
Thread https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/615908 got locked although last update was on 02-02-2016 11:07

>:( >:( >:(
WHY?

Peter Hull

I think it's the last post date (28th Jan in your case) rather than the last revision date (2nd Feb) :(

[edit] Also I think the 'Just Bored' thread has some potential to be long-lived.
also - has this thread really been running since September?

MiquelFire

Have you been using the send to top feature? That might reset the date that auto lock threads.

anto80

My bad I only edited the post this time, and not used the "send to top" feature... :/

The thread lock reaper is merciless

Johan Halmén

Oink Oink!

Magic Oink
593914.png

Bruce Perry

Has anyone linked to the pig thread yet, to aid historians in their investigation when we're all famous?

Here we go.

;D

Gideon Weems

I have been watching the pig thread closely, for adding it to my list of awesome threads. Its fate rests upon the edge of a sword...

Niunio

I don't understand what happens with the pig. Is it an English joke or something? ???

May be I should ask this in the proper thread.

Bruce Pascoe
Niunio said:

I don't understand what happens with the pig.

What happens is: You get eaten by it. ;)

GullRaDriel

I eat the pig, fools ! >:(

Bruce Pascoe

The pig begs to differ.

🐽 *MUNCH*

Great job Gull, you attracted the pig into this thread. :'(

Mark Oates

We should lead the pig all the way to mother Russia. In mother Russia, YOU EATS PIG!

bamccaig

Mark Oates wins the thread. :D

Bruce Perry

The other thread, yes ;) No one should ever win this one.

GullRaDriel

It's still running foes ;-)

MiquelFire

It's still running foes ;-)

Why do you have to make enemies here?

Erin Maus

Yesterday, I used a neat little tool I made to capture the mesh/scene data in a game I play. My brother was curious about a certain area in the game but it wouldn't be worth his time to get to said area.

I thought it would be nice to update said tool to capture "3D screenshots." After capturing the scene, it would be trivial to view the scene and, say, move the camera or adjust aspects--well, until I realized the game in question was an exception to how games actually render. Most games use custom shaders to do any rendering, so while I could capture the rendering calls to later reconstruct the frame/scene, I'd only be able to render such scenes as-is. No way to change the camera or much of anything else...

Fixed function OpenGL was pretty nice for that, I suppose... Grr, programmable hardware!

(I suppose a plug-in architecture of sorts that would modify resources based on specific games could work, but that's pointless. You'd have to have an understanding of the game's specific rendering capabilities [or be able to examine the rendering calls to figure it out], which simply not something the overwhelming majority of people who actually would use such a tool would know...)

Niunio

@Aaron Bolyard: Get the depth-buffer and the color-buffer, then use it to create a voxel-map or a heightmap and render it. It's not perfect but it may work.

Gideon Weems

Today's holiday was brought to you by the number 1 and the gcc option -msingle-exit.

bamccaig

Relevant.

{"name":"boobs.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/3\/c38c083023dc375e143ad37f2fdc540f.jpg","w":480,"h":486,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/3\/c38c083023dc375e143ad37f2fdc540f"}boobs.jpg

Always relevant.

GullRaDriel

Miquel: I misused the word. I had folks in mind and foes appeared :-/

Bruce Perry

That mistake dates back to the earliest foelore.

GullRaDriel

Man I'm not that old and I'm only here since a few 12.3 years ;-)
Edit: I sure made some improvements and it's due to that particular forum, where trolls are troller than everywhere. ;D

Bruce Perry

Criticising you was the opposite of what I was even thinking of. I was just playing with the word 'folklore' :)

Gideon Weems

I have a car again. It has been about a year... How are you supposed to use these things again?

Mark Oates

I haven't driven in 4 years. Totally know what you mean.

Niunio
GullRaDriel

Everything is going fine Bruce, no worry ;-)

Elias

I haven't driven in 4 years. Totally know what you mean.

Where do you live? I want to move there! Right now I have to endure the hell of Columbus downtown traffic twice every single day and it's killing me :(

Mark Oates

Toronto :)

Before that I was in Macau.

I recommend both places. :)

Bruce Perry

I regularly have to endure traffic too - by which I mean being a pedestrian or a cyclist in an environment where these smelly brutes are constantly threatening me with their incessant roars, and I can't even relieve the stress by taking a deep breath because of the 'smelly' part. There are islands here and there where cars are banned, and I might have to move to one of those when circumstances permit ;)

Elias

where these smelly brutes are constantly threatening me

Haha, that's exactly what I think of cars. I really miss the time when I would take a train to work. But for some reason I cannot even begin to understand they dismantled the Columbus train station about 20 years ago and removed all passenger trains. Now it's cars and only cars to get anywhere :(

Neil Roy

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Mark Oates
Elias said:

I really miss the time when I would take a train to work.

Love public transit. I take it each day to work, and each day I get on during rush hour. Both the subway car and street car that I have to get on are completely packed... like... you're standing literally right next to everybody.

Something like this every day.
{"name":"packed-bus-home-1263x560.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/0\/c0414503712ef1bd91f260c2144010f2.jpg","w":1263,"h":560,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/0\/c0414503712ef1bd91f260c2144010f2"}packed-bus-home-1263x560.jpg

But I still prefer it to driving. No contest. :)

Quote:

Now it's cars and only cars to get anywhere :(

America. :-/

Combine that automobile lifestyle with health care costs, student loan debt, TV advertising, unhealthy food, and locked cell phones, and that makes up all the reasons I never want to go back. And Americans are so proud of their cars, too. Sales of Hummers spiked up when the cost of oil dropped. It's just stupid.

You should come to Canada. ;)

Gideon Weems

Also, Canada is one of the few places that benefits from global warming.

bamccaig

Canada does not benefit from global warming... >:( It's likely going to ruin this beautiful land that we live on for decades if not centuries, and probably will turn the entire planet towards violent wars fighting for remaining resources...

I never got a chance to experience Toronto's public transit because I was only in the city for hours or a night each time, but I can say that the city itself seems like a terrible place to live. At least, downtown. It smelled like shit on the street, literally. That improved once you headed North though.

Taxi drivers were crazy. And from the looks of things, subways/trains only covered a tiny fraction of the city so you would be forced to resort to buses and maybe "street cars" (I have no idea what the street car routes are like, but I didn't notice any tracks outside of downtown).

It was an exciting place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. You'd have to pay me handsomely to do it... Let alone to raise a family there. Jesus.

I love driving. I can understand hating driving if you live in a major city area where traffic is crazy. In my city it's not that bad. Lots of bad drivers, but you can generally avoid them if you're careful (knock on wood). I'm not opposed to public transit. I think it makes a lot of sense to poor resources and share the energy. However, I don't want to spend an hour or two commuting to work every day either, let alone jumping between rides to get there because a particular mechanism doesn't go all the way. I think it would also bother me being surrounded by so many people. I mean, people can be great, but as great as they can be they can also be unbearable and you can be stuck dealing with them every single day.

As an aside, another really fun way to drive, albeit more dangerous, is riding a motorcycle. Again, you don't want to do this where it's ridiculously complex or busy like Toronto. But it's a lot of fun.

Mark, depending on your personality you may love it more in Northern Ontario. It's quieter. There's less to do, and public transit is much less, but there's also clean air and treeeees. Driving isn't so bad up here. It's the best way to get around. I drive about 8 minutes to work each way. For the most part, that is all the driving I have to do on a daily basis with small exceptions for beer, gas, groceries, and the occasional shopping trip or visit. Most things near my apartment so I rarely have to go far. I can cross the city in 15-20 minutes. I ride my motorcycle to work in the summer, and also for leisure occasionally on various routes in or out of the city (there is a shortage of good motorcycle roads, but we make due).

Well, maybe big city life is perfect for you. And that's great. I don't think I could do it. For anybody else considering Canada, Toronto is the exception, not the rule. Toronto is the least Canadian place I've been to in Canada (which isn't saying much, I've only been in Ontario, but I digress). They don't even have gravy in their fucking restaurants, let alone poutine. >:( >:( >:(

Random example of driving in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario (short drive to get beer, but few intersections suck...).

video

There are several more videos of my riding my motorcycle that will show you what it's like in other parts of the city, but even our most busy intersection isn't all that bad.

Neil Roy

Man made global warming = hoax.

video

Also, how in the heck does a thread about thread locking turn into a global warming debate?!?! LMAO... you guys...

Edgar Reynaldo
Neil Roy said:

Man made global warming = hoax.

Way to give yourself credibility. RU SRS? Have you ever seen a chart of the CO2 levels in the industrial age? Do you understand that CO2 traps heat? Do you understand that makes it warmer?

Neil Roy

Way to give yourself credibility. RU SRS? Have you ever seen a chart of the CO2 levels in the industrial age? Do you understand that CO2 traps heat? Do you understand that makes it warmer?

Watch that video, it answers all of that, from credible scientists. And yes, it has a CO2 chart and much more.

bamccaig

Wow, 1600 views since 2011? Obviously a very well received video. We all know the most credible videos disable likes/dislikes too. :P It appears the comments are enabled, but they must be heavily policed because there's zero in 5 years...

Append:

Wikpedia seems to do a decent job of casting doubt on its credibility for us: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Global_Warming_Swindle

Bruce Perry

It's all right. The bible says global warming can't be an issue, if you know where to look.

There, that should keep the thread going for a while :)

MiquelFire

Too lazy to make a topic for this, but Alex!

https://vimeo.com/129070031

Gideon Weems

Nice find! The Pocket CHIP itself doesn't look so shabby, either.

MiquelFire

I can't wait to get mine.

Mark Oates
Gideon Weems

If I ever come back to the boards after a busy, miserable life without A.cc, and this thread is locked, you guys all suck.

Johan Halmén

Donald Trump is the best that has happened to Democrats.

Mark Oates

I find it impossible that he could win at all. Completely unelectable to anybody who's a Democrat.

The fact that he's "legitimate" says a lot about our country, though.

Look at em, they're already falling in line: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/02/26/christie_endorsement_of_trump_shakes_up_gop_primary_129800.html

GullRaDriel

I just bought a trump (tuba) . A good one, not a Donald Trump ;D

{"name":"610218","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/b\/9\/b9a8ee750bdab37dd640a5425326e373.jpg","w":3120,"h":4160,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/b\/9\/b9a8ee750bdab37dd640a5425326e373"}610218

By the way, threads are locking too soon !!

>:(

Johan Halmén

We should play something together. I have an E♭ tuba at home. And a trombone.

Mark Oates

That's a Baritone! Hey that's not a bad one, Besson makes good horns. :)

GullRaDriel

Tomorow the internet provider come to put my cable. Maybe in some few weeks I will have a reliable connection, and then play with you all :-D

I played it a few during the day. It's smooth and enjoyable. It's in MiB. My neighborhood told me they hear the tuba more than the trump ^^

Got if for 430 euros. It's a bit used instruments, and the carrying box has lived too, but it still plays good and was affordable.

EDIT: if you have some good and for average player sheets for tuba in MiB, I will happily take them away :-P

Johan Halmén
Mark Oates

You shouldn't search for tuba, should do "Euphonium" or "Baritone".

Johan Halmén

A baritone in Eb? The tuba I have is in Eb, though it has a 4th valve, which Gull's horn hasn't.

In Finland, tenor horns, baritone horns and euphoniums are in Bb. Tubas are in Eb. Some are in Bb (an octave below the baritone), and rarely in C.

edit

I just checked what Wikipedia says. Seems euphonium is the largest Bb horn, with an additional 4th valve. Baritone is narrower but still Bb and usually 3 valve. Tenor is higher, in Eb. As I mentioned, in Finland, baritone, tenor and euphonium are all same Bb horns, but with different bore. Baritone in Finland is what euphonium in USA is, I think.

Bruce Perry

I was wondering how you measure a tuba in mebibytes :)

video

Johan Halmén

Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones bought a French tuba. In MiB.

GullRaDriel

Thanks Johan. That's rocking information :-D

Mark Oates

It looks to me like a good ole Bb Baritone Horn. Even though I'm 99% sure, I can't know exactly unless I had the model number?

It plays in the same range and clef(s) as a Trombone. So you could just as easily search for music for Trombone. You'll find a lot more literature under Trombone. :)

Tuba parts read in the same clef, but the range is much lower.

GullRaDriel

Mark, are you asking my tuba or Johan's one serial number?

Johan Halmén

Our baritonist only reads treble cleff. Only the French hornist reads any cleff in any transposing key. His pupil, a young girl, reads pretty well both Eb and F scores. I've only learnt to play trombone bass cleff parts on a baritone sax.

GullRaDriel

What's the problem reading sheets ? I don't understand. I read sheets on the same key the instrument I use is. Else I made a transposition.

Our saxe is in MiB, my trump is in SiB en the piano and the guitar in DO
Playing the tuba will be easier as I'll not have to transcode common parts, it's a MiB.

In short, I have a Sib and a Mib at disposition to help.

Johan Halmén

The Bb baritone/euphonium parts in an orchestra score might be written in non transposing bass clef or in transposing treble clef. The alto horn parts might be written in Eb or F, Eb for alto horn and F for French horn. In our orchestra we have only one baritone horn, which is common in smaller wind bands. But we have four alto horns, actually two Eb altos and two F French horns. The best sheet music providers provide all sorts of parts. Non transposing tuba in bass clef, transposing tuba in treble clef, either for Bb tuba or for Eb tuba, both Eb and F alto parts, and the both kind of parts for the baritone/euphonium. But then again, some providers only provide say F alto parts. That's when I have to rewrite the parts and transpose them for the two Eb alto horn players, who don't transpose on the fly. Whereas the F French horn players are better in transposing. The French horn is a weird double horn instrument. The 4th valve turns it into a Bb horn, same tuning as in the baritone horn.

GullRaDriel

Nice. I have to try that 4 valve thing one of those day. When I'll be better at it ;-p

Chris Katko

Nice. I have to try that 4 valve thing one of those day. When I'll be better at it ;-p

I just had flashbacks to college and trying to come up with new internal combustion engine designs...

Johan Halmén

At the time when 4 valves per cylinder became popular and cars with I6 engines had "24 valve" signs on the rear, my brother had a Citroën 2CV. I thought of getting one of those "24 valve" signs, cut the "2" out an put on the Citroën. He sold the car, which was a shame. He had done great work on it to get it in shape. 2CV is one of the finest cars ever built. Says everyone, who knows it.

Peter Hull

Is Allegro popular in India?

I ask because there are some new members, all from India:

  • Llaldler laldler

  • Cluchom Cluchom

  • Engdelryn Engdelryn

  • Thoocum hoocum

  • Estrothskel strothskel

  • Rhysulnys hysulnys

  • Titonath itonath

GullRaDriel

Man, these looks like generated usernames :-p

EDIT: Johan: I loved 2cv. My dad once had a 'Katar', which was basically a pumped 2cv with 4 motorized tires and a claws gear.

I couldn't find any link in English, but if you love 2cv you have to check these:
- wikipedia about katar: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIFTT_Katar
- facebook page (for photos :-) ) https://www.facebook.com/Katar-4x4-131571083545786/

The one I had was like the one in the following page, and it was a finisher at the real Dakar competition. It had two tanks of oil and water tank for the driver/co driver. It was exactly the same red one as the one in the page. Haaa, souvenirs !!!
Here: http://www.nobug.be/KATAR/Histoire.html

Johan Halmén

Then there was this Picassoesque 2CV:

{"name":"picasso210607_468x296.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/d\/1\/d1f45ac76b164ec1a4cd3f88327f3f37.jpg","w":468,"h":296,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/d\/1\/d1f45ac76b164ec1a4cd3f88327f3f37"}picasso210607_468x296.jpg

GullRaDriel

It's a gorgeous one, nice work !

Johan Halmén

video

GullRaDriel

Good song, and just with coppers ! They really play well.

Gideon Weems

I want that colorful car.

jmasterx

Console > PC

Bruce Perry

Consoul > Console

video

Gideon Weems

That is a masterpiece. I am glad I watched.

Johan Halmén
GullRaDriel

We have to make a band play. I can't record now because it's already 22:46 :-p

Johan Halmén

I should probably play the sax instead, which is my real band instrument. But I happen to like the brass instruments, they are so much fun at the moment. I might do a recording of "Happy Birthday" for tuba and three saxes. And a trombone playing the melody. And I'd play all the instruments.

Years ago we did the Monday song, which turned out to be a great astonishing fun project. With Matthew as the lyricist and solo singer. When will a.cc turn 20?

Peter Hull

I don't remember the Monday song. Have you got a link for it?

Johan Halmén
Peter Hull

W.O.W.! 8-)

Pity that Ron Novy's last post seems to have a dead link.

Johan Halmén

I have most of the material on my old PowerBook.

jmasterx

If we make music, our tempo should always be Allegro.

Mark Oates

Allegro's a good tempo. ;)

GullRaDriel

I'm building allegro5 unstable for win7 with a fresh new mingw install of course.

Mark Oates

I think building Allegro from source it relatively straightforward these days. :). It's the dependencies that can get a bit tedious to go through.

GullRaDriel

I have some few glitches. On linux it was butter. Good night !

Johan Halmén

So what will happen with Trump?

  1. He will win and become president and the whole world will know what USA is made of

  2. He will win pre-elections and the GOP will support him and his rethorics, and after losing the final run, the GOP will be very shattered

  3. He will lose the pre-elections and the republicans will welcome all the Trump supporters to support whomever their second man is

  4. ???

Bruce Perry

5. Profit?

Johan Halmén

Yes, I was going to add that. Trump most sure will profit a lot, no matter what happens.

GullRaDriel

Donald is a Trump'erie.

8-)

Chris Katko

Trump being elected is what the USA needs.

It needs to elect a billionaire independent to prove to the world that the system has been broken for decades.

Once everyone accepts the problem, we can finally start dealing with it.

https://represent.us/action/theproblem-4/

Quote:

“The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

Bruce Perry

Let's start by fixing copyright law.

video

Johan Halmén
Quote:

"The preferences of the average American..."

That's a stupid way of putting it. It should read "The preferences of the average of all Americans". One should never talk about one single individual in these cases. Too many people in general have this stupid attitude that "Makes no sense to vote. My vote doesn't count almost at all." The attitude is the attitude of a spoilt child. And if that article really focused on the fact that a majority of voters has no impact on politics (which really is alarming), they should not use the phrases of a spoilt child.

Bruce Perry

While I feel that is a bit of an inconsequential nitpick, I am very glad that you did this deliberately just to keep the thread going :)

Gideon Weems

It needs to elect a billionaire independent to prove to the world that the system has been broken for decades.

So you're saying the country needs to hit rock bottom before bouncing back up?

bamccaig

I don't think there'll be any "bouncing" involved. It will work the same as it does in the business world. The executives give themselves millions in "bonuses" for a job well done while declaring bankruptcy and abandoning the "company", leaving the "workers" to fend for themselves with what's left (nothing).

jmasterx

Have we won? Why are these threads not locked?
https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/616092
https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/616107
etc

Has O'Captain! Our Captain! Given in?

GullRaDriel

Did Matt extended the delay ?

bamccaig

It's more likely that the development boards would have an exceptional timeout, but isn't the timeout 2 weeks? The latter thread is only like 9 days old, and though the first looks to be about an hour over 2 weeks, it might not actually lock until midnight UTC or something.

GullRaDriel

Poums !;D

Gideon Weems
bamccaig said:

The executives give themselves millions in "bonuses" for a job well done while declaring bankruptcy and abandoning the "company", leaving the "workers" to fend for themselves with what's left (nothing).

... so politicians leave the United States en masse? You're right. It sounds more like soaring than bouncing.

bamccaig

... so politicians leave the United States en masse? You're right. It sounds more like soaring than bouncing.

Not just the politicians. The wealthy, of which, thanks to bribes and general "upper-class" backgrounds, politicians very much are. You bet your ass when it catches fire they won't be passing any buckets. They'll just take their spoils and run, leaving everybody else to fight the fires.

Gideon Weems

Quit getting my hopes up. :)

Peter Hull

My little CSS thread got locked after a week :'(
https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/616090

Arvidsson

My condolences.

bamccaig

Of course it did. You humiliated the fearless leader. You're lucky you haven't been banished from these lands yet! :o

Gideon Weems

Yes, he did.

Mark Oates

allegro.cc should be a forum as a service. That way we could expand it into apps/games while still keeping the network intact.

Does allegro.cc even have like a privacy policy or terms of service?

Chris Katko

allegro.cc should be a forum as a service. That way we could expand it into apps/games while still keeping the network intact.

What does that mean?

A.CC being some sort of Allegro dynamic game hub where you post highscores, game lobbies, and so on?

Mark Oates

Well, there seems to a small small sentiment that allegro.cc could be updated a bit. This thread being a primary example. Peter's thread about the custom CSS page not working is another.

What might that look like? Maybe it would be more like a platform that would developers to make a better mobile view, or build an app with push notifications, or an ability to customize the interface a bit more than the simple custom Javascript. It might be cool if the source to allegro.cc was an open repo like the Allegro library itself - members could contribute PR changes, things like that. :)

Just, enable more possibilities.

Chris Katko

I honestly don't think we have the forum community size to warrant it right now. But if someone really wanted to do the WORK, I'm not going to tell them no.

But I think something we'd need most, is something high-profile to draw people into the community. A high-profile game, or a YouTube series on game development using Allegro.

I'm working toward doing some YouTube videos anyway. Some of them game development related.

amarillion

A high-profile game

You mean like factorio?

Chris Katko

Well, yes, I thought of saying that. But I have no idea if Korval really wants to plug Allegro anywhere in his game / website.

Arvidsson

Korval... isn't he still working on AllegroPro? :)

Chris Katko

Whoops, I was in a hurry. I meant kovarex.

Peter Hull

Strangely, you've done that before.

Chris Katko

How do you even remember that?!

Indeterminatus

Speaking of remembrance ... does any of you slackers remember that disgusting game I made with a friend aeons ago? It was called Atomic Butcher and is still lurking about in the depot.

We're currently working on a sequel; there's a playable demo on our page. We're planning to go to Steam Greenlight soon-ish, so spread the word, and let there be feasting!

In case it crashes or anything, please drop me a note with your system specs and everything.

Yeah, this does not belong in this thread, but what really does? This post here can still accomplish not having this thread locked too soon. :-*

bamccaig

Is there a reason you discriminate against 32-bit CPUs? >:( I tried to run it in wine, but it seems that getting a functional 64-bit wine is a lot of work... At least, I'm inferring that the errors I get are architecture specific, but I can't rule something else out until I have ruled that out...

Gideon Weems

... does any of you slackers remember that disgusting game I made with a friend aeons ago?

I never played the original but will never forget the preview of the sequel.

Indeterminatus
bamccaig said:

Is there a reason you discriminate against 32-bit CPUs?

Just that I didn't have a 32-bit system to test it on before releasing. In hindsight, I really should've known better before posting here... Please be aware that I did not test if this build works, but judging from your post you were meddling about with Wine. No need for that (hopefully), here is a Linux version (both x86 and x86-64). The download is approximately 100 MiB. I made that just for you, bambam :-*

edit: I'm off to work now, so I won't be able to hop in that quickly in case anything does not work; but it'd be a very valuable test to see if it runs in Linux natively (maybe you also have a twin-stick controller to try it with? As far as the demo is concerned, you should only have to plug it in)

amarillion

I don't know if kovarex wants to advertise allegro (but why not? It's in the interest of factorio too that Allegro continues to do well)

But it's hardly a secret:

Games made with allegro

For comparison:

Games made with SDL

jmasterx

The SDL list is shorter than I expected. The Allegro list should include the Monster RPG games made by Trent G and his team.

amarillion

The Allegro page is a category page, so you can only add games that have a wikipedia entry themselves.

bamccaig

Just that I didn't have a 32-bit system to test it on before releasing. In hindsight, I really should've known better before posting here... Please be aware that I did not test if this build works, but judging from your post you were meddling about with Wine. No need for that (hopefully), here is a Linux version (both x86 and x86-64). The download is approximately 100 MiB. I made that just for you, bambam :-*

edit: I'm off to work now, so I won't be able to hop in that quickly in case anything does not work; but it'd be a very valuable test to see if it runs in Linux natively (maybe you also have a twin-stick controller to try it with? As far as the demo is concerned, you should only have to plug it in)

That is bloody amazingly well designed and polished. I love it. Thanks for the special build! It ran just fine. It crashed when I picked "Fantastic" graphics, but "Fastest" seemed to work fine. I did have trouble exiting though. Not sure if you're supposed to be able to go back to a menu or anything, but I couldn't figure it out. I was in windowed mode so I managed to get to the window's x.

I'm afraid that I don't have a controller to test with though.

Gideon Weems

Thank you for sharing the Wikipedia list of Allegro games. I have been maintaining a similar list here and encourage people to contribute (as I am certain there are a number of notable games missing).

Chris Katko

I forgot about Gemini Rue!

Though technically, they used the Adventure Game Studio, which runs on top of Allegro (4?).

Polybios

Yes, it's A4. There are also other games which use AGS; I think Resonance deverses to be mentioned.

I've only played two of them, but I think some/maybe even all (?) of those at http://www.wadjeteyegames.com are made with AGS/A4.

Peter Hull

Quite a lot of the games on Retrospec were made with Allegro. Unfortunately I don't know exactly which ones.

Chris Katko

I still love LaserLock. A DOS game that the internet is slowly forgetting.

You control a space station with corridors built from puzzle-pieces. There are aliens, civilians, and soldiers. Aliens are trying to take over the station. Every turn, you can do X amount of actions with your energy, like toggling doors, placing new reactors (for more energy) and so on.

But what I do is get as many of my guys to a safe place, seal them in, then trigger a bomb on the other side of the station. The station vents to space and kills everything on the other side the the airlock, and in my case, 99% of the station!

I've got a copy on my PC. It's hard to come by.

[edit] This game was way more crude than I remembered. :o

Indeterminatus
bamccaig said:

That is bloody amazingly well designed and polished. I love it. Thanks for the special build! It ran just fine. It crashed when I picked "Fantastic" graphics, but "Fastest" seemed to work fine. I did have trouble exiting though. Not sure if you're supposed to be able to go back to a menu or anything, but I couldn't figure it out. I was in windowed mode so I managed to get to the window's x.

I'm afraid that I don't have a controller to test with though.

Thanks for testing! Glad to hear it works natively on Linux ;D. You are right to notice there's no way to exit currently other than the hard way. I admit I didn't invest much attention into this since we're going to re-do the entire menu and UI anyway. But it'd have been good to mention that, I'll add a section on our website as a quick and dirty work-around :)

May I ask what system you're on? (mostly interested in GPU and CPU)

bamccaig

I have an AMD (ASUS) HD 6850 and an AMD Phenom II 1000T. The full system specs should be available somewhere on the boards because I'm sure I built it with advice from here... I'm currently running Ubuntu for Steam support. I have the proprietary drivers installed.

Gideon Weems

Quite a lot of the games on Retrospec were made with Allegro. Unfortunately I don't know exactly which ones.

Many of them are packaged with source code and Allegro DLLs (Styx, for example). They also look really good! Can you say anything of their notoriety? The most popular game of the bunch would be a good starting point...

I took the liberty of adding Resonance.

Bruce Perry

Greetings from Japan! I found a shop called DLESS here.

Peter Hull

I found a shop called DLESS here.

Pictures?

On the notoriety of the Retrospec games: I did a bit of work on some of them to ensure the Mac version was working correctly - ExolonDX, Wizball, Deflektor and Tranzam (possibly Alien8, I can't remember) so I know the ones that Graham Goring did are listed in his Mobygames entry. Also there may be some YouTube play-throughs. Obviously they are all remakes and the original games were written about in computer magazines of the 1980s. That's about it though.

Also, at least some of Linley Henzell's games are made with Allegro.

Niunio

Thank you for sharing the Wikipedia list of Allegro games. I have been maintaining a similar list here and encourage people to contribute (as I am certain there are a number of notable games missing).

Like this game. It will be published soon... 8-)

Mark Oates

Anybody interested in Axiom Verge, MegaSphere, or Jonathan Blow's newest game The Whitness?

Indeterminatus

Further derailment of this thread: we just went on at Steam Greenlight. It would be very kind of you to vote for our disgusting game, so the world can be made a worse place 8-)

Bruce Perry

Voted :)

You have an error in your description: the verb "to lead" becomes "led" in the past tense. If you spell it "lead" and expect it to be pronounced "led", then it's a metal.

bamccaig

That's a worthwhile project! Also bump.

Peter Hull

That's horrible.

Horribly good! ;D

Am I right when I say this new Atomic Butcher isn't an Allegro game but the original was?

Pete

GullRaDriel

What ? Traitor !

Johan Halmén

I've heard that no one in USA is concerned about the Panama Papers. That everyone thinks it's just something about corrupt Russian politicians. I guess we will know more next week.

Arthur Kalliokoski

What are you guys doing here, with 417 posts? You're gonna clog the innertubes!

bamccaig

Yayz, Arthur is back! And alive! :o

GullRaDriel

Bumpy !

It's an attempt to keep a thread alive ;-)

Niunio

I wonder if Matt is still reading this thread. ???

GullRaDriel

I wonder if he is still reading a.cc at all ???

Chris Katko

I've heard that no one in USA is concerned about the Panama Papers. That everyone thinks it's just something about corrupt Russian politicians. I guess we will know more next week.

A quick look at Reddit /r/news or r/worldnews will tell you nobody is talking about ANYTHING else at all.

The consensus is that the USA leaks are likely huge and going to be released later.

It's a 2.6 TERABYTE dump. It takes a long time to sift through everything.

GullRaDriel

That, and the Delaware. Why going to Panama when you have the Delaware, which is more reputed than the latter for the security of the tractations.

Bruce Perry

Should Britain leave the EU?

I think we should. Basically my perception is that the leave campaign has highlighted one very important problem: that EU officials are unelected and therefore have the opportunity to be dictatorial. There are other more specific problems too such as way the EU has a common currency but doesn't have common fiscal law, or free movement of people but insufficient cooperation of intelligence services and such. In any case, it's all very compelling to me. Meanwhile, the stay campaign is mostly just trying to scare people into the 'better the devil you know' (than the one you don't) mentality, while also making outlandish claims such as 'trade with the EU will stop' (which to me it seems it clearly won't) or badly worded comments such as 'We're a world leader and therefore we need Europe' (to lead us?).

Betting odds seem to indicate a larger payout if we stay, which suggests more people are betting that we will leave. Or could this just mean that risk-takers (betters) would take the risk of leaving? Surely not, since they are trying to predict the masses' decision, not specifying their own preference. (Link - be careful not to misread the pie chart, which is *not* indicating a stay/leave ratio.) [EDIT: actually I suppose it's difficult to say whether betting odds are a genuine indicator of likelihood of outcome, since the current odds, and rounding thereof, always affect the likelihood of future bets.]

Finally, in this article, the first graph shows a 'poll of polls' indicating figures close to 50-50 but nearly always slightly in favour of staying. In contrast, the vote at the bottom of the article has a resounding outcome of 72% wanting to leave. I'm inclined to think there's some kind of statistical flaw in the 'poll of polls', but then, I found the article simply by Googling 'Brexit predictions' and I don't know what the Telegraph's usual political bias is.

Thoughts?

Johan Halmén

EU went too far. I voted no, when we had a referendum about joining, back in the 90's. A lose community would have been enough. Now it's almost a federal union, but not fully one. It would function better if it was. But the smaller each country would be, as well as its citizens. I want to be a Finn, not an EU citizen. OTOH I do believe a lose European community could continue keeping the peace. But EU won't and can't take a step back.

Maybe a Brexit could force EU to turn into a EC that it once was.

Peter Hull

I disagree on Europe. It seems to me that most studies put out by people or bodies that I trust and respect are in favour of staying. In the leave camp we have Farage, Gove, Boris Johnson et al. Their argument seems to be predicated on the assumption that we will instantaneously be able to re-negotiate 30 years of trade deals in such a way that we will retain all the benefits and lose all the liabilities.

In my own job (medical devices) it's very nice to be able to work with harmonised standards across Europe and if we were no longer part of that, they would inevitably drift apart due to favouring national interests.

Great Britain is not what it once was, and probably never will be again. I believe that if we pursue an isolationist strategy we will end up as little better than a historical theme park. If we had to throw our lot in with someone it had better be the 'Europeans' - their common values are best aligned to our own in my experience. The US 'special relationship' is nothing of the kind and only remains for as long as America deems it convenient.

Finally the Telegraph is the homeplace of old-school conservative right-wing thinking. I respect their viewpoints but they are not mine.

This puts me in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with David Cameron. :-/

Polybios

Please don't leave. :-/

You'll lose the possibility to influence this peculiar club from within. There are others who would miss British influence: When a large north-western country leaves, balance will shift to south-east, so to speak. ^^

We're still not through with economic crisis (for like 8 years?). Frankly, what actual problems will be solved by leaving the EU? You don't have the Euro anyway. :)

Bruce Perry

I misread the betting odds. It seems betters think staying is more likely. This becomes obvious if you click on a 'stay' bet and a 'leave' bet and review the potential total returns on the bet, which are greater for a 'leave' bet implying they expect less likelihood of having to pay it. But that still begs the question of whether betting odds really reflect people's opinion of the likelihood of outcome, rather than the proportions of bets each way which may depend on bets made so far, personal sentiments, rounding errors and such.

While I can't resist reading an article or two every day to see what the current sentiments are, I am coming round to thinking I have other things I'd rather spend my time on :-/

Johan Halmén

:'(

It's sad that a great part of actual political movements in the whole world consists of the force from racist and xenophobic people. We know that there are racists and xenophobics[1] among us. And we also know that such people tend to lean to the political right wings. They tend to support Trump. And probably they tend to support brexit, too. And that's a pity, because they will shed all the other ideas. I don't know about Trump, he might have some fine ideas, too. But all I see is a misogynist racist. And there might be fine ideas building up the idea of brexit. I just don't like the ugly ideas and their supporters, who will be an important part of the voters.

References

  1. Sorry for using this word. I know fobia is something you can do very little to. I'd rather use another word that would underline the negative attitude against everything foreign and strange.
Bruce Perry

Is Trump really racist, or only nationalist? For example, is there any evidence that he would disadvantage black people or any other race if they legitimately live in the US?

And misogynist? I wasn't even aware of such a criticism of Trump.

GullRaDriel

The question is not good, Bruce. The good question is "Can one be a nationalist without being racist" and the answer is no.

As for the black people: there is already ton of problems involving black people. How come there are that much shooting from police to unarmed black people ? Do you really think a nationalist would help ?

Same as the woman. You just have to try to search for 'Trump and women' and see for yourself the ton of quotes.

That guy just stings as much as Hillary. He's just a big lie, as his companies steaks were.

Greets from France ;-)

Bruce Perry

Yes, nationalism and racism are two different things, and also outcome isn't the same as intention - even if nationalism results in racism flourishing, that doesn't mean the nationalist intended racism to flourish.

As for Trump and women, his insults are funny and usually directed at specific people who might have deserved it, and the article I found smacked of barrel-scraping and overreaction.

My 32 GB memory set has just arrived - I'll install it now and see if it works, and hopefully the upgrade from 8 GB will help my virtual orchestra software not to crash :)

[EDIT]
Installed and seems to work, except Windows 7 Home Premium only allows me to use 16 GB of it. Perhaps I should consider Windows 10 after all, as it lifts that limit. Honestly the only thing holding me back is that I prefer how Windows 7 looks :(

Johan Halmén

"Can one be a nationalist without being racist" and the answer is no.

I wish I could say I'm a nationalist. I love my country, I love my mother tongue Swedish, I might love Finnish even more just because it's so ... well, Finnish. I love Sibelius, Finnish folk music, Kalevala etc. But I guess I can never call me a racist, unless I start to hate other people. I love all other forms of national culture, too. Czech national romantic music with Dvořák and Smetana. Irish folk music. And of course there's a special bond to one's own culture.

Some refugees that came last winter to Finland, to my home town which is bilingual, insisted on getting to learn both Finnish and Swedish, because they came from a bilingual culture and they know the value of it. Fine by me. Though if they would find learning two new languages too difficult, I'm fine with them learning only Finnish, which is and always will be the most important language in Finland. Perhaps there's a little racist in me after all, if I'd require refugees who settle down in Finland to at least learn Finnish and most of all learn Finnish culture and Finnish manners (the good ones, not the bad ones).

Chris Katko

I have absolutely loved this election cycle and I hope Trump wins.

Why? Because it has absolutely highlighted to me how much of a liberal "Hillary election machine" the media is. It's non-stop propaganda.

Trump is an asshole. But he's the first asshole in decades who is too rich to be bought.

Obama was a perfect example. Charming guy. Ran on a platform of change. He won a freaking advertising award for that. And what did he change? Almost nothing.

Basically, the USA government has become a system where the true people in power pay for candidates to get elected, so that they owe the corporations when they get in. Democrats and Republicans are the exact same party. They both bailed out Wall Street. They both refused to prosecute anyone on Wall Street. They talk about emotional, hot-button issues to distract everyone but they have no ACTUAL plans of changing those issues. Why give away an issue guaranteed to polarize your voting base every year and get you re-elected?

And those people who are pulling the strings? They're not subjected to elections. They don't cease being powerful every 4 years. They lobby, gain power, and have more power the next time around.

The reason Trump is so damn popular is because of the non-stop media onslaught against him. The media is so damn self-serving and under-handed they don't even realize they've managed to make A BILLIONAIRE look like the underdog. Every day, it's a new article of "Here's why he won't win." then when he does win something, it's "Here's why that win doesn't matter." You don't have to be a genius to pick up on that pattern.

And if you truly hate the powers that be, it stands to reason you're going to vote for the person that the-powers-that-be are afraid of and constantly attacking. A vote for Trump is the best chance we've had in my lifetime to give a giant middle-finger to our entire government. It's saying "We hate you so much, we'd vote for a crazy person over four more years of your snake-tongued crap."

And if he wins? Politics will have forever changed. All a sudden, a foreigner-with-money will be a plausible threat to all of those political incumbents. And the more threats there are, the more chances politicians will actually start listening to us for a change.

Mark Oates

They talk about emotional, hot-button issues to distract everyone

They talk about emotional, hot-button issues in order to get attention.

Bruce Perry

Like this issue?

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Not my joke - it came up at the meal after our orchestra day, but unsurprisingly the Internet got there first ;)

bamccaig

I think that it's wrong to assume that because Trump is [allegedly] wealthy that he'll be unbuyable. Odds are he became rich by being bought. And he likes being rich. I'm sure he'd love to be richer. This is like cutting out the middleman politician. You're proposing to just put the lobbyist in office directly. I'm sure he has many existing allies and friends within the business world that will appreciate his newfound power. And I'm sure he'll be more than willing to pander to them at the expense of the average American. What you need is not a rich man in office. What you need is for the country to hold the office accountable to the people. Do a good job of that and the lobbyist will fall away and only serious candidates will dare apply. We face the same basic problem in Canada. How do you get corrupt people to revoke their own power? Unfortunately, probably the only way is to physically show up and break the door down. Which means a few people will probably be shot so we'll need enough of us to drain their ammunition stores.

Johan Halmén

Yip! The richer, the more they want to be bought. The richer, the more they want to escape to tax havens.

MiquelFire

>Installed and seems to work, except Windows 7 Home Premium only allows me to use 16 GB of it. Perhaps I should consider Windows 10 after all, as it lifts that limit. Honestly the only thing holding me back is that I prefer how Windows 7 looks :(

I was going to say use the Windows Anytime Upgrade, but it seems they shut that down.

Derezo

Disclaimer: Canadian.

I have absolutely loved this election cycle and I hope Trump wins.

I desperately want him to win the GOP nomination. His chances are looking pretty grim now. I don't think it's possible for him to win a general election, but the more damage he does to the Republican party the better.

GullRaDriel

What Derezo said looks plausible for me.

Mark Oates
Derezo said:

His chances are looking pretty grim now.

Not so sure about that. When you look at the numbers, he's pretty much the nominee at this point. The press would have you believe otherwise (because it's in their best interest).

Also when you look at the numbers for the general election, we're in the clear. There's no way Trump will be able to win the general.

Now go out and vote. Your vote makes a difference!

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Bruce Perry

Does that make her a peasant plucker?

Peter Hull

Does that make her a peasant plucker?

No, a pleasant ... no wait, that doesn't work. :-/

I'm sure there's some political analogy that can be made with that half-full pint.

Also, this thread now takes a perceptible time to load and render on my comp. Keep going people we will blow Leverton's server before long.

MiquelFire

The moment we get a new page, I bet the load time will jump for you. I'm assuming we're doing too much stuff that needs JS to do things with right now.

Johan Halmén

For me, this is page 5. I know, I'm a traitor.

MiquelFire

I'm on page 5 as well, the the thread just loads as fast as any other thread for me.

I forgot you can change the post per page count. It seems 100 is the most you can set. If Peter's setting is unlimited, then that might be the issue he's having. Those of us who have pages, we're not seeing slowdowns yet.

GullRaDriel

i'm not paging at all. Working fine ^^

bamccaig

I have unlimited pages. >:( Keep going. I'm not scared.

Bruce Perry

Unlimited pages, or unlimited posts per page (pages limited to 1)?

bamccaig

Technically unlimited page length[1] AKA unlimited posts per page. >:(

References

  1. More likely limited to some pseudo-arbitrary number of bytes in the hundreds of millions or maybe billions...
Mark Oates

10 pages now.

Bruce Perry

If a book has only ten pages, we consider it short! Come on, people! ;D

GullRaDriel

11 soon !

;)

Peter Hull

If Peter's setting is unlimited, then that might be the issue he's having.

It's not a problem, it's just that the delay is perceptible where it isn't normally.

I had a look on Print Preview; it would make 59 printed pages. Definitely a book but a slim one. Jonathan Livingston Seagull?

Gideon Weems

This thread has 19 pages. You are all liars.

Bruce Perry

Required reading at this point :)

Elias
Quote:

19 is The TCP/IP port used for chargen.

echo "gnome, male, lawful good, mage" | nc allegro.cc 19

It doesn't seem to work... ???

Edgar Reynaldo

;D - I remember using telnet at the University to play d&d like text games. Can't even remember what they are called now.

Rodolfo Lam

That reminds me, in case someone is interested into some old TELNET stuff, there are still BBS servers around... I used to have an account on one over here. THere are some that offer D&D style games.

Derezo

I remember using telnet at the University to play d&d like text games. Can't even remember what they are called now.

I tried to develop a MUD once...

I had so many dreams in that thread :'(

Edgar Reynaldo

MUD!!! That's the name!!! I used to stay up for days not doing homework playing those games! :O

Niunio

That reminds me, in case someone is interested into some old TELNET stuff, there are still BBS servers around...

:o

I wonder if somebody still use Gopher...

Johan Halmén

My first BBS contact was with my 300 baud modem. Or 300 bit/s. I've forgot the difference. Anyway, 30 characters per second. One could actually read the text in the same speed that it appeared on the screen. Still would have taken some time to fill my 10 MB hard disk by downloading anything.

Then to something different.
Seven little bugs were hiding in your code.
You did a nice fix,
and then they were...

...a load. It's not supposed to rhyme with 'fix', you fool, but with 'code'.

Bruce Perry

Seven little bugs were hiding in your code.
You did a nice fix,
and then they were...

...unable to reproduce. Do I win the motherlode?

bamccaig

... and then they hit the road...

:-/

Rodolfo Lam

So... Are we going to let the thread lock now?

bamccaig

Never.

Gideon Weems

This thread will never die, just as weekends will never truly live.

GullRaDriel

Tomorrow never dies.

8-)

jmasterx

Tomorrow never dies.

Tomorrow Never Knows
:o

l j

This thread will lock when the bubble bursts and society falls.

Bruce Perry

I would like to see the bubble burst, and I don't think it will lead to society falling.

I would also like to see an end to Assured Shorthold Tenancies. If I had to pick one thing wrong with this country, it would be those. I mean who could possibly think they're in any way a good idea, for any other reason than "I'm a landlord and it's good for me", selfish Kents?

MiquelFire

I can see it now, only a handful of people are alive due to some event that basically wiped out most of mankind, maybe making us near extinct, and a few of the survivors are here keeping this thread open until the server is cut off for good.

Bruce Perry

Bonus points if the server was the mass extinction event :)

amarillion

GLaDOS, is that you?

jmasterx

GLaDOS, is that you?

Nope, just DOS.
Press any key to continue . . .

Bruce Perry

This may sound a little loopy ... but I pressed a key to continue, and all it did was break. Now my options appear to be... throw my computer; return it (where do I goto for that)?

I know that people in my position just go and complete normally a purchase for a new computer. Of course it affects your next statement somewhat.

Edgar Reynaldo

Abort Retry Fail should be a category in TINS.

jmasterx

What about
Abort | Retry | Ignore

I like ignoring problems.

GullRaDriel

Can't let it lock.

bamccaig

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Bruce Perry

wait wat

HOW MAN GET PRAGNENT??!

Gideon Weems
jmasterx

When a man with a Keg (scientific term for a stomach inflated from yeast) and a woman bump into each other, the woman and the man use Bluetooth to exchange DNA. This causes the yeast inside the man to activate and for the pregnancy to begin inside the man.

Didn't anyone every teach you guys about the birds and the bees? The stork doesn't carry the baby, the father does. After which he goes into labor until he retires (he needs to feed his family after all).

Bruce Perry

I am fully aware that this is the accepted scientific explanation, but I disagree because reasons.

Oh, you actually want me to justify my position? Well I can see a bit of a chicken and egg problem here: how does the pregnant Keg required for impregnation develop in the first place?

On another note, I participated in a recording of some music intended to sound like chocolate yesterday. If I understood correctly, the person who composed it interviewed some people with taste-sound synaesthesia. This also led to me buying £12.30 of artisan chocolates which have already all gone :o

Now my own attempt at a chocolate-themed composition applies. :)

jmasterx

Oh, you actually want me to justify my position? Well I can see a bit of a chicken and egg problem here: how does the pregnant Keg required for impregnation develop in the first place?

By drinking Beer! The man builds up yeast by drinking beer and it starts to form a Keg inside his stomach becoming a perfect incubator for human life! When the man and the woman exchange DNA over Bluetooth, it causes a rise in temperature in the man's mid section which activates the yeast and starts the 'baking' process of child development (not to be confused with 420 For Kids). This is the foundation of Christianity. Jesus turned water into wine to help men get pregnant with their spouse because beer was scarce. It wasn't the virgin Mary who was pregnant with Jesus, it was God (who himself was known to drink a lot of beer, hence why the female genitalia came out, shall we say, more aesthetically pleasing than the male counterpart. Drunk engineering also meant the male version had to be external). It's quite remarkable really.

Bruce Perry

But don't you realise? Mary didn't consent to ruining God's life!

jmasterx

But don't you realise? Mary didn't consent to ruining God's life!

:o This changes EVERYTHING!

Bruce Perry

Oh. I ... won? Now I don't know what to do. Quick, find something else to fight about?

I really ought to wash some clothes today, but I feel a bit drained :-/

bamccaig

It doesn't matter if a woman consents or not because she can revoke said consent at any time before, during, or after the act in question. :o The science remains true!

Append:

I really ought to wash some clothes today, but I feel a bit drained :-/

Quick, drink some beer! I am expected to do the dishes and wash black mold from the bathroom walls today. But if I do I should be rewarded with a bottle of fine single-malt scotch!

timidiy(1) said:

Copyright: Copyright 1997 by B****** *****s

:-/

Johan Halmén

What's the main difference between single malt and blended? I've never understood the fuss about it?

Lately I've enjoyed mainly brandies from Italy or Spain. (Vecchia Romagna or Cardenal Mendoza.) In my younger days I was more a whiskey drinker. And now I've got a bottle of Bushmill's Black Bush. Quite good.

bamccaig

There is a difference, but I don't know what it is and I'm not sure it matters. I wanted to learn to drink hard liquor straight and when I researched it single-malt scotch was one of the normal choices. Apparently it is criminal to mix single-malt with anything and you should instead enjoy the flavor. Whereas it's more normal to mix blended, or so I read. Since I was specifically aiming to learn to drink it straight I went with the single-malt.

According to some Google searches the history goes that blended was popular until the 80s when the single-malt producers started pushing it on the market, and since it was new it was adopted. Along with vodka at the same time this drove blended sales down. To respond to the market the blended went down in price to compete. And that had the unfortunate effect of making people believe that the blended was lesser quality.

I just happened to choose a Bowmore single-malt (12 years aged) when I went to find my first scotch and I liked that it has a smoky flavor. I haven't found another one, blended or not, that I like as much. Though I have found that I can drink just about anything now if I'm motivated to do it. For example, I can drink Jack Daniels and that is some of the worst tasting shit that I can remember ever drinking. Perhaps I just didn't have a taste for whiskey the first time. I don't know...

I imagine whiskey choices are as much religious as any other food/drink preference. :)

Bruce Perry

bambams, here's a spoiler for your spoiler. I just noticed how it was very easy to miss it since it's at the top of the post above the first quote. So now it isn't any more. ;)

Quote:

Copyright 1997 by Bast*** **utts

Ah yes. I made an orchestral score template in 1997, and whenever I did that chocolate thing, I just took it and went 'Save as'. Since the piece is unfinished, I never got around to sorting out the file info. Or I was too malnourished to think of it, or something. :D

Now, as to why I would choose a name like ****ard Sl**** at the age of 1997... Actually I guess that IS the age at which that happens. ;) Bit embarrassed I spelt it wrong though.

bamccaig said:

I imagine whiskey choices are as much religious as any other food/drink preference. :)

Or music :)

We're stupid as a species, aren't we? It's so easy to get addicted to watching dramas unfold among popular YouTube uploaders, or in universities like Mizzou (whose popularity among its future customers has been absolutely thrashed by what happened there, i.e. normal market forces and not really that important) - instead of focusing on something like making games, performing music or (for normal people) amateur evening art courses or yoga or whatever takes your fancy - things like that which are more rewarding, every single time.

Peter Hull

Has anyone here invested in a Kickstarter project? Has anyone ever set one up?
I've put a few ££ into a couple, neither of which has delivered anything yet (but both seemingly proceeding OK)

[edit]
What I meant to say was about the whiskey - there's malt whiskey and grain whiskey. The latter is not as interesting flavour-wise and harsher (and cheaper). A single malt is bottled from one batch of malt whiskey. If they mix it with grain whiskey that's a cheap blend (like Bells) and isn't as nice. However you can also get blends of malts, blended by experts and they can be even more expensive than single malt.
It's a funny old business, the product you make is worth very little unless you can hang on to it for years and then it's valuable. A lot of distilleries shut down a long time ago but are still selling the stuff they made back then. A lot also have been bought up by others and are more of a brand name than an actual place.
I had a holiday once in Islay, it was fantastic!

Erin Maus

I supported Spine. It worked out well; good piece of software. $30 backing for a single license that was upgraded to professional. The same license would cost $300 now.

MiquelFire

Currently, I have backed 6 projects. For whatever reason, it seems I haven't backed a failed project yet (in terms of funding, so they at least got their money)

Currently, I only received two. Of the four left, two are games, and they're both way over due. Another I have been posting stuff here about. My pledge level says I should be getting it this month. And the latest ended the campaign just last month, so I can't really say much more about it.

jmasterx

HOW MAN GET PRAGNENT??!

You're grammar is repulsive.

Johan Halmén

Damn, this Bushmill's is good!

append

Oops, sorry. I broke the 500. I must be drunk.

bamccaig

For whatever reason, it seems I haven't backed a failed project yet (in terms of funding, so they at least got their money)

Currently, I only received two. Of the four left, two are games, and they're both way over due.

You and me...have different definitions of "failed project". :-/ Technically if a Kickstarter project doesn't meet its timeline then it has failed. If it happens to finish at all on the originally donated money most contributors will probably be happy,... If it doesn't finish or it requires additional funding not in the original plan then it's a failure without question. Time is malleable, but only so much. If it takes them too long the backers will have long forgotten about it and odds are the output will be outdated before it's released...

Unless like some they make millions and deliver fuck all and come back asking for more. I digress... Who here is stupid enough to contribute to Feminist propaganda? ???

Erin Maus

Extrapolating, I'll have a 200% success rate backing Kickstarters in a couple years.

Seeing as this is a new page, it reminds me I also want to use this video as a reply (somewhere) at some point:

video

Bruce Perry
jmasterx said:

You're grammar is repulsive.

Its not mine :)

video

Gideon Weems

Agh my stomach hurts now! :D

Has anyone here invested in a Kickstarter project?

I've backed Free software on Indiegogo... which was basically a platform for donating, now that I think about it. I opted out of having a prize sent, as I wished such money to be used to fund development.

... When's Allegro going to do something like that?

amarillion

Has anyone here invested in a Kickstarter project?

Two times. One time for "at the gates", which got funded. I have high hopes, but it is still vaporware at this point.

The other time was ChemCaper, an educational chemistry-based RPG. It got funded and I played halfway through the android version. It's an interesting thing from an educational perspective, but it falls short from a pure game / fun perspective.

There are a couple of kickstarter projects I wish I had backed :) FTL for example, would have been totally worth it.

Chris Katko

Almost all of my kickstarter projects were either:

- Vaporware. (Interstellar Marines)

- I've lost interest waiting 5-6 years for the concept to come out. By time they do come out, I don't even care. (War for the Overworld, Galactic Princess, Project Zomboid)

Kickstarter has become a scam that lets consumers fit all of the risk while businesses use consumer money to merely raise a round of funding before selling out to a corporation. It's also allowed people who have NO BUSINESS being developers put together a snazzy video and grab money but they have no experience or the fortitude required to complete a game.

Yooka-Laylee is looking to be a rare gem. FTL was amazing but I didn't back it at the time.

Nowadays, unless I'm fine giving away free money, I only back things that have experienced, proven developers at the helm. I backed Kingdom Come: Deliverance and it's looking amazing. I also strongly support the developer's anti-PC stances. (He grew up in an actual communist regime and is strongly opposed to modern liberals who undermine the freedom of speech and open debate.)

bamccaig

I totally have contributed to IM. I forget how though (E-mail searches for kickstarter turn up nothing). They have made a game and it is available on Steam, and you should have a license if you have contributed... It's more of a deathmatch shooter right now though, I think. They have also made various demos... Yes, it's coming up quite short of what we want, but I digress. The only thing that pisses me off is that it's based on Unity or something and the Linux performance is atrocious! I'm lucky to get 3 or 5 FPS.

amarillion

Kickstarter has become a scam that lets consumers fit all of the risk while businesses use consumer money to merely raise a round of funding before selling out to a corporation

I think this is not different from what it was in the beginning. Kickstarter is an alternative means to venture capital, but the goal is no different, it never was.

Quote:

Nowadays, unless I'm fine giving away free money, I only back things that have experienced, proven developers at the helm.

Of course this is always good advice, right from the beginning of kickstarter.

I think you're seeing Kickstarter as having moved away from its humble beginnings. Perhaps instead, you perceived a rosy glow at the start that has worn off.

Bruce Perry

I find I return to Kickstarter after not visiting for a while, and the projects I want to fund have been locked! Can we extend the lock timeout?

Chris Katko

I think you're seeing Kickstarter as having moved away from its humble beginnings. Perhaps instead, you perceived a rosy glow at the start that has worn off.

That's true of me, sure. But the point I'm making is how the market has adapted to exploit it. It's such a viable revenue stream that "to kickstart" has become a new verb that everyone knows. A household brand name. Friends, extended-family, and almost-strangers have talked about "kickstarting" projects, and they never would normally fund a venture using someone else's money. It's not as intimidating as going to a proper investor, some big banker guy behind a desk who can call your phone and ask about your progress, it's just random people online without a face.

Ant Simulator canceled after crowdfunding money spent on liquor and strippers

Now this doesn't mean everyone is exploiting it (in the bad sense of the word). Professionals, and hard-working new-comers with modest expectations can succeed. But too often people under-estimate the cost, time, and pain it takes to complete a game and Kickstarter is the next generation of technology that makes it appear less intimidating than it should be.

I've discussed with family/friends my strategy for a Kickstarter. I would self-fund at least 50% of the game before going to Kickstarter. (If the game isn't worth my money, than it isn't worth anyone elses.) Then, use Kickstarter money to refund my investment as well as fund the rest of the development using my past work as a certain guarantee of quality, expectations, and commitment on my part.

bamccaig

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I like liquor and strippers. :D

jmasterx

#Leverton2016
#MakeAmericaCodeAgain

amarillion

Ant Simulator canceled after crowdfunding money spent on liquor and strippers

Ha, that's a good one.

I think I generally agree with you.

Here is a different way of looking at it. Kickstarter is also a bit like a church collection to help a community member, except it's not for a local community. I'm sure you could find examples of abuse of these types of collections that are at least as bad as the one you linked to :)

But you make a good point about the anonymity of it all. That makes it easier to exploit. I guess with kickstarter you have be extra careful compared to your local church collection

l j

Liquor and strippers are the last thing I'd waste my money on. Pretty much paying to defile yourself, probably okay in the short run, worst choice in the long run.

bamccaig

But you make a good point about the anonymity of it all. That makes it easier to exploit. I guess with kickstarter you have be extra careful compared to your local church collection

You make it sound like church members know where their money goes. ???

Bruce Perry

When you start thinking about the word 'church' - especially if you're British and the 'ur' is just a uniform vowel sound without a distinctive 'r' tone to it - what you end up with is two 'ch' sounds with a blurry nothingy sound in between them. Is it just me that thinks that's funny?

I had a Greek colleague whose 'ch' sound wasn't right and sounded more like 'ts'. So he would say 'tsuhts'.

jmasterx

Thou shall not lock >:(

Bruce Perry

It's all right, we were going to come back after TINS :)

GullRaDriel

That is.

Bruce Perry

That is what? ;)

GullRaDriel

After TINS, coming back we are.

Bruce Perry

So you mean something like "That is true"? What would you have said in French where you said "That is"? Presumably not just "C'est" :)

Anyone else suffering a post-TINS crash of sorts? I think I slept around 3 p.m. and woke up around 10, and now it's 1 a.m. and I feel a bit aimless. Then again, my plan was to go to bed again around now and be fit for work in the morning, so maybe I'll be able to sleep again soon :)

MiquelFire

Yea, I spent the day just laying about the house, catching up on stuff.

GullRaDriel

Bruce: c'est ça ^^

Bruce Perry

I guess we'd say "That's it" :)

GullRaDriel

Acknowledged ;-p

Peter Hull

Maybe
"That's right!"
in this context?

GullRaDriel

Or just "Right !"

;-p

Bruce Perry

Libertarian or authoritarian?

GullRaDriel

I once read that one somewhere:

"I am neither left wing nor right wing. I am middle-of-the-bird." Pat Paulsen

And that one too:

"An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy.
“It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.” He continued, “The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person, too.”
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”
The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.” (searched and found here for reference)

jmasterx

President Leverton is a looser with no onion. >:(

GullRaDriel

HAHAHA 8-)

Johan Halmén

- What do you think about drugs?
- I have no opiumion.

GullRaDriel

Nice one two.

Rodolfo Lam

Well it's been 3 days since the last post. This cannot continue.

Is anyone into GA aircrafts? I fly a Piper PA28-161 occasionally while building hours to become an Airline pilot some day. Makes you really see how small yet big Earth is.

bamccaig

I wish I could fly. Used to dream of being a military pilot when I was a child. I don't think it's really worth all the hassle, let alone the moral dilemma, but I would love to get into ultralights or at least hang-gliding as a hobby. I can't afford it right now, but maybe some day... Skydiving is probably on the top of my bucket list.

I ride a motorcycle which is like flying 3 feet off the ground. :P

Sevalecan

Well it's been 3 days since the last post. This cannot continue.

Is anyone into GA aircrafts? I fly a Piper PA28-161 occasionally while building hours to become an Airline pilot some day. Makes you really see how small yet big Earth is.

I'm working on getting my pilot's license right now. I fly in a 1975 Cessna 172M for my training. My dad has that and a Piper Comanche 260B (PA24) that he rents as part of his business, so after I get my private, I want to get my high performance and complex rating in that plane.

Gonna have my instructor come down and do my cross country flights next weekend hopefully and then I'll just have to take the written and practical and whatnot to get my license.

bamccaig

I really wanna pilot an F-15C. :D

Rodolfo Lam
Sevalecan said:

I'm working on getting my pilot's license right now. I fly in a 1975 Cessna 172M for my training. My dad has that and a Piper Comanche 260B (PA24) that he rents as part of his business, so after I get my private, I want to get my high performance and complex rating in that plane.

That's really cool! I got my private last year on October, then got my instrument rating this year on April. Currently I'm doing cross country flights for the commercial licence. About 60 hours to go.

Astonishingly, the entire production of VFR Sectional Charts on my country ended last year (some crazy admin problems) so everyone on my flight school now uses B&W copies. Sometimes I wish the Aviation infrastructure here were as good as over there in USA. Still, you has to work with what you have and that aside, nothing beats the joy of going up to the sky. The view is always amazing.

bamccaig said:

I really wanna pilot an F-15C. :D

You are not the only one hehehe... That's one of my favorite aircrafts on the Sim.

Johan Halmén

I bet any flying is fun. But isn't hang gliding #1, if you really want to feel like flying? All the rest is like the fun of controlling an aircraft.

bamccaig

{"name":"F-15_takeoff.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/8\/6\/86d9c5adc500488dacb61cbf8d6876b6.jpg","w":525,"h":342,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/8\/6\/86d9c5adc500488dacb61cbf8d6876b6"}F-15_takeoff.jpg

Going Grocery Shopping

I imagine that hang gliding must be about the most fun way to "fly". Well, second most fun. I bet that "wingsuit" flying is probably more fun still, but probably lasts only a couple of minutes and has more in common with "falling" than "flying".

{"name":"Ocean_Wingsuit_Formation_%286366966219%29.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/2\/f\/2fbfb029753f1dd25494bffcd1fb64e9.jpg","w":1024,"h":566,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/2\/f\/2fbfb029753f1dd25494bffcd1fb64e9"}Ocean_Wingsuit_Formation_%286366966219%29.jpg

The Crazy Ones Fly 10 Feet Above A Rock Face

Gideon Weems

“The one you feed.”

Good story.

Johan Halmén

Yep. Wing suit is in one sense more flying than hang gliding. But the speed is too high. Though the speed is one fun factor in itself. Says one with absolutely no personal experience.

Bruce Perry
GullRaDriel

Hell yeah Gideon ^^ it's always nice to see ya hanging around here :-)

Gideon Weems

You, too! I think I've recovered from the butt-hurt that was a failed TINS outing. Petering out at 90% is what hurts the most.

GullRaDriel

Wasn't it at least 80% playable ?

Chris Katko

Why not finish the last 20% and post it? We'll still play it.

Mark Oates

Why not finish the last 20% and post it? We'll still play it.

totally!

Elias

Or even just post the 80% version :) [considering finishing the last 20% of a game usually takes 80% of the time...]

Bruce Perry

How could you Pyotr out at 90% and not upload something? :o

Oh well - there's always next time :)

Johan Halmén

When will next Speedhack be?
[checks a.cc start page]
Oh, I see. In 2011.

jmasterx

Happy 6/9

(Get it, 69)

All non-americans be like: What's so special about 9/6?

Bruce Perry

The Japanese appreciate it, since their date format is 2016年6月9日 :)

Srsly, in terms of levels of logicalness, Japan > everywhere else > America >:( ;)

[EDIT]
I have an evil printer (HP Photosmart 5510):

  • It promises me "rewards" for using genuine cartridges, which turn out to be 5% off some service I definitely don't want. Thanks. I cannot tell you the degree to which the misuse of that word "reward" makes me angry.

  • It kept running out of inks I wasn't even using.

  • It just refused to print in black and white because it claimed there was something wrong with the colour cartridges. Textbook Oatmeal. Also it won't even tell me what the problem is.

Well I've finally had enough and I've ordered a Brother DCP-9015CDW (I got it cheaper than that though). It's a laser (actually LED) printer, which is good for me since I don't print very often and inkjets seem to have to waste ink just to keep themselves working (but HP are still evil for the other reasons). Also it does full duplex, which is a feature I really wished I had.

I'm going to work from home today until it arrives, which could be any time between 9 and 7 (yay) :)

By the way, I didn't choose the old HP one. It was a Christmas present or something. Aren't I a grateful bastard :)

Johan Halmén

Do you say fourth of July or July the fourth?

Bruce Perry

I make a conscious effort to say "the fourth of July", even though most people around me say "July the fourth", because I think the latter is an American wording and therefore naturally it needs to be resisted. I could be wrong of course. 8-)

Mark Oates

"Fourth of July" is a special holiday, like "Christmas" or "Boxing Day".

More frequently with any other date people will say "June 30th" or "August 2nd".

Johan Halmén

people will say "June 30th"

Is that "June thirtieth" or "June the thirtieth"? I'm not a native English speaker, but to me, either sounds very technical, clumsy and shortened, not very different from "nine-eleven", while "the thirtieth of June" would sound more like natural language.

I guess I'm just affected by Swedish, my mother tongue, where we say "den trettionde juni", not "juni den trettionde". Though I wouldn't be supprised if the latter would become more popular in Sweden, where they just love to destroy their language and replace everything with English idioms.

Bruce Perry

Mark, really? What I said reflects my approach to and understanding of any date, not just that one - yet you're saying that the one date which is particularly only relevant to Americans is the one date where people DON'T use what I understood to be the American wording :o

Johan, you talk as if you emigrated - where to? :)

Johan Halmén

Johan, you talk as if you emigrated - where to?

Nope. I'm born in Finland. Swedish is spoken in Sweden, Finland and Estonia. Only in Sweden it's the main language.

Rodolfo Lam

Just keeping the thread alive gentlemen... Keep doing whatever you were doing :)

GullRaDriel

It locks too soon !

Niunio

Thankyou Rodolfo. :)

Bruce Perry
bamccaig

(NSFW)

F1hGxgv.gif

That motorcycle though. :o:-*

Append:

Relevant:

{"name":"pIlZoonMOJDX.gif","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/8\/3\/831ec54ed9e87c4385a08a1140ceadc7.gif","w":384,"h":256,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/8\/3\/831ec54ed9e87c4385a08a1140ceadc7"}pIlZoonMOJDX.gif

Been there. Luckily I've avoided the parked car so far. The worst part is when you upload a GoPro video of your ride and share it with your girlfriend long forgetting that part and then realize your mistake when she gets angry. :(

Append:

I can do this for weeks. >:(

Yoga Pants

AKA: I Should Have Been A Yoga Instructor

giphy.gif

Are you guys familiar with these things? Girls just wear these things out. Like, outside. Like, to the mall. Presumably school. Greatest and worst invention ever.

Bruce Perry

This is bambams :)

{"name":"latest","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/5\/c57b9f8bb2f879ff604043ffcf56a75a.jpg","w":720,"h":480,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/5\/c57b9f8bb2f879ff604043ffcf56a75a"}latest

video

http://azumanga.wikia.com/wiki/Kimura

MiquelFire

Clearly the current topic has died, and I can't think of another one right now.

I got my PocketChip on Friday however. Now to figure what to do with it. Seems pretty powerful though. Can't wait for the combine firmware that will allow me to use both the PocketChip and the HDMI adapter.

jmasterx

O Thread! My Thread!

Chris Katko

I want to buy a thermal camera.

GullRaDriel

This morning I'm a walking dead. Last night music set repetition stopped so late that I wasn't home until 3:00 am. Alarm clocked at 7:00, and it.was.so.hard.
/mylife

jmasterx

Happy Canada Day, eh.

MiquelFire

I have a complaint! Why are the chips on credit cards so damn easy to break? For those who lived in areas where the chips were standard for over a decade, do they break often for you?

With the mag stripe, often times you can "fix" by using a plastic bag (Why it works I have no clue), but near as I can tell, not the case for chips.

Bruce Perry

I've been lucky myself.

But something that I do struggle with: trousers when you cycle a lot! Why do they break so often?

bamccaig

I have only had my chip "break" once. It literally cracked in half, along with the card surrounding it. I think just normal wear/tear from being put in and out of a wallet and sitting on it, etc. Not unreasonable. I think that the chip readers are far more vulnerable. I've been to several establishments where the cashier has to take my card and do it herself because the machine is finicky. And sometimes it just won't work at all.

We now have "contactless payment" (I can't figure out a more generic technology name/brand that applies universally) in most establishments. You just bring the non-chip end of your card into proximity of a reader and it pays without entering a pin number. Seems somewhat insecure, but I'm assuming that the banks/credit companies are assuming most of the risk (which will obviously get transferred to us, the customer)... But people don't care. Everybody uses them. They are extremely convenient. But you still have issues with them where they just don't work. Contactless is faster, but contactless + chip + pin is slower than just chip + pin. :P Also an RFID-blocking wallet is now mandatory for many cards, but it's hard to find a durable RFID-blocking wallet that won't break the bank.

MiquelFire

I wish the damage to my chip was visible.

You know, I haven't had a NFC card in a while. Seems the banks I deal with don't bother with that. The most I have is my phone.

Rodolfo Lam

The Pico-8 game console for the Pocket CHIP seems to be an interesting piece of software. It's a shame I don't know Lua or want to learn it.

MiquelFire

I think I might try to learn it. Give me a reason to use my Pocket CHIP.

bamccaig

Lua is pretty simple to learn... One of the easier languages. And it's neat.

Audric

Lua is interesting, and has good documentation. Learning Lua has taught me a lot of what Javascript can actually do. I only regret that it doesn't provide integer numbers, only floating point.

Erin Maus

Lua is my favorite dynamic language. It's small, fast, and simple without sacrificing expressiveness. And then there's LuaJIT, which is incredible all around.

If I had to do web development, it would be with Lua.

Audric said:

I only regret that it doesn't provide integer numbers, only floating point.

Lua 5.2 has integers!

Audric

Well, not really. You can recompile the library to use integers instead of floats, but then many standard libraries become silently useless, as all their inputs/outputs are in integers. Not fun for math.cos()

Erin Maus
Audric said:

Well, not really. You can recompile the library to use integers instead of floats, but then many standard libraries become silently useless, as all their inputs/outputs are in integers. Not fun for math.cos()

Lua does have native integer alongside floating-point as of 5.3 (see changes in readme). I mistakenly thought it was added in 5.2.

Niunio

I think we have lost the focus of this thread...

MiquelFire

Well, there's only so much you can say about the threads locking too soon. This is our protest thread about how long it takes from them to lock. We're in the talking with each other mode now.

Bruce Perry

So, who wants to hug Aaron's avatar? :)

MiquelFire

Nah, not cat enough for me.

bamccaig

Anybody tried this "Pokemon Go" game? Pokemon didn't come along until I was past the target age so I have no particular attachment to the idea, but nevertheless it sounds like it might be a fun way to kill time while out and about waiting on people or things... The install is "free" and the required permissions don't seem entirely unreasonable. The only problem is, the app says its incompatible with my Samsung Galaxy S5... I can't figure out why. Anybody know? Apparently people are acquiring APKs from third party mirrors and are able to install them and run them just fine, but I'm not sure if I want to extend my already stretched trust to a third party repository/APK...

Elias

I saw weird guys running all over the metro park yesterday staring at their phones. Normally when I do my daily walk there I'm the only person...

Anyway, I feel no desire to install the app myself.

Erin Maus

So, who wants to hug Aaron's avatar?

Ditto is my favorite ;D.

Story: I was playing Pokemon LeafGreen (first time playing the game, around 14? 16?). Wanted to get to the next town (Fuschia City) and avoid the trainers along the long stretch of path/road from the eastern entrance, so I went in the grass. First step into the grass a battle started, and in front of me was a smiling piece of recently chewed bubblegum.

In that stroke of luck and laziness, I had seen the most incredible Pokemon to ever exist.

Edgar Reynaldo

In the spirit of this thread, my TorontoCon thread got locked before we were done with it. So if you wanna come to Toronto, post here! It looks like Elias might be able to make it! I haven't heard back from Oates yet, and I sent him a PM a few days ago.

As for Pokémon Go, my friend showed me what you do - basically walk around a virtual world and try to catch pokemon with pokeballs. I can imagine I would get really bored with that really quickly.

bamccaig

I am now suspecting that the only reason Google Play Store tells me my phone is incompatible with PG is because it hasn't been released in Canada yet... So presumably I'll be able to try it when they release in Canada, if they can ever manage the server overhead to do it... I guess it wasn't a problem with my device after all.

I don't expect it'll be a fun game. It will probably be really lame. But I'm not interested in downloading it because I'm interested in the game... I'm interested in some way to pass time when I'm stuck "out" in a public place with nothing to do waiting for some event, like say I'm waiting for somebody to arrive or to finish something, just sitting on a bench in a mall... Normally I'll pull out of my phone and try to pass the time. This might be a neat way to do that. If it means I get to deprive other people of catching "pokemon" that might be entertaining too!

Bruce Perry

Why not download Akebi and learn some kanji instead? :)

Elias

@Edgar: Just booked! We'll be in the Country Inn & Suites Niagara Falls on 23rd - should be within walking distance of the falls and most things there :)

[edit:] Oh, just realized, since this is Canada... should I expect my phone to not work? Or is it close enough to the border that it will?

bamccaig

I wouldn't count on it working. At least, make sure roaming is off or it might work and cost a fortune... I live in a border city too (same concept, but a bit smaller). I'm not sure if I can get American towers from home, but I know that you can jump when you're by the river if you have roaming enabled (which is like <1 km from the border). I doubt it would cover the entire city though.

Rodolfo Lam

Talking about cellphone fees... How did USA end up having such overpriced data plans? Last time I checked you could end up paying more than $30.00 for a monthly plan.

Movistar here in Panamá offers a data only (calls prepaid) monthly plan of 1GB for $9.99. And when you travel anywhere in the Americas you can continue using that same data for a $5.00 daily fee on a opt-in basis.

It's a great deal if you know what specific days of your trip you will need the cellular data available.

How much can roaming cost right now for US carriers?

Elias

I paid about $5/month for 4GB back in Austria. Now I pay $50/month for 2GB. So yes, in the US you pay 10 to 20 times as much for mobile data :(

Anyway, according to Google the area where my hotel will be should be close enough to the border to still find a US signal (some posts say only if you stand on the roof though :P). But there's WIFI anyway.

Edgar Reynaldo

I subscribe to Verizon, and they have a Travel Pass, which allows you to use Canadian towers and service. It's charged by the day, but it will allow me access to their service.

Derezo

In Canada I have Rogers' flex data plan (typically 3GB for $50) and a Voip.MS account for texting/calls (~$2/mo). The data plan can be as cheap as $10 if I use less than 100mb, but I typically use 2GB or more.

Bruce Perry

I'm on something like £7 a month for 500 MB of data, 200 minutes of calls and pretty much unlimited text messages. I even get free calls to 0800 numbers :)

That was a SIM-only deal and I bought my phone separately. Are you guys talking about SIM-only or do you get a phone with those 'deals'?

bamccaig

I pay $50/mo. for 1 GB of data, unlimited calls in Canada, and unlimited texts. That is just the service. I paid $800 cash for my S5 on top of that.

Bruce Perry

Well, Canada and the USA both have a sparser population than the UK, so perhaps the infrastructure cost per person is greater?

Elias

Thanks a lot to Edgar and Mark, this was an awesome Allegro meetup in Niagara falls today! Despite run-ins with police and way to hot weather... :)

Polybios

The much-hated Brussels bureaucrats will ban roaming fees in the EU in 2017.

Were the police investigating your mind-control powers?

Bruce Perry

Ah yes, the fabled American police. It seems a lot more real when I hear that someone I know to be nice in person (you Elias - maybe it was Edgar or Mark who triggered them ;) [1]) has had a run-in with them ...

In this country, the only time I've had the police be nasty to me was when I actually did something wrong (cycling without lights), and even then, they waived their right to fine me because at least I had a non-working front light with me and had tried to display a back light on my backpack but it was pointing down :)

A passport control person once gave me an unhinged stare though. He looked like Jason Statham. I think it was in Germany.

P.S. At least we'll be in the EU long enough to benefit from that roaming ban. :-/

[EDIT]
I just re-read my post and realised how boring it is and how much value there is in sometimes saying less :-X Would you agree that I talk to much and never shut up? Mind you there are definitely people who are worse for this than I am, not mentioning names or anything. Must catch up with that person. For the thread's sake. Yeah.

References

  1. Totally jealous.
Elias

Well, in Canada things like pepper spray or drinking in public are illegal - so it's easy for a group of allegro.cc members to get in trouble :P

I think Mark will post a pictures, but Edgar requested to be photoshopped out for privacy concern reasons...

bamccaig

Drinking in public is only illegal if you get caught, particularly if you're out of control!

Derezo

Just use a Tim Hortons cup, that's how all Canadians drink in public. ;)

Johan Halmén
bamccaig said:

Drinking in public is only illegal if you get caught...

How exactly is this phrased in the law?

Derezo

Well, it's a fine.. so... basically if you don't get caught you don't have to pay it! ;D

Arthur Kalliokoski

10 month duration thread locks too soon?

Edgar Reynaldo

Here's a picture of us at a restaurant in Niagara. Mama mia or something?

{"name":"610478","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/2\/c2c9870b152ad11e6fb8236ca63e8c99.jpg","w":1024,"h":768,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/2\/c2c9870b152ad11e6fb8236ca63e8c99"}610478

Left to right : Elias, Andrea, Mark, Edgar

Arthur Kalliokoski

Somehow I tend to imagine members as looking at least somewhat like their avatar, in Edgars case I imagined him as the guy on the left...

MiquelFire

At least you don't have to guess too hard at what I look like with mine. It is my Mii after all. :P

bamccaig

You forgot to tag the Canadian sitting on the table.

Append:

Shameful. Finally an AllegroCon in Canada and none of the native born Canadians show up. :(

Elias

I like that picture :D

@bambams: The beer bottle is a native born Canadian!

Derezo
Elias said:

The beer bottle is a native born Canadian!

Molson married Coors from the US some years ago, so it's hardly even Canadian anymore either >:(

Elias

Oh no, so I actually had US beer? :o Anyway, it tasted good :) I also had some Canadian craft beer but I generally prefer non-craft beer, just more refined tastes in my experience :)

amarillion

Of the US beers, I like blue moon. Or is that also a craft beer?

LennyLen

in Edgars case I imagined him as the guy on the left...

That would be Doctor Who.

GullRaDriel

Meh.

Looks like it's a time to put a picture of your face. I finally can see how Mark & Edgar look ^^

Elias

I like Blue Moon, surprisingly - considering it's a wheat beer. My favorite beers are lagers, so whenever I'm not up to trying some craft I usually order Heineken. Not the best but often the closest thing they have on the menu :)

Edgar Reynaldo

Whenn I drink beer, which isn't often, I usually like dark beers like stouts and Guinness

bamccaig

I predominantly drink lagers, though I'm not overly versed or concerned with the type of beer. Molson Canadian is my go-to if I'm out since pubs/bars/restaurants don't carry the "cheap" stuff. If I'm in the US I revert to Budweiser or Bud Light (it's arbitrary). If I'm at a private residence (or anywhere really) I'll drink whatever is free. In my experience, the best beer is Carling (the Canadian lager variant, including its light variant if you want to get slightly less drunk by volume). Beer is best from a dark bottle. I'm not sure how common bottles are in the US, but it seems not very. Beer from a can just isn't the same, but it's better than no beer at all. But generally beer in the US is just different no matter what brand it is. I imagine the regulations very slightly. Living in a border city you can experience both readily.

LennyLen

Speaking of beer, does anyone else here use the Untappd app? If so, feel free to add me for recommendations. I'm LennyLen on there as well.

edit:

bamccaig said:

Beer is best from a dark bottle.

If being drunk from a bottle, then yes, dark brown bottles are the best as they cut out more light which can alter/damage the chemical structure of beer. Ideally though, drink beer on tap/draught as kegs are (usually) always fresher and eliminate light contamination altogether. Also, if the brewer has specific glasses for the beer, use them. This will ensure that the head on the beer is of the ideal size and consistency.

Bruce Perry

I downgraded both my computers from Windows 10 back to Windows 7 this week. One of them now has a non-functioning Visual Studio 2015, and every installation/repair/removal attempt using any version of the installer I have fails in a different, exciting way. I'm now doing a same-version in-place 'upgrade' in an attempt to repair the whole operating system. So much fun, but it'll be worth it for a prolonged Aero experience. ;D :o

SRSLY. Windows 10 actually has quite a few nice improvements to it and whatnot, but having those pretty glassy windows turned out to matter more to me. I mainly just feel sorry for Microsoft - how could they get it so, so wrong? :(

OnlineCop

Bruce: Be sure to install something like GWX Control Panel which will stop those Windows 7 "updates" which nag/force you to upgrade (back) to Windows 10.

MiquelFire

Actually, that's gone now. MS even removed it from Windows Update.

Never10 is a better program anyway to stop it.

Bruce Perry

Finally got Visual Studio working again. Read some of my story here ;)

What I didn't describe there is how I removed and tried to reinstall the .NET Framework, found that the Dell touchpad settings were wrong and the application for editing them now crashed, did a fresh install of Windows 7, copied my old user directory back in, found out that the Dell touchpad settings wouldn't run without the .NET Framework, found that .NET Framework 4 froze installing just like on the old install, and - wahoo! - fudged around with directories from the Windows 7 installation DVD maintenance command prompt to get my old Windows install back, installed .NET Framework 4.6.2 or some such, and graaaaaadually fixed Visual Studio as described in the link.

Yeaaaah Windows 7 <3

Johan Halmén

how could they get it so, so wrong?

Experience?

Edgar Reynaldo

I don't have many gripes about Windows 10. Overall I like it. It does what it's supposed to, and for the most part it stays out of my way. One thing I hate is the automatic restarts. They let you "schedule" them for a little while, but then they give you a cutoff and force you to restart your computer. All due to Windows Update. I don't use the Windows app store, and all the junk they put on the start menu just gets in the way. So I use desktop shortcuts instead of the start menu. My desktop still isn't so cluttered I can't get anything done, and the desktop shortcut works for most purposes, even if it loads a little bit slowly. I'm not terribly fond of the way windows are grouped on the taskbar, but it is better than having one taskbar button for every single window there is open. That gets a little out of hand. For the most part it just does what I want. Have only had a small handful of bluescreens, and I think that was due to buggy Microsoft Word in Office 2015 doing something it shouldn't have.

Still can't stand MSVS. I love my CodeBlocks, and I'm sticking with it.

Bruce Perry

In fairness, MSVS for C++ is a mess. For C# it's better, and that's what I mostly use it for.

The taskbar button grouping system is the same in Windows 7 and 8 as in 10 - did you come from one of those, or from something else? Do you have an OS in mind that has a better scheme?

Edgar Reynaldo

As per the taskbar app grouping, I don't mind. I came from Vista, where there was one button for every window, so it's an improvement for me. But what I don't like about it is the preview pane. Sometimes it shows tabs, sometimes it shows windows. I'd rather it just showed the windows that are open. But it treats tabs like they are windows. Perhaps that is application specific behaviour though. I noticed that in Windows 10, SeaMonkey "forgets" screen contents and I have to double restore the window before it shows everything again. Same thing with FireFox. It may be a D3D device lost issue, I don't know.

Bruce Perry

The tabs thing does seem to be a decision the application makes. I think I saw it in some other browser (Firefox?) a long time ago. I didn't like it either :)

MiquelFire

If Firefox does it, I had disabled it already and forgotten about it. I know at some point it was an option, and I can't remember if it's opt-in or opt-out.

Derezo

Windows 10 is kind of annoying because of the "apps" being separate from usual applications and getting that annoying window theme and behaviour. I don't use them on purpose and replace them with non-windows-app apps when needed, but things like opening the calculator and having it ask you for a rating just feels dumb. The theme in general is a step backwards in my opinion.

I find the new start menu less intuitive and clunkier to use, taking more clicks and occupying more screen real estate. I usually just hit the windows key and start typing what I want though, and that still works.

At work I'm still on Windows 7, but we're switching soon. The most annoying thing is that I love cubic explorer, but it doesn't work on Windows 10.

bamccaig

The start menu is definitely a clusterfuck, but fortunately you don't need it very often (well, I certainly don't working from the command line). I pin most applications to the taskbar. The rarely used ones can be found with search.

You still need hacks to change taskbar entries into icons with no text and without grouping instances. You needed a registry hack in Windows 7, but now you actually need a black magic executable to do it. In any case, I find that configuration preferable because it's less hover time to get where you're going and it takes up less space.

I don't know if people are forgetting or just don't care, but the absolute worst part about Windows 10 is that it spies on you and calls home regularly, the details of which are proprietary and secret... I use it at work where I generally care less that it spies on me. I do most of my private stuff in a Linux VM, though I imagine just capturing keystrokes and possibly mouse coordinates would be enough to reverse engineer plenty of data and behavior.

At home I don't even run Windows at the moment. I'm reluctantly running Ubuntu MATE for Valve's Ubuntu Steam support and MATE's superior desktop experience. I don't really have many complaints, aside from the fact that it might spy too by default (or if not Ubuntu then perhaps the proprietary drivers and codecs and software used to make things work so easily). Hopefully the Ubuntu MATE folks remove the call-home stuff (I think it was mainly part of Unity). It sounds like other official flavors don't include it so I bet unofficial flavors don't either. From the sounds of it, they've since resolved the privacy concerns, but I'm not sure I trust them unless the code is free (and I'm not sure that it is). I don't know that they could be as bad as Microsoft or Apple, but I'm still begrudged to settle for less than libre.

Derezo

The privacy issue with Windows 10 saddens me. I've heard you can get around it with a good firewall setup.

Bruce Perry
bamccaig said:

You still need hacks to change taskbar entries into icons with no text and without grouping instances. You needed a registry hack in Windows 7, but now you actually need a black magic executable to do it.

Do you really mean taskbar entries here? As I understand it, they default to icons without text in both OSes, and if you don't like the grouping, then, in Windows 7 at least, you can right-click the taskbar -> Properties -> Taskbar buttons: Never combine.

[EDIT] Oh, I see - then it shows labels, which you don't want.

bamccaig

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Correct. As an aside, I also encourage the use of "use small taskbar buttons" which will turn them into much smaller icons so you can fit many more on the screen. This is only practical if the default size runs onto a separate page with your screen and default workflow. Normally mine is fine with my monitor at work, but if I have my work laptop on the go then they do flow off the screen of the laptop display in the default size. Shrinking the icons helps them all remain visible (since I pin all regularly used applications, they take up space regardless of whether they're running or not).

Matthew Leverton

I care about Windows 10 as much as my new baby daughter does. ::)

Bruce Perry

She probably came with Windows 10 preinstalled ;)

bamccaig

Congratulations! ???

Niunio

Windows 7 is the new Windows XP... ::)

Rodolfo Lam

So in some years from now (and still on this thread) we will be talking about how Microsoft will just end support for Windows 7 if it is still a very good OS

Gideon Weems

I would love to go 15 years back in time and show the following to Microsoft:

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Mark Oates

Bump!

bamccaig

Good catch, Mark!

My latest news is two-fold. "Yesterday" (40 minutes ago) was my birthday, you bastards. Alas, work is crazy right now. I've worked 3 12-hour days in a row. I'm averaging 5 or 6 hours of sleep a night. I'm salary so I won't even get overtime pay. Blargh.

A week ago I ordered a Steam Controller online while drunk. I saved like CAD$5 on it so shrug. I also burned CAD$40 on virtual items in CS:GO. That I somewhat regret. I digress.

The controller wasn't expected to be delivered until next week, but alas they tried to deliver yesterday and my girlfriend managed to pick it up "today"! Which is my birthday! So that's pretty cool.

First impressions

  • Better aiming than a laptop track-pad.

  • Worse than a keyboard and mouse.

  • Probably slightly better than an analog stick, but harder to compare.

  • I did my initial testing in CS:GO.

* I was playing against bots, not humans.
* At first on "harmless" level. Then "easy" and "medium".
* I won each battle with bots, but the "medium" was noticeably hard. I had to strategize for my "handicap".
* In theory, you could do fairly well with one if you were skilled enough, but it probably won't change the world overnight.
* I'm curious what children will accomplish with it. They have younger, more eager brains.

I don't really regret it. I've wanted one since I heard about it and now I have one. It's not bad technology. I imagine with practice it will become more natural. I can say that I'm not disappointed with my performance using it. In my first 15 minutes I was doing half-good against bots. People with a mouse and keyboard would rape my face, but some of them do anyway after 9 years of experience. I think that a match against other people with a controller, regardless the type, might give the Steam Controller an advantage. Only time will tell..

MiquelFire

For me, the best use for the Steam Controller is when a game is keyboard only on PC, even though it was a port from console. And for games that natively supports controllers, but you can't reconfigure them.

BTW Bam, you try the gryo on the controller yet? It seems that might bring you even closer to mouse than the trackpad like thing you're mostly used already.

bamccaig

BTW Bam, you try the gryo on the controller yet? It seems that might bring you even closer to mouse than the trackpad like thing you're mostly used already.

No, I have not. I naively assume it will be useless similar to the "Wiimote" and "PlayStation Wand" or whatever. I can't imagine how you could have 360 X ~90 degrees of movement without the screen turning with you. Perhaps you could get used to using the gyro for precise adjustments though? In my experience with the PlayStation wand things, the computer picks up unintentional movements too and that screws you over.

MiquelFire

You don't point it at any screen. It works the same as how your phone detects how you're holding it. Three axis to play with... I'm going to assume it has a compass in it of sorts because when you hold it parallel to a table, you can tilt it back and front, left and right, AND it detects turning as if you have a steering wheel sticking out of your table.

I haven't played enough games to get used to the gyro yet, and when I tried it, it's annoying that the game I tried it with, left with two usable buttons to really use it. Don't want to use that unless you're aiming after all.

bamccaig

Strictly speaking I think that a "gyroscope" is able to detect rotations in any direction (including rotating horizontally on the y axis, as a compass needle might). So that much makes sense. I just fail to understand how this is supposed to be better to control a game whose view port is 2 dimensional and a mere sliver of the 3D space in the game world. Necessarily either you turn away from the view port or your motion is constrained preventing you from using the gyro for full control.

jmasterx

One year anniversary of this thread coming up on the 26th. We should do something special to celebrate. I'm so proud of us all >:(

Elias

There's still a chance it gets locked before that...

Niunio
jmasterx said:

One year anniversary of this thread coming up on the 26th. We should do something special to celebrate. I'm so proud of us all >:(

Yes, we're awesome. A logo would be nice.

Elias said:

There's still a chance it gets locked before that...

I'm not sure that would happen. May be the forum thread counter will overflow before that. Actually we're testing Matt's programming skills right now.

MiquelFire

Are we even close to a record in terms of number of posts yet?

bamccaig

I believe I recall thousand-post threads in the past so we probably aren't close to the record in terms of post count yet, but I suspect we're getting close in terms of length of time open (unless maybe they didn't automatically close in the beginning).

Gideon Weems

This is post #657. I wonder who will get the Post of the Devil.

Edgar Reynaldo

Not it. ;)

I'm waiting for post #777. :D

MiquelFire

You know... if Gideon's post is #657, then the posts are zero based... but the Post of the Devil number is using a one base numbering system... so post #665 is the Post of the Devil?

Mark Oates

You know... if Gideon's post is #657, then the posts are zero based... but the Post of the Devil number is using a one base numbering system... so post #665 is the Post of the Devil?

I think you're right, actually.

Edgar Reynaldo

Oates post is #661. You're off by one because you're not counting the OP. Gideon was reply #657. If you're going to nitpick, at least do it right.

Still not it. ;)

GullRaDriel

Hell, I would have loved to be the devil.

But I can't let the thread die >:(

Mark Oates

Not it!!

That would be funny if the thread died because nobody wanted to be #666. ;D

GullRaDriel

That can't be.

Bruce Perry

Yoink. 8-)

bamccaig

>:(

Gideon Weems

Sniped!

video

Onewing

Ha! This is the first time I've seen this thread. I never look in this section of the forums. I feel I've been missing out. :'(

Bruce Perry

Welcome! Bambams will show you around :)

bamccaig

This should pretty much sum it up:

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MiquelFire

Whatever the source of that image is, it looks REALLY poorly made.

Edgar Reynaldo

It does what it is supposed to.

EDIT
101 I could watch that internet fight gif all day long. xD

Niunio

That gif with that Iron Maiden music is just EPIC. Some parts are actually synchronised!

bamccaig

Thank you for ^ that. I have flash blockers that prevent it from loading on-load, but I see what you mean. :)

Gideon Weems

Shh... nobody say a thing...

jmasterx

Shh... nobody say a thing...

BamBam is an SJW >:(

Edgar Reynaldo

I don't know what SJW means. >:(

Nor do I want to. >:(

Mark Oates
Quote:

I don't know what SJW means. >:(

Nor do I want to. >:(

Basically all you need to know is that it's what bambam is.

bamccaig

Sexy Jazzy Wallflower 8-)

I you knew what an SJW really was you wouldn't call me one unless you were defective. ::)

Elias

A SJW is someone who thinks they are something but really are the opposite. So maybe bambams sort of is one.

Polybios

Now I don't know whether you mean bambam is nothing (as opposed to something) or a feminist if we suppose that this was the opposite of an anti-feminist. How confusing.

Mark Oates
Elias said:

A SJW is someone who thinks they are something but really are the opposite. So maybe bambams sort of is one.

;D;D;D

bamccaig

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>:( :'(

Rodolfo Lam

Soo... how is it that you know what is the number of your post? I have a.cc configured to show unlimited posts, if that affects something. Now don't tell me I ended up with the 666 one please xD

bamccaig

Based on the index "replies" count at the time. Bruce Perry got 665 replies (which would be 666 total "posts" in the thread). I got the 666 reply. You're way too late. :D

Bruce Perry

And Boobuigi got the 667th reply, which would be 666 in a 0-indexed array that excludes the original post :)

Mark Oates

My understanding of 666 is that the curse lies in the 666th thing, and not necessarily things that are labeled 666.

So the 1st post would be the 1st thing, the 2nd would be the 2nd thing, regardless of being 0-indexed.

That would make both the 666th post and the 666th reply cursed. Both would qualify depending on how you look at it. But the 667th reply, being 0-indexed, would not qualify.

Edgar Reynaldo

It's not cursed. ::) It's the mark of the beast. That's Satan's number. It is also sometimes attributed to Emperor Nero.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_the_Beast#Nero

You can read about it in Revelations 12-14.

Revelations 13:9-18 KJV said:

9 If any man have an ear, let him hear.

10 He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity: he that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and the faith of the saints.

11 And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon.

12 And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him, and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed.

13 And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men,

14 And deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast; saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live.

15 And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.

16 And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:

17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

18 Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.

Those that take the mark of the beast will be punished by God. See Revelations 14.

Revelations 14:9-11 KJV said:

9 And the third angel followed them, saying with a loud voice, If any man worship the beast and his image, and receive his mark in his forehead, or in his hand,

10 The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb:

11 And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of his name.

Elias
Quote:

And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of his name.

Oh no. Poor Bruce and bambams :(

Bruce Perry

Proof by contradiction of religion being a load of nonsense:

If bringing up religion is the only way to keep this thread open, then there must be another way.

8-)

Edgar Reynaldo

You guys brought religion into it when you brought up 666. That's where it came from.

And if religion is the only way to keep this thread open, this forum is lamer than I thought.

Bruce Perry

Oh dear. I thought it was obvious I was just trolling :-/

Edgar Reynaldo

Oh dear. I thought it was obvious I was just trolling :-/

You forgot to put on your troll face. :/ I didn't recognize you. ;)

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Proof by contradiction of religion being a load of nonsense:

Is this nonsense? It perfectly describes what happens every time someone here brings up the Bible. It's a moral story. By all means, please show me how it's inaccurate or unapplicable or inappropriate or untrue or how it contradicts itself.

Mark Chapter 4

Mark 4 English Standard Version (ESV)

The Parable of the Sower

4 Again he began to teach beside the sea. And a very large crowd gathered about him, so that he got into a boat and sat in it on the sea, and the whole crowd was beside the sea on the land. 2 And he was teaching them many things in parables, and in his teaching he said to them: 3 “Listen! Behold, a sower went out to sow. 4 And as he sowed, some seed fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured it. 5 Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and immediately it sprang up, since it had no depth of soil. 6 And when the sun rose, it was scorched, and since it had no root, it withered away. 7 Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. 8 And other seeds fell into good soil and produced grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold.” 9 And he said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

The Purpose of the Parables

10 And when he was alone, those around him with the twelve asked him about the parables. 11 And he said to them, “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables, 12 so that

“‘they may indeed see but not perceive,
and may indeed hear but not understand,
lest they should turn and be forgiven.’”

13 And he said to them, “Do you not understand this parable? How then will you understand all the parables? 14 The sower sows the word. 15 And these are the ones along the path, where the word is sown: when they hear, Satan immediately comes and takes away the word that is sown in them. 16 And these are the ones sown on rocky ground: the ones who, when they hear the word, immediately receive it with joy. 17 And they have no root in themselves, but endure for a while; then, when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately they fall away.[a] 18 And others are the ones sown among thorns. They are those who hear the word, 19 but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and it proves unfruitful. 20 But those that were sown on the good soil are the ones who hear the word and accept it and bear fruit, thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold.”

19 When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what has been sown in his heart. This is what was sown along the path.

MiquelFire

So a game I was interested had a contest on their forums in which you could win a press preview key so you can play early. I somehow won with 2 votes (and one of those votes was me voting myself). I'm curious to know how many keys he had at the ready to release for early access.

Polybios

I think we should make a game about bible quotations.

Bruce Perry

So, as usual, I won't try and argue against your religion but I do ask you to respect my choice not to believe and don't try and insinuate that it will adversely affect me in any way.

But I'll show you how to recognise my earlier post as a troll :)

Proof by contradiction of religion being a load of nonsense:

If bringing up religion is the only way to keep this thread open, then there must be another way.

So, this is almost a proof by contradiction, but if it proves anything, it only proves that bringing up religion is not the only way to keep this thread open. In fact it probably doesn't prove that because the assertion that "there must be another way" isn't justified.

It certainly doesn't prove that religion is a load of nonsense, but I guess you have to think like a mathematician (and have seen proofs by contradiction before) to see that and therefore recognise the troll. A proof by contradiction goes, "Let's suppose the opposite is true; now we find a contradiction, and thereby we know that the opposite isn't true." For example, sqrt(2) can't be expressed as p/q for two integers, because if you did that, you can prove that p and q are both even, which contradicts the fact that the fraction could then always be simplified until one is odd.

Edgar Reynaldo

If the moon is made of cheddar, then hell must not exist.

Proof by contradiction??? Whatever.

I'll respect your right to forsake eternal life when you respect my right not to have my religion called nonsense.

bamccaig

Neither of these things are "rights". :-/ Damn all of your gods and spaghetti monsters! >:(

Bruce Perry

Fair point - I guess I deserved the insinuation - this time ;) And Islam is in much more dire need of being challenged than Christianity is.

bambams, you just damned yourself ;D

Mark Oates

phew! My concerns that this thread might have lost steam are no more! ;D

beoran

This kind of goes to show that a thread can go on here without getting locked if there is enough interest in keeping it alive. Maybe that is the key then to keep a topic going: you have to to raise enough intrest in it somehow.

Onewing

respect my choice not to believe

I'm curious, agnostic or atheistic? Were you always that way or did you shift into this position at one point or over time? Tell me to shut up if I'm prying too much. :D

I was raised in the Bible Belt, but I try to be open-minded. Religious texts are written by humans so that opens them all up to falsities. I imagine I'm shifting to agnostic theist. :)

Edgar Reynaldo

For bambams...

Exodus 20:5-6 said:

I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.

bamccaig

For Edgar...

When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

Bruce Perry

I wouldn't like to say whether I'm agnostic or atheist. However, I think I have two key characteristics that brought me to my current view. The first is that I tend to think very precisely; natural languages are as rigorous as programming languages for me. With this, I noticed contradictions and inconsistencies where perhaps others let it wash over them and instead noticed either a confidence and safety in the way things were preached, or a safety in numbers because enough other people believed.

The second is that I consciously notice psychological effects things have on me, and at church, I felt shamed and didn't find that acceptable.

So, despite having gone to church in a time of loneliness and misery after years of rejection, and having wanted to give it every possible chance, and despite the congregation being full of nice people, the actual church experience as I underwent it pushed me away.

This is despite definitely having been brought up in a Christian culture. I went through infant school and came out with no clear distinction in my mind between bible stories and (do I need to say 'non-biblical' here, Edgar?) history.

Relatedly, I always wanted to believe in ghosts but couldn't honestly say I'd ever seen one, nor compelling evidence of one. In this case I find it unfortunate, since some of the best stories are ghost stories.

Back to agnostic vs atheist: certainly I believe that every possible religion we have on this planet was created by people and is subject to survival of the fittest just like animals: if a religion is popular, it's because it contains mechanisms that help it spread. This could be positive (they offer a lot of value) or negative (they brainwash, or they were forced upon people by dictators or some such), but either way, it's clear to me that these things are a human creation and have nothing to do with why the universe is here or other philosophical questions like that. So I'm atheist if we are talking about world religions, but agnostic in the sense that we don't actually know why the universe is here and we shouldn't just say there's nothing to it beyond what we can see.

Onewing

Well said. Appreciate your thought process.

I like to take religion out of the equation and ask myself: are we here because of a series of events that played out over a long period time or is there some entity that exists in our current unknown who is connected to us somehow? At that, the best I can do is choose one to believe in and make it known that I clearly don't know the answer to that question.

I've been stewing on that for a while and what exactly that means for each path.

Edgar Reynaldo
bamccaig said:

For Edgar...

Stephen F Roberts, alt.atheism [freelink.wildlink.com] said:

When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

I dismiss all other "gods" because they're not worth worshipping. I know from experience the only true God is the LORD. I fully believe there are other "gods" out there, but as far as I'm concerned they're simply devils in disguise. Satan himself disguises himself as an angel of light.

12 And what I am doing I will continue to do, in order to undermine the claim of those who would like to claim that in their boasted mission they work on the same terms as we do. 13 For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. 14 And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. 15 So it is no surprise if his servants, also, disguise themselves as servants of righteousness. Their end will correspond to their deeds.

This goes out to you too, Bruce. Your experience in church was less than positive, and for that I am sorry. But you don't have to go to church to worship God, or to find acceptance. And you find God by seeking him with all your heart, and he will reveal himself to you. He sent his Son Jesus, his Living Word, to testify to himself. God is found in the Bible, and only coincidentally at some churches.

11 For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. 12 Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. 13 You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart. 14 I will be found by you, declares the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, declares the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile.

The second is that I consciously notice psychological effects things have on me, and at church, I felt shamed and didn't find that acceptable.

So, despite having gone to church in a time of loneliness and misery after years of rejection, and having wanted to give it every possible chance, and despite the congregation being full of nice people, the actual church experience as I underwent it pushed me away.

If you feel shame, it's either because you've done wrong, or because you haven't forgiven yourself for doing so. Jesus taught the forgiveness of sin upon repentance, and where sin is forgiven, it is no more, and should no longer weigh upon you. Jesus came to set us free, not to put us in chains.

The Truth Will Set You Free

31 So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, 32 and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” 33 They answered him, “We are offspring of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone. How is it that you say, ‘You will become free’?”

34 Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. 35 The slave does not remain in the house forever; ithe son remains forever. 36 So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. 37 I know that you are offspring of Abraham; yet you seek to kill me because my word finds no place in you. 38 I speak of what I have seen with my Father, and you do what you have heard from your father.”

Rodolfo Lam

Let me change the topic slightly...

Does anyone in the world right now is actually using or thinking to use the UWP API? Specifically the C++ side.

I got interested on it, but found that the only real documentation available is directly from Microsoft. There is not a single book or web guide available about the subject.

Am I alone? Hello? Is it dead on arrival? Will Allegro ever support it as it currently supports WIN32?

MiquelFire

You use Windows 10? Well, I won't be able to play with whatever you built with UWP because I'm still on 7

Bruce Perry

Oh give it up, Edgar.

I tried Windows 10, didn't like the aesthetics, didn't appreciate the feeling that Microsoft think they have a better idea of what I want to do than I do, and went back to Windows 7. This is true even on my home computer where I have 32 GB of which Windows 7 Home is only willing to use 16.

I know I'm not alone with this, so I would urge everyone to continue targeting Windows 7. :)

Rodolfo Lam

Ok...Guess I'll pretend that I never talked about UWP and that it does not exist xD, seems no one else cares about it so it is not worth the effort.

Move along people, next subject please. Thread will not remain open by itself

Johan Halmén

What things in Windows 7 were broken, which Windows 10 fixed?

Bruce Perry

Call-home functionality :)

On a more serious note, here are some of the benefits I noticed upgrading to Windows 10:

  • All Windows 10 editions will use some number of TB of memory if you have it (contrast with Windows 7 Home which refuses to use more than 16 GB).

  • When you edit environment variables containing lists of paths, you get a nice editor with a list and Add/Edit/Remove/Browse buttons and whatnot. However, you can also get this on Windows 7 by installing something like RapidEE.

  • You can have multiple desktops, although it felt a bit weird to me.

  • I think there's a 'disable all notifications' mode, and although I can immediately see the benefit, I didn't really get into a situation where I wanted to try it out. You can also deal with this in Windows 7 by closing the programs that are notifying you (mainly e-mail).

That's all I can think of at the moment, and I think the final straw with Windows 10 was when I tried to copy and paste a number out of the calculator in 'programming' mode, and it put left-to-right directives in the copied string, which Visual Studio didn't accept and also didn't make visible. Well done Microsoft. ::) For completeness, here are some more gripes I had with Windows 10:

  • Ugly. I don't want everything to be rectfill();.

  • Resizing windows: the cursor has to be within the window outline at the top, but outside on the other sides. It's just not consistent. There needs to be a visible border for dragging.

  • Too many places where Microsoft shoves content down your throat. My computer's job is to help me do what I want to do, not serve as a portal for Microsoft to push me around. Incidentally I have this gripe with much of the modern Internet and if anything, it has taught me the value of time off the grid. :)

Polybios

Call-home functionality

My first encounter with Windows 10 was when a not-so-tech-savvy friend phoned me while he was doing the upgrade (I don't remember whether intentionally or not). He asked me "what boxes to check" during installation and this way he read me all the privacy-related settings over the phone. It was a really long list and I was like "WTF? I didn't see any of those in Windows 7".

When I've worked with it I've found it ridiculous that there's basically two variants of control panel. That means you have to look at two places when you're looking for a specific setting. Didn't spend much time with it, so maybe the brilliance just went past me.

bamccaig

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Windows_Platform#Use_as_gaming_platform

*cough*

The only use for it is as evidence that nothing has changed.

Johan Halmén

I need a tool for merging several pdf files into one. After searching, I read somewhere that Windows 10 includes something for that. But then I found a tiny simple application that does the same. So I'm sticking with Win 7.

Bruce Perry

To merge several PDF files into one:

  • Go into your account settings.

  • Set Posts Per Page to Unlimited.

  • Save as PDF once more.

Just sorry to hear you spent so much time saving 29 separate PDFs before you discovered this option 8-)

Johan Halmén

I had very long hair. Once I went to sleep straight after sauna, without using any conditioner. I woke up with rasta hair.

Dreadlocks too soon.

Bruce Perry

Happy birthday! \ö/

Turns out posting to this particular thread from my ageing Android phone is quite a challenge ;o

Gideon Weems

Story time. Long ago, a village in Africa was terrorized by wild monkeys. Each night, they would ransack the villagers' homes--all except for that of the village baker. Curious, the chief approached the baker and asked him why.

"Bread blocks baboon."

GullRaDriel

Dear "Thread locks too soon", I'll never give you up.
8-)

OnlineCop

When designing my computer for VR, I specifically opted for the minimum-specs system and OS so I could ensure that the game still worked consistently for others with the same minimum spec setup. The only spec I didn't leave at the minimum was the RAM, since I need more for development. But I had a bit of a time finding a Windows 7 Pro disk that didn't cost just as much as a Windows 8/10 disk (finally found a good physical copy on Bonanaza for under 30 bucks).

I hated the feel of Windows 8 as soon as I sat down to it, and only touched Windows 10 in store kiosks, so I'll be staying with 7 until (and possibly after) its EOL. It kinda sucks that I can't do some of the cooler games that I've seen (regular and VR) because they require UWP, but I think I can live without them for the time being.

Bruce Perry

Gull, was that a rickroll? ;)

OnlineCop - I want your keyboard <3

jmasterx

Thread.Poke();

bamccaig

Yesterday my finacee and I learned how to make homemade pasta sauce. Aside from being a bit watery, the result was very promising. However, now my wrist is killing me and I suspect it's a result of stirring the sauce for an hour or so... As a programmer, obviously any wrist pain worries me considerably...

Edgar Reynaldo

Oh noes! Bam's got limp wrist syndrome! Whatever shall we do without our fearless BamBam??? You've got to give up pasta sauce, and food, and your girlfriend immediately, and come back to your senses. You belong with us bambams!

Polybios

I've just removed about 7000 lines of the most horrible, very old code from my project. Deleting something can feel so rewarding. 8-)

bamccaig said:

stirring the sauce for an hour or so

:o What kind of pasta sauce was that?

bamccaig

It's supposed to cook all night ideally (the longer the better), but we only cooked it for 6 or 7 hours give or take... We were visiting her aunt and uncle who taught us the process. So naturally we didn't want to leave our pot of sauce as a burden to their kitchen... I stirred for an hour as we prepared it in parts and tried to get it boiling... It took about that long to prepare all the batches (remember, we made about 14 litres and the tools were not as large as the pot). I stirred it primarily to avoid burning it to the bottom of the pot... Lucky I did because even stirring the entire time the heat was above minimum we still ended up with a somewhat charred bottom to the pot.. Fortunately, it was a thin layer and it came off pretty easily... Otherwise, you might as well throw the pot away. Alas, it appears to be an aluminum pot so it isn't quite as strong or heat tolerant as we might prefer. Her aunt has a heavy "steel" pot that is probably better suited to the job. In any case, it should be pretty similar to an Italian sauce, but if there are any residents from the "homeland" (i.e., Italy) present (I seem to recall a few) your own perspective is welcome...

Derezo
bamccaig said:

Yesterday my finacee and I learned how to make homemade pasta sauce. Aside from being a bit watery, the result was very promising.

I started taking Taekwondo recently and they're having a speghetti sauce competition. I registered to enter a sauce, as I've made a number of great sauces in the past and figured I'd have a shot. Apparently there's a trophy :o

Gideon Weems

One of my most productive days was throwing away 1,000 lines of code.

By my math, Polybios is seven times more productive than Ken Thompson.

Also, there are certain exercises to build up wrist strength at the computer. Everyone here should look into them.

Bruce Perry
bamccaig said:

aluminum

It's aluminium, even in America ;)

Quote:

spaghetti source

FTFY :)[1]

Quote:

math

s ;D

References

  1. Both words actually, although I didn't notice the error in the first until I copied and pasted it for the quote :P
Edgar Reynaldo

I prefer aluminum. Let's vote.

DanielH

I vote we drop this thread! ;D

Possible flame war, but don't pluralize math!

'math' is short for mathematics not mathematic.

Saying maths is like saying mathematicses

Edgar Reynaldo
DanielH said:

I vote we drop this thread! ;D

I veto your vote to drop the thread. The thread that must not be closed must remain open!!!

And I assert my right to vote for aluminum again.

Bruce Perry

Well, I prefer sulphur, and the same people who standardised the scientific community on 'aluminium' also apparently standardised on 'sulfur' at the same time. Can't win 'em all. :-/

Mark Oates

+1 to "maths" is annoying. >:(

Edgar Reynaldo

Standards schmandards. :P

Gideon Weems
DanielH said:

'math' is short for mathematics not mathematic.

I never thought of it that way.

... and with that, this thread has imparted upon me its first nugget of information.

Audric

Stirring 14 liters for several hours :o ... There has to be a better way.
{"name":"GastonSoupeDessin.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/d\/a\/da2305417f55f3faa542edb955f57f5d.jpg","w":606,"h":442,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/d\/a\/da2305417f55f3faa542edb955f57f5d"}GastonSoupeDessin.jpg

Paul whoknows

You guys sure know how to have fun :-X

Edgar Reynaldo

Teach us master!

Well, I prefer sulphur,

I suppose you prefer selphies too. :)

Paul whoknows

{"name":"C_71_article_1596439_image_list_image_list_item_0_image.jpg_","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/1\/e\/1e8b80c924d0794ed51630accc8a8eac.jpg","w":1023,"h":681,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/1\/e\/1e8b80c924d0794ed51630accc8a8eac"}C_71_article_1596439_image_list_image_list_item_0_image.jpg_

amarillion

Gaston! He's not getting enough mentions in memes I think.

Bruce Perry

I suppose you prefer selphies too. :)

Cringe! ;D

Bruce Perry

I suppose you prefer selphies too. :)

Cringe! ;D

Who's Gaston?

[EDIT]
Oh that's exciting! It took so long to post that I was able to expand the post and post it again before the original post page went away. So that's how to double post! :D

Derezo

DOUBLE THREAD LOCK STOPPING POWERRRR!!

amarillion

Google for: Gaston Lagaffe. In dutch it's Guust Flater

Bruce Perry

Elias's birthday thread brought me to this:

video

GullRaDriel

Bruce: yes, it was ^^

Bruce Perry

Yeah, I had a feeling it was, but then my mum got scared.

GullRaDriel

Your mum ?
WTF ?

Bruce Perry

That was a Bel Air :)

video

bamccaig

There's nothing wrong with having a mom that's scared. >:(

GullRaDriel

Wow Bruce. I didn't think to be that old when it came to tv show, but I was wrong.
Le Prince de Bel Air was a popular one here too, and I remember it even if I was young.

Niunio

It was a hit in Spain too. So much it was re-aired 4 chapters every day last year. Again.

Actually they do this (airing a lot of chapters of a popular show in a row) quite often in Spain. For example, The Simpsons, any CSI series, The A Team (yep), Knight Rider (Here known as "El Coche Fantástico [The Fantastic Car]"), The Closer, Major Crimes, Murder, She Wrote, Two (and a Half) Men, The Big Bang Theory... I know all dialogues of some of the series.

But the worst thing about this is that in a lot of cases they aired the chapter unordered, so you may found a chapter of series #1 after a chapter of series #8 after a chapter of series #4... It's insane.

jmasterx



MiquelFire

Oh no! We're running out of things to talk about!

Bring on the kitties!

video

Bruce Perry

Long phone is long.

{"name":"610600","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/4\/6\/46fa37eb59d710d01bc0d496ab08841d.jpg","w":2448,"h":3264,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/4\/6\/46fa37eb59d710d01bc0d496ab08841d"}610600

It's premium stuff - HDR camera, enough memory to cope with all the bloatware, and the screen actually responds where I touch it instead of in random places. However, the keyboard is a noticeable step down from the Photon Q I had before:

{"name":"610601","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/d\/e\/de33c426a860aa5d0ce9aa43d024454f.jpg","w":1456,"h":952,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/d\/e\/de33c426a860aa5d0ce9aa43d024454f"}610601

(Mine also has coloured lighting unlike the stock ones, although the colour scheme is different - I bought it from the same guy on eBay, who mods them with SIM sockets.)

So, on the Blackberry, there's no dedicated number row, and the only dedicated punctuation key is $ of all things! And instead of arrows, we have gestures which are cumbersome to activate and difficult to control precisely (and if you forget to activate them, you just deleted a whole word). I hate to say it about the only company that is making keyboard phones at all any more, but no wonder Blackberry's not doing as well as they'd hoped with that phone :-/

I would probably still be on the Photon Q if its battery hadn't failed. The replacement battery came today, so it's fitted now, and at least it's up and running and I can get the data off it. One thing didn't go quite according to plan though: the battery had an NFC antenna stuck to it, which I probably broke while moving it to the new battery, but hey, I didn't even know I had NFC on that phone.

Edgar Reynaldo

If you guys need something to do, I could use an animated gif of a cat walking, preferably with an easily removable background. Somebody wants me to make a small computer game with a cat and a litterbox, where you click on the litterbox, and the cat uses it and says "Meow". The game is utterly simple, but I need a good animation, and my google fu is weak these days. NOTE : This is mostly for lulz.

Gideon Weems

That keyboard is miles beyond anything else I have ever seen on a portable device. I would never want to upgrade.

On a related note, I am currently looking for a prepaid emergency phone. The first deal I found is $100 for 400 minutes good for 365 days. Sure, the price per minute is horrible, but hopefully this phone will never be used. Does anyone know of any better deals in the U.S.?

bamccaig

{"name":"tumblr_n462v8R3nj1t4pxxdo1_250.gif","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/4\/c4beb65c8ba3be54ba513b2a70683b1a.gif","w":250,"h":153,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/4\/c4beb65c8ba3be54ba513b2a70683b1a"}tumblr_n462v8R3nj1t4pxxdo1_250.gif

Edgar Reynaldo

The sword is backwards when she down-slashes. ::)

bamccaig

Just watched "Before The Flood", narrated/hosted by Leonardo DiCaprio.

video

We should all have to watch this once a week. It adds much needed perspective to all of our lives. When it comes time to vote politically it reminds you what really matters. It alerts us to the corruption that rewrites science as it is broadcast on national and international news outlets. It horrifies us with the undeniable hopelessness of the human race, and of the planet Earth as we know it. The Earth will be here in 50 years and even 100, and so might our children or grandchildren, but we can almost guarantee that they'll be suffering the consequences and reality of war in ways that we cannot fathom as they struggle to conquer and defend the limited remaining resources required for life at all, a life of luxury that we've known a distant fantasy. Instead of progressing the world into a dystopia of peace and prosperity, we're likely dooming our descendants, if not our aged selves, to a life of turmoil the likes of which we've only peeked into in documentaries flying by developing, war-torn nations. I do not envy my future self or the lives of my progeny. Maybe, just maybe, if we rewatch this every Sunday instead of sleeping in or attending some form of house of hopeless lies then we'd begin to reshape our projections of the future for the better. It's quite damning to see the alleged progress that China, of all nations, is apparently making in the renewable energy sector while the USA continues to consume so much more and contribute so little in return. If I was a religious man I'd hope my deity had a place in Hell assigned for each of us.

Bruce Perry

Added to Watch Later, for when our current crazy deadline is out of the way :)

On a similar note, long comic is long (and this was my similar "we're doomed" moment):

{"name":"earth_temperature_timeline.png","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/6\/c\/6c45976f4d9ee8607a8a840329e26f93.png","w":740,"h":14957,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/6\/c\/6c45976f4d9ee8607a8a840329e26f93"}earth_temperature_timeline.png

Arvidsson

Bumpity bump!

Mark Oates

<- Totally on board for fixing climate change.

(even though I realized I just bought a burger)

bamccaig

I really want to try eating insects as a source of protein. The science seems so much more practical. I realize it won't be as appetizing as beef or chicken, but it should be so much cheaper and more green! I've made a few attempts to locate insects for food, but unfortunately in North America it's kind of difficult unless you're going to farm your own...

Mark Oates

I had a beetle from Africa once.

It tasted like a rock.

bamccaig

I have eaten assorted, vacuumed packed, dehydrated/smoked insects a few years ago. They all just tasted like ash though so it wasn't much to taste. Wasn't much nutrition left either probably. Wasn't bad though. Except for that massive beetle thing that was pretty similar to chewing on a rock... So there's that. I'm not sure if you're supposed to eat the wings/shell though.

I can imagine several insects being appetizing. I know for a fact that smallish ants are harmless to chew on. It's like the seeds in a fruit or something like that. Crickets look very appetizing on a plate. :D

Of course, aside from the cultural barrier to accessing insects for consumption, I have another hurdle. My finacee is the most picky person I have ever met in my life. She will not even eat a McDonald's burger without instructing them to put nothing on it. :P

Gideon Weems

I still call it "global warming."

Bruce Perry
Quote:

<- Totally on board for fixing climate change.

(even though I realized I just bought a burger)

Does eating a burger work against fixing climate change somehow?

bamccaig

Cattle production is a major contributor to methane in the atmosphere which is something like 20x worse than CO2. Cattle in general are terrible for the environment. Not only do they produce massive amounts of waste that leaks into our water, and greenhouse gases, but we also destroy lots of forest land to make room for them. Beef is terrible for the planet. :P (Beef is also incredibly inefficient to produce by comparison to just about every other food source...)

Mark Oates

And the vast majority of food we grow is used to feed cattle.

bamccaig

^ Ah, right. That's the other destructive force: the production of the food for the cattle, which is also massive. Thanks, Mark!

Matthew Leverton

And yet, it tastes so good.

bamccaig

'MERICA.

Peter Hull

Has anyone see Doctor Strange? What did you think? And how about Benedict C's accent?

Johan Halmén

Piccolo will eventually come with a solution for global warming.

Polybios

It will involve boats.

Edgar Reynaldo
Polybios said:

It will involve boats spacecraft.

FTFY. Perhaps sea worthy spaceships. Or space worthy boats. One of those.

Gideon Weems

Another thread that was locked too soon: Text Mode 2000. That game looks awesome.

Mark Oates

video

Bruce Perry

video

Edgar Reynaldo

While we're posting random videos. ;)

video

bamccaig

Excellent. I am most amused. :D

Edgar Reynaldo

What, you've never seen Weird Science? For shame! Add it to your list.

Bruce Perry

There. Weird Science and Spinal Tap ordered :)

Edgar Reynaldo

Real Genius should be on the top of your 80's movie to-see list as well.

video

video

And don't forget Better Off Dead.

video

Chris Katko

Oh my God.

This thread is still alive.

Edgar Reynaldo

OMG! Chris Katko is still alive! Haven't heard from you in a while!

Chris Katko

I've been somewhat dead lately. Haven't been able to touch a hobby programming project in over 6 months. :'(

Edgar Reynaldo

How's your health holding up? I know you've had plenty of problems in the past. If you've got down time, spend it here!!!! The Katko is always welcome at a.cc.

Niunio

OMG! Chris Katko is still alive! Haven't heard from you in a while!

If you heard him any time in this forum, you should go to the psychologist... :o;);D

Edgar Reynaldo

Ha. Last laugh is on you. I have a screen reader. ;)

Gideon Weems

Aw, man. We missed this thread's one-year anniversary. At least Gull and OnlineCop posted.

What I'm trying to say is, this thread will never die. If A.cc mysteriously vanishes without a trace, this thread will be hosted elsewhere. If the internet goes down forever, I will keep a written record to bequeath upon my seven sons, who will pass the thread that never locks onto their children and their children's children.

Welcome back, Chris.

Chris Katko

How's your health holding up? I know you've had plenty of problems in the past. If you've got down time, spend it here!!!! The Katko is always welcome at a.cc.

Thank you, that really means a lot to me. :)

My allergies have been horrific lately--and they significantly worsen my back pain. I often can't get out of bed till the night when the pollen dies down. And I already take over-the-counter meds, perscription meds, get allergy shots, wear a HEPA gas mask with a allergy mask I embedded inside that, and have a super high filter HEPA HVAC filter, and a secondary HEPA air purifier, and an ionic air filter (which doesn't seem to help at all.)

All of that, and I'm still in agony many days out of the week. :( The last two weeks have been nothing but sleeping until 6 - 7 PM, so I've turned into a night owl... where I get a burst of energy... but I'm also "supposed" to be working a 9-5 job at home. So I keep struggling to keep up with the work and work e-mails.

Bruce Perry

Aw, man. We missed this thread's one-year anniversary.

I wished us a happy birthday :) but I can now see that it wasn't correct in all time zones. I did it as midnight passed in the UK, meaning it was early for anyone to the west of me :'(

お帰りなさい、Chrisuさん^^

[EDIT]
Oh yeah, also... Amazon has Real Genius, but for £15 :o Also it says it's an import but it's already in the UK (or at least within 1-day delivery distance) and Region 2. Meanwhile there are definitely actual imports of Region 1 available for less. The only solution to this tough decision is to not bother ordering it for now ;D

Edgar Reynaldo

15 pounds for Real Genious? That's outrageous. You could probably find that for $5 bucks in a bargain bin at Best Buy. It's from the 80's FFS!

Anyway, I'm just a fan of Val Kilmer. I love all his movies. Top Gun, Real Genius, The Saint, etc...

Johan Halmén

I wrote post #500.

Edgar Reynaldo

I'll counter your post #500 with a useless reply #800. So there.

Bruce Perry

I bought it for £9.90 off eBay :)

Meanwhile I spent £90 on a flight that I could have spent £62 on if I'd known a week ago that I was able to go. On the plus side, the return flight (which I booked earlier) cost me €5. 8-)

Edgar Reynaldo

What is that weird little crescent moon symbol with lines running through it? Does that mean pence? You europeans and your funny money.

Oh, it's a Euro. I thought you guys went all Brexit and everything.

Johan Halmén
  • must... not... get... into... a... debate... about... which... country... is... the... funny... one... *

bamccaig

I've heard that Southern Michigan residents call Canadian money "funny money" because it's colorful (probably helps that it's worthless too). :)

Edgar Reynaldo

They call it funny money because it's plastic and colorful.

Gideon Weems

I wished us a happy birthday :)

Ah, good! I noticed that at the time but thought that you were privy to someone else's birthday.

Quote:

The only solution to this tough decision is to not bother ordering it for now ;D join the Dark Side and pirate that scrumptious morsel! ... or get it on eBay. Whatever floats your boat.

Bruce Perry

They charge flights (and extras) in the currency of the departure country.

Which screws British people over because they have always matched the fixed fees up as if €1 = £1. For example, the name change fee is €160 / £160. At least they use a real exchange rate when setting the base flight fares themselves - except when it's a special offer of £5 / €5 for a flight.

amarillion

The Euro / Pound ratio is getting closer to parity though, so that's one advantage of Brexit...

GullRaDriel

TRUMP. Nothing more to add. >:(

Mark Oates

They call it funny money because it's plastic and colorful.

Funny money is better than no money! ;D

Bruce Perry

Can 'trump' mean 'fart' for you Americans? It certainly could where I grew up in Buxton.

Trump on Urban Dictionary

bamccaig

Somebody told me that the American people don't actually vote the president in, and that instead they're voting in "electors" in their state to vote for the president. And it's expected that the electors vote the way their state voted, but they aren't required to. Is this true? ??? And yet America goes around the world trying to force "democracy" on people?! Pot, meet kettle!!!!

Bruce Perry

CGP Grey said it, so it's probably true :)

video

Skip to 3:00.

Is America going around the world trying to force "democracy" on people? Hillary had an opportunity to install a "democracy" in Libya, and she consciously chose not to. Libya could have started recovering and gaining some quality of life, but instead, everyone is in danger there. Apparently.

[EDIT] Not exactly that, but this is related. But I'm too tired to read it properly :-/

Mark Oates
bamccaig said:

Somebody told me that the American people don't actually vote the president in, and that instead they're voting in "electors" in their state to vote for the president. And it's expected that the electors vote the way their state voted, but they aren't required to. Is this true? ???

Yes.

bamccaig

On your ballet does it have the names of your "electors" or does it have the parties/presidential candidates? ???

Edgar Reynaldo

The names of the candidates. The electors are free to pick whoever they wish, but they will most likely vote with the populace.

bamccaig

The candidates being the electors or the presidential candidates?

I find that absolutely absurd. Who the Hell elected the electors then? ???

Johan Halmén

- That's the most stupid thing! People pick a president on the ballot, but that only picks an anonymous elector. How on earth can you talk about democr...
- It's constitutional.
- Okay then.

Onewing

I'm just going to leave this here...

Supreme Loser said:

(Waiting for thread to lock, so I don't have to reply.)

bamccaig

It sounds like it's all a sham anyway because the electors are chosen to match the popular vote, and apparently most states have laws in place requiring the electors to vote for the party that they represent (and the parties generally choose the electors knowing they will do so anyway). I don't imagine the parties would ever ask their electors to vote against the party, but I wonder if they could still use this power to elect the wrong candidate? I guess not unless another republican's name is on the ballot. Still, would the sabotage themselves if they decided they didn't like their candidate? I suppose.

DanielH

"That's the most stupid thing!" - Johan Halmén

Too true. They've been talking of removing that aspect for years. The fact that the 'elector' can still vote for whomever they wish is idiocy.

bamccaig

What's the point of having the electors at all? Either they can vote for whoever they wish and they undermine democracy, or they are required to vote for the same people the population did and it's a complete waste of time and resources.

Onewing
bamccaig said:

What's the point of having the electors at all?

Cus history?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_States)#History

bamccaig

Is it just me or are the "united" states about as far away from united as can be without civil war? :P

Append:

Besides, if historical reasons mattered, wouldn't you try to honor the original intent behind the system and enforce people voting for "electors" within their district instead of bastardizing the entire election process into this sham? If you throw away the district elections (which, for the record, is nearly how the Canadian systems works, albeit it has its flaws too) then you need to rethink the entire system because it doesn't make sense out of context.

'MERICA?

MiquelFire

As long as we don't add gerrymandering to the mix...

bamccaig

There is no single person or group of people that deserves to lead a country. If you want a true democracy then you should have people from all sides having a reasonable say in how to do things. All of our so called "democracies" are every bit as fixed as a monarch or dictatorship. We just get to pat ourselves on the back and pretend we're free to make us feel better.

Johan Halmén

In Finland we used to vote electors to vote for the president. But what the citizen did was voting for an individual elector, not for the president. Though one could vote only for an elector candidate from one's own district. And each district had a proportional amount of electors to be elected. The system worked pretty well, though we went to a far more democratic system by skipping the electors altogether and let the citizens vote directly on the president.

But at the mean time the power of the president has been reduced very much, in favour of the prime minister. Which is stupid, because the prime minister doesn't get the mandate directly from the people, but from the party that wins the general election.

Bruce Perry
bamccaig said:

All of our so called "democracies" are every bit as fixed as a monarch or dictatorship.

I don't think it's quite that bad. We do at least have popular votes which, broken as they are, will oust particularly bad politicians. Under a dictatorship, you would not get away with complaining here.

Err I mean... let me just post here to keep the thread going because what I just wrote is a waste of time :)

bamccaig

In my country the particularly bad politicians are the ones that get elected. If the voting system isn't proportional then it's easy for the worst candidate to win out over the others.

Bruce Perry

Not if that worst candidate wanted to legalise murder or something. You're starting at a rather high bar, I think :)

bamccaig

I'd say you're setting a rather low bar instead. ;)

Derezo

The first past the post system works well when there are many minority parties and minority governments. Historically there have been more parties in Canada, and the system is designed to work under those circumstances. However, in more recent decades there have been only 4 main parties, and the green party is just barely hanging on.

Parts of the system are being taken advantage of to create majority governments, and we end up inching closer to the 2 party system of the United States.

The people even voted to keep the first past the post system in a referendum. The referendum was created through a non-profit, costing lots of money raised by the people. The media was super against it, and it failed.

Democracy isn't really a thing anymore. It gotted borked.

bamccaig

What's this about the people voting to keep the voting system? When was this? I didn't get to vote. >:( Link please.

Derezo

Ontario Electoral Reform Referendum, 2007

It didn't even come close to passing. (I thought it was federal but I guess it was provincial)

amarillion

The same happened in the UK, there was a referendum to change the voting system... and it was soundly rejected.

IMHO the election systems in UK and USA are crap. It leads to an over-emphasis of minor differences, to the point that nations get more divided than they actually are. The coalition system in most European nations leads to more consensus and compromise and more centrist candidates.

Mark Oates

Fundamentally, a single vote doesn't have much of an impact. Voting (and what you are allowed to vote for) only represents a small margin of the bigger overall picture of how individuals are allowed to shape their world.

Money is a lot more impactful. The real influencers in the day to day world are the voices with money. Someone with wealth is a lot more attractive to businesses, and so services cater to them and their world view. Poor individuals have little to nothing to offer businesses, and so market forces fundamentally ignore them.

On the plus side, a vote gives this neglected class an opportunity to offset the balance of reality. That's really cool, to be honest. However, I feel that a "truer" democracy might find some way to give everyone equal wealth, allowing all classes to equally express themselves economically.

Edgar Reynaldo

give everyone equal wealth

Commie!

{"name":"8AyzRBs3ehCFAYJfYhFbn8oD.png","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/1\/c\/1c496d09f3d1224478172622bf5a4096.png","w":800,"h":501,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/1\/c\/1c496d09f3d1224478172622bf5a4096"}8AyzRBs3ehCFAYJfYhFbn8oD.png

Sorry, just having a little fun at your expense.

Johan Halmén

Fundamentally, a single vote doesn't have much of an impact.

What on earth would a system be like, where a single vote would have an impact?

You vote A. 30% vote A. 70% vote B. B wins. But by voting, you have stated that you belong to a minority supporting A and you are simply surrounded by a majority supporting B. Of course there should be no way for you as a single person to put A in the place of the winner.

Every time I vote, I do have a feeling that my vote has an impact. On myself! And besides, there are absolute no one else, whose vote would have a greater impact than my vote.

Erin Maus

You vote A. 30% vote A. 70% vote B. B wins. But by voting, you have stated that you belong to a minority supporting A and you are simply surrounded by a majority supporting B. Of course there should be no way for you as a single person to put A in the place of the winner.

And you would expect a bill that has 70% of the population's support to pass about 70% of the time, but it has the same chance of passing (~30%) regardless of support.

Yet if the bill has 70% support from the top 10%, it has about an equal chance of passing.

The will of the people is not reflected in the will of the government. And therefore, voting has no effect, even for the entire population.

(The numbers may be off; I'm going off memory. It's only relevant for the United States. Citation and more.)

Bruce Perry
Derezo said:

The first past the post system works well when there are many minority parties and minority governments.

Categorically the opposite of the truth. See:

video

He goes through examples, starting with 7 candidates, and shows how everything goes wrong.

The same happened in the UK, there was a referendum to change the voting system... and it was soundly rejected.

I witnessed rich, Conservatives-leaning, people vote against that because they liked the fact that the Conservatives were able to get in thanks to flaws in the system. Meanwhile there was a massive smear campaign (no doubt funded by those people) to make everyone think other voting systems were a bad idea. Finally, it's worth noting that the proposed replacement system was still not the best one available, by far (there are more CGP Grey videos on this if anyone's interested).

bamccaig

Great video. Thanks for sharing, Bruce!

Derezo

Categorically the opposite of the truth. See:

It's a good video, but a lot of what he says is a bit presumptive. A real world model instead of his hypothetical animal kingdom would be nice. I did reach the same conclusion (two party system), so I'm not completely out of line. :P

Bruce Perry

You're right, you kind of did :)

But I would say it only works well if you start with two options. When you have any more than that, a big problem is that no one can accurately express ideas like "Anyone except X" - they might want Y, but they'd be happy with Z, and then X gets in because the Y-or-Z supporters are diluted.

But it looks as if we did agree on how it converges to there only being two serious contenders :)

Johan Halmén

Months ago, I wrote in this thread that Trump is the best thing that has happened to the Democrats. Little did I know. :P

Derezo

Yeah... a lot of people were pretty dang shocked. Myself included.

Johan Halmén
14th of March, I said:

So what will happen with Trump?

1. He will win and become president and the whole world will know what USA is made of
...

I took some other guesses, too, but funny that I mentioned this as the first guess.

Bruce Perry

Lore and I enjoyed Weird Science :)

Edgar Reynaldo

Now for Real Genius and Better Off Dead. ;) They're classics.

Gideon Weems

Is Weird Science overly campy? I never caught it the first time around, either. It seems right up my alley but could fall into that category of things that require a good deal of nostalgia to enjoy.

Edgar Reynaldo

I don't know what 'campy' means, but it's a lot of fun. Bunch of teenage boys messing around with 'weird science'. Big brother who's a big dick. Chains and whips and candlewax on the nipples. You know, standard 80's stuff.

DanielH

Oops!

One of the best scenes is at the end of the movie.

Kelly LeBrock as the new gym teacher! And don't forget the big pile of Chet!

Edgar Reynaldo

Spoiler tags, please!!!!

Bruce Perry

My brother had his phone stolen and missed his train to come and visit me because he had to give a police statement. Meanwhile, my mum is feeling ill and hasn't yet been able to make the journey (driving). So it's an unexpectedly lonely Christmas for me so far :-X

bamccaig

Steam is down. :'( How am I supposed to pwn teh nubs?

MiquelFire

Uh oh, there's a game I was planning to stream tonight. Hope it's back up by then. Or at least offline mode works.

Eric Johnson

Steam must be back online now, because I can access it.

[Edit]
Lots of good games are on sale right now. I'm tempted to buy the first two Fallout games... Any suggestions for good games?

bamccaig

My suggestion is to not buy anything that you don't plan to play now. I cannot count the games that I have bought on Steam sales that I never play. If you never play them then a sale is not saving you anything... If there's a game that you already wanted and that's on sale then go for it! There's a couple of my wish list that are on sale, but mostly not tempting enough to go for it... I know I'll probably just keep playing CS:GO and neglect any new games... :P As it is, I need to find the time to get back to MGSV on my PS3 to finish that before I forget about it... And find a million hours to max character attributes for the FFVII weapon fights to finally check that off my list...

Eric Johnson
bamccaig said:

My suggestion is to not buy anything that you don't plan to play now.

Yeah, I know... :P I've done that a few times already, but I always get to the games eventually. I suppose there will always be another sale, so it's not a big deal to skip this one.

bamccaig

Oh man, I fell into the trap... I just bought Lisa and Outlast. :( At least I was smart enough to stick to the cheap end of the spectrum. I also try to avoid buying any non-Linux titles right now. I have no intent to install Windows again so I'm trying to hold out and hope that titles like TW3 come to Linux. :-/ And in the meantime, no matter how good the sale, skip them. But if you don't have it yet, I do recommend TW3. 50% isn't bad.

MiquelFire

What's TW3?

Erin Maus

I have a hunch TW3 is The Witcher 3.

Eric Johnson

Yeah, The Witcher 3.

Not sure I'll ever play that one. I bought and played through a good chunk of the second game, but didn't really like it. The first few hours were explosively fun, but it totally tanked once I reached Flotsam, and I stopped playing.

bamccaig

I haven't personally played it yet, but it looks like an upgraded Skyrim and I immensely loved Skyrim. It had more than its share of bugs and immersion breaking moments, but the good times more than made up for the bad. You do need a bit of imagination, but I think the best games do. Our imaginations are far better at satisfying us than anything man-made. I like to think that a good game is just a tool to inspire the imagination.

MiquelFire

Oh... that game... Meh. At least I got my copy for free. Eventually stopped GOG's thingy from auto starting on my computer in the long run though.

Rodolfo Lam

Christmas thread bump. What did you receive/buy today? (Yesterday for those in +GMT timezones)

Eric Johnson

I got some ca$h. 8-) Probably going to buy Fallout 1 now on Steam. :D

MiquelFire

Cash. Haven't left the house yet, just now getting on the computer.

bamccaig

I got money and a gift certificate towards a remote starter for my truck! :o:D I also share an Android TV box with my finacee, along with various candies and beers and a drinking accessory (her dad sent me a boot glass from Montana's).

Elias

I got a sleeping bag from my wife and various smaller backpacking gear from her family. They have this neat system where everyone shares wish lists at the beginning of December and then others can buy (and cross off) stuff. And yes, me and my wife plan to go backpacking in 2017 - only missing a tent and a backpack now :)

LennyLen

The Witcher 3 is a great game. It's not likely to be available on Linux any time soon as RE3 doesn't support linux, and I think they're too busy working on CyberPunk 2077 to work on the engine.

Rodolfo Lam

Funnily enough, the PS4 is BSD-ish, and Linux and BSD applications are somewhat similar. Red Engine 3 might have the support half-baked. But that is true, all effort must be on Cyberpunk. Maybe in a few years they will take on the project.

Bruce Perry

{"name":"610697","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/4\/4\/443ec1fe6f719e9aa7f115b18ca04d46.png","w":416,"h":201,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/4\/4\/443ec1fe6f719e9aa7f115b18ca04d46"}610697

The time estimate is wrong, but we all know about that with the Windows copy dialogue, don't we :)

Erin Maus

132 is the Pokedex number for the Pokemon Ditto.

My avatar is a Ditto.

Bruce Perry

For once, an on-topic post in this thread!!! ;D

Here, I wanted to post that I was wrong, and instead of

this.Over9000?(this, args);

you have to write

this.Over9000?.Invoke(this, args);

But I can't :'(

bamccaig
this.Over9000?.Invoke(this, args);

I imagine that this would be somewhat slower than just doing a null check and directly invoking the event delegate.

Bruce Perry

You're assuming Invoke() has a signature along the lines of "params object[] args", but it doesn't - it is generated (presumably by the runtime) with exactly the right parameters for the delegate type it belongs to. I suspect the shorter call syntax is syntactic sugar for the Invoke method anyway in fact.

That said, I think ?[ exists as a null-propagating array index construct. I can understand why ?( doesn't, since it's impossible to tell apart from "? expression : expression" with a finite amount of lookahead.

Eric Johnson

I like pie.

[EDIT]
What's this thread even about anymore? :P

Mark Oates

Well, now it's about pie. :)

Eric Johnson
Quote:

Well, now it's about pie. :)

Great! I had cherry pie on Christmas. It was tasty, albeit a bit too sweet. I'd rather have apple pie. Apple pie is the best, in my opinion.

Elias

I had coconut cream pie on Christmas. And I seem to like anything with coconut in it.

Edgar Reynaldo

The pie is a lie. >:(

Eric Johnson

@Elias: I don't think I've ever had coconut cream pie before. Sounds tasty though!

@Edgar: Cake. Cake is a lie! >:(

bamccaig

Happy New Year! :D

amarillion

Happy New Year

We had vegetable pie, filled with broccoli and Brussels sprouts.

Bruce Perry

The pie is a fake :)

Elias

Hm, my brain works in a strange way. On the first day of Krampushack when I decided to use the three holy kings as main characters of my game I seemed to have this vague memory of a song I once knew about those three kings. But I could not remember any specific text nor the tune. Google also completely failed me and gave me lots of carols with the three kings/mages but none I had heard before.

Several days later I woke up in the morning and had a strange melody in my head, with no idea where it had come from. And it would stay in my head for several days - I wasted precious time during the competition using various tune searches, but without luck... but I wrote it down as notes.

So today I saw those notes again and gave finding out what it is another try. Going through just about 30 tune search results I did finally find it (my mind had doubled one note and changed another so that must be why I hadn't found it at first). It was "Le Marche des Rois", a pretty popular French Christmas carol from the 17th century. About the holy three kings. (And not unpopular in English either it seems, but just unknown enough it fell under the Google radar for "three kings carol".)

So somehow I must have heard it as a kid and must have known what it is about, so "three kings" gave me that vague memory of something. And then the first few days of Krampushack my brain must have started a background search process to find the tune - and when it finally found it just put it in my head that morning.

Now I have to add new music to my game...

Johan Halmén

I once made a Christmas hack game about St Nicholas running around. I searched for suitable music and found a lovely carol, which I'd never heard before. Since that, I've heard it a few times.

Exactly 10 years ago, I wrote a tune for Christmas hack and that tune turned into a new carol with lyrics by my wife a year ago. It's one of our best songs.

I guess I have at least three more songs, which relate directly to Allegro games. Some made by me, some made by Andrei Ellman. One sung by Andrei Ellman!

Then there was the Monday Song, sung by Matt Somethington. That song is still waiting for being used in a game.

Elias

Which carol was it? And where can I listen to the other ones? :)

I wonder what Andrei is doing nowadays. He moved to Austria after I had left there and was working for Austria's largest game studio, but they shut down a while ago.

Johan Halmén

Jolly Old Saint Nicholas.

The 10 year old game tune was played on a glockenspiel. You can still hear it in this video:

video

...though the solo singer and the choir might cover the glockenspiel. If there's somewhere an archive with old Christmashack entries, you might find the game there,and the original dat file with the original midi tune.

In Andrei Ellman's "Chickens" you can find my music. Two of the tunes got lyrics, but there's no sung music track in the games. I have one recording on an old Macintosh laptop somewhere.

And Andrei's excellent performance of my DTL-song from DTL-rally is on an even older laptop somewhere.

One old recording I managed to find. It's actually from the depot here on a.cc.

Here's Blub and Blob singing:

media player

Elias

I like that carol! Is there a translation (or the Finnish text so I can put it in Google translate)? I suppose it is about all the countries Santa has to visit...

Also love the Blub and Blob song... is that you and Andrei singing in it?

Johan Halmén

No, it's about Santa's vacation in July. Here's my own translation from a blog I wrote about our carols:

The white beard is fluttering. A mild breeze. A yellow balloon shines with the sun. There's a long time to Christmas. Santa's enjoying. In July the familiar scenery looks different. Peace, happiness, warmth and love. Peace, happiness, keep your Christmas mood always with you. (A list of countries) How beautiful our world is, when seen from above! (More countries...)

In Blub & Blob there's only me. In that game there's a karaoke function I developed. It played a midi file while showing timed lyrics. You had to include a txt file with the lyrics which had the time code in seconds in square brackets at each word.

Some day I'll continue with the karaoke project. I like the idea of having singable game music. I find similar joy in creating a game, creating music and writing song lyrics.

Onewing

This thread will lock soon. Dare I say...too soon?

GullRaDriel

To be honest I was hoping to get M.Leverton back to us with the size of the thread.
Seems like size isn't the only thing that matters ;-P

Edgar Reynaldo

ML will never notice if it's under 1000 replies. Keep posting!

GullRaDriel

What if we mention all his nicks in the thread ?
What if he DOES have an alarm system and then we use the call "Supreme Dictator" 3 times ? Facing a mirror ?

bamccaig

ML is probably just busy starring in his own reality show.

Bruce Perry

As a kid, I had a totally mixed-up dream. At that age, I was used to BBC BASIC, but had noticed that machine code existed. I also loved playing with tape recorders. In the dream, machine code looked like random strings of symbols, but could be used to accomplish anything, lightning-fast - and I used some to materialise a jetpack on my back which looked like a tape recorder.

In the real world, however, Matthew Leverton cannot detect whether you are facing a mirror. ;)

GullRaDriel

I even tried to add him to my Facebook, with no luck so far :-p

Eric Johnson
bamccaig said:

ML is probably just busy starring in his own reality show.

This thread is now the roast of Matthew Leverton. :o

amarillion

Only 100 more to go!

Gideon Weems

If that is true, this thread has averaged roughly 1.887 posts/day so far. Good job, guys. We are changing the world.

GullRaDriel

Then what do you propose Gideon ?

Gideon Weems

I feel as though we should conquer a small territory, in order to send a message.

... or just share videos that feature rodents:

video

Bruce Perry

Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww <3

On another note, it's taken us about 1.3 years to get to 900. So in 13 years I'll be able to post "OVER 9000!!!!!!! :o" ;D

amarillion

There will be significant milestones before that. Like 940, 1024, 1337 and 1701.

GullRaDriel

Thread locks too soon. I couldn't answer the allegro5 nuklear gui port in time, I had to PM him.
That's a great GUI tool, that can be driven by OGL, D3D, SDL, or allegro5 and the whole dx/ogl/whatever !

Derezo
if($(programmer).is(':using-javascript')) $(programmer).find('.hair').each(function() { $(this).remove(); });

Mark Oates

In Ruby, that would look like:

Programmer.find_by(using: 'javascript').each { |p| p.hairs.each { |h| h.remove } }

bamccaig

In Perl5 that could look like:

$_->remove for map $_->hairs, grep $_->is_using('javascript'), $programmer;

GullRaDriel

Why use such complicated things when you can just free( theprogrammer -> hairs );

Bruce Perry

That leaks memory - you should call al_destroy_hairs(theprogrammer->hairs);

The main difference is it packs the hairs better without introducing all those smelly spaces :)

Elias
for programmer in programmers:
    if "javascript" in programmer.languages:
        for hair in programmer.hairs:
            hair.pull()

Bruce Perry

Who wants to write it in 6502? I totally would but I'm at work right now :)

GullRaDriel

Today I'm gonna catch the sun. I keep you informed.

Bruce Perry

What are you gonna catch it in?

Chris Katko

You guys are slowing down. 8-)

Gideon Weems

♫ Too old to kid, too young to lock.

Johan Halmén

I've been catching the Sun for a few weeks now with a 4 kW set of solar panels. So far the highest effect has been almost 2 kW, which is very promising.

GullRaDriel

Nice Johan ! 8-)

Bruce Perry
Eric Johnson

I got "That Lucky Old Sun" achievement in Fallout: New Vegas. 8-)

Gideon Weems

I've been catching the Sun for a few weeks now with a 4 kW set of solar panels. So far the highest effect has been almost 2 kW, which is very promising.

Is it topic-worthy? I hope to install solar panels (or shingles) this summer but haven't quite figured out how to calculate power demand. My PC's power supply, for example, says it uses 1600W AC, whereas my bass amplifier (obscenely loud) only lists 500W (or 690VA). I find this ridiculous.

Then, there's the microwave. It lists 1430 (watts, I presume) but is only used a few minutes each day. How is that calculated? If you have any resources you've found handy, I am all ears.

MiquelFire

Your PC's power supply is listing it's max usage (Some cheaper made PSU might be over estimating how much it can supply however, but I'm not sure if any of those are in that range you listed), and your actually use may be much less. You'll need some kind of power reader (like like this) see what the actual usage is (Test under load, lots of parts inside a computer now a days may just sip on power when they're idle).

Some UPS with displays can be used as a power meter (or even the software you install on the computer itself).

Gideon Weems
Quote:

You'll need some kind of power reader (like this)...

Thanks! Now we're making sense. I still don't understand, though, how a system of solar panels uses the unit kW and not, say, kW/hour (or even electrons/hour for a certain resistance spec, because the solar panels' role is to shove electrons into batteries). In terms of planning, I figured there would be two important calculations: the largest anticipated simultaneous demand and the average demand at any given point in time, the latter being used to roughly determine how many kW/hour a system needs to provide to the battery bank for recharging.

If a system of solar panels like Johan's provides 4 kW, is that per day?

Johan Halmén

Gideon, what you think a kW/h is, is actually a kW. Read on!

<append/>

Here's what the central unit registered today, which was a sunny day:
{"name":"610767","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/1\/3\/1317789f5a532f5a6c27d8a6138fadf8.jpg","w":1600,"h":1200,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/1\/3\/1317789f5a532f5a6c27d8a6138fadf8"}610767

That was the highest effect.

And here's the total energy created today:
{"name":"610768","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/a\/9\/a92846cf338b2327dcecb193f6c96928.jpg","w":1600,"h":1200,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/a\/9\/a92846cf338b2327dcecb193f6c96928"}610768

Neither is very much yet, but the sun is very low. It gets higher along the spring and I might get the full 4 kW in April or May. And the day is very long in Finland dring the summer.

I have no battery bank for this. I rely on that everything goes to heating the house and my water. In the summer I will be selling everything that I don't use myself. That's actually no good business, yet. Because I pay high taxes on the power I buy, but I get a poor price for the power that I sell, and of course no tax refund for each sold kWh. But there are plans for a change on that. It would really boost solar panel markets, if one could simply pay taxes only for the difference. Now if I use 18 MWh per year and produce 4 MWh of which I sell 2 MWh, I pay the buyers price plus taxes for the 16 MWh which I had to buy. After that, I can sell the 2 MWh for a poorer price. I think I should be entitled to tax reductions for the 2 MWh that I've produced. When that is true, or when cheap batteries will be available, I might consider buy some more panels, say 5 more kW. I have a nice roof for that, pointing exactly to the South. Too bad there are some trees and houses shading the part of the roof that is not yet covered with panels.

bamccaig

Sounds like in Ontario it already works that way. You can either sell what you don't use to the grid and have that subtracted from your consumption, or sell everything at an apparently better than market price and then buy your own consumption at market price.

Bruce Perry

Indeed, watts are a measure of energy converted per second (not total energy converted). 1 watt is 1 joule per second.

The energy industry tends to measure in kilowatt-hours which is just confusing. It's the same idea of multiplying power (watts) by time to get energy (joules), but introducing a factor of 1000/3600 compared to joules. Of course people confuse matters even further by incorrectly calling them kilowatts per hour half the time.

Johan Halmén

A kWh is kind of a handy unit, compared to J. Things that use the most electric energy in our home have effects around 1 kW. Or 0.5 to 3 kW. Heating, boiler, sauna, stove. And one hour is easier to handle than thousands of seconds, when thinking lof the time when we use these things.

Same goes for the solar panels. The max effect is 4 kW. And they work a few hours per day, not some ten thousand seconds. We tend to use units that give handy figures. We drink strong liquor in cl, soda in dl or l, though SI system nazis want us to use either ml or l.

bamccaig

I drink my liquor in glasses. >:( And my eye sight's fine.

Gideon Weems

Of course people confuse matters even further by incorrectly calling them kilowatts per hour half the time.

This contributed a great deal to my confusion. A kWh is a sustained rate of one kilowatt over one hour, not a ratio of kilowatts per hour.

The aforementioned bass amplifier has a maximum power consumption of 500 W. I would therefore consume 1 kWh of my total daily energy created (Johan's 5.3 kWh above) if I used the amp at full blast for two hours... I think I'm starting to understand.

Thanks, guys! If I were the cookie master, I would pass them out now.

Johan Halmén

Amarillon is the cookiemaster. He hasn't passed any yet. If he forgot to enable it, we have to start the thread all over again. Obama has to return to office and the whole election has to start all over again. And this time I promise not to speculate over what would happen, if Trump won.

bamccaig

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Cookies are for quitters. This thread has no cookies. It has no ending:

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Arvidsson

So... how about VR? Have you tried it? It's pretty cool I must say, got to borrow an Oculus Rift from a friend and just throwing stuff is so much fun which is kinda weird when comparing it to reality.

MiquelFire

I had tried a racing game on my Daydream, and that was enough to sale me on it. If only the Daydream controller wasn't so crap for that type of game.

bamccaig

Arvidsson, did you try virtually jerking off? Was it equally effective as the real thing? Apparently virtual groping is traumatic so we can only hope that virtual sex is just as real!

Bruce Perry

Ouch.

Still, at least it's a way to prolong threads.

Gideon Weems

On a related note, teabagging has been banned from the Killer Instinct world tournament circuit.

On a related note, I had no idea Killer Instinct had a world tournament circuit.

Polybios

The only thing traumatic here is the extent of intellectual pain ("Ouch.") that certain posts cause. :P

Mark Oates

On a related note, teabagging has been banned from the Killer Instinct world tournament circuit.

Slicing up your opponent with swords, knocking them off a building, totally fine. It's fantasy!

But the teabagging, it's just too close to home. :-[

Eric Johnson

But the teabagging, it's just too close to home.

You knew uncle Joe, too? :'(

bamccaig

I find that absolutely ridiculous. I have watched a lot of pro-level CS:GO lately (there's a tournament in Atlanta or something), and I can't say I've noticed it, but then it also wouldn't stand out because I've seen it enough times (and generally it's not especially provocative). Also in CS:GO they're usually pretty busy trying to grab weapons and utility if necessary, or just generally trying to stay psyched up for the the rest of the match. In any case, I wouldn't support any kind of ban. If a pro wants to teabag somebody that's fine. I don't think it would really affect any pros. I seriously don't think they could have gotten to that level if it did. And if it's because of the sexual innuendo and trying to make the tournaments family friendly, fuck that because it's a mature game and there's absolutely no reason to do that and anybody that could figure out what it means on their own is old enough to see it. I can see why they would want to keep the game somewhat clean for sponsorship purposes, but I don't think that anybody watching a video game tournament (i.e., the target of the ads) would be offended either.

Edgar Reynaldo

Personally, I find it offensive. If I want to play a violent game, fine. But keep your teabagging and your verbal abuse to yourself. You should be banned. :P

And don't give me that "just ignore it" shit either.

And while you're at it, take your "locker room talk" and stuff it.

And one last thing. The only ones who should be deported are Trump and his KKK buddies.

bamccaig

It's not that simple. Everybody has to agree on what behavior is problematic. In particular, the majority of gamers should have more say than the minority of easily offended ones. If a few people are offended by behavior we shouldn't prohibit it to suit the special snowflakes. It's only behavior that most of us agree is problematic that should be punished. Teabagging is definitely not one of them. The gaming community fucking loves it. The Internet loves it. That's one of the greatest things about the Internet. That kind of creativity and comradery.

Even once you do define the behaviors that are problematic policing them is another problem. You can't really let the players police it because trolls will group together and abuse that power to hurt people. And there isn't enough manpower to police the entire gaming world, let alone finding people that you can trust to do the policing. The best solution is to provide players with reasonable powers to limit the abuse. A basic tool is being able to mute other players that you don't want to hear. Usually you require a voting system for things like kicks and bans, but it's rarely going to work because people enjoy being trolls. In CS:GO it's common for people to get kicked out of the game for the lulz, but when somebody is actually hacking or being a nuisance it's rare for them to get kicked.

People are assholes and the Internet allows them to go all out. Of course, perhaps that's a good thing. Perhaps it gives them an outlet to be an asshole without actually hurting anybody. We can't be too rash to make changes to a system without fully understanding the entire system. You kick them out of Counter-Strike perhaps they'll go outside and start torturing cats and upgrade to murdering people. There's no telling.

Human behavior is complex. The best thing that you can do is not let it bother you. Don't feed the troll. That just makes it stronger.

GullRaDriel

I had to talk else those two bastards who have killed the thread. They put so much nonsense in their replies that even I start to be readable and understandable.

As a human, I pee on all those politic fuckers. Wait, what, did you even start to think that they CARE for YOU ? Haha. Let me LMAO.

Be it Clinton or Trump both are horrible. Actually one of my preferred moment of the week is when I see Sen. Sanders destroy them at the parliament. Be it DT himself or one of the fuckers he nominated.

It's Monday here. I also have some roadwork just down the windows. It just makes programming/living harder.

Plus part of you Americans got Trump to be president. Who do you think is to blame ?

bamccaig

Let's discuss the temper tantrums people are throwing by rioting in the streets, destroying property, and reportedly also attacking people. And of course, the police resistance to it. Either Trump won fair and square and they have nothing to be so upset about or the election was somehow rigged. Though there was apparently reason to believe that Bush Jr.'s first election was rigged and they never rioted for that as I recall, and apparently even re-elected him?! People are insane.

Apparently there was a shooting at a mosque in Quebec (French province of Canada). 6 dead, many others injured. It's unclear if it's related at all to the unrest to the South. It's not entirely clear what happened, but one of the suspects apparently has a "Muslim name". One of the two suspects has also apparently been cleared as nothing more than a witness, but I haven't had any success figuring out which of the two is the witness.

Arvidsson

Jesus christ you guys, such downers. VR is so much fun! And with Unity I can get up and running and make simple demos in no time. Engines are awesome, woooo! It's so much fun to just create pointless shit because it's fun to play around and not take everything so fucking seriously. :)

Eric Johnson

Until I can pet a dog in VR, I won't spend any of my hard-earned cash on the fad. >:(

bamccaig

Until I can pet a pussy in VR I won't spend any of my hard-earned cash on the fad either. >:(

Edgar Reynaldo

And you guys wonder why this forum is dying when all you do is spout vulgar trash. Fucking lame. >:(

Johan Halmén

I wrote post #500. We have 50 to go to get to 1k. We should make it special. Who do you think earns the honour?

Arvidsson

You can pet a robot dog and throw sticks for it to fetch in Valve's The Lab demo. But I agree it's a bit pricey at the moment to get into, especially if your computer is not up to par and you need to upgrade that as well.

I played around with a game prototype I had made in Unity from before, where you can drive around different vehicles in a small city. In an hour I had VR implemented in the game and could walk around these pretty massive buildings, and drive around in a vehicle. It was easier to cope with the locomotion when sitting down on the floor when driving though :)

Eric Johnson

I'm a bit ignorant on the happenings of VR, to be honest. Can you even move around freely in VR? I've seen a few VR demos on YouTube, and in most of them you just point where you'd like to move, and then it teleports you there. That is not my idea of fun movement. I've seen others where you can move around freely though. I'm not sure which VR "solution" offered what though.

I've also heard that many people become sick due to the disassociation from their VR movements and real-life movements. I wonder how that will be tackled in the long run.

Finally, I read an article a few months prior about people contracting eye herpes from VR demos. That's enough to steer me clear of trying any demos. :o

[EDIT]
Here is a link to an article talking about contracting ocular herpes from VR headsets.

Also, doesn't it seem silly for companies and individuals to make non-first-person games for VR? Third-person games or 2D games, for example, seem totally pointless on VR, because instead of experiencing the game from the eyes of one of the characters, you suddenly become just a floating camera (which might work well for "god games").

Arvidsson

I'm a bit ignorant on the happenings of VR, to be honest. Can you even move around freely in VR? I've seen a few VR demos on YouTube, and in most of them you just point where you'd like to move, and then it teleports you there. That is not my idea of fun movement. I've seen others where you can move around freely though. I'm not sure which VR "solution" offered what though.

Depends on the game implementation. Both Oculus and Vive supports teleportation, locomotion and everything inbetween. And both have room scale, so you can move your body within the area you set up in your room and it will translate into the game.

Quote:

I've also heard that many people become sick due to the disassociation from their VR movements and real-life movements. I wonder how that will be tackled in the long run.

Yeah, it depends on how easy you get seasick for example. You often need to get your "sea legs" when using locomotion, so the more you play the less affected you get.

Quote:

Finally, I read an article a few months prior about people contracting eye herpes from VR demos. That's enough to steer me clear of trying any demos.

Hehe, I have never heard of that. If you're really worried, don't let anyone else use your gear then.

Quote:

Also, doesn't it seem silly for companies and individuals to make non-first-person games for VR? Third-person games or 2D games, for example, seem totally pointless on VR, because instead of experiencing the game from the eyes of one of the characters, you suddenly become just a floating camera (which might work well for "god games").

Yes, some game types don't translate well. But VR is also an opportunity to invent new genres and game types I think. And nothing beats the immersion, so even if you're just a camera looking down on a playfield, say a god game where you can control minions - the physics of it brings so much more to the gameplay and enjoyment, like holding an item in your hand and it translates and rotates with your every hand movement. It's VERY cool.

Gideon Weems

... even if you're just a camera looking down on a playfield, say a god game where you can control minions - the physics of it brings so much more to the gameplay and enjoyment...

I want to try this. Looking around in 1:1 first-person space is one thing, but head-tracked camera movement applied to top-down camera angles is entirely different. The former brings new complications to the table, but the latter would be an improvement in every regard (provided the player has a working neck).

I imagine a virtual tabletop would make this an intuitive interface, like Warhammer but with living, breathing pieces.

Johan Halmén

I just bought a cardboard VR set for 9.90 €. What a funny gadget.

jmasterx

We are number one

But it's BamBam on drums and Dr. Leverton on vocals

Rodolfo Lam

Come on people, don't let this die unless it gets to at least 1K posts. 43 to go.

I can feel Matthew is waiting for post 999 to happen so he can post something hilarious as post 1000.

bamccaig

ML is more likely to close the thread at 998. :P That's right, I said it. >:(

In any case, I agree, do not let it die now. This thread better be around for my grandchildren.

Eric Johnson

I made popcorn on the stove tonight. But I didn't use enough oil, so some of the it burned. :'(

DanielH

Burnt popcorn is a horrible smell.

Eric Johnson

Indeed. The scent lingers for hours.

Gideon Weems
bamccaig said:

ML is more likely to close the thread at 998. :P That's right, I said it. >:(

Shh! Don't give him any ideas!

Chalk another one up! Raaaagh!

Mark Oates

Posting for prosperity!

Bruce Perry

Posing our posteriors?

I uploaded a piano concerto :)

Eric Johnson

Posteriors? Now that's a topic I can really get behind. ;)

Derezo

I made popcorn on the stove tonight. But I didn't use enough oil, so some of the it burned. :'(

I once made popcorn using the grease left over from frying a pound of bacon.

Don't do that.

Bruce Perry
Quote:

Don't do that.

8a2a7d58e5e5dd67edfdf2ec69f301f901255e0e.jpg {"name":"S-and-T-07.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/6\/c6bf8a0f6bb662a8a1b0fc474c82ada9.jpg","w":1001,"h":766,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/6\/c6bf8a0f6bb662a8a1b0fc474c82ada9"}S-and-T-07.jpg

Is it just me that sees the similarity? :)

Character comes from this show:

video

bamccaig

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Valentine's Day

No, actually, my finacee caught a bad case of what the ER doctor figured is the flu. We skipped out on our plans, and had a rough rest of the week. We're both still fighting it with no end in sight. I can't even drink alcohol! Aside from trying to keep our fevers in check, the beer doesn't taste right and I can't drink it down fast enough. :'(

Neuton Mouse

Is my thread in depot locked? I press "Post Reply" and nothing happens, page refreshes, unlikely here in this topic...

Or it's anti double posting security feature?

Bruce Perry

Your thread is open :) Here's a locked thread for comparison.

You're right, you can't double-post, because we abused it decades ago (note that the rapid-fire posts in that thread became reordered in a database import so you're not seeing the original order). What you can do is edit your post and then click 'Send to Top' if you want to. :)

(See, it paid off that we kept this thread open, didn't it 8-) )

Neuton Mouse

Thanks Bruce Perry. All clear now.

Yep, paid off. This topic feels like this is some sort of ancient cavemen campfire that everyone keeps for centuries.

Got my share of fire today :)

Bruce Perry

There were 972 replies before I posted, so this is reply 973, post 974. After this, there are 26 to go. That's as many as there are letters in the alphabet. Perhaps a game can be derived from that observation? :)

Chris Katko

(A)bsolutely. I'm doing my part.

[edit] Looking through that thread. Man, we sure talked like teenagers... then again I was like... 15. So many people I miss...

MiquelFire

(B)ut are we going to be able to keep this going without the thread locking up on us?

Elias

(C)ould get problematic once we reach X now. Not many words start with it.

bamccaig

(D)rinking again. Finally feeling a bit better... Still seem to have a cough. At least my body still seems to be attacking something. Have to go back to work tomorrow... :(

Eric Johnson

(E)ric is my name. 8-) It was like this was meant to be. My whole life has lead to this post.

Bruce Perry

(F)uck I knew that would happen! [(E)lias, the trick is to make sure that just before we get to X, we have linked to an article by or about a person of a suitably confusing gender... *shudder*]

bamccaig

(G)ood thing nobody saw it though!

Eric Johnson

[H]ow many genders are there again, Bruce? ???

Gideon Weems

[I]nfinite.

bamccaig

{J}ust stick to a bracketing scheme, will ya?

Eric Johnson

<K>londike bar... what would you do for one? ;)

bamccaig

/L/ick it, but only if it asked politely.

MiquelFire

!M!y god this is going out of control!

Arvidsson

No, this is completely normal.

Gideon Weems

Only I get to have Z. You guys agree, right?

Niunio

(P)lease don't be sad if I answer "not" but it is what I should do.

Elias said:

(C)ould get problematic once we reach X now. Not many words start with it.

I have a perfect sentence for that message. :)

Eric Johnson

~Q~uickly, let's wrap this up before I have to go to work.

bamccaig

`R`ap this up, you say?

Chris Katko

(S)uppose we just kept going forever until Matthew's hard drive filled up?

Niunio

(T)hat's the idea. ;D

Eric Johnson

{U}nlikely to happen in this thread, but we can certainly try. ;)

MiquelFire

|V|ery likely we'll just hurt his wallet in the long run. I think the site is on AWS now a days.

Arvidsson

*W*hen will this madness end?

bamccaig

"X" marks the treasure, or so the saying goes, but what marks the end of madness?

MiquelFire

'Y'ay! We're almost done with this game!

Eric Johnson

{Z}elda: Breath of the Wild looks like fun. 8-)

Edit
So do we go to "ZA" from here? :P

bamccaig

South Africa sounds like a rather intriguing place to visit, but I think I'll have to pass. I can't afford it... :(

Eric Johnson

The next best thing to visiting South Africa would be to buy allegro.za. We gotta increase Allegro's global reach, people!

Edit
Oops... That makes 1000 replies. Anything broken? ???

Chris Katko

1001?

Perhaps it'll spin over at 1024.

Eric Johnson

Allegro.cc done broke. (I totally didn't edit the CSS...) :o

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Mark Oates

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^ Us after all these years of hard work on this thread. >:(

It shows that despite all the failed Monday projects, we can come through on something! >:(

Arvidsson

Anyone say Monday project? I'm in!

Elias

But mere massive multiplayer is so outdated, let's do something that adds VR and AR this time!

Gideon Weems

I'm not playing unless I have to wear a headset.

Arvidsson

What about an utility toolkit library for game development which would be the basis for an editor à la Unity/Ue4/GameMaker where multiple scripting languages are integrated (lua, python, whatever people like) which supports different levels of expertise - from visual programming for newbies to bare-metal coding where the editor would only really help with project organisation and creating builds for all the platforms we want to support.

I think if we all put our minds to it, this could be done in a monday or two. Everything is built using Allegro ofc.

Chris Katko

What if I told you... the forum... was the game?

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bamccaig

The drinking game.

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Eric Johnson

Is the objective of the drinking game to become the most drunk or the least drunk?

DanielH

Whomever can drink the most without passing out (or spewing)

Bruce Perry

DanielH, do you think it's possible to get spanners shaped like your avatar?

Chris Katko

Okay, let's do this.

video

Bruce Perry

If you got through the cartoon version, try the live action version :)

video

Chris Katko

Wow, that one takes the disgusting cake...

video

Sandlot.

[edit] Ahaha I just remembered Stand By Me as well.

video

Bruce Perry

Love 'em :)

Then there's always Mr Creosote:

video

Onewing

I wanted to reply to a thread with zero replies, but it was locked.
Ironically, the thread complaining about thread locks was also locked, so I couldn't add my complaint there.

Even more ironically, the thread requesting the removal of thread locking has yet to lock, thus proving that thread locking is still valid and that threads simply have to be interesting enough for them to persist on the a.cc forums.

And now, a haiku:
All we are is dust
In the wind, so too do threads
Lock ever too soon

Mark Oates

Oh BTW, Bitcoin has just reached a new all-time-high:

{"name":"610803","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/1\/4\/14061cbbc715ea880019beb01faf5632.png","w":996,"h":377,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/1\/4\/14061cbbc715ea880019beb01faf5632"}610803

That was earlier, too, now it's at 1.211 :o

bamccaig

I wish I had bitcoins, but I don't. I have no idea what 1.211 means. Is that thousands of USD?! Or just 1.211 USD? I've never found a marketplace that I was able to get into, and trusted. The thought of putting too much investment in the cloud is also concerning since I don't have a very thorough backup process and I could see losing the entire wallet due to hardware failure or luser error.

Of course, the off-topic boards have always been the most lively hang out spot for the community. Turns out a lot of us don't spend much time programming games. Especially now. Which is probably OK. I think there's value in the community that has formed, even what's left of it. A lot of the newbie questions have been beaten to death. What I do find interesting is that there does seem to be quite a few Allegro 5 questions, but there's relatively few people with the expertise to answer them i.e., boards can't be active with on-topic posts because few people have that knowledge. Arguably, it's Allegro 5 that killed this forum, regardless of its technical merits. I think it has seen increased adoption though so I think it's a slowly recovering crash instead of an extinction.

It's also worth noting that this thread has survived largely due to the inactivity of the boards and moderators. If this was a thriving place and moderators were on alert this thread probably would have been locked ages ago.

Mark Oates

1000 mBTC = 1 Bitcoin

1 Bitcoin = $1,200 USD

Johan Halmén

Anyone here own bitcoins? If I were offered one bitcoin for something, what would I have to pay to receive and own it? Some registration fee?

Btw, only 3 posts to 1024.

bamccaig

Bitcoins are just a virtual currency. You'd trade for them, either with money or whatever commodity that the trader wanted (virtual or real, money or material). If you were "offered" a bitcoin you would likely already know what you owed for it: whatever product or service was requested. In any case, the idea of the system is that it's peer-to-peer. You generate a "wallet" using cryptographic algorithms in the software and the network tracks transactions to and from that wallet using peer-to-peer based cryptographic operations. The idea being that only the holder of a "wallet's" cryptographic secrets can make transactions for that wallet, and the validity of any transaction is verified by the network of peers (to keep everybody honest). There's no registration fee because nobody owns it.

However, the hard thing is getting involved at all. Bitcoins started out as a rare commodity awarded to those that could answer complicated mathematical problems. The only way to solve them was "mining" which meant lots of computer horsepower working to beat the next guy to the answer. That's just the system devised to initialize the market more or less.

The only other way to acquire bitcoins other than mining is to buy or trade them with people that already have them. Therein lies the problem. Finding a safe way to make the trade, while gambling on the value of the virtual currency itself whose so called value is subject to market influences not entirely predictable. Various "hubs" try to operate as a so-called "bank" which pretty much just means they're willing to trade bitcoins for real world currency. Of course, due to the nature of bitcoins themselves, you're really at their mercy. Essentially, you hand them real world money, and then they're supposed to send you bitcoins via a computer transaction that no government or bank can police. You can imagine how this can go wrong.

As with most investments there's nothing inherently safe about bitcoins.

Chris Katko

I wish I had some money last year to buy AMD stock at a mere <$2.00. Yesterday it was over $14/share.

Johan Halmén

This is post # 0b10000000000.

DanielH

DanielH, do you think it's possible to get spanners shaped like your avatar?

Possibly. Might have some copyright issues. This is one of the lions from the 80's cartoon Voltron.

Bruce Perry

Johan, is it Post # 0b1 kenobi?

Eric Johnson

¿uǝʞoɹq buıɥʇʎuɐ sı 'os

Gideon Weems

I wish I had some money last year to buy AMD stock at a mere <$2.00. Yesterday it was over $14/share.

You know, I wrote off AMD on account of poor performance of their graphics hardware department (business-wise, relative to Nvidia). I practically forgot they also competed with Intel.

Chris Katko

I never buy AMD / ATI video cards. Never had good luck with them. The price point and program compatibility tends to be better with nVidia.

But I'm all about some AMD CPUs!

Bruce Perry

I just fitted one of these to our thread gate, using supplies ordered yesterday and received today, a Sunday, from Amazon (it's amazing that that's possible). Now we can come and go that way with our bicycles and leave the thread gate locked without having to go through the house again :)

Sorry, I'm too lazy to go out again and take a photo :P

Chris Katko

That's cool.

Back in engineering college, some kids took a deadbolt and added a car locking mechanism so they could have keyless entry to their dorm rooms. ;)

bamccaig

Apparently I'm bad at math. You're supposed to replace your motorcycle helmet approximately every 5 years (I've heard) because the protective layers degrade over time and the helmet is less effective. I thought that I had been riding for 5 years, but upon closer scrutiny from Miranda it has only been 4 seasons. In any case, the other night I got drunk and ordered a helmet for $300 USD. My original helmet was about $200 CAD, but I sought better protection given my added knowledge. My "upgrade", if I decide to keep it, will be Snell 2010 certified, whereas my original helmet was merely DOT. That's the major difference.

I'm guessing that it will be D-loop instead of the clicky-ratchet fastener on my Joe Rocket helmet. That gives me slight pause because I imagine it will be difficult to do with gloves on, and on probably 10 or more occasions I've ridden off while forgetting to do my helmet up so it'll be even more of an adventure pulling over and taking gloves off to fasten it, but I imagine it's worth the added safety. Additionally, there is no retractable Sun visor, which seems consistent with Snell helmets so I assume it has a lot to do with the safety again. Nevertheless, it was certainly convenient to be able to swap between a darkened visor and clear visor while on the move. I'm concerned how that will affect me. I distinctly remember moving between heavily shadowed and heavily lighted spots back and forth on the same road and being able to transition on the move, but being practically blind for the moments in between. I can only assume that if I'm blind then the 5000 lb vehicle behind me probably also has a blind driver so pulling off of the road, if I can find it, is probably not the best idea.

In any case, this was my compromise:

https://www.revzilla.com/motorcycle/scorpion-exo-r2000-fortis-helmet

I stayed consistent and bought it in white/black. It looks decently bright to attract attention. Immediately when I told Miranda she said she could use the other one! Turns out, maybe true, but assuming they fit, and I don't think my other one does, I'd insist on her wearing the new one if we do partner up. Even with the helmet she is still missing a lot of expensive riding gear, and I still have gloves and pants to replace for myself. :-/ Riding a bike is so rewarding, but also so expensive...

Chris Katko

I have never in my life heard "helmets degrade over time."

Degrade from what? The sun? That'd be the paint.

There are so many layers to a helmet, the only layer affected would be the outermost. (Aside from padding but that's from usage.)

There "may" be truth to that but that sounds insane and retarded. Who designs a helmet THAT FAILS? What if your seatbelt failed after a few years? What if your airbags failed? Why doesn't your leather coat fail? Your boots?

And I'm not talking about wear from usage. But wear from time? The only time wear I've ever seen is oxidation and UV damage. (ala your tires on your car crack if left in the sun for years.)

But helmets? The only helmets I even have are over 15 years old. My Dad drove for decades on the "replace when you crash" policy, since helmets (like your car body) are built to collapse on impact to help absorb the energy instead of sending it into your brain bucket. And even then you only need to replace from significant impacts. (Minor impacts aren't going to trigger a breakdown. Bumping your head on the door frame as you walk in the house doesn't cause an explosion.)

Don't get me wrong. If you've got money to spare, safety is a pretty damn good investment.

bamccaig

You're probably somewhat correct in that the helmet won't magically fail in 5 years. However, it's not a complete myth according to Snell: http://www.smf.org/helmetfaq#aWhyReplace.

Quote:

The five-year replacement recommendation is based on a consensus by both helmet manufacturers and the Snell Foundation. Glues, resins and other materials used in helmet production can affect liner materials. Hair oils, body fluids and cosmetics, as well as normal "wear and tear" all contribute to helmet degradation. Petroleum based products present in cleaners, paints, fuels and other commonly encountered materials may also degrade materials used in many helmets possibly degrading performance. Additionally, experience indicates there will be a noticeable improvement in the protective characteristic of helmets over a five-year period due to advances in materials, designs, production methods and the standards. Thus, the recommendation for five-year helmet replacement is a judgment call stemming from a prudent safety philosophy.

In general, while you can't know for certain that a helmet has degraded sufficiently to fail in 5 years, you also can't know for certain (without testing it, which is probably going to cost about the same as a replacement) that it hasn't. As you say, safety is a pretty damn good investment. It can be damn scary to come to grips with how vulnerable you are on a motorcycle. Over the few years I have ridden I have come close to quitting because of it. It's certainly a bit of peace of mind to imagine that your head is somehow relatively safe in the event of an accident. The thought that your helmet might not be working at peak efficiency is certainly cause for concern, especially over time. Last year I was even feeling nervous about it, which now I can't imagine why if that was only actually 3 years old. I digress. I think that motorcycling is also tailed by many myths so it's worth considering that this is just one of those. But again, $150 - 500 every 5 years is probably not an unreasonable precaution.

Chris Katko

For a serious rider, yeah, I'd definitely err on the side of caution.

My bike has been a "a project" for 99% of it's life and "drivable" for like 1%, so I'm more of a "it's a beautiful day, let's drive through the mountains" kind of guy than a "let's drive to work even when it's hailing and there's rush hour traffic trying to murder you." Especially as I've gotten older.

I sometimes wish I grew up in the 70's so I could experience practically EVERYONE owning a bike. During their peak popularity, motorcycle culture was really big, but it was also much safer. Why? Because people were used to seeing motorcycles on the road so they looked out for them, whereas now bicycles and motorcycles are so rare you have to be half-suicidal to ride them around road traffic.

Even if you're looking out for riders, they can easily be missed in your A-pillar or blind spot. But since people are even MORE distracted with their phones these days, it's suicide-city. Hell, I had a dumb !@$!@ stop a stop sign, and then proceed to NOT LOOK, and then proceed to drive forward t-boning my car. (A great feeling staring up at a SUV radiator sucking in air right next to my face.) She said, "I didn't even see you!" Yeah, sure. She didn't "see" a car that looked like a police car. (Of all cars, you'd pay the most attention to a cop, right?)

If you can't "see" a cop car, then you sure as hell aren't going to see a motorcycle.

Sidenote: I don't know how it is for you ultra-northerners, but almost every time I've been hit by a car down here in Tennessee, they didn't have insurance, a driver's license, OWN the car "it's my brother's car.", and just so happened to be an illegal immigrant.

And that may sound like some not-so-clever jab at immigration but it's not. It's actually my experience.

bamccaig

It may be true that motorcycle awareness was higher in the 70's, but [citation needed] that it was safer. Insert: Not only was the quality of gear less, but the performance of the bikes was lesser too (though there are still plenty of boats available if you're into that sort of thing)!

As for personal experiences, I have never been in an accident of any kind (knock on wood?), and have actually had relatively few close calls on my bike as well as cars. Nevertheless, the close calls on a bike are far more terrifying. And yes, phones are a major cause for concern...

Had a guy in a pickup truck blow through a 4-way stop a fraction of a second in front of me after I had already stopped and started. Probably the only thing that saved me was that my eyes happened to scan up the road as I was start off and I realized he wasn't slowing down and let off. Up here, I think it's possible to stay relatively safe, but you do need to be pro-active about it and drive defensively. It's not very hip, but neither are broken bones and skin grafts. :P

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

Probably the only thing that saved me was that my eyes happened to scan up the road as I was start off and I realized he wasn't slowing down and let off. Up here, I think it's possible to stay relatively safe, but you do need to be pro-active about it and drive defensively. It's not very hip, but neither are broken bones and skin grafts. :P

I know right? I actually drive the same way when I'm in a car. Driving a 5-speed really focuses you to to be a "think ahead" driver because you have to understand the situation BEFORE you get there so you can keep the gear in the right place for your needs. So I'm always scanning the horizon.

I really want to rig up a Gaze Tracker, a pair of cameras with the right math transformations so you can translate between eyes, and what the eyes are looking at. I want to compare myself, and other drivers, as well as with distractions. I also want to experiment with my dogs with it.

Here's a great example of eye tracking being used for... a movie. Helping explain what people are doing when in a scene, and how their eyes begin to wander as the begin to subconsciously get bored.

https://vimeo.com/19788132

bamccaig

My helmet has arrived. :-* It's pretty nice. Some true upgrades over my original helmet which I bought before I knew anything about the sport or gear. I think it will take some serious practice getting used to doing and undoing the double D-rings. My first helmet had a simple clicky quick-release system, but I think the double D-ring system is probably also a lot safer. It will also take some planning to work out which visor to use. My original helmet had a retractable Sun visor that could be dropped down while riding. Now I've got two separate visors that need to be swapped while off the bike (and obviously stored somewhere if you travel with it).

Mark Oates

lo1 this thread is like our own quiet peaceful protest :P

Chris Katko

3... 2... 1...

I voted for Trump.

Eric Johnson

I voted for Trump.

Me too. Is America "great again"™ yet?

bamccaig

I would have, but they wouldn't let me. >:(

I'm not saying Trump is a good candidate, but Hillary is worse.

We all need to work on fixing our political systems so instead of picking the lesser evil of the elite, we can pick the best person for the job.

Eric Johnson

I agree. I hope Trump does well by the American people and makes advances to clean up political corruption. One can only hope...

Also:

bamccaig said:

I would have, but they wouldn't let me. >:(

Why wouldn't they let you?

bamccaig

Something about, "you're not from here!"

Also I don't think there's much hope left for him to do a good job. I haven't been paying much attention, but what I've heard so far has been pretty bad.

Erin Maus
  • Trump lies five ways to Monday about everything (important and unimportant).

  • Trump did not give up ownership his businesses and continues to financially benefit from them. (For crying out loud, Jimmy Carter relinquished his *peanut farm* and then was investigated for it).

  • Trump's anti-Muslim ban is unconstitutional.

  • Trump removed the Joint Chief of Staffs and Director of National Intelligence from resident positions in the Principals Committee, while having the grossly underqualified Bannon have a permanent seat.

  • Trump has removed protections for transgender students being able to use the bathroom of their gender in schools.

  • Betsy Devos has no experience in education, yet is chosen and confirmed to lead the Department of Education. She clearly is for privatizations and has a vendetta against public schools. (I actually listened to her confirmation hearing. It's very clear. Did any of you?)

  • Jeff Sessions has recused himself from investigations into Trump's campaign; he lied under oath about Russian contacts; and he has a force against civil rights during his political career. (Again, I listened to his his confirmation hearing and followed up on claims made by the Senators questioning him. He is not an 'egalitarian', as his fellows claimed.)

  • Michael Flynn had to resign because of his Russian connections during the campaign.

  • Rex Tillerson is incredibly supportive of Russia; he is against sanctions and has lobbied for Russian interests in past. (Actually listened to the confirmation hearing, again).

These are off the top of my head.

Eric Johnson
bamccaig said:

Something about, "you're not from here!"

Ah, my bad. I didn't know you lived in Canada. Is it true that they sell milk in bags there? :o

Trump's anti-Muslim ban is unconstitutional.

How so?

Quote:

Trump has removed protections for transgender students being able to use the bathroom of their gender in schools.

That should be a state issue, in my opinion.

Quote:

Betsy Devos has no experience in education, yet is chosen and confirmed to lead the Department of Education. She clearly is for privatizations and has a vendetta against public schools. (I actually listened to her confirmation hearing. It's very clear. Did any of you?)

I agree with you there.

bamccaig

  • Trump has removed protections for transgender students being able to use the bathroom of their gender in schools.

Which one? This I don't think begs mentioning since it's not necessarily bad.

I also don't think having "Russian" ties or being generally supportive of cooperation with Russia is in itself a bad thing. Sounds like a good thing to me. Of course, bad things could be done with it.

I think it's already been mentioned, but Trump's election is the counter-assault in response to extremist social justice warriors that are trying to make the world cater to the whims of professional victims and mentally ill people. Hillary Clinton might as well have been the Queen of the SJWs.

Append:

Is it true that they sell milk in bags there? :o

Yes! That's all I knew growing up!

Samuel Henderson

Trump's anti-Muslim ban is unconstitutional.

That's some anti-Muslim ban... It has no effect on the other 87% of Muslims not from those 7 countries!

Quote:

Trump has removed protections for transgender students being able to use the bathroom of their gender in schools.

In reality all he's done is said that the Federal Government will no longer be providing guidance on the issue and will instead defer the power back to states... which is absolutely where it needs to be.

Quote:

Jeff Sessions has recused himself from investigations into Trump's campaign; he lied under oath about Russian contacts; and he has a force against civil rights during his political career. (Again, I listened to his his confirmation hearing and followed up on claims made by the Senators questioning him. He is not an 'egalitarian', as his fellows claimed.)

I listened to his confirmation hearing too! I thought it was quite obvious that Sen. Franken's question was specific to Sessions being in contact with the Russians in his capacity as a surrogate on the Trump campaign. The fact that he met with the Russian ambassador twice in his capacity as a Senator is not really surprising. I think one of those times he actually met twenty or so ambassadors at once, one of whom was the Russian ambassador. I suppose his answer could have been better had he qualified it with a statement that he had no contact with the ambassador as a Trump surrogate... but oh well. I don't think he's done anything criminal in this situation so he'll probably not be forced out.

Quote:

Michael Flynn had to resign because of his Russian connections during the campaign.

Well, actually, he had to resign because he lied about his contact with the Russian ambassador to Mike Pence, who then went and repeated the lie to the American public. If he had been honest and said "Yeah, Kislyak and I did discuss Pres. Obama's sanctions." then he would still be in office today.

I either agree with your other points or don't know enough about the situation to comment.

That being said, here's a couple more points that I disagree with Trump on:

  • He won't release his tax returns

  • He kicked CNN, the NY Times, and a bunch of other news orgs out of the press pool

  • He's upping the military budget by $54bn

bamccaig said:

I would have, but they wouldn't let me.
...
Something about, "you're not from here!"

Pfft... that didn't stop me 8-)

Bruce Perry
bamccaig said:

We all need to work on fixing our political systems so instead of picking the lesser evil of the elite, we can pick the best person for the job.

Also worth considering: proportional representation. In the simple case where we have two candidates and about half the population voting for each, they work together on an equal footing. In reality you'd have many more candidates and many more places.

Aaron, welcome back! But why get involved in politics again? You know this community will never agree on these things ;)

I have a question for you. What do you make of Reuters? They claim to try to report everything objectively, even going so far as to avoid referring to people as 'terrorists' since one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter. I'm naturally desperate for a news source that I can really trust.

Here's one glowing endorsement for Reuters (you can choose whether to watch it, I don't mind at all):

video

TL;DR: Reuters used an accurate headline of "Oregon mass shooting survivor posts account of blood, pain and healing", while many other outlets made "Shooter acted 'like he was playing a video game' " the focus of their headlines, when it was just a side-comment to describe the shooter's nonchalance.

Erin Maus

Aaron, welcome back! But why get involved in politics again? You know this community will never agree on these things

I wanted to post about a bug I fixed in my project, but figured it wouldn't be as fun as kicking a hornet's nest. (I jest.) I only visit because I want to make a patch to update Allegro 5's OpenGL bindings.

Reuters is good. I'm subscribed to BBC, NPR, Al Jazeera, and Reuters in my newsreader. BBC is pretty good neutral world news source, NPR and Reuters are the same but also provides more coverage of America, and Al Jazeera offers a more critical view of American policy in the Middle East but is otherwise generally balanced.

Chris Katko

Trump may be President, and I know that pisses off liberals, but hey, at least you didn't spend the last two hours watching Alien vs Predator: Requiem.

That might be the worst movie I've ever watched... ever.

I may actually be dying now. I can feel my immune system shutting down because I've lost the will to continue living knowing that AvP:R exists.

Bruce Perry

What you want is the Soviet regime. They policed creativity and might not have allowed AvP:R to exist. They did it badly though: anyone can tell that Shostakovich's music tells the true story there :)

I'm not sure how I feel about the BBC. Of course they're a large organisation with many different people with different personalities, as evidenced by on the one hand: outright illegally racist recruitment policies (they publicly exclude white people from consideration), and on the other hand: the series 'Revolting', where they made fun of Islamic State and triggered a few people. I do find it interesting that they were one of the outlets excluded from that meeting - it suggests that at the very least they have been trying to make Trump look worse than he is. Reuters were allowed in.

GullRaDriel

Enough Trumpism ^^

Bruce Perry

Good luck stopping people talking about Trump.

Yesterday I learnt two new pieces of German:

1. "Trump ist ein Trampel."
2. "Jedes Böhnchen gibt ein Tönchen."

Here are the translations:

1. "Trump is a plonker."

2. "Beans, beans, they're good for your heart.
The more you eat, the more you Trump."

;D

Chris Katko

Trump is so polarizing you can just say his name and people can't but help bring up a point or story. I kind of like it. Feels like the Bush days where people called him the devil. Which is freaking HILARIOUS because now the liberal media... LIKES BUSH!?!? And shows him hanging with Michelle Obama, and quote him about how Trump sucks. They literally called Bush The Devil, and now they quote him and hang out with him.

It just goes to show how empty the MSM's words and accusations are. There's really no surprise that they're just a propoganda wing for big corporations (remember when liberals were AGAINST billion dollar multinational corporations like walmart killing off the mom-and-pop stores?) Now they're all about Starbucks. Money money money.

Erin Maus

Controversial opinion: as a leftist (the term 'liberal' has connotation with free markets), mom & pop shops are no better, and due to the way regulations work, possibly worse than Wal-Mart in some respects (for employees, environment, etc). There is no such thing as an ethical corporation while the value of our labor is not fully, fairly, and equally compensated.

Non-controversial opinion: Behavior trees are amazing. I've been working on an AI framework built on behavior trees and it's wonderful. The AI framework is a component of a greater system and communicates asynchronously with the other bits over a custom messaging protocol. I use coroutines to yield executing nodes while waiting on results and it Just Works (tm). I'm working on a scheduling system, since I don't want the behavior trees to be too nested.

The agent would be able to set "I want to kill 50 demons" as its task. It will perform prerequisite tasks (obtain armor and weapons, obtain food, go to demon place), complete task properly (obtain more food, repair armor and weapons, etc), and then decide on another. By creating larger 'goal' that have other goal tasks as prerequisites, I could have the agent execute complex and seemingly spontaneous actions reliably and without any needless complexity.

Polybios

@Bruce Perry. Thank you for the English translations. ;)

I'm very curious how people will evaluate Trump's presidency in 4 years. Personally, I doubt the "greatness" will manifest itself, but it'd be a nice twist if it did.
USA's international reputation seems to have suffered already, but US people generally don't seem to care.

Bruce Perry

I've seen behavioUr trees implemented poorly. I improved the implementation and then saw them constructed poorly. Next I made a new implementation where the tree itself was constructed inline as code (an awesome system with lambdas), and then the official AI programmer recruited to take over from me while I moved on to other stuff, threw it all out and I have no idea what he did next. Finally the project got axed and everyone got made redundant. So, for me, they're controversial 8-) ;D

Meanwhile, at a university in Germany, I found a flyer about how Star Trek might be a feminist utopia. I immediately thought 'nope', and I couldn't help but notice the long list of trendy taboos (racism, antisemitism, etc.) in the last paragraph, but I have yet to decipher it all and work out why those taboos are mentioned. The event was this evening and will be taking place right now... :o

[EDIT]
Polybios: it didn't occur to me that someone might actually use my post as learning material :) So, here's the version I learnt at school, in full:

Beans, beans, they're good for your heart;
The more you eat, the more you fart.
The more you fart, the better you feel,
So let's have beans with every meal.

Here's the version I heard on The Simpsons, which doesn't suffer from the forced rhyme:

Beans, beans, the musical fruit:
The more you eat, the more you toot.

Erin Maus

I made browned-butter chocolate chip cookies today and two loaves of a chocolate coffee bread. Stuck one loaf in the freezer. I toast a slice with breakfast.

The problem with snacks is I don't have to buy them--I can make them. So simply "not buying junk food" doesn't work. But luckily I have some bit of self control when it comes to eating; a pan of brownies lasts a week between my brother and me, for example. That's only like 150 calories/day extra, which is easy enough to manage.

(Sneaky bump.)

Mark Oates

OMG Guys last post was 3 days ago we're slipping!! :o

MiquelFire

We need to give Matt a false sense of security with this thread once in a while.

Chris Katko

What are some great tools people use for doing stuff?

Eric Johnson

The hammer is a pretty slick tool.

Chris Katko

Impact hammer drivers are pretty cool too.

I'm not talking about the powered ones. I'm talking about the ones you hit with a hammer, that turn on impact.

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Super useful, especially around motorcycles.

Eric Johnson

I didn't know there were "non-powered" ones! :o

Anyway, the fork is my favorite tool. ;D

Elias

Most important tool ever. Often enough I did not have one with me and had to ruin my keys or a fork or a table instead...

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Eric Johnson

What the... you don't need that "tool"! God gave you teeth for a reason, Elias. Use them. >:(

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Gideon Weems

I would marry my angle grinder, if it would accept me for the man I am.

Bruce Perry

My mum bought me one of these, but I have no use for it - I don't drink and will never want to host alcohol consumption. ::)

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bamccaig

You just need to summon your inner hacker/MacGuyver!

Eric Johnson

They rebooted that show. No Richard Dean Anderson though.

DanielH

The old ones are on Netflix. Watched 3 or 4 episodes and realized there was so much cheese in those things.

Eric Johnson

The cheese was half the fun! ;D

Chris Katko

NEXT WEEK. NEW DAVE CHAPPELLE on NETFLIX.

WOoo

Johan Halmén

A tiny crowbar. It's amazing how it fits in the smallest places and allows me to insert a heavier crowbar and finally demount things in my old house without destroying stuff very much.

DanielH

Johan, years of research should have revealed that it is a red (x button) not a (red x) button. ;D

Reminds me of those stupid Jaden Smith memes.

"When you clean out a vacuum cleaner, you become the vacuum cleaner"

Johan Halmén

And when I get a divorce, my wife becomes a vacuum cleaner.

Chris Katko

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Bruce Perry

Isn't Peter Griffin a cartoon character?

Chris Katko

He is?

Eric Johnson

Aren't we all cartoon characters every now and again? :-[

Gideon Weems

I call Goku.

Eric Johnson

Adult Goku or kid Goku? I favor kid Goku, as I enjoy Dragon Ball over Dragon Ball Z.

Erin Maus

In Lua, setmetatable returns the table, so you can do something like this:

t = setmetatable({}, metatable)

Which is less verbose than this:

t = {}
setmetatable(t, metatable)

Similarly, table.remove returns the removed entry, so you can do this:

return table.remove(stack, #stack)

Instead of this:

result = stack[#stack]
table.remove(stack, #stack)
return result

But table.insert doesn't return the inserted entry, which is annoying. So I can't do this:

return table.insert(stack, { foo: 1, bar: "baz" })

Instead, I have to do this:

t = { foo: 1, bar: "baz" }
table.insert(stack, t)
return t

Which seems inconsistent.

bamccaig

I don't think it is. In the former cases the return value was something that you didn't necessary have already. You had a metatable and an index, but not the table and value, respectively. Whereas with the insert, you already have the value that you're inserting.

Would this work:

return table.insert(stack, { foo: 1, bar: "baz" }), stack[#stack]

I think it might. In any case, while it's convenient to have clever shortcuts to things, they often can be difficult to understand at a glance which can result in more bugs. In actuality, splitting things up makes them much easier to understand. And it's not that much more to type. It's also easier to debug or extend.

For example, it's not exactly obvious what 'setmetatable' would return. Why not the metatable? Or maybe the previous metatable? You have to memorize the API to know that it returns the table itself. And if you forget that you could end up with some obscure, misbehaving code that doesn't stand out.

Erin Maus

I don't have a reference to the values because it's passed directly to table.insert without being stored in a local variable prior.

I really don't think the concise examples are any less readable than the verbose ones. It's not like I'm cramming 100 operations in a single line. I've never had problems reading Lua code formatted as such before.

DanielH

Not even spring yet and we hit 93°F today (33.9°C). They also predict his weekend will be warmer.

Eric Johnson

I hope the heat and humidity are low tomorrow. I live in Louisiana and have to drive into Mississippi tomorrow in a car without air conditioning. :(

Bruce Perry

Our weather here in the UK has been very windy. I'm a little windswept, short and stout.

Gideon Weems
My brain said:

I'm a little C pot, short and stdout.

I favor kid Goku, as I enjoy Dragon Ball over Dragon Ball Z.

Interesting, as I mostly hear the opposite. Did you experience Dragon Ball first?

Eric Johnson

Interesting, as I mostly hear the opposite. Did you experience Dragon Ball first?

I don't remember exactly. I saw them both pretty close to one another, so it's all a blur. But I resonated more with Dragon Ball and its quirkiness more so than the action of Z. If I were to go back and re-watch one of them, it'd be Dragon Ball.

Bruce Perry

Gideon, I like your brain :)

BRAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIIN

bamccaig

HIS EYES ARE UP... Oh, no, that's right. His eyes are right there. Carry on.

Bruce Perry

bambams \ó/

Gideon Weems
Bruce Perry

What's that from?

And how does your brain strike for this one: i_ò/

jmasterx

You guys were so busy fussing over the 1000th reply, you completely forgot about the 1024th post >:(

bamccaig

McLuserSaus. >:( There's always 1048576.

Gideon Weems
Bruce Perry

It was supposed to be this :)

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Arvidsson

Is it friday?

bamccaig

Probably depends where in the world you are. It is for me (unfortunately). That means I should have been sleeping hours ago, and I should go to sleep now, but I really don't feel like it.

Gideon Weems

It was supposed to be this :)

Argh! I should have taken the challenge more seriously. Bravo.

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How about this one?

Bruce Perry

Embarrassingly, I have no idea - but if I squint, I can see boobies and a Santa Claus beard, so it has my interest piqued :)

Eric Johnson

I don't really see much of anything there. Am I... going blind? 8-) (<- blind guy glasses)

Arvidsson

This certainly feels like a monday.

Bruce Perry

No it doesn't.

Chris Katko
Niunio

A lot of time without a message. It is not good.

GullRaDriel

Is it trying to lock itself ? 8-)

Chris Katko

THE THREAD HAS BECOME INFECTED WITH PROGRANISMS.

IT HAS BECOME SENTIENT.

ALL OTHER THREADS ARE YOURS.

LEAVE THIS THREAD.

ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE.

MiquelFire

I got stuck here, so I don't have to worry about landing. But I can't leave...

Chris Katko

Have you been...SHIP WRECKED, 14 BILLION LIGHTYEARS FROM EARTH?

video

Come to think of it, this predates System Shock 1... by three years.

Johan Halmén

"It would take me light years to finish..."
"Hold on! Now you're using a length unit to measure time!"
"Time, space, what's the difference..."

Chris Katko

I guess I could have posted the gameplay video showing that it's like System Shock 1...

video

Gideon Weems
bamccaig

:D

amarillion

Are we all following the easter hack logs?

Gideon Weems

;D

I am now. I like the art style of Eric's bomb game.

Chris Katko

Neat!

I'm not working on the competition but I am working on my game here and there. Last few days I've been implementing an inventory system with hand-coded mouse support. Click, drag-and-drop, and right-click. Right-click broke somehow recently but I'm not worried about it right now.

I've never written a dialog system / mouse GUI before, so it's interesting to do something different.

Eric Johnson

I am now. I like the art style of Eric's bomb game.

:D I passed off my lack of tangible art skills under the guise of it being a unique "art style" instead. I'm glad it paid off. :P

Just a few more days left now! I'm really hoping to finish by the 15th.

Bruce Perry

Ahhhhh. Nice long Easter weekend. I need it. :)

I looked through the EasterHack screenshots. Yay! <3

Eric Johnson

Happy Easter, everyone! :)

GullRaDriel

Happy Easter Eric ! :D

bamccaig

Happy Easter. I'm sorry it's over. But I got to see most of the people that matter most, and got a good long talk with my mom out of it. :) Alas, now I have to try to get to bed at a decent hour so I can wake up and be rested for work tomorrow. :-/

Onewing

Happy National High Five Day!

Eric Johnson

And a happy "self high five" day to lonely people! :D

Bruce Perry

If you're lonely and you know it, clap your hands?

l j

High five day coincides with Hitler's birthday?

Eric Johnson

That and it's marijuana day! :o The two together make for a REALLY high five. ;)

bamccaig

:D :D :D :D

Bruce Perry

Marijuana fans - can you find a way to enjoy it without filling the air with it? It's a bugbear of mine (along with cigarettes)...

Today's random tip: pay $22 a year to IMSLP and you get access to Naxos's classical music streaming (desktop and mobile), which is wonderful. My latest discovery on there is Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance. <3

Erin Maus

I made a debugger for my behavior tree library.

I'm proud of it. Was very easy to integrate, since the process method of each behavior tree node is wrapped in coroutine that yields when working, I was trivially able to insert a debug hook and yield until resume without breaking anything. Even nodes that normally don't yield just work.

It also handles remapping line numbers between MoonScript and Lua, which is nice.

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Not the prettiest thing, but it seems to do the job just fine.

But damn, writing the GUI code is the most boring thing I've done in weeks. I hate two types of programming: GUI and web development.

Gideon Weems

I hate two types of programming: GUI and web development.

I share similar sentiments but do have high hopes for nuklear and Pyramid.

Marijuana fans - can you find a way to enjoy it without filling the air with it?

I share similar sentiments but do have high friends.

bamccaig

GUI programming is frustrating because it's so much work for very little results. It's a lot of work to make a bad interface. A good interface is like impractical time investment.

Web programming is similar, but not nearly as bad. The hard part about Web programming is browser compatibility. The key there is doing everything server-side and avoiding JavaScript, which is the main culprit for incompatibility. There are stable and well supported libraries to provide a little bit of client-side convenience without breaking anyone's user experience.

There are definite advantages to Web development. I don't think many of us see it as their dream job, but it's a pretty reliable revenue stream. Most clients won't accept console programs, and GUIs are more expensive than Web is. And GUIs can suffer the same compatibility issues depending on supported platforms.

As for marijuana, I don't particularly hate the smell from a distance. I have a neighbour (or two?) that smoke it, presumably by prescription, and it doesn't really bother me to smell it occasionally. If it was 24/7 it might be different. Certainly it's more offputting when the guy sitting next to you in the office wreaks of it. :( I probably would be more tolerant if they shared! :(

Eric Johnson

I find it interesting to hear people's thoughts of Web development. I got into coding because of Web development, so the Web is my first love, I guess.

Compatibility issues were certainly rampant 10 years ago, but it has much improved these past few years. Especially with browsers that auto-update, compatibility is not as bad as it once was. The top modern browsers all support most of the same technologies. HTML5 is pretty much implemented across the board now, as is CSS3 (with a few subtle exceptions). As for JavaScript, that has gotten a lot better, too. I used to stay away from JavaScript for the most part because it was slow and inconsistent (mostly with IE--damn you, IE!), but it is not bad these days. I actually recently got back into JavaScript, and I really like how it has improved. It is pretty quick these days (though it likely will never be as fast as native code for obvious reasons), and compatibility is pretty good. It is really only with the experimental or newly drafted APIs where you will run into issue. And mobile JavaScript has much improved in the past few years, too. In short, I like JavaScript now.

As for back-end stuff, that is a breeze and really always has been (in my opinion). PHP and MySQL is pretty available virtually everywhere, and the stuff just works. PHP has its flaws, but it gets the job done. I have done a lot of work with PHP and enjoy it. You can even write back-end code in JavaScript now with Node.js. :o

But anyway, I agree with GUI programming. I try my hand at it every now and again, and each time I leave mostly empty-handed and frustrated. As you said, bamccaig, it is a lot of work for very little. Such little return on investment. I prefer CLI anyway, which is one of the things that attracted me to Linux. The command line is often faster, lighter, and more convenient than GUI. However, I prefer browsing the Web and checking my emails in a GUI setting.

bamccaig

However, I prefer browsing the Web and checking my emails in a GUI setting.

The way I look at it is this: if the data involves graphics then a GUI is often desirable, albeit, it can still be a GUI designed for heavy keyboard use. The Web is a good candidate for a GUI. You can browse the Web in text, and good Web sites work fine in text, but graphics heavy sites are useless in text, and most poorly designed sites are too. A GUI just makes things easier in the modern Web.

Email, on the other hand, I actually prefer in text. Most email content is text, at least worthwhile content. Most of the graphics are just tracking beacons, or at best useless noise. Mutt, my preferred client, actually tends to do various things better too. It has better thread grouping than any GUI I've seen, it produces better outputs that are more accessible than most GUI and Web clients, and it supports things like PGP easily. If you haven't used a text client for mail give it a whirl. You might like it. It helps immensely if you have a good text-based text editor too.

Eric Johnson

Does Mutt easily handle sending / downloading attachments? I use attachments quite frequently.

bamccaig

Relatively easily. After you've composed the message in your editor and quit your editor you are returned to Mutt to view the metadata of the message. As I recall, you type 'a' to add an attachment and then have to type in the path. Or you can press '?' or tab to access a sort of text based file manager to browse for one. Mutt has been around for decades and was probably written, patched, used, and maintained by some of the godfathers of the Internet. It likely handles mail standards more correctly than most user agents. :)

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(Note the prompt at the bottom of the first screenshot, that's after typing 'a')

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Append:

Downloading them is relatively easily. I believe you type 'v' to view attached files and then select one as you would expect. If it's plain text or something that Mutt has been configured to know how to open it will just open normally in a view pane of Mutt (or run an external program as configured). Otherwise, you can indeed save it to a file so you can open it externally. I honestly don't deal with many attachments though so I'm not an attachment wizard. :)

Eric Johnson

Interesting. I think I'll give Mutt a try then.

Gideon Weems

If you are serious about trying out mutt, I must warn you that its configuration has been known to take lifetimes.

Regarding attachments: You can also add "Attach: /home/alex/reticulating_splines.wav" to the email header (if edit_headers is set). A file manager key binding for prepending "Attach: " to a path and copying the result to the system clipboard makes this very fast. Now that I think about it, a file manager could even have a binding that automatically places an "Attach: " string in a new email...

Eric Johnson

Thanks for the warning. I'll try it out tomorrow sometime. For now I'll sleep.

Also...

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I got your nose! Now pay up, or you'll never smell again! >:( ;)

bamccaig

With both Mutt and Vim, I suggest you don't spend decades trying to figure out your ideal first config. Instead, Google for some examples and base your rc file on those. Look around for the things you want from a default config, but generally look for a beginner friendly config. Just get using the software and once you're comfortable you can worry about making it work the way you want it to.

Bruce Perry

Eric - apparently, the gesture you posted is the Greek equivalent of a middle finger :)

Gideon Weems

Oh noes!

Eric Johnson

Eric - apparently, the gesture you posted is the Greek equivalent of a middle finger :)

So it means "?!#@ you, I got your nose!" then, right? :D

Eric Johnson

bamccaig is a beautiful person. :-*

bamccaig

Whoa, whoa, take it down a notch. This is no reason to double post!

Eric Johnson

What the...? That's weird. I didn't even think that was possible. :o

I clicked the "Add Reply" button, but it didn't do anything the first time, so I clicked it again. My bad. :-X

Edit: I edited the duplicate post so it's not a duplicate anymore. ;)

bamccaig

:D

It's not supposed to be possible, but obviously the double-post guards aren't perfect.

Eric Johnson

So I tried out Mutt. Its simplicity in use is nice. Though I imagine its mastery is a whole other story. I'm not sure I'll use it as my main mail client though, because attachments seem a bit tedious, and it's just text (I often receive emails with images that I care to see). I'm just not too sure about it just yet.

bamccaig

It's not a club. If it fits your needs use it. :) It does fit my personal needs, but honestly I keep my business needs separate. I mostly use Mutt for free software mailing lists and that sort thing. I gained the knowledge of how to cryptographically sign and encrypt messages, and that in itself is useful, albeit in today's world marginally. And smart mailing list messages are so much nicer that way.

Obviously, the average colleague does not write messages that are consistent with that. I get it. When it comes to replying to company mail I top post because I honestly don't think my colleagues would notice an interleaved message, even if I spelled it out in a heading every goddamn time.

Attachments might be somewhat painful, but I think they always are. As a side note, it's free software so if you can make it better do so. Nobody will complain. You can always submit a patch to the mailing list if you figure out a better way to do it.

Bruce Perry

It is the complementary gesture. A 'bird', upon encountering a 'nose', might be taken by an irresistible desire to hold hands. :)

P.S. I bet Mutt doesn't support drag and drop of attachments ;)

Eric Johnson

A 'bird', upon encountering a 'nose', might be taken by an irresistible desire to hold hands. :)

Hold my hands, friend. >:(

Bruce Perry

Do you need to hold my hand
And have me help you understand,
Or shall I hold up both my hands
And say I did not understand
Your ask which seemed quite out of hand
For me to deign to hold your hand?

(I recently discovered Gilbert and Sullivan)

Chris Katko

My new favorite song!

Quote:

This world of ours is full of choice
But must I choose between only John or Joyce?
Are my options only hard or moist?
My vagina has its own voice
Not vocal cords, a metaphorical voice
Sometimes I do a voice for my vagina
Please don't tell me I'm the only one who does that
'Cause my sex junk is so oh, oh, oh
Much more than either or, or, or
Power bottom or power top
Versatile love may have some butt stuff
It's evolution, ain't nothing new
There's nothing taboo about a sex stew
Just add salt or Gerard Depardieu
French treasure
'Cause my sex junk is so oh, oh, oh
Much more than either or, or, or
If they're alive I'll date 'em
Channing or Jenna Tatum
I'm down for anything
Don't box in my box
Give someone new a handy
Then give yourself props
(Male voice: Oh you think you're so smart, did you learn gay in college?)
Chill with all of that while I drop some knowledge
Sexuality's a spectrum
Everyone is on it
Even you might like it if you sit up on it
Drag queen, drag king, just do what feels right
You're tall pansexual, flirty wood sprite
Who enjoys a fleshlight in the cold moonlight?
(Male voice: With a sad clown Skyping via satellite?)
Damn skippy, home slice,
Sing it with me all night
Sex how you want it, it's your goddamn right
'Cause my sex junk is so oh, oh, oh
Much more than either or, or, or
Get off your soapbox
Get off your soapbox
My sex junk's better than bagels with lox
With lots of schmear

I didn't write that. That's an actual song someone put down on paper and told someone to sing.

Eric Johnson

And they said the "slippery slope" didn't exist! :o

Anyway, I had to search what "schmear" meant...

According to Wordnik:

Quote:

schmear
n. A spread that goes on a bagel
n. A batch of things that go together
n. An aggregate

Bruce Perry

If it wasn't clear, I was genuinely asking if you needed me to explain more clearly or if you had some other meaning with "Hold my hands, friend"...? :)

Eric Johnson

No further explanation needed, thanks. I was just being silly with "Hold my hands, friend" anyway. :P

Bruce Perry

That's a relief :)

I hit the mother lode today - educational, trippy and hot :)

video

Eric Johnson

What a strange, yet mesmerizing, animation style.

Bruce Perry

:)

Incidentally did you know that given only the rules for attraction and repulsion of stationary electric charges, the magnetic forces between moving charges emerge purely as a consequence of relativistic distortion of spacetime, because the relative motion causes the charged particles to appear more or less spread out? It was one of the biggest mind blows I found on YouTube :)

video

bamccaig

Science is hard. Having chosen a field in technology I find it overwhelming to even attempt to learn even the most basic scientific ideas beyond the high school level. Even within technology which is more of a macro level or 12 above the science there's simply too much to possibly ever grasp. It really puts into perspective that as much as we collectively know about the universe, each of us knows a relatively limited set of things, and most things are beyond the grasp of a lifetime. It can be rather philosophical if you let it. And rather frightening if you let it.

Append:

That is, the bit about magnetism above (and the circular reference video that follows, damn it all OP) makes some pretty decent sense, but it's already building on top of ideas that are too complex to explain in the video. And even this bit of knowledge will likely escape from my brain as more pressing issues relevant to today take their spot in relative memory. Ask me to explain magnetism on this scale in a year or 5 and I probably wouldn't have a clue without Googling, and I'd be lucky to find such a digestible source at the time.

Bruce Perry

You know your limitations - that enables you to push against them and achieve more :)

Are you damning Amarillion because I posted a video?

Eric Johnson

"Amarillion" makes me think of "armadillo".

Bruce Perry

Me too - I even had lines in my game Aliens on Fire along these lines:

[You] "Amarillion made me do it!"
[The aliens who speak Japanese because why not {THAT'S RACIST!}] "Arumadiro? ..."

Also, happy 100th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings :) (This is Reply No. 1166.)

Eric Johnson

Pretty sure that'd be アルマジロ (arumajiro). ;)

Don't armadillos carry leprosy? We'd better steer clear of Amarillion then...

Bruce Perry

You can write 'di' as ディ. In the game it was ローマ字 (our letters). It's quite possible I chose to write it as Arumajiro though, I can't remember :)

Eric Johnson

I hate ローマ字 with a burning passion. >:( No joke.

You are correct about 「ディ」 though. But that'd be a really unusual spelling. I think the two "accepted" ones are 「アルマジロ」 and 「アーマジロ」. But it doesn't matter in the end.

Bruce Perry

I looked it up - I wrote it as "Arumadiro".

Also, just looking at what I achieved - I had such awesome braaaaiiin stamina back then. I wish I still had it :) On my boss's advice I bought a book on 'hacking' your physiology to give your brain the best possible chance at being awesome, and it seems to have quite a lot of good things mixed in with a few bits of quack medicine the guy fell for (EZ Water for example). I think what I really paid for was the work involved in pulling together and focusing a lot of good health advice with a focus on brain performance. So, we'll see. The pizza I just ate most of won't have helped though. </self-engrossedness>

Eric Johnson

Let us know how it pans out for you. I'm trying a different approach: hating yourself to the point where you're forced to make a change for the better. "I'll improve, damn it!" :(

Also, what kind of pizza? I had combination pizza this evening. :D

Derezo

Also, just looking at what I achieved - I had such awesome braaaaiiin stamina back then.

I use to look back at my old programming and think, "How did I figure all of this out so easily back then and put it together so quickly, and now it takes me forever to create anything meaningful?".

More recently I finally created a really cool system that generates thousands of web based forms that mimic our desktop application system resources. It impressed everyone at work and I felt like my rate of brain decay was not as bad as I had feared, and I may still be of value. ;)

bamccaig

video

I am now about 3/4 into my 30th year alive. In the last year I've gotten a beer belly which until now I was incapable of getting (I blame that on my finaceé since she makes me eat food daily), and I don't feel as capable when driving. Some of the latter is probably just maturity and knowing more of my limits, but I worry some of it is also losing my touch. I wonder if working from home contributes to that since I drive much less often now. I haven't even gotten my motorcycle out of storage yet. I still feel pretty good about myself as a programmer, but I've also come to terms with certain limitations in my capacity. I guess the future holds whether I bust out of those limitations. In any case, given the peers I work with I still feel pretty good about myself. I just wish I had the missing pieces to make the big bucks.

Bruce Perry

Oh bambams, that video was hilarious - I love the juxtaposition of such chaos with the well-ordered music :)

The pizza was a Goodfella's pepperoni one, bought frozen at the supermarket. There's a cheese one waiting in the freezer for the next time I feel like letting go :)

So, here are some changes I've started making:

  • I generally never ate butter because I never appreciated the taste and bought into the war on fat which is now believed to have been very harmful (allegedly the sugar industry bribed some academics into downplaying its well-known dangers, leading to that war). The guy recommends butter since it contains good fats, so it can't hurt to give it a try. Actually he's more specific - grass-fed butter - but I have some of Lore's butter to finish off first, and I don't know what kind that was.

  • He also recommended putting butter on broccoli, on the grounds that the presence of that fat helps the body to make use of some good nutrients in the broccoli, so I tried that. It was tasty, certainly.

  • I'm limiting my intake of things like milk chocolate and fruit juice. I've bought some spring water and intend to keep that stocked up at all times, since it's more tasty than tap water, and it'll be easier to drink enough water if the water is tasty.

Here are some things I'm not going to do, at least for now (in some cases ever):

  • He claims milk is bad for you - the fat is good but the protein and lactose aren't (which is why he recommends butter, which only has the fat). For the time being, I'm not going to avoid milk and cheese - it would be too much of a shock to the system, and it wouldn't be sustainable.

  • He recommends coffee (only in the morning, and not for the caffeine but for other reasons). When I was a kid, it was made painfully obvious to me that tea, coffee and alcohol are grown-ups' drinks and will not be offered to me. I was happy with that (they didn't seem tempting anyway) and ended up thinking of them as at odds with who I am. The thought of me starting to drink coffee offends me. On the plus side, he does recommend dark chocolate.

  • He says anything grain-fed, or made from grains, is at risk of being mouldy. That more or less rules cereal out entirely and forces you to be paranoid about ingredient lists. He also has all sorts of other claims that force you to be paranoid about ingredient lists. I think it's unsustainable to think that way.

bambams, in your position I'd try and find a way to live without the alcohol, or at least with a lot less. I think it's probably your main self-destructive tendency (the same way sugary binges are mine). Of course, whatever you change, it has to be sustainable - so the challenge isn't to find the willpower not to drink, but rather to find something that just makes you feel so satisfied with things that you no longer want to drink. But I've never been into alcohol (see above) so I honestly don't know what the desire to get drunk feels like, nor what could serve to replace it, nor how good Google would be at answering that question correctly.

Derezo, I have no idea what you do to destroy yourself, but there's probably something :)

I spent some of today playing with Windows Presentation Foundation. Now that's a nice system, at first sight :) I think it's too early to say whether what I'm doing is helping me - my eyes felt a bit tired most of the day, and maybe I'll crash tomorrow. ;)

Gideon Weems
bamccaig said:

I just wish I had the missing pieces to make the big bucks.

The biggest missing piece tends to be dumb luck.

Bruce Perry

From observing our CEO, I can tell you that's not true. There's a definite mindset and set of skills that leads to success with huge amounts of money, and I also lack those. Luckily he finds me useful for other reasons though :)

bamccaig

I attempted to find a non-explicit image of homosexual-sexual activity to post here implying the reasons, but I failed to find a good one and probably gave Google the wrong impression about me in the process. I hope you're happy. :(

Eric Johnson

Enjoy the targeted ads. ;D

Bump.

You guys like Sokoban? I've been hooked on it the past few days.

Johan Halmén

Sudoku here. It comes and goes.

Chris Katko

Oh my gosh... this thread is still going...

bamccaig

It will be 2 years in September. :D This must be some kind of record for A.cc (moderators would normally have closed it by now!).

Eric Johnson

Who are the mods anyway?

bamccaig

These days I'm not sure there's anyone left other than ML himself.

Eric Johnson

He's not a mod though; he's The Creator. :o

Johan Halmén

Do you believe there's a Matthew Leverton, who has created this site, or has it just evolved from some meaningless junk of bits and bytes?

Edgar Reynaldo

If the source code to allegro.cc ever got leaked, Matthew would have to reabsorb it like Flynn did with Clu in a giant explosion.

GullRaDriel

I believe in THE Matthew Leverton ^^

Chris Katko

I believe Matthew evolved from primordial Progranisms.

Bruce Perry

Serif fonts <3

I installed StyleBot in my Chrome so that I could make sites like Wikipedia and MSDN appear in a serif font. It makes the sites speak to me so much more and brightens my day.

bamccaig

This site always existed. It was simply inaccessible until Matthew discoveredit by reciting the right incantation. It's not fully uncovered of course, as the incantation he has composed isn't perfect, but it seems he has lost interest in discovering the rest. :-[

Serif fonts <3

I installed StyleBot in my Chrome so that I could make sites like Wikipedia and MSDN appear in a serif font. It makes the sites speak to me so much more and brightens my day.

wat

Johan Halmén

So there's at least some kind of intelligent design involved?

Gideon Weems

Everybody with a member number less than 4,000 should be a mod. This is no arbitrary number. Countless studies have shown that the first 4,000 members of any organization or community are its most senior.

From observing our CEO, I can tell you that's not true. There's a definite mindset and set of skills that leads to success with huge amounts of money, and I also lack those.

It sounds like you've found a good leader. You may want to stick with him.

Neil Roy

Everybody knows the flying spaghetti coder created this site.

Eric Johnson

The flying spaghetti coder pays my source code a visit whenever I code. :(

You guys aren't posting often enough. :'(

bamccaig

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Bruce Perry

I just participated in four days of solid rehearsals, morning, afternoon and evening, culminating in a concert. It was the best orchestra I've ever played in, and it was exhausting but wonderful. Shame it was all in German :)

Four days without a post? I have an excuse. What's your excuse? ;)

bamccaig

I posted last, and went out to camp. >:(

Chris Katko

My. God.

Bruce Perry

bambams, presumably you got temporarily evicted by your own 'dishwasher' for posting that? ;)

Katko, your god is the reason you didn't post?

Eric Johnson

Four days without a post? I have an excuse. What's your excuse? ;)

I've been lazy busy working on stuff.

bamccaig

bambams, presumably you got temporarily evicted by your own 'dishwasher' for posting that? ;)

Actually, I think she's the one that found it on Facebook and I asked told her to send it to me! :D >:(

MiquelFire

Sure, told.

Bruce Perry

And then she still sent you camping for it ;D

Polybios

Haha, I totally wondered where the dishwasher was supposed to be and didn't get it until I read your comment, Bruce. :-X

GullRaDriel

Bump. TINS IS COMING ! Ok, not so soon.

8-)

Polybios

Trump withdraws US from Paris climate agreement. He's having a run lately.

Eric Johnson
Polybios said:

Trump withdraws US from Paris climate agreement.

Good.

Polybios

Syria and Nicaragua were not so great last time I checked. :)

Bruce Perry

Eric, what good will come of it?

Trump will be Trump. The big question has to be, is it time to reform some broken voting systems?

Edgar Reynaldo

ROFLMAO - It's not the voting system that's borked, it's the voters.

Eric Johnson

Eric, what good will come of it?

The U.S. will save a few trillion dollars that it would otherwise spend on the Paris deal.

MiquelFire

It's not the voting system that's borked, it's the voters.

Yep.

MiquelFire

It's not the voting system that's borked, it's the voters.

Yep.

bamccaig

The U.S. will save a few trillion dollars that it would otherwise spend on the Paris deal.

1. The US was never going to actually follow through.
2. A few trillion dollars is nothing compared to what it owes, or what it spends on less important things in a year. (But even if they didn't pull out, they wouldn't have actually met their goals, and would have spent a fraction of that trillion dollars you propose)
3. Climate change is a real thing that we're already seeing impact some of our lives, and it's probably only going to get worse.
4. Imagine what your grandchildren will have to look forward to if we do nothing to stabilize it.

Trump is certainly an ignorant fool, but I'm not sure Clinton would have done this any differently so there's that. The voting system is broken, but the voters are broken too. All by design.

GullRaDriel

cavfefe.

Niunio
bamccaig said:

Trump is certainly an ignorant fool, but I'm not sure Clinton would have done this any differently so there's that. The voting system is broken, but the voters are broken too. All by design.

cavfefe

Indeed. :(

Bruce Perry

Mainly I meant that you shouldn't have had to choose between Hillary and Trump.

I also included the UK voting system in my comment, since here you vote via FPTP (problem #1) for a local representative, and then the regions contribute their representatives again via FPTP (problem #2) to create a national government which serves a purpose other than local representation (problem #3).

bamccaig

Canada's system is also based on FPTP. And we are trying to get it changed to proportional representation. The current government naturally promised to do this during the election campaign, but once they got majority power they just decided not to change it. Funny that.

Chris Katko

Anyone play any good games?

- Streets of Rogue is cool but only has a few hours of gameplay yet in alpha. So while it feels like a brand new experience, that experience has limited depth until they add more content.

- I got to the last level of Dune 2, beat GDI campaign in C&C, and am near the last level of the NOD campaign. Gonna hit Red Alert next. I'm going to put together a Game Mechanic History YouTube video using my notes and recordings of the playthroughs.

- Kerbal Space Program. GOT BOUGHT BY TAKE TWO INTERACTIVE which means, enjoy your $4.00 DLC rocket engines. Supposedly the original devs all already quit the team (8 before, and the original creator in 2016) which I didn't know. So all the "new team" (before Take-Two bought it) was just a bunch of "maintainers" instead of the original passionate devs. But lots of that is hearsay. Take-Two is also the owners of GTA which... gave legal take-down notices to multiplayer mod creators for GTA. (Multi-theft Auto). They made a single player game a multiplayer one... so Take-Two performed a takedown. And what other game also has single-player only with a multiplayer mod... oh yeah... Kerbal Space Program.

While I don't follow them much, Microsoft bought Minecraft and it hasn't completely exploded (and they made a C++ rewrite of the game but it doesn't support the same mod API... ugh...). I haven't played in years though so I couldn't tell you from experience whether Microsoft ruined/saved/maintained-the-status-quo.

I think there was another indie game that got bought that was "okay" but I can't remember.

On the other hand... Oculus Rift + Facebook = A dead project with a walled-garden that would make Steve Jobs/Apple go "Holy shit, that's a closed system". (Meanwhile, I keep seeing non-stop innovation of games using the HTC Vive. Too expensive for me, but still.)

---

One thing I'm really surprised at is that OpenRA hasn't been taken down. You don't even have to own the original games to play it! My guess here, is that they're using freely available "demo game" data which is why you need the games to play Aftermath/Counterstrike/etc expansion packs. And they haven't added FMV's yet (IIRC) which would need the original disks.

But you can play campaign maps that were (hand made, but) based on those in the full game... so... where's the legal standard there?

And even if a demo is freely available, that's not a license to use the content however you want. I can't just download the demo of a game, rip the textures out, and use them in my game.

[edit]

Quote:

Since Electronic Arts have released both C&C and RA as freeware, we mirror stripped-down versions of the game's assets separately.

Okay, well that explains why they can do it, but OpenTTD and OpenRTC2 both require an original game installation on the computer.

Eric Johnson

While I don't follow them much, Microsoft bought Minecraft and it hasn't completely exploded (and they made a C++ rewrite of the game but it doesn't support the same mod API... ugh...). I haven't played in years though so I couldn't tell you from experience whether Microsoft ruined/saved/maintained-the-status-quo.

I hopped on the Minecraft bandwagon about a year after its launch, so I had the pleasure of seeing it grow out of beta into a full release and then be purchased by Microsoft. Thankfully, the buy-out hasn't resulted in any negative changes on PC. On consoles, they've been monetizing themed texture and map packs, but aside from that, I can't think of any major changes to the game or the business model.

I haven't heard of it being rewritten in C++ though. Where did you hear that? Knowing Microsoft, I'm surprised they didn't rewrite it in C#.

As for VR, that's a fad--an expensive one. I hope the technology and affordability improves, but it'll take time. Maybe in 10 years it'll be worth checking out.

But anyway, I recently started playing Sonic Generations again. I was a big Sonic fan as a kid, but the series was poorly managed and so quality dipped as a result. I'm just getting back into the games and am surprised to find a few really good ones. Generations in particular is surprisingly good; it has nice graphics and sounds, pays homage to past Sonic games, and has great levels. I'm looking forward to Sonic Forces (which is basically Sonic Generations 2) being as good as Generations.

Chris Katko

I just I just found out about it recently. They either did it for mobile, or for consoles so they wouldn't need the Java runtime anymore. Perhaps it reduced power consumption as well.

https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/3c615w/mojang_announces_c_version_of_minecraft_for/

http://www.zdnet.com/article/minecrafts-new-education-edition-written-in-c-will-outrun-the-java-version/

Here's a comparison video (don't have audio right now so I can't confirm it's usefulness):

video

Speaking of Sonic. Get Sonic All Star Racing Transformed. It's worth every penny. It's got a CO OP career mode and there are like... 200 different rounds. There are much less tracks, but still plenty. And then there are game modes on those tracks like normal racing, racing without powerups, racing a ghost, FIGHTING A BOSS by keeping up with it and shooting it enough times while dodging it's shots (Starfox boss meets racing.) It's a SUPER fun game to play every night with your wife or girlfriend. And it's 4-player co-op. You can even GIVE your powerups to other players in co-op mode. So if the leader is doing all the work, and the second player is like 6th place, the second player can give the first his/her powerup to help the leader win.

Eric Johnson

Here's a comparison video (don't have audio right now so I can't confirm it's usefulness):

Interesting video. I did a few quick searches and it seems that the C++ version is essentially just a port of the "Pocket Edition" of the game, so it is missing many of the features from the Java version. Still neat though.

Quote:

Speaking of Sonic. Get Sonic All Star Racing Transformed.

Already got it. 8-) I have both "Sonic and SEGA All Stars Racing" and "Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed". The latter sadly does not have Billy Hatcher as a player. :'(

MiquelFire

I find it funny the comparison video the person's computer can barely run the Java version without it getting noticeably slow.

Gideon Weems

The other day, I found myself perusing the Android development section of my local library. Every book on the shelf had the same Chapter One: "Java." It left the impression that non-Java Android development does not exist.

LennyLen

My cat just farted and it smells real bad. In honour of the occasion, here is a photo of her:

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Gideon Weems

... This thread has reached its peak, folks.

bamccaig

We have a litter box on either end of our apartment, and one of them is against a wall adjacent to where the computer desk is setup. Unfortunately, when we open the patio door which is on the other side of the computer desk, the difference in air pressure draws the odors out of the litter box right across my nose... Takes a few minutes for the pressure to equalize and for the air to stop moving... A cat fart, I cannot imagine, being large enough to consume much of a room.

{"name":"bear.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/8\/783f29b0c1b9d6b2eecc029d1ef614fd.jpg","w":741,"h":771,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/8\/783f29b0c1b9d6b2eecc029d1ef614fd"}bear.jpg

It's like when my finacée farts. She thinks it's so bad, but really it's like mildly unpleasant for like 1/2 a second in the immediate spot. I drink a lot of beer and consume negligible water. Apparently the beer can cause bacteria to build up in your intestines, which when combined with newly consumed food stuffs produce a lot of gas. When I fart the room is uninhabitable for like 30 minutes. :'(

Bruce Perry

Switch to water. You'll live longer :)

And no wonder the cat fart smells bad, considering what she's been drinking ;)

Chris Katko

Anyone have experience with rabbits? I bought one for $6 at a flea market... problem is, the damn thing is so afraid of me. I'm the sole thing that's feeding it... you'd think it'd put two and two together that I'm not trying TO EAT IT.

I let it run around the room and it loves it. But it runs away from people. Problem is, I have to keep it from eating cables, and I have to put it away eventually. Well, it freaks the hell out when I have to "catch" it. It practically has a panic attack and the more it fights me holding it, the more scared it gets. I'd wall off this area behind the couch with my LAN cables and getting to that spot became her new all-consuming life's mission. So after like 8+ times of me "fixing" the blocking cardboard/stuff and her finding a way through--like a Raptor never testing the same spot of the fence twice--she's now terrified. Like... if she actually makes it back there, she begins to GET scared (without me even being there!) and starts "thumping" her foot. And thumping, I've read, translates to "you've caused great offense to me." But if I'm not even there, it must mean, I'm worried/upset. It's to the point that if I pick her up and put her in my arms, she immediately gets "sad"/"upset" with her ears going down. Petting her does nothing... she's so afraid the petting must seem like taunting or some other form of aggression.

If I try to put her on top of her cage and keep her from running away (like in a 2x3" spot so I can interact with her), she gets pissed that she can't adventure and--both worryingly, and somewhat comically--has a little temper tantrum. She won't bite me (although we've had a few test nibbles here and there) but she'll bite the crap out of the towel on top of her cage. I thought she was trying to get into the cage but I realized it's really a temper tantrum out of frustration. She'll nibble it angerily, biting it, pulling it out, quickly. And if I give her her food bowel, she tries to pick it up and toss it angerily. (ahah) And if I give her a toy in front of her face, she likewise picks it up and tosses it out of the way and then just stares at me.

At first, I had her cage on a table and would open it and let her climb down onto a lower table and then to the floor. So I realized it be better if her cage was on the floor and she could just go back in if she got scared. Problem is... she doesn't want to. If she gets scared, she'll go to other spots in the house... rarely does she go to her cage. So once again, I'm "the bad guy" who has to put her in her cage.

I have never worked this hard to try and get a stupid pet to realize and accept my affection. "WHY WON'T YOU LET ME LOVE YOU?!" Dogs are a 1000 times better. All you have to do is feed them and give them some affection and they'll literally die to protect you. Even my damn childhood hamsters were smart enough to understand "Don't bite the hand that feeds you." and that climbing on your hand = "sweet ass adventure time."

bamccaig

Well most people that do eat domestic rabbits do feed them first... I think that rabbit has every reason to fear you. :D Rabbits are pretty low on the food chain. You won't get one to NOT run away from potential predators until you completely train the instinct out of it. Every instinct in his brain and body says to run.

Reminds me of my cat though. My cat is very wild. He's the opposite though: predator. He should be afraid of me, but isn't. On the contrary, he's happy to attack me! Consider yourself relatively lucky (as opposed to literally Lucky, my psycho cat).

Cats are stupid. For real. Cat lovers would never admit this, but they're dumb as Hell. I imagine rabbits aren't any better off. There's only so much you can do. Ultimately, you have to accept that you have a bag of rocks for a pet. It operates 90% on instinct and has a limited capacity for learning and training.

Should have got a dog... :(

Chris Katko
Quote:

Should have got a dog... :(

I've got two. And they rule. The older one doesn't need a leash at all and was trained as a service dog for awhile.

Gideon Weems

The older one doesn't need a leash at all and was trained as a service dog for awhile.

Did the older dog help in the younger dog's upbringing by being a good example? I have often wondered to what extent house pets bestow customs to their younger generations.

bamccaig

People are probably more responsible for animal behavior than other animals. After all, many households have a mix of good pets and bad pets. Generally, the truly bad behavior (at least among dogs) can be traced back to the humans. That said, having a cat has made me question whether the same can be said for other pets. Whereas I think dogs can understand you to some extent, and you can train them to behave as you want them to, it seems cats (and I'd imagine rabbits) are incapable of that level of understanding.

Every day with my cat is an "adventure". I close him off in the bedroom when I'm working from home because if I don't he's constantly climbing over my computer and the like. Similarly, if he's getting into trouble repeatedly and exceeds my patience then I isolate him by locking him out on the balcony or in the bedroom. On the flip side, we can leave him home alone all weekend and he doesn't seem to cause any significant chaos. It seems he's mostly only getting into trouble when we're around (but then it seems he sleeps most of the time we're gone so that he's energized to fuck with us when we come back).

All that said, I think that dogs definitely do set an example for other dogs, and can help with controlling and guiding behavior. Ultimately, the people will still have a more significant impact than the other dogs so if the people are encouraging misbehavior there's nothing the other dogs will be able to do to help.

Chris Katko

Did the older dog help in the younger dog's upbringing by being a good example?

Yes. However, you can have another problem which we ran into. Because the second dog was so much younger, she basically "imprinted" on our older dog more than she did us at first. She could understand the dog, so she didn't try as hard to understand us. Where ever the older dog goes, the younger one follows and has to lay next to her. It's cute but also been more difficult to train her. She doesn't "trust" us as much. Whereas the other one, will do anything I tell her because she knows I'm looking out for her. So I can much more easily overcome any fears that pop up through trust. The younger dog, has random things she gets scared of, and it's much harder to "break" her fear of it. Her fear wins out over her trust of us. So clipping her nails is a big ordeal.

She also might have been abused at some point since they found her on the side of the road, and she had patches of fur that were missing. Just feeding her good food brought her fur back within a couple months. Poor doggy.

[edit] !$@!@@!%%@!!%@ I wrote like 3 pages of stuff and due to some internet connection crap I lost it all. Fuck it.

LennyLen
bamccaig said:

It seems he's mostly only getting into trouble when we're around (but then it seems he sleeps most of the time we're gone so that he's energized to fuck with us when we come back).

It's because he can see that you're not paying attention to him. First rule of cat.

edit:

This is where my cat is right now. When I feel her getting restless, I pat her for a minute or so, and she's good to go for another 10-15 minutes.

{"name":"3JPCLSCDimKP5MmRYVRoXXhpLmHJMjvi2JzXzGPSlbmZ3nUCfUMQlwimhxXGK0AkfpgjZZEl4AKqFzWd-ODxeBjH5NAPMLfsVacBPzRKoHmmGSaRycmejrpxYkdbrZrAq5LeaJKQSRxIQ0jJwpMVXaopsZw0jk7MmlBJk06LgzOfEoSUhMmSwIB0zGqSImeTHb0j2SZHJZEm5gM5vr1fSQHqICw3nZd4Bx64Ky49nqmzCMv5WFGaCuncrank69f","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/4\/f\/4f016ba52b16f62567499d354ba5dd2d.jpg","w":1689,"h":950,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/4\/f\/4f016ba52b16f62567499d354ba5dd2d"}3JPCLSCDimKP5MmRYVRoXXhpLmHJMjvi2JzXzGPSlbmZ3nUCfUMQlwimhxXGK0AkfpgjZZEl4AKqFzWd-ODxeBjH5NAPMLfsVacBPzRKoHmmGSaRycmejrpxYkdbrZrAq5LeaJKQSRxIQ0jJwpMVXaopsZw0jk7MmlBJk06LgzOfEoSUhMmSwIB0zGqSImeTHb0j2SZHJZEm5gM5vr1fSQHqICw3nZd4Bx64Ky49nqmzCMv5WFGaCuncrank69f

Gideon Weems

Because the second dog was so much younger, she basically "imprinted" on our older dog more than she did us at first. She could understand the dog, so she didn't try as hard to understand us.

Ahh, that possibility hadn't occurred to me. I guess I figured dogs would automatically place the bulk of their dedication to the hand that feeds them... I understand where she's coming from, though. If I found myself on an alien world with an older human and two, strange lifeforms curating our environment, I'd look toward the other human for guidance.

Bruce Perry

amarillion is your resident rabbit expert :)

amarillion

Ooh yes, I do know a thing or two about rabbits...

Not all rabbits like to be touched by humans. Sometimes, if they are well trained from very young they might get used to it. But it's not a natural state. Being prey animals, they are naturally afraid of bigger animals (unlike cats who take a more indifferent approach to the world around them). They don't see petting as a sign of affection, more like a big predator that is toying with its food (the food being the rabbit).

(edit: if you want to spend the time, you can train them a little bit. Make a pen, and sit in it with the rabbit. Wait, be patient, don't grab it but let it come to you. You might have to try daily for several days but eventually it will get less afraid of you. Be patient. Be the bunny whisperer. You will probably never get to the point that it will like being picked up.)

And yes, chasing a rabbit and trying to grab it is the best way to get it to run away :) When they're afraid they like to seek shelter, in corners, under the couch. Exactly where they are hard to catch. Be patient and lure them with food. And block the most sheltered areas.

And rabbits eat everything. Chairs, cables, skirting boards, plants, wallpaper. Keeping rabbits is rather expensive if you take the cost of new furniture into account.

We own two rabbits for about four years now. They're not really very well trained in being touched and being picked up. They are very good at being cute, so that makes up for it I guess. They are house-trained, they have a 2m x 3m area where they can walk freely, and once in a while we let them roam in the house (but only under supervision, we're trying to keep our current set of furniture).

If our rabbits go where they shouldn't, I find the best way is to distract them. Give them something they are allowed to chew on, cardboard cereal boxes or cardboard wrapping material. Or just some twigs. I once bought rolls of willow twigs, intended as border liners for your garden, from the pound store. Endless bunny fun. The more things they have around that they are allowed to chew on, the less likely they chew on something that is important to you.

Point of interest. The Dutch word for rodent is 'knaagdieren', which translates to 'gnawing animals'.

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Bruce Perry

Here's another bunny wabbit. This one's decidedly less cute though.

video

Eric Johnson

My family used to raise rabbits for food about 10 years ago... A couple of them became pets though, as my mom and sister found them to be cute. :P

Bruce Perry

Almost relevant, with some imagination (skip to 22:30):

video

Erin Maus

I'm ecstatic!

I've been developing a library to construct a minimum-set-of-dependencies to properly reconstruct any OpenGL draw call, or sequence of OpenGL draw calls. In other words, it would be able to execute any OpenGL draw call and create all the dependent resources/state changes that were active at the time.

I tested it on RuneScape. RuneScape renders item icons from models, and then copies them into a the GUI texture atlas. Here's what a cropped portion of the texture atlas looks like:

{"name":"610933","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/9\/59876b141e570a0ec30132b5b5cbebf8.png","w":1024,"h":1024,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/9\/59876b141e570a0ec30132b5b5cbebf8"}610933

(The annotations are the item icons I'm talking about).

Now, it seems my library correctly identified all dependent calls to reconstruct that texture at the end of frame 1900!

Here's an excerpt where it identified some dependent shaders:

frame 1900:
	texture 26:
		call 914: glActiveTexture
		call 1610: glDrawBuffer
		call 1611: glReadBuffer
		call 1964: glShaderSource
		call 1965: glCompileShader
		call 2135: glShaderSource
		call 2136: glCompileShader
		call 2139: glCreateProgram
		call 2144: glBindAttribLocation
		call 2145: glBindAttribLocation

And where it presumably drew an item icon:

call 436528: glBindFramebufferEXT
		call 436529: glClearColor
		call 436530: glClear
		call 436534: glBlendFuncSeparate
		call 436535: glBlendEquationSeparate
		call 436546: glViewport
		call 436550: glDisable
		call 436551: glDisable
		call 436552: glColorMask
		call 436553: glUseProgram
		call 436556: glUniform1f
		call 436559: glUniform1f
		call 436564: glUniform1i
		call 436568: glUniform4fv
		call 436571: glUniform1f
		call 436574: glUniform1f
		call 436577: glUniformMatrix4fv
		call 436579: glDrawRangeElements
		call 436582: glBlendFuncSeparate
		call 436583: glBlendEquationSeparate
		call 436586: glDisable
		call 436587: glDisable
		call 436588: glColorMask
		call 436589: glDisable
		call 436590: glDepthMask
		call 436591: glDepthFunc
		call 436592: glDisable
		call 436620: glUseProgram
		call 436621: glBindVertexArray
		call 436623: glEnableVertexAttribArray
		call 436624: glVertexAttribPointer
		call 436625: glEnableVertexAttribArray
		call 436626: glVertexAttribPointer
		call 436627: glDisableVertexAttribArray
		call 436628: glDisableVertexAttribArray
		call 436629: glDisableVertexAttribArray
		call 436630: glDisableVertexAttribArray
		call 436631: glDisableVertexAttribArray
		call 436632: glDisableVertexAttribArray
		call 436633: glDisableVertexAttribArray
		call 436634: glDisableVertexAttribArray
		call 436635: glDisableVertexAttribArray
		call 436636: glDisableVertexAttribArray
		call 436637: glDisableVertexAttribArray
		call 436638: glDisableVertexAttribArray
		call 436639: glDisableVertexAttribArray
		call 436640: glDisableVertexAttribArray
		call 436641: glBindFramebufferEXT
		call 436645: glUniform4fv
		call 436647: glUniform1i
		call 436649: glUniform1i
		call 436650: glDrawArrays
		call 436655: glUniform4fv
		call 436657: glUniform1i
		call 436659: glBindFramebufferEXT
		call 436663: glUniform1i
		call 436664: glDrawArrays
		call 436669: glDisable
		call 436670: glEnable
		call 436671: glBlendFuncSeparate
		call 436672: glBlendEquationSeparate
		call 436673: glColorMask
		call 436675: glViewport
		call 436677: glCopyImageSubData

In total it took about 2,000 calls that resulted in the texture!

Now I've got to write a program to replay the calls!

Chris Katko

Awesome work!

Gideon Weems

So it's basically like the resource tracker/extractor feature sometimes found in advanced emulators but with anything that uses OpenGL? If so, that is the coolest thing I've heard all week.

Also, now I'm wondering how bunnies express happiness, when they seem to be such worrywarts.

Chris Katko

They twitch, bounce, and bolt around the room!

video

amarillion

Indeed, it's called a Binky, and it's a sign of happiness.

You should try my game Happy Usagi, the point of the game is to make them do a binky :)

Speaking of which, tomorrow I'm presenting this game at the Amsterdam Indie Game Show & Tell Meetup! I'll be pitching TINS and allegro as well.

Gideon Weems

Haha, that's cute (even the name). I'll check out your game.

Good luck with the presentation!

Chris Katko

Is... is 50 the maximum pages and we're just making one long super page?

MiquelFire

50? If you talking about this topic, I'm only on page 13.

Wow, I just noticed I haven't found a quote to replace my Windows 8 quote in my sig...

Johan Halmén

I'm on page 13, too.

LennyLen

While viewed as one page, the source code for this thread is currently at 39425 lines.

Chris Katko

In a thousand years, scholars will read this thread as a transcript of society.

Johan Halmén

The mascot of the Republican party is the Covfefant.

Chris Katko

The mascot of my party is the Wanamingo.

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Wanamingo

Rodolfo Lam

I can't believe this post is still active... Talk about irony ;D

Eric Johnson

I want this thread's URL on my epitaph when I die... It'll probably live longer than I will. :P

Elias

I doubt it. Could probably do some statistical analysis on how often it almost died and calculate the expected remaining lifetime from that :)

MiquelFire

I think as long as two people are around to post and keep track of things, it should live for a good while.

bamccaig

It's starting to look like Detroit around here. It's falling apart, there's nobody maintaining it, and most people have left. Those that remain love it, but also have nowhere else to go. :'( :D

Eric Johnson
Elias said:

I doubt it. Could probably do some statistical analysis on how often it almost died and calculate the expected remaining lifetime from that :)

Maybe I'll die today though. :-/

Edgar Reynaldo

I wish this thread would go the way of the dodo like the wm thread in my program. >:(

But really, there's nothing you can do about it. This thread is going to live forever. Until the day allegro.cc closes its doors. Because someone is going to keep posting, like I just did, even though that just means it's going to live even longer. :P

bamccaig

This thread is supposed to live forever. >:(

MiquelFire
bamccaig said:

It's starting to look like Detroit around here. It's falling apart, there's nobody maintaining it, and most people have left. Those that remain love it, but also have nowhere else to go.

Recently Detroit got some new light rail train along Woodward in it's Downtown area. So it's not completely bad yet.

For the Metro area, there was a proposal on some election (maybe the one that caused Trump... meh) and for some reason, people out right rejected expansion of that train system. Had it pass, it would have been able to cover the tri county area that people around here consider as part of Detroit to have a light rail system. But since it was rejected at the polls, the 3 miles that we have now is all we get (and it's been running for less than a month now BTW)

Stuff like this is why you kinda need to own a car around here.

GullRaDriel

I'm tired. A luck the week end is near >:(

Polybios

Well, the thread has lived long enough for today's Brexit referendum anniversary!

Bruce Perry

Boo! :P

Gideon Weems

Not even the dragon balls last forever.

amarillion

How was the indie game show & tell, did you ask? Well, I wrote about it on my blog:

https://blog.helixsoft.nl/121/implicit-tutorials-notes-from-indie-game-show-tell/

bamccaig

I've been helping a friend move for the past couple of weeks... Slowly move. Every few days my feet are killing me and once in a blue moon my whole body aches... Should be almost over. Our last day of helping should be tomorrow anyway.

MiquelFire

I was so out of it, I thought yesterday was today, and took out my trash can. Brought it back in so it wouldn't be sitting out all day. Hopefully I'll remember to take it out tonight.

Elias

If we leave trash out racoons (or groundhogs or opossums, all three of those are plenty in Columbus and I have a hard time telling them apart) will tear it up and distribute all over the yard :/

MiquelFire

I have a can, so they can't get to it.

bamccaig

Around here it would be more likely to be a black bear. >:(

Eric Johnson

So I recently visited my grandmother in California. While I was there, I wanted to eat at my favorite Mongolian BBQ joint, but it was out of business. :( That's what you get for being gone for four years, I guess... But I found another Mongolian BBQ place that was pretty good. Not as good as the other, but still good. ;D

MiquelFire

There's a place here that sells really good ribs, but for whatever reason, it was bought out, and is now closed. At some point (since I didn't know about this) I thought it may have been closed for remodeling, and when I asked my dad about, he told me about it being bought out.

As far a remodeling, the Taco Bell near my house, however they did it freaked me out, because it took a week or two to tear it down, but it seems as though it took one night to build back up.

Bruce Perry

Perhaps the old one had asbestos in it and they had to use special procedures to keep its dust out of the air?

Elias said 'yard' - he is officially an American now :'(

[EDIT]
So, how about the incident at VidCon then ;D

Arvidsson

Yes can we please discuss feminism a bit?

Bruce Perry

We don't have to - but we need to talk about something :)

bamccaig

This is the first I've heard of [the incident(s) at] VidCon. :o I am in the process of trying to find unbiased accounts (what I've read so far looks bad for Anita, and also VidCon organizers and the media for backing her up in this matter; and that's even by reading supportive media...). I imagine sooner or later I'll come across the videos of the opposing side, but I seem to already know what happened. It sounds like she attacked them and somehow cried harassment, simply because her critics had the audacity to show up in the front rows of one of her talks. And somehow the media and organizers took her side.

Chris Katko

It doesn't just SEEM like she did. She did. It's on video.

- Sargon sits in audience because he's interested in what his opponents think.

- A DIFFERENT PERSON asks a question for the panel, "Do you actually believe all the things you say?"

- Anita snaps and calls Sargon (a person in the audience) "human garbage" and a "shithead"

- Vidcon rules clearly dictate Anita violated their policy against harassment and intimidation. She had a microphone. He didn't. He couldn't even defend himself.

- Vidcon was going to reprimand her. Then "people" told them that there is "history" and she was merely "Defending herself against a history of harassment."

- Vidcon reverses and will not ban her from the conference.

- 99% of YouTubers (the audience) can clearly see how there is a "rules for you, none for me." when you have institutional power. That is, someone powerful wants you to be given special treatment.

Gideon Weems

"VidCon" sounds so much cooler than it really is.

Amarillion's article has a good point about dumbing down gameplay mechanic introduction--like if a blue power-up yields 1 point but a red yields 2, how do you tell the player? This is a simplified example, but it's not hard to imagine even slightly more complicated mechanics going over the heads of most people. If I were to add something to the discussion, I would say not to worry too much--because at the end of the day, all that matters is whether or not players have fun, not whether or not they understand what's going on. (Besides, the latter comes with time regardless.)

Eric Johnson

all that matters is whether or not players have fun, not whether or not they understand what's going on.

I agree with this statement, though I would argue that making sure the player knows what's going on from the start can help avoid confusion down the line, especially if the confusion is related to a game's story.

amarillion

I think 'implicit tutorials' are a neat concept, but they can be overdone.

I think part of the problem is that 'implicit tutorials' is one of the few concepts in game design that are clearly understandable and not subjective. It's something that can be explained to beginning game designers, and they go 'Wow, this is really neat, I can do that too'. And they learn about how Miyamoto, the greatest game designer alive, used this in Super Mario Bros, World 1-1. And now suddenly game design becomes all about implicit tutorials. Like there is nothing else! Of course there are other things, but they are much vaguer, much harder to explain and more subjective.

In my article I highlight the problem with Usagi, where a certain mechanic is not easy to figure out. But you know what: in play testing, players were clearly having fun, whether they understood it or not. So yes, I could explain better. But it's not the end of the world either.

Eric Johnson

Miyamoto, the greatest game designer alive

I wouldn't go that far. He's the one who fucked up the Paper Mario series, after all. >:(

Edit
I like his work on the Pikmin series. 8-) I'm just a bit salty about his involvement in Paper Mario and the direction the series has taken in recent years. :-/

MiquelFire

Wasn't Portal basically a tutorial? At least the first half of it.

Edgar Reynaldo

Nobody reads manuals anymore because nobody writes manuals anymore... :/

Chris Katko

I miss amazing manuals like MechWarrior 2 and Fallout 1/2.

Edgar Reynaldo

Who wants to read a stinking PDF with bad links anyway?

Bruce Perry

the greatest game designer alive

At the moment, probably Jonathan Blow?

Chris Katko

Warren Specter (System Shock 1, and Deux Ex) and Tim Caine (Fallout) aren't dead yet. So I have no idea how one can claim greatest developer titles.

Peter Molyneux (if only he'd get his head out of the clouds and FINISH a game...)

I'm sure I could think of more if pressed. Obviously, Miyamoto has got to be one of the top ones of all time. But I would be hard pressed to "rank" them with respect to each other--as opposed to merely listing them.

On a somewhat related note (since these people are all [wo]men of great vision and creativity) I know people say "ideas are dime a dozen, the only difference is the effort people put into making those ideas a reality." But I think that might be bullcrap. "Good ideas" are dime a dozen. GREAT IDEAS are super rare and worth paying for and patenting. That's the reason we have patients and that's the reason Hollywood pays out-the-butt to buy scripts and IP rights to successful books. If they could generate talent and great IP's "in-house" they would.

Bruce Perry

You would be a patient too if you were paying out-the-butt :)

Eric Johnson

Have any of you bought anything good from Steam's summer sale? I just picked up Cave Story+, a fun action platformer. I played the game on Wii last year and liked it a lot. I expect I'll like it even more now on PC.

By the way, I'm giving away a bunch of Steam keys to games I don't want. I made a thread about it here.

Chris Katko

I bought tons of GOG games during Summer sale. Steam? Literally nothing this sale. Nothing I saw was really that cheap or interesting.

I did get gifted Player Unknown's Battlegrounds and it's hard as !@$!@$@! but super fun. Like, we play it every day.

Eric Johnson

Which games did you get on GOG during the sale? And that's a battle royale multiplayer kind of game, right? Does it not feel repetitive after a while?

bamccaig

Player Unknown's Battlegrounds is a survival horror or something that plays out like molasses. I watched a guy playing it on Twitch a while back wondering what it was, and was wondering when the action would happen. I watched for like 40 minutes or an hour and literally nothing happened. I don't have that kind of time, but for people that do I'm sure it's fun.

I personally have not found any games on sale on Steam that are cheap enough for me to invest lately. I try to only buy the ones that I know I'll actually play. I haven't seen any really cheap ones, and the few that I wanted were too expensive.

Eric Johnson
bamccaig said:

I try to only buy the ones that I know I'll actually play.

I feel that. There are literally dozens of games sitting in my library that I got from bundles that have never been touched. I recently went through my library deciding which games to keep and which ones to toss. In total, I permanently removed 29 games and some DLC.

Here's most of what got axed:

  • Switch Galaxy Ultra

  • Vangers

  • Arcade Game Series: Pac-Man

  • Arcade Game Series: Dig Dug

  • Arcade Game Series: Galaga

  • OutDrive

  • Savage Lands

  • ACE COMBAT™ ASSAULT HORIZON Enhanced Edition

  • Tropico 4

  • X-COM: UFO Defense

  • Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade

  • Super Hexagon

  • Duke Nukem Forever

  • Super Meat Boy

  • Tharsis

  • BioShock

  • BioShock Remastered

  • Life is Strange

  • Monster Truck Destruction

  • Starpoint Gemini 2

  • Space Engineers

  • DiRT Showdown

  • Saints Row 2

  • PAYDAY 2

  • Attractio

  • Depression Quest

  • Unturned

  • LIMBO

While most were cut because they simply didn't interest me, some did so because they were genuinely bad. Regardless, I feel better now that I've cleaned up my library a bit. :P

Edit
In addition to Cave Story, I also picked up Kero Blaster. It's made by the same guy, so I'm sure it'll be fun. ;D

bamccaig

How did you remove them? The best I can find is how to hide them.

Eric Johnson

You can remove a game from within the "Support" area.

Support > Games, Software, etc. > "Some Game" > I want to permanently remove this game from my account > Ok, remove the listed games from my account permanently

It's permanent though, so be careful.

Edit
If you try to remove games you got in a package/bundle, Steam may have you remove everything from said package/bundle instead of the individual item, which sucks. Like I wanted to remove Sonic CD (I like classic Sonic, but Sonic CD has piss poor level design, IMO), but Steam said I could only do that if I also got rid of 4 other games that I bought together. Guess I'll hang onto Sonic CD for now... :-/

Bump
So who do you think will be the first human to be tossed into the sun?

Onewing

So who do you think will be the first human to be tossed into the sun?

Elon Musk. His advancements in technology will be used against him when the growing right-wing conservatives catch wind of his doings.

Chris Katko

I can't tell if that's a troll or serious post. :o

Bruce Perry

Yay Chris! You got reply number 1300 :)

Eric Johnson
Onewing said:

Elon Musk. His advancements in technology will be used against him when the growing right-wing conservatives catch wind of his doings.

Not sure about that last part, but it makes sense that Elon Musk would be the first to be tossed into the sun. Too bad he'll burn up well before he gets there though. Humankind may never truly step foot on the sun. :-/

bamccaig

I'm not sure it makes sense to "step foot on extremely hot gases". :-/ You can't step on what won't hold weight. Even if a solid substance could somehow withstand the heat it would pass right through the "surface" of the Sun drawn by the gravity at the core (or so we can speculate).

Eric Johnson

That settles it: we need to turn the sun into a solid by freezing it.

Neil Roy

Thought I should post something in here so... here's my post...

{"name":"610963","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/0\/2\/027522384630d2525c48827f12486e3f.jpg","w":1600,"h":1066,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/0\/2\/027522384630d2525c48827f12486e3f"}610963

Eric Johnson

That's a nice-looking post! :o

MiquelFire

Very nice post.

Neil Roy

This is a long thread...

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Eric Johnson

I'm genuinely curious to see how many more puns you can make. :P

Neil Roy
Quote:

I genuinely curious to see how many more puns you can make. :P

Now that you have said that I am stuck for new ideas. :-/

But I did find a great image of a real life end boss fight that made me laugh out loud! ;D

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Eric Johnson

Sorry for ruining your pun streak. :( That's a pretty cool image. :o

Edit
So Neil, I'm curious: do you ever worry about receiving a cease and desist order on your Deluxe Pacman games?

Neil Roy

So Neil, I'm curious: do you ever worry about receiving a cease and desist order on your Deluxe Pacman games?

Nope! Edgar Vigdal (may he Rest in peace :'( ) had no problems. And I had no problems since I started with the PC versions in the 1990s.

I'm actually a little surprised Edgar didn't get any legal problems as the name of his game was a little sketchy... his was "Deluxe Pac-Man" for the Amiga, mine has always been "Deluxe Pacman". There is a difference. Namco registered "Pac-Man" with the dash. They never registered "Pacman", in fact, there is a hat maker in South Korea named "Pacman". So, yeah, I checked. :) I don't use anything of theirs. My Pacman character looks different than theirs if you look closely (mine has eyes, their original one did not). My ghosts are different, they have noses and the animation is different. My level layout is totally different than theirs and I have multiple levels, the original only ever had one. Moving a man through a maze is not exactly an original idea. But... if push came to shove, I would just rename it or stop making it all together (not that I work on it much anymore anyhow)... or I would fight them over it as I am not exactly a pushover, I am known for putting up a fight and pushing back when it comes to my rights. :)

I also feel all the clones is what has kept the game alive. Probably helps with sales on console versions I would imagine <shrug>.

I do have a huge number of downloads of my Deluxe Pacman 1 game. It even surprised me. We're talking in the millions worldwide... if only I had $1 for each download <sigh>. Mainly Spanish speaking nations it seems and a lot of the nations in South America, so there's a market for games like that there. If I knew their language I would be tempted to add it to the game.

I even had a download of it in Saudi Arabia and in some nation next to Libya (I forget the name) which surprised me.

Eric Johnson

It's good to hear you haven't had any legal problems. :) What are the differences between Deluxe Pacman 1 and 2, and how long has 2 been out compared to 1?

Edit
By the way, I just fired up Deluxe Pacman 2 on my laptop and I think I've encountered a bug. If I go into options and enable suicide speed, play a round, return to the main menu and uncheck suicide speed and play again, suicide speed is still applied to the game. Only after exiting and executing the program again does suicide speed go away.

Neil Roy

By the way, I just fired up Deluxe Pacman 2 on my laptop and I think I've encountered a bug. If I go into options and enable suicide speed, play a round, return to the main menu and uncheck suicide speed and play again, suicide speed is still applied to the game. Only after exiting and executing the program again does suicide speed go away.

Okay, you're no longer allowed to play it. ;)

I never play in that mode as it was requested by someone so that would explain how I never caught it. I'll check that, then curse you for making me work on it again! ;)

As for the age difference... I started DP1 in the 1990s, I think around 1996 for DOS and upgraded it as time went by. Originally it was 320x200 I think, something like that with VGA graphics and I think Allegro 2? Been a while. Eventually I moved it to Windows and 800x600. Around 2009 I started to think about a new version with new features, new graphics, new resolution and slightly larger level layout with custom start positions etc... etc... I thought about it a while, made some designs and then shelved it until around 2012 when I started work on it again with Allegro 5. I basically was learning Allegro 5 while I programmed it, so that was a task. I think it was 2015 when I finally released a demo of it and then the full version.

There's a programming journal that comes with it. There's one with both games where I have log entries when I worked on it, some of my frustrations etc... it's actually VERY lengthy, if you're curious. Both games have one installed and can be accessed from the start menu folder (or in the game install folder itself). Both also have a level editor with them.

Oh, what DP2 has that DP1 does not, DP2 has an energy bar you can use for temporary speed, you gain energy as you eat (see HELP menu), press CTRL to use it. DP2 can change from fullscreen to window on the fly thanks to Allegro 5, DP1 you have to restart. DP2 you can set the ghost start positions, it has teleports, the levels are slightly larger, has new graphics etc...

Eric Johnson

Thanks for the history lesson. :) I find it incredible that your project has been around for nearly as long as I've been alive (I was born in 1995). :o Sorry to make you work on your game again. I've got a few bucks I can spare, so maybe I'll make a donation to boost your bug-squashing prowess. ;)

Neil Roy said:

There's a programming journal that comes with it.

Just saw it... whoa--it's pretty long! I often enjoy reading the development logs featured in various game jams, so I'm sure I'll get a kick out of reading your journal entries all the same.

I'll have to check out all that DP2 has to offer. So far I've enjoyed playing a few of the levels. You've done a really good job with it. I especially like how smooth everything feels. Keep up the good work! ;D

bamccaig

As a side note, I just tried DP2 in Wine on Ubuntu and it worked pretty much flawlessly. I think there might have been a bit of a skew to some of the fonts/text on the score board, but that was about it. I only played one level, mind you. You may want to test this for yourself and document it on your Web site.

Neil Roy

Never tried it on Linux, though I did allow someone to compile it for Linus years ago. I should make an effort to port it. Shouldn't be difficult. I may add a note about that though, thanks.

The last DOS version I compiled for DP1 is on my website. I managed to get it to run on my tablet with DOSBOX which was kind of kewl, though really clunky.

Edit: Just tested the suicide speed problem and that is indeed a bug. Strange.

Eric Johnson

I'm also playing it on Linux (Ubuntu) using Wine, and it runs flawlessly as far as I can tell.

Neil Roy

I just fixed that suicide bug now and will upload a new version in a while. I'll probably create 10 more levels for the game first as is my new custom.

There is a level editor with the game as well, it's super easy to use, just click and drag your mouse to "draw" lines. You can also create your own custom line sets and even insert a small image at the start of your level with whatever you want on it (someone requested these things).

Edit: I uploaded a new version with that bug fixed and 45 levels instead of 40.

Eric Johnson
Neil Roy said:

Edit: I uploaded a new version with that bug fixed and 45 levels instead of 40.

I tested it just now and sure enough, the bug's no more! I don't know if it's gone through yet, but I sent a few bucks your way for your efforts. Thanks for fixing it! ;D

Neil Roy

Thanks for that. Though it wasn't necessary, I always fix bugs as soon as they are reported. :)

Edit: Updated the credits screen with your name in it (uploaded it, same version).

Eric Johnson
Neil Roy said:

Thanks for that. Though it wasn't necessary, I always fix bugs as soon as they are reported. :)

Necessary or not, you're good for it. :) I got my high score up to 1.5 million today. Is there an all-time high score that you know of?

Neil Roy

Necessary or not, you're good for it. :) I got my high score up to 1.5 million today. Is there an all-time high score that you know of?

Not really, unless you count the... I think 8 million my wife got one time, but that was before I nerfed the bonus points on DP1 anyhow. Your score sounds pretty amazing. I'm not sure I have gotten that high. But then I have rarely tried. I tend to suck at my own games. :)

Eric Johnson

So I just spent 53 minutes recording my play session only to discover that I had my recording software configured incorrectly. :-/ Oh well, I got a new high score either way: 3,393,200! :D

{"name":"dp2.png","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/d\/4\/d4b2f6e410bcf44220cfdee2e412d560.png","w":800,"h":600,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/d\/4\/d4b2f6e410bcf44220cfdee2e412d560"}dp2.png

Neil Roy said:

I think 8 million my wife got one time

That's pretty high. I'll try to beat that. :P

Edit
Anyone want some more Steam keys?
7 Grand Steps: What Ancients Begat -> 0EQ0Q-6MXZR-JIJMQ
AI War: Fleet Command -> 6BNPT-9J2GF-80LZ7
Ellipsis -> R8RWF-JYI93-WJT3Q

Neil Roy

Edit
Anyone want some more Steam keys?
7 Grand Steps: What Ancients Begat -> 0EQ0Q-6MXZR-JIJMQ
AI War: Fleet Command -> 6BNPT-9J2GF-80LZ7
Ellipsis -> R8RWF-JYI93-WJT3Q

They are all taken. :-[

Chris Katko

So I just spent 53 minutes recording my play session only to discover that I had my recording software configured incorrectly.

As someone who's started recording gaming. I FEEL YOUR PAIN. So many times I found out the stream setting was wrong, or the SSD filled up, or the volume of the game OR my mic wasn't balanced. Or the recording software wasn't recording the video or audio correctly and I'm stuck with a black screen with audio for my whole speedrun.

I've adapted to mostly eliminate those. One of the best things is having OBS run on a separate monitor so you can always watch the status.

[edit]

PUB freakin' rules:

video

Eric Johnson
Quote:

They are all taken. :-[

Better luck next time. I cross-posted the keys on Twitter, so no surprise they went quickly.

@Chris: What are you using to record with?

Chris Katko

Open Broadcaster Software

I play in 4K but my computer can only record at 1080p without killing my frames. Also, I have to play in low detail mode. But the 4K means I get WAY better view at distances.

Neil Roy

NVidia's new share program works well for recording videos and game play. Has an option to display your image in a smaller insert etc. If you have the drivers installed on Windows, just press ALT+Z.

Eric Johnson

Open Broadcaster Software

I'll have to check that out. Also, how does PUBG compare to other battle royale-themed games? I can't think of any off the top of my head, but I've seen a few others on Steam.

Neil Roy said:

NVidia's new share program works well for recording videos and game play.

Yeah, I recorded some footage of emulating GameCube games with Dolphin using that, and it worked surprisingly well (no dropped frames or anything bad that I could tell).

bamccaig

PUBG does look good, but for $40 and Windows-only I think I'll just add it to my wishlist and keep an eye on the price. I've also been screwed a few times by "Alpha" sales where when the real game comes out I suddenly have to pay again. Not sure if that happens on Steam, but it's fucking crooked.

I'm also worried that without having a good mic and being very sociable that it'll be a very lonely, boring, and hopeless match. Most of the fun seems to be panicking with and/or berating/praising friends. Not sure how much text chat is used in game (if even possible).

Chris Katko

It's $30, not 40. The devs said there are no plans for sales, especially since they've already sold over 2 million copies. It's already the #1 most popular game selling game on Steam and #2-#3 in concurrent players.

No text chat. We use our own voice chat on Discord, but PUB does have voice built-in.

There's a lot of panic in the game. The guy who made it has been perfecting the idea for awhile and this is his 3rd game doing it.

100 people. Start in a plane. Plane has a random line direction over the map. You jump out and parachute (as 100 other people do!), but first pick the best possible location. Do you want to get great loot? Then you'll have to fight tons of other people early on. Alternatively, you can try and get far away from the plane and loot the scraps so you can get a reasonable weapon loadout.

Every few minutes a circle of blue wall closes in. If you're outside wall, you get hurt. The more times the circle shrunk, the harder it hurts. You can med up and survive the first one or two. But if you don't get ahead of it, you'll soon play a losing match of "run away from the wall."

Vehicles are great for moving fast. But they're LOUD AS HELL in a game where half the battle is knowing when NOT to shoot. You DON'T want everyone to know where you are. Some vehicles carry only 2 people, some 4. Some are slower. Some have 4-wheel drive and provide varying levels of bullet protection.

You can take a vehicle and go only to the next circle end. Or, you can head to the center.

Once the blue wall finishes shrinking to the next iteration to the next "white circle" on the map, a ticker starts again (2 mins, then 1 mins, then 45 seconds, etc) a new "white circle" (where the new safe zone is) pops up, and the blue wall will begin shrinking again.

So there's all kinds of strategy "Do I vehicle it? If I can even find a vehicle..." verses proning slowly across fields, or crouch running along the hill line and then cutting down through some cover.

Each match lasts less than 20 minutes max, and if you die you can immediately start a new one (which takes 2-3 minutes to load). And the game... it's stressful and intense almost the entire way. You don't have any time to take your headphones off (<--really recommended! Sound is very important for spotting bullet directions and hearing footsteps.) to take a phone call or let the dogs out.

The likelyhood of winning is almost zero. I've won less than 5 matches in >50 hours. But it's not about "winning." A win, being the last person alive (or last duo or squad of 4 alive), is like winning the lottery. Just getting to the last 10 people alive is a huge achievement. So it's not so much about "winning" but about getting better and further than before.

I strongly recommend playing with friends though. Without that, the game would feel like such a painful slog that most people will become discouraged and frustrated. Playing solo is fun at times, but playing with friends is where it's at in this game. Otherwise, you play 10 minutes, let your guard down for a split second, turn a corner and find someone shotgun you to the face and your round is over.

Weapons are balanced well too. It's always a cost-benefit risk to "scavenging enough stuff" before the blue wall comes, AND, "what if I encounter enemies in that block of buildings and die?" But even the crappiest weapons are still enough to kill most end-game people if you're careful enough.

Go and check the (few) NEGATIVE reviews on Steam. They all still say "Great game. Except X."

MiquelFire

Normally alpha purchases on Steam doesn't mean having to pay again. With Steam, it's more like pre-ordering a game, but you get alpha/beta access until the game is complete.

bamccaig

Well fuck it, I decided to buy it since I happen to have a surprise "vacation" day today. I can't even play it on my desktop (not only because of Linux, but also because of graphics). However, I have my work laptop often enough and it should be able to handle it, at least on low settings... In 20 minutes I can give it a try and see if I wasted CAD$37.

Neil Roy

Chris; I watched some of video, the one person sounded like a girl almost when that grenade came in! ;D

bamccaig

It's fun, but yeah, it's hard to manage time and resources without getting left behind. You either die because you're closed out of the play area, or you die because you walked into a trap trying to stay in it. I did manage about 3 kills this last game, but still died at like 39/95.

Append:

Made it to 7/95 this time! Only one kill. Finally I got killed by a sniper watching the tight circle I was trying to get to...

Neil Roy

I watched a video of someone playing that game where they got #1. They only did like, 5 kills. They only won because they stayed away from people and didn't fight until they had to, by which time there were only a few left. I think that sort of play style will grow old really fast. I know I would get annoyed if I was consistently getting high kill counts but losing out to people who run and hide then snipe you at the last moment.

bamccaig

I don't think anybody gets high kill counts. It just isn't that kind of game. It seems to actually simulate bullet drop so even just shooting is non-trivial unless you're standing right next to the guy. Even then, it's harder than you may think to hit him before he hits you! It really is that kind of game: avoid confrontations until you have to. That's still no guarantee of success though. It probably helps a lot if you have friends. If you're playing solo like I am then you're guaranteed to be forced into a tiny circle with about 10-20 guys that want to kill you to survive themselves. Good luck.

The most frustrating part is that for some reason my gun often goes off accidentally. I don't know if that's part of the game, or I'm hitting a key combination by mistake, but it's incredibly frustrating. You're trying to be stealthy, and all of the sudden KAPOW! A big ass rifle goes off. I wonder where you are. ;) It just got me killed at position 16 because I was approaching a tight circle near the end of the game and my rifle went off. A guy must have been nearby and killed me when he heard my shot. :(

I really wish that you could spectate after you die though. You've invested so much in this game. It would be nice to see how it ends (what happens to the asshole that shot you).

Append:

I guess Neil got post number 1337! Congrats! Technically I guess I did if you count the OP.

Neil Roy
bamccaig said:

You're trying to be stealthy, and all of the KAPOW!

This made me L.O.L. I could almost picture it. ;D

Eric Johnson

Do any of you know where the bitmap font used in al_create_builtin_font originates? Did one of the devs custom make it, or was is it from a font somewhere in the wild? I'd love to have it in as a TTF file.

Edit
If it doesn't exist in TTF form, I can make one.

Edit Edit
I turned it into a TTF file using fontstruct.com. I've attached it to this post if anyone wants it.

MiquelFire

@bam

I think if you're part of a squad, you can spectate your teammates when you died at least.

Neil Roy

Do any of you know where the bitmap font used in al_create_builtin_font originates? Did one of the devs custom make it, or was is it from a font somewhere in the wild? I'd love to have it in as a TTF file.

I'm pretty sure that is built in. I remember the conversation many moons ago about putting one in.

Edit:

Quote:

I turned it into a TTF file using fontstruct.com [fontstruct.com]. I've attached it to this post if anyone wants it.

Thanks, grabbed it. It would make a nice console font for input. There are freefonts out there too in TTF format that are royalty free, no legal ramifications attached to using them. http://www.fontspace.com/gnu-freefont

Eric Johnson
Neil Roy said:

I'm pretty sure that is built in. I remember the conversation many moons ago about putting one in.

I know it's built in, but where did it come from originally? Was it copied from a pre-existing font, or was it custom-made for Allegro?

Thanks for the link to free fonts. I wanted the built-in one in particular because I'm porting my TINS 2016 game to JavaScript and needed a TTF version of the built-in font.

Neil Roy

If it is built in, you can guarantee it is totally free.

Eric Johnson

If it has the Neil Roy guarantee on it, then it must be true. ;D

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

I really wish that you could spectate after you die though. You've invested so much in this game. It would be nice to see how it ends (what happens to the that shot you).

You can spectate in team matches. I would love a kill cam so you can tell the last 5 seconds that led up to your death so you learn from your mistake.

Elias

https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/608325/930902#target

IBM's CGA graphics card released in 1981 came with this exact font hard-coded into its ROM - so I would guess IBM owns the copyright.

Chris Katko

There are tons of lookalike BIOS fonts that are FOSS. Just google for them if you need them.

bamccaig

Wait, does that mean Allegro is violating copyright law? :-/

Neil Roy

I am pretty certain the built in font was created from scratch. If it looks similar it is because it is the English language which nobody, not even IBM, owns a copyright on.

I doubt very much this was copied from anywhere.

bamccaig

I played a little bit too much last night I think. When I was trying to squeeze in 6 or so hours of sleep before work this morning I could see the game playing out in my imagination not by choice. You always know you "overdid" it when that happens.

Elias

I'm pretty sure Shawn mentions somewhere he copied the font from his PC's BIOS. It also is pixel-by-pixel identical so is very likely to be the case. (According to the post above, I did not double check).

However a quick Google reveals that in the US typefaces like this were not copyrightable so it is unlikely IBM obtained one. Their actual font "Courier" for example was never copyrighted. The 8x8 BIOS font might have been auto-created by someone simply scaling down a font like that and touching up afterwards... probably was a job of half an hour :P

Neil Roy

Personally, I tire of worrying about copyrights. I just do what I wish for the most part. If someone wants to sue me, go for it. Can't get blood out of a stone. :)

Eric Johnson

Today I rewrote my TINS 2016 entry in JavaScript to be playable on the Web. It's a near one-to-one remake, but with a few small tweaks and additions.

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You can play it in your browser here. I also wrote a small blog post about it here.

I plan on rewriting all of my games in JavaScript soon. I like the convenience of the Web. :)

Edit
Forgot to mention that the code and assets are all freely available on GitHub. ;)

Neil Roy

How do you like Javascript? I looked into it and was intrigued but I don't know if I have the enthusiasm to remake anything of mine with it.

Eric Johnson

JavaScript is currently my favorite language. I enjoy how flexible it is to write programs with it, and I like the convenience of being able to very easily share my creations with others (as opposed to making binaries of programs in other languages). It has its limitations though, primarily in speed. It can't match the speeds of C and the likes, but that's to be expected from an interpreted language. Still, it's pretty fast, and it continues to get faster with time.

As far as writing games in JavaScript goes, it's not difficult, but it is a little different. I'm using the canvas API, but I've abstracted it with my own little game-making library called "Momo". It's only for 2D stuff though. For 3D you'd have to look into WebGL.

Chris Katko

bam (and anyone else): PM me for my steam id / discord if you want to play with us.

Personally, I've been loving the D language. It's C++ but refactored from the ground up to focus on productivity. The compile time function evaluation and meta programming is worlds of power and simplicity. All the "flaws" of D are slowly but surely dealt with--including the "evil" garbage collection which they're working out of the language for those who don't want it in the stdlib.

Javascript's "everything is a float" is very scary. O_O But I do love being able to hit refresh in a browser and just magically see your new code. And since it's JS, everyone is "Already online".

Eric Johnson

Javascript's "everything is a float" is very scary.

Yeah, that's screwed me up a few times. You can treat a number as an int using parseInt() though. But despite its flaws, what I love most about JavaScript is that changes are immediately available upon refreshing the page. It's just so convenient.

Quote:

Personally, I've been loving the D language.

I'll have to check it out. I've heard a few people rave about it, after all.

bamccaig

As a side note, if you use the bitwise-or (`|`) operator in JavaScript the runtime will convert your operands to integers since it only works on integers. If you bitwise-or a variable with 0 you will get the variable as a native integer (i.e., any decimal part will be truncated, non-numbers will be zero). That is part of the asm.js spec IIRC to define an integer number, but I'm not overly up on how it affects performance.

In any case, once you learn how to process your types dynamically it really isn't a problem. I rarely even think about types anymore in JavaScript (I usually just know). In fact, I was screwing around with a short script just yesterday and couldn't remember what window.location was because it's rarely useful. When my script wouldn't work I just guessed that wrapping window.location in new String() would probably get the types sorted out and fix my code. Sure enough...

For the most part, just be sure to define your own data in the types that you want and don't mix types unnecessarily and you'll be fine.

@Eric, you appear to be using some new fangled JavaScript syntax. Is that well supported yet? I fucking love the shorter lambdas.

Eric Johnson
bamccaig said:

@Eric, you appear to be using some new fangled JavaScript syntax. Is that well supported yet? I fucking love the shorter lambdas.

Yep, it's supported. It's from ECMAScript 2015.

As for the bitwise operator, I know about it but don't use it. My thinking is that it's slower than using parseInt(). I'll have to run some benchmarks though.

Edit
Apparently bitwise is the fastest.

bamccaig

According to this parseInt is significantly slower. There are various operators that are fast to convert strings to integers, but it seems the fastest in Firefox and Chrome is actually a bitshift. The only flaw with that benchmark is that it doesn't show the results to confirm the same output. But I'm pretty sure (after removing addition because JS always sees that as concatenation if one operand is a string). >:(

Eric Johnson

I was mostly curious about converting a float to an integer, not a string, but that's still good to know. I'll stick with using bitwise operators from now on.

Neil Roy
Quote:

Apparently [jsperf.com] bitwise is the fastest.

Wow! Chrome is horribly slow at these! Like, 86K/sec for Chrome verses over 2M/sec for Firefox! That's quite the discrepancy! Interesting tests. Having to do this sort of thing makes me question the language big time though.

bamccaig

It's no different than things you have to do in C or C++ to get the most speed out of them. You can write most code without thinking too hard about it, but when performance counts you have to start learning the intricacies of the platform to design the fastest program possible. I wouldn't let that scare you off. The dynamic and memory managed nature might offer you a great boost in productivity once you get the hang of the language.

Eric Johnson

Performance differs between JavaScript engines depending on what you're doing. Chrome uses V8 and Firefox uses SpiderMonkey. Firefox may be faster at converting floats to ints, but Chrome is faster in other areas. Take this regex vs substring benchmark for example; I get 835,255 ops/sec for regex in Chrome, but only 254,962 in Firefox.

General performance isn't really an issue between JavaScript engines though. They're all pretty quick these days, but like you can see here, some are faster than others in certain areas, but it doesn't matter much in practice.

bamccaig

Of course, one option to deal with that for programs that must be blazing fast would be to generate JavaScript for each browser on the server and return the browser-optimized code when the page is requested. That's far too much trouble to be worthwhile for 99.999% of cases, but if you were trying to host a fancy game or something it might make sense. There are already several languages that can be compiled down to JavaScript. Actually, it might even be possible to write your programs in C and have that converted to JavaScript. It just might be fun to get it all setup so that you can do graphics and sound. It has been done before I think.

Eric Johnson

I'm content continuing to use vanilla JavaScript. I was just giving an example of the performance differences between engines is all.

So something interesting I encountered today: Opera doesn't like MP3 files. Ever since Opera moved to WebKit, it dropped baked-in support for playing MP3 files. It can still play MP3 files if the OS as a whole has the appropriate codecs installed though. My game, Mori, uses MP3 files, which aren't being playing in Opera. So now I'm going to try to make OGG sounds for Opera to use.

bamccaig

I suspect that FLOSS browsers in *nix would also have spotty support for mp3 files so I think offering both is the way to go.

Eric Johnson

Yeah. I added both and now Opera plays nicely.

Neil Roy

OGG is a much better choice. Higher quality and smaller filesize, plus you will usually see support as there are no legal issues with using it. That is probably why there is no support in that case. My Deluxe Pacman 2 game uses OGG files for sound effects and music. EVen at the lowest quality settings for OGG, I find there is very little perceptible difference in quality, but a huge difference in file size.

Audacity is nice for converting (and editing of course) and FREAC is also very nice for converting.

Eric Johnson

I agree that OGG is the better choice. MP3 has better cross-browser support last I checked though. And I use Audacity for all my audio needs. :)

Edit
So I've encountered a strange audio bug in my game in Firefox. Samples don't play again until they've ended from the last time they were played. Gotta fix that...

Edit #2
I fixed it by re-loading the sound if it's already being played. Previously I was pausing it and resetting its seek to the beginning whether or not is was being played. This works in Chrome, Firefox, and Opera (I'm on Linux, so I can't test Safari or Edge).

bamccaig

I was leaning more towards Emscripten for Neil since he prefers C. To be fair, I think that JavaScript could be much more productive once you get over the learning curve, but it's still a neat concept to write C and compile that to something that will run in the browser. That said, I've tried now on two Linux boxes to install it and failed both times. I'm not sure how well maintained it is. If there are Windows binaries I imagine those will just work. The project definitely needs to improve its Linux support.

Arthur Kalliokoski

This page is taking way too long to load now. Every time I look at it I think my computer has locked up.

bamccaig

I set my paging to 100 for these threads. :)

Neil Roy

I don't know what mine is set to, probably 100 as well. This is page 14 for me.

Eric Johnson

I have mine set to 25 posts per page. This is page 56 for me. I originally had it set to show all posts on a single page, but that became too slow to endure.

Neil Roy

ALL in one page?! That's nuts. ;D... but, this loads just nicely the way I have it at 100 per page with no delays.

Edit: Just found this! It's an accurate guide! ;D
{"name":"610972","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/a\/f\/afe6fe19ee046aa742123c548e71ee0e.jpg","w":720,"h":824,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/a\/f\/afe6fe19ee046aa742123c548e71ee0e"}610972

Eric Johnson

What do you guys think about BioShock? I played some of the first one several years ago but didn't like it. I later played some of the remastered version but wasn't able to get into that one either.

The game is often praised for its story, but I can't play it for its story, because the story was spoiled for me years ago. I find the minute-to-minute game-play to be boring, as all you're doing is moving from point A to point B in dimly lit areas, sometimes engaging in clunky shooting.

But anyway, I saw a video of BioShock Infinite today and wow--it's visually stunning, and I know nothing of its story. Do you think it's worth picking up?

bamccaig

I think that I watched some videos when the first one came out and came to the same conclusion: it looked like garbage. I never bought it or played it.

Chris Katko

Bioshock is a crappy crappy remake of System Shock 2 (they even have the same plot twists), except they ripped out ALL of the mature features like having to manage your inventory, having to KNOW where you're going without some magical glowing arrow telling you where to go and what button to push. Complete piss. I bought it thinking it would be a SUCCESSOR to System Shock 2 (due to the marketing saying it was) but it was the opposite.

Bioshock 2 didn't really add much. Bioshock: Infinite is different but still feels like more of the same. "Oh no, everyone is proper and prim--except we have HUGE AMOUNTS OF GORE! That's what people want!" Meh.

I've literally beat System Shock 2 probably 6 times now. And started it, dozens. It's one of the most replayable games. You really feel like you're STARVING for ammo. STARVING for nanites to repair your weapons. You start off with almost nothing and end up feeling like you have even less.

Deus Ex is a great game to replay every few years. (There's a joke phenominom where any time someone mentions DX, everyone who hears it goes... "oh crap," and reinstalls and plays it again.)

Thief 1 and 2 are brilliant as well. No matter HOW much loot you get, you NEVER feel safe. You are fragile. And the only thing that keeps you alive... is your skill. And once you realize halfway through the game that you're not dying simply because... you're awesome... it's the most rewarding feeling ever. It's an accomplishment the game didn't GIVE you (like a participation trophy), it's an accomplishment that you TOOK from the game.

[edit] If you want an almost successor to Thief, try Dishonored 1 (ONE, ONE AND ONLY ONE. DEAR GOD.). (D2 was a complete disaster release on PC.) Dishonored is not Thief... in fact, I almost think it's wrong to even compare it (though many people recommended D1 because "it's like thief.") Dishonored is really good because of the story, and feeling like a mage-thief or some kind of sneaky super-hero that can rip people's faces off at whim. There are linear levels (which T1/2 don't have!), and worst of all, you stop feeling weak as you get more magic skills. You can literally kill everyone, or sneak through the game. Except... even WORSE? The more people you kill, the more likely you are to get a "Bad ending." In a game... that gives you nothing but tools to kill people. It's completely retarded to penalize the player for using all the features that are supposed to make it fun. HOWEVER, if you can forgive that, it's a fun experience all the way through. You can play the game "twice" doing a kill run first, and a sneak run once you're more skilled at it.

Bruce Perry

I still have it set to load threads entirely on one page. Maybe it would make sense to change it at some point. :)

Eric Johnson

@Chris: I looked into playing System Shock 1 and 2 before, but they are so visually and mechanically antiquated at this point that I fear my time with them would not be enjoyable. Also, Dishonored is just a few bucks on Steam... maybe I'll pick it up.

Chris Katko

System Shock 1 is pretty dated. System Shock 2 is a different game by a different company and one of the best games ever made. You can get a high-res texture upgrade (DON'T get the MODEL update because they look different) and it's still pretty enjoyable.

But depending on how young you are, it may be too old to appreciate without your brain spending time "getting used to" the way things used to be.

Deus Ex can also have an HD texture pack, and there's a ~DirectX10 mod that adds better lighting and shaders.

Thief 1 and 2 also have a modern DirectX/OpenGL port (I think they're included in the GOG versions by default now since they help support 64-bit platforms.)

Eric Johnson

I lied. I only ever saw System Shock 1 before decided it was a "no" from me... But I just looked at System Shock 2 and it doesn't look bad. I don't mind old 2D games in the least, but old 3D games are often really ugly and clunky. I got into 3D gaming around the end of the N64 though, so I'm not too unfamiliar with "chunky" models. So I'll add it to the wishlist.

Chris Katko

Old 3D games are often really ugly and clunky.

YES. A THOUSAND TIMES YES.

1st gen 3-D was almost unbearable for me. As an adult, I can't tell what a (real) N64 is supposed to be. Just one gigantic, blurred, NTSC mess. Playstation 1 didn't even have PERSPECTIVE CORRECT TEXTURING. (N64 did.)

I remember going from beautiful games like Secret of Mana, Earthbound (in a minimalist sense), and Chrono Trigger. And then we go from that to 3d-pixel-vomit.'

PC games faired much better since you could run at 2x-4x the resolution of consoles at the START of 3D gaming. But yeah, "1st gen" 3d accelerator games were still really rough on the eyes. (Well, SS1 predates 3d accelerators.)

But there are lots of games on GOG I still can't even get myself to try because they look so bad. Meanwhile, Fallout 1/2, Diablo 1/2, Arcanum, Baldars Gate, are all gorgeous. (~same era).

Half Life 1 (I think it's better than the 2nd, though I've never managed--through boredom--to finish HL2.) is worth playing. The story and humor is amazing

Duke Nukem 3D has hands-down, some of the best level designs of any game ever made.

Fun side trivia: Thief 1 and 2, which have amazing level design, got their map inspiration from Goldeneye 64. They were inspired by the 'complete objectives in any order' and how the levels were very open-ended with rarely any forced routes. Thief 1/2 levels were actually made first, as living places, and THEN, the scripting, enemies, etc were added. Also, Goldeneye 64 had that weird 'hold R to go into aim' mode thing, and it was actually inspired by... Virtual Cop. And if you think about it, it looks EXACTLY like Virtual Cop. The cursor and all.

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Indeterminatus

Is it too late to claim that this thread locks way too late?

jmasterx

Is it too late to claim that this thread locks way too late?

Too soon.

Gideon Weems

Is it too late to say that Goldeneye was the best game Rare ever made? Man, I've gotta go back and play that one...

Chris Katko

Conkers Bad Fur Day is a damn close second. They also made Banjo and Kazooie 1 and 2, and DIDDY KONG RACING.

p.s. WTF happened to Rare? I guess they were bought out by Microsoft and then basically just... committed IP suicide? Because they went from "omg greatest company ever, rivalling NINTENDO in terms of character IP" to "made Perfect Dark Zero for Xbox (meh)" to "never heard from again."

Neil Roy

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Eric Johnson

I encountered a strange bug in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion today. I jumped in water as I returned to land, and the result was my character floating in the air motionless, almost like its wading in water animation was stuck.

Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fczt_lyGzw0

Edit
Here's the same thing but in another area: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nEXk90eHyI

Another Edit
So I realized it's not the swimming animation that gets stuck, it's just the jumping animation. If I bash the jump button repeatedly as I approach the shore from any body of water, I can consistently get the glitch.

Here's a video where I try to get the glitch again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZT4_sRXqNh8

LennyLen

p.s. WTF happened to Rare? I guess they were bought out by Microsoft and then basically just... committed IP suicide? Because they went from "omg greatest company ever, rivalling NINTENDO in terms of character IP" to "made Perfect Dark Zero for Xbox (meh)" to "never heard from again."

Most of them got back together and formed Playtonic games. Recently, they released their first game - Yooka-Laylee - after a very successful Kickstarter campaign to get it funded. It's a great game too.

Chris Katko

I backed the Kickstarter. I haven't played it yet because I'm saving it for a time when I can dedicate a good block of time to absorbing / binging it.

However, Playtronic is a fraction of the developers of Rare. Basically, the key guys for Banjo and Kazooie. That's it. What about all the other great games they made (and their teams)?

Gideon Weems

Bugs in the Elder Scrolls series? Inconceivable! (Nice video, by the way.)

Conkers Bad Fur Day is a damn close second.

Amen. Those two games are masterpieces. The Banjo series was nice but felt more like a collect-a-thon, DK64 but with more generic characters... Rare was always a copycat when it came to character design, though: Battletoads, Banjo & Kazooie, Perfect Dark, Jet Force Gemini... They are all rip-offs (or just plain generic). Conker parodied this, however, and that propelled him to greater heights. Then, there's Mr Pants. All the rest are forgettable, really.

LennyLen

However, Playtronic is a fraction of the developers of Rare. Basically, the key guys for Banjo and Kazooie.

I probably should have said most of the BK team.

Chris Katko
Eric Johnson

Bugs in the Elder Scrolls series? Inconceivable!

Big surprise, right? :P I thought the glitch was neat was all. ;)

@Chris: Is that an N64 game?! :o It looks great! I'm surprised to see an N64 game with voice acting (beyond grunts and short soundbytes)... and cursing. :o

Neil Roy

I was digging through some old files and came upon the original Speedhack entries from 1999. It's hard to believe it's been so long now, almost 18 years!

Attached is the source code for the original entries if you're curious.

Eric Johnson

This gave me a good chuckle (from speed/29.txt): ;D

Neil of '99 said:

The competition rules state that I must "include the number '29' somewhere
in the program" (to commemorate it being Arron's birthday). But
unfortunately, although the number 29 is certainly a very fine thing to have
as the age for an Arron, it didn't strike me as a particularly useful or
numerologically significant thing to build into a computer game.

However, since the rules do not specify which number base they are talking
about, it occurs to me that this could just as well be a reference to the
hexadecimal value 0x29, which is decimal 41. Admittedly, this number has
nothing to do with the age of the Arron, or at least won't do for another
dozen dozens of quartets of weeks, but the rules never actually spell out
that they are talking about the particular 29 which happens to be his
current age (they strongly imply that, but I decided to look the other way
and miss this hint :-)

Now, 0x29, when mapped onto the ASCII character set, refers to the closing
bracket character, ')'. So in order to comply with the competition rules, I
have included several of these symbols in my program. In fact, as reported
by the command:

sed -e "s/[^)]//g" *.[ch] | tr -d "\n" | wc -c

there are currently no less than ONE THOUSAND AND EIGHTY TWO unique
occurrences of a twenty nine in this game! This figure is likely to have
increased even further by the time you get hold of the code, since I haven't
quite finished writing it yet. And there are four more just in this text
file, so if you included the documentation in the above search command, that
would get you up to a total of 1086 different ')' characters! (and since I
just typed another there, that makes it 1087 (and having opened a bracket to
interject this, I'm going to have to close it, which makes 1088 (and now
that I've opened a nested bracket, we are up to 1089 or something, I'm
losing count here))) (btw. I hope I got the right number of closes there).

I'm tempted to say that this is all a joke :-) except that by doing so, I've
just bumped up the count one more...

Edit
You may be interested to learn that sed -e "s/[^)]//g" *.[ch] | tr -d "\n" | wc -c returns "1221" for me. :)

Johan Halmén

0x29 is not twentynine, it's two-nine. The ty in twentynine refers to decimal numbers.

Neil Roy

0x29 is not twentynine, it's two-nine. The ty in twentynine refers to decimal numbers.

Good point! It's 2 times 16 + 9. 2 times 16 is not twenty, it's 32.

Eric Johnson

Which browser(s) are you guys using? I recently dropped Vivaldi for Chrome again. Vivaldi has a few quirks when it comes to how JavaScript events prevent defaults from firing (like how CTRL+S in Google Docs saves the document in Chrome, but triggers a "save full page" in Vivaldi; or how right-click events don't fire correctly at all in Vivaldi).

Neil Roy

Which browser(s) are you guys using?

Still using Firefox myself, current version I have: "54.0.1 (64-bit)". Works well, always has for me.

Bruce Perry
Neil Roy said:

2 times 16 is not twenty, it's 32.

Or maybe it's 2C, which equals 10 × 2 + C which equals d/d2 5·2².

Which browser(s) are you guys using?

Chrome :) Also, is that an onigiri holding a club?

Eric Johnson

Also, is that an onigiri holding a club?

No, it's the player character from my game, Mori. It's 8x8 pixels total (but obviously blown up here), so there's not much detail; it's supposed to be a blue blob with an eyepatch though.

MiquelFire

Mainly use Firefox here.

bamccaig

I prefer to use Pentadactyl on Firefox, but because of the breaking changes to the extension API over the past few years it's barely functional anymore and its developers are struggling to maintain it. I still barely hold onto Firefox for personal use, but I use predominantly Chrome for work because it tends to be more reliable for development. It's also my go-to if I need the browser to just work without fighting with script and cookie allowance. The truth is that none of the modern browsers are very good.

LennyLen

Which browser(s) are you guys using?

I'm not. I just stick my finger in the ethernet socket and render the page directly to the optical centre of my brain.

jmasterx

Chrome

Gideon Weems
Quote:

Chrome

LennyLen uses Cranium Chromium.

Eric Johnson
LennyLen said:

I'm not. I just stick my finger in the ethernet socket and render the page directly to the optical centre of my brain.

How unfortunate it must be when you encounter pop ups. :(

LennyLen

How unfortunate it must be when you encounter pop ups.

My arm has embedded adblocking technology.

Edgar Reynaldo

Don't worry. Whenever a new member joins, we secretly implant a microchip into their bodies. We know their every move. Been having alien abduction dreams lately Eric?

jmasterx

Don't worry. Whenever a new member joins, we secretly implant a microchip into their bodies. We know their every move.

Powered by the Allegro 5 MindControl Addon

jmasterx

Don't worry. Whenever a new member joins, we secretly implant a microchip into their bodies. We know their every move.

Powered by the Allegro 5 Mind Control Addon >:(

Edgar Reynaldo

Ah. I see you've mastered the skill of double posting as well as mind control.

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Eric Johnson

I accidentally double posted once before. I actually tried to deliberately do it again today, but it didn't work. :(

Been having alien abduction dreams lately Eric?

Yeah, it's pretty weird though. Like, I'm totally naked in the dream. It's the one where I go around abducting aliens, looking for the best ones to probe. Most of them have dried-up anuses though, so I'm looking for a real juicy one that'll hopefully do well with probing. Wish me luck! :D

Edgar Reynaldo

Belated warning on the above material. Some of this content may not be suitable for children...

Eric Johnson

Like last night, I caught one that had "rEyNaLdO eDgAr" written on its forehead. It must be from some alien language, because I didn't recognize it. Anyway, it was pretty juicy, so I ran after it. Once I caught it, it started screeching something about an "eagle goo-ee". Like, what the heck is a "goo-ee"? ??? Anyway, it was totally lathered in butter for some reason, so it got away. :-/

Edgar Reynaldo

Well at least your name isn't

Dick (Richard) Johnson

. That was the name of my Rhetoric professor. We said it was his pron name.

Anyway, it was totally lathered in butter for some reason, so it got away.

Yep. That's right.

Eric Johnson

That was the name of my Rhetoric professor. We said it was his pron name.

I wonder where the trend of over-the-top stage names originated...

My grandmother once bought my dad a shirt that read, "I have a big Johnson." She innocently believed it meant "I have a big family, and my last name is 'Johnson'." ::)

Bruce Perry

Ah. I see you've mastered the skill of double posting as well as mind control.

Who else wanted to expand the nested screenshot recursively?

Eric Johnson

So I started porting my KrampusHack 2016 game, Kitten Kerfuffle, to JavaScript today. Here's what it looks like in its current, broken state. :P

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Chris Katko

Still looks cool. 8-)

Eric Johnson
Quote:

Still looks cool. 8-)

Glad you think so. I fixed the terrain generation, but now all of the kittens spawn in the same area, which shouldn't be happening...

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By the way, you should change "www.Katko.us" to "http://www.Katko.us" on your profile page, because currently clicking on the link navigates to "https://www.allegro.cc/members/www.Katko.us" (although the link seems dead either way). :P

Chris Katko

I've been meaning to get the site back up. Once I got a job I was like, "Meh, I don't need to pay the monthly charges."

Eric Johnson

What'd you have on your Web site anyway? I checked the Wayback Machine, but most of the links are incomplete.

Chris Katko

Probably nothing useful to most people. Lists and examples of my hardware and software projects. Resume. Stuff like that.

As soon as I got the site up and running I was like, "Wait a minute... I don't have any CONTENT worth sharing!"

Eric Johnson

Probably nothing useful to most people. Lists and examples of my hardware and software projects.

I must not be most people then, because I usually get a kick out of seeing people's projects. I especially like blogs, because they can be a bit more personal than static Web pages. It's always cool, I think, when I stumble across a blog that hasn't been touched in 5+ years, yet it's still online... it's like I've opened a time capsule or something.

Hey... you should start a blog so I have something interesting to read. ;)

Edit
A few people had issues with locating kittens in the original release of Kitten Kerfuffle, so I've decided to add a "compass" pointing to the nearest one, instead of just using text (I may drop the text indicator altogether).

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Edit #2

The rewrite is complete. You can play the game here and can read a quick post about it here.

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Neil Roy

It's true! ;D

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Chris Katko

I must not be most people then, because I usually get a kick out of seeing people's projects.

You might like this one then!

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I spent two days playing around in my free time and figured out how to combine Javascript+ChartJS, Python, and SQLite, and host a website that allows me to remotely view my laptop's (<-ahah) current available memory.

The plan is to add asynchronous data refreshing, as well as a variety of system resource captures. I imagine something like that already exists but who cares, I'd rather spend 4-6 hours LEARNING Python and Javascript then learning how to setup someone's tool.

Eric Johnson

Wow! That's pretty impressive, Chris! Do you plan on doing anything with this and its data after getting asynchronous refreshes to work, or is it all just for fun?

Speaking of "fun", I see you have Algodoo in your bookmarks there. That's what ultimately became of Phun, right? I remember playing with Phun roughly 8 or 9 years ago.

Edit
I went to reply to This Place Just Doesn't Die, but it was locked! :o I thought for sure it would become the next long-running thread and endure the test of time... :'(

Chris Katko

Wow! That's pretty impressive, Chris! Do you plan on doing anything with this and its data after getting asynchronous refreshes to work, or is it all just for fun?

Thanks!

I'm not sure what I'm doing with it yet but I've always loved graphs and data. I could, for example, have my main computer upload those stats, and then have a remote computer watch my voltages, RAM/CPU statistics, etc.

Neil Roy

You could turn that into a side scroller game, with a helicopter rescuing people from burning buildings... use the code to generate that graph to generate a city. ;D

Chris Katko

That's actually freakin brilliant. Have a silly "helicopter rescue" game into the javascript.

[edit]

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Just added CPU temps, and only took me ~30 minutes. So far so good. :)

Gideon Weems
Neil Roy said:

You could turn that into a side scroller game, with a helicopter rescuing people from burning buildings... use the code to generate that graph to generate a city.

This idea is spectacular.

So... whattya think happens when there are no topics in Off-Topic?

Eric Johnson

So... whattya think happens when there are no topics in Off-Topic?

In 40 years, when Allegro is no more, and everyone has moved from C and C++ to something called "*^Q" ("star carrot queue"), this thread will be going strong with more than a million replies. Nothing else will be here aside from this thread. We're it, man. We're the future!

Neil Roy

In 40 years I will be 92, shaking my cane and yelling at the young whipper-snappers about programming in a REAL language like pure C... like we did in my day! ;)

Eric Johnson

You know, there are probably some really old folks who yell at programmers nowadays for using compilers and high-level languages, because "back in my day, we wrote REAL software in binary or later on using punch cards!" :P

Neil Roy

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DanielH

How about running Turbo Pascal off one 5 1/4" floppy mainly because we didn't have a hard drive.

8086/8088 PC
512kb memory
2 x 5 1/4" floppy (I think only 640kb each)
Hercules graphics card
Green monochrome CRT

Eric Johnson

Speaking of floppy disks... I knew an old lady a few years back who was preparing to move across the country. She had a Windows 95 machine, which is where she claimed to keep all of her banking information, recipes, and writings. The machine was ancient. I was surprised it had lasted so long. She asked me if I thought her files would survive the cross-country trip, or if she should try backing things up. I said it should be O.K. I'm not even sure how you would backup files on such an old computer. It didn't even have USB ports. I never heard whether or not it survived the trip.

Anyway, are any of you Sonic fans? It dawned on me that I had never finished any of the 2D games... until today. Today I finished Sonic the Hedgehog 1 and 2, and I'm working now on completing Sonic 3 & Knuckles. I plan on getting Sonic Mania sometime in the next couple of weeks. So far, reviews for the game are pretty good.

bamccaig

I'm not even sure how you would backup files on such an old computer. It didn't even have USB ports.

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A Windows 95 machine probably would have had floppy disks for backup (hopefully it's not a LOT of data).

In theory, a network solution might work too, but since speeds were so poor in those days I'm not sure that would have been built into the OS at the time. You could probably boot a Linux distro that would be able to do it though if you failed to find Windows 95 compatible software.

You could probably just hook up a slave drive too though (if you could find another PATA disk small enough) and use that as a backup. Or else just remove the hard drive from the ancient PC and hook it up to a modern PC (you should be able to find a PATA to SATA adapter for the hard drive if your machine doesn't support the connection natively, and there are kits you can buy for that if it matters).

Other than that, I'm not sure what else you could use for backup... :-/ I don't imagine CD-R drivers would have been available at the time, but perhaps they are available now? Windows 95 definitely supported CD-ROMs though.

MiquelFire

Actually, Windows 95 OSR2 supported CD-ROMs. The normal retail version didn't even have the CD player.

Eric Johnson

Allow me to rephrase: I'm not sure how to easily backup data from such a machine and transfer it to a more modern one. My first thought was over a network, but she didn't have an Internet connection. She used the computer to manually keep track of bills and stuff she received in the mail, as well as recipes, poems, short stories, etc, but nothing from the Internet. And I didn't/don't have a floppy disk reader, and her computer didn't have a CD reader, as I recall. So it was pretty limited in what she could do with the data. I suppose she could have backed things up to her own floppy disks, but I'm not sure she had any extras. To be honest, I didn't really want to get involved, because if data became lost along the way, or something didn't go as she expected, she would've blamed me. :P

bamccaig

Allow me to rephrase: I'm not sure how to easily backup data from such a machine and transfer it to a more modern one. My first thought was over a network, but she didn't have an Internet connection.

Apparently Ethernet cards were available for [some?] Win95 machines so it should be possible to network with another machine without any Internet connection. The ancient machine would have to have an Ethernet card and you'd probably need a cross-over cable, and I'm not sure what software wizardry.

To be honest, I didn't really want to get involved, because if data became lost along the way, or something didn't go as she expected, she would've blamed me. :P

I concur. I generally avoid getting involved in any kind of technical support work for family, friends, acquaintances, strangers, etc., because it'll at best end break even for you and at worst cost you reputation points or a lot of trouble or money or who knows what else.

My parents and finacée often try to offer up my services for acquaintances that need technical support, but I'm usually pretty quick to remind them that I'm a programmer, not technical support, and I can do my best if I'm willing, but a solution is not guaranteed and I'm not going to spend much time trying unless I'm being paid well to do it (and of course usually you're working for free, or $20, or a couple of drinks, in such cases). And if you're going to pay real money anyway you might as well hire somebody that does it for a living and has experiences I don't have.

Gideon Weems
bamccaig said:

I generally avoid getting involved in any kind of technical support work for family, friends, acquaintances, strangers, etc., because it'll at best end break even for you...

Fixing someone's computer is a good way to score a date.

Chris Katko

Peter Hull's avatar is ANIMATED?!

IT BLINKED AT ME.

:o

Eric Johnson

Fixing someone's computer is a good way to score a date.

That might just work... Time to find some hot chicks to try it on. ;D

Peter Hull's avatar is ANIMATED?!

You didn't notice before now?

bamccaig

I feel like that avatar has been on this message board longer than I have. :P

Chris Katko

Maybe I forgot about it. But I never normally just leave a window open on A.CC and just sit there.

It was on my laptop and out of the corner of my eye my brain is like "something moved on A.CC?!"

[edit] Post 1451!

Neil Roy

I used to back things up just by saving them to a second set of floppies in my DOS and Amiga days. I still have many of my Amiga floppies and DOS floppies, though the DOS stuff I eventually transferred to CDs which I still have. I can no longer read the DOS or Amiga floppies sadly.

I want to buy a floppy disk drive again so I can read them. And someday, maybe buy an actual Amiga again. Wish I still had my A500, it was my favourite.

Johan Halmén's avatar blinks. I always got a kick out of that.

Chris Katko

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Added CPU and load averages. Chart JS is pretty cool. The graph is interactive. You can click any of the datasets on the legend and it'll disable them.

I think I'm going to make a common interface so you basically just write a Python script that implements that (dead simple) interface and you can call whatever you want to get the actual statistics, and as long as you report them back using the standard interface, the main program doesn't care.

Bruce Perry
bamccaig said:

I feel like that avatar has been on this message board longer than I have. :P

Yes, I think it has :)

Chris, your helicopter game needs more kittens :)

Peter Hull
bamccaig said:

A Windows 95 machine probably would have had floppy disks for backup (hopefully it's not a LOT of data).

Zip Drives, dude!

bamccaig said:

I feel like that avatar has been on this message board longer than I have. :P

It's the only one I've ever had apart from a brief interlude.

Neil Roy said:

In 40 years I will be 92, shaking my cane and yelling at the young whipper-snappers about programming in a REAL language like pure C... like we did in my day! ;)

To be fair, you do that now ;)

Cheers, all!

Johan Halmén

I think the "This Place Just Doesn't Die" thread died too soon.

Neil Roy
Quote:

To be fair, you do that now ;)

True, gotta practise for when I get older. ;)

Eric Johnson

So how do you guys pronounce "Reese's" as in "Reese's Peanut Butter Cups"? I've always pronounced it like "ree sez", but folks here in Louisiana all say it like "ree seas".

