IninewCrow

About 20 years I went on a vacation to southern Spain … during the point when Spain was just fully transitioning into the European Union.

I remember trying to watch some TV programs (there wasn’t much to watch) … but the funny thing that struck me was the commercials. They’d play an hour and half long movie for about an hour … then stop and play non stop commercials for about 15 minutes. It was normal for everyone because they used the time to just get up, bathroom break, kitchen duty, clean the house, go grab some groceries, etc … then return to the living room in time to watch the rest of the movie. No one watched commercials because they all hated them as much as anyone else.

I don’t think they do that any more but I thought I wouldn’t mind that myself … instead of breaking my show every ten / fifteen minutes with a minute of commercials … just show them all to me in ten minutes at the end of an hour.

The Vatican … and just let it become part of Italy again. Nothing would change except for a bunch of wealthy idiots trying to hide their money.

Same here

Exactly … I have wealthy friends and non-wealthy friends who are dirt poor … you know what the difference is between the two groups?

The wealthy people are the stingiest people you’ll ever meet and they’ll fight to save a dollar or two, even though you know they have tons of money in the bank.

The poor people will spend $100 on something they could buy for $20 and never think twice about the money they lost, even though they have nothing saved in their bank.

I have a theory that every company/service/corporation has dozens of loopholes like this everywhere that people could take advantage of. But no one ever does because most people are too honest and proud to ever ask for a discount or to take advantage of an opportunity like this. Most people are too nice and gullible.

Corporations bet on people being too nice all the time.

People are too embarrassed or self conscious to go after a deal or even to ask for one … when in reality corporations are complete greedy whores and will sell your grandmother if it meant they could save a penny.

No one should ever feel embarrassed or shy to ask for a discount or go after saving themselves a few dollars. Corporations do it all the time and they never shy away from skimming off a few pennies from you if they can.

BTW - beautiful work on getting that regular discount for yourself

For every service you sign up to … phone company, subscription, gas company, water service, electricity, whatever …

… always ask if you can get a discount or a better price.

Don’t be embarrassed to ask. No one cares. We just build a culture around the hope that no one will ever ask for a better price and negotiate. The rep your talking to doesn’t care about you and doesn’t care about the company … they might be having a bad day and won’t care about helping you … or they might be having a good day and they know an inside method or option to save you something … or they might be facing losing their job so they figure out a way to save you a ton of money.

I got a banking service a few weeks ago and they gave me a price for a subscription … I knew it was a sham but it was a service I needed … I asked for a discount from the Filipino rep who spoke bag English … she went off for five minutes and came back with a 60% discount.

Sometimes these businesses set their prices high and just hope that no one will ask for a different price … because most people never ask.

Has nothing to do with the upcoming US election

Same here … but I was imagining a gamer youtuber building an entire community around the life of a minecraft character … documenting everything they’re doing … near misses, near deaths, mine adventures … but mostly watching the character grow old … and the holding a funeral of sorts for the life and death of a minecraft character that a bunch of people would have followed for 11 years.

It would be like watching your favourite TV character or actor and the following their work over a few years and then realizing that they have to die and life moves on.

It’s not the typical idea of an ever lasting game with no end … it’s more an admission that these things come and go and we all have a finite lifespan.

I like playing minecraft to relax a lot of the time.

One game mod I was always interested in was a game character with a life span.

Normally, you can play a game like minecraft in hard core mode … basically one life and when you die the game is lost completely. I see many hard core mode players who can make their game last months or years and in some instances, they’ve carefully crafted everything to the point where they are more or less protected from everything. They could play it indefinitely, at least within an actual human lifetime.

One Mod I’d like to see is to have a hardcore mode … but with a built in lifespan and an aging character. Give the character a lifespan of about 80 human years … a day in minecraft is 10 minutes I think … so here is my calculation …

Roughly 82 years can be broken down to 300,000 days … so if a minecraft day cycle is ten minutes of day and ten minutes of night - we multiply 20 with 300,000 and you get 6 million minutes, which adds up to a maximum of about 11.4 years of real human years of active game playing.

So an entire hard core mode game cycle would be programmed for a maximum lifespan of 6 million minutes or 11.4 years of playing time … but there is a catch.

Of course you could die by the usual ways of accidental death. But your player is spawned as a weak child character for the first 750,000 minutes (37,500 minecraft day/night cycles) - (which corresponds to the first ten years of human life) … don’t worry, you are born into a village that protects you, or at least tries to and you have to figure out how to survive by not being able to hold tools, weapons or use basically anything other than to eat whatever you can find and shelter in place.

A teenaged period could be programmed in for the next ten year cycle but we’ll just skip to full adult for now.

So starting at 37,500 minecraft day/night cycles … you automatically become an adult and now the game can start as usual. However a clock starts working in the background. For the next 3,000,000 minutes (150,000 minecraft day / night cycles) - this corresponds to the human ages from 10 to 50 - you are more or less a healthy normal adult.

