Christian

I didn’t get it until I read the transcript. I thought that the second panel was a jab with barbed wire (tetanus risk) and that the joke was basically “if your body is punctured, be sure to treat it by puncturing your body”.

I actually think I find that reading more fun than the intended one.

I can’t get this method to work for me, do you have a guide?

I just finished Anode Heart after a million hours over the past couple weeks. Spectacular game. It’s an indie monster tamer, it doesn’t have the graphics of Nexomon: Extinction or Cassette Beasts but I liked it better than either of those.

I’ve started a monster taming game called Anode Heart and it’s good stuff so far. There’s a lot of depth to the gameplay, somewhat nonlinear with a strong story anyway. It came out about three years ago. Comparing to other indie monster tamers I’d definitely put it above Cassette Beasts, not sure about Monster Sanctuary but it’s much less well-known than either and deserves to be.

A class of students doing that would be a million times more fun for the professors too. Acadamia would be so much better if education were its primary purpose.

That was my niche in grad school. I authored a paper proving that the CW-complexes in the category of small categories under the Joyal-Tierney model structure are exactly the groupoids. I never came up with a reason why anyone should care, but at least it was fun.

I believe veganism is ethical but have failed repeatedly in attempts to give up comfort foods. A lot of tastes nauseate me, so I don’t intend to give it another try until I can afford the costs (in time, finances, emotional health) of trial-and-error to find more meals that work for me.

intrinsic critical thinkers whose nature overcame their upbringing

I’m going to push back on this because I don’t think it’s true and also because I think it’s harmful.

There are not people who are naturally inclined not to think critically. Just as much as upbringing can shape someone’s worldview, environment can shape willingness and capacity for introspection. People don’t think critically when they’re naturally predisposed to do that, they think critically when they’re either adequately distanced from the disincentives for reflection they’ve known forever or when the incentives for reflection create enough desperation to overwhelm.

I say harmful because is there anyone who sincerely doesn’t picture themselves as an intrinsic critical thinker? Everyone is already there, so the “intrinsic critical thinker” worldview means assuming some people you meet will be worse at it. “I’m naturally better at critical thinking than this person” is a mindset that provides a shortcut to dismissing this person’s viewpoints without actually evaluating them.

I never went further right than voting democrat, but I used 4chan occasionally for a good decade and I’m convinced that support of Trump’s campaign on there was well-understood to be a running joke until people unaware it was a joke started joining to participate. I’ll admit I wasn’t using it much anymore at all by that time, but when I saw comments about Trump support start popping up the first couple months my thought was “this is hilarious”. The idea of actual Trump supporters existing was not something I was capable of imagining at that time.

I can’t even get mad, I find it genuinely funny that that’s the argument he came up with to elaborate on why AI disclosure mandates are irresponsible.

It’s full-on “no one reads past the headline anyway” effort-level without understanding that people who read past the headline are his only possible reachable demographic, because not looking past the headline is defaulting to the easy assumption that Epic is just spewing garbage.

Anthropic is right! AIs trained without direct consent from the owners of the training material should be blacklisted!

We demand that our governments criminalize all AIs developed without full permission for use of training material, in support of Anthropic!

Ace and Demi have sex, it’s just not a primary motivator.

I am totally ignorant here, is there a difference between a low sex drive and asexuality? My expectation was that sex is not a primary motivator for someone with a low sex drive while someone who is asexual is not sex-motivated at all (like having sex is entirely treated as caring for someone else’s needs).

I’m hoping this reads as sincere, I always worry about whether my phrasing will come across as rude whenever I’m this spectacularly out-of-touch.

I am 100% certain, I’ve done this many times over the past few years.

I always had to look up how to use the dd command until a few years back I saw somewhere that you can literally just use cp and the results won’t be worse in any way.

cp image.iso /dev/sdX

I mostly agree with this. The reason I stick with arch has nothing to do with finding it technically superior or more convenient to use than other distros. There is almost no way I would be using arch if their wiki wasn’t leaps and bounds more helpful than other distros’ documentation. Some other distros can meet my needs just as well or better, but arch’s documentation allows for a more straightforward learning process through tinkering.

I do think repository differences can potentially matter a lot. I have a lot of respect for hyperbola being ultra-hardline in removing proprietary packages and any hint of uncertainty in licensing, but the fact that that kills off texlive makes it untenable for me to use. Keeping manual installs up-to-date is a hassle, so I can definitely understand someone limiting themselves to distros supporting a certain set of packages.