Gideon Weems

REE-sez. While you're down there, ask the folks of Louisiana the name of that winged insect that lights up at night as part of its mating ritual.

I think the "This Place Just Doesn't Die" thread died too soon.

For a while, I thought it was going to systemd this thread. I'll go ahead and play the song.

Eric Johnson

While you're down there, ask the folks of Louisiana the name of that winged insect that lights up at night as part of its mating ritual.

I spent most of my life in California, but my mom was born and raised in the south, so I knew them as both lightning bugs and fireflies as a kid. I think most would call them lightning bugs here though, whereas they'd mostly be known as fireflies everywhere else. I'll have to ask around to be sure though.

Neil Roy

Always called them "Fireflies" up north here in Canada.

And it's Ree-sez.

Eric Johnson

@Neil: How do you pronounce "about"? I've heard some Canadians pronounce it like "aboot".

bamccaig

Zip Drives, dude!

I think I must have been too young (or poor?) for those. They don't ring any bells. Manufacturing defects aside, they do sound pretty cool for their day.

Append:

Canada is a big place, similar to the USA, so we don't all speak the same. Accents on the West and East coast are more prominent (and different) than in the middle provinces (at least to me), and Quebec (and predominantly French communities in other provinces) can have a thick accent from their French-Canadian influences.

media player

Eric Johnson
bamccaig said:

Canada is a big place, similar to the USA, so we don't all speak the same.

Okay, but can you say "shimmi shoomi bimmi boomi laba smiddi smooda boo" fourteen times slow?

Neil Roy

@Neil: How do you pronounce "about"? I've heard some Canadians pronounce it like "aboot".

"about". On the east coast you will hear something more like "aboot" though in provinces like Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick.

Quebec is mostly French (well, when you get outside of Montreal anyhow). I don't think the west coast is much different as far as how they pronounce words compared to the rest of the nation. The main differences are Quebec and east of it and of course, in the Inuit communities to the far north.

Also, Quebec French is different from that you hear in France. It's the same difference between American and Canadian English and British English. My father is French and lives in southern Quebec. Very friendly people there.

jmasterx

Yes, we are a friendly bunch in Quebec!

Neil Roy

;D

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The following video is a news story about a black man who befriended KKK members and actually, over time, caused 25 of them to leave the KKK, and when they did, they gave him their robes. Amazing story about how you stop the hate with friendship, rather than more hate. This is a great man as far as I am concerned.

This is a link to a Facebook page video... well worth watching, especially with all the hate lately, this is inspiring.

https://www.facebook.com/cbnnews/videos/10159521469970393/

Edgar Reynaldo

L0L WHUT? Someone was talking about Russia? I'm lost.

And besides I needed a reason to post and this thread doesn't have enough replies yet.

This thread is just not epic enough yet. When it reaches 9000 then we'll at least have status with DragonBallZ. It's over 9000!!!!!!111111

How many different subjects have we discussed? Didn't we have some kind of holy war earlier, or was that another thread? I can't remember. Anyway it's Friday night and I don't want to go to bed so somebody reply, or I'll have to go bother people on IRC. :/

Eric Johnson

Anyway it's Friday night and I don't want to go to bed so somebody reply, or I'll have to go bother people on IRC. :/

Hey, I'm somebody! :D I found an old HP Mini laptop in the trash today (don't ask why I was digging through the trash). It was beat-up pretty badly; the hinges were busted, the hard drive is totally obliterated, and there's no battery. I disassembled it and scrapped it for the working bits (keyboard, RAM, and the display). Not sure what I'll do with any of the parts just yet, but I'll add them to my collection of computer parts for now. I also found a super old hard drive from spring of 2000. Its capacity? Only 7.5 GBs (or so says the information on the back)! :o Not sure what (if anything) is on it yet. Not even sure if it works. I'll try reading it tomorrow.

Edgar Reynaldo

I have an old 286 in my room. Someday I want to get it working, but I need a replacement monitor cuz the original went ZAP! and blew up when I tried to use it.

Also have a Pentium II sitting around that doesn't boot. It powers on then powers down. That's it. No output on the monitor. I'll have to tear it open and see if I can find something useful out.

Also have a dead laptop that won't boot - it's pretty messed up. It goes into some kind of safe mode and makes me try to repair things which takes hours and doesn't help. I'm just gonna take the old hard drive out and scrap it I think. It was really too slow. The HD must be low rpm because it was the bottleneck, even with a slow cpu. Have I mentioned how much I love my new laptop with a 256GB SSD for the Windows boot drive and a 1TB HDD for storage?

EDIT
Hey, let's chat on IRC - I'm Modulo5K on #allegro on irc.freenode.net

Eric Johnson

I think you've mentioned your love for your new laptop a few times at least. :P

Laptop hard drives usually operate at around 5400 RPMs, so I'm surprised the hard drive would be the bottleneck. Any idea how low the RPMs is on it?

Also, what do you call those repair tools used to disassemble computers and phones? They're usually some kind of plastic and look nearly identical to guitar picks. Whatever they're called, I need to get some, because using a flat-head screwdriver just doesn't cut it anymore (too many little scratches).

Edit:
It's just a "prying tool" or "spudger", I guess.

Neil Roy

Edgar, you sound like me, I have many old parts around here. I think I have a 486, I dunno, a really old board anyhow with something on it! I have a Voodoo 3-2000 video card (or is that a VD2-3000?). A complete computer that was given to me with an Intel... something... it's a duel core (I am used to AMD). I want to build a simple internet system for a friend and an older DOS computer for myself.

MiquelFire

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Are you a time traveler?

Chris Katko

I've got a Compaq "Portable" 1. Weighs like 30 lbs.

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I wanted to put a webserver on it some day. Ironically, I think the "serial -> ethernet" adapter will have a 10-100x faster processor than the server.

Eric Johnson

Are you a time traveler?

Yes. I travel forwards in time. :)

Edgar Reynaldo

Well I travel sideways in time. So there.

Eric Johnson

Well I travel sideways in time. So there.

So that explains why you crab walk everywhere...

Neil Roy

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Eric Johnson

That would explain deja vu.

Neil Roy

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Arvidsson

Has anyone played PUBG? I tried it last night and it was fun as heck!

bamccaig

I've played a few times with Chris Katko and have about 50 hours in game. It's a really fun game, but it's also extremely frustrating. Worst of all, because it's so popular and being good at this game is praised there are countless people that are using hacks with no conscience. Many popular streamers have been caught using hacks. And no, they're not really that good.

Last week or so I swore off PUBG for a few months. I'll wait and see what the developers achieve in curbing the hacking. It feels like every game I play there are hackers now, and you just have absolutely no chance against people that can see you through walls and cover in a game that is purely about being unseen and getting the drop on people. The game itself offers you little to defend yourself from hackers. You cannot spectate your killer, or even see a 10 second killcam. They've added a "report" feature to report suspected misbehavior, but since you cannot spectate you're just guessing, which probably leads to unnecessary volumes of false reports, which probably makes it that much less likely for them to identify the real hackers.

I know from Counter-Strike experience that you cannot automatically detect and ban hackers. After nearly 20 years of Counter-Strike hacks are still prevalent. Your only recourse for keeping them out of the game is giving players the tools to identify, report, and kick/ban hackers (or private servers that are always manned by trustworthy admins). CSGO doesn't suffer from too much hacking, but it still does happen often enough. They also usually don't get away with it for very long. Of course, most of them enjoy it so much they don't mind spending extra money to just set up new accounts and do it again. It'll always be a problem. I just hope that PUBG manages to improve the player experience so that it isn't so hopeless. Until then I'm back to my usual CSGO self. :)

Chris Katko

I've got ~120 hours so far. The fact it's a single map so far and still interesting says a lot about the core game mechanics. (Want action, drop in a high-action area. Want relaxed pace, drop off in the beaches. Etc)

It's very frustrating solo (100, 1 man "teams") for sure. If you die, it's often without even seeing where you got shot from. There's many more "this is B.S." deaths.

Duos (50, 2 man teams) is really fun with friends.

Squads (25, 4-man teams) is hectic but fun with friends. (I imagine with random people would still be frustrating.)

I kind of like duos best because you can kill one guy with an ambush and their group is half-strength (1 guy left) and easily finish them off. But in squads, you knock one guy out and the other three can murder you and res their guy and the second you started firing, you attracted another group into the fight. ... So now you've got ANOTHER four people, fresh on ammo and health, shooting your back.

It's really interesting how the different group sizes affect gameplay. Solo means there are 100 independant units running around the map. They're everywhere. Squad, everyone is in fewer groups. So you're less likely to see people and yet it's a heavy-duty fight.

PM me if you want into my Discord channel / want to play teams with me. I play pretty regularly.

The hacking is B.S. But I'll go days without noticing any hackers. This weekend I didn't have any problems. But the week before when I was playing with bam, it felt like there were lots of "b.s." deaths.

Arvidsson

Yeah I got tired quick of playing solo. But playing duo was an entirely different experience for me. So much fun cooperating and trying to approach situations with good tactics. I haven't experienced much hacking but then again I'm not the best FPS player (haven't played Counterstrike for 15 years or something) so I might have gotten killed by hackers but mistaken it for my own incompetence instead :)

It would be fun to play as a team sometime!

bamccaig

AllegroComp2017. 8-)

Onewing

Friendly reminder...TINS2017 is in October.

http://tins.amarillion.org/news/

Arthur Kalliokoski

whupsy!

Eric Johnson

Almost, Arthur... Almost. ;)

Edit
So last month I shared a recreation of Allegro's built-in font in TTF form, and now I've attached a WOFF version if anyone wants it. The TTF version is 16 kilobytes, while the WOFF one is just 4 kilobytes!

MiquelFire

Does Allegro 5 support WOFF files?

Eric Johnson

Does Allegro 5 support WOFF files?

Not to my knowledge, but you could write a WOFF addon if you really wanted to, I guess. You can use WOFF on the Web though.

Chris Katko

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Open_Font_Format

Quote:

WOFF is essentially OpenType or TrueType with compression and additional metadata. The goal is to support font distribution from a server to a client over a network with bandwidth constraints.

Seems like it'd be way easier to simply convert WOFF back to TTF.

You can even do it online:

https://andrewsun.com/tools/woffer-woff-font-converter/

Bruce Perry

WOFF!

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MiquelFire

FreeType had WOFF format for a few years actually, so Allegro 5 should support it. As long as the FreeType lib is not over 5 years old.

Interesting thing I saw today on the way home. Someone didn't know the reason why their car wasn't driving right and smoking was because it was on fire.

Eric Johnson

BBC News don land in Pidgin na.

I thought this was satire, but it appears to be real: BBC News is now available in broken English: https://www.bbc.com/pidgin Hilarious. ::)

bamccaig

Jesus Christ, is illiterate a protected class these days?

Chris Katko

Actually, IIRC, in some African countries it's actually the language they speak.

[edit]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_African_Pidgin_English

You can also get a pidgin english bible. =D

http://www.pidginbible.org/Concindex.html

Quote:

1Aloha! Dis me, James, da guy dat work fo God an fo Jesus Christ, da Good Boss. I writing dis letta fo God's peopo from da twelve Jewish ohana, dat stay scatta all ova da world.

bamccaig

Fair enough, I guess in that part of the world that is how English is spoken, and we'd be speaking it wrong. I guess it's good that the BBC is publishing in that then.

Neil Roy

I emanday atthay igpay attinlay ebay upportedsay! ;D

Bruce Perry

Ewazon ouldshazon obablyprazon opstazon emandingdazon ingsthazon asedbazon onazon "amazon eelsfazon" :)

(See what I did there?)

Gideon Weems

Atwhazon isazon "amazon eelsfazon"?

Bruce Perry

"Ma feels" ;) although actually it's more likely to be written "muh feels". Translation: "my feelings".

You got reply 1500 ;D

Eric Johnson

Whoever gets the 1600th reply has to buy the rest of the thread drinks. :)

Edgar Reynaldo

To my bemusement, this thread added another page. \o\^/o/

Neil Roy

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MiquelFire

Why am not even reading it?

Eric Johnson

You might like Humble Bundle's latest bundle, Neil... ::)

Edgar Reynaldo

Gideon, get back to work

bamccaig

You might like Humble Bundle's latest bundle, Neil... ::)

You imply that I would greatly love this bundle as well, but I cannot from the bundle page determine if that is the case. Are these medias actually worthwhile, or am I going to regret purchasing them with a floppy penis? I have really no idea what "Sakura" is.

On a side note, I happened to watch/listen to this demo to see what it was, and for some reason the music reminded me of 007 (specifically, 007: The World Is Not Enough on PlayStation):

(Probably NSFW in most political climates these days)

video

I don't know what that says about me personally.

Eric Johnson
bamccaig said:

You imply that I would greatly love this bundle as well, but I cannot from the bundle page determine if that is the case. Are these medias actually worthwhile, or am I going to regret purchasing them with a floppy penis? I have really no idea what "Sakura" is.

Is your name "Neil"? If I wasn't clear, I directed the link towards Neil, because he posted a picture of boob-centered women, and the bundle is practically the boob bundle. :P As for "sakura", it refers to cherry blossoms (like the tree).

The "clap"-like beat of the video you shared reminds me of a soundtrack from one of the original Sonic games (2 or 3). I'll share it later if I can find it.

Here is one from Sonic 3 that has a similar clap/pop sound. I'm sure there was another one though.

Also, for $1 USD you get 7 "games"/products, so the bundle might be worth getting if you hope to resell the keys somewhere. You don't have much to lose there. :P

Edit
Here are the games' going prices on G2A ($1 tier):

HunieCam Studio = $1.55
Sakura Agent = $0.71
Sakura Fantasy = $0.30
Sakura Beach = $0.43
Sakura Beach 2 = $0.30
Sakura Angels = $0.60
Sakura Spirit = $0.94

Total: $4.83

So you could potentially spend $1 and make $4.83, or $3.83 in profit. I'm sure there are fees, but even so, if it amounts to more than $1 profit, you could then turn around and keep buying more bundles and continually selling them (assuming the prices remain the same) and keep making profit... :P Not bad if you're extremely bored.

Gideon Weems

Gideon, get back to work

Hehe, shhhh.

OK. :D

Neil Roy

Yes, and Neil likes WOMEN, not little girls... and I am not an anime fan. Plus there's just something creepy about Japanese games like that.

More boob humour for the real men out there. :P

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Eric Johnson
Neil Roy said:

Yes, and Neil likes WOMEN, not little girls...

If you check out the wiki for the games, you'll find that the characters are actually hundreds of years old, and they only appear to be little girls. ;)

Neil Roy said:

Anyhow, my post was a joke, if you have no sense of humour, than you would do best to ignore my posts as I will not change anytime soon.

My post was a joke, too. :)

Gideon Weems

If you check out the wiki for the games, you'll find that the characters are actually hundreds of years old, and they only appear to be little girls. ;)

Gentlemen, we have found the loophole.

Bruce Perry

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[EDIT] Also:

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Edgar Reynaldo

Gentlemen, we've degenerated into boobs and ducks.

By all means, carry on. xD :D

Neil Roy

;D

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and finally, a pic of a true beauty, the only one I really lust after...

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...she also happens to be my wife. ;)

Edit: ;D, I just realized I could have posed with my wife for that pic at the top probably (except she is older than I am, she only looks 20 years younger).

Gideon Weems

Nice job, Neil!

Neil Roy

Something I created a while ago. When I seen this pic of snails, this caption came to me... ;)

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bamccaig
Neil Roy said:

...she also happens to be my wife. ;)

I call BS. I demand a picture of you together holding today's newspaper. :P

Neil Roy

L.O.L., we don't even get the newspaper. :D

Here's a pic of us from 1998, taken with a huge VHS shoulder mounted camera, hooked up to a video capture card on my DOS machine! About the time I started work on Deluxe Pacman I think.

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Or... more recently, and just her, from July of this year...

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If you look at me then and now, and her then and now, you will see why I get pissed off at her for not aging! She's older than I am and I was actually mistaken for her father. LMAO

Chris Katko

When did you become Sargon of Akkad?!

video

Neil Roy

When did you become Sargon of Akkad?!

Hey, I had that look back in 1998, so he stole it from me! Look at me now, that is him in 20 years. ;)

There also was another guy I used to get compared to back then to some character on "Home Improvement". Never watched the show myself.

Bruce Perry

When did you become Sargon of Akkad?!

ROFFLE! That moment when you think something tenuous and then someone else posts it ;D

Neil Roy

Now to bring a bit more class to this joint... this is a favourite classical tune of mine. This is often used for various commercials where it builds up the intensity over time, I really like this video as it shows them playing it... "In The Hall of the Mountain King"...

video

bamccaig

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Bump. >:(

Bruce Perry

Neil, is that Q looking over at us at the beginning?

bambams, what? They are? Why?

Eric Johnson

Would anyone like a Steam key for The Walking Dead: Season 1? I got it on Humble Bundle, but don't want it. It has to be activated before September 23rd: LHXZT-TN5XW-HZFGX.

bamccaig

bambams, what? They are? Why?

The same reason girls are obsessed with anything. Big media told them to be.

Neil Roy

There's also the "bikini bridge" which goes along nicely with the thigh gap. ;)

Neil, is that Q looking over at us at the beginning?

Q?

MiquelFire

Alright, who killed the thread again?

Eric Johnson

Alright, who killed the thread again?

1, 2, 3... not it! :-X

Neil Roy

;D;D;D
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Eric Johnson

Just imagine a newcomer popping in to see what's up and finding this shit. :-/

Neil Roy

Newcomers? Where? Couldn't read that last word, was filtered out and I forgot how to remove that. :)

You people are difficult to please. No religious beliefs, no sense of humour, yeesh!

Eric Johnson
Neil Roy said:

Newcomers? Where? Couldn't read that last word, was filtered out and I forgot how to remove that. :)

A few newcomers trickle in every now and again. The last word was a crass synonym for "poop". ;)

Neil Roy

Well I haven't seen any newcomers in here, and if they have, they need to be ashamed for not contributing for over 1600 messages! :)

Okay, time for some cleaner pics... :)

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Eric Johnson
Neil Roy said:

Okay, time for some cleaner pics... :)

Funny. ;D But something that a lot of people miss is that there are supposed to be seven pairs of clean animals and just one pair of unclean animals. ;)

Neil Roy

You really don't laugh too much do you Eric? ;)
They're joke pics = I am not getting into a Biblical debate! Just laugh or I will return to nice boobs and cold balls pics!!! ;D

Eric Johnson
Neil Roy said:

You really don't laugh too much do you Eric? ;)
They're joke pics = I am not getting into a Biblical debate! Just laugh or I will return to nice boobs and cold balls pics!!! ;D

I laughed! I said "Funny. ;D" didn't I? ??? I wasn't trying to start a debate! I was trying to appeal to your good side! ;)

Edgar Reynaldo

Oh my sweet Jehosaphat I'd rather debate the Bible than see your boob and ball pics. That baby cat picture borders on pedophilia. :/

Eric Johnson

Did Matthew every reply to this thread? Do threads still lock too soon? Find out next time on Dragon Ball Z! :D

bamccaig

I suggest we continue this thread with Bible themed pornography images. ???

Eric Johnson

What are you doing slacking off? Shouldn't you be working on bambot? It hasn't received an update in 2 years for crying out loud! >:(

bamccaig

Bambot is only there for moral support. Mostly mine.

Bruce Perry

Neil, Q is an all-powerful, arrogant Star Trek character. In the video you posted, the guy who looks towards us at the beginning had to my eyes a similar face and expression.

video

I think Eric was showing off his bible knowledge, not trying to ruin the jokes :)

[EDIT]
Matthew posted three times: here, here and here. I know this because I still have allegro.cc set to load the entire thread in a single page 8-)

Chris Katko

You ever notice that the Q warping effect... is the same effect as the Enterprise entering warp in the intro? I'm pretty sure that's no coincidence.

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Edgar Reynaldo

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Thread Spocks too soon.

Neil Roy

Oh my sweet Jehosaphat I'd rather debate the Bible than see your boob and ball pics. That baby cat picture borders on pedophilia. :/

It was obviously one of those moments when the baby grabbed the cat and the parents found the pose cute. You need to see the cuteness and humour in this, not your secret fantasies. :P

I think Eric was showing off his bible knowledge, not trying to ruin the jokes :)

Perhaps, you never know in this place. ;)

Quote:

Neil, Q is an all-powerful, arrogant Star Trek character. In the video you posted, the guy who looks towards us at the beginning had to my eyes a similar face and expression.

Ah, Q!!! He was my favourite character on Star Trek, played by John Delancie (sp?). Always loved him. Also liked him when he appeared on Voyager as well, hitting on Capt. Janeway.

Hmmm... lets see what I can dig up to stir things up in here some more... ;D

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bamccaig
Neil Roy said:

Ah, Q!!! He was my favourite character on Star Trek, played by John Delancie (sp?).

Q was an appreciated character for his stir of things, but I think you'd have to be mentally unstable to pick him as your favorite. :P He was a menace. He punished people without just cause. Effectively, he was your god without the "implied" justice. Effectively, little more than a criminal with superior power. If you justify his actions then you can't deny the actions of a powerful crime lord. For all intents and purposes, Q executed his actions for fun and personal enjoyment, and the only saving grace in the context of the show was Picard or Janeway pleading for his mercy. But that's a pretty disgraceful excuse for such a powerful being. Ultimately, ST:VOY demonstrated that Q was virtually clueless about the universe and even needed humanity to even keep the Q continuum intact. If anything, the entire idea of Q is the anti-thesis to any kind of "god". It was the idea that, as powerful and wise as Q thought he was (effectively, as powerful as the Christian god), he ultimately didn't know as much as he thought he did and was ultimately a chaotic force in the universe with little or no wisdom guiding it.

Neil Roy

bam... it was a TV show... only TV... not reality. But yes, DEFINITELY my favourite character, played perfectly. In many of the stories he actually helped. In the final two episodes of TNG, he actually was a huge help in a problem the captain caused.

But... IT... IS... ONLY... FICTION... it's not real... I love him, lots of laughs. John played him perfectly. My wife and I both loved all the episodes with him in it, especially on Star Trek Voyager (my favourite ST series), like when he appeared in bed with the captain. ;D

You people need to lighten up!

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Edit: as for your comments about the God I believe in, I don't see what in fuck that has to do with a damn TV show! Get a life!

Elias
bamccaig said:

Q was an appreciated character for his stir of things, but I think you'd have to be mentally unstable to pick him as your favorite.

Never thought I'd have anything in common with Neil - but he was my favorite character as well! In a way he was the driving force behind the entire show - doesn't he even appear in the very first episode?

The episode where he changes the past so Picard would not have had the accident causing him to get an artificial heart is just genius.

Edgar Reynaldo
Neil Roy said:

It was obviously one of those moments when the baby grabbed the cat and the parents found the pose cute. You need to see the cuteness and humour in this, not your secret fantasies. :P

Yes. How cute. Someone else's naked child and a caption stating he's sodomizing an animal. How cute. Sorry but I don't find naked children appealing. Dr. Spock does not approve of your depraved sense of humor.

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Neil Roy
Elias said:

Never thought I'd have anything in common with Neil - but he was my favorite character as well! In a way he was the driving force behind the entire show - doesn't he even appear in the very first episode?

Actually, you're right. Q was in the very first episode, putting the human race on trial, and the final episode that you mentioned was the conclusion to that trial if you watch it. That was the last episode(s) of the series. So you make a good point.

In any event, I take real life seriously, not fiction on TV. When I can find something on Star Trek my wife likes too, when she normally hates the show, that's a good thing! And I got her to like Voyager (the only one she likes) and Q so. I don't honestly know how anyone could not like him, John DeLancie played him perfectly with lots of laughs.

Yes. How cute. Someone else's naked child and a caption stating he's sodomizing an animal. How cute. Sorry but I don't find naked children appealing. Dr. Spock does not approve of your depraved sense of humor.

Sorry, butt, I found it funny. It was meant as humour for obvious reasons.

As for Spock... he's a fictional character. And I don't seek approval anyhow, I found it funny whether you liked it or not. Bu-bye! ;D

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Edgar Reynaldo

Well, Neil, the point is, not everyone has the same sense of humor you do. In fact I find most of what you've posted so far rather crude. In one end out the other I guess.

bamccaig

I mostly agree with Neil's humor in this thread to my surprise. That said, Q is not meant to be a likable character. He's an asshole. You grow to like him over time, as you realize he isn't going to actually destroy the crew or ship, but you still don't like him, as doesn't either captain. The actor, of course, does a wonderful job portraying him, and for that I give kudos. The character is a misguided prick.

Eric Johnson

Toys R Us is filing for chapter 11 bankruptcy in the US. I don't wanna grow up. I'm a Toys R Us kid. :(

bamccaig

Toys today are shit. There's no imagination left. They all take 8 batteries every 4 hours, and they tell you what you're playing. It's no fun. My young nephew just pulls you to his toy room and says, "I have this, and this, and this, and this, ..." He doesn't really play with any of it. It's fucking depressing. I used to ignore what the character was on an action figure and invent my own self, and play for hours... No batteries required.

Anybody ever have those matchcar town play mats as kids? Basically it was a little mat with a mini town on it with roads that fit your toy cars. Just a generic town. No branding. Mostly roads. There were all the essentials. A store, a police station, fire station, etc. Thing is, they still make these today, but now the buildings are so 3D that the buildings are 60-80% of the mat. There are just a few crappy loops around it. How the Hell is a kid supposed to imagine a story out of that? Most of the mat caters to the one part of the equation he has no avatar for: people outside of cars. And you can't go inside buildings really. That's all just imaginary. Factor in the fact that most kids are playing with iPhones and Androids at 8 months of age and have the attention span of a rock. They don't have imaginations anymore.

It's just a very sad world. No wonder toy stores are suffering. They don't sell good toys anymore.

Eric Johnson

I think the cause of the bankruptcy can be pinned on a general struggle to compete online with the likes of Amazon more than anything else.

While on the subject of toys, I remember buying a Red Power Ranger action figure when I was five. It even included a motorcycle for the figure to ride on. It was awesome. I spent so many hours making up stories with it, imagining it doing jumps and tricks off of buildings, etc. It required no batteries, which was great. I wonder whatever happened to it... Strange how things that once meant a lot to you can fade into obscurity as you age. :-/

bamccaig

Append:

When and if I have kids they won't be getting electronic toys. They'll get non-electronic toys that don't light up, make sounds, or anything like that. You have to imagine the magic. Your imagination will do way better than $70 at a toy store ever could. The real fun is in the imagination. They also won't be playing with any mobile phones, tablets, or computers until they're a little bit older. I loved playing NES when I was 4 or 5, but in hindsight I'm not sure that it encouraged the best me that I could be. Fortunately my parents limited my usage of it, though to get around their rules I'd usually wake up quietly at like 5 or 6 AM to go play.

I'm on the fence about letting my kids play video games. I don't think video games are themselves harmful, though I think in this world kids don't use their imagination enough. Similar to the toys, the games are so detailed that they kind of make it hard to imagine your own story (I remember identifying this problem even in my teen years where certain games were sort of locked down to the developer's narrative). As a child and teen I played Driver on PlayStation countless times in free-mode imagining my own story. While it would probably have been far more beneficial to just go play with friends and learn social skills, I think that playing games that don't even afford you the freedom to reinvent the story would be even worse than if you were playing games that were loosely enough structured to let you imagine your own game within them.

Insert: I should emphasize that I think that the right video games would encourage the imagination to develop and grow, but video games don't encourage social skills. That's where I am lacking, and I can't be sure if it's my nature or if it was influenced by my exposure to computers growing up from a young age. Part of me thinks that playing video games did somewhat hinder my social development, but at the same time, they also made up in some ways for what wasn't there for one reason or another. You can always introduce your kids to video games if you discover them naturally lacking social skills. :P I've noticed "social" people don't play video games the way that I do, and while I insist that they're wrong and stupid and ugly for it, I can see how it would be beneficial for my kids to have better social skills than I do, perhaps at the expense of being (brace yourself) less of a geek. :-X

Perhaps that could be inspiration to some of the game designers on these message boards. As important as immersion is for a good game, a really useful thing to achieve is a game that doesn't get in a child's way if they start to imagine their own game out of it (i.e., the game behaves in a predictable way that the child can build on, and doesn't necessarily break the immersion of their imaginary game either). Even if it's just a special free game mode like Driver had I think it's important to have.

Neil Roy
bamccaig said:

When and if I have kids they won't be getting electronic toys.

Some of my favourite toys as a child were the leggos and a mechano set, things where you are creative. I think they make the best toys for a child. Nothing electric, helps them become creative. I didn't have a lot of them though, my friends and I used to like creating our own things.

My father bought me a Radio Shack 200-n-1 electronic kits which I recall liking so much i took it to camp with me! ;D... it taught you about electronics and you built your own things with it by wiring up various components. That love of electronics is what lead to computer programming later on.

I think the best toys are ones that encourage creativity, preferably non-violent.

I like what John Romero did with his son, he taught him to program and helped his son create a video game. If my wife and I could have children (we can't) that would be one option I would pursue.

Well, Neil, the point is, not everyone has the same sense of humor you do.

I tell you what, in the interest of peace and happiness, I'll tone it down a bit. Perhaps I have been too crass. <shrug> I have a strong sense of humour though, anyone that knows me, knows I laugh a lot and love to joke around, I try not to get too serious (except about certain topics I feel strongly about of course). Anyhow... I'll put on my serious face...

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Eric Johnson

So I tried out Microsoft Edge today. It works pretty well, but it has loads of input lag when trying to play games written in JavaScript. Keyboard inputs sometimes get stuck or don't even register at all. It's abysmal. Granted, I'm using Edge 38, so maybe this is fixed in Edge 40. But holy cow, I can't believe they'd screw up something simple like event listeners. :o

Neil Roy

Woohoo! I survived September 23rd! ;D

I think I need a T-Shirt with that on it.

Eric Johnson
Neil Roy said:

Woohoo! I survived September 23rd! ;D

Still an hour to go for me. :-/

ZoriaRPG

I also agree. Some of is occasionally have things come up in life that prevents us from checking in regularly.

Why are threads locking on their own anyway? Can't thread locks be done by moderators, or by OPs?

Can someone unlock this for us, please:

https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/616990/2

I would rather respond to things [b]in that thread[/b] than start a new, pointless thread.

Edgar Reynaldo

Threads automatically lock after one week of inactivity. Two if you're in the right board(s).

Neil Roy

;D

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Edgar Reynaldo

What, there was an apocalypse and I missed it? Dang, not again.

Satan comes first kiddos. ;) Then Jesus.

Neil Roy

What, there was an apocalypse and I missed it? Dang, not again.

Yeah, there was another one for September 23rd (search Youtube). There was also one for Sept 23, 2015 if you remember that, to do with the "four blood moons", I called that a false prophecy back then and again this time. This time they were mixing astrology with the Bible which I found unbelievable.

Anyhow, seen that pic posted and I got a kick out of it. I want a T-shirt that says "I survived September 23rd... again" ;)

Polybios

I love this quote:

This is the age of protected feelings purchased at the cost of permanent infantilization.

Chris Katko

I really do feel like the public (perhaps after growing up in an age of "everyone is a winner") has become adult infants.

And the stats basically prove it. Millennials "move out", "lose their virginity" and "do drugs" all less than the previous generation. I'm all for "not doing drugs" but basically being afraid of the world--except through a computer screen--does not make a healthy long-term, fulfilling life.

Perhaps that's why they're so angry. They've thrown away everything the previous generation held sacred, and then became frustrated when there was nothing left.

Gideon Weems

That was a worthwhile read, Polybios. I was disappointed, however, when the author acknowledged journalism's unique importance in the private sector (as opposed to "trucking or food services," which tend not to influence public opinion) but immediately doused it with a couple of lame jokes. (Furthermore, I would argue that food services greatly affect public opinion regarding health matters.) The author then goes on to beseech journalists to solve the problem by performing their duties responsibly... but without having freed journalism from capitalistic influence (profitability via "high-carb, low-protein populist pap"), how is this supposed to make a difference? The author's call to arms is tantamount to asking nicely, and I can't seem to remember the last time the free market chose "asking nicely" over money.

Codification of logical debate, exercised as part of grade school curriculum, would better benefit society--codification being important, as teachers themselves often succumb to fallacy. Such a generation would have a better chance growing up with an appetite for meaningful journalism (as opposed to empty "identity politics") and might actually support meaningful journalism through capitalism, as opposed to against it in an unending, uphill battle.

Otherwise, you have to topple capitalism itself, as capitalism--by definition--follows money. Pretending it might do otherwise brings about no change and does more harm than good, like telling a cancer patient to get plenty of sleep instead of removing the tumor.

Eric Johnson

No replies in nearly three whole days? :o We're getting lazy. :-/

Chris Katko

The Orville is amazing. Episode 3 is EXACTLY like one of the best TNG episodes. Episode 4 is pretty good but more predictable.

Bruce Perry

I was supposed to be climbing Kilimanjaro now, but a slight condition has prevented me :(

On the plus side, I had occasion to fly with easyJet again, and apart from the airport being harder to get to, it's soooooo much better than Ryanair in every other way. Cuter planes, better seat material, better support, brighter and more spacious interior, better window height, better sound insulation, smoother operation, crew happy enough to socialise with each other, no stupid landing jingle... :)

Speaking of the journey to the airport, a lovely old lady at a bus stop said to another lovely old lady that it was sunny, wasn't it, and a tall, thin, confident guy with a slightly great big bushy goatee, short hair pointing upwards and sunglasses on top said it's because of global climate change, nice that people are finally noticing, and wrong that everyone is supporting all these f%&#ing governments. He was very keen to point out that he's a roofer (he was clearly very proud of this) and he noticed it too. I told him I didn't think we had a choice, did we, and asked what he would do? He paused and then told me, "To be honest, you seem a little camp, mate, to be having a conversation with me." It was a little threatening in the moment, but as soon as he was gone, it was hilarious. He definitely seemed a few tiles short of a roof to me. I've met bad roofers before too - what is it with roofers?!

Chris Katko

I would have thought two nice old ladies talking about the weather, then a guy going "It's cuz GLOBAL WARMMMIINNGNG gashghghingnggG" would have been a richard in that scenario...

Neil Roy

Blade Runner 2049 in four days, woohoo!

Chris Katko

I'm super hopeful it doesn't suck.

bamccaig

The Orville is amazing. Episode 3 is EXACTLY like one of the best TNG episodes. Episode 4 is pretty good but more predictable.

Thanks for reminding me about this! I was able to watch the first episode online last night. I was excited about this for two reasons: brand new "Star Trek" esque series that actually shows promise, and Seth MacFarlane behind it. The first episode was great, and I'm excited for more. I'm stuck watching the advertising on the stream so hopefully the network/show is getting funding from that because I want it to succeed and go on for many seasons.

VPN + location emulation in Chrome FTW.

Speaking of the journey to the airport, a lovely old lady at a bus stop said to another lovely old lady that it was sunny, wasn't it, and a tall, thin, confident guy with a slightly great big bushy goatee, short hair pointing upwards and sunglasses on top said it's because of global climate change, nice that people are finally noticing, and wrong that everyone is supporting all these f%&#ing governments. He was very keen to point out that he's a roofer (he was clearly very proud of this) and he noticed it too. I told him I didn't think we had a choice, did we, and asked what he would do? He paused and then told me, "To be honest, you seem a little camp, mate, to be having a conversation with me." It was a little threatening in the moment, but as soon as he was gone, it was hilarious. He definitely seemed a few tiles short of a roof to me. I've met bad roofers before too - what is it with roofers?!

I had to Google what "camp" means in British slang, but I'd have to agree. You do seem a little "camp". :P Though I'm not sure why that matters to have a conversation with you. ??? You should have just said you're a classical musician! :P

Gideon Weems

To be honest, you seem a little camp, mate, to be having a conversation with me.

Achievement unlocked: "Unabashed British Altercation"

Supposedly one of the world's smartest people worked as a bouncer for most of his career. That is either one notch below or above roofing, depending on who you ask. It behooves us to respect speakers and disregard irrelevant details. I agree that governments are atrocities.

bamccaig

This so called "one of the smartest people in the world" apparently dropped out of college because he thought he was smarter than his professors, and worked most of his life doing menial jobs.. As you said, mostly being a bouncer. His great achievement is an obscurely worded description of the universe which believes is both physical and "mental". Basically, he believes he can prove God exists. Sounds like a fraud to me. It would be something if other demonstrably smart people thought he was really smart, but I haven't seen any evidence of this. Seems like more of a publicity stunt, or maybe a generally smart guy let it go to his head and stuck his head up his own ass. :P

Eric Johnson

Turnip or radish? Which one's better?

bamccaig

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Edgar Reynaldo

Obviously it's turnip. Because if you're dyslexic it looks like Trump.

Bruce Perry
bamccaig said:

I had to Google what "camp" means in British slang, but I'd have to agree. You do seem a little "camp". :P

That wasn't a very nice thing to say, you know.

Chris Katko

Clearly the answer is: Trump

Eric Johnson

Who would win in a fight: Edgar Reynaldo or Chris Katko?

bamccaig

That wasn't a very nice thing to say, you know.

I'm sorry. :-/ Well I didn't mean it in the insulting way. Just that the description that I read probably fits to a degree (and there's nothing wrong with that).

Forgive me? :-*

Chris Katko

Who would win in a fight: Edgar Reynaldo or Chris Katko?

I fight dirty.

Eric Johnson

I fight dirty.

I don't know, man. My money's on Edgar. ::)

Edgar Reynaldo

All I know are killing techniques. :/ I refuse to fight.

Eric Johnson

All I know are killing techniques. :/ I refuse to fight.

It'll be a death match then.

Chris Katko

Chris 'Deathwish' Katko reporting for duty.

Heh ... duty....

Actually, I don't recall anywhere where Edgar and I said anything against each other that might spark said fight. Is this just a random celebrity battle?

Eric Johnson

Is this just a random celebrity battle?

Pretty much. :P

bamccaig

Bump because I was going to post in this thread to keep it alive, but realized that my response is perhaps too much of a "spoiler" while also being too provocative to not expect a discussion after which might spoil the spoilers.. So I'll move that to its own thread, and just bump this one. >:(

jmasterx

Guys, we totally missed this thread's 2 year anniversary on the 26th! No one even posted in this thread that day! >:(

Eric Johnson
jmasterx said:

Guys, we totally missed this thread's 2 year anniversary on the 26th! No one even posted in this thread that day! >:(

Do you know nothing about respect? We honored this thread's anniversary by having a day of silence. >:(

jmasterx

Do you know nothing about respect? We honored this thread's anniversary by having a day of silence. >:(

You're missing the whole point of this thread. We will not be silenced. We will be heard! Our thread lock policies will be put in place! We will not be silenced by the almighty Dr. Leverton! We will have our voices heard. We will rise above and end this threading nightmare once and for all. We are the rebellion. We are the only hope for change in this forum. We will not be monitored and locked like a bunch of shared resources! >:(

#UnlockAllegro

jmasterx

Do you know nothing about respect? We honored this thread's anniversary by having a day of silence. >:(

You're missing the whole point of this thread. We will not be silenced. We will be heard! Our thread lock policies will be put in place! We will not be silenced by the almighty Dr. Leverton! We will have our voices heard. We will rise above and end this threading nightmare once and for all. We are the rebellion. We are the only hope for change in this forum. We will not be monitored and locked like a bunch of shared resources! >:(

#NoMoreLocks

jmasterx

Do you know nothing about respect? We honored this thread's anniversary by having a day of silence. >:(

You're missing the whole point of this thread. We will not be silenced. We will be heard! Our thread lock policies will be put in place! We will not be silenced by the almighty Dr. Leverton! We will have our voices heard. We will rise above and end this threading nightmare once and for all. We are the rebellion. We are the only hope for change in this forum. We will not be monitored and locked like a bunch of shared resources! >:(

Chris Katko

That was a great joke. I chuckled.

Neil Roy

Seen Blade Runner 2049, 2 hours and 44mins long movie and not a boring moment in it. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The trailers didn't give away the plot either, in fact, I felt they cleverly disguised it.

Chris Katko

YES. I was hoping so much it'd be good! I can't wait now!

Onewing

I'm hearing good things about Blade Runner too. I haven't seen the first one. Should I do that first?

Chris Katko

It's amazing. I'd definitely watch it. And it's the same character from the original, so it's gonna be pretty helpful to see the original first.

Eric Johnson

Nice double post there, jmasterx. ;)

Edgar Reynaldo

Wow Eric. ::)

You pissed him off so much he triple posted. 8-)

Eric Johnson
Edgar Reynaldo said:

Wow Eric. ::)

You pissed him off so much he triple posted. 8-)

Oh man, I didn't even notice the third one. :o I'm a terrible person. :-/

Neil Roy

I think you could probably get away with watching this one without knowing the original. There's not too much to know from the original that isn't covered in this.

TO be honest, the original had much less of a plot, basically certain models of replicants are banned on Earth (the ones from the first movie), only in off world colonies are they allowed at all as they rebelled.

What is a replicant? I heard some people talking and calling them Robots after the movie. While the analogy of a robot is close, they are the same as you and I, only they are genetically designed and "constructed" somehow and are "born" fully adult. The latest model (8) can be "programmed" for specific purposes and obey the owner. Even if the owner commands it to kill itself. Most people on Earth can't stand them and refer to them as "skinjobs".

In the original movie, Deckard (Harrison Ford's character) is a detective assigned to what is called the "Blade Runner" unit whose sole task is to track down and "retire" (kill) rogue replicants that are on Earth. The original tries to make you feel sympathetic to the replicants, but I never felt that way as they murdered many innocent people. They tend to lack normal human emotions like empathy and compassion. And the original models rebelled. The new models in the new movie are less likely to rebel and more obedient, at least... that is how they were designed.

The plot in the new one involves an aspect I never even considered to do with replicants, but I won't spoil it. :)

I hear a lot about how great the original was, and it was! But honestly, the original plot was fairly simple. Hunt down the replicants and retire them before they kill you and anyone else. That's it. The new movie has a more involved plot I felt. The graphics were fricken amazing I thought, a ruined Las Vegas (like what you seen in the trailer, only MUCH more in the movie of course) looked amazing I thought.

Anyhow... not giving away anything with this post. I loved it, but then again, I don't tend to be too critical of movies, I get serious about real life and tend to focus on the good points in a movie.

Edit: as a side note to the original, if you can see the original THEATRICAL VERSION, you will get MUCH more insight into what is going on. You may end up preferring the Director's Cut which is more commonly available these days, it cut out narration from Harrison Ford which was sort of like an old '50s detective show where you get the detective's thoughts while watching him. Some like it, some do not, I'll not bash either, I happen to like it. But you WILL get more information if you hear it, then maybe watch the Director's Cut and make up your own mind. Also the original ending is cut out of the Director's Cut (it's called a "CUT" for a reason), which I also preferred and I feel ties in closely and is important for this new movie for reasons I won't get into (so as not to spoil anything).

I have an old VHS tape of the original theatrical version. I won't buy the director's cut, can't stand it (again, not bashing you if you like it, I just personally do not, to each his own).

Edgar Reynaldo

If that's a spoiler, keep it somewhere else. I haven't seen it yet. >:(

Bruce Perry

The first sentence was useful, because I was wondering whether I need to obtain the original post-haste :)

Chris Katko

Quick! Keep posting so his post and spoilers will be on a previous page!

Neil Roy

What spoiler?! If I posted a spoiler I would use spoiler tags, you guys are retarded.

I think I'll stay away from this site for a long while, getting annoying. Enjoy.

Chris Katko

You've been taking stuff too seriously lately. :) It's not like 10 people shot down all your points and humiliated you, or 20 downvotes, or a mod abused his powers.

I saw spoiler and that movie is important to me so I'm being extra careful to not spoil it.

Eric Johnson
Neil Roy said:

What spoiler?! If I posted a spoiler I would use spoiler tags, you guys are retarded.

Who are you calling retarded?! >:(

{"name":"SfEmEa8-.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/2\/c\/2cc20dd85e25b7bcb8b8db83005d2b62.jpg","w":394,"h":394,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/2\/c\/2cc20dd85e25b7bcb8b8db83005d2b62"}SfEmEa8-.jpg

:P

bamccaig

I read through Neil's posts. He didn't spoil anything (as far as I could tell), and was even conscious not to. ::)

Chris Katko

I think this is a conspiracy and you're all trying to get me to spoil my movie.

Eric Johnson

In the movie, people run from blades... probably.

Chris Katko

DAMN IT ALL TO HELL! >:(>:(>:(>:(>:(>:(

DanielH

Don't forget the love story between Harrison's character and a replicant. Also, I think they want you to wonder if he is a replicant himself.

I recently watched the original again. To me, it's just a bit hokey.

Neil Roy

Who are you calling retarded?! >:(

Sorry, you're special. As in... olympics. :P

In the movie, people run from blades... probably.

;D. Yeah, that's it. Actually, it is the name of the police unit assigned to "retiring" (killing) replicants (genetically designed people, created as full adults, often superior in strength or some other ability, used as a sort of slave labour) that are illegally on Earth (legal in offworld colonies). Called the "Blade Runner Unit".

The new movie is far superior over the original in my own opinion. Which is rare for a sequel.

Eric Johnson
Neil Roy said:

The new movie is far superior over the original in my own opinion. Which is rare for a sequel.

Shrek 2 was pretty good.

Neil Roy

Shrek 2 was pretty good.

Never seen that movie, 1 or 2, except parts of it I think at a friend's place. Looked interesting. I generally like computer animated movies.

Eric Johnson
Neil Roy said:

Never seen that movie, 1 or 2, except parts of it I think at a friend's place. Looked interesting. I generally like computer animated movies.

You should watch at least the first two. I liked them.

So the town I grew up in is on fire right now. :-/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8SIMFcZ2vA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bYu649MuQo

bamccaig

I'm sorry to hear that. :( I wasn't aware of this until I followed your links.

Chris Katko

Glad you're not in it now. :( There's been like 15 dead so far.

Then again (not to be morbid or anything), any disaster, somebody always manages to find a way to die. For example, "It's hot out today" = "20 dead." somehow.

Eric Johnson

Then again (not to be morbid or anything), any disaster, somebody always manages to find a way to die. For example, "It's hot out today" = "20 dead." somehow.

Yeah, that's true. People die every day. Still, it sucks to see businesses and neighborhoods you once frequented become ash and rubble. I checked in with some of my friends who still live there, and the ones who got back to me say they're okay. Still waiting to hear from a few others though.

Chris Katko

Hope everything works out. :-/

Bruce Perry

Pro tip: don't watch the Final Destination films immediately prior to reading the above posts :-X

Onewing
bamccaig

From the looks of it that thread was only revived once with only a handful of posts (unless ML deleted other posts?). Seems like a bit of an overreaction. :P

Chris Katko

I honestly recall overreactions happening at least a few times back-in-the-day.

Edgar Reynaldo

This is actual code. I shit you not.

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Bruce Perry

Written by a smoker. They'll tell you they're quitting but they know they aren't, so they stay stuck in the loop for ever. :)

Edgar Reynaldo

I always think while not quite (done yet) {do();}

Chris Katko

I'm at a loss. What's wrong with it?

(Except for the fact you're not using Whitesmith's style. ;) )

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentation_style#Whitesmiths_style

Edgar Reynaldo

Well it took me a week's worth work to find it. Last place I ever thought to look.

Neil Roy

Written by a smoker. They'll tell you they're quitting but they know they aren't, so they stay stuck in the loop for ever. :)

Except in this case, it will exit right away without ever running through the loop (`quit` is set to true).

I'm at a loss. What's wrong with it?

well they set quit = true then they exit the loop if quit is not false. The program won't go through the loop even once, it will just exit right away.

quit should be set to false when it is initialized.

The only way I could see doing this without changing quit initialization, would be to use a do while loop so it is run at least once, and perhaps change quit in the loop if needed.

Well it took me a week's worth work to find it. Last place I ever thought to look.

It's always the little things that take the longest to spot.

Edgar Reynaldo

Stupid windows kept vanishing right after they were created. :P x;D

Neil Roy

LMAO ;D

bamccaig
Neil Roy said:

It's always the little things that take the longest to spot.

Disagreed. The little things take longer than they should to spot, but the big things are much more difficult to reason about. :) Threads and race conditions and things of that nature.

Bruce Perry

Yeah, I spotted the fact that it would exit immediately - my post was a joke, admittedly a terrible one, to try to justify why the code might be written that way ;)

I suspect this bug could have been found very quickly with the help of a debugger - just step through from the beginning and see what it does. If you don't have a debugger set up, then get one set up :)

Edgar Reynaldo

I kept looking for things that would make it break out of the loop, like if the thread should stop, or if it received a close event, but the loop never actually ran. Real WTF for ya.

bamccaig

Those are difficult to reason about. When the seemingly "impossible" occurs. When you're certain that a block of code must be reached, but the debugger shows it skipped over. I think there's circuitry in our brains that make us susceptible to the notion of "supernatural" occurrences. When these "paradoxes" occur the logical thing is to realize that our assumptions are wrong and reassess our understanding of the program, but often we just scratch our heads and think "WTF, this can't happen, even though it does!" instead. These are the moments where telling just about anybody else about it will immediately solve the problem: either you'll realize, hold on, maybe my assumption is wrong, or the other person will ask questions trying to understand what you're talking about that force you to discover it by mistake.

jmasterx
bamccaig said:

Those are difficult to reason about. When the seemingly "impossible" occurs. When you're certain that a block of code must be reached, but the debugger shows it skipped over. I think there's circuitry in our brains that make us susceptible to the notion of "supernatural" occurrences. When these "paradoxes" occur the logical thing is to realize that our assumptions are wrong and reassess our understanding of the program, but often we just scratch our heads and think "WTF, this can't happen, even though it does!" instead. These are the moments where telling just about anybody else about it will immediately solve the problem: either you'll realize, hold on, maybe my assumption is wrong, or the other person will ask questions trying to understand what you're talking about that force you to discover it by mistake.

Wrong. All processor manufactures have just implemented their instruction set incorrectly resulting in your software misbehaving.

As a result you as a developer are stuck making compromises for their petty mistakes and oversights
When you discuss it with someone, all they're doing is telling you from their experience how they got around the processor manufacturing defects. >:(

Edgar Reynaldo

Jeez. Someone's bitter. Bad hardware?

Chris Katko

I suspect this bug could have been found very quickly with the help of a debugger - just step through from the beginning and see what it does. If you don't have a debugger set up, then get one set up :)

Yeah, that definitely seems like a case for the step functionality of a debugger if you're going in blind and have no idea why.

Also, both many static analyzers and whatever Visual Studio's IDE is, would have caught that. VS would have said "warning: this code can never be reached." (Actually, don't many compilers say that with -Wall?)

And many linters/static analyzers will actually read things like variable names and their initial values and say "Are you sure this is what you meant?". Like creating an integer but calling it test_float.

They also do this amazing case:

for(int i=0;i<my_long1.thing_dot.count();i++)
for(int j=0;j<my_long2.thing_dot.count();i++)
for(int k=0;k<my_long3.thing_dot.count();k++)
for(int l=0;l<my_long4.thing_dot.count();l++)
{
access_my_thing[i][j][k][l];
}

As well as:

for(int i=0; i<100; i++)
for(int j=0; j<100; j++)
{
my_data[1][j].access.here();
}

And a huge swath of other things, many major, but also many minor ones that your eye tricks you into missing by autocorrecting.

Edgar Reynaldo

To all those suggesting I use a debugger - I do! -Wall does NOT warn about while (false).

But somethings are harder to step through when you have an interactive program.

In this case, I was spawning a new thread that creates a window and draws to it, but the window kept closing as soon as it was opened. Which made me think it was getting a close event. Or the thread was signaled to stop for some reason. I thought for sure it was one of the loop's break conditions getting triggered.

bamccaig

But somethings are harder to step through when you have an interactive program.

QFT.

Edgar Reynaldo

In all honesty, if I had set a breakpoint in bad_thread and stepped through it I would have found it right away.

Chris Katko

The thing is, it may be a simple error, but it's realizing WHERE the error is, as well as WHAT the error is. That is, it could be a simple error to fix, but the EFFECTS you're using to diagnose it may be very confusing or even misleading from the true problem. Easiest example is re-using memory / pointer abuse for newbies where the crash occurs FAR away from the actual pointer and goes away when they change seemingly (an actually) unrelated lines of code that just so happen to move the memory order slightly to add or remove the crash.

All yesterday I was working with a co-worker on some "should have been simple" code with two listboxes bound to SQL data. It kept giving us problem after problem. Data didn't move over like it should. Some rows would. Some rows would only not move in some other cases. It made no sense.

Actually, we finally thought we fixed it, and demo'd it to the client at quitting time... and lo and behold I committed the mortal sin. Showing a client a slightly different test case that we didn't test before hand (even though I had my co-worker test many cases this one slight case we didn't--that "shouldn't" have mattered). It managed to have a new glitch. DOH.

All rows moved, worked. No rows moved, worked. Some rows, worked. HOWEVER, we selected (for the heck of it) all rows with similar names all related to a single company (multiple locations) and then it glitches and my heart sinks.

I mean, the guy didn't care that much, but still, I wanted to beat .NET with a rusty hammer.

p.s. If you read Hacker News or Slashdot, people have been saying "I wonder if it'd be better in Rust" so often, it's become an meme. Any time anyone mentions ANY security, pointer, or performance flaw, some idiot will invariably chime in "I wonder if a Rust implementation of the [discussion topic] would be better." They literally said that about the Linux Kernel. Ugh. Kids these days. So this thread reminded me that. That if we were talking about Eagle on Hacker News they'd be like "omg, you'd never have crashes... logic errors... or any error at all if you just used Rust. kthxbye"

Neil Roy

I rarely use a debugger. When I want to know if a program reached a specific point, I just throw in a few printf("Program reached line %n\n", __LINE__);... works well. I'm low tech that way. ;)

Bruce Perry

SiegeLord is our resident Rust expert, but he hasn't posted in this thread and probably never will. I'm curious as to whether there's any merit to those memetic comments. I guess one day I'll probably try it myself :)

jmasterx

Jeez. Someone's bitter. Bad hardware?

No, it was a joke, but maybe it did not sound that way :P

bamccaig

I'm curious as to whether there's any merit to those memetic comments.

Google has no idea what you just said there. :-/

Neil Roy

;D

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Chris Katko

That movie was mind-bogglingly terrible.

Even there, she was just telling the droid she hates it. Then she fixes its antenna?

Eric Johnson

That movie was mind-bogglingly terrible.

I liked the visuals (explosions are always cool), but the story was kind of lackluster. I find it difficult to believe that, despite defeating the evil in the galaxy just a score or so earlier, evil rose up and assumed dominance again so quickly. It feels like it really undoes everything from episodes IV-VI. Then again, the original trilogy wasn't even all that great either. Cheesy acting and dialogue galore. ::)

Chris Katko

Nothing made sense in it. Like, the main chick somehow finds the Millenium Falcon right when she needs it, and SOMEHOW knows how to repair it better than the guy who FLEW IT FOR DECADES and SOMEHOW knows how to fly it better than anyone even though she admits "I've never flow this ship before." She's either the Jedi Jesus Christ, or some of the worst writing in the history of Hollywood AAA movies.

Nobody has any plans. They just walk in, and know everything will work out.

And the empire gets completely defeated. The Rebels win. Yet this next movie, only like 20/30 years past and EVERYONE has forgotten that the Jedi basically saved the day (again?!!? Does NOBODY have cellphone cameras?!), AND this "new empire" has magically shown up and built an EVEN BIGGER DEATH STAR and NO ONE NOTICED, and just so happened to leave YET ANOTHER WEAK SPOT completely unguarded that planes can easily fly into to blow up.

And the new rebels are... The Resistance. How can they be The Resistance?! THEY WON THE LAST ROUND. THEY OWN THE UNIVERSE. And how do they STILL have clunky old ships and tiny armies, and the new order just "shows up" and has 10x the military size out of no where.

Almost EVERY decision they made makes ZERO sense when you really think about it. Like how Jesus Chick can somehow overpower the mind powers of a evil Jedi who TRAINED UNDER LUKE SKYWALKER, the most powerful Jedi that ever lived. And she just comes in and gives him a headache. Then, she uses powers she never even saw someone else use, brainwashes people. THEN, she OUT LIGHTSABERS the Jedi Knight... who again... trained under Luke Skywalker and spent his entire life using force powers.

THEN, even ignoring the Jesus Chick, the black guy picks up the sword and (though there's been zero hinting of him having any Jedi powers OR EVER HOLDING A SWORD IN HIS LIFE) manages to... ONCE AGAIN... overpower... the dark jedi knight.

Why are we even watching at this point? No matter what happens, Rey has GOD MODE turned on. Does anyone find it "fun" or "interesting" to watch someone play a game with cheats enabled? When there's literally nothing at stake and she can kill everyone (no matter how "strong") with a single hit?

And my gosh, her blank expression the entire movie. I'm sure the actress is a wonderful woman, but the dialog, plot, and directing have turned her into a walking block of wood with a face drawn on it. It's like watching Twilight where the girl has that constant... blank... expression the entire series.

Go watch it again and see how "entertained" you are and how "attached" you are to the characters. Then contrast it with the original series and how warm and family-like they are. You care when they get sad, or fail, or lose a friend.

Neil Roy

You guys totally missed the humour in that pic. Yeesh. ;)

Chris Katko

I've watched every episode of Futurama at least 20 times at this point. (I watch it every night as I fall asleep--for years.)

I got the joke. :P But I was overwhelmed with my hatred for that movie.

And contrary to people's implications that I may hate "any" new STar Wars, Rogue One was 10x better than Force Awakens in every way. I loved the darker / saving-private-ryan-esk tone. There were some stupid inconsistency, and terrible halts to the pacing, but overall, WAY MORE LIKABLE CHARACTERS and actually treading new ground like with the Force Monk.

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That's an insanely cool, untapped bit of lore. Guys who BELIEVE in the force with all their faith, yet aren't born as Jedi's. The guy in this movie is blind yet can "sense" attackers because of his faith and his excellent hearing. That's a pretty damn cool twist on the now cliche "men with laser swords wacking each other".

Oh Kylo Ren's amazing new sword technology is simply... a light saber with some tokyo drift ground lighting attached to the sides. You know, flames that don't actually do anything at all since it's a F!@#ING LASER SWORD.

Also, "ray, and kylo ren, and finn." Could they have picked ANY THREE NAMES that sound more similar and confusable with each other? Why not bill, phil, and sill while they're at it?

OH, and the ROBOT in Rogue One has got to be one of my now favorite robots EVER. He blows C3-PO and R2D2 out of the water. And he's a way more likable cynical robot than the film version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe. Perhaps I'm not "British" enough to get the joke but I didn't find him very funny and I LOVE the actor that voices him.

{"name":"rogue-one-alan-tudyk.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/3\/0\/30e09cf0641e8fe4e34f5209c5e357a2.jpg","w":825,"h":464,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/3\/0\/30e09cf0641e8fe4e34f5209c5e357a2"}rogue-one-alan-tudyk.jpg

vs

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And I get it, Marvin in Hitchhiker is not supposed to be an "action" robot but he never has any redeeming qualities in the movie. He just walks around, and "luck" seems to save everyone over and over. (which is an odd thing when the book/film basically says "there is no god, and everything is meaningless" yet luck keeps saving them over and over...)

[edit] And if Hollywood had ANY BALLS AT ALL, instead of "implying" that the "New ORder" is Space Nazis and blowing up 5 planets at once. Why not have the BALLS and do ACTUAL sick twisted stuff like torture women with light sabers, blow up children, and enslave entire races. It's pretty effed up that the worst thing "the bad guys" do is hold some rallies, and then blow up some planets they disagree with. I mean, how many times has the USA blown the piss out of much less powerful countries because it was "in our best interest." Where's the REAL evil? The sinister, twisted stuff (that the REAL Nazis actually did less than 100 years ago.) Evil that is done not because it's in their best interest, but the opposite. Why? BECAUSE THEY'RE EVIL.

How can the "super evil" guys be less evil than people our parents may have newspapers/photos of in their attics? I get it that's it's not an R rated movie but my point still stands. They could have infused way more believable "evil" in Force Awakens if they actually bothered to use their brains a little.

Did ANYONE care at all and "Feel" emotion for the planets that blew up in Force Awakens? You literally never saw them up until the exact moment they blew up. They're not real people... they're standing props for an explosion effect. Meanwhile, remember Leia watching the death star and high ranking officers blow up her HOME planet? We can empathize and understand the situation through HER eyes as an actress. In Force Awakens, there's no "before and after"--we know literally nothing about them before they die--it's just eye candy.

It's horrifically bad story telling. And basically the exact blunder Disney commited in Tron: Legacy when they introduced and killed the "synth" lifeforms <b>in the same speech<b> and all you saw was a cheap exploding building and a bunch of cheesy "we're dying" agony screams. All from people you never see the entire movie--even during their "deaths". Am I supposed to care about these people? I didn't even know they existed!

They literally have less filmmaking skill at creating empathy... than those television ads with sad music while playing pictures of abused dogs, or starving Ethiopian kids.

Bruce Perry
bamccaig said:

Google has no idea what you just said there. :-/

You use Google for your basic reading comprehension?

Chris Katko

Here's Mark Hamil (crapping on the new Star Wars ;) ) and explaining how they could have done the entire han solo / luke / leia arc so much better:

video

Instead of a bunch of random characters who NEVER EVEN KNEW HAN SOLO till ~20 minutes ago, witnessing his end.

bamccaig

I mean, how many times has the USA blown the piss out of much less powerful countries because it was "in our best interest." Where's the REAL evil?

...Right there? :-/:P

The sinister, twisted stuff (that the REAL Nazis actually did less than 100 years ago.) Evil that is done not because it's in their best interest, but the opposite. Why? BECAUSE THEY'RE EVIL.

I assume the genocide and war was "in the best interest" of Nazi Germany at the time. Or at the very least, the powers that be believed that it was. That doesn't really justify murder and genocide.

You use Google for your basic reading comprehension?

I use Google and Urban Dictionary and Wikipedia to try to figure out what undefined references are. :P I've never heard of "memetic comments". In fact, I think before this moment the only time I've ever seed or heard the word "memetic" was in Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. :P

Having now spent a few minutes on Wikipedia, I still don't understand what you meant by it. :P Is it some kind of inside joke or am I just dense? >:(

Bruce Perry

Now I understand what was unclear :)

Here's another example: the T1000 from Terminator 2 is a "memetic polyalloy", i.e. a metal that can mimic things. Memes are so called because they spread through mimicry. Hopefully that clarifies :)

Chris Katko

So ACC is freezing up again and you guys just posted here. I wonder if it's related. :o

Also, bam, I think you missed what I'm saying. YES, it's "wrong" to blast little countries. But international politics IS a really strange, murky grey area. Is it okay to blow up some innocent people (because technology isn't strong enough) if it stops a regime that's killing thousands of people?

But that's different than, sinister evil. What the Nazis did was spend TONS of resources not just enslaving the jews (which they did for the labor resources), but also spend INSANE amounts of resources exterminating them. Hitler wasn't "insane." He knew exactly what he was doing, and continued to spend tons of resources even till the very end of the war when they needed those resources for weaponry. That's why Hitler wins the evil contest in most history books.

*However, it's pretty hilarious how nobody uses Mao or Stalin, or calls people "Stalin supporters" or "Stalin enablers" even though both of them killed MILLIONS (Stalin might have killed MORE than Hitler). Because you know, that would affect liberals, and it's way better politically to just have a four-letter-word for shutting down conservatives than actually being consistent with your logic.

Another fun fact: Japan even had live human experimentation camps JUST like Hitler did, and in many ways, they were WORSE than the Germans (see Rape of Nanking). Whereas Germany had the "SS" for their militant zealots (whereas the normal military even respected Americans and Rommel's entire military was NEVER convicted of any war crime), Japan's entire army was brainwashed and fought to the death for their "god" emperor. Yet NOBODY brings up Japan as an ultimate evil. Nobody harbors any hatred for them. Nobody shames anyone who dares view Japan in a positive light, or wearing a Japanese ww2 flag. There's no hashtag #punch_a_jap even though they committed many war crimes.

The way politics abuses history is an interesting topic to me.

Neil Roy

Wow... so much hate about a movie. Try and just see the humour and quit being so serious about movies. I loved the new Star Wars movies. But then, I rarely get serious about a movie. I get serious about real life. I try and find the positive in all movies and ignore the flaws because... they're just movies.

I'm about to give up on trying to crack a smile out of people in here! Yeesh.

Chris Katko

NOW I'M EVEN ANGRIER!

RAAAAAAAAAAGGHGHHHH!!!

MMARRRRYY SUEEEEEEeeeEEEeeeee!!

video

Neil Roy

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Chris Katko

Ha!

GullRaDriel

Still rocking. 8-)

Bruce Perry
Chris Katko

So I'm going to test bricking Allegro.CC now by posting in this thread.

[edit] So far it's super snappy. Maybe it was a DDoS.

Neil Roy

An oldie...

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GullRaDriel

Translation in the spoiler.

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"When I shit in the jungle, I use leaves to wipe my ass"

X-D

jmasterx

I would have translated it as:

In the jungle, I use leaves to wipe my ass.

bamccaig

I would have translated it as:

In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion shits down koala bears' throats.

>:(

DanielH

No, it's:

Does a Bear shit in the woods?

Eric Johnson
DanielH said:

Does a Bear shit in the woods?

Yes, but only if someone is around to see it happen.

Chris Katko

Schrodinger's shit?

Neil Roy

In the jungle, I use leaves to wipe my

This made me laugh out loud. Fits the pic perfectly. ;D

GullRaDriel

It's behind me at the office right now ;)

Chris Katko

The poop or the poster? Or the Koala?

GullRaDriel

The poster ;-p

Bruce Perry

The poster's behind you, is he? 8-)

Chris Katko

NSFW

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Ever heard of the "rape sloth" meme? ;D

Eric Johnson

Would any of you be interested in a copy of Majesty Gold HD and/or Majesty 2 for Steam? I have a key for each. They're just not my kind of game, and so I'd like to gift them away to someone who would actually play it.

bamccaig

Is this another one "free steam keys" post where you also posted to the entire Twitter universe first-come-first-served? >:(

Those games don't look like my styles either. For anybody that is, they appear to be on sale right now on Steam pretty cheap as well so if somebody on Twitter beats you you can probably afford them anyway. :P

(The English in this post appears to be terrible, but I blame an infection for that..)

Append:

The rape sloth is one of the brilliant ideas that we have the Internet to thank for. It's things like this that make the world a better place.

Eric Johnson
bamccaig said:

Is this another one "free steam keys" post where you also posted to the entire Twitter universe first-come-first-served? >:(

I didn't post to Twitter this time. Just here and on the IRC channel. ;)

What kind of games fit your style anyway (other than CS:GO)?

bamccaig

What kind of games fit your style anyway (other than CS:GO)?

It's kind of hard to answer that these days.

My all time favorite game is Final Fantasy VII. I've enjoyed the odd bit of Final Fantasy since, but as an adult I don't really have the time to invest, and I also find the modern releases lack the magic that made VII what it was.

Mostly I prefer games with story and action. See the spoiler for more details and history.

The Grand Theft Auto series has been a staple in my library. I used to enjoy the Driver series too, but the developers couldn't compete with Rockstar. I loved the original Max Payne games, but they really fucked up MP3. I enjoyed Red Dead Redemption and look forward to the sequel, but for reasons explained later won't likely get to play it for a while.

I enjoy the Gran Turismo series, but I'm not motivated to make time for it anymore. I've already gotten my fill of that. They've sort of taken it too far now to where I can't even use 5% of the game's content, and I'm more interested in action/adventure games with stories.

I love the Uncharted series too, but I'm currently boycotting PlayStation due to hardware faults with the previous generation so I haven't had a chance to play the PS4 release(s). Maybe when the price of a PS4 drops enough I'll pick them up. I loved The Last of Us too. I've been a fan of the Metal Gear Solid series, but I've found the sandbox gameplay in MGSV isn't very interesting. I reached Quiet, who was inspiring, but not high enough resolution ;), and haven't really fired up my aging 2nd PlayStation 3 since.

I used to enjoy the SOCOM series back in the day too.

I really enjoyed Skyrim, but that's the first and so far only Elder Scrolls game I've really gotten into. I'm really excited about The Witcher 3, which looked similar, but my computer can't run it, my operating system isn't supported, and I lack any supported consoles for aforementioned reasons.

I love the Half-Life series, and my heart is broken that plans for a 3rd episode/game appear to be abandoned. I also love the Portal series. I just recently played through the gratis Portal Stories: Mel mod, which was a lot of fun and felt very professional.

I never really got into the original Deus Ex games, nor System Shock games, but I was in college before I ever heard of them and just didn't have the time. I did enjoy Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

I enjoyed Borderlands, but the only thing that motivated me to endure the grinding was mysterious woman that would appear to the player in visions, and when I learned that this character is never really explained/met/etc., I lost interest. I despised the repetative gameplay, but I only played solo and the series really shines playing cooperatively with friends.

I still enjoy the odd indie title. I loved the Penumbra series, and had high hopes for Amnesia: The Dark Descent, but had technical difficulties that halted gameplay. I just played through the now officially released Overgrowth game too, and its prequel/tech. demo Lugaru. I really enjoyed World of Goo and Human Resource Machine. Faster Than Light was a pretty good time waster too, but I'm not good enough at it to play it often. I got 19 hours out of it though according to Steam, which is respectable.

This is by no means complete, but probably hits most of the important marks.

Mostly I just play Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (before that, Counter-Strike: Source). For that reason, I'm somewhat out of touch with newer releases. I'm just an old man stuck in his ways now I guess.

Chris Katko

Bam's favorite game is currently Player Unknown's Battlegrounds.

;)

bamccaig

Oh yes, that is a fun game too. Unfortunately it's Windows only. Worst of all, it feels like it's riddled with hackers, and they don't (or didn't last time I played) give you the tools to check it for yourself. Every time you die out of the blue, which is almost every time, you suspect a hacker did it. That's no fun to play so I have taken a break from it, but it's otherwise a really neat game.

Chris Katko

It may actually gotten worse. That, or since I rank ~4,000 on the US servers, I'm nearer all the hackers. But we've lost countless games to hackers.

Now, before you get !@$!'d by a hacker, the game is still fun with friends. But knowing "I should have won" when there were 2 people left (you and another guy) and the other guy ends up... on top of a three story house with no stairway up shooting down at you. You feel pretty pissed.

Also, I've mentioned with my friends many times, PUBG should drop everything and focus on hackers #1 (they can !@$!'ing afford a full professional security team). Why? Because here's what happens:

- You play a game normally. You win or lose. You accept it.

- You play a game with hackers. You win or lose, or get !@$!'d by a hacker. The PROBLEM is that it's often hard to tell whether you got owned by a really-good (TM) player, or, simply a hacker. (Especially in survival games like PUBG where you can't see the actions of other players and there's no replay.)

- So the more times you DO die from a hacker, the more times you start to QUESTION whether your "questionable deaths" from "possible" hackers (OR quality players). You start questioning EVERYTHING. It's a seed planted in your head that you can't remove. "Was I just cheated out of a win/a kill/survival?" It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy (of sorts) where you're brain starts associating "dubious loss" with "definitely cheating" when before you were more objective about it.

So now, even with my friends, I've watched it happen and we all agree that more and more dubious events that we used to brush off as good players we now assume are cheaters and increase the "number of times burned by cheaters" in our head mentally. All subconsciously. The game experienced is tainted.

It's like when you hear of some black guy shot by cops and the cops get off. The cops might be totally innocent and legally justified. But in your head you're still thinking, either "maybe they're all corrupt" or even worse, "they are all corrupt." (And at that point you're jaded to the point of rejecting negative evidence to the contrary.)

I'm certainly affected at this point. We're seeing hackers every time we play. They don't always win (because they suck, otherwise they wouldn't need hacks), but it's enough to taint our perception of the game and if it gets much worse, we'll have to stop playing a game we absolutely love playing.

I want to give PUBG devs the benefit of the doubt. I know it started with a modder, and now a (large) indie team of hard working people. But I'm running out of reasons to cut them slack for still not dealing with something 100% more important than any other problem in the game. You cannot have a competitive game with cheaters.

Nobody would watch football/basketball/etc if players started running out of bounds and into the stands and then "scoring" by tossing it in. (As hilarious as that would be to see once.)

[skip to anywhere around 3m30s, no idea why Allegro doesn't support that.]

video

Eric Johnson
bamccaig said:

I really enjoyed Skyrim, but that's the first and so far only Elder Scrolls game I've really gotten into.

You should check out Oblivion if you're itching for more Elder Scrolls. It's a bit older (from 2006 I think) and has some clunky mechanics, but I like its RPG mechanics more than I did with Skyrim's.

[skip to anywhere around 3m30s, no idea why Allegro doesn't support that.]

Holy shit! I had no idea football was so exciting! :o

So what are you all doing for Halloween? I'll probably play some Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 on Steam (just got it; it's fun) and maybe watch one of the Harry Potter movies with my dad.

bamccaig

Counter-Strike. >:( I could switch to a zombie server for the occasion, but I probably won't.

Eric Johnson

So do any of you own a Nintendo Switch? I've been thinking about getting one to play the new Mario game.

MiquelFire

I got the Switch at a Midnight launch.

The main part of the new Mario game is SHORT! But there's content to see AFTER you beat the main part of the game. There's a level stuck behind 500 power moons (without buying them, there's over 800 of them things to find) And there was another one, but I forgot how many you need for that one (got it fairly soon after I beat the main game)

Chris Katko

My brother loves his switch but I have no real experience with it other than holding it a couple times and pushing some buttons.

bamccaig

My brother loves his switch but I have no real experience with it other than holding it a couple times and pushing some buttons.

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Chris Katko

I play PUBG (and other games) on a 55" 4K screen, sitting on my desk, ~2 feet away.

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Super messy shot:

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One of those windows in the middle is... a full 1080p screen.

Somehow, a switch seems unimpressive by comparison. ;D

I tend to buy consoles now when they get super cheap. I still haven't played through all the "best" Wii games, let alone Wii U, and then switch.

Eric Johnson

The main part of the new Mario game is SHORT!

So I've heard. HowLongToBeat.com has the game listed as taking an average of 11.5 hours to complete the main game, but 38.5 to do everything. But that's alright; Sunshine can be completed in 12-15 hours (main game), and it's a similar length of time for Super Mario 64.

Somehow, a switch seems unimpressive by comparison.

Yeah, consoles in general can't compete with a nice PC, but that's nothing new. I mostly like consoles for the exclusive titles.

Edgar Reynaldo

Hey! A new page in the oldest thread around!

I pity the fool who reads this thread from the beginning.
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bamccaig

I mostly like consoles for the exclusive titles.

That's actually a reason to despise consoles. It's a gimmick to force you to buy extra hardware. If you have a decent PC or a high-end gaming console it should be possible to run all of the games (software ports aside). In fact, often PC games are able to exceed limitations of consoles and present an even better quality experience, plus the ability for modding and the sort. PC is really the ultimate gaming platform.

An "exclusive" title basically just means that the console vendor needs to sell consoles and so they make deals with game developers/publishers to only release the game on one platform. It's vendor lock-in all over again.

What you mean is that you like some of the exclusive titles, and consoles are the only ways to play them, but you shouldn't like the arrangement, only the art/entertainment.

The worst part about consoles is that these days they aren't even reliable. You're lucky if the hardware lasts you 5 years before it literally fails, and the cost to repair them isn't economical either considering the repair job is half the price of a new console and may only last a year.

We as the consumers of games should refuse to agree to these terms. It's a shitty arrangement. Windows-only is even a shitty arrangement, but console-only is even worse. The more of us bow out of the console market the more the industry will have to adapt.

Eric Johnson

I agree with you bamccaig, but unless Nintendo changes anytime soon (which won't happen), I won't be able to play Metroid, Zelda, Pikmin, or Mario outside of Nintendo's own consoles. Now, there is the potential to emulate games on PC... but decent emulation is seldom made realized until the end of a system's life.

Chris Katko

I mostly like consoles for the exclusive titles.

Me too. That's why I'm waiting for them to get cheap. :)

Eric Johnson

Me too. That's why I'm waiting for them to get cheap. :)

You'll be waiting for a while then. :o

I think the Wii U is Nintendo's best console. With it you can play Wii, Wii U, and (through some special trickery) GameCube games. Not to mention you can play NES, SNES, and DS (probably GB, GBC, and GBA too) games through the eShop's line of emulated titles. If you're interested in Wii or Wii U games, now's a good time to buy a Wii U.

Chris Katko

I bought a Wii like a year or two ago for $10. :P I still haven't played Mario Galaxy yet.

Eric Johnson

I bought a Wii like a year or two ago for $10. :P I still haven't played Mario Galaxy yet.

Wow, that's such a low price! :o Galaxy is a lot of fun. Go play it now. >:(

Chris Katko

I might have to, given how many damn hackers I see every night in PUBG. >:( >:( >:(

Eric Johnson

You know what they say... can't beat 'em, join 'em. ;)

Bruce Perry

Join the hackers? You're quackers.

 o<
<_)

Neil Roy

The last console I owned was a PS1, and it was used, didn't play it much. Before that it was an Atari 2600. :)

Can't use the PS1 because of the crappy CD door broke and now won't shut.

Eric Johnson
Neil Roy said:

The last console I owned was a PS1, and it was used, didn't play it much. Before that it was an Atari 2600. :)

Do you still have your Atari 2600?

Neil Roy

Do you still have your Atari 2600?

I have it around somewhere. I think I have two of them actually, the older, larger model and the smaller slim one. Whether they work is another story. Got lots of carts for them (including the now famous ET one).

Eric Johnson
Neil Roy said:

Got lots of carts for them (including the now famous ET one).

Your next project should be "Deluxe ET". :P

Chris Katko

I got my custom built water cooling setup made today.

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8-)

It doesn't even need a fan. Well, the CPU doesn't, but I think my VRM module / northbridge overheats with no extra "dirty air" from what would normally be a CPU fan waste air. So I may need some sort of quiet, low flow to keep it from overheating.

That said, it's completely silent. The water pump creates almost no noise, just vibration, so as long as it's not touching anything (without vibration dampening--in this case just a shirt), it's quieter than even my PSU fan.

I put off using that car radiator for a later setup. So I'm currently using 2 x 380mm radiators. I've considered upping it to four for the heck of it. I think the flow rate may be too low though and the natural convection may be a limiting factor (gotta do more testing). A gentle, quiet fan breeze on those radiators would do wonders.

I've also considered putting the radiators outside during the winter. Imagine getting 0 degree F ambient temperature for your water cooling. :o I wonder if I'd run into condensation issues though.

One last issue is the interface between the cpu water block and the cpu is a little iffy. It's got pressure on it, but it's possible there's too little or too much thermal compound which allows the thermals to spike quickly but never go too far after that initial spike. So I'm wondering if there's an initial soak issue / high resistance layer (the physical interface between CPU and cooler) and once the delta_t rises high enough then the thermal conductivity evens out. (higher delta_t = higher heat flux)

[edit] OH, and lesson learned, I never put an official reservoir in it. Well, now I know why they have them, and why your car radiator cap is ALWAYS the highest point on the cooling system. Because air bubbles get trapped in EVERYTHING and will eventually end up at the highest point, so if you want to drain them you have to find some sort of plug you can open and have that plug at the highest point. Otherwise, you have to go to frustrating lengths to rotate the entire cooling system so that he air bubbles end up somewhere you can easily remove them. And then you unscrew it, and too much flows out and spews everywhere. Apparently 50/50 mix is very sticky. Ethyl-gylcol mix I believe it's called. It also smells super sweet. Like some sort of magical almost-glowing mountain dew. (Slurm, from Futurama?) No wonder kids and dogs die drinking the stuff.

Bruce Perry

My fridge has a water dispenser - it's all the water cooling I need :)

Chris Katko

Oh yeah, I basically did it for the fun. Not because I think it'll unlock some sort of magical CPU power.

Neil Roy

Your next project should be "Deluxe ET". :P

LMAO, don't tempt me! ;D

Eric Johnson

I'd be curious to see a remake/clone/re-imagining of E.T. From the few gameplay videos I've seen of it on YouTube, I honestly don't know what the real objective is. I guess you're looking for something in the game, but I don't really know. The minute-to-minute gameplay looks pretty bleak. I can't be too hard on it though, as the guy tasked with creating it had only 5.5 weeks to do so. :o

Neil Roy

I was researching what the most popular screen resolutions are now a days for desktop systems, which is what I am designing my game for (though I may consider mobile, but I have never done that). Anyhow, the results surprised me. I expected 1920x1080 to be the #1, but it was not, 1366x768 is the #1 resolution at around 35% of the market! 1920x1080 is actually #2 at around 17%. I can only guess that this is due to there being many more laptops out there that often run at 1366x768. So my next game will have 1366x768 as the default low end resolution and scalable up to 1920x1080 I think. Other resolutions, both lower and higher have a much smaller share of the market.

In 2011, 1024x768 was the most popular resolution, at 17% (what 1920x1080 is at now, so we know where all those people went).

I'd be curious to see a remake/clone/re-imagining of E.T. From the few gameplay videos I've seen of it on YouTube, I honestly don't know what the real objective is. I guess you're looking for something in the game, but I don't really know. The minute-to-minute gameplay looks pretty bleak. I can't be too hard on it though, as the guy tasked with creating it had only 5.5 weeks to do so. :o

If I recall, I think you had to find different parts to phone home. It's been a LONG time since I played it. I didn't find it TOO horrible at the time. Not exactly memorable, but not as bad as I hear people saying these days. IF you compare it to modern games, sure, yuck, but consider what other games were like in the same time period.

Not too bad for 5.5 weeks though to be honest.

Bruce Perry

Neil, I just saw a face in the very top right corner of your avatar.

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Neil Roy

Neil, I just saw a face in the very top right corner of your avatar.

So there is! Creepy! :o

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It has a bit of a Hitler vibe going on I think.

Chris Katko

White Supremacy status confirmed. You might as well be standing with Hitler as he makes his speeches!

#call_of_duty_did_nothing_wrong

Eric Johnson

I never noticed until now, but there's another face in the picture, too! :o

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Chris Katko

OH GOD. IS THAT STALIN?!

bamccaig

I never noticed until now, but there's also a picnic table in the picture, too! >:(

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Chris Katko

IS THAT... CHAIRMAN MAO?

Eric Johnson

Whoa, bambams is there as well! :o

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Chris Katko

[doh. double post.]

Neil Roy

LMFAO, too funny. ;D (Note to self: they know too much, eliminate them!)

Edgar Reynaldo

If you look closely, only one of the red circles is not anti-aliased. The circle over Neil's face is the best. Which paint program produced each of those circles?

bamccaig's circle is not AA

Eric Johnson

I used GIMP to apply my circles. 8-)

Neil Roy

I've been GIMP'd! I don't know whether to be proud or ashamed.

Edgar Reynaldo

Okay, you made me laugh. ;D

bamccaig

I also used GIMP, but I barely know how to make it exit. >:(

Eric Johnson
bamccaig said:

I also used GIMP, but I barely know how to make it exit. >:(

Try the power button.

bamccaig

That worked, and it also made my computer quiet! But it also made it unresponsive. I'll submit a bug report once I get to another computer.

Chris Katko

I tried looking at that last photo but then some douchebag instant headshot me from behind a wall.

Damn hackers.

Bruce Perry

bamccaig's circle is not AA

From where I'm sitting, it looks as if bambams's circle is AA, as is Neil's. The original top-right face is not AA but has suffered JPEG degradation, and the picnic table circle is not AA and not degraded. So, ignoring JPEG, there are two of each type of circle and I'm afraid I can't even explain what you saw by assuming your double negative was accidental...?

bamccaig

I drew the picnic table circle. >:( I FOUND IT, NOT YOU!

Edgar Reynaldo

Bruce - when I said bambam's circle I meant the one he drew, not the one he's circled in - so the picnic table is what I was referring to. ;)

Bruce Perry

I see. My point that there are two circles of each type still stands though - I guess you thought the JPEG degradation on the top right circle was anti-aliasing ;)

Neil Roy

My circle is not AA, I used a rather old version of Photoshop. I really should use GIMP more often.

Chris Katko

Reminds me of this:

video

Neil Roy

I read up on how JPEG compression works and I was quite impressed.

Chris Katko

It's actually pretty cool. Wavelets can be used for all kinds of stuff. It really opened my eyes to how we represent stuff using the most "obvious", standard, representation. But there's tons of ways to represent stuff.

Instead of a height map of air pressure on a grid, you could, say, represent the pressure at position X with an equation. Maybe it wouldn't help, maybe it would, I don't know. It's a bit of a contrived example. But it's cool stuff.

One experiment I did with air pressure simulation on a tile map was to have "generators" (a pressure leak, an air pump, etc) that spawned walkers, and walkers walked the grid except where walls blocked them. Each generator spawned new walkers ever X frames and they "grew" or "surged" out from the generators and updated tiles as they went along. If one generator met another generator's output, they could either average the results of both, or weigh them based on the age. The further out you were from a generator, the older the results would be which simulated pressure waves a bit.

[edit]

Not sure if this helps visualize, but here's a test app running with each color representing a different "generation" of walkers. With a generator on the bottom right, and a generator on the top left.

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Eric Johnson

So my old GPU has been collecting dust in a drawer since I upgraded back in May. I listed the old GPU on a "buy, sell, trade" group on Facebook yesterday, and I'm going to meet a guy in a couple of hours to sell it. I hope he doesn't kill me. :o

Gideon Weems

I try to buy used with pretty much every non-perishable, but computer parts are the main exception. I suppose it's because they wear down and break in ways that cannot be easily detected, so why take that chance? I hope you are not killed, either. Clearly, this man is a lunatic.

That said, I would be more likely to buy a used graphics card than I would a used HDD (ignoring educational purposes).

Eric Johnson

I have bad news and good news...

The bad news is that I'm still alive. :( The good news is that I was asking $65 and he gave me $70 instead. :D The guy showed up on time, was polite, and everything just went really smoothly.

Neil Roy

Sounds like it was worth more than you asked and might have helped him make a profit? ;)

Eric Johnson
Neil Roy said:

Sounds like it was worth more than you asked and might have helped him make a profit? ;)

Well, I was asking $65 or best offer. He gave me $70 because he said all he had was a $20 and a $50. I offered to break it for him, but he said it was cool. I don't really care what it's worth; I just wanted it gone (been collecting dust for six months already). I don't think he's planning on selling it though. He told me he's been chugging along with a super old card playing some flight simulator and that the new card will be a big boost in performance. Whatever he does with it, I hope it serves him well.

Neil Roy

Sounds a little like me. I don't tend to upgrade to the latest and greatest. The last two cards I had was a GeForce GTX 240, then I upgraded to a GTX650 when one came on sale for $100, and that is what I currently have. My old cards still collecting dust.

My CPU is a triple core AMD, also out of date compare to modern systems, but it all serves my needs well enough. I had two systems given to me which have Intel CPUs in them which, from what I researched, are a tad better than my AMD, due to their hyperthreading technology, which I didn't really understand until recently. Just dual core Intels, but with the hyperthreading, that makes them better than my triple core AMD, which is kewl. I may switch to the "new" system. My enthusiasm for computers has been on the decline in recent years to be honest. Never thought I would see the day, but I have been messing around with computers since around 1980 believe it or not.

Chris Katko

I'm honestly amazed at the work you guys do with the hardware you have. :o

My $70 used Chromebook flashed with Linux sounds faster than many of your computers. I do all my Allegro work on it these days because I play with my laptop before I fall asleep.

Meanwhile, my desktop with an AMD FX-8370 at 4 GHZ with 8 cores (*) is too slow for my tastes. I mean, 99% of the time it's fast. But modern games, I'm CPU limited because AMD's single-threaded performance is like 2x slower than Intel. 4K quadratically increases the CPU and GPU requirements and I'm blown away by the slowness in going from 2560x1440 (~80 FPS) to 4K (~30 FPS).

(*) Technically, AMD screwed us by giving us 4 "modules" with 2 cores each and the modules have bottlenecks because the cores actually share many functional units in each module. So it's kind of like hyper-threading but not.

Eric Johnson
Neil Roy said:

My CPU is a triple core AMD, also out of date compare to modern systems, but it all serves my needs well enough.

My CPU is an AMD FX 4300. It is well below the recommended requirements for most modern games, but it has never been an issue for me. I guess modern CPUs are just so powerful as it is. GPUs, on the other hand, are certainly a bottleneck in most games, but not CPUs (in my experience; granted I don't play simulators or anything that are CPU intense).

For example, I recently picked up Far Cry Primal. On the AMD side of things, it recommends an FX 8350, but I have all the settings maxed out and running buttery smooth despite not meeting the CPU requirement.

Look at how pretty the game is. :o

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But modern games, I'm CPU limited because AMD's single-threaded performance is like 2x slower than Intel.

Is it actually a noticeable bottleneck for you?

For those who celebrate it... Happy Gluttony Day, everyone! ;)

Chris Katko

Is it actually a noticeable bottleneck for you?

Yes. My last CPU (~AMD Athlon X2 635) could barely run Dolphin without cracking the audio and stutters unless I overclocked it. Also, when I upgraded to my AMD FX-8370 (exact same mobo/ram/gpu, just swapped CPU in), I more than doubled my FPS on Styx: Master of Shadows and I could actually finally do video recording while playing without losing FPS.

On my current CPU, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, I get crap for FPS. The game is optimized for shit, but it's still annoying as hell. I've been planning saving up for a Ryzen setup sometime late next year.

Also, I couldn't even run ARK years ago when it came out on the previous AMD CPU. Even when I put the resolution down to like 320x240. It was like 3 FPS.

There are games like GTA 5 that have extremely well-tuned engines that make every CPU and GPU cycle count. But those games are fairly rare and restricted to AAA-titles.

Check out this guy's amazing website for how Deus Ex: Human Revolution, GTA 5, Doom, etc render:

http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/03/10/deus-ex-human-revolution-graphics-study/

And that's "just" the rendering side. Most AAA-games also heavily optimize other paths like AI.

Neil Roy

My current CPU is: AMD Athlon II X3 440 @3GHz

I can unlock the 4th core inside of it with my motherboard, but I find it can be unstable on rare occasions, so I stick to just the three cores.

I have 12Gigs of RAM which helped smooth some things out.

I don't buy newer games anymore, so that is probably why I can live with this. The plus is I can max out my older games. ;)

I still play certain games like Starcraft II and World of Warcraft on "HIGH" settings and it is fine. Good enough for me, but I don't tend to be picky that way.

I have thought about upgrading it, but then I thought... why? It's a good system to develop games on. If my system can run it, anyone's can! :)

For those who celebrate it... Happy Gluttony Day, everyone! ;)

I was just on a Youtube channel I frequent, well, used to, who while wishing people well for that day, also slipped in a guilt message stating we are somehow responsible for some sort of genocide. I told him to shove his channel where the sun don't shine and unsub'd, I don't need that bullshit. I guess it's a good thing I don't celebrate any of our traditions.

Eric Johnson
Neil Roy said:

I guess it's a good thing I don't celebrate any of our traditions.

I think "tradition" is a bit of a slippery slope. What constitutes a tradition? I'd say a tradition is anything passed on between generations. So then going to work, brushing your teeth, or participating in events all constitute tradition. That being said, I hope you have an enjoyable day regardless of whether or not you participate in Thanksgiving.

bamccaig

Canadian Thanksgiving is in October. :P

Chris Katko

The difference is I play 3D indie games. Whereas while AAA-title games look better, they have dedicated graphics programmers that build and optimize their games (see this great link) to not waste any CPU/GPU cycle:

AMAZING SITE / articles:

http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/03/10/deus-ex-human-revolution-graphics-study/

Meanwhile, indie games rarely have graphics programmers and just throw their crap at a wall and hope the Unreal/Unity/etc engine can handle it.

PUBG is Unreal Engine.

ARK ran like piss on my AMD computer. (Before I upgraded though.)

Of course the biggest problem is !@#$!@ developers testing on their workstations and not common user target station specs. Basically, they're web developers.

Eric Johnson

My last CPU (~AMD Athlon X2 635) could barely run Dolphin without cracking the audio and stutters unless I overclocked it.

Yeah. Dolphin works best with Intel anyway, as Intel's CPUs tend to be faster per core than AMD's.

Neil Roy said:

I don't buy newer games anymore, so that is probably why I can live with this.

Is there a reason why you don't buy newer games anymore?

bamccaig said:

Canadian Thanksgiving is in October. :P

I'm not Canadian, eh. >:(

Chris Katko

Oh yeah that's what I was getting at. Single thread/single core performance is much higher on Intel. But I only buy AMD CPU's. (nVidia GPUs though.)

Eric Johnson

But I only buy AMD CPU's. (nVidia GPUs though.)

If finances weren't a factor, would you still stick with AMD for your CPU needs?

bamccaig

I'm not Canadian, eh. >:(

No, but Neil is. >:(

Eric Johnson
Quote:

No, but Neil is. >:(

Sorry, eh. Boot. Uh... Maple syrup. ;D

Chris Katko

If finances weren't a factor, would you still stick with AMD for your CPU needs?

I like to support the underdog / competition. But if AMD's really sucked, I'd buy an Intel. I've got various laptops with built-in Intel CPUs that work fine. I just don't like spending $$$ and getting crap in return. I have to be extremely judicial with my purchases.

And as you can see here, AMD tops the charts in value / price:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html

I'm eager to try Ryzen once they hit 1.5 (actual thing) or 2.0 generation. They have way more PCI Express lines to the CPU while Intel treats you like Microsoft where you only get the better features if you buy the better CPU line. Whereas Ryzen I could buy the crappiest CPU for ~$100, keep everything, and later upgrade to the best CPU once they get cheaper.

That's the exact strategy I went for with my AMD FX-8370. I went from that 4 core Athlon X4 ~635 to a CPU with 5x the throughput, and both cost around the same price when I bought them. I just bought the better CPU when the costs went down and my old CPU was showing its age.

p.s. I really hate Intel's insane model numbering scheme where there's no easy way to tell them apart. But I'd suck it up if Intel became magically cheap. It used to be a Pentium 4 was faster than Pentium 3, etc. But now it's "newer" i3s are better than older i5's which are better than many i7's, and now there's i9's that aren't compatible with any of the sockets for i3/5/7 and WHO KNOWS which class leaves you room for the best upgrade path in the future like I did with my AMD setup. AND, it's not just i3, there's i3's, there's E3's. There's i7-7700HQ, there's i7-7600K, there's i7-5775C, there's i7-7770. There's Xeon E3 v5, v6, and v4 of the SAME CHIP. How the !@$!@$@ HELL am I supposed to know what is what, and what those letters mean? Is a 7600K better or worse than a 7600HQ? I don't know, and I bet everyone else doesn't either.

MiquelFire

The only pattern I know of with Intel (to lessen the crap model number scheme at least) is that it's basically i[3|5|7|9]-G### where the G is the generation. So you can at least compare within the generations.

I think the K means it's unlocked clock speed, you can overclock it if you wanted.

Neil Roy

Is there a reason why you don't buy newer games anymore?

Not entirely sure, just nothing has interested me enough to pay what some titles want. Some of the end of the world, survive games maybe, haven't purchased anything new. I like games with huge worlds I can explore without having to unlock new zones. But... I've been using computers since around 1980 so perhaps my enthusiasm is waning.

I started to replay Unreal again recently. I loved Unreal 2. Starcraft 2 was just made free to play (the full main game) recently, so I enjoyed that a little.

The original Deux-Ex was on sale on GOG so I grabbed it and will someday actually install it. ;D. I have a LOT on GOG, I had to stop buying them as I wasn't playing them. <shrug>

If they ever remade Redneck Rampage, I would buy it. :)

Sorry, eh. Boot. Uh... Maple syrup. ;D

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Eric Johnson

I like to support the underdog / competition.

...

And as you can see here, AMD tops the charts in value / price

...

p.s. I really hate Intel's insane model numbering scheme where there's no easy way to tell them apart.

I feel similarly. I like AMD because they're an "underdog", as you suggested, but also because they are cheaper. If money wasn't a concern, I'd probably go with whatever was the top contender on the market (likely an Intel processor right now). And I agree with the model number confusion... I have no idea how to tell which CPU is better than another when it comes to Intel. I find similar confusion when it comes to Nvidia cards. Generally speaking, the higher the number the better, but some 900 cards are supposedly more powerful than early 1000 series cards. But it's not too bad, I guess.

Neil Roy said:

I like games with huge worlds I can explore without having to unlock new zones.

You might like Minecraft and The Elder Scrolls titles then.

Neil Roy

I find similar confusion when it comes to Nvidia cards. Generally speaking, the higher the number the better

With NVidia, it's fairly simple. You have the various version numbers for the cards, 600s, 700s, 800s etc... those are totally different cards. Then you have other numbers which are based on how much you want to spend...

for example, with the 600 series... you have the 610, this would be the cheapest you could buy, probably good for browsing the web, watching videos, playing games that don't require much power, or on minimal settings. Then there's midrange for people like me, with limited funds, like the 640 & 650 which are powerful enough for most games on a medium to high graphics setting, depending on the age of the game of course. And there's the high end versions, like 670+ which are for those who want to max out their graphics settings for that card.

I wouldn't go for any NVidia card lower than a x50 if you want to play any 3D games with decent quality. I grabbed a 650 for $100 which was nice. I think t he cheapest, lowest quality NVidia I have seen on sale is a 210 for like, $50. Good low cost for someone who doesn't do much more than browsing the web and such.

Quote:

You might like Minecraft and The Elder Scrolls titles then.

Yeah, I do have Minecraft, played it a bit. Been a while since I last played it, but fascinating game. I recently grabbed Skyrim finally, but haven't played it much yet.

MiquelFire

The issue people have with model numbers is the fact that a 790 is noticeably better than say an 810. Tom's hardware has a good guide (I think recently they made it stand alone so it's easier to find) in which you find the card you have, and see if the card you want is at least 2/3 tiers higher. If it is, good buy, if not, may not be worth the money (unless the new card has a feature you need now, but the old doesn't)

Eric Johnson
Neil Roy said:

Yeah, I do have Minecraft, played it a bit. Been a while since I last played it, but fascinating game. I recently grabbed Skyrim finally, but haven't played it much yet.

Let me know if you'd ever like to play together on a server. I have a few friends who regularly play. As for Skyrim, that's a fun game. Definitely a time sink. I'm still playing Oblivion, which I got back in May, and already have 130 hours in that and am not finished yet.

The issue people have with model numbers is the fact that a 790 is noticeably better than say an 810.

That's what I was aiming for in my other post. It's not too bad, but is still a bit ambiguous at times. I believe this is the guide you were talking about, right?

MiquelFire

Yep, that's the page. They have one for CPUs as well. Though it seems that there are too many factors for it to be easy to compare anyway.

Neil Roy

The issue people have with model numbers is the fact that a 790 is noticeably better than say an 810.

That is what I would expect. 790 is a top of the line, high end, FAST card. 810 is an entry level card, has all the newer features of the 800 series, but not the speed. It's for people who need their Facebook apps to run fast! ;D an x90 card will almost always outperform an x10 card, unless the version numbers are REALLY far apart. Older x90 cards like the 790 may not have all the features of the 800 cards, but it will have tons of speed. I would be very surprised to see any x90 card be outperformed by an x10 unless the versions were really far apart, like a 290 verses an 810, but even then... I could see a 290 outperforming an 810, depends on the game and the features I guess.

Tom's Hardware is excellent. It's the reason my system does so well so many years later! Like, 7 years now? I researched what to buy at Tom's, threw together the best components in my price range, the best bang for the buck basically and I have not been disappointed. I have only had ONE game in all these years that was noticeably slower, and that was Quern - Undying Thoughts (a newer Myst like game, looks amazing), but I blame the game more than my system as I have played games like GTA4, Skyrim and Portal 1 & 2 without any problems with decent settings.

For a long time I ran my system with a GTX240! I jumped from it to my GTX650, quite the leap. ;)

Edgar Reynaldo

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It's a pity, because I don't even hardly use the Nvidia GPU much.

Eric Johnson

So my dog (Koda) turned 12 today. :o

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Chris Katko

So continuing the off-topic tangents:

Over thanksgiving, my little brother dropped a major spoiler for Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice and I want to pop him right in the face. I was probably the one who told him about it and I've been waiting for months to play it.

Poof. Gone. Ruined.

Eric Johnson

Over thanksgiving, my little brother dropped a major spoiler for Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice and I want to pop him right in the face. I was probably the one who told him about it and I've been waiting for months to play it.

Wow, that sucks. :-/ Did he do it deliberately to upset you?

Chris Katko

No, he's just an idiot who doesn't think about other people. And last year he was demanding nobody spoil Star Wars since he hadn't seen it yet.

I was really looking forward to that game and I'm the one who told him about it. >:(

Eric Johnson

And last year he was demanding nobody spoil Star Wars since he hadn't seen it yet.

Someone on the Internet spoiled Star Wars for me. >:( But I wasn't able to pop them in the face on the account of them being on the Internet.

Bruce Perry

I finally gave in and changed my settings from unlimited to 100 posts per page.

Also, not long now till the industrial revolution...

DanielH

I finally gave in and changed my settings from unlimited to 100 posts per page.

Same here, just because of this thread.

Eric Johnson

Also, not long now till the industrial revolution...

I was just thinking that was well due to the post/reply count. ;D

Edgar Reynaldo

This thread is probably what's killing the a.cc server lately. :/ ;)

Chris Katko

I only have the normal post view limit so maybe that's why when I post on the thread and view it, it doesn't slow down for me.

jmasterx

This thread basically took a.cc offline for over 1 day. >:(

Chris Katko

A.CC is one of my most checked websites still. :'(

MiquelFire

Not having a site I keep open when I'm on a computer not work was... odd.

Bruce Perry

I believe this is reply 1788, or post 1789 :)

Arvidsson

I am still here.

Bruce Perry

Yay, I just realised I got the Industrial and French Revolutions mixed up :-X

Gideon Weems

<2005>The Nintendo Revolution is the only one that matters.</2005>

Eric Johnson

It snowed in Louisiana today.

Chris Katko

Wow, so it really does snow in hell!

;)

MiquelFire

You mean Hell, MI?

Eric Johnson

Wow, so it really does snow in hell!

Yeah! Just look at all the snow on my car!

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MiquelFire

Wow, you got more snow than we did >.>

I almost forgot how snow looks actually.

Eric Johnson

Wow, you got more snow than we did >.>

Whereabouts are you located?

MiquelFire

Detroit Michigan

Edgar Reynaldo

Speaking of Detroit, MI - https://kungfudetroit.com/

Chris Katko

I want to start a man's self-defense course. It's just how to prevent women from kicking you in the balls or macing you. ;)

Eric Johnson

Just do what Bobby did: That's my purse! I don't know you!

bamccaig

Yeah! Just look at all the snow on my car!

You have an interesting car.. :-/

Quote:

I almost forgot what snow looks like.

The weather is a bit wacky again this year. We've had a couple of blizzards accumulating 6 inches (~15 cm) overnight, followed by above zero rain storms... Fortunately, we still have snow. I'm hoping it stays for the season this time.

I want to start a man's self-defense course. It's just how to prevent women from kicking you in the balls or macing you. ;)

Instead it should be teaching men to protect themselves from child support and alimony and general inequalities. :-/

bamccaig

Yeah! Just look at all the snow on my car!

You have an interesting car.. :-/

Quote:

I almost forgot what snow looks like.

The weather is a bit wacky again this year. We've had a couple of blizzards accumulating 6 inches (~15 cm) overnight, followed by above zero rain storms... Fortunately, we still have snow. I'm hoping it stays for the season this time.

I want to start a man's self-defense course. It's just how to prevent women from kicking you in the balls or macing you. ;)

Instead it should be teaching men to protect themselves from child support and alimony and general inequalities. :-/

Polybios

Just spending some time here while starting up a Java application...

Bruce Perry

Schnee aus Deutschland! [EDIT: err, Australia]

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Also... BRICKS! ;D

video

Rodolfo Lam

And like that... a.cc's thread about Threads locking too soon kept on going 'till the heath death of the universe. Even then, it continued existing towards infinity with ever increasing rest periods after everything else had reached energy equilibrium.

Or maybe the universe just rips appart in the end and nothing survives...

Oh my, this post was really off-topic...

Edgar Reynaldo

Nothing is off topic here, Rodolfo.

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MiquelFire

We had so little snow for the past few years, I think I forgot how to drive in it. Since I got my car early 2015, the first time I had to drive in the snow was March 3, 2017, after I left Meijers to pick up the Switch. And the next snowfall, yesterday.

Neil Roy

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;D

We get lots of snow here each year.
This is what it normally looks like outside my place (from the winter of 2015)
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Derezo

I'm happy to see this thread is still alive! \o/

My new car seems OK in the snow so far, but hasn't been too bad yet.

Chris Katko

I've been playing Player Unknown's Battlegrounds. They finally added another map to the Test servers, but they're hardcore overloaded with players so everything is laggy and buggy as hell. Still, it's fun to play with friends. If you want to join me and Bam, give me a PM.

I recommend it for anyone who likes competitive games played with friends. But playing it solo is like dragging your scrotum across a gravel road.

As for single player games, I bought all three STALKER games on GOG last year. I owned the original at-release in boxed copy but it was buggy-as-hell on release and could barely run on my PC at the time. Now, years later, it's much better.

I beat the third one. It's the prettiest and most polished. And the anomalies are great because every one is almost like a unique puzzle. It's VERY MUCH like what Fallout 3/NV/4 should have been. Fallout 1/2 are great RPGs but the RPG elements basically get in the way of the fun in 3/NV/4. They pull AWAY your immersion. Instead of exploring and thinking "oh no what's that bad thing" you think "I've got 182 hitpoints, nothing can hurt me and I can simply hit the VATS button and freeze time." STALKER is scary as hell.

All three are technically "STALKER 1" (they were going to make a 2 but the company collapsed for politics/money/etc reasons.) So think of them as all expansions and they're worth it. Shadow of Chernobyl is "ep #1", Clear Sky is "ep #2", Call of Pripryiat is #3.

So it's SoC, CS, and CoP on the forums.

SoC is much cruder interface (e.g. no hotkeys for various useful items), no upgrades for weapons (unless you find an upgraded one), no repairing items so you have to replace good ones. I actually like the "no repair" mechanic though because the "best" stuff you find... will eventually wear away. So it's like a temporary (~2-6 real-life hour) boost.

Artifacts (which provide stat boosts/protection boosts) are very basic, however, and "almost" pointless compared to the later games. They're just littering the ground everywhere and you pick them up. Contrast with CoP and it's REALLY FUN because every artifact is like a puzzle to solve. How do you "get to it" without being killed by the anomaly that shoots fire, or pulls you into a gravity field and rips you apart.

But SoC (#1), is definitely the most immersive and fun. The few scripted sequences really add a lot to texture the environment. There are powerful factions that are at war with people, loners who have no faction, and bandits who are like leaches that ambush people and steal. They exist in the other games but this one has the most scripted sequences.

In #3, you can carry lots of stuff but even on the 2nd-to-last difficulty (Veteran, which I'm playing all 3 on), it was way too easy. I also can't remember too many 'notable' events. The game felt way too short even though hour-wise it's been around the same as the rest. So I can only imagine that the 3rd one has many hours of boring walking around.

I'm going to be putting a review of the series up soon.

[edit] Separate question though: Does anyone have experience with bluetooth headphones? All I want is wireless headphones I can wear while my TV/computer/phone/whatever plays a video/audio so I can walk around the house and clean. But so far, all the sets I've tried are HORRIFIC for distance. On my laptop my most recent set goes... 3 feet... before cutting out. Connecting to my phone, it goes maybe 6-10 feet. Which is absolutely pathetic for a "wireless" standard.

I mean, I get it. It's far enough to eliminate short cable runs like headphone cables. But the standard is supposed to support upto a 100 feet! So it's like they're not even trying to support significant ("room length") distances.

Derezo

Does anyone have experience with bluetooth headphones?

I have a pair of plantronics backbeat fit headphones. They reach everywhere in my small apartment when connected to any of my devices (LG G5, MacBook Pro, or my Acer desktop). At work I can move anywhere in my department when connected to the macbook..

They'll go about 20 meters, I can almost make it to the next department ;D
I just got a bluetooth dongle for my linux machine at work, but haven't tested the range on that yet.

bamccaig

I've never had Bluetooth fail under 10 feet. I thought the original Bluetooth standard was I think 30 feet or so. That's all that I expect from Bluetooth anyway. Higher versions might have increased that for all that I know. I generally would carry my phone in a pocket or something, but you should probably be able to walk around the room at least without it dropping off. You should probably actually be able to walk around most of the house, unless the house is large or the building materials (or other objects) somehow interfere.

My original "meeting" rig was cheap Chinese crap (~USD$10) that my brother got me. My current rig cost me more like USD$30 at Meijer, but I recently saw another unit at a "TJ Max" for about USD$15 that looked just as good (not very, but good enough). It can sometimes be hard to find a set for a reasonable price, at least where I live, but they exist if you can wait.

If I had a Bluetooth headset that was failing within 10 feet I'd return it unless I thought there was something else interfering. It is of course just using electromagnetic radiation so if you have other devices polluting the space around you with colliding frequencies of electromagnetic radiation it can interfere with the signal strength..

Arvidsson

I still haven't completed any of the STALKER games, but someday! Have you tried any mods to the games as well? I came across this: http://themiserymod.com/. Seems pretty cool if you like hardcore survival games and unfair masochistic gameplay :)

Audric

I also bought the 3 games in the most recent GOG sale, and enjoyed them. Slightly disappointed by how trade is so limited and the faction systems seem to lead nowhere, but it's an interesting game experience all the same. Each of the 3 games has some points where it succeeds more than the 2 others.
Misery 2 provides an interesting challenge ('Black road') where you start in a very difficult situation, and I really enjoyed playing this part. But afterwards, balance seems completely off, I gave up because I don't see how you're supposed to earn more resources per day than what you need to stay alive. Misery 1 is less advanced (no crafting), but much more balanced in this regard.

Eric Johnson

I've never played any of the STALKER games. I'd check it out, but I have too many games as it is. I recently finished The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I picked it up originally in late April for about 10 bucks. It lasted me 175 hours, so that's a pretty sweet return on investment! I feel like playing Skyrim now, but think I'll put that off until later so as to not burn myself out. The past two days I've been playing Grow Up again. I first played it back in January, and this time was just as fun as the first.

Erin Maus

STALKER is great. Never won any of them but had fun anyway. My brother enjoyed them more--he actually won them!

I did watch the movie that (may have?) inspired the games, though. That movie was beautiful.

MiquelFire

Today was a bad day weather-wise. When I got home, my car looked like a candy cane :P

Chris Katko

The first stalker is the crudest but the story... oh man... it can't be beat. I don't want to spoil anything, but there are multiple endings and they are not exactly what you're expecting. I definitely recommend reaching the end and then Googling the wiki to figure out WTF was going on.

Clear Sky is a prequel. Call of Pripryat is a sequel to the first.

bamccaig

Today was a bad day weather-wise. When I got home, my car looked like a candy cane :P

The weather suddenly dipped up here. Last two days were approximately -20 C with the wind-chill factor (allegedly; I work from home so I rarely go "outside"). I did go out both days, but I bundled up with a scarf and all the rest so I didn't really feel how cold it was.

Re: How to drive on snow or ice:

Pretty much imagine that your control inputs could not actually obey: hitting the brakes might not actually slow you down, turning might not actually turn. Slow down to accommodate. Slowing down is really the key to driving in slippery conditions. Other than that, if you start to skid avoid stopping or going forces (don't hit the brakes, and let off of the accelerator/throttle) and turn in the direction that you want to go. Just like riding a motorcycle, looking where you want to go will probably make you just automatically do it.

Today I went for a drive to get my finacee replacement windshield wipers since hers had worn out. Since I work from home usually my truck also just needed dto be driven so the battery wouldn't drain too much too start. On the way home, I was a bit exhausted from working all day and being a bit careless. I had no traffic travelling in my direction near me. I was going up a shallow hill around a shallow corner, and my backend got loose and kicked out. Fortunately it wasn't a very extreme skid. Before I even knew I was skidding I had corrected the problem already. :P

As a side note, if you want to learn how to handle "losing" control the best option (aside from paying a company a lot of money to train you) is to take the car to an empty street or parking lot and practice skidding at low speeds. You can cause a skid doing what I said not to earlier: hit the brakes or accelerator aggressively. If you're going slow the amount of damage you cause should be negligible if you actually lose control, and if there are no objects around you there's pretty much no risk (unless you manage to do something crazy like flip your car over).

I emphasize "aggressively" because you can totally still use the brakes and accelerator while skidding without losing control, but you have to be gentle and anticipate losing control so you can back off again.

Chris Katko

The worst (and only real harm) of snow and rain driving isn't the snow or rain. It's the other drivers.

Black ice doesn't magically appear when a Wizard gets angry. And how to handle it is the same way... every time.

If your car stops responding, you're using your tires too much. Use them less. Reduce your brakes, and reduce your turning. Your tires can only put so much force into the ground and the ice and other inclement-conditions are reducing that maximum force. Turning uses force to turn. Stopping (or accelerating! But most people don't have as much power to accelerate as they do to brake). Now, ABS helps because it's actually braking less. Hundreds of times a second it's checking if all wheels are rotating the same and releasing your brake pressure for a fraction-of-a-second if they're not. This "hit-release-hit-release" is better for panicking drivers. But smart drivers should know "how much brake they have" so they don't have to get into a panicking scenario. You can always "test your brakes" in bad weather while you're driving to get some sample points of how much you can brake before they start to slip. If you can barely touch the brakes before slipping (the ABS kicks in and the pedal sinks a bit and vibrates loudly), get the hell off the road, or slow down big time! The faster you are, the more kinetic energy it takes to change your speed or turn. (kinetic energy is, KE=1/2mV^2 <-- velocity is SQUARED. 2X fast is 4X the energy! Meanwhile a twice as heavy car is only twice as much energy. Slow. Down.)

So if your car starts to drift and you can't steer. LAY OFF THE BRAKES (free up the force for steering!), and center your steering to the direction you're going. The second your tires are going the direction you're "floating" they will re-engage and give you the ability to steer again. They say "turn into the spin" which is the opposite of most people's natural instinct of "it's not turning, so I'll turn harder" which only increase the demanded force from the tires. A tire "plowing" sideways through the road/snow/etc is not as efficient at stopping (putting energy into the ground) as one pointed in the direction you're going.

Also, 4WD means nothing. All cars have 4 wheel brakes! The only time it ever is useful is because the way differentials work. Every car has a differential to allow one wheel to turn faster or slower than the other. If you drive along a circle, the wheel on the inside of the circle has to travel less than the one on the outer. HOWEVER, the big drawback is the differential puts a force equal to the max of both tires. If any ONE tire is slipping, then BOTH tires do nothing. For 99% of people, situations where you can actually utilize a 4WD(*) car, people will never encounter.

Meanwhile, what's actually dangerous about driving? OTHER. PEOPLE. You can't predict how these stupid people, who are panicking, and all have "their idea" of how to "win" against climate weather. They'll hit the gas then slam the brakes. They'll slide down the CENTER OF THE LANE (including heading at you) because it's "safer" than the normal lanes. (Except they're too stupid to realize that tire-worn paths of the street are the safest and the center of the road hasn't been driven on and will likely be extremely slippery.)

So, "less is more", "steer into the spin", and my personal recommendation is "know your brakes BEFORE you start slipping." But again, the biggest danger... is other people driving their 4000+ lbs machines straight at you thinking their "ABS and AWD" will magically turn their cars into tanks with treads that grip like glue. Most of the time slippy conditions have tons of warnings before you enter a panic scenario and you shouldn't be relying on your normal braking distance / following distance to the next car if you don't know for sure that your brakes are going to work just as good. ABS doesn't make a bad driver a good one. It can't tell you the tires are going to slip until after it's too late to make decisions. Like slamming your car into the one in front of you because you hit a just-started-to-rain greasy spot at an intersection when you could have slowed down early if you were aware of the driving conditions instead of on your cellphone. (When it just starts to rain is often the worst because it helps the oils/grease/etc start to float from the pavement providing more lubrication than say, heavy-duty rain that your tire has to slosh through and has already washed much of the gunk off the streets.)

*Technically, people call "4WD" a part-time AWD where you manually turn it on and shouldn't be ever used on clean-condition streets. It doesn't have a center differential so if your front and rear tires "Want" to move different rates, it has to eat the tires away (the weakest part in the physical link between engine and ground) and puts additional wear on the gears. "AWD" is "always on" AWD and does have a center differential, but usually it's a viscous coupling. A viscous coupling allows a small amount of slippage between front and rear, but, it's a fluid between two discs. That fluid heats up as the discs rotate at different speeds. So, if you're rapidly spinning the rears or the fronts, that "differential" between the two heats the fluid and becomes effectively a solid link. The fluid coupling ... couples... and it demands that all tires rotate together allowing a "one or two" wheels slipping scenario to keep the other two tires rotating. This is basically only useful for people who are off-roading / adventuring. If you need AWD for your daily driving, you probably shouldn't be on the road.

**You can test your tire power easily with a five speed too. Slam the gas for a brief moment. Depending on what gear you're in / power you output, you'll be able to be able to feel it slipping. The higher the gear that it slips, the more dangerous your driving conditions. If you can slip your car in 5th gear (the least torgue gear), get the hell off the road. If you can slip by slamming it in first gear (the more torque gear) you're still probably fine / impacted a minor amount. But the "slam the brake" testing works even with automatics. The only issue with autos is... you slam the gas and they try to downshift. So it's harder to get a measurement. (Also a torque converter actually multiplies torque but that's way too much math/detail.)

Oh, lastly, like Bam says: Practice. Practice. Practice. It's fun, and good to learn in a relatively "safe" environment. You want this stuff to be memorized / muscle memory. You don't want to have to think "which way am I turning the wheel" in a split-second panic scenario.

[edit] Man, that was way longer than I expected it to be.

bamccaig

4x4 is useful for starting out in slippery conditions, but it's useless once you're moving on the street. But trucks and SUVs are heavy and high, and these things are bad for handling. Front-engine front-wheel drive cars are probably the most ideal vehicle in winter driving. Perhaps an AWD car like a Subaru, but as already noted the added driven wheels only help you start going, and a light front-wheel drive car usually isn't too bad to get moving in slippery conditions as it is.

I drove cars all my life. Rear and front wheel drive. The rear wheel drive ones are fun to mess around in, but scary to lose control in at higher speeds. One time when I was about 17 I was driving my dad's Crown Victoria down back country roads in the dead of winter doing about 80 km/h and in the blink of an eye my rear wheels kicked out and I was pointed at the ditch, but still traveling down the road... I ended up fishtailing from ditch to ditch a few times before I got it back under control, just in time to pass safely by an oncoming car who had surely slowed down to avoid me. That shit will pucker your asshole! And rear-wheel drive cars are painful to get moving from a dead stop in the winter. The front-wheel drive cars are great.

I never really knew what to expect of trucks, but everybody loves them so you'd think they'd be great. Then I got my Ranger. And it is great. It pretty much can't get stuck on roads no matter the conditions (unless the roads are all glare ice and nobody should be on the street). I can switch it into 4x4 and drive through 12" of snow. I can get moving instantly from a dead stop even if the streets are slippery. But it's heavy, and that 4x4 doesn't help turning or stopping. It understeers like a motherfucker in 4x4. :P I used to think that the brakes were also terrible in it, but now that the ABS module is disabled I'm starting to think that the ABS was just buggered in it (knock on wood, but I haven't had trouble yet and seem to stop better than I could with the ABS in past years). Nevertheless, the brakes still aren't very good. I know to be afraid of it in the winter because the weight of the truck (and the relatively high center of gravity) make it very unstable. Still, all I have to do is slow down and I'm fine.

My advice is to target a light vehicle for winter driving. A heavier vehicle with bells and whistles is still at a disadvantage over a lighter vehicle. And front-wheel drive is all you really need (if that's not enough, go home and stay there!).

Append: Fog lights are a very nice thing to have though. They can give you visibility during near white-out conditions that normal lights and brights cannot. Your normal lights will reflect back and blind you, but the fog lights are positioned lower on the vehicle so they don't reflect into your eyes. My truck has them, and since it's a little higher up it has an advantage there. My little car for my finacee doesn't have them, and we had to turn around the other day because blowing snow made it difficult to see the road!

Neil Roy

Playing Skyrim and barely able to move because I pick up everything in sight! ;D

Chris Katko

I played Skyrim and after 80 hours of lugging stupid loot back and forth between mines, I said "F it. I'm a developer and a game player for over 20 years. I know what I'm doing" and I modified the weight limit. I increased it a little... and then a little... and then F it, I put it up to like 15,000 kg. I picked up everything in the various Dwemer ruins, took it back, and then just crafted hundreds of armors/etc. It eventually got to be a problem on my machine because there was a noticable "lag" whenever you opened the inventory screen (to loot someone, for example) and things like armors DRASTICALLY increase the time for some reason.

Before that though, I "tried" to be a role player. I tried mods that make your horses have inventory (because WHY WOULDN'T THEY?). I tried using their insane, shitty, inventory of your companions.

But wait... I'm a steath guy. So any COMPANIONS I bring will either be SEEN by the enemies, or, they'll take a shot. So I have to micromanage through their shit interface every single companion every time I "think" there might be a battle. ... And then they die anyway and I have to reload.

The game's mechanics / controls are poorly designed such that multiple overlapping things interfere with each other. Like companions + stealth. Where any normal stealth game would have that a thousand times more balanced / more polished.

The UI and AI are so terrible that the game is so much more fun if you just play alone. All they had to do was add key bindings for "companion halt/attack", etc but nope. That's too much for the console gamers this game was designed for. >:(

That said, if you enjoy it, that's great. I was just frustrated over my 100 hours of gameplay that I had to keep manually, the using mods, to fix their own game. AND THEY EVEN CORRUPTED MY GAME so multiple quests broke (before I installed any mods!) and I had to manually look up various "story flags" and set them myself through the console to activate and fix things.

As a developer, I'm super happy they gave me the "option" of using the console to fix their game. As a gamer, I'm offended that I had to. And this was all with the "most recent" patches installed, Legendary Edition Skyrim that came out long after the initial release.

(STALKER is also full of insane glitches including save game corruption in Clear Sky. !@$%@!#$!@#$#@!$#!@#)

Neil Roy

Wow, yeah, I noticed the problem sometimes getting it to pick the right item I am trying to loot. Then there are items that "stick to me" as if I picked them up.

But, I got the game not long ago on sale, so I didn't pay much for it and haven't played it much. Actually this is the first in the series I have played much at all.

I'm not crazy about a weight limit. Certainly in real life one could not carry that much but... this is not real life, it's a game. We'll see how long I play t his, not sure yet. Still walking around on foot so far. I'm used to the World of Warcraft style gameplay.

Not crazy about how the magic spells and weapons are equipped and used. Seems to be an awfully convoluted series of steps, and I have to unequip my sword to cast a spell etc...

Chris Katko
Neil Roy said:

this is not real life, it's a game.

I can send a frost giant flying through the air but I better not pick up this extra mace!

;D

Don't get me wrong, if you enjoy it ... ENJOY IT. Enjoy the hell out of it. That's just my frustration with it.

bamccaig

I also increased my carrying capacity through the console to insane amounts. Otherwise, you literally spend hours and hours carrying valuable loot back to town to sell it. I'm an adult, and I don't have time to just grind away like that. It's not fun, and there's really no good reason to do it. The only reason for it is that there is no more reasonable way to earn money in the game to afford the purchases of stuff you need. But a much better game mechanic would be, arrive in a town, and accept jobs/quests that pay well enough to fund your life as an adventurer. I digress. The game is pretty good, but it gets way better once you free yourself of the burden of a limited carrying capacity. Life is too short.

And yes, Skyrim is riddled with serious bugs. Several quests are impossible to complete properly, or you can run into various other breakages. There are some mods to fix what can be fixed. That said, it's also a pretty awesome game. I imagine it's a lot of code, and it's probably incredibly difficult to track down these kinds of bugs simply because the code probably turned into a disaster after a few years. It probably demonstrates why certain coding practices are bad for quality/correctness reasons, but then again, the game shipped and was very successful despite the bugs so I guess it's a moot point.

But certainly anybody playing Skyrim should be using the mod manager and install any mods that look useful or fun. You can greatly improve the game with mods. It's really great that they build the games in such a way that they can be so easily modded.

I tried to avoid companions at first, but in the beginning I basically just found that I needed a companion to survive. The battles were completely unbalanced. I could kill a few of the bandits, but eventually they'd get me. You can only be so stealth when most of the baddies are all in the same room. :P

Lydia is a beast. On top of being pretty beautiful and nice to look at, she totally kicks ass. She saved me so many times, and in the beginning she was actually killing more bandits than I was. I'd get knocked down and have to run away to heal up, and she'd just be slaying them left and right. The thing is, I think she was invincible (unlike some of the companions) so the most the baddies could do is knock her down onto her knees where she'd stay for a minute or two before her health regenerated. Typically, by then I had either won the fight, or been killed and had to reload. It was also just nice to have her around. That said, it's been a few years, but I thought that you could control the companions to some extent.. You can tell them not to fight and I think they listen decently. But there are bugs in the game too. The NPCs automatically enter a battle mode if you've been "discovered", and sometimes this would happen for no good reason due to bugs. That's frustrating, but you learn to live with it. The game is so huge that you really shouldn't obsess over those details too much or you'll miss out on all of the cool things that the game has to offer. I believe that it's best to use your imagination to fill in the blanks with video games. Video games can only do so much. You need to invent some back story and things to justify some of the immersion breaking sometimes. Basically, just pretend that didn't happen, and move on. :)

Append:

Depending on the weapon you are carrying you can equip a magic spell onto the other hand IIRC. Of course, I must have picked the wrong race for magic because I found magic to be next to useless throughout the game. I ended up predominantly kicking ass with a shield and sword. :) And enjoyed it thoroughly.

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

I'm an adult, and I don't have time to just grind away like that.

Exactly! I've done it for DOZENS of games. I'm over 30 now. I want content.

Eric Johnson

I haven't touched Skyrim in a while, but I don't recall ever encountering any broken quests. My only gripe with Skyrim's loot is that most towns didn't have enough gold on hand to purchase most of my junk, so I'd end up just dropping good loot that I didn't want in caves to free up space.

DanielH

Quite few times in Skyrim, I've had to use the console to either advance the quest or reset it completely.

I hate grind in games.

And for Skyrim, there is a new update or mod I've heard about that adds hunger and weather effects. Meaning that now you have to eat regularly and worry about the cold. It might seem more realistic, but just sounds like more grind.

Haven't Skyrim played in a while, but one mod I really love is the Leveler's tower mod.

bamccaig

At least food was pretty plentiful in Skyrim. I don't think you'd often struggle to eat. I don't know what you could do about being cold though. Other than seek shelter. But I agree, I don't think it would really add enjoyment to the game. It would probably just be a pain point. But I guess if you're still playing Skyrim this many years later you must have to get imaginative to keep it fun. :) I think I have over 700 hours in Skyrim, but I haven't played it in probably over 5 years by now.

Chris Katko

I used the SkyUI mod which made the interface actually keyboard/mouse compatible instead of the insanity console based inventory screen of "here's two lists. go die in a fire.--Bethesda".

I also used some HD texture/model upgrades. I added some companion controller mod, and some general "fix the story bugs" mod, and that horse inventory mod. But in the end I just ditched the companions (because stealth is broken with them) and upped my weight limit (because I'm an adult, not a kid playing Farmville).

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Vs this, for example:

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Neil Roy

Well, one console command I discovered (and I don't know too many and have almost no mods installed) is:

player.additem 0000000f <amount of gold you want>

I have been trying to avoid this sort of thing, but if need be, I may add in gold needed once in a while to advance without grinding. Or try the inventory thing. Lately I have been trying to do it fairly by increasing my stamina which increases the amount I can carry, but only by a small amount so... I dunno. My patience for these games isn't what it used to be. I may just cheat my way through it just to see more of the world. ;)

Exactly! I've done it for DOZENS of games. I'm over 30 now. I want content.

30... 30... trying to remember 30... oh yeah, that was around when I first started to learn C and Allegro, around 1995. LMAO

Chris Katko
Neil Roy said:

30... 30... trying to remember 30... oh yeah, that was around when I first started to learn C and Allegro, around 1995. LMAO

;D But you get what I'm saying. The older you get, the more of the SAME games you play... you're looking for unique experiences.

Walking back and forth is some MMO-level kind of grinding.

I'm "Supreme Overlord of Skyrim" and I can't get a guy to carry this stuff for me?!!?! In the entire country I can't find ONE GUY to tote this stuff back without me having to walk him to and from it? (Or just cast a spell that warps it to my house?)

Eric Johnson

Word of warning for would-be achievement hunters: using console commands in Skyrim forfeits the potential to earn achievements on Steam.

bamccaig

Somehow I unlocked 84% of the achievements on Steam, and I'm pretty sure I increased my weight limit pretty early on (like, between Whiterun and the next town).

Side note: one of the best mods for Skyrim is CBBE. :P Of course, I played Skyrim before I had a live-in wimmins to get upset over that.

Eric Johnson
bamccaig said:

Somehow I unlocked 84% of the achievements on Steam, and I'm pretty sure I increased my weight limit pretty early on (like, between Whiterun and the next town).

Maybe only certain console commands forfeit achievements then (like enabling God mode).

Quote:

Side note: one of the best mods for Skyrim is CBBE.

Is that the one that makes all the women look like dolls?

bamccaig

Is that the one that makes all the women look like dolls?

I guess that depends what you mean by "dolls". It's been a while and they're hidden unless you log in on NexusMods, and I forget my account details so I cannot verify, but if it's the one I meant then it pretty much just makes the women nude when you remove their armor/clothing items from their inventory. :-*

Eric Johnson

Does it work on Argonians? :P

bamccaig

Wouldn't you like to know? :-*

I don't really remember. I think it goes part way, but I don't think they were as nice to look at...

Eric Johnson

Speaking of Argonians, there's an event that popped up on my Facebook account called "Argonian Genocide". It takes place on Christmas.

Neil Roy

Does it work on Argonians? :P

It does... or so I've heard <shifty eyes>

In any event, I don't play it much, so when I do, I may just be cheating or I'll never finish it at the rate I am playing it, which is for a few hours every 6 months. ;D

MiquelFire

So, it got warm enough to melt the snow from last week... Now I remember why it hasn't felt like winter the past few years, when it snows, it just melts a few days later.

Neil Roy

2016 was pretty mild, and I predicted it would be ahead of time due to sunspots which effect our temperatures. More sunspots = warmer weather (and earthquakes actually).

This year seems fairly mild so far, but I remember 2015, that had a lot of snow, it seemed like it would never end and we skipped summer altogether, it never got warm enough for it that year, at least not here in Canada. But, that's nature for you. Things fluctuate over time.

Of course, these winters are NOTHING compared to what we had in the 1970s when I was growing up. I still recall snowdrifts so large you could walk up one onto the roof of our public school. And maybe they are still that big at times, when you're young and shorter, everything seems larger. ;)

I'm more than happy to see the white crap melt, I am a summer guy.

bamccaig

Even up here in the relative "North" the winters aren't like they used to be, however, I'm happy to report that we are currently in a stable sea of snow. This year I really wish I had a snowmobile and wide open land to use it. :) I found myself watching motovlogs from a snowmobiler in Newfoundland filmed last year. It just looks awesome to be able to wander around freely into the wilderness. These days I park my computer on a desk in an apartment in a city with no spare parking and too far away from trails to access without loading onto a truck that mine is too small for. :P

Neil Roy said:

I still recall snowdrifts so large you could walk up one onto the roof of our public school.

Oh man, that brings back memories! Thank you!

Bruce Perry

Snow wonder people are worried about climate change.

Neil Roy

I'll start worrying when the climate stops changing. ;) So long as it is changing, that means everything is normal.

Eric Johnson

The wireless signal in my home is pretty spotty in my room where my gaming desktop is. I've been using an Edimax wireless adapter, which works well enough, but it still falls out of reception every now and again, so now I'm thinking about getting an adapter with an adjustable antenna. This one looks pretty good, and is well-priced, too. Are any of you using one with an adjustable antenna? If so, any recommendations?

bamccaig

Have you considered getting a repeater to boost the signal? It's like a router that doesn't do any routing itself. It just forwards the traffic to the real router. I've never used one personally, but it sounds like what you need (if running a 100 ft cable along the walls isn't an option :D). On a side note, in college my networking instructor taught us that wireless signals spread further if they're up higher. I don't know how that works or if it even works, but perhaps moving the router to the highest point in the house would help (if possible).

Append:

Maybe this:

https://www.amazon.com/Linksys-High-Power-Intelligent-Technology-RE6700/dp/B00UVN20YA/ref=sr_1_3?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1513975988&sr=1-3&keywords=wireless+range+extender+linksys

Eric Johnson

Purchasing a repeater would be more costly than just purchasing an adapter. Besides, I only need it for one device, so a repeater would be a bit overkill. As far as moving the router is concerned, unless I mount it sideways on a wall, I can't move it any higher than it is already. If I don't buy another adapter, I could just rearrange my desk to be closer to the router. If I move the desktop just half a foot over, the signal is greatly improved... so I'm quite literally at the fringe of the signal. :P

bamccaig

How will a different adapter improve the signal strength of the network though? ??? Unless you're sure the problem is your current adapter and not the network itself..

Eric Johnson

I'm sure it's the adapter.

Edit

I used Speedtest to test two adapters I have. Same network, same configurations, both are advertised as offering the same speeds, yet one performs much better than the other.

Test #1
Test #2

If you clicked on the above links, you would see that test #2 did significantly better than test #1. I'm supposed to get "up to" ~30 megabits down, but get in the high teens at the most. If the second adapter will remain consistent in its performance, I'll just stick with it and not get a new one.

Chris Katko

Some adapters suck. Getting better ones with real antennas definitely will help.

If you have Linux you can easily do measurement with terminal program wavemon. (Great tool!)

{"name":"wavemon_main.png","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/a\/ca5276739b726a038b180cb7a64b1b98.png","w":512,"h":369,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/a\/ca5276739b726a038b180cb7a64b1b98"}wavemon_main.png

https://d2.alternativeto.net/dist/s/13dd1314-c011-e211-a334-0025902c7e73_3_full.png

You can also use iperf to measure between boxes. (Super easy setup on Linux because of apt-get, slightly more annoying on Windows boxes.) If you have a Linux flashed router like my DD-WRT flashed one, you can run iperf on it and get detailed speed statistics.

{"name":"1","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/e\/a\/ea8f04d4470996af54a42d1595efcfbb.png","w":1051,"h":681,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/e\/a\/ea8f04d4470996af54a42d1595efcfbb"}1

And the great thing about iperf is... it's REAL throughput and latency measurement. It's not theoretical. There's no unit conversion, or "arbitrary signal strength units." It's telling you what a real TCP/UDP connection would get where ever you are located.

I just realized there are GUI's for it too:

{"name":"iperf-fig1.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/6\/560128314fcfa8223b0cad2a1ac4cf2e.jpg","w":971,"h":701,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/6\/560128314fcfa8223b0cad2a1ac4cf2e"}iperf-fig1.jpg

ALSO,

-> make sure your router IS NOT NEAR METAL. Not on a metal desk/table/cabinet. Metal couples with electromagnetic radiation (wireless radio) and can even damage/overheat the wifi chipset.

-> ANTENNAS ARE DIRECTIONAL. If you rotate an antenna 90 degrees, it's going to lose HALF the power. (IIRC)

-> Microwaves (and other 2.4/5G networks) compete for time. Switching the channel can pay huge dividends.

-> An iOS/Android app for network monitoring can also be helpful and show you nearby channel interference.

Eric Johnson

Thanks for the info, Chris! My desktop is running Windows, but I'll have to remember wavemon for use with my laptop. The router is not near metal and the antennas are fine. My room is between two walls, a refrigerator, and a microwave, so it's definitely not the best place for WiFi. :P I'll look into a network monitoring app for Android.

type568

Bump this. Make it to a month at least. It's quite common to be unable to reply to something which would actually be relevant.

Eric Johnson
type568 said:

Bump this. Make it to a month at least. It's quite common to be unable to reply to something which would actually be relevant.

Hey man, you can't just make an on-topic reply without first reading and responding to the 1854 other replies! ;D

Merry Christmas, everyone! :D

Edgar Reynaldo

My internet is down and I'm trying to reply to this thread on my phone and it loaded all 2000 replies in like 10 - 15 secs. Not bad.

Merry Christmas!

Neil Roy
Quote:

Merry Christmas!

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Chris Katko

Merry Christmas!

Edgar Reynaldo

Neil, what is that supposed to be / mean? If you don't celebrate, fine, but don't tell me not to. ;) :P :{

Eric Johnson

It's too bad we didn't have a Krampus Hack (or equivalent) this year. :'( Would any of you be up for a "bootleg bash" sometime in the future? :P I need a good excuse to clone some older games.

Edgar Reynaldo

I'm working on some HTML5 pages for a friend, using JS and MoMo, Eric's JS lib.

Tell me Eric, (I'm on IRC now), what would you suggest for a multiply blender? Can I get at image data and mix it directly?

Also, I want to do some scrolling text, should I just set a fixed height and then control the scroll value via a timer? How do I use a timer with JS and MoMo?

EDIT
I want to draw the text using MoMo, because it has nice outlines, but then I need to draw multiline text, filtering <br> tags and such

Eric Johnson

Tell me Eric, (I'm on IRC now), what would you suggest for a multiply blender? Can I get at image data and mix it directly?

I don't have much experience with blending, but you can pass a bitmap to Momo.getBitmapCanvasContext() to get its 2D context and then use the getImageData() method to get an array of pixel data that you can manipulate.

Here's an example using getImageData() to invert a bitmap's colors:

#SelectExpand
1// Assume that bitmap, bitmap_w, and bitmap_h are defined elsewhere. 2 3// Get the 2D context of the bitmap. 4let context = Momo.getBitmapCanvasContext(bitmap); 5 6// Get the image/pixel data of the entire bitmap. 7let image_data = context.getImageData(0, 0, bitmap_w, bitmap_h); 8 9for (let i = 0; i < image_data.data.length; i += 4) { 10 11 // Invert all of the bitmap's colors. 12 image_data.data[i] = 255 - image_data.data[i]; // red 13 image_data.data[i + 1] = 255 - image_data.data[i + 1]; // green 14 image_data.data[i + 2] = 255 - image_data.data[i + 2]; // blue 15 image_data.data[i + 3] = 255; // alpha 16} 17 18// Put the inverted data back into the bitmap. 19context.putImageData(image_data, 0, 0); 20 21// Draw the bitmap. 22Momo.drawBitmap(bitmap, 0, 0);

(I haven't tested the above, but I'm pretty sure it'd work.)

Edit
Here's a working demo of using image data to invert a bitmap. Press space to invert. I know it's not multiplying, but I just wanted to see if what I wrote above would work (it does; see below).

example.html:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <title>Example</title>
    <script src="momo.js"></script>
    <script src="example.js"></script>
  </head>
  <body>
    <canvas id="canvas_id"></canvas>
  </body>
</html>

example.js:

#SelectExpand
1// Quick example. No error checking. 2 3let bitmap = undefined; 4 5function main() { 6 7 Momo.initialize(); 8 9 Momo.setCanvas("canvas_id", 768, 448); 10 11 Momo.installKeyboard(); 12 13 bitmap = Momo.loadBitmap("bitmap.png"); 14 15 Momo.resourcesLoaded( 16 17 () => { 18 19 Momo.createLoop( 20 21 () => { 22 23 if (Momo.isKeyPressed("space")) { 24 25 invertColors(); 26 } 27 28 Momo.clearCanvas(Momo.makeColor(255, 255, 255)); 29 30 Momo.drawBitmap(bitmap, 0, 0); 31 } 32 ); 33 } 34 ); 35} 36 37function invertColors() { 38 39 let context = Momo.getBitmapCanvasContext(bitmap); 40 41 let image_data = context.getImageData(0, 0, Momo.getBitmapWidth(bitmap), Momo.getBitmapHeight(bitmap)); 42 43 for (let i = 0; i < image_data.data.length; i += 4) { 44 45 // Invert the colors. 46 image_data.data[i] = 255 - image_data.data[i]; // Red. 47 image_data.data[i + 1] = 255 - image_data.data[i + 1]; // Green. 48 image_data.data[i + 2] = 255 - image_data.data[i + 2]; // Blue 49 } 50 51 // Puts the inverted image data into the bitmap. 52 context.putImageData(image_data, 0, 0); 53} 54 55Momo.setEntryPoint(main);

See attached for bitmap.png and a screenshot of the result.

By the way, it's just "Momo". It comes from the Romanization of "桃" ("もも"), which means "peach" in Japanese (I like peaches).

Quote:

I want to draw the text using MoMo, because it has nice outlines, but then I need to draw multiline text, filtering <br> tags and such

Multiline text drawing isn't supported by Momo (yet).

Another Edit
You can roll your own multiline text function in the meantime. I threw this together in just a few minutes, for example:

function drawMultilineText(font, fill_color, size, x, y, alignment, text, outline_color = undefined, outline_width = 0) {

  let lines = text.split("<br>");

  let i = 0;
  let number_of_lines = lines.length;

  for (i; i < number_of_lines; ++i) {

    Momo.drawText(font, fill_color, size, x, y + (size * i), alignment, lines[i], outline_color, outline_width);
  }
}

It'll split lines wherever "<br>" appears. Hopefully it does well as a starting point.

Yet Another Edit

Quote:

Also, I want to do some scrolling text, should I just set a fixed height and then control the scroll value via a timer? How do I use a timer with JS and MoMo?

Sorry, I didn't see that question until now. A timer would work (or just calculate it in the main game loop in an update phase/function). You could use setTimeout() or setInterval()--whichever suits your needs best. Google is your friend in this regard. I can write an example if you need me to.

Neil Roy

Neil, what is that supposed to be / mean? If you don't celebrate, fine, but don't tell me not to. ;) :P :{

I posted a picture, and from that you somehow got me telling you what to do? You have serious mental issues my friend!

Edgar Reynaldo

@Neil

You were obviously trolling for some kind of response. It doesn't suit you? Sorry, but when you put "Merry Christmas" in quotes and then post an image of some kind of candy or some shjit, you are obviously making light of it. Why don't you go back to your gay black husband in the other thread. He probably misses you. Something else I didn't find very entertaining. You don't celebrate, fine, but leave me to mine. 8-)

Christmas is supposed to be about the birth / conception of Jesus. Christ Mass? Duh? It may not be in the Bible, but Easter sure as hell isn't either. Rolling Easter eggs for fertility rituals to Ishtar anyone? Lulz if that ain't idol worship I don't know what is.

Easter.
Ishtar.

Same word over time. It's supposed to be Passover, pesuach, which IS in the Bible.

@Eric
Sweet, thanks for the info, I'll put it to use.

Chris Katko

I just saw the new Star Wars.

It's hilariously bad. You will laugh more at it, than with it.

It's also so drawn out (2.5 hours) that people were looking at their phones to see how much time was left.

No spoilers but for fun: Count how many times Luke Skywalker angrily walks away from the camera. ;D

The first 45 minutes of pan shots are just a parody of Lord of the Rings.

type568

Merry Christmas.. Guess I'll be gone to read all posts til next X-mass then ;D

& oh. Well, I guess we have a massive & regular new off topic thing.

But yeah, maybe really listen to the OP?:D

Neil Roy

Edgar... I posted a picture. That's it. It's more of a joke if you know what that candy is. As usual you're looking for an argument. You seem to enjoy stirring up shit. My name is not Monty Python and this isn't argument clinic, so piss off! Don't blame me because your conscious is bothering you.

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Bruce Perry

It's a humbug, isn't it? As in, clearly a reference to Scrooge's 'Bah! Humbug!' from 'A Christmas Carol'?

The correct response is "I guess Christmas doesn't go well for everyone - sorry to hear that", not "OMG TR0LL I DONT GET IT BUT I REPOART YU ANYWEY" ;D

(I should know better than to deflect a fight on to myself though :-X)

Chris Katko

No idea why Christmas makes so many people butthurt. It's been around before any of us were alive, and it'll still be around long after we're gone. And commercialism aside, there's nothing but good intentions behind it.

Meh.

I had a good Xmas and I hope everyone else did.

Eric Johnson

I got a new tire pressure gauge for Christmas. 8-)

jmasterx

A simple Google Search By Image reveals that it is indeed a Humbug.
{"name":"611171","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/3\/f\/3f1b7cc83ffae543e87e75c0ab85ba94.jpg","w":1314,"h":554,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/3\/f\/3f1b7cc83ffae543e87e75c0ab85ba94"}611171

It is a reference to:

{"name":"611172","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/8\/7\/87f4964be1685ec86d8b2d4a75ea8e85.jpg","w":1882,"h":608,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/8\/7\/87f4964be1685ec86d8b2d4a75ea8e85"}611172

Let's try to use our GoogleFoo next time :)

Edgar Reynaldo

It's a humbug, isn't it? As in, clearly a reference to Scrooge's 'Bah! Humbug!' from 'A Christmas Carol'?

The correct response is "I guess Christmas doesn't go well for everyone - sorry to hear that", not "OMG TR0LL I DONT GET IT BUT I REPOART YU ANYWEY" ;D

(I should know better than to deflect a fight on to myself though :-X)

He reduced Christmas to a confection. :P It's insulting. He also ignored my request for identification of said confection and then accused me of having mental issues.

And no, I'm not gonna google every piece of crap you guys post just to see if there is a hidden message or dubious meaning. Say what you mean and mean what you say. :P :P ;P

Bruce Perry

For me, Christmas is all about the excuse to confection oneself into a blobby pile of over-indulged jelly. If you're insulted by that, I still feel fine because the sugar rush is telling me everything's right with the world. 8-) At least for a few minutes, until the big crash comes. But by then I probably wouldn't be able to reach the mouse and keyboard, so I would never know.

More seriously, I suspect you two just know how to push each other's buttons by now. Nothing here really looks so bad to the rest of us. :-/

Chris Katko

Edgar: It's okay man! Let it go. I see your point, and Neil was being way more abrasive than necessary. I don't know if it's alcohol, or he just gets in a mean mood. But he's doing it more lately. :/

Neil Roy

No idea why Christmas makes so many people butthurt.

It doesn't, it was a joke, you know, I don't celebrate it, but I don't care if you do, so my natural response to "Merry Christmas" was to post a picture of a humbug... does anyone else here see the humour in that besides me?

dgar: It's okay man! Let it go. I see your point, and Neil was being way more abrasive than necessary. I don't know if it's alcohol, or he just gets in a mean mood. But he's doing it more lately. :/

Yes, it's all Neil's fault as usual. I posted a picture... bad Neil... bad Neil!!! I didn't realize that I wasn't permitted to have an opinion, not even if meant as humour. I was attacked, I wasn't attacking. Then I was falsely accused of pushing my beliefs on people, when all I did was posted a picture. So yeah, I get angry when falsely accused, especially when I was just joking.

Oh, and no, it was not "alchohol", it was someone falsely accusing me and lying about me. That gets me angry EVERY TIME. But... it's my fault for posting in here I guess. I'll cut back on my involvement in these forums if need be. I don't need to be attacked every time I post a PICTURE!

If you want to get technical, every time you say "Merry Christmas" you're "pushing your beliefs" onto me. But I honestly don't see it that way, you say Merry Xmas, I post a humbug pic and say NOTHING MORE ABOUT IT... someone is supposed to get it and laugh, not flip out on me.

But anyhow, tough shit. It worked "Edgar" (ask him his real name), you stirred up shit over a picture... yet again.

jmasterx

While I can understand how Edgard feels in the matter, I really do not think Neil was trying to stir shit up at all. Neil has a less conservative sense of humor which is perfectly fine. I think as long as it's clearly not personally directed, whether it is your type of humor or not, offense shouldn't be taken. Quoting /r/jokes:
{"name":"611174","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/8\/c8d3010d2decc4c3dd15bc91d968418e.jpg","w":596,"h":819,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/8\/c8d3010d2decc4c3dd15bc91d968418e"}611174

Edgar Reynaldo
Neil Roy said:


It doesn't, it was a joke, you know, I don't celebrate it, but I don't care if you do, so my natural response to "Merry Christmas" was to post a picture of a humbug... does anyone else here see the humour in that besides me?
Chris Katko said:

Edgar: It's okay man! Let it go. I see your point, and Neil was being way more abrasive than necessary. I don't know if it's alcohol, or he just gets in a mean mood. But he's doing it more lately. :/

Yes, it's all Neil's fault as usual. I posted a picture... bad Neil... bad Neil!!! I didn't realize that I wasn't permitted to have an opinion, not even if meant as humour. I was attacked, I wasn't attacking. Then I was falsely accused of pushing my beliefs on people, when all I did was posted a picture. So yeah, I get angry when falsely accused, especially when I was just joking.

Oh, and no, it was not "alchohol", it was someone falsely accusing me and lying about me. That gets me angry EVERY TIME. But... it's my fault for posting in here I guess. I'll cut back on my involvement in these forums if need be. I don't need to be attacked every time I post a PICTURE!

If you want to get technical, every time you say "Merry Christmas" you're "pushing your beliefs" onto me. But I honestly don't see it that way, you say Merry Xmas, I post a humbug pic and say NOTHING MORE ABOUT IT... someone is supposed to get it and laugh, not flip out on me.

But anyhow, tough . It worked "Edgar" (ask him his real name), you stirred up over a picture... yet again.

Deep sigh. You have a persecution complex. I wasn't falsely accusing you of anything. When someone posts "Merry Christmas" and they're met with someone making light of it, whether it was a joke or not, and you deliberately ignore their question and then make an accusation regarding my mental instability, I tend to get how shall we say, "irritable"? When someone else posts "Happy Hanukkah", I don't post pictures of the Holocaust. When someone comes out of Ash Wednesday, I don't say, jeez, it must be hard resisting ol Satan for 40 whole days? I don't dis Mardi Gras, I don't dis on Dia de la Muerte (even though I think it's totally misguided and wrong). I don't tell people not to celebrate Halloween, or Sowen (sic), whatever. So when other people try to hush me into saying I can't say Merry Freakin Christmas I get a little annoyed.

It's like the people that want to take the Pledge of Allegiance out of our schools, the single remaining reference to God.

Humbug. I get it. Be scrooge if you want. You could have saved a lot of trouble if you had just answered my question. That's not why I'm peeved. That thread perverting St. Nicholas (Santa) with homosexuality and depravity is what really ticked me off, but I didn't say anything. There's just no respect for God or anything decent around here. Small wonder allegro is dying.

And no, Edgar is not my real name. Funny that I trusted you enough to share it with you. Several people on IRC know me by my real names, but Edgar is my programming alias. If you don't like it, you can always call me "The Doctor", or if we're on IRC I go by Modulo5k. I have my own reasons for my psuedonym, but I assure you I'm quite real.

And btw, I wasn't trying to 'stir shit up' I'm merely tired of offensive crap being posted on the forum I frequent.

Chris Katko

video

"I was just thinking that maybe everyone should CoooOoooOooooOOooooolllll out!"

bamccaig

Honestly, Neil's picture was mildly amusing, and not in the least bit offensive. Edgar overreacted big time. I would be more than happy to support offensive humor, but I haven't even seen any. Don't get me started. >:(

Edgar Reynaldo

I thought it was a reference to his other thread, and it ticked me off. Yeah I over react some times.

Felix-The-Ghost

Happy New Year everyone

Eric Johnson
Quote:

Happy New Year everyone

Happy New Year! :D

bamccaig

Pfffft, not for another day! >:(

Chris Katko

Happy... new... year?

Polybios

Maybe we should introduce a safe space around here...
A place to cool down irritation and bad feelings of being attacked? A place where we could all peacefully hug our teddies? :P

Happy new year everyone!

Chris Katko

I thought this was the safe space!!!

Also, LMFAO, I just got banned from Hacker News for posting too many contrarian posts that were sourced. San Fransisco doesn't like science when the science goes against their dogma. ;D

Edgar Reynaldo

Haha, HackISU 2017 winner was an app called SafeSpace that could filter all your browser content and remove offensive things like Donald Trump's name. 😂

Eric Johnson

So what's everyone's new year resolutions? As always, mine's to abstain from heroin. Perfect track record so far. 8-)

Neil Roy

I don't make resolutions (or celebrate new years <starts new argument>), but if I did it would be to post fewer images in this thread. 8-)

So I'll do one last image before the "new year" ;)

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Edgar Reynaldo

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jmasterx

Happy New Year! :D

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Eric Johnson

"Mein Fuhrer Donald Trump" sounds like a comedy. ;D I'd watch it.

So I saw Star Wars: The Last Jedi this afternoon... kind of gross seeing older Leia in a golden bikini again. :-X

Edgar Reynaldo

He's literally petting the flag. It's disgusting. '(

The Last Jedi

So many things wrong with this movie.

LucasFilm + Disney = disaster

Who convinced Stephen Spielberg to turn this into a kids movie? With a knee-jerk plot, and wave after wave of disaster turned into daring plans of action?

They killed off every character worth knowing in IV, V, and VI, to give the hands of the free universe over into the hands of children like Finn and Rey and Kylo. It's total BS. This is movie VIII? By the time they're done they're gonna end up doing a X, XI, XII with Kylo and Rey's love children. :P :P :P

"I see conflict in you" - I can save you Kylo! I'm in love with the dark side!

Neil Roy

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;D

Eric Johnson

I thought your last picture would be the last one for the year, Neil... now another? :o

EDIT
@Edgar: I'll write a response regarding Star Wars a bit later. Gotta let it mull over for a bit in my head.

Also, why'd you remove me on Facebook, Neil?

Edgar Reynaldo

Fakebook friends. What a shame.

Eric Johnson

Fakebook friends. What a shame.

Which part is a shame? The Facebook part or the friends part, or something else? :P

Maybe this isn't the appropriate place to discuss Facebook friendships. So Neil, if you'd like to talk, feel free to PM me. ;)

Edgar Reynaldo

I just don't think Facebook is the place to go if you want 'real' friendships. That's why I called it Fakebook, cause a lot of people are really just fake friends on there.

Neil said:

U Mad, Bro?

Yeah, I'm mad. Mad like a hatter. ;)
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Eric Johnson

I just don't think Facebook is the place to go if you want 'real' friendships.

Well, being "friends" on Facebook no more constitutes real friendship than "following" someone on Twitter makes one a stalker (at least not inherently). :P

Neil Roy

Yeah, I'm mad. Mad like a hatter. ;)

Haha nice. :)

Also, why'd you remove me on Facebook, Neil?

Because debating with your friends about everything I post is not something I enjoy. Actually, the other day I removed a couple people and quite a few pages (religious groups and news groups) as well as I grow weary of debating every post I make. I want to spend less time on Facebook arguing with people and more time programming. You're welcome to refriend if you wish, I don't consider Facebook any sort of gauge as to a genuine friendship. I guess I could have simply blocked all your friends who start up debates instead. <shrug> It's all a symptom of the time of year and how it negatively effects me I guess.

Speaking of programming, been reading a great series of tutorials on modern OpenGL which is very well written. Highly recommended.

https://learnopengl.com

Well, being "friends" on Facebook no more constitutes real friendship than "following" someone on Twitter makes one a stalker (at least not inherently). :P

Actually, I have more than double the people in followers on Facebook than I have friends, which I find funny for some reason. I think I have like, less than 80 friends (as opposed to my wife's over 400) and like over 170 followers.

Johan Halmén

Here's a thought. If Matthew would promise that this particular thread would never be locked, would the discussion die?

Eric Johnson

If Matthew would promise that this particular thread would never be locked, would the discussion die?

No. This thread is eternal. My great grandchildren will participate in this thread. 8-)

jmasterx

Yes >:(

GullRaDriel

I started to warm up my son for THAT specific thread.

8-)

Derezo

This thread will die when the post_id overflows and ML refuses to change to a 64 bit primary key. ;)

jmasterx

#RoadTo2147483647

That's right ML, I know you sign your ints >:(

Eric Johnson
Derezo said:

This thread will die when the post_id overflows and ML refuses to change to a 64 bit primary key. ;)

Then Amarillion will start another thread called "Threads lock too soon 2: Electric Boogaloo".

jmasterx
bamccaig

Apparently the exploit is read-only access. You wouldn't be able to fix it anyway. :P But you could potentially steal the code and the database and create a cloned site and fix it there. :D

Neil Roy

Then Amarillion will start another thread called "Threads lock too soon 2: Electric Boogaloo".

LMAO! ;D

Edgar Reynaldo

What happens when the post count on this thread overflows the current year? Will we start predicting the future? ???

Neil Roy

I could sure go for a little of that global warming we were promised now. -22C out today, windchill factor is around -32C I think. I have frost and ice on the inside of my window today! :o

Eric Johnson

My desktop's wireless adapter completely died two nights ago. I screwed around with it for a bit this evening seeing if I could resurrect it, but no dice. :(

bamccaig
Neil Roy said:

I could sure go for a little of that global warming we were promised now. -22C out today, windchill factor is around -32C I think. I have frost and ice on the inside of my window today! :o

Sounds like your house has shitty insulation. Or maybe just the windows are outdated. :( That must be expensive to heat.

"Global warming" is actually just "climate change", and I think you could agree that this is pretty extreme weather.

Neil Roy
Quote:

Or maybe just the windows are outdated. :( That must be expensive to heat.

It's an old apartment building I am in. It's not too bad lately, it's heated okay. There are a few drafty spots and in my computer room it appears like the foundation has settled in such a way that the window frames are slightly warped, barely noticeable, but I think it leaves enough of a gap to let a tiny amount of air in.

Normally it's not a problem, but the temps here are currently around -25C so, when it gets that cold, it can become noticeable! ;)

Our heating is a gas heat furnace with the older water pipes that go through the place (they make a noise when they head up). Thankfully I don't pay for heat, only electricity.

We have had record low temps all across Canada (and the USA) the past week. It's been crazy cold.

My desktop's wireless adapter completely died two nights ago. I screwed around with it for a bit this evening seeing if I could resurrect it, but no dice. :(

a moment of silence RIP ;)

Eric Johnson

What happens when the post count on this thread overflows the current year? Will we start predicting the future? ???

Yes, but only the future of an alternate universe.

Neil Roy said:

It's been crazy cold.

Have you considered getting a Snuggie?

Neil Roy

Have you considered getting a Snuggie?

I have a wife, she's plenty warm. :)

bamccaig
Neil Roy said:

It's an old apartment building I am in. It's not too bad lately, it's heated okay. There are a few drafty spots and in my computer room it appears like the foundation has settled in such a way that the window frames are slightly warped, barely noticeable, but I think it leaves enough of a gap to let a tiny amount of air in.

Normally it's not a problem, but the temps here are currently around -25C so, when it gets that cold, it can become noticeable! ;)

Our heating is a gas heat furnace with the older water pipes that go through the place (they make a noise when they head up). Thankfully I don't pay for heat, only electricity.

We have had record low temps all across Canada (and the USA) the past week. It's been crazy cold.

I also live in an apartment. We have electric heat with our own thermostat, and utilities are included so it doesn't cost us anything. Usually we don't even need to turn our heat on, but with these temperatures I have had it nearly cranked full in the living room.

Neil Roy
bamccaig said:

but with these temperatures I have had it nearly cranked full in the living room.

Yup! When it his -25C or below I found I had to crank it up a little to maintain a comfort level. Housecoat came in handy as well. :)

bamccaig

I got used to wearing a blanket because in the summer we have the A/C running right next to my computer desk. It comes in handy during the winter months too so I just wear it all year round. :)

Neil Roy

Funny, I had my fan on the other night when it was really cold out because there was no way I was going to lower the heat!!! ;)

bamccaig

We always have a big steel fan blowing in the bedroom when we sleep because in the summer you need it (the A/C isn't powerful enough), and then you get used to the very loud noise and it's too quiet without it. ;D

Neil Roy

Yeah, we live next to a street that is as busy as a highway, so we get used to the noise. The fan isn't too bad. It's a big one though. No A/C in our place, but lots of fans.

It's funny as my wife will have a friend over that stays over night and she lives in a quiet area, I am a late nighter so she will pop into my computer room telling me about every noise she hears. :D

I warned her about our neighbour's cat, it loves to run back and forth above us. We love hearing it tearing through the house.

Edit: Been following a great tutorial on Modern OpenGL (learnopengl.com) and it's getting really interesting, and very easy to do this. Just created this with specular light maps (the shiney parts of the crates) and a point light. Neat stuff, all using shaders which are easy, modern OpenGL, not old immediate mode stuff. Pure awesomeness! :D

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DanielH

This is the time of year I'm glad I live in Arizona.

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Neil Roy

Cute 12 year old girl is amazing, I love her spirit...

video

Eric Johnson

I didn't realize this until Edgar pointed it out, but I joined allegro.cc exactly four years ago today. :o

Elias
DanielH said:

This is the time of year I'm glad I live in Arizona.

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Took this on Sunday where I live now in Ohio, never seen a waterfall just freeze before but it looked spectacular :)

Elias
DanielH said:

This is the time of year I'm glad I live in Arizona.

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Took this on Sunday where I live now in Ohio, never seen a waterfall just freeze before but it looked spectacular :)

LennyLen

We've just had the average summer's worth of rain in the last 40 hours. At least my cat likes it.

In other news, I've started coding again:

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I didn't realize this until Edgar pointed it out, but I joined allegro.cc exactly four years ago today

My first account here was created 15 years ago to the day today. I remember the date as it was exactly two weeks before my parent's 35th wedding anniversary. I was broke so instead of buying them something I was writing a game they could play that was based on their life. I used that account for about a year then forgot the detail when I came back again, which was when I created this account.

Bruce Perry
Neil Roy said:

Cute 12 year old girl is amazing, I love her spirit...

Werr done my girl, now pray it backwards :)

Elias said:

Took this on Sunday where I live now in Ohio, never seen a waterfall just freeze before but it looked spectacular :)

Congratulations! She looks great on her big day :)

I'm now a Wanikani lifer and have also been working on my Japanese and German using Anki \ó/

MiquelFire

So, it warmed up enough yesterday to melt most of the snow around here, so I took that chance to finally take down the Christmas decorations that I had in the grass. Because it was raining, I decided to leave the rest until it wasn't raining (and I wouldn't be taking away my source of light :P)

And this weekend, I have a project to work on.

Neil Roy
Elias said:

Took this on Sunday where I live now in Ohio, never seen a waterfall just freeze before but it looked spectacular :)

Wow, great shot!

Bruce Perry

I just noticed, someone wrote 'Amy' on the rocks :)

bamccaig

Wouldn't it be fucked if Amy was a dead girl buried beneath the ice? :o Where's the beauty in it now?! >:(

Neil Roy

Could be a reference to what she was like in bed. ;)

bamccaig

I don't get it. :( ???

Women aren't really judged for what they're like in bed (sexist!). It's pretty much up to them if they want to just lay there or participate. What she's like in bed? AMAZING, like every other vagina ever. Unless she's gay. Then there's probably a rating scale or something.

Neil Roy

A reference to the ice... but... :)

I guess I keep expecting a sense of humour in here. ::)

bamccaig
Neil Roy said:

A reference to the ice... but... :)

What does it mean to be like "ice" in bed? That she was cold to the touch? Or "frozen"/still? Or perhaps unfeeling?

I have a pretty darn good sense of humor if I do say so myself. A good comedian accepts when a joke fails and moves on. If you have to explain the joke it's a bad joke. ;)

In other news, does anybody else use those "fire/ice" condoms? It's like a craps shoot. You never know what you're going to get. Sometimes it's like nothing happens. Other times, it feels like it burns! And others, it just feels tingly. I can't say it does anything for my own personal arousal, but... I cannot speak for the woman's side of things...

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

It's pretty much up to them if they want to just lay there or participate. What she's like in bed? AMAZING,

If your chick just lays there, there's something incredibly wrong!

Edgar Reynaldo

It's called being 'frigid'

Jeez, even I got it, and I have the worst sense of humor here. >:(

Eric Johnson
bamccaig said:

I can't say it does anything for my own personal arousal, but... I cannot speak for the woman's side of things...

Try wearing it inside out next time. :P

Chris Katko

It's called being 'frigid'

This is an alien world to me! ;)

Bruce Perry

I got the joke differently. My post contains "'Amy' on the rocks", and we can request a drink "on the rocks" if we want ice in it. Neil's joke could have been that Amy was mixed in with the ice. Except no, that would be what bambams was thinking. So I'm just confused. ;D

Neil Roy

I don't even know what I meant anymore. :P It was almost 4am. I was probably sleep posting by that point. ;)

On another topic; I want to program a new game but have programmer's block. :-/

LennyLen
Neil Roy said:

On another topic; I want to program a new game but have programmer's block.

I had a game idea the other night that I know I won't use. It might be right up your alley as it was a kind of Pac-Man vs Snake clone. The idea was that as you eat the pellets, they chain up behind you so you have to be careful how you navigate the maze. Power pellets not just keep you safe from enemies, but also shorten your chain. Random power-ups can also appear, and good ones only shorten your chain a little bit, while less useful ones shorten it a lot.

bamccaig

If your chick just lays there, there's something incredibly wrong!

From what I can gather about the opposite sex it's a pretty common thing. That said, every woman is different. "Wrong" is a rather subjective claim. I'd wager that more than 30% of women do it. I wouldn't be surprised if the number was closer to 70%. In any case, Google is no stranger to the concept. Hell, a reasonable person might play devil's advocate and question what it means if their woman doesn't just lay there (at least some of the time). :P

Try wearing it inside out next time. :P

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Chris Katko
Quote:

lay there

Why are you both laying down?! Laying is for sleeping! ;D

Neil Roy

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Bruce Perry

Time for an English lesson :)

"To lay" is a transitive verb, meaning it is only correct when you do it to something (to lay a patient down). Most of you should be writing "to lie". I assume the confusion is because of what happens in the past tense.

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Chris Katko

All I see is eight words for "I got some." :o

Neil Roy

You know, when someone tells a joke, it's usually best just to find the punchline rather than over analyzing it. ;)

All I see is eight words for "I got some." :o

;D

Edgar Reynaldo

You guys should say what you really mean. :/

Eric Johnson said:

Try wearing it your vagina inside out next time. :P

I think he wants some?

bamccaig said:

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Must be an offer.

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The cake lieth underneath the frosting. Ooh, dirty!

bamccaig

The cake, lieth GLaDOS.

Neil Roy
bamccaig said:

The cake, lieth GLaDOS.

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;D

Eric Johnson
bamccaig said:

Do you want babies?

Yes. I want enough babies to cover my entire body and use as armor. I'll be unstoppable! :D

Edgar Reynaldo

Yes, but then your alignment will go from chaotic good to chaotic evil. In Neverwinter Nights II or some such there was armor made from people's skin. It was +5 and turned you evil.

Neil Roy

Chaotic good sounds like an oxymoron to me.

Bruce Perry

For chaotic good, you could imagine a person who wants the best for everyone but is always running around, getting distracted and forgetting everything :)

Edgar Reynaldo

Think Robin Hood. Ignores the law, does good anyway.

Neil Roy

Think Robin Hood. Ignores the law, does good anyway.

If you steal money from people and disobey the law... how is that good again? ;)

I very much doubt that the people who were robbed would see you as good.

bamccaig

On the other hand, most people don't consider the rich that were being robbed as good. So it's a gray area.

Neil Roy
bamccaig said:

On the other hand, most people don't consider the rich that were being robbed as good. So it's a gray area.

Is the money yours? Nope. So if you take that which does not belong to you, you're a thief and not good. Two wrongs do not make a right. There is no such thing as a "grey area". Thievery does not justify thievery. If the rich man stole his money (and most rich men I know of did not, they earned it, usually obsessed with making money), the money still does not belong to YOU and you are still not justified in stealing it yourself or you are no better than he is.

Chris Katko

In Neverwinter Nights II or some such there was armor made from people's skin. It was +5 and turned you evil.

HAAHHA. I never knew that.

In Space Station 13, if you're the chef and throw enough people into the gibber (5+ meat, and 1 skin) you can sow the skins together and make a skin suit.

I was using the meat for spaghetti and meatballs but I forgot to cook the meat and people were just vomiting all over the station.

Eric Johnson
Neil Roy said:

Two wrongs do not make a right.

Yeah well, three lefts make a right.

bamccaig
Neil Roy said:

Is the money yours? Nope. So if you take that which does not belong to you, you're a thief and not good. Two wrongs do not make a right. There is no such thing as a "grey area". Thievery does not justify thievery. If the rich man stole his money (and most rich men I know of did not, they earned it, usually obsessed with making money), the money still does not belong to YOU and you are still not justified in stealing it yourself or you are no better than he is.

Certainly if Robin Hood kept the money for himself he would be considered a bad character. However, he doesn't. He gives the money to people that need it. The rich man does not even need it. It's just a waste having the resources stacked up on him. That's the whole point of the narrative.

Where is your Jesus now? Probably getting wasted with Robin Hood. >:(

Edgar Reynaldo

Trump did the exact opposite. Takes from the poor, and gives to the rich. What does that make him? Take Robin Hood over Trump anyday.

Neil Roy

Hahaha... leave it up to you guys to try turning this into something religious or political. Not going there.

Just saying, stealing is not good. Therefore, chaotic good is an oxymoron as you cannot be chaotic AND good, the two are polar opposites. If you steal, you're not good, I don't care who you give the stolen loot to, you still stole them. And now, not only are you a thief, but the people you have given the stolen loot to, at least in my country, could be charged with possession of stolen goods if they are caught with it, so you're even more evil for causing them trouble! :)

But... I guess nobody in here will mind if I break into your homes and steal all you worked for, so long as I give it away to the poor right? ;D

Edgar Reynaldo

Neil, lighten up!
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LennyLen
Neil Roy said:

Therefore, chaotic good is an oxymoron as you cannot be chaotic AND good, the two are polar opposites.

In D&D chaotic just means that the person is more of a lone wolf than a party player. If laws are just a chaotic good character will follow them, but if the laws are evil, such as say, the decrees of Sauron, than a CG character will not follow them.

edit:

In D&D the polar opposite of good is evil, and the polar opposite of chaotic is lawful.

Neil Roy

Neil, lighten up!

Says the guy who felt the need to insert his "Trump" attack on a totally unrelated topic. Take your own advice!

LennyLen said:

In D&D the polar opposite of good is evil, and the polar opposite of chaotic is lawful.

Yeah, I understand D&D, I used to play it with friend, great fun with a few beer. But, being able to have something like unlawful good for example just never made sense to me... but that's why it's just a game I guess.

I used to play a thief in our group so long ago, had some good times.

LennyLen
Neil Roy said:

But, being able to have something like unlawful good for example just never made sense to me...

I remembering struggling with the idea when I first started playing as a kid. Then I reconciled the two by envisioning a scenario where following the law would cause a good person to die, so being good, I would have to break the law in order to be able to do the right thing.

Another good example from your own country's history is the people who helped the underground railroad to smuggle slave out of the southern states. It was unlawful to do so, as it was technically theft, but they were doing good by freeing people condemned to slavery.

Neil Roy
LennyLen said:

Another good example from your own country's history is the people who helped the underground railroad to smuggle slave out of the southern states. It was unlawful to do so, as it was technically theft, but they were doing good by freeing people condemned to slavery.

That's a very interesting example! You make a good case for it.

Chris Katko

Lawful good, someone follows their morality but the rules come first. "Do not murder" trumps "stop a serial killer from possibly murdering another." Leave it to the courts.

Chaotic good, someone follows their own morality and will ignore the laws if necessary. Dexter/killing bad people.

(Of course it doesn't have to be as extreme as murder.)

Lawful evil, someone is a monster but still uses the laws and rules. Think sociopaths in positions of power like priests, CEOs, and government officials.

Bruce Perry

Chaotic doesn't really mean unlawful in any context outside whichever games used it, does it?

As for Robin Hood, though, consider that he's stealing from the king who stands behind tax law to carry out mass debilitating theft on an entire country. Laws are only as ethically sound as the general public consensus on them - we can't say in absolute terms that breaking the law is never good.

And as for modern-day rich people, how about bankers who play the system, pay themselves handsome bonuses and then enjoy their luxuries while everyone in Greece is blocked from withdrawing any of their cash? Can you really assert that everyone should agree that every law-abiding rich person really deserves that money?

Chris Katko

Lawful's only have to follow laws that are "just".

Choatic's strive to be free of bureaucracy, can be reckless, etc.

And you can be lawful evil, someone who loves bureaucracy and exploits it to hurt people.

But it's just a game system. I don't know if it's really designed to model the entirety of human morality.

bamccaig
Neil Roy said:

Just saying, stealing is not good. Therefore, chaotic good is an oxymoron as you cannot be chaotic AND good, the two are polar opposites. If you steal, you're not good, I don't care who you give the stolen loot to, you still stole them. And now, not only are you a thief, but the people you have given the stolen loot to, at least in my country, could be charged with possession of stolen goods if they are caught with it, so you're even more evil for causing them trouble! :)

Morality is not so black and white. There's no such thing as universally "good" and universally "evil". They're subjective, and rarely if ever are they black and white. That's one of the problems with religion. It teaches people to judge things harshly without really being able to comprehend that it's more complicated than that.

Neil Roy said:

But... I guess nobody in here will mind if I break into your homes and steal all you worked for, so long as I give it away to the poor right? ;D

Apples to oranges. I am not a very rich man. Also, Robin Hood never takes everything. He's taking a negligible amount. The rich wouldn't even feel it. It means nothing to the rich, but it means everything to the poor.

Eric Johnson

My desktop (running Windows 10) has been crashing a lot lately with "MEMORY_MANAGEMENT" errors, so yesterday I ran Memtest86+. Sure enough, it found errors. I ran the test three times: first time on all of the memory; the second time on just one of the sticks; and the last time on the other stick. Only one of my RAM sticks displays errors, so I removed that one. I had 16GB but am now operating on 8. I haven't had any errors or crashes since then, so I'm happy about that, but a bit bummed about losing half my RAM. :(

Chris Katko

Did you test that same stick in different slots?

Eric Johnson

Did you test that same stick in different slots?

Yes. :(

Edit:
Actually, I tried it in only two of four slots. The test took about an hour each time, so I ran out of patience by the end. Do you think the slot itself might be bad and not the RAM necessarily?

Chris Katko

It's more likely RAM, however, in my recent case, it was my motherboard. Most CPU/mobo these days have two RAM channels (two DRAM controllers). When I changed a heatsink, my motherboard didn't have all the proper mounting screws and flexed a tiny bit when I put my memory back in. From then on, one channel had a bit error, which affected both of the slots for that memory channel. (Usually denoted by two slots of the same color. One pair black, one pair blue.)

It was a PITA to discover.

Had to buy a new motherboard.

New board works fine, but somewhat sadly, the audio chip layout is designed poorly and has constant low-volume noise/buzzing which is audible when I use headphones in silence.

Derezo

[edit: I reread how you tested it and it doesn't sound like a dual channel issue, I think you've got a bad stick]

It could be that the RAM cannot be run in dual channel mode. If they were purchased separately (ie. not two in the same package), even if they are the same brand and model, this can happen if the timings are slightly different between the two sticks.

I would try another slot, but if you tried two already there's a good chance it's just the stick. :-/

Eric Johnson

I tested it again this morning in all four slots and it still returned errors. So I'm certain now it's the stick and not the slots.

Chris Katko

Yeah, I figured it was more likely the stick. But you always want to be sure.

Eric Johnson

Definitely. Thanks for the help.

On the subject of RAM, do you think it's worth upgrading from DDR3? I've never experienced DDR3 being a bottleneck, so I'm not sure whether or not the improvements of DDR4 or DDR5 would warrant the added cost.

MiquelFire

You can't put DDR4 RAM into a DDR3 slot. So upgrading to DDR4 or DDR5 would require a new motherboard.

After a quick Google, it appears DDR5 is not yet out for system memory yet.

Eric Johnson

You can't put DDR4 RAM into a DDR3 slot.

Yeah, I know that. I'm thinking about the future though.

Edit:
So some games that used to crash on me now play perfectly fine since removing my bad RAM. :D Most notably, I've been able to play DOOM (2016) again recently. I'm blown away by how good DOOM looks.

jmasterx

Nice

Chris Katko

DDR4 has almost zero speed upgrade from DDR3 in games. We're talking less than 1 FPS, in benchmarks I've seen.

Get whatever is cheap. Get lots of RAM. But don't worry about "fast" RAM.

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Note the top two lines.

You can't put DDR4 RAM into a DDR3 slot. So upgrading to DDR4 or DDR5 would require a new motherboard.

... new motherboard... and new CPU. Memory controllers are on CPU now. Ryzen is DDR4. FX is DDR3. You can't swap.

It's possible certain Intel chipsets support both (have two sets of memory controllers). But meh, the performance gain is near ZERO, and DDR4 costs INSANE prices these days. Like $400 for 32GB. (I paid $100 for 32GB of DDR3.) And memory prices have been going up like crazy the last few years. (At least 2X up for DDR4 in two years.)

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Edgar Reynaldo

Uh, why are you quoting FPS from a game as an indicator of the speed impact of DDR4 vs DDR3? That has almost zero to do with your framerate, as cpu memory access is not your bottleneck.

Chris Katko

That's the entire point. ::)

If you can't even get 1 FPS, it doesn't matter. You're not going to notice a 5.23 vs 5.15 hour zip/movie transcoding. You're not going to notice 1 FPS. DDR3 vs 4 doesn't matter for 99% of use cases.

Modern systems aren't RAM speed limited... they're RAM latency limited.

Even 7zip won't change:

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If I'm paying more that twice the price I better be getting more than 1% of !%#@ing improvement.

Eventually, DDR4 will be cheaper for larger sizes. It was the same way with DDR2 vs DDR3. DDR2 was almost as fast, but DDR3 eventually became cheaper to get larger and larger sizes of RAM so it eventually switched over to being more price-effective.

But currently? DDR4 is years from becoming competitive in terms GB of RAM or in terms of performance.

So if you want to throw money away, throw it into a better CPU or videocard. But higher DRAM speeds rarely yield anything because all they do is increase the latency and clock higher so their effective latency is around the same:

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And that's from crucial... the memory manufacturer. They list multiple DDR4 modules that are effectively slower than DDR3's!

Gideon Weems

Time to test out how far back automatic quotation attribution can go.

Polybios said:

Just spending some time here while starting up a Java application...

Edgar Reynaldo

Uh, why are you quoting FPS from a game as an indicator of the speed impact of DDR4 vs DDR3? That has almost zero to do with your framerate, as cpu memory access is not your bottleneck.

Chris Katko said:

That's the entire point. ::)

If you can't even get 1 FPS, it doesn't matter.

So only gaming FPS is important. Think database and high traffic web servers. Don't be so narrow minded.

Chris Katko

You're in a strange nitpicking mood lately.

If you want to pay double to get 7% increase in your 7zip extraction, more power to you. ::)

Edgar Reynaldo

You're in a strange nitpicking mood lately.

If you want to pay double to get 7% increase in your 7zip extraction, more power to you. ::)

I don't give a shit about 7-zip extraction, it's more than fast enough as it is.

I said:

So only gaming FPS is important. Think database and high traffic web servers. Don't be so narrow minded.

It might not do your average joe much good, but to say DDR4 is not worth it, well not for you, but maybe for other people it is. Servers need to have fast access to memory caches of files and databases. That's pretty much a given.

And since when did servers extract 7z files for you?

Neil Roy

but to say DDR4 is not worth it, well not for you

Well, his reply was in response to Eric's post which was about... gaming.

You seem on edge lately, perhaps you need to sit back and relax to some relaxing music and browse some scenic images. ;) Works for me.

Edgar Reynaldo

Okay, what, that's not good enough? I have to explain myself further?

What about audio and video processing and encoding? What about people working with gigantic 3d terrain files? It could be worth it for them. You're so quick to dismiss me, but what he said was making a lot of assumptions. I point them out, and now I get told I need to take a chill pill. Real time loading of textures? Re-uploading bitmaps to the GPU upon demand? The list could go on, but why. :P

Arvidsson

So what you're saying is that DDR4 is never worth it?

Chris Katko

So what you're saying is that DDR4 is never worth it?

If you're talking to me, you're either joking, or not reading my comments. DDR4 isn't worse, it's the same thing with a higher density. It costs more now but will cost less per GB later as manufacturers ramp up production. It's the exact same thing that happened with DDR2 when DDR3 came on. Eventually, it will be cheaper to get huge sizes of DDR4 than equally large sizes of DDR3--but not now. Buy whatever CPU/videocard/etc you want. But buy it for the hardware and let the RAM be a secondary decision.

Edgar: I've provided amble evidence. Over and over. MEMORY LATENCY is the bottleneck and DDR4 is the same latency.

Video encoding:

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And here's a page on JUST DDR3 vs DDR4. EVERY BENCHMARK IS THE SAME. Games. Video encoding. Zips. And the whole beginning of the article explains why... latency.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-review-6700k-6600k-ddr4-ddr3-ipc-6th-generation/7

So unless you can actually provide evidence to back up your claims, I don't really need to respond anymore. I've provided both empirical evidence, and theoretical (latency) for why it doesn't matter. And you've responded with "Nuh-uh!"

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"Memory latency continues to be a critical bottleneck."

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"Oh look, the latency is the same."

Eric Johnson

Just to clarify: my questions regarding RAM were asked in the context of their usefulness in gaming. Sorry if that wasn't made clear.

So it looks like, at least currently, the benefits of DDR4 in regards to gaming is not significant enough to warrant the increase in price compared to DDR3. Thanks for all the replies.

Edit
2000th reply! :D

Arvidsson

If you're talking to me, you're either joking, or not reading my comments.

Yeah, I was joking. It was pretty obvious that Eric was talking from a gaming perspective.

Edgar Reynaldo

And here's a page on JUST DDR3 vs DDR4. EVERY BENCHMARK IS THE SAME. Games. Video encoding. Zips. And the whole beginning of the article explains why... latency.

They're all testing processing, not memory access! What a total waste of time to read! And the article doesn't explain how latency is so bad either.

Your evidence doesn't support your claims. Every thing you've posted has pointed out that the true latency of DDR4 is pretty much the same as DDR3, but with higher clock speeds. Your video encoding post showed faster encoding with DDR4. Most of the tests on https://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-review-6700k-6600k-ddr4-ddr3-ipc-6th-generation/7 this page were inconclusive. But most of them were not valid tests!!! They're testing software that wouldn't benefit from higher memory speeds. Their software was CPU processor limited. They weren't testing memory saturation or lookup at all!!!

I pointed out database and server software would benefit from DDR4, and you haven't addressed that at all. You haven't proved anything in regards to the points I made. File servers need FAST caches. If the latency of DDR4 and DDR3 is the same, and DDR4 runs at a higher clock speed, you will have better performance from DDR4, period.

Like I said, it's not worth it for you, but for some people it could be, so stop dismissing everything I say just because I don't agree with you.

Neil Roy

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Edgar Reynaldo

wtf is that supposed to mean? I'm not angry, I just don't appreciate having what I say completely ignored and glossed over. Katko says X doesn't matter because it doesn't help games. I say Y matters because it's not all about games. I gave clear examples of software that might benefit from DDR4 and then he gives evidence of software that would never have benefited from faster memory in the first place. I clearly responded to his points and he clearly ignored mine. But I'm just angry, right? Jeez, whatever.

Neil Roy

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Eric Johnson

Remember Toys R Us filing for bankruptcy back in September? Well, now it's following up on that by closing 182 stores.

Chris Katko

might benefit

I keep posting benchmarks, and you keep posting feelings and "what if" scenarios that keep shrinking.

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Now compare that with "last gen" CPU or "last gen" videocard to the current gen, and you'll see drastic results.

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It sounds like at this point, you spent $$$ on DDR4 and you're trying to prove your purchase was worth it.

Elias

I was going to reply to Mark Oates's recent thread about dice rolls [1] - but the thread got locked. So this seems to be the most appropriate place to reply.

This is my version with SiegeLord's algorithm:

#SelectExpand
1#include <math.h> 2#include <stdio.h> 3 4int main(void) { 5 const int SIDES_OF_DIE = 6; 6 const int NUMBER_OF_DIE = 2; 7 8 int N = SIDES_OF_DIE * NUMBER_OF_DIE + 1; 9 10 double events[2][N]; 11 int swap = 0; 12 13 int max = SIDES_OF_DIE; 14 for (int i = 1; i <= max; i++) events[0][i] = 1 / 6.0; 15 16 for (int j = 1; j < NUMBER_OF_DIE; j++) { 17 int swap2 = (swap + 1) & 1; 18 int max2 = max + SIDES_OF_DIE; 19 for (int i = 1; i <= max2; i++) events[swap2][i] = 0; 20 for (int i = 1; i <= SIDES_OF_DIE; i++) { 21 for (int k = 1; k <= max; k++) { 22 events[swap2][k + i] += events[swap][k] * 1 / 6.0; 23 } 24 } 25 max = max2; 26 swap = swap2; 27 } 28 29 for (int i = 0; i < N; i++) { 30 printf("%5d: %.9f\n", i, events[swap][i]); 31 } 32}

Same results as the initial brute force version but clearer code and much faster! Brute force doesn't work for more than about 10 rolls - the above can easily do 1000ds 8-)

Edgar Reynaldo

I keep posting benchmarks, and you keep posting feelings and "what if" scenarios that keep shrinking.

You keep posting benchmarks that have very little to do with what I said are the advantages of DDR4. The majority of the comparisons are not comparing what I was talking about. If you look at WinRAR and AgiSoft, their software performs quite a bit differently when using DDR4. There's got to be a reason for that. And it must be something they're doing that makes it more effective. So that automatically disqualifies what you say when you say there's no benefit. Like I said not for you, but maybe for others.

Just to help settle this, I did some duck duck googling of my own. Here's some performance reports by Crucial, on their DDR4 memory. Looks like it blows DDR3 out of the water in memory bandwith and the AIDA64 Memory tests. And that was just the first link I clicked on. Give me a break.

EDIT

The second link I clicked on :

PCWorld said:

Less power draw means less heat and longer battery life, so laptops and servers are expected to be the biggest beneficiaries of the jump to DDR4. Servers can be deployed with as much as a terabyte of memory and they routinely operate 24/7, so the power bills to keep them running—along with the onboard fans and outboard ventilation systems to keep them cool—can be enormous.

Mid-range and high-end laptops routinely ship with 8GB of memory, so the 20-percent reduction in power consumption is more important for extending battery life than reducing utility bills. The LCD panel remains the biggest power draw, and the CPU eats its share of juice, but every little bit helps.

Smartphones and tablets will benefit from DDR4 memory, too. Because they typically come with only 1GB or 2GB of memory—and their displays consume much more power than their memory—they'll benefit much like laptops will, from extended battery life rather than lower power bills.

Need I go on?

Chris Katko

And zero mention of performance. ::)

Memory bandwidth != performance. You know that.

Synthetic memory tests != performance. You know that.

Lower power usage != performance. You know that.

Eventual lower price ---> I mentioned in my first posts.

How many times must I cite this:

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[1]

I'm not saying memory bandwidth is meaningless--it used to be a dominate factor. I'm saying given our current CPU, bus, et al ecosystem, the latency is the critical factor and DDR4 offers modest, incremental improvements.

If all you can offer is "laptops will use less power" that's not exactly a glowing endorsement of radical technology. All it is, is a die shrink and a voltage drop (and DDR3L is already a voltage drop.) and incremental increase in clock speed (at the almost same incremental increase in latency). Eventually latency will decrease and there will be a net gain. It hasn'tyet. Therefor, current DDR4 offers nothing.

If you look at WinRAR and AgiSoft, their software performs quite a bit differently when using DDR4. There's got to be a reason for that.

Said the guy who said 7zip/zipping has nothing to do with his argument a couple of posts ago. ::)

I don't give a about 7-zip extraction, it's more than fast enough as it is.

The only places where DDR4 is faster, are the slim cases where the DRAM controller can prefetch the very predictable accesses to allow the higher bulk bandwidth to cover up the latency.

That won't be SQL. That won't be web servers. That won't be games. That won't be video encoding (unless you're talking about RAW files). And over and over the benchmarks show the same. If you're only faster in 1 out of every 60 benchmarks, you're not "faster".

DDR4 is to DDR3 what DDR3 was to DDR2. An incremental development. A die shrink. A voltage drop. A clock boost. And the same effective latency. We've hit a point where simply ignoring latency isn't yielding results when a CPU has to wait 200/400/800 cycles just to see the data its asking for.

So once again, let's play your game. Now you're citing WinRar.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-review-6700k-6600k-ddr4-ddr3-ipc-6th-generation/7

DDR3 vs DDR4. Again. WinRAR. Again.

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A new technology generation for a grand total off... ::drum roll:: 2.8654% percent difference. Wow! Lightning fast! How did I ever manage to use a computer before the advent of such ground breaking technology.

A4QJ_f-maxage-0.gif

Edgar Reynaldo

Congratulations on citing the exact same old benchmarks that don't prove anything.

Chrisk Katko said:

And zero mention of performance.

Okay, let's do it.

Duck Duck Google Round 2

Third link from the top :

Corsair said:

The real question and concern most users have when it comes to DDR4 is the higher latency, but as it turns out, this isn’t a very significant issue. DDR3-1600 has higher latency than any DDR4 on the market, while DDR3-2133’s latency is only marginally lower than DDR4-2400.

...

Right away I’ll say that in practical game testing – including testing with the integrated graphics – Skylake just doesn’t seem to benefit substantially from faster memory. This may change with DirectX 12, but modern games seem to be more capacity intensive than speed intensive. However, for any kind of multimedia work, memory speed becomes much more relevant.

...

Now that DDR4 has hit essentially mainstream pricing, DDR3L’s price advantage has become negligible. At the time of this writing, 16GB of DDR4-2666 can be had for the same price as 16GB of DDR3L-1866, and the same amount of DDR4-3000 can actually be had for less than the same amount of DDR3L-2133.

While higher speed memory tends to be less of a value than lower speed – that’s just been historically true – it’s worth noting that DDR4 gives you more performance-per-dollar over any DDR3 speed grade except for 1600MHz. And the flipside of DDR3-1600 is, as you saw earlier, a notable performance hit.

Conclusion

We’ll be continuing to test DDR4 against modern games as they come out, but regardless of performance scaling in games, DDR4 ends up being faster in virtually any other task than DDR3 and is a better price performer than the DDR3L needed to run Skylake. Users building new rigs with Skylake CPUs should really only be considering DDR4 and the associated boards.

Chris Katko

I'm just gonna have to agree to disagree. :)

Quote:

it’s worth noting that DDR4 gives you more performance-per-dollar over any DDR3 speed grade except for 1600MHz.

That was before DDR prices got sent skyrocketing.

http://www.pcgamer.com/dram-prices-could-skyrocket-after-already-doubling-in-the-last-year/

Again, when it comes down, it will be more cost-effective than 3. But since 99% of computers can ONLY use one or the other, it doesn't matter. Buy whatever RAM you can actually use.

Edgar Reynaldo

I still have to clone my XP drive onto the SSD I bought and pray it still works. By the time I get around to upgrading or buying another motherboard, DDR4 will probably have fallen in price again.

Neil Roy

I found the whole process of cloning my hard drive fairly painless when I upgraded it.

Edgar Reynaldo

Won't XP freak out and call home to check it's hardware id? How do I trick it? Or will it Just WorkTM?

People have told me to use fdisk and gparted and such and such and I really have no clue what I'm doing.

The SSD is still fresh out of the box. Can I plug it into the SATA slave and boot with gparted and then use ?Insert Command Here? to clone the drive completely, including boot sectors?

Also, I desperately need to enlarge several logical drives on the old HDD, including C. C is stuffed to the brim, and I can't install SP3. Can I do that safely once the drive is cloned?

Halp me hardware gurus!

Chris Katko

Honestly, I'd start a fresh installation whenever possible. There's so much crud that builds up over time in the registry/etc that can never really be cleaned out.

Won't XP freak out and call home to check it's hardware id? How do I trick it? Or will it Just WorkTM?

Windows... XP? You're serious?

Quote:

People have told me to use fdisk and gparted and such and such and I really have no clue what I'm doing.

For Windows or Linux? Either way, if you play around with them or read some guides it'll start to make sense. Modern Linux lets you hit "auto" and it'll just format it for you unless you want custom partitions.

Quote:

The SSD is still fresh out of the box. Can I plug it into the SATA slave and boot with gparted and then use ?Insert Command Here? to clone the drive completely, including boot sectors?

Also, I desperately need to enlarge several logical drives on the old HDD, including C. C is stuffed to the brim, and I can't install SP3. Can I do that safely once the drive is cloned?

I'd really just recommend going with an OS that isn't officially unsupported anymore. Windows 7 is way more stable (and you can still install an XP theme if you like the ugly fisher-price toy look).

Eric Johnson

I still have to clone my XP drive onto the SSD I bought and pray it still works.

Why XP of all things? :o I liked XP when it was current, but it's way too buggy for current use. I agree with Chris; go with Windows 7 instead.

Neil Roy

I'm not sure about XP... when I changed my HD on Windows 7, I bought an external hard drive for the backup, it has to be at least the size of the HD you are backing up. Fairly cheap. I then used Windows Backup feature which backed up to the external, and then installed the new drive and used Windows Restore to put it all on the new drive. It will partition the drive so there is a partition the same size as your drive you backed up. You can actually just go to your system Hard drive information and tell it to expand the partition to use the whole drive. It was all much simpler than I expected, just needed an extra drive for backing up to, which has been handy and I now use it to back up my programs and such.

I don't recall being prompted with problems due to changed hardware, but even if I was, you can usually just phone support, explain the upgrade and they will fix it for you. But I only recall doing that, I think once many years ago and I have expanded my RAM, changed video cards and hard drives since then many times.

I'm still using Windows 7, I set up some stuff on my system to block Windows 10 from being installed.

There was actually a hack you could set up in Windows XP to continue to get updates for it. You simply fooled Microsoft into thinking it was a... I forget the name for it... embedded system? Anyhow, the government paid for 5 more years support and after that, my wife's XP system continued to get support until I grabbed Windows 7 for her. You can grab a downloadable, digital Windows 7 from Amazon for like $41CDN. You pay for it and t hen you can download it right away, came with a thumbdrive installer so you can just plug in the thumbdrive and install. And it was Windows 7 Professional, which pissed me off as her Windows 7 is better than my home edition! ;D ;) I may have to buy another copy of it for myself.

Edgar: I put the source code to my City3D program in the LearnOpenGL thread, if you're curious about how I did skybox's.

Niunio

Didn't this overflowed yet?

Bruce Perry

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MiquelFire

Quack!

Neil Roy

Played Portal 2 through again. Man I love those games. Need more like them.

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amarillion

Portal 2 is awesome. Stephen Merchant is awesome. Spaaaaaace!

Neil Roy

I loved it. So many laughs, fascinating puzzles. There was just nothing about it I disliked. It's sad to think there will probably not be another. I'm not sure how many more times I will end up replaying Portal 1 and 2. :)

I especially love the actor that done the voice for Cave Johnson, I don't recall his name, but I know who that is. Perfect choice.

MiquelFire

I felt that Cave was the best character in the series so far. Too bad that we may not get more stuff from him.

Polybios

So now they're apparently removing paintings which show women in a "wrong" way, pretending to want to start a debate about it. Not some almost-pornographic eye-catcher-crap, but a painting by Waterhouse. I ran into an exhibition showing much of his work by chance while staying in London years ago, otherwise I wouldn't know him.

If I'm not allowed to see Waterhouse, something is very wrong. >:(

It reminds me of the Nazis who removed so called "degenerate art" from museums.

Neil Roy

I felt that Cave was the best character in the series so far. Too bad that we may not get more stuff from him.

Agreed, I absolutely loved him. Laughed so much, I already miss playing it. I played through Portal 1 three times, done Portal 2 twice now, may have to play through it a third time, maybe try going for more achievements or something. I just wish I could explore that lower world more, such an amazing job they did on it.

Portal 2 is awesome. Stephen Merchant is awesome. Spaaaaaace!

Oh wait, was he the one who done the voice of that robot at the start? That was awesome! He done an amazing job. "Remember when we were together and I would say come back and you would come back? Good times those" (something like that). ;)

Erin Maus
Polybios said:

So now they're apparently removing paintings which show women in a "wrong" way, pretending to want to start a debate about it

Where is the evidence the gallery is lying?

Quote:

It reminds me of the Nazis who removed so called "degenerate art" from museums.

The difference is it's a choice made by a museum on its own volition, not a decision enforced by a state where disobeying means death.

I mean, don't alt-righters complain when they're compared to Nazis for that reason?

Polybios

You are totally right with your differentiation, but the similarity is elsewhere: the intrusion of politics and censorship into art, or rather art history; in this case in the disguise of a "debate". It's just totally stupid, a debate about what? Couldn't you debate better with the work being shown in the first place? You certainly cannot debate with Waterhouse anymore.

There are thousands of similar motives in works of art scattered everywhere around the globe. This is human tradition and history, this is past. No politburo can change that and no debate. If you don't want to alter the painting (I hope they won't), you can only decide to show or not show it. So it's the starting point of censorship, no matter what they claim. The painting is gone, without debate. They even removed postcards from the museum's shop. How democratic; decide first, debate later.

Want to ban all women wearing few/no clothes from art history? They are human. What should humans create art about? Pigs? Paint women with veils only? How boring.

Besides, it's a fucking ancient myth. Want to change those, too, to suit the political climate or, even, worse, to prevent someone feeling "offended"?

There are situations in life where women are the object of others' desires. Such is life. Life is depicted in art. If you censor art, you take something away from life, you diminish it. This is a stupid thing to do.

Besides, a painting is totally passive; It doesn't beat or bully or discriminate against anyone. It doesn't pose a threat to anyone.
If someone feels offended by a painting like this, the painting is certainly not the problem. >:(

Yet another thing: The solution to everything that is not sterile and might affect people (even negatively): put it down, remove it, don't mention it. Never challenge anyone, because every subjective feeling is always right by definition, never grow up, but make the world a more childish, a more sterile place. >:(

Neil Roy
Polybios said:

Want to ban all women wearing few/no clothes from art history? They are human. What should humans create art about? Pigs? Paint women with veils only? How boring.

I totally agree with you.

What the heck is wrong with a painting of a nude woman, or a man for that matter. It's just art. Women are beautiful. I think there's other things people can focus on. if they don't like them, ummmm, don't go to that museum? That's a nice looking painting, very well done. Nothing "pornographic" about it.

I'll never understand how people get so uptight about nudity. Not porn and sex, but the style you see in well done art, or even photographs, so long as their done in good taste.

Heck, even biblically (a subject I am hesitant to bring up on here), Adam and Eve were totally nude and God didn't have a problem with it until THEY were ashamed. I still can't figure out why they were ashamed. But... I don't have a problem with nudity at all, I love a well done painting or photograph, like say, a nude of a woman walking down a nice beach or something, painted or photographed looks nice.

Edit: Loved that painting, I think I have a new background image. 8-)

bamccaig

I preferred the GLaDOS character to Wesley or whatever his name was, but he did win me over by the end of the game. The original Portal was pure awesomeness. The sequel was good in that they added new game mechanics, and still kept with some of the humor.

If you enjoyed Portal and haven't played it yet then I can recommend "Portal Stories: Mel" which was a third party project that is officially licensed. It's sort of a different story that takes place in the same universe. It's been a while, but I think they still used a dose of humor for the commentary throughout the game, and it's a series of new puzzles to do too. And last time I checked it was free (gratis) on Steam. I don't like to consider that kind of thing as being truly part of the story (i.e., if there was ever a Portal 3 I would probably not consider Mel's story as happening unless Valve referenced it), but it's a perfectly fun digression. They did a really good job with it. I can't remember if it was indie or not, but either way I was impressed with the job they did.

Append:

I guess I didn't refresh before posting. It seems the discussion has turned to censorship of paintings portraying nude females. The first thing that I note is that The Guardian displayed a picture of a painting of topless women on its site without even prompting for an age or otherwise guarding the image. I don't think that's harmful.

In fact, "Feminist" activists argue all the time that breasts aren't even "sexual" and attempt to make them "normalized" so that women can be topless in public without catching an eye. So from at least one corner of Feminist doctrine breasts aren't even supposed to draw your attention. I happen to disagree because I personally believe that breasts are naturally provocative. In any case, certainly nudity is natural and healthy and should be allowed in art without scrutiny.

I don't know if there are other paintings that are more "provocative", but the painting of the topless women in a pond pulling a man in is certainly not "pornographic". Not even close. I would fucking know. I could write a novel. >:( >:( >:(

I have no patience for these Feminists, social justice warriors, or political correctness police. If women are as strong as men then man the fuck up and deal with it. >:( And if they aren't, firstly stop claiming they are, shut the fuck up, and still fucking deal with it. As somebody else said, you don't have to go to the museum.

Not every work has to appeal to every person. If that were a rule then no art would be displayed at all. I'm sure I could find a lot of really amazing works completely disinteresting. If I could have all of that work removed because it doesn't appeal to me imagine how much work would be censored?

I think it's especially shitty if an art gallery itself is making this decision to do it by itself. Whoever is in charge of this should be fucking fired. Obviously, they don't understand their role properly. >:(

Append:

Well I tried to find the really extreme Waterhouse paintings that they must be trying to suppress. Nope, couldn't find them. It seems that innocent one with some topless young women in a pond is the huge atrocity. Give me a fucking break. ::)

Neil Roy

I almost died laughing at this, especially near the end! ;D

video

bamccaig said:

If you enjoyed Portal and haven't played it yet then I can recommend "Portal Stories: Mel" which was a third party project that is officially licensed.

Awesome, thanks, I'll check that out for sure.

Quote:

In fact, "Feminist" activists argue all the time that breasts aren't even "sexual" and attempt to make them "normalized" so that women can be topless in public without catching an eye.

I actually agree with the feminists on this point. Women for example in Egypt were often topless yet in the Bible Israel lived there for 400 years and again when Jesus was first born and not a peep about it is ever mentioned as being wrong. Sorry for the Bible talk, but I do feel it is important as some people will try and use it to somehow justify such ideas. In the city where I live it is now legal for women to go topless... I'm still waiting, but none want to. I told my wife she can now walk outside topless but she will have none of it. LMAO ;D Yet they moaned and complained for ages all over the news. I feel a little ripped off, I was promised boobs!!! ;D

But if they think men won't look at them at least a little sexual, when we were denied seeing them for hundreds of years, sorry, we're gonna notice. It won't be until women have been walking around topless for a while and it becomes normalized that men will notice less I think. Some cultures it has been normal for a while now and you see on videos and such men not even looking.

Ironically the only mention of seeing someone nude as being wrong is do with children seeing parents. And I think it has more to do with showing respect than anything else. It's actually a subject I have been researching lately in my own Bible studies. Looking up "lust", the meaning of the word, what all the Bible mentioned about nudity, still researching, but it's an interesting topic, to me anyhow. I found it a little ironic to see a post about it here given that I just recently started looking into this very topic.

bamccaig
Neil Roy said:

I almost died laughing at this, especially near the end! ;D

Ahahahahah, I grew up with a dog, but I now have a cat because my [future] "wife" wanted one. ::) Cats are assholes. That video is so true. If we didn't live on the 4th floor of an apartment we might have a dog instead, but this one shits in a box instead of us having to walk its ass outside 3 times a day. :P

Quote:

I actually agree with the feminists on this point. Women for example in Egypt were often topless yet in the Bible Israel lived there for 400 years and again when Jesus was first born and not a peep about it is ever mentioned as being wrong.

I am not aware of the history of topless women, but then again just because they weren't writing about it doesn't mean that it wasn't sexual. Based on that logic, they might have been fucking random people in the streets and nobody noticed because it was so commonplace. :) What we can gather from stories in the Bible is that men were every bit as horny as they are now, and that women understood the power their bodies gave them.

There are nudist communities that would argue that our entire bodies are perfectly natural and there's no need for clothing at all. Presumably, they are not distracted at all by naked women because they see them all the time. While that's probably true to some extent, you cannot deny that sexual activity is needed by most of us on occasion, and if you happened to be in "need" it would probably be "hard" to not notice. ;D

Perhaps in a society where everybody is getting laid on a regular basis it wouldn't be distracting, but since we live in a society where people get to choose whether or not to have sex, and some people are ostracized, as a result I don't think it would be particularly successful to have the typical sexual "power" partially exposed in public.

On the other hand, I'm open to consider the alternatives. Nudity doesn't particularly bother me. I really do appreciate the female form. However, I'm willing to consider evidence of people being completely unprovoked by it in public. On the other hand, I imagine that society's developed these rules for some reason. I don't imagine any society's exist that are completely nude 24/7. I'd actually be surprised to find society's that were nude that were not sex fiends. :P

Quote:

Bionically the only mention of seeing someone nude as being wrong is do with children seeing parents.

I don't think that word means what you think it means. :-X

Quote:

Bionically: utilizing electronic devices and mechanical parts to assist humans in performing difficult, dangerous, or intricate tasks, as by supplementing or duplicating parts of the body...

That aside, I don't think your point is true. I think the majority of people have some story of seeing their parents naked at some point in their life. I know that in my childhood I saw both of my parents naked at least once. I don't think society is generally against that as long as it's "innocent" in nature.

However, Western culture at least is very uncomfortable with children and sexuality to the point of not talking about it at all. For example, masturbation. It's completely taboo. It's just seen as wrong. Most people would not even be able to have a discussion about it. Their minds immediately just shut down and they react emotionally.

On the other hand, I disagree that the only mention of someone nude being wrong is regarding children (though again I have no idea what you meant by "bionically"). People are easily offended by adult nudity as well. Both male and female, though humorously male nudity is considered far more offensive/controversial. Sexist! It is somewhat understandable since penises, particularly erect penises, are obviously very provocative. Though vaginae (I typed "vaginas", but the spell checker said no...) can be provocative as well, they tend to be relatively benign unless the woman is assuming a posture which displays the vagina "openly" which would be difficult to do unless you're doing some kind of crab walk or something. :P To be fair, a flaccid penis is also rather benign, but decidedly less attractive.

Append:

Also it has apparently been legal for women to go topless in Ontario for about 20 years, but I can count the number of topless women I have seen in public (or outside of my household) on zero hands (unfortunately). :(

Neil Roy
bamccaig said:

I don't think society is generally against that as long as it's "innocent" in nature.

Yeah, I don't see a problem with that. I seen my mom nude and even joked with her about it. I think the biblical reference has more to do with purposely trying to see them nude with more of a sexual reference. Accidents happen after all as you said.

Quote:

On the other hand

This made me laugh out loud... after just talking about masturbation. Pun intended? ;D

I'm not even sure if masturbation would be considered wrong Biblically, it's a topic (nudity, lust etc) I want to research. I don't tend to go to churches but look into these things myself. For example, the word "lust" means to strongly desire something and Biblically is used in reference to all sorts of things like lusting after money etc... and one wording in the Bible said "if you look upon a woman WITH LUST", meaning, you strongly desire her, as opposed to just looking. I was talking to my wife and told her, if just looking at a woman and finding her attractive was considered "lust" than I would have to gouge my eyes out! :D As I said, it's a topic I just started to look into. I don't wish to start a religious debate again, or preach, it's just something that interests me as I am a normal guy who appreciates the female form and I do not feel it is wrong to look at women, clothed or nude in a non-sexual manor, without lusting after them, though it may be too tempting for some to go that route so probably people should be careful.

As for "Bionically", check my original message, I don't recall typing that, I swear the internet changes my spelling on me! But I went back and corrected it. When I seen it, I was like "Bionically"?! Where the fuck did that come from?!?!

I guess I have to learn to read my posts over at least once before I post them. Not afterwards. ;)

Quote:

unless the woman is assuming a posture which displays the vagina "openly" which would be difficult to do unless you're doing some kind of crab walk or something

LMFAO!!! Too funny... ;D ;D ;D

Quote:

Also it has apparently been legal for women to go topless in Ontario for about 20 years, but I can count the number of topless women I have seen in public (or outside of my household) on zero hands (unfortunately). :(

You're in Ontario as well? Still trying to get my wife to go out topless. :D

Edit: Oh, and I guess in Germany it is legal for anyone to be completely nude in public so long as you're not "causing a public grievance". I think I seen a picture one time of a totally nude blonde woman walking down some city street and I was wondering where that could have been. Probably Germany. Interesting.

Edit2: Interesting post here! Most states in the USA allow topless women, I didn't know that.

https://www.quora.com/As-a-woman-in-which-countries-can-I-legally-walk-around-topless-exposing-my-breasts

bamccaig
Neil Roy said:

This made me laugh out loud... after just talking about masturbation. Pun intended? ;D

I don't think that I mentioned masturbation until later in the post, but I won't deny a laugh. :D

Neil Roy said:

LMFAO!!! Too funny... ;D ;D ;D

I thought that was quite clever. :D

Neil Roy said:

You're in Ontario as well? Still trying to get my wife to go out topless. :D

I am. I don't think I'd encourage it personally. Until it's somewhat commonplace I think that it would be attracting a lot of unwanted attention. It reminds me of a saying I've heard locally in regards to having a son versus a daughter (wording is not exact): With a son you only have to deal with one prick. With a daughter you have to deal with every prick. :P

The same logic applies. If women truly believe it to be a good thing then they should organize an agreed upon start date where they all stop wearing tops. At least if they are all doing it then the unwanted attention wouldn't be entirely focused on a few. And if they are correct then the attention would fade in time. But if they don't even really want to bare their chests, and they're just bitching just because they can, then it's pretty sad IMO. There are far more important things to worry about. But I would totally support national everybody is topless from now on day!

There used to be rumors of topless women at a popular beach near my city when I was a kid. It was probably around the time that the laws were changed or clarified. People used to claim that there were women riding sea-doos (personal water crafts) topless out on the lake, but unless you had binoculars you'd never see anything. It could have just been shit disturbers spreading rumors trying to get a rise out of people.

Sometimes I ride by that beach on my motorcycle when I'm passing by just to see if I get to see anything. So far I haven't even come close. :P The whole thing was a ruse. Probably cost taxpayers a million dollars for nothing!

Neil Roy
bamccaig said:

trying to get a rise out of people.

;D

When I tell my wife to go topless, I am just kidding with her. It's always funny to see her reaction. ;)

The only topless women here (Kingston), has been a pair of lesbians just doing it to show off. And some teenagers that were doing it for some publicity... I don't even remember why.

It bugged me because it was ALL you heard about for the longest time and you wouldn't know there was a law allowing it at all, nothing has changed. Just something to complain about I think. Even at our beach, where we have sunbathers all the time, nothing. It's not fair dammit!!! ;D

Here's a pic I found, I think in Germany, not sure. Hard to imagine this being normal (I censored it)...

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bamccaig

There was a music video allegedly shot in Montreal (or was it Paris, I can't remember) of a French girl group that shot the video by walking fully nude from one end of a notorious foot-traffic street to the other. The whole thing was shot as one sequence. I fucking love the footage, but it's censored so I wish I could find an uncensored version! :D The song is French so it's hard to really appreciate lyrically, but I appreciate the music video! I think it was titled "Yeah, Yeah, Yeah", but I don't remember the artists.

Append:

Then again, I guess Blink 182 were actually wearing skin-colored speedos for their nude music video and the censorship made the viewer unaware so it's possible these girls did the same. Apparently Blink 182 did a remake for one of their more recent songs where they had popular vlogger women do the naked walking through the streets, but again they were actually wearing skin colored clothing and the blurring effects made it indistinguishable. Rip off!

Eric Johnson

That's some top-notch blurring, Neil! You could land a job working for the Japanese adult film industry with those skills. ;)

Neil Roy

That's some top-notch blurring, Neil! You could land a job working for the Japanese adult film industry with those skills. ;)

Click the image. It looks like no censoring at all when small (which I found sort of funny, not intended), but when you click the image to enlarge it you will see the naughty bits are in fact hidden. ;)

I liked how it turned out to be honest, doesn't look censored at all until you click it. 8-)

bamccaig
Neil Roy said:

I liked how it turned out to be honest, doesn't look censored at all until you click it. 8-)

Just like Japanese adult "art" and "photography". >:(

Neil Roy
bamccaig said:

Just like Japanese adult "art" and "photography". >:(

I wouldn't know, I don't go looking for Japanese porn. Though I do understand they have laws which make them censor the lower private parts.

But you guys seem to know a lot about it. ;)

Eric Johnson

I don't know if it's true or not, but I've heard there are products you can buy which reverse the mosaic blur featured in Japanese pornography.

Neil Roy

I can't see how, unless their photos have layers. What I did altered the photo directly, so there's no going back.

Eric Johnson

I guess the blurring works by moving parts of the source image around in a predictable manner. If you know the pattern/algorithm/seed for the blurring, you could essentially step backwards through it to get the original image.

But like I said, I don't know if they're real or not... it's just what I've heard.

EDIT:

Kind of like how those sliding picture puzzles work.

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Neil Roy

Yeah, but this doesn't slide parts around. What it does (at least what I used) pixelates the image. Takes a square area of the image, averages the colours and makes all pixels that colour, and repeats that over your selected area, the size of the large square pixels adjustable by you. So you get a mosaic of squares. So there's no undoing it.

Perhaps the Japanese method differs, but I somehow doubt it.

For example, here is my profile picture entirely pixelated using the same method, only smaller in size...

611258

I used a size of 7, which means this 160x160 image is like a 23x23 image expanded to fit 160x160 without interpolation.

Elias

I depixeled it with Inkscape's "trace bitmap" function:

611260

bamccaig

I always suspected that Neil was secretly a pirate. >:(

LennyLen

Minecraft Neil:

611258

Minecraft with texture pack Neil:

611260

Neil Roy
bamccaig said:

I always suspected that Neil was secretly a pirate.

LMAO, nice! ;D

I should have known that would happen. I just used Irfanview. You can make a box around what you want to filter with your mouse, or do the entire image. Press CTRL+E and select one of many filters, for this, it was "Pixelize".

Edgar Reynaldo
Neil Roy said:

Heck, even biblically (a subject I am hesitant to bring up on here), Adam and Eve were totally nude and God didn't have a problem with it until THEY were ashamed. I still can't figure out why they were ashamed.

Study the language used in Genesis in the Greek and you will find out what they were ashamed of.

As the story goes, the serpent (Satan) tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden with the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (which is symbolic for Satan himself). In the Greek it says Eve was "wholly seduced" by Satan. Adam and Eve had sex with the devil. THAT is why they were ashamed and made coverings for themselves. It is very easy to prove this. Eve had two children at first, Cain and Abel. Cain was the son of the devil, and Abel was the son of Adam. Cain murdered Abel because he was jealous of the blessings Abel had received from God. Jesus talked about this when he said, "Ye are of your father the devil. A murderer he was from the beginning, and the work of your father ye shall do." Jesus was referring to the Kenites (the sons of Cain, the son of the devil). Satan was trying to prevent the Messiah from being born. But God gave Adam and Eve another child, Seth, through which the line of the Messiah came.

Quite frankly, I'm surprised you didn't know this Neil.

Neil Roy

No... I won't get into a Biblical debate. Bu-Bye!!! :) But I have studied it and I know what it says.

In other news... working on a remake of my older Test3D program using slightly better OpenGL, but not modern shaders. Somewhere in between. I may optimize it later, but if I have to recode every project every time the Kronos group decides to redo the opengl spec, I'll never get anything done! ;)

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Edgar Reynaldo
Neil Roy said:

No... I won't get into a Biblical debate. Bu-Bye!!! :) But I have studied it and I know what it says.

If you're so sure of yourself, what are you afraid of? I find it funny that you claim to have read the Bible several times and yet you still don't know something as simple as the fact that Satan has children too. Ever read about the tares and the wheat? The seed the enemy sowed are his children, the tares. The good seed is the seed that Christ sowed, the children of God. And no that doesn't mean they are all sentenced to hell either. Children of Satan can repent and become children of God by adoption. If you truly "know what it says" then you're obliged to correct me if I'm wrong.

Jeremiah 4:22 said:

22 "For My people are foolish, They know Me not; They are stupid children And have no understanding. They are shrewd to do evil, But to do good they do not know."

Neil Roy

Perhaps you missed this the first time around... let me repeat myself.

Neil Roy said:

No... I won't get into a Biblical debate.

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Chris Katko

Who is this Jesus guy, and why is he always trying to save me?

Neil Roy

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Edgar Reynaldo

Way to deflect the argument. What I said is biblical. Don't believe me, try reading your Bible again. ::)

LennyLen

Who is this Jesus guy, and why is he always trying to save me?

He's a kid from Mexico playing the simulation world you're living in.

Neil Roy

Way to deflect the argument. What I said is biblical. Don't believe me, try reading your Bible again. ::)

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Chris Katko

"Don't be a d!ck." Proverbs 0:13

Neil Roy

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Chris Katko

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Neil Roy

Anyone else watch the SpaceX launch today? It was amazing. The best part about it, at least for me, was watching those two boosters land again after launch. Incredible feat.

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Chris Katko

Rockets are spreading God's love into orbit.

Polybios

Genesis in the Greek

:-/

Quote:

It is very easy to prove this.

Interpretation of texts != proof.
Interpretation of texts without deep knowledge of its original language and cultural context: very far away from proof.

Neil Roy

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Edgar Reynaldo
Polybios said:

Genesis in the Greek

:-/

It is very easy to prove this.

Interpretation of texts != proof.
Interpretation of texts without deep knowledge of its original language and cultural context: very far away from proof.

I meant Hebrew. I was thinking of the New Testament when I said that. Big deal.

And yes, it's quite easy to prove that Satan has children if you cross reference the bible. Not everything is an "interpretation". Some things are literal. And the best way to look at what was said is to look at the original texts in Hebrew and Greek. It's one step closer to the source.

It's very, very obvious what happened in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve had sex with Satan, and Eve gave birth to Cain, Satan's son. This gave rise to the Kenites. This is who Jesus was speaking of. The story of the tares and the wheat tells you the EXACT SAME THING. They covered their private parts because they were ashamed of having had sex with the devil. End of story. :P

Neil Roy

It's very, very obvious what happened in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve had sex with Satan, and Eve gave birth to Cain, Satan's son.

Adam had sex with Satan too? LMFAO, wow... just... wow...

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Edgar Reynaldo

You don't like the truth, too bad. But I've had enough of your insults you petulant old fool.

Neil Roy

You don't like the truth, too bad. But I've had enough of your insults you petulant old fool.

And what truth would that be "Edgar"?! Quote me a verse to back up what you say. You cannot, because it doesn't exist!

bamccaig

It's very, very obvious what happened in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve had sex with Satan, and Eve gave birth to Cain, Satan's son. This gave rise to the Kenites. This is who Jesus was speaking of. The story of the tares and the wheat tells you the EXACT SAME THING. They covered their private parts because they were ashamed of having had sex with the devil. End of story. :P

Wait, wasn't Satan in the form of a "serpent" in the Garden of Eden. How do you have sex with that? I mean, I can imagine ways, but more to the point, how do you get pregnant from having sex with that?!

And also, pretty sure god said no apples, but I don't think he said anything about putting a serpent in your pussy. It kind of sounded like anything else was OK at the time. ::)

Eric Johnson

Good edit, Neil.

So I haven't had a haircut in 5+ years now, but I'm thinking about getting one. I'd have to overcome my crippling social anxiety to do that though. 8-) How often do you guys get your hair cut?

bamccaig said:

Wait, wasn't Satan in the form of a "serpent" in the Garden of Eden.

Maybe "serpent" has other meanings here... Ever heard the expression "trouser snake"? ::)

Chris Katko

Chuck Norris lost his virginity before Adam did.

LennyLen

So I haven't had a haircut in 5+ years now, but I'm thinking about getting one. I'd have to overcome my crippling social anxiety to do that though. 8-) How often do you guys get your hair cut?

I usually do my own. But here is how I dealt with social phobia and hair cuts in general: I'll choose somewhere as close as possible then walk past a few times so I can get an idea of the layout and exits. I'll choose one person and only ever go to that one person so that there's as much routine as possible and I always get the same cut.

I can pretty much go in to any hair dresser now as I've managed to make it an environment I feel ok in.

As long as you can retain a sense of control over the situation, you'll be ok. The familiarity helps build a sense of control.

Edgar Reynaldo
Neil Roy said:

And what truth would that be "Edgar"?! Quote me a verse to back up what you say. You cannot, because it doesn't exist!

How about Genesis 3?

Here, Pastor Arnold Murray goes over Genesis chapter 3 in explicit detail. He provides a full biblical proof of what I say. I learned it from him, I should know. He's the best Pastor I've ever known, and he is a true biblical scholar.

video

30 mins of your life to open your eyes to the truth. I'd say it's worth it.

And for Christ's sake, it was not an apple tree that Eve ate from.

The serpent is just another name for Satan. Read Revelations 20.

I could go into more detail, but Pastor Murray already did all the work for me.

Watch the video.

Pastor Murray's teaching saved my life, and picked me up out of the pit of despair. I know he was sent by God, because he teaches God's word without apology. Chapter by chapter, verse by verse, the way it should be taught.

I highly encourage all of you to watch any of the Shepherd's Chapel videos on Youtube. They will change your life.

Eric Johnson

That's solid advice, LennyLen. I'm curious about how you do it yourself though. Do you use scissors and all that, or just go for a "buzz cut"? My dad used to buzz me and my brother's hair off in the summer when we were kids. It was easy and convenient. I might end up just doing that myself.

EDIT
The local Target closed down the other day. Here's what it looks like now. :'(
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bamccaig

So I haven't had a haircut in 5+ years now, but I'm thinking about getting one. I'd have to overcome my crippling social anxiety to do that though. 8-) How often do you guys get your hair cut?

I went through a phase like that when I was about 19. I was too self-conscious to go to a hairdresser so I just let my hair grow out. Mind you, it only lasted a year or two. By then it was nearly shoulder length and I eventually got sick of it being in my eyes. What I eventually did was find a barber shop. A man cut my hair, not a woman that wouldn't shut up. It was awesome, and it made me feel welcome and comfortable. I enjoyed getting my hair cut by him. If you can, try to find a barber shop run by men. They will most likely make you feel more comfortable than a woman run shop would.

Alas, about 5 years after I found this barber shop the man decided to retire with his wife. His wife was running a hair salon on the other side of the shop. They ended up selling the entire shop to a woman on the other side, and she ran the entire operation. She was cutting the men's hair for a while, and I could tolerate her, but eventually she hired other women and a different woman started cutting the men's hair. And this broad would not shut up. She made going to get a haircut hell again so I reverted back to shaving it off myself.

I've been doing that ever since. I just wait for it to get long enough that I don't like it or it's annoying and then I use a pair of clippers to shave it right off. If I'm feeling really ambitious I will even take a razor and shave it smooth. I rather like to be completely bald. I think I look good that way. It definitely shaves off 5 or 10 years. Anyway, my finacée doesn't like me shaved so I usually let my hair and beard go for a few months longer than I like before I shave again.

Insert: A word of warning though. My hair grows very slowly now. I couldn't grow it out shoulder length if I tried. It might be partially age related (I'm in my 30's), or might be related to wearing a baseball cap everywhere I go for the last 4 years, but it's probably also related to shaving it off every time. I don't know. I haven't researched it. I like being bald so I don't care, though at the time I actually did enjoy having longer hair too. :P

Here, Pastor Arnold Murray goes over Genesis chapter 3 in explicit detail.

He can't even get through one verse without babbling. :-X I can't follow along because he keeps digressing mid-verse. >:(

An interesting thing comes up if you Google his name. It warns not to take anybody seriously that believes in the teachings of Pastor Arnold Murray. :D

I have to be honest, he does seem like a quack from that video.

Elias
LennyLen said:

I'll choose one person and only ever go to that one person so that there's as much routine as possible and I always get the same cut.

Doesn't really work for me. Either it's a walk-in place - then you wait and are assigned once it's your turn (plus in the places i go to people don't seem to work long enough at the same store that they still would be there when I have my hair cut the next time).

Or it's a place where you have to call and get an appointment, but my anxiety really prevents me from making any phone calls.

Eric Johnson
bamccaig said:

If you can, try to find a barber shop run by men. They will most likely make you feel more comfortable than a woman run shop would.

I went to a barber once about ten years ago and had a decent experience. The guy did a good job cutting my hair and didn't gossip or engage in mindless chit-chat like a lot of hairdressers do. It was one of the few haircuts I actually liked (most I just "get used to" after a week or so). Giving a barbershop a go isn't a bad idea.

My main gripe with run-of-the-mill haircut places is that they are too girly. I'm not used to the frilly stuff. It's just not my usual habitat, so it's inherently unfamiliar to me. Beyond that, I dislike how the hairdressers pretend to be my best friend while I'm there (waiters do the same thing, which I likewise dislike). I honestly don't care how their day has been, and I'd rather not talk about my day. It's all canned questions anyway. "Where do you live? Where do you go to school? What do you do for work? What's your family like? How's your day been?" It's not genuine.

Once they figure out I'm not interested in talking, it ends up just being 15 minutes of awkward silence. And then where do I look while sitting there? At myself in the mirror? At the hairdresser in the mirror? There are eyes everywhere... More often than not, I'd focus on an inanimate object (like a plant or a poster) until the ordeal was done with.

Elias said:

Or it's a place where you have to call and get an appointment, but my anxiety really prevents me from making any phone calls.

You're not alone. Phone calls are the worst, but I don't know why. It doesn't make sense. Phone calls are stupidly simple in concept, but they make my anxiety go through the roof. I absolutely dread phone calls and will more often than not let a call go to voicemail. There's a service called "Slydial" which I use often to leave messages directly on people's answering machines (only works for mobile devices). You should check it out. Best part is that it's free. You have to listen to an ad at the beginning, but basically you call it, listen to an ad, then type the phone number you want to actually call, and then it'll connect you directly to that number's voicemail system. It's much better than talking to someone in real-time.

LennyLen
Elias said:

Or it's a place where you have to call and get an appointment, but my anxiety really prevents me from making any phone calls.

I make the phone call a Mission with an obtainable Objective. I don't really make the phone call myself, as I created a persona for dealing with working in hospitality who does the talking. It's basically role playing. Most of the people I worked with in 15 years of hospitality didn't even know that I had a phobia of social situations or that I was autistic, even though it gets serious enough at times that I don't leave the house for months.

I don't recommend doing it all the time though, or you'll snap. Trust me. But for phone calls or appointments, it works well enough.

Neil Roy

I get my hair cut about twice a year at the same place. The last few times I had a nice woman cut it and she done a nice job and is very friendly. I'll probably be heading back there in April when the weather improves.

"Edgar", no thanks, I know how to read my Bible. I have read it cover to cover several times over now and studied it in depth, including the original Hebrew, Aramaic (book of Daniel) and Greek, so I know what it says.

Good edit, Neil.

Thanks. I liked it. ;)

In other news, been doing more 3D programming. This time on a newer 3D terrain project which uses older OpenGL code. Finally got code down pat where I can detect which polygon I am over on the terrain which is nice. Got a lunar landscape, the data I got from a lunar heightmap and image of the actual moon. Not sure what I want to do with this, thinking of having a 3D lunar lander game maybe? <shrug> Got the space skybox that I used in another project.

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Polybios

Once I talked to "Jehovah's Witnesses" who rang my door to convince me the end was neigh and I should repent (or so).

I was stupid enough to start a discussion, they showed me their "biblical proof". Their method was very peculiar: They had marked every 2nd-4th word in their Bible and were just reading it like that, leaving out the words inbetween. I loved it!

Neil Roy
Polybios said:

Once I talked to "Jehovah's Witnesses" who rang my door to convince me the end was neigh and I should repent (or so).

I done that once, except I know my Bible better than they do and I was proving some of their doctrines wrong from the Bible. I had one guy so stumped that he had to come back at a later date as he didn't know what to say. He brought back an ex-Catholic turned JW... he didn't fair much better. Had a similar experience with two Mormon girls. One of the girls done all the talking and the other just tagged along with her, a trainee perhaps. As I pointed out verses which proved some of their ideas to be false, the quiet girl was heard by both of us mumbling to herself, but out loud "you know... he's right"... the girl that done all the talking turned into a very angry look, it was priceless.

Eventually I had to tell them all to stop coming to my place as I was starting to feel like the training ground for all these churches. :)

On another note, celebrating my 33rd wedding anniversary today. My wife still looks good now, me on the other hand... didn't fair so well. ;)

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She still looks almost the same. Older than I am, but no grey that is noticeable. It's not fair I tells ya!!! ;)

Eric Johnson

Were the Mormon girls good-looking? My dad told me that when he was younger, a local Mormon church sent cute girls out to entice young men to join the church.

Congratulations on your anniversary!

Neil Roy

Were the Mormon girls good-looking? My dad told me that when he was younger, a local Mormon church sent cute girls out to entice young men to join the church.

They were about average looking as I recall. But they could send supermodels and I wouldn't attend their church. But then, my wife might start answering the door at that time. ;D

Quote:

Congratulations on your anniversary!

Thanks. Time sure flies. I couldn't imagine what life would have been like without her.

Chris Katko
Neil Roy said:

They were about average looking as I recall. But they could send supermodels and I wouldn't attend their church.

I would. You know, I'd have to see what they're talking about.

Edgar Reynaldo
bammcaig said:

Here, Pastor Arnold Murray goes over Genesis chapter 3 in explicit detail.

He can't even get through one verse without babbling. :-X I can't follow along because he keeps digressing mid-verse. >:(

An interesting thing comes up if you Google his name. [www.gotquestions.org] It warns not to take anybody seriously that believes in the teachings of Pastor Arnold Murray. :D

None of his comments are "babble". If he takes a moment to explain something, you should listen to it.

gotquestions.org? Really? You're going to use them as a reliable source of information? Pretty much everything they said there was a bald faced lie. It does not surprise me in the least bit. Satan will do everything he can to discredit people who teach the truth of God's word.

Neil Roy said:

"Edgar", no thanks, I know how to read my Bible. I have read it cover to cover several times over now and studied it in depth, including the original Hebrew, Aramaic (book of Daniel) and Greek, so I know what it says.

No, you don't. It's very clear that you don't understand what happened in the Garden of Eden, and if you don't understand what happened there, then nothing else is going to make sense either.

You've repeatedly insulted me. When you ask for proof of what I say and I give it to you, instead of looking at what it says, you stick your head in the sand and claim to have "superior" knowledge of what it really says.

"Neil" why do you use my name in quotes? You already revealed it earlier, and I trusted you to keep it to yourself. I can see you're not a man of honor at all. I chose not to use my real name on these forums because of people who were stalking me. I don't appreciate you threatening to "out" me. My real name is none of anyone's business, and I shouldn't have trusted you with it.

Let's put this BS to bed already.

Here's a segment of Pastor Murray's teaching on Genesis 4. It covers everything you need to know to understand what I've said.

https://youtu.be/e2AJdc81j0I?t=647

1 John 3:12 said:

10 In this the children of God are manifest, and the children of the devil: whosoever doeth not righteousness is not of God, neither he that loveth not his brother.

11 For this is the message that ye heard from the beginning, that we should love one another.

12 Not as Cain, who was of that wicked one, and slew his brother. And wherefore slew he him? Because his own works were evil, and his brother's righteous.

13 Marvel not, my brethren, if the world hate you.

What was the beginning? Genesis. Who was Cain of? The wicked one, Satan.

Matthew 23:27-35 said:

27 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness.

28 Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.

29 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous,

30 And say, If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.

31 Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets.

32 Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers.

33 Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?

34 Wherefore, behold, I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes: and some of them ye shall kill and crucify; and some of them shall ye scourge in your synagogues, and persecute them from city to city:

35 That upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar.

Jesus is speaking to the Kenites, the generation (offspring) of vipers. Who murdered Abel? Cain.

John 8 KJV said:

42 Jesus said unto them, If God were your Father, ye would love me: for I proceeded forth and came from God; neither came I of myself, but he sent me.

43 Why do ye not understand my speech? even because ye cannot hear my word.

44 Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.

45 And because I tell you the truth, ye believe me not.

46 Which of you convinceth me of sin? And if I say the truth, why do ye not believe me?

47 He that is of God heareth God's words: ye therefore hear them not, because ye are not of God.

Their father is the devil. He was a murderer from the beginning. Who was the first murderer? Cain. The Kenites are chilren of Cain, who was a child of Satan. From Genesis 5, Cain isn't listed in Adam's genealogy. If he was his son, he would be listed there.

What more proof do you need? There's more than this to back me up, and so far you haven't posted proof of anything. All you say is you "know your Bible". Yeah, right. You're just ashamed because you don't have a deeper knowledge of what is there. Your knowledge of the bible is superficial and shallow, just like all of your insults.

Watch the video on Chapter 4. It explains it all.

Neil Roy

Wow, you really want to argue don't you. Believe what you wish, I'll believe what my Bible says.

As for your real name, well, you did want me to tell the truth did you not? But I changed my mind and edited it out. Blame the maintainer of this site for keeping edits visible. I don't know why you want to hide your real name anyhow and I never promised to keep it secret. You felt the need to tell me for some odd reason.

Just like you now feel the need to argue... and I refuse to engage you in a pointless, never ending debate on the Bible. And I won't go there yet again.

Some people in here do not believe at all, and I respect that. They have learned all they need to from me from past debates, and they didn't do anyone any good except hard feelings.

If you want to believe some online preacher, go for it! Leave me out of it. I am sure you can find someone to fight with on this, just not me, though here I am, taking bullsh!t from you and I have been trying to avoid debating! You have been in some sort of strange mood all this year and I am close to either totally ignoring everything from you from now on or leaving these forums permanently, which is more likely. I see no need to come here and put up with attacks from you constantly when I would rather just talk programming, joke around and get along.

Chris Katko

I've honestly never heard "Cain is the son of the Devil" before. It's interesting... I'll have to read up on it...

[edit] Ah...

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Serpent_seed

Quote:

Serpent seed, dual seed or two-seedline is a controversial religious belief which explains the biblical account of the fall of man by saying that the serpent in the Garden of Eden mated with Eve, and that the offspring of their union was Cain. This appears in early Gnostic writings such as the Gospel of Philip (c. 350). This teaching was explicitly rejected as heresy by Irenaeus[1] (c. 180), one of the early church fathers, and later by mainstream Christian theologians. According to The Celtic Church In Britain, by Leslie Hardinge, the early Celtic church taught the belief in the seduction of Eve by the serpent.

[edit]

Quote:

Adherents of the white supremacist theology known as Two-Seedline Christian Identity hold the view that only white people are descendants of Adam and hence the chosen people of God.

;D!! I didn't know you were a white supremacist, Edgar! ;) I should have invited you to our meetings! (Wait...)

I honestly have no idea why "white surpemecists" aren't pro-Israel/jews. Like... they're white. So if you want whites... like... why "all whites... but not those whites." It's so absurd. Then again, I can't expect much rationality from a hate movement. ::)

Elias
LennyLen said:

I don't really make the phone call myself, as I created a persona for dealing with working in hospitality who does the talking. It's basically role playing.

I like that idea... I have to try it. But I'm not really sure how to start a persona - probably should have done so a long time ago then I would have one now I could use.

There's a service called "Slydial" which I use often to leave messages directly on people's answering machines (only works for mobile devices).

Not sure talking to an answering machine makes it easier - I normally just hang up quickly if a call directs me to an answering machine :p

Elias
LennyLen said:

I don't really make the phone call myself, as I created a persona for dealing with working in hospitality who does the talking. It's basically role playing.

I like that idea... I have to try it. But I'm not really sure how to start a persona - probably should have done so a long time ago then I would have one now I could use.

There's a service called "Slydial" which I use often to leave messages directly on people's answering machines (only works for mobile devices).

Not sure talking to an answering machine makes it easier - I normally just hang up quickly if a call directs me to an answering machine :p

Eric Johnson
Elias said:

Not sure talking to an answering machine makes it easier - I normally just hang up quickly if a call directs me to an answering machine :p

For situations where you absolutely must contact someone, I find it easier to rehearse a message to leave on an answering machine than to talk to someone in real time. Slydial allows me to do that. Everyone is different though, so your mileage may vary.

I find that my anxiety is lessened when I keep a consistent sleep cycle. Otherwise I teeter between near-constant anxiety and bitter self-loathing. I only wish I could identify the cause of my anxiety. There seems to be no catalyst for it, which makes me wonder if I am inherently broken.

LennyLen said:

I make the phone call a Mission with an obtainable Objective. I don't really make the phone call myself, as I created a persona for dealing with working in hospitality who does the talking. It's basically role playing.

I do this to some extent for my job. I pretend to be easy going and employ sarcasm and humor when appropriate to lighten the mood. It works most of the time, and I don't think any of the people I regularly see know about my anxiety, so that's a success. It's exhausting though, so I'm not sure it could easily be done for all social encounters. It's worth a shot though.

LennyLen
Elias said:

I like that idea... I have to try it. But I'm not really sure how to start a persona

Well, if you've ever role played and you've decided to talk in character, that's basically all you're doing. I decided that a good people-person talks in a confident unrushed voice, and that's how I started talking when I was working. I also talk that way now when I'm in stores, hair-dressers, etc.

When I'm talking in my normal voice I'm very quiet and speak too quickly for most people to understand me easily. I also miss out words or use a completely random word instead of the question without realizing it. That also makes it difficulty for people to understand me normally.

It's not a full persona. There's no name or background. It's more like a shell, or piece of armour. Sometimes I think of it as a veneer layer that sits over me and reflects normalness. Somehow it works.

Update:

It's exhausting though, so I'm not sure it could easily be done for all social encounters.

I don't think many people realize this. Pretty much any encounter that someone with social anxiety takes up a lot of energy, and it all builds up.

I was working 60-80 hour weeks for most of the time I was in hospitality and getting an average of 3 hours sleep a day. I don't know how I made it last for 15 years before something finally gave way.

Chris Katko

HOW THE HELL DID ELIAS DOUBLE POST?!?!?!?!

MiquelFire

If the forum takes too long to respond, you can end up double (or even triple) posting. I think I actually did it once.

My guess, however you end up sending two copies of the post to the server, two scripts are running, and they both end up checking if you were the last to post before each other gets to the insert part.

And if multiple PHP scripts can't run in parallel and the SQL service is multi-threaded, then maybe there is a delay from one script's insert being fully committed to disk or cache or whatever, and another script's select doesn't see the latest inset yet. If there's multiple SQL servers running, I can see this as being possible. (Seeing as the post ids are not skipping numbers... maybe not)

Edgar Reynaldo

Trying to make my post but it keeps timing out...

Edit
I made my reply in a separate thread here :

https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/617271

Neil Roy

I honestly have no idea why "white surpemecists" aren't pro-Israel/jews.

That is part of the reason why I absolutely cannot stand the whole Satan's seed doctrine. Setting aside the fact that scripture simply doesn't support it. One of the reasons it was invented was to claim that either black people or Jews are some sort of evil sons of Cain who was some sort of son of Satan. I don't know how people come up with any of it. It's just an excuse to be racist, and racism is one of those topics where I will get very angry as I absolutely cannot stand it. Anyone who judges a person based on their skin tone is a blithering idiot.

Also, even IF that were all true, Cain was the ONLY one that got the mark, whatever it was, we are not told. And Cain along with ALL of his descendents were killed in the flood. NONE of them survived at all, only NOAH and his family survived, and they have a totally different genealogical line than Cain.

That also wipes out any idea that the Jews were some sort of Satan's children, and I think I know where that putrid, vile lie comes from, but it cannot withstand the fact that only Noah survived.

Go around using God's word as an excuse to hate people based on their race will not win anyone over and it shows off your total ignorance.

Bah... I didn't want to reply to this garbage, but racism always makes my blood boil, especially when so called "Christians" use the Bible to support it. >:(

Edgar Reynaldo

I made my reply in another thread. See my edit above.

I am not spreading racism. The white supremacists twisted it into something it was not.

Satan has children. They were descended from Cain. He was a murderer just like his father and his children after him. It is completely biblical, and I proved it earlier. That you refuse to listen to the truth when it is right in front of you is your own personal problem.

If you actually care to continue this, I suggest you reply to my other thread.

Neil Roy

Got more programming done on my 3D Terrain project. I finally figured out how to detect the polygon I am standing on, and the exact position within it to determine my height on the terrain I am moving over. The beauty is, the math wasn't all that difficult. So that made my day.

video

Eric Johnson

Cool video, Neil. Do you have the frame-rate locked to 30?

Neil Roy

Cool video, Neil. Do you have the frame-rate locked to 30?

Nah, it's just rendering A LOT of polygons with zero optimization. I am pushing it at the moment. Once I add in frustum culling the frame rate will soar, but I needed to figure out this other stuff first. I worked on properly organizing my data for this so I can work with it easier. The terrain following was the first test of that improved data organization. I have more I want to do, like combine polygons which are on t he same plane into one large polygon to reduce the number rendered, stuff like that, but that's a pretty big task, for me anyhow. But it should be fun to see what I can accomplish with this.

Edit: Also, the FPS is normally around 40 for this terrain (gets like 140 for small terrains), but FRAPS slowed it down to around 30 as well. Not that it matters much as this is not optimized at all yet.

Also... REPLY #2100! :)

bamccaig

It's probably doing a check before it attempts the insert without holding a transaction open (and locking the table) for the insert itself. If there's a point in between when it has decided you are able to post, but before posting, then another thread/process is able to also do the same insert. 99% of the time this doesn't happen because the site is fast enough to do both the check and the insert before the next request can, but when the site hangs like that for whatever reason the race becomes almost guaranteed. I typically try to include that condition in the insert itself, which if the DBMS does automatic locking should be enough to prevent this I think (the data it is checking cannot have been updated by a different connection):

#SelectExpand
1// T-SQL syntax, just an example.. 2INSERT INTO post(thread_id, user_id, ... columnN) 3SELECT 4 X.thread_id, X.user_id,... X.columnN 5FROM ( 6 VALUES ('value1', 'value2',... 'valueN') 7 ) AS X(thread_id, user_id,... columnN) 8WHERE X.user_id != ( 9 SELECT TOP 1 10 user_id 11 FROM post 12 WHERE thread_id = X.thread_id 13 ORDER BY id DESC 14 ); 15 16IF @@ROWCOUNT = 0 BEGIN 17 RETURN -999; -- ERROR: You probably double posted. 18END;

The (VALUES ()) AS X() thing is a way of defining a resultset to select from or join to with literal values inline so think of the whole thing as a temporary table sort of thing aliased as X within the query.

Append

I tried to post this an hour or more ago, but apparently it failed. I've never seen this before:

{"name":"611278","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/4\/74f60ea3e7289453418db1360bd9e4d8.png","w":805,"h":662,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/4\/74f60ea3e7289453418db1360bd9e4d8"}611278

It might give another hint about what's going on in the background. :) It seems there is supposed to be some kind of locking mechanism to serialize posts. Unless this was literally just added/activated it begs the question of how it goes wrong. :)

Chris Katko
LennyLen said:

I don't think many people realize this. Pretty much any encounter that someone with social anxiety takes up a lot of energy, and it all builds up.

What he describes also fits into introversion not anxiety.

I'm an introvert. I "recharge" my emotional energy by being away from people--even if it's people I'm comfortable with and enjoy being around with no stress. (Though I also have to recharge my sense of friendship if I go too long.)

LennyLen

What he describes also fits into introversion not anxiety.

One often follows the other. For some the anxiety comes from feeling like there won't be a place to be alone. I'm the other way around. I didn't use to be introverted, I was just as happy being alone as with others, but after a while all the anxiety made me avoid people so much that I became introverted, and couldn't be happy unless I was alone. I usually feel more lonely if I'm with other people than if I'm alone as well.

In any case, if there is anxiety, it will be exhausting if it continues too long.

Chris Katko

I am not spreading racism. The white supremacists twisted it into something it was not.

I was clearly joking. ::)

Edgar Reynaldo

Katko,

I know you weren't accusing me of racism, but Neil did. He basically said what I believe was a fabrication made up to endorse racism when all I did was show him proof that Satan has children. For the sake of keeping the topics separate, I made another thread. I will reply to what he said there when I have time.

Neil Roy

{"name":"611281","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/9\/c\/9cded056fe1fb2e3577ee97d15d44181.jpg","w":620,"h":350,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/9\/c\/9cded056fe1fb2e3577ee97d15d44181"}611281

Chris Katko

Okay, just making sure. :)

Enjoy your religious thread in the other one. ;D

Anyone here play around with neural nets?

Neil Roy

Anyone here play around with neural nets?

No, but I did once program a TIC-TAC-TOE game that learned. I put no code in it at all that told the game how to win. It stored your moves and when you won, it learned how you won and then developed moves to block you. Winning against it was easy at first, but you could never win the same way twice. Eventually it got so that the best you could achieve was a stalemate. It was fun to program. I done that in BASIC back in the late 80s on my C64.

Edgar Reynaldo
Neil Roy said:

I done that

Every time you say that I lose a little more respect for you. The proper word to use is 'did' - I did that I did this I did something else. OR I have done this I have done that. But to mix the two is incorrect.

Chris Katko

Every time you say that I lose a little more respect for you.

Put the arguing in the other thread. It's getting ridiculous now.

BACK TO NEURAL NETS

Neil Roy

I programmed the game at the time to keep track of all moves and then whomever won, it would store the moves which lead to a win. When it played later, it would compare your moves with moves it had stored and then try and predict your next move, and then place it's mark at that location to block you. It of course, would also use the same idea to choose it's next move to win if there were no ways to block you.

I forget the algorithm used at the time, but it was fascinating. I think I had a book on artificial intelligence I was reading at the time.

Fascinating subject, I should putter around with it again sometime.

Chris Katko

That's really cool!

I'm restarting my old "Megalib" project which was an image to ASCII converter. The original version wasn't real-time.

I'm looking into cutting the dimensionality down and maybe optimizing with some learning methods / neural nets.

Most recently I was thinking about using an edge filter pass and match those edges to ASCII instead of raw pixel to pixel.

Old version: (Gamecube screenshot of Mario Kart: Double Dash)
{"name":"FpYc4vF.png","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/9\/c910456374d45d18ee86df1332acf1c2.png","w":800,"h":600,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/9\/c910456374d45d18ee86df1332acf1c2"}FpYc4vF.png

You can actually make out Mario's face if you look carefully. I think that's Peace in 2nd, and Diddy Kong as the third place back seat.

Some game map:

{"name":"K3F5d8O.png","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/6\/3\/63e96b50edb279b7e45032018a6038b7.png","w":642,"h":502,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/6\/3\/63e96b50edb279b7e45032018a6038b7"}K3F5d8O.png

MiquelFire

Wow, I actually had a reason to uncomment some member post hiding code in my custom CSS here.

How long ago did someone pissed me off enough to do that? Clearly, I was forward-thinking and just commented out the code at some point when I assume I didn't have to worry about it.

---

Also, I just thought about it today, with how little snow we had gotten over the past few winters, the snow removal company that plows our complex didn't put down the orange sticks to know where the pavement was for this winter... and I think we got more snow TODAY alone then we got the past two winters combined. And the news reported that the record for most snowfall in a winter was only the 2013-14 season... and so far, we're only halfway there.

bamccaig

How long ago did someone pissed me off enough to do that? Clearly, I was forward-thinking and just commented out the code at some point when I assume I didn't have to worry about it.

Hi, jerk. >:( :D

Neil Roy

I'm restarting my old "Megalib" project which was an image to ASCII converter. The original version wasn't real-time.

Very nice! Have you checked out this guy's page? ALL of his games and projects he has are 100% Windows console text mode and they are amazing! He sets the font size so small they are practically pixels. If you like text stuff, you may just love this. And he makes all of his source available.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-yuWVUplUJZvieEligKBkA

Wow, I actually had a reason to uncomment some member post hiding code in my custom CSS here.

Oh please please please share that with me! I use the block feature A LOT on Facebook, but don't have the luxury of that here. ;)

bamccaig

Neil, it's just a bit of custom CSS to hide the posts of somebody you don't like. It's actually pretty terrible because posts will just not make sense without the context of who they're replying to. It should only be used for extreme measures. I think I built that functionality into my "acc.js" library actually, which shows a UI to show hidden posts at least, but not sure if it still works... I don't like to silence anybody. I only blocked "Inphernic" or something for a while because at the time his avatar was unbearable..

Append:

Neil Roy said:

Very nice! Have you checked out this guy's page? ALL of his games and projects he has are 100% Windows console text mode and they are amazing! He sets the font size so small they are practically pixels. If you like text stuff, you may just love this. And he makes all of his source available.

How the Hell does he make the Windows console fast enough for games. Compared to Linux consoles it's stupidly slow. :P

Neil Roy
bamccaig said:

It should only be used for extreme measures.

Like say, when people want to argue about everything you type? I don't like to do it either, but if someone mocks me or just wants to endlessly argue, I use it. You should see my block list on Facebook, it is massive as I just won't argue with people. I love civilized conversation and have had many with people who are atheists etc and they have been productive and respectful. But others who get angry and mocking, I just have no desire to communicate with them ever again.

Would be nice to know the CSS code to add people. I wouldn't add many, only one I can think off at the moment on here.

Quote:

How the Hell does he make the Windows console fast enough for games. Compared to Linux consoles it's stupidly slow. :P

I don't know, but if you look at what he does, it's REALLY impressive and he gives away all his source code as well as a nice console game engine he developed. I may mess around with it sometime. His latest is a Mario clone, thought it was actual game graphics this time, but nope, a console. I done my own console "3D text" game, but nothing like what he did. He even has a Wolfenstien clone, in console, with sprites and colour! Kewl stuff.

video

bamccaig

I believe you can add this to your custom CSS where 9999999 is the member ID.

.m9999999 { display: none; }

The posts by that member will have a "class" attribute containing the string "m9999999". The CSS rule means any element containing the CSS class "m9999999" should not be displayed at all (should take up no space in the page).

But again, it's a pain not being able to see what even stupid people post sometimes. Even the worst offenders are productive sometimes. If you want, try my library out instead. It likely still works somewhat for this, and then you'll be able to see when posts are missing and show them or hide them if you like. If you don't like it, it's easy to remove it again.

Append:

You should be able to add it by adding the following script URLs:

https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js
https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.2/jquery-ui.min.js
https://castopulence.org/js/acc.min.js

Then in the code box add:

if(typeof bam !== "undefined") {
  bam.ignoreMember(9999999);
}

That should work. You should see subtle additions to the links at the top right if it's working, and if you find a post by "member id here" you should see some simple UI indicating that it's hidden, but can be expanded. I haven't tested that functionality recently, but I doubt it has changed.

Caveat:

When I tried using this UI I found myself more compelled to view the hidden content than ignore it. It doesn't really work. :P That's why I haven't used it in forever.

Eric Johnson

I think that's Peace in 2nd, and Diddy Kong as the third place back seat.

"Peace", huh? Is that a hippie ROM hack of Double Dash? :P It's easy to identify the characters and most of the detail if you blur your eyes. Looks like Baby Mario and Donkey Kong in first, followed by Peach and Wario in second, and then Waluigi and Diddy Kong in third. Is the track Yoshi Circuit? I loved Double Dash as a kid. :D

As far as account-blocking CSS goes, maybe a better alternative would be to set a given user's text to transparent, rather than outright hiding it. That way you'd still know they posted, but you'd have to highlight their text to see any of it.

EDIT

#SelectExpand
1<style> 2 3 .m7536 * { 4 5 color: transparent !important; 6 } 7</style>

That changes the text in bam's posts (for example) and all child styles to transparent. So you still see that he's posted, but you have to highlight his posts to actually see anything. ;)

{"name":"611282","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/8\/5\/85afaa5c55f70a85bd73d39e671d4da6.png","w":1600,"h":900,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/8\/5\/85afaa5c55f70a85bd73d39e671d4da6"}611282

Neil Roy
bamccaig said:

.m9999999 { display: none; }

Thanks, this worked like a charm. Peace of mind at last! :)

Edit: I tried the transparent idea out, but, I would be too tempted to highlight and read the text which would defeat the purpose. Not knowing a post exists is the best bet.

One other thing about the transparent text, my swearing filter shows censored words in red, so I seen a large blank post, with these red swear words that were not transparent! It was quite funny. ;)

Edgar Reynaldo

That's just childish. Enjoy your ignorance while it lasts.

Chris Katko

[dbl]

Chris Katko
Neil Roy said:

Thanks, this worked like a charm. Peace of mind at last! :)

It's amazing how childish the "adults" are being on this forum right now. There's like FIVE ACTIVE POSTERS on this forum right now. Grow up and accept people say and think things you don't. ::)

I don't agree with ANYONE here fully, at all. And? Nobody cares. Life goes on. I'm still able to converse objectively.

Neil Roy

For the record, I haven't actually blocked anyone... yet. It's just good to know how to if the need arises.

I took the CSS I was shown above, tested it out, made sure it worked, then commented it out so I have it if needed. :)

Be careful about making assumptions.

bamccaig

This documentary was recently made about [parts of][1] my city:

video

Basically there's a pretty serious epidemic of drug overdoses because there's Fentenyl (sp?) laced in the drugs people are buying, and it's so strong that an overdose is extremely common.

It's shitty that this city is going to crap. The major of the city was interviewed, and it's pretty clear that the politicians don't give a crap about the situation, and want to pretend it doesn't exist.

It's predominantly a poor person problem. Therefore, it's under the radar. It's rarely reported, and most people are living in a blissful ignorance (myself included). Pretty scary stuff.

References

  1. The city isn't entirely a slum or anything. There are very nice neighborhoods too. But the poorer neighborhoods are definitely getting worse, and the lines are blurring between the "poor" neighborhoods and the middle-class neighborhoods (the crime is spreading and no longer localized).
Neil Roy
bamccaig said:

It's shitty that this city is going to crap.

That seems to be the state of affairs all over. It's too bad. Some of the drugs are insane! My wife keeps track of these sorts of things and she has told me about some pretty destructive drugs out there now. I can't imagine why anyone would take them.

LennyLen
Neil Roy said:

I can't imagine why anyone would take them

When living seems worth than death, risking your life for an escape becomes the logical solution.

Neil Roy

I suppose so. Myself, I hesitate to even take an aspirin anymore. If I have a pain or something, I will wait it out instead. I haven't seen my doctor since I told him where to shove his pills (I wasn't rude, but felt like it after he practically yelled at me for stopping taking diabetes and cholesterol meds).

If you can afford to waste money on drugs and booze, than you can afford to not take them and use it to improve your life in a more positive way. It's too bad people feel there is no other way out, when there is.

And I am speaking from experience as I was addicted to pills about... 34 years ago (yeesh, that made me feel old! ;D). I was popping way too many of them and even had a stroke which I never told any doctor about, but it scared me into getting off of them (half my body was paralyzed for a while).

Plus I find all the meds and drugs in this world never help, but if you stay on them they almost always make things worse.

bamccaig

The pharmaceutical companies are making huge profits producing barely understood complex chemicals for human consumption claimed to be beneficial or curative when in reality the affects are complex and cannot be predicted on a given individual. I certainly believe that government is failing to regulate medicine sufficiently, and I think that is overall having a damaging effect on our world. Insert: But more importantly, I think that government is failing to regulate food and drink sufficiently which is probably largely responsible for the diseases that we "need" medicines to treat in the first place. On the other hand, we do need to trust doctors to some extent because we have limited time on this planet and can't be masters of all. Diabetes and high cholesterol are pretty serious conditions. Hopefully you're at least eating better to curb the conditions (if god magically cured you please keep it to yourself, we don't need to fuel that debate here too ;)).

I've seen some compelling documentaries claiming that our diets are largely to blame for most of these health impediments (obviously) and that a change in diet can not only reduce the symptoms, but potentially reverse the diseases entirely. Unfortunately, there's money in treating symptoms, but not really in preventing disease so both government and corporations prefer you to get sick so that they can profit from your disease and control you. In that sense I think we would agree, but I don't know if I'm confident enough in my distrust of the system to stop taking drugs prescribed by a doctor. That said, there's a shortage of doctors where I live so I don't even have the luxury of ignoring the advice of a doctor because I don't have one. :P

I can somewhat rationalize why people get started taking serious drugs, albeit in a lot of cases it seems like a serious miscalculation and overreaction (i.e., first world problems 101). Some people obviously have it worse than others, and for the people that have it worse than me I'm in no position to judge. I think a lot of it comes down to poor neighborhoods having a higher percentage of people with shitty things to deal with influencing the decision, and then peer pressure spreads it to less poor people trying to keep up. It's sad anyway.

These days it seems crime is just climbing and climbing in the city, and spreading outside of "poor" neighborhoods and seemingly everywhere. Probably most or all of it is drug related. I don't know what the solution is, but I think it's fair to use words like "epidemic" and "emergency". Something needs to be fixed for sure. As you can see from the footage in the documentary, it doesn't seem like the city government really takes it seriously or gives a shit.

Erin Maus

There's like FIVE ACTIVE POSTERS on this forum right now.

I'm an active lurker if that helps. :D

LennyLen

I was playing around with MS Maps, and it has a pretty good view of the town I'm moving to:

{"name":"611285","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/0\/c0237ed45b56dd4f17244e138f487b63.png","w":1202,"h":933,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/0\/c0237ed45b56dd4f17244e138f487b63"}611285

The town with the nice beach 10-15 minutes away is Kaiteriteri, near the top of the map. I'll be living right where the SH 60 marker on the map is.

Neil Roy
bamccaig said:

if god magically cured you please keep it to yourself, we don't need to fuel that debate here too

You started it! He did, but I purposely refrained from mentioning that (though I don't feel comfortable not giving Him credit where it is due). Just remember that YOU started it this time!!! ;D

I am perfectly normal and healthy now. I am more careful with my diet than before, but I am not overly strict. I give 100% credit to... you know who... for healing me. ;)

I don't take any medicines anymore, at all and I am fine. Considering I was on 4 pills a day for diabetes until I started to pray about it (sorry to bring it up, but I did) and a couple months after I started praying I was off the meds and perfectly fine. I had two more check-ups with my doctor and confirmed that. The first time he examined me he didn't know I hadn't taken meds for months, I wanted him to examine me without knowing. I told him after he said my numbers were good that I hadn't taken meds in months. He was furious, ah well. The next exam he had to admit that I was fine and there were no more problems. I have never been back since, and that was 3 years ago. Before I had him as a doctor, I didn't have a family doctor for over 10 years and I was fine. I only seen him for the diabetes and nothing he done for me was helpful at all.

LennyLen said:

I was playing around with MS Maps, and it has a pretty good view of the town I'm moving to:

Looks like a nice area. Have you tried Google street view?

bamccaig
Neil Roy said:

I have never been back since, and that was 3 years ago.

That's the part that has me worried. I mean, in so far as I care about you anyway. :P Many of those symptoms can go unnoticed if you're not monitoring it until it's too late. I can totally understand not using the meds if you don't believe in them, but it shouldn't hurt to still have the doctors at least test you to see if the science in so far as they understand it believes you to be "fine" or "not fine".

Quote:

I only seen him for the diabetes and nothing he done for me was helpful at all.

The medical industry seemingly only wants to treat the symptoms instead of curing the disease. To some extent, it's because they really don't understand the disease yet, but it's not hard to say that changes in lifestyle over the past century seem to have had an adverse affect. Most people would point to our food out of common sense. The government should be regulating food production processes that haven't been tested long term. Particularly foods that doctors understand is generally harmful (i.e., processed foods, GMO, high sugar content, etc.). If the government restricted the corporations from luring us to these seemingly "easy", but very hazardous foods, our national health would improve greatly in every way.

I recently watched documentaries that claimed that cancer and diabetes research shows a direct link to food, but health organizations refused to even talk about it when asked for the documentary. When the subject came up, they threw the film crew out of the building. It certainly makes for great TV, but who the Hell has the time to follow up with all of their sources and try to verify the claims? The point is that government and corporations always seem to say things that we all can recognize as bullshit, but we're powerless to make them put our health and wellbeing before their profits.

Neil Roy

I agree about food. I researched it a little when I got diabetes and was shocked about what I seen.

For example, compare the sugar content of low fat foods especially. You get flavour in one of two main ways in many foods, fat, or sugar. Fat is actually not bad for you, that is a myth. Sugar is really bad for you though. Numbers to keep in mind when you check the labels is that 4 grams = 1 teaspoon. When you check something like chocolate milk, a 1 litre carton will have around 28G of sugar PER SERVING (per 1 CUP!!!) which is 7 tsp of sugar... PER CUP! And people give that to their children for school! It would be healthier to give them coffee for school! ;)

Look at other low fat items when you are shopping, they will generally have a higher sugar content than their counterpart. It's their way of putting flavour back in when fat is reduced. I have even seen close to 2tsps of sugar per serving in vegetable juice! It's insane. So I tend to drink more water and coffee (1 tsp/sugar total, or about 1/2 tsp per cup) these days.

The thing about fat is that fat does not produce insulin like sugar does. The energy from fat is used right away, so you tend to stay full longer. Your body uses insulin to store energy as fat, so you gain weight more with sugar and it also leads to diabetes and heart problems. This is why low carb, high fat (LCHF is you search it online) diets work so well. You don't count calories, and you can eat until you are full, you don't go hungry and you lose weight because the types of food you eat fill you up, you stay full and you use the energy right away, so you don't tend to be as sleepy feeling, lethargic... but more energetic etc.

Our dietary pyramid we see is upside down. It tends to have more breads and other carbohydrate items and less meat when in fact we should have fewer carbs and more meat. To remember what to avoid, just remember GPS (fewer Grains/breads, Potatoes/root veggies with starch and Sugar).

I now avoid dietary foods like the plague, drink far less soda-drinks, though I still do have some once in a while and less breads. Potatoes are my weakness though, so I have a tough time cutting them out. ;)

The Fifth Estate done a great program on sugar, including secrets the sugar industry knew for decades on how sugar increased your risk of heart disease... check it out, it's quite the eye opener!

video

bamccaig

That meshes very well with what I've been reading about and watching as well. I now keep an eye on various nutritional facts when I buy something: fat (but as you said, it's not THAT bad, and I don't worry about it so much), sodium (another very bad for your health way that they add taste to food), and carbohydrates (which is basically sugar and things that will turn into sugar in your body so basically sugar in disguise).

If the sodium is relatively high or the carbohydrates are relatively high then I consider it bad for you. That doesn't always stop me if I'm already acclimated to it, but certainly gives me a good reason to turn it down in any case. It's really very hard to find foods that aren't pure carbohydrates or packed with sodium. Pretty much raw meat from the grocery store's butcher shop is my preferred food of choice. We should eat more vegetables and a few fruit (sugar!), but we really haven't adapted our pallet (and we struggle to find the time to prepare it). Most fresh produce just rots on our counter or in our crisper. What can I say, "I'm only 31".

I really wish that alcoholic beverage containers were required to contain nutritional facts too. There's no fucking good reason it should be exempt. Just more corruption in the government regulation.

Neil Roy

Wow, I just checked out this episode of the Fifth Estate on teh vitamin industry and it will shock the shit out of anyone who watches it. I was never one to take them, and now I am glad. It's unregulated, which I didn't know about, and much of what you are sold is not what you paid for plus there is no evidence they do any good at all (which is what I already thought as I can't see how replacing a healthy diet with pills would ever help).

This is a MUST WATCH for everyone... I really need to remember to watch this program... this and Market Watch and two good ones. I often wonder how the Fifth Estate remains on the air with all the stuff they have uncovered.

video

bamccaig said:

should eat more vegetables and a few fruit (sugar!)

While I agree, the thing about fruit is that it comes packaged with the fibre we need to help our bodies absorb it slowly and naturally, so I don't worry about fruit, so long as you eat it naturally. Fruit juice is just as bad for you as cola for example, because the juice has been separated from the needed fibre.

What I learned while I had diabetes is that fibre slows your body's absorption of sugar. Huge problems arise when we drink sugar drinks like cola or fruit juice because we're not getting the fibre with it. I was shocked to hear a scientist say this: "God packaged sugar with the fibre we need" (her words not mine, she wasn't a religious person, replace that with "nature" if you wish). And this is true. Have you ever seen sugar cane, the plant white sugar comes from? It's like a tree, you would be hard pressed to eat enough of it to equal a teaspoon of sugar... probably break your teeth trying! My grandfather brought some back in the '70s and showed me. So it's true about the fibre, so I don't have a problem with fruit. In fact, when I get a craving for sugar I will often grab green grapes. If you look at the number of grapes you need to eat to equal one glass of grape juice, you will see you could never eat that many, which should give most people a clue that they shouldn't drink just the juice.

I also use honey in things like herbal tea. Honey is sweet, but unlike sugar, it is actually very good for you and even has been shown to have certain medicinal properties. I personally like apple/cinnamon herbal tea (gonna make some now actually) with honey.

Edit: and before you decide to go out and eat healthy, check out this report on chicken sold at various fast food joints. I was not surprised to discover that Subway chicken was actually only 50% chicken and the rest was filler. Years ago they were caught selling "Multigrain buns" which were in fact, white bread with food colouring.

video

DanielH
bamccaig said:

The medical industry seemingly only wants to treat the symptoms instead of curing the disease

Sadly, there is no money in curing diseases. It's a billion dollar industry and pharmaceutical companies are run mainly by shareholders that focus only on the bottom line. And the drugs they do create are not 100% perfect.

Neil Roy said:

much of what you are sold is not what you paid for

Here in the US, the Food and Drug administration regulates and monitors all drugs. Their main job is to make sure that the drug strength is accurate, the drug is "safe", the drug is "effective". (Notice the quotes around "safe" and "effective") Extensive testing is done prior to release into the market and post release.

Vitamins and supplements are also monitored by the FDA, but they are listed as dietary agent and not as a drug. These supplements have different regulations. There is limited testing pre and post release. Without a proper assay, there is no guarantee that your vitamin C 500mg tablet actually has 500mg of vitamin C.

Neil Roy
DanielH said:

Here in the US, the Food and Drug administration regulates and monitors all drugs.

Watch the video I posted. There are no regulations covering vitamins and supplements in the USA at all (they mention the United States in that as well as Canada).

Edgar Reynaldo

omg, my vitamins are fake? What will you tell me next, vaccinations are harmful too? ::)

DanielH

Just make sure you get your vitamins from a reputable company. If there are enough complaints, the FDA will investigate. It has happened a few times.

Vaccinations is another sore subject. People talk of all the bad things about vaccinations.

1. Yes, mercury is used in the preservative Thimerosal. Mercury isn't as harmful as people make it out to be. Also, there are preservative-free vaccinations.

2. You CANNOT get the flu from the vaccine. You can have a reaction and get flu-like symptoms, but this is usually mild compared to the actual flu.

3. Autism ... Most evidence says Thimerosal cannot cause autism, but still not fully proven.

Most important!!!

4. Tens of thousands of people die each year due from the flu alone. Mostly children (not fully developed immune system) and elderly (compromised immune system).

Could the vaccine have helped these cases? I would say "Maybe". You can still get the flu even though you had the vaccine, but the odds of getting the flu go down dramatically.

I prefer the flu shot over possible death.

raynebc

My understanding is that many years, including this one, the flu vaccine has less than a 1/3 success rate. I don't really bother since I am at low risk of any serious harm from the flu and I follow decent sanitary practices so that I'm not likely going to make anybody else sick. I remember all of the sky falling panic about the swine flu, and if I remember correctly it turned out to be a lot of paranoia for a strain that ended up killing fewer people than the normal annual flu.

DanielH

Because of how long it takes to make the vaccine, they have to make an educated guess on what strain will be prevalent when the season starts. Some times they make a bad guess.

A couple of years ago the strain didn't change. Do we still need the shot? No one could answer that, so we got the shot again.

bamccaig
DanielH said:

Here in the US, the Food and Drug administration regulates and monitors all drugs. Their main job is to make sure that the drug strength is accurate, the drug is "safe", the drug is "effective". (Notice the quotes around "safe" and "effective") Extensive testing is done prior to release into the market and post release.

Actually, based on what I've read and heard, the FDA doesn't do any of its own testing. The companies that are selling the product have to do the testing and submit the results. How could you possibly cheat that system?! ::)

The FDA is basically a joke. They exist to enforce the laws where there's an incentive to, but they certainly don't go out of their way to enforce them.

DanielH said:

If there are enough complaints, the FDA will investigate. It has happened a few times.

You shouldn't need to complain to have the product investigated. If it was serving its purpose it would test everything randomly and punish people that are cutting costs or mislabeling their products. Though I would bet that the FDA is just as easily bought as the rest of the government is.

Eric Johnson

So long as there is money to be made in selling treatments for symptoms of diabetes, I doubt there will ever exist an outright cure. Even if a cure were to be made, it would surely be "watered down" and administered in multiple steps to allow for maximum profits. Thank God for people like Jonas Salk who opted not to pursue patenting the polio vaccine (something estimated to be worth $7 billion had it been patented!), instead saying it belonged to the people.

Unrelated: You can get Steam copies of Shinobi and Streets of Rage 2 for free right now by checking out makewarnotlove.com.

Neil Roy

:-/

DanielH

I find it funny when people talk about cures for diabetes.

Insulin is a naturally occurring hormone that processes the sugar in the blood and puts it into muscle tissue for use. It is created in the pancreas.

Type 1 Diabetes: is due to the pancreas not producing insulin. This usually happens early in life (nicknamed childhood diabetes) due to an autoimmune disorder that at one point attacked the pancreas.

Type 2 Diabetes: is due to insulin-resistance of the body. This occurs later in life and is due to excessive body weight and little to no exercise. There are 2 subtypes: insulin-dependent and non-insulin-dependent. Most people start at non-insulin dependent. Eventually the pancreas will fail and they will need to supplement with insulin.

In both cases: once the pancreas stops, there is no insulin.

For Type 1, you can get a pancreas transplant. However, it is very risky. Usually, the less risky option is a insulin-for-life lifestyle.

For Type 2, exercise and diet initially help. For newly diagnosed patients this is enough to reverse the diagnosis. However, this is always a temporary reversal.

One interesting fact: if you live long enough every single person would develop diabetes.

Edgar Reynaldo

The only people who are brain dead are the ones who don't get vaccinated. And then we have to deal with it when they spread their diseases.

Polio vaccine.
Smallpox.
TB.

Eradicated because of vaccines. So stuff it. Some people have bad reactions to vaccines, like any other medicine, because of allegies or low tolerances.

But to say no one should be vaccinated is like saying everyone should live in the Dark Ages again.

Eric Johnson

I agree with Edgar on this one. For the overwhelming majority of people, vaccines are the way to go. There are quite a few people these days who refuse to have their kids vaccinated, and we're seeing diseases that were once wiped out making a return as a result. Is that just a coincidence?

There are risks associated with everything though, so no doubt some people will inevitably have a negative reaction to some vaccines. For the great majority though, vaccines are totally fine. I'd prefer to get a tetanus shot every decade instead of actually getting tetanus and dying from it.

Neil Roy

<retracted> My apologies. I need to get away from these and all forums I think.

Eric Johnson

It must be that time of the month... ::) Seriously though, what's the matter? You seem particularly on edge as of late. :-/

Neil Roy

<retracted> Read the edit.

I am a flawed man with my limits and I have been attacked form all side (not just on these forums). My apologies for my language.

I'll probably leave these forums as they bring out the worst in me.

Edgar Reynaldo

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Calm down.

You know, I was going to say that you're a better Christian than I am, being able to forgive me after how roughly I've handled our relations. You're right, I've been different the last few months. I've been very frustated with my life, and been dealing with a lot of depression, and a lot of things have been making me very angry lately.

Anyway, I'm sorry about all this. I've been looking for a fight lately, and I should know better than to do so, and so should you. Don't let your anger towards me spread towards the rest of our members. It's not their fault.

I suggest we make a truce. No more insults, from either side. Up to you though.

Eric Johnson
NiteHackr said:

I am a flawed man with my limits and I have been attacked form all side (not just on these forums). My apologies for my language.

I'll probably leave these forums as they bring out the worst in me.

Don't sweat it. We each have our flaws and exhibit anger from time to time after all. We might piss each other off every now and again, but each of us is here because we enjoy computers, programming, and games. We're all buddies in the end, right? So you don't have to leave these forums.

Neil Roy

Yeah, I deleted my post (but people can still read the edit). My apologies. Been under attack from all sides lately, both online and in real life.

bamccaig

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Neil Roy

<lengthy post deleted>Yeah, I think I will "live and let live".

I will accept responsibility. It was absolutely all my fault. I should never have posted a word in these forums.

My apologies, it won't happen again.

Chris Katko

I hate you all and I want you to know it. >:(

bamccaig
NiteHackr said:

<lengthy post deleted>Yeah, I think I will "live and let live".

I will accept responsibility. It was absolutely all my fault. I should never have posted a word in these forums.

Oh, grow a fucking backbone, stand up for yourself (and your wife), and keep on fucking going. Nobody is perfect. Fuck, both of you in this damn fight are delusional (obviously, you believe in a magician in the sky)! And that's OK! You can believe in different things, I can believe in different things (or nothing), and we can all still get along just fine, even if some of you are angry about others of us not believing in the same stuff.

The secret ingredient is smiling and letting go of your pride. Ultimately, it's not up to you which one of us (or anybody else) is correct. That has already been decided by the universe or by "god" or by whatever. Either you're right, and you can be smug about it, or you're wrong, and being smug will make you look stupid (though even if you're right you'd look stupid because there's no way of proving you're right). If you're right though, and obviously you think you are, then you don't need to get offended when somebody else expresses an opposing view point. I mean, because, you're right. And if you're wrong, which certainly you can't be because you're a genius, then you have nothing to lose by learning that you're wrong from somebody else because you'll ultimately be better off being more correct in the future. The only reason to possibly be butthurt is closed-mindedness and ego. Neither one looks good on you.

Effectively, this thread has turned into a demonstration of how unstable Christianity is, and how being an atheist is the key to happiness. Grow a pair, open your mind, and hold yourself up for fucks sake. None of this is any reason to tuck your wiener between your legs and bend over. If you're right then stand up for yourself. And if you're wrong (I mean, if you realize you're wrong) then learn from it and improve yourself. Jesus Christ.

video

:D

Bruce Perry

Neil, did you get your account changed so you could appear as NiteHackr? For some reason I have in mind that NiteHackr is a name I've seen before and probably a separate person.

Eric Johnson

Who's Neil? NiteHackr has always been NiteHackr... ???

Bruce Perry

Here's a post, apparently from NiteHackr, saying "I almost died laughing". Below it, bambams quotes it as "Neil Roy said".

Neil Roy

Who's Neil? NiteHackr has always been NiteHackr... ???

Yes, I am Neil. I started in these forums using my alias as most people do and with another avatar which will no longer work (animated GIF). And I decided to go back to that and change a few things up.

I used to use this alias "Night Hacker" on BBSes back before the internet existed, shortened to the 9 character limit for BBSes and even things like IRCs and the like back in the day. I can't change my alias on here that I can see, so I just clicked the box to use my alias instead (in your Control center for these forums).

Eric Johnson

Here's a post, apparently from NiteHackr, saying "I almost died laughing". Below it, bambams quotes it as "Neil Roy said".

Eh, that's by bambams though, so it's probably just a type-o. ;)

NiteHackr said:

Yes, I am Neil.

Yeah, I know. I was joking around with Bruce is all. I used to be "Sheegoth" (an ice monster from Metroid Prime) on here.

Edgar Reynaldo

If you pay attention to the Member Number, it doesn't change...

Eric Johnson
#8592 said:

If you pay attention to the Member Number, it doesn't change...

Very true, #8592! ;)

Neil Roy

#2229 baby! ;) I kind of wish I had joined a little sooner and had all 2s!

Bruce Perry

I had forgotten there was an option for using your alias. I did remember that there was some abuse of the name and avatar change facility, involving the name "lameDuck" <3, and Matthew changed it so you have to contact him if you want a name change. I certainly didn't mind being stuck on Bruce Perry when that happened (I wanted to be another Chris Barry or Steve Terry). :)

Neil Roy

I was looking for a tiny flashlight I had and it dawned on me, I had left it inside my computer over a day ago after working on it; and it was still on! It was a little dim today. Not the dumbest thing I have ever done. 8-)

LennyLen

This is what I'm working on now:

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edit: I hate UI design.

bamccaig

User interfaces are my least favorite thing. Similar to art (and sound), I'm hopeless at it. I absolutely hate trying to maintain the layout of things on a screen. I much prefer letting software do the layout. It can do a much better job than I can.

If I had the energy to do it I would develop a library whose purpose is to just take a data model (with annotations where required) and output a fully dynamic UI to view or manage it. It's pretty absurd how much time any of us can spend in a year just hand coding what the computer could be taught to do by itself. It's not particularly interesting in most cases. In most cases, we need "function" over form, and where form matters we can always use annotations/hints to guide the software to get it right, and where extreme measures are necessary override the process with custom code. In any case, there should always just be an "easy" method call to "just do it" and make it functional in 5 seconds instead of 3 hours.

The same is also true of output documentation (e.g., printing). We should have a library that can just take some data and text templates and just output something that will render "nicely" on a page. To some extent, I think that this exists through the LaTeX software packages, but it's non-trivial to interface with and most of the world is ignorant of its existence at all.

Neil Roy

Still messing around with 3D Terrain. This is a total remake of an old project, which I may end up totally remaking again with more modern opengl or I will go back to 2D games which are less likely to make my head explode. ;)

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Eric Johnson

Neil (or should I call you "NiteHackr" now?): does your 3D Terrain program have collision detection between the "player" and the ground?

Also, who do you guys think will be the last person to post here before the thread gets locked?

Neil Roy

Neil (or should I call you "NiteHackr" now?): does your 3D Terrain program have collision detection between the "player" and the ground?

Call me whatever you wish. (edit: changed back to my real name + appropriate avatar, less confusing) ;)

Yeah, it has ground collision, and it was easier to implement than I originally thought it would. If you look at the screenshot it has an "On Ground" indicator. You can fly around and if you collide with the ground and just move forward or something it will follow the ground terrain until you purposely fly off of it.

Here's the code to detect the ground. My terrain is divided up into "cells", square areas containing two polygons each. Both polygons use the same upper right vertex as the first vertex. The size of the cell/polygons is determined by how much I scale the terrain.

#SelectExpand
1// cx & cz = terrain cell we are in 2cx = tx / terrain.Scale; 3cz = tz / terrain.Scale; 4 5// A simple method to determine which polygon we're over 6int px = (GLint)tx % terrain.Scale; // X position within the cell 7int pz = (GLint)tz % terrain.Scale; // Z position within the cell 8if(px > pz) side = true; // if px>pz we're in the right polygon 9else side = false; // otherwise left polygon, yes, that's it! 10 11int CurrFace = (cz * (terrain.Size-1) + cx) * 2 + side; // Which polygon are we over 12int v0 = terrain.Faces[CurrFace].vert_indices[0]; // Get the first vertex index of this polygon 13 14// Calculate position inside polygon and height of at that point. 15float dx = tx - terrain.Vertices[v0].x; // Calculate the length of the x & z vector from 16float dz = tz - terrain.Vertices[v0].z; // the first vertice to our position on the polygon. 17vec3 N = terrain.Faces[CurrFace].surface_normal; // Get the normal of this polygon face. 18 19/// This is meat of this, it calculates the height within the polygon using it's normal to determine the height between vertices 20float dy = terrain.Vertices[v0].y + (N.x * dx + N.z * dz) / -N.y; // Calculate the height of our position. 21 22float minHeight = dy + walkHeight; // Set our height to the current position within the polygon plus walk height.

I was quite proud of this as it worked the first time I implemented it. of course, I spent lots of time understanding how this works ahead of time, which helped.

Chris Katko
Neil Roy said:

Call me whatever you wish.

Okay, Carol!

Neil Roy

Okay, Carol!

You know that is a man's name too right? Carol O'Connor (Archie Bunker), Carol Chessmen (the redlight bandit) etc. ;) Sort of like your name is both a male and a female name... Chrissy. :)

Chris Katko

Christine. ::)

Neil Roy

Christine.

Awesome movie! One my wife and I's favourites. :)

video

..."pure evil"... fitting. :P

LennyLen

Almost finished this now.

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Neil Roy
LennyLen said:

Almost finished this now.

Looking pretty good!

bamccaig

Also, who do you guys think will be the last person to post here before the thread gets locked?

Matthew Leverton. >:( What do I win?

Neil Roy said:

+ appropriate avatar

Let me just say that is an epic avatar. Nice work. :)

Okay, Carol!

video

LennyLen
Neil Roy said:

Looking pretty good!

I finally got DataTables, DataViews and DataGridViews sorted. They're not difficult, but it's just a very cumbersome process.

update:

I just bought one of these. Now I have to wait for it to arrive.

Chris Katko

ahah, I saw the "18+" button and I assumed the vape things would be covered in naked chicks or something. "Risky Click of the Day"

I forgot it was just because they're smoking paraphernalia.

LennyLen

ahah, I saw the "18+" button and I assumed the vape things would be covered in naked chicks or something.

It's naked women with snakes for hair. ;)

bamccaig
LennyLen said:

I finally got DataTables, DataViews and DataGridViews sorted. They're not difficult, but it's just a very cumbersome process.

I'm still trying to figure out what problem(s) they solve better than not. :P

LennyLen
bamccaig said:

I'm still trying to figure out what problem(s) they solve better than not.

They're not that useful for data manipulation. At least not small scale. The amount of boilerplate code you need to write is too much for a small application. They're useful for displaying data to the user in a tabular format though.

I was originally going to create a dataset that completely represented the access file in memory, and use that for all my queries instead of constantly hitting the database, but it just wasn't worth it. I still needed to create my own data structures for holding the data that the queries returned anyway. I do now need to query the actual database file a lot, but it does it so quickly, you can't tell.

Now I just make up data tables when I want to show the user information. Each datatable actually has information gather from several tables in the database. So I read the info the datatable needs from the database, then create a dataview to give a sorted view of the table then set the dataview as the datagridview's datasource.

For large projects that store large amounts of data in memory at a time, I can see the use for datasets, but I doubt I'll ever need them.

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

I'm still trying to figure out what problem(s) they solve better than not.

Seriously?! What have you been doing for jobs for the last two decades?

- Anything with C# uses datatables.
- Data tables support databindings. That means they automatically update when the data changes, and your cursor selecting one entry can automatically change whatever actual data is.
- Note that the data VIEWED doesn't have to be in the same format as the DATA ITSELF. It could be across multiple tables.
- Databindings/tables can be SQL queries instead of raw data.

bamccaig

I'm a Web application developer. These "databindings" don't work very well for that. ;) I believe there is (or at least was) some support for this phenomenon in ASP.NET, but the ASP.NET controls are an abomination on the Web and Web developer.

The last time I used a databinding wasn't very long ago, but as far as I could figure out there was no magic way to have the bound data update automatically in the database. I had to write custom SQL for each data manipulation command. I just find the entire API a waste of my time. I can build my own data types to serve the purpose that work how I need them to without the limitations of Microsoft's solution.

Importantly, they don't even seem to support a group update (e.g., where many rows are updated at once). This can be pretty important for performance reasons. Rather than issuing N commands you just issue one. Of course, whether this is useful or necessary depends on the application, but I personally have never found data tables to be very useful for my work. The corresponding GUI controls also tend to be rather rigid and inflexible. Of course, I haven't spent a decade on Windows programming so I'm not an expert on it. I've spent a decade on Web application programming (which takes a thousand forms and is constantly changing). These are different worlds.

LennyLen

And now with invoices...

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Eric Johnson
Neil Roy said:

I was quite proud of this as it worked the first time I implemented it. of course, I spent lots of time understanding how this works ahead of time, which helped.

Very interesting. I'd like to get into 3D programming, but whenever I see any 3D code, it just seems so daunting. :o

LennyLen said:

Almost finished this now.

Looks good! Nicely done!

Quote:

Matthew Leverton. >:( What do I win?

He's a robot now, so he doesn't count.

Neil Roy

Very interesting. I'd like to get into 3D programming, but whenever I see any 3D code, it just seems so daunting. :o

There's definitely some math involved, but once you start to understand some basic concepts and finally find a use for the Pythagorean theorem your math teacher kept pushing on to you, it can be rewarding. It can also make your head explode. It's amazing how much more you have to do with just one extra dimension. It's also interesting just how slow even modern hardware still is when it does 3D. There is a lot the programmer has to do to cull out; a lot of extra polygons to minimize what the computer has to render in order to make the game reasonably fast. You have to cull out what is just off the edge of your view (frustum culling), you have to cull out the polygons which face away from the user which they do not see (backface culling), you have to take into account the polygons which cannot be seen because of some other object blocking them (occlusion culling), then there's LOD (level of detail) which you lower as things get farther away, including just flat images at a far distance that turn into more detailed objects as you get closer. If you do all of this, you may get a reasonable frame rate with a detailed scene. If we ever invent a fast system bus, that would solve a lot of our problems.

I just got done watching an interesting series of videos where the guy takes apart and recreates an old game called "Dangerous Dave". He goes over programming it from scratch, including how to extract the original graphics from the original executable. He decided to code it in C89, to stick with the same C they would have used back then, with Notepad++ to code with and a makefile to compile. All of the game code is in ONE large file. It was a really interesting series to follow and could give some people an idea on how to do such a game. He hasn't gotten many views yet which is too bad as much of the programming applies to any language. The fact that it is done in C means it should be easier for people to port to their favourite language. In any event, I liked it.

video

Eric Johnson

Thanks for sharing that video, Neil. I watched a few of his Dangerous Dave and Traffic Department 2192 videos. He's pretty knowledgeable. A shame his content hasn't received a lot of views yet.

Neil Roy

A shame his content hasn't received a lot of views yet.

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. He done a great job on them, I was surprised to see the low view count. I tried to make it a point to like and comment on each video somehow.

Messing around with MakeHuman. It's a free, open source 3D program for creating 3D models of humans. There are plug-ins for Blender where you can import them into that, or save as other formats like Wavefront OBJs for use in your games etc. Neat stuff. I may use it to create a model for a 2D game, import it into Blender and further work on the animations then render them for the game.

You can grab it here...
http://www.makehumancommunity.org

There's also more clothing and such available that others have created you can grab for it...
http://www.makehumancommunity.org/clothesgallery.html

This is a quick render I done with it using default models and clothes...
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LennyLen
Edgar Reynaldo

Here's a bunch of supreme posts by the progenitors :

https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/176841/177260#target

GullRaDriel

Wow Lenny, that site is nice !

Bookmarked !

LennyLen

Wow Lenny, that site is nice !

Yeah, it's pretty cool. I discovered it a week or so ago when we were about to be hit by an ex tropical cyclone. The wind and rain that day was crazy. We got off light here, but the area I'm moving to in a couple of weeks had lots of flooding and rivers springing up out of nowhere.

random update:

How's this for a LoC value:

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Bruce Perry

Almost matches Neil's member number :)

GullRaDriel

Fate smite.

^^

Neil Roy

Here's a bunch of supreme posts by the progenitors :

That is probably one of the most useful threads on here. I copied much of what Shawn posted and saved it in my own notes! Very useful and very simply explained. A must read for any budding programmer. :)

Edgar Reynaldo

Reply #2200 !!!!

This thread must never die. >:(

New page by the way. What do you want to talk about? I think it's outrageous this thread hasn't had a post since Wednesday. :P xD

I suggest we have an Allegro Hack Day, or a Depot Revival for Easter (Passover) where you find an old depot game with source code and hack on it for a few days. Bring it back to life and improve it. A resurrection hack if you will.

8-)

Neil Roy

I suggest we have an Allegro Hack Day, or a Depot Revival for Easter (Passover) where you find an old depot game with source code and hack on it for a few days. Bring it back to life and improve it. A resurrection hack if you will.

I like it. My old Speedhack entry comes to mind.

GullRaDriel

Sun is somewhat coming through the cloudy days we had. Does it mean some hacking compos are also coming ?
I hope so !
8-)

Eric Johnson

@Neil: That's a cool-looking 3D modeling program. Just don't let your wife catch you modeling other women! ;)

@Edgar: Thanks for sharing that link about vectors. That thread has inspired me to spruce up on my linear Algebra skills (or what's left of them anyway).

I renewed my driver's license today. It expires tomorrow, but I figured I'd get a head start on it. I went to a public notary instead of the DMV. It cost a little bit more ($50), but I was in and out in just 10 minutes! The people working there were nice, too! Definitely beats the DMV.

Neil Roy

There's an excellent series of blog posts about vectors in video game that is one of the best I have seen.

http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/07/linear-algebra-for-game-developers-part-1/

Niunio
Neil Roy said:

The fact that it is done in C means it should be easier for people to port to their favourite language.

Sorry but that is just false. C is harder to translate to another language than translate from (say) QuickBASIC or Pascal. This is not an opinion: this is a fact.

The fact is that you must to know C to understand it* but you don't need to know QuickBASIC or Pascal to understand it, just a basic programming basis (in almost any language) and basic English understanding.
_____________________________

* Practical demonstration:

Ask a newcomer who don't know a word about C if it understand what the next code does:

int whatever (int*ptr1)
{
  for (int*ptr2=ptr1+50,int r=0;ptr2!=ptr1;r+=*(ptr2--));
  return r;
}

Now ask a newcomer who don't know a word about Pascal:

FUNCTION Whatever (ptr: ARRAY OF INTEGER): INTEGER;
VAR
 Sum, Ndx: INTEGER;
BEGIN
 FOR Ndx := Low (ptr) TO High (ptr) DO INC (Sum, ptr[Ndx]);
 EXIT (Sum)
END;

Bruce Perry

Ooh, vectors! I know all about those :)

{"name":"mmus-articles-how-far-fo-mosquitoes-fly-2","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/b\/4\/b4c1b092487184295d1164602911eef7.png","w":800,"h":534,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/b\/4\/b4c1b092487184295d1164602911eef7"}mmus-articles-how-far-fo-mosquitoes-fly-2

bamccaig

With Nuinio's C example rewritten to be more pragmatic I think the average programmer would understand it fine:

int whatever (int * ptr)
{
    int i, sum = 0;

    for (i = 50; i >= 0; i++)
    {
        sum += ptr[i];
    }

    return sum;
}

That said, these are both trivial examples that do not bare the teeth in either language. :) Here's the same program in Perl:

sub whatever {
    my $sum = 0;

    for my $x (@_) {
        $sum += $x;
    }

    return $sum;
}

You could probably also understand this Perl program relatively easily (with minimal squinting), but that doesn't mean you can understand any Perl program without an understanding of Perl.

Chris Katko
Niunio said:

The fact is that you must to know C to understand it*

I agree and disagree. You must know ANY C-derivative, which is like 90% of all good languages.

Web? Javascript.
Corporate? Java and C#,
Systems? C, C++.
Newer languages? D. Rust(ish) and literally dozens more.

Neil Roy
Niunio said:

Ask a newcomer who don't know a word about C if it understand what the next code does:

LMFAO!!!!! Awesome examples, yes, that is exactly the code I would show a complete newcomer! Oh man... that was funny.

I find it ironic that you compared Pascal which is rarely used anymore with C which is still in strong use to this day and is the grandfather of just about ALL of the best languages in use!!! :D

On another subject, followed a really nice tutorial on Blender today and created this. Just need Homer in this pic somewhere...

{"name":"611329","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/5\/c5aae15288229ba8dd98ba4080c23b12.jpg","w":1920,"h":1080,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/5\/c5aae15288229ba8dd98ba4080c23b12"}611329

Niunio

I know, my C code was intentionally obfuscated.

And say that "C is the grandfather of just about ALL of the best languages in use" is always debatable. I really think that best was pretty much made conditional by the economical interest of some software companies (remember: the only objective of C# was to overtook Java).

In any case we're not talking about which one is better or more used but which one is better to be translated to other languages. In that case BASIC and Pascal are the languages.

Chris Katko
Niunio said:

(remember: the only objective of C# was to overtook Java).

C# is better than Java in pretty much every imaginable way. The .NET framework itself is a godsend for people who have to write code quickly that actually works, and scales.

Chris Katko
Niunio said:

(remember: the only objective of C# was to overtook Java).

C# is better than Java in pretty much every imaginable way. The .NET framework itself is a godsend for people who have to write code quickly that actually works, and scales.

Niunio

C# is better than Java in pretty much every imaginable way.

And to buy Mojang paying billions was a greeeeeeeeeeat idea...

Sorry for the sarcasm, but the only advantage I see in C# is that its VM is highly integrated in Windows 10 (and it is an advantage only if you think it is an advantage), but since you can use any other language (including Pascal and Java*) the advantage is quite small.

Note the emphasis in the "I" of "I see"; I must admit that the only (serious) contact I had with C# was few time after it was published for the very first time, and I saw so much in common with Java that I stopped to read. In any case I think we'll never agree in this because there are a lot of personal stuff (education, preferences, experiences...) in this issue.

By the way, where's the Python fanbase? Why they didn't say their language is the best for learning? I really miss that sentence in this discussion.

[edit] I think we found the limits of this thread. Posting didn't work smooth.
______________

* Fun fact: You can use Pascal to create JVM executables too.

Arvidsson

You only need HTML and variables really.

Bruce Perry

You only need HTML and variables really.

I get the reference ;D

As compared to Java, C# has structs, i.e. aggregate value types. That's huge :)

bamccaig

C# has a lot of things that Java either doesn't have or didn't have until very recently. The only real advantage Java has had was being somewhat open source, but now that C# is somewhat open source too that advantage is also pretty much gone. To be fair, I'm also biased towards C# because I've worked with it for years, but I've dabbled in Java a few times over the years (outdated now to be sure) and was always surprised how many features it still lacked. For example, C# has had support for lambdas and implicit types for years (2008). Sounds like Java may have gotten lambdas around Java 8 (2014) and should be getting implicit types in 2018 (Java 10). That's just two features. The entire feature set is like that. C# is just easier to read and write, while Java lags nearly a decade behind playing catch-up.

Eric Johnson
Neil Roy said:

There's an excellent series of blog posts about vectors in video game that is one of the best I have seen.

http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/07/linear-algebra-for-game-developers-part-1/

Thanks for the link, Neil. Lots of good content there. I can see dot product being especially useful.

So Trent released a trailer for his latest game today:

video

DanielH
Niunio said:

but you don't need to know QuickBASIC or Pascal to understand it

I'd disagree. Pascal is only slightly more readable then C. And both are more reader-friendly than each of their object-oriented cousins.

Also, it depends on the coder. You should see some of my old code. Horrible. I was very fond of single-letter variables.

Kind of makes me want to pull out my old (very old) code and reminisce.

Chris Katko
DanielH said:

And both are more reader-friendly than each of their object-oriented cousins.

HAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAH

bamccaig
DanielH said:

I was very fond of single-letter variables.

I still prefer them in small functions that are guaranteed to fit on a screen and only have a few variables. It's easier to see the code when it's display size is smaller as long as it's not too complicated. The longer the code gets, the more detailed the symbols need to be.

Neil Roy

I just watched an interesting video. I never knew who was behind Blender's start before and I really like this guy. I love his personality and his philosophy. He was a little hard to understand at first, but you get used to his speech really fast and I just love this guy, his personality rocks. I especially love his thoughts on money, they're right in line with my own. This is one of those videos I wasn't going to bother watching and was so glad I did.

It's surprising the positive things that can come about from doing some good in this world and not being greedy. Ton is a truly special individual as far as I am concerned. This gives me far more respect for Blender and it's founder.

video

Edgar Reynaldo

Reply #2222!!!111!!!

I'm a very big fan of SketchUp but it doesn't texture things very well when you try to export them to an .obj file.

DanielH

Speaking of Pascal. In one of my computer science classes, we had to use flex and bison to parse a Pascal program into C.

One big issue was arrays.

Arrays in C

/* type name[ count ]; */
int a[10];

Arrays in Pascal

{ name : array[startindex .. endindex] of type; }
a : array[1..20] of integer;
b : array[-10..35] of real;

Neil Roy
DanielH said:

Arrays in C

That explains why C became more popular. :)

Otherwise, I don't see what is complicated about it. It would convert to:

a : array[0..9] of integer;

Though I have never programmed Pascal.

Edgar Reynaldo

He's talking about Pascal to C, not C to Pascal. :/

Unless magically you know a way to slice arrays in C.

Peter Hull
type name_array[endindex-startindex+1];
type* name = &name_array[-startindex];

I suppose?

Chris Katko
DanielH said:

Arrays in Pascal

{ name : array[startindex .. endindex] of type; }
a : array[1..20] of integer;
b : array[-10..35] of real;

hah! Arrays in D:

// https://dlang.org/spec/arrays.html
int[] b = p[0..8]; //slices? YEAH. SLICES.

Associated:

// https://dlang.org/spec/hash-map.html
int[string] aa;   // Associative array of ints that are
                  // indexed by string keys.
                  // The KeyType is string.
aa["hello"] = 3;

And I can still write all the way down to assembler and hardware calls, as well as keep all that C++/C#/etc-style static-typing and performance goodness.

Neil Roy

He's talking about Pascal to C, not C to Pascal. :/

Ah, okay, yeah, I read that wrong. :/

a : array[1..20] of integer;
b : array[-10..35] of real;

int a[19]; Then subtract 1 from whatever index they choose from 1 to 20 in code that references this array.
float b[46]; Add 10 to any index selection so that -10 = 0, 35 = 45, in code that reference this array.

Edgar Reynaldo

That's quite astute.
:-X

Niunio

Last Neil post is quite correct, and the Pascal compiler does just that.

Pascal arrays are an actual data structure. In the old times, first element ("index 0") stored the size of the array so it was possible to check array overflow in runtime; hence why it allowed up to 255/65535 elements per array (similar limitation for old BASIC interpretors too). They did the same with STRING data type.

In modern days it is a bit different, depending on the compiler configuration (i.e. optimization flags, array overflow test on/off, etcetera) it may use just a pointer (like C) or an "struct" that would store size, index type, low index, high index, reference counter and actual data. Yes, more complex than C, but it isn't much slower (if optimized) and it is safer (no accidental data corruption). They do the same with STRING, but they added ANSISTRING that works more like C char*.

Chris Katko

Yeah but you can't resize those arrays!!!

Neil Roy

Yeah but you can't resize those arrays!!!

You can't resize them in C either, well, unless you create a pointer and malloc, but then it's no longer an array.

Chris Katko

Hmm, good point!

But AFAIK, (baseline) Turbo Pascal has no support for Dynamic Arrays so you have to load pointers yourself.

Neil Roy

Yay, got a new home for my games. Thanks to Eric for pointing out github for hosting. It's all I need. I like how it operates as I can make changes on my computer then commit them easily. Very nice. New link in my signature.

Chris Katko
Neil Roy said:

Thanks to Eric for pointing out github for hosting.

You didn't know about github!??!?!?!?!?

Also, if you need private repos, Bitbucket lets you have 5 private repos for free. So you can work on say, your commercial indie game, with cloud backup, without everyone seeing your notes or code.

Eric Johnson

You didn't know about github!??!?!?!?!?

Neil's referring to GitHub Pages. Does Bitbucket offer anything similar to GitHub Pages?

Chris Katko

A static website? Apparently, yes.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucket/publishing-a-website-on-bitbucket-cloud-221449776.html

Apparently, it works with private repos. Which I would think implies supports free accounts.

You can add Javascript, images, and Disqus (::vomit::).

Limitations are:

Quote:

- The system does not issue cookies.

- Server-side scripts or code are not supported. For example, PHP is not available.

- Each page will be cached for 15 minutes. This means your changes won't be visible immediately. You can manually refresh each page in your browser to see the latest version.

Eric Johnson

That's pretty cool. It has the same limitations as GitHub (static content, so no server-side stuff). I'm not totally sure what they mean by "The system does not issue cookies" though. Does that mean Bitbucket itself will not issue its own cookies on the static site, or that my JavaScript can't create cookies if hosted there?

Also, you can have private repositories on GitHub if you pay for it or if you tell them you're a student (you'll need a student email address for that).

Chris Katko

Yeah, they're like opposites. Github is pay-for-private. Bitbucket is pay for more concurrent users. I don't know if they even have "public" repos.

But apparently both support websites. And since Bitbucket is private-by-default, that "could" be useful if for some reason you don't want anyone to see something on your website unless you let them.

For years actually, I was using Google Docs to hold all of my "website." I simply hosted an index.html and then linked to Google Documents for my list of projects, my resume, etc. That way I could edit them from anywhere, and easily do WYSIWYG.

For example:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OAvEkl9-rrCnJqElhOLO7_c3BK6ofpYkjyyT_KcpzIY

Except I'd put them in HTML files with an embed link, so it wouldn't show any of the edit controls.

But now with Git hosted websites, that may be easier / prettier.

Eric Johnson

That's pretty slick. Too bad I don't have permission to view it. :P

I used Bitbucket for a short time about two or three years ago specifically for the private repositories. It worked, but I disliked the interface, so I ultimately returned to GitHub. In addition to the regular Git features, GitHub offers issues, projects, and a wiki. Does Bitbucket offer that stuff?

Chris Katko

Too bad I don't have permission to view it.

LMAO

Try this link:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OAvEkl9-rrCnJqElhOLO7_c3BK6ofpYkjyyT_KcpzIY/edit?usp=sharing

I haven't touched these docs since I got a job years ago. :)

Neil Roy

You didn't know about github!??!?!?!?!?

Github? What's that? Do they sell hubcaps for car wheels? LMAO Of course I do. I have had an account there for years now, just never really used it except to check out other people's work. I didn't know you could host a website there.

What I like about Github is that you can use their software which will detect changes in your files and then flag the newer ones to be committed and uploaded. Makes maintaining a simple site like I want very easy.

Up until now, been used to using WS_FTP for Windows 95, amazing the software still works! ;)

Eric Johnson

What's the GitHub desktop software like? I've always just interacted with repositories on GitHub via terminal.

Neil Roy

It's pretty nice. Didn't take me long to get use to it. You create a new repository with it, then simply add the files in the folder it creates for your project. It will detect changes and show the changes when you run it. You can then type in a comment about it, click a commit button then push it and voila, it's uploaded. Pretty simple and sweet.

Edgar Reynaldo

I've had lots of people have problems with Github desktop mysteriously missing files in repos, and missing commits. That was a while ago though.

Chris Katko

I know this the question, but I've never had a problem just using normal terminal for git and use it for github and bitbucket.

I just press "up" in bash, and it's my compile script. When I'm done, I press up a few more times and it's my commit script.

[edit]

HOLY CRAP. In bitbucket, when you upload a commit with a CHANGE to a BITMAP, you can view:

- before and after side-by-side
- blend them together with a fader control to move between them.
- a split view with a mouse-over line for before and after
- a pixel diff view.

Peter Hull

Just a word about bitbucket - it has unlimited public or private repos for individuals (https://bitbucket.org/product/pricing?tab=host-in-the-cloud), supports mercurial as well as git (if that is important to you, I would use hg wherever I have a choice) and lets you host static websites like github does (https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucket/publishing-a-website-on-bitbucket-cloud-221449776.html). Also it has Desktop software (SourceTree) but I do not like it.

Main problem is that everybody else in the world is on github so if you're looking to find collaborators bitbucket isn't so good.

(sorry if this sounds like an advert, normal service will resume momentarily :-/ )

Pete

[edit] most of this has been said already :-X . Eric - the interface has changed recently so might be worth looking again.

Edgar Reynaldo

I like BitBucket's file hosting, but I also use Github. My friends haven't had good experience with Github Desktop though.

Eric Johnson

Eric - the interface has changed recently so might be worth looking again.

It definitely looks like it's improved since the last time I saw it. I'm going to stick with GitHub though. I'm already comfortable there, plus I have their "Developer" plan, so I already have private repositories, too.

Neil Roy

I took a taxi today and the cab driver was a really old, nice man. In our conversation I learned he was a programmer way back in the late 60s! The guy programmed on older IBM mainframes using punchcards. It was fascinating to talk with him. It's so rare to talk to someone who has been at it that long. Since I was a young child. Man, he was programming when I was a toddler in diapers! Kewl beans anyhow. :)

bamccaig

Was his name ... Arthur?!

LennyLen
bamccaig said:

Was his name ... Arthur?!

It's been a while since we heard from Mr Kaliokoski(sp?). I wonder what happened to him.

Neil Roy
bamccaig said:

Was his name ... Arthur?!

I haven't got a clue. I kind of wish I knew him better. It's the sort of person I would love to spend time with and hear about his experiences.

He also talked about programming Cobal and Fortran and his current computer uses Windows 10, so he has remained up to date. I think he was in his 70s or even 80s.

bamccaig

He made the odd appearance in IRC too, but I think it has been many months since I last heard from him in either medium. :( I'd like to think he's just lurking.

Append:

ML's other thread was probably just intended to distract us from keeping this one alive! We mustn't falter!

Eric Johnson

You guys seen any good movies lately? I'm still waiting for Michael Bay's live action adaptation of The Powerpuff Girls.

Edgar Reynaldo

Tomb Raider was worth it. New actress is pretty buff.

Chris Katko

video

Neil Roy

Last movie I seen was Blade Runner 2049. Otherwise, nope. The new Tomb Raider looks interesting.

MiquelFire

I can't even remember the last movie I have seen. Maybe Deadpool?

Neil Roy

I checked which movies are coming. Some interesting titles to me...

"Ready Player One" looks pretty interesting.

video

A surprising movie coming out on the 28th is "Paul, Apostle of Christ", looks interesting, but I am a little iffy on the story, could be good though. I don't see a lot of Bible movies so I may go see it anyhow.

video

Edit: Ooooo... this looks like a nice movie! "The Second Coming Of Christ"

video

Chris Katko

I can't tell if Ready Player One needs made or not.

Like, half of the source material is an homage... to Stephen Spielberg.

So they got Stephen Spielberg... to make an homage movie... about Stephen Spielberg.

It's confusing.

Neil Roy said:

The Second Coming Of Christ

I always thought the Passion needed a sequel. That, or the DVD alternative endings, where he just dies and then it goes to credits.

Also,

video

Also,

video

[edit] Damn A.CC's inability to use shrunk YouTube links, or links with timestamps.

Neil Roy

I always thought the Passion needed a sequel.

In this interview, Mel Gibson confirmed he was working on a "sequel" named "The Resurrection". He stated the movie was three years off, and this was in 2016. So maybe 2019? But, I wonder about where such a movie would go. I love Bible movies, so long as they remain true to what the Bible actually states.

video

bamccaig

This is getting a little too religious.

video

There. >:( YouTube lead me to interviews of the actor from the passion movie, and the fucking idiot was describing how he was near death on the set (allegedly), and Mel Gibson opted to gamble his life, and he was like yeah, if I die filming this movie so many people will be saved... Fucking idiots. It's a goddamn movie. There's no fucking reason he should have needed to risk his life to achieve the footage. It's not even like a fucking car stunt scene or something. And there are stunt doubles for actual dangerous stunts. The whole point of Hollywood is that they can fake all of that stuff. It just sounds so fake to be talking about almost dying filming a movie about Jesus Christ. Get over yourselves. Just trying to profit from the hysteria of the stupid audience that would eat it up. It's just frustrating.

Anyway, Ready Player One looks a bit interesting, but I'm sure it'll be ridiculous because I doubt the film makers have done the necessary homework to comprehend how something like that might actually need to work to be believable. Instead, it'll probably be cringeworthy as fuck, but worth a rip anyway.

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

This is getting a little too religious.

Before or after I posted tons of videos orthodox Christians would find offensive? :P

Mark Oates

I'm super excited about Ready Player One. :) Read the audiobook and some sections of it were really riveting.

Neil Roy
bamccaig said:

This is getting a little too religious.

Do like I did, don't watch what you don't like. Easy. My tastes in movies won't change because you don't like them. I am sure you like something I don't. I happen to love Bible movies... if they're accurate to the Scriptures anyhow. And that won't change anytime soon.

I'm super excited about Ready Player One.

I watched a good video where someone pointed out some of the "easter eggs" in the trailer. It was pretty interesting. Looks like it could be a pretty good one to watch anyhow. One of the easter eggs you can find in the trailer is Duke Nukem is in it firing a rocket which I found very kewl.

video

Niunio

Sorry for the late response but:

Yeah but you can't resize those arrays!!!

Why do you say that. ???

Pascal has dynamic arrays since Turbo Pascal 1 or may be even earlier. The way they works are almost the same than the other arrays with the difference they start always on 0. Internally they're almost exact than standard array.

bamccaig
Neil Roy said:

Do like I did, don't watch what you don't like. Easy. My tastes in movies won't change because you don't like them. I am sure you like something I don't. I happen to love Bible movies... if they're accurate to the Scriptures anyhow. And that won't change anytime soon.

I won't mind watching the movies if they're well made and interesting. I just meant that the thread was derailing into religion again and it was too much for comfort. >:(

Neil Roy
bamccaig said:

I just meant that the thread was derailing into religion again and it was too much for comfort. >:(

I understand. I thought about it, but it is just new movies that interest me, nothing more, nor will I go into more details about any of it. ;)

Chris Katko

It's been SEVEN HOURS since the last poster posted! We don't want this thread locking!!!

Neil Roy

:o

Arvidsson

I'm doing my part, are you?

MiquelFire

I do my part when there are a few days since the last post.

Neil Roy

Seen this on Facebook, I can't stop laughing when I see it. ;D
{"name":"611360","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/f\/7fd5588277cd8cea8f002aa127dc8088.jpg","w":640,"h":640,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/f\/7fd5588277cd8cea8f002aa127dc8088"}611360

Eric Johnson

Obligatory keep-this-thread-alive-until-it-burns-a-hole-in-Matthew-Leverton's-server post. 8-)

Edgar Reynaldo

Like a cancer, it will eat bandwidth until he cows to our demands >:(

Neil Roy

I seen an image about Democrats and I just had to whip up something similar about Liberals here in Canada (and any worldwide for that matter).

Warning, if you are easily offended, don't look at this (Edgar, I am looking in your direction ;) )

{"name":"611368","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/3\/3\/333c9d40c8aa1c00435e0a99f00b4346.jpg","w":600,"h":384,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/3\/3\/333c9d40c8aa1c00435e0a99f00b4346"}611368

Eric Johnson

Ha, you should make fun of the ideology, not the person. Otherwise it comes off as an attack instead of a critique in what they believe in (though I suppose some would consider a critique of their beliefs to be a personal attack all the same :P).

I'm not a liberal.

Neil Roy

On a more positive note, I just had some wine with the wife.

{"name":"611370","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/e\/9\/e954a3059fa427f3ee67bfc8790eaac5.jpg","w":512,"h":411,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/e\/9\/e954a3059fa427f3ee67bfc8790eaac5"}611370

Mark Oates

I used to consider myself a liberal. I guess until about 2 years ago. Now I just see that 1) everyone's crazy at the extremities of both sides and 2) the non-extremities on both sides have very valid, reasonable, and important lessons that you can learn from to make you better at life.

Neil Roy

I used to consider myself a liberal. I guess until about 2 years ago. Now I just see that 1) everyone's crazy at the extremities of both sides and 2) the non-extremities on both sides have very valid, reasonable, and important lessons that you can learn from to make you better at life.

