Mossy Feathers (She/They)

One time I played exploding kittens and fucked everyone else over so hard that I felt bad and never played again because I was too good at guessing what kinds of cards people had, how and when they’d use them, and remembering who had already used their defuses. The result was that I was really good at setting people up to explode. On top of that, I was told afterward that I had a terrifyingly good poker face; that the moment the game began I turned into an expressionless robot kinda poker face.

Made me feel like an asshole even though I wasn’t meaning to try-hard it.

Does this run on a raspberry pi 1 or 2? I can’t remember which one I have, but I barely use it so it’d be cool to have something to use it for.

I think I understand what they’re saying. Replace the “belly drumroll” thing with your favorite hobby; and “status-quo” with “normies”.

The first message is pretty straightforward. The consumer wants the best but has an ungodly number of options to pick from.

The second message builds on the first, establishing that this character (lets call him Bob) is a “normie”. Bob thinks OP is a weirdo because they find something mundane, like belly drumming, to be a fun hobby. OP tries to convince Bob that it isn’t the belly drumming that OP enjoys, it’s the hobby that OP enjoys. It’s the people around it, the culture that surrounds it, and so on. This concerns Bob because OP has just admitted that they aren’t really into belly drumming, it’s everything around belly drumming that they enjoy. Bob is even more concerned about OP when OP tries to share the hobby with him. Bob then gets confused when OP ditches Bob and finds a group of friends who appreciate their enjoyment of belly drumming.

The third message then complains that, at some point, belly drumming might become a fad, at which point people who are only into belly drumming as a fad, become the main voice in the hobby; destroying whatever culture the hobby had built up.

I think there’s another message missing somewhere in there that OP either meant to write but forgot, or they went full ADHD and just didn’t properly connect their thoughts (it’s okay, it happens a lot to me, that’s probably why I feel like I can understand this lol). I’m guessing this is closer to what OP was trying to say:

People who enjoy the status quo, aka “normies” (actually lets call them Bob again), tend to look at a particular thing and, if they desire it, want to jump to the best. However, when Bob approaches an enthusiast or hobbyist for advice, they get many conflicting answers (because it often comes down to personal taste regarding “the best” of a thing). When Bob probes further, they may find that many of the enthusiasts don’t actually give a shit about the thing itself, but instead they enjoy the act of finding “the best” thing.

One example that comes to mind is the running gag that hardcore audiophiles don’t actually listen to music, they listen to their hardware. They spend hours and hours fine-tuning their setups using special audio tracks for calibrating your speakers, room, and so on; only to listen to a song or two to confirm their choice. They then return to tweaking their setup, spending more time placing crystals, buying outrageously expensive cables, and so on. These are people who enjoy the hobby itself more than the actual subject matter, and that’s okay. As long as they know that the crystals and cables are placebos at best, then that’s okay. Maybe they just want to support their favorite audiophile blogger, or think the cables or crystals are very pretty but feel silly for spending $200 on a 3ft cable; so they come up with a story about how it makes the sound better. As long as they’re aware that the cables probably aren’t doing anything special, that’s okay.

(Edit: I can say from experience that when you get into a hobby, you tend to be more willing to spend more money on something than necessary if it means you’re helping to support another enthusiast, group of enthusiasts, or small hobby company that you like. I’m guilty of doing this myself and I’m sure many of the people here are guilty of it too if they’re honest about it.)

However, people like Bob get confused by this. Why would someone spend thousands of dollars on something they don’t care about? Bob doesn’t understand that the rituals are what makes it fun for this individual (lets call them Joe), not the objects themselves, and he thinks this is strange. So Bob makes fun of Joe for spending thousands of dollars on something they supposedly don’t even like. Joe tries to introduce Bob to the hobby so that Bob might understand why Joe finds it fun, but Bob, not wanting to spend the time to commit, just gets even more confused.

“This is boring”, says Bob, “I want to listen to music, not frequency sweeps playing through standalone phono preamps to find the one with the most accurate RIAA curve.”

Joe gets tired of Bob mocking his hobby, ditches Bob and finds a group of friends who can appreciate Joe’s hobby, even if they don’t actually enjoy it themselves. This makes Bob very upset.

However, this isn’t the end of OP’s saga. OP then goes on to talk about how, at some point, Joe’s hobby becomes a fad. Sarah, armed with Beats by Dr. Dre, believes that this is what being an audiophile is. She thinks Beats are the best-of-the-best and that anything more expensive is a scam. She thinks buying whatever is marketed as “the latest and greatest” is truly, the latest and greatest. She believes that this is what audiophiles do. They buy $200~$300 headphones and listen to their favorite music all day.

As such, she gets confused when she runs into a “true” audiophile like Joe. She’s more likely to talk over Joe and “fadsplain”(?) the hobby to others because “audiophiles don’t listen to frequency sweeps, that’s what weirdos do”. Furthermore, she’s likely to mock Joe for being “behind the times” once the tide goes out. As such, Joe’s hobby has been ruined.

I think there’s also an implied message that consumers tend to trigger fads if enough of them are looking for “the best” of a thing, but it’s vague enough that I’m not confident about that.

Edit: missed a bit; I think the last message is also trying to reference the first message with the “drum was always attached to their belly” thing and is saying that the hobby was always there, but the fad was started because Bob wanted an easy answer to his question and the market replied. Bob is happy with the market’s answer, but hobbyists aren’t because it redefined the hobby.

I dunno if I 100% agree with the message, but I probably agree with about 90% of it and can sympathize with OP.