I just mean that I can understand where it comes from when someone is already close to their breaking point, and I think most people are about there. They’re not consciously deciding to bury their heads, because making a decision requires too much inspection to actually ignore it. Often when I was beaten down it’s like my mind selectively blocked out information as a means of protecting me, but I remained in denial about that until I started really getting out of the hole. I’m not sure I’d equate them to Trump supporters in a broader scope, but I do think the lack of inquiry here is not too different from Trump supporters.

I also think that with more animosity towards regular citizens, the more the conversation shifts from the powerful to the powerless. The impact of one citizen changing their mind is wholely insignificant compared to what a politician changing course would do.

I see that there’s no apprehension of “Prevention is better than cure”. You cannot wave away problems because they’re only going to return worse than before.

I’m not smart enough to piece together what you’re saying here. Prevention or cure for what? What does prevention look like? Why should we be apprehensive, it sounds like a reasonable statement?

There’s also demeaning people who see the atrocities for what they are and want to create awareness so they can minimize it. But are shamed for it.

I do feel this point and I’ll admit I’ve had many infuriating interactions. Now I try to just ignore until I cool down, because once I do it’s like this asshole isn’t worth that much thought. I have a limited amount of time to be angry, that’s better spent on the people who actually could make a meaningful difference by taking a stand.

To be clear, -Qm displays installed packages not currently in the repositories. This will include AUR packages, but I avoid the AUR (except for davmail years ago) every once in a while I’ll run it just to check and sometimes it finds packages.

When you install things from the main repos the dependencies get installed too, and if those dependencies are no longer needed they’ll be removed from the repositories. (I also have a bad habit of forgetting --asdeps when installing optional dependencies.) Sometimes they’ll conflict with a new dependency and pacman will ask to remove and replace them, but other times the functionality has become a part of an existing package, so with no conflict to prompt removal they’ll just sit unused on your install. If you haven’t tried -Qm in a long while you’ll probably find a few harmless currently-unused packages that were installed through the normal repos. (-Qdt will cover the other cases where dependencies remain in the repos but are now only needed for packages you don’t have installed.)

Obviously -Qm will also show removed packages that aren’t dependencies, a few years back my preferred pdf viewer was removed from the repositories.

-Qm will also find manually installed packages that aren’t in the AUR if you ever do that.

Gonna disagree with some of the crowd here and say I think those people typically aren’t bloodthirsty/supportive of war. They’ve never believed many examples of inhumanity have been direct consequences of democratic leadership, and some (I have the Gaza genocide in mind here) they’ve never believed existed at all. They’ll see an “expert” voice an opinion that they’re already inclined to believe at present. The “expert” authoritatively cites evidence that they’re not familiar with, so seems legit enough. They’re not going to trust you to have knowledge the “expert” doesn’t, but they’re not interested in holding the discussion with you because they don’t carry the mythical knowledge that would win them the argument. They concede the point ahead of time to avoid conceding after a debate that didn’t convince them. It’s not forgetting, it’s pretending that they agree with your assessment.

A huge factor is how detached we are from atrocities that don’t touch us. I really believe that if one of these people had a friend or family that were affected by this, they would think a lot more deeply on culpability. I lived in Dearborn during the last election and I didn’t get the sense that muslims there were more likely to abstain from voting (or vote third-party) than non-muslims. I know this is partially a function of who I was talking with (mostly academia), but I’m convinced that a big factor was that all of us knew someone in our personal lives that had been emotionally injured by losing family.

There’s a good argument that ignoring atrocities is a moral failure, but I think most of us can relate. There are so many evils in the world today that if I actually spent time to think on even a fraction of them I think I’d be in a mental institution. That recent exposé on the dogs that were trained to rape prisoners, I can acknowledge it’s almost certainly real and that saying otherwise would be an injustice to the victims, but in my heart I don’t actually believe it happened because I don’t feel capable of managing the emotions that would come with accepting it. If you’re already overwhelmed by other aspects of the hellscape you live in, at some point reacting to horrifying headlines by throwing up your hands and booting up a video game becomes a survival strategy.

I loved that one when I was in high school! I was really impressed by the level design, and I do remember liking the soundtrack a lot. I haven’t heard it in forever but I’m sure I would recognize it.

I’ve wondered for forever, was there a way to make the secondary fire for the Jabberwock’s Eyestaff actually helpful? The meteors would pretty consistently injure me more than the enemies.

I remember thinking the jacks were the most useful weapon by a longshot.

I recently played through To the Moon, it’s just a few hours long and it’s really just a story with some superficial gameplay elements taped on top. It’s really sad, I cried.

I saw there are a couple sequels and I intend to get to them eventually.