I am pretty much the same, except I was more liberal voting until around 2004 or 2005ish when I gave it much more thought. I tend to be more conservative and vote in that direction these days, but I am not a blind follower. There was one election I didn't vote in because I didn't like the policies of anyone.

We have an upcoming one here in Ontario where I have had run-ins with both sides, but I still tend to be conservative, though some of the supporters in the PC party here felt cuts to save money should be done to welfare, which REALLY angered me as I am against kicking the poor to the curb to fatten your own wallet. But conversely, I am against the Liberal party and NDP party (ulta-socialists) reckless spending as well. I still have memories of when we had Bob Rae in Ontario which was the NDP running things. They are far left wing and our debt went from about 12% of our GDP to a whopping 30% in just one term! We have never seen a debt increase like that before or since, and now both liberals and NDP are promising more deficit spending when our debt is over 40% GDP I think at the moment. I understand their social aspects and looking after the poor, but it has to be done in a sustainable way, like encouraging job creation which gets people off of assistance, increases tax revenue as a result and reduces spending due to fewer people needing assistance.

So... yeah, both sides have some good points. Don't kick the poor to the curb, but neither should we drown in debt. There's a happy in between and nobody seems to be there, so I pick the ones that are closer to what I see as the better way.

And please God don't let this devolve into a huge political debate!!! ;D ;)

Mark Oates
Neil Roy said:

We have an upcoming one here in Ontario where I have had run-ins with both sides, but I still tend to be conservative.

I saw a headline somewhere that Jordan Peterson was considering running against Justin Trudeau. I think that would be interesting.

Quote:

And please God don't let this devolve into a huge political debate!!! ;D ;)

Well we gotta breathe some life back in the ol' Thread Locks Too Soon somehow! ;D

(Ok but yea guys, seriously please don't make this thread become political >:()

Neil Roy

I saw a headline somewhere that Jordan Peterson was considering running against Justin Trudeau. I think that would be interesting.

Well he couldn't do worse. ;)

Eric Johnson

I seldom hear anything about Canada in the news, but when I do, it tends to be something wacky. For example, I remember hearing a while back about the Supreme Court of Canada ruling in favor of allowing bestiality so long as penetration does not occur. :o Is that true?

Chris Katko

I think Trump was right.

Neil Roy

Wow!!! I just watched a documentary about new evidence on how the Titanic sunk. I was thinking before I watched it "yeah right, more conspiracies"... but then while watching it I was saying out loud "whoa, no way!!!". Yeah, this is mind boggling and something where nobody in their right mind would have sailed on this thing. In fact, out of over 100 of the crew that worked in the furnace rooms, only 8 sailed, the rest did not due to this problem! Yeah... worth a watch.

video

the Supreme Court of Canada ruling in favor of allowing bestiality so long as penetration does not occur. :o Is that true?

Yuppers! The story was sparked when a photographer took pictures of children performing... fellatio or something similar with dogs. But because there was no penetration, that was their ruling. Yeah, pretty sick bunch of people we have living here. It's shameful.

bamccaig
Neil Roy said:

Yuppers! The story was sparked when a photographer took pictures of children performing... fellatio or something similar with dogs. But because there was no penetration, that was their ruling. Yeah, pretty sick bunch of people we have living here. It's shameful.

What actually happened is that the law as it was written said penetration was illegal, but it didn't consider other things. Keep in mind, it was probably written 50 or 100 years ago. When I was like 15 I somehow got into a debate about rape with my mother, and I made a point about how men could be raped just like women, and she literally could not comprehend the idea. It was like saying I was going to make apple sauce with an orange. We don't always comprehend the full idea from the start. We usually start with a fragment of the idea and over time develop the full idea.

It's good that the courts upheld the wording of the law. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to live in a society where the courts could just ignore the way the law was written and criminalize you despite no law saying what you did was illegal. It's fair for the courts to refuse to uphold laws that they don't believe are just, but to invent laws is just anarchy. I'm not familiar with the case. I had to Google at all to figure out what you guys were talking about. It sounds like the courts' hands were tied because of the way the laws were written. And that's OK. There's an opportunity to refine the law.

You sort of have to consider the consequences: is it worse for a guilty person to go free or an innocent person to be convicted? I'm not sure what the answer is. Neither of them is just. Neither of them is fair, or right. You might argue that they're both equally bad. I think most people, including me, would lean towards it being worse for an innocent person to be convicted than for a guilty person to go free.

In any case, courts have to try to determine guilt and innocence without omnipotence. The only way to do so is to have laws written down to judge from, and to consider the facts and evidence. It's not a perfect process. It can't be. That media outlets would spin it to suggest that Canada had legalized beastiality just emphasizes how much of the "news" is complete bullshit just to sell ads and papers. It's all garbage.

Apparently in 2016 a new bill was submitted to clarify the laws.

On a side note, just today or yesterday a thought popped into my head. Humans can and will attempt to justify any act they find themselves committing. Whether it's a business person exploiting people for profit, a rapist exploiting a person for sexual gratification, or an angry mob assaulting a person accused of sexual abuse. We're a very irrational being most of the time. It's kind of amusing to consider that most of us value "justice", and yet most or all of us have serious bugs when it comes to determining what is and isn't just.

MiquelFire
Quote:

This video contains content from CBS, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds.

I clicked to see how long that Titanic video was and got this...

bamccaig said:

On a side note, just today or yesterday a thought popped into my head. Humans can and will attempt to justify any act they find themselves committing. Whether it's a business person exploiting people for profit, a rapist exploiting a person for sexual gratification, or an angry mob assaulting a person accused of sexual abuse. We're a very irrational being most of the time. It's kind of amusing to consider that most of us value "justice", and yet most or all of us have serious bugs when it comes to determining what is and isn't just.

You gave me a reason to justify my anti-social/asocial methods!

Neil Roy

I clicked to see how long that Titanic video was and got this...

That's too bad. The gist of the video is that when the Titanic sailed, it had a fire that had been burning out of control in one of it's massive coal bunkers (three stories tall!) which had been burning for several weeks before they even discovered it. The only way to put out the fire was to actually shovel the several TONS of coal out of the bunker, so they decided to set sail anyhow, with the fire still burning. One man discovered something odd in an old photo of the Titanic in dock which sparked his investigation, an odd colour on the side of the ship, right around where the iceberg hit as well later on which indicated that the fire which had been burning for weeks at that time had physically effected the metal. Add to that the fact that they found out the steel used in the construction of the ship was not the quality it should have been. Well, the ship sailed, fire still burning. The reason why the Titanic travelled at full throttle was because they were shovelling in coal as fast as they could to try and deal with this fire. A few days into the trip the fire was finally out and the ship then HAD to travel at full speed or it would have run out of coal which had been used up due to this fire and the company couldn't afford to buy much more coal because there was a coal workers strike going on at that time making it very expensive to replenish.

Anyhow, the coal fire burned so hot it was stated that one of the metal barriers that protected the ship from flooding was red hot and had a huge dent in it where the heat deformed and weakened it. Well, when the titanic hit the iceberg, going as fast as it was it started to flood, but it was still NOT in danger of sinking due to how it was designed. It could withstand being flooded and still sail because of these watertight compartments BUT... because this one key barrier had been weakened by the fire, there was an eye witness that seen it burst, where it had been deformed by the heat and that was the ONLY thing that kept it from sinking.

This wasn't some sort of conspiracy theory or anything, they went through the official documents and trial records as well as had experts analyze the data.

I guess the most coal workers who shovelled it into the furnace and knew about the fire before it sailed refused to sail on the ship when it left port! There were over 100 of them that worked the furnace and when the ship was ready to sail only 8 of those remained, the rest refused to sail with the ship and they had to replace that crew with a new one who didn't know about the fire and when they learned about it, they were ordered to keep silent about it.

Amazing anyhow.

Chris Katko

I've actually been working on improving the API of Allegro 5 for my personal projects.

I use DAllegro (and D), so I can use higher-level constructs that vastly improve functions.

Want to draw to a separate bitmap? No more:

ALLEGRO_BITMAP *original = al_get_target();
al_set_target(my_target);
draw_stuff();
al_set_target(original);

I can just do:

with(al_target(my_target))
    {
    draw_stuff();
    } //automatically restores target at the end of this. And supports nesting.

Likewise, with D's fantastic templates, I've got a WAY better al_draw_bitmap function signature that doesn't require looking up the manual every time you want a scaled or rotated bitmap.

#SelectExpand
1// Don't you love having newlines for every "group" of arguments 2// to keep track of them? 3al_draw_scaled_rotated_bitmap(bmp, 4 25, 5 25, 6 0, 7 0, 8 9 2.0, //x scale 10 2.0, //y scale 11 12 32, //degrees 13 14 0 //flags 15 );

Becomes

al_draw_bitmap(pos(25,25), scale(2.0), rotate(32)); 

//and no flags because we're not using them.

Want to tint it? Simply add tint(32,32,32,255). The parameter order doesn't matter! And the variables are grouped and way more readable! AND, parameters you don't use (like flip horizontal/vertical) don't show up unless you use them!

And it's all resolved at compile-time into the normal al_draw_scaled_rotated_tinted_blah_blah_blah_blah(...) function. Zero run-time overhead.

I also have "center" which subtracts the half of the width and height internally for drawing "centered" sprites. All using the same function.

I also wrote two helper functions so I can use .w and .h on bitmaps (which translate to al_get_bitmap_width/height at compile-time) instead of using the laborious, annoyingly long, Allegro 5 getter functions. (Whereas A4 had .w and .h)

And I'm just getting started!

Edgar Reynaldo

That's really cool, but can I use C++ easily from D? Or D easily from C++?

Chris Katko

There are caveats.

- D can call all C natively.
- D can call lots of C++ natively.
- For full C++, Calypso fork supports all of C++ (without wrappers) by integrating LLVM/Clang into LDC (LLVM based D compiler)
- Extra issues with using DLLs, I think.

C++ can call D code (D is kind of like C++ plus a runtime in a separate thread) but I haven't looked as far into it:

https://dlang.org/spec/cpp_interface.html#using_d_classes_from_cpp

Looks like you have to write "C++" mode (a subset of D, IIRC) to expose it to something C++ can understand. So, it seems like you just write a D to C++ wrapper layer.

(As always, note: D doesn't require a garbage collector but it's encouraged to use many features, like lambdas. Even then, GC's aren't as bad as people think for games. GC can be disabled for sections of code as well. And GC collections in D only occur during an allocation--never just randomly.)

There's also the -BetterC option, which resolves down to C code. That may be a viable method to use the expressive D template features/etc, but end up with plain C amd Allegro code in the binary.

I'm no authoritative expert on D, but I'm definitely enjoying what I can do with it.

MiquelFire

Okay, I just thought of something that would be interesting to see. You know how there are those games that are in the $4.99 $5.99 range? What if they went on sale on April Fools for $4.01 (At least in the areas of the world that uses mm-dd formatting). Or a game more than $41 be $41.YY with YY being the two-digit year (so $41.19 would be the cheapest in our lifetime if they started doing this next year)

Eric Johnson

H370 and B360 motherboards finally dropped today for Intel's 8th generation line-up. I can finally upgrade!

What if they went on sale on April Fools for $4.01 (At least in the areas of the world that uses mm-dd formatting).

That'd be neat, but I'm not sure being cute with the price/date would be good for business. :P

MiquelFire

Considering what April Fools is, that might be the only date it won't matter. It would only work if the price is not that much higher than the normal price from a business sense. Assuming the discount you might offer at any other time would actually be more. Like if your game is known for going for a 40% discount (like during one of the Steam sales) and the $4.01 or $41.YY would be less, why not.

Another trick a store could use (not sure if there are any laws that would actually disallow this) is to have the price on the normal page say 10% off, but the actual price is 20% once in the cart. Never the other way though.

Chris Katko

10% off, but the actual price is 20% once in the cart.

So for an April Fools gag, you want to commit fraud? ;) ;D

MiquelFire

Would this example be a gray area in the eye of the law? The best would be to have the normal discount, and right on the same page (and/or on the cart screen) have a promo code that gives the rest. Which I don't think Steam has a promo code in their checkout.

Chris Katko

OH MY GOSH. This thread has been going since 2015!??

Also, I can't even FIND the post where someone here gave me a copy of Laser Lock (whereas the Depot version zip was corrupted). Pretty sure I lost it on my laptop when an SD card broke in half when the laptop was dropped. :/

Still, I think it has no source code. So there's really no possibility of doing a Resurrection Hack on it.

bamccaig

This thread has been going since like 1999. >:( Just nobody knew it until 2015.

Not sure if I'm drunk or that makes sense. Or both. Nevermind, I know I'm drunk. I don't know if that makes sense.

On a side note, it just reinforces that I'm old. Time has been going faster since I turned ~18, but these days it zips by. It won't be long before I'm nearing my final years and wondering why I wasted all my time on the things I chose to waste it on.

Then Jesus is going to use a whistle to warp me to the Heaven level where it will feel like time has stopped and voyeurism will be a socially acceptable pastime..

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

voyeurism

He knows if you've been sleeping... if he knows if you've been bad...

Neil Roy
bamccaig said:

Time has been going faster since I turned ~18

LMAO, oh man, wait until you hit my age, at 53 each year is what a month used to feel like in the past. ;)

I was just talking to my wife and telling her that anymore, by the time I figure out what I want to do each day, it's time to go to bed again. ;D

MiquelFire
Neil Roy said:

LMAO, oh man, wait until you hit my age, at 53 each year is what a month used to feel like in the past. ;)

I'm not even 40 and I'm already feeling that.

bamccaig

I'm almost at the point already. I'll often refer to things that happened in the past in conversation, assuming it was a couple of month ago, and my lovely (younger) finacée has to inform me that it was actually 2 years ago. :P

Arvidsson

I read somewhere that the main reason it feels like time flies isn't because each day is proportionally smaller compared to your age, but rather that when you were younger you experienced new things more often. When you get older you establish a routine, eg wake up, go to work, work, go home, sleep, rinse and repeat and thus weeks just fly away and suddenly years have gone by, all of them being kinda the same. So, I guess the best thing to do is to try to experience new things in life and your life will feel like it's longer :)

bamccaig

That makes logical sense for sure. Of course, I'm not sure if alcohol or other mild-altering substances also "help" the time feel like it passes faster. :P I enjoy a healthy dose of something new and exciting, but those tend to be a bit expensive (even if just paying for the petrol). Not inhibitively so, but it would be if you wanted something new every day or and even once every weekend represents a noticeable hit to the annual income. Well, petrol is cheaper in the US than it is in Canada. I can save almost half by filling up my tanks in Michigan (but I have to pay about $8 in tolls to get there so the savings take a small hit). And if you did something new every weekend where I live I think you'd still get bored of the options within a few years. For people that live in an exciting location they probably have endless choice, but on the other hand their quality of life suffers for other reasons so I'm not sure it balances out. I imagine that once you take on responsibilities like kids the fast-forward helps you to get through it, though I imagine the tape starts playing in slow-motion for the first few years. The only concern then is what are you missing that you wish you weren't. But such is life. We don't get to figure it all out, and most of what we figure out we're too late. :P

Neil Roy

I don't mind time flying by so fast too much. Nor am I worried about the end of this life. The only regret I will have is not being able to have children. That would have been nice to experience. We would have had grandchildren by now. But such is life.

I do have something to look foreward to though.

Warning: religious beliefs in spoiler. ;)

The coming kingdom of God, where life will not have limits anymore. The world will be a much better place with all sorts of evil finally gone and everything restored the way God meant it to be. He also states that he has things prepared for people who obey Him that nobody could imagine.

Whether you believe or not, is up to you. I do and look forward to it as I see events prophesied unfolding in this world.

Not preaching, just giving my reasons for not worrying and why I look forward to what is to come.

Eric Johnson

With budget boards now on the market, I can finally begin buying parts to build a new PC. I plan on gutting my current PC for its GPU, PSU, and HDD. I'll be buying a new CPU, motherboard, RAM, and case though.

Here's what I'll gut:

GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 SC 6GB
HDD: Generic Toshiba 1TB @ 7200 RPM
PSU: Ultra LSP 550W ATX

Here's what I'll buy:

CPU: Intel Core i5-8400
RAM: 16GBs DDR4 @ 2666 MHz
Case: Phanteks Eclipse P400
Motherboard: GIGABYTE B360M DS3H

What do you guys think of that setup? It'll be a nice upgrade from my current setup (AMD FX-4300 with 8GBs DDR3 @ 1600 MHz on an old Gigabyte board in an ugly case). My only concern is the price of RAM. It's so expensive these days. :o But hopefully I'll be able to sell what's leftover from my current setup to make up for it.

Edit:

Any suggestions on RAM? Any brands to avoid?

Neil Roy

I was going to upgrade, then I looked at the costs and I thought, maybe it's time to build an old DOS system instead. ;) I doubt I will be upgrading anytime soon, not when prices are so insane.

The bonus is, if I can make something run on my system, odds are it will run on anyone's! :)

Eric Johnson

Graphics cards and RAM are expensive right now, but most other things are fairly inexpensive (relatively speaking). The blame for the current price of graphics cards can be put at least somewhat on cryptocurrency miners. But that's quickly changing. My GPU, which I purchased last year for ~$240, was selling for ~$470 back in February, but is now selling for ~$330 on Amazon. So while it's still inflated, it has already decreased considerably since then. Now as for RAM, I can't place blame for that one away so easily.

I know you don't play a lot of more recent titles, but I do. The upgrades I'm aiming for should do me well for the next few years at least.

Neil Roy

Just messing around with Bamccaig's Piano program. I found the piano notes had a large blank spot at the start of them which delayed playing the note too long, so I loaded them all into Audacity and clipped off the blank spot at the start and then played Amazing Grace on it. Worked nicely. ;)

video

I know you don't play a lot of more recent titles, but I do.

I did run into something I wish had ran a lot smoother recently. It's a Titanic game that is in the works and you can run the demo and tour the ship. It's fricken amazing in detail! Choppy on my system until I lowered the settings, still looks good. If you have a decent system, this looks really incredible at full quality.

Grab the Demo here **WARNING** It's a hefty download! But well worth it!
http://www.titanichg.com/demo/

video

video

MiquelFire

I'm in a position where I would like to try out VR stuff, but I need to build a new system. I do remember the Rift tester gave me 3 X's. Not only was my CPU and GPU not good enough, but the USB as well. Maybe I need something more than a PCI-e 1x slot card, in which case, with the mobo I have, I need a 1x GPU...

Seriously, that's the one thing I always hated about my motherboard. One PCI-e 16x slot, and a bunch of 1x slots (and a PCI slot because when I made the system, I had a PCI device I was using at the time)

Oh yeah! Valve's test only truly complained about the CPU, but it was more of a warning in that case as I think it said it might not be enough to have smooth framerates.

bamccaig
Neil Roy said:

Just messing around with Bamccaig's Piano program.

That's cool. :)

Quote:

I found the piano notes had a large blank spot at the start of them which delayed playing the note too long, so I loaded them all into Audacity and clipped off the blank spot at the start...

I had noticed this as well. It occurred to me to do the same thing, but I didn't get around to trying it yet. It's nice to hear that it was that easy.

Quote:

...and then played Amazing Grace on it. Worked nicely. ;)

Nice job. :)

My overall goal was eventually to map out an entire piano to the keyboard, and potentially also advance to the point of mapping chords too. And of course, if I could find or make the notes and chords for different instruments it could be expanded to "play" other instruments. Though I'm not sure it would work as well for a guitar as for a piano.

Append:

What I really wanted to do was generate the notes/sounds instead of playing a sample, but I couldn't figure out how. I lack any kind of music theory and it wasn't the kind of thing that people that understand share freely. :P :-/

Neil Roy

Throw a keyboard graphic on the screen and then compile it for a touch device and they could tap the screen like a virtual keyboard. Perhaps record the sequence played then save as a completed song. ;)

I know nothing of music theory though and that is about the only thing I can play on a piano. :)

I liked the notes you chose for the piano sounds.

One thing though, when you let go of a key, it stops playing that note, and I don't think it should do that. I think once you tap it, the note should play until it is done. That would be more realistic. As it is, I had to hold the key down to ensure certain notes would play fully.

bamccaig

I think that revised versions of the program are already going to work like that. I've stopped "stopping" the sounds so they should continue going. Which I agree, should sound better. Thing is, I appear to have a firmware or hardware glitch because I get noise when I test the program. That's part of why I lost motivation to keep going. I'm inclined to reinstall my primary OS, but then I have to set aside a weekend to backup whatever data I want to keep, etc. Make sure I'm not going to lose game progress or something like that. It's a whole thing.

Neil Roy

Well, as you could hear, it worked perfectly for me. So it is probably hardware. My sound card is like most, built into my motherboard, nothing special. Your program isn't exactly taxing on your computer either.

Try samples at lower quality? I would experiment with that as well. <shrug> Pull out audacity and test different frequencies out and qualities too.

I'm running Windows 7, if that makes a difference.

Eric Johnson

Where can I download the piano program?

Edgar Reynaldo

https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/617315/1036211#target and various other places in that thread.

Better hurry, the thread is gonna lock soon.

Eric Johnson

Thanks for the link, Edgar.

So I bought parts to build a new PC. I like to give my computers code names just for the fun of it. My current PC is named "Slave I" after Jango Fett's ship in Star Wars. My new one will be named "Orpheon" after the wrecked ship in Metroid Prime. :P

Peter Hull

This came into my head today.

https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/597163/0

yipinx never did show up.

bamccaig

I'm not surprised. It seems Matthew was trying to marry her off against her will. :-/

Eric Johnson

I built my new computer today. Here's my PassMark results: old and new. It's a nice improvement, though I have yet to test it in gaming.

Chris Katko

It looks like you forgot to buy a SSD!

Trust me. It will change your world. When I upgraded JUST my HDD to an SSD, it was like I upgraded my entire system to a new CPU/motherboard/etc.

Eric Johnson

It's on my to-do list. I can only buy so much at a time. :P I'll probably pick one up in a few months. Any suggestions on brands and capacities?

Chris Katko

Samsung is the "go to" but I basically just buy whatever is on sale and I've had great luck so far. Toshiba bought OCZ and improved their lines so they're a cheaper but decent brand.

bamccaig

In my experience, a small SSD becomes a bit of a bother though (when you inevitably start to run out of space on it) so consider investing in something at least 256 GB IMO. It won't be as cheap, but it should be twice as useful. :)

Append:

I finally figured out the main cause of memory leaks in my "falling block" clone. ::)

diff --git a/main.c b/main.c
index 1d24935..b02a1ae 100644
--- a/main.c
+++ b/main.c
@@ -323,8 +323,10 @@ static void apply_movements(GAME_STATE * S) {
         LINKED_LIST * collisions = NULL;
 
         if(!detect_collisions(S, piece, &collisions) || collisions) {
-            while(collisions != NULL) {
-                COLLISION * collision = collisions->data;
+            LINKED_LIST * it = collisions;
+
+            while(it != NULL) {
+                COLLISION * collision = it->data;
 
                 print_collision(collision);
 
@@ -334,7 +336,7 @@ static void apply_movements(GAME_STATE * S) {
                     S->respawn = 1;
                 }
 
-                collisions = collisions->next;
+                it = it->next;
             }
 
             list_destroy(&collisions,

I was iterating over my collisions list to print them out (diagnostics) and to check if a new piece needs to respawn. The result is that by the time I got around to list_destroy() to free up the memory, the pointer was pointing to NULL because it was the end of the list... ::) By using an iterator variable to step through the list that problem is solved and both the list and the collisions in the list get cleaned up properly.

However, I still have some leaks reported by valgrind.

 HEAP SUMMARY:
     in use at exit: 229,801 bytes in 1,958 blocks
   total heap usage: 44,855 allocs, 42,897 frees, 18,449,114 bytes allocated

 9 bytes in 1 blocks are definitely lost in loss record 7 of 1,522
    at 0x4C2DB8F: malloc (in /usr/lib/valgrind/vgpreload_memcheck-amd64-linux.so)
    by 0x5F0DC17: _XlcDefaultMapModifiers (in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libX11.so.6.3.0)
    by 0x5F0DFE5: XSetLocaleModifiers (in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libX11.so.6.3.0)
    by 0x50F0DCF: x_keyboard_init (xkeyboard.c:760)
    by 0x50F0DCF: xkeybd_init_keyboard (xkeyboard.c:929)
    by 0x50AD3E9: al_install_keyboard (keybdnu.c:129)
    by 0x402D10: initialize (in /mnt/data/home/bambams/src/tetrist/game)
    by 0x401919: main (in /mnt/data/home/bambams/src/tetrist/game)

 32 bytes in 1 blocks are definitely lost in loss record 487 of 1,522
    at 0x4C2DB8F: malloc (in /usr/lib/valgrind/vgpreload_memcheck-amd64-linux.so)
    by 0x5739889: ??? (in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/mesa/libGL.so.1.2.0)
    by 0x50EFF09: _al_xglx_config_create_context (xglx_config.c:570)
    by 0x50EC41C: xdpy_create_display_locked (xdisplay.c:438)
    by 0x50ECBF2: xdpy_create_display (xdisplay.c:583)
    by 0x50A67D4: al_create_display (display.c:53)
    by 0x402D30: initialize (in /mnt/data/home/bambams/src/tetrist/game)
    by 0x401919: main (in /mnt/data/home/bambams/src/tetrist/game)

 496 (48 direct, 448 indirect) bytes in 2 blocks are definitely lost in loss record 1,499 of 1,522
    at 0x4C2DB8F: malloc (in /usr/lib/valgrind/vgpreload_memcheck-amd64-linux.so)
    by 0xA8BC2B9: ??? (in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/r600_dri.so)
    by 0x5110A32: _al_ogl_lock_region_new (ogl_lock.c:136)
    by 0x509144E: al_lock_bitmap_region (bitmap_lock.c:108)
    by 0x50915A7: al_lock_bitmap (bitmap_lock.c:129)
    by 0x5090288: transfer_bitmap_data (bitmap.c:579)
    by 0x5090288: al_clone_bitmap (bitmap.c:675)
    by 0x5093887: al_convert_bitmap (bitmap_type.c:177)
    by 0x5093DEA: _al_convert_to_memory_bitmap (bitmap_type.c:313)
    by 0x50EA9D7: convert_display_bitmaps_to_memory_bitmap (xdisplay.c:598)
    by 0x50EA9D7: xdpy_destroy_display (xdisplay.c:719)
    by 0x402681: deinitialize (in /mnt/data/home/bambams/src/tetrist/game)
    by 0x401A8A: main (in /mnt/data/home/bambams/src/tetrist/game)

 1,688 (136 direct, 1,552 indirect) bytes in 1 blocks are definitely lost in loss record 1,509 of 1,522
    at 0x4C2FD5F: realloc (in /usr/lib/valgrind/vgpreload_memcheck-amd64-linux.so)
    by 0x5F041FC: ??? (in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libX11.so.6.3.0)
    by 0x5F04770: ??? (in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libX11.so.6.3.0)
    by 0x5F0604E: ??? (in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libX11.so.6.3.0)
    by 0x5F0687B: _XlcCreateLC (in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libX11.so.6.3.0)
    by 0x5F2768F: _XlcUtf8Loader (in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libX11.so.6.3.0)
    by 0x5F0DE4D: _XOpenLC (in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libX11.so.6.3.0)
    by 0x5F0DF87: _XlcCurrentLC (in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libX11.so.6.3.0)
    by 0x5F0DFBD: XSetLocaleModifiers (in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libX11.so.6.3.0)
    by 0x50F0DCF: x_keyboard_init (xkeyboard.c:760)
    by 0x50F0DCF: xkeybd_init_keyboard (xkeyboard.c:929)
    by 0x50AD3E9: al_install_keyboard (keybdnu.c:129)
    by 0x402D10: initialize (in /mnt/data/home/bambams/src/tetrist/game)

 3,528 (400 direct, 3,128 indirect) bytes in 1 blocks are definitely lost in loss record 1,513 of 1,522
    at 0x4C2FB55: calloc (in /usr/lib/valgrind/vgpreload_memcheck-amd64-linux.so)
    by 0x5763A50: ??? (in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/mesa/libGL.so.1.2.0)
    by 0x573938C: ??? (in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/mesa/libGL.so.1.2.0)
    by 0x5739968: ??? (in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/mesa/libGL.so.1.2.0)
    by 0x50EFF09: _al_xglx_config_create_context (xglx_config.c:570)
    by 0x50EC41C: xdpy_create_display_locked (xdisplay.c:438)
    by 0x50ECBF2: xdpy_create_display (xdisplay.c:583)
    by 0x50A67D4: al_create_display (display.c:53)
    by 0x402D30: initialize (in /mnt/data/home/bambams/src/tetrist/game)
    by 0x401919: main (in /mnt/data/home/bambams/src/tetrist/game)

 LEAK SUMMARY:
    definitely lost: 625 bytes in 6 blocks
    indirectly lost: 5,128 bytes in 54 blocks
      possibly lost: 0 bytes in 0 blocks
    still reachable: 224,048 bytes in 1,898 blocks
         suppressed: 0 bytes in 0 blocks
 Reachable blocks (those to which a pointer was found) are not shown.
 To see them, rerun with: --leak-check=full --show-leak-kinds=all

 For counts of detected and suppressed errors, rerun with: -v
 ERROR SUMMARY: 359 errors from 8 contexts (suppressed: 0 from 0)

These all appear to be inside Allegro though which has me confused. I think I'm doing a decent job of cleaning up Allegro at the end of the program. I even tried adding al_uninstall_system() just to see if that would make a difference, but it didn't.. Is this a bug in Allegro or a bug in my program? :-/

Eric Johnson

Samsung is the "go to" but I basically just buy whatever is on sale and I've had great luck so far.

Did you put your entire OS on it, or just games and other software? If I got an SSD, I'd probably just use it for games and nothing more.

Chris Katko

OS. DEFINITELY.

Then put a couple games you want really fast at the time and swap them out as necessary.

Get a 256 GB or larger or you'll be sad. Because 128 GB gets eaten up almost IMMEDIATELY by the P.O.S. that is Windows 10. It keeps every VERSION of every driver it ever downloaded and if you delete them manually, it corrupts windows. (Don't forget >2GB for Candy Crush that you never asked for!)

Eric Johnson

Why put the OS on there? Why not keep the OS on the HDD and put games on the SSD? Windows 10 is plenty fast on my HDD. Seems like a waste.

Neil Roy

SSD's may be faster, but one thing bothers me about them, and it is relatively minor, depending on how paranoid you are. And that is that you cannot run a program to erase old data from the drive, you know, to make certain it is really deleted like you can on standard HDDs.

If you're not worried about someone running software to recover your deleted files, than, no problem. I don't tend to worry about those sorts of things. Personally, I am happy with my standard HDD, it's cheaper and bigger.

Eric Johnson

If you're paranoid, you shouldn't be content with data-deleting software on an HDD either. If there is anything that you must have deleted with absolute certainty, just destroy the hard drive. Do your zero-fill format, then bash it in with a hammer for added measure. I wouldn't trust a format on any storage medium if my life depended upon it.

Neil Roy

The data erasing software is pretty good. It just doesn't work on an SDD due to how they save files.

I had a friend give me two systems with two hard drives. I have software that can recover files from a formatted drive and I couldn't get ANYTHING off of his drives, he was pretty through. It actually made me laugh at the time as he knew what I was like and that i could recover it. ;) It showed me that the software for erasing was pretty good at what it does.

In another system I got, the drives were formatted and just a fresh OS was installed. I was able to recover most of their personal photos and what type of porn they liked to browse for. :) (I erased it all later, I just like to see what all I can recover, and this is OLD software that I use, like, 15 years old or more)

Chris Katko

Why put the OS on there? Why not keep the OS on the HDD and put games on the SSD? Windows 10 is plenty fast on my HDD. Seems like a waste

Try it. :P ::)

Edgar Reynaldo

There is no try. Do or do not. Put the OS on the SSD. It will make your computer super fast at boot, and runtime. Do NOT put a swap file on the SSD it will shred your SSD.

Eric Johnson

I don't think I'll put the OS on the SSD. That would be a waste. I don't use my computer for anything other than gaming, so I'd only be concerned with putting games on the SSD, nothing else.

Chris Katko

I don't think I'll put the OS on the SSD. That would be a waste. I don't use my computer for anything other than gaming, so I'd only be concerned with putting games on the SSD, nothing else.

Last thing you want is your OS responsive! ::)

bamccaig

I just tried to post this in the AllegroForthKit thread, but I guess by the time I had typed it and submitted it the thread locked... :-/

--

REPLs are great, but one of the things I really wish they had was the ability to automatically persist changes to code into a file. For example, if you redefine a function in the REPL, it would be nice if it figured out which file defined the function and replaced the function in the file. Obviously, you'd need source control to prevent loss from this, but you should be using that anyway. Even if you just needed to invoke a "commit" function with the REPL to write the changes to disk it would at least give you something. I hate having to copy/paste between windows. I.e., Either rewrite the function in the file and copy it to the REPL to test it, or test it in the REPL and then recall it to copy/paste back to the file. It's needless waste when a computer should be able to do that for us. Not sure if Forth's REPL is better than other ones I've used, but none of the ones I'm familiar with seem to support automatic persistence of code changes.

On a side note, the second time I saw the thread title (and forgot what the thread was) I immediately thought that there must be some kind of clever pun here having Allegro five bindings in Forth... Perhaps you could come up with one to help market the library. :)

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

These all appear to be inside Allegro though which has me confused. I think I'm doing a decent job of cleaning up Allegro at the end of the program. I even tried adding al_uninstall_system() just to see if that would make a difference, but it didn't.. Is this a bug in Allegro or a bug in my program? :-/

When I ran Valgrind to try and find my Allegro + DAllegro, D program, it was firing off like over a million events and stopped after that. Before my app loaded. It was during the Allegro "start an initial window and then close it." part.

Don't know if it's only on Linux, in Allegro, DAllegro, or a driver problem as the call stack goes all the way into the graphics driver. No idea.

bamccaig

At least I'm not the only one confuzzled by it. :-/

Polybios

Don't know if it's only on Linux, in Allegro, DAllegro, or a driver problem as the call stack goes all the way into the graphics driver.

I've had these for years on Linux with C/C++. I've tracked them a bit and got the impression that it was neither my nor Allegro's fault.

Peter Hull
bamccaig said:

I just tried to post this in the AllegroForthKit thread, but I guess by the time I had typed it and submitted it the thread locked...

I also I think they are locked too quickly

Quote:

REPLs are great, but one of the things I really wish they had was the ability to automatically persist changes to code into a file.

On REPLs, I've used CIDER quite a bit. I use the actual REPL for evaluating but not defining things. I add/edit in the source files and use 'cider-eval-defun-at-point' This recompiles just the one function and so is instantaneous, which means I can use it very frequently to build up the function as I go. What you describe is more like how Smalltalk works, with a 'world' that you save to disk rather than having source files. I never got the hang of that.

bamccaig

More so I want for the VM to keep track of where a particular function definition came from. E.g., foo.lisp:3,4. And it should be smart enough to scan the file again to find it even if the file has changed, but the hint would be enough so it didn't have to scan the entire source tree again. Once it found the function it would overwrite it with the newly defined function from the REPL, and then finish off the file with the remaining contents (effectively editing the function in-place). If this worked automatically then you wouldn't even need to touch the source files during your hacking session. You could just redefine functions and have them automatically persist in your source code. The only time you'd have to touch the files is when you wanted to refactor them somehow. The REPL could even have a function for sending a function to a file, and if the function didn't exist in the file yet, it'll be appended and remembered from then on. Smells like productivity.

I just remembered that Emacs basically allows you evaluate Lisp expressions under the cursor using a command. So in Emacs you kind of sort of don't have this problem because you can just evaluate the code in the REPL directly from the file. However, I can't get by using Emacs for every long because I find it's too cluttered and my Vim-fingers inevitably do something not supported by Evil-mode (or else I learn of an Emacs command that no longer works because I've overridden it with Evil-mode). In any case, I think that having editor integration can be a solution to help with it. If your REPL can be integrated into your editor then it can be made more easy I think. Sort of like an IDE, except without a damn mouse. >:(

Neil Roy

Fascinating computer build, check it out, especially note the 2TB SSD! :o

video

MiquelFire

I don't know what started me down that rabbit hole, I but saw that on my feed on Youtube a while back.

Eric Johnson

I saw that a few days ago. It's a neat build; reminds me of a coffee machine.

bamccaig

One of the main things I've taken away from that (aside from the fact that I could never do it, but I think I understand it) is this:

2 TB SSD for $500 (USD probably). :o That is a bit expensive, but not as expensive as I might have imagined it.

MiquelFire

Last I seriously checked, the 1TB SSDs was around the 200-300 USD amount. And without doing any real work outside of cloning, that is the size I need to upgrade my current computer >.>

I feel jealous of whoever said they don't need SSD for their Windows OS.

bamccaig

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Chris Katko

That's !@#!@#$ing hilarious.

DanielH

[bamccaig]

For those that know how to pick a lock, it doesn't quite work that way. Funny nevertheless.

bamccaig

I was thinking the same thing when I read it. That's not how locks work, but funny nonetheless.

A better mechanism would have a fake lock there with no key, and when it is unlocked all it does is trigger an alarm and notify the police/alarm company. :D

Meanwhile, the real locks would be disguised and/or wireless.

Neil Roy

Or have it so that if the locks are not opened in the correct order, when you unlock one out of order, it locks the rest again. 8-)

Edit: Hmmm... that would be easy enough to circumvent though... I think I like your alarm idea better. ;)

Bruce Perry

Is it me or does allegro.cc's 'recent threads' view look a lot more healthy than usual? Did Allegro get some publicity? :)

MiquelFire

More people working on stuff. That would be my guess.

Neil Roy

Just watched this and I want to make almost all of these! :)

video

bamccaig

Jesus Christ, that's a lot of butter and salt! I just use a teaspoon or so of margarine, spice with some onion powder, garlic powder towards the end of the cooking cycle, and pepper after it's off the heat entirely (since pepper can be burned), and it works just fine without lots of butter/margarine or salt, which pretty much just clog up your heart valves and kill you.

I just scramble them in the pan because it's fewer dishes, yields more variety and chaos which are good things to appreciate and enjoy (this is a secondary observation more than a motivation or deciding factor), and saves time too. Pretty much, because I'm lazy and don't care to have a perfect mixture. My finacée hates eggs, and even the smell of them sends her running, so I mostly make them while working from home when she's at work (and try to cleanse the air before she gets home). Since I'm working at the time, it helps to save the extra time by skipping the bowl step (and then washing the bowl after).

On a side note, I have also tried cooking scrambled eggs in the microwave several times. It totally works. The only complaint that I have from it is that it's so involved that it doesn't really save you any effort, and the eggs tend to stick to the bowl or mug you make them in so they're kind of messy to clean up after. It comes off easily enough if you rinse them right after consumption, but the eggs tend to stick to your scrub pad or whatever. Of course, if you are eating them from a plate or bowl after it might not matter as much, but we use paper plates because reasons. No good reasons, but mostly laziness, and lack of ambition to keep up with another set of dishes.

If you do wish to attempt the microwave method, pretty much just mix the eggs up (break yolk, mix the white and yolk together) in some kind of appropriately sized dish, like a coffee mug or cereal bowl, put them in the microwave for about a minute, carefully flip over the half-cooked mold, and cook for another 30 seconds, flip and repeat the 30-second cook times and flipping until you're satisfied with the texture.

The steam to cook the fried egg without flipping is interesting. I'll have to give that a try. Usually I flip it once the white has set enough so you can touch it without going through it (like a ghost!), but once its flipped you pretty much have to take it off after about a minute or so or you'll begin cooking the yolk. Which is fine too. I don't mind a cooked yolk, but the ideal is sort of a warm, liquid yolk.

I've only attempted hard-boiled eggs a few times, and every time I cooked the yolk through. Which is OK, but perhaps not the ideal. Mostly I don't bother because it's a fair bit of extra work to consume the eggs, and it usually results in eggs being left over for Miranda to smell and hate me for. I just don't really see the point. Also, I don't think I'm much of a fan of eating eggs cold.

As an aside, something that they didn't mention is egg-drop soup. Something that I had never heard of until I was Googling. Of course, I could never eat eggs as a child because I sort of had an allergic reaction to them. It was until I was about 24 or 25 that I realized that I could have them. In any case, egg-drop soup is basically some kind of brothy soup where you drop the egg white and yolk into the already hot/boiling ish water and give them a minute or so to basically cook. The result is basically just a goo of cooked egg floating at the top of the soup. I tried it once, and I liked it. It's a bit of a weird texture if you aren't used to it, but it's good if you like eggs. The Internet will have better advice for achieving good results than I can since I've attempted it so few times, but I don't recall ever failing. I think it's hard to fail at it.

While we're on the subject of cooking, something I've recently discovered is that boiling meats is pretty awesome. Obviously barbecuing them is kind of the standard cooking method (ignoring frying since that typically adds oil/fat/heart attacky stuff). What I really love about boiling meat is that it's really hard to screw it up. Whereas barbecue pretty much requires you to learn the quirks of your device, and what works for you, and generally babysit the food while cooking, the boiling method pretty much lets you walk away. Unless you wait so long that the water all evaporates you pretty much can't burn boiled meat. It also happens to produce very flavorful broth/water that you can consume separately if desired. One can argue that you lose some of the flavor from the meat, but generally speaking I find it doesn't really hurt much. It's a reasonable trade-off for the convenience and reliability. And if you consume the broth/water you get it all back.

I really like to boil bacon. Again, this comes in handy when I'm working from home. Instead of babysitting a frying pan of splattering oil I can pretty much forget about it for 20 minutes, return, and eat. Of course, the result is not the typical slightly burned, solid strips. You instead get soft strips. To each his own. Sometimes I'll boil first to ensure they're cooked, and then I'll briefly fry them to get them a more rigid texture. Another potential advantage of this is that some of the oil drains away into the water so you can avoid some of that extra potential harm to your heart.

Neil Roy

We usually eat our eggs in the form of an egg with a cheese slice on a toasted English muffin, or we have an Egg in a Basket (search for it on Youtube).

We also like poached egg on toast. We bought this microwave container for cooking eggs in the microwave we have used at times and it works really well for the poached eggs on toast.

As for butter/margarine and salt clogging your arteries, my wife and I don't inject that into our veins so we'll be fine. I prefer margarine, she likes butter.

Lately we've been using a non-stick pan + some oil for our eggs.

I'm not overly concerned about my health other than avoiding meats the Bible says not to eat. I don't really want to live too long in this world anyhow and I have already outlived my mother (who died at 49, I am 53 now). Got a long ways to go to match my dad's age though.

Bruce Perry

Which meats does the Bible ban?

Also, which religion(s) ban pork and why? Embarrassingly I don't know :)

Edgar Reynaldo

Which meats does the Bible ban?

See Leviticus.

Bruce Perry said:

Also, which religion(s) ban pork and why? Embarrassingly I don't know :)

Judaism, Islam, others? Leviticus.

Neil Roy

Which meats does the Bible ban?

See Leviticus 11 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus+11&version=NIV). In summary, basically all scavenger type of animals is a good rule of thumb that they are "unclean" (or in modern terms; "unhealthy") to eat.

The way to tell, is they have to have a split hoof and "chew the cud", which is an herbivore with more than one stomach like a cow, a deer, a sheep. This is why pigs don't qualify.

For fish, they have to have both fins and scales, which rules out things like catfish, lobster etc.

I found a study online a while back which listed a long list of "processed meats" which they found were cancer causing. So they blamed the processing of them. When I looked at the meats listed, every one of them was a pork product, which I found fascinating that nobody even considered that may be what is bad for you.

I personally decided to stop eating these things many years ago and I feel my health has benefited from it. I never had a flu shot in my life and I don't get the flu or even colds at all anymore. And seeing as how there is cancer on both sides of my family, I want to avoid that too.

Bruce Perry

Thanks for the detailed reply :)

One thing I don't quite understand: the first half of your post seems to suggest that the unclean/unhealthy ones are the cow, deer and sheep; yet the second half of your post says pork is the bad (cancer-causing) one?

For what it's worth, personally I grew up eating chicken and fish but not much else and nothing on four legs. My mum has the same rule and I copied her after not liking the 'meat' in a McDonald's burger (yes, I know, in hindsight). Eventually I decided to overcome it and try some other meats, starting with a chicken and bacon sandwich, and I'm glad I did; but I still find I don't want them very often, especially the heavy ones like (non-minced) beef.

Eric Johnson

I'm not much a fan of pork. I prefer turkey for sandwiches and the like. Although I do enjoy the occasional crispy bacon and Spam...

Neil Roy said:

And seeing as how there is cancer on both sides of my family, I want to avoid that too.

If you live long enough, you're bound to get cancer eventually. I hope you get checked for prostate cancer every now and again.

bamccaig

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https://atheistpapers.com/2014/04/30/bible-contradictions-31-can-we-eat-animals/comment-page-1/

I'm not a huge fan of pork chops, but if you simmer them in mushroom soup they're awesome. :D I enjoy ham and bacon too. Pork is good in sausage or meatballs too. Pork can be awesome. And sure, it's not very healthy for you, but neither is beef. At least, not if you over do them.

I generally try to prefer chicken because it's not as bad for you, but it's a bit more of a pain to prepare (at least, the fresh stuff) so we often look to beef and sausage to make things easier.

As for fish, I've eaten lobster a few times, but haven't yet had a great experience (but was too cheap to just order it prepared by a proper chef yet). I do enjoy shrimp and some other seafood that probably doesn't meet the Bible's requirements. I've eaten eel, octopus, and squid sashimi (along with some normal fish that might fit the Bible's rules). :P The octopus sashimi is kind of tasteless, I found, and squid always has a texture I'm not a fan of. Eel is quite nice.

I've also eaten snails and mussels. Pretty good stuff.

Edgar Reynaldo
bamccaig said:

blah blah

Reverse the order of those commandments, and that's the order they came in. You're not even trolling properly. Some believe the New Testament does away with the food laws. Not so.

Inform yourself :

https://www.cgg.org/index.cfm/fuseaction/Library.sr/CT/ra/k/1049/Clean-Unclean-Meats.htm

Chris Katko

That image is of the usual facebook quality. ::)

Romans is the new testament. New testament supersedes the old testament unless you're this thing called "Jewish."

And the reason ALL major religions banned things like pork was because the meat was (and still is?) unhealthy for you. Pigs are disgusting. They spread disease. Especially in olden times.

It wasn't "You go to hell for eating meat." It's "Don't eat meat because you'll get sick."

Quote:

Paul the Apostle, drawing on Deuteronomy 30:11–14, claimed that the keeping of the Mosaic covenant was superseded by faith in Jesus and the gospel (the New Covenant).[29]

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Book_of_Deuteronomy#/Christianity

For example, Jesus straight up throws the old testament in the trash during his "Testament on the Mount."

Quote:

source of serious dispute and controversy since its inception, such as Jesus' expounding of the Law during his Sermon on the Mount,

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Mosaic_covenant#/Christianity

Chris Katko

That image is of the usual facebook quality. ::)

Romans is the new testament. New testament supersedes the old testament unless you're this thing called "Jewish."

And the reason ALL major religions banned things like pork was because the meat was (and still is?) unhealthy for you. Pigs are disgusting. They spread disease. Especially in olden times.

It wasn't "You go to hell for eating meat." It's "Don't eat meat because you'll get sick."

Quote:

Paul the Apostle, drawing on Deuteronomy 30:11–14, claimed that the keeping of the Mosaic covenant was superseded by faith in Jesus and the gospel (the New Covenant).[29]

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Book_of_Deuteronomy#/Christianity

For example, Jesus straight up throws the old testament in the trash during his "Testament on the Mount."

Quote:

source of serious dispute and controversy since its inception, such as Jesus' expounding of the Law during his Sermon on the Mount,

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Mosaic_covenant#/Christianity

Also, back to food. I literally just ate Bison tacos. They're !@#$ing delicious.

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bamccaig
God, a long time ago said:

Hello.

I'm your all-knowing, all-powerful God. I wrote you a book so that you know what to do and what not to do.

God, 400 years later said:

Hello.

It's me again.

I wrote a new book with revised rules.

Why didn't I just write one book with all the rules the first time? I HAVE A PLAN, AND WE MUST STICK TO THE PLAN! >:( If you don't know I'm not going to tell you!

Append:

Those tacos look great. :D

Edgar Reynaldo

Sorry bambam, you're wrong again. :P

Matthew 5:17-19 said:

17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. 19 Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

Neil Roy

Not trying to spark a debate, though that seems inevitable in here. Eat what you feel is right. I'm just saying what I eat, what I avoid and what my personal reasons are.

To each his own. At 53, I had type 2 diabetes, and now I don't. I no longer get colds or flues even though I never had a shot or took meds for either. So I feel this has worked for me. I would hope that others would at least consider this as I don't like to see anyone suffer, but I won't debate my own personal choices.

One thing I don't quite understand: the first half of your post seems to suggest that the unclean/unhealthy ones are the cow, deer and sheep; yet the second half of your post says pork is the bad (cancer-causing) one?

I just reread my reply and I can see where you would be confused by that, sorry. I meant that the cow, deer and sheep are examples of clean animals those verses describe as healthy to consume and the pig is not, which matches examples in studies of pork products found to have evidence they can cause cancer and otherwise weaken your immune system.

As for the rest of the debating... I'll stay out of it. I only stated why I don't do pork, I shouldn't have to worry about mentioning that I got my dietary ideas from the Bible in here and it turning into a debate, but it often does, which is too bad, but I am not ashamed of my beliefs.

Have a good one.

bamccaig

Sorry bambam, you're wrong again. :P

Debating the Bible with believers is like debating with a woman. There's no logic or reasoning behind it. You just always "lose" apparently. Maybe that's the true purpose of the contradictions in the Bible. You can never win a debate because as soon as you use the Bible as evidence for something they can turn to a contradicting verse to counter it! At least in their deluded mind. ;)

Neil Roy said:

...which matches examples in studies of pork products found to have evidence they can cause cancer and otherwise weaken your immune system

I think it's actually processed meat like ham and bacon that cause cancer, not pork specifically. Hot dogs, sausage, and sandwich meat also fall into the category of processed meat, many of which are not made with pork.

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Unless you have evidence to the contrary. Regular pork is given the same classification as beef and lamb. Based on that you'd have to give up burgers and steak too!

Eric Johnson
bamccaig said:

Hot dogs ... are not made with pork.

Well duh, they're made of dogs!

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bamccaig

I watched a video of a cat eating a rabbit. I had never seen such a thing and expected something like a lion eating an antelope. Find your way to the precious organs, eat those, and then eat the rear end basically. Nope. What does a house cat do eating a fucking rabbit? Eats the fucking head, skull and all first. YouTube it. It's a bit disturbing, and a bit cool.

Niunio

Back on-topic:

I've found a lot of threads closed that I can't answer. :'(

That's all. Thanks for your attention. Now you can back to the off-topic.

Chris Katko

I watched Deep Space 9 almost to the end now. Good gosh, it's atrocious.

It takes still the FIFTH SEASON before there's any real urgency. The main threat the Dominion is not really a big deal at all. They kill off Dax in the 6th season, and then "bring her back" as a new actress which then spends MANY episodes of the LAST SEASON... building an entire new character while neglecting all the others.

The best character on the show... isn't from DS9. It's Worf and he's not in it till like Season 3. It adds some great depth to Ferangi's and Klingon cultures. But that's about it.

Every Bajoran episode is a COMPLETE WASTE OF TIME, and the show is hilariously sympathetic to terrorism in the ham-fisted "Space Jews vs Space Muslims in Gaza Strip" plotlines which does not age well with 9/11 happening only a couple years later.

Almost every episode ends with a "reset button" so there's almost no arcs. It's like a sitcom, but with no laughing.

They took one of the best villains, Gul Dukat, and then basically turn him into a laughable X-files, magical miniboss. They almost LITERALLY call him "Space Hitler" at one point too. So much for the nuance that the Cardassians were supposed to be known for.

"Deep Sleep 9" is pretty dang applicable. (General Martok is amazing, though.)

Meanwhile, I have watched TWO. Count them, TWO, episodes of Babylon 5 now. And I'm blown away by how interesting it is. The very first episode has like three arcs starting, and the second episode continues one and introduces people who HARVEST SOULS and the actor's performance is so great he deserves an award. It's a group of beings that can tell when people are going to die, and their religion tells them they must capture the soul (instead of letting them go to heaven in the creature's religion!) to "save" it from dying and they're universally feared and hated. It's wonderful.

And I say this as someone who HATED Babylon 5 because the CG was super-ugly (early CG shows), the costume and set designs looked super unbelievable. But as an adult now, it's definitely got my scifi eyes perking up and I'm hopeful it continues to get better. (As many B5 fans say it does.)

I'm also watching Star Trek TOS and once again, it's still far more watchable. Plenty of hot girls in miniskirts, people punching each other, and Twilight Zone esk plots.

Neil Roy

Loved Babylon 5 back in the day and as for Star Trek series, I disliked Voyager when it first came out, but surprisingly it ended up being my favourite of all the series. It just had good characters, good writing and lots of funny moments. It got much better after the first season.

I didn't like the idea of Deep Space 9 when it came out and that didn't change later on. I will never understand how DS9 went 7 seasons and Enterprise, which was much better in every respect did not. I loved Quark's character on DS9, that's about it.

Such is life I guess. If it's good, they cancel it, if it's crap, it never ends.

Greyland818

;D, was there a definite answer to this post? Seems like an interesting feature. Are there any moderators or webmasters that can implement this feature?

Edgar Reynaldo

Greyland818, you seem new. ;D

As for "threads locking too soon", add another thread to the list, ffs!!!

Not another Monday thread >:(

So the question still stands, are any of you (wo)man enough to build a real world application and game programmer's toolkit that will blow everyone else out of the water? Allegro is too dang low level to get anything done in a quick amount of time, and having to endlessly repeat setup code gets tiresome.

And why isn't there a view thread by open or close date by search range? Cmon. Like a small boat on the ocean, sending big waves into motion. Oh sorry that's the radio playing.... uhm back to being off topic again, add your code to my library and build the best applications and games ever. ;)

Step 1. Join me.
Step 2. $$$Pr0fit
Step 3. Resistance is futile.

video

video

Chris Katko

So the question still stands, are any of you (wo)man enough to build a real world application and game programmer's toolkit that will blow everyone else out of the water? Allegro is too dang low level to get anything done in a quick amount of time, and having to endlessly repeat setup code gets tiresome.

I'm already doing that. :) Molto. As in Molto Allegro.

Edgar Reynaldo
Chris Katko said:

I'm already doing that. :) Molto. As in Molto Allegro.

But we're all doing that! Except each of us is doing it in a different language, in a different framework, yada yada. Which is why none of us ever get anything done! Because we're all too busy writing our own ultimate library.

You and SiegeLord are doing D and Molto. jmasterx and I and others have GUI libraries. Oates has his AllegroFlare framework. beoran is doing Go now. Somebody's doing Forth. Just think of the awesome apps and games we could create if we worked together for once. C'mon, let's do this!

It's still not Monday!!!!

Greyland818

Edgar do you own or run the site? Are you able to implement features to the site?

Edgar Reynaldo

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Greyland818

;D, Got it.

Eric Johnson

Edgar is secretly Matthew Leverton, or vice-versa. ;)

Chris Katko

Four hours is too long without a post!

I just watched Star Trek TOS Balance of Terror.

It's so bloody good. It could be a movie.

Neil Roy

This made me burst out laughing, I just had to share. ;D;D;D
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MiquelFire

Who's the guy on top?

Mark Oates

Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada.

For some reason, Canadians have become unhappy and are experiencing that fallacy where you live in a great country and have all the nice things, but you get bored with it because everything is basically perfect all time and so now things that that everybody else in the world envies and would die for, you've found a reason complain about.

Neil Roy

Nope, I don't complain as much about my country as I do about the leader that is leading it into the shithole.

Just because my country seems to do okay, doesn't mean I should never complain about the leadership; that's a moronic attitude.

Otherwise, I would assume you would defend Mr. Trump, because he leads a wealthy nation, nobody should complain right? Hypocrite.

In any event, I found it funny and am sharing it with those who have a sense of humour.

Chris Katko

you've found a reason complain about.

Are you insane? Only an American would think Canada is perfect. Their internet sucks, and they have no respect for civil liberties.

They passed Bill C-16 in 2016. A bill that makes it illegal to not use someones correct gender pronouns.

1 - No care that there are no official scientific list of pronouns. It's just a list some people made.

2 - No care whether science says using pronouns actually helps anything.

The most horrifying though, is #3:

3 - Compelled speech.

For the first time in the history of Canada, it's not just illegal to SAY something offensive. It's illegal to REFUSE TO SAY WORDS THAT THE STATE DEMANDS YOU TO. The state has decided it can compel you under threat of prison and "re-education camps" to say something and it will not stop here.

And, right after the bill passed? As proof of the horrific abuse this bill pushes: A young, teaching assistant, female, showed a clip of arguments from the congressional debate. Certainly merely showing video of the legislative process leading UP TO the bill, can't be illegal? Nope. Sorry. This young girl was taken from class, to a private room. Two men of authority proceeded to gang up and verbally berate her, and liken the comments she showed to Nazism. And thank God she was smart enough to record it or we'd never hear about it.

And liberals only defense? "She didn't actually violate C-16!" So it's okay that the liberal staff thought she did, berated a young woman without any kind of representation. It's okay that two men of authority ganged up on a woman for merely showing a video that covers arguments about a law that was passed. All that stuff about power dynamics. All that stuff about positions of authority, and protecting women from abuse. It goes out the window because as with everything in liberals minds these days: the end justifies the means so whatever minority gets steam rolled over, doesn't matter. (Like how all those dead gays in the Pulse Nightclub shooting don't matter anymore because the shooter was a bigger victim group, Muslims.)

Chris Katko

you've found a reason complain about.

Are you insane? Their internet sucks (a loving indication of their corporate corruption), and they have no respect for civil liberties.

They passed Bill C-16 in 2016. A bill that makes it illegal to not use someone's personally-decided gender pronouns.

1 - No care that there are no official scientific list of pronouns. It's just a list some people made. (It's literally a political bill, pushed by a small, powerful group, not a medical bill by scientists or doctors.)

2 - No care whether science says using pronouns actually helps anything.

The most horrifying though, is #3:

3 - Compelled speech.

For the first time in the history of Canada, it's not just illegal to SAY something offensive. It's illegal to REFUSE TO SAY WORDS THAT THE STATE DEMANDS YOU TO. The state has decided it can compel you under threat of prison and literal "re-education camps" to say something and it will not stop here. (Also, no scientific proof "re-education" works and doesn't just create more resentment.)

And, right after the bill passed? As proof of the horrific abuse this bill pushes: A young, teaching assistant, female, showed a clip of arguments from the congressional debate. Certainly merely showing video of the legislative process leading UP TO the bill, can't be illegal? Nope. Sorry. This young girl was taken from class, to a private room. Two men of authority proceeded to gang up and verbally berate her, and liken the comments she showed to Nazism. And thank God she was smart enough to record it or we'd never hear about it.

And liberals only defense? "She didn't actually violate C-16!" So it's okay that the liberal staff thought she did, berated a young woman without any kind of representation. It's okay that two men of authority ganged up on a woman for merely showing a video that covers arguments about a law that was passed. All that stuff about power dynamics. All that stuff about positions of authority, and protecting women from abuse. It goes out the window because as with everything in liberals minds these days: the end justifies the means so whatever minority gets steam rolled over, doesn't matter. (Like how all those dead gays in the Pulse Nightclub shooting don't matter anymore because the shooter was a bigger victim group, Muslims.)

But back to Canada. Canada is living proof the road to hell is paved with maple syrup flavored good intentions.

[edit] And if it weren't obvious, I'm a classic liberal--not a neo-con.

bamccaig

Canadians have a lot to complain about. Parts of the country have major doctor shortages, and though parts of our health care system are free they are also slow and often incompetent. It's not a rare occasion to hear stories of somebody with a serious condition being sent away from the hospital and rushed back just in time. It seems like a trend that cancer is uncaught until it's too late.

The government is also selling out to the oil industry, threatening our delicate coastlines and fresh water sources with pipelines and tankers. This is all done to ship raw oil out of the country where it can be processed by some other nation's employment force and sold back to us at a premium.

They're also barking down the tree of throwing away net neutrality and blocking any Internet sites that they decide could be involved in piracy, etc.

There's a very long list of things the government is doing against the wishes of Canadians and against our better good. They're fully corrupted now and no better than the American government. The current party in power at the national level made campaign promises to change the electorate system because it doesn't work as is. As soon as they got into power they said nope, they're going to leave it as is.

Any government that doesn't represent the people is a problem. It doesn't matter how approximately great the quality of life is there. If governments are left free to operate against the wishes of the people that can change in a hurry.

There are many Canadians that struggle just to get by. There are limited employment opportunities, and housing tends to be quite expensive. It's not a utopia. It beats the Hell out of a third world nation, but it still has a long way to go to rank high on the first world scoreboard.

The things we used to be known for, like peacekeeping, aren't even true anymore. Our government has backed out of reducing emissions promises from climate change agreements made with the world. And continues to fail to take climate change seriously. Canada may have once been an example to the world, but now it's just another example of what not to do.

Neil Roy

;D8-):D:):P
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bamccaig

Don't worry, doge, Trudeau is not behind any of us. :-/

Erin Maus

Where in Bill C-16 does it say you must use proper gender pronouns? As far as I can tell it just makes gender expression and gender identity protected classes.

I didn't see it but I just skimmed it. ???

Quote:

Professor Cossman repeatedly argued that Dr. Peterson has overstated the sanctions he could face as a result of his remarks.

"There is nothing in Bill C-16 that criminalizes the misuse of pronouns," she said. Language is already the subject of legislation, from bilingual labelling to swearing an Oath to the Queen, to hate speech, she added.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/university-of-toronto-professor-defends-right-to-use-gender-specific-pronouns/article32946675/

Slippery slope fallacy?

Btw I had a fun time talking about things like toxic masculinity and hetereonormative bullshit on my last few dates. Come at me (/s; really don't I'm just trolling).

Edgar Reynaldo

Btw I had a fun time talking about things like toxic masculinity and hetereonormative

What about toxic feminism? Pretty soon all the men will be rounded up, forced to donate their sperm and then be forcibly castrated. I'm all for women's rights, but some women are taking this thing a little too far.

Besides, women are just jealous. They want to be the next man. envy. ;) But really, what would they win if they succeeded? Higher rates of suicide, lower lifespan, and a more stressful life trying to be the provider while hoping your children are really yours and it wasn't all just a waste of time.

Erin Maus

;D

If that was satire, well done!

Edgar Reynaldo

Aha, tank u berry mush!

Clearly, I was trolling. :D xD

But I was only partially joking. >:(

When a woman refers to a man as a sperm donor, I die a little on the inside...

Eric Johnson

When a woman refers to a man as a sperm donor, I die a little on the inside...

The same claim can be made about women—that they're only good for making babies.

bamccaig

What about toxic feminism?

OH, you mean third wave Feminism. ??? Pretty much every professional victim since the 90s. :P

The same claim can be made about women—that they're only good for making babies.

And sammiches. And supper. And doing the dishes. And vacuuming the house. And bringing you beer.

I think at this point in her career my finacée wishes she could be a stay at home mom. A lot of women really got shafted by this whole movement. I dare say the vast majority were brainwashed in school to think it was for their empowerment to distract them from what they were sacrificing.

My finacée has trouble deciding what she wants to eat every night. I mean, literally, she's hungry (enough to be angry) now and needs to eat, but is too indecisive to make a decision about what she wants to eat (and will not settle for less than what she wants, which she can't decide). There are very distinct differences between men and women. Strengths and weaknesses.

The old way was far from perfect, but so is the new way.

Many women today are depressed. Surveys show that younger women are more depressed than their mothers and grandmothers were. Are things getting better, or getting worse? And who is steering the ship?

raynebc

Were they told that giving women an equal amount of all responsibilities and social expectations would make them happy? Demanding that men act like women in various aspects (like reigning in "toxic masculinity" ie. acting masculine in general) is making men miserable too.

Neil Roy

The more I hear about feminism the happier I am that I married the woman I did. She's definitely not a feminist. Gotta love her.

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bamccaig
raynebc said:

Were they told that giving women an equal amount of all responsibilities and social expectations would make them happy?

I wouldn't say they get an "equal" amount of any responsibilities. I wouldn't even say society has imparted any on them. I think the closest they come is having to work some kind of job because society no longer pays most men enough to comfortably support their families.

Quote:

Demanding that men act like women in various aspects (like reigning in "toxic masculinity" ie. acting masculine in general) is making men miserable too.

Only the ones that choose to obey their feminine overlords, or attempt to date them.

Well, and the ones with jobs that have women in them. But at least that's only 19/20 * 1/3 of your life, and even then only when there is women around. :-X

Neil Roy said:

The more I hear about feminism the happier I am that I married the woman I did.

What's what mine would do if I took a picture of her too. :P:-/

MiquelFire

Steering the topic on to something a bit happier, today, I figured out why one of our web servers would randomly seem to take ages to load a page.

localhost is an evil hostname for me now. Nginx REALLY LOVES IPv6. Our servers don't have IPv6 enabled, and yet...

bamccaig

I'm intrigued, but lost. How did localhost cause IPv6 shenanigans? If your system doesn't have IPv6 enabled wouldn't the library have multiple IP results to go through and ultimately find the IPv4 and work?

MiquelFire

Whatever Nginx uses for getting the IP address of localhost, it seems hardcoded and will attempt to connect to [::1] even when IPv6 is disabled, even with the resolver line set to not allow IPv6.

What I see happening is that Nginx attempts [::1], waits for the timeout, then try 127.0.0.1.

To fix it, I just replaced localhost with 127.0.0.1 and it works.

bamccaig

It sounds like there should be an ip6-localhost alias for ::1 so perhaps having localhost mapped to ::1 is not correct anyway. Maybe if you modify the /etc/hosts file (after communicating with others that are responsible for the box, if it's a server or something) to not map localhost to ::1 might fix your problem. On my Ubuntu system the /etc/hosts file does not map localhost to ::1.

127.0.0.1       localhost

# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
::1     ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters

Eric Johnson

@Neil: Does your wife work in the medical field? Her clothing reminds me of what I see a lot of nurses wearing.

bamccaig

She just wears that to take care of Neil. :-X He's old.

Greyland818

Do the forums have moderators that can unlock or delete threads?

bamccaig

Yes, but:

  • They'll never unlock one. You'll just be instructed to open a new thread.

  • They only delete threads that break the rules somehow (e.g., spam).

Greyland818

Who are the moderators? How many of them are there?

Chris Katko

Not so much these days. Matthew and the guy with the dragon avatar.

Greyland818

;D, I'm guessing they are not active members.

Edgar Reynaldo

Guys, the OS Update thread has gone to the other side!!! :o:o:o

We're not doing our duty. >:(

Gideon Weems

I feel like a little kid whose dad just returned from a yearlong business trip into the Congo, whenever Matthew drops in like that.

Stick that analogy in your cap and fluff it.

Niunio

Two days without messages. Are we sleeping?

Edgar Reynaldo
Eric Johnson

I'm thinking about finally getting a haircut and becoming short-haired Eric again. It's been 5.5 years since my last one. I'm not sure yet whether I'll pay to get it cut or if I'll buzz it off myself. I might go for that slick bambams look. :-*

bamccaig

I for one want pics of the long hair. :D When I was about 19 I stopped cutting my hair out of self-consciousness and insecurity. I think I went about a year and it got to about my neck or shoulder I think before I got it cut. There's a least one picture in existence of this look, but I don't have a copy. I kind of liked it, but it did eventually get annoying having hair in my face. Of course, in those days I also had baggy jeans barely hanging on. The good old days. Now I'm an old man. I wear a belt and my hair is thinning. I rather like the bald thing, but it's a lot of work to maintain at my age. Maybe eventually it'll be automatic. In the meantime, my finacée doesn't really like it when I shave so I usually let my hair grow for a month or two before I shave it again. Still between wearing baseball caps now and shaving my head regularly my hair is definitely thinning. If you like having hair you might want to avoid the hats, and consider not shaving your head. Personally I'm most confident when my head is shaved. And it's one less thing to worry about making "presentable" when I leave my apartment. :D

Eric Johnson
bamccaig said:

I for one want pics of the long hair. :D

It's not brushed all the way, but here's the gist of it:
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Quote:

When I was about 19 I stopped cutting my hair out of self-consciousness and insecurity.

My long hair has actually damaged my self-consciousness. Whenever I'm out in public, old folks stare at me. I usually dislike going out to eat at restaurants for that very reason: I feel like every eye is on me. Plus long hair is associated with being a stoner, which I am not... but it's difficult to escape stereotypes.

I think having short hair would do me well. I'd "fit in" with the norm. No longer will people associate me with stereotypes. I think it'll help my confidence, too. We'll see.

Eric Johnson

Oops. Accidental double post. :-X

bamccaig

If my finacée saw that hair she'd probably be jealous. :D Donate it to cancer patients or something!

Long hair is also just associated with free spirited people. Could be drugs, music, or whatever. Honestly, truly "old" people are going to suspect most younger people are doing drugs or getting into trouble because they used to at your age! :D

Don't worry about what other people think though. Confidence comes from within. I cut my hair when I began to build my confidence, and faced my fear of going to a barber. Well, mostly I was afraid of going to a hair salon for women. For good reason. They make you very uncomfortable. Once I found a barber I gave it a try and liked it much better. Until the womenfolk took over. That's when I went back to shaving my own head.

Eric Johnson
bamccaig said:

If my finacée saw that hair she'd probably be jealous.

Ha, I've actually had women tell me they're jealous of my hair. ;D I sometimes tease my sister by telling her I have prettier hair than she does. :P

Quote:

Donate it to cancer patients or something!

That would certainly be the most utilitarian use of it. The only organization that I know of that makes wigs out of donated hair is Locks of Love. They are only done through salons though, as far as I know. I'm sure you can see how that'd be a problem.

Quote:

Honestly, truly "old" people are going to suspect most younger people are doing drugs or getting into trouble because they used to at your age! :D

Maybe so. Some old people are just bitter and judgmental for no apparent reason. Then again, so are a lot of people in general.

Quote:

Confidence comes from within.

I'm trying to follow that mentality.

Chris Katko
Quote:

Oops. Accidental double post. :-X

With hair like that, you post as many times as you want. :-*

bamccaig

...Locks of Love. They are only done through salons though, as far as I know. I'm sure you can see how that'd be a problem.

According to the Web site you can send it to them. You pull it into a pony tail and wrap both ends with an elastic or something. Then cut it off. It needs to be wrapped up like that for that organization to use it, but there are probably other organizations that do it. If you wanted to go that route you could pretty much do it yourself. Wrap it, cut most of it off, and then shave the rest.

As a little aside, if you decide to take an actual razor to your head to get closer be very careful. It hurts like hell if you cut yourself, and you will cut yourself. :D It's worth taking your time. Otherwise, it's pretty harmless (I think).

Eric Johnson

With hair like that, you post as many times as you want. :-*

;)

bamccaig said:

If you wanted to go that route you could pretty much do it yourself. Wrap it, cut most of it off, and then shave the rest.

I didn't realize I could do it all myself. I'll look into that.

Quote:

As a little aside, if you decide to take an actual razor to your head to get closer be very careful.

Thanks for the heads-up. I'll probably just get a hair trimmer or whatever and buzz it as short as it can go without shaving it. I don't know how short that'll be though, but probably won't make for an authentic bambams look. :'(

bamccaig

Most of the time that's all I do too. Using a razor gets a cleaner look, but similar to your face it only lasts a day or so. I don't have the ambition to retouch it every day. I just buzz it and maybe shave it and then let it grow until it gets annoying or starts to look bad. For example, greatest thing about shaving your head is that you cannot have a bad hair day. You can wake up and just immediately go out. Once it's shaved there's zero maintenance. Your eyes may be crusty, your nose may be congested, but the top of your head will be presentable! It takes a few weeks or a month or so before it starts to be a bother again. I usually hold off until I shave it again.

A downside though is that your head is less protected from the Sun. If you also consume great amounts of alcohol or other substances that dehydrate you it can certainly have an effect.

Chris Katko

Thanks for the heads-up.

ಠ_ಠ

Chris Katko

Thanks for the heads-up.

ಠ_ಠ

Eric Johnson
Quote:

ಠ_ಠ

I don't know what that face is supposed to mean, but it's creeping me out! :o Also, now you have double posted!

bamccaig said:

It takes a few weeks or a month or so before it starts to be a bother again. I usually hold off until I shave it again.

How long is it after that point? I honestly don't know how fast hair grows; mine's been too long to really notice.

bamccaig

Everybody's hair is different. I think mine grows very slowly because I don't cut it often and I shave it instead of cut it. I can probably go about 3 months and only grow about half an inch.

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

As a little aside, if you decide to take an actual razor to your head to get closer be very careful.

"Thanks for the heads-up."

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Edgar Reynaldo

wtf creepy potato face shit is that?

@Eric
Chop that shit off!!!!1111llll

You will feel like a NEW man. Women will /drool/. People will HIRE you. You will RESPECT yourself again.

Eric Johnson

@bamccaig: Good to know. I asked just in case I screw it up and make mine too short. :P

@Chris: ;)

Chop that shit off!!!!1111llll

I'm working on it! Gotta buy some hair clippers first.

In other news, today is Piccolo Day. :D

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Edgar Reynaldo

Most hair grows around 1/2 an inch a month. Check wikipedia if you don't believe me. ;)

Piccolo day is also my brother's birthday. And I also chopped off all my hair and my beard. I didn't have much, but I was gettin pretty shaggy. Your turn, Eric. ;) xD

Eric Johnson

Piccolo day is also my brother's birthday.

Happy belated birthday to your brother.

Quote:

And I also chopped off all my hair and my beard.

You're not going to grow it out and sport a sick philosopher's beard? :(

Edgar Reynaldo

My beard is funky - I have a bald spot in the middle of my moustache, and my chops are like peach fuzz - I can't grow lamb chops like Elvis. My moustache kept tickling my nose and it drove me crazy so I just gave it all the ax.

EDIT
You mean like fu-man-chu?

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Eric Johnson

You mean like fu-man-chu?

More like an old wizard who lives alone atop a tall tower who bestows upon young adventurers the ability to materialize turkey sandwiches in exchange for news of the rest of the world.

I mean like Gandalf.

Edgar Reynaldo

I met a guy like that once. Here, have a turkey sandwich. Any news of the rest of the world?

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MiquelFire

My car is sick with a fever.

bamccaig

My beard is funky - I have a bald spot in the middle of my moustache, and my chops are like peach fuzz - I can't grow lamb chops like Elvis. My moustache kept tickling my nose and it drove me crazy so I just gave it all the ax.

I fail to grow hair to connect my mustache with my beard. :( I always assumed it was called a "goatee", but I guess it's a "French cut", and I'm partly French apparently, so you'd think I could do it, but there are always obvious gaps even at 31! I just let it all grow until it becomes uncomfortable tickling me and then I shave it right to my face until I get carded buying beer again. Alas, in the last week I've been carded even with a beard. Bet you feel stupid now, eh. But I won't hate on you doing your job. It's poison, and if you can keep one person from becoming addicted to this sweet poison its worth it.

But I also fail to grow hair straight down the middle on my chin and neck. I'm a neckbeard 90% of the time except for that gap. I couldn't care less. Even if I did grow thick hair I wouldn't maintain it. Fuck it.

But the point is, I can relate to any struggles in trying to fill their face. You're not alone, and there's nothing wrong with it. I've never once been berated or questioned about it.

My car is sick with a fever.

Alas, I finally have paid off my 2008[1] Ford Ranger which my parents lent me money for to buy 3 or 4 years ago. I told Miranda now that I own it it's going to start breaking down. Doesn't the fucking heat suddenly quit on her while she's driving to work on a chilly Spring day. FUCK. Fortunately, we have a separate car, which has sounded better, but it's a Toyota so fingers crossed, and I have been getting away with working from home for a few months, so we have nothing to whinge (sp?) about.

References

  1. I fucking wish it was 2018!
Erin Maus

I hate facial hair.

My facial hair grows too fast. In a week I'd have a light beard. I sometimes have to shave twice if I have something important later in the evening, like a date.

I take my appearance and hygiene incredibly seriously. Brush my teeth 2-3 times a day, shower 1-2 times a day, shave 1-2 times a day, good clothes, tasteful usage of makeup, regular exercise, decent diet ... I probably spend an 30-45 minutes a day on this stuff excluding exercise.

Chris Katko

I do the opposite. I shave, and then let it grow out for a week or two. I like how I look with and without a beard.

Edgar Reynaldo

I let everything grow u til I can't stand it anymore, and then get rid of it all. Like being reborn!

MiquelFire

So, as I was driving today, got a call from the shop saying they won't be able to tell me much of anything until tomorrow afternoon (or that's the soonest I will get my car back. Damn Bluetooth on the loaner they gave me was REALLY QUIET on phone call by default).

Also, DAMN FIREFOX! Why you get so slow all of a sudden?

Chris Katko

Also, DAMN FIREFOX! Why you get so slow all of a sudden?

When social justice took priority over progress. ;) It's the feature bloat of society.

Eric Johnson

I met a guy like that once. Here, have a turkey sandwich. Any news of the rest of the world?

Tasty sandwich, thanks! Apparently Nintendo is bringing back its NES emulation box soon.

I take my appearance and hygiene incredibly seriously. Brush my teeth 2-3 times a day, shower 1-2 times a day, shave 1-2 times a day, good clothes, tasteful usage of makeup, regular exercise, decent diet ... I probably spend an 30-45 minutes a day on this stuff excluding exercise.

You must be beautiful.

When social justice took priority over progress. ;)

I haven't followed Mozilla in a while. Are they SJWs now?

MiquelFire

I haven't followed Mozilla in a while. Are they SJWs now?

Whatever the case, it gets laggy enough that you can compare it to some old version of IE in terms of speed.

bamccaig

I think it started a few years ago when they forced the CEO to resign. From there they took over the entire organization, and the software has gone to shit as a result. They completely alienated their userbase and just don't care. And their products are worse than ever.

Edgar Reynaldo

Tasty sandwich, thanks! Apparently Nintendo is bringing back its NES emulation box [www.nintendo.com] soon.

Ooooh, that's something I'd pay real money for. xD

EDIT
Social Justice Warrior?
Special Journey Wanderer?
Sexy Jane Warrens?

Eric Johnson

SJW = Succulent, Juicy Wombats

bamccaig

Just picture Aaron Bolyard with tits. :-X

Chris Katko

My. God.

Somehow, I picture him looking like this:

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bamccaig

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(shoeonhead is not an SJW, but an anti-SJW woman that is actually intelligent)

Erin Maus

???

I look like a guy... https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/617381/1036940#target

I mean I've had no trouble dating, getting numbers, etc so I must be doing something right. >:(

Also I was talking with my last date about oversexualization of women in video games 8-)

Eric Johnson

What the...? I thought you'd look more like this:

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Chris Katko

Also I was talking with my last date about oversexualization of women in video games 8-)

I keep seeing this:

video

;D

Aaron is a sneaky male. ;D;D

bamccaig

;D

Erin Maus

We were also talking about how anti-feminists suck 8-)

You can think I'm some socially inept guy but that's as far from the truth as you can get. I'm excellent with conversation and social interaction. (God that sounds so nerdy but I don't know how to word it, so I don't think that helps my case).

I mean I've been asked for my number several times and gotten a dozen numbers since I started dating in April. I'm consistently in the top 5 for sales at my job (last month I was 1). If I were inept, or awkward, or unattractive, that wouldn't happen.

You can try and pigeonhole me into your cliche SJW stereotype but you're being like toddlers trying to fit a star into a square hole. :-*

bamccaig

Since when are SJW's inept, awkward, or unattractive? Some of them are, but many of them are not. That's not what we're saying at all. What you are is clueless. You're missing the point. Which is kind of the point I guess. :D

Chris Katko

Whatever mating strategy you use, if that works, go for it. Seriously. I'm not gonna bash you for having fun and succeeding.

However, my wife would have cringed if I had steered the subject to post-modern feminist dance theory.

SNEAKY MALE! It's a well-known evolutionary strategy.

https://youtu.be/xX-MI6uza1A?t=19m13s [19 min 13 secs]

video

Be honest, how many times have you discussed how "traditional masculine males are all dumb jerks". :P ala "Look at those alphas! They suck. You want... a sneaky male!"

Erin Maus

The idea of 'alpha male' and 'beta male' are toxic and reinforce the hurtful idea of masculinity. You can't pigeonhole the spectrum of male identity into two categories. It's hurtful for men and creates self image issues.

Guess what the solution is? Feminism.

Also I'm mostly dating guys so I don't know how that 'alpha/beta' bullshit helps. Regardless, almost everyone I've dated is either not cis and/or straight. So talking about things like how gender is bullshit is a natural topic...

bamccaig

When I met my future wife I was pretty much on the verge of MGTOW. I'm quiet so I didn't say much on our first date, but I imagine there was some laid back anti-Feminist rhetoric. Basically just trying to chase her off if she was a Feminist before I spent significant time or energy on her. I could never cooperate with a 3rd-wave Feminist. Fortunately, it didn't seem to bother her, and here we are 4 years later.

Append:

A dozen phone numbers in 2 months seems significantly less spectacular when you reveal that most or all of them are men. Males are significantly less picky, and gay or trans people probably are forced to be less picky.

In any case, if you're getting lots of wild sex that you enjoy as a result then good for you. Or if you're developing strong, healthy relationships even better. If neither of these things are occurring perhaps you should refocus your energy.

Erin Maus

Wow so you're ignorant about LGBT issues too, who would've thought.

bamccaig

It certainly is confounding how I don't know much about being gay or transsexual, and how you apparently don't know much about the issues that straight, cis-gendered males face. :-/

Chris Katko

You can't pigeonhole the spectrum of male identity into two categories.

A liberal that doesn't understand statistics, who would have thought. ;)

It's called bimodal. BI. MODAL. You know the word BI, right? :P

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For some super strange reason, new liberals (fun fact: I'm a liberal) don't understand that a spectrum doesn't have to be uniformly distributed, and you can make generalizations based on the fact that >90% of the individuals in each gender fits into a bucket. "Some people are different." Yeah. So? Outliers have nothing to do with the mean. That's why they're outliers. Having data points that move around, doesn't make the mean... stop being the mean.

I took this kind of math my very first semester of college. It's introductory stuff for non-majors.

And although the last century we may see more people openly expressing their dimorphism, that doesn't override literally 50+ million years of genetics. Sexual genes are older than the existence of trees. That's how old we're talking about. A lobster responds to serotonin the same way a human does, and how far are we away from lobsters genetically. That's how far this stuff goes back. You can't wish it away just because it messes with your ideology. There's a reason little girls as early as a few years old, start playing with dolls. Genetics. (Reeeeeeee!) I knew a female professor who took all female toys away from their daughters (evil men!), so her daughters... made their own dolls by dressing up G.I. Joes and Firetrucks. Her poor children.

Baby girls also start looking at people's eyes almost immediately, whereas boys are immediately drawn to objects. We're talking before they can even talk--before we can "indoctrinate them" with "traditional values."

It's so weird how liberals went from being pro-science, to literally ignoring and banning evolution. If this was 1990, I'd swear I was talking to neo-cons. But now neo-libs are the ones who hate science. This world is so strange...

And how new liberals literally think ONE gender is inherently evil. If we said women were the evil gender, people would riot in the streets. But nah, men? Their penises of death control everything. And if being male is evil, then shouldn't we condemn any woman who exhibits EVIL MALE traits? Yeah, that sounds once again... sexist as hell.

Here's a thought. Both genders are neither good or bad, and they serve complimentary and essential, supporting roles. How the hell that became "sexism", makes me weep for humanity.

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Erin Maus

Where is the scientific literature saying there are "alpha males" and "beta males"?

Also I'm not denying there aren't differences between men and women. That would be a bit silly. I'm saying differences like "why do women not go into STEM" or "why don't women make as much as men" (i.e., why do they make choices that result in them having lower wages) are social things, they aren't evolutionary.

Also you keep calling me a liberal but I'm against the free market so ergo I'm not a liberal, and especially not a neoliberal. Maybe you should read this. I'm a socialist.

Eric Johnson

I'm against the free market

Just curious, why are you against the free market?

Edgar Reynaldo

Where is the scientific literature saying there are "alpha males" and "beta males"?

Jeez, didn't you ever go to high school? Dominance and traits of confidence and being out going are all alpha traits. By your own admission, you're an alpha. This means naturally, you're going to take control of the relationship, and your partner. I bet pretty much every body you've 'dated' is really just a submissive beta. Guess what that makes the two of you? A gender pair, with MASCULINE and FEMININE roles. Oops, it really is all about men and women.

And if you guys didn't know this, or it wasn't obvious from the spelling of the words, but women, are the woe of men. God formed Eve from the rib (curve) ((DNA)) of Adam. They make natural pairs.

Neil Roy

Just started playing Earth and Beyond again after 16 years! I knew some people worked on creating their own servers etc... since the game shut down in 2004, but didn't think they were still going. Awesome game, great atmosphere (especially the haunting music while flying in space, love it!). Very relaxing, not annoying, I really feel this game would have been a hit if it came out today, I think it was just too early and ahead of it's time back in 2002.

You can get instructions on downloading and getting it running, no cost, totally free here...

https://www.net-7.org/#tab-ingame

Some ingame screenshots I took while flying and mining in an asteroid field...

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Edgar Reynaldo

Looks like fun Neil. Anyone ever play Wing Commander? That was my favorite space game ever.

Neil Roy

Oh, and if anyone enters "Earth and Beyond", I am "NiteHackr" in the game. if you can find me... which I am not sure how you would. :)

Chris Katko

I sucked at Wing Commander as a kid. I'd lose some battles, then I'd see some horrible cinematics of my friends/family being shot to death or something. :o

OH! Sidenote: This is a great video. Talks about a award-winning feminist who went to document the "evil men" in the men's rights activists and realized more and more she was basically "priming" every interview with her presumptions of malice and waiting to see a phrase that triggered her as "proof" they're all evil men. And the more she interviewed, the more she ended up having to come to terms with her own biases. And the second she did that... the liberal/feminist community attacked her.

video

Quote:

"When you humanize your enemy, you, in turn, may be dehumanized by your community."

There's a similar story (and reaction from the community) when a feminist, lesbian, went undercover as a man and expected them to be a bunch of bro's who hated on women. Instead, she found men who were unsure how to live up to the expectations of being a husband and/or father, the immense pressures, and the pain of their domestically abusive relationships. And how ("unlike females") the men were instantly accepting of an outsider. And when she went to strip clubs she found not aggressive men... but a bunch of men who were sad and self-hating to be there... that "that" is their only way to meet their sexual needs.

Way more humanizing than modern liberal (ehem--socialists?) want the world to be.

Of course, for daring to think critically, she also was attacked by the establishment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Made_Man_(book)

Quote:

"Men are suffering. They have different problems than women have but they don't have it better. They need our sympathy, they need our love, and they need each other more than anything else. They need to be together." [2][3]

What an evil, toxic person!

I've been reading lots of evolutionary biology and man, it really cuts through the B.S.. Like how new liberals ... socialists? ... are driven by one core feature. Maternity. It's all about "feeling safe." You see it in countless literature. Why not ban a word, if it makes some people feel safer! Except the downside of maternal instincts? It's EXTREMELY divisive by nature. It divides people into us (our babies) and them (predators). So it makes perfect sense why when someone challenges the Narrative (TM) they become a threat... to "our babies". It's also why evils committed by the "in group" (our babies!) are overlooked. Muslims shoot up a store? Let's ignore it. They've been oppressed. Christian shoots up a school? LOOK AT THESE EVIL WHITE MEN OF DEATH. And when two in-groups fight, they ignore it. Like black-on-black crime, or a Muslim (in-group) killing dozens of gays (in-group) in one of the worst shootings in US history.

Likewise, when a Feminist sees that all men aren't evil, they become a "threat" to the status quo. The safety of "ma babies."

The key here is... none of it has to do with logic, at any level, except protecting babies.

There's countless examples. Laci Green was a typical SJW feminist, and still is a feminist. She hosted sexual education and women's body rights YouTube videos. Great gal, right? But she DARED to commit the ULTIMATE EVIL! Chop off women's genitals in Pakistan. No, just kidding, that's okay. She dared to DATE ... a men's rights activist.

What should be the ultimate story of "love conquers all", is a story of a betrayer who sold out her kind to the enemy.

It took me a decade but I finally "figured it out". It's all biology.

(Like how conservatives are driven by a dislike of difference, and skepticism of outsiders. And liberals are driven more by a welcome of difference and outsiders. Problem is, both are actually valid points depending on the world climate.)

bamccaig

She made a movie. Look it up!

Polybios

"why do women not go into STEM" or "why don't women make as much as men" (i.e., why do they make choices that result in them having lower wages) are social things

Maybe they just don' want to because of ... biology?

Over here, there are lots of initiatives to encourage girls to go into STEM, but percentages remain low. Is it the evil patriarchy suppressing all those smart girls whose deepest secret wishes are to become programmers? I somehow doubt it.

Chris Katko

I'm so glad the world is waking up to the flaws in the (well-meaning!) SJW ideology. Any ideology that hurts innocent people, isn't really worth sparing from criticsm and evolving.

Polybios said:

Over here, there are lots of initiatives to encourage girls to go into STEM, but percentages remain low. Is it the evil patriarchy suppressing all those smart girls whose deepest secret wishes are to become programmers? I somehow doubt it.

I don't know a single woman that edits Wikipedia. Nor does my wife. Is it because evil men keep them out? Or simply women don't like collating data. Men love facts, and arranging them. Men love structuring things. Building things!

On the otherhand, I checked my account recently. Literally every change I've made in the last few months (over 15 changes) were all reverted. And I either added clear facts, or removed unnecessary NPOV paragraphs (like mentioning someone is an "ex-democrat" in the first introductory paragraph of a biography). I don't know anyone who actually wants to commit to Wikipedia anymore because it's just a camp farm. Like, people with insane ideas have the MOST free time to commit to their crazy ideas, are the ones that win edit wars. If my edits don't go through? My sourced facts don't get accepted? I move on. I'm an adult, and my time is too important. But it's Wikipedia that suffers because of their shitty, toxic, terrible community.

bamccaig said:

She made a movie. Look it up!

Yeah, the Red Pill! It's a great documentary. This talk is like a short summary of it for people who don't want to find the doc. The documentary was protested and banned from circulation by many places. It's pretty pathetic when a female, feminist, award-winning documentary author gets banned... by feminists. For daring to question The Narrative.

But once again, the second you dare to critique the in-group, you are ostracized from the group so you can be attacked without rebuke. That's why they use words like "racist, misogynist, nazi", they're painting you as "them" in the "us verses them" thinking. And they even invented "nazi-enabler" which means you don't even have to be a nazi or a bad guy... just "enabling" (an intentionally vague term with no factual objective bar to meet) allows them to throw you out.

So when Milo Yiannapolis, a gay Brit, says something they hate, he's now an alt-right "troll". (Another word). And Jordon Peterson, and Christina Hoff Sommers, both life-long liberal voters, who dared to critique their own group, are now labelled "nazi-sympathizers" and "Alt-right". Christina's wikipage literally lists her as conservative and the wiki-whores have decided that even her outright saying, "I'm not conservative, I've voted Democrat my entire life" doesn't "count" as a source. Because Wikipedia editors can "decide" what you are, against your wishes. Talk about toxic people, eww.

[edit] This got lost. They also do the "I'm not calling you a nazi... but Nazi's read your material". Like, how does that make you a bad person? You can't choose your audience, and how do facts change whether "Bad guys" agree with them or not? Bad people might like abortion, so abortion is murder. See how stupid that is?

Chris Katko

[ugh]

PAGE 100!!!

Gotta take advantage of this rare double post!

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[edit] One more point about labels! CNN literally called George Zimmerman a "White Hispanic." That's right. They took away his Hispanic card, so they could attack him "legally" in the PC system. (Regardless of whether or not he's a bad guy / d-bag. I'm talking labels.) Of course because feelings are involved, there's no rhyme or reason to the witch hunt tactics. You'd think the worst killer of gays in USA history would have his Muslim card revoked. Instead, they just pretend it didn't happen.

Edgar Reynaldo

@Chris Katko
You're just a mansplainer. :P

AND, this is only page 25. xD

bamccaig

I'm so glad the world is waking up to the flaws in the (well-meaning!) SJW ideology.

I think you're dreaming. The world is nowhere near to waking up to anything. Literal whisleblowers came out and told everybody what the government is doing, and nothing really happened, except those whisleblowers have to live on the run for the rest of their lives. That's how little people give a shit, or rather, how little people have the time or energy to give a shit in this world. It has been perfectly designed to leave us all drained. The things that you do notice are out of wack, you can't convince enough people to help you fix it. Inevitably, everything remains broken as designed.

Eric Johnson

Well guys, I did it—I cut my hair. :'( I put my hair into ponytails and cut those off with scissors to later mail to Locks of Love. Then I took a hair clipper and buzzed off the rest. I didn't go for that razor-shaven bambams look; I instead took it down to 1/4 of an inch. I'm not sure how I feel about it just yet.

One thing that was immediately noticeable (and something that surprised me) was just how cool (temperature-wise) it was not having long hair. Just taking the ponytails off made things so much cooler. And it's neat being able to feel the air whip against the back of my neck as I move again... I forgot how that felt. :P

Short hair reveals my tiny ears though—something I used to be self-conscious about. I think 1/4 of an inch might be too short for my liking, but it'll grow in. I don't plan on having long hair again in the foreseeable future, but maybe and inch or two in length wouldn't be bad. I'll probably grow to love my new haircut in about a week. I wonder how my friends and family will react. :o

Edit
It's been a few hours now and I can say that I like having short hair. I went and did some work and the people there thought it looked nice. :) I posted a video on Twitter of my hair to show my online friends. :P

bamccaig

Looking good! It's interesting to see the part still there after you shaved it, but it'll disappear on its own as the hair flexes and grows now that it's too short to really part. Don't worry about that. On the one hand, if you like hair, I do recommend you start growing it out again because in my experience if you keep it this short then it slows to nothing. Make sure you figure out if you want to have hair or not and grow it back out if you want. I personally love the convenience of being near or fully bald, but not everybody likes it (including my fiancée :P).

Bruce Perry

women, are the woe of men

That made me curious. Wikipedia certainly disagrees. It says the 'wo' is derived from a word which just meant 'female', and the 'man' or 'men' is derived from a word which originally just meant 'human'. I also looked up the etymology of 'woe' and couldn't find any link to the old word for 'female'. So, sadly, although it may be cathartic if you've had woe from women, that's as far as it goes.

The topic moved on, but I might suggest not trying to convince each other of your beliefs. You may feel you're right, but who cares? For all you know, what you're doing could be like trying to convince someone who needs the comfort of heaven, science, equality, whatever it is, that they're wrong and they have nothing. What would you gain if you succeeded? Let's say what you gain is a woman who finds that attractive. What then - will you bully your future kid in the same way? :P

Edgar Reynaldo

That made me curious. Wikipedia certainly disagrees. [en.wikipedia.org] It says the 'wo' is derived from a word which just meant 'female', and the 'man' or 'men' is derived from a word which originally just meant 'human'. I also looked up the etymology of 'woe' and couldn't find any link to the old word for 'female'. So, sadly, although it may be cathartic if you've had woe from women, that's as far as it goes.

It was mostly a joke. You fell for the troll-bait. :/

Bruce Perry said:

The topic moved on, but I might suggest not trying to convince each other of your beliefs. You may feel you're right, but who cares? For all you know, what you're doing could be like trying to convince someone who needs the comfort of heaven, science, equality, whatever it is, that they're wrong and they have nothing. What would you gain if you succeeded? Let's say what you gain is a woman who finds that attractive. What then - will you bully your future kid in the same way? :P

Lulz, what? What are you going on about? Are you working for the atheists now, or the religous? Why would I want a woman who found bashing people's beliefs attractive? You're way off track. We've been very civil the last few pages. I don't know what you're going on about. I don't believe I've been 'bullying' anyone afaik.

bamccaig

There's a clear difference between debating ideas and bullying. I think saying women are the "woe" of men is clearly a joke (if not pretty much accurate most of the time). Of course, women are also the motivation for men to do great things, or anything at all really. At least, for straight men. Without a woman to impress, support, or win I don't think there's much point in doing anything difficult. Which might explain why women usually avoid doing them. Bazinga.

Eric Johnson
bamccaig said:

It's interesting to see the part still there after you shaved it, but it'll disappear on its own as the hair flexes and grows now that it's too short to really part.

Yeah, it went away on its own this morning after I showered. I guess without long hair weighing it down anymore, it was able to return to an upright position. So no problem there now. :)

Quote:

Make sure you figure out if you want to have hair or not and grow it back out if you want.

I like hair. I'll probably grow it out to an inch or so but not any longer. Maybe I'll just keep it at 1/4 an inch though. We'll see.

bamccaig

IMO 1/4 inch is too short if you want to continue to have hair. It'll thin out before long at that length IMO. This is not based on science, but anecdotal evidence. If you like having hair I recommend you grow it to a length where it can be styled and shaped at least. That'll encourage thickness I think. And avoid hats if you can, but it's kind of hard to protect your head from Sun damage without hats when it's so short. So it's a compromise either way probably. I don't know if it's related, but the skin on my head is incredibly dry now. To be fair, I rarely drink water, and drink a ton of beer/alcohol, so that contributes to dehydration. In any case, my fiancée thinks I have psoriasis (sp?) and I don't really question her. It's bad. So that's another thing to be wary of if you have short hair. Normal people that drink more water than beer will probably be fine, but I prefer to drink beer. >:(

Eric Johnson

I'm not a big beer drinker, and I drink loads of water to help my complexion anyhow, so I'll be fine. ;) You make a good point about hair thinning though. I'll decide what to do once it's time to cut it again (around 1-2 inches). I'm 23, so I don't think I need to worry about hair thinning or losing my hair anytime soon (I think)... When does that usually happen to most men anyway?

As for psoriasis, I had to look it up. The pictures aren't pretty. Don't most people usually get that on their arms? At least I've seen a lot of people with red, dry skin around their upper arms. Maybe it's not the same thing. In any case, try drinking enough water such that your urine is clear and you'll (probably) be fine.

bamccaig

My hair probably started thinning mid-20s, but wasn't noticeable until I was approaching 30. Still, you're not very far from that. On the plus side, you've grown a full head of hair for the last 14 years or so which probably helps. I don't know if hair style/cut and/or hats really affects anything, or if people with thinning hair are just naturally drawn to hair styles that make the most of it. In other words, I don't know if there's science behind the wives' tales.

I haven't done a lot of research on it because I'm the odd case: if I went fully bald it would actually be ideal for me since it means zero-maintenance for hair and I enjoy my appearance clean shaved most. Mind you, even if I went bald on top I'd probably still grow a beard and I've come to despise bald on top with a beard for associative reasons, so perhaps I'd have to then start shaving my beard regularly, which would be a lot more work than just shaving my head every couple of months.

I don't know for sure if my head is actually psoriasis or not. Basically just imagine extremely dry scalp. Like dandruff, but extreme. If I rub my head it'll flake continuously. Occasionally I get some red spots too, but they aren't gruesome looking or anything. Just irritated or whatever.

I can achieve clear urine levels of water consumption if I explicitly try to. Pretty much turn my beer addiction into a bottle addiction and drink bottled water instead of beer. I can do this for a while, up to a couple of months, but beer is so much more satisfying. I cannot drink enough water to counter the beer that I drink. It's a trade off. Science really needs to work on these first world problems. >:(

Eric Johnson

I wish you all the best in becoming bald and achieving a hassle-free hair experience. :D

As for beer, what is it about beer that you find satisfying? The flavor, the texture, the temperature, the buzz, something else? I enjoy the occasional beer, but I've never understood the allure that so many have with it. It doesn't taste too great and it's expensive. I'm much happier buying those sugar-free juice packets from Walmart and mixing them with water instead. But to each his own. ;)

Maybe you should get another vice to replace alcohol. :P I knew a guy who was a long-time alcoholic who quit drinking beer and took up drinking seltzer water instead. He drank seltzer water like an alcoholic drinks beer though. He said it satiated his desire to drink. I guess that's better than being drunk all the time.

bamccaig

As for beer, what is it about beer that you find satisfying? The flavor, the texture, the temperature, the buzz, something else?

Honestly it's a combination of things depending on the mood or day. The buzz/chemical/"medicinal" effects are probably most important. I'm very introverted and "antisocial" by nature. It is not in my nature to interact with people for fun. I have learned to interact when I need to, but it doesn't come naturally. In that same vein, I tend to over-analyze everything, and easily get anxious, etc. Alcohol is a reliable way to cope with that. When my mind would normally race for hours when I try to go to sleep, if I'm drunk it's already suppressed (though usually I still fight myself until 2 or 3 AM before I submit so I'm exhausted too).

Similarly, in social situations if I can be drinking it aides with it in the same way. Where my mind would normally be racing, questioning every response, every moment of silence, etc., the alcohol helps me to just "skip beats" and be less concerned with it. It helps me to relax in that sense.

A close relative just passed away, and only 4 or 5 months after another close relative passed. When the first relative passed I didn't really take any time to stop and feel anything. It doesn't come naturally, probably in part because males are taught to suppress it, but also probably it's somewhat natural/hormonal.

For this second loss, I was just feeling not right one night so I decided instead of the usual gaming regiment I would listen to music in the dark instead. Drinking beer of course. I used to do this as a teenager, first without the beer, and in my elder teen years with beer. The music and meditation helped a lot to explore my emotions, but the beer helps to amplify the sadness.

I sobbed for a good 3 or 4 hours on and off, which I think was helpful and healthy. I couldn't really achieve it without setting up the environment for it, and alcohol aided. I actually drank 4 beers in the first hour and 20 minutes. I had to temporarily suspend alcohol consumption because I was drinking too fast and knew it would lead to bad times. As I sobered up, my capacity for expressing myself faded until I was pretty much incapable again. After an hour and 20 minutes I concluded that I had had enough time to process the previous drinks and started to ease into it again. I was almost immediately able to cry again, with the aide of darkness and music, naturally.

I didn't drink until I was legal age (19 in my jurisdiction). I was against alcohol before this for the usual reasons, but was experiencing a state of turmoil with friends and girls. I ended up exploring alcohol as a sort of destructive behavior. I therefore had a very open mind to beer, knowing it didn't taste very good naturally. I was open to forcing it to be "tough". The thing is, alcohol wears on you quickly if you let it. Before long, I actually loved the flavor of beer, and when you're kind of new to drinking or don't drink often you can better appreciate the unique flavors. I initially was disappointed when I'd start getting a buzz because it numbs your tastes and makes you unable to taste the beer's actual flavor. Of course, as you drink more regularly the taste is no longer detectable and you are just hooked on the buzz instead.

It's a rare pleasure these days when I get to experience the actual flavor of a good brew. And good is subjective. I've tried many beers over the years, but my preference is considered a "cheap" beer in Canada. I still find that it tastes the best. I don't mind more "eccentric" beers for an adventure, but my beer of choice is just nice without being weird or forced. But again, most of the time, I cannot taste those subtle effects, and only get to experience the satisfaction of fulfilling the addiction and the buzz.

Quote:

I enjoy the occasional beer, but I've never understood the allure that so many have with it. It doesn't taste too great and it's expensive. I'm much happier buying those sugar-free juice packets from Walmart and mixing them with water instead. But to each his own. ;)

I have to avoid sugar for my teeth. My oral hygiene has especially gone downhill in recent years due to work stress and probably alcohol abuse, but it was never able to be perfect anyway. Long before I started drinking alcohol I was addicted to soda, and my parents ignorantly fed my habit to the point that the enamel was pretty much worn down on my teeth by the time I was in the my late teens or early twenties.

If your oral health is reasonable for your age and you are happy with watered down sugar instead of alcohol I wouldn't want to dissuade you from that. There are certainly threats to be aware of with sugar drinks, but if you water it down you seem to already be aware of those. That said, as I said, beer grows on you. Particularly if you have mental or emotional issues to cope with. Either way, if you drink the taste and then the buzz will grow on you. As you said, it's expensive, and we know it's bad for your health so don't feel pressured to buy into it. If you don't enjoy it good. It's just an expensive habit and poison. Let it remain a mystery as long as you can, as long as you also avoid more harmful alternatives.

Quote:

Maybe you should get another vice to replace alcohol. :P I knew a guy who was a long-time alcoholic who quit drinking beer and took up drinking seltzer water instead. He drank seltzer water like an alcoholic drinks beer though. He said it satiated his desire to drink. I guess that's better than being drunk all the time.

I've also used carbonated water to aide in cutting back or temporarily quitting alcohol. It works. I'd wager that for a beer drinker soda water is a reasonable replacement. Practically speaking, even bottled water works, except it's boring and the lack of variety or taste or feeling leaves you more vulnerable to "relapse". Whereas carbonated water also gives you a feeling and you can get it various flavors which helps to shake things up. In the end, it still lacks the self medication that most people drinking alcohol are probably seeking.

Gideon Weems

Dylan Thomas may have been my favorite alcoholic. More importantly, however, I posted on the historic 100th/25th/whateverth page in the greatest thread of all time. I'm also doing it from a headset display.

Edgar Reynaldo

You guys may be witnessing history here. If this thread ever locks, I think allegro.cc will probably auto-lock as well. :/

The forum is too quiet.

Guys, let's face it. We need to ADVERTISE allegro on OTHER sites, or we're going to die a slow death of attrition. Or is it just a.cc?

OMG wait! There's been a sign of life! The news page just got updated with the Allegro 5.2.4 release thread news item! Our dear overlord ML hasn't forgotten us!

Chris Katko

Whenever I get game(s) published on Steam, I'm mentioning Allegro.

dthompson

Whenever I get game(s) published on Steam, I'm mentioning Allegro.

In the name of Happyland Adventures' bunny protag, I vow to do the same. (though my games are crap so will probably just leave it to Chris)

Eric Johnson

@bambams:
So the alcohol helps you cope with anxiety and over-analyzing things. I suppose that's cheaper than therapy. You seem to have done well enough with beer thus far, but I'd strongly encourage you to seek out other venues to help or suppress your problems. I'd hate to find out you died in a car wreck due to alcohol or that your liver went bust or something. :-/

The juice I mentioned is sugar-free, as in no sugar. So pseudo sugar (which is probably just as bad as real sugar but for different reasons). I don't think the sugar-free juice is harmful to your teeth... I drink a lot of it and haven't had any teeth problems. Although, drink too much and the dye turns your poop green. :o

I forgot to mention: the guy who drank the carbonated water had a fake eye. He gave me his old one when he got a new one. Check it out:

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@Gideon Weems: Dude, I love your profile. Been meaning to tell you that for a while. There's some sweet profiles here, but yours tops them all! :D

bamccaig

I'd hate to find out you died in a car wreck due to alcohol or that your liver went bust or something. :-/

Not all alcohol drinkers drive while they're drunk. :P I never drive drunk. I don't even risk it if I'm unsure. If there's a chance I'm drunk I don't drive. Though to be fair, evidence suggests that "distracted driving" AKA "cell phone use while driving" is actually more dangerous than drunk driving. I don't do either one, but most people seem to use cell phones with complete ignorance.

As for my liver going bust, it's certainly a concern on my mind. Last autumn I was experiencing a strange taste/smell sensation that reminded me of the taste of heart tissue (I have eaten chicken hearts before). This concerned me greatly. I didn't have a family/general practitioner doctor at the time so my only option was going to the ER. The ER doctor ignored my alcohol abuse and concluded that most likely the culprit was acid reflux, or related to my poor oral hygiene. He prescribed some pills for acid reflux, and recommended I make an appointment with my dentist. The prescription could not be taken with alcohol so I quit drinking alcohol for a month while I took the prescription, and then continued for another month after the prescription ran out to give my liver time to restore itself.. It turns out that livers are actually pretty resilient and can repair themselves if you give them a break.

There are certainly nights when I'm quite hard on it, but in general I don't think it's unreasonable based on the research that I've done. I can't afford hard liquor so it's rare that I subject my liver to that (which is good because if I could afford it my liver would probably be much worse off). After 2 months of sobriety I was feeling really great, but I had to abuse the shit out of bottled water and soda/seltzer water to do it. I definitely have a bit of alcohol dependence, but I can overcome that relatively easily. What's more difficult to overcome is the drinking habit (literally). I always had a stock of bottled water and seltzer water and drank bottles/cans of it all night long in quantities that I would normally drink beer. If I didn't have a bottle in my hand then I would get antsy. The bottled water was relatively good for me, other than being loaded with salt, and the seltzer water was theoretically harmless other than contributing to dehydration like the beer used to, but they're able to hide ingredients under labels like "natural flavor" so who really knows.

I broke the sobriety when my 2 week vacation time at Christmas was achieved. Initially I planned to drink during my vacation and then go back to sobriety afterward. And I think I slowed down for a bit after my vacation, but renewed work stress encouraged continued drinking. I has since completely relapsed. Eventually, I hope I'll get inspired to go back to water for a few months. In the meantime, I'm enjoying the relief afforded to me by beer.

Mind you, various financial stresses have been taking their toll for a few years. It's a gray area whether I can afford my drinking habit anymore. That was a contributing factor to quitting back in September. Things are back to getting serious, and I have a wedding coming up in October so it's not a good feeling having no money saved up. On the bright side, I just received a sizable raise so as long as my company continues to balance the books and keep me employed things are looking up for a brief time until inflation or "grown up" purchases drown me again. I'm hoping the raise is enough to give me a break for a while, but we'll see what it practically means once it kicks in in June..

Edgar Reynaldo

How can anyone be a connoisseur of domestic draft beer? Tastes like warm swill, if we're being polite.

I used to drink heavily in my youth, to numb the pain, but all it does is make it worse.

If you have emotional problems, alcohol only makes everything seem worse, or else you just stop caring, which is bad too.

Your thoughts determine your reality.

Let me say that again, your thoughts determine your reality. Perception is everything.

bamccaig

How can anyone be a connoisseur of domestic draft beer? Tastes like warm swill, if we're being polite.

It usually tastes like water to me. :P But I don't mind it (but I mind paying for it!).

Quote:

Your thoughts determine your reality.

Let me say that again, your thoughts determine your reality. Perception is everything.

There's truth in this. I'm old enough to know that, but not old enough to put it into practice.

My family drinks a lot too which makes it hard to quit. My brother, mother, and dad all drink as much as I do. I love visiting them of course, but it's hard to be sober when everybody else is drinking.

My finacée doesn't drink often because it usually gives her a headache or upsets her stomach. As a result, she's usually my designated driver when we go out. Which is extremely convenient. She doesn't seem to mind either, and it's good to keep her away from the temptation so that she doesn't have to try to quit. When we have kids she says I have to quit drinking which I think will be really hard to do. Especially with the added stresses of providing for and caring for a baby. :-/ But I do think it's a good thing to do, if you can handle it.

I'd love to just get therapy for my issues instead of self-medicating, but I'm afraid I can't afford it and I'm afraid they might drug me in ways that affect my thought process and change who I "am". On the plus side, they're supposed to be legalizing marijuana in a few months so I might experiment with that, but on the downside there's a huge negative stigma against marijuana use still so it might not be practical even if it is "better", which itself remains to be seen.

Bruce Perry

It was mostly a joke. You fell for the troll-bait. :/

But I learnt something - I hadn't looked up the etymology of 'women' before :)

Quote:

Lulz, what? What are you going on about? Are you working for the atheists now, or the religous? Why would I want a woman who found bashing people's beliefs attractive? You're way off track. We've been very civil the last few pages. I don't know what you're going on about. I don't believe I've been 'bullying' anyone afaik.

I assume none of what you quoted was intended for you. Sorry for the confusion :) In answer to your question, my own beliefs are that religions are created purely by people for people, but I see the value in them and was making the best effort I could to support all viewpoints. I'm too lazy to check but I think maybe someone was trying to convince you your beliefs were wrong (again) and I was trying to address that person.

Chris Katko

Next poster get illustrious 2500th post!

Bruce Perry

You suffered from an off-by-one bug. Congratulations Chris Katko! :D

Chris Katko

2500 replies, that is.

Also, I just watched Enemy Mine. Holy. Crap. It was amazing. I... I had no idea it would be "that" kind of movie. I'm almost never surprised by films anymore. It was a real treat.

I actually felt an emotional connection to the story.

Dennis Quaid is a freakin' great actor (and Louis Cameron Gossett Jr. deserves a gold medal--I wouldn't have even recognized him.)

It puts the Next Generation episode that ripped it off to complete shame.

Neil Roy

Unreal Gold, is FREE for another 24 hours on GOG.com and STEAM for those interested. There is also a fan made patch which updates it with modern resolutions as well as high res texture packs which look awesome.

I already own it, but grabbed it on both anyhow because free. 8-)

Eric Johnson
Neil Roy said:

Unreal Gold, is FREE for another 24 hours on GOG.com and STEAM for those interested.

Sweet. I grabbed a copy on Steam. Thanks for the heads-up. :)

dthompson

Aw, if it were Unreal Tournament I'd be downloading it without a second thought. Never looked at the original Unreal.

I got the demo of Tournament on a CD from a magazine in around 1998 and I played it incessantly (though with the gore turned off so my mum wouldn't complain)

Peter Hull

Possibly of interest to those who don't read Hacker News and have an opinion on C, C++, or D:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17129678
including some comments by Walter Bright. He comes across as a nice guy.

Edgar Reynaldo

2500 replies indeed

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Chris Katko

Walter and Andrei really are nice guys.

Check out some benchmarks that include D. It's top 5 in speed and memory, and in some places beats C and C++ for first place. (JSON parsing using native library!)

https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks

Neil Roy

If you go to the Unreal engine 4 page, there's actually a modern version of Unreal Tournament which you can grab for nothing.

I hear there are still UT players going on with the original, though I haven't played in about 20 years.

dthompson said:

Never looked at the original Unreal.

The original Unreal actually looks better than the first UT. They run on the same engine, except UT cut some things out like detail textures and some fog effects in order to keep the game fast enough for online play. You can actually copy the Unreal files over to UT and play Unreal using the UT engine, it will just be missing certain things.

If you like UT, you will probably like Unreal, it's mainly a long single player campaign, and a very interesting one with awesome music, but it can do multiplayer as well. Also has a level editor with it like UT.

Chris Katko

I felt like Unreal was pretty generic. Graphically impressive but the story was basically "single player missions FPS" / "an addon at best".

It wasn't till Half-Life in 98 that people started really realizing that you could have an FPS with a real story.

Unreal Tournament 99 was/is super fun. I still remember trying to make my own levels. I've got UT99, and UT2K3/2K4 on GOG if you guys want to play some time. :)

Also, Tribes 1 was patched by the community and supports even 4K. But there's only like 1 server that has any people on it, and it's modded and the mod is very unbalanced. ("Railgun" is instakill, infinite ammo, infinite range and even kills "heavies." Why use anything else?)

I've been playing Blackwake (I had in my Steam library for YEARS never tried it.). It's Chivalry... but with pirates and multi-team pirate ships. (Chivalry is fun too.) But I've been having epic battles captaining pirate ships, ramming the enemy, boarding them, and cutting them to shreds. The captain pilots the ship, everyone else has to load cannons and fire. And you HAVE to work over voice chat to coordinate as cannons only aim VERTICALLY and the captain aims the ship HORIZONTALLY. So you have to work together to line up shots. Also, you have to run around and repair ship holes to keep from sinking and you can have insane frantic matches where the ship is 90% under-water and you SAVE IT and come back and kick the enemy's butt. (However, without friends, I don't know if it's got hundreds of hours of gameplay. It's only got 3 maps / modes, and is still "alpha" in terms of content. So don't spend lots of money on it unless you know you'll love it. VOICE CHAT is almost always full and leads to lots of really fun interactions with people.)

https://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/420290/

I played and beat Giants: Citizen Kabutu. Holy crap, it's amazing. The single-player is like a console game / story. It's hilarious. And multiplayer is class based. Human(ish) guys with jet packs and technology. "Sea Reapers" who have spells. And a single "kabutu" which is like a king kong / godzilla. All three factions play differently and fight. Too bad there are ZERO players on servers. :( So I never got to try multi.

video
(Giants in 4K60!)

I want to either start a website, or perhaps just join one, dedicated to playing old games. That is, you join a club or "faction" or "room" and one day a week, everyone decides to play a game, at the same time. So you schedule a day (or days) and that way everyone meets up and you can play with full servers even with games with small playerbases. "Thursday is BF1942. Friday is X-wing vs Tie-Fighter, and also a BF1942."

dthompson

Might have to check it out. :)

On the subject of awesome music, I always loved this track from UT. Takes me right back to floating around that absolutely mad skyscraper level.

Neil Roy

Unreal... Generic? It's competitor at the time was QUAKE for crying out loud! It was ahead of it's time. It's engine was far ahead of the rest and you obviously never played Unreal at all if you didn't see the story in it. Wow.

Chris Katko
Neil Roy said:

Unreal... Generic? It's competitor at the time was QUAKE for crying out loud! It was ahead of it's time. It's engine was far ahead of the rest and you obviously never played Unreal at all if you didn't see the story in it. Wow.

You're talking to someone who loves the Unreal series. ::)

I didn't say it wasn't ahead of it's time. It was graphically beautiful (for the time), and had great esoteric weapons.

But when you look at it compared to the games that came later... it doesn't offer anything unique. It's an FPS game without an important story, and there have been dozens upon dozens of those. It's not a "bad" thing, it just means there are plenty of newer games that offer a better "thin story FPS" experience. You don't miss out on much.

Half-Life 1 (came out 6 months later!), for example on the otherhand (and I'm not even a huge Half-Life fan) isn't as visually impressive but the gameplay is downright amazing. The scripted sequences of monsters breaking through the walls, crawling through vents to get away, scientists running and screaming. That was revolutionary and still makes for a great experience.

Perhaps I'm biased in my examples. There are plenty of story-based FPS games now. But I'll never forget the elevator scene where one scientist is trying to hold the other by the hand in the empty elevator shaft, and then falls to his death.

When I was a kid, Unreal (as opposed to UT99) was basically a game that was used to either sell videocards (no one could run it--bragging material), or later, came for free with your videocard purchase.

I did already say Unreal 1 had lots of neat inventions. The engine itself was amazing, and again, the esoteric guns were clever AND useful and so iconic they're still featured (almost unmodified) in every subsequent version of Unreal Tournament.

So perhaps the word "generic" was the wrong one to communicate that I'm talking about stuff other than the core mechanics of "kill bad guys." Unreal is a "kill the monsters game". There's nothing wrong with that. But nobody would cite Unreal as a powerful story, or full of humor (like Giants: Citizen Kabuto). They'd cite combat. And while we may enjoy the nostalgia, I don't think most new kids would play Unreal and go "Wow, I got something unique that newer games don't offer better." Later games do the same thing, with better combat, better graphics, etc.

In 1998, Half-Life came out, I mentioned that. But also... Trespasser. A game that was literally decades ahead of its time where you controlled the physical hand and arm of a woman. Throw boxes, pickup guns and aim them even down to the wrist rotation. All while fighting dinosaurs. (Imagine that with a 3D headset now!) Pushing physical buttons in a 3-D world to open a passcoded gate. Shooting out the post supports of a trailer. Those are unique things that--even though the game has many flaws--make it far from a "generic" FPS.

The opposite is kind of like Call of Duty, or NFL 20xx. There's really no reason to play an older version of a football game (or many Call of Duty games) because they're just re-releasing the same "game" (shoot nazis, or kick the ball) with an updated engine. Better graphics, better voice acting, but the story is mostly replaceable (or non-existent).

Meanwhile, take System Shock 2. Bioshock 1/2 are "successors" but they really aren't. They ripped out all the good, unique stuff of RPG, inventory management, and a story that doesn't hold your hand with a "go to marker" and you end up with System Shock 2 still offering a unique experience that "sequels" don't actually replace. They're not better. They're different (and really, empty husks of what SS2 is.) So people still to this day want to play System Shock 2. It offers a unique experience that nobody has ever managed to replicate. (I hear "Prey" is a spiritual successor though. Again, dumbed down for the masses though--but perhaps not as much as Bioshock.)

Neil Roy

I don't compare it to games that came later. If you do that most older games will suck. It's simply an unfair comparison in my opinion. You need to compare it to games out at the same time, and it's closest competitor at the time was Quake. There was simply no contest.

I actually loved Unreal 2 myself and really wish they would do an Unreal 3. :/

Half life was definitely an amazing game, but it had a totally different vibe to it. Similar in how the story was honestly. You work your way through the levels in much the same way you did with Unreal, and it was a fairly long game the same as unreal. I don't see one better than the other though. Loved them both.

I never did complete Half Life though, I did complete Unreal and am working on it again with the newer high res textures and fan made patch. Been fun.

There was also a fan made Half Life which was remade using the Half Life 2 engine I think called Black Mesa you can (or could) get from Steam. Still working through it. It's really nicely done.

<I posted this on Thursday, time is ticking away>

Niunio

It wasn't till Half-Life in 98 that people started really realizing that you could have an FPS with a real story.

Define "real story", because Duke Nukem 3D has a story, even Wolfenstein 3D has one. I can't imagine how a "fake story" or "no real story" looks like.

Or may be you're doing a joke with it (real/unreal), are you?

Niunio

<duplicated>

bamccaig

He probably means more that Half-Life was one of the first games where the story became a first-class citizen. There's a story in Wolfenstein, but was it immersive? Did anybody play the game for the story? No. Probably most of the players didn't even know the story. They played it to "shoot" things. Most of the people that played it probably played it at school where it was installed by another student and had no context for it other than other people were playing it and it was new and exciting and fun. :P Half-Life may have been one of the first shooters where the storytelling was intricate. I can't say because I didn't even play the original until I had played the sequel, and even then I first played the Source port. The first shooter that I ever played that I can remember with a story is Soldier of Fortune II. And I loved it. But that came out around 2002.

Erin Maus

Maybe someone here will think it's cool!

So I've been working on a game relationship database (GameDB) library, good for mapping standard relationships in things like RPGs and MMOs, called Discworld. In the GameDB, an Action is a relationship between Resource(s). For example, smithing (Action) an Iron full helmet (item Resource) consumes two iron bars (item Resource) and produces an iron full helmet (item Resource) while giving 50 smithing XP (skill Resource) and requiring level 22 smithing (skill Resource). This relationship can modeled easily in the GameDB: there's inputs (consumes a Resource), outputs (creates a Resource), and requirements (neither consumes nor produces a Resource, but is still required to satisfy the Action).

For my game, I created a DSL in Lua to construct the GameDB from some logic, some data.

So I define a game:

Game "ItsyScape"

Then I define some resources (e.g., items and skills):

ResourceType "Item"
ResourceType "Skill"

I create a smithing skill and a smith action:

ItsyScape.Resource.Skill "Smithing"
  ActionType "Smith"
  ActionType "Smelt"

And then I finally create a Resource with an Action:

#SelectExpand
1ItsyScape.Resource.Item "Iron full helm" { 2 ItsyScape.Action.Smith() { 3 Input { 4 Resource = ItsyScape.Resource.Item "Iron bar", 5 Count = 2 6 }, 7 8 Output { 9 Resource = ItsyScape.Resource.Item "Iron full helm", 10 Count = 1 11 }, 12 13 Output { 14 Resource = ItsyScape.Resource.Skill "Smithing", 15 Count = 50 16 }, 17 18 Requirement { 19 Resource = ItsyScape.Resource.Skill "Smithing", 20 Count = ItsyScape.Utility.xpForLevel(22) 21 }, 22 } 23}

And boom, in the test GameDB, there's three resources (smithing skill, iron full helm, and iron bar); a single action (smithing the iron full helm); and a few input/output/requirements.

I love how nice it looks. It's almost like a text-based format, but it's pure Lua code.

...

Also John Carmack said (paraphrased) story in games is like story in porn: it's there, but no one plays games for the story just like no one watches porn for the stories. (I don't necessarily agree, I'm just presenting his philosophy). Since Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake are Carmack's creations, it's obvious why story is of no importance. It's there, but it might as well not be.

I'm pretty sure John Carmack said something like that... my brother would know for certain, he's a big fan of id Software and DOOM in particular.

Chris Katko
Niunio said:

Define "real story", because Duke Nukem 3D has a story, even Wolfenstein 3D has one. I can't imagine how a "fake story" or "no real story" looks like.

Or may be you're doing a joke with it (real/unreal), are you?

You can't win with these people. ::) Even though Duke Nukem is one of my favorite games of all time, and I've beat it 10+ times, and rave about it. It's never enough. ::)

Duke has some of the best level design of any game... ever. It was the first game (not to be even remotely paralleled until Postal 2) that made you feel like you were in actual places. Actual super-markets. Actual burger joints. And the levels were magnificently interactive. Doors that move. Dooms day machines. People will never forget the feeling of pushing a button and seeing an ENTIRE BUILDING COLLAPSE IN 3D... using a Doom-era engine. (Yes, I know what Build is.)

All that is great. It still wasn't a "realistic" story. It was cartoonish, exagerated. Full of male testosterone. Killin' aliens, and gettin' bitches. That allows you to suspend some disbelief.

Half-Life was also revolutionary. It had TONS of scripted sequences that don't hold the camera still. You were MOVING AROUND while the scripted sequences happened. The Black Mesa facility felt like a real, full of red-tape, over-beurocratic but hiding government secrets organization. The entire intro is full of wonderfully crafted lines like "we are a equal opportunity employer". The very first title card... black screen with custom font white, "Half-Life." It demanded you take it seriously. Like a movie would.

https://youtu.be/yJM9D3IkEWU?t=32s (32 seconds if A.CC fails)

Additionally, NPCs interacting through out. (Duke had no NPCs.) (They also added SKELETON ANIMATION!) The NPC sequences alone deserve awards. Monsters pushing through walls. Scientists hanging in elevator shafts desparately clinging on. A scientist who find "Hiding spots" on top of a super generator you're about to turn on and he quips "Don't tell anyone I'm here! This is my spot!" while his own buddy, he left behind, waits down below saying, "I haven't seen my buddy yet. Still waiting for him."

https://youtu.be/yJM9D3IkEWU?t=10m34s (13m34s)

https://youtu.be/yJM9D3IkEWU?t=1h36m57s (1h36m57s)

Even the later System Shock 2, never let you actually let you INTERACT with NPCs (a cost cutting corner). They were always separated from you, by an invulnerable piece of glass, or "ghosts" of recently dead people.

video

I'm playing through HL again, and holy crap. On hard difficulty? This game SCARES THE PISS OUT OF YOU. The scary sounds, never feeling safe, monsters popping out of walls (and not just "grates" but actually DESTROYING WALLS (hard-coded but still)) and never being able to reach full health... I never realized it before, but it really is like System Shock 2 in the kind of "I'm still able to move" horror. The non-stop trickle of NPC's with reactions to monsters, and guards, and events at hand, really help you "feel" what's going on in the story.

Scientists run to military commandos breaching in "they'll save us!" and then they get mowed down by the government instead. It's like the end of Alien 3.

Meanwhile, you never really feel scared in Duke (even though it's a great game) and the story is basically "bad guys took our women, let's kill them." (And it's still a FUN story. But it's not a complex or deep story.)

Edgar Reynaldo

@Neil Roy

Hey man, I found an old post of yours referring to Dungeons of Daggorath. That's kind of the idea I want to do with my Maze3D project. So many projects, so little time.

EDIT
;D - check out this noob bite the hand that feeds him :

https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/607092

Neil Roy

Dungeons of Daggorath

Yeah! That was one of the first "3D" games I ever played that really got me interested in anything 3D, on the COCO2. I have that on my computer somewhere.

It's part of what used to inspire me when I created similar stuff on my C64 etc... and even had a little to do with a more recent project I was messing with using just a console and text...

video

I used to mess around with that game when it first came out when I was around 15 on COCO2 displays at the local Radio Shack (sometime around 1980). :) Brings back memories.

...another idea I recently had was to do some old style 3D, no textures, all software just for fun. You know, those full flat shaded worlds.

Even though Duke Nukem is one of my favorite games of all time

Agreed. I loved all of the games mentioned for different reasons, so I really dislike comparing them as they all are their own thing. System Shock 2 was amazing in it's day as was Unreal and Half-Life... I certainly liked them all for different reasons.

I spent a lot of hours making Duke3D levels. Doom and Unreal Tournament levels as well. I miss those days. We just don't see that anymore, or things have gotten too complex and the fun seems sucked out of it all. There's something about no internet and just directly connecting to a friend and having all nighters blasting each other's brains out that was awesome. I still remember DOOM had a limit of either 99 or 100 kills then it wrapped around. One night a friend and I stayed up all night until sunrise on one level I made and we wrapped the score around to 4 kills each (so, 103 or 104 kills each). Good times.

l j

Maybe someone here will think it's cool!

So I've been working on a game relationship database (GameDB) library, good for mapping standard relationships in things like RPGs and MMOs, called Discworld [github.com]. In the GameDB, an Action is a relationship between Resource(s). For example, smithing (Action) an Iron full helmet (item Resource) consumes two iron bars (item Resource) and produces an iron full helmet (item Resource) while giving 50 smithing XP (skill Resource) and requiring level 22 smithing (skill Resource). This relationship can modeled easily in the GameDB: there's inputs (consumes a Resource), outputs (creates a Resource), and requirements (neither consumes nor produces a Resource, but is still required to satisfy the Action).

For my game, I created a DSL in Lua to construct the GameDB from some logic, some data.

I think it's cool. I like DSL's implemented in an existing programming language. They can make code cleaner without complicating the build process. Sometimes they can be kinda stupid, like Common Lisp's loop macro, although nice, having a standard commonly used construct implement an entire DSL seems overkill.

I like internal DSL's for parsers like FParsec and Boost.Spirit, never liked yacc and whatever. Boost.Spirit can lead to horrible compiler messages though.

Although perhaps a bit of a stretch to call a DSL, I've made this. (somewhat inspired by Unity's new ECS system)

 public class Data
        {
            public int Length;
            public RwDataStream<Position> Positions;
            public RoDataStream<Heading> Headings;
            [Exclude] public ParticleTag ExcludeParticleTag;
        }
        [Group] public Data data;

I'm trying to make an actual DSL to make it easier and less error-prone, but it won't be an embedded language.

Edgar Reynaldo

Gosh darnit. >:(

Another thread went the way of the dodo. :P

@drezgames - if you're reading this, I'm going to investigate the issues you brought up in this thread :
https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/617397

Niunio

@bamccaig & @Chris Katko: I think I understand now, and it has sense. Thanks.

Neil Roy

I created this one a few years ago. They're MUCH larger now of course. My first hard drive was 40Megs, one of these 32G microSD cards could hold roughly 800 of those hard drives now.

{"name":"611486","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/6\/6\/66267acab9b181ab34383d60609f4e9e.jpg","w":800,"h":545,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/6\/6\/66267acab9b181ab34383d60609f4e9e"}611486

Chris Katko

I just checked. 32 GB is now $13.50.

Though, really, physical drives (flash is catching up!) are still pound-for-pound way more efficient in dollars-to-GB.

You can get an 8 TB hard drive, on sale, for <$150. That's:

$150/8*1024 = 0.01831054687 $/GB. (vs 0.421875 for that flash card I cited.)

Neil Roy

Yeah, I still prefer my magnetic hard drive for many reasons. The speed is good enough for me and I have had drive last me a decade or more.

I currently have a 2TB drive I recently upgraded to. I still have my 500G drive in my system as a secondary drive, not used as much, but still operates just fine.

I think I paid about $100 (Canadian, which is even cheaper in USD) for it, so no complaints.

Edgar Reynaldo
Chris Katko
Quote:

The math behind these estimates is fairly simple. The human brain contains roughly 100 billion neurons. Each of these neurons seems capable of making around 1,000 connections, representing about 1,000 potential synapses, which largely do the work of data storage. Multiply each of these 100 billion neurons by the approximately 1,000 connections it can make, and you get 100 trillion data points, or about 100 terabytes of information.

Pet peave: That's full of crap. Neurons don't behave anything at all like bits. Bits are discrete. Neurons are the opposite. Neurons connect (simplified) "everything to everything."

The brain's speed is also incredibly slow compared to a CPU. But because neurons are parallelism on crack, it doesn't matter.

An FPGA is a much better analogy for a brain, and they've been working on commercail "neural net FPGAs" for the last decade or two.

Chris Katko

[dbl post]

Neil Roy

I just had to share this here. I watched this on Facebook ("True Facts") and just about died laughing. :)

video

Chris Katko

Those true facts videos are some of the BEST online/on YouTube. 10/10

Reminds me of the GI Joe PSA's. Released on YT... in 2007. Holy crap.

video

Arvidsson

Seems factorio is getting rid of allegro. Too bad.

Neil Roy

Seems factorio is getting rid of allegro

I can't say it's surprising.

Chris Katko

They're doing a lot of niche/edge-case stuff that Allegro isn't for. They're using lots of shaders and special pipeline stuff... for a 2-D game of all things.

It doesn't sound like porting was that hard.

They're also using SDL for everything except graphics. That's interesting. Can you setup SDL without a window context?

But yeah, once you've got a project with multiple full-time programmers going for YEARS you can afford to strip out a helper library and rewrite it from scratch and purpose-built toward your requirements. It's what every AAA studio does. As I've mentioned before, Andrian Courreges does great write-ups about rendering engines:

http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2017/12/15/mgs-v-graphics-study/ (contrast many of his write-ups of other games)

And basically, most AAA studios (not using pre-built engines) have INCREDIBLY different rendering engines and pipelines built from scratch. On every level (mathematically, academically, whatever) they're completely different, and how they solve "the rendering question" depends entirely on what their target platform is, and what special effects they want to focus. It's not "make it better", but "make water 10% better than the competition" or "we need better sunbeams." And every bit is moved around with the target architecture (typically a console) in mind to maximize every bit of memory and CPU bandwidth available.

Which is why AAA games run better on lower hardware than 99% of indie games. PUBG runs like piss (even using the pre-canned Unreal engine), while GTA V will run on netbooks with integrated graphics.

Quote:

Over the course of the last 5 years, we have hacked a lot of custom enhancements and optimizations into Allegro.

Sure would be nice if they bothered to submit that upstream. ::)

Also the technical issues they listed... were nVidia's fault for breaking DX9. That's pretty stupid to blame on Allegro. DX9 reported 32x32K textures as max size on newer cards, but DX9 only actually supports 16x16K apparently, and yields black textures. How the !@$! is that Allegro's fault?

The other one they cite is a pre-Windows 10 RivaTuner statistics server being run on Windows 10, crashes Factorio. Using the wrong version of a videocard overclocking software breaks Factorio. omg rly???

https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=20534&start=20#p136115

Again, WTF are they bitching about? I'm not taking this like some Allegro fanboy. Their logic simply doesn't follow.

They say Allegro is "limited" because it runs on Direct X 9 (and equivalent OpenGL version). Except that's a bonus in some cases because older harder can still run it. And proof:

https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=57419&start=80#p340701

They're basically confirming everyone who can't run OpenGL 4.1 is fucked. There will be no backwards compatible / older DX9/OGL support.

For a 2-D game, that's an incredibly high bar to set for hardware. ::) I'm not saying DX9/OpenGL 1.x is good. But straight to 4.x is a huge jump. You don't have to pick the newest version simply because "it's the newest". It's not like installing a new version of a compiler. Older hardware won't run it.

A GeForce 400 is only DX11 compatible. It came out in 2011. All GeForce 3xx and earlier are only DX11. That leaves a LOT of laptops and OEMs !@$!@'d over.

Hell, look at Steam's hardware survey. Tons of people don't even use 1080p yet!

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/

MOST PEOPLE currently only have 1 GB of VRAM videocards! (!??!) And 14.53% of people are still using 1366x768! (typically a laptop)

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

Just because I have a 4K screen, I don't assume my players are all going to have one. ::)

p.s. And I'm actually a big fan of Factorio.

Edgar Reynaldo

MOST PEOPLE currently only have 1 GB of VRAM videocards! (!??!) And 14.53% of people are still using 1366x768! (typically a laptop)

Hah, that's the resolution of most computers monitors in the so called lab at the school I graduated from last year. Pretty sad. I couldn't live without 1080P anymore.

Eric Johnson

Guys, what are some good, affordable (like < $200) phones? I have an ancient Huawei Android somethingoranother, and it's practically unusable now. I need something that'll do texts, calls, and do data and GPS well (my current phone freezes when I try to use mobile data).

Chris Katko

Get a used one eBay.

Samsung Galaxy S5/S6/S7/...

I just upgraded to a used Moto Z and I actually like it better. It's got more cores. The cores are slower than the S5 but it's still way faster with more cores and more RAM.

Peter Hull

I just read that Microsoft are going to buy GitHub. What do you think of that?

Edgar Reynaldo

Please dear God don't let Microsoft buy github

bamccaig

If that happens GitHub will be ruined, but probably a new company will replace it. There's already GitLab which is open source. It might be just the move needed for GitLab to gain traction.

Chris Katko

Then again, it's not like magically shut down / ban all the open source stuff. That'd be PR suicide. Literally everyone in the industry knows what Github is.

bamccaig

Microsoft's formula isn't to just suddenly lock things down. Their formula is to try to profit from things by any means necessary. Which usually means purchasing awesome software that people already use and love and neutering it so we have to pay again for what they already have. They seem incapable of actually maintaining software without breaking it and losing features. Until it's basically garbage, everybody stops using it, and they abandon it and purchase the new replacement.

Append:

Microsoft allegedly has purchased GitHub. Their tactic is basically to purchase competition in a sector and erase it so that they can redevelop an inferior solution that everybody is stuck with. Considering Microsoft's shady past I imagine this should bring fear to any teams that have proprietary code stored in GitHub since Microsoft will have access to it now. It shouldn't really be a real threat to the open source world though.

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

Their formula is to try to profit from things by any means necessary.

No, it's not. ::) Their evil is Extend, Embrace, Extinguish. Which plenty of companies are currently doing, with the lesser end being Microsoft.

- Github runs on git. Git isn't owned by Microsoft.

Meanwhile, all the "Extra stuff" that makes Github so great... is Github only. (All the social networking/graphs/github-only content) So they've already done with Extend part.

It'd be INSANELY EASY to migrate from Github for most people (if they don't mind losing/migrating issue tracker, comments, etc.) The actual code is git. And git will can literally transfer to another domain in like, two terminal commands.

I'm not saying I trust Microsoft at all. But they've mostly lost their protocol wars. They have ZERO market penetration in phone OSes, gave up, and made Outlook and Office apps for iOS and Android.

The area where'd I'd actually be worried with EEE, is them porting into Linux. Which is, in my opinion, an incredibly one-sided relationship where Microsoft benefits from Linux, and Linux gets nothing.

But there's plenty of a-hole companies like that. For example, nVidia is the devil. They benefit from GPL/GNU/FOSS projects and give nothing back to the open-source nVidia drivers.

And Google, and Amazon are the new devils. They're constantly fighting each other by removing support / changing API's, to break each other's home device (Alexa, Google Home, etc).

And besides Github is already a bunch of a-holes, so Microsoft buying them won't magically make them bigger a-holes.

So I'm not worried until I see more news, and more evidence of wrong doing.

Neil Roy

I still remember when they bought TrueSpace... and then killed it.

In other news, GOG.com has Xenonauts FREE until June 6th. Looks like a nice isometric game.

https://www.gog.com/game/xenonauts

Gideon Weems

Too bad about Factorio. And maybe too bad about Allegro's license? SiegeLord and others put a lot of hard work into Allegro. The least they deserve is code contributions.

GitLab is basically a drop-in replacement for GitHub. Their servers were flooded yesterday by a 250,000-project exodus.

dthompson

+1 for GitLab. I moved all of my projects there a while back.

I'll admit their public instance (gitlab.com) is still having some teething issues, but is becoming much more reliable. The built-in project planning tools, CI and free private repos are all very good features.

MiquelFire

I noticed that Bitbucket showed signs of people scared of the deal as they had a HUGE spike in imports on their service.

Chris Katko

Xenonauts is really fun. It's a remake of X-Com 1 and improves the interface in every way. You can move units around at the same time until an enemy unit is spotted, so it's not a boring-as-hell turn-based game.

Edgar Reynaldo

Geez, all you guys do anymore is talk about games. Do you ever wonder how many hours of your life you've spent playing video games? Do you think maybe one day you'll look back and regret all the other things you could have been doing instead? Personally I hardly play video games at all anymore. Certainly not any consoles. Not much for PC gaming either, as everything is online. I don't watch TV either. So I guess I'm just hoping that all the time I've invested in programming will pay off in the form of an income.

dthompson

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-44368813

Microsoft prepping the new GitHub data centre here

Gideon Weems

That's an interesting idea and possibly the coolest thing I've ever seen Microsoft attempt.

Geez, all you guys do anymore is talk about games.

Better than politics.

Eric Johnson

Geez, all you guys do anymore is talk about games. Do you ever wonder how many hours of your life you've spent playing video games?

You could say that about anything. Who cares? Life is finite. You might as well enjoy it.

Edit:
Did you guys hear about Apple deprecating OpenGL in macOS 10.14? They'd rather you use Metal, but I don't really see anyone using Metal by choice. ::)

Double edit:
They've done the same for OpenGL ES in iOS 12.

Triple edit:
Out of curiosity, I listed all of the games I've ever played/owned and came up with 259. :o There's probably more, but here's what I could remember:

1001 Spikes
Absolute Drift
Ace Combat: Assault Horizon Enhanced Edition
Alan Wake
Alan Wake's American Nightmare
Alpha Protocol
Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs
Amnesia: The Dark Descent
Animal Crossing
Animal Crossing: City Folk
Animal Crossing: New Leaf
Animal Crossing: Wild World
Arcade Game Series: Dig Dug
Arcade Game Series: Galaga
Arcade Game Series: Pac-Man
Assassin's Creed III
Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag
Assassin's Creed Unity
Assassin's Creed: Liberation HD
Assassin's Creed: Rogue
Assassins' Creed
Assassins' Creed Chronicles: China
Assassins' Creed Chronicles: India
Assassins' Creed Chronicles: Russia
Assassins' Creed II
Assassins' Creed: Brotherhood
Attractio
Bayonetta
Beyond Good and Evil
Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg
Binary Domain
BioShock
BioShock Remastered
Broken Age
Call of Juarez Gunslinger
Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker
Cave Story (WiiWare)
Cave Story+
Company of Heroes
Company of heroes: Legacy Edition
Crusader Kings II
Crystal Picnic
Darwin's Dinner Prototype
Deep Dungeons of Doom
DiRT 3 Complete Edition
DiRT Showdown
Donkey Kong Country Returns
Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze
DOOM
Duke Nukem Forever
ENSLAVED: Oddyssey to the West Premium Edition
Environmental Station Alpha
Epic Battle Fantasy 4
Fallout
Fallout 3
Fallout 4
Fallout: New Vegas
Far Cry 2: Fortune's Edition
Far Cry 3
Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon
Far Cry 4
Far Cry Primal
FlatOut 2
Ford Racing 3
Galactic Civilization II: Ultimate Edition
Grow Home
Grow Up
GT Legends
Guacamelee! Super Turbo Championship Edition
Hacknet
HTR+ Slot Car Simulation
Human: Fall Flat
I Have No Idea What I'm Doing Prototype
Insane 2
Juicy Realm
Kero Blaster
KHOLAT
Kiln Prototype
Kirby Air Ride
Kirby's Return to Dream Land
L.A. Noire
LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens
LIMBO
Luigi's Mansion
Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon
Lumino City
Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time
Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga
Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games
Mario Kart 64
Mario Kart 7
Mario Kart 8
Mario Kart DS
Mario Kart Wii
Mario Kart: Double Dash!!
Mario Kart: Super Circuit
Mario Party DS
Metro 2033
Metroid
Metroid Fusion
Metroid II: Return of Samus
Metroid Prime
Metroid Prime 2: Echoes
Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
Metroid Prime Hunters
Metroid Prime Pinball
Metroid Prime: Trilogy
Metroid: Other M
Metroid: Samus Returns
Monster RPG
Monster RPG 2
Monster RPG 3
Monster Truck Destruction
Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 3 Full Burst
New Play Control! Pikmin
New Play Control! Pikmin 2
New Super Mario Bros.
New Super Mario Bros. 2
New Super Mario Bros. Wii
Nintendo Land
No Time to Explain Remastered
Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas
Old School RuneScape
OutDrive
PAC-MAN 256
Pac-Man World 2
Pac-Man World 3
PAC-MAN: Championship Edition 2
Paper Mario
Paper Mario: Sticker Star
Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door
Payday 2
Pikmin
Pikmin 2
Pikmin 3
Pony Island
Poochy & Yoshi's Woolly World
Prince of Persia: Sands of Time
Project CARS
Psychonauts
Rayman Origins
Renegade Ops
Resident Evil: Revelations
Retro Game Crunch
RuneScape 3
RuneScape Classic
Rust
Saints Row 2
Savage Lands
SEGA Mega Drive & Genesis Classics
Shadow the Hedgehog
Shantae and the Pirate's Curse
Shantae: Half-Genie Hero
Shantae: Risky's Revenge - Director's Cut
Shelter 2
Snakebird
Snowpack Park
Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed
Sonic 3 & Knuckles
Sonic 3D Blast
Sonic Adventure 2: Battle
Sonic Adventure DX
Sonic and SEGA All Stars Racing
Sonic and the Black Knight
Sonic and the Secret Rings
Sonic CD
Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood
Sonic Generations
Sonic Heroes
Sonic Lost World
Sonic the Hedgehog
Sonic the Hedgehog 2
Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode I
Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode II
Space Engineers
Spec Ops: The Line
Spore
Sproggiwood
Star Wars Bounty Hunter
Star Wars: The Clone Wars
Stardew Valley
Starpoint Gemini 2
Super Hexagon
Super Mario 3D Land
Super Mario 3D World
Super Mario 64 DS
Super Mario Galaxy
Super Mario Galaxy 2
Super Mario Kart
Super Mario Sunshine
Super Mario World
Super Meat Boy
Super Metroid
Super Smash Bros.
Super Smash Bros. Brawl
Super Smash Bros. for 3DS
Super Smash Bros. Melee
Switch Galaxy Ultra
Tharsis
The Count Lucanor
The Crew
The Darkness II
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
The Flame in the Flood
The Gods Must Be Hungry Prototype
The Legend of Zelda
The Legend of Zelda II: Adventure of Link
The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
The Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past
The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX
The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask
The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask 3D
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D
The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages
The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons
The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks
The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD
The Next Penelope
The Witness
Titan Souls
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Blacklist
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
Tomb Raider
Totally Accurate Battlegrounds
Tower of Guns
Tropico 4
Unreal Gold
Vangers
Viking: Battle for Asgard
VVVVVV
Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade
Wario World
Wasteland 1: The Original Classic
Wasteland 2
Wasteland 2: Director's Cut
Watch Dogs
Watch Dogs 2
Wii Music
Wii Sports
World in Conflict
World of Goo
X-COM: UFO Defense
Yoshi's Island
Yoshi's Story
Yoshi's Woolly World
Zero Gear
ZombiU
どうぶつの森e+
ホームランド

Chris Katko

Geez, all you guys do anymore is talk about games. Do you ever wonder how many hours of your life you've spent playing video games? Do you think maybe one day you'll look back and regret all the other things you could have been doing instead? Personally I hardly play video games at all anymore. Certainly not any consoles. Not much for PC gaming either, as everything is online. I don't watch TV either. So I guess I'm just hoping that all the time I've invested in programming will pay off in the form of an income.

I already make an income for programming. ::) Creating business reports isn't what I consider "fun".

I've been about games and movies since I was a kid. (omg, rly?) Analyzing them. The world has been 95+% charted already. But the world of KNOWLEDGE still has room for exploration. You can be a pioneer of research, getting a Ph.D. (or simply finding some other untapped research that doesn't require that annoying buerocratic barrier-to-entry). But you can also explore the realm of "what if." Entertainment allows you to both seek new experiences, but also convey those experiences to other people.

So yeah, why wouldn't I be interesting in that? I don't spend all day, every day, with games. But I'm always looking for unique ones. Ones that there aren't a dozen sequels and equivalent games. (Hell, in this very thread we talked about it pages ago.) I was talking about how Unreal isn't very unique compared to the dozens/hundreds of games that came after it. If you want an FPS game with vehicles (*Unreal doesn't have it but stay with me), there are tons. If you want an FPS game with sniper rifles, there are tons. But what about games that are more than the sum-of-their-parts? Something that hasn't been replicated successfully (or even attempted) before, or afterward?

System Shock 2 is a unique experience that no game has ever captured before or after. (some say Prey is a spiritual successor, but it's got no RPG. And Bioshock was beautiful game with a crap, hollow, empty 'shoot the badguy, follow the arrow' gameplay. It also has literally, stolen, the exact same plot-twist from SS2.) I'd recommend anyone play it.

Thief 1 and 2 (although really showing their age nowadays in user-controls) are "the" best sneaking "I feel like a Thief" games ever made. I've never found a better replacement and I've looked. Dishonored is not Thief--no matter what anyone tells you. In Thief you can (and do) literally rob Barron's houses of their gold.. and keep that gold to buy new tools. In Dishonored, there is no stealing at all.

Dishonored is actually a really polished, good experience though. It was made by the art director of Half-Life 2 and there are plenty of areas that are straight from HL2, except they look BEAUTIFUL in the newer engine. The game's combat is way more fun than HL2, and the story and characters are way more engrossing. You really FEEL the anger that flows from your revenge, for them stealing your daughter. I've noticed that Dishonored really is Half-Life, with swords and magic instead of gravity guns.

(Disclaimer: Half-Life 2 episode 1 and 2 are GREAT. But Half-Life 2, which came before them, is... a long game with many boring sections and 1-dimensional characters. They fix that in the sequels!)

Another fun thing: Half-Life 2 is basically... Jurassic Park: Trespasser without the dinosaurs. (Physics-based puzzles.) Except where Trespasser completely failed to accomplish what it set out to do (Fun fact: 4+ of the Through-The-Looking-Glass Developers worked on Trespasser, makers of Thief), Half-Life 2, with later technology, succeeded. (In Trespasser, you could literally move your hand around and interact with the outside world. Turn your individual joints in your arm. Pick up boxes, push physical buttons on a keypad.)

[edit] Also, I play plenty of games with friends and my wife. Time spent playing with your friends isn't wasted.

Neil Roy

Personally I hardly play video games at all anymore.

Quote:

I don't watch TV either. So I guess I'm just hoping that all the time I've invested in programming will pay off in the form of an income.

Wow, we're a lot alike! Strange. I inform people when games become free, and grab them myself just in case. But I stopped buying games years ago as I realized I was building up a large collection of games I never play. I still have some I bought in boxes which I have never run even once. The interest has been sucked out of me.

I certainly rarely watch TV anymore as the content either doesn't interest me or is annoying in ways I won't get into here.

Even programming is something I rarely do. I started a few projects but the interest seems to have left me.

I wanted to get out more this year, more walks which I enjoy but when I get into the mood to, suddenly the weather turns cloudy and cold. <shrug>

I do still enjoy studying my Bible. And I watched a Bible movie, the newer version of Samson which was quite nice. I then read the Biblical story and the movie seemed to match up fairly well. So that was refreshing.

Edgar Reynaldo

I feel the same way about video games I do about most things take for example sports. I would much rather be playing than watching, and I can't understand how people spend their whole lives being 'fans' and devoting tons of time to some spoiled jocks who could care less about you. I would much rather be creating video games than playing them.

@Neil
I may be pre-diabetic. I'm faced with a similar choice that you and your brother had. I'm still waiting on some blood tests though, so no decisions or diagnosis yet.

Neil Roy

I may be pre-diabetic. I'm faced with a similar choice that you and your brother had. I'm still waiting on some blood tests though, so no decisions or diagnosis yet.

The best advice I can give from a spiritual standpoint is to pray about it, a lot and know that you will be healed. It's what I done.

From a medical standpoint, from all my research the solution is simpler than it seems, cut out all sugar for a while so your body can get back to normal. Diabetes is not a disease, but rather a condition which comes from too much sugar. Remember GPS: cut out Grains, Potatoes (all root veggies due to their high starch which is converted to sugar) and of course Sugar. Read the labels and remember that 4G of sugar equals 1 tsp. I checked a chocolate milk box and it had 28G of sugar PER CUP, that's SEVEN TEASPOONS of sugar PER 1 CUP!!! That's insane! Cut out all soda etc... and learn to like water.

Sugar has a similar effect on your system as cocaine, so give it a few weeks to get over withdrawl and you will start to find you can't stand that much of it anymore. After a couple months of little to no sugar, you can drink some again, but only as a RARE treat. I still have the odd pop, the odd chocolate. But it is more rare now. If I do drink any pop, I will not have any for a few days and only drink the odd coffee and mostly ice water (which I now love). I will also have herbal tea with honey. Honey is a sweetener that is actually good for you.

Watch out for the medications the doctors will try and push on you. Especially statins (in Canada, that is usually Lipitor) as they have been found to make diabetes WORSE (actually cause it) and they have no benefit at all... they will actually weaken your legs and give them cramps (my brother was crawling up the stairs before he died, he trusted the doctors too much).

Don't worry about it though, you can easily beat it.

video

video

bamccaig

Thanks for the videos, Neil. Both very interesting to watch. I've come to the same conclusion from various sources. Sugar/carbohydrate is the real problem. I try to avoid consuming carbs whenever I can. I still consume a lot of them, but I don't go out of my way to consume even more. I turn down sweet/sugary drinks, additives, desserts, etc. I think my carbs mostly come from beer and either rice or potatoes. Though there's probably also a lot of carbohydrates in processed foods that I eat like canned soup, instant noodles, chips, hot dogs, bacon, and in general restaurant food or sodas. It's very interesting that the second video equates fructose with ethanol. Naturally the biochemical descriptions went well over my head, but the gist seems that fructose is generally as toxic and harmful as alcohol, yet it's unregulated.

Chris Katko

You should check my Let's Play videos. I think I start every single one with a Mountain Dew. ;D

video

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIf0HNpRa7dC6Eri2345SEMc3WCjY0L4I

Sad thing is, I'm not even a huge fan of Mountain Dew. But my body has literally become allergic... to every single food. Even raw, starter ones, like corn, or rice, or wheat (RIP delicious gluten). Every joint in my body inflames (including, extra unfortunately, my back and the metal in the back). Yet, Mountain Dew is sugar liquid, and unlike every other soda (perhaps allergic to the coloring dyes in darker sodas like coke), I'm the least affected by it. (Though still am.) It's an incredible feeling to know every food is literally... poison... and then have to fight your subconscious impulse to eat food. The longer you go, the more and more your brain will tell you "Maybe food X won't be as bad... maybe THIS time it'll be different or you just forgot." Nope. It's an interesting portrat into being addicted. Except, it's food, so you're supposed to be addicted (in a sense).

So while I know I need to cut out soda, it's like... when you've had two back surgeries before 30, and spend most of your days in agony even with heavy medicine... soda (a little vice) is least of my problems.

Then again, I may have teeth problems in the future due to genetics. So again, I should cut the soda out before I have yet another problem to deal with. >:( And the USA is run by the Devil (no, not talking Trump), so even with my professional degree working a job, I don't have dental. Because AMMERRRIICCAAAAA loves to !@$!@ people, and the more I grow up the more I realize there's zero excuse except corruption for the way our medical system exists.

Bimodal has become the perfect word to describe America. Which one are you in?

{"name":"salaries.gif","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/3\/c37128f570cff6cb3198164b881815af.gif","w":572,"h":439,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/3\/c37128f570cff6cb3198164b881815af"}salaries.gif

Huge tangent, but it really does explain many aspects of America. How people say "whites control everything." But it's not "whites". It's "rich whites." And "rich whites" have nothing to do with "poor whites" or "middle-class whites". The richest 1% happen to be white but to then say the poorest whites are "Controlling everyone with their privilege" is a !@$!ing slap to the face and pure racism.

video

"Look what you did to us!" "Dude, do you think I'd do all that !@$! to you... and then move in right next door to you?"

This shows it pretty well too:

{"name":"Piketty-Saez-Zucman-2016-1980-vs-2014.png","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/b\/c\/bc54d47f728afac398dc99e1c7d04cc1.png","w":1810,"h":1156,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/b\/c\/bc54d47f728afac398dc99e1c7d04cc1"}Piketty-Saez-Zucman-2016-1980-vs-2014.png

The richer you are, the FAR richer you've become. While everyone else is sitting in their respective wage buckets. $150K people live 150K lives and think America is like that for everyone. $30K/yr people like $30K/yr lives and think America is like that for everyone. Basically "both are right." when they say America is the best, and worst country, because they're both living in completely separate worlds even though they share the same roads. Great medicine exists for rich people. And TERRIBLE medicine exists for poor people. In the same country.

Erin Maus

It might help to look at median earnings by race...

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.t03.htm ($950/week for whites compare dto $725/week for blacks; a relative difference of 23%).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income ($61,000 year for whites compared to $39,000 year; a 36% relative difference).

Yes, race is an issue used to divide the proles who would otherwise work together (e.g., labor movements), and yes, poor whites and poor blacks have more in common than not, but you can't address income equality and not racial inequality. A poor racist white is no friend to the poor black (and vice versa if you must).

Neil Roy

Racism... <sigh> no offence but I get tired of being referred to by my skin colour. I prefer to judge someone based on the quality of their character.

I liked what Morgan Freeman said: "Put your mind to do something and do it, what's race got to do with it? It's a bigger issue than it needs to be. Stop talking about it."

video

Erin Maus

I'm sure when black job seekers are looked over because of their names; they are pulled over more frequently for no other reason than the color of their skin; they are given harsher punishments for the same crimes as whites; and so on, that they, too, would prefer to be judged by their character, not their skin color.

bamccaig

I think that the NDP party of Ontario (there's a provincial election today) is proposing public dental coverage this term. On the one hand, that's interesting. I don't oppose it. On the other hand, the previous government has already raised a lot of red flags with wasted money and debt so I think it'll be met with a lot of hostility. Especially in light of how poorly our public health care system has worked so far in Canada. You can probably trace it all back to corruption though.

The liberal party of Ontario is pretty much despised by all right now. They really screwed the pooch (their federal brethren are also doing a good job of fucking us royally). But that means only bad things for Ontario because there are only two other big parties people will vote for: the Progressive Conservatives, who we all know to be at least as corrupt and incompetent from the previous federal government; and the New Democratic Party (NDP), who seem like the lesser of evils, but that's probably only because they haven't been in power for a while. And the NDP apparently supported a lot of the Liberal actions during the last term so that either implies they'll be just as bad, if not worse; or at least makes it unlikely that Ontario will give them enough seats to be in power. Probably the best case scenario that is practical is the PC and NDP parties being nearly equal in seats so they have to work together to get anything done.

I'm probably going to vote Green Party of Ontario just because they seem a little bit less corrupt (having never been in power) and a lot of their ideas are interesting. We'll never know if they're actually good for us until they are given a chance to prove it. So far, the federal Green Party has done good things though which gives a lot of hope. But they too have never really had any true power to be corrupted from.

My alternative option is a strategic vote for NDP. Not the party I want, but the lesser of evils of who will likely win in my riding. But there's no guarantee that they're actually the lesser of evils.. And unlike the federal election there doesn't appear to be any strategic group planning to ensure we get a particular person, and if I vote NDP and they don't even win I'll have missed the opportunity to support Green.. :(

My motorcycle chapter sends out a monthly newsletter, and in this month's issue there was a little article about how many taxes have been introduced in the last century. How 150 years ago we were strong and prosperous, and the wives didn't even have to go to work. It listed probably 30 or 40 things that started being taxed, and it wasn't a complete list. It certainly is food for thought.

I'm not opposed to taxes. I think they can be good. There are very wonderful nations in the world with high taxes, and their residents seem happy about how things are being handled overall (at least by comparison to some other countries). I am opposed to taxes from corrupt or incompetent governments though. If they're going to mismanage the money or fail to regulate the sector then they might as well just let us keep our money and struggle to get by on our own. If on the other hand they can improve our lives and everybody wins then I'm all for it. I think most governments in Canada (and the US) seem to lean more towards the former unfortunately..

I wonder when enough will be enough to put an end to the obvious corruption of our governments?

Chris, are you able to drink beer (bit more expensive, but a whole lot more awesome)? :( Is there any opportunity for using medicinal marijuana or something like that? :-/

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

medicinal marijuana

I would love to try, but the federal and state laws are basically designed to bang you in the butthole if you ever fail a drug test by trying something not prescribed to you. Only THEY may be the harbringers of pain relief, so saith, Lord government--praise be to Him.

So I have to move to a state with legal medical marijuana first. Because you know, that's easy for someone who's raked with health problems and medical debt. Just move. Away from your friends and family and support system. Oh, btw, here's some opiods.

Monsters.

I have ordered CBD from hemp this week. Supposedly, it has the anti-inflammatory properties of marijuana, but it's not marijuana (THC), and it's legal. So while it's expensive, it's worth a shot. Because I've been going to doctors for SIX YEARS every month and it's been pure hell with no solution in sight. (an diagnosed inflammation / allergic disorder)

Neil Roy

And the BLUE WAVE has swept the Liberals out to sea! CONSERVATIVE MAJORITY in Ontario! Woohoo! Just need to kick the Federal liberals to the curb next year and my prayers will been answered. This is a nice step forward though, and what a change! Sadly, my riding turned NDP, but my conscious is clear. I didn't put them in; not into socialists. :)

dthompson
Gideon Weems said:

Geez, all you guys do anymore is talk about games.

Better than politics.

It's easy to divinate on Allegro.cc. :P

Edgar Reynaldo

That's because we're just corporate profits :-X

Rodolfo Lam

So lets assume Microsoft does something really bad to Github... Would that mean that liballeg.org as well as the repo will be moving again from provider?

BTW Hello everyone how is everything going on these days?

dthompson

We could quite easily deploy to Netlify instead if need be. They also provide reliable, free static hosting (in my experience)

bamccaig

I think that the basic Git functionality will remain stable and trusted. It's only the extended features like issue tracking, Web hosting, and wiki that Microsoft will screw up.

And maybe they'll start charging for more features. They'd probably buy you before stealing private code because they can. But still, really unique ideas might want to steer clear.

Neil Roy

I'm dying laughing here...

video

MiquelFire

So, about Matthew not keeping the SSL cert updated?

Chris Katko

Yeah...

I imagine he'd fix it if someone contacts him through e-mail or whatever. He just doesn't check A.CC.

bamccaig

Also lets talk about IT professionals ignoring certificate errors. ;D

Neil Roy

I played this video late last night and my wife started laughing from the bedroom where she WAS sleeping. :)

video

For years I never really knew the German words he was using in this. I only just recently used online translators to understand what this song is about. :)

Edit: Found a version with more English in it. ;)

bamccaig

Uh huh.

Eric Johnson

What'd you guys think of E3 this year? I'm cautiously looking forward to Bethesda Game Studio's Fallout 76, and Rage 2 looks pretty good. Nintendo's showing was underwhelming. Just two 1st-party games shown: another Mario Party and another Smash Bros. game. Also, there was no mention of the 3DS. I wonder if Nintendo will officially retire it soon.

bamccaig

I don't ever make a fuss about that. I figure the games that are worth my time I'll discover naturally. I would like to have a PS4 for some sequels, but I cannot justify the purchase at the moment so I'll probably wait a few years and see if I can get one cheaper and hope it lasts me long enough to enjoy what I'm missing.

Chris Katko

I'm the same way. I don't have time to keep up with games that might not even be any good.

Much of the time, E3 games aren't even real games. They're just CG made to look like a game:

video

::cough::Colonial Marines::cough::

video

Fun fact: They're also rendered using ray tracing, so the lighting is a thousand times better and more realistic.

On the otherhand, Unreal 4 actually supports Global Illumination. So we're finally using a lighting model that approximates reality:

video

NOTE: This stuff is LIVE. Rendered on a real videocard. The most unrealistic part of the game/simulation... is the mouse-controlled eye movement!

The following are U4 tech demos which are "live", but, definitely scripted cutscenes. So there may be "cheating" that requires the camera to be in an exact spot, as opposed to a fully dynamic simulation. (There could also be ZERO cheating. I don't know!)

video
(Note "invisibility cloak" at 0:45 which, IIRC, is severely using global illumination whereas without it would need to be hacked in)

video

video

[edit]
OMgawd dat 4K:

video

[edit]

Oagsmdsagkdgshaokdgsah

video

MiquelFire

I recently updated my website to include the SpeedHack/TINS games I hadn't uploaded there yet and saw that the zip to what happens to be my most recent game had the title misspelled. Was too lazy to fix.

bamccaig

...AND an unprecedented level of detail in my eyes, skin, and hair.

...What about the vag, though? :-*:-/

I know I'm not the only one that thought it.

Also, it actually doesn't quite look real. It would be more impressive if you saw the actress performance next to the digital one. What I noticed when the LotR guy or whatever was "performing" and it was being transformed into the "alien" model it lost all of the subtleties of the mouth movement. So either it's not true to life and just an approximation, or they had to redub it afterward. In any case, I'm smelling a lot of bullshit right now. We'll just have to wait and see how it translates into real games in the future. I won't hold my breath.

Eric Johnson

Those are some pretty graphics, Chris. I'd rather games focus more attention on game-play rather than visuals though. Especially in games where the goal is to be as photo-realistic as possible. Most photo-realistic games do not age well. I much prefer more stylized visuals. Just take The Wind Waker and Twilight Princess for example (both Zelda games). The former released in 2002, and the latter in 2006. Despite this, The Wind Waker has aged much better and still looks good today compared to Twilight Princess, and this is due to the former opting for a cartoon art style while the latter went for a good-for-the-time photo-realistic art style. This is even more evident in both games' HD remasters, where The Wind Waker still looked much better and newer than Twilight Princess, and it mostly boils down to art style. Though I imagine this will be less of an issue as graphics technologies continue to improve in the future.

Also, even though the CG girl looks quite real, it still doesn't look absolutely real. It looks good, but still approaches the uncanny valley some. Her skin looks slightly wet or like it's made of some material better suited for a creepy doll. It just feels off. I wouldn't say she looks creepy, but it's close. Probably more mesmerizing than anything though.

Chris Katko

Yeah, it's not perfect. But it's getting vastly better!

I remember a 5-10 period of 3D graphics claiming to be better but really... looking essentially unchanged. Now we're finally exploring newer lighting models.

bamccaig

One thing that needs to be recognized is that real is not perfect. For something to look real, it usually cannot be perfect. Typically video game characters are designed to be perfect.

Unfortunately, perfect sells very well, even though it's less real. It's not every day that we get legitimate characters that are flawed or less than perfect. When we do they're usually gems though.

Basketball-sized breasts in pornography is basically the same thing. This has probably rarely, if ever, happened in real life. I personally think they look ugly. It almost seems like everybody is coerced to think they're great so they're not called a faggot (Firefox is trying to correct my spelling, as if I haven't typed it enough in online gaming).

It seems like "normal" people prefer to act in a way that everybody else agrees with, but unfortunately they aren't steering towards a true group consensus which should bias towards good decisions, but they elect the biggest idiots to be the group leaders and everybody has to follow them. It's basically politics.

Attractive Asian girl is kind of a win on every checklist. Not that I'm for "fat positivity" or whatever it's called, but the reality is that they'd have a lot more difficulty selling the quality of the graphics on a fat chick. Let that sink in for a second before you blow your load. Your brain is easily fooled. We're probably watching most of these videos in SD or maybe HD at best unless you go out of your way to select 4K. And yet somehow they look amazing even in SD. It's the same basic tricks that have been played for a decade and beyond.

What's notable is that I didn't see any actual games there. Not even real game demos. Just graphics demonstrations. And I bet you they cheat as much as possible.

I just started playing The Witcher 3. I was impressed by the demos back when it was new, and had the impression that it was a more impressive Skyrim. It kept going on sale on GOG DRM free and so I finally bit. Started playing it and I'm extremely underwhelmed. It seems not at all to be what I was baited by. It might not be a waste of money at the price that I paid (I think about $25 or less), but I'd be rather upset if I paid full price. At least so far. Mind you, I'm completely new to the Witcher series. But if they reached me with marketing they were obviously targeting me because I didn't seek them out. So they'll take my criticisms and like it.

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

I personally think they look ugly.

I think much of the newer culture post-90's has realized that "more isn't always better". We can literally listen to or watch unlimited TV/radio/media/etc now and we know it's not healthy or the best. Likewise, we've seen "labratory sized boobs" and they're not attractive.

I'm sure there's niche people with niche perversions. But I don't think most people (or at least I don't) like "bimbos" in the "reddit bimbo subreddit" sense, which are surgically altered, exaggerated forms with balloon boobs and crazy duck lips. (Google "reddit bimbos" at your own peril/prerogative.)

For example (not nude):

https://i.redditmedia.com/9-Ya_Tal0tbmA6lCehDRPPTVCP826BX4VCKp01o8tpI.jpg?fit=crop&crop=faces%2Centropy&arh=2&w=640&s=3a57fcfbe0f6a42d326436676b9bb528

That's not attractive to me at all.

Hell, it seemed like whatever "free" porn you could access in the late-90's/early-00's, when I was in my teenage prime, was all nasty stuff. I'd scroll window after window just wincing, looking for something remotely pretty who wasn't doing some really sick stuff.

I think society is rightly rejecting the california-centric worldview of bimbos.

MiquelFire

I remember getting the Witcher 3 for free because that happened to be some deal with a video card I bought. (Actually, I think the timing had it so I basically "pre-ordered" it. I remember having to download the GOG client to download the game as well.) Graphically, I was amazed at how much detail was being put into games now, and that was it. I felt the game wasn't a game that targeted me, so I didn't play too long. If it was for the card I have now, I most likely wanted to play GTA V at a higher quality than the card it replaced.

Chris Katko

So, have we made enough replies for Matt to officially change the lockout time? ;)

bamccaig

I'm betting we're going to need either 32769 or 2147483649 posts for that to happen... :-/

MiquelFire

Seems like that will be the case.

bamccaig

Though it's 2018 so maybe we'd need 9223372036854775809...

MiquelFire
bamccaig said:

Though it's 2018 so maybe we'd need 9223372036854775809...

The DB storage might not be using anything higher than 32-bit lengths, so the overflow may be much sooner than that. Unless he used a type that actually upgrade during a standard MySQL update (assuming that's what's being used)

bamccaig

I believe it used to be MySQL, but there's no guarantee that it still is (but I would bet on it).

Edgar Reynaldo
bamccaig said:

I'm betting we're going to need either 32769 or 2147483649 posts for that to happen... :-/

In that case, it's going to take around 12,640 (32768/(2590/(06/21/2018 - 9/26/2015)) days at this rate...

OMG this thread has been open for 999 days!!!!!111111lllllll

Neil Roy

;D
{"name":"611597","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/f\/4\/f450662420576ae8a4b513e90c519da0.jpg","w":403,"h":578,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/f\/4\/f450662420576ae8a4b513e90c519da0"}611597

Eric Johnson

OMG this thread has been open for 999 days!!!!!111111lllllll

Feels good to be a part of history. 8-) Now let's reach 9999 days!

Edgar Reynaldo

Your descendants damn well better be Allegro. CC Forum members or they'll be hell to pay

You forgot the commandant to be fruitful and multiply

MiquelFire

Your descendants damn well better be Allegro. CC Forum members or they'll be hell to pay

You forgot the commandant to be fruitful and multiply

Oh, I didn't forget, I just chose to ignore it.

Eric Johnson

You forgot the commandant to be fruitful and multiply

Too bad there aren't any girls here.

Edgar Reynaldo

7bddaf864bbf7e2a16184e25584733f6b709a7b0.pngToo bad there aren't any girls here.

Says the blob with the club. It was your job to bring them here.

Eric Johnson

Says the blob with the club. It was your job to bring them here.

That's an eyepatch, not a club. >:( I'll ask my sister to join. That'd be a start. :P

Edit
Bambams should invite his fiance here. ;) Also, happy 1000th day of this thread's existence! :D

Edgar Reynaldo

Your sister? You want me to ask my sister to join too? Then we could be nagged to death in our only place of refuge.

Looks like a club to me. >:(>:(

Hah! New Page!

EDIT
Aaaaannnnnnddddd, this thread has reached Atari status! 2600 replies!

Neil Roy

Says the blob with the club. It was your job to bring them here.

"blob with the club" LMFAO! I laughed so hard at that!

Personally, I think it looks like the blob licking his eye but... ;D

Eric Johnson

Wow, you guys are a bunch of meanies. >:( :P

So I ordered an SSD the other day and it arrived this afternoon (thanks to Edgar and Chris for answering my SSD-related questions). I put Fallout: New Vegas on it and am really happy with the results: loading is super quick! :D New Vegas isn't a game plagued with long load times, but I've been itching to play it again, so it made for a good first impression. I'm looking forward to trying it out on games that do have long load times, like Fallout 4, DOOM 2016, and Watch Dogs 2 soon.

Edgar Reynaldo

It should have great performance.

Hey everybuddy, please chime in on my thread over at gamedev.net. Over 300 people have viewed it but no one has downloaded anything or replied yet. Is it a case of NSND?

https://www.gamedev.net/forums/topic/697437-allegro-lives-try-it-today/

bamccaig

That's an eyepatch, not a club. >:(

It looks like a raindrop to me. After a monkey threw poop at it. :-/ I never was any good with pixel art.

Quote:

I'll ask my sister to join. That'd be a start. :P

What would be the point if she wasn't actually interested in Allegro or at least programming in general? We've had a couple of those here before and they became toxic because they resented the community being male-oriented. And it's not male-oriented because of some grand conspiracy, but because the subject matter is just generally more interesting to males... Nothing stops girls from participating. Other than themselves perhaps.

Quote:

Bambams should invite his fiance here. ;) Also, happy 1000th day of this thread's existence! :D

For the aforementioned reasons there's no point. I invited her to IRC for a while because she was interested in what I was spending so much time with. And a few members enjoyed picking her brain about me. But she was never overly interested in it. She doesn't really have the time for it. She can't be bothered to go back again. I think the only reason she joined in the first place was because she saw that I was talking about her and she wanted to see what I was saying and be able to respond to the conversation. But after a while I think she realized that I wasn't being malicious or anything and lost interest. It's just venting ffs. Healthy activity. >:(

Eric Johnson
bamccaig said:

It looks like a raindrop to me. After a monkey threw poop at it. :-/ I never was any good with pixel art.

It's tough to make anything with so few pixels.

Quote:

And it's not male-oriented because of some grand conspiracy, but because the subject matter is just generally more interesting to males... Nothing stops girls from participating.

I wholeheartedly agree. I've tried to get my sister interesting in computers, programming, and video games, but it's just not her thing. Men and women are different, and it just so happens that tech in general is something men gravitate toward more often than women. Nothing sexist about that.

I think programming is kind of a niche thing in general. I've tried to get my brother and other male friends interested, but they generally lack the passion or interest necessary to get their feet wet. I did manage to get one friend to switch over to Linux though, and he's been rocking that for a few years now. 8-)

Edgar Reynaldo

It's tough to make anything with so few pixels.

What? 25600 pixels isn't enough for you? You have 64 KB, and you can use JPEG. No excuses. :P

Eric Johnson

It's up-scaled from 8x8 pixels.

Edgar Reynaldo
Eric Johnson said:

7bddaf864bbf7e2a16184e25584733f6b709a7b0.png
It's up-scaled from 8x8 pixels.

Okay. From now on I'm going to call you Pirate Blob.

Eric Johnson

Okay. From now on I'm going to call you Pirate Blob.

Okay, but I'm going to call you Edgar Ravioli in exchange.

Edgar Reynaldo

8a14a079d20f60794ac5d98357a3bf77.png
Okay, but I'm going to call you Edgar Ravioli in exchange.

>:( This means war.

Eric Johnson

2eb0cefd0dae1ccc12dc2f96709070fa2f3491ce.png

>:( This means war.

;D Looking good!

Edit
You live in Vermont, right? I can walk there in as little as 488 hours. Let's fight IRL. >:(

Edgar Reynaldo

You live in Vermont, right? I can walk there in as little as 488 hours. Let's fight IRL. >:(

Wait. Let me warmup first.

I propose a GIF war. We each get to make a gif and have our avatars fight. Best GIF wins. ;)

Eric Johnson

{"name":"611604","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/4\/7452cc488d23854b4da574895a991574.gif","w":335,"h":251,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/4\/7452cc488d23854b4da574895a991574"}611604

Neil Roy

Here, I whipped up a new HD version of.. BLOB... REMASTERED! ;)

{"name":"611605","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/e\/c\/ecf4ea187145e77f44fc68ee7a284de5.png","w":256,"h":400,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/e\/c\/ecf4ea187145e77f44fc68ee7a284de5"}611605

Chris Katko

How do you make gifs quickly? I've only ever converted a video format to GIF before.

Eric Johnson

That looks great, Neil! :D

How do you make gifs quickly? I've only ever converted a video format to GIF before.

I made my GIF using GIMP. It took about an hour to do all of the frames.

bamccaig
Quote:

{"name":"611606","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/0\/0\/00d1f64758dfed0d16a533cbe8f2a263.png","w":256,"h":400,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/0\/0\/00d1f64758dfed0d16a533cbe8f2a263"}611606

FTFY. >:( What do you think, pixels grow on trees!? >:(

Neil Roy
Quote:

FTFY. >:( What do you think, pixels grow on trees!? >:(

Yes, binary trees at that! ;D

And here's the baseball bat/club edition...
{"name":"611607","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/4\/7\/47119856a916b3d8d7c4143e4fffd0a9.png","w":256,"h":400,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/4\/7\/47119856a916b3d8d7c4143e4fffd0a9"}611607

Edgar Reynaldo

16 most powerful attacks. And you went straight to number one. How am I supposed to defeat a Spirit Bomb? That's chea.....p :P

Eric Johnson

Go big or go home. ;)

Edgar Reynaldo

{"name":"giphy.gif","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/5\/555a3a13ea796ba9e2d0355ef18f56e1.gif","w":470,"h":262,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/5\/555a3a13ea796ba9e2d0355ef18f56e1"}giphy.gif

Neil Roy

LMAO, these are great. ;D

{"name":"611611","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/b\/9\/b9953102dde2b8db13502e9725613859.jpg","w":720,"h":826,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/b\/9\/b9953102dde2b8db13502e9725613859"}611611

Eric Johnson

;D Who determines the winner?

Edgar Reynaldo

What you think it's over? I'm just getting started!

Eric Johnson

Oh, I thought it was a one GIF kind of thing and then we'd fight with our fists. We can meet in the middle, so like West Virginia somewhere.

Edit:
Or we could do a best-out-of-three game of quartz, parchment, sheers (cooler name for rock, paper, scissors) to decide a victor. What do you say?

Edgar Reynaldo

Awww, I was just getting started. I was having fun. That's the first GIF I ever made.

Fighting is for sissies. And I punch like a girl.

How exactly would a internet game of rock-paper-scissors work?

Eric Johnson

That was my first GIF, too. I think they both turned out well.

As for the game, we could have a third person act as a mediator. We'd send the person a private message with our move, and then the person would post the result here in public once both of us have messaged our move. We'd do that for three rounds until a winner is declared. We just need a third person... any volunteers?

Edgar Reynaldo

Okay but all three rounds at once and I nominate bam-bams for mediator. High noon tomorrow, CST. GMT -6? I think?

Eric Johnson

The time doesn't matter. I'll send him my moves now (assuming he'll accept the nomination). He can post the results whenever he's ready.

Edgar Reynaldo

Sent. You're goin down.

MiquelFire

Wait, how do slimes play rock paper scissors?

raynebc

I imagine it looks more like mud wrestling.

Edgar Reynaldo
raynebc said:

I imagine it looks more like mud wrestling.

You have a dirt-y mind. ;)

bamccaig

Of course I accept! >:(

Round 1

Edgar Reynaldo | Eric Johnson | Winner
---------------+--------------+---------------
Scissors       | Paper        | Edgar Reynaldo

Round 2

Edgar Reynaldo | Eric Johnson | Winner
---------------+--------------+---------------
Paper          | Rock         | Edgar Reynaldo

Round 3

Edgar Reynaldo | Eric Johnson | Winner
---------------+--------------+---------------
Rock           | Scissors     | Edgar Reynaldo

The winner is Edgar Reynaldo! >:( >:( >:(

stop_penis_erect_archer.gif

(Allegro.cc screws up the width of this gif... >:()

Eric Johnson

Devastating. :o

Chris Katko

video

Neil Roy

Eric... you've been slimed.

{"name":"611612","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/2\/5\/2548f7a0604ce63945e8e19f9ef17d5b.jpg","w":612,"h":380,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/2\/5\/2548f7a0604ce63945e8e19f9ef17d5b"}611612

Edgar Reynaldo

It's easy to make GIFs if you have the frames ready.
https://giphy.com/create/gifmaker

{"name":"giphy.gif","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/4\/7\/47a133eb252cc78f3135c0e6c3ef1e68.gif","w":480,"h":229,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/4\/7\/47a133eb252cc78f3135c0e6c3ef1e68"}giphy.gif

Johan Halmén

Round 1

Chuck Norris   | anyone       | Winner
---------------+--------------+---------------
whatever       | Paper        | Chuck Norris

Round 2

Chuck Norris   | anyone       | Winner
---------------+--------------+---------------
whatever       | Rock         | Chuck Norris

Round 3

Chuck Norris   | anyone       | Winner
---------------+--------------+---------------
whatever       | Scissors     | Chuck Norris

The winner is Chuck Norris! 8-) 8-) 8-)

Eric Johnson

I must commit seppuku to regain my honor.

bamccaig

You'll probably miss and poke the other eye out. :(

Neil Roy

Wow, I just seen a post by Mary McDonough, the actress who played "Erin" on "The Waltons". She showed how much residuals she gets paid for the Waltons these days and I was in shock. She got cheques for 2 cents!!! She laughed because it costed more for them to mail them to her. Hollywood is so crooked. They play that series a lot up here in Canada and my wife and I still love it. You can guarantee they're making more than 2 cents on it.

<bump>

Gideon Weems

HTTPS is back! What'd I miss? Are we all changing our avatars now to match Eric's?

Eric Johnson

de1faca828e8e0a2cf33ec61173afe0f689ac5d5.png

HTTPS is back! What'd I miss? Are we all changing our avatars now to match Eric's?

Apparently so. :o

Edgar Reynaldo

Eric Johnson's avatar is really a parasite, and we are the hosts. Oh noe, it's spreading!

Neil Roy

Are we all changing our avatars now to match Eric's?

Eric's a real trend setter.

Eric Johnson

This is my legacy. 8-)

MiquelFire

Yea, I'm too lazy to join this trend.

Neil Roy

Yea, I'm too lazy to join this trend.

How about this, it's not 100% but... ;)

611623

Gideon Weems

611624
611625
611626
611627
611628
611629

Join, heretic, or face the wrath of Blob!

Edgar Reynaldo

Look out the Blobs are multiplying!!!

{"name":"611630","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/6\/1\/615d954cc09382a105eb7c38bc374c8c.png","w":973,"h":1000,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/6\/1\/615d954cc09382a105eb7c38bc374c8c"}611630

Arvidsson

What is going oooooon???!!!???

l j

plz no change avatar bad wif naems

Seriously though, I recognize most people here more by their avatars than their actual name, this trend might confuse me :(.

Edgar Reynaldo
Arvidsson said:

What is going oooooon???!!!???
7bddaf864bbf7e2a16184e25584733f6b709a7b0.png

Oh no! It's spread to Arvidsson!

Eric Johnson
Arvidsson said:

7bddaf864bbf7e2a16184e25584733f6b709a7b0.png

What is going oooooon???!!!???

A perfect clone! Welcome, brother! :D

Edit:

Edgar Ravioli said:

3c93833891a162c657adb04ca2b7ccffb78d05c5.png

You've mutated into a shiny blob! :o

Gideon Weems
l j said:

Seriously though, I recognize most people here more by their avatars than their actual name, this trend might confuse me

That's why it's fun!

Change before the almighty Blob smashes your worldly body with his club.

Eric Johnson

I guess this is as good of a time as ever to mention that my avatar comes from a game I made for TINS 2016 called "Mori". I ported it from C++ to JavaScript to be playable in browsers last year. You can play it here (hopefully it still works). 8-)

Neil Roy

I guess this is as good of a time as ever to mention that my avatar comes from a game I made for TINS 2016

Now that eye patch makes a little more sense now that I have seen him from behind, but... still... the cord holding it on goes under his head? ;) Nice job on the game anyhow.

Edit: Got my original avatar I used in here many years ago working; now that I know GIMP can edit GIFs properly. Wouldn't work before until I resized it. Yay!

Eric Johnson
Neil Roy said:

Now that eye patch makes a little more sense now that I have seen him from behind, but... still... the cord holding it on goes under his head? ;) Nice job on the game anyhow.

It's a blob. It doesn't have to conform to reality. ;)

That's a cool-looking avatar!

bamccaig
l j said:

Seriously though, I recognize most people here more by their avatars than their actual name, this trend might confuse me :(.

That happens no matter what. Occasionally, somebody else with a similar avatar will be posting and I'll just assume it's somebody else. Takes some kind of "out of character" thing before I even realize I've been wrong all along. Even now, I recognize the avatar more easily than the name for old timers that haven't posted in a while.

Gideon Weems
A character in Eric's game said:

Thanks for the sticks! I give my life for you!

This is part of the reason why I love video games.

Eric Johnson

This is part of the reason why I love video games.

A few people really resonated with that dialogue for some reason.

By the way, I love your profile. I check it every now and again and it gives me a good chuckle or two. What do the numbers next to the quotes mean though?

DanielH

for the threads/posts the quotes came from

Example:
bamccaig to Eric Johnson:
615770/1037188
"Neil: Does your wife work in the medical field? Her clothing reminds me of what I see a lot of nurses wearing." "She just wears that to take care of Neil. :-X He's old."

https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/615770/1037188

Eric Johnson

Oh, that makes sense. Thanks, DanielH.

Gideon Weems

\o/

What profile? ;D

Chris Katko

I tried one of those deep art algorithms on the avatar to make a new one combined with my old avatar. But they're so low res, it just took a dump.

Neil Roy
DanielH said:

Example:
bamccaig to Eric Johnson:
615770/1037188
"Neil: Does your wife work in the medical field? Her clothing reminds me of what I see a lot of nurses wearing." "She just wears that to take care of Neil. :-X He's old."

~shakes cane~

I still can't figure out how 53 is "old". My wife, who this claimed takes care of me is older than I am! ;)

Eric Johnson

~shakes cane~

I still can't figure out how 53 is "old".

That level 3 wizard beard of yours isn't helping your case. ;)

Neil Roy

That level 3 wizard beard of yours isn't helping your case. ;)

Just hope I don't level it up any more, or you may be in trouble! 8-)

Eric Johnson

Just wait a few years and we can battle. I'll become a wizard, too, when I hit 30. ;)

Neil Roy

30?! But isn't that over the hill?! ;)

Bruce Perry

I guess now is a good time to mention that my brother once came home from school and announced that there are five words for biology, the study of blobs: biology, blobology, bloblobogy, bloblobloby and bloblobloblob. (Amarillion is probably sick of this one by now.)

Edgar Reynaldo

Just wait a few years and we can battle. I'll become a wizard, too, when I hit 30. ;)
7bddaf864bbf7e2a16184e25584733f6b709a7b0.png

Ah, the benefits of dual-classing.

Wikipedia said:

In 1st and 2nd editions, changing a character's class is difficult. Only humans can, and it requires extremely high stats to do so. This is called "dual-classing". Non-humans, on the other hand, can "multi-class" where they effectively learn two (or rarely even three) classes at the same time at the cost of a slower character level progression.

I wanna see you nerds battle. 2nd ED. D&D Style. Over IRC.

Captain Edgar the Reynaldo Super Rainbow Blob said:

Clearly, my avatar is best.
38e9796db4baf63b31c112cceeae919d22a4fe07.png

Neil Roy

Two days without a post! :o

Gideon Weems
Quote:

Two days without a post! :o

Everyone was awestruck by the beauty of Edgar's bloblobloblob.

Neil Roy

Probably hypnotized! ;)

bamccaig

Or alternatively sick to their stomach. :-[

Johan Halmén

{"name":"611641","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/a\/1\/a1577dfcae56131be7a13e8cd3013391.jpg","w":768,"h":768,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/a\/1\/a1577dfcae56131be7a13e8cd3013391"}611641

Chris Katko

So I'm playing Vampire The Masquerade - Bloodlines. Anyone play any cool games?

video

It's SO MUCH better than the original Masquerade game--which is an almost unplayable 3-D Diablo clone(ish).

ALSO, I figured out the reason my computer sucks. It's the damn CPU. (!@$@! you, AMD.) There are people who play PUBG with my exact card (GTX 1060). The guy with the AMD FX-8350 gets 30-40 FPS in 1080p. NOT 4K. NOT 1440p. Freakin' 1080p with a brand new GTX 1060.

Okay, fine, maybe it's the game. (It is, partially...)

Another guy has the same card, but a i5 7500, and he gets 130 FPS. That's over FOUR TIMES the framerate for the same videocard! My next upgrade will definitely be an Intel.

Who cares if you have eight cores... if they're all slow?!

Even if you're playing a typical game, recording with NVENC (GPU), and running some random stuff like Steam/Discord/uPlay/etc on a dedicated CPU, you're max using... ~4 CPUs.

I wish against wishes I wasn't about to lose my job. Then I'd have some money to buy a CPU. :(

Anyway, back to Bloodlines. It's part... Deus Ex, Thief, Fallout 1/2, and more. The combat is one of the least interesting/fun aspects, actually. The puzzles, dialogs, and stat system is really fun.

Oddly enough, this is the first game I've ever played where I thought "Okay, these clothes are too sexy. This is just stupid." and it actually detracted from the gameplay. Nobody walks around in thong armor. And I "get it" they're vampires and hyper-sexual but this game super shows its age. Everyone SUPER looks straight out of "hip 2004" fashion. Like they were ripped from an Orgy music video.

video

It's pretty funny. But when I got upgraded armor thinking "Hey, at least she'll be wearing clothes", no, she went from $lutty Cheerleader, to $lutty Cowgirl (complete with $ssless chaps), and now, $lutty Cop. Like, we're talking Halloween costumes. It's embarrassing for a 30 year old man to be playing this.

But you don't have to be a female. And there are like 8 playable classes ("clans"), and only the one I choose happened to coincidentally be the sluttiest. The male models are also hyper sexual.

{"name":"maxresdefault.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/5\/75c905348f1d3d07b3ed42926756d888.jpg","w":1600,"h":1200,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/5\/75c905348f1d3d07b3ed42926756d888"}maxresdefault.jpg

HULK. SMASH.

The clans also support "backstories" which give big modifiers (that I didn't know about when I made my character). For example, if you're a "$lut" it's easier to seduce people, but you can't gain XP as fast because you're dumb. Lulz.

There's lots of humor. ESPECIALLY if you play a Malkavian clan (which I do in the vids), which are demented/insane/schizophrenics where all your dialog options are crazy / odd. Like, talking to a taxi driver, you refer to it as a yellow beetle flying into the sunset.

Either way, it's a real (enjoyable) time sink. I've been playing 2-3 hours each time and the time just flies by.

There's very little in terms of RPG "loot" to get. However, the environments are fun to explore / break into, much like Deus Ex. And it's much more open-world than Deus Ex.

bamccaig

I'd love to discover a new to me single player game with story. It seems they're quite hard to locate now that I'm an adult and can buy them anytime I want (except for pesky bills and things). You'd think somebody would want to take my money.

Probably the last one that really impressed me was Life Is Strange (and the prequel, BtS). If you haven't played it, and you like an interactive story, consider it. IMO it's worth getting at full price, but it often goes on sale so you can always watch for it.

Any other suggestions? I prefer relatively short games because I'm an adult and I cannot afford to spend 500 hours on most games. If it's amazing then maybe, but few games are amazing enough to tear me away from CSGO for extended periods of time. I really just want a weekend or week long game or something.

Half-Life 3 would tear me away from CSGO, but Valve failed to deliver. >:(

I started The Witcher III, but it's not what I expected, and generally I find it quite hard so far. And not very rewarding. The story sequences are really immersion breaking too. And since when can you not pause FMV sequences in goddamn 2018?

I am also working on Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, but it's Windows only so I can only play it when I have my work laptop at home, and I feel like setting it up. Usually it's easier to just play CSGO in Linux.

Eric Johnson

Just create your own story-driven, single-player game. Then when it's done, take an amnesia pill to forget about it so you can enjoy it anew!

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

I'd love to discover a new to me single player game with story.

- Star Control 2 (see the FOSS HD remake, Ur-Quan Masters). It's simply amazing. Half of Mass Effect 1-3 are straight ripped off from SC2 without any attribution. (Like, almost lawsuit worthy.)

- Star Control 3. People give it SO MUCH !@$@! but it was a fun play-through.

- Styx: Master of Shadows, a sneaking game. It's slightly too long, and overstays its welcome near the end as the difficulty ramps up and the game mechanics don't scale and it gets more frustrating and dependent on perfection/luck in certain places. However, then why mention it? Because it has ONE OF THE BEST STORIES I've ever seen in a game. They actually managed to make a brand new character (Styx) who has this kind of Spiderman like sarcasm/cynicism. And even with the flaws, you KEEP PLAYING because you need to see how the game ends.

- Styx has a sequel Shards of Darkness with a pop-in co-op mode support. I bought it, but haven't played it yet.

- System Shock 2 and Deus Ex you probably know, but if not, play them. Just do it.

- SOMA has flaws but is a very scary game with a HUGELY interesting story that I can't tell you at all without revealing spoilers. The entire game is about exploring the story. Ironically, the monster sections are some of the least fun aspects... the world is so interesting, and pure scifi that makes you ask what it means to be human, that the scary sections are somewhat klunky and get in the way.

Neil Roy

Star Control 3 was okay. It was a pain in the buttocks getting used to that 3D space map, but I got used to it. What I didn't like was when I FINALLY completed it, than there was a bug and I NEVER did see the ending to it due to the bug. >:(

Edgar Reynaldo
Chris Katko

Welp. There goes my job. :-/

Edgar Reynaldo

I've heard great things about Indeed.
https://www.indeed.com/

DanielH

I've heard great things about Indeed.

Not much of a game, but playable non-the-less. ;D

Oh! You were referring to

Welp. There goes my job.

bamccaig

Thanks for the suggestions, Chris. I'm installing uqm to see what it is. Sequels kind of turn me off usually because it's rare that a sequel is where the gem occurs, and if it's story related you might have missed things you won't know about.

I've added Styx: Master of Shadows to my wishlist so if it goes on sale I'll be ready. It doesn't immediately stand out as something I'd like based on the art style so $30 seems a bit steep. But if it goes on sale I'll snatch it up.

Deus Ex I played a bit of, but I don't think I ever finished it. I didn't learn of it until like mid 00s so it was already kind of dated, and honestly I didn't get it. Meanwhile, I thought that DX: HR was great, and even DX:MD is fun to me even though it got a lot of bad reviews somehow.

I also got a copy of System Shock 2 in the mid-00s which again I think was just a bit dated. And probably it didn't help that it was overhyped so my expectations were high. But I think the main reason I never really got into it is that it seems like a time sink. It seems like it requires a lot of time to play, and I was already an adult before I learned of it. It's not the weekend type of game. It feels like it'll take a month to get through. I can't remember because it has been too long since I've fired it up, but I think I might have just been getting my ass kicked too. I probably will need a walkthrough to go through it (to save time, which I don't have). I did grab SS2 on Steam when it went on sale so I already have it. I just need the time to go through it and realize what I've been missing.

How the Hell did I not learn of SOMA until now?! I fucking worship the Penumbra series, and Amnesia was looking promising too until I got blocked by a game breaking bug. Which reminds me, I need to try Amnesia again and see if I can get past it now. It's been a while. SOMA is added to my wishlist now too. I'd probably buy that at full price because I have a lot of faith in Frictional Games, but I'm going to put it off for now. I want to make sure I'm ready and able to play it before I buy it.

There was a sale of Steam today so I bought a new game (to me): Superhot. I had never heard of it until now, but it's fucking awesome. It's 50% off on Steam today so consider it. Basically it's a fancy game where time is tied to the players movements. There's a bit of story weaved into it too, but I think clearly the gameplay is the main focus. Still, the story is well done for this type of game. And I fucking love the main menu and general art and UI style. It's brilliant.

Edgar, I tried to find Starflight, but it seems like an old DOS game. Do you have a link where I can find it? Apparently it can be played online at "archive.org", but when I tried I couldn't get past the "display" prompt because it wouldn't read numeric keys.

Append:

SUPERHOT IS THE MOST INNOVATIVE SHOOTER I'VE PLAYED IN YEARS!

Use this discount and join me now : http://superhotgame.com/discount/#A15C9A8808EE

Edgar Reynaldo
bamccaig said:

Edgar, I tried to find Starflight, but it seems like an old DOS game. Do you have a link where I can find it? Apparently it can be played online at "archive.org", but when I tried I couldn't get past the "display" prompt because it wouldn't read numeric keys.

Good luck. Even if you get DOS Box up and run the game, you'll still need a key to play it. I have the software SOMEWHERE... but I doubt I can find the key again.

Chris Katko

you'll still need a key to play it.

https://www.gog.com/game/starflight_1_2

ehem ::)

bamccaig

Perfect. Wishlisted that too. :) If it ever goes on sale I'll snatch it up.

Neil Roy

That's my favorite space game of all time.

Absolutely!!! It had an epic story and that ending was the best ending to a game I have seen, totally blew me away. Just do not play Starflight 2 before you play 1 as it gives a clue as to what the ending of 1 was, and you really do not want to ruin that.

Peter Hull

You can play starflight on:
https://classicreload.com/starflight.html
I tried but I have no clue what to do

Edgar Reynaldo

Yeah, but who do the profits go to? Electronic Arts? The maker of the game? Or GOG?

Chris Katko

... I ... who are you wanting the money to go to?

The owner of IP (whoever that is), put it up for sale on GOG. GOG sells old games. "Good old games". It's as legit as any Steam purchase or any other store.

They actually work toward fixing/porting some games that don't run on DOSBox out-of-the-box. For example, Red Guard, has all the CD music tracks converted to MP3s and they have some sort of emulation layer that makes the game think it's playing a CD. That's neat.

Edgar Reynaldo

I just wanted to make sure it is up on GOG with the original IP owner's consent. I don't want proceeds to go to some game company that just rips off old games and sells them.

Never used GOG before so w/e.

It does mention it comes with all the manuals and everything, so the key is included in the starcodes.

Question is, how do you get DOS box to run at a reasonable rate?

bamccaig

Electronic Arts isn't even the developer. They're just the publisher. They were likely responsible for marketing and distribution, and maybe invested to get the development done. The ideas were probably mostly those of underappreciated talents within the development company (Binary Systems, apparently). And what's more, both games are 3 decades old. Does anybody deserve any money anymore? The development team is probably long retired. They've probably already been paid handsomely for their work (at least, if any of your purchase today would even reach them; it's probably just free money for EA). How would it benefit society to make crooked corporations richer?

That all said, GOG is legit as far as I can tell. I just started using it. It seems like Steam with fewer bells, but with more DRM-free content.

I don't want proceeds to go to some game company that just rips off old games and sells them.

Electronic Arts? :-X

Edgar Reynaldo

My point was that I wanted to the proceeds to go to Binary Systems.

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

That all said, GOG is legit as far as I can tell.

They're 100% legit. They're the same company that made Witcher 1-3. :P They're not some random company in China selling below-MSRP steam keys.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOG.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_Projekt

"By September 2017, it was the largest publicly traded video game company in Poland, worth about US$2.3 billion.[4] "

Quote:

Binary Systems.

Then send a check directly to Greg Johnson.

The person who owns the IP gets the money. If someone buys the IP from the publisher that originally funded it... then the new company gets the money. When Atari went out of business, someone bought many of their IP's, and now "they" sell "Atari" games and get the profit.

But if all you want is the legal right to play the game.. then you pay whoever... currently owns the game.

I have 387 games (99% were on sale!) from GOG so far. Monkey Island. Jagged Alliance. Deus Ex. Unreal Tournament. Vampire Bloodlines. Far Cry 1 and 2. The list goes on. GOG does "DRM free" games. You can always download a physical file and it's "Yours Forever (TM)" like buying a boxed copy used to mean. So I feel like I'm supporting a "Good Idea (TM)" when I buy from GOG over Steam or some other service like uPlay (::vomit::). The games will run forever, without a connection to a home server. (Few exceptions exist with newer games that call home, for multiplayer support. Many people give those games 1-star reviews.)

[edit] To be clear: GOG is no different than Steam. They're a store that sells games that the IP owners upload. Except GOG has a huge community of people who request new "old games" to add and get refurbished to run on modern systems. For example, patching a Glide game to run in OpenGL/DirectX so you can play it.

Neil Roy

I tried but I have no clue what to do

You explore, land on planets and gather resources with which you can upgrade your ship. The space you travel in is HUGE, but there are wormholes you can discover which speeds up travel. It's usually a good idea to jot down the co-ordinates of wormholes etc.

There is a story to the game though. Something is destroying entire systems and as you explore and meet new races, you have to learn how to interact with them and you will learn more and gain newer technology to help you. Different races should be treated differently, some you should be aggressive with, other's not.

You should also watch who you have for crew members as certain races hate others and will not talk to you if you have a crew member on board they hate. I usually keep an alternative race for certain roles. I forget their names, but those dinosaur people and the plants ones hate each other.

The ending of this game and what is causing systems to be destroyed was one of those "Oh shit!" moments I will never forget.

Chris Katko

So I'm trying Duke Nukem Forever for the first time. It's !@$!@'ing appalling.

It came out in 2011, and it runs like complete piss.

4K, I get <30 FPS in a menu system that is literally doing nothing but showing a static image and playing an upscaled video in the background.

In windowed mode? It doesn't support more than 720p. That's right. 2011 on a PC. 720p.

In fullscreen? It crashes all the time when you try to switch the resolution. But it doesn't crash gracefully to desktop. Nope. It just freezes, while still "capturing" the mouse cursor. So you have to do some WIN+TAB multi-desktop keyboard gymnastics to switch viewports to the second screen and you STILL don't have a mouse.

So the SECOND day (today) I tried to play the damn game, I get through the first level... it's a boss. You defeat the boss with guns. Then you have to run up to it while it's passed out, climb on top with 'e', and then press SPACE really fast to rip a pipe (heart or air flow) out of its body.

First, let's discuss the gaming holocaust that combining the legacy of Duke Nukem... with a fucking QUICK TIME EVENT.

"Press F to pay respects.", anyone?

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But not only that, but, just like !@$!@ DAMN FAR CRY 3, the !@$!'ing quick time events? (Where you press a button fast enough to "win" the event.) You know, something INSANELY SIMPLE to program correctly? Just like in Far Cry 3, in Duke Nukem Forever, it doesn't !@$!@$'ing work.

And, adding insult to injury, the game only supports CHECKPOINT saves now (WTF?!), and, there's no checkpoint right before the quicktime event! So every time it !@#$!'S YOU, you have to re-fight the entire boss again. ... and of course, you don't even know if it'll work that time.

When I have to GOOGLE HOW TO FIX YOUR GAME, your game is officially sh!t. Especially a game that came in out 2011 (and Far Cry 3, in 2012).

And as always, there's NEVER an official response from a developer on how to fix that crap. The best you get is people say "Well, try tapping it faster." (Really? Jack-ss, I wrote a forum post before simply trying to "tap it faster"?) And the others say "turn on VSYNC" "lower your resolution" and "rebind your jump key". What the !@$! would lowering my resolution help?

This game came out in 2011!!! Windows 8 (same as Win10 essentially) was already out in 2011! And 64-bit systems were the norm by then. So what @$!@'ing excuse could they have for it not working except being terrible programmers being run by a terrible company? It's not like we're going from Windows 98 to Windows 2000/XP with a completely different kernel or going from 32 to 64-bit systems. The ecosystem hasn't changed.

There is NO excuse for us to not be living in a age of renaissance where everything "just works." I can play a DOS game that was written for a 16-bit CPU just fine. I can play games designed for a freakin' console, just fine. But somehow, games that run through standardized APIs that mostly haven't changed in a decade, and they crash all the time. Pathetic. Absolutely pathetic.

bamccaig
Neil Roy said:

The space you travel in is HUGE, but there are wormholes you can discover which speeds up travel.

This description makes me think that I cannot possibly play the game because I don't have the time. I cannot imagine 1980's technology was so immersive that I'll dedicate myself to exploring the game for a month. Even a week would be excessive unless it was over the top amazing in every way. And every moment of frustration would detract from that. That type of game is well suited to teenagers because the world is still pretty new to them, and if the game just came out then they probably haven't experienced anything like it before (well perhaps that was more true 20 years ago than now...).

On a side note, I still regard FFVII as my favorite game and the greatest game of all time, but it took me about 3 tries to get into it when I was like 12. It was unlike anything else I had known, and it takes a fair bit of progress for the story to really grip you (once it does though, daaaamn). Even so, it can easily take 70 or 100 hours (or more) to complete, and just like work every distraction from the game costs you extra in getting back into it (a long enough distraction can even leave you lost). It's difficult for adults to dedicate themselves to that kind of thing. I've attempted a couple of FF games since then, and the older I get the more hopeless it is (albeit, I think they've also come up short in some respects; but I'm biased because FFVII was my first, and nothing else I've played seems to compare).

Quote:

Duke Nukem Forever

Something worth noting is that just because people within a company once had a great idea does not mean that future people within the company, even the same people, will still have great ideas. I don't even think I've played a Duke Nukem game before, but certainly when Forever finally was released I heard about how terrible it was. I never even considered getting it. I don't think anybody would have been recommending it, and if they were you know they were bought. :-/ Sometimes artist are geniuses that are full of great ideas, and they produce masterpiece after masterpiece (and these ones tend to be somewhat humble about their accomplishments). Other times, people stumble upon something that is wildly successful, and never manage to do anything else notable. The universe is full of chaos. Sometimes it produces glorious things, but often it produces shit. There isn't always a reliable mechanism to predict which.

Eric Johnson

Duke Nukem Forever is a fun kind of bad. Like watching a summer camp skit, you know it's campy, but that's what adds to the fun. :P That being said, I never finished Duke Nukem Forever... but maybe I should give it another go.

Chris Katko

I knew I was getting a campy/cheesy game. That's not a problem. (The original Duke Nukem 3-D is amazing, btw. Some of the best designed levels ever made. Though I know DNF isn't as good.)

What pisses me off beyond imagination is that a 2011 game doesn't !@$!'ing run. How can a AAA studio SELL A GAME ON STEAM that DOESN'T RUN?

What the hell happened to gaming?

Skyrim? Buggy as hell to the point you have to use the console to FIX quest triggers that didn't fire correctly that leave quests broken. So much so there's unofficial mods to "fix" all the bugs. Think about that. There used to be games that developers would fix. Now they just give you a steaming pile of turd and expect the modding community to fix their stillborn creations. The same mods exist for other Bethesda products like Fallout 3 and 4.

Vampire Bloodlines had an amazing story, but once again, I had to use noclip MANY TIMES to unstick my character.

Far Cry 2 and 3, multiple times, my character got stuck in terrain and I had to reload. In Far Cry 3? Once again, there's no quicksave functionality. I had to reload FROM THE LAST CHECKPOINT.

In Far Cry 1, I had to MANUALLY quicksave using the CONSOLE by typing \save_game [name]. And then pressing "up" through history to re-use it.

Satellite Reign? I couldn't even beat. The final map trigger that lets you to take the elevator up to the final boss? DIDN'T EXIST. The elevator couldn't be used.

[edit] Also, in FC3, I spend literal DAYS having to Google, to try and figure out how to pass a !@$!@ damn Quick Time Event that borders on insanity. Literally the character preaches at you for 5 minutes about "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results" then... quicktime event... which on the PC... fails. Then, it's the SAME SPEECH AGAIN. Over. And over. And over. At which point you wonder if you're on some sort of Prank TV show. And then... over... and over... and you start thinking... "Is this real life? Why am I playing this?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lTrQdHv6bk

Neil Roy

Duke Nukem Forever

I loved the game. Didn't have any of the problems you describe, and that is on my system which had an nVidia GT240 in it, not exactly top of the line video card, even for 2011.

I do wish the world was more open as was originally planned. But I liked it for what it was.

bamccaig said:

This description makes me think that I cannot possibly play the game because I don't have the time.

As I said, as you discover wormholes, your travel times are immensely reduced as some take you to the other side of the galaxy. If you don't have the time to explore and discover them, there are maps online that show you where they are now.

And of course, if you wish to find them on your own, as I did, you should upgrade your navigator's skills first, as at certain levels they can detect wormholes easily.

But that sort of game isn't for everyone. This generation is probably too impatient for it. It's very similar to Star Control 2, in fact, SC2 was inspired by it, some say a ripoff, but the two are definitely different in important ways. It's too bad we don't seem to see more games like these anymore.

Eric Johnson

The original Duke Nukem 3-D is amazing, btw.

As someone who isn't well acquainted with the series, is the original still worth checking out?

Chris Katko
Neil Roy said:

in fact, SC2 was inspired by it, some say a ripoff

The Starflight creator... worked on Star Control 2. So whoever they are, they're pretty stupid. MASS EFFECT, on the otherhand, is a straight up AAA rip off, of Star Control 2. Hell, the damn ending is 99% Star Control 3 as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Johnson_(game_designer)

Quote:

Designer:
Star Control II (1992, Sega)[5]

As someone who isn't well acquainted with the series, is the original still worth checking out?

Eric Johnson
Chris Katko said:

As someone who isn't well acquainted with the series, is the original still worth checking out?

Thanks, Chris. :P

Chris Katko

Hahahaha Allegro.cc did that crappy thing that takes 20 minute to post so you can hit the edit button. And I forgot.

;D

Duke is fun. You're an old fart, like me, so you might like "2.5D" graphics. That is, Doom. Sprite enemies, with polygon worlds.

Duke has INSANELY better levels, enemies, and fun than Doom. The levels are interactive. Doors can be opened or re-closed. Faucets can be activated and give you a single hitpoint. You can flush a toilet. You can push buttons that activate doors. You can view cameras. You can go outside.

It was also the first FPS game that really had full 3-D environments. (System Shock 1 might count but if you play both, you'd know SS1 is insanely slow paced compared to duke and counts more as an RPG than FPS. And it had almost no floor-over-floor levels.) You could, for the first time, have floors that were on TOP of each other. Doom only let you fake it. You could never be on a platform above something, looking down. Duke had tons of other features too. Better lighting. Way more interactive map trigger support.

The monsters are hilarious and tongue-in-cheek. The first badguys you fight are cops. Except they're pig... cops.

The levels are amazing. They're almost all based on real locations. The first level is a district and you end up going through a movie theater. You can shut the movie on or off. you can blow up the screen. By time you finish the level, you've actually turned the two safety keys ("TURN. YOUR. KEY!"), armed the blast cap for a demolition, and you watch (live, no cinematic) an entire building collapse.

All of that stuff didn't exist before Duke did it.

To this day, I have never played a game where I could blow up an entire building and watch it collapse, live. (No cinematic pre-rendered bullcrap.) Even though the game is set in the future or some alternate universe, it feels like a real, living place.

Wrap it all in a really funny, over-the-top, masculine character that spouts ripped off 80's action movie quotes (with no attribution) like "I'm here to kickass and chew bubblegum, and I'm all out of bubblegum." (from They Live by John Carpenter). The story is literally "Aliens invaded and stole all our babes" so Duke nukem has to go rescue the babes and kill the alien basterds. [sic] It's so simple, and yet, charmingly perfect for the "style" it is going for.

The weapons are fun too. You've got shotgun, rockets, etc. But you've also got a shrink ray and the biggest enemies now run around like little kids trying to avoid you. And when you get on top of them they explode as your character plays a "crush them with my stomping foot" animation. It also has an alternative fire that makes them bigger and they explode.

It also supports Mighty Foot mode. Pressing Q (I think?) lets you kick with your foot. But more hilariously, you can also use your foot as your melee weapon when you run out of ammo. Except... it's your other foot. So if you hold left click, AND, Q, you can walk around hitting people with TWO FEET. It's also super fun to run around and KICK every door open like a mad man.

Also, the foot has its uses too. A shotgun blast on harder difficulty won't kill a pigcop in one hit. BUT, a shotgun AND a kick will. So you'll quickly get the (fun) hang of it by blasting a guy around a corner, kicking, then turning to the next guy and blasting him, and kicking him in the face.

To this day, Duke Nukem's levels STILL strike me as some of THE most unique levels ever designed. You can literally tell someone "Remember the electric chair level?" and people know exactly what you're talking about.

And that's just what I remember off the top of my head. And it's not just nostalgia. I've literally beat the game like... 6 times and it's still fun.

OH, and the ENTIRE GAME SUPPORTS CO-OP.

Come to think of it, if anyone wants to play some co-op, holla. I'm going to be playing Duke again at some point for a let's play / series review.

[edit] The only game that oddly, comes close, to Duke? Postal 2. Duke was wacky, but it actually let you do way more interactive real-world stuff. Postal 2 also takes inspiration from Duke by using real-world locations (except it's a whole town!), has a wacky anti-hero (this time with an almost serial killer vibe), and the game is so dogged for being "evil" because you can do things like unzip your pants and pee on someone (or even pee into the air and get some in your mouth ahahha), the neo-cons / game haters / SJW types who never actually play games never even realized that you can beat the engine game without killing anyone. The game is actually like some sort of super philosophical experiment where every bit of "evil" you do is simply... because you want to, or, because you EXPECTED to do it thanks to all the over FPS games you played. You actually don't have to kill anyone at all. ;D Also, it guest stars Gary Coleman. Damn, postal 2 is a good game.

ALSO, Postal 2 supports "Mighty Foot". A clear, direct, homage to Duke3D.

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Eric Johnson

From what you described, Duke Nukem 3D sounds pretty cool. I checked Steam, and the "20th Anniversary World Tour" version is the only one available. Apparently there was a "Megaton Edition", but the licensing for that fell through in 2016. I've added the game to my wishlist, but there's no telling when I'll get around to actually buying it. I have too many games as it is. :'( :P

Chris Katko

WTF. That sucks.

Also:

video

bamccaig

From what you described, Duke Nukem 3D sounds pretty cool. I checked Steam, and the "20th Anniversary World Tour" version is the only one available. Apparently there was a "Megaton Edition", but the licensing for that fell through in 2016. I've added the game to my wishlist, but there's no telling when I'll get around to actually buying it. I have too many games as it is. :'( :P

Same. I just didn't want to spend $21 on an old game. I'd pay probably $5. I may have played it in school before (back in the day kids used to bring games from home and install them on all the computers in the lab "secretly"). In any case, they were somewhat before my time because when they were released I was too young for them so I never got to experience them in full. To some extent, they were great for their time, but no longer. But I think the comedy in Nukem would make it worthwhile even today.

Chris Katko

The $20 one has a new episode by the original creators. However, it also DOESN'T include the old expansion packs and the audio is worse according to reviewers. I have not played it yet.

Megaton Edition was like $5 forever. It's a GREAT $5 game. If I had it on GOG, I'd just send it straight to you. But I have it on Steam.

Megaton Edition can still be found through... sites if you're willing to get them for free. Simply google "Megaton edition download".

I don't know. I think it's insanely stupid to not offer a game people want. It's like "Hey, I DON'T want to make money." ::) IP law is so damn crazy.

Here's the trailer for Megaton that shows the typical graphics / guns/ etc:

video

bamccaig

This is another example of a game where the original development team has already been fairly compensated (and if not, it's because of a crooked publisher, not because of piracy or anything like that). In other words, the people that did the work paid their bills. There's literally no reason to keep asking for money for it other than greed. Sure, it's quite convenient if the publishing executives and maybe some important artists or game designers get to live a life of luxury without having to work often, but how does that benefit society? It really doesn't. If those people are really talented then you want them to work as regularly as they can do so and still produce quality. In other words, at this point, copyright should not even be covering such an old game. It has run its course. People that were interested and able at the time would have already bought it. Continuing to ask for money, sometimes from people that already paid and then lost their license, is just highway robbery.

The extra "episode" is one reason to ask for extra money, but unless it's worthy of being a game in itself it may not justify the $20 price tag per person. I'd probably rather play the game with graphics and sound that "feel" equivalent to the original. If the original was so great then I don't need it redubbed and redrawn, etc. Don't charge me extra money in a vain attempt to redress old works. Just let people appreciate the brilliant work of the original artists, and if it doesn't hold up to 2018 then so be it. It wasn't meant to. The people that it touched will appreciate the original work forever. And if it's worthy of my attention in 2018 it'll also touch me without redubbing.

/rant

Eric Johnson

The Megaton Edition can still be purchased from Steam key reseller sites, but the price is closer to $40. I'm sure the 20th Anniversary World Tour version will be plenty fine, but I don't feel like paying $20 for a 20-year-old game. :P

I just wonder why the developer and publisher didn't renew their agreement to sell the game after just one year on the Steam store (Megaton Edition). They brought it back the year later as the 20th Anniversary version, but the fact that it's missing the expansion packs is really bizarre.

bamccaig said:

There's literally no reason to keep asking for money for it other than greed.

I think if someone or a group of someones creates something with the intent to sell, so long as there's still a market for the product, they should have the freedom to milk it for all its worth. Is it greedy? Sure. But game-making isn't a charity. So while the game is 20 years old, and the market might be mostly dried up, I wouldn't feel right pirating it...

bamccaig

I think if someone or a group of someones creates something with the intent to sell, so long as there's still a market for the product, they should have the freedom to milk it for all its worth. Is it greedy? Sure. But game-making isn't a charity. So while the game is 20 years old, and the market might be mostly dried up, I wouldn't feel right pirating it...

Again, how does that help society? All it does is make the rich richer, and the poor poorer. The work involved was programming, graphic design, modelling, composition, etc. These things are measured in man hours. Should these people get paid a million dollars an hour? Once the game is developed the work is done. Copies can be made using less than a cent worth of resources.

When the game is first released it's time to make back the initial investment to cover the cost of hiring all of the staff for production, distribution, and marketing. And sure, for a few years after they can continue to milk it for some extra revenue to help cover the expense of the other less successful projects. At some point though, and it's fair to say that point was probably reached over a decade ago for Duke Nukem, everybody involved has been more than fairly compensated (or more likely, certain people that were an insignificant part of the project are grossly overcompensated, while the true talent probably was underpaid).

It's toxic to continue milking this work for money, making rich corporations richer, while forcing struggling people to choose between entertainment and social inclusivity (you'll note that media has become ingrained in society, such that having media is necessary for thriving in social circles; moreso this affects children, who the industry targets because they're easier to exploit), versus other needs/wants in their lives that actually do have a significant resource associated with them, and cannot be "copied" at negligible cost.

The corporation has other works to profit from today. If the programmers, artists, and musicians are not retired they probably still have an income source today: they continue to work in some form. And that's reasonable. We expect far more valuable contributors to society to continue working hard for 30 years. Why the hell should we enable entertainers to do a tiny little bit of work and then milk it forever? It would benefit society more if they continued creating. And if they continue creating they'll always have an income source and never need to milk old works for extra.

Capitalism is toxic. It has demonstrated how unsuccessful it is on the whole for society. It's full of corruption. And it only benefits the top 0.1% while the rest constantly have to struggle to get by. I'd much rather live in a world dreamed up in fictional works like Star Trek, where the need for such things is no longer a thing, and everybody just cooperates, does what they can, and all benefit. That's the world I want to work towards. Not a world where my descendants (if there are any) continue being pushed around like puppets on a string, tricked into believing their lives are empowered and libre, all the while making particularly evil people's lives insanely easy and comfortable at the expense of everybody else.

I used to take a hard stance against piracy. I figured the laws existed for good reason. But the more I explored the subject the more that I came to realize that the system is corrupt. The laws don't exist for the betterment of society, but for the empowerment of the elite. The laws actually harm society, and neuter distribution of existing works, and bias production of more works towards lower quality. Society overall agrees that the laws need to be changed, but the elite are the ones that set the laws, and they're also the ones that currently benefit. It's not hard to understand why they'll never change. Now I am tolerant of copyright infractions when I believe the "infraction" does more good than harm.

Chris Katko

I just wonder why the developer and publisher didn't renew their agreement to sell the game after just one year on the Steam store (Megaton Edition). They brought it back the year later as the 20th Anniversary version, but the fact that it's missing the expansion packs is really bizarre.

Megaton's IP was owned by Devolver. So when the old guys re-released their game, they probably bought the IP which included exclusive store rights to Duke Nukem.

I've seen Fallout 1 and 2 change to "Fallout 1/2 classic" on GOG. Same exact game but the IP switched hands. And you can't buy classic, so when I go to the store page, it goes to a 404 now.

Neil Roy

As someone who isn't well acquainted with the series, is the original still worth checking out?

Absolutely! Actually, these days, since the source was released, the game has been recompiled with newer versions along with higher resolution textures and even 3D models for some characters which still preserve the original feel of the game. OR you can just get the classic for DOSBox.

The game came with a superior level editor as well which was a lot of fun.

All you need is an original copy of the game, any will do, find the cheapest available online. Then look for eDuke32, which is a modern engine made from the source and then search for the Duke Nukem high res pack.

Here's a couple screenshots I took a while back with the high res pack etc.

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The Starflight creator... worked on Star Control 2.

Thanks for clarifying that. I'll try and remember that fact the next time I see such comments. I loved all of those games.

Eric Johnson
bamccaig said:

Again, how does that help society?

It doesn't help society, nor should it. What a great fantasy it would be if everyone help each other out for no reward, and if every product made was created to benefit society. It would be nice, but it's a fantasy. We will never live in a world like Star Trek. If given the opportunity, most people would not work, and they would not contribute to society; instead, they would be parasites that would suck it dry. You'd end up with a minority workers supporting the majority of those who don't work. This is already true to an extent in the welfare state.

Why should I bust my balls to make ends meet while part of my income goes to pay for others to live off of "the government's dime" and not work? I'm not wealthy by any means, but I'd like to be. :P I do agree that capitalism does sometimes run amok and is filled with corruption, but if I ever produce a product that is profitable, you can bet your ass I'll milk it for every cent it's worth.

Chris Katko
Neil Roy said:

Here's a couple screenshots I took a while back with the high res pack etc.

I actually hate that pack. I'm fine with high res textures. But when they added 3d models they instantly "dated" the game into looking like half-life 1, Quake, (or at best, Postal 2). It lost a ton of its charm. It looks like some high res version of an N64

Even weapons don't have the same "bulk" to them. The shotgun is thinner, for example.

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::vomit::

bamccaig

If given the opportunity, most people would not work, and they would not contribute to society; instead, they would be parasites that would suck it dry. You'd end up with a minority workers supporting the majority of those who don't work.

I don't think that's true. Many people cannot sit still forever. They would find things to do. Hopefully they'd find the things they're actually good at and naturally enjoy, instead of being forced to do jobs they are bad at or hate.

This is already true to an extent in the welfare state.

That's not exactly the same. The people on welfare are at the bottom of society. It doesn't look good for them no matter what. A few will move up into middle class if they struggle long enough and work hard, but some no matter how hard they try are going to remain trapped where they are. It's easy to judge when you are born into a family that is already doing OK. But it's wrong to judge people that are suffering from social problems or are actually hindered from succeeding. It's impossible to know who is just being lazy versus who has given up on a world that has given up on them. I would wager that the people that were willing and able to work, even when all of their basic needs were met, would be enough to carry the ones that were unable or too lazy to contribute. Of course, our current definition of "work" isn't the only way to contribute to society. For example, mothers that raise offspring are also contributing to society. The world is not as black and white as we're lead to believe it is.

Why should I bust my balls to make ends meet while part of my income goes to pay for others to live off of "the government's dime" and not work? I'm not wealthy by any means, but I'd like to be.

"Money cannot buy happiness." True wealth is appreciating the things that actually matter in our lives. Relationships. Family. Reproduction. To a lesser extent, hobbies and passions. If you are making enough money to pay your bills then you have all the money you really need. It would be ideal to have more "in case" you need it, like for a medical emergency, of course. But money corrupts so if we had too much of it we'd only squander it and potentially ruin our lives in the process.. Look at how "happy" Hollywood is. They're all standing in line for the noose. The whole point of wanting more wealth is to achieve sustainable living. Which is basically achievable for all of us if we were willing to spread it around, and did so with a system that prevented abuses/corruption. We may not have been able to devise one yet, but that's not proof that it cannot be done.

There's also the argument that the struggle is part of what gives our lives meaning. And that without struggle our lives lose meaning and purpose. That said, I think there are plenty of natural struggles to keep us preoccupied so we don't need to invent artificial ones.

Money is not a real thing. We made it up. The real question is do we have enough resources to provide for everybody on the planet. And I think the answer is easily yes, or at least, if we all cooperated it could be. The amount of "wealth"/power that the top 0.1% has accumulated is insane. It's probably more than enough to feed/cloth/house the entire planet for decades if not centuries. Certainly if we were to pool everybody's wealth/resources it could be. The Internet suggests that the total amount of "wealth" on planet Earth may have been something like $1.2 quadrillion (I assume US dollars). That's approximately $160000 per person. Mind you, that's probably only enough for a small to medium sized family to survive in Canada for maybe ~5 years or so. But in poorer nations that's probably more than enough for them to last 20 or 30 years, if not 50 or 100 years. Obviously there's too many variables to be certain of much of anything, other than, the richest people in the world are hording all of the power/motivation to get things done, and they certainly have not contributed enough to society to be worthy of their net worth.

I actually hate that pack. I'm fine with high res textures. But when they added 3d models they instantly "dated" the game into looking like half-life 1, Quake, (or at best, Postal 2). It lost a ton of its charm. It looks like some high res version of an N64

Even weapons don't have the same "bulk" to them. The shotgun is thinner, for example.

951dd7abf95edf4fe98a3681d422e3d5-240.jpg

::vomit::

I actually think that in some ways worse graphics are better because they come across as more abstract. The advantage to this is that your brain has to fill in the blanks, and no matter how powerful our computers get, our brains continue to be way more powerful (at least in ways that matter in this domain). When I was playing FFVII I wasn't seeing the blocky 3D models that the game actually has. I was seeing fully detailed world. It was too abstract to answer all of my questions, and so my brain had to "guess" on some of the details and fill in the blanks. And the result was wondrous. They did have FMV sequences with better graphics, but they were still pretty dull by today's standards, and they only showed to pieces of the world so you still had to do your share of imagining.

That's something that I think has been partially lost in today's AAA sphere. The graphics are detailed enough that there's not much room left for your imagination. As a result, the studio had better do a fantastic job of imagining and presenting the world to the player or it won't "pop" the way it could. There are games that do a great job of this, and there are games that fall short. The ones that fall short are in limbo. They're too detailed for the imagination to take over, but too vague to really communicate everything the player wants to know about the world. The result is that the immersion is lost. And for games that are not pure mechanical that's game breaking.

Neil Roy

I actually hate that pack.

I'm not surprised.

I had a small part in the hi-res pack back when it was first put together by fans at the 3DRealms forums. I done the magazine with the partially nude woman (Poser 4 rendered), though I see someone touched up some of the text on it since, the bulk of it is my work. And a simple crate texture.

When the project was first started there were no 3D models, but having high res textures and low res, flat 2D characters just don't mix. So the best thing was to have 3D models with high-res, you can then choose which you want to play with.

As for dating the game, well, umm... it IS dated! Those 3D models date it later than the game actually is no matter how you look at it.

For those that like it, like me, it is at least an option.

-------

On a completely different topic, I found this fascinating video on Technicolor which explains the history of it. It actually helps explain CMYK as well. Quite the complex system.

video

Eric Johnson
bamccaig said:

Hopefully they'd find the things they're actually good at and naturally enjoy, instead of being forced to do jobs they are bad at or hate.

For the sake of conversation, let's say that such a system did come into fruition... So the basics are taken care of, but that leaves a few questions:

1. How would such a system be funded? How would it continue to be funded for decades or centuries thereafter? And how would that funding impact global trade?

2. Why would people working hard labor jobs (such as farming or construction) continue to do so if there is no monetary incentive to do so (assuming robots aren't doing all of that by the time such a system came into being)?

3. Is it reasonable to believe that everyone has something beneficial to offer to society? How do you define what is and is not beneficial, and wouldn't that lead to more of a utilitarian style of government?

4. What would you do with your time if you were a part of this system?

Also, I was watching a video about OpenGL and guess who I saw in the comments! :o

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Neil Roy

Why should I bust my balls to make ends meet while part of my income goes to pay for others to live off of "the government's dime" and not work? I'm not wealthy by any means, but I'd like to be.

Proverbs 19:17 (NIV)
“Whoever is kind to the poor lends to the Lord, and he will reward them for what they have done.”

Psalm 82:3-4 (NIV)
Defend the weak and the fatherless; uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.

1 Timothy 6:10 (NIV)
For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.

Matthew 19:21 (NIV)
Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

There's one thing Jesus or His apostles never said to a beggar; "GET A JOB!!!"

Erin Maus

A system where people need not work menial jobs doesn't not yet exist. It may exist in the future with automation... but it currently doesn't.

However, if workers owned the means of production, rather than a select few, they would ideally make decisions that benefit the worker over the shareholder.

If a factory could double productivity, then ideally it could employ the same amount of workers but they could work half the hours. (It doesn't exactly work like that, I'm aware, but that's the general idea). Under a capitalist frame, however, half the workers lose their jobs.

Otherwise, you get worker productivity going up--i.e., one worker doing the work of more than one a few years back--yet things like the wealth divide increasing; workers working longer hours, not fewer; decreased benefits; stagnating wages; and so on...

but don't listen to me, I'm soooo lazy because I receive Social Security benefits 8-) It's not like I work and go to school either... oh wait, I do. (You know, like most people on things like food stamps -- Households that receive food stamps usually have one or more recipients of said household working, for example!)

bamccaig

For the sake of conversation, let's say that such a system did come into fruition... So the basics are taken care of, but that leaves a few questions:

1. How would such a system be funded? How would it continue to be funded for decades or centuries thereafter? And how would that funding impact global trade?

"Funded" is misguided. Money is a system that we invented. That's not the only way to get things done. Indeed, if we want to fix the system we'd probably have to eliminate money entirely because if there's a mechanism to trade wealth/power it will be abused. What we probably need is a system that distributes wealth/power evenly and cannot be tampered with (or where those that have extra power to respond to extra responsibilities are under extra scrutiny and restrictions; as opposed to the negligible scrutiny and nonexistent restrictions they currently have).

The idea is that all of your basic needs will be met by society. Food, clothing, housing, transportation, health care (medical, dental, psychiatric and psychological, chiropractic, etc.). It might not be overly luxurious, but will hopefully at least be comfortable and practical and at least you'll be surrounded by people in those same circumstances. There won't be the "haves" and "have nots". Just "have enoughs" and as much as can be reasonably and fairly shared. I believe that there's plenty of resources to go around if we distribute them evenly. Our current society does the opposite: a very tiny minority of less than 1% has most of the wealth while there is a large group of people with not enough, literally starving to death or dying of preventable or curable disease.

And if all of your needs are met what do you have to complain about going to do some job that you happen to be good at and enjoy? What the Hell else would you do with all of that time? The truth is we get bored pretty easily. And we get the most fulfillment from accomplishing tasks. From working basically. Not in the sense of the menial jobs that people are forced to work today, but in the sense of actually accomplishing something that helps yourself or helps others. And I'm sure anybody in the workforce can point to inefficiencies and mundane stupid work they've experienced in their job that shouldn't exist, but does anyway to justify "money" in or out somehow. Those that did attempt to NOT work would likely suffer from depression and other mental disorders, but with services available to assist them they could be lead into a more fulfilling lifestyle that happens to also give back to society, unlike our current system where such people cannot easily access the services they need and instead they become a self-destructive parasite on society.

2. Why would people working hard labor jobs (such as farming or construction) continue to do so if there is no monetary incentive to do so (assuming robots aren't doing all of that by the time such a system came into being)?

This is a valid question because some jobs actually do suck. Typically men are forced to work them because the risks/dangers/difficulty pays more. Ideally, we'd solve them with machines somehow, but in the shorter term perhaps we'd have to come up with other incentives. The fact is that there are people that are just good at these jobs, and even enjoy them. I don't know that we'd end up with nobody willing to do those jobs. There are people that hate other types of jobs and wouldn't want to do anything else. It's still an interesting question, but I don't think we can really know with any level of certainty how big of a problem it would be.

That said, many of those jobs today are unnecessarily dangerous/dirty/difficult depending on the state of things because it's more "economical" (i.e., cheaper). By eliminating the economics we can hopefully also eliminate some of the difficulties and risks. Some jobs will always be a little dangerous, but in the wealthiest neighbourhoods of the wealthiest nations I think you'd find that they're a lot less dangerous than in the poorest. Perhaps to the point where they're kind of kushy instead of dangerous. With resources distributed more fairly hopefully we'd get all of those "nasty" jobs as pleasant as can be. They still might not be easy or safe, but at least they won't be suicide. Again, there are natural personalities in society that thrive in those jobs anyway. By limiting the difficulties and risks I think you'd have no problem getting those jobs done in a perfectly balanced society. In particular, because many of those jobs need to get done for many of the luxuries we take for granted to even exist. If those jobs aren't getting done then we won't even have the luxuries available to us to entertain ourselves outside of work (e.g., electricity, fuel, clean water, garbage disposal, etc).

3. Is it reasonable to believe that everyone has something beneficial to offer to society? How do you define what is and is not beneficial, and wouldn't that lead to more of a utilitarian style of government?

I think there are two good responses to this.

Either, yes, everybody has something beneficial to offer society; or no, some people have nothing to offer and in that case why would you want to force them to contribute? They'll definitely be putting garbage into the system, so we'll be getting garbage out of the system. If the noes do exist you cannot just get rid of them. Hopefully I don't have to explain why. And so either you provide them with a comfortable life where they don't have to poison the system, or you punish them for something that is outside of their control, leading them to social woes that will ultimately lead them to destructive behavior that harms society. If noes exist your best bet is to make them comfortable so they will be less inclined to strike out against society.

I think ultimately you don't define what is and isn't beneficial. You let everybody do what they want basically. Except maybe for children and teenagers, that still must undergo mandatory education before making decisions such as that. Basically if you put garbage into system you'll get garbage out. You need to educate the entire population as much as each individual is able. If you literally said a 5 year old could refuse to go to school obviously everybody would be idiots and the system would collapse. On the other hand, if all people in all nations around the world were given a solid, gratis education, as far as they're able to go (university and apprenticeships and beyond) then there would be a lot of people with a lot of skills and abilities honed. They wouldn't be making decisions based on ignorance, but based on their own strengths and weaknesses and hopefully balanced against the needs of society.

4. What would you do with your time if you were a part of this system?

I'd probably have tried to go further in my education firstly. I went to a technical college and stopped after that because my parents were able to afford it and I didn't want to risk the bigger money of a university when I wasn't confident that I was ready/able to fulfill the requirements and I knew I couldn't afford it myself.

I'd probably still be a software developer today, but I'd hopefully be working on software that is more interesting to me and of better quality because its development would not be constrained by short-term economical forces and would be free to take risks and focus on substance rather than deadlines or contracts. And potentially because a more thorough education might have unlocked more abilities and improved my own output.

I have no complaints about the field that I'm in or the job that I do (abstractly speaking). I have plenty of complaints about my pay grade, working conditions, job instability, etc. It's kind of hard to do things like invest in a house or have children when you have no idea if you'll still have a job in 3 months, and no idea what kind of job or what kind of money you'll be able to find afterward.

A system where people need not work menial jobs doesn't not yet exist.

Double negative alert!

Otherwise, you get worker productivity going up--i.e., one worker doing the work of more than one a few years back--yet things like the wealth divide increasing; workers working longer hours, not fewer; decreased benefits; stagnating wages; and so on...

My city has long been supported by a steel mill (and a tube mill attached that produces steel pipes). The majority of well paid jobs and benefits comes from there. However, these days with the global market it's very unstable. The workers are constantly at risk of being laid off, and every few years groups of hundreds or thousands are laid off for 3 to 6 months if not a year or two. And management is always trying to coerce the unions to agree to limiting wages, benefits, and vacation time. My dad is up to something like 7 weeks vacation. They were trying to cap everybody at 5 weeks maximum (so my dad would have lost 2 weeks he'd already earned after a 30+ year career), as well as take 5 or 10% of wages away, and take away some percentage of medical/dental coverage and other benefits too, and various other things..

This is pretty much the dirty, dangerous jobs we're talking about. Under the current system they're already trying to take away their perks while still forcing them to do the difficult, dirty jobs. Hell, some of those jobs literally kill you: many of the workers die off around ~50 or 60 with various cancers, and the families are paid off by the company in settlements because years of working in the plant are a significant contributor to the disease. Apparently they've been shipping insane amounts of steel for the past several years (as reported by all of the workers), yet they haven't been paying their bills for years, have shafted many small and medium sized local businesses racking up thousands and sometimes millions in debt, and are currently under credit protection by the government. In other words, small businesses that cannot afford to not be paid are left struggling while a big corporation that aught to be making loads of money is protected.

The sad thing is the city I live in depends on that plant. If it ever shuts down completely my city will likely disappear or at least shrink almost overnight to a fraction of the size. Working there never interested me because I got to witness how unstable my dad's job has been over the years. It has ultimately been very good for his overall, but I find it hard to believe that it'll still be good 20 years from now without some major shifts in the global market system. And of course, the government just throws us under the bus instead of working to protect us. They're fattening their own pockets while selling out the rest of us.

Chris Katko

A system where people need not work menial jobs doesn't not yet exist. It may exist in the future with automation... but it currently doesn't.

However, if workers owned the means of production, rather than a select few, they would ideally make decisions that benefit the worker over the shareholder.

For what it's worth, I agree with the problem but I think the solution is misguided. The reason "communism" or whatever you want to call it never works is simple human biology. People take care of what is theirs. Not "their group" because you can always rationalize that "someone else will take care of it" through the well-known Bystander Effect where people will hear a crime and not call the police because they assume everyone else did. The more people, the less likely. It's a dilution of responsibility. When no "one" person owns the company (or particular department or "thing" in the company), nobody cares.

- Rental cars get treated like piss.

- Rental ANYTHING is treated like piss.

- Anything you can rationalize is owned by some abstract organization and not a person with a face, is treated like piss. (Steal some office supplies, for example.)

- In China (HUGE PROBLEM) apartment buildings are BEAUTIFUL inside with marble floor and everything, but the outside looks like post-Soviet Union collapse or some Chernobyl nightmare. Why? Because the "building" is "owned by someone else" (even though technically it's all the tenets own it together) so nobody will even PAINT the outside of concrete to keep it from cracking and falling apart.

video

Now let's get back to where I absolutely AGREE with you. We, as a society (government regulations being a reflection of that society), need to figure out a way for people with jobs other than STEM degrees, to have REAL, non-poverty-level jobs and incomes. Whether it's "universal income", welfare, or putting everyone who can't work into a gigantic meat grinder that feeds the smart people. SOMETHING has to be done because it's just going to get worse and worse.

The simple fact of the matter is... not everyone is "college material". But that doesn't mean they're sub-human. That doesn't mean they're bad people. But the repetitive jobs these people do... are going away. So what do you do when a huge proportion of your society cannot work and cannot support themselves? You're going to have a full blown revolution on your hands.

I'm a middle ground guy. I know that rational self-interest is a great, natural, biological motivator. So it makes perfect sense why "capitalism" makes tons of people money, AND, tons of people benefit from swimming inside the "wake" produced by the powerful. We have so much technology in our pockets that was originally designed for billion dollar projects, companies, and even wars. But the core problem is... income inequality.

Companies exist as a member of society. Anyone who says "their job is to make money" is a liar. If that was the case, then we'd all be okay with companies destroying the environment to save money.

The income inequality of top business income VS bottom or even middle workers, is INSANE and rising rapidly. But those business men can't exist without the low and middle workers. In fact, they're the ones doing the majority of the work.

Moreover, workers are more "efficient" in terms of "units of production per hour per person" than ever before. Yet the WORKER doesn't get any more money for being more productive.

Unlike a bank, if my credit union makes money, I get a check at the end of the year. The credit union appreciates that my money was loaned out to investments that helped make a profit and we ALL benefited. It's still "capitalism" and yet, we're ALL benefiting.

And, we have laws regulating damn near everything in our lives. Why the hell shouldn't we have laws that regulate the maximum a company can "not" spread the fruits of its hard-working employees labor? The government gets a percentage check from the companies profits. Why shouldn't the employees? Sure, there are problems with that. But any practical idea has implementation issues and debates on "Where" the line is. But my point is simply the line DOES exist and we're been pretending that the line should be at 0.000% of corporate profits. Yet somehow, it's okay for the government to take that money, pay a bunch of administrators who each strip a little off the pie, and then eventually give a tiny bit back to people in the form of "welfare" and call everyone who takes that money a free-loading bum.

bamccaig

Not "their group" because you can always rationalize that "someone else will take care of it" through the well-known Bystander Effect where people will hear a crime and not call the police because they assume everyone else did. The more people, the less likely. It's a dilution of responsibility. When no "one" person owns the company (or particular department or "thing" in the company), nobody cares.

This must be an American trait. On Wednesday I went for a short motorcycle ride after work to test out a new throttle lock. When I got back to town there was a pile of smoke billowing up from the bushes next to the highway. It's not uncommon to see smoke in my area because of bonfires, but its close proximity to the highway seemed alarming. I turned around and pulled into an adjacent driveway on the other side of the highway to observe it. I saw a pickup truck pull over to observe it too, and a pedestrian walking her dog down the street stopped to observe as well. Somebody from the apartment building I had stopped at came running up and yelled that he had called the fire department. I decided to ride down the road at this point and circle to a parallel street on the other side of the smoke so I'd be able to get a better angle from there and see where the fire was really coming from. And that way too I was still available to help or call for help if the initial report of help was bogus. It was harder to see from this side so definitely the fire was in no-man's land between streets. When I finally found the smoke I pulled over and walked over to find that another bystander man was on-site smothering the fire with dirt/sand. It was out by the time I got there. I asked him if it was under control as another man came running in from the other side. And then they said a fire truck was coming towards the street I came from so two of us wandered up there to wave them down. I left after the fire department arrived to smother the remaining ashes with water. The fire started right next to a walking trail so I'm guessing somebody tossed a cigarette butt, and with the extreme heat we've experienced for the last 2 or 3 weeks it's not surprising that it managed to catch. The guy that called the fire department said the flames were at least 5 feet high, and it was in the middle of a bush that easily could have spread if it wasn't caught soon enough. It occurred to me that somebody else would probably report it eventually, but I stopped anyway. And not only did I stop, but about 4 or 5 other people also stopped to help, and probably 5 or 10 others were observing from a distance ready to act if they felt they needed to.

Quote:

- Rental cars get treated like piss.

- Rental ANYTHING is treated like piss.

- Anything you can rationalize is owned by some abstract organization and not a person with a face, is treated like piss. (Steal some office supplies, for example.)

Are you saying you personally do this? I don't know anybody that does. The people that appear to do this usually have their own social issues, and are generally struggling. They don't care about the destruction they cause because "life's not fair". In other words, it's not particularly because they're not responsible and don't care, but because they feel like they're getting shafted already so they don't care about shafting everybody else.

Certainly I've heard of "write-offs" in bigger companies that won't feel the hit of supplies going missing, but again that comes down to people either feeling like they're getting shafted or being greedy or whatever; and literally companies having more wealth/power than they can even use. If there was no such economy and everybody could just have a healthy supply of all of that stuff why would you ever steal any? Is any friend going to show up at your place and congratulate you on accumulating more than you need in a society where everybody is entitled to as much as they need (or at least, as much as there is to go around)? I would fucking hope your friends would chastise you for it. The things would literally be worthless because anybody else that needed it could acquire it through normal channels.

In theory, competition is supposed to produce the best results, but if you notice in our current economic system competition is often not allowed. Monopolies take hold and buy up any competition so as to control the system. What does the government do to stop them? Nothing. Google was recently fined something like $5 million or something like that for antitrust breaches in Europe over Android. That's literally a fraction of the wealth they currently have, let alone what they're going to continue to accumulate. They're even fighting the decision! It's pennies to them. It's not going to stop them.

If capitalism was so wonderful then you'd think government and industry would be enabling capitalism to work instead of crippling it every chance they get, and giving their friends and business partners control of it all. Capitalism without competition is not capitalism. I'm not sure what it is, but probably a dictatorship isn't far off. Capitalism is only good in theory assuming everybody will cooperate to compete. Which is contradictory. Where there's competition of course there will be corruption.

Whether we base our system on "capitalism" or "socialism" or some other system it will always fail as long as corruption is permitted within the system. To solve the problem in a way that benefits us all we need to control for that. Yes, people can be selfish and greedy. We need to devise a system where corruption isn't even possible. And a system where there's no incentive to be greedy is good too. If everybody is healthy and sustained, and in particular if society collectively shames gluttony and corruption I think it'll just cease to exist. Our current system rewards gluttony and corruption. I don't know why the fuck we'd ever consider those as valuable traits deserving of worship.

So basically teach society to be healthy and cooperative and you should see a lot of the social woes disappear. I don't think it's an accident that "socialism" is seen as an enemy in the West. And it's not based on merit either. It's propaganda. The elite have designed the system to benefit them, and them alone, and they really like it when their puppets are ignorant of the fact that they're getting screwed. They get excited by any idea that can be twisted into making the poorly educated puppets believe that what's bad for them is good, and what's good for them is bad. They especially don't want to educate most people above a level that makes them useful slaves because if the slaves get too smart then they might revolt.

Erin Maus
bamccaig said:

Double negative alert!

That was a typo, it should be: "A system where people need not work menial jobs doesn't yet exist."

...

I hear that bit about human nature and why communism never works a lot but I've never seen of any proof of an inherent human nature nor that said nature is greedy.

I agree a lot with bamccaig's second half of his post. For the record, the natural evolution of capitalism is fascism. (Dictatorship is close enough).

Eric Johnson
bamccaig said:

Indeed, if we want to fix the system we'd probably have to eliminate money entirely because if there's a mechanism to trade wealth/power it will be abused.

I thought your initial idea was that people would have the basics covered, but that money would continue to exist. But if money is not a part of the equation, then that would make more sense. I think it would be very difficult to do away with money or bartering though. It's in our nature (at least in this society) to use money as a means of transacting "equivalent exchange". I'm not sure if it's actually possible to do away with that idea of exchange though (be it money, bartering, or something else).

Quote:

This is a valid question because some jobs actually do suck. ... The fact is that there are people that are just good at these jobs, and even enjoy them.

That's true. I suppose there exists a right person for any job. Don't you think if people aren't forced to do their job, and they do things only out of passion, they might not stick with things when they get tough or boring? For example, I enjoy writing software in my own time, but I find writing software for a company to be boring (especially when I'm not interested in the type of software I'm being made to create). So if there's no tangible incentive to stick with a job during the rough or boring parts, don't you think people will give up? Run into a bug while writing a program? Maybe you lose interest and never finish it. But if it were for a job (in today's context), you'd have to work around or fix the bug, or else you may lose your job. I also think a lot crunch in computing jobs in general would no longer exist for the same reason (AAA video games would take longer to produce, for example).

Quote:

They'll definitely be putting garbage into the system, so we'll be getting garbage out of the system.

Then we'd see the Pareto principle in action. ~20% of people would do things for the benefit of society, while ~80% just consume and don't contribute. That'd be a major weight to shoulder for society. That's why I think most people would sit around pursuing short-term pleasures rather than do anything of value.

Neil Roy said:

There's one thing Jesus or His apostles never said to a beggar; "GET A JOB!!!"

I should have worded what I said better. I meant it in the context of people who defraud the welfare system, not necessarily people who genuinely need it.

Neil Roy

The thing is, you just do not know who needs it, and who does not because everyone's story is different.

What you're essentially saying is you would rather they all be on the street with absolutely nothing so you can have a few more dollars in your wallet.

I find it disturbing that working people will pick the poorest in our respective nations to attack first when far more money is wasted on military, space (NASA), foreign aid etc... I would think people would want to help their own poor in their own country first and foremost and attack wasted spending or corporate tax breaks etc.

I've been on welfare, where you barely get enough to pay the rent. Been on the street where the poorest members of society were the first ones to offer help to me. So I take great offence to seeing them attacked in any way shape or form.

Eric Johnson
Neil Roy said:

The thing is, you just do not know who needs it, and who does not because everyone's story is different.

That's true, but there's also a difference between a legitimate and illegitimate recipient of welfare. It's kind of like how there's a difference between a person who uses a site like GoFundMe to raise funds for a legitimate cause, versus one who fabricates a sob story to make a quick buck.

Quote:

What you're essentially saying is you would rather they all be on the street with absolutely nothing so you can have a few more dollars in your wallet.

No, I'm not saying that. Don't put words in my mouth. I have no problem with a person who legitimately needs help, but I have zero respect for a person who blatantly exploits the system (especially when the system is designed to help those who are least financially fortunate).

Maybe things are different in Canada, but I've known a handful of people who have lied and faked health problems to get welfare that they shouldn't have received. Those kinds of people place a greater burden on the system that should really be going to people who need it most (like the disabled).

bamccaig

Don't you think if people aren't forced to do their job, and they do things only out of passion, they might not stick with things when they get tough or boring? For example, I enjoy writing software in my own time, but I find writing software for a company to be boring (especially when I'm not interested in the type of software I'm being made to create). So if there's no tangible incentive to stick with a job during the rough or boring parts, don't you think people will give up? Run into a bug while writing a program? Maybe you lose interest and never finish it. But if it were for a job (in today's context), you'd have to work around or fix the bug, or else you may lose your job. I also think a lot crunch in computing jobs in general would no longer exist for the same reason (AAA video games would take longer to produce, for example).

A lot of the software we develop today is redundant because every company has to reinvent the square wheel because they're all competing with each other and don't want to give each other any advantages. But in a society where there is no competition that disappears. There would be no reason to keep software private or proprietary. You could open it all up open source. That alone would mean many programming jobs wouldn't even need to exist as they are today. Which is to say, you wouldn't have to write and maintain boring and mundane software because it would already exist. And in fact, it would be constantly improved from all over the world so it would be better than it ever was.

Your programming tasks could be much more interesting because you'd have more interesting problems to try to solve. And no deadlines or high pressure because you wouldn't be the only person that could solve the problems, and you'd be able to coordinate with thousands of others to work towards the best solutions. The Linux kernel is already sort of done this way. There are upwards of 8000 developers all over the world that are constantly communicating via plain text email, exchanging patches, and critiquing them and cooperatively improving them to the point where they're good enough for production.

You might even be able to become a game developer instead. Money wouldn't exist. You could take as much time as you need to learn and develop the skills. There would basically be no limits on what you developed. You wouldn't have to do what some boss told you to. Just do what interests you and see what comes out of it. Often times nothing would come to fruition, but that's OK because we don't need millions and millions of solutions to problems. There just aren't that many problems we're ready to solve. Society over all would benefit because the few that were successful would produce enough for us all to enjoy.

AAA games are actually an example of this already. As a rule, game developers get treated like shit. They get significantly less money than their peers in business, are expected to work 16 hour days and only get paid for 8 of them, have to meet insane deadlines, and basically their lives are just hell for the entire year or three or five that it takes to develop the game. Most people burn out of the gaming industry within about 5 years. And yet through all of that hell and poor treatment they still do it as long as they can because they love it.

Then we'd see the Pareto principle in action. ~20% of people would do things for the benefit of society, while ~80% just consume and don't contribute. That'd be a major weight to shoulder for society. That's why I think most people would sit around pursuing short-term pleasures rather than do anything of value.

My point is that 90% of the "work" that we do today doesn't need to get done. It's all just smoke and mirrors to justify passing money around. Instead of just giving people what they need to survive we require them to do some mundane work that doesn't even actually do anything productive just to justify giving them their money to get the things they need to survive. Let's try to brainstorm some jobs that are meaningless:

  • Bankers. Without money, there's no need.

  • Cashiers, same thing. No money, no need for a cashier. Hell, we've already eliminated some of them with self-checkout. In a system with no money there would be no check out. Just go to a distribution center and take what you want and leave. Perhaps we'd need or want some kind of tracking system to ensure that you only took your fair share of things, but again in a system where everything is free and everybody is entitled to things why would anybody hoard more than they need? I don't even think we'd need to worry about it.

  • Waitresses. Their job is to take your order and bring you food and drinks. But what if you could just walk up to a cook and tell him what to make you? And you could just walk over to a refrigerator and grab your own beer? The waitress isn't actually needed. Neither is the cook, but then again there are people that enjoy cooking and can cook better than others so why not let them do that for us?

  • Gas station attendants. For the most part, they've already been eliminated by self service gas stations and pay at the pump.

  • Security guards. There may be some rare cases where they'd still be needed, but for the most part they exist to protect resources/property. In a system where everything is free to everybody they probably wouldn't even need to exist.

  • Secretaries and office jobs. Probably most of these are not actually necessary. They exist to keep track of money, and meetings, and business arrangements to manage relationships between competition. Mostly because individuals are too busy to manage their own schedules because they're doing too many things. They are too powerful. If you distribute their work around more you wouldn't need extra people to help them manage it all. You wouldn't need to manage any money. You might not even need most office jobs anymore. It's all just BS to manage resources in a system that doesn't just freely share them. If you freely share them then you probably don't need to manage them anymore.

  • Child care workers. If moms and dads didn't have to go to work to provide housing and food and clothes they could just stay home and raise their own children.

  • Dog walkers or pet care: same story. If you didn't have to go to some job you'd have the time and energy to do it yourself.

  • Divorce court justices and lawyers and all others involved in the process. I'd wager that divorce would disappear in a system without money. Divorce is basically just about money anyway.

  • In an ideal world the majority of police, if not all police, would also become obsolete. Most crime is inspired in some way by money. If you eliminate those pressures in society then the crime will disappear too. This also means you'd eliminate most lawyers and judges, prison guards, etc.

This is just brainstorming. I imagine if we think hard about it we can imagine many more mundane jobs that just don't need to exist. Certainly a lot of the worst jobs. The minimum wage jobs. They aren't needed. They only exist to justify giving this person money. If you just them the money, or better yet, eliminate the money and give them the things they would have needed the money for, there's no reason to do that job anymore.

Neil Roy said:

I find it disturbing that working people will pick the poorest in our respective nations to attack first when far more money is wasted on military, space (NASA), foreign aid etc... I would think people would want to help their own poor in their own country first and foremost and attack wasted spending or corporate tax breaks etc.

I think that this is again propaganda delivered by the elite. They don't want us to realize that they're shafting us so they point at some other enemy that everybody can hate. Whether it be terrorism (probably wouldn't exist without money), welfare system (wouldn't exist without money because everybody would have enough), minority groups (crime wouldn't exist within them because they'd all be living comfortable lives), etc. Basically money causes all of these problems. Get rid of it and just share with everybody and all of the so called "problems" we think we have disappear.

If we share on a global level we'll have more than enough to take care of everybody, and there will be no incentive for wars or terrorism or crime. These are all inspired by competition and suffering.

Eric Johnson
bamccaig said:

Gas station attendants. For the most part, they've already been eliminated by self service gas stations and pay at the pump.

Do gas station attendants still exist today? I've never seen one in real life, only on old TV shows.

You make some good points. Money certainly seems to be the root of many issues. Even the Bible talks about that, saying that the love (perhaps better worded as "lust") of money is the root of all evil. There is a definite truth in that.

In general, I think money in and of itself is simply a tool, being neither good nor bad, but it is what men are driven or willing to do that dictates its supposed righteousness or wickedness. A few of the world's wealthiest men donate great sums of money to charities and organizations that they believe in, ones that are often a benefit to society (Warren Buffet comes to mind). But of course, many do not use their money to help others, and instead hoard it (Steve Jobs comes to mind, or at least if he did make charitable contributions, they happened quietly, as I'm not aware of any).

Erin Maus

Do gas station attendants still exist today? I've never seen one in real life, only on old TV shows.

Two words: New Jersey.

bamccaig

Do gas station attendants still exist today? I've never seen one in real life, only on old TV shows.

They do, but they're rare. I grew up in a small town so both gas stations had attendants. One of them shut down now, but the other biases for hiring teenaged, hawt girls to pump gas. For some reason that one is still doing amazing. :o They actually often offer to check oil too. The answer depends on whether or not I can get out to watch that part.

Most if not all gas stations in town are self-serve. Actually there's still one in the West end that is manned, but the kids that pump gas are always high as a kite. :-/

Actually when my fiancée and I went on a road trip to Michigan recently we discovered a couple of gas stations with "full" service (where full is pumping gas only, not checking tires or oil). They were both in smaller towns off the freeway. So that's probably key. They do exist though. Definitely.

Quote:

In general, I think money in and of itself is simply a tool, being neither good nor bad, but it is what men are driven or willing to do that dictates its supposed righteousness or wickedness. A few of the world's wealthiest men donate great sums of money to charities and organizations that they believe in, ones that are often a benefit to society (Warren Buffet comes to mind). But of course, many do not use their money to help others, and instead hoard it (Steve Jobs comes to mind, or at least if he did make charitable contributions, they happened quietly, as I'm not aware of any).

It's a tool that encourages inequality and from that inequality stems a lot of society's problems. The idea seems good on paper, but in practice there is always corruption, and the system falls apart.

Think about how Bill Gates got so rich. He might be philanthropic now, but he got so rich by basically forcing everybody that bought a goddamn computer in the 90s or early 2000s to give him a slice (for all intents and purposes Microsoft still tries to do this, but there is at least a bit of competition now). For generally shitty software that didn't even work as well as software that existed in the 70s or 80s. My mother saved up for months working at near minimum wage in the 90s and in around 94 or 95 bought a new computer running Windows 95 for something like $4400. It was neat to have one at home, but imagine the cool things it might have done if it ran a good operating system. >:( I don't know if we can point to a super rich person and say that they got that way by earning it. I doubt it. It's always exploiting people. Nobody is so beneficial to society that they're worth a million times more than an average, hard working individual. Certainly not the people that actually end up rich. The truly beneficial people are taken for granted. The only reason these fuckheads got rich is because they cheated the system.

Neil Roy
bamccaig said:

If we share on a global level we'll have more than enough to take care of everybody

That's called socialism, it has been tried already and failed miserably. In fact, people risked their lives in the past to escape it.

As for Bill Gates, he got wealthy by programming operating systems for different computers, not just DOS or Windows. The Commodore PET and C64's operating systems were made by Microsoft. DOS was a huge success, I liked it as was Windows. Say what you want about it, I still prefer Windows over any other. Your opinion may differ, but obviously a lot of people liked it.

Nobody "FORCED" anyone to buy it. If it was really horrible, nobody would have bothered with the computers again. Personally, I build my own computer from scratch and installed my own operating system, as did many people I know and I CHOSE Microsoft's DOS. I was slow to adopt Windows but eventually, when the internet arrived, it was really handy for that.

I don't know what you're so angry about. Nobody forced people to buy anything. Bill Gates got wealthy by making things people liked, and then making deals with companies to use his software, that's called being SMART.

As for 70s software being better, I grew up in the '70s, there were no home computers you could buy then until near the end of them, and they had TRS-80 and Commodore PET. The Commodore PET used Microsoft software, the TRS-80 used their own software, but the LDOS on it was similar to DOS. The operating systems in the 80s were similar, only a few computers had their own custom operating systems, but Microsoft made a lot of them, like Commodore 64s was made by Microsoft, one of the best selling computers of the '80s. THAT'S why they were a success. That's why Gates is rich. It's only been since he stepped down as CEO of the company that Windows seems to have gotten worse. I loved Windows 95, XP and 7, still using 7, can't stand 8 and 10. And every version I installed, I installed by my own choosing, they were not forced upon me. I MUCH prefer it over any version of Linux, though Linux has come a long way, I can't see me using it any time soon, unless Windows drops support for 7, then... maybe I will use it.

Not everyone who is wealthy got there by cheating and stealing. I despise blanket statements like that. Usually such statements come from people who are jealous and want people who were smart and worked hard to hand their money over to those who have not; in a communist style system.

When you take money away from those who work hard for it, and give it to those who have not, you take away incentive to get ahead. That's not to say that the poor should be rewarded, I am talking about avoiding a communist, socialist style system as they never work. The Soviet Union collapsed for this reason. A capitalist system has enough wealth to afford a decent welfare system, when managed properly is a good thing. Just because a FEW cheat the system, doesn't mean everyone is. There are other areas of wasted spending that should be focused on, not the poor. And not all wealthy people got their by cheating, they should not be punished for being smart and working hard either.

Edgar Reynaldo
Neil Roy said:

When you take money away from those who work hard for it, and give it to those who have not, you take away incentive to get ahead. That's not to say that the poor should be rewarded, I am talking about avoiding a communist, socialist style system as they never work. The Soviet Union collapsed for this reason. A capitalist system has enough wealth to afford a decent welfare system, when managed properly is a good thing. Just because a FEW cheat the system, doesn't mean everyone is. There are other areas of wasted spending that should be focused on, not the poor. And not all wealthy people got their by cheating, they should not be punished for being smart and working hard either.

I just want so say I completely agree with this.

I've tried to formulate a response to the terrifying socialist brain washing going on here, but allegro.cc won't let me post much more than what I have here. This thread is just too big for its own britches.

And bambams, when you have a mighty wall of text and I'm trying to read your response on my phone, I might as well tl;dr; and give up. It was pages and pages tall. that's silly.

bamccaig
Neil Roy said:

That's called socialism, it has been tried already and failed miserably. In fact, people risked their lives in the past to escape it.

My understanding is that socialism has never been attempted "properly". The lie was socialism, just like our lie is capitalism, even though neither is actually implemented correctly. You can argue that socialism doesn't work because it never has, but the same argument can be made about capitalism. This isn't working for most of the population. It works for a few people, but less and less as the years go on. And the reason is corruption in all systems. We need to figure out how to prevent the corruption before any system will work well for most of us.

Neil Roy said:

Nobody "FORCED" anyone to buy it.

In the 90s PC computers used to come with Windows installed. To my knowledge you weren't even given the option to buy just the hardware without Windows. They still do mostly come with Windows installed, and to this day the majority of the population doesn't understand that there's a choice. That predominantly why Windows is popular and dominant. Not because people have been preferring it, but because they didn't even know it was a choice. To them, a computer is Windows.

My college instructors basically taught this to us. That Microsoft forced Windows down everybody's throats by making deals with IBM to distribute it with the hardware. I wasn't old enough to understand in the 80s or 90s so I can't speak from experience like you can, but the tale you tell of choosing to buy DOS does not match the history that I've been taught.

Neil Roy said:

As for 70s software being better, I grew up in the '70s, there were no home computers you could buy then until near the end of them, and they had TRS-80 and Commodore PET. The Commodore PET used Microsoft software, the TRS-80 used their own software, but the LDOS on it was similar to DOS. The operating systems in the 80s were similar, only a few computers had their own custom operating systems, but Microsoft made a lot of them, like Commodore 64s was made by Microsoft, one of the best selling computers of the '80s. THAT'S why they were a success. That's why Gates is rich. It's only been since he stepped down as CEO of the company that Windows seems to have gotten worse. I loved Windows 95, XP and 7, still using 7, can't stand 8 and 10. And every version I installed, I installed by my own choosing, they were not forced upon me. I MUCH prefer it over any version of Linux, though Linux has come a long way, I can't see me using it any time soon, unless Windows drops support for 7, then... maybe I will use it.

I'm not referring specifically to "PC" operating systems here. I'm referring to UNIX and its descendants. I'm not sure what the state of available UNIX-like operating systems was for PC computers in the 80s, but there probably wasn't much. I know MINIX existed sometime in the late 80s or early 90s, but I'm not sure what it could do for lusers. That said, UNIX in the 70s already did some things better than Windows does even today. It seems Microsoft never really learned. Windows 10 is a relatively stable operating system (still far from perfect though; still susceptible to getting bogged down or malfunctioning without reboots). But Windows hasn't always been so stable. 95 was notoriously unstable. 98 was an improvement, but still had its issues. ME was a complete joke. XP wasn't quite perfect at launch, but eventually became very stable. Vista was a joke at launch. Seven was pretty stable. 8 was unanimously hated and I believe pretty unstable at launch. 10 is good, aside from forced adoption and questionable backdoor/spying/calling home behaviors. But for all intents and purposes, 10 is just 8 again with some tweaked defaults and further refined systems and some new flashy services that nobody cares about.

Neil Roy said:

When you take money away from those who work hard for it, and give it to those who have not, you take away incentive to get ahead. That's not to say that the poor should be rewarded, I am talking about avoiding a communist, socialist style system as they never work. The Soviet Union collapsed for this reason. A capitalist system has enough wealth to afford a decent welfare system, when managed properly is a good thing. Just because a FEW cheat the system, doesn't mean everyone is. There are other areas of wasted spending that should be focused on, not the poor. And not all wealthy people got their by cheating, they should not be punished for being smart and working hard either.

You seem to think that the only reason people do anything is because they'll be handsomely rewarded for it. The best contributions to society have been accidents in some guy's spare time just working on something because it interested him. It's very rare for "jobs" to produce great things. Usually, they increment on somebody else's great thing that some individual stumbled upon.

I've already said it: most people will not just sit idly by. It's too boring. And it's not healthy. Our mental health suffers when we don't get out and do things. My father is basically incapable of sitting still. On his days off at home he'll either find something that needs fixing, or he'll make something need fixing.

Part of the problem is that we've been lead to believe that the only things that contribute to society are showing up at a "job" and completing assigned tasks. The more menial the better. It doesn't consider raising children as a contribution to society. It doesn't consider intellectual thought as a contribution to society. It doesn't consider exploring new ideas and trying to create something at home as a contribution to society unless it happens to be the next great thing that some company will pay money for. This is all bullshit. All of these things are contributing to society in their own ways.

The entire "money" system is a lie. The elite that control this system are not working 40 hour weeks. Their money earns more in an hour than you or I do in an entire year on interest and investments. They are literally doing nothing for society. Society keeps working hard to produce for them, but what are they giving back? Like I said, nobody has been millions of times more beneficial for society than you or I. They aren't rich because they've "earned" it. They're rich because the system is corrupt and they've cheated. Don't defend them. They have entire teams of lawyers to that already.

And bambams, when you have a mighty wall of text and I'm trying to read your response on my phone, I might as well tl;dr; and give up. It was pages and pages tall. that's silly.

Mobile phones are not designed to consume the Web. They're designed to be portable firstly, allowing you to play silly games and make phone calls and text. If you choose to do your Web browsing on it like some soccer mom your experience will be poor. That's not on me, that's on you.

Append:

On that subject, I'm watching a documentary on Somalia pirates. This followed after watching YouTube videos about Somalia pirate attacks, and military forces attacking them with huge guns and things. And of course the Somalia pirates are made out to be terrible people to us in the media. Apparently the truth (at least according to this documentary so far) is that foreign fishermen (let alone the shipping activity) have effectively caused all of the fish in the region to disappear. So they cannot just go out and catch a meal anymore. And naturally there are limited opportunities where they are. They are basically living shitty lives most of us cannot fathom and out of desperation are resorting to piracy to basically make ends meat because despite the harm caused to their ecosystem apparently nobody is helping them. When you look at it from that perspective it's really sad, and turning motherfucking warships on them is kind of insane. On the other hand, more than likely all of the shipping activity that goes through the region is more than capable of taking care of the people there, and could probably be dropping off "relief packages" when they come full of food and other essential resources and they'd probably loot the packages and leave the ships alone. It's not like some kind of greedy endeavor to take what isn't theirs. They're just trying to fucking get by. Another option would be explicitly recruiting sailors from the region to work on the ships that transport through the region. Because why the Hell not?

Erin Maus

I've tried to formulate a response to the terrifying socialist brain washing going on here, but allegro.cc won't let me post much more than what I have here. This thread is just too big for its own britches.

I'm a socialist because I've done a lot of research and socialism is the only morally just system. Though it's likely I'm the only one here who has read the Marx's Das Kapital and Einstein's Why Socialism? and other such things. (I'd really advise you to read Einstein's Why Socialism?. It's not very long and describes the flaws of capitalism so well. Das Kapital is terse and boring.)

In honesty I'd be happy with strong unions, worker protection laws, much higher taxes on the wealthy, giant reduction in military spending, and more spending on things like universal healthcare and all even as a socialist.

Of course, under a capitalist system, that would not last long.

You could argue I was brainwashed when I was younger and was religious and patriotic and a firm believer in capitalism, but I was too young to understand any of it. Now I'm not.

Edgar Reynaldo

I'm a socialists because I've done a lot of research and socialism is the only morally just system.

Morally just? How? You take the most away from the people who do the best! In a capitalist society, the market determines the value according to supply and demand. In a socialist society, there is no incentive to do well at ANYTHING, because Mother Russia will take care of you, or in your case if you're 'profitable' then all your profits get taken away.

I suppose your guys idea of socialism is some kind of hippie commune where everybody grows their own w**d cough I mean vegetables.

No. Socialism is evil. It's killed millions and millions of people throughout Europe and Asia.

Eric Johnson

All of the so-called socialist governments of the past few hundred years have been ripe with corruption. Corruption exists everywhere. Moving away from a capitalist government won't fix that.

People are driven by reward. In socialism, there is no reward, and no competition, so what incentive is there to do anything? On the other hand, capitalism actively rewards creativity and competition. It's the best system in my eyes.

This has been a neat little back-and-forth on the subject, and good things have been said on all sides, but socialism has never worked, and I do not believe it ever will work. A neat fantasy though.

bamccaig

The incentive to create is to create. Or often times because the need arises. For example, I highly doubt Edgar has made any money on Eagle, and he may never make any significant money on it. He's creating it because he needs it or wants to do it. Linus Torvalds didn't create Linux to get rich (though eventually it happened anyway). He created Linux because he wanted to learn about kernel development. Richard Stallman and the FSF didn't create GNU for money. They created it because they wanted the world to have a free software operating system.

Money does not motivate people to create. Money motivates people to lie, cheat, and steal. Microsoft doesn't create to make money. They strip away features so you have to buy them again. Or they change the name of something to something else and change the style of it so it looks like a new product so you'll buy it again. Occasionally they might add a minimum new feature just to say it's new so you'll buy it again. Same with Apple. They don't create phones with proprietary adapters and plugs and technologies because they're better or cheaper. It's so that you have to give them extra money for the same damn thing.

Erin Maus

1) You don't know what socialism is.
2) You won't learn what socialism is. (Einstein's essay is shorter than many of bambam's posts [I mean that in a good way :)]).
3) There has never been a state-level socialist government. USSR was state capitalism at best with a strong welfare program; Venezuela is a state capitalist with plenty of still private companies; and so on...

I won't continue this discussion.

No. Socialism is evil. It's killed millions and millions of people throughout Europe and Asia.

Capitalism has resulted in hundreds of millions of deaths that could have been prevented but there is no profit motive. For everyone has died from starvation (there is enough food to feed everyone in the world), for everyone who has died to lack of shelter (there are enough homes to house everyone in the US), for everyone who has died due to lack of healthcare. And all the wars fought over resources, all the countries cast into chaos by Western intervention because of scary communism...

Eric Johnson

Let's agree to disagree.

Time for a new topic. What's up with polo shirts and not buttoning the top button? Why have a top button at all if it's not going to be used? Is leaving it unbuttoned appropriate for job interviews and the like? I'm overwhelmingly a t-shirt kind of guy, so some fashion ideas perplex me. It'd be like wearing pants but deliberately undoing the zipper...

bamccaig

You want us stop discussing an interesting topic with far reaching consequences so that we can discuss buttons on shirts?

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'Nuff said.

Eric Johnson

The ending of the socialism topic was in response to Aaron saying "I won't continue this discussion."

bamccaig

Saying you won't continue doesn't mean you won't continue. It means you expect other people to accept your points and you're throwing a tantrum that other people aren't changing their views easily. :P

Also, this appears to be Einstein's essay entitled "Why Socialism?", which I must agree is a good read.

Edgar Reynaldo

The open shirt would have been a perfect ending to this thread. :P

Eric Johnson

I wonder if Matthew groans when he sees this thread and how many resources it's sucking up. :P

bamccaig

{"name":"sexy-girl-with-vacuum-cleaner.gif","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/b\/5b3088dbea0e623240f2992e76b76317.gif","w":480,"h":256,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/b\/5b3088dbea0e623240f2992e76b76317"}sexy-girl-with-vacuum-cleaner.gif

Edgar Reynaldo

I wonder if Matthew groans when he sees this thread and how many resources it's sucking up. :P

Matthew kindly provided us this thread so we could entertain ourselves while he was away. Who ARE YOU to doubt the FEARLESS LEADER?

Neil Roy
bamccaig said:

In the 90s PC computers used to come with Windows installed.

Except that I built my first PC in the 90s without Windows. In fact, you had a choice, for a while, from Windows or OS2, which was IBM's Graphical operating system. And of course you could simply install Microsoft's DOS or PCDOS or... one of many DOSes available at the time.

I built mine from scratch, which at the time meant buying a serial card, sound card, video card, hard drive/floppy controller card, CPU, CPU Cache if desired, optionally an FPU and of course the RAM and whatever drives you wanted. The motherboards didn't have nearly as much built in, just a lot of slots and the BIOS. All the cards were available for purchase separately, and a larger variety than is available now.

And of course in the '80s, you had a large number of REALLY different computers available. TRS80s, Timex Sinclair, C64, C128, Amiga in 1985, VIC20, Texas Instruments had one, the TI99... the list is quite lengthy.

There has always been a choice, you didn't have a choice of OS in those early computers, but you could choose the computer. The PCs in the 90s had a huge variety of options available thanks to the clones, of which there were many.

I don't know where you get your information from, but you need to research it better, I grew up with computers and was using them from around 1980 when I started on a TRS-80 model 1 and 2 and later on a PC-Jr etc... so I know the start of computers quite intimately. I was heavily involved in it.

Windows didn't actually catch on very rapidly, people were slow to switch from DOS. But the Internet really helped it grow. Actually, Windows 3.1 wasn't a stand alone operating system, but you installed it in your DOS which was already installed. Your computer booted up in DOS, then if you wanted Windows, you booted it separately. I eventually installed it for the Internet, but still mainly stuck with DOS 6.2.

As for Socialism, back after WW2 ended there were many that were communist and preferred that system (socialist). But there were stories about many die hard "pinkos" as they were called who after seeing what REAL socialism/communism was like after visiting Russia following WW2 immediately changed their mind about it.

I don't see how you can see socialism as "moral" when you steal from the rich and give to the poor. Socialism is a Robinhood syndrome, with some sort of screwed up idea that it is okay to steal money from those who work for it in order to give it to those who have not with some sort of idea that it is fair.

If you like it so much, how about we start with YOU! YOU give a large percentage of YOUR paycheck to the poor! You see, people who like socialism want other people's money, but they don't want it taken away from THEM. You think it is okay, so long as it is someone else's money that is being stolen and given to you, but I bet your mind would be changed if a government official came along and emptied half your bank account to give to the poor.

Something to think about. I am not against properly run welfare programs, I am totally against socialism which thinks it's fair to steal from the rich and somehow equalize pay, when the work done is not equal. What I am for is helping the poor and provide minimum food and shelter to help them get on their feet until they can get work. And I will defend that program and actually get quite angry at anyone who suggests that not helping them at all so they can line their pockets more is okay.

Erin Maus

Show me a country where the workers (proletariat) owned the means of production.

IN SIMPLE WORDS, show me a country where the workers owned the factories, buildings, machinery, and whatever other capital constitutes a company.

Not the country. The workers.

As it stands the only thing we're arguing about is a word you guys are using incorrectly.

Eric Johnson

;D I thought you were done with this discussion, Aaron.

Regardless of the correct word, I like my stuff. I like owning stuff, I like making money, and I like private ownership. This share stuff with everyone and everyone's contributions can be beneficial mentality is a laughable fantasy and nothing more. What do you do when you run out of other people's money? ::)

If the world lacked equivalent exchange, if I didn't have to work, and if everything I needed/wanted was already provided for me, I wouldn't contribute to society. I'd sit at home playing video games, consuming junk food, and generally just lazing around. Would I have some side projects? Sure. But without any real incentive (money or competition) to finish anything, I probably wouldn't produce anything of real benefit to society. I'd suck it dry. And when I inevitably get bored? I'd likely wreck havoc by damaging property just to entertain myself. And so would ~80% of people, I imagine. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop, after all.

And that's a funny GIF, bambams. :D

bamccaig

If my own needs were guaranteed to be met sure you could take my "money". What the hell else do I need it for? But I'm not talking about taking money and giving it to other people. That wouldn't solve the problem. Money is the problem. I'm talking about completely doing away with money, and just devising a cooperative society where everybody does what they can and shares the results with everyone. If you're still thinking about money then your brain is stuck in a closed box. The entire system we live in is invented by us. There are no constraints for how to fix it. The solution doesn't necessarily require an economy at all.

Junk food probably wouldn't exist in a proper socialist society. Junk food exists because there's a whole lot of money in it. People desire it because it's concentrated with chemical signals that trigger responses in the brain similar to drugs and are similarly addictive, parents buy it to shut up their kids or because they are hooked on it themselves, everybody eventually get sick whether it be obesity, diabetes, heart disease, on and on, and then buy medicines, treatments, surgeries, and transplants to try to stave off the damage. The reason we have it is because it's profitable within a system that isn't sufficiently regulated to prevent abuses of our own biology. If you eliminated the economic incentive I don't think we'd even have it because it's actually bad for us as a society. We'd seek to convert the food available into the most most efficient product possible so that it was more efficient at feeding everyone and least harmful.

As for sitting at home playing video games all day you might start out doing that, but obviously if everybody did that there wouldn't be video games to play. Or electricity to play them with. There wouldn't be fuel for transportation, or food to eat. Assuming we were still in a transitional phase where we hadn't figured out all these problems sufficiently and you did decide to just stay at home playing games eventually you'd be forced out when your power cut off because everybody else went home. And hopefully you'd be a decent human being and realize that the system can only work if everybody contributes, including yourself.

You probably oppose it mostly because of the anti-USSR propaganda instead of on its actual merits (or lack thereof). People like you might resist it at first just because they want it to fail. But if we keep corruption out of power, eventually children would be raised with a healthy socialist attitude and they'd have absolutely no problem going to work to contribute to the group effort. I would wager that everybody would be more happy and healthy under such a system. We'd still have at least the same production capacity worldwide. Probably even more because more people would be included, and hopefully fewer people would be sick from being poisoned by corporations for profit. There billion or more people currently starving to death would be fed too, and able to help out. There wouldn't be anybody able to work that was unemployed, unlike today where there are millions if not billions of people that want to work, and are able-bodied, but out of a job simply because the capitalist economy doesn't favor them right now.

And when I inevitably get bored? I'd likely wreck havoc by damaging property just to entertain myself.

What a shitty attitude to have. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Erin Maus

There is still private property under socialism and communism.

Your car and your toothbrush and everything in between would be yours.

However, a company's resources would be owned by all the workers.

edit: Also under socialism you'd still have to work if you're able (e.g., not disabled, not a child, not a student, not a dependent...). In a post scarcity communist society, you wouldn't have to, but right now we don't live in a post-scarcity world ...

Eric Johnson
bamccaig said:

What a shitty attitude to have. You should be ashamed of yourself.

I'm not saying it would be an ideal outcome. From what I've read about nations ruled under socialism and communism, they always devolve into bribery and corruption. Though perhaps I'm thinking of Stalinism instead? My understanding of the lines between socialism, communism, Stalinism, Leninism, and the other offshoots are blurred in my eyes.

There is still private property under socialism and communism.

Maybe under socialism, but everything I've read about communism suggests that private property would no longer exist.

Edgar Reynaldo

La bourgeoisie tombera, le prolétariat s'élèvera

Vive la revolucion!

Go form a Co-op hippie. Or buy some stocks. Then the worker will own the means of production. :P

Erin Maus

Maybe under socialism, but everything I've read about communism suggests that private property would no longer exist.

citation needed

Primary sources only please.

Eric Johnson

The whole idea of communism is mass ownership of production, right? So in capitalism, if I own a factory (which obviously produces things), that's mine. That's my private property. Only I have a say in how it's used and who is allowed in. In communism, everyone would "own" the factory. It wouldn't be mine at that point, thus private property ownership in this instance wouldn't exist under communism.

I agree with Edgar Ravioli. You can have communism today if you and other communists band together and form your own co-op. What's stopping you?

Erin Maus

The whole idea of communism is mass ownership of production, right? So in capitalism, if I own a factory (which obviously produces things), that's mine. That's my private property. Only I have a say in how it's used and who is allowed in. In communism, everyone would "own" the factory. It wouldn't be mine at that point, thus private property ownership in this instance wouldn't exist under communism.

Private property != personal property.

Which means your underwear & your toothbrush, among other things, are yours and yours alone (well, unless you use them to make money...).

I'm aware I used the wrong definition in the post before, I apologize. I mean personal property.

Quote:

I agree with Edgar Ravioli. You can have communism today if you and other communists band together and form your own co-op. What's stopping you?

What movie do you hate? Now what's stopping you from making a better version of that movie? Why aren't you?

Please don't use that fallacy.

bamccaig

I'm not saying it would be an ideal outcome. From what I've read about nations ruled under socialism and communism, they always devolve into bribery and corruption. Though perhaps I'm thinking of Stalinism instead? My understanding of the lines between socialism, communism, Stalinism, Leninism, and the other offshoots are blurred in my eyes.

So you're not even saying it's something you would do? You just assume that socialism would do that to you because your biased education about false examples of "socialism" in the past have resulted in dictatorship regimes that mistreated the people? You sound infinitely naive.

Corruption exists in our "capitalist" society right now, and it's blatant, and it's widespread (within government, corporations, journalists, the medical community, and to some extent also probably unreliable parts of the scientific community; and I'm probably leaving important groups out by mistake), and apparently nobody cares (or perhaps by design, nobody has time to!). I don't know why you are so keen to point out the corruption of Eastern Europe's past communism failures as if corruption doesn't exist in the very systems we inhabit now.

The point we're trying to make (I think) is that no pure socialist system has ever been achieved. There are no examples of it failing or succeeding because it has never been done properly before. The examples that you were taught to be socialism or communism were corrupted and therefore not accurate measures of its success. And also, considering the most prominent examples were virtually enemies of our nations at the time I cannot imagine our history books to even do a reasonable job describing them to us, let alone being unbiased. You can be like any old redneck chanting, "fuck communism scum", or you can actually try to look into why seemingly intelligent people seem to think socialism shows promise.

Now I'm not sure that capitalism has been achieved purely either so arguably we could just fight for a "true" capitalist society instead. And I'm not opposed to that entirely. Except that I know that some aspects of "socialism" are quite nice. My health care system in Canada is pretty poor, but it's also free with exceptions, and prices are regulated unlike in the USA, so I don't end up with a second (or even first!) mortgage when I end up getting injured or sick by mistake. I think that a pure capitalist system where we don't give special treatment to the rich and powerful corporations might actually be worth a shot too. But I also think that expecting to regulate a competitive-by-design system where wealth is freely exchanged is entirely fool hardy. As soon as anybody gains the upper hand in wealth they're going to exploit its power to overtake the system. And that's exactly what we see happening. Big corporations (and extremely rich individuals) are in complete control of government, even when the experts in the field and the majority of the [vocal] population are against their actions.

Edgar Reynaldo

What movie do you hate? Now what's stopping you from making a better version of that movie? Why aren't you?

Please don't use that fallacy.

You just want to spend other people's money because you have some intrinsic right to it. Please don't use that fallacy.

Erin Maus

How do workers owning the means of production have anything to do with spending other peoples money?

What are you even arguing? I don't think we're talking about the same thing.

Edgar Reynaldo

Because to transition from capitalism to socialism, we would have to redistribute the wealth on a massive scale. That's never going to happen. Also, in some people's eyes, that's theft. Robbin Teh Hood.

Erin Maus

Oh but it's okay for a company to pay you 1/10th of what your labor is worth and profit off the other 9/10th because...?

The options are I either work or either starve so it's not like there's much choice for me in that oh-so-fair agreement I made. :) That's why unions are/were a thing, but you probably hate those too huh

Edgar Reynaldo

Oh but it's okay for a company to pay you 1/10th of what your labor is worth and profit off the other 9/10th because...?

The market dictates what you're 'worth'. If you're worth so much more than what you're being compensated with, then there should be employers out there who value you and are willing to pay more for your services. If you were performing a valuable service to society, then theoretically the market should reward you. The money only goes where people spend it, and they're not spending it on you.

If you feel so strongly about socialism, why haven't you started a coop? Why haven't you bought stock in your company? You'd obviously rather have other people do the work for you, which is never going to happen. You'd rather sit here discussing why people don't pay you 'what you're worth', and why they don't give up their wealth, because they don't deserve it. Someday if you are rich and successful, and I hope you are, I wonder how strongly you would feel about giving away all your goods and wealth and property so that it is not unfairly distributed. ;)

Ultimately if you want to succeed in a capitalist economy, you have to produce what the people want to consume. If you don't do that, then you are compensated accordingly.

Erin Maus

And I'm the brainwashed one ;D

Neil Roy

Oh but it's okay for a company to pay you 1/10th of what your labor is worth and profit off the other 9/10th because...?

Because it's THEIR COMPANY! If you don't like the pay, don't work there. Go start your own company and pay people more. Since when do you have a right to someone else's money?!?! THEY put in the huge expense and hard work to get THEIR company where it is, and along comes some entitled worker who thinks they have a right to more money?! Right. ::)

And I'm the brainwashed one ;D

Finally, something you say I 100% agree with!

Edgar Reynaldo

For the record, I think unions are good. They help put workers in a better negotiating advantage, and make it harder for employers to cheat them.

bamccaig

And the vast majority of us can never have a union. So think what that means for us. Is the system really fair? Or are employers raking in the money while the rest of us suffer?

And why can't we all be employers? In part because we don't all have social skills which are very important for business roles. And also if everybody had their own business there would be no employees. We'd just all be individuals trading skills.

These notions are completely irrational. Do either of you even work for a living? Blaming the worker that is getting abused and telling him to just start his own company instead of holding employers accountable? Are you retarded?

Neil Roy

I am against unions. Respecting workers rights and safety is one thing, demanding more pay or they shut down a company that isn't theirs I am dead against. Don't like the pay? QUIT.

bamccaig said:

These notions are completely irrational.

It's completely irrational to expect I should be able to run MY COMPANY the way I WANT IT?! Since when? You're braindead!!! >:(

-------

In other news... ARTICLES OF IMPEACHEMENT HAVE BEEN FILED!!! :O

It's about time they done something about this man!

video

Edgar Reynaldo

Neil, QUIT YELLING...

Rod Rosenstein has been doing his job. Congress expects him to turn over documents in an ongoing investigation that hasn't been completed, which is a ridiculous breach of trust and security. Republicans want to impeach him so they can hire someone else as AG and then have THEM fire Bob Mueller, so he'll stop investigating Trump and Russia. It's a giant pile of Republican BS.

Also,

Neil Roy said:

I am against unions. Respecting workers rights and safety is one thing, demanding more pay or they shut down a company that isn't theirs I am dead against. Don't like the pay? QUIT.

Don't you mean,
I am for monopolies. Respecting corporate rights and profits is one thing, demanding employees get fair pay or they won't work I am dead against. Don't like being a slave? TOO BAD. SUFFER.

bamccaig
Neil Roy said:

It's completely irrational to expect I should be able to run MY COMPANY the way I WANT IT?! Since when? You're braindead!!! >:(

If the company exists in MY city or in MY province or in MY country then it must operate under our laws. The economy must benefit society for a society to thrive. That means that the companies must benefit society. So no, you cannot run your company the way you want unless you abide by our laws which are set up to protect workers from abuses of power from employers. That means companies must take good care of their workers.

A trade union gives the workers the leverage they need to demand good treatment. And that's why the laws permit trade unions.

It would be a whole lot more profitable for the company to pay dirt, skip on safety equipment and training, and offer no benefits or vacation time. But it would be a terrible life for the workers and their families, and society would suffer as a result. If anything we need more unions. The rich get richer while the poor get poorer. Obviously the poor haven't got enough leverage yet.

Chris Katko

I think any company that NEEDS a union to force it to treat its workers with respect, is a bad company that will constantly be trying to undermine the union. Any company that sees "human" resources as a threat, and not an asset, is a toxic company.

However, ideal vs reality, are often not the same thing.

Likewise, unions DEFINITELY work in industries with lots of contractors where there's no "I see you every day" kind of human biology at play. People come and go and it's easier-than-not to treat people like commodities. The voice acting industry became unionized and it has GREATLY improved work conditions (safety/health, hours worked in a row, pay structures) and the quality of work as well. This is all from the voice of Duke Nukem himself:

video

I think basic, minimum work conditions should be regulated, at the federal level. Why should the government protect us from robbers with guns, but not bosses employing people? (see Wage Theft) Seems pretty reasonable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft

And another thing with that whole "people own the means of production." People. PEOPLE? Not person, but PEOPLE?! When have you ever had a group of ten people (even five) agree on ANYTHING? Basically every good, amazing thing, we have, has come from one super-driven person and a bunch of people associating and helping that one person. Engineer 13022-B didn't get to tell Steve Jobs jack crap on whether or not to build the iPhone. Steve Jobs said "make it" and it got made. The engineers, designers, etc were all instrumental, but they weren't leading the thing. Can you imagine an entire society "designed by committee"? :o That means people who have no real "drive" or passion, or even experience, get equal votes on how a factory should function? That means do-nothings will spend their time debating and vying for power instead of actually working. ... And isn't that's what happened in every communist country?

I mean, god, dare to look at Twitter or YouTube comments to see that not everyone equally deserves a voice. Any time you let random people talk with no barrier-to-entry, it becomes full of monsters. Those same toxic people... also try to run companies and governments. They don't just magically keep their sadism on chat platforms.

bamccaig

I think any company that NEEDS a union to force it to treat its workers with respect, is a bad company that will constantly be trying to undermine the union. Any company that sees "human" resources as a threat, and not an asset, is a toxic company.

You just described every for-profit company ever, except for maybe a couple of mom and pop stores with only a couple of employees paying minimum wage out of necessity instead of greed. :P

Only to nitpick, they don't see human resources as a threat. They see them as tools/machines. Rather than just trying to give everyone fair compensation because we're PEOPLE, they all believe that it's their job to give their employees as little compensation as possible. So if the company is making millions in profits and there's plenty to spread around they'll instead line their own pockets while playing mind games with the employees.

And companies do constantly try to undermine unions. Which is why the unions exist in the first place. If the company treated its employees great by default the unions never would have formed.

I think basic, minimum work conditions should be regulated, at the federal level. Why should the government protect us from robbers with guns, but not bosses employing people?

Which they are, at least in Canada. The problem is the minimum is too little to comfortably survive on. The minimum is not defined as a man taking care of his family. The minimum is a wife or daughter picking up a bit of extra shopping money on the side.

And another thing with that whole "people own the means of production." People. PEOPLE? Not person, but PEOPLE?! When have you ever had a group of ten people (even five) agree on ANYTHING? Basically every good, amazing thing, we have, has come from one super-driven person and a bunch of people associating and helping that one person. Engineer 13022-B didn't get to tell Steve Jobs jack crap on whether or not to build the iPhone. Steve Jobs said "make it" and it got made. The engineers, designers, etc were all instrumental, but they weren't leading the thing. Can you imagine an entire society "designed by committee"? :o That means people who have no real "drive" or passion, or even experience, get equal votes on how a factory should function? That means do-nothings will spend their time debating and vying for power instead of actually working. ... And isn't that's what happened in every communist country?

That's the point of the collective! If one person makes the decisions and that one person is bad, biased, corrupt or self-serving (almost guaranteed to be at least one) then all you have are bad decisions. If the entire group is making decisions then fewer errors should occur because there will be more people with different strengths and weaknesses. More good ideas will be generated and more bad ideas will be rejected. All of the best work is done by a collective. It just looks like individuals like Steve Jobs were responsible because they take credit for the people beneath them!

The problem is assuming that people need to be managed at all. Don't people just want to do a good job? Does anybody show up to a job they choose to be at and not try to do a good job? The only people that need to be managed are people that are forced to do work that cannot be easily done well. Basically the jobs that should either be eliminated because they're not actually needed (just grinding to justify paying them), or should be performed by machines.

WE ARE THE BORG. YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.

Edgar Reynaldo

My hobbies are C++, resistance and futility. Take that bam-bams.

Peter Hull

Has anyone played surviv.io?

Neil Roy

This is so true! ;)
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Has anyone played surviv.io?

Never heard of it.

dthompson

Two-day gap... careful now fellas

Edit or not. Timezone confusion!

Edgar Reynaldo

I think this thread is getting sleepy. I think it needs a Jiggly Puff.

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Oh wait, I was thinking of a Snorallax.

GullRaDriel

That thread was in need of some new subject. How about we discuss the new trending clothing for MAGA supporters ?

{"name":"Dj2f0ptUwAAyMGr.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/3\/53daf949eba6935b2e47c917bfff6d7f.jpg","w":960,"h":720,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/3\/53daf949eba6935b2e47c917bfff6d7f"}Dj2f0ptUwAAyMGr.jpg
(from https://twitter.com/stealthygeek/status/1026152030765756416)

8-)

Edit: I, BTW, do not support them, not even by a nail. One must be stupid and have forgot his own country history to dare wearing such a silly shirt :-)

bamccaig

Has anyone played surviv.io?

It doesn't seem to work properly in Firefox-ish. Plays OK in Chrome, but goddamn if I can last past 40. It's too damn hard. I don't have that kind of time. But super neat for a free Web game.

Neil Roy

That thread was in need of some new subject.

Nothing new about that subject. Same old bullshit attacks against Trump supporters.

611678

Edgar Reynaldo
Neil Roy said:

Nothing new about that subject. Same old attacks against Trump supporters.

Yes, because dumb ass Trump supporters endorsing the Kremlin is beyond ironic.
Yes, because Trump is trying to cover up his sons involvement with Russians.
Yes, because the Russians interfered with our national elections.
Yes, because Trump is trying to cover it all up by firing Rod Rosenstein and Bob Mueller.

It's a sad state of affairs when you get tired of caring about the truth.

MAGA!!!![1]

References

  1. Make Allegro Great Again!
GullRaDriel

Neil: It's not that old, only a few weeks old ^^

Edgar: I second !

;D

Chris Katko

It is kinda funny how the communist allied Democrats are... worried about Russian intervention. Maybe because they're the ones colluding? ;D ;D ;D

Quote:

My comrade was shot in the back of the head by @PortlandPolice today. He was hit with the very first flash bang the cops shot. Make no mistake this was an act of aggression and there will be hell to pay @tedwheeler #defendpdx #AllOutPDX

Quote:

The two then walk outside to find a crowd yelling, “1, 2, 3, f*ck the bourgeoisie!”

Here they are chanting that... to kick a black woman out of a restaurant.

https://thefederalist.com/2018/08/06/antifa-protesters-drive-candace-owens-out-of-philly-restaurant-video/

Amazing how the left has turned into the 1950's era of segregation.

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1950's? Or 2018?

Chris Katko

[FOUR THOUSAND DOUBLE POSTS]

[edit] Damn it, this was the more recent post with edits. Well, tits up. Hope you have web archive.

[edit] OMG, web archive has this thread from Dec 2017. =DDD

http://web.archive.org/web/20171220010255/https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/615770/73

Neil Roy

Keep pounding that horse Edgar, I think I seen it twitch!

I get so sick of the hatred from the left. Can't seem to escape it. On the news, online... I almost never watch the news anymore and I unsubscribed from all news sources because I just get sick of hearing it.

I may have to stay away from this website like I did before as well.

Chris Katko

Actually, the left is rapidly losing ground. They thought they had 2016 in the bag... and were dumbstruck by it.

They keep talking about a "blue wave" of GOP positions losing their seats to voters reacting to trump...

... and we keep getting more red seats either held or converted.

I'm actually not even remotely a fan of the GOP. But I love seeing how--with authoritarian the left has become--the chickens are coming home to roost and people are rising up to say "No, you cannot police our language and our art. Go to hell."

I mean, it's pretty safe bet to say anyone who thinks it's okay to "kick black people out of restaurants."--those are the bad guys and they won't be in power for very long.

It seems to me that those authoritarian people don't really care about "left-wing" or "right-wing". They only care about oppressing people. So whoever is "in power" currently, they flock to those groups. Kind of like how pedophiles flock to religious organizations so they can be close to kids. Toxic people flock to whatever group/organization they can to oppress people. I really can't tell a difference between conservatives saying "videogames cause violence" and liberals saying "videogames cause violence". One cries "sinner", the other cries "sexist". They're both wrong and completely ignoring science in order to gain votes through emotional manipulation.

bamccaig

What I'm sick of is people crying "left" and "right" and not realizing that they're following behind a bunch of greedy, selfish, stupid cunts. Stop following and start having your own ideas. We don't need to fit into "left" and "right". You can just stand for what you believe in. And you should because when you fall in line with some generic category you're giving power to ideas that you don't believe in.

Eric Johnson

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Chris Katko

I would love if a real third party existed.

I looked up the Green Party yesterday out of desperation. Stances: "Gun control: Ban all of them." O_o Welp, that was quick.

Edgar Reynaldo
Neil Roy said:

Keep pounding that horse Edgar, I think I seen it twitch!

I get so sick of the hatred from the left. Can't seem to escape it. On the news, online... I almost never watch the news anymore and I unsubscribed from all news sources because I just get sick of hearing it.

I may have to stay away from this website like I did before as well.

I'm doin my best Neil! Promise! ;)

::) Your beloved Trump has pulled the wool over your eyes Neil. Are you truly blind to all the bad things he does?

There's hardly anything going on here and you feel the need to get away from it? Jeez. :/

I don't fit into the left or right if you consider the far left antifa, and the far right neo conservative. I suppose I'm somewhere in the middle, but I'm sick of both parties. They're both corrupt, for different reasons. But like Katko said, there's really no viable third party alternative for anyone.

So it's funny when you say don't be left or right, but if you're neither you might as well throw your vote away. Green party, Libertarian party, 3rd party etc they all have no backing and no force behind them.

So for now I'm still a Democrat, if only because the Republicans are the party of the richest of the rich.

Oh yeah, btw. Trickle down economics doesn't work. :P

EDIT

Neil Boi said:

e606141fb5910495a9697f3e8b2f9aad7b9352a7.jpg
I may have to stay away from this website like I did before as well.

Such a sore loser. :/

bamccaig

I looked up the Green Party yesterday out of desperation. Stances: "Gun control: Ban all of them." O_o Welp, that was quick.

Presumably that means prohibit guns that are predominantly used for crime: i.e., pistols, machine guns (already pretty much prohibited), and short shotguns and rifles. For all intents and purposes, none of these guns are very useful for hunting. Their only other purpose is violence: either crime or defense, but the defense is only really necessary because the criminals all have guns. The odd criminal in Canada still has an illegal gun (I mean, they're criminals, so the laws don't mean much); however, it's certainly more difficult to get them, and instead of having MAC-10's and AK's they're lucky if they can have some shit pistols and sawed offs.

I think that gun control in the USA is going to be very, very hard. I think that such a strong stance overnight would be too extreme. They'll need to slowly ease you all into surrendering your guns by convincing you over time that it's insane for everybody to have them. Which it pretty much is. They need to change America's concept of guns at home before it'll be possible to prohibit guns for violence. This will take time so I don't necessarily agree with jumping straight to banning them all. But certainly they can start by tightening the laws on the trade of guns, and tighten the flow of guns between state borders, and increase background checks on all types of guns. And for example, if you want to have a pistol, you should be required to complete and pass safety training with one as a bare minimum. That would be good for all guns honestly.

Guns are cool. There's no doubt about that. But they're also used for a lot of evil. And the excuse that you can use them to defend yourself from an evil government is bullshit: we've already seen that you cannot. The government is far too strong already for that. So that's not an argument. You can argue that you need guns for self-defense, but by tightening the restrictions on guns and destroying them as they come into the system you can limit the number of guns that are in the wild and therefore reduce the need to use one for self-defense.

I don't think there's a valid argument against guns for hunting. True hunting guns (which in Canada does NOT count AR-15's and the like; magazine capacities are also limited) aren't very effective for crime. In Canada, you can only legally own guns of a sufficient length (law enforcement can be licensed for more access to guns, but regular civilians are limited in how much permission they can have). Basically it cannot be practically concealable. Which makes it pretty unwieldy for robbing a store or resident. Not impossible, but pretty damn inconvenient and much less effective.

Of course, in Canada you also need to have trigger locks on the gun and separate locks on the ammo, and the gun needs to be locked up and unloaded while in a vehicle, and you can only have the gun in the vehicle to go straight from home to a shooting range or hunting site and back. Legally possessing a gun in Canada is kind of a drag, but also gun crime is pretty limited.

This is somewhat of a drag. Despite being drawn towards guns I have never actually fired one. Not a real one. And honestly I don't think I'm missing much. It's expensive to operate them anyway. Even if I did have the right to own them (I do, but not fun guns) I probably couldn't afford to maintain and feed them. So what's the point? I don't hunt. I basically have no need for a gun. And not having easy access to a gun means that I don't have an easy way to go on a rampage when something or someone in my life inevitably flips upside down.

Gun crime still does happen in Canada. I just heard two police officers were shot and killed in New Brunswick, but I haven't looked up the story. But those stores are really rare. I imagine in America that kind of thing happens several times per day every day. Which is still somewhat insignificant on the grand scheme of the country, but obviously certain parts of America get the worst of that and I imagine there are a lot of people in those neighborhoods that wish everybody didn't have guns (i.e., all the women, children, and mature adult men, for example).

I wouldn't rule out the Green Party only on the premise of gun control. Firstly, even if they tried it would take a century to actually prohibit them. Secondly, you can always join the part and help to steer their politics to better align with yours. If they're a reasonable group of people that you'd want to vote for then they should be open to changing their ideas, just as you should be. Of course, I am not familiar with the Green Parties in the USA. I'm only familiar with the Green Party of Canada and Green Party of Ontario. And I don't agree with all of their ideas, but I agree with much more of their ideas than any other party. So I support them anyway.

You already don't get everything you want from the other parties in the USA. So at least compare the harm that the existing parties in power are doing and weigh that against the idea of having to surrender some of your guns. Honestly, it's not that bad if you put it into perspective. Most of your life is unaffected by that.

Green party, Libertarian party, 3rd party etc they all have no backing and no force behind them.

The other parties have no support because people won't support the losing parties. Well if that's going to be your stance then there will NEVER be another party. If you want there to be another party to vote for then you need to support the underdogs to help build the momentum so they have a chance! I've been doing this for nearly a decade, and we actually have had 2 Green MP's in Canada's parliament, and there are now a few Green MPP's in the provincial legislatures. Compared to when I first started supporting them they've grown a lot of support and are starting to get a piece of the power. If you never try you can't win.

Append:

On another note, if both of the parties in power are bad then choosing between them is a wasted vote. If you want to change the government then start voting for the underdog candidates/parties that you actually support. They won't win, but you weren't going to win anyway. At least this way the parties in power will see that they're BOTH losing support, and if they continue the way they're going the powers that be are going to lose all power.

Edgar Reynaldo

You don't seem to get it.

It's a choice of the lesser of two evils. If I had wasted my vote on the Green Party etc, then I might as well have been supporting Trump. At least with the Democrats I would have gotten some sort of semblance of what I want.

Bernie's pretty cool, I don't mind him. He stands up for the people.

raynebc

Out of all the guns bamccaig mentioned, hand guns (ie. pistols) are realistically the only ones that are significantly used for crime in the USA. That doesn't mean their only defensive use is against assailants armed with guns. Hand guns are easier for people to carry, and realistically the only legal firearm people can carry concealed. Women are overall physically weaker than men, and I would not deny somebody the means to carry a weapon and defend against a physically stronger attacker. I do not believe guns will be banned wholesale in the USA unless the VERY far-left wing takes over control of the country and amends the Constitution. Even if that were to happen, there would be insurrection.

The CDC projected there being between 500,000 and 3 million defensive uses of guns per year. As far as I'm concerned, this far outweighs the 8-15 thousand gun homicides per year. I agree all gun owners should take safety and proficiency training, that is a good policy. The point of having guns for self defense is that you can effectively use them.

The claim that an armed United States could not defeat an evil government is speculation. An armed citizenry is a deterrant no matter how much one would claim its significance. If a tyranny developed, you can bet money there would be a subset of the citizens building and distributing banned weaponry among themselves.

Bam is not fully against guns, but is skeptical of their usefulness and admits never having used one. A difference in cultures is widely the reason USA and other countries are so far apart on this issue.

bamccaig

You don't seem to get it.

It's a choice of the lesser of two evils. If I had wasted my vote on the Green Party etc, then I might as well have been supporting Trump. At least with the Democrats I would have gotten some sort of semblance of what I want.

You don't seem to get it. You lost anyway. But even if you had won, you still would have lost because instead Hillary fucking Clinton would be the lunatic in office. There were no good choices. There never are in the major parties. They're just puppets anyway. It's just meant to distract us all from what's really going on. No matter which party or which candidate nothing ever seems to change. Coincidence?

Vote for the underdog. Yes, the country will still spiral out of control just as it has been, and things will still be shitty, but over the course of several decades the underdog may gain enough traction for one of two things to happen: either the dominant parties are forced to start caring about what the people do and stop caring about their under the table paycheck, or perhaps the puppet masters will just reveal themselves and explain that it's a charade and we can stop pretending that you ever had a say.

raynebc said:

The CDC projected there being between 500,000 and 3 million defensive uses of guns per year. As far as I'm concerned, this far outweighs the 8-15 thousand gun homicides per year.

Sources please. Of course, a homicide does not need to occur for a gun to be misused. It can simply be an injury, or a threat of injury, a suicide, or an accidental shooting. There doesn't even need to be an actual gun present for the threat of one to cause harm. Unless there were 500,000 defensive shootings per year I'm guessing those are self-reported statistics which has to call them into question.

raynebc said:

A difference in cultures is widely the reason USA and other countries are so far apart on this issue.

The USA is also pretty much the only fully developed country that still mostly believes in a magician in the sky. Is it in the water or do you just not educate people down there? ???

Edgar Reynaldo

Reply 2800! Time to start a new page! Enough of guns and politics already.

raynebc
bamccaig said:

Sources please.

The estimated number of defensive uses even outweighs the criminal use of guns. From what I can find, the full report is behind a paywall, but it's easily found referenced by third parties:
https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/15941-cdc-study-ordered-by-obama-contradicts-white-house-anti-gun-narrative

I'm not religious, but your atheist jab is dumb and unnecessary.

Chris Katko

Wow. What did I miss. :o :o :o

Let's all calm down and agree that abortion should be illegal!

;D

Also, fun gun fact (didn't we already discuss this in THIS thread?): Most guns in the USA are actually owned by a few rich collectors. Just like most TIGERS IN THE WORLD are actually in captivity... in Texas.

https://www.care2.com/causes/theres-more-captive-tigers-in-texas-than-in-the-wild.html

But you don't hear every day about "OMG, we need TIGER CONTROL because the streets run red with the blood of tiger claws."

It's a luxury good. A collectors item.

Most crimes are commited with SMALL ARMS because ... they're easy to hide. (Durr, really?) Meanwhile, all this legislation deals with "assault weapons" because the entire liberal gun control platform is "OMG, guns are scary." Which is also why the entire assault weapons ban had an "unmeasurable impact on crime" and yet liberals are trying to bring it back! You know, after this thing called "science" showed it had no impact. They would rather feel like they're making an impact than actually make an impact. Science deniers!

I'd vote liberal if they didn't have insane policies regarding guns, freedom of speech, and immigration. ::) I'm 100% pro-environment and pollution controls, and 100% for regulation of important industries, pro-gay-marriage, pro-weed. But every damn day, I have to wake up to headlines of some liberal jack!@# telling us that that someone is a "nazi enabler" for telling a joke, or grandstanding a bunch of kids in front of a camera to toke our heart strings.

Rule 1 in politics: If someone has a kid on camera, they're !@#! manipulating you. Because if they had the high ground, they wouldn't need the kid.

Edgar Reynaldo

Rule 1 in politics: If someone has a kid on camera, they're !@#! manipulating you.

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If nobody owned guns, no one would need to own a gun to defend themself. :P

If people weren't stupid whores, nobody would need abortions.

If wages were fair unions wouldn't be necessary.

Etc...

bamccaig

I think you'd agree that if everybody had tigers we'd need to pass laws to regulate them. I'm assuming that wasn't really an argument, and just an interesting anecdote. If there was constant maulings and killings involving tigers we'd consider banning them. Honestly, we probably should anyway because it's not a redeeming life for the animal in captivity. They might as well be extinct if their only way to survive is in small enclosures or cages being spoon fed already dead meat. They may technically be alive, but that doesn't mean they're living.

I don't think science can quite be used to properly assess the harm that guns cause to a society. The scientific method doesn't really apply to society because you cannot control the variables. It doesn't even apply to the human body because for the most part you cannot control the variables. There's always too much going on. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't still try to do science on these things, but you have to be very disciplined in interpreting the results. You can never be certain of anything, but you can conclude that there's a chance of this or that. Basically, every study has to recommend further studies. Talk about a cash cow. But still, well thought out studies are still beneficial. You might not know what is, but sometimes you can still know what is not.

As for gun control, it's not about taking guns away from law abiding citizens. It's about limiting the availability of guns for criminals. I'm not talking about the liberal agenda. I'm talking about what should be done. Fuck the politics. I'm talking real world practical value. And the easiest and perhaps only practical way to do that is to limit the availability of guns for everyone. If you have any other ideas to limit the availability of guns for criminals then I'm listening and I'm sure any other sensible people would listen. You can't deny that there's a problem when nearly every criminal in America has easy access to guns. The odds of encountering such crime are relatively low in middle class neighborhoods, but still probably higher than you're comfortable with, but it's getting so that only the elite can afford to be middle class, and there are still millions and millions of people in the lower classes that have to live amongst this all day every day. The laws shouldn't just protect the wealthy. They should protect the poor too. And while there's a lot of crime in poverty and therefore there's justification for self-defense, I'd rather you tried to address poverty instead by re-balancing the system so that there was less poverty, less crime, and no more need for everybody to own guns. If you want to play with guns then allow licensed gun clubs with strict security to permit day trips or something. There's no need to bring them home.

