Nobody Cares If Music Is Real Anymore

I’m nobody. Who are you? Are you nobody too?

It’s highly dependent on the music and context. As pointed out in this study, strategic application of the wrong music at the wrong time can inflict measurable pain.

All they have to do is look outside or step outside themselves and lend someone, anyone a hand.

Touch grass, if you will.

I remember years ago watching a video – I desperately wish I could remember the channel – where the author shared his experience with depression and the early days of 4chan anime forums. He found it easier to browse forums about anime than to go out and actually watch them. Then the negativity piled in. That anime you like? “It’s shit.” Any hint of optimism or passion was an opportunity to get a rise out of someone or smugly ridicule them. The only unassailable belief was to doubt everything. The only winning move was not to care.

I’ve been thinking about that video a lot recently.

Online activism has led to a handful of noteworthy victories. But the ease of online activism has also made people (myself included) rely too much on it, and get disillusioned by it, as if we’ve forgotten that online activism is pointless unless it leads to real-world resistance.

I don’t believe doomer trolls are right-wing plants (though I acknowledge it’s a potential avenue of attack in the future). I don’t think they usually have ulterior accelerationist motives (though I have spoken with a few). I think for the most part, they’re just people who’ve given up, or otherwise mistaken cynicism for maturity, and seeing anyone else expressing optimism or trying to organize real-world resistance just pisses them off.

Voluntarily disenfranchising yourself is complying in advance.

A broken tool still has its uses. A bent screwdriver can still be a prybar. A rusty sword can still kill, so don’t ask people to drop it before have something better. It is possible to explore and acknowledge the failures and limitations of a system – and to reduce overreliance on it – without abdicating all influence over it.

The Democratic Party is a disappointment. They follow popular (polled) opinion rather than sticking to principles, and that makes them vulnerable to Overton shifts. As public opinion towards trans people has been poisoned by the Jugendverderber libel, Democrats have largely thrown trans people under the bus instead of fighting back. Likewise, Democrats stick closely to corporate interests because money is power. These issues may never be fixable.

The solution to this is not to capitulate and discard what political influence we still hold.

The first half of the solution is to primary the hell out of Democrats. A left-wing caucus within the party could easily tilt things in our favor, just like the Freedom Caucus tilted the RNC in the opposite direction once before. Bernie Sanders (link) and David Hogg (link) are now spearheading multiple campaigns to do exactly that. Even if you have no faith in your ability to change the norms of the party, just think how much impact your resistance could have if you held an office, even a low one, even for just a week. Do you have any idea how much trouble a county clerk can make?

The second half of the solution is to build solidarity-based power structures outside government to reduce overreliance on a broken system. Economic desperation, social isolation, and cultural “other”-ing make people easy to exploit and oppress regardless of the type of government, so attack those problems directly. Unions, mutual aid networks, churches, you know the drill. Put in the legwork to find them in your area or your profession.

Embrace nuance. Embrace diversity – even political diversity. Political beliefs are not sacred, but the lives under those political systems are. Don’t try to reduce the vast complexity of politics to 120 characters. Don’t treat the ongoing wellbeing of human beings flippantly. If you think the problem is the existence of a state, then say so, but make your case for why making the state worse makes conditions for its subjects better. If you think voting third-party will teach the Democrats a lesson and drag them leftwards, then make your case and acknowledge the risks of what happens if you’re wrong.

Don’t just ridicule every positive effort you see. Doomer trolls (or cuckoos, if we’re going with that) are pithy, but reductive, and their criticism is never constructive.

@remington is all about healthy discussion. He doesn’t mind when people disagree, just as long as they say why.

Are the stabbing pains skin-deep like an insect sting, or deeper like a pulled muscle?

I just moved into my first house. The president is using modern-day gestapo to disappear undesirables and political dissidents against supreme court orders. My career work has paid off and I have a nice new job and there are dogs in the office. The party I vote for now thinks it’s a winning strategy to throw trans people under the bus. Probably thanks to social transition and HRT, I’m getting a grip on my social anxiety and expanding my friend group. I carry pepper spray when I’m alone now.

My life is coming together right as the world falls apart. I am filled all at once with indescribable hope and unfathomable dread. Hell of a thing to find your soul during an apocalypse.

I could make one of these, but first I’ll need to go to Tosche Station to pick up some power converters.

Based on current information, no. But they would reject a passport renewal.

The initial contract is plausibly just for 12V car batteries, but if Zoolnasm’s goal is 10GWh/yr, they definitely have their eyes set on larger-scale applications.