After this point, your character requires more food and food doesn’t last as long in your system. You are also 30% slower, 30% weaker and you incur 30% more damage when hit (regardless of what equipment you carry)

The next stage is started after this period ends (this corresponds to human ages 50 to 70) … now for the next 1,500,000 minutes (75,000 minecraft day / night cycles) … your character ages again … you are now 30% more slower, 30% more weaker and you incur 30% more damage with every hit (regardless of what equipment you carry) … at this point your character is moving around 60% slower and can’t do much any more.

The last segment is the last ten years of life (from age 70 to 80) … 750,000 minutes (37,500 minecraft day/night cycles) … if you survived this long, you can now barely move and everything is dangerous to you again … like the first ten years of life. At this point, no matter what you do, if you achieve everything and stay safe to the end of the clock, your player just dies and the game is over without any choice.

I don’t know if anyone would enjoy that game or not … I’m not sure if I would either … but I would probably by excited about it at the same time.

I have the opposite opinion … I have one system of mine that has Win10 because I need it for one piece of software … and I absolutely do not want to upgrade to 11 even though I get almost daily reminders that I can.

Once I stop using the software I have for Win10 … I’m deleting the OS and installing Linux

Levels of Evil

Level I - burn kittens and watch them suffer
Level II - build a space weapon so massive it blows up planets
Level III - micromanage your minions and review security footage

Beautiful work … I really don’t mind the long wait between releases … the previous Gimp 2.0 versions were so robust and practical that they have lasted for close to 20 years

In the early 2000s, I started off with cracked version of photoshop before I discovered GIMP and as soon as I did, I stuck with them since. They’ve saved me several thousand dollars in software costs over the past 20 years that I really don’t mind waiting for the latest major release.

They can take their time releasing 3.0 for all I care. I’m still using 2.10 and I probably will for the next long while until 3.0 becomes stable. They’ve done a mountainous amount of work already and I congratulate them on everything.

This makes me realize too that I should probably donate something to their community for all the money they’ve saved me over the years.

Polar Bear on the Hudson Bay coast in northern Ontario.

I’m Indigenous and I’ve gone hunting and trapping with my relatives a few times in my life. On one of those trips we happened on a polar bear on the mud flats of the bay during the late autumn. We drove by in our freighter canoe (a very large oversized canoe with a 60 HP outboard motor) and the bear swam near us and then walked by a few hundred feet away. It wasn’t afraid but we were. We watched for a while and then fired rifle shot into the mud next to it to scare it away. From the moment it started to run to the point it disappeared as a speck on the horizon was about a minute or two. I went up later to look at the prints and the clay mud looked like a tractor had driven over it. I couldn’t believe how fast it could move on the mud. I quickly sank in my boots and could barely walk around.

One paw print was about the size of my head. I never left camp without someone nearby or a rifle in my hands.

How do we not know that this isn’t an AI generated Sam Altman?

This is the main reason why I seldom install anyone’s “app”.

Most of these apps aren’t true apps anyway, they’re just customized browsers that lead you to a website and are free to collect as much data from you and your phone as they want.

I’ll go on your website first if I have to and 9 / 10 I get what I want. Besides, I’ll only ever visit the service once or twice so I don’t need to install a permanent app on my phone for that.

Launches entire US nuclear arsenal against Russia

The fact that most of the world has decent access to food. And the fact that here in the first world (I’m in Canada), just about everyone has access to some kind of food.

I know it isn’t perfect and there are still a small percentage of people that may have difficulty with access to proper food, plentiful food or enough food … but everyone everywhere here has something to eat.

I’m Indigenous and when I was growing up in the 80s, mom and dad had enough for us to eat but we weren’t starving or anything.

However, my parents were born in the 40s and they said they had to live through famines as children … in modern Canada! They remembered a severe famine that swept through northern Ontario in the 50s where every hunter and trapper just couldn’t find enough wild food anywhere to feed people. It was a normal cycle that happens in our part of the world that takes place at least once a decade - most times it is just small decline in animal populations but other times, everything just disappears for one reason or another (disease, migration, weather, temperature, animal movements, etc)

In my grandparents time … starvation was a normal part of life to the point where lots of our old legends are filled with stories of cannibalism and murder because people were starving to death.

It all just means that in our modern era over the past hundred years … food has become plentiful for the majority of the world and that starvation has become less prevalent than it ever was in human history.

In our modern world of interconnected finances, services, governments and systems … it is all hinging on a very delicate balance … because as Will Durant put it …

“From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day”

Our easy access to food for everyone is only possible if we maintain a functioning world order of cooperation.

I guess he didn’t duck that cock

But after our national ship we were living on hit that Middle Eastern iceberg and sank, you died because I didn’t want to help you and I survived with a million dollar necklace that I could have used to pay for a good life … but I just threw it away into the ocean after keeping it doing nothing with it for 60 years.

THE END IS NEAR!!