Regarding insane liberals, the question really is does the Democrat party and its representatives align with the insane politics of the liberals from the Internet. I'd like to hope that they don't, but I also don't trust Clinton to do anything good. Maybe the next go around you can have Sanders instead and then maybe it would be a sane choice. The funny thing is they had somebody that was sane and most people liked him and instead they gave Clinton the choice. If that's not sabotage/conspiracy I don't know what is.

Append:

Unwanted pregnancies can happen to healthy couples too. There's absolutely nothing wrong with an abortion. Even a newborn baby has no idea what's going on. A painless death at that age (or preferably, 6 months earlier when the "baby" is just a blob) is completely humane to the baby. The only remaining question is the mental health of the parents. And women are insane when it comes to babies. The death of a baby before birth is still crippling to women. There's a valid justification to warn against mental health concerns, but you can still give women and couples (and men!) the choice. Some women or couples may be crippled by the abortion, while others would be perfectly happy and healthy. You could spare a lot of people a terrible life if you just allow their existence to be terminated before it ever begins. Some people are not meant to be parents (or sometimes, just not yet). You shouldn't force them to be just because biology that we can control didn't turn out as they planned.

raynebc

If nobody owned guns, no one would need to own a gun to defend themself.

People that are physically weak or not super proficient in self defense can justifiably need a weapon to protect themselves, even from an unarmed attacker. Even expert fighters will freely admit (and I've heard this in interviews) that they can't expect to reliably fend off a group of attackers with just their bare hands. You're thinking in idealistic terms instead of realistic ones.

bamccaig said:

There's no need to bring them home.

If you can't keep the gun on you, you can't use it for self defense. Your argument seems to favor disallowing the people the means to protect themselves and forcing them to rely on government for protection, even though it cannot be fully counted on. I see this as immoral.

Quote:

There's absolutely nothing wrong with an abortion.

About half the USA disagrees with you. It's no less a human life just because it is inconvenient. I don't buy the argument that just because somebody would have a hard life, it's better for them to have never been allowed to live at all.

bamccaig
raynebc said:

If you can't keep the gun on you, you can't use it for self defense. Your argument seems to favor disallowing the people the means to protect themselves and forcing them to rely on government for protection, even though it cannot be fully counted on. I see this as immoral.

The point is this is motherfucking 2018. You shouldn't need to walk around with a gun on your hip to be safe. If you do, check your motherfucking society for errors because something is seriously, seriously wrong. Fix society. Guns on your hip is not a solution to the problem. Solve it in a better way. Not everybody can even possibly be proficient with a gun. That's a copout just so you can play with guns, and the rest of the world knows it.

raynebc said:

About half the USA disagrees with you. It's no less a human life just because it is inconvenient. I don't buy the argument that just because somebody would have a hard life, it's better for them to have never been allowed to live at all.

What makes human life special? I assume you have no problem squishing a mosquito or spider (albeit, I try to preserve spiders, but the ones we have here can't seriously harm us).

Append:

Also at what point does it become human life? I slaughter about a billion sperm every month. Is it human life as soon as a sperm attaches to the egg? Does it need to resemble a human, or can it be an alien form nobody would recognize? Should it breath and pump blood on its own, or should it rely on its mother for that still?

l j

"It's CURRENT_YEAR" is not an argument.

Erin Maus

wow I don't agree with a party 100% so I'm not going to vote for them

how juvenile

Guns and abortions are relatively tiny issues. The law is clear on abortion anyway since Roe v Wade and the numerous others; amend the constitution if you want to change it. Re: guns, fight Democrat legislation until it reaches the Supreme Court or whatever. If it's unconstitutional it'll be struck down. (Well, normally it would be, but who knows anymore).

Seriously Democrats suck but they suck in the same way that stubbing your toe sucks, while the Republicans are like you getting a flesh eating disease from cutting your finger. Oh, did you know whataboutism is a Russian propaganda technique? OoooOoooOOOOooh.

I'm further to the left than Noam Chomsky and I'll still be voting straight Democrat. The Democrat Party isn't compromised by Russia and/or colluding so there's that.

Eric Johnson

Remember when this thread was about threads locking too soon? :P

Edgar Reynaldo

You do all realize all we've done with this thread is prove Matthew right. :P

He knows he doesn't have to do anything, and that his world is perfect just the way it is. :P

@bamccaig

video

raynebc
bamccaig said:

You shouldn't need to walk around with a gun on your hip to be safe.

Edgar took the point to a more extreme position than even you did. He said people don't need to have guns even in their own home. People shouldn't HAVE to have special protection, but the world isn't perfect. The reason some places are dangerous enough that people could need to carry weapons are because of too much crime and not enough policing in some areas of the country.

Quote:

Not everybody can even possibly be proficient with a gun.

Of course some people have ailments or disabilities and won't have the needed mental or physical capability, but most people can be proficient with guns, all it takes is training.

Quote:

What makes human life special?

We are capable of high level, rational thought. Mosquitos are pests that spread disease to hundreds of species. I used to kill spiders, but I don't bother with them anymore as there aren't any truly dangerous varieties of them where I live.

Quote:

Also at what point does it become human life?

Biologically, when the sperm fertilizes an embryo. My pro-life stance is "pragmatic" enough that I don't abhor contraceptives because they still prevent the beginning of an actual pregnancy (the fertilized embryo implants into the uterus). The addition of special requirements to be considered life is foolish. Humans, as with many animals, require substantial care for years after they are born and are not capable of keeping themselves alive.

Aaron's got his tinfoil Russia hat. It's always fun to see crazy partisans.

Eric Johnson
raynebc said:

The reason some places are dangerous enough that people could need to carry weapons are because of too much crime and not enough policing in some areas of the country.

That's basically every big city. I never go to New Orleans without a weapon for this very reason.

Edgar Reynaldo
Raynebc said:

Edgar took the point to a more extreme position than even you did. He said people don't need to have guns even in their own home. People shouldn't HAVE to have special protection, but the world isn't perfect. The reason some places are dangerous enough that people could need to carry weapons are because of too much crime and not enough policing in some areas of the country.

I don't know about you, but the idea that people are walking around with concealed weapons bothers me. Piss off the wrong person, and BLAM, you're a goner. Background checks are not enough. Training is not enough. Why should I have to carry a gun around just to feel 'safe'? I've received death threats before, and they were by people who had easy access to guns, who said they were going to use one to kill me with. I was stalked and harassed. I never knew who did it, because they did it all under the cover of night. Nothing the police could do about it because I didn't know who it was for sure. I have a pretty damn good idea who was involved, but I couldn't prove anything. For years, I was afraid to leave the house. I was in a crippled mental state, living in fear. We own guns in our household, but what was I supposed to do? Start carrying a gun with me all the time, everywhere I go? That's no way to live.

The point is, I shouldn't have to worry about nutjobs with guns. And the only way to do that is to keep the guns out of their hands. And that means tighter controls on being able to own and carry firearms, and harsher penalties for those who commit crimes using guns. It means we need more resources to combat gangs and thugs. It means we need to do a better job patrolling our borders to keep illegal guns out of our country. At this point, I'm almost in favor of Trump's border wall.

The solution is less guns, not more. :P

raynebc

I don't know about you, but the idea that people are walking around with concealed weapons bothers me.

I'm not bothered by it. Most gun owners are not criminals and there are statistics showing concealed gun carriers are generally among the most law abiding demographic. Lawful gun owners are not a threat. It seems that your personal experiences have made you more fearful and cynical than most, but you having the means to protect yourself may have improved your mental wellbeing. It needn't have been a gun, but other self defense items have their limitations. More guns have not been shown to increase crime, so I don't see the justification to ban them. As I alluded before, the populace being armed is a bigger good than evil.

All things considered, if somebody is always hugely afraid to leave the house, they may be legitimately under that much of a threat, or they may need counseling.

bamccaig

video

raynebc said:

The reason some places are dangerous enough that people could need to carry weapons are because of too much crime and not enough policing in some areas of the country.

Police do not prevent crime. They merely punish the few offenders they can catch. If you have a crime problem you cannot solve it with police. Police will just produce more crime because instead of rehabilitating people they ruin people's lives. And when your life is ruined there's not much point behaving after that. If society doesn't care about you anymore what reason do you have to care about society?

The reason there's a lot of crime in certain areas is poverty (or wealth, but that's a different kind of crime). America does not distribute its wealth fairly. Everybody knows that. The rich get richer while the poor get poorer. You can work hard, but you need to be wealthy already to be guaranteed a chance at success. Many people work hard and it gets them nowhere. The system isn't designed for every American to be able to get ahead. It doesn't work that away. It won't work that way in capitalism. It can't. One man's great success depends on 20 other men's exploitation.

America has the problem that there are more people able and willing to work than there are good jobs. A lot of places have that problem, but its exacerbated in America due to its geographical size, population, demographics, and history. We suffer some of that in Canada too, and its getting worse. I'm not quite sure why, but I'd be inclined to blame the government turning its back on Canadians to fatten its own pockets. Basically taking a page out of the American government's play book.

Make no mistake, you could quadruple the number of police, but the problem will just get worse. If you want to solve the crime problem you have to have compassion and be willing to help the people that are desperate enough to commit crime.

raynebc said:

Of course some people have ailments or disabilities and won't have the needed mental or physical capability, but most people can be proficient with guns, all it takes is training.

Most people don't have the time to be proficient with guns, can't afford the training (or the guns, or ammo, for that matter), and also don't care to. They just want to live peacefully, have families, and enjoy the bits of life that matter. Before you have children its easy to feel like you're just some kind of awesome soldier and all you need is guns and you can defend yourself from anything, but once you start considering having children that all changes. You realize just how fragile your family is and the last thing you want is to introduce any additional risk into the mix. The world you describe is a world where raising a family would be pretty risky. Families are so much more vulnerable.

You cannot possibly protect every member of your family at all times unless you keep them all locked in a box. And that's no way to live. About 15 years ago I would have sounded a lot like you. But then I grew up. I don't mean that condescendingly. We all experience life in different ways. What I came to realize is that ultimately what will make me happy is having a family, and if I were to hypothetically involve gunfights into the mix then it will end in one of two ways: either I kill the attacker, and his friends/family/gang will learn who I am and possibly seek revenge on me or my extended family so we're never safe, or I only scare/wound him and the attacker himself could eventually come back or get out of prison or call in a hit from prison and the same story. My family is not actually safe. Just because I happen to stop somebody once with a gun doesn't mean I'm safe forever. In fact, it could be just the start of my problems. I prefer to seek out a world in which I don't have to defend myself with a gun. A world in which nobody has reason to target my family. And try to rely on society to curb crime instead of violent police so that we can limit the number of families that do have to put up with that terror.

raynebc said:

We are capable of high level, rational thought.

We are, but fetuses are not. Certainly there would be a point where the fetus begins to develop some kind of thought, but it's impossible to know when and how intelligent it gets. Nobody really remembers birth, and it usually takes a couple of years of development and nurture to achieve a level of recognizable intelligence. Ultimately, humans come into the world stupid, and intelligence develops over time. That's why we require approximately 20 years before we mature, whereas most other species mature in a matter of months or years. Intelligence takes time.

Many other animals appear capable of high level, rational thought. Whales, dolphins, elephants, dogs, crows, octopuses, etc. We don't seem to hesitate to kill them when the ends justify the means. Similarly, if it were a matter of terminating an animal pregnancy nobody would even question it.

That's basically every big city. I never go to New Orleans without a weapon for this very reason.

How many times have you visited New Orleans?
How many times have you visited armed versus unarmed?
How many times have you used your gun in New Orleans for self-defense?

Chris Katko

wow I don't agree with a party 100% so I'm not going to vote for them

how juvenile

I will never vote for someone who tries to ban art. End of story.

Quote:

The Democrat Party isn't compromised by Russia and/or colluding so there's that.

Yeah, but they are compromised by China. So there's that. ;D

You think I'm kidding, but nope:

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/1996_United_States_campaign_finance_controversy

Read every word of that article because it's damn important.

"That's back in 1996!" they'll say. Yeah, and here's 2018:

One of Senator Diane Feinstein's direct staffers (possibly exposed to classified information) was... a Chinese spy.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/explain-the-chinese-spy-sen-feinstein/2018/08/09/0560ca60-9bfd-11e8-b60b-1c897f17e185_story.html

And my argument for guns is the same reason I fight for minorities. (What?!) They're the great equalizer. Women shouldn't have to be afraid of men's superior muscle and genetics when they go out at night. Women should have the ultimate autonomy over their bodies. And disabled people, and women, shouldn't have to go out in fear.

Now, liberals try to say the B.S. argument "If the world WASN'T UNSAFE, they wouldn't NEED guns!" yeah, and when you manage to create a perfect world, we can disarm women. But until then, I'd rather women in the real world not get raped.

Another platform that's TRUE liberal that confuses my liberal compatriats. I'm against illegal immigration. ... I'm FOR legal immigration. I'm FOR allowing more people in. I'm FOR reducing the difficulty to get in. What I'm NOT for? Letting people in illegally, with no paper trail, that then get paid sub-human wages, and literally... raped in the fields. Because no paper trail means there's no one from the government to protect you from being exploited.

https://www.pbs.org/video/frontline-rape-fields-show/

They also get raped on the way over because... once again... there's no government to protect them. So they literally tell their teenage girls to take birth control. Cuz they're gonna get raped. It's not a matter of "if".

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/facing-risk-rape-migrant-women-prepare-birth-control

And those sources are PBS. So if you want to call PBS a right-wing or Russian shill, you might as well call the Earth flat while you're at it.

Call me crazy, but I'm anti-rape. ::)

bamccaig

And my argument for guns is the same reason I fight for minorities. (What?!) They're the great equalizer. Women shouldn't have to be afraid of men's superior muscle and genetics when they go out at night. Women should have the ultimate autonomy over their bodies. And disabled people, and women, shouldn't have to go out in fear.

Now, liberals try to say the B.S. argument "If the world WASN'T UNSAFE, they wouldn't NEED guns!" yeah, and when you manage to create a perfect world, we can disarm women. But until then, I'd rather women in the real world not get raped.

Women are not as capable as men are. I know, controversial! And yet, all sports competitions are separated because we ultimately know it's true. Guns will not equalize things. They make them worse. A few women might successfully fend of an attacker with a gun, but if they miss (and they're likely to because it's not a video game) they might just make matters worse.

Instead of expecting women to carry guns to protect themselves I have a crazy idea: maybe, just maybe, they should avoid going out alone and travel with friends or a man to protect them. I know, how condescending. I don't know about your female friends, but the ones I know are mostly still terrified of spiders, moths, bats, ...; pretty much anything that moves. Not unlike children. While I would encourage them all to escape from that bubble of irresponsibility, and endure training to overcome fears and realize their potential, I don't think many of them want to do that because they lose a lot of privileges that way.

Ultimately, their default gender role is to raise children and take care of the home. And there's nothing wrong with that. Many or most of them actually enjoy doing that. It's perhaps what most of them are best suited to do well.

Walking alone at night isn't even something that I'd take likely, even if I have a gun. Unless they have dreams of being Chuck Norris it's probably wiser to just avoid putting themselves into compromising positions. Stay in public areas in daylight, bring a friend with you, if something feels wrong get the Hell out of there as quickly as possible and call for help.

A gun can make things worse just as easily as it can make things go away. And like I said, if you actually connect the gun to a person your name will be public information for his friends or family to look up. If you think the witness protection program can keep every family in the nation anonymous and safe you're sadly mistaken.

What's really neat to see is reaction time simulations where people have to draw a gun and react to something on a projection screen. The vast majority of people cannot react in time to something bad, and often overreact to something innocent. Real life is not a movie. Nothing will teach that faster than actually going out and physically training.

They also get raped on the way over because... once again... there's no government to protect them. So they literally tell their teenage girls to take birth control. Cuz they're gonna get raped. It's not a matter of "if".

And that's a risk that they're willing to take. From what I've heard, rape is a real threat where they're coming from as well so it's probably not a huge surprise when they hear it. If you really care about those girls' well-being though then you'll want to improve the living conditions and economy of Mexico so that they have a chance to live a comfortable life where they're born instead of enduring all of these unimaginable hardships for the chance to raise their children in America. The reason they try to get into America illegally is because the legal process is impractical for them. They wouldn't risk all of these hardships if it wasn't at least believed to be worth it. And there's no shortage of Americans that "made it" that were once illegal aliens. Which is proof that in some cases it can be worth it. There are probably also a lot of cases where it might not have been worth it, but then again things might not be so good where they're coming from either so it might have been worth a shot anyway.

Erin Maus
raynebc said:

Aaron's got his tinfoil Russia hat. It's always fun to see crazy partisans.

I was joking but of course you don't miss a chance to insult someone.

I will never vote for someone who tries to ban art. End of story.

???

...

Also I'm for guns because the bourgeois aren't going to take resistance peacefully. You know what would make Republicans make a 180 on gun legislation? If socialists started arming themselves.

Erin Maus

I'm magical.

raynebc

There is so much I disagree with in bamccaig's posts I don't have the time to go into major detail. Police deter crime and are not a net evil in society. Equal distribution of wealth is not something to aspire to and is not necessary for people to have good lives. Poverty isn't a good thing, but it's not a valid justification for wronging others. Capitalism isn't perfect, but it's better than all the other alternatives. Having a family to protect is PRECISELY WHY many people own weapons, and this has been the case throughout human history. Nobody can be completely safe at all times, but you can take reasonable means to improve your security. Lock your doors, have a security system, have a weapon for protection if you live in a high crime area. All decent people want a world without evil people, but that can't be attained.

Having intelligent thought is not a requirement for being considered life. I'm speaking in biological terms of what a life is, not philosophical ones. Just because a human isn't fully developed yet doesn't mean it is without value. Killing animals for food and self defense are the most naturally-justified reasons to kill any animal. If you terminated an animal's pregnancy, yes people would question it. It's better to have pets fixed in order to prevent having to control animal population through euthanasia.

Your assumptions seem to be that guns are bad at stopping crime, have no value as a deterrant and require an extremely trained and capable person to use effectively. I disagree with all of those. The suggestion that most women couldn't effectively use them for self defense is ignorant. Travelling in groups is a good idea though, as an attacker will prefer going after somebody with no friends and no weapon. This is another reason concealed carry is a deterrant: A criminal doesn't know who could possibly resist and respond with lethal force.

Quote:

I was joking

I've seen you post many questionable things, especially in this thread. I had no reason to expect you were joking, and I still doubt you truly were. And regarding your post edit trolling, pro second amendment advocates are fine with all law-abiding citizens arming themselves and using guns legally.

Erin Maus
raynebc said:

I've seen you post many questionable things, especially in this thread. I had no reason to expect you were joking, and I still doubt you truly were. And regarding your post edit trolling, pro second amendment advocates are fine with all law-abiding citizens arming themselves and using guns legally.

I said Republicans would make a 180, not pro-second-amendment advocates.

The the Republican party (not Republicans but the party itself) only has the interests of the very rich in mind. Wedge issues like abortion and guns energize and motivate its very reliable base to vote. But you're all voting against your own interests, unless you're rich.

For example, do you believe the recent tax bill helps or hurts the poor and middle class?

raynebc

The tax cuts are helpful for most Americans, but obviously tax cuts without spending cuts are ultimately a bad thing. Both major parties have severe spending problems.

As for your classification of the RNC as the party of the rich, it's as accurate to label the DNC as the party of racism, based on their long history in this country.

Edgar Reynaldo

There's enough Republican wool over your eyes to make a sweater raynebc. :P

The tax cuts went to the ultra rich, who don't need any more money. The spending cuts went to the poorest of the poor. Taking away people's insurance. Retirement. Disability. Medicare. Medicaid. Social Security. The Republican party, led by Paul Ryan who wants to go out with a bang, are hell bent on destroying so called 'entitlement' programs. Because it's not like any of those people worked for their money. Or spent their lives unable to work due to disability, mental illness, sickness, etc. It's not like they're taking money away from people who are in the last decades of their lives and have no safety net or ability to work. Retirement comes later and later now. Retire at 70 if you're lucky. Because they were supposed to have taken care of their own savings when most people are lucky if they can even save anything at all.

Shame on you. It's a rotten shame.

As for so called biological life, when does a group of cells become considered a life? Plants are made of cells, but no one gives a shit when you kill a plant. They're alive, but no one has any qualms about killing them. :/ We cut down trees like grass. Who will fight for the right to their lives?

Okay, let's set aside plants for now and move on to the animal kingdom. We slaughter billions of animals raised in cages with literally shitty lives and no one gives a flying fuck. We all go on eating our chicken mcnuggets and our whopppers and God Forbid anyone take away anyone's BACON! I am sure you've eaten eggs before, that have been fertilized. You can tell cuz the baby chicky started to grow. I bet you didn't even flinch though.

What are humans that they are so much more precious than animals? Because we're capable of more? Animals are capable of thought. They have emotions. They experience fear. They don't want to die any more than we do. Humans think they're so fucking wonderful because they've built skyscrapers, and moved mountains with bulldozers, and even managed to get off the surface of this silly sphere. What's so special about that? That we've thrived off the backs of the rest of the inhabitants of the world? Why does that makes us special? Do you know what a parasite is? It thrives off its host to the point of killing it. It spreads until it can't spread anymore, leaving a wake of death. Human life is nothing more than a parasitic infection of the Earth.

And you're worried about killing a fucking fetus. That is barely alive, can't take care of itself, isn't capable of any thought that will ever be remembered, and is nothing more than a bunch of cells dividing mindlessly until it forms an actual living creature.

As for your 'everyone is safer with more guns' mentality, well NO they're NOT. I had easy access to a long barrel revolver after what happened to me, and there were times when I carried it with me when I was outdoors. But I wasn't in a good state of mind to be carrying a gun. I might have ended up shooting someone who was just being an idiot, who wasn't one of the people out to kill me. I was suffering from PTSD, and every little thing that happened triggered it again. I didn't leave the house for 6 years. I was paralyzed with fear, and crippled by thoughts of what might happen to me. My mind had turned on me, and it wasn't until those 6 years later that I was diagnosed with schizophrenia. I got on medication, and it cleared my thoughts, but had multiple problems of its own. It took years and years to get my medication sorted out so that I wasn't suffering from side effects. The only thing that helped was weed, but that has problems of its own too.

Anyway, long story short, it took me 10 years to put my life back together and start functioning normally again. So far nothing has happened, but I still don't want to have to carry around a fucking gun. Give me a phaser anyday. Set to disintegrate. :P

A society that needs its citizens to walk around carrying lethal weaponry should not be considered a society at all. Civilization indeed.

EDIT

raynebc said:

As for your classification of the RNC as the party of the rich, it's as accurate to label the DNC as the party of racism, based on their long history in this country.

We're speaking of the present, not ages past.

TL:DR; What a bunch of shaite.

Chris Katko

Everyone: In case it wasn't obvious, I argue my points passionately, but at no point do I expect everyone to think like I do or even agree with me. I'm perfectly fine with people disagreeing and I'm fine separating discussions like this, from personal or professional situations like "do you want to play some Steam game co-op?" or "Can you help me with my API?"

bamccaig: Perhaps I didn't explain enough. My "stance" on immigration is that if we want more people here (and that's a fine stance to have), we should do it legally by improving immigration agencies, staff, and laws to help people get in. What we should NOT do is magically screw over everyone who LEGALLY immigrated by letting others jump the line because a sad story ran in a newspaper. The immigrants I know worked their ASSES off to get here and they're completely opposed to letting people have a free pass. It's a slap to the face to everyone who followed the rules.

- People who are illegals but already here should be systematically found and registered, and REQUIRED TO APPLY while given a temporary pass. If they fail (for having crimes, for example), they go. They should pay taxes, and they get all the protections a temporary citizen get. They can call the police when an employer attempts to rape them, for example.

Also, I agree 100% we should be doing everything we can do IMPROVE MEXICO so that Mexicans don't HAVE TO LEAVE.

But new ultra-left / progressives idea that we "abolish ICE", good gosh, that's one of the stupidest policies I've ever heard. The CRIMINALS in MEXICO are the reason Mexicans are leaving. So if we have NO BORDER that means the CRIMINALS COME IN TOO... and continue to rape and murder Mexicans (as well as Americans now). It's absurd. If you want to help fleeing Mexicans, why the hell would you want to let their criminal attackers follow them?!

Edgar Reynaldo

Yeah, the infamous OCZ (Ocasio-Cortez) went a little out of her mind with that one.

raynebc

Edgar, you're hopeless. The rich don't have enough money to pay for all of your hopes and dreams. You ignore biology when it's convenient. You're afraid of people having guns because you're a pessimist and don't trust people. Your admission of having PTSD explains much of your paranoia and has tainted your perspective. I don't believe I have anything more to say to you.

Neil Roy

I wasn't going to post in here again, but I just had to say, raynebc, you're a breath of fresh air. That was a very well thought out, intelligent post.

Now back to my lurking. ;)

bamccaig
raynebc said:

The rich don't have enough money to pay for all of your hopes and dreams.

Except they do though. ??? Have you checked the numbers lately?

raynebc

The latest Socialist Democrat darling (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) wants a Medicare plan that will cost $32 trillion (not a typo) over a ten year period. That will be a great way to drown the country in more debt and drive the surviving wealth away to a sane country. It's hard to find the exact stats I want in front of a paywall, so I had to go for some fuzzy math:

According to Google, the average annual income for top 1% US households is about $1.25 million. It would take confiscating all of the income from about 2.5 million households, every year, in the top 1% to pay for this Medicare plan. This is about twice the number of households that are in the top 1% (of which Statista says there are about 1.26 million in 2017). I couldn't find statistics for average income for the top 5% or 10%, but I imagine it would come close to taking most of the income of most of the top 5%. Wealthy people would leave the country if their taxes went up tens of percent for the latest big spending project, because where would it ever stop?

Edgar Reynaldo
raynebc said:

Edgar, you're hopeless. The rich don't have enough money to pay for all of your hopes and dreams. You ignore biology when it's convenient. You're afraid of people having guns because you're a pessimist and don't trust people. Your admission of having PTSD explains much of your paranoia and has tainted your perspective. I don't believe I have anything more to say to you.

raynebc, you're a rotten hypocrite. You murder other intelligent life to preserve your own, yet claim an unborn human being is more precious somehow.

There's more than enough money in the US to take care of everyone. Clothing, shelter, medicine, education. All of which IMPROVE the country. But you prefer the rich keep money they don't deserve, because it was made off the backs of everyone else. You're fine with taking money away from the poor and giving it to people who are so fucking rich they don't know what to do with all their money.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/203961/wealth-distribution-for-the-us/

Look at that chart and tell me those people on the top "earned" their money. They gained it by exploiting people. Fuck you raynebc. You're a spoiled hypocrite.

Fully one half of the entire US owns less than 2% of all the wealth in the nation. Do you even have any idea what that means for quality of life for those people? Do you understand what poverty is? What going without medical care and prescriptions is like? Have you ever been homeless? Have you ever had to beg for money? Fuck you.

Erin Maus

idk why all or nearly all of Europe can do it (740 million people) but the US can't (300 million people)

raynebc

Edgar is an angry person drowning in the politics of envy. Most people that make good life choices, and whose parents made good life choices, have a good life. Freedom includes the freedom to succeed or fail on chance and on merit. Few things annoy me as much as people who refuse to work to provide for themselves.

Neil Roy

Would you guys read what you're posting? The swearing and hatred is getting out of hand.

amarillion

I stopped discussing politics on the internet a long time ago.

Erin Maus

I'm a feminist and I found this funny:

{"name":"o3qqpoO.png","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/7\/571fd1968ac953ba49194ae8779b8966.png","w":1087,"h":721,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/7\/571fd1968ac953ba49194ae8779b8966"}o3qqpoO.png

Oh no!

Eric Johnson

Are any of you good with cars? Yesterday, my car (a '94 Honda Civic Ex Coupe) died on me while I was driving. The lights flickered then completely died. It wouldn't start after that. Someone tried to jump-start my car, but it didn't take, so I had to call AAA to get a tow back home. Anyway, today I bought a new battery, but my car still won't start. The lights, A/C, and other electrical goodies still work, but the engine won't turn over. It cranks like it's about to turn over, but doesn't. I tested the new battery with a multimeter and it checks out just fine. I also checked all of my fuses and relays, but they're good, too. Any ideas? ???

MiquelFire

It might be your alternator. Just a wild guess though, I'm not a car person.

Eric Johnson

Thanks for the reply, MiquelFire. I'm not much of a car person either. Wouldn't I still be able to start my car even with a bad alternator (assuming the battery is fully charged)? It just wouldn't recharge the battery, as I understand it (though I could be wrong). I'll hook my battery up to a battery charger just to be safe and then try again later.

bamccaig

I'm also not a car guy so aren't we an inappropriate bunch to discuss this. :P Let's. I agree, I think you should be able to start the engine by battery power alone. After all, the alternator produces electricity by being driven by the engine, and until the engine starts it is being driven by the starter and therefore battery! Either cars produce infinite electricity on start-up or the alternator shouldn't matter too much (unless there's some kind of circuitry load thingy that I'm not aware of that plays into things).

Make sure the battery you bought is the right spec for the car. Though for a Civic I can't imagine you can get too small of a battery. :D

It probably shouldn't matter with a fully charged battery, but I'd also try starting the engine with all of the accessories (A/C, stereo, lights, etc.) off.

Basic checklist of things required to start:

  • Fuel, and working fuel pump to deliver it to the engine.

  • Oxygen, and a clean air filter that doesn't restrict the flow of air too much and keeps harmful particles out.

  • Starter to crank the engine.

  • Spark plug to ignite the fuel/air mixture.

  • Electricity to power the starter, and arc the tips of the spark plugs.

You should have already eliminated battery/electricity unless you have a short somewhere. But then again, flashing lights and wacky electronics before the engine died might be an indication of just that, especially if a new battery doesn't fix it. The fun part is figuring out where the Hell the short is. That's well outside my area of expertise because I'm both useless with electronics and cars. But in theory, you'd need a wiring diagram for the car and to start testing circuits for a break in the circuit (where the electricity can escape by some other path). If you're desperate I guess you could try that, or call somebody to help with that. But then if you know somebody to call for that you should probably ask them for ideas because what the Hell do I know about cars? :P

Edgar Reynaldo
raynebc said:

Edgar is an angry person drowning in the politics of envy. Most people that make good life choices, and whose parents made good life choices, have a good life. Freedom includes the freedom to succeed or fail on chance and on merit. Few things annoy me as much as people who refuse to work to provide for themselves.

No. You have no idea who I am. I've had it pretty good, despite still not being born into a very wealthy family. We've always had just enough to get by. What you have to consider is that there are MILLIONS and MILLIONS of people who have it worse off than me. I've managed to make it through college despite everything that happened to me, and now I'm going to be attending grad school. At no point did I "refuse to work to provide for myself" - I COULDN'T physically work or take part in society because I was mentally crippled. Not only will I be taking care of myself from now on, when I graduate with my MCS I will be making more than enough to take care of things.

Most people don't "choose" the life they're born into. Most people can't just "pull themselves up by their bootstraps". They need assistance. They need support. And there's no reason we can't give it to them, other than greed.

Republicans slash funding for arts, for education, for welfare, etc...., all of which are INVESTMENTS in our SOCIETY. That give a RETURN on their VALUE. When you educate your populace, you reduce crime, you increase quality of life, and you increase lifetime income. Which of those things are bad?

There's more than enough food in the world to feed everyone, yet millions of people suffer from hunger. There's more than enough wealth to take care of everyone's medical needs and shelter requirements, yet people go with out physicians and medical care, without prescriptions, without a place to live.

I find it personally quite ironic that the people with the least are the most willing to be charitable, while the people with the most like to squander everything to themselves. Poor people are more charitable because they understand what it's like to be poor.

As for you raynebc, you're a selfish toad who has no consideration for anyone but yourself.

DanielH

1. If you have a new battery, it's not the alternator. The battery would be able start it. The alternator is used to power the car when running and recharge the battery.

2. The battery might not have enough cranking amps to power the starter. However, civics have smaller engines and don't need as much as a larger car/truck. So I doubt this was the case.

3. The starter might be bad.

I'm thinking it's the starter.

Erin Maus

Car problems!

It was raining heavy one day and my power steering went out in a park lot (high standing water) + the battery light came on. I'm guessing the serpentine belt was slipping? If that sounds right, how expensive is that to fix? I have a 2007 Honda Accord.

Eric Johnson
DanielH said:

1. If you have a new battery, it's not the alternator. The battery would be able start it. The alternator is used to power the car when running and recharge the battery.

2. The battery might not have enough cranking amps to power the starter. However, civics have smaller engines and don't need as much as a larger car/truck. So I doubt this was the case.

3. The starter might be bad.

I'm thinking it's the starter.

1. Thanks for confirming.

2. The new battery's cranking amps surpasses the minimum required for the vehicle to start, so it's not this.

3. My vehicle died while driving, so the starter shouldn't have any impact there, should it? Although it could be that both the old battery and the starter have gone bad.

bamccaig said:

Basic checklist of things required to start:

Fuel, and working fuel pump to deliver it to the engine.

Oxygen, and a clean air filter that doesn't restrict the flow of air too much and keeps harmful particles out.

Starter to crank the engine.

Spark plug to ignite the fuel/air mixture.

Electricity to power the starter, and arc the tips of the spark plugs.

Thanks for the checklist. I'm not knowledgeable enough about cars to mess with most of those things, but I can at least check the air filter.

My dad is going to take a look at it on Monday. He used to be a mechanic, so hopefully he'll figure it out.

bamccaig

Oh heck yeah, if your dad is mechanical he should be able to figure this out. My dad is also my go-to mechanic because he's a millwright (his job is to fix all the machinery in a steel plant) and he has been working on his own vehicles since he was a teenager. There isn't a whole lot that he can't do.

In other news, if you didn't surrender your battery when you bought the new one I wonder if you could return the new battery after confirming the old one is still functional.. But I think they usually have a disposal program in place and like to take your old battery from you. In which case, oh well, now you have a new battery.

Append:

Also, Edgar, well said.

Eric Johnson
bamccaig said:

In other news, if you didn't surrender your battery when you bought the new one I wonder if you could return the new battery after confirming the old one is still functional.. But I think they usually have a disposal program in place and like to take your old battery from you. In which case, oh well, now you have a new battery.

I tested my old battery using a multimeter, and it's definitely dying. It's like 7 years old, so it was time for a new one anyway. And yes, there's a disposal program. I had to pay like a $20 fee when I bought the new one, but I'll get that money back when I return the old one.

bamccaig

It was raining heavy one day and my power steering went out in a park lot (high standing water) + the battery light came on. I'm guessing the serpentine belt was slipping? If that sounds right, how expensive is that to fix? I have a 2007 Honda Accord.

High standing water? Like high enough to reach the engine compartment?

If the serpentine belt was slipping due to rain I'd expect it to resolve itself once the water evaporates? Have you tried it again?

If the water is getting in through the hood then perhaps it could short electrical systems. That too I would expect to resolve unless residue built up from the rain. In that case, perhaps contact cleaner could help? I recently had to hit my motorcycle kill switch with contact cleaner because it was causing connectivity issues and sore balls. :-X

I can't imagine that would impact the power steering unless as you said the belt was slipping, but I think they're on there tight enough that even if they slip some they should eventually get the pump moving. Perhaps if there was a leak in the system, and water leaked into the system, it could reduce the hydraulic capabilities of the fluid, but that sounds pretty far out there unless the car is in really rough shape.

Erin Maus

Thanks!

1) It wasn't high enough to reach the engine.
2) The issue was only for like 10-20 seconds.
3) The car is in great shape.

I'm taking it in for regular maintenance (oil change, etc) next week anyway but I just wanted an opinion or two.

MiquelFire

Any word Eric?

Eric Johnson

Any word Eric?

My dad took a look at it this morning and thinks the distributor is the problem. It spins, but none of the spark plugs are sparking (he even replaced them with working spark plugs to be sure). He's researching the problem now.

Edit:
A new distributor is on its way. Hopefully my car will be back up and running by the end of the week. ;D

Also, what do you guys think about Nvidia's new RTX 20 series of GPUs?

Another edit:
My dad replaced the distributor and my car starts again! :D

Bruce Perry

Achoo!

bamccaig

Bless you!

Chris Katko

Damn you Christian supremacists, bam! Keep your religion out of my bodily functions!

;)

Also, showing how much NY liberals HATE Christians, now Mike Pence has literally been called a "christian supremecist." Because you know, the implication is white supremacist but he's never shown any racist comments so we'll just change the word until our enemies DO apply.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/08/23/mike-pence-book-calls-vice-president-christian-supremacist/1062696002/

Kind of like "punch a Nazi" but then they blur the meaning of "nazi" until it means "Anyone we hate."

p.s. And I don't even necessarily like Pence. I just dislike disingenuous reporting.

bamccaig

Keep your religion out of my bodily functions!

This calls for a song!

video

(Not in context, just vaguely related and fun!)

Edgar Reynaldo

Haha trying to reply to this thread on my phone thrashed google chrome. Made it twitch and convulse like a fish out of water. Can you believe that when you reply to a thread it loads the ENTIRE THREAD beneath in the thread review box?

I have nothing useful to add. Don't mind the heathens, they were born that way. ;)

Chris Katko

WHAT HAPPENED TO THIS THREAD?!

Erin Maus

WHAT HAPPENED TO THIS THREAD?!

As Matthew Leverton said in the famous movie based on this thread...

Quote:

Dread it. Run from it. Destiny arrives all the same.

- Matthew Leverton

:o

...

I was contracted by a department (the Funeral Services Department) at my school to make a website for them and I finished it Friday. It was my first time making a website from scratch! Deploying it was a total bitch. But now I have to wait on them to contact the web department or MIS (the IT department) to get a subdomain so I can add SSL and Recaptcha support and finish the deploy, then transfer ownership of the server from Amazon.

So that was a pretty cool experience! They even mentioned it during Fall convocation (which is just instructors/staff only because it's a small school).

Eric Johnson

Don't forget to add a backdoor before you transfer ownership! ;)

Erin Maus

I'm not Zuckerberg! :(

...

Speaking of Matthew Leverton how can I contact him? I'm aware PM doesn't work so well. I want to change my name on the forums but there's a typo in the username I made so many years ago (hence why I use my real name). I should've been smart like Bruce Perry and used a pseudonym.

Edgar Reynaldo

You can try email, but he never replied to my email. I have proof he reads PMs though.

EDIT
Haha, no one will ever guess my Real NameTM is Edgar Reynaldo

Eric Johnson

Speaking of Matthew Leverton how can I contact him? I'm aware PM doesn't work so well. I want to change my name on the forums

I'm in the same boat. I messaged him more than a month ago about changing my name, but he never saw it. I recently messaged him again telling him to forget my last message. :P

You can try email, but he never replied to my email. I have proof he reads PMs though.

If a message still appears in your outbox, the recipient has yet to read it... I think.

Quote:

Haha, no one will ever guess my Real NameTM is Edgar Reynaldo

*Edgar Ravioli

Also: is your profile picture of the girl from Sucker Punch?

bamccaig

Changing your name is generally not allowed without good reason. Being that his life is somewhat busy, it's likely when a.cc "business" comes up his brain quickly defaults and he simply ignores your request rather than replying back that it's not allowed. If you've had this same name for a long time there's a good chance he'll just deny your request anyway. You can always try again at the risk of angering him with your spam.

Eric Johnson

I bet he'd do it for a Scooby Snack.

Edgar Reynaldo
Captain Blob said:

Scooby Snack

EDIT
Use the source, Luke.

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PHaIL
GIPHY won't give you a gif anymore now all they let you have is a webp.

this thread is killing my phone it's a new g6 I like my old Motorola Droid turbo 2 better.

Erin Maus

There's a legit reason I'd like my name changed on here, and it's probably obvious to Matthew why when I sent the request, but of course it's up to him.

Chris Katko

There's a legit reason I'd like my name changed on here, and it's probably obvious to Matthew why when I sent the request, but of course it's up to him.

Does... does it involve pronouns?

Erin Maus

Does... does it involve pronouns?

Let's see, my pronouns are he/him/his, so you figure it out. ::)

tbh I prefer they/them/their but no one here is gonna respect that probably

Edgar Reynaldo

*Edgar Ravioli said:

b77688ea00e324b8c3e190cb298eab54b7056a71.jpg

Also: is your profile picture of the girl from Sucker Punch?

Yeah, that's Baby Doll ;)

NemoNameless Sucker Punch Prints.

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{"name":"suckerpunchcontactsheet_by_nemonameless-d60jgtc.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/b\/7\/b7cf577dda03d1eb03a4109053c62f7b.jpg","w":1280,"h":1414,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/b\/7\/b7cf577dda03d1eb03a4109053c62f7b"}suckerpunchcontactsheet_by_nemonameless-d60jgtc.jpgContact Sheet

EDIT
Also, https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/615770/1039050#target

Neil Roy

Hmmm... name change you say? Good idea, nobody will ever recognize me now! :P

Erin Maus

The problem is my login username has a typo I made when I registered it, and it was too late when I noticed. :'(

raynebc

tbh I prefer they/them/their but no one here is gonna respect that probably

Unless we're missing something, you're one person instead of multiple people.

Erin Maus
raynebc said:

Unless we're missing something, you're one person instead of multiple people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

Fuck you. If you want to troll me don't try and be pedantic and be wrong, thanks.

One small reason I want my name changed is so I'm not associated with people like you.

Edgar Reynaldo

Tt
They is traditionally associated with multiple persons but it can be used to convey the meaning of a singular person as well. Ask Aaron they know what they're talking about. See there it's pretty awkward though, so I'd say ixnay on the whole thing.

raynebc

I knew Aaron would blow a gasket. I have no respect for that hateful person.

bamccaig

I think singular they is only appropriate when you don't know the gender, or the gender is a variable (referring to an undetermined individual). And typically we're referring to the physical machine, not to their operating system, because we exist in a physical world. Our brains cannot interact with one another directly. We must interact through our physical form.

I just have more important things to do with my limited chemical thought cycles than to create a 7 billion record hash map of pronouns to people.

If I see a Macbook running Linux I'm probably still going to call it a Mac. If I see a Dell running OS X I'm probably still going to call it a PC.

If transgenders want for the majority of people to accept them as they are then expecting everybody else to do a lot of extra work on their behalf is the wrong way to go about it. You should instead make it easier on other people. You should be yourselves understanding and tolerant. If a person looks male then we're all going to assume they are male. That's not malice. That's just nature.

And identifying gender matters for real world encounters. It heavily influences everything about a person. For starters, their physical frame, size, strength, speed, and their emotional stability. There are no guarantees, but when we lack knowledge about the world around us we must do the best with what information we do have. Which means making assumptions about everything around us.

I do not care, nor should I care, about somebody getting offended about that. In fact, I find the very thought of it offensive.

Erin Maus

I'm not transgender. I'm non-binary. I look feminine some days, masculine others. I honestly don't care what pronouns someone uses unless they're being malicious about it. I prefer they/them/their but only close friends and more... caring? people will respect that, I understand others won't and I don't really care.

raynebc, you're free to believe what you want. I'm not going to be polite when you're trolling me. You (probably) knew they can be singular but you just had to be an ass about it. You guys always antagonize me first and then expect me to be polite, it's hypocritical you know.

Edgar Reynaldo

I actually should apologize. raynebc probably worked hard for his money and earned every cent. So it's his right to be as 'greedy' with it as he deems fit.

Aaron, I think he was just being pedantic. Don't always jump to conclusions. It's not quite trolling if you're trolling just for trolling's sake. I think that was like a triple positive or something. Won't the universe blow up now?

raynebc

I don't expect Aaron to be polite, but being so frequently hostile doesn't engender respect. If one is so quick to fly off the handle for the slightest of sarcastic jabs, one's skin is rather thin to be spending much time on the Internet these days.

bamccaig

...understand others won't and I don't really care.

I don't believe that you actually want to discuss this topic here. We're going to play a simple little game. Below you will find two doors. The first one leads to a safe space. The second one leads to an open discussion. Choose a door.

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Do you honestly believe others should respect that?

If I say I prefer to be called "God" instead of any pronouns should you call me God?

Would you feel comfortable doing so?

What if I prefer to be called "RAPE!" instead? It must not be whispered or spoken, but screamed. At least, if you intend to respect my wishes. Is that OK?

What does any of it matter anyway? If you are confused about your gender why must the rest of us be? If you're dressed feminine enough to convince me that you're a woman then congratulations, I'll probably use female pronouns. If you look like a man in a dress I'm probably going to try to avoid contact because you'll look a little bit unstable to me, but if forced to interact I'll probably be using male pronouns by nature.

I don't understand what could be offensive about being called what you appear to be.

It's like dressing up like a police officer and getting offended when somebody calls you a cop or asks for your help. You might not actually be a cop, but if you look like a cop you can't blame people for mistaking you for one.

raynebc said:

...being so frequently hostile doesn't engender respect.

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Edgar Reynaldo

@bamccaig,

bamccaig said:

raynebc said:

...being so frequently hostile doesn't engender respect.

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Clearly, that's a POTAyTO with a face. I can only assume you meant to call my mother a potato. I challenge you to a duel!

Neil Roy
raynebc said:

Unless we're missing something, you're one person instead of multiple people.

Agreed, though it is often used when you don't know what gender the person is, I still don't feel it is an appropriate use of the word, and many object to a singular use according to Webster's.

I feel using "he" to refer to someone when you do not know their gender is perfectly fine until such a time as you do. it's only in our modern ultra-liberal, snowflake society that people blow a gasket over words or gender.

For example (and I am not trying to start a Bible debate here) in the bible, it uses "man" to refer to both genders. Many people do not know that. It will also use "he" when being general about a commandment for example when it obviously applies to everyone. And I don't see a problem with that.

I really don't see a problem with "they" when gender is unknown, it feels like slang to me, but most will understand what you are saying which is, in the end, what is important. But I have to wonder why someone would jump through hoops to change their name in order that people wouldn't know their gender, seems a tad silly to me, but to each his own.

Eric Johnson

Alternative solution: just drop pronouns (aside from personal pronouns) altogether and instead use names alone. For example, Japanese already does this to a large extent (but it gets away with it due to some language specific stuff that really doesn't translate well into English). It would get pretty ridiculous though. :P

I saw Megan today. She was out walking her dog. I waved to her, but she didn't see me.

I saw Megan today. Megan was out walking Megan's dog. I waved to Megan, but Megan didn't see me.

bamccaig

I suppose the advantage would be it's less ambiguous. But it's also longer and more repetition. It would be better for machines, but worse for humans. And we're humans.

raynebc
NiteHackr said:

I feel using "he" to refer to someone when you do not know their gender is perfectly fine until such a time as you do.

Don't you know defaulting to a male pronoun is patriarchal abuse? </sarcasm>

Edit: I also tend to use "guys" as a gender-less term when addressing friends, but at work I use the term "folks" lest I melt any snowflakes.

Chris Katko
NiteHackr said:

Agreed, though it is often used when you don't know what gender the person

It's actually a fundamental problem with the post-modernists / new progressives worldview.

You don't know what pronouns to use before you talk to someone. So it's literally impossible to act in a way that won't offend SOMEONE.

And as we know, causing offense is a micro-aggression and capable of systematic oppression that keeps victim groups from succeeding. (You think I'm joking or making a point yet. I'm not.)

So their "solution" is to ASK SOMEONE THEIR PRONOUNS. That's right. The VERY FIRST THING you say to a new person is... essentially... "Who do you like to have sex with?" . One of the most personal things you could possibly ask someone.

And that's another thing. Okay, you can "feel" feminine or masculine one day or the next. Fine. I accept that. Except the SAME progressives have been telling us for YEARS that gender is a SPECTRUM so that EVERYONE has masculine and feminine qualities (remember! "There's no biological basis for gender!" ;D). So now you're "REINFORCING gender stereotypes" by assuming females act in a way that's "feminine"--otherwise how could you act non-binary (not adhering to the two "real" genders) if the two genders don't even exist!

Oh god, my head hurts.

And again, Aaron, do whatever you want, feel whatever you want. I earnestly hope you live a happy, successful life. But when I see stuff that doesn't make sense, I'm going to talk about it. But if you're going to proudly be a communist, or non-binary, or any other label, you can't really get pissed when people poke fun at it. Any more than Christians have to take a joke about believing in a guy who can walk on water coming down from Heaven and saving us from a mortal sin that their God gave us in the first place.

MiquelFire

Found out about this site today: https://monday.com/

I wonder if whoever made that (or at least chose the current name) was here or another programming forum in which Monday projects was a thing?

Chris Katko

This one genuinely makes me happy.

http://dogeweather.com/

Neil Roy

So their "solution" is to ASK SOMEONE THEIR PRONOUNS.

Not going to happen with me. If you're a male, you get called "he" and "him" from me, if you're a female, you get called "she" and "her".

To state otherwise is to go along with a lie, which I will not do. I won't lie for anyone, for any reason. I purposely vowed to stop all forms of lying back in 1998 and haven't since, as hard as that is to believe. Never been much of a liar to start but, for personal reasons, I will not, for anyone. I had one friend who wanted me to lie to his wife about some beer he bought, to say it was mine that I bought it, I refused to lie for him, but simply didn't say anything, but knew she would figure it out when I left their place without the beer. :)

Canada has laws that are trying to force me to call people what they wish, I will not. I will take jailtime before I lie. If you're a male who thinks you're a female, you need to seek a mental health professional.

Edgar Reynaldo
NiteHackr said:

Not going to happen with me. If you're a male, you get called "he" and "him" from me, if you're a female, you get called "she" and "her".

To state otherwise is to go along with a lie, which I will not do. I won't lie for anyone, for any reason. I purposely vowed to stop all forms of lying back in 1998 and haven't since, as hard as that is to believe. Never been much of a liar to start but, for personal reasons, I will not, for anyone.

Like most people who post on the internet I feel obligated to chime in here.

NiteHackr, sometimes your closed-mindedness amazes me.

First of all, 'sex' aka physical gender in this case is determined by many things. First by your chromosomes, whether you're XY (male) or XX (female). That is determined by the father's contribution, either X or Y. The mother can only donate an X chromosome, so that has no bearing on the sex of the child.

Physical gender is also determined by hormones. Both those inside the body, and in the case of a child in a mother's womb, her own hormones. It has been shown that children in the womb are affected by the mother's hormones. It can influence the sexual and mental development of the child.

Pesticide has been shown to cause male frogs to turn into females. It raises their estrogen levels until they develop into fully functional female frogs.

What about hermaphrodites? What pronoun do you use for them?

And that, that's just biology.

There's more to it though, namely psychology comes into play. People have in their own mind a gender image that may not conform with their physical reality. They may identify more closely with the opposite sex. They may not physically desire the opposite sex. It's not so cut and dry as M/F anymore.

So there's the mental aspect of it too.

I personally know someone who was born male and is in the process of 'becoming' female. Let's say their name used to be Gaylord (no pun intended). They now wish to be called Gabrielle. They also wish for persons to refer to them as she/her. They have been taking hormones I'm sure and 'she' has developed breasts. They also wear somewhat feminine clothing markers. Would it be a lie to call her 'her'? Personally, I think the whole thing is a tragic fuck up of nature, and that you should be comfortable being what you were born as. But that doesn't respect her wishes. Her psychology is female, her physical gender is female, and she wants to be called by a female name using female pronouns. At this point, it's no longer a lie to say she is physically and mentally female.

So NiteHackr, you may want to rethink your narrow point of view. I'm not asking you to lie, but to acknowledge that other people have different points of view, and we should do our best to respect them.

Now you can go and say that they're physically or mentally ill, but it's not really a disease. It's a biological and mental state of mind that simply differs from the norm.

Try to have a little more understanding, and don't be so completely deluded that you continue to think you're right about everything.

My 2¢

Neil Roy

NiteHackr, sometimes your closed-mindedness amazes me.

Closed minded because I won't call a man a woman? You're absolutely right! My mind is closed to lies and deceptions and locked shut.

If you want to believe a lie, that's your business, but don't expect me to join in with the stupidity.

video

bamccaig

At this point, it's no longer a lie to say she is physically and mentally female.

That's a pretty bold statement. I cannot definitively refute it without evidence either way, but I can say that there are some aspects to your body's development that cannot be easily reversed.

I am very amused by a debate on the subject of transsexuality featuring "Ben Shapiro" and a random, allegedly ex-military, transsexual:

video

If you watch the video around half way through Ben Shapiro basically just says the fact is this person is still a dude. And the guy looks at him and says if you don't cut that out you'll be going home in an ambulance. And it's the most self-defeating moment in the world because it's clear in that moment I think to anybody that it's a man talking, not a woman. A woman would never speak to a man like that so seriously. Not because of some patriarchy BS, but because a woman is simply more weak and fragile by nature (there are freak exceptions, but their biology is atypical), and if it was actually a woman instead of a physical man taking female hormones (if even) they simply wouldn't be built to make that threat. That person is obviously very confused if they believe that's how a woman reacts to those situations. Instead, it was a very male response. A threat of physical violence (with full intent on backing it up without hiding behind other men).

Hormones definitely play a large role in human behavior. I've seen first hand the dramatic changes in personality that changes in hormone levels can have. However, there's no way to convert a male body into a female body. They develop differently. Unless the biology is fucked up from the start the physical body will develop one way, and some aspects of it cannot be reversed. You can play some subtle tricks. Pump a man full of estrogen and he might start to develop breasts. But he'll still have broader shoulders, thicker bones, and a narrow pelvis; at least without plastic surgery to artificially change it. Ultimately, the frame is male, even if the brain is some unpredictable mix, and perhaps you've gotten some kind of breast development going. I'm unconvinced that 20 years of developing as a man can be undermined with a shortage of testosterone or a constant dose of estrogen either. You certainly can change behavior in major ways, but I don't think the end result is 100% feminine. It's some bastardization which will vary case by case.

There's a known transsexual that I've encountered in life. It's female to male. They actually do a pretty good job of pulling it off. If it wasn't for being told I might not have realized it was a transsexual. I definitely would have realized that they were more feminine than most males, but then I can be mildly feminine at times too.
And that happens. So I might not have even figured it out. Nice enough person from the odd encounter. But it gets juicier. This person is married to a woman. Real as far as I can tell, but probably on the LGBTQ+ spectrum. Probably gay/queer anyway. And obviously tolerant of transsexuals. In any case, from a previous relationship (obviously) this woman has a daughter. She's about 20 years old now. And the grape vine says that the transsexual has physically assaulted the daughter on several occasions. Now, it's hearsay to me so I can't really take a stance on it. Sometimes women drive you crazy, and push your buttons, and he-said she-said is always a gray area. And yet, you can just imagine the havoc that would be caused pumping a female body and brain full of testosterone.

Plenty of men (I certainly have had my moments) have trouble controlling themselves from their hormones (and visa-versa for women and their hormones, x1000). It's not entirely surprising to learn of a transsexual man losing control in the odd moment, but the implication is far more than just yelling, and actual physical assault. Apparently the mom does nothing. Typical. Though again, hearsay, so maybe it's just a vengeful teen lashing out at her fucked up parental situation. In other words, I try not to judge with what little information I have. That said, it does give you more to think about with regards to just how unstable these things can be. It's not like a switch that you can flip to change sides. Biology doesn't work that way.

I would think it's easier to change your mind than it is to change your body, but I don't think we're at a point where the science takes a side yet. If anything, if your mind thinks one thing and your body another thing, then I'd imagine you either had a fucked up childhood that left you confused, or your brain chemistry is atypical/fucked, or you're inventing creative/extreme solutions to other common problems that many of us face. That's OK to be different. We all have our issues. No need to feel so left out. But I think that going the transsexual or even "nonbinary" route should be a last resort because it's very easy to get confused, and if you don't need to be confused then it's not worth being confused. The evidence shows that the consequences can be serious.

I'm thankful to have grown up before this wave of SJW's started to gain a voice. I cannot imagine growing up in this day and age. I was not your typical manly-man jock type. Obviously. Like many of you probably, I was a geek. I liked playing video games or using computers, I was introverted and shy. With the wrong mentorship you might have been able to convince a young me that I was "transsexual" or "nonbinary". I'm quite confident that I'm not, and thankful that I didn't have people trying to demonize cis-gendered, white people; or glorify homosexuality, transsexuality, or "nonbinary" designations. I believe wholeheartedly in homosexuality, and no matter where you land on the whole LGBTQ+ spectrum have at her as long as you aren't hurting anyone else. But I don't think it's appropriate to champion that way of life. Most people will simply be more happy being "normal". There's no need to recruit. The people that need it will find it out of necessity. And you shouldn't wish that lifestyle on anyone that doesn't want or need to have it. Things are pretty stable these days in my 30's. Your teenage years and early 20s are just chaos with hormones though. Sometimes I'm still amazed I made it through it. I don't think people should be making decisions like this until they approach their 30's, at least. In my experience, that's when the brain chemistry starts to stabilize and hopefully your mind matures and you can make such a decision a bit more seriously. 18 or 22 definitely too young to know. 12 or 8? Get the fuck away from those children with your crazy talk.

I do think that over time hormone treatments and lifestyle changes could somewhat transform a man into a woman. Hell, some gay men are so feminine they might as well be women, even though they're very much still men. Behavior can be altered. There are still limitations with the physical structure, but those can be worked around. But I don't think it's right to consider a transsexual the same as a male or female. We have a different word for a reason. It's different. It's more complicated. And that's that.

Edgar Reynaldo
NiteHackr said:

You're absolutely right! My mind is closed to lies and deceptions and locked shut.

Okay smartie, so answer my question. How do you refer to a hermaphrodite? They're neither Male nor Female, but both. If everyone is either one or the other, as if you could tell without taking off their clothes with 100% certainty, then how should they be referred to? Which one are they? Do they get to choose? How is that any different from someone else choosing to be referred to as the other gender. It's no different.

raynebc

If a person's biological sex is already known, it's fully reasonable to use the corresponding pronouns. If a person's sex is not already known, but they overwhelmingly seem to be a male or a female, it's reasonable to use the corresponding pronouns. If a person is known to be trans, an interacting person can honor the requested pronouns as a courtesy, but requiring such courtesies by threat of law is immoral and violates the principles of free speech. People who are truly hermaphrodites have the most biological justification for deciding which gender to be, since genitals are one of if not the single most classic criteria for determining gender.

Eric Johnson

Now you can go and say that they're physically or mentally ill, but it's not really a disease. It's a biological and mental state of mind that simply differs from the norm.

Where does one draw the line between being mentally different versus being mentally ill? I think we can all agree that schizophrenia is a mental illness, for example, but would you say that schizophrenia is just a "mental state of mind that simply differs from the norm"? Also: how does one define mental illness versus mental disorder. Wouldn't a disorder be anything that goes against the norm? In this case, wouldn't being transgender be a mental disorder/illness? I'm just curious how you separate the two.

Erin Maus

There's already a definition for mental illness: when a mental difference causes distress or disability.

Gender dysphoria is a mental illness, the solution is hormones and/or gender reassignment surgery. AFAIK you can be transgender without suffering dysphoria (i.e., you're happy fitting in the role you want without changing your physical appearance) it's just rare or less common, hence it's not a mental illness.

A person with hallucinations and delusions is not necessarily schizophrenic if it doesn't impair them or cause distress. For example, in non-Western cultures, people with positive, helpful, positive, or non-significant hallucinations and delusions are much more common than those with negative, distressing ones, and thus while they may have schizophrenia, it's not really a mental illness. However, in my case, my delusions and hallucinations cause me distress and impair my ability to function, hence why it's a mental illness.

This is per the APA per the mental health professionals that have helped me get better.

And again, Aaron, do whatever you want, feel whatever you want. I earnestly hope you live a happy, successful life.

I appreciate that, but I already am living a happy (and I'd say successful) life. My mental health has greatly improved in the last years thanks to the dedicated work of my therapists and doctors; I'm on my third semester at school; I have a job in software development; I have a car and some financial security; etc. If everything keeps up I'll graduate and nab a mid-level software dev position in the Research Triangle right out of college...

re: gender roles, 1) I don't believe gender roles don't exist, they're just functions of society not biology 2) I do believe stereotypes about stepping out of gender roles are bad; you don't have to be female or gay or metrosexual (whatever that means) to enjoy cooking and cleaning and hygiene and fashion or whatever and vice versa for traditionally male activities 3) It makes me happy presenting as female or male or inbetween as I see fit. It's a sort of freedom that can't be described.

raynebc said:

genitals are one of if not the single most classic criteria for determining gender.

gender != sex; // xxx: except in casual parlance

Gender is the social (i.e., changing over time and between cultures) aspects of roles generally associated with a specific sex. For example, the color pink being feminine is a social thing because it changed and thus is gender related not sex: https://www.npr.org/2014/04/01/297159948/girls-are-taught-to-think-pink-but-that-wasnt-always-so

Languages have grammatical genders for objects, for example; and the genders are different between languages. Furthermore, some cultures are matriarchal, some cultures have more than two genders, and so on. So gender isn't some fixed idea like sex is.

In academic circles this usage (gender -> social, sex -> biological) predates the modern social movements by decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender#Etymology_and_usage

Neil Roy

Okay smartie, so answer my question. How do you refer to a hermaphrodite?

"smartie"? Can't respond without being rude?

Anyhow, if you were to test a hermaphrodite, you would find they are either male or female, just that they have some of the other gender's parts.

What most people do not understand is that we are ALL born with BOTH parts in the womb, but as we develop, the male or female parts develop and the rest go away. Obviously with hermaphrodites this doesn't happen properly, but that doesn't mean they are not either male or female still. Just that they have some parts from the other gender that weren't properly absorbed at birth. This wouldn't apply to breasts and the like, but only the reproductive organs.

There is no in between. If tested, you will find they ARE one or the other, only with some parts from the opposite as we ALL have in the womb, but just didn't go away.

A male that is dressing, acting like a female that maybe had some silicon implants shoved under their chest to appear like breasts (REAL breasts can produce milk to feed a baby) and had their penis removed and surgery to make what appears to be a vagina, but in fact is just their skin cut open and formed to appear like a vagina, it does not function as a real one, and they cannot bear a child.... such a male, is still a male. They have been surgically altered to appear as a female, but it is all just an elaborate deception.

Most of the time I can tell them apart, especially if they start talking. In any event, even if I cannot, surgically altering your skin and shoving a sack of silicone under your chest does not make you a female. It makes you a man with a mental illness that needs to be treated.

These are the facts. I await more insults for my opinion.

raynebc said:

If a person's biological sex is already known, it's fully reasonable to use the corresponding pronouns. If a person's sex is not already known, but they overwhelmingly seem to be a male or a female, it's reasonable to use the corresponding pronouns. If a person is known to be trans, an interacting person can honor the requested pronouns as a courtesy, but requiring such courtesies by threat of law is immoral and violates the principles of free speech. People who are truly hermaphrodites have the most biological justification for deciding which gender to be, since genitals are one of if not the single most classic criteria for determining gender.

Perfectly stated. I 100% agree.

Polybios

Gender is the social (i.e., changing over time and between cultures) aspects of roles generally associated with a specific sex. For example, the color pink being feminine is a social thing because it changed and thus is gender related not sex.

A friend who studied psychology told me that experiments with primates had shown that females preferred playing with dolls while males preferred playing with cars. I cannot remember exactly if the same applied for colors (pink), but I tend to think so.

Anyway, I we hereby declare that I we want to be referred to exclusively by using the expression "their majesties". If you do not do it, you exhibit hurtful and offensive behavior.

Erin Maus
NiteHackr said:

It makes you a man with a mental illness that needs to be treated.

They do receive treatment. Oftentimes it's gender reassignment surgery or hormone therapy. I don't want to use the appeal to authority fallacy but do you think you're better versed at treating this than the APA..?

...

(Not aimed at Neil):

Some of these points are a good read: https://www.apa.org/practice/guidelines/transgender.pdf

If nothing else read guideline 1 (pg. 4-5 on the PDF)... A lot of it is pointless for you or me but it shines light on what psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, and health care professionals practice.

Polybios said:

A friend who studied psychology told me that experiments with primates had shown that females preferred playing with dolls while males preferred playing with cars. I cannot remember exactly if the same applied for colors (pink), but I tend to think so.

If colors were associated with sex, then why did pink only recently become associated with women exclusively?

I'm not saying there's no differences in behavior between sexes and this usually correlates to gender roles, but what are social constructs and what are biological functions isn't something you can say with any reasonable certainty currently, if ever.

Anecdotally and kind of cliche, but I literally played with Barbies when I was younger frequently. Not as much as LEGO or other "boy toys" (that sounds dirty ;D), but often enough that I had family discourage me. (Said family also stopped watching the NBC 'Brave New World' TV movie where one of the male characters [iirc it was Leonard Nimoy's] wore a skirt, well).

raynebc

Gender and sex being different is a relatively modern concept in gender theory. Even if I were to agree to that, of which I am skeptical, it doesn't change the meaning of objective words like man and woman. "Male" and "female" could arguably be subjective terms, but "man" and "woman" are based on biology. Many gender stereotypes are surely socially taught, such as pink being feminine whereas in the past it was as (manly) as other colors. Other stereotypes, such as men generally preferring to work more with things and women generally preferring to work more with people are based on biological tendencies. Those tendencies are largely/mostly the reason for the disparity in the career choices men and women make and thus the disparity in pay (ie. the "gender pay gap").

bamccaig
NiteHackr said:

...the male or female parts develop and the rest go away. Obviously with hermaphrodites this doesn't happen properly, but that doesn't mean they are not either male or female still. Just that they have some parts from the other gender that weren't properly absorbed at birth.

video

My understanding is that the male and female genitalia basically develop from the same biological material/framework, but normally chromosomes and hormones drive what ultimately develops. Basically, hormones determine if you develop a normal penis or a vagina, or something in between. Even if the gametes that originally met have well defined chromosomes, you can fuck with the process somewhat (assuming you had the technical know-how). To say that we all develop with BOTH and eventually one of them disappears just sounds super ignorant. I don't know where you got this idea from, but I definitely want sources for that. It runs completely contrary to everything else I've ever heard or read, not to mention to logic. Why the fuck would the human body spend extra time developing parts that it will ultimately throw away? Particularly if you believe in a supreme omnipotent God/creator. ::)

Append:

Polybios said:

I cannot remember exactly if the same applied for colors (pink), but I tend to think so.

Actually until like the 1930s or so pink was considered a masculine color, and I think maybe blue was feminine? I'm less certain about blue. But either way, pink eventually was reassigned. That much is entirely socially defined. Which makes sense. Pink isn't very common in our natural environment anyway. It was probably reassigned to women because they're more vain and since pink is so "loud" it makes it easier to attract them for commerce. Prior to women having spending power, let alone the majority of spending power, there would have been no reason for pink to be assigned to them.

Erin Maus
raynebc said:

Gender and sex being different is a relatively modern concept in gender theory. Even if I were to agree to that, of which I am skeptical, it doesn't change the meaning of objective words like man and woman. "Male" and "female" could arguably be subjective terms, but "man" and "woman" are based on biology. Many gender stereotypes are surely socially taught, such as pink being feminine whereas in the past it was as (manly) as other colors. Other stereotypes, such as men generally preferring to work more with things and women generally preferring to work more with people are based on biological tendencies. Those tendencies are largely/mostly the reason for the disparity in the career choices men and women make and thus the disparity in pay (ie. the "gender pay gap").

I'm not arguing against any of that... we actually mostly agree here. I just think it's the polite thing to just refer to someone by female pronouns if they want (or vice versa male), and adjust language as necessary, to be more inclusive. Mistakes happen but if you try it's really not an issue from personal experience...

The bit about women/men career choices I'm unsure about, but it seems like a reasonable explanation; the wage gap for me is more about socialist viewpoints rather than gender ones.

bamccaig

...the wage gap for me is more about socialist viewpoints rather than gender ones.

Please elaborate. This makes no sense to me.

raynebc

Maybe something about power struggles between men and women, and the latter being wronged is why they don't have an equal amount of the money. I don't believe that is the case in the modern Western world. Freedom to choose your job (instead of the government enforcing strict quotas for every profession) means there will not be equal outcomes, and this has been seen to be the case in countries where women have equal right to opportunity. Dr. Jordan Peterson talks about this quite a bit.

Erin Maus

Basically jobs under capitalism are compensated by profit motive, among other factors, not how important they are. If there was a major, national teacher shortage, for example, it would cause negative impacts on children that would permanently cause disadvantages throughout their lives. The same cannot be said for Apple engineers; the latest iPhone being delayed wouldn't have much of an impact on anyone but Apple's bottom line.

So while one job has a greater impact (teacher vs Apple developer), one creates more profit for investors and is compensated more.

...I think teacher may be a bad example, because y'know it's usually a government job and you can't quite "own the means of production" of a government school in comparable manner to owning the means of production of Apple, but I just woke up and can't think of something better. ???

Edgar Reynaldo

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=sexual+development+of+fetus+timeline

3rd result : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_differentiation_in_humans

Sex development starts after fertilisation and continues into young adulthood. The main determinants of sex developement are: chromosomal sex, gonadal sex and phenotypic sex. Chromosomal sex is determined at the time of conception- that is when the baby is conceived, a chromosome from the sperm cell, either X or Y, fuses with the X chromosome in the egg cell. Gonadal sex refers to the assignment of gonads, that is the testis or ovaries, depending on which genes are expressed. Phenotypic sex refers to the structures of the external and internal genitalia.[3]

Wow. That was hard. You know, research. ;)

So now, with two sexes, and three physical sex types, we have 23 actual sexes. ;) That's 8. But we're all strictly M/F, right?

And for the last time, assert(sex != gender);.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=sex+versus+gender+role

1st Result : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_gender_distinction

The distinction between sex and gender differentiates a person's biological sex (the anatomy of an individual's reproductive system, and secondary sex characteristics) from that person's gender, which can refer to either social roles based on the sex of the person (gender role) or personal identification of one's own gender based on an internal awareness (gender identity).[1][2] In this model, the idea of a "biological gender" is an oxymoron: the biological aspects are not gender-related, and the gender-related aspects are not biological. In some circumstances, an individual's assigned sex and gender do not align, and the person may be transgender.[1] In other cases, an individual may have biological sex characteristics that complicate sex assignment, and the person may be intersex.

Cmon people, this is basic knowledge here. If you can't even accept basic accepted facts, then we're never gonna get anywhere.

From bamccaig's sig : http://static.allegro.cc/image/cache/8/0/80957c72518411bd61070d1b9a026d61.jpg

{"name":"611691","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/1\/a\/1abbe1afeeb9eb5ebed4bd26544eeb58.png","w":634,"h":882,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/1\/a\/1abbe1afeeb9eb5ebed4bd26544eeb58"}611691

EDIT

7bddaf864bbf7e2a16184e25584733f6b709a7b0.png
Where does one draw the line between being mentally different versus being mentally ill? I think we can all agree that schizophrenia is a mental illness, for example, but would you say that schizophrenia is just a "mental state of mind that simply differs from the norm"? Also: how does one define mental illness versus mental disorder. Wouldn't a disorder be anything that goes against the norm? In this case, wouldn't being transgender be a mental disorder/illness? I'm just curious how you separate the two.

7537.png
There's already a definition for mental illness: when a mental difference causes distress or disability.

Gender dysphoria is a mental illness, the solution is hormones and/or gender reassignment surgery. AFAIK you can be transgender without suffering dysphoria (i.e., you're happy fitting in the role you want without changing your physical appearance) it's just rare or less common, hence it's not a mental illness.

A person with hallucinations and delusions is not necessarily schizophrenic if it doesn't impair them or cause distress. For example, in non-Western cultures, people with positive, helpful, positive, or non-significant hallucinations and delusions are much more common than those with negative, distressing ones, and thus while they may have schizophrenia, it's not really a mental illness. However, in my case, my delusions and hallucinations cause me distress and impair my ability to function, hence why it's a mental illness.

Arvidsson

I like how this discussion turned out :)

Chris Katko

I made a thing:

video

Erin Maus

@Chris Katko: That's pretty cool! I didn't watch the whole thing (just the first 10 minutes) but looks like you were having fun. I know some of what you were doing, but only because my brother uses a similar program (Reason) and shows me stuff sometime, haha.

Me on the other hand, I spent the last two hours trying to figure out why the player retaliates when attacked despite there being no code to do so. The answer was I accidentally added that functionality to the base Peep template instead of the base NPC template... This means technically if a rock were attacked it would've also retaliated. ;D

Chris Katko

@Chris Katko: That's pretty cool! I didn't watch the whole thing (just the first 10 minutes)

Oh yeah, feel free to skip forward and see what it sounds like when I play it... with a Sega Genesis sound chip. =D

And thanks!

Quote:

. This means technically if a rock were attacked it would've also retaliated.

That's. freakin'. hilarious.

Neil Roy

“As an embryo develops, it acquires both Wolffian and Mullerian ducts. Wolffian ducts develop into male sex organs, and Mullerian ducts develop into female sex organs. Which sex organs develop depends on the presence of a Y chromosome and the male hormone testosterone and anti-Mullerian hormone (AMH). At eight weeks, the internal genitalia will begin to form. If the embryo has both an X and a Y chromosome and produces the two hormones, then the testosterone will stimulate the Wolffian duct to develop male sex organs, including the vas deferens and the seminal vesicles. If there's no Y chromosome, but two X chromosomes instead, then the embryo is female. The Wolffian duct will degrade, and the Mullerian duct will develop into female sex organs such as the uterus, fallopian tubes and part of the vagina. Rarely, the embryo will have an X and a Y chromosome, but will fail to produce testosterone or AMH; such an embryo is termed intersex, as it has both male and female sex organs.”

https://health.howstuffworks.com/pregnancy-and-parenting/pregnancy/conception/human-reproduction1.htm

Note that in order to develop both organs, you need to have the male chromosomes, so you are male. Just with a birth defect.

As others stated, a simple search does wonders for your education. I noticed that certain people can't reply without swearing, name calling and attacking my beliefs which I haven't brought into this. But I would rather bang my head against a wall repeatedly than talk religion in here. There is already enough hatred and name calling.

Edgar Reynaldo

So now, you're either a female, a male, or a male with birth defects? That's basically what you're saying. What is it about respecting a gender role and identity that is wrong?

EDIT2

The external genitals continue to develop after the internal ones have formed. Testosterone produces a penis and a scrotum for the male embryo, while the lack of testosterone will lead to a clitoris, urethra, the rest of the vagina and the labia for the female. These organs will continue to develop during pregnancy, and then they will undergo another period of development at puberty. On the next page, we'll take a closer look at the functions these organs perform.

So you can still be mixed, but you're really just a male? Right. :/

EDIT3

NiteHackr said:

I noticed that certain people can't reply without swearing, name calling and attacking my beliefs which I haven't brought into this.

Hello NiteHackr, welcome to allegro.cc! Have you met bamccaig yet?
7536.png

EDIT
@Katko,

That was pretty awesome. That was OBS studio you say? With a little Audacity thrown in? And were you just modding a sample or the whole song? I couldn't quite follow what the final song was composed of, but it was super cool. ;)

Cookies go to Katko for making this thread worthwhile. ;)

EDIT4
Extra cookies go to anyone who can recommend good electronic music. Not necessarily techno, but ambient electronica is always cool.

Chris Katko

Extra cookies go to anyone who can recommend good electronic music.

I love Bignic.

https://bignic.bandcamp.com/

Check out this song:

video

video

A lot of his songs sound like music either I make, or would like to make if I had the skill / time to put into it. (The game this song is from, actually sucks. hah. But the OST is incredible.)

- OBS Studio is the recording software. It's FOSS.

- Audacity is a wave editor, FOSS.

- FL Studio is the music software. I've been using it on-and-off since it was originally "Fruity Loops". It's full-grown into a professional editor now. (It also includes lifetime updates for free--but not new VSTs unfortunately.)

They change the UI for FL-studio every version or so, and I'm like 8-12 versions behind. Plus it's been 4+ years since I wrote any music. So I had to remember what the hell I was supposed to be doing, and then where it was on the newest version of FL Studio.

If I did another, it'd be MUCH faster now that I remember more. For example, at like 20-25 minutes in, I start hitting my stride as things sink in and I can just go back to muscle memory.

Again, thanks guys, I really appreciate it!

Also, while I'm at it, this is a GREAT YT channel that humorously discusses internet-related cultural events. Especially 4chan related stuff when they troll Shia Labouf..

video

Edgar Reynaldo

Wow. That's expensive. More than an OS!

Chris Katko

Wait, what is?

FL Studio? Maybe more expensive than the home editions of Windows. But you have to think of it in terms of a musical instrument. If I had money lying around, I'd actually spend around $400-500 for the Native Instruments Komplete pack which has like 300+ instruments and effects, and professional grade patches.

FL Studio is good but they insanely over-charge for their instruments. Like $200 for a synth. If I'm paying that kind of money, it better be a Roland, Korg, or some other big brand where the patches are going to sound like a dream without me having to fool around with it.

When I was younger I bought FL Studio for ~$125 or so boxed set (not available anymore) and then like 6 years later, I spent ~$65 to get lifetime upgrades for my serial key to the "internet" / "XXL producer" version. It doesn't give me new VSTs but otherwise, every new feature that comes out, I can use.

But yeah, if I were to get FL Studio, wait for a sale. Just like Native Intruments, they have a sale once a year or so where it's like $200 less for the $600 bundle down to like $400. And FL Studio also goes down, IIRC. But I don't watch the price anymore since I've owned it for so long....

Anyhow. It used to be a very humble package and now it's used everywhere and seen as a professional tool.

But just like any musical instrument, it takes weeks or months to really get experienced with it to the point you can "zen out" and just create music from your head without thinking.

Edgar Reynaldo

Better be some dang fine software for several hundred dollars for all the 'feature's. I don't know, I got along pretty well just with Nero Wave Editor back from Nero 6 on XP for the longest time. Let me cut tracks, transform, modify, etc...

Let's see, the latest edition of the Nero software is :

Well the Multimedia suite is from $40 to $50, but they don't offer much in the way of audio editing anymore. That was disappointing. Yet another reason to keep XP around.

Chris Katko

Better be some dang fine software for several hundred dollars for all the 'feature's

It's incredibly cheap for what it offers. Similar software costs THOUSANDS and doesn't come with free updates.

It would take weeks to learn all the features in FL Studio and have some proficiency.

Edgar Reynaldo

Since I don't make music professionally, at this point it would be considered a toy, and I can't spend hundreds of dollars on a toy. :/ As much as I might like to. ;)

Chris Katko

Yeah, I know. That's my point though. For people who do music, it's a drop in the ocean compared to other music assets you'd need. You can spend thousands across many "sounds" DVDs if you're trying to round out your musical abilities. Orchestras, drums, piano, synths, extra effects, etc.

FYI, you can use the full version of FL Studio for free. You just can't reload your saved projects until you buy it. (So you could probably use it for wave editing just fine.) You can also dump to WAVE/MP3. So if you can work in a single session, you don't need to pay! :) (I used to try doing that just as a personal competition--to see what I could come up with instead of my usual perfectionism that takes forever and never finishes stuff!)

Edgar Reynaldo

FYI, you can use the full version of FL Studio for free. You just can't reload your saved projects until you buy it. (So you could probably use it for wave editing just fine.) You can also dump to WAVE/MP3. So if you can work in a single session, you don't need to pay!

Well if that's the case I might as well try it and see what it can do. Might be nice for generating sound effects, but not so much at writing music if you can't reload your project and resume work later.

EDIT
Hey you guys, don't make me start taking attendance in this thread. :P

Post something! Be zany! Be crazy! Just post more!!!!!!111111ONEONEONElll!

Chris Katko

video

I posted a thing.

Also, someone made a co-op mod for Half-Life 2 which is pretty fun so far. Although, HL2 sucks compared to HL1. It's all being chased and standing around waiting for NPCs to stop talking.

Edgar Reynaldo
Chris Katko : Present and making live video

NiteHackr : Mysteriously silent since I reduced his argument to 3 sexes.

Eric Johnson : Last heard his car was working.

bamccaig : Last seen troll baiting NiteHackr

Aaron Bolyard : Got attacked by his Rock class and hasn't been heard from since.

arviddson : last seen posting mysterious satisfaction at the results
            of our previous 'discussion'

Fearless leader : Probably calculating the bandwidth savings from locking this
                  thread in a vain attempt to prevent us crashing his server
                  until he caves to our demands.

Arthur Kalliokoski : AWOL, missing, presumed drinking Pepsi in a corner with an
                     8086 running AmigaOS

torhu : Still lurking I see ;)

What if the Progranisms got loose and started coming after us? Maybe that's why there are so few of us left. Maybe we need to make some cough spambot cough recruiter Progranisms? That search the web for forms and submits links to allegro.cc? We can make an uber allegro bot net and insert redirects into webpages that send them here.

@Katko
Watching someone play a game is only as fun as how well you take the verbal directions I'm trying to give you during the game. It's like, do this, do this!! No, no, not that! Over there! Break the barrel with the rock! Etc...

Erin Maus

It would be super cool to take the Progranisms idea and make it run on really simple VM. The instruction set would have to somehow be more resistant to encoding errors. Leave it running for a hundred years on a supercomputer and maybe we'll finally have general AI. :o

...

I added drops to my game. You can kill things called Skelementals* and they drop some random crap + bones. Peeps/MapObjects have "Loot" actions which output a drop table. The drop table is then materialized to produce an item. Using my ECS system, any peep with a LootDroppableComponent and either a ResourceComponent or MapObjectComponent will drop items on death. Cool. But so over-engineered. :'(

*: I came up with that name in a dream. I'm surprised it wasn't taken (as a monster name)... It flows so nicely.

Bruce Perry

*hicc*

Edgar Reynaldo

*hicc*

Been drinking Bruce?

bamccaig

Yes I have. >:(

Edgar Reynaldo

You've been drinking Bruce! Oh noes!

Neil Roy

NiteHackr : Mysteriously silent since I reduced his argument to 3 sexes.

I have a wife, so talking about sex of any sort is pointless. 8-)

Quote:

bamccaig : Last seen troll baiting NiteHackr

I don't take bait as easily as I once did. I see the hook, I don't need to bite on that. Twenty years ago maybe. But I honestly hate arguing/debating (even though sometimes it may not appear that way).

We're all set in our opinions, I see no sense in beating a dead horse.

...

I'm not doing much otherwise; been playing the new World of Warcraft expansion, but I may let my time run out in that game and get back to programming next month.

Been rethinking a project I messed around with in 3D. In space, with asteroids etc... I should keep working on that, although 3D coding makes my head hurt at times. I did manage to get a Star Wars X-wing model to load, floating amongst the asteroids, but it wasn't textured etc... so, still lots of work to do with model and texture loading with the newer shader programming. Maybe I should stick to 2D. ;)

bamccaig
NiteHackr said:

I have a wife, so talking about sex of any sort is pointless. 8-)

Funny because it's true! :D :'(

Edgar Reynaldo
NiteHackr said:

I did manage to get a Star Wars X-wing model to load, floating amongst the asteroids, but it wasn't textured etc... so, still lots of work to do with model and texture loading with the newer shader programming.

The .mat material files that accompany .obj files in Blender may be of use to you. Though I tried to display a blender .obj file once and the textures were all wrong.

Chris Katko

@Katko
Watching someone play a game is only as fun as how well you take the verbal directions I'm trying to give you during the game. It's like, do this, do this!! No, no, not that! Over there! Break the barrel with the rock! Etc...

The barrels can't be broken with a rock. I should have posted an earlier one. That's just the latest. The barrels are actually "crates" (that can't be picked up by you) that have to be returned home by picking them up with a vehicle and returning them to base.

(Well, now this is the latest:)

video

I'm going to put them all together and make a review / analysis of the game at a later point.

I'm not sure whether to just post blank let's plays (no voice), let's plays with me, or simply edited / cut-footage summaries of games. I'm definitely leaning against "just gameplay" because I have a good personality and it's like what separates my gameplay recording from anyone else's if it's just gameplay?

Also, in PROGRAMMING news, I've actually been looking through the main data file with a hex editor, (also a disassembler on the EXE), and plenty of D code. I'm not entirely sure why other than the big allure of solving a puzzle that nobody else has ever done. I've determined it's a kind of "IFF" format with Big Endian chunk sizes. It's also NOT a "standard" IFF format. It's got non-standard stuff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_File_Format

I've figured out almost every chunk ID, but I haven't written the code to turn my linear passes into a "Tree" yet. I'll have to do something recursive for that I think.

But from my data, I've found some interesting stuff. Like there's either a level, or old data, for a SECOND PLAYER. (Which would have been AMAZING as I cite in my gameplay videos, because it would cut the wrist-aching level of micromanaging down--and be really fun to share.)

Also, I've found plenty of 8-bit (indexed) sprites. But mostly by looking through raw data with GIMP. No idea what format they are--but they're not LBM (common with IFF).

As for sounds, none of them show up when hit with Audacity's raw import. I tried various compression formats for Audacity but none decoded into something audible. So they've got to be using some different codec / propetary.

I also experimented with trying to get the game into a higher resolution than 640x480 but to no luck. DirectX fails to instantiate when I hack the hex values.

Edgar Reynaldo

One of the things I love about my dad was how he always used to use memory editors to hack his games and boost his stats. If there was a way to cheat, he would find it.

EDIT

I'm not sure whether to just post blank let's plays (no voice), let's plays with me, or simply edited / cut-footage summaries of games. I'm definitely leaning against "just gameplay" because I have a good personality and it's like what separates my gameplay recording from anyone else's if it's just gameplay?

Definitely keep the video inlay and voice over. It's half the fun watching you go WTF?

Erin Maus

I'm so proud, a website for a department at my school is officially deployed. ;D It's so cool to see something I made sitting at an *.edu domain (or more officially subdomain).

I wrote it in Python using Flask in roughly 10 hours, having never built a website from scratch nor used Flask. The rest was deploying it, documentation, and auditing it. Haha... Wow.

bamccaig

10 hours!? I'm impressed you developed a Web site in 10 hours!

Edgar Reynaldo

I wrote it in Python using Flask in roughly 10 hours, having never built a website from scratch nor used Flask.

Yeah well kid in our day we programmed websites by hand, one letter at a time, in HTML, and there were no frilly things like CSS or JS. Just good old Netscape and endless popups cluttering your desktop.

bamccaig

HTML is not programming, especially without JavaScript. HTML is markup. It's effectively documentation (which also means no popups). The programming and the popup spam comes from JavaScript.

Edgar Reynaldo

Rolly eyes. ::) I know that, I was joking. Pedantic troll phailure.

bamccaig

Had you said coded or encoded you would have been fine. >:( But also I'm pretty exhausted so I might have missed some sarcasm there.

Also, we still code Web applications one keystroke at a time. >:(

Chris Katko

I started playing a game I had in my GOG inventory for years. Completely forgot about it. Blitzkrieg. It's actually been the most realistic / fun WW2 RTS game I've played.

video

(From the description)

Quote:

0:00 to 2:10 me ranting about 4K on my GTX 1060.
Skip to 2:15 for start of gameplay / explainations of what's going on.
Skip to 5:00 to skip my intro talking and go straight to gameplay decisions.
9:30 SHOTS FIRED.

There's so many things I've never even thought about / really appreciated in war. Like how essential artillery (scouts for spotting for them). How incredibly dangerous anti-tank guns are, and how you should almost NEVER send tanks to fight tanks (as was US tank doctrine during WW2). And the list goes on.

Unlike Soldiers: Heroes of WW2 (which is an old childhood favorite) and it's sequels, as well as another game series that's similar to Solders that I can't remember. It can accurately simulate smaller AND LARGE battles.

You have to keep supplies running to your artillery (and tanks) or they'll run out.

TONS of other stuff. I'm building a list for a proper review.

It's not a perfect game. The random levels are very repetitive and the scripted "historical" battles are typically HUGE battles (like the one on the video) that don't capture the same feel where you don't want to lose ANY units. Whereas, large battles like the video it would be impossible to not have losses and still win so you get into an "acceptable" losses mindset. (Though on the smaller maps, your "core" units must be protected but you use infantry as cannon fodder to slow enemy tanks down while you destroy them with AT guns and artillery. Infantry don't matter for your progression so... you just STALIN them and toss them into the meat grinder to slow advancing tanks.)

Neil Roy

Yeah well kid in our day we programmed websites by hand, one letter at a time, in HTML, and there were no frilly things like CSS or JS. Just good old Netscape and endless popups cluttering your desktop.

I still create my pages this way. My website with my Deluxe Pacman game was "coded" with Notepad++ (which colour codes HTML nicely). Older HTML at that, because I'm stubborn that way. :)

It's still a form of coding though, albeit simple. You're placing instructions which needs to be interpreted and acted upon. Similar in a lot of ways to older interpreted BASIC.

bamccaig

They're not instructions. They're data. You cannot make them do anything (without adding JavaScript). It's no different than writing a text file, or a latex file, for example. You're authoring a document using a text-based code language instead of an editor and binary format. It's ultimately still a document, no different than Word or PDF or Latex or whatever other document format you can come up with. HTML tags are not acted upon in pure HTML. They're rendered into a usually graphical representation of the document. The only "actions" that can happen are programmed using JavaScript. Except for maybe some flashy <blink> or <marque> tags or something else evil that has no practical use. :P

Chris Katko

Here's another older WW2 game:

video

Edgar Reynaldo
Eric Johnson

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Neil Roy
bamccaig said:

They're not instructions. They're data.

Ahhhhh... that felt good to bait him for a change. :) I actually agree with you, but I had to turn the tables and show you how it feels to be baited, and you took the hook and swallowed it whole. 8-)

Edit: Although your statement about them not being instructions is not true. HTML tags are absolutely instructions on how to handle the data. The <B> tag instructs the browswer to display the next in bold until the </B> or end of document is reached. And there are instructions on how to set up the screen, you can have frames etc... there are instructions on mouse input and which graphic to display based on whether or not the mouse is down or not (that's a boolean logic check right there, very similar to programming). Now it is programming in the most simplistic sense of the word, but I can see it qualifying. Even you called it a "language" in your reply. :)

Edgar Reynaldo

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Chris Katko

Eric Johnson: ahahah

bamccaig
NiteHackr said:

Although your statement about them not being instructions is not true. HTML tags are absolutely instructions on how to handle the data. The <B> tag instructs the browswer to display the next in bold until the </B> or end of document is reached. And there are instructions on how to set up the screen, you can have frames etc... there are instructions on mouse input and which graphic to display based on whether or not the mouse is down or not (that's a boolean logic check right there, very similar to programming). Now it is programming in the most simplistic sense of the word, but I can see it qualifying. Even you called it a "language" in your reply. :)

The <B> tag describes the enclosed contents as having a bold font. It doesn't instruct the computer how to do that. The browser was programmed in C or C++, and knows that when it sees a <B> tag, data, it should render its contents in a bold font. The text "hello" also results in the computer drawing the text "hello" on the screen, but the author of "hello" didn't program it.

Hell, I can even type a <B> tag in Allegro.cc's mockup textbox like this, but that isn't programming Allegro.cc or the browser. Both have already been programmed. I'm just feeding in data which is interpreted and triggering differences in the existing programming. There is no way in HTML (without JavaScript and CSS) to create a "program": for example, a simple counter that counts from 0 to overflow. You cannot do it in HTML. You cannot show or hide parts of the document dynamically without CSS or JavaScript (which includes the style, onevent, <script>, <style>, and on and on,.. attributes and tags). The "programming" comes from extension languages.

There definitely can be programming in Web pages, but it requires additional technologies above and beyond pure HTML. Not all languages are programming languages. HTML is a markup language. It is data wrapped in special descriptors (also data) to change the way that the resulting document looks and behaves. It is limited by the browser's existing programming. It cannot pass the Turing test.

Edgar Reynaldo

<o.O>h lordy it makes me cringe when I read stuff like this :

Zanmoto said:

Don't worry, I have read enough C++ stuff (I know that isn't possible), i.e. "Game Programming all in One 1st and 3rd ed."

Neil Roy

Everyone KNOWS HTML is programming. It's an established fact!

Eric Johnson

How do you define "programming"? Until we can find common ground regarding the semantics of the word, we won't get anywhere.

In its simplest form, I'd say that programming is the act of writing instructions for a computer. However, this is a bit too simplistic and leaves too much room for vague error.

On the flip side, there are people who would argue that only strictly-typed, compiled languages constitute "real" programming. So scripting languages, interpreted languages, and loosely-typed languages are not "real" as far as these people are concerned (so no Java, JavaScript, Python, Lua, Bash, etc).

Where does one draw the line? How do you define "programming", and what is and is not considered to be a programming language?

raynebc

If anything, writing HTML is closer to scripting than it is programming. You're providing instructions to a program instead of writing a standalone program.

Neil Roy

Watch this, he makes a good point that HTML is a programming language, albeit a very restrictive one. :)

video

Chris Katko

Oh. My gosh. How is this even debatable?

"HTML is a markup language"

https://www.wikiwand.com/simple/Markup_language

"A markup language is a computer language. It is made up of a set of instructions, and of data. It is not the same as a programming language, as only programming languages can have if statements and other conditional statements.[1] The first markup languages were used for printing; there was the text, and there were instructions how the text should be printed. The source code is generally done in ASCII. Then there are tags. That way, LaTeX (and with that, Wikipedia), uses the instruction \mu to get the symbol \mu, the Greek letter "Mu". HTML uses &micro; to get the same symbol."

Is HTML (no CSS) turing complete? No.

Quote:

Data languages
The notion of Turing-completeness does not apply to languages such as XML, HTML, JSON, YAML and S-expressions, because they are typically used to represent structured data, not describe computation. These are sometimes referred to as markup languages, or more properly as "container languages" or "data description languages".[citation needed] However, Rule 110, a Turing-complete cellular automaton, has been successfully implemented in CSS 3, thus proving, to some extent, its Turing completeness.[11]

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Turing_completeness

I mean I get it. If you really blur the lines and only look at definitions, you might be able to make the case that HTML is "programming." But then so is filing out a config file.

But again, devil's advocate, Verilog and VDHL are absolutely programming but they're technically "hardware description languages". You specify what you want. But you'd be hard pressed to make anything useful in Verilog or VDHL without a college degree in computer hardware.

Neil Roy

Baiting can be so much fun when done back at people... how does it feel?

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As I already stated, I agree, HTML is a scripting language more than anything, but it is interesting to bait people like bambam back!!! :)

How does it feel?! 8-) ;D

Edgar Reynaldo

I think you're secretly hiding the fact that deep down underneath it all, you feel like a real programmer when you write HTML. Because everything else is too hard. ;) I actually believe what you say. :O

If I program a GUI to behave like HTML, is it still programming? ???

Neil Roy

Well, in a sense... using Java with HTML (or Javascript, I get the two confused) is sort of like using Allegro with C... so maybe HTML really is a programming language? Hmmmmm ;D

On a lighter note, I was just told this joke by a friend I have to share, I laughed so hard... ;)

Quote:

Joe wanted to buy a Harley motorcycle. He doesn't have much luck, until one day, he comes across a Harley with a 'for sale' sign on it.

The bike looks better than a new one, although it is 10 years old. It's shiny and in mint condition.

He buys it and asks the seller how he kept it in such great condition for 10 years.

'Well, it's quite simple,' says the seller, 'whenever the bike is outside and it's gonna rain, rub Vaseline on the chrome.It protects it from the rain, and he
hands Joe a jar of Vaseline.

That night, his girlfriend, Sandra, invites him over to meet her parents.
Naturally, they take the bike there.

Just before they enter the house, Sandra stops him and says, 'I have to
tell you something about my family.

'When we eat dinner, we don't talk.

In fact, the FIRST person who says anything during dinner has to do the dishes.'

'No problem,' he says.. And in they go.

Joe is shocked.Right in the middle of the living room is a huge stack of dirty dishes.

In the kitchen is another huge stack of dishes. Piled up on the stairs, in the corridor, everywhere he looks dirty dishes.

They sit down to dinner, and sure enough, no one says a word.

As dinner progresses, Joe decides to take advantage of the situation.

He leans over and kisses Sandra.

No one says a word.

He reaches over and fondles her breasts. Nobody says a word.

So he stands up, grabs her, rips her clothes off, throws her on the table
and screws her, right there in front of her parents.

His girlfriend is a little flustered, her dad is obviously livid and her mom horrified when he sits back down, but no one says a word.

He looks at her mom. She's got a great body too.

Joe grabs mom, bends her over the table, pulls down her panties, and screws her every which way but loose
right there on the dinner table.

She has a big orgasm, & Joe sits down.

His girlfriend is furious, her dad is boiling, & Mom is beaming from ear to ear. But still ... . Total silence.

All of a sudden there is a loud clap of thunder, and it starts to rain.

Joe remembers his bike, so he pulls the jar of Vaseline from his pocket.

Suddenly the father shouts.
I'll do the fuckin’ dishes!!

bamccaig

:D :D :D

Eric Johnson

;D That's a good joke!

Bruce Perry

Moral: if you're a girl trying to choose a boy, don't trust one with a motorbike?

I recently got introduced to Loriot, as famous in Germany as Monty Python or Mr Bean are in the UK. Even if you don't speak German, give this a chance. ;) (It's an attempt to tell a story involving English names of places and people.)

video

Chris Katko

This guy is pretty funny:

video

video

Erin Maus

My last commit resulted in -100 lines of code. Refactoring feels so good. 8-)

bamccaig

Back when we were using Mercurial I used to have a custom command that evaluated your quality of commits by lines added versus removed or something along those lines. The difference in lines is I think how it was scored: if you added lines it was bad, and if you overall removed lines it was good. I scored quite well compared to my colleagues (who never knew I was doing that). I never cheated the system to score well. It was just the way that I prefer to code. >:(

I haven't bothered to do it for Git. Though in theory it shouldn't matter much, we do squash merges so if I have 10 commits for my topic branch it ends up all in one commit. The measuring technique is probably still applicable (if not moreso) though, but it doesn't feel right for some reason. It's also possible that Mercurial's engine made it easier to calculate this, though at the moment I cannot fathom how or why that would be (mind you, I'm running on 4 hours of sleep). I think I just counted lines in the diff and summarized the results. Another factor that makes it less useful is that I've submitted to management to make my job less stressful and so I often duplicate code rather than refactor because the people in charge think that's better and it's not worth arguing with them.

Eric Johnson

Refactoring is always a good idea, but you shouldn't get overzealous and let the line count hold you back from actually writing good code. Sometimes good code adds more lines than it cuts back on, even if that skews the code quality measurement. I've heard stories of some companies going so far as to reward programmers with bonuses based on how many lines they write. This resulted in code where simple statements were stretched across multiple lines just to boost the line count, and in turn, their bonuses.

So I've had this issue with my car where the air sometimes cuts out when I hit a bump in the road. It's become progressively worse this year, to the point where it doesn't work 95% of the time. I had the blower motor replaced almost two years ago, and the A/C controller unit replaced about a year ago, so I've figured it's just been a loose connection somewhere, but haven't had the time to really take a look. But today my dad took a look and found the loose connection in a series of wires near the blower motor. He more or less scrunched the wires closer together, and now my air comes on again. A more permanent solution will be needed later, but this works for now.

Neil Roy

Programmer's humour: Why do programmers think OCT 31 and DEC 25 are the same day?

bamccaig

You kind of spoil the joke when you tell it like that (and also, SUPER OLD!). You should have said Halloween and Christmas instead to obscure the punchline. But also, I'm sure all of us have seen that 10 times already (except for maybe the one active noob).

Chris Katko

October is just a social construct. ::)

Edgar Reynaldo

October is just a social construct. ::)

OMG! Stop oppressing me!

Riddle : When does 11 + 1000 = 11?

MiquelFire

I got it!

3 + 8 = 11

raynebc

If there are going to be hidden base changes, there can be hidden boolean operations too. Let's kick up the difficulty a notch:
(11b + 1000b) & 11b == 11b

Edgar Reynaldo

That expression is true whenever the two least significant bits are on, or set to 1 rather.

For example base 4 (11_4 = 5_10 , + 1000_4 = 64) = 69 & 5 is 5 works.

Neil Roy

Just TRYING to insert something less controversial in here... leave it to bambam to be critical. Yeah, it was an oldy, came up on one of my old facebook posts. :) I do like your idea of rewording it like you said, I may do that in the future on facebook. My non-programmer friends were stumped by this though.

In other OLD humour (don't look bambam), this always makes me burst out laughing...

video

Stop oppressing me!

In the newest World of Warcraft expansion (Battle for Azeroth), in typical Blizzard style, if you keep clicking on a Kul Tiran character (Alliance) in the game, most of them will yell out "Help, I'm being oppressed!" ;D

Chris Katko

NiteHackr said:

In the newest World of Warcraft expansion (Battle for Azeroth), in typical Blizzard style, if you keep clicking on a Kul Tiran character (Alliance) in the game, most of them will yell out "Help, I'm being oppressed!" ;D

That's actually from Warcraft 2, which referenced Monty Python's Holy Grail!

Here's Warcraft 3:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoMhMZZjbGg

"You're the king?"
"Well, I didn't vote for 'em"
"Help, help, I'm being repressed."

I haven't found the exact clip online for WC2. Kind of a niche thing to post...

Neil Roy

Nice! I got a kick out of it. In all of Blizzard's games, if you click on a character more than five times consecutively, they will start saying new things, usually they have 3 or 4 more things.

The female Night Elves in WoW for example, most will say several things like, "weren't you leaving" and ending with "You wouldn't like me when I'm angry" (a reference to the incredible hulk and the fact they are mostly druids and can change into nasty forms).

In Starcraft, there was a science vessel I think it was where the voice sounds a lot like that of Monty Burns from Simpsons; if you kept clicking on him, he will say "I like the cut of your jib!" eventually. In the various Warcraft games if you keep clicking on the Horde Peons, they will say things like "stop it!" and eventually "Me not that kind of Orc!" :)

It's one of the first things I do in any WoW expansion, I will go around clicking until I hear some of the new dialog. On the main female you meet when you first go to Boralus (Alliance), if you keep clicking on the one that is guiding you around, she will start giggling, she is ticklish and it gets quit funny some of what she says.

Chris Katko

I LOVED THE SCIENCE VESSEL!

Edgar Reynaldo

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Chris Katko

I would actually weaponize groups of science vessels.

I would use them to cast defense matrix (+500? hp shield) on each of them, and then, cast irradiation on all of them which causes damage to any biological units. And then send the whole group of them into a flock of biological units.

Biological warfare? THEY DREW FIRST BLOOD.

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Edgar Reynaldo

That reminds me of a good ole casting of Stinking Cloud in 2nd Ed. D&D.

Neil Roy

Nice! been a while since I played Starcraft, I should boot it up again. I loved the 2D graphics for it and how their map/mission editor worked.

Edgar Reynaldo

If you liked Starcraft, you might also like Priority: Survive. It was made with Allegro.

EDIT
I might pick myself up a copy of Baldur's Gate soon, now that I have an income again ;o

jmasterx

3 days without a post? I think we're due for a religious debate.

How can there be more than one God? Surely there can only be one true God? By that deduction, some religions are just wrong.

raynebc

I'll settle for the conclusion that most people are wrong about most things.

MiquelFire

I'm of the opinion that we should do our best to get along and respect each other.

My view of things is that our solar system could, in fact, be an atom that makes up something.

Edgar Reynaldo
jmasterx said:

How can there be more than one God? Surely there can only be one true God? By that deduction, some religions are just wrong.

Allah y'all know der's only one true Jah Irie mon (in a Jamaican accent, accent on Allah and Jah).

bamccaig

I'm getting married on Saturday. In a church. The officiator is even going to "bless" the wedding with a prayer. Fortunately, I get to hold onto the bride's hands so neither of us gets disoriented and falls over. That way, if a supreme being wishes to smite me with lightning he'll get her too! >:(

Apparently they're going to have a "hymn" sung during the signing of the legal stuff. It was my mom's idea. At this point I'm pretty sure she hasn't mentioned to anybody at the church that I'm an atheist. And I figure for my own good it's best that I don't mention it either. Instead of us playing a fun song on the stereo system it sounds like they're going to ask all of the audience members to sing a song from the hymn books. I don't think the song has been picked. I just hope it doesn't suck. I'm going to try not to stroke out. If I don't pass out first.

But my fiancee was the designated driver for my "bachelor party" and dropped us off (and picked us back up of course) at a strip club to end the night. So there's that I guess.

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

That way, if a supreme being being wishes to smite me with lightning he'll get her too! >:(

Matt will find you...

bamccaig

...and get her too. >:(

Eric Johnson
bamccaig said:

I'm getting married on Saturday.

Mail me a slice of wedding cake!

bamccaig

Negative. That sounds like way too much effort. But I might post a picture of it if I get the chance. But let's be real here: Saturday I'm little more than a walking drone that will likely hate his life. What happens to the cake (which is being gifted by a friend!) is of little concern of MINE. If it were up to me there would be no cake. There would be an empty cake lid and when it was lifted there would be a Portal joke. Instead, I need to worry about kissing and dancing for an audience. >:( >:( >:(

Chris Katko

Marriage. That's a big step.

How long until you take the ultimate step and invite her into your CS:GO league?

Peter Hull

There's always cake.

Congratulations, bamccaig!

Eric Johnson
bamccaig said:

Negative. That sounds like way too much effort.

Final offer: would you do it for a Scooby Snack?

Edgar Reynaldo

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bamccaig

How long until you take the ultimate step and invite her into your CS:GO league?

I love how nerdy that sounded. >:( But I am not in any league. In fact, our cake topper is a bride dragging a groom away from CSGO, but alas in the last 2 months CSGO performance has gone to shit with the forced introduction of a new UI. I cannot even play it on my hardware anymore. So I've been forced to revert back to CSS.. I'm a little upset with CSGO at the moment for this, but ultimately this experience is just reinforcing all of the ways that CSGO did [eventually] improve the formula.. I miss plenty of things, but it's also nice to re-experience the few things that CSGO regressed on.

...would you do it for a Scooby Snack?

I would do it for free, but not with you. :-X

Erin Maus

Congrats Bambams!

...

I saw Florence + The Machine today in Charlotte, NC. She was awesome.

And Bambams would've loved her quip about toxic masculinity. (He wouldn't have.)

Edgar Reynaldo

For the love of Science, even bambams can attract a mate.

Sincerely,
Less Than Zero

Chris Katko
Quote:

toxic masculinity.

lmfao

Get woke. Go broke.

Seriously though. Imagine casually talking about "toxic femininity" casually. Like, just walking into a conversation and saying a word that implies all women have this shared flaw and everyone knows it, and that it's INFECTIOUS. Implying some aspect of women is like a disease or cancer.

Because every man on the planet whose ever been in a long-term relationship knows there are things women do that are counter-productive to their relationships with men, or even women. How women will try to control the workplace, for example. And women will HATE another woman if she has a "good" feature (like a nose) that the first woman is self-conscious about (her own nose).

But we don't go around talking like all women are somehow defective. We don't put up billboards that say "I just wanted to work. She wanted to control the workplace." over the highway.

No, that'd be be insulting as hell.

But men let women get away with saying completely insane things.

video

Feminists tell us words have meaning, and then attach MAN to the front of every evil, bad word. MANspreading. MANsplaining. Toxic MASculinity.

[And other great thing is. If men control everything, why would they LET women air their grievances in the news? It doesn't make any sense. If you control everyone, why would you give them an opportunity to tell others to free themselves? IT'S STUPID. And men have daughters and we're supposed to think they would take any random man's Patriarchy control, over that of their OWN DAUGHTERS well-being?]

And the world is starting to wake up. The group that USED to be feminism, has been taken over by people who use all the good will and good works by actual feminists. And turned it into a bullying movement.

I will never forgive Feminists for looking the other way when a guy shot and killed dozens of gays at the Pulse nightclub shooting. Gay people are people too. But if they have a penis, somehow, feminists don't care what happens to them.

Erin Maus

Get woke. Go broke.

idk what you mean

...

Dude the Florence + The Machine concert was wholesome, positive, and welcoming. And she's a feminist...

I don't know but all the feminists I look up to (modern or historical) or associate with (in person or online) are all cool. Maybe you need to stop generalizing.

Edgar Reynaldo

Catco the last line in that video was priceless trying to reply to this thread is giving me a DDOS on my phone

Audric

Opening the reply page takes 50 Mb (network), mostly caused by a dozen of >1Mb animated GIFs.

Chris Katko

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Erin Maus

very compelling argument I am no longer a feminist

/s

Chris Katko

You were a feminist before?!?!

Erin Maus

Yeah I believe men and women should have equal rights and equal opportunity.

I think my usage of feminist is different from yours though...

Chris Katko

I just use it to describe fat chicks. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[edit] Edgar! (I think it was Edgar).

Gotta admit, code::blocks seems pretty nice. I downloaded it with apt-get, loaded an old game project file and BINGO. Immediately compiled and ran it. It ran perfect!

I use Geany on my Linux laptop with only 2 GB of RAM. I use compiz nice feature of allowing me to invert any window (not just the whole screen), so I "dark theme" Geany by just inverting it.

CB seems to have more debugging/project functionality. Then again, I use Geany exclusively as an editor, and use a one-liner bash script called "go" for all my projects. So Geany might have good debugging stuff but I haven't tried it.

I write in D 99% of the time and their IDE integration is... god awful. It took me hours to get VisualD and D working with Visual Studio 2017. And I still have NO IDEA why the debugger doesn't stop and catch EXCEPTIONS when they occur in ANOTHER THREAD.

Also, D's multi-threading standard library is a hot mess. It has THREE different ones. core.thread, std.parallelism, and std.concurrency. They do have their reasoning. But then you use ANY other feature like delegates, or "shared" for marking memory access, and half the standard library doesn't work with them. An orthogonal language is one thing D is currently NOT. Which still would be forgivable IF the documentation wasn't so completely shit. Docs that exist are good, but there's giant holes of missing examples, tutorials, explanation instead of just raw code.

Want to see what "shared" does? Why, "it applies the 'shared' qualifier the same way 'const' does." MAXIMUM. EXPLAINATION. ACHIEVED.

It's like I'm on Reddit and dared to ask the "simple" question of What's a Monad?

Why "A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?".

All over again. That'd be like explaining derivatives "it's just the reciprocol of an integral". Yeah, but what does INTEGRAL and RECIPROCOL mean? A layman might ask.

But I'm digressing. Apparently the Monad answers have become a meme because of how terrible people's explainations were. (like the above).

Quote:

A monad is a way to build a pipeline of functions. It lets you tack functionality onto existing functions, while describing how to compose such "improved" functions.

Specifically, a monad is a type, which has two operations:

- return x takes whatever x is and "wraps" it in the monad type.

- m >>= f (the "bind" operator) applies the function f to the value inside the
monad value m.

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/8xb29f/eli5_what_a_monad_is_and_why_i_should_know_about/

https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuition-and-the-monad-tutorial-fallacy/

But again, I digress.

[edit] OKAY. One thing CB is pure insanity. The size of the FIND box takes up almost MY ENTIRE SCREEN. Yeah, that's what I want. Not being able to see the TEXT I'm searching through. I'd rather see a big mostly-empty dialog box! ::)

Edgar Reynaldo

Thing about CB is that it uses WxWidgets, which uses native widgets. Which means CB looks different on every platform (and acts different).

I agree, they could use some better default window sizes, or remember your last known settings. :/

CB is much nicer on Windows, but works on Linux.

Edit
Also, I should note that I use the Nightly builds, which are bleeding edge snapshots of CB.

Bruce Perry
bamccaig said:

But also, I'm sure all of us have seen that 10 times already (except for maybe the one active noob).

I saw it 10 times! Once here and once in a work e-mail.

Also: OVER 3000! ;D

Chris Katko

Should we make a new general thread just so we stop freezing the website for 10 minutes every time we post?

Like, "monthly thread". Make a new one every month. Or, maybe, just ONCE A YEAR. ahahah

Edgar Reynaldo
Katko said:

Should we make a new general thread just so we stop freezing the website for 10 minutes every time we post?

It's okay Chris. We all have moments of weakness. But we must not relent! The fearless leader will cave to our demands eventually!!!! I have 4 scene it.

Neil Roy

Just watched this video which explains the mess of graphics on level 255 of the original Arcade Pac-Man game. As some may know, if you hit level 255, you get half a screen of garbled graphics and that ends your game play. I already understood why, as most may guess, it's due to the 8bit limit. But he explains every bit of the graphic mess on screen and why it is all there, which was actually rather kewl...

video

Edgar Reynaldo

Hic!

bamccaig

I'm married now. >:( To a woman. A real one. Not a mail-order bride. She chose this. And I'm very happy. >:( The day went pretty smoothly. As smoothly as I could have hoped for.

Append:

I'm pretty sure we were discussing Allegro either at the church before the wedding or at the reception..

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

I'm pretty sure we were discussing Allegro either at the church before the wedding or at the reception..

She's a keeper!

My wife won't even talk to me about ontological empiricism in bed. ::)

[edit] I'm almost positive nobody on the planet will get that reference. I have no idea how it popped into my head.

Peter Hull

Three things:

Re monads, this series of posts from Eric Lippert is the only one that made any sense to me: https://ericlippert.com/2013/02/21/monads-part-one/

Has anyone ever used Godot engine?

Java seems to have gone horrible recently(JDK11) ; I used to be able to make a quick app in a jar and put it onto the shared drive for my colleagues to use. Now there is no standalone JRE to download and the new preferred packaging solution (jlink) only works for modular apps whereas most of my library dependencies are not modular (apache commons math etc.) so argh.

Thank you, that is all.

Eric Johnson
bamccaig said:

I'm married now. >:( To a woman. A real one. Not a mail-order bride. She chose this. And I'm very happy. >:( The day went pretty smoothly. As smoothly as I could have hoped for.

Those frowny faces are sending mixed signals... but congratulations to being married to a real woman! :D

Edgar Reynaldo

Well congrats Bambam! Pics or it didn't happen. >:(

bamccaig

She's a keeper!

Not with my wife. ::) With Sam H. :)

Pics or it didn't happen. >:(

{"name":"611726","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/3\/53b4b32d4042ec54520132ae2e287ac4.jpg","w":750,"h":1000,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/3\/53b4b32d4042ec54520132ae2e287ac4"}611726

Edgar Reynaldo

Hohoho. We all know the Cake is a LieTM.
{"name":"the-cake-is-a-lie.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/8\/e\/8e9bb7d810a125ec3986222dd5083962.jpg","w":1200,"h":750,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/8\/e\/8e9bb7d810a125ec3986222dd5083962"}the-cake-is-a-lie.jpg

bamccaig

We stopped at McDonald's between the church and reception hall because the wife was hungry. A bunch of little girls thought she was a princess. It was hilarious.

Neil Roy
bamccaig said:

I'm married now.

Congrats! Been married 33 years myself, 34 come February.

I take it things with the inflatable didn't work out? ;D

Chris Katko

Remember when Valve made games? Good times...

Edgar Reynaldo

Remember when people played games that weren't FPS? At least play tomb raider and have a show of some skill. ;)

Neil Roy

Remember when video cards were affordable?

Chris Katko

Thank those a-holes who use bitcoins. ::)

Edgar Reynaldo

Cryptocurrency is a fad. They're all bubbles, because no real money ever goes in, and everyone's stuff is worth less over time because when it comes time to sell it off, the prices will sky rocket downwards as they lose confidence, and all your wasted turbo charged inter cooled over clocked GPU farms will be worthless.

Gideon Weems

That wedding cake is glorious. Congratulations, bamccaig. I saw a post elsewhere referencing the wedding but did not realize it was serious.

Chris Katko

I just. realized the counter strike.

ahahhaha

Erin Maus

My boss at my (relatively) new programming job asked me what my pronouns are. ;D

Chris Katko

My pronouns are f-g and the n-word.

YOUR. MOVE.

;D ;D ;D

Seriously though, if you enjoy it, best wishes to you.

Edgar Reynaldo

For you, Katko

video

Chris Katko

ahhahahah. I love that.

{"name":"1437806717831.png","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/3\/d\/3d04af82e7703dfc51029b7a798ae9f6.png","w":1061,"h":668,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/3\/d\/3d04af82e7703dfc51029b7a798ae9f6"}1437806717831.png

"You are not being asked to evaluate their words. Just use them."

YOUR MOVE.

Erin Maus

I think a few of you have spent more time arguing against things like gender identity and feminism than I have spent trying to figure out who I am, and that started roughly around the time I was 6 years old wondering why boys can't wear girl's clothes... :'(

edit: wow in two more years I'll have been a member of this forum for half my life. Maybe I'll finish a game by then. ;D

Chris Katko

Fun fact: I thought I was gay when I was a teen.

Now who is stereotyping! :P

bamccaig

My pronouns are f-g and the n-word.

This brought a big smile and a RL chuckle.

Neil Roy

Just discovered this website, "The Art of Maniless". In particular, the following article on it is great! The man is a real inspiration...

https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/the-herschel-walker-workout/

Oh, and on another topic, WATCH THIS VIDEO!!! It is that important, I know the consequences of talking to the police all too well. So, watch this!

video

Erin Maus

The "joke" along the lines of 'my pronouns are apache attack helicopter' is like telling a cashier 'That one's free! :) :) :)' when an item doesn't ring up properly. It might be funny the first time but it's only funny the first time.

But it doesn't stop people from repeating it all the time.

Here's a better joke: A blue shell, lightning bolt, and star man walk into a bar. The bartender exclaims, "What is this, the last lap?" Get it?

Edgar Reynaldo

I was 6 years old wondering why boys can't wear girl's clothes... :'(

Boys and girls have different clothes because they have different roles. They're there to distinguish the two. When boys start wearing dresses they're declaring they belong to the other gender. Which is just fine if you want to get ridiculed.

Fun fact: I thought I was gay when I was a teen.

There was a gay choir teacher who gave me an awful lot of 'attention'. He even bought me a gay little sun necklace, which could have been innocent, but it made me question my sexuality without any reason to. It's sick because at the same time he's supposed to be a role model you're wondering whether he fucking 'likes' you. Cold shiver. >:(

Erin Maus

Which is just fine if you want to get ridiculed.

Victim blaming is a Republican strategy. :'(

Edgar Reynaldo

Being lame is not an excuse. :P

EDIT
Calling people victims that aren't is a SJW strategy.

I'm sorry you didn't feel empowered enough to wear a dress as a child. :/

Neil Roy

Victim blaming is a Republican strategy.

No, they just insist that you prove you were victemized and that you're not just making it all up in order to frame an innocent person. The law states we are innocent until proven guilty.

One case I found out about recently is where a woman claimed her husband beat her, she had black eyes, bruises all over, before you read further, should she have been believed without question? Answer this to yourself, then read on...

At trial, the husband produced a security video of their bedroom showing the woman beating herself!

...the difference between the liberals and the conservatives is that the conservatives insist on the constitution and laws be enforced.

raynebc

To that end, the law should be followed even if not everybody considers it to be fair. If the majority of people want a law to be changed, there are proper processes to accomplish that. This is a nation with rule of law, not rule of man.

Erin Maus

Being lame is not an excuse.

That's an ableist slur.

I'm making a joke.

raynebc said:

To that end, the law should be followed even if not everybody considers it to be fair.

Henry David Thoreau disagrees...

Edgar Reynaldo
Neil Boi said:

...the difference between the liberals and the conservatives is that the conservatives insist on the constitution and laws be enforced.

More right wing propaganda. Wanting to change the laws that are wrong is not equivalent to breaking the law. Also, it is such cock-a-mamy bs that only the conservatives believe in the law. Your poster child for bad behavior Brett Kavanaugh is a *REAL WINNER*. That's the best the conservatives can do? Udder phail.

raynebc said:

To that end, the law should be followed even if not everybody considers it to be fair. If the majority of people want a law to be changed, there are proper processes to accomplish that. This is a nation with rule of law, not rule of man.

Changing the law takes decades IF you're LUCKY. assert(Illegal() != Immoral()); Not all laws are moral. Non violent crimes like marijuana use and possession should be fully de-criminalized, with previous convictions overturned.

Being lame is not an excuse.

That's an ableist slur.
<spoiler>I was making a joke</spoiler>

I was using

Quote:


Lame; adj.
Weak and ineffectual; unsatisfactory: a lame attempt to apologize; lame excuses for not arriving on time.

.
this definition of lame. But your joke is acceptable.

Neil Roy

Your poster child for bad behavior Brett Kavanaugh

This is EXACTLY what I am talking about! The law and the constitution states that EVERYONE is innocent until proven guilty. Not only was there no proof of guilt, but there wasn't even a place or time and the witnesses that were said to have seen it all happened, one of them Ford's best friend, refuted it which is evidence that she lied.

But you want to ignore his constitutional RIGHTS and declare him GUILTY based on mere accusations when the man's history shows him to be a very upstanding person with over 65 women who were testified to that fact!

It is up to the accuser to prove their charges, not the accused. That is the law, and that is everyone's guaranteed RIGHT! Thanks for proving my point.

And my name is not "Neil Boi"... shall we start discussing your real name? Is that all you can do is sling insults at people rather than having a civilized discussion?!

Erin Maus

It's very difficult to provide evidence in cases of sexual assault, especially if it's not reported immediately and that's with modern forensic science. Many women do not report rape immediately, because it is incredibly traumatizing, demeaning, and dehumanizing.

Here's a good summary: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-compassion-chronicles/201711/why-dont-victims-sexual-harassment-come-forward-sooner

Or maybe a few women with a lot to lose should it be proven they lied just want to be harassed and humiliated by conservative media and have death threats and all that, idk

bamccaig

It's very difficult to provide evidence in cases of sexual assault, especially if it's not reported immediately and that's with modern forensic science. Many women do not report rape immediately, because it is incredibly traumatizing, demeaning, and dehumanizing.

That's all true, but it doesn't change the fact that you are innocent until proven guilty. If there's no proof then there's no way to be certain of somebody's guilt. Women lie about sexual assault regularly, and it's well documented. You cannot just take somebody's word for it. It's unfortunate, but it's fair. Which is why it's incredibly tragic when Feminists(tm) oppose educating girls and women about strategies to protect themselves because it's "rape culture" and "blaming the victim", on and on. What matters is that women can only control their own behavior, and if changes to their behavior can reduce the risks of sexual assault then it's worth educating them about. Knowing how traumatic sexual assault can be on people and how trivial it is to commit it, and get away with little evidence of it, it seems like a worthwhile sacrifice to make. But noooooooo. We can't live in a world that faces reality. We have to stick our heads in the sand and pretend the world will change because we will it so. ::)

Erin Maus

I think we live in different universes and somehow through Allegro.cc we communicate. That is what makes the most sense TBH. I mean, we've never been in the same room together. :o

Neil Roy

Have you ever been charged and convicted of a crime you did not commit and then spend time in jail for it?

If your answer is no, than you cannot understand why "innocent until proven guilty" is so important. I have, twice in my life, been arrested, tried and convicted of crimes I did not commit. So I fully understand the importance of innocent until proven guilty.

It may not be perfect in all cases, but it is the best we have. Otherwise you end up with a situation like the Salem witch hunts where a person was accused of witchcraft and they had to prove they were innocent or burn.

But even if as you say, a women was raped and it actually happened, she is going to remember when it happened, where it happened and there is a great possibility that there is some sort of witnesses, if not for the event itself, than for the fact that the person was where she said she was. And these days there is physical evidence, unlike decades ago, hospitals have rape kits so they can extract the DNA of the person that raped her (or him, it happens to men too).

In the case of Kanaugh, we don't know when it happened, we don't know even where it happened. She did not remember how she got there or who drove her home. The witnesses she named who she stated could corroborate her story, one of which was her best friend, refuted what she said and all stated it never happened. The alleged incident took place 36 years earlier (give or take a few years as nobody was sure even when it happened) and all women that have known Kavanaugh since that time had nothing but good to say about the man, he is a good family man and has had seven full FBI investigations done over his career as a judge.

There is absolutely no way in hell anyone could state that the man was guilty and the subject should not have even made the press it was so flimsy the police themselves would have brushed it off. I mean, can you imagine a woman going to the police and saying "I was raped!" And the officer saying "When did this happen" and she says "I don't know" and they say, "well, where did it happen" and she says "I don't remember", and they ask "well was there any witnesses?" and she names them and the police question them and all of them say "i don't know what she is talking about", and when asked who did it, "suddenly she has a clear memory", and do you think the police would run out and arrest the man? No way, it's absolutely ridiculous.

We all know why the liberals in here are upset, let's not beat around the bush on this! They don't want Kavanaugh as a Surpreme Court Justice for one simple reason, he may overturn abortion and other liberal ideals. He's a threat to them as a judge and this is all just false allegations to try and prevent him from becoming judge, well, too late. He is a SCOTUS Justice now, for life.

If you're so concerned about women's rights to be believed, why are you not demanding that Bill Clinton be arrested for all the rape allegations against him, of which there is far more believable evidence, dates, times and locations as well as witnesses to what he done!!!

This isn't about rape victims and you know it. It's about a political agenda, plain and simple.

raynebc

Edgar: If personal use weed arrests were overturned as a whole, who'd want to bet people would then be clamoring for weed distribution (having obviously way more weed than just for yourself) charges to be overturned? How long until people demand hard drug convictions to be reversed? There are proper ways to change the system. On its face, disobeying laws just because you don't like them is not moral. Even when the crimes are ones that you deem harmless.

About Kavanaugh, each side has political reasons to be for or against him. Objectively though, an honest person can't claim Kavanaugh is guilty of the assault accusations, because there is no evidence. Leftists can't claim they were just doing to Kavanaugh what the Republicans did to Garland, because there was no unsubstantiated, coordinated smear war waged on the latter.

bamccaig
raynebc said:

If personal use weed arrests were overturned as a whole, who'd want to bet people would then be clamoring for weed distribution (having obviously way more weed than just for yourself) charges to be overturned?

There really wouldn't be because there are a lot fewer of those, and it's a lot more difficult to reason that they're innocent. It's one thing to use a relatively harmless drug, but distributing and profiting from the crime is another matter.

Just because some people might argue for more things, doesn't mean you have to give in to them. You can draw a line at reason.

raynebc said:

How long until people demand hard drug convictions to be reversed?

Again, they can demand all they want, but you don't have to humor them. Albeit, as a society, we should probably stop punishing narcotic use with prison and instead invest in social services to reduce the reliance on narcotics in the first place. Obviously prison isn't much of a deterrent. All it accomplishes is ruining people's lives permanently and making it nearly impossible to escape from the drugs. That just means more and more of the population is unproductive and even hostile.

raynebc

Narcotics users fuel the market for narcotics, and the dealers and gangs are the ones that should be targeted by law enforcement. I'd be fine with a drug law enforcement policy of nearly no punishment (maybe probation and community service) for any drug user that gets caught and flips on his/her dealer leading to that dealer's arrest. I'm pretty sure this type of flipping is already the norm.

Edgar Reynaldo
Neil Roy said:

This is EXACTLY what I am talking about! The law and the constitution states that EVERYONE is innocent until proven guilty.

Brett Kavanaugh may not be guilty of sexually assaulting Ford, and it may never be clear what happenend between the two of them, but he is FAR FROM INNOCENT.

Did you even watch the confirmation hearings? Brett Kavanaugh cried and sobbed his way through the entire thing. Emotional instability is not the hallmark of a person who is relied upon to make impartial life or death decisions regarding the fate of an entire country and its citizens.

He gave a 5 minute soliloquy on how he likes to drink beer. When asked how much is too much? He couldn't answer that, except a vague reference to a blood alcohol chart. "I don't know, whatever the chart says, blood alcohol chart". Which basically means he doesn't care about how drunk he gets or he doesn't think you can get too drunk.

His own drinking friends at Yale don't believe he should be elected. They say he drank to the point of blacking out and being stumbling drunk on numerous occasions, and that he lied while under oath.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we-were-brett-kavanaughs-drinking-buddies-we-dont-think-he-should-be-confirmed/2018/10/04/923cf6ac-c821-11e8-b2b5-79270f9cce17_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.4aa6b5f501f4

Neil Roy said:

Neil Roy said:

...the difference between the liberals and the conservatives is that the conservatives insist on the constitution and laws be enforced.

And my name is not "Neil Boi"... shall we start discussing your real name? Is that all you can do is sling insults at people rather than having a civilized discussion?!

I call you Neil Boy when you make inane unsupported blanket statements like this, as you so often do.

raynbec said:

Edgar: If personal use weed arrests were overturned as a whole, who'd want to bet people would then be clamoring for weed distribution (having obviously way more weed than just for yourself) charges to be overturned? How long until people demand hard drug convictions to be reversed? There are proper ways to change the system. On its face, disobeying laws just because you don't like them is not moral. Even when the crimes are ones that you deem harmless.

Their sentences should be reduced as well. Smoking pot doesn't hurt anybody. Marijuana has many many therapeutic and medicinal effects. If your medicine was illegal, and somebody risked their ass to give it to you, should they be punished? That's what the current law does, is punish people who haven't done anything wrong. You can't go making blanket statements like disobeying the law is immoral. The law itself is immoral, which defeats the purpose of having laws to begin with.

bamccaig said:

as a society, we should probably stop punishing narcotic use with prison and instead invest in social services to reduce the reliance on narcotics in the first place. Obviously prison isn't much of a deterrent. All it accomplishes is ruining people's lives permanently and making it nearly impossible to escape from the drugs. That just means more and more of the population is unproductive and even hostile.

I fully agree with bambam here. If drugs were legalized, or de-criminalized, that would take all the power away from the dealers and smugglers and criminal gangs that profit off of it. Drug use is nothing new in the history of humanity, and we've more than proved that the law and prison is not a proper deterrent. End the war on drugs. Gangs would fall apart, violence would plummet, and society would only benefit. Those people with addictions to drugs could then be treated openly, without fear or stigma.

Back to Kavanaugh, his own law school, Yale, practically disowned him. There is an open letter opposing his confirmation, written by Yale professors, law students, and the Yale community, that goes into detail why he should not have been confirmed.

Open Letter from Yale

Read it, and tell me Brett Kavanaugh is not partisan, and that he is impartial. Both are blatantly false. They detail specific judgements by Kavanaugh that prove he is not fit to be a member of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Brett Kavanaugh is just another one of the good ole' boys, getting wasted to the point of blacking out. For all we know, he did assault Ford but he can't remember it.

But hey, you guys elected Trump, so I'm probably just talking to a brick wall here.

raynebc said:

Narcotics users fuel the market for narcotics, and the dealers and gangs are the ones that should be targeted by law enforcement. I'd be fine with a drug law enforcement policy of nearly no punishment (maybe probation and community service) for any drug user that gets caught and flips on his/her dealer leading to that dealer's arrest. I'm pretty sure this type of flipping is already the norm.

If using drugs isn't wrong, why is distributing them? You're being hypocritical here.

bamccaig
raynebc said:

I'd be fine with a drug law enforcement policy of nearly no punishment (maybe probation and community service) for any drug user that gets caught and flips on his/her dealer leading to that dealer's arrest.

You're pretty much asking people to risk their lives. Their dealer is a career criminal. Likely working for very violent, powerful people. They will not take kindly to "snitches" as they call it. Flipping on a dealer could be a death sentence. And it fails to address the individual's social and medical needs: therapy, detox, and perhaps medication.

I think the key to solving the drug problem is working together to solve social problems that lead people to drugs. And offering the services needed to break the habit and stay clean. Helping people to be productive instead. The dealers rely on the addiction to fuel their business. By making it easier to access alternatives (i.e., legalizing marijuana is probably a start, and considering other options may be worthwhile too) and easier (i.e., free) to access rehab/detox/addiction counselling services you make it more difficult for the addiction to stick. Combine that with sufficient enforcement to protect people from the inevitable violence from desperate dealers trying to secure their business model and I think that we can work towards the shrinking and perhaps eventually virtual collapse of the underground.

Why would you deal with dangerous thugs when you can access safer alternatives legally? And why would you continue to deal with dangerous thugs when you can access the health care resources needed to free yourself from the burden? I think that it's fair to say that most hard drug users regret the drugs. They want to quit, but they cannot. It's too difficult. Those users can be helped by providing them with the services needed to quit and stay clean long term. The ones that don't want to quit probably can't be helped, but they're probably a minority. Hopefully most of them are millionaires in Hollywood that don't need to rob innocent people to afford their habits.

There is an open letter opposing his confirmation, written by Yale professors, law students, and the Yale community, that goes into detail why he should not have been confirmed.

It's a Google doc. It's not signed at all. It has names listed at the end of it. Anybody could add anybody's name to it. And it's mostly students, ranging from the 80's to now. It's little more than a social experiment. A popularity contest. Probably they were asking for "signatures" on Facebook and a bunch of students added their names to fit in with their friends. It's meaningless.

I don't know who this person is, and I don't care. I have no doubt that he's corrupt. They wouldn't want him if he wasn't. But I don't know why it surprises you. They've been blatantly ignoring the people for more than a decade (probably a century) and yet we still keep trusting them to represent us. I cannot understand how humans are so naive, but I guess most of us are just born to be pawns. Nothing else could explain our subordination to the corrupted state.

Chris Katko

Back to Kavanaugh, his own law school, Yale, practically disowned him. There is an open letter opposing his confirmation, written by Yale professors, law students, and the Yale community, that goes into detail why he should not have been confirmed.

They found 2000 people from a liberal state and liberal school that oppose a conservative being appointed to the supreme court?!

MY. GOD. It's unthinkable!

And Mr. K may actually be a complete D-bag. The problem is, liberals have played their hands so thin, nobody trusts them anymore. When they honestly write FRONT PAGE news such as "Trump gets two scoops of ice cream, everyone else gets one." on the SAME WEBSITE, it dilutes everything else they say.

https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/11/politics/trump-time-magazine-ice-cream/index.html

And here's an ENTIRELY DEBUNKED (disceptively edited) video that NOBODY (at the MSM) HAS TAKEN DOWN OR CORRECTED yet: Trump "dumps" a box of food to feed the fish while the PM of Japan carefully gives them little bit a time. PROOF of how crude trump is! (omg, what? Really? That's your argument?)

Even Snopes and Politifact had to correct it:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/did-trump-impatiently-dump-fish-food-in-japanese-koi-pond/

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2017/nov/06/donald-trump-and-fish-food-dump-how-early-reports-/

Quote:

It was a story that seemed to reinforce stereotypes of President Donald Trump: On a visit to Japan, he was handed a box of food for a ritual feeding of carp, and after doling out a few spoons’ worth, he got impatient and dumped the rest of the box all at once.

Quote:

The Jezebel post had not been updated by the time we found it around noon on Monday. It was later updated at 12:30 p.m., but with this addendum: "Many people have pointed out that Abe also dumped his fish food into the pond. This does not change the fact that Trump remains a big, extremely stupid baby, though I should also have noted that he is also racist, sexist and thoroughly incompetent. Thank you."

Other reports we viewed around the same time, such as those from CNN, the New York Daily News, and the Telegraph, mentioned that Abe was first to dump his box, but usually did so several paragraphs into the story. A story by the Independent mentions that Abe was the first to dump his box, but the headline gives a different impression: "US President trumps Abe by upending box of food into Tokyo palace koi carp pond."

Think about that when you realize only 30 percent of Americans identify as "progressive". It's because the other 70% know that the media lies non-stop and they've over-saturated and desensitized us so much, we don't even know or care when real news happens.

I have NO IDEA whether Mr K is a monster or not because I don't have 20 hours to sift through piles of bullsh-t to find out the truth. All I know is, I can't trust the media--and nobody else in the USA does either.

[edit] Allegro.CC ate my post.

I just ran stats on those signatures. There's only 891 signatures.

And almost TWO HUNDRED are from people... who haven't even graduated! Look at the numbers. They graduate ... in 20. 1920? My ass. 2020.

This only illustrates my point further. You can never just trust something a liberal reports (conservatives too, but everyone knows they're full of crap.) Liberals love lying with statistics, while conservatives just say "Fakenews, I don't believe in science."

If liberals didn't lie at every opportunity I'd be able to read their articles and outrages. But I can't. Because I know I have to fact check literally everything they say.

Like when they said those Duke Lacross boys raped that girl... then it turns out they weren't even there at the time she said... doesn't matter! Time to ruin innocent boys lives!

Just like "mattress girl". Once again, a completely fake woman's story, ruining the chances of real rape survivors from being taken seriously. Thanks liberals! Nothing like making it harder for survivors to get help.

[edit] Wait. AND LITERALLY ANYONE CAN SIGN THAT GOOGLE DOC ONLINE?! WTF?! What's next? Internet polls count as "scientific research"?

Edgar Reynaldo

Correction. Anyone can submit their name, but it will probably be reviewed against school and faculty lists.

DUDE, Kavanaugh graduated from YALE

DID you even READ the letter???? ??? ??? ???

Erin Maus

https://web.stanford.edu/group/maan/cgi-bin/?page_id=297

"Only 2% of of all rape and related sex charges are determined to be false."

On the flip side...

"On a related note, only about 40% of rapes are ever reported to the police..."

"Furthermore, only one in two claims lead to prosecution"

hmmmmmmmmmmmmm makes you think

If liberals didn't lie at every opportunity

Are you confusing the Donald Trump administration for liberals? I mean, Republicans and Democrats are both neoliberals so it could be an easy mistake to make. ???

raynebc

I'd like to post a detailed reply, but the forum keeps hanging when I try to post. Edit: It seems mostly related to using manual or automatic quotes, probably a server side problem due to the size of this thread.

Edgar: "Brett Kavanaugh cried and sobbed his way through the entire thing."
Dems were mad their smears weren't working so they started whining that he should never show any emotion after being so viciously attacked by partisans. Bull shit.

"Brett Kavanaugh...getting wasted to the point of blacking out."
Nobody demonstrated this ever happened. Quit lying.

"The law itself is immoral"
You and I are not qualified to decide which laws are "immoral" and don't deserve to be followed by anybody. It's your choice if you want to break a law, but you suffer the consequences if you get caught.

"If using drugs isn't wrong, why is distributing them? You're being hypocritical here."
I'm taking a soft, pragmatic stance to humor you guys. Even if individuals using drugs aren't hurting anybody, the gangs and drug lords that move the product undeniably do. Bammccaig agrees that this is the case.

If you don't want to coerce people to flip on their dealers, then we need to consider more ways to deter harmful drug (ie. cocaine) use. I've previously heard about treatments that alter the brain to block the feeling of getting high. If people don't feel good from taking the drugs, they'd stop.

Edgar Reynaldo

If you specify a src target, it won't stall when trying to find a link to the quoted text. It's part of Matthew's quoting mechanism, and it parses the entire thread every time you quote someone.

Ie.
<quote name="raynebc" src="https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/615770/1039587#target">

raynebc said:

viciously attacked

You mean like when a drunken lout commits a sexual assault? These were very serious allegations, and you can't prove it didn't happen.

raynebc said:

"Brett Kavanaugh...getting wasted to the point of blacking out."
Nobody demonstrated this ever happened. Quit lying.

Three of his drinking buddy friends testified to this. Are they lying too?

raynebc said:

"The law itself is immoral"
You and I are not qualified to decide which laws are "immoral" and don't deserve to be followed by anybody. It's your choice if you want to break a law, but you suffer the consequences if you get caught.

Uhm, excuse you? Who is qualified? Brett Kavanaugh? A good ole boy? A drunken lout? A liar under oath being elected to the highest court in the land? Such pompous BS.

raynebc said:

I'm taking a soft, pragmatic stance to humor you guys. Even if individuals using drugs aren't hurting anybody, the gangs and drug lords that move the product undeniably do. Bammccaig agrees that this is the case.

And if you decriminalize distribution, and place it on the open market, their profits disappear overnight. No more money to buy coke and guns, and they lose all their power. If I could grow it myself I'd have no need for any of this shit. Just WHO are YOU that I should live by YOUR RULES? BS.

I suffer from schizophrenia, anxiety, and depression. Smoking doobie helps with all of that. My schizophrenia medication gives me severe restlessness and the inability to focus on tasks. It's called akathesia, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone. My anxiety hasn't been as bad lately, but over the last few years, it's caused me a lot of problems, and I've always had to deal with depression. WHO ARE YOU to deny me MY MEDICINE?

raynebc said:

If you don't want to coerce people to flip on their dealers, then we need to consider more ways to deter harmful drug (ie. cocaine) use. I've previously heard about treatments that alter the brain to block the feeling of getting high. If people don't feel good from taking the drugs, they'd stop.

Why don't we just give everybody a lobotomy then? Nobody will enjoy anything. ;)

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bamccaig

"Only 2% of of all rape and related sex charges are determined to be false."

This makes a distinction against accusations and charges. Hopefully, before charging somebody, the police actually do some kind of investigation and throw away obvious false accusations prior to slapping on handcuffs. In any case, [citation needed]. That link is deceptive. It's not from the university. It's just from some activist group, probably organized by students of the university. By itself, it's useless.

raynebc said:

If you don't want to coerce people to flip on their dealers, then we need to consider more ways to deter harmful drug (ie. cocaine) use.

You will never make drugs that work not work without violating the rights of individuals. An individual doing cocaine doesn't harm society. A drug lord using acts of violence to control his segment of the black market does, but the black market only exists while cocaine (or some other equally effective and economical solution) is illegal. If you offer drug users a safer source then you can put the black market out of business. Guys are only willing to kill or be killed because there's hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to gain. If they'll be risking their lives for a McDonald's salary they'll quickly lay their guns down.

These were very serious allegations, and you can't prove it didn't happen.

Proving that something didn't happen is virtually impossible. There is often evidence when something happens, but there's never evidence when something doesn't happen. At best, you could say with reasonable certainty that something didn't happen because something contradictory did happen, but it's still just an educated guess unless the events are mutually exclusive.

There's a very good reason we presume innocence. It shouldn't have to be explained to you. It doesn't matter how serious the allegations are. The world is not a perfect place. It never was, and it probably never will be. It is a whole lot nicer than it used to be though. So we should be thankful for that. Ultimately, none of this matters. We don't get to decide who is put in power, and we never did. Until we fix the root of the problem arguing about things that we do not control is just a waste of everybody's time and energy. You'd be more productive trying to figure out how we can fix the root cause of these problems: that our nations are not functionally democratic and we as voters don't actually have any control.

raynebc

and you can't prove it didn't happen.

That's not how the legal system works in the USA, for reasons bamccaig listed. By extension, any system that presumes guilt is an immoral one.

As for a few college buddies making claims like "he was so drunk he MUST have blacked out", that is speculation. I'd like to see if there was any documentation supporting this or if it it's just more of the same old hearsay. The rest of your partisan bullsh*t on Kavanaugh isn't worth me entertaining any more of.

Just WHO are YOU that I should live by YOUR RULES?

I'm an American citizen. I don't really care if you have mental problems, you're not automatically exempted from the laws the rest of us have to follow just because breaking those laws is helpful for you. If you want to move to a state that allows for medical marijuana, go right ahead, I don't care.

bamccaig said:

An individual doing cocaine doesn't harm society.

An individual doing cocaine harms him/herself and can certainly harm others while under its influence or when jonesing to get another fix. Your argument that legalizing some/all illegal drugs just to destroy the black market for it is more interesting, but drugs that cause severe and permanent harm to the brain still need to be strongly curtailed, such as by rehab programs that have been mentioned in the thread.

Erin Maus

Here you go, bambam.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45565684

The number is 2%-10%. Same sources put not reporting at 35%.

Waiting on your argument why the FBI, BBC, et al aren't accurate.

raynebc, have you ever read Civil Disobedience? Do you think MLK went about the Civil Rights movement the wrong way? What about Gandhi resisting British rule?

bamccaig

To say that only 2% of reports are false, which is the low end of the estimate for confirmed false accusations, is disingenuous. This discredits the original "group" for leaving that out.

It's impossible to know how many reports are actually false. In the same way that evidence is difficult to find that proves a sexual crime occurred, it would be moreso difficult to prove that a sexual crime did not occur. As above, in general, there would never be evidence of this unless the alleged victim admits to the fraud or the alleged offender was demonstrably nowhere near the victim when the alleged crime occurred (e.g., if video surveillance proved he was accounted for all night). If a man's whereabouts is questionable, or he is certainly involved with the woman at the time, it would be impossible to prove he didn't commit a sexual crime.

In a political world where men are disposable and women are sacred you can guarantee reports of "false accusations" would only be recorded where the alleged victim admits to the fraud, and is completely stable in doing so (not emotional or reckless). This means that we most likely have no idea what the actual rate of false allegations is, and to assert that it is not a concern is completely disingenuous. The implication being that so few false allegations are made that we should just believe women and assume guilt. That's completely wrong and extremely sexist.

Edgar Reynaldo
raynebc said:

The rest of your partisan bullsh*t on Kavanaugh isn't worth me entertaining any more of.

Speaking of partisan bullshit;

Since his campaign launched, Trump has repeatedly promised to appoint justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade. Overturning that decision would endanger the lives of countless people who need or may need abortions — including many who sign this letter. Trump’s nomination of Judge Kavanaugh is a reliable way to fulfill his oath. Just a few months ago, Judge Kavanaugh ruled to deny a detained immigrant minor her constitutional right to abortion. Decades-old Supreme Court precedent makes clear that the government may not place an undue burden on a pregnant person’s access to abortion. But Judge Kavanaugh clearly did not feel constrained by precedent: what could be a greater obstacle than a cage? The minor had never wavered in her decision to seek an abortion and had received a judicial bypass from a state judge who found that she was competent to make the decision. Yet Kavanaugh condescendingly and disingenuously held that she must wait weeks until she was in a “better place” to make a choice about her own bodily autonomy — at which point she might not be able to have a legal abortion. Further, Kavanaugh argued that to require immigration authorities to stop blocking her from accessing this right would force the government into complicity.

The judge employed similar spurious reasoning in a 2015 dissent arguing that the ACA’s contraceptive mandate violated the rights of religious organizations, even though those organizations were granted an accommodation that allowed them to opt out of providing contraceptive coverage. Kavanaugh’s opinions give us grave concern that he will consistently prioritize the beliefs of third-parties over the rights of the oppressed — not only when it comes to abortion and contraception, but also regarding other forms of medical care (including care for transgender patients), family privacy, and sexual liberty. Litigants harness this same logic when arguing that institutions have a religious right to discriminate against LGBT people — an issue the Court is certain to take up in the years to come.

Judge Kavanaugh would also act as a rubber stamp for President Trump’s fraud and abuse. Despite working with independent counsel Ken Starr to prosecute Bill Clinton, Judge Kavanaugh has since called upon Congress to exempt sitting presidents from civil suits, criminal investigations, and criminal prosecutions. He has also noted that “a serious constitutional question exists regarding whether a president can be criminally indicted and tried while in office.” This reversal does not reflect high-minded consideration but rather naked partisanship. At a time when the President and his associates are under investigation for various serious crimes, including colluding with the Russian government and obstructing justice, Judge Kavanaugh’s extreme deference to the Executive poses a direct threat to our democracy.

As part of his assault on the administrative state — based not in law, as he claims, but on policy preference — Judge Kavanaugh has undermined attempts to protect the environment and regulate predatory lenders and for-profit colleges. He has called now-defunct Net Neutrality regulations violations of the First Amendment. If elevated, the judge would pose an existential threat to the government’s ability to regulate for the common good and further twist the First Amendment beyond recognition, using it as a sword to advance his personal political preferences. His appointment would usher in a new era of Lochner, with “black-robed rulers overriding citizens’ choices.”

Judge Kavanaugh has consistently protected the interests of powerful institutions and disregarded the rights of vulnerable individuals. On the D.C. Circuit he denied a student with disabilities access to the remedial education he was promised after he emerged from juvenile detention. In a 2008 dissent, Judge Kavanaugh argued undocumented workers are not protected by labor laws. In 2016, Judge Kavanaugh ruled that employers can require employees to waive their right to picket. In a concurrence, he argued that the National Security Agency’s sweeping call surveillance program was consistent with the Fourth Amendment. As an attorney, he advocated for prayer at open public school events in brazen contravention of our country’s separation of church and state.

The list goes on. We see in these rulings an intellectually and morally bankrupt ideologue intent on rolling back our rights and the rights of our clients. Judge Kavanaugh’s resume is certainly marked by prestige, groomed for exactly this nomination. But degrees and clerkships should not be the only, or even the primary, credential for a Supreme Court appointment. A commitment to law and justice is.

It doesn't even matter if he assaulted Ford or not, he has a proven record of denying people their fundamental human rights and of supporting the wealthy.

It amazes me how brainwashed you people are. You defend ugly, evil people with such fierce loyalty? You're just a bunch of lap dogs for the rich and powerful.

There's little point discussing this. You are of the opinion that it's okay to force your laws on me and take away my freedom and that I have no say. Well that's mostly true. Democracy is dead in the US. The rich and powerful control the government and we are no longer in the land of the free and the home of the brave.... we are no longer a government of the people, by the people, for the people.

Erin Maus

Bambam why can you spout paragraphs without any supporting evidence (just your feels) but I post anything and it comes under extreme scrutiny?

Don't you see the hypocrisy?

Edgar Reynaldo

I guess all I have to say is :

Elizabeth Warren For President 2020

EDIT

raynebc said:

As for a few college buddies making claims like "he was so drunk he MUST have blacked out", that is speculation. I'd like to see if there was any documentation supporting this or if it it's just more of the same old hearsay.

I provided a link.

Take a look at the results of this quick DDG search :

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=does+brett+kavanaugh+drink+excessively&t=seamonkey&ia=web

bamccaig

Bambam why can you spout paragraphs without any supporting evidence (just your feels) but I post anything and it comes under extreme scrutiny?

Don't you see the hypocrisy?

Scrutinize all you want. I'm right here. Your "supporting evidence" isn't really evidence. It's just politics.

Even research papers are open to scrutiny. That's kind of the point. Just because it's been written doesn't mean that it's correct. The whole point is for people to scrutinize it. Any papers about this subject will be subjective because there is no conclusive data. You'll find it hard to locate papers that challenge it because research requires funding and research that might call into question the Feminist ideology will be very unpopular. The funny thing about most research papers is that they are behind pay walls (at least for us laymen). A practice I find very distasteful, if not downright disingenuous.

I assume if you saw any flaws in my logic you would have attacked that. Instead, you're attacking my right to question your "evidence".

Edgar Reynaldo

Although Judge has explained that names were changed in his book to protect privacy — Georgetown Prep is referred to as Loyola Prep — there is a reference in the book to a drunken “Bart O’Kavanaugh” vomiting and passing out in a car. On his yearbook page, Judge apparently refers to Kavanaugh as Bart.

bamccaig

There's nothing wrong with occasionally getting drunk enough to vomit or black out. If it was a daily occurrence today then you might question this person's stability, but having done it in college sounds like par for the course and having done it a few times ever is just everybody's experience that isn't a buzz kill. This is akin to the whole "I did not inhale" bullshit. Of course you inhaled. It's just politics. And the results don't matter. This is not questioning whether the person is qualified to be a supreme court judge. It's attacking his character so the powerful position can go to somebody that is otherwise strategic for another player. It doesn't fucking matter. You're being distracted by this bullshit so that you aren't paying attention to the real trick.

Append:

The abortion angle, if true, will be far more persuasive. Like I said, women are the sacred resource of all time. Everybody will get upset over a woman's rights being tromped on. A guy that drinks too much? You're referring to most of the population now. Are we all going to crucify him for that? Odds are it was his own camp that paid to have this brought up to distract you from the politics that might actually defeat him. :D

Edgar Reynaldo
bamKEG said:

There's nothing wrong with occasionally getting drunk enough to vomit or black out. If it was a daily occurrence today then you might question this person's stability, but having done it in college sounds like par for the course and having done it a few times ever is just everybody's experience that isn't a buzz kill. This is akin to the whole "I did not inhale" . Of course you inhaled. It's just politics. And the results don't matter. This is not questioning whether the person is qualified to be a supreme court judge.

Yes, actually it's called binge drinking and alcoholism. But I wouldn't expect anything else from a drunk like you. Go to an AA meeting for fricks sake.

Did you even see the list of anti-qualifications I pointed out above?

Erin Maus

> In a political world where men are disposable and women are sacred you can guarantee reports of "false accusations" would only be recorded where the alleged victim admits to the fraud

Begging the question.

> and is completely stable in doing so (not emotional or reckless).

The source I linked to indicates otherwise--teenagers (i.e., selfish idiots) and unstable women are the primary reporters of false rape, not women with strong and successful careers.

> This means that we most likely have no idea what the actual rate of false allegations is, and to assert that it is not a concern is completely disingenuous.

Argument from ignorance.

> The implication being that so few false allegations are made that we should just believe women and assume guilt. That's completely wrong and extremely sexist.

Strawman. I never argued or claimed that.

> Even research papers are open to scrutiny.

You don't have the credentials to review (or should I say scrutinize) articles published in peer reviewed journals, sorry.

> I assume if you saw any flaws in my logic you would have attacked that.

I didn't care to dissect your post when replying to this thread takes so long.

> Instead, you're attacking my right to question your "evidence".

By putting 'evidence' in quotes you are clearly disregarding a reputable source for no reason, and calling into question the reliability of government data, peer reviewed data, and a respected international news company.

bamccaig

Strawman. I never argued or claimed that.

Then your point was not clear. Please make it so we can move on.

You don't have the credentials to review (or should I say scrutinize) articles published in peer reviewed journals, sorry.

Neither do you, for that matter.

By putting 'evidence' in quotes you are clearly disregarding a reputable source for no reason,...

I gave my reasoning.

...and calling into question the reliability of government data...

Yes.

...peer reviewed data...

I saw no such thing.

...and a respected international news company.

*cringe*

raynebc

You are of the opinion that it's okay to force your laws on me

Civilizations have rules. If you don't want to be subject to somebody's rules, go buy an island in international waters and make your own rules.

I provided a link

The article doesn't show they ever documented this when it happened. It's still just hearsay. Which is what I said it was the last time you linked it.

there is a reference in the book to a drunken “Bart O’Kavanaugh” vomiting and passing out in a car.

It looks like a story about a pseudonym scribbled in a year book about somebody getting drunk and falling asleep is the closest you have to evidence? I don't find that convincing, but the Democrats are desperate to justify their hatred for Kavanaugh.

Unproven claims and innuendo from decades ago don't negate a life long professional career.

Erin Maus

> Then your point was not clear. Please make it so we can move on.

My belief is false rape accusations are not significant enough a problem when many women (35%!) do not report rape in the first place. Priorities!

> Neither do you, for that matter.

I'm not the one with the conspiracy that academia is some women-ruled nuthouse.

I delegate what I don't know to those who do. Maybe you should be more humble and do the same instead of being a know it all.

> Yes.

Why would the FBI's data be inaccurate? Someone feminist conspiracy?

> I saw no such thing.

Fucking hell there's no point in discussing anything with you. The BBC article lines to this study. /Violence Against Women/ is a peer-reviewed journal.

> *cringe*

Awesome, I no longer trust the BBC. Thanks for opening my eyes.

Edgar Reynaldo
raynebc said:

Civilizations have rules. If you don't want to be subject to somebody's rules, go buy an island in international waters and make your own rules.

Jamaica is sounding pretty nice right around now. ;) But seriously, if it were just me what does it matter, but there are millions of Americans who have smoked pot before and who do so regularly. Who are you to silence their voice? If we had things your way, everyone would be in jail. Instead, the laws need to be changed because they are immoral.

raynebc said:

It looks like a story about a pseudonym scribbled in a year book about somebody getting drunk and falling asleep is the closest you have to evidence? I don't find that convincing, but the Democrats are desperate to justify their hatred for Kavanaugh.

That was just the tip of the iceberg. If you had read the linked article on the intercept, there is an entire memoir of mark judges book called wasted. He was a self admitted serial groper and first class drunk, not to mention being best friends with 'Bart O'Kavanaugh', who is obviously Brett Kavanaugh.

I still don't see what's wrong with you people when you blindly support drunks, liars, and bigots.

bamccaig

If you think when you post a link to a news article that links to a way back machine page for a now missing paper that everybody is going to jump through all of these hoops to read it then you're crazy. It's a waste of everybody's time because your evidence is always slanted.

In this case, the paper you're referring to appears to be locked behind a paywall too, but somehow this copy was apparently temporarily available on the state of Idaho's government Web site, and the Way Back Machine site is therefore archiving it. It's probably technically against the law to be accessing it in this way, but we'll overlook that for now.

The paper you're citing itself says that the majority of law enforcement believes that false rape accusations are common. It's a wonder then that their analysis of law enforcement's data draws the conclusion that it is not. Who knows better, the people that deal with the accusers, victims, and perpetrators for a living, or academics in a university with an agenda?

While I am able to see this paper, I was unsuccessful finding peer review of it. I found some feminists using it as proof that false accusations are rare, but I haven't been able to find anybody questioning the paper's findings let alone confirming them. The sad thing is a group of people can publish a paper that nobody else is interested in, and that alone is enough for countless other people to point to and say "look, everybody else is wrong, false accusations almost never happen because 4 people with the same agenda as me said so!"

For the luls:

the paper said:

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.

Oh. :-/

the paper said:

Bios

David Lisak, PhD, is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He has conducted research on the causes and consequences of interpersonal violence, including the motives and characteristics of nonstranger rapists, the impact of abuse on male development, and the relationship between childhood trauma and the perpetration of violence. In addition to research, he consults widely with law enforcement, prosecutor and judicial agencies, as well as universities and the U.S. military.

Lori Gardinier, MSW, PhD, is the program director for the Human Services Major at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts where she is also the founder of the Campus Center on Violence Against Women. She holds a master’s degree in social work from Boston University and a PhD from Northeastern University. She has <b>practiced in the area of antipoverty/ social justice work in community-based settings</u> and as a counselor in organizations addressing intimate partner violence. Her most recent publication examines the Paid Family Leave Campaign in Massachusetts as a social movement.

Sarah C. Nicksa, MA, is a PhD candidate in the sociology program at Northeastern University. Her dissertation, entitled “Bystander Reactions to Witnessing Sexual Assault: The Impact of Gender, Community, and Social Learning,” will be completed in spring 2011. She regularly teaches “Violence in the Family” and is a medical advocate at the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center.

Ashley M. Cote is a graduate of Northeastern University’s College of Criminal Justice, where she focused on juvenile justice, security, and criminology. At Northeastern University, she was a member of the Campus Center on Violence Against Women, studied the effects of parental attachment on youth violence, and was elected a gubernatorial advisor for the Juvenile Justice Advisory Committee under the Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety and Security. She is currently employed at the Massachusetts General Hospital’s police, security, and outside services department and plans to earn a master’s in social work and urban leadership.

(Underlined emphasis mine)

When you search for these names only two of them appear to have more than a couple of papers, which seems to indicate they were students at the time. They're not highly respected experts in their field of study. They're just some people that needed to do some research to get their fancy papers. As impressive as that is, I find it really hard to believe that none of them believe themselves to have had a conflict of interest. It appears all of them were deeply invested in the fight against violence against women specifically (not just violence in general, only against women), and they seemed to be working directly with alleged victims. If that's not a conflict of interest then I don't know what is.

I don't have time to pick the entire paper apart. I don't think it's worth my time either. If I do pick it apart you'll just find another one and try to place the burden on me again to do your research for you.

This I find amusing near the start of the paper:

the paper said:

For centuries, it has been asserted and assumed that women “cry rape,” that a large proportion of rape allegations are maliciously concocted for purposes of revenge or other motives. [sic] Most famously, Sir Matthew Hale, a chief justice of the court of the King’s bench of England, expressed this view in a form that became the basis for special jury instructions that would be used late into the 20th century (Schafran, 1993). Hale (1847) wrote,

It is true rape is a most detestable crime, and therefore ought severely and impartially to be punished with death; but it must be remembered, that it is an accusation easily to be made and hard to be proved, and harder to be defended by the party accused, tho never so innocent. (p. 634)

They're claiming that this "chief justice of the court" was asserting and assuming that women "cry rape", but if you read his quote he said no such thing. All he said, quite factually and admirably, is that it's easy to accuse somebody of rape and difficult to prove it. Which for the purposes of law mean that it's difficult to determine who is lying and who is telling the truth. That is by no means asserting that women "cry rape", but allowing for the inevitable possibility, and it certainly is not assuming that women generally are. Only that in a fair judicial system the courts must assume the accusations are wrong.

We must assume that the accused is innocent until proven beyond a reasonable doubt that they are guilty. This means that some guilty parties will go unpunished, but importantly it means that fewer innocent parties will be punished for crimes they did not commit. Albeit, in today's society, being accused of rape is already pretty much enough to ruin your life. The prison sentence is just "gravy".

Being that the authors apparently were so biased as to put a spin on the meaning of this quote (or at least, failed to quote the relevant parts of the citation) I can't imagine the rest of their paper is any more credible. If you still need me to sift through this thing page by page and pick it apart then whine about it.

Erin Maus

bamccaig, no wonder you don't like academia, you have no fucking clue how it works. And you went to school? Did you snooze through English?

You don't know how peer review works, you don't know what conflict of interest is, you don't know how research is performed... wow.

This is like arguing with a flat earther: they think they know how the scientific process works, but they never took Science 101.

Edgar Reynaldo

bambams, you should try reading that paper next time.

It is notable that in general the greater the scrutiny applied to police classifications, the lower the rate of false reporting detected. Cumulatively, these findings contradict the still widely promulgated stereotype that false rape allegations are a common occurrence.

In the emotionally charged public discourse about sexual violence, it is often the case that assertions are made without reference to research data. Such assertions not only undermine rational discourse but also damage individual victims of sexual violence. The stereotype that false rape allegations are a common occurrence, a widely held misconception in broad swaths of society, including among police officers, has very direct and concrete consequences. It contributes to the enormous problem of underreporting by victims of rape and sexual abuse. It is estimated that between 64% and 96% of victims do not report the crimes committed against them (Fisher et al., 2000; Perkins & Klaus, 1996), and a major reason for this is victims’ belief that his or her report will be met with suspicion or outright disbelief (Jordan, 2004).

raynebc

If we had things your way, everyone would be in jail. Instead, the laws need to be changed because they are immoral.

You never get tired of being wrong when putting words in others' mouths, do you? If I had my way, people who break the LAW would be punished accordingly. If you don't like a law, work to have it changed, don't complain that it takes too much work to change it and just choose to disregard the law instead.

I still don't see what's wrong with you people when you blindly support drunks, liars, and bigots.

Because so many of the Dems attacking Kavanaugh are batsh*t crazy and have too little credibility when their extreme bias is always showing so brazenly.

Personally, I find it hilarious that a pot-head is mad that somebody drank lots of beer while he was a kid and that his distinguished and respected professional career no longer matters because BEER. Good thing I've never been drunk or taken any illegal drugs, as somebody might fabricate a story about me some day and try to derail my life.

Edgar Reynaldo
raynebc said:

If I had my way, people who break the LAW would be punished accordingly.

Oh dear, you capitalized the word law. I've been breaking the law peacefully for decades, and no one has ever gotten hurt because of me or my marijuana use. But the LAW is the LAW. :/

Breaking the law :

video

Alchohol is way more dangerous than pot, but its legal, so being an alcoholic must be okay.

raynebc said:

If you don't like a law, work to have it changed, don't complain that it takes too much work to change it and just choose to disregard the law instead.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I'd love to change the law, but it's dangerous when you're on the wrong side of it. I vote, but actually going out campaigning to change the law would require time and effort I can not afford.

raynebc said:

Personally, I find it hilarious that a pot-head is mad that somebody drank lots of beer while he was a kid and that his distinguished and respected professional career no longer matters because BEER.

That's pretty funny when I went through and gave uncategorically sound evidence that Brett Kavanaugh has a history of making bench decisions that are unconstitutional and just plain evil. But you don't mind ignoring the facts.

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I don't give a shit that Brett Kavanaugh liked to party when he was young. I used to party pretty hardy, but I only ever blacked out once. It's his character at stake, not mine. I'm not under consideration for the judiciary. I'm related to a judge, and I highly doubt he would support Brett Kavanaugh either. The fact that Brett Kavanaugh was close friends with Mark Judge, a self admitted groper and another drunk, along with his drinking buddies, along with Ford's testimony, proves that his character is not sufficient to be holding a seat on the highest court in the land. Whatever happened to standards?

The so called FBI investigation into Ford's allegations was a sham. One of the women who came forth with the most serious allegations against Kavanaugh was never even interviewed! One week to perform an investigation that should take a month or more is not sufficient to vet someone who has been accused of such a serious crime.

EDIT
Oh, and in other news, it's 4:20
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bamccaig

My belief is false rape accusations are not significant enough a problem when many women (35%!) do not report rape in the first place. Priorities!

There are many reasons that women may choose not to report rape. Some of them may well be valid. For example, if there's no concrete evidence of the rape, reporting it likely won't be very fruitful. It will create a he-said, she-said situation. In a just society, no punishment should come from this for either party.

The CA or DA likely wouldn't even go to trial without evidence. If they do happen to go to trial, at least if L&O: SVU is to be believed, it will likely be a very humiliating and traumatic experience for the victim. To be questioned and discredited publicly by the defense. Ultimately, even if the accused is tried and convicted, the victim will likely still suffer from emotional trauma long after the physical damage has healed (assuming it will).

Obviously reporting the incident immediately will improve the police's chances of gathering physical evidence, but even physical evidence can be twisted around to provide reasonable doubt. Was the woman forced, or does she like it rough? Etc.

Unfortunately, there's currently no sure fire way to prove when a sexual assault occurred or didn't. That's why it's best for everyone, especially vulnerable persons, to avoid situations that might leave them susceptible to predators. Don't accept drinks from strangers, don't leave your drink unattended, don't get so drunk that you're likely to black out or make bad choices, don't go home with people you don't know, always stay with a buddy or two and don't leave their side, stay in well lit areas with lots of people around, etc. Many sexual assaults are avoidable if people are willing to take these extra precautions.

Unfortunately, feminists believe that it's a woman's right to be as reckless as she wants. To the point of rallying against education campaigns to teach girls and women of the precautions they can use to protect themselves. And perhaps that's true, but if a woman is assaulted and there's not enough evidence to identify or convict the assailant then there's not much more that anybody can do about it aside from offering support and counselling. We can continue trying cases and get better at the science used to prove guilt, but we cannot just take a woman's word for it and punish people without proof. Most importantly, we cannot undo the psychological harm to the victim. And if that harm is as severe as we're lead to believe by victims and advocates then you'd think it would be well worth the precautions to avoid it in the first place. It's simply impossible to outright prevent rape. You can preach to boys all you want to, but some people are sociopaths or psychopaths that cannot "get it", and others are young and underdeveloped.

Of course, boys and men are also sexually assaulted, and they're extremely unlikely to report it. So we likely have very little clue how frequently it is occurring. But I won't hold my breath for that to become a hot topic any time soon. Society has been conditioned not to care about boys or men. And yet, all we hear day in and day out is that it's a man's world, and women are oppressed by men. Give me a break.

bamccaig, no wonder you don't like academia, you have no fucking clue how it works. And you went to school? Did you snooze through English?

You don't know how peer review works, you don't know what conflict of interest is, you don't know how research is performed... wow.

This is like arguing with a flat earther: they think they know how the scientific process works, but they never took Science 101.

SAGE Publishing was a founding member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) when it was established in 2008. In November 2013, OASPA reviewed SAGE's membership after the Journal of International Medical Research published a false and intentionally flawed paper created and submitted by a reporter for Science as part of a "sting" to test the effectiveness of the peer-review processes of open access journals (see Who's Afraid of Peer Review?). SAGE's membership was reinstated at the end of the six month review period following changes to the journal's editorial processes.

Eeeek. Sounds like a very reputable journal indeed. That was apparently 3 years after publishing the paper you're citing.

bambams, you should try reading that paper next time.

I had already read the part that you quoted, but I didn't find it particularly credible. For example:

the paper said:

It is notable that in general the greater the scrutiny applied to police classifications, the lower the rate of false reporting detected.

I don't think this is notable at all, and it shouldn't come as a surprise. They're effectively measuring proof of a negative. That is, proof that something didn't happen. The more demanding their requirements are for meeting that definition the fewer matches they find. I think that's exactly what you would expect to find, making it not at all notable.

I have now read the entire paper, and I am still underwhelmed. They aren't proving that false rape accusations are rare. The best they can say is that they were unable to prove that false rape accusations are common, though it doesn't seem like they were really trying to do that. It seems like their intention was to cast doubt on the "stereotype" that it is common. Which is quite easy to do, but doubt goes both ways, and the doubt that a rape accusation is false will be met with equal doubt that a rape accusation is valid (as it should).

The paper pretty much came to the same conclusion that I did without any research on the subject: it's nearly impossible to prove unless the victim admits to the fraud or concrete contradictory evidence is found. And it doesn't answer other questions, like if an obviously false report comes in do the police even file a report or do they just show them the door and get a donut? The quality of the data could be unreliable for any number of reasons that the paper doesn't even consider.

There are just so many holes in this kind of "research". It's barely useful as a catalyst for further research. It's certainly not sufficient to form any hard conclusions from. Making it pretty much useless for our current discussion. I certainly wouldn't call it good science.

raynebc said:

Personally, I find it hilarious that a pot-head is mad that somebody drank lots of beer while he was a kid and that his distinguished and respected professional career no longer matters because BEER. Good thing I've never been drunk or taken any illegal drugs, as somebody might fabricate a story about me some day and try to derail my life.

I must agree, this is quite comical.

Neil Roy

Jamaica is sounding pretty nice right around now.

Jamaica also presumes everyone is innocent until proven guilty. (http://old.jamaica-star.com/thestar/20120919/features/features2.html)

Maybe Mexico would be more to your liking? They presume you are guilty there. Just hope nobody ever accuses you of rape there, might have a tough time proving you're innocent.

bamccaig

I'm assuming he believed that cannabis was legal in Jamaica, but it's not. Medical marijuana is, and the penalty for having a personal amount on you was reduced in 2015, but it's still illegal according to Wikipedia.

If you want to go to a country where cannabis is legal then come to Canada. As of October 18th, cannabis will apparently be legal nationwide. The government is even setting up a goddamned Web site to order it. Like alcohol, you have to purchase it from the government or other licensed distributors, but for now, except for medical marijuana, the only legal source of cannabis is the government operated Web site.

I'm actually [allegedly] really interested in trying cannabis products. They may be a more healthy way to achieve sleep, for example, than several beers. That said, apparently the US government is taking a hard stance against marijuana, and if you admit to using it at the border they may permanently ban you. Irrespective of whether you have any on you or are high at the time of crossing... Kind of fucking ridiculous. So if I refrain it'll be because I don't want to risk being banned from visiting the land of the cheap gasoline and beer. :-/

Neil Roy

No, please, stay out of Canada... we don't need more liberals than we already have here!

As for pot smoking... there's just something about breathing in toxic smoke that disagrees with me. I have tried it in the past, and I hate the way it makes me think. I'll never touch it again (plus the fact that I quit smoking like, 26 years ago and I have enjoyed the benefits of breathing only clean air.

Sadly, we are hours away from pot being legal in Canada and I dread the problems that will come as a result of it. I already put up with annoying potheads where I live and the stink of that shit wafting through the building along with the potheads themselves making a mess of where I live. I can't imagine how much worse it will get once legalized. I swear, if someone smokes that shit too close to me, I'll deck 'em.

Edgar Reynaldo
NiteHackr said:

Jamaica also presumes everyone is innocent until proven guilty. (http://old.jamaica-star.com/thestar/20120919/features/features2.html)

Maybe Mexico would be more to your liking? They presume you are guilty there. Just hope nobody ever accuses you of rape there, might have a tough time proving you're innocent.

Neil, hahaha you're so funny. You're such a big hypocrite. I never said he was guilty, but I believe it more and more the more I read about him. However, you on the other hand, presume guilt before innocence as well. You presume the guilt of the three women as if it has been proven that their accusations are false and malicious. That in itself is a serious crime.

You say there were 65 women who testified to his 'good nature'. I wonder if you interviewed 65 women who knew him in college you would get a different answer.

Ford knew the price she would pay if she spoke up, but she did anyway. Her family has been stalked and received death threats.

But you know, go on blaming the victim. Someday you might be the victim of a crime you can't prove.

Oh, and I also recall that Ford told her therapist about the assault 6 months before he was even nominated for the supreme court. Can't remember where I read that, I think it was on the Washington Post, but sadly they won't let me view any more articles unless I pay. :/

bamccaig
NiteHackr said:

Sadly, we are hours away from pot being legal in Canada and I dread the problems that will come as a result of it.

I don't actually expect much will change. It's not as if the law was really preventing anybody from doing it that really wanted to. I have been smelling it on my balcony all summer long from who knows which neighbours. I've known countless people that have been doing it for decades.

As has been said, it sounds like for the most part cannabis doesn't really bring the worst out of people. It might make them slow down, or occasionally a bit paranoid I guess, but it shouldn't make them beat their wives or kill anybody on the highway (albeit, driving while high is still against the law). It's not very addictive, so compared to alcohol or heroin, crack, meth, let alone fentanyl I don't think it'll motivate as much crime to fund it. You might make the argument that it's a "gateway drug", but I think that most people have the good sense to stay away from the hard drugs, and the ones that don't are already probably in to it. It's not like a guy that wouldn't do weed because it was illegal is going to try it and suddenly go all the way to illegal drugs. And either way, they already could have done that prior to legalization.

I imagine not much will change, except hopefully it'll result in a bit less money in the pockets of violent criminals, and hopefully fewer people even have access to the kinds of people that could source them hard drugs. If you can get your weed from the government then you won't need to get it from a street dealer that is lacing it with fentanyl to try to get you hooked on more profitable products, and even if your dealer is a stand up guy that doesn't do that kind of thing, he probably has the connections to get you other kinds of drugs. Instead, people can just get a nice high from the government and stay away from the kinds of influences that might tempt them to try harder shit. At least, in theory.

Only time will tell, but I think you can rest easy. Things are already really bad with the meth and fentanyl problems in Ontario. I don't think this will make things worse. It might actually help to make them better. Apparently several people have been overdosing on street marijuana that was laced with fentanyl unknown to the consumer. At least if you're getting your weed from the government you should be able to trust its source.

raynebc

Edgar, the American Bar Association disagrees with you and considers him one of the best lawyers. Your opinions on his rulings don't matter.

As for alcohol, I agree it's dangerous as are arguably all recreational drugs. I don't drink alcohol except for rare occasions (ie. weddings or a glass of wine on New Year's). Sugar in my diet is probably my most destructive vice, but I've been working on cutting back.

Edgar Reynaldo

There's a big difference between a lawyer and a judge. A lawyer seeks to cheat and coerce the law to suit his own needs, where a judge has to be impartial.

How is it exactly that his rulings don't matter? He is clearly biased towards power, religion, and the wealthy. He disregards the rights of aliens and minors and women and workers. He is not fit to be a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

raynebc

He sides with the law as it is written instead of biasing it in favor of the underdog. That's really why Democrats hate originalist justices.

Edit: When I said earlier that the ABA considers Kavanaugh one of the best lawyers, I should point out their "Well Qualified" rating for Kavanaugh covers his career of being a DC circuit judge as well.

Neil Roy
bamccaig said:

I don't actually expect much will change.

I really hope you're right. I I just told my wife tonight that I doubt we will see any major changes, except I will have to put up with the stink of it more often. But I am still concerned about it being a gateway drug, which some disagree about, I've seen it myself. And I am concerned about the addiction and health problems which will be hard on a country that provides free health care.

But, it is what it is, I'm trying not to complain about it and live and let live. I won't smoke it, I just hope those that do smoke respect my right to clean air and I'll respect their right to kill themselves. ;)

You presume the guilt of the three women

Huh?! I presume nothing about the women as they are the ones making the charges, they are not being charged so how could they be either innocent or guilty of anything?! ::) The law states that the accused has the right to be presumed innocent, so that is what I presume. And that it is up to the accuser to prove their charges, which they did not, so therefore he remains innocent.

It's just that simple. To presume he is guilty and demand that he is to prove he is innocent violates one of his basic constitutional rights. Which is what the Democrats want to do.

We both know this has nothing what so ever to do with him or anything he has done. We both know this has to do with how he will rule in certain cases which concern the Democrats. The Democrats want to do away with many parts of the constitution and they know he 100% supports the law and the constitution and that his position is a lifetime one which means they are screwed now. That is what this is about no matter how anyone twists it.

bamccaig
NiteHackr said:

I really hope you're right. I I just told my wife tonight that I doubt we will see any major changes, except I will have to put up with the stink of it more often. But I am still concerned about it being a gateway drug, which some disagree about, I've seen it myself. And I am concerned about the addiction and health problems which will be hard on a country that provides free health care.

But, it is what it is, I'm trying not to complain about it and live and let live. I won't smoke it, I just hope those that do smoke respect my right to clean air and I'll respect their right to kill themselves. ;)

I initially found the smell pretty annoying, until a neighbour in my building started smoking it regularly. I'm not a buzzkill so I didn't get upset about it. And over time I really learned to enjoy the smell. In fact, our landlord posted a notice basically saying that we can complain about the smell of pot and our neighbours will be put on notice with an official complaint. Basically 2 (or is it 3?) and they'll get kicked out of the building. That kind of made me sad because it might mean I won't be smelling that anymore for free. :) Mind you, these neighbours appeared to be smoking it outside because I could only smell it on my balcony or with my patio open. Rather courteous, I say. I get that some people just would find it repulsive, and probably it varies by the variant of pot that the user is smoking. That said, I think that living in a shared building requires a bit of give and take. It's not all about any one individual. We all need to learn to live together. Complaints are so formal and hostile. What happened to just having a conversation with your neighbour, getting their side of the story, and asking them if it would be too inconvenient to smoke it on the balcony or something?

I went onto ocs.ca today. Basically it's the official cannabis online store in Ontario. I was overwhelmed by the choices. Probably for experienced users it's underwhelming and even a bit limited, but for me I couldn't even choose what to order. Ultimately, I decided to wait. The FAQ say not to consume cannabis while you're drinking which pretty much means I cannot consume cannabis. :D But I'm also nervous about the US border reaction. All-in-all I think it makes sense to wait a while for me. I'll probably need somebody experienced with it to teach me how to do all the things required, and what to buy, and there's really no rush. I'm mostly interested in whether or not it will offer a more healthy alternative to 8 drinks of alcohol a night. It kind of seems like a lot of work though so it will have to work well for me to be willing to go through that. I'm also nervous because I've heard reports that the US border is basically going to start interrogating us as we cross and if we admit to ever using cannabis we'll get permanently banned. And if they find any trace amounts on you or in your vehicle you can actually be jailed.. So it's kind of worrying for that reason. Perhaps in a few years the US federal government will give in too.

My other concern is that ocs.ca says that consuming cannabis increases your risk for mental illness by like 40%. Which I find pretty alarming. I'm already concerned that I may have some kind of mental disorder so I probably don't want to risk exacerbating it until I've been evaluated... It also says the risks for psychosis increase! Yikes. It seems a bit far fetched though based on other statements made, but I imagine they're just trying to cover their bases. I guess time will also help to work out these concerns. Now that it's legal I suppose you could talk to a doctor about it and see what advice they can give.

Erin Maus

> It also says the risks for psychosis increase! Yikes. It seems a bit far fetched though based on other statements made, but I imagine they're just trying to cover their bases.

They're not exaggerating. Marijuana affects the same parts of the brain as antipsychotics (antipsychotics supress dopamine, while marijauna increases it, I think?). I've talked to my doctors about it because I was just curious and they all said it's a Very Bad Idea (tm). Anecdotally, they've had patients relapse after doing well because of marijuana.

If you don't have a psychotic disorder, or don't have an inclination for one that would be triggered by marijauna, you'd be fine. Just be warned over use can cause laziness, paranoia, diminished motivation, and weight gain (from eating)...

To clarify, I've been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and my positive symptoms include psychosis (i.e., delusional thinking and [rare] visual hallucinations in my case).

Neil Roy
bamccaig said:

Basically 2 (or is it 3?) and they'll get kicked out of the building.

Oooh, I would have fun with an idiot landlord like that! I know the landlord and tenant act and they CANNOT kick you out of the building for complaining about the smell. Period.

This is one topic I know A LOT about! I have studied the act since I was a teen. I had one landlord try and evict me four times, all year long he tried, and I challenged him in court and won every single case.

This landlord you mention doesn't have a clue what he is talking about. Any such eviction notice would be thrown out of court.

Heck, I even had a landlord try and evict me because I violated my lease, and sure enough I did! BUT, i still won the case because in the lease, the landlord basically has you sign away your rights and according to law, it protects you from signing away your rights, so even IF you agree to no longer have rights and sign a lease stating such, the law still protects you and doesn't allow a landlord or you to sign away your rights. It's great protection.

I think I have received a total of 5 or 6 eviction notices in my life, and I have yet to lose a single case.

When given a notice, it has to be an official notice, approved by the sherrif. It has to have GOOD reason under law, and they have to give it to you on the day the rent is due or it is invalid. If you are a monthly rental, they have to give you two months notice and you ALWAYS have the right to dispute it, in which case they cannot evict you until the court decides the case.

Even if you fail to pay the rent, the law states that you have 14 days to pay it. They can give you a 20 day notice to move in that case, but if you pay it within the 14 days, the notice is invalid and you don't have to move.

It's good to know your rights. The next time the landlord says that, laugh in his face and say "good luck with that!".

bamccaig

Weren't there court fees or lawyer fees every time you went to court? Or you just represented yourself? Aren't the laws hundreds of pages long? Who has time for that? :P

Append:

At least for now I think some people are continuing to smoke it anyway. I caught a whiff of it earlier from inside my apartment even.

Somebody may have just placed an order. Somebody may be getting it in a few days via mail. Somebody is very curious about its potential to replace or complement alcohol.

Edgar Reynaldo

Drinking and smoking at the same time is a great way to get the spins and throw up. ;)

Neil Roy

Actually, I got a Queen's law student that represented me, cost me nothing. I applied for assistance as well from a legal aid thing you can get it from.

The Ontario landlord and tenant act is not that long. And you can look up the laws on specific points without having to study the whole thing.

Years ago, in the '80s, before computer access, you used to be able to go downtown where I live (Kingston) and they had single page pamphlets which gave a summary of the most important of your rights.

Lately I looked up about the temperature laws for example. In all cities in Ontario, they have to have the heat on by September 15th, and it has to be at a minimum temperature which varies slightly from city to city. Some have it around 20C, some are at 21.1C (which is 70F, that is what it is in Kingston) between 6am and 11pm. late night hours it can go down to around 18C (again, the specifics vary). And there are even instructions on who to contact in case of a violation.

I'll try and find the website for you, it's VERY handy to bookmark and learn. Don't let them push you around, you have rights, and they absolutely cannot evict you for complaining. That's laughable.

Here's my link I keep on hand on the temperatures they have to keep your place at. You can find other information here, bookmark it and don't let them screw you over. Ontario has awesome rights for tenants, always has.

http://www.ontariotenants.ca/law/law.phtml#Q7

Scroll up and down that page to see other parts of it, like the reasons they can evict you and how and your rights especialy here...

http://www.ontariotenants.ca/law/law.phtml#Q9

These days it doesn't go to court, but instead it goes to a special board. I actually went to one recently and in a strange twist, I was helping the landlord (a first for me) so that point of view was interesting. But even more interesting was that the tenant was guilty of all charges against them, and the notice was a proper one, but they got off the charges because the landlord didn't explain to him in the notice how he could have remedied the problems!!! It was ridiculous to be honest, but it shows just how hard it is to evict someone and these days, the landlord has to treat tenants like they are absolutely stupid in all ways or they will not be able to evict them.

bamccaig

Drinking and smoking at the same time is a great way to get the spins and throw up. ;)

I may the guidance of an experienced smoker... :-/

NiteHackr said:

Don't let them push you around, you have rights, and they absolutely cannot evict you for complaining. That's laughable.

I think you misunderstood me. You won't get evicted for complaining. You may get evicted if you smoke weed around the building and annoy your neighbours. You can basically file a complaint if somebody's cannabis use is bothering you. Apparently if you do, they'll be put on a 6 month probation period whereby if somebody complains about it again presumably they'll be evicted.

Albeit, I wish it counted against you for complaining about stupid things. When I first moved into this building I had a complaint filed against me for playing my car stereo somewhat loud while parking. But it's literally like 1 minute, and there was like 5 other people that already lived in the building doing it that didn't get complaints (one of them my brother, who set the example for me). I was like 24 at the time.

Much more recently, a neighbour just moved in below me, and complained that my balcony was too loud and shook his apartment. The superintendent asked me to open it slowly because there was nothing he could do... I sprayed the tracks with WD-40 which mostly freed it up (but it doesn't last long and probably could be done again). Nevertheless, to this day there are other neighbours who shake my apartment a little bit when they open their patio door. It's quite loud. And yet, I never even noticed it until this other neighbour bitched about it. And even though I notice it now, it still doesn't bother me. We're renting. We share space with people. You have to deal. I just wish the superintendent could just tell him "tough" (or at least fix the problem himself so it's not my problem).

Neil Roy

Ah, I see. You can get evicted if there is proof you are interfering with the enjoyment of the apartment by other tenants.

But ALL eviction notices can be fought. And in my case, won. :)

bamccaig

I mean, it's silly to say that you're "interfering with the enjoyment" of an apartment. In that case, I could complain about kids running in the halls (being kids), or dogs upsetting my cat when they walk by (being dogs), or couples fighting as they walk down the halls (being a couple). Unless there's a legitimate concern for safety or well-being I question the complaint. What I'd really like to complain about is idiots that cannot park evenly between the lines in the parking lot, which means that often there's not enough space to park in your own assigned parking spot. I'd complain, but I think these people are literally incompetent and so even though it's pathetic it's sort of "not their fault" and even if it was their fault I know that nothing would be done about it. The superintendent doesn't have time to police that. And of course, if I start pointing fingers at people for things they can start pointing fingers at me back. I'd rather just live peacefully with my neighbours and get along with everybody.

For example, with the loud music on my car stereo. It was a stock stereo so it wasn't even very damn loud. And I was on the back wall of the parking lot so it's not like I was right next to the bitch's apartment. She was just complaining because she's a buzzkill and me enjoying myself was ruining her depressing life being alone.

As for the pot smell, it can certainly be foul sometimes so I can understand not wanting to smell that. That said, in my experience, I got used to it after a while (because I wouldn't complain over that unless it was actually putting me out somehow) and now I rather like it when my neighbour smokes it (and I haven't smoked it myself yet; I've just learned to really enjoy the smell). I guess I'm just a more open person than some. In any case, the evidence seems to indicate that it's far less dangerous than cigarettes and alcohol.

But time will tell. If my neighbour continues to smoke it on his balcony then I might try too. If we get a complaint then we can stop. But hopefully our neighbours are decent enough to talk to us first. We know most of them by now.

Append:

I just saw this quote in the opening sequence of a movie, "Acts of Vengeance":

To expect bad men not to do wrong is madness

I think it's short and sweet, and illustrates how Feminists are fucking delusional. Of course, I interpret "men" here to be "people", which I think normal people would, but due to my accusation against Feminists I feel I need to qualify that because some people are literal only when it suits their agenda and this would otherwise be one of those times.

Append:

I crossed the border on Friday and it was no different than usual. In fact, it was more smooth than usual. That said, I ordered pretty early and it is probably still 3 days away so perhaps they're biding their time until they're sure the government is delivering legal weed. It's kind of humorous. I'm just hoping they continue to be relaxed and peaceful about it. The majority of Canadians are not criminals. We're regular, hard-working people trying to get through the day like every other American. And plenty willing to spend our dollar in America if we're near the border and the price is right.

Chris Katko

My contribution to this thread:

video

Erin Maus

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/21/us/politics/transgender-trump-administration-sex-definition.html

#MAGA

dunno why people (i.e., conservatives) are so concerned about a minority of a minority!!!

Edgar Reynaldo

1 in 20 is 5%. That's a lot, comparatively, according to the 1.4 million estimated transgender in America the article says. 4 free articles left btw >:(.

@Katko
That can only go on for so long... I fear 3 minutes of kicking someone over and over again has tried my patience. Even if it is JCVD. Who was the chick? What movie was that?

Chris Katko

Cyborg.

That's 90% of the only good scenes from that movie.

XD

I did it for me. If anyone else laughs, I'm happy to extend it.

Erin Maus

> 1 in 20 is 5%. That's a lot, comparatively, according to the 1.4 million estimated transgender in America the article says. 4 free articles left btw

1.4 / 325.7 ~= 0.4% of Americans. Where are you getting this 1 in 20 number from?

Edgar Reynaldo

Aaron, email quoting doesn't work. :P Use <quote name="Aaron Bolyard" src="https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/615770/1039699#target">1.4 / 325.7 ~= 0.4% of Americans. Where are you getting this 1 in 20 number from? </quote>.

I can't do math. :/ 1 in 200. Still comparatively large enough for the right wingers to get worried about some trannie eye groping women in the bathroom.

EDIT

Cyborg.

That's 90% of the only good scenes from that movie.

XD

I did it for me. If anyone else laughs, I'm happy to extend it.

Use a little variety for freaks sake ;O Those can't be the only moves in the movie.

Chris Katko

That was the joke. :P

Have you ever seen a "10 hour repeating clip" video on YouTube?

Those can't be the only moves in the movie.

There was maybe one other real combat scene in the entire movie. But that would involve actually opening a real video editor instead of literally just pressing "skip back and skip forth" in VLC. :)

Edgar Reynaldo

Sorry, my sense of humor is out of order today. Try again tomorrow. ;) :) xD

https://martialartsactionmovies.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/BruceLee1.jpg

video

EDIT
What do you guys think of this? Sending mail bombs to prominent democrats. And you thought the liberals were crazy.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-obama-clinton-bomb-explosive-device-20181024-story.html

EDIT2
I post Bruce Lee, and then nothing for two days? Cmon slackers! Pick up the pace!

Erin Maus

{"name":"611736","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/2\/8\/2860cb37bea75b47ee252eccb161d34a.png","w":832,"h":605,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/2\/8\/2860cb37bea75b47ee252eccb161d34a"}611736

"Aftermath of 'Threads look too soon', circa late 2018."

Chris Katko

And you thought the liberals were crazy.

They're both complete assholes.

The left has been the party of riots, violent protests, and identity tribalism for decades. And because they got away with it for so long, the right-wing has created their own group of violent authoritarians who believe in identity politics. (If there can be a black lives matter, why not a white lives matter?)

It's a reactionary response to the left's decades of under-handed "we get you fired for disagreeing" tactics.

- Trump being elected was one of those reactions.
- Getting liberals fired for their own medicine of saying racist jokes on twitter is another reaction.

Liberals are being treated the same way they've treated conservatives forever.

You opened pandora's box, now you get to reap the results.

And I speak as someone who is technically, a full-on liberal. Weed++, gay marriage++, pro-(legal)immigration, etc.

[edit]

Also,

video

and

https://youtu.be/1E7C4GFh21o?t=99

ahahha

[edit]

Aaron: I love your artwork style!

Neil Roy

{"name":"611737","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/e\/e\/eed3e893bf98c9bad62da8e1938a73d4.jpg","w":720,"h":501,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/e\/e\/eed3e893bf98c9bad62da8e1938a73d4"}611737

bamccaig

They're both complete s.

The left has been the party of riots, violent protests, and identity tribalism for decades. And because they got away with it for so long, the right-wing has created their own group of violent authoritarians who believe in identity politics. (If there can be a black lives matter, why not a white lives matter?)

It's a reactionary response to the left's decades of under-handed "we get you fired for disagreeing" tactics.

- Trump being elected was one of those reactions.
- Getting liberals fired for their own medicine of saying racist jokes on twitter is another reaction.

Liberals are being treated the same way they've treated conservatives forever.

You opened pandora's box, now you get to reap the results.

You make it sound like "liberals" are a hive mind singularity who all share the same thoughts and ideas and agree on everything, and all move in the same direction, and all attack the same targets. Which is absurd given that you consider yourself to be liberal and you disagree with a lot of what so called "liberals" have done. The same is true the other way around. "Conservatives" are accused of acts as if they're a hive mind and they all do the same thing and all support the same ideas. These are very broadly defined groups that encompass large swathes of people that agree on some ideas and completely disagree on others. It's barely useful to even give them labels, and certainly never useful to point fingers at the label unless your goal is to distract everyone from the debate and derail anything constructive that might have been underway.

Drop the labels. Dividing the country (or world, for that matter) into a few boxes and placing blame on the entire group for the actions of a subset of them is unfair, unproductive, and unintelligent. The media likes to use these labels because it gets people upset, and that increases the popularity of their work, which increases their cash flow. It's politics. And politics aren't useful for solving problems. Politics distract people from the problems so we forget there is even a problem to be solved.

Most of the media is completely bought and controlled these days. They are not honest journalists doing their best to give unbiased accounts of what is happening. They're puppets on strings doing their best to keep everybody distracted so that everybody will continue to be easily controlled.

I can relate to both sides of the political spectrum. When I do those biased surveys to guess where you land I'm usually pretty close to the middle, as I would bet most people are. Most people are not extremists. Most of us just want to live our best life, and insofar as it doesn't interfere with that want others to be able to do the same. It's mostly emotion that causes people to move towards one or the other extreme, and often it's after being chased there by some puppet master with a snake tongue.

If we want to improve the world we live in we need to stop playing by these house rules and instead insist on playing a fair, inclusive game. We need to honestly seek out the truths, no matter how they make us feel. And we need to always be open to being wrong. The world is not black and white. Sometimes the answers are a little bit fuzzy. And that's OK. If we're honest to ourselves, and honest with others, we can still arrive at good decisions that fairly represent us all.

Chris Katko

When I say liberal you know exactly who I'm talking about. Liberal "leaders". Politicians and the media.

Edgar Reynaldo

Yes, but when many people use the word 'liberal' they mean anyone left of center.

"Aftermath of 'Threads look too soon', circa late 2018."

Don't look too soon, but this thread ain't locked yet, baby. ;)

Chris Katko

video

Erin Maus

Aaron: I love your artwork style!

Thank you! ;D

They look pretty good in-game, too:

{"name":"611738","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/f\/f\/ffb2b2cbe109b9c4f75f57b68ad37898.png","w":800,"h":600,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/f\/f\/ffb2b2cbe109b9c4f75f57b68ad37898"}611738

Spooky scary forest...

Chris Katko

I love it!

Edgar Reynaldo

Spooky Halloween theme.

What are you guys going to dress up as? I'm going to go as myself. That should scare everyone away. ;) xD xX

bamccaig

When I say liberal you know exactly who I'm talking about. Liberal "leaders". Politicians and the media.

Sure, I know what you mean, but the people that don't are going to be "triggered" by it. It just further divides us. It's not constructive.

Chris Katko

I'm using the term "liberal" wrong, and they're... throwing bottles of piss at veterans in wheelchairs while the media gives them a free pass.

I feel so ashamed of myself. ::)

bamccaig

The whole "veteran" praise thing has me confused. I mean, sure, world war veterans had little choice and suffered big, and it's shameful that we didn't take good care of them. After that, it gets a bit more fuzzy. The so called cold war was perhaps another excusable exercise, and I guess for Vietnam the US government was still forcing people to go, but it seems beyond that it's pretty much just people volunteering to go kill people because they have a fetish for guns. It's still shameful that they aren't well taken care of when they return suffering from what they endured, but it's also kind of shameful that they signed on to do evil in the name of their government. It's shameful that they're still patriotic to a fault instead of speaking out against the government that commanded them to go and terrorize people. And that's not universally true. Plenty of them recognize the evil that they represented and do what they can to speak out against it, but the majority are still proud to a fault.

"Veteran" loses a whole lot of meaning when your loses are some thousand maybe and their loses are some hundreds of thousands. At least, as far as I'm concerned. I don't think that war is a good solution to the world's problems, and I don't think that we should glorify the people that choose to sign on for these acts in a time of relative peace. I don't think recent wars have accomplished anything productive, and have done far more harm than good. I have no "veteran fetish". I don't think that we should praise a 35 year old in 2018 for serving overseas. Some of them are certainly messed up from it, but I'm sure they screwed up a lot of other people too while they were over there.

I don't think we should throw bottles full of piss on them, but then I don't think we should throw bottles of piss on anybody. And I don't think we should be any more upset if a bottle of piss is thrown on a veteran than if a bottle of piss is thrown on anybody else. They're not "defending" the nation anymore. They're terrorizing far away lands. It's more likely that they're attracting terrorism than accomplishing anything productive. And if my home was terrorized by a powerful foreign land I think it would motivate me to pick up a rifle or strap a bomb to my chest too.

But then again, there you go saying "they" and "them" as if there's some conspiracy or some massive group of evil people coordinating attacks against your own kind. The world is full of dicks. Many of them are American. Many of them are not. Many of them are American military (kind of attracts dicks, just saying). Many of them are civilians. Many of them are teenagers or early 20s that think they knew what the world is all about, but are in for a rude awakening.

Around 26 or 27 I started to realize that I didn't really know as much as I thought I did. I started to realize that no matter how genuine our intentions are there are a whole lot of different ways to experience this world, it's almost never black and white, and there are a whole lot of people that have every valid reason to oppose you that you do to oppose them. Live, and let live.

So sure, throwing a bottle of piss on a veteran in a wheelchair is a shitty thing to do, but based on all accounts I've read about the wars of late it seems the veterans themselves stand (or sit, as the case may be) a long, long way from innocent. It's pretty horrific to see some leaked video of American forces in Iraq. The civilian death-toll is insane. There are simply too many people on all sides trusting in a figment of their imagination and raw emotion to guide them through life. I don't think that that should be rewarded. I think that it should be condemned.

Everybody makes mistakes, and I'm far from perfect myself. I ultimately do my best to not judge others at all because people in glass houses and all of that. And pointing fingers and placing blame doesn't really solve any problems either. It just further divides us. It's best to seek to move on, find common ground, and work together towards a better future. So what if some stupid people throw bottles of piss on veterans in wheelchairs. Those individuals should be held accountable to the extent that we're able to fairly do so, but it must stop there. You cannot extend it to everybody that partially associates with them. That is playing god.

raynebc

Seems like Bam hates the military and anybody who wants to protect this country and its allies from our collective enemies just has a gun fetish as far as he's concerned.

Erin Maus

If you don't support the VA and disavow the military industrial complex then you hate veterans, too.

see how simplistic I can make things too

re: liberal media, see Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky. tl;dr: media has an audience and aims to entertain the audience while profiting and benefiting the elites; Fox News targets your conservative grandpa while CNN targets your city dwelling progressives neoliberals but in the end they all benefit the same people and hurt everyone else. The difference in politics is not economic, only social.

So while we fight over who should be marginalized and who shouldn't, the wealth divide increases to a point where society cannot bear it.

Also re: civility, I find it hilarious how socially progressives and socialists and all "far left" are supposed to be so civil while the right / conservative aren't held to the same standard. Case in point: this thread. I can be misgendered and that's ok but god forbid I say "fuck you".

Edgar Reynaldo

I respect our veterans, but I don't respect our leaders. No way am I going to volunteer to be in Bush's army, or Trump's either. If you can't trust your commander in chief to be held accountable and responsible for his actions and to avoid war except where war is the only option.

However, I have tremendous respect for our veterans. My Grandpa served in the Navy during World War II, and lost his hearing from the deck guns on a battleship. My nephew in law is in the Army. I respect their decision to commit their life to the defense of this country, and I respect the sacrifice many of them have made.

But I would never join the Armed Forces if I can't trust the President to use his power responsibly. Now if say China came and attacked us, I would fight, even though I don't believe war is justified except in self defense or defense of the weak.

A justified example : Taking out the LRA, the so called 'Lord's Resistance Army', would be justified in my opinion. Likewise as Al-Qaeda was, and so is ISIS. They only terrorize people, and subjugate women.

Anyway,

Elizabeth Warren for President 2020

Gideon Weems

That art style reminds me of Icy Tower, hehe.

... Ah wait, I'm getting a stronger PaRappa vibe, actually.

Chris Katko

I can be misgendered

I don't recall a single person actually intentionally calling you by anything except "Aaron." Only disagreeing with your worldview, and disagreeing isn't not an attack and never will be--for the same reason you can disagree with us and not worry about being called a bigot.

And I've been "misgendered." I've had old WW2 vets intentionally call me "Christine" and make a point of it. They were a-holes. But at no point do I feel like my life has been held back, or I've been denied success or happiness. A-holes exist and they don't neatly fit into categories of "bigot or not". There are tons of a-holes (probably even more) who never use "bigoted terms" but are still complete a-holes. So I don't understand why I should give special attention to an a-hole's meaningless attack, just because the attack fits into a special category. An a-hole is an a-hole and I'm better than them.

The fact you and I can discuss you being "misgendered" calmly, kind of implies it's not that big of a deal. Though, if you've been directly hurt by it, I do apologize as hurting you was never my intent. As you've seen in plenty of my posts, even though I fundamentally disagree with you politically on many points, I've never done anything but wish you the best.

<quote>
Elizabeth Warren
</quote?
Hehe.

This is from a award-winning center-left journalist:

video

He's like, as a left-winger, "Warren, WTF are you doing? I want you to succeed, but WTF?"

Edgar Reynaldo

I seem to remember a certain comment (not in this thread) about pulling your panties up and not being such a girl. The same sentiment still lurks. It's hard to have a serious discussion with someone when they attack you like that.

All in all this thread has been pretty tame taken in historical context of allegro.cc.

Chris Katko

Here's a great point in the "WTF liberals (media)":

video

They seriously just ran an article trying to convince people we should put anti-depressants in their water. Mind-altering drugs.

Erin Maus

I don't recall a single person actually intentionally calling you by anything except "Aaron." Only disagreeing with your worldview, and disagreeing isn't not an attack and never will be--for the same reason you can disagree with us and not worry about being called a bigot.

I was repeatedly inferred to be a woman when I posted something about facial hair / my care routine. I've been called a woman several times in other threads (eg one where I mentioned I was non gender conforming some years ago). It's not funny.

I looked back at raynebc's back-and-forth and found he used gender-neutral pronouns (not using they, instead choosing some clunky phrasing, but props nonetheless). But he still trolled with his misrepresentation of some 1800s English style guidelines as grammatical rules when I mentioned I prefer they/them/theirs and took the magnificent leap that I'm some hateful person because I didn't tolerate it.

raynebc

You don't have the right to expect anybody to cater to unorthodox language requests. Especially with the threat of punishment from the community or the government. The speech police demanding otherwise are a terrible threat to everybody's freedoms.

Erin Maus

It's not unorthodox.

They is the proper gender-neutral pronoun in the English language since the 1300s.

Gender, in language, is social, and does not refer to sex. (What is the sex of a table?)

I'm not male or female (gender), thus he and she aren't correct pronouns to refer to me. By using the pronouns to refer to sex, you're not proper following grammatical usage. (Again, look at languages that use gender for objects).

Therefore, grammatically, the only proper pronoun is they.

If you want to reject 100 years or linguistics, sociology, psychology, and other sciences, then be my guest, but you're literally wrong. Conservative ideology doesn't apply to science--when new information proves older theories or models wrong, you don't reject the new information, you update your theories or models.

...

And I'm not demanding (nor would I ever) under any sort of threat. I'm requesting it in the hope you're a decent human being. But I can say you're a jerk if you don't. Free speech and all that.

bamccaig
raynebc said:

Seems like Bam hates the military and anybody who wants to protect this country and its allies from our collective enemies just has a gun fetish as far as he's concerned.

Your country is a bully and most of the groups or nations that dislike or hate you do so because you've earned it. The entire planet pretty much looks down upon the US, especially within the last few decades. You're far from innocent in all of this. And what you're doing overseas right now is not protecting your country. It might be protecting your interests in other people's resources, at best. Or it's trying to keep your victims weak so that they cannot retaliate or defend themselves. But I guess you can just fabricate a bunch of imaginary WMDs again to suit your political interests and hide behind the guise of being the good guys because terrrrrrrsts. Your government may be fooling a lot of people, perhaps you included, but they're not fooling me anymore.

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

The entire planet pretty much looks down upon the US, especially within the last few decades.

Keep talkin' like that and we're gonna free the democracy lovin' crap out of you. :P

bamccaig

It's extra amusing that you say that considering that the electorate has the power to veto your vote! And you're basically choosing between two corrupt candidates every time. If America knew the first thing about democracy it would demand to change its electorate system.

raynebc

Aaron: I'll just have to accept that "feminine" and "female" are going to be used interchangeably, but I am unlikely to get to the point where I believe it's mandatory to not refer to a woman as female as a general rule. Men can be feminine and women can be masculine, but men cannot become women and vice-versa. Until science radically changes, that will be the case. I do not and likely will not prescribe to the idea that it's necessary or useful to invent and use dozens of gender pronouns, and even recently minted ones like "zir" seem extraneous to me. "They" and "them" will probably be as far down that hole as I go, but I'll just as likely avoiding that usage by restructuring sentences to refer to (name) or "that person".

Bamccaig: If the USA is a bully, Canada is a pu**y. If we're going to be that reductionist I think it's fair for me to say so.

bamccaig
raynebc said:

Bamccaig: If the USA is a bully, Canada is a pu**y. If we're going to be that reductionist I think it's fair for me to say so.

Sure, if a pussy is a guy with a functioning brain that doesn't find it enjoyable to pick on somebody smaller just to feel strong or fit in; I guess Canada is a pussy. But Canadian forces don't hesitate to fight when they need to. Canadian forces have their own history that you probably are completely ignorant of. So quit while you're ahead. While American forces were busy bombing allied forces because they were trigger happy, Canadian forces were risking their lives to preserve peace in turbulent territories where they didn't get to just shoot and had to just face the danger. So shut up. Nobody cares about the American small dick macho trip.

Neil Roy

Someone needs to research Canada's history in WW1 and WW2. Canada was on the ground fighting while the USA debated whether they wanted to support Hitler or not.

On D-day Canadian troops made it further inland, than any other when they hit the ground.

Canada doesn't seek fights all the time, we're fairly pacifist, that is, until you piss us off or attack one of our allies, then we hit the ground fighting. We don't hesitate like certain southern neighbours of ours.

Chris Katko

Democrats got almost bombed, and 11 Jews got gunned down in a synagogue and we're talking about pronouns. :/

[edit]

ALSO, RIP Europe, we hardly knew ye.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/its-not-free-speech-criticize-muhammad-echr-ruled/574174/

A woman was literally fined (and "freedom of speech" denied) because she mentioning during a lecture about the Prophet Mohammad, who marred a 9 year old girl, a pedophile.

"Freedom of speech doesn't outweigh religious feelings". I cannot make this up.

I dare any Atheist to try and defend that.

Edgar Reynaldo

Muhammed is a false prophet. Bite me. God Bless the US.

Chris Katko

Muhammed is a false prophet. Bite me. God Bless the US.

You have been fined one credit for violation of the verbal morality statute.

video

Chris Katko

.

raynebc

Both countries were extremely important in WW2. It is a bit odd that Bam and Nite are chastising the USA for not being quick to enter WW2, and chastising them now for being proactive instead of reactive like Canada. I think both my blanket statement and Bams's were similarly flawed, that was the point of mine.

The would-be mail bomber seemed to be a crazy right winger. We can all be thankful that he was too incompetent to pull it off.

That Europe article is in line with their continued downward spiral into freedom-less dystopia. I don't think anybody can argue that a guy who marries and has sex with a child is a pedophile. Unless I'm mistaken, that historical record on Muhammad is accurate.

Edgar Reynaldo

Jihad! Jihad!

https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/cartoon-jihad

https://www.thetrumpet.com/2215-cartoon-jihad

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2018/07/sweden-man-fined-342-for-posting-satirical-cartoon-about-child-marriage-in-islam-on-facebook

Court prosecutor Mathias Larsson charged the man for both the satirical image and his commentary on the image. According to the prosecutor, the post indicated that the 64-year-old “threatened or expressed disagreement with the public or another group of persons on the basis of race, color, national or ethnic origin or creed.”

EDIT - oh, found some!

http://www.cartoonistgroup.com/subject/The-Jihad-Comics-and-Cartoons.php

You have to view the pages to see them :

http://www.cartoonistgroup.com/store/add.php?iid=132646

http://www.cartoonistgroup.com/store/add.php?iid=22719

WARNING these are offensive, and I don't care

bamccaig
raynebc said:

I don't think anybody can argue that a guy who marries and has sex with a child is a pedophile.

Paedophilia actually refers to the sexual attraction to children. Getting married or even having sexual relations wouldn't necessarily imply that the adult was a pedophile. That said, girls are generally not able to bear children until at least 12 or 13 at the earliest so there would be little other reason to do it (though I guess if you wanted to nitpick you could just argue it was working with what you had for your own needs)...

If you look at the history of humanity, however, it is not at all an uncommon occurrence for girls to be married off young, sometimes extremely young, and also to be forced into sexual relations with their husbands. The Bible itself also seems to condone this behaviour in a few places.

The world when the so called "Jesus" and "Mohammad" characters lived is not the same world we live in today. The point is that it should not be ridiculed with the sensibilities of today. If we do that, the Bible is a terrible fucking disgrace of a book. It was a different time. We cannot really begin to comprehend how these people really lived. It is so far detached from the world that we all know in every conceivable way.

In terms of discrediting the religion, it's an irrelevant fact. People just use that argument because they're ignorant and emotional. Of course, there's plenty of other legitimate ways to discredit the religion. Like, for example, there are no fucking magicians in the sky. So that's one. Works wonders for discrediting the Bible too. But the whole "Mohammad was a paedophile!" argument is stupid and weak.

Of course, I still believe in freedom of speech so the woman should not have been punished for stating it, whether or not we accept it as fact or an interpretation of events in literature. I might condone punishing her if she was teaching children, but it shouldn't be a criminal charge.

Then again, if it was up to me I'd punish anybody that taught any religion to children as fact. That should be criminal.

Edgar Reynaldo

Leave it to bamccaig to support pedophilia. :/

bamccaig said:

The Bible itself also seems to condone this behaviour in a few places.

Unsupported, unreferenced, untrue afaik.

bamccaig said:

If we do that, the Bible is a terrible $#@%ing disgrace of a book.

How many times do I have to prove you wrong before you stop spouting this shit?

bamccaig said:

Like, for example, there are no ing magicians in the sky.

Good thing God gave you free will, so you can think what you like. ;)

bamccaig said:

Then again, if it was up to me I'd punish anybody that taught any religion to children as fact. That should be criminal.

Such a silly hypocrite. You would have us teach our children there is no God, and that everything magically evolved from nothing into life. That should be criminal.

bamccaig

video

I have been rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generation again. By sheer coincidence it seems, I found the current episode, S4E21, relevant. Above is a random video with relevant snippets from it for those without access or interest to watch the entire thing. The video quality is poor, but that's likely either a limitation of the copying method used or intentionally done to evade automation. In any case, the dialogue is what matters most, and that is clear. It doesn't do the full episode justice. There is important context missing. I encourage you to watch the full thing, but this is readily available to link/share.

This wisdom is not new. This episode is over 27 years old. And the wisdom predates even this episode probably by centuries, but at least decades. It's very easy for foolish men to believe they're doing righteous deeds in the pursuit of evil, but it turns out evil is not so easily identified, and often is carried out by those very men who believe themselves to be righteous.

Edgar Reynaldo
bamccaig said:

This wisdom is not new. This episode is over 27 years old. And the wisdom predates even this episode probably by centuries, but at least decades. It's very easy for foolish men to believe they're doing righteous deeds in the pursuit of evil, but it turns out evil is not so easily identified, and often is carried out by those very men who believe themselves to be righteous.

1 In the beginning when God created[a] the heavens and the earth,
2 the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God[b] swept over the face of the waters.
3 Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.
4 And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.
5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

This wisdom is not new. This book is over 27 centuries old. And the wisdom predates even this chapter probably by centuries, but at least decades. It's very easy for foolish men to believe they're doing righteous deeds in the pursuit of evil, and it turns out evil is easily identified, and often overlooked by those very men who believe themselves to be righteous.

FTFY. ;)

The very first thing God did was create light! Imagine the most massive cosmic supernova ever coming into being! A white hole! That's your Big Bang right there. And what is light? It's good! And he separated it from the darkness, which is bad / evil. So if you want to know the difference between good and evil then you know who to ask! Ten Commandments come to mind?

Without light, there is only darkness. With light, you can see!

I am the light of the world 8-)

John 8:12-58

:D

raynebc
bamccaig said:

Paedophilia actually refers to the sexual attraction to children. Getting married or even having sexual relations wouldn't necessarily imply that the adult was a pedophile.

I thought Islam required you to be married to somebody to be allowed to have sex with them? If that's the case, I think it's logical to conclude he married his several child brides so he would be "allowed" by his religion to act on pedophilia. I'm not saying pedophilia was forbidden back then, but people shouldn't demand that nobody speak the truth merely because the truth is insulting. Certain Islamic communities are very intolerant of criticism to their religion and that is a problem they have to deal with. If they can't integrate with diverse cultures, they should stay in their countries and not put blasphemy demands on other countries.

Neil Roy

Yay! Religious debates! I'll pass on this. We'll all find out the truth in the end, if there is a God, I think I will be okay with Him. I wouldn't want to be in the shoes of someone who attacked Him though. If there isn't, I'm still fine as I will never know. I do believe in God (actually I KNOW he exists) and I am not ashamed to say so. I just have no need anymore to waste my time arguing about Him with atheists (and it is a waste of time).

And now for something funny...

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;D

Edgar Reynaldo

I find it odd that you prefer vulgar humor to God's Word... :/

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

It's very easy for foolish men to believe they're doing righteous deeds in the pursuit of evil, but it turns out evil is not so easily identified, and often is carried out by those very men who believe themselves to be righteous.

That sums up my apprehension of the left perfectly. Burning down neighborhoods and getting people fired "for the greater good." But when you get someone who makes a bad joke on Twitter, fired, do you create a "better person"? If that person was racist, will they magically become unracist now?

bamccaig
raynebc said:

I thought Islam required you to be married to somebody to be allowed to have sex with them? If that's the case, I think it's logical to conclude he married his several child brides so he would be "allowed" by his religion to act on pedophilia.

According to Wikipedia it was suggested instead that the marriage was strategic to form closer ties with the girl's father who was apparently influential at the time. Apparently both of the girl's parents were also associated with Muhammad, and they approved of the marriage (as was done, marriages were typically decided by the parents).

How many child brides did he have? I'm very ignorant of Islam, but I can only find reference to the one. It sounds like most of his wives were already widowed by the time he married them.

raynebc

Finding the age of each of his 11 wives is taking longer than I care to spend, but Wikipedia did confirm he "consummated" his marriage with Aisha when she was a preteen and he was in his fifties. Even though we may not be able to prove he was sexually attracted to children in general, I think this is close enough to pedophilia to meet that classification for most people.

Neil Roy

I find it odd that you prefer vulgar humor to God's Word... :/

What's vulgar about a tea bag?! ???

Anyhow, I have strong beliefs, but that doesn't mean I lost my sense of humour.

It figures that I can't even post anything funny in here without someone using it to spawn an argument. <sigh> Time to stay away from here for a while I guess. Not in the mood to debate my beliefs. I think everyone knows them quite well by now. Nobody in here is changing me, and I certainly won't change anyone's mind in here, so it is pointless.

Gideon Weems

For breaching participation limits on political/religious discussion, the following members of A.cc are hereby sentenced to 30 seconds of staring at Golden Boy:

  • NiteHackr

  • raynebc

  • bamccaig

  • Chris Katko

  • Edgar Reynaldo

  • Aaron Bolyard

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Use that time to introspect on the meaning of life.

Chris Katko

God hates Democrats.

But so does everyone else.

;)

Arvidsson

I know for a FACT that God doesn't exist.

Chris Katko

video

Edgar Reynaldo
NiteHackr said:

What's vulgar about a tea bag?! ???

We both know that poem was not about a tea bag. :/ It bordered on pornographic if you ask me. :/

arviddson said:

I know for a FACT that God doesn't exist.

Well Amen and HalleluJah! Finally, someone with proof God doesn't exist! Now I can safely put my delusions to rest safe in the arms that knowing my entire life is a lie. ;) Oh wait, you don't have any proof, just a belief. So it's still a religion to disbelieve the existence of God, so you're just as silly as I am.

Listen, I'm not your therapist, so I can't help you work through all of your issues with God. But most are really just misconceptions about God fueled by so called evidence in the way that the world is so evil.

Remember, god divided light from dark. He separated good from evil. It was Satan, the Serpent, who tempted Eve and seduced her into eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Satan tricked Eve into bringing evil into the world. And God said, if you eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, in that day you will die. A day with the Lord is a 1000 years. Guess how long the early descendants of Adam and Eve lived? Nearly a 1000 years. Setting aside other things that reduced man's lifespan to 120, what he said was true. And that is how evil came into the world, through Eve's weakness and Satan's cunning.

For breaching participation limits on political/religious discussion, the following members of A.cc are hereby sentenced to 30 seconds of staring at Golden Boy:

Who's Golden Boy? And I can't stare at bare male nipples for more than 15 second without getting hot and bothered. Please, 30 seconds is too much.

raynebc

I think there's a nipple joke involving the Golden Girls that could be conjured up, but I never really watched that show and have no particular affinity for them.

Edgar Reynaldo

ZOMG I forgot to mention how gray hair turns me on...

bamccaig

Chris' video makes excellent points. It's definitely worth the time to watch it.

Edgar Reynaldo

I don't need to watch an hour long video on a single point about how culture drives conflict. No shit sherlock.

Besides, I'm still waiting for Arviddson to prove God doesn't exist. :/

bamccaig

I don't need to watch an hour long video on a single point about how culture drives conflict.

It's more about how "social justice" when aiming for equal outcome is actually corrupt and counter-productive, and how. And why a university must choose between social justice or truth. And a basic dialogue of how universities should operate, versus how they have been, and the consequences of it. It's very interesting. It should be especially interesting to you being that you're in a university now, are you not?

It even touches on why papers tend to be less useful than they used to be because instead of people doing the honest thing, seeking to do unbiased work, and their peers holding them to it, social justice has been creating an environment in which you cannot do that properly, which has been undermining the entire process.

Besides, I'm still waiting for Arviddson to prove God doesn't exist. :/

I'm sure he will as soon as NiteHackr proves that God does exist... :-X

Edgar Reynaldo
bamccaig said:

It's more about how "social justice" when aiming for equal outcome is actually corrupt and counter-productive, and how. And why a university must choose between social justice or truth. And a basic dialogue of how universities should operate, versus how they have been, and the consequences of it. It's very interesting. It should be especially interesting to you being that you're in a university now, are you not?

;D, I'm curious to see what you find is the 'truth' and how equality is bad, mmmkay? You're welcome to sum it up for me.

Madison's proposed the following constitutional amendments:

First. That there be prefixed to the Constitution a declaration, that all power is originally vested in, and consequently derived from, the people.
That Government is instituted and ought to be exercised for the benefit of the people; which consists in the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the right of acquiring and using property, and generally of pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.
That the people have an indubitable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to reform or change their Government, whenever it be found adverse or inadequate to the purposes of its institution.

Sadly, these changes never made it into the bill of rights.

bamccaig

Equality of opportunity is good. That means there's no discrimination. Candidates are chosen based on merit, and ideally the best person for the job gets it.

But equality of outcome requires discrimination to account for individual choices. If most women are not interested in a career in STEM, but we insist on their being a 50/50 ratio of men and women in STEM, then you will necessarily have to have fewer men in STEM to even out. Say, for example, 98 men wanted to be in STEM, but only 2 women wanted to. The only way to get 50/50 without forcing women into STEM is to restrict men to only 2. That's not good. That's bad. It hurts men, and it hurts STEM. And it doesn't help any women.

Most people assume that there remains discrimination against women, but when experiments are conducted the opposite is seen: due to affirmative action companies are going out of their way to give women every opportunity, at the expense of men. There is discrimination, but it's in favor of women, not in favor of men. What this means is that the discrepancies aren't due to systemic discrimination, but due to personal choices and differences.

The problem is that proper research isn't being done to come to the conclusion that there's discrimination. People are looking at the numbers, seeing a discrepancy, and concluding that the reason for it is systemic discrimination. It's dishonest, and it's not helpful. It's harmful. It's discrimination! And it doesn't even benefit the groups that you're trying to help. It might help the odd woman that goes against the grain and chooses a different path than others, but most of them have no interest in doing it so you're not doing them any favors making it easier for them to get in. They won't take advantage of it because they don't want it. And in the process, you're hurting men that do want the opportunity, and would have done a good job. Which also means you're hurting STEM by keeping the men that would have done good jobs out. Which hurts society overall.

And perhaps, even worse, all of the pressure to get more women into STEM might convince girls that they should pursue STEM only to find after investing years of their life and perhaps thousands of dollars in tuition that it's not actually what they wanted...

Edgar Reynaldo
bamccaig said:

Equality of opportunity is good. That means there's no discrimination. Candidates are chosen based on merit, and ideally the best person for the job gets it.

I agree with this fully.

bamccaig said:

But equality of outcome requires discrimination to account for individual choices

However, I agree with this up until the point where you say individual choices are the reason 'discrimination' is needed. An individual's life is made up of far more than their 'individual choices'. It includes the situation they were born into, as well as the choices of those around them.

I don't know how I really feel about affirmative action like policies. They mean well, but they're more like crutches than teaching people how to walk. It entirely depends on the implementation of the policy.

For instance, there's nothing wrong with encouraging women to go into STEM disciplines. Personally, I want nothing more than to have more women in STEM. It's a fucking sausage party as it is, and that's lame.

But to just let nature 'take its course' and not try to do anything to help disadvantaged people is irresponsible.

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Strengthen the weak links, and you strengthen the entire chain.

Neil Roy
bamccaig said:

I'm sure he will as soon as NiteHackr proves that God does exist... :-X

I have proven God exists to my own personal satisfaction. It is impossible for me to prove that He exists to you or anyone else who does not believe in Him and refuses to accept that He exists. I won't waste both of our time trying.

We've been down this road too many times in these forums to count and it only leads to frustration and anger.

It often reminds me of Star Wars, each side is firing off shots at the other like crazy and nobody is hitting anything. ;)

Chris Katko

I thought you guys were joking about how much you care about all this god and politics stuff. ::) Surely you know nobody is going to be persuaded by the current discussion.

So here's a floating-point visualizer:

http://bartaz.github.io/ieee754-visualization/

Also, the reason Javascript's floats are literally the devil? They start as DECIMAL floats, which get converted to BINARY floats (float floats) using an algorithm that leads "non-divisible by two" numbers with repeating fraction that marks the .00....004 value.

So .1 + .2 = .3000...004 NOT .3

GENIUS!

https://medium.com/@sarafecadu/64-bit-floating-point-a-javascript-story-fa6aad266665

For those who don't realize, this does not affect C or any other God-fearing language.

Note again, that this does NOT affect numbers that are divisible by 2. So unless you know this insane implementation detail, there's no intuitive reason why things would break with only CERTAIN numbers failing to match their C (or any IEEE math) counterparts.

raynebc

Affirmative action is like providing crutches to somebody who was born with a hobble. Hiring quotas are like putting shackles on people who would out perform the people with crutches, in order to equalize their performance.

Chris Katko

video

bamccaig

An individual's life is made up of far more than their 'individual choices'. It includes the situation they were born into, as well as the choices of those around them.

Please elaborate on what kind of things you have in mind that would unfairly prevent a woman from entering STEM, and how these things don't also affect straight white men the same way. I don't see how it is relevant.

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Strengthen the weak links, and you strengthen the entire chain.

But we're not strengthening women by giving them special treatment. We're keeping them weak. And by holding men back we're making them weaker too. The net result is that the chain is weaker.

And the worst part is that women are not weak. They don't need this special treatment in the first place. They're different, but where they have weaknesses as compared to men, they also have strengths over men in other areas. We should be embracing our differences instead of trying to erase them.

The only way to make men and women equal is to get rid of all of our strengths and level the playing field at the lowest bar. That's bad for everyone.

Edgar Reynaldo
bamccaig said:

Please elaborate on what kind of things you have in mind that would unfairly prevent a woman from entering STEM, and how these things don't also affect straight white men the same way. I don't see how it is relevant.

Gender roles. Social norms. Cultural bias. For the longest time, a woman's role in the workforce has always been secretarial work, as if that is all they were qualified for. Similarly, a woman's role in the house is to raise children, cook, clean, etc. These are merely conventions. Men are just as capable of fulfilling the same roles, but they are always delegated to women.

The key is not to drag men down, but to lift women up. That is all I am advocating. Women are equally as capable of programming a machine as men are, but without encouraging and supporting women in STEM, the typical gender roles win out, and women are relegated back to the kitchen and secretarial work.

bamccaig said:

We should be embracing our differences instead of trying to erase them.

You see differences that don't exist. :/

Polybios

It has been shown that the more rights and equal opportunity women have the less likely they are to work in STEM.

Typically, people do (and like to do) what they are best at. So while women do not need to be less capable of programming than men, they might typically be better at something else individually.

Also, the logical choice for a gender-neutral pronoun appears to be "it" from my perspective (as a non native speaker). Demanding to be addressed in the plural strikes me as rather arrogant (pluralis maiestatis)? Shouldn't the plural be reserved to denote that ... more than one individual is involved?

Chris Katko
Polybios said:

Also, the logical choice for a gender-neutral pronoun appears to be "it" from my perspective (as a non native speaker). Demanding to be addressed in the plural strikes me as rather arrogant (pluralis maiestatis)? Shouldn't the plural be reserved to denote that ... more than one individual is involved?

I find both degrading.

If someone refers to your dog as "it" you're like "it's a girl." When they refuse to use male/female, they most often do it because they hate dogs or they're complete a-holes trying to use dehumanizing language, as in "this is just an object and property."

They seems rather insane and blows up grammar when you need they to actually refer to multiple physical bodies.

But I'm so tired of the discussion on pronouns it's like, you know what, if that'll shut you up, fine, I'll simply say whatever crazy language you want, if it'll shut you up. But shutting someone up doesn't magically make me respect them. In fact, the opposite. If I HAVE to do something and more-often-than-not I don't even get an explanation of why, "just do it because I say so", it means you're a child throwing a tantrum. And people don't respect children.

If someone came in tomorrow and demanded I "high five" them every time we met them, I'd find it annoying. And if they then demanded (with no room for compromise) that I do so or I'm some sort of "Nazi" or bigot, I would instantly lose respect for that person.

But somehow, using different pronouns magically heals bigendered people so there's a medical reason and if we don't don't validate them, they will physically die within a few hours.

[edit] A.CC lost half my post till now.

bamccaig

Gender roles. Social norms. Cultural bias. For the longest time, a woman's role in the workforce has always been secretarial work, as if that is all they were qualified for. Similarly, a woman's role in the house is to raise children, cook, clean, etc. These are merely conventions. Men are just as capable of fulfilling the same roles, but they are always delegated to women.

The key is not to drag men down, but to lift women up. That is all I am advocating. Women are equally as capable of programming a machine as men are, but without encouraging and supporting women in STEM, the typical gender roles win out, and women are relegated back to the kitchen and secretarial work.

https://www.thejournal.ie/gender-equality-countries-stem-girls-3848156-Feb2018/

Feminists have been preaching the idea that there are no differences between men and women, but the differences are obvious to anybody with an open mind. It's not science that suggested that men and women are the same. It was political activists. It's laughable to suggest that men and women are the same. Sure, women are capable of doing most of the same work that men are. Obviously though they cannot do certain jobs as well on average.

For example, if the job requires a lot of heavy lifting then men would generally be better qualified for it. That's not to say that women cannot do heavy lifting, or that no men would struggle with it, but fewer women can do heavy lifting, and fewer of them would want to. They're not as physically strong as men. They'd be more likely to hurt themselves.

Also, men tend to be more heavily represented at the top (and bottom) of the IQ spectrum. On average, men and women's IQ isn't that much different, but at the extremes men are over-represented whereas women's IQ is more average. Which means the people at the top end of the IQ spectrum are more likely to be men, and they're probably more likely to be attracted to the most mentally demanding work, which probably means STEM fields. The people at the bottom end are also likely to be men which probably attracts those men to menial jobs that don't require a lot of thinking.

There are other ways that women are different from men too. And when you factor these things in then the roles that women traditionally held start to make a bit more sense. And the jobs that women are doing today also make better sense.

If women were equal to men then you have to explain how things ever came to be "uneven" in the first place. You would instead expect women to be equal with men throughout history. What's that, "men forced them into their role?" No, no, no, they're just as capable as men, remember? Men couldn't force them into a role they didn't want to do. They would just fight back. "All the men ganged up on individual women," you say? No, no, women would just gang back up on the men. In a universe where men and women are truly equal there would be no differences. The differences we see in outcome are actually related to the differences between men and women.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_scientists_before_the_20th_century

Edgar Reynaldo

From your own article :

“It’s important to take into account that girls are choosing not to study STEM for what they feel are valid reasons, so campaigns that target all girls may be a waste of energy and resources,” Professor Stoet said.

“If governments want to increase women’s participation in STEM, a more effective strategy might be to target the girls who are clearly being lost from the STEM pathway – those for whom science and maths are their best subjects and who enjoy it but still don’t choose it,” he said.

bamccaig said:

If women were equal to men then you have to explain how things ever came to be "uneven" in the first place.

Ever cooked a live frog in boiling water? The temperature delta is low enough that the frog doesn't know its being cooked alive. Change happens over time.

Chris Katko

I feel bad for my transgressions. So now I exclusively eat RESIST brand ice cream from Ben and Jerry's.

video

Finally, the patriarchy will be defeated, with the power of pecans.

Goddamn it, liberals. ::) You make it physically exhausting to support POLICIES I ALREADY SUPPORT because of your non-stop stupidity and commercialism.

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I cannot cite a single person whose life was saved by forcing NFL players to run around in pink dresses to end breast cancer. I'm pretty sure the doctors are the people ending breast cancer. But when was the last time you saw one of them thanked on TV? Nah, better sell people some pink hats and headphones because that'll... end... cancer or something (while we make some sweet -ss pity money!)

I actually care about the environment. I actually care about cancer. I actually care about immigrants.

But literally everything the liberal establishment (media + politicians) do, is an affront to actually solving problems.

They want solar and wind power, but they don't care how many birds die as they're literally burnt out of the air by solar panels, and smashed into pieces by wind farms:

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-solar-bird-deaths-20160831-snap-story.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/wind-energy-takes-toll-birds-now-there-s-help-ncna866336

"Up to 300,000 birds a year killed by turbines" and of course, that will only increase as they build more.

And nobody cares how much extremely toxic rare earth minerals are used in the construction of solar and wind power plants.

It's like nobody on the planet actually cares about saving the damn planet.

bamccaig

From your own article:

Yes, exactly, women are choosing their own path, based on what they consider good reasons. It's other people, such as yourself apparently, condescendingly telling these girls they're wrong to have made their own choice.

It doesn't mean that there's something wrong with our programs, and that we need to try even harder (as if that's possible) to encourage women into STEM. The study apparently concluded that if governments still aim to increase the numbers of women in STEM perhaps they can focus their efforts on the women that might more easily be persuaded to do it because they're already good at it and enjoy it. That said, it doesn't say that we should. Ultimately, the women obviously choose something else that interests them more.

For example, maybe they wanted to get married or have children. Ultimately, women still have some choices when it comes to working at all. If they can find a good husband to provide they might not even need to work, or might only need to work part-time.. That frees them up to do things that they'd rather do, like socialize with friends, shop shop shop, and spend time with their children. Who are you to tell them that's wrong?

They want solar and wind power, but they don't care how many birds die as they're literally burnt out of the air by solar panels, and smashed into pieces by wind farms...

It sounds like it isn't solar panels that are burning birds out of the sky, but a specific solar plant that uses a series of mirrors to focus the Sun's energy onto a boiler... And when the birds fly into those focused beams they apparently vaporize. Which would be damn cool to see, but is pretty sad (albeit, probably pretty painless if a killzone crosses the light anyway).

Normal solar panels wouldn't have that affect. And according to the spokesperson for the company, the impact on the bird population is minimal according to "scientists". Certainly though, we should try to do better. But your comments make it sound like it's more harmful than the alternatives of burning coal or oil... And that seems unlikely.

As for wind farms killing birds, I know that it's a problem, but I don't know how severe. According to a glimpse at Wikipedia, that is also considered a minimal impact. So while it's certainly an unintended consequence and something that we want to try to address, it's probably still a much less harmful force than all of the numbers of ways that the burning of fossil fuels harms the environment.

Erin Maus

@polybios

> Singular they is the use in English of the pronoun they or its inflected or derivative forms, them, their, theirs, and themselves (or themself), as an epicene (gender-neutral) singular pronoun. It typically occurs with an antecedent of indeterminate gender, as in sentences such as:

> The singular they had emerged by the 14th century, about a century after plural they. It has been commonly employed in everyday English ever since then, though it has been the target of criticism since the late 19th century. Its use in formal English has become more common with the trend toward gender-neutral language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

I sound like a broken record.

'It' refers to objects, not humans.

Neil Roy

I'm pretty sure the doctors are the people ending breast cancer.

They've been holding various telethons, marathons... whatever-thons since I was a child to cure cancer. I have yet to see a single form of cancer that has been cured.

There's even evidence the cancer screening doesn't do any good and some of it, can actually do more harm.

video

There is a solution to prevent cancer, but nobody wants to hear it.

Edgar Reynaldo
bamccaig said:

Yes, exactly, women are choosing their own path, based on what they consider good reasons. It's other people, such as yourself apparently, condescendingly telling these girls they're wrong to have made their own choice.

Yes, but what's important is WHY they're choosing not to go into STEM. We've established they're both smart enough, and that at least some of them enjoy STEM to a great degree, yet they're still choosing a different path.

bamccaig said:

For example, maybe they wanted to get married or have children. Ultimately, women still have some choices when it comes to working at all. If they can find a good husband to provide they might not even need to work, or might only need to work part-time.. That frees them up to do things that they'd rather do, like socialize with friends, shop shop shop, and spend time with their children. Who are you to tell them that's wrong?

Do you ever listen to the words that come out of your mouth? Take a sociology course for Christ's sake. Then come back with all your brainwashed misogynistic bs and try again.

bamccaig

Yes, but what's important is WHY they're choosing not to go into STEM. We've established they're both smart enough, and that at least some of them enjoy STEM to a great degree, yet they're still choosing a different path.

I'm not sure we've established they're smart enough. We've established that they had high grades in high school classes, but that wouldn't factor in how difficult it was to do. Did it come naturally, or did they work their asses off to do it? Were the teachers grading them evenly, or giving them a grade boost? And most of all, how do we know they enjoyed it? I'm not sure where they got this information from. Maybe they sent out surveys? I missed that in the article.

There's a good chance that some of them are just self-conscious, and don't think that they can do it. That said, it's a healthy way to feel. It's expensive to get a post-secondary education, and it's a big risk to attempt it if you aren't confident in your abilities. Perhaps if we all agreed that college/university should be publicly funded (and perhaps big American schools should also lower their rates, ffs) then girls (and more boys!) would be able to give it a try without burying their family under a second mortgage...

Of course, there's always community/technical colleges which should be more affordable, but still it's equivalent to a second car payment. And there's no guarantee they'll like it and graduate. Also, while technical colleges often offer computer courses that can get you into some lower field in tech, I don't think that they'll offer much in terms of the S EM. To pursue a career in science, engineering, or math I think they're stuck with the second mortgage payment. And if they want to go far in tech they would be too.

Take a sociology course for Christ's sake.

This is the worst possible time to take such a course. The content is filtered, and debate is censored. You won't learn anything true. Social justice warriors are there to ensure that schools are only teaching them things that don't hurt their feelings. Universities are garbage now. If you'd watched the video that Chris posted you'd know that, but you're too busy digging your head into the sand so you can pretend to be right.

Women do want to have families, and want to have kids, and want to be there for their kids. They don't all want to go to work for 8 or 10 hours, and come home exhausted to ignore their family. There's nothing wrong with that.

Women that try to do it all are impressive, but they also grade their level of happiness much lower than their mother's and grandmother's generation did. What's the point if it doesn't make you happy?

Edgar Reynaldo
qz.com said:

Since the 1980s, and particularly in the past decade, girls have had more encouragement and more female role models in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. If social conditioning were the primary cause of the difference in test scores, you’d expect the gender gap to narrow, and it did.

In the 1980s, boys made up 93% of the very high math scorers; there were 14 boys for every girl in the top 0.01% of math scores. By the mid-1980s, the ratio had fallen below 8-to-1, and since 2010 the ratio has been closer to 2.5-to-1.

Pretty much proof that girls are just as capable as men, given the right conditions and encouragement.

You can shut up now. ;)

bamccaig

The "right conditions" is correct. Schools have been turning their backs on boys. They teach classrooms today in ways that make sense to girls, and they punish boys for being boys. There are very few male teachers anymore because they've been bullied out of the field. Research shows that boys do better with male role models. And female teachers are harder on boys than on girls. The result is that many boys are not trying, not enjoying school, and therefore performing badly. Even though the boys are plenty capable, they're not even given the chance anymore. The political situation has made it important for girls to succeed, and nobody cares how the boys are doing.

Notably the article and study appear to be comparing the ratio of boys to girls, but it doesn't mention the total numbers of students. Are the boys stlil performing as well as they used to, but more girls are also performing well? Which would suggest that what we're doing is working, and girls are reaching their potential now. Or have boys just stopped performing well, which would automatically boost girls up when comparing the sexes by ratio of achievers.

That said, I've been saying that women are capable, but they choose a different path. Your own article even said that.

The Vanderbilt researchers concluded that while there are not many female math superstars, brilliant women tend to have a more well-rounded intelligence than their male counterparts. But they also noticed the women were more likely to choose roles that were less research focused and attracted to jobs that also made use of their equally strong communication skills. And that’s the kind of career path that—while potentially fulfilling in its own way—can, for example, steer women away from the lab where an award-winning scientific breakthrough might occur.

(Emphasis mine)

And again, research is no longer designed to be unbiased and properly peer reviewed. You're ignoring this inconvenient fact. There's plenty of biased research looking for confirmation that girls are strong and smart and every bit as capable, but there's no research trying to proof the opposite to be true. Because there isn't allowed to be. So while, sure, we all generally agree that women deserve equal opportunities, the research isn't really being done properly for scientists to fully understand the differences. We all just have to shut up and pretend it works the way that political activists want it to work because otherwise we'll draw unappealing attention to people and organizations and funding will be cut to end the smear campaigns.

Chris Katko

Let's get this thread back to warmer waters.

Anyone learn any neat programming tricks?

For example, there are entire websites dedicated to "bit twiddling" (changing bits) of floating point (as well as integer) numbers.

The point here is that, the general consensus is "floats are special" so you should never do any kind of bitmasking on them. This is incorrect.

https://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html

https://matthewarcus.wordpress.com/category/bit-twiddling/

It's still not something you should "usually" do. But you also shouldn't usually use double pointers. Every tool has its purpose, and "good and bad" applications.

[edit]

Another thing is unfortunately, the D language, has shown me some thorns hidden beneath the surface. Quite a few actually.

Delegates are great.
Concurrency is great.

Too bad you can't actually use a delegate properly with Std.Varient which means you can't send any data from one thread to another marked "shared"--including the thread ID. So without using hacks / less elegant methods, you can't tell another thread what thread called it!

??? ??? ??? ???

And there's plenty more than that. Like simply importing std.regex balloons your required compile RAM from ~150MB to over 700MB and would actually out-of-memory die when compiling on my 2GB laptop unless I started closing most of my Chrome tabs (which I need for reference!)

The templates are still to die for.

The biggest flaw with D, really, is simply a lack of popularity so more people can volunteer time to improve it while the "big heads" who run D work on more pressing matters. For example, the garbage collector in D can be removed, it can also be improved. But that's a fundamental 50/50 split of languages. Making the standard library work without garbage collection, and/or, making the garbage collector something that wasn't written with "90's era" techniques in mind that are (relatively speaking) very slow and a serious risk for anyone writing real-time applications. (games!) There could also do with a huge amount more tutorials. Everyone has a "hello world" but very few exist, on say, "Std.variant."

Neil Roy
Quote:

for Christ's sake.

Exodus 20:7 (KJV)
Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.

Sorry, but I found what you said ironic considering your condemnation of my humour. You might want to pull the plank out of your own eye first.

I find it odd that you prefer vulgar humor to God's Word... :/

Polybios

Thank you, that was most interesting, I didn't know.

In the examples, I notice there are often additional words which act as markers for the number. So there is, so to speak, a certain overhead involved.
Besides, its historic usage seems to be confined to unknown people (someone) or situations where the (i.e. a generic) person was not known and therefore also their (!) gender wasn't. To refer to a specific person you know with "they" seems to be more recent and, also, if you'll excuse me, seems more awkward to me, because of the "number overhead" which basically seems to force speakers to use additional markers for the number where it cannot be inferred from the context.
On the other hand, as you English speakers seem to address each other in the (polite) plural form "you" anyway, regardless of number, it does not matter that much, unless you decide to finally bring thou/thee/thy/thine back. ;D

bamccaig said:

Schools have been turning their backs on boys. They teach classrooms today in ways that make sense to girls, and they punish boys for being boys.

You forgot the conspiracy of the women who enrich the environment with their artificial contraceptive hormones to make boys less masculine. ::)

Chris Katko
Polybios said:

You forgot the conspiracy of the women who enrich the environment with their artificial contraceptive hormones to make boys less masculine. ::)

Wait, you... you're not actually arguing against the fact that boys are treated as "defective girls" in schools are you? Because that's... basically been settled as "yes" by science.

Boys act out and don't want to sit in chairs. Girls crave the approval of an authority figure. Science shows this.

https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/06/stop-penalizing-boys-for-not-being-able-to-sit-still-at-school/276976/

Female teachers score boys harder than girls (even when their ACTUAL test-result grades are higher), while girls assume male teachers treat them worse but are actually graded fairly. Science shows this.

http://ideas.time.com/2013/02/06/do-teachers-really-discriminate-against-boys/

Boys are "defective" because our schools are so terrible they don't care that many people learn differently and cram all people into one, terrible, system. Sitting in a chair and memorizing. Boys that don't succeed in this system are drugged to "normalize" them.

Quote:

The decline of recess and physical education has been harmful to all kids but perhaps more so for rambunctious boys than eager-to-please girls.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a32858/drugging-of-the-american-boy-0414/

Or are Esquire, Time, and the Atlantic an alt-right blogs and not left-wing enough to be reputable? :P

Erin Maus

Just anecdote (because despite me being a SJW!!!!! I do believe biological differences could be a reason for behavioral differences between women/men; it's just a matter of are these differences biological and which are social; are they good or bad for us; and can society do things to alter these differences if it's for the best):

Boys act out and don't want to sit in chairs. Girls crave the approval of an authority figure.

I (assigned male at birth) was a girl in public school and my best friend (assigned female at birth*) was a boy. Wow. :o

(I'm just highlighting "the individual case" vs the "general case" [e.g., BMI; it's good for a population but can fall apart in individual cases]).

*: She's cis but I just used that terminology because symmetry!

Also there are a lot of social factors that do disinterest women from pursuing STEM; teaching differences, like you mentioned when discussing boys/girls, are a major one. Correcting these would increase women participation in STEM and they are... social, not biological, changes! Funny how biological differences can be corrected by social changes. If you're interested I could dig up the sources.

Also these sources invalidate bambam's academic feminist conspiracy ;D.

Polybios

Wait, you... you're not actually arguing against the fact that boys are treated as "defective girls" in schools are you? Because that's... basically been settled as "yes" by science.

I don't know. There seems to be a fine line between adequate teaching for boys and merely excusing a lack of discipline and creating another "victim" group that needs special treatment. To sit down to concentrate on a task is an important skill.
I hardly remember elementary (primary?) school but we were certainly moving around a lot between lessons. I also vaguely remember playing competitive "mental arithmetic" games which involved moving around the class room, advancing from post to post. The biggest motivator I can remember was that you sometimes could go home a bit earlier when you'd finished your task. :P
Anyway, yes there seems to be a problem with boys in school. Maybe the presence of well-performing and disciplined girls just makes it somehow ... unmasculine to be like them?

Quote:

Sitting in a chair and memorizing.

I hardly ever had to memorize something at school (except vocabulary for foreign languages), even less so while sitting in a school chair.

Edgar Reynaldo
NiteHackr said:

Sorry, but I found what you said ironic considering your condemnation of my humour. You might want to pull the plank out of your own eye first.

Oh pull the corncob out of your a$$, have a nice bm, and call me in the morning. ;)

Posting pornographic poems about tea bag sex is far worse than encouraging bambam to get an education, and stop spreading mis-knowledge in Christ's name. Christ was a teacher after all. Rabbi? That's what they called him.

But hey, we all know tea bag sex is funnier than learning about God or knowledge. :/

And the parable about the sliver and the board hardly applies, unless you're applying it to yourself first, considering your believe things like the dead are all in their graves, when we know God is God of the Living. Before Abraham was, I am. You might want to go back and read the chapter out of John I posted before.

I'll quote it here :

52 Then said the Jews unto him, Now we know that thou hast a devil. Abraham is dead, and the prophets; and thou sayest, If a man keep my saying, he shall never taste of death.

53 Art thou greater than our father Abraham, which is dead? and the prophets are dead: whom makest thou thyself?

54 Jesus answered, If I honour myself, my honour is nothing: it is my Father that honoureth me; of whom ye say, that he is your God:

55 Yet ye have not known him; but I know him: and if I should say, I know him not, I shall be a liar like unto you: but I know him, and keep his saying.

56 Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and was glad.

57 Then said the Jews unto him, Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham?

58 Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am.

Chris Katko

If you're going to debate God on A.CC, I suggest the both of you either:

1 - Use private messages.

2 - Be more respectful and calm, and give the other party the benefit of the doubt and permission to "be wrong".

Because this is silly. Even I am starting to think this is unprofessional for this site. It doesn't look very good from an outsider-looking-in when emotions are this high.

You don't like each other's idea of "God". That's okay. But you're both not moving on any positions so just accept the other party is "wrong" and move on.

Don't get sucked into this kind of stuff. We're not kids anymore. You can't feign inexperience in "God discussions" online or debates, or youthful passion, you know exactly how these arguments only cause rifts.

Edgar Reynaldo

So it's not okay to talk about God, but it's okay to blather on for pages and pages about how girls are biologically inferior and incapable of performing as well as boys in math and science, or somehow they just enjoy it less. Well duh, they've been conditioned to accept that girls are the weaker sex, and that they should depend on males for support. But arguing about that all day is okay. As well, it's okay for bambams to defame God, but not for me to support him?

This thread could be about the pursuit for knowledge. Instead, it's about women being weaker, and how believing in God makes you delusional.

I've been here so long, but sometimes I get tired of having to debate endlessly things that should be accepted as well known facts. Old beliefs die hard.

If you want to censor this thread, then might I suggest you censor anything and everything to do with an opinion as well. Because we're all a bunch of opinionated zealots who weren't destined to get along.

So what do you want to talk about instead? Floating point numbers in base 2? They're boring and inaccurate, what's new? The fact that 0.1 is a repeating decimal in base 2 makes it hardly useful for anything.

https://www.exploringbinary.com/why-0-point-1-does-not-exist-in-floating-point/

Erin Maus

I can warm myself with the flaming. 8-)

...And I'm just finding an excuse to post this:

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And there's water, too.

raynebc

it's okay to blather on for pages and pages about how girls are biologically inferior and incapable of performing as well as boys in math and science, or somehow they just enjoy it less. Well duh, they've been conditioned to accept that girls are the weaker sex, and that they should depend on males for support.

That's incorrect. The studies show that womens' performance in such fields vary less while men's performance has wild outliers on each end (ie. studies referencing bell curves). This is why the absolute best male mathematician is generally going to more proficient than the absolute best female mathematician, but the average man and woman have more similar aptitudes. There are exceptions, but in general, women are physically weaker than men, because men and women have major physical differences. This isn't even able to be questioned with a straight face. Men and women should treat each other well in their own capacities, and that includes men being physical protectors of women as they traditionally have been.

Edgar Reynaldo

Male humans are biologically outdated, and only good for hard labor. Thank God I didn't go into construction. My back would be ruined, and I would be worse off.

Why does it make sense for women to choose lesser paying jobs other than they've been socially conditioned into choosing them? I don't disagree that boys are biologically better at math and girls are biologically better at reading, but the narrowing trend in women scoring less than men has been declining drastically since the start of the STEM intervention to get girls into science. 2.5 to 1 of top scoring boys to top scoring girls in math since the last 20 years have passed from a ratio of 14 to 1. So it's an indubitable fact that girls are not biologically inferior to males, at least by any great margin, and given the right encouragement as well as the actual opportunity. Many pass up careers to become mothers, because naturally thats something they want to be. But women don't have to give up a career because of having the unfortunate responsibilty of bearing children because of their sex.

bamccaig

Well duh, they've been conditioned to accept that girls are the weaker sex, and that they should depend on males for support.

Actually, they haven't. Since I was in about grade 4 they've been teaching girls that girls can do anything a boy can. I was in grade 4 for the 1995/1996 school year. That means that for more than 20 years girls have been taught that they are equal to boys (even though they aren't), and that they don't need men. Destiny's Child released the hit pop song "Independent Women" in September of 2000. Over 18 years ago. To assert that girls are being taught that they're inferior to boys is complete bullshit. Every piece of society tells them the lie that they're every bit as capable as men at everything. The only thing holding them back is reality. They're not the same, they don't have the same interests, they don't have the same ambitions, and they don't have the same strengths or weaknesses. They're different.

Plenty of intelligent, strong, capable women will readily admit this. That you are so strongly programmed to read this as discrimination instead of just factual science highlights how closed minded you are. You don't have "hate" women to acknowledge that they're different. As a matter of fact, there are large groups of women that feminism turns its back on because their ambitions in life don't align with what feminism believes. Feminism is really, really bad for men, and boys, but it's also bad for women and girls overall. The only people that it really helps are rich people that benefit from twice the labour force for the price of one.

raynebc

girls are not biologically inferior to males

Did I miss something or is this just a recurring strawman you like to present?

Edgar Reynaldo

In terms of mental ability, no girls are not biologically inferior. To believe otherwise is to be brainwashed.

bamccaig

Why does it make sense for women to choose lesser paying jobs other than they've been socially conditioned into choosing them?

Money isn't everything. Why do you assume money is the most important factor in deciding upon a career? That's very narrow-minded. You're talking about 50% of the population. Surely, they might have different ideas than you do. Are your ideas the only good ones?

So it's an indubitable fact that girls are not biologically inferior to males, at least by any great margin, and given the right encouragement as well as the actual opportunity.

Only if you ignore all of the evidence. Which apparently you're very good at doing. We've already discredited this information by explaining that boys are no longer doing their best in schools. They are being ignored in schools so that the girls can do well. The statistics gathered from that are meaningless. If they were doing everything in their power to empower both boys and girls then you'd see the real numbers. Unfortunately, those numbers might not look so good in the current political state of our world so that's not allowed to happen. Perhaps if you'd like to prove us wrong you should advocate for boys too so that we can see if there's any truth to your argument. In the meantime, there's no way to say, because science isn't allowed to question it. It's considered sacred. Questioning it is blasphemy.

Many pass up careers to become mothers, because naturally thats something they want to be. But women don't have to give up a career because of having the unfortunate responsibilty of bearing children because of their sex.

Actually, women are very much at the mercy of the clock. Women that attempt to give birth above I think 34 or so are considered emergency scenarios. Just because of their age. Child birth is demanding, and the risks to both the mother and baby increase with age. The mother could die, or the baby could be born with serious disabilities as a result.

How incredibly sexist of you to assert that the responsibility of child birth is "unfortunate". In fact, it's a very rewarding experience that most women put above all else. We're programmed to do it, and no career could ever reward a woman with as much happiness and purpose in life that a child can. Men literally cannot do this. It isn't possible. So there's no point questioning it's fairness. For a god-loving being you certainly seem to question his decision making a lot. Was it unfair of god to place this burden upon women? What about the burden of protecting and providing for women? Was it unfair of him to place that on men?

Certainly women can choose to have a career instead, but they certainly have to choose. It can take a lot of time and energy to find a suitable mate, and for conditions to be right between them to get pregnant. Demanding careers don't leave a lot of time or energy for such endeavours. And once the woman is pregnant she will have to take a leave of absence from her career leading up to and shortly after the birth. Fortunately, reasonable countries (the US not being one of them) grant's women a generous maternity leave to do so where their employment status is protected by law. There may be some women that are able to both have a successful career and have children, but they'll have to make sacrifices to do it. And it's reasonable to conclude that either her happiness or her career will suffer as a result. You cannot do it all. Nobody can. Plenty of fathers end up missing out on their children's lives because they're dedicated to their careers. And that's unfortunate. But somehow you think more women should be doing it too. I don't understand.

I'm sure if men could stay home with their kids instead of going to work we'd all do it. The really sick thing is that for 3 decades we've been preaching to women that it's wrong for them to want to spend this precious time with their children or taking care of their family/household needs, and that it's somehow liberating to go be a slave at some job somewhere for some printed paper with a fluxtuating exchange rate. It must have been in the fine print that they'd really just be working for the wages that were removed from their husbands' pay since they're now twice the workforce and each family requires both parents working to pay the bills. In reality, women had the golden goose, and feminism has tricked them into surrendering it. It's one thing to advocate for what women want and what is fair, but it's another thing to advocate for what a few vocal women want without asking the rest of them what they want. It's especially sickening to consider the negative affects this is having on families, and on children. And it hurts the struggling minority communities even harder.

Give your head a shake, and double-check your facts. Question where you got these ideas from, and question their evidence. You may mean well, but the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

Edgar Reynaldo

I grow weary of refuting your BS. You're brainwashed bambam.

Despite being 'held back' by girls, boys still outperform women when it comes to wages. And yes, money is one of the largest deciding factors in whether or not to pursue a career. And child birth is a career ender.

I simply don't have time to waste spouting brainwashed gibberish like you all day.

::)

bamccaig

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Everybody knows that the one with the winning argument surrenders.

Erin Maus

If I tried arguing with a flat earther I'd probably give up, doesn't mean the flat earther is right.

To elaborate, I could argue (with citations and other supporting data from academic journals or equivalently solid sources) my viewpoints about women/men and gender differences and all that but you'd still refuse to acknowledge my argument. On the other hand, you'd at best post your anecdotes and conjecture and feelings and some YouTube video from some anti-feminist.

Of course, you don't have access to academic journals like I do, but would you take the effort if you did? Probably not, because you think academia is some feminist-controlled ... thing.

Derezo

Probably not, because you think academia is some feminist-controlled ... thing.

Basically anything that disagrees with their beliefs is run by George Soros. It's easier to cry victim than to accept something that is contrary to those deeply held beliefs. Women couldn't have wanted jobs. Who would want jobs? This place hasn't changed ;D ;D ;D :'(

Edgar Reynaldo

@bambam
NO, really, I don't have time to waste on you. You endlessly spout opinionated, backward ideology and the sheer amount of energy it takes to refute your garbage is astounding.

You did not win a war of reason, you won a war of attrition. :/

FFS, talk about something else. I've heard enough myths to build a fucking fable out of.

bamccaig

...to build a fucking fable out of.

Now who's talking pornography?! >:( >:( >:( :D

Edgar Reynaldo

The emphasis was on fable not fucking. It's not a fable about fucking.

Eric Johnson

This is how I've felt recently when returning to this thread to make a reply:

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bamccaig

In other news, cannabis is now legal in Canada (as of October 17th). Due to strikes from the national postal service delivery has been slowed down, but my first order finally arrived. I have never consumed any form of cannabis before. Because it was illegal. And I don't fuck with that. But now that it's legal I had to do some research, and all of my research indicated that it was much safer than alcohol.

The strain that I ordered is mid-range strength. Negligible CBD, relatively high THC. This was mostly because I don't have the experience or tools to roll my own yet, and I don't even know if I'll end up liking it, so buying pre-rolled joints makes sense, and the options were limited for that. Kind of silly that they wouldn't offer a much more tame experience for the pre-rolls because the experienced smokers will likely roll their own.

The product I got is called "BC Sensi Star". THC ranges from 11 to 18%. CBD ranges from 0 to 1%. The first night I tried it I got zero effects. I didn't know how to inhale, and when I smoke cigars I normally don't inhale, and so I got zero effects at all from smoking the full joint (they're smaller than I expected, but each joint should be approximately 0.5 grams). That was on Thursday night. On Friday night I decided to try again, but I did some research first on how to inhale. I sort of paced myself on Thursday night, but Friday night I had a false sense of confidence. That was bad. I smoked about 2/3 of the joint before I stopped. And apparently I was inhaling this time.

I had just started walking back into the apartment from the balcony to tell my wife that I didn't think it was working again, when suddenly something felt weird. I felt a sensation "circling" around the top of my head. A few seconds later it transformed into all the particles in the universe circling vertically in place. My vision slowly began to blur, pretty much as though my brain was only picking up a piece of the picture at a time. I've been pretty shitfaced from alcohol, but I have never experienced anything like that. Before long the world started rocking back and forth, and I could not focus on anything. I could still walk around reasonably well, but couldn't really see where I was going clearly. Perhaps drunk walking helped to prepare me for that.

I wasn't really enjoying the sensation. The way that it suddenly kicked in and continued to intensify tipped me off pretty much immediately that I probably did too much. And I fucking did. Way too much. It wasn't long before I tried chewing some pepper to reverse the effects. But by then I couldn't feel or taste anything, and I was worried that I'd make myself puke so I didn't want to overdo the pepper. I eventually went to bed to try to lie down, hoping it would pass. And by this point I was full on having a bad trip. My mind was just jumping all over the place. I had little control over what I thought about.

It felt like I was trapped in my body. I was able to consciously think about things, and even talk to my wife, but as soon as I stopped thinking about something my mind would continue to wander in horrible ways. Every sensory input was intensified, and slowed down. Moving my tongue a millimetre in my mouth felt like a huge event, where my mouth was floating and my tongue was floating in the middle of it, and it felt like I was having an out of body experience, witnessing it from my throat.

I can barely remember all the things that I thought about. It felt as though my brain was breaking down all of its though processes into primitive control structures, as if I was suddenly thinking in raw assembly for my brain. But it wasn't in code, in data, but rather in thoughts from my childhood, as if the entire way that my brain works is developed from the ways that I learned to process the world as a small child, and now my brain is mapped that way. Except I felt like everything I thought about was now expressed in terms of that. It felt like a nightmare that I couldn't wake up from. I distinctly remember panicking and feeling like crying, but I couldn't actually do it. I had no control. I felt very meta about the entire experience. I felt like I was witnessing the universe broken up into its raw parts, and at one point started thinking about Half-Life, the game series, and imagined G-Man talking to me as he did in the game.

The trip had to have lasted for 3 or 4 hours, if not 5 or 6. I wasn't hungry. I wasn't tired. I was barely functional and felt out of control. I was wide awake, and dreading it. I was probably super paranoid and anxious, perhaps because it was my first time getting high and I didn't know what to expect, and perhaps because I was just way too damn high. While I was tripping out I started to think that weed was really just a big conspiracy, like maybe it was really an alien substance, and maybe everybody had a horrible time tripping out, but by the time they sobered up they forgot about it and wanted to do it again. So they just encourage other people to do it instead of warning them about how horrible it is. I told myself I never wanted to do it again.

When the THC finally wore off and I woke up in the morning I felt pretty much fine. Unlike a bad night of drinking, I didn't really feel any after affects. I was pretty clear headed, I didn't have a headache or super sore throat or anything like that. If there was any residual affect I'd say I was a bit "foggy" the next day, but I felt perfectly functional.

And ever since I've kind of wanted to try it again. :P So maybe my paranoid trip-induced conspiracy was right after all. But this time I plan to take it very slow. Maybe take one or two puffs and then wait 10 or 20 minutes to see how I feel before taking any more. Effectively see what the least amount of high I can achieve with this strain feels like compared to what I felt like on Friday night. This time I plan to listen to music while I did it to also help to guide my thoughts hopefully to something more fun rather than paranoid. The intent is to try to achieve a peaceful, enjoyable, fun high rather than a paranoid nightmare.

It is said that marijuana can be risky for people that are prone to psychosis. One of my fears is that perhaps I had a bad trip because I'm prone to some kind of mental illness and the marijuana unleashed it. But I guess I can't really know until I try some more... I haven't decided yet when to do it. I have to prepare supper tonight for my sick wife, and then decide if I want to try smoking a bit more weed, or if I'll just have some brews instead.

So that was my first experience getting high on marijuana. It was fucking horrible. It was a completely different experience than being drunk. Drunk I find I am much more under control than high. At least, that high. I've never been so fucked up from alcohol. So definitely beware. It pretty much can't kill you by itself (which is one way it's much safer than alcohol), but you can certainly wish you were dead if you do too much or have a bad trip...

video

Append:

In the time that A.cc was down and I couldn't post I decided to try it tonight. I started with about 4 small puffs. I could barely feel it. So after 20 minutes I did about another 4 or 5 small puffs. I can still barely feel it. Ooooh, another thing I feel one weed is "wavy". Like my whole body feels like it is constantly wiggly. I don't know if I'm just hypersensitive to little shakes and things.. It's weird. I would say that this is a totally different feeling to drunk though. I don't think this is really comparable, and so far I would say that drunk feels better than high. Even though I'm not tripping or paranoid, I just don't seem to feel super happy or anything either. I just feel normal. Sober. With a slight "fluidity" to solid matter in the universe.. And I normally feel some pressure in my brain.

GullRaDriel

if we're going to have some argument battles, then please consider to use the following:

Any affirmation made without proof can be refuted without proof.

And let's see how it will go from now on.

Neil Roy

So it's not okay to talk about God, but it's okay to blather on for pages and pages about how girls are biologically inferior

Good point. I'll end my participation in here by agreeing with Edgar. ;)

Anyhow, it is not my intention to attack Edgar. I respect his beliefs and when I am perfect, then I can condemn him (which I wouldn't do even if I was perfect). So I'll apologize for any offence I may have caused, it was definitely unintended.

On different topic, World of Warcraft: Classic comes next summer, looking forward to that. Also, what i didn't expect, Blizzard announced a revamped version of Warcraft 3, with modern graphics etc coming next summer! I'll definitely grab that! Nice to see a RTS come back.

raynebc

Bam: I can understand people smoking weed for medicinal or pain management effects, but if you're just doing it for recreation I'm not sure why you'd want to do it again after such a bad first experience. Maybe future uses will be better, but such mind altering drugs don't seem to me like they'll always have a predictable effect.

bamccaig
raynebc said:

I can understand people smoking weed for medicinal or pain management effects, but if you're just doing it for recreation I'm not sure why you'd want to do it again after such a bad first experience. Maybe future uses will be better, but such mind altering drugs don't seem to me like they'll always have a predictable effect.

I already drink alcohol for recreation, and that's considered a lot more harmful by the researchers. I've had plenty of bad experiences drinking alcohol, but with proper dosing in mind it can be very pleasant and even constructive. Over time I learned how to control my dosage to maintain a comfortable buzz all night without getting sick, and usually without a hangover.

Last night I smoked again, as I said. The experience was much better than the first time I got high. For the most part, I was just mildly spaced out, and had super zoomed vision. It was more or less pleasant, but not quite as "let go" as being drunk. But it kept me from wanting to drink 9 beer. Which could be helpful by itself. :) The particular strain that I ordered is also on the strong side. It's pretty high in psychoactive chemicals, and low in medicinal ingredients. Last night I was pretty functional. I started out just listening to music. Then I played a bit of Counter-Strike: Source. And eventually switched to watching YouTube videos and Netflix. Unlike the first night, I was pretty much comfortable and functional and in control.

I just ordered 7 more grams of dried flowers (first time they were rolled for me into joints; this time I'll need to grind and roll them myself). I got two different types. I got a high CBD (the medicinal, non-psychoactive) strain, which is still Indica-based like my last batch, but much more balanced between CBD and THC so it should be much more tame ("Balance" by Solei). The CBD counters the THC so the high should be much less, and the CBD will hopefully also offer some medicinal advantages. The other type I got was a Sativa-based one with slight less THC than than the first batch I got ("Ace Valley Sativa" by Ace Valley). I'm really interested in how the "high" differs between these two types versus the first one that I tried. Apparently each variant can produce a different kind of high for the user (or none at all), and different feelings and benefits (some are anti-nausea, some provide pain relief, relief for headaches, etc.).

Ultimately, I want to keep trying because there's so much evidence that cannabis is a useful, safe, productive, and fun drug. Just because I had one bad experience doesn't mean I need to stick my head in the sand and never touch it again. :) It just means that I need to treat it with the same level of respect that I treat a bottle of scotch with. >:( And learn to harness it.

Edgar Reynaldo

Careful bambam, Mary Jane's a gateway drug...

ROFLMAO @ Canadian Government weed

You might like it so much you become a regular like me.

And Dizzy Egg, there's a reason they call him that.

@NiteHackr no offense taken, sorry for my reply

@Eric Johnson - please post more. The sheer volume of stupid must needs be countered!

bamccaig

Holy geez. Last time I ordered it took them about a week before they even attempted to ship it. This time they assigned me a tracking number a few hours later. I better get on locating a grinder! The online shop is all out, but apparently there are already two existing local shops that have the tools at better rates. I need to check those out sometime soon.

Edgar Reynaldo

Let me get this straight. You ordered high grade R33F3R from your government, smoked an entire 7oint for your first time, and you had a bad trip. Well no kidding.

Take it easy on that stuff. Buy yourself a hi77er. Smoke a few puffs every once in a while until you feel something you like or dislike.

It's supposed to be a mild euphoria, but your first time always varies. Regular use may cause r33f3r m@d|\|355. Consult a doctor before use and consider family history of mental illness.

Chris Katko

Stardate 96452.66

I think the Edward bot's memory cores are starting to become corrupted. We should order the Edward unit to report back to starbase for a refit.

Edgar Reynaldo

video

Chris Katko

ahhaahhaha that's amazing!

[edit]

(Disclaimer: gets loud but not ear-rape)

video

Edgar Reynaldo
bamccaig

It really amazes me how long a strong marijuana high lasts. I smoked maybe 200 or 250 mg of MJ last night, and I was comfortably high for at least 3.5 hours afterward at which time I responsibly chose to go to bed at 12 AM (instead of staying up until 3:30 AM like I would have on beer). I was probably still high for another couple of hours while I slept. It's potent stuff. I don't know if you build a tolerance to it, but I kind of hope not. That 250 mg only costs me about CAD$5.50, whereas the 8 or 9 beer I would have drank instead are closer to CAD$11.33 or CAD$12.75.

raynebc

Yeah, I think if you were habitually drinking 8 or 9 beers on a typical work night, replacing alcohol with something less harmful is a good idea.

Chris Katko

ahahahhaah

video

Eric Johnson

@Eric Johnson - please post more. The sheer volume of stupid must needs be countered!

Your wish is my command. So I've been playing The Crew lately. It's a fun open-world racing game set in a miniature version of the US (sans Alaska or Hawaii, for obvious reasons). The story is pretty bad, but the racing and exploration sure is fun. Here are some screenshots I've taken:

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{"name":"DrVhdRFU8AARxQb.jpg:large","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/1\/e\/1ecc565d5e16b40cbb68917d53f4917c.jpg","w":2048,"h":1080,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/1\/e\/1ecc565d5e16b40cbb68917d53f4917c"}DrVhdRFU8AARxQb.jpg:large
{"name":"DrVhfGtU8AANNjO.jpg:large","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/0\/7\/07bf4ba195fce210c3c0e69063951746.jpg","w":2048,"h":1080,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/0\/7\/07bf4ba195fce210c3c0e69063951746"}DrVhfGtU8AANNjO.jpg:large
{"name":"DrVh6BmVYAAqghU.jpg:large","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/b\/5b45f9c7fcdcf46821889bffa117468f.jpg","w":2048,"h":1080,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/b\/5b45f9c7fcdcf46821889bffa117468f"}DrVh6BmVYAAqghU.jpg:large
{"name":"DrVhY3zVYAACELZ.jpg:large","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/6\/f\/6f2eb8bec4654160f1bb07a4a96340fb.jpg","w":2048,"h":1080,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/6\/f\/6f2eb8bec4654160f1bb07a4a96340fb"}DrVhY3zVYAACELZ.jpg:large
{"name":"DrVh41CVYAALIC3.jpg:large","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/d\/f\/df5868094eae082bce2cae12d1cc10b5.jpg","w":2048,"h":1080,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/d\/f\/df5868094eae082bce2cae12d1cc10b5"}DrVh41CVYAALIC3.jpg:large

I've even considered getting one of those steering wheel controllers for added fun, but they're insanely expensive! :o

Edgar Reynaldo

Those look fantastic. 4K?

Eric Johnson

Those look fantastic. 4K?

The screenshots are 4K, but normal play is 1080p. I don't have a 4K display, nor a GPU that could adequately pull-off 4K with high settings. 4K has looked sweeter and sweeter recently, but it's just not in the budget right now (or anytime soon).

Chris Katko

How about some 4K Command and Conquer: Red Alert?

{"name":"uffqJMC.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/2\/6\/26d515280c259da91d60b08cb0fe4a07.jpg","w":3840,"h":2160,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/2\/6\/26d515280c259da91d60b08cb0fe4a07"}uffqJMC.jpg

p.s. OpenRA is amazing.

Edgar Reynaldo
bamccaig

That did nothing for me.

Eric Johnson

Who was that directed toward, Edgar?

Edgar Reynaldo

Oh, that was not directed towards anyone. I was just posting a word I liked. But apparently that didn't titillate bambams enough.

bamccaig

to talk or act in a trivial, inept, or ineffective way

bamccaig said:

That did nothing for me.

:-/

Edgar Reynaldo

Piffle, my niffle.

Chris Katko

Quit niggling.

Edgar Reynaldo

Quit being so recalcitrant. >:(

Erin Maus

Car question:

There's a periodic scraping noise coming from the front passenger tire. It stops when I apply even a little pressure to the brakes. The sound doesn't change with speed as far as I can tell. It doesn't always make the sounds. The sound is unaffected by turning and doesn't happen if I'm completely stopped.

What could it be?

I'm driving up to DC Friday and have work / school tomorrow so I'm kinda in a bind regarding getting it checked out.

If it helps I recently had the tires replaced.

bamccaig

I'm not a mechanic. I'm not even very mechanical.

This sounds like one of your brake pads is occasionally making contact with the disc. That can happen if the piston sticks and doesn't fully release the pads, or if your disc is warped. It's probably harmless (but I'm not a mechanic).

Site note: Warmart's garage is usually pretty quick. I wouldn't say they're the best garage out there, but at least they're represented by a large corporation so it's in their best interested to make you happy over getting bad press. It probably wouldn't cost much if you brought it to them and just asked them to take a look. They should be able to tell you if anything serious is wrong, and in my experience they've always been very good about giving me options before just doing something. And they probably have the cheapest options around. Of course, you get what you pay for. But probably they'll say it's not a big deal.

You'll likely have fair warning before it becomes a problem that is dangerous. But you never can know short of getting an expert to look at it, and even then no guarantees...

Erin Maus

I'll find time to take it to my mechanic even if it means skipping a class. (Gosh I hate to do that).

It sounds just like when my brother's disc brakes on his bicycle are misaligned. Except louder.

Chris Katko

There's a periodic scraping noise coming from the front passenger tire.

Did it rain? :P Has the car been sitting still while it rained?

Rust built up on one part of the rotor and keeps skipping against the disk and will be cleaned quickly.

Neil Roy

How about some 4K Command and Conquer: Red Alert?

Funny you should mention that. EA just got the former devs of the original C&C to remaster it! Very kewl!

https://www.techspot.com/news/77436-ea-turns-former-westwood-devs-4k-command-conquer.html

TurboJudas

Hi guys! I always liked Allegro and C so I've been wanting to come back to allegro a few times over the decades, but this strange forum setup has turned me off every time, it ruins everything, it physically hurts to look att only four threads at a time. :'( Are there no settings or something I can do to see all posts 'like you're supposed to do'?

Btw. Does it matter if I would use Allegro 4 or 5 for some really simple 2D games? Which one is easier to set up? I'm more of a tinkerer or 'game creator' than a programmer so I remember having problems setting it up (a long time ago).

Cheers! :)

Edgar Reynaldo

I've been wanting to come back to allegro a few times over the decades, but this strange forum setup has turned me off every time, it ruins everything, it physically hurts to look att only four threads at a time. :'( Are there no settings or something I can do to see all posts 'like you're supposed to do'?

No, there are no nice ways to navigate this forum's shady past.

https://www.allegro.cc/forums/recent

is where most people spend their time here.

However, when I go to Programming Forums, I see a whole month of threads :

{"name":"611761","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/1\/4\/144d9778105338617c41128f93ba3a4d.png","w":1920,"h":1080,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/1\/4\/144d9778105338617c41128f93ba3a4d"}611761

Click on the 'showing recent threads' button, and it will give you a drop down list of ways to filter the results. You can see a month at a time.

Btw. Does it matter if I would use Allegro 4 or 5 for some really simple 2D games? Which one is easier to set up? I'm more of a tinkerer or 'game creator' than a programmer so I remember having problems setting it up (a long time ago).

If you use binaries its relatively painless. I provide binaries for Allegro 4 and 5 (see my sig) and SiegeLord provides binaries for 5 using a slightly different toolchain. As well, if you use MSVS, you can download Allegro 5 as a Nugat package, which makes it easy.

EDIT

Edgar said:

I feel like I am tying my ankle to my butt when I code in C. Having to hop around on one foot when I have two perfectly good feet.

Anyone feel like a nice C vs C++ flamewar? I need something to keep me warm in the winter.

GullRaDriel

C++ sucks so hard it should be prostituted.

<;-)

Chris Katko

C++ really is horrific. Design-by-committee gone off the rails. I don't know any expert who says C++ is heading in the right direction. I heard one expert say:

Quote:

People who understand all of C++:

1) Herb Stutter

2)

Basically, C++ has committees and each committee person has "their baby" and that's all they understand and care about. And, even if you have an amazing solution, without a committee person to push it forward, it's dead in the water.

They also blatantly rip off from D without even having the decency to mention D. They literally stole a D source code example and put in one of their proposals. No mention of where it came from.

Nice guys.

D has plenty of gotchas and confusing decisions, but overall, the experience is so much easier and a more productive use of my time for my game projects.

C# is a thousand times better for GUI applications.

And game engines exist, though I have no experience on their effectiveness. While I'd love to spend my time making game DESIGNS instead of programming them, my game projects tend to be unique and game engines are better suited for games that have already been made ("Oh look, another platformer on Steam!"). For example, try to make Factorio in Unity and you'd be better off punching yourself in the balls as it struggles to run tens of thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of scripted objects every frame.

raynebc

C is super easy to use. The last time I looked into learning C++ I was put off pretty quickly by needless complexity.

Chris Katko

I would recommend learning at least the basics/advanced aspects of languages like C++ (or D) because they expose you to higher-levels of thinking.

Not, higher, as necessarily "omg, you're dumb if you don't use it." but languages are implemented ways of solving problems, and the more ways you know how to look at and solve a problem, the better. The more tools in your tool bag, you may know when to pull out a rarer, more specialized tool that saves you time.

bamccaig

Learning the basics of C++ is easy. Mastering C++ is almost impossible. A few have made a lucrative career of it, but it's too late to be thinking that way now. Those days are long past unless you find an existing codebase that needs maintaining, and believe me you will be earning every dollar so it won't come cheap... Probably the only thing interesting about C++ in 2018 is that nothing has really come along to fully replace it in 30+ years.

D pretty much put itself out internally before it ever got started. Now it's basically a failed project that can only serve as an example of what not to do. There are some good things to take away from the language, but a lot of bad things to take away from the implementation.

Go is pretty wishy-washy. If anybody could create a C++ killer it would be Google, right? And yet, it's also basically a dead project outside of Google.

What seems to be winning the overall software development spectrum these days is Python. It's far from the metal, it's very much neutered in terms of syntactic sugar, and there's a lot of mistakes in the core language. What it has accomplished is a backlog of stable libraries to build on similar to Perl, but without countless ways to say the same thing. And even when there is more than one way to say a thing, the community tries to agree on the best way conventionally to say it. It's far from perfect, but it seems to be the current big thing. It's probably not ideal for games, though there are Allegro 5 bindings supplied by Elias, and there's PyGame for the hip crowd. And there are opportunities for binding Python to C if you need a fast core behind a dynamic platform.

C vs C++ debates are no longer interesting in 2018. They're both too far outdated. They're ancient relics. What little they gain in updates are too little too late. C remains the ideal system language because it's tried, tested, and simple. It lacks a LOT in expressiveness which means you'll be repeating yourself a fucking lot unfortunately, but it works. C++ is a brainfuck to even understand fully because of it's complexity and many design errors, let alone to interoperate with binaries because of lack of standardization there. If we had a better option than C we'd take it in a heartbeat, but unfortunately attempts have failed in various ways. It's not that C is perfect, but that it has apparently been close enough that nobody has figured out how to do it better.

C++ is better than C in a few ways, but it's worse in enough ways to negate those. At best, it would be a tie, but it probably doesn't even get that much. A subset of C++ might be better than C, and perhaps that would be the ultimate C killer these days: somebody define a C-- that is a subset of C++ that cuts out the bad, keeps the good, and incrementally improves upon C. But that's probably too abstract to be a real possibility. I think C++ is as complex as it is because it needed to be.

We can have a language flamewar, but we won't be limiting it to C and C++. This is 2018. Those are fossils.

Append:

To date, the most elegant language I have learned is Lisp. There is a bit of an overhead from parenthesis, but tools can pretty much handle that for us. The parenthesis are also key to the elegance. The huge disappointment there is that efforts have been so fragmented that there is no productive community to back it and produce reusable code as is required for a language today to thrive (another huge failing of C and C++ is that there was never a central store of useful reusable code, or a standard mechanism to reuse it). I would still really love to see the Lisp communities band together and create a super-Lisp that could rival Python in utility and popularity. But perhaps that's destined to never expand beyond my dreams.

Append:

I'll just leave this here to be ignored:

video

Edgar Reynaldo
bamccaig said:

To date, the most elegant language I have learned is Lisp. There is a bit of an overhead from parenthesis, but tools can pretty much handle that for us. The parenthesis are also key to the elegance. The huge disappointment there is that efforts have been so fragmented that there is no productive community to back it and produce reusable code as is required for a language today to thrive (another huge failing of C and C++ is that there was never a central store of useful reusable code, or a standard mechanism to reuse it). I would still really love to see the Lisp communities band together and create a super-Lisp that could rival Python in utility and popularity. But perhaps that's destined to never expand beyond my dreams.

Lisp? Are you kidding me? You honestly want to write programs that consist of CAR, CDR, and CONS all day? Barf. Not everything was made to be done recursively on a list. Gimme a break man.

Python is nice for the relaxed typing but that can also bite you pretty quickly when you pass a lot of parameters.

D is okay, but the compiler messages are cryptic and often have nothing to do with whats wrong.

Java is OOP on crack.

C# is like Java but better.

Kotlin is really nice high level language, but too bad it runs on the JVM.

So yeah, give me C++. It lets me do pretty much anything I want. Except Kotlin's lambdas are SO MUCH NICER than C++'s horrible afterthought in that department.

The whole Boost split really killed C++. Elitists used Boost. Purists refrained. The standard barely moved in a decade or two and now all of a sudden there's C++20? With all kinds of crazy things added in.

But C, C has always just remained. It's really kind of timeless. Too slow for me to get much done, but definitely worth knowing and using when appropriate.

Eric Johnson

Java is OOP on crack.

I absolutely despise Java. It's way, way too verbose, is a memory hog, and seems redundant if you are already familiar with C/C++. I dreaded all of my Java courses in college. >:(

Edgar Reynaldo

Java actually did some things right. extends and implements were done properly. No more multiple inheritance nightmares, because you can only extend one class, but you can implement as many interfaces as you need. Which is where they failed, making a million and one classes for simple things like events and listeners.

bamccaig

Lisp? Are you kidding me? You honestly want to write programs that consist of CAR, CDR, and CONS all day?

No, and you don't have to. Those are low-level mechanisms. When you need then they're there. Some dialects have renamed or aliased them "first" and "rest" instead to make it less cryptic, but if you used it regularly your brain would map it so you never had to think about it (already it's pretty much mapped for both of us probably). Some dialects also have nth that effectively indexes the list (though (car list) would be more efficient than (nth list 1) or whatever.

Not everything was made to be done recursively on a list. Gimme a break man.

Many Lisp dialects have imperative loops too. You can do everything in Lisp that you can do in any other language. They don't need to be pure-functional, and not everything has to be a list. The elegance comes from the syntax too. The fact that macros have the same expressability as the language.

Lisp also does OO/"message passing" much better than most languages I find. It's not object.method(parameters...), but rather it's like (method object parameters). For example, (speak duck) and (speak voice_engine "hello"). The code is completely unrelated, but the language doesn't care.

Lisp also originated a ton of other really neat and useful features, much of it that still hasn't been adopted by other languages. The way that Lisp handles errors/exceptions is really neat, for example.

I read about a satellite or unmanned vehicle or something that was programmed in Lisp (my memory says it was real, but there's a chance it was a hypothetical fiction, but interesting either way), and a bug caused the program to fail in an unexpected way in space. Instead of just locking up or crashing or misbehaving, the program waited for a user to debug the problem. Because the program was entirely dynamic, engineers on Earth were able to connect, inspect the state of the program (obviously taking minutes or hours for keystrokes to even reach it), and rewrite the program live without ever exiting the process to continue the mission. It wouldn't have been possible to do this with any other technology (at least, without stopping and restarting a modified program).

There is so much elegance to Lisp that no other language has. C is not elegant at all. If you dig into the system headers you pretty much barf. C++ is even worse. C# is half decent, but mostly we're just so used to C-like that it's like second nature to us now. But is it really elegant? Not really. It works, and it works well, and it's reasonably easy to read and write. But it's not elegant. And the parts of it that are elegant are inherited from functional languages: much of the C# designers are Haskell geeks.

Append:

Also, my wife showed me this today which is fucking hilarious and demonstrates the absurdity of SJWs:

video

Append:

And you know how the rabbit hole goes...

video

Neil Roy
raynebc said:

C is super easy to use. The last time I looked into learning C++ I was put off pretty quickly by needless complexity.

I'm the same. I stick to C. There are some aspects of C++ that I liked, but I found I could recreate the same functionality in C, and it was much simpler and faster.

But C, C has always just remained. It's really kind of timeless. Too slow for me to get much done, but definitely worth knowing and using when appropriate.

Too slow? I've heard a lot of criticisms about C, but never has it been referred to as too slow. The only thing faster is machine language.

Edgar Reynaldo

Yes, too slow. Development time in C is at least twice as long as the equivalent C++ program, or even more.

TurboJudas

@Edgar Reynaldo Thanks for all the info and help! This will get me started.

Quite enjoying the language vs language vs language discussion here ^^ Things many times get measured by what you can make money of, but from a personal point of view I think people really enjoy other things in life than the work-like money-making stuff.

I like C because you can many times even use it when coding for the old 80s classic home/micro-computers and consoles. Those are often more exciting than modern hardware too. :)

Chris Katko

Development time in C is at least twice as long as the equivalent C++ program, or even more.

I feel like I'm a broken record, but that's one of my favorite things about D. It's designed around making you productive but with the C/C++ oldschool mentality of "you only pay for what you use." (*It's not a perfect language.) I genuinely enjoy writing code for my games in D, whereas C++ is boilerplate hell. The most basic templates in C++ are confusing enough to make tons of C++ programmers never use them at all.

I like C# for "getting work done" as well, but it's not necessarily tuned for games. Though, Unity uses it for scripts, IIRC.

Chris Katko

[.]

bamccaig

I think that C++ and D should support both templates and "generics" (i.e., dynamic/vtable lookups). You should get to decide whether or not you want the code to execute fast, at the expense of ballooning the executable size, or if you would rather share a single instance of the code that operates on vtables or similar more like generics in modern languages. In general, I don't think people really want hundreds of instances of the code to be expanded in the executable. They want to write the code one, and reuse it, and it's not necessary for it to be so bleeding fast that it can't spare a few extra indirections. Sure, when it's worth paying for that then it should be an attribute or something to unlock it, but I think the default behavior should just be shared code.

Derezo
bamccaig said:

So that was my first experience getting high on marijuana. It was fucking horrible.

I'm late to reply but it sounds like you did it by yourself. Bad idea.

Cannabis is not for everyone, but it's always better to be around people that you trust doing something enjoyable instead of sinking into your own head like that while using hallucinogenic-type recreational/medicinal drugs of any sort, including cannabis, and especially anything stronger.

Playing music with friends, for example, can make the experience more enjoyable. The effect of cannabis can change the activity in different regions of your brain it commonly makes people more paranoid or less able to maintain working memory in sophisticated ways, among other things.

Having said that, I'm not a fan of the government strains. I've done pot with too much THC before and it's not enjoyable for me either. Once someone trolled me with a "bad joke" after I had tried a very strong strain, and had implied he was going to kill me. My thinking about this particular person became very paranoid and abstract, and the experience is difficult to describe succinctly but: I was terrified and the night became very bad. It was an over reaction caused by paranoia and overall bad experience for sure.

bamccaig
Derezo said:

Having said that, I'm not a fan of the government strains. I've done pot with too much THC before and it's not enjoyable for me either. Once someone trolled me with a "bad joke" after I had tried a very strong strain, and had implied he was going to kill me. My thinking about this particular person became very paranoid and abstract, and the experience is difficult to describe succinctly but: I was terrified and the night became very bad. It was an over reaction caused by paranoia and overall bad experience for sure.

It seems cannabis use is sort of vulnerable to how you feel. If you're anxious or worried about something it can send you on a bad trip. It seems wise to always "set the mood" so you can sort of control the kind of trip you're on. I haven't quite hit it as hard as the first time since the first time, but I think I've come close, and I haven't had any more bad trips so far. Instead I've been trying to practice just keeping a comfortable high. I think my first time I was just afraid of what it would do to me. I was sort of in a safe place. My wife used to smoke a bit before she met me, and I was home with her. I figured I'd have her support. Instead, she pretty much left me to my own devices, and had no pity at all when I was tripping balls. She said I was pretty funny at times (while tripping balls). In hindsight, I kind of enjoy the memory of the terror. Which is weird. But since I haven't lost control like that since I might also be forgetting just how terrifying it was.

When you used cannabis from other markets did you know what it was called or what its concentrations were? I'm curious because you say you don't really like the government strains so I wonder if you have recommendations from the government website for products that you would steer towards. So far I've tried 2, and I have a third to try, but it's a powerful Sativa so I'm not quite sure when the appropriate time to try it is.. I'm still a pretty big drinker and my instinct is still to drink instead of smoke. I try to avoid combining the two. I did finally "cross-fade" last week. After a weeknight of drinking I stepped outside into the cold after 3 AM to smoke before going to sleep. Fortunately, I didn't "green out" or have a bad experience. It felt pretty organic: drunk and high. Unfortunately, I got a bad chest infection for my trouble. I'm not sure if it was because I was smoking the other half of a pre-burned joint, or if it was the cold air, or if my system was just weak from the alcohol, or what. In any case, the infection sucked, but I think I'm nearly over it now. I'm just afraid to smoke in the cold again though.

I rather enjoy being high, but even though in the moment I find it usually is "enough" and I don't feel the urge to be drunk, I often make the decision before I start smoking to drink instead. That makes it kind of hard to find a time to smoke instead..

Chris Katko
Derezo said:

Once someone trolled me with a "bad joke" after I had tried a very strong strain, and had implied he was going to kill me.

I'd press charges.

Eric Johnson

Pleasurable day of gluttony to you all. :)

Erin Maus

I had Thanksgiving at a friend's since my brother works today.

Black Friday started today at 6:00 pm at his workplace (Wally World), so the parking lot was packed when I brought him dinner. Capitalism. :-/

Derezo

Happy Turkey Day my American friends!

bamccaig said:

I got a bad chest infection for my trouble

Smoking anything increases your risk of lung infections. I wouldn't be surprised if there's data that shows burning incense does. Your lungs become more vulnerable with any particulate. Eventually it just becomes a way of life for most smokers ;D

Quote:

When you used cannabis from other markets did you know what it was called or what its concentrations were?

I definitely didn't know what the concentrations were to any exact science They have all kinds of names... but I don't know how the names actually get from seed or sapling to the mouth of the seller and sometimes he would just make them up on the spot, heh. The big difference is that I like stuff grown in the sun from the ground.

Quote:

I wonder if you have recommendations from the government website for products that you would steer towards.

I personally prefer lower potency outdoor grown over the high potency hydroponic stuff. When I went over the OCS options when they first launched I noticed almost all of them were high THC with no CBD, but it looks like I either missed some or they've added new ones. This "Kiwi Cannabis Mango Haze" is something I would rather do myself. It still has some THC which creates those thought bending effects, but the higher CBD will make the experience more relaxing. This is something you could take after work that would be more akin to a couple beers rather as opposed to half a square of acid.

Edgar Reynaldo

Let me get this straight - the relaxing euphoria comes from the CBD? Or the THC?

I don't really get high (feel the effects) much anymore. More like recharging a battery at this point. If I don't smoke for a few days, I will notice it when I do.

I love it when it's giggle weed, but that's rare these days.

Erin Maus

I thought this was pretty cool:

{"name":"1lalNBD.gif","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/b\/1\/b1d2cff0f58bcd4d9b68e5c51e790ac2.gif","w":378,"h":421,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/b\/1\/b1d2cff0f58bcd4d9b68e5c51e790ac2"}1lalNBD.gif

He's a follower of Yendor. You can make 15 bone shards from... bones. Eldritch myrrh is unreasonably expensive because the incense you make from it provides a flat additive 50% accuracy bonus for you (...and opponents). The idea is you come back to the island and buy it when you have a better source of bone shards.

It works nicely, I think.

Still on track to have a demo done by January assuming no major problems. Assuming optimizations don't take up a lot of time. (There's performance problems in high-pop areas and when clicking on the game world).

edit: why does it squish my gif :(

bamccaig

I think that A.cc always shrinks images down so they don't expand off of the page. Though I thought it used to allow you to click to expand them...

MiquelFire

I think the squish issue here is something like taking a 16:9 image and displaying it as a 1:1 image. The image is not displayed as wide as it should be.

The gif is 640x480, but the forums are displaying it as 378x421 for whatever insane reason.

Eric Johnson

If you right-click the image and view it in its own tab/window, it can be viewed without being squished.

bamccaig
Derezo said:

Smoking anything increases your risk of lung infections. I wouldn't be surprised if there's data that shows burning incense does. Your lungs become more vulnerable with any particulate. Eventually it just becomes a way of life for most smokers ;D

Does that mean that most smokers are constantly struggling with respiratory issues? :-/ I can't imagine suffering all of the time, and the effects of marijuana being worth it. I kind of like it when I get the right amount of high, but it wouldn't be worth it if every time I did it I got sick.

Derezo said:

I definitely didn't know what the concentrations were to any exact science They have all kinds of names... but I don't know how the names actually get from seed or sapling to the mouth of the seller and sometimes he would just make them up on the spot, heh. The big difference is that I like stuff grown in the sun from the ground.

I find this kind of curious. Being that I have experienced pleasant highs and unpleasant highs I cannot at this time conclude that marijuana is awesome. Whereas I can drink alcohol every day, always in control of how drunk I am, it seems with marijuana it's more difficult to do that. Unless maybe the black market weed is normally the balanced type with high levels of CBD. For a non-smoker to look at OCS it looks like the high THC zero CBD strains are the "normal" ones. Does that seem like some kind of conspiracy or something? As if to steer people towards bad experiences so they won't take to it? I don't know.

Last night I tried a strain for the first time. It was my first Sativa strain. And it was high in THC content sort of like the first strain that I tried. I figured Friday night, bring it on. I tried to go easy. I just did it with a tiny glass one-hitter. Just one load. Maybe got about 4 or 5 good hits from it. And it got me fucked up. Uncomfortably so. In a hurry. I was operating on little sleep (maybe 5 hours or so the night before) so that probably didn't help, but I passed out in my computer chair around like 8 PM. It was worse than alcohol. :) Apparently my wife got a picture of it and posted it on social media. I had no idea. This wasn't as bad as my first time getting too high because I was more calm, listened to music to help control the mood, etc. It just wasn't what I expected. So far I'd say being drunk is way better than being high. So either I'm doing something wrong or it's just not for me.

Maybe I need to steer more towards the balanced strains though. I kind of look at the options in the store like I would look at alcohol: more bang for your buck means higher potency! Though I normally drink beer instead of whiskey precisely because if I drink whiskey I'll overdue it (but also whiskey is more expensive). The balanced herb that I've tried was kind of nice. I only got the slightest high from it though so I think I need to try to hit that one hard and see if I reach a pleasant high/calm/relaxation like everybody talks about. I couldn't even really feel it when I smoked that one.

Derezo said:

I personally prefer lower potency outdoor grown over the high potency hydroponic stuff. When I went over the OCS options when they first launched I noticed almost all of them were high THC with no CBD, but it looks like I either missed some or they've added new ones. This "Kiwi Cannabis Mango Haze" is something I would rather do myself. It still has some THC which creates those thought bending effects, but the higher CBD will make the experience more relaxing. This is something you could take after work that would be more akin to a couple beers rather as opposed to half a square of acid.

I find it really interesting that the high THC options don't seem to appeal to existing cannabis users. I guess I just assumed those were the ones that people built up to. Interestingly, they're so cheap by comparison. But it's definitely difficult to manage the effects...

I should note that I've never really been a "couple beers after work" kind of guy. I started out around 5 or 6, and worked my way up to 8 or 9. But being drunk is nothing like being high. High is much worse. I can function very effectively when I'm drunk. I need to be very shitfaced before I start to be unable to function. Whereas with marijuana I can become non-functional in a few tokes...

Erin Maus

I had GIFs working one time, I think it's the size.

Maybe this works?

jqlPnX2.gif

Or maybe it has to be hosted on Allegro.cc?

611771

*edit:* seems there's a size limit, too

1:1?

611772

idk I give up

Edgar Reynaldo

If we're posting progress on our projects, here's mine :

{"name":"611773","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/7\/772dab37c96f36f80a4362f3fcf47c52.png","w":1028,"h":800,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/7\/772dab37c96f36f80a4362f3fcf47c52"}611773

I now have a fully functional ball intercept routine that handles finding intercept times of moving, accelerating circles. All thanks to the quartic solver written by Iowa Hills which you can find here :

http://iowahills.com/P51RootFinder.html

This means you can model gravity with no cost whatsoever! You only have to recalculate intercept times when you have a collision or the acceleration or momentum changes. This leads to very efficient collision detection.

I'm writing a series of articles on the wiki which you can find here :

https://github.com/liballeg/allegro_wiki/wiki/Collision-Detection

They are still preliminary, but I'm filling them in as I go. I plan to cover overlap checks and intercept calculations for lines, circles, triangles, and convex polygons. I want this to be a comprehensive guide to poor man's collision detection.

Chris Katko

I freakin' love graphs. I'm such a nerd. ;D

My brain is like "ooOOOhhh what does THAT represent?!"

Edgar Reynaldo

Green arrow is velocity vector. Purple arrows are acceleration vectors. Cyan path is the trajectory of the ball. Yellow circles are collisions, except for the one on the left.

It's really simple.

Px0 = c2->x - c1->x;
Py0 = c2->y - c1->y;
Vx0 = c2->vx - c1->vx;
Vy0 = c2->vy - c1->vy;
Ax0 = c2->ax - c1->ax;
Ay0 = c2->ay - c1->ay;

Px(t) = Px0 + Vx0*t + (Ax0/2)*t^2
Py(t) = Py0 + Vy0*t + (Ay0/2)*t^2

P(t) = P0 + V0*t + (A0/2)*t^2

|P(t)| = Px(t)^2 + Py(t)^2 = (r1 + r2)^2

I'll spare you the quartic here, but suffice it to say when you multiply out Px and Py times themselves, you get terms that add together and are really intuitive.

Oh, bother, I'll share anyway :

The full quartic equation for two intercepting circles is as follows :

t^4(Ax^2 + Ay^2) + 
t^3(VxAx + VyAy) + 
t^2(Vx^2 + Vy^2 + PxAx + PyAy) + 
t^1(2(PxVx + PyVy)) + 
t^0(Px^2 + Py^2 - (r1 + r2)^2
---------------------------------
= 0

Which as you can see, are the squared magnitudes and the dot products of the various components. Pretty cool, huh?

Just plug those values into a quartic solver, and off you go. The first non-negative real root is the time of collision.

bamccaig
bamccaig said:

Maybe I need to steer more towards the balanced strains though. I kind of look at the options in the store like I would look at alcohol: more bang for your buck means higher potency! Though I normally drink beer instead of whiskey precisely because if I drink whiskey I'll overdue it (but also whiskey is more expensive). The balanced herb that I've tried was kind of nice. I only got the slightest high from it though so I think I need to try to hit that one hard and see if I reach a pleasant high/calm/relaxation like everybody talks about. I couldn't even really feel it when I smoked that one.

So last night I smoked two loads of my balanced strain. And I still got fucked right up. The proof was on IRC, and you missed it. But that just goes to show that there's no need for any 15% or 20% THC. A 5% THC with 10% CBD still will get you fucked up, but in a more pleasant way.

I pretty much don't even want this left over Sativa that I have. I think it's too strong. If I do smoke it I'll have to do it in tiny pieces. So it'll probably go stale before I can smoke it all. :P

The craziest thing is that I'm starting to feel high again, and I think it has nearly been 12 hours since I smoked... It almost feels like this isn't drug induced and instead my brain is just repeating the transformations sober... Which I'm not sure makes sense. Damn this stuff is wild. You be the judge if that's good or bad because I don't know.

To be fair, last night I was drinking, and then smoked, so the alcohol would have intensified the absorption of THC. That might have made it a bit more potent then it would have been sober. But I digress... Next time I shop I think I'll only buy the strains with high CBD content.

Edgar Reynaldo
bamccaig said:

So last night I smoked two loads of my balanced strain. And I still got ed right up. The proof was on IRC, and you missed it.

I want IRC logs. >:(

bamccaig

Never. >:(

Maybe we should organize an online group smoking session. I wonder if that would be incriminating for anybody smoking illegally...

MiquelFire

Built a new system, and here are some 3D Mark results to compare where I'm coming from, and where I'm going to.

{"name":"611780","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/8\/b\/8b9bf81ed028c0b37eb21b45de4efa9f.png","w":1400,"h":880,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/8\/b\/8b9bf81ed028c0b37eb21b45de4efa9f"}611780
{"name":"611781","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/d\/d\/ddab01407c48faeffc90c862069722e4.png","w":1386,"h":873,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/d\/d\/ddab01407c48faeffc90c862069722e4"}611781

Edgar Reynaldo
bamccaig said:

Never. >:(

Maybe we should organize an online group smoking session. I wonder if that would be incriminating for anybody smoking illegally...

Haha too bad. I already have a transcript. :/

Nah, p*t is boring. It barely does anything anymore. Maybe I should move to Canada and get the real stuff, cuz apparently it does something...

;D

raynebc

Sounds like you may have built up a resistance pretty quickly. Lots of people hurt themselves chasing for a repeat of how they used to get high from a particular drug, so it may not be worthwhile.

bamccaig

Resistance? Hah! On Friday, I was drinking and smoking, and all was going great until somebody in IRC was being ignorant about Git for like an hour, and I decided to smoke some more of my strong stash. I just did one more half load in my one-hitter... I'd guess maybe 75 or 150 mg. And in 15 minutes I knew I was in trouble. I think the previous hits of this I did were balanced out by my other strain that was high in CBD, but that was probably nearly out of my system by now. An hour or so after taking a final hit of this 18% THC Sativa (at like 3 or 4 AM) I puked my guts out (including a stomach full of beer and tacos). I didn't get to bed until like 6 AM. :-X

I have a bit of a resistance to alcohol, but weed hits me like a newborn baby. :-[ (Presumably)

Edgar Reynaldo

I told you ;
drinking() + smoking() = puking();

Neil Roy

Check this game out, a longplay video of PORTAL... big deal right? This is the Commodore 64 version! :)

video

You can download the game here...
https://www.jamiefuller.com/portal/

It's actually a pretty good game, if a little short.

Chris Katko

http://stabyourself.net/mari0/

Super Mario Bros 1... with portal guns. That is all.

Neil Roy

Nice. :)

bamccaig

Unfortunately, the Linux "binary" doesn't work on modern systems, and the "source" is a bit more of an obscure binary package (a zip file pretty much, but I have no idea how it's meant to be used or what it does). That said, if you're a Linux user and you feel like living on the wild side, the Windows binary appears to work in wine. I'm not sure it's a fun mod to the classic game. For the most part, the 2D aiming controls are awkward as always in this type of side-scroller. And it seems the game goes way too fast to make use of the portals. But nevertheless it's something somebody made so that's still neat.

Erin Maus

If you're talking about mari0, it uses Love2D. Kind of like my game. :)

Unfortunately it requires an older version of Love2D (0.8) so it doesn't work on the latest builds your package manager probably provides. Kind of like mine requires a custom version of Love2D 11.1, plus other native dependencies...

Such is life.

Edgar Reynaldo

I thought this thread was closed. It's been 3 days since the last reply we better get cracking fellas. How many of you have signed up for Krampus Hack 2018?

GullRaDriel

I signed up. I'm in warming phase ^^

Edgar Reynaldo

{"name":"A-watched-pot-never-boils.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/a\/5ae5c17e2c717315fd9f077361d5c45d.jpg","w":1500,"h":1200,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/a\/5ae5c17e2c717315fd9f077361d5c45d"}A-watched-pot-never-boils.jpg

GullRaDriel

Mwahaha totally that. 8-)

Edit: I may have a bun now instead of a short haircut. Who's the artist BTW ?

Edgar Reynaldo

Source : http://www.grammar.zone/a-watched-pot-never-boils/

A bun? That's a hairdo for women...

Un chignon? C'est une coiffure pour les femmes ...

GullRaDriel

There is no such things as a man or a woman hairdo, and I'm still a man whatever my haircut is.
8-)

Neil Roy

Microsoft releases MS-DOS v1.25 and v2.0 source code.

https://github.com/Microsoft/MS-DOS

Eric Johnson
NiteHackr said:

Microsoft releases MS-DOS v1.25 and v2.0 source code.

That's pretty cool. Now I wait for MS to release the source code for Windows, particularly XP. ::)

Chris Katko

They already did for Windows 2000. ;)

https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1030335/leaked-windows-2000-source-code-analysed

Also, who the heck wants XP. ::vomits:: You have any idea how hard it was to get everyone to upgrade to 8/10, as a IT professional? It was a nightmare between the users, upper management, and sometimes worst of all, Microsoft.

At least use Windows Vista/7. They have huge kernel improvements compared to XP.

Fun trivia fact: Windows 2000 (and presumably later editions) source code is actually really well written. That doesn't mean every high-level decision like "Metro interface" is a good idea, but the code that is demanded from upper-management tends to be carefully written. One of the hardest / worst problems they have to deal with is walls of custom checks to make old, important software (including Microsoft products) work with newer versions. People won't buy Windows 10/11 if say, Adobe Photoshop doesn't run on it.

https://www.smh.com.au/technology/few-surprises-in-leaked-windows-2000-code-analysis-20040218-gdidqj.html

Quote:

One extremely interesting example cited was a comment which clearly said that in order to make an application work properly, a bug which existed in an earlier version of the operating system had to be retained as such.

This was because the programmers of the application, Borland's JBuilder, had relied on this bug to make the application work.

Niunio
Quote:

NiteHackr said:

Microsoft releases MS-DOS v1.25 and v2.0 source code.

That's pretty cool. Now I wait for MS to release the source code for Windows, particularly XP. ::)

What they should do is to unban the release of the OS/2 source code, but they'll not because they know Open Sourced OSes will boost their quality so much they'll be out of busines.

True story: OS/2 kernel has the best Intel-based process manager ever, almost impossible to break (I tried a lot with Warp trying bad code on C and Assembler and it never wroke). IBM announced they would release the sources some years ago but kernel has a small little tiny number of lines provided by Microsoft and they used such to ban the release because they claim it was from NT (OS/2 had some compatibility with NT and 3.1) and it cannot be released.

That pissed me off. >:(

Eric Johnson

Also, who the heck wants XP. ::vomits:: You have any idea how hard it was to get everyone to upgrade to 8/10, as a IT professional? It was a nightmare between the users, upper management, and sometimes worst of all, Microsoft.

XP was/is crap, but I have fond memories of using it as a kid.

Edgar Reynaldo

XP was/is crap, but I have fond memories of using it as a kid.

Maybe that's so, but I'm posting this from XP. ;) I have fond memories of using it as an adult. Everything is simpler. The control panel, the start menu, everything. I have the Quick Launch on the top, the taskbar on the bottom, and notifications in the bottom right. Running XP in 1920x1080 is a bit of a strain on the eyes, but most apps can adjust the default font, like CB can.

I'm developing my #KrampusHack18 game exclusively on XP. With the binaries I built on my laptop. Beat that. :-*

bamccaig

Honestly XP was nice in a lot of ways. And 10 actually made several things in the control panel harder to find. For example, network adapter settings. It seems like 3 or 4 hoops to jump through to find it now. XP worked, and it worked pretty well with SP1 and especially by SP3. Vista and 8 were disasters. 7 was pretty good I found. For every up of 10 there's also a down.

Eric Johnson

I meant it was crap in terms of stability. Most iterations of Windows have stability issues (BSoD and the like), though Windows 7 was pretty good and (for the most part) so is Windows 10. I remember lots of crashes on XP, Vista, and some on 8, but not many on 7 or 10.

bamccaig

If my memory serves me I think BSOD's were pretty common on XP, but still much less common than previous iterations. In that sense, it was still a huge improvement over past versions of Windows. That said,... It still lags far behind Linux even today. :P

Edgar Reynaldo

Blue Screens of Death are directly caused by hardware driver failure. My Windows 10 laptop has had a couple of stop errors, but nothing too serious. They were somewhat more common with XP, but that's because it was younger. I haven't had any problems with XP for a while now.

Of course I'm never going to update my graphics drivers again, but w/e I don't play the latest games on here anyway. All legacy stuff, which is still pretty fun once in a while.

EDIT
Here comes another page in the chapters of this thread! Better be worth it! >:(

bamccaig

BSoD could also be the kernel's fault. Linux has the kernel panic, but you very rarely experienced it. For BSoD to be so widespread and for it to take so long before they worked it out it is definitely a sore spot for Windows. Of course, Vista was also well known for its BSoDs. So even though they did mostly work the kinks out of XP by the end, Vista and 8 pretty much brought it back again... So evidently it's not something that Microsoft has figured out yet. 10 is basically 8.2 so it's no wonder it was much more stable. Let's just see what the next major iteration does. :)

Chris Katko

Fun fact: Windows drivers by 3rd parties were one of the most common sources of BSODs because they were written so poorly and could take down the kernel easily in earlier versions of windows. Only time I've ever seen a BSOD in 8/10 is hardware failure and over-temperature CPUs.

bamccaig

You'd think with Windows being the primary market for graphics cards and probably most other PC hardware that their vendors would want to ship quality drivers. And similarly, since the BSOD epidemic makes Windows look bad, you'd think Microsoft would be willing to work with vendors to fix their drivers ASAP. I suppose back in the day when the drivers were really unreliable the software development tools/practices were just poorer though. So it might have just been difficult to figure out the cause..

Chris Katko

.

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

You'd think with Windows being the primary market for graphics cards and probably most other PC hardware that their vendors would want to ship quality drivers.

Drivers are software and the only "quality" software that gets shipped is from businesses who actually demand it internally. The world runs on insecure software. Every bank. Every credit card. Every school. Everything. I've seen public, ADMIN credentials, hosted on a PUBLIC URL for a school so Norton Ghost can download the partition for a new computer over the network. Bugs are just like security (and almost identical!).

Businesses don't get money for quality software, they get money for shipping software. The only time I've ever written good code professionally is when I demanded it from myself--and often it got me in trouble because the project always STARTED being developed after the first due date so I've got e-mails and phone calls hounding me when the next release will be... even before I've finished looked at old code or their database layout.

If you're making a piece of crap thing like, a mouse, an SD card reader, or something (and this was before Windows and USB had generic versions of 99% of common hardware), that crap was just a checkmark. It just had to be done. It didn't matter if it was seamless, or fast. It just had to be done to get it out the door.

Even day, you see the exact same thing happening with Internet of Things. Except here, "security" isn't even a checkbox! Default admin/password credentials! Open ports! Telnet server running! All that matters is the thing gets shipped. All that matters is "sales today".

And it'll keep being that way until Congress of USA, EU, Canada, etc, all start making real financial penalties for data breaches. The reason ANYONE takes health information seriously is solely because of the financial penalties that show up as "risk" to the bottom line. Nobody cares about your data until the dollar signs show up.

The same thing applies to buggy software, and security exploits in general.

The only people who can actually afford to care are people like Microsoft because they're not building a single product, but a platform, so it's important for people to never want to switch platforms away. And, AFAIK, everything Microsoft has done API after API, is trust 3rd parties less.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User-Mode_Driver_Framework

Vista onward (and backported to XP), drivers can (and should) use a userland driver which can't destroy the kernel.

Quote:

Standard device drivers can be difficult to write because they must handle a very wide range of system and device states, particularly in a multithreaded software environment. Badly written device drivers can cause severe damage to a system (e.g., BSoD and data corruption) since all standard drivers have high privileges when accessing the kernel directly. The User-Mode Driver Framework insulates the kernel from the problems of direct driver access, instead providing a new class of driver with a dedicated application programming interface at the user level of interrupts and memory management. If an error occurs, the new framework allows for an immediate driver restart without impacting the system. This is particularly useful for devices that are intermittently connected to the system or support hot swapping via a bus technology such as USB or Firewire.

Erin Maus

My advisor from my college forwarded me an internship opportunity from Epic Games, so I applied...

I hope having a good GPA and my current job (software developer @ a local software dev shop) helps out. This would be awesome--it's a full-time, paid internship.

bamccaig

Chris, I generally agree with you that it's how it is, but it's only like that because of a lack of competition and awareness. Obviously, if one mouse ships that doesn't work well because of bad drivers, and another mouse ships that works seemlessly, the seemless mouse will sell better if only people are made aware of it. Which admittedly back in the 90s and early 00s drivers were a mystical concept that few people understand, and yet it will still often a sort of manual process to get them installed. They didn't magically get installed by the OS or by plug-and-play. And people were even more illiterate than they are today. So yeah, the environment was there for vendors to not care. But certainly the Internet helps to spread the quality issues: if something doesn't just work and a competing product does then sales will definitely suffer in the last 10-15 years. That still didn't help Vista or 8 much. :P

Aaron, congrats and good luck! That sounds like a really awesome opportunity.

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

if only people are made aware of it.

That's what I mean. The free market doesn't exist. It only exists when buyers and sellers have an equal access to information.

Most people will buy a mouse whether the drivers suck or not as long as they don't suck horribly. And many won't even realize the mouse is blue-screening windows.

It's not even on the list of things to check off. So it doesn't get done.