Edit: accidently swapped Bob and Joe at the end, should be fixed now.

Is an EULA presented this way considered binding? That seems really exploitable, like making people click hundreds of links to get to the real EULA so they don’t actually read it.

Probably like, 95% of the people in my city are either neutral or supportive of LGBT people. The last 5% are so fucking insane that it’s still scary to be LGBT. - (major Texas city)

Edit: I kinda assume this is unique because I’d think most places are either safe (with the occasional heckler) or completely unsafe. Texas seems special because it seems like most people don’t care or are supportive, but then you get the nutjob who’s entire reality is shattered by the idea that you aren’t straight and/or cisgendered and all they can do is get apocalyptically mad about your existence.

Edit 2: oh yeah, on a less depressing note, iirc Texas is like, sorta kinda half canyon. Iirc Palo Duro canyon doesn’t really have an end to it, it just kinda… widens until it becomes part of the normal landscape (I might be thinking of a different canyon though). As such, you could basically consider anything downstream from the canyon as being inside the canyon, resulting in a huge chunk of Texas existing in a canyon!

That makes a hell of a lot more sense than what I thought it was. But why’d they censor “Nazi”? I assumed it was a slur because why else would you censor an “n-word”?

Why’d they put black people in antarctica? What?

Mhm, as a former projectionist I can confirm that those files average 200~300gb.

Why would they sell them? Cinemaphiles. Your average person won’t spend $200 on a 500gb drive containing The Room, but a hardcore cinemaphile might. My boss at the theater I was working at was the kinda person who would have bought that. Well, maybe not The Room, but he probably would have spent the money for something like The Godfather trilogy.

I know, I’m kinda complaining by illustrating how difficult it is to get official movie files nowadays; especially if you want lossless, master-quality files.

You can get the files if you want, they’re just very expensive and to the tune of hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars. Also they’re typically encrypted and can only be played back on an approved projection system and you have to buy decryption keys every time you want to watch the movie. This is why theaters suck by the way, they have to pay for the movie, the ability to play the movie, the ability to take money in exchange for people seeing the movie, etc.

It is. I’ve kinda been meaning to get into it as a low-effort artistic hobby. However you’re more likely to find matching puzzles made the same year by the same company than if you try to use puzzles from different years or different manufacturers (yes, some manufacturers share stencils).

Yeah, no doubt it’s a significant upgrade, the old vehicle’s silhouette is just really iconic to me.

I’m gonna miss the old design. The new one looks like someone smashed it with a looney tunes hammer.

Fyi, from what I’ve read anarchists reject the cookbook and interpret it as being pro-government while also having inaccurate and dangerous recipes. There are better resources for the latter (including official military handbooks), while the former encourages people to roll over and take whatever abuse they’re handed.

When it comes to punching Nazis, would I actually do it IRL? I’m not sure. It’d probably depend on whether I’m in a “fuck it, we ball” kinda mood or not. If I am, then I’m absolutely going to try and wreck the Nazi to the best of my ability. They might not get back up. If not, then I’d probably just roll my eyes, lose a little more faith in humanity, and keep going.

What you need to realize is that the Nazi would absolutely do the same to you, possibly worse, if given the chance; and people are too busy to research every single person they come across and are too desensitized to respond to “he’s literally a Nazi” (America’s right wing did a great job of painting “Nazi” as being meaningless in a modern context). That makes it very easy for them to lie to the general population about their goals.

Look at how far Trump and Vance have gotten. They literally support Nazis and Klansmen (Ku Klux Klan), yet people seemed to actually believe that Biden was as bad as Trump. It wasn’t until Trump started talking about Hatians eating pets at a national debate that people stopped and were like, “damn, what the fuck?”

What if he hadn’t though? What if he’d managed to keep his cool and pretend to be normal? The thing that scares me is that I think he might still have a chance, simply because I think the recent debate may have inspired false confidence in Democrats.

Nazis, Klansmen, bigoted institutions in general, will take a mile if you give them an inch, and proceed to wrap it around your neck and hang you from a tree with it; and they’re very good at getting what they want because they’ll literally eat shit if they believe it’ll help them win. They believe utopia is achieved through oppression and mass murder; wouldn’t you do anything you can to achieve utopia if you think it’s in arms reach, especially when the path is obvious thanks to the efforts of prior fascists?

That’s why you punch Nazis. That’s why people say that the only good Nazi is a dead Nazi. A Nazi’s idea of utopia is forged with blood and torment; and they’re willing to do anything to make it a reality.

Tbh that’s actually pretty good for what is probably a VHS rip. They might not even be all that compressed compared to the original.

It seems like the big weakness of torrents is that if the front-end goes down, then no one can get new torrents anymore, making the front-end an obvious target due to its centralized nature. However, has anyone considered making an activitypub-powered torrent tracker/download site? Kinda like a hybrid between soulseek and BitTorrent. The sites in the network all get torrent information from each other so you have a billion front-ends. Good luck stopping that if they all sync their databases together.

You’re just mad because they won’t let you piss on things anymore.

I’ve had creepypasta-esque nightmares and I love those. I’ve also had dreams that would have probably been legitimately traumatizing if I had a better memory.

Basically nothing AAA as far as I’m aware. Only major AAA releases I’ve had any interest in are the Sega relaunches (JSR, Crazy Taxi, etc), but some of the rumors I’ve heard aren’t good so I dunno how much hope I should put into it. Everything else is either indie or old console games.

What about Finland? What metal is Finland?