Also, if they’re actually capable of 190Wh/kg, that’s better than current-gen automotive LFP. That’s a pretty huge “if,” though.

Ships can register any nation as their flag state, so they often choose flags of convenience based on whoever has the lowest fees or regulations – or more insidiously, whoever has the least ability to hold companies accountable.

This is why so many shipping companies register in Liberia, Panama, and the Marshall Islands. Also Mongolia, which is landlocked.

So unless we want to fill the oceans and ports with ships that have nuclear reactors with no regulation, no safety measures, and no accountability, we’re gonna have to fix the last hundred years of international maritime law.

If resin is a non-starter for you, FDM printing can also make cool miniatures, but it will take more effort and the details won’t be as fine.

People are getting good results printing minis on the Elegoo Neptune printers which are around USD$190. The latest fad is multi-material printers like the Anycubic Kobra 3 combo (USD$380) and Bambu A1 combo (USD$490) which can make colorful figurines at the cost of wasted plastic.

Tomb of 3D Printed Horrors has been getting pretty good results and is a good channel to follow if you go down the FDM route.

(Elephant-in-the-room sidenote: If you look at FDM printers, you’ll run into fans militantly promoting Bambu Lab as part of an ongoing corporate-sponsored flamewar, and the community has a laundry list of grievances against the company. It’s a mess. Bambu printers are good but not spectacular, and easy to use but hardly the only user-friendly printers out there.)

I think for a small, detailed figure that you’re going to photograph, I’d recommend resin sprayed with a food-safe clear coat such as shellac.

Resin of all kinds requires rubber gloves, cleanup, and a well-ventilated room because it’s smelly and generally bad for you in its unfinished liquid form. A small resin printer will cost under USD$200. Creality has one on sale for USD$100. They also sell washing/curing stations – I built my own stations out of junk, but for USD$99, I’d go with theirs. Much more compact.

Nerdtronics made some excellent videos introducing resin and explaining how and why we print the way we do. These days, almost all printers are plug-and-play and the software is super smart, but I think these videos are highly educational anyways.

First, what kind of models are you curious about making? Big, small, decorative, springy, strong? Cosplay helmets, bike parts, tabletop miniatures?

This will inform whether you should look at tutorials for FDM (filament) printing or MSLA/DLP (resin) printing.

It’s more about the how and why.

How: CCS pumps liquefied or pressurized gas into an exhausted oil or saline reservoir. These reservoirs didn’t hold pressurized gas before, so it’s difficult (if not impossible) to prove they won’t leak. In the Decatur case, about 8 kilotons of CO2 and saltwater either found or created a crack in the reservoir, exactly as critics predicted. Locals are worried about groundwater contamination.

Why: CCS is largely unregulated in the US, and the companies interested in it are ones with awful environmental track records – ADM is no exception there. To claim the 45Q tax credit, they only need to store the CO2 for 3 years. Why would they care about preventing leaks if they already got their payout? Doing shoddy work is in their best interest.

Does this event prove that underground CCS is literally impossible? Of course not. But feasibility isn’t a pass/fail test, it’s judged by factors like cost and risk. This event proves the approach isn’t foolproof and the companies aren’t trustworthy. So it’s high time we stop acting like they are.

Beyond All Reason is my favorite RTS at the moment. I enjoyed Planetary Annihilation (despite its flaws), and BAR provides the same sense of exponential growth, escalation, and strategic pivots.

One of my favorite things about the game is that it’s not ridiculously APM-intensive. The controls have a learning curve, but they enable you to “fire and forget” most of your tasks.

If you want to get a sense for the game before diving in, Brightworks does some good casting for both competitive and community-level games. https://www.youtube.com/@BrightWorksTV

a bit melancholic sometimes

Viewer be advised: If you’ve ever lost someone you took for granted, or hurried through what should have been a formative time in your life instead of slowing down and appreciating it while you had it, then this show knows how to punch you in the tender bits, and it will not stop.

I cried during every one of the first four episodes.

10/10

But we know what it really is all about - selling more cars.

It isn’t even about selling more cars at this point, it’s about selling securities. Their market cap dwarfs their total sales. Their P/E ratio is 67.67x, meaning they could sell cars for 67 years and still not make as much money as their stocks are worth today.

The real product is the rising stock price. The factories are just a front.

Thanks for the analysis and insight!

I found at least one of the posts, and you’re right, that’s not really what impressed them. It just stuck with me because I’m a hardware girl.