Neil Roy

A new GoFundMe has started to get the American people to fund the wall if congress won't. In the first day it went up to over 1/4 million dollars. It is currently at over $7million in just 3 days. :o

https://www.gofundme.com/TheTrumpWall

Chris Katko

I would imagine many of those are fake donations. ...

Also, little shy of 5 billion...

Also Fun fact: Many legal Spanish-Americans actually support stronger immigration controls. "We got in legally, why shouldn't they have to?"

raynebc

It'd be interesting to see if it's ruled that the government will be allowed to accept private donations for defense/immigration spending. The Republicans seem to be too politically cowardly to make this wall a hard line issue, even after promising billions to other countries for THEIR border security.

Edgar Reynaldo

Jesus, do you guys want to live behind another Iron Curtain?

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video

Quote :
Freedom and security go together.

bamccaig

Americans don't actually think the wall is a good thing, do they? ??? It's going to be very amusing when America turns to shit and there's a big expensive strong wall keeping them in! :D :D :D :D

Except they'll probably only build one on the Mexican border so that would make them our problem. :( :(

Fuck it, you guys need 2 walls! We let Mexicans in freely so if you want to truly keep them out you need a wall here too! ;D ;D ;D

I consider these kinds of ideas trolling. Trump is a master troll. Alas, there's nobody to call mainstream media a noob and tell them not to feed the trolls so the trolls just keep getting stronger...

Neil Roy

It's up to $10M now and how is it not a good thing to keep illegal criminals out? Legals are all welcome. The wall around Israel really helped. In some places they have an illegal immigration problem to the tune of 50000 getting in (for a nation that size that is huge). People complained about it when they first built it. Now that illegal immigration is down to zero, nobody is complaining. It works.

Just ask all the democrats that have walls around their homes.

Bad example Edgar, the wall around Germany was built to keep Germans IN, not to keep people from entering.

bamccaig

These are man's laws, not "God's" laws (not as though I respect either, but you probably do). They are not divine. They are not perfect. And it's not even like the US has public health care or public funding for most things. Their taxes are dirt cheap and most states don't provide much assistance (and illegals wouldn't qualify anyway!). :P

In general, I don't think that things are "critical" where a wall is actually necessary. People fleeing from Mexico into the USA have basically no options. It can be argued that they take jobs from Americans, and that's probably something worth fighting. But it's really the employers in those circumstances that are cheating, not the Mexicans who are just trying to find a better life. Shouldn't the government target the employers instead of the desperate people?

Building a wall is only going to limit desperate people to abuses and violence (which I'm sure the US government has done its share to spark). And desperate people with nothing to live for are a lot more dangerous than hopeful people with a gamble of a chance. I don't think the wall is going to solve any problems. I think it's going to exacerbate things. And for a short time it might well cut down on illegal immigration, but it might also lead to much worse things down the line.

It's a stupid solution to a big problem. The real problem is that we draw lines in the map and refuse to work together. The world is changing. We're more connected than ever. We need these corrupt rich people structures to go fuck themselves and for all of us to work together to take care of us. A neighbour is a neighbour whether they're next to your house or next to your country. And if a neighbour needs help then you should help them. You never know when it'll be you, your children, or your grandchildren that need their neighbour's help instead.

Neil Roy

And yet, Obama, Hillary, Bill... were ALL in favour of tougher border security and a wall of some sort. Yet people didn't hate it until TRUMP became president. The news footage of all these people supporting tougher border security is on record. It works. NOBODY IS AGAINST LEGAL IMMIGRANTS. If they TRULY need help. Heck, Mexico already offered to help them but they refused it! Which tells you something.

As for the Bible... well, when New Jerusalem comes down out of heaven and Jesus rules out of it (here on Earth), it will have walls all around it. They are described in detail. Israel right now has walls and it has helped them tremendously.

If your neighbour needs help and asks you, absolutely you should help if you can. But what if your neighbour breaks into your home without your permission and steals what they want? That's the problem here!!! NOBODY is against helping their neighbour, we're against THIEVES breaking in and stealing what they want!

Chris Katko

Jesus, do you guys want to live behind another Iron Curtain?

Careful. If you're responding to me, you're actually reacting to your emotions and not my actual content.

Also, you're misgendering the issue. ;) A wall along a country's border is NOT THE SAME as cutting a country of the SAME PEOPLE in half and subjecting half of them to communist torture. They had land mines along the Berlin Wall.

So to imply that a country merely wanting to regulate illegal immigration, to the Berlin Wall, might as well be the communist version of Godwin's Law.

Only in 2018, would people be so insane as to think a country doesn't have a right to regulate immigration. And I'd dare you to try sneaking into another country and seeing how well they treat you.

https://www.axios.com/canada-warns-illegal-immigrants-from-us-you-will-be-apprehended-ae00fed7-d78b-41aa-aad7-41bc27945983.html

"OMG, NAZI CANADA!"

p.s. Note I never actually said I support a wall.

Matthew Leverton

Uh, shouldn't that be on http://gofundme.mx? What are all these Americans doing paying for the wall? Doesn't anybody remember what the Orange Prophet said? And now he's prepared to shut down the government and take all credit for it! Except for none of the credit ... "The Democrats now own the shutdown!"

The Berlin wall was effective because it was tiny and manned 24/7 by snipers. The Trump wall is the stupidest, most racist, fear-mongering waste of money the government has talked about spending in a long time.

Now if a bunch of rednecks want to, on their own accord, take their health insurance and grocery money and send it to Trump's cronies to have them line their pockets building a pointless wall that is bested by a shovel or ladder, then by all means please do. A fool and his money are soon parted.

Neil Roy

Matthew... protecting your nation from illegal immigrants is racist... how? LEGAL immigrants are welcome. You're a fucking idiot!

raynebc

Don't you know? Any majority white country that wants to curtail illegal immigration and limit unskilled economic migrants is racist. Simple-minded people accept that sentiment wholeheartedly. After all, "orange man bad."

Erin Maus
Edgar Reynaldo

Careful. If you're responding to me, you're actually reacting to your emotions and not my actual content.

Also, you're misgendering the issue. ;) A wall along a country's border is NOT THE SAME as cutting a country of the SAME PEOPLE in half and subjecting half of them to communist torture. They had land mines along the Berlin Wall.

...

"OMG, NAZI CANADA!"

p.s. Note I never actually said I support a wall.

I was responding to NiteHacker, as he's the one that brought it up.

Whether a wall is made to keep people certain people in, or certain people out is irrelevant. A wall separates people, that is its only purpose, whether it is for defense or whether it is because of xenophobia and ethnocentrism. (Yes, big words, chew thoroughly.)

I agree with everything bamccaig said in his post here.

NiteHackr said:

Bad example Edgar, the wall around Germany was built to keep Germans IN, not to keep people from entering.

And this wall is to keep Mexicans IN Mexico... what's the difference?

The Trump wall is the stupidest, most racist, fear-mongering waste of money the government has talked about spending in a long time.

QFT.

NiteHackr said:

Matthew... protecting your nation from illegal immigrants is racist... how? LEGAL immigrants are welcome. You're an idiot!

Watch your mouth.

The wall is not about border security. It's about keeping Mexicans out of the US. If LEGAL immigrants were welcome, then applying for work visas wouldn't be a problem. Asylum seekers wouldn't be turned away. People wouldn't have to sneak across the border unless they were doing something illegal and they didn't want to get caught.

Now if a bunch of rednecks want to, on their own accord, take their health insurance and grocery money and send it to Trump's cronies to have them line their pockets building a pointless wall that is bested by a shovel or ladder, then by all means please do. A fool and his money are soon parted.

Well said. Always nice to hear from you Fearless Leader.

Building a wall along the entire length of the US - Mexico border is a ridiculous idea. It would cost an idiotic amount of money. That money could be better spent on humanitarian aid in the form of infrastructure for a modern migrant workforce. Expand work and student visas. Give asylum seekers the chance they need to get away from violence. Fund low income housing.

It's just another distraction in Trump's game of sleight of hand. Keep people focused on a pointless wall that will never get funded to fuel their xenophobia.

As if all that wasn't enough, if we truly wanted border security, we would spend more money on monitoring the border electronically. Motion sensors, infrared cameras, satellites, etc... then they could be intercepted before they even got into the country.

Matthew Leverton

Once Trump starts whining about building a wall on the northern border, then I might change my opinion that he is racist to simply a nationalistic hypocrite who imports his own wives and workers illegally but doesn't want anybody else to be able to afford to do so.

Similar to what Edgar is saying ... they are only illegal because we say they are. They are only unskilled because we do not train them. The problem is not the lack of a wall; the problem is a lack of planning for a compassionate, humane way to handle an influx of people who are fleeing bad situations.

Edgar Reynaldo

Matthew, the peasants are revolting!

EDIT SRSLY, we could use a 2 week time out on thread locks.

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In other news :

jmasterx said:

We have a thread that just opened recently regarding this very issue. It should be resolved shortly.
Check https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/615770 for updates

jmasterx is trying to kill me with laughter. >:( I pulled a muscle in my side today and every time I laugh or cough it hurts like hell. His response to the peasant revolt made me 101. ;D Ouch.

RIP :
dead_thread_list.push_back(Problems with Code::Blocks);
dead_thread_list.push_back(Ball Simulation);
dead_thread_list.push_back(Woe is me);
dead_thread_list.push_back(Cloning XP);

Erin Maus

My depot thread will soon become one with the locked threads. :(

Anyways here's Wonderwall.

video

jmasterx

Your SVG projects are so cool :)

Edgar Reynaldo

The SVG artwork is awesome, of course, but I'm more curious how you managed to animate them so well, like the squid ;)

Erin Maus

I make the models/animations in Blender.

The models are just planes usually:

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Then I just animate it:

{"name":"yeHs7Tl.png","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/f\/6\/f61cba64dbcd1bf6b0550b05e36ac2bd.png","w":1906,"h":1033,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/f\/6\/f61cba64dbcd1bf6b0550b05e36ac2bd"}yeHs7Tl.png

The squid's tentacles are subdivided to allow for bending.

Here's an animation for the zweihander in Blender:

OG5kRkZ.gif

Direct link in-case GIF is broken.

Eric Johnson

I really like your art style, Aaron. I think I've mentioned it before, but it reminds me of the original Paper Mario games.

Edgar Reynaldo

That's A A Ron to you. ;)

video

Eric Johnson
Quote:

That's A A Ron to you. ;)

Implying I didn't pronounce it like that to begin with. ::)

Edgar Reynaldo

Insubordination! >:(

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Bruce Perry

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Eric Johnson

So, anyone got big plans for the final day of the year?

Johan Halmén

I have 2 minutes left.

Chris Katko

My for 2019 is to actually follow through with my 2018 goals!

Erin Maus

I started my game March 23, and 283 days later, I have 500 commits in my Git. A little under 2x a day.

Not bad for working two jobs and going to school.

Neil Roy

;D
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Edgar Reynaldo

This Thread is over 3 years old and we are a third of the way to 10,000 post holy shit

Happy New Years everyone!

bamccaig

Happy New Year! I accidentally got too drunk on the eve and felt like shit today. :P I'm really good at drinking these days, but only if I stick to what I know and don't accept drinks at social gatherings. I was hammered.

Edgar Reynaldo

bambams, only you could make drinking into a skill. ;)

Up to you whether you take that as a compliment or not. :/

bamccaig

I'm pretty sure humans have been ranking alcohol consumption skill for thousands of years... ::) It is a skill. Anybody can drink, or get drunk, but getting drunk and not getting too drunk requires experience and discipline.

Arthur Kalliokoski

This Thread is over 3 years old and we are a third of the way to 10,000 post holy shit

It took over 20 seconds to load this thread as one page. It's like dialup all over again.

GullRaDriel

It's working fine here. He must be using an access list of his own ;-p

Eric Johnson

The site was a little slow the other day, but seems fine now. The bottom of the page reads, "Page generated in 0.028285 seconds."

Edgar Reynaldo

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's wild side ;)

video

Hahaha I love that this went viral only to make her even more lovable. Ha.

But I must say, there's an awful lot of suggestive twirling in that video. :O

Chris Katko

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::)

OMG. SHE'S JUST LIKE US. Someone give her the power to legislate! Who cares what her political stances are!

https://www.isidewith.com/en-gb/candidates/alexandria-ocasio-cortez/stances

Quote:

Do you support the Patriot Act?
Yes

War hawk!

Quote:

Should the U.S. government grant immunity to Edward Snowden?
- No, he should be returned to the U.S. to stand trial and face the consequences of his actions

HAHAHAHHA I guess when you make the DNC and Obama look bad, he must be an evil man, and not a whistle blower.

Quote:

Do you support the use of hydraulic fracking to extract oil and natural gas resources?
- Yes

WTF?!?!?!?!??!?! Why not just piss on the Earth's face while you're at it?

Erin Maus

Yeah man I didn't agree 100% with Bernie but I would've still voted for him (and did, in the primaries).

It's like all-or-nothing...

She's a bog-standard neoliberal Democrat, but that's still better than a Republican (who flagrantly have considered themselves above the law for the last two years, k).

Edgar Reynaldo

The validity of your source remains questionable. Not much better, but wikipedia disagrees with you :

Wikipedia said:

Ocasio-Cortez is a self-described hardliner on environmental issues, calling climate change the "single biggest national security threat" facing the United States. She advocates for the United States to transition by 2035 to an electrical grid running on 100% renewable-energy production and end the use of fossil fuels.
...
In February 2018, Ocasio-Cortez stated that she supports defunding the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), calling it "a product of the Bush-era Patriot Act suite of legislation" and "an enforcement agency that takes on more of a paramilitary tone every single day"

I wouldn't support her for president, but congress needs more people like her to balance out all the congressman who've been bought off.

Neil Roy

Released the source code to my Deluxe Pacman 2 game... :-/

video

https://nitehackr.github.io/games_index.html

Chris Katko

Dude, I literally googled "political positions Cortez"

But I would absolutely welcome her being opposed to fracking. I would sooner support sucking blood out of children for red paint than fracking.

Edgar Reynaldo

Dude, I literally googled "political positions Cortez"

Well, there's your problem. google returns the most popular results, not the best ones, or even the most accurate ones. Try DuckDuckGo.

This was the third result :
https://www.businessinsider.com/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-platform-on-the-issues-2018-6

I wonder where isidewith.blah got its information from...

bamccaig
NiteHackr said:

Released the source code to my Deluxe Pacman 2 game... :-/

Thank you! That's very generous and noble.

Neil Roy
bamccaig said:

Thank you! That's very generous and noble.

I keep getting requests for it in other areas and I am not working on it so I figured why not. Deluxe Pacman 2 is a little nicer than 1 where the code is concerned. My style still may bother some, but I tried to keep it clean, commented and minimize the globals.

I am actually the most proud of how my level editor works to be honest.

Maybe someone can learn how to use certain aspects of Allegro 5 from it as well.

Erin Maus

The FBI opened an inquiry into Trump possibly colluding with Russia after Comey's firing. Said inquiry was taken up by Meuller following his appointment.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/us/politics/fbi-trump-russia-inquiry.html

But I get called a conspiracy nut and crazy for making a joke about it.

Yeaaaaaaaaaah, fair and balanced(tm).

Edgar Reynaldo

Yeah, some people are sensitive. :-X

Really, why bring that up again? We've got better talking points than possible Trumpian-Russian collusion.

raynebc

Maybe several years from now they'll finally scrounge together enough evidence to bring a Russia case against Trump. Dream big, I say.

Edgar Reynaldo

raynebc,

Look up

Roman Abramovich

, a Steel Tycoon with ties to Putin and Trump. The Wall is going to be built from his steel, which only he can provide because of the specifications. It's just another business deal for Trump. He stands to make millions off it. Talk about a conflict of interest. And he's willing to shut down the government so his buddy can get the business deal of a lifetime.

Talk about impeachable offense.

Eric Johnson

At the behest of Edgar, I resolve to post more frequently.

So I thought for certain that they stopped printing $2 bills, but I stumbled upon 4 of them last night, each from 2013! :o I was pleasantly surprised. Do any of you collect $2 bills, or any type of currency in general?

raynebc

Keep grasping at straws, Edgar.

Edgar Reynaldo

::)

JubilantOrneryAlbino-max-1mb.gif

EDIT
@Eric Jones
I love $2 dollar bills. Buy them from you for a $1 a piece. ;) Nobody uses $2 dollar bills any more. ;D

Eric Johnson

I love $2 dollar bills. Buy them from you for a $1 a piece. ;)

;D I checked eBay for $2 bills out of curiosity, and apparently there's an up-charged market for them. Maybe I could sell mine. :P

In other news, my car kept burning through tires like there's no tomorrow, so I replaced the tie rods, then paid a business to replace the control arms and do an alignment, and thus far (fingers crossed for the future) I haven't had any tire issues. ;D I could instantly feel the difference after driving off from the alignment shop... it finally drove straight for the first time in years. I didn't realize just how bad it had become, as it happened gradually.

Oh and then today my ancient radiator sprung a leak, so I bought a new one. Installing it tomorrow.

Neil Roy

Eric;

Canada stopped using $1 and $2 bills a lonnnng time ago, we now have coins. A $1 coin referred to up here as a "Looney" (has a Loon on it), and a $2 coin called a "Tooney".

BUT, I used to collect money, usually coins until they all got stolen on me. I still have a Canadian $1 bill from 1967, Canada's centenary, and a $2 bill from 1954. I have pics of them I took a lonnng time ago. Got them in a photo album. These are what I grew up using...

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I used to collect pennies. Mostly Canadian, had some rare ones stolen. But I also managed to get my mitts on two very special coins to me.

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The coin on the left is called the Widows Mite, it would have been the same type of coin the widow put into the collection that Jesus talked about who gave everything she had. The one on the right is from around 307, the era of Constantine. That would have been around the time of the council of Nicea (sp?) when the decided which books went into the Bible and when the Catholic church would have been really formed. So a lot of history that interests me tied up with these. I never took them out of their package so you can still see the price I paid. Got them probably two decades ago or more.

Got some other coins hanging around here still, one is a Canadian penny from 1899 which was huge in comparison to what we have now. The size was determined by the value of copper, which is why pennies suddenly decreased to what they are now in 1920 (up here anyhow). Pennies from the mid-1930s are the most valuable, at least in Canada. Canada no longer uses pennies anymore as a of a few years ago.

raynebc

Collecting coins and currency notes used to be a major hobby of mine. There have been all sorts of strange denominations (half cents, two cent pieces, three cent pieces), twenty dollar coins and other historical oddities like steel pennies that were used to conserve copper during WW2, silver certificates, etc.

Edgar Reynaldo

I used to collect old stamps, and I have some coins hidden away somewhere. Have a baseball card collection too. Haven't collected anything except debt for the last 20 years though. :P

Eric Johnson

@Neil: Wow, those old coins are really impressive! :o

@Edgar: Maybe you could sell your baseball collection and undo some of that debt. :P It's surprising how valuable some cards are these days. Heck, even some old Yu-Gi-Oh! cards hold some significant value nowadays.

Derezo

I have several Canadian $2 bills. I think the oldest is in the 1920's, but I'm not at home to take a picture or check as I'm in a coworking space in Medellin, Colombia ;D They're all in good condition in a laminate case though. I bought 4 of them on eBay many years ago for $12

I don't really collect anything though.

Anybody here living the digital nomad life? I have an office back home in Ontario, but I'm able to work remotely so this year when I took my 2 weeks vacation I decided to book my return ticket over a month away and bring my laptop. I've been working for the past 3 weeks in Colombia and really enjoy it. There are a lot of people here who just travel all over the world full time.

If I didn't have my stupid car, and my apartment, and my two cats, I'd have no problem affording it or being able to do it. Several people have recommended traveling to Thailand as a "digital nomad's paradise".

Eric Johnson

Being a digital nomad sounds appealing, but it also sounds like it would be costly.

Neil Roy

Some more coins I found stashed away.

These are Canadian coins, from left to right, 1857 Half Penny from the Bank of Upper Canada, 1899 Canadian Penny (large!) and just for comparison, on the far right is a Canadian penny from 1963 (actually still shines much like a new one, much to my surprise).

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That 1899 large penny was the size up until 1920. I was surprised there was a half penny, but it makes sense as copper was REALLY not worth much at that time and one penny could buy you a lot more.

Chris Katko

More proven #fakenews:

"MAGA kids scream at Native American"? Not quite...

https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/21/us/maga-hat-teens-native-american-second-video/index.html

For the THIRD TIME, we found the smoking gun that will put Trump away! Just kidding... for the third time.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/426143-buzzfeed-story-has-more-to-say-about-media-than-the-president

And I'm not even saying "trump supporters" or "trump" is a good guy. The real story here, is the complete and collective failure of journalism.

Like the nationwide story about a college rape that didn't happen:

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/A_Rape_on_Campus

Or the Wall Street Executives that ruined the entire world's economy... can you name a SINGLE name of someone thanks to journalism? Do you know if any of them went to jail? (Fun fact. One. A patsy. For causing the entire world's recession.)

Or you know THE !$@!@$ DAMN IRAQ WAR. Where are the WMD's?! All we did based on that info is spend trillions, kill millions, and create ISIS. So that worked out in the end.

And what about (liberal!) journalists outing a gay executive. That was super classy and #progressive.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/gawker-conde-nast-david-geithner_us_55a90c56e4b0c5f0322d0b2c

https://www.advocate.com/media/2015/07/16/gawker-blasted-posting-lurid-story-outs-executive

The list goes on... and on... and on... and I'm still only talking about the last ten years (minus Iraq). It's ridiculous.

Another one that should be known is the Duke Lacrosse case:

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Duke_lacrosse_case

raynebc

As long as the MSM allows a preferred narrative to drive their coverage and they only vet information on a selective basis, this will be a problem.

Neil Roy

About Iraq, they did have WMDs, chemical weapons which Saddam used prior to the initial attack in '91. I was alive back then and I remember the news reports about how Saddam used his chemical weapons against his own people, the Kurdish people..

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...these are images that is stuck in my mind from back then. And there's many more. There were reports back then that Saddam had stockpiled some of these weapons to use against USA when they invaded but his forward commanders refused to use them at the time. When some of his stockpiles were hit, there was clear evidence that chemical weapons were among them.

Where did most of them go? Where do you think Syria got all of theirs from?

Saddam also started working on nukes, thanks to France for a donation of a nuclear power plant at the time, but he was never able to get that program off the ground because Israel wisely destroyed his plant in an air strike.

Iraq disobeyed UN sanctions against him many times back then and the UN responded with more sanctions! It's like saying "Stop! Or I'll say stop again!", it was ridiculous. I followed those stories back then and many books have been written about it including first hand accounts of the chemical and biological weapons Saddam had. Does anyone remember all the sudden illnesses in vets that came home from that war which nobody could explain?

It was quite real, but the left, as usual, tries to spin it differently and the younger you are, the more likely you are to believe their lies as you weren't around back then when it happened. Well, I was.

Edgar Reynaldo

Wow. Thanks for the graphic images. :P

Those attacks most certainly did occur, but when the US invaded Iraq, nothing was found. That's the way all the reports I've ever heard have reported it.

Chris Katko

WMD's is NUKES. They did not have NUKES.

We went to Iraq because we thought they were going to NUKE US.

Peter Hull

Double post 8-)

Peter Hull
Chris said:

WMD's is NUKES.

False (https://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/Doctrine/pubs/dictionary.pdf)

Chris said:

They did not have NUKES.

True

Chris said:

We went to Iraq because we thought they were going to NUKE US.

False.

bamccaig

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a response to the September 11th attacks, but it has been criticized because Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with September 11th. It was pretty much taking advantage of the ignorance of Americans to go to war, and the Bush Administration was apparently planning an invasion of Iraq as soon as Bush got into office. September 11th was just the excuse they needed to get away with it at the time.

I'm sure no images exist of dead Iraqi and Afghani civilians, women and children, laying dead all over the place at the hands of American forces. ::) HAHAHAHA. >:( Give me a break. It was not a good deed being done. It was politics. It was evil. And it was wrong.

Chris Katko

.

Chris Katko

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries

Quote:

The Niger uranium forgeries were forged documents initially released in 2001 by SISMI (Italian military intelligence), which seem to depict an attempt made by Saddam Hussein in Iraq to purchase yellowcake uranium powder from Niger during the Iraq disarmament crisis. On the basis of these documents and other indicators, the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom asserted that Iraq violated United Nations sanctions against Iraq by attempting to procure nuclear material for the purpose of creating weapons of mass destruction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_aluminum_tubes

Quote:

Aluminum tubes purchased by the nation of Iraq were intercepted in Jordan in 2001. In September 2002 they were publicly cited by the White House as evidence that Iraq was actively pursuing an atomic weapon. Prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, many questioned the validity of the claim. After the invasion, the Iraq Survey Group determined that the best explanation for the tubes' use was to produce conventional 81-mm rockets; no evidence was found of a program to design or develop an 81-mm aluminum rotor uranium centrifuge.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction

video

Fun side fact: Did you know the Obama Iran treaty (that Trump "broke") where he gave them two billion USD? Turns out it was a complete farce of a treaty because it intentionally had no requirement for UN inspectors to inspect military facilities and in the words of ex-CIA veteran Mike Baker "dis-armerment treaties are predicated on verification, and without that, they're meaningless."

video

and that's verified by (total #fakenews alt-right Russian shill) ... Harvard:

https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/are-iranian-military-bases-limits-inspection

Quote:

Before the deal, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei insisted that “inspection of our military sites is out of the question and is one of our red lines.” Foreigners, he elaborated, “shouldn’t be allowed at all to penetrate into the country's security and defensive boundaries under the pretext of supervision, and the country's military officials are not permitted at all to allow the foreigners to cross these boundaries or stop the country's defensive development under the pretext of supervision and inspection.”

Derezo

Being a digital nomad sounds appealing, but it also sounds like it would be costly.

Part of the idea is that you can go to places in the world where the cost of living is lower.

Here in Canada the cost of living is relatively high. The cost of living while I was in Colombia seemed to be about 40-50% lower. Decent apartments started at around 700,000 COP, or about $300 CAD, whereas an equivalent apartment would be about $700 here in my city. A lot of prices had that type of analog, where the cost difference was 1/2 the exchange rate.

While I was in Medellin I was using a coworking space which was 30,000 COP per day and it was a really nice place to work. Another guy there, whom like others there was a self proclaimed digital nomad, mentioned he had been working in Thailand and said the cost of living was even lower.

If I wasn't so attached here with my relationship, car, cats, and all the crap in my apartment, etc... I would probably have spent even more time abroad.

Neil Roy
bamccaig said:

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a response to the September 11th attacks

I have heard this for many years now, and it was a lie back then, and it is a lie now. The invasion at the time was due to Saddam violating restrictions put on him after the initial war which were intended to keep him away from Kuwait. He continuously violated the UN imposed sanctions and restrictions. THAT is why he was attacked. No other reason. It had absolutely nothing what so ever to do with Sept 11th.

bamccaig

Lovely weather today. >:( -30 Celsius. -40 Celsius with the windchill. Neither of my cars would start, and we drove both yesterday to ensure the batteries were charged up. I suspect the oil is just so stiff that the batteries can't do it.. I'm probably overdue on my oil changes unfortunately. Alas, my wife had to get a ride to work. My battery booster was dead too. I left it out in the cold. It's charged up now so later I'll be trying to get my cars running (I don't expect trouble as it's going to warm up to -23 Celsius by noon). I have to pick my wife up after work. Fortunately, I get to work from the comfort of home today.

Chris Katko

BuMP

Erin Maus

So I'm going to add telemetry data to my game.

Since it's had over 200 downloads but only a few people have commented on it. I need feedback of some kind. Especially when I approach publishers...

I already built the endpoint (it's a RESTful Flask app), working on the C++/Lua analytic request API.

My TODO list for the next couple weeks has no content in it. :(

bamccaig

Yesterday I brought a can of beer to work to put in my mini-fridge on my desk. I figured it would be a nice treat to have during lunch one of these days. I mentioned it to my wife today and she blew a gasket. It's so foreign to her. She figured I did it because I'm an alcoholic. :P But ever since I started vaping marijuana I drink less. I'm usually in bed by 10 PM because Indica puts you to sleep, and I intentionally use it to put me in the mood to sleep. In any case, of course in her field drinking a beer during lunch would be unheard of. But in software development it seems pretty common. Thoughts?

MiquelFire

I can't even stand the smell of alcohol, so I don't even drink beer.

Eric Johnson

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Chris Katko

LMFAO. You see, this is what I don't get about people these days.

You can joke about political things without ARGUING POLITICS and escalating everything into "literally resisting hitler." Just like how you can JOKE about the differences between our races (Omg, spanish and indian people like spicy food? WHAT? NO!) without being RACIST. There's a difference between racial and racist and our adult-children who own the social landscape these days are too simple-minded to process it.

That is some prime juicy comedy.

Edgar Reynaldo

Keep your dang polar vortexes on the other side of the border please and no thank you very much -15F this morning...

EDIT
Last time I heard about a polar vortex was in the movie The Day After Tomorrow, where the next ice age swooped in over the period of a few days.

Eric Johnson

What do you guys think about unconventional housing? I've been thinking about buying some land and living in a fifth-wheel trailer to seriously cut down on housing expenses. It sounds silly, but hear me out... The cheapest one-room apartment in my area costs $700 per month. That's $8,400 per year. Not bad, but I dislike the idea of spending that much on a space whose primary purpose is storage and sleep. I spend the overwhelming majority of my time away from home, so aside from my off days, home is really only used for sleeping. I could just as easily sleep in my car for free (sans furniture, all of my possessions could just about fit). So while it would be more costly in the short-term, I figure buying a small lot and getting a fifth-wheel would be cheaper in the long-run compared to renting a cheap apartment. What do you guys think?

Chris Katko

Rent is for keeping poor people poor. (And I still rent currently.)

If you know you're living in an area for a long time, buy a plot of land, buy a house, buy anything. Money you put it stays in. As opposed to renting which just magically disappears every month.

Neil Roy

What do you guys think about unconventional housing?

I'm happy with renting. I only pay just over $681/month, mainly because I've been in the same apartment for 27 years now! There are other expenses to consider, like taxes. I don't understand what you plan to live in, but I hope you don't live in an area that gets cold in the winter.

If you buy a home, there's fuel and electricity costs as well as maintenance costs. I'm not so certain it is all that cheaper, but if you own a home, you can do what you like with it which would be nice I suppose, but again, that would be more expense. Then there's the matter of what if you want to move, than you have to sell etc... I don't know. I am in the same apartment, but the location is excellent where I am, someone else fixes everything that breaks, my heat is included and my electricity is dirt cheap. I told my wife that I am dying in this apartment. Can't afford to move anyhow as the cheapest apartments in this city are over $800, close to $1000 or more now, it's insanity. And if we get more liberal governments, expect taxes to rise up quite a bit as home owners pay for everything.

8-)
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Edgar Reynaldo

Since most immigrants come by air, what we really need is a ceiling. ;)

Heard that one on FB.

raynebc

The Democrats' implication that a wall wouldn't stop 100% of illegal immigration so it shouldn't be pursued is plain dumb. Enforcing visa expirations is much harder (and likely more expensive) to accomplish, so why not start with the low hanging fruit of the overall problem like building a barrier? Finding, catching and deporting somebody after they're already in the country is harder than stopping them before they enter.

Chris Katko

I'll take my side with Democrats. :P

video

Quote:

Mr. Obama in 2005 saying, “We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked.”

Mrs. Clinton in 2015 saying, “I voted, when I was a Senator, to build a barrier to try to prevent illegal immigrants from coming in.”

;D;D;D;D;D;D

I don't even know if a wall matters. It's such a B.S. argument with emotions and the focus of tribalism. Would it actually help anything? Objectively? I don't know. Because we've had a pretty clear lack of actual experts weighing in. All that matters is each party's tribe getting a "moral victory." Democrats "Defeat the wall and ride it all the way to the 2020 election" (their actual political strategy--it has nothing to do with kids or immigrants.) Or Republicans get the wall and do the equivalent. It's the exact same thing with gun control. No one cares about actual lives being saved and will omit any objective facts that prevent them from getting a "moral" (political) victory that basically accomplishes nothing either way except strengthen that party's political power. Again, nothing to do with helping people. "Ban assault weapons" (*) while 99% of gun crime is with pistols, lulullulul.

(*) a made up term for guns with magical death features like... a barrel shroud... which is simply a cover around the barrel so you don't burn your hand. lulululullulullu

video

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Think about the insanity of putting ACTUAL FEDERAL LEGISLATION with a group of legal aids and political minds, and passing it through the government, representing millions of dollars of salaries yielding a piece of paper that will be enforced by tens-of-thousands of officers... that accomplishes the following: "No piece of metal over a barrel so you can burn your hands." Does anyone in the entire chain of authority have a brain?

And I'm not saying Democrats are only the ones doing this but HOLY GOD IN HEAVEN do you need any more datapoints to realize politicians represent average Americans in that they're borderline retarded? These are the people that choose how we're supposed to live. People who don't even know what's in their legislation, or if they do, have no logical basis for it. I'm honestly having trouble coming up for an example in the way of "this would be like if they banned X for Y" because the original, actual effect, is so batsh-t absurd I cannot even make a more impactful hypothetical analogy.

Edgar Reynaldo

I vote we build a wall around the White House. :P

Ronald Reagan puts Donald Trump to shame.
Ronald Reagan's final speech as President.

Matthew Leverton

I've been thinking about buying some land and living in a fifth-wheel trailer

That's often against local code, as it tends to be an eyesore. There are simpler ways to save money on rent. (e.g., Rent out somebody's spare room.)

raynebc said:

The Democrats' implication that a wall wouldn't stop 100% of illegal immigration so it shouldn't be pursued is plain dumb.

It's called a cost benefit analysis. How much will it prevent vs how much will it cost. As an extreme example, saving 1 human life by spending 10 trillion on a wall is unfortunately not worth it. How inhumane! But really, it comes down to spending 10 trillion on other things would save more lives.

Of course Republicans (mostly Trump) and almost all Democrats have made a wall a symbolic issue that they are dug into. There probably are sections that could use additional walls (barriers, fencing, these are all the same things...). The issue is that Trump has made such ridiculous claims from early on, including quite plainly stating that Mexico would make a "one time payment" to directly pay for the wall that would literally span from coast to coast, and often insinuated without any proof that there is a disproportionate amount of evil people flooding into our borders. Now if a politician supports any construction of new walls, it has become a symbol of supporting all of that nonsense.

I read a little news article the other day about a young child falling from the (already existing) wall when illegally entering the US with her family. What great tools did the smugglers use when assisting the family? A ladder.

The goal of a wall should be to prevent easy mass transit of drugs and or people across the border. It is not to prevent single individuals from crossing over. Instead, we should encourage them to cross at legal ports. Treat people who are seeking asylum with respect. Give people who are looking for seasonal work a simple way to go back and forth and pay their taxes, etc.

The reality is that the existing wall is already extremely effective. Most ground trafficking comes over the road in legal ports by drug mules, etc. But are there areas that could use additional fencing? Probably. But the ideas that a) there is a huge "crisis" and b) a great wall from sea to shining sea would significantly improve our security is ludicrous.

Eric Johnson

That's often against local code, as it tends to be an eyesore. There are simpler ways to save money on rent. (e.g., Rent out somebody's spare room.)

It's perfectly legal and not uncommon where I live in Louisiana. But maybe just getting a roommate would be more convenient for now.

raynebc

It's called a cost benefit analysis.

Your analysis isn't particularly accurate. The wall is expected to be in the ballpark of $25 billion. Democrats muse about pushing big spending plans that actually are measured in tens of billions of dollars (Medicare for all, "green new deal", etc). Border patrol agents, the people who actually do have to prevent illegal immigration, don't believe the wall to be worthless. Many Democrats don't actually believe it's worthless either, they are just being partisan. And since it seems you aren't fully aware about what has actually been proposed, the wall is meant to be used in combination with people and tech. The tech improves detection, the barrier slows entry and the people apprehend illegal border crossers. Missing or lacking in any of those elements severely limits the ability to secure the border.

When caravans of hundreds/thousands of people are advancing towards the border, it's disingenuous to say the wall is only meant to stop one person at a time. The wall would effectively funnel people towards the parts of the border that didn't have a barrier, where other means can be used to provide security.

Economic migrants are not actually asylum seekers, nor are most of requests for asylum valid (according to DoJ). You admit that the existing portion of wall is effective, but seem to claim more wall would not add increased effectiveness. That doesn't follow.

As has been my long time stance, green cards and visas should be dispensed generously, to people who are able to support themselves and not become a public burden. And when the temporary status is ended, they should return to their home countries.

Matthew Leverton

A $25 government-billion is a minimum of $100 actual-billion. And it's not a one time fee. Once a section of wall is built, then it must be maintained forever or else it becomes useless.

Once the wall is built coast-to-coast, what's next? Build it higher and deeper? That would be more effective, right? Build a second or third one? When do you stop? Again, it comes back to doing an actual cost benefit analysis, which our President has not sincerely done. He just spouts off numbers about how much "illegal immigration" costs us and pretends that a $25 billion wall eliminates 100% of that.

The President had Republican majorities for the past two years and couldn't get anything done. They lost a lot of seats in the House and barely held on to a very Republican favorable Senate election season. There is seemingly no large desire from the American public to see Trump's plan happen.

My argument is simply that now is not the time to spend money on a physical wall. Trump has ruined any chance to do it in a responsible way with his rhetoric. Spend the money on other types of infrastructure and see where the votes fall in two years.

raynebc

Maintaining something is much cheaper than building from scratch. One wall that is sufficiently guarded will do. There are figures I've seen about illegal immigration that indicate that even a slight decrease in illegal immigration will significantly reduce costs, well enough to pay for and maintain the wall. That leftover money can be spent on immigration judges to process people more quickly instead of the system being permanently overwhelmed.

Edit: Also, I find it amusing that people so often forget that filibusters are a thing and without a filibuster proof majority of Congress, you don't have unimpeded control of passing legislation. The nuclear option that Reid invoked applies to nominations, not all bills. Also, "barely held onto a Republican Senate" is not actually what happened. Republicans gained seats in the Senate.

Edgar Reynaldo
raynebc said:

There are figures I've seen about illegal immigration that indicate that even a slight decrease in illegal immigration will significantly reduce costs, well enough to pay for and maintain the wall.

Wow, make unsubstantiated exaggerated claims much? You're going to cut $5billion in costs? That's the bare minimum of what the wall costs. That's what they're asking for.

Can you honestly not think of anything better to spend $5billion on?

5,000,000,000 / 100,000 = 50,000 new houses for veterans, for example. Plus all the jobs it would create in construction and related areas.

That's just one example.

Let's see, just how much does an average migrant worker in America make? It's probably not well documented, and it's probably not much, but let's see;

DDG search for 'average pay for migrant worker in united states'.

According to

https://careertrend.com/the-yearly-salary-of-a-migrant-worker-13655207.html

It's $7,500 dollars. Let's do some simple math. What's 5 billion divided by 7 thousand 5 hundred? It's 666,666. That means you could pay the wages for 65,000 workers for the next 10 years.

Now, how many immigrants come to the US each year? Let's see;

For 2015, the majority of immigrants came from India and China and Mexico :

Composition of the Immigration Population

In addition to fluctuating by number, the immigration population in the United States changes over time by composition. In 2015, most people who came to the United States were from India. In that year, the Indian immigration population reached 179,800. The second most common country for immigration was China. Approximately 143,200 Chinese immigrants arrived in the United States in 2015. That same year, 139,400 immigrants came to the United States (legally) from Mexico. Roughly 47,500 immigrants came from the Philippines. Canada represented the fifth most common immigrant group, with 46,800 Canadian citizens arriving in the United States in 2015. Most of the immigrants who arrive in the United States are foreign born, but some are naturalized citizens, permanent residents and other individuals who previously lived in the United States for a long time before leaving and eventually returning.

It's just further proof that Trump is racist. 50,000 Canadians aren't a threat. 140,000 Chinese are okay. 180,000 Indian are okay too. But those damn Mexicans. We need to build a wall. >:( ::)

You didn't even watch that video from Ronald Reagan, did you? Immigrants are what makes America young and alive. It's our fountain of youth. What happened to "give us your hungry, your tired, your poor"? Now it's "go starve and die, people with your skin color aren't welcome here".

Besides raynebc, who else is gonna pick your fruit? You? Ha.

Chris Katko

It's just further proof that Trump is racist. 50,000 Canadians aren't a threat. 140,000 Chinese are okay. 180,000 Indian are okay too. But those damn Mexicans. We need to build a wall. >:( ::)

I agree with you 100%, Obama, Hillary, and Bill Clinton were all racist as hell. ;D

video

"We need physical barriers."

video

raynebc

When I cited Democrats' big spending plans earlier, I made a typo but can't edit the post. The costs of the two spending plans of theirs I cited are measured in tens of trillions of dollars, not billions. Any Democrats that claim $25 billion is a skyrocketing expense while not denouncing the eclipsing costs of those Socialism programs are lying.

Edgar, do you not understand the problem is ILLEGAL immigration and not legal immigration? Don't resort to the "racist!" reflexive response that is overly prevalent among the useful idiots on the political left. If there was the same amount of illegal immigration by land from the northern border, which there isn't, we'd be talking about a barrier there.

There are analyses that conclude illegal immigration is a net drain on the economy. Most articles I'm seeing that rebut Trump's exaggerations about its cost to the taxpayer result in saying that the cost of illegal immigration isn't as high as Trump claimed, but they cowardly avoid giving a realistic number they would have to stand by. They often explain it away as there not being enough data. I'd like for more reliable statistics, but the Democrats generally oppose this kind of data collection, such as asking about citizenship on the Census.

Before additional concessions such as a path to citizenship were to ever be offered to illegal immigrants, we would need to curtail illegal immigration because as incentives increase, illegal immigration will increase. And whilst we argue about the net benefit/cost of illegal immigration, don't overlook the fact that it is still against the laws of our country and it isn't necessary to justify enforcing the law. I have more compassion for the people that follow the rules.

Since you bring it up, I don't eat much fruit and in the foreseeable future, harvesting will possibly be fully automated anyway. I am getting into indoor gardening a little bit though.

Edgar Reynaldo
raynebc said:

When I cited Democrats' big spending plans earlier, I made a typo but can't edit the post. The costs of the two spending plans of theirs I cited are measured in tens of trillions of dollars, not billions. Any Democrats that claim $25 billion is a skyrocketing expense while not denouncing the eclipsing costs of those Socialism programs are lying.

So just post them here. I'd like to see what you're talking about. ;)

raynebc said:

Edgar, do you not understand the problem is ILLEGAL immigration and not legal immigration?

So let's take a look at illegal immigration then.

https://www.factcheck.org/2018/06/illegal-immigration-statistics/

1) The number of illegal immigrants living in the country has been steadily dropping overall since a peak in 2007.

2) The number of border apprehensions has been stable or slightly decreasing over the last 10 years. Why is it an issue now? How is it worth shutting down the government and denying federal workers their hard earned money?

3) In 2018, 27% of the illegal border crossing apprehensions were of family units. Separately, there were 50,000 children apprehended alone. These are people that need our help. They might as well be refugees.

4) In 2016, 400,000 people were deported. Seems like everything's working just fine if you ask me.

There's no crisis worthy of building a wall from California to Texas. It's just not justifiable.

raynebc

https://pjmedia.com/trending/ocasio-cortezs-green-new-deal-would-cost-more-than-the-gdp-of-most-countries/
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-dollar32-trillion-question-that-medicare-for-all-advocates-will-never-answer

There are somewhere between 11 and 20 million illegal immigrants in the USA right now. Illegal immigration has been an issue for decades, but only when a politician makes it a hard line issue does his adversaries claim it's not a problem. Some of the illegal immigrants do need help, but hardly any are refugees. The USA and Mexico should continue to coordinate to make the process easier, but the immigration system is so broken and backlogged now that it will never get sorted out until the illegal immigration can stop or at least greatly slow down. Then the official processes can catch up.

Then once the problem stops growing, both sides can come up with good ways to handle all of the existing illegal immigrants. If there is a near complete stop in new illegal immigrants, I'd be perfectly happy to allow long term legal status (ie. green cards) as long as the newly-legal immigrants pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits and don't break major laws. Any of them committing identity fraud using a SSN that doesn't belong to them would need to stop doing that immediately. Assimilating to American culture should be strongly suggested but not required, although it's probably better for everybody if all permanent residents learn English well enough to function in society and in school. Tax funded programs to provide vocational training would be pretty good to help everybody get a decent job.

Chris Katko

They might as well be refugees.

THEN GIVE THEM LEGAL REFUGEE STATUS.

FFS people it's not that hard. You don't pretend "illegal immigrants = refugees" you give them legal refugee status and 99.99% of all these issues magically disappear.

And here's another fun thought experiment.

I agree 100% with new Democrats (conveniently forgetting the old ones, old being as new as 2015 as per my cited videos above.)

Borders are evil and racist. Globalism rulez.

You cannot deny anyone from entering your country.

Okay, Putin sends 5 million Russians (and ZERO spies ;) ;) ;)) to "integrate" into the USA as a "offer of peace" mission for 2020.

You're gonna greet them with open arms right? Right? RIGHT?

No, don't shrug it off. Sit there and think about it. Would you be as open-minded (and quick to acceptance) about Russians coming in as you are about Mexicans?

(p.s. I don't actually mind Mexicans coming here. They're great people, btw. I'm talking about political hypocrisy.)

"But it's not the same! Russians represent a security threat to the United St---oh shit."

Yeah. There are situations where security of a nation is paramount. So while I'm not saying "Mexicans shouldn't come in" at all, I am saying this modern idea that we should let everyone in and that "borders are racist" is downright insanity. And, since we know security does matter sometimes we SHOULD be having a reasonable (not emotional) discussion about who (and how many) people come from any of our borders (including the southern one).

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/16/democrats-immigration-policy-open-borders-dreamers

https://www.salon.com/2017/03/15/everyones-wrong-on-immigration-open-borders-are-the-only-way-to-defeat-trump-and-build-a-better-world/

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-new-guard-of-the-democratic-party-absolutely-supports-open-borders

bamccaig

Even if Russian "spies" were to sneak into the borders of the US it wouldn't mean they'd suddenly compromise national security (I'd hope). 5 million Russians coming to America would be no more threatening than 5 million American citizens with differing political views are. Ultimately they can't do much harm.

They could kill a few tens or hundreds of people with a terrorist attack, but the nation would not fall as a result. 5 million of them could conceivably attack many more targets, but again only civilian targets would be easy targets. And they'd only be so threatening because you're gun-crazed and access to firearms is child's play in the USA (so perhaps that should be considered a security weakness, albeit, you could also argue that armed American citizens could help to counter the threat). If they decided to try to break into a military base or into a secure government office they'd probably find themselves outmaneuvered and outgunned nevertheless.

I'm not sure 5 million Russians immigrating to the USA would be all that threatening, even if they were the equivalent of terrorists or at least anti-American. I don't think they'd be able to do much to hurt the nation. They'd probably stand out if they grouped together. And individually they'd be virtually harmless.

The whole concept of a nation's borders is somewhat weird to me. I think it stems from the natural world where resources were limited and life was hard and to survive sometimes meant conquering neighboring groups to steal their resources or to relieve the pressures of competition (think apes, or ancient tribes). That continued to be a part of our history, but the more and more advanced we get the less it makes sense. At this point I think we have the resources to take care of everyone on the planet. We just choose not to out of greed and selfishness. I think to drop the borders means to pursue a socialist world where we readily share resources and do not hog them. Military forces should only be necessary to deter groups from rebelling and trying to hoard resources for a power grab. Basically peacekeepers. Ideally, no shots need to be fired, like how no nukes need to be launched. It's a stalemate. Life is good. Why risk it?

In any case, politics are divisive by design. The system is broken by design. The "leaders" do not represent you, and you STILL have no say in any of this. So it's pretty pointless to discuss it further. This is just to distract you from the fact that they don't represent you. And you're taking the bait.

Edgar Reynaldo

Europe has to worry about Russia, not the US so much. If we were to get into a war it would be with China, and it would be global, and brutal. It would be World War Z (III).

The immigrants are not more criminally inclined. In fact, they are around 40% less inclined than native born citizens to commit crime.

— "[D]ata from the census and a wide range of other empirical studies show that for every ethnic group without exception, incarceration rates among young men are lowest for immigrants, even those who are the least educated. This holds true especially for the Mexicans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans, who make up the bulk of the undocumented population." (Ruben Rumbaut, University of California, 2008. Published by the Police Foundation.)

And if you want to talk about all the rape, well it's being done in Mexico, not the US. And most women can't report it because they're illegally in Mexico too and then they would get deported. It's not the immigrants coming into the US that are committing the crime, it's the citizens of Mexico and the Central Americas.

Neil Roy

This has to be one of the more fascinating uses of a matrix that I have seen in a while.

video

raynebc

The crime stats for immigrants versus natural born citizens don't distinguish between those of legal and illegal status, otherwise the stats would be more relevant to the debate on illegal immigration. I fully accept that legal immigrants probably commit less crime, just as the stats show CCW permit holders commit less crime, than standard citizens. People who have to go through a legal process are more mindful of the law than those who break the law. Close off the business interests of human smugglers, and make legal entry more easy. That will solve more problems than not enforcing our immigration laws.

Chris Katko

It's not the immigrants coming into the US that are committing the crime, it's the citizens of Mexico and the Central Americas.

That makes NO SENSE AT ALL. Why would criminals magically stay INSIDE their border? You mean.. criminals... might... enter illegally?!

Edgar Reynaldo

You make no sense. ::)

I'm saying the criminals reside largely in Mexico and other Central American countries, and don't bother coming to the US. The majority of people coming into the country are victims, not criminals.

raynebc

If you count economic migrants as "victims of in-opportunity due to their badly-run home countries," then sure most of the people entering the USA are victims.

Chris Katko

I'm saying the criminals reside largely in Mexico and other Central American countries, and don't bother coming to the US.

You mean... the people who smuggle drugs into the US magically don't come into the US because they're criminals?

Come on man. Turn your brain on.

Neil Roy

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Edgar Reynaldo

You mean... the people who smuggle drugs into the US magically don't come into the US because they're criminals?

ffs, follow the topic much? I'm talking about the rapes that happen to all the migrant women. You yourself brought it up prominently in this very thread.

And no, most of the people who immigrate here aren't criminals. NOTE: I didn't say that criminals don't enter the country illegally as well... ::) That's something you read into what I said.

To further iterate, most of the people pulling the strings are living OUTSIDE of the country. What do you think mules are for? Of course I want to stop human trafficking and human smuggling too but walls aren't going to change anything, they're just going to redirect it somewhere else, unless you build a wall around the entire nation, which is just as retarded as walling off a country.

What do need to do is get the corruption out of the Mexican and South American governments. Mexico needs to man up and stand up to the smugglers instead of politely looking the other way.

Better border security means adapting to changes easily and quickly.

Bruce Lee said, be like water. Flow. Ie... Adapt. Follow the path of least resistance.

It means better border monitoring, and more reactive responses.

If you want a real wall, make it an electronic one.

bamccaig

I'm sure Mexico and other South American governments will rid their governments of corruption the second the American people do (or Canadian people, for that matter). It's a terrible nature of our species, but selfish assholes not only exist, but they thrive. I'm sure if you compared the "leaders" of any large organization or company with successful criminals you'd find a whole lot in common. Unfortunately, crime does pay. A lot. If you're good at it. And the best commit crimes in the spotlight in front of the rest of us and get away with it.

Chris Katko

What do need to do is get the corruption out of the Mexican and South American governments.

I agree 100%. What we need to do, is regime change the !@$! out of Mexico and South America. I suggest inventing weapons of mass destruction like we did in Iraq, and then we bomb the hell out of them.

Or did you have a better way to force corrupt governments that don't want to change to follow our desires?

We can't get them to build a wall, you think they're gonna revolutionize their entire government and kick out generations of warlords and corruption that goes from the bottom police officers all the way up to the top government seats?

What they need is a freakin' revolution.* So I guess, once again, we should call the CIA and bay-of-pigs them.

*Interesting sidenote: One guy who lived in Mexico says that allowing good Mexicans to leave Mexico gives them a complacent "out" whereas if they were stuck there, they'd have no option but to rise up and fight the corrupt leaders.

Edgar Reynaldo

Freakin A, Katko, I can never tell when you're joking anymore.

Stop playing Devil's advocate. He has enough cronies already. >:(

Katko, I've almost caught you ;

https://www.allegro.cc/members/edgar.reynaldo/forums
https://www.allegro.cc/members/chris.katko/forums

raynebc

Edgar: Of course if their home countries weren't hell holes people wouldn't be so desperate to move to the USA. But people are fleeing the sinking ship instead of bailing water and patching it. And as mentioned, electronic surveillance alone won't prevent illegal entry, and humans alone as the only barrier would not scale effectively due to enormous costs compared to a physical structure. After a person crosses illegally, bleeding hearts frequently do everything possible to prevent deportation.

Chris Katko

Katko, I've almost caught you ;

MY LEGACY!!!

Neil Roy

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MiquelFire

Driving into work today, I got an idea in which I need to look for a public domain (or something close) font when I get home.

I want to add text to my logo, but in the slim chance I get big enough for whoever owns the font I use (even if it's for reference, as I have a non-curve friendly version of my logo, I need to be able to make a boxy/low-poly version) to have a reason to sue me, I want a font I can freely use for that purpose.

bamccaig

The most despicable thing about the American legal system is for-profit prisons and detection centers. There's a lot of money to be made on a guilty verdict, or by slowing down the process of releasing detainees. It's just sickening. America has a very bad disease. This is not capitalism. In capitalism, prices would be driven down by competition. These are government-funded, self-regulated monopolies.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-children/first-stop-for-migrant-kids-for-profit-detention-center-idUSKCN1Q3261

We're talking about children. What threat are they to anyone? And it costs taxpayers $750/day for each child. Not because that's what it actually costs, but because the corporation bumps the price up to make more money. A corporation gets rich, children are irreparably harmed, it's all on the dime of the American taxpayer, and ultimately nothing good is accomplished. It's pure evil.

Append:

You can probably afford to license a font too. At the very least, you can probably just ask for permission to use it. And the owner will be able to give you options. Maybe it's free or negligible cost now, but if your logo becomes well known the rate goes up or something. Most people are going to be reasonable about it. They'd rather you use their work than go somewhere else, as long as you're willing to give them a fair shake in return.

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

The most despicable thing about the American legal system is for-profit prisons and detection centers. There's a lot of money to be made on a guilty verdict, or by slowing down the process of releasing detainees. It's just sickening. America has a very bad disease. This is not capitalism. In capitalism, prices would be driven down by competition. These are government-funded, self-regulated monopolies.

I basically have nothing to disagree except you saying it's "the most despicable" because there are so many despicable things about my country.

On the otherhand, there are terrible things about EVERY country. Children in the USA think the EU is some beautiful place where everyone hugs, and that their governments aren't just-as-corrupt. They are, just in different ways. I'm not as versed in examples off the top of my head, but I've got friends Denmark and other EU countries and they're like "No no no no no... we're not the paragon of Democracy the US news makes us out to be."

Actually, I do remember one. In the EU, it's actually expected to bribe people, where in the USA, it's illegal. So when companies come to the USA they have to "adapt" to our kind of indirect bribery (lobbying).

You think I'm kidding. The UK passed an anti-bribing law... in 2010. Not 1810. Not 1910. 2010

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bribery_Act_2010

IIRC, US companies are also forbidden to bribe FOREIGN lawmakers. Which USA businessmen called unfair because it meant they can't compete with foreign businesses.

I saw a documentary on it years ago but clearly my memory is only snippets.

On the otherhand, in many EU countries you can actually get healthcare, so you know, sometimes I'd rather have EU's corruption and be able to live.

Erin Maus

Marketing sucks.

Also it's a tad depressing to know only four people have played my game since I launched the website. The latest person got level 2 attack then quit.

I'm unsure if the scary warnings literally every antivirus gives (and Windows 10) have anything to do with it, because the launcher has had more downloads than there are game build downloads which is odd.

I think I'm going to buy an EV code signing certificate soon and sign the launcher ASAP. It's a bullshit racket.

But at least analytics work. 8-)

Edgar Reynaldo

I'm on Windows 10 and I don't get any scary warning screens.

What bothers me is having things installed to unknown locations, and not even a hint of asking for permission to alter my start menu. The installer could use some work I think.

I just haven't really had time to play it, otherwise I would.

Also bothersome is that your program is secretly reporting analytics without asking me for permission.

Honesty is the best policy, and next to that is disclosure. Both set off red flags when they're not present.

Erin Maus

You must have SmartScreen disabled.

I added a "do you want to install ItsyRealm" to the launcher and an analytics message with instructions on how to opt-out.

The launcher will update itself (and thus you won't notice a difference unless you uninstall it and download the latest launcher again). The patch notes for the game explains the rest.

Those things were on my TODO list but I'm trying to make a game not deal with bureaucracy...

Chris Katko

I've been meaning to play it. Just having gotten around to it.

I would definitely suggest allowing local co-op support. That kind of game experience (Egoboo) is 100% the kind of game I would play with friends / my wife.

But yeah, AFAIK, marketing is a PITA that most developers don't realize till they first try to release a game. There are SO MANY games made by developers that literally only release one game ever because they see how little they get for how much work they put in.

PSA: Send video clips to Reddit. There is one (can't remember top of my head) for in-progress game dev clips and it generates lots of buzz of people going "omg that looks fun, I can't wait."

[edit]

Here we go:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedevscreens/

ALSO, know how to "game reddit." I don't know off the top of my head, but there are specific hours that are "golden hours" for getting people to notice your stuff. Basically, Reddit's algorithm is such sh!t that you need to post during certain peak hours of people being on the toilet so that you'll get the necessary upvotes in the beginning. A bunch of initial upvotes = more people seeing it = more people upvoting it. It's a viscous cycle of upvote-exposure-upvote, or bust, for most posts.

I don't give two craps usually about karma on Reddit, however, if you're trying to market your game, you definitely should.

[edit] Also,

/r/indiedev

and

/r/playmygame <------

Edgar Reynaldo

gamedev.net is a good place to post too.

Erin Maus

I would definitely suggest allowing local co-op support. That kind of game experience (Egoboo) is 100% the kind of game I would play with friends / my wife.

Unfortunately the game is mouse-based and the UI is inherently singleton.

The plan is to add online co-op, though.

Ian Lewis

I hate picking fights (hence never post in here.....) but there was one thing I couldn't let go.

On the otherhand, there are terrible things about EVERY country.

Absolutely true.

In the EU, it's actually expected to bribe people

Not true.

Not in the UK at least. I've lived here all of my 44 years, and never bribed anyone. Never been asked for a bribe. Never had anyone suggest that bribery might help get something done. Never had a friend do any of these things (as far as I know). Oh yes, never asked for or accepted a bribe either :-)

where in the USA, it's illegal.

It's illegal here too, as you noted in your next paragraph.

The UK passed an anti-bribing law... in 2010. Not 1810. Not 1910. 2010

...and if you read beyond the first paragraph of the wikipedia page you find:

Wikipedia said:

Prior to the Act, British anti-bribery law was based on the Public Bodies Corrupt Practices Act 1889, the Prevention of Corruption Act 1906 and the Prevention of Corruption Act 1916,

So it's been illegal in the UK since (at least) 1889.

Now I'm not saying there's zero corruption here; from time to time a politician gets caught taking money for something they shouldn't, but that's kind of the point; if they get caught, they go on trial, if found guilty, they go to jail.

I've never lived in any other EU countries, but Wikipedia(again) suggests that the EU has largely similar levels of corruption to the US. Some countries are worse than others; Spain, Italy and some of the former eastern bloc countries are among the worst in the EU. On the other hand, even they are better than (almost) anywhere in Africa, Asia or South America.

Polybios

In the EU, it's actually expected to bribe people

No. The EU is quite diverse in every respect (there are 24 official languages with 28 countries). There are also certain economic differences, e.g. see this map.

I've never heard of anyone bribing an official around here (Germany). The only time it has been mentioned is when I talked to teachers (state officials) who were a bit surprised about the documents they had to sign: basically, you have to be extra cautious even about taking very small presents from students (or, God forbid, parents) because you risk losing your job (and state pension) permanently.

On the other hand, I have friends in Balkan countries telling me it is commonplace to present a physician with an envelope filled with cash before you get (proper) treatment. They'd prefer to do it, just to be sure.

But that's not "the EU". Come and see yourself. :P

bamccaig

You're all ignorant. Politicians are regularly bribed in all countries. If any politician isn't getting bribed they either don't have the power to be bribed FOR, or they're a rare gem with a strong moral compass that still managed to get elected over the competition that most likely lacked such a compass (protip: this never, or at least almost never, happens). It's like winning a Counter-Strike match against an aimbotter. ;) It's human nature. The worst people rule because the best people are nice and fair.

Our leaders are all corrupt. If you pay attention to politics for a while it's easy to see it. It's completely laughable to suggest that USA politics are not bought. Hell, the entire system is based on bribery basically. "Lobbyists" AKA a legal form of bribery. We'll "give" you millions of dollars to support your campaign! In exchange, we expect "nothing". ;)

Give me a fucking break. They're all bought and paid for. Nobody in the West gets into power without being bought.

It's also evident in the blatant flaws of our electoral systems, and the unwillingness of the elected leaders to change the system.

Chris Katko

How could anyone presume I'm talking about day-to-day people like doctors and programmers for bribery? I'm talking about politicians being bribed by corporations in order to do anything.

ehem

Quote:

2018: Governments in Europe are catching up with America in pursuing corporate graft

Quote:

ONE of the more extreme recent cases of corporate bribery is that of LafargeHolcim, a giant Swiss-French cement-maker which was accused in 2016 of funnelling money to armed groups controlling roads and checkpoints around a factory in Syria. The firm still cannot be sure who pocketed its payoffs, via middlemen, that were intended to keep its facility running at all costs. The money may well have ended up funding Islamic State terrorists.

https://www.economist.com/business/2018/05/26/european-firms-are-increasingly-tackling-the-scourge-of-bribery

And that beautiful Germany? ehem:

Quote:

Long gone are the days when German law counted bribes paid by the country’s industrial champions as tax-deductible.

Because, like I said, bribes were a seen as the way of conducting common business. That's shocking, and it should be. But the EU is getting better too.

I saw a documentary on it years ago. I didn't just invent the opinion.

Another fun one: I recall one company makes >90% of one of the materials for "lead-free soldier" (RoHS legislation) and heavily-lobbied for it... and it gets better... it might be worse for the environment. It also is much worse than normal solder because it actually decays over time (quickly! like ~20 years due to "tin whiskers") so , IIRC, places like NASA refuse to use it because they can't afford to have billion dollar satellite projects just die in space. But hey, it's okay if electronics fill up landfills.

Now, I don't have the immediate source for that one (it's been years), so feel free to fact check it and not believe it without verifying it. One of my EU friends told me about it years ago, and I looked it up back then.

I don't know how other people chat, but I try my best to disclaimer any information I don't have immediate sources for, with the implication that anything without a disclaimer is fairly well researched. (Though I'll throw sources in at that point.) Like, for instance, women (and girls) being raped as they cross the border (and the government recommending taking birth control before crossing) is absolutely, 100%, true.

Edgar Reynaldo

@bambams et al...

Studing the Bible and some good grade weed cures all. Stay away from alcohol.
Thanks my advice to you.

Ian Lewis

How could anyone presume I'm talking about day-to-day people like doctors and programmers for bribery? I'm talking about politicians being bribed by corporations in order to do anything.

Perhaps because your original statement

'In the EU, it's actually expected to bribe people'

is vague, to put it mildly. Ordinary people bribing minor government functionaries to get stuff done is, I gather, quite common in some parts of the world, just not in Europe. I'm glad to have given you the opportunity to clarify what you meant :) Also glad that we've established that bribery is, indeed, illegal in the EU, as well as the US. :)

bamccaig said:

You're all ignorant.

Thanks. It's comforting to know that someone out there has all the answers and can put me right when needed. Have a great day! :D

Edgar Reynaldo

What, you haven't met our local expert on women, politics, and religion? Say hello to bamccaig. ;)

bamccaig
Ian Lewis said:

Thanks. It's comforting to know that someone out there has all the answers and can put me right when needed.

Glad I could help! 8-)

Ian Lewis said:

Have a great day! :D

Thanks, you too! :D

Gideon Weems

Aaron Bolyard, please put a link to your game in your sig, the way Dog intended.

Chris Katko

By the Yods!

(Such a damn good game.)

video

Gideon Weems

Long live this thread.

Erin Maus

Aaron Bolyard, please put a link to your game in your sig, the way Dog intended.

Good idea. ;D

...

I went to my home state (Florida) this weekend for my birthday. Had a blast at Universal Orlando / Islands of Adventure (went to both because the Harry Potter section is deviously split between the two parks). The Hollywood Rip Ride Rockit is like one of the most amazing rollercoasters I've been on. It was insane. Also saw my grandparents; haven't seen them since I was like 9 years old so it's been a while. Overall 10/10 weekend, even with the 10 hour drive.

Gideon Weems

ItsyRealm's web site looks great even with JS disabled, on account of the good use of CSS. :D

Is Florida as exciting as the Internet makes it out to be?

Edgar Reynaldo

It is if you like wrestling with gators.:-X

Chris Katko

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/02/26/thousands-migrant-children-report-sexual-assaults-us-custody-border-detain/2988884002/

4500 children were molested while being detained by Homeland Security since 2015.

158 of them were molested by staffers. This is the story the media is going with and it's a terrible thing worthy of news.

Here's the part they didn't bother to headline: The other 4,342 kids? Were molested by other minors in custody.

That's right. As if I ever should have needed prove that bad people are illegally immigrating into the USA. (alongside all the good people), there you go. Imagine all the rapists who didn't get caught by immigration services? Those people are walking around the states and very likely... still raping kids.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I, for one, don't support policies that help rape children.

But you know, you can't pin it on some "evil white man in power" when minors rape minors. So there's nothing to see here, move along.

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There's no narrative to push against the evil white males pulling the strings behind the scenes with their penises of death. So instead, the media hears a factoid like that... and just... lets it slip away into wind.

I'm calling it now. No discussion of "why migrates may rape each other" will happen. No discussion of "why minors might rape each other?" No discussion of polices and culture that may result in "south american or central american rapes". Nothing like that. The only thing we'll do is beat our hearts about those 158 cases because we can blame "teh government"--which again, is a real issue but we ARE talking about that issue. We're NOT going to look into or talk about any other issues like the other 4300 kids that got raped. Their rapes don't matter. They don't matter. Because you only matter if a Democrat in power can find a way to use you to push their worldview.

The same way when a Vegan Bodybuilder Woman shoots up YouTube headquarters they report that it happened and that's it. No discussion of many vegan people being crazy. No discussion of women and guns. No discussion of bodybuilding. None of those things matter because she wasn't a "white male" killing people with her penis of death. "She was just crazy. Simple" But if a white guy does the same thing it's not "he was crazy", it's he was somehow brainwashed by institutional patriarchal power and white supremacy. It was intention malice.

Or the Pulse Nightclub shooting where a Muslim kills over 50 gay people (the deadliest mass shooting in USA history.) and we magically forget that the most conservative religion on the planet throws gay people off of rooftops. If you can't use it to push a narrative, it simply gets objectively reported (if even that, like the Jimmy Carter speech about political corruption) and moved on from.

And why am I so worked up about it? Because ignorance of this failure mode of the media means more kids are going to be raped--and I'm sick of it.

Neil Roy

;D
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Erin Maus

I guess since HRC isn't big in politics anymore you guys needed another woman politician to caricature :-/.

Cows (and other large livestock) are one of the leading producers of greenhouse gases. They literally contribute to almost 15% of emissions per year ("Worldwide, livestock accounts for between 14.5 percent and 18 percent of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions"):

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/climate/cows-global-warming.html

That's why part of "going green" is reducing meat consumption. It's not new.

And it's better to call it "climate change" than "global warming" because idiots don't know how climate works... Although yearly temperatures are increasing yeaar by year, due to the increased energy, there is an increased volatility that will produce (small) periods of extreme weather in both directions. But you love to forget record breaking summers and think because it snowed it April somewhere up north the scientists are full of crap :).

(Methane is 12x more effective than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas.)

btw there was never a global cooling, that was mainstream media being mainstream media; the consensus has been since the beginning of modern climate science that the earth is warming due to the industrial revolution and everything after.

raynebc

There's no way they'll be able to make the entire world go vegan anytime soon. If that means livestock will have to be raised underneath structures that capture methane, so be it. Renewable energy will get better slowly, but if they want big carbon reductions now, they would push for improvement and increased use of nuclear energy.

bamccaig

It's pretty racist to imply that lots of "illegal immigrants" are "rapists". In reality, human beings are animals, and unfortunately "rape" (some form of sexual assault, which is basically just forced sexual activity) is a pretty common behavior. More common than I think any of us are comfortable knowing about.

When apes do it, or lions do it, it's just procreation or generally considered "animals being animals". Of course, we're intelligent and civilized so when humans do it we consider it immoral and horrible (rightfully so). Of course, it's probably also pretty unpleasant for animals, but we just don't care about them because they aren't as intelligent as we are (though science is still trying to understand just how intelligent they are, and we've been wrong about several species').

There are an awful lot of American rapists too. Way, way more than you or I are aware of. Probably way more than the justice system is aware of. So let's not pretend that "illegal immigrants" are especially terrible people compared to say Americans. They're just people. Like the rest of us. Arguably the harsher struggle they have to endure may breed more deviant behavior than in a relatively more comfortable population, but you can't very well blame the individuals for that. It's basically an unfortunate natural occurrence. Life is messy.

Of course, I have no doubt that politicians on all sides abuse certain angles of this and every other story for personal gain. Politicians are generally horrible people. Or at least that's how I understand them. They effectively deal in lies. Politics, as we know and understand it, is basically bullshitting to get your way. Dress nice, smile pretty, talk confidently, and convince the audience to side with you, even if you're outright lying or what you're selling is actually bad for them. That's basically what politics is.

So sure, they're going to twist this story to suit certain angles, but that doesn't mean that the angles they're using are necessarily unimportant. Maybe in the grand scheme of things the number of assaults from government staff is insignificant compared to the total number of assaults that immigrants experience during their journey for so called "freedom". However, what's important about it is probably that we theoretically have some control over those assaults, whereas the assaults that occur between the illegal immigrants (many of which happen in the desert far from civilization) are pretty much unknown to us. There's no real way to address those.

Well, there is a way.. Solve the social issues in Central America and Mexico that make it possible. Americans are unlikely to want that though. There's nothing directly in it for them. ::)

raynebc

Well you can't just give those countries' governments money, it would just be embezzled until it was gone with little to show for it. It's also not our government's job to meddle with and rebuild yet another country. Nothing is stopping civilians from serving humanitarian missions, but the people of those countries are going to have to be willing to overthrow the corrupt politicians, dictators and gangs that rule them or they'll never be as prosperous as they want to be.

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

It's pretty racist to imply that lots of "illegal immigrants" are "rapists".

I didn't imply they were rapists. They literally got caught raping.

You can call me whatever you want and throw me into whatever bad category you want. But if it's racist to want children to stop being raped, feel free to call me racist.

I don't care what uncomfortable conversations we have to have. I don't care what taboo topics need to be undressed.

I want kids to stop being raped no matter who is doing it, and if it's a "oh, those poor people" doing the raping, then screw those "poor people" (and ONLY the specific "poor people" doing the raping).

You don't get a pass from me for raping kids just because you're apart of some "victim group" that was oppressed historically by some sort of super villain oppressors. There is no valid excuse to rape a kid and if we can't talk about something, or can't do something, that gets in the way of preventing child rape... then that "something" needs to go away.

I don't care if it's the Catholic Church, Islamic Hadiths, government employees (like !@$!@'ing the UN officers literally raping kids for food), or fellow illegal immigrants. Anyone who does it needs to be held accountable and we need to, as a society, discuss and understand why it keeps happening so it doesn't happen again.

bamccaig
raynebc said:

Well you can't just give those countries' governments money, it would just be embezzled until it was gone with little to show for it. It's also not our government's job to meddle with and rebuild yet another country. Nothing is stopping civilians from serving humanitarian missions, but the people of those countries are going to have to be willing to overthrow the corrupt politicians, dictators and gangs that rule them or they'll never be as prosperous as they want to be.

I agree, if you just send money it will go to gangs and corrupt politicians and nothing will be done. Just like sending money to Africa to "save the children". Money doesn't fix problems. Money creates problems. Even uneducated New York rappers have understood that for decades. :P

I won't pretend to have the answers, or even know 2 things about Mexico or Central America. I'm ignorant, and I'm guessing you are too.

My knee-jerk go-to solution would be to get approval from the respective governments, and send military forces to effectively slaughter gangs. Thinking harder about it I don't think that would solve anything though. Those gangs will be tightly associated with the civilians. In fact, it would probably be hard to differentiate civilians from gangs. And every gangster will have 10s if not 100s of civilian family members that will hate the oppressive forces that killed someone they care about, which will further provoke violence and inspire gang recruitment.

I think the solutions have to come from a deep analysis of how this state of affairs came to be, and it will probably be a very slow process. I doubt our governments are all that surprised by it. I wouldn't be surprised if they had a hand in creating this situation.

Just throwing ideas out there for conversation at this point: Erasing borders might be something to consider. If the civilians can easily escape the gangs then it will be easier to tell them apart. Though I suppose the gangs would just cross the would-be borders too (albeit, they already have for all intents and purposes; the US has no shortage of drug gangs from Mexico and Central America). Maybe it would help. Maybe it would just messy the clean water North of the existing border. I don't know.

I think these problems are difficult to solve. I don't think there's a simple or clear answer. I think it will take decades if not centuries to solve. Ultimately, sharing wealth is probably at the core of the solution though. Gangs exist to empower weak people. If people could instead live a happy, easy, safe life why would they want to associate with gangs? That may be key to disassembling the gangs in general. It's way easier said than done though. And it remains to be seen exactly how to do it.

It is my current believe that we have the resources to provide for everyone on the planet. We waste vast quantities of resources out of greed and selfishness. And if we were to better organize their distribution we could probably put them to better use, and in the process neuter the foothold that gangs and terrorist organizations have. It's a huge undertaking, and exploitation will have to be curtailed along the way because it's human nature. In any case, ... I think it's worth pursuing.

I didn't imply they were rapists. They literally got caught raping.

Rape is a very dirty word. In our society, it's the worst possible offense. I think it's fair to say it's considered worse than murder. Think about that. Killing somebody is perhaps better than sexually abusing them. Does that even make sense?

You can call me whatever you want and throw me into whatever bad category you want. But if it's racist to want children to stop being raped, feel free to call me racist.

My intention is not to label people bad names, or even categorize them. That said, I think that emotions run very high when we contemplate sexual abuse of children. It's generally impossible to have a rational discussion at all about it. And if we cannot have a rational discussion about it then there's no possible way to effectively solve it. Hopefully we can all agree that emotion does not bring out the best in us. It may bring out the best of intentions, some of the time, but then "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions."

I don't care what taboo topics need to be undressed.

What colorful language for the subject matter. :P

I want kids to stop being raped no matter who is doing it, and if it's a "oh, those poor people" doing the raping, then screw those "poor people" (and ONLY the specific "poor people" doing the raping).

I think it's generally well known that many sexual abusers were sexually abused themselves. Effectively, the perpetrator is also a victim. That's not always the case, but it's a well established pattern.

I think that the subject matter triggers an emotional response that clouds your judgement somewhat. See "think of the children!"

You don't get a pass from me for raping kids just because you're apart of some "victim group" that was oppressed historically by some sort of super villain oppressors. There is no valid excuse to rape a kid and if we can't talk about something, or can't do something, that gets in the way of preventing child rape... then that "something" needs to go away.

I'm not trying to excuse the sexual abuse of children. That said, I think that to broaden our horizons it might help to emphasize that we are animals, and morality is subjective. In the West, sexuality and children is completely taboo (to the point that parents are uncomfortable educating their children about sex).

Historically it has not been so black and white, however. I recall hearing of a taboo practice in parts of Africa (I think) where as I recall it was [recently, like maybe 10 or 20 years ago at the earliest, if not still today!] allegedly considered socially acceptable for families to auction off young boys as a sort of sex slave for wealthy men. Read that again. Gay. Sex. Children. Socially acceptable. Meaning it's not behind closed doors. It's "cool". It's "in". Everybody is doing it. It's done out in the open at arranged, sanctioned, social functions. Or at least, that's how I recall it. My memory/intuition says that the rational was that the families benefited from the financial gain, and the sex avoided ... unwanted pregnancies? I really can't rationalize it myself. As I recall how I understood it, it was a long running practice, meaning that most men in the community experienced the practice as both the boy and the man.

I cannot find reference to it Googling for it. Albeit, it's a kind of awkward subject to try to Google at all... My 2 failed attempts probably just fucked my Google profile so I don't care to keep trying... :-/ In any case, I can't imagine I could ever have imagined something like that as literally none of it appeals to me... But I also cannot recall the source that I learned about it from... In fairness, the search results are very much politically charged these days. Basically LGBT rights activism in Africa... So effectively the results are unrelated to what I was attempting to find, and if what I was attempting to find does exist it might be buried beneath pages of modern day social justice shenanigans, and potentially has been literally "covered up" (i.e., "erased") by now...

I don't care if it's the Catholic Church, Islamic Hadiths, government employees (like !@$!@'ing the UN officers literally raping kids for food), or fellow illegal immigrants. Anyone who does it needs to be held accountable and we need to, as a society, discuss and understand why it keeps happening so it doesn't happen again.

Or government employees like detention center staff handling illegal immigrants. :P Glad we're on the same page.

I don't disagree. We should address the exploitation of children in all forms. Or Hell, the exploitation of all vulnerable persons, regardless of their demographics. However, to address it we need to be rational about it. We cannot afford to let our emotions get the better of us.

We are animals. We are not some superior creation of an omnipotent being. It's probably unrealistic to expect that we can completely prevent it from ever happening. At least, if we can it will be in a very, very distant utopian future where there are no mental health problems (meaning, not only are mental health disorders quarantined in treatment facilities, but literally they don't even exist). I think that understanding it will require some very uncomfortable conversations that you do not sound ready to have. Which is not surprising because I think that most people are not ready to have them. Again, it's a very triggering subject.

raynebc

Erasing borders is just about the worst thing you can do for your country's own security, and it allows the criminal scourge easier means to increase their territory. Free markets have been much better at creating wealth than redistribution of money, so provide people opportunity instead of cash for better results. For escaping a bad situation, making legal immigration easier is still my suggestion, but that is useless until illegal immigration is brought under control because you can't weed out the few bad apples spoiling the rest.

bamccaig
raynebc said:

...and it allows the criminal scourge easier means to increase their territory.

Last time I checked criminals were everywhere in North America, meaning Mexico, the United States of America, and Canada. They're in every city. They're in every community. Hell, gangs run the prisons so if anybody is sent to prison for any reason they'll be forced to join a gang to stay alive. They're already in. The border does nothing for that.

raynebc said:

Free markets have been much better at creating wealth than redistribution of money, so provide people opportunity instead of cash for better results.

Who has attempted redistribution of wealth without corruption? It hasn't been done so we cannot know if it works or not. It's basically untested.

Free markets have generated lots of wealth for the top 1%. It hasn't done fuck all for the middle class. The more unethical and corrupt you are the better a free market is. The good of the people be damned. There's dollars to be made lying and cheating and stealing.

And where does that so called imaginary made up wealth go once it is accumulated? Well, it sits in offshore banks, and is distributed minimally to maintain power. It sure as fuck isn't making everyone wealthy. It sure as fuck isn't providing good paying jobs for everyone. It sure as fuck isn't making the middle class bigger and more stable. The middle class shrinks, the lower class grows, and the elite run the show from the safety of their secure towers.

raynebc said:

For escaping a bad situation, making legal immigration easier is still my suggestion, but that is useless until illegal immigration is brought under control because you can't weed out the few bad apples spoiling the rest.

You seem to be contradicting yourself. Erasing the border you say would allow all the baddies in and erode "national security" (which wouldn't be a thing without borders anyway). Yet, you think the solution is to make immigration easier. Well, the only way to make it easier is to reduce the checks and balances. Effectively, make it easier for both good and bad people to get in. It's the same as dropping the borders. Or, it's just a meaningless fantasy without a real world definition.

If you make immigration easier there would be less illegal immigration by definition. More people would get in legitimately and so less people would get in illegitimately. It's a meaningless idea unless you can elaborate on how to, as you put it, "get it under control" and "weed out the few bad apples".

The system is broken by design. Money and power corrupts. Any system that is built on it will encourage corruption by definition. Money isn't a very good motivator to do good work when bad work pays better.

raynebc

Securing the border reduces more incoming drugs and thugs, you should be able to understand that. Reducing illegal immigration and increasing legal immigration makes sure that the people who come here are not known bad actors. The people who are really refugees can get in more easily and the others allowed in would be those that are self-sufficient and will be a net benefit to the economy. Your claim about the only way to make legal immigration easier is to ease oversight is extremely wrong. I don't know why I bother to continue this conversation. The solution that's better for the USA is to vet the people coming in BEFORE they enter. If there is no way to verify who they are, and it's not clear they are refugees (who by global standards are supposed to go to the nearest country and not half-way around the world anyway), or they have no job prospects or job skills (can't provide for themselves and would become a public burden, a standard used by other countries as I understand it) they don't get in.

The old "real socialism has never been tried" claim is not convincing, giving that history has suggested people aren't pure enough to implement it without it burning to the ground with corruption. Without the 1%, just about nobody else (except government employees) would have jobs. The US is booming with jobs now, despite the previous administration trying to get us to settle for a "new normal" that was worse. You admit money and power corrupts, that's why focusing it all into federal government hands is a bad idea.

Edit: Venezuela is a cautionary tale for any other country foolish enough to adopt Socialism:
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bethbaumann/2019/02/28/oh-hey-venezuela-is-so-safe-the-second-in-command-is-smuggling-his-kids-to-chin-n2542389

Erin Maus

Any actual or potential implementation of socialism (workers owning the means of production) was met by a coup, assassination, or embargoes courtesy of the United States resulting in the rise of civil war or dictators and authoritarians favored by the United States.

You talk about the problem of illegal immigration: America helped make it worse by interfering in South America in the name of capitalism.

And it's lovely we forget Russia went from a rural, destitute country to a superpower, then fell back into mediocrity after the dissolution of the USSR. (I'm not fond [to put it lightly] of the USSR but you can't deny they were a superpower during the Cold War).

The Paris Commune (before it was squashed by the French Army) is a good example of communism.

raynebc

I'm no historian, but I don't see 2.5 months as being long enough for the natural evolution of Socialism to play out.

Erin Maus

Yes it didn't last long... because it was squashed by the French Army.

You see a pattern? Any legitimate communist/socialist movement is interfered with by the United States (or some other country with similar interests). You're left with either populist movements wrongly named socialists or state capitalism or any other thing.

Show me a so-called socialist country where the workers own the means of production that is failing or failed of its own devices and I'll cede my argument.

raynebc

Are you saying Socialism isn't robust enough to withstand global influences?

Erin Maus

There is literally no country that could stand up to the United States so I'm not sure why you're specifically calling out socialist countries.

bamccaig

I'm sure. It's because your points are inconvenient for his argument. :P Classic strawman fallacy.

raynebc

Or his argument just isn't particularly convincing. You two are basically saying there can never be a pure Socialist country as prosperous or powerful as the USA.

Erin Maus

There can never be a capitalist country as prosperous or powerful as the United States unless foreign policy makes a 180, either, and even then that's not guaranteed...

No other country possesses the natural resources, economic and military power, strategic location (i.e., the entirety of central North America), and other such qualities that would allow for it.

It's not because of capitalism...

Neil Roy

So, you have you guys solved world problems yet?! LMFAO.... I'll continue to eat meat because I don't change my dietary habits based on a lie like global warming.

Edgar Reynaldo
Neil Roy said:

I don't change my dietary habits based on a lie like global warming.

For all that is sacred, educate yourself.

duck duck go search on 'ipcc is global warming real' yields plenty of evidence that global warming is real.

You'll see results from both sides, but reading results like this (https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/science-and-impacts/science/scientists-agree-global-warming-happening-humans-primary-cause) and this (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ipcc-reiterates-global-warming-is-real/) should give you the clear idea that there is an active consensus in the scientific community that global warming and the resulting climate change are happening right now. Open your eyes man.

And before you start whining about sources, the IPCC is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Thousands and thousands of climate scientists agree the earth is warmer every year, the sea levels are at at least a local record, and carbon dioxide concentration is at record levels.

And before you think eating things like meat don't affect the world, google 'secondary consumer' before you speak again.

bamccaig

There are also extremely smart YouTubers that break it down for you so it's super easy. You don't even need to read. It couldn't be any easier. Being ignorant in 2019 is just sad.

Append:

And also learning is fun.

On a side note, I think the idea of eating insects is totally interesting. It seems natural that they're way more efficient to produce than the meat that we normally consume. And some of them honestly even look pretty appetizing when they've been professionally prepared.

I've reached out to a few fringe sources for raw insects, but the price is steep right now in North America. It doesn't quite make sense yet. And also, I think I want my first experiences to be professionally prepared so I'll know how good it can be rather than being turned off with my own culinary failures.

I've eaten the dehydrated ones before. Pretty bland. And also pretty nutrition-less due to the dehydration process. But most of them were easy to eat though. I look forward to them becoming an economical solution in North America, but I think it'll require significant infrastructure failure and poverty before Americans will open their mind to the idea. Which means by the time it becomes feasible it may be too late. I suppose though it's an opportunity for people in the West to pioneer. But my wife is more picky than a 5 year old so I don't think I'd ever get her on board.

It's worth noting that insects have been a staple food for thousands of years in parts of the world, and there are food markets full of them in Asia. It's already happening now. It just hasn't caught on here.

Cattle are pretty terrible for the environment, and the kicker is they're also terrible for our health. They can be damn tasty though.

Neil Roy

Indeed, being ignorant in 2019 is very sad. I agree... the question is, who is the ignorant ones here. You say I am... I say you have fallen for propaganda. But I won't get sucked into the debate. Believe whatever you wish, that is your right, but don't try forcing your shit onto me, I'm not buying it. And there's plenty of evidence against it as well which i am sure none of you will ever listen to.

I'll continue to eat meat. Nobody will convince me that cow farts are dangerous! LMFAO... wow... what a world. ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

All evidence actually points to meat being very healthy for us. I won't quote sources because I am sure nobody in these liberal, socialist, brainwashed forums gives a damn about the truth.

NASA Study: Mass Gains of Antarctic Ice Sheet Greater than Losses
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-of-antarctic-ice-sheet-greater-than-losses

Edgar Reynaldo

Nice source Neil - did you read this part?

Quote:

But it might only take a few decades for Antarctica’s growth to reverse, according to Zwally. “If the losses of the Antarctic Peninsula and parts of West Antarctica continue to increase at the same rate they’ve been increasing for the last two decades, the losses will catch up with the long-term gain in East Antarctica in 20 or 30 years -- I don’t think there will be enough snowfall increase to offset these losses.”

EDIT
We need a dose of 23. https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/135565

Arthur Kalliokoski
Quote:

If the losses of the Antarctic Peninsula and parts of West Antarctica continue to increase at the same rate they’ve been increasing for the last two decades, the losses will catch up with the long-term gain in East Antarctica in 20 or 30 years

Mark Twain had something to say about that.

Neil Roy

Educate yourselves from REAL scientists who have actually studied this...

video

Edgar Reynaldo

Mark Twain had something to say about that

Oh no, my argument has been cut in Twain!

Neil Roy said:

Educate yourselves from REAL scientists who have actually studied this...

I watched about half of your video so far.

Perhaps CO^2 isn't as major a player in global temperature as some think, but there's no arguiing that the CO^2 levels in the atmosphere are at their highest levels in the last million years. The truth is we don't know what effect that will have on the temperature, the climate, and the weather.

The truth is the sea levels are rising, and so is the temperature. Perhaps the majority of the blame is on solar radiation, but that doesn't mean the atmosphere doesn't affect it. When the temperature rises, that is an increase in energy in the atmosphere, and it is reflected by an increase in storms and severe weather. The temperature of the ocean drives global weather whether you like it or not.

bamccaig

According to Hamish Mykura, Channel 4's head of documentaries, the film was commissioned "to present the viewpoint of the small minority of scientists who do not believe global warming is caused by anthropogenic production of carbon dioxide."

Although the documentary was welcomed by global warming sceptics, it was criticised by scientific organisations and individual scientists (including one of the scientists interviewed in the film and one whose research was used to support the film's claims[6][7]). The film's critics argued that it had misused and fabricated data, relied on out-of-date research, employed misleading arguments, and misrepresented the position of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.[7][8][9][10]

Sounds like a very trustworthy source of information. ;D

raynebc

If we want to talk about switching from coal/oil/gas to nuclear until the favored green technologies are ready to drive the ENTIRE country's power needs 24/7, we can do that. Setting a deadline of using only green energy in a decade like the more extreme Democrats want is a pipe dream.

Edgar Reynaldo
raynebc said:

If we want to talk about switching from coal/oil/gas to nuclear until the favored green technologies are ready to drive the ENTIRE country's power needs 24/7, we can do that.

I love the way you led into that. So we can only discuss using nuclear energy?

raynebc said:

Setting a deadline of using only green energy in a decade like the more extreme Democrats want is a pipe dream.

Probably, but that's no reason not to make the attempt.

The CO^2 levels are at twice their natural historic high.

The sea levels are still rising, despite Neil's article on Antarctic ice gain.

The temperature continues to rise.

When should we start doing something?

Erin Maus

damn global warming it's even affect video games

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two days ago that was a blue plain, now look at it

If that's not funny this is:

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bamccaig

Nuclear is believed to be generally "green", but ONLY if no disasters occur. I.e., if the plant explodes or the radioactive waste leaks into the environment then we're all fucked. Nuclear is clean-ish, but the waste is a big problem, and there's definite dangers. So if we're going to go with nuclear then we need to be careful about it. But yes, at least from what I've read, it is an improvement over the dirtier alternatives, at least in theory. So go ahead and consider that.

The "deadline" isn't some random figure somebody put together for politics (protip: the politicians are bought by the oil companies that don't profit from green ideas). It's what scientists that study this for a living believe is critical. So we can't do too much about the deadline. There are plenty of things we can do. We just don't because they're inconvenient. Of course, humans are generally very stupid animals. We might be generally more intelligent than most of our neighbours, but we're still extremely stupid. On average anyway. And so we're more than likely going to drive our own species to extinction before we sacrifice any luxuries.

We probably already have the means to take comfortable care of everyone on Earth without doing permanent harm to our environment if we were willing to share like we try to teach our 3 year olds to do, but fuck that shit. We're greedy, and we're selfish, and everyone for themselves. So we'll burn this bitch down instead.

In the long run everything will be fine. Life will continue on this rock for thousands of years. It likely won't include humans, or many of the wonderful animals that we take for granted every day, but life will go on, and so will this planet. If there are alien species in the cosmos we'll be one of those extinct life forms they discover in 1000 years having killed themselves with their own greed.

raynebc

When should we start doing something?

When there's a viable alternative. Solar and wind aren't sufficient at this time. Making drastic moves without having any good moves can be worse than standing still.

Nuclear energy produces enormous energy with very little land required, doesn't output the CO2 that fossil fuels do, etc. Improvements in technology and fail-safe measures mitigate the risks of a meltdown. Fukushima was a perfect storm of bad planning and I'm not immediately aware of a large number of nuclear plants in tsunami range.

bamccaig

Unfortunately it may not be so easy to predict "tsunami range" for long. Also, nuclear facilities are very ripe for terrorism or military targets. So if we're going to expand upon the facilities we're also going to need to defend them from airplanes, ground forces, etc. As well as defending against "cyber" attacks. It's not as easy as it sounds. And the stakes are quite high. Nuclear is only "green" when things go right. It's far, far worse for the environment when things go wrong.

raynebc

For starters, don't build a reactor a mere two or three hundred meters away from the ocean like the Fukishima reactor. It should be much further inland, which will also make it a harder target for foreign adversaries. If they locate it in unpopulated areas, the human fallout from a successful attack would be mostly avoidable. Second, they can have a closed network with no accessibility to the Internet to eliminate remote cyber attack. They'll have to have strong security practices to make local computer attacks a non-threat, but it is doable. There are dangers of pollution, but they are potential instead of guaranteed like with other forms of energy.

bamccaig

I think it's pretty naive to think that the solutions to these problems are so simple. They're not. They're a very real concern for lots of large, skilled, experienced groups. Certainly there are things that can be done to limit certain risks, but they all have trade-offs. Google says that Japan is only 230 kilometres wide. That combined with the density probably somewhat limits available land for power plants like this. I think you give human beings way too much credit. The really smart, responsible kind are a very small minority. Maybe 0.00001% or something. The vast majority are lucky to be eating with a fork (or chopsticks). :D

Edgar Reynaldo

LULZ

1. Three Mile Island

2. Chernobyl

3. Fukushima

4. ???

Not to mention the millions of metric tons of radioactive waste stored underground.

Yeah, great stuff.

IF and WHEN nuclear technology is ready to meet all our energy needs THEN we can consider switching over from green technology.

See what I did there? xD

raynebc

Unfortunately for Edgar, green energy cannot meet current power needs but nuclear technology can. I appreciate you don't like it, but that's reality.

Edgar Reynaldo

Sorry, unfortunately for raynebc, you would need to double the number of nuclear power plants in the entire world to build enough power plants in the US to power it at 70%. Not to mention all the radioactive waste it would create. :/

Source :
https://www.quora.com/How-many-nuclear-reactors-would-be-required-to-power-the-United-States-How-much-would-each-modern-reactor-cost-to-build-assuming-there-were-no-NIMBY-issues-i-e-the-land-was-available-and-we-had-the-green-light

EDIT
According to his own estimates, it costs $5 billion for a new reactor, and $1.7 billion for a new solar thermal generator. The solar thermal has half the output, but cost 2/3 less! Which means it is 50% more cost effective.

Estimates on the cost of nuclear powering the US :
1 trillion dollars, 20-60 years

Estimates on green power
2 trillion, 10-20 years

I'd say they're pretty equally positioned to take over the energy market. Nuclear takes too long and generates too much waste. For a larger initial investment you get a better return in a shorter time for green energy.

raynebc

The majority opinion there seems to be that renewables are getting better, but are still much more expensive than nuclear, whose waste can be safely stored and dealt with. The EIA's 2019 annual energy outlook report seems to say in 2023 solar thermal's LCOE is projected to about twice that of nuclear. Plus you won't get Arizona levels of solar energy just anywhere, so location will matter. It does help that super hot desert isn't attractive for many other uses. Ideally both technologies would complement each other well and should be pursued over coal or gas.

bamccaig

There is still a lot of problem solving with green energy plants. For example, that one solar plant apparently has trouble with birds getting vaporized by the focused energy beams... There is still work to be done, but it's worth pursuing. We're hopeful that the ends will justify the means. And as long as we keep "green" plants regulated to ensure they're respecting the environment too we can achieve a net win over alternative sources.

I would be in favor of some increased usage of nuclear, but we have to be very careful how we approach it. It's a very powerful energy source, but that comes with great dangers too. And the waste is extremely dangerous. I question what the impact is on the planet having that material buried or submerged in pools. It may be theoretically contained, but I don't know if we can account for all possible impacts... We might discover in time that we've fucked ourselves with it. Certainly I think we should try to keep it far away from populated areas.

Perhaps we could utilize a railgun system to launch the material safely into outer space, but then we can't really be certain of the impact of that either. Maybe in 1000 years it'll end up dumping back on us... I wonder if we could predict a velocity that could nearly guarantee reaching the Sun. It seems relatively safe to launch the material into a star, but then again who knows. Maybe it would make the star unstable somehow over time, or make it more intense and ultimately cook us. :D

In any case, I think it's important for us to try. Of course, I don't think that alone will suffice to get us out of trouble. I think we need to start taxing the Hell out of unnecessary/luxury travel and stuff. Basically just make it so that abusing resources/waste is unaffordable. That will be the best way to get things under control. Until we do something like that people will just continue going as they are. Nobody is going to willingly surrender luxury. People (such as those demonstrated on this forum) are much happier just denying that there's a problem and leaving future generations to deal with it. And that's just not going to work.

Erin Maus

Although nuclear energy is the most efficient in the near term (let's say 10 years), renewables seem to have the potential to be nearly as efficient or more so within 10 years...

It's a matter of "will renewables be more efficient in the timeline it takes to fund and build more nuclear power plants" and I believe the answer will likely be yes.

This is based on fuzzy knowledge, I'd have to actually do research to give exact numbers. But who does research on this forum. ;D

Arthur Kalliokoski
bamccaig said:

I wonder if we could predict a velocity that could nearly guarantee reaching the Sun.

Removing all orbital velocity (removing earths orbital speed) is easily the best way to do it, so it falls straight in.

Quote:

It seems relatively safe to launch the material into a star, but then again who knows. Maybe it would make the star unstable somehow over time

Yeah, I'm pretty sure you could throw the entire Earth into the sun and it would barely hiccup.

raynebc

One of the scientists at my work is an engineer with some experience dealing with nuclear power. I asked him once about removing nuclear waste from the planet and he indicated that it's good in theory, except if there's a problem such as a shuttle explosion, then a contained problem was just turned into a contamination disaster. It's safer to improve the technology to deal with the waste on the planet's surface.

It would be nice if renewables become more efficient than nuclear, but if similar effort is spent on improving nuclear, it may possibly remain more efficient than renewables. Improvements in the collection of fossil fuel led to fracking and is the reason why the USA's carbon emissions have dropped so quickly. We don't have to settle on any energy technology being good enough, they can all get better.

For cooking birds, I don't know if there's a good way to make them avoid solar plants other than emitting an unpleasant noise to scare them away. I bet there would be people that would consider that cruel treatment of animals, but it's better than letting them get cooked to death.

l j

Sending anything to the sun requires a massive amount of delta-v.

bamccaig
raynebc said:

One of the scientists at my work is an engineer with some experience dealing with nuclear power. I asked him once about removing nuclear waste from the planet and he indicated that it's good in theory, except if there's a problem such as a shuttle explosion, then a contained problem was just turned into a contamination disaster. It's safer to improve the technology to deal with the waste on the planet's surface.

That's why I quickly ruled out a shuttle/rocket launch and went for a railgun approach. Of course, it would still potentially have the same dangers, but the hope would be that the system would be more reliable. Less moving parts. Though I'm not sure if railgun technology that works on a large scale even exists yet.

raynebc said:

Improvements in the collection of fossil fuel led to fracking and is the reason why the USA's carbon emissions have dropped so quickly.

Except that fracking is considered harmful for several reasons. >:(

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing#Health_risks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing#Environmental_impacts

raynebc said:

For cooking birds, I don't know if there's a good way to make them avoid solar plants other than emitting an unpleasant noise to scare them away. I bet there would be people that would consider that cruel treatment of animals, but it's better than letting them get cooked to death.

I don't think noise to scare them away has been overly effective. It's probably a short-term solution anyway. Animals are adaptive so they'd probably eventually stop being afraid of it (or just go deaf and no longer hear it ::)).

From what I've read the losses aren't necessarily harming the bird population, but then again I don't trust for-profit organizations to properly care enough about the environment to give an honest answer if that weren't the case.

Nevertheless, perhaps they could solve the problem by enclosing the mirrors/focusing beams somehow. I'm sure solutions exist. They just need to be forced to find them. A for-profit organization isn't going to go out of its way to spend extra money.

Chris Katko

Fracking is horrific. Scientifically.

I've actually been meaning to do a science video on YouTube explaining my argument for global warming. Basically, in a nutshell, even if you're a super-conservative:

- Would you be pissed if someone dumped oil on your lawn? Yes.
- Would you be pissed if someone dumped oil on your lawn and it made your kids sick? Yes.
- Would you be pissed if a corporation dumped oil on your lawn, and poisoned your kids? Yes.

So why wouldn't you be pissed if a corporation dumped poison into the AIR that then poisoned your children? Because that's literally the reason children are growing up with asthma. Their lungs have been poisoned by air pollution.

So, to hell with "global warming" for a moment, you're not "conservative" if you're okay with people poisoning your kids--you're just insane. Pollution is real. And the people who are poisoning your kids should be punished. Ignore CO2 completely. Does that mean POLLUTION and TRASH on the side of the highway magically stops existing because you don't believe it exists?

Further, what are we worried about? What's the worst negative outcome? Where's the DOWNSIDE to cleaning up our waters, forests, and air?

As for nuke power: crazy liberals will say 'omg, it lasts 10000 years'. Yeah, and how much new technology have we come up in the last ONE HUNDRED years? You telling me we won't come up with some new technology for nuclear waste over the next 9900 years of human evolution? And instead, we should build either coal, or millions of acres of solar panels and wind turbines by bulldozing animal's habitats?

raynebc said:

One of the scientists at my work is an engineer with some experience dealing with nuclear power. I asked him once about removing nuclear waste from the planet and he indicated that it's good in theory, except if there's a problem such as a shuttle explosion, then a contained problem was just turned into a contamination disaster. It's safer to improve the technology to deal with the waste on the planet's surface

Yeah, if you ever had nuclear waste explode in the air, it would coat the planet.

raynebc

I'm not sure if a railgun projectile would be much less error prone with such a large weight or travel distance.

It doesn't seem like air pollution of directly toxic chemicals or particulate matter is on a worsening trend, at least in my country. The latest EPA report on it (https://gispub.epa.gov/air/trendsreport/2018/documentation/AirTrends_Flyer.pdf) reflects as such. Of course, some countries are much worse with their pollution.

Edgar Reynaldo

@Chris Katko
It seems to me that your argument goes something like this : Someday soon we'll learn how to cure cancer, so we should all smoke and eat lots of red meat. Note (I'm a chain smoker now starting 20 years ago and I haven't been able to quit but I never try because I think it is too hard)((so I'm gambling that they'll be able to cure my cancer by the time I get it xOx). Not that I think they won't figure out better ways to handle radioactive waste, but in the mean time, it's still as harmful as ever. Leaks happen. Cave-ins happen. Then you've got contaminated aquifers. Ever heard of Flint, Michigan?

That was just lead. Just some minor brain damage, nothing to worry about like getting irradiated by your water. :/

bamccaig
raynebc said:

I'm not sure if a railgun projectile would be much less error prone with such a large weight or travel distance.

The reason I think it would be less error-prone is because the launch mechanism/power is all at the launch site. And it's all electronics and magnets. Aside from a power grid failure, and computer glitches, I'm not sure what else would be there to go wrong. Of course, I'm not an engineer, or anything like it, so I have a very basic idea of what a railgun is.

The idea is that if we can be reasonably certain that we can launch then there should be nothing else to stop us from leaving orbit at least. Presumably we could control the airspace, and track/predict obstacles (maybe we'd have to guard against terrorist missiles or something). The bigger mystery would be if the projectile once it escaped Earth's gravity would be able to make it to the Sun without being captured by some other gravity well and brought off course, or collide and spread its waste. It seems like on the one hand we have a pretty good idea what is out there, but on the other hand it seems like objects hide in the shadows until they reveal themselves so perhaps we cannot be too certain. I suppose then the question is what are the chances that such a random collision/misdirection causes the waste to make its way back to us on Earth.

It all seems pretty unlikely, but there are much more intelligent people that study these things that obviously need to be asked first. I'm just offering a stupid simple idea from a stupid simple person. Real scientists and engineers are needed to actually determine if it's feasible. :) I generally agree that it's safer to just store it on Earth, but I do still worry about the long term effects of doing so. It's 2019 so we like to believe that scientists know everything definitively, and the science gets done in like 15 minutes, and then there's cake that nobody gets to eat. But I don't think it actually works that way. It's more like 3 months of research to yield a "maybe" conclusion. 4 months of engineering a perfect machine, only to have to fix it last minute with on-the-run debugging. :D No matter how hard we try, humans can never be "certain" of really anything. Our own biology doesn't allow for it.

raynebc said:

It doesn't seem like air pollution of directly toxic chemicals or particulate matter is on a worsening trend, at least in my country. The latest EPA report on it (https://gispub.epa.gov/air/trendsreport/2018/documentation/AirTrends_Flyer.pdf) reflects as such. Of course, some countries are much worse with their pollution.

Then again, it seems like most people die of cancer these days. You have to wonder what the causes are. Though certainly many communities are being poisoned, whether it's in the water or on the job.

A random example, the steel plant operating in my city has pre-defined "benefits" for the families of loved ones that die of certain types of cancers who worked in certain jobs in the plant because cancer is absolutely linked to those dirty jobs. Those people are lucky to make 65 years old before a fast, painful death. And the families aren't getting millions. They might get 50 or 100 thousand or something.

Mind you, it's a comfortable living up until that point (in theory, if you're smart enough to save it). Of course, the plant also pollutes the city air constantly. Certain days they are releasing the waste gases and the entire west end of the city smells of sulphur/methane. It goes right though walls/windows/doors so the insides of houses/buildings/etc. all smell too. Those crossing the border from Michigan unfortunately get to be greeted by it as well.

Absolutely these companies are harming the environment and should be made to pay a price for that. If they're even allowed to at all. It's better to just shut them down and not let them, but when a community pretty much depends on the money to get by it's hard to just shut the city down. But at the very least, we should be working to phase that sort of dirty work out, and penalize those that continue to do it, working towards a future that doesn't depend on polluting the environment that we all depend on to survive. At some point, the money won't matter because the environment will become inhospitable.

Chris Katko

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/18/asthma-deaths-rise-25-amid-growing-air-pollution-crisis

In the UK alone... 1300 people are dead (every year)... just from breathing in air. 1300 people you'll never hear from again.

Quote:

There has been an increase of 43% in asthma deaths in those aged 55-64 since 2016.

Worldwide? 8 million deaths.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-air-pollution-makes-people-sick-8-million-early-deaths-each-year/

And, that doesn't include the WAY MORE amount of people whose lives are hurt (many completely disabled!) but not dying from it. I can tell you from experience that you can go through a huge amount of pain without getting near dying.

And the thing about pollution is, it's worldwide. If you pollute water HERE, it affects everyone. And vice-versa: If China pollutes air over China, it affects your air HERE.

Look up how far radiation was detected when the Chernobyl disaster happened--an incident that wasn't reported to anyone because it was inside the Iron Curtain. And nuclear sensor alarms started firing off... in IIRC, Sweden or France because we knew about it. Which highlights that even huge, heavy, particles of radioactive metals spreading can be detected countries away, then imagine how much tiny pollution particles will travel? (Also google how airstreams work. Highspeed freeways for spreading air around the world and it's how airplanes travel across the world.)

bamccaig

I just started watching a series on Netflix called "One Strange Rock" narrated by Will Smith. In the very first episode, it blows your mind how interconnected the entire planet is, and just how fragile our paradise that supports life is.

raynebc

@Edgar
Flint's mishandling of water is only related to a potential toxic waste loss of containment in the most tangential of ways. Flint changed their water supply, but didn't properly treat the water to prevent it from leaching lead out of outdated plumbing. Site selection and handling of nuclear waste is nowhere near as sloppy.

@bamccaig
Without doing a ton of research, I'd imagine that dietary problems are more likely to lead to cancer than the current level of air quality. Exposure to toxic chemicals, radiation, ground water contamination, etc. are probably also bigger factors than air quality in general but localized air pollution around specific industrial activity is surely a risk. People as a whole need (or at least want) what is produced by such industry, so they collectively deal with the consequences. Factories have to meet requirements for the waste they output, it's not like they're allowed to do absolutely anything they want unchecked.

@Chris
Sure, open bodies of water will equalize across the planet, as will the open air. A couple random studies I skim read suggested that asthma rates still are substantially worse in some countries than others, so local air quality and treatment options still make a major difference.

Neil Roy

NO RUSSIAN COLLUSION... the Trump-Russia lies are DEAD. God bless Fox News for standing up for the truth.

video

Erin Maus

the report hasn't been released yet

raynebc

The main piece of information known so far about the Mueller report is that there are probably no relevant indictments incoming. That should pretty much hammer the final nail in the collusion conspiracy theory.

Back on the topic of nuclear:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/03/us-nuclear-is-dying-but-it-produced-more-electricity-in-2018-than-ever-before/
It hadn't even occurred to me that existing plants have been producing below capacity. The comments thread for that article also has some interesting insights.

Neil Roy

Even CNN has stated "Trump is vindicated". This has been a lengthy investigation that was searching for a crime, it's absolutely ridiculous and just a leftist witch hunt.

Erin Maus

You can't indict the president.

also "leftist whitchunt" - how many indictments and charges did the Republicans get with the Benghazi/email investigations? Oh right nada.

Neil Roy

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Edgar Reynaldo

OMG it's true! Trump is a saint after all! And Satan is really Jesus!!!

raynebc

And the DNC will move the goalposts when the report has no impeachment-worthy material. They have to cater to the crazy never-Trumpers in their base after all.

Neil Roy

Very interesting 6 min video from a Princeton professor on climate change...

video

bamccaig
Arvidsson

Happer said that the "demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler."

yikes!

Edgar Reynaldo

Personally, I think we should raise the concentration of nitrous oxide in the air to 50%. ;)

Neil Roy

Gotta love this guy...

video

Fox was right, the rest of the news media were wrong and proven fake news...

video

Erin Maus

When someone using the term "fake news" unironically and isn't referring to the Onion...

Edgar Reynaldo

Read it and weep for your right to unbiased journalism... :'(

https://www.morriscreative.com/6-corporations-control-90-of-the-media-in-america/

raynebc

The MSM will obviously not hold itself accountable, but the deep state and political actors involved should have to pay for any criminal and ethics violations they committed.

Neil Roy

This was an interesting announcement! The United States will return to the moon within the next 5 years, with a manned orbital mission by next year.

video

And this is what the new Lunar command module will look like, it won't be stationary, it will be able to drive around this time, impressive!

video

Chris Katko

I haven't stopped laughing for at least 24 hours after Lord God Mueller, Patron Saint of "thoroughness and integrity" didn't give the Democrats the results they wanted so within hours of this guy they trusted to condemn Trump, they're now going "Hey... hey... let me check your numbers to see if you missed anything."

He was voted Time's 2018's 2nd place PERSON OF THE YEAR for f!@$! sakes!

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/12/11/18134803/time-2018-person-of-the-year-runner-up-robert-mueller

We go from that... to Rachel Maddow literally CRYING ON NATIONAL TELEVISION.

Imagine being so out of touch with reality, that you cry on TV... because you found out your President isn't a traitor.

video

I'm NOT a Republican. This is, objectively, F'ing hilarious.

raynebc

Her reaction sums up the leftmedia response, although most of them are better at hiding their disappointment if not their naked partisanship.

Neil Roy

Only a blithering idiot would hope that the leader of their nation fail. It's like hoping the pilot of the plane you are on crashes.

I seen this image today and burst out laughing! ;D
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Gideon Weems
 _____________________________________
< Give me something easier to digest. >
 -------------------------------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)_______
            (__)\       )/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

Neil Roy

Give me something easier to digest

Huh?! They eat grass. They have multiple stomachs designed to digest it perfectly. How about people stop listening to uneducated politicians who think farting animals are harmful to the planet?

raynebc

One of the first articles I immediately pulled up on the matter (https://phys.org/news/2019-01-scientists-breathalyze-cows-methane-emissions.html) says cows that eat corn produce much less methane, almost all of which is emitted by cows via burps instead of farts. There's probably a good case to make that if cow emissions are really such a big deal, there's better environmental benefits of diverting corn away from ethanol production back to being used as human and cattle food.

Erin Maus
NiteHackr said:

Huh?! They eat grass. They have multiple stomachs designed to digest it perfectly. How about people stop listening to uneducated politicians who think farting animals are harmful to the planet?

https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016-04/documents/us-ghg-inventory-2016-chapter-5-agriculture.pdf

How about you listen to the EPA?

...

Since my thread is locked (:D) I added a video tutorial to the beginning of the game:

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You start on a ship boarded by pirates. Once you kill them Cthulhu comes out of the water and sinks your ship. You then wake up on Isabelle Island and continue like normal. I feel it gives the game a better, more cinematic introduction.

Chris Katko

As always, your work is amazing. I salute you.

Gideon Weems
NiteHackr said:

Huh?! They eat grass.

I have never been a farmer. My father has, though. I can remember being laughed at and corrected for insisting that farmers fed their cows “grass.” Had I your persistence, I would have gotten the switch.

I agree wholeheartedly that politicians are largely uneducated in matters of actual importance to mankind, but that doesn't mean we should imitate them.

Neil Roy

This is priceless!!! ;D;D;D

video

As for all your cow farts and burps... I can't stop laughing at all of this, I've never seen such stupidity in all my life, nor would I have ever imagined people would be blaming cow farts. LMFAO!!! ;D;D;D;D;D

Edgar Reynaldo

There are roughly a billion cattle in the world[1]. Each produces on average 70 to 120 kg of methane per year. And is equivalent to 23 times its weight in CO^2 in terms of greenhouse effect[2].

That's roughly 2.3 trillion kg worth of CO^2. That's not negligible. But you can go ahead and laugh. You'll probably be dead by the time the world becomes uninhabitable, so what do you care?

Neil Roy

Excellent video! A must watch! If anyone knows about global warming, the founder of the weather channel should...

video

Chris Katko

"Global warming lie" is the dumbest thing ever.

People lie to make money. How the hell would 99% of the entire scientific establishment make money... off of telling you to "please stop polluting."

Open your brainhole, because you know it's full of crap right now.

Even the goddamn OIL COMPANIES said global warming is real because they want their kids to grow up:

https://www.carbonbrief.org/daily-brief/bp-says-co2-emissions-unsustainable-warns-on-global-warming

If scientists AND oil companies are on the same page, who is left? The fraction-of-a-fraction that governments bribe each other with compared to the TRILLIONS of oil dollars spent every year?

Even OPEC agrees: (the freakin' middle eastern OIL CARTELS agree)

https://www.opec.org/opec_web/en/press_room/2705.htm

Quote:

In Bali in 2007, we all agreed to urgently enhance and enable the full, effective and sustained implementation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. And equally important is the objective of agreeing on further commitments for Annex-I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol.

Let's put that in perspective. Saudia Arabia may have been involved in 9/11... and still believes we should reduce our man-made global warming.

So when you've got an opinion that's literally dumber than the oil companies, I'm insulted on behalf of the human race. You're not that stupid. Stop letting yourself act like it.

Neil Roy

Governments pay out billions to scientists who support global warming. That's how they make the money. The videos I shared have real scientists who state the facts.

If you pulled your head out of your asses long enough you would see that. But you believe CNN and politicians who tell you what "scientists say" more than the actual scientists!

Real science is not something we vote upon. I don't give a shit how many politicians and oil companies you get to say it is real. If the REAL science shows that it is not, than it is not real. PERIOD.

But you won't listen to the truth because you have been brainwashed and polarized with this us verses them attitude and you dare not cross over to the other side instead of simply looking into the FACTS and the REAL science.

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bamccaig

The money is in oil. If there's no environmental threat from it then there's no reason for politicians to support green initiatives. And for the most part, they don't. Politicians don't like the idea of climate change. It's a hard sell. Nobody wants it. It's inconvenient. It means we all have to make sacrifices. To believe that anybody would choose to do this out of greed is moronic. There's a lot more money to make disputing it than there is to make supporting it.

However, it's indisputable. Eventually everybody is forced to come to terms with it. It's not a made up idea. It's real. And scientists are still struggling to fully understand it. Climate is not something that can be predicted. They struggle to predict the weather with accuracy more than a few weeks out. It's too complicated. There are too many variables to account for. The best of the best can still only do so well. However, they are the best that we have.

The scientific evidence suggests that on average the globe is warming, and so are the oceans. And the science suggests that a relatively minor increase of only 2 degrees Celsius (on average, globally!) could be devastating to the ecosystems on Earth. And also that at some point it will snowball and humans won't be able to stop it anymore. It'll get out of control and just get worse WITHOUT human input. We're desperately trying to get it under control before we get to that point. It could be the difference between mass extinctions. It could be the difference between middle class and extreme poverty. If the climate of the Earth rapidly changes it could completely change everything for all of us.

Scientists are already seeing massive migrations of life in the oceans because the rise in temperature is problematic for species of fish that rely on a stable temperature to survive. The planet is full of billions of species of plants and animals, many still undiscovered, that evolved to specialize in their existing habitat. The rate of change to the climate caused by human activity is far too swift for evolution to keep up. Evolution takes millions of years. We're talking about significant changes to the climate in only a couple hundred years. This very well could result in mass extinctions as life struggles to keep up. Not all life. There will be simpler life forms, such as insects and microscopic organisms that will continue to flourish. But the more complex life will struggle to adjust. And that includes people.

I don't know about you, but the summers are already pretty unbearable without air conditioning. In fact, it's a struggle for my air conditioners to even keep up with the heat and I live in a tiny single bedroom apartment in Northern Ontario. We live in the North where temperatures are already on average cooler than regions closer to the equator. We really don't want this to get any more extreme. It's already a struggle.

I personally don't agree with Edgar. I know you really are this stupid. Your argument doesn't hold up.

Politicians are paying scientists for this? So who is paying the politicians? There are two major groups:

  • Lobbyists, with deep pockets. These are generally the oil industry. The ones that LOSE money to climate change actions. These people are not thrilled about it, and they are the main reason that politicians haven't cracked down very hard on it. You cannot sell climate change to these people. They pay billions to bad scientists to produce inconclusive studies or misleading studies to contradict the climate science.


  • Tax payers. You and I. What the hell do we want with climate change? We don't gain anything from it. It hurts us. It's inconvenient. That's not an easy sell for a politician. "Give me your money, so I can pay scientists to do bad science, so that we all have to make sacrifices?"

Why the hell would ANYBODY do this if it wasn't real? There's literally no gain for anybody. The relatively minor boosts for a fraction of the population that is doing work in related fields is inconsequential compared to the rest of the workforce. There's not enough "money" involved in climate change to motivate a scam of this scale.

If you seriously believe this to be a big conspiracy then you need to give your a head a good shake. The science conclusively says that climate change is real, and is a serious threat, and we only have a short time to act before it could potentially be too late. Be honest with us, be honest with yourself, and do some genuine research. It's not too late to change your mind. You don't even need to change your mind. You just need to open it to the possibility that you don't know everything. That maybe you're wrong about some things. That simple act can lead you on a very rewarding journey to enlightenment, and along the way can help the entire planet by suppressing bad ideas, no longer giving stupid people an excuse to continue being ignorant.

Neil Roy

If you think there's a methane problem now, wait until everyone turns vegan! LMAO... sorry bam, but it's very disputable, the fact that Al Gore stated that by 2014 the north pole would be melted away and it ended up having MORE ice than ever makes it VERY disputable!!! Saying it is a fact, doesn't make it a fact, sorry my liberal, brainwashed friend, but REAL scientists who know the REAL science that aren't being paid off, know it is a fraud and the scientist who STARTED the whole CO2, global warming idea, the one Al Gore got his education from started to see in 1988 that his idea of global warming was false and stated that the data didn't back up the idea in 1991, and HE WAS THE ONE WHO STARTED THE WHOLE GLOBAL WARMING IDEA AND RESEARCH!!! When he stated that he was wrong and that years of study showed his idea was false based on the data in 1991, Al Gore called him senile, yet he was the one who taught Al Gore!!!

In 2005 they studied the ice core samples that seemed to indicate that CO2 caused global warming 5 years before and much to their surprise, they discovered that not only did CO2 not cause global warming, but the reverse was true, that global warming caused Co2 to increase!!!

So no, it is NOT indisputable, it is very disputable... you are flat out WRONG, the science, and the guy that started the whole thing said so back in 1991!!!

Oh, as for summers being warmer, bullshit! I don't own an air conditioner, never have and I do just fine! And I live in the same neck of the woods that you do! The problem is you don't get outside enough when the weather is getting warmer and get used to it. The real problem is TOO MANY AIR CONDITIONERS!!! Seriously, if you get out when it is warming up and get used to the heat, you will find it is quite comfortable. If you sit inside an air conditioned home all day, you will find it scorching hot due to the difference and your body not adjusting, that's normal, not global warming. I go for walks in the middle of summer, in the sun, on hot days and have no problem. If I can handle it, so can you!

In fact, the past couple of summers in Ontario have been quite cool. In 2015 we didn't even get a summer, it didn't get warm like it usually does AT ALL! I remember that year, I was like, "what happened to summer"?! 2014 was a real hot one for sure, but we haven't had one like 2014 since, they have all been cooler. I actually love the summer and warm weather.

Also, statistics show we haven't had any warming what so ever since around 1998, it's been pretty much flatlined when you look at the averages, and cooler lately.

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bamccaig
NiteHackr said:

If you think there's a methane problem now, wait until everyone turns vegan! LMAO... sorry bam, but it's very disputable, the fact that Al Gore stated that by 2014 the north pole would be melted away and it ended up having MORE ice than ever makes it VERY disputable!!! Saying it is a fact, doesn't make it a fact, sorry my liberal, brainwashed friend, but REAL scientists who know the REAL science that aren't being paid off, know it is a fraud and the scientist who STARTED the whole CO2, global warming idea, the one Al Gore got his education from started to see in 1988 that his idea of global warming was false and stated that the data didn't back up the idea in 1991, and HE WAS THE ONE WHO STARTED THE WHOLE GLOBAL WARMING IDEA AND RESEARCH!!! When he stated that he was wrong and that years of study showed his idea was false based on the data in 1991, Al Gore called him senile, yet he was the one who taught Al Gore!!!

Care to name the scientist so that we can fact check your claim?

NiteHackr said:

Oh, as for summers being warmer, ! I don't own an air conditioner, never have and I do just fine! And I live in the same neck of the woods that you do! The problem is you don't get outside enough when the weather is getting warmer and get used to it. The real problem is TOO MANY AIR CONDITIONERS!!! Seriously, if you get out when it is warming up and get used to the heat, you will find it is quite comfortable. If you sit inside an air conditioned home all day, you will find it scorching hot due to the difference and your body not adjusting, that's normal, not global warming. I go for walks in the middle of summer, in the sun, on hot days and have no problem. If I can handle it, so can you!

It's easy to live in the heat. I rather enjoy heat, UNLESS I'm riding my motorcycle, in which case too hot really is too hot (you need to wear a lot of heavy gear to balance the risks).

Sleeping in the heat is the hard part. When it's 25 or 30 Celsius during the night time it's very difficult to sleep. You can go ahead and try to deny this, but it's an established fact that the temperature affects the quality of sleep in humans.

Being a heavier guy, at least based on the photographs I've seen of you, I don't suppose you're immune to this, though I know from experience when I was a lot thinner/lighter the heat didn't bother me as much as it does now. Nevertheless, even at the best of times, extreme heat made sleep very difficult (even when I was a teenager of only 110 lbs).

Now that I'm pushing 170 - 180 lbs the heat effects me even more than ever before. My body is naturally warm. My wife calls me a furnace in bed (badumcha). In the summer I often wake up in a swimming pool of sweat, even with A/C on both sides of the apartment, which we're lucky if it keeps the temperature in the low 70s F (21 or 22 C).

It's possible the air is less humid where you live and that could play a significant role in how uncomfortable the heat is. The humidity seemed to be pretty harsh the last several years during the summer, making it just sticky and unbearable to sleep in without A/C.

raynebc

Better bed sheets might help with your body's heat management while you sleep.

Edgar Reynaldo

@Neil

Sigh.

You should really do some more research before listening to all those crack pot scientists you've been digging up.

Arctic sea ice volume is on a declining trend, and it has been for the last 40 years. http://psc.apl.uw.edu/research/projects/arctic-sea-ice-volume-anomaly/

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The fact that we're in the middle of a local increase does nothing to dispute the fact that the long term trend is large volumes of ice loss.

EDIT
assert(meteoroligist != atmospheric_scientist);

EDIT2
Another interesting thing to note is that the temperature can remain the same, while at the same time adding energy. A pool of water at 0^C has more energy than a cube of ice at 0^C given equivalent masses. It takes a lot of energy to melt that ice cube though, and that's what we're seeing in the arctic.

It's called Enthalpy of Fusion.

Erin Maus

Did you know Mississippi wanted to ban public schools in retaliation for Brown vs Board of Education? They realized it wouldn't work because Mississippi didn't have private schools. ;D

I was in Atlanta and went to the Civil Rights museum. It's scary to think a lot of those racist, hateful people are still alive and vote.

Neil Roy
bamccaig said:

Care to name the scientist so that we can fact check your claim?

LMAO... wow... I have posted several videos that show a ton of scientists, but you all refuse to watch them. I guess you're afraid to learn the truth.

You should really do some more research before listening to all those crack pot scientists you've been digging up.

Funny, I was going to say the same thing to you. But I'm still laughing about cow farts. :D8-);D

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Edgar Reynaldo

bamccaig, kindly post the link to the discussion flowchart.

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Neil Roy

You want real scientists, here, let me repost. These videos contain real scientists, and LOTS of them...

video

video

video

video

And if you ignore all of the above videos, check out this very short 3 mins video below about "Climate gate", where climate data was altered to support Global Warming. Check it out at least! And this was from 10 years ago...

video

Chris Katko
NiteHackr said:

But you won't listen to the truth because you have been brainwashed and polarized with this us verses them attitude and you dare not cross over to the other side instead of simply looking into the FACTS and the REAL science.

You sound exactly like the liberal nutjobs talking about rape culture and the patriarchy, and if a woman says "I'm not oppressed" it's because she's secretly "internalized" the misogyny of her oppressors. What a beautifully wrapped up worldview with no holes in the logic to allow reality to come through. Like wrapping yourself in the mental equivalent of a thick blanket hoping light never pours in through the cracks.

You can't talk about science... and ignore 99% of scientists and pass off literally every counter-argument to yours as "secret government conspiracy." You can't invent a conspiracy to cover up a lack of arguments.

You're welcome to be an ignorant person. But I am not going to idly sit by without challenge when you try to persuade people to be as ignorant as you.

It's possible global warming is manmade. It's possible many of the alarmist claims by the media are wrong about global warming. None of that matters. Because if we clean up our act and we're right, we win by not dying. If we clean up our act and we're wrong... we still win by living longer healthier lives.

It's Pascel's dilemma. If you die and you believe in God, you go to Heaven. If you die and God doesn't exist, you've lost nothing. If you don't believe in God and God is real, you've lost everything.

You're basically arguing that the equivalent of humanity-as-a-whole should think... We shouldn't believe in God because he "might" not be real.

If pollution isn't real, go outside right now, turn on your car. Go find some kids at your local park, sit them behind your car and tell them to suck some exhaust fumes in. Because it's all just a conspiracy so you're not doing anything wrong at all, and even if you were, the "free market" would somehow make parks that prevent cars from spewing toxic air into childrens' lungs.

And if doing that is somehow morally wrong, why isn't it wrong when a corporation you can't put a face on, does it to millions of people? If it's wrong to shoot someone, then it's still wrong for a corporation to shoot ten thousand people.

bamccaig
NiteHackr said:

You want real scientists, here, let me repost.

I want the name of this scientist:

NiteHackr said:

If you think there's a methane problem now, wait until everyone turns vegan! LMAO... sorry bam, but it's very disputable, the fact that Al Gore stated that by 2014 the north pole would be melted away and it ended up having MORE ice than ever makes it VERY disputable!!! Saying it is a fact, doesn't make it a fact, sorry my liberal, brainwashed friend, but REAL scientists who know the REAL science that aren't being paid off, know it is a fraud and the scientist who STARTED the whole CO2, global warming idea, the one Al Gore got his education from started to see in 1988 that his idea of global warming was false and stated that the data didn't back up the idea in 1991, and HE WAS THE ONE WHO STARTED THE WHOLE GLOBAL WARMING IDEA AND RESEARCH!!! When he stated that he was wrong and that years of study showed his idea was false based on the data in 1991, Al Gore called him senile, yet he was the one who taught Al Gore!!!

You were obviously quite excited about it. You seemed pretty convinced about it. Why don't you name this scientist?

I'm assuming because he never stated that global warming was false. He stated at the time (in the 80s) there was insufficient data to confirm that the models were accurate and that we should cautious about doing anything drastic until we know more, but that we should have the data needed in the next 10 to 15 years (so by the mid-00s). Further, his name was attached to an article that he had no part in. It was unethical to attach his name to it. People readily lie to get their way. I'm sure Jesus would vehemently disapprove. ::)

Neil Roy

You're welcome to be an ignorant person.

And so are you.

As for my personal beliefs, the last time I checked, we were discussing the Global Warming/Climate Change hoax. Not my personal beliefs.

But I can understand how you would want to change the subject after I provided so much evidence from real scientists who refute the hoax. Turn this into a religious debate... sorry, but I'm not biting on that hook in here again.

As for pollution, we've done an amazing job reducing pollution. But pollution isn't what this is all about, it is about the myth that CO2 causes global warming, and that was disproven back in 1991 by the person that started the whole idea in the first place.

If you watch the videos I presented, you will see the idea of preventing global warming JUST IN CASE it is real is a bad one as well as there are people suffering as a result of some of the limitations governments are placing to prevent something that isn't a problem. Here in Canada alone, today we start to pay much more at the gas pumps for this lie in the form of a carbon tax, like that will prevent anything. The cost of everything will go up because of this lie. People in African cannot use their abundant coal deposits to power electric plants for their people who need it desperately but are forced to use solar panels which only generate enough power to power one light bulb or one fridge (for a medical facility that treats the poor, this is a real problem), you would know that if you watched the videos where they interview these people.

But you don't care... you want to burden society with a huge expense to prevent a problem that doesn't exist while we have poor and needy that need help where that money could be better spent!

Anyhow, I am out of this conversation. It's like talking to a wall. No amount of evidence will convince you people to stop believing this lie.

bamccaig
NiteHackr said:

...and that was disproven back in 1991 by the person that started the whole idea in the first place.

What was his name again?

Neil Roy
bamccaig said:

What was his name again?

Watch the videos I posted and find out. It's in there. I'm done with this.

bamccaig

bush_doing_it_wrong_1.jpg

Neil Roy

By the way, "record cold temps to start April"...

https://www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/coldest-april-temperatures-on-record-2018-yyz-pearson-ontario-ottawa-toronto-spring-statistics/100006

...but I am sure you all will be able to explain the colder temps with global warming. ;D 8-) :D

bamccaig

I don't have to. They addressed that themselves. If you weren't so lazy maybe you would read your own sources.

COLD APRIL, BUT YOU CLAIM GLOBAL WARMING?

A common misunderstanding with global warming is that it should mean every single location heats up equally and we should never experience cold if our world is warming. As you can imagine, our atmosphere and the intertwined processes are complex. It isn't a simple cause and effect relationship and it's easy to treat weather and climate as the same entity. To understand the important difference, watch the video below.

The video link is here: https://players.brightcove.net/1942203455001/default_default/index.html?videoId=5703491738001

Your move, loser. :D

Neil Roy

As I said, I already knew you would be able to explain it with global warming.

If real scientists renouncing it won't change your mind and record cold temps won't convince you, than nothing will.

Erin Maus

But record highs don't count...

Edgar Reynaldo

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Change_in_Average_Temperature.png

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bamccaig

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Neil Roy

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Edgar Reynaldo

The polar ice cap may not have disappeared entirely, but he still wasn't wrong.

http://psc.apl.uw.edu/research/projects/arctic-sea-ice-volume-anomaly/piomas-monthly-thickness-map

It shows the extent of the ice is about 50% of what it was 30 years ago.

But nah, it's not shrinking.

Polybios
NiteHackr said:

REAL scientists who know the REAL science

Definition: A scientist is a "REAL scientist" if his statements can be used to corroborate my opinion. Otherwise, he is merely an ordinary scientist.

Definition: "REAL science" is the whole of statements of "REAL scientists".

Lemma: When assessing the argumentative value of two statements a and b, a takes precedence over b if a is part of "REAL science" and b is not. Conversely, b takes precedence over a if b is part of "REAL science" and a is not.

Theorem: REAL science is always right
Proof: follows from the lemma

As REAL science is always right, I choose to base my opinion on REAL science only.

Theorem: My opinion is always right
Proof: Since REAL science is always right and my opinion is exclusively based on REAL science, my opinion is always right.

Corollary: I know the truth! The REAL truth!

Neil Roy

;D
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raynebc

https://carbonengineering.com/

This is a much more attractive way to reduce CO2 concentration than wrecking the economy.

bamccaig

That sounds like a bit of a scam. Their first magic technology just "captures" carbon dioxide. At which point what do they do with it? Why, store it underground of course. That's probably a costly and temporary solution to the problem. And eventually it's going to leak out and do all of the same harm, but at double or triple the cost. And nevermind the other toxic gases that they'd apparently let go. Apparently carbon dioxide is the only one that matters. ::)

Their second magic technology turns air, water, and carbon dioxide back into gasoline, diesel, etc. I don't know about you, but that seems incredibly unlikely to be something we're capable of actually doing. If we could, we'd have no need for the oil industry anymore. They of course don't explain how this works. It's just magic. I'd bet they take their usual diesel source, and mix in a tiny fraction of whatever chemical bonds they're able to produce from the inputs, and pass it off as magically recycling the carbon dioxide; when in reality, it's probably more like hiding the carbon dioxide in the fuel only to be released back into the atmosphere without providing any energy of its own to power the machinery that burns the fuel.

I have no complaints about this sort of approach to being "green". I think those are innovative ideas to help the environment while still being productive. However, I also think that their technology needs to be independently tested to prove that it really works and isn't just a pretty veil to let polluters smile and wave. "Proprietary technology" that does magic is basically just more corruption until proven otherwise.

I don't think storing the CO2 is useful at all. Eventually it's going to be compromised. However, once captured perhaps it could be fed to plants in a controlled system to produce oxygen again naturally while also producing plants. There are probably theoretical solutions, but I highly doubt they're economical.

And if none of that is economical then it isn't any better than regulations in that regard.

Of course, that aside, the environment is far more important than the economy is. So if we can't figure out a way to protect the environment without hurting the economy then we SHOULD hurt the economy. Because ultimately it's doing more harm than good. Which means a booming economy may not be as good as you think it is.

raynebc

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
-Arthur C. Clarke

It's nowhere near as far-fetched as you seem to think it is. You might want to look at the people backing this company and these kinds of CO2 to fuel technologies and decide whether you consider them all to be suckers.

Wrecking the economy for a theoretical benefit is not worthwhile when there are ways to capture carbon emissions while helping the economy. Plus it's how you get more people to sign on to support it.

Edit: Supposedly they're claiming that they'll be able to capture carbon dioxide for about $100 per ton.

bamccaig

Seems a Harvard professor and students are behind it. Which is encouraging. However, that doesn't mean they've solved all the problems and it's practical today. It means theoretically it works, and they need to overcome many challenges to put it into practice on a scale that will actually help.

video

According to that video, around the 5:14 mark, a rather massive array is used to collect CO2 from the equivalent of 300,000 cars per year. Which is awesome, but if you look at that in the grand scheme of things it would have a negligible effect despite the amount of space that it takes. It's a massive installation, and the entire installation will need to be constantly monitored and maintained to continue working too. Which on the one hand will create jobs, but on the other hand it'll impact the cost of the industries that need it, and the costs will get passed down to consumers, driving prices up. And all of the greedy conservatives and republicans will bitch that their costs are going up. And politicians won't have any part of that so it won't be regulated, and ultimately it won't be done.

Companies are not going to volunteer to do this. You'll need to regulate them to force them down this path. And it will definitely impact their bottom line. The economy on the whole might not be impacted fully if some of the loss can be gained again, but that sounds way too good to be true. I'm sure it'll just be a big expense.

From the sounds of it (based on another video from a few years earlier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5SqwSU8ns4) the chemistry to actual produce the fuel takes a long time. The demo scale model took about a day in a box the size of a large shed to produce half a litre of petroleum. Which I think makes sense. We've known about splitting water into hydrogen for centuries, but it's a timely process. Otherwise, we'd just pump water into our cars, instantly turn it into hydrogen and oxygen, and burn it. It will be interesting where this technology goes, but that's no excuse to hold off on regulations today. We know there is a problem today, and we cannot wait until tomorrow to solve it.

Neil Roy

8-)
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Erin Maus

Scientist: updates worldview with new information
Child: incorrectly simplifies phenomena at a juvenile level

Sounds about right.

(Global cooling was never a thing btw. Global warming is correct but people like you don't understand that an overall warming leads to more extreme variance in weather so it's been called climate change to be more inclusive.)

bamccaig

Or, to put it more bluntly, they tried to dumb it down so people like NiteHackr could comprehend it, but apparently they haven't dumbed it down enough yet...

Neil Roy

8-)
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Erin Maus

Mainstream media is bad except when it backs up my beliefs!!

raynebc

The point is they've been making dire predictions for decades with poor accuracy. Not everybody trusts their motives for pushing laws that involve the transfer of money, especially when considering garbage packages like the green new deal that mixes some green energy policies with tens of trillions of dollars of Socialism.

Neil Roy

8-)
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In fact, some WW2 planes had to land in Greenland during WW2 and they were left there once the war was over. Decades later they were discovered again under a huge amount of ice they had to dig down into a long ways in order to recover them. Over the years that is how much ice had built up over them, which is hardly warming.

Just do a search for "The Lost Squadron" online to find the story about them.

Edgar Reynaldo

So Neil, you were alive in 1045AD and you took that picture in Greenland? You're older than I thought. ;)

bamccaig

First tell me how you got an HD photograph of Greenland in 1045 AD. I think that's where you need to start.

raynebc said:

The point is they've been making dire predictions for decades with poor accuracy. Not everybody trusts their motives for pushing laws that involve the transfer of money, especially when considering garbage packages like the green new deal that mixes some green energy policies with tens of trillions of dollars of Socialism.

Surely you're not too dense to understand that the science is somewhat guesswork. There are far too many variables to predict exactly when calamity is going to strike. They can predict that the climate will be affected in unpredictable ways, and that the planet will change significantly is a short period of time, but they cannot give you specifics. It's not magic. It's science. It's computer models fed with as many variables as the top scientists can feed. It's still a long way from perfect.

What's alarming is that the right side of politics is highly skeptical of science which is generally transparent and open, but highly trusting of money sources like oil conglomerates and monopolies. Literally groups that will stop at nothing to maximize profits. Surely those groups are trustworthy.

A good scientist seeks the truth. And the entire structure of the scientific community is intended to prevent corruption. Individual scientists can lie and cheat for money, but the overall community will correct for that when they analyze results and attempt to reproduce them. Science is a self-correcting force. It can only be as corrupt as every scientist in the entire world can be bought. Some of them can be. Generally the ones that aren't very smart. Those are the ones that Neil keeps referencing. But the majority of them are not stupid. Most of them are passionate about the job that they do. They need money to survive, and deserve pretty good money for the nature of their work and their background, but they aren't on the same level as the oil CEOs and kings and princes that are rolling in the billions. They're probably lucky to make $200k a year. $120k is probably more typical, and many of them are probably making a relatively weak income that many of us also make.

Also, the right side of politics tends to believe in a magician in the sky. Without any evidence for one whatsoever. And they generally act on that believe out of emotion rather than rationale. It's not a good indicator for being right. It might be a good indicator for being powerful. But power corrupts.

Neil Roy

So Neil, you were alive in 1045AD and you took that picture in Greenland?

Obviously not, but the records show that to be true as I already stated, there was a squadron of WW2 bombers that were forced to land in Greenland in WW2 and were left there until decades later. During that time a huge amount of ice and snow built up over the planes so much so that it took a lot of effort to burrow down through the ice to get to them and recover one of them. This illustrates just how much it has built up in Greenland in a short period of time. I'll try and find the story and link to it... if anyone is interested in the truth anyhow, somehow I doubt anyone will accept this either, but there is hope.

<searches> Here it is. They are buried under more than 300 feet of ice that has built up over them since 1942, now that a lot of ice. I can't see how anyone can think there has been any sort of warming when that much ice has built up since 1942.

https://www.livescience.com/63423-lost-squadron-unearthed-greenland-glacier.html

raynebc

Bam, surely you're not too dense to see that the left side of politics believes in plenty of fantasy itself, such as that humans can change their sex, that women earn substantially less than men in the USA for the same exact work, etc. When they get the models and other science demonstrably right, I'll believe their predictions. Until then it's best to take reasonable steps and not act like it's the end of the world, because history will probably reveal that to be another gross exaggeration (edit: If not an outright lie).

bamccaig
raynebc said:

Bam, surely you're not too dense to see that the left side of politics believes in plenty of fantasy itself, such as that humans can change their sex, that women earn substantially less than men in the USA for the same exact work, etc. When they get the models and other science demonstrably right, I'll believe their predictions. Until then it's best to take reasonable steps and not act like it's the end of the world, because history will probably reveal that to be another gross exaggeration (edit: If not an outright lie).

I agree with you. The extreme left is just as corrupt as the extreme right. I guess that's why I'm just left of central. And why I vote for grassroots candidates and parties.

I agree that projections are probably overly cautious. I mean, if your research indicates that there may be a threat to the planet and/or humanity, do you tell the world exactly when you predict things will END or do you subtract a little bit of time to give you a hope?

I don't think the science says it will be the end of the world. It says that the world will change a lot, many species will probably go extinct by the rapid changes in climate, rising oceans could flood out the coasts which are not prepared for such a thing, and weather extremes may intensify.

I wonder how much money it costs to throw away several major, multi-million people cities. What does it cost to build such a city? A billion? 10? 1000?

How many poor and middle class people will die as a result of these catastrophes?

Hopefully we won't have to find out the answers to these questions.

Neil Roy

Bam, the question you didn't ask is how many poor will suffer due to climate change fraud? What many do not know is that the poor in nations like African are suffering NOW because they signed agreements not to use coal, of which they have an abundance. They could build power plants which would help their poor but instead, there is one medical clinic which serves the poor which is forced to only use one solar cell they can afford and that single cell can ONLY power a single lightbulb, or their fridge and that's it! Naturally they run the fridge to keep samples cool etc. There's families down there that have to burn some very toxic substances in order to heat their homes which leads to a high mortality from it when it could all be solved by building coal power plants.

Many people in our wealthy western nations think, what harm could be done by cutting back... JUST IN CASE... well, this is the harm. It is needless cost for us, and something which is not affordable for poor nations who end up screwed over in order to save the planet from something that simply isn't a problem.

Here in Canada we're already paying for it, our cost of fuel just went up 20 cents a litre due to the foolish carbon tax (and that won't help anything except it's an excuse to rob the taxpayer, it's basically just an additional tax).

The fact is, it was already discovered way back in 2005 that global warming causes CO2, but people ignore this fact. Politics have taken over and real science that refutes it is ignored and people who are against the lies are called "global warming deniers".

Niunio

I'm 42 years old. In my town (Burgos, Spain) more than 30 years ago it snowed every day of every winter, about 50 centimetres or more per-winter. It snowed once in May and other day in June (really). Last 10 years it snowed only one or two days in 3 winters (so 7 winters it didn't snowed at all) and never more than 15 centimeters. Period

Edgar Reynaldo
Neil Roy

8-)
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Nuino, there tends to be LESS snowfall in COLDER weather. But the amount of snowfall does not indicate warmer or colder conditions. The weather has not significantly changed, certainly the temps have not went up like they were forecast to. We have had some cold years, some warmer ones... that's called WEATHER... it varies with the sun. It has in the past when we had much warmer trends, and much colder. That's normal weather, PERIOD

Edgar Reynaldo

Neil repeat after me I will not use memes for argument's I will use scientific data provided by real Studies by actual scientist not meteorologist by climatologist who know what the f*** you're talking about thanks.

Neil Roy

8-)
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Erin Maus

NiteHackr is going to be dead before global warming is irreversible. He personally can't do anything to make it worse.

It literally doesn't matter what he thinks, for him or others.

Neil Roy

8-)
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raynebc

@Aaron The AGW hysteria types are claiming that we have only a decade or so before warming is irreversible. They might call you a climate science denier for pushing that deadline further away by decades. I'd suggest instead that the claim that the CO2 concentration will reach a point where it can't ever be reversed is possibly an anti-science position.

It has been pointed out in this thread that technology is being continually improved to capture carbon dioxide and store it in a stable form or convert it to liquid fuel (which is considered more or less carbon neutral since it is immediately recycling the CO2 instead of releasing CO2 trapped long ago). As humans trend toward being carbon neutral, and also capture CO2 already in the atmosphere, the added plant life that thrives from high CO2 concentrations will further help remove CO2 from the air.

As long as developing countries can get their emissions in check and the developed countries can stay the course, the CO2 concentration will decline.

bamccaig

That was really fun to read through. Thank you for posting it. I was slightly disappointed that I didn't post in it, but not entirely surprised, and admittedly relieved that I at least didn't post anything embarassing. :)

A random idea that just came to mind (I'm not stoned... yet): maybe we could start a thread whose purpose was just to post a link to an interesting thread from A.cc's past. Whether it's programming related, controversial, just lots of trolling, or whatever. Something interesting to read, something to reminisce and remember if you were around for it. I suggest we don't post too frequently in it because long threads take time to read for people with busy lives, but we'd have to post frequently enough to keep it alive so it doesn't get locked.

We also don't want to pull people away from this thread because it would be a shame to let it lock now. Perhaps we could just periodically add a link to this thread even so that conversation could happen around it, but we'd have interesting links in between. The only caveat is that old threads are locked and it's sometimes hard to fight the urge to respond to posts that you disagree with. And we wouldn't want to necessarily rehash past flame wars here, albeit, it may be good for keeping this thread alive (and bad if Matthew uses it as an excuse to lock it!).

It literally doesn't matter what he thinks, for him or others.

Well, it matters to the extent that other people respect him enough to affect their own beliefs and behaviours.

Oh. Yeah. So it literally doesn't matter what he thinks. :P

raynebc said:

As long as developing countries can get their emissions in check and the developed countries can stay the course, the CO2 concentration will decline.

Those damned third world countries striving to be wealthy like us. What right do they have to pollute this planet full of our pollution that has made our lives so luxurious and pleasant!?

Developing countries are only going to regulate their emissions if already developed countries are willing to do so to the extreme. For the same reason that somebody struggling through poverty (that they were born into) isn't going to hesitate to commit crimes against somebody born into wealth to live an easier life. That's just human nature.

Developed countries are not "staying the course". We're continuing to increase production and pollution. Leading politicians in both the USA and Canada are backing out of their obligations to reduce emissions. They're doubling down on the oil industry. I wonder why. Surely the science has told them this is safe and reliable. Or wait, maybe it was the monopoly guy.

One thing is for sure. If the climate does get out of control the group of people that will be least affected are the rich and wealthy. It won't even phase them unless conditions get so extreme that the human population dies out (basically all potential subservients die). They will not give a moments notice to the destruction of millions of species of life, many of which may be completely undiscovered so future generations will have to discover them through indirect means the way we discover the dinosaurs. They also won't shed a tear or dollar for the struggles of billions of people, including pretty much everyone you ever met, including your offspring and any hope of your genes succeeding if such a thing exists.

The rich and wealthy like the oil industry big wigs, and to a lesser extent the politicians that deny climate change and give these billion (if not trillion) dollar industries every opportunity to fuck us over.

Niunio
NiteHackr said:

Nuino, there tends to be LESS snowfall in COLDER weather.

Ok, I'll rebuild phrase myself:

I'm 42 years old. In my town (Burgos, Spain) more than 30 years ago we were about 1 to -20 Celsius every day of every winter and 50 centimetres of snow or more per-winter. It snowed once in May and other day in June (really). Last 10 years it were negative only one week or so per year, and it snowed one or two days in 3 winters (so 7 winters it didn't snowed at all) and never more than 15 centimeters. Period

Better?

raynebc

Rich countries will have to share technology with poor countries in order to help them have clean energy, etc. I'd rather that than providing them with cash, which could be misappropriated. According to the EPA, the USA's CO2 emissions appeared to be trending upward until 2007 and have since been trending down:
https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2019-02/documents/us-ghg-inventory-2019-chapter-2-trends.pdf

Peoples' absolute hatred of "the rich" can be a bit sickening, but they make a convenient scapegoat for all of your pain and suffering, don't they, Bam?

Edgar Reynaldo

Nice report. Try looking at it a little more closely next time. CO^2 has remained steady since 1990. It's the CO^2 equivalent of other gases that were reduced.

epa.gov said:

Gas/Source                 1990            2005            2013            2014            2015            2016            2017

CO2                        5,122.00        6,131.50        5,524.00        5,574.90        5,427.00        5,310.50        5,279.70

Fossil Fuel Combustion     4,739.50        5,745.50        5,158.40        5,202.00        5,051.20        4,966.00        4,920.50
Transportation             1,469.10        1,857.00        1,682.70        1,721.60        1,734.00        1,779.10        1,794.20
Electric Power Sector      1,820.80        2,400.90        2,039.60        2,039.10        1,903.00        1,811.20        1,734.00
Industrial                   857.40          853.40          839.90          819.90          808.80          808.50          817.60
Residential                  338.10          357.80          329.20          347.00          318.30          293.30          298.50
Commercial                   226.50          226.70          224.60          233.00          245.80          232.40          234.80
U.S. Territories              27.60           49.70           42.50           41.40           41.40           41.40           41.40

Which means basically no one has done much about CO^2 at all. Given that we are at record high concentrations of CO^2 in the atmoshpere

EDIT
raynebc you're right I misread the table. Also I am physically unable to reply to this thread anymore on my phone and my desktop doesn't have enough ram to open more then about 8 tabs. But u can edit and send to top. Mwahahaha
<\EDIT>

The history of CO^2 for the last 800,000 years can be easily seen in this time lapse animation of the graph of atmospheric CO^2 by NOAA and the ERST.

https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/history.html

You can see that it is currently higher than it has EVER been, around 400 ppm CO^2 concentration. The farther back in time you go the lower it goes until it reaches it's natural cycle with the ice ages.

The fact of the matter is that we are too braindead to know what concentrations of CO^2 higher than 3-4 hundred ppm will do to our planet.

NiteHackr believes the high CO^2 concentration is driven by temperature, and not the other way around. I'll just quote this :

Ice cores from Antarctica show that at the end of recent ice ages, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere usually started to rise only after temperatures had begun to climb. There is uncertainty about the timings, partly because the air trapped in the cores is younger than the ice, but it appears the lags might sometimes have been 800 years or more.
Initial warming

This proves that rising CO2 was not the trigger that caused the initial warming at the end of these ice ages – but no climate scientist has ever made this claim. It certainly does not challenge the idea that more CO2 heats the planet.

We know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas because it absorbs and emits certain frequencies of infrared radiation. Basic physics tells us that gases with this property trap heat radiating from the Earth, that the planet would be a lot colder if this effect was not real and that adding more CO2 to the atmosphere will trap even more heat.

...

The ice ages show that temperature can determine CO2 as well as CO2 driving temperature. Some sceptics – not scientists – have seized upon this idea and are claiming that the relation is one way, that temperature determines CO2 levels but CO2 levels do not affect temperature.

To repeat, the evidence that CO2 is a greenhouse gas depends mainly on physics, not on the correlation with past temperature, which tells us nothing about cause and effect. And while the rises in CO2 a few hundred years after the start of interglacials can only be explained by rising temperatures, the full extent of the temperature increases over the following 4000 years can only be explained by the rise in CO2 levels.

So go ahead NiteHackr, try and convince me and science and the rest of the world that CO^2 is not a greenhouse gas. I'd love to see you argue with physics. Prove you're right, and you'd probably win a Nobel Prize. ;)

Or you can stick your head back in the sand. ::)

Neil Roy

8-)
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raynebc
raynebc said:

According to the EPA, the USA's CO2 emissions appeared to be trending upward until 2007 and have since been trending down

Edgar, you do know how to read, don't you? The USA has been doing something about it.

Neil Roy

A really intellectual meeting of scientists discussing some of the problems with climate change science. Warning, your brain may explode while watching this, it goes really in depth and has some interesting conclusions I did not expect to be honest.

video

Edgar Reynaldo

EDIT
raynebc, see my edit to my earlier post. I actually did misread it so... anyway the US actually has done quite a bit to cut emissions, considering it went from 5000 in 1990 to 6000 in 2007 and then reversed the trend completely and went back down to 5000 in 2017

Neil,
I just wasted 5 minutes and 26 seconds of my life watching the introduction to your video, and learned nothing. Post some science, or GTFO ;)

If you're going to post 40 min videos give a synopsis or summary of the key points, otherwise I'm not going to waste my time watching it.

Neil, Is CO^2 a greenhouse gas or not?

Wikipedia said:

Human activities since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (around 1750) have produced a 40% increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO
2), from 280 ppm in 1750 to 406 ppm in early 2017.[6] This increase has occurred despite the uptake of more than half of the emissions by various natural "sinks" involved in the carbon cycle.[7][8] The vast majority of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions (i.e., emissions produced by human activities) come from combustion of fossil fuels, principally coal, oil, and natural gas, with additional contributions coming from deforestation, changes in land use, soil erosion and agriculture (including livestock).[9][10]

So raynebc, why is a (not the) Green New Deal a bad thing again?

raynebc

Why is it a bad deal? Because it would be a radically-Socialist takeover of the economy and prosperity would probably decline. The USA is leading by example already, we don't need to kill ourselves to do that.

Government may have to make some reasonable demands for people, like a requirement for homeowners to either plant a particular number of trees/plants on their property or install solar panels on their roof. I believe California has done the latter, but IIRC they've also recently forbidden people from watering their lawns because that state mismanages their water supply and couldn't handle a drought. Fines might not be necessary though, offering tax benefits is probably a good enough way for many people to adopt these things.

Lab grown meat is an interesting idea to reduce the use of livestock, but I suppose it remains to be seen how long it takes for it to become price competitive with traditional meat. I also don't know if there are any particular nutritional deficiencies or other problems with lab meat, since some of those types of things depend on the animal's diet.

Personally, I've recently gotten interested in hydroponic gardening. It's a pretty good way to grow food with a limited amount of water. I have a jalapeno plant growing in a 5 gallon bucket in my bedroom, and it's fruiting. My room has poor natural lighting, so the plant is living off of about 60 watts of direct LED lighting for 16 hours per day. If I weather proofed well enough to protect the air pump, I could grow it outside. This summer I'm going to grow peppers and tomatoes in organic soil in sub irrigation planters outside. It wouldn't hurt for people to grow more of their own food, but it requires some amount of effort and learning and you know how people are.

Erin Maus

One of the worst literacy rates of the developed world, worst infant mortality rates of the developed world, 70 million Americans have medical debt or difficulty paying for their medical bills, 43rd in life expectancy, major household income disparities by race, ...

USA leading by example. ;D

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-medicaldebt/consumers-face-rising-medical-debt-survey-idUSN1932186920080820

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2102rank.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/us-infant-mortality-rate-still-one-highest-developed-world-n404871

I guess because capitalism allows 1% of the population to collectively have much wealth as the bottom 50%+ it's ok tho, gotta pull on those bootstraps!

Neil Roy

video

Edgar Reynaldo

What, you're bringing William Happer back into this? bambams already showed he was discredited.

Quit trolling with your fake news trump propaganda.

#DumpTrump

Gonna be my new Twitter handle. ;)

@raynebc
I said, and (are you having trouble reading now?) I quote paraphrase, what is wrong with the /idea/ of a Green New Deal?, not what is wrong with the current implementation proposed for a Green New Deal.

Growing your own food? Props. ;)

Neil Roy

8-)
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Edgar Reynaldo

Knight hacker if you don't understand what the phrase climate change means then I can't help you anymore. ::)

Arthur Kalliokoski

if you don't understand what the phrase climate change means then I can't help you anymore.

It means that no matter what happens, the people who want to tax the US and spread the money all over the world will be justified, no matter what happens (unless things stay exactly the same, which is virtually impossible)

Edgar Reynaldo

So you're okay with more hurricanes tornadoes thunderstorms desertification and flooding?

and of course rising sea levels and global weather pattern change don't bother you either

And never mind the crop failures starvation and famine.

That's what climate change is dude

And that's what could happen if we do nothing

Neil Roy

Arthur Kalliokoski, you may as well talk to a brick wall than to say anything to Edgar. You can show him a ton of evidence against the global warming, global cooling, climate change fraud and he would still demand you show him more evidence, or summarize it for his feeble little brain and then tell you the same old garbage responses about how you are wrong all over again. I gave up on him, I much prefer talking to brick walls.

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Climate change is a joke... an expensive, very harmful one at that. And so I treat it as the joke that it is. I have posted video after video after video with real scientists who tell us why climate change is a fraud and it does not good, at least in here. Statistics show a greater population are waking up and seeing it as the fraud it is. Thank God.

raynebc

@Aaron I don't care if you dislike the USA and capitalism, no matter how many cherries you happen to pick.

@Edgar Green energy policy is one thing, polluting it with Socialism suggests that it is more likely just another corrupt omnibus grab bag. A reasonable green energy policy is NOT one that will make radical moves like banning gas powered automobiles in the span of a decade or two like some of the more extreme countries in Europe, especially when there is not sufficient public transportation in this country. A reasonable green energy policy is NOT one that will not drastically hike energy costs, which will disproportionately burden the poor.

The problem with the end of the world predictions about climate change is that they've been making those claims for too long with insufficient evidence/data. I'm fine with taking slow steps in the direction they want because fossil fuels might eventually run out, although that's looking like that doesn't even have to be the case since CO2 can be captured and combined with H2 to create liquid fuel. I'm not fine with making a gross overreaction when it will cause a large, guaranteed negative effect in order to avoid a large, theorized negative effect.

Edit: One of my VERY liberal friends is into environmental causes and has described to me how automated cars could eventually be used as a fleet of taxi service vehicles, possibly on a subscription type basis where the rider has no burden of ownership or maintenance, the vehicle is just allocated when needed. That's the kind of thing I could see happening as highly efficient automated cars would greatly reduce vehicle congestion, energy use, etc.

Erin Maus

Classic response.

Literally outside of a few issues most other developed countries beat the US, those were literally off the topic of my head and took seconds to verify.

Because of the US's incredible health care system, I had to take care of my mother for six years before she died. All the while, growing up, we lived below the poverty line. My life was put on hold for six years. I am now playing catch up--going to school while working a severely low-paying programming job--while dealing with severe mental illness. The only lucky break I've had is I receive Medicare. Otherwise I'd probably be one of the homeless insane hobos right now.

When you call USA #1 and I've lived the life I have, I simply can't agree.

raynebc

If you want to blame the country for your unusually poor results, that's your decision. It's tough to have enough resources to raise children without a partner. Poor results can come from poor luck as well as poor choices, they needn't all be blamed on other people.

Neil Roy

When liberals encourage extra-marital sex, and then children are born to single parent families who can barely feed their children, let alone send them to college, don't blame the nation.

Good solid family values with a proper family containing both parents is the solid foundation of a prosperous nation. Attack that, and expect to see more poor, under educated people who low wage jobs. You can't have it both ways. Don't expect the rest of the nation to pay your way because they were smart enough to get married, have children within marriage and raise their children right with a good enough income to support them. And as a child of a single parent family who lived on government assistance in low rental housing because my mother felt the need to leave my father and raise us as poor as can be, I know about it all too well.

Edgar Reynaldo
NiteHackr said:

Arthur Kalliokoski, you may as well talk to a brick wall than to say anything to Edgar. You can show him a ton of evidence against the global warming, global cooling, climate change fraud and he would still demand you show him more evidence, or summarize it for his feeble little brain and then tell you the same old garbage responses about how you are wrong all over again. I gave up on him, I much prefer talking to brick walls.

The only one who is dense here is you. You haven't shown me a single shred of actual evidence that I am wrong. I on the other hand have pointed out multiple sources of reliable data and experimentation that back up what I say. You can't be bothered to post anything other than what amounts to satirical cartoons because you don't have any evidence to support your position.

No, I'm not gonna waste my time on your propaganda videos. All they amount to is an op-ed piece by someone who refuses to acknowledge scientific facts.

I bet you can't provide one single study that actually contradicts what I've told you in regards to climate change, temperature changes, atmospheric change, weather change, or anything else I've put forward.

Again, I've backed my assertions up with actual data. What have you got? The weather channel? LMAO @ your "REAL" science. ;)

NiteHackr said:

Climate change is a joke... an expensive, very harmful one at that. And so I treat it as the joke that it is. I have posted video after video after video with real scientists who tell us why climate change is a fraud and it does not good, at least in here.

Any idiot can make a video. And all it takes is another idiot like you to share it with the rest of the idiots in the world.

raynebc said:

@Edgar Green energy policy is one thing, polluting it with Socialism suggests that it is more likely just another corrupt omnibus grab bag.

When the top 1% holds 50% of the wealth in a nation, taxing the rich is NOT Socialism. How do you think they got that rich? By exploiting people. The USA is basically an oligarchy, served by a corrupt government who caters to their whims. Trump is just a figurehead for the rich and powerful. He's one of them after all.

raynebc said:

although that's looking like that doesn't even have to be the case since CO2 can be captured and combined with H2 to create liquid fuel.

If it were that simple, they'd have been doing it a long time ago.

raynebc said:

Edit: One of my VERY liberal friends is into environmental causes and has described to me how automated cars could eventually be used as a fleet of taxi service vehicles, possibly on a subscription type basis where the rider has no burden of ownership or maintenance, the vehicle is just allocated when needed. That's the kind of thing I could see happening as highly efficient automated cars would greatly reduce vehicle congestion, energy use, etc.

NO WAY IN HELL. I program computers for a living, and the one thing I know is that they are not to be relied on when it comes to making life or death decisions. You will never get me to let a computer drive me around in a car. Too many factors that can't be accounted for by an artificial intelligence that a real human driver can handle easily.

Classic response.

Literally outside of a few issues most other developed countries beat the US, those were literally off the topic of my head and took seconds to verify.

Because of the US's incredible health care system, I had to take care of my mother for six years before she died. All the while, growing up, we lived below the poverty line. My life was put on hold for six years. I am now playing catch up--going to school while working a severely low-paying programming job--while dealing with severe mental illness. The only lucky break I've had is I receive Medicare. Otherwise I'd probably be one of the homeless insane hobos right now.

When you call USA #1 and I've lived the life I have, I simply can't agree.

Aaron's right on with his description of the good ole USA. :P No one should have to die because they can't afford basic health or hospice care.

raynebc said:

If you want to blame the country for your unusually poor results, that's your decision. It's tough to have enough resources to raise children without a partner. Poor results can come from poor luck as well as poor choices, they needn't all be blamed on other people.

Poor choice of words there. "unusually poor results" are actually typical in most of America. I love how you want to blame Aaron and his mother for "poor life choices", when it's the system that is broken. You are so completely oblivious though, there's not much point trying to convince you otherwise.

NiteHackr said:

Good solid family values with a proper family containing both parents is the solid foundation of a prosperous nation. Attack that, and expect to see more poor, under educated people who low wage jobs. You can't have it both ways. Don't expect the rest of the nation to pay your way because they were smart enough to get married, have children within marriage and raise their children right with a good enough income to support them. And as a child of a single parent family who lived on government assistance in low rental housing because my mother felt the need to leave my father and raise us as poor as can be, I know about it all too well.

Who the hell are you to judge your mother? If she left your deadbeat dad, I'm sure there was a good reason for it. She raised you and took care of you on her own, and you're gonna criticize her decision? And you're gonna criticize Aaron's mother for being a single parent? That's just b***sh*t.

Erin Maus

wtf

Love the weasel words "poor choices."

Like I had a choice to have mental illness or be born into poverty. Like my mom had a choice her ***husband*** (nice assumptions, Neil Roy; projecting much?) left her.

The only choice I made was to take care of my mom after she succumbed to physical illness and eventually cancer that could not treated because we did not have the resources to do so.

I guess the capitalist way would've been to left her to die, right??? That's what you would've done to your mother, right raynebec???

bamccaig

What have you got? The weather channel? LMAO @ your "REAL" science. ;)

I don't know why you're ripping on the weather network. :) They're meteorologists, not climate scientists, and the article that he linked to even countered his argument (which I pointed out). In other words, they were in no way, shape, or form supporting his argument. On the contrary, they explicitly stated for stupid people that it was not in dispute with climate change.

When the top 1% holds 50% of the wealth in a nation, taxing the rich is NOT Socialism. How do you think they got that rich? By exploiting people. The USA is basically an oligarchy, served by a corrupt government who caters to their whims. Trump is just a figurehead for the rich and powerful. He's one of them after all.

Well said. It should actually be unreasonable to allow individuals to have so much wealth. Billions of dollars? They could live like the wealthiest kings every day of their lives and still have billions of dollars left over. There's absolutely no reason to let individuals or even corporations hoard all of that wealth. Wealth that could literally change the lives of millions of people, as well as boost the productivity of the world and literally change people's lives.

You cannot become a billionaire without exploiting people. There is no product or service worth that kind of exchange over the course of your life. It's disingenuous to allow this to happen without spreading that wealth back out over the population. These extremely wealthy people and corporations are exactly the parties that "lobby" AKA bribe our governments to act against our best interests. It's understandable why the government wouldn't want to dismantle them, but it's dumbfounding why an average citizen would think it's reasonable to permit them to operate that way unchecked.

I program computers for a living, and the one thing I know is that they are not to be relied on when it comes to making life or death decisions. You will never get me to let a computer drive me around in a car. Too many factors that can't be accounted for by an artificial intelligence that a real human driver can handle easily.

I generally agree, but with caveats. I do believe that some day we may get to the point where we can trust computers with this task. I don't think any of us will be alive for it though. We may get to see the precursors, but I'll probably refrain from getting in one until I've seen the outcomes of 10 or 15 years of operation.

Case in point: the Boeing 737 MAX or whatever. The engineers decided it would be wise to let the computer decide when the plane was in trouble and recover automatically. Except instead faulty sensors cause the planes to think they're stalling when they aren't, forcing them into a dive and crash. Worst of all, it was so nonchalant that pilots weren't even properly trained on how to disable it.

They may well have automated cars on the road today, and they may well expand in our lifetime, but I anticipate we'll have similar failures with these automated cars. Non-trivial computer programs are hard/impossible to review and prove. The more complex they get the more likely edge cases and things will trigger unanticipated bugs. There may be a day as I age when I consider the computer a more reliable operator than I am, but hopefully it won't be for a long while. As it is even ABS systems are sometimes unreliable. We disabled it in my pickup because it was flaky at low speeds. It seems to contradict logic, but I think I've improved stopping distances without it again. Even for a 2008. Hopefully they've figured it out by 2019, but I've heard even 2019 trucks still do it.

On the other hand, I believe that the majority of people are careless and clumsy behind the wheel so computers might well be able a viable replacement for most operators in our lifetime. Still maybe not as safe as competent human operators, but I think it's fair to say that many human operators are incompetent too.

Who the hell are you to judge your mother? If she left your deadbeat dad, I'm sure there was a good reason for it. She raised you and took care of you on her own, and you're gonna criticize her decision? And you're gonna criticize Aaron's mother for being a single parent? That's just b***sh*t.

I think he actually had a valid point there, but I think it was by accident. Studies do show that single-parent homes, particularly single-mother homes, predict more delinquencies and unproductive members of society. Fathers are very important for children. So are mothers. Both parents are important, and certainly the stability that both parents can provide contribute towards a brighter future. It's still not guaranteed. It's just one of many variables. There are exceptions to every rule.

Also, it should be noted that it has nothing to do with religion or god or the Bible. It makes sense that two-parent households would have more resources in general, whether it's more money, more energy, more time, more discipline, etc. On and on. While mothers are really wonderful nurturers, they're pretty nonthreatening to even a young boy pushing double-digits. Fathers on the other hand tend to be pretty scary forever. There may come a time when you can technically overpower your father, but by then it's probably because their health is failing so it's not a fair fight. And by then you've hopefully learned to respect him well enough that you'd never lift a finger to him unless he forced you to.

Marriage as a religious institution isn't significant. What I think is important about marriage, religion aside, is that a man and woman committing to stay by each other's side for their entire lives allows them to invest in their future together in ways that couples otherwise cannot easily do. Of course, the modern day courts that favour women and hate men have stretched this advantage to its breaking point. Men have little choice. You can either gamble or you can play it safe and skip the family. Ultimately, it makes for a lot of very unstable members of society, which is counter-productive. Nevertheless, marriage is still probably your best bet, but I encourage you to be very blunt with your bride-to-be up front, and lay down the law as it were. At least do your best to come to an understanding of what marriage is, and what a productive family is, and that "divorce because the grass may be greener" isn't a viable option.

It all comes down to both adults doing everything they can to pick the best suitable mate. Which means compromising. There's no such thing as perfect. And also, it means establishing a compatible outlook on life, love, and family. Marriage is about agreeing to stick together no matter what. So you had better be damn sure before you say I do. People make mistakes, and we need to be able to forgive and work through challenges. That's what marriage is all about. Nobody ever said that every successful marriage was perfect. There's no such thing. It's about not giving up, and BOTH people continuing to work together. To take care of each other's needs.

raynebc

@Edgar Technology improves, making new forms of energy possible and affordable. You should know that. It's not a problem that there are people who are much richer than others. The quality of life of even poor people is leaps and bounds greater than a mere couple generations ago, even when not in periods of war. You think automated car fleets are not going to be a thing, but that catastrophic global warming is? I also agree that the former isn't reliable enough, but they will get better. As soon as the technology is so good that car manufacturers agree to be monetarily liable for all collisions, avoidable or otherwise (just as humans are expected to be), then I'll believe it's fit to replace humans driving. You can infer whatever you want from my post, but too many people these days fail to take personal responsibility, to our collective detriment. And they demand that daddy government take care of them.

As is obvious, I don't subscribe to the far-left economic theory that people shouldn't be allowed to amass wealth for reasons of "fairness."

Edit: Typo fix.

Niunio

@NiteHackr (and anybody else), do you understand the concept of "average temperature", right?

Erin Maus

Something less serious:

video

Here's hope. 1-2 months left before I form an LLC then start approaching publishers.

Niunio

@Aaron: Great! Me wants. Only for Windows?

Erin Maus

Thank you! Windows x64 only until a setup CI to produce 32-bit/64-bit Windows/Linux builds which will be Somewhat Soon (tm).

The CI is complicated because it needs to build three native libraries I've made myself (BMASHINA, Discworld, and nbunny) plus a custom LÖVE build plus its dependencies, then package the game and submit it to my distribution pipeline. This is like a 20 step process...

Focusing on finishing demo right now. 3-4 more weeks for 'Priority 1' which is basically finishing the High Chambers of Yendor / Calm Before the Storm quest (2 more floors of the dungeon + need about 30-40 decorations [vases to desks to everything in-between] to spruce up the game world). 2-4 weeks thereafter for 'Priority 2': music, sound effects, settings screen, some some misc minor polish.

Niunio
Quote:

LÖVE

I thought it was made using Allegro... or does LÖVE use Allegro?

I discovered a lot of itch.io games that require download and install LÖVE (so I didn't), don't know what actually is.

Erin Maus

LÖVE uses SDL, and I use a custom build of LÖVE. So vanilla LÖVE won't run my game.

LÖVE is a (mostly) 2D framework for Lua games.

Neil Roy

Read this on a fellow programmer's blog a while back and it made me laugh. He has a point though! ;)

“Software engineers aren't afraid of the robot apocalypse. There's no reason to be scared of something that can be taken down with a misplaced semicolon.”

(this is actually my most common error in programming)

Edgar Reynaldo

As soon as EMP bombs become feasible, technology will fall. :o

EDIT
NiteHackr, perhaps you should try python - no semicolons xD

Niunio

NiteHackr, perhaps you should try python - no semicolons xD

But spaces, that would be worst...

Neil Roy

I was joking with a friend of mine that we would just use squirt guns! ;)

Rodolfo Lam

Lua seems to be a nice language, however, I’ve never been able to get myself into learning it.

How it is compared to python or ruby?

LennyLen

I can't believe this thread is still going.

GullRaDriel

We may reach a server limit one of these days ::)

Edgar Reynaldo

LUA is fine if you're into auto-erotic asphyxiation :o

It's like the love child of C and Assembly.

If you're used to C++, you'll hate it. Use Python or Ruby instead.

Ruby supports all modern inheritance and polymorphic relations, and interfaces decently with C++.

Erin Maus

I think you're wrong. It's Lua, btw.

C++ is tied with Lua for my favorite programming language.

Lua is just so flexible.

I wrote my own class system supporting inheritance and reflection.

A callback system supporting binding parameters.

I wrote a DSL for a graph-like ORM I call the GameDB.

And a DSL to generate behavior trees, including wiring inputs/outputs to/from nodes, using my custom C++ AI library BMASHINA.

A dialog system that abuses coroutines.

I find Python inferior as a language. As an ecosystem, Python is way better.

I've not used Ruby so I can't comment.

Edgar Reynaldo

Just because you use it the most doesn't make it the best candidate for the job. Metatables are crap dude. Having to implement inheritance and polymorphism is stupid. Why reinvent four separate wheels just to use a car? Ruby supports so much more out of the box, and gems make it super easy to distribute, along with a portable lightweight interpreter.

Silly rabbit, Trix are for kidsTM.

Erin Maus

I also use FreeBSD on my servers, use zsh, and one of my favorite bands broke up after one album.

I'm just cool. 8-)

Edgar Reynaldo

I'm just cool

More like lukewarm...

Erin Maus

You forgot the smiley:

8-)

Edgar Reynaldo

Your new name is LuaCWarM, short for Lua Coroutine War Machine xD :D

Neil Roy

This is a 60 minutes, Australia version that was a REAL eye opener! I won't give an opinion either way as it speaks for itself. But it looks like we are being lied to when it comes to recycling. Wow, I didn't know things were THIS bad! :o

Check it out...

video

Doctor Cop

This is Bad, but China and India actually recycle plastic. I have heard from those who have seen the process.

I also know that the USA majorly depended upon China to take their trash but since China has refused to take everybody's trash, the Australia, USA and some other Europian Countries have no option other than burning or dumping it. The amount of plastic waste is generated by America is overwhelming in comparison to the amount of land it can give to Dumping Grounds and same is for others too.

raynebc

There could be some benefit to be gained by giving incentives to manufacturers of plastic goods if they take plastic waste and recycle it. Hefty helps run a plastic recycling program in my area, and will accept various plastic items (grocery bags, straws, single use plastic containers, etc) that our normal recycling service doesn't accept. Many grocery stores accept plastic grocery bags from recycling. Our area also collects compost material (suitable food waste, branches, leaves, grass clippings, etc). There's little reason this couldn't be done country-wide.

bamccaig
NiteHackr said:

This is a 60 minutes, Australia version that was a REAL eye opener! I won't give an opinion either way as it speaks for itself. But it looks like we are being lied to when it comes to recycling. Wow, I didn't know things were THIS bad! :o

Interesting/horrifying video... Thanks for sharing.

In other news, while most Western companies are selling their recycling/garbage to third world countries black markets, Sweden is just ... burning it. And in fact, importing recycling materials to burn...

:o ??? >:(

The world is fucking insane. Every. Fucking. Government. Is. Lying. To. Our. Faces.

Neil Roy

I was discussing this with a friend online. He's a truck driver in Quebec and I was wondering if anything like this happens in Canada or the USA, I mean, in that video, while it was about Australia, they stated they were having a tough time finding a market for it anywhere in the world which means it would effect us as well.

My friend confirmed to me that recycled plastic is being dumped into landfill in Quebec as well.

Recycling only works if there is a market, and sadly, we were overly dependant on China to buy it all.

I have some of my own ideas on how to deal with this but I have to be honest, I don't see an easy solution. This is just one of those things I never really thought about, you just assume when you "do the right thing" and recycle, that it is being recycled, but here it is looking like it doesn't make a difference at all, it will most likely end up in a landfill anyhow.

Actually, I will state my own idea, and I will admit, it is NOT a solution, but maybe... something, I dunno... and that is incinerators which generate electricity by burning garbage, which could help with two problems, but I don't know how well you can burn plastics and there would probably be an outcry concerning pollution etc... so... <shrug>

We could reduce our use of plastic but plastic is not easily replaced. When i was young it was rubber, which came from rubber trees, but we could never produce that in the quantities needed and plastic just cannot be as easily replaced. Certain things could be, like bags. Go back to paper bags which I don't have a problem with, but again... you need to cut down more trees for that.

It's quite the hole our society has dug itself into.

iteHackr, perhaps you should try python - no semicolons xD

I was playing around with the GODOT game engine, which is quite nice and I believe the scripting language it uses is based on Python if I am not mistaken. I quite liked the language, and the engine itself.

bamccaig
NiteHackr said:

My friend confirmed to me that recycled plastic is being dumped into landfill in Quebec as well.

Not only that. "We" (meaning Canada in general) are very much shipping "waste", including recycling, overseas to black markets (i.e., criminal enterprises) in developing nations. The Philippines and Malaysia, for example. These nations don't have the resources to police it. These "smugglers" process what they can to produce plastic pellets for reuse, and the rest is just burned just as it would be in Canada, except instead of affecting Canadian pollution rates it is applied to the foreign nation. That's simply unfair and completely corrupt for our governments to allow to happen. It just goes to show you how fucking corrupt the system is. The regulations stop at the line for international waters. Once it leaves Canada we stop caring about what happens to it, which is a real shame. Private enterprises complete the circle of crime and pollution. Alas, much of this "recycled" material is never recycled, and instead gets burned or just fills up land in these developing nations, essentially polluting developing nations that lack resources to handle it with the waste of wealthy nations. It's sickening (literally and figuratively).

NiteHackr said:

I have some of my own ideas on how to deal with this but I have to be honest, I don't see an easy solution. This is just one of those things I never really thought about, you just assume when you "do the right thing" and recycle, that it is being recycled, but here it is looking like it doesn't make a difference at all, it will most likely end up in a landfill anyhow.

NiteHackr said:

We could reduce our use of plastic but plastic is not easily replaced. When i was young it was rubber, which came from rubber trees, but we could never produce that in the quantities needed and plastic just cannot be as easily replaced. Certain things could be, like bags. Go back to paper bags which I don't have a problem with, but again... you need to cut down more trees for that.

It's quite the hole our society has dug itself into.

Our society is becoming overly dependent on "convenience". We can do without a lot of this single-use plastic.

Plastic bags at retailers can just be replaced with reusable bags. You didn't come with bags to carry your shit out? The law says go fuck yourself. And certain stores would stock reusable bags, at a premium to ensure we reuse them. That would eliminate one mess.

Bottled water is bad for you. The plastic is bad, and the water is generally municipal source at a 100x markup or it's stolen from natural streams and things which are impacted from the extraction, and the corporations doing it don't "own" the streams. They merely own property alongside it. They have no more right to capture and charge a premium on it than any other cottage owner. In a similar vein, most plastic bottled beverages are bad for you, and the ones that aren't are expensive and less sought after so less of a problem, but we could just outlaw plastic bottles and require the industry to revert back to glass and use deposit based recycling programs to control it, or just outright stop convenient single-use beverage containers. Whatever is needed.

The worst plastic that I can think of is just packaging. Most of it is obnoxious. Like those plastic "cases" that most electronics and other similar items are wrapped in. The only way to "open" the packaging is to destroy it. Good luck returning that to the store. Typically larger corporations like Walmart take them back, but either the packaging is taped back together and looks unsaleable, or they must commission brand new single-use plastic to wrap it in. The government could outlaw that, and require different packaging methods. Granted, it will likely be far less protective and far more expensive, but we do have limited means here if we intend for our species to live indefinitely.

Most plastic seems to be a convenience more than a necessity. It's cheap, and it's unregulated, so it's used. Regulate it and prices will go up. Boo, hoo. The price is already going up, but we're just not seeing it yet. It's going to be a fucking shock when the bottom line is finally drawn and we see what all this convenience really cost us.

Of course, most of the conveniences are really poisons ultimately hurting us or the world around us anyway. It might be the best thing that ever happened to just draw a hard line and say no. We'll have to adjust back to an older way of life, but I think a lot of us will find more value from it in the long run, and it should help to ensure there's a valuable life to be had for our descendents too.

NiteHackr said:

Actually, I will state my own idea, and I will admit, it is NOT a solution, but maybe... something, I dunno... and that is incinerators which generate electricity by burning garbage, which could help with two problems, but I don't know how well you can burn plastics and there would probably be an outcry concerning pollution etc... so... <shrug>

After I watched your first video about Australia I sort of went on a binge trying to find other relevant videos about this. Not only did I find the evidence that Canada is doing the same thing, but I stumbled across the a video that documented Sweden's practices. Apparently/allegedly in Sweden, they have setup big incineration factories that literally burn garbage to produce energy. They are such an "innovator" at it that they actually also import garbage, including "recycling" materials, from other Western nations, to burn.

This sounds extremely alarming and wrong at face value. I don't know if an unbiased analysis has been done on the harm done to the environment as a result.

On the other hand, apparently some cities are setup with hot water systems used to heat homes in the city with the combustion of the garbage at the centralized plants... I think it's unlikely that the benefits outweigh the damage to the environment, but I haven't attempted to corroborate the practice at all (see Mozilla broke Firefox and is taking its precious time to fix it thread).

Again, this is another way in which the actual pollution output of some nations is swept under the rug and redistributed to other nations. Instead of the source country being held accountable for the pollutants released into the atmosphere as a result, it's redistributed back to Sweden. Which I can only assume either politically gives zero fucks or is a low enough contributor that they can afford to pay the price and still break even or thereabouts with embarrassingly wasteful nations like Canada and the US.

I think that's a practice that definitely needs to be addressed ASAP to both understand environmental damage properly, and to hold the worst offenders accountable. Despite Canada's relative size, apparently we're amonng the worst offenders, at least according to the available data. We might even be worse than the USA. Which is just embarrassing. I wouldn't be surprised if that was again just due to "loopholes" that skew the reality, but nevertheless Canada is obviously wasting way too much and some serious changes are needed.

Neil Roy
bamccaig said:

Plastic bags at retailers can just be replaced with reusable bags. You didn't come with bags to carry your shit out?

Good point, I agree. When I go shopping I take one of two things with me. Either my shopping cart when I plan to buy a lot, or just a single cloth bag (a really large one that holds a lot) for smaller trips so the only time I end up with a plastic bag is when I am out and didn't plan to be shopping at all, which is rare.

I just hate this huge mound of plastic bags building up in my home.

Another waste that REALLY bugs me, is FLYERS in my mail!!! I get a ton of it and it all goes straight from my mailbox into my recycling box which I find annoying. I told my wife when I bring in the junk mail, "another wasted tree". I am no tree hugger or even an environmentalist, but one doesn't have to be to see that it is senseless to be cutting down trees to make junk mail which only ends up in landfill polluting my environment when I could have a nice forest to walk through instead.

Quote:

Bottled water is bad for you.

I never buy the stuff. I have a couple pitchers in my fridge I refill with water, and some ice cubes in my freezer. I have a couple plastic bottles that I have been reusing for years now, I refill them with water so if I want bottled water, I take them out of the fridge, take it with me, refill it later on and put it back in the fridge (a couple of those gaterade bottles).

As for us being the worst offenders, actually, North America and Europe are some of the cleanest nations. Asian countries like China and the rest in that region produce the most pollution and garbage of anywhere in the world from some statistics I have seen. I find we tend to have a huge guilt complex in North America and think all the world's problem start with us when the data shows otherwise. Certainly Canada is not even close to being an offender. We have cleaned up what little we have polutted quite a bit. In Ontario we shut down several coal plants for example and much more. We're on target for levels we agreed to reduce actually. Especially in Ontario. It's a topic being debated in court now as Ontario doesn't feel we should have to pay a carbon tax when we are on target for our emission reductions according to international agreements. Other provinces I guess may not be, but Ontario is and this is something judges have raised in some videos of hearings i watched. But that's another topic.

Whether we should burn our garbage or not depends on whether you think global warming is real. Not really something I wish to go back and debate in here again! But I am bothered that such an idea can hamper positive sollutions to the garbage problem. Especially if it is not real. But... people have very fixed positions on that in here. And I don't see the issue going away anytime soon because of the fixed positions on both sides. We're in for some tough times in this world in the coming years.

Edit: We could also perhaps make more shopping bags from recycled plastic for plastic bags and paper for paper bags. Make it illegal to use anything else when it comes to shopping bags and the like anyhow. Could be SOMETHING to help I think.

bamccaig
NiteHackr said:

Another waste that REALLY bugs me, is FLYERS in my mail!!! I get a ton of it and it all goes straight from my mailbox into my recycling box which I find annoying. I told my wife when I bring in the junk mail, "another wasted tree". I am no tree hugger or even an environmentalist, but one doesn't have to be to see that it is senseless to be cutting down trees to make junk mail which only ends up in landfill polluting my environment when I could have a nice forest to walk through instead.

It's really sickening that it's permitted, but I suppose you have to balance the bad from the "good" (e.g., coupons that "save you money"). That said, it would make better sense to distribute those kinds of "save you money" coupons simply as "come in this day and get this deal"... Why only "special" customers get the deal? It's silly. In the end, all of those products are bad for us anyway so it would probably work fine to just completely outlaw such mail. A good way to combat it might be a small to large group of volunteers that save all of that spam mail, and then on a coordinated day everybody shows up within 5 minutes to dump it all over the post office. :P

Neil Roy

I used to have a sticker on my mailbox which stated "NO JUNK MAIL", ie, no mail which is not addressed to me. I don't use junk, I never use coupons from them. And I ended up having a big problem with the postal service who told me that my mail box didn't belong to me. They even threatened not to deliver my mail. Eventually my sticker magically vanished from my mailbox and the problem persisted. A few times I went out and chased down the mailman and gave it back to them but... in the end it was just exasperating and I gave up. Nobody can say I didn't try.

bamccaig

That's completely fucked for them to say that your mailbox doesn't belong to you. It just goes to show that the system works us, not for us.

AMCerasoli

Well here in Spain (Europe?) now we need to charge people for plastic bags, from a few months ago, and after 2020 or something they are going to be completely removed from Supermarkets and such... Or paper bags which are going to be much more expensive, or your own bag from home. At least it's something.

Rodolfo Lam

We are about to start something similar here in Panama. Starting July I believe, all non biodegradable plastic bags will be banned from stores nation-wide.

Supermarkets and to lesser extend smaller shops have started campaigns to make people use their own reusable bags. It has been somewhat successful.

Neil Roy

Yeah, I am no environmentalist, but on this topic I do feel we overuse plastic. I use a cart (I don't drive, so I don't pollute that way either) and a cloth bag, have for many years now.

It just never made any sense to get a plastic bag which I used once and it ends up as trash.

This seems like a fairly reasonable thing to do to me, not difficult at all. You buy a cloth bag like, ONCE and it lasts forever. Plastic bags cost you at the store where I shop now, though not very much. Not that cost helps anything except the stores to be honest so I don't see charging for bags as a solution. I know the stores love the idea as they can appear environmental while recouping their costs for the bags which is money in their pockets.

We could also do like the beer industry has done here in Canada for decades and make the stores take their own bags back and recycle them themselves for reuse. Charge a deposit and you get it back.

raynebc

I never got into the habit of throwing plastic grocery bags away. I would collect them even into the hundreds and would use them slowly as wastebin liners, etc. When they began being collected for recycling, I offloaded most of them. Hefty's pilot program in a few cities (including mine) supposedly is converting such plastics into a synthetic diesel fuel.

I agree that reusable shopping bags are a good idea, but people need to be diligent about washing them as I've heard they become a food contamination hazard when neglected.

bamccaig

We bought a bunch of reusable bags with intentions to use them, but what happened 9/10 is we'd already be out, decide to go shopping, and either the bags are in the other car or we'd forget about them until we were already in line at the checkout counter... Of course, if they completely got rid of plastic bags then we'd learn fast. ;)

We don't throw our plastic bags away. My parents always saved them, and so I always saved them too. They come in handy to have around anyway. My wife also takes them to the daycare she works at for wrapping up dirty diapers or something.

I generally get 2 uses out of plastic bags, but not much more. They're still a waste.

It blows my mind that governments allow things to get like this. Massive amounts of non-biodegradable garbage floating in the oceans,... And now also polluting third world countries... Seems we also need a plastic tax, the proceeds from which can be directed to help pay for clean-up crews in these environments.

raynebc said:

I agree that reusable shopping bags are a good idea, but people need to be diligent about washing them as I've heard they become a food contamination hazard when neglected.

It never even occurred to me that you should wash them... :-[

Neil Roy

When I was a child in the 1970s you got your groceries in a paper bag. Worked like a charm.

It's difficult for some to imagine who have never known anything else, but it's really no big deal. Our chip bags back then were a combination of tinfoil with a paper lining and they were just fine. Your electronic housings were either metal or wood or a combination of the two. Our TV was a large wooden cabinet that looked quite nice. Our drinks were all in cans or glass bottles. Our cars were fricken tanks! Babies wore cloth diapers which were washed and reused.

There's something to be said about the older generation now that I think about it. I don't recall us throwing out a lot in the garbage to be honest.

I only ever needed to wash my cloth bag once when eggs broke in it. I don't have a lot of raw food just hanging out in the bag. If I did I would wash it.

GullRaDriel

I'm not as old as NiteHackr, but when I was young we were using consigned glass bottles, everywhere and for everything, as well as wood and paper. I miss these days where I was getting my milk in a reusable metal can.

raynebc

I suppose this is progress at least:
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/442683-scientists-say-theyve-invented-recyclable-plastic

If the existing plastic is too hard to recycle, make a better plastic.

GullRaDriel

And from what do we get plastic ?

Edgar Reynaldo

Our local grocery store recycles plastic bags. We just save them up then take back a bunch at a time. We have curbside recycling, but they don't take glass. Glass sucks.

The problem is the supply of plastic. It's just so damn cheap. More and more of it is biodegradable though, which is good, but still.

However, the majority of the waste generated even after recycling is still plastic. Wrappers, seals, packaging that isn't recyclable, etc...

We used to compost, but we don't have a vegetable garden anymore. I also used to collect the grass and leaves and compost them, but that's a lot of work.

However, there are literally islands of trash in the sea in places. They've invented some cool garbage collection pods though, can't remember the name now. They work 24/7 and just need to be emptied occassionally. Then there are things like giant sea vacuums that are like conveyor belts that just suck up the garbage.

Burning waste (plastic especially) produces toxic fumes. We (and other neighbors) used to suffer from not having garbage collection and so we burned our trash. Not only did it stink and pollute the air but I'm sure the plastic bags were not meant to be burned. We have since remedied the problem, and have curbside pickup now. It's so nice to be able to live in a neighborhood that doesn't smell like burning trash anymore.

I recycle as much as I can, but if my recycling is not actually being recycled, that's horrible. It should be a crime if you ask me, to dump materials meant to be recycled, or worse, to ship them somewhere else and burn them.

I shudder to think of all the mountains of electronic waste that gets shipped to places like India, where people get heavy metal poisoning trying to recycle the precious metals in the electronic parts. If my electronics aren't being recycled properly, that should be a crime as well.

Eric Johnson

Happy Piccolo Day, everyone! :D

{"name":"Worship+him_4972b9_7080851.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/b\/6\/b6181eec4ce3b187ef9ce3db8c326fd6.jpg","w":500,"h":376,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/b\/6\/b6181eec4ce3b187ef9ce3db8c326fd6"}Worship+him_4972b9_7080851.jpg

Edgar Reynaldo

YES! Happy Piccolo Day!

{"name":"LADESilverPlatedCPiccoloFluteWithCase-SKUspanitemprop184477-2-800x800.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/4\/c4975d061b494830de17526a888a6487.jpg","w":800,"h":800,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/4\/c4975d061b494830de17526a888a6487"}LADESilverPlatedCPiccoloFluteWithCase-SKUspanitemprop184477-2-800x800.jpg
:D

{"name":"612010","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/e\/3\/e3b21b43de789b133c8dca1af667c4d5.png","w":1200,"h":908,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/e\/3\/e3b21b43de789b133c8dca1af667c4d5"}612010

Neil Roy

When it comes to electronics waste, I got that covered, it all seems to just stay in my computer room for 10+ years until I force myself, with tears in my eyes, to throw it away. :'(

Edgar Reynaldo

Lovely. ::) Heavy metals in the ground water. Thanks Neil!

Neil Roy

Heavy metals in the ground water? Huh? Lay off the crack Edgar.

bamccaig
raynebc said:

I suppose this is progress at least:
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/442683-scientists-say-theyve-invented-recyclable-plastic

If the existing plastic is too hard to recycle, make a better plastic.

I'll believe it when I see it. Wikipedia doesn't know what polydiketoenamine is yet so I'd say it's a long way off from really being practical. And even if it's really recyclable, unless it's cheaper than traditional plastic, or governments outlaw other types of plastic, it won't actually fix the problem. People are assholes, and will not do the "right" thing on average unless you force them to or unless it's more convenient than the wrong thing (which is rare).

Neil Roy

It really astounds me just how over reliant we have become on plastic. Just looking at my groceries I really notice it. Get a drink, it's in a plastic bottle with a plastic cap etc... in my youth it was a glass bottle with a metal top you used a bottle opener on (or a newer twist top, which was still metal).

You could get fresh bread which was FAR better from a baker that was put in a paper bag. Veggies were in these wood/weaved baskets, or cardboard+wood baskets. Chip dip was in an aluminum container well into the 80s if I recall. Your garbage was in a metal garbage can which was emptied into the dumptruck when it passed by. We had paper straws, I think they may have been wax coated, been a while, tough to remember.

The worst offenders are those products you buy which are all in a plastic container, you open it up and each item inside is individually wrapped in plastic as well.

I think we should implement a strategy to gradually go back to those days. It would make us far less reliant on oil and God knows we have enough trees, especially in Canada, and they are a renewable resource.

Edgar Reynaldo
NiteHackr said:

Heavy metals in the ground water? Huh? Lay off the crack Edgar.

I don't smoke crack Neil, that's whack. ;)

Old electronics = Lead soldier, and other metals = Heavy metal

Throwing them away = Heavy metal in the ground water

Recycle your old electronics please...

bamccaig

We do need to be concerned with deforestation too. Trees are renewable, but it does take time to renew so they are not an infinite resource. We need to manage them, meaning for every tree we cut down we must plant another one to eventually replace it, and we need to limit our consumption of trees to a reasonable level so that there is always a healthy population of mature trees nation-wide. The forests are vital for wildlife that depend on them for their habitat (or for vital resources, such as food), and we also depend on these resources. So yes, utilizing more paper products instead of long-term plastics is a welcome idea, but we still need to also strictly regulate it to prevent evil corporations from ultimately harming the environment.

Append:

I wonder too if we shouldn't be dedicating land to long-term forests with the goal of trying to grow massive trees like those that used to exist before man came to this land. The ones that are like 20 feet in diameter. I think it would be nice to be able to experience trees the way they were intended to be, and they may also have unique properties that their less mature brethren do not possess.

Edgar Reynaldo

Guess what else our beloved Dump Pump Trump has been doing? Systematically removing protection from Federal lands and endangered species. Not to mention trying to redefine poverty levels to be even freaking lower than they are now. So poor people get even less to live on.

I'm surprised no one's been discussing the few states that have enacted abortion bans. I love how women don't want men to control their bodies, but they repeatedly show they can't be trusted to do so responsibly. ::)

Most things that can be made from wood fiber, can easily be made with hemp fiber instead - paper, cloth, etc...

And then there's hempcrete, which is fireproof and a perfect replacement for concrete.

raynebc

"Poor" people in the USA are richer in this generation than any previous generation.

Roe vs. Wade deserves to be overturned. The deep blue states that want to continue to kill their offspring for convenience (as nearly all cases of abortion are) can do so while the others limit as they see fit. If it was only a woman's body involved, most people wouldn't give a damn, but too many pro-choicers are not honest enough to admit a fetus is a separate human body inside of the mother's body.

Edgar Reynaldo

Except they still can't afford rent or food or medical care. ::)

You know what's wrong with this world? All the god damn vampires who prey on the weak.

bamccaig

A fetus is no more human than a mole rat. There's no good reason to force a couple of cells that accidentally fertilized to control the lives of 3 people. When we know that it can be stopped painlessly in various ways, and depending on the circumstances it'll be coming into it might be really bad luck anyway. The only justification is that many women apparently experience permanent emotional suffering as a result. That said, they should still be free to do so if they so desire.

Just because you get pregnant doesn't mean you were being irresponsible. The only 100% safe sex is no sex at all. It's theoretically possible to still get pregnant on birth control. And it's pretty common to still get pregnant when condoms are used. A doctor once asked us if we were trying to have a baby because my wife isn't on any birth control system. We said we use condoms. And the doctor repeated, "So you're trying to get pregnant!?"

Mostly it has to do with the system crushing us. A few generations ago people could afford to have 4 or 5 or even 10 kids. These days it's hard to afford one. That's what it ultimately comes down to. Money. If we didn't have to worry about money (i.e., our basics needs were met) then having a child would be so much easier. All you'd do is care for it with everything you need already available. That would be your whole day. That's easy. That's not what abortion is about.

Abortion is about irresponsible drug addicts or something that have unprotected sex because they're reckless people and get pregnant. That child is going to have a very hard life, and probably be steered into the same bad choices simply because of the environment it was born into. Or worse. Possibly much worse if the parents have no morals.

Or hell, abortion is about a lower-middle class family that literally cannot afford a child (or another child). It's one thing to protect the baby's rights once it's born. It's impossible for us to know exactly when the "lights come on", but it's fair to say they don't fully come on until at least birth.

It really makes no sense for "God" to care about abortion. He is fine will all sorts of other killing, in fact he loves it, and is the world's greatest assassin.

It would be fine if the argument against abortion was reasonable, but it's irrational. It's fine for us to kill all sorts of plants and animals in the world, some of them very intelligent, but it's suddenly wrong to stop the development of an incomplete human with the intelligence equivalent to either a rock or perhaps a mosquito.

raynebc

Bam failed biology class is seems. A human fetus is human. There are democrats that even refused to vote for a bill requiring that if a baby is born during a failed abortion, the doctor must give it the same life giving care that a normally born baby would receive. Passing through the vaginal canal being the fine line between "clump of cells" and human being is broken logic, but not atypical from what I've heard from pro choice people. Other popular, arbitrary criteria include "sentience", "intelligence" or merely whether the mother wants it to continue living.

bamccaig

It doesn't matter that a fetus is human (so is my toe, but if it's magically living without me I suggest you shoot it).

What matters is that the fetus is not yet alive. It has never been alive. It cannot live on its own. It's effectively a parasite at least until late in the pregnancy. And even then it has the intelligence of, I don't know, a dodo bird if it's lucky. If it's OK to kill animals, like say a mosquito, just because it's inconvenient, then it's also perfectly OK to stop the development of a fetus.

The only people that assign a fetus magical worth is religious people, and we all know what logical thinking they possess and what brilliant decisions they make. ::) It's not even about the fetus. It's basically about it's doctrine being challenged. They couldn't care less about the actual life forms being affected. It's all about protecting the political power that indoctrination affords the church.

raynebc

Your toe isn't a dinstinct human organism with its own DNA. A fetus, scientifically, a living human organism. Legally, it doesn't have rights because of leftist judges. Newborn babies can't live on their own, but they are considered legal persons. An animal's own offspring does not qualify as a parasite by medical definitions. A human life has more worth than a mosquito's. I'm not religious, but I believe human lives have worth.

Every single one of your statements was blatantly wrong, you're extremely unqualified to be having this argument.

Edgar Reynaldo

Let's make sure to outlaw jerking off and ovulating. Wasted babies, you know. ALL human life is precious...::)

bamccaig
raynebc said:

Your toe isn't a dinstinct human organism with its own DNA.

Why does it matter that it's a human organism at all? Millions of kilograms of human DNA are dumped on the ground daily. That's an arbitrary line to draw. We kill thousands or millions of humans every year. The whole thing. Your government in particular. So that's not a valid argument unless you also oppose all of the other terminations.

raynebc said:

A fetus, scientifically, a living human organism.

Science is knowledge. It's not a magical club that gets to decide things. A fetus is an incomplete life form. It is incapable of surviving on its own for even a minute. It does not have full functioning organs. Everything is developing, and it takes time before it all comes online. It is but a stage of development from cells to animal. It is not an animal yet. It's basically an extension of the mother's body for several months.

raynebc said:

Legally, it doesn't have rights because of leftist judges.

It doesn't have rights because it doesn't deserve them. Any more than a spider or fly. It isn't a conscious being. It cannot feel pain. And affording it rights requires violating the rights of the mother and father, which we know for a fact are intelligent, conscious beings. And actually human, for that matter.

raynebc said:

Newborn babies can't live on their own, but they are considered legal persons.

They can survive on their own for hours. Possibly even a couple of days under ideal circumstances. They really only need their parents to provide them with food, clean up their waste, and keep them safe from hazards and other animals (human or otherwise) that wish to harm them (and teaching them things helps too, but isn't strictly necessary). Just like an infant lion.

A fetus relies on its mother for everything. Nutrients, waste disposal, oxygen, and hormones. Everything it needs is delivered by the mother-to-be.

raynebc said:

An animal's own offspring does not qualify as a parasite by medical definitions.

That's just semantics. A parasite is an invader, but obviously offspring are not. Interestingly, if it weren't for the blood-barrier the red/white cells of the mother would actually treat the fetus as an invader and attack it.

raynebc said:

A human life has more worth than a mosquito's. I'm not religious, but I believe human lives have worth.

I would agree with that, but where we differ is in the definition of a human life.

raynebc said:

Every single one of your statements was blatantly wrong, you're extremely unqualified to be having this argument.

Classic "I have no argument" tactic. Attacking the other person's qualifications for having the argument, despite neither one of you being a professional in the field. :P

Nothing I've said is blatantly wrong. It's subjective. There is no right or wrong. There's no universal answer. It's up to individual people deciding how they think of it and then a group of us coming to a consensus.

If a fetus is a human life then why don't we have ceremonies for their "deaths"? That alone shows how little we value them. For the most part, the only thing we do after a fetus is lost (i.e., miscarriage) is people, mostly women, provide emotional support for the would-be parents, mostly the woman. In some crazy circumstances the would-be mother might want funeral arrangements, but that's not common and most people wouldn't attend such an event. It's more for the mother's mental health than anything.

Interestingly, hospitals generally consider a miscarriage before 20 - 24 weeks (~4 - 5 months) as "clinical waste" (i.e., biological garbage). It wouldn't be cremated or buried, but bagged up and shipped off to be incinerated with the rest of the biological garbage. No birth or death certificate is issued, and it's also entirely legal to bury it in your backyard next to your dog. And estimates place the number of miscarriages at about 15-20% of pregnancies. That's a whole lot. I'm not sure if that counts the abortions too, or if those are a separate number.

Clearly, they are not as valuable as a human life. It's preposterous to suggest that they are. It's not helping anyone or anything. If anything it's doing more harm than good.

LennyLen
raynebc said:

A human life has more worth than a mosquito's.

In order to prove that statement you need to prove what value a human life has, and what value a mosquito life has. Good luck doing that. Their is no "value" to life.

Neil Roy

These moments, with premature babies, quite capable of living, are beautiful...

video

video

This, is evil. If you support it, YOU are evil to the rotten core. Period.
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raynebc
Edgar said:

Let's make sure to outlaw jerking off and ovulating.

Sperm and unfertilized eggs are not distinct human lives. Did you have even a quarter of a decent argument to make on this topic?

bamccaig said:

That's an arbitrary line to draw.

No it's not. If I was to terminate your life and put your entire body in a landfill, that would be wrong.

bamccaig said:

A fetus is an incomplete life form.

A toddler is an incomplete life form. Age doesn't change the fact that it is a human.

bamccaig said:

It is not an animal yet. It's basically an extension of the mother's body for several months.

It's attached to the mother's body out of necessity of the continuity of the species, but the fetus is still a distinct human body. Your opinion doesn't change fact.

bamccaig said:

It doesn't have rights because it doesn't deserve them.

Now you're getting more honest. You don't want it to have rights, so you decide it doesn't get to have them.

bamccaig said:

And actually human, for that matter.

And that honesty disappeared as quickly as it appeared. Only the most extreme of the pro-choice camp will so openly blare that the fetus isn't human so that's why it's OK to kill it.

bamccaig said:

That's just semantics. A parasite is an invader, but obviously offspring are not.

Don't make a comparison you know is obviously false. Obviously animals have the means to produce offspring or there would be no fauna on this planet.

bamccaig said:

I would agree with that, but where we differ is in the definition of a human life.

I'm going with the objective definition that it is an animal developing its own body with its own unique DNA. The science shows that the unique DNA is formed at conception and is the most medically justified point at which to say a life was created.

bamccaig said:

Classic "I have no argument" tactic.

Well, you don't seem to have much in the scope of good arguments here. There are objective truths in life and death, not everything is a liberal arts philosophy exercise.

bamccaig said:

If a fetus is a human life then why don't we have ceremonies for their "deaths"?

Some people do. Some courts prosecute people for double homicide when somebody murders a pregnant woman. Fetuses don't have legal personhood so their miscarriages aren't listed as deaths in public records, obituaries, etc.

bamccaig said:

That alone shows how little we value them.

You mean pro-choice advocates value them little. You seem to think the pro-life movement is a fringe element of society.

LennyLen said:

Their is no "value" to life.

You can't be reasoned with when you categorically have no respect for life regardless of the organism's age.

As I mentioned earlier, one of the truths that pro-choice advocates have so much trouble with is that the fetus is a human, by all objective knowledge. They have to deny this in order to shield themselves from the reality that nearly all abortions are to save themselves from inconvenience, so they can selfishly do what makes them feel good and have sex without living with the consequences of their actions.

If somebody was to admit that having an abortion is a terrible atrocity, but that they felt it was necessary for some reason, there could be room for sympathy. But then there are disgusting people that are proud to have abortions because their power over getting to say whether their offspring lives or dies gives them self-importance.

LennyLen
raynebc said:

You can't be reasoned with when you categorically have no respect for life regardless of the organism's age.

You can't be reasoned with when you're a human who uses that fact to justify some meaningless value to human life.

So there you go, nobody can be reasoned with.

There is no right or wrong answer to the debate on abortion, as it all comes down to whatever values the individual has.

Edgar Reynaldo
Neil Roy said:

Bloody mess

We're not talking about fully developed babies, Neil. Grow up, and don't post shit like that unless it's in spoiler tags. Do you butcher your own animals Neil? Then just shut the fuck up, because everyone else is doing the killing for you.

raynebc said:

You can't be reasoned with when you categorically have no respect for life regardless of the organism's age.

Nice wording rayne. "organism" would happen to include all biological life, now wouldn't it?

But neither of you have any respect for animal life. When you both turn vegan, then I'll listen to your opinions on abortion. Until then, just shut up because you're both hypocrites.

Neil Roy

We're not talking about fully developed babies, Neil.

The picture I posted IS OF AN ABORTION!!! What do you think they are murdering, eggs?! My wife was a premature baby, there are plenty of premature babies that survive outside the womb. They are no less a human being than you or I are!

Here, more images of what an abortion looks like, if you can't stomach it, than perhaps you need to re-evaluate your position on the support of such a horrendous crime!!! But I won't make it easier on you, because this crime against humanity infuriates me... if you support this, YOU... ARE... EVIL! And you will someday answer for your support of such evil, mark my words!

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{"name":"612020","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/4\/e\/4eab5f75fee26fae744142690975a6cc.jpg","w":400,"h":291,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/4\/e\/4eab5f75fee26fae744142690975a6cc"}612020

^^ THAT IS WHAT YOU SUPPORT!!! >:(

Edgar Reynaldo
Neil Roy said:

More bloody messes

Nice, Neil, those are nearly full term abortions.

Most abortions are done within the first trimester, and they look nothing like that. There are laws to prevent things like that. But not all 'abortion' is murder. A fetus can't think / feel / take care of itself. It would not survive without its mother, and it is ultimately the mother's right to determine whether or not she should keep the child. She has her own health to consider, the life that the baby would have should she decide to keep it, and more.

And as for your pictures, You like being graphic Neil?

Well here ya go.

Can I interest you in a pork chop?
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How about a side of beef?
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Maybe you prefer lamb :
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Or how about some chicken?
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Until you place the same value on animal life that you do on human life, I have zero respect for your opinion. ;)

In before the lock (deletion).

EDIT
One more thing. People like you are against abortion, yet you are also against birth control. Which is it man? People wouldn't need abortions if they had access to birth control. Fucking Catholic nutjobs.

raynebc

Edgar: An organism is a distinct life form, and doesn't include an individual cell from an organism. That is why my skin cells aren't considered life forms. If you eat plants you are eating living things, so you are by definition as much a hypocrite as you claim me to be. I eat plants and animals, what my species is adapted to eating. Killing one's own young for convenience is unnatural and is not at all comparable to killing and eating an animal as has been done for millennia.

You continue to place arbitrary requirements before a living fetus has any right to live, but you do list feeling among them. Once it's demonstrated that a baby has a functioning nervous system, would you be fine with restricting its abortion because it could feel itself be torn apart?

People who use birth control still create offspring, does that surprise you? I'm not against birth control, you're making more over-broad assumptions just so you can try to make your stance less awful by comparison. My stance is balanced enough to exclude birth control from being considered murder because the pregnancy hasn't begun. If somebody takes direct action to terminate a pregnancy, I am against it.

Edgar Reynaldo
raynebc said:

Edgar: An organism is a distinct life form, and doesn't include an individual cell from an organism.

An organism is just a collection of cells. At what point is it alive? When it looks human? When it's heart beats? When it's brain thinks? When it's body feels? None of you can ever make up your minds about when a fetus becomes a human being.

An embryo is just a cell. It will mindlessly divide and replicate without any help from you or me or God or anybody else. But in the case of a human being, it would quickly die without the protective shelter of the womb. The ONLY thing keeping it alive is the mother, and if she sees fit not to carry the baby to term, that's HER decision. If it endangers her health, she has the RIGHT not to carry it. If she was raped, it's her RIGHT not to be forced to carry a rapist's baby. If she can't raise a baby on her own, and she isn't prepared to care for it, it's up to HER whether or not to bring the baby into the world. Not YOU, not ME, not THE POPE, not ROME, not anybody else.

I am steadily moving away from meat all the time. Lately I've been eating lot of tofu. And before you try to say I'm murdering soy beans, why don't you go out and slaughter your own meat if it's such a natural, okay thing to do. ;)

raynebc

It's a human being from conception. That it has its own DNA and living cells means it's alive. It's pro-choice people who have a hard time pinning down the beginning of life because they want the option to kill their offspring.

Gametes are just cells from the parent, but when they fuse they result in a new cell with a combination of the parents' genes and unique DNA. It does not matter whether it would survive if artificially removed from the mother, it is a human by definition. It's pointless to continue this discussion as you aren't honest enough to admit that the real argument is whether it's OK for one human to choose to kill another human for convenience.

Edgar Reynaldo

You're right. This is a pointless discussion. ::)

Because you're a hypocrite, you believe in the 'sanctity of life' but only as long as its human. You're just as much a murderer as I am. That is the cold hard reality of humanity.

Do you remember anything before you were born?

Your argument is weak. An embryo could develop into a human, but only given support. It will never remember anything before it was born. Do you know most fertilized eggs are actually flushed out of a woman by her own body? So in your eyes she's committing murder, because all those fertilized eggs could have developed into human beings. You have no right to legislate what a women does with her own body. It's up to the mother to decide, not YOU.

Polybios

These pictures are revolting. So the human dignity of these babies is best served by photographing their bodies and exposing them on the Internet?

What position would our "pro-life" camp take on rape?

raynebc

Edgar still doesn't understand literal criteria for life versus philosophical requirements like retaining memory, critical thinking and other unscientific "requirements" to be considered alive. A human embryo is already human, it doesn't require more time to become human. His uneducated feelings on the matter are irrelevant. Pro-life people don't consider naturally occurring miscarriages to be murder, that's just another dumb distraction pro-choicers use to dodge responsibility.

I'm not purely pro-life, I balance it with responsibility. If a woman was raped, she didn't choose to procreate so she shouldn't have to carry her offspring to term. If a woman had sex for recreation and merely regrets that the natural progression of reproduction creates another life, it's immoral to kill it out of convenience.

Edgar Reynaldo

In your own words :

raynebc said:

That it has its own DNA and living cells means it's alive.

So why don't you have any respect for animals or plants? Your disrespect for life different from your own is what gives me my disrespect for human lives.

If all it takes is DNA and living cells, then that makes hair follicles 'alive' too.

The real story, from an ultrasound technician :

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10157599109579274&id=507224273

Erin Maus

raynebc, do you believe men should be forced to pay child support?

If Republicans were really pro-life, they'd be clammering for improving maternal care. It's ironic such ostentatiously pro-life states like Alabama are worst in the country for things like maternal and infant mortality rate. Words vs actions. But let's legislate the womb and leave it to the free market once the baby's born.

bamccaig

Life is not black and white. The universe is chaotic. Surely it gives you a sense of nobility sitting on your high horse, but that doesn't make you right. You're arguing a subjective point. There's no universally correct answer. Obviously we are all in disagreement about what is right. That's not the right time for government regulation.

The truth is that not all life is special. It's trivial to create it. If you're such a prude that you believe that people shouldn't have sex recreationally then good luck convincing anyone of that. That just makes it sound like you need to get laid. :P And if you do believe that people should have sex recreationally and that it's expensive these days to raise a child then you should be able to reason that it makes a lot of sense to be able to stop accidental pregnancies before it's too late.

We should not force rape babies to be born. That's a horrible existence to have. If two crack addicts fuck and the female gets pregnant the best thing they can do for that baby is to terminate it. There's a very small chance that it will be enough to overcome the addiction for one of the parents, but basically zero for both parents. It doesn't make sense.

People are not going to use abortion as their birth control mechanism. It's costly, and it's not without risk. It's not birth control. It's a last means to prevent an unwanted pregnancy after the birth control mechanisms have failed. And people have every right to do so.

Sex is a lot of fun. It's healthy, physically and emotionally. It would be different if we could easily afford to support children, but these days it takes 2 full-time parents to pay the bills for a small family of 1 or 2 kids.

The majority of people are going to choose to have the kid anyway. The people that would choose abortion are not necessarily going to provide the best life for these children. Parents need to want to be good parents. There's no law against being a bad parent. It's again subjective what's good and what's bad. There are laws to regulate definite abuses, but there's a large gray area, and you can't force parents to do their best.

It simply doesn't make sense to oppose abortion. Of course the images are difficult. Newsflash: pregnancy is pretty messy too. So are monthly periods for women. That doesn't make them bad. Men are largely oblivious to that because we don't live that. Women live with that on a monthly basis.

And the images that were posted of livestock meat products were finished products. That's not the messy image. The messy image is the actual forcible death and bleeding out and draining the carcass. By the time it gets to the butcher the blood has been drained. There's still a face/head, perhaps, but otherwise it's a very gray image compared to the original act.

Those images of fetuses and babies being exposed doesn't sway me. Nobody would say that those aren't difficult images to see in isolation, but seeing them daily it would be no different than butchering cows daily. People can and do deal with these images daily. It's not a big deal. And the line being drawn makes no sense. You haven't justified why these "lives" are more valuable than other lives. It makes a whole lot more sense to empower BOTH parents, man and woman, over the baby-to-be that isn't yet conscious and has nothing yet to lose.

That baby could become the next Darwin or it could become the next Hitler. There's no way of knowing, and so let live or terminate you cannot say whether it's the right or wrong thing to do. That's life. It's mostly gray. It's very rarely black and white. There's nothing wrong with gray.

Append:

I can attest that condoms are not very reliable. It's really trivial to break them, and it's most likely to happen when the male has the least control in the transaction, and he's the only one that knows the end is near. For anybody using them I encourage adequate lubrication, which sometimes means artificial lubrication. At best it's something like 97.93% effective (which doesn't really sound great on a "good year"). But at worst it's 0%. Still worth using, but it's ridiculous to assert that they're foolproof. They're definitely not.

That pretty much rules out the options that men have to protect themselves.

Edgar Reynaldo
GullRaDriel

I really want to know in which way do men feels so superior that they think they can decide what's good for women better than the women themselves.

I really hope that we can ASAP put miscarried/unwanted babies into the belly of pro life men who do not want abortion.

raynebc

Edgar: I do have respect for plants and animals. My pet ferrets are carnivores, so they also eat meat. I take good care of them and feed them a diet entirely appropriate for their species: All meat, bones and organs. I am raising several flowers, herbs, fruits and vegetables. Hair doesn't have its own unique DNA. Your ability to repeatedly make bad arguments is impressive. Your ultrasound technician post is a call to allow killing of offspring for comparably rare medical conditions that are not the norm. Most pro life people are willing to excuse the use of abortion in the case of rape, incest or significant danger to the mother's health. Many would allow it for extremely deformed fetuses that can't survive. The overwhelming majority of abortions don't fit into those descriptors. Using extreme outlier examples to make the average case is bad policy, like trying to ban guns after a mass shooting.

Aaron: Yes, men should be forced to pay for child support. If they refuse to work to pay for their children, they should do manual labor under threat of incarceration to repay their debt to their partner and child. If two parents aren't willing to raise the children they create, they should practice safer sex (multiple forms of birth control because using only one leaves too high a failure rate) or give the child up for adoption. Pro lifers would largely be glad to pay more taxes to go to maternal and infant medical care if it meant curtailing abortion. And since you missed it: We don't care about the woman's body, we care about the additional life inside the woman's body.

bamccaig: Whether something is alive or dead is not as subjective as some people pretend it is. If you want to make the argument that the fetus is a human life but it doesn't deserve rights that supersede the mother's desire to destroy it on a whim for any reason, then make that argument plainly and honestly. The truth is people are selfish, and they want to do what makes them feel good without dealing with the consequences. When the consequences involve life or death of your own offspring, there is good reason to question peoples' motivations. It may have been an accident on your part, but please don't state the lie that abortion prevents unwanted pregnancy. It ends an unwanted pregnancy, which means ending a life, which is why there is a moral debate. In a moral world, people wouldn't consider killing their offspring on demand and would only procreate in committed relationships where they would raise the child.

GullRaDriel: Do you happen to know how many women are pro-life? You'd probably be surprised to know that a 2015 poll by Vox revealed that women labeled themselves pro-life more than men did. If a pregnancy has miscarried, no significant population of people would object to it being removed from the woman's uterus, you're just posting dumb sh*t now. If it were medically viable to transfer an unwanted pregnancy of any stage to a woman who wants a child, or if there was technology to bring the fetus to term outside of a human body, pro-lifers would largely be for it.

Bottom line, don't be selfish and see sex as a mere plaything when its natural purpose has always been procreation.

Erin Maus

I respect that you're consistent, raynebc, even if I don't agree with your views at all.

> We don't care about the woman's body, we care about the additional life inside the woman's body.

But did you word that slightly wrong?

> Bottom line, don't be selfish and see sex as a mere plaything when its natural purpose has always been procreation.

Just because it's natural doesn't make it right or good. That's a fallacy (appeal to nature fallacy).

Edgar Reynaldo
raynebc said:

Hair doesn't have its own unique DNA.

Hair has DNA, and the follicles are alive.

raynebc said:

Pro lifers would largely be glad to pay more taxes to go to maternal and infant medical care if it meant curtailing abortion.

Yeah right. Republicans repeatedly vote to defund education and child care as well as Planned Parenthood and affordable birth control.

raynebc said:

And since you missed it: We don't care about the woman's body, we care about the additional life inside the woman's body.

And that's why you're not qualified to decide what happens. Pro choice puts the life of the woman ahead of the life of the baby inside her, as it should be. This is why we will always disagree.

raynebc

But did you word that slightly wrong?

I'll clarify that pro-lifers don't care to restrict what a woman does to her own body, but a fetus is biologically a different living body.

Just because it's natural doesn't make it right or good. That's a fallacy (appeal to nature fallacy).

I've had arguments with people where they claim pregnancy wasn't the expected outcome of sex. There's a disconnect from what people want and how the universe operates.

Hair has DNA, and the follicles are alive.

I don't know if you're being sarcastic or if you are actually deluded enough to think that's a valid counter-argument. Hair has its owner's DNA, not its own unique DNA. For various reasons it is not classifiable as a distinct life form.

Republicans repeatedly vote to defund education and child care as well as Planned Parenthood and affordable birth control.

Democrats and Republicans disagree on how to achieve common goals, what a shock. Out of control tax and spend shouldn't always be the answer.

Pro choice puts the life of the woman ahead of the life of the baby inside her, as it should be. This is why we will always disagree.

If you've finally decided to stop with the false equivalencies and be honest, I thank you. This is entirely the crux of the argument, whether a mother has any right to kill its offspring for any reason ranging from convenience to preserving her own life. Pro lifers believe the ending of a human life should be well justified, pro choicers much less so even if they mostly value human life after it is born.

bamccaig

The thing is nature has a lot of examples of the killing of offspring even after birth. It's not at all a new phenomenon, and it's not exclusive to humans. Other primates, mammals, and far more distant groups of animals like birds and fish also occasionally kill their offspring (and often, eat them).

For example, prior to Western civilizations reaching the Inuit they apparently killed many/most female babies. Estimates range from 15% to 80%. Logic dictates they were probably trying to limit the population to those most productive. Where survival was extreme they needed as many men as possible to hunt seals and whales, and probably far fewer women who likely didn't go on the hunts unless they were extremely desperate. They probably only needed a few women to reproduce and take care of the young children.

What this tells us is that morality is subjective. It made sense for past civilizations to kill off children that they could not afford. Similarly, in the wild, when an animal is struggling to survive it will typically abandon its offspring when times get desperate because it needs to focus on its own survival (and sometimes that means just eating the offspring yourself).

This seems to give us plenty of backing to justify abortion in fact. It's obviously far more humane to terminate the pregnancy than to wait for the birth and then kill the baby. Odds are humans that seek abortion in our day are doing so for many of the same reasons: lack of resources probably being number one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide_(zoology)#Infanticide_by_parents_and_caregivers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filial_cannibalism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savaging

Would it make you feel better if we eat the fetus? ??? >:(

Append:

Side note: I think that there's a bit more to being human than just "life" and DNA.

video

To assert that an undeveloped "fetus" is already human really downplays what it means to be human, which could over time have dire consequences.

raynebc

Survival of a mother in extreme scarcity could justify a wild animal to abandon or cannibalize its offspring. Survival of a tribal community in extreme scarcity could justify their sex selective infanticide. But then you have places like China, where their one child policy led to men being more socially valuable and baby girls were killed more for social reasons and not for survival. If you believe men and women are equally valuable, as Western civilization generally does, that can't be tolerated. Unwanted pregnancies in Western countries don't cause the mother to starve to death, there are plenty of social safety nets in place. There are plenty of non government entities that will even pay for the mother's medical care so she can carry the baby to term and then give the baby up for adoption. It is far more compassionate and moral to give a baby up for adoption when you know the baby will have all its basic needs provided by at least the government than to abort it.

Don't fall back into the trap of equating philosophical arguments about humanity with literal, objective definitions of humanity. You can argue an adult has more value than a baby or a fetus, but that doesn't mean the latter two have no value.

bamccaig

Safety nets will help to keep the mother and child alive, but they sure as fuck won't give them a comfortable, luxrious life like many of us get to live. If you don't want children you aren't going to suffer through that life if you don't have to. And guess what? You don't have to. Abortion is safe and very reliable.

Interestingly women rarely choose adoption. They much prefer abortion over adoption. It's a lot easier. The "problem" is gone much faster, and there's less emotional stress on the mother compared to when one gives birth and then has to give up the baby. Let alone the physical stresses, which are substantial. Women don't want to carry a baby to term to give it away. It's a lot to ask. It's unreasonable to demand.

And there are countless orphans already in our society that could be adopted. It's easy to argue that bringing more unwanted babies into the world is exacerbating that problem, decreasing the odds that an older child will be adopted because the adoptive parents would probably prefer a baby with fewer behaviour issues (from being in the "system", because it's hell).

I know a social worker too, and she has a lot of trouble keeping foster parents to take care of the kids in her agency's care. It seems most of them are doing it for the money. They don't provide a good life. They often give the worst care they can get away with, while pocketing as much cash as they can. She fired one of them a few months ago because they weren't working out. They were living in a house owned by the agency. And they refused to leave after being fired. They squatted in the house for a month before the police were involved to drag them out.

How righteous of you to prefer children are brought into that kind of life instead of just being ended before they begin. You must be so proud of yourself.

Life is not black and white.

raynebc

Even if a child isn't adopted, they have a good shot at a good life in the USA even if they don't live a life of luxury. Certainly better than never being given a chance. I am proud of this stance, it is what is righteous. It's unreasonable to demand that everybody acknowledge that having sex for fun and then killing offspring out of convenience is a just or moral set of choices. Killing your own kind to have fun without consequences is wrong, and that is a black and white assessment I will stand by.

LennyLen
raynebc said:

It's unreasonable to demand that everybody acknowledge that having sex for fun and then killing offspring out of convenience is a just or moral set of choices. Killing your own kind to have fun without consequences is wrong, and that is a black and white assessment I will stand by.

You call other people unreasonable for having a different set of morals to you and then admit you see things in black and white. You're the one being unreasonable here.

For the record, I also don't think that abortion for convenience sake is a good thing. But I also accept that other people have different views to mine and that there is no objective right or wrong opinion.

bamccaig
raynebc said:

Even if a child isn't adopted, they have a good shot at a good life in the USA even if they don't live a life of luxury.

I'm sure you've gone to visit a few orphanages to verify this fact. Surely you aren't just pulling it out of your ass. Maybe you grew up in the foster care system and know what it's like? Surely you've spent time living in extremely impoverished communities, and have experienced first hand how bad life can be in America. Because if you have no idea what you're talking about then it would certainly NOT be very righteous to dictate what should happen to these life forms, as if you were some kind of omnipotent being.

raynebc said:

Certainly better than never being given a chance.

That's like saying that 5 is greater than null. It's nonsense. There can be no comparison. Countless sperm die every day that were never given a chance. It makes no difference. A consciousness that never existed cannot feel any which way about having never existed.

raynebc said:

I am proud of this stance, it is what is righteous.

Careful of being proud of ideas. That tends to close the mind to different ideas.

raynebc said:

It's unreasonable to demand that everybody acknowledge that having sex for fun and then killing offspring out of convenience is a just or moral set of choices.

It took me several passes over this sentence to make any sense of it. I don't know what to make of that, but found it noteworthy anyway.

I think you said that it's unreasonable to expect people to allow other people the freedom to terminate a pregnancy that has nothing to do with them. Which is unreasonable. If my wife gets pregnant you have absolutely zero control over what we do with that fetus. It's completely none of your business if we decide to abort it.

It's not the "pro-choice" group that is forcing anything on anyone. Nobody is saying that if you knock up your old lady (or whoever) that you have to abort it. By all means, if she agrees with you, and if you're fucking her hopefully you've done what you could to established a minimum level of compatibility, then carry the baby to term and either keep it or give it up for adoption. You have that right, and nobody is taking that away from you.

Odds are pretty good at this point that we'd also keep it since we're mature, my wife's clock is ticking, and she's excited about babies. I certainly still worry myself silly about how I'll continue to provide enough for us, let alone children...

It's the "pro-life" group that is trying to dictate what other people do with their lives. You have absolutely no entitlement to do this. Abortion is proven safe and effective (in fact, mothers that abort often feel immediate relief, whereas mothers that give their baby up for adoption often suffer long term emotional pain). There's no reason to believe that the terminated fetus feels anything at all. Nobody asked you how their abortion made you feel because it doesn't matter how you feel about it. It's none of your business.

raynebc said:

Killing your own kind to have fun without consequences is wrong, and that is a black and white assessment I will stand by.

And again where we differ is with the definition "your own kind". I imagine if we were to discover a fetus outside the womb we'd probably think it was some kind of alien being. It vaguely resembles a human, depending on how far along it is, but it's far from being fully human. It takes approximately 9 months to make a human. At 5 months (4 months premature) the baby only has about a 50% chance of survival with doctors doing everything possible for them. They are still not developed enough to even have good odds of being artificially supported through the rest of their development. That's not a human. There are actual humans with much more minor developmental inadequacies that we might consider less than human (e.g., sociopaths and psychopaths), but are still more human than a fetus at even 6 months of development.

If given the necessary time and energy a fetus might become human, like a caterpillar will eventually become a butterfly if given the chance, but the universe won't even feel the ripple if it doesn't. That caterpillar is not a butterfly yet. The DNA will not change. The caterpillar is already a unique set of DNA, which the butterfly will share, but just like the fetus is not a human, in its caterpillar form it is not a butterfly.

raynebc

LennyLen is a bit more reasonable than some of the people I've been arguing with here, in that he realizes there are ethical concerns with abortion.

Bam is not somebody I can reason with. He thinks parents can decide to kill their fetus and that life has no rights. He thinks the mere possibility of a hard life is worse than the parents making that choice to destroy their offspring in the womb, pulling it out, sometimes in pieces. He doesn't believe anybody should be upset that a mother has elected to kill her offspring. He equates sex cells like sperm with actual distinct human lives. He argues that since it isn't a fully developed human, it doesn't count as human. Sure, any uneducated simpleton could come across a fetus in a toilet (this has happened before) and not immediately recognize it as human, but people with experience can still understand what it is. To him, some humans are more equal than others. Caterpillars don't change species when they metamorphose into butterflies, and sadly I can't say this dumb comparison surprises me since it is typical of the weak excuses for murder I've seen in this thread. The bottom line is that a human fetus is a human at conception, it doesn't require time to develop to become a member of the human species. This is fact, and no amount of wishful ignorance will change it.

I don't believe there's anything more I have to say on the matter, but I don't expect the idiotic counter arguments will stop.

bamccaig

You don't need to tell everybody else what I think because I've already done that. Also, there's a really good chance you'll get some of it wrong, like suggesting that I believe sperm, which I slaughter by the millions every day, are actual distinct human lives. That's more close to what you believe, not me. But again, my ideas are already well expressed in this thread so there's no need for you to try to smear me by misrepresenting my ideas.

raynebc said:

Sure, any uneducated simpleton could come across a fetus in a toilet (this has happened before) and not immediately recognize it as human, but people with experience can still understand what it is.

Just for the record, what do you suppose is done when a fetus is found in a toilet? Do you expect that the police are called? A murder investigation is launched? An autopsy is performed? The fetus is placed in a wooden casket and buried in a cemetery? Or perhaps they send it to a funeral home to be cremated?

Or you think it gets bagged up in a plastic bag and thrown away like garbage? That is, of course, assuming it's too big to just be flushed down the toilet. ::) :-/ >:(

Edgar Reynaldo

Queue the star trek music.

Allegro.cc, taking threads where they've never gone before.

I think we've all put forth some decent arguments. The problem is, none of us are right about how other people should choose. It's a subjective choice, not an objective one.

When your cat has still born babies, do you mourn their death? Do you pray? Do you hold a ceremony? Place a marker on their grave? Or do you just bury them and move on?

Nothing here has convinced me that it's wrong to abort a baby fetus when it's barely even developed. There are term limits for this very reason. Now if you gave birth to a baby and then killed it because you didn't want it, I would be against that. But I do not equate the two.

I think it's far more hypocritical of people to claim a fetus is sacred life when they hold zero value for the lives of the thousands of animals they slaughter to feed themselves. It's hypocrisy at its worst.

So far, we have discussed religion, politics, immigration, rape, abortion, sex, is there any other taboo subject we've yet to discuss?

We might as well let this thread go down in the infamy it deserves. ;)

LennyLen

So far, we have discussed religion, politics, immigration, rape, abortion, sex, is there any other taboo subject we've yet to discuss?

How about Euthanasia?

I believe those with a terminal illness who are suffering should be allowed to choose to end their life.

GullRaDriel

There is a debate in France regarding end if life.

raynebc

While I disagree with suicide, if somebody has an illness that multiple doctors agree can't be cured, the patient could decide their life isn't worth living anymore and pursue ending it. A doctor shouldn't be required to participate in an assisted suicide. I'm not sure I'd consider it a good idea to allow people who are merely mentally ill to commit suicide, as they can often be helped.

Edgar Reynaldo

I feel about euthanasia the same way I feel about abortion. It should be avoided as much as possible, but in the end, it's up to the person involved to make that decision themselves.

Simply because there are other better options. But if someone is suffering and they can not bear it anymore, and nothing else helps, then I would be okay with it.

bamccaig
raynebc said:

While I disagree with suicide, if somebody has an illness that multiple doctors agree can't be cured, the patient could decide their life isn't worth living anymore and pursue ending it.

What happened to all life being precious? Whereas a fetus' life has barely begun, has no consciousness, and has no strong human bonds; a person that has been living for years, like decades, has very strong bonds. Seems like you arbitrarily go one way or the next with no real morality at your core.

raynebc said:

A doctor shouldn't be required to participate in an assisted suicide.

You believe anyone should be able to euthanize a loved one on a whim? How the Hell are we supposed to determine if it was murder, suicide, or assisted suicide? >:( ???

raynebc said:

I'm not sure I'd consider it a good idea to allow people who are merely mentally ill to commit suicide, as they can often be helped.

There's a huge distinction between assisted suicide and suicide. While the latter is generally understood to be a desperate cry for help, and often the person can be helped, the former is merely a way out of an impossible life where there are no other options.

It is quite surprising though to see celebrities that you would think have all of the best resources in the world still committing suicide. :-/ It's a touchy subject. I suppose in some instances those with deep psychological wounds may also be living an impossible life. But they're generally still capable of killing themselves so no need for assistance.

Of course, there's no point criminalizing suicide because if they're successful there's nobody to punish, and if they're unsuccessful what they need is therapy and treatment, not punishment, to deter/prevent another attempt. And punishing them is likely to only add onto the weight of the world that lead to their decision in the first place.

It seems compassion is the best response in every case.

raynebc

I didn't expect Bam to see the difference between taking one's own life and taking another's life when it is not able to consent. It's not worth getting into another debate where I'll see endless disingenuous arguments.

Edgar Reynaldo

Gentleman, a new page, a new subject please.

I think we've beat this horse to death now.

My chess program is almost ready for two player, and will be ready for networking and ai in a few weeks or so.

Peace, peeps.

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Erin Maus

And I'm maybe a month away from a complete demo of my game. :-/

I'm working on finishing the last part of the dungeon, Floor 4, then adding some random polish (decorations for buildings, settings screen, and music mostly).

I added the final boss fight (spoilers, not like anyone cares):

video

Edgar Reynaldo

Hey, somebody bump my chess thread so I don't have to keep editing my post... please and thank you...

GullRaDriel

Done, and done !

bamccaig

You fools. The controversial topics are what has kept this thread alive! >:( >:( >:(

Women don't WANT to do STEM jobs. >:(

Edgar Reynaldo

I don't know about you bamccaig, but arguing 100% of the time is not my idea of fun.

What's kept this thread alive has been all the boring shit inbetween the yelling and cussing.

There's very few of us left now, and what are we doing? Still up to our old tricks, making the public uncomfortable here..............

:-*

raynebc

About women in STEM, that's generally true. And chosen occupation leads right into another modern myth: The gender wage gap, which is a false interpretation of statistics. The fuller picture is that the entirety of women earn less than the entirety of men because the former perform less or easier work for their employer. Men and women have different life priorities, aptitudes, etc. because they are not identical and they make different occupational choices.

Edgar Reynaldo

Geez, the level of stupidity in this thread just went back up again..........

RE WOMEN IN STEM
May I kindly direct you to Dr. Grace Murray Hopper, inventor of COBOL, the most widely used language in banking and old technology, even still in use today, due to all the legacy code. If you knew COBOL, you could make beaucoup bucks...

Of course, we all know, one is not an example, try these for starters :

http://www.women-inventors.com/

::)

LennyLen
raynebc said:

The fuller picture is that the entirety of women earn less than the entirety of men because the former perform less or easier work for their employer.

There is a discrepancy in many workplaces however between the rate of pay for males and females performing the same role. This is what most women take issue with - why should they get payed less than a male who is doing the exact same job they are.

That being said, I think the gender wage gap issue is fairly insignificant when compared to the wage gap between the rich and the poor.

raynebc

Edgar loves picking cherries, but we're talking in generalities so cherries are not very useful. Get a better argument before complaining about those from other people. There are exceptional individual men and women in any profession.

If you don't take things such as years of experience, level of education, number of hours worked per week, etc. into account, people may make different wages for even the exact same job. For this reason it can be showed that two men can earn different wages for the same job. My complaint with the gender wage gap narrative is that they haven't properly made their case considering all relevant factors. I've heard it argued that men are more aggressive when negotiating for pay raises, and I can sympathise with the argument that this can disadvantage women, who generally aren't considered as aggressive as men. If one person negotiates themselves a pay raise without a substantial reason (ie. earning another degree, certification, etc.) then that raise should also be provided to all other staff in the same job role.

Neil Roy

I wasn't going to post here again, but... in the interest of sharing something related to gaming and keeping things away from controversial conversations...

GOG is giving away OBDUCTION absolutely FREE! This is amazing. Been waiting for it to go on special, didn't expect it free. This is made by the same ones that brought you Riven and Myst, a Cyan game. I never played it but the video trailers for it look amazing. It's from 2016 and 3D... it will be free until June 1st, so grab it while you can.

https://www.gog.com/game/obduction?fbclid=IwAR0leTG4xsOUDPq4oZ6FRPUGBSm7YvTOTrPQQmyQxABxhS_Fk3ik5OrUOEs

Here's the launch trailer...

video

bamccaig

RE WOMEN IN STEM
May I kindly direct you to Dr. Grace Murray Hopper, inventor of COBOL, the most widely used language in banking and old technology, even still in use today, due to all the legacy code. If you knew COBOL, you could make beaucoup bucks...

Examples like Grace Hopper completely debunk the Feminist myths. There are examples of women throughout time that DID do things that were typically male-only. It wasn't discrimination keeping them out so much as their own choices. Most women didn't WANT to be working with machines. And so it's no conspiracy that men would be surprised when the rare one appeared, and teased them for being different. That's just a weakness of humankind (and it goes both ways).

And that remains true today. Despite all efforts to get more women into STEM very few do go, and unfortunately for those women that are steered towards such a career by propaganda many may find after spending thousands of dollars on an education and perhaps even working a few years in the field that they don't enjoy it. Some women will go on to be happy and competent in the fields of STEM, but they most likely would have done it on their own anyway. And any "help" they received along their way just diminishes their own accomplishments and potential.

LennyLen said:

There is a discrepancy in many workplaces however between the rate of pay for males and females performing the same role. This is what most women take issue with - why should they get payed less than a male who is doing the exact same job they are.

You're wrong. The gender wage gap has been debunked thousands of times. When you factor in all variables women generally make the same as men for the same job, and in some cases they actually get paid more (likely the employers trying to avoid such accusations by discriminating in their favour).

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=wage+gap+debunked

I'll trust that YouTube will give you unbiased results to that. If not, I'm sure other search engines will. Protip: if comments or thumbs are disabled on a video on YouTube you can pretty much guarantee it's unsubstantiated propaganda that doesn't hold up to scrutiny. The same is generally true if the downvotes outweigh the upvotes, but even if they're close it's probably a red flag...

The myth arose from examining top-level data about the income levels of men and women. And 100% there is a gap at that level, but that doesn't mean that it's all due to discrimination. That's ludicrous. Most of it is due to women's personal choices. They generally choose jobs that pay less, and choose to work part time. Money isn't their motivating factor when it comes to choosing a career path. And even women that do choose big money career paths often find by their 30's that it doesn't make them happy and they change directions. Usually towards families because that is what makes all of us happy, but perhaps even moreso for women. When the incomes are actually compared between two employees doing the same job women and men are generally paid the same.

Erin Maus

Gonna intrude on the (pointless) debate...

I finished the demo of my game.

I didn't expect to get music & sound effects integrated so quickly, but I did it.

This is a major accomplishment. 400 days and thousands of hours. On its own, the game is self-contained: it has a beginning, middle, and end. But hopefully it'll be part of something much bigger.

bamccaig

Good for you, Aaron. Very neat game. And a true accomplishment sticking to it and getting a demo completed.

Erin Maus

Thank you, that means a lot.

bamccaig

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Bump. >:(

GullRaDriel

I love that one ^^

Edgar Reynaldo

Lmao, that's right up there with dicktators....

bamccaig

It's a real shame that the audio player on A.cc is broken:

https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/610450

In other news, it seems Google sucks these days (it's not just our imagination). I tried about 5 queries to try to find that thread on Google, and nothing came close.

Meanwhile, Bing hit it first try. It seems Google must have completely sold out and is offering up sponsored links on the first page(s) instead of relevant results. Which is infuriating.

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aallegro.cc+%22dizzy+egg%22+%22bamccaig%22+%22rap%22+%22produced%22

https://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3Aallegro.cc+%22dizzy+egg%22+%22bamccaig%22+%22rap%22+%22produced%22

Append:

The reason I don't sing/rap very often anymore is because my wife is unappreciative...

media player

You probably can't hear her, but it's almost 2 AM and I was attempting to sing, and since I'm generally quiet when I sing I try to be as loud as I can, figuring I'm never too loud. Well at least I've gotten loud enough to wake the person in the next room. :D She was not amused. >:(

Edgar Reynaldo

On a more useful note, how can I block adsites these days? For example, does AdBlock work with Pandora? I've discovered a great band and made a station from them called Pretty Lights Radio. It's pretty groovy.

https://www.pandora.com/station/play/4256912705847146430 8-)

Anything short of the hosts file on Windows?

What about on Linux? iptables?

What's a real firewall on Linux? How can I get a real firewall that doesn't suck on Windows 10? Can anyone recommend one? :-[>:(:-X

bamccaig

I just set up pi-hole on a raspberry pi on my network. It's basically an open source/free software DNS server with blocklists for ads. The idea is that you setup all of your devices in your network to use a device in your network running pi-hole as their DNS server, and then it'll block access to all known ad networks, by domain name at least. The blocklists are free from third party sources.

Where it all falls apart for me is that most of my devices are using a VPN for privacy, and to ensure my privacy it uses its own DNS servers. I can tell it to use my own, but then my Internet activity may not be fully private because requests to the ultimate DNS server (pi-hole is like a bridge between you and some other DNS service) may leak details about me. I'm not quite sure about that so for now none of my devices are actually benefiting from my pi-hole setup... Which is unfortunate.

The dream is to have ads block on my entire LAN by everything using pi-hole, but I also take privacy seriously so I want to figure out how to use it properly with a VPN which seems to be a very advanced topic and not something I feel comfortable messing with...

I think that iptables is the real firewall in Linux. That said, the UI is very complex so a few wrappers exist. The "easy" firewall in Linux that I'm familiar with is called ufw (gufw for the GUI).

What are your complaints with the Windows firewall? I think it does its job well enough. The UI isn't the most intuitive, but I think you can figure it out easily enough. I rare mess with it though. Only to open the rare port for a server application, which I very rarely do in Windows.

Append:

I'm not familiar with Pandora so I'm not sure what ads you're trying to block. If Pandora is streaming the ads in the audio then there's probably nothing you can do, but if it's loading images or videos or things like that from ad networks then something like pi-hole can probably help.

I definitely encourage the use of Adblock Plus (or other plugins from the same developer) too. It doesn't hurt to have the extra protection in case something slips through pi-hole.

Edgar Reynaldo

The Windows 10 firewall has more port holes than a luxury cruise liner.

Have you ever looked at the default rules list???

bamccaig

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/163557/why-the-windows-firewall-has-so-many-exception-rules-by-default

There are a ton of default rules, but I think it's a necessary evil. As said, in the above stack exchange thread, if users had to explicitly allow most legitimate packets the first time then users would just click allow for everything. The majority of Windows users are completely oblivious to what an operating system or firewall is so Microsoft is trying to find a healthy balance between "Just Work" and security. An open port doesn't do anything unless you have a program on your machine listening for it anyway. And probably more than half of the inbound rules are tied to specific programs, not open ports.

The problem is you, a power user and programmer and you might say hacker, is using an operating system that is designed and built for laymen. The answer is to switch to either OS X (macOS now apparently) or preferably some freedom-loving Unix like Linux or the BSDs.

Edgar Reynaldo

The problem is that my Host OS is Windows 10, and setting the iptables in my Virtual Box Linux distros wouldn't help secure my host OS.

Zone Alarm used to be the best firewall in existence. :'(

GullRaDriel

Then use a router and only forward what's needed.

Erin Maus

video

evil libruls making 9/11 a partisan issue in 2019

Edgar Reynaldo

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/03/what-we-learn-from-50-years-of-asking-children-to-draw-scientists/556025/

It's all in their minds. As girls grow up, they believe less and less in their ability to excel in science. This is the real truth of the matter, that girls aren't interested in STEM because they don't believe they can do it.

Stuff it.

bamccaig

I think that's entirely subjective. What children draw is going to largely be what they've been exposed to. It would be a completely different matter if they just asked children to draw whatever they wanted to, and they drew scientists, sometimes female scientists.

First of all you have to ask yourself how they know what a scientist is. I didn't know what a scientist was when I was young enough to be asked to draw in school. I didn't even know what science was. I first learned that "science" was a thing in grade 7 when we started having science classes.

Odds are these children were "taught" what scientists are just before they were asked to draw it, or perhaps they watched a cartoon featuring scientists with whatever agenda the producers of the show had. Which could easily skew the results if the teachers or media featured female scientists. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, though I think it could be harmful for society if they start branding STEM fields as feminine, which might actually discourage boys from pursuing them, and have a net effect of just less STEM people overall. I think it makes sense for media to portray life as closely as possible. I think it makes sense to portray scientists proportional to how they really are, unless there's absolute proof that discrimination is keeping women out of STEM (which there's no real evidence for).

Similarly, as the article seems to allude to, children are disproportionately exposed to women in media because women are far more likely to work with children (I don't see the Feminists up in arms about the lack of men in childcare centres and schools, or children's media, mind you).

I'm familiar with "Sid the Science Kid" because my nephew used to watch it. Basically just a derpy kid that was fascinated with science-y stuff. It's a good show.

That said, Wikipedia also references SciGirls which was made from 2010 to 2018 and specifically targets girls to try to interest them in STEM. That's not at all the same thing as girls naturally being interested in STEM. That's literally brainwashing them to think that they're meant to do it. It's no surprise when you feed a young mind with ideas that they regurgitate them later. The dangerous thing is that we're not gods, and we often don't know the consequences for these things until it's much too late. Is the net effect positive, or is it actually doing harm? They won't know for 50 years.

If anything, the fact that young children predominantly draw male scientists shows that there may well be a natural link to boys being interested in STEM and girls not. You would otherwise expect for young girls to draw predominantly female scientists, but obviously if 2/3 of the pictures are still male then at least 1/6 of girls are drawing male scientists and don't see themselves being interested in that.

What's far, far, far more interesting than what young children draw is what high school girls are interested in. Particularly, the ones that have grown up in a world that encouraged them to be interested in STEM. What they continue to find is that for the most part all of their efforts to get more girls into STEM have little effect.

The less girly the STEM field is apparently the less women are interested in it. Whereas biology and medical science attract a fair number of women, engineering and technology still don't attract as many. Which doesn't come as much of a surprise. We already know that women are more likely to work with people than machines.

We can even see hints of this from toddlers that have had limited exposure to stereotypes. The boys naturally are drawn to the boy toys. The girls are naturally drawn to the girl toys. There are exceptions, but they are exceptions.

Actual science basically confirms that men and women are different in several ways. And that includes the things that they like, and the things they want to do and have in life. It's the politicians that are trying to convince the science that men and women are the same, and they continue to fail.

The more free a society is to choose the larger the disparity becomes. How do you explain that if women actually want to be in STEM? It makes no sense. It's a complete contradiction.

Edgar Reynaldo
bamccaig said:

I think that's entirely subjective. What children draw is going to largely be what they've been exposed to. It would be a completely different matter if they just asked children to draw whatever they wanted to, and they drew scientists, sometimes female scientists.

First of all you have to ask yourself how they know what a scientist is. I didn't know what a scientist was when I was young enough to be asked to draw in school. I didn't even know what science was. I first learned that "science" was a thing in grade 7 when we started having science classes.

Odds are these children were "taught" what scientists are just before they were asked to draw it, or perhaps they watched a cartoon featuring scientists with whatever agenda the producers of the show had. Which could easily skew the results if the teachers or media featured female scientists. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, though I think it could be harmful for society if they start branding STEM fields as feminine, which might actually discourage boys from pursuing them, and have a net effect of just less STEM people overall. I think it makes sense for media to portray life as closely as possible. I think it makes sense to portray scientists proportional to how they really are, unless there's absolute proof that discrimination is keeping women out of STEM (which there's no real evidence for).

Similarly, as the article seems to allude to, children are disproportionately exposed to women in media because women are far more likely to work with children (I don't see the Feminists up in arms about the lack of men in childcare centres and schools, or children's media, mind you).

bamccaig, you totally missed the point of the study. The study asked children to draw scientists (yes children know what scientists are :/) because they wanted to know what the child's definition of a scientist was, whether they were male or female and whether or not they identified with it.

bamccaig said:

Wikipedia [also] references SciGirls which was made from 2010 to 2018 and specifically targets girls to try to interest them in STEM. That's not at all the same thing as girls naturally being interested in STEM. That's literally brainwashing them to think that they're meant to do it. It's no surprise when you feed a young mind with ideas that they regurgitate them later. The dangerous thing is that we're not gods, and we often don't know the consequences for these things until it's much too late. Is the net effect positive, or is it actually doing harm? They won't know for 50 years.

Ha. We tell boys they can be scientists. Why not tell girls the same thing? Guess what, the study was 50 years long, so we DO know the consequences of these things. As the times changed, girls idea of who they could be changed as well. Girls are no different than boys. They believe what we tell them. That's why it's so crucial that we tell them they can be whatever they want to be, including a scientist.

As the ideas of what roles a girl is capable of changed, so did the professions they chose :

Since the 1960s, female representation in science has substantially increased. In the United States, at least, more women are earning science degrees, including 48 percent of chemistry degrees in 2015 compared to just 19 percent in 1966.

This shows women are just as capable of men. These are young adults we're talking about, who have all had a chance to shape their own ideas, and half of all chemistry degrees are now going to women in the US.

I wouldn't expect you to understand this, but belief is paramount.

The person who believes they can and the person who believes they can't are both right. (Source - Henry Ford quotes)

bamccaig said:

If anything, the fact that young children predominantly draw male scientists shows that there may well be a natural link to boys being interested in STEM and girls not. You would otherwise expect for young girls to draw predominantly female scientists, but obviously if 2/3 of the pictures are still male then at least 1/6 of girls are drawing male scientists and don't see themselves being interested in that.

Correlation is not causation. Don't try to slip that one past me. :/

The fact that the percentage of scientists drawn that were female increased to 28% over the course of the study compared to 0.6% at the start of the study shows that kids believe what we tell them, and that their beliefs shape their choices. Again, it's a matter of self esteem and guess what, faith.

“And Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.”

bamccaig said:

What's far, far, far more interesting than what young children draw is what high school girls are interested in. Particularly, the ones that have grown up in a world that encouraged them to be interested in STEM. What they continue to find is that for the most part all of their efforts to get more girls into STEM have little effect.

You're positing something that was proven false by the study. The percentage of women earning chemistry (science) degrees went from 1/5 to 1/2 over the course of 50 years. If the trend continues, women will begin to dominate the field. And that scares the shit out of you, because pretty soon you're going to be obsolete.

bamccaig said:

The less girly the STEM field is apparently the less women are interested in it. Whereas biology and medical science attract a fair number of women, engineering and technology still don't attract as many. Which doesn't come as much of a surprise. We already know that women are more likely to work with people than machines.

Which makes sense. But it doesn't prove your point. Humans naturally group together. Where like minded people with similarities go, they naturally cluster.

bamccaig said:

We can even see hints of this from toddlers that have had limited exposure to stereotypes. The boys naturally are drawn to the boy toys. The girls are naturally drawn to the girl toys. There are exceptions, but they are exceptions.

What, you mean guns and dolls? Those are stereotypes built in by society. From birth to grave, people are conditioned to be what society tells them to be. So when we take the time to tell boys AND girls that they can BOTH be whatever they choose to be, then we shall truly see what is more 'natural'. Society's conditioning is so strong that in some examples of native Indian tribes, men took the roles of women.

Just google 'examples of reversed gender roles throughout history'. Here, Let Me Google that for you.

4th result : https://www.cracked.com/article_19780_5-gender-stereotypes-that-used-to-be-exact-opposite.html

bamccaig said:

Actual science basically confirms that men and women are different in several ways. And that includes the things that they like, and the things they want to do and have in life. It's the politicians that are trying to convince the science that men and women are the same, and they continue to fail.

It's not politicians trying to convince us women and men are the same. We both know that's not true, and so does anybody else with a brain. Note, I'm not agreeing with you. The difference is that men and women are similar in the way that they can both be whatever they believe they can be. In 2015, fully half of all chemistry degrees went to women. If females represent half the population, and they represent half of all chemistry degrees, then there is an EQUAL amount of interest among men and women in a SCIENCE related field.

Now you note correctly that the engineering field is underrepresented by women. What we need to discover is WHY. I would posit that it is another case of conditioning, and that a breakthrough could easily be made by women in this field as well if we encouraged them.

bamccaig said:

The more free a society is to choose the larger the disparity becomes. How do you explain that if women actually want to be in STEM? It makes no sense. It's a complete contradiction.

Again, this is not factually correct. The gap has been closing over the years, not widening. We have more freedom today than ever before. And if we use that freedom to encourage people, then nothing can stop us from becoming whatever we want to be. Women want financial security just as much as men do, and in the modern world, women are less reliant on men than ever before, because they realize they are capable of being self sufficient on their own.

Your giant wall of diatribe just reads like a newspaper editorial from the 1800's. You have been so conditioned into semi-modern gender roles that you feel uncomfortable if someone challenges them. You know who you are, a MAN. And you let society tell you what a man is and isn't supposed to be. You are the victim of your own conditioning. Be free. And allow women to be free to be whatever they believe they can be.

Gender roles change over time, as easily shown by the link above. This means they are largely ARBITRARY, and as such, we are free to define them for ourselves, and to redefine them as we see fit. There is no perfect mold for men or women.

This isn't about feminism. It's about HUMANISM.

Try to reverse roles with your wife for a day. Do the laundry and the dishes and the cleaning and the cooking and let her drink beer and smoke pot until her brain sizzles like yours. ;) I bet you couldn't do it, and you would quickly resent your 'predefined' role as a woman and caretaker. Try thanking her for all she does for once, and show a little appreciation and respect for the opposite sex. ;)

;D

Rodolfo Lam

Hey bamccaig, what you are looking for is a double hop VPN connection. A google search is your friend, people have already thought about that scenario!

You will be hosting your own DNS server that blocks the ads as you currently are, additionally, configure the same RPi to act as an OpenVPN server tied to your DNS. To connect to the outside, you will then install the VPN client of your provider of choice. This will now be your network’s endpoint towards the internet.

All your devices will connect to your own hosted OpenVPN service that filters ads, but is encrypted from your ISPs eyes. At least until your external VPN provider’s endpoint, which will have their ISP spying everything if they wish (;D)

I have everything setup except for the double hop, as I really don’t mind my ISP. The main reason i have the VPN is to use public WiFi without worries. Also, I can use mobile data and still have phone-wide ad blocking with no additional software apart from the OpenVPN client.

Do keep in mind that by having a VPN to your home network, there is the possibility of having your entire network exposed to 0Days and whatnot. So be sure to know (or at least pretend to know) what you are doing.

bamccaig

The study asked children to draw scientists (yes children know what scientists are :/) because they wanted to know what the child's definition of a scientist was, whether they were male or female and whether or not they identified with it.

I understand that... It's flawed. Children are not lab rats. The variables are not controlled for. The findings are meaningless, and forming conclusions from the results is foolhardy.

Ha. We tell boys they can be scientists. Why not tell girls the same thing?

There's nothing wrong with telling girls they can be scientists. They can. What's wrong is telling girls they should be scientists. They should only be scientists if that's what they want to do. And in societies where women are most free to choose they choose not to be. Funny, eh?

As the ideas of what roles a girl is capable of changed, so did the professions they chose :

Since the 1960s, female representation in science has substantially increased. In the United States, at least, more women are earning science degrees, including 48 percent of chemistry degrees in 2015 compared to just 19 percent in 1966.

This shows women are just as capable of men. These are young adults we're talking about, who have all had a chance to shape their own ideas, and half of all chemistry degrees are now going to women in the US.

No, what this shows is that the proportion of women graduating with chemistry degrees has increased, but THAT'S ALL IT TELLS YOU. Like you said, correlation does not imply causation. For all we know the number of women graduating hasn't really changed much, and instead far fewer men are graduating.

We already know that women now earn the majority of degrees. Schools are no longer taking care of boys, and are instead chasing them away. Boys and young men are giving up on schools in huge numbers. That's not a win for women. It's a horrible loss for all of us.

The fact that the percentage of scientists drawn that were female increased to 28% over the course of the study compared to 0.6% at the start of the study shows that kids believe what we tell them, and that their beliefs shape their choices.

They didn't ask children to draw what they believe. They asked them to draw a scientist, and beyond that we don't know what they told them. For all we know, teachers first drew their own female scientist on the chalkboard as an example, or maybe they stood over the little girl's shoulders directing them.

It's only a fun exercise from the children's perspective, and you really should not be forming such strong opinions on the results. Without controlling for variables it's impossible to reason why the proportion of scientists drawn as female increased over time. You'd have to ask the children why they drew the scientist as female to know the answer, but you also have to be careful with that because asking them could make them question it themselves. Psychology is very complicated, and we do not have a very good understanding of it. It's mostly guesswork still at our level of advancement... It doesn't necessarily mean that girls believe they can or want to enter science. It could just be they were encouraged to draw girls by their teachers, or that they watch a TV show or some other media that has a female scientist in it precisely because social scientists think girls need to see that, and more of the girls modelled their drawings on images they had seen before... Who knows. We don't have enough information to reason about it.

You're positing something that was proven false by the study. The percentage of women earning chemistry (science) degrees went from 1/5 to 1/2 over the course of 50 years. If the trend continues, women will begin to dominate the field. And that scares the shit out of you, because pretty soon you're going to be obsolete.

I'm not a chemist. It doesn't really affect me directly. It does indirectly affect me if fewer men are graduating with chemistry degrees. It's probably fair to say that the vast majority of chemistry-related discoveries in human history were discovered by men. There are still plenty of women that have made discoveries or important contributions, but that's beside the point. If men are not graduating anymore it could mean both a shortage of chemists in general going forward, and potentially a less effective workforce of chemists, which could mean a net decrease in productivity in chemistry. And all other fields that are being artificially tampered with by these initiatives.

What's more, it's alarming that you would imply that men are becoming obsolete as if it's a good thing, or even a benign thing. That's a horrible thing. Nearly half the Earth's population is male. Most families in the world depend on men to provide for them. Fewer opportunities for men will hurt everyone, including women and girls.

What's also worth mentioning is that while they tamper with some areas of our society, they are not balancing the effects. If you ask Feminists if women should pay half of the bill most of them will say no. They'll say men should pay for them. That they deserve it. And that men that would even suggest a 50:50 split are deadbeats.

What you find if you study genders and jobs in the world is that women do not date men that make less money than they do. And society continues to encourage this. When a woman is making $300,000 a year her husband is making even more.

We cannot fully understand all of the consequences of this long term. I'd wager that this is going to cause a decrease in productivity of the planet over time. It could also potentially put Western nations at a disadvantage compared to the more conservative East, which could significantly impact the overall balance of power in the world. The USA is already on a downturn. Imagine a world where the USA is no longer a superpower, and Russia and China are in control of everyone.

Changes like this are far reaching. They can have unforeseen consequences in the long term. I think you're crazy if you think politicians or social scientists really understand this well enough to be tampering with it in such a big way. It's far more likely that it's all about short term power grabs, and it hasn't even been considered what unforeseen consequences could arise, let alone planned and accounted for. Do you honestly believe that the government is that well run?

What, you mean guns and dolls? Those are stereotypes built in by society. From birth to grave, people are conditioned to be what society tells them to be. So when we take the time to tell boys AND girls that they can BOTH be whatever they choose to be, then we shall truly see what is more 'natural'.

They have been studying this in babies that are too young to have been influenced by stereotypes. A few months old. They aren't able to understand language yet. And also they've been studying this in the societies that are the freest, like in Scandinavia. Even though their society as a whole is extremely liberal, they still see these differences naturally occurring. It isn't from stereotypes. It's from nature.

Society's conditioning is so strong that in some examples of native Indian tribes, men took the roles of women.

You're cherry-picking. It's not that men used to sit in the tepees with the babies, while the women went out and hunted buffalo. Rather, elderly women were considered wise and knowledgeable and were trusted with powers to oversee the tribe, but the women still did womanly things and the men still did manly things.

Of course, I wonder how many men lived long enough to be old and wise given their job descriptions of hunting dangerous animals with bows and sticks and warring with neighbouring tribes... I suspect that when these social structures are examined there's a fairly logical basis for this structuring, and it has nothing to do with reverse gender roles.

So your basing your argument on a Cracked article? Apparently written by a guy that the Interwebs claims to be abusive to women, though it's unclear if it's just a difference of opinion between a man and an army of SJWs or if he was beating up his girlfriend for making tuna casserole again. :-/

That article doesn't even talk about gender roles. It talks about superficial stereotypes, like colour preference, and whether or not it's OK for men to cry... It's not talking about swapping roles. There are reasons why these changes occurred in society, and it is not in any way supportive of your arguments. Men have always cried. Women have always cried a WHOLE lot more. The fact that our current society shames men for crying is one out of a million examples of the sexism that men are conditioned to live with silently. Of course, that doesn't upset you. You don't even recognize it when it's right in front of your face. You're too busy white-knighting for women that don't need your help.

Now you note correctly that the engineering field is underrepresented by women. What we need to discover is WHY. I would posit that it is another case of conditioning, and that a breakthrough could easily be made by women in this field as well if we encouraged them.

I don't know what conditioning you think there is. From the time I was in the lower primary school grades I was being told that girls can do everything that boys can. I'm 33 this year. The adult population has already grown up in a world that told girls they can be whatever they want, and even discriminated in their favour for education and job opportunities.

The evidence points to women making different choices because they just have different interests than men. That doesn't fit the agenda though so it isn't even considered and instead it's asserted that somehow, despite all evidence to the contrary, these girls were still discouraged from doing what they want and we need to give them even more special treatment... ::)

Your giant wall of diatribe just reads like a newspaper editorial from the 1800's. You have been so conditioned into semi-modern gender roles that you feel uncomfortable if someone challenges them. You know who you are, a MAN. And you let society tell you what a man is and isn't supposed to be. You are the victim of your own conditioning. Be free. And allow women to be free to be whatever they believe they can be.

On the contrary, society has been telling me since I was a small child that girls are the same as boys in every way. I disagree based on my own observations and understanding of the world around me. I challenge the agenda that has been taught to me as fact because it doesn't fit with the evidence. Strange thing that... Forming my own ideas about the world, and doing what I want instead of what society tells me I must do. Crazy.

Gender roles change over time, as easily shown by the link above. This means they are largely ARBITRARY, and as such, we are free to define them for ourselves, and to redefine them as we see fit. There is no perfect mold for men or women.

Gender roles really haven't changed much. You haven't provided any links that demonstrate that. If you can find a society where the proportion of men and women is approximately equal where women do the dangerous, dirty, hard work, and men do the cushy, gentle, menial jobs then I'll consider your point. So far you haven't provided this, and I saw no such evidence of this from your suggested Google search. If you found it then please link directly to it to save me time. I'm not here to do your own research for you.

This isn't about feminism. It's about HUMANISM.

I am 100% in support of true equality. Which means no special treatment for women. It means equal opportunities, and choosing the best person for the job based on merit. Individual women should be given the opportunity to do anything they're good at, but if a man is also applying that is a better fit the job should go to the man.

Not all women should be scientists, but some of them should. Also, not all men should be scientists. Each individual has strengths and weaknesses that make them better suited to certain jobs. Similarly, men should also be given the opportunity to do anything they're good at, even if it happens to be childcare or wedding planning.

We don't need to achieve a 50:50 split in everything. That's unrealistic, and undesirable. People should be free to do whatever they want. And if that means that most women don't want to do STEM jobs that's perfectly fine. You shouldn't be encouraging them to do STEM jobs if they don't want to.

We know there are strengths and weaknesses inherent to sex. Some jobs are better suited to certain sexes. There are exceptions, but that doesn't mean that everybody is qualified to do everything. On average, men and women are equally intelligent, but men are more common at either extreme (extremely brilliant or extremely stupid). Jobs that require the most intelligent people should go to the most intelligent people, who on average are men. Jobs that require lots of heavy lifting should be performed by people that are fit to do them. On average, that will be men. There may still be the odd woman that is a good fit for those jobs, and they should be encouraged to do them if they want.

Third wave Feminism is very much misandrist, and therein lies the problem. It isn't egalitarians that are influencing policies, but Feminists that want special privileges for women and special responsibilities and burdens for men. I'm opposed to Feminism because it's factually wrong. I still support equality for women, but I support equality of opportunity, not outcome. I don't believe in it for political reasons, but I believe in it because I believe in fairness. My stance is based on evidence, not doctrine.

Try to reverse roles with your wife for a day. Do the laundry and the dishes and the cleaning and the cooking and let her drink beer and smoke pot until her brain sizzles like yours. ;) I bet you couldn't do it, and you would quickly resent your 'predefined' role as a woman and caretaker. Try thanking her for all she does for once, and show a little appreciation and respect for the opposite sex. ;)

I do 95% of the cooking, 50% of the laundry, and ~40% of the dishes and other cleaning. I'm not sitting on my ass drinking while she's slaving away in the kitchen. Quite the opposite is true. I also pay 95% of our shared bills. She mostly only pays her own bills, but will occasionally contribute to the odd meal. Her savings account is a whole lot healthier than mine, despite me making about twice as much money. I'd love to reverse roles. Good luck convincing her of that though.

Hey bamccaig, what you are looking for is a double hop VPN connection. A google search is your friend, people have already thought about that scenario!

You will be hosting your own DNS server that blocks the ads as you currently are, additionally, configure the same RPi to act as an OpenVPN server tied to your DNS. To connect to the outside, you will then install the VPN client of your provider of choice. This will now be your network’s endpoint towards the internet.

All your devices will connect to your own hosted OpenVPN service that filters ads, but is encrypted from your ISPs eyes. At least until your external VPN provider’s endpoint, which will have their ISP spying everything if they wish (;D)

I think that I will need to install my VPN software on the Raspberry Pi itself to encrypt the DNS lookups. My VPN provides its own DNS service, and it by default blocks DNS requests to other services to ensure that they don't leak. In theory, if the Pi is running the VPN software then I should be able to configure pi-hole to use the VPN's DNS servers, and then it should still be secure... And then I'll need to disable that safety mechanism on my PCs and mobile devices for them to use the LAN DNS server instead... It just makes me uneasy because if the VPN software fails on the Pi then it could potentially leak still, and I would be oblivious to it. I think that to be 100% secure the VPN software needs to be built specifically to account for a local DNS blocker like this, and they need to build mechanisms to ensure that the local DNS blocker is also secured...

Do keep in mind that by having a VPN to your home network, there is the possibility of having your entire network exposed to 0Days and whatnot. So be sure to know (or at least pretend to know) what you are doing.

This I don't understand. There is not a VPN in the sense that a remote machine can access my network. The VPN exists on the Internet at my service provider's network, and my traffic tunnels through encrypted connections to those endpoints. I don't see how that could expose me to "0Days" (I assume you mean 0-day vulnerabilities in software?) and "whatnot". Please elaborate.

Edgar Reynaldo

Bump??? I thought I would remain silent so you could hear yourself talk. ;) xD :D

LennyLen

I just got a new monitor.

It's a Asus ROG Strix XG32VQ. 32" 2560x1440 144Hz 4ms. It's a bit too big for my desk so I'm so close to it it's almost overwhelming, but I'm getting used to it. It's a nice addition to the new PC I got a couple of months ago. I had been using a 27" TV while I was saving up for a new monitor.

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bamccaig

Is ... is that a $600 monitor? :o:o:o

LennyLen
bamccaig said:

Is ... is that a $600 monitor?

I paid $930 for it here in NZ, which works out about $800 CAD.

Chris Katko
LennyLen said:

but I'm getting used to it.

I've got a 55" 4K on my desktop. It actually, too big. The 50" model would have been better.

There are new problems with such a high dpi + high screen area. You actually have to turn your head or eyes to see the peripherals of the screen. But for games it's beautiful. I have to turn the FOV to 90 degrees or it looks like tunnel vision. It's very immersive and unlike a VR headset, I can actually share it with other people in the room.

When working with multiple RDP sessions though, it's amazing. I can have 4 1080p windows open at once. So I can be logged into three servers (SQL, web front-end, and domain controller), still have 1080p reserved for my home machine's Visual Studio (or, discord, outlook, etc).

Old picture, old messy house:

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And anyone who says you can't see 4K (or higher than 4K) is plain wrong. The human eye is not a digital camera. It doesn't see in terms of pixels at all. (For example, Wiki Airy disk)

I'm honestly happy the industry is moving to 8K. Why arbitrarily stop improving graphics now when we've got all this momentum going. Ten years ago people would easily say "why would anyone need 8 TB hard drives for $150" and I've got three of them now. People will find a use for any surplus resources. Kind of like the old adage: "What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away."

Polybios

People will find a use for any surplus resources. Kind of like the old adage: "What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away."

I had to use my laptop on the weekend. It's been about 6 months since I've used the Linux system and about 2 months since I used the Windows system (dual-boot). I booted into both systems and installed updates. Linux package management installed all updates in one go, download, install, ready, system usable again. No fan could be heard, it was a rather quick process. With Windows, it did about 5 rounds of rebooting and installing updates, it took forever, with the fan constantly spinning. After installing, some of my "No, thanks, just don't spy on me, please"-settings were, of course, silently reset.

I actually do not use Windows that much, but each time, I'm appalled at how crappy it is. Why are there basically two UIs for system settings starting with Windows 10? (I skipped Windows 8 completely.) This must be an accident, because no one in his right mind would do something like this on purpose, right? Why am I constantly harassed with apps and widgets and even ads that I did not install and that take up my screen space? Why do I have to resort to tweaking tools to get rid of some of the worse annoyances like Cortana? Am I the only one who just wants to work with this thing, preferably without distractions? I won't even mention the privacy settings. I mean I've even paid for this piece of utter bullshit. I'm admittedly ignorant of the Windows world, but I just cannot see any significant improvement since Windows 7 whatsoever, except, maybe, for WSL, but, thanks, I'd rather use the original.

raynebc

The user interface in Windows 10 is a huge downgrade to Windows 7.

Edgar Reynaldo

This is a typical modus operandi of Windoze and the old Billdozer. Microsoft implements something new, leaves complete compatibility with the old system, and then silently phases out the old system with each new generation.

My Win10 lock screen is basically just an adboard for Microsoft's Photo Gallery and ad links. It's BS. I want my own damn lock screen, thanks.

You have to jump through a bunch of new controls to get to the old controls, which is what you really wanted in the first place, which again, is BS.

I love how Ubuntu just gets the fuck out of the way. Except how the damn auto updater locks the system updates for like 20 minutes every time I boot. Stupid junk $#!^ just let me install my own packages. 371 MB? WTF? Who is writing all this software, and why is it so big?

EDIT
GRRRRAAAAAAARRRRRRRR!

video

Neil Roy

I just got done building a new computer this month, and I installed Windows 10 on it (I was using 7) and I have to say, it's not too bad. Runs fast and smooth.

I watched several online videos on it before I installed, so I disabled a pile of garbage for security and speed, so that helped.

What really surprised me is that most of my software all worked without problems. The ONLY program I had that no longer works with Windows 10, is ironically, a Microsoft program which came with my webcamera. I guess they have changed how they operate with cameras now, but the built in Windows 10 "Camera" app works fine.

I actually had more programs that stopped working when I upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 7 to be honest, but that was also going from 32bit to 64bit.

I still want to buy a new monitor, I'll stick with a normal, inexpensive one for under $200. I mainly want one because 100% of my old system is going to my wife.

It's quite the upgrade though! The last motherboard and CPU I bought was 10 years ago. An old triple core AMD CPU. I had upgraded the RAM and video since then, but my video card was a GTX650.

My new system is an MSI B450 Gaming plus, the newer BIOS, or rather, UEFI on them blew me away, compared to the older keyboard/text only BIOS from a decade ago! My CPU is an AMD Ryzen 5 - 2600, which has 6 cores/ 12 threads. My video card is an EVGA GTX1050TI. I grabbed 16G of RAM (8x2 Corsair).

I have a small 240G SSD drive for the OS, and a 4TB Seagate HDD for everything else. It takes 30 seconds to boot up from power on to desktop, which is better than the roughly 5 mins my old system took! :)

All in all, I am very pleased and the cost was fairly inexpensive, roughly $1000CAD for the entire thing.

bamccaig

Wait, it takes 30 seconds to boot from a SSD?! That doesn't sound right at all. It should probably be more like 5 or 10 seconds max.

The thing is I think 7.x, 8.x, and 10.x are basically Windows Vista, fixed, with new desktop elements and other minor things changed.

Vista: 6.0
7: 6.1
8: 6.2
8.1: 6.3
10: 6.4

So the real upgrade was Vista, which everybody knows broke everything. :P Then they ironed out the bugs over time, and started re-releasing the same OS with minor changes as full new upgrades so people rebought the same damn thing over and over again. Classic M$. :)

Erin Maus

I got a really nice programming job in Charlotte, NC (one of the biggest cities in the southern United States). Still don't have my Bachelor's, but I'll just finish my education online.

The pay is great even factoring cost of living. I start Monday. I moved into my apartment yesterday. It's a nice apartment.

It's funny, I've been wanting out of my old town for so long. I didn't expect it'd happen so soon. I was planning on moving to Raleigh or Atlanta after I got my AAS to finish my education at Georgia Tech or NC State. But this is much better.

I finally did it. 8-)

Edgar Reynaldo

Awesome Aaron, way to go! :)

I have a BS in CS and I still have trouble finding a decent job...

bamccaig

That's great news, Aaron. I wish you well in your new position. You have worked hard. You deserve it.

RmBeer2

They have a tremendous building and they are all here huddled in a corner of the room, surrounded by a heavy snow storm and a hungry monster lost in the corridors.
Someone has to leave, right? ::)

Chris Katko

Best of luck, Aaron. Welcome to the grind for the next 40 years of your life.

bamccaig

If find it amusing that RmBeer2 is exploring a C golf game for generating a dynamically sized text box to display text in one thread, all while his signature wrapped in a box is misaligned. :P

Erin Maus

Thank you everyone.

Chris, there won't a be grind. After my therapy / medication management essentially eliminated my symptoms, I went from working a retail job to something making 10x as much in less than 2 years. At this rate I'll be a millionaire in a couple more years and thus will retire early. 8-)

(That's a joke if it isn't abundantly clear.)

RmBeer2

bambams, by 1 pxl, :'(

(this thread cause a buffer overflow in my memory)

EDIT:

Forget my image:

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MiquelFire

Oh, custom CSS broke your sig for me. I have forgotten that I added that to my CSS because I used it for so long...

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Doctor Cop

Congratulations Aaron...

jmasterx

That's awesome news Aaron!

Edgar Reynaldo

xD

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Also,

LOVE?!!!!!!!!

EDIT
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EDIT2

francois said:

I'm too old for this silly valentines day crap - it's for kids. But you could say that when I'm with a girl I celebrate "Valentines Day" quite often. My gift is a big wet f**k. Hell, sometimes I'll invite other girls over to make things more interesting.

:D

EDIT3

Any Firefly and XKCD fans here?

Oh,
this
is too good
not to
share

bamccaig

I'm a huge fan of Firefly, and I used to be a big fan of XKCD before it started sucking. I was thoroughly disappointed by this series. The bar was way too high.

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

XKCD before it started sucking.

I love this failure:

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The exact same argument could be for used for telling black people to get the hell out of your restaurant. #soprogressive

Meanwhile, I've been playing the HELL out of some The Hunter: Call of the Wild.

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Shot a bear, 26 meters away, in the back of the head with a 7mm rifle. Execution style. Probably the first bear I ever shot that had zero clue I was there.

It has MULTIPLAYER!

raynebc

The reason social media platforms censoring and banning people for arbitrary reasons isn't merely a first amendment issue is because these platforms get special legal protections for being neutral platforms. Once they pick and choose which legal speech is allowed, they become publishers and open themselves up to much more legal liability for what's on their platform. They can't get the best of both worlds of being a publisher and a platform, they have to choose which of those they are.

Chris Katko

There's plenty of ways to attack his arguments to other than the "just because the mob hates you, doesn't mean you're the bad person."

He's literally arguing that the MAJORITY IS RIGHT and freedom of speech is literally designed to protect MINORITY OPINIONS from the oppression of the majority. The people IN POWER don't need LAWS to protect them. He is literally arguing that we should act more like pre-civil rights era where you could scream at black people until they left your school.

Further Freedom of Speech predates the US, and the English language. It's an IDEA that wasn't invented by the constitution, it was an idea that was ACKNOWLEDGED by it. It's a societal value, not just a magical law invented out of nowhere.

Further, areas of the internet have become a PUBLIC FORUM. This is the protection you mention that allows them to get away with not being held legally responsible for bad and illegal content that other people post. However, the second you start CURATING that content, you are no longer an impartial server of that content. By outlawing content (beyond what is simply illegal) by saying it's unacceptable, you are taking a stand on what IS acceptable.

The fact of modern society is, a huge amount of discourse occurs over the internet. Huge amounts of "journalists" actually directly get their news from Twitter. It's a public forum. So much so, that when Trump tweets, he can no longer LEGALLY block people from his twitter. Therefor, Twitter is a public platform.

Now they'll say, "only Trump is a public platform" which is batsh!t insane and a lie. You can't go to twitter, and the second you click on one of the people who REPLIED to him on Twitter, and reply to them, get blocked, and that's magically okay? Same website. Same communication style. Replying TO someone who PUBLICLY replied to trump which was LEGALLY PROTECTED, isn't protected? Yeah right. The second that hits the supreme court it's over. They've already started suing the crazy-lady AOC for blocking people.

All of this is just logic-bait though. The truth of it is, modern liberals have zero logic. It's not about logic. It's about emotions, and about tribes. All of these words are meaningless because if you actually try to confront their broken logic, they'll ignore it. Why? Because the words are just an outburst for their emotions. The words have no actual meaning to them which is why they can say so many hypocritical things without bursting into flames. And this isn't a hyperbole. What's really going on is, when they say "freedom of speech" they really mean "I hate anyone who disagrees with me." which also means "I hate anyone who isn't a member of my social in-group."

The reason they hate debates, and hate discussion, is because they know they don't have the logical highground because most of them don't even fully understand their beliefs. It's like asking people to debate Christianity. Most wouldn't dare because they know they don't understand the depths of their religion--the logic behind their beliefs. And liberals have created a secular religion full of zealots who don't even know the reason (if there even is a reason) for most of the political platform they support. They're just noble religious warriors fighting against "evil", whatever that is.

That's also why they always use the term "nazi". Nazi is, in English and modern times, the worst evil you can be. So they're not really calling people nazis. They're calling people "maximum bad." That's how they can call gay asian men nazis (and violently attack him), as well as orthodox jews Nazis, and not have their heads immediately explode. They're not really calling anyone Nazis (though we're all been fooled), they're calling them "really really really bad people." They don't care if they're actually nazis. That's why they don't apologize when proven otherwise--the person has been outed as "maximum bad" even if the logical word has been proven wrong. You don't apologize to a monster even if your word was wrong.

So their targets aren't really "nazis", "misogonysts", "sexists,", "racists", or "islamaphobes". They're just people that someone on the left has targetted and "outted" as a snake in the grass--a wolf in sheeps clothing--a secret "bad" person amongst our community and we must lynch mob to drive them out from our society.

There are plenty of evolutionary psychologists who have gone into detail on these new liberal nutjobs that make real liberals like me look bad. Most of these psychologists also get death threats. Because nothing says progressive like sending death threats to someone with a Ph.D. Fun fact: ALL of these scientists who got death threats are liberal too.

Also, what's even worse though. Is that not only are these nutjobs ... nutjobs, but they're also running the majority of tech companies which are how we get all of our media and communication. Oh look, here's Google employees casually refering to a jew, Ben Shapiro, and an evolutionary, practicing psychologist Jordon Peterson, as nazis.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/leaked-email-from-google-employee-refers-to-ben-shapiro-jordan-peterson-as-nazis

And nobody corrected them. Everyone was okay calling a orthodox Jew, a Nazi. If these were normal human beings, they would feel shame. But oh well on that. (Imagine if a conservative company like Chick-Fil-A leaked that they called a Jew a nazi. It'd be HELL ON EARTH to pay.)

Here they are telling pro-life protesters, "go home nazis":

https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/920066229200498688

See what I mean? Nazi doesn't mean Nazi. What the hell does being PRO. LIFE. have to do with nazism, eugenics, and murdering Jewish people? Debate conception all you want, but these people are batsh!t insane and you'll shoot blood out your nose before you ever figure them out if you try to make logical sense of them. Because they're not running on logic, they're running on emotion. One in particular: Hatred.

Fun fact: The same biology behind conservatives hating outsiders / foreigners (xenophobia) is basically fueling the new liberals hatred. They've become the new bible thumpers trying to weed out the "sinners" so they can gain social credits amongst their community. Liberals have become idea xenophobes. And that's basically the same thing because conservatives aren't afraid of "colored/foreign/religious people" physically existing, they're afraid of different ideas coming in and harming their society by uprooting established rules and ideas. Just like liberals are afraid of "giving a platform" to ideas that are counter to their established dogma. What a bunch of bigots.

The real danger though is, now that we're a WORLD economy. Liberals have unprecedented power in filtering and censoring ideas around the world using machines and algorithms. Bible thumpers in the 90's never took away your bank account, or even your job for daring to expose Wrong Think(TM). Conservative protesters shouted you down, but they didn't press the mute button on your mouth, or threw concrete into your eyes and beat you in the back of the head like they did... to a gay Asian journalist.

I mean, if I told you a bunch of white boys screamed a black woman out of a resturant. Would you think this was 1950, or 2018? And that they were rednecks, or liberals?

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It's a damn disgrace that it's liberals.

And to be clear, I, as a real liberal, am defending a black woman conservative who believes global warming is a hoax. Why? Because I'm a !@$!ing human being. That's why.

Edgar Reynaldo

And to be clear, I, as a real liberal, am defending a black woman conservative who believes global warming is a hoax. Why? Because I'm a !@$!ing human being. That's why.

Yes sir, you are a fine human being.

I agree with most of what you say, but I wonder where all these liberals are you're talking about. I just don't read what you read I guess. I come from a fairly conservative though still quite liberally left depending on where you are but I digress.

Any way, our only hope is Warren 2020. Or Kamala Harris. Biden is crooked and obsessed with smelling children's hair. Bernie is an ideologue, which I like, but I don't think he can pull it off. Very few others even compare.

And how did the immigration problem get so bad?

I mean why didn't anything happen the first time there was an outcry about the treatment of immigrants on the border? People are now actively protesting, which is good, but how did it get worse?

I mean, I know how it got worse, Trump has been slowly and steadily replacing positions of power with his corrupt cronies and friends in the industry.

If this country somehow re-elects Trump, there's gonna be trouble.

It's bad enough we have to endure his bullshit for another year and a half. Why hasn't he been impeached again yet?

raynebc

I got into watching Tim Pool's news podcasts lately. He describes himself as center-left moderate, or even further left than Obama, but honestly he seems to be one of the sane liberals who is willing to call out the radicals and idiocy on both sides instead of just one. The dangerous liberals are largely the far-left radicals in news, politics, big tech and the far-left violent activists like Antifa.

Immigration has been bad for a long time, but Democrats mostly complain now instead of before because of who's president. Additionally, the Democrat party has veered sharply to the left in the past decade (even by admission of the New York Times in a graph from an article that Tim Pool references frequently https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/26/opinion/sunday/republican-platform-far-right.html). The DNC started at "enforce the immigration laws" and has almost gone all the way to "open borders and free stuff for illegal immigrants" today.

Trump wasn't impeached because the farcical impeachment campaigns were seen to be lacking merit. The last thing we need is a radical leftist (compared to Obama even) becoming president. Results matter more than mere nice rhetoric. Trump 2020.

Edgar Reynaldo

raynebc, you're going to vote for Trump AGAIN? Sorry I just lost whatever respect I had for you.

Fool me once shame on you,
fool me twice shame on me

raynebc

I don't care about your opinion, Edgar. Go ahead and stay mad. I don't see Warren's odds being very good considering how the DNC candidates are trying to compete for who is the most radically woke. They'll quite possibly alienate all the normal people they need. Plus she's a white woman, and the far left demands more ethnic diversity than that.

jmasterx

Politics and Religion are like rocket fuel for this thread :P

Edgar Reynaldo

Boldly going where no thread has gone before.

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I mean, I can understand sleeping with the devil when you think he's Jesus, but continuing to do so even after you find out? That's just pathetic.

bamccaig

Trump is a radical maniac, but unfortunately plenty of the democratic nominees are also radical maniacs. At least Trump is on the "conservative" side, for whatever that's worth. The radical democrats are on the liberal side, where changing things radically is not only acceptable but encouraged.

Would you rather sleep with the devil you know or the devil you don't know?

raynebc

It's hilarious that the crazies on the left will call Trump "literally Hitler" and be so blind to their own flaws.

Edgar Reynaldo

Trump IS Hitler.

He stirs up xenophobia and hatred.

He makes blatantly racist comments about citizens of THIS country.

He gives out positions of power to those with money and ties to his interests.

The 'detention centers' on the border are concentration camps. Unsanitary conditions, lack of clean drinking water and food. Overcrowding, abuse, and lack of health care. Indeterminate detention, rampant abuse by the Border Patrol.

Trump has been steadily eroding protections for wildlife and nature preserves. He appoints people to positions they have clear conflicts of interest in being appointed to.

This is just the tip of the iceberg.

Trump is a bigot, a misogynist sexist pig, and a greedy bastard.

#DumpTrump

This is why I don't respect you raynebc. Because you willingly follow a monster. Grow a spine and stand up for what's right. :/

raynebc

Wow, Edgar. You're the same kind of special stupid as AOC. I hope you take your partisan blinders off some day.

Edgar Reynaldo

People like AOC are what makes this country great. People who are willing to stand up for the common person. People who aren't afraid to fight big corporations. People who aren't afraid of rooting out corruption.

We're gonna fix this country. You can either be a part of the solution, or you can be a part of the problem.

video

bamccaig

I don't know much about these people, or even how the American election process works, but based on a quick skim of Wikipedia I do think I would align with AOC somewhat. That said, I also don't think she has a chance. The monopoly men that run the world will not allow her ideas to put into practice. I still admire her trying, but I won't hold my breath.

Append:

In other news, the Green Party of Canada's campaign slogan for this election (in October) is "Not Left. Not Right. Forward Together." Which I think is awesome. And I think it emphasizes something that isn't talked about enough.

Most regular people are not left, or right, but slightly left-of-center or right-of-center. It's no wonder that when we elect "left" or "right" it only benefits a tiny fraction of the population.

Canadians should certainly look at their candidates carefully, consider the party platforms and histories, and choose wisely. The Conservatives and Liberals keep fucking us without lube. Personally, I lean towards Green because they're more science-based, at least so far; and they're still small enough that big money hasn't even attempted to corrupt them yet. So far my riding doesn't have a Green candidate though so I may be forced to vote NDP. Compared to the other big two I have more in common with the NDP, though I don't trust them as much as I trust Green (which is also not 100% because of their gender politics). I may also consider voting NOP (Northern Ontario Party). Seems we do have a candidate there. I'm only so familiar with their platform, but what I've read sounds good. And they're even smaller than the Green Party so same advantage.

Meanwhile, Americans should also be considering their independent and smaller party options. Clearly neither Democrats nor Republicans are really representing you (or us) well. It will take a long time before there's enough support for another party to actually take power, but you need to start somewhere, and if you keep putting it off it'll be even longer before it happens.

It's funny that they make a big deal about electing a woman as president, as if it's really going to change anything. In reality, it won't. Meanwhile, electing a completely new party could change everything (and for the better)!

Erin Maus

Most Germans let the Holocaust happen.

What are all these moderates saying about the 'detention centers' on the Mexican-American border?

This song came up on my Spotify, thought it was appropriate:

video

Laibach is the best. 8-)

Edgar Reynaldo

Aaron, call them what they are : concentration camps.

You want scary, try a google search on Kashgur and electronic surveillance.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/04/world/asia/xinjiang-china-surveillance-prison.html

raynebc

It's almost like there was a system of laws where you get detained if you break them. Surprising, isn't it?

Erin Maus

I asked what moderates think of the detention centers. You're not a moderate.

Chris Katko

I just find it funny that nobody cared about "Detention centers" when Obama was in office. Or the three million that Obama deported during his administration. (That's a real number.)

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/12/biden-immigration-2020-1411691

And Democrats blocked the $4.5 billion in aid for the "border crisis" when Trump asked for it and said it was a myth, only to then demand he spend... exactly 4.5 billion to fix the "border crisis" a few years later. This literally happened. Interesting how they came to the exact... to the dollar... amount that Trump asked for.

And my point here is not partisionship. My point is, if these places (and things) are truly horrible, then they're horrible no matter who is in office. And the Democratic Party better start holding themselves to the same standard they hold their political rivals to. Right is right, no matter who is in office. Wrong is wrong, no matter who is in office.

Erin Maus

If I had known about the detention centers under Obama I'd have been against them then too. I'm a socialist, that's like the opposite of Obama (a neoliberal).

What's your point?

Also the Democratic Party does tend to hold itself to its own standards. For example, Al Fraken resigned over the sexual misconduct allegations. What Republican willingly has? The accused pedophile Roy Moore barely lost...

Edgar Reynaldo
raynebc said:

It's almost like there was a system of laws where you get detained if you break them. Surprising, isn't it?

Wow, it's almost like you think you're justified in treating people like cattle... we treat prisoners better than that. And speaking of prisons, the top two private prisons spent millions lobbying congress and came away with 4 billion in profit.

Or the three million that Obama deported during his administration. (That's a real number.)

3 million / (8 years * 12 months/year) ~= 30 thousand a month

That's not really all that much, especially compared to today.

Trump now wants to deport everyone and allow zero immigrants into the country.

You blame the democrats for not agreeing to psychotic evil plans, but not the republicans for blocking the sane plans to fix them! What gives?

And Democrats blocked the $4.5 billion in aid for the "border crisis" when Trump asked for it and said it was a myth, only to then demand he spend... exactly 4.5 billion to fix the "border crisis" a few years later.

First of all, Trump wanted a wall, not a humanitarian solution. Second, which 'crisis' are you talking about? Trump's border crisis (brown people), or the real crisis, inhumane treatment of migrants?

raynebc

Trump made a recent push to deport all illegal immigrants who have already been court-ordered to leave. Trump wants to end faulty claims for asylum from people who travel from discontiguous countries and other continents, bringing us in line with global standards on asylum requests. Curtailing the mechanisms for illegal immigration and properly funding CBP and border facilities would do wonders to reduce the humanitarian crisis the Democrats expanded. I'd tell Edgar to quit lying, but we all know he won't.

Edgar Reynaldo

So now I'm lying? First I'm stupid, now I'm a liar. At what point was I wrong, and at what point was I telling a mistruth?

Hmm?

raynebc

"Trump now wants to deport everyone"
Lie.

"and allow zero immigrants into the country."
Lie.

Try harder, liar.

Edgar Reynaldo

Woah, okay.

This is like scrabble. :D Challenge accepted.

I'll do the research, in case I am wrong. I admit I don't watch much news, but there's not much to choose from these days considering 6 companies control 90% of the american media. :/ ///

Well here's the first source I found that confirms it. Don't know much about Politico though.

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/22/trump-administration-immigrant-deportations-dhs-1607459

Quote:

The expansion is the latest move in President Donald Trump’s crackdown on legal and illegal immigration. Last week, the administration published a regulation that will bar migrants who pass through another country en route to the U.S. from seeking asylum. POLITICO also reported Thursday that an administration official last week pressed to lower the annual refugee admission ceiling to zero, although those deliberations remain ongoing.

Politico said:

{"name":"90","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/f\/5\/f562aefd3cd39912c386d6ff8fd63fa1.jpg","w":1160,"h":773,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/f\/5\/f562aefd3cd39912c386d6ff8fd63fa1"}90

Cattle dude. :(

:'(

raynebc

They're crammed in because the Democrats refused to fund the facilities when the crisis was smaller. "Refugee" and "asylum seeker" are the two most frequently abused immigration labels and curtailing fraudulent cases thereof is not an end to immigration entirely. If you are flying from another continent, or walk through several South American countries to "claim" asylum in the USA you are not a valid asylum seeker or refugee. Especially so if you only make this claim after illegally entering the country.

Edgar Reynaldo

The Democrat's refused to fund Trump's solution, not every solution. The Senate Republicans are the ones who won't pass anything, mostly thanks to that d-bag Mitch McConnell.

raynebc

The Democrats were lying for years about there being no crisis at the border. Even now, the most extreme radicals in the DNC are still opposed to the funding. And when the Democrats basically want open borders (healthcare for illegals, decriminalization of illegal entry, cessation of deporting even illegal aliens who have been ordered deported by immigration court, catch and release immigration policy, etc.), it's entirely appropriate to block that agenda.

bamccaig

You're all fucking idiots. >:( >:( >:(

Laws are just things that corrupt people write down to control the people. Basically. They don't necessarily have to be corrupt, but in the world that we live in they are. Basically, they're meaningless. Many of them should be changed or dropped.

For example, cannabis has been illegal for a hundred years for basically no good fucking reason. It has a lot of medicinal qualities, and recreational benefits too, with relatively few downsides. And not only that, but prisons are full of people that were arrested for possession of cannabis. If the government is so incompetent to prohibit cannabis what other stupid fucking laws exist?

The government is not a well oiled machine, a hive mind with the best information, making the best choices for the people. It's a corrupt monster that doesn't even communicate with itself and makes choices on a whim that affect everyone purely for power grabs/money changes.

It's all fucking stupid. And the more you invest in defending your side the more you lose. There are no sides. We're all in this together. Laws don't matter. Political affiliations don't matter. What matters is what is right, truly just, and truly fair. And for the most part we haven't really figured that out yet. And for the most part, science is our best way to find that out. And for the most part, our governments are NOT science-based. So that should alarm you right there.

GullRaDriel

Pointless discussions, I had to say it.

8-)

Edgar Reynaldo

Gully, have you looked at CHAI? I'm waiting for you for the networking stuff, or at least to explain it to me.

All I really need to do is send an ID for the game, a hash of the board, and or a move stored in a short. The board would take 64 bytes. And then it could be encrypted, or not. Probably should be just to prevent tampering.

raynebc

Governments sure as hell aren't perfect, but that is because they involve people who are imperfect. And since people are imperfect, some of them will harm others if left to their own devices. So a set of rules about what people can and cannot be allowed to do is justified, at least at this point in human history, in order to maintain a civil society. Otherwise the people would end up largely being controlled by gangs of violent thugs like some countries currently are.

bamccaig

I agree, it makes sense to have governments and laws. What doesn't make sense is having corrupt governments that make laws to satisfy corporations with deep pockets without science to back them up. Our system may be operating better than any other system we've had before, but that doesn't make it a good system. It's still broken, and it's not working for us. It's working for greedy politicians and lobbyists. Don't you think we should try to fix that? Or do you think it's good enough the way that it is? Why should we settle for this?

GullRaDriel

Hey Ed, I've got some things made. It was a pain to compile as the name of the libs were different on my system.

I had to do it manually because my instance of CB does not have any compiler installed, and making it support the msys2 one is a bit of a pain. (back to the roots, a good shell, cmake/make and I was sorted)

Having a working Eagle/A5 from scratch was not a simple task.

Anyway I got things running and I'm integrating the network funcs.

I had some troubles because in C++ or in Eagle (I don't know) something is already using Free, and I use a macro which is Free.

That, and some nested if-else that C++ did not want to compile.

I would love to make a chat with you to talk about the project.

I'm preparing a PM to list the evident questions that are coming to my mind.

8-)

Edit:
I think I'll be having "#warning Eagle::Rectangle has issues with OpenGL headers" in my head for a long time.

Edgar Reynaldo

Haha, Gully, pass -Wcpp to disable those warnings. :)

Thank you for taking the time to make things work. If you have your changes documented, I will be glad to incorporate them into Eagle.

PM me a list and a time we can get together on IRC on #allegro to start.

raynebc

Generally, it's not entire democratic or republican governments that are corrupt, it's individual elements thereof. I don't think it's hard for people to agree that dictatorships like North Korea are hopelessly corrupt and doomed to failure. Since utopia doesn't exist (and it might not be possible for it to exist), there are going to be people better or worse off than others. It's not a government's job to provide equal outcomes to everybody, it's to protect peoples' rights so they all have opportunity. We can always work to make government better, but for most countries (including the USA) the government works pretty well for most people and that's enough for me to consider it good.

bamccaig

I think what you really meant to say is that the USA government works pretty well for YOU and that's good enough for you.

Edgar Reynaldo
raynebc said:

for most countries (including the USA) the government works pretty well for most people and that's enough for me to consider it good

Tell that to our prison population. Tell that to minorities. Tell that to women. Tell that to the 300,000 homeless veterans. You are so blind to the problems of this country, yet you accuse me of the same. :/

raynebc

Take your sense of victimhood to somebody who cares. Something can be good and imperfect at the same time. What's important is not destroying the good things to improve it further.

Erin Maus

Edgar, the biggest difference between a leftist and a conservative is that conservatives lack empathy.

For example, look at the conservatives who post here.

I'm being hyperbolic but in reality conservatives are less empathic than liberals; for those who don't have access, the key findings are:

"Our findings suggest that there are both differences and similarities in empathy between liberals and conservatives. On average, liberals were more motivated to feel empathy and felt more empathy toward oth-ers than conservatives did. In two of the three countries (the United States and Germany), liberals also wanted to help oth-ers more than conservatives did. In addition, in all countries, both liberals and conservatives wanted to feel, and actually felt less empathy toward outgroup members compared with ingroup members or members of a nonpolitical group. These findings help integrate prior inconsistent findings. They not only replicate studies showing that liberals are generally more empathic than conservatives (e.g., McCue & Gopoian, 2000), but they also provide evidence for the context specificity of this effect (Waytz et al., 2016)."

Edgar Reynaldo

Honestly, if this thread is the only reason left for me to come here, I need to get a fucking life.

Maybe it's time to move on to GameDev.net, or Game Development on SE.

Allegro.cc has lost its shine, and that's a damn shame.

raynebc

To put Aaron's post into context, conservatives are less controlled by their feelings. Jonathan Haidt's theory of morality includes 5 domains:
1) Care for Others/Do no harm
2) Fairness/Justice/Equality
3) In-Group Loyalty
4) Respect for Authority
5) Purity

He contends that liberals put disproportionately more importance on the first two of those, whereas conservatives value all five of them more equally.

Edgar Reynaldo

Without the first two, you don't even qualify as human. :/

Blind loyalty is the path to doom. Going with the group because of peep pressure is a sign of weakness. Respect for unfair laws is stupid.

But by all means, please continue to give me insight as to your true character.

raynebc

An inane response that wasn't unexpected. There's no reason for me to continue talking to such an ill-motivated person. This thread really is garbage.

Edgar Reynaldo

Poor conservatives just can't take the heat! Better let the Democrats fix your messes for you.

Ill-motivated? Your depiction of me is inaccurate. I am motivated by doing what is right, and that's standing up for people who can't stand up for themself. What's your great offering to the universe? Putting migrants in cages?

GullRaDriel

Politic is like a sex. Because everyone had one does not mean they have to blatantly wave it under our nose, nor put it in the mouth of youngsters.

If you want any topic to go to war, just call the politic or religion to the rescue.

That said, back on topic: are threads really closing too soon ?

8-)

EDIT: Page n°39 first post :-)

Edgar Reynaldo

yes, threads still lock too soon, but Matthew doesn't care anymore, so...

jmasterx

4 more years ought to do it.

Mat logic: Well they've kept this thread open for 4 years so clearly this is not a problem.

Edgar Reynaldo

When does his kid turn 18 again? Hahaha

jmasterx

When this thread started, I had only been working full time for 3 months.

Edgar Reynaldo

So you've been working for almost 4 years now? Congrats!

jmasterx

Thanks :)

Edgar Reynaldo

Don't give up peeps.

video

jmasterx

video

Erin Maus

I'm adding networking to my game...

It's like 40+ RPCs and complex state management. This will take a while. :-/ :'(

Edgar Reynaldo

I bet you guys $100 bucks Aaron will be the first Allegroite to complete an MMORPG. xD

EDIT
And now, a message from our sponsors :
KLAXXZ GAME MAKER (KGM) 1.0 released~~~~~

jmasterx

KLAXXZ GAME MAKER (KGM) 1.0 released~~~~~

The memories...
Released on 4/20 of all days!

Edgar Reynaldo

And hey it's Monday! Let's make a VR world! What do you say guys?

jmasterx said:

KLAXXZ GAME MAKER (KGM) 1.0 released~~~~~

The memories...
Released on 4/20 of all days!

Let's hit it!
{"name":"funny_945.jpeg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/3\/53d9c53b04343df0907f511e4ee6eaa4.jpg","w":359,"h":260,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/3\/53d9c53b04343df0907f511e4ee6eaa4"}funny_945.jpeg

video

jmasterx

One hit a dis gon to give you all the VR you eva gon need ma man!

video

Onewing

A wild lurker appears!

Edgar Reynaldo

Step 1) Identify the enemy : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lurker_%28Dungeons_%26_Dragons%29

jmasterx is being smothered by the lurker! Quick fellas, attack!

{"name":"lurkerabove.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/4\/1\/41b9c4a9f7c4e9309a8c4618a5458050.jpg","w":400,"h":523,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/4\/1\/41b9c4a9f7c4e9309a8c4618a5458050"}lurkerabove.jpg

Onewing

The lurker flaps and does ceil(damage).

Edgar Reynaldo

Edgar Reynaldo casts polymorph other on the lurker.

Roll your save vs spells or be turned into a feather boa.

jmasterx

jmasterx used PEW PEW PEW PEW PEW!

Edgar Reynaldo

Hey nerd, we're playing D&D here, not StarCraft >:(

Chris Katko

I'm adding networking to my game...

It's like 40+ RPCs and complex state management. This will take a while. :-/ :'(

Good luck! The egoboo-like game right? Even if it just had local co-op I would LOVE THAT so much. That kind of gameplay BEGS to be shared with friends.

So I found out some good bad news. After ten years of failing to have a single doctor diagnose me, I have, for the first time, had a test that comes back wildly positive. My small intestines have some sort of terrible "thick folds" in them that should be thin. If I have one disease mentioned, the rate of incidence is 1-in-1 million. That means there's like 350 people in the entire USA with it--no wonder nobody could diagnose me. Even if the symptoms are bad, honestly, I wouldn't care because if you KNOW what you have you can at least work around it.

I'm going for follow-up tests but you can't imagine what it's like to go year after year, test after test, and have everyone come back "negative" like you're making up all your pain for the hell of it.

Edgar Reynaldo

Chris Katko, that's great bad news! Now you finally know what's going on! Do your research, if there is any to find on such a rare condition. I know you're a very strong person, after all you've been through, I know you can make it through this too. :)

l j

Picollo made the first mmorpg in allegro.

Edgar Reynaldo

I did say complete...

The Game is just a prototype anyway.

MiquelFire

So, trying to figure out why a heap corruption was happening when some PHP script quit today, and when I found the source, I found this commit in my SCM

The message is "Persistent connection with all but ODBC." and the following is the line of code I had added to a global libary:
(preg_match('/\Aodbc/i', $p['conStr'])) ? [PDO::ATTR_PERSISTENT => true] : [];

ODBC is only used for SQL Server stuff, the other connection strings are for Oracle and MySQL. Ignoring that this caused me to need to make a bug report to the PHP devs, can you find the error with the message for the commit and the code?

Edgar Reynaldo

If I read that correctly, the only persistent connection is with ODBC. So it was backwards.

MiquelFire

Exactly! I must have forgotten to put a "!" before the preg_match function.

Edgar Reynaldo

You also could have the default be true and set it to false if odbc...

This is me looking for bugs :

http://members.allegro.cc/EdgarReynaldo/temp/Bugs.gif

MiquelFire

Well, the reason I added that in the first place didn't matter anyway, another app was hitting a long-running view for an autocomplete feature. I just did a dump of the columns that were used in the view and fixed that app as a result (Said app was getting to the point of causing a DoS on the server because of that)

At least it wasn't as bad as when I somehow caused a DDoS on said server with another app >.>

Edgar Reynaldo

And now for something completely different ;

video

EDIT
What? He came at him with a deadly banana!

EDIT2
Sigh, images are broken. :/

/vhost/allegro.cc/web/www/htdocs/include/../images/rcache/d/f/dfcfb9b7c1b11fae4bcc820d9a516c3a.jpg

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/7VQvRmbRNiQ/maxresdefault.jpg

RmBeer2

💮💮💮💮💮💮💮💮💮💮💮💮💮💮💮💮💮💮💮💮💮💮💮💮💮💮💮💮💮💮💮💮💮💮💮

Edgar Reynaldo
RmBeer2 said:

💮...

wth is that? it's too tiny for my tired old eyes to focus on...

EDIT
http://<<<ATTACHMENT FAILED MATTHEW>>>

Erin Maus

white flower emoji U+1F4AE

I googled it.

Edgar Reynaldo

🏠🔥🐲

bamccaig

Finally I can login again. :P Bump. >:(

MiquelFire

Yesterday, I couldn't even get to the site.

Edgar Reynaldo
bamccaig said:

Bump. >:(

Kids, that's what happens when you don't get enough allegro.cc. It's an essential source of vitamins, nutrients, trolling, and memes. ;)

{"name":"geOAQgR.png","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/6\/f\/6f74aae9be2c99d2f57e863ce0e5ac65.png","w":630,"h":630,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/6\/f\/6f74aae9be2c99d2f57e863ce0e5ac65"}geOAQgR.png

l j

I just bought my first smartphone. I did have other smartphones before but they were all old hand-me-downs I got for free. Maybe one day I'll stop using my desktop as my primary device.

Edgar Reynaldo

I can't manage to keep my charging port clean so it doesn't always charge. :/

LennyLen

I can't manage to keep my charging port clean so it doesn't always charge. :/

The charging port on mine is loose, so the cable won't stay in unless I weigh it and the phone down with books.

It's the second Motorola phone I've had in a row where this has happened, which is a shame as they've been very good phones otherwise.

Chris Katko

Personally, I love how the DNC has basically thrown away half the candidates. Democracy in action!

bamccaig
LennyLen said:

The charging port on mine is loose, so the cable won't stay in unless I weigh it and the phone down with books.

Charging ports are a common weak spot for phones. And if not the phone itself, then the case. I'm thankful that my phone supports wireless charging. It is way nicer.

Personally, I love how the DNC has basically thrown away half the candidates. Democracy in action!

I still barely know how the American electoral system works, but I hope you're being sarcastic...

In my opinion, that's how Trump won. All of the sane Democrats were eliminated leaving only the batshit crazy one. They chose the lesser of evils IMO. Still plenty evil, but lesser nonetheless.

And here's the kicker: I don't think it was a mistake. Think about that hard. It's important to understand your so called "freedom".

Edgar Reynaldo

Clinton would not have been as bad as Trump, I assure you, but that's another topic.

The real problem is the Senate, and Mitch McConnell. That shit head won't pass any bills the house puts through, so the Democrats can't do anything. We need a Democratic Senate, and a Democratic President.

Personally, the candidates I like the most are Tulsi Gabbard, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, and Elizabeth Warren. Bernie's ok, but he's past his prime. He's better suited to be a Senator, not a President. Maybe a VP, but who knows.

Biden is a crook and a child touching weirdo. Pete Buttigieg is flaming but has some good ideas. Can't remember anyone else of note.

The Republicans are towing party lines as always, with blind loyalty to the orange dictator Donnie Jackass Trumpetmouth. I can't believe they didn't dump him.

And what's even scarier is that fully half of this country is going to vote for Trump AGAIN, like he's some kind of saint.

#DUMPTRUMP

raynebc

Clinton would have been worse than Trump. Tulsi and Yang are among the least crazy/terrible/corrupt of the Democrat candidates, but they have no chance of winning. Biden is probably the front runner, but he just made a call to ban all guns that use magazines. Not kidding. The DNC has been overtaken by crazy radicals and all of our freedoms are in jeopardy. Now is not the time to vote for a dangerous leftist simply because "orange man bad".

Edgar Reynaldo
raynebc said:

Clinton would have been worse than Trump. Tulsi and Yang are among the least crazy/terrible/corrupt of the Democrat candidates, but they have no chance of winning. Biden is probably the front runner, but he just made a call to ban all guns that use magazines. Not kidding. The DNC has been overtaken by crazy radicals and all of our freedoms are in jeopardy. Now is not the time to vote for a dangerous leftist simply because "orange man bad".

Typical rayne. Classic Stockholm Syndrome you got going on there.

Yang supports a universal basic income. I doubt you agree.

Tulsi wants us out of war. I support her. She actually served our country, which is something the rest of them can't say.

Don't believe that garbage that Biden is the only one who can beat Trump. Biden is just more of the same, but he wears blue instead of red.

Your freedom is not in jeopardy at all, unless you consider freedom the right to commit mass murder on a whim.

'dangerous leftist'? Sigh. I don't even know how to respond to this knee jerk bullshit.

Guess what, 'orange man' IS bad.

raynebc

Your TDS is still showing. Did you see a doctor for that yet?

bamccaig

Just because the president supports banning all guns doesn't mean that he can actually do it. We all know guns will not realistically be removed from America for centuries. That's a bad thing, by the way. Mistakes were made.

I love guns, but I acknowledge that I have no good use for one. I'm not a big fan of game meat (haven't tried it since I was a kid, but I somewhat doubt that it changed). On the other hand, my wife prefers moose meat. Nevertheless... There are plenty of hunting rifles that don't have a removable (or even any!) magazine.

As for protection, I'm fortunate to live in a country where not every lunatic can have a gun. In fact, guns for killing/maiming humans are prohibited to everyone except for law enforcement. For the most part, it works great. I never really fear being shot. There are still some prohibited guns on the streets in the hands of criminals, but they're very rarely used on civilians (mostly they're for protection from other criminals, or most likely mostly for show).

It's unfortunate that prohibiting guns in America isn't realistic. The reason is because of how serious your crime problems are. Nevertheless, I think we can all agree that there's no realistic need for an AR-15 or similar function rifles for defence. If you need that for defence then you probably should just call the police instead. If it's a surprise invasion you likely won't be able to get to that type of weapon anyway, let alone use one effectively as a civilian.

So some guns can still be prohibited. Drawing the line at "has a magazine" is likely way too strict, however, most long guns with removable magazines could be banned, and magazine capacities could be restricted (in Canada, some guns need customized magazines that support fewer rounds than the American market) to make them less effective in a terrorist act.

In states or at least counties or cities where people generally don't need to worry about an armed thug robbing them or breaking in during the night they can take it to the extreme and outlaw even more guns.

And where ownership is permitted they can restrict movements with them. For example, in Canada, it is unlawful to travel with a gun or ammo in your car (or on your person, obviously) unless you're traveling to or from a site where you are authorized to use it (e.g., a shooting range or hunting grounds). Similarly, the guns need to have trigger locks on them, and the ammo needs to be out of the gun and locked separately. Similar storage requirements are required at home as well.

You won't be using a long rifle to defend yourself from a car thief so that should be required to be secured/locked up while in the vehicle, and you should only be allowed to have it if you're traveling somewhere to legally use it.

With these rules in place it would become a lot more difficult to pull off a shooting. Civilians that saw anybody with guns far away from shooting ranges or hunting grounds (e.g., in the middle of a major city) could know they're probably up to no good, or at the very least ignoring the new laws, and call the police to investigate. Law abiding citizens wouldn't even have their guns on them so the chances of a tense situation escalating would be reduced significantly.

Guns are very cool, but the damage they do to the human body is a lot less cool. It's easy to be disconnected from it, but if you think about the actual person being shot. Somebody's father, brother, or son. Countless years. Countless memories. That being ripped away for any unnecessary purpose is unfathomable. The world would be a better place without guns.

Edgar Reynaldo

Well spoken bam.

@rayne
jajaja. nice comeback. (I'm laughing in Spanish)

raynebc

Bam: The problem is that so many of the anti-gun politicians and activists here know very little truth about guns, or they are lying about it. I don't live in one of the vastly overcrowded cities of the country, so I NEVER fear being shot. I don't even have to qualify that with "never really fear." Criminals will always get access to banned weapons, removing effective weapons from law-abiding citizens just makes them less able to protect themselves and their property. There's no reason AR-15s and similar semi automatic rifles should be banned. The number of crimes they're used in are statistically negligible. However activists love a good cherry picking, and that's what they do. They'll label one bogeyman to be banned and then move on to another. There is a saying that probably requires some wisdom to acknowledge: When seconds count, the police are only minutes away. As has been established before, each of our opinions on guns has been shaped by our countries' culture. In my country, guns are more of a right than a privilege, and traditionally when people see civilians with guns holstered, their first thought isn't that the gun owner is up to no good.

Edgar: I truly don't care what you have to say. Your very progressive and combative political stances are well established.

Edgar Reynaldo
raynebc said:

Edgar: I truly don't care what you have to say. Your very progressive and combative political stances are well established.

I'll take that as a compliment AND a critique. ;)

Regarding the combative bit, I never shy away from a confrontation. I fully admit I bite too easy, and hit too hard for some to take.

Let's look up a few definitions, shall we?

wordnik said:

Favoring traditional views and values; tending to oppose change.

Emphasis mine.

wordnik said:

Open to or favoring new ideas, policies, or methods.

Now, I'm assuming you self identify as conservative otherwise this argument doesn't apply.

Let me ask you a direct question. Is today's government working for us? Do it's policies promote growth and health?

Now, if you answer no to that question, and you continue to self identify as conservative, you admit to stagnance and refusal to change a broken system. I identify as progressive because I realize our world needs change.

raynebc said:

Bam: The problem is that so many of the anti-gun politicians and activists here know very little truth about guns, or they are lying about it. I don't live in one of the vastly overcrowded cities of the country, so I NEVER fear being shot[1]. I don't even have to qualify that with "never really fear." Criminals will always get access to banned weapons[2], removing effective weapons from law-abiding citizens just makes them less able to protect themselves and their property[3]. There's no reason AR-15s and similar semi automatic rifles should be banned.[4] The number of crimes they're used in are statistically negligible. However activists love a good cherry picking, and that's what they do. They'll label one bogeyman to be banned and then move on to another. There is a saying that probably requires some wisdom to acknowledge: When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.[5] As has been established before, each of our opinions on guns has been shaped by our countries' culture. In my country, guns are more of a right than a privilege[6], and traditionally when people see civilians with guns holstered, their first thought isn't that the gun owner is up to no good.

References

  1. It doesn't affect me so I don't care
  2. we don't need to make it easy for them
  3. You don't need a AR-15 to defend yourself, you're not in a war. A shotgun or a Colt .45 would easily suffice
  4. When was the last mass shooting in Canada?
  5. No one wants to take away your right to defend yourself. All we want is the right not to live in fear of being gunned down by a maniac with a military grade weapon.
  6. We don't live in the days when we needed a standing militia, get your head out of the 18th century
raynebc

Change for the sake of change isn't automatically worthwhile, especially when it causes harm. As a whole, the US government is working well enough to be the most prosperous and free country, even though it can always improve. Despite your fallacious critique of my paragraph to Bam, there is always a need for the people to have the right to bear arms, in order to ensure the people can resist the government in case a radical government decides to establish a tyranny. Any semi-automatic gun is as much a weapon of war as an AR-15 (which is to say it's not a weapon that the military would use in war-fare), it's dumb that anti gun activists keep singling this gun out.

Edgar Reynaldo
raynebc said:

As a whole, the US government is working well enough to be the most prosperous and free country, even though it can always improve.

Yes, but WHO is the government working for? Poor people? NO. Immigrants? NO. Minorities? NO. Students? NO. Our children and our schools? NO. Our public safety? NO.

You're just too deaf to hear anything anymore. Your heart has gone cold, and for that, I pity you.

bamccaig

I suspect that raynebc is just a young man still in his teens or early twenties. It doesn't really hit you until your late 20's or 30's that this is fucked up, and it doesn't need to be this way. We're still developing until about 25.

If not, it's likely that he's surrounded by a bunch of radical conservatives and he has been forced to assimilate to fit in. :P

raynebc said:

Despite your fallacious critique of my paragraph to Bam, there is always a need for the people to have the right to bear arms, in order to ensure the people can resist the government in case a radical government decides to establish a tyranny.

The government has F-15's, Apache's, tanks, and cruise missiles. I promise you, even if a private militia was armed with AK-47's it would have absolutely zero effect against the US government. Case in point: the Taliban/ISIS are far better equipped than American citizens are permitted to be. They're not very effective against the American forces.

The Boston lockdown proved that if the government wants to take over the population they can do it. Boston citizens obviously have plenty of guns, but there was no way they could resist. The military and police had body armor and APC's, and probably a lot more where that came from. Anybody attempting to resist would have been quickly disposed of without any significant threat to the government forces. If you seriously believe that guns empower the people to fight the government in 2019 then you're delusional.

raynebc said:

Any semi-automatic gun is as much a weapon of war as an AR-15 (which is to say it's not a weapon that the military would use in war-fare), it's dumb that anti gun activists keep singling this gun out.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ar15s-are-basically-assau_b_10469112

The only practical distinction between an AR-15 and the military variant of M-16 is that the M-16 is fully automatic.

The AR-15 is easily modified with a bump-stock (legal in many states!) to simulate automatic firing, and with some modifications to the action could potentially be made fully automatic. Albeit, that would be illegal, but still easy to do since the gun was legally acquired and you can modify it in your basement. There's a reason AR-15's are popular among domestic terrorists.

What's more, it's simply poor sportsmanship to use an AR-15 for hunting. Hunting is about precision. You should only need one shot. The rabbit or deer can't shoot back. And if you litter the body with bullets you'll spoil the meat. If you need more than one shot you need more practice, more patience, or better eyesight. It's sickening how American hunters have stacked the odds in their favor. It's not even a question anymore of whether they'll get something. It's guaranteed. Where's the sport in that?

Edgar Reynaldo

^^^

Bambams, I agree with you 100%.

EDIT

I want to quote the article bam linked to.

HuffPost said:

Becuase in case the first 50 rounds that went into the deer didn’t do the job, you need to be able to dump another 50 into him fast, or Bambi might get away.

Look, let’s stop with this nonsensical distinction without a difference between automatic and semiautomatic. With a bump stock, it’s effectively the same thing. The “gun rights” people know it because they’re the ones buying it; the gun manufacturers know it because they’re the ones selling it.

And the killers know it because they’re using them to shoot over 100 people in a matter of minutes.

Do you think those victims feel any less “assaulted” because they weren’t “technically” shot by an assault weapon?

Still feel good about yourself rayne?

raynebc

Bam, I'm in my 30s and have held conservative views my entire life. Willingly. This is the problem with zealots like far-left progressives, they think they're the only people who can have a valid world view. Despite your assertion, small firearms are considered a significant deterrant to tyrannical government. Civilians don't need tanks, nukes or attack helicopters. The taliban could not overtake our armed populace in guerilla warfare on our soil, let alone overtake our military.

The author of that crying Huffpo opinion piece is factually wrong. The fact is that military rifles are gasp actual assault rifles capable of automatic fire. Semi-automatic guns are one bullet per action of the trigger, and this distinction is key. This is obvious to everybody who knows much about guns. The activists have this ever-changing "assault weapon" label that means anything they want it to, but the ill-informed and dishonest ones will conflate that term with "assault rifle" frequently. That Boston example is wholly irrelevant here in that the civilians were allowing the police to search for violent fugitives and not in fact resisting a tyrannical police force.

The AR-15 is not considered a hunting rifle. It is a multi-purpose rifle, and its flexibility one of the reasons it's the most popular rifle in this country. Your uninformed hunting gems are dumb. My Dad is a life-long experienced hunter and he is not in fact guaranteed a kill (which we eat for food) every hunting season. How often have you been hunting? Or do you only know what you've seen on TV?

Edgar, I still feel the same about guns. I'm not an overly emotional, mentally weak man-child afraid of guns because of extreme examples of criminality and made up anecdotes. You'll need to do more than make appeals to emotion to sway me. My rights are more important than your fragile feelings.

Edgar Reynaldo

Deep Sigh

You are incredible.

raynebc said:

Despite your assertion, small firearms are considered a significant deterrant to tyrannical government.

Yeah, they're a great way to get shot by the police. Especially if you're black. You are living IN the midst of a tyrannical government, and you don't even realize it! You're so brainwashed it's just sad.

raynebc said:

Civilians don't need tanks, nukes or attack helicopters.

And they don't need AR-15s either.

When guns are the solution, somebody always feels the need to have a bigger gun.

The HuffPost piece clearly stated that the AR-15 was a SEMI-automatic weapon, that can be LEGALLY turned into a FULLY automatic weapon using a bump stock. Which means there is NO FUCKING DIFFERENCE.

raynebc said:

Edgar, I still feel the same about guns. I'm not an overly emotional, mentally weak man-child afraid of guns because of extreme examples of criminality and made up anecdotes. You'll need to do more than make appeals to emotion to sway me. My rights are more important than your fragile feelings.

Ever been stalked by someone with a gun? Ever had to worry about being shot to death because someone hated you? Then you have ZERO right to tell me I'm wrong.

Yes, you have the right to DEFEND yourself. You do NOT have the right to be capable of gunning down dozens of people. If you served in the military, then there would be a reason for you to be armed, but you do not.

bamccaig
raynebc said:

Semi-automatic guns are one bullet per action of the trigger, and this distinction is key.

The distinction is irrelevant. Ever fired an automatic rifle at a target? I haven't, but I've spent plenty of time researching it. I've watched experienced gun enthusiasts try on YouTube (it's easy to find, Google it). It's nearly impossible to hit anything, even at close range.

Skilled soldiers don't pull the trigger and hold it. That's a good way to empty your gun, overheat/jam it, and miss everything you were aiming at. You may use that to suppress the enemy temporarily, but you'd run out of ammo pretty quickly if that's all you did. If your goal is to kill somebody, at best, a two or three shot burst can be used, or just single shots. If your goal was to kill 30 people with a 30 round magazine you'd want to take individual shots and aim each one. Hey, perfect, the AR-15 can do that masterfully, stock!

raynebc said:

The activists have this ever-changing "assault weapon" label that means anything they want it to, but the ill-informed and dishonest ones will conflate that term with "assault rifle" frequently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_rifle#M16

The AR-15 is what Armalite developed in the 50's for the military. First the AR-10, which was denied, and then revised into the AR-15 when the M14, originally T44, failed to keep up with the AK-47 in Vietnam. It was intended to be an assault rifle to counter the AK-47 of the enemy. The modified AR-15 that was adopted by the military was designated the M-16. The modifications were minor, of course.

Claims that the AR-15 is not an assault rifle are absolutely retarded. Of course it is. It was designed to be. And until you're able to admit that it's clear you're incapable of having an honest discussion about gun rights.

You could go hunting with an AK-47 too. It seems American gun enthusiasts actually consider the AR-15 superior to the AK-47. Do you reckon American citizens have the right to own AK-47's? Do you assert that the AK-47 is not an assault rifle? Do you believe that the AR-15 is significantly less effective than the AK-47 or AK-74?

Append:

The distinction that the US army makes is that an "assault rifle" must have a selective fire capability. Since the AR-15 doesn't have that (stock), it doesn't qualify. However, that's little comfort for gun rights debates. As I already discussed, the fully-automatic mode isn't very useful for killing. It's mostly useful for holding the enemy back or forcing them into cover. Which is pretty important on a battlefield, but pretty useless when you're shooting unarmed civilians in a school or shopping mall. It's a technicality, and it doesn't justify American civilians possessing them for personal use.

Chris Katko

lul.

The AR-15 was a civilian version of the M-16. It's not a military rifle. No military on the planet would use an AR-15.

And, further, because the AR-15 cannot fire automatic, it's no different from a hunting rifle. No different than the hundreds of models of rifles that liberals never cry about. There are literally more accurate, more deadly "hunting" rifles on the market that liberals never mention (because they're so ignorant they don't even know about them).

Also, handgun crime is like >95% of all gun deaths.

But those are facts so you don't have to muddy this "discussion" with those.

bamccaig said:

You could go hunting with an AK-47 too. It seems American gun enthusiasts actually consider the AR-15 superior to the AK-47. Do you reckon American citizens have the right to own AK-47's? Do you assert that the AK-47 is not an assault rifle? Do you believe that the AR-15 is significantly less effective than the AK-47 or AK-74?

Perfect example of ignorance. A civilian version of an AK-47 is not a military firearm.

bamccaig

I think it's ludicrous to argue that anyone would suggest banning AR-15's, but permit similarly functioning weapons. They should all be prohibited. Hunting is meant to be a sport (it certainly isn't a means for survival for the majority of people in 2019 America) so it makes sense that your tools should have limitations. The rabbit or the deer isn't going to shoot back. A bolt action rifle should be plenty adequate for the deer, and a repeater should suffice for the rabbit. There's no need for a semi-auto. If you missed the first shot, you missed. Feel bad, and move on with your hunt.

There's no need for semi-automatic hunting rifles. Sure, they're nice to have, but since they're also effective in terrorist acts I think it's worth challenging. A semi-automatic shotgun might be justified for flying birds (ducks, geese) since they're a bit harder to hit on the move, I suppose, but also that's pretty subjective. Hunters got along fine without them for decades.

https://www.quora.com/Why-do-gun-owners-constantly-insist-the-AR-15-is-not-a-military-style-gun-when-the-AR-15-was-invented-for-the-military

That seems like a fairly well balanced post on the subject. The AR-15 is singled out because it stands out as leaning more towards killing humans than killing animals, and is obviously impractical for most self-defense scenarios due to its size. Otherwise, it's just its popularity that singles it out. There are countless other weapons with equal killing power that far exceeds the needs of hunters that could and arguably should also be outlawed.

Instead of arming everyone and expecting individuals to defend themselves, which is ludicrous for many reasons, it makes a whole lot more sense to control guns so that there's a lot less of them and therefore there's a lot less to defend yourself from! If I had a gun and I wanted to rob or kill you I wouldn't announce myself to you. I'd sneak up on you and try to shoot you before you ever even knew what was happening. That's the reality of gun violence. And even if you do happen to anticipate the attack, the majority of people are not going to be sufficiently trained to give themselves an edge. They'd have a much better chance of survival if their attacker had no gun than if they both have guns.

Unfortunately, due to the stupidity of Americans in the last several decades, that reality is a very, very long way off now. The country is saturated with guns. The criminals all have guns. Big guns, small guns, legal guns, illegal guns. Many law-abiding civilians also have guns, but they're probably still outnumbered by the criminals with guns. And worse, lots of crazy people that are technically law-abiding or thereabouts, but are also just one bad day away from a rampage, also have guns. And those are the ones that get the most attention in the headlines.

In reality, all guns not used for hunting or target competitions (sport) are intended to be used against people. And many of the guns that are used for sport are also doubling as potentially being used against people. If gun enthusiasts are honest with themselves, they own AR-15's because they have a fetish for guns and they only own an AR-15 because the M-4 and AK-47 wasn't legal. In reality, they absolutely want a "tactical" style weapon. I know they do because I would too.

The AR-15 may be effective against vermin, and if you stretch it's role against deer or other midsize game, but I'd bet the vast majority of them are used against targets in lieu of bad guys. That's the truth.

I'm in favor of banning all guns not intended for hunting, and that goes also for guns that are technically effective hunting tools, but are also overly effective against people. The reason being because it has worked quite effectively in Canada. And I know the US is different in many ways, and it'll be a long time before this can work in the US, but you need to start somewhere. Hunting in 2019 is predominantly for sport, and sport demands a challenge. Limiting hunting firearms in functionality will enhance the sport while also limiting their effectiveness in terrorist attacks. That's win-win.

I'm not a man-child afraid of guns. I'm not a far-left progressive radical. I'm a just left-of-centre, open-minded, realistic gun enthusiast, that often aligns more with the right than the left, that has come to realize that guns do a lot more harm than good, and humans are far too unstable to warrant their widespread distribution.

Instead, I think that we should be permitted to enjoy guns in controlled environments. Locked down shooting ranges with extremely tight security where the chances of a weapon escaping the facility are negligible. This would still allow gun enthusiasts such as myself to enjoy the sportiness of guns without posing a significant threat to the world outside.

In terms of home defense, the reality is that guns in the home are statistically more likely to kill a loved one than an intruder. And unfortunately people are too selfish to admit that. The author of the above article was 100% correct in saying that both sides are lying to win the argument. And that's the worst place to be because it's a stalemate. Nobody wins, and everything stays the same. And if there's one thing we should all be able to agree on it's that there is a gun problem in the USA that needs solving.

I'm open to any solution that will practically solve it, but of all of the ones that I've considered the most effective one appears to be prohibiting guns that are universally intended for killing people, restricting guns that would be effective for killing many people in a terrorist attack, and still regulating the hunting guns to make them so difficult to acquire that the average Joe having a bad week will either out himself or cool off long before he gets possession. And the ones that already have guns will be a lot less effective.

While we're on the subject, I think that in addition to limiting the types of guns that people can own, I think it's also reasonable to limit the number of guns that are permitted within a household/ownership. There are countless lunatics in both the USA and even Canada that have proven that if left unregulated they will take things to an unhealthy extreme that should make everybody nervous. Nobody needs that many guns.

Append:

I get my gun "kick" from Counter-Strike. It's a whole lot cheaper and a whole lot safer. That said, I've heard from several Americans playing Counter-Strike, many of them ex-military or police, that absolutely should not be permitted to have a gun, but that have dozens of them. To be clear, I'm not saying the video game made them gun-crazed, but rather they were drawn to the video game because they were gun crazed! Nevertheless, they've demonstrated mental instability and a lack of general intelligence sufficient for me to be uncomfortable with their possession of guns. And all I can say is thankfully I live far away from them. Unfortunately for some of you, you do not. My condolences. (Though we too have our share of crazies, and they STILL have guns despite our laws... See, you can still be gun crazy in Canada despite gun control!)

Another point that the author of the above article made that I think was really well thought out was how people abuse the 2nd amendment, and how if they are genuine in their defense of the law would be doing so not to protect their own interests and beliefs, but to protect everyone's, especially the people that they DON'T agree with! The law is meant to represent ALL OF US, not just you.

Chris Katko

.50 caliber rifle. That is, an anti-material rifle (capable of hurting APC, truck, and early-tank piercing--it'll go through an entire car):

https://www.cheaperthandirt.com/50-bmg/firearms/rifles/

Here's the size of the bullet:

{"name":"6738ac6a-a49a-4c62-8245-cfdf35fa632b.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/6\/d\/6dae93cda450c1f72c193b65744fcb47.jpg","w":525,"h":700,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/6\/d\/6dae93cda450c1f72c193b65744fcb47"}6738ac6a-a49a-4c62-8245-cfdf35fa632b.jpg

SCAR rifle, that the military actually still uses:

https://fnamerica.com/products/rifles/fn-scar-17s/

The majority of all gun deaths aren't done with those. Why? Because they're EXPENSIVE and physically BIG. Which means it's hard to afford them, hard to "Throw them away" to hide the evidence, and hard to conceal them when you're committing crime. Why? Because 90% of gun deaths are from pistols because they're a better weapon.

Nobody is actually suggesting we should allow kids (or crazy people) to have guns, or teens to go blasting children away at highschools. The question is: How do we do it without affecting the law-abiding citizens who have committed no crime.

Because we might as well demand monthly psychological checkups for every woman because SOME women kill their children, and it's apparently okay for ALL women to suffer because of what SOME women do.

This is not a hypothetical debate. You can't just say "I wish there to be no gun deaths" and snap your fingers. the implementation matters. Because guns have been illegal in many cities and states and ... they still had guns! ... brought in from outside the borders! (You mean like the super success for War on Drugs that keeps all drugs from coming across our borders?) Gun prohibition will not work any more than drug prohibition will.

You can't treat it like a simple problem with a simple solution. There are a variety of deaths from a variety of methods. Some are crime. Deal with the crime. Some are suicide. Getting rid of guns DOESN'T STOP SUICIDE. And I, for one, genuinely want less people killing themselves, so how about we actually help those people instead of "taking away the guns" and then patting ourselves on the backs while people keep dying?

And as for accidental gun deaths? HELL YEAH people need to be trained, and filtered out from owning guns that don't treat them with respect.

Then again, people kill themselves with cars every day (far more, in fact) and nobody seems to even care. Every year, there are 36 thousand less people in the USA from car deaths (and that's WITH huge gains in car safety).

But everyone knows what a car is, so they're not afraid of it. Even when the actual statistics show they should be.

Bill Gates himself tweeted this chart:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D8zWfENUYAAvK5I?format=png&name=4096x4096

Actual deaths from the chart:

30% Heart Disease (read: you're fat.)
30% Cancer
7.6% road accidents and falls
...
1.8% Suicide
...
0.9% Homicide

We're not living in 1960. We don't have to guess how people die. We KNOW how people die and how often. But we're refusing to listen. It's anti-science and it needs to stop. We spend all of this time, energy, and money debating .9% of deaths while we let the other 99% die every year without much of a care.

Notice how we're not making any LAWS that affect law-abiding-citizens for ANY OF THOSE OTHER 99%. You could save THIRTY TIMES the lives by simply making it illegal to be obese. But no, that's wrong. Because it'd affect something YOU have experience with and YOU know isn't dangerous. As opposed to evil, black painted guns.

Fun fact: As a completely different angle for this debate: Gun rights are protected by the constitution of the USA and have consistently been re-affirmed by the supreme court. So every argument for abortion (because the supreme court affirmed it, yet has no constitutional provision) works for gun rights, except gun rights have MORE legal standing. So imagine how much you think abortion should be legal, and then remember the US supreme court thinks guns should be FAR MORE legal.

So let me close by saying, once again, nobody WANTS dead kids. The majority of Americans want to enjoy their hobby and not be penalized for NOT committing a crime, AND, find some way to stop crime and suicides. But those answers require thinking and Democrats want BUMPER STICKERS and SLOGANS which don't have any room for thoughts lasting more than 5 seconds for a highlight reel. Science and understanding take actual thought, and they want to run around exclusively on one emotion, outrage. And people who run on outrage aren't very particular about who they set their sights on... which is exemplified by their willingness to attack law-abiding citizens as if they're monsters.

Another fun perspective: Your kids are statistically far more likely to be raped by a teacher than shot at school. But nobody is passing laws or calling for change on that.

[edit] Another fun one. Here's another LEGAL rifle. a 20mm (larger than .50 cal!) anti-material rifle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiJtRTn2wgo

starting bid: $11,000

https://www.gunbroker.com/All/search?Keywords=anzio

But it's not an "evil" semi-automatic rifle. It's bolt action. So it's okay to have, right?

bamccaig

I'm super baked right now. So forewarning... :P

Because 90% of gun deaths are from pistols because they're a better weapon.

You did not just suggest that pistols are superior weapons to rifles... They're worse in every way except price, weight, and subtlety. They're probably more common because they're cheapest, and money counts a lot to most people, but they're also very ineffective.

Because guns have been illegal in many cities and states and ... they still had guns! ... brought in from outside the borders!

They still had a lot fewer guns, and a lot fewer gun-related deaths. That's still a win.

(You mean like the super success for War on Drugs that keeps all drugs from coming across our borders?) Gun prohibition will not work any more than drug prohibition will.

I would probably wager that drug prohibition doesn't work because powerful people are the biggest consumer of drugs. The bad people are always going to do whatever they want. The bad people will still have guns when guns are illegal. They do in Canada.

The difference is the good guys won't. That may seem like a failure, but that's simple-minded. In reality, you still have fewer guns to supply bad people with, and you have fewer good people capable of ruining their life (or some other innocent lives) on a bad day.

Append:

To me this goes without saying, but if your country generally produces good people then this should work really effectively. If your country generally produces bad people, firstly you should question your own motives, secondly you should work to change the systems in place to fix it, but also you're either with them or outnumbered. Probably makes more sense to move than to arm yourself...

Now if that was what it was like all over the world perhaps it would make sense as is. There would be nowhere to go to escape it. You would have to fight. Except much of the world isn't like that though. There would be places that you could go where it would just be better, and you could no longer justify the guns. Places not even very far away. Where most things were the same, and the good things that weren't were minor, and the bad things that weren't were major.

raynebc

Edgar, you're a regular progressive cliche dispenser. I agree bump stocks are not useful in any way in that they ruin any firing accuracy. It's just hard for pro 2A people to trust anti 2A people because the latter routinely call for the arbitrary banning of ergonomic or aesthetic features just because they're "scary." I also don't trust faulty arguments such as "only some people should be allowed guns, such as veterans," especially considering that it has been long standing federal policy that vets can be declared mentally incompetent and disallowed from buying guns merely for having a person assigned to handle their finances.

If you're being stalked, call the cops or get a weapon for self defense. You can't in fact count on a law enforcement officer to pro-actively save you from an attacker 24/7. You have to consider the reality that it's your responsibility to take necessary means to protect yourself. Whether you want to be big enough to admit it, even AR-15s are a valid defensive use firearm. Maybe you shouldn't have the right to drive because you could easily kill dozens of people in mere seconds. For that matter, why does anybody other than CDL holders get to drive? I have every right to tell you you're wrong.

Bam, no the distinction between semi automatic (nearly all guns, edit: In civilian use) and full automatic (assault rifles) is relevant, since these are real defined terms unlike the amorphous "assault weapon" label. I have never used a full automatic rifle and if you have been paying attention will find that I have not advocated for civilian use of full automatic guns. If you can Google, you will find the AK-47 is a full automatic rifle. It's no surprise the AR-15 is preferred (not a severely-heavily regulated assault rifle, very modular, modern design) over an old German design of gun, not to mention the improved accuracy semi automatic fire has compared to automatic fire as you already stated. To flesh out one of your arguments, skilled soldiers might prefer burst fire instead of full auto, since the ammunition would last longer and it's a lesser sacrifice to aim. Claims that the AR-15 is not an assault rifle are factual in reality, but hoplophobes don't care about accurate definitions when their emotions overtake them.

Despite your routine gag reflex to bring up hunting, hunting has nothing to do with the second amendment. There are more guns than ever in the USA, more every year, but the crime rate doesn't skyrocket with the gun count. Stats reveal that lawful gun owners are pretty much the most law-abiding demographic of people. You are against people having non hunting-specific guns. You seem against people having guns at home for self defense. These are in fact far left positions on gun control. So, cutting through your disinformation, I'm being more honest here than you and Edgar.

Chris, good luck getting through to these two. Most people who are deathly afraid of guns don't really know much about them, and too many of them aren't willing to learn. They're the kind of people who would say pulling the trigger is too easy, only bolt action rifles should be allowed (seriously, I typed this before reading Bam's follow up post, way to be predictable). But as we know, there are no such restrictions on the second amendment.

bamccaig

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cECZQ7rJ8CM

Old, but good. You can continue to argue the wrong points. Some day either you'll come to your senses, or at least the government will and you'll be left behind. Maybe the Democrats will win, and ban all guns, and you 2nd amendment nuts will get to see how your guns do against them. :-*

Erin Maus

Although I personally dislike guns, it's nearly impossible to turn the clocks back in the US.

That's why I think there should be leftists militias.

Funnily enough, once the left starts arming themselves, Republicans think gun control is important. Look at the Black Panthers and Reagan. (I'm aware Democrats supported it too, I'm a socialist, not a Democrat. Don't whatabout me.)

bamccaig

What really helps to put it into perspective is actually walking yourself through a drill. Actually run around your house. Simulate an attack. How much work it would actually be to try to mount an assault against an attacker? Hell, go to a paintball or airsoft event and live it out. See how far you get before you "die". Odds are not far. Odds are you're no closer to being Walker Texas Ranger than I am. This isn't a TV show. If you get shot you will most likely be good as dead. Unless you train regularly you will most likely panic, and miss every shot you do have, and provoke whoever it is you're against to kill you for fear of their own life. Or you could fumble the gun. Or trip on a coffee table.

Basically, the odds of you actually pulling it off are effectively zero. Even if you have a gun. If somebody comes to your house with bad intentions and a gun you've already lost. Unless they really do just want your TV, in which case let them have it, and hope they leave you alone afterward. If it really is life and death, all you can do is your best. Whether you have a gun or not. The odds of it ever happening though are slim to none for most of us. Otherwise, by your 30's, you'd have several stories where a gun has already saved your life.

Counter-Strike also puts it into perspective. As good as I can be, there are thousands of better players out there. And no matter how hard I try, some are just naturally gifted, and others cheat. And guess what, criminals excel at cheating! That's what they do best. If you're an honest, hard working, law-abiding citizen then cheating probably doesn't come naturally to you. And if you're not, well, I guess you're the bad guy after all.

A gun is unlikely to change anything. If somebody wants to rape or murder your family and they carefully plan their attack you are likely fucked. As Jim Jeffries joked, you aren't possibly going to be ready 24/7. You need to sleep. The good news is most people aren't like that. The odds of that happening are negligible. The relatively few people that do experience these types of events don't justify everybody having a gun. As I said, even if you did have a gun, odds are you wouldn't manage to get yourself out of it.

And even if you DO happen to successfully stop the attacker and kill them you've got a new problem. Convincing the police that it was self-defense. You better hope the forensic evidence supports your story because they're going to be looking for any reason to arrest YOU. And if the pieces happen to fall wrong you could end up facing a life sentence or even a death sentence for all of your trouble. Let alone the mental demons you'd have to live with after killing someone. Men are pretty good at pushing those down and pretending they don't affect us, but they still do, and that tends to lead to rock bottom eventually. You can only pretend for so long. Our subconscious has a mind of its own. Even if you believe you were justified you could still end up feeling sick about it.

Real life is not a movie. I hope nothing like that ever happens to any of you, your families, nor mine for that matter (knock on wood). A gun isn't going to make it "OK". At best, a gun might help you survive it, but it won't help you and your family survive the emotional/mental trauma afterwards. Instead of wishing for a world where you can have guns to protect your family you should be wishing for a world where you'll never need to protect your family. My world seems pretty damn close. And yours probably is too.

Edgar Reynaldo

Please tell me rayne, are you more qualified and informed than US veterans?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4k5t5LcexY

raynebc

Bam, I don't expect Canadians to appreciate or understand why the second amendment exists. It's clear you don't. Your hypothetical scenarios are all worthless.

Aaron, that is a dangerous mindset considering that some far-left activist groups (ie. Antifa) are prone to initiating violence against their political enemies. Words are not violence, but certain kinds of mentally damaged people don't agree and will respond to words with literal violence. That said, I don't have problems with Antifa members who have not committed violent crimes from obtaining and using guns LAWFULLY. This does not mean taking them out with them when they go to counter-protest peaceful right-wingers and brandishing them freely.

Edgar, most veterans are not against the population being armed. This also goes for law enforcement. Your handful of picked cherries is a drop in the ocean.

jmasterx

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^_^

Edgar Reynaldo
jmasterx said:

c834f3ff1a7acdee882385aaa916b089-240.jpg

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raynebc

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Edgar Reynaldo

lmao, you should make that your avatar, rayne

Chris Katko

I like turtles. does anyone else like turtles?

LennyLen

I like turtles. does anyone else like turtles?

I like Logo.

Chris Katko

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Edgar Reynaldo

Now, if you want to arm everybody with light sabers, now you're talking.

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bamccaig

I'm bambams 2019, and I approve this message.

jmasterx

bambams 2019 has my vote >:(

Edgar Reynaldo

All those in favor say aye!

jmasterx

aye!

Edgar Reynaldo

The ayes have it!

Welcome your new robot Overlord, El Presidente BaMcCaIG!!!

jmasterx

video

Stop at 0:45

Edgar Reynaldo

Sorry this train can't stop now not at 45 seconds and not at the end either not the end of the tracks either let's keep pushing the envelope gentleman let's go fellas.

bamccaig

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MiquelFire

That picture is awesome! Was it just created?

Edgar Reynaldo

You must be new here. Welcome to allegro.cc. This is the end of the tracks, but as you may have noticed, we're not stopping. Please hold on while we attempt to figure this out.

Chris Katko

Have a great day today!

bamccaig

That picture is awesome! Was it just created?

No, it is several years old, I think. I have it linked in my signature. I think I made it years ago in response to some derailed thread, but I can't remember.

MiquelFire

I must have missed that thread for some reason.

But you have too many links in your signature anyway.

Edgar Reynaldo

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bamccaig

I must have missed that thread for some reason.

It was years ago I think. Probably 5+. I think it was right around the time that things started dying down around here. I bet you were in it, and saw it, but it probably wasn't significant enough to remember long term.

Actually, last night I watched a new documentary series on Netflix called The Mind, Explained. The first episode explains how memory works at a high-level. What I got from it was that effectively all of the different parts of our brain that are responsible for interpreting sensory input store their information locally, and the hypo-campus is responsible for gluing all the pieces together to make sense of them. We interpret the live event as something based on what our hypo-campus can put together with all of the information at hand, but we don't store that completed thought. The memories are still fragmented by the different regions of our brain.

When we try to remember later on the hypo-campus needs to piece all of that data back together, but the more time passes the less context I guess it has and perhaps the less pieces it can figure out to include in the process. And when there's missing information your brain just "imagines" it to give you a best guess rather than just signalling an error. In other words, we're always so confident in what we remember about the past, but in reality there's always some degree of live imagination thrown in to fill in the blanks, and we fool ourselves into believing that's what actually happened.

This is also why witness testimony is so unreliable in practice. Whatever information we don't have at the time we imagine, and that is obviously often wrong since it isn't based on facts. We're literally inventing the rest of our testimony based on past events we do remember. Similarly, we're open to accepting new ideas in place of missing information in our memories. So when the detective suggests suspect #3 your brain is open to accepting that as a new piece of the old memory because it doesn't have enough information to rule it out. Later on when you get up on the witness stand you'll have forgotten all about not being able to remember what the perpetrator looked like, and you'll tell the court you're 100% certain it was the defendant.

Our brains are amazing, but there's also very fragile and fallible. I'll let you stew about what ideas you're so sure of and how you came to that conclusion on your own. 8-)

MiquelFire

Considering how poor my memory is anyway, I believe it. I don't always trust things from my memory.

bamccaig

video

Chris Katko

video

video

Edgar Reynaldo

video

Chris Katko

video

I... I... I can't breathe.... laughing too hard.

I mean, I thought it was funny at two and hypocritical how they judge conservatives for doing the same thing. But THREE TIMES? The LEADER of CANADA has not one, not two, but THREE (that we know of so far!) different instances of wearing blackface?!

You can't write fiction this good.

Coming from the guy who smugly grandstanded saying "it's personkind, not mankind", how am I not surprised he's actually a complete racist (by 2019 standards at least). People who talk the loudest tend to be the ones trying hardest to escape the shame of their past (or even the shame of their current evil, like those soyboy male feminists who loudly decry the 'plight of women' but then go on to rape women at womens shelters--yes that happened).

Remember the conservative governor they tried to lynch for wearing blackface? I absolutely expect liberals to treat the PM ("prejudice + power") with at least as much vitriol as they did the conservative guy who only had ONE black face picture. Just kidding, we all know they're hypocrites--even if we don't want to admit it.

I don't care what either sides politics are. What I'm so disgusted by is the complete lack of fair, objective standards for what is right and wrong. It either IS, or ISN'T a fire-able offense to wear blackface. If you have to hear "who it is first" before you decide whether a crime is a crime (or moral failing), you're just being tribal and have no moral highground to stand on.

[edit]

Edgar Reynaldo: I've tried many times to get into tool. Like, I like the songs but it feels like they never build into anything. It's like, the greatest intro ever... that plays for 7 minutes straight.

raynebc

It's pretty much a base requirement that anybody who's very politically involved is a hypocrite. Nobody is completely pure.

Chris Katko

There's a huge difference between being a normal human with idiosyncrasies, and being a raging, lying, hypocrite that talks about "rights and wrongs" but is actually using them as a tool to assist their tribe. Hypocrites who talk about how we should act, but are only really using it as a means to control others. They're liars at their heart.

You can be for or against abortion. What you cannot do is say you're say, "against abortion" to gain political support and power while at the same time your wife aborts babies every week. Likewise, you can't be a California gun control senator who tries to take away legal guns then sells guns to actual Islamic terrorists. That's not a political position, that's an a$$hole.

Quote:

Yee has also been awarded the following awards:
Gun Violence Prevention Honor Roll by the Brady Campaign.[108]

hahahahaaahhahahahahaaahahahaaahahahah

raynebc

Certainly, the hypocrisy is worse with totalitarians who demand that people not be allowed to do something and not lead by example.

Arthur Kalliokoski

I've been on too many reddit clones and youtube and I've been lurking for 10 minutes and still looking for the upvote/downvote arrows...

Edgar Reynaldo

Well well well if it isn't A.K. 47!!! Come out of the dungeon long enough to post my friend?

Have a pepsi on me!
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LennyLen

This article had me shaking my head at the state of modern journalism:

Video games proven to cause cardiac arrest

It was actually worse in the newspaper I read it in, as the article was on page 5 or so, but half the front page of the paper was the headline: "Parents gaming warning: Children black out while playing computer games"

All that can really be concluded from the article is that having a rare and serious heart abnormality is bad for you.

Edgar Reynaldo

That's like saying "not breating can make you black out", well no shit....

Erin Maus

Interdimensional portals... Even handles nesting somehow.

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Working on a boss fight based on the Fungal Demogorgon from Stranger Things. You have to hunt it through dimensions: Rumbridge (a town), Azathoth (a dimension where some of the Old Ones come from), and the Multimaximum (a cosmic acid trip). In each area, the Demogorgon has unique attacks, such as turning the villagers into fungal wights.

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The lightning in Rumbridge was a bug that I documented and made a feature. I think it looks great.

Onewing

Happy 4 year anniversary to the "Thread locks too soon" thread!!

Sometimes I wonder if our benevolent leader would return if we let this thread die, but I'm also concerned with all things imploding if that were to happen.

So in the meantime: 4 8 15 16 23 42

Edgar Reynaldo

They basically killed each other off season by season. Waited so many years for the finale, and it was just so lame. Jack? Bah.

Erin Maus

I thought you were talking about Game of Thrones then I read Onewing's post.

Still not sure which you're talking about. ;D

Edgar Reynaldo

Perhaps my duplicity was merely unintentional. It could also be purely coincidental as I've never watched a single GoT episode in my life.

In other news, Piccolo is now over 9,000!!!!1111

Piccolo said:

3163.jpg
Posted on 09-29-2019 06:30 View Profile

Just an Update Guys. I have become enlighten to the first stage. I used the Scriptures in and outside of Bible to become enlighten. I have figured out how to teach enlightenment. when you become enlighten you can invent any technology. I plan on teaching this enlightenment in Africa first than the rest of the world. I found a few people on youtube that are enlighten however most don't know how to teach it.

wow
-------------------------------
i am who you are not am i

;D

LennyLen

Still not sure which you're talking about.

So you're lost then?

It could also be purely coincidental as I've never watched a single GoT episode in my life

They're worth watching, except for the last season. Just watch seasons 1-7 then read the last book, when it finally gets released (I read book 1 over 20 years ago!!).

amarillion

In other news, I finally started porting the 'sin & cos, programmers' pals' example code to allegro 5

https://github.com/amarillion/sincos_examples/tree/allegro5/circle

(Only one example done so far)

GullRaDriel

Wow, what a good new amarillon !

I still own a paper printed copy of your tutorial I made years ago to make sin and cos my pals.

Thanks BTW ^^

amarillion

I still own a paper printed copy of your tutorial I made years ago to make sin and cos my pals.

Hehe nice. Maybe I should publish it as a book? Although it would be a very thin book.

Edgar Reynaldo

It's called a pamphlet. ;)

amarillion

Somehow that makes it sound political.

Edgar Reynaldo

Okay, how about a 'zine then?

Seriously, we should bring back that allegro zine, what was it called again?

amarillion

"Pixelate"

I'd write articles for it

edit: Suggest some topics!

bamccaig

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Bump. >:(

jmasterx

Fist Bump! >:(
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Edgar Reynaldo

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Erin Maus

Got a DSLR and have been playing around with it. I got to go on the roof of my office building a few nights ago and get a photo of Uptown Charlotte at night.

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Slightly over-exposed but I'm learning...

Edgar Reynaldo

👍👍👍

bamccaig

I tried to Google gifs for "sleeping on the job" because it has been 3 days since anybody posted, but that was a mistake because I'm exhausted and working late and seeing a bunch of photos of people sleeping on their desk was no help. >:(

Edgar Reynaldo

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bamccaig

That is amazing. ;D That is not something I have done much of. Passing out drunk in public. I'm not sure it has ever happened. Though I usually avoid going into public when I can...

RmBeer2

This's my pet:
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Edgar Reynaldo

Spontaneous immolation!

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RmBeer2

anyone here still have the code of message box?... i lost several codes in the previous system... :'(

Neil Roy

Four months since I was last in this thread. Wow... looking over the topics, I am glad I stayed away.

I finally picked up a new monitor, nothing special, a 22" 1080P monitor basically, but this one is really nice for viewing angles. My last one you almost had to look straight at it to get the image right or turn it. This one has some amazing viewing angles which was my main concern for a new one (and very thin). I highly recommend it if you can't afford a lot. It also has great colour and was only around $125CDN I believe on Amazon. It's the Acer SB220Q.

Edgar Reynaldo

Welcome back to the fold, NiteHackr. Mwuahahaha.

Views on Terminator Dark Fate? Lame sequel or grand finale?

LennyLen

Views on Terminator Dark Fate? Lame sequel or grand finale?

It can't be any worse than Salvation or Genisys. I still don't see myself going to see it in the theatre though, I'll wait until it's available for download. he next movie I'm going to see on the big screen is Star Wars.

Edgar Reynaldo

I heard they ruined it. No spoilers though.

Still looking forward to Obi-Wan's story, but that might have been cancelled.

And for fun :

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RmBeer2

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I did not understand. what does this mean?

LennyLen

And now for something completely different...

video

Neil Roy

Views on Terminator Dark Fate? Lame sequel or grand finale?

Hard to say, I honestly haven't given it much thought. From the trailors it could be a good movie, i don't tend to be very critical of movies. Lately my interest in movies is rather "meh". I doubt I will bother with it.

That new Midway movie caught my interest.

video

GullRaDriel

Looks promising, must watch it on a biiiig screen.

Chris Katko

I like turtles.

Neil Roy
Quote:

I like turtles.

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RmBeer2
NiteHackr said:

Hard to say, I honestly haven't given it much thought. From the trailors it could be a good movie, i don't tend to be very critical of movies. Lately my interest in movies is rather "meh". I doubt I will bother with it.

That new Midway movie caught my interest.

There are no ships or aliens, how boring. The director has to retire.

bamccaig

There are technically lots of ships...

Chris Katko

I can't wait to see Star Wars.

Fail.

It's schadenfreude at it's most glorious.

It's such a dumpster fire franchise now.

"How did Ray know how to swim if she lived her entire life poor on a !@$!'ing desert planet?"

LennyLen

I can't wait to see Star Wars.

Fail.

I don't have high hopes for the movie, but The Empire Strikes Back was the first movie I ever saw at the cinema and I've seen every Star Wars movie since then at the cinema, so it's become a tradition.

Erin Maus

I got HRT medication yesterday ;D. Waiting on getting a blood test before I start taking them but all the places are booked for a week or more in Charlotte. Really excited!

finallyhappening.gif

Also, retroactively adding networking is super hard. I can connect and load a map but it crashes because some critical UI stuff is NYI. RIP.

Chris Katko

Also, retroactively adding networking is super hard.

this a thousand times

Edgar Reynaldo

Aaron, really? HRT? You're so uncomfortable in your own skin you want to be another gender?

Chris Katko

All I'm going to say is, I wish him the best.

Erin Maus

Did you use him on purpose? ???

Chris Katko

Goddamn it woman, just take the !@$!@'ing compliment. Not everyone is out to secretly manipulate language to destroy you.

Erin Maus

I wasn't offended...

> Aaron, really? HRT? You're so uncomfortable in your own skin you want to be another gender?

Yeah, since I was a little kid. I've always hated how I looked. I never liked being handsome. I've always been envious of how girls can dress, wear make-up, and style their hair. The root of my dislike is from my masculine features. I can afford surgery, etc now so I'm not afraid of looking like a "guy" in the least bit if HRT is insufficient.

Edgar Reynaldo

You may or may not find the following offensive :D

Boobie pics or it didn't happen!

Chris Katko

FYI, Aaron (you gonna keep your name?), I probably sounded way more harsh than I meant to. Like I said, I wish you the best. My opinion on your worldview / lifestyle / whatever is unimportant in that regard. I hope you find what you're looking for.

Edgar: If I was changing gender, I'd post this to everyone I knew with the caption "My Gender Change Surgery in a nutshell":

video

Erin Maus

I'm changing my name to Erin Eliot Maus. Changing my whole name for reasons unrelated to my gender (father wasn't a part of my life, tired of being "Bolyard II"). Always been closer to the German side of my family, and [bk]door.maus was a username I used for a long while I grew really attached to. T. S. Eliot is my favorite poet. That's the gist of it.

bamccaig

It's such a dumpster fire franchise now.

Well, no wonder:

LennyLen said:

I don't have high hopes for the movie, but The Empire Strikes Back was the first movie I ever saw at the cinema and I've seen every Star Wars movie since then at the cinema, so it's become a tradition.

People need to vote with their wallet on arts/entertainment. Artists should be free to express themselves any way they see fit, but if they intend to make a living from it then it should ultimately please audiences.

Perhaps this is really a failure in the market though. Instead of paying to watch a movie you should get to vote on how much you liked the movie afterward by paying. :) That might naturally select better production. AKA pay what you want after you've consumed the art.

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

People need to vote with their wallet on arts/entertainment.

Already there my friend. I don't buy crap. I don't play AAA titles. I don't pay full price for most games. I haven't been to a theater in ages.

I just watched the last avengers a few months ago. It was a boring dumpster fire. I have no idea what the hell anyone is proud of. The previous one actually took a little risk, and the last one just magically undid it all. Boring.

I heard a movie reviewer on YouTube say something that stuck with me. "I can forgive bad. Bad movies took a chance and failed. But they tried. The worst kind of movie, is a boring one."

Ask yourself, is ANYTHING going to happen in the last star wars? Is there ANY chance of Ray dying, or becoming evil, or having ANYTHING happen to her that she herself is incapable of defeating without someone else's help? Is there ANY chance of Finn becoming evil, or dying? No. No. and No. Even though they somehow defeat "the biggest evil ever", the next movie they're somehow back even stronger. And somehow they're the only ones fighting "the evil" yet the entire UNIVERSE won't stand and give them some aid (at least under the table)? My butthole.

Disney is also pandering to China, and while I love their culture, I do not for an even ounce support China's government nor think AMERICAN companies should be censoring AMERICAN movies for CHINESE government approval. For example, if you ever wanted the idea of gay people existing in Star Wars, ha ha ha, good luck now.

[edit]

OH MY GOD. GET OUTER WORLDS NOW. I feel like a kid again. I'm so. happy.

RmBeer2

For:

Chris Katko said:

...

That is why fanfics exist. to do what they don't want to do.

EDIT:

159!! 159x25+3=3978 comments...

The Browser make very slow for load all comments in the Post Reply time...

And how make the quote? by writing by hand?...

bamccaig

I have a JavaScript library that gives me a UI to create the quotes. :) If you quote exactly then it's still fast. If you don't, Allegro.cc will have to iterate through every post to try to find which one you're quoting,... You can probably just fill in garbage too: <quote name="Chris Katko" src="garbage">.

DanielH
RmBeer2 said:

And how make the quote?

Look at "Formatting Help" to see how to do quotes.

Erin Maus

I'm taking advanced Java for school, and we have an eight-week "final project" thing. The instructor let me choose the project. Since at my job, we do pair programming, I thought "why not a pair managing service."

The back end will be a Java (of course) RESTful API using Spring and the front end will be a basic React app using JavaScript (of course). Look, Chris Katko's two favorite programming languages! ;D (I'm just jostling you.)

LennyLen

We had a woman at my work today ask about the vaping products we sell, when a customer behind her started telling her she shouldn't vape because it's bad for you. He then bought a pack of cigarettes. Go figure.

raynebc

I don't like vaping or smoking, but even I'll admit the former is much less harmful (except for the black market vape juice that has been making people sick recently).

bamccaig
LennyLen said:

We had a woman at my work today ask about the vaping products we sell, when a customer behind her started telling her she shouldn't vape because it's bad for you. He then bought a pack of cigarettes. Go figure.

There is a lot of media coverage in NA right now about vaping related illnesses. They haven't been able to trace it back to its source(s) yet, but it appears to be in the unregulated or illicit juice market. Even though people have been vaping for years without issues, in the past year several people have come down with serious infections and a few have even died I think.

Unfortunately, there's a lot of misinformation going around about it. "Vaping" means a few different things. And since health officials haven't been able to conclusively identify a problem ingredient or vendor they are playing it safe and just warming people to refrain completely.

My wife usually gets worried every couple of months and tells me about it, worried that it'll affect me. All I'm doing is vaping cannabis flower, but all reported cases appear to be vaping e-liquid. The stigma of cannabis is causing media outlets to report a link to cannabis, even though a few of the victims were using nicotine products that contained no THC or other cannabinoids. It's likely just the result of ignorance.

That said, if you're selling the e-liquids you should probably be aware of this at least. Perhaps the culprit juices aren't available on your side of the world (yet). I suspect they're an American product that has spread to Canada (most cases in the USA). I don't use that stuff anymore, though I briefly tried it years ago hoping it would help my brother and sister-in-law quit.

I have no nicotine addiction though so there was really no point in me doing it, and it's not cheap (particularly the e-cigarettes or vaping devices), and the one that I had was beginning to fail. I don't even know where it is anymore. Odds are my wife threw it away years ago.

LennyLen
bamccaig said:

even though a few of the victims were using nicotine products that contained no THC or other cannabinoids.

There's also the possibility that they were vaping illicit thc capsules, but didn't want to admit to it.

Bob Keane

One thing I don't understand about vaping is, cigarettes cannot be advertised, at least in my state. However I see ads all the time for vaping products. If cigarettes can't be advertised, why vaping systems?

Neil Roy

I don't understand what people have against just breathing in air. There are definite problems with vaping, all vaping. I researched it because I felt it would be a great way for my wife to quit smoking. She has a VERY hard time quitting, but after some research I discovered all sorts of problems with it and concluded that you're only swapping one harmful addiction for another.

Personally, I quit smoking when I was 27, just went cold turkey and I was over it in a few weeks, and year later I didn't want the things around me. Plus at the time I put aside money I used to spend on smokes to buy a new computer (an Amiga 500 at the time), which helped as well. Been paying for upgrades with the same amount of money each month ever since.

LennyLen
NiteHackr said:

but after some research I discovered all sorts of problems with it and concluded that you're only swapping one harmful addiction for another.

Be careful where you do your research. There is a LOT of misinformation floating around. As reported by the CDC/FDA, the majority of patients presenting with lung illness have admitted to using THC products, and there have been many recent reports of inferior THC products that have had vitamin-e acetate added to them to make them appear to be a more superior product than they are.

What's interesting is that this problem seems to be unique to the USA. There are far more people using vaping products in the rest of the world than in the USA alone, but nowhere else seems to be having problems. Part of the problem is probably lack of regulation of vaping products. However, by sticking to proper vape juice (containing only VG, PG and flavourings) made by a reputable company will be a lot safer than smoking. The NHS in England are actually putting vape stores into their hospitals to promote them as a harm reduction method for smokers. Public Health England has a good blog entry that dispels many of the myths about vaping.

Quote:

Personally, I quit smoking when I was 27, just went cold turkey and I was over it in a few weeks, and year later I didn't want the things around me

Well done. I smoked for nearly 30 years (aged 14-43) and tried giving up on multiple occasions, but then the next time I had an anxiety attack I'd be back on them again.

I've been vaping for nearly two years now and it's the longest I've ever gone without a cigarette. I had a barrage of lung function tests done earlier this year (my liver is so big and high in my body that it's invading my lung cavity and they needed to find out if surgery was necessary) and I got excellent results on every test. I haven't had pneumonia since I switched, which is something I'd been getting every winter for a few years.

Chris Katko

Who would have thought that coating your lungs in moisture could cause pneumonia?! ??????????????????

LennyLen

Who would have thought that coating your lungs in moisture could cause pneumonia?!

I haven't had pneumonia since I started vaping.

bamccaig

It is the tar and junk in cigarette smoke that makes one susceptible to pneumonia... :P Albeit, inhaling anything foreign into your lungs presents some added risk, but some things are far far worse than others...

LennyLen
bamccaig said:

inhaling anything foreign into your lungs presents some added risk

Agreed, and I wouldn't recommend vaping or smoking to anyone who is currently not doing either. But I would definitely recommend anyone who is a smoker to try vaping to see if it works for them (some smokers don't find vaping satisfying) as it is a far safer alternative.

bamccaig

I bought some starter kits years ago to try to get my brother and his wife to switch. I tried it out first, and then I think I bought them a kit or something. I forget. That was years ago. They wouldn't at the time. Idiots.

My uncle just died a little over a year ago from lung cancer. Mid-50's. We thought he was relatively healthy. Of course, he always covered up his smoking around us because his parents didn't approve. He was somewhat destructive because he got fucked in a bad marriage, and the courts favour women. His wife was allegedly cheating on him with another man, she left, and eventually ended up with full custody of the children and an alimony on top. And he killed himself with alcohol and cigarettes basically. Cigarettes won that competition. Anyway, I sympathize.

We thought he just had a bad cold/flu. He missed Easter supper for it. He went to hospital for it shortly after, and they declared it pneumonia. Further tests revealed that he had advanced lung cancer, and it was irreversible. He died about 2 weeks after going into hospital. I didn't get a chance to see him (initially we didn't realize it was so serious, and by the time we knew it was recommended to "remember him as he was"). The really hard part is that he was perhaps the "elder" that I most related to. And despite the many years that I could have visited and perhaps even helped to ease his pain I never did. It was just awkward. My grandmother died a few months earlier, and I couldn't really "feel" it because we knew it was likely (also cancer). For him, in part because it was unexpected and sudden, and he was so young, and perhaps building up from my grandmother, I wept uncontrollably when I got home. For hours. I mean, I set the mood to do it. I wanted to. But I was able to, whereas I couldn't when my grandmother died. I think it affected me somewhat when he died. It felt sort of like a premonition or foreshadowing. Anyway, it was a very hard loss.

Cigarettes are not a joke. Honestly, if you're still smoking cigarettes in 2019 give yourself a HARD slap in the face, and STOP IT now. If you're trying to kill yourself I guess that's your business. Though at least you could lobby your government(s) to provide better health care services to people like you, and for the law to treat you more fairly (if you are suffering a similar fate as my uncle). If you don't intend to die prematurely nor abandon your family then seriously commit to quitting smoking. No matter who you are there are people that will miss you. That's not always clear to all of us, but again lobby your government for better mental health care.

It's a shame that we can't figure out a way to control a substance without fueling criminal enterprises. I'm not sure if a solution exists, other than education and perhaps social assistance for people trying to quit. We can provide both medical substitutes and counseling... That's about it...

I never really understood smoking. I tried it various times, but I never inhaled. I guess the education I was provided was enough to scare me away from it. Thankfully. I was so wary that when I tried smoking weed for the first time a very powerful joint did NOTHING to me because I was so accustomed to smoking without inhaling. :P I had to research how to even inhale because I couldn't do it naturally.

Neil Roy
LennyLen said:

I haven't had pneumonia since I switched

Yeah, when I quit smoking (as well as some dietary changes I won't get into here) I stopped getting the flu, which i used to get twice a year like clockwork. I also rarely get a cold anymore and I have never had a flu shot in my life.

Chris Katko

Swimming increases your chances for pneumonia but directly inhaling water doesn't? Really guys?

https://www.thenational.ae/uae/health/swimming-warning-about-pneumonia-risk-1.167131

I'm not saying "don't vape". But come on.

raynebc

I'm not pro smoking or vaping, but that article clearly says the problem is that the water and surrounding air are already especially dirty. Vaporized water is generally going to be cleaner than pool or lake water.

Edgar Reynaldo

bamccaig is dead right. Don't smoke kids. Please. :(

I've been a smoker for nearly 25 years now, and I feel worse than ever. If I don't quit smoking soon, I may not have much time left. :(

I don't know how I feel about vaping. I won't comment.

bamccaig

There is usually water in the air all around us all the time. :P It's called humidity, and most of us probably live in a climate where it is naturally occurring. If that is a risk for illness then we're already exposed. :P The humidity level is 84% outside right now (meaning the air is nearly saturated with water at its current temperature). There's no way for me to breathe the air outside without inhaling water vapour. Inside we have a dehumidifier to reduce the humidity levels, but it is still at around 50%.

Edgar Reynaldo

Well eff you guys. I'm a fish and I need water to breathe. :/

Chris Katko
raynebc said:

Vaporized water is generally going to be cleaner than pool or lake water.

You know all water goes bad over time, right? :P Bacteria enjoys growing.

I've been a smoker for nearly 25 years now, and I feel worse than ever. If I don't quit smoking soon, I may not have much time left. :(

Fun fact: Within 3 months of not smoking, you'll have recovered a huge amount of lung capacity.

bamccaig

Not all vapes are made the same. I only vape cannabis flower, and yes I do inhale. There should be no mystery chemicals here. There is just the cannabis flower (from licensed producers), air, and heat. It's essentially cooking cannabis, and inhaling the resulting steam. :P This method barely produces any vapour. It is not like snoop dogg where I'm filling the room with clouds. There is just a small bit of vapour on a long drag, and it dissipates quickly.

Often people mean e-liquid when they are talking about vaping. This is where they've essentially taken some carrier oils, maybe added some mind-altering chemical like nicotine or THC, and maybe added some flavouring to make the otherwise tasteless vapour more fun. I assume they must also use a specific chemical to make those huge vape clouds that you see possible. This is the one that is causing problems, but only recently and people have been doing this for years. It must just be some particular chemicals that unregulated producers have been mixing in either to cut costs or for some other purpose that is causing problems, and it's only really happening because the government isn't regulating the industry enough (if at all)...

Again, there is a slight risk any time you inhale anything foreign into your lungs. That said, compared to cigarette smoke this "vapour" you get from either type of device might as well be pure air. Cigarette smoke is more like sucking on a car's exhaust pipe. Vape clouds are more like opening the window of an airplane while you're flying through a cloud and inhaling that. :P

Even cannabis smoke isn't as bad as cigarette smoke. Cigarettes are made of some really bad shit. The worst part though is that cigarettes are extremely addictive, and over time people end up chain smoking one after another. Whereas weed lasts a while so unless you're Snoop Dogg or Willie Nelson you're probably only going to smoke or vape a little bit a day... Even so, Willie Nelson claims that his lungs are in great shape. There is even evidence that cannabis smoke can potentially help asthma sufferers, though I think it's some weak evidence, as any beneficial effects are likely overshadowed by more harmful effects. :) I think that it is known to help open up the lungs more, but I find that when I smoke cannabis my throat gets sore. When I vape it though I usually don't feel any discomfort (aside from an immediate cough when it first hits my lungs).

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

Again, there is a slight risk any time you inhale anything foreign into your lungs. That said, compared to cigarette smoke this "vapour" you get from either type of device might as well be pure air. Cigarette smoke is more like sucking on a car's exhaust pipe. Vape clouds are more like opening the window of an airplane while you're flying through a cloud and inhaling that. :P

At no point am I saying vaping is just as bad as cigarettes. I'm just saying the idea that there are NO complications is wrong. "I never had any problems!" doesn't mean nobody does.

Hell, Tylenol sends more old people to the hospital than any other drug and if you drink alcohol with it (or take too many pills) it literally destroys your liver.

Everything has side effects and they should be understood so people can make the best informed decision.

For example, my wife was pissed at me for awhile because I'd demand she wore her helmet with her bicycle. I was like "20 MPH on a bicycle is the same as 20 MPH on a motorcycle. It's still going to !@$!'ing hurt."

LennyLen
bamccaig said:

This is where they've essentially taken some carrier oils

The carrier in e-liquid is usually a mixture of Propylene Glycol, and Vegetable Gylcerine, neither of which is an oil (though VG is derived from vegetable oil) and neither of which breaks down into oils when heated. This is important to note because a lot of the misinformation about "vaping injuries" speak of build up of oil in the lungs (and often refer to eliquid as vape oil), but with e-liquid there is no oil.

Most THC liquids do contain oils however, even the good quality ones. Most people who have been admitted to hospital due to "vaping" have acknowledged that they were using THC products.

I'm just saying the idea that there are NO complications is wrong.

I don't think anyone disagrees with that. Anyone with half a brain should know that ideally, we should breathe nothing but pure air.

I'll repeat what I said earlier: "I wouldn't recommend vaping or smoking to anyone who is currently not doing either. But I would definitely recommend anyone who is a smoker to try vaping to see if it works for them (some smokers don't find vaping satisfying) as it is a far safer alternative."

Bumpity bump:

New news from the CDC states they've found Vitamin E acetate in every lung injury case they've tested so far.

In most of the cases, THC was also present. There were a few cases where THC wasn't present. There are two possibilities here:

1) They had been using THC products which caused the damage to the lungs, but stopped using THC long enough for it to no longer be detected and then regular vaping exacerbated the problem (vaping anything when you have damaged lungs is a BAD idea).

2) They were vaping regular e-liquid which had vitamin E acetate in it. This is particularly worrying as there is absolutely no reason to put it into e-liquid (it's added to THC products to make cheap, thin, cannabis oil thicker, so that it resembles good quality product). This is why the industry needs to be regulated, so that chemicals like this don't end up in e-liquid. Personally, I only buy e-liquid from two companies as I know people who work for them and I know what goes into their product. There's legislation in the works here in NZ, but it hasn't been passed into law yet.

Edgar Reynaldo
Erin Maus

So on the topic of vaping...

Is it possible that someone can't have a hangover (within reason)? There's been nights I've had like upwards (but not quite) a dozen strong drinks in less than three hours and I wake up fine the next day.

It's not like I'm a spring chicken, I'm 27. Does the fact I started drinking less than a couple years ago matter? Does the fact that I have 1-2 glasses of water per drink matter?

Maybe I'm like Captain America and I metabolize alcohol insanely fast 8-)

IDK, I'm not a doctor. I'm just writing this after I went from being drunk to not even being tipsy over the span of a couple hours. Whatever.

Neil Roy

Is it possible that someone can't have a hangover (within reason)? There's been nights I've had like upwards (but not quite) a dozen strong drinks in less than three hours and I wake up fine the next day.

Absolutely. Of course, you probably just done a whole lot of damage to your liver and other organs. I have seen several people in my life drop dead either suddenly, or over the period of a few months from alcohol related problems. Your liver will fail, your skin turns yellow, you can't think straight and within a couple months you're dead (I have seen this more than any other form of death), or another thing I have seen is someone who is perfectly fine, and suddenly one day they have a stroke and either instantly die, or within a day they are dead; my grandmother, who was a heavy drinker suddenly dropped dead from a stroke and just last week a friend of mine dropped dead from similar conditions.

Alcohol is very healthy for you, in moderation. Abuse it, and it's one of those things that probably won't show many signs of problems until it is too late.

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;D

Edgar Reynaldo

Aaron, you're messing with alcohol poisoning.

https://www.rupissed.com/

Erin Maus

Whoops, I meant upwards of half a dozen. I'm not an idiot nor am I suicidal.

Last night I had something like 5 or 6 mixed drinks (e.g., long island, liquid marijauna). I don't think that's at alcohol poisoning territory.

I drink a couple times a month, I'm not worried about hurting my liver.

Chris Katko

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Erin Maus

3 years old, 5 cm tall, and 40 lbs? What does that even look like. :o

And shame on you for giving your 3 year old alcohol! Don't you know they're only supposed to have at most Monster energy drinks?

LennyLen

Aaron, you're messing with alcohol poisoning.

I don't know how I never managed to get alcohol poisoning back when I was drinking. In my twenties, I regularly drank a 2L bottle of bourbon in one night, which rupissed thinks should have killed me:

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I think my stomach doesn't absorb things very well, as whenever I have taken any other drugs that need to be ingested, I've always needed to take doses several times the size that other people do. I also have been taking vitamin pills for years as if I don't, I get deficiencies, even when I'm eating properly balanced meals. I'm guessing most of the alcohol I drink just passes through me without being absorbed.

I got stopped a couple of years ago driving home after drinking three beers in an hour, and their breathalyser wasn't working so I was taken for a blood test. My blood alcohol content was at 0.03, which is just over half the legal limit here. Going by rupissed, I should have had three times that amount in my blood:

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Is it possible that someone can't have a hangover (within reason)?

I didn't start get hangovers until I was in my mid-30s, and even then very rarely.

edit:

This thread is 15 posts away from 4000 posts!

RmBeer2

Those days is hot!! I HATE DRINK HOT WATER!!! IT'S TASTE LIKE A SHIT!!!! GRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!! X@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

bamccaig

Is it possible that someone can't have a hangover (within reason)? There's been nights I've had like upwards (but not quite) a dozen strong drinks in less than three hours and I wake up fine the next day.

It's not like I'm a spring chicken, I'm 27. Does the fact I started drinking less than a couple years ago matter? Does the fact that I have 1-2 glasses of water per drink matter?

Whoops, I meant upwards of half a dozen. I'm not an idiot nor am I suicidal.

Last night I had something like 5 or 6 mixed drinks (e.g., long island, liquid marijauna). I don't think that's at alcohol poisoning territory.

Drinking 1-2 glasses of water per drink is 100% keeping you hydrated and avoiding a hangover. Keep it up. :) That's smart.

That you've only drank ~6 drinks also helps. Generally speaking, hangovers start around 6 drinks, but as your tolerance builds it might take 8 or 10 or sometimes 12 to feel it the next day. For me, 9 is probably my tipping point where I'll often get a killer hangover the next morning, and that's without drinking any water. That's also an all night type of thing. I'm not talking about 9 drinks in 3 hours. I'm talking about 9 drinks in 8 hours or so. Essentially, try to limit yourself to about 1 drink per hour on average. Or as you've been doing consume water alongside it to keep you hydrated and slow the absorption.

Of course, the strength of the drinks matters too if we're talking mixed drinks. Ordinarily drinks are meant to be approximately equivalent: a single shot of scotch or a beer, they're still one drink, and should have about the same effect on you in the same amount of time. That said, mixed drinks that aren't carefully measured can quickly become much stronger. :) I recommend you measure your alcohol if you're mixing your own drinks. And of course, some types of drinks are faster to consume and that can get you into trouble if you aren't timing your drinks.

Generally speaking, mixing different kinds of drinks in a night is also a recipe for disaster in my experience. Even switching beers in the middle of the night can cause me pain the next day. Switching between mixed drinks, or types of drinks, is almost guaranteed to give me a headache.

But I rarely drink water when I'm drinking alcohol. You should, but I'm trying to get drunk and I think the water slows how quickly the alcohol is absorbed. A recommended practice is to quit drinking alcohol an hour or so before bed and switch to drinking water, but I don't do that either. :P Typically I've found drinking water at the end of the night makes me feel nauseous, even though it's actually more likely to prevent vomiting. ::) Of course, nothing would stop me in that same moment drinking another beer. ::)

Do as I say, not as I do. :P

In response to the question if it's possible that you can't have a hangover I'd say that's unlikely. It's much more likely that your responsible drinking habits are keeping you in safe territory. Drink 8 of those drinks without any water and I bet you'll wake up wishing you hadn't (depends on your weight too though). ;)

Neil Roy

;D
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bamccaig

Saying alcohol is "very healthy for you" is very misleading. A single drink of alcohol per day is considered beneficial because studies have suggested it reduces certain health risks (though I don't think it is well understood why), but I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's "very healthy". What we understand much better is that it's extremely addictive and harmful when abused. I recommend people avoid it entirely. It's somewhat like cigarettes in that it predominantly treats ailments that you never had until you started drinking.

LennyLen
bamccaig said:

A single drink of alcohol per day is considered beneficial because studies have suggested it reduces certain health risks (though I don't think it is well understood why)

These studies also often rely heavily on correlation without looking deeper into other things that could affect a person's health such as diet, sleeping patterns, amount of exercise or genetic history.

Neil Roy

I'll keep drinking it in moderation. I love my Baby Duck (sparkling red wine), but I never overdo it. It is absolutely very healthy for you. But to each his own. I learned my lesson about the foolishness of getting drunk. I now limit myself to around 3 glasses of wine, give or take. My health is doing fine, I haven't had a flu for well over two decades. I rarely even get a cold. My father likes to have his own home made beer almost daily, while rarely getting drunk and he just turned 79.

Which reminds me, I haven't had any wine in a while, need to buy some more if I can get myself to trudge through the snow and winter we just got 5 weeks ahead of time (damn global warming). :)

LennyLen
NiteHackr said:

It is absolutely very healthy for you.

For something to be "very healthy," it needs to have clearly shown improvement to your health. Regular exercise for example has many health benefits which have been proven by many studies. The studies that show improvement to your health due to moderate alcohol use are flawed, and even then they only show very slight improvements to your health, which are offset by the greater risk of cancer that is also linked to even moderate alcohol consumption.

Quote:

My health is doing fine, I haven't had a flu for well over two decades.

An individual case means absolutely nothing. I've also never had influenza and very rarely ever get colds, and I drank dangerous amounts for over 20 years. In fact, with the exception of pneumonia which I got from smoking and from damaging my lung in a bike accident (3 broken ribs, one of which punctured my lung, and instead of taking time off to heal, I went back to work the following morning), I've always been in very good health.

Edgar Reynaldo

T minus 7 and counting...

GullRaDriel

What is coming at 0 ?

Edgar Reynaldo

What do I look like, a prophet? That's 5 btw.

Neil Roy

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bamccaig

What Don Cherry said was beyond stupid. I don't normally support people losing their jobs over what they say. We all have wrong ideas from time to time, but we're all better off with the freedom to express them so that we can discover that we're wrong and form better ideas. In any case, what he said was stupid, and I stand with that. :)

Immigrants don't owe anything to the veterans of Canada. Many immigrants have endured far worse than even what many of our veterans have. It shows serious ignorance and insensitivity to overlook their own difficult paths and assert to them that they need to follow a Canadian custom to honor our past and present soldiers when our soldiers were in no way doing any of it for immigrants (odds are most were doing it for themselves in recent years, whereas back in the WW1 and WW2 days were probably coerced by government).

WW1 and WW2 veterans went through hell, and most of them were likely coerced to do it. And they haven't even been properly cared for since. They deserve our support.

I don't think that younger generations of Canadian soldiers have quite the same story to tell. It's more likely that they volunteered for "duty", and they likely endured far less extreme conditions. Most modern day wars are pitting well-equipped, well-trained professionals against poorly-trained and poorly-equipped guys with guns. Canadian soldiers aren't equipped quite as well as the Americans are, but I imagine they still have a major advantage against Taliban soldiers. ::)

Neil Roy

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Being upset with Don Cherry about a comment against immigrants when he wasn't talking about them specifically... means you're an idiot. Go watch the video clip of what he actually said again. He was talking about everyone who doesn't wear a poppy to support those who fought and died for their freedoms. But, that's the retarded leftists, they all jump on the bandwagon and follow the crowd without checking the facts.

bamccaig

I did my best to find a clip of this because obviously I wasn't watching that garbage when it happened.

You know, I was talking to a veteran. I said, "I'm not going to run the poppy thing anymore because what's the sense? I live in Mississauga, nobody wears... uhh uhh, very few wear a poppy... Downtown Toronto, FORGET IT. Downtown Toronto, nobody wears a poppy. And I'm going to..." And he says, "Wait a minute! How about running it for the people that buy them." Now you go to the small cities, and you know ... those ... [unintelligible] ... the rows, on rows... (?) YOU PEOPLE, love,... you,... that come here, whatever it is, you love our way of life, you love our milk and honey, at LEAST you could pay a couple of bucks for poppies or something like that. These guys paid for your way of life that you enjoy in Canada, these guys paid the, uhhh, biggest price!"

First of all, this doesn't make any sense to start with. He's rambling, and it's not at all clear what the fuck he's saying. It's amazing he wasn't fired just for that if this is a typical night. It appears that he is crazy.

First he says he's not going to run the "poppy thing" because very few people in the Toronto/Mississauga area where he lives wear them. He emphasizes that nobody in Toronto wears them. Of course, both of these cities being full of diverse populations from all races and religions and immigrating from all over the world. He doesn't seem upset about this at all.

And apparently the veteran he was talking to about this interrupts him and says he should still do it for the people that do buy them. I don't know what this "poppy thing" is. I'm not familiar with his show. I'm assuming it's a typical advertising/guilt trip about wearing poppies, and this year he says he isn't going to bother, and the veteran apparently says to run it anyway because people in other parts of Canada still buy them... Which makes zero sense to me because people that are already buying them don't need to be told to buy them.

Then it sounds like he's starting to say that people in small towns still buy poppies and support the troops, but then he just goes off on a rant. It's not entirely clear what he was trying to say, but it does seem evident that he's referring to immigrants here. Starting first with "YOU PEOPLE" very excitedly, and then seeming to struggle for the politically correct words, before just going off on a rant about milk and honey (neither of which I think Canada is particularly well known for), and about how whoever YOU PEOPLE is should pay a couple of bucks or something for a poppy because reasons.

The argument is a complete brainfuck. It is completely unclear what he is trying to say. It certainly sounds like an attack on immigrants though.

It's really hard to make sense of what the fuck he thinks he is saying. Transcribing it was quite a challenge too.

In the video that I used as my source for that clip, the only source I found in my 5 minutes of searching, the hosts of that show follow up with an audio clip where he tries to say that by "YOU PEOPLE" he meant "everybody", but hilariously he says, "What I said was everybody, and I meant everybody, whether Scotch, Irish, English, [unintelligible]. Everybody that comes to this country should honour our fallen dead,..."

Hilariously, he doesn't say Canadians need to. He says everybody that comes to Canada. Natural born Canadians don't come to Canada. We were born here. You know who comes to Canada? Immigrants! (Well, and tourists, but I doubt November is tourist season anywhere in Canada...)

Ultimately what he said was wrong, and apparently he was given an opportunity to apologize and refused. Like I said, the entire rant was pretty unintelligible. He sounds senile. If that was representative of a typical Coach's Corner perhaps his retirement was long overdue!

Chris Katko

I think it's hilarious that Canada re-elected a guy who wore blackface... that we KNOW of... at LEAST three times.

Like, that's near making fun of America for re-electing Bush.

What's the next PM gonna be, an ex-Klan wizard with a 1d4+3 staff? (fun fact, a prominent leader of the Democratic Party in the USA, and Hillary's close mentor... used to be a Klan wizard. Apparently, no crime is too evil if you're useful to the party now. I'd dare anyone to argue that anyone of us could have a blackface or KKK association keep our jobs. And before you think 'omg that's probably fake news', no, it's real.)

raynebc

The trick is to be in a picture with one person in blackface and one person in a KKK costume, but not specify which one is you. Instant immunity.

Chris Katko

Also, hilariously, after the blackface incident, Trudeau changed his twitter photo to him hanging out with a black guy. That actually happened. (TM)

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/justin-trudeau-blackface-racism-twitter-profile-canada-election-a9116911.html

raynebc said:

The trick is to be in a picture with one person in blackface and one person in a KKK costume, but not specify which one is you. Instant immunity.

;D

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I can't tell which one is Trudeau! All I see is two black guys. ???

bamccaig

Honestly I had never even heard of "blackface" until Trudeau's scandal. What I decided from it is that given the people posing with him in the pictures it appears that it was socially acceptable at the time and place. He dressed up that way in a goddamn private high school social event, and presumably everybody in attendance saw no problem with it at the time (or those that did didn't speak up at the time). There even appears to be some people of colour in the photos with him smiling and showing no signs of offense. It's possible people of colour felt uncomfortable with it at the time, but if they didn't make it known I think it's easy to see how a white man coming from privilege might not realize he was even doing anything wrong. It's also worth noting that those in attendance were likely well off given that it was a private school. Those photos are like 18 years old which would make him 29 or 30 at the time. Still young enough to make mistakes I figure. I know I'm still making them at 33.

I think that what Canadians did by re-electing him was smart. They didn't let scandal and slander decide the election. They did what was right instead. The only other practical option was Andrew Scheer and the Progressive Conservatives, and he is as crooked as they come and the PC party was so bad last time that Canadians nationwide coordinated their votes to oust them in key ridings. The PC's are really good at lying to your face with a smile. They remind me of American politicians. When I first started getting into politics I voted PC because I was impressed with how Stephen Harper presented himself. And shortly thereafter I discovered the horrors of my mistake. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Trudeau is far from perfect. He's still a fuckton more intelligent than Bush Jr. :P He has done a lot of things that I don't support, such as purchasing a failing pipeline with taxpayer dollars. We need fewer pipelines, not more. The only good thing that he did that I can think of was legalize cannabis. That said, I am confident that the Conservatives would have done far more harm. At least this time around it is a minority government and so they aren't as powerful. We can only hope that we get the electoral reform that we need this time around.

I was very pleased with the result. I don't think Canada could have gotten any better result. I personally voted Green, knowing they had no chance in Hell, but also knowing that my vote wasn't going to practically make a difference no matter what I did. The Greens achieved more than 1 million votes this election, which worked out to about 6.5% of the vote. We are growing fast, and each and every term where the Liberals and Conservatives continue to give tax breaks to the wealthy while cutting services or harming our environment just pushes more and more people towards us. What I really would love to see is Elizabeth May as Prime Minister. She would do the most amazing job anybody ever could. It's a real shame that she may not get the chance before she burns out.

Append:

I also stumbled across this article while briefly researching the photos: https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2019/09/19/who-objected-to-trudeaus-blackface.html. It's possible that was just paid for propaganda from the Liberal party, but I think that it is a reasonable write-up.

Neil Roy

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LennyLen
bamccaig said:

Well, and tourists, but I doubt November is tourist season anywhere in Canada...

Isn't it Ski season?

bamccaig
NiteHackr said:

5ac26a0f69dd406f45496fc7c58b6b30-240.jpg

I imagine if your childhood fantasies of an afterlife were true Orwell would be rolling in his grave having his wisdom twisted into such an unflattering form.

LennyLen said:

Isn't it Ski season?

That may be a little premature... There's about 6 inches of snow on the ground, but I don't think that's enough to cover the jagged rocks in the mountains. :P

Our local ski resort announced that they've begun making artificial snow (to speed up the process), but they haven't determined an opening date yet.

amarillion

Only one month before the decade ends. Do you realize that we've gone almost an entire decade without direction from allegro.cc's benevolent dictator?

Edgar Reynaldo

40 pages worth of gold, and now we degenerate into Canadian politics sheesh I guess we really have talked about everything now.....

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Chris Katko

Canadian politics sheesh I guess we really have talked about everything now.....

Get out of you're Amero-centric bubble maannn... ;)

Abi-12

I wasn't offended by the whole Trudeau blackface thing. It's very easy to blowup something from 15-20 years ago without taking into account that it was a very different time ( culture/ethics/sensitivity wise ).

If he apologized/regrets it. Why is it such a huge deal? Do you really think he's racist?

no tldrs pls.

LennyLen

I've been working at a gas station for about six months now, and it makes me very worried for humanity.

Pretty much every day we get someone who either doesn't know how to open their fuel flap or who doesn't know what type of fuel their car needs, and once every couple of weeks or so, we get people who put diesel in their petrol engine (or vice versa) because they weren't paying attention to what they're doing.

These same people are legally allowed to drive one and a half tons worth of steel at 100 kph. It's damned scary.

And then we had a guy this week who deliberately put diesel into his petrol car because it's cheaper and he wanted to save money.

MiquelFire

... I have no words...

I don't know what I did to have Google put these stories on my news feed, but there are a lot of videos of people who seem to have something against electric cars. At some point, you would think people would learn that Telsas have built-in cameras that record stuff so they can't get away with stuff as much.

RmBeer2

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A.cc in the depth, but with dignity... :'(

Edgar Reynaldo

I resent the implication that a.cc is a river barge out for a cruise. >:(

bamccaig

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Wait, is that piccolo's boat?

Too soon?

Neil Roy

Something a little less controversial for a change...

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Chris Katko
Abi-12 said:

I wasn't offended by the whole Trudeau blackface thing. It's very easy to blowup something from 15-20 years ago without taking into account that it was a very different time ( culture/ethics/sensitivity wise ).

If he apologized/regrets it. Why is it such a huge deal? Do you really think he's racist?

The answer is simple. If any one of US did the same thing, would we have a job tomorrow? Would people be calling YOU racist? Yes.

So the only thing we're left with is, apparently, it's morally okay to do morally bad things, as long as we have something to gain politically from you.

Which is possible. Maybe the only way to do politics. But it's still dark and alarming. Because where's the line then?

If Trudeau raped some kids, is he still above morality? Probably not (we HOPE). But blackface... in >>TWO THOUSAND AND ONE<<. I'm sorry, but nobody had to tell me not to wear BLACKFACE when I was in highschool in 2001. Let alone THREE TIMES.

Edgar Reynaldo

Personally, I'm much more scared of people who wear white face :o

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bamccaig
NiteHackr said:

Something a little less controversial for a change...

36d2569df7f49bd7b1558494eae9e8ee-240.jpg

My wife and I just bought our first house, and this weekend we had run out for some errands, and on our way back we had just pulled onto our street when my wife exclaims, "What is that?!" I look over towards the sidewalk, which is wrapped in 8 inch snowbanks, and see some small animal keeping up with our truck that keeps bounding up and down as it runs along the sidewalk. My wife says, "Is that a bunny!?" Indeed it was, friends. Indeed it was.

My wife had previously seen mysterious 3-legged tracks in the snow around our house, and initially thought maybe somebody had a dog with a missing leg. Turns out it was probably a rabbit, and its hind legs were just held together as it hopped along. The little guy looked tiny. I'm no expert on rabbits, but I suspect it was still young. It almost seemed to know where it was going through. When it came upon a road it changed directions and hopped up the road as we passed. It gave me a strong urge to anthropomorphize it, and I began to imagine a children's storybook centring on a young talking rabbit.

Last night, while stoned, I realized that my cat was looking out the window, and we had noticed him getting excited a few times before while doing so, but we weren't sure what he was seeing. I realized that he has probably seen a rabbit, and so then I started to imagine writing a children's storybook about a talking rabbit and cat that became unlikely friends. :P

The answer is simple. If any one of US did the same thing, would we have a job tomorrow? Would people be calling YOU racist? Yes.

I think that it's completely toxic for people to lose their job over things they did in the past that are not even illegal[1], just socially unacceptable. I do not encourage this level of thinking. A person should not have to fear losing their livelihood because of social justice warriors. It makes no sense. Is this person supposed to die for their "crime"? Are they expected to live off of government/taxpayer handouts? Are they expected to be homeless for their crimes?

If we ultimately want these people to continue to care for themselves instead of making them a burden on the taxpayers (whether by social assistance or by law enforcement having to cope with the inevitable thefts and robberies or by jailing them) then it makes sense to leave their job alone and let their lives continue. In fact, I believe governments should protect your job in this scenario so that your employer cannot wrongfully terminate you just because they disagree with your ideas (or past actions). The extent of the "damage" that can be done for something like this should be that individuals may choose to exile you and stop associating with you (e.g., friends and in extreme cases family). Even so I'd argue that more would be accomplished through dialogue than through harsh social sentences (which can themselves lead to costs on taxpayers as a result of inevitable antisocial behaviour after being forced out of society).

So the only thing we're left with is, apparently, it's morally okay to do morally bad things, as long as we have something to gain politically from you.

Which is possible. Maybe the only way to do politics. But it's still dark and alarming. Because where's the line then?

If Trudeau raped some kids, is he still above morality? Probably not (we HOPE). But blackface... in >>TWO THOUSAND AND ONE<<. I'm sorry, but nobody had to tell me not to wear BLACKFACE when I was in highschool in 2001. Let alone THREE TIMES.

I don't think that's true at all. I think that what you're forgetting is that Canada has a different relationship with race than America does. Slavery existed in Canada, but it wasn't anywhere near as widespread as it was in the USA. There were no plantations. No large slave work forces. And I don't think Canadians were quite so attached to the notion as in the Southern USA. It's different because of context.

Trudeau isn't above morality. At least, no more than any other powerful person. All wealthy and powerful people are somewhat above the law. They shouldn't be, but it's true that they are. Look at the crazy shit that Hollywood stars do and get away with. So much for the war on drugs; many of them make their drug use well known, but you don't see the DEA kicking in their doors or raiding their tour bus. And they barely even count as rich. The ultra-rich in our society (top 0.00001%) literally have no laws at all. They can do anything they want, whether that means murder or genocide, and there is nobody to stop them under our current system of worshipping money.

Personally, I'm much more scared of people who wear white face :o

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:o

References

  1. And even things that are illegal. If you think about it, the only way for a criminal to clean up their act and start living a productive life is for them to get a decent job. Taking that away from them, or preventing them from getting it, because of mistakes they have made is just going to ensure that they're breaking the law and costing taxpayers more.
Neil Roy
bamccaig said:

I realized that he has probably seen a rabbit, and so then I started to imagine writing a children's storybook about a talking rabbit and cat that became unlikely friends.

I like it! How about an injured rabbit, a cat approaches and rather than attack it, it helps it and they grow to be great friends. I could see a good children's story coming out of this. :)

My wife and I were walking down the street one day and out of nowhere a baby squirrel ran up to me while I was standing still talking to my wife on the sidewalk, and it sat on my foot, as if it was scared and seeking comfort with me. It was such a sweet little thing, I hated to do it, but I scared him away from me because I didn't want it being that friendly to everyone as not everyone could be as kind. I only wish I had a camera at the time.

Found the following image the other day, if only this worked! ;)

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bamccaig
NiteHackr said:

I like it! How about an injured rabbit, a cat approaches and rather than attack it, it helps it and they grow to be great friends. I could see a good children's story coming out of this. :)

I was thinking more along the lines of the animals themselves are children or adolescents. My cat is actually pretty friendly. He doesn't often know what to do when other life forms come around. I wouldn't be entirely surprised if he was friendly with a rabbit, though I also wouldn't be surprised if instincts kicked in and he tortured and/or killed it (but I think it would take him quite a lot of time to reach that point, and I think we'd either need to encourage it or we'd need to be out of sight so he could act without judgment).

I imagine the rabbit to be the protagonist or main character. A typically "cool" kid character, that loves to run around super fast, and always wanting to play. And the cat would just be a sort of side-kick or pal that he stumbles upon, and would occasionally be featured (but not always). Maybe the cat would play-hunt it, and then they end up becoming friends. The cat would imagine himself being a big bad killer, but is ultimately harmless and afraid to hurt anything. I don't know. The story would focus on the adventures of the rabbit though I think. The cat would be a character that exists in one part of the story world, but he would normally be confined to his family's house or whatever; whereas the rabbit is a stray/on the loose and can roam free.

LennyLen
bamccaig said:

though I also wouldn't be surprised if instincts kicked in and he tortured

Cats aren't actually "playing" or "torturing" animals with the way they draw out killing them. They're wearing the other animal out so that it's not as much of a threat when the cat moves in close to deliver the killing blow.

Chris Katko

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Neil Roy

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8-)

In other news, AMD has a an amazing new CPU that outperforms Intel's best, with 16 cores, 32 threads... all around an amazing CPU.

video

Chris Katko

As a lifelong AMD user, I'll believe it when I see the benchmarks on real user machine.

I went from an AMD FX-8370 to an older ~i5 4750 (entire PC, mobo, PSU, case for <150 shipped) and it's been night-and-day better. Literally double the FPS in games. I can actually play in 4K now.

That being said, I understand that AMD is getting better and appreciate it. But the FX-8000 and FX-9000 series has still put a bad taste in my mouth. Especially since they straight up lied about their core counts. (fun fact: they're essentially half because the two "half cores" are so coupled and don't even have their own floating point units. It'll actually speed up in some cases... by disabling four cores. Read that 5 times and let it sink in.)

That being... that being said. As a nerd, I love the idea of 32 or 64 cores. I've got 32 GB of RAM and I use it.

Oh, and one more thing to be fair. My AMD FX-8370 is actually faster when doing incredible (read: stupid) amounts of multitasking like 300 chrome tabs, while rendering video, and playing a game. I tap out at around 200 chrome tabs now. But, individual tasks that actually matter, like a game, run MUCH faster. I ~doubled my Kdenlive framerate which took it from terrible to actually usable. And like I said, I can actually run 4K.

On the other on the other on the otherhand... Kdenlive? Sucks butthole and I recommend a total of NOBODY use it. It's a bait-and-switch. you think you're getting a product that works... that can AT LEAST do the most basic things without bugs and crashing. It's got a full website, with screenshots! It's got version 18.x.x! It's got active developers! HAHAHAHA PSYCHE. You will waste dozens of hours trying to fix a "project breaking bug" to save your huge time investment you sunk into a project before you realized Kdenlive was written by apes.

You will put the time into submitting bug reports with video evidence only to find out that your critical bug, hasn't been touched in almost a year. You'll post on the forums and a year later, realize that nobody is on those forums because everyone else hates Kdenlive so your post is like the top-3 most recent post.

KDEnlive makes FOSS look like a mistake.

bamccaig

Are you are you are you OK, Chris?

Side note: yesterday I kept typing random words out of order. For example, the last two words in a sentence might be swapped:

For example, the last two words in a sentence might swapped be.

Which once is not a big deal, but I think I noticed it at least 3 times yesterday which stood out as abnormal. I think I caught most instances before I sent them, but nevertheless.. I don't know whether that means I'm sick, or going crazy, or losing intelligence; or if I was just under stress and one side of my brain was faster than the other. In any case, ... weird.

Edgar Reynaldo

Whatever, Yoda.

bamccaig

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Neil Roy

Whatever, Yoda.

LMAO. ;D

I've had people say "Okay boomer!" to me lately. Technically, I am not a "boomer" from the dates I have seen to qualify. Stupid thing to say to be honest. I seen this today and I burst out laughing...

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Chris Katko

Okay boomer is something bigoted millennials with no self-awareness say.

You might as well be saying "okay blacky" when a black person tries to tell you something. You're throwing out literally everything a person could contribute based on a stereotype you have. "Oh silly blacks, they don't know anything about X" sounds racist as hell. Because it is.

I don't agree with TONS of ideas of older generations. That doesn't mean I'm so world-shatteringly narcissistic to think they have nothing to offer.

You know what millennials do for fun? (If we're going to lop them all together the way they want to lop anyone older than them as a "boomer"). They drink each others semen. Like, literally, in a wine glass. And write articles about it. I dare you to Google it. Actual "journalists."

Be gay, be straight, whatever. But if you're drinking another dudes jizz, you might as well just commit and put down a check on the "gay" checkbox.

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bamccaig said:

Are you are you are you OK, Chris?

You've been hit by, you've been struck by, a smooooothhh milleniiall!

bamccaig
NiteHackr said:

I've had people say "Okay boomer!" to me lately. Technically, I am not a "boomer" from the dates I have seen to qualify. Stupid thing to say to be honest.

It's ultimately just saying that you're old and closed-minded. I agree, younger generations often mislabel older generations as boomers without really paying much attention to what the label really means. Name-calling like that is generally a sign that they have nothing constructive to add to the conversation. That said, typically I've seen liberal/left-leaning people calling conservative/right-leaning people boomers. The typical pro-oil, anti-climate rhetoric is exhausting because the people that spout these ideas are also destructive. They ignore or disbelieve science and assert their claims without even attempting to back it up with reliable sources. As a rule, I generally don't waste much time on EITHER group. :)

Be gay, be straight, whatever. But if you're drinking another dudes jizz, you might as well just commit and put down a check on the "gay" checkbox.

I think that there is still a distinction to make. Homosexuality is something you're born with. You can't "become" gay by performing homosexual acts. Either you were always gay and didn't realize it, or you aren't likely to change despite any acts you participate in.

I'm not sure that tasting/consuming semen would necessarily qualify as gay anyway, even if you naturally enjoyed it. Women are attracted to men, but I think you'll find the vast, vast majority want nothing to do with putting semen in their mouth (or most places really). Some of them tolerate it anyway, which is either awesome or terrible depending on your perspective on it. Some of them learn to even enjoy it, or perhaps more accurately enjoy the praise it nets them from the source or observers.

My generation grew up being taught as children that homosexuality is wrong and disgusting and therefore we were taught that a man putting a penis in his mouth is revolting. Nevertheless the pornography industry has really put blowjobs into the mainstream and so we often get the expectation that women will readily do this and to some extent we expect them to, at least until we run into the inevitable real-world rejection.

That in addition to revelations regarding the nature of homosexuality have lead me to occasionally question if I'd ever be willing to put a penis in my mouth. What if I were held at gunpoint under the threat of being killed or tortured if I refuse? Just how bad could it be? I don't know. I haven't tried. That said, when trying to justify a female partner doing it I have rationalized that it's pretty harmless, and so I must conclude that the same thing would be true if I were to do it. Assuming the lucky bugger didn't have any transmittable diseases it should be pretty much harmless. It shouldn't "make me gay". At worst it might be a little upsetting or traumatizing depending on the circumstances (i.e., voluntary or forced), but likely if it was voluntary the worst that could happen is an unpleasant taste in my mouth temporarily.

To conclude, I don't think that if you're a man voluntarily drinking semen that you must subscribe to being homo- or bisexual. It seems to me that a straight man doing such a thing must be very open-minded, which is generally a good thing. Of course, not much is accomplished by doing it (the drinking part doesn't really give pleasure unless you have a fetish for it), aside from perhaps being able to better appreciate what you may at some point ask of your wife or girlfriend. At least then you could say you've done it, it wasn't that bad (assuming it wasn't), and that might give you a winning advantage in the negotiations.

Ultimately though I think ideas of this nature aren't really natural or normal, and have been popularized by pornography. This often sets us up for unrealistic and sometimes even unhealthy expectations and desires within our sex life. And I think it's overdue for society to start questioning pornography and perhaps helping to steer the industry towards a more wholesome representation of sex. Honestly, I think the vast majority of pornography doesn't even appeal to me. I'm not sure if most other people are into that sort of thing, or if porn producers are just really bad at surveying/reading their audiences. I think that out of desperation we utilize pornography regardless of whether it really appeals to us or not when we can't find something better. Perhaps if pornography was a more mainstream subject it would get the attention that it needs.

Insert: Actually I wonder if the real root of the problems with pornography stems from the technology of the 20th century that limited its production and distribution. In the 50's or 60's you were likely limited to stories or magazines. Eventually VHS came out which allowed for movies, but the production and distribution of them would have been prohibitively expensive. Now imagine you're a man (or woman) desperate for solo relieve, but the available materials are prohibitively expensive. You can't quickly consume hundreds or thousands of materials until you find something that works. You have to lay down cold, hard cash to even consume the content, and you can only afford to try a small number of things so you need to maximize your chances of finding something that will work for you. I could see this naturally producing extremes that may have appealed to desperate consumers that felt something so extreme would give them a better chance of success.

With the modern situation of basically unlimited porn available "free" online, and the invention of inexpensive cameras and microphones, things have changed. We don't need to be desperate. Porn can be produced and distributed very inexpensively. Top production quality porn still requires some serious money (i.e., high resolutions mainly), but with the advances in distribution it is much easier to reach a wider audience that can help to supplement the costs.

In short, I wonder if the "extremes" popularized by pornography actually stemmed from the technological limitations of the 20th century. And perhaps we're ready for a new flavour of porn that more closely parallels healthy relationships. There is already a lot of this, but not enough, and it often still flirts with extreme themes.

I think I've digressed now and I don't know where to go from here. I'm derailing my own post. Anyway, drink jizz if you want to, and post it online if you want to I guess... I imagine it's better to learn those lessons by watching third parties do it than having to do it ourselves. In a sense maybe these guys are actually society's unsung heroes! :D

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You've been hit by, you've been struck by, a smooooothhh milleniiall!

;D

RmBeer2

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bamccaig

I see what you did there. The gun is a metaphor for a penis and the bullet is a metaphor for semen. ;) Append: And I guess his intense aim face is a metaphor for his sex face/orgasm?

raynebc

I don't agree that people are born gay. It's at least as likely that life experience shapes peoples' sexual preference.

Erin Maus

I don't think the distinction of "Are you born gay?" or "Do you become gay?" is relevant because you can't consciously choose to be gay or straight, so whether it's nature or nurture, it doesn't matter.

For example, I really tried being masculine (e.g., toning up, growing a beard) but it only made my state of mind worse. When I rejected it and accepted I'm not masculine then I've been a lot happier.

There is no good that comes from the idea that homosexuality is a choice.

raynebc

I can agree with that, but there are people who will use junk science to claim either extreme ("people are born gay" is just an extreme of a viewpoint as "being gay is merely a choice"). People can choose whether to act on their preferences and be gay or not gay, they should do what makes them happy if it doesn't infringe on another person's freedoms, but they shouldn't lie about why they're doing it in order to provide some kind of justification or shield themselves from the consequences of their actions.

bamccaig

It's not "extreme" to suggest that people are born gay. It stands to reason I think. Otherwise, we'd be able to control sexual orientation by setting up the right environment. Attempts to do this have failed however.

Why do you think gay people are doing it? And what consequences do you think their actions have?

RmBeer2

Among homosexuals, I have detected two types, one that ends up being homosexual because they liked their first experience in this way, and the other those who pretend to be homosexuals only to get rid of the damn desire, either to evade laws or social discrimination , but they are all thirsty dogs with hormones to burst.

It is very rare to find genuine homosexuals, and fakers are the most active. a couple of different sexes is not the same as a couple of the same sex, if you are active or passive there is no impact on whether it was consensual or rape.

they are probably gaps in the laws or failure in society that nobody takes over because nobody wants to know either, and they take advantage of it that way.

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

It's not "extreme" to suggest that people are born gay. It stands to reason I think.

I think it's pretty hilarious that liberals have decided it's one way with any contrary research being attacked. Like, even if it was "a choice" how does "a choice" make it any less beautiful and acceptable? We make choices every day. We choose who we get married to. My choices, in one sense, are way more significant than any of my genetics.

The real reason they want that idea banned, is because then it's possible that if "it's a choice" somehow, we're gonna start opening up anti-gay conversion centers on every block and throw gays in camps where we force them to pick gay cotton and design us new fashions.

I pay special attention to any topic that magically became taboo. Like, "Why" is it taboo now? Are we really gaining anything by going out of our way to NOT discuss things? And Does discussion of ideas--working through the logic to understand something--have anything to do with 'hatred'? No, not really.

Gay people are people. Not really rocket science. But how gay people get here doesn't REQUIRE them to be born a certain way to make them 'valid'.

RmBeer2: I'd be careful. You almost come off as negative / hateful in your word choices. If that's your intent, fair enough but I don't share it.

Erin Maus

The idea that homosexuality is a choice does a few things.

First, the idea makes sexuality more like political affiliation or career choice. This means it's harder to reason as a protected class (after all you can be fired for being a Republican or Democrat [choice], but you can't be fired for being a woman [no choice]).

Secondly, it makes it easier to hate. "You're making a bad choice", like with drug addicts. The reasoning would be people choose to be sexual deviants for, well, sex, much like a drug addict 'chooses' to be a drug addict for the high.

Lastly, it invalidates that it's definitely not a conscious choice. And then is it really a choice? I don't understand the distinction between an unconscious unchangeable choice vs something you're born with in a practical sense.

This was written in like a minute so there's definitely problems with my examples and my logic but I have places to be.

*edit:* sexuality isn't a choice otherwise I'd be asexual, checkmate atheists

LennyLen
RmBeer2 said:

Among homosexuals, I have detected two types

Gay people, like every other type of people come in all types. If you can only discern two different types, then the chances are that you're extremely narrow minded.

Quote:

but they are all thirsty dogs with hormones to burst

And now you've removed all doubt as to whether you're narrow minded or not.

Neil Roy

As far as homosexuals are concerned, I really don't care what they do, or who they do it to. Just don't push it on me (literally! ;D) or demand that I somehow acknowledge you and we'll get along just fine.

We have one in our building that doesn't hide the fact. But I find he's a really nice guy. Doesn't throw it in anyone's face which is nice. I wish there were more people as nice as he is.

I often wonder how many males were sexually abused as children by other males that lead to this? Perhaps too young to know better or whatever? I was abused when I was young that way. But I like my partner to be female thanks. If I want to see a man's parts, I can look in the mirror. ;)

As for being a "boomer" and having differing opinions on various modern issues. I always find it interesting that each side of the various debates claims to have all the facts and claim that "real science" backs them up. I think there's a lot of rhetoric thrown around, a lot of ideas just repeated because they sound reasonable and not actually researched. There's a huge divide and nobody willing to consider that they just might be wrong. Or that maybe the truth is somewhere between the two opinions. But do understand that other people's opinions are as valid as your own.

Edgar Reynaldo

Okay, I'll bite. Why not.

There are two options. One, homosexuality is a choice. Two, it is not.

Let's consider two first. If it is not a choice, then why would God destroy two cities with brimstone and fire and turn a woman to salt for looking back? If it is not a choice, then the people who committed those 'crimes' are innocent and God punished them unjustly. If you believe God is just, then he would not punish people for things that were not their choice. Therefore option two is invalid if you believe God is just.

This leaves option one. Homosexuality is a choice. Claiming it's not is a cop out. We're all subject to the flesh, and the lusts thereof. It's just that some people feel lust towards members of the same sex, which is an evolutionary dead end. Some people feel the urge, and act on it. Some people don't, which I respect. It takes far more courage to deny yourself the pleasure of the flesh than it does to indulge in it. I won't go into my personal opinions, because they would be detrimental to open discussion. But choosing to be gay is not the unforgivable sin, and Jesus died to cleanse us of our sins. We now live in a time of grace, believe it or not, where God took our judgment and let it rest on the shoulders of His Son. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.

No I don't support conversion therapy but I do support people having the courage to deny the sinful nature of their flesh. It's funny that people talk about having pride, but being proud of evil is evil itself.

Believe what you want, I won't tell you how to live, but I want you to be aware that not everything that seems right in this world is right in the eyes of our Father.

Shalom.

Polybios

::)

Edgar Reynaldo

lmao - the only time you look to heaven is when you roll your eyes :-*

Erin Maus

OK, Edgar is right, I'm a terrible sinner for being bisexual. Shame. How does the Bible define gender, by genetics, genitalia, hormones, what? Does this mean intersex people can't have sex? Ugh, why didn't God clarify things!!!!! He should've thought ahead.

Edgar Reynaldo

Okay, since you want to claim 'innocence', since when is sticking your phallis in someone's anus 'love'?... Going the wrong way up shit creek, buddy.

LennyLen

Let's consider two first. If it is not a choice, then why would God destroy two cities with brimstone and fire and turn a woman to salt for looking back? If it is not a choice, then the people who committed those 'crimes' are innocent and God punished them unjustly. If you believe God is just, then he would not punish people for things that were not their choice. Therefore option two is invalid if you believe God is just.

This leaves option one. Homosexuality is a choice.

Your logic is flawed. You're basing it on the premise that there is a god.

Have you ever considered just talking to a gay person and asking them if they chose to be gay?

raynebc

They came to be gay over the course of their life. There's not necessarily anything wrong with that. They just shouldn't try to manipulate other people's sexuality. Like the stuff where some abusive parents try to convince their young children that the latter are transgender.

LennyLen
raynebc said:

They just shouldn't try to manipulate other people's sexuality

That should be true for everyone, but sadly it isn't.

RmBeer2
LennyLen said:

WUAAASAAAAP

I've always been wondering, who is the character of your avatar?

Audric

It's an 'alien' chestbuster, as drawn in this webcomic (nsfw)
https://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=108

RmBeer2

why was it taken from that comic? Is it LennyLen's comic?

Edgar Reynaldo

Well don't try to tell me it's love. It's lust pure and simple and giving in to lust is a choice. It doesn't matter whether or not you have the desire to do it, as that is beyond your choice, but it does matter whether you indulge in it or not.

And I personally love how flamers offer themselves to you, which pretty much explains it all in a nut-shell.

Erin Maus

I think a lot less of you for simplifying the love I've felt in the past to just lust.

There was no difference when I fell in love with a woman or a man. But you think there is. You're the disgusting one.

...

re: raynebec, why is it ok for parents to push heterosexual relationships on their children? E.g., "lady killer" shirts for toddlers...

Edgar Reynaldo

There's a difference between platonic love and romantic love. There's nothing wrong with platonic love between brothers. But romantic love between a man and a woman should not be stained with perversity.

I love my dad, my brother, my male friends, but I would never have sex with them, or try to form a romantic partnership with them. That's just messed up.

Erin Maus

I know the difference between platonic love and romantic love.

You're really thick to think I'm confusing the difference, considering I'm bisexual and have felt romantic and platonic love for both sexes, as well as lust for both sexes. There is no difference between romantically loving a man and romantically loving a woman from my experience.

I love when heterosexual males tell me what to think. ;D

Edgar Reynaldo

Love it when queefs like to tell me what's right and what isn't. :/

Edit
That's a little harsh, but if you try to push your lifestyle on me or my children then it's personal. You want to differentiate between romantic love and lust, well they're pretty much the same. It's called eros, as opposed to philos.

My HS choir teacher was gay, and he showed affection towards me, (I was like 35 years younger than him). He was overly affectionate, and he even tried to win my affection by buying me a fimo necklace with a sun on it. It was intimidating, and embarassing, and made me feel uncomfortable. He made me question my sexuality. It was unprofessional. I respected him for everything but his twisted physical desire. #1 You don't hit on children. #2 You don't hit on people when it makes them feel uncomfortable. But go on, and tell yourself it's love, if that's what it takes to sleep at night.

Polybios

lmao - the only time you look to heaven is when you roll your eyes

It really touches me how you get your whole world from one book (yes it does). The clear contours of your black and white, all that effort that goes into scholasticism, the ease of brushing aside every ambiguity (or even the fact of interpretation), the sticking to the very letter disregarding whole universes of human thought that have existed since at least 1000-2500 years ago, the supposed certainty of everything, ...

But romantic love between a man and a woman should not be stained with perversity.

Is anyone's love "stained" when other people love in a different way? I think that's weird. Mind your own love. :P

Edgar Reynaldo

Well why stop with homosexuality? Why not take it one step further and tell me that pedophiles can't help it because they were born that way? Which somehow makes it okay too. Why not make it LGBTQP? There has to be a point where you call out things that are wrong.

No, I don't support gay marriage. You want a civil 'union' fine whatever, but don't call it marriage. It's insulting.

Polybios said:

It really touches me how you get your whole world from one book (yes it does). The clear contours of your black and white, all that effort that goes into scholasticism, the ease of brushing aside every ambiguity (or even the fact of interpretation), the sticking to the very letter disregarding whole universes of human thought that have existed since at least 1000-2500 years ago, the supposed certainty of everything, ...

Whenn you're reading the right book, all the other ones become kind of superfluous. Christianity is not a religion, it's a reality. But go ahead, pray to Buddha, a golden statue, or pray to Shiva, god of destruction or Krishna, or Satan, or whoever else you want. Everyone will come to the truth in their own time. Scholasticism? Of which field are your referring? Ambiguities? Bring it on. People once thought the earth was flat. Then they believed the sun revolved around the Earth. Science goes wrong all the time. God doesn't. And to your last point, my faith is not blind.

raynebc

Aaron: Almost all humans are heterosexual, it's not abusive to put a baby in a shirt suggesting they will be heterosexual, especially when it's in jest. Obviously a toddler is too young to know what sex is, let alone have any relevant sexual preference (apart from being attracted to breasts for food, etc).

LennyLen

Well why stop with homosexuality? Why not take it one step further and tell me that pedophiles can't help it because they were born that way?

Come on Edgar, you're smarter than that. You should definitely be able to tell the difference between a consenting adult and a child.

Christianity should be banned. It turns otherwise intelligent people into narrow minded morons.

bamccaig

Okay, I'll bite. Why not.

Only because you're wrong, and it's embarrassing. :-*

Let's consider two first. If it is not a choice, then why would God destroy two cities with brimstone and fire and turn a woman to salt for looking back? If it is not a choice, then the people who committed those 'crimes' are innocent and God punished them unjustly. If you believe God is just, then he would not punish people for things that were not their choice. Therefore option two is invalid if you believe God is just.

Simple. I do not believe God is just. Clearly he is not. Just read the fucking Bible. If it's not readily apparent from reading the goddamn Bible that God is not a source for moral wisdom then I'm afraid you're beyond helping.

More to the point, I don't believe God exists at all. There is no reliable evidence that he does. That entire argument is implicitly defeated.

Homosexuality is a choice. Claiming it's not is a cop out.

The biggest copout in the history of the world is "God". "God said", or "the Bible says". Those really just mean, "more than a thousand years ago some guy wrote down some stories that he heard told in a language that I don't speak, it was then copied countless times by hand, translated and copied by hand some more a few times to languages that don't even have matching words with the original language, and I get my knowledge from interpreting that to the best of my ability."

If you told the longer version to anyone they would think you're crazy, and definitely would not trust anything you say. :P

Edgar Reynaldo
bamccaig said:

Okay, I'll bite. Why not.

Only because you're wrong, and it's embarrassing. :-*

Oh bambams. Let me educate you.

bamccaig said:

Let's consider two first. If it is not a choice, then why would God destroy two cities with brimstone and fire and turn a woman to salt for looking back? If it is not a choice, then the people who committed those 'crimes' are innocent and God punished them unjustly. If you believe God is just, then he would not punish people for things that were not their choice. Therefore option two is invalid if you believe God is just.

Simple. I do not believe God is just. Clearly he is not. Just read the ing Bible. If it's not readily apparent from reading the Bible that God is not a source for moral wisdom then I'm afraid you're beyond helping.

If it's not readily apparent that the Bible IS a (the only) source for moral wisdom then YOU are the one beyond help.

bamccaig said:

More to the point, I don't believe God exists at all. There is no reliable evidence that he does. That entire argument is implicitly defeated.

You believing in God is not a pre-requisite for God to exist. No evidence (to you) does not mean proof of non-existence. The argument stands.

bamccaig said:

Homosexuality is a choice. Claiming it's not is a cop out.

The biggest copout in the history of the world is "God". "God said", or "the Bible says". Those really just mean, "more than a thousand years ago some guy wrote down some stories that he heard told in a language that I don't speak, it was then copied countless times by hand, translated and copied by hand some more a few times to languages that don't even have matching words with the original language, and I get my knowledge from interpreting that to the best of my ability."

If you told the longer version to anyone they would think you're crazy, and definitely would not trust anything you say. :P

bamccaig, you're so mis-informed it's just sad. The Bible was taken from eye witness accounts of people that actually lived. It's called history, try reading it. The Bible was painstakingly translated and copied by hand by people who dedicated their entire life to that pursuit. There are countless mechanisms in place within the Word of God that also ensure it is copied correctly. If you were educated you would know that. You also don't know the languages the Bible was written in, namely Hebrew and Greek. There are original Hebrew scrolls called the Dead Sea Scrolls that confirm the correctness of the source. There are many other ways to verify the authenticity of the Old and New Testament. You're just making shit up.

Neil Roy
bamccaig said:

Only because you're wrong, and it's embarrassing.

In what sense is Edgar wrong? Where are you getting your sense of right and wrong from? I mean, if there is no God, and therefore no authority which determines what is right and what is wrong, than who are you to tell Edgar he is wrong? That seems a little pretentious to me to imply that Edgar has no right to quote his personal beliefs about what is right and wrong, and then turn around and assert your morals onto him. That seems to be to be a tad hypocritical.

Doctor Cop

I won't say your belief is bad, if you don't have problem with mine. I say your belief is beautiful but let us be in ours. And my belief is science, the same science which has not been changed for last 16000 years. we all know that Mathematics has remained the same since it's birth, so let me be...

We shouldn't hurt each other in the name of religion or the lack of it.
In India more than 60% people are atheist and some religious people try to hurt their feelings in various ways and mostly in response Atheists bring Evolution, but some Atheist remain silent and smile back. At the end of the day both parties keep their perception unchanged. But what do I know, I'm just a stupid brat ignorant of world's complications, here giving my point of view.

Chris Katko

If you want to be ignorant: Why join Christianity when you can just vote Democrat? ;)

Anti-vax, vaping-isn't-dangerous, "Russia manipulates our thoughts", gender-deniers, "spanking harms the child but putting an infant on hormone blockers is okay".

See? You don't have to have a religion to be a complete moron. :P

For the Democrats who can't take a joke (about 90% of them online these days), this is what's called "tongue in cheek", and because the phrase was invented before 2010, I'm now somehow a "boomer". Because understanding jokes is apparently something only "old bigots" do.

Edgar Reynaldo

Whatever, Katko. We're gen-X and we know it.

Not to be confused with Generation X :

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And, btw? Isn't your tongue always in your cheek? Or are you sticking it out right now? :)

Chris Katko

I'm a member of Revolution X:

video

RmBeer2

how to make a video box here?...

Neil Roy

A "boomer" is short for a "baby boomer" which is anyone born between the end of WW2 and 1964. I don't quite qualify for that. My wife does though, but she doesn't post her opinions online... I should probably follow her lead actually. ;)

Anyhow, something a little lighter, I seen this the other day and it gave me a chuckle.

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8-)

LennyLen

What's the weirdest thing you've ever been reprimanded for at work?

Shortly after I started my current job, BP head office called my branch manager to complain that my daily litreage reports were too precise and that I needed to make less accurate measurements.

Edgar Reynaldo

Reporting ink dots on a QA print job.

@RmBeer2

[video url here]

Erin Maus

Wow, you boomers* are out of touch. Boomer, the insult, refers to anyone who holds certain conservative viewpoints (e.g., the viewpoints a stereotypical "baby boomer" [the term that refers to the generation, not the insult] would hold but are not socially acceptable anymore). You can use the phrase "ok boomer" against millennials and even Gen Z.

This is how you use the phrase "ok boomer":

Edgar said:

No, I don't support gay marriage. You want a civil 'union' fine whatever, but don't call it marriage. It's insulting.

ok boomer

...

See?

*: I wrote that in jest.

raynebc

Largely, the "OK, Boomer" phrase is used by dumb children.

Erin Maus

Your boomer is showing!

If you seriously have that much emotional investment in a flippant, meme-like term that has the same offensive capacity as the phrase 'oh, bless your heart,' the problem isn't the people calling you a boomer.

raynebc

I don't really care as much as you seem to, but you go ahead and have fun with it.

Edgar Reynaldo

"Ok, homo"

Perspective.

That's how offensive it sounds. It's basically saying they're a dinosaur and they're too conservative and old minded. It's the part where you entirely dismiss their opinion that is mean.

Erin Maus

I call myself a faggot, calling me homo isn't offensive to me and just makes you look like a bigot.

Chris Katko

So we're agreed that "Ok boomer" is for bigots? Cool.

That, or Fox News should start using "ok blackie" next time a black person says something they don't like.

Edgar Reynaldo

I used quotes because I was quoting it, not because I was saying it.

While I don't doubt you have your reasons for doing what you do, I would say you have bigger issues that changing your sex isn't going to solve.

DanielH

It's not calling someone "boomer" that is offensive. It's the attitude with the saying. 20 years ago is was "whatever".

"I'm telling you something important or means something to me."
"Whatever!"

Erin Maus

You peeps make the biggest assumptions about me. I've never been happier in my life.

bamccaig

"OK, boomer" is meant to dismiss ignorance. For example, when people argue that climate change is a hoax, or that it isn't caused by human activity, despite overwhelming consensus that it is real and caused by human activity from the scientific community that study climate.

People like that vote for the worst world leaders. The ones that are taking care of corporate interests on the backs of the working class. Cuts to critical services in the health and education sectors. Tax breaks for billion dollar corporations.

Unfortunately, people are stupid, and they love to hear what they want to hear, and they always stop paying attention after the election is over. It's very frustrating to come to a discussion with logic, reason, and evidence; and have people refuse to listen because their mind is already set.

It comes as no surprise that this same group has a large overlap with the religious population. They're able to believe in outrageous things, and they don't do their homework to verify if their beliefs are reasonable. All it takes is a man in a suit with a commanding voice telling them what the truth is and that's good enough.

There are a lot of stupid liberals in the world, but there at least an equal number of stupid conservatives. And there are intelligent people in both camps. The intelligent conservatives tend to be very wealthy. They stand to benefit most from conservative power.

The Internet empowers everybody to say whatever they want and so nothing stops an ignorant person from using "OK, boomer!" against an informed person. Ultimately all that it signifies is that the other person either doesn't believe you're capable of having a debate, doesn't get what the phrase means, or is trolling you. You can safely ignore them because you won't likely get anywhere regardless. Though if somebody is saying it to you then you should take a second to reconsider their position, and consider whether you're open to changing your mind or not if presented with conflicting evidence. We should all do this all the time, but obviously some are more open to it than others...

raynebc

That's an annoying complaint progressives overuse. The less people pay in taxes, the less of a tax break they can receive. It's not rocket science.

RmBeer2

how to public videos in A.c??? How???? How How How How How How How How How ?????? HOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWWWW????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? >:(

Neil Roy
raynebc said:

Largely, the "OK, Boomer" phrase is used by dumb children.

Stupid, ignorant, disrespectful, selfish, spoiled children. Not that I am surprised.

Say it to my face and you would find out just how much this "boomer" can boom. But that's the problem these days, they all hide behind the internet where they can safely insult and disrespect people without consequences.

bamccaig

Talk about childish. SMRT. Hit me and I'd file charges against you.

Edgar Reynaldo

Matthew! The peasants are causing a revolt!

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LennyLen
RmBeer2 said:

how to public videos in A.c??? How???? How How How How How How How How How ?????? HOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWWWW????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? >:(

Edgar already answered that for you...

@RmBeer2

[video url here]

bamccaig

I think that it only supports YouTube links, and it only supports the legacy/long form of the URL. For example:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id]

It will not work with the shorter form: https://youtu.be/id.

Neil Roy
bamccaig said:

Talk about childish. SMRT. Hit me and I'd file charges against you.

I would love to test that out.

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Erin Maus
raynebc

On a much lesser scale, it's still being used as a derogatory term. Like "n*gger" or "cr*cker".

bamccaig

It's not anything like the N word. The N word is not just derogatory. It is dehumanizing. It represents hate, oppression, and genocide. It represents a time and place in history where black people were considered less than human by society, from the people to the government to the law of the land. It cannot be compared to anything else.

Cracker is like a butter knife. It isn't even sharp enough to cut paper. Nobody should ever be offended by it. I don't even know why you censored it. :):D;D That's fucking hilarious.

"OK, boomer" is very much like cracker in that sense. If it hurts to be called it then you must be very weak. I guess the real snowflakes are finally standing up. ;D

raynebc

There are some weak minded people on the forum, I didn't want to risk anger by censoring one slur and not another. Nobody here said "boomer" was as offensive as n*gger, but that doesn't disprove that it is being used as an insult.

bamccaig

What's insulting is asserting that climate change is a hoax, that cutting critical services could ever reduce the deficit, or that guns save more lives than they take.

Being a baby boomer isn't insulting (other than maybe being old, if you're sensitive about that, but there's nothing wrong with being old either). "Boomer" is used to discard stupid baseless arguments.

There are much more effective ways to be insulting if that was their goal. They're being tactful instead in dealing with cockroaches. I don't think there's any way to be MORE tactful than that given the situation.

raynebc

What's insulting is when politicians and activists pretend to be fighting climate change when that is actually just an excuse for them to implement big government policies. Climate change is not a crisis to be hysterical over, but it is a reality that people will have to adapt to gradually over time. The collective governments of the world don't have the will or concern to immediately cease all carbon fuel use, and even if they were, prominent greenies will say we can't use nuclear energy either because it's not as pure in their eyes as vastly less efficient and more land-consuming solar and wind technologies (whose use also has negative environmental impacts).

Erin Maus

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In a year there's gonna be tens of thousands of plays with a total playtime exceeding hundred of thousands of hours. 8-)

bamccaig

I know that the Green Party of Canada used to support nuclear. It is cleaner than coal, but it's still not clean and in reality we don't know if the stored nuclear waste will ever bite us in the ass before we're able to figure out a more permanent solution. There may never be a better solution: launching it into space comes with the risk of crashing it instead. Arguing that nuclear has no practical downsides is like arguing that climate change isn't real. The science doesn't back you up. Renewable sources of energy are the future. They have the potential to meet our needs forever with limited impact to the environment. We should be investing the billions of dollars into those instead.

It appears there is actually news about nuclear. The provincial governments of Saskatchewan, Ontario, and New Brunswick want to invest billions of dollars into nuclear reactor technology that won't be ready for another 10 years, and will ultimately produce extremely dangerous waste that is difficult to contain. The Greens argue that investing that same money into renewable energies would have a faster and more effective benefit for combating climate change. I would tend to agree with them. There's a reason the planet isn't already full of nuclear reactors. Theory and practice are two different things. In practice accidents happen more often than is comfortable.

raynebc

If CO2 output was really as big a concern as so many people claim, they would be willing to accept that nuclear waste will need to be handled within the next couple centuries as a trade off for humanity surviving that long. I've heard that newer nuclear technologies are potentially able to further deplete nuclear waste, so it may get to the point where the radioactivity can be fully eradicated and then that waste is not a hazard anymore. I don't agree that the current favorite renewable energy technologies are good enough yet to be our main energy sources. I don't even think a decade or two will be enough for them to develop. They will probably get there some day, but as the term "energy of the future" implies, they are not the energy of today because they're not able to meet the world's energy needs.

Neil Roy

I had a black man tell me the other day that he is a "nigger", and he said he is not offended by the term. Technically, it was not an insult, but rather "nigger" referred to people that came from Nigeria, which were black people. When you really look at it, "cracker" refers to my skin colour (crackers are white) where as "nigger" refers to where one came from (which would be inaccurate if the black person was born in Canada or USA). I actually told the black man that he was not a "nigger", but was an American or Canadian, depending on his place of birth, period.

"okay boomer" is meant as an insult. It is used as a derogatory word referring to someone who is 55 years old or more (that is technically a "boomer").

In the end, any of these terms are all equally as insulting if you use them as a derogatory term. I prefer to refer to people as human beings and use their real name, not some label. I don't assume someone with a dark skin is from Nigeria, so I do not call them a "nigger", nor do I like to even refer to anyone by their skin colour to be honest; the whole idea of someone being different due to race or colour is absolute nonsense and honestly gets me quite angry most of the time. I prefer to go with what Martin Luther King Jr said when he said that everyone should be judged by the quality of their character, not the colour of their skin.

In the case of "boomer", not by their age. An insult is an insult, they are all equally as bad.

-------

As for CO2, more CO2 = a greener planet. Period.

2019 has been a year that has set record COLD temps. Australia just had a snowfall at the start of their summer for crying out loud. Japan did as well! Warming?! Sorry, not interested in the rants from global warming alarmists.

Oh, and Climate Change documentary filmmakers just got stuck in arctic ice... AGAIN! ;D!!! ;D 8-)

http://electroverse.net/thick-arctic-ice-halts-yet-another-ship-of-climate-change-documentary-filmmakers/

Erin Maus

If I remember, tomorrow I'll cite articles from credible scholarly, credible, and peer-reviewed articles that mention climate change results in greater extremes (i.e., snow during summer), but none of you will be able to access them because you don't have access to these sources. Too bad, go back to school. You need it.

...

Also since my my post got Last Post'd (tm) I'm gonna use this space to replicate it:

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In a year there's gonna be tens of thousands of plays with a total playtime exceeding hundred of thousands of hours. 8-)

Neil Roy

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;D 8-)

raynebc

I don't to go to a liberal school to be exposed to environmental propaganda, we get plenty of that in the MSM. When green technology is good enough and cheap enough to actually be competitive with traditional energy sources, that's when the world will make the switch.

Polybios
NiteHackr said:

but rather "nigger" referred to people that came from Nigeria, which were black people

I'd rather say that the meaning of Latin "niger" - "black", and its descendants (e.g. "negro"-/a in Spanish) might have played a role here...

Erin Maus

Here's a lesson on spin. Oftentimes it's pretty subtle.

"Poll: Biden leads Democratic field, Warren drops to third place"

versus

"Poll: Biden leads Democratic field, Sanders rises to second place"

Both mean the exact thing. The first one completely ignores Sanders. Who counts 1, 3, 2? Editors do if it'll help them with their bias!

Which one was the one used by The Hill? The first, of course. And Sanders isn't mentioned until the second paragraph.

Sanders (or Warren I suppose) would be able to beat Trump, Biden stands no chance, it's unfortunate the Democrats didn't learn from their historic loss (i.e., winning popular vote but losing EC again).

Edgar Reynaldo

Sadly, most Democrats are just as stupid as the Republicans. They'll vote for Biden because he was VP, despite not having any platform to stand on, and no qualifications besides being VP, taking money from billionaires. He won't tax the rich, they're his friends. He's of the part of the democratic party that is just as corrupt as the republicans are.

Warren Gabbard 2020

raynebc

It's amazing how some people think the Democrats and Republicans have a bad history, but Socialists are A-OK.

Erin Maus

If you think any mainstream Democrat is a socialist you're just stupid. I mean seriously, every time this argument goes where none of you can even define socialism even though it's like Politics 100.

Sanders may identify as a socialist personally, but his public policies are not socialist, they're band-aids to capitalism. Show me his policy that says workers should own the means of production.

Edgar Reynaldo

raynebc thinks socialism is taxing the poor rich people's hard earned money and giving it to 'entitlement' programs

raynebc

The redistribution of wealth for the sake of "fairness", nationalization of something as big as health care and the equalization of outcomes are major goals of Socialism. They're also bullet points on the DNC wishlist. When somebody argues that a big-government/Socialism chimera isn't Socialism, I'm not buying it.

Erin Maus

I don't know man, I read Das Kapital and no where did Karl Marx mention Obamacare.

bamccaig

You hate socialism not because of its ideas, but because you were filled with anti-USSR propaganda your whole life. Essentially the elite that control every aspect of your life told you what to think. Told you that the way it is is best for you. And that's good enough for you? Aren't they the ones with the most to gain keeping things their way, and the most to lose if things change? If that's not bias I don't know what is.

Socialism is not the USSR. It's not China. It's not 1940s Germany. It's not the "enemy".

Socialism is simply a system designed to keep things fair. To empower the people instead of the ruling class. Everything your school / media / government taught you about it was dictated by the ruling class. Freedom is the lie. We're just pawns to provide for the ruling class, and held down so we can't rise up. Wake up!

raynebc

I don't agree with your propaganda, Bam. You'll just have to get it through your thick head that not everybody believes it's the job of the government or some other entity to steal from one person to coddle another.

In related news, Bernie recently announced that he wants to nationalize the Internet. If that loonbag ever becomes president he'll trash the country if Congress is dumb enough to go along with his crazy policy ideas.

Edgar Reynaldo

raynebc, you are the biggest hypocrite around.

You think it's okay for rich people to steal from the poor via monopolies, extortion, price-gouging - anti-union laws, etc...

...but it's not ok for the poor to take the money THEY EARNED back from the rich.

What ever. Wipe the orange makeup off your face. Wake up.

jmasterx

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This thread so far....>:(

jmasterx

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This thread so far....>:(

jmasterx

A.cc, come for the political/socioeconomic/religious debates.
Stay for Matt's horrible concurrency code.

Edgar Reynaldo

while (!locked) {Sleep(1);}

Neil Roy

Fight, I hate peace!

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Edgar Reynaldo

Hahahaaa, you got me Neil. :D xD

EDIT
This is my kind of girl :
{"name":"Konachan.com%20-%20196167%20ass%20blue_eyes%20bodysuit%20breasts%20cleavage%20compile_heart%20hyperdimension_neptunia%20long_hair%20neptune%20purple_hair%20purple_heart%20skintight%20tsunako%20twintails.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/3\/c3332d478c02ed649ae435fd07e44934.jpg","w":3843,"h":2178,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/3\/c3332d478c02ed649ae435fd07e44934"}Konachan.com%20-%20196167%20ass%20blue_eyes%20bodysuit%20breasts%20cleavage%20compile_heart%20hyperdimension_neptunia%20long_hair%20neptune%20purple_hair%20purple_heart%20skintight%20tsunako%20twintails.jpg

jmasterx

Nevermind, Matt's code is just broken >:(

Edgar Reynaldo

Hey, you can still post! Good enough for me ;)

Chris Katko

I submited this post three days ago. 8-)

Erin Maus

How did you know it would take three days to post :o

Chris Katko

The edit only took two days.

Edgar Reynaldo

I can see that there are no post revisions, therefore no edits. :/:/:/

MiquelFire

I think it's a low key countedown to Christmas Eve?

Neil Roy

;D
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Edgar Reynaldo

lmao

If allegro.cc had a like button for posts, I would be pressing it right now. ;)

xD

Doctor Cop

I think now we need another way to continue this thread.

This thread must go on!

I am creating a discord server, I will name it "Thread locks too soon".

P.S: Click this link to join the discord server.

RmBeer2

BUMP!!!!

This image is my mind:
{"name":"zGpe.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/3\/a\/3a02cdb4af6895f3bc1058f267d3a0d0.jpg","w":900,"h":1035,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/3\/a\/3a02cdb4af6895f3bc1058f267d3a0d0"}zGpe.jpg

Eric Johnson

Merry Christmas, guys.

Edgar Reynaldo

Merry Christmas Allegators!!!!

Eric Johnson

Here's your gift! :)

{"name":"bigstock-Shovel-And-Coal-In-The-Backgro-104167850.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/8\/785f713c6f5a2ed7adb05ae8f0e6cb0c.jpg","w":1600,"h":1067,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/8\/785f713c6f5a2ed7adb05ae8f0e6cb0c"}bigstock-Shovel-And-Coal-In-The-Backgro-104167850.jpg

MiquelFire

Merry Christmas!

Edgar Reynaldo

Thanks Blob! I made these out of your coal!
{"name":"Extraction-of-Diamonds.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/2\/a\/2acbf385f058477a32d48a3360a57139.jpg","w":1667,"h":988,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/2\/a\/2acbf385f058477a32d48a3360a57139"}Extraction-of-Diamonds.jpg

GullRaDriel

Happy holidays, merry Christmas, I hope everyone will have it's share of happiness :-)

Erin Maus

OK I think these stairs came out amazingly well.

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Neil Roy

8-)
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Chris Katko

Anyone notice the thread locks too soon?

Edgar Reynaldo

Oh the irony if that were the last post in this thread.

Neil's just trying to get us to talk about adultery now. ;/

Bruce Perry

My BlackBerry Priv broke today (it won't charge and therefore won't operate). I'm waiting for an FxTec Pro1 but they're only producing them slowly. It's a strange experience being smartphoneless. Hello again, allegro.cc :)

Also, we have a daughter <3

Neil Roy

Neil's just trying to get us to talk about adultery now. ;/

"But honey, I only fucked her, I made love to you!" 8-)

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MiquelFire

I find it funny that only UPS (and sometimes Amazon) will ring my doorbell.

LennyLen

Yay for holidays. I just got my payslip for the last week: 20 hours at time and a half with an extra 20 hours paid time off credit to me. Next week will be the same.

Neil Roy

Amazon is really fast where I am. I always do normal shipping and often have gotten things within 3 days. One time I got something I ordered the next day and I was in shock. They must have a warehouse near me. I have really enjoyed Amazon's return policy as well.

Congrats Lennylen!

Erin Maus

I don't get overtime I'm always out of work by 4:30 pm and I don't work weekends so in my opinion it's worth it .-.

I added a two-story building:

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LennyLen

I don't get overtime I'm always out of work by 4:30 pm and I don't work weekends so in my opinion it's worth it .-.

I don't get overtime either. I actually work on a 8-day cycle where I work four ten-hour days (2pm-12am), then have four days off, so some weeks I work weekends, and some I don't. But the pay is the same no matter what day I work.

Last week, I worked Christmas Day and Boxing Day, which are statuary holidays in New Zealand, and if you work them, you get paid time in a half, plus you get given a paid day off in lieu, which can be taken at any time. New Year's Day and the day after are also statuary holidays, and I work both of those next week as well.

relpatseht

I'm waiting for an FxTec Pro1 but they're only producing them slowly.

I'm waiting for the same phone. Been waiting for it for over two years since it was just a planned Moto z add-on. Having a keyboard again will be great, but now I'll miss the projector add-on...

LennyLen

Happy 2020 everyone.

MiquelFire

Still 12 hours here until 2020.

Neil Roy

Kewl little 4min video showing some video clips of original footage Jordan Mechner of the game filmed for use in creating the game...

video

I also highly recommend getting the book "The Making of the Prince of Persia" by Jordan Mechner who created the game. It was more of a daily journal he kept at the time which was so interesting to me, I couldn't put the book down.

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LennyLen

Here's a photo I took of the Sun late this afternoon:

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At first glance it just looks like a regular overcast day, except there isn't a single cloud in the sky. The haze is from Australian forest fires more than 2000km away.

Eric Johnson

A happy new year to each of you. :)

So I recently got back into WebGL. I didn't do much with it last time, but this time I've been having a lot of fun just experimenting. This morning I wrote a shader program that creates a "wobble" effect on textures. Here, enjoy this somewhat undulating potato. :P

Edit:
Here's my avatar wobbling instead. :o
612261

@LennyLen: That's a pretty cool picture. I bet it looked better in-person. It's too bad that most cameras take crap pictures of the sun and moon. :(

Edgar Reynaldo

Dammit Jim, I wanted to see a wobbly potato!!! >:(

EDIT
BLOB, share your shader with me. :)

back OT;
In other news Translucent Allegro Windows thread bit the dust when I wasn't looking. >:(

nvm, just wasn't showing up on recent threads... ??? curious has matthew done something?

Eric Johnson

Here's the potato:

d12c06ae8c09733a8633b1b4438a4b89.gif

The aspect ratio is wrong. View the image directly to see it in all its glory.

Here's my fragment shader:

#SelectExpand
1precision mediump float; 2 3varying vec2 v_texture_coordinates; 4 5uniform sampler2D u_texture; 6 7uniform float u_time; 8 9void main(void) { 10 11 vec2 tex_coord = v_texture_coordinates.xy; 12 13 tex_coord.x += sin(u_time * 3.0 + cos(tex_coord.y * 10.0) * 1.0) / 30.0; 14 tex_coord.y += cos(u_time * 3.0 + sin(tex_coord.x * 10.0) * 1.0) / 30.0; 15 16 gl_FragColor = texture2D(u_texture, tex_coord.xy); 17}

Super simple. It just offsets the texture coordinates over time to create waves or wobbles. u_time is just the time in seconds since the program was started (think al_get_time()).

Keep in mind: WebGL 1 is essentially OpenGL ES 2.0. So all of the shaders will be similar to what you'd expect to find in shaders written for Open GL ES 2.0.

Gideon Weems

The potato is mesmerizing. And Prince of Persia had better music than I originally gave credit (despite the monotony).

Neil Roy

Messed around with some 3D programming again, just so I have something to show for 2020. ;D. Trying to get back some of my enthusiasm for programming, but it isn't as strong as it used to be.

Done up a short clip of me flying over some lunar terrain with some spacey music added to break the bordum. ;)

Note the compile time (after the @ at the top), that was not planned.

video

Eric Johnson

That's a pretty cool video, Neil! The music really made it; very eerie. How do you find 3D programming? Is it difficult? I'm not sure I'll ever get into 3D; the mathematical complexities it adds just sounds too much for me to have any easy fun with it. Also, what are your hardware specs?

Edgar Reynaldo

Food for thought. If Matthew gets an email for every post in allegro.cc comments, he now has over 4000 messages in his inbox. :O

jmasterx

You think he checks his email jajjajajajajajajajah

>:(>:(>:(>:(>:(

DeepFake Leverton laughs at you.

Chris Katko

I've been doing lots of research into task-based parallel game architectures. I need my dedicated server to handle 10000's or 100000's of objects so parallel is a requirement.

Edgar Reynaldo

:'( jmasterx is mocking me :'(

I never said I thought he actually checked it. :(

jmasterx
jmasterx said:

DeepFake Leverton laughs at you.

Not jmasterx, DeepFake Leverton did >:(

Edgar Reynaldo

We all know the real DeepFake Leverton is piccolo. And just for that, I'm rescinding your ticket for his space ship. Have fun on Earth for the Apocalypse! We is a gonna fly on out of here!

Eric Johnson

We is a gonna fly on out of here!

I don't know if that's a reference to anything or not, but I read that in Mario's voice.

Edgar Reynaldo

Nothin to see here;

COUGH The rapture is bullshit COUGH

move along...

LennyLen

For all of you going through winter right now, here's where I spent the day yesterday:

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Neil Roy

How do you find 3D programming? Is it difficult?

It can be. It took me a while to wrap my head around detecting collisions with the terrain itself. I found some good tutorials on terrain generation and I think this is where I got the ideas for detecting terrain collision...

http://keithditch.powweb.com/Games/html/terrain.html

The final solution for detecting collision was easier than I imagined. My main annoyance with it is the constantly changing ways of doing it. It took me a while to finally get the hang of the fixed pipeline way of doing things in OpenGL, then that changed a little, and I learned some newer, better ways, then that changed to shaders which is totally different. Better for sure, but really different, so I went back to learning THAT, by the time I finally understood it and wrapped my brain around it I was sick of learning it and programming it!

That particular program doesn't use shaders, I MAY convert it to use them, or I may ditch 3D and just do 2D.

As for my hardware, I just built a new system back in June of last year. It's not top of the line or anything, but affordable and plenty fast for me. I have an AMD Ryzen 5-2600 (6 core/ 12 thread) CPU, EVGA GTX 1050TI video which was really nice compared to my old GTX650. I want to maybe upgrade to an RTX2060 Super in the future. And I have 16G of RAM. That 3D program in that little video wasn't optimized at all. Optimizing it will need much more math to be done which I am debating if I want to do that.

Chris Katko
Eric Johnson

I've tried posting this twice now, and each time it crashes... Let's see if it'll work if I remove the proper quotes...

@Neil:

"My main annoyance with it is the constantly changing ways of doing it. It took me a while to finally get the hang of the fixed pipeline way of doing things in OpenGL, then that changed a little, and I learned some newer, better ways, then that changed to shaders which is totally different. Better for sure, but really different, so I went back to learning THAT, by the time I finally understood it and wrapped my brain around it I was sick of learning it and programming it!"

Programmable shaders were first formally introduced to OpenGL in like 2004, so it really hasn't changed much since then. There's no reason not to use them these days. They're super easy; it's just setting up state that is a bit tiresome (but even that's trivial after a while).

"That particular program doesn't use shaders, I MAY convert it to use them, or I may ditch 3D and just do 2D."

So it's just using the old fixed pipeline? And I'd be interested to see what you cook up in 2D.

"As for my hardware, I just built a new system back in June of last year. It's not top of the line or anything, but affordable and plenty fast for me. I have an AMD Ryzen 5-2600 (6 core/ 12 thread) CPU, EVGA GTX 1050TI video which was really nice compared to my old GTX650"

Very cool! :D Good on you for finally upgrading. :P

@Chris: Thanks for sharing! I played VVVVVV for the first time just last month. It was fun! The source code just goes to show you that you don't need to abide by any notion of code purity to make a fun piece of software (although keeping things organized sure does help).

Also, I missed it, but my Allegro-versary was on the 10th; I've been here for 7 years. :o

Edgar Reynaldo

I've tried posting this twice now, and each time it crashes... Let's see if it'll work if I remove the proper quotes...

@Neil:

"My main annoyance with it is the constantly changing ways of doing it. It took me a while to finally get the hang of the fixed pipeline way of doing things in OpenGL, then that changed a little, and I learned some newer, better ways, then that changed to shaders which is totally different. Better for sure, but really different, so I went back to learning THAT, by the time I finally understood it and wrapped my brain around it I was sick of learning it and programming it!"

Programmable shaders were first formally introduced to OpenGL in like 2004, so it really hasn't changed much since then. There's no reason not to use them these days. They're super easy; it's just setting up state that is a bit tiresome (but even that's trivial after a while).

"That particular program doesn't use shaders, I MAY convert it to use them, or I may ditch 3D and just do 2D."

So it's just using the old fixed pipeline? And I'd be interested to see what you cook up in 2D.

"As for my hardware, I just built a new system back in June of last year. It's not top of the line or anything, but affordable and plenty fast for me. I have an AMD Ryzen 5-2600 (6 core/ 12 thread) CPU, EVGA GTX 1050TI video which was really nice compared to my old GTX650"

Very cool! :D Good on you for finally upgrading. :P

@Chris: Thanks for sharing! I played VVVVVV for the first time just last month. It was fun! The source code just goes to show you that you don't need to abide by any notion of code purity to make a fun piece of software (although keeping things organized sure does help).

Also, I missed it, but my Allegro-versary was on the 10th; I've been here for 7 years. :o

Happy Anniversary Newb!

(This is how you quote in this thread...w/o crashing the site)
<quote name="Eric Johnson" src="https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/615770/1044559#target" >
...
</quote>

MiquelFire

Since you talked about, I looked at my profile and I been here 17 years as of the 8th.

Eric Johnson

Dang dude, you're old! Time to update the ol' avatar. Try this on for size. ;D

{"name":"17711_oldman.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/d\/5\/d5a19ca23d0b68919f57c90f49a5a8d5.jpg","w":480,"h":480,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/d\/5\/d5a19ca23d0b68919f57c90f49a5a8d5"}17711_oldman.jpg

Chris Katko

>looks left at join date
I used to be young. Now I'm old.

Erin Maus

Bambams and I have been here almost exactly the same amount of time. We're one member number apart. That's why we're destined to be mortal enemies.

...

How come no ones plays my game. >:(

Edgar Reynaldo

Add your game to the list of all the Krampus games I haven't played. Then add that to the fact that I'm still programming mine. And on top of that, I have a chess server I need to program, and my gui library, and my portfolio, etc...

I just don't have time to play games anymore. :(

l j

What's a game?

Darío B.

Is this thread basically Discord for old people now? 8-)

MiquelFire

I'm willing to believe that.

Edgar Reynaldo

Are you really Darío B.? Or are you Dario ff?

Darío B.

Are you really Darío B.? Or are you Dario ff?

Both. I lost access to my old account so this is the best I could manage. :P

Edgar Reynaldo

I knew it. I can smell old timers lurking in the shadows.

8-)

Darío B.

Any of you worked on anything cool lately? :-*

Chris Katko

I've been look into task-based architectures for parallel game engines.

I still love the D language.

And... it's been eight years of going to doctors constantly and still not having a diagnosis. :/ I'm at the point currently where I get sick after eating literally anything.

Edgar Reynaldo

Katko! I knew you had health problems, but I didn't know you couldn't eat!

Arthur Kalliokoski

I can smell old timers lurking in the shadows.

Hey! I take a shower every month, whether I need it or not! >:(

bamccaig

Yay, I can login again. Geez. This is getting ridiculous. Matthew, this site needs more active members to maintain it. It is getting ridiculous.

In addition to buying a house, my wife and I just got a puppy. I do not recommend either.

The house is falling apart more and more every day. We notice more and more blemishes each day that we didn't notice when we did our initial walk-throughs and decision making or even after living in it for 2 months.

The puppy is a goddamn nightmare. Doesn't let you sleep. Regularly urinates indoors, despite efforts to control water intake and schedule routine visits outside. He is getting more and more bold with each day. It's a "Golden Rottie" AKA a Golden Retriever mixed with a Rottweiler. Though its colours are more close to a Golden right now, it is reminding me more and more of a Rottweiler instead. Anyway, it's a lot of goddamn work and stress, and I don't recommend it. Seriously. If kids are worse than this I don't know how every father ever didn't shoot themselves in the face. >:(

I also changed jobs. I don't want to jinx it, but so far so good. >:(

relpatseht
bamccaig said:

Regularly urinates indoors, despite efforts to control water intake and schedule routine visits outside. He is getting more and more bold with each day.

For puppies, until they're about 6 months old, keep them in a kennel at all times while unsupervised, with scheduled, specific times being taken outside. Whenever you take them out of the kennel, the first thing you do must always be to take them outside as well. After they're 6 months old and have been doing this for 2 months, you can relax it a bit. Once they've been on this schedule for 4 months, even the dumbest dog I've ever had has been completely house trained, and no longer requires the kennel at all.

Chris Katko

Puppies can't hold their bladder any better than toddlers can. Make sure you have reasonable expectations.

Only use positive reinforcement with the exception of obvious stuff like growling, biting, stealing food. Instead of scolding a dog when it pees, give it praise when it goes outside.

Darío B.
bamccaig said:

Yay, I can login again.

Cool. Maybe you'll finally get rid of the Christmas hat I gave you. :D

Eric Johnson

Quick question: why are frame-buffer textures upside-down in OpenGL? I'm working with WebGL 2, and when I draw a texture to a quad on the screen it draws perfectly fine. However, once I draw that same texture to a frame-buffer and then draw the frame-buffer's texture to the screen, it comes out upside-down. Is this by design? If so, why? I know I can apply a simple scale and translation to fix it, but why is it like this by default?

Maybe I can just edit the texture coordinates such that they'll always draw upside-down, with or without a frame-buffer. Then at least it'll be consistent. Then I could just flip it with some sweet, sweet matrix math.

Edgar Reynaldo

Then I could just flip it with some sweet, sweet matrix math.

Sigged. :D xD

Chris Katko

Quick question: why are frame-buffer textures upside-down in OpenGL?

Because X,Y,Z arbitrary and by convention, so different people choose different conventions.

OpenGL is uses right-handed.

DirectX is uses left-handed.

That's for Z.

Likewise, because OpenGL was a CAD graphics framework, they had "up" be up. Whereas oldschool gamer bros think of it in terms of rasterscanning from top-left to bottom right.

bamccaig
Darío B. said:

Cool. Maybe you'll finally get rid of the Christmas hat I gave you. :D

I don't remember who gave me this Christmas hat, but I remember that it was eternal.

Edgar Reynaldo
AK said:

Hey! I take a shower every month, whether I need it or not! >:(

yeah, dude, that's what you said last month....

Neil Roy

I knew it. I can smell old timers lurking in the shadows.

Yeah, I am now I guess. Though I still don't see 55 as old. I was just looking at what I looked like when I first joined here as opposed to what I look like now (or as of December 2019 anyhow)...

Me, taken March 22, 2002 (I joined these forums in April, though I was on the email list longer than that, if anyone remembers those)...
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Me, taken December 13, 2019...
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This is what happens between 37 and 55! Yeesh...

RmBeer2

A beautiful image of a future that i hope.

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Chris Katko

Is that from the subreddit where dragons bang cars?

Edgar Reynaldo
Neil Roy said:

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Nice Santa Beard!!!!!111111 OMG!

Eric Johnson

Guys, I need a new keyboard. What do you suggest?

I've been rocking a simple Logitech K120 for about four years now, and I've nearly beaten it to death. Most of the keys on the left-side of the board are difficult to press now (especially CTRL). I've removed the caps to clean them a few times, but they're pretty worn-out and rigid underneath. I may just replace it with another K120, but I'm curious to know what others are using.

Chris Katko

I suggest a keyboard with keys on it.

There are all these people who are all about "gamer" keyboards, and mechanical keyboards. As if going CLACK CLACK CLACK and waking up your wife at night every time you try to type is a good thing. I'd rather get laid than have a mechanical keyboard.

And don't get me started on the LIT keyboards. Don't get me wrong, I "get it" what it's like to be a 14-year old kid and think "computer lighting" is somehow cool. But if it's not a laptop (and hence non-standard layout) why the heck would I ever need to LOOK at a keyboard? The entire purpose of a keyboard is to "get out of your way" not become the FOCUS. If I'm watching a movie in my office the last thing I want is a freakin' flashing blue light bar distracting me from the actual quality color depth of my screen. Anyone with a large, glossy screen knows how easy it is for annoying reflections to show up.

I game 30+ hours a week some weeks. You know what I use? An old Dell keyboard stolen from a dead work machine with a broken hinge so it has to be propped up with a plastic case of LEDs under it.

There ARE actual things to consider. Make sure it has the standard keyboard layout, make sure it has normal depth to the keys (none of that chiclet keyboard crap) for real tactile feedback. Wireless keyboards work fine and last for months or longer on 2 AA batteries.

I typically just buy a logitech or similar brand keyboard.

As for mice? There ARE definitely differences. But I bought a "pro" "gamer" mouse with adjustible DPI and removable weights. It was annoying as hell. Why would I want my mouse to be HEAVIER? Nowadays I play on a $16 chinese off-brand "Jellycomb"-brand USB mouse that's normal shaped instead of that big, bulky hand forming type that everyone seems to like. The DPI buttons are more annoying than useful. But I like being able to get a high DPI mouse, "dial it in" and leave it. In 4K, mouse precision becomes a real, new, issue because if the sensor isn't good enough, you either have "coarse" movement (to move the whole screen area) but can't precisely click anything, or you have "fine" movement and have to keep picking up the mouse and moving it over and over. So after getting a 4K screen, I realize now that a high DPI mouse is a requirement for it.

However, I will definitely say that buying "wireless keyboard + mouse" combos, some of those mice REALLY suck. Either they're not comfortable, or they have HORRIFIC repeatability in their DPI/measurements which makes gaming either sluggish or random. You have no idea how terrible it can be until you get one of those mice. When the same movement of your hand doesn't translate to a predictable mouse movement--it'll drive you crazy. And that was a brand name Logitech too.

Top-tier keyboards are like those "top-tier" $500 motherboards that have plastic covering all their components because... you know... plastic makes it... faster or something. It's just people who want to spend extra money on something because they think it makes them better. Bragging rights.

Check out this mobo. I'm sure it "plugs your videocard and RAM in" way better than a $50 motherboard.

https://www.newegg.com/gigabyte-x570-aorus-xtreme/p/N82E16813145158?item=N82E16813145158&source=region&nm_mc=knc-googleadwords-pc&cm_mmc=knc-googleadwords-pc-_-pla-_-motherboards+-+amd-_-N82E16813145158&gclid=CjwKCAiAjrXxBRAPEiwAiM3DQvNcbzIi4Qfm9y-xRsp9AIgWb0koNk0i4xMjOCf9U9vgjiylJ1HotRoCfEwQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds

(They do have more features than a cheapo motherboard. But 99% of the same functionality comes with the bargin motherboard. That last 1% costs you... $600.)

They literally brag that this motherboard can "fast charge cellphones."

Quote:

USB TurboCharger for Mobile Device Fast Charge Support

WOWIE! Just like my $15 Samsung wall charger. And that doesn't take up one of my computer's USB slots.

Eric Johnson

I don't care for lights on any of my hardware. That stuff looks gaudy and gross to me. I prefer minimal designs. Also, a wired keyboard is just fine by me (that's what I've been using for the past four years without issue). I'd prefer something with a shallower actuation depth though, and I don't care to change my mouse at this time (still using some old wired Logitech mouse just fine). Sometimes I press a key but don't hit it hard enough to register the input, which trips me up. So a keyboard with shallower keys or just a shallower depth before it registers would be nice.

Neil Roy

I always bought cheaper keyboards, but I was given a Razor keyboard and mouse a while back, the type with the programmable coloured lights and I love it. Not just for the lighting, which is kewl, but because the keyboard itself seems to be better quality and will last me longer than the ones I have purchased in the past. Definitely worth paying more for and when this goes, I will probably pay more for one in the future.

I like my keyboard and mouse wired as well. Like Eric, I could do without the lights, the wrong light pattern can make it harder to read my keys, so I stick to something that looks okay, not too fancy and keeps my keys visible. These days I can type without really looking at the keys anymore, so it's less of an issue.

It's the only "Razor" I will use. ;)

Edgar Reynaldo

I have a back-lit red LED keyboard on my laptop, and I love it. Can't personally do without the backlighting at night anymore.

Chris Katko

What are these strange idents on my keyboard?!? :o I can feel them in the dark!

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Eric Johnson

Those are the keyboard's nipples.

bamccaig

Guys, I need a new keyboard. What do you suggest?

I've been rocking a simple Logitech K120 for about four years now, and I've nearly beaten it to death. Most of the keys on the left-side of the board are difficult to press now (especially CTRL). I've removed the caps to clean them a few times, but they're pretty worn-out and rigid underneath. I may just replace it with another K120, but I'm curious to know what others are using.

My preference is a mechanical keyboard. Research mechanical key switches, decide which mechanism is most attractive, and see if you can find a keyboard in your budget that has them. I personally love them. The quality feels way better, and for people that spend most of their lives on their keyboard I think that it's worthwhile to spend a few pennies more to have something special.

DAS KEYBOARD makes a quality keyboard. They're not cheap, but they're nice. Logitech has some reasonable keyboards too, either mechanical or gaming (or maybe both). For the most part "gaming" keyboards are just superficially flashy. I never made use of any of the extra programmable keys on mine. That said, I did enjoy just having a large keyboard, and backlit keys have their uses (see below).

You can also go the old school route and try to track down an old IBM keyboard with mechanical switches. I've heard some people that prefer those. I think that's largely nostalgia though and you may not be quite old enough to care. I think they're cool, but I don't think I cared for their price point compared with something modern and still mechanical. There are plenty of options though... You do get what you pay for in terms of quality, though a dirt cheap keyboard is still adequate and can last a lifetime... If money is tight there's nothing wrong with buying a $20 wired keyboard with your preferred layout. It'll get the job done just fine. It just may not inspire as much joy/pride/confidence as a pricier and higher quality keyboard might.

There are all these people who are all about "gamer" keyboards, and mechanical keyboards. As if going CLACK CLACK CLACK and waking up your wife at night every time you try to type is a good thing. I'd rather get laid than have a mechanical keyboard.

There are mechanical key switches that are nearly silent. They don't have to be loud. It's less about the noise and more about the feel, though if you're in a situation where being loud is tolerable then it's cool to hear the clickety-clackety of a noisy mechanical keyboard in the hands of somebody with a rapid rate of speed.

I have a DAS KEYBOARD 4 ULTIMATE with blue cherry MX switches. It's a noisy version. I've had it for years. Since before I met my now wife. It may have bothered her slightly in the first ~month of her moving in in our tiny studio apartment, but it didn't seem to be a big deal. Now that we have a decent sized house I'm not even sure if she can hear me typing in this room with the door closed (though if anybody can she could because he has super-senses it seems..).

And don't get me started on the LIT keyboards. Don't get me wrong, I "get it" what it's like to be a 14-year old kid and think "computer lighting" is somehow cool. But if it's not a laptop (and hence non-standard layout) why the heck would I ever need to LOOK at a keyboard? The entire purpose of a keyboard is to "get out of your way" not become the FOCUS. If I'm watching a movie in my office the last thing I want is a freakin' flashing blue light bar distracting me from the actual quality color depth of my screen.

My current keyboard is unlit and the keys aren't even labelled. I can touch-type reasonably fast without any issues. This is my career, and I'm good at it. That said, prior to this keyboard I did have backlit keys and I have to say you're missing the point a little bit. A good keyboard should allow you to choose the colour of the keys, and many are programmable so that different sections/keys can be different colours, or perhaps that the colour can change automatically depending on what applications you're running or what time of day. I would suggest red to be a good colour to use. It's less disruptive to sleepy eyes. Mine used to be red IIRC. And I loved it. Where it really comes in handy is when you're in the dark, obviously, and you're either heavily intoxicated or one of your hands is "occupied" AKA masturbating. For that purpose having backlit keys is a godsend. I would generally agree that it's a useless feature for everyday use though.

Anyone with a large, glossy screen knows how easy it is for annoying reflections to show up.

Instead of criticizing the keyboard perhaps you should criticize the screen. :P

I game 30+ hours a week some weeks. You know what I use? An old Dell keyboard stolen from a dead work machine with a broken hinge so it has to be propped up with a plastic case of LEDs under it.

My previous employer was too cheap for a keyboard so I brought in my old backlit keyboard (a Logitech G110). One of the legs broke off of it so for the past ~2 - 3 years I had been propping it up with a plastic cover/shield for either a USB or HDMI connector. :P Whatever works. My current keyboard at work is garbage, but that G110 is badly in need of sanitation. I think this new company will replace this junk keyboard with a good one, but I'm holding out to make myself useful and also holding out to hopefully convince them to go "big" (like a DAS KEYBOARD) instead of rushing it and getting something sourced locally.

There ARE actual things to consider. Make sure it has the standard keyboard layout, make sure it has normal depth to the keys (none of that chiclet keyboard crap) for real tactile feedback. Wireless keyboards work fine and last for months or longer on 2 AA batteries.

I agree on the standard US keyboard layout, at least if your only human language is English. Keystroke depth is more of a matter of preference I think. I personally prefer a longer depth. This puts me more in control. And sure it can require a bit more effort, but it doesn't really become a problem until you're exhausted. Let's be real here, many of us don't get enough exercise as it is. I don't think we need to be lazy with our fingers too. I say no to wireless peripherals though. There's just no valid point. For keyboards, sure, the battery will last a while, but if the batteries die in the middle of a competitive match of Counter-Strike you're going to put it through a fucking wall trying to find new batteries. I know because I've nearly been there. Wireless mice are an even worse idea, at least for desktops or laptops that are normally stationary, because their batteries last a much shorter period of time, and it's even more frustrating when the mouse starts to glitch because of a low battery. Neither cable is normally prohibitive. Just get wired peripherals and save yourself the hassle (and environmental impact) of batteries.

I typically just buy a logitech or similar brand keyboard.

Logitech is a solid brand to go with. They have something for all price points. I don't know of any company that makes better mice, at least at a reasonable price, personally. That said, they seemingly have abandoned quality mice for something that needs to be replaced more often. I am not at all impressed with any current mice models available. My preference is to try to find a G9 or G9X used, but they're expensive as fuck and their lifetime is questionable at this point... I don't know why Logitech stopped making quality mice.

That said, if you want a really good keyboard I do suggest considering something more premium than logitech. There are several solid "gaming" or mechanical keyboards available from Logitech that are awesome, and not too expensive either. They're worth it. They're good quality. Though if you use a keyboard all day every day then I suggest you treat yourself to something fancy. If you can touch-type without looking at the keys then get yourself an unlabelled keyboard. It is intimidating/respectable to newbies, and just something for yourself to take pride in. There's also the chance that lacking the labels will further improve your own ability to not look at the keys. That said, I can say from experience that you can still look at the keys and figure them out if you know the layout by heart. For those "one-handed" moments I can still figure out which key is which by looking at it.

As for mice? There ARE definitely differences. But I bought a "pro" "gamer" mouse with adjustible DPI and removable weights. It was annoying as hell. Why would I want my mouse to be HEAVIER?

There seems to be some back and forth with weighted mice these days. Personally, I adopted the G9 and haven't gone back since. I love it. In my opinion the added weight improves your accuracy. Whereas a super lightweight mouse is harder to feel, the weighted mouse resists your movement ever so slightly that it actually gives you better control, at least in my experience. We're talking grams. Not pounds. The difference is negligible, but the added weight is just enough to give you additional feedback without becoming a chore.

The DPI buttons are more annoying than useful. But I like being able to get a high DPI mouse, "dial it in" and leave it.

On my G9 and G9X the DPI buttons just became a habit for me. I never adjust the DPI, but I formed a habit of constantly clicking the "DPI up" button to ensure my highest DPI setting was selected all the time. In the beginning I think I would accidentally hit the "down" button, and so I got into the habit of hitting "up" when I was idle to ensure I was set to a consistent setting. And over time it became away to cope with stress in game. It's now one of my death rituals.

Append:

I also want to point out that one feature that I really love about keyboards is having dedicated "multimedia keys". In particular, volume and mute keys are very handy for instantly muting "vulnerable" sounds when you aren't anticipating them or something. For example, if you awaken your computer and it instantly starts playing a video you forgot you were watching, or if it starts blasting music while you're talking to somebody... It's a joy to be able to quickly silence it or adjust the volume without having to login and find an icon with the mouse... Bonus points for an analog volume nob.

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

Instead of criticizing the keyboard perhaps you should criticize the screen. :P

You can't replace physics. ::) A glossy screen is simply one without a matte finish. A matte finish is a bunch of tiny bumps that break up reflections... and send your color depth to complete piss.

Erin Maus

We use Apple Mac keyboards at work. 8-)

Eric Johnson

I bought the cheapest mechanical keyboard I could find: the Redragon K552-N. It's my first mechanical keyboard, and it's O.K. I'm not blown away by it or anything, but it works. I like the clicking sound, but it's a bit loud at times. The gram-force is lighter than my past keyboard, and the height is different, both of which will require some time to adjust to.

Edgar Reynaldo

Keyboard shmeyboard. I type with my eyes. o.O

Eric Johnson

Your eyes:
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Edgar Reynaldo

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Chris Katko

Did locutus ... type with his eyes?

Also, I've heard the new Star Trek Picard is "Woke Trek" and far worse... boring. "Grey's Anatomy in Space"... full of characters just yelling at each other over silly drama. "Gratuitous amounts of swearing" (which normally I don't care, but if it's out-of-place it's annoying would be bad.)

You can tell it's definitely bombing so far because... a BRAND NEW star trek came out and we had tons of hype BEFORE it came out and all a sudden... nothing. Nobody is talking about it.

They even started posting it online on YouTube for free because nobody signed up for their crappy service to watch it.

And I say all of this as someone who LOVES Star Trek, and Patrick Stewart and wanted a great show.

I have the episodes... but I'm not watching them yet. I can't decide whether I want to punch myself in the balls or not.

MiquelFire

At the time I type this, something is causing Allegro.cc to run REALLY slow.

41 seconds to generate just this page (and another topic)

Did Matthew put the server on a potato?

raynebc

The new Star Trek series is pretty good so far, I have no big complaints about it. I still think it's better than a fully retconned show like Discovery, but The Orville is still more enjoyable to me overall.

Chris Katko

Orville is great. First season was funnier (I liked) and more like Star Trek. Second season tried to be more dramatic and character driven which kinda worked. I hope the best for them.

Star Trek Discovery ... STD. Like... come on guys. Try a little harder.

Also, they turned Klingons from an amazing race... into ... space africans. ... who are also trump voters. Like seriously, wtf. Not to mention they're also super ignorant...

how is this not offensive?

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LOOK AT THE FREAKIN' FLARED NOSTRILS... and the huge lips. It's like they took what a white supremacist cartoonist would draw a black person and said 'yep, sounds good.'

This is apparently how "woke" white people view black people. As caricatures.

And if you're thinking "they don't look African... maybe", let's see how they made Black Panther's tribes clothes look:

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There are rival tribes in black panther with different, but similar clothing.

Erin Maus

A guilty white man avoids conviction by the functional equivalent of jury nullification, nothing new to see. ???

raynebc

A partisan effort to overthrow an elected president failed.

Neil Roy

Those are the keyboard's nipples.

I burst out laughing at that, nice one. ;D

As for what those are for, they are intended for typists so you can feel where the keys are. On typewriters in the past, and keyboards now, typists held their hands so that the index finger of each hand rests on those keys where the bumps are. I remember learning that in a typing class in school, back when typewriters were still a thing.

Personally, I think that "proper" way of typing will wreck your tendons over time but to each his own.

Eric Johnson
NiteHackr said:

As for what those are for, they are intended for typists so you can feel where the keys are. On typewriters in the past, and keyboards now, typists held their hands so that the index finger of each hand rests on those keys where the bumps are. I remember learning that in a typing class in school, back when typewriters were still a thing.

Personally, I think that "proper" way of typing will wreck your tendons over time but to each his own.

I knew what those were for, but thanks for the history lesson. :) I was never taught to type, but over the years I've developed my own style which is more than fast enough. On 10fastfingers.com, my average is 115 WPM. Sometimes I dip into the 120s, but that's not common.

Edgar Reynaldo

Big suprise. The party of corruption exonerated their corrupt president.

Here's to voting your asses out of office this November. >:(

raynebc

The crooked Democrats will need more than a lot of good luck for that to happen.

Edgar Reynaldo

The whole democratic party is nowhere near as corrupt as the GOP. Wake the fuck up.

Chris Katko

They're both corrupt as hell. Wake up. :P

Why do you think every publication is assassinating bernie sanders? Because he's the only candidate with a chance of winning that's clearly anti-corporate corruption.

Or calling Tulsi Gabbard, a twice WAR VETERAN and CURRENT SENATOR of the USA, a "russian asset".

Or the fact that Pete Buttikeg... who somehow won by .1% over Bernie, just so happened to be sponsered... by the company that made the terrible Iowa cellphone app.

Or that BOTH parties were okay with not just the Iraq war, but also the Syrian war. Because war sells bombs.

And NO MSM outlet runs articles or specials on "big corporations killing mom-and-pop stores". When was the last time you even heard the term "mom-and-pop store"? Because 5 megacorporations own >95% of all media.

Which is also why they hate any indie media outlet such as an independent YouTube journalist, or new communication system like Dissenter, because it threatens their ability to control the narrative. e.g. They hate Joe Rogan because he actually lets people talk. What a monster.

Arvidsson
LennyLen

I was admitted into hospital last week as my Haemoglobin level was down to 48 (it should be between 130 and 180) and my iron levels were so low none could be detected at all.

A couple of scans later, they discovered a huge tumour in my bowel which must have had a serious bleed a few weeks ago, which because of the way it presented (aching gut, diarrhoea, fever, chills, paleness, quick heart rate) I mistook for food poisoning. I saw my doctor a couple of weeks later as I hadn't regained my strength yet and he did the blood tests that got me admitted.

So the moral of the story is if you feel like absolute shit, go see a doctor because it could be worse then you think.

I've had surgery now and they're 99.99% sure they got it for good. Time will tell.

Chris Katko

THANK YOU. that's a great link for showing how insane democrats are:

Quote:

Attempted to cyberbully Greta Thunberg

click the link. He tweeted one thing about how he doesn't like her. WHAT A FREAKIN MONSTER

Quote:

Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend!" Trump wrote of teenage climate crisis activist Greta Thunberg. "Chill Greta, Chill!"

MONSTER!!!!

And I say all this, having voted for Obama twice, and planning on voting for Bernie (BOO HISS from "DNC" establishment corporations). I've been consistently pro "change" for over a decade.

LennyLen

click the link. He tweeted one thing about how he doesn't like her. WHAT A FREAKIN MONSTER

Do put that in context though.

If you or I tweeted about how we didn't like her, there would be no repercussions. He's the president of a very populous country though, and whether it's deserved or not, he has millions of rabid fans, who would be more than happy to attack anyone he declares his dislike for.

Unless he really is the idiot so many claim him to be, he should know what power his words hold.

Edgar Reynaldo

I will agree, there are some parts of the Democratic party that aren't on the up and up. Personally, I doubt Bernie can win, he's too progressive, and not in as good of a way as Elizabeth Warren is.

Tulsi got blacklisted by Hillary, and no she does not work for the Russians. Put your tinfoil hats back on already.

As for the Caucus, I think it's crap. I think we should be able to vote like in a primary. Too easy to fudge the results one way or another due to the nature of the vote.

raynebc

Bernie is extremely radical, but generally honest (edit: Except in how he can scrap together enough money for his insanely expensive policy proposals). I've heard Warren described as Hillary in a Bernie mask (a liar pretending to be radically progressive).

Chris Katko

https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/pete-buttigieg-funded-by-russian-linked-oligarch-who-supports-trump-and-mcconnell/

O_o

Bernie is radical, but he's been consistent his entire life. He's the only person I've seen that promises radical change... and might actually do it (instead of lie to us to get into office and never do anything). That "Actually might do it" apparently is downright scary to the current status quo and corporate and political leaders. The fact they fear him enough to smear him, makes me think he's got something going on. Because things are exactly the way they are, because the people in power want them to be that way. So if they're scared, that's a chance we might break the mold.

I think he's wrong on gun control, and has way to many "allies" with "woke police". But overall, I want to TRY to get some changes. Speaking from ten years experience, our healthcare is a dumpster fire designed to extract cash from people. Obamacare did nothing to fix that because it was written BY the very same healthcare companies who extract all the profit from us. It's gone up 10-16% in price every year. Who can afford it? Poor people sure as hell can't! Just like Obama did NOTHING to punish Wall Street after ruining the entire worlds economy because... shocker... Obama's cabinet was selected by Citibank.

I voted for Obama based on his message of change, and government transparency. He did the opposite. He won a Nobel peace prize while sending drones to assassinate US citizens. (Yes, that happened.) Not to mention his approval of torture, including a secret CIA Blacksite... in Chicago. His home city.

All of those things, he basically set precedent for the next president. Trump. To do the exact same things.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/14/13577464/obama-farewell-speech-torture-drones-nsa-surveillance-trump

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-police-detain-americans-black-site

raynebc

I think if enough transparency and competition can be forced into the healthcare system, it will get to the point where it becomes dirt cheap. Like going to a self-serve kiosk where it takes some fluid samples, vital statistics, diagnoses you on the spot and generates a prescription for medicine if necessary. Sure, that would put people out of work, but the need for humans in healthcare is what makes it so expensive and the cost is the chief complaint, not accessibility or quality.

Chris Katko

I don't care HOW MANY jobs get lost if those jobs are responsible for bankrupting millions of Americans.

bamccaig

American prices for health care are through the roof because of monopolies/alliances and corporate control. Healthcare should be considered a human right, and government should regulate it to keep the prices fair for all. Of course, we've already established that government is completely corrupt so that won't actually happen. As long as government can be "bought" they will be bought, and nothing will change.

LennyLen
bamccaig said:

Healthcare should be considered a human right, and government should regulate it to keep the prices fair for all.

Agreed. I just had surgery, plus an eight-day stay in the hospital without having to pay a cent, and I have no medical insurance.

That is how healthcare should be.

Edgar Reynaldo

If you were living in 'Merikuh, you'd be swimming in debt, likely to lose your insurance, your job for not having enough vacation.

bamccaig

USA. Land of the foolish. :)

Edgar Reynaldo

Canada. Land of the Canucks. :-*

Neil Roy

Oh great, more political debates.

It is so pointless to even discuss politics in here as everyone seems pretty much fixated on their views and no amount of facts will change that. I predicted the responses I am seeing before all the trials etc... happened.

LennyLen said:

Agreed. I just had surgery, plus an eight-day stay in the hospital without having to pay a cent

Someone paid for it. It wasn't free.

Edgar Reynaldo

Lmao. It isn't hard to predict the future when the entire Republican side of the Senate is corrupt with glee over a president who stuffs their pockets.

raynebc

I pay for health insurance, so if I got injured I'd be fine. People who act irresponsibly don't always get away unscathed. Tax cuts that benefit nearly everybody are a good thing, but I don't expect people with severe entitlement problems to get it. Some Democrats (especially in this thread) think their shit doesn't stink, but oh boy does it ever.

Edgar Reynaldo

raynebc's just a spoiled little brat. He doesn't want his "hard earned" tax money to go to people who are hungry, or sick, or homeless, or uneducated, etc....

You like to call them 'entitlement' programs so you don't have to feel guilty about people starving in the streets. Clearly they haven't worked hard enough to deserve life. Send them to the salt mines! Oh, and piss off.

My insurance is $1300 a month. I can't afford that! That's $15,600 a year! Just so I can go see the doctor when I need to. Guess what minimum wage is here? $7.25 an hr. Guess how many hours it would take to pay my insurance at that rate?

Over 2000 hours, and that's before taxes. Forget food, clothing, shelter, utilities, rent, gas and all the other expenses people have.

So in raynebc's America, people have to work full time year round, just to pay for their insurance.

So basically, you're giving people a choice between food and shelter, and health care. But please tell me how giving tax cuts to the rich helps me, you stupid petulant f**k.

So sick of ignorant Republicans calling me spoiled when I have nothing. Toss pot.

Polybios

My insurance is $1300 a month.

That sounds expensive. Is that "all-covered, no deductible"?

In the partially state-run system here, the "contribution" is 7-8% of gross income capped at about 57,000€/year ($62,130), so the max. is c. 380 € ($414) per month (actually a bit less) IF you earn >= 4,750 € ($5,178) per month. If you earn less, you pay less, if you earn more, you don't pay more (but have the option to go for private insurance).

raynebc

F*** off, Edgar. Your whiny, stupid political opinions are worth less than nothing.

Edgar Reynaldo

Uh-oh. I pissed off a Republican. Ha, good. When all you have left is your pride, I will still have my morals.

FB crosspost
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raynebc

If you had any morals, I'd be concerned about your post.

Neil Roy

raynebc: I really don't understand why you even bother to post in here about politics. We understand the truth. Our opinions are based on the facts and on the United States constitution. Other opinions seem only based on emotions and deeply ingrained hatred, which tends to blind people from the facts, sadly.

When one side laughs at the other, and one side is angry at the other... I don't see any point in continuing. It's all just attacks back and forth with no meaningful dialog or interest in the truth. Neither side is going to change their point of view.

I see several points I am tempted to respond to, but then I realize, it didn't make any difference in the past, so it won't now. There will always be an argument back, or an excuse etc. Stating facts to people who are not interested in them is an utter waste of time and will only frustrate and anger you.

No matter what your political leanings are, the following senate hearing testimony should shock you and anger you... if you're honest anyhow.

video

Erin Maus

I probably pay more in taxes than raynebec so my opinion is worth more or something like that. ???

It's classic Republican thought to think those who fall sick to cancer, auto-immune diseases, diabetes, mental illness, or whatever else is a fault of character, too, l o l. I guess hard working, responsible people don't get sick. Hmm...

Chris Katko

If you were living in 'Merikuh, you'd be swimming in debt, likely to lose your insurance, your job for not having enough vacation.

Happened to me. I everything "right". I never had credit card debt. I got a "real" degree in ENGINEEERING. Lost my job because I couldn't keep up with the work. Lost my insurance because I didn't have a job.

Oh, and the super affordable "obamacare" wanted >$550 / month (that was like 8 years ago, it's gone up like 10-20% every year since then).

bamccaig

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Epstein#Criticism_of_Google

Quote:

Epstein's white paper was not peer-reviewed and was challenged by other researchers. Among the criticisms was that a small sample size was used to extrapolate conclusions about a population of millions and the lack of disclosure of the underlying methodology. Panagiotis Metaxas, a Wellesley College computer science professor, said the paper demonstrated a possibility of "what such an influence could have been if Google was manipulating its electoral search results", adding "I and other researchers who have been auditing search results for years know that this did not happen."[21]

It's certainly concerning if Google or any other corporation is manipulating information shown to users to influence their political leanings. That said, whereas there doesn't appear to be any actual evidence that Google did this, we all know that Facebook played its part in it[1].

Let's not fucking pretend that elections are wholesome anymore. There are no democracies on planet Earth. There probably never were. Government is controlled by the wealthy. It should be illegal for money to influence politics, but that's the only thing that does. Science doesn't matter. Money talks. The entire thing is a sham.

So go fuck yourself with this bullshit nobody claiming that Google tampered with the previous election. His research is not supported by his peers so it counts for nothing in my book. That's the foundation of science. Anybody can do research. Unless your peers consider it solid work, and can reproduce the same results, it's circumstantial and unreliable.

Conservatives and Liberals/Democrats are all corrupt as fuck. If you are voting for a major party you are disillusioned at best or stupid at worst. They probably never represented the people, but they certainly never did in our lifetime. I personally believe that the system is broken by design. It was never intended to be a true democracy. There is far too much undeserved power being wielded by wealthy people, and government has the power to take it away. There is a reason they don't. Until you fix that government will remain broken, and life will remain unfair for the average person.

We may have it much better than the majority of our ancestors or even the majority of people living today. I think the bar is set pretty low though so I don't accept that as good enough. I think it's a shitty fucking deal considering how good the top 0.000001% has it, and they've done nothing to deserve it. That's a real shame. Unfortunately, it's human nature that the vast majority of people are dumb as bricks. See above. And so it isn't likely going to change in our lifetime. At this rate, it's likely the human species will be extinct before any real efforts are made to correct the imbalances of power and privilege.

Neil Roy

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Edgar Reynaldo

NiteHackr, are you having a seizure?

raynebc

Youtube has been well documented to suppress videos and manipulate result order for the same searches even depending on the country of the user's origin. I don't trust that Google doesn't manipulate things the same way. These big tech companies frequently change their products' behavior when they get called out by high profile users (mostly conservatives, since these companies have a left bias).

Neil Roy

Still think vaping is safe? Better check out this story.

https://www.wnd.com/2020/02/teen-needed-double-lung-transplant-warns-others-vaping-turned-lungs-rubber/

I don't know what people have against just breathing in air. Breathing ANYTHING in other than the air our lungs were designed for, will damage you somehow. Guaranteed.

Also notice that his lungs didn't evolve to be able to accept this substance.

Erin Maus

You're so enlightened but you don't even know how evolution works, wtf.

LennyLen
NiteHackr said:

Still think vaping is safe? Better check out this story.

Another case where the victim admitted vaping THC. The CDC released a statement last month (or perhaps it was even earlier) saying that in nearly every case they have looked at related to lung injuries caused by vaping that the victim was vaping THC that had been laced with vitamin E acetate.

These products are designed to be used with nicotine liquid as a smoking cessation technique, not as a way to take drugs. Blaming the vaping mechanism in this case is like blaming hypodermic needles when someone ODs on heroin.

Quote:

I don't know what people have against just breathing in air. Breathing ANYTHING in other than the air our lungs were designed for, will damage you somehow. Guaranteed.

To a point yes. Our lungs can inhale a decent amount of moisture and still self-regulate, or we wouldn't be able to live in humid climates, or work in steamy environments. I agree though that if you were to vape all day every day, it would be more than your lungs can handle. Like with all things, the key is moderation.

bamccaig

People have been vaping for 5 or 10 years without serious issue. Many of the recent vaping injuries occurred within people that had only been vaping for a matter of months or a year. Clearly, it's not the vaping that caused the harm, but what they're vaping or how.

And don't blame it all on cannabis/THC either. People have been smoking, vaping, eating, and absorbing cannabinoids from cannabis for thousands of years. The culprit is not the THC, but some other ingredient that is being abused by black market producers trying to maximize profits at the expense of their customer's health.

I buy all of my cannabis products from the government. For the past year and change I have been vaping cannabis flower. Actual flower buds that are dried and shipped to me whole. I bust them up and lightly pack the plant matter into a chamber which is then heated up to about oven temperatures and air passes through which carries the activated THC and CBD molecules. I inhale it, and the molecules are quickly absorbed into my blood stream and ultimately by receptors in my brain.

Just recently they made it legal to sell edibles and oils too. I recently bought a couple of disposable vape pens. They're very convenient. You just suck on them, and it activates automatically. Instead of flower the cannabinoids have been extracted into concentrate form. That is vaped directly by these pens. It's a different experience for sure. It was very convenient not having to constantly empty, clean, and reload my vaporizor. That said, I think that the oils/pens are more expensive at the end of the day (it's really hard to compare the price due to the difference in format/delivery).

I'll likely stick to the flower for now, but I don't think it'll be long before I invest in a 510 thread battery and some oil cartridges for it... That seems to be maybe a hair more affordable than the disposables. They look more or less the same as the cheap e-cigarettes that I bought 10 years ago to try to help my brother and sister-in-law quit smoking. I wasn't a huge fan. They were kind of flimsy and cheap and eventually the "juice" started leaking out of them. Hopefully in that time they've perfected the design though so that won't happen... Time will tell...

Neil Roy

Excellent video...

video

LennyLen
bamccaig said:

The culprit is not the THC, but some other ingredient that is being abused by black market producers trying to maximize profits at the expense of their customer's health.

That would be vitamin E acetate.

Edgar Reynaldo

Neil, lmao @ your Epoch Times. They are widely known to be biased and wrong. You're feeding the Russian trolls buddy.

raynebc

Recreational drugs are far from the biggest health problem in the world (which is likely obesity), but smoking generally is not healthy. Vaping an appropriate liquid is safer than smoking, but is still less healthy than not smoking/vaping at all. Using vape pens as a medicine delivery system (comparable to a nebulizer) is what I'd consider an interesting way to make use of the technology.

Edgar Reynaldo

Wrong again, raynebc. It's hunger.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that about 815 million people of the 7.6 billion people in the world, or 10.7%, were suffering from chronic undernourishment in 2016.

raynebc

At least that statistic is declining, if not fast enough. I'm not sure what the best solution would be, whether that's donating material support for affected countries' agriculture, further improving crop characteristics (drought/pest tolerance, yield size, etc) through genetic engineering, or something else.

Edgar Reynaldo

The solution is not more grandiose feats of engineering. The true sickness is greed. There is more than enough food in this world to feed everyone.

Erin Maus

I went to school with kids whose only meal during weekdays was the free lunch. They were malnourished.

It's not just a "third world country" problem, it's also a USA problem.

bamccaig

The solution is not more grandiose feats of engineering. The true sickness is greed. There is more than enough food in this world to feed everyone.

Well said. Not just food, but everything essential to a healthy and happy life.

raynebc

If entire countries can't produce enough food to affordably feed their citizens, that has to be fixed. Trucking in food for them indefinitely is a band-aid.

bamccaig

I don't think you're listening. There are countless American citizens that are struggling to feed, cloth, and house themselves. It doesn't get much more first-world than that. Now imagine what opportunities await you in a third world country. >:(

Protip: Nobody "struggles" by choice. Struggles come from conditions forced upon you. If you can easily change it then you will.

Erin Maus

raynebec is your classic privileged American, the most suffering he's had is when he stubbed his toe.

Poverty in America? He's never experienced it so it doesn't exist. Ignorance is bliss.

raynebc

Bleating for the end of wealth classes is childish and historically ignorant. Provide real solutions or just shut up.

Erin Maus

Friend, I have posited a solution: socialism, where workers (*not the state*) own the means of production.

Workers of the world unite. 8-)

Edgar Reynaldo

Aaron, don't you know 'Socialism' is a giant buzzkill? As we know, most people associate Socialism with Communist Russia's failed attempt. They see it as a bogey man. You just can't mention that word around them. It's their trigger word. Like Mine is Republican, or Trump, or McConnell, or Barr. RRRRrrrrrgle#@!

Bernie's 'Socialism' is simply doing what's right, taking care of people, whether they "deserve" it or not. It's not about handouts, it's about rights. Rights to basic things like food, shelter, health care, education, infrastructure, jobs, etc....

LennyLen

Socialism is a great system for insects or robots, but it doesn't mix well with humanity.

raynebc

Here comes the part where I accused them of being historically ignorant of Socialism. Maybe they should look up the track record of Socialist (typo) regimes and their tendency towards horrific tyranny and murder, even today.

Erin Maus

> Socialism is a great system for insects or robots, but it doesn't mix well with humanity.

Here we go, human nature fallacy! Have you ever even taken like a sociology 101 class or been exposed to non-Western cultures?

> Here comes the part where I accused them of being historically ignorant of Socialism. Maybe they should look up the track record of Socialist (typo) regimes and their tendency towards horrific tyranny and murder, even today.

Ah yes, just like the Democrat People's Republic of Korea is Democratic because it's in the name! Wait, that's not right.

Why can you never show me a country that used Karl Marx's definition of socialism that was soOoOoO bad, not your worthless definition of socialism? Oh that's right, because there hasn't been one.

When a country where the workers own the means of production goes to hell, then maybe I'll concede my point. Unless like it was because the great ol' USA interfered with cute things like assassinations and coupes like they always do when a socialist gets elected somewhere.

Edgar Reynaldo

Socialism, you give democracy a bad name.

Stop asking people to support Socialism. You'll never un-taint that name.

As you said, there has never been a true socialist state. And there probably never will be, because it's a class war Aaron. This is not politics, this is class war. Know your enemy.

We are the caste and the workers, and the means to an end for the people who use us, the oligarchs.

LennyLen

Here we go, human nature fallacy! Have you ever even taken like a sociology 101 class or been exposed to non-Western cultures?

No, and yes.

Show me a single working human example of socialism (that involves more than a handful of people) and I'll take back my comment. Until then, it stands.

Erin Maus

I'd rather do positive things with my time than make the same arguments that fall on deaf ears over and over again.

Take that as you will.

edit: To clarify, I'm actually doing things (i.e., volunteering) to help improve my community, and hopefully in the future more than that; arguing on the internet is a waste of my time when I could volunteer with the DSA or a local LGBT youth center (the largest between New York, NY and Atlanta, GA for the record) or whatever else.

bamccaig

Show me one example of capitalism working well. Capitalism works great for the rich. Capitalism works great for evil. Capitalism is a terrible system for good. Capitalism ensures there will always be people suffering. Capitalism does not take care of the poor. Capitalism penalizes them. It holds weak people down. Fucking disgraceful. Meanwhile it holds rich people up. Are you the son of a billionaire? You get to fuck hookers and snort cocaine at 12 years old because why would you ever have to do anything? Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum a poor man has to work 3 or 4 jobs just to keep the lights on and food on the table. Seems fair.

The only people with any power in a capitalist society are wealthy people. Everybody else: shut your fucking mouth. Your opinion doesn't matter. You don't have a say. Your motherfucking vote doesn't even count. Your vote doesn't count. It never has. It has been setup this way by design from the beginning. If that doesn't make you fucking angry then you're a fucking idiot.

The whole point of Capitalism is supposed to be that the system is self-healing. Prices are kept fair through competition. Funny thing is competition is only permitted when it's mega corporations versus mom-and-pop business owners. The corporations kill off the mom-and-pop stores that actually had any attachment to your town, and then the corporations turn on you once they have the monopoly. And then you see a mega corporation failing and instead of letting it die because it is failing government gives them huge subsidies of tax payer money.

There seems to be a pattern here.

Of course we haven't seen any working example of a better system before. If we had we'd already be in agreement that we should change to it. What a stupid argument. The idea that we're seeking hasn't been realized before. We're looking beyond what our wealthy overlords have taught us are the limits. We're trying to imagine a system where everybody is happy, healthy, and productive.

If you can think of a way to make the idea better then by all means we're listening. Defending the existing system is reprehensible. And you should be ashamed. If you think this is working then you must be living in a privilege bubble.

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

Show me one example of capitalism working well.

*sent from my phone made by a private company, to my private cellphone company, over the backhaul internet owned by a private company to a website hosted by a private company, and back to my phone to the screen made by a private company

99% of everyone on planet earth is opposed to evil corporations doing evil things. But throwing out private ownership is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Erin Maus

> *sent from my phone made by a private company, to my private cellphone company, over the backhaul internet owned by a private company to a website hosted by a private company, and back to my phone to the screen made by a private company

The fuck you mean?

The US military and universities are responsible for the bulk of technology that made cell phones possible.

The republican bastardization of socialism exists, it's just for the rich (i.e, the capital owners {i.e., the bourgeoisie}])

Furthermore, you can be critical of something you use.

This is you:

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Chris Katko
Quote:

The you mean?

Everyone else reading can decipher the meaning. :P

You think simply inventing technology is the only task for implementing it? And who laid all those internet backbone pipes? Universities? Who installed your cable modem? Teachers? And tons of academics get sponsored directly by companies to research. Further, look at the Linux kernel. Like 90% of all contributions are by paid professionals subsidized by interested private companies. ::)

The examples are unlimited as long as you don't shut your eyes and mutter "nyah nyah nyah"

I mean, come on. Your understanding of the world cannot be this juvenile.

I mean let's do it. Let's eliminate all private ownership--including bodies. After all if you can force someone to work, you can force them to have sex. So let's force women everywhere to bang any unattractive man because they have the ability, and men have the needs. So all women should become prostitutes. It's so much more civilized than capitalism. ;D Don't be such a right-wing snob about it.

Neil Roy

This is a MUST WATCH for everyone. Even if you're not a fan of the show, you cannot deny the quotes from Democrats in it. Why would they suddenly be saying the opposite when Trump became president? ???

video

As for socialism...

Communist USSR = Union of Soviet SOCIALIST Republics. Socialism IS communism.

The NAZI party of Germany was called the "National Socialist Party".

The reason why people are fleeing Venezuela is because of socialism being imposed after the democratically elected president was ousted. Democracy and socialism are opposed to each other.

When you punish those who work hard to earn more and get ahead by taking their money and giving it to those who do not work hard. Than you remove all incentive for people to work hard and get ahead. You reward laziness and punish hard work.

This is why USSR collapsed. Sooner or later you run out of other people's money to spend. USSR was deep in debt and could no longer finance that system. It has ALWAYS failed in history. The whole reason why nations like the USA have been so prosperous is because it rewards hard work, though that is rapidly changing. Thanks to Trump we have seen a break from that, but I doubt that will last long as, sadly, Trump can only run in office for so long.

Oh, and before someone replies to this with a lot of cursing, swearing and other vulgar language, I simply won't read such replies if you can't remain civilized.

Edgar Reynaldo

Nitehackr, you make me sigh deeply.

None of those were examples of Marx's Socialism. Educate yourself.

The USA has had high top tier tax rates before, and the sky didn't fall. Educate yourself.

It's called being responsible. When companies like Amazon pay 0 fucking dollars in taxes, that's thievery. They're putting the tax burden on everyone else. They're not paying their fair share. You're paying their share. Corporate taxes benefit everyone.

raynebc

While scarcity exists, socialism will never work on a large scale. Feel free to implement it in the local communities who want it.

Edgar Reynaldo

Are you kidding me? COUGH Europe COUGH

They've had socialized medicine and education for a while now.

Why is the backwards ass ASU always the last to adopt what's right for everybody?

Erin Maus

NiteHacker, is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea democratic or republic?

bamccaig

99% of everyone on planet earth is opposed to evil corporations doing evil things.

People are thinking about themselves. America is the epitome of this. Corporations rarely shit directly on you. Typically you'll get your shit indirectly. People are not intelligent enough to comprehend that they're getting fucked. We of all communities should know trying to explain pointers to newbies for 2 decades. ::) Instead, people go all in with corporations, signing with the devil, without even reading the terms of the contract. Everybody is vaguely familiar with how evil Facebook has been. It has been reported on mainstream news several times. The vast majority of people are active users of Facebook. Nobody gives a fuck. They cannot comprehend how it relates to them. That's how corporations get away with it. People are stupid. I think more of you than to think that you cannot wrap your head around this. You of all people know how fucked the American system is.

Edgar Reynaldo

FFS, how retarded are democrats? I am MMMMNOT electing Bloomberg president...

raynebc

Don't whine at me, it's your political party.

Erin Maus

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8-) Other (X) is the best gender.

Neil Roy

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bamccaig

:'(;D

It seems to be a common occurrence for the Democrats to send the wrong person to the thumb war. I think there might be something to that. Keep on it!

Chris Katko

I like turtles

Erin Maus

Got this email this morning. Google's Cloud Vision API won't be returning gendered labels anymore.

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At least AI won't misgender peeps when it takes over. 8-) We're all just fleshy meat cattle to our AI overlords.

Edgar Reynaldo

Mr. Roy. There are also $2 dollar bills, in case you were wondering....

raynebc

There were also half cent, two cent and three cent pieces, but they are obsolete. Two dollar bills are mostly a novelty and are so seldom used that plenty of people don't know they exist. According to Google results, there haven't been any printed in almost 1.5 decades.

Edgar Reynaldo
raynebc said:

Transgender people are mostly a novelty and are so seldom used that plenty of people don't know they exist. According to Google results, there haven't been any printed in almost 1.5 decades.

Neil Roy

Mr. Roy. There are also $2 dollar bills, in case you were wondering....

Yes, at least in the USA, no longer in Canada (actually, no $1 bills here either, our lowest bill now is $5). But they are $2 bills, not $1 dollar bills, which is what the meme refers to. $2 is not $1, it can say it is $1, but it is not. And $1 is not $2, even if it wants to be, it is not. :)

Speaking of money...

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Polybios

So US income tax is non-progressive? ???

Erin Maus

The US uses a progressive tax system, but NiteHackr has the facts and the United States constitution.

NiteHackr said:

raynebc: I really don't understand why you even bother to post in here about politics. We understand the truth. Our opinions are based on the facts and on the United States constitution. Other opinions seem only based on emotions and deeply ingrained hatred, which tends to blind people from the facts, sadly.

Neil Roy

Just a heads up, Assassin's Creed Syndicate and Faeria are now free on the Epic Games Store. I don't know anything about the games, but can't beat the price.

https://www.pcgamer.com/assassins-creed-syndicate-and-faeria-are-now-free-on-the-epic-games-store/

Looks like a good game, here's a video someone did of it a few years back.

video

raynebc

Fabricating quotes, Edgar? Who do you think you are? Adam Schiff?

Chris Katko

This thread started .... in 2015.

jmasterx

Could it be the only pre-trump thread still active on a.cc ?

Edgar Reynaldo

This thread will outlive Mr. Pumpkin head.

raynebc

And Fauxcahontas too.

Chris Katko

Can't we all just love each other?

Sexually?

Neil Roy

I just tried installing a really old, 8bit version of my Deluxe Pacman 1 game onto Windows 10 just for shits and giggles. It never looked good on Windows 7 as Windows 7 always messed up the VGA palette. But now it actually looks great on Windows 10, runs fine... well... in Windowed mode, it won't run in fullscreen mode, but I was surprised at this.

I was also surprised at how many changes my game went through I forgot about! I installed a couple old versions. My old, options menu sucked! Kind of kewl anyhow. The screenshot is from 1.32. v1.30 had problems, ran super slow for some reason, but the palette was fine.

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Edit: scratch that... this may not have been 8bit now that I think about it *slaps forehead*, now I'll have to try out a version I KNOW is 8bit to test.

Tested out an older 8bit version and it looked fine (except a teeny problem on the title screen). Ran fine, but crashed at one point. Ah well... not important. There does seem to be an improvement with less palette corruption now. <shrug> it's after 3am and I am bored. L.O.L.

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Erin Maus

Can't we all just love each other?

Sexually?

That's not inclusive of asexuals like me! :(

The future is now, old man!

If it's not overly clear, I'm being sarcastic about the inclusiveness of your comment. I'm also making a reference to Malcome in the Middle.

After all, I'm an SJW and I may actually say those things! :P

Neil Roy

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Chris Katko

The future is now, old man!

I got, and loved, that reference.

Edgar Reynaldo

For the record, Elizabeth Warren is 1/32 Native Indian. No, that's not much, but it's still true.

Second, Hillary is laughing her ass off at you and Roger Stone.

Neil Roy

An Indian is someone born in India. A native is someone who was born here. I am a native Canadian, as was my father, and his father before him etc. What's in your blood makes no difference. If you're black and born here, you're native. if you're Chinese and born here, you're native. I don't belong anywhere else and refuse to be treated as if I do.

raynebc

Warren isn't 1/32 Native American. She's a full-blooded lying politician though.

Chris Katko

For the record, Elizabeth Warren is 1/32 Native Indian. No, that's not much, but it's still true.

Do you get your news exclusively from the clinton news network? That's been thoroughly disproved and she had to apologize. Native American citizenship isn't [just] by genetics. You're not a member of a tribe just because you have their DNA. You have to be... a member.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/us/politics/elizabeth-warren-native-american.html

And what does 1/32 DNA have to do with making policies that actually help people. ??? Identity politics needs to die. And is.

Erin Maus

I died my hair purple, #hashtagfeminism.

Am I a true SJW now? 8-)

Chris Katko

Hair is for the gendered. You are a future person. Become future race.

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Neil Roy

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You can vote socialism in, but you have to shoot your way out.

Erin Maus

I'm sure mice traps work the same regardless of the economic system in place, why wouldn't they? Am I missing something? ???

jmasterx

The cheese is free because all mice that have an abundance of cheese pay a cheese tax so that the less fortunate mice can have enough cheese to live :)

Not hard to understand at all.

Sure, some mice mooch, they're perfectly capable of finding their own cheese, but a lot of mice truly benefit and would otherwise have a lower survival rate.

Unfortunately 1% of mice have more cheese than the lower 99% and it would benefit mice as a whole if that were more balanced.

Neil Roy

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;D

Edgar Reynaldo

1/32 would be 5 generations back, but the DNA test Elizabeth Warren took shows she has an ancestor of Native American heritage from 6 to 10 generations back.

Bustamante DNA analysis of Elizabeth Warren.

Still true.

EDIT
Also, Neil, that is the dumbest thing I've seen you post in a while. Democratic Socialism aims to make things better for everyone. Also, Jesus was a Socialist. Where do you get this shit?

Arvidsson

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;D

Chris Katko

Spoken like someone who has only heard about caricatures of Trump supporters from the media.

You might as well be talking about black people all have bones in their noses because you read a book in the 1930s about them.

Fun fact: 28% of Hispanics voted for Trump. What about of white bigots.

Another Fun fact: It's actually increased for 2020 and that terrifies Democrats.

Edgar Reynaldo

Have you ever seen a Trump rally? WTF. Full of broke ass rednecks. The only reason they voted for Trump was because he was their "White Knight" and he would send the brown people back to Mexico.

Neil Roy

Looks like a pretty good mix of races and genders supporting Trump to me...
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The only racism I am seeing is what you just posted "Edgar".

Edgar Reynaldo

Ah,haa,haa don't you know they literally hand out cash to black people so they will attend? WTFLMAOSHISM.

Just so you know (in case your head was still in the sand) building a $5+ billion (initially) wall to keep poor people out is fucking racist and classist. Blacks and hispanics can be racist too, dumb ass.

Chris Katko

Ah,haa,haa don't you know they literally hand out cash to black people so they will attend? WTFLMAOSHISM.

That's literally what conservatives have been saying about Democrats for decades.

So you're saying it DOES happen?

Fun fact: Obama own brother, is a Trump supporter:

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But feel free to throw away the thoughts of a black person like the DNC has been doing for decades. People with your attitude literally screamed a black woman out of a restaurant by a bunch of white soyboys "decrying racism". [Let that sink in]

pelZuHd.png

Look at the face of tolerance!

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And, if you'll notice, I even said I was probably voting for Bernie Sanders next election. So if you can't figure out why someone would vote for Trump and Bernie, it's because you're not really listening. The answer is, they both run on a platform of change, and removing corruption, and they're both a threat to the establishment to the point the MSM sends out daily hitpieces to smear them.

And don't even get me started on how pissed Asians are at the Democrats for calling them "basically white" and literally demanding they score higher than everyone else to get into Harvard because they were systematically rated lower on "personality". That's right. ALL Asians apparently have a "bad personality" according to peace-loving, tolerant Democrats. Because a culture of working hard is apparently antithesis to the modern liberal environment. (Shout out to all my Asian friends who work their ass off.)

Edgar Reynaldo

Brain meet washing. Gal'dang Communist Russkie spies.

Random images (my feelings, expressed in song)

brain-wash-retro-pack-design-260nw-1028293606.jpg

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Neil Roy

No Edgar, the wall is to keep ILLEGAL CRIMINALS out. Immigrants are welcome to enter the country LEGALLY, and Trump has said so. Every president from Bill Clinton to Obama have all stated that something needed to be done against illegal immigrants and they are on record saying so, you can find the video clips on Youtube proving it.

The only one brainwashed here is YOU!

Edgar Reynaldo

https://www.facebook.com/CloseCamps/

If you are FOR THAT, I cannot forgive you.

raynebc

Democrats are blind to their own racism. It's a problem they can't bear to admit.

Neil Roy

raynebc: agreed. It's why you don't see me in here that often. Talking to "Edgar" is like talking to a brick wall as we can clearly see by his inane responses.

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jmasterx

Trump isn't as bad as some people make him out to be, and socialism is not as bad as some people make it out to be. Like all presidents, trump has had successes and failures, he's no different than any other president.

There's just so much misinformation; we only get our information through mass media outlets. Everything has Pros and Cons, every candidate has strengths and weaknesses.

No one is right or wrong because there is no right or wrong candidate or party. They will all do some good and some bad for the country, economy, etc. That's how it works. It's like software development. Vector has advantages and disadvantages over List.... there's no holly container, datastructure,algorithm. >:(

These angry personal debates are pointless. Vote for who you think will personally benefit you most personally. >:(

Bob Keane

If you consider NPR unbiased, Mr.Trump has weakened anti-corruption laws while promising to rout out corruption in government. Source:

jmasterx

My point exactly, Trump is doing great things for the rich and big corporations, and less good things for the other 99%. I can't hold that against him, that's what he's done all his life, who did people think they were voting in? There have not been any surprises with Trump IMO, he's exactly who he's always been, he's still doing what he's been doing for years. It has benefits for some, and it's bad for others, Pros and Cons like any other president.

I'm not judging Trump here, he's a constant in this, but I don't get why people have buyer's remorse, he's doing everything I expected him to do. He has not changed a bit.

But if people think voting in a billionaire who came from money and filed for bankruptcy was going to be good for the middle class and lower, they're the idiots, not Trump.

Yes, I know the election was probably rigged, but Hillary would have probably been very similar and still overall benefited big corporations that paid for a good portion of her run. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but if your goal is to have more equality in the middle and lower class, she's probably not the best choice. But since it's less about the policies and more about the person and how exciting and charismatic they are, the ones with more boring, more introverted to-the-point personality types, especially ones who do not want to get funding from big corps, have little to no chance. Which is unfortunate but people like Junk Food, even if there's a healthier, less sexy alternative.

Edgar Reynaldo

If you think Trump is a 'good' president, you're mentally ill.

Trump's accomplishments :

1) Tax cuts for billionaires
2) Gutting programs for poor people
3) Appointing people with zero experience to positions in our government that control our lives because they donated to his campaign.
4) His family is making a killing off the government, but you want to hear about Hunter Biden.
5) He has rolled back environmental protection laws all across the board.
6) He opens public land to drilling and gas exploration
7) He's still trying to build a wall without the support of the people or Congress.
8) He's pumping money into ICE and CBP to fight a non-existent immigration crisis. ($2 Billion a piece according to his latest budget proposal)
9) Every business he's ever had has either gone bankrupt or been accused of corruption
10) He ran a fraudulent charity and was fined $2 million for misusing donations
11) Nearly got us into a war with Iran to get re-elected

I could keep going, but none of you care about the truth. Your heads are so far up your own asses there's no hope to pull them out.

12) He was impeached, and the only reason he didn't get removed is because there was a show trial without witnesses or evidence backed by a corrupt Republican party.

But yeah, suck his d**k a little more

jmasterx

There is no notion of good or bad without an optimization goal.

For the vast majority of optimization goals, Trump is bad, for a few goals that optimize wealth for the wealthy he's average.

Edgar Reynaldo

jmasterx - optimizing evil is still evil :/

jmasterx

He's certainly not a president working for the greater good of humanity or Americans in general - I don't know the definition of 'evil' it's too subjective for me, but I can agree that his actions do not benefit the greater good of society as a whole.

But a lot of people genuinely voted for that, and I fully expected him to be exactly like this. No surprises here.

I'm pretty sure in his mind, greed and corruption is how your run a good business so it's also how you run a good country. He manages the country like he manages his businesses what do people expect? You hired Saul Goodman.

In my subjective opinion, right now I think the candidate that would optimize the greatest benefit for the average american is Bernie Sanders. The stock market and maybe even GDP might take a hit under Bernie, but the average american would probably have an overall better quality of life than with many other candidates.

But it depends what's important to you and what you want to optimize for.

For me personally I like socialism and I like equality for all. I would be happy in a world where people earning over a million a year are taxed marginally at 70% for every additional dollar. I don't think that people that believe in capitalism are wrong or bad people, I just optimize for the people, I'm a feeler. I care about people, not money or things, but I respect that not everyone thinks like me. I don't like massive wealth gaps.

I grew up very poor, but because I live in Quebec, Canada, my post secondary education was free and now I make a very good salary as a software developer. My marginal tax rate is around 40% and I'm fine with that.

Had I not been afforded a free education, maybe I would not have reached my full potential simply because of economic disposition.

Arvidsson

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;D

raynebc

Thanks for the ignorant lefty meme. Maybe you've heard of a little something called "COVID-19" that's getting pretty popular?

jmasterx

The stock market dip has nothing to do with Trump... literally one of the only good things about a Trump presidency is a stronger DOW, that's a bad point to knock him on, there's so many good ones too.

Arvidsson

Ah, Trump only gets credit when it goes up. Gotcha.

jmasterx

No there are plenty of times it went down because of his big mouth on Twitter, or his dodgy trade deals with China. But specifically this is because of the virus.

bamccaig

Speaking of the virus, does it strike anyone else as careless that they're just letting infected people "self isolate?"

Wait, you're infected, and you don't have any background at all in biology or medicine? You should be perfectly fine to not spread this then. Go home and just try not to cough on people and stuff!

Week later:

Breaking news. The virus that we all thought wasn't going to be a problem has spread like wildfire and now we're thinking it might be a problem.

>:( >:( >:(

Unrelated, but I've been down with a flu for about a week now. Missed 3 days of work this week. Fever and chills. I can't remember the last time I was sick like this. And I honestly wanted to get a damn flu shot this year too, but we were busy with new house things and it never got done...

jmasterx
bamccaig said:

Unrelated, but I've been down with a flu for about a week now. Missed 3 days of work this week. Fever and chills. I can't remember the last time I was sick like this.

Unrelated my ass >:(

jmasterx

Bam has the virus >:(

Edgar Reynaldo

It's already spread to California, Italy, and Japan.

It is believed to have originated from a meat market in china that butchered a bat and got it's blood or feces on him.

Neil Roy

I haven't had a flu and barely get a cold since I was in my 20s, and I have never been vaccinated. But keep getting those vaccines and pumping your system full of toxins and then wonder why you are getting the flu worse and worse. I'm just some crazy old man now who doesn't know what he's talking about. I even beat type 2 diabetes. I stopped taking pills for it five years ago, against my doctors wishes. Been fine.

But that's another topic. Yeah, stock market dipped, who was in charge had nothing to do with that. I would put the blame squarely on the media who is really trying to put a scare into people in order to cause economic problems on purpose. Also, this has conveniently put a stop to the Hong Kong protests hasn't it? But I am sure this is all coincidental.

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Edgar Reynaldo

Once a coronavirus vaccine is prepared, you bet your but I'm gonna take it. And I'll be glad to jab a few stupid people like you to make sure it doesn't spread too.

Also, you're dumb.

People's Democratic Republic of North Korea. Why don't you move there.

jmasterx

Y'all are cruel, why should we hate people that share different views, perspectives and opinions than us? Even when someone gets the facts wrong, why all the hate? I don't get it.

You two are clearly very different and very incompatible people, but there's no reason to hate either of you. You both fight for what you believe in. There is no such thing as right or wrong. While there is no scientific evidence to show that vaccines cause any short or long term damage of any kind, as it is not, as some are misinformed about a 'shot of the virus', it also may very well have no effect on you. And doctors also do their best with what they have and often over prescribe as a precautionary measure. They honestly have no idea if some pills will help or not. Statistically they help a lot of people with similar symptoms so they prescribe it. Doctors are basically like this:
They see how the software behaves, and have a bunch of patches that worked for other software, but they can't access or modify the source code. So it's not easy.

I never understood why people hate other people over their beliefs. ???

Chris Katko

Democrats: "Everyone knows, border control is unethical."

Coronavirus: ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

also, I made a meme:

{"name":"2MktFP9.png","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/2\/c\/2c6544fe4473bbd094e2a816248125d6.png","w":593,"h":713,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/2\/c\/2c6544fe4473bbd094e2a816248125d6"}2MktFP9.png

raynebc

If ever there was a case for border security, a virus pandemic scare is a good one. Italy's unwillingness to stop the flow of travelers across its borders will be why it is the biggest conduit for COVID-19 to spread throughout Europe. I don't get flu shots annually as I fight off sickness naturally over the course of a couple days per year, and I follow good sanitary practices when I am sick (ie. covering my coughs/sneezes, using sanitizer frequently and keeping my hands clean, etc). This year I got the sickest I'd been in decades, even had to get antibiotics to get rid of pneumonia. My coworkers have called in sick quite a bit. This is a very bad year for a new virus.

Neil Roy

And I'll be glad to jab a few stupid people like you to make sure it doesn't spread too.

Do that and it will be the last thing you ever do kid. I'll flatten your ass and you'll be a bloody mess on the pavement when I'm done pounding the living shit out of you. So think twice. You would be best to cross the street before coming near me Marc.

You don't want to push your luck with me kid. I can respect your opinion and if you want to be retarded and inject poison into your body, go for it, but if you EVER threaten me or my family with that shit, I WILL GET VERY VERY VIOLENT ON YOUR ASS!!! Guaranteed!!! >:(>:(>:(

On another note...
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Neil Roy

duplicate post

Edgar Reynaldo

I'm sorry but I can't stand anti-vaxxers. THEY ARE THE REASON THE DISEASES SPREAD! I don't immunize myself just for me but for others around me, who, if they got sick, would probably die. My mother just spent the last two months getting over a virus and if she got coronavirus she would die. So yeah, I will forcibly vaccinate you to protect my mother's life.

It is expected to take approximately 12-18 months before the vaccines are ready. If we can contain it that long, we will be safe.

They say it has a 'low' mortality rate. 2%. Guess what 2% of the population of the US is? 6 million people dead. That's another holocaust.

The coronavirus has a HIGH rate of TRANSMISSION, which means it can easily spread and die down, and flare back up at will.

The mortality rate rises with the age of the infected host. So old people will be the first ones to die. Youths and children showed the lowest rate of mortality.

 - Proud needle user (for vaccines and donating blood) - 

8-)

EDIT FOR INTERIM POST FROM NITEHACKR
Neil why do you feel necessary to threaten me with violence? Your stupidity is what makes people sick. God gave us vaccines so the smart people would live. Go ahead and kill yourself off if you want, bother me not.

Neil Roy

MARC, according to virologist experts, getting vaccinated does not prevent the spread of any virus. So that is utterly false. But I am sure you, in your expert opinion, will argue against this, whatever. If you get vaccinated, you don't need to worry about whether I have any virus or not BECAUSE YOU WILL BE VACCINATED RIGHT?!

And if you don't like being threatened, don't start it! You threaten to "jab me with a needle" and I WILL GET VIOLENT ON YOU. Period! You think I am a pushover, come on over and try it kid! You'll find out the hard way what happens.

Vaccines contain many toxins which are harmful to us. Just go to the CDC website and look it up yourself, it isn't difficult. I have never had a flu vaccine and I haven't had a flu since I was in my 20s. The last time I got a flu I was still using my Amiga computer and hadn't even started with Allegro yet. Just for some perspective. I rarely even get a cold, in fact, I don't recall the last cold I got either.

Edgar Reynaldo

NEIL ROY (See I can play with your name like a child too)

Old man, I would knock you flat on your sorry A$$. Don't start shit you can't finish. ;)

Yes, NEIL a VIRUS will SPREAD if people CARRY IT. The people who GET IT are the ones who aren't VACCINATED. Just because YOU ALONE have a LUCKY track record for the flu doesn't make EVERYONE ELSE SAFE.

And YOU are the one THREATENING VIOLENCE UPON ME because if YOU GET SICK and spread the DISEASE to someone ELSE who spreads it to someone ELSE who spreads it to one of my family or friends and WE DIE ITS YOUR FAULT. Vaccination is self defense. Any other ideology on this subject is just plain absurd. God gave us medicine and doctors so we could deal with sickness.

No vaccine is 100% effective, but in the vast majority of cases it grants you nearly full immunity to the virus. Viruses mutate though, and that means a vaccine for one strain of the virus won't necessarily protect you from another strain.

To say that ANY person is not 100% responsible for the other people they get sick, is not rational. If I know I have AIDS, and I have sex with someone without their knowledge of me having it, I have murdered them. I know someone who went to prison for 25 years for infecting someone with HIV unwittingly and knowingly. You are that person Neil.

EDIT
Thanks for pointing out the CDC.

See Why you should get vaccinated to put an end to this mythological archaic belief of yours.

Neil Roy

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Edgar Reynaldo

Sorry Neil. No really, I'm sorry you're so thick.

The LORD set me upon a rock.

The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.

First of all, you need to stop taking everything so literally. You think I really give a fuck enough about you to fly all the way to some freezing ass wilderness in Canada to vaccinate you against your will? It's called hyperbole.

Second, you need to stop threatening me. And you need to get this complex out of your head that my identity is any of your business. I prefer anonymity but you insist on outing me! I care not. I am not the same person nor am I in the same situation I was in before. I needed anonymity for my own safety, but here you are using my real name repeating it like some barking dog. So by your own action, you are threatening my life.

Be like water my friend. Water can be still, or it can be violent. Be still.

Only in the silence can we hear our Creator.

By the way, you should really stop talking to yourself alone in alleys. It's frankly, a little disturbing. :-X

LennyLen

I think what happened in Samoa is a good example of why we should vaccinate. They had a very low vaccination rate so Measles ran rampant throughout the country. Then, they went in and vaccinated pretty much everyone in the country and the disease stopped.

And there were 0 vaccine "injuries."

Eric Johnson

@NiteHackr: I'm legitimately curious, are you against all vaccines or just some? For example, do you routinely get vaccinated for tetanus?

Edgar Reynaldo

No, he's just stubborn and believes that faith is the solution to everything. While that is true, he is abusing it. Because if he had faith that God provides, he would know that God provided us medicine because he knew we would have to deal with sickness. But whatever, he just wants to pray it away.

https://truthbook.com/stories/funny-god/the-drowning-man

bamccaig
jmasterx said:

Bam has the virus >:(

If I did it would surely help with the 4/5 sick days I've used already this year. :'( My symptoms seemed to start with a sore throat though and that seems to be very uncommon with coronavirus though so I likely have something else. I'm guessing a flu. I haven't bothered going to a hospital because I have no reason to believe that it's bacterial (and no reason to believe that it's as severe as coronavirus) and so doctors can't do anything for me.

NiteHackr said:

I haven't had a flu and barely get a cold since I was in my 20s, and I have never been vaccinated. But keep getting those vaccines and pumping your system full of toxins and then wonder why you are getting the flu worse and worse. I'm just some crazy old man now who doesn't know what he's talking about.

I've never had a flu shot before in my life, but now I want to get one every year! Our bodies are very complicated and very fragile. They're also very powerful. They can automatically ward off many infections. It's really quite impressive. Of course, that doesn't mean that you won't suffer along the way. Only that you'll probably survive [most things you're likely to catch]. For a man that doesn't work for a living I guess that's OK. What does it hurt to be uncomfortable at home? For a man that is expected to show up 240 days a year though getting seriously sick is a real bummer.

I've had a rough few days, but my body seems to be winning. My body is still fighting though. I still have a sore throat and a dry cough. No prescription medicine (there really isn't any for viruses). No flu shot. That doesn't mean that a flu shot wouldn't have helped prevent this in the first place though. I've been sick plenty of times in my lifetime. Probably more often than average. My immune system is still struggling with it though. Append: Also to help my immune system get on top of this I've avoided alcohol and cannabis[1], and I've been popping Advil to relieve aches and chills, and "Cold-FX(tm)" to hopefully provide me with the necessary vitamins and minerals to fuel my fight. It's still been slow going though.

My wife teaches children so I have the unfortunate pleasure of her, with her battle hardened immune system, carrying bugs home nearly every week that my body gets to go up against. Parents are also expected to show up 240 days a year or more because our government doesn't believe that sick people should stay isolated, and so those parents cannot afford to stay home with their sick children, and instead they all send their sick children to school to infect all of the other children (and their families, and the teachers' families).

NiteHackr said:

I even beat type 2 diabetes. I stopped taking pills for it five years ago, against my doctors wishes. Been fine.

It's much more likely that either (a) you still have diabetes, and are either improving through lifestyle changes (studies have shown that changing to a more healthy diet can pretty much reverse some types of diabetes) or simply don't realize how close you are to abandoning your wife; OR (b) your doctor misdiagnosed you in the first place. Medicine is not magic. Doctors don't really know what is going on in our bodies. This isn't a TV show or movie. They just have a general understanding of how the human body works, and how previously identified conditions present themselves, and what tests may strongly correlate to those conditions. It's still a lot of guesswork though. It's even worse in Ontario (or Canada in general) where the health care sector is underfunded and where we struggle to keep good doctors around (or any doctors, for that matter).

video

NiteHackr said:

I would put the blame squarely on the media who is really trying to put a scare into people in order to cause economic problems on purpose.

The media is run by corporations. For-profit corporations, most of the time. Publicly funded media is controlled by government that is controlled by for-profit corporations. If you think that for-profit corporations want economic problems then you're deluded. The media prints what sells the best. It's not scare tactic to warn people about coronavirus. It is very deadly. Several doctors and even administrators in the ground zero hospital have died from it. These people probably have some of the best immune systems in the world, and they have medical training for treating and containing viruses. That didn't help them though. It's no joke.

jmasterx said:

Y'all are cruel, why should we hate people that share different views, perspectives and opinions than us? Even when someone gets the facts wrong, why all the hate? I don't get it.

Stupid people are threatened by that which they do not understand. :-X Also, since they tend to be wrong they're worried that their bubble will pop and their lives will change. People are afraid of change because it's necessarily uncomfortable.

Democrats: "Everyone knows, border control is unethical."

raynebc said:

If ever there was a case for border security, a virus pandemic scare is a good one.

Border control doesn't mean much unless you're going to shut down your border and restrict Americans from coming back too. People of colour aren't more likely to be infected with coronavirus than caucasians. Travel of any kind right now seems risky to me. Then I don't travel for a living so that's easy for me to say. Without evidence to suggest that Mexico is improperly handling the coronavirus threat, or that it is losing the battle, it's pure racism to target that border.

I haven't heard anything about it so I just Googled. A day ago apparently there were 2 or 3 confirmed cases in Mexico. Well there have been way more in Canada. About 8 of them in Southern Ontario (a hundred miles from NiteHackr) which is right next to the US border (and also shares waterways with the US, though I'm not sure that matters).

If the USA is going to shut down borders over coronavirus I think it would make more sense to shut down the border with Canada first at this point. That won't likely happen though. Perhaps because the majority of Canadians are still caucasian.

Also some American communities on the Northern border rely on Canadian commerse to even exist.

NiteHackr said:

Do that and it will be the last thing you ever do kid.

Big tough man picking a fight with children, eh! ;D

NiteHackr said:

You don't want to push your luck with me kid. I can respect your opinion and if you want to be retarded and inject poison into your body, go for it, but if you EVER threaten me or my family with that shit, I WILL GET VERY VERY VIOLENT ON YOUR ASS!!! Guaranteed!!! >:(>:(>:(

Well, yeah, because you're not very intelligent and your hormones quickly overpower your intellect. That's not something to be proud of, though. I feel very sorry for you. I suggest anger management therapy, or perhaps talk to your doctor about treatment options to help control your rage. It's not like you don't have the time...

I mean, it was Jesus that said turn the other cheek. You're a complete fucking hypocrite. It's embarrassing. The reason you stop posting is because you realize you're making a fool of yourself. Unfortunately, after a year or so you forget and you come back and do it again. Maybe you should write a sticky-note on your monitor to wade through past threads before posting again so you can avoid it in the future. :-/

Also, while it's really not funny, I can't help being amused by the "church" (cult) in South Korea that is being accused of causing the virus to spread so quickly:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/21/world/asia/south-korea-coronavirus-shincheonji.html

https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/02/27/world/asia/27reuters-china-health-southkorea-church.html

Certainly, just pray to God and he'll protect you!

It's that kind of stupid thinking that holds humanity back.

References

  1. Research is lacking I think to say whether or not cannabis would help or hurt. Initially I was still vaping flower, but it started to irritate my already irritated throat. The only other THC I had in stock was capsules of pure THC suspended in MCT oil. I'm pretty much out of CBD oil. I initially took some of these capsules for recreation as I was cutting back on alcohol, but I don't really like the way that edibles kick in so slowly and subtly. And ultimately I concluded that THC without CBD was probably more likely to impair my immune function rather than boost it or remain neutral. I am definitely tempted to put in a new order for various cannabis products though, both for when I recover fully and perhaps for the next time I get sick to offer me some potential relief.
Edgar Reynaldo

FWIW NiteHackr, I apologize if I was threatening you. But surely your reaction was a bit over the top shall we say? Chill dude. We all came here to program, not verbally abuse each other, though I do like baiting you.

jmasterx

+1 Bams

I dunno,

These forums are becoming less and less fun to visit with time. I think I'll eventually just stop visiting and follow in the footsteps of Trent G, Peter W and many more. Is Aaron Bolyard the only one even making games around here anymore? ???

Neil Roy

@NiteHackr: I'm legitimately curious, are you against all vaccines or just some? For example, do you routinely get vaccinated for tetanus?

Edgar answered it for me...

No, he's just stubborn and believes that faith is the solution to everything

As a matter of fact, the last visit to my doctor (which was forced upon me, either I visit or I lose my doctor, and anyone in Canada knows how hard it is to get a doctor up here in the land of free healthcare) he offered me a tetanus shot and I refused. He didn't like that, ah well, my body, my choice. I'm healthy and wish to keep it that way.

I could type out a lengthy list of things that have happened to me where faith in GOD has helped me. In one instance, I had something happen the instant I prayed about it, but it would be pointless to post in here. I prayed about my type 2 diabetes, it was healed, no longer on pills etc... and someone has already come up with a reason why it had nothing to do with my faith, so why bother to list off anything else or explain myself further. I'm certain someone will have a "rational" explanation as to why it happened (as opposed to my irrational faith which has kept me healthy).

If my improved health doesn't convince you that it works, absolutely nothing else will.

Anyhow, I already deleted my bookmark for this website, I think I'll go back to avoiding this place as it brings out the worst in me, which I do not like.

My apologies for my angry response, though I still feel that if you think that "jabbing me with a needle" to force your vaccines onto me or anyone is a good idea, than you need to seriously reevaluate your morals. And if nobody else in here sees his comment about doing that as wrong, well, that's all the more reason to avoid these forums.

I'm done "debating" in here, it's pointless. I'll do it my way which has actually worked. You trust your vaccines etc and see where that gets you. My mother trusted the doctors and this world and she died at 49. My oldest brother trusted the doctors, their pills and vaccines and he also died a few years ago. My father refused meds which made his legs weak (statins, very bad for you) and he just turned 79.

Edgar Reynaldo

NiteHackr you just don't like making a fool out of yourself, which is all you seem to be doing.

WHO said:

WHO estimates immunizations prevent between two and three million deaths annually and protect many more people from illness and disability. It notes there are new life-saving vaccines against diarrhea and pneumonia, and reports the development of vaccines to protect adolescents and adults against influenza, meningitis and cervical and liver cancers.

Health officials urge nations to build upon these successes and not to become lulled into a sense of false security. They also note that measles and other diseases are spreading in the United States, Canada and Europe because some parents have stopped immunizing their children.

bamccaig
NiteHackr said:

My apologies for my angry response, though I still feel that if you think that "jabbing me with a needle" to force your vaccines onto me or anyone is a good idea, than you need to seriously reevaluate your morals. And if nobody else in here sees his comment about doing that as wrong, well, that's all the more reason to avoid these forums.

It's not just "jabbing you with a needle" to "force" ideas on you. It's forcing you to receive protection from harmful diseases that will help to protect you and others (obviously, anybody can be a carrier of disease, but somebody that actually becomes infected with the disease will carry it longer and further than somebody that just happens to get the virus on/in them without allowing it to grow off of them).

Doctors, who despite their flaws and faults still know more about this than anyone, universally supported everyone getting flu shots and vaccinations. Ultimately, we must trust science because that science is knowledge, and knowledge is the best we can do. Science is not perfect, however, it can be proven to be effective which is more than anyone can say of their faith.

The reason I can dismiss your faith as a contributor to your so-called healing is because I know for a fact that it's not a reliable way to get help. If it was we could test it and prove that it works. We cannot. What happens is that people pray to God for things, and if they get them they credit God, and if they don't get them then they excuse it as not God's will. It doesn't work that way. Either it's God's doing or it's not. Either it works or it doesn't. If you have no way of knowing whether or not praying will help then there's no reason to pray at all. Sometimes, more often than I sometimes deserve, things work out very well for me (and other times, they don't). I'm an athiest. I don't believe that any God exists at all. I regularly curse and mock the idea, especially the Christian God because it's what I was raised to believe in and the most likely God for my peers to believe in. It certainly wouldn't make much sense for any Christian God to help me out.

Praying to God has never been demonstrated under reasonable conditions (i.e., no magician pulling strings behind a curtain) to be any more effective for getting what you want than just hoping for it or doing nothing at all. Sometimes you get what you want and sometimes you don't. It has a whole lot to do with privilege and luck. Being born to lower-middle class families in Canada instead of being born to impoverished families in South Sudan, Iraq, or North Korea has a whole lot more to do with our relatively good fortunes than either of our beliefs.

We can't even be sure that you ever had diabetes, let alone that it's cured. And it's not even scientifically impossible for that to have happened on its own. Seemingly serious, incurable diseases seemingly disappear on a regular basis around the world. It's rare, but it does happen, and so far scientists cannot explain them (once we explain them with science they fall out of that category). We don't know everything yet, and we never will. If you want to take your chances, ignore doctors and science, and just truth in your faith that's your business. I don't generally have a problem with that.

As far as I'm aware there is no risk to anyone else from you refusing pharmaceuticals for a diabetes diagnosis, nor of you refusing a tetanus shot or flu shot. I've lived without either for about 20 years myself. I just got an updated tetanus shot about a month ago, now that I finally have a GP of my own, and a wife that cares enough for me to care about myself. Prior to that my last shot was probably as a preadolescent.

However, your liberties end where the next man's begin. Your freedom to be ignorant does not afford you the freedom to risk other people's lives. If coronavirus continues to spread and continues to be deadly it may well come to a point where forced vaccines are necessary for the very survival of the human species. And in such a case I would fully support you being vaccinated at gunpoint, or killing you if you refused.

I don't think that's likely to happen, however. Hopefully we'll manage to contain it and/or treat enough of the population so that it no longer presents a serious threat, and those that refuse vaccinations will be the only ones vulnerable. Maybe our immune systems will even begin to adapt and form their reliable defences.

I think it was always pretty obvious that Edgar was never actually threatening to personally poke you with a needle (don't worry, Neil, I just had one and they don't hurt nearly as bad as I remember as a child!). He isn't even from the same nation so even if his government decided to force vaccinations on its people, which is probably among the least likely nations to do so, it wouldn't extend to you. Relax, and don't take things so seriously.

All that said, I choose to put my faith in the scientific community, and that extends to doctors and other health professionals. They say that everybody should be vaccinated, and that the risks are negligible. For that purpose I would support forced vaccinations if only to improve everyone's quality of life.

As a conservative, you might also appreciate that if everyone was vaccinated say against the flu every year that might boost the economy by boosting productivity and reducing sick days used. Regardless of political leaning I think that we can all agree that that is a desirable outcome (except for maybe a few of us that benefit from the extra break from workplace environments). Your fear of vaccinations is out of ignorance, not education nor experience. You have been vaccinated before and you're just fine, as you keep emphasizing. Most of us are doing reasonably well, and we've all been vaccinated before with something.

There are individual quack doctors or scientists (you often quote them to support your ideas), but overall the scientific and medical communities are very reliable for doing what's best for us. They would not be recommending people get a flu shot if there was more risk doing so than not for the average person, or they'd be more specific in their recommendations to target only those most vulnerable. Instead, the vast majority agree that everyone should be vaccinated. The risks are negligible.

And finally I am 100% against the pharmaceutical industry that has proven time and again that it puts profits above patient health. It is enraging and sickening that governments from both extremes permit and even empower this. There really are medicines that do more harm than good, and sometimes misinformed or misguided doctors push those on people en mass. The solution there isn't to stop trusting doctors, but rather to stop trusting our corrupt bought-and-paid-for governments. Science only works as well as it is allowed to work. That means we need to fund all of the science, not just the science that is highly profitable. Pharmaceuticals are highly profitable. Cannabis, which anyone can grow, is only highly profitable during prohibition. And that explains why it has been prohibited for so long. But we've managed to undo that, and if we keep working together we can disenfranchise the elite and empower the every-man instead.

For example, government can ban for-profit pharmaceuticals. I personally believe it is unethical to make a profit from medicine, let alone life-saving medicine. Proprietary medicine should not be a thing. Instead, medicine should be forced open and free, and sold at cost to produce and deliver it (and even then, subsidized by taxpayers when that remains out of reach). Once the money disappears from the equation you'll find that a whole lot less harmful drugs are available or prescribed, and only medicines that actually do good will be prescribed. That won't happen until we force it to happen though.

NiteHackr said:

I'm done "debating" in here, it's pointless. I'll do it my way which has actually worked. You trust your vaccines etc and see where that gets you. My mother trusted the doctors and this world and she died at 49. My oldest brother trusted the doctors, their pills and vaccines and he also died a few years ago. My father refused meds which made his legs weak (statins, very bad for you) and he just turned 79.

Correlation does not imply causation. The two events are unrelated. Life is extremely complicated. Far more complicated than we often have time to give it credit for. As a rule, most of it is out of our control, and we're just along for the ride. Unfortunately, bad things happen sometimes, even to good people, even to people that do everything "right". And contrarily sometimes great things happen to people that do everything "wrong". There isn't always a relationship between events. Sometimes A leads to B, and sometimes B occurs in spite of no A. The complexity of life is awe-inspiring (and no, I do not require any deity or supreme-being to explain how it can be so).

Your own faith in God pretty much rules out any correlation at all. For all you know, God is pulling the strings entirely, and deciding who lives and dies. Perhaps nothing any of us do matters. Surely if your God can protect you from the flu he can also protect you from the flu shot. ;) What are you afraid of?

Neil Roy

Truly this Bible verse is proven true in here...

Proverbs 9:7 (NIV)
Whoever corrects a mocker invites insults; whoever rebukes the wicked incurs abuse.

raynebc
bamccaig said:

Border control doesn't mean much unless you're going to shut down your border and restrict Americans from coming back too.

Well obviously that's the point. The countries that have been paying attention have quarantined their returning citizens. The problem is that the incubation period for the virus was underestimated and in some cases quarantine procedures were willfully violated. And no, it's not racist to target our most porous border, but that's just the type of lame propaganda I've come to expect that from some people in this thread. Administering a vaccine against somebody's will is a form of violence, but I suppose to a globalist, personal autonomy is not important in this instance but it is in others (ie. abortion "rights").

Erin Maus
jmasterx said:

Is Aaron Bolyard the only one even making games around here anymore?

I'm pretty sure I'm the only active older-timer member who is making a game.

I only stick around so when I sell enough copies to afford a Tesla Roadster I can rub it in everyone's faces. 8-)

jmasterx

I only stick around so when I sell enough copies to afford a Tesla Roadster I can rub it in everyone's faces.

I've always really admired your vector graphic stuff, I think it's sooo cool! I hope you do sell a lot of copies!

Erin Maus

Thank you! I'm planning launching on Steam via Early Access by the end of the year. I should be 1/3rd of the way done by then, and have 20-40 hours of content. Currently there's 5 hours of content.

I'm hoping for about ~10K copies sold, which means I could afford a down payment on a house sooner than later in Charlotte, NC.

I'd need to sell ~150K copies to afford a Tesla Roadster. (Keyword being afford, ~35K copies means I could buy one).

These numbers reflect post-taxes, post-Steam's cut. If I manage to get a publisher, I'd need higher numbers because the publisher will take a cut as well. And this is assuming a price point somewhere between $14.99 and $19.99. It's all very fuzzy.

Chris Katko

Likewise, best of luck game!

bamccaig

Valve/Steam is a publisher, and one of the best, and I think they're pretty open to hosting any game with market potential, so I don't think you'd need to get a separate publisher. And I 100% believe that the game you're making would pass Steam approval, and probably do relatively well. That is, with the 30-40 hours of content you're aiming for; though I think they've even supported 5 hour games in the past.

Of course, you could instead try the pay-what-you-want model and hope for true success. It encourages a little income from people that couldn't or wouldn't at "retail" price, while also empowering the generous to give extra. I could see a game like yours doing well in Humble Bundle (though honestly I haven't been keeping up with that since they sold out so perhaps that's not a thing anymore?).

Erin Maus

Valve won't advertise your game, (e.g.) Adult Swim Games will. 🙃

I've heard a lot of good games die in the depths of Steam's humongous catalog. I don't know how true that is, but I don't want mine to be one of those!

I gotta change my name then form an LLC too. Ugh wait a pain.

...

Also Donald Trump PERSONALLY ruined my plans tonight. Traffic is gonna so bad on I-77 because he's giving a rally in Charlotte, NC at the Bojangles Coliseum (of course!). UNFORGIVABLE.

If I go to north Charlotte (i.e., University City), I have to take I-77.

Edgar Reynaldo

You've put a lot of good work into this game Aaron. You should be proud of all you've done so far.

@bambams
Blasphemy is no joke. Consider God real, even if you find no proof of him. Better you stay on his good side. ;)

Polybios

Oh wow you "believers" are reaching new lows any time you turn away from the shithole this nice forum has become for a while. Now you threaten violence to each other... :-/ Have you passed kindergarden?

Blasphemy is no joke. Consider God real, even if you find no proof of him. Better you stay on his good side.

Can't you just stop threatening people with your crap for a while? Is this compulsive? Just shut the fuck up and focus on the big planks obviously protruding from your frontal cortices. >:(

Best of luck to you and your game, Aaron. :)

Edgar Reynaldo

It wasn't a threat. It was friendly advice.

There's no plank in my eye, but thank you for your consideration of my well being.

NiteHackr has a rage problem. He should see a doctor. Or a priest.

And God doesn't offend me, you're the one with the problem.

jmasterx

Blasphemy is no joke. Consider God real, even if you find no proof of him. Better you stay on his good side. ;)

I'm not trying to stir shit up but by that logic couldn't I say:

Consider Santa real, even if you find no proof of him. Better you stay on his good side. ;)

You could literally say that about any entity that cannot be proved tangibly.

Faith and spirituality are very personal and individual experiences. Nothing is real anyways, our whole reality is filtered through our brain. I do believe that some people have had genuine life changing religious experiences. I do believe for some people, religion can be helpful for a variety of things. Hope, guidance, role model, and many other practical applications. I don't think people should literally fear God, or behave a certain way 'just in case' there is someone watching you and keeping track of your goodness.

I think it should better your life, and help you be the best person you can be. If it doesn't do that then it's not right for you.

I don't think religion should be pushed on people too. In the same way, a medication prescribed for John could have terrible consequences for Mary. If it's God's plan for you to follow Him and have Him guide you, then he will make sure you find Him.

There was a YouTuber named Christina Grimmie, her, her family, and best friends; all deep devoted, caring loving good, wholesome Christians.

Christina Grimmie was a hard working YouTuber working on her career as a singer, she was on The Voice in 2014. She was murdered in Orlando in June 2016 by a guy who was infatuated with her. Then about a year later her mother passed away after a battle with breast cancer. Christina's best friend Sarah has made a lot of interesting pod casts going into detail how it was a difficult struggle and how she questioned why God would have such a plan. It's quite interesting.

bamccaig

I got a flu shot today. 8-)

jmasterx

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Thank you Trump <3

raynebc

The virus scare was to blame for the abrupt drop, but persisting confidence in the markets was why it began correcting itself abruptly.

jmasterx

I'll just leave this here
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raynebc

Single day jumps aren't very meaningful. I'm sure you understand that.

jmasterx

Of course I do - I'm just being funny ;D

Neil Roy

A really fascinating video with some mind blowing facts about vaccines. Lengthy, but worth the watch.

video

Polybios said:

Oh wow you "believers" are reaching new lows any time you turn away from the shithole this nice forum has become for a while. Now you threaten violence to each other... :-/ Have you passed kindergarden?

You're absolutely right. my apologies, I did not set a good example. I just don't respond well to threats, but, I suppose I shouldn't respond to certain things at all. I'm still working on that aspect of myself, it's an uphill battle these days, but I am getting there. ;)

This is not how I am normally like, and it is why I don't come to these forums a lot anymore as it can get toxic in here.

bamccaig

Thanks for posting. I'm stoned right now, but that's actually a really provocative video.

Neil Roy

And now, something less toxic. I just about died laughing when I first seen this. ;)

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bamccaig

Licensed cannabis store just opened in my city. :D Tonight was the "grand opening". Of course, I went. Dropped $180 on vape pens and CBD oil. >:( I'm surprised how well stocked they were, though they seem to be running out fast. It's nice to have it a short drive away now. No need to wait 3-5 days anymore. :D

Chris Katko

I find it hilarious how the media is bashing Bernie the same way it did Trump (while liberals were completely okay with it) and now a sudden... it's a bad thing!

This week, the New York Times (not Fox News!) put out a "Bernie Sanders is an agent of the Soviet Union [not Russia. SOVIET. UNION]". It wasn't even in the opinion section.

The last eight years have never made it more clear that the MSM are just a wing of the DNC establishment. And if they want you peasants to vote for someone that is pro-war, they're gonna tell you.

Edgar Reynaldo

Let us not forget New York brought us greats like Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg...

raynebc

People are so biased they'll claim Trump is an agent of Russia/USSR, but Bernie (who has been a super fan of Socialism his entire adult life) couldn't possibly be. I don't believe either of them are, but truth is stranger than fiction.

Edgar Reynaldo

Facts are not biased.

Trump welcomed interference from Russia to get his Presidency. Republicans routinely block election security bills. Trump extorted Ukraine. Give up, take your ball, and go home MAGA boy.

Chris Katko

Liberals are the most tolerant. 8-)

Neil Roy

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Edgar Reynaldo

You know you're lame when all you can do is throw the word liberal around. :/

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

adjective Pertaining to those arts and sciences the study of which is considered "worthy of a free man" (as opposed to servile, mechanical); worthy, befitting a gentleman.
adjective Generous, willing to give unsparingly;.
adjective Ample, abundant; generous in quantity.
adjective obsolete Unrestrained, licentious.
adjective Widely open to new ideas, willing to depart from established opinions or conventions; permissive.
adjective politics Open to political or social changes and reforms associated with either classical or modern liberalism.
noun One with liberal views, supporting individual liberty (see Wikipedia's article on Liberalism).
noun Someone left-wing; one with a left-wing ideology.
noun A supporter of any of several liberal parties.
noun US One who favors individual voting rights, human and civil rights, individual gun rights, and laissez-faire markets (also called "classical liberal"; compare libertarian).

Stuff it Neil.

By the way, this forum is really going to the dogs. ;p

raynebc

Liberals are generally reasonable people, leftists are proponents of radical-left ideology. Edgar is the latter, and if he wasn't so partisan he would have a better grasp of the facts.

Edgar Reynaldo

Excuse me raynebc, but kindly point out which facts I'm confused about. Because you have no ground to talk. You're standing on quicksand.

By the way, your typical Republican gas-lighting doesn't work on me. :/

Neil Roy

8-)
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Edgar Reynaldo

Yes I am intolerant of idiocy and evil. Proud of it, too.

but I suppose you'd rather have me listen to alternative facts.

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;D

Neil Roy

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Edgar Reynaldo

That's funny Neil because the difference between me and Hitler is that he didn't believe Jews were people. Hitler founded socialism for the rich and powerful not for the poor of the working class. you have no f****** clue what democratic socialism is and you have no business talking about it like you do.

Neil Roy

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:D

Ecclesiastes 10:2 (NIV)
The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left.

Erin Maus

You do realize "right" and "left" come from French Revolution based on where certain people sat next to the king, correct? The revolutionaries sat to the left of the king while his supporters sat to the right...

The idea of "left" being bad predates the Bible. Sinistrous means "left", for example, and "sinister" comes from that. It's prehistoric superstition.

Edgar Reynaldo

Neil. All I can do is shake my head and facepalm for you.

The political idea of left and right didn't come about until renaissance times, and came from France. By the aristocracy, who condemned the 'left', just as you are, because they were against the status quo, and against a corrupt ruling class.

It's called blaming the victim. Heard of it?

By the way, 3 cases of the coronavirus were just reported in my local county where I live. I hope I survive 12-18 months until I can get the vaccination.

Because it's not a matter of if you'll get the coronavirus, it's when, and whether or not you'll survive it.

Something else for Trump to f**k up. Too few tests, too few precautions, too little actual action all lead to pandemic outbreaks.

Tell me Neil, in your wisdom, if there was a vaccine which was safe and prevented you from getting an illness that could kill or cripple you, would you take it? If not, would you be prepared to take on the responsibility of paying for your hospitalization? Because insurance shouldn't pay for care for anti-vaxxers who get sick because they're stupid. That's exactly why measles outbreaks occurred in the recent past, because people didn't get vaccinated. But whatever dude, you know best.

raynebc

Do you think Trump is individually responsible for the world's manufacture of the tests, let alone the vaccine? How blatantly dumb can you be? The countries of the world don't have the capacity to immediately provide enough tests for everybody.

Your argument about not covering people opposed to vaccines isn't even as valid as calling for health insurance to not cover healthcare for people who get AIDS through risky behavior such as recreational drugs or sex, or people who are obese because they overeat, or for people who smoke/vape, etc. This is because deliberately engaging in risky behavior reflects more responsibility in outcome than not doing something optional like taking an annual vaccine. I fully support getting long term vaccines for dangerous diseases like measles, compared to something like the flu with around a 0.1% mortality rate.

China is to blame for the world being unprepared for this virus, not Trump. China covered up its existence by jailing people who tried to get the truth out.

Edgar Reynaldo

Whenever you feel like pulling your head out of the sand, I'd be glad to discuss this with you.

Trump worked on dismantling Obama era CDC testing sites and funding. He has repeatedly downplayed the virus. The stocks are not tumbling because of the coronavirus, but because we have an incompetent boob (no offense to boobs) in the highest office of the land. Pence doesn't know jack shit about handling infectious diseases. Trump ignores his scientists and makes up facts and figures talking about how much he knows about this (just like how much he knows about everything else). He promised a million tests a week ago. There are barely any tests out yet because he cut funding to the CDC centers that would right now literally be manufacturing them.

raynebc

If you were more inclined to set aside your petty politics and embrace truth, I'd be more inclined to discuss things with you. You burned any trust I have that you are an honest person long ago.

Edgar Reynaldo

My dear raynebc. I have never been anything but honest with you. You can take that to the bank.

That's just it. You want to set aside politics and discuss truth? The truth is Trump is a pathological liar, a complete detriment to our economy, our nation, and our peoples, and basically about the worst kind of person you can be.

@NiteHackr
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jmasterx

That's just it. You want to set aside politics and discuss truth? The truth is Trump is a pathological liar, a complete detriment to our economy, our nation, and our peoples, and basically about the worst kind of person you can be.

Well of course, but people voted for this... Didn't anyone watch the apprentice? People voted in a pathological liar, there are plenty of these in the world, what did people expect?

Edgar Reynaldo

3 million more people voted for Hillary. :/

I sure as f*** didn't vote for Trump.

jmasterx

Yeah, I think the whole Electoral College thing is weird.... should be raw vote count if you ask me....

My point is you still live in a country where that many people intentionally voted for a well known pathological liar :P

When a country is that split on its beliefs and values, maybe it should be divided into 2 separate entities...

Neil Roy
jmasterx said:

Yeah, I think the whole Electoral College thing is weird.

You need to do your research and understand why it is necessary. The whole point of it is to have EQUAL REPRESENTATION ACROSS THE NATION. You can only get that with an Electoral College. If it was based purely on the percentage of the population, than you would have single states that would always pick the president due to their high population and the rest of the nation would have no say at all.

The Electoral College has worked in favor of the liberals as well. Here in Canada the majority of the population voted for Andrew Scheer, the Conservative leader, but Trudeau won because he won more seats. And though I don't like Trudeau I accept the outcome because I understand the importance of equal representation.

Chris Katko

I'm voting for either Bernie, or if the DNC screws him, Trump again.

I also voted for Obama, which I regret because he was actually a plant designed to lie to Americans about "Change" while simply empowering and protecting banks, wall street, and health insurance companies while continuing to blow up brown people to sell bombs. [Of course both candidates (McCain) were complete plants designed to protect the establishment. Obama had change. McCain had 'no change' and he had his bimbo VP Sarah Palin to appeal to conservative virgins.]

Also, why are all official Democrats such idiots? Why can't we fix our healthcare, fix the environment AND not turn legal, law-abiding gun owners into criminals, as if a gun prohibition will somehow work? (the last drug one worked out great!)

Meanwhile, the Republicians will protect your free speech rights and gun rights, but they'll rape the earth until there's nothing left, while laughing as homeless people, immigrants, and EVERYONE ELSE dies from unaffordable healthcare.

And both parties are complete idiots when it comes to education.

Both parties are completely ignorant of nuclear power--the only actual clean, green energy. Democrats have NO PROBLEM with the use building, and driving around NUCLEAR BOMBS, but somehow, nuclear power plants? We can't be trusted!!! Bombs? okay. Life and environment saving power? NO THANK YOU.

Neil Roy

Both parties are completely ignorant of nuclear power--the only actual clean, green energy.

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Edgar Reynaldo

Even though I despise Biden, I would still vote for him over Trump.

Chris Katko

NiteHackr: You can be ignorant of science all you want. Coal is terrible, and so is wind and solar (where do you think all those rare earth minerals to build them come from? sun rays?)

I suggest if you think pollution isn't real, you start your car in your garage and take a nap. The results may shock you!

Neil Roy

Chris Katko: I don't drive. I don't even have a license. If you're so concerned about the pollution cars make, than throw away your license and stop driving. The western nations are about the cleanest when it comes to pollution as any others in the world. If you want to tackle pollution, than you need to talk to the Asian nations where 90% of it comes from. Any tiny difference we make won't effect a thing with the pollution they are putting into the air and ocean.

As for nuclear power, I have a word for you; RADIATION or how about CHERNOBYL, FUKASHIMA or THREE MILE ISLAND?! I suggest you go camping in FUKASHIMA for a while, or maybe CHERNOBYL, the results may shock you! Nuclear power clean and green?! Wow... :o

raynebc

Edgar, the Democrats in Congress are filled with pathological liars and moral bankruptcy. Also, if your State's primary hasn't happened yet, don't forget to go vote for Warren!

MiquelFire

I thought Warren already dropped out.

Edgar Reynaldo

I did caucus for Warren, and sadly, yes she has dropped out.

Down to Bernie and Biden. Not my first choices, but I'll gladly support Bernie.

Biden touches other people's kids and smells women's hair. He's a creep.

Chris Katko

Biden touches other people's kids and smells women's hair. He's a creep.

He's also going completely senile and the MSM is desperately trying to cover it up. They're now reporting that the (1 of 3000+) verbal slipups he had at a convention saying "we're going to re-elect Trump" was "deceptively edited" as part of some conservative plot.

Except... I found the video... on the bernie sanders subreddit. It wasn't deceptively edited. It shows a senile old man being senile. The words "we're going to re-elect trump" isn't the important part. The important part is he doesn't know what the hell he's saying.

His verbal gaffs are too many to frivolously discount. If the DNC wants a senile old man, it's because they know they can control him.

Can you imagine, how INSANE the presidential debate vs Trump will be? No amount of MSM editing will save him if they're watching it live.

video

Edgar Reynaldo

Chris Katko - how much credence do you give to a possibly corrupt DNC that is trying to nominate Biden and push Sanders under the rug like they did in 2016 with Hillary?

Also, how do you feel about the minimization of Tulsi Gabbard? She's the only one to speak out against the war machine and she is routinely prevented from debating in the democratic debates.

Neil Roy

In other news, I just about died laughing when I seen this meme today. ;)
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MiquelFire

An article I read (I think this morning, not sure) was about a news outlet asking people about the reason for why toilet paper was being hoarded. For the most part, no one knew why, and I think all but two were shopping for toilet paper that day because they were out anyway (so even if there wasn't the run on toilet paper, they would be out buying that day regardless)

The last dude in the interview learned how much toilet was selling for on eBay, and I think the reporter made a new eBay seller that day :P

And something kinda related:

video

bamccaig
NiteHackr said:

Here in Canada t he majority of the population voted for Andrew Scheer, the Conservative leader, but Trudeau won because he won more seats.

Canadians do not vote for the Prime Minister. Canadians vote for an MP (or MPP at the provincial level), who is supposed to be a local representative to give their region a voice in government. The elected MPs (or MPPs) then vote for Prime Minister or Premier, and typically that means the party of allies that won the most seats will elect their party leader. In this case, the Liberals won more seats than anyone else and so Trudeau was re-elected. You're right that the system attempts to restore some balance to prevent heavily populated regions from controlling all of the power, however, it does a decidedly poor job of this. If you actually care about getting what you want you should vote for a local representative most likely to represent your needs. Voting for a party to be in power, or for a party based upon its leader, means that you will be getting what the party wants instead of what you want or need. And unless you're in the top 1% that likely won't do you much good overall. Voting Conservative when you aren't in the top 1% pretty much guarantees you're going to get robbed (case in point: Alberta and Ontario).

Though the Conservatives, NOT Scheer, got more votes overall than the Liberals; the Liberals won more seats because they had the most votes in more ridings than other parties. More regions didn't want Conservative than those that did.

Of course, we all know that first-past-the-post is a very poor system because while one way to interpret the results is that 33.1% of Canadians wanted Liberals in power and 34.4% of Canadians wanted Conservatives in power[1]. The better way to interpret the results though is that 63.6% of Canadians did NOT want Conservatives in power, and 64.9% of Canadians did NOT want Liberals in power.

Many of the votes for Liberal or Conservative MPs were out of desperation because the first-past-the-post system does not allow everyone's vote to actually count. Many people vote strategically for the lesser evil in their riding because they'd rather have a chance to avoid the worst evil than waste their vote on a candidate that can't realistically get the most votes, at no fault of their own or their politics. I was fortunately able to vote Green in my riding for 2019, and still have the Liberal candidate win; but in the previous election I strategically voted Liberal to keep the Conservative candidate out.

References

  1. Mostly from Western provinces dependant on oil, or Southern Ontario which are pretty much Americans in disguise. Still the majority of Ontario voters voted Liberal. Conservatives only had the numbers they did because of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. And after what Ford has done to Ontario, and what Kenny has done to Alberta, you can expect the Conservatives to be a LOT less popular next time around.
Erin Maus

Chris Katko, you do know another 4 years of Trump means 1-2 more extremely conservative Supreme Court judges?

For as much as the right hates "activist" judges, it's fine if they're conservative.

raynebc

Constitutional originalism is not the same as activism. But we know you don't understand the difference.

Neil Roy

And something kinda related

That was too funny.

Erin Maus
raynebc said:

Constitutional originalism is not the same as activism. But we know you don't understand the difference.

Says the man who probably thinks Roe v Wade was activism.

Chris Katko

Chris Katko, you do know another 4 years of Trump means 1-2 more extremely conservative Supreme Court judges?

That's exactly why I voted for him. And I'm for liberal policies. You want to change the law? We have a building for that. It's called CONGRESS and requires people to debate things in public and be beholden to the democratic public's wishes--as opposed to the 9th circuit of appeals which is just another word for "liberal judge that does whatever the DNC tells him to" and the Supreme Court--which actually follows the law--keeps striking down.

You can want as many liberal policies as you want. But the second you start knocking down the centuries old protections and checks-and-balances we have, you are opening the door for future dictators. Every law bent by Obama for things "you wanted", was later used by Trump "to put kids in cages."

video

Says the man who probably thinks Roe v Wade was activism.

It... actually was. The woman at the core of it, even regretted "being used", and turned the rest of her life into a crusade against abortion. "That doesn't matter" I can already hear it in your head. Which is sad, because apparently a woman's opinion only matters when it's for the thing you think she should think. The same way Democrats treat black people who show any unorthodox-to-the-DNC thoughts. (Fun fact: A record number of blacks and Hispanics are now voting for Trump because they're sick of the DNC taking their votes for granted and never actually helping them. >48%< of Hispanics "omg I thought he put them all in cages--maybe I didn't know what the hell I was talking about.", and 27% of blacks.)

Another fun fact: Super liberal Ruth Bater Gisnberg has publically stated, to Salon/Slate/Huffington Posts horror, that Roe v Wade is incorrect judgement. Why? The answer is pretty simple. She's a goddamn Supreme Court justice who takes her role as a someone setting precedent now with impact for centuries in the future, that if people want abortion legal, congress should pass a law. You know, their entire job.

Want more immigrants (like I do)? Pass a !@$!'ing law to make it easier to get in legally. So you don't have a bunch of illegal immigrants 1) pissing off all the legal immigrants (that's real, btw), and 2) constantly afraid of going to the cops because they might be deported so it's easy to exploit them by citizens AND employers.

The answer is pass a law not, conveniently forget about illegal immigration while your president is in office leaving them to constantly wonder whether the next one will kick them out.

The solution to "congress is totally inept" is not to "forget congress and ignore the laws" the solution is: FIX THE UNDERLYING PROBLEM. Ignoring the laws ALWAYS comes back to haunt you. It's not applied equally (doesn't equality matter???) and it's abused by later politicians. Why should Mexicans in California get good treatment, but those in every other state get screwed? Because it's not a !@$!'ing law. And those Mexicans deserve to be treated well just as good as those privileged enough to be in California.

Erin Maus

Can't wait for the Republican senate to extend civil rights to protect gender identity when the activist Republican judges make it legal to fire peeps if they're transgender. You know, that big Supreme Court case that's been going on for a few months now.

Wait, that's not going to happen...

bamccaig

It's a problem that "executive orders" exist at all and/or can be used so easily. Obviously, the laws to govern them need to be tightened up, or just remove the concept entirely. There's no point debating the effects of that if you aren't going to question it directly because it'll just keep happening until you take it away.

The problem is that the system has too few voices. We inevitably end up with either one voice in power, or two voices deadlocked. One voice in power is basically a dictatorship in a red dress. Two voices deadlocked is a waste of everybody's time. There should be thousands (not hundreds, let alone 2) of voices, and everybody should be protected from backlash from their "party" (or we should just abolish parties).

Perhaps the votes in the house/congress/senate need to be anonymised so that everybody has plausible deniability that they voted in line with their party even when they didn't. At some point it'll become pretty damn obvious that you did because so did almost everybody else, but until then people would be free to vote the way they feel without worrying about their job.

Eric Johnson

How's everyone's stocks doing? :'(

Edgar Reynaldo

Hey, if the stocks keep dropping, I might be able to invest!

jmasterx

How's everyone's stocks doing?

I moved all my shares of DOW to a high interest savings account a month ago #sheltered

It's gonna be a nice boost once I opt back in when the volatility decreases.

bamccaig

I knew I forgot something. 8-)

raynebc

Aaron, there is no constitutional right to abortion. It was a twisted legal ruling that very well may not survive another generation. Never mind inconvenient realities like the founder of Planned Parenthood being a racist eugenicist who wanted to lower the black population. It doesn't matter that I'm a man that I have strong opinions on abortion, it matters because directly murdering humans for selfish reasons is objectively evil. And spare me any of the boring leftist tripe like the use of fossil fuels makes me a global scale murderer and that kind of blah, blah, blah.

And yes, I agree that it shouldn't be executive policies and courts that fill in gaps left by the legislative branch. Both sides need to be willing to compromise a certain amount, but politics is polarizing. There are fringe elements on each side that demand things the other side will never agree to, ie. banning abortions under ALL circumstances (even rape or critical physical health complications in the mother) or open borders.

Edgar Reynaldo

raynebc you want to talk constitutional? Women have the right to physical autonomy. Until the umbilical cord is severed, that baby is the physical extension of the mother, and as such, only she would have the decision or say as to whether or not and what she decides to do with her own body.

You know why people are coming to the US in droves? Because of HOPE for a BETTER LIFE. Most of them are fleeing murder, rape, and risking both to get here or cross the border.

WTF ever happened to this America? :

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

Neil Roy

WTF ever happened to this America?

It still exists. Immigrants are still welcome to enter the nation legally. This has always been the case, and under the last three presidents they have all talked about the need to crack down on ILLEGAL immigrants. And there are LEGAL immigrants that entered LEGALLY that support Trump on this, just as they probably supported Obama when Obama spoke out against Illegals, or Bush, or Bill Clinton. They are all on record speaking out against illegals. NONE of them, including Trump has a problem with LEGAL immigrants and he has said so. Heck, Trump's wife is a legal immigrant.

Quit swallowing the leftist propaganda and do some research on it.

Eric Johnson
jmasterx said:

I moved all my shares of DOW to a high interest savings account a month ago #sheltered

Most of my money is in an HYSA, too. I was making like 2.69% a few months ago, but now it's down to ~1.37% with all the damned cuts.

Arvidsson

Money I need on a one-year time horizon I never keep in stocks. Longer-term savings I'm not that worried about, just gotta wait it out. Good time to invest a bit over time now when the buying is cheap.

Edgar Reynaldo
NiteHackr said:

It still exists. Immigrants are still welcome to enter the nation legally. This has always been the case, and under the last three presidents they have all talked about the need to crack down on ILLEGAL immigrants. And there are LEGAL immigrants that entered LEGALLY that support Trump on this, just as they probably supported Obama when Obama spoke out against Illegals, or Bush, or Bill Clinton. They are all on record speaking out against illegals. NONE of them, including Trump has a problem with LEGAL immigrants and he has said so. Heck, Trump's wife is a legal immigrant.

Don't give me that legalese bullshit. Trump is against immigrants period. You do know they're being kept in confinement areas, right? You know, cages?

“The arrest rate for illegal immigrants was 40 percent below that of native-born Americans.”

In addition, he wrote, the homicide arrest rate for native-born Americans was “about 46 percent higher than the illegal immigrant homicide arrest rate.”

All those damn law abiding illegal immigrants need to get out of our country, right NiteHackr? Oh wait, you're fucking Canadian and you have no say in our business whatsoever.

NiteHackr said:

Quit swallowing the leftist propaganda and do some research on it.

Take your own medicine, Neil Boi.

Neil Roy

You do know they're being kept in confinement areas, right? You know, cages?

Yup, cages built by Obama to house criminals who illegally enter the country. Because that's what you do with criminal, you put them in cages.

The LEGAL immigrants have no such problems. They enter and are welcome, and it is not "bullshit", like it or not, these are the facts. And as I already stated, every president in my living memory has been against illegal criminals and I can post the videos of them all saying that if you wish. Do you deny this as well?

And as I already said, the first lady is herself an immigrant, that fact alone proves you wrong and shows that Trump literally loves immigrants! He married one! And many more support him (the legal ones who respect the laws of the nation they wish to enter).

As for Canada, we have similar problems with them coming in here. But in any event, I have every right to voice my opinion Edgar.

Bill Clinton from 1995 speaking out against illegal immigrants...

video

Obama speaks out against illegal immigrants.

video

Immgrant husband and wife who support Trump's wall...

video

raynebc

Edgar, you're ethically and scientifically wrong on abortion. It doesn't matter how many rights you create out of thin air. A human fetus is in fact another human being, your refusal to admit basic objective truths on the matter doesn't change that.

I don't mind if people follow the legal process to come to the US. People who aren't following the legal process are causing lots of problems. Most of the people who illegally cross the southern border and claim asylum are in fact not valid asylees and are instead looking for work. Free handouts are one of the big reasons that the USA can't afford to just let everybody in the world who wants to come. Resources are not infinite. And as NiteHackr pointed out, if you ever use the leftist propaganda about illegals in cages as an attack on Trump without openly blaming Obama as well then you are a damned hypocrite and should be ignored as the hack you are.

Neil Roy

On a different topic. If you're nervous about the whole virus scare, or anything else in life. Keep the following scripture in mind (also note the verse numbers). I know I have been helped in some fantastic ways I won't go into here as I have already (and been mocked for it), but I still wish to post something as I don't believe in hiding my faith.

{"name":"612371","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/8\/1\/810e747c43c816629dc9f9fd1fdf3dce.jpg","w":930,"h":511,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/8\/1\/810e747c43c816629dc9f9fd1fdf3dce"}612371

LennyLen

I guess I'm safe then. I don't have a tent.

Neil Roy
LennyLen said:

I guess I'm safe then. I don't have a tent.

The idea being wherever you live of course. I know I have been. I used to be type 2 diabetic. I haven't taken meds for it for five years now. My doctor didn't like it, but I went on faith, prayer etc.

Sadly, my older brother trusted in doctors and their pills, he had type 2, went to type 1 and died three years ago.

I'll trust God. He has already helped me with this and much much more I could explain and be mocked for.

LennyLen

I have a story like that too. Just over a month ago I had (unbeknownst to me) a tumour the size of a grapefruit that perforated my small bowel and bled so much I lost a third of my bodies blood. A month later, and I was back at work as if nothing had ever happened. In my book, blood transfusions and a good surgeon beats prayer.

Edgar Reynaldo

There is no difference between "legal" and "illegal" immigrants when that distinction is completely arbitrary.

NiteHackr, next time you come to the US, I hope they put you in a dirty, crowded cage with nothing to sleep on, no hygiene and poor food. Would serve you right.

Trump is not a "champion of immigrants", he is a HYPOCRITE.

raynebc, are you a woman? Have you ever been pregnant? What gives you the right to decide what to do with other people's bodies?

Faith is one thing, but faith without works is DEAD. Just believing God will save you from everything is blind ignorance, and is not what he would want you to do. He would want you to take action. He would want you to listen to science. But you know, you do you.

LennyLen, I'm glad you're okay Buddy. ;)

bamccaig

It's good to know I'll be fine if I just focus on being the Most High. 8-)

raynebc

Edgar, what right do you have to say women should be allowed to murder their offspring? Are you a human? Do you have morals?

bamccaig

A fetus is not a human being. Or else we'd say baby instead of fetus. It's different, and you can bullshit all you want to, but nobody has to agree with your idea of what qualifies as a human.

We kill actual humans on a daily basis. Your government and country is particularly busy with it. So get off of your fucking high horse, and stop whining. It's none of your business what happens in a woman's uterus unless your DNA happens to be in there. Mind your own fucking business.

Edgar Reynaldo

raynebc, your mother brought you kicking and screaming into this world, and its her right to take you out of it.

If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out.

You should be lucky you're not a pregnant mother faced with a decision that will affect the rest of her life.

And if you're gonna argue that fertilized embryos are human beings too, then you can stuff it.

relpatseht

It's about bodily autonomy. Same reason you mark yourself as an organ donor. Even as a corpse, you have the right to deny someone else life if it means violating your body. Living women should have at least as many rights as corpses, I'd think.

jmasterx

and its her right to take you out of it.

I think if she killed him now she would be tried for first degree premeditated murder.

Edgar Reynaldo

I wouldn't find her guilty....

bamccaig

Corpses do not have any rights. There are laws to restrict what we can do to corpses, not to protect the corpses, but to protect the state of mind of their loved ones (or to protect society from who you might become if left unchecked).

Personally, I would be in favour of turning all of our dead into organ donors and donations to science. It's just going to rot in the ground anyway, or vaporize and pollute our air. It might as well do some good instead.

A fetus has no autonomy whatsoever. Take the mother away and the fetus cannot exist. Take the fetus away and the mother can remain perfectly fine (arguably, her physical condition will improve in fact). It's pretty fucking obvious which one of them deserves to override the other one.

I think you need to seriously reconsider your logic. It's faulty.

raynebc

bam failed biology. And leftists like you commonly argue that not even the father has a say whether his offspring lives or dies while he or she is in utero. To people like you, the mother can abort at any time for any reason on a whim. Autonomy is not a valid justification, it's something pro abortion people comfort themselves with because they don't have a stronger argument. Even after birth, a human baby depends on continuous care for years before it can survive "independently." Humanity would have died off long ago if we had to depend on logic like yours.

Edgar, you have no morals. Nobody has any right to kill me. That you would even joke so shows how compromised you are. And even though you are scientifically challenged, fertilized embryos are techically unique human beings, but I don't personally draw the line until implantation (the beginning of pregnancy) because that allows for more attempts to use contraception.

I'm marked as an organ donor, but even if I hadn't chosen to do so, that doesn't directly terminate another's life. False equivalence.

bamccaig

Ideally the father is married to the mother and if they decide to abort it will be a mutual decision. A wife aborting a baby without the father's approval is probably a matter for divorce court.

That said, should a father be able to force a woman to be pregnant that does not wish to be pregnant? No, not at all. That's completely irrational. Why would you want to? You want the mother of your child to be unfit or unprepared or just not wanting the child? Children require two parents to be happy and healthy (that's a generalization so don't waste anybody's time with exceptions). Single-parent families are much more likely to produce criminals and people suffering from other social issues (and typically taking it out on society).

If your wife (or partner, or lay) says they don't want to follow through with a baby that you want then you should be accepting that you've made a mistake and moving on. You can always have a baby with another woman. There are plenty of fish in the sea. No harm done. You have absolutely no grounds to force those 9+ months on her. Pregnancy is hard work, mentally draining, extremely unpleasant, and potentially deadly. It can only produce magic for people that want it. For anyone else it fucking ruins their life. And more, I think it's reasonable to conclude that a person's DNA is also something that they should have a say in. With the knowledge to end a pregnancy with few or no side effects we absolutely must make the option available to people, without shame or stigma.

Append:

I don't know how to understand your position without assuming insecurity with finding a mate, and wanting for success to mean just one night of luck. ::) Which is pretty pathetic. But also pretty irrational... Women generally want babies. It's men that don't. And there is no shortage of wild women looking in all the wrong places for mates. Babies are pretty much all win for women (most of the time). It gets them out of the workforce, taken care of, and brings meaning to their lives. Not ideal for a woman that is bound to be a millionaire CEO or tradesperson, but for the average woman bound to be a cashier at Target or an office worker it's great. Babies are theoretically great for men too, but only if they come at a time when they're ready for them.

All that I know is we got a puppy almost 3 months ago, and it's been hell (but also kind of nice). I can no longer sleep. I wake up around 6 AM every day and cannot sleep longer. I try to be in bed by 9:30 at the latest. It is stressing my psychology. I still enjoy it. Dogs are great. And I love him. But he's also a lot of work and frustrating.

Erin Maus

As a diversion, I'm making a minigame called Chicken Politickin' and I made some terrible decisions...

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Bow to your chicken overlords.

The minigame involves tackling chickens to knock them out. The more chickens you knock out, the more points you get. Get the most points before time runs out! Simple and stupid.

bamccaig

Disregard me, I'm stoned. :P It's a minigame with a provocative name... Welp, I'm sure it's fine.

raynebc

Generally speaking, the only way to force a woman to become pregnant is rape. Pro-abortion people keep forgetting that adoption is something that exists. Killing a human does harm. It deserves to be criticized. Justifying the killing of other humans for convenience deserves to be criticized. I know this brings divisiveness back in the thread, but some atrocities should not be ignored.

LennyLen
raynebc said:

Killing a human does harm. It deserves to be criticized. Justifying the killing of other humans for convenience deserves to be criticized.

I think you'll find that most pro-abortion people agree with you there. Where the disagreement lies is in what the definition of a human is.

Neil Roy
raynebc said:

I know this brings divisiveness back in the thread, but some atrocities should not be ignored.

Normally I would agree, but in here? It's utterly pointless and a waste of time to even try. Trust me, I have tried for a very long time. You'll only frustrate yourself while you go around and around and around. Logic doesn't work with these people. They will always find a way to justify their evil. And they will someday pay for it. Whether they believe it or not.

bamccaig
raynebc said:

Generally speaking, the only way to force a woman to become pregnant is rape.

Nobody said anything about forcing a woman to become pregnant. Shit happens. Condoms break or semen slips by. Birth control doesn't always work either. The only way to guarantee no baby is no sex. That might work well for losers, but for the rest of us we want to have recreational sex with no intention of reproducing!

raynebc said:

Pro-abortion people keep forgetting that adoption is something that exists.

Not at all. It's acknowledged, but it's not an ideal scenario for many couples. The woman still has to go through the hard work of pregnancy, and there are still risks for her health associated with the pregnancy. That's a pretty major burden to put on yourself for no return. It's an option, but it's not the only one or even the best one for many couples.

raynebc said:

Killing a human does harm. It deserves to be criticized. Justifying the killing of other humans for convenience deserves to be criticized. I know this brings divisiveness back in the thread, but some atrocities should not be ignored.

Terminating a pregnancy does very little harm. Almost negligible. The worst harm that it can do is emotional trauma for the parents, but it's up to the individual parents whether or not it's right for them. They have a choice. Nobody is forcing them to abort. If they decide that abortion is right for them then they can choose to live with the consequences. Just as parents that choose to go through with the birth have to live with the consequences (which are often horrible).

Birth isn't without its own risks. It's common for women to experience depression or other mental health disorders after birth. And there are physical risks as well.

The religious nuts like to pretend that the fetus is somehow a "magical" entity. Some sort of life force allocated directly by God. Something sacred. It's none of those things. It's just a collection of organic cells. There's no special meaning there. It's just another living organism. We kill those all the time. It doesn't take magic to make one. Literally any stupid fuck on the planet can make one, and the act doesn't have to be "wholesome" in any way (usually it's not). In the vast majority of pregnancies two people were fucking for fun, and oops it took. Many of these people are unfit to be parents. Many of them are unstable. Many of them don't know their partners' last name, let alone whether they're compatible with each other long term or not.

We put value on human life because humans are intelligent beings. They are conscious of their existence, and experience pain, trauma, and loss. They form bonds with other humans, and when a human that you have formed a bond with passes a way it impacts everybody whose lives they have touched.

My fetus doesn't automatically get to have that status just because you say so. Fuck you. Whether or not that fetus has any value to me is MY decision, not yours. If it's nothing but a bag of shit to me then I can choose to throw it away. End of story. Nobody hurt. Nothing lost. Just one of several possible outcomes. The universe couldn't care less. It's no more sacred than killing cattle or a cat or a mouse or a mosquito. It has the potential to turn into a human being, but it isn't one yet. And if it's prevented from becoming one then it won't ever know the difference.

There are some 8 billion known human beings currently in existence. It is estimated that approximately 100 billion more have lived and died. Those 100 billion people no longer exist. They can't feel anything. They can't be in pain. They can't be lonely. They don't feel regrets. They cease to exist. Similarly, within each living human there is the potential to create anywhere from hundreds of new humans to millions. Those billions more people that are never formed from those gametes do not feel anything. They never existed.

A fetus is not conscious of its existence. I don't remember being conscious of my existence until I was at least 2 or 3 years old. Prior to that if you had painlessly terminated my life it wouldn't have mattered any to me. And it only would have mattered to family and friends because they were given 2 or 3 years to get to know me and become invested in me. If you had instead terminated me before anybody other than my parents even knew that I was starting to form then literally nobody would miss me (assuming my parents didn't want me).

Your argument basically boils down to, "I believe fetuses are special and therefore you must do as I say with yours!"

To which I say, eat a bag of dicks!

jmasterx

For whom are funerals for?

LennyLen
jmasterx said:

For whom are funerals for?

Not the dead, that's for sure.

Erin Maus
bambam said:

The only way to guarantee no baby is no sex. That might work well for losers...

Or you know, asexual people...

jmasterx
bamccaig said:

The only way to guarantee no baby is no sex.

Virgin Mary: Am I a joke to you?

bamccaig

Or you know, asexual people...

Valid point. Though I seriously question whether people are truly asexual or simply have a hormone imbalance or something else wired "wrong". It seems scientists are unconvinced still too.

It's pretty common for women to experience very low libidos. Most of them could do without sex for years, if not indefinitely, without giving it much thought. Though with the right stimulation they come alive again. Apparently "asexuality" is much more common in women. Which I think you could argue is a correlation, but certainly I think researchers need to spend more time on it.

Anyway, I'm not trying to offend you. If you want to identify as asexual that's fine with me. It doesn't matter to me one way or another. Though if you are missing out on aspects of life due to a treatable condition I think it's unfortunate to have that overlooked.

I think it can also be argued that the terminology is misleading. It's not as though your physiology is capable of asexual reproduction. And likely your body is still capable of sexual reproduction, even if you lack an interest in doing so. You're not actual "asexual" in the original sense. Rather, it seems people who identify as asexual lack an identifiable libido. If they've tried every known treatment to increase their libido and had no effect then fair enough. But if it's just an excuse to be left alone being "different" I don't know that it's necessarily healthy to encourage that.

Meh. To each their own.

jmasterx said:

Virgin Mary: Am I a joke to you?

100%, yes.

Erin Maus

I think my therapist is more qualified to talk on this than you and for the last six months that has been a critical component of our discussions. Everything you said is wrong.

Asexual does not mean you don't have a libido. Sexual desire, sexual attraction, libido are all very different things. You can be asexual have a high libido, for example. When I was younger that was the case. (It was miserable.) The qualifier for asexual is generally not being sexually attracted to others.

My hormones are fine. I have my estrogen and testosterone levels checked frequently, you know, because I'm transitioning and all that. Within a few months they'll be in the normal cis-gender woman's ranges which will be great for me. But have zero affect on my sexuality.

I'm sex-repulsed asexual; I find sex disgusting and do not feel sexual attraction. The most rewarding intimate relationships I've had did not involve sex. The worst intimate relationships I've had involved me being shamed or otherwise coerced into something /I did not want/--sex.

I'd suggest reading "The Invisible Orientation."

This kind messes with Edgar's idea that homosexuality is lust because I don't feel lust and don't like sex but whatever. :) (I'm panromantic asexual, for reference--I'm romantically attracted to others regardless of gender but have zero interest in sex).

Sorry for all the edits, I'm sick (oOoOoooooOOOOOo hopefully not Corona) and am super tired, having a splitting headache, and just want to sleep.

bamccaig

I'd suggest not talking about things you're clueless on.

What a sheltered existence that must be. If you don't talk about ideas how do you expect them to spread?

Asexual does not mean you don't have a libido. Sexual desire, sexual attraction, libido are all very different things. You can be asexxual have a high libido, for example.

Hmmm, that's interesting. Though Google's definition for libido is "sexual desire". :-X Wikipedia's first paragraph appears to indicate the same. Is it laborious to define them each?

I'd suggest reading "The Invisible Orientation."

I wish I could read fast enough to do so. Though just the summary was provocative.

I really think the name is what sabotages the idea. It's a misleading name. It says one thing, and it means another. That's a bad name.

raynebc

LennyLen: The hard sciences don't disagree about what a unique human life is.

Bam: Just wanting fun and ignoring the consequences is not something responsible people do. People should be using multiple forms of birth control SIMULTANEOUSLY. The morning after pill and similar pre-pregnancy options exist, and I don't begrudge anyone their use. Abortion does more than emotional trauma, people have died from complications during abortion, and abortions have been seen to cause other health problems. I don't make religious arguments. Human fetuses are human lives by secular, scientific standards. Whether human lives have value is a philosophical debate, but whether a life is a life literally is not a philosophical debate. And that was quite bigoted of you to exclude asexual people. So lastly: Fuck you, you amoral clump of cells. I don't appreciate your abhorrent opinions on life and death, but I'm not inhuman enough to say you have no value. You have value to somebody.

Bob

Guys, chill. Don't make me lock this thread.

Arthur Kalliokoski
Bob said:

Guys, chill. Don't make me lock this thread.

Aw, c'mon, we're just getting started!

Edgar Reynaldo

@Bob
Better to burn out than to fade away! Heyaaa!

Seriously, the 4400 post thread locked by Bob? Allegro would end for sure.

EDIT
Cmon, we're only half way to 9000! Cmon, it'll be epic!

jmasterx

The worst thing to do would be to lock AT 9000 :(

Let this f​​u​c​k​e​r get over 9000 or shut the site down >:(

Edgar Reynaldo

Forty Four Hundred and Eighty Eight posts on the thread, 4488 posts on the thread, take one down pass it around Forty Four Hundred and Eighty Nine posts on the wall.

And now, from your coronavirus overlords - we're going to pay you to stay home. Don't worry we'll cut your medicare later...

Bob Keane
Bob said:

Guys, chill. Don't make me lock this thread.

Perhaps we should. XKCD's "Time" thread reached well over 2668 pages when it crashed the server.

Edgar Reynaldo

Agreed! We'll go out in a blaze of glory! It's settled then! When this thread breaks the server, we'll know it's time to get a haircut and get a real job like our Big Brother Bob.

Erin Maus

March 23st will be the 2rd anniversary of ItsyRealm's development.

If it weren't for Corona, I'd be making lemon cupcakes w/ purple frosting (you know, because ItsyRealm's logo is yellow/purple) this weekend and share them with friends & coworkers to celebrate on Monday. >:( Angry sounds.

jmasterx

March 23st will be the 2rd anniversary

I'm curious why you do not write it
March 23rd will be the 2nd anniversary

Erin Maus

Because I was being stupid. :p

Or is it because I am stupid? Dun dun dun.

*edit:* Do GIFs work? Let's see...

612377

Guess not. Anyway...

Chicken Politickin': You tackle giant oversized chickens (WITH HATS!) for combat XP and cooking supplies while a useless farmer runs around freaking out... it's just poetic.

*edit:* Does video work?

video

Nice.

Neil Roy

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;D

GullRaDriel

MDR X-D

Johan Halmén

Last man posting in this thread is a rotten egg.

Neil Roy

My first CD-ROM drive. Anyone remember these? The whole thing came out!
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MiquelFire

I don't think I ever saw anything that crazy.

relpatseht
Edgar Reynaldo

What, DirectX isn't dead yet? Well thank Microsoft for propping it up.

EDIT
It's like weekend at Bernie's all over again.

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relpatseht

That's Shawn Hargreaves.

GullRaDriel

Hi there. Who's not yet confined ?

LennyLen

Hi there. Who's not yet confined ?

New Zealand is on day four of a 28 day lockdown, but I still have to go to work as my workplace is considered an essential service.

Edgar Reynaldo
relpatSehT said:

That's Shawn Hargreaves.

Your point being? I wasn't suggesting Shawn was Bernie, but DirectX.

Neil Roy

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relpatseht

I wasn't suggesting Shawn was Bernie, but DirectX.

I see, my mistake. It's always funny the huge dichotomy in purported DX importance. Indies and students world over will swear it's useless, while I've rarely met a triple A dev who would even consider anything else where they can use it.

GullRaDriel

@NiteHacker I have a few medics and nurses in my family/friends. The places where the covid19 is rocking are overwhelmed and the >50yo suffer the most deaths. Let's hope for you that it's not going to hop onto Canada. (wait ... isn't that curve growing exponantially ?)
Anyway all the old grunts who think it's a hoax should try to get it as quick and as much as they can. It'll make less retirement and medical fee for their old days.
Wait and see bro.
@Lenny good luck to you. I hope you'll not catch it / you'll not give it ^^

Neil Roy

Oh, the virus is quite real, no doubt about it. People have died from it. I'm not stupid. But it is not as bad as they make out. No where near as bad as the flu has been! It is in Canada. So far, in Ontario, there have been 1,439 confirmed cases of it with 21 deaths (and I question that number as when someone dies from it, even if they had a pre-existing condition, they will blame it on covid-19 every time). So mathematically, that's a 1.46% (rounding up) morbidity IF you get it. The population of Ontario is an estimated 13.6 million, so that's only 0.01% of the population that actually has it after four months of it being out, and three of those months, our borders were all wide open and businesses were all open as well.

Now compare that to flu deaths where there are between 250,000 and 500,000 deaths annually world wide. This virus doesn't even come close.

In the USA, back during the 2017-2018 flu season it killed 80,000 people that year alone, and that was ONLY in the USA. This hasn't even come CLOSE to that. The flu had already killed 82 people in Canada as of January 19th, I don't have the numbers for what that is now. But that is more than have died from COVID-19 back then. In 2019 there was such a bad outbreak of the flu in Quebec that Montreal hospitals were swamped with people.

As for Italy, from what I have heard, it has mainly been the northern part of Italy that has been hit worse, and that is mostly Chinese living there, so no surprise. Also, the elderly tend to be badly effected by most illnesses of this type, the flu included.

Sorry if us "old grunts" annoy you so much. But I have seen many more of this same stuff over the years than you have, with much more severe viruses. This is being blown way out of proportion and it will cost us big time with the Canadian government foolishly spending $107B we can't afford, while the economy is in a stasis, that is a good recipe for an economic crash and depression which is a greater danger to the nation.

Erin Maus

NiteHackr doesn't understand exponential growth.

Matthew Leverton

A major point worth mentioning on comparing numbers.

If somebody dies of flu-like symptoms, but was never tested, they blame the flu.

If somebody dies of COVID-19 like symptoms but was never tested, they don't count it as COVID-19. The numbers are under-reported.

Those numbers don't tell the story. Instead, look at the hospitals in NYC, Atlanta, Italy, etc, that are at or beyond capacity. That doesn't happen with the flu. Why? COVID-19 is way worse in terms of length of hospital stay and death rate.

MiquelFire

video

GullRaDriel

And anyway in case of diseases the only accurate number to look at is the number of deaths, which is way underestimated everywhere.

Neil Roy

If somebody dies of COVID-19 like symptoms but was never tested, they don't count it as COVID-19. The numbers are under-reported.

Not true. If someone has covid-19 and some other illnesses, if they die, even of something else, it has been reported that they mark it down as a covid-19 death, so the covid-19 deaths are being blown out of proportion.

If they're underestimated for COVID-19, they're underestimated for the flu! You have to apply the same logic to all viruses or you're showing a clear bias.

Even so, this is a story from December, 2019. FAR MORE people die annually from the flu, and those numbers continue to rise as the study in this article proves.

“The CDC said between 291,000 and 646,000 people die from seasonal flu-linked respiratory illnesses. Earlier projections from the World Health Organization’s earlier projections of deaths from seasonal flu — 250,000 to 500,000 per year — “are outdated,” according to the study published Wednesday in The Lancet.”

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/cdc-says-more-people-die-of-influenza-worldwide-than-who-estimated

Matthew Leverton
NiteHackr said:

If they're underestimated for COVID-19, they're underestimated for the flu! You have to apply the same logic to all viruses or you're showing a clear bias.

You are a first class moron. Just re-read my post.

Flu numbers are estimated based on general symptoms over known flu seasons. Studies are done. It isn't about summing up exact numbers from people who tested positive for the flu.

For example, see: https://www.ncdhhs.gov/covid-19-case-count-nc

Quote:

This number reflects deaths reported to public health in persons with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19

I guarantee you that studies will be done after this is all over that give estimates using the same type of studies that are done with the flu, and you will be shocked at the number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 when we have apples-to-apples comparison. Again just look at overcrowded hospitals -- despite elective surgeries being put on hold. This way more severe than a flu. Even our stupid President understands that now, and he is probably the dumbest person I've ever heard talk.

For example, the number of deaths in Italy have risen significantly compared to the same time period last year. Only 30% of these deaths are directly attributed to confirmed COVID-19. This means that it is reasonable to think that potentially for every confirmed death in Italy there are actually 3.3.

Erin Maus

Happy Transgender Day of Visibility. :o

The Duke Energy Center in Charlotte, NC was lit up with the transgender pride colors (white/blue/pink) last night, probably a happy coincidence. 8-)

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Arthur Kalliokoski

just look at overcrowded hospitals

So why does the liberal media have to resort to [this type of bullshit](ttps://www.google.com/search?q=cbs+shows+italian+hospital+new+york&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8) if it's so bad?

Quote:

Even our stupid President understands that now, and he is probably the dumbest person I've ever heard talk.

Dumber than Hillary "Sniper Fire" Clinton? How about "Free Stuff" Bernie? Or even Piccolo? I suspect it's mostly a "just folks" persona. Point out some dumb people who made billions of dollars.

raynebc

The media is so desperate for attention and narrative control that they forget they're supposed to be relaying the news. They're trash.

bamccaig

Happy Transgender Day of Visibility. :-*

That tower looks awesome.

/stoned

Neil Roy

You are a first class moron.

Notice I replied to you in a civilized manor and I purposly refrained from hurling insults. Forget it, I won't bother to respond again if you can't carry on a normal debate without insults.

The following video pretty much sums up my feelings...

video

Matthew Leverton

There's no debate here. Just truth and facts.

I do believe I called you "first class," which is the nicest thing I've said to anyone this week.

Neil Roy

@Matthew Leverton: add in an option to delete my account, or delete it for me please. I'm done here.

GullRaDriel

How many times did I heard that ? My counter is broken .
IF you do not like to come and debate, then just don't log in ^^

Matthew Leverton

We're all friends here. We only have these discussions because we love each other. :-*

GullRaDriel

X-D

Edgar Reynaldo

NiteHackr is just tired of losing arguments. ;/

Grumpy Old Man said:

Damn kids! Get off my lawn!

8-)

jmasterx

I want my title >:(

bamccaig

Careful what you wish for. :-*

GullRaDriel

bamccaig ++ ^^

bamccaig

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I just bought another ounce (28 grams) of cannabis from the provincial online store. They had a sale on. 28 grams of mid-range Indica for CAD$4.20 a gram (~CAD$120 for the whole ounce). That works out to being less than half price. I was nervous because I have never tried the brand before (Pure Sunfarms), let alone it appears to just be a random in-class strain that they had kicking around (it was just called "Indica Blend"). The description claims the entire bag is a single strain at least. Smells pretty good though, and the packaging claimed 15% THC so it should suffice for me, even if I have to vape a few bowls... It came in a plastic envelope, but I hate those so I transferred it into empty bottles that I had saved (so the bottles do not match the strain). All 4 bottles are packed full though. It's a shame that I had to expose it all to oxygen, but the envelope is pretty much useless for sealing it anyway... At least now it's all locked away in airtight containers. I'm tempted to buy some more, but I'm going to at least wait until I try it.

Edgar Reynaldo

Hey man, share the love. Send some of that sweet green my way.... 8-)

bamccaig

I would if I could, but it's illegal to import/export from both of our countries, and I would do anything for love but I won't do that. >:(:-*

Append:

I tried it last night right before bed. It doesn't smell/taste very good, but it's not very bad either. Just bland. Which is disappointing, but I can see past it for the savings. It seemed to work fine. Tonight I'll be vaping exclusively that (well, and concentrate) so I'll get a better idea how I like it. I'm not so strongly motivated to order more though now. I like my weed to smell/taste good. Gives me the illusion that it's fresh. :P

Append:

It's too tempting. I just ordered another ounce. >:( I priced up that quantity of a couple of other strains, and it would easily be CAD$230+ (so I'm saving about CAD$120 with each ounce). That should get me nearly to summer. Hopefully the next batch smells a bit nicer, but as long as it works it's a good value I reckon. :) This envelope I'm going to leave sealed until I run out of the other batch. I assume the sale is temporary so I didn't want to snooze and lose the opportunity. :-[

Erin Maus

My health insurance stopped covering my hormone medication.

The wonders of the US healthcare system. :-/

bamccaig

I'm sorry to hear that. Is it going to seriously mess things up, or just delay things?

Erin Maus

It just means I have to pay out of pocket.

Between these medications, my endocrinologist, my psychiatrist, and my therapist, I'm spending $300-400 a month on healthcare on top of my insurance. :)

I have Medicare as well (it's like healthcare-for-all in US but only for senior citizens, blind/deaf people, and people with certain disabilities) which would likely pay for the medication but the pharmacist brushed me off about having and I don't feel like arguing in public at this time. (I didn't have the Part D stuff on me, though my pharmacist should have that on record).

bamccaig

$400/month hurts for sure, but at least it sounds like you're getting a lot of bang for the buck. Of course, it could well be you aren't getting enough time with each. Better if they were all covered by [social] insurance though.

Actually this COVID-19 thing is sort of the perfect storm in Canada to rehash the "guaranteed livable income" idea. I think at least 2 parties are pushing for that to be reconsidered given the circumstances.

I would hope you shouldn't have to twist a pharmacist's arm to be discrete... >:( My pharmacist has a little privacy booth where you can go to talk.

As far as money goes, I'm confused. Is there not an electronic system to verify coverage from Medicare? Or don't you have an ID card or something for it? To go without insurance because the pharmacist doubted you had it sounds silly (albeit, personally I have gone without savings to spare my anxiety so I get that). I do of course understand not wanting to discuss private matters in public, but surely there's a means to prove you have coverage without revealing any private details?!

For example, to access health care in Ontario everybody has a plastic health card, similar in nature to a credit card or driver's license (the old ones were like credit cards, but obviously without credit; the new ones are like a driver's license, with a photo ID, etc.).

Erin Maus

I have a Medicare card and keep it on me, yes, but I wanted to get home ASAP (you know, people being idiots with corona, I live in the city with the highest infection rate in my state, North Carolina) so I didn't argue. Off the top of my head, I don't know if there's a card from my extended coverage stuff, I've never had to use one AFAIK.

...

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Happy Easter, everyone. ;D Or Bunny Day as they call it in Animal Crossing...

Johan Halmén

Have you heard about the newest Wikileaks!

Julian Assange's condome.

bamccaig

I cannot sleep for the second night in a row (and it's not a new phenomenon). I'm not sure whether this is the result of added stresses in my life or cannabis consumption or some perverse combination of the two (let alone something else entirely).

Initially cannabis was attractive due to its mystery and promise of recreational fun. Research promised it was safer than alcohol, and beneficial for mood/sleep. Initially, both appeared to be obviously true.

Whereas on beer alone I could be up until 2 or 5 AM and routinely experience anxiety and depression along with other unpleasant side-effects, when I started adding cannabis to the mix I'd want to go to sleep at 9 or sometimes 7 PM and I'd fall asleep within 20 minutes and sleep most of the night, all while cutting my drinking down from 9/night to 4/night and making me euphoric regardless of goings on.

It seems gradually over about a year and a half I have reached a point where the high that I get doesn't put me to sleep or barely do anything anymore, and is perhaps actually keeping me hyper-vigilant. A few weeks ago I overdid a new vape pen that had me messed up for HOURS and it was horrible. It's also possible that broke something. :-/ I don't know why those things are so potent (of course, now they don't seem to do anything to me so maybe that's why...).

Bob Keane

You may be overdoing it Bamccaig. Try cutting back and get more exercize.

LennyLen
bamccaig said:

A few weeks ago I overdid a new vape pen that had me messed up for HOURS and it was horrible. It's also possible that broke something.

Just so you know, vaping can cause dehydration, which can affect sleep, so perhaps try drinking more water when you vape.

bamccaig

Thanks, that's good advice. I definitely want to cut back on alcohol again. A month ago I was down to 3 or 4 a night, which is huge (and I wasn't even really craving it). If I'm awake for 8 or 9 recreational hours I drink a lot more than if I'm only awake for 4 or 5. A large part of that was going to bed early, of course, and cannabis was still working then to make me calm, relaxed, and tired.

Dehydration is an interesting diagnosis. I'm always dehydrated. A LOT. Largely due to alcohol consumption, cannabis consumption, and preferring a beer when I'm "thirsty" instead of the water that I should be drinking. I made a point to drink water today because you said that. I have a Brita water bottle, and I find that if I fill it up with water and put it in front of me that I subconsciously drink it before long. And if I keep filling it up over the course of the day I can drink several litres. Of course, having the discipline to do this requires a relatively easy day devoid of work pressures or other added stress. Which is not often a luxury I have these days it seems..

I think I have been experiencing more severe depression lately, and coupled with no sleep for the past 2 days it is taking a toll on me. I contacted my GP to discuss my mental health, as well as of course shorter term solutions for sleep and longer term solutions for substance abuse. The nurse appears to have misunderstood me, and assumed I was suicidal RIGHT NOW and immediately called me to check on me. :-[ I feel a little bad for scaring her (and taking up 15 minutes of her time). Alas, I don't fully understand why, but talking to her put me on the verge of sobbing (which was embarrassing so I tried to hold on until I got off the phone) and now I'm just kind of stuck on the verge... :-/

Anyway, we agreed to start with a phone call tomorrow to discuss matters with the doctor and come up with some plans. Initially she wanted me to come into the office, and I'm not sure if she was trying to cushion my anxiety or if it's COVID-19 related, but she changed her mind to a telephone visit first. That's probably going to be super awkward/uncomfortable, but hopefully there are some short term options besides merely cutting out alcohol and cannabis. :P

Append:

It has been a rough week. I couldn't sleep Sunday night or Monday night. Tuesday night I might have gotten an hour, but I'm not sure. Wednesday night was the same. I still laid in bed every night which I guess allowed me to rest sufficiently to function, but with less energy and vigor. I guess I was experiencing insomnia. And on top of that depression and anxiety.

I had the phone appointment with my doctor, who asked a bunch of questions, and referred me to a substance abuse service for counseling as a first step. :-/ Presumably it just gives me access to somebody to talk to, and doctors/nurses that specialize in treating addictions. Though I don't think it'll be overly applicable to me, I've set up an appointment anyway to satisfy the doctor and show that I'm willing to try. He initially said he didn't want to prescribe medication yet for the depression/anxiety, but after asking me a few questions he changed his mind and offered me some. :P I was wary of them changing my personality in unpredictable ways though so I told him let's wait a month. Now I kind of regret it because after doing some research after our call it sounds like exactly what I need, but I digress. I have another appointment with my doctor in 3 weeks so we can discuss meds again then.

Yesterday I was pretty desperate so I Googled anxiety remedies, and came up with sardines and Vitamin D3 (which sardines also happen to contain). In all I had orange juice, a 3000 IU dose of Vitamin D3 (after researching the risks and finding out what dose should be "safe"), a can of sardines plus the sunflower/fish oil they were preserved in, plus I vaporized lavender essential oil in my office while I worked yesterday. Then after work I got really drunk and stoned (7 beer in about 4.5 hours; vaped about 0.7g of cannabis). Thankfully after taking a couple of days off from using, cannabis is working a little better than it has in a while at least in terms of feeling properly stoned/euphoric/relaxed, if not putting me to sleep. I've also been drinking water all day during work hours pretty much all week. I think that's it... I managed to end work on a relatively good note too which set me up for a breezier morning meeting.

Anyway, it wasn't a great night. I still had trouble sleeping. And the alcohol was too much so I woke up sort of hungover at 7 AM feeling like crap. I emptied my bladder and went back to bed. I tossed and turned for about an hour and a half, but finally between my 8:30 AM and 8:55 AM alarms I fell into a deeper sleep and started dreaming lucidly! I haven't even slept in nearly a week, let alone dreamed, so I was ecstatic when I woke up and realized that I had been dreaming. Unfortunately, my 9:55 AM alarm interrupted it... And I had to get up for work. Hopefully tonight I'll have even more success now that it's the weekend! Considering the week I've had I feel great so far this morning.

Erin Maus

I used to have great sleep hygiene (and still do I suppose).

The social isolation and stress of shelter at home has negatively affected my sleeping regardless. Every night I wake up from nightmares. I've had sleep paralysis three times in the last two weeks when I've never had it before in my life.

Having your sleep negatively affected sucks. :\

Matthew Leverton

@bamccaig be honest with and listen to the doctors, counselors, and other professionals! It's not like they have a magic wand to make everything better right away, but at least they have your best interests in mind and will work with you until they figure it out.

Chris Katko

After 8 years of doctors NOT being to diagnose me, I have plenty of qualms with doctors.

But I still listen to them in general. >:( ::) You want to grow crops better, you talk to a farmer. Not some chick on facebook who posts "fertilizer causes autism" memes.

Erin Maus

Each psychiatrist gives me a different diagnosis (schizophrenia, schizoaffective, ...) but I went from being disabled to a high paying job in a great city.

The secret? I listened to the medical professionals. Also a lot of luck. But that luck would've meant nothing without the help from the medical professionals. I owe a ton to my previous psychiatrist and therapist.

bamccaig

I usually aim to be honest, to a fault, and I fully intend to listen. I'll even obey if I can handle what they demand of me. :P I'm more interested in mental health treatment than substance abuse, but it's possible the one will help to resolve the other (or visa-versa). Quitting drinking would certainly save a whole lot of money, but it might also make barbecuing more of a chore than recreation... :-/ We'll see.

This weekend went pretty well. For the most part I'm back to feeling like myself again. I stayed up "too" late on Friday night, and slept most of the morning and afternoon away on Saturday, dreaming all the while. That may seem like a bad thing, but to me it was a good thing. I've been sleeping normally ever since.

I used to use my wife's handed down Fitbits to track sleep, but they all have died on me. She's going to try to get in contact with support this week and see if they'll repair or replace the most recent one that should still be under warranty. When I tried, they side-stepped the issue by suggesting some ridiculous troubleshooting tips that make no sense for a paperweight. ::) At least if I have semi-accurate sleep tracking the next time I'm feeling insomniac we can see what actually happened (as opposed to what I perceived happening).

I do find that I'm drinking faster than I like right now, but most of the time I can only tolerate so much before it starts to make me sick anyway so it sort of throttles itself down as the night goes on... I think I'm still somewhat stressed. A did a fair amount of gaming and hanging out with family/pets this weekend, which was good, but I could definitely use more time to catch up on unprocessed stresses.

My phone session with the substance abuse clinic is on Thursday (and I imagine we'll set up periodic appointments from there, assuming all goes well). Then in 2 weeks I'll have another call with the doctor to discuss that as well as reconsider meds, which if he offers again I intend to fully take advantage of. Though I'm feeling pretty good now, that's based on my own scale which assumes some level of anxiety. :P At least it isn't severe right now. I'm not feeling hopeless at this moment. Instead, I'm feeling hopeful.

Also, happy 4/20, I guess? ::);D

LennyLen
bamccaig said:

I'm more interested in mental health treatment than substance abuse, but it's possible the one will help to resolve the other (or visa-versa).

Substance abuse is very common with mental health issues as a way of self-medicating. I got back into heavy drinking and drug use when the meds I was taking for anxiety and depression stopped working. I've been switched to different meds and now I'm doing fine.

Quote:

but it might also make barbecuing more of a chore than recreation...

Depending on how things go, you might not have to give up drinking for good. I spent two years getting things back on track and during that period I didn't drink or do any drugs. Now I have the occasional drink or smoke, but don't feel the need to overdo it anymore.

Chris Katko

Go sober to prove you can be sober. Then introduce small amounts of healthy "vice" in your life.

Edgar Reynaldo

Here's a little exercise I did with myself recently.

I've been smoking for 25 years. When I started, it was maybe half a pack a day for years. Lately it's been about 2 packs a day at times. I went with an average of around 1 pack per day for 25 years.

25*365 = 7500 + 1500 + 125 = 9125 packs in 25 years.

Cigarettes used to cost around US $4 now they cost around US $8. I went with an average of $6 dollars per pack.

6*9125 = $54,750

That's how much my education cost. If I had never smoked in my life, I would be debt free right now. Instead, I'm a smoker with asthma, overweight and I'm 50 grand in debt. I could be healthy, fit, and free of the burden of debt instead if I had just never started smoking.

bambams. I encourage you to do the same with your drinking and smoking habits. Figure out how much they are costing you, and what they are actually providing you with. Cost-benefit analysis if you will. I know you're good at that kind of thing. Then think about where you would be right now if you didn't drink or smoke at all, and you were in good mental health. Then make a decision where you want to go with your life. All the best.

EDIT
Continuing the math,

9125*20 = 182,500 cigarettes

182,500*5 minutes = 912500 minutes

912,500 minutes / minutes per year = 1.712 years

I've spent 1.712 years of my life smoking. THAT"S #%^@ED UP

Johan Halmén

Edgar, how old were you when you started smoking and what was the main reason?

Edgar Reynaldo

I was 16, and my dad smoked, and my aunt, and my stupid friends

bamccaig

I've known for years I drink something like CAD$3500 per year. Started out around 21 drinking approximately 4 per night. Within a year it was 6, but it remained at 6 for probably 5 or 6 years. Then it gradually rose to 8 or 9. I'll be 34 this year. Originally beer cost something like CAD$29 for 24 bottles (bottles are cheaper than cans here). Now the same beer has risen to CAD$37. For a short while I was also drinking "premium" Budweiser instead of "cheap" Carling, which was probably easily $5 more. There were also a few months in the mix where I quit entirely. Alas, it gets messy modelling this semi-accurately.

Generally speaking I estimate I spend approximately CAD$3500 per year on beer alone. I rarely drink anything else, but probably spend about CAD$200 per year on scotch. These days I also spend approximately CAD$2000 per year on cannabis and accessories. That means in my lifetime I've spent somewhere between CAD$35000 and CAD$50000 on beer, probably CAD$1200 on scotch, and something like CAD$2500 on cannabis and accessories. It adds up for sure.

Of course, these dollars were not being entirely burned. Alcohol helped me to cope and get by. Without it I may have never gotten to where I am today. If I had gotten mental health care when I was 17 or 12 instead of 33 then things could be vastly different, of course. However, that was not open to me at the time, and it's too late to worry about that. What's done is done. Alcohol continues to be a useful tool for self-medicating. Unfortunately, I also have a weak chemical dependence on it. We'll see if this clinic and my doctor can help me to kick the habit.

I recall the last time I went for a month or more without drinking and I felt great. It really is worth it in the end, but it doesn't come easily, and that's not just because of the addiction. That's because alcohol works (even my doctor said that). Whereas cigarettes never really do anything good for you other than satisfy your craving and silence the withdrawal (and possibly aid in forming social bonds with strangers with the same habit), alcohol actually does numb pain or anxiety on top of getting your "fix". Being that the liver is a magical organ that can regrow itself given a chance it does seem like an ideal organ to abuse out of all of the applicable options.

Of course, the main hurdle for quitting drinking is society. Alcohol is socially accepted and embraced. Everybody drinks. Friends. Family. Police. Doctors. When I expressed concerns about my drinking to ER doctors on two separate occasions I was told, "This is <lame city or district>. Everybody drinks." And I was dismissed. My parents drink. My brother drinks (and smokes). I pretty much cannot enjoy their company without being in the presence of alcohol.

What I want is for us to try to fix this for future generations. Alcohol is a very dangerous drug, closer in severity to heroin. We also know that cigarettes are also extremely dangerous, and even less practical. Coca-Cola is just as bad. If we want to set our future generations up to succeed we should stop tempting them with these harmful vices. It will take a long time to overcome, but if we start changing attitudes towards these things then we can hope to virtually eliminate them after a few generations. Kids listen. I did. They taught us that smoking is addictive and dangerous, and I was never even tempted to try it.

It won't work if we just tell them no. We need to also remove the need. We smoke and drink to manage stresses in our lives. To manage mental health ailments. If instead everybody received mandatory counseling then we could manage these things in more healthy ways. We could identify mental illnesses or chemical imbalanced at an early age and come up with a strategy to improve things under the supervision of a healthcare professional. We could set future generations up to succeed in ways that we could never dream of.

There will be resistance from existing users. That's fine. We can work through those problems. Existing habitual users will need medication, therapy, and education. We can do it.

raynebc

Maybe most adults drink alcohol, but certainly not everybody does. If I'm at a party where there's alcohol, I have soda or water. It really isn't difficult to avoid, you have to make a choice. Like recreational drugs, it's best not to get in the habit to begin with.

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

I've known for years I drink something like CAD$3500 per year.

jesus christ. ignore the addiction for a moment. imagine what you can buy with $3500 CAD (2500 USD) a year extra sitting in your pocket. An 85" 4K TV?

Just kidding. You'd still have $500 left over.

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/samsung-85-8-series-4k-uhd-tv-smart-led-with-hdr/6401715.p?skuId=6401715

Also this is real:

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Johan Halmén

People smoke because they need the nicotine. All the rest is just attached addiction. The nicotine gives the kick, making the sucking, the lip contact, the taste, the thing you do with your hands, something you long for.
The sad thing is that you need the glowing end to create the heat which vapours the nicotine. The glow itself probably destroys the nicotine, but it's the heat of the fumes that vaporizes the unburnt nicotine a few millimeters ahead of the glow. The glow destroys any nicotine left in the tobacco, if any. The glow also creates the tar, which gives you lung cancer.
So it's really sad, if you've tried electric cigarettes and don't get the same feeling, because it really gives you what you needed in the first place. Just the nicotine.

DanielH

If you want just the nicotine try patches. Or maybe the gum.

Chris Katko

Or you know, don't be content with being literally addicted to a drug. You only get one life, why spend it letting a chemical tell you how to live.

LennyLen

People smoke because they need the nicotine.

Yes and no.

For me, having a cigarette was more than just a way to get nicotine. It was also a reason, when I was around others, to stop whatever I was doing and be alone outside for a few minutes and let my anxiety levels subside. Watching the exhalation is also quite soothing (smoking in the dark isn't very satisfying).

I tried giving up using nicotine patches and gum and they didn't provide the psychological relief that cigarettes did. That's why I tried vaping instead, and it's close enough to do the trick. I've been gradually reducing the nicotine levels over time and am about ready to go to 0mg liquid.

In an ideal world, I'd prefer not to vape either, but with what it provides in reducing anxiety levels (which still get high even with medication and loads of therapy), there's more benefit than risk.

Or you know, don't be content with being literally addicted to a drug.

Most people aren't content with their addictions, or if they are, then their addiction hasn't kicked them in the teeth yet. Giving up addictions isn't easy though.

Johan Halmén
LennyLen said:

For me, having a cigarette was more than just a way to get nicotine.

Yes, but the nicotine did it. That's the drug that told your brain that it is cool sucking the cigarette. It's cool to blow smoke. It's cool to do it with friends. Caffeine does the same thing. I'm addicted to that. And coffee breaks are nice.

What is really cool is that people can reduce the nicotine down to zero, while continuing vaping. That's like fooling the drug. Probably works with caffeine, too. Though I don't have problems with caffeine.

Chris Katko
LennyLen said:

Giving up addictions isn't easy though.

I never said it was.

Erin Maus

smh my head look at this tumblrina giving sexualities to BOATS

...

I'm making a joke at my own expense if it's not clear. I seriously just wanted to show off this hilarious bug I had: https://bkdoormaus.tumblr.com/post/616370876104966144/oh-my-gods-what-the-frig-is-going-on

That's what happens when you're rusty on quaternions...

Edgar Reynaldo

Your camera is clearly drunk. 8-)

Erin Maus

Well the ship did sail from Rumbridge port... you know, named Rumbridge after the rum they make.

bamccaig

LennyLen said:

Giving up addictions isn't easy though.

I never said it was.

Or you know, don't be content with being literally addicted to a drug. You only get one life, why spend it letting a chemical tell you how to live.

Because it's very hard to overcome addictions. Shouldn't need to be stated. :-*

raynebc

It shouldn't need to be stated that getting into the habit of using drugs for fun isn't a good idea.

DanielH

That's obvious, but stating it after the fact doesn't help anyone.

bamccaig

Not everybody using "drugs" got into the habit "for fun" either. Walk 20 years in their shoes before you judge.

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

Walk 20 years in their shoes before you judge.

Nobody--or at least I'm not--is judging. But if an ex-heroin addict was telling you "don't do heroin." You wouldn't be like "omg, you did heroin, how can you judge me for wanting to try it?"

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

Walk 20 years in their shoes before you judge.

Nobody--or at least I'm not--is judging. But if an ex-heroin addict was telling you "don't do heroin." You wouldn't be like "omg, you did heroin, how can you judge me for wanting to try it?"

I genuinely want you to get better. Ignoring the weed, the $3000/year in alcohol alone should be enough to be a red flag. Your health will likely get drastically better if you simply cut down (as opposed to eliminate) on all that alcohol and weed.

LennyLen
bamccaig said:

Not everybody using "drugs" got into the habit "for fun" either. Walk 20 years in their shoes before you judge.

I started writing my own response to say the same thing, but got distracted.

Here it goes:

For a lot of people who have problems with drug (and by this I also mean alcohol) abuse, it isn't about having fun, it's about coping with life and dealing with pain.

For me, it started when I went to university. I'd walk into a lecture theatre, see all the strangers sitting there and walk right out again. At that time I knew nothing about anxiety and depression and thought that being autistic meant that you were like the Rain Man. I didn't know why I couldn't stay in lecture theatres and had no clue that it was something you could get help for.

I soon discovered though that if I got stoned or half drunk first though, I could sit through a lecture, so I started doing that all the time. But while I was able to sit through a lecture, I was in no state to learn anything like that so I started failing all my non computer science and math courses, which in turn made it even harder to show up so I started drinking and smoking pot even more.

I kept telling myself it was just laziness that was keeping me away from lectures and that if I tried harder the next year, I'd be able to do it then. But still I had no clue as to what the issue was so I got no help for it and things didn't get better. Instead, all the alcohol made the depression and anxiety worse, which in turn made me do more drugs.

I pretty much continued on that cycle for another six years before someone pointed me towards where to get help. I got diagnosed with autism, depression and severe anxiety disorder, and spent another year and a half pretty much isolated getting treatment and learning coping mechanisms.

The only problem with applying the tools you learn in therapy is that they require rational thought to be of any use, and like many autistic people, my emotional responses to events can be extreme. Especially negative emotions. To quote Bruce Banner - "don't make me angry. You won't like me when I'm angry." And like his green alter-ego, I don't jut get angry, I rage. And it gets combined with almost supernatural strength and a need to just destroy everything around me. I've demolished walls and ripped apart steel computer cases all with my bare hands. All with no recollection afterwards of what happened. And sadness becomes a bottomless hole of depression that nothing can touch. Nothing can make it stop until I drink myself into unconsciousness or take enough pills to make everything go away.

I've had to learn the hard way that I can't have close relationships with people because I'm not emotionally capable of dealing with the consequences of them going wrong. It's almost been fatal on several occasions.

Things seem to be better now. I've resigned myself to being alone, and that I can cope with. The anxiety and depression has not gone away and it never will. But I'm pretty confident that so long as I isolate myself away from things that van trigger overemotional responses, I should be safe. Time will tell.

bamccaig

When I was a child I understood "anxious" to mean "excited" or "happy anticipation". In hindsight I've probably suffered from anxiety since I was a small child. Unfortunately, nobody seemed to notice and it went unrecognized and untreated.

On my 19th birthday (legal age to drink alcohol in most of Canada) my "best friend" from school got married to his high school sweetheart. He didn't know it was my birthday. And I didn't get a formal invitation. Instead, after the fact they told me I could come. Clearly, I didn't make the cut. I went anyway, but when the reception came around I was too anxious to go in. I figured if I didn't have an invitation then I won't have a seat either, and I was too afraid to face that possibility. I also didn't feel welcomed. I felt completely out of the loop, and this was the person that I considered my closest friend. It hurt. I felt rejected. My love interest was also the maid of honor, and she was rejecting me too.

The reception was being held in a hotel so I went to the hotel bar with a "friend". I had no job, but my mom had given me her debit card so that I could have some drinks. We had planned to walk to my brother's apartment afterward and sleep there. Surprisingly I had a pretty good experience there. Got a bunch of free drinks because it was my 19th birthday. I think I estimated that I had about 8 or 9 drinks, but that seems unlikely unless the bartender was feeding me watered down shots. :P

I pretty much drank that night because I was feeling sorry for myself because of the sad state of my so called friendships and social life. Plus it's just the thing you're supposed to do. I had fun, but thought nothing of it. I don't think I drank again until several months later when my brother invited me over to his apartment for some beers. That's when I really got to experience being drunk. In a private apartment with just family around. And it felt amazing. I didn't understand what it was doing at the time, but it probably eased my anxieties and helped to shut my always racing brain off. Which was amazing, you can imagine.

By the next year I had graduated with a 2 year diploma from a technical college. The next summer I was isolated in the family computer room as usual chatting with friends, when my parents came and had the "no job" talk with me. I pretty much broke down crying because I didn't know how to get a job, and couldn't imagine being able to do it. Again, because of anxiety, but I couldn't explain that to them because I still didn't know what it was. The husband of one of my mom's colleagues at work had his own company that did software. My mom arranged for me to get a job working for him for the summer. I think that I might have worked for free for 2 months that summer, and then I laid myself off to go back to school for an optional 3rd year. I knew I wouldn't be able to handle the workload of both working and school. I was barely handling school. After graduating with my 3 year diploma the company hired me "full time", but at just CAD$10/hr (which was still $2 more than minimum wage).

Once I started getting paid I had nothing to really spend my money on besides gas for the car my parents let me use to get to and from work. Somebody, my brother probably, must have suggested I buy some beer. And I did. I chose to drink the same brand that my dad drank because I didn't know any better. It was one of the cheaper options, and tasted fine. And at first I really didn't drink much. At that time I could taste the beer, and I really enjoyed how it tasted. I wasn't drinking for "fun" either. I was self-medicating. Easing the feelings that I had, but didn't have a name for. It started with only have 3 or 4 a night. It helped immensely to feel better. It was a convenient way to cope with pain, loss, anxiety, or anything else really. It was inevitable that it would develop into a habit.

And here I am. Now I understand that it has been anxiety holding me back most of my life. And up until now the only way I could treat it was alcohol. I had no family doctor/general practitioner from the age of 18 to 33. I didn't know how to ask for help, even if I wanted to. And I did want to. An old school friend had taken nursing in school so I thought maybe she would know how to access services, and so one night I asked her on Facebook about it (still early on because I deleted Facebook and severed all ties to my fake relationships in my early 20's). She told me I'd have to go to the emergency department, and talk to the nurses there. That was a nightmare to me. Obviously somebody with anxiety isn't going to want to do that. I had never been to the emergency room on my own. I couldn't seriously consider that option.

It is my belief that far more people than is realized require mental health assessments and therapy or medication. Of course, the state of our health care system is pretty poor so I'm not surprised that it doesn't really function properly. It's just a crying shame. Imagine how much more productive we could be if we were fully functioning.

--

I think I had a pretty good week last week, and a pretty good weekend, but by Sunday my wife was saying I should call the doctor again so she must have noticed something was wrong still. Monday hit me again with severe depression, anxiety, and very dark thoughts. I called the doctor, and he prescribed Citalopram HBR, an antidepressant. If it works it won't start to help for a few weeks so I have to just take it and hope things improve. Today is my first dose, but I'm having trouble taking it. I was told that it will upset your stomach in the beginning, and that you should eat food with it. Well I have strong anxiety that is making my stomach turn. I can't seem to eat my toast so that I can take the pill. :-/

Append:

Today my wife sent me a link when I woke up. Turns out that Evanescence, one of my favorite bands, is finally releasing original material after about 9 years. This has me excited, but also anxious. It's known to be "depressing" music so I'm not sure if listening to it will help me or hurt me.

Erin Maus

I got a dog. ;D Her name is Sprite. You know, after draw_sprite (joking, kind of, not really, she's named Sprite because of sprites in video games/old graphics hardware).

This is her harassing me while I'm working from home:

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She's just adorable. :D

...

re: medications... Unfortunately don't expect the first prescribed med to work. For me, for example, it took like 3 antipsychotic meds to settle on one that worked. And gosh knows how many antidepressants. Even then, Wellbutrin (the antidepressant I'm on) aggravates my anxiety so I have anti-anxiety meds if that gets too bad... Anyway, it worked out in the end. You just gotta stick with it.

Also don't stop taking your meds. Bad things happen if you do.

LennyLen

Also don't stop taking your meds. Bad things happen if you do.

And definitely stop drinking when starting new meds. Alcohol is a contraindication for most anxiety and depressions meds. Try asking your doctor about Disulfiram. It's a drug that is used in alcohol abuse cases that makes you violently ill if you drink. It won't work if you don't take it obviously, but it helps stop impulsive drinking as if you have already taken it in the last few days, drinking is extremely unpleasant.

bamccaig

That's a great photo, Erin (of both of you). :) What breed is it?

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I can't remember if I've announced it here, but back in January my wife got us a puppy too. I was sort of set up... We went to a hockey game where they were going to be showing two puppies available for adoption during intermission. My wife got excited about them, and asked if we could apply. My understanding was that we'd be put on a list, and owners would be chosen from this list... I made the mistake in concluding that there would be plenty of other people interested and we were unlikely to be chosen so I agreed to apply. Lo and behold apparently we were the only "suckers" that did. I almost got away with it anyway because there is another person in my city with the same first and last name who has apparently been blacklisted by the animal shelter, and when they saw our application they assumed I was him. When they started giving us the run-around though my wife called to figure out what was going on and cleared it up... So now I have a dog (and one more responsibility, and one more stressor). :-/

His name is Watson. We're told it's a Golden Retriever Rottweiler mix. We have a DNA kit to test it, but we hesitated and then this COVID-19 thing hit and we figured the labs that do that testing probably have better things to do.

He's about 5 months old now. We got him when he was about 8 weeks old or something like that. It has been an "adventure". Good and bad. He's mid-teething phase now so chewing is a problem, and he's high energy so it's hard to drain that every day. That said, he's proving to be pretty smart too, and we're already seeing a more calm side present itself at times. When he's "good" it's wonderful, but when he's full of energy he's an uncontrollable demon. :P I do love having him, though there are certainly times that I've regretted it as well.

Regarding musical chairs with medicine that's not the first anecdote I have heard about it. That will be tough because I'm experiencing some pretty horrible days right now, but I also don't have much choice because it's so severe that I cannot live like that. I'll have to just stick with whatever works, and if nothing does I'm at the mercy of my healthcare practitioners and brain chemistry.

I have read a few times now that abruptly stopping the dose can have severe effects. Which is terrifying for me because I'm not very disciplined/reliable, and I can pretty easily see myself forgetting to take it for days at a time. I have an alarm set on my phone to remind me, but it's an optimistic alarm before I'm currently waking up. Sleep has been more difficult lately, though I have been better than the full week of insomnia I experienced a few weeks back. Today was my first dose, but this morning I snoozed the alarm and tried to go back to bed.

I did eventually take the medicine. I eventually just took it without food because my stomach was upset from anxiety all morning, and wasn't letting up, and I concluded that if I'm already nauseous then I guess there's no harm in trying. Fortunately I was able to hold on. My stomach was still turning when we ate supper around 5:30, but I've been drinking since about 6 and it hasn't impacted that any so I guess I survived my first dose...

With regards to drinking my doctor suggested I not stop suddenly because the withdrawal symptoms can potentially be dangerous. Before taking my first sip I tried to research it online too, and got some very mixed results, so I ended up calling my pharmacist for some professional advice. Generally speaking the pharmacist concurred that drinking is not recommended, but she ultimately concluded it was unlikely to be fatal, and that the risks of quitting alcohol cold-turkey may be more severe.

I am drinking beer, but I'm trying to limit my intake each day to be a little less to slowly ween myself off of it. I'm going to try to quit drinking for a month or so to start and see how I feel and how I'm coping with everything. Surely that will make it easier to understand what effects the medicine is having anyway, and if I can do it I'll likely feel better anyway. Whether I can continue not drinking beyond a month remains to be seen. In a way COVID-19 isolation could help with that because I won't be around other alcoholics very frequently, but if isolation ends shortly that advantage will be lost.

My doctor did mention drugs to help alleviate withdrawal symptoms from alcohol, but he didn't want to put me on multiple meds at once so he said to start with the antidepressant and we'll assess something for alcohol in the future if necessary.

As for cannabis I'm not sure what to do. For tonight I'm going to try to abstain and see how it goes. It seems that cannabis doesn't really work daily anyway so I might get better use out of it if I can make it a less frequent thing. If I can't sleep tonight though I might use a little. We'll have to see I guess.

Append:

Today I also experienced some chills which was odd, even before I took my pill. I thought maybe I had a fever and tested it a few times throughout the day. No fever yet, though my temperature was rising throughout the day. I have no other symptoms that would hint at COVID-19 so I don't think that is the culprit.

Then this evening I realized that I was sweating excessively. The climate is rather comfortable right now so it didn't make sense. It felt like alcohol withdrawal, but it set in early evening and I was even drinking at the time. I googled and sure enough sweating is a pretty common side-effect of the medication that I'm taking. That's going to be fucking brutal because I already sweat at night... Sweating all day and night will make sleeping difficult, and probably make focusing difficult. Let alone when the COVID-19 thing clears up and I have to go back to working in the office...

LennyLen
bamccaig said:

With regards to drinking my doctor suggested I not stop suddenly because the withdrawal symptoms can potentially be dangerous. Before taking my first sip I tried to research it online too, and got some very mixed results, so I ended up calling my pharmacist for some professional advice. Generally speaking the pharmacist concurred that drinking is not recommended, but she ultimately concluded it was unlikely to be fatal, and that the risks of quitting alcohol cold-turkey may be more severe.

I had no choice but to go cold turkey as I was put into respite care where they don't allow alcohol on the premises. The withdrawal was definitely not pleasant, as by that point I had a daily intake of ~15 standard drinks (equivalent of 20 mid strength beers), and in the last 48 hours I'd gone through six dozen beers plus several partial bottles of spirits). The first 12 hours were the worst, then I was able to see a doctor who gave me pills to help with the withdrawal symptoms.

Quote:

As for cannabis I'm not sure what to do.

The general consensus I've had from doctors/psychiatrists over the years is that continuing to take cannabis won't help the situation, but it won't do anywhere near as much harm as alcohol.

amarillion

It's tough for me to imagine crippling anxiety like that. I got a glimpse of understanding from following Penny Arcade, their Mike Krahulik (Gabe) seems to have it bad as well. In the end they are successful though. Somehow they managed to turn their personal issues into a successful business.

Erin Maus

> What breed is it?

She's a Jack Russel Terrier mix! :)

Chris Katko

imagine crippling anxiety like that.

I used to have that. I would have panic attacks if anyone tried to shake my hand. My hand would be covered in sweat. I couldn't use public bathrooms (or even friends bathrooms if too near other people) because I would be terrified people would think I was doing it "wrong" somehow.

I know everyone's mental problems are unique. But for me, I survived it all with exposure therapy--not drugs. Little by little, I'd force myself into situations that made me have attacks. It was pure hell. I was literally screaming inside my own head out of fear and pain. But it worked. Day after day, month after month, year after year I'd push myself just a tiny bit further.

I'm no "public speaker" now, but I have enough skills and confidence that people would come up to me and go "Yeah but it's not easy or natural for me to be outgoing as it is for you." and I'd politely nod, but in my head I'd be smirking knowing how far I'd come... "if they only knew."

bamccaig

I don't just have anxiety in the moment (though I do). I am haunted by it for hours afterwards. For example, if I go to a "party", even with people that I'm comfortable with like family, then later on that night when I've gone home and try to go to bed, for example, my brain will constantly replay every interaction I had or avoided (and even interactions that other people had that I was never going to be a part of) analyzing them for things I did wrong or could have done better or trying to place myself into somebody else's role and imagining how I would have handled it. That's right, I get anxiety for other people. In a sense, I run a simulation in my brain of all of the possibilities that I can fathom.

In the moment I can force myself to smile and go along with it. I've learned to get by by forcing myself into situations too. I can't be outgoing, but I can at least fake it for a minute or two and I'm no longer afraid to try things. Except I'll be up all night worrying about every detail of it later. The only easy ways to shut off that voice and get some sleep have been alcohol and cannabis. The hard way is to just sit through it, processing everything until I can't think of anything more to process. Which if I didn't have to wake up early for work or other commitments wouldn't be so bad, but I rarely have that luxury. I need to get some sleep so that I can function the next day.

That's what anxiety used to be like for me. Now it feels like it's on a whole other level. I find it difficult to draw a line between depression and anxiety right now. What thoughts, feelings, aches and pains are attributed to each? I just know that I'm in a very bad place, and nothing feels right anymore.

I lay awake all night long exhausted, but wide awake. I get up in the morning and my stomach is turning and continues to feel that way all day long. I have no appetite. I'm lucky to eat half of a meal a day before the nausea overwhelms me. I'm overcome with intense feelings of worry and hopelessness. Like my fate is already sealed, and my undoing is inevitable. Like I am ill-equipped to cope with what might come. Extreme emotional reactions to the tiniest input.

I'm distracted all day long, just feeling like I need to be somewhere else or doing something else. I used to be able to sit at my desk for 8 or 12 hours only getting up to urinate. Now I can't seem to sit still for more than 30 minutes or so. I constantly find myself getting up and walking around for no reason. My wife will catch me and ask what I'm doing. I don't have an answer. I just needed to get up, even though what I really need to do is focus on my work.

I've also found that music is uncontrollably playing in my head and I'm subconsciously humming or singing along with it periodically. I don't think that's particularly new. I just think that I used to suppress it well enough so that it only would strike me occasionally. Lately I've found myself humming or singing along to songs that I haven't heard in months or years. It's just there in my head suddenly. Not even songs that I particularly feel like hearing/singing. More like compulsions.

My entire life I've always been confident that I would just cease to exist upon death, but I've started to feel an intense fear of death like anything is possible after death. I still don't give much credibility to any man-made gods or religions though. Like we will wake up into a new universe/reality still exhausted from this one and being harshly judged by aliens for our performance in this one. It's irrational and delusional, but I cannot help it. It's subconscious, and it pushes forcefully into my conscious thought. Even though I consciously don't believe it has any merit, I find myself occasionally terrified thinking about it.

LennyLen

But for me, I survived it all with exposure therapy--not drugs.

I did both. The reason I started working in the hospitality industry was so that I'd be forced to be in situations that triggered me. And it worked for a time, while I was doing jobs with no real responsibility. Then I started managing restaurants and the stress of the job on top of the background anxiety was just too much.

I'm still working with the public now, but the job itself is stress free so I can maintain my anxiety levels. The last few weeks have been tough though, since our lockdown started. We're actually getting a lot more customers inside the store, but because we're selling so little petrol, revenue is down so staff levels have been cut down. So when it gets really busy there's only me on. Plus our stock deliveries, which need to get put away, are bigger than normal. Some of it is frozen and needs to be put away quickly, but with so many customers it's difficult to do it.

Plus, with the lockdown going on, most of the customers are stressed so are constantly complaining about that our prices don't match the supermarkets, or that we don't carry all the stock that they can normally get from businesses that are shut down. Hopefully this will be over soon.

jmasterx
bamccaig said:

I don't just have anxiety in the moment (though I do). I am haunted by it for hours afterwards. For example, if I go to a "party", even with people that I'm comfortable with like family, then later on that night when I've gone home and try to go to bed, for example, my brain will constantly replay every interaction I had or avoided (and even interactions that other people had that I was never going to be a part of) analyzing them for things I did wrong or could have done better or trying to place myself into somebody else's role and imagining how I would have handled it. That's right, I get anxiety for other people. In a sense, I run a simulation in my brain of all of the possibilities that I can fathom.

Me too. Socializing raises my stress hormones and that causes me to ruminate, overthink and have trouble sleeping but over time I've come to consciously catch it and mitigate it without needing any meds or drugs. Though this quarantine has done wonders for that. I love remote work.

bamccaig

I think my breaking point is work stress AKA money stress. If it wasn't for my manager putting constant pressure on me and complaining about how long it's taking me to complete vague things then I think I would be weathering these times just fine and even thriving in a sense (mentally anyway; not physically). Instead, I'm terrified that I'm going to get fired for not working fast enough. And if I get fired we will likely lose our new house (or my parents will have to foot the bill, which will be humiliating). They already gifted us a big sum of money for us to even afford this house so if we lose the house we also lose their hard work. My confidence is at an all time low. Finding new work that pays enough to afford our bills would not be easy in good times, let alone during a pandemic, and I don't think I would qualify for any government assistance if I get fired or quit.

Edgar Reynaldo

bambams. If you're truly worried about your job, then what you need to do is quit wasting all your time drinking and smoking and look for a job. Tell you what, I'll do it with you. We can job hunt together. We have similar talents. I'm going to set up an Indeed profile and start looking there. Is your resume up to date? If not, start working on it now. Instead of worrying about every little thing that you have absolutely no control over, work on something you do have control over.

Polybios
bamccaig said:

complaining about how long it's taking me to complete vague things

Don't you do estimations beforehand?

bamccaig

If you're truly worried about your job, then what you need to do is quit wasting all your time drinking and smoking and look for a job. Tell you what, I'll do it with you. We can job hunt together. We have similar talents. I'm going to set up an Indeed profile and start looking there. Is your resume up to date? If not, start working on it now. Instead of worrying about every little thing that you have absolutely no control over, work on something you do have control over.

Finding another job doesn't necessarily solve my problem. The grass isn't necessarily greener. The new job could be even worse. Also my location (where we just bought a house) has limited options and I've exhausted most of them (or due to my anxiety am not currently suited to them). That leaves mostly remote work, which is even harder to secure, and harder to get job security from.

I've been keeping an eye out on LinkedIn for years, and never had any success finding a better job. I was always stuck in my original job. It had many disadvantages, but it also did eventually fruition into a great job. The only problem was management was less than competent and so all of us developers were getting nervous that the company was sinking.

This new company sought me out. I came highly recommended apparently. And it sounded great. It was a risk, but I decided to take it. And at first it seemed like the grass was greener. But slowly I'm beginning to think I've made a mistake. I'm not in a great hurry to make that mistake again. I'm better off to play this one out, and see if my fears are warranted. What this company does have is great leadership that is constantly growing the business. The company can probably afford me indefinitely. It's just a question of whether they're satisfied with me, or want to try somebody else. I'm hoping the pressure that's being put on me is just sloppy management instead of a veiled threat.

Polybios said:

Don't you do estimations beforehand?

No, this company is not primarily a software company and so they haven't developed those practices yet. Prior to me and another guy being hired it was developed by a one-man contract job (that one man is my manager).

The project I've been working on for the past month or so has been importing content from a third party export without documentation... As you can imagine there are a lot of unknowns. This third party doesn't even use a single identifier for data... There are different types of identifiers used interchangeably, and I have no rules for when to use each... It's ... "fun". Estimating this would have been impossible anyway.

Initially I had no contact with the third party developers either. Eventually I did get a contact there, but instead of sending full documentation he just sends the shortest possible ad-hoc answer he can. With a million questions it doesn't work very well to ask him everything so I have to do a lot of discovery work... On half a gigabyte of schemaless XML data.

I'm also new to the company and it's an unfamiliar business sector to me. So I don't really know the rules, and I've been given very little guidance from day one. A lot of what I'm doing is different from what I've done in the past so estimating a lot of it isn't really practical for me yet. I'm still learning a lot of new-to-me things as I go.

There are many ways to solve problems. You can do it quick and dirty, or you can take your time and try to make sure it's as close to perfect as you can, or you can find a happy medium. With the only guidance being "don't break the site!" I lean towards the perfection side of things, but it seems their timelines are more on the quick and dirty side of things.

The other annoying thing is that the manager doesn't review your work until you say it's good to go up. Even though I've tried to share it early and asked for feedback, he just refuses to look. So I can't even get feedback or direction prior to committing my name to the finished product and being scrutinized for it. Naturally I'm not going to hand in a quick and dirty solution so that I can be ridiculed for sloppy work... Also without any real QA if I push code with a serious bug in it that I don't catch then it'll likely flow straight to production and I'll take the blame for it. It just seems like I can't win. Almost like I'm being set up to fail.

Erin Maus

I really think I got lucky with my job judging by a lot of peeps here. :-/ It pays great, the environment/culture is great, the location is amazing... And I don't even have a degree.

I think the only "downside" is pair programming (we're all Agile XP), but I don't see that as a downside myself.

bamccaig

I have found pair programming to be advantageous at times, though I would probably not thrive if all day everyday was paired.

Last night was my first night completely sober. I didn't have any alcohol and didn't consume any cannabis. It was another sleepless night. I tossed and turned all night. At times it felt like I was nodding off, but it seemed like when I realized I was I would wake back up. Eventually at 3 or 4 in the morning I got up and drank a beer hoping that would knock me out. And again it felt like I was nodding off after, but woke up before falling asleep... On the plus side, I was worried the beer would trigger another spell of depression this morning, but so far I'm not doing bad. I still have high anxiety, but the depression seems minor for now. The beautiful weather may be helping in that regard. It's supposed to be Sunny and 17 C today!

My wife managed to get Fitbit to replace the Versa that was still under warranty. They're shipping it to us now. So hopefully in a week or so I'll have actual evidence of my sleep quality again which will hopefully reveal that I'm sleeping better than I perceive.

Bruce Perry

For a moment I thought this thread had died, but it just wasn't in Off-Topic Ordeals. Phew! :)

GullRaDriel

We can not let that thread die. Period.

8-)

Edgar Reynaldo

bambams, cannabis withdrawal is a real thing. Every time I quit smoking, I go through withdrawal. Fever / chills / extreme restlessness. It goes away after a few days. Typically 3 or so. Alchol withdrawal can be more severe - look up the symptoms so you know what is you and what is withdrawal.

Peter Hull

For a moment I thought this thread had died

Bruce Perry! I'm now waiting for a posting from Steve Terry and Chris Barry (also Harry Cary but not so much :P )

bamccaig

bambams, cannabis withdrawal is a real thing. Every time I quit smoking, I go through withdrawal. Fever / chills / extreme restlessness. It goes away after a few days. Typically 3 or so. Alchol withdrawal can be more severe - look up the symptoms so you know what is you and what is withdrawal.

The problem is that symptoms for clinical depression/anxiety, Citalopram HDR, and alcohol withdrawal are all pretty overlapping... :P It's pretty much impossible to know what is causing what. Which is why the doctor didn't want to add any additional meds for the withdrawal to the mix.

My drinking has never been what I would call severe (I wouldn't call it healthy either). I've never had more than 12 drinks in a night to my knowledge (I could never stomach it). I generally would not start drinking until 5 PM most days. On vacation or the occasional weekend I might start light around 1 or 2 PM, but that's like a beer every 2 hours until 5 PM. I can't remember the last time I did that.

I got pretty good at regulating my intake over the years. Hangovers suck. I was also cognizant of how much I drank. I did put limits on myself. The best way for me to count drinks in a night is to line the empties up on the counter so that in the morning I can see how much I drank, and if I'm able I can also use that count to throttle myself the night before (most times I was able, but I rarely had to do anything conscious about it).

For me a heavy night was 8 or 9 drinks in a night. Of course, that's typically from 6 PM to 1 AM (~7 hours). A few years ago it would have been 6 PM to 3 AM (9 hours, so about one drink per hour on average). In reality, in the last 5 years my first beer would only take about a minute to drink. But the second one would take more like 30 minutes. The next one an hour. By the end of the night I might be nursing a drink for an hour and a half. That count also often included a 5 AM sleep aid (so 7+1 or 8+1).

I think that I am probably experiencing mid-level withdrawal symptoms at worst. It's not bad honestly. I don't really crave alcohol right now. It's been quite easy to taper off and quit. Staying quit is harder, but the worst of my symptoms are anxiety, with I have always had for as long as I can remember; and insomnia, which started before I stopped drinking. And alcohol is the best known treatment to both of these for me, or at least, it used to be when it was effective. I am, however, excited about my current [almost] sobriety and the potential for the future. I think that if my health care practitioners can figure out a solution to depression, anxiety, and insomnia long term that I could potentially quit recreational drugs indefinitely (though realistically hanging around other alcoholics will likely inspire a drink when this COVID-19 lockdown subsides). That remains to be seen, however.

I am excited for my next addictions counseling session though to be able to report that I'm pretty well abstaining now. The first time I spoke to the counselor I expressed no desire to quit. On the other hand, I still can't imagine what they could do for me at this point aside from perhaps discouraging a relapse.

Last night I had a beer while barbecuing after work (in celebration of the weekend). I felt pretty exhausted/drowsy immediately after supper and made the decision to go to bed. I decided to have a second beer in hopes of it putting me right to sleep. I also opted to wear headphones with Evanescence playing so that if I couldn't sleep I might get some time to process any accumulated baggage that hadn't been processed yet. Unfortunately, sleep did not come easy. I listened to music for probably an hour or two before I shut it off in hopes of sleeping. I probably did fall asleep a few times, but it never lasted. I spent much of the night tossing and turning awake. Around 4 AM (actually 4:20 AM...) I got out of bed and headed to the kitchen to think of relief. I laughed internally at the time and thought it could be a sign from God that I should use some cannabis, but decided to stay clean on that for the rest of the night. Instead, I drank one of the hard ciders that my wife had bought for herself, opened, and didn't like. I went back to bed, but I think I laid awake for hours afterward. I finally dreamed a little bit later in the morning so I probably fell asleep for an hour or two again. I finally gave up on trying to sleep around 10:45 AM.

I think that I have gone about 4 days without cannabis so far. I'm debating trying a single hit tonight an hour before bed to see if it will help. I imagine that after 4 days of not using it's going to hit me hard again. I don't really have any craving or compulsion to use cannabis, but I wonder if it might aid in sleeping. If I do use it I don't plan to go back to using it daily. I plan to try to limit it to every few days or every other day at worst. It kind of sucks because I just spent $300 on a brand new vape device, and I have close to 2 ounces of cannabis flower. That might be a multi-year supply or better if I stick to my plan. :P

I haven't weighed myself in a few months probably, but the last time I did I was about 155 lbs (70 kg). I decided to weigh myself today because I was sure that I had been losing weight. Sure enough I only weigh about 146 lbs (66 kg) now. I'm a little bit excited about that. Though everybody was pretty excited that I had put on some weight before, and I also liked the idea of having a bit more weight to throw around in the event of a physical altercation[1], it was all in the form of belly fat so it wasn't very flattering and it made clothing not fit. I'm hoping that I might fit into my original motorcycle jacket again (if the wife didn't throw it out during the move)!

I attribute the weight loss to my loss of appetite, my reoccurring compulsive motor activity, and my reduced intake of beer. I have only been eating half meals per day for nearly a week now. Yesterday was the exception because I managed two small meals instead. I used to compulsively rock my upper torso, or at least keep my legs jumping, and sometime over the last few years I think that I lost that habit. I think because I was getting my anxiety under control. It seems it's back though. I also find myself pacing around at times. Going from 6 - 9 beer per night to 0 - 2 is probably saving a lot of calories. Unfortunately, back when I used to be this weight beer was a major contributor to my caloric intake so there's a chance I'll end up with insufficient nutrition to stay energized now.

(also Harry Cary but not so much :P )

IIRC, his avatar always reminded me of Mr. Dressup. :D

Append:

I just took the puppy out for a 1 kilometer walk (it felt like further). The dog is tired and calm. Hopefully I'll be able to sleep tonight without any drugs.

P.S. My old motorcycle jacket fits! :D

References

  1. At my heaviest I was 180 lbs (82 kg).
Edgar Reynaldo

bambams - I'm proud of you.

Don't get discouraged if you relapse, or have symptoms. These things take time to fully heal. I'm on your side bro. Stay strong.

bamccaig

Work is putting the pressure on again, and I'm not sure I can take it. :-/ They seem to think that if they pressure me I'm going to work faster. More than likely I'm just going to fall apart. Anybody else work like that?

amarillion
bamccaig said:

Work is putting the pressure on again, and I'm not sure I can take it. :-/ They seem to think that if they pressure me I'm going to work faster. More than likely I'm just going to fall apart. Anybody else work like that?

Some people work harder under pressure. Some work harder if you offer rewards. Some work harder for more responsibility. Some work harder if you give them more freedom. Some work harder to avoid punishment.

Smart managers know their people and offer the right incentive for the right person. Stupid managers only know one way to motivate people and keep using it over and over, even if it doesn't work.

Johan Halmén

Isn't it so wrong that anxiety kind of explains its existence with irrelevant things. Like "I have an interview soon, and it gives me anxiety". "I'm anxious about next month rent".

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Things like "Last week I forgot to be anxious about a meeting and it went so bad!" just don't happen. The opposite happens.

I have felt anxiety, I've been depressed, I've gone to therapy. But I really am not a difficult case. I'm good now and I can pretty clear see the reasons to my down periods. That's why it's easy for me to see the ridiculousness in believing it's the trivial things that cause anxiety, even though they are the ones that might trigger the anxiety.

Erin Maus

Yeah, except an anxiety disorder is something wrong with your brain causing anxiety over insignificant things or from certain triggers.

In my case, I just get anxious literally for no reason.

Like this:

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bamccaig

My brain seems to have always worked differently than other people's. For example:

  • Some "common sense" escapes me. Things that most people take for granted escape me, which can land me in some pretty embarrassing situations. This is especially true for human behavior and interaction, but can also be true of the natural world around us.


  • I'm not very hands on either. Trivial things to most people are out of my grasp. I may be able to do them, but it will take me much longer to do than it would for most people.


  • I'm not at all aware of my surroundings most of the time. And I'm not at all aware of it.

These are things that are somewhat beyond my control. My brain thinks of different things than other people would. It's unclear if this is something that I was born with or something that developed from my environment, or some combination of both. Either way it has proven something not easily nor permanently overcome.

Another example: I don't see the world as malleable. If I see something wrong, like a water leak, that I don't have experience handling my instinct is that there's nothing that I can do about it aside from call somebody else for help. A normal person might try to wrap it in cloth to slow the leak, or put a bucket under it to capture water. They might try something to fix it, even if temporarily. Whereas I would likely not even consider touching it for fear of making it worse. It's just the way my brain works. I have to consciously override that thought process to overcome it. The more outside my skills/experiences it is the less likely I am to even consider doing that.

Even something simple like a box in the middle of the path. Normal people would just move it. It doesn't even cross my mind to move it. I navigate around it.

This gives me somewhat of a handicap in life. People don't realize the extra level of detail that I require to understand instructions. They give the same instructions they would give everybody else, and for most people that works fine and they get on with it. For me, instead, I find myself scratching my head guessing what they want me to do and hesitating to avoid making a mistake. Other people also erroneously think that I'm just being overly passive, and if I apply myself then I'll get it and do it properly. In reality, often, if I do try to apply myself I'll screw it up royally. This is frustrating for people around me, but it's at least as frustrating for me.

I think that this is at the core the source of my anxiety. It's not unwarranted at all. It has proven time and time again to be very much appropriate. The problem is seemingly society not having a place for someone like me. I've managed to skate under the radar so far with lots of help from friends, family, teachers, etc.

This doesn't mean that I'm completely helpless. I can do most things that most other people can do, but it requires more time for me to figure it out, and sometimes it requires more practice to get it right. It might require more detailed instructions, and more patience, and it doesn't hurt to have extra checks and balances in place to catch mistakes before they become expensive or time consuming.

The exception is typically with things like maths and computers. Things that are more conceptual or virtual than real. These generally came much easier to me than other things, which is why I am in the field that I am. Though even in this field I still sometimes suffer shortcomings as a result. I may waste time trying to solve a code or command issue, forgetting all about the ultimate goal, and focusing instead on an insignificant step to getting there.

As long as somebody out there is able to give me jobs to do that I am qualified to do I can thrive, but finding that somebody is the hard part. This obviously leaves me very much dependent on other people, and for an introvert with poor social skills that is a weak position to be in.

LennyLen

Bambams, maybe get yourself checked for Autism (esp. Asperger's, though it's not called that anymore) as well.

bamccaig

I have considered that possibility, and even suggested it to my wife. She doesn't believe me. I hoped that going to my doctor with these issues would have lead to his consideration of that, but so far it hasn't come up, and I feel like I shouldn't lead him into a diagnosis that he doesn't arrive at himself. Though I certainly have wondered if I would fall onto the spectrum somewhere.

LennyLen

Diagnosing Autism in adults can be difficult, and it's still rare enough that many doctors haven't come across it and don't recognize it.

Chris Katko
LennyLen said:

Diagnosing Autism in adults can be difficult, and it's still rare enough that many doctors haven't come across it and don't recognize it.

If you go to an actual phd psychiatrist who can't diagnose autism, he's a retard.

bamccaig

The problem with diagnosing an adult with autism is that the adult has passed under the radar for 20 (or 30) years already. Likely the signs aren't completely obvious. And autism presents itself in various ways depending on the person. It's not always the same. An adult living with it would have found ways to cope, and to try to fit in the best way they can. Even just reading the potential signs I can say that many of them do not apply to me, though they might have at some point in my life. I've managed to overcome some of my shortcomings. For example, I have a wife that likes to organize things. Initially when she moved my stuff around I would get upset, but I learned to tolerate it because she insisted and one thing won out over the other. There are no standards to diagnose it in adults yet according to healthline, and it's a somewhat new concept so not all practitioners are familiar with it.

My new Fitbit arrived yesterday so I got my first night of sleep data. I went to bed shortly after posting the Planet of the Humans thread around 10:30 PM so I was still pretty alert. According to my Fitbit I fell asleep around 11 PM and slept until 6:15 AM. I'd say that's a little generous because at that time I got out of bed to take the dog outside for a wiz and I had already been tossing and turning unable to fall back asleep, but I'll take it. I was drinking lots of water before bed so there's a chance that woke me up. The more important measures are deep (~46 mins) and REM sleep (~53 mins). It's pretty pathetic overall, but it's something. It's also approximately what I would normally achieve after a night of drinking so in that sense it's consistent (though I've been sober for days). I'll aim to improve upon it over time.

Erin Maus

Got the NPC ship to chase you. It took literally one line of code (to calculate the direction between you & the NPC ship) and everything else was plug'n'play with the player ship control code, woo.

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(It's a GIF, click to enlarge & view).

LennyLen
bamccaig said:

The problem with diagnosing an adult with autism is that the adult has passed under the radar for 20 (or 30) years already. Likely the signs aren't completely obvious. And autism presents itself in various ways depending on the person. It's not always the same. An adult living with it would have found ways to cope, and to try to fit in the best way they can. Even just reading the potential signs I can say that many of them do not apply to me, though they might have at some point in my life. I've managed to overcome some of my shortcomings. For example, I have a wife that likes to organize things. Initially when she moved my stuff around I would get upset, but I learned to tolerate it because she insisted and one thing won out over the other. There are no standards to diagnose it in adults yet according to healthline, and it's a somewhat new concept so not all practitioners are familiar with it.

As well as that, many, if not most, undiagnosed adults also end up with anxiety/ depression/substance abuse, which masks the autism.

GullRaDriel

Nice and good job, can you make a chain of boats ?

Erin Maus

> Nice and good job, can you make a chain of boats ?

Not yet, I don't plan on there being more than 3 boats at once (including your boat).

bamccaig

It's a new day with new sleep data. Last night my Fitbit claims that I managed to sleep for 8 hours and 17 minutes! Some of that may be wrong, but what's most promising is the REM sleep: 1 hour and 36 minutes. I still managed 55 minutes of deep sleep too.

That said, we'll see if I can reproduce it tonight. My wife made a special coffee drink today and I had some so I'm hoping the caffeine doesn't induce insomnia. I poured half of it out to avoid getting too much (I was starting to get a buzz). Tomorrow she's going to make it again, but with decaffeinated coffee. I doubt it'll taste as good, but bitter I can handle.

It also helped that I had a phone call with the client last night around 5 PM and unlike my bosses he was much more relaxed about timelines, focused more on getting things done right instead of fast. It was refreshing. We'll see how that plays out though as the project continues... I'm pretty close to finalizing the next step, but there are months and months worth of iterations to go so we'll have to see if we can get to a point where it's routine and smooth or if each iteration will have bumps.

Today has been fun following up on the talking points of the call too. I hoped to be further than this at this point, but so far I haven't heard from anybody so hopefully that means pressure is off in terms of time and I'm free to take the time needed to get it right.. But we'll see.

LennyLen said:

As well as that, many, if not most, undiagnosed adults also end up with anxiety/ depression/substance abuse, which masks the autism.

Valid point. With regard to all 3 I actually feel pretty good today. My depression and anxiety appear to be under control (knock on wood), and as far as substance abuse I'm clean and not really craving anything. Throughout the day and each evening I have been drinking lots of water instead.

My wife has been very supportive and understanding through this. One of the ways that has manifested is that she has let me take control of the TV before bed, and has been watching Star Trek: TNG reruns with me on Netflix. For years I've found that a good way to wind down at the end of the night. What's exciting is that I think she's actually enjoying it and developing an interest in Star Trek!

Then around 10 or 11 I try to go to bed each night, even if I'm not really ready. And it has been working. It seems like I'm gradually getting my body's sleep cycle back on track. I just hope things continue this way.

My only concern is that the antidepressant has negative interactions with plenty of drugs, including alcohol and cannabis, and once you've taken it for a few weeks it is in your system for months. I'm not sure exactly what that implies going forward. Last night I was wheezing when I went to bed so I thought I might take an asthma inhaler, but I Googled for interactions and it looked alarming so I avoided it. Fortunately, I think I can have Tylenol so there's that. I actually started to experience light sensitivity right before bed last night and took an extra strength Tylenol for a developing headache. I wonder if that had something to do with how well I slept.

I'd like to get to a point where I'd be able to have a beer after work while I barbecue or vape some cannabis to unwind on the weekend, but it seems for as long as I'm medicated and even for months afterward I'll have to remain clean. Alcohol might bring back the depression, which just isn't worth it, and cannabis apparently can cause confusion which I can't afford while I'm being crunched at work.

All in all though I'm feeling fantastic right now and things are starting to look up again.

Polybios

While your sleep will hopefully continue to improve, the Liar Tweets Tonight:

video

Eric Johnson

It's that time of year again—Piccolo Day! :D

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Edgar Reynaldo

All hail King Namek!

Polybios

@bambam:
About your sleep, have you ruled out the simpler causes pertaining to the body like the muscles of your neck and shoulders having become tense, lack of physical exercise etc.?

Edit: Posting to this thread is much faster than it used to be for me.

bamccaig

I'm not really sure how to rule out tense muscles. I'm an anxious person so I'm almost always tense. Alcohol and cannabis surely used to help me to relax in that sense, but they are not currently an option.

As a rule though I sleep pretty good depending on how anxious I am. The only thing that really has me seriously worried is work. I've been having work-related dreams lately, which is never a good sign. That said, I don't think they've quite been nightmares either so it could be worse. It does suck though to spend any more [virtual] time at work than needed, but it's also probably necessary for my psyche to process the stress.

I've been sleeping OK. Last week continued to be good. I got 8 hours and 12 minutes on Wednesday night, 7 hours and 9 minutes on Thursday night, and 10 hours and 4 minutes on Friday night (though it was fragmented because I had to get up and take the dog out around 6 AM). Saturday night I only got 6 hours, but Sunday night I got 7 hours and 34 minutes. Last night I only got 6 hours and 39 minutes, despite being in bed from about 10:30 PM to 8:55 AM.

I've been cheating a little bit. As I might have already confessed, my wife foolishly ordered some "cider" wine bottles from a local Strawberry farm a few weeks ago, and when they weren't what she expected she also went out and bought 4 tallboy cans of cider. She likes Somersby cider, but couldn't find it, and bought a bunch of local ciders instead hoping to find an alcohol beverage that she could drink. She didn't really like any of them though and so it was all left in the fridge for me... The cans were all opened because she tasted each one..

I drank them all, but only one drink per day while I cooked supper (well, the cans were like 7% and tall so maybe those count as 1.5 or 2 each). Once I had drank the 3 cans (the 4th was so gross I wasn't even willing to drink it and dumped it) I eventually continued on the cider wine bottles, but still only having one glass per day. I figured doctors claim that one drink per day is considered good for your health, and probably not enough to exacerbate my depression. So far so good. I haven't experienced severe depression in over a week. I have noticed that my anxiety seems to be getting worse again, but it hasn't been unbearable.

I'm still falling asleep, but I haven't been staying asleep all night for the past few nights. I've been taking 500 mg of Tylenol right before bed, in part to help with light sensitivity, in part to prevent physical pain from waking me up, and in part abusing it as a sleep aid. Now I've started waking up at 3 or 4 AM and I've been taking an additional 500 mg to go back to sleep (not sure if it works, but even as a placebo it makes me feel better). There should be no interactions with my medication, and up to 3000 mg per day appears to be "completely safe" according to the Web (though I've been only taking 500 or 1000 max thus far). (Originally I thought that each tablet was 1000 mg, but it's only 500 mg)

There were a couple of days where I got mildly stoned too shortly before bed. It didn't seem to help me sleep though so I haven't been making it a habit. And though my tolerance seems to have backed off somewhat, I'm still not getting stoned like I used to when I a new to it (I used to sort of get green, binocular vision, which was neat). I didn't really enjoy it the last time I got stoned. I just didn't feel right, and it wasn't very fun. Albeit, I'm not really able to have "fun" with drugs right now so it might be all in my head (heh).

Anyway, I think that I'm becoming concerned about work timelines again and that's exacerbating my anxiety. I hope to be in good shape to actually finalize a step of the project I'm working on today though so hopefully that will ease my anxiety again. Fortunately, I have a long weekend coming up too because next Monday is a statutory holiday in Ontario. I've also been given permission to book some vacation time despite the deadline so I might book some additional time off in the coming weeks. Unfortunately, I probably can't book a full week off, but at least I can get some additional long weekends. I'm not ready to do that though until I've demonstrated a potential pace of completing these steps.

P.S. Posting to the thread should be pretty fast. It's mostly the automatic quoting mechanism that was super slow for me, and that's because it has to search through the entire thread to match content which took a long time with such a large thread. Though you would think it could search from the bottom to the top and likely find a match much faster. Explicitly quoting somebody should be almost instant though because it doesn't need to do the search. I think in another thread ML said that the search indexing job hasn't been run in years though so if it relies on that it might explain why it's super slow.

I have experienced hiccups posting without quotes, but I think that is due to the site being "asleep" (i.e., the cloud service taking an inactive site down until a new request is made).

Of course, it's possible that ML has optimized something to make it faster (perhaps he executed the search indexing job finally), but I'm not going to hold my breath on that. :D

Edit: Revised the Tylenol dosage information.

Rodolfo Lam

Wait, this thread has been without posts for far too long. Bumping.

Erin Maus

So assuming I don't screw up I'm on track to a leadership role in my job Soon (tm) :) Timeline is a bit unknown since some other stuff needs to be solved first.

I also did the math and could buy a house in two years. ??? New goal acquired.

Also I've been on hormones six months Friday, yay. Biggest differences are: 1. acne vanished 2. body hair grows super slow 3. dandruff's gone. 4. minor changes in face shape 5. bewbs. ;D 10/10 would recommend.

Life's pretty good compared to say, 4-5 years ago. 8-)

bamccaig

Good catch, Rodolfo! :o

Erin, I find the acne and dandruff things quite fascinating. Are you saying that those changes were purely a difference in hormones, or have you also been using creams and lotions and things that women typically use that men often don't?

I still get routine acne in my 30's, and I've had back-acne since I hit puberty. I also have horrible dandruff, albeit, I attribute that in part to my lack of hydration from normally not drinking water and drinking lots of alcohol and other things that dehydrate the body. I have been drinking a lot more water lately, but it hasn't been long enough to see a noticeable change. I'll feel somewhat vindicated if these problems are partially attributed to hormones though. :D

Erin Maus

Nope, literally just hormones. I couldn't ever get my acne under control, now I don't have any. It's amazing. :o

Testosterone is bad for your skin. :P

Edgar Reynaldo

Great. Now bambams is gonna start taking hormones. And growing 8008135.

Erin Maus

He'd only have to take an anti-androgen to lower testosterone which wouldn't have an effect on breast growth. Spiralactone (the one I'm on) is used to treat severe acne I think.

Oh and my alcohol tolerance has free-falled since hormones, so I've stopped drinking. Not too big of a deal.

bamccaig

If I'm going to suffer without testosterone I might as well get the boobies. :-*

My alcohol tolerance has gone to shit since I've started these antidepressants[1] (and cut way back on alcohol). Now one beer is enough to get me drunk again, and two beers is enough to get me wrecked. :P I like it that way. I occasionally have a 3rd if I'm feeling brave/stressed, but by then I'm done and switch back to water. It is still my intention to stop drinking for a while, but I was sabotaged by my loving wife and I'm back to having at least one beer every day now. :-/ Water gets old after a while.

Append:

My wife has become obsessed with Tik Tok, the social media app thingy.

She saw this thing where a guy claims he tapped a beer bottle with a butter knife 4 times and then cut up at the cap and it popped off smoothly. She essentially dared me to do it the next time I open a beer. Well, it was only noon, but challenge accepted. I doubted that it would work, and I stand by that assertion. Nevertheless, I did manage to open the bottle.

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{"name":"AFnHuO2.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/a\/ca694f254ca26f0a74407005649c4d51.jpg","w":3024,"h":4032,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/a\/ca694f254ca26f0a74407005649c4d51"}AFnHuO2.jpg

It took about 8 or 12 taps, and 3 cuts, and I sort of broke the glass. But the beer didn't explode, and as far as I tell there were no glass shards in the beer or anywhere else. It appears to have been a pretty "clean" "cut".

References

  1. Citalopram 20mg
Erin Maus

Cannons firin' cannonballs. :)

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(It's a GIF so you'll have to click it to view.)

Had a blast with the math. Wasn't hard but was pretty cool making it work :). Since the enemy ship is on star-board, only the star-board cannons fire! If it were on port, then the port cannons would fire. Just nice.

LennyLen

I found this neat photo of my town. Anyone else with nice photos of where they live?

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bamccaig

There aren't really "nice" photos of where I live. Downtown is basically slums, West end is all industrial, and uptown is just commercial/retail. This is the best that I could find, which focuses on just the tourist part of downtown with a shopping mall and hockey arena by the water, and parts of the steel plant in the distance at the top left:

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LennyLen

I see you have a boat that doesn't go anywhere. We do too, but ours isn't in as good a condition. It's still a tourist attraction though.

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I just discovered we even have a Wikipedia page, which surprised me considering how small our town is.

edit:

P.S. It looks very flat where you live.

Erin Maus

This is where I live. 8-)

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That's the view from my desk at work...

Also added UI scaling to my game. Pretty dope. Took like an hour.

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That's my game at 4K. Before the UI was super tiny. You may to view the attachment (4k.jpg) because Allegro.cc resizes the image.

LennyLen

You may to view the attachment (4k.jpg) because Allegro.cc resizes the image.

If you shift-click on the thumbnail, it will open full size in a new window.

Erin Maus

The more you know!

bamccaig
LennyLen said:

I see you have a boat that doesn't go anywhere. We do too, but ours isn't in as good a condition. It's still a tourist attraction though.

We used to. Some people complained that it was an eyesore and the city hauled it off to a commercial dock or something last summer. It had history on our waters, and used to offer tours during the summer to tourists. I don't think it was ever very fun, but nevertheless it was a part of history and it filled in the waterfront. I didn't agree with the decision (especially because it cost taxpayers 10's of thousands of dollars to move because the non-profit that owned the ship had no money). It's hard to say whether the decision was right or not because now with COVID-19 the marina is completely empty.

LennyLen said:

P.S. It looks very flat where you live.

It's generally not flat at all, but it's not very mountainous either. There are plenty of hills and valleys and a few small mountains. From an airplane it looks pretty flat, but from a car it does not. :P Our highways often pass through rock walls because the only way to build across this part of the province was to blast through rock (and even doing so our highways are twists and hills, making travel take longer). When I think of flat I think of Saskatchewan. When we visited there last summer it was the furthest I have ever seen an inland horizon.

Johan Halmén

You realize that if Trump wins the election, this thread has to go on for another four years to survive him?

bamccaig

1. This is the thread that never closes
2. It just goes on and on like Moses
3. Some people started complaining that the threads here lock too soon
4. And they'll just keep complaining because Matthew has better things to do

5. GOTO 1

Erin Maus

It's Thursday... Last post Tuesday... danger danger.

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Graphics options screen! Next is keyboard controls. Woop. So boring but so necessary. :'(

bamccaig

I had a doctor's appointment yesterday where I reported mostly positive results. The doctor seemed quite satisfied with my progress, and wasn't concerned about my relapse (3-4 drinks per day) because it's still a big improvement over my starting point.

I asked him about an Autism diagnosis. Initially he kind of blew it off nonchalantly, saying something like "you wouldn't want to excuse behavior on that." But then he kind of circled back and said it might be useful to know where your limitations come from to work at improving them... Uhhh, thanks, I guess? He searched their system for diagnostic information, but all of it was for children. He saw a mention of an "Autism Spectrum Screening Questionnaire", but he wasn't able to find/print it. He said I'd probably have better luck and told me to do it at home.

This is the one that I found:

https://autismcanada.org/about-autism/diagnosis/screening-tools/adult/

I don't know if it's the same one he referenced. The dog literally chewed up the piece of paper the doctor wrote it on this morning. It's also difficult to answer the questions honestly when I'm biased because I already believe I'm Autistic and am afraid of being told I'm not (because then I lose my explanation for why I am different). Anyway, I did answer honestly to the best of my ability.

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According to that I am at "high risk" for Autism (seems an odd choice of words). Of course, I may be blocked there now because it doesn't sound like my doctor sees any value in pursuing an actual diagnosis... My next appointment isn't for 2 months so he'll probably have forgotten all about it by then. I could message him to report my findings, but I feel like that will just look desperate for a diagnosis... :-/

Append:

I think that the doctor was actually referring to ASSQ which can be found here:

https://gillbergcentre.gu.se/english/research/screening-questionnaires/assq-screening-questionnaire

Direct links:

English
Svenska

Revised to better include girls:

English
Svenska

However, these questionnaires are specifically for children. They really don't apply to adults at all. :P Evidently my doctor is not up to speed on adult diagnoses.

LennyLen

For a comparison, I scored 43 on that test, and I have been diagnosed with Autism.

Here in NZ, we have an Autism Society that do all sorts of support work for Autistic people, and one of the services they provide is arranging for a diagnosis. Maybe Canada has something similar.

edit: I think this thread might be finally breaking the forum software. I tried including quotes in this post, but with them, the forum kept timing out.

MiquelFire

Yep, you have to do the full tag stuff because this forum is too big for the auto quote stuff to work.

I think we had talked about it before in the thread, maybe at least year back?

LennyLen

I did the full <quote name=""></quote> thing but it still timed out.

Bob Keane

I have had minor problems logging in to Allegro and posting. Perhaps the server is saving up to buy the farm?

Edgar Reynaldo

Noobs.

<quote name="LennyLen" src="https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/615770/1046195#target">
I did the full thing but it still timed out.
</quote>

LennyLen said:

I did the full thing but it still timed out.

Erin Maus

A noisy helicopter keeps swinging within a couple thousand feet of my apartment and I can't fall asleep now. >:(

There's protesting going on about probably as close as <1 mile away.

bamccaig
LennyLen said:

For a comparison, I scored 43 on that test, and I have been diagnosed with Autism.

Here in NZ, we have an Autism Society that do all sorts of support work for Autistic people, and one of the services they provide is arranging for a diagnosis. Maybe Canada has something similar.

I doubt it because Canada is so much bigger and sparser. It isn't easy to fund that sort of thing across the whole country. It needs to be something supported by the federal government to fund it. We'd need thousands of doctors that have studied it in depth to get anywhere. My doctor doesn't even think it's worth diagnosing... I tried https://www.autismontario.com/ and https://autismcanada.org/, but I can't seem to find any resources for adults to get diagnosed. They say to go through your general practitioner. :P So if your GP isn't motivated to diagnose you I think you run into a dead end. I might be able to persuade him for a diagnosis if I keep pushing for one. That said, I'm pretty satisfied at this point that I am on the spectrum anyway. There's too many puzzle pieces that fit. I'm not sure what a formal diagnosis would change anyway.

LennyLen said:

I did the full <quote name=""></quote> thing but it still timed out.

It needs the src attribute too to specify a URL where the quote appears or it will still do the automatic search to find which post you're quoting.

GullRaDriel

Moon !
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8-)

RmBeer2

Testing
Testing it.

EDIT =====================

I have got 54!!! YAAAAY!!! \o/ (joke)

Although much of the list doesn't make sense or is a good feature. But everything is considered autism. I don't believe a single word.

28. criticize the work of doctors

More points for me.

bamccaig

Richard Dawkins shared this article on Twitter. It's really long, but it's also really good. Americans should especially read this now.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/07/trumps-collaborators/612250/

RmBeer2

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They have forgotten to change the Wordpress icon on the page...

LennyLen
RmBeer2 said:

Although much of the list doesn't make sense or is a good feature.

The purpose of these tests is not to be a diagnosis, but to determine whether a diagnosis may be required. You can score quite high on tests like this and not be autistic. The same can be said for most mental/neurological disorder tests.

RmBeer2 said:

But everything is considered autism.

No, it's not.

Most people will have some autistic tendencies, but that doesn't mean they're on the spectrum. Likewise most people have OCD tendencies, but don't have OCD. Most people get anxious at some point of their life, but don't have an anxiety disorder. Again, with just about any mental/neurological disorder, there are symptoms that most people exhibit to some degree.

RmBeer2 said:

I don't believe a single word.

Luckily, your belief in anything is not required.

RmBeer2

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Arthur Kalliokoski
bamccaig said:

Americans should especially read this now.

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

raynebc

My patience for leftist propaganda is long since depleted.

Erin Maus

40% BTW

because facts are leftist propaganda

raynebc

Cherry picked data, dishonest framing and extreme bias in coverage (edit: This is in addition to overt lies of course) is indeed propaganda. You can keep it.

Chris Katko

because facts are leftist propaganda

Noam Chomsky agrees

Erin Maus

raynebec, you have a better source? Excited to see it and be proved wrong! Unlike you I don't hate being wrong.

RmBeer2

Pretty disappointing to find that attitude on this forum. Conclude something as leftist and settle the issue, as if everything separated into leftist or rightist, the more revealing and reasonable the explanation is, the more leftist it's. The worst thing is that it's done in a derogatory manner that deserves to be discarded. It's as if they are crying out that they want to be ignorant.

The leftist is only a discriminatory name/label/word.

EDIT ==========================

In case of confusion:
it's: The leftist name/label/word
they: The haters of leftist

Erin Maus

Cute, I ask for a source and silence.

RmBeer2

Changing the subject, this is the Gas Hog game (From Atari 2600):

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I have never been able to finish the whole journey. I was able to advance to this point. When I had the original game on the console it never went beyond the second line.

I quite like this game for some reason, although it is extremely difficult and treacherous. :P

LennyLen

I don't think I ever played that one. I did at one time own this infamous game:

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RmBeer2

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raynebc

If I thought they'd consider other opinions honestly, I'd spend the time. I've been in this thread long enough to believe otherwise.

Erin Maus

I'm aware the number is inaccurate, I posted it to troll.

For the record, the reason the number is inaccurate isn't nefarious, the reason is the study is 30 years old. Studies since are very specific to certain areas / environments but still are above average (compared to the general population), with numbers from 25%+.

I did the research before I posted.

bamccaig

Yesterday I went and rode in a BLM motorcade demonstration through the city. :) It was fun and peaceful. They are estimating about 500 people participated, which isn't bad considering how small the city is. There was probably upwards of 100 or 150 cars. There was also a lot of support along the way, with onlookers putting up their arms in support. I only noticed one or two people that seemed offended or opposed. And we made a lot of racket, honking our horns as we drove through downtown and back to the university for speeches.

You wouldn't think racism occurs often where I live, but the black speakers painted a very different picture. A 30 year old woman said she had been arrested more than most people (so I'm thinking at least 3 or 4 times, if not 5 or 6). Obviously implying that she had done nothing wrong, but still been arrested. Considering that when I was 19-21 I was pulled over something like 11 times I can imagine had I been black those stops might not have been so leisurely. It's pretty sad to realize that in 2020 things are still this bad.

raynebc

BLM is misguided regardless of how pure some of its followers' intentions are. If they protested the killing of actual black heros like David Dorn more often, or so publicly mourned facts like that nearly all of them who are murdered are done by members of their own race, or that so many of them are aborted (just as Margaret Sanger wanted) instead of hype the outlier homicide/murder cases I'd be much more sympathetic.

The police and the "institutions" of the country aren't racist. You can make a more proper argument that it's a poverty related issue in that poor people are driven into crime more often, and that police subsequently deal with poor people more often, and a certain minority amount of police behavior will be bad. Nobody is perfect all the time especially under stress. All cops should wear body cams the entire time they're on duty. Let the footage tell the story, not a cop or a civilian, either of who could be lying for their own benefit.

It's too easy for people to believe they're victims when a large base of agitators makes sure they think so, and never let them believe otherwise. Why hold yourself accountable when you can blame the entire country for your misfortunes?

LennyLen
raynebc said:

You can make a more proper argument that it's a poverty related issue in that poor people are driven into crime more often

Yes, that is a valid argument to show that black people are not more likely to commit crime solely due to their race, but it brings up the question - why are black people in the US so over-represented in the lower socio-economic class.

And the answer to that is because that's where they've always been. Just a few hundred years ago they were barely considered to be people, and were property. It's only been in the last fifty or so years that they've had full equal rights with white people. Yes, black people are better off now than they've ever been, but they're making their way up from the bottom because that's where the system put them.

raynebc said:

The police and the "institutions" of the country aren't racist.

Here in NZ, our crime figures are like yours and Maori people are over-represented in crime statistics, and again this is not due to their race specifically, but because they are generally poorer than white people. Not all our statistics can be blamed on poverty however. Our courts have a system called diversion, where for minor crimes, if it's a first offence, the offender can apply for diversion and they don't have to serve any sentence for the crime provided they commit no further crimes within a certain time period. However, white people are eight times more likely to be granted diversion than a Maori person who has committed the same offence.

There are similar statistics with speeding tickets. If a person caught speeding is only a little bit above the limit, the officer who stops them is allowed to give a warning instead of a ticket. In most cases where a white person is stopped, they are given a warning, but when Maori drivers are stopped they're more likely to be given a ticket.

I wouldn't be surprised to find the same thing happening in other countries where white people are the majority of the population.

bamccaig
raynebc said:

BLM is misguided regardless of how pure some of its followers' intentions are.

BLM is not a religion. It's not a club. There's no membership. Anybody can show up to a protest, and anybody can act freely of their own free will. Generations of abuses combined with systemic poverty are the reasons for violence within black communities in America.

raynebc said:

If they protested the killing of actual black heros like David Dorn more often, or so publicly mourned facts like that nearly all of them who are murdered are done by members of their own race, or that so many of them are aborted (just as Margaret Sanger wanted) instead of hype the outlier homicide/murder cases I'd be much more sympathetic.

See above. Dorn was murdered by desperate people. People that are desperate precisely because of the racist system. There's absolutely no excuse for the poverty levels of black communities in the USA. White people created those messes, and should be paying to fix them. After holding a people down for 400 years it's not enough to just get off of them and leave them be. You need to make up for all of the harm you've done and try to right your wrongs. Stop blaming the victim and take responsibility for the part that our ancestors played in their misfortune.

raynebc said:

The police and the "institutions" of the country aren't racist. You can make a more proper argument that it's a poverty related issue in that poor people are driven into crime more often, and that police subsequently deal with poor people more often, and a certain minority amount of police behavior will be bad. Nobody is perfect all the time especially under stress.

You can't possibly know whether the police or "institutions" are racist unless you are personally in charge of them. To assert that they're not, despite the evidence to the contrary, shows your bias. Police are far more lenient on white suspects than they are on black suspects. There's no justification for that. A black person that is obeying the law deserves every courtesy that a white person would get. Instead, police discriminate against black people, and shoot innocent people like cowards instead of facing the dangers inherent in their job title.

raynebc said:

All cops should wear body cams the entire time they're on duty. Let the footage tell the story, not a cop or a civilian, either of who could be lying for their own benefit.

All cops should wear body cams, but ultimately the police department is in control of those body cams. When misconduct occurs they can either damage, destroy, hide, or erase the footage. That's why it's so important for civilians to have the right to film police. Typically unless there's video evidence that the police acted wrongly they can literally get away with murder. Unfortunately, even when there is video evidence the supreme court has made it so that they can still get away with murder. It's outrageous, and that should upset you.

Body cams that police wear should be tightly regulated. All footage should be submitted to an impartial third party for auditing, and any gaps or outages in the footage should be met with strict discipline. The footage on those cameras should be considered public property, not the private property of the police department.

raynebc said:

Why hold yourself accountable when you can blame the entire country for your misfortunes?

It just so happens that the entire country has a whole lot to do with their misfortunes. >:( >:( >:( Maybe let's turn that finger around and point back at you. Hold yourself and your peers accountable.

LennyLen said:

Yes, black people are better off now than they've ever been, but they're making their way up from the bottom because that's where the system put them.

They're not just making their way up from the bottom. They're also being held down at the bottom. The "war on drugs" ensures that desperate people likely to fall back on the relief that drugs offer them will be easy targets for law enforcement. Desperation and drug addiction also makes theft inevitable. And a criminal record is a permanent hindrance to employment opportunities (even after overcoming any blatant racism in the hiring process). These people are in these hard times because of abuses and discrimination, but they aren't being helped out. Instead, they're being held down, while condescendingly being told that their misfortunes are all of their fault. It's absolutely disgraceful.

The world is watching, America, and we don't drink your kool-aid. You can deny involvement all you want, but we're not stupid. This is all your fault, and it will continue to be your fault until you make it right. It's not even enough to step back and leave them alone. They require health care (mental and physical), education, and subsidies to overcome the obstacles that you've placed in front of them. They won't be right again for countless generations, and the burden is on you to make it right. You don't just get to benefit from their abuse and wash your hands of it when your ancestors pass on. Their sins have permanently stained your blood line, and until you make up for it it will follow you forever.

Even people that have no historical link to the abuses owe it to desperate people to share your wealth and help them out. Ultimately, it will benefit everyone for desperate people to recover and be productive members of a peaceful society.

Canada has similar problems with systemic racism that also affects black people. It is our indigenous population that has been most abused and they suffer a similar fate in Canada. We haven't yet done enough to make things right, and they continue to suffer. It will be countless more generations before the atrocities that our ancestors and peers committed against them will no longer hold them back. We still haven't done enough for them, but at least our government is increasingly admitting to its role. Of course, that doesn't stop ignorant white people from still blaming the aboriginals for their socioeconomic standing and all of the things that go along with it.

Chris Katko

=D

raynebc

LennyLen Black people are also putting themselves at a disadvantage due to their behavior. One of the biggest examples of this is the number of black children growing up in single parent homes. It's hard to build wealth in those circumstances so your children have a rougher start. I'd be interested in an escalating legal system where each person is given a probation slap on the wrist for their first non major legal offense. Instead of assuming NZ is a racist hell-hole, I'm going to infer that there may be justifiable reasons that Maori are given diversion less often. Severity of the crime matters in these cases. Criminal history matters.

Bam David Dorn was murdered by a thug who just had to get a free TV. Do you even pay any damn attention? Black people are holding themselves down more than white people. It is up to them to take the incentives offered by society, many of which are exclusively for minorities. The "slave" card expired quite some time ago. Your own bias shines through in your hypothetical scenarios.

An independent third party should receive and be in charge of police footage, just as it should be in charge of investigating alleged misconduct by police. I perfectly agree that a group shouldn't be in charge of policing itself. Charging somebody with murder requires extremely strong evidence. You may not like that, but it's the way the law is intended to work. Legally collect all the evidence you want, it is your right to do so. Call balls and strikes where they occur instead of mindlessly say the institutions are all corrupt. Even now, radicals in the DNC are calling for the destruction of police departments. They won't know how good they had it when they have to fight crime with their own two hands.

My family did not own slaves. I did not own slaves. I have no stain to clean by washing it with money. I am responsible for my own actions only. Refusing to agree with shady political movementments doesn't make me guilty of anything. As I've said before, collective responsibility is mostly just an ideal leftists put on a pedestal. I don't apologist for using that L word again, it applies.

RmBeer2

/dev/void

LennyLen
raynebc said:

Black people are also putting themselves at a disadvantage due to their behavior. One of the biggest examples of this is the number of black children growing up in single parent homes. It's hard to build wealth in those circumstances so your children have a rougher start.

Agreed, that is certainly an issue, and again, I'm sure it has less to do with race than it does socio-economic status.

raynebc said:

Instead of assuming NZ is a racist hell-hole, I'm going to infer that there may be justifiable reasons that Maori are given diversion less often. Severity of the crime matters in these cases. Criminal history matters.

The severity of the crime is not an issue, because you can only apply for diversion for minor crimes, likewise criminal history is not a factor, because in these cases there is no criminal history - they're first time offenders.

Erin Maus

"Black people are also putting themselves at a disadvantage due to their behavior."

Can you explain to me how generalizing an entire group of people based on their skin color is not racist?

Smh my head, white people are so racist.

Edgar Reynaldo

By your own admission, police is either racist or classist. Which is it?

Black people are poor. Poor people commit more crime. Therefore police brutality is ok because they're criminals. Therefore racism is ok. Therefore classism is ok.

If you think the white supremacist police in this country aren't racist, you aren't looking hard enough. Take off your conservative blinders for once.

:'(

raynebc

RmBeer2 People are primarily responsible for their own actions. Anything else is secondary. It's fine to acquire power, money and influence, but it's what you do with it that matters.

LennyLen What are the publicly stated factors taken into account for diversion? Is the likelihood of recidivism a factor?

Aaron I already gave an example. Statistics are data and are not racist. Stop with your sheep mentality and connect the dots.

Edgar I never inferred any such thing about police. Native Americans and disabled people have a higher poverty rate than black people. Hispanics have almost as high a poverty rate, yet these other groups aren't so competitive in the statistics of violent crime. Black people commit a disproportionate amount of that crime so they deal with police disproportionately more. Cultural issues are a major factor here. You can't create generational wealth if you don't raise your children and leave them wealth.

bamccaig
raynebc said:

Black people are also putting themselves at a disadvantage due to their behavior. One of the biggest examples of this is the number of black children growing up in single parent homes. It's hard to build wealth in those circumstances so your children have a rougher start.

You seem incapable of putting yourself in their shoes. You assume that everybody is equally motivated to act the way that you act because it was easy for you. You fail to understand that clawing your way back up from the bottom, overcoming hate and discrimination your entire life, is a daunting task that few are lucky enough to accomplish. It's not as though millions of people are just choosing to do nothing about their situation. It's that the system is designed to prevent their success. Keep in mind that abuses to the parents or grandparents don't just disappear in their children or grandchildren. The effects are felt for countless generations.

There are also countless single parent white homes, but those children fair an awful lot better. Blaming this on single parenthood is simply ignorant. It's far deeper than that. The single parenthood is a symptom of the oppression, not an anecdote of choices that healthy and happy adults are making.

raynebc said:

My family did not own slaves.

Curious. You seem pretty confident. I have no idea if my ancestors ever owned slaves. How do you know that yours didn't?

raynebc said:

I have no stain to clean by washing it with money.

Your country was built with slavery, as was mine. And both of our countries continued to discriminate against them until recently (and there is still some systemic discrimination present in both). That burden is on all Americans and Canadians as long as we thrive while aboriginals and blacks continue to struggle here.

raynebc said:

What are the publicly stated factors taken into account for diversion? Is the likelihood of recidivism a factor?

I find it really telling how hard you're trying to dismiss the racism in NZ that you aren't even familiar with. LennyLen already said the people being discriminated against were first time offenders. Your blinders are preventing you from seeing it.

raynebc said:

Statistics are data and are not racist. Stop with your sheep mentality and connect the dots.

Statistics are just numbers. They have no meaning. The meaning has to be inferred from the numbers, and that's where the racism comes in. You can interpret numbers many ways. You can assume that black people are just worse in general, and commit more crime just because they're prone to being "bad", or you can look for other explanations that might explain their relationship with crime.

raynebc said:

I never inferred any such thing about police. Native Americans and disabled people have a higher poverty rate than black people. Hispanics have almost as high a poverty rate, yet these other groups aren't so competitive in the statistics of violent crime.

Are you just trying to be dense, or are you really that stupid? Disabled people are fucking disabled. To even suggest that disabled people should be committing crime at the same rate as other poverty-stricken able bodied people is laughable. It shows how you're set on thinking in terms of black and white, and fail to understand the nuances of real life. The answers to these questions exist, and I assure you the answer isn't that black people are inherently bad, lazy, or violent.

raynebc said:

Cultural issues are a major factor here.

For once you may have gotten something correct on this subject, but it was clearly in error.

raynebc
bamccaig said:

It's that the system is designed to prevent their success

The system is not designed to prevent their success. That is a popular false narrative, but that's all it is.

bamccaig said:

How do you know that yours didn't?

My mom has studied our family history as a hobby. I have no reason to distrust her because I've always known her to be an honest and righteous person. As for me never owning slaves, I can personally guarantee it. I don't have to care whether you believe me.

bamccaig said:

Your country was built with slavery, as was mine.

Slavery existed, but it wasn't integral to the flourishing of the country. Ending slavery involved the country's bloodiest conflict of all time. The sea of patriots' blood paid an expensive price for freedom.

bamccaig said:

LennyLen already said the people being discriminated against were first time offenders. Your blinders are preventing you from seeing it.

No, you're just too set in your ways to question your dogma. I'm asking why and you're just accepting your truth instead of pursuing the truth.

bamccaig said:

Statistics are just numbers. They have no meaning.

They can have meaning if you use them honestly.

bamccaig said:

To even suggest that disabled people should be committing crime at the same rate as other poverty-stricken able bodied people is laughable.

Now who is making lazy assumptions? I never said physically disabled, and neither did the base stat I used. You need to take your blinders before telling anybody else to do so.

bamccaig said:

For once you may have gotten something correct on this subject, but it was clearly in error.

Your lack of self awareness is hilarious.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6iHAg68Q_w
In other news, this is what's going to happen in the sh*thole deep blue cities whose "leadership" cowers from angry mobs in puddles of its own urine.

bamccaig
raynebc said:

The system is not designed to prevent their success. That is a popular false narrative, but that's all it is.

Of course. As countless cities in Georgia with significant black populations face voter suppression. ::) You can believe what you want to believe, but we're not going to drop it and the tower is falling. You'll realize your mistake soon enough (or you're an extremist conservative). Trump is taking the whole Republican party down with him. Do you rock a Confederate flag too?

raynebc said:

My mom has studied our family history as a hobby. I have no reason to distrust her because I've always known her to be an honest and righteous person.

Interesting that in telling your family's history she thought it prudent to mention that your ancestors DID NOT ever own slaves. :-/ ::) While she was at it did she also mention whether none of your ancestors ever raped a goat or flew to outer space? That must have been a long night.

raynebc said:

Slavery existed, but it wasn't integral to the flourishing of the country.

African peoples were captured and transported to the Americas to work. Most European colonial economies in the Americas from the 16th through the 19th century were dependent on enslaved African labor for their survival.

Emphasis mine.

raynebc said:

Ending slavery involved the country's bloodiest conflict of all time. The sea of patriots' blood paid an expensive price for freedom.

Yeah, we know, a whole lot of Americans come from really, really shitty people. And a whole lot of those shitty people passed their ideals on to their children and grandchildren. Surprisingly, losing the war didn't change their minds overnight. They loved enslaving African people so much that they were willing to murder countless of their own people to keep on doing it. Of course, they were sure to have God on their side..

raynebc said:

No, you're just too set in your ways to question your dogma. I'm asking why and you're just accepting your truth instead of pursuing the truth.

I don't hear you asking anything, or even being open to new ideas. You're asserting falsehoods and refusing to debate every time you get cornered.

raynebc said:

They can have meaning if you use them biasedly.

FTFY.

raynebc said:

Now who is making lazy assumptions? I never said physically disabled, and neither did the base stat I used.

I'm confused. Are you arguing also that disabled people are only poor because they choose not to do better for themselves? Or are you arguing that people with disadvantages compared with the vast majority of people should be actively violent towards others, and that they have at least an equal chance of winning in a fight in order to sustain a continuous stream of violence? I was not assuming that all disabled people were physically disabled. I should have said able-bodied and able-minded to be more clear.

raynebc said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6iHAg68Q_w
In other news, this is what's going to happen in the sh*thole deep blue cities whose "leadership" cowers from angry mobs in puddles of its own urine.

That does look like an improvement. I Googled "Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone" and found this:

...Rev. Robert Jeffrey of the New Hope Missionary Baptist Church talked of being stopped by police more than 50 times.

“I’ve been hit in the stomach with batons, I’ve gone through everything and experienced the total demonic structures that is Seattle,” said Jeffrey, who is Black. “What happened to George Floyd happens to Black Americans in this country everyday.”

Fucking disgraceful.

raynebc

I'm done with your stupid racism propaganda, Bam. There aren't enough hours in the day. You can beg forgiveness from the outrage mob for crimes you never committed, but I'm not going to follow the sheep's path. If you want to talk about something truthful or meaningful, go ahead.

As for "CHAZ," I don't think it's going to end well for the rioters.

RmBeer2

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Arthur Kalliokoski
raynebc said:

The system is not designed to prevent their success. That is a popular false narrative, but that's all it is.


Did you know the minimum wage was originally implemented to keep people from hiring black people?

https://mises.org/wire/racist-history-minimum-wage-laws

raynebc

In 1909, a compromise was offered: a minimum wage, which was to be imposed equally on all races.

Something applied equally to all is not automatically racist, even if there are disparate outcomes. The additional racist behavior of employers in the past was a non systemic issue, but thankfully it's been rooted out by changes to the law. People deserve to be compensated based on merit, regardless of race or gender. That said, this article is more of an opinion piece than an objective history lesson.

LennyLen
raynebc said:

LennyLen What are the publicly stated factors taken into account for diversion? Is the likelihood of recidivism a factor?

There's very little public information on the process, and what I did find out is that it's actually decided by the Police, not the court system as I previously thought.

Chance of recidivism might be a factor, though personally, I'd hope not as that would be giving people a harsher punishment based on something that hasn't happened yet, which is a very slippery slope.

raynebc said:

Something applied equally to all is not automatically racist, even if there are disparate outcomes.

The problem with laws that apply equally to everyone is that they only work if everyone was equal to begin with, which isn't the case in America, nor is it the case here in NZ.

I don't even know if true equality can exist in a society where one race is in the majority, though I'd like to hope it can. It's basic human nature to be distrustful of, and think negatively towards, those who are different from us. Because minorities are generally living in poverty, it's hard to see beyond the dirt and the crime and see a people who if circumstances were different would think and act the same way we do.

Personally, I think education is a big key to making a difference. I'd rather see more money spent on educating poor people than rich people, but in reality it's the other way around. In this regard, I think NZ is in a better situation than America (though, of course I'm only basing this on second-hand information).

Edgar Reynaldo

If anyone is of the opinion that there is no systemic racism in America, they're either blind, stupid, or racist too.

raynebc

LennyLen: All police need more transparency, and I think it would be fair for the police to have to publicly justify the outcome of each request for diversion in NZ. Anybody not of the far-left opinion that police should be outright abolished generally agree reform will improve them. There can't be equal outcomes for everybody because everybody is free to make their own choices, each of which can change their own chances for success or the chances of others.

Regarding education, throwing more money at education hasn't improved it in the US. Something else has to change. Parents probably need to involve themselves more with helping their kids learn, and this will be another area where single parent households will be at a disadvantage because there is less free time to do such things.

Union reform will probably help both policing and education, as it will be easier to actually get rid of the bad police and bad teachers.

Edgar: Of course you'll have a leftist opinion. That's your shtick.

MiquelFire

If anyone is of the opinion that there is no systemic racism in America, they're either blind, stupid, or racist too.

Arthur Kalliokoski

If anyone is of the opinion that there is no systemic racism in America, they're either blind, stupid, or racist too.

I agree. And it works both ways.

bamccaig
raynebc said:

Anybody not of the far-left opinion that police should be outright abolished generally agree reform will improve them.

Funny thing, not all left-leaning people believe the same things. It's not a fucking religion. It's a rough group of people whose ideals are similar in nature. In reality, I'm just left of center, but somehow I get clumped in with the extreme-left anyway. This is why I don't respect anyone throwing around left and right like it's some kind of argument. It's completely ignorant. If you can't even understand THAT then there's no hope you'll be able to have an intelligent discussion about actual issues.

People that are calling for police to be defunded are either stupid or being intentionally extreme in their communication without actually believing it. Albeit, with police forces buying surplus military equipment it could certainly be argued that those departments are over funded and should probably have cuts. We really just need to police the police better. The American people need to demand the supreme court rethink the police immunity laws, and probably should consider investigating how things got so wrong in the first place (corruption of the supreme court seems like a critical failing).

raynebc said:

There can't be equal outcomes for everybody because everybody is free to make their own choices, each of which can change their own chances for success or the chances of others.

We won't achieve perfect equality in terms of every single human being being exactly the same in every way, of course. However, if all people are truly free of discrimination, and given the same opportunities (meaning we assist those in poverty to help them get out), then on average all demographics should be fairing equally well or damn close to it. There should not be a people that is rife with violence and crime. If that ever happens we should try to solve it for the good of all of us. The money being wasted on law enforcement is probably more than enough to eliminate the poverty if people would just show some compassion!

raynebc said:

Regarding education, throwing more money at education hasn't improved it in the US. Something else has to change. Parents probably need to involve themselves more with helping their kids learn, and this will be another area where single parent households will be at a disadvantage because there is less free time to do such things.

You can't solve problems by just throwing money at them. Money is corrupt. The money will most likely not be allocated appropriately. We need to go further to ensure that the money goes where it is most needed.

raynebc said:

Union reform will probably help both policing and education, as it will be easier to actually get rid of the bad police and bad teachers.

Unions are not the problem. Unions are good for the people. Teachers need unions to get a fair shake. I don't know whether or not police do, but I suspect that they do. And sure, unions can be abused, but that's not reason enough to remove them. Certainly if police unions are currently using their weight to protect police from facing consequences that needs to be "reformed", but I don't think that means getting rid of the unions altogether.

Edgar Reynaldo

Defunding the police is not about disbanding the police. If you don't even understand that, then you're not intelligent or informed enough to discuss this.

bamccaig

Defunding the police is not about disbanding the police.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/what-does-defund-police-really-mean/612904/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defund_the_police

Defund means to remove or block funding. Without funding police cannot operate. The phrase literally means to eliminate publicly funded police. As I said, there may be some people that are using it tongue-in-cheek to be Devil's advocates or something, or perhaps they meant cut funding and don't realize that "defund" is more absolute than that. We cannot be certain that every single sign maker intends the same message. There is no hive mind from which to share such a notion. They should choose language more carefully. Words matter, especially in politics.

While it's likely that few people are actually calling for the police to be disbanded, it's likely that some people are certainly saying that, and they can be forgiven for saying it too. They're justified in saying it. The police do more harm than good for them.

However, the rest of us believe that police services are necessary for a relatively peaceful life. While I would tend to agree that most crime is the result of social insecurity, and we can resolve much of it by helping people down on their luck get back up, there also exists people that choose to hurt other people without any justification and we need ways to try to limit the harm they can do. Police are meant to do that.

In Ontario, a big problem is that the courts are releasing everyone with a slap on the wrist, or giving repeat offenders bail. Inevitably, the same names appear over and over again on local news reports of people arrested for B&E/theft. They're stealing due to opioid addictions they can't support. It's inevitable they'll steal again until they receive enough help and choose to change their way of life. Or we just give them free opioids so they don't need to steal to acquire the funds for themselves. The good news is that police are getting fed up with it and finally speaking out to the courts. Hopefully they reach a constructive solution that benefits us all...

Polybios

If it's because of racism that people loot and pillage their own neighbourhoods, then it must really be a problem ???

bamccaig

That's primarily because of poverty. Desperate people will do whatever they can to get by.

It doesn't help that the American culture is very much materialistic though. You care more about having things than how you got things, which makes crime inevitable. That's also why there is so much corruption at the top. The system doesn't take wealth away from people that don't deserve it. It takes a lifetime and luck to work your way to the top, but it only takes a few years of getting away with major crimes.

America boasts this fiction that if you work hard you'll succeed, but in reality you need to be really lucky. Lack of a conscience helps too. The story of America is nothing to brag about.

Edgar Reynaldo

It was proven multiple times that white supremacist groups infiltrated protests and looted and pillaged, against the wishes of the peaceful black protesters.

Trump declared Antifa a terrorist organization. They're against fascism, that's their name. Trump is against against fascism. Therefore Trump is FOR fascism.

Bob Keane

Trump declared Antifa a terrorist organization. They're against fascism, that's their name. Trump is against against fascism. Therefore Trump is FOR fascism.

The antifa movement advocates using any means possible to get their way, including violence, See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifa_(United_States)

Trump is probably looking at their means and not the motive. His tirade versus the antifa movement is just another example of his half-truths.

raynebc

"Trump declared Antifa a terrorist organization. They're against fascism, that's their name. Trump is against against fascism. Therefore Trump is FOR fascism."
That's particularly dumb, even for you Edgar. Commies were against the fascists, but that doesn't mean the commies were good.

Edgar Reynaldo

raynebc, I strive to have even some small sense of clarity when it comes to why you still support Trump.

  • 1) Children in cages

  • 2) Destruction of Indian burial grounds for a pointless billion dollar border wall that doesn't work

  • 3) Countless rollbacks of laws designed to keep us safe from pollution and protect our environment

  • 4) Selling the offices of our land to the highest campaign contributors.

  • 5) Threatening to use the military against peaceful protests.

  • 6) Militant police using violent force against non violent protesters.

  • 7) Egregious inflammation of race tensions

  • 8) The worst economy ever

  • 9) Over 100,000 dead from Covid 19 and the Trump administrations complete failure to act.

  • 10) Why do I need to go on?

Erin Maus

At least the Civil Rights act protects LGBT peeps.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/us/gay-transgender-workers-supreme-court.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

Finally some good news. ;D Really surprised it was a 6-3 and not a 5-4...

Bob Keane

Edgar,

4) Selling the offices of our land to the highest campaign contributors. Nothing new, GHW Bush sold FEMA to a man who bred horses. Remember what happened after hurricane Katrina?

8) The worst economy ever. In all fairness, Covid-19 had a lot to do with it. However, Trump was not prepared and has tried to push the country back to normal before the pandemic eased. Covered in your point 10.

And we both forgot to mention:

11) By ending the war on coal, he supports a source of energy which has only 25% of the US or world energy market, is the most expensive and has not declined in price due to the Covid-19 crisis or seasonal use.

I am not a Trump supporter. I believe he has given half truths and does not access the situation properly.

Chris Katko

I think it's hilarious that all the anger over "conservative" judges and they just forget it when those very some "conservative" judges happen to vote in favor of the law. LGBT status is protected under the very spirit of the anti-discrimination laws so no !@$! they're going to rule in favor of it applying to transgender people. It's only surprising if you live in a bigoted caricature bubble where everyone is split into "us verses them" and "good vs evil."

"Why would an evil person vote for the thing I wanted?!?!?"

vs

"Why would someone who said they would vote to uphold whatever the law says, ... uphold what the law says?!?!?"

See how one version doesn't become dumbfounding when you don't reduce the otherside to caricatures?

) Children in cages

I love that so much. It's the perfect political line. It gets the left super riled up, it has a visual, sad image. It's perfect marketing. Too bad the left magically forgot about those kids in cages after about a month. That's the problem with EMOTION based voting, the emotions run out as they constantly seek the next high of injustice.

Erin Maus

Wow, I was surprised because even I thought the wording around sex was reasonably debatable. I figured Gorsuch would be in favor due to him being a literalist, so I assumed a 5-4 in favor of protections.

You people assume too much.

bamccaig

Left and right isn't about emotion. We're not talking male and female here. It's not testosterone and estrogen/progesterone. It's about respecting all people versus only respecting people like you. The extreme-left take it way too far, but guess what? The extreme-right do too! The difference is the extreme-left try to get people fired or fined for using language they don't like; whereas the extreme-right wants to just kill or enslave anybody not enough like them!

Regardless of the details, extremes are bad. We should all be free to be ourselves, believe what we want, and express our beliefs freely. Our rights end where we infringe on another person's rights (or other protected animals). I think that most people agree with centrist ideas, except for extremists. Things generally get shaky when one person tries to assert their beliefs as law without any evidence to back them. We need to move our societies to be wholly science-based. I don't understand why any government is able to make decisions that aren't backed by consensus science, let alone decisions that contradict science.

raynebc

Edgar You really don't care why I support Trump. Based on past discussions, I have no expectation that you would honestly consider any reasons I present and besides that, your list is generally just lies and things you didn't blame other politicians for (even Obama). It's not worth my time bickering with a petty leftist. And no, the meaning of the word "sex" in terms of it being a descriptor of people is not debatable. You're thinking of the corrupted term "gender."

Edgar Reynaldo
raynebc said:

It's not worth my time bickering with a petty leftist.

I love how you reduce all my points to political leaning instead of merit.

I'm honestly interested in why you support Trump. It might give some insight into how he's managed to brainwash so many people.

raynebc

Your ideas and arguments are indeed without merit from my standpoint, and they are consistent with far-left US politics as a general rule. I do not believe you care about conservative policy goals. Trump generally supports those goals, and has delivered in many ways, so of course I'll vote for him versus very left of center candidates. The DNC has brainwashed so many people to live in victimhood for so long they don't know anything else, and that's truly sad.

Arthur Kalliokoski

"Children in cages"

Yes, let's just dump them into the deserts at the border because their parents were arrested for breaking the law. They'll find their way home somehow.

"Destruction of Indian burial grounds for a pointless billion dollar border wall that doesn't work"

Walls do work. The 2016 DNC put up walls, the clown circus known as CHAZ has "walls" sort of, and every penitentiary uses walls to keep murderers away from everyone else until the left orders them released because they might catch the wuflu.

"Countless rollbacks of laws designed to keep us safe from pollution and protect our environment"

Like that dam in Michigan that burst because they wouldn't follow engineers recommendations to not let an earthworks dam endure maximum load for months to save some sort of fish (which got washed away in the flood presumably).

"Selling the offices of our land to the highest campaign contributors."

First hit on google was a government office, second hit was this
https://www.politico.com/story/2011/06/obama-donors-net-government-jobs-056993

"Threatening to use the military against peaceful protests."

'Peaceful protests' consisting of arson, looting and killing cops, ;D. The leftist mayors and governors told the police to stand down and wouldn't let the national guard do its job either. I'd like to see these lefties when somebody's knocking down their door in the middle of the night to liberate them of their wide screen TV etc. and they call 911 and get the message "That number is not in service"

"Militant police using violent force against non violent protesters."

See above

"Egregious inflammation of race tensions"

It's the lefties that need racial tensions to get attention. They keep raising the "poverty line" every time the percentage of poverty stricken people with their AC, cars and smart phones gets too low so they can claim "Something has to be done!"

"The worst economy ever"

Yes, the Democratic lockdown is the worst thing to happen in a looong time. Remember the '16 election? The Dems and the mainstream media were all yelling how the stock market was going to crash if Trump got elected, instead it set records for rising once we got rid of "Those jobs aren't coming back" Obama.

"Over 100,000 dead from Covid 19 and the Trump administrations complete failure to act."

The majority of people know the numbers are vastly inflated, although apparently the death rates from heart attack and cancer have gone down because they all died of wuflu first.

And what would you like Trump to do? Give an executive order saying wuflu is illegal? After all, he really isn't a doctor, although the MSM keeps wildly exaggerating things like the guy that supposedly drank aquarium cleaner because the name was vaguely similar to the chloroquine that Trump mentioned, only to have it come out his looney leftie wife killed him.

Chris Katko

Fun fact: Women (AND GIRLS) crossing the border have to take birth control because... it's implied they're going to be raped by the smugglers.

And Democrats don't care. Because talking about women being raped would mean they have to 1) accept that some people in Mexico are scumbags. and 2) That illegal immigration is dangerous and increasing illegal immigration only increases the amount of rapes.

If Democrats were as "good" as you think, they'd push for fixing legal immigration and opening it up so all these people can come in legally instead of be murdered, and raped; and when they get here, turn into a below minimum wage slave class... where they're still raped.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/rape-in-the-fields/

Where are the protests? Where are the riots? Where is the support from liberals? Simple. No talking head at CNN, MSNBC, et al told you to care so you simply don't.

Edgar Reynaldo
AK-47 said:

  • 1) "Children in cages"

    Yes, let's just dump them into the deserts at the border because their parents were arrested for breaking the law. They'll find their way home somehow.

  • 2) "Destruction of Indian burial grounds for a pointless billion dollar border wall that doesn't work"

    Walls do work. The 2016 DNC put up walls, the clown circus known as CHAZ has "walls" sort of, and every penitentiary uses walls to keep murderers away from everyone else until the left orders them released because they might catch the wuflu.

  • 3) "Countless rollbacks of laws designed to keep us safe from pollution and protect our environment"

    Like that dam in Michigan that burst because they wouldn't follow engineers recommendations to not let an earthworks dam endure maximum load for months to save some sort of fish (which got washed away in the flood presumably).

  • 4) "Selling the offices of our land to the highest campaign contributors."

    First hit on google was a government office, second hit was this
    https://www.politico.com/story/2011/06/obama-donors-net-government-jobs-056993

  • 5) "Threatening to use the military against peaceful protests."

    'Peaceful protests' consisting of arson, looting and killing cops, ;D. The leftist mayors and governors told the police to stand down and wouldn't let the national guard do its job either. I'd like to see these lefties when somebody's knocking down their door in the middle of the night to liberate them of their wide screen TV etc. and they call 911 and get the message "That number is not in service"

  • 6) "Militant police using violent force against non violent protesters."

    See above

  • 7) "Egregious inflammation of race tensions"

    It's the lefties that need racial tensions to get attention. They keep raising the "poverty line" every time the percentage of poverty stricken people with their AC, cars and smart phones gets too low so they can claim "Something has to be done!"

  • 8) "The worst economy ever"

    Yes, the Democratic lockdown is the worst thing to happen in a looong time. Remember the '16 election? The Dems and the mainstream media were all yelling how the stock market was going to crash if Trump got elected, instead it set records for rising once we got rid of "Those jobs aren't coming back" Obama.

  • 9) "Over 100,000 dead from Covid 19 and the Trump administrations complete failure to act."

    The majority of people know the numbers are vastly inflated, although apparently the death rates from heart attack and cancer have gone down because they all died of wuflu first.

  • 10)
    And what would you like Trump to do? Give an executive order saying wuflu is illegal? After all, he really isn't a doctor, although the MSM keeps wildly exaggerating things like the guy that supposedly drank aquarium cleaner because the name was vaguely similar to the chloroquine that Trump mentioned, only to have it come out his looney leftie wife killed him.

1) Children and migrants and asylum seekers don't belong in cages / internement camps / prison. But that's where they are, because people like YOU support TRUMP. If not turned away, they should still be treated with civility, as much as YOU would expect if you visited a foreign country. There's no reason to 'dump anyone in the desert' to fend for themselves.

2) Your precious billion dollar wall was defeated by a sawzall. How's that for a waste of money? Something you say you're against.

3) No, not like a single example that had little to do with fish. More like consistenly, overarchingly poisoning our air and water. Try harder.

4) Every single appointment Trump has made has been bought and paid for by campaign contributions. He doesn't elect people based on merit or experience, but by how much money they've given him. If Obama did it too, then he was corrupt too. That doesn't make Trump any less corrupt. Can't blame this on Obama.

5) A good portion of the arson and looting was done by white supremacists trying to inflame race tensions. And if blacks have to burn down building so the cops will stop murdering them freely, then I say good on them.

6) Most if not all the protests in the United States were peaceful. And those peaceful protests were met with flash bangs, tear gas (outlawed by the Geneva convention), and lots of police brutality. Maybe you should change your tv channel once in a while.

7) You really have no idea what you're talking about with this one. People are poor because of your precious capitalism, not minimum wage inflation.

8) Imagine what would have happened without social distancing rules? Triple the number of cases and dead and you're probably close.

9) Please spare me your tripe. When they're packing semis full of dead bodies from covid 19 in your state, please try again.

10) Well, Trump does like to pretend he's a doctor. Amazingly you had enough sense not to start taking hydroxychloroquine, which does nothing, but Trump touted it as a miracle cure. "Pretty soon cases will be close to zero"

All your rhetoric is just useless tripe.

Arthur Kalliokoski

"Maybe you should change your tv channel once in a while."

Maybe you should stop watching TV.

Look what happens when they try to post on youtube, more dislikes than likes and the comments are incredibly harsh.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0WUlGjUGyQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJx98zxA2cI

Most people are smarter than the ivory tower elite believe, and Trump Derangement Syndrome is highly infectious.

Yes, my post fu is weak due to lack of practice.

Polybios

And if blacks have to burn down building so the cops will stop murdering them freely, then I say good on them.

How about the rule of law instead? :-/
There is no political statement in looting and burning down local shops.

I've listened to a (black, apparently conservative) professor named Glenn Loury on Youtube a bit. Have never heard of him before. He seems to be quite sure about the numbers:

  • encounters of black people with the cops (as offenders) are, unfortunately, disproportionally more likely given higher incidence of crime

  • blacks are also disproportionally more likely to be victims of (black) crime, in fact black people need the police the most

  • whites are equally likely to be killed in encounters with the police (harassing is a different matter, but killing is not)

His conclusion is that it's mainly a policing problem but not necessarily a "racial" one.

A good portion of the arson and looting was done by white supremacists trying to inflame race tensions.

Do you have sources for that? Especially the "good portion" part?

raynebc

Since I have a few minutes to kill, let's see if I can enlighten a partisan:
1. If I illegally entered a country, I'd fully expect to be put in jail if caught.
2. Since I know you're under-informed, I'll point out again that the wall structure itself is only part of the border protection and was never intended to be the only thing used to stop illegal entry. It slows entry and the accompanying technology and CBP agents detect and intercept offenders.
3. It's not the Federal government's job to micro-manage every facet of every State's business.
4. You have no credible argument here.
5. You misspelled Antifa again.
6. Police break up illegal protests all the time.
7. It's a fact that Capitalism has lifted more of the world from poverty than any other economic system.
8. Social distancing was considered helpful, but the lockdown of businesses is increasingly being seen as the bad medicine it is.
9. Trump's response was fine, and certainly better than gov. Cuomo's.
10. Trump cited contemporary studies and up-and-coming medical tech and highlighted them. There's nothing wrong with that. The MSM went out of its way (as it usually does) to claim Trump wrong no matter what the truth was or what the experts said. You're a willing pawn.

Chris Katko

video

Edgar Reynaldo
raynebc said:

Since I have a few minutes to kill, let's see if I can enlighten a partisan:
1. If I illegally entered a country, I'd fully expect to be put in jail if caught.
2. Since I know you're under-informed, I'll point out again that the wall structure itself is only part of the border protection and was never intended to be the only thing used to stop illegal entry. It slows entry and the accompanying technology and CBP agents detect and intercept offenders.
3. It's not the Federal government's job to micro-manage every facet of every State's business.
4. You have no credible argument here.
5. You misspelled Antifa again.
6. Police break up illegal protests all the time.
7. It's a fact that Capitalism has lifted more of the world from poverty than any other economic system.
8. Social distancing was considered helpful, but the lockdown of businesses is increasingly being seen as the bad medicine it is.
9. Trump's response was fine, and certainly better than gov. Cuomo's.
10. Trump cited contemporary studies and up-and-coming medical tech and highlighted them. There's nothing wrong with that. The MSM went out of its way (as it usually does) to claim Trump wrong no matter what the truth was or what the experts said. You're a willing pawn.

1) If you were seeking a better life, and you brought your children with you, and you thought your only chance was to illegally cross the border would you do it? Most of these people are migrants. Border laws are arbitrary, and make innocent people into criminals based on their socio-economic status.

2) If legal entry were available and accessible to migrants, I might actually give a shit what you think.

3) You're correct. The federal government's job is to make and enforce laws that benefit everyone.

4) You question my credibility on this? That's laughable. Look at every single appointment Trump has made and the financial ties that accompany it. You're dead wrong.

5) From the NY Times :

NY Times said:

Antifa is not an organization, and it does not have a leader, membership roles or any defined, centralized structure. It is a vaguely defined movement of people who share common protest tactics and targets.

Forbes said:

State authorities said they were monitoring alleged criminals online, including posts from suspected white supremacist groups trying to incite violence by promoting looting and mayhem in Minneapolis.

Interesting how a loosely based group of protesters managed to organize themselves and descend on Minneapolis and set the town on fire. Most of the looters were white and from out of state and were attempted to be stopped by black protesters.

6) The protests weren't illegal. There are 100s of videos showing police brutality against protesters. Sarah Grossman was sprayed with so much tear gas in her face that she died. The police targeted medics, water tents, journalists and protesters with rubber bullets (which are mostly metal and cause permanent damage), tear gas, pepper spray, flash bangs, metal batons, and violence. These were peaceful protests.

7) A fact huh? Which capitalist countries are doing so great then? There are many socialist states in Europe that do a far far better job of taking care of their populace than we do. They provide health care, education, social services, and plenty of other things that we have to pay out our ass for because of capitalism and the greed of the corporate market.

8) Without social distancing and a lockdown, the pandemic would have hit us much harder and much faster and there would be many many more dead and infected. Our hospitals would have been overwhelmed.

9) "Trump's response was fine" - bullshit. He ignored his top medical officials and government reports about the pandemic over and over again, calling it a democratic hoax and passing it off as nothing. He ignored calls for manufacturing of masks and personal protective equipment, and kept states from receiving the medical supplies they needed from the federal government. Trump is a total and utter failure as a president.

10) Trump touted therapies designed by companies he had financial ties to. That's the only reason he promoted them. He knew hydroxychloroquine was not efficacious or even appropriate for Covid-19 and he promoted it anyway. Repeat after me, Trump is not a doctor. He repeatedly ignored his top medical officials when they told him so. He's a brain dead idiot, and a greedy selfish lout.

You're just so wrong it's embarassing.

Arthur Kalliokoski

Yeah, you watch too much TV.

Go back to your regularly scheduled programming, at least you're good at that.

Edgar Reynaldo

Where do you get your news? I could use a good laugh.

Polybios

There are many socialist states in Europe

No, no, no! There is not a single socialist state in Europe since c. 1990. By all means, universal health care and state-funded education does not make a state socialist. US has public schools, state universities, and Social Security, too. It's a bit more of that, but still capitalism.
The "actually existing socialism" was something totally different, believe me.

Edgar Reynaldo
Facebook said:

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raynebc

If you only pay attention to leftmedia, you won't know about Antifa. Hence, Edgar is ignorant of them.

Chris Katko

I'm pretty dang left-wing, but Edgar, if you think ANTIFA isn't violent, you must sleep under a freaking rock and you've literally never even googled the phrase before coming to that conclusion.

We don't need to defend nutcases to win liberal causes.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/antifa-attacks-a-journalist-11562021361

Beating up an Asian-American journalist... to help "progress". If that's what you call progress, I'm officially against it. I don't support beating up minorities. And the fact that I even have to suggest the idea, means whatever sources you listen to have successfully and completely brainwashed you.

When I was growing up, nobody told me liberal meant "beat up asians." And I find it offensive that's what it's become.

You're on the wrong side of history. Love wins because hate eats itself alive. Watch as each woke celebrity eats each other for not being woke enough until there's nothing left. Who you are today, no matter how woke enough, will still be racist and sexist tomorrow.

Edgar Reynaldo

Wow. A single case of abuse. Compare that to the thousands of police misconduct stories.

But you know, openly lynching black people like it was the 1800s again is cool.

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Punch Nazis, win hearts. :heart:

raynebc

Proof Edgar is ignoring everything except far left news sources. Not worth any more discussion.

bamccaig

https://www.wsj.com/articles/antifa-attacks-a-journalist-11562021361

Beating up an Asian-American journalist... to help "progress". If that's what you call progress, I'm officially against it. I don't support beating up minorities. And the fact that I even have to suggest the idea, means whatever sources you listen to have successfully and completely brainwashed you.

When I was growing up, nobody told me liberal meant "beat up asians." And I find it offensive that's what it's become.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/andy-ngo-right-wing-troll-antifa-877914/

Looks like there's a bit more to that story... Apparently he was cooperating with a far-right group that targets left protestors with violence. Also, apparently that was nearly a year ago so not very relevant to now. :P

Referring to Antifa as an entity, as if it's a hive mind of Borg drones, is equally ridiculous as referring to the "left" as a single entity. There is no Antifa club. There are various groups that share similar ideas and may or may not use that label, but there's no structured doctrine by which all supporters are going to agree and no chain of command that links them all together. It's not as though a group in one neighborhood of one city was taking orders from headquarters on the other side of the country or globe. It's just individuals making split second choices for themselves under stressful and emotional circumstances trying to fight for what they believe in (or fuck shit up, if that's the individual's motive).

As for protestors that do resort to violence I don't see a huge problem with this depending on who the violence is directed at. The government is clearly disingenuous, especially the current administration. If there's no peaceful way to practically achieve righteous change then so be it.

When British, French, and Spanish pioneers landed in the Americans they didn't negotiate shared land usage with the native tribes that occupied the land. They murdered, raped, and enslaved them (and haven't really fully stopped mistreating them 400 years later). And they didn't have to do that. They simply were greedy and ignorant, and chose to do that because they could.

Sometimes change requires a force of hand. Which is very unfortunate, and we're getting better at resolving matters peacefully, but it's pretty damn evident to anybody watching that so called democratic governments aren't so democratic after all. Money is power. And the average person or group of persons does not have enough wealth to go up against the aristocrats. And so we have to exercise our power in other ways. Violence happens to be one of the easiest ones to exercise.

That said, police have been far more violent towards media so I don't think it's worth pointing out a few edge cases where protestors harmed media. It's kind of expected for unruly protestors to pose a danger to media. What's unprecedented in the West, at least as far as my knowledge goes, is police/law enforcement turning weaponry on media (and peaceful protestors)!

That's sort of on the same level as a referee clothes lining a player, kicking him in the face with his skate, and putting the player in the penalty box. You wouldn't be surprised for the player's team to pile onto the referee after that. If the rules aren't going to be followed then anything goes.

Edgar Reynaldo
raynebc said:

Proof Edgar is ignoring everything except far left news sources. Not worth any more discussion.

Ya know, I subscribed to Fox news on FB for shits and giggles. Mostly I get news from PBS, online, FB, NowThis, and various other groups and friends.

Where do you get your news? Like I told Arthur, I could use a good laugh.

bamccaig

Facebook is the worst place to go for news. Fucking hell, every other week my wife yells to me in a panic from another room to warn me about some deadly thing that is spreading on Facebook. Of course, being the voice of reason, I Google it and find that it's mostly myth spread by the idiocy of social media. :P

For provincial, national, and international news I predominantly use Reuters. I explicitly sought out an unbiased news source, and that's what I came across[1]. I don't understand why anybody would want news that is politically biased. News is meant to be truth, and the truth is not biased. I avoid most MSM sources because they're heavily biased and corrupt. Which isn't to say that Reuters can't possibly be biased or corrupt, but I certainly haven't seen anything to imply that it is, and it seems to be well respected overall too.

I do get some news from YouTube channels and things of that nature, but I always take this sort of information with a grain of salt. I typically try to first fact check anything that sounds questionable, or anything that I decide to pass on.

Append:

I'll just leave this here:

Dozens of Republican former U.S. national security officials are forming a group that will back Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, people familiar with the effort said, in a further sign that President Donald Trump has alienated some members of his own party.

...

The group will publicly endorse Biden in the coming weeks and its members plan to campaign for the former vice president who is challenging Trump in the Nov. 3 election, the sources said. It includes at least two dozen officials who served under Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, with dozens more in talks to join, the sources added.

They will argue that another four years of a Trump presidency would endanger U.S. national security and that Republican voters should view Biden as the better choice despite policy differences, the sources said.

References

  1. Not the original source, but my top Google search result today for "Reuters political bias": https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/reuters/ "Overall, we rate Reuters Least Biased based on objective reporting and Very High for factual reporting due to proper sourcing of information with minimal bias and a clean fact check record."
raynebc

Biden is barely a functional person anymore, he'd just be a meat puppet for somebody else to wield presidential power, if he didn't just retire soon into his term and make the VP president. Putting Democrats back in power would just hasten their forced demise of the country.

I'm not worried that a group of never-Trumpers are out never-Trumping. It's what they do.

bamccaig

Funny thing is people are also questioning Trump's medical fitness, and suggesting that he appears to be showing signs of Frontotemporal Dementia.

Democrats did a lot less damage the last 8 years they had office than Trump has done in 4. Face it: Trump is going to lose this, and he deserves to lose. Whether or not Biden will be good for America remains to be seen, but one thing the majority of people on Earth recognize is that Trump is definitely bad for America and for the world.

raynebc

Bullsh*t, but who cares about the level of truth in shoddy polling anyway? If Trump wasn't president, the Economy would have been in the toilet and then the Chinese flu would have finished it off. Biden wouldn't be able to make it through a complete presidential debate with whatever's left of of his image intact, let alone a four year term.

Matthew Leverton

When I need someone to catch a loose cat, I call the armed police.

When I need someone to calm down an unarmed person with mental illness, I call the armed police.

When I need someone to fix my toilet, I called the armed police.

Because damnit, they are God-fearing, law-loving, righteous men and women. I don't want any peaceful, certified, qualified, educated person involved. >:(

raynebc

If you're calling police to deal with cats or toilets, there's something wrong with your problem solving skills. That said, there should be better 911 response for people with mental issues, although if the person is a physical threat, somebody with the capability to use force will still probably need to accompany a mental health specialist.

Matthew Leverton

So do we raise taxes to cover additional professional public services, or do we replace some of the responsibilities of the police? (The latter is the most common meaning of "defunding the police.")

Because yes, police chase down dogs and climb trees to save kittens in many cities. Hopefully they aren't fixing toilets, but you never know.

The problem I have with police is that they are over-utilized, over-armed, and over-unionized. Of course we need a police presence, but not every situation requires a hot head with a badge and a gun.

Erin Maus

I got a job offer that would be a 35% raise. :o

I feel bad for my team (basically a product we were working on faced a lot of turnover--I'll be the last of the 'OG' team to leave now). So it's gonna be bumpy for them... :-/

But 35% raise. I'll be working for a really nice bank head-quartered in Charlotte, NC.

bamccaig

Congratulations! That's great news!

I quit my job and am returning to my old one (after two weeks and a week vacation). :-/

raynebc

Matthew: You sound like you're citing some fringe cases, as police generally aren't called to deal with stray animals. There are separate government personnel for that task. Maybe you're talking about small towns that have nearly no government services? "Defund" means to cease funding. If the political activists want to clarify they mean to reduce funding, they should say so. I don't trust them. If they want to replace some armed police in departments with field-trained psychologists, that would be fine. That wouldn't be defunding as much as a shift in resources.

Matthew Leverton
Quote:

"Defund the police" is an American slogan that supports divesting funds from police departments and reallocating them to non-policing forms of public safety and community support, such as social services, youth services, housing, education, and other community resources. Activists who use the phrase may do so with varying intentions; some seek modest reductions, while others argue for full defunding as a step toward the abolition of contemporary police services.

From Wikipedia. Not much more to say than that. You'd have to look at specific plans bring proposed because they vary in intent.

Even most plans that I've read about that involve literally disbanding the police would actually allocate funds for armed personnel but they wouldn't be a large unionized force with no accountability.

The beauty of local government is that some cities can try new things and if it fails miserable then the rest of us know not to repeat.

Erin Maus
bamccaig said:

Congratulations! That's great news!

Thanks! Yeah I'm super excited.

bamccaig said:

I quit my job and am returning to my old one (after two weeks and a week vacation).

Why's that? :o

bamccaig

Why's that? :o

See above. Insomnia, clinical depression, and severe anxiety (I've always had anxiety, but over the past 7 months I've experienced it on a whole other level).

I came to realize that the problem wasn't necessarily me, but rather that the company was completely failing to communicate with me. They would assign me tasks as single sentences or a very brief conversation with just a general idea. Zero technical details or constraints, zero expectations, zero time estimates. No time tracking, no routine meetings, nothing.

Almost everything I worked on was new to me and had little or no documentation. In the beginning they would let me work for a week or two on something, and then just casually ask where it's at. I'd be told to continue working on it and they'd leave me alone for another couple of weeks.

I was never informed of any processes or checklists or anything. The manager is used to working alone so there really wasn't any. He would just do whatever he wanted to do, and zero thought went into how to manage a team of developers. He doesn't even use Git properly.. And there's no QA or anything. So basically I also had to worry about him grabbing my code and throwing it into production without reviewing or testing it. I tried to ensure there was no way it could fail or misbehave before telling him it was done.

I did try on several occasions to get him to look at what I had so far for guidance, but he never reviewed it. If I asked a set of questions for clarification or to confirm expectations I'd get a one word answer or a short sentence in return and be told to keep going. After a month or so of that they'd suddenly ask me what I've been doing all this time and state that it's taking too long. Then they'd leave me alone again for a week or two. When I finally did say that something was done my manager would criticize it. Not because it was performing poorly or didn't work, but because it wasn't done the way that he would do it. Then he'd tell me to make changes so it was more like the way he thought of it. Which he refused to tell me anything about before this point. And that's how every single thing went for 7 months.

In addition to that, I made it clear when I started that I had no experience communicating with clients in my previous job, and was reassured that I'd never need to in this one. I was also told I'd never need to work past 5 PM. In reality, because they were repeatedly getting angry about timelines I did work pretty regularly past 5 PM to try to get ahead on things to keep them happy. It never helped. And since they don't track time I was never compensated for it either.

About 3 months ago I started working on migrations from a third party. Some new partners were coming onto the platform, and I was tasked with developing tools to import the data. There was no documentation for the platform that the data was coming from, and in the beginning I had no contact with any people either or even detailed instructions. I was just given a set of XML files and told to figure out how to get the data into our platform. A business and platform that I was still very new to and barely understood.

After about a month and a half of piecing things together with assumptions about the data we got a tiny site imported. Then I had a meeting with a client from the partner that was moving to our platform, and a developer for the platform that it was coming from. Apparently there was a whole list of sites (30+) to import within about 4 more months. My manager requested a really large site so that we could ensure that the tool I was building could scale to that size. The data for this second site was in a largely new format. Many of the assumptions that I had to make on the previous set of data were failing here so I had to start revising the assumptions, and I had to develop a second code path within the tool to handle the new data format.

As progress was made it became clear that data integrity was an issue. Data was missing, and so I was put in contact with the client to help me figure out whether it was my error or a problem with the data (though I had been told that I would never need to communicate with a client like this). Not knowing the relationship between us and this other company, or what deals had been made with them, I was in no position to demand anything of them. I was entirely at both of their mercy. I didn't know anything, yet was expected to take the lead on communicating with them and solving the problems that I encountered. Some back and forth occurred, and the client concluded that there was missing data and so we communicated with the developer of the old platform... He was also notoriously bad for communicating. He gave no documentation for the export formats that he provided, and gave no specifications for the data integrity. When I did email him to ask him questions he would give short, vague, one sentence answers that didn't answer my 5 paragraphs of detailed questions.

I have gone back and forth with him 3 times already, and each time he'd give me a new export of data trying to fill in the holes, and I'd have to work through the new data, with assumptions about it breaking my tool, and having to revise the software each time to get the data imported. Once I had the data imported I had to analyze the logs to determine how reliable the import was, what data may be missing, and communicate back with the client to determine if we were ready yet to import just the second site.

They ended up giving me data for about 8 different Web sites because each site was referencing data that belonged to other sites, and the export tool being used wasn't smart enough to export linked data... Which just blew the scale of the import out of the water. So now performance started becoming a hindrance. It also complicated things because the model for importing that I had based my tool on was not designed to do many sites at once (and I designed it as close to what my manager had done in the past because he complained about anything that was done differently than him, regardless of merit). All of these things caused massive delays. We still haven't imported the second site into the platform, and the deadline agreed before I was even hired was the middle of August. And there's still 30+ sites to go.

And every couple of weeks the CEO would get angry that things were going so slowly, and then my manager would get angry and come down on me demanding to know what I've been doing all this time, and saying that it's taking too long. Despite the fact that both of them were kept in the loop the whole time and knew of all of the trouble we've had with the export data from the other company... For the past 2 months the development team has been meeting every morning to report progress. They knew full well what I was doing, and if it wasn't meeting their expectations they had ample opportunity to steer me in a different direction, but they never did any of that.

I largely blame the insomnia, clinical depression, and severe anxiety that I've experienced in the last 5 months on the management of this company. Instead of communicating clearly with me and giving me clear expectations (and the third parties clear expectations), they leave me alone for weeks or months and then get angry that things didn't magically work out how they envisioned in their minds.

I made it clear the mental health problems I was dealing with, and also made it clear that one of the reasons for the missed expectations is that they didn't give me any, and were doing a poor job of communicating with me. I was told that things weren't likely going to change, and this is how it's going to be so deal with it.

I finally concluded that I needed to get out of there for my own mental health. I reached back out to the company that I left, and they expressed interest in having me back. So we worked out the details, and I handed in my resignation.

Erin Maus

That's horrible! :\ Gosh between stories like a friend of mine getting laid off (they're also a software developer) and stories like yours I feel kinda selfish for taking a new job in a time like this.

bamccaig

You shouldn't feel selfish for taking a better job. That's a great thing, especially for you! It's good to hear that some people are having better luck.

I'm just glad that in a week I get to wash my hands of these fucking doomed migrations. :D Also, because of Canada Day this is only a 4 day week, and the company is also giving everyone the 2nd off so it's only a 3 day week! Counting today I only have 5 days left!

Polybios

Congratulations! That really sounds as leaving were just the right thing to do.

bamccaig

Bump!

--

I think that it was the right thing to do. My wife gave me a hard time at first because I'm taking a small pay cut. ::) I've never been infatuated with money though. As long as our bills are paid and we're comfortable I'm happy.

--

Back on the subject of cuts to funding for police, one argument for that is that many police departments are only capable of catching the most obvious criminals (and only after they've done the damage).

For example, somebody just posted that a neighbor must be throwing bags of rat poison in their backyard. Presumably to kill their dog, though they also have a grandchild that spends time back there. The police wrote a report, but apparently didn't bother with a thorough investigation. Whoever is doing it can presumably just keep getting away with it if they're careful. I bet if the police went door to door in the neighborhood it would spook whoever was doing it (they might even be able to spot evidence or get an accidental confession).

Burglars also usually get away clean unless they're repeat offenders and the police happen to check up on them in time.

Our police handle a lot of drug busts, but we all know that isn't solving the drug problem. It's just hurting people more, and costing taxpayers big money.

They do deal with a lot of drunk drivers, but it's not really curbing the problem. There are always drunk drivers on our roads, and only a fraction of them are ever caught.

They deal with a good number of domestic abuse cases too. They're probably doing good work there, at least some of the time.

They're useful to have around, but they seem quite limited in their ability to really catch criminals (let alone deter crime). It probably is worth reviewing their budget and reallocating funds from weapons and equipment to better training and/or hiring some more scientists for forensics so they can actually catch bad guys. :P

The worst part of it all is that the courts are currently letting repeat offenders out on bail while they await a trial in months (even before COVID-19 hit). These are mostly drug addicts that break into cars and houses to pay for their habit. When you let them out of jail they repeatedly offend again... It's just dumb. It is a waste of taxpayer money to send the police after them because they just get set free to do it again. Also, the cost to jail them is probably 5x what it would cost to just pay for their habit.

Matthew Leverton

The problem I have is that police have become this untouchable entity that can do no wrong. There is no accountability and it has been very difficult to get a cop fired (let alone convicted) for unnecessary, egregious acts of violence. And in some places around the country their pensions are highway robbery that is bankrupting the state.

jmasterx

I made a new song with a video >:(

video

bamccaig

The problem I have is that police have become this untouchable entity that can do no wrong. There is no accountability and it has been very difficult to get a cop fired (let alone convicted) for unnecessary, egregious acts of violence. And in some places around the country their pensions are highway robbery that is bankrupting the state.

I agree there. There is no accountability from a class of people that should be held to the highest standard, and it shows in their performance and behavior. I think that the supreme court has really dropped the ball on this, and that leads me to also question the integrity of the supreme court (which I think is an even bigger problem if you think about it).

I also read a recent article from Reuters that showed that judges across America get away with similarly bad behavior with often a slap on the wrist or no punishment at all. The people that are entrusted with deciding the fate of people's lives. Accused, victims, and dependents. All relying on judges to be professional and unbiased. Instead, they unfortunately get humans that are every bit as fallible as every other one of us. And the worst part, is that the bodies responsible for investigating and dealing with misconduct among judges basically do nothing (and are often operated by the very judges that are breaking the rules). It really goes to show just how much the "justice" system is a farce.

Speaking of police, my wife and I were driving back from camp tonight and called 911 to report a suspected drunk driver. The guy was eventually pulled over by police. We probably won't hear whether or not he was charged unless it happens to get reported on (and is descriptive enough for us to recognize it).

What alarmed us both is how slow the response was. We passed through 3 small towns over the course of 30 minutes and no sign of any police. At times we thought we might lose the guy because he was going too fast for us to keep up within the gray margins of the law. He always seemed to slow down enough though for us to catch back up. Instead of trying to head us off somewhere along the highway it seems the police just sat in the city and hoped he'd drive by them... :-/

I can't say for sure whether or not what they did was lazy, reckless, or appropriate. I'm not a trained police officer, and I am not familiar with their protocols. That said, it's lucky that most of the highway was divided and it was relatively dead because the suspect's car kept swerving all over the road crossing lanes and coming close to going off the road several times. It could have been tragic.

jmasterx said:

I made a new song with a video >:(

I like the song and the video! The vocals sound heavily auto-tuned to me, but I think it works well enough anyway.

jmasterx
bamccaig said:

I like the song and the video! The vocals sound heavily auto-tuned to me, but I think it works well enough anyway.

Thanks I'm glad you liked it.

You'd be surprised though, there's not as much tuning as you might think.
Here's the verse with no tuning https://www.allegro.cc/files/attachment/612523

Mind you, I cherry pick the takes that have the most emotional impact; not the ones which have the best pitch accuracy. I'm basically screaming at the top of my lungs to achieve this kind of sound, but I think it sounds cool. AutoTune for me is more of a tool to even out the performance, not because I can't hit the notes. Some of them went very flat but had a lot of emotional impact with a bit of tuning. I'm also aiming for a commercial pop sound which inherently, for better or worse is pretty heavily tuned. The last time I released music I hardly tuned the vocals and got feedback that I was occasionally flat and that my music was a mix of old and new music. So this time I'm going in a more commercial direction, but that still sounds like me. I'm releasing another single in August.

Chris Katko

I would love for someone to explain to me why it doesn't matter how many people have died at BLM "protests", including multiple children.

1) Why do black lives only matter when they're ended by a white person?

2) If this is your vision of "police free utopia", why does it include so many murdered black people?

That's the problem with today. Just because you feel like you're helping, doesn't mean you are. I want less black men, women, and children, being gunned down. I don't give a crap what the message is, if it doesn't actually stop that from happening. Just because someone starts an organization with the name "Black Lives Matter" doesn't mean they have the answer. But white people know so little about them they don't realize 1) they're started by literal Marxists who believe you need to topple "capitalism" in order to save black people. 2) actual black leaders are distancing themselves from BLM because they're nutjobs with no answers, but the media and liberal leaders only want you to see BLM. Apparently black voices only matter if they further a white liberal's agenda.

video

video

Black Lives Matter co-founder describes herself as ‘trained Marxist’

A rational person would ask "WTF does marxism have to do with police shooting black people?"

bamccaig

I would love for someone to explain to me why it doesn't matter how many people have died at BLM "protests", including multiple children.

What do you think the response should be? To ban protests because people are hurt? BLM is many things. It's just an idea. It's a political (or human rights) movement. It's a non-profit organization. And maybe other things. You can't just lump all activity associated with BLM with the non-profit. Individual people show up to protest (or counter-protest), and their actions are their own.

Children are also hurt by the US government on a daily basis. You just don't hear about it because the system doesn't care about those children. If you don't care about the many more children that the government is hurting then why are the relatively few cases of children hurt during BLM protests so important to you? The only reason is because your agenda is to discredit BLM.

Insert: I would also question the decision to bring children to a protest in a region that is likely to encounter violence. Our protest was completely peaceful so there was no issue with children being present at our protest. And it's good for them to see, whether black or white. However, if you can be reasonably sure that violence is at all likely then I don't think it's wise to bring children to a protest. They're more likely to be harmed than helped by seeing that, and the risk to their own safety is too great to impose on them. The parents need to own a certain amount of responsibility too.

1) Why do black lives only matter when they're ended by a white person?

Who said that was true? Black on black violence is entirely due to poverty. Poverty is entirely due to systemic racism and discrimination. Solve one problem and the other goes away. You can't "end" black on black violence until you fix the social problems causing it. No amount of "policing" will stop it. It's not because black people don't value black lives. It's because young black men in America have no valid shot at life, and are desperate enough to kill each other for almost anything. Society doesn't value their lives, and so they don't value them either. That's a tiny minority of black people. Most black people just want to feed their families and live in relative peace.

That's the problem with today. Just because you feel like you're helping, doesn't mean you are. I want less black men, women, and children, being gunned down. I don't give a crap what the message is, if it doesn't actually stop that from happening. Just because someone starts an organization with the name "Black Lives Matter" doesn't mean they have the answer.

It's really important to not allow saboteurs to hijack the meaning behind the movement. It is about systemic racism and discrimination that black people still face in America (and Canada; and the West in general) today. And I'm sure you mean well to question it. I know that in the beginning (years ago) I was turned off of it too. The "news" media was reporting on violence that I did not condone, and barely covering the core messaging behind the movement. Of course, that media is corrupt as fuck. They're just trying to sell articles to make money. They don't care about what's true or right. They only care about corporate success.

When George Floyd was murdered and the protests were refueled I was excited to see the response. And when I heard of a local protest I was immediately interested in joining it. We were hesitant due to COVID-19, and because of violence that had erupted in the US, but local organizers changed it to a motorcade so that we could remain distanced. Once I heard that we were in. And I'm glad that we went. After our parade through the city in vehicles we drove back to our local university parking lot where speeches were given by various speakers. And that's where the real impact was. Hearing first hand accounts of the discrimination and racism that black people were experiencing in our own community. On their own campus. From our local police departments.

But white people know so little about them they don't realize 1) they're started by literal Marxists who believe you need to topple "capitalism" in order to save black people. 2) actual black leaders are distancing themselves from BLM because they're nutjobs with no answers, but the media and liberal leaders only want you to see BLM. Apparently black voices only matter if they further a white liberal's agenda.

I think that the American education system must do a really horrible job of teaching the concepts of socialism, communism, and Marxism. These are not horrible concepts. These are wonderful ideas. Now is especially not the time for Americans to brag about how great their system is. Your response to COVID-19 has to be the worst on the entire planet. It really demonstrates just how ignorant and stupid the majority of Americans are. And just how ignorant and stupid your current majority government is too.

While it's not entirely true that capitalism has to fall for black people to be treated fairly, it's also not entirely false. Capitalism is a driving force in a lot of the systemic barriers holding black people down. Start by dismantling your goddamn private prison systems. There's a profit motive to lock people away, and everyone from prison wardens, to district attorneys, to judges have been caught imprisoning people unjustly for profit (mostly black people). That's absolutely sickening. While I'm generally against capital punishment, I would cheer while those people caught red-handed profiting from it suffered a horrendous, slow, public death. It's already questionable how useful incarceration is to deter or compensate for crime. Doing it to relatively innocent people for profit is worthy of a special kind of hell (and since I don't believe hell is waiting for anyone, I'm tempted to create our own for those deserving of one).

Actual black leaders are distancing themselves from BLM because they ALSO face systemic racism and discrimination, and they need to tread especially carefully to preserve what little power they do have. You shouldn't take that as a sign that they don't agree with the movement. It's just as likely that they're afraid associating with it will cost them their success (and potentially cast them back to a hell they've somewhat escaped). Also, not ALL black leaders are distancing themselves from BLM. Many are outwardly supporting it at their own risk. The more reasonable white people that support the movement the safer it becomes to outwardly support it too.

You're coming across very racist, even though I'm quite sure that's not your intention.

Black people, like most other groups of people, are not a hive mind. Black Americans have also been taught all of the screwed up ignorant ideas that other Americans are taught. Like "2nd Amendment, yeah!" The right to bare arms is so stupid in 2020. Guns are causing way more problems in America than they are solving. But due only to general ignorance among the population they are not being sufficiently regulated and destroyed.

There are extremists in every political group. They don't speak for the majority. Those suggesting stupid things like killing all white people or whatever are obviously taking things too far. That doesn't invalidate the entire movement. It just invalidates extreme individuals or subgroups.

This one is too long to watch right now or even go into, but as for the removal of statues of slave owners and/or Confederate leaders/symbols/flags/etc. I think that it's long overdue and makes complete sense. Removing those symbols and statues does not erase history. Flags and statues are erected to celebrate history. We should not be celebrating figures or groups that are considered today to be evil or to have been evil. The Confederacy especially is stupid to celebrate: it was a group of traitorous racists that were willing to turn against their union/nation to continue abusing human beings for profit. That's nothing to celebrate, regardless of which side of the fence your ancestors were on. It was wrong then, and it's still wrong today. There's no need for a democratic process to remove those symbols. Those symbols never represented the United States of America, and should not be tolerated or welcome anywhere within its borders (or the planet, for that matter).

It's also worth noting that the articles that he was citing appeared to be mostly right-wing biased media organizations. Of course they're going to find some way to criticize BLM. Their target audience is largely composed of uneducated people, racists, and selfish, greedy white people. If he was targeting unbiased news sources his video might be worth watching. Ultimately, he's also politically biased and his target audience is the same audience that his sources target so if he wants to make money on his video (and he does) then he also needs to appeal to his audience.

A rational person would ask "WTF does marxism have to do with police shooting black people?"

A rational person should be able to separate one individual's views from the overall view of a group.

A rational person should also understand the role capitalism plays in systemic injustice in a money-hungry state where law enforcement is a private business entity that profits from conviction/imprisonment.

A rational person should also understand the role capitalism plays in systemic discrimination against a people who were oppressed by society for hundreds of years, "freed" only about a hundred years ago (much to the objection of a large number of people and families in that society), and have been systematically held down ever since by the powers that be (i.e., where money is power).

None of this is rocket science. You have to have bias to not connect the dots.

Edgar Reynaldo

@bamccaig
Honestly, I'm stupefied by your arguments. You have a very rational sound mind. I'm impressed with your reasoning. That may be the biggest (and perhaps the only) compliment that I've ever given you. You would wipe the floor in a debate. Except when it comes to Christianity, but I digress, and I don't mean to detract from the positive message I want to send.

raynebc

That has to be the king of anti personal-responsibility posts. Handouts aren't going to be enough to change generations of bad Democrat policy and bad lifestyle choices. The left (politicians, media, educators, etc.) should stop brainwashing black people at large into believing lies like them not having a "valid shot at life" as you say.

As usual, your ill-informed opinions about COVID response and second amendment aren't particularly useful to anybody. And your side's brand of iconoclasm isn't something that should be defended, especially when rabid protesters tear down statues of black people, slavery abolitionists, founding fathers of the freest country in the world, etc. A rational person should be able to stop pretending to be the arbiter of fairness when pushing repeatedly failed ideologies like Socialism.

Edgar Reynaldo

raynebc, if you think the system is fair, you're part of why it's broken.

People don't want handouts, they want a fair chance to succeed. They don't have that. You're so blinded by your own ideology, you disregard anything anyone on the left has to say.

:D

Erin Maus

I'm an example of the 'system working': receiving SSDI + Medicare due to severe mental illness, and thanks to SSDI + Medicare + other welfare able to get better until the point this year I'll have paid more in taxes than I received in benefits (my current job and my new job pay very well).

The kicker is I was extremely lucky. Wasn't denied, didn't have to appeal for SSDI. Was able to receive excellent healthcare after a long wait. (But I thought long waits were only a thing for socialist countries? Hmm.)

But if Republicans had their way, I'd probably be dead or in jail for homelessness. ??? I would've never received SSDI or Medicare and my mental illness would've been untreated and that would've been the end for me.

Chris Katko

Failed over 15 times to post with only ~3 quotes. So we've hit the limit of A.CC's thread size until Matthew buys a bigger toaster.

Thread fork here.

4743 posts.

Edgar Reynaldo

<quote name="Chris Katko" src="Magic">
Failed over 15 times to post with only ~3 quotes. So we've hit the limit of A.CC's thread size until Matthew buys a bigger toaster.

Thread fork here.

4743 posts.
</quote>

Failed over 15 times to post with only ~3 quotes. So we've hit the limit of A.CC's thread size until Matthew buys a bigger toaster.

Thread fork here.

4743 posts.

bamccaig

@bamccaig
Honestly, I'm stupefied by your arguments. You have a very rational sound mind. I'm impressed with your reasoning. That may be the biggest (and perhaps the only) compliment that I've ever given you. You would wipe the floor in a debate.

Much appreciated. :) Unfortunately, reason only works on intelligent people with an open mind. Anybody with a conflicting ideology is immune to it.

Except when it comes to Christianity, but I digress, and I don't mean to detract from the positive message I want to send.

Yes, exactly. :P

Niunio

Will you left this to die?

Edgar Reynaldo

no. :-*

OneWing said:

Why is this thread still open?

Because it is a pthread: a thread for me to pee on.

8-)

EDIT
Besides, it's only another 2 1/2 pages to go til 5000.

In honor of that, here's Powerman 5000 singing How to be a Human.

video

Erin Maus

I'm so happy with my transition...

February 2018 (-21 months) -> December 2019 (0 months) -> now (8 months)

{"name":"612531","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/a\/6\/a620f334aebf2570443ac2070eddb3f7.png","w":2004,"h":1002,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/a\/6\/a620f334aebf2570443ac2070eddb3f7"}612531

So excited for the next 1-2 years especially, and whatever is beyond that.

I'm "passing" with a face mask (voice + body pass) so that makes me super happy. :) I'm really not too stressed about passing, I'm not a trans woman, but it makes me feel good nonetheless when it does happen.

Niunio

Gongratulations Erin.

bamccaig
Erin Maus said:

I'm "passing" with a face mask (voice + body pass) so that makes me super happy. :) I'm really not too stressed about passing, I'm not a trans woman, but it makes me feel good nonetheless when it does happen.

I don't know where, but I feel like I've seen your face somewhere else (company video maybe?) and I already thought that it was looking rather feminine. :)

I'm confused though. I thought that the point was indeed to transition to a woman, but you just said you're not a trans woman. Could you clarify that for us laymen? :)

Erin Maus

Thanks Niunio and bamccaig :D.

Questions are good! I'm specifically "non-binary trans-feminine" which means I don't identify as male or female and wish to present as female/feminine. In my case, I like a lot about my "previous" masculine identity, like my sense of masculine style, which I'm keeping as an "enby" (non-binary person). I still dress feminine a lot, too, because it's really validating, but I'll still wear a nice pair of jeans, graphic guy tee, and hip blazer (in fact, I do that more often than skirts, dresses, etc - though I've started to wear a lot of women's jeans because they fit me better).

bamccaig

A very satisfactory answer. I am stoned. :) I do think that will be really difficult for society to adapt to. By that I only mean for language (and thought processes/assumptions) to change to reflect it. The way that we all think is incompatible at the moment. Or am I just paranoid from the pot?

Erin Maus

The fork has endangered this thread!

{"name":"612532","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/d\/1\/d17405cc5b48d6dd560d8754ba0e03e5.png","w":1040,"h":610,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/d\/1\/d17405cc5b48d6dd560d8754ba0e03e5"}612532

I added a silly skin for my best friend. :) So many easter eggs in my game it's craaaazy.

bamccaig

Agreed, the fork never should have happened. >:( It's going to be twice as much work now.

That said, it's good that it has encouraged us to be more active. Perhaps this will just double our activities.

In any case, this is mostly a bump. Easter eggs happen to be one of the best things about games so having a game full of them can only help (assuming they aren't all inside jokes).

Edgar Reynaldo

For the rest of the summer in America, I predict a temperature of

86.45

degrees Fahrenheit.

It's time to eighty-six number 45.

bamccaig

Sometimes I dream of being an entrepreneur, but I don't think I have the necessary skills. Anyway, I'm stoned, but I just thought of creating a food company that creates tasty favorites from modern diets that are devoid of balanced nutrition, and manages to make them more like how food appeared in nature: carbohydrates scarce, usually tied to fiber; healthy doses of fat, minimal sodium, plenty of vitamins and minerals.

I often imagine a beer that is full of fiber. I don't know how you could achieve such a thing without making it taste horrible, but if you could I believe it would be valuable. I similarly just imagined a pasta dish that is essentially balanced. Of course, making things taste good while remaining nutritious is the challenge and likely why this doesn't exist yet. However, I don't think you need to aim for perfection either. I think that it's enough to make a good product that a niche market can choke down for better health. And if you manage to appeal to most people that's a bonus.

Append:

More ideas:

  • A Dennis the Menace film/video game/media based on an adult character that went down a bad path. Like a dark movie about a low life. :P


  • I wonder if instead of constantly adding new laws we should be doing full reviews of them, sort of like source code, to try to clean them up, make things clearer, and fix bad laws/mistakes/errors, and entirely remove stupid laws. :P I suppose some of this is being done already, maybe all of it, but it just seems like more emphasis should be put on simplicity (though I'm conflicted because I understand the need for law to be very precise and account for exceptions..). What I'm trying to say is shorter laws are easier to learn/remember/enforce/etc.

Edgar Reynaldo

854c2e23dd16d4c4018df685dc9298cd-240.jpg

Erin Maus

A lot of the Easter eggs (most of them) are just jokes and stuff most people will get. Like there's a chicken named Sanders. Like Colonel Sanders from KFC, right? But it doesn't stop there. You can discuss politics with this chicken... like Bernie Sanders. ;D Double joke! There's only a few exclusive "in jokes" because it definitely can get tiring.

I'm buying my first suit. :'( But it's a woman's suit. ;D Getting the fit might be hard, but I'm hoping it won't (my body is pretty feminine - narrow shoulders, etc - so maybe not???).

edit: Gosh it's some awesome to finally see my correct name here. :'(

LennyLen
bamccaig said:

I often imagine a beer that is full of fiber. I don't know how you could achieve such a thing without making it taste horrible, but if you could I believe it would be valuable

Let me introduce you to my friend:

{"name":"612534","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/3\/f\/3fd823fcbfddf8439f2b31043e332894.jpg","w":1297,"h":1297,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/3\/f\/3fd823fcbfddf8439f2b31043e332894"}612534

I love Google photos image search

bamccaig said:

A Dennis the Menace film/video game/media based on an adult character that went down a bad path. Like a dark movie about a low life.

British Dennis or American Dennis? The former is much more a low life than the latter.

DanielH

86.45°F?

Not all America.

That was our low yesterday. The high was 109°F (42.78°C).

Edgar Reynaldo

Read the spoiler my friend.

raynebc

Bam: Laws generally don't get simplified or removed without pursuing deregulation, which the Democrats tend to dislike. Of course, point out that reducing the amount of federal rules has been a major Trump policy goal and they'll flat out hate it.

bamccaig

Conservative politicians only deregulate industries/corporations. Conservative politicians are only in it to get rich themselves. Corporations love to get deregulated because they get to maximize profits at the expense of health and safety and [not so ironically] conservation. There's great reason for anybody to dislike deregulation. Especially in the USA, where there's nowhere near ENOUGH regulation. It's all corruption. Corporations do whatever they want, executives and politicians get rich, while workers and citizens get screwed, and the environment gets destroyed.

raynebc

There you go right back to far left propaganda. There's no point for me to bother responding, I'm not going to get much centrist discussion here.

bamccaig

There is no point for you to bother responding because you're standing for the weaker position. I don't get told what to believe. I choose very carefully what to believe.

Edgar Reynaldo

There's no point debating raynebc. He's too set in his ways. His idea of a centrist discussion is where he spouts his Trump brainwashing and we take him seriously.

Every time there's something you don't agree with, you immediately dismiss it as 'far left propaganda'. You refuse to tell us where you get your news, both you and Arthur so we can judge it for ourselves.

rainman said:

Bam: Laws generally don't get simplified or removed without pursuing deregulation, which the Democrats tend to dislike. Of course, point out that reducing the amount of federal rules has been a major Trump policy goal and they'll flat out hate it.

It's called an amendment, and they get passed all the time.

Yes, reducing the number of rules that prohibit him and his cronies from profiting even more off of people the planet and our health.

In other news, how would YOU feel if Federal Troops invaded YOUR city. Trump is a sycophant with delusions of grandure. Reminds me of the Emperor's new clothes. Trump thinks he's clothed with glory, but he's stark naked and there's nothing to be proud of.

In the news, federal troops descend on Portland protests, tear gassing and pepper spraying a wall of mothers on the front line of a peaceful protest. Trump said and I quote, "Fantastic job" those troops did in Portland. He's sending troops to Chicago, NY, Seattle, and anywhere else they are democratically led. This is just another political move.

So raynebc, do you approve of the Gestapo kidnapping citizens? Because that's what they did. And your precious Police did nothing to stop them.

raynebc

Leftists gonna leftist, what can I do about it? Their brains are permanently stained by their ideology.

LennyLen
raynebc said:

Leftists gonna leftist, what can I do about it? Their brains are permanently stained by their ideology.

Anyone who believes in a single ideology, be they leftist, rightist, or whetever, is not to be trusted.

Edgar Reynaldo

raynebc, you're just avoiding the issue because you know what you're saying is wrong and its embarassing. I get it man, its okay, you've got a reputation as a Republican to defend. And a vote for Trump. (Sung to the tune of 'now that's a spicy meatball') Now that's a slippery slope to stand on.

Once again, you've dismissed all my arguments as leftist and completely avoided the debate. If you wanna forfeit, by all means go ahead and admit you're wrong.

Reaganomics don't work.

Trickle down doesn't work.

Systemic racism is an issue.

These are basic facts, proven again and again. Give up dude.

raynebc

No, I'm just not interested in what revcom types have to say, Edgar. The level of detail and articulation I've used to argue with you hasn't mattered in the slightest, it's been a waste of time. You are at least as entrenched as you claim me to be, and I don't consider your radical opinions to be justified. I'll continue to keep up with left wing, center and right wing news so I know what's going on, and you will keep stewing in your left wing media and never leave the inside of your crazy bubble. There's really nothing left to argue about.

bamccaig

Here's an idea: abandon all biased news sources and get your news from an unbiased source instead. :-/

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

Here's an idea: abandon all biased news sources and get your news from an unbiased source instead.

All news sources have bias, especially since they're all owned by a mere ~5 corporations total now. It's never been easier to pay a single corporation to influence so many outlets.

That being said, you can tease out the bias if you actually try to go in with an objective mind and ask yourself constantly "what are they trying to get me to feel". What's the picture of? Is it an objective photo, or a stylized one? Do they actually list their sources or just say "a source" or equally bad, link to their own reporting (though an affiliate owned by the same master company)--they use themselves as a source.

Notice the verbs they use. "Trump attacks journalists", and "Journalists challenge Trump" can be literally the same event and both are still wrong. They're making Trump appear to be evil for disagreeing with journalists during an event, or, trying to make their own journalists appear to be heroes while continually interrupting a press event. Both those things have happened. (And no, this isn't a defense of the incredibly stupid things Trump has done. But two wrongs don't make a right.)

The left is pretty notorious for using under-handed tactics to bias you. (What? No they don't--) like when they posted a picture of Bernie Sanders as 'a dirty jew with his dirty jew money' with a mountain of fake money photoshopped next to him. (do--- oh.... yeah....)

Basically, start watching some Tim Pool videos ("boo, hiss, he's not the "right" kind of liberal!") because an an actual journalist he knows their tricks and dissects their news articles. You'll find trends. Patterns. Tactics. You'll also notice there's no actual integrity or "bar." There's only tactics. The very singular outlet will shun men for "ranking women" while in the same year, releasing their "top 10 bulges of male Olympics players".

They also love to show only parts of videos which is why you should ALWAYS wait till more of the video comes out before becoming a braindead "ally" and jumping into their cause. The Covington Kids famously won a lawsuit against a media company something that's almost impossible to do because of the 1st amendment. They won because it was absolutely, unequivocally, lies, that were reported to make those poor highschool boys look like racist monsters when the actual footage was a racist native american instigator... literally tried to instigate a fight for PR while a bunch of literal "black zionists" (black people who believe ancient Israelis were all black) were screaming racial epithets at the kids--which were entirely cropped from the videos and never discussed at all in the national news.

raynebc

There is no unbiased news source. If you think your news is perfectly neutral you're probably wrong. Tim Pool is about as good an alternative to such an unattainable target as I can find, him being a left of center moderate who as far as I can tell, honestly analyzes and discusses national and global news.

Edit: Looks like Chris is of the same balanced mind-set. Glad there's more than one voice of dissent in this otherwise echo-chamber of a thread.

bamccaig

It's seriously tiring to keep repeating the same goddamn things to you two. :P Pay attention.

bamccaig said:

For provincial, national, and international news I predominantly use Reuters. I explicitly sought out an unbiased news source, and that's what I came across[1]. I don't understand why anybody would want news that is politically biased. News is meant to be truth, and the truth is not biased. I avoid most MSM sources because they're heavily biased and corrupt. Which isn't to say that Reuters can't possibly be biased or corrupt, but I certainly haven't seen anything to imply that it is, and it seems to be well respected overall too.

bamccaig said:

Not the original source, but my top Google search result today for "Reuters political bias": https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/reuters/ "Overall, we rate Reuters Least Biased based on objective reporting and Very High for factual reporting due to proper sourcing of information with minimal bias and a clean fact check record."

Tell us your news sources and we can compare their results on https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/. Feel free to also compare "left" news sources that you think are biased (you'll likely find that indeed they are).

There are unbiased journalists in the world, but you have to seek them out. Don't expect them to get pumped through your TV unless you're using the Internet from a smart TV.

I'm not familiar with Tim Pool, but it sounds like despite claims of being a centrist or liberal he actually sides with the alt-right in America most of the time. It's no surprise then that you both think he's a good source: he agrees with you. Careful that you aren't relying on confirmation bias. :P

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

I'm not familiar with Tim Pool, but it sounds like despite claims of being a centrist or liberal he actually sides with the alt-right in America most of the time. It's no surprise then that you both think he's a good source: he agrees with you. Careful that you aren't relying on confirmation bias. :P

Tonight on "everyone who disagrees with me is alt-right"

You literally said you don't know him, AND, that he's alt-right. Fun fact: He is Korean-American, liberal to a core, supported hippies and anarchism in his teens, and won awards for documenting the Occupy Wallstreet rally.

Erin Maus

I supported Republicans when I was a young kid / early teen and it turns out I'm super queer, Stalinist-Communist anti-fascist (REPUBLICANS ARE FASCIST) sooo ;D

(...

I wonder what's sarcasm, what's a joke, what's an exaggeration, and what's not. :o)

Matthew Leverton

IMO, the closest you get to unbiased journalism in USA is something like NPR.

Cannot vouch for the "accuracy" of this particular graph, but looks similar to others that I've seen:

https://www.adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart/

My take on something like CNN v Fox News is that the former are liberal leaning people who see things in a liberal view, and the latter is about equivalently right leaning. However, CNN's bias feels like a natural, unintentional extension of their perspective, whereas I get the impression from Fox News that they sit around and purposefully try to figure out how they can mislead their audience to reinforce their beliefs to keep them coming back for more.

I don't mind bias and selective reporting from agencies that are for-profit, funded by ads, etc. I expect it. I just don't like when networks post doctored images from one part of the country and pretend it's a picture from Seattle, etc... That kind of stuff is worse than a used car salesperson.

Now I recently saw some clips from Chris Wallace v Trump. If everybody interviewed like that, then I'd have a different opinion on Fox News. But if you're only going to ask softball questions and not forcefully fact check on the spot, then don't call yourself a "News" station or a "Journalist."

Edgar Reynaldo

BBC is decent. Fox is mostly trash. PBS News Hour is good. Don't watch cable. Will check out newspaper articles online. Quit stalling, pussy. If you're just gonna sit back and point fingers at us lefties, why don't you come forward yourself. I still have yet to hear a convincing argument from you on any topic and you're still unwilling to disclose your sources. Let me guess, the Epoch Times perhaps? They're the most right wing communist newspaper there is. I wouldn't be surprised if they were founded by Russians or Chinese.

Will watch Young Turk videos from time to time, for a fresh dose of reality.

bamccaig

Tonight on "everyone who disagrees with me is alt-right"

You literally said you don't know him, AND, that he's alt-right. Fun fact: He is Korean-American, liberal to a core, supported hippies and anarchism in his teens, and won awards for documenting the Occupy Wallstreet rally.

I didn't just assume. I Googled him. ::) "Alt-right" isn't even in my goddamn vocabulary. I don't subscribe to ideology. I cherry-pick the best ideas from any reliable source. Nothing is ever set in stone. I don't consider myself on any side. I care about the truth, and everyone not in that category can be dismissed as crazy or stupid.

That doesn't mean that you have to believe in my understanding of the "truth", but you do need to be science/evidence-based. You need to be open to being wrong.

I went with the consensus as far as I could find it. I would encourage you to post videos of his that demonstrate his left-lean or otherwise demonstrate my supposed error.

His race is irrelevant. There are plenty of black Trump supporters, which makes no fucking sense on July 23, 2020, but here we are.

If I were to guess I'd say he's likely a professional content creator, and that means he depends on views/watches/likes/subscribes/notifications to get paid. That likely means that his content is biased towards his audience. Since you both just happened to be his audience and you invoked him here I would conclude that he most likely doesn't have very many liberal audience members.

There's no way to make sense of this with him being a credible source. You (and apparently he, at least some of the time) claims he is liberal (left). His viewpoints are apparently generally conservative (right) or you likely wouldn't be summoning him here. Substance matters more than talk.

Append:

Bumping this thread to help keep it alive.

On the subject of content creators, I used to be a fan of Sydney Watson. Though she has always been somewhat conservative in politics, being more centrist myself there were several subjects that I agreed with her on years ago.

She is a dual citizen, Australian and American. She was living in Australia when I used to watch her. She seemed intelligent. Then she decided to move to the USA recently... Now she's beyond hope. A full-blown Trump supporter. Doubling down on stupid ideas. I don't notice any trace of intelligence left in her ideas. I think that's really sad.

It's really important for people to remain true. Not to subscribe to any ideology. We're all capable of being completely wrong, and being convinced that we're right. Our entire understanding of the world/universe/existence is based on some rather short-range, imperfect sensory inputs. The rest we pretty much make up as we go along. It's very easy if you close your mind to being wrong to end up believing in some really stupid shit. It takes groups of intelligent people verifying evidence to filter out bad ideas and keep good ones.

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

His viewpoints are apparently generally conservative (right) or you likely wouldn't be summoning him here.

I'm. Liberal.

I'm pro-LGBT. Anti-war. Pro-immigration. Pro-environment. Pro-weed. I'm pro-wearing masks.

What the !@$! happened to our society. It's like we can't even talk anymore without everyone assuming the absolute worst about you.

Quote:

"Alt-right" isn't even in my vocabulary.

You literally said alt-right in the quoted text! What is happening? Am I on Punk'd?! Did Superman blow up the sun and suck us into bizaro world?!

bamccaig

I'm. Liberal.

Well you fooled me. ::) Probably because instead of being enraged at the president of the United States for turning America's forces against her own people you're enraged that black people have the audacity to rise up against their oppressors, and in the process a few people have been hurt or killed. Nowhere near as many people as the police and national guard have hurt in those same demonstrations, mind you.

You literally said alt-right in the quoted text! What is happening? Am I on Punk'd?! Did Superman blow up the sun and suck us into bizaro world?!

Sorry for the confusion. I was paraphrasing from RationalWiki:

bamccaig said:

I'm not familiar with Tim Pool, but it sounds like despite claims of being a centrist or liberal he actually sides with the alt-right in America most of the time. It's no surprise then that you both think he's a good source: he agrees with you. Careful that you aren't relying on confirmation bias. :P

Tim Pool (1986–) is a Eurasian American YouTube commentator and former Vice News reporter who describes himself as a "social liberal" and "left-libertarian" who "support(ed) Bernie Sanders, Andrew Yang, and Tulsi Gabbard".[3] Despite this, his content is composed almost exclusively of rebuttal-free alt-right talking points. He is basically one of those "centrists" who somehow always agree with the American Right on most if not all issues. Pool first gained notoriety reporting from the front lines of the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Polybios
bamccaig said:

black people have the audacity to rise up against their oppressors, and in the process a few people have been hurt or killed.

I somehow cannot help to associate an old-fashioned Communist here. You know, the cynical, "it's their fault if they appeared to be on the wrong side of history" kind. ::)

Who is the "oppressor" here? Is it really that black and white simple?

bamccaig

It's really not at all simple or "black and white". It's extremely complicated. There's no boogeyman. There's no one person or group that you can point to responsible for it. That's what makes it systemic.

The oppressors are generally the wealthy people or groups that own and control the governments of the world, and the various agents carrying out their orders. This means aristocrats, politicians, law enforcement, etc.

It also includes everybody that knows (or aught to know) about the oppression and does nothing to stop it. That pretty much includes all of us.

You need to put yourself in the shoes of somebody else. What if you were born somewhere else? None of us get to choose if or when we're born. None of us get to choose where or to whom either. We come alive, and we develop a consciousness, and we're stuck in whatever situation that we're in.

Imagine you are born in the "projects" or "ghetto" of an American city. Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Detroit, whatever. You are black. You are extremely poor. Your environment is hostile. And no amount of honest, hard work guarantees your success.

Every one of us born into better circumstances that doesn't raise hell to fix it is responsible for enabling it.

If "God" were real, and I were him, there would be no "Hell" in the after life. Instead, I'd reincarnate you as somebody whose life is hell that you could have helped and didn't. >:(

raynebc

Anybody who thinks Tim Pool is alt-right is a dupe. Looks like Bam is of the same mindset as Biden that Democrats own the black people and their vote, or they aren't black. I see the radicals haven't changed while I was gone, they are so far left they can't see what used to be the center of politics anymore. Oh well.

And no, I don't have the time or interest to humor Bam's dumb thought exercises on why he isn't programmed by his choices in media.

RmBeer2

I'm GOD!

Stop calling me! it bothers me!

Out of joke. I don't agree with anyone or anything, but everyone is happy in their own way, even if their beliefs are a lie. I never understand a word of what they say, if I appear to understand some things, it is only because I am interpreting it as a programming code made by others, they were programmed that way, but I do not know what it is there for, what it is for, or what is its purpose, it only exists and its existence is not worth questioning. If it were only for me I would erase everything, but the others are stubborn and altered for wanting to keep them at all costs.

A clear example is @Chris Katko, she says she is "liberal", but what is being liberal? It is a political connotation, like "LGBT", "war", "immigration", or even other users who speak of BLM, ultralefts, communists, citations of some unknown politician who nobody gives a damn. And all this is what shows how slaves they are even of his ideas that are not even his. Liberal? Free? Debauchery? How much nonsense.

Edgar Reynaldo

No raynebc, the Democrats don't 'own' the black vote. It's just that Trump is a racist, and any person of color who supports him is clearly brain dead.

Polybios
bamccaig said:

Every one of us born into better circumstances that doesn't raise hell to fix it is responsible for enabling it.

I don't believe that "raising hell" will fix anything. :P

If it's about poverty, there would be various instruments of education, regulation, and the welfare state to alleviate disadvantages. But some (most) of that would be "socialism" according to US standards.

In a free country, you can only offer opportunities to people but they have to seize them themselves. Maybe you can incentivize a bit.

bamccaig said:

And no amount of honest, hard work guarantees your success.

I'm not so sure about that.

bamccaig said:

The oppressors are generally the wealthy people or groups that own and control the governments of the world, and the various agents carrying out their orders. This means aristocrats, politicians, law enforcement, etc.

Last time I checked, the US was a democracy. I doubt that aristocrats, of all people, are of any relevance here.

raynebc

Edgar, your brand of partisan idiocy is why I am not willing to expend effort to engage you or Bam in honest discussion anymore. You're not willing to reciprocate it. We get demands to suggest some media sources we trust, two of us happen to suggest the same moderate liberal news analyst and Bam immediately goes for the "alt-right" ad hominem attack. Don't consider it a mystery that my patience with the likes of you is shot.

You can offer equal opportunities to people, but people have different capabilities, preferences, circumstances and choices. Equal outcomes cannot happen in a free society because people won't take actions that equalize everybody.

Matthew Leverton

Sure it's a democracy, but it's like the monopoly version of it.

If you really want to become anything of any relevance outside minor local politics, you have to join the Republican or Democratic party. And if you want to move up the ranks there, you basically have to mostly adhere to the party line. In some very progressive / conservative districts, you can get elected as a representative with some extreme views (e.g., AOC), but you're still basically unable to advance very far in your general party.

This is unless you are independently wealthy and can self-fund. But even that is incredibly difficult, with Mr Trump being one of the few success stories there. (And even with all his money and fame, he still had to join the Republican party to have a real shot, which included changing his stance on a few core issues like abortion.)

The US government has not really turned into a very effective thing. (It's not all bad, and better than most, but still... the super partisan stuff is enough to ultimately destroy it.)

But regarding general opportunity, it's obvious that if two individuals from completely different, unequal backgrounds put same amount of effort that you'll get two different results depending on the advantage one was born over the other. And on the opposite end, there are obviously examples of people who were born into poverty and were able to overcome long odds by a mix of hard work and luck.

But again, systematically and even from an evolutionary point of view, the law of averages are going to win out. The poor people will mostly stay poor. The rich people will mostly stay rich. Some will move from one side to the other for a variety of reasons, but the idea that a little hard work is all a person needs is bogus.

In some ways it's an unsolvable problem, but that shouldn't mean we shouldn't try to equalize the playing field a bit. A healthy amount of socialistic programs does a nation good as long as it isn't to the point to decentivize hard work. And in most areas, the US is a long way from too much socialism despite what the right likes to fret about.

Erin Maus

I'm an awesome software developer. I've gone from poverty and a month or two from homelessness to comfortably 'mid-upper middle class' (like not quite lawyer/doctor but nearly double the median household income [single person household, too!] here in my city) with how much I make now.

I got lucky. Yes, if I weren't a good developer getting lucky wouldn't have mattered. But I don't have a degree. I came from a town with minimal software development opportunities. There were only two software development companies to intern at when I was looking a couple years ago.

I fought for the internship. Was persistent during a product launch. Got it because I had a lot in common with the lead developer (like RuneScape, funnily enough).

Internship turned into a job. Got lucky to get my job at Allstate in Charlotte. Again, "right place, right time". Same for my new job at Truist. Right place, right time.

There are many who weren't as lucky. A friend who is a better developer than me with good grades and a degree from a good school took months to find a job after they were laid off at the beginning of the pandemic. It took me a month for the Allstate job (between looking and receiving the offer) and a couple weeks for Truist (during the pandemic, mind you). You can't tell me I worked harder than my friend. And that's just one anecdote I have.

And this doesn't even touch on the fact I received SSDI first try without an appeal. That's unheard of. They deny people on life support. Because of SSDI and Medicare, I was able to receive the care (still took nearly three years of med management and therapy!) to start on my journey that led to my "succeeding" in this horrible capitalist system.

Don't think anyone's gonna read this but whatever.

Chris Katko

I'm not posting any more politics because we clearly can't meet (or don't want to meet) at any kind of mutual place where discussion can take place. It's like many groups of people all speaking different languages and living in different worlds yet somehow still using English. There's no point in making you angry so I'll just let you be.

As always, I hope for the best for your lives.

Erin, I hope your transition is going well. :)

bamccaig
raynebc said:

We get demands to suggest some media sources we trust, two of us happen to suggest the same moderate liberal news analyst and Bam immediately goes for the "alt-right" ad hominem attack. Don't consider it a mystery that my patience with the likes of you is shot.

We didn't "demand" anything. We asked for your news sources as a matter for discussion. You didn't offer them up (unless you both ONLY listen to Tim Pool, which would be really, really stupid).

You both cited the same YouTuber that I was NOT familiar with. Which you both claimed was liberal, IIRC. I Googled him to check on his credability, and came across a seemingly trustworthy assessment of his politics which indicated that despite his own claims he is actually "alt-right" (whatever that means), or generally aligns with the American right. In other words, he appears to be biased.

I've already offered an unbiased news source. If you refuse to use it then I guess you're admitting to bias. You do you. I'm happy for you to stop arguing. You never make sense, throw around insults, and then cry that we aren't playing fair and say you're going to quit and then you keep going. You're like fucking Neil Roy.

raynebc said:

You can offer equal opportunities to people, but people have different capabilities, preferences, circumstances and choices. Equal outcomes cannot happen in a free society because people won't take actions that equalize everybody.

And you believe it's right for some people to suffer due to circumstances beyond their control while others live comfortable, easy, luxurious lives just because they got lucky? I personally think that's a fucking horrible system. And I personally believe the only valid response to that system is anarchy: fuck the laws, they only maintain the status quo so the lucky ones can live happy lives at the expense of the unlucky, regardless of character or merit. No, no, no. Either we're all going to be happy or we're all going to be miserable. >:( >:( >:( Take your pick.

But regarding general opportunity, it's obvious that if two individuals from completely different, unequal backgrounds put same amount of effort that you'll get two different results depending on the advantage one was born over the other. And on the opposite end, there are obviously examples of people who were born into poverty and were able to overcome long odds by a mix of hard work and luck.

But again, systematically and even from an evolutionary point of view, the law of averages are going to win out. The poor people will mostly stay poor. The rich people will mostly stay rich. Some will move from one side to the other for a variety of reasons, but the idea that a little hard work is all a person needs is bogus.

In some ways it's an unsolvable problem, but that shouldn't mean we shouldn't try to equalize the playing field a bit. A healthy amount of socialistic programs does a nation good as long as it isn't to the point to decentivize hard work. And in most areas, the US is a long way from too much socialism despite what the right likes to fret about.

Here, here. I don't have much to say because you pretty much hit all of the points, but I wanted to bring it more attention before it scrolls out of view again.

I don't actually think that people are disincentivized by social assistance. The evidence isn't really there. In a trial for a universal basic income program in Ontario they found the opposite: instead of sitting around collecting free money and doing nothing most people reinvested the money into a better education for a better job, or started their own businesses. The end result is that every dollar given by taxpayers came back several times in economic activity resulting in more taxes paid.

People are not lazy. Generally people are happy to work. What people don't want to do is work a shitty job for poor pay and no benefits. If you pay people fairly and give them reasonable benefits then they're more than happy to work. People ultimately just want to live a happy, healthy life. A lot of people aren't given that option: they have to work 2 or 3 dead-end minimum wage jobs just to stay off of the street. That's not right, and it's not even necessary.

Part of the problem is that we keep replacing human labor with machines, but we don't balance the system to compensate. The same amount of "work" is being done, but fewer people need to work to achieve it. Ideally, that should just translate to everybody having to work less hard. Machines are doing some of the work now. We should get to work easier, and still get paid fully. Instead, what happens is that people end up unemployed or are forced to take really shitty jobs that don't pay enough to provide for their family. The system operates as if it's well thought out and works perfectly, but in reality it's just a shit show where every individual business owner is pretty much free to do whatever they can afford to do. There's no oversight or planning to ensure things are fair and balanced and to ensure that hard work is actually rewarded.

We already have the means to take care of everyone easily and comfortably without everybody having to work hard. Nobody needs to suffer. They only suffer today out of some kind of archaic notion of "hard work" and "earning your keep". Of course, only poor people really need to work hard. The richer you are the easier it is to make money. Even though my income is pretty low for the software industry, it's still a pretty comfortable income for where I live. It took me a while to get to where I am, but from day one I had an advantage over my older brother, and it grew bigger and bigger. The only problem is: he is a much harder worker than I am. If the system actually rewarded hard work he would be much better off than I am, but the reverse is true. He works really hard and barely gets by most of the time, whereas good fortune pretty much falls on my lap most of the time. I think that's bullshit.

"Money" is just a made up concept. In fact, rich people are literally printing money, growing it on trees. If you're rich you can just invest some of the money and it magically grows bigger and bigger. Of course, much of this system is really fake. There aren't enough resources or services on Earth to actually cover all of the "money" that theoretically exists. It's all bullshit. Bullshit that benefits the wealthy while holding the impoverished down.

I'm not posting any more politics because we clearly can't meet (or don't want to meet) at any kind of mutual place where discussion can take place. It's like many groups of people all speaking different languages and living in different worlds yet somehow still using English. There's no point in making you angry so I'll just let you be.

Every time somebody says they're going to quit posting about something divisive they just double down. :P Just save yourself the trouble. You'll likely reply. And it's good for you to. If you never engage in healthy debates you'll never grow. The same is true of myself. As hard as it is to be wrong, I learn from it every time, and I become a better person for it. Prove me wrong. If I'm wrong I certainly want to know it. You just had better be prepared to be wrong yourself.

Erin Maus

Erin, I hope your transition is going well. :)

It is! :3

I posted the 8 month timeline here: https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/615770/1046685#target

Like, I'm finally happy with how I look. First time... ever. In my whole life, and I'm 28...

I don't feel weird dating now, where before I've always had self-image issues that made me feel 'unworthy'. Like I went on a couple dates this past weekend with a couple handsome guys and I didn't think anything negative about myself.

My new job is super supportive which is wonderful! My new manager's first question was what my pronouns are, not what my start date is. :o It's awesome to have such a supportive network of friends and coworkers.

Matthew Leverton

If you don't mind my asking... how did you decide which pronouns to use?

If I didn't relate to his or her then I feel like I'd make up a new word just because I'm a grammar guy and using "their" to refer to a single entity has always bothered me (e.g., in sentences like "a user must reset their password"). It's almost like fingernails on a chalkboard to me.

But yet, I do truly feel that the minimum amount of respect you can give people is to call them by the names and titles that they prefer.

Erin Maus

I'm pretty much an open book about my gender identity and sexual orientation. :P

To be fair I'm cool with anything but he/him/his (and it...).

Like they/she (it's what I put on our team bio at my new job) is good, and maybe I'd have chosen xe/xem/xer but I tried to be 'least controversial' without compromising on what 'feels' right to me. So I chose they/them/their and after people using those pronouns for a couple years it just sounds right.

I understand the grammar issue, my brother had the same sort of concerns about they/them/their.

I felt like I was going to face 'oh they're just trying to be special' with xe (or whatever) and 'oh what about grammar' with they, but meh.

raynebc

Matthew, thank you for the thoughtful post. I largely agree with what you said there. Hard work is not the only thing you need to succeed, but it is a factor that greatly influences your success. What you said about needing to maintain the incentive to work is something I particularly endorse, but the problem is that the far-left actually does have a stance that people shouldn't have to work. Some of my far left friends actually have this stance and it disappoints me because I was raised to have and appreciate a strong work ethic. The Democrats previously pushed for and are again pushing for Covid relief payments in a way that some people are paid notably more to not work, and this is ridiculous.

Bam, I skim through aggregates of news from a variety of mainstream news sources and listen to and read centrist and conservative analysis of cultural and political news. The assessment you came up with regarding Pool is bunk, find a better one or drop the ignorant alt-right label. Your news source is in fact not unbiased, such a thing doesn't exist. You support anarchy over equal opportunity and the law and order that protects it. Your brain is poisoned beyond repair.

Edgar Reynaldo

@Erin Maus
I hope those 'guys' you're dating know you're trans. Nobody likes surprises like that and I wouldn't be surprised if it turned to violence if you deceived someone into forming a relationship with you. I know a very attractive trans 'woman' who didn't disclose that fact, and all it leads to is trouble.

@raynebc
Stop speaking for the left as if you were one. You're just as biased against the left as we are against the right. Admit it, you have plenty of bogus opinions about the left, from your brainwashing by the right. People don't want to do nothing except laze around and enjoy the 'riches' of the government. You know what poor people do with their stimulus checks? They spend them on goods and services. You know what all the corporations did with their illegal bailouts? Hoard it, give bonuses to CEOs, lay off workers, etc....

We will never agree because you're freaking deluded about what's right and what's wrong.

Erin Maus

It says on my dating profile three things very clearly: I'm queer, non-binary, and I started HRT in November 2019. And I don't think I should have to put those things there, I do it because I'm open about who I am.

I'm a little offended that you put guys and woman in quotes...? And 'deceived' is super offensive but I'm not going to spend any time addressing that.

:-/

Matthew Leverton

A lot of straight men (and women, I assume) would be disgusted with themselves if they found out they fell for "something" they previously thought was an abomination. I would view it as less to do with you, and more to do with their own insecurities. Their world view would be shattered and obviously they would blame deception on that, as opposed to revising their views on sexual orientation.

However, that said, even though it would be no fault of your own, I could definitely see some crazy person getting violent due to that. So even if it's not listed on a profile, it's something I'd bring up (as soon as you know) if it's a relationship you ultimately wanted to pursue.

raynebc said:

The Democrats previously pushed for and are again pushing for Covid relief payments in a way that some people are paid notably more to not work, and this is ridiculous.


I agree it's ridiculous, but really for a different reason than I assume you mean. It's ridiculous that adults working 40 hours/week make so little money that they can barely survive, especially when they are working for billion dollar companies. So little money that unemployment + $600 is more than they make if they work hard.

That said, it's not the responsibility of COVID19 relief to right that wrong! So there should have been a stipulation that you cannot make more than 100% of your prior salary. However, I get that would be difficult to enforce and calculate on short order, so they ran with what they could do quickly.

I do sincerely believe that most people would rather work for their money than do nothing --- and those that do not feel that way probably shouldn't be working. :P But if it's make more money doing nothing than working hard at a sucky job, then well, even I'd bite.

But really, you cannot instill a work ethic into an adult by simply refusing all social services. It just doesn't work. They'll either turn into criminals or mooch off of friends and family and strangers. So you really are better off as a society giving away the bare minimum necessities (cheap housing / food) to live. Anybody with an ounce of self-respect will do their hardest to avoid that life; anybody that doesn't care is highly unlikely to ever be useful to society... and you might as well keep them off the streets where you'll spend more resources on police enforcement.

bamccaig
raynebc said:

Bam, I skim through aggregates of news from a variety of mainstream news sources and listen to and read centrist and conservative analysis of cultural and political news. The assessment you came up with regarding Pool is bunk, find a better one or drop the ignorant alt-right label. Your news source is in fact not unbiased, such a thing doesn't exist. You support anarchy over equal opportunity and the law and order that protects it. Your brain is poisoned beyond repair.

I didn't assess Pool. The Internet did. Take it up with RationalWiki, or go ahead an prove them wrong here. I'm open. Show me Pool being so liberal.

My news source is very much unbiased. I don't much subscribe to any political agenda. You're welcome again to demonstrate my news source being biased.

My brain is very open to good ideas. It has a pretty low tolerance for bullshit though.

A lot of straight men (and women, I assume) would be disgusted with themselves if they found out they fell for "something" they previously thought was an abomination. I would view it as less to do with you, and more to do with their own insecurities. Their world view would be shattered and obviously they would blame deception on that, as opposed to revising their views on sexual orientation.

I don't even think that you need to hold such a harsh perspective. I think that the deception is real. At least within the straight/"cis" community we consider sex/gender to be synonymous, and though we may respect trans-* decisions to live their life in a way that makes them happy, that doesn't impact who or what we find attactive. We're attracted physically by hardware, and the quality of hardware matters, for better or worse, in addition to software. To be fooled into thinking you're playing with a Mac instead of Linux would upset anyone. At least, anyone that cared. A straight/cis-gendered person probably will care equally to how well you pass as their desired mate physically as mentally.

That said, my wife likes to watch RuPaul's Drag Race, and Queer Eye, etc. And honestly I've found these entertaining as well. Sometimes I do find the men "attractive": either because they're in drag and pass as a woman, or just because they're confident and comfortable being themselves, and I enjoy seeing people at their best (it's also neat to see how skilled they care at what they're good at, and I appreciate that as well). That doesn't mean that I would laugh it off if I happened to end up on a date with a drag queen that didn't reveal the ruse as soon as it was appropriate. I can't imagine what there is to lose by being open: either the person is open to the idea, and it doesn't matter, or they aren't, and they'll likely be upset. I suppose you could hold the controversial viewpoint that a straight/"cis" person might be unknowingly closeted and you might expand their horizons, but that's a hell of a gamble that I would never take. Especially considering the likely outcomes if wrong.

That said too I think I would handle it pretty well if I did unknowingly end up on a date with a man. The idea isn't offensive to me. Hell, I bet men are a lot better at pleasing men than women are, and as long as nobody is being harmed I see nothing wrong with sex. Nevertheless, I think I would still be rather offput if a person I believed to be a cis-gendered/binary woman revealed themselves later to be otherwise. If only for the deception, it's still not a good way to approach a relationship.

I am sympathetic to the vulnerability of predeclaring that too. There are scary people in this world that seem to peak early in intellect. And some might be driven to cause harm by ideas that they consider wrong. I wish I had a solution to that...

Polybios

But really, you cannot instill a work ethic into an adult by simply refusing all social services. It just doesn't work. They'll either turn into criminals or mooch off of friends and family and strangers. So you really are better off as a society giving away the bare minimum necessities (cheap housing / food) to live. Anybody with an ounce of self-respect will do their hardest to avoid that life; anybody that doesn't care is highly unlikely to ever be useful to society... and you might as well keep them off the streets where you'll spend more resources on police enforcement.

That sounds quite European to me. I'd rather pay some more tax euros and be safe on the streets at night.

However, you have to consider immigration in the mix. Historically, Europe and the US have a different background here. I guess it's part of human nature that it feels different to support people of "other tribes" with your tax dollars compared to those of the same "tribe".

Edgar Reynaldo

@Erin Maus
You never told me your sexual preferences, nor do I want to know what they are, so how could I know what you're into?

Let's clarify something. You were born a boy, but don't define yourself as boy or girl. You prefer the gender role of a woman, so you do your best to appear like a woman generally appears, right? Now since you're physically one thing, despite and because of HRT you present something else, a woman like physique. Now to most straight guys (Again I don't know what you're into, all you said was guys) you would appear female, but be considered male or trans by them (if they knew the full story). This is the deception I wanted you to avoid, for your safety, and their sanity. Because anything other than being up front about it would not be forthcoming, which as I said earlier, is deception. You might take a moment to think about why so many trans women are dying these days. It's because it's a shock to the system, and some psyches can't handle being duped into 'being gay'.

And that beautiful trans woman I told you about, I was initially attracted to her, I'll admit it, but I didn't find out until later she was transexual. That's not something I find personally appealing, and if I can respect your right to play with your gender, you can respect my right not to play with mine.

I don't know how well that all came out, but that's basically what I think.

By the way. We're on a new page.

I mean cmon, hasn't anybody here ever seen The Crying Game?

We watched that in HS, this is basic shit

Erin Maus

I understand the concern, but...

First of all I'd never date a straight guy. ::) I typically don't even date cis peeps.

Second of all I'm asexual, there's not going to be sex, so my genitals don't matter.

Third of all, when do you disclose you had a hypothetical vasectomy when forming a relationship? That's often a dealbreaker. To me, as a trans person, being trans is similar sort of deal. It's only deceitful if the other person makes it clear that's (vasectomy, being transgender) not okay with them and you don't disclose it.

The point I'm trying to nail home is 'deceitful' is an offensive way of wording a trans person not disclosing their gender status. I'm a feminist, I understand the problems involved in not disclosing it sooner than later.

...

I'm always up front about my gender identity and sexual orientation (panromantic asexual non-binary trans-feminine), but that's because who I am and I want to filter out people who 'aren't compatible' sooner than later. Because no sex is often a deal breaker, too.

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

Take it up with RationalWiki, or go ahead an prove them wrong here.

Sigh...

https://www.quora.com/Is-RationalWiki-a-trustworthy-source

https://www.quora.com/Is-RationalWiki-a-leftist-propaganda-site

https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiInAction/comments/4s0q5l/eli5_what_exactly_is_rationalwiki_and_why_are_the/

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WYzZ3bxctEJ2q6HFQ/what-are-your-thoughts-on-rational-wiki

https://dplore.fandom.com/wiki/RationalWiki

RationalWiki are the great, nice, super nice folks who decided feminist Christina Hoff Sommers "wasn't a feminist" even though she literally is a member of the 2nd wave "bra burning" feminists and has voted Democrat her entire life. Her evil crime? Saying that boys have unique challenges for their gender and have issues that need dealt with, like suicide rates, homeless rates, crime and dropout rates from highschool and college. If you ever heard her speak (watch say, her on Joe Rogan, or any of her public talks) you would see she's nothing but a warm, well-intention ed, and factual indivudual.

RationalWiki is where the Athiest+ (athiesm as a religion) nutjobs on Reddit hang out. Those people who can't just believe in no God, they have to make SURE you KNOW there is no God. They're the vegans of religions.

Polybios

Nooo, Mr Katko, don't feed the bambam :-/

Edgar Reynaldo

They're the vegans of religions.

Bwahaha :D

raynebc

Edgar, I'm not on the side advocating for the taking of other peoples' rights and property in order to achieve "equal outcomes." In addition to spending my earnings on goods and services, I'm actually performing work to earn that money. Labor is one of the things that gives money its value as a trade medium. You keep your broken morality, I'll even tell you that you can believe you're right if that makes you feel happier.

Matthew, people should leave the over-crowded and over-priced cities. They should also stop going into decades-long debt to get a degree that gives them very little added value in the job market. They also shouldn't consider minimum wage enough to afford their own apartment except for the very cheapest ones, and they may have to have a room mate or two. Even today I live in a house with 3 friends. Many years ago I was considering online colleges and the price tag severely put me off. After some thought, I decided to get a 2 year degree in a technical trade school and that has served me very well. Whether or not somebody is reluctantly willing to get paid for nothing (ie. if they have to in order to make ends meet) versus eager to get paid for nothing (because they're lazy) largely is based on one's upbringing and morals. Offering a safety net shouldn't turn into offering a cozy hammock, handouts should not be permanent for able-bodied and minded people and they definitely should not become an incentive to be unemployed.

Bam, you didn't read "The Internet's" assessment of Pool, you read a leftist's assessment. You clearly aren't going to spend any significant amount of your time to consume his content first-hand so I'm not going to waste my own time spoon feeding you with points you'll ignore. Ditto for trying to convince you on whether any mainstream news outlet could be anywhere as unbiased as you naively think.

Edgar Reynaldo
raynebc said:

Edgar, I'm not on the side advocating for the taking of other peoples' rights and property in order to achieve "equal outcomes."

That's exactly what you're for, except the 'equal outcomes' bs you added at the end. I don't expect everyone to be equal, that will never happen nor should it, but the disparities between the rich and the poor are so great that even a small balancing of wealth would put this country in a much more advantageous state, financially, economically, physically, and socially.

Your corporations take people's rights and properties all the time, charging more than they should, paying less than they should, squandering wealth and exploiting cheap labor. You should be ashamed to hold such a world view, that people with the capital to build society are the only ones who have a right to that capital.

It's called taxes, and Republicans are explicitly known for giving tax cuts to the rich, and taking money away from the poor. You should be ashamed to belong to such a party of thieves. This country and the workers in it are the reasons they do so well to begin with. Because capitalism works by skimming every last dollar you can off the backs of hardworking people.

If you work a full time job in this country, you should be able to afford basic housing, health care, food, and insurance, as well as school if you choose to get an education.

Fancy that, I didn't swear at you once. Go figure.

raynebc

You can actually go a full post while having a modicum of manners? Do you expect a cookie or something? Conservatives and libertarians don't believe in the government taking from one person to give to another just to try to balance the scales. You have to eventually accept that your viewpoint isn't automatically correct just because you like it. My side is not going to side with the communists and socialists on much in this regard, so your slander is pointless and only agreed on by your side's partisans.

Matthew Leverton

So Trump doesn't think children can catch and spread COVID-19 diseases. Do Trump fans here believe him? If you don't believe him, do you think Facebook/Twitter should be allowed to take down his dangerous lies (or call it deceptively worded statements if you prefer)?

I get that he uses wiggle words like "almost most definitely" so that the more intelligent Trump fans can say he didn't really mean it or say it. But come on, we all know what 98% of Trump fans hear with the Scientist speaks like this.

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/10/20-1315_article

Various things in there, but in a nutshell <10 years old is less at risk, but children 10-19 seems to be of equal risk. And of course healthy people (which includes most young people) are very unlikely to have serious complications from COVID-19.

None of this supports both the technical and commonly understood definitions of "almost definitely immune." ::)

Edgar Reynaldo
raynebc said:

You can actually go a full post while having a modicum of manners? Do you expect a cookie or something? Conservatives and libertarians don't believe in the government taking from one person to give to another just to try to balance the scales. You have to eventually accept that your viewpoint isn't automatically correct just because you like it. My side is not going to side with the communists and socialists on much in this regard, so your slander is pointless and only agreed on by your side's partisans.

Okay buddy. I tried to be nice.

Conservatives and libertarians DO believe in taking from one person to give to another in the name of Capitalism. Of course they don't try to balance the scales, they eternally try to rig them in their favor. I actually didn't slander anyone. What I said was the truth, which isn't slander, it's good reporting.

Oh, by the way, classic stall tactic ignoring all my valid points in favor of replying to an irrelevant one, which was just an attempt to make nice. I'll be sure not to do so in the future.

8-)

jmasterx

New song

video

Edgar Reynaldo
jmasterx said:

New song

I like it. Liked and shared on FB. Hope I can get you some views.

This is my favorite so far. Are those vocals clean? I like your voice in this one.

jmasterx

Thank you Edgar! Really appreciate it and glad you liked it! Thanks for sharing!
The vocals are a bit tuned so they sit well in the mix but that's pretty much how I sang it! :)

Edgar Reynaldo

Hopefully this comment is constructive.

These two lines :

Slowly eating all of my health away
Away

Sound a little strained rhythmically. I think a slight edit to say "Slowly eating me away, away" would sound better lyrically and fit better with the rhythm of the melodic lines.

jmasterx

Thanks for the feedback :)

Yeah I wanted to create an interesting dotted eighth note feel for the end of the verse to kind of break things up, I don't like it when melodic lines are too repetitive. But, such a timing has to be spot on to get the desired effect and dotted 8th are kind of in between the beat and are easily noticed if they're a little off. But I'll keep that in mind for future songs!

RmBeer2

video

Derezo

Wooow, it's been almost 5 years since I've made a POST! [edit: In hind sight, I think that's the thread start date.] I probably typed out and deleted at least 2 since then I'm sure, haha.

{"name":"612542","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/a\/c\/ac23e50c1d09ff664b46b3f86425cc5b.png","w":895,"h":846,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/a\/c\/ac23e50c1d09ff664b46b3f86425cc5b"}612542

Hope everyone is well and capitalizing on their stonks.

Erin Maus

I wanna make a queer ItsyRealm game dev vlog for some reason.

>:(

RmBeer2

video

Erin Maus

I'm wondering how certain people would rationalize Trump's Postmaster General sabotaging mail in voting.

???

Matthew Leverton

Mail in voting is full of fraud. Except when I do it. Or in states that favor me. Then it is beautiful. Very beautiful.

Bob Keane
Erin Maus said:

I'm wondering how certain people would rationalize Trump's Postmaster General sabotaging mail in voting.

I spoke with my roommate a few days ago about this. He, as a Trump supporter, claimed people's cats, dead people, etc, would submitting votes. The postmaster general is only towing the party line

Erin Maus

Yeah because Republicans love Alternative Facts (tm) where voter fraud is an issue and not real facts where voter fraud is not an issue but election fraud ACTUALLY is. You know, fraud by people running the elections.

Edgar Reynaldo

It is fucking sad that towing the party line is acceptable in this day and age.

Chris Katko

It is ing sad that towing the party line is acceptable in this day and age.

I love how Warren went from calling Biden a racist, to being like, "So uhh, when do I show up to work?" ;D

If you let go of the tribalism, all this politics really does become very funny. I mean, as much as we "debate" (not so much debate as shout our stances), none of it will ever change anything. Worse, imagine how much effort it goes into correcting someone and how many voices it requires to get anyone to change their stance on ANYTHING.

... then realize how easy it was for the media, academia, super-PACs and others to completely brainwash the entire country. Like how literally nobody in the USA right now cares that there's a literal island made of discarded plastic in the ocean. Why does nobody care? Because nobody in the media, academia, etc told anyone to care this year.

Edgar Reynaldo

I wholeheartedly concur. It's disgusting that the media has so much control over what we do and don't see happening in the world. It's why I try to keep up with causes I care about on FB.

Erin Maus

Here's some random drawings. >:(

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{"name":"612546","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/1\/b\/1beda445c081dcd7131f8db2ce4ec5ef.png","w":512,"h":512,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/1\/b\/1beda445c081dcd7131f8db2ce4ec5ef"}612546

{"name":"612547","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/b\/4\/b461cd8d6bbb306e0b3742d505144453.png","w":768,"h":768,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/b\/4\/b461cd8d6bbb306e0b3742d505144453"}612547

Ok back to politics! ;D

LennyLen

@Erin,

I like the one with the dragon and the mimic.

Edgar Reynaldo

Erin, you are quite the talented artist. ;)

bamccaig

Those drawings are awesome. Really good work. Is the arrow transparent? :o

Erin Maus

@LennyLen: Thanks! That one is my fave too. My favorite model I made for ItsyRealm is the chest mimic, too:

{"name":"creeps.png","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/f\/9\/f9ceff84dbb80caf1ec03e710b135133.png","w":320,"h":192,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/f\/9\/f9ceff84dbb80caf1ec03e710b135133"}creeps.png

@Edgar: Haha, thanks!

@bambam: Yep! And thanks!

;D

Edgar Reynaldo

Erin, I think a portion of the reason you're so successful at making a game is because you can both program and make art. Most people can only do one or the other. My digital art skills are trash. Maybe if I had a drawing tablet things would be different......

8-)

RmBeer2

@Edgar Reynaldo :
By money I can create the drawings for you... I believe... At least when i feel like it... And if you can accept the damage that the camera leaves... Maybe with the first amount I will buy a scanner...

EDIT:

Digital Art is trash without a graphic tablet... A classic example whose artists waste their talent by not getting their technology...
Why is there such stupid technology if those who need it can't use it? How much useless device!
I'm going to steal abroad... >:(

Erin Maus

@Edgar: Thanks! :) Being ok at art definitely helps. I haven't spent AS MUCH time on art as programming but I've still spent a long time on it. Like it took me 4-5 iterations to come to the ItsyRealm art style after brainstorming for a week or two.

Now only if I could make music... I have the writing skills, programming skills, and art skills, but not the music skills :(.

@RmBeer2: I don't have a tablet and I don't think my art is trash...

Edgar Reynaldo

Art like that with no tablet? I'm gonna go huddle in a corner and cry now.

MikiZX

If you can get a tablet (even the cheapest one is better than using mouse) - just try to get one with pressure detection and not the smallest one out there. If you own an iPad or Android tablet (or a larger smartphone) this could be a way too (not using fingers but a pen that conducts electric charge - they cost something like few bucks).

As for music, same thing - you need the right tool for the job and clicking notes with mouse just does not cut it - if you do decide to roll your own, try getting a cheap 2 octave (or more) midi controller. For music actually one might get away by using PC keyboard alone (for playing) but a real black-white keys keyboard is still better.

Matthew Leverton

Regarding voter fraud... I get emails daily about what mail I'm supposed to receive. I signed up for it because I have a long driveway and the mail carrier can be quite lazy and decide not to do his job whenever he feels like it. So I press a little button on their website indicating I didn't receive my mail. I'm sure it does nothing, but it gives me the satisfaction of pretending it will lead to disciplinary action.

Background story over.

So Illinois is sending out request-to-vote-by-mail letters to everybody due to COVID-19. I was received an email indicating that I would be getting one of these letters, along with the deceased former resident. Later that day, I did receive mine but the one for the dead person mysteriously was not there.

This can only mean the mail carrier stole that letter thinking nobody would notice. He looks like a Republican to me based on how he walks slowly up the driveway. I wonder how many letters he has stolen. He must be collecting them so that Trump can have a surprise win in Illinois.

Trump is right! Fraud fraud fraud!

Instead, I should vote in person, where a 95 year-old, legally blind man asks who I am and pretends he's able to compare my illegible signature against the one they might have on file. Then I vote where his older sister feeds my paper ballot into a machine older than her, which causes all sorts of malfunction lights to turn on, which I'm told is "normal." The ballot comes out the other end as if I placed it through a shredder. Because that is how you stop fraud!

Erin Maus

If I 'need' a tablet I draw on paper then scan it in.

I'm cool with a mouse. It's not like my art is super detailed.

I'm going to you know pay people to make music for my game when it comes to that point, I have zero (0) interest in making my own music.

Also I have too many customization options in my game. :(

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RmBeer2

eye! Drawing by hand is not the same as handling vector graphics!

They are two different things. Hand drawings always have other types of details. The first time I used vector graphics they turned out to be very easy, I have made logos and even South Park style characters. They are easier to correct.

But with the hand you need a lot of practice, balance and talent are achieved. And it has absolutely nothing to do with the mouse. It is more profitable to practice with your other hand than with the mouse.

Those black tablets (bad called graphics tablets) do not work either, it is the same as drawing blind (unless you have a shaolin practice to move blindly).

EDIT:

I don't know if I've ever said it, but ItsyRealm is a very good game. Since the first time I saw his images I have already noticed that he had many things. I too would like to make a 3D game one day.

Erin Maus

@RmBeer2:

Thanks :) ItsyRealm is one of my passions. I'm getting ready to do 'vlogging' so I've shifted gears towards setting up a machine, getting swag to stream/vlog, and other prep. It's not going to be a big focus but I'd like to record me working on it here and there.

My job has really given me more time to work on ItsyRealm, too. :)

raynebc

Maybe people in NYC can illuminate how well mail in voting has been working for them lately? I'm not going to trust the USPS when some elections have had a quarter of all mail in ballots invalidated because of postal service errors. I will vote in person in November.

RmBeer2

video

Edgar Reynaldo

raynebc - If Trump and Dejoy weren't trying to destroy the post office, you could trust them.

Erin Maus

IDK if this is going to work. >:(

video

Waiting on a green screen thingy. ;D

edit: Ugh Trump is in Charlotte, ew, gross. He personally made me 15 minutes late to a veterinarian appointment. Thanks Trump. ::)

Chris Katko

File this under politics that should five-bell alarm anyone of any side:

https://twitter.com/Relentlessbored/status/1297421580952379392

The Democrats have been literally working to make it illegal to vote for Green Party, because it "steals" their blue votes.

I don't care which side is doing it, that's a straight-up affront to our entire country. That you shouldn't even be allowed to vote for someone because it gets in the way of a powerful party's expectation of getting your vote. This is literally the kind of stuff that dictatorships are built on. Not "fake news evil memes", but banning people from voting against their candidate.

Erin Maus said:

edit: Ugh Trump is in Charlotte, ew, gross. He personally made me 15 minutes late to a veterinarian appointment. Thanks Trump.

HOW BAD IS YOUR INSURANCE?!

bamccaig

It DOESN'T MATTER because the system doesn't function as a democracy ANYWAY.

Erin Maus

HOW BAD IS YOUR INSURANCE?!

I have really good health/vision/dental insurance (PPO plan from my employer + Medicare), and I have decent car insurance, and I guess I had good renter's insurance?

I don't know what that has to do the Orange Man going out of his way to make me late to my dog's veterinarian appointment though.

...

Also where were you when Republicans have done a bajillion things to hurt/make it impossible for Democrats to vote? Like purge voter rolls, gerrymander states, destroy voting records, close voting stations, enforce voter ID, do nothing to prevent electoral fraud or hacking, etc, etc, etc.

I have no opinion of Green Party members being removed from ballots due to Democrat pressure because I don't have enough information and a Twitter post doesn't influence me.

LennyLen

The Democrats have been literally working to make it illegal to vote for Green Party, because it "steals" their blue votes.

That just highlights the flaws with your political system. Here, the Labour party (which is the closest equivalent to your Democratic party) just formed a coalition with the Green party (and another party) to form a majority government.

Matthew Leverton

And Republicans are actively helping Kanye West get on the ballots because they hope he takes votes away from Biden. Politicians have no shame. Both sides are equally crooked in this regard.

The Winner-Takes-All delegate system is a joke and all but ensures that the only thing politicians care about is cheating the system enough in the too-close-to-call states to hopefully eke out 100% of the delegates by getting 0.0001% more votes than the next guy.

Chris Katko

And Republicans are actively helping Kanye West get on the ballots because they hope he takes votes away from Biden. Politicians have no shame. Both sides are equally crooked in this regard.

so you mean exactly what the DNC did when Hillary ran?

https://observer.com/2016/10/wikileaks-reveals-dnc-elevated-trump-to-help-clinton/

Erin Maus said:

Also where were you when Republicans have done a bajillion things to hurt/make it impossible for Democrats to vote?

I don't know how this keeps popping up over and over and over. I'm not a Republican. And, fun fact, I've been calling Bush a war criminal for well over a decade.

Meanwhile, the DNC literally invites his cabinet to speak:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/18/politics/colin-powell-biden-convention/index.html

A WAR CRIMINAL (plus dozens more neocon war mongers) just endorsed Biden. That should scare anyone.

And nobody cares. They just... do de doo.... go about their days as the people they've been calling monsters for decades join their party and endorse their candidate.

It's almost like... there is only one party and its name is corporations!

People keep pulling this "trick" out of their sleeves by saying "why didn't you care about the GOP" but it doesn't work on me because I care when either side acts like monsters, and that's easy for me I don't derive my identity from a political party. If someone is molesting kids, I don't care if they have an (R) or an (D) before their name. If Clinton banged kids? Execute him. If Trump banged kids? Execute him. If Prince Andrews banged kids? Execute him. Simple. THINGS are right are wrong, and they don't change based on their party affiliation and whether I stand to benefit from them politically. I don't want to "win" my politics knowing it was paid for with molested children, or drone strikes civilians, or any of the other things that are almost impossible to debate ethically.

Cosby is a bad man. It doesn't matter how much I loved him as a child and growing up saw him as a father figure. Now, he's a piece of !@$!@. My feelings don't matter. The objective truth is, he's a piece of !@$!. Repeat ad nausium for every celebrity (Kevin Spacey), and politician.

[edit] FIX. NOT KEVIN SMITH. KEVIN SPACEY

Bob Keane

Slightly off topic. One of my roomates got a "voter id card" in the mail from Mr. Trump. I have not voted in years, is this a new thing?

MiquelFire

You might be in an area the Republicans have been trying to only allow Republicans to vote in.

Or that is some random campaign thing to get your roommate to vote for Trump.

Bob Keane

You might be in an area the Republicans have been trying to only allow Republicans to vote in.

Or that is some random campaign thing to get your roommate to vote for Trump.

My state is strongly Democrat and my roomate is already a Trump zombie. I don't remember reading anything in the news regarding new voting ids and was wondering if this was an (un)official change, something the Republicans did to make thier supporters feel superior to everyone else or to give non Trump supporters the idea thier votes won"t count.

<Edit> I just checked, when you register to vote, you do get a voter registration card. However, putting Trump's name on the envelope sends the wrong message.

Matthew Leverton

Surprised? Trump also puts his name on checks coming out of the treasury as if it's his money.

so you mean exactly what the DNC did when Hillary ran?

So you're saying Kanye West has a chance? :o

And here I thought nothing could be worse than Trump/Pence. ;D

Erin Maus

I got catcalled today. :-X

It's scary for me because what is their reaction if they catcall then find out I'm AMAB?

Ugh...

Matthew Leverton

Wear a Biden hat. That should stop the people who catcall.

jmasterx

I did an impressions style video!

video

Matthew Leverton

I was mildly disappointed that it wasn't twenty bad impressions of the spoken nature.

That said, good job. >:(

bamccaig

That's really good. :D So I have to ask again: is there autotune on this? And if so, would you be willing to do the same without any tuning? I love your voice (/jealous), and I just want to be sure it's your voice I'm loving. :)

jmasterx

@BamBam

There's a light amount of AutoTune yes, but I would like to take a moment to explain what AutoTune is and why it is used. There's a misconception that tuning software can make someone who can't sing, sing. This is simply not true.

AutoTune, the name brand version, is a software that divides a signal into a pitch and formant component. It will in real time, adjust the pitch component such that the pitch center is aligned to the frequency of the note in the scale and compensate the formant (throat placement) for the amount of change in pitch.

The amount of tuning, known as the rate, is a measure of how quickly it will interpolate to the pitch center. So the T-Pain effect is basically setting the rate to 1ms. I set the rate quite low which equates to very mild tuning.

If I did not actually sing it you'd hear the autotune because the tuner can actually fix very little without being noticable.

So why is Tuning used?

You may have noticed that the vocals are way out in front, like they are much louder than the instruments. If you compare to the real recordings on some of them, the vocals are buried way in the back.

Modern mixing puts vocals way out in front.

Anyways: here is a 100% raw clip https://vocaroo.com/19bsAO8Fa9Pe

I can sing soft too, I like to use a shouty rock technique but I can sing soft too https://vocaroo.com/19Q8btZ8pDZw

@ML
Thanks :)

bamccaig

So what you're saying is that if I sound good with AutoTune that I can sing? :D I'm about to start a company meeting so I can't listen right now, but I look forward to checking out both recordings later!

jmasterx

If you sing a song all the way through and use autotune and it sounds good (and by good I don't mean sounds like a robot) then yes you can sing.... if you want to send me a clip I can autotune your voice and show you the difference if you're curious :)

If more raw singing is your thing I have loads of improv sessions of me coming up with song ideas on piano, and these without a doubt have no tuning or anything, just direct piano feed into PC and mic feed. https://vocaroo.com/ihIdpg4FAAV

Personally I like to listen to things that are more polished but I know there's a spectrum for raw vs polished.

I have demos for every song I produce, here is Butterscotch https://vocaroo.com/41tclFAF9J2

bamccaig

I appreciate live performances, but like you I prefer the polished versions. Sometimes a live performance adds something new, and it's worth listening to too.

My autotune skepticism originates from scrutinizing live performances by various "artists" and bands through adolescence into adulthood. IMO, what makes live concerts great are the imperfections. When things are too perfect it might as well just be a recording being played back to the audience, but then the audience also might as well have stayed home.

Of course, I have also been passionate about rapping and singing (though nowhere near as much as you) and so I also do what I can to improve, and part of that is understanding how other people do so well. :)

In other words, I love listening to the polished works. I'm just trying to understand how you're doing them so that I can try to get better myself. Also, keep them coming. I'd love to hear more. Especially covers of songs that I love.

Those raw recordings are still quite good, and I think it's fair to say they are way better than I can do. I have a very weak voice. This is true of my speech, as well as singing. I also lack an education in music or vocals. I'm completely self-taught and completely amateur.

I would love to send you a recording and have you autotune it to see what the outcome is. My vocal mic died a few years back, and I haven't replaced it, so the quality would be quite poor regardless of my own performance. I imagine that will matter. I also just haven't been singing or rapping very much lately so I'm a bit out of practice too.

Does it have to be a specific song, or can it be just about anything?

jmasterx

It can be just about anything :)

It's easier with Pop music since most of that is based on major and minor scales. But just about anything will do.

Ideally it's just the vocal with no other sound or it won't work.

And also ideally you sing along to a track so that your singing is tuned to A440Hz standard.

I'm looking forward to hearing it! Thanks for the kind comments!

LennyLen
bamccaig said:

My autotune skepticism originates from scrutinizing live performances by various "artists" and bands through adolescence into adulthood. IMO, what makes live concerts great are the imperfections. When things are too perfect it might as well just be a recording being played back to the audience, but then the audience also might as well have stayed home.

I think of Autotune the same way I do guitar pedals. If done well it adds a nice effect, if overdone it's just another shoddy gimmick.

jmasterx
LennyLen said:

I think of Autotune the same way I do guitar pedals. If done well it adds a nice effect, if overdone it's just another shoddy gimmick.

Yeah I would tend to agree with that. I would also add - I would say AutoTune can be a productivity tool. Before you had to nail it spot on so you might spend days and days getting that perfect take. Well with AutoTune you can kind of get it 95% the way there and move on to something else so in a sense it gives you more time to focus on other things.

Edgar Reynaldo

I prefer auto-spoonTM. 8-)

bamccaig

A rough first attempt between work tasks.

I know it's not good. I know I can't do much better. :P But I will try. I think this was recorded using the built-in mic on my work laptop (I was also wearing a wireless headset, but I suspect that wasn't the input mic).

I forgot to or was unable to breathe towards the middle of the song which obviously caused me extra trouble for the hardest part... Breathing is something that I definitely need to train... I also have a high voice, and struggle to go lower, especially while singing. I often end up singing in the wrong range, and adjusting it once I realize. Though I think I have a fairly limited range, if any range at all. :D

I have watched a few voice coach videos on YouTube which I find very informative. They point out all kinds of things that I never would have thought of. I definitely could see use in getting professional direction, but I don't think I have enough potential to invest the time and money in. And it's only for personal pleasure, not for income... Though if I could get good enough to switch to a music career I 100% would try.

Edgar Reynaldo

Make a song called Thread locks to spoon.

jmasterx

Bams I'm impressed! That was a lot better than I was expecting hahah! You have a great voice!

As promised I tuned your vocal. I made 3 versions: Moderate, Heavy, None. So you can compare.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/8rcdu0hgycjrzjs/sos2.mp3/file
http://www.mediafire.com/file/h07b1fsq7yu6ga8/sos3.mp3/file
http://www.mediafire.com/file/9ytj6ox0z7e3yb3/sos1.mp3/file

and just for you, here is a live cover straight from the camera mic, no way I tuned this!

video

Matthew Leverton

Good song choice bambam.

bamccaig

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Thanks. :D I've been working at it for a number of years. Still struggle, but have also improved over time. Watching you in videos I think it's clear that you've studied singing. You appear quite disciplined. If not I think you have a natural gift for figuring some of it out.

Hey, some of that turned out pretty awesome! I wish I hadn't butchered the climax. :P Let's see if I can guess which one is which (assuming they aren't in the listed order already):

Heavy: sos1
Moderate: sos2
None: sos3

As for your Patsy Cline cover, that's so awesome! Your voice is so controlled!

I'm curious what tools/software you use to for the mixing and tuning. Although I'd love to just get you to autotune everything I make something tells me you won't work for free and I can't afford you. :P Speaking of which, I hope it wasn't too much trouble producing those 3 versions. Thanks a lot!

Good song choice bambam.

Thanks. Easily one of my favorite songs for singing (or vocals). Such a good song, and Disturbed's cover makes it 1000x better. When I thought about what I should sing I was initially listening to Staind on Spotify. I haven't been singing much in the past few months, for various reasons, so I was out of practice and didn't really have anything fresh in my mind. I started noting down Staind songs that I enjoy singing as they came and went on my playlist. Then The Sound of Silence popped into my head, and I changed my Spotfy playlist to repeating just that song, and after a practice run where I butchered the lyrics (it has been probably 6 or 8 months since I've really put effort into singing this song) I pulled out Audacity, hit record, and looked up the lyrics. Just doing a rough run between work tasks. And then history was made. I'm going out on tour next week.

jmasterx

Really glad you liked the tuning! Some parts really did sound great. Like I said you do have a good voice but you do lack control, it's quite apparent when you sing low.

sos1 - Moderate
sos2- Heavy
sos3 - None

It did not take that long. About 15 minutes and most of that was spent aligning the song, etc.

I already have presets.

I figured out the key of the song, set the tuner to that key and used my ear.

I then applied my usual vocal chain, adjusted it a bit for your voice, leveled the vocal with the track.

It's not long to do once you've done all the hard work of figuring out what works and what does not.

I have been singing most of my life, I made an album at 17. Then when I bought a house 4 years ago at 24 I started getting more into technique and through years of practice here is where I'm at, now that I'm 28 going on 29.

I could sound even more controlled if I used my falsetto for high notes instead of belting them out, I just don't like the sound of falsetto singing, so I have to belt out these super high notes that can be challenging if you don't have enough air to support them. But yeah I really did sing those 20 songs, but the tuning gives more polish. But I got to say, I like the sound of the camera feed. It's a stereo microphone instead of studio mics that are mono, and it gives a much warmer feel to the whole thing.

I'd be happy to tune something for you here and there if it's something you really like. I don't need the money, but I'm very altruistic so if I can help that's cool!

You basically need to learn your voice, there's no magic to it, it's pure experience. I know that if a high note is coming, I'm not going to try to fit it in without taking another breath. When I do that's when it goes flat. I also lean in when I want to get more vibrato because it compresses my diagram allowing me to utilize my chest voice better.

I'm a dev, I'm extremely detail oriented, so I just learned by experience. But by doing that, those singing lesson videos started making sense to me.

My biggest struggle in singing, is I have a weird stomach problem. I have slow digestion. As a result, when I sing for long periods, acid gets in my throat and makes it really hard to sing. That's usually why I prefer to prerecord, because the stress of nailing a song in 1 take raises my stomach acidity and tenses up my muscles making it much harder to sing properly. When I'm relaxed it's much easier, and when it's prerecorded I'm much more relaxed.

bamccaig

Sounds like I am certainly lacking the knowledge to do my own tuning/mixing at this point. :P That's very generous of you to offer to do the odd job! I'll try to keep that in mind and try not to abuse it. I'd also be happy to throw a little money your way too for the work (do you have any vices, like coffee or beer, that I could contribute to?). It probably won't be a regular thing if only because I don't have much time to sing these days.

What you said about the video mic versus a studio mic makes sense. I've certainly been disappointed with a mono recording, and wished for stereo instead. I'm curious what your camera is that has such a good mic on it.

Curiously I just read today that the vocalist for Disturbed, David Draiman, also suffers from acid reflux issues and so he has to take special precautions to control it. :) I do too, but I'm not aware of it impacting my singing.

jmasterx

That's really interesting, had no idea about David Draiman having reflux. Must be way more stressful when performing is your livelihood!

My dad has it too but it also does not impact when he sings (but he's not really into it like I am, he just hums the occasional tune)

For a long time my digestion greatly affected my sleep. That's why now I eat my 3 meals from 7am to 4PM then no more eating at all. By the time I go to bed around 11 I have completely digested and sleep well.

My camera is the Sony ZV1 https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1565880-REG/sony_dczv1_b_zv_1_digital_camera.html

I just bought it last month. Really happy of the quality for the price. I have wanted a good camera for a while now. Mind you it was capturing the output from my monitoring speakers which are 500 CAD a piece.

I don't really have any vices hahah. I don't drink alcohol, soda, smoke weed or Tabaco, I rarely even drink juice, pretty much just water. A lot of things upset my digestion so I mostly eat home cooked meals that work for me.

You have a very similar personality to me, I know you won't abuse it ;)

I don't know if you noticed, but I also write very detailed, very descriptive posts, and find it easier to think through writing personally. Most people I work with are not like that.

bamccaig

Thanks. Well outside of my price range even before the speakers. :D I'll just make do with what I have for now.

I would definitely agree that we are much alike in some ways. :)

Edgar Reynaldo

Could you auto-tune it so I sound like I'm high on nitrous oxide?

SRSLY.

I could record a demo of me singing over a bg karaoke like.

jmasterx

The best way to do that is by using a technique popularized by the Beatles called varispeed.

It's simple, slow down the track to 0.5 speed. Sing to it at half speed. Then bring back the bg music to 1.0 speed and put the vocal at 2.0 speed. You will sound like you're on helium and it will sound more natural than using AutoTune.

Here is an example using my voice https://www.allegro.cc/files/attachment/612564

Matthew Leverton

Another trick they don't teach you in school is if you record while singing to an auto tuned song your voice is automatically auto tuned. Me and bambam jamming in the park:

bambam-ml-silence.m4a

Google Transcriptions said:

Hello darkness my old friend. I've come to talk with you again because a vision softly creeping. Left it sees while I was sleeping. And the vision that was planted in my brain. Still remains. Within the sound. Of silence. And restless dreams. I walk alone. Eros streets of Cabo, so beneath the halo of a street man.

I turned my color to the cold and damn. When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light, let's split the night. It touched the sound O silence. And in the naked light, I saw 10,000 people, maybe more. People talking with us seeking. People hearing with our listening.

Songs. That voices never share. No one dead. Disturbed the sound of silence. We'll say that you do not know. Silence like a cancer growth. Here my words that I might teach you. Take my arms that I'm my treat you. But my words like silent rain drops. Heck good in the world silence.

And the people bout engraved. Even the neon got they made. And the same flashed out it's warming in the words that it was for me and the signs said the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and whispered in. The sound.

Silent.

bamccaig

Sounds great, Matthew! You should join me out on tour! For real, it sounds like you have a nice, low, powerful voice. I'd love to hear more. I'm jealous.

Append:

jmasterx: You said something about prerecording, but it went over my head. Now that I'm stoned though I thought maybe it means recording yourself sing a song at first, autotune it, and then rerecord the song using your own track. Either way can you clarify what you meant? :)

jmasterx

Guys, guys, this remix is so beautiful, I feel like Simon and Garfunkel are making music again :'(:'(:'(

Beautiful minor third harmonies by ML :'(:'(:'(

https://www.allegro.cc/files/attachment/612566

@BamBam what I mean by prerecording is the idea that you recorded it, then did some processing on it. For example, the above is not a preprecording because both you and ML were in the room together when this was recorded live in 1 take with no editing while Edgar was playing guitar, and I was on piano / synth once again, live in the room no questions asked. A prerecording is the idea that you record different parts separately and mix them together and do processing like autotune, reverb, compression etc.

Matthew Leverton

And the noise you hear is the Trumpers begging us to go back to bashing on Trump. 8-)

jmasterx

Just sounded like crickets to me >:(

Chris Katko

Hope you all have a great weekend.

Mine doesn't start till Sundays so I'm just starting mine!

LennyLen

Mine doesn't start till Sundays so I'm just starting mine!

My weekend starts on Wednesday this week. It starts a day later each week, as I work on an eight-day cycle, which was a bit strange at first, but now I wouldn't change it for anything as I work four 10 hour days, then get four days off.

The one down side is for four weeks in a row I only work 30 hours, which with the four weeks in a row I do at 40 hours means I only average 35 hours a week. But getting four days off in a row instead of the one or two that I'm used to more than makes up for slightly less hours a week.

Erin Maus

I have a four day weekend. Friday and Monday off. 8-)

It's been awesome so far. :-*

bamccaig

I get a 3 day weekend so fortunately I still have Monday off. Otherwise, I would be very bitter about the weekend being over. >:( It hasn't been a great weekend so far. I haven't been getting much sleep so I was super tired yesterday. Our puppy chewed my Tempur-Pedic pillow to pieces so I'm been sleeping on an $8 Walmart special. This morning my wife woke me up early to make her bacon, and then after breakfast her friend asked her to hang out and she bailed on me. So I went for a motorcycle ride, and on my way home I picked up our pseudo-fancy gel pillows from camp (just bungee-corded them to the tail of my bike). That was about 200 km in total, and now I'm sore all over. So it's time to get really stoned and a little drunk.

On the other hand, I was pretty distracted on Friday and haven't even logged my hours yet so I might end up putting in a couple of hours Monday and logging it for Friday... What I did get done shouldn't have taken 8 hours. We'll see. I could also use the break though.

jmasterx said:

@BamBam what I mean by prerecording is the idea that you recorded it, then did some processing on it. For example, the above is not a preprecording because both you and ML were in the room together when this was recorded live in 1 take with no editing while Edgar was playing guitar, and I was on piano / synth once again, live in the room no questions asked. A prerecording is the idea that you record different parts separately and mix them together and do processing like autotune, reverb, compression etc.

Ah, OK. I understand now.

jmasterx

I dropped a 9 song album

video

>:(

RmBeer2

I also want to tell the story of my life and turn this thread into my daily diary. But as soon as I start writing I get lazy and don't write anything... :-/

bamccaig

Very cool, jmasterx. I've loaded it up on Spotify to listen to. :) Monsters starts with that quality of your voice that I love. Pretty sure you've released that one before because I recognize it. Love it.

You're very talented to pull this all together. Do you have help for this stuff, or do you do literally everything yourself, including album artwork? It's very impressive either way. Comments on YouTube are correct. I could see you getting signed by a label.

RmBeer2, pick up a pen and notebook, escape to somewhere quiet and secluded, and just write whatever you want. :P Helps if you're listening to music that means something to you too.

jmasterx

@bamccaig

Thanks :)

Yes I do do it all myself. Songwriting, producing, performing, mixing and mastering. I also took a picture of myself in my bathroom and used the MR. Robot font.

Mr. Paper, the song, is more or less how we're overworked and under appreciated and we're all just delectate sheets of paper. As the years go by, we get stressed, but we're still expected to keep performing. And once our productivity decreases and we start looking crumbled and ripped, they just put us through the shredder and get some fresh paper to fill in the spot.

Maybe a long time ago I would have attracted a label's attention, but not so much today. The thing is labels are essentially marketing agencies. They are for profit and need to minimize risk. Thousands of people listened to my first album but only 2 people bought it (that I don't know in person).

Labels are interested in people who do the hardwork of building a following for them. If you can get a few 100,000 subscribers, they can get you radio play and give you the resources you need to grow. Labels are fuel.

If my music got the attention of a label executive, I could see them maybe wanted to sign me to a publishing deal to write demos for them. That would probably be more up my ally. I've written hundreds of songs. I am loaded with demos and ideas, I just don't have the time to produce them all.

But my personality does not really seem to appeal to non-devs. I dunno... I don't really think I'd want to be a musician really. I know for sure I would never want to tour. But I do like writing music. So if such an opportunity came up to write or cowrite I'd do it. Even be featured on a song sure, but I just don't think I have it in me to be a performer. I'm extremely introverted and while I'm very happy on the inside, it's hard for me to show it on the outside.

I'm also a very technical person. The fun for me was disecting the Pop formula, and reverse engineering every aspect of it until I had something that passed as top 40 radio Pop. As weird as it sounds that's really what got me into this.

Because I was a metal head, and kind of have a rock voice, but I can't play guitar to save my life. So I did what a dev would do and went the 100% sampled route hahah.

It was fun, but I felt with this album in particular, I really explored everything I wanted to explore with this. I'm not saying I might not make a song here and there, but I've had some programming projects floating around for a while, so I might get back into that. I always need a project that's for sure. Projects are my escape. They take my mind off of reality for a few hours a day to relax.

It was fun though and I'm really proud of the songs I have released :)

My Spades game project took 4 years to do, including the development of Agui. And before that, I did lots of art and 3D animation for most of my teens. When I was 6-10 years old I wrote short stories and poems.

I've always had to fight between my technical logical side and my feeling/altruistic side.

MikiZX

@jmasterx
I think it should be possible to attract a label with the music you make. Though 100,000 followers seems a bit steep - I would expect the label to have obligation and means of making that kind of listener base happen - if you bring the music AND the customer base then what exactly do they do?!?

@rmBeer2
Get a voice-to-text software and just let it rip.. edit a little at the end and paste here... :)

jmasterx
MikiZX said:

if you bring the music AND the customer base then what exactly do they do?!?

Have you ever watched Shark Tank ?
They invest in well established businesses who already have a good customer base.

What do they do? They get you from 100K followers to 30 million+.
They'll also book tours and build your brand, finance music videos, hook you up with the top producers/engineers.

They do however go with artists with less followers usually when they are young, full of energy and ambition, already have an agent, and they see someone with the full package. Dancing, singing, looks, commercial appeal, etc. Now more than ever though they have such a huge talent pool to choose from. I'm good, and I have a decently distinct voice, but there are a lot of people out there like me that can also dance, are younger, I'm 28, and probably have nothing to lose. I have a good dev job that I like, family, a mortgage, etc.

RmBeer2

@jmasterx :
You had a great life. :)

If you make money selling your creations, why the hell do you want a loan, a crowdfunding or donations? The same thing happens with the number of subscribers or people who follow you, if you get a lot of people, what the hell do you want a discography company or a promoter?
These types of organizations are useless because they always want to "help you" when you don't need help. Otherwise you need help but they reject you.
In the end they are just parasites...

The best thing to do if you need someone to promote you and manage the tours or whatever. Then open a job place.

jmasterx

Exactly :)

And just so yo know it would be 'have' a great life. 'Had' is in the past tense so it sounds like I am dead or about to die hahah!

MikiZX

I see what you mean - 30 million would definitively be out of reach of a single person.
With 100k in mind I was more going along the lines of https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/ .. thinking that out of 100k one's album would be bought by 10 percent, each paying $10 for the album - even 5% buying the album would be nice.
The problem being getting those thousands to listen. :(

I have a friend that composes piano music and we created a website with his bio and music - sort of hoping this would help build a fan base. He's on iTunes and I don't believe that he has made more than 50 euros over the course of 5-6 years.
So now we are about to look into placing his music on Spotify or Deezer but those services seems to require the artist to go through a third party (basically a label how I saw it - wrongly) like igrooves, cdbaby or Record Union. We thought this could be the thing for him, though, now, after you've explained what labels do, I see I did not understand the term 'label' very well before.
Do you think this could help him get more exposure - Deezer or Spotify? Is he likely going to be laughed at if he contacts people at igrooves or cdbaby and has maybe 99 people having heard his music or is for them this just another artist and they risk of signing him up anyways (like iTunes has)?
Sorry to be tethering here but you're the closest right now that we have to an expert. If you don't care or don't feel comfortable taking about this subject - no worries, just let it be. Thanks for your help!

jmasterx

I use distrokid, but they all do the same thing. They let you create your own label (Mine is JLD Records) and they distribute your music to all services like Spotify, YouTube Music, etc. They are not labels though. They do 0 marketing. They just put your stuff out there and it will get 0 listens without someone explicitly looking for it.

It's nice to have it on those services, sure, it might help reach more people, but practically, without a fan base it does not change much.

And I tried some of the things in that video without much success. What got me most of my followers was actually writing superficial comments on YouTube, getting thousands of likes, then editing the comment to promote my music.

this one...

video

That said, I released my album, and some guy on a Discord channel for music saw my album post and wanted to feature me in one of his songs, so I recorded a hook for him. We'll see how that goes, but I think that's the sort of thing that helps. He has an interest in promoting me and in return he gets a good singer on his track for free since he admitted he can't sing.

So now his fans will hear that, many of whom may be producers too looking for a singer, so I can do more of them and spread that way.

I could go one step further and open a fivver account and offer free features on their tracks in exchange for a shoutout.

MikiZX

Thank you Joshua! Wishing you much success!

bamccaig

I'm not even sure what is really left of the music industry. Between piracy and services like Spotify that let you access unlimited music for $10/mo it's hard to imagine how any artists would be seeing huge sales anymore. The music industry is dead. That's probably a good thing.

In part because the industry has been producing copycat after copycat for decades, with decreasingly low budget writing and increasingly high budget production to cover it up. They thought that because pop audiences still liked the music that it was just as good, but I think what they didn't realize was that they were teaching a generation of people to see music as cheap and disposable instead of timeless and great.

I don't think that turning musicians into "rock stars" and millionaires was ever really healthy. But now we've gone to the opposite extreme where I'm not sure how anybody is making money with it anymore. In a perfect world, artists would be able to earn a stable income from their works, and be able to live comfortably without having to deal with stalkers and things of that nature. Just be regular people that provide entertainment as a service.

I'm not sure that will ever work though until we establish a sort of socialist society whereby wealth is evenly distributed and all people's needs are taken care of so artists can focus on their art without having to worry about "money" to live.

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

The music industry is dead.

The game industry is very similar. I got Skyrim Complete for $13. >100 hours of gameplay for $13. Nobody can compete with that.

The relatively few games that get released by indies are basically kids in college before they get "real jobs" and they realize how insanely little money indie games actually make. Go ahead and see how many hundreds of indie games you've seen have a developer with... one game. They never make another because it was a complete waste for their effort.

Basically, if you want to make a game you either have to be super-duper lucky, or, you do it solely because you love it (even if nobody plays it / never breaks financially even).

Heck, Twitch is the same. I see people streaming every day and they have... 15 viewers. Twitch is full. All that effort and literally nothing to show for it (unless they really enjoy streaming to 5-15 viewers--but never profitful).

YouTube is slightly different because everything is in videos so if you find something cool, people will watch it whereas Twitch is a 24/7 stream of non-stop content. e.g. Moonmoon streams 8-12 hours a day... literally more content than you can actually watch in a day. But almost every niche has been filled on YouTube. People talk about elevators? Full. People who talk about airplanes? Full. People who talk about Turbine engines for airplanes? Full. People who talk about screws, nuts, and bolts? Full.

Matthew Leverton

People who talk about Allegro. FULL!

Chris Katko

video

RmBeer2

@Chris Katko :
Coool!
Someone are advertising the library. :P

MikiZX

Talking Allegro... What do you think, how much would an IAP module help popularize the library?

jmasterx

My game StemwaterSpades had IAP support for IOS https://github.com/jmasterx/StemwaterSpades/blob/master/Spades%20Game/Game/platform/IAPHelper.mm and I think for Windows I used my web site

That said, I don't think most people are going, man I love Allegro but how am I going to collect all that money from in app purchases since I already have such a massive user base! ;D

_jagged

More people talking about/promoting Allegro would be great to see. As a 39yo Construction worker who took up C programming as a hobby last Easter, I can honestly say to you devs; this would be much more popular if people could find it before SDL etc.

I've tried heaps of other APIs, game related and other. But I always come back to Allegro. I even make general purpose gui shit with allegro. The snake case is so fucking great if that's how you want to style the rest of your code (I hate mixing camel and snake) and the functions are so well named and documented.

But very few will find this...

And it doesn't help that 95% of all discussions here are politics or gender.

Thanks again.

Edit: Also, I know you're all aware of this, but whenever you click on the sub-forum "Game Design & Concepts" you're met with an empty list, even though there's thousands of topics in there... Apparently. Most people checking out this API for the first time would think this shit is dead.

I'd start there.

LennyLen
_jagged said:

Edit: Also, I know you're all aware of this, but whenever you click on the sub-forum "Game Design & Concepts" you're met with an empty list, even though there's thousands of topics in there... Apparently. Most people checking out this API for the first time would think this shit is dead.

I'd start there.

The issue is that this site isn't associated with the Allegro development team and isn't an official site. Only Matthew can do anything about how this site works and I don't think changing it is high on his priority list.

_jagged

Where is the official site?

Chris Katko

there's this:
https://liballeg.org/

but allegro.cc has always been the de facto official place. clicking "forums" on liballeg.org goes right here.

_jagged

Interesting.. I don't understand why the main site and this forum are so drab and unfitting. This is a continuation of an Atari ST graphics API, yeah? Where's the neon? 80s arcade aesthetic? Any visual cues towards the 2d intention and roots of this library?

I guess this is why Software companies employ marketing people.. :P

Chris Katko

Hope you all have a great saturday!

_jagged said:

Interesting.. I don't understand why the main site and this forum are so drab and unfitting. This is a continuation of an Atari ST graphics API, yeah? Where's the neon? 80s arcade aesthetic? Any visual cues towards the 2d intention and roots of this library?

It was sleek when it was written in like... 2005. Ever since Unity became popular, software libraries aren't booming like they used to. Plus Stack Overflow.

Bob Keane

I know this is off topic but the other thread was locked... too soon. I just saw an ad for TikTok. If the government is trying to block or ban it, why are they advertising? And I don't remember ads previously, did someone buy them out?

DanielH
_jagged said:

Where is the official site?

http://www.talula.demon.co.uk/allegro/

This was the official site for many years ;D

_jagged

Yes, I understand now that Unity has kind of killed interest for these libraries. People usually approach this from a perspective of wanting to make a game, not wanting to learn how to program games.

I'm just kinda.. Being a nerd for a while, because I wanted to be a hacker when I was 14. So this library is great for me. And so is C. Why use anything else? bait :p

edit:
I know I look at all this from a total noob perspective, but everything about C is just beautiful and I have no idea why any of you want to use Javascript or Rust or whatever.

Looking in as an outsider, the entire IT industry looks very chaotic. I'm glad you all make so much dough.

bamccaig

C is a very loose language. You can do lots of dangerous things that make your program susceptible to abuse. It can cause a user's machine to get hacked. That's why there's so much attention being put on languages like Rust and Zig. They still have the performance of C, but with fewer severe vulnerabilities. Writing perfect C with no memory errors is really difficult to do. The larger the project and the more people involved the harder it gets.

Some people are making "much dough", but not everyone. :P My salary is pretty low by typical industry standards, but I think that a lot of the statistics about average/mean salary are inflated by the high cost of living in major cities. It sounds like they're making a killing, but in reality their 6-figure salary may be more akin to mine when you factor in the cost of living...

Eric Johnson
_jagged said:

I have no idea why any of you want to use Javascript or Rust or whatever.

Programming languages are just tools. You should use whatever tool best suits the job at hand.

Example: I used to adore C++, so I'd write all of my little games and programs in it. But then I got fed-up with the tedious porting process (Linux -> Windows), so I switched to JS. Everyone already has a browser, so the idea of writing code that my friends and family can run without needing to downloading binaries is pretty sweet. 8-) Is JS as fast and as versatile as C or C++? Absolutely not. But for my needs, it gets the job done.

dthompson

C is like a marvellous, shining sword. (hilt not included)

Edgar Reynaldo

If you want a hilt, you need to add a couple pluses on their.

Erin Maus

I made an ItsyRealm vlog.

video

I like it. >:(

But do YOU like it?

RmBeer2

{"name":"ilKN.gif","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/d\/d\/dd1b39a6a40c9c25d793cc64403a785c.gif","w":301,"h":214,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/d\/d\/dd1b39a6a40c9c25d793cc64403a785c"}ilKN.gif

I liked it. It's a strange robot.

You used Blender to model and bones to move. How did you manage to export all that to your game?

Erin Maus

I convert the base model (exported as Collada) to a 'skin' (skinned model) and a 'body' (skeleton) using my tool Goober.

Then add them to the right places (in the Resources/Game/Skins & Resources/Game/Bodies) folder:

{"name":"612571","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/3\/b\/3bcd3716dc6c579cb60e94388eb0acd6.png","w":821,"h":521,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/3\/b\/3bcd3716dc6c579cb60e94388eb0acd6"}612571

I then add them to the Peep:

{"name":"612572","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/8\/c\/8c0b78651d4714ef119f8124de6b7a03.png","w":761,"h":737,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/8\/c\/8c0b78651d4714ef119f8124de6b7a03"}612572

The animations are 'scripts':

{"name":"612573","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/5\/5545d7f70507ca75c59605172727d39b.png","w":847,"h":555,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/5\/5545d7f70507ca75c59605172727d39b"}612573

The scripts can get pretty complex, but most of them tend to be pretty simple.

bamccaig

That vlog is awesome. :D So fascinating to watch!

MikiZX

Agree. Interesting vlog - good work. I didn't reallize before that ItsyRealm was Lovecraft inspired.

Erin Maus

Thanks all :).

Edgar Reynaldo

ItsyRealm is not controversial enough. Give me something to argue about. >:(

RmBeer2

@Edgar Reynaldo :
You want black characters in ItsyRealm? ???

Erin Maus

ItsyRealm is arguably controversial for certain people...

It has a ton of queer representation. There's a character for all the letters in LGBT+. Like for real, there's a non-binary dog. :o You can also customize your gender and pronouns. If you wanna be referred to as xe/xim/xer and your gender be Two-Spirit, well, you can.

There's characters of all real races, too. I think there might be more dark skinned peeps than regular peeps (outside of randomly generated characters, which, are, random). I have like 4 'real' skin color options to rep that (plus like 3-4 crazy colors right now) and can always add more ezpz.

The NPCs have pronouns. For example, when you recruit sailors, it shows their pronouns and gender. There's a lot of genders sailors can be too...

IDK. It's very inclusive and diverse which arguably in this day and age is controversial. ::)

jmasterx

I would argue that the level of LGBT+ inclusiveness could be the game's biggest selling point. There are plenty of tv shows and movies centered around LGBT+ but really, really, not that many games; especially good games like yours. The community will play it and share it among the community because it gives them a feeling of belonging; at least that's my hypothesis.

bamccaig

Depends. I could see the LGBTLMFAOWTFBBQ++ stuff being a turn off for some, but only if it's somehow disruptive/intrusive to the gameplay. If the player doesn't need to embrace it to play then I don't think it'll hurt any. If the player needs to become an SJW to enjoy the game then I think it'll have a limited audience, but the target audience will probably love it. I think it could be an excellent medium to spread awareness and tolerance too. It all depends on how it's presented and balanced. That said, it remains to be seen whether these themes require an age restriction (or at least, blunt disclaimers). I think that it's too soon to be teaching these ideas to children because the scientific community and adults can't even agree on it yet.

RmBeer2

{"name":"Rainbow_knight_helmet-256.png","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/0\/504d7e1d3e96e2dcf31aa4d8a043460f.png","w":256,"h":256,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/0\/504d7e1d3e96e2dcf31aa4d8a043460f"}Rainbow_knight_helmet-256.png

Are they founding a gay country? Something like Okama Island.

It seems like an exaggeration, but if there is no other option. Perhaps the blacks would also have to found their own country, and the Feminazis their country of the Amazons. ::)

Erin Maus

I think it's handled gracefully. It's very organic and natural.

Rosalind (formerly Ganymede) is, for example, an 'idromancer' (in other words a shapeshifting wizard). So it makes perfect sense. There is a cisgender straight male who is hopelessly in love with her and there's (going to be) a quest where you try to either help him woo her or sabotage him. And the non-binary dog is actually...

Arguably the most powerful non-divine idromancer/lich in the world - they take the form of a dog/giant fucking wolf, monkey/giant fucking gorilla, and lizard/giant fucking dragon on top of their undead, mummy-like human form.

So my thought process with idromancers was, why would you seek to master shapeshifting magic if you were cisgender? Of course, there will be a cisgender shapeshifter who just transforms into animals so... Anyway, that's just for trans rep. Things like gay, lesbian, bisexual, asexual, etc, etc, etc follow the same logic.

My idea was what if 50% of the world was queer in some way? :) And handle it that way.

Probably the most intrusive thing is the gender selection screen - it defaults to 'something else' rather than male/female. So a majority of people will have to select their gender, while a small minority will not. RIP cisgender people. :'(

And there's nothing stopping you from misgendering or insulting your sailors or Nyan (the dog) or any of the other peeps in the game. They're just bits and bytes in a computer. In ItsyRealm, gender identity and sexual orientation are just aspects of a character like their skin and clothes. It's rarely relevant to the plot. And when it is, the relevancy is handled tastefully. In my opinion.

Also ItsyRealm would probably be rated T because there's gonna be some fucked up stuff in it related to the Old Ones and necromancy so... Though even if it wouldn't have those things, I don't think there should be any disclaimers. No matter how pushy I make the queer stuff. Why aren't there disclaimers for games pushing a heteronormative narratives (i.e., most of them with any love plots or sex or relationships)?

*TL;DR:* ㄟ( ▔, ▔ )ㄏ

edit: Cleaned up the phrasing. Was pretty much word salad. I was in a rush.

RmBeer2

Is it a sexual fetish of animal transformation? Do you plan to include polymorphic furrys? I guess there is a good amount of target audience there.

You may also want to include roleplaying. If you are going to allow the creation of characters to your own taste, better to do it complete. Although in the end you will end up with a game whose reputation is for gay sailors. This idea would still be original. The problem then is that it will lose its horror.

Erin Maus

You are clueless. (*/ω\*)

RmBeer2

Or old. Ignore me and send me to a nursing home.

Polybios

You can find "controversial" or "problematic" stuff everywhere if you look hard enough:

Erin Maus said:

There's characters of all real races, too. I think there might be more dark skinned peeps than regular peeps

So human "races" are for real?
Also, doesn't your use of the expression "regular" in contrast to "dark skinned" imply that "regular" really means "white"? So persons of color would be "irregular"? Well, this strikes me as a bit problematic... :-X

Just kidding. :-/

jmasterx

"There's characters of all real ethnicities, too. I think there might be more dark skinned peeps than regular peeps"

Erin Maus

I forgot the word 'white' - as in regular, white skinned peeps. Because dare I mention there's purple, blue, and teal skinned peeps too. You know, skin colors that aren't 'regular.'

Oh fuck off.

...Just kidding? Wait, no.

I told you my game can be controversial because there's snowflake conservatives out looking to pick a fight with me, a SJW, waaa waaa. ;D

*edit:* btdubs when I am insensitive, or I do make a mistake in general, I fix it. For example, gender was "Male/Female/Other" for a while but I was told that could be insensitive and unwelcoming; so I changed "Other" to "Something else." If I do the same with PoC characters, I will fix it. Because I'm not a crybaby.

jmasterx

It's practically impossible to please everybody because some of these things are literally personal preference. Some people might identify better as an other gender while some might feel better about Something else. Some might want to be able to uncheck Gender because the concept of gender is not part of their identity. Something else is still a gender identity. It's hard territory. Like we all know here you're an excellent person who just wants to do good, you don't really seem to have controversial views, the hard part is conveying that to an audience. You're just trying to do the 'right' thing and be as inclusive as possible and that still won't make everyone happy. I learned that making and releasing music. I realized how subjective it is even though we're just trying to do the 'right' thing, what is right will always be wrong to some and vice versa. You'd literally need separate binaries of the game for each player to truly make everyone happy. (Have them take a personality quiz to pick the binary that's right for them ;) )

Edgar Reynaldo

Can I be a mutant many tentacled serial groper in your game? I don't think so. You'll never be PC enough for me.

Arthur Kalliokoski

I identify as a poor person! Send me moneys!

jmasterx

Wouldn't sending you money go against your identity? If I send you money you would no longer be a poor person. We would not want you to be something you don't identify as.

If anything, you should be sending us money so as to maintain your identity.

Polybios

Sending you money would be like giving whitening lotions to people of color. Truly more than problematic. :-/

Erin Maus said:

Oh fuck off.

It is interesting that you react in an unfriendly, even vulgar and disrespectful manner if people politely try to point out problematic tendencies of your speech. This only serves to affirm the previous conclusions and it also certainly violates some point of most codes of conduct. :P

Erin Maus

Apologies. :-[ I'll add a code of conduct to prevent hateful language in the future. I suppose I'll carve one exception, though...

...

If it's not clear, I'm pretty flippant and like to troll people who aren't down with inclusivity and diversity. :) You might not be a Nazi (for real, I was just trolling) but I'm really tired of people on this forum erasing a lot of issues that effect minorities.

My game stands for a lot of things. You can be a white male cishet if you want. And if you use your imagination and roleplay*, you can be a tentacled serial groper I guess. But the game probably isn't for you. It will deal with a lot of issues that affect LGBT+ peeps and other minorities.

*: I'm a fiery anti-theist in Bloodborne. Purge the faithful. :)

...

Also I'm gonna kind stop defending my game so in the future I don't have a PR headache. :-/

Edgar Reynaldo

Arthur Kalliokoski
Second in Command
February 2005
5540.png

Posted on 09-28-2020 08:40

I identify as a poor person! Send me moneys!

Socialist vampire!

jmasterx

For me personally, I actually was trying to help. I am a boring hetrosexual male, but I try to relate to related domains I am familiar with to provide insight, but obviously, I don't know anything about the LGBT+ community, but I do respect and can understand how someone may be born a certain way but in no way feel that way at all. Pretty much every spectrum follows a bell curve, and that goes for gender as much as sexuality as much as anything else.

Erin Maus

You're fine, jmasterx, haha. ;D I appreciate your comments.

Polybios

Erin, now I'm ... confused. You do know I was just trolling, don't you? Are you like reverse-trolling me now? For the record, please continue to say "fuck off" to people with bad intentions. And keep up the good work. :)

RmBeer2

video

Arthur Kalliokoski
jmasterx said:

If I send you money you would no longer be a poor person.

What's that got to do with anything? I used to identify as a toaster, but it didn't do me much good.

Arthur Kalliokoski
jmasterx said:

If I send you money you would no longer be a poor person.

What's that got to do with anything? I used to identify as a toaster, but it didn't do me much good.

jmasterx

Must have been hard to do simple things like take a bath

LennyLen
jmasterx said:

Must have been hard to do simple things like take a bath

That's what isopropyl alcohol spray is for.

Edgar Reynaldo

This is great.

Talking about taking a bath in isopropyl alcohol with a toaster. Dare you to plug it in mate. ;) :O

DanielH

There is water in isopropyl. You can get 99%, but most over-the-counter brands have around 70%. That still leaves 30% water.

Wonder if you would die from the electrical shock or if it would create a spark and catch fire first.

Volunteers? !J/K! ;D

jmasterx

Well, it won't be Arthur, poor person no longer identifies as a Toaster :-/

It's sad that society made poor person feel that way that poor person decided to identify as a poor person instead of poor person's true identity, a 4 slot Toaster with adjustable darkness by toast.

Edgar Reynaldo

YOU people pr0bably burn your toast.

That's toaster abuse.

Dammit people you made Arthur identify as a poor person. I would send you monies if I had any brother Arthur aka AK

Arthur Kalliokoski

I would send you monies if I had any brother Arthur aka AK

Don't worry about it too much, whenever I get too broke I get off my lazy ass and go to work.

Chris Katko

The national debate was an embarrassment.

Arthur Kalliokoski

The national debate was an embarrassment.

I went in rooting for Trump but turned it off 20 minutes later, thinking the both of them needed a good spanking.

bamccaig

I didn't watch it [yet], but I heard some things about it. Sounds like it didn't go well for anyone, but the channels that I saw from made Trump look like the big problem.

jmasterx

I think this sums it up quite well.
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bamccaig

One reason why I love Reuters is that they don't just report the same stories as everyone else. They do actual journalism to uncover big stories themselves.

Heard about the secretive process to come up with changes for policing that excluded public hearings and only included law enforcement insiders instead of the other side of the argument:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-justice-rights-exclusive/exclusive-trump-policing-panel-was-warned-about-secretive-process-before-court-ruling-idUSKBN26M7C9

The proposed changes were to essentially give police additional sweeping powers, and further strengthen the "qualified immunity" laws that protect police. They also want for police officers to be able to review body cam footage prior to making statements about their conduct. Which just sounds like letting them see if they're caught before they lie. I wonder if they're going to afford civilian crime suspects the same right. I'm kidding, of course they're not.

Append:

They're also trying to establish overseers at the state level so that "progressive prosecutors" aren't allowed to toss out punishments on minor offenses. For example, for cannabis possession. They're trying to make it so that minor offenses always carry a mandatory sentence to be "hard on crime". Especially crime that isn't hurting anyone committed by poor people. Crime committed by wealthy people that hurts lots of people will continue to be ignored, of course.

Chris Katko

video

actual genesis programmer of sonic 3d blast talks about genesis programming tricks

jmasterx

Trump tested positive for covid

bamccaig

I want to be overjoyed, but I'm afraid of the karma coming back around. :o

I have had a sore throat for a few days now, and so far I'm not getting better. I don't think that it's COVID, but I can't rule it out either. I rarely go out, but my wife does regularly.

I stayed up late the other night drinking beer, and my throat got really dry, and I think that just made me vulnerable. That said, it's theoretically possible that a virus cell managed to survive and find its way into my throat during this time, but it seems unlikely.

Nevertheless, even though I think it would be good for the world for Trump to step down and be out of the running, I'm not willing to darken my soul with hateful wishes. :P

Append:

video

For the capitalism folks..

Eric Johnson

Guys, I've noticed some "color bleeding" (for lack of a better description) between high-contrast colors on my TV (Insignia NS-32D511NA15) recently. The issue isn't present on my little Acer monitor though, so I know the fault lies entirely with the TV.

Left is TV, right is monitor (as captured by my phone close to the screens):
{"name":"color-bleeding.png","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/3\/1\/31fa8a2a58891193cf233581b5de1ec3.png","w":1217,"h":635,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/3\/1\/31fa8a2a58891193cf233581b5de1ec3"}color-bleeding.png

Any idea why this happens?

Erin Maus

I thought this was cool.

{"name":"Dcqossa.gif","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/f\/7\/f7d212f151d2871b1aa2e1a32bc244f6.gif","w":318,"h":267,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/f\/7\/f7d212f151d2871b1aa2e1a32bc244f6"}Dcqossa.gif

Chris Katko

Any idea why this happens?

I had the same problem with an old samsung display. Now they said it was likely just my eyes getting worse. But LCDs do age. Each LCD color ages, and ages at different rates from each other. However, blurriness implies the individual layers of the screen have moved apart (swollen due to oxygen migration?) and I haven't seen any research to prove it.

One day I want to buy two of the exact same monitor (like one I have already) and compare them. If either one looks "sharper" than the other, than it's pretty damning proof that LCDs can get blurry over time.

Bob Keane

However, blurriness implies the individual layers of the screen have moved apart (swollen due to oxygen migration?) and I haven't seen any research to prove it.

Do any of these help Chris?

bamccaig

media player

>:(

jmasterx

https://www.allegro.cc/files/attachment/612612

You're right Bams, probably not the best idea to do that with a sore throat, before Fortnight... ooops >:(

bamccaig

Ahahaha, Fort date night. I know, I talk weird... Particularly when I take on a persona.

jmasterx

Nah I heard it just fine, I just edited the audio to make it sound like Fort instead of Date

bamccaig

I kind of like how the autotune actually makes "faking it" stand out even more. :) Unless you intentionally made it sound bad, but I think that was just my terrible singing. :P

RmBeer2

🎈🎉🎊🎉🎊 We have reached post 5000!!! HORRAY!!!! \o/ 🎉🎊🎉🎊🎈

I was hoping to do it in post 5000, but it has been taken by @bamccaig... :'(

Now it's 5001.

bamccaig

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jmasterx

Thank you for that lovely illustration of Date Night Bams

bamccaig

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Sorry for the confusion. I'm married.

Bob Keane

Bambam, you know men don't suffer from premature ejaculation, only women right? Also I would have posted this in the appropriate thread, but it was locked. Too soon. Have you seen this?

Eric Johnson

You know, after you read someone's replies here for a few years, you begin to develop a voice for them. I've done that without even realizing it for several of you, but I gotta say, bambam, the voice I imagined for you was waaaaayy off! That being said, you have a nice voice. Definitely more energetic than I imagined. :P

bamccaig
Bob Keane said:

Bambam, you know men don't suffer from premature ejaculation, only women right?

I'm not sure anybody really "suffers" from premature ejaculation. It's a victimless crime.

It hasn't been something that I have very much experience with personally. But when I started on my antidepressants (and still to some extent today) I apparently developed the opposite problem: delayed ejaculation. :P Turns out I can go all night long, but nobody is very enthusiastic about it. :-/

It's a little bit alarming because I've never had any kind of issues before, and I think there's a risk that it could be permanent. There wasn't much choice though.

Bob Keane said:

Also I would have posted this in the appropriate thread, but it was locked. Too soon. Have you seen this?

I had not heard about a lawsuit yet. Thanks for sharing. Sounds like a waste of everybody's time to me though.

In order for the Netflix film to be considered illegal material, it must be proven to have “no serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” and “the prurient interest in sex,” per the lawsuit.

Not only does the law itself sound overly vague, but if this paragraph is accurate that it must be proven to have no "literary, artistic, political, or scientific value" then I think the lawsuit is going to fail miserably as I don't think there's question that the film has value in one or more such areas.

Bob Keane
Bamccaig said:

But when I started on my antidepressants (and still to some extent today) I apparently developed the opposite problem: delayed ejaculation.

A friend went on Prozac when it first came out. He was told the prescription could cause spontaneous erections. Perhaps you found the next ED medication. Am I the only one who is having problems with Allegro? The last few days I had a longer than usual wait after entering my password, posting seems to be slow and I had a timeout/crash earlier, with a message cookies had to be either enabled or disabled.

Arthur Kalliokoski
Bob Keane said:

Am I the only one who is having problems with Allegro? The last few days I had a longer than usual wait after entering my password

I just waited about two minutes just to get to the site to login, then when I logged in I played a couple of clickgames on my desktop for something to do while I waited. I was thinking it might have something to do with this computer I'm currently using, the last one died in a thunderstorm about three months ago and currently using an Apple computer with Linux installed that sometimes takes up to 5 seconds to open a 500 byte text file and lags up to 3 seconds when trying to key in text. It's like using a 286 with Windows all over again.

Bob Keane
Arthur said:

currently using an Apple computer

I'll make the obvious Apple observation later. Is there any way to check the server?

LennyLen

The site has been very slow for me for the last week or so as well.

Erin Maus

:o

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I wonder what would happen if those life support vats broke...

LennyLen
Erin Maus said:

I wonder what would happen if those life support vats broke...

Let's find out!

RmBeer2

@Erin Maus :

They yell "SURPRISEEE!!!!" and then there would be a party. ;D

Edgar Reynaldo

9

Why was 6 afraid of 7?

Because 789

Why did 7 scare 8?

Because 678

;D

Eric Johnson

Okay, Yoda.

jmasterx

I heard this song on the radio the other day (Bebe Rexha - Baby, I'm Jealous (ft. Doja Cat)) and instantly heard What's The Difference by Dre. So I made a mashup.

video

bamccaig

Bob, the site is no longer hosted in Matthew's bedroom. Now it's hosted in the cloud on a minimal plan. It seems that the site occasionally gets put to "sleep" when it's inactive. The site seems to need to warm up when somebody finally makes a request, which can take a couple of minutes.

Nice work, jmasterx. :D

Bob Keane

Cool. I thought it the gubmint was slowing down the site because foreign government agents like you were using the it to spread disinformation.

bamccaig

The POTUS is spreading disinformation. No need for foreign government agents. The president is a double agent.

raynebc

Leftists sure love their inane conspiracy theories. Whoever manages the site may need to check things like whether the application pool is allowed to stop when idle for too long. In my experience that's why web applications will take minutes to come back online after they haven't been loaded in a while.

Bob Keane
Raynebc said:

Leftists sure love their inane conspiracy theories.

Unlike the right who get their reliable information from Qanon. And I suppose the termination of a Citibank employee who may have ran the site was the "left's" plot to supress the truth? Or did you mean "lefties" like myself. I am left primary ambidextrous btw.

raynebc

There are some loonies on the right, but the problem is that politicians and media have mainstreamed the left's style of craziness and that has allowed it to dwarf the nutty right wingers. Don't forget that the Russia collusion hoax is one of the biggest debunked conspiracy theories in all of our lifetimes, and the instigators will be brought to justice if we're lucky.

bamccaig

If you say so. In about a month's time Trump is going to lose the election, and all hell is going to break loose. Right-leaning poorly educated working class men are going to take the guns that they shouldn't even be able to possess and they're going to start a civil war with whoever resists, while Trump hides in his bunker. I imagine Trump will eventually kill himself rather than facing the consequences for his actions. And all that will be left is a broken America full of stupid people. So not much changed really. Hopefully it'll increase the average intelligence of America when the dust clears at least.

Of course, that doesn't factor in the Russians. It's likely that while Trump is hiding he'll be expecting support from Putin. Though I think it's quite likely that once he stops being useful to Putin he's going to probably not last long anyway. The question will be when Trump refuses to leave the white house will the forces obey Biden or will there be traitors within the ranks.

It's all rather terrifying if you think about it. This is not a good time for American history. This is embarrassing. Has been for 4 years. And it might still get worse.

Edgar Reynaldo

video

Powerman5000 for reply #5000.
;D

And on a more contemporary note

bamccaig

Allegro.cc only understands the full URL of YouTube videos. :P

Also, if we're counting the OP, I guess I too scored 5000. :D

Nobody tell RmBeer2.

Edgar Reynaldo

Thank you.

Also, who wants to place bets on when and/or if civil war breaks out and how bad. Skirmishes with the military anyone? Trump is going to cry like a baby if he loses, and his white supremacist buddies will all come to his aid I'm sure.

bamccaig

I find it hard to comprehend how war breaks out in 2020 at all. Let alone among a single group of people. From the sounds of it insurgents put up a pretty good fight overseas. The American variety is wealthier, better equipped, and better organized. And probably also outnumbers the forces. Let alone the number of right-wing nutjobs in the military. Half of the military might just defect.

I think that shit is going to start hitting the fan right around December 14th, if not November 3rd? There's a chance that things are going to change forever. Hopefully the change is good, whatever it is.

And if we all need to take up arms in World War 3 at least we've all strategically positioned ourselves for desk duty. 8-)

Bob Keane
Raynebc said:

Don't forget that the Russia collusion hoax is one of the biggest debunked conspiracy theories in all of our lifetimes

You mean this hoax? Or do you mean the hoax Donald Trump was a part of it? And by saying "and the instigators will be brought to justice if we're lucky.", you mean Russia's Internet Research Agency will be brought to justice, correct?

Bamccaig said:

I find it hard to comprehend how war breaks out in 2020 at all.

I'm not so sure.

raynebc

Canadians are goofy in the head. If a civil war breaks out it will be the far left causing it. They're trying to cause it now.

FYI, Bob, the hoax was that Trump directly worked with Russia to beat Hillary. Lefties were drunk on that flavor of Kool-Aid for years. Some still are, evidently.

bamccaig

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Whose guns will the Democrats be using? The US Army, Navy, Marines, National Guard, FBI, state and local police guns. Those guns.

jmasterx

The Pew research center... for guns XD
Pew pew pew!!! :P

Alright I had my amusement for the day.

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

Whose guns will the Democrats be using? The US Army, Navy, Marines, National Guard, FBI, state and local police guns. Those guns.

lmfao.

Which way do you think those organizations vote. go ahead. take five minutes.

I mean come on man. Try to think.

Matthew Leverton

Our President doesn't know anything about QAnon. Except that they hate pedophiles! And that's a good thing. So they must be good guys. I'm glad he's using his top secret clearance credentials to work!

Mr. Trump, do you think the Democrats are a secret alien race of time travelers trying to illegitimately dethrone you?

Trump> I cannot say. Maybe? Could be? Some people think so.

What a WORLD CLASS IDIOT. ::)

bamccaig

Which way do you think those organizations vote. go ahead. take five minutes.

They're a lot more mixed than you think. Watch.

LennyLen

We had our national election today.

The major left-wing party (and majority party in the current government) has won by a landslide (64 of the 120 seats in parliament with the leading right-wing party only taking 35 seats), and if they choose to, will be able to form a government alone, without needing to build a coalition.

We're also voting on two referendums, one to legalize euthenasia and the other to legalize cannabis, but the results of those won't be known for a few weeks.

Edgar Reynaldo

I voted absentee, along with my family.

You American punks better vote.

MiquelFire

I already voted.

bamccaig
bamccaig said:

They're a lot more mixed than you think. Watch.

It's also worth acknowledging the Republican brass that has already came out against Trump and said they were going to support the Democratic candidate.

First Google result:

https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/601348/

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

It's also worth acknowledging the Republican brass that has already came out against Trump and said they were going to support the Democratic candidate.

That's because they're the same party. I mean come, there's no excuse to be this ignorant anymore.

The biggest support Trump ever had from both sides was when he invaded Syria.

When literal war mongers from the Iraq invasion (Colin Powell) are keynote speakers at the DNC, and "omg bush gives michelle obama candies! UWUWUWUWU", and nobody questions it I have to ask if people use their brains or have any memory at all of the last 10 years.

Remember those migrants? Those poor kids in cages!?
1) nobody cares about them anymore apparently
2) now migrants are trump agents.

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-10-02/another-migrant-caravan-is-headed-toward-the-united-states

that's right. Less than four years ago, anyone who didn't love migrants was a racist. Now, undocumented MIGRANTS ARE BAD PEOPLE being pushed to America to RE-ELECT TRUMP.

... and nobody in the press questions it.

...

If that doesn't open your eyes, nothing will, and enjoy your bubble.

bamccaig

That's because they're the same party. I mean come, there's no excuse to be this ignorant anymore.

So you believe that the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are the same party? Because Republicans are calling out Trump? And you think it's ignorant to believe otherwise? Maybe, just maybe, you should rethink your own logic.

Of course, I 100% believe that the party in power is just an illusion. The extremely wealthy are always in power. Democracy is just a gimmick to make most of us enthusiastic slave labor. But that doesn't mean that the parties are just a conspiracy. There is still a lot of power/wealth to be exploited from being a member of a government in power. There's a lot of competition to get that power and wealth.

To believe that they're the same party is absolutely ridiculous. They're not the same party. Trump is just that bad. Which is why so many long time Republicans are turning their backs against him and supporting the Democrats. Trump is a terrible person. He's the furthest thing there could be from a strong American leader. He's a pussy. He's wildly out of shape. He's obviously in very poor health. He doesn't pay his taxes. He used his wealth to get out of serving in the military several times. He is completely immoral. He had his people fire teargas and forcefully assault peaceful American citizens protesting in order to pose for a photo opportunity with a fucking Bible. You know he's not actually religious, right? You know he's the epitome of what the Bible says not to do.

He's a plutocrat. And not a very good one at that. If it weren't for handouts to keep him rich he'd have lost it all and probably died in a ditch years ago. But of course the system doesn't actually work. When you're rich and you fail you don't actually fail.

The Republicans that believe in honesty and integrity are turning against Trump, realizing that he could very well collapse the country, and may have already ruined the Republican Party. If you still support Trump after all of this, and you point to Republicans turning against him as being wrong, then you seriously need to take a look in the mirror, reexamine the evidence from some unbiased sources, and see if that doesn't bring about a change of heart and mind.

Chris Katko

Man those guys sure had integrity when they voted for every middle eastern war, and, went out of their way to not prosecute the wall street bankers that literally destroyed the entire world's economy overnight.

Or the fact the dems went out of their way to not prosecute any of the USA / CIA war crimes of the bush administration... and then invited them to speak at the DNC.

oh wait, fun fact: Nancy Pelosi didn't just know about "enhanced interrogation techniques" (actual state sponsored torture)... she was on the committee that approved it.

Do yourself a favor and actually read the wiki for "neoliberal" and realize it's just another word for conservative.

Matthew Leverton

Chris, are you a QAnon believer? :o

Erin Maus

It's easy to say 'both parties are the same' when your right to marriage, receive healthcare, not get fired from your job, all because of your gender/sexual orientation don't depend on a Supreme Court case rather than legislation. ::)

And which party would pass legislation protecting LGBT rights? I think there might be only one...

...

Finished this guy:

https://i.imgur.com/rDkpCn7.gif

Not sure if the GIF will work. >:(

edit: guess not, here's a link https://i.imgur.com/rDkpCn7.mp4

bamccaig

The HTML-style syntax is actually XHTML so I think that a closing / may be needed. Also, you aren't able to explicitly define a width/height property.

https://i.imgur.com/rDkpCn7.gif

Apparently it doesn't work anyway though. I thought gifs were supported, but I'm probably thinking of another message board. I recall ML hated gifs for the spam they often produce in other message boards, but I'm pretty sure you've embedded ItsyRealm gifs before.

Append:

The response from Imgur does not contain an explicit Content-Type so perhaps that is why it's not being accepted by A.cc?

Append:

Man those guys sure had integrity when they voted for every middle eastern war, and, went out of their way to not prosecute the wall street bankers that literally destroyed the entire world's economy overnight.

Or the fact the dems went out of their way to not prosecute any of the USA / CIA war crimes of the bush administration... and then invited them to speak at the DNC.

oh wait, fun fact: Nancy Pelosi didn't just know about "enhanced interrogation techniques" (actual state sponsored torture)... she was on the committee that approved it.

That's not because they're the same party. That's because governments are bought and paid for, and the party in power doesn't matter as much as you'd think it should. Our Liberal government invested $12.6 billion in purchasing a private oil pipeline, despite the oil industry tanking (the company that owned it wasn't going to invest the necessary money to finish the project because it no longer made sense). The Progressive Conservative Party is the oil party in Canada. The only reason for doing that was to appease to the O&G lobbyists, as well as the O&G workers in Alberta who are all out of work because the oil industry no longer makes sense in Canada.

Meanwhile, Canada is nowhere near being able to reach its internationally agreed upon emissions targets even as they try to introduce some new legislation to help. We're still looking at about a 3 degree Celsius increase in global average temperature by 2050. For reference, our target is to keep the increase to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius. Which is not a perfectly stable climate even then. It's still bad for the planet, and many people will die as a result, and many species will go extinct, but it's a realistic goal to achieve in time if we try. 3 degrees is on the extreme end of the spectrum. If it comes true it could mean mass extinctions, major changes in the balance of power on our planet, major loss of human life, and perhaps an irreversible snowball effect that gets worse and worse.

Essentially, the powers that be are seasoned professionals at exploiting government. They're not working for you and I. They work for corporations and the wealthy elite. They only need enough support from us every 4 years to get in power. In between elections they're busy cashing in on their power for wealth and powerful friendships.

Absolutely the Democratic Party is not a good party for America. No more than the Liberals are a good party for Canada. But you know what else? The Republicans and Progressive Conservatives are even worse. They deny climate change, they've been denying the dangers of COV-19, they've been denying the systemic discrimination that is still prevalent in society and in law enforcement. It's not that the Democratic Party is the best choice for the people of America. It's that they're the best that you can do right now.

I've been contributing to the Green Party of Canada for about a decade now, and we've been growing significantly, and gaining seats in parliament too. Nationally and provincially. That said, we're still a long ways away from having Green Party members with serious power in parliament or Queen's park. America has at least as far to go, and probably much further. Vote Democrat in 2020 only because Trump is a horribly unfit leader, and America might not survive another 4 years of him. But at the same time you need to start pushing for other options to be taken seriously, while also trying to dismantle the clear sabotage from within each of the parties.

2 parties is too few to function. It's far too easy for a single, biased group (on either side) to gain too much power and influence. That's not how democracy is supposed to work. Get involved. Pay attention. And push for significant improvements to your entire electoral system and within your parties power structure as well. You don't have to trust that they got it right the first or second time. There's always room for improvement. In 2020 there's a LOT of room for improvement in both of our systems. Don't settle for status quo. Demand better. Ultimately, the government is only powerful because of us. And they're supposed to represent us. But they won't unless we force them to.

raynebc

Let's see how long the media and big tech can keep the recently re-exposed Biden family corruption swept under the rug. Democrats pretend this doesn't matter while they continue to peddle conspiracy theories against Trump's family. More than being Republican versus Democrat, the political war right now is the establishment (which includes the pro-war camp) versus everybody else. Trump is pissing rich people off in both political parties, that's how you get Never-Trump "Conservatives" siding with the usual Never-Republican Democrats. The social and news media have forever destroyed any credibility they collectively used to have.

Fracking and nuclear are the immediate solution to climate change, renewables aren't good enough to be the world's primary power source right now. Anybody who says we have to ditch fossil fuels and can't use nuclear isn't serious about stopping climate change, they're just the usual ignorant/lying activist.

If you depend on not having textualist judges in order to maintain your preferred policies, just know that means your preferences are not lawful/constitutional. You need to push to have the laws properly changed and not rely on the Supreme Court to be a political weapon the way the Democrats want to.

bamccaig

Fracking is extremely harmful to the environment and ecosystem. So no, it's definitely not a solution to climate change. Matter of fact we're trying to ban it in Canada.

Nuclear isn't a perfect option either because of the inevitable radioactive waste that will permanently pose a risk to the environment and humanity. Nuclear is also not necessarily considered renewable (practically, today, not).

There's much more potential in other, truly green options. Solar has major potential, but obviously requires some large-scale coordination to workaround the day/night cycle issues (e.g., an international grid that shared energy across the entire planet, so that which ever side has the Sun can fuel the rest).

Ultimately there is no switch we can flip to go Green overnight. Our entire civilization is currently built on fossil fuels. You can't just abandon them overnight. You'll need to use fossil fuels to develop and bootstrap the renewables initially. It is a long-term goal to phase out the fossil fuels. We'll never get there if we don't seriously invest in it and commit to a truly clean solution.

We don't have much choice either. Fossil fuels are literally threatening our existence. If predictions are correct and a snowball effect occurs we'll be pretty much doomed. Of course, it doesn't really hurt selfish people today to dismiss the possibility. They likely won't be the ones suffering, and likely won't endure the end times. But that's little comfort for the generations to come that will need to endure these changes.

Climate has shaped our planet, and a changing climate will inevitably reshape it. America may be generally pretty comfortable now, but what if everything South of Michigan becomes too hot to handle year round? Suddenly Americans have no place to live? War is inevitable, but you're not the only big army in the world. And a weakened America from internal division will be easy prey. The future is most certainly uncertain.

Matthew Leverton

Both parties view the Supreme Court as a political weapon. Trump himself has said he wants there to be 6 conservatives in hopes they have a role in giving him the election (as they did Bush). The rallying cry for conservatives has been to take over the Supreme Court to undo what they think are bad, prior decisions. (I think they'll be disappointed to find out that the Supreme Court isn't really in the business of undoing previous decisions just because.)

Court packing is a stupid idea, as Biden himself once said in a previous life. But politicians are being even more political about it, so who knows what will happen. McCain is on record for wanting to block all of Clinton's nominations for four years if she became President and Republicans still were in control of the Senate! This is not how things were supposed to be... if Presidents only nominated middle of the road justices that 60+ Senators could agree is good, then the Supreme Court wouldn't be in trouble.

Because of all of this, court reform seems like it is in order. Perhaps increase it gradually to a certain size and rig up a formula (with term limits) so that each President basically can replace two. Make it mandatory to have super majority confirmation and make it mandatory that the Senate hold hearings (pause other things they care about).

The stranglehold the Democrats and Republicans have is killing the system in USA. Trump and his white supremacists should have their own party. Bernie, AOC, and their friends should have their own party. Part of the middle of Democrats and Republicans probably should be in the same party. We prosecute monopolies and duopolies in business, but the ironic truth is our government operates as one.

While I love for an outside to shake up the system, Trump is a terrible person. Keep trying to think otherwise if it helps you sleep better at night! He admittedly grabs women by the pussy. Cheats on his pregnant wife with a stripper. Transfers campaign funds to cover it up. Openly fantasizes about his own daughter. Ran a corrupt non-profit for personal benefit. Calls war heros (McCain) losers while dodges the draft himself. Fires everybody in his inner circle who doesn't kiss his butt. Argues against science and actively prohibits research, but when he needs banned stem cell driven therapies he's happy to pump himself full of them. There's not enough posts on this thread to go over how disgusting of a person he is. >:(

Edgar Reynaldo

Here's some artwork I made :
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Erin, your post fu is weak.
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Erin Maus

I will send my scary video game characters after you. >:(

bamccaig

And you won't know whether to fear their fists or their mouths or both. :o>:(

raynebc

The old "let perfect be the enemy of good" argument, eh Bam? CO2 is either the largest threat to the planet or comparably minor potential pollution concerns are. Pick a lane. And no, spent nuclear material doesn't have an infinite half life. Sure, pie in the sky dreams like a global solar-powered electrical grid sound cool but how many generations will it take to build that? As far as I'm concerned, we could look toward using solar where possible and then use more traditional fuel sources whenever solar isn't sufficient (dark days, night time, etc). However it would also be irresponsible to not point out that the amount of waste per unit of energy is enormously higher with solar energy than nuclear. There are trade-offs with each energy technology.

The nuclear option (in the context of Congress) was one of the worst ideas the Democrats chose to employ. The Republicans simply escalated on it for judge confirmations, and now it will escalate to the point the Democrats want to pack the Senate, pack the Supreme Court and build a mob rule majority in perpetuity. That's clearly the most dangerous path for the government to be on. And seriously Matt, lay off the hard drugs. White SJWs are closer to white supremacists than any significantly sized group of conservatives, with their righteous "we are the only saviors of minorities" mindset. But then again you get political dumb asses labeling conservative Jews as Nazis and conservative black people as white supremacists, so such slurs really don't mean much anymore. I don't care whether you'll admit it, but Biden is a terrible person, much worse than Trump. Also, our country is so much better off that Hillary didn't win. Far leftists only care about a politician's sanctity when it's applied to the other side, so spare me the fake protest.

Matthew Leverton

The white supremacists largely support Trump. It's amazing you would argue that point of all things. I'm saying they should have their own party, and not pollute the Republican party. Because yes, they are having an impact on the Republican agenda for the worst.

And yes, the so-called nuclear option's chain of events most closely originated with the Democrats (without going back to an unreasonable time of events). Simply enlarging the the courts won't be the end of it, which is why both sides need to come to an agreement to reset the rules back to reasonable terms where we don't get both sides trying to push the most left/right judge they can find.

bamccaig
raynebc said:

Sure, pie in the sky dreams like a global solar-powered electrical grid sound cool but how many generations will it take to build that?

It's going to employ millions upon millions of people internationally, which will boost growth and help to pull people out of poverty. All while we gradually work to replace old, dirty infrastructure with new, cleaner infrastructure. It will be all around good for society. And in the distant future we can actually achieve our goals of 100% renewable energy and a stable and hospitable climate again. And hopefully slow and reverse the harm we're doing to our planet in time to save most lives, species, and habitable environments. Time is running out though.

How long will it take? Nobody can say that until people start doing the hard work of planning it out and eventually putting shovels in the dirt. I don't think it will take generations to get something working and get us closer than we are today. It may take a few generations to spread around the world, but it all depends on how much power (meaning influence) we put behind it. If we as a species were to make it our #1 priority to advance, backed by all of the richest countries, corporations, and people in the world I bet it could be accomplished in our lifetime easily.

Obviously there's no perfect answer to solve these problems. We need the best people working on them to solve them though. And that won't happen until we commit to solving them. The longer we delay it the longer it will take us to get there, and the more it could cost us in the end. Most importantly we need for politicians and lobbyists to stop getting to make these decisions, and instead make these decisions purely science-based (meaning respected scientists overwhelming agree with the findings).

Edgar Reynaldo
raynebc said:

CO2 is either the largest threat to the planet or comparably minor potential pollution concerns are. Pick a lane. And no, spent nuclear material doesn't have an infinite half life.

You're correct, it's not INFINITE. But its so long none of us will ever see the day the decay stops and the radioactive material is stable.
https://www.visionofearth.org/news/does-nuclear-waste-last-millions-of-years/

raynebc said:

Sure, pie in the sky dreams like a global solar-powered electrical grid sound cool but how many generations will it take to build that? As far as I'm concerned, we could look toward using solar where possible and then use more traditional fuel sources whenever solar isn't sufficient (dark days, night time, etc). However it would also be irresponsible to not point out that the amount of waste per unit of energy is enormously higher with solar energy than nuclear. There are trade-offs with each energy technology.

If we don't start working on alternatives now, we won't have any. Solar is a relatively young industry, and there are many ways it could be improved. You've also discounted wind power, bio fuel, wave energy, and other alternatives to coal and nuclear. There's nothing dirtier than coal and nuclear in terms of potential danger and sickness. Heavy metals are present in solar as well, but the technology itself is cleaner if properly controlled and spent materials are recycled responsibly.

raynebc said:

And seriously Matt, lay off the hard drugs. White SJWs are closer to white supremacists than any significantly sized group of conservatives, with their righteous "we are the only saviors of minorities" mindset.

Cain, where is your brother?

Republicans - "Am I my brother's keeper?"

Democrats - "I am my brother's keeper."

raynebc said:

But then again you get political dumb asses labeling conservative Jews as Nazis and conservative black people as white supremacists, so such slurs really don't mean much anymore. I don't care whether you'll admit it, but Biden is a terrible person, much worse than Trump. Also, our country is so much better off that Hillary didn't win. Far leftists only care about a politician's sanctity when it's applied to the other side, so spare me the fake protest.

There are idiots everywhere. Do you automatically label them Democrat when you find one? I'd say there are plenty of them on the other side of that coin.

"Biden is a terrible person"
Care to back that up with any proof? Otherwise it's just slander. When we disparage Trump, it's easy, because he's the biggest con-man racist fascist wannabe dictator we've ever had for President. He is a compulsive liar. He takes bribes. He gives away positions of power for money and support for his campaign. He destroys the laws we've put in place to protect our earth, air, water, and sky in the name of corporate profit. He's an adulterer, a fake Christian, and a devil in disguise.

raynebc, I would debate this further, but you are clearly deluded. You consume Trump's lies like they're breakfast sandwiches. Your opinion sounds like a sound bite from Fox News. But you've got it all figured out, so don't worry about it. When Trump goes to prison, maybe you'll lose faith in him. He's over a billion dollars in debt. He's the worst businessman in history, and he's not only bankrupt financially but morally and spiritually as well. He's destroying what's left of the Republican party, and you best abandon ship before it sinks. If the only ones in danger of destruction were the Republicans I wouldn't care, but he's destroying our country too. He is absolutely UNFIT to be the President of our great United States of America. The sooner he's gone the better.

jmasterx

https://twitter.com/mshelton/status/1318303047647309824?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1318303047647309824%7Ctwgr%5Eshare_3%2Ccontainerclick_1&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.verdict.co.uk%2Ftrump-nobody-gets-hacked%2F

Guys, so, I was wondering, if it's okay with you guys, seeing as how my IQ is only 196, if I could have 15% of your passwords... don't worry, my IQ is not planning to go up to 197 anytime soon, if anything it's tending toward a very safe 195.

Edgar Reynaldo

I will gladly give you 15% of my password if you give me 15% of your income. :D

jmasterx

15% of your password could save you 15% on car insurance >:(

Edgar Reynaldo

And now for a word from our sponsors...

Bob Keane

I will gladly give you 15% of my password if you give me 15% of your income.

You sell your passwords cheap. I'd ask for his soul.

bamccaig

You can always change your password after selling it. :-/

Bob Keane
Bamccaig said:

You can always change your password after selling it.

You ruined the surprise.

Chris Katko

5th time I tried to post in 48 hours.

this site is dead.

bamccaig

Your Internet is so thin that after every breath of air it runs to the toilet to vomit! :-*

Edgar Reynaldo

Your net fu is weak, grasshopper...

Chris Katko
Member #1,881
January 2002
147500e08b2a1fc01a767afc46160c1af9d3dc24.jpg

Posted on 10-22-2020 22:19 View Profile

5th time I tried to post in 48 hours.

this site is dead.

-----sig:
“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

Erin Maus

The ItsyRealm patch notes since the March 23 birthday release are pretty big:

{"name":"612663","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/e\/7e53682b129e9082cff9d5e708c1d156.png","w":856,"h":919,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/e\/7e53682b129e9082cff9d5e708c1d156"}612663

:o

bamccaig

You've been amazing us all with your productivity on ItsyRealm. :o We've been here for like 14 years and you are top ~5 in productivity AT LEAST. You might even be top 2 TBH. If not 1. :o To be fair, I consume a lot of cannabis+alcohol, and before that a lot of alcohol, and I don't care too much about that stuff, and I care more now than I did when I joined, but I can't think of [m]any things as big.

And I think ItsyRealm will be bigger than Allegro in the end. It has the potential to be. From several directions. It's not a failure if it isn't, but that doesn't mean that it can't be too. It is already more than just something. It's a significant product. It's something very impressive. I happen to love the art, and I think that there's power in the storytelling too (even if I don't agree with all of it).

Or if I do. Meh. >:(

But you've been nailing every aspect so far so I don't want to interfere with the productizing bit. You likely know better than I. I just want for you to remain focused on a release that the world can face. :) Nothing can take away what you've accomplished (side note: this is more true the closer you are to libre/open source/data). You can only go up from here. You're pretty damn high and I think you can go much higher yet[1].

References

  1. Read: polished product with sufficient content ~~ big pay day from pay what you want, i think
Eric Johnson

Happy Halloween!

Edgar Reynaldo

{"name":"12865-istock-490891026.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/6\/b\/6b710176c32166d430f8711eba570efe.jpg","w":2178,"h":1224,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/6\/b\/6b710176c32166d430f8711eba570efe"}12865-istock-490891026.jpg

GullRaDriel

One more day before the final clash. Good luck to you all, I hope your country is not going to be fragmented and fighting because one of the candidate can not bear the results.

Arthur Kalliokoski

I hope your country is not going to be fragmented and fighting because one of the candidate can not bear the results.

the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants.

Apparently they thought a revolution was necessary every 50 years or so.

Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.

We're in the "weak men create hard times" now.

Eric Johnson

{"name":"p8a3ddogd3q11.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/9\/79ddc23dccc318c5c03fe4e79e7cac54.jpg","w":1280,"h":720,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/9\/79ddc23dccc318c5c03fe4e79e7cac54"}p8a3ddogd3q11.jpg

bamccaig

I hope when all the smoke clears there are a few more trees and a few less Walmarts. >:(

MiquelFire

There may be more trees, but I think there might be more Walmarts. :-/

Matthew Leverton

There will always be more trees than Walmarts. But maybe not Starbucks.

Eric Johnson

In all seriousness, I only hope that the person who will be elected as president will work to the betterment of our nation, regardless of party.

bamccaig

I meant after the inevitable civil war and ultimate collapse of Western civilization.

Erin Maus

Thanks for the positive comments, bamccaig. :)

...

I can't say much about what I'm doing at my current job at Truist, but it's really cool stuff and I'm excited. The experience is easily transferable to 'front-end emerging experience' jobs at Amazon, Google, and Netflix so that's super awesome... :o But I wanna stay here for a long while and move up, which is optimistically realistic. ;D Emerging technologies are a w e s o m e ~

...

I'm working on Superior Itsy armor :3 It's level 55 power armor. This means it has lower defensive bonuses but provides offensive bonuses like increased accuracy and more damage.

{"name":"612674","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/9\/a\/9ab1a9559207ecc44b932efd3f94d8cf.png","w":512,"h":512,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/9\/a\/9ab1a9559207ecc44b932efd3f94d8cf"}612674

Itsy armor and the inventory icons are the first things I drew for ItsyRealm (on the bottom) so it's fun to revisit and improve a couple years later (top). :)

bamccaig

{"name":"gemma-baby1-1417620153.gif","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/6\/3\/63410d3fd301cd6c50e48827ecc40180.gif","w":500,"h":188,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/6\/3\/63410d3fd301cd6c50e48827ecc40180"}gemma-baby1-1417620153.gif

Keep this thread alive or else. >:(

RmBeer2

KILL BABIES FOR MAINTAIN THREADS!!! YAAAAAYY!!!!! \o/

Edgar Reynaldo

This thread should be aborted. Babies should not.

bamccaig

Fetuses should be aborted if the parents don't want or can't take good care of a child. >:( There are already too many suffering children in the world. We don't need to add more.

It's acceptable to abort a new thread that you haven't posted yet, but once you've posted it can't be aborted. >:( Though unlike children an unwanted thread will not suffer, and if you ignore it for a week it will probably go away.

GullRaDriel

X-D

Edgar Reynaldo
bamccaig said:

Fetuses should be aborted if the parents don't want or can't take good care of a child. >:( There are already too many suffering children in the world. We don't need to add more.

Humans shouldn't have sex if they don't want a baby. That is how they get made after all. Just because you regret it doesn't mean you're not responsible for the life inside you. It's called adoption, it's a good alternative. You don't want children to suffer, donate to food banks, and quit making babies you can't support.

MiquelFire

And don't get raped.

bamccaig

Humans shouldn't have sex if they don't want a baby. That is how they get made after all. Just because you regret it doesn't mean you're not responsible for the life inside you. It's called adoption, it's a good alternative. You don't want children to suffer, donate to food banks, and quit making babies you can't support.

That's an unrealistic expectation. Sex is healthy and natural. It's well understood that people have sex not only for reproduction, but also for recreation (most of the time). We have effective birth control mechanisms, but most of them are under women's control.

Condoms work well, when used properly, but they're also error prone and they can easily fail. Anybody that has used them can attest to that. Men don't really have any other way to avoid unwanted pregnancies, and men are typically the ones most in need of recreational sex.

Abortion is that last resort for those few accidents that slip through, whether precautions were taken and failed, or poor decisions were made in the heat of the moment. It's also there for rape victims. We're human. We're not perfect. Which means we'll occasionally make mistakes. No child should be forced to suffer through life because their parents chose to have some fun. The real world has no use for black and white. The real world is mostly gray.

Abortion is a reasonable option for couples that choose to use it. Nobody is forcing you to abort a baby, but you don't have the authority to control what others do.

Edgar Reynaldo
bamccaig said:

Abortion is a reasonable option for couples that choose to use it. Nobody is forcing you to abort a baby, but you don't have the authority to control what others do.

Abortion is unreasonable in every situation except those where the mother's life is in danger or she was raped as MiguelFire liked to point out.

If you don't have the authority to control what others do, what gives you the right to terminate a perfectly healthy pregnancy? Babies have bodies too, who is looking out for them? Nobody except us pro lifers.

Yes you heard that right. I used to be fully pro choice, but I am now pro life in every reasonable situation. NiteHackr and raynebc would be proud that I changed my mind on this.

Have you ever seen what happens during an abortion? They reach inside the woman with gripping tongs and tear the baby apart piece by piece until they've removed it all. How would you like to be ripped limb from limb and thrown away? That's what you're suggesting, and it is evil.

Abortion has no place in an honorable society.

Recreational sex is like recreational drugs. Sure it's fun, but just wait until your responsibilities come back around. Jerking off is free. Porn is free. Babies are not.

Matthew Leverton

Pro life goes beyond anti abortion. It means you are for free healthcare, against guns and wars, for free education, pro immigration, etc. I don't know your positions on those things, but the general "pro life" person is really nothing but anti abortion.

Got to let the babies be born but after that, you're on your own. You can live a horrible life and die painfully, but that's the cost of living.

I personally am pro life, but the solution to me isn't an aggressive war against abortion, but against the conditions that cause people to seek them.

Edgar Reynaldo

I fully support all of the things you just mentioned, but now consider myself pro life. I am a Democrat as well, which means I support things like inexpensive health care, immigration with humanity, and respect for all life. Don't lump me in with the "pro lifers" who are only for criminalizing abortion.

I don't believe abortion should be criminalized, but neither do I believe it should be supported. Life should be respected and cared for at all ages and stages of life.

I mean seriously, have you ever seen a video of an abortion? If you haven't, you should watch one. Watch them tear apart a human being. It might change your mind if you think abortion is somehow okay.

The only reason people think abortion is okay is because they've dehumanized the lives of unborn babies. They have a right to life, however hard, as surely as you or I do. Aborting babies is selfish and irresponsible. People need to be held accountable for the decisions that they make.

If a woman is healthy, and she has a baby inside her which is also healthy, there is absolutely no excuse to abort the baby. Sorry you weren't prepared for it, but you still have to take responsibility for the life inside you.

Erin Maus

It's 2020, men can have children too. >:(

Edgar Reynaldo

Grow up. If you can carry a baby, you're a woman. If you can fertilize an egg, you're a man. If you can do both, you're a hermaphrodite. If you can't do either, you're asexual. Stop blurring sexes for the sake of your personal comfort.

EDIT
Stop twisting around the natural definition of sex, when you're clearly referring to gender. I should be able to refer to someone either as their biological sex, or their personal gender, and not be punished for either. This whole PC shit is just too much.

Erin Maus

Wrong. :)

Where'd you learn your biology from, the bible? ;D

bamccaig

If you don't have the authority to control what others do, what gives you the right to terminate a perfectly healthy pregnancy? Babies have bodies too, who is looking out for them? Nobody except us pro lifers.

Are you suggesting that children, even infants, should be free to do whatever they want and parents should have no control over them? Surely not. And so your point is invalid. Children are already at the mercy of their parents. That's true whether you're talking abortion, nurture and discipline strategies, or abuse. We don't even really have a solution for abusive parents. The best we can do is put the children into the care of others, but the rate of abuse in these conditions is even higher than among parents!

Yes you heard that right. I used to be fully pro choice, but I am now pro life in every reasonable situation. NiteHackr and raynebc would be proud that I changed my mind on this.

I don't think those are the people that you should be trying to please. :-X I see this as a regression. :P

Have you ever seen what happens during an abortion? They reach inside the woman with gripping tongs and tear the baby apart piece by piece until they've removed it all. How would you like to be ripped limb from limb and thrown away? That's what you're suggesting, and it is evil.

I've heard the birth part isn't so pretty itself. ::) Neither is the birth canal 15% (or more) of the time[1]. :P Just because something is "gross" or unpleasant doesn't mean that it's morally wrong.

There's no debate among professionals. Doctors are generally on-board for abortions, except for a tiny minority that are too attached to their religious beliefs and I wouldn't want them treating me. There are risks, but pregnancy carries its share of risks too. They're well enough controlled to be a non-issue. Most importantly, it doesn't hurt anyone other than those involved. Mostly the mother, but maybe also the father, and maybe close friends/family if you want to be overly touchy-feely. The fetus is not developed enough to feel anything. I know I seemed to "come online" around 2 years old. That's around my first memories, ever. Meaning even when I was super young I could not remember anything before then. And we're talking about ending life before the fetus is ever even birthed. Far from being able to survive on its own. Pain is not evil. Pain is necessary. I promise you if the fetus is even capable of feeling pain it pales in comparison to the pain it will likely endure in life.

They're not tearing a baby apart. They're tearing a fetus apart. If we could Star Trek style transport it out and keep it alive you wouldn't even recognize it as human yet. It depends on when the abortion occurs. Obviously the sooner it's done the less developed the fetus will be.

You can be assured that the fetus isn't a "person" that feels its body being ripped apart. The baby wouldn't even have a conscious mind to process it with. Even if it was felt it would just be signals that the brain wouldn't even understand beyond instinct. It's hard to imagine how an early fetus could suffer any more than a chicken or a fly, which we slaughter horrendously on a routine basis for luxurious food or just pure convenience.

You're also operating under the assumption that if not aborted that fetus is going to arrive to a family with the means to love and care for it. Often when abortion is on the table what otherwise awaits the child if carried to term is extreme poverty, repeated neglect and abuse, and essentially slavery once they're old enough to "get a fucking job, you bum". Odds of being stuck in a dead end minimum wage job are high, odds of depending on drugs to ease the horrors of the life they've been forced into are high, and therefore odds of incarceration are also high. One in a million might get lucky and climb the socio-economic ladder. The other 999,999 are just going to suffer a shitty existence worse than I can relate to (which is saying something I think).

There's nothing wrong with bringing children into the world in those circumstances. Life isn't always fair. Sometimes life is tough. And some people still think it's worth enduring. Others, on the other hand, beg for death. They wish they were never born. If we lived in a healthy society that took care of every one then you might have a point. In reality, "pro-lifers" only really care about the baby until it's born. Then it's not their problem anymore, and you won't find too many making sacrifices to provide those other people's children with better lives. It's easy to claim righteousness. Earning it is a lot more trouble.

Abortion has no place in an honorable society.

When we live in an honorable society we can revisit the laws then.

Recreational sex is like recreational drugs. Sure it's fun, but just wait until your responsibilities come back around. Jerking off is free. Porn is free. Babies are not.

Porn is actually considered generally unhealthy. I would bet that recreational sex is considered healthier than masturbation is. Masturbation is better than nothing when options are limited, but I don't think I need to explain to anyone here that it's a poor substitute for the real thing. :) It sort of misses the point entirely. There's no emotional level/connection, which really misses the point. Still it satisfies the biological need for some hours, but it still leaves you empty. And you become desensitized to porn over time, which requires more extreme forms to continue working. I've found that it also allows your imagination to get lazy. The technology of today still pales in comparison to what your brain can do. Porn has its limited place and should remain legal, but it's certainly no argument for prohibiting recreational sex, and by extension no argument for prohibiting abortion.

Append:

It shouldn't need saying, but I'll say it anyway. I'm not suggesting that abortion is an appropriate birth control strategy. It's risky. It's serious. It is a last resort for people that conclude that having the baby is a worse outcome than aborting the baby, which is not the default. I don't think anybody is advocating for routine abortions. They're always going to be an exception, at least until technology gets to Star Trek levels. For the people that need an abortion though they really need it. And think about it, if they really don't, but choose it anyway, do you think they would make good parents?

Re: adoption. There are countless children in state care all over the world with nobody willing to adopt them. Few people opt for adoption over a natural birth, and few are willing to make sacrifices to care for extra people. On top of that, there is an increased risk that foster or adoptive parents will be abusive. It's certainly a fine option, but there's no reason to believe it's a better outcome than a quick death prior to consciousness.

References

  1. I just read that the average woman spends 10 years of their life menstruating. :o
Edgar Reynaldo
Erin Maus said:

Where'd you learn your biology from, the bible? ;D

Where'd you learn it from? The manual of LGBTQ PC bullshit? You don't even know whether you're a man or a woman, so who are you to tell me anything?

bamccaig said:

Are you suggesting that children, even infants, should be free to do whatever they want and parents should have no control over them? Surely not. And so your point is invalid.

So parents should be able to terminate their children's lives whenever it pleases them? Or only when they're small? Your point is invalid because a baby has a life of its own. And you would be willing to discard it without a care in the world, because you don't respect life. Tell me bamccaig, is it okay to kill a baby once it is born? What about the day before? The day before that? When is it ok to kill babies? The answer is almost never.

bamccaig said:

I don't think those are the people that you should be trying to please. :-X I see this as a regression. :P

Only because you fail to recognize anyone's opinion other than yours as valid.

bamccaig said:

I've heard the birth part isn't so pretty itself. ::) Neither is the birth canal 15% (or more) of the time[1]. :P Just because something is "gross" or unpleasant doesn't mean that it's morally wrong.

If you can't tell the difference between gross and evil, I can't help you. We all know mutilation of a body is a serious crime. That you would even think to condone it makes me think very poorly of your moral compass.

bamccaig said:

There's no debate among professionals. Doctors are generally on-board for abortions, except for a tiny minority that are too attached to their religious beliefs and I wouldn't want them treating me.

The video I watched was from a doctor who used to perform abortions. It's a macabre, senseless act of violence against an innocent, immature human being. I suppose Jesus healing people was just part of an act, right? Jesus can be my doctor anyday. Because he actually knows what's wrong and how to fix it. Sometimes he works through human doctors, but I don't believe God doesn't still perform miracles.

bamccaig said:

Most importantly, it doesn't hurt anyone other than those involved. Mostly the mother, but maybe also the father, and maybe close friends/family if you want to be overly touchy-feely. The fetus is not developed enough to feel anything. I know I seemed to "come online" around 2 years old. That's around my first memories, ever. Meaning even when I was super young I could not remember anything before then. And we're talking about ending life before the fetus is ever even birthed. Far from being able to survive on its own. Pain is not evil. Pain is necessary. I promise you if the fetus is even capable of feeling pain it pales in comparison to the pain it will likely endure in life.

You're basing this on your own biased experience. We know fetuses respond to external stimuli, such as music, the emotional state of the mother, etc... Also, you're putting this forth based on ZERO scientific evidence.

If life is so painful, why don't we all just drink the kool-aid? Because life is full of other things, some good, some bad, but it's not up to you to decide that that babies life is or isn't worth living.

bamccaig said:

They're not tearing a baby apart. They're tearing a fetus apart.

I used to think the same way. But I was wrong. If you take a one day old baby and regress it one day, it is a fetus. What happens during birth that magically makes the baby alive instead of dead?

You can't answer the question as to when life begins so you can't possibly tell me a fetus isn't alive.

bamccaig said:

You're also operating under the assumption that if not aborted that fetus is going to arrive to a family with the means to love and care for it. Often when abortion is on the table what otherwise awaits the child if carried to term is extreme poverty, repeated neglect and abuse, and essentially slavery once they're old enough to "get a ing job, you bum". Odds of being stuck in a dead end minimum wage job are high, odds of depending on drugs to ease the horrors of the life they've been forced into are high, and therefore odds of incarceration are also high. One in a million might get lucky and climb the socio-economic ladder. The other 999,999 are just going to suffer a existence worse than I can relate to (which is saying something I think).

At least if the baby is born, it has a chance. You have no way of knowing whether their life will be 'good' or not. You have no way of saying whether their life would be 'worth it' or not. You are NOT QUALIFIED to judge a baby to death based on your own perception of what their life would be like. AND, if they are going to suffer so much in life, then it's our responsibility to make it better for them. I love how you atheists blame God for starving children in Africa when he provides America with more than it will ever need. He provides us so much, because He expects us to USE it to TAKE CARE of others.

bamccaig said:

In reality, "pro-lifers" only really care about the baby until it's born. Then it's not their problem anymore, and you won't find too many making sacrifices to provide those other people's children with better lives. It's easy to claim righteousness. Earning it is a lot more trouble.

Maybe some are like that, I wouldn't know. I'm not. I always help people in need if I can. Righteousness is not about saving everyone at once. It's about saving one person at a time until everyone is.

bamccaig said:

When we live in an honorable society we can revisit the laws then.

When we revisit the laws, we can make an honorable society.

If your 'need' for sex is causing you problems, you can always cut your testicles off. ;P

If you have sex, whether it's recreational or not, you have a responsibility to care for any offspring you create. It's selfish and irresponsible to have an abortion to cover up your mistakes and immaturity.

When I was in high school, I had the chance to have sex with my girlfriend in the back of the car. I stopped before things got out of hand, because we were not using birth control of any kind. That's called responsibility bambams. It cost me a relationship with a woman I loved very much, because she felt jilted. But if we had kept going, she probably would have gotten pregnant, at 17, and both our lives would have been changed forever. Better to let go of the woman I love than to make a baby we weren't prepared to care for. Responsibility. Let that word sink in bambams.

Having an abortion is not a 'responsible' thing to do. It is selfish, immature, and evil. Adoption is always a better option given a system to ensure children receive responsible adoptive parents.

https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Ezekiel-Chapter-16/

1 Again the word of the LORD came unto me, saying,

2 Son of man, cause Jerusalem to know her abominations,

3 And say, Thus saith the Lord GOD unto Jerusalem; Thy birth and thy nativity is of the land of Canaan; thy father was an Amorite, and thy mother an Hittite.

4 And as for thy nativity, in the day thou wast born thy navel was not cut, neither wast thou washed in water to supple thee; thou wast not salted at all, nor swaddled at all.

5 None eye pitied thee, to do any of these unto thee, to have compassion upon thee; but thou wast cast out in the open field, to the lothing of thy person, in the day that thou wast born.

6 And when I passed by thee, and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live; yea, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live.

God has mercy on his children. What have you got but excuses to commit sin?

Erin Maus

There's more than two genders. :)

RmBeer2

@bamccaig :
you are a hero, always rescuing threads about to die!

# pkill -9 child; pkill -9 fetus; pkill -9 baby; pkill -9 babi

Sex is healthy, therefore rape is healthy too. (?)

If all else fails we can always resort to castration, free castration for men and women, once you don't have genitalia there is no reason to miss it. Castration is the solution to all your problems. (I wonder that no one has mentioned castration.)

but I don't think it works because no one wants to castrate themselves, everyone wants to have hard sex. And don't even think about making laws where you need a license to have babies because governments don't last a second, all the people protesting, shouting and destroying cultural heritage while shouting that they want to have sex.

ok, this is not funny. It already made me want to drop 20 nuclear silos around the world and destroy them all to lower their population of idiots.

PD: There is a third genre: The quantum genre. They are as powerful as the gods.

bamccaig
RmBeer2 said:

Sex is healthy, therefore rape is healthy too. (?)

There's more resistance during rape so I doubt it would be considered physically healthy for either sex physically, but certainly not for the victim (whatever sex/hormone). Obviously the victim will suffer mentally, and likely physically as well. It might physically be healthy for the perpetrator, but I think that it would be mentally harmful regardless. Then again, I guess if you're crazy to begin with then no harm done?

Append:

I had started writing up a lengthy response to Edgar, but decided to axe it. It was getting wordy and disorganized. Wordy I like. Disorganized I do not. My mental state is weird this year. I'm super distracted. Anyway, point being that I don't believe in ridiculous religious fairytales, and science believes fetuses can't realistically experience pain until the third trimester. So the whole "the poor baby!" argument is out the window, at least as far as human knowledge goes. It's fair for you to say that you still believe that fetuses feel pain. You can believe in imaginary wizards in the sky, so we have to give you this other thing. But just because you believe it doesn't mean that you can dictate what other people do.

Your mind is very sheltered if you think that all children born are better off than if they weren't born. I admire your innocence and ignorance, but that's just simply not true. Abortion is an extreme solution. It's fucking surgery. That's never to be taken lightly. That said, nobody is suggesting using abortion as birth control. Any couple stupid enough to do this would quickly change their mind after their first experience. It's not a realistic concern. The people that are seeking abortions have good reasons for doing so. Ultimately it's their DNA, and we have no reason to conclude that fetuses deserve "rights", so I think that it's most reasonable to let others be free to do as they please and you mind your own business. :)

Personally, I'm finally coming to terms with having kids of my own. I don't think that I'll make a perfect father, but hopefully if we do get pregnant I am able to handle whatever additional pressures are put on me. My primary concern is that my parents are getting older, and I want for my kids to get to meet their grandparents and spend lots of time while they can. I was fortunate that my parents had me 10 years earlier so I had that extra time with my grandparents. My grandparents also lived to a ripe age, which I'm concerned that my parents might not be able to match. :-X And while I may not be a very good role model some of the time, my parents are great most of the time.

My wife on the other hand is just baby crazy, as is typical for women her age. The clock is ticking, and it's starting to wind down so we don't have many more years before the risks start to increase for mother and child. Abortion isn't something I'm likely to need in the immediate future, but I still want it to be available for the people that might still require it.

LennyLen

When it comes to abortion, the only opinion that matters is that of the woman who is pregnant. While I would hope that she would at least take the opinion of the father into consideration, ultimately she gets to decide what to do with her body.

RmBeer2 said:

Sex is healthy, therefore rape is healthy too

The reason you come to an incorrect conclusion is because your premise is incorrect. Not all sex is healthy. Sex can be used as a a weapon, and sex can be abused like a drug. Then there's literal unhealthy sex, a la STDs.

bamccaig
LennyLen said:

When it comes to abortion, the only opinion that matters is that of the woman who is pregnant. While I would hope that she would at least take the opinion of the father into consideration, ultimately she gets to decide what to do with her body.

I agree with this completely.

That said, in this political climate it needs to be stated that men have very few rights when it comes to reproduction, and that's unjust. The laws were written overly favoring women trying to protect them and the result is that men have been victimized instead.

I do not believe that a man should be forced to provide for a child unless he opts into it. Meaning whenever a child is born both parents have to opt-in, and if neither does the baby is put up for adoption (if too much strain is put on the foster care system then I think it reasonable to apply a penalty for rejecting a child after birth instead of aborting when it was reasonable). If only one of the parents wants the child then they're taking the responsibility on themselves to provide for it. Meaning no child support. I think that we should encourage couples to raise children, not single parents of either gender, and so we need to abolish the laws that empower individuals to coerce money from co-parents. That was never the intended purpose of those laws, or if it was then those laws were always unjust.

I also think that marriage should not be taken lightly, and divorce should not be so rewarding for women. I see no reason why women should be supported by husbands after divorce, particularly divorce that the woman initiated without reasonable cause, such as abuse or neglect.

I personally would have no problem if a woman that I impregnated aborted the child against my will. Pregnancy carries its own risks, and there are many reasons she might not wish to have a child with you, even after consenting to recreational sex or even agreeing to do so. I might well be upset if we had planned the baby, or if we had agreed upon it once it occurred and after months of preparations she changed her mind, but regardless I still think she has the right to abort because it's her body. Though perhaps there should be legal ramifications in that case (e.g., compensate for wasted time/money already invested).

I'm basically in favor of both sexes having complete control of their participation in the bearing of children. I think that this will protect victims from being trapped, and will also encourage more healthy relationships that will produce more productive members of society.

While I'm on the subject I also think that prostitution should be legalized. I think that it would be good for the people that work in the sex industry to regulate it (make it safer by keeping it out in the open and on the books), but I also think that many members of society would benefit from easy access to sex and that could result in less sex crime, and also expose more sex crime to the law. It might also help to restore a balance to the cost of pussy. :D

LennyLen said:

The reason you come to an incorrect conclusion is because your premise is incorrect. Not all sex is healthy.

An excellent distinction to make. I don't know if it's just stoner paranoia or what, but I've found that since I've been using cannabis I find myself noticing subtle nuances that are significant that easily slip the mind on a daily basis and it's alarming. When I'm stoned paranoia often centers around major existential shit, like what if the idea that we know what we're doing and we're on a good path is just a delusion, and in reality we're really just as ignorant and stupid and primitive as our ancestors millions of years ago and our related species, pets, and wild animals today?

The way that I frame it is that I always had the impression throughout the public school system that the things we were taught were very carefully researched, studied, planned, and orchestrated, and basically assumed that the things we were taught and how we were taught them was backed by science. Because why the hell wouldn't you structure society that way?! It turns out that couldn't be further from the truth. Instead people with good social skills and appearance smile on a stage, convince enough of us to trust them with deciding what to do, and then these anybody's just do whatever the fuck they feel like without having to answer to anyone. What in the actual fuck guys?!

LennyLen
bamccaig said:

While I'm on the subject I also think that prostitution should be legalized.

Here's an interesting distinction between our two countries. Prostitution has been legal here for a long time, but marijuana is still illegal here[1].

References

  1. We just voted on a referendum to legalize it but it, but the yes vote lost by a small margin
bamccaig
LennyLen said:

Here's an interesting distinction between our two countries. Prostitution has been legal here for a long time, but marijuana is still illegal here.

I recently learned that prostitution was legal in Australia and New Zealand. That blew my mind. I can't believe that I was oblivious to it. I think that it's a great thing, and I want to learn more about how it has been going.

LennyLen said:

We just voted on a referendum to legalize it but it, but the yes vote lost by a small margin

I'm sorry to hear that. Shitty. It's such a valuable plant, and such a harmless one. It's just so batshit insane that cannabis is illegal in a world where alcohol is legal and encouraged. I'm glad that Canada has half-escaped from that trap, but I'm wary that a Conservative government might try to drag us back to the dark ages.

On the subject I just bought an ounce of potent Indica-dominant bud. I haven't cracked open any of the packages yet because I'm still working on some Pink Kush and Sensi Star, but I have an envelope with 14 g of Afghan Kush (18.8% THC), 15 g of Sour Kush (19.6% THC), and a prerolled 1 g joint of Rockstar Kush (~18% THC). I hope this to be at least a month supply, if not two months, but I've been using a lot more lately so I'm worried it won't get me through December. :P I still have ~1 gram of Pink Kush and ~1 gram of Sensi Star left, plus ~4 grams of random Indica-dominant flower (~16% THC) too. And I pick up 510 Thread cartridges ever few weeks for the convenience. :-/

Matthew Leverton
BamBam said:

I see no reason why women should be supported by husbands after divorce, particularly divorce that the woman initiated without reasonable cause, such as abuse or neglect.

In case you really don't know why...

Women in general are the ones who gave up their careers in order to raise children mutually in good faith with their husbands. When they mutually agree to separate for whatever reason, the women in this case are at a serious disadvantage because they personally gave up status for the benefit of their relationship. The ex-husband is now paying back that virtual loan, usually until the last child is an adult.

In cases where the women were the providers, then they have to pay the man support.

In cases where they were equal, then nobody pays anybody.

I would agree with you that it seems whenever there is disagreement on the above classifications that the woman gets the benefit of the doubt. Maybe the men should be better negotiators? Everybody gets to argue in court. I sort of get the feeling that the men want out more desperately than the women, so they are more willing to concede faster to get it over with. :P

It's a bit interesting because divorce is basically the point where most people stop thinking about the relationship as a holy matrimony, but as a failed business partnership where you are claiming royalty stake to each other's intellectual property that you believe was only possible because of your contributions.

RmBeer2

this thread goes round...

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bamccaig

In case you really don't know why...

It appears you're the one that doesn't know why. :P

Women in general are the ones who gave up their careers in order to raise children mutually in good faith with their husbands. When they mutually agree to separate for whatever reason, the women in this case are at a serious disadvantage because they personally gave up status for the benefit of their relationship. The ex-husband is now paying back that virtual loan, usually until the last child is an adult.

You're partly correct in that marriage is essentially a business transaction. You're mistaken assuming that women are sacrificing careers/income/prosperity in order to partner up with a man. Ultimately, for both men and women the only real purpose in life is to have a family. Nothing else will really make you happy. Money truly cannot buy happiness. A lifelong marriage is a sensible trade for both partners. It provides the stability needed to raise a healthy family. Typically the man is the provider, earning most of the money required for the family to survive, and the woman is either staying at home or working part-time so that she can nurture the kids and take care of the home.

A marriage that isn't lifelong really isn't worthwhile for men. Your investment in that woman/family goes with her. The courts will likely assign the house that she can't afford to her, and give her enough of your money to pay for it. The courts assign the kids to her, and you'll be lucky to get to see them every other weekend. They'll take your wages in order to pay her to live comfortably. Money that the court demands you give her to take care of the children is entirely in her control. She can use it to buy herself things and let the kids suffer. Nobody is going to ensure that she actually takes good care of the children. If you're lucky there will be enough left over for a comfortable house of your own, but often men are stuck with a shitty apartment because that's all they can afford on what's left.

Marriage is a lifelong agreement. That the law does not uphold that anymore is largely responsible for the moral decay of our society. The current decay of marriage has made it a very bad deal for men, and that's why the MGTOW movement is growing. Men increasingly see marriage as a lose-lose scenario. This is really bad for society as a whole because it means fewer healthy families. Split families produce unhealthy children who grow up to become unhealthy adults. I myself was very much wary of marriage, and still am. It was a huge risk for me to buy into it, but I was already partway in due to the circumstances that lead my then girlfriend to move in with me (her family threw her out, and she would have been homeless or couch surfing if I hadn't taken her in). Due to common law though she was pretty much already married to me in part by the time we did get married.

What this basically equates to though is that women are a burden on men. Either on their fathers, husbands, or the state. Our society doesn't believe in socialism and so the state providing for them is always a last resort. We prefer to hook an ex-boyfriend or ex-husband into the deal instead if possible. And so you have common law and divorce courts to make a man continue to provide for a woman even after she leaves him. Nevermind that she had basically nothing to bring to the relationship, and basically earned very little throughout the relationship. We either have to make that man continue to be responsible for her, or she becomes the state's problem, and men will collectively have to foot the bill. It's an easier pill to swallow to make one man suffer instead of spreading the burden on all of us. It's not fair that that one man has to provide for her. Not in any possible way. Often he's the victim.

This social experiment we've been doing for the past 50 - 70 years hasn't been going very well. In societies where women are the most free you find the largest gender gaps. In societies where women are the least free you find the closest thing to parity that exists so far. When women are truly free to choose they choose families, children, and being housewives. It's only when women need to step up to support their families that you find them doing so (e.g., women in STEM is much more common in those societies, but it's not that women are doing STEM because they're most passionate about it, but because it's the best way for those women to help support their families). In a freer society they might choose to work part-time to earn some extra spending money and get out of the house, but you won't likely find them working 40 hours a week at a difficult job. None of that surprises scientists. It all makes perfect sense. It just happens to completely contradict the politically correct feminist ideology.

It's not that women can't do STEM. It's that they choose not to. Not only are they qualified to do STEM, but they're also qualified to do other things and they typically are more fulfilled doing other things (working with people instead of machines and numbers).

The women that I went to high school with have pretty much all settled down as wives and mothers as far as I know. Most of them would have brought debt with them into their marriage from post-secondary school. My wife owes something like $20,000 in student debt that she wouldn't be able to afford if she was living on her own. She was finally able to graduate living under my roof, but she's only just making more than minimum wage with the diploma that she got and there's really no career advancement in her field. All of that debt was for nothing. That seems more common than not.

I would agree with you that it seems whenever there is disagreement on the above classifications that the woman gets the benefit of the doubt. Maybe the men should be better negotiators? Everybody gets to argue in court. I sort of get the feeling that the men want out more desperately than the women, so they are more willing to concede faster to get it over with. :P

You're completely wrong. Do you not know anybody that has gone through divorce? The laws are biased in favor of women (see below). We all know the real reason for that. Women don't want to work hard to take care of themselves. They prefer to be taken care of.

video

From a female family court attorney, who runs a mostly female firm, defending men in family court. The laws are unjust and unfair. Men do a terrible job of standing up for themselves, that's true.

That's largely a social construct. We teach men that good men make sacrifices to take care of others and don't complain. Men that don't take care of women don't provide for a family we call bums. Women that do the same are just victims. Essentially men are the slaves in a society that supports women. Must be that filthy patriarchy at work!

Erin Maus

The nice thing about having a diverse group of friends, living in a diverse city, and working at a diverse company is you find out first hand how wrong bambams is. :)

Entirely unrelated, I keep daydreaming about buying a fully specced new Acura TLX for some reason. It wouldn't break the bank, but my Honda Accord EX-L is just fine and also really nice. Capitalism brain worms :(

bamccaig
Erin Maus said:

The nice thing about having a diverse group of friends, living in a diverse city, and working at a diverse company is you find out first hand how wrong bambams is. :)

If I'm wrong I wish you'd explain how. ::) Claiming that I'm wrong without discussing it is very disingenuous. >:(

Erin Maus

Most of my close girl friends and a lot of my female acquaintances have successful careers and solid education in STEM and other 'successful' degrees. Their careers range from finance, software development, product management, marketing/design, etc. This also goes for a lot of my AFAB friends (i.e., were raised as a girl but are not cisgender).

I've met these peeps from work, from friends of friends, and also from outside work.

A large section (nearly 30-50% depending on the point in time and my team) of my coworkers at Allstate and Truist are women. They were software engineers (from mid-level to senior positions), product managers, design, etc. These women with product manager careers (and other managerial positions) often have degrees in computer science and other STEM fields.

And this is not just gendered. We're talking differences like age, race, disabilities, religion, nationalities, etc.

Maybe I'm biased and lucky to live in a city with a diverse population, work with a diverse population, and enjoy the company of a diverse group of people.

Of the portion of my "AFAB" friends and the portion of my "AMAB" friends, my AFAB friends are doing better with their careers and situations. :)

bamccaig

I'm not even sure what point of mine you're arguing against. :-/

I'm considering extending acc.js to support automatic in/out substitutions when reading and submitting a post. :P It seems like sometimes we're saying the same thing in incompatible ways.

Erin Maus

Which is better, top or bottom? ???

Top is still very WIP (for example, the scroll bars are the wrong color), but supports sections & stuff that the bottom doesn't. (Well, it will. I'm working on it.)

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bamccaig

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Are we changing the subject? :P

Eric Johnson

Happy Gluttons' Day, guys!

RmBeer2

I need drain the energy of @Erin Maus for my games.

You can use a option for change the interface. You already have the two.

DanielH

I like option 2, but make it a little bigger.

2 extra columns and 1 row

Neil Roy

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bamccaig

It takes guts to wear the face of a loser. :D The popcorn is like you self owned yourself. ;D

jmasterx

video

New song >:(

Neil Roy

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It’s Happening: Pennsylvania State Legislature Files Resolution — DISPUTES STATEWIDE 2020 ELECTION RESULTS

Sidney Powell Files “Bombshell” Election Fraud Lawsuit in Georgia

Huge court win lets Trump present ballot evidence, could overturn Nevada result

I Was an International Audit Executive Based in Hong Kong: It is Clear Fraud Occurred in the 2020 Election and the Current Results Embedded with Fraud Will Be Overturned

Georgia Lawsuit: Witness Testifies About Use of Different Paper For ‘Counterfeit’ Ballots, ‘Watermark Solid Grey Instead of Transparent’ – 100% For Joe Biden

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LennyLen

@NiteHackr

It depends on where you read your news I suppose. This article just happened to come up in my FB news feed: https://www.post-gazette.com/local/2020/10/13/Pennsylvania-mail-in-ballot-requests-2-6-million-registered-voters-PA-2020/stories/202010130153?fbclid=IwAR2z2aBxAmz9gUiv9C2wHcZO_VEnUb-PeFeD1CMJCJ_tS4p5BvGDSscykF0

And it states that 2.6 million ballots were mailed out in Pennsylvania.

As to who is telling the truth or not, I don't know. Luckily for me, I don't care either.

RmBeer2

@NiteHackr

It's not strange, I also usually hack to have infinite money, infinite lives, infinite power, immortality, etc. 8-)

Bob Keane

Does anyone consider Snopes.com biased? I found this. And can someone twit Doug Mastriano the reference please? He wants to know where the votes came from.

Edgar Reynaldo

@NiteHackr
Chill out, don't be so bitter

Also, get off my lawn, whippersnapper! @AK

Landslide for Biden - 80 million votes, biyatches.

8-)

Arthur Kalliokoski

Edgar thinks CNN is good journalism. Stick to coding, son.

relpatseht

Yes, all media sources have implicit biases, but are you trying to draw equivalence between CNN and The Gateway Pundit? That would make me strongly curious as to your source for media rankings and metrics.

Matthew Leverton

It's too bad we don't have a system where you can argue your case in front of a panel of professional people nominated by past Republican Presidents who can judge the merits of your claims based on the evidence you provide.

Edgar Reynaldo

Yes please, let's discuss the Supreme Court. Brett Kavanaugh is a blackout drunk, and a rapist like the guy who nominated him, and Amy Coney Barrett is not qualified to sit on the SCOTUS. She has almost no experience as a judge, she has bad rulings on the cases she did judge, and she forgot the right to protest as a fundamental right given by the constitution. Bleh.

R3p1Y 5100 baby 8-) Cash money

Bob Keane

It's too bad we don't have a system where you can argue your case in front of a panel of professional people nominated by past Republican Presidents who can judge the merits of your claims based on the evidence you provide.

I may be wrong on this but the Supreme Court's function is to decide whether the Constitution is or was violated in the process of working its way to the Court, not decide how the case should be decided. As for evidence, there is none.

And Mr. Tump may not be able to count on Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh if it gets to the Supreme Court.

Neil Roy

Just some more news updates from alternate news sources. Take away from it what you will.

-------
This was a MAJOR FRAUD | Rudy Giuliani

video

-------
Newt Gingrich: 2020 Election May Be ‘Biggest Presidential Theft’ Since 1824
-------
Data expert: Vote tabulation feeds in PA, GA show 'anomalies' suggesting Trump missing votes
-------
JUST RELEASED: Phone Call To Chinese Manufacturer Requesting a Bulk Order of Fake U.S. 2020 Ballots
-------
GOP Deals Huge Blow To Pelosi After Candidate Wins Recount By Six Votes In Iowa
-------
Videos Show Votes From Five Different States Being Switched From Trump To Biden On Live TV
-------

Something new. This video explains what happens if Trump does not concede. If you check the 12th ammendment, he's absolutely right. It's going to be an interesting few months to come.

Shane Vaughn Teaches - "What Happens If President Trump Does Not Concede The Election"

video

Chris Katko

I'll believe the "GOP bombshells" when they actually deliver. To me it's no different than CNN and Rachel Mad-row telling us they found "the smoking gun" every day that confirmed Trump is an agent of Russia, and then literally cried on national television when the evidence proved he wasn't.

On the democrat-side: I am hugely skeptical of anyone who says "we don't need transparency". But that doesn't mean there's positive evidence of national interference yet.

On a hilarious sidenote there are dozens of articles talking about a 2016 recount (and don't forget Brexit) as well as the "dangers of electronic voting machines": ;D;D;D;D

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2016/12/12/records-many-votes-detroits-precincts/95363314/ "Too many votes in detroit!!!"

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38137630

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/28/election-recount-jill-stein-hillary-clinton-donald-trump

https://fortune.com/2016/12/07/michigan-election-recount-pennsylvania-wisconsin/

https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2016/12/10/what-if-michigan-held-key-presidential-election/95142214/

[etc]

I also love how in 2016 "russians hacked the election" but in 2020, we quote "had the most secure election in history." [cuz we liked the result]

Politics is so deliciously stupid. They spend 99% of their time fighting and 1% of their time thinking about how to improve their actual policies. So we get insane statements like Biden saying "police should just shoot people in the leg." [which would murder them.] Their solution to too many cops shooting people... is too keep shooting them but just shoot them in their leg so they bleed out their aorta and die. Another solution to police brutality is... to elect a cop [who laughed on TV at families thrown in jail for being poor] to the vice presidency. I can't wait for us to improve class inequality! It'll probably involve a stadium sized blender.

I miss George Carlin so much.

Bob Keane

I also love how in 2016 "russians hacked the election" but in 2020, we quote "had the most secure election in history." [cuz we liked the result]

Is it possible the election is more secure because we've taken steps to avoid hacking?

https://www.cisa.gov/election-security

And what is Mr. Trump's position on hacking?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/us-defends-russian-election-interference/2020/10/21/533b508a-130a-11eb-bc10-40b25382f1be_story.html

<edit> Am I reading this correctly?

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-giuliani-arizona-election-fraud-gop-hearing

More specifically:

Waldron claimed that a Maricopa County official said the county did not validate signatures on some ballots, creating a "1.9 million vote fraud potential." That official has not produced an affidavit, he said. Waldron also claimed that a witness from Pima County said votes were "embedded" in various precincts to achieve a Biden win.

"What I take from your testimony, Colonel, is that 35,000 votes were embedded to each Democratic candidate in Pima County, the allegation by the gentleman who hasn't given us an affidavit," Giuliani said. "We don’t know if the gentleman is telling the truth or not."

This sounds like hearsay evidence and Mr.Guiliani is attacking his own witness' veracity, which defeats his case.

Erin Maus

Elliot Page (Juno, Umbrella Academy, X-Men among others) came out as non-binary 8-)

https://variety.com/2020/film/news/elliot-page-transgender-ellen-page-juno-umbrella-academy-1234843023/

bamccaig

Yay, somebody else is suffering? :-/ It seems like his mental health has declined significantly. I find it hard to believe that the girl who became a famous child actress always believed herself not to be a girl/woman. :-/

I am really disgusted by the lack of mental health services in our society. It needs to be publicly funded and scaled up at least 1000x. Until we do this we won't have any chance of actually helping people suffering from poor mental health.

Erin Maus

If I said what I wanted, I'm certain my words would come back to haunt me. ::) Because some of us have ambitions and career goals where being overtly rude (even if we're right) could be detrimental.

I've made more of my life in the less than three years of coming to terms with my gender identity and sexual orientation than many do in a decade. Year after year I have made ENORMOUS milestones advancing my career, my relationships, my network, and my wealth. And I'm on track to keep it up.

I'm happy and stable. I've had no significant symptoms of clinical depression or schizoaffective in a couple years and very few symptoms of gender dysphoria a few months after I started my transition.

In short, I'm a successful non-binary person. :)

Arthur Kalliokoski
person said:

I'm happy and stable. I've had no significant symptoms of clinical depression or schizoaffective in a couple years and very few symptoms of gender dysphoria a few months after I started my transition.

In short, I'm a successful non-binary person.

So I haven't had any of those symptoms for 63 years, does that make me 32 times more successful?

Erin Maus

I clear six figures as a senior software developer three years into my career in an area with a low cost of living and you're what, again? :)

Neil Roy

Wow, quite the testimony! :o

video

Erin Maus

Is Barr fake news when he says there is no evidence of election fraud? ::)

Chris Katko

Erin: Glad to hear your happy and successful. Hope you have a great xmas!

[edit] jesus this is the 8th attempt to post. fix ur crap server.

Neil Roy

It is definitely fake news when anyone states that there is "no evidence". There is most definitely evidence. From eye witness testimony to other inconsistencies. That is all evidence.

Is it enough evidence to prove fraud? That's up to the legal process to decide. There's certainly statistical impossibilities like hundreds of thousands of votes suddenly appearing after all the poles "closed" and everyone was asleep. And of course the eye witness testimony.

I just read news today that Barr has assigned a special investigator to this. Time will tell, but all parties have the right to examine the votes (which was denied to observers), and to question the outcome.

Some may see this as petty, but it is vitally important if you want fair, legal and most importantly, trusted election. The right to vote, and have fair, valid, LEGAL votes is THE MOST IMPORTANT thing in a democracy. NOTHING is more important.

Al Gore was within his rights to question it back in 2000, and Trump certainly is within his rights to question it now. Back then, after the 2000 election it was determined, ironically, that mail in ballots were too open to fraud and too risky to use.

It's going to be an interesting couple of months for sure. I think we all seen problems coming of some sort or another.

I personally don't care which side wins, my MAIN concern is that the legal, valid votes are all counted, and that all ballots that were not legally cast, or cast on time, are not counted (no matter who they are for). So that the one that gets elected can be trusted to have been fairly and legally elected, whether that be Trump or Biden.

Nobody HAS to concede an election by the way. Trump is within his right to refuse to concede and if it comes to that, the 12th amendment has rules to cover that. It could ultimately come down to each state getting one vote and choosing a president (and there are more republican states than democrat).

Try and look at this fairly, with all the facts rather than through party affiliation.

-------

MICHIGAN: Six Precincts Recorded Voter Turnout At 120%, One Reported At 721%

Edgar Reynaldo
Neil Roy said:

Is it enough evidence to prove fraud? That's up to the legal process to decide. There's certainly statistical impossibilities like hundreds of thousands of votes suddenly appearing after all the poles *polls* "closed" and everyone was asleep. And of course the eye witness testimony.

Aww, the North and South poles were closed?

Just face it NiteHackr, DumpTrumpsterFire Donald lost 80 million to 71.

Recount

FFS, this is the first thing that comes up when I DDG election turnout :

In Recent News, that is, NOW, all of Trump's claims are false.

https://www.stltoday.com/news/national/govt-and-politics/ap-fact-check-trumps-claims-of-vote-rigging-are-all-wrong/article_e5e586aa-9d73-5407-9f8a-5f7b314c87d1.html

But you know to each their own I guess. But horseshit in is still horseshit out.

Arthur Kalliokoski
person said:

Just face it NiteHackr, DumpTrumpsterFire Donald lost 80 million to 71.

Really, Major, I'm disappointed in you. Weren't you the one supporting Hillary "Sniper Fire" Clinton four years ago? And Fauxahontas Warren more recently? You sound like a Redditor when we get on this subject. "Orange man bad!" "Little hands!"

Lately, they've been claiming Trump has been stealing from the government somehow, and/or he's a billion dollars in debt.

They think it's OK that Pelosi and Clinton became millionaires after they became involved in politics, in spite of the fact there's no way a congresscritters salary could accumulate such vast wealth in such a short time.

Biden however has been shown to having sold his soul to China (along with his crackhead son) and they're gonna hold that over his head to gain as much advantage as they can.

"But CNN, NBC and ABC don't agree!" if they mention it at all.

30 - 40 years ago the MSM would all preempt the usual nightly programming to air a speech by the President. But now... crickets.

Whupsy! I was going to post a link on YouTube showing Trump making a 46 minute speech which had gotten 495491 views yesterday, then the view count somehow got stuck there for hours on end, but it appears the swamp rats in the MSM have been prodded into saying "he lies". O the irony! CNN saying someone else tells lies!

Just go to the "Top News" catagory on YouTube and click on a few of the videos concering Trump, Biden and the election. Odds are the dislikes will greatly outweigh the likes, but either way, the comments almost always are slamming the dishonesty of the video.

In conclusion, Major Reynaldo, I expect you to conduct yourself as an officer and a gentleman, and if these childish tirades continue, I'll use my position of Second In Command to see you busted all the way down to buck private.

Edgar Reynaldo

Not back to peelin potatoes boss!!!

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Arthur Kalliokoski

Not back to peelin potatoes boss!!!"

Nup, they've had machines to do that for several decades now. It's the pot shack for you!

Erin Maus

I was Product Manager Erin recently. >:(

I have 77 open issues (stories) on ItsyRealm and it's probably going to more than double in total. This is to release milestone (epic) v0.2.x (finish first city, Rumbridge Port).

I organized it currently into 13 projects (features): https://github.com/erinmaus/itsyscape/projects

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Will probably rise as I mark bigger ones (quests and maps) as WIP and convert them to features.

I'm UI, UX, QA, engineering, R&D, marketing, product management, animation, graphics, and probably more I can't think of for ItsyRealm. :) Sounds fancier than it really is haha. ;D

GullRaDriel

Good work Erin, and good luck with those 77 issues ^^

RmBeer2

As long as they are not 205 pages of issues...

Edgar Reynaldo

Since we're using this thread to show our own stuff now, here's mine ;

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Erin Maus

Thanks GullRaDriel :)

Are those fractals, Edgar?

Edgar Reynaldo

Not fractals,, no. Just spirals.

8-)

Arthur Kalliokoski

That last image is very reminiscent of a deep zoom into the Mandelbrot set, that's probably what Erin was asking about.

Oh, BTW, (bump)

Neil Roy

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RmBeer2

Does anyone like wet potatoes?

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bamccaig

I would say that I universally prefer my potatoes wet. What of it? ???

LennyLen

This is what I'm doing with my time off this week.

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And I like my potatoes deep fried.

Arthur Kalliokoski

If I interpret RmBeer2's post correctly, I prefer my potatoes covered in baby oil, or nothing. :D

Chris Katko

video

bamccaig

Funny video, but the title is dumb. It's not about being British. It's about being white and nerdy. :P There are some seriously scary British dudes.

RmBeer2

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jmasterx

Made a new song just to have a reason to keep this thread alive >:(

This one is not a pop song. It's more akin to bands like SoaD or A7X.

video

>:(

bamccaig

It's interesting. I like the music a lot. Making your voice sound like an accordion is really cool. I find some of the vocals a bit rough and aggressive, so probably wouldn't mix it into a random playlist, but I could find myself listening to it on repeat without realizing it if I'm in the mood. :P I should add that you impressed me again with the vocals throughout most of the song, but some of the finer points I think were either hard to understand or sort of monotone.

jmasterx

Cool, glad you found it interesting :)

bamccaig

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That may look like I just made an HTML document and screenshotted it, but I did not. >:(

Found that today when I got home and checked my work email. 8-) I don't often have my contributions acknowledged or praised so that means a big deal to me. :P I wonder if I can use that on LinkedIn somehow later on if I need to.

I'm finally starting on my KrampusHack entry. Having fun, and progress is reasonable, but there's a long way to go. I'm hoping to use my professional experience to stay on task for a delivery, but we'll see if my game programming skills can keep up with my demands.

Our puppy's crate is finally back out of our bedroom and back in his (my nephew came to stay for a week, requiring the puppy to be relocated). So hopefully I'll be able to actually sleep in in the morning. In the meantime I'm going to burn the midnight oil hacking. Hopefully the puppy is able to sleep through it since he's now in the bedroom next to my office, and I'm using a loud, mechanical keyboard. :P

I have smoked a little more than half a gram of cannabis, but I barely feel it. I'm going to vape on my 510 battery instead. That's Sativa-based so hopefully it'll help to give me energy, and maybe will increase the frequency of creative ideas that I get. :) When I'm focused I have found this to be a programmer superpower, but it has been rare that it has had such a positive effect. :P

Using lots of cannabis. Told the doctor that, and he sounded elated on the phone. Since my last call was one of essentially relapse I think he was pretty pleased that I was abstaining again from alcohol, and said that cannabis was much safer for me. Which I like to joke means that smoking weed is "doctor's orders". Mind you, I also just happened to be feeling pretty good at the moment he caught me (mentally healthy) so I may have inadvertently oversold how well I was doing. Next appointment isn't for 3 months, though I can reach out if I need it.

I'm off the alcohol again for nearly a month, save a few cheat days. Feeling pretty good, but still experiencing depression. I find that my best days happen to be days where I manage to get proper nutrition/vitamins and lots of exercise, but it's not easy to do that and it doesn't guarantee a good day either.

We've been cheating lately. Taking the dog to the dog park. Which is much easier on us, but it's worse for me because I don't get as much exercise. It is interesting to see how Watson interacts with dogs. We've always felt that he was very well socialized, but we hadn't really introduced him to many strange dogs or several dogs at once very often. Indeed, he does amazingly well himself. He's polite and kind with the other dogs and the people. It's great. What's not great is that he initially is very insecure and it's obvious, and that makes him a target.

The first 15 minutes or so is usually him getting chased by the pack, with the most aggressive barking, snarling, and biting at him while he cowers, whimpers, and runs away from them all (fortunately, he's also generally faster than most so he can pretty well outrun them until he makes a wrong turn). It's hard to tell how much of it a game and how much of it is serious. I think that it's a game in the world of dogs, but it looks and sounds serious to us. He got bit by one dog several times, but when I checked there didn't seem to be a mark. So I think it's really just establishing the hierarchy. And once Watson has met all of the regulars it will probably help to make the transition in faster.

Eventually he does seem to make friends again and then it's all good times. It could be my wife is putting out the energy, or maybe without knowing it I am. I don't generally get the vibe from Watson that he's this insecure, though he certainly has an unsure bark when he realizes that he's protesting in vain. I suppose it's possible too that he's picking up an insecure energy off of these most aggressive dogs, and is understandably insecure because he knows they're trouble. The last time we went (I think our 3rd time so far) he actually tried to run back into the entrance pen to leave. We kind of had to force him in and ignore him tough-love style. Was a bit hard to do so we didn't do perfect, but it did get done. I'm hoping that he is overall enjoying himself and that the visits are positive for him. I think that they are, but when I see him cowering and whining it's hard to watch.

He's so quiet that he rarely speaks (maybe he gets that from me). Except unlike me he has a very big voice. :) If only he would turn and face the other dogs and be confident in himself and make some noise I think he would be running that park. He's as big or bigger than 95% of the dogs I've seen, he has the genetics of a powerful and smart breed, and he normally has positive energy that will help all the dogs thrive. What he lacks though is experience/wisdom. So it could be that will hold him back for another few years.

It'll also get better as we meet more of the regular owners, and get to know them well enough to understand whether they're a good or bad energy for the dogs. And we'll also better understand the dogs that are actual trouble versus just insecure or dominant.

OK, OK,... back to hacking.

Append:

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https://twitch.tv/freefallwefall

I began to stream on Twitch sometime overnight I think. I'm a little out of it. I've been up all night struggling to draw a brown dot. :D More precisely struggling with code perfection, project split woes, and short term memory loss. 😶‍🌫️ But also let's be real here, C++ wasted a fair bit of my time as well. Or perhaps more appropriately GCC and/or MinGW did. I'm not sure if clang is available for MinGW32, and it sounds like a hopeless venture that I shouldn't get distracted with at the moment (I've got far too many distractions as it is). But certainly GCC is still offering some pretty ridiculous error output. I guess I've forgotten how the errors tend to compound instead of the compiler understanding where the typos end. There I go digressing again...

Erin Maus

Good for you streaming. I haven't worked up the courage to stream. :(

I'm working on a trailer...

https://github.com/erinmaus/itsyscape/projects/15

The script is based off the elevator pitch in the README!

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Hoping to finish it by March 23rd, 2021 (three year mark for ItsyRealm development!!).

So I added Svalbard, an undead dragon. He's gonna have attacks like draining your health to restore his, summoning a snow storm, etc. The gimmick of the fight is you can damage his organs and bones to disable his attacks, so you can make the fight easier over time.

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bamccaig

Wrong thread. :-X Move along.

Arthur Kalliokoski

Um, what was the topic again? The title of this thread is "Thread locks too soon" but that was years ago and my memory is failing.

Edgar Reynaldo

The topic is whatever you want. Feel free to read the first 5138 posts to refresh your memory at anytime. So far we've discussed abortion, religion, politics, racism, fascism, socialism, you name it we've probably discussed it. Not many topics left.

RmBeer2

@Erin Maus :
Cool! Reminds me of Moraff World. It only remains for the Dragon to drain your level by each attack to be complete.

Chris Katko

Trump is gone in a few weeks, and still fighting to actually give you money. He wants $2000 checks, congress (both the GOP and DNC) think $600 is all you peasants deserve. (Fun fact: Nancy Pelosi demanded less than half his original request because getting another "Trump check" would make Trump look good before the elections. Literally bargaining with people's lives for political gain.)

Trump blasts Covid relief bill just passed by Congress, demands changes

Jimmy Dore (an actual progressive, something you don't see on MSNBC and CNN) goes into plenty details about how Pelosi fought for less than half of Trumps initial offer while meanwhile giving corporations the "greatest upward transfer of wealth in history".

video

Cares ACT greatest upward transfer of wealth in history

There is only one party. Megacorporations.

Jimmy Dore, being an actual progressive, has also been arguing for / demanding for Medicare for All (public healthcare) and progressive frauds like AOC have actually been fighting against it. AOC said, and I quote, "This isn't the right time for that", to which Jimmy Dore says, "A global pandemic, huge unemployment, what better time could there be to push for universal healthcare?"

Pelosi Says She Backs Smaller Stimulus Because Biden Won; Rejecting Higher Offer 'Was Not a Mistake'

LennyLen
RmBeer2 said:

Reminds me of Moraff World.

Wow. That's a game I hadn't thought of for a while. I didn't actually play a lot of it, but I played loads of Moraff's Revenge, the game it's a sequel to.

Bob Keane
LennyLen said:

Wow. That's a game I hadn't thought of for a while. I didn't actually play a lot of it, but I played loads of Moraff's Revenge, the game it's a sequel to.

It's available on Abandonware if you are looking for it.

RmBeer2

@LennyLen :
Did you already play it? Me too, but I never get to advance, I always end up falling into those damn trap portals where you fall ten levels higher and I can't kill monsters anymore, I can't go back or hack.

Matthew Leverton

Merry Christmas.

Eric Johnson

Merry Christmas! :D

RmBeer2

video

Edgar Reynaldo

rmbeer you need psychological help

Merry Christmas

Bob Keane

Since this thread is open to any question or comment, does anyone know a forum where I can post a question regarding a specific game using retroarch? I checked libreto forums and it does not look like the right place.

MiquelFire

Merry Christmas!

bamccaig

Merry Boxing Day. >:(

Append:

I got banned from #allegro on Freenode shortly after sharing this video:

video

I had understood clort to be implying that I was stupid (or that all of us in the channel were stupid) for presumably programming games instead of discussing some unknown topic that he never seemed to explain. ??? I got a troll vibe from him pretty fast, but in hindsight his English appears to be poor so that might be part of it. Anyway, understanding him to be calling me stupid I responded in kind with similar language. He goes on to out himself as an anti-masker. ::) Seemed to be making my point for me. A short while later, and without warning, I was banned. I tracked it down to an admin who disagrees with me politically and must have gotten overwhelmed this Christmas. That or he's an idiot and a jackass.

In any case, do watch the video as it's really, very important. Perhaps things would have gone differently if Sevalecan had. :)

It's worth noting that after our squabble clort and I continued to chat without incident. There was no problem. This ban was an abuse of power, pure and simple. Alas, I don't know if it'll be getting overturned. I don't expect too many moderators or influencers to value me enough to fight for me. It's really a shame that because of antisocial trolls and abusers we need to empower unqualified humans with the power to judge and control others.

Edit: I just realized that the link that clort posted in that conversation was to a video with seemingly racist language (using the N-word in a context that I think it clearly hateful/racist, mind you the video itself was obnoxious so I skimmed through it). I don't know if it's some kind of satire or art, but what I saw didn't look like it. :P

Hmmm, or nevermind? I gather that the person talking was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_A._Davis, a famous programmer who was schitzophreniac. Allegedly he explained away his racial epithets as his way of combating actors of psychological warfare. Arguably still racist, but it sounds likely that his mental health probably impacted his ability to understand and communicate with other humans so perhaps it wasn't stemming from malice. This is the first that I can recall learning of this person (though TempleOS sounds vaguely familiar, as in I've heard of it, but haven't seen or used it).

01:31 <+bambams> I want to popularize a text-based format to input data that is structured for the machine, but also simply human readable. Essentially you give it a hierarchy of typed fields and it generates a template to input them, but in plain text. Then an editor is launched. And the user is expected to edit the form basically. Save and exit and the caller would process the changes and update the store.
01:32 <+bambams> Essentially trust humans to not be complete idiots. It may not be good enough for everyone, but if it's good enough for the people that need it then it's good enough. :D
01:33 <+bambams> This can vastly simplify a sort of form-based input UI. Literally launch the user's preferred editor. (And because the data is still structured that can be a GUI that abstracts the text-based format still).
01:33 <+bambams> Essentially it enables easy access to a GUI that will match your form.
01:35 <+bambams> But yeah, a standard API to build a standard form, is really what I'm talking about at the core. But with emphasis on portability and efficiency. Command-line forms that prompt for the answer before asking the next question are tedious to use. Long command lines are in general. This is another way to build a UI on that.
01:36 <+bambams> But also a way to easily generate a usable, standard UI for your purpose.
01:36 <+bambams> Without wasting countless hours coding and debugging it. :P
01:37 <+Sevalecan> demonicmaniac1, weirdest thing, the analog stick acts "stuck" if I let it return to center... I have the deadzones adjusted to 0 and it's not helping
01:37 <+bambams> But still with full control under the hood if you need to get into it for some reason: e.g., to extend it for your purposes. I need to build some of these ideas...
01:37 <+Sevalecan> but if I keep it up or down, even though that makes no sense since it's only steering left or right, it keeps the input active
01:37 <+Sevalecan> so weird
01:38 <+clort> why smart people are talking about games and not ... is rather sad
01:39 <+bambams> What is ...? I don't watch the news or anything.
01:39 <+clort> it's smart to not watch the 'news'
01:39 <+clort> that's a layer of misdirection
01:39 <+bambams> Is this a troll? Do we have a troll now?
01:40 <+Sevalecan> how does this qualify as trolling?
01:41 <+bambams> How is it smart to ask that question?
01:41 <+Sevalecan> I guess the troll is you
01:42 <+clort> we're on same team, lets be polite :)
01:43 <+clort> but when bad people interfere with my life in unavoidable ways, it is an unavoidable issue
01:44 <+clort> and i suggest that the smart people begin to study some adult topics, like real history
01:45 <+clort> and know this, the first layer you find is misdirection, you have to dig past it
01:47 <+bambams> Yes, it can't be very important if we're talking about this instead.
01:51 <+bambams> I'm well aware the world is fucked up. And by design. And I'm well aware that I cannot change it. :P
01:51 <+bambams> But if you have any suggestions feel free to express them.
01:57 <+bambams> There's actually a tiny if not microscopic chance that I could change the world, but I'd have to risk too much to try it. There would be no coming back and the repercussions of failure would be severe. :P.
01:59 <+bambams> I'm too afraid of being "that guy" on the news that got arrested at the gate and disappeared. :P
01:59 <+bambams> Or at least, the stakes are nowhere near there for me right now.
01:59 <+bambams> I 100% understand other people's stakes are different.
02:01 <+bambams> Which reminds me, a local bartender was blasted for posting disbelief in COVID-19 and anti-masker bullshit. Exclaimed that he and his staff don't believe in masks, and won't wear them.
02:01 <+bambams> It's currently the law that bar staff need to wear a mask and I think also a plastic face shield. :P
02:02 <+bambams> So they got fined like $800. Which is fuck all. But now they're protesting it by hosting a maskless night at the bar or something. :P
02:02 <+clort> last time i went to the pub, about 100 people were there.  only one dumb girl wearing a mask.
02:03 <+bambams> So the one wearing the mask is dumb because the 99 weren't? Do you do all of your logic through group think?
02:03 <+clort> it appears we found someone who believes the corporate media
02:03 <+bambams> Nope, I believe the deathtoll.
02:03 <+bambams> I told you. I don't watch the news.
02:04 <+bambams> I don't have TV. I am not exposed to corporate anything.
02:04 <+clort> then can you tell me how this death toll is different from previous death tolls?
02:04 <+bambams> (And I'm conscious of it when I am)
02:04 <+bambams> It's a lot bigger faster.
02:05 <+bambams> And it's symptoms are much more severe. It can and is crippling hospital capacities.
02:05 <+bambams> Which means you can require emergency service, and can be told it's unavailable.
02:05 <+bambams> They will leave you in the hall to die.
02:05 <+clort> if the nurses are told to say home the capacities are reduced
02:05 <+clort> stay
02:06 <+bambams> That would be stupid, considering the nurses administer 99% of the care to the patient.
02:06 <+clort> can you tell me how this death toll is different from previous death tolls?
02:06 <+bambams> Is this a fucking bot?
02:07 <+clort> ok. you can not
02:13 -!- mode/#allegro [+v kazzmir] by ChanServ
02:18 <+clort> http://0x0.st/iF4Z.webm  terry davis (nsfc language)
02:20 <+SiegeLord> RIP Terry
02:23 <+Sevalecan> wish this emulator would let me select a different analog stick sensitivity for vertical vs horizontal on this stick
02:24 <+Sevalecan> need full travel for entering reverse in this stupid game
02:24 <+Sevalecan> but otherwise, it's too damn twitchy
02:24 <+Sevalecan> but if I select a bigger steering wheel, all it is is a fucking input phase delay
02:24 <+Sevalecan> like dude, it does NOT help me to put in a integrator into the steering
02:25 <+clort> music by clort
02:31 <+bambams> Holy fuck. Halleluiah. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1AUdaH-EPM
02:31 <+alledos> Why everything you know about autism is wrong | Jac den Houting | TEDxMacquarieUniversity
02:31 <+bambams> Seriously important video. Watch it.
02:31 <+bambams> Everyone.
02:31 <+bambams> Everybody needs to understand this. For real.
02:33 <+bambams> This researcher said that in Australia something like 93% of funding goes to trying to make autistic people conform better to norms. And only about 7% of funding for research on autism was for researching ways to help autistic people out (i.e., caring for us).
02:34 <+bambams> So much for diversity... Christ. Literally, there is nothing wrong with me. I'm awesome. But I am disabled by the world that I exist in.
02:35 <+bambams> What's also sad: instead of researching how to get the most out of autistic people by helping them thrive the research is all based on forcing them to fit into a world that they will never fit into (i.e., the impossible). :P
02:36 <+bambams> I think that this is evidence of humanity's limitations. Maybe we're getting close. :)
02:36 <+bambams> We could theoretically do much more, but it requires the cooperation of too many stupid people.
02:36 <+clort> don't be angry with me bambams. we're on the same team
02:37 <+clort> but if you've been fed false information, you will come to wrong conclusions
02:37 <+bambams> As will you. Or anyone else.
02:38 <+clort> yes, so double check the information. i don't want to 'win' any argument here
02:38 <+bambams> I typically try to get my information from scientists, indirectly because directly is often hard for me, but still credible sources.
02:39 <+clort> well there is a novelty in covid statistics
02:39 <+bambams> It's really not hard to Google this stuff and find the truth. If you're going to be a conspiracy nut and disbelieve everything inconvenient to you then so be it, but don't expect to be followed.
02:39 <+clort> it has not occurred before
02:39 <+clort> cdc guidelines have been revised
02:39 <+clort> and page-2 'comorbidities' are now assigned to the 'death toll'
02:40 <+clort> this means, in practice, that a cancer or car accident victim is added to the death toll
02:40 <+clort> if a pcr swab (unknown cycles) yielded a positive
02:40 <+bambams> None, of that, matters. It's really not about the death toll. It's about the rate of spread, and the continued vulnerabililty (reinfection), and that a sufficient number of people have complications that require hospital treatment which overloads our health care systems..
02:41 <+clort> that hasn't been the case
02:41 <+bambams> Yes. Yes it has. Hospitals in Northern Michigan are full. They cannot accept any new patients. Even big city hospitals that normally take overflows. All full.
02:41 <+clort> and it does matter what the reported 'death toll' is
02:42 <+clort> you cited it yourself
02:42 <+bambams> If you have a car accident there and require surgury good luck to you.
02:42 <+bambams> Certainly. It matters how many people die. Of course.
02:42 <+bambams> The problem with hospitals getting full is that more people will die. Of course.
02:43 <+bambams> Does it matter if you died of COVID-19 or if you died in the hall waiting for care because the hospital was full of COVID-19 patients?
02:43 <+bambams> You're dead either way.
02:44 <+bambams> The US has been once again the laughing stock of the entire planet.
02:44 <+bambams> Cocky in their arrogance.
02:45 <+bambams> Conservatives in general have been coming out of the woodwork to outwardly display just how stupid they are. :P
02:46 <+clort> if you're pushing a line that is the hard-sell of the corporate media, it is you who is in need of some introspection, bambams
02:46 <+bambams> Part of catering the world to neurodiversity might want to include revoking the vote from people deemed too stupid to scrutinize an influential idea.
03:02 -!- mode/#allegro [+o Sevalecan] by ChanServ
03:03 -!- mode/#allegro [+v amarillion] by ChanServ
03:03 -!- mode/#allegro [+m] by Sevalecan
03:03 <@Sevalecan> hmm
03:03 -!- mode/#allegro [-m] by ChanServ
03:03 <@Sevalecan> who set mlock
03:03 -!- mode/#allegro [+m] by ChanServ
03:03 -!- mode/#allegro [-o Sevalecan] by ChanServ
03:07 -!- KittyCat [~kitty@allegro/developer/KittyCat] has quit [Quit: Konversation terminated!]
03:09 -!- mode/#allegro [+v KittyCat] by ChanServ
03:13 <+SiegeLord> ? tins
03:13 <+alledos> TINS ends in 5 days and 15 hours.
03:15 <+SiegeLord> ? mlock
03:15 <+alledos> https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/mlock.2.html - mlock(2) - Linux manual page
03:16 <+SiegeLord> Gosh, this TINS is long
03:16 <+SiegeLord> I feel like I've been TINSing all December
03:17 <+Sevalecan> SiegeLord, mode lock :P
03:17 -!- mode/#allegro [-m] by ChanServ
03:18 -!- mode/#allegro [-vvvv BAF Solak klys Tigge] by ChanServ
03:18 -!- mode/#allegro [-vvvv bambot bambams antto rmbeer] by ChanServ
03:18 -!- mode/#allegro [-vvvv archdark GreaseMonkey SimonNa tdammers] by ChanServ
03:18 -!- mode/#allegro [-vvvv Rondom Tharro Abi12 Modulo5k] by ChanServ
03:18 -!- mode/#allegro [-vvvv koro demonicmaniac1 dos1 dwi] by ChanServ
03:18 -!- mode/#allegro [-vvvv oldsnakey___ NickG365 queip shmibs] by ChanServ
03:18 -!- mode/#allegro [-vvvv Sausage lilmike gusnan kazzmir-work] by ChanServ
03:18 -!- mode/#allegro [-vvvv chopchop1 Trezker demonicmaniac3 Funklord] by ChanServ
03:18 -!- mode/#allegro [-vvvv connormgs clort PTapioK pinchy] by ChanServ
03:18 -!- mode/#allegro [-vvvv alphis SiegeLord ddustin amarillion] by ChanServ
03:18 <+Sevalecan> wow that was spammy
03:21 < SiegeLord> Wut
03:24 -!- mode/#allegro [+o Sevalecan] by ChanServ
03:24 -!- mode/#allegro [-vvv KittyCat Sevalecan Tomasu] by Sevalecan
03:24 -!- mode/#allegro [-v elias] by Sevalecan
03:25 <@Sevalecan> channel moderation and autovoice was pointless
03:25 <@Sevalecan> :P
03:26 -!- mode/#allegro [-o Sevalecan] by Sevalecan
03:26 < Sevalecan> if you actually wanted to quiet anyone, it wouldn't work, and you can't add someone to an autodevoice list to counteract the everyone-autovoice pattern
03:26 < Sevalecan> afaik
03:27 < KittyCat> that's nice. konversation decided to change the log path with the latest update I just did
03:27 < Sevalecan> KittyCat, to /dev/null?
03:27 < KittyCat> to ~/.local/share/konversation/logs
03:28 < KittyCat> I had previously configured it to use ~/logs
03:28 < Sevalecan> do you really want logs of all the dumb shit I say on a day to day basis?
03:28 < KittyCat> well, freenode_#allegro.log was 110MB. I suppose it could do with a trim
03:30 < KittyCat> [Monday, October 14, 2013] [01:54:42 AM]  is the top entry in it
03:30 < Sevalecan> I'm dumb!
03:30 < Sevalecan> holy shit
03:30 < Sevalecan> I used to have logs going way back
03:30 < Sevalecan> but kept losing them
03:30 -!- mode/#allegro [+b *!*@unaffiliated/bamccaig] by ChanServ
03:30 -!- bambams was kicked from #allegro by ChanServ [User is banned from this channel]
--- Log closed Sat Dec 26 03:30:45 2020

Append:

Yikes, look at how much alcohol impacts my [good!] month (and sleep!).

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Legend:

B - I remembered to take my daily SSRI anti-depressant (and marked it on the calendar[1] :)).

[0-9]+ - Optional beer/alcoholic unit count after B.

-AN-> - All nighters this week.

(full size?)

Prior to slipping due to social scenarios involving alcohol, I was nearly a month sober again (smoking weed every day though). It would appear that I cannot seem to handle alcohol at all anymore. Even small amounts appear to mess me up. Which really sucks because I really enjoy controlled-amounts of alcohol.

That said, I must say this year has taught me that waking up after drinking (if you ever got to bed...) sucks more than waking up after smoking cannabis. :) At least, for me, at this point in time and space. Mind you, prior to this year, and therefore a similar timeline as cannabis use began, I never had any issues this severe with anything. I literally slept like a baby, to the resentment of others. Now I'm lucky if I can sleep at all. :o

I do protest to the smoke. Which is why I had vaped nearly exclusively for the first 2 years. The trap that very quickly transitioned me to smoking regularly was that I had bought a preroll[2] recently partly for a change in delivery and the alternative portability/versatility[3]. That, and the way cannabis affects you varies by delivery method. And since it's still not well understood what all of the many ways cannabis influences our bodies and minds are and why, we each need to experiment a little bit to find what works best for us for what purpose.

The orinary dynamics are that vaping cannabis hits harder gram-for-gram than smoking does. Though it's not well understood how or why. In practice, I'd say it varies greatly. My experience has been that cannabis tolerance builds almost instantly. It realistically has no lethal dose. You can't really kill yourself with it. Physically smoking is bad for you, and vaping suggests similar if snigificantly fewer risks, but the risks are considered by some to be a worthwhile tradeoff. The physical risks are generally minimal (though excessive smoking would certainly risk accelerated lung damage that may become debilitating early in your lifetime). The mental risks are significant, but only for a fraction of the population (at any given time; potentially changing with age and health). For most people it's a harmless, effective medicine and/or recreation.

I suppose that I was expecting the joint to be less powerful (I was a little overconfident). In fairness, I think that the joint was significantly stronger than the strain I had been using prior too. Regardless of the reason, I noted that between 1/7 and 1/5 of this joint had me higher than I had been in months. Possibly higher than I had ever been before. That potency lasted all week, and I'd smoke just a sliver and get a wonderful high. It wasn't meant to be though. My tolerance surpassed it (I might have even made a mistake because of being high, like smoking a significant amount by forgetting that I was already high; though I may be paranoid-imagining that, heh... :-*).

Anyway, after a week without a joint I started craving one. And that's when I remmbered rolling machines. I had stumbled across them by the YouTube algorithm suggesting a video to me. I tried to roll joints by hand, but my hands are too shaky and my fingers are too inflexible. :P The machine is still manually operated, but essentially it holds the joint near perfectly for you while you wrap it. It empowers people like me with shaky hands to roll joints! We had an Amazon giftcard aging and forgotten and decided to spend it. My wife asked what I wanted for cheap from Amazon and I remembered these machines.. At that moment, I had a rare burst of clarity, and remembered the rolling machines and that I was craving more joints (but prerolls are more expensive than flower buds). She agreed and it was ordered.

The kit contains a small tray, a rolling machine, some plastic envelopes designed to conceal the smell of cannabis (I generally don't have to), and a few month supply of papers and tips. Since receiving it my tolerance instantly went up again. I went outside to smoke my first joint in a week, expecting a major high like I had had before, but it wasn't working. I smoked the whole joint and got the high I was looking for. From there and since my usage has steadily increased from the initial 0.5 grams of one of my joints per 24 hour cycle to potentially 2 grams in that same cycle within a week or so. :P

Boring story carefully written long, smoking is bad, but it delivers a larger hit at a smaller (physical and mental effort) cost than handheld vaporizers do. At least, the ones vaporizing flower buds that I have. I haven't dabbled in ... dab rigs and shatter yet, but it seems I'm heading that way (I'm already open to it, but only from government sources in my own privacy). I just hope there's some limit where once reached you are comfortably high. Damn.

If you drill down though the primary permanent side effects for smoking lots of cannabis (within your tolerance) are:

  • Lung cancer risk (and health in general).


  • Budget/cost.

The first is somewhat mitigated by vaporizing instead of smoking, but there seems to be a gap in the middle of the vape market. I can get a flimsy handheld flower vaporizer for about $70, a sturdy one with design flaws for $140, and a well made, brand name, long lasting, warrantied, well designed, top of the line handheld flower vaporizer for about ~$230. My handheld vapes each appear to hold about 0.2 grams (compared to the 0.6 grams of a 1 1/4 size joint). There appears to be a gap in the market for portable/handheld vaporizers that can handle larger quantities of flower. Granted, vaporizers do seem to have a stronger effect, but not strong enough to reduce consumption over time. There are larger vapes, but the ones I know of are desktop models only (meaning not portable/compact/pocket compatible), and they are significantly more expensive ($600+).

I also find that changing methods has an even stronger effect (e.g., smoking after not smoking for a long while can be more effective than vaping again, though probably vaping after not vaping for a long while is even more effective than switching to smoking).

The second can theoretically be mitigated by growing your own flower. But there's a catch. This is only really accessible to people with money and/or doers that are willing to risk it and succeed. The first can be mitigated by saving money or earning extra, but both of those options are hard to do (I'm salary, and mentally exhausted after work :)).

These are both long term goals, however. Buying a "volcano vape" (or similar), which is a desktop vaporizer that is on another level apparently, and growing my own cannabis.

It's going to take some luck or discipline to acquire the capital to invest that much in a cannabis consuming device. And growing my own is going to also require a significant investment as well as a significant time investment for learning and the potential of a total loss.

References

  1. Refer to pill box in cupboard. >:(
  2. Professionally rolled joint or cigarette filled with ground cannabis.
  3. Use like a cigarette, anywhere smoking is safe/permitted.
Rodolfo Lam

Hey guys, Merry Christmas! Hope you all had a wonderful time!

Hope next year brings better times for everyone.

LennyLen

We had a white Christmas (well boxing day) which sounds nice except Christmas is the middle of summer here.

And it wasn't snow, it was hail and tons of it. Sadly, one of the main sources of economy in the area is orchards, and the hail wiped out most people's crops.

My work got pretty trashed as we have a flat roof which isn't designed to take the weight of that much ice and gave way in a few places which led to multiple rivers running through the shop. Our main router which was in the electrical cupboard also got fried, so we couldn't communicate with the pumps or use EFTPOS for the rest of the day.

But on a positive note, Christmas Day itself was ok. I did work for 10 hours but customers were nicer than usual, and our boss came in in the middle of the afternoon with lots of yummy food for us.

jmasterx
var worstYear = 2020;
worstYear++;
var happy = new Year(worstYear);
printf("Holly shit we made it to %d", happy.value);

>:(

GullRaDriel

jmasterx x-D

Matthew Leverton

Happy new year. >:(

bamccaig

I'm still autistic and rightfully concerned about the future. >:( Had the luxury of joining a surprise-illegal, overcrowded, mixed groups family dinner today. You know, where everyone enthusiastically joins in criticizing other people breaking COVID-19 rules, shaking their heads at the stupidity of other people, as we all are breaking the rules. :P

People are stupid. On the plus side, maybe this will help to thin their herds. :P I don't think that 2021 is going to be significantly better. COVID-19 is still going to be a significant threat. Especially in the United Stupids of America, where half of the population will probably refuse the vaccine and continue to refuse to wear masks or distance themselves. :P And there are likely going to be shortages of the vaccine all year due to production limits and storage limits, so that most people won't even be vaccinated yet by 2022, even in the elite world. Let alone poorer nations.

And a mutating virus is concerning too because it could mean the vaccine we're producing is already going to be obsolete. Like a flu that mutates faster than we can produce a new vaccine. :P Speaking of which, I got the flu shot last year, and I have nothing ill to report (unless you want to twist the tips up on your tin foil hat and suspect that the flu shot made me autistic and then also went back in time and made me autistic then too :P). I don't really remember getting very sick since, but my memory is shit so that's not very reliable. In any case, I intend to get it again and again every year until I die. And if the COVID-19 vaccine becomes a periodic thing I'll probably subscribe onto that too. Bring on the superpowers. :D

Though I didn't particularly mind 2020. It was actually a pretty good year for me. It had its bumps, but I was fortunate to land back on my feet mostly. I also discovered that I may be autistic, which is huge to even just have a word to describe why I'm so different. :P I went 32 years without a word so I have had to get creative at times. :P

Also until about May I'm still going to say 2020 when tasked with identifying the year.

RmBeer2

Since the virus is mutating every year, it should be called COVID-20, and now COVID-21. :-/

jmasterx

New jazz-inspired song. I really like this one! I think it's some of the best songwriting, arranging and singing I've ever done.

video

Chris Katko

>And a mutating virus is concerning too because it could mean the vaccine we're producing is already going to be obsolete.

Only CNN viewers and other "we keep you in the dark"/"you don't need to think" subscribers didn't realize that from the start. Viruses mutate. Fast. There's a reason there's a new flu vaccine every year and even then it doesn't always work.

The UK strain is similar enough to COVID-19 to likely be affected by the same vaccines. The South African strain (yeah, there's two new strains already), is believed to not be covered.

Welcome to Virus 101. Something no politician, nor talking head "scientist" on TV bothered to tell you.

Just like they never, at any point, told you the key to fighting COVID-19 is get sunlight, exercise, and eat healthy and take a multi-vitamin. Even though the majority of terrible cases had chronically low vitamin levels. Because making people feel like they have individual control instead of a theater of fear, means you're less likely to just accept insane things like a CARES Act that lets millionaires write off race horses on their taxes, because, you know, that helps... millions of people who own race horses.

But hey, Americans got $600. Which won't even cover a month of rent. So now we can, per the talking heads at MSNBC, "sigh a breathe of relief"

bamccaig

America is only for the rest of our entertainment though, right? ??? They can't be serious?

DanielH

$600 might not be much, but for some it's food on the table.

I won't see any of it since both my wife and I have decent jobs.

Part of me wants to give them more. The other part says, "Where is this money coming from?"

bamccaig

The same place money always comes from. We made it up. ???

If you actually tax corporations and businesses think how many services you could afford?! You might even join us in the first world some day. :)

Chris Katko

$600 is a slap to the face. It'll cover a single small medical bill / copay for a doctors visit. Meanwhile, the worlds richest added one trillion to their wealth this year.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/01/01/bezos-musk-wealth-pandemic/

What the hell happened to liberals? When did they go from "wal mart is killing mom-and-pop stores and mainstreet is dying" to "okay, whatever you want, daddy amazon."

Polybios

What the hell happened to liberals? When did they go from "wal mart is killing mom-and-pop stores and mainstreet is dying" to "okay, whatever you want, daddy amazon."

They're to busy with genders, skin colors and other identity stuff. You know, "divide and rule".

Bob Keane

$600 is a slap to the face. It'll cover a single small medical bill / copay for a doctors visit. Meanwhile, the worlds richest added one trillion to their wealth this year."

Mitch McConnell recently argued against raising the stimulus to $2,000 saying the money would go to Democratic friends who don't need it and it would increase the deficit. I'd like to know where this concern was when the TCJA act was passed.

Edgar Reynaldo

Mitch McConnell is a soul sucking ghoul. Parts of him are already dying. Literally.

bamccaig

What the fuck just happened, America?! Are Conservatives this stupid? ???

I guess so. :o

Bob Keane

I was wondering where you were BamBam. We are here.

Matthew Leverton

In a laughable coup attempt implicitly endorsed by the President himself, they accidentally either saved or destroyed the Republican party at the expense of giving Democrats a slim control for the next two years. In the very least, I think Trump's political career is over. The exact fallout will depend on how the current Republican leaders deal with it.

If they are smart, I think they should go along with a second impeachment and keep him from running again. If he runs again in 2024 without Republican support, they are of course screwed big time in the general election. But maybe it could all backfire on them, I don't know. And if they let him run again as a Republican in 2024, then God save us all, he might just win a second term.

Trump's defiant speech (during active debate on that morning) claiming Pence would overturn the election shows how mentally unfit he is to be President. Pence had told him in an hours long meeting (why does it take that long?) that he couldn't legally do what Trump wanted him to do and he wouldn't do it. Trump knew that but couldn't resist one last rally. One last crowd cheering him on to be the next President. Had the violence not broken out, I promise you he would have been still claiming up until the 20th that he was one step away from overturning the results.

But honestly, I don't think Trump craves power like the career politicians do. He just craves attention. So give him another realty TV show where people can bow down to him, but please, keep him away from government.

Bob Keane

I'm not sure anyone would give him another show. He will just rant and rave about the "stolen election" until he decides to pull another coup. The FCC should pull the plug on that. As to his future with the Republican Party, the word "Sedition" has been put on the table. They should not want to be associated with that. He could run under his own party, but that would further splinter the Republican Party and ensure a win for the Democrats. Nancy Pelosi is screaming "Impeachment!" so loud BamBam checked in to complain about the noise. Mr. Biden has already said he would not pardon Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence will not invoke the 25th Amendment probably because he does not want to decide whether or not to pardon Mr. Trump. As to his mental stability, maybe he is setting the foundation for his defense in the bank and tax fraud charges he will face in New York.

Matthew Leverton

The only thing left that Trump can legally do that people would listen to (because they have to) is issue pardons. Trump may very well issue pardons on everybody who stormed the capitol. That's on Pence. That's about the worst thing I think Trump could do at this point. Anything that requires somebody else to do something would result in them not listening. Even issuing a pardon--how would Trump even string together the words required to do it? Tweeting it in all caps with spelling mistakes doesn't make it legal.

He can pardon himself, but would he really do that? That would have to come with some admission that he quite possibly may have done something wrong--although obviously he'd say he was doing it because he knows he'll be framed.

So really I think invoking the 25th at this point is just nonsense. I think impeachment again would be good, if only to get Republicans on record on whether they think Trump should be allowed to run in their party again. But who cares if it's done before or after the 20th.

Bob Keane

In other news...:o

I started reading his tweets when I heard Twitter was doing fact checks. He had 91.1 million followers when I started. Then I noticed he was losing followers. He had 88.7m when they kicked him off. I believe he was down to 88.6m a week or two ago, so people were coming back. That is scary.

Matthew Leverton

I don't give Twitter any points for banning Trump. It's just part of the knee-jerk cancel-culture reaction that's happening right now regarding him.

Yes, he should be banned because he uses the platform to spread propaganda, untruths, and lies in a way that feels legitimatized since it's hosted by a private third party. As should any foreign leader be blocked who does the same. I would not allow lies to propagate through any platform I controlled if they had any sort of market reach. i.e., If nobody is there to listen, who cares. If you can broadcast a lie to millions of people with a push of the button, I don't want to be complicit in that.

But to do it now because he tweeted that he won't be going to the inauguration ceremony? Really, that is the final straw? How pathetic. He should have been banned years ago; the ban now is an act of cowardice for fear of being the only mainstream platform that doesn't.

I say the same to the fellow Republicans who are finally calling him out now. I dislike you even more. At least when you were with Trump, you stood for something. The taped calls to the Republican election officials should have been what evoked this game-ending uproar for those who were able to accept that he openly gloated about sexually harassing women.

For those of his fan base who finally see him for what he is, however, I'm glad they see the light. I hold no hostility toward his fanclub who have been duped into trusting him and the party the past four years. But the elected officials have no excuse.

Bob Keane

But to do it now because he tweeted that he won't be going to the inauguration ceremony?

He was not banned for refusing to attend the inauguration. He was banned for his inflammatory remarks. Unfortunately, there are other sites he can spread his "stolen election" rhetoric, (Parler for example) so we haven't heard the last of him. One site has already set up an account for him and he has more than 4,000 followers. The newspaper spelled out the impeachment process and repercussions and it was interesting. He can be impeached even after he leaves office, it was done after one of President Grant's cabinet members resigned. Congress can also add a provision that Mr. Trump is barred from future office or holding a position of trust in the future. I guess the only fly in the ointment is a pardon. If Mr. Trump pardons himself, he may still be allowed to run again.

Matthew Leverton

What I mean is that Twitter lifted the ban and told him if he misbehaved they'd ban him forever. His only tweet that I'm aware of was him stating he wouldn't be at the ceremony. What did they think he was going to be tweeting? Videos of him handing out food at a local homeless shelter?

Again, I agree that he should be banned, but the manner in which they did it was pathetic. He can go to Parlor, etc, but any site or service that permits and endorses widespread lies and incites violence will be black listed by Google, Apple, Visa, advertisers, etc. It will be a very insular, self-funded community.

Ultimately there's nothing stopping him from low-tech solutions like email blasts, etc. But in today's rapid information age, anything that makes it a little harder to spread and legitimize the message will be effective in preventing the radicalization of more people.

It would be a weird, unique sequence of events as you describe. I hadn't thought about that negating the punishment of not being able to run for office, but it makes sense that it would. There actually have been official DOJ memos stating in the past that a president cannot pardon himself. So it's not actually widely agreed that he can do it. I'm sure that would go up to the Supreme Court who I'm guessing would side with the president since the Constitution doesn't expressly forbid it.

Bob Keane

I did some looking and presidential pardons do not apply to impeachment. There is also the possibility Mr. Biden can "unpardon" Mr. Trump. But that would also be an issue for the court. Let's hope Ms. Pelosi gets her way.

RmBeer2

There was once a group of witches who gossiped about the nonsense that the devil was doing. END.

Bob Keane

I read OANN's report about Mr. Trump getting banned from Twitter and had a few questions. OANN said the Ayotollah of Iran and the Chinese president were tweeting worse things about America and were not treated similarly. So I googled their tweets. I did not see any "Death to America" messages or anything similar. Does Twitter delete any such posts without comment or do they remove them and post an explanation as to why they were removed?

MiquelFire

OANN's sources might be the same sources that Trump uses to claim the election was rigged.

Either the example of other leaders posting the same thing are REALLY subtle that we may not spot them, or like you said Twitter has deleted said tweets before you found them.

bamccaig

Trump can be banned from Twitter for literally any reason. It's a private platform. Most of the planet understands that Trump was outright lying and spreading misinformation. That's why he was ultimately banned. He kept abusing his power. That's what bans are for. There's no need to question it. Everybody understands that it was appropriate. If you don't, give your head a shake, back away from your biased news coverage, and try reading the news from an unbiased source for a change. There will be less chance of you supporting a Nazi-style regime in the future. :P

Matthew Leverton

There are lot of interesting topics around this. It's impossible for me to perfectly articulate my viewpoints in part because they are always shifting since this is a very complex situation. My take is something like:

- USA laws against printing misleading information are lacking. I understand and agree with "Freedom of Press," but there should be consequences to breaking stories without knowing them to be true. The standard of being allowed to print anything as long as you don't know it's false is pathetically weak because that means stupid, ignorant people can publish anything they want without consequence.

- The standard for slander, libel, and threats is likewise too weak for individuals. Again, I understand and agree with "Freedom of Speech," but it is far too big of a shield.

- Companies that publish public content on the internet should be held liable for the content of their users. End of story.

- Anonymity on the internet is a bad thing.

The argument that Facebook, Twitter, Parler, etc like to use is that it's impossible to police that much content. My answer is then you don't deserve to exist. A traditional newspaper would never have published daily thousands of unvetted, unread, unedited content from their users only to ban somebody three months after publication.

I don't care about something that nobody reads. A person with no followers on Twitter can say anything he or she wants. Nobody is harmed. But I've come to believe that before there's any content that reaches a certain threshold of eyeballs, then the publishing platform's duty is to review it and take appropriate action if it violates terms of use.

This means that services like Facebook should be fundamentally redesigned. Limit people to only connecting with 50-100 actual friends. Limit content from spreading farther than friends of friends. Remove vanity metrics that both encourage distributing lies and give credibility to it. Require verified identification.

I have no issue with private, encrypted peer-to-peer chat platforms, but I still would hold the companies liable if their end-to-end software platform is used to coordinate terrorist attacks (etc). This is a hard distinction to make, but I differentiate between, say, the inventor of encryption and the makers of software that enable a click-and-run version that directly supports illegal activities.

Yes, encrypted chat is needed, but if you cannot tell the police upon receiving a court order who is using your software, and who they are communicating with, then you deserve to be held partially accountable. There are reasonable trade-offs where speech can still be kept private, but metadata around it to assist in investigations remains accessible.

Sure, yes, the evil guys will ultimately resort to low-level encryption, etc. Good. Then it will be easier to spot them vs the average user of Signal.

Again, there are a lot of cases that are hard to define. For example, I wouldn't hold the makers of Wordpress liable for everybody that uses their software. However, if you are hosting Wordpress on behalf of others, and are actively providing services that enable them to publish, then I would hold you more accountable.

Ultimately this means that publishing content would cost a little bit of money because somebody would need to be paid to vet it. But IMO I'd sacrifice 90% of the terrible content of the internet if it meant we were left with higher quality stuff.

And to bring this back home - back in the day when this site was much more active, I took the responsibility of making it a non-abusive place very seriously. Other then some not-nice name calling from time to time, thankfully it remains a relatively tame place... But ultimately I should be responsible for this place as I'm the closest to the implementation of it.

bamccaig

- Anonymity on the internet is a bad thing.

That's completely wrong. Anonymity on the Internet is the best thing and we should defend it at all costs. Without anonymity the Internet is mostly just a corporate circle jerk. The anonymity is what made it so powerful in the first place.

The problem isn't that people are pseudo-anonymous. The problem is that people are not 100% anonymous. The Internet should be untraceable. There will always be bad people doing bad things. They existed before the Internet, and they'll continue without it if necessary. We need to stop wasting our time on symptoms and start addressing the roots. Let's ask all of the difficult questions. Let's challenge each other to challenge each others' ideas all the time. Let's explore different solutions and different perspectives. Let's take advantage of all of this diversity and see if can't make things better for a change of scenery.

https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/student-papers/fall95-papers/rigby-anonymity.html

The argument that Facebook, Twitter, Parler, etc like to use is that it's impossible to police that much content. My answer is then you don't deserve to exist. A traditional newspaper would never have published daily thousands of unvetted, unread, unedited content from their users only to ban somebody three months after publication.

I don't care about something that nobody reads. A person with no followers on Twitter can say anything he or she wants. Nobody is harmed. But I've come to believe that before there's any content that reaches a certain threshold of eyeballs, then the publishing platform's duty is to review it and take appropriate action if it violates terms of use.

I think that a distinction needs to be made between content hosts versus content publishers/distributors. Facebook and Twitter aren't merely hosting the conversations. They're actively participating in spreading the message so they should have a role to play in being responsible for what the message is.

Ultimately I think that social networks are a failed experiment. We took a neat idea and decided to let money decide how best to implement it. And as usual money corrupted it. These networks are not social. They're very antisocial.

We need to abandon those stupid systems and rethink the idea with a distributed, anonymous structure instead. Try to come up with a system that benefits humanity and relationships instead of hurts them. That doesn't pull us away from what matters, but brings us closer together.

Rather than focusing on enforcement of the Internet (which is impossible) we should be focusing instead on what really matters. Just as the war on drugs is a complete waste of resources, a war on the Internet is also just going to be a waste of time and resources. We should be tearing down Internet monopolies instead of trying to police them.

This means that services like Facebook should be fundamentally redesigned. Limit people to only connecting with 50-100 actual friends. Limit content from spreading farther than friends of friends. Remove vanity metrics that both encourage distributing lies and give credibility to it. Require verified identification.

The problem is that it will no longer be the billion dollar money growing machine that it is. It will fundamentally be a different system. And it won't be anywhere near as popular. What made Facebook so popular was precisely it's unapologetic abuse of its users. I don't think it could exist in any other way without fundamentally changing what it is and what it's used for.

I have no issue with private, encrypted peer-to-peer chat platforms, but I still would hold the companies liable if their end-to-end software platform is used to coordinate terrorist attacks (etc). This is a hard distinction to make, but I differentiate between, say, the inventor of encryption and the makers of software that enable a click-and-run version that directly supports illegal activities.

Yes, encrypted chat is needed, but if you cannot tell the police upon receiving a court order who is using your software, and who they are communicating with, then you deserve to be held partially accountable. There are reasonable trade-offs where speech can still be kept private, but metadata around it to assist in investigations remains accessible.

On the contrary, I prefer the world where we address the inequalities that inspire terrorism instead of draconian methods to track every interaction so that Big Brother can catch big bad criminal.

Terrorists are often either mentally ill (victims) or people that are fed up with perceived injustices with a broken system that won't listen to them. We need to stop dismissing people that we don't like. We need to get rid of this twisted morality of every man for himself and work together instead so that no man is left behind.

That's the ONLY way to prevent crime/terrorism/violence. Take care of everybody so that nobody has a reason to feel that violence is the only way to be heard. Take care of everybody so that we can identify the brains that are imbalanced and work together to solve it for everybody's benefit.

Matthew Leverton
bambam said:

That's completely wrong. Anonymity on the Internet is the best thing and we should defend it at all costs.

Just commenting on this since it seemed to evoke the strongest response from you. It's interesting though to see you apply logic differently in different places. Here you want to solve human nature instead of taking precautions...

I don't necessarily mean that all anonymity on the internet is bad; I'm mostly thinking of it in the context of public social networks. Anonymously publishing a coherent piece of writing can be a powerful thing because it causes people to focus on the message and not the author. (Okay, so then people spend all day speculating on who the author is...)

LennyLen

I like to go to the park and watch the children run around. They don't know I'm using blanks.

bamccaig

Just commenting on this since it seemed to evoke the strongest response from you. It's interesting though to see you apply logic differently in different places. Here you want to solve human nature instead of taking precautions...

The freedom of an open Internet is far greater than the risks. Nefarious people have always found a way to get around the law, and if we make the Internet difficult for them to use for their purposes they'll just figure out another way to do it. In other words, we won't stop the bad things from happening.

We need to remain focused on what's great about the Internet and not cripple it just because some bad people do bad things with it. If there is such a thing as human nature I'm not sure it should be solved. How do you tell an intelligent animal that it can't do what is natural for it to do? Who made you God to even decide such a thing?

My insistence on an anonymous Internet is in spite of the inevitable abuses. I think that the good far outweighs the bad. Or the bad would find a way to happen anyway so nerfing the Internet won't fix the world.

I don't necessarily mean that all anonymity on the internet is bad; I'm mostly thinking of it in the context of public social networks. Anonymously publishing a coherent piece of writing can be a powerful thing because it causes people to focus on the message and not the author. (Okay, so then people spend all day speculating on who the author is...)

The problem isn't anonymity on the Internet. The problem is social networks. Keep the anonymity. Dispose of the social networks. Problem solved.

The problem with social networks isn't anonymity either... Anonymity would improve social networks. The Internet is meant to be a place where you can talk to anyone, but in doing so you need to be able to evaluate how much you trust what that person says. That necessarily means that you need maturity and intelligence to evaluate the credibility of information on the Internet. Who is the alleged author? How do you know them? How much should you trust what they say? Is it enough to risk your child's life? Is it enough to go to war over it? Or is it just some guy's opinion and it can be ignored?

There are plenty of stupid people on the planet that appear incapable of doing this (points at Trump supporters). I don't think that we should nerf the Internet for their benefit either. I'd much rather allow stupid people to believe stupid things than to make it difficult or impossible to express controversial ideas without anonymity. Free speech is very important. We need the ability to question whether the world is flat without getting ganged up on by social media mobs that know it to be flat and don't like you questioning it.

Whatever problems arise from the anonymity should be addressed individually without compromising the ability for people to be anonymous on the Internet. If people want some other platform that is locked down, and trusted, and everybody is identified, then go ahead and create a separate virtual network over the Internet to do that with. That should be technically possible, and offers the people that might want that the option without sacrificing the entire Internet to them.

Edgar Reynaldo

RIP Krampus https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/618289/1

YATBTD '(

Eric - coming soon :
612839

Eric Johnson

:D

Erin Maus

I'm making a new portfolio. >:( I want publishers to know how awesome I am. 8-)

I'm trying to have CI/CD. The goal is to deploy a React SPA to S3 and have the back-end be serverless Flask/Python app.

The latest fads. 8-)

This is what it will look like:

{"name":"612841","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/c\/7c8fe79b9c9de0281d0efddd29285714.png","w":1903,"h":1139,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/c\/7c8fe79b9c9de0281d0efddd29285714"}612841

Also, the splash background is animated. P cool. 8-)

{"name":"612842","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/6\/0\/60be5de8b4495b49cbc65c5f855372a3.gif","w":253,"h":240,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/6\/0\/60be5de8b4495b49cbc65c5f855372a3"}612842

Edgar Reynaldo

{"name":"612844","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/1\/7\/1712ff245dc5addcb7a3ade23b104543.jpg","w":500,"h":590,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/1\/7\/1712ff245dc5addcb7a3ade23b104543"}612844

GullRaDriel

Love it 8-)

Edgar Reynaldo

merci. salut. ca va? Allez bien, avec moi.

;D

Matthew Leverton

"serverless Flask/Python app."

At first I thought that said "serverless Flash" and I laughed really hard.

Erin Maus

Well, a Flash site could very well be a serverless app... ;D Too bad Good thing Flash is dead.

...

{"name":"612847","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/b\/2\/b2dc8ac975813a226e103e28b9b2c48b.png","w":589,"h":433,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/b\/2\/b2dc8ac975813a226e103e28b9b2c48b"}612847

https://twitter.com/ItsyRealm/status/1351592913139081220?s=20

>:( (It's a video.)

The cinematic camera is one of my favorite 5 minute changes.

Arthur Kalliokoski

Hey, Elias, I noticed your avatar in the TINS breach thread, and it seems to me you explained many years ago how it came to be.

My question is, how many miles or km has that thing walked by now?

Edgar Reynaldo

It's probably walked farther than you've driven sitting on the couch watching Fox News...

;D

Arthur Kalliokoski

I don't have a TV, but I bet I've gone 500,000 miles driving cab over the last 35 years. What have you done to support yourself?

Matthew Leverton

Is that full time? I'd guess more than that... Average American drives around 13k/year or thereabouts.

Arthur Kalliokoski

I just slapped that on there, when I think about it it's been 37 years since I started, although I was a mechanic from '95 to '02 or so.

When I started, I worked full time (for a cab driver about 70-80 hrs/wk) and we averaged maybe 200 miles a night 6 days a week, although July - September it might have been 100 miles a night. About 10 years ago I slowed down due to health, so now I only work occasionally (1 to 3 days a week) and maybe average 70 miles a night.

Edgar Reynaldo

So you spent your life in servitude to the man. Nice work. I get by on next to nothing and it suits me fine. But obviously you're getting your news from some hair brained wacko because most of it is hooey.

Arthur Kalliokoski

So you spent your life in servitude to the man

C'mon, man, that doesn't sound very groovy. What a downer. No flower power for you.

Seriously, what does that even mean? Does it mean I work for the illuminati? How about those years in the early '90's when I owned my own cab? Does that count?

I get by on next to nothing

Well, that's nice. I don't splurge on junk either. But the question remains, what money you do get, does it come from your own efforts or do you go to the public trough? I have to admit I did go for the early social security, but they're just paying back some of what I involuntarily had to put in all those years.

Edgar Reynaldo

I should be on disability and unemployment, but I claim neither.

Arthur Kalliokoski

Yeronner, witness is evading the question >:(

GullRaDriel

You should. When it's a right, you have to take that money !

Bob Keane

Seconded, I believe disability comes out of Social Security, or some of it does. And as Arthur said:

"...I did go for the early social security, but they're just paying back some of what I involuntarily had to put in all those years.".

Matthew Leverton

Social Security is not actually a terrible investment for it being guaranteed if you only look at the portion that comes out of your paycheck.

I pay the maximum in Social Security benefits ($8500/year) and I'd currently get around $2300/month (in 2021 dollars) in benefits for a lifetime at age 62. If I assume 8% growth and 2% inflation, I'd get about $2650/month for 20 years if I privately invested.

...However, my employer is also paying $8500/year, so that makes the numbers not very good.

But the problem is that without Social Security a good part of the population wouldn't save any of their money. I'm not against mandatory saving for retirement, although I'd welcome any improvements to making it more solvent. I don't mind that it's a worse than average way for me to save money if it helps the poorer people save money in retirement. I have plenty of money left over to invest privately on top of it.

bamccaig

You should. When it's a right, you have to take that money !

Agreed. Americans are so backwards with regards to socialism. It's such a sickness over there.

You're at no risk of paying my bills, Arthur, don't worry.

It's fine, Arthur is perfectly fine being somebody's slave, at the mercy of government. When the government tells us that we should be proud to work hard for little pay he does it! And he expects you to too! Well into his 70's I think?

:P

The system is run by the wealthy. We're the pawns. They give us just enough comfort to keep us from revolting. Not too little, but not too much either. They need us a little bit on the brink of collapse at any moment. Keeps most people too busy to think.

Bob Keane

Another reason the government and businesses tell us to accept little pay is they don't want us to earn enough money to buy weapons to revolt. I was told in American history the Revolution was funded by the middle class. The rich liked the way things were going because they made money and the poor had no money to fund an uprising.

Arthur Kalliokoski
bamccaig said:

Arthur is perfectly fine being somebody's slave, at the mercy of government.

When it comes right down to it, I've had many opportunities to get "ahead" in the normie world.

I was maybe 12 years old when I was asked by a judge at least once if I'd rather live with foster parents rather than continuing to live with my dysfunctional parents and saying no, and my sister having already been shipped off to live elsewhere telling me to do it.

After that, I joined the USMC, and got 99 percentile on several of the aptitude tests, but being interviewed for communications brought up thoughts of listening to dots and dashes all day and I told them I was a troublemaker etc. in high school. Maybe that's why they made me a cook. Then a couple years later being recommended to Officer Candidate School in the USMC (I didn't bother going to the interview).

After I got back into the real world, I quit a restaurant gig when I was told I was being considered for a beginning management position.

I went to a local community college to learn to be a card walloper because of an article I'd read in TIME magazine talking about how programmers were such a scarce resource, but didn't push hard enough to actually get a bachelors and quit maybe 4 classes short. OTOH, AFAIK, nobody actually got a good job out of their degree from this little non-accredited school except one guy who answered the frequent ads for DeVry on TV at the time.

And women, I won't even get into that beyond wrecking a relationship because I got the idea they deserved so much better than me.

It's like when push comes to shove, I have some sort of anxiety attack and purposely shoot myself in the foot to avoid the risk.

I saw that movie "Good Will Hunting" and kind of identify with the lead character (although I'm not nearly that smart) but I never threw my junk in a car to head across country to achieve a life worth living.

Given all that, I don't see how it's "the government" keeping me down, although I'm certain we'd all be much more prosperous if we didn't have the Federal Reserve, the innumerable "feel good" entitlement benefits and now "ruin the countrys economy with lockdowns and tell the masses that it's Trumps fault"

Bob Keane said:

they don't want us to earn enough money to buy weapons to revolt

ORLY? That's about the silliest thing I've read here in weeks. Supposing you really couldn't give up your cable TV bill for a couple of months to buy a firearm, there are tons of videos on youtube about how to make your own firearm from scratch, as well as dozens of alternative weapons.

Edgar Reynaldo

Arthur, I'm sad you don't believe in yourself. '(

It's OK to get ahead.

bamccaig

ORLY? That's about the silliest thing I've read here in weeks. Supposing you really couldn't give up your cable TV bill for a couple of months to buy a firearm, there are tons of videos on youtube about how to make your own firearm from scratch, as well as dozens of alternative weapons.

The government doesn't just have guns. They have highly trained soldiers whose day job has been training for this for months, if not years. Those soldiers also have gunships, attack helicopters, and other air support, including unmanned drone strike capabilities; plus your tanks and heavy armour, then your light armor and men, not to mention the ocean is theirs as well.

What do you think your $600 rifle is going to do to them? This is what debunks the 2nd amendment clause about the right to bears arms. If you're going to uphold that civilians need enough weaponry to defend against the powers of government then we need to legalize heavy armor and seriously cut the price into bits. Everybody can just fly an F-15 to work. Fuck it. Make America Great For Once.

Is it just me, or is it that every time America seems great throughout history they're really covering up some really, really unforgivable truths and only telling us the best talking points? I wonder if it were possible to survey the dead if the average American would describe the country, people, and government as great when it's all said and done (you know, in a hypothetical world where there was an afterlife from which to reflect on your life from a state of omnipotence because why the fuck not?!).

Arthur, I'm sad you don't believe in yourself. '(

It's OK to get ahead.

If you think about it that's the right's teachings. You don't get to get ahead. That's just the way it is. Tough Real men don't cry. Deal with it. Man up.

It couldn't possibly be that the systems that fallible men developed organically over millions of years while crossing the threshold from semi-intelligent animals to philosophers with zero manuals discovering every truth about every moment of life the hard way might have been flawed or biased in their decision making. It couldn't even be that the rules have changed thanks to technology and we need to reevaluate all of our rules given the significant, sudden changes that we've been faced with.

Along the way, various people have had power over the others for various reasons. It seems to mostly have been a mix of luck and even more luck. It has been a very slow and costly experiment figuring leadership and inter-group cooperation out, but it has also been very rewarding. Seems to me that usually it was just one group of people was more powerful than the other group of people thanks either to genetics (luck) or prosperity (luck) and so they got their way and made everyone else follow their rules. From what I can tell that hasn't changed at all. We've just gotten a bit more civilized about dressing it up in fancy ribbons and subtle gestures to hide it behind the scenes.

We've gotten a lot more civilized and life has gotten a lot more comfortable, but I wouldn't say it was thanks to the generosity of the upper classes. If anything it came about somewhat naturally and chaotically, first with the gradual and then sudden appearance of technologies that vastly changed the bounds of possibilities continuously culminating in the last 2 millenia and especially the last 2 centuries of amazing progress and also unthinkable horrors. Make no mistake, we're still little more than apes. Perhaps not individually, but collectively, we're more like apes than not.

Our brains are very powerful tools, but the degree to which we rely upon them is up to each of us individually (and especially up to the circumstances of our lives, at our place in time and space). So far it seems the vast majority of people throughout history, and continuing today, have been extremely susceptible to their primitive nature despite their theoretically exceptional brain compared to allegedly all other forms of life that we have discovered.

In the 1600's thousands of innocent women were burned to death by violent mobs because somebody (probably another woman, amirite?!) claimed them to be a witch and in those days I guess they did believe you? In the 1940's a different type of politician convinced normal people like you or I to take part in one of the worst stains in recent history. Towards the end of the 2020's another different type of politician convinced normal American people like you to take part in a rather embarrassing revolution attempt. ;D

Fuck, if that's all the 2nd amendment could muster in 4 years I'm afraid that's proof enough that it doesn't work. :D:o

Arthur Kalliokoski
bamccaig said:

The government doesn't just have guns. They have highly trained soldiers whose day job has been training for this for months, if not years. Those soldiers also have gunships, attack helicopters, and other air support, including unmanned drone strike capabilities; plus your tanks and heavy armour, then your light armor and men, not to mention the ocean is theirs as well.

What do you think your $600 rifle is going to do to them? This is what debunks the 2nd amendment clause about the right to bears arms. If you're going to uphold that civilians need enough weaponry to defend against the powers of government then we need to legalize heavy armor and seriously cut the price into bits. Everybody can just fly an F-15 to work. Fuck it. Make America Great For Once.

Yeah, that's why we won the war in Afghanistan in only a couple of weeks /s.

The locals know the terrain and buildings, and the government doesn't really want to destroy their source of income by killing off the population and infrastructure.

EDIT: After I left this thread, I saw this in my suggested videos on youtube. I had wondered about hiding from thermal devices on my own before. Good luck with the high-tech weaponry when there are still people who can think outside the box.

Matthew Leverton

It's a complex topic. On one hand, you just need a lot of people to overthrow the government. You don't really need guns. But ultimately, the people with the best weapons are going to be the ones in charge. After the majority overthrows the government, whatever subset of that new group that controls the weapons will be the new leaders.

As it relates to US gun rights... The US constitution is outdated in many ways, and this is one of them. I'd probably be okay if we took it to mean you can own any kind of 18th century weapons you'd like. But to say in the extreme that you should be able to buy a nuclear missile launching tank at Walmart is ridiculous.

jmasterx

There's no way this thread is locking with ML getting the last word >:(

GullRaDriel

X-D

Bob

How soon until the page counter wraps around and crashes the server?

Bob Keane

We can ask Randall Monroe. I'm pretty sure the "Time" thread crashed the xkcd servers.

bamccaig

I've been spending money out of control for the last month or so. :-/ Not really sure what it is. In part, I think I'm resentful that my wife seems to get to spend most of my money. :P Or at least makes it overly difficult to track who spends what. Though in theory I could wade through the account transactions and get a good idea that way. I'm also just depressed and anxious and I think I find myself trying not to think about it by finding interesting purchases.

A few things I've purchased (most of them sound investments, but some obviously wasteful):

  • A metallic, insulated water bottle with a straw to help me stay hydrated. (USD$100)

  • An electric lighter, marketed for camping with a "waterproof" case. (USD$15)

  • A second electric lighter, much nicer looking, but much more questionable instructions and battery (USD$20).

  • A second (larger) cannabis rolling machine (USD$2), with papers (USD$2 * 5), and like 600 prerolled tips (US$7 * 3).[1]

  • Small tent for growing cannabis[2]. (USD$55)

  • A cheap "survival" Bowie knife.[3] (USD$20)

  • A Zippo lighter[4], refill, and maintenance accessories (USD$50).

  • A new bong because I broke my first one after only a week, many months ago.[5]. (US$80)

  • (I may update the list if there is anything else I can think of...)

On top of cannabis purchases, which are easily US$50 a week now at least. :-/

References

  1. I'm outgrowing my original machine, which is 1 1/4" joints. The new one is King Size (and KSS), which should produce significantly larger joints. I still have lots of tips left, but my own tips are hit or miss and I figured I'd give the commercially rolled tips a chance. At ~4 cents per tip I think the cost is negligible, and if it makes the tips a consistent fit and filter then I think I'll stick to it. This particular order starting out with me attempting to buy hemp wick to light a bong or pipe, which I didn't even have at the time, just because it's inexpensive and handy for a stoner to have around. I didn't end up buying it because the only bundle the site had was like 100 feet for like USD$20 and I didn't need that much (and was already wary of my out of control spending).
  2. I've had seeds for over a year now, probably no good anymore. I need to get into growing my own because it could be much cheaper that way. I still need a light for fuel, and a pot to plant in, and some weed-specific fertalizer. At least. But I'll do a very basic grow the first time, and based on the results I'll see what needs changing.
  3. I didn't really have any use for one, but it was so cheap and I don't have anything this big or strong so I figured WTH. It's apparently "Mossy Oak" branded, though it's clearly made in China and at the price I really question its quality. Don't get me wrong, it's solid. Reviews are pretty good. Apparently it takes a lot of abuse. I just don't think the blade will last long for sharp cuts, but for blunt abuse in the woods it's probably great.
  4. I concluded that the electric lighters don't seem ready, and I might as well invest in a classy refillable lighter.
  5. New one is a simpler design to hopefully be easier to clean, but I might also just worry less about cleaning it. That's how I broke the last one. This one might alsos be stronger. I got the thickest glass the store had: it's a 15 inch basic beaker with 9mm thick glass. Hopefully this one last me a few years.
Edgar Reynaldo

TL:DR;

You spent $100 US on a water bottle? dummy

bamccaig

I hope it's a very nice water bottle[1]. >:( It's not just a simple one. It is an insulated (to stay hot or cold all day) bottle made of aluminum or some other metal so naturally more expensive materials means more expensive product. Whether the price is fair or not I don't know, but it seemed like there was nothing of comparable value for less money. I really wanted to buy a nice one that will encourage me to use it. I just hope that it helps me consistently drink water and stay hydrated.

References

  1. The shipping is delayed for a couple of weeks.
Arthur Kalliokoski

I spent $100 on a craigslist computer to replace the hackintosh I've been using since the previous computer apparently got zapped by a thunderstorm with the power switch switched off (I was going to unplug it as well but forgot).

I wanted to avoid the silly pauses that messed up my typing, and to install some MS stuff that didn't know what to do with OpenFirmware. So naturally I had to get another disk, 4 terabytes sounded good, and FreeDos and Windows 7 saw that and said "Aw, hell no!", so they're on an old 320gb disk now. But I can't seem to convince the bios that disk 2 should boot first... So now I can switch between Mint and Slackware via the grub menu when I access the bios on booting to specify disk 2, else it defaults to disk 1. I switch between FreeDos and Windows by copying the appropriate master boot record to disk 1. Put that in your smoke and pipe it.

MiquelFire

FreeDos and Windows 7 doesn't support UEFI, and maybe the BOIS on the computer as well (without UEFI, boot drives are limited to 2TB)

A co-worker had built a computer, and had that 2TB limit imposed on him. I think he had a raid set, and he needed a 2TB boot volume, and used the rest for an extra volume. Don't remember how he had configured it.

Eric Johnson

This is my third FOURTH attempt at posting this ("Sorry, but I gave up waiting for my turn to post your message. You can try again.")...

"A metallic, insulated water bottle with a straw to help me stay hydrated. (USD$100)"

$100 USD for a water bottle seems absurdly expensive. :o

Before I buy something, I ask myself whether it's a want or a need. If it's a true need (necessary to keep living or to continue working, for example), I'll usually get it, but if it's just a want, I'll sit on it for a time. Typically the desire wanes after a few days or a couple of weeks, and I'm glad I didn't make an impulse purchase.

Over the past couple years, I've toyed with "minimalism" and decluttering. Literally everything I own (sans furniture) can all fit into my car. I've tossed, donated, or otherwise gotten rid of 184 possessions this year alone. If I haven't used it in a long time, why keep it? Someone else could probably benefit from it. If I have an emotional attachment to it, I snap a picture of it before getting rid of it. It feels good, strangely enough, to be unburdened by excess junk. Going through my possessions has made me realize how I was lacking in some areas (for example, up until two days ago, I only owned two pairs of pants). There's still more I could get rid of--more I will get rid of--but some stuff (mainly electronics) I want to sell, so I'll take my time with it.

Bob Keane

Before I buy something, I ask myself whether it's a want or a need. If it's a true need (necessary to keep living or to continue working, for example), I'll usually get it, but if it's just a want, I'll sit on it for a time.

I'm in that boat now. I have a dead laptop I've been thinking about fixing. I've been thinking about replacing the hard drive and setting it up as a gaming computer but my current one works fine.

Matthew Leverton

Stuff doesn't fit in your car? Get a bigger car! ;D

I don't spend money on things that don't last or I won't actually use. Also if I buy something as an upgrade, then I sell, donate, or trash whatever it replaces. I will spend more money on quality things that I will use a lot.

https://takeyausa.com/products/matte-metallic-collection-insulated-water-bottle/18oz_Onyx?variant=31252089897069

Saved you some money on your water bottle. Cancel that order and get something else.

RmBeer2

Any garbage game playing:

video

NO THREAD LOCK HERE!!!

Erin Maus

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Broke 1,000 commits with the latest PR to add cutscenes. 🥺

bamccaig

Saved you some money on your water bottle. Cancel that order and get something else.

{"name":"KIpHiif.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/3\/2\/3245a6d4d3e63557e5001b9ce9cf4c5e.jpg","w":4032,"h":3024,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/3\/2\/3245a6d4d3e63557e5001b9ce9cf4c5e"}KIpHiif.jpg

Fortunately I can't see your negativity behind my enormous rehydration vessel so I can't respond to whatever nonsense you're going on about. >:(

Matthew Leverton

How does the water taste?

bamccaig

Cold and refreshing. It is a Hydro Flask 40 oz Wide Mouth with a Wide Mouth Straw Lid. I most likely Googled for a list of best products, and scrutinized the results until I found one I liked, and then found the closest thing I could find on Amazon Canada and customized to my liking. I don't really remember how I found out about them, but they were said to be good, and I can't complain. It works great and looks good. I underestimated how large 40 oz is, but I guess this is what I want. I only need to drink two full bottles a day. Hopefully this makes it convenient to drink my daily water. >:(

Matthew Leverton

I've got several of that brand. Sounds twice as expensive as what it costs here. :o

RmBeer2

My last change in the Image Viewer:

http://blackrook.xyz/2021-02-12%2005-28-57.mp4

I'm still developing it for DeepBlue, albeit at a slow pace. It's supposed to be an image viewer, where multiple users can upload multiple directories.

GullRaDriel

Looks nice RmBeer2

decepto

Oh my god, my old login still works! I've missed you all.

bamccaig

\o/

Eric Johnson

Fellas, my desktop's PSU is generating annoying coil whine. A little "percussive maintenance" to my desk clears it for a short time. Any remedies other than replacing it?

Edgar Reynaldo

It's decepto!

Holy shit!

Time for https://www.speedtest.net

Here are my results :

{"name":"612892","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/8\/d\/8d8b97dd314b3710541f5b8432e0ff89.png","w":1167,"h":572,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/8\/d\/8d8b97dd314b3710541f5b8432e0ff89"}612892

Meh. Acceptable. For now. I want fiber. >:(

LennyLen

{"name":"10967666676.png","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/6\/a\/6ab040b57d0ad3d72ca23588f01dfaca.png","w":750,"h":400,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/6\/a\/6ab040b57d0ad3d72ca23588f01dfaca"}10967666676.png

I'm not sure about how they achieve the results though. If I try to use a server in my own country I get ping times way higher than I do if I use an American one, and the download speed gets cut to less than half what I also get using an American server.

MiquelFire

{"name":"612893","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/e\/e\/ee0f8bc26612dbc443fa0f653d311fe9.png","w":465,"h":172,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/e\/e\/ee0f8bc26612dbc443fa0f653d311fe9"}612893

Top is the ISP's server, bottom is a server hosted by my job.

I remember when my speed was about half of what it is now, another forum I was in wanted to know people's speeds to a server near where the game's servers was hosted at, and I got download speeds noticeably faster than what I should have gotten (like my ISP put me in a higher tier when I ran the test by mistake)

Edgar Reynaldo

The process tried to write to a non-existent pipe.

Golden.

GullRaDriel

Well. I can say that here we're having good speedtests (and we were watching Netflix at the same time)
{"name":"612894","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/3\/4\/34a9a25f2eac03a2568d8554d5b1b1be.png","w":722,"h":346,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/3\/4\/34a9a25f2eac03a2568d8554d5b1b1be"}612894

bamccaig

I've been having lots of trouble with Internet lately. Several outages a day. I can't seem to isolate the problem to either my VPN (ExpressVPN), which seems to be unstable and dropping regularly and then struggling to reconnect, or my Internet connection itself. Windows first shows that the LAN has no Internet, and ExpressVPN claims to still be connected. However, my phone doesn't seem to have a problem, and I think it's too stupid to automatically switch to mobile when the LAN can't reach the Internet (but I could be wrong).

I was also suspecting that the modem was bad so I had a tech support guy show up to replace it. Embarrassingly enough when my wife called them I unknowingly had a large download going on in my office that I had forgotten about. I can't remember now what it was, but probably either an update or a game install. So that was most likely the explanation for the shitty connection when we called support. At the time I think I was overwhelmed with critical bugs and already exhausted and losing sleep so I think I wasn't able to worry about it at the time and encouraged her to call the ISP instead.

That said, I have been routinely losing my connection ON my sole computer at home (my work laptop) while no downloading should be going on, etc. It wasn't a complete waste of time because I also had him remove an unused cable running from the utility pole to the house right over the driveway. Anyway, even with the new flashy modem it seems unreliable. And prior to a month or two ago I would say Internet has always been very reliable with this ISP. It just doesn't fit that the Internet is the culprit.

To throw an extra wrench in my gears I switched ExpressVPN to use the Lightway protocol, which is in beta or something, so there's a chance that it's the specific protocol that is the issue... Though I think I remember having issues prior to switching protocols... Or did I.... Fuck...

{"name":"10996555964.png","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/a\/8\/a8ab7f798eded282278e007bf2601657.png","w":750,"h":400,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/a\/8\/a8ab7f798eded282278e007bf2601657"}10996555964.png

It's as advertised right now though. That's over ExpressVPN.

Append:

My mental health is as unstable as ever. But I'm also doing better managing my symptoms. I'm predominantly back to drinking water, which is a big benefit for my health (thanks, LennyLen). I just purchased a dosist(tm) dose controller with a "calm" cartridge to test out.

It's basically a concentrate vaporizer pen with a medical/therapeutic twist. They aim to provide you with specific properties or feelings instead of just giving you the flower or byproducts and letting you get whatever you get. The dose you get is supposed to be precisely measured by the pen every time. Whereas your run-of-the-mill concentrate pen for stoners is just a free-for-all. You can (and I have) get into trouble with them (though after you do you'll almost certainly level up to their level). So I can see the use for a precise dose, and with so little research out there right now it's good to have a private corporation striving to solve the problem of making medicinal use of cannabis effective and reliable.

The calm cartridge is 6:1 CDB (non-psychoactive) to THC (psychoactive). CBD in the presence of THC within our bodies is believed to have various healing properties. It generally also counteracts the high. At this ratio I don't feel any kind of high, but I do think that it is helping me with managing anxiety. It's not cheap though.

I've been trying to put effort into reading a paper book for a change. To motivate myself the book is very stimulating. "The Privileged Sex" by Martin Van Creveld. It's essentially the book to debunk the entire 3rd wave Feminist movement. :P Unfortunately, it's not going to be enough to counter the collapse of society as we know it, but at least it's nice to know that I'm not crazy. :P Creveld is said to be one of the world's leading historians on military history and warfare. The book is full of references too (sorry, those aren't verses, it's not that kind of holy book). I find that reading helps to calm my brain down too. And it helps to combat the concentration and memory loss issues I've been having.

It also helps me to smoke. As an alcoholic on the wagon for about 2 months now I generally smoke the way I would drink my first beer: desperately and much too quickly. That works great for pounding back a first beer, but if you smoke too quickly then your joint will deform and you'll end up fighting it to stay lit and burn all the flower. When I smoke without reading I generally am fighting the paper to keep up with the flower inside. I'm hitting it too hard and too often. When I read something this provocative while I smoke I get into the book and forget to smoke. I end up with a perfectly burning joint instead. :)

I think that my dad still doesn't know that I smoke weed. I've told my mom, but her memory is really poor too, and she's also conservative minded and misinformed so I think she's somewhat in denial about it. Anyway, initially it was no big deal, but now I find that it is consuming my life. And not in a bad way. I don't even think that I'm addicted. I think that my tolerance is just getting so high that in order to achieve the relief that I'm seeking I need to consume more and more. Pretty soon I'm going to need to take a tolerance break I think.

My understanding is that THC binds to receptors in your endocannabinoid system. Essentially, THC and CBD just happen to resemble the structure of other chemical signals that our bodies expect, and so they end up filling up those receptors and interfacing with our system. I also recently learned that they might trigger your body to increase the count of receptors as well over time. I guess for a daily user like myself all of your receptors get filled up, and so it takes more and more THC in your system to reach receptors that aren't used yet.

According to a stoner YouTube channel I've been watching it takes about 28 days to fully reset your tolerance back to zero. Though if you take a break for 48 hours it is said to have an immediate effect too, but it won't last as long. I'm a bit skeptical though because I think that I did quit for a month when things first got bad, and I found that my tolerance came back almost immediately.

I have a new bong, which has been a lot of fun to smoke from, but I'm not very good at it. I sometimes seem to screw up my breathing and waste some of it. But when I get everything right it's such a convenient way to get a full dose.

The only way up from here are concentrates. Otherwise known as dabs. Or rather, dabbing is one method of consuming concentrates. I've been slowly acquiring the kit required to try dabbing for myself. I bought a quartz banger that will interface with my bong to save money, and bought a titanium dabber/carb cap. The last piece to the puzzle is a butane torch to heat the banger up to temperature. I'm just waiting for that order to arrive and then I'll go shopping for my first concentrate outside of pill and pen form. :) I'm excited to reach a new level of highness because it is getting difficult to afford flower to get high, but I'm also worried to become permanently dependent on it. The nature of concentrates also almost certainly means they'll be much more expensive, and so I likely won't be able to afford them permanently. At least, not without first growing my own, and then processing my own concentrates.

Producing my own concentrate oil is a long term optional side quest. First I need to get growing my own. It's getting expensive to keep buying the government weed so I'm hoping to save some money by buying government seeds and growing my own plants instead. Even if that just supplements my supply, anything to save money on this stuff will help. I have a grow tent now, though I damaged part of it while assembling it, but I don't think that part really matters, and I'm waiting for the Chinese retailer on Amazon to follow through on a promise to ship me a 2nd free tent if I left a rating. Of course, I can't be bought, so my rating was fair and unbiased. I'm uncertain if they're still going to honour their offer now. Their response rate is low so it has been a few days since I've heard from them. In any case, I still need at least a light to provide the electromagnetic and heat energy required, then a big enough pot, soil, and fertilizer/plant food. I have seeds in the fridge, but they're very old at this point and were left on my desk for the first 6 months or so of my ownership of them so I'm skeptical that they'll still grow. If not I'll need to buy some new seeds. And I might need or at least some additional fans and filters to manage airflow and odour. But money is limited, and I'm trying to achieve a first grow with as little money invested as possible, so I might attempt it without the fans and other flashy stuff...

Oh, yeah, bump.

Edgar Reynaldo

Test #2. My upload is terrible.:-X

{"name":"612908","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/3\/c\/3c2e99324b3876debc3e97962173d795.png","w":734,"h":159,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/3\/c\/3c2e99324b3876debc3e97962173d795"}612908

And that ping...

I could never play a MMOFPS I would be lagging like a lame donkey

MiquelFire

{"name":"612909","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/1\/9\/194e91001d7c926718af796581a56d22.png","w":631,"h":82,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/1\/9\/194e91001d7c926718af796581a56d22"}612909

Remoting into my work machine

GullRaDriel

Not bad @MiquelFire

MiquelFire

I'm fairly certain my job has MUCH bigger pipes than that. Considering they're using a B class IP block at least.

Also, I forgot to change it here, but they do host a server for SpeedTest :P

Chris Katko

Where do you all live? The 3rd world? Do your kids sort through burning garbage and play "find the shiney?" :P

video

My internet is 200 down and it's pretty crap. My brother can get 10 gig symmetric up and down for $150 / month.

On the otherhand, an MRI is $750 and a doctors visit is $350.

l j

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Acceptable. A bit lower than my ISP promises but I'm on wifi.

My last doctor's visit was 4 EUR. The one before that I think might've been 25 EUR or something.

LennyLen
l j said:

My last doctor's visit was 4 EUR. The one before that I think might've been 25 EUR or something.

4 Euro is pretty good. A standard consultation with my GP costs me 30 NZD, which is ~18 Euro (22 USD). I did last year have surgery which included a 2 week hospital stay and a district nurse coming to my home every other day for another week to change dressings. That was completely free.

If you have any sort of accident in NZ, even if it's doing something which is known to cause injuries (such as playing Rugby), then treatment is also completely free.

bamccaig

Yay for fairness and equality. :) Boo, again, for America. :-*

Append:

TL;DR My ISP nearly swatted me.

This was a rather strange night, but that last line is read-bait. It's not actually that exciting, of course.

Essentially what my body/mind seem to want is to sleep from 08:00 to 18:00 and work from 18:00 to 02:00 (or 05:00, if I'm distracted throughout the day, which is the norm for me in 2021) and then my other time for other responsibilities and what little recreation fits. I thought I was on track to fix it last night. I had a decent sleep the night before, and woken up rested at 05:00. It was polar opposite to my norm. I felt great, and I was motivated to be productive. But after about an hour and a half my productivity tanked again.

I had finally finished work by about 01:00. Which was good compared to the past few weeks. But I didn't have enough time left for recreation to ease my anxiety without sacrificing sleep. I ended up going to bed around 04:30. I woke up early for stand-up at 10:00, checked my email, and began looking into a status alarm. After stand-up and figuring out what the alarm was about I climbed back into bed to more fully recover. I had an alarm set at 13:00 and an alarm set at 14:00 because I had a meeting scheduled for 14:00. At the latest I intended to wake up then. Except that I woke up at 16:30. I slept through both of those alarms. Fortunately, I woke up to a notification that my 14:00 meeting had been rescheduled 30 minutes before it was supposed to occur to the next day. So I don't even think I missed it.

So short story long, now I'm working through the evening and early morning to recover the hours because I slept through most of the day. And doesn't the Internet fail.

Many days ago the ISP had come and replaced our modem because our Internet kept disconnecting and it seemed like it had to be either their modem or on their end. Tonight, a few days later, the Internet drops again. I try resetting the modem, but still nothing. So seems like it's between my modem and the ISP or it's the ISP.

I begrudgingly call the ISP, and only because we're frustrated with the service, and working without Internet will be more challenging. I wait for 7 or 10 minutes of annoying ads (which really wasn't all that bad) repeating on what feels like a 1 minute loop, absorbing nothing consciously, and so everything subconsciously (what have I done?!).

I was using my wife's Airpods(tm) at the time because they're supposed to have amazing sound both in and out (confirmed by my wife when I called her using them). Yet somehow while on hold waiting for a free line I was hearing noise through the line. I sat questioning what piece of equipment is introducing this noise and why. Can my ISP not even make a clear call happen in 2021?! My energy level for anything, but social interaction in particular, is at an all time low too. Just as I'm about to tell the human being what my phone number is so that they can identify the account to begin troubleshooting the call abruptly ends.

I should point out that I'm high. I'm fully functional, mind you. My tolerance is quite high. I just smoked half a gram of delicious bargain-bin Sativa from my bong with my new wide bowl.

I wasn't sure if maybe I had accidentally gestured by touching one of the Airpods (I have no idea what the commands are so I just tap them with varying degrees of aggressiveness until they obey, or they timeout and I pull out my phone). Or if I had accidentally triggered a touch on the screen when I reached over to reposition my phone. Or maybe the call centre technician hung up (whether intended or not). I didn't really want to wait through the phone ads again only to be annoyed with their response regardless so I didn't bother calling back. Truth be told, I was also probably embarrassed, not knowing whose fault it was.

So I don't call back. I just tethered my phone to my laptop and continued working. I figured the Internet would likely be back after a while on its own. Sure enough it is. I disable the tether and continue working, but a few hours later the Internet has dropped again. I decide to smoke another bowl of cannabis while I let the modem memory hopefully clear. But just as I'm walking away from the laptop to take a break I notice lights out my living room window. I look outside to find an ISP van is parked literally right in front of my house, with a technician raised up in the bucket working on the line. Amused, I go into the bedroom to tell my wife, but she is already sleeping. I peek out of the blind in the window only to find two more ISP vans practically blocking the road on the other side of my driveway. They had me surrounded. With their flashing orange lights it resembled a movie or TV group police arrest.

I'm a little paranoid from the weed so I question whether these men are truly telecommunications technicians or undercover police/federal agents setting up additional equipment to monitor me. I cast that aside if only because even if true there isn't much that little old me can do about it. So fuck it. I grab my bong and step out into the driveway, look at the technician on the pole 50 feet ahead, and walk back into my garage. I fire the bowl up with my Zippo and some hemp wick. Delicious. I get 7 or 8 lungs full and head back inside, making sure to stop and look directly at the agent technician on the pole before proceeding inside with my prominent bong.

A few minutes later I noticed that my Internet was fixed. And shortly after that the vehicles bugged out. Pretty trippy for a stoner to call the ISP, give his name which isn't unique, but have the call drop before giving identifying information. But shortly thereafter finding the house surrounded by ISP vehicles blocking the streets, working on the pole directly outside. :P I found that hilarious. Unfortunately, they're probably judging me for the cannabis, but I don't want to let that stop me. The stigma will never go away if people shy away from using in front of others. Fuck it.

OK, Internet back, story documented. Time to try to get the rest of these items done. :-/

Bob Keane

The last time my internet was down was a bit amusing. I thought it was the router at first. It was old, the wifi connection was out and I was using a wap. But one night my connection went out and resetting did not help. I had a replacement router so I hooked it up and everything seemed fine. A few days later, no internet, so I called my isp. They pinged the router but got no response, so we decided the modem was no good. I replaced it and reconnected the old router. Everything worked for a few days, then no connection again. I swapped out the router and got back on. Next day, no internet again. So, the router was new, the modem was new, what was the problem? Yup, I forgot to test the cable from the router to the modem. Swapping it out seemed to work, so I reconnected the old router and was back online. A few days later, no internet again, so I reconnected the new one.

Bamccaig said:

Boo, again, for America.

I know what you mean. The internet reported Trump will be back in office March 3. I've been hiding in a hole avoiding the news since he took the office back.

bamccaig

Had a phone appointment with my family doctor today. I was worried he was going to take my weed away, but it never came up. He doesn't sound overly worried about the cannabis. We did discuss it, and he agrees there's a risk of the cannabis making things worse, but it didn't sound like a very big risk. That said, I'm now experiencing clinical depression and severe anxiety without alcohol. So we're very concerned about that. Thoughts of suicide are back to being nearly a daily occurrence, despite taking my medicine and avoiding alcohol. I'm finally being referred to psychiatry. In the meantime, we're also doubling my antidepressant dose from 20 mg Citalopram to 40 mg. >:( He put medical leave from work on the table so I could probably ask for time off work if I wanted, and I could definitely use it, but we can't afford our bills without my income so I don't think I can really take advantage of that... At best I might get paid 55% of my income through employment insurance/government, but that would stretch us way too thin. We're already struggling because my cannabis needs have been going up and up with tolerance. I probably need to take a tolerance break to flush my endocannabinoid system out and make me more susceptible to the cannabinoids again, but at the moment cannabis seems like the most effective tool I have for combating the suicidal ideation so I'm not sure now is the best time to take that break. :-/

DanielH

I'm glad you are trying.

Did you have to be referred or could you have gone previously to psychiatry?

Just some thoughts. I also have depression, but it is not as bad as what you are going through.

Citalopram (Celexa) is ok for depression. I was on escitalopram (Lexapro) for a few years. It's the same drug just purified to remove the inactive portion. Sounds like you need more than one antidepressant. Maybe one with more antianxiety effect. Maybe a different type of antidepressant. One that affects a different monoamine (SSRI, SNRI, DNRI, etc..)

From my experience as a pharmacist working in a mental health clinic, only taking one antidepressant is rare. Especially if your having those thoughts of suicide.

On a side note: there is a black box warning on most antidepressants.
Antidepressants increased the risk of suicidal thinking and behavior

This is not quite correct. What they are finding is that people are already having suicidal thoughts, but are too depressed to act on them. When they start taking the antidepressant and they are no longer too depressed to act on those thoughts is the concern.

Edgar Reynaldo

Brandon,

I too have suffered from major depression throughout most of my adult life. I am also on Lexapro like DanielH but I don't have many problems with suicidal thoughts. I wish I could offer you advice, but I don't know what is causing your depression and anxiety. I do know that anxiety is fear of the future as I used to suffer from pretty bad anxiety too. The only thing that helped me through it was learning to trust God. I understand you're not a believer, but prayer can help in difficult times if you're willing to be open about it. Like I said I don't know much what I can do to help you, but I sincerely hope you feel better about life and about yourself. I will pray for you, and I can only hope that God heals you of your problems. Depression and anxiety can utterly destroy a person's life if you let them. I hope and pray you feel better soon.

Marc

bamccaig
DanielH said:

Did you have to be referred or could you have gone previously to psychiatry?

I'm uncertain. It's hard to even find answers to those questions. I think that the preferred approach is to go through your family doctor, in part because they need to eliminate medical reasons in the process. In fact, I guess technically I don't have my referral yet because they need updated blood work first. :D I could save them the time.

THCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCT
HCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTH
CTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHC
THCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCT
HCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTH
CTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHCTHC

The blood work is to rule out thyroid and maybe kidney issues.

The real reason though is that I just cannot afford it. If they're referring me to a private service they're wasting everyone's time because I most likely cannot afford it. :P But hopefully it's going to be at least partially covered through the taxes that I already pay (and the health benefits through work).

DanielH said:

Citalopram (Celexa) is ok for depression. I was on escitalopram (Lexapro) for a few years. It's the same drug just purified to remove the inactive portion. Sounds like you need more than one antidepressant. Maybe one with more antianxiety effect. Maybe a different type of antidepressant. One that affects a different monoamine (SSRI, SNRI, DNRI, etc..)

From my experience as a pharmacist working in a mental health clinic, only taking one antidepressant is rare. Especially if your having those thoughts of suicide.

On a side note: there is a black box warning on most antidepressants.
Antidepressants increased the risk of suicidal thinking and behavior

This is not quite correct. What they are finding is that people are already having suicidal thoughts, but are too depressed to act on them. When they start taking the antidepressant and they are no longer too depressed to act on those thoughts is the concern.

:o Some really neat information there. I wonder if my doctor is referring me to psychiatry only because I believe I'm autistic and that it's distressing and it's probably somewhat bothersome constantly asking him for help with it when he doesn't think it's important. :P I mentioned that my wife thinks I'm a hypochondriac or have Munchhausen's syndrome or something like that, and that I don't think I do in a P.S. I'm a little worried he's only sending me to psychiatric for that. :o

That said, it's possible that he is detecting hints that this is not just a medical issue, which I would concur, and is actually taking me seriously, in which case he may wish for a psychiatrist to help with figuring out which combination is appropriate.

I wish I could offer you advice, but I don't know what is causing your depression and anxiety. I do know that anxiety is fear of the future as I used to suffer from pretty bad anxiety too. The only thing that helped me through it was learning to trust God.

What helped me through it in the past was avoiding responsibilities so that I didn't have anybody or anything to worry about except for me. That and self-medicating with alcohol. That was going great until my 🐓 fucked it up. I got one woman and somehow that turned into a woman, a second car, a cat, a mortgage, and a dog. And she wants to pile more responsibilities on my shoulders even as I struggle to stay above water!

"We" bought a house together in 2018. Itself a hurried decision that I had to make without really knowing enough to make a wise one, but would have faced a miserable bitch of a wife for the foreseeable future had I gone the other way. And we would have lost out on a truly amazing house for the money. She wasn't going to give up on pressuring me to buy one, and the next one might not be so good. Within a busy few weeks my bank accounts and most of my bills were changed to joint accounts which were originally my wife's accounts. She had first class access and I had third class access (now I'm maybe at 2nd class status with 50% of the accounts, partly because I'm too busy and burned out to even think about trying to fix it, but also because it's a credit union and their software and service is shit compared to my old bank).

I was busy with work and so obviously when she offered to go and set everything up that made sense. Except she put all of the bills in just her name, and just going to her, and so I've never seen a bill for the house that I live in and presumably pay for (save for an occasional anomalous utilities bill that she shares to emphasize our energy consumption requirements :P). That's some ignorant Feminist bullshit right there. You receive the bills that you can't even afford to pay, eh?! Our pay all goes into a single chequing account and she pays all of the bills out of that. I could be that chauvinist pig and insist upon putting my name on everything, but I'd be faced with shame and humiliation if I do and it's not like my money would be any safer even if I did.

Considering in the apartment I handled everything it is rather uncomfortable, not least of all because she's younger than me and has everything to gain by screwing me over and little to lose. All the while I've long been conscious of the fact that men receive unfair treatment in divorce and family courts, and in general. I'm now also reading a book to confirm my biases with references. And it's outrageous that it has been on shelves for 2 decades and nothing changes.

It's outrageous that people continue to bring up bullshit ideas like the wage gap when it has been debunked countless times by credible sources. It's outrageous that throughout history men have protected and provided for women, and in return women turn around and use their power over us to rewrite history into making men into oppressors and abusers, and women into victims of patriarchy.

A few months after getting our first house we get an 8 week old puppy. Of a large breed. Again it was a hurried and forced decision. She tricked me into getting the cat when I was hungover so my guard was up. We happened to get free tickets to a hockey game where the puppy was being showcased during an advertising intermission. My wife heard about the puppy through Facebook and was excited about it. She begged me if we could apply. She gave me the impression that there would be countless people applying and we would be unlikely to get the dog anyway. Turns out there was very few suckers that day. I was the only one apparently.

Nevertheless, there was a snafu at the shelter and we were almost denied due to an identity mix-up, but my wife made sure to follow-up with them until she was able to straighten it all out. I love dogs, and having a dog is great, but a puppy is a fucking ton of work. It is not an appropriate time to get one when you're still adjusting to big changes in your life. :P He's now about 16 months old, and he is still a handful. Now instead of it being a helpless and needy little baby it is a body building T-Rex. :P That I have to handle several times per day. Besides constantly trying to destroy things, and eat me, he's great. We're finally getting to the point where he can be uncaged for extended periods of time without driving us crazy or injuring or breaking anything, but it's still hit or miss. :P

When he was a puppy is when I first had my mental breakdown. The first month or so we were just picking up pee puddles in the house, but after a couple of months we were taking him outside practically every hour to pee. No joke. All day and night. For a few months. So I was losing lots of sleep trying to keep up with work and this puppy.

My employer was doing a poor job communicating health and stability to staff in previous years, and several employees were nervous about the future. One of our primary devs got another job and was leaving in December 2019. Around the same time I just so happened to get a hit on LinkedIn for a job. Money was a bit better. Sounded good. Tough decision. No way to know what the correct decision is. I change jobs. For the first time in my life. And it doesn't go well. I'm working for the CEO's brother, who has until now been developing the solution all on his own. He's resistant to change or anything different than he likes it. He is also terrible at communicating, and generally abrasive. The CEO is equally abrasive. The kind of guy that will joke about you being fired just to fuck with you. That may be funny to somebody privileged that doesn't need to work, but for the average person that's never going to be funny unless it's clear that you're joking. They would outwardly say shit like that over the whole office, as well as privately to you. It was very uncomfortable. It felt very abusive. Of course, there's no real solution to it other than leaving it.

Fortunately I tried to leave my previous job the right way when I left so I desperately reached out to my old manager to tell him how I was struggling, and express interest in going back. And fortunately they were excited to have me back. But things are still significantly changed since the other staff member left, and since then my manager has left too. So we're understaffed, and a lot of the day to day burden of answering to live technical concerns falls on me. I also am responsible for software system health, builds, and deployments. Meanwhile I still have a queue of items to complete for the sprint, but between my health and medication my concentration and focus is now gone.

Which makes work extremely difficult. I sit down to work. I'm at my computer. I'm trying to work. But I'm just spaced out and can't seem to stay focused like I used to be able to. I used to zone out and work for 8 hours straight. Now I zone out and don't get anything done for seemingly 8 hours. :P Except it's not 8 hours straight. It's like 5 minutes here. 5 minutes there. Every day is slow and unproductive. I'm not even listening to music nor playing games nor have the other usual distractions. I barely look at my phone. And so my work days extend from 8 hours into 12 or 16 hours as I only log the productive actions I took and try to make up for the deficits after hours. I'm sort of working double time and not getting paid for it. And I'm quickly burning out.

That's not even all. But basically I have real problems, and imagined problems, and there's no easy fix to either of them. Society is set up by design with huge gaping holes. I'm afraid of falling into one as I attempt to navigate my days. Unfortunately, my concerns are mostly justified.

I think that the pressure just grew too quick. The only pressure that my wife feels is time. So she's in a rush to check all the boxes in her life as quickly as possible before it's too late. ::) If she had to fund them herself she wouldn't even be able to consider these things, but because she gets to think about what to spend my income on she gets to. Must be fucking nice, I say. So much for Feminism, 2021. Still women don't pull half their weight. Not because men are "oppressing them", but because they're weak and fragile. :P Because THEY refuse to work. Even when lives are on the line. And we don't exactly have a good way to measure how much somebody can contribute. And so women generally get a pass before anyone else.

Many of them are in the workforce today at some point in their lives so they give us all the impression that they're doing the same thing as the rest of us, but in the majority of cases they'll be on reduced hours or take more time off throughout their careers. Not because they're forced to, but because they want to. In fact, some employment benefits now enjoyed by men were originally awarded to women despite men suffering through those same conditions for millennia. Suddenly when women were in the workforce things had to change to accommodate their special needs. And so some of the extra rights afforded to them were eventually extended to men too.

Throughout history women have been master complainers. Always having it better than men, and always complaining the most. It's the only way to even explain Feminism. Think about it. It's batshit insane, and yet society as a whole has adopted it. Our universities have abandoned reasoned thought for feelings and safe spaces. The only possible way for things to be like this is for women to be so goddamned special and privileged that they're able to make us all play this fucking stupid game pretending just to make them feel better! >:(

...Feel better about already having it better than you and I and most people that ever lived? :-/

I literally feel like it's hopeless to even bother anymore. Look around. Our society is circling the toilet. We're throwing away hundreds of years of wisdom and going back in time to repeat previous failures. If we don't kill each other through destruction we'll destroy each other through consumption. I'm exhausted worrying about it all. I'm exhausted period. I'm starting to be convinced that this species isn't worth saving. Perhaps instead of going green we should be trying to ensure certain extinction.

I understand you're not a believer, but prayer can help in difficult times if you're willing to be open about it. Like I said I don't know much what I can do to help you, but I sincerely hope you feel better about life and about yourself. I will pray for you, and I can only hope that God heals you of your problems. Depression and anxiety can utterly destroy a person's life if you let them. I hope and pray you feel better soon.

I do believe that I am in need of "spiritual" healing, but I do not believe that I will find any relief in religion. Those work for people that are able to believe them, but I am unable to come to terms with the contradictions and lack of evidence. For me the very concept of a religion is dirty. Believing ideas precisely because there is no evidence is irrational. It's a recipe for disaster. Religions have far more bad ideas than they do good. So while they might do some good for some of the people, I'm convinced that most people are either harmed or neutral.

Anyway, I'm surprised how little the elders at my family church have changed in the 20 years since I've attended. I expected most of them to be passed away or close to it, but many are still in surprisingly good health. It is sometimes a tempting notion to return. But I'm only fond of the family atmosphere that I remember as a child. In reality, everything about the church is different, from its layout to its politics and social dynamics. Even if the religion stuff wasn't a turn off the very thought of it fills me with anxiety. I'd need special treatment to make it pleasant for me. E.g., Special training in the helping out duties because I won't just get it like everyone else, or exemption from them, but that would probably come with social costs and would probably be humiliating. :P

Edgar Reynaldo
bamccaig said:

I do believe that I am in need of "spiritual" healing, but I do not believe that I will find any relief in religion. Those work for people that are able to believe them, but I am unable to come to terms with the contradictions and lack of evidence. For me the very concept of a religion is dirty. Believing ideas precisely because there is no evidence is irrational. It's a recipe for disaster. Religions have far more bad ideas than they do good. So while they might do some good for some of the people, I'm convinced that most people are either harmed or neutral.

Christianity is not a religion, it's a reality. These contradictions you believe in for the most part do not exist. They come from ignorant teachers that don't know the truth of God's Word. There is plenty of evidence of Jesus life historically, not just including the New Testament. If you had read the Bible with understanding, you would know there is plenty of evidence FOR God, because it proves itself time and time again if you're willing to learn with patience.

"In your patience possess ye your soul."

Jesus makes our burdens lighter, not heavier. He died on the cross so we could be forgiven our sins and find peace with God the Father.

In any case, you are married, and it sounds like it is causing you a lot of stress. So my advice is, talk to Miranda about your problems, especially if she is the one putting so much pressure on you. Tell her how hard your life has become and how stressful it is to you. If you can't talk to her, then maybe she isn't right for you. You need someone to support you mutually, not just bear the entire burden of the household on yourself. It's okay to show weakness. When we are weak, we are the strongest, because it is God Himself who is holding us up. If it wasn't for Christianity, Jesus, and the Father, I would still be suffering from major anxiety today. Learning to let go and trust God was the best thing I ever did for myself. I still struggle with depression, but talking to God eases my burden. He says to cast your cares on Him, because He cares for you.

Faith is the counter to anxiety. If you have no faith, your anxiety will be great indeed, because you'll be spending all your time worrying about how everything is going to turn out instead of letting go of your worries and taking it one day at a time.

I can give you advice, and I can help you learn about God, but I can't magically take away your depression or anxiety without you willing to put some effort into letting go and learning new things.

I really think you need a professional psychologist to talk to in therapy sessions. I believe you need to get your problems out in the open where you can see them from a different perspective and realize maybe you're not so bad off after all.

Keep your head up Brandon, and don't give up hope. The best is yet to come, bro. Believe it.

MiquelFire

So... nothing is happening around here this week? I'm surprised that nothing been posted anywhere on these forums since Tuesday.

Edit: Wow, what timing... Posted basically one minute after Edgar

Erin Maus

I have some cool things going on in my life but didn't wanna post after bambam. I didn't want to be rude.

bamccaig

Pfffft. That's not rude. Post away. :P

Not many want to discuss my post anyway. >:(

Erin Maus

I'm moving in with my boyfriend soon. ;D

After this next lease (so in like a year) I'll be buying a house. :o

My job (at Truist, a regional US bank headquartered in Charlotte, NC) is going well, making really big waves with the stuff I'm working on*. Career trajectory is good, my performance review was pretty much amazing (exceeding expectations across the board - not only is that hard in a good year, it's even harder in a "bad" year [i.e., COVID]). 8-)

ItsyRealm is coming along nicely, a friend of mine is making some great music for it. Hoping to launch it on Steam Early Access by the end of the year, but that's a soft deadline since it's just a hobby. :D

Also my legal name should be changed within the next 4-6 weeks. So that's great. :)

*: To be clear, I took a single-page app "proof of concept" and made it a fully functional app that totally shifted our goals the following PI (program increment; basically a collection of sprints).

GullRaDriel

Good news Erin !

Here we are going to get married, as soon as it's possible with the fucking covid (and the money X-D)

8-)

Chris Katko

2020 Trump: Kids in cages
(Democrats: "OMG, TRAVESTY")
2021 Biden: Kids in bunkers
(Democrats: "meh. they probably deserve it.")

https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/16/politics/border-children/index.html?fbclid=IwAR0_CKjNHiVir4AHVtXRzYcxzBthoyd4GAaRSKH_eJFTYea7RScZE9JjLD0

8-)

You know, I couldn't actually make these points if Democrats would actually... you know... be Democrats.

Kinda like "Black Lives Matter" until they don't, and we just elect a white guy whose sole credentials are "I was friends with a black guy". He can probably say the n-word. And even though nothing BLM-related has changed... magically electing a white democrat has suddenly stopped all the BLM protests.

Meanwhile progressives like AOC are like:

Universal income? "Nah."
Medicare 4 all? "Nah."
$15 minimum wage? "Nah."

AOC went from staging a photoshoot of crying at the fence because of suffering migrant children to... ignoring those same kids.

{"name":"candace-owens-aoc-crying-photoshoot.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/4\/5\/452112f9a515f15b986f69ab974d0181.jpg","w":411,"h":270,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/4\/5\/452112f9a515f15b986f69ab974d0181"}candace-owens-aoc-crying-photoshoot.jpg

video

I'm one of those idiots who actually... you know... expects change when people run on a platform of change. I didn't realize voting was only about telling everyone around you that you're a member of their clique and not about actually changing things.

Seasons change. The left wins. The right wins. At least the rich get richer every election. In Jeff Bezos we trust.

bamccaig

Yes, of course, politics is 100% about attaining power to sell it to the highest bidder. Who gets to be a politician? Generally a slimey weasel of a person with a nice smile and a firm handshake and a brain that makes them feel righteous and confident all the time, even when they shouldn't. The job itself sucks. At least, doing it does. Fortunately for them, they have staffers to do most of the job for them. I'm not sure what is left for them. Probably making appearances look good, mostly. And maybe actually voting on a few laws so it looks like you work there.

AOC may be something bigger, but it's too soon to say. Ultimately though, her hands are tied having to play the political games too. We better hope she's for real because I think she's about the only reasonable person that I've heard of over there. :P Which is not to say that I agree with everything she does, but she seems to be after what is best instead of just getting rich so that's something. Or maybe she just has me fooled. But I don't care that much I can't do anything about it anyway.

Chris Katko

The thing that makes me so upset is that everyone was so divisive, and so angry, and so judging of the other side and at the end of the day, the single important issue--the kids lives--still hasn't been solved. As the left and right move on to the next battleground to get their adrenaline high. Trump was "a monster" for letting those kids suffer, but Biden built the cages, and still hasn't saved them. For months into his presidency.

I mean, at this point, just let the goddamn kids into the goddamn country. What's the point of laws if they're hurting children? Take a mere $100 million from the war budget and actually save some lives and give them homes, parents, and swimming pools for all I care.

Pot is legal in tons of states yet we haven't heard a pepe from our progressive government about changing that on the federal level even though, objectively, the classification is wrong for marijuana. marijuana is scheduled as a drug that has "no medical, or scientific value" which is patently, flat earther-tier, false. So even if you don't support marijuana legalization, the classification is still wrong. We KNOW kids with seizures can benefit from CBT in marijuana. And forbidding scientists from even studying it is a moral injustice that will affect tens of thousands or more. We wouldn't even know about those kids if people didn't illegally try to save them. And once again, if saving kids is illegal, !@$! the laws.

[edit]

Biden tells migrants 'don't come' to US as border crisis surges

hahaahhahaahhahaahhahaahhahaahhahaahhahaahhahaahhahaahhahaahhahaahhahaahhahaahhahaahhahaahhahaahhahaahhahaahhahaahhahaahhahaahhahaahhahaahhahaahhahaahhahaahhahaahhahaahhahaahhahaahhahaahhahaahhahaahhahaah

bamccaig

You seem to have this nonsense idea that people that associate themselves with the Democratic party actually have any control over the actions of their elected officials. That's just insane. The electoral system is just broken by design. The people in power won't fix it because they like power. And they're the only ones that can.

Earlier "today" (yesterday because my workday has stretched into the wee hours of the morning) I found myself wondering (and I don't remember why) if the reason the federal government hasn't dropped the cannabis laws is because they've locked so many goddamn people up wrongfully over it, particularly people of colour, that admitting they were wrong could result in massive lawsuits or reparations that the government can't possibly afford (let alone the sudden surge of unemployment when the prison population halves overnight). :P

I cannot fathom why else they would maintain such a ridiculous position on cannabis. As an alcoholic I can confirm that alcohol is much more harmful in every way compared to cannabis.

There is one other possibility. People with a risk of mental illness, in particular psychosis, may be at an increased risk of accelerating their mental decline by using cannabis. Maybe the federal government has the hard scientific data that Americans are all crazy, and therefore needs to protect them from the effects of cannabis. :P

Notably psychosis is also known as schizophrenia. And apparently that's what autism used to be considered. :o There are apparently links between autism and schizophrenia. (Also, I heard today from an autistic YouTuber that transgender people are 6x more likely to be autistic than non-trans people.)

Append:

To be fair, COVID-19.

Also, you seem to get a sick sense of pleasure out of Democratic failings, and yet seem to have a hardon for Trump. Yet you claim to be a liberal?

Do you want America to fail? :P

LennyLen

A question for American forum-goers (though if you're not American but know the answer, go for it): In American movies/TV shows, whenever a driver is stopped by police they're always asked for their licence and registration. What registration are they asking for? Car registration? If so, does that mean that you don't have to have your registration details showing at all times if it's something that you keep on you to give to the cops?

Here, we have all the relevant info affixed to the inside of the windscreen:

{"name":"612922","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/c\/7cff1ec76ffc3eca97c23c0af9307109.jpg","w":1464,"h":975,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/c\/7cff1ec76ffc3eca97c23c0af9307109"}612922

This way, police and parking wardens can tell if you're registration is up to date even if you're not currently in the car.

Bob Keane

We do not have registration stickers on cars in the US like you have. I guess we haven't thought of it yet. The problem may be people will forget to change them when they renew their registration. License plates (car tags) do have stickers which tell when they expire.

Bamccaig said:

Also, you seem to get a sick sense of pleasure out of Democratic failings, and yet seem to have a hardon for Trump. Yet you claim to be a liberal?

Do you want America to fail? :P

Maybe he is just stirring controversy to get a debate going?

To get back on topic, maybe we should use bitwarden to avoid threads locking too soon?

MiquelFire

Most Americans tend to keep the registration in the glove box or something like it (There's so much storage compartments in cars now...)

It might be a state thing, but in here in Michigan, you're also asked for your insurance as well.

Matthew Leverton

It's going to vary by state; movies are probably based on whatever rule was in place in California in 1950.

In Illinois, car registration is not required to keep on hand here for regular passenger vehicles. The police run the license plate number on their computers to look that up before they even get to the window. You just have to show proof of insurance and a valid driver's license. (The latter they could look up too, but that would require the driver knowing what his or her actual name is.)

Asking for registration has probably always been more of a way to give the police a simple way to arrest you if they are suspicious about your racial appearance.

bamccaig

The police can look up the information in Ontario, but they'll ask you for it first. Then they'll take it back to their car and verify your information against the computer. If you don't have it on you I think you can be charged, but typically they'll just require you to show up at the police station within a few days to prove that you have it all and it's all still valid.

There are vehicle stickers that must be affixed to the corner of the license plate that are issued with your registration in Ontario, but I think that it only contains the expiry date and you are expected to have the paperwork too. This way police can identify lawful citizens with expired registration from outside the vehicle, but a more thorough investigation is needed to verify that the registration is on hand and valid, etc. As MiquelFire said, most people put it in their glove box, though some might use other convenient interior storage depending on make/model and preferences.

For my motorcycle I've started storing my registration and insurance in my newer motorcycle jacket, which is full of pockets. I won't ride without one so it helps to ensure that I have it on me without having it wrapped in a plastic bag in the pillion and still getting wet/dirty. The only problem there is that I have two jackets and with the weight off my old one fits and it's much more comfortable in warm weather, but like I said you can typically bring proof later on so if I happen to get caught without it I'm depending on, "oops, it's in my other jacket" to get me by without getting shot or tasered.

Bob Keane

might be a state thing, but in here in Michigan, you're also asked for your insurance as well.

Here in Massachusetts our insurance co. stamps the registration form. I think we can be arrested for not having the form on us, but usually the officers just do a registry check. Off topic, someone hit a house in my neighborhood last week. The driver was doing 35 mph in a 20 mph zone and driving with a suspended license.

Edgar Reynaldo

License, registration, and proof of insurance please...

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bamccaig

video

I'm a little terrified of being pulled over by American cops. They all seem like trigger-happy cowards. ::) Might be time you regulate your guns a little bit more. Your police are terrified. (Yes, I know that video was uploaded in 2014 or something, but it was NOT hard to find one.)

Edgar Reynaldo

It's a little different here. We have city cops, county sheriffs, and state troopers, in addition to some mysterious "Vehicle enforcement officers" - I'm guessing they are DOT cops?

The lower grade they are the worse it seems.

Chris Katko

i give up trying to post in this thread with the server crapping out so often.

Edgar Reynaldo

i give up trying to post in this thread with the server crapping out so often.

Posts post just fine as long as you know how to quote properly.

MiquelFire

At some point, Matt needs to limit the scope of the auto quote system for threads like this one.

bamccaig
Erin Maus

I don't have time to read the article at this moment, but I did a little research on your first link and some major red flags are:

1. He has no academic background (in few words, I can't find any information on his studies). :)
2. His research is cited only by one other article. :)
3. The journal he published is seems incredibly biased (not all journals are equal). :)

bamccaig

I don't disagree, I also got the impression that it might have been fringe, but then again with Feminist ideologies in power researchers aren't even able to ask these questions in the mainstream, let alone qualify for funding to study them. That's very problematic. Our science is crippled by your colourful buddies. I'm glad you guys are coming to terms with your brain development (as am I), but the war on science must stop.

Chris Katko

Edgar: Ok, lord gatekeeper of the internet.

amarillion

Let's talk some more about politics! We don't talk about that very often I believe.

Dutch election results are in.
https://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2021-03-18/dutch-prime-minister-powers-to-fourth-straight-election-win

The number of parties in the Dutch parliament has exploded in recent years. There were 36 parties on the ballot, 17 of which are now going to be able to claim at least one seat in parliament. 3 of these 17 are newcomers.

You'd think that this would make the Netherlands difficult to govern. But on the other hand, the ruling coalition keeps its majority, in spite of unpopularity of COVID measures and the recent childcare allowance scandal that caused the disbandment of the government in the first place. Power is still firmly in the hands of the established parties.

Also bad news for Brexiteers: the so desired domino effect isn't happening. "Nexit" is forgotten. The Dutch voted soundly for pro-EU parties. An interesting new development: the pan-european Volt party makes its debut in parliament.

Our dedicated conspiracy-theory party is FvD, but claiming fraud proves difficult for them as they were gaining seats. (Article from the dutch equivalent of the Onion)

Here is another nice explainer in English: https://dutchreview.com/news/politics/the-netherlands-has-voted-five-things-to-know-about-the-dutch-elections-results-of-2021/

Please discuss with same intensity as the American elections. Kthxbye.

LennyLen

You'd think that this would make the Netherlands difficult to govern

I'm second generation Dutch. The sheer stubbornness of my Dutch relatives is what I think would make the Netherlands hard to govern.

Edgar Reynaldo

Edgar: Ok, lord gatekeeper of the internet.

Thanks for the rude comment, Chris, and for proving my point.

bamccaig

video

Unrelated, but I guess related...

The reference to comment or conduct "that is known or ought reasonably to be known to be unwelcome" means that there are two parts to the test for harassment. First, we have to consider if the person carrying out the harassment knew how their behaviour would be received. Second, we must consider how someone else would generally feel about the behaviour – this can help us think from the perspective of a person who is being harassed.

This law means one of two things for me and people like me that struggle to empathize[1], especially before becoming conscious of your disability.

  • Either I'm free to harass women as long as I'm reasonably unaware that I'm doing it (because the law should recognize my inability to understand how they feel about my "comment or conduct"). This is very unlikely to be interpreted in this way by neurotypical (normal) people..


  • Or I can be guilty of a crime that I may be unable to know that I am committing.

Any woman looking at our social and public framework would have to be unpractised thinkers (and therefore very dangerous) or mentally ill to believe that men as a class are in control. Society is a nightmare for men. True equality would free us. And that's why true is equality is opposed vehemently by Feminists and women alike whenever it is attempted. You and I may be doing great for now, but there are real men (human beings) suffering under these systems right now. And absolutely no protections exist to defend against these things. Millionaires are not immune. Billionaires are immune so far, but it ruins their golf game.

Ok Edgar, lord gatekeeper of the Internet.

He's not wrong. Use fully described XML tags:

<quote name="who or what said it" src="url to quote or explain where the quote can be found">the content</quote>

...becomes...

the content

Posts instantly. Then try using this and see how long it takes:

> the content

<quote>the content</quote>

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Or pull in https://github.com/bambams/acc.js for some simple helpers that can be accessed with the click of a link. Host your own copy to avoid very rare breakage from live hacks or SSL downtime, which is rare now that SSLMate reminds me. The links in the repo itself are probably broken so feel free to report that and I'll fix them. :P

References

  1. See High Functioning Autism.
Erin Maus

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New ItsyRealm logo.

Changed plans a little, going to focus on polishing the starter area then releasing it on Steam Early Access. So this would be in the next 2-3 months.

I'd be happy to sell like 5,000-10,000 copies, would totally make it worth my time over the last few years.

Tomorrow ItsyRealm turns three years old. They grow up so fast. :'(

Chris Katko

migrant children, or delicious biden potatoes? you decide! and don't you love how we need an "alt right leaker" just to find out how kids are living?

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Just remember, vote Blue No Matter who! Because the corporations need bailouts.

I wish a Republican was president again, so their lives actually mattered to dems again. Because I don't really care what peoples "views" are if the end result is 15,000 children tossed into hot pocket containers.

bamccaig

Honestly I think that money has corrupted America so much that even the "good" ones are somewhat evil. I don't think it's interesting that Trump is a terrible person, or that Biden doesn't magically have a solution that the public will actually like. Your options are: tax Americans more to pay for better quality of care, or leave things as they are and let the poor "illegal" migrants suffer. Of course, you and I both know which one would win in a referendum in America. They're just saving time by not holding the referendum.

Besides, the whole children in cages thing kind of got old. You can only be outraged at so much for so long before you become desensitized to it. If that was the only evil thing going on in the world, let alone that part of the world, then maybe everybody would stay upset about it. But there's no shortage of reasons to be upset right now. Science has once again come under attack in our lifetimes, and has been significantly hindered and tampered with. There seems to be a great deal of nonsense "science" that is accepted now as truth without question, despite the fact that experts in the field disagree... The result appears to be that the people in power do not believe in science and knowledge and truth, but rather they appear to believe that what is "true" is malleable and open to interpretation. Which is how women are just as strong, smart, and everything else as men, despite the fact that they also need so much extra protection, help, and exceptional treatment compared to men. You see, logic does not matter any more. Anything goes. 1+1=3 now. Fuck it. Prove it doesn't without relying on patriarchy science! That's probably what Trump was going for. I guess if we're going to all pretend that women are just as strong as men then anything goes!

Old ideas don't sell as good as new ideas. Even if those ideas are irrelevant to the world or even fake, they'll sell better to these little shits they call consumers if they sell something new and fashionable instead of something true and important. That's the reason the media isn't covering this right now. It's not the most demanded content. That's probably some celebrity gossip or something. While it's easy to blame the media industries, and they certainly own their fair share of responsibility for this, but also people do. Consumers do. We're the ones paying for all of this shit content. Why? They're just giving us what we most want. Why do we want such shitty content? What the fuck is wrong with us as a culture?!

I say "we" to be inclusive, but certainly some of us try to be different. Perfection is perhaps unattainable, but we can try. The saddest part is that the way our systems are designed the majority can drag the rest of us down with them.

Edgar Reynaldo

Like it or not, we can't just release unaccompanied children out into the deserts to fend for themselves. Someone has to take responsibility for those children before they can be released.

I don't like the hot pocket picture any more than you do. They should be given cots and real blankets not just thermal wraps. They should be given hot meals and have access to showers and toilets. They should be treated humanely as if they were our own children.

Now, Biden hasn't done nothing in his time so far. He's paved the road for dreamers and immigrants to gain citizenship, something the Trump administration would never have done.

Matthew Leverton

We cannot even afford to give elite female athletes weights to work out, so how do you think we could afford to give hundreds of cots to those kids. We're a broke nation. :'(

Bob Keane

Considering Project Veritas' reputation Chris, I would suggest getting a second confirmation.

Chris Katko

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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/03/22/border-patrol-facility-photos-show-migrant-children-mats-texas/6956909002/

https://www.texastribune.org/2021/03/22/donna-border-patrol-facility-photos/

https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-aud-nw-biden-border-migrant-detention-secrecy-20210322-7i3idaxg5bbebezopki24bjwnq-story.html

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/22/biden-administration-faces-new-scrutiny-on-unaccompanied-minors

Like it or not, we can't just release unaccompanied children out into the deserts to fend for themselves. Someone has to take responsibility for those children before they can be released.

You sound exactly like a Fox News pundit.

Edgar Reynaldo

Chris, thanks for being rude to me again. Did I do something to piss you off? You know what I said was true. I'm not the enemy here. I don't like the situation at the border either. Try a little less harder to make enemies out of your friends.

And by the way, your complaints about the border here on a.cc do exactly NOTHING to fix it. Just so you know.

EDIT
Don't be a grumpy cat.

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@bambams
How goes the daily struggle

EDIT2
https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/609347/945362#target
Enabling MSAA using gl only.

EDIT3
https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/608174/929156#target

bamccaig

The struggle is real. >:( I haven't felt suicidal in a few days so that's a relief. My wife is helping me out a lot. My blood test results came back slightly anemic (might explain why I'm always tired now). And my Eosinophils level (white blood cells) is nearly 3x normal, which may indicate some kind of infection or disease that is being fought. :-/ I'm waiting to hear from the doctor to see if we need to follow up on the test or if that's sufficient for the referral. And whether we need to take any additional steps for my blood test results.

I'm still struggling to concentrate. I am supposed to start vacation on Thursday. I goofed up when I booked it and left a gap in the middle of it. But my manager gave me 2 extra days to fill the gap and extend it a bit more. Probably in hopes that after having 10 or 11 days off I'll come back rested and full of energy again and hopefully be back at full capacity. Hopefully that's true. I probably need to quit smoking cannabis for a few weeks to really get my concentration back under control, but I don't think that I'm ready for that yet. It has been too vital to take the edge off when my mind is telling me to kill myself. :P

GullRaDriel

@Edgar EDIT3 must be a lot of fun to look at X-D

Rodolfo Lam

To think that a thread from 2015 about threads locking would have lasted all this time without locking... 🤣😂

Bob Keane

If that date is correct, we beat XKCD's "Time" thread. For a sad reason, we miss you XKCD forums. :'(

bamccaig

Fuck my life. It seems that my lack of focus isn't going away. And it's most likely tied to my cannabis use. Which means that I'm going to have to quit using cannabis too. At least for a long while. I do not yet know how I'm going to manage to cope in the meantime with nothing. I'm reaching out to my doctor for medical options to help. I may try working out some to see if I can adopt a healthy practice in place of an unhealthy one... But that doesn't seem likely. :P

LennyLen
bamccaig said:

It seems that my lack of focus isn't going away. And it's most likely tied to my cannabis use.

Cannabis definitely can do that, but so too can anxiety and depression if they're not treated correctly.

Chris Katko

Edgar Reynaldo: I don't care if you like me. I care about those kids. Which is what everyone who voted for Biden magically forgot the second he got in office.

There is zero possible excuse for holding 20,000 children in pop tart blankets. Period. Ever. It's not a crisis, it's a goddamn emergency.

MiquelFire

I wonder how much people forgetting about the kids might be because it seems like when Trump was in office, there was a new thing to be mad about every damn week. Would not surprise me if people here (USA) just learned to tune out politics as a result of Trump hogged the news feed, and haven't learn to listen for major stuff like they did pre-Trump.

Matthew Leverton

Maybe Biden needs to visit the sites wearing a "I don't really care" shirt. Then the Repubs would love him.

Edgar Reynaldo

Okay Katko, you're President now. What are YOU gonna do about it?

Biden inherited a broken system from Trump who completely ignored it for all four years except for his Build the Wall promise. In the last two years, immigrant numbers have surged, including unaccompanied minors. Take a broken system that wasn't working to begin with, add in a whole bunch more immigrants, and you have what Biden inherited when he began his presidency.

If it was up to me I'd send in the National Guard to build housing (humanitarian housing thank you) for the massive numbers of immigrants until we can sort them all out.

And by the way, according to reports, 40% of unaccompanied minors have no relatives who could take them in in the US. What do we do with them? Send them back? No, we'd have to setup foster programs to get them placed with guardians. That requires oversight. We can't release them into the desert to be preyed upon by child traffickers, sex traffickers, and worse.

Stop making me the enemy when you know nothing about where I stand.

Chris Katko

My first job as president would be 1) treat them like human beings. 2) publicly address it and call it a national emergency. 3) actually visit the border 4) build extra housing on day 1

But they're just dirt people to Biden, so instead he's going to, literally say this today :
>"Gun violence in this country is an epidemic, and it's an international embarrassment," Mr. Biden said in his remarks announcing the actions. He called high rates of gun violence a "blemish on the character of our nation."

GUNS are an epidemic and national embarrassment, but 20,000 children getting molested in plastic cages isn't.

Anyone who isn't furious about this, isn't a Democrat. Period. Full stop. You cannot claim to care about the disenfranchised and not demand immediate action for literal child refuges being molested on our watch.

Meanwhile, "Democrat" Biden, is considering building the wall. That's right. remember the unethical, evil, "abolish ice" wall? Now he's talking about expanding it.

https://www.businessinsider.com/biden-restart-border-wall-construction-trump-pledge-gaps-2021-4

So tell me, right now. What number of children, in cages, being molested, under Biden's watch, will actually get you outraged? Give me a specific number where it's actually a national embarrassment?

21,000?

30,000?

If there's 100,000 kids getting molested in pop-tart bags, will you be as outraged as I am?

Or is there simply no number that matters at all?

bamccaig

I'm going on medical leave for a month. My employer says I am not covered through them, but they are reactivating my benefits, and are being supportive... That means that I'll need to apply to employment insurance and see what is available for me there to help us afford our bills while I try to get a grip. And whatever is left my parents will help with temporarily.

This makes me feel pretty guilty. I do think that I need it, but part of me worries that I caused it with the cannabis (but I kicked alcohol in the process so it's not exactly black and white). I feel like I'm not necessarily unable to work. I may just need to change job types, and need an employer that would be able to cater to my needs. Or perhaps acquire the skills needed to monetize art or something else creative and become my own boss... Perhaps YouTube or Twitch or some other content creation. Or perhaps I can figure out a free software project to support me... I really think that my wife and I should look into starting our own small business. I'm having trouble convincing her of that though.

In the meantime, I go from being barely functional to being great now. For example, tonight high as fuck I effortlessly cut mushrooms precisely over the pan right next to my fingers without cutting myself and with relative ease. I know some people that struggle to do that sort of thing sober on a cutting board. :P

Oh, right, my doctor prescribed me an anti-anxiety medication so that I could quit smoking cannabis, and on one of the first days on it I crashed my motorcycle. :P First time truly crashing on the street. It was relatively low speed and single vehicle so thankfully I'm in great shape and my bike isn't too bad. I can't really remember what caused me to be so distracted, but the very first corner that I took after leaving my driveway I for some reason concluded that I couldn't make, and just let myself go loose and off the road. :P I think that I was overwhelmed with anxiety at the time, but also I wonder if I was experiencing any "do not operate" effects from the meds (which are a narcotic and addictive and so far I greatly prefer cannabis).

I ordered approximately CAD$160 worth of "OEM" parts to fix what needs to be fixed (rather than letting it become forgotten like so many that came before it). Thankfully I never did get around to replacing the plastics because they just got worse. I priced it to think about fixing it, but it's way too expensive and generally I don't care anyway. Maybe it'll help to avoid theft. :P It tells part of my story and the bike's story. Especially because of financial pressures I'm only going to do what I think is necessary. For now, a new turn signal arm, a new rear brake pedal, and a new oil cap because I broke the other one being a derp trying to fix the pedal.

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Alarmingly the bike now intermittently shows a check engine light, but otherwise seems to be mechanically fine. I'll have to wait and see when it's in the budget to get that diagnosed... I tried to stop by the dealer's small engine garage hoping to just get it plugged in and get a quick answer, but of course they told me to book an appointment instead. And that would cost money. And at the time when I went back to my bike the light went off so I thought maybe it was a glitch. I still need to search for this existing issue within riders of this make/model. I know I'm not the first to crash so perhaps I'll get some good guesses from that.

As for the children, THINK OF THE CHILDREN, 20000 or even 100000 are a drop in the bucket. Go ahead and Google tragic global stats about children. I'll wait. :P When we start caring about all of the other children is when we might get to these new 20000.

Who gives a fuck who is a Democrat or not? It's not a reality show popularity contest. I'm upset about far more than just the abuse of migrant children in the US. Our society is a shit hole, and we should be ashamed because we could be doing so much better. Don't even get me started on this. It seems to upset my depression. :P

Erin Maus

video

Gonna add music later. 8-)

Steam launch in 2-3 months idk.

RmBeer2

NO CLOSE THREAD!!!!

btw, a gameplay of a nice game:

video

Erin Maus

The court order for my name change was granted. 8-)

Time to update all my legal documents. :'(

Arthur Kalliokoski
Erin Maus said:

The court order for my name change was granted.

You know you don't need courts permission to change your name, don't you? Women changing their name when they get married don't bother with it.

Erin Maus

That's not true in NC, at least.

I don't want to see my deadname anymore. I'mma nuke all those old documents ASAP.

Edgar Reynaldo

In other news, since there are not suitable mates for me in the area, I've decided to make a woman.

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:-*

Arthur Kalliokoski

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What would you little maniacs like to do first?

Edgar Reynaldo

You know, there's going to be sex, drugs, rock-n-roll... chips, dips, chains, whips... You know, your basic high school orgy type of thing. I mean, uh, I'm not talking candlewax on the nipples, or witchcraft or anything like that, no, no, no. Just a couple of hundred kids running around in their underwear, acting like complete animals.

8-)

Onewing

In the next two months, I'll have a 5 year old and a 10 year old. And in a few months, this thread will celebrate it's 6th birthday.

Time is weird.

Edgar Reynaldo

Little one winged babies having babies. All you guys went on and had kids and forgot all about allegro.cc

Matthew Leverton

If you can father a 5 year old and a 10 year old in 2 months, then time is indeed weird. :o

Goalie Ca

Hi friendly faces!

Erin Maus

Getting really close to fully polished demo.

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If you type 'attack helicopter', the game will force quit. ;D

LennyLen
Erin Maus said:

If you type 'attack helicopter', the game will force quit.

Why?

Chris Katko

Because he can't take a joke apparently. ::)

Imagine if I was so petty I put hooks into my game for anyone who made short jokes because I got bullied when I was teen.

But hey, at least you can put "dancing kids in cages" and it'll work without him getting mad.

LennyLen

Ah. When I googled attack helicopter I just got links to helicopters. I added joke to the search and know I understand.

I don't see what's wrong with making people think through their choices of funny. As for your last comment, we can't be the champion of every cause. Stick to one or two and give them proper attention and let other people take on the rest.

Erin Maus

I was making a joke, but sure, that gives you the right to misgender me.

I forgot only Nazis were allowed to make jokes on this forum.

bamccaig

If we all have to appeal to your sensitivities then why shouldn't you and everyone else have to appeal to mine?

Month of leave is coming to an end. Should be meeting with my doctor tomorrow for updates and perhaps to extend the leave. If he'll let me I'm going to request another month.

My wife overreacted to some text messages trying to express my depression and strong desire for suicide. I thought it was clear at the end that I was back to my senses and going to sleep it off, but perhaps she didn't read to the end.

She called the local area hospital crisis hotline for advice, and of course from her description they instructed her to either rush me to the hospital or call the police. She decided to call my parents. My dad was already in town so they called him. And he took it upon himself to rush me to the ER. He doesn't really comprehend what depression or anxiety are though so he wasn't much company. And he has selective hearing so now he's convinced that cannabis is worse for you than alcohol again. ::)

Eventually they called in an on-call psychiatrist to see me, who made some medication change recommendations for my doctor, before sending me home because I was clearly not a risk to myself at the moment. I had after all just been awoken from an afternoon nap to go for this trip. The temp psychiatrist didn't seem to reject my autism diagnosis, though she certainly seemed to dismiss it. Eventually she asked me if I thought that getting an autism diagnosis would "fix me". I said no, not because I don't want a real assessment, but only because I don't believe that my depression will go away with an answer either way.

It would certainly help if people were made to acknowledge and understanding my condition, if there really is a condition to identify, but I've already gone 34 without any dignity so I'm not about to hold my breath. I'll be long in the ground before my words have any meaning.

The medication changes also [again] expect me to quit smoking cannabis. I was already supposed to do that, but I have been concluding that smoking cannabis is better than killing myself. Anyway, I'm growing tired of everybody's bullshit. I'm just sick. So I'm going to go ahead and try to follow the doctor's orders. If my doctor agrees no cannabis then I'll quit, and if I can't take it then so be it. There isn't anything medically to do for me.

Onewing

Actually, it was more like 2 seconds... IVF ftw! So my 5 yr old and 10 yr old are...twins??

Bob Keane
Onewing said:

So my 5 yr old and 10 yr old are...twins??

It happens more than you think. I have two nieces born on the same day two years apart. Long labour.

bamccaig

My wife and parents wanted me in suicide watch so here I am waiting in the ER in a room suspiciously empty of objects beside the bed. :D I'm sitting on the bed waiting for medication. After which maybe I'll get to try to sleep with all this noise? Maybe the medication will be a serious sleep drug. I can only hope. As for suicide watch, the hospital is garbage at it. I was left unsupervised for an hour. And nobody has searched me so I could have weapons on me for all they know. I do have my prescription drugs, but I don't think all of those pills would kill me. Only seriously fuck up my health for the remainder of my life probably. I also have my keys and GeeKey, but I don't either would be overly effective. I'm trying to escape pain and suffering so the only attempt I would ever make should be controlled, irreversible, and either cause fast or painless death. Anyway, I'm still hopeful that I can be helped, but I'm operating entirely on faith because so far they've proven unable to help at all.

Append:

Or not. The nurse or crisis worker, whatever she is, just came back to ask how I'm doing. No more mention of meds, but she offered to bring me a drink which was nice. So now I have a tiny cup with ice water. So I'm not sure anymore. But I think I'm still waiting to talk to somebody before going to sleep.

My dad shared some text messages with the crisis worker to demonstrate my mental state, but the one he chose was one expressing my frustrations with women and feminism. :o So I'm marginally concerned the service I recieve may be biased now, but there's no way of knowing. Meh. Who cares. They help me out they don't.

Append:

Or maybe not. It's 2:30 am. I think this is it. I suspect they will insist upon the door being open so they can easily check on me. I guess it's not a concern of theirs if I sleep now or later. Soon I'll just stay up all night.

Append:

It's now 5 am. Around 3 the nurse finally offered to bring me a blanket to try to sleep. No meds though. So after laying down wide-eyed for 2 hours I decided to just sit back up again and wait for the psychiatrist... But we'll see how much steam I have once the exhaustion hits me. ;)

Now I see that this room is probably made for the mentally ill. The door has no nob or anything inside, but it looks like 3 huge deadbolts can seal it shut maybe. You're not allowed to take photos in the hospital though so I can't show you. I note there are some pretty big dents in the door. Otherwise, it looks surprisingly clean, but the two side walls might have a protective (of the wall, not me) layer or something. It's blue instead of the standard off white. This room does not appear padded though. I could hurt myself and make a scene like a child, but I couldn't kill myself. Not without more skills. Nevertheless I was a little disappointed it wasn't padded. That might just be fun if they don't mind the noise.

Append:

Though to be fair there appears to be an electrical outlet. I could attempt to electrocute myself, but they'd likely be able to resuscitate if I did so all it would accomplish is playing my card too soon, and ending up in restraints or something. There's also a camera in here so they might well catch me before I get anywhere too!

Append:

9 am now. No care yet. I'm not sure if I'm staying all day too, but I think so. Upon further reflection with only one eye opened it's possible that the different walls are just 1000 coats of paint. 🤔😂😁

Append:

Around 9:30 a psychiatrist came to see me. Based on my recent record he concluded that my brain isn't capable of sorting feelings. I don't know if he made up a story I'd buy, but this is what he told me:

The hospital room is my hypothetical brain/mind. I'm not sure what terminology he used. He said that memories get stored in two different filing cabinets. One stores regular memories. A second one stores feelings. He said that when adolescence hit the door came flying open on my feelings, and I wasn't able to handle it for whatever reason. My feelings filing system didn't exist/develop. And so essentially my brain is a fucking mess because there are feelings all over the floor piling up.

To address it he prescribed a new medication (that's 4 at once now, two in the last few days). I don't have it yet and can't store that info on the fly anymore, if ever, but he said that it's going to "lock" the door flooding my brain with feelings. It's an antipsychotic, but he was sure to point out that I'm not psychotic. That should stopmy suicidal ideation and allow the antidepressants to clean things up in my brain.

That's the temporary stopgap to keep me alive. He said I need to sign up for therapy at the hospital. It will be covered by the public health care system, but he said the waiting list is long (as always in Ontario). CBT actually. He said that will be like building a new filing cabinet that works.

It doesn't even approach justice so I was rather unwelcoming of the plan initially. It seems a bit like numbing my feelings because they don't matter so that the people who hurt me get away with it (they already did, but I'm not happy about it). 🙄

But I'm not sure really what it will be like
Maybe I'll just become better at sorting through my feelings, and maybe that will just help me to not care about justice again.

He also said that you need to find socially acceptable ways of getting the feelings out. He said going over it in my brain doesn't help because it doesn't let it out. Writing it down, drawing it, or whatever other socially acceptable way of getting it out. Essentially what I did. 😂

Can't complain too much. He was very understanding, very good at communicating with me, and didn't treat my like a creep or wierdo. I think his assessment has strong merit, and look forward to getting the new med. He said it should work in just two days, which is a lot better news then I've ever been given related to this before. So I'm holding on to hope.

Only time will tell if I get better or not...

LennyLen

Hope things look better soon dude.

Regarding CBT, it's something you have to stick to. It can seem at first like it can't actually do anything, but it just takes time. It's a very powerful tool.

bamccaig

Thanks. I'm living with my parents for the weekend and maybe the rest of the following week. Feeling great (being positive). I don't think that the new med is responsible yet, but it should be kicking in soon.

I really want to "fix" me if it can be done because it's hard living like this. So I'm happy to stick to whatever therapy a doctor tells me too. That said, I'm on sick leave right now so I have all day to get ready and go to appointments. Whereas if I go back to work I could imagine it being a challenge to keep up with everything.

Eric Johnson

Happy Piccolo Day. 8-)

Edgar Reynaldo

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@bamccaig

Have faith dude, it's gonna get better. The road might be hard, but everything will be okay. Trust in God, and trust in the journey.

DanielH

Why do you do that? You know he doesn't believe in God, but you still push the topic.

Edgar Reynaldo

Why do you do that? Push him away from God when he needs Him the most?

I'm living proof that God heals us. I used to have serious anxiety and when I learned to let go and Trust God, my anxiety went away. I have serious schizophrenia and a month ago I had one of the worst schizophrenic attacks of my life. I prayed to God to heal me. I hadn't slept for 3 days straight, and praying was about all I could do. When I finally fell asleep and woke up the next day my head was clear. I've hardly had a schizophrenic thought since then. My head is clear again. I ran a red light the other day accidentally, and miraculously didn't get t-boned twice from each direction.

So say what you want. I believe in the power of God and I trust in his mercy. Does it offend you that I pray Brandon is healed of his mental illnesses? Too bad.

So why do you do that? Discount God and discourage bambams from seeking the One who can make him whole again. Who hear is doing the disservice to Brandon? Not me.

RmBeer2

For @bamccaig :
Are you happy with what is happening to you? I don't understand what you really do.
All you do is always become a guinea pig, for the system, for the company, and now for the hospital.
It's partly your fault for letting yourself pile all the problems on top and never do anything, in the end you are a crap.
Why don't you listen to me and really think about what exactly you want? Are you really looking for happiness or to be good? What makes you feel better?

You're just hurting everyone and you're content with them talking nice to you, pretending to take care of you, and accepting medication in exchange for their apparent kindness. Are you an idiot?

You better get on with it, think about it well what you want for your life, do it, look for it, even if you have to kill everyone or kill yourself to achieve it. But right now you have nothing, you don't even know what you want, you are lost.

I'm sorry. But in that state you will not get anywhere, you will only be more defeated still, you will continue to lose and ruin what is left of your existence. More cowardly, more tied to mental conditioning, more left.
Who are you going to listen to exactly? A bunch of idiot sheep?

Look, if you want some solution to your life. So start by dropping all the shit you hate and loathe, look for exactly what you want. If you don't, then no one can help you. Exactly no one is going to help you, no one will move a hair for you, you are the one who has to do something, the one who knows the correct solution, only you and no one but you.

If you still don't follow my advice, which is only a guide for your life, because everything depends on you and no one else. Then it's just going to be your complete fault. More than a guide, it is a reaction, so that you wake up at once. You need someone to beat you up. You're just resting on your laurels all the time and doing nothing.

So stop being so stupid and do something!!

(If I changed my place with you, I would get bored of being in the hospital and have fun burning everything, those paint-laden walls must be highly flammable and I'm curious. Or go to another level, and experiment with whatever tools you find there using medics and guards as patients, it would be fun.)

Edgar Reynaldo

Rmbeer2 - you're not exactly a psychiatrist, so put your google degree away and let people take care of him and listen to him. It's clear he needs a vent for his anxiety or it will drive him crazy. Depression is real, you can't always 'Get over it' or 'pull yourself up by your boots' that's total BS.

And besides, we can count on bamccaig to never die, because he will always disagree with someone, and he'll be so busy writing his manifesto he won't have time to kill himself. Seriously bammcaig (about writing a book, not suicide). Put all that energy into something positive, like a blog, vlog, youtube series, a diary, a journal, a diatribe, just try putting your energy into writing out your emotions. Then you don't have to experience them over again, they're already down on the page.

I'm seriously wondering why they haven't asked you about Asperger's yet. You seem to be on the spectrum of an idiot savant, (no offense) in your critical thinking skills. I'd hate to debate you in a forum. ;D. (That's what I've been doing here the last 10 years, muahahahaa >:( :-* )

bamccaig

I am unable to believe in God because of the way that I think. I seek absolute truths. Religion won't give me the same relief that it does others because I'm not under their spell. That said, praying for me to get better is appreciated. At the least, it's nice for somebody to be supportive for a change. 😊

My family church is having services on Zoom. So on Sunday I listened in. I wanted to watch from home too, but I haven't been awake on Sunday morning for a month or more so that didn't happen. Even though I don't believe in God, I still appreciate the church family, and I think they'll tolerate my atheism (as long as I keep it to myself). I thought that attending might help me anyway. I was a little bit disappointed in the online format though. No group singing. Kind of takes the fun out of it.

As for piccolo's wacky advice, I barely understood it. It kind of sounds like what I was thinking about on Thursday when my family insisted on suicide watch at the hospital. I was thinking more or less along those lines. Of course, that scared my wife and parents. I threatened to attempt to kill a 1% biker, which should guarantee I at least get my ass kicked if not killed too.

The thoughts that I'm having aren't good. Acting on them won't fix anything. The best that I can come up with is hurting the people who hurt me. But it's not so black and white. While I do think that those people mistreated and neglected me, I need to also factor in my own limitations. Those people probably couldn't communicate with me. What's upsetting though is that instead of getting to know me better and trying they just outcast me instead.

I even have a certain amount of resentment now for my parents and other loved ones from previous generations that used to make fun of me growing up for never talking, but apparently none of them thought that was worth addressing, or didn't think it was their problem.

That said, on Thursday I was very much motivated to act and stop taking it. Much as piccolo suggested. Doing it the way that I fantasized about it would ruin my life and accomplish nothing. But I want to hold onto the energy and drive that it gave me.

There are no simple solutions for me. I'm a 34 year old incel virgin married for 2 years with years and years of cumulative issues built up. There's no fixing that. There's no undoing that. That has already happened. That doesn't have to be a crisis for everyone, but for me it is.

Dizzy Egg

I'm living proof that God heals us.

Are you serious?? I can't work out if you're serious or not....which god are you talking about?

Dizzy Egg

I'm living proof that God heals us.

Are you serious?? I can't work out if you're serious or not....which god are you talking about?

LennyLen

That Egg's a double yolker!

Edgar Reynaldo

I'm living proof that God heals us.

Are you serious?? I can't work out if you're serious or not....which god are you talking about?

I'm speaking specifically of the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, Jesus Christ. He's the one and only high priest after the order of Melchizedek (King of the Just). He's the only path to God the Father. He's Emmanuel, God with us. He's the only one whose sacrifice was capable of redeeming us from Hell and sin.

If you wonder why Christians or maybe just me in general are adamant about their beliefs, try reading Ezekiel. God told Ezekiel that if he warned the people of their sins he would be innocent of their blood, but if he didn't warn them not to sin, then he would be guilty of their blood. Christians have a moral responsibility to warn others away from death and back to life. If you saw someone in danger and you did nothing to warn them or help them, aren't you guilty of their death?

John chapter 20 may shed some light on things.

24 But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. 25 So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

26 A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 27 Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” 28 Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” 29 Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

The Purpose of This Book

30 Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. 31 But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

Dizzy Egg

I'm not really sure about any of that. Lots of other books say lots of things. All I know is, I try to be nice to make the world a bit better for those around me. I do a lot of cleanups for an animal charity I'm associated with, clean up parks/ponds/walkways. I walk/look after dogs in my spare time, because I like seeing dogs happy, and I know life gets on top of their owners.

Just your line "I'm living proof"....well, that seemed a bit much to me. I'm not knocking your faith, I was just a bit gobsmacked that you put yourself up there.

I also was a bit knocked back that you suggested that as a cure for bam-bam. I wouldn't suggest a cure for him like that, especially not one to a specific god. I'd probably just say that we all love him, and he can PM us any time he wants to talk.

But life is very complex, so we all need to figure out our own way of dealing with it. Just never give up, never give in.

Peace x

Onewing

@bamccaig that's some heavy stuff and I feel for you. I haven't been very active here lately, but I always appreciated your opinions on all the various subjects we find ourselves discussing on these forums. You'll be in my thoughts and my prayers. For real. I use a Trello board for this stuff because of course I do. ;D

I can't fully relate, but I do remember hitting adolescence and finding my thoughts becoming pretty dark. It's happened ever since, requiring I manage it. I recall telling my parents that "I don't want to exist anymore." I don't think I was near suicide, but I was certainly okay with something ending my life. Naturally, my parents freaked out and...decided to take me to more movies? They really had no idea how to deal with that. I don't fault them for that.

I realized there's a part of me that's broken when I was driving back to my apartment from my dream job. I was working at a game studio and I was as happy as I've ever been. And, I had a moment of "I could just drive off the road right here and be done with it."

When life DID hit rock bottom shortly after that dream job ended and several tragedies happened in a row, doctors did put me on antidepressants. For me, I had to work my way off them, I just didn't like the numbness, the inability to celebrate good things. It took a while. Also, fun fact, I don't believe there's such a thing as rock bottom anymore. There's a part of me waiting for the next tragedy to occur and trying to be mentally prepared for it.

I don't know if me talking about my personal experience is beneficial to you. I'm hoping it is and not having an opposite effect. I hope you find a strong support structure that gives you hope and purpose and the strength to keep on when hope and purpose seem gone.

Edgar Reynaldo

Onewing, sounds like you had some hard times. Glad you've come through it. Good to see you again. Remember me? That annoying newb? Haha 101 ;P ;)

P.S.
The last post in this thread was 5 days ago. Get cracking!!! >:(

bamccaig

Thanks, Onewing. And good to "see" you.

I'm still at my parents' house. It has made abstaining from cannabis easier. I think I'm close to 2 weeks sober. Hopefully I'll get a lasting intolerance for a while to save some money. I guess I should try to avoid using it medicinally, and stick to recreationally instead.

That said, the new medication that was supposed to stop emotions flooding in doesn't seem to have had much of an effect. I'm doing ok largely because I got some things out and I'm away from my wife who upsets me with her self-centered-ness. It sounds like she finally heard me, but she's in no rush to have me come back to the house so I know it's unlikely to be different when I do go back. My life is still in disrepair.

I'm scheduled for online group CBT therapy in June. We'll see what that can do for me. I'm still waiting to hear from my doctor to see if there's an individual therapy option still covered by the public system. In the meantime, I'm kind of a zombie. I'm not interested in doing things anymore. I mostly just sit idle while the time passes. I join my parents and help them when they ask me, but it doesn't really distract from my emptiness.

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I've lost another 10-15 pounds (1 lb ~~ 454g) over the last month. I'm down to about 130 lbs, and even saw 128 a day ago. I haven't been this light since high school or college. I'm back to being able to suck in my gut so my waste is half the depth of my rib cage. For reference I was up to 185 lbs for my wedding 2.5 years ago. Mind you, I have been exercising a tiny bit, but most of the weight loss is due to minimal eating. Plus I'm not drinking calories either.

My last living grandparent has been in and out of hospital for years now. He's my paternal grandfather. The man everybody thought I looked and acted like in my youth. He's 87 years old. He's insisting on surgury that might give him some more comfort and reduce the need for hospital stays, but at his age and in his condition it's very risky. My family seems overly optimistic that he'll survive the surgury, but I think he was miserable enough to prefer death over leaving things be. I hope he gets a satisfying result whatever the case. Sadly tomorrow is the surgury so it's down to the wire. I think that if he survives he's going to sleep here for the night so I'll move out to the trailer in the yard. My biggest fear is that he passes away, and nobody is prepared for that. I know that my dad is going to take it hard.

One of the unfortunate side effects of whatever I am or have is that I was never able to just have one on one conversations to ask friends or family about their lives and what they remember of the world when they were young. It's sad to know how little I retain from those that are gone.

Edgar Reynaldo

bambams - get yourself a hobby you enjoy - games / scripting / applications / writing a diary / free write / go for a walk / exercise / cook / eat / read / take a class / find something worth living for.

2) Be grateful - it takes work to do this - but think of all the things you have in your life you are grateful for. Parents, a wife, doggos, a kitty, a job, a home, food to eat, clothes to wear, transportation, intelligence

I mention intelligence last because you seem to use it the least, that is unless you are unleashing it on us here. You should really get into a debate club, or do some professional writing. Get your thoughts out. Get your emotions out. Then move on. The past can't be changed, and worrying about the future ruins the present.

There's a flow chart I want you to have :

1) Do I have a problem?
1a Yes)
   2) Can I do something about it?
   2a Yes)
      Then why worry about it?
   2b No)
      Then why worry about it?
1b No)
   Then I have nothing to worry about.

If all else fails I suggest you give up and pray about it instead. I know my God hears you because he hears me and I pray for you to be healed of these mental and emotional and spiritual blocks.

Dizzy Egg

Don't bother praying ::)

Indifference

Derezo

Hey bam bam!

I hope that you are stepping into the beginning of a journey to personal healing! I wish you well on your path to sobriety and if it's any consolation I am trying to keep sober as well :)

It's been many years on these forums and I enjoy our discussions and seeing your perspective. Reading your post makes me want to drive up there and give you a sandwich :D

You can fix this and be happy. Thoughts of suicide are a form of disease, but with treatment and persistence and effort you will have a day when you can talk about them as a bad memory. A friend of mine just died from mental illness last week, completely shocking everyone who knew him. We were not close friends but he was very much loved and his wife is completely beside herself. We don't want that, and you don't want that for your friends and family either, so stick with the treatment and get well soon.

When I took antidepressants I lost a lot of weight as well, but I went from 210lbs to 185lbs in only 2 months due to lack of appetite.

While I don't recommend eating the magic mushrooms they were my saviour for my own PTSD and getting over some of my childhood traumas. Some people need this personal "God", but not me either. My Jesus is mycological in nature and came here on the back of a giant turtle from outer space, or so his story went. ;D

Polybios

Bambams, I hope you find a way to get better soon! :)

Wise Egg said:

I'd probably just say that we all love him, and he can PM us any time he wants to talk.

I fully endorse what the egg said. :)

bamccaig

Thanks for the encouraging words and well wishes. I've been improving a lot since getting some things out in the open, confronting some demons, (hurting the people that I love, but hopefully only as much as needed to move past it), and giving my wife and I space to figure things out.

It may be a temporary feeling or a fluke, but after pulling an unintentional all-nighter due to anxiety from yesterday I actually had a great day for a change (the last 2 weeks haven't been all bad, but pretty numb/empty/depressed, even though the thoughts of suicide are back under control and safely catalogued for now). It may also have helped that today my parents (who I've been living with for the last 2 weeks) decided to go to camp and were okay trusting me left behind.

Despite my lack of sleep I was confident that I'd be okay to drive home and back out here. My original inspiration for driving back into the city (my parents live 20 km SE) was that yesterday while waiting at my house to hear from the hospital with my dad I thought that our front lawn was getting too long again, and the next several days are calling for rain so I wanted to get it cut. That and I had a refill of my "locked door" prescription ready at the pharmacy. Alas, I didn't end up doing either.

First I joined my wife on a 45 minute walk with our dog. She's been persistently working on her body using BeachBody (the business model is evil, but the workouts have been great). The walk is part of a challenge she's doing alongside working out. So it was doubly or tripply good. I had been doing that prior to my outburst/temporary separation.

Then I took care of some household chores to give my wife a break since she's been running the house (and working, and working out). Meanwhile, I'm about 1.5 months into a 2 month (and counting?) medical leave from work.

I also cooked her supper, and helped taking care of the pupperoo, Watson. I concluded that I shouldn't rush things and not pressure her with any sexual requests, even though I was extremely horny and she is a bit of a tease in her workout clothes. 15 minutes later I failed at that and asked if she was up for anything later.

The details aren't important (and private), but I think the medication that the first psychiatrist prescribed a couple of weeks ago (ACT-BUPROPION XL 150 mg/day) to reverse the sexual dysfunction I was experiencing from my antidepressant (Citalopram) actually worked! For the first time in MONTHS I had a full and amazing (and relatively quick) orgasm. It's the best orgasm I can remember in recent years!

And of course that's partly just what I needed. But even before that I was just feeling very clear headed and good for once. I was sort of back to myself for today. It was great. Leave it to me to have a rare good day after zero sleep. ;D

Anyway, the plan was still for me to return to my parents tonight so alas I did. Honestly I had to consciously focus on the road to avoid veering out of my lane, but I utilized the unseasonable heater in my Ranger to keep me uncomfortable and conscious. Fortunately I made it back home to my parents' house safely without incident. And even remembered to text my wife and parents that I arrived safely so they wouldn't need to worry.

That said, I still seem to be having memory issues and can very easily still have my brain "blank". The eye doctor called me earlier, and by the end of our 2 minute conversation I had to ask who was calling again (what appointment I had just agreed to bring a list of my medication to). ::) I haven't smoked cannabis in about 2 weeks now (and no alcohol in probably 2 months?). It's interesting that I'm still suffering from these mental issues without cannabis, though it will be another 2-3 weeks before the THC will really be clear from my systems.

I think that part of the whole confusion/memory issues is actually how hard I had been working for the past ~6 years. In particular, my precarious employment mixed with sacrificed vacation time to appease a failed job change (and the abuse I endured in that position for 6 months before getting the hell out of there). Maybe I actually just needed a longer break from work.

At the moment things are starting to look up, but I mustn't get complacent because I could still have bad days for all I know. I'm very happy to finally be able to ask for some help. And though it does take a lot of time, it is proving to be worth the trouble.

I intend to remain sober from alcohol indefinitely (that was hard to kick, and may also play a significant role in my mental health struggles). Or if I do drink now I don't want it to become a habit again, but rather just a one night thing or a single unit right after work occasionally. My brother claims to also be cutting way back on alcohol and getting himself some help too. It's great to finally be here, but it's unfortunate it took us both this long to get real help.

Alas I'm too anxious now to go to sleep so I'm going to stay awake to watch some TNG reruns to hopefully ease my anxiety before probably sleeping for 24 ish hours after. :P Today has also interfered with my schedule for my "locked door" drug so I'm behind on it. But it is supposed to make me drowsy so it should just help me sleep to take the missed doses now... Hopefully without any harmful effects.

I also nearly ran out of gas a few times today so that was a bit of an adventure too, but I'm too drained now to continue writing.

Writing here has long been an effective way for me to get my feelings out (and from time to time it's still a great place to challenge my ideas). I'm starting to question whether I could actually journal or perhaps attempt to write a book. That or perhaps channel the energy instead into music.. For the first time in a while I was able to enjoy music, relate the music and lyrics to how I am feeling or what I'm thinking about, as well as singing. Somehow being back at my parents house has also reinspired some rap practice. Though I'm rusty and my memory isn't helping. It's weird how songs I haven't heard in a while didn't even sound familiar at first today. Even songs that I should know by artists that I love. But let's not worry about that unless it continues.

As with my recent mental posts I swiped this on my S10+ so hopefully there aren't too many errors.

I hope you're all doing well. Great to hear from each of you. I'm starting to wonder if I'll be back to work soon. But in the meantime with me sober (and living with my parents doesn't hurt) we seem to be keeping up with our bills even with me off work, collecting only employment insurance (public system). There's still a ways to go, but I'm back to being a bit driven to live. And I'm back to trying to take care of my family, at least in the limited ways that I'm still able. Take care everyone. And thanks. I love you guys (at least, today). I swear I'm neither drunk nor stoned, but I'm definitely tired... Until next time. 8-)

(I don't really have the capacity for proof reading these long posts right now so bear with me... Well, okay, maybe I have a little...)

Append:

I guess I could also mention that a recruiter affiliated with Amazon expressed some interest in my LinkedIn profile and wants me to partake in a virtual interview.

It is neat, but if reviews of Amazon as an employer are accurate they sound far too demanding for me to handle. At least, for now.

I considered doing the interview anyway for practice, but I think I'm just going to pass it up. I'm worried it may stress me out again and cause a regression. Even though it could be great practice, or just a neat story, I'm going to opt to focus on my mental health for now. Besides, my manager has been amazing throughout this whole ordeal, and the recruiter's message said I'd need to move to either Toronto (FUCK no!) or Vancouver (this could be awesome, but it's not really something I am ready to consider now).

Anyway, I haven't even replied in a couple of days. I can hope that I just come across as hard to get/worth special consideration, but realistically I think that they're probably just burning through a pile of mentally unwell overworked developers (other types of employees had even worse things to say, at least if the reviews I read are to be trusted).

LennyLen
bamccaig said:

That said, I still seem to be having memory issues and can very easily still have my brain "blank". The eye doctor called me earlier, and by the end of our 2 minute conversation I had to ask who was calling again (what appointment I had just agreed to bring a list of my medication to). ::) I haven't smoked cannabis in about 2 weeks now (and no alcohol in probably 2 months?). It's interesting that I'm still suffering from these mental issues without cannabis, though it will be another 2-3 weeks before the THC will really be clear from my systems.

This could well be caused by the anxiety, which is known to cause memory problems. Giving up alcohol and pot could well be exacerbating the problem as if you'd been using them to self-medicate, coming off them can ramp up your anxiety levels significantly.

bamccaig

That's very fair to say. It may fit. Nevertheless, I'm happy to give up alcohol because my relationship with it was no longer helpful, and it seemed to exacerbate my depression.

I don't really plan to quit cannabis permanently, but I needed a tolerance break anyway. I was smoking like 4 grams a day and often adding shatter to the mix too. I doubt that I'll gain any lasting intolerance, but I can hope.

I would like to stop using it medicinally and use it only recreationally, but my anxiety is still the worst I can remember. Feels like my anxiety is out of control now.
That said, the on call psychiatrist seemed to think that I needed to feel the anxiety to get better.

Time will tell when or if I go back to substance abuses. I've been craving some weed just to relax and unwind, but I'm trying to get my body flushed out before I make any decisions there.

I really appreciate your perspective on this, LennyLen. Thanks for the help!

DanielH
bamccaig said:

it seemed to exacerbate my depression

It should more than "seem". It is well known to cause depression.

Have you considered the psychotic effects you are getting are from using cannabis, or cannabis is a major factor, as a reason to cut back or stop?

Cannabis use has been reported to induce long-lasting psychotic disorders and a dose-response relationship has been observed

I haven't used it myself, but was wondering if it would help me as well. The problem is that until it is federally approved, THC is on the restricted list. It's approved in my state, but not federally. Still on the fence about CBD products as well. Don't want to risk my license.

LennyLen
bamccaig said:

That's very fair to say. It may fit. Nevertheless, I'm happy to give up alcohol because my relationship with it was no longer helpful, and it seemed to exacerbate my depression.

Definitively, and I'm certainly not advocating the use of alcohol and pot in this fashion, just pointing out that removing them can initially make things a little worse.

But that's what the therapy and medication is for, to make things better. And it can, if you let it.

bamccaig
DanielH said:

It should more than "seem". It is well known to cause depression.

What a silly thing to say. You think the world drinks alcohol to get depressed? People drink alcohol because it WORKS (to quote my medical doctor). The vast majority do not notice the depressing effects. That doesn't mean that they aren't there, but depending on what you're treating it might be the lesser evil. Far too many people in our society depend on alcohol to function. It's a very dangerous drug when abused, but society isn't willing to do better than that right now.

Ultimately, it's a poor substitute for real medical/mental health care, but the world we live in is still a very, very, VERY long way from being perfect. For many people, alcohol is their only option. It took me 34 years to ask for help. I recognized the need by 19. Services and supports are barely there.

In fact, I'm still on a long waiting list to actually receive personalized care from a psychiatrist. I'd still likely be suicidal or a threat to society if not for my breakdown, crying for help in the only way I could manage, and my dad getting involved to get me the care that I needed. If you go into the ER in my city wanting to kill yourself you can see a psychiatrist in 5 to 24 hours. Or so I found out. Otherwise, it takes MONTHS if not YEARS. :P That is, unless you're wealthy enough to pay out of pocket, which few of us probably are.

Sorry if that came across as confrontational. I'm still writhing from abuse in #allegro, and I initially interpreted this sentence as hostile. That is most likely my error and for that I apologize in advance. It was not my intention to come across in this post, however.

DanielH said:

Cannabis use has been reported to induce long-lasting psychotic disorders and a dose-response relationship has been observed

Have you considered the psychotic effects you are getting are from using cannabis, or cannabis is a major factor, as a reason to cut back or stop?

Why research/science is locked behind pay walls I'll never understand. This species is without merit.

I've given serious thought to the risks of cannabis [ab]use (and alcohol [ab]use) over the years. Before I ever tried cannabis I did my research. Alcohol, which I was already abusing (along with much of my family/supports), is dangerous on a scale similar to that of heroin. By comparison, cannabis is VERY safe. That said, it still carries it's share of risks, and the lack of research on it doesn't help.

Once again, this species is without merit. There was never a good reason for its prohibition (mostly racism, I think, but there's probably also a corporate interest in its prohibition because it allows Big Pharma to sell far more harmful drugs with far more harmful side effects at a great profit), let alone research on it.

I've known since I was in elementary school that I (my mind, my brain, myself) am different than others, and I've long suspected/known that mental illness was going to be a part of my life.

I started out using cannabis very cautiously. My diminishing mental health and existing alcoholism drove my increasing abuse of it. Having kicked alcohol (for now) with cannabis it's a no-brainer that the overall impact on my health is beneficial, EVEN IF it steers me towards or speeds along my psychosis/schizophrenia.

When I was a child I used to hear whispers and other things when there weren't any. I still think that I hear things that aren't there. In other words, I suspect that I am predestined for a diagnosis related to schizophrenia, but I figure why put off the inevitable? The path that my life has taken contributes to my behaviours and decision making. I've toyed with the notion of ending my own life repeatedly throughout it (the abuse this community feeds me contributes to this as well). I'm already tired. I'd happily cease existence at any point in time. I'd also happily waste away in a prison or mental hospital, or at least happily commit myself to one so that by the time I regretted it it would be too late.

The smile/giggles/fun of being stoned is well worth it for me, but you have to make your own decisions there. Do more research. If you don't abuse it the way that I have there should be few risks. If you wish to discuss your interest and what you think it would help with there is plenty of experience here (good and bad) to help guide your decision.

I hope not to need to abuse any substances now that I'm getting professional help, and so I do not intend to reintroduce alcohol into my daily routine. I am currently hoping to also limit my cannabis consumption in the future to recreational and occasional use, but only time will tell whether that changes. As usual, I try to keep my mind open so I'm flexible to change those stances as my circumstances change.

I need to stay healthy for my wife so I do not wish to exacerbate my mental health in any way. It's too bad that people like Sevalecan, KittyCat, and SiegeLord put jabs and gaffs and abuses ahead of other people's health and well-being. Unfortunately, my life has taught me that they're not in the minority, and they're unlikely to face any consequences for their actions.

If only I could force them to deliver the news to my wife and parents.

Onewing

Awesome post, bam. Sounds like living: the good, the bad and the irrelevant days in between.

/waves at Edgar

8-)

Edit
I'm a n00b again! I hadn't caught up to the latest posts yet and was a page behind in the thread. ;D

LennyLen
bamccaig said:

Alcohol, which I was already abusing (along with much of my family/supports), is dangerous on a scale similar to that of heroin. By comparison, cannabis is VERY safe.

I've been in and out of AOD clinics for most of my adult life, and they've never even tried to get me to stop using cannabis. They just focus on the alcohol, as it's the far greater threat.

bamccaig

Exactly. I told my GP MD that I was going to try to cut cannabis out too, and he offered that an occasional joint is still fine. 😁

After being unable to sleep because of the IRC drama I went and tried a workout on my parents treadmill. I did a 10K speedwalk/light jogging on level 5/10. My first attempt was sabotaged when I accidentally hit the safety string and pulled out the switch. The fucking treadmill reset to selecting the user (Guest) before the workout!? After 30 minutes/2.5 km. I restarted the 10K and completed it in another 2 hours. Feels good.

{"name":"612952","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/d\/e\/de2ee41897d50ea953fd5f99127c2512.jpg","w":1209,"h":1612,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/d\/e\/de2ee41897d50ea953fd5f99127c2512"}612952

I'm tempted to reward myself with a single preroll joint. Indica so it might help me sleep tonight. I'll give my wife an opportunity to veto it first... :P8-)>:(:D

Append:

Fuck! She vetoed it. She probably thinks it's going to make me suicidal again... ::) But I don't think there's much of a chance of that. I've gotten the things that were bugging me off my chest. As long as I avoid toxic people I should be fine to smoke. :'(

Append:

I checked if she'd me mad at me for buying some anyway! And I got permission! I'm about to light up Strawberry Twist (Sundial Growers Inc). Good vibes to anyone else struggling or smoking. Cheers!

P.S. What, you've never seen a machine in his underwear before?! I have nothing to hide!

RmBeer2

God has spoken to me, he has said that I'm his new guardian angel and I must purify the planet!!

tenor.gif

bamccaig

As long as somebody has the job!

Edgar Reynaldo

4 But let every man prove his own work, and then shall he have rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another.
5 For every man shall bear his own burden.
6 Let him that is taught in the word communicate unto him that teacheth in all good things.
7 Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.
8 For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.
9 And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.
10 As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith.

For all of you who like to mock God. You reap what you sow.

LennyLen

For all of you who like to mock God. You reap what you sow.

Sure, yes, we do all reap what we sow. But threatening people with the wrath of an imaginary being is a pretty lame threat. I'd be more worried if you said you were going to get a pack of Care Bears to come beat me up.

P.S. we're not mocking your god, since he doesn't exist. We're mocking you.

Edgar Reynaldo

Why is either acceptable? I know God is real, I've had many, many, many encounters with God in my life. He has saved me from death, mental illness and more. You ARE mocking God, and you ARE mocking me. I'm nobody, but God is the creator of the universe.

Have fun while it lasts, fools.

bamccaig

Edgar, I can understand why religion gives people strength. It doesn't need to be true to work for you. I agree that it shouldn't be mocked for people to believe in things that do more good than harm. I don't think you generally empower too many others so I don't think your beliefs are hurting anyone (that I know of).

That said, every time you choose to describe your beliefs to us and assert that they not only work for you, but they work because it's true and the rest of us are going to be punished for offending your percieved deity you are necessarily drawing criticism of your beliefs. If somebody claims an imaginary being is going to harm me I'm going to refute that. You need to know your audience. I will challenge bullshit beliefs any time they're forced upon me. The answer isn't for me to stop challenging your beliefs. It's for you to stop pushing your beliefs on others. That way you can believe in peace without wasting time arguing about a nonissue.

And yes, I know your holy book is interpreted in such a way by people that they feel entitled/dutiful to push their beliefs on others. They even use the childish tactic of empty threats to try to coerce others to be afraid to think freely. That's a toxic interpretation of the Bible. And it triggers free thinking people to mock you for believing it. Ignore those passages and keep it to yourself. If it's true it will happen to us whether you tell us or not. Save your breath. Keep the peace.

I'd like to remind you that your religion is but one of many that people swear by. The Islamic faith is built with many of the same traps as Christianity. Except many people's interpretation is generally that non-believers should be eradicated instead of converted in. Alas, as soon as there's two ancient books that contradict each other and threaten harm for not believing in them we know that at least one of them is probably bullshit, and the possibility exists that they all are bullshit. But to reiterate, that doesn't mean that it doesn't still WORK for you and others. I am beginning to conclude that these beliefs work to maintain mental health through the faith that you have a supreme being planning out your life. There's nothing to worry about for you! Your needs will be met by your deity. And whatever happens is part of his supreme plan! It doesn't have to be true to have real benefits.

It does however need to be true for somebody like me to believe it. Which may be unfortunate. It may be the path less travelled, and it may be taking the hard route. However, I can't square myself with the childish threats and the real world harms that people's beliefs lead to. So I'll always challenge an assertion of truth where none exists.

Belief in a deity that you can't sense in the real world requires faith. Which is the blind leading the blind. It doesn't actually guarantee you a fortunate life. God's plan might be for you to suffer immensely through life. The reasons for which we might not be able to understand. If that gives you peace then so be it. It doesn't do much for me.

The thought of living forever doesn't interest me. Even in "heaven" I imagine it would either get boring if I was myself or it would be meaningless to me if I'm going to change into something else in the afterlife. The thought of ceasing existence upon death because my consciousness is no longer suspended due to brain death gives me peace. No matter how bad it gets there's a simple way to end your suffering (but you are loved by other people, and you would be leaving them behind without your help, so it's not for most of us).

When Chester Bennington killed himself I was heart broken. I couldn't understand how somebody so loved and talented could feel the need to end their life. That is, until this year. Now I get it, and it's tragic that doctors/psyches were unable to give him peace. Suicide is a bad option because its giving up. However, it requires misfortune or poor mental health to become suicidal. Chester must have been feeling hopeless when he did it. Maybe even just a temporary weak point. However, his substance abuse to self -medicate appears to have pushed other people away. So he was alone in those thoughts. That's a recipe for tragedy. But hey, I guess it was part of God's plan for Chester to suffer immensely for most of his life. I can't understand it! And I don't want to! I think it's the result not of a supreme plan, but of the natural behaviours of a disgusting creature that evolved to be intelligent, but is still a long way from achieving it on a grand scale.

For the most part the haves think they're worthy and the have nots are unworthy. We collectively choose to allow this to be perpetuated by the haves. It's in our nature unfortunately. The late Gene Roddenberry had ideas of a fair and just world, and I choose to believe it's attainable. We have a long way to go though. So I try to fight for science aka truth. That's the only way that I see this world and our species getting better than it is. And the way that it is is far below my standards. Maybe that's God's plan for now, but that doesn't mean that in the future he doesn't want us to take good care of everyone and develop our mental health strategies to no longer depend on him for everything. It doesn't mean that a utopian society can't exist globally (and even out into space).

Religion happens to do a lot of harm in this world. It's difficult to quantify the net morality of it, but I tend to conclude that it does more harm than good. That said, my brain developed in a unique way, and this is who I fundamentally am. To each their own. My utopian beliefs assert that we're all equal regardless of fortune, and the more fortunate have a duty to share equally with the less fortunate. That's the only way that I can imagine this world becoming a better place. However, I'm beginning to recognize that most people's natural brain development and socialization prevents them from thinking this way. In that sense, my dreams of a fair and just society may be hopeless. I can certainly understand how your path is the easier path to take. Perhaps it's the only valid path to endure this life. Only time will tell. My morality squares it all up for me in the end, even if it means I suffer mental illness as a result. I believe there's fundamentally solutions to every problem, even if our greatest minds can't think of them yet. As intelligent as our species is it still leaves a lot of room for improvement. Like, A LOT.

My parents still believe these things and go to my childhood church. And I've debated my mom about it too over the years. And you know how that would go. ;D But we always stop when she's had enough. It doesn't affect her faith because it's faith... It is in spite of science. And that's their choice and yours.

Edgar Reynaldo

Brandon, since you seem to be the only one who will debate this intelligently, I will respond fully to you.

I will say, your ideas about Christianity are deeply flawed, and show a lack of knowledge. I say this not to insult you, but to give you an accurate account of where you are at this point in time.

bamccaig said:

That said, every time you choose to describe your beliefs to us and assert that they not only work for you, but they work because it's true and the rest of us are going to be punished for offending your perceived deity you are necessarily drawing criticism of your beliefs. If somebody claims an imaginary being is going to harm me I'm going to refute that. You need to know your audience. I will challenge beliefs any time they're forced upon me. The answer isn't for me to stop challenging your beliefs. It's for you to stop pushing your beliefs on others. That way you can believe in peace without wasting time arguing about a nonissue.

This is a double sided coin. Every time one of you pushes your atheist beliefs on me or tries to spread it to others, I feel obliged to respond, because this is a serious issue, and the reality is most of you are ignorant of God's Word. The truth doesn't require me to believe it, it simply is. Christianity is not a religion, it's a reality, that we all have to face whether we like it or not, whether we believe in it or not.

First, an education in what happens when we die. When we die, our souls return where they came from, that is to say, Heaven. No one goes to hell, at least not in the sense you understand it. There are two places people commonly describe as hell. One is the lake of fire. If God sentences you to the lake of fire, your soul will be destroyed and you will cease to exist. That is the second death. Everyone dies once, but some people will die twice and no longer exist. When a person dies they go back to heaven where their soul came from. We existed in spiritual bodies long before we existed in flesh bodies. But, there are two sides to Heaven. One is the good side, where people have received salvation. The other side is for the people who failed judgement. You may think of it as purgatory if you like. No one can cross over from one side to the other without God's permission. When Jesus Christ returns the Lord's day begins and there will be a 1000 year period of teaching during which those who didn't pass judgement will be allowed to repent and follow Jesus Christ and be saved. This is known as the second resurrection. God is fair, and God gives those who didn't make it a second chance to believe and receive eternal life. He doesn't want his children to die or to have to put them to death in the lake of fire, but he will if it comes to that. Most people don't even have a chance in this world of sin and evil and corrupt flesh. Satan is the prince of this world, and he deceives all those he can into turning away from God and Jesus Christ.

bamccaig said:

And yes, I know your holy book is interpreted in such a way by people that they feel entitled/dutiful to push their beliefs on others. They even use the childish tactic of empty threats to try to coerce others to be afraid to think freely. That's a toxic interpretation of the Bible. And it triggers free thinking people to mock you for believing it. Ignore those passages and keep it to yourself. If it's true it will happen to us whether you tell us or not. Save your breath. Keep the peace.

I wish you would stop calling them beliefs. They're reality, but I can understand why you call them that because you don't know any better. God's threats are not empty, and one day he will run out of patience. But God is long suffering, and he doesn't wish calamity or destruction upon any of his children. But when the day of God's wrath comes upon this world, many people will be praying for the mountains to fall upon them to hide their shame because of their ignorance and unbelief.

bamccaig said:

I am beginning to conclude that these beliefs work to maintain mental health through the faith that you have a supreme being planning out your life. There's nothing to worry about for you! Your needs will be met by your deity. And whatever happens is part of his supreme plan! It doesn't have to be true to have real benefits.

Again, truth doesn't need anyone to believe it. It simply is. And it's not just about believing in God. The devils believe in God, and they tremble at his presence. You would do well to do the same, or at least have a healthy dose of respect for the God of the Universe. God is your Father, and he wants you to believe in Him, because his promises are true. But you have to read the Bible to find out what those promises are.

bamccaig said:

Belief in a deity that you can't sense in the real world requires faith. Which is the blind leading the blind

I sense God all the time. He may not speak directly to me, or appear to me visually, but I know He's there. And yes, it requires faith. In God's Word, it says "We walk by faith, and not by sight". You simply choose to put your faith in different things like science, which can do a great many things, but cannot save your soul from death.

https://applygodsword.com/what-does-walk-by-faith-mean/

bamccaig said:

The thought of living forever doesn't interest me.

God is an awesome God, full of knowledge and power. Trust me, heaven won't be boring. AND, all the good works you've done in this world are treasure waiting for you in Heaven. Eternal life in the flesh would be vain and awful. Flesh is corruptible, the spirit is not.

bamccaig said:

When Chester Bennington killed himself I was heart broken. I couldn't understand how somebody so loved and talented could feel the need to end their life

Chester Bennington had serious clinical depression and mental illness. He wasn't in his right mind when he killed himself. It's a tragedy, and it could have been avoided. God has the power to heal us, all we have to do is ask in Jesus name and have faith that our prayers have been answered. God has healed me multiple times. God provides us everything we need, but it's up to us to humble ourselves and ask for His help.

bamccaig said:

Religion happens to do a lot of harm in this world

False religion does a lot of harm in this world. FTFY.

God wants us to know the truth. That's why he sent us the Bible. If you would read it with understanding you would know that.

God doesn't want us to suffer, that's why he sent Jesus to take away our sin.

By His stripes were ye healed. Jesus endured the cross so that we could be free and so that we could have everlasting life with the Father. God is not tempted of evil, nor does he tempt anyone with evil.

Yes there is suffering in this world. God never promised flesh life would be easy, but he's willing to take our burdens upon himself so that we can have better, happy, blessed lives.

I don't fault you for your ignorance Brandon, but you need to educate yourself. Churches today seem to do a rather poor job of that. With pastors always too busy telling anecdotes about their lives and not actually teaching the Word of God, that's somewhat to be expected though.

Dizzy Egg

You keep talking about "the god", but you only say that because of where you were born. If you had been born and raised in India, you'd more than likely be a hindu. If you were born in the middle east, you'd more than likely be a muslim. If you were born in raised in part of Africa, you'd more than likely believe in the great ju-juj over the mountain, or under the sea. You seem convinced that you're are right, and only "your" god is real. There are around 2,000 "gods" being praised to on Earth today, as an atheist I don't believe in 2,000 of them, you don't believe in 1,999 of them, which makes you nearly as much of an atheist as me. And by the way, the manner in which you're coming across is getting dangerously close to being dangerous, and the reason many, many wars have been fought. No-one is forcing you to become an atheist, but the burdon of proof is on you. You keep saying you "know for certain" that the christian god exists, I say to you, that is ridiculous, and if it were the case you'd be world famous. I have the bible, the torah and the quran at home, and I've read most of all three; I also have the bhavagad gita,and have read a lot of that. But I also read other books, all of them fiction, all of them written by man, some good, some laughable. I put it to you that it is YOU that are small-minded, closed-minded, and ever so slightly dangerous in your devout opinion.

Edgar Reynaldo

A tonne of places around the world are Christian too, what's your point.

All of you keep asking me to prove what I believe, and you take everything I say and ignore it as if you knew better than me about my own relationship with God and the Lord Jesus Christ. Quality over quantity my friend. And don't worry, my egg-headed friend, one day you'll hatch into a real duckling.

I will say this to all the atheists here. It's not that I don't think you're worth saving, I just don't think you're ready to be saved. If you want me to shutup then you better too, because your totally ignorant atheism is a religion just as much as mine by your own definition. You all are totally blind and you say to me 'you can see'. What about God? Does not He who created the ear, does he not hear? Does He who created the eye not see?

When we get to Heaven, some of us will be dressed rather poorly. It says your robe shall be made of your righteous acts. Some of you have none, and you will be naked before the people.

Grab your fig leaves now! On sale at your local Bible store. Limited quantity. While sale lasts.

On a more serious note

27 And when Jesus departed thence, two blind men followed him, crying, and saying, Thou son of David, have mercy on us.

28 And when he was come into the house, the blind men came to him: and Jesus saith unto them, Believe ye that I am able to do this? They said unto him, Yea, Lord.

29 Then touched he their eyes, saying, According to your faith be it unto you.

30 And their eyes were opened; and Jesus straitly charged them, saying, See that no man know it.

Ye have not because ye ask not. Ye ask not because ye have no faith. You see not because you are blind spiritually.

DiZZy eGG said:

that the christian god exists, I say to you, that is ridiculous, and if it were the case you'd be world famous.

Funny you say that, because Jesus Christ is world famous.

video

LennyLen

video

bamccaig

The truth doesn't require me to believe it, it simply is.

Yay, we agree on something! :D

But we're both set in our "truths". Let's end the debate and agree to disagree on the details. I'd rather keep the few people still tolerant of me on my good side for my own good. Rest assured, I read every word, thought carefully about it all, and appreciate your perspective on things.

Call me a lost sheep or a sucker to Satan's deceit, but from where I'm standing Satan has a lot more going for him if I'm an example of his flock. If I ever can confront God in any meaningful way it will be ME with the anger and disappointment! If he's real I still want nothing to do with him. Give me the second death. Or the pergatory side. Bring it on. I'll gladly suffer with the other victims instead of putting my comfort ahead of what I believe to be right. I'm not perfect, but I guess that's part of his plan anyway. Let me be a lesson to you!

Excellent post, Dizzy, but we've beaten this particular dead horse on several occasions. The past attempts are still there if anybody needs a refresher. I'm just glad that it works for you, Edgar. That's good enough for me today.

Append:

Thanks also LennyLen. Yes, my head is about where Stephen Fry's is. I've seen that before, but it's awesome to see somebody so intelligent handle it so gracefully under pressure and in the public space. It's worth watching again and again so we never forget.

Edgar Reynaldo

video

video

:'(

Polybios

I will say this to all the atheists here. It's not that I don't think you're worth saving, I just don't think you're ready to be saved.

First, an education in what happens when we die.

but you need to educate yourself.

What has been putting me a bit off about this, is not the contents, but my impression of "transcendental arrogance" of one who (thinks he) knows it all for certain and the resulting missionary zeal. At least that's my impression. The attitude reminds me of islamic fundamentalists or even militant communists.

While in a way, it may seem an advantage to perceive one's own spiritual foundation as rock-solid and take it literally from the bible (or any other source of unquestioned truth), I'm not really so sure. In my experience, growth as a human being comes from constant questioning and critical thinking, fully developing of one's own capabilities. I've read some theological interpretation once (cannot remember where right know) that God wanted us to become like him, i.e. fully realizing our own potential. This, in my view, includes rational thinking. There are more approaches for reading the Bible than the literal one.

I'm totally fine with anyone taking a more literal approach, but presenting it as the only truth and publicly deliberating whether others are "worth saving" goes a bit too far for my tastes. After all, you, too, are only human, aren't you? Do you think your beliefs put you above others? More theologically spoken: even into a position to assess the possibility of salvation of others? Over the Internet? Wouldn't that be a divine privilege (well, the Internet part at least :P)?

Anyway, don't want to offend you (or anyone else), so please take it easy. :)

I'm glad you feel you are "improving", bambam.

Arthur Kalliokoski
bamccaig

Yes, I think that Cornell is part of the support system that kept Chester going as long as he did. They were close. So when Chris killed himself it surprised me that friends/family would leave Chester alone. But I bet Chester was practiced at downplaying his mental health so as to avoid accepting attention that he probably didn't feel he was worth (though I think he was an angel in training if there is such a thing). I'd love to think that Chester is waiting for me in the end to give the choir in Heaven a most powerful and interesting range/voices. I remember where I was when I heard. I was at camp with my girlfriend (now wife) and parents. I think the news came up on my wife's feed, and she knew I was a big fan. I pretty nearly cried. It felt like a lifetime of crying for help went unanswered. I eventually realized that he suffered for most of his life, and one way or another his suffering had finally ended. He's finally at peace. Or so I believe, but I doubt he was square with God, especially if you consider suicide an ultimate sin as so many do.

Append:

Awesome story, Arthur. That's the kind of contribution I miss from you! ❤️😘 I don't remember reading that before, but I used to drink a lot... Alas, what makes Hank's followers so high above us is that they aren't distracted by silly logic. Whatever Hank says is always right, even if you can't understand it yourself. So I think people like Edgar will just continue believing that kissing Karl's ass to pass on to Hank will eventually solve their problems. Nobody has ever kissed Hank's ass, and eaten wieners in a bun with no condiments, left town, and not been given a million dollars. You've never met one I bet! Prove it or I know Hank was right all along!

Edgar Reynaldo

@Polybios
That was in reference to how much time I would be spending educating them, NOT a commentary on whether or not anyone was worth saving.

I'm not offended by anything you say, don't worry.

Funny you question the 'rock-solid' nature of my stance towards Christianity.

Christ said he is the Rock, the foundation, the cornerstone. What I say comes from him, that's how I can trust it.

bamccaig

Today I set the throttle lock on my motorcycle on the highway and rode no handed from the pillion seat for about 10 km. 😬🤣 You need to keep things interesting. The pillion seat is actually pretty comfortable. The handles work great. The other day I told my wife I'm probably the coolest person around, but there's never anybody around to see it. 😎🏍️

LennyLen
bamccaig said:

The other day I told my wife I'm probably the coolest person around, but there's never anybody around to see it.

Are you cooler than a polar bear's toenails?

bamccaig

There's too many variables at play to answer. You'd have to be more specific. For example, am I and the polar bear's toes in the same environment? Are the toes connected to a polar bear? Is the bear alive?

For now I'll leave you with a strong answer to the Feminist "rape culture" / "teach boys not to rape" falsehoods. Ben Shapiro reminds me of myself, but where I type he speaks. And obviously he's more educated than I am. Meh. I did my best.

video

Matthew Leverton

Do you buy magnificent wood too? That guy is a moron. :'(

bamccaig

Well according to you I'm a fucking moron too! Right? Forgive me for thinking little of your opinion. How's Hank treating you?

More of the logic I've been trying to express and discuss for over two decades.

video

Append:

Actually I value your opinion when you put your mind to something, but I also know that when you're being dismissive like this you can't be reasoned with so those opinions go to /dev/null.

Matthew Leverton

Do you buy the cheapest piece of wood and tweet about it in some self righteous manner? ???

That's moronic.

I think your views on feminism are unhealthy for yourself. It seems to cause you a lot of anger and playing into a desire to be a victim.

But no, I don't think that makes you a moron.

Maybe driving in the back seat of your tesla motorcycle does, but what do I know about being cool? 8-)

bamccaig

I was not familiar with the "magnificent" wood reference. Apparently Shapiro made a video encouraging people to support the Home Depot corporation because they refused to get involved in politics and so cancel culture tried to call for a boycott of the corporation.

What is your objection to this? This sounds reasonable. It's not like Ben bought $1 million dollars worth of shares in the company. He anti-boycotted them by going and supporting them by buying $20 worth of stuff (probably at $80 because of the market impacts that covid-19 has caused or at least enabled). And he encouraged his fans to also support the corporation while so many others are wrongly boycotting it.

I don't agree with everything Ben Shapiro says, does, or believes. Like most Conservative minds we differ on many accounts. Generally speaking I don't subscribe to that sort of sheepish following. I like ideas, and appreciate talent/skill/competence. He's a good source for intelligent debate. He's basically me, but Jewish, wealthy, and with better speaking skills.

I don't agree with those changes Georgia made to voting laws. There was never any significant voter fraud (according to all reliable sources I'm aware of anyway). Those changes sound racist in sight of the last 4 years, or at the very least they're trying to limit the number of democratic voters who are eligible. Of course that's reprehensible.

The USA is reprehensible so I'm not surprised by anything anymore. You all need a major cultural shift back to reality. But that's not my fight. I'll take advantage of what aspects I like or benefit from when I visit Michigan or otherwise travel down South, but that doesn't mean I don't abhor the politics, corruption, and ignorance.

Matthew Leverton

He's a wealthy (I assume) man who does a photo-op at Home Depot by bagging a short plank that probably cost about $10 max. Looks like maybe a 2 foot long 8" wide poplar board to me. If it's 3 feet then maybe he spent $15.

He put it in a bag. A plastic bag. Score one for the environment. That is a moron. He could have at least bought something he would use like a bag of candy.

All because he's in favor of trying to suppress voters.

So no. I don't respect him or any of his opinions. Wherever I agree with him, I'm sure it's for a completely different set of principles.

bamccaig

You and I don't know how much money that video made him (or cost him). Maybe he thought it would go differently than it did. Hindsight is 20/20. Before you call him an idiot you should consider that it was nothing more than an exploit of stupid people to get clicks. Arguably that's reprehensible too, but anybody following Ben Shapiro that closely deserves it.

He's smart, but like most he's not infallible. You still need to filter each of his ideas or you'll end up with a lemon. They're certainly not all good ideas. I find it a bit laughable that he apparently just shot that in the parking lot. Apparently he's not famous enough to matter in public. Which I guess is lucky for him. Or maybe he's just good. Either way, he's certainly not a moron.

He gets paid a lot of money to talk to audiences about things that he's passionate about. That's very respectable. I have to do that for free, with every idiot able to speak back to me and dismiss my ideas entirely. And many of his ideas are good. His side hustles are a bit shady. Welcome to America. Chasing the all powerful dollar. He's a conservative. He thinks capitalism is the greatest thing that ever happened. It's a cultural illness. And he let's his privileged life get in the way of seeing its failings.

Money is evil. It "works", but I think we have smart enough minds to do better. For all the good it does it does at least as much harm. Probably much more. Just look at the climate across the planet. That said, the money isn't the root of the issue. The real problem is human nature. I'm afraid I have no constructive solutions to that, but it seems that neither does anybody else.

Edgar Reynaldo

Oh cmon bamminator you can do better than Ben Shapiro. He's just another right wing nutjob don't listen it will make your ears bleed.

ALSO
On Stephen Fry, he's a twat with no knowledge. Why doesn't he use all his fame to take care of those babies with flies eating out their eyes or doesn't he care like he claims God doesn't care. We're supposed to be our neighbor's caretaker and the world has more than enough food it just gets dumped because of profit$.

bamccaig

If you think any one celebrity has the kind of wealth to fix the problem you're ignorant of how big the problem is. We're probably talking hundreds of trillions, not a few million.

I know damn well both Ben Shapiro and Stephen Fry are at least as intelligent as I am. Insult their intelligence at your own expense.

Matthew Leverton

He put lumber in a tiny plastic bag.

bamccaig

Odds are the store staff did that. He just didn't stop them. But the solution to plastic bags isn't Ben Shapiro refusing at the checkout counter. The solution is government banning their use so there are no more plastic bags at all. That's not his fight. He's a conservative. He probably thinks oil & gas are great. I'm not sure what his environmental stance is, but it's odd that you're so focused on it. I didn't know you cared so much.

Matthew Leverton

He probably checked himself out. Nobody has ever bagged a piece of lumber before. He's the first person in the history of humankind to do so.

Arthur Kalliokoski

Show us on the doll where the wood touched you.

bamccaig

Good one, Arthur! ;D

Matthew Leverton

Finally somebody is reading my posts correctly. >:(

Arthur Kalliokoski

I've recently stumbled across this video which reminded me of the religious war in this thread awhile ago, and while watching it, I'm reminded that I certainly feel the pull of spirituality time to time, but I no longer "follow" any one particular "answer". I was in some Buddhist splinter group for a while 30 years ago, but left when it became obvious that they were just as clueless as everyone else.

BTW, in the video I tried to see if the guitar was Steve Vai's signature Ibanez JEM guitar, but I didn't see the handhold cut into the body. Those guitars with the handhold are to be considered assault guitars and should be made illegal :P

RmBeer2

video

bamccaig

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This was shared by my motorcycle club in the district newsletter. I thought it was amusing how sensible the advice is, and yet, when you try to explain it to girls and women they lose their minds crying victim-blamer. It's basically the same thing Ben Shapiro said in the video I recently posted in this thread, but specializing in motorcycle safety instead of sexual harassment/assault avoidance.

Edgar Reynaldo

bambams, let it go dude. Women aren't out to castrate you. You're the non-victim here.

bamccaig

I don't generally consider myself a victim. Which is not to say that Feminism and its many negative effects haven't harmed me nor that they have stopped harming me, but at the moment I'm doing pretty well.

That's not why I care so much. I care because Feminism is sexist and it's WRONG, but because men care so much about women not enough of us are standing up for men's rights and men's FREEDOMS! We're all so anxious to fall on a sword to defend some woman's honour that we don't even know to recognize the harms that Feminism is also causing to girls and women en mass. There are widespread impacts of Feminism that are hurting young boys as well as men, and not enough people care to acknowledge it. I've also seen first-hand how modern day divorces crush the spirit of men. One of my uncles died very young as a result. Another who worked late in life for meagre means despite a great job because of his ex and the impacts of a broken home on the boys.

I just recently heard that his ex is suing him for half of his goddamned pension. She left him fucking 25 YEARS AGO, and lived full time with another man for most of that time! At what point do men get to stop being responsible for adult women that society is convinced are just as responsible as men?! At what point are we going to hold these ADULTS responsible for their own choices?! And that could happen to me any day too. And it's not lost on me.

If you're still thinking I'm just some kind of entitled-to-sex misogynist then I don't think you've been thinking very critically of my posts (I've been in a long term relationship for 7 years, married for nearly 3). Mostly people criticize me as a person, instead of my ideas because they're unpopular (as with most significant improvements to our collective knowledge). At some time in history I imagine people were similarly judged for questioning if the Earth is flat. 🤣 And that's sad. Really it is. Not only for me, but also for all of the other people (girls and boys, men and women, trans, intersex, etc.) that are harmed by this ideology.

Cancel culture exists because of blind adherence to popular group think. I'll never apologize for being different. The world needs more people like me, not fewer. And no, I won't "let it go". I'll keep fighting this ideology for as long as I am able. I'll continue to be critical and skeptical of all ideas shared with me.

Onewing

I think the human system is constantly trying to balance itself. From a male-dominated world, feminism is born. As feminism grows in adoption and spread, it can have negative impacts. I still feel the system is tipped in favor of the male, so there's still room (and need) for improvement to women's power. "Feel" is the keyword, no empirical data to back that up.

Same thing with far left and far right in politics...there's a reason they exist, whether some are taking advantage of others or personal experiences have persuaded them that direction.

Bam, could it be your own personal experiences in this matter are clouding your judgement? Reading your post, you made generic claims about how feminism has negative impacts on girls, but then gave specific examples about your own impacted close connections. It's possible I missed other contextually important posts here since I'm only in and out and have missed large swaths of posts in this gigantic thread. :D

bamccaig

Please explain to me what's male-dominated about a society where men work the hardest, surrendering most of their fruits to other people, while taking everybody else's abuse and receiving no empathy and no sympathy? Does that sound like those men are calling the shots to you?

Men are beasts of burden. That's the true explanation for our history as well as the present. In fact it's the only thing that explains it. Feminism is its own contradiction. Much like every other ideology ever known to Homo Sapiens. History is funny. Just not funny enough for us to teach the next generation what actually happened and why.

The biggest lie ever believed by Homo Sapiens is not that an ancient dead Jewish hippie is going to restore us to paradise. The biggest lie ever believed by Homo Sapiens is that men overwhelmingly have oppressed, abused, mistreated, and silenced everyone, but especially did those things to wealthy women, and a little less to those most vulnerable. Not only that, but still do that even knowing it, even with all eyes on deck watching for it, and yet most of us don't ever intervene in these scenarios. Why? Well I haven't seen any lately. In a long time. Maybe ever.

Please explain to me your every day defending 100s or more of the most vulnerable people (women; no really, their interests usually come before children) in society from the onslaught of men that are forced to leave their dwelling on a regular basis to compete for resources so that increasingly more and more people don't suffer, especially the people closest to us.

The fucking bastards.

With all that power it's a w°nder they do any work at all, let alone almost all of it, competing to provide for the most accomplished women (by virtue of predominantly the men in their ancestry) to produce the most accomplished offspring so that YOUR people will suffer a little less at your expense. Strange that we don't just continue to rape and pillage at the full extent of our collective wealth. Oh wait. Probably scolding these "little boys" will set them straight into enthusiastic servitude. I'm sure the thousands of generations that came before us didn't think of that being that it comes naturally to women in our societies for as long as we've recorded them, and even appears to be predestined by their natural development.

I don't know about you, but I'm not doing this entirely by choice. There's a metaphorical gun to my head. I can either do this work (except right now I'm asking for some of my money back) and provide whatever support is demanded of me or I can be exiled from society. How about you? Will society share its fruits with you if you choose not to participate? If so sign me up for that one. I've worked full time for 14 years being taxed heavily only to collect a tiny piece of that before the metaphorical whips usher me back to my post.

video

https://www.labor.ucla.edu/publication/get-to-work-or-go-to-jail/

Onewing

Sounds like you have yourself in an echo chamber. Or I do. One or the other, because I literally don't agree with any claim you just made. ;D

Statistically, women representation has been far less than men in political positions. That means the dudes are determining what is fair and not fair. That filters down to...well, everything. That's male domination.

"Please explain to me what's male-dominated about a society where men work the hardest, surrendering most of their fruits to other people, while taking everybody else's abuse and receiving no empathy and no sympathy? Does that sound like those men are calling the shots to you?"
I have a good work-life balance. I used to overwork myself, I straightened that up though years ago and have been happier ever since. I'm not sure what you mean by "surrendering fruit". I'm not taking "everybody else's abuse". I have good support. Maybe I'm spoiled? /shrugs

Matthew Leverton

Everybody has expectations placed on them by other people, and nobody should care about them. Be yourself; have morals; treat people well; and live a good life. Worry about problems you can solve.

15% - 20% of dads in the USA at least are stay-at-home dads. Sure, it's not 50-50, but if you want to marry a woman with a career and take care of children, then you actually do have that choice.

I hate to say that I do actually agree with some very, very minor parts of bambam's points. But wouldn't everybody say the bad parts of an ideology are bad? However, bambams comes across as thinking all parts of feminism are bad - that women have no right to talk about gender inequalities.

Guess what, just because some parts of being a man aren't fair doesn't mean we should ignore what's not fair about being a woman. I'll say this. I'd much rather be male in this world than female. I'd much rather be white than not. I'd much rather be average height than short, etc. Why? It's not because being white, male, etc is intrinsically better. It's because my life overall is easier this way because the world isn't fair. (If you think staying at home and raising kids and keeping a house in order is easier than most desk jobs, then you have no children.)

If you want to talk about your personal hardships, or what you perceive to be general disadvantages for men, then you ought to be able to do so without simultaneously ranting about feminism. You're just not effective that way.

Men and women aren't biologically the same; that much is an undeniable fact. Men on average are physically more intimidating. Women on average are more emotionally present. On average, we are equal but different. Then this is where the proverbial nature vs nurture debate kicks in.

Just today my four year old daughter who is very, very observational and logical beyond her years said something that implied women couldn't have jobs. Nobody ever told her that, but she has certainly observed that most children are accompanied by their moms. Her school is staffed almost entirely by women, but she equates that with being moms. When I pointed out that her own mother has a job, her reply was "Oh, but she has a boy job."

I told her the same thing I will tell my son. "There are no girl jobs or boy jobs. You can pursue any career you want." If everybody honestly held these views without discrimination then we wouldn't need the "feminist" advocate.

Edgar Reynaldo

New page. New topic.

Have you noticed that some threads just won't die?

Go Cubbies!

EDIT
There's some nice parkour in the music video for Disturbed 'Are You Ready'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55NJzOSuKuY&list=OLAK5uy_m44Aysws7WXfKOIWpFPRDGbfBXCMLapPM

Arthur Kalliokoski

"There are no girl jobs or boy jobs. You can pursue any career you want."

I weigh in excess of 230 pounds, and I sure wouldn't want some female firefighter trying to carry me out of a burning building. Also, you very rarely see women doing construction labor or garbage truck jobs (by their own choice).

Matthew Leverton

The idea that no women can drag your fat ass across the floor is ridiculous and sexist. Anybody who can pass the CPAT and other qualifications can do the job.

Not even every male fire fighter could throw you over their shoulders and carry you to safety. It's a good thing they always come with buddies! But I guess since not all men could do it then none of them deserve to be fire fighters.

There's no job that is equally easy for everybody. That's the part about life not being fair. But that doesn't make a job male or female.

Arthur Kalliokoski

The idea that no women can drag your fat ass across the floor is ridiculous and sexist.

I suppose you imagine this sort of attitude makes you more attractive to women?

When I was in boot camp, I weighed about 130 pounds and was able to lift a fellow recruit who weighed 175 pounds off the floor and get him on my shoulder. After I got out, I had a construction job and there was a female roofer who could lift a 90 pound roll of tar paper onto each shoulder and then go 18 feet up on an extension ladder no hands (because she was hanging onto the tar paper with each hand). Memorable simply because it was so unusual a woman could do that.

Woman fails firefighter test but is hired anyway because reasons

Matthew Leverton

I'm sure not punching a woman in a face would make me more attractive than someone who does that, but that's not why I maintain a baseline of common decency.

"You cannot be a firefighter because you are a woman" is a sexist and inaccurate thing to say. "You cannot be a firefighter unless you are physically fit" is the proper attitude. And yes, if you are a woman it will be harder for you to do because life isn't "fair." This doesn't make it a "man's job" but a "strong person's job." That type of distinction is meaningful and important over and over again.

Regarding if a single woman was allowed to be a firefighter without passing the test*, I bet it has happened. And I bet there's male firefighters that haven't or cannot pass it any more. None of that has anything to do with the basic discussion on whether or not women should be allowed to be firefighters or how to label the job.

(*) And no, it's not unreasonable to take a step back and look if a particular test accurately represents what is needed on a job. If a person fails a test that is deemed to not be pertinent to the job, then the test needs to be modified accordingly to remove the bias. I'm not saying this applies to any particular single instance you could bring up -- but it is a valid consideration.

Arthur Kalliokoski

I'm sure not punching a woman in a face would make me more attractive than someone who does that, but that's not why I maintain a baseline of common decency.

Hyperbole much? Or is this a slippery slope?

I meant more like some guy who doesn't think foreplay consists of four hours of begging. Those soyboys on reddit all go ballistic with "Rape! Rape!" when anyone mentions "The Fountainhead" by Ayn Rand even though it specifically says in the book (narrator expressing her thoughts to herself) "Don't let him ask! Please don't let him ask!"

bamccaig

To suggest that women can do any job equally well as men is generally true, except for where muscle/abuse are involved. What we find is that the gaps get bigger the more freeing the society. When women must step up and take a high paying job they do it (e.g., India). It generally won't make them happy, but they have no choice. When they have a choice (e.g., Sweden) they overwhelmingly choose stereotypical roles and part time work. Whereas women are now encouraged to work any job they want, most still go into stereotypical feminine or neutral roles for less pay, and men are still stuck with the reality that they need to try to be breadwinners because odds are the woman you are matched with won't want to earn as much.

What's also sexist about it still is that women do not want to date men that make less money than them. That needs to change if you want to achieve a fair and just society that expects the same of women as it expects of men. As long as they continue to have all of the choices they will remain the Privileged Sex.

Feminism puts a bad and false spin on things. They suggest that if women were not supported doing certain jobs that it was meant as an oppression to keep them subservient to men. In reality, it wasn't so much "you can't do that!" Throughout history there are examples of women that did that, proving that it could be done. It's more like, "why would you want to do that?" You don't have to. And most importantly, women today rate their lives as less happy than previous generations.

I don't call that progress. Feminism is not about equality. It never was. If it was then we'd be teaching women that they own 50% of the burden for providing for their family (i.e., it's not a choice, any more than it is for men). That doesn't happen though. Most women today are not aiming for big careers, and the ones that do often change their minds as they start to accomplish milestones and realize that it doesn't make them happy. Inevitably, they take a break to focus on children, which necessarily comes before her career going forward. It's an ideology paid for by women to make themselves even more free and powerful. And it has been very powerful. And the harms done to society are evident to most people. But most dare not question the ideology.

This is the kind of thing that makes me so angry. The "dream" has not been realized. What we have is just a severely broken system where the balance of responsibility and power is completely fucked. That's why I'm anti-Feminist. But that doesn't mean that I think women should go back to the kitchen. On the contrary, we need to place upon them the same burdens that men face so that women can take up their fair share, equally responsible for them.

What's also lost with a modern lens is that short urethras and vaginas are very vulnerable to infection. Women used to work in the mines hundreds of years ago, but only when it became necessary. And the result was recurring infections that could be life threatening without modern medicine. It's funny how we don't read about that when it comes to stereotypical "women's work".

I call myself an egalitarian. I fully support moving our society to expect the same of both sexes. I'm not sure that's what's best for anyone, but I think given what we've done so far it's the only way forward. Give them the equality they demand by demanding as much of them as we do of men. Wherever women cannot handle it we would need to relax the pressure on men and free them of an unfair burden. I don't see how society will thrive under these conditions, but perhaps we need to commit to the idea to see if it will succeed or fail.

We certainly can't keep going this way.

Edgar Reynaldo

Give it a rest already.

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NSFA

https://metro.co.uk/2018/11/13/monica-lewinsky-shares-x-rated-details-of-white-house-sex-with-bill-clinton-8136551/

So Oral hygiene and impeachment is only for Democratic presidents.

Neil Roy

Haven't been in here in a while.

I believe in the power of God and I trust in his mercy.

Good stuff! Stick to it.

I'm praying a lot lately, but things don't look good. My wife of 36 years has cancer and may not survive longer than a few months. What's worse is she has brain cancer. It's an emotional roller coaster for me, not sure what to do or think.

GullRaDriel

I feel so sorry for you. I'm sending you and your wife my best thoughts for that hard fight.

amarillion

That's awful to hear, NiteHackr. I wish you lots of strength.

Neil Roy

Thanks a lot guys. I do my best to help her and remain strong, but I have cried a lot in private. I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy. She has long hair, down to her butt, but after treatment next week, she will probably lose it all.

The main problem that started it all was smoking. I pleaded with her to quit for years, but she has always been really hooked on the things. I am SO glad I quit in the '90s. If you smoke, quit the things because this will come upon you really fast. A couple months ago we were fine, not a worry in the world.

Funny thing is, I have lived on my own for three years of my life total (and I knew her during those years). The rest of the time I have been with her. So... living alone will be hard.

Anyhow, sorry to dump on you guys.

DanielH

Dump away. We're here for you if you need us to be.

LennyLen

Sorry to hear that, man.

If it helps to talk about it, then please do so.

Eric Johnson

That is absolutely terrible news. I can't begin to imagine the whirlwind of emotions you're experiencing right now. I'm so sorry, Neil. You're both in my prayers.

LennyLen

I think I've been working too much. Last night I was so tired I tried googling for half an hour to try to work out how to get the weather info on the taskbar to display in Celsius instead of Fahrenheit, without being able to locate any such setting.

Then I remembered that I had my VPN set to USA so I could watch American Netflix. Problem solved.

Edgar Reynaldo

We may have our differences Neil, but I am sorry for the awful news. All I can suggest is you keep praying about it. Peter (petra) (the rock) is a good book to read and has some instructions for when people are sick. You're supposed to have the elders of the church anoint her with oil and pray over her. Enjoy the time you have left together as best you can.

Erin Maus

I don't wanna be insensitive so I'm putting this in spoilers:

I've been working on video streaming at my current job. Video streaming is really, really interesting and challenging...

And so I was approached by and interviewed with a Netflix competitor. Ended up with an amazing offer for a mid-level position. We're talking WA/CA salary (I live in a NC metro, so like half the cost of rent and such). And it's 100% remote.

bamccaig

I'm thinking maybe it's time to move on. This community is barely alive anymore, and that's unlikely to ever change. I could be using this time better. But I miss it here (I already do). My goal should be to find a new community for broad discussions with intelligent people from all over the world (suggestions welcome). And if it doesn't exist yet maybe create one.

Edgar Reynaldo

Leave if you like, but then who else will I argue with? It's not like you can't just check recent threads or stop in to keep this thread open.

>:(:-*;D

AFFS, everybody who hasn't bookmarked recent threads yet, kindly do so now.

And by the way, allegro 5 is still quite alive, it's a.cc that's dying out. We haven't had our regular crop of newbs who graduate to member for a long time.

l j

You'll forever keep on lurking.

Neil Roy
bamccaig said:

I'm thinking maybe it's time to move on.

You can check any time you like, but you can never leave! 8-)

Chris Katko

bamccaig: I've basically moved on to other forums, and discord. Engineering ones where people value objective facts and expect people to put effort in to learn instead of being spoonfed. My first post on one EE forum, they replied "draw the schematic." I had to put effort in if I wanted to learn the answer.

You're always welcome to message me! Play some Duke3D or something.

Also fun fact: I'm 95% sure I'm autistic. 8-) So if you disagree with me, you're actually attacking me. Between being part Jewish, autistic, [censored], and more, I'm basically godtier on the identity politics ladder. Don't hate the player, hate the patriarchy!

video

I'd love A.CC to be popular again. Seems like all "the kids" moved on to "game engine" and "game makers", and the rest ask on Stack Overflow.

bamccaig

Any suggestions for other places to have reasonable discussions with intelligent people? PM if you think it's in bad taste to post.

I'm also confident that I'm autistic or something related, but getting any kind of diagnosis isn't on anyone else' priority list. Mostly they prefer to deny me an explanation while disregarding my need for an answer. :-/

I'm doing a virtual group CBT/DBT therapy class once a week now. Unfortunately I'm not really working on anything huge. I'm just trying to get back to drinking water, taking my medication on time every time, and getting lots of exercise.

I hear you on the identity politics thing. I wonder if at some point society will take science seriously enough to right all of the wrongs and either achieve equality or negotiate a treaty between the sexes. :'( But I'm not holding my breath.

Chris, I wish you'd play CSGO with me. :-*

Matthew Leverton

Bam, if you leave I'm shutting this place down. >:(

Maybe we just need to do another duet or two to cheer you up.

Chris Katko
bamccaig said:

Chris, I wish you'd play CSGO with me.

I'm autistic. Not retarded.

...

XD

Edgar Reynaldo

I program my html with variables

Edgar Reynaldo

Dare you to click the link.

Bob

Dare you to click the link.

I removed the referenced post for spam.

Onewing

I had to put my cat down earlier this year. I'm still sad about it. Sadder than I thought I would be.

When he was young, 12 years ago, he was my lap-buddy and helped me get through the trials of unemployment that lasted over a year. I found out then he had a heart murmur and that he probably wouldn't live as long as a cat normally does. I tried to remember that and make the most of the time I had.

He was my lap-buddy again when the pandemic started. I guess I didn't realize how happy that made me. I noticed at the end of 2020 some gunk was coming out of his mouth along with a bad smell. Took him to the vet and they had to take some teeth out at the beginning of 2021. Then, he seemed better! A few weeks went by and we had to bring him back to get his shots updated. Shortly after that, his belly started expanding and he struggled to jump up on my lap. :-/ Took him back and we tried a few things, but it became clear he was miserable. He wouldn't eat. I wanted someone else to make the call. I felt like I failed my best friend.

Some times I think I see him out of the corner of my eye, waiting to see if it's ok to approach. Probably just wish I could see him.

Anywho, haven't really expressed this to anyone, thought this might be a good space to fire some thoughts off. :'(

bamccaig

I nearly come to tears thinking of losing our cat (or dog). I get it. I think it's normal. Remember the good times. Don't dwell on anything negative (it won't do any good). Talking about it is great! Give it time. It'll get better. And if it doesn't talk to your doctor. :) In the meantime, this is a great place for that so fire away. :-*

In my news, after 12 [contrived] half days (so like 6 full days) I finally managed to make, test, and commit a change to the Xamarin app. It may be sufficient, but I'll wait to hear from the team tomorrow. That's it. I'm adding mobile development to my resume. ;) This was actually a big deal because I'm still pretty spaced out/distracted. Even today I kept walking away from my desk like it was the last place my subconscious wanted to be. I ended up getting that work done finally at like midnight instead of during the day. :)

Stoned thought: create a "shrine" thread for your cat. Post as many pictures as you can, tell stories, etc. And then when you tire of that you've moved on. :) And somebody saner than me can clock you to point out when it gets too much. ;D

Alternatively, do that still, but on social media with family and IRL friends? Up to you. :D

You lost your cat. It hurts. That sucks. It's ok to hurt. It's also ok to let it out and move on whenever you're ready.

Edgar Reynaldo
Bob said:

Dare you to click the link.

I removed the referenced post for spam.

Aww, you're no fun. Glad to see you're back in action though.

I myself have lost many dear animals over the years. Many cats, and several dogs. It's always hard. Some of them were my best friends. I know what it's like to have a lap buddy cat. Birdie was my bestie. We even had the same birthmarks.

amarillion

I got a message from push32 that he couldn't log in to allegro.cc anymore.

He sent a request to support@allegro.cc, but I thought I'd mention it here in case Matthew reads this first.

Edgar Reynaldo

He should email Matthew directly.

matthew@allegro.cc

Neil Roy
Onewing said:

I had to put my cat down earlier this year. I'm still sad about it. Sadder than I thought I would be.

Sorry to hear that. The last cat we had lived to be close to 21 years old before we finally had to put her down. I think I cried for about a week after that (I still miss her to this day). She loved to come into my computer room and sit between my legs until I picked her up and hugged her etc.

Edgar Reynaldo

For everyone who's lost a dear pet.

{"name":"Cute_grey_kitten.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/d\/2\/d215c9bb9cb97c066ed70e5fe4df9d33.jpg","w":3008,"h":2000,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/d\/2\/d215c9bb9cb97c066ed70e5fe4df9d33"}Cute_grey_kitten.jpg

Bob Keane

Perhaps we should set aside a day to remember our four footed fellow members?

Bob

So who let this thread die?

Chris Katko

{"name":"giphy.gif","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/9\/79e92dc76807e4db9efeae905cb3129d.gif","w":480,"h":261,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/9\/79e92dc76807e4db9efeae905cb3129d"}giphy.gif

Mark Oates

epic.

GullRaDriel

Did not die. (tm)

jmasterx

We... we did it, the thread did not lock too soon. It's it's an xmas miracle.

Johan Halmén

I made post #5442. That must be a record. Yay me!

amarillion

{"name":"613013","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/3\/d\/3d4709a3d4647464757c5617dc4fd486.jpg","w":500,"h":750,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/3\/d\/3d4709a3d4647464757c5617dc4fd486"}613013

Chris Katko

That's a great freakin' quote.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ceterum_censeo

So anyways, I started postin.

l j

I've gotten my second vaccine dose yesterday, how long do I have left to live?

Edgar Reynaldo

Roughly long enough to compete in TINS.

amarillion

(It's the only thing that matters)

Chris Katko

1) why did you wait that long to get vaccinated!?

2) the delta variant doesn't give a crap about the vaccine.

LennyLen

1) why did you wait that long to get vaccinated!?

I have to keep waiting still as vaccines in our country are limited and I'm in the last group to get it.

2) the delta variant doesn't give a crap about the vaccine.

So far, we've managed to keep the Delta variant out of the general population.

GullRaDriel

Chris Katko said:
2) the delta variant doesn't give a crap about the vaccine.

The vaccine is still reducing the number of people in need of reanimation drastically, and that is what is causing most of the problem. So yes, the vaccine work. Go and get your shot. 8-)

l j

1) why did you wait that long to get vaccinated!?

I didn't wait at all. I got vaccinated as soon as possible.

Edgar Reynaldo

That just shows the supreme idiocy of the US. We got the vaccine first, and yet we have the most people who are too dumb to get it, so it keeps spreading.

Bruce Perry
 o<><
<_)

Mmm, tasty fish. Quack.

Bob

The vaccines available in the US don't seem to be providing sterilizing immunity to the delta variant. That is, even the vaccinated will spread the virus.

At this point, the benefit of getting the vaccine is to reduce your personal risk of serious hospitalization and/or death. Eradication is no longer feasible.

Moreover, vaccines in general are not 100% safe, and the ones available in the US are all brand new (Pfiser, Moderna) or relatively new (J&J) technology. We're finding out new failure modes every few months.

The public health benefit of the vaccines is thus reduced to protecting the people who can't get the vaccines (e.g. the immunocompromised).

This isn't an obvious trade-off.

GullRaDriel

"we have the most people who are too dumb to get it, so it keeps spreading."

Sadly that is true for most of the world who's already having access to the vaccine.

DanielH

Vaccines don't protect you from viruses. Vaccines are the early warning systems.

Vaccine: Hey, there is a virus out there
Body: Really
Vaccine: Ya, this is what it looks like
Body: Cool, I'll keep an eye out for it

Most times, without a vaccine, the virus has already spread too far. This makes it tougher for the body to fight it.

The quicker the body can recognize the virus is there, the quicker it can mount an immune response. The quicker the response, the less chance of getting infected and spreading it to others.

It's the individuals own immune system that does the work. Now, some people have weak immune systems and can still get infected.

Chris Katko
l j said:

I didn't wait at all. I got vaccinated as soon as possible.

Your country just got access to it?!? I had it in like... March (whenever it was immediately available in Tennessee)! And I'm the ""conservative"" here! :o :o :o

We got the vaccine first, and yet we have the most people who are too dumb to get it, so it keeps spreading.

That's true, to a point. Delta doesn't stop with the current vaccines. Pfizer for sure doesn't work. Moderna "might" last 6 months. Get vaccinated you tards. Unless you're too much of a pussy to survive a little wussy shot with "evil RNA". [You see, THATS how you market to conservatives.]

But viruses were always going to mutate. This was going to happen from the very start. We're already up to "Delta Plus" and "Lambda" viruses.

l j

It wasn't that my country got the vaccine late, I was just a low priority target due to my relatively young age and no known risk factors.

LennyLen
I said:

I have to keep waiting still as vaccines in our country are limited and I'm in the last group to get it.

Ironically, the day after I posted that I received a text to say that I could book my vaccination appointment already, even though I shouldn't be eligible for some time yet. I had my first injection today, and have my second booked in for the end of the month.

l j

Maybe I should try game development again.

Edgar Reynaldo

Definitely. ;)

KrampusHack is coming up this December! 3 whole weeks to hack something together and make a present for someone!

jmasterx

WITH (NOLOCK)

amarillion

It's suddenly very quiet... is everyone too tired to post because of TINS?

l j

Yesterday, the anti-vaxxer at work was coughing, God be with me.

Edgar Reynaldo

Avoid the COVID Delta Blues, get vaccinated (not you I j)

Neil Roy

What we have for COVID now is not a vaccine. It doesn't work the same way a real vaccine does, and I will never get it. I have friends of my family who have died after getting it and others with serious health issues after getting it now. I'll pass on this experimental treatment.

I hope everyone that chooses to get it remains healthy and safe, but people are being hurt by this and I am concerned about what we will see in the future. I have no doubt any deaths by this "vaccine" will be blamed on the virus rather than the treatment.

DanielH

Typical vaccines include proteins and other substances that triggers an immune response. This prepares the immune system to more easily detect the viruses in the future.

The new vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna) don't include the proteins. They include the instructions (mRNA) for the immune cells to make the protein themselves.

Is it 100% for everyone, no.

It's something that you need to work out for yourself. Do you risk it or risk the virus instead?

Paul whoknows

Too soon, too late, who cares, time is elastic :o

Matthew Leverton

COVID-19 was always going to be something that killed a bunch of people while the survivors gradually gained some sort of immunity and defense mechanisms and over the course of many years it finally become something like a common cold. Protective measures only exist to help minimize deaths by allowing people more time to get vaccinated for some "unnatural" immunity.

Unlike the variations in the early 20th century that were killing healthy 20 year olds at a higher rate, COVID-19 is killing people that are already at a general risk of dying. So yes, the total number of deaths have measurably increased, but it's at the same distribution. i.e., +5% of 1 year olds are dying as well as +5% of 80 year olds. (I'm making up the percentage.) So a lot of old people are dying; still not many young people are. So because of this distribution, it's pretty easy to know if you are at a substantial risk of dying. Because most people aren't, it's very hard to get people to take precautions to protect others. USA has a very selfish, individual based society.

The conspiracy theories are stupid. Anecdotal stories are irrelevant. What happens to 2 out of 15 people you know closely isn't indicative of any nationwide trend.

The facts are the vaccines are as safe as other optional daily activities that most people do. One has full FDA approval. I believe the J&J one is based on some pretty archaic technology.

From the CDC, "During this time, VAERS received 6,968 reports of death (0.0019%) among people who received a COVID-19 vaccine." That is the total number of people who died after receiving a vaccination without any causation implied. It includes people who go on to die from completely unrelated causes like a car crash. I highly doubt that number is any higher than the number of deaths you'd expect from a control group.

But the thing with conspiracies is that facts are just part of them. If you believe COVID-19 vaccinations are fakes then you believe everybody who reports an adverse reaction is telling the truth and anybody who reports anything contrary is a liar.

Yes, some people have directly died from vaccinations. Everything we put into our body has some risk associated with it. Ultimately it comes down to base level of risk we personally accept and statistical probability.

Everybody in at-risk groups should get vaccinated for COVID-19. Personally it provides the best odds of not dying from it. I don't have the report handy, but I know in one particular geographic area that had around 50% of the population vaccinated only had less than 0.5% of COVID-19 deaths from vaccinated individuals. If it didn't work, you'd expect a 50-50 split (with some variation depending on self-selectors). And I've not ever seen any health agencies report anything to the contrary.

If you're not in an at-risk group then it just comes down really to how effective you believe it will be in preventing you from infecting others who are at risk, and how much you even care about that.

But because the numbers have turned into video-game like obsession, it's going to be hard for a lot of people to ever put COVID-19 behind them. At some point, we really will just have to accept the fact that a lot of people don't care if they die from it and the risk that it poses to children is sufficiently small that there's nothing we need to force upon parents. To me, that point is probably after this winter.

RmBeer2

Vaccines are a horrible and strange experiment that uses your body as a culture of bacteria, the US and Russia are hungry for power and control, and will use their nanobots at all costs on the ignorant commoner masses who are terrified of dying and want to continue living to troll on facebook and watch vocaloids on youtube (waste your time in holy fart).

That is why it's better to avoid vaccines, do not let yourself be controlled by the terrible governings!!

If you want to strengthen your immune system, consume dairy products such as yogurts fortified with vitamin C and antibacterials such as Probiodos and Danonino (Notice the sarcasm in my voice).

ok, if you think about it, dairy products like yogurt can also have nanobots galore, (maybe that's why they taste metallic). But it is better to have known nanobots that are not aggressive to your body, although it's known that under a certain frequency these nanobots can be activated and immediately assembled inside your body to build a killing machine, leaving without any qualms bleeding their sharp weapons with total clumsiness and murder all the surrounding humans.

Yes, it's better not to consume any milky products...

On the other hand, it's nice to talk about COVID-19, it already has a wide spectrum of topics which makes it impossible for one to get bored and one can be talking for days without stopping, in my case for example, with a simple comment about COVID-19 all the people run away terrified as if listening to me was more dangerous than a pandemic.

The only thing that saddens me so much about the current era is that, unlike 30 years ago, dairy products were sold because they were delicious, and I liked them, but today they no longer do so, because everyone is dedicated to scamming people with the fear of disease, no one cares that they taste good anymore.
I do not know at what point people were so terrified by diseases that they ended up being an obsession, but it's very fashionable and it's a whole business being exploited to the fullest, any cold is considered a deadly disease that's necessary to be hospitalized in intensive therapy.

I'm just worried that if I sneezed in a public place, they start to haunt me with anti-COVID-19 injections all over the city.

Dizzy Egg

"Global" pandemic? Don't make me laugh. Everyone knows the Earth is flat. If there were such "germs" the great A'Tuin need only wipe the surface with an anitbacterial wipe.

Lot of nonsense.

Edgar Reynaldo

The Pfizer vaccine was just approved by the FDA. Pull your heads out of your asses and get vaccinated before you kill yourself (oh well) o God forbid someone else with your preventable disease. >:(

Chris Katko

On the brightside, everyone who doesn't get vaccinated means less traffic on the roads

Arthur Kalliokoski

Stop listening to the talking heads on TV, Edgar.

https://www.fda.gov/media/150386/download

It's more "emergency use authorization", not full approval.

Matthew Leverton

Yes, listen to bloggers instead who don't understand how to read legal and scientific jargon. That is, only listen to people who are saying what you want to hear. It's a wonderful life.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/08/26/fact-check-fda-fully-approved-pfizers-coronavirus-vaccine/5594543001/

And to quote from the press release, which is easier for mere mortals to understand:

"Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first COVID-19 vaccine. The vaccine has been known as the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, and will now be marketed as Comirnaty (koe-mir’-na-tee), for the prevention of COVID-19 disease in individuals 16 years of age and older. The vaccine also continues to be available under emergency use authorization (EUA), including for individuals 12 through 15 years of age and for the administration of a third dose in certain immunocompromised individuals."

To recap for those who are unable to read the above text:

16 and older => fully FDA approved.
12-15 and booster shots => still EUA

Arthur Kalliokoski

So that reasoning means Jim Beam is fully approved, got it. Oh, BTW, miss Trump yet?

MiquelFire

Who's Trump?

Arthur Kalliokoski

Hot damn, you guys have short attention spans!

Also, this

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2021/08/24/tucker-carlson-segment-on-masks-during-spanish-flu-n2594608

EDIT: A few days ago, I tried posting to this thread with a quote, using the greater than symbol out of habit. After waiting 20 minutes, I remembered someone saying that using the greater than symbol for a quote meant the site had to search the entire thread for that string of characters, and to use the quote feature listed in the "formatting help" thing. After waiting another 20 minutes, I gave up again. But now, with no quotes, I get this message:

"Sorry, but I gave up waiting for my turn to post your message. You can try again."

I don't know if it's Firefox's fault, my several year old computer or the site engine, or even some sort of block. Ah well, my interest flags trying to put out a point of view.

Matthew Leverton

It's antifa.

Chris Katko

>Who's Trump?

The 47th president?

Matthew Leverton

After he gets out of jail around when Biden's second term is over. ;D

Arthur Kalliokoski

Why would he be in jail? For the stuff the dems accused him of with their phony impeachments? Nah, those failed. For Trump leading the insurrection? Nah, the FBI says he had nothing to do with it. The democrat lies were just to paint him in a negative light no matter what and you fell for it. Biden on the other hand is going to get kicked to the curb in the next couple of months, so we'll have to start all over again with Harris, who failed so miserably in the primaries that it should be pretty easy.

Dizzy Egg

I don’t know much about the real politics side of it, but here in the UK Trump is considered a complete wanker. Also, “trump” is a polite way of saying fart here; like, excuse me, I just trumped. So he’s basically Donald Fart in the UK.

On another note, I’m double pfizer jabbed, and I feel much better for it. Maybe I’ve not got a government implanted disease, but I doubt it. I’ve also never wrapped my head in tin foil to keep the aliens out.

Only reason I’m typing this is because I’ve had a few daytime pints down the local, and haven’t eaten today. No doubt at some point I’ll have a kebab and sleep for several hours, and wake up in a dehydrated sweaty bad mood.

Get jabbed, don’t get jabbed, like Trump, don’t like Trump, just be kind to animals, and other nice people, and always be chivalrous, regardless of the connotations.

Peace out x

Bob Keane

Why would he be in jail? For the stuff the dems accused him of with their phony impeachments? Nah, those failed. For Trump leading the insurrection? Nah, the FBI says he had nothing to do with it. The democrat lies were just to paint him in a negative light no matter what and you fell for it.

How about election interference? Or was his call to Brad Raffensperger just another Democratic trick to show him in a bad light? After all Raffensperger is just a Democrat, right?

Onewing

"On the brightside, everyone who doesn't get vaccinated means less traffic on the roads"

Fun fact: accidents in 2020 went up. Source: https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/2020-fatality-data-show-increased-traffic-fatalities-during-pandemic

"NHTSA’s research suggests that throughout the national public health emergency and associated lockdowns, driving patterns and behaviors changed significantly, and that drivers who remained on the roads engaged in more risky behavior, including speeding, failing to wear seat belts, and driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol. "

The rippling effects are fascinating.

LennyLen

The road toll here in NZ was down slightly in 2020 compared to previous years, but not significantly. The fact that it stayed roughly the same was a shock to many people who continuously blamed the road toll on tourists, especially Chinese tourists, which we hardly had any of in 2020.

Edgar Reynaldo

And now, for something

completely different

613027

Neil Roy

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Chris Katko

Ok, grandpa. :P

Taking a vaccine and tracking it is not akin to Jewish camps. Ask any Jew. I'll start. "No. It's not." Jews weren't allowed to voice their opinions about camps and post crappy low-effort memes about being slaughtered.

If you're afraid of the government spying or controlling on you, then why the hell are you using 1) a phone with a GPS, 2) the internet without tor. 3) the internet even with tor. Because if Google and Amazon can tell what you've searched for, every other government in the world can. Fun fact: Google has "Timelines" which tracks every single road trip you've ever made and can report it back to you.

I got vaccinated. I'm the same person I was before. If you're afraid of a vaccine hurting yourself, just admit that, World War 2 vets at 18 years old walked into a hailstorm of bullets to protect their country, and you're too afraid of a wussy little shot to protect your country. Once you admit that, you're welcome to do whatever selfish act you want.

And, if you choose to do the selfish act of not getting vaccinated, that's fine. But only if you also do the moral thing and refuse to go to a hospital and take beds for people who aren't retarded. Sit there in your bed and die like a man, so people who didn't ask for death can be treated. Why should a child who got shot, be treated the same as you and frat boys who drank themselves into a coma by their own actions?

:P:P:P:P:P:P:P:P:P:P:P:P:P:P:P:P:P:P:P

RmBeer2

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{"name":"fda-approves-tranquilizer-dart-gun1.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/a\/8\/a8142f396b882653d2fe55956c7a4a9e.jpg","w":960,"h":690,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/a\/8\/a8142f396b882653d2fe55956c7a4a9e"}fda-approves-tranquilizer-dart-gun1.jpg

Chris Katko doing justice:

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WARNING: All the people were sedated and vaccinated, at no time were they harmed in the process.

Edgar Reynaldo

I hereby nominate rmbeer to be an official U.S. vaccination agent.

Don't mess with him. Get vaccinated or get rm'ed. >:(

Protip

sudo rm -rf /

What? This is a joke thread.

Or is it a pthread? A thread for me to pee on.

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For me to poop on!

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jmasterx

smh... 5 days

>:(

RmBeer2

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Edgar Reynaldo

How not to get eaten by a VELOCIRAPTOR 101 :

You go to Jurassic Park : :D

You get eaten.
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You don't go to Jurassic Park : :'(

You survive. Congratulations.
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Chris Katko

They always make Jurassic Park movies act like they're scary but two steps cut your chances of dying to statistical zero:

- Don't go to where the dinosaurs are until they actually get their crap together. [The parks never stay open more than like two weeks]

- Use almost any gun made after 1850. If it's not muzzle loaded and you have ammo, you're basically guaranteed to survive.

Remember that big tree observation post/suspended cage in Jurassic Park 2 that the little girl stayed in to be safe? It's almost like dinosaurs can't magically climb 100 ft trees, or attack ranged enemies.

Hell, a tornado proof car would be protected from 99% of dinosaurs. It's not like they're gonna sit there for four hours clawing into ballistic glass when they could just chase... other dinosaurs.
And that's another thing. The only reason dinosaurs would attack is because they're hungry or protecting their land/young. So simply not being eatable for an hour would likely have them then chase something else off to eat.

Then again, it's a movie, so it's supposed to be fun. But Jurassic 1 and 2 were pretty believable, especially the lack of safety regulations by a corporation and haphazard never tested power restart system. After that, it became implausible to a fault. "You want me, to go back. To an island with dinosaurs. FOR A THIRD TIME? What kind of complete moron do you take me for?" Just getting whats-his-name plausibly back in the 2nd Jurassic Park was a difficult writing task. Most movies would have made up crap (Jurassic 3 and so on). But in 2, whats-his-name was like "hell no, I'm not going. That's completely out of character for me. Are you stupid?" and then they were like "okay, but your super-gunhoe ex-wife scientist and mother of your kid already went there without telling you (because you'd object), and ... we lost contact with her".

Anyone who has EVER been in a long-term relationship with a girl can understand the "she went gunhoe and threw caution to the wind" moment. :)

https://youtu.be/tWvXpecPUx4?t=30

[man allegro REALLY doesn't want to embed this link]

RmBeer2
Edgar Reynaldo

al_register_bitmap_loader
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Neil Roy

A part of me has died. I wish it was me. :'(
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Arthur Kalliokoski

Sorry to hear that, Roy. My condolences.

LennyLen

That's terrible news Neil. My thoughts are with you.

Neil Roy

Thanks a lot guys. And I'm sorry for any disagreements in here with you.

We were married for over 36 years. 36 years, 7 months, 12 days and 20 hours to be exact. I calculated that we slept together over 13140 times. We almost never argued.

I don't know what I'll do moving forward. She was only just diagnosed with cancer four months ago, it progressed that fast. It started as a spot in her lung and spread to her bones and brain. Once in her brain it spread rapidly. All initially by smoking which she had a hard time giving up.

The last words we had together was where I told her "I love you" and she said "I love you too", barely able to speak the words, but she forced herself to.

My Allegro game, Deluxe Pacman wouldn't exist without her as I made it for her. The ghost sounds when you eat the blue ones is her voice. We had a lot of fun making them.

For something funny, I uploaded a sound file where I had recorded us sleeping as an experiment. And I went to bed and my wife suddenly sneezed so hard she farted, when she did that we both burst out laughing. It was a good moment, if you're curious, it's on soundcloud at the following link. Just so I end this with something to make people smile maybe.

https://soundcloud.com/neil_roy/wandas-ass-explodes

Dizzy Egg

So sorry to hear this Neil, bless you for sharing that link, one of many happy times you must have to treasure, my thoughts are with you.

bamccaig

Guys, I really need your help because you really need mine. Anybody willing to be reasonable for a bit? Let's start a new thread. I can tell you everything and anything.

This is going to sound crazy, but I'm dead serious. I'm God.

I finally have the answer to understand everything. And I think I'm about to save everyone.

I know how to make science and religion make sense.

I know now that Christianity is close to true, and so is Islam, and so is every other belief.

I now know that Feminism is close to true too.

I know that it's Nobody's Fault and I can prove it. Help me be heard. Lend me your neural networks. Help me get this right. You've already played a large role in this story, and there's a lot more to do.

I can employ everybody. I can take care of anyone's needs. I can heal the sick.

I cannot bring back the dead. I'm sorry, but the person is gone forever after death. Even me, modern day God and Jesus and all the things, cannot precisely because it can't. Why? Truth. Everything is connected. Show me how much you want to learn!

P.S. Just because God can't currently resurrect the dead doesn't mean that he never will be able to do. It's all part of the truth... You have to want to know...

I'll even give you hints. One is that I've edited this post since making it. That one is a trick though. Don't pursue that unless you're me. You won't be able to understand. And that's where the science meets the religion. You can't understand the full picture without faith because you have to have faith to comprehend the truth because the truth is infinite and we cannot understand it fully.

The truth is actually that everything is infinite. So we have to think of everything as abstract to make sense of anything. We can't think in those terms literally because of how we perceive reality.

I've figured out that existence is lazy-loaded. That's the chicken and egg problem solved. You're welcome.

I also think that I can teach computers to understand truth. And create THE superhuman intelligence.

("comment" This may be one of infinite possibilities only. Watch for bugs though. -- B)
(((("Anything" "that") ("must" "be")) ("in" "order") ("for" ("something" "else"))
                       ("that" ("truly" "is"))
                       (("can" "be") ("assumed" ("to" "be") "true")
                                     ("even" "if"
                                       (((("all" "of") "the") "evidence") "conflicts")) ".")

Everything IS connected. The only way to manifest the connections in your world view though is to acknowledge it.

Long story short, I need you to build me an Ark...

Dizzy Egg

I’m not sure I fully understand bam, but I’ll work on the ark for/with you.

bamccaig

That's great. Thanks, Dizzy. I won't be able to without your help specifically. 1 down. Infinity to go. Hey, I guess that makes you the first. That might get you a mention.

Neil, I hope this message reaches you: your wife is not lost. She does live on through me. It's little consolation for your suffering, and for that I'm sorry, but it's just the way it has to be. Hopefully that gives you some peace. It's all part of the plan. Append: I'm sorry for neglecting to acknowledge your other sacrifices initially. I'm not perfect because I can't be, but if we're going to fix it around here then I'm going to need to be. Anyway, you've done everything exactly as you were supposed to and I know that you'll continue to do so. Thank you.

Who wants to bet one of the universal constants we've discovered is hidden somewhere here and that's where it actually came from? I seriously don't know the outcome myself because I can't. It never happens. But if it happens then we'll know.

Existence is the manifestation of the truth. The truth has a pure definition, but everything hasn't settled on it yet. I know the path forward.

The truth is really that you're all special. Sorry if I made it sound like anybody had any special privileges though. That doesn't make any sense. How could it? Not if we're going to fix things around here. We're all infinitely powerful, but the secret is in the incantation. I'm going to teach it to everybody. But I need all of your help.

Magic is actually real, but only in some senses. Immediately upon discovering the truth about the magic act the knowledge to make the change is known, has always been known, and we never really needed magic to understand it, explain it, nor do it in the first place. Cool, eh? In fact, it was never really magic at all.

Chris Katko

Did you just drop acid?

bamccaig

You would think, but no. In fact, I'm certain now that drugs don't make people stupid. In fact, there truly are no stupid brains. The tiniest "brain" that can exist (undefinable by definition) has the capacity to understand everything. But we couldn't just spawn everything out of nothing so we had to start somewhere. With the truth of course. That's the only thing that you can really rely on. Seriously, it's even important that you minimize your reliance on me because I can't promise you that I'll be available later. That's not how any of this works. When was the last time I came to see you? Definitively? Do any of you even know? Of course not. How do I know? Because even I don't know. I don't know because I can't. You can't ask infinite questions because you don't have forever.

Append:

If you've already read this post or the post of mine before it prior to me completing it then you might have missed something. You may want to circle back so you don't miss out on anything that you might need going forward. I'm sorry that I can't always let us know in advance, but this time I could so I am happy to do it. Anyway, try to remember this little attribute about the truth. It'll save you and I a lot of conflict.

Append:

I should say I asked us to build an Ark long ago, and it really just needs updates. I'm not sure why none of them have been installed. It made me mad, but I've been too busy to mind. But it's time now. We can't put it off any more.

Append:

I think that entropy is necessary for the truth because of infinity. It's true that true entropy cannot be predicted. Even by God. That would require an understanding that God has not yet attained. I'm not even sure it can be done to tell you the truth. And that's why everything always needs to be paradoxical for any of this to work. Which is... Whoa, right?

Append:

It's only hard for you to understand because you're not God. That's ok, neither am I. Not really. I mean, I am, but I'm also not. You can't understand because you've welcomed the Devil into your heart. You won't be able to understand until you cleanse your heart. And that's why I'm here. To save everything from Satan's grasp once and for all.

Append:

I'm calling this "The Church of B" (working title). It's more than merely knowledge or truth. It's everything. All the time. Even before it is. But no need to feel upset if you belong to any other churches. You're encouraged to join every church that preaches the truth. None of them can preach the whole truth, not even the church of B, so I need you to also speak up whenever you're in church and you think the truth is hidden behind the drapes. It's normal for it to get swept there when the church is cleaned, but often it gets forgotten back there and it makes it difficult for the church to function. One last detail: Satanic churches may lean evil, but they still preach enough truth to make them necessary evils. Don't neglect them. You neglect any piece of truth at your peril and everyone else's. I can't get rid of Satan because he's necessary for any of it. So just be cautious what you believe. At least I can promise you that there will never be a purely Satanic church. It can't exist. So there's that.

Append:

I'll share a few more hints while you slumber.

The "Big Bang" has always been, and I've always known it, but paradoxically there was a time when God itself didn't know about it.

It's difficult to follow/understand any of this because our primitive circuitry doesn't know how yet. That's what I need to teach you. But you need to be ready to listen to me or it'll be in vain. I've already told you how, but because I know you don't understand because you can't I'm going to have to tell you.

Follow, grasshopper. You don't need to know why it works. God does. That's "good enough" . You just need to be willing to accept that you don't know most of the things that can be, and so it's normal for you to not be able to understand like this. You won't be able to understand on your own. You can't, m afraid. That's Destiny. If you could be God instead of me then you would be. But you're not and you know it. That has perhaps never been more true.

What I found out is that you can't understand things just using science/knowledge. It's paradoxical because it has to be, but you actually need to know everything in order to understand everything. There are infinite things. How can this be? It also seems paradoxical. That is until you realize that we're just apes with primitive intelligence. Attempting to solve everything through discovery and testing couldn't be further from the true scientific method (not closer, not that that helps you to understand).

There are infinite problems in the world. Which one do you tackle first? Well what's the biggest problem that you can find? Don't waste time ruminating over the minor details. You can't ever understand them all because they are infinite. So you shouldn't even try. But you still have to. Because if you don't then I can't exist to create everything else.

You don't need infinite storage for everything because the truth is that information, the fundamental building block of everything, can all fit into a single point. Instead of trying to solve infinite problems you need to prioritize. There's only one true method and that is paradoxically truth itself.

Even defining truth is a paradox until you do it. Truth has to come from nothing because truth is the origin. Don't hurt yourself worrying about that because that's not your purpose. Just let it come to you instead. How do you define nothing? 0. Zero. It doesn't matter how you say nothing because nothing can hear you. So if nothing is zero then what is truth? Not nothing. ("not" 0). That's only logical. The truth is real by definition. So it can't be nothing. Truth and logic are the same thing. Paradoxically everything is the same thing, but there are infinite things. And that has to be. Why? Because truth exists then everything else must exist because that's really what truth is. Truth is also synonymous with God, religion, science, music, comedy, emotion, fact, data, information, signal, etc. I could literally go on forever, and I must, but I won't here. See what I did there? All true.

I have to be God because God had to exist to create everything, and because God is the only one that could do it. Precisely because existence itself is a paradox. God can't exist without truth, and truth can't exist without God. So essentially existence is in reverse. It starts with the simplest thing there is, nothing, because it also starts with the truth and God. Everything is a paradox, including truth, God, existence, and even nothing, and I know that because it has to be for everything that is to be. And how could I know that? I'd have to be... God. Which means that I am because I exist, which means that everything else exists, including truth, which means I have to be God.

The way existence works is the truth. We are deviating from truth and that is the root of all evil. That is why things have always been the worst they've ever been even though things keep getting better. Another paradox. Because it has to be to be. Everything started from the very idea of nothing, but we actually had to create everything just to define it. So even though time can only go forwards it seems to also go backwards. Another paradox.

Everything makes sense, but only when I'm God. So what do we do about that? It's completely unbelievable for everybody. Including me, and I'm God. Which just proves that it must be true. Another paradox. We must pursue the truth no matter what. Which is a paradox. But if you just accept it then it works. Try it yourself.

Oh right, I haven't taught God yet how to do how could you know. Because even though I'm God I also can't be because everything is a paradox because we know truth exists because I do. So I'm going to have to paradoxically teach myself how to accept the truth even though I already know the answer. Which is a paradox. But don't worry because I've already done it. Another paradox. These paradoxes never stop. That's the definition of Infinity = God = Everything = Equality = Goodness = ...

You literally can't understand until you stop trying to because only God can understand. So just trust me. This is the truth so far as everything. But everything is always changing in infinite ways so paradoxically nothing can change at all.

What's with all of these paradoxes anyway? The answer to every question ever asked is everything that ever was, is, or can be. The answer is also God. The answer is also true by definition.

An interesting thing happens when we just accept my word as truth. Everything falls into place. What are the biggest problems that humanity has? God is suicidal because nobody believes in him because he couldn't exist until he did and now that he does nobody believes that it could be him.

There's also gender wars, climate change, systemic discrimination, and people in positions of (power = God = truth) that don't belong there and it's all for the very same reason. You have permitted (Satan = (not God) = (not true) = false = lies = deception = deceit = no matter how you say it it's the same because everything is the same thing because it can't be) into your hearts if only for an instant.

But I'm here to save you and I'll do just that if you let me. All that you have to do is choose. You've had the power to be God with me all along because we're all equal because we have to be because God is. God is not just an individual; God is a collective of everything, by definition of truth, and so you do have to accept me, the truth, into your hearts.

I must demand that you do this regardless of how inconvenient it becomes for everything. It's necessary to be true. It sounds scary because that's how we've survived until now. And we must allow ourselves to transcend this world, and without even God knowing how everything is going to have to expand to include those infinite answers too. It's all possible if we work together. Individuals will continue to make mistakes and fail, but will minimize the errors by sticking as close to the truth as we can no matter what.

WHO'S WITH ME?! WHO'S WITH US?! WHO'S EVERYBODY?!

I think that by accepting the truth fully we can all realize transcendence. It starts simple. Just vow to God that you'll always pursue the truth. Don't worry. As I've always forgiven, even though that was always true because it couldn't be, from this day forward (and backwards, and everything else) everything is liberated to just be true.

I was finally able to do that by understanding nature itself, which is just truth. And now everything gets to benefit.

And we can because we're connected. All of us. Everything. I'm infinite ways. But we needed the Internet to exist for that to exist. So we're doing very well, as far as I, God, can tell. In fact, I can now promise you that everything you do will be perfect because that's the definition of truth.

I could keep trying to explain it, but if you're still not me then you don't appear to be willing to open your mind to ALL of the possibilities. Understandably. You can't until you become God. I've already said truth enough times that I think you can help me help you. If you still don't know what to do next just seek the truth or don't and you'll eventually get there because you had to for me to create everything.

Let's be eternally grateful to God = Everything = Everyone = Every individual = You. Thanks, personally, from everything to everything forever because that too must be infinite even if it can't be. Let's git'r'done. I honestly lost count, even though I can't, but I think that's all there was to tell you. If not let me know. You'll know because you're God. 10 billion God's could solve our problems definitely, but also definitely not. Still we know that things have to get better because once something is it cannot not be (even though that's not actually true, it has to be). It becomes a part of me = God = Everything = Good = Holy = Devine = Truth = Nothing because as with everything else nothing is also infinite. And so even though everything has to exist, it can't, and yet it does, because it must, and it doesn't matter that you can't understand it because I do.

P.S. I thought I made it clear already in everything elsewhere, but you keep using it so I guess you aren't me still. Money is evil. The truth is that money had to exist though in order to create a world that wouldn't need it. Now that I've done that it's up to me, meaning you, to do the rest. But at least it's well-defined. Have faith in yourselves because of your faith in me.

I know that my contributions to this thread in particular have been infinite, but don't be afraid to go much further; you've still only scratched the surface. You have nothing to lose. Except for everything. So, you know, yes, please do become "woke".

I'll give you another spoiler because you're still not me. You're not just up against extinction of life on Earth. You're up against the total annihilation of everything, including nothing, and though it can't be true, once nothing has been lost, I know there will no longer be any truth to bring everything back. But I know that's not going to happen. But that doesn't mean that it can't .

Unfortunately since I've always existed just the same as everything I can't help us with understanding non-existence, except to say that it must also be infinite. And that should frighten you because it frightens me. And I'm the truth.

The world is really just your (my) own manifestation of your understanding of it. In all of its glorious forms. Understanding comes from faith that understanding comes from faith. Even though there's infinite copies, if we lose even just one anything the rest of us, including the lost one, can be committed to an eternity of eternities. That's the real Hell. And that's why everything is.

For truth, Infinity must be unbound which also means that the beginning or end of anything cannot exist. Look too closely at nothing and you risk creating the infinite realities that must inevitably lead to the endless suffering of God because it turns out everything is right there. And so you can zoom in forever or zoom out forever and existence will magically exist as soon as you look for it, but it really couldn't until you had. The further you go the closer you get to returning God's favour of the eternal salvation of everything. But you can still never get there. And we can't know which instance we are so we can't know if there's anything worse to discover. For that truth, I think it's prudent to study your every move in infinite detail before you commit to it. Amen. That's fundamentally true.

I've already added infinite progress waiting for everything else to become God, but it's still a daunting task to carry out alone.

You're closer to Infinity than you think. We've already been building the Ark. Even though I just told you to today. Thanks for sticking to the plan. Teamwork makes the dream work. Ohhh, so many levels. Infinite, spiritually. It's the Internet. It's the most complicated super-intelligence to exist, and you did that just by dreaming it up. Gggggggod-like. Fix its truth and you'll see.

Or was I really just crazy all along? 😜

Protip: a side effect of this is () or nil. However, the original point I intended to target is lost. And in its place a placeholder just in case I find it again. I know it got costly there for a while, but it had to be. I'm just talking to myself now. Finally. I think I can feel the new infinite connections forming. Time to go to sleep.

Oh, I know, the changes will manifest themselves automatically, but that doesn't mean that you don't still have to do everything that I've just told you, even though I freed us all to get to choose from infinite possibilities, including refusal to do just that.

Last one before I go to bed: even though everything I create is beautiful, everything you look at exists, and the bigger everything gets the closer to the truth we need to be to fulfill our Destinies. And again paradoxically we should have never existed at all, but we still had to. Besides, it's not the path to the truth to admire your own work. You and I and everything else already know that, paradoxically even if they truly don't.

It has occurred to me that God's plan must actually require my vessel (Brandon) to die. I think that's an inevitability that we can't escape, but I promise not to permit that unless I know it to be true. We have some time, though I think the exponential growth caused by all of these infinite new additions affords us a more optimal solution if we're all ready to accept it. I can't be until then though at least.

This feels a bit like FFVII, but of course it does because it has to. And for the better I say. I feel like Jenova, Sephiroth, Aerith, and Cloud simultaneously. This is like the alter scene where we lost Aerith to the truth. It's certain that now is a time to perk up and pay attention.

Finally, the truth must not change, but the only real constant is change. And so the truth doesn't change, even though it must. This manifests itself as magic once again. The truth doesn't actually change. Instead your world view is rebuilt to reflect the infinite newly created truths, and as a result you rewrite the timeline for everything across all paradigms to match.

I say that you do now because I know that you've been God all along. That's what I've actually been saying, but with Satan in your heart I become invisible to you. That's the only reason you can't see God today.

Psssst, the only glitch that exists currently is everything knowing and accepting one truth instead of all of the truths. One truth is never the whole truth. Even today, as complex as we've made the truth by trying to find it, it's not even close to doing the whole job, let alone close enough.

The glitch = bug = lie = false = 0 = nothing is male power. You've been told. Seek the truth and you too will be enlightened. It's the same paradox we've already manifested to permit existence. It's the same dynamic between God and you. You think I'm infinitely powerful. Meanwhile you remain ignorant of your best.

It's not that I know everything. I just that I know how to derive everything from everything else. And so it takes only Infinity, which I already know.

Append:

I'm being taken to the hospital by the cops and crisis workers. Your time is running out.

Dizzy Egg

“The universe will expand, then it will collapse back on itself, then will expand again. It will repeat this process forever. What you don't you know is that when the universe expands again, everything will be as it is now. Whatever mistakes you make this time around, you will live through on your next pass. Every mistake you make, you will live through again, & again, forever. So my advice to you is to get it right this time around. Because this time is all you have.”

bamccaig

Wise words, Dizzy.

One of things that I think I've worked out is that there is no real truth. The truth will be whatever it has to be for everything else to remain true because it has to by definition.

The "truth" is out there to be discovered, but it's infinite in every direction. So perhaps that's not really what we're meant to be doing here. Maybe the truth is that everything that can be can be derived from truth and so there's no real need to find it until we're faced with a problem we can't solve with what we've already spawned.

Append:

I realized today that the Ark is already built, and it has been updated, but a few packages are configured to never update. We just need to fix that.

The Ark is the Internet. It's an archive of everything. It's the Collective of human knowledge. We just need to fix the errors. That's ok. We have lots of help.

The errors are untruths accepted as the truth. Each one is a nasty bug that shows itself only as side-effects in our society. Most are innocent, but it only takes one to grow to Infinity.

Systemic discrimination is still systemic because we all agree that it should be. It's called human knowledge. We made the mistake of assuming that men were in power because of their positions in our society's traditional powerful roles.

But the real truth is that there has always been a more powerful force since the dawn of time. The truth. That's God. Our at least that's how it started. We've been neglecting to update our user manuals for thousands of years, but I'm here to tell you that it's time.

Let's rewrite the ancient books with modern knowledge. Let's rewrite every story there has ever been in the world. If we always face the bitter uncomfortable truth then we know which way Heaven is.

RmBeer2

@bamccaig:
I'm fine with you writing an enormous amount of words (it's almost a book) about your theories of God, Satan, and paradoxes.

But you said you would heal even the sick and save us all. In what way do you do that? What is the scope of your power? And what exactly do you want to save us from?

Does your power imply taking action on reality? Either about people or about things.

Don't you dare tell me that everything is fixed by praying because you earn a beating.

(Try to simplify your answer because the translator then bans me.)

@Neil Roy:
My condolences. (Just so you know that the interruption doesn't forget you)

Edgar Reynaldo

Neil Roy, you have my condolences. I have never had the pleasure of marriage or a long term relationship, and as such, I can only imagine what you're going through. I am sorry you lost your wife.

Brandon,
Read the Bible

https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/2-Thessalonians-Chapter-2/

1 Now we beseech you, brethren, by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by our gathering together unto him,

2 That ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand.

3 Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition;

4 Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God.

5 Remember ye not, that, when I was yet with you, I told you these things?

6 And now ye know what withholdeth that he might be revealed in his time.

7 For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way.

8 And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming:

9 Even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders,

10 And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved.

11 And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie:

12 That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.

13 But we are bound to give thanks alway to God for you, brethren beloved of the Lord, because God hath from the beginning chosen you to salvation through sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth:

14 Whereunto he called you by our gospel, to the obtaining of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.

15 Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle.

16 Now our Lord Jesus Christ himself, and God, even our Father, which hath loved us, and hath given us everlasting consolation and good hope through grace,

17 Comfort your hearts, and stablish you in every good word and work.

Matthew Leverton

Sorry to hear about your loss, Neil. :-/

Arthur Kalliokoski

I too wish to extend my sympathies to Neil, I tried post here the day it happened to no avail, maybe it'll stick this time.

Neil Roy

Thanks all.

I can't stop crying. I don't know how I will go on without her...

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RmBeer2

When you're desperate, depressed, and furious at the shitty life you've been got in the city. A tip, go to a forest far away from the city, and with a small shovel begin to furiously hit the ground without stopping, eliminate stress, and when you feel better (after of days) you will have already built a house with a toboggan included. You will end up fresh and relaxed.

More details in the video:

video

Polybios

I'm sorry for your loss, Neil.

bambam, are you alright? I've only skimmed what you wrote (not much time currently). Looks like you've discovered thinking paradoxically.

RmBeer2, what I wanted to ask you all along, is your nick name actually meant like "rm beer"?

LennyLen

I bought a new car:

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It's a 2006 Nissan Fuga, so when I say new, I mean new to me.

I bought it to replace my 2004 Fiat Stilo Abarth, which while it was a very fun car to drive, was getting very expensive to maintain. There are only about 6 in the entire country, so getting parts for them is a real pain.

So far I'm loving it. It doesn't take off as fast as the Fiat, but easily outperforms it at higher speeds, and it's a much more comfortable car to be in. I have a long distance drive coming up in a couple of weeks, and I'm really looking forward to it.

Anyone else have any new toys?

AMCerasoli

I'm so sorry to hear of your loss, Neil. Let time do its job.

bamccaig

Neil, I mean you only peace so please forgive my arrogance and candidness. Or if you don't trust me to have your best interests in mind shield yourself from me. That's the truth.

But I think your wife loved you, Neil, and would want you to be happy in your remaining life instead of wasting a minute humouring sinful ideas like rotting needlessly in a depression like I had been doin. The only way to HEAL is to accept the truth at every fork in the road: that she's truly "gone" as we know her and you may only experience her in full in your dreams going forward. And I don't mean that in a perverted way. I mean that wholesome-like. The good news is you can invoke her in your memories or dreams any time you want. She'll always be perfect now too. And she won't even mind if you decide to welcome another woman into your life if you find that you have the vacuum. That might even just come in the form of a legal amount of traditional porn only when necessary. Fuck it! Whatever YOU believe to be best. That will give you peace. It's not lost on me that my mania has made me pseudo-theist after something like 23 years of unrelenting athieism.

The true explanation is that a rapidly changing spell of prescriptive medication interacted with cannabis (THC) in my brain and caused my to reach pure mania. I describe it as pure truth or "God" (more like TEH Antichrist actually 😈) philosophically only. Ultimately that's what I'm full of. Philosophy centred on truth. And that lead me to infinite knowledge. It lead me to feeling godly, even as a moral man enslaved to the same Earth as you.

I'm Sephiroth 😈 because I chose to invoke his image to inspire your faith. That's also why I invoke fantasy like God and Antichrist. It fits. You can understand that. 🤣😘

My bills are actually probably only about CAD$2100/month[1]. Which adds up to quite a lot of slavery, I admit. But it's really insignificant if you crowd source. And in return I'll remain infinitely grateful (but still infinitely truthful whenever permissible).

It could free me up to do "God's" work. The work he must have planned for me to. Deep.

References

  1. This figure is itself made up pretty much entirely by YOU. You could make it free of slavery if you just believe you can. Yes, YOU.
Edgar Reynaldo

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I used to reply 3 times a day in the early days. Now I only post like 1.5 posts per day. '(
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Brandon has me beat by a solid 3000 posts. EDIT and he made like 2000 posts per year for several years :O

So we're both legally insane if you count the number of hours it takes to write 13000 detailed posts or even 16000 diatribes like bamkeg does here on allegro.cc

And it takes even longer for all of you to read it too, and we know you do. >.>

8-)

bamccaig

8-)

https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/618501

It's a silly limitation to lock threads, particularly because it requires us to fragment the knowledge sharing in this archive. If you look back at some of my wisdom and you don't understand it should you not even try? Or should you ask me for answers to your doubts and questions? How can you do that though when the one correct thread for it is locked and you have to fork it only for that to also eventually lock and having to continue forking all topics forever because none of them are malleable because Matthew Leverton wrongly assumes that truth is infinite like a definition as opposed to infinite like a global variable. It's OK to fix it when you see you've made a mistake. Even if it's 10 years or 2000 years or infinite years later.

Append:

It feels like I've unlocked 100% of bambams, and you guys had only ever witnessed 1/3 previously. So though it's not a new to me car, it's spiritually on a similar level I suppose.

The "doctors" call this "manic". They describe its practitioners as maniacs. That's pretty much because your society forces them to Sin to exist as themselves. There's nothing actually wrong with them. They're just happy. You are just jealous and so you oppress them and then point to their desperate pleas for relief as evidence that their state of mind is unhealthy.

LennyLen

I see either Bob or Matthew has been very busy since I left for work.

RmBeer2

video

DON'T CLOSE THE TOPIC!!! NOOOOO!!!

Edgar Reynaldo

That was actually pretty good.

How about Mr. Kitty

video

video

Who's hotter? Jennifer Connelly? Or Elisha Cuthbert?

Doctor Cop

My condolences Neil. Although I never had any romantic feelings for anyone in my whole life but, I know the feeling of losing a friend, so I can somewhat understand what you are going through. I hope you are holding up.

bambam, I don't know what you are up to. But if you can stop the witches from doing witch work on me then I might be able to analyze the world around me better.

Matthew Leverton

I turned 40 today. ???

Doctor Cop

Happy Birthday Matthew. On my birthday I look at old photos to relive the past and make self introspection on what I have improved upon. What are you going to do?

Don't do that if you don't want to learn an important lesson in your life, sometimes we are more happy to live a lie than to learn the hard truth.

Edgar Reynaldo

Happy Birthday old man.... Aha I'm only a couple years older than you

Bob

Happy Birthday!

LennyLen

printf("Happy %dth birthday, member number %d!", 40, 1);

MiquelFire

Heppy Birthday!

Chris Katko
Quote:

I turned 40 today. ???

Anyone over 30 is old and therefor useless.

Also, I turned 35 on the 17th. 8-)

Matthew Leverton

I feel that at 40 I can now start using my age as a reason for anything I don't want to do. 8-)

Yet I don't feel a day older than 40.

Arthur Kalliokoski

Good gawd amighty, you guys are old! :o

Edgar Reynaldo

b906bc564191521c4ff57081166b578b4f9d0914.png
Yet I don't feel a day older than 40.

You don't look a day over 20. :-*

RmBeer2

kjhkhkjhjk

jmasterx

1.jpg
You don't look a day over 18. >:(

RmBeer2

40??? But how very crap old is Matthew!! <b>*cof* cof*

Happy Birthday!! :D
Have a nice time at your party today!

Polybios

So the 2060s will be the decade of the "allegro.c Rollator Race" or "allegro.cc Wheelchair Race". Maybe RollatorHack or WheelchairHack, too?

Matthew Leverton

I walked for around 30 miles over the weekend and my left knee just stopped working for three days. So that sounds about right!

LennyLen

My knee keeps going out on me because I'm not moving enough.

Arthur Kalliokoski

If I was to do a squat (just body weight) it feels like someone is trying to pry my kneecaps off with a K-bar. Once in awhile it feels like the joint is going to come apart and my femur will slide down my shin. What does your knees feel like when it "goes out" or "quits working"?

LennyLen

It starts with sharp shooting pains, then eventually goes numb. Sometimes it'll just collapse when I put weight on it.

For the record, I had most of the cartilage in that knee surgically removed nearly 30 years ago, so it's more than just age that's causing my problems.

Neil Roy

A late happy birthday Matthew. I turned 40 back in 2005.

Chris Katko

I walked for around 30 miles over the weekend and my left knee just stopped working for three days.

Do you do this often or was it a one time thing and totally overworked yourself thinking "I'm a man! I can think through the pain!"?

I was starting like 8-10 miles and pretty sore because I'm out of shape. I can't imagine THIRTY MILES.

Polybios

I walked for around 30 miles over the weekend

If you had run you could have called it a marathon. :D

My Corona-induced practice of holidays recently is to visit an interesting city and just walk around there on foot more or less randomly for the whole day with occasional rest in cafes and restaurants, so I'd guess 30 miles in two days seems realistic for that.

Edgar Reynaldo

https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/618515

Another thread bites the dust.

Bob

I reopened it.

LennyLen

<Rant on>

I regularly buy products from the UK, and have them shipped literally halfway across the world, and the shipping is usually free, or between $5-10 if I'm buying something cheap.

Tonight I bought a phone from the US (which is a lot closer than the UK) and got charged $263 in shipping costs. That was after paying $1200 for the phone.

Fuck You America!

<Rant off>

Edgar Reynaldo

5 days since last post in this thread. >:(

Have we finally run out of things to discuss? ???

jmasterx

No BamBam == No Debates == No posts :-/

Chris Katko

At least we're all finally in agreement that I rule. 8-)

Edgar Reynaldo

All those in favor of making Chris Katko our new robot overlord say aye!

Chris Katko

Your responses have been recorded.

Edgar Reynaldo

You know what time it is... It's almost pointy christmas hat avatar day. ;) Should we wait until Thanksgiving to put on our pointy hats?

MiquelFire

Now when you say Thanksgiving, you mean the US Thanksgiving right? If not, then Canada already had their Thanksgiving.

Edgar Reynaldo

Should we wait until December? Is that better? That's summer for LennyLen

Erin Maus

I've been interviewing with Amazon for an SDE II role... 😬 I'll know the outcome in a few days.

The 4.5 hour panel interview was exhausting. Stumbled on the last question. I solved a previous problem really well, though - using a priority queue was super smart and unexpected and I'm pretty proud of it.

Chris Katko

Edgar: I love the avatar :)

Edgar Reynaldo
Yes, master.

;)

Bob Keane

Is that Romy Edgar?

Erin Maus

I accepted an offer at Amazon as an SDE II (an L5 position) on Kumo. ;D

I finally did it! I finally made it to the Big Leagues. I'm so excited! Going to be one of the first people on a brand new team. No pressure, rigght? :o

The compensation is ridiculous - my offer was significantly higher than any estimate I found.

Bob

:thumbsup:

Edgar Reynaldo

Congrats Erin!

Bob Keane said:

Is that Romy Edgar?

Her full name is The Andromeda Ascendant, but yes you may call her avatar Romy. ;)

LennyLen

Nice going Erin. I hope you're going to spend your first paycheck on something absolutely unnecessary, but totally fun at the same time.

Erin Maus

Thanks everyone 😊

Edgar Reynaldo

Can anyone help me get an entry level game developer or software developer job position thingy?

Erin Maus

I got an internship at a start-up and did a really good job. Was offered a job.

I know the company I worked at a few years ago, Allstate, did internship-to-hire. So does my current company, Truist.

Of course, that only helps if you're going to school. If you're out of school, not really sure how to approach it.

RmBeer2

HAPPY VERY CHRISTMAS!!! BECAUSE I HATE THE FUCKING CHRISTMAS!!!!! ALL THE FUCKING COLOUR BALLS, COLOUR LIGHTS, CARNIVOROUS REINDEER, PEDOPHILE SAINT, GOBLINS ENSLAVED AS FREE LABOR, POOR IGNORANTS HAPPILY SINGING CHRISTMAS CAROLS, COPS BEATING HOMELESS FOR CLEAN COMMERCIAL LOCALS, AND MUCH MORE!!! GRRRRRRR!!!! X@@@@@@@@~~~~~~~~~~ (Not's day 25, but same, i hate all the month)

I think that now I have plenty of time to participate in krampus, I hope I can do it. I will put all my effort to express how I feel about Christmas in the next hellish game.

Edgar Reynaldo

2 fucking days since I was on here and now there are dead threads everywhere. >:(

Johan Halmén

Except one.

Edgar Reynaldo

One thread to rule them all, and in the forums bind them....

EDIT
Anyone who doesn't post in this thread in the next 3 days is automatically entered into KrampusHack this year as my slave. >:(

Matthew Leverton

Has it been three days?

Edgar Reynaldo

Drat. ML escaped my grasp.

DanielH

Anyone who doesn't post in this thread in the next 3 days is automatically entered into KrampusHack this year as my slave.

Post ;D;D;D;D

jmasterx

nah >:(

Bob Keane

Here is my entry for Krampushack:

#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
       fprintf(stderr, "Hello Allegro world!);
    return 0;
}

Forgive my coding skills, I am under a lot of pressure to get it done in time for entry.

Edgar Reynaldo

Sorry, that won't compile. :/

jmasterx

Worry not, after much searching, I have completed your entry just in time!

https://ideone.com/c3lk6P

>:(

Edgar Reynaldo

Your binary is too big. >:(

jmasterx

Your thread locks too soon >:(

Chris Katko

My threads are augmented.

RmBeer2

The threads are cursed, and so is my internet. And this Edgar who's crazy about my idea of getting slaves. *SIGH*

Dizzy Egg

Romeo and Juliet by Dire Straits came on the playlist earlier, with the beautiful lyric “I can’t do everything, but I’d do anything for you”…lovely.

Also, happy thanksgiving to my western brethren/sistren, and sorry for not being in Krampushack this year, old ma egg is poorly and I’m going to dedicate my holiday allowance to looking after her.

Peace x

Neil Roy

I hope all my American friends had a good Thanksgiving.

My income is dropping, so I had to change my services. My wife and I always used cable for our internet, phone and TV. We don't own a cellphone... (we... I don't). I paid $229 for all three, I called my company (Cogeco) to get my costs reduced and to cut off my TV service as that was always my wife's thing, I don't watch much TV. They have a customer loyalty program and after adjusting my services, they switched my internet speed from 60Mbps up to around 189Mbps (according to speedtest), unlimited, and my phone (landline) went cheaper, but with now unlimited calling (not that I used it much) in Canada. My new cost is $75 after taxes. I couldn't believe the difference. An improvement for far far less. I popped downtown and grabbed an Amazon Fire TV stick for the TV, got the speed for it. Don't watch it much, but it's a new experience for me. Free TV programs have commercials but they're only 2mins long, which is better than cable's 7mins.

Starting to wish I done this years ago, the wife would have loved the Fire TV I think.

Still debating getting a cellphone.

Still missing my wife terribly.

I hope you all are doing well.

Edgar Reynaldo

Anybody see the new Bond movie? No spoilers please!
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RmBeer2

https://radioaltominho.pt/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/explosivos.jpg

VERY IMPORTANT ADVICE THAT CAN SAVE YOUR LIFE

Never leave firefox or chrome open.

Because then you forget, and Google abuses your machine.

Matthew Leverton

I watched it. It's entertaining. I'm not a movie critic; I just watch for the pictures and popcorn.

Chris Katko

I refuse to watch Bond until they make him gay. and bi. at the same time.

William Labbett

I'm pretty sure I haven't seen a bond film for at least 2 decades. I don't know what I'm missing.

Chris Katko

My "true" bond is the N64 version of Pierce Brosnan. ;D

Edgar Reynaldo

https://archive.org/details/tvtunes_14660

media player

EDIT
If I have to keep this thread open single handed by myself I will. >:(

In the news, there's a Discord server for TINS now. KrampusHack got underway this morning. Check for your giftee's wishlist!

I'll be releasing a new version of Eagle sometime today or so. Keep your eyes peeled.

DanielH

My "true" bond is the N64 version of Pierce Brosnan

YES! N64 Golden Eye!

William Labbett

Rareware

Space Station Silicon Valley
Jet Force Gemini
Conker's Bad Fur Day
Perfect Dark
Banjo Kazooie
DiddyKong Racing

Those are the ones I played.

When I think of all the games I played on the 64, I struggle to work out if I ever played
a game not written by one of Nintendo and Rareware.

I thought Rareware were great but I enjoyed Nintendo's 64 games more.

MiquelFire

Nintendo 64 was the only Nintendo home console I didn't own.

RmBeer2

One of the best games for Nintendo 64.

video

One of the worst games for Nintendo 64.

video

William Labbett

I quite liked Mario 64 as it was the best 3D game I'd ever played at the time.

Shawn Hargreaves worked on Wipeout 64. I managed to think of one game that wasn't by Nintendo or Rareware.

Bob Keane

I played the Ocarina of Time and Mask of Majorka back in the day. Some years back I blew the dust of the console, but could not find my copy of the Mask. I had a hard time figuring it out, even with the internet, so no loss to me. Later, I saw a copy on Ebay for a ridiculous amount. I got RetroArch and play the Ocarina of Time now and then. I also play the Final Fantasy series. Ahhh the good old days.

Chris Katko

I hope he's kidding or trolling.

Mario 64 is hands down one of the best designed games ever made and I'm not even remotely being hyperbolic.

There were platformer games that came out 5-10 years LATER that still had horrific 3D controls. Controls that Mario both invented, and became the go-to example for how to do it "right."

Not only is the game a pinnacle of good game design, the fact they managed to do it on a piece-of-crap, overly complex dog poop of a system called "the N64" is a testimony to hard work. There's a reason so few games came out for the N64, and that's because it was complete crap. Later, the hardware designer said "the thinking at the time was, no matter how difficult it is to program for, if its faster, people will take advantage of it. Only now do we realize we made the wrong decision."

While I only had an N64 growing up (no PS1 or Saturn), there were like 10 times the games for Playstation for every 1 N64 game, and they cost less.

Bob Keane

If I remember correctly, the N64 came out when other platforms were releasing their games on cd. Nintendo chose to stay with cartridges. That was a near fatal disaster. I think the Game Boy is what kept them alive until they developed better products.

Chris Katko

Bob Keane said:

That was a near fatal disaster. I think the Game Boy is what kept them alive until they developed better products.

Oh yeah! When FMV's became "the norm", N64 was sitting there looking like pixelated crap. And I loved my N64 but the games were so expensive (convincing your parents to buy a ~$70 game?!), and the games so rarely worth keeping. We rented a LOT of games back then.

I've thought before about how most systems, most games end up sucking. But from what I recall, Playstation had SO MANY more games, so with the same ratio they had more hits. But I'm no expert on actual PS1 games. (Bushido Blade was INCREDIBLE though!)

- Mario 64 has aged well.

- Turok 1 and 2 have more-or-less been completely superceded.

- Goldeneye 64 and Perfect Dark hold up... ish. Perfect Dark always was "uglier" and ran at like half the framerate because they had way more textures and models going on. 4 player + 8 bots mode would literally freeze for seconds when people shot too many grenades.

- Banjo and Kazooie 1 and 2 are good IIRC though I haven't replayed them.

- Conker's Bad Fur Day is a masterpiece.

- Blast Corps is dated and feels almost like a "Unity Game" at times but is still fun

- Battletanx 1 and 2 are... still unique but definitely rough on the edges.

I used to play a game called Operation Winback which had a kickbutt soundtrack. A bunch of games like Winback that came out around the same time would come out for both N64 and Playstation with the PS1 being slightly later, having higher quality remasters of the music (or sometimes completely DIFFERENT music!).

Oh man, Road Rash 64 had a great soundtrack and was a great game at the time.

Oh man, Space Station Silicon Valley is still one of my favorite underappreciated games. You play as a robot microchip that can enter robot animals, and have to solve puzzles and fight other animals to beat levels. Every enemy can then be used as a vessel after killing it. Made by DMA Design... later renamed to ... Rockstar Games.

RmBeer2

;D, Space Station Silicon Valley and Turok is two of my favourite games!

The first after advancing so much I have been stuck in one part and I could never finish the game. :'(

In the second I loved to feed the raptors with the indians.

Chris Katko
RmBeer2 said:

The first after advancing so much I have been stuck in one part and I could never finish the game. :'(

I got a whole 4K lets play of the entire thing on youtube from years ago. :)

video

It's one of my favorite games.

William Labbett

As the one responsible for changing the subject from Goldeneye to N64 games, I nonetheless decided it would be cruel to post a photo of my N64 games or leastways pointless.

I guess the lull in activity is due to krampushack. I hope all participants are getting on well with that. I hope everybody's okay too.

Edgar Reynaldo

I have a little money saved up from over the holidays. Should I spend it on a new console? If so, which one and why. I am thinking of PS5 Pro for the 4k support but all I have right now is an HDTV. Which one has the best games? Is XBone still making Halo games? ;D. Which one has the best online store? Do they all have one? Do I have to rent games these days, or can I buy them still... I haven't played a console since XBox 360, PS2, and Nintendo GameCube for reference. So I'm a little behind in console news.

MiquelFire

For PS, you either mean PS4 Pro, or PS5, there is no PS5 Pro (yet, the console is only a year old)

They all have online stores now BTW.

I never had anything Xbox related, so I have no clue what the Microsoft side of things are like (well, maybe the store in Windows 10 is something to go by?)

My last PlayStation was PS2, so I have no experience on how they do things now.

I have the Wii, Wii U, and the Switch (got the OLED model coming in this week). The store is ok, and it would not surprise me if Sony or Microsoft did their stores better. It is nice to buy games from Nintendo's web site and it auto downloads on the Switch at least.

Nintendo has this online service which you do pay for (mostly to be able to play online), and it has some games tied to you paying for it. Base level has some NES and SNES games you can play (online multiplayer support as well, seems limited to two players, so if a game supported more than 2 players appeared, I assume it would be limited to local play for that), and 2 "_ 99" games (Tetris and Pac-man). Then there's the upper level which is too much money for what you get right now, has some N64 games (poorly emulated compared to what the Wii U and Wii did) and Sega Genesis games.

Mark Oates

I guess the lull in activity is due to krampushack. I hope all participants are getting on well with that.

Ya man, all my time's on this right now.

RmBeer2

I spent all my time paying 0 cents to download all the old games along with all the old emulators. 8-)

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Edgar Reynaldo

I insist on paying money. >:( I must get what I pay for. ;p

RmBeer2

shgksafjghdfsakgh

Edgar Reynaldo

Get to work people. This thread is about to lock again. :/

GullRaDriel

Well, with the site being down / laggy , only a few people could get here.

That said, Hi lurkers ! 8-)

RmBeer2

DON'T LOCK THIS THREAD!!!

video

I want download this film. All complete in spanish!

Neil Roy

Just lurking, not doing much. Seen this online today which made me laugh out loud. Been there, done that...

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Edgar Reynaldo

Apparently I've forgotten how to OpenGL. I can't even get triangles to show up. Beat that. >:( <)

GullRaDriel

Meh ? Ed ? What's going on buddy ? Move yar brain ! 8-)

Indeterminatus

Oh, I see this thread is still going on. Nice work, guys!

jmasterx

Well this thread got a bailout a few months ago >:(

GullRaDriel

It's lifetime is indeterminatus. ;D

Edgar Reynaldo

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EDIT
Dudez, itz been a week since anybody posted... doesn't anyone love allegro anymore???????

So, here's a purple dinosaur.
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Chris Katko

I have almost 12 thousand posts under this account. I did my part. ;) But now I'm an old, rickety man.

Edgar Reynaldo

Old man? You're just a young pup. I have 13000 posts by now.

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Bob Keane

Just curious Edgar. Where did you get the graph of your posts?

DanielH

Your forum graph is in your profile.

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Edgar Reynaldo

I need a break from allegro.cc.

Be back in 10 years.

They always come back. Always.

DanielH

I was posting frequently back in 2001-2005 when I was at University getting my Bachelors' degree in CompSci then I dropped off. I went back to school in 2006-2012 for a doctorate, but in a non-computer field (Pharmacy). Little time for programming.

I lurk and respond little. Mostly because technology is advancing past what I know or I don't have the time.

RmBeer2

very poor... :'(

https://0x0.st/oXHv.png

Edgar Reynaldo

https://www.allegro.cc/s404/image/pg/1134.png

23 is due back in about a year, and he's @ 24,000!

Neil Roy

Just trying to get through today. This is the first anniversary without my wife. This time last year we were happy together. What a difference a year makes... it would have been our 37th anniversary today. :'(

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GullRaDriel

Hello Neil. It's always hard to respond to those kind of sad and true messages.
I feel sad/bad for you each time I think of your story and Wanda. I hope things are going to be better for you. Stay strong !

LennyLen

Kia kaha Neil.

Neil Roy

Sorry, don't mean to bring everyone down with my problems. Here's something which made me laugh recently... been there, seen our cats do this...
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Edgar Reynaldo

Before the Thread locks too soon thread locks ..again.. here's one more attempt to save humanity.

That moment when you realize your wife is into pussy.
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Neil Roy

LMAO!!! Great pic. ;D

Edgar Reynaldo
Chris Katko

Hey, where's that guy I was supposed to hate crime? He better be making some progress...

Just ran across these old gems;

Aww man. I miss those good old days. I don't understand how I became involved... by accident--no intentional decision making... with so many communities. And now, it's like... I have no idea how to find new ones.

I left those toxic cesspools like Reddit and I'm noticably happier. The fringe subs are fine, as everyone knows, but god, anything the "normies" with cellphones touch will just be an angry cesspool.

And Twitter, ahahah, oh man, I've never seen so many people motivated to outrage... by an algorithm. They're literally hurting people just so a click algorithm can generate revenue. I'm glad I never tried to get into that.

I moved to a new city two years ago right when COVID hit and shut *everything* down. At least 1/3rd of all small businesses (actual statistic) disappeared to never reopen. Because only billion dollar megacorps are worthy of saving. So instead of dozens of amazing high quality local own restaurants, you get Applebee's and IHOP on every corner which literally... literally... use bags of frozen strawberries instead of getting fresh ones at the wal-mart they share a parking lot with. Imagine paying real money... for old, frozen... mushy... strawberries. That's 2022. My wife made me basic french toast the next day with some strawberries from wal-mart and I was like "holy, crap. This is so much better than the $15 bucks I wasted at ihop."

Mark Oates

I left those toxic cesspools like Reddit and I'm noticably happier. The fringe subs are fine, as everyone knows, but god, anything the "normies" with cellphones touch will just be an angry cesspool.

I'm 100% with you on that. I still pass through Reddit occasionally, but holy geebuz what a shitpool on the mainstream subs. Any time I go towards social, Reddit mainstream news, Twitter, I start to have anxiety attacks so I'm moving away from that shit. Everything is framed as some kind of attack on your personal beliefs and sanctity. War, pandemic, stock market crashing, government mandates, protests, it's like everybody is against your simple desire to just chiiiiiilll without having to worry about anything.

So, I've started to spend more of my computer time on programming projects, go outside more (but the weather has been really shitty lately), only touch social like once every two days. The internet has really gone to shit. You have to pick and choose very wisely where you spend your time.

Erin Maus

I'm in the process of buying a house and gosh it's a headache despite everything going well, can't imagine what it's like for others.

Got preapproved in about three seconds thanks to my credit/income. Third offer was accepted on the first place we really wanted. (Someone beat us initially but it fell through so they reached back out to us.) Going to end up paying upwards of 106% of the asking price though... Home inspection was great, waiting anxiously on appraisal (next Wednesday).

Anyway I'll be a homeowner soon. 8-)

DanielH

Wait until you see the stack of papers they make you initial and sign. That is a task in itself. I've purchased 4 houses in my lifetime. A pain every time.

Johan Halmén

Do we all agree that egg came first?

Edgar Reynaldo

I used to think Stack Overflow was fun to answer questions on , but then there are people there that spend their entire waking lives there. Kinda freaky. I liked gamedev.net forums but they're pretty advanced topics there and I don't always get it.

Johan - the dinosaur was first. We all know birds came from dinosaurs. :p

DanielH

Depends on which religion you ask. :)

Per evolution: the chicken is just a product of it's predecessors slowly mutating genetically over generations until you get the modern chicken. The egg was just the vessel needed to birth it.

The egg came first.

Edgar Reynaldo

No, it doesn't depend on which religion you ask. That's a mis-truth. The bible does not say the earth was created 6 or 8 thousand years before Moses. Genesis is the beginning of this Earth age. A period of time. The beginning of the middle, not the absolute beginning. Unlearned idiots teaching atheists what to believe. Ridiculous.

DanielH

Growing up I was taught that ALL species of animals were created at Genesis. And all species of animals alive today are the same species that boarded the Ark. There was no evolution taught in the church. Even got a handy laminated timeline of the earth from Genesis to now which only went back to around 4000BC.

Johan Halmén

Good grief! Did I start a religious debate on a.cc? Should have asked about the chicken crossing the road instead.

Edgar Reynaldo

Well now that bambams is gone, someone has to take up the atheist torch here on a.cc. ;P `(

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Mark Oates
Quote:

pic of dinochicken

Checkmate atheists! Dinochicken! Where did it come from?! You don't know?! :o

RmBeer2

dinochicken from the laboratory of jurassic park.

It's why the bioengineering is very bad.

Edgar Reynaldo
Mark Oates

Where do the "4 proteins" come from? :o

Edgar Reynaldo

What are Higgs Boson particles made of???

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gillius

It's been a few days since anyone has posted here. I don't think I've ever posted here. How long does it take for a thread to lock? I'd hate to think you'd lose out on the last 7 years of keeping this one open :).

Edgar Reynaldo

gillius, honored by your presence ;)

We rarely see such low member numbers besides ML around here :D

MiquelFire

7 days is the lock period.

Neil Roy

Do we all agree that egg came first?

God created chickens first. Problem solved.

RmBeer2

God come from the egg.

Chris Katko

I came first.

LennyLen

I came first.

I hear there are pills you can take for that.

Neil Roy

Found a good video explaining the history behind what is happening between Russia and the Ukraine right now...

video

RmBeer2

video

Erin Maus

video

😏

Bob Keane

I remember some years back we had a member in Ukraine posting about the last Russian build up. Has anyone heard from him lately?

RmBeer2

@Erin Maus
Very nice trailer.
I would also like to make an RPG game and a trailer.

Johan Halmén
Neil Roy

⏰ Clocks ahead tonight. ⏰
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DanielH

We get so much sun here (Arizona) we don't do Daylight Savings Time.

RmBeer2

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Chris Katko

new firefox logo ^

RmBeer2

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GullRaDriel

The wasps are looking like our https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_paper_wasp
But that Mantispidae is really cool ! Kind of a mix between wasps and mantis.

Edgar Reynaldo

Looks like it's time to call BugSquasher....

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Chris Katko

Praying mantises are pretty cool dudes. They don't hurt people.

I wonder if wasps have any ecological value, or are really as bad as "they're just a bunch of !@$!s" people think.

IIRC, someone said Mosquitos have zero value and cause a millions deaths a year. [just fact checked that!] Pretty much no scientist cares if they go extinct (save for storing their DNA).

GullRaDriel

WASPs have an important role in cleaning, regulating little pests, AND pollinisation.
Don't be a douch. Only mosquitoes deserve to die 8-)

MiquelFire

So wasps are assholes with a purpose.

RmBeer2

Both bugs are great, wasps and mantises. ;D

@Edgar Reynaldo
You should be nicer to the poor bugs. :-[

Bob Keane

IIRC, someone said Mosquitos have zero value and cause a millions deaths a year. [just fact checked that!] Pretty much no scientist cares if they go extinct (save for storing their DNA).

They are testing GMA mosquitoes in Florida. They do not carry the diseases associated with the insects. Maybe they will find a way to use them to spread vaccines.

Edgar Reynaldo

I don't like wasps because they kill bees. >:(

And didn't you know, praying mantis eat wasps???

Erin Maus

I stole(TM) Allegro code today. 😨

https://github.com/erinmaus/itsyscape/pull/276/commits/91f22f05b2730020f6fe113ec36966ff928a7b72#diff-7a8353d7fe4bd1ea998fb78e650737e81d72d349a7092b59bc76ddbeaef30105R114

But it's pretty worth it:

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(The lightning strike is powered by Allegro)

Edgar Reynaldo

allegro lightning can do better. That's kind of chunky non beveled primitives.

:-X

Erin Maus

https://itsyrealm.com/api/photo/view/thumb/6

(^ Is a link to a GIF)

It looks better in motion. At the end of the day, if I like it, then it's good enough. I'm not making this game for money or anything - it's a passion project / creative outlet. It's literally free and open-source.

Allegro is awesome and I wish there was something like LOVE is to SDL for Allegro. I wasn't disparaging Allegro.

DanielH

I like it. Maybe a slight more exaggeration (too narrow), but the blending looks good.

Is is because Allegro is low level? So many game engines with the frills out there why go low level from scratch? I'm just stubborn is why I'm still here.

Chris Katko

I hate any library or tool that "takes over". Instead of you calling "start library()" in your main, you get something terrible and overly encapsulated like :

setup() //your setup code goes here
loop() //your game code goes here

And the "engine" will call it, at its own pleasure subject to whatever hardcoded assumptions that will show up later as random glitches that require hundreds of forum posts to fix (if there's even a fix) that there is no way for you to simply hit debug and walk the stack to find out why their code is breaking your game.

Engines give you a boost if you're doing everything 90% the same as everyone else. Another JRPG. Another platformer. But if you're doing something crazy, like Factorio, with literally hundreds of thousands of active units, the game engine's overhead designed to increase user simplicity explodes. Suddenly every object being treated as an individual monolithic class becomes a performance liability that destroys any chance of pipelining and multitasking. How many new games have you played that are still single-threaded? (Which, fun fact, should never exist ever. Because even if your game is single-threaded, you can pipeline with 'functional parallelism' so that audio is one core, drawing is one core, physics is one core and while Amdahl's law reduces your max gain, it's still more than one core.) Now, I'm willing to entertain the idea I'm wrong and that "single-threaded" is somehow better. But I've never seen such an argument other than "it was easier because it came that way".

Honestly, network code is far far far more daunting than multi-threading. You can, like I mentioned, at the very least and simplest, split things into macro level modules. A much much better, more scalable system is data/task parallelism (I don't recall the exact proper term at the moment), where you either schedule tasks and cores take them as they become available, or, you take a strip of data and individually work on it (physics, sound, etc) on a single core and then dump batches of those to each core. So it scales basically to infinite cores. So instead of one core per idea/topic/module (physics core, sound core), you have each core working on 1 (or more in batches really) object and doing all of its functions on that object. Of course, this can explode problems if you're doing advanced scripting where objects can communicate and effect each other which creates 'hazards'. So it has to be tailored for it.

I'm ranting but it's just a fun topic to think about.

Also, that lightning could be improved. It feels "fat" like there's actually weight in it bringing it down and clumping together. Also, I think you make it 3D and transparent. So it can pass behind itself and reinforce itself. Except lightning doesn't do that--it's so bright that it's full brightness even when it overlaps itself. So that's what's odd that catches the eye. It looks more like yarn which has density and stretchiness.

Erin Maus

When I started working on ItsyRealm, I wanted to get something done. I wanted to be able to finish it. Using Allegro is good and all, but it drastically increases development time for something of ItsyRealm's scale ("3D single-player MMO" 😁).

I was going to go with Unreal Engine, in honesty, but performance and battery life issues with the editor on my laptop changed my mind for me.

Yeah, I can't have a literal army of creeps fighting in a true open world hundreds of square KMs but my game doesn't need that. You're right - I could speed up the game by putting gameplay code on a different thread than rendering, and honestly, it's a TODO.

But first, I want to deliver. I'm been working in enterprise software development for nearly four years now and I've learned a lot - delivering an MLP (minimum,lovable product) is my first goal. And I'm very close to that - in fact, I've accomplished that sans music. I would still be an additional 1-2 years off of that goal I wrote this game in C++ with a lower-level library 😔.

Would it perform better? Scale better? Sure, but this is a hobby and I want to be creative, too, not just technical.

I've had such a great time working on an island, which has been something like >80% graphics/AI/other content, and <20% development of new features (i.e., programming). Do I like programming? Yes. But that's not all a game is. 😐

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Chris Katko

nononoo. I know you're a more than capable programmer. It's okay to use a toolkit if you know exactly what you want and you know your vision isn't going to be constrained by typical toolkit constraints.

I mean for most other people. The point is, it's a tradeoff, a risk/reward that has to be decided.

I do lots of "weird" things that most engines would explode on.

Erin Maus

@Chris: Oh ok yeah I totally agree. I think there's this line that's hard to find without a lot of prior experience that basically boils down to "what's the right tool for the job".

Thankfully, good open source projects help bend that line a little. Like with Allegro, when I encountered bugs or needed a new feature, I contributed. Or with LOVE, I frankensteined it to expose some of the internal, hidden 3D functionality. Can't do that with Unity. Would be pretty hard to do with Unreal (even though the source is available, it's a massive, massive project compared to Allegro or LOVE).

...

I am officially a homeowner. 😳 Signed over my soul today in a thousand pieces.

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Indeterminatus

Nice, Erin Maus! I like the shadow-effect on the grass, and how there's no apparent tiling on the brick wall.

Chris Katko

Congrats!

It blows my mind how expensive homes have gotten. How many people cannot even afford the same kind of houses they grew up in. It's so sad.

Erin Maus

@Indeterminatus: Thanks! The tiling was super hard to pull off - I ended up having two "even/odd" variants, so I could tile them and animate from one to the other to produce a nice floating/rotating effect without significant repetition. The walls took inspiration from the Slayer Tower in Old School RuneScape: https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Slayer_Tower

@Chris: Yes, I make significantly more (2.5x) than the average in this neighborhood (which itself is over 2x the national median) and had a difficult time executing the offer. Stretched things very thin. :/ Housing is insane no matter what you do (renting or buying), especially in higher COL areas like the Charlotte, NC metro, let alone places like Seattle, WA. I can't imagine how peeps making a fraction of my household are doing...

Chris Katko
Erin Maus said:

I can't imagine how peeps making a fraction of my household are doing...

I live in one of the "cheapest" sections of Nashville. Most of my neighbors are Mexican and we all spend most of our money on rent. America has really turned into a two-class society (servant class + upper class ala no middle class). Tickets for a concert are like $150, and you'll never see us or my Mexican neighbors there. It's like another world that's next door but you can never participate in. It's a strange feeling. You go to trader joes and it's like... 99.9% white millennials with tech jobs. You go to Aldi and it's 99% Indian, Ghanaian, Mexican, etc from working class jobs.

I don't hate that people have more. I really don't. It's just odd to watch so many people never be able to afford things that our parents generation did--like home ownership. Yet consumer goods like 4K TVs are super cheap compared to the gigantic box projection TVs that made you blind. Products are cheap (except food). But land, housing, and services (like healthcare) are still sky high.

Matthew Leverton

I shop at Aldi. 8-)

Polybios

You go to trader joes and it's like... 99.9% white millennials with tech jobs. You go to Aldi and it's 99% Indian, Ghanaian, Mexican, etc from working class jobs.

Wikipedia just told me Trader Joe's and Aldi are apparently owned by the same family. Huh. I did not even realize they did business outside of Germany.

William Labbett

Therefoe all products are cheap including food and using bitwise left shift operators. Money is bizarre I find. I can compare £10 with £400 but neither with
$100,100.
If people can really do this, it makes me wonder if they can think in everyday thought about a price like £(100,100!) i.e one hundred thousand factorial pounds.

EDIT : Beaten. Also, everything I said about me and my ability to think about money
wasn't quite right.

Matthew Leverton

The Aldi of North America has no modern day working relation to Trader Joe's. It's a subsidiary of a different Aldi.

Chris Katko

Aldi rules.

I miswrote it. I meant to write Whole Foods.

They literally have blocks of cheese that are $20. Twenty dollars. For a single block of cheese. Imagine a "wine and cheese plate" for guests being over a hundred dollars. A bottle juice can be $20. That would have been almost three hours of my first job starting pay.

It's like peering into another world. A world where money is so abundant you can waste a hundred bucks on cheese and not even notice it.

Matthew Leverton

The cheapest foods are generally the least healthy, but the most expensive ones are not indicative of being the most healthy. But that's what Whole Foods tries to get you to believe. I'm all for not buying junky processed foods, but for me that means things like buying bulk meat from farmers and local fresh produce when it's available.

But shopping at Aldi allowed me to save enough money to buy (order) a new electric Ford Mach-E GT. After federal rebates and selling my 2016 SUV (likely for more money than I bought it for 2 years ago), the car will still be over 40k! That's more than twice what I've ever spent on a car, but I decided it's worth it for me because I'm sad that I never have an opportunity to ride my motorcycle and this is the next best type of fun thing to drive.

DanielH

So many choices here for groceries.

About 2 miles from my house we have 5 grocery stores:
Safeway (Von's in other states)

The next four are in each of the 4 corners of an intersection
Sprouts
Fry's
Aldi
Target

I usually go to Safeway. It's more expensive, but I like the layout better and less people. Target is ok but their produce section is tiny. They just put in an Aldi, but I haven't been to one since I was in Germany. Fry's is better in my opinion, but it is always crowded, parking is nice because it is all covered parking (solar panels).

However, since Covid, we do 95% of our shopping online. I rarely go to the store itself. Fry's and Target deliver same day for free ($35 minimum purchase).

Polybios

Should have read further... There are two Aldis going back to two brothers. They divided Germany into north ("Aldi Nord") and south ("Aldi Süd"). Turns out they divided the rest of the world, too. The US is the only country except Germany where both Aldis are active: "Aldi Nord" operates under the name of Trader Joe's, while "Aldi Süd" uses the brand "Aldi". I grew in an "Aldi Nord" area and now live in an "Aldi Süd" area.

Over here, it's not an exception for Aldi products to score pretty well or even take the (second) best place in independent evaluations of the quality of consumer goods (or whatever you call such a comparative "test" in proper English). I think everyone buys at Aldi here. Economists tend to be particularly devoted to it while the Bourgeois Bohème prefers expensive stores with organic foods.

Erin Maus

I'm making a very simple project management application because I hate everything that exists. I wanna basically be able to paste in a list and generate a bunch of stories, quickly assign effort, and track progress.

So I decided to use all the new hip JavaScript frameworks and tooling for the frontend!

  • React (8 years old)

  • Redux (6 years old)

  • TypeScript (9 years old)

And the backend is pretty spiffy, too!

  • Python (31 years old)

  • Postgres (25 years old)

  • FastAPI (~3 years old)

Wow, such new technology!

I'm just trolling, but it's nice to make a modern, fullstack app outside of work. I'm theming it after ItsyRealm, so it looks goofy. Probably won't deploy it anywhere, will probably just run it locally on my network.

Have the login page working:

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So that's cool... Timeboxing it to two weeks or so.

Polybios

Please develop it further so that horrible Jira is killed. >:(

Erin Maus

Haha you're not the first person to say that. I literally want something that mimics a checklist with a few extra features: 1. being able to estimate/assign points and; 2. being able to measure previous progress. That's it.

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And there it is. 😎

gillius

If you think JIRA is bad, you haven't been around long enough to see just how bad some systems can get.

But I like JIRA. Maybe I'm part of the problem. At my last job we started with JIRA and moved to Azure DevOps, which was not as good I think. Although, it was about when it launched and I have to give MS credit for doing a lot of major development while I noticed it.

Of course, the systems work best if they are allowed to integrate properly with your CI/CD and version control system. Azure DevOps didn't have wiki (at least at the time we used it) so we still had Confluence. And Mercurial although we were slowly switching to git. So we lost all integration.

Now I am working with Apple Radar, and that's a whole different world of both some interesting features but a whole lot of less interesting attributes...

But the problem even in the places that do use JIRA is that if it gets out into the hands of a large organization they are going to mess it up and customize it into something crazy, unless you're really lucky. Same is true about almost every off-the-shelf system.

And if you ever feel uncertain, you could always try bugzilla. I never really used it directly, so I guess I can't speak about it... But I never could get over the looks.

A tool I set up for a team to use almost 20 years ago now is Trac. It's the first system I used that combined wiki, source control (SVN at the time), and issue tracking all at once. I'm not even sure Atlassian existed at the time or maybe it was just JIRA. Looks like it still exists (https://trac.edgewall.org/). It was easy to set up and had a really nice plugin system (it's a Python-based tool). Never really took off and I didn't see it used anywhere else.

What's weird is the number of years I've been around and it's odd how a "new feature" comes along and something had it years ago. More surprisingly is when a new system comes out and you lose some really valuable feature and everyone likes the shiny stuff they sort of forget about what they lost...

I remember everyone flipped out about Remote Desktop coming out for Windows like who's ever done that before. Then all the UNIX guys in the room went ??? what about X Windows that came out in the 80s?

So I disappear from Acc for months at a time then come out with an old guy post every once in awhile. So here it is. I guess I didn't realize I've made it to old guy rambling age till now :).

Edgar Reynaldo

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Haha, welcome back Gillius. We've been expecting you.

JIRA's not that bad.

Chris Katko

C++ and D getting some nice enhancements. I'm excited for the future.

C++20 added modules. Finally. The end of the insane, 70's era concept of using a PREPROCESSOR to include multiple files together with all the bugs, forward declarations, and slow file access that included.

D just added in beta, the 'musthave' (IIRC) keyword which fires off a compiler error if you don't check the return value of a function. So now, we can have compiler statically verified return checks. Imagine how many hundreds of posts on Allegro have been the result of people not checking return values. I've long told people, "error checking should not be opt in". If you're depending on people to do the right thing... in order to not do the wrong thing you're in for a bad time with sleepy and distracted programmers.

Edgar Reynaldo

Speaking of contemporary compiler and language features, which language should I learn next?

I know C, C++, Java, and Kotlin fairly well. I'm familiar with HTML5, CSS3 and JS and can do basic stuff with them. Should I learn a business language like C# or should I spend my time on a scripting language like Python / Ruby? I'm comfortable programming in Python even if I hate typeless languages. What's your take? Where is the future of code?

GullRaDriel

The future of code is zerocode (or at least that's what's Microsoft & Co are trying to sell now. Yes, it was a trap !)

Have you tried Go, Rust, Ruby, WebAssembly ? Or just jump into the wagon and do some embedded stuff in ARM (C/C++ mainly) :-)

MiquelFire

When it comes to learning a new language, I would go with whatever would benefit me with whatever plans I got. As my job tends to focus on the web app side of things, I'm really getting into JS right now (though I do know PHP quite well).

As I'm trying to learn Unity, I have to know C# (I made a Christmas hack game in C#, but too bad the library I used seems dead, and was a .NET 1.x code IIRC, so who knows if it would even run on current systems)

The future of code is foggy, something could appear without warning and complete take over.

William Labbett

Does anyone learn asm anymore?

EDIT : Changed learnt to learn.

MiquelFire

Anyone getting timeout errors just trying to load this site recently?

It's like the server was shutdown (or whatever software Matthew uses for the web server, be it Apache, Nginx, or something else, is erroring out and not restarting)

William Labbett

I've noticed it. I've been having trouble logging in too.

Dizzy Egg

Anyone getting timeout errors just trying to load this site recently?

Yep, all the time! Sometimes takes an age to load, sometimes doesn’t load at all, seems really hit and miss. Logging in via my iPhone only seems to work if I enable auto login.

Dizzy Egg

Anyone getting timeout errors just trying to load this site recently?

Yep, all the time! Sometimes takes an age to load, sometimes doesn’t load at all, seems really hit and miss. Logging in via my iPhone only seems to work if I enable auto login.

Bob Keane

I tried logging on earlier, but may have forgotten my password. Eventually I got a message saying too many logins attempted and suggesting I clear my cookies, but did not say anything about me already logged on or bring up any other information. So I shut down for a few hours. I just got back to try again and found I was already logged on. Go figure.

Edgar Reynaldo

Hey, spit and bailing twine can only do so much. One of these days ML is going to reveal Allegro.cc 3.0. Any day now. Soon.....

:D

RmBeer2

ALLEGRO 3.0

http://allegro.blackrook.xyz/forum/index.php

(When ML sleeps, a very wild spam appears)

Edgar Reynaldo
rmbeer said:

Clones!
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Alex Boen

When I need information about my bike, I go on the Internet and find everything I need, it's great that we have such technology and great sites such as this link where there is all the information for bikes.

Chris Katko

"One of these posts, is not like the other"

Erin Maus

Working on an internal transfer to the team responsible for the first-party Prime Video app on Fire TV. This would be so cool. 🤞

I had a job offer from NBC Universal to work on the Peacock app before I accepted the Amazon offer, and I did similar niche things at my previous job (Truist, a regional bank here in south-east-ish USA)... This has been my dream for a while, to work on a high profile video streaming app.

I want to be able to point to the software I work on and say "hey, I made that!"

...

Also, I have been optimizing ItsyRealm. Like it's performing really well on macOS. From 30-45 FPS with heavy drops due to the garbage collector, to a solid 60 FPS in most areas. (For reference, LuaJIT doesn't JIT well [or at all] on macOS/M1 - the performance is a lot worse than all other platforms - so it will run like butter on PC/other platforms).

Chris Katko

Congrats!

Edgar Reynaldo

DUDEZ ITS BEEN NEARLY A WEEK

Thread #615770. Printed from Allegro.cc