I'm halfway through the extended version of American Gods. I read the original version a while ago and I'm loving the revisit, but I'm also easily distracted and the book is so thick it's almost a cube so my dedication is waning. I also have a friend who wanted to start a comic book book club and we're starting with Sandman, so my break from Neil Gaiman is... Neil Gaiman! It's interesting because you can see him trying out the literary tools he perfected years later.
This is super neat and it's interesting to hear about the component parts. Maybe I missed this, but why bookbinding at all?
How on earth do we counteract this? How do we define "legitimate news source" without also limiting the accessibility of the press?
Name: Ish Location: Durham, NC Age: 32? 33? somewhere in there. Definitely not 34. Current preoccupation: Fertility, and that all the scare tactics you heard as a kid weren't necessarily true. Previous preoccupations: Board games, video games, basic economics and history.
I feel like this thread has shone a light on how few romantics frequent hubski.
Oh man, I feel you on the work front - to the point I wondered if we worked at the same company. It makes me wonder if things are just getting tighter all over, we're supposed to be in this boom time, but I see more and more companies are playing closer and closer to the chest. It's like they know their not supposed to, and they pretend they aren't, but they do it anyway. Pretty crazy. On the study bible, I've recently started going through these videos and It's been a really fascinating education. If you're looking for a supplement, that's a good one.
I got Pyre and Hob in an effort to improve my indie quota and didn't really end up liking either. Pyre was more interesting, but it seemed like an excuse to make a fantasy sports game. Hob just didn't grab me. I also got Endless Space 2 though, and that game is awesome. They took everything great about ES1 and amplified it. I'm also really stoked for the new civ expansion, but I'm getting a little tired about people complaining that firaxis shouldn't put in ladies and how leaders should only be chosen based on their historical merit. Gilgamesh is in the new game and we don't even know if he's real. I've been working on a back story with one of my DnD players and it turns out he's a Aasimar who fell in love with a Tiefling and had a child. So there's a half demon, half angel walking around the world and I'm really excited about all those possibilities.
If the witcher series is any indication 2077 is going to be largely about the morality of the various shitty decisions you have to make in a world where cybernetics create inequity. I really like the development company, CDPR, and think they could do great things for the cyberpunk genre. Mechanically, I liked Mirror's Edge - it used interesting mechanics that weren't all fighting. But as far as it's merit as a sci-fi story, I don't think it had much. I played ME1 in college a lot and couldn't even paint the story back in broad strokes today (time trials were fun though.) But based on their past works, I think CDPR will avoid the pitfall. The witcher games were all about non-black and white moral decisions. It wasn't, "do you want to hug or punch this baby?" it was more, "do you want to save these children from getting eaten, or save that village from a wrathful spirit?" I feel like they get story.
What a shitty thing to do.
Is therapy an option? I don't know if it has a stigma in your life, but it was helpful for me. Also, I get the urge to drink and I know that can be a hard fight. Have you thought about a group like AA? I don't know your situation or what you've tried before but try running when you wake up. I mean, if you're drinking when you wake up you're already putting your body through the ringer. If you want to forget just push yourself to run until you throw up (very doable). If you want a distraction, try to focus on your breathing. Don't set a goal to run x miles or for y minutes or anything else - start with the basics and set a goal to get out and run. Just get out of your bed, get out of your house, and run. Don't set a goal to stop drinking, to stop thinking, to stop communications - do whatever, I don't care - just set a goal to get out of your house once a day and run.
The nicest thing about cash is that it has an intuitive interface - as you spend your physical stack of paper gets smaller and you instantly get feedback on your spending. Cards simply don't have that. I thought programs like Google pay had a great opportunity to improve the interface. Some way of showing your daily "stack of cash". I would love a widget on my home page or an icon in my top bar that depletes as I spend. Something that turns the 1's and 0's of digital spending into something more tangible. I doubt this will come from banks or cards because it's not in their interest. I think it could come from third parties like Google or Mint because "getting your spending under control" is a great selling point.
I had an ancestor who accused a guy of witchcraft - the first guy of my family to come to america, in fact. Matthias, my many great grandfather, had a spat with a dude and the dude burned Matthias' house with Matthias' wife inside. Pretty messed up, but Matthias didn't have proof it was the dude and so he accused the dude of witchcraft. He said the dude could pass through locked doors and convince people of things they didn't want to do. It's crazy to me how an accusation of witchcraft was pretty much, "that guy's doing some shady shit and I don't like it." Like, the bad dude in the story was good at picking locks and had a silver tongue, but for prosecution those became otherworldly powers. It makes me wonder - at the time did people think of these accusations in a more plain way than we think of them now? Did most people know witchcraft as a shorthand, not for magic but for having skills common to scoundrels?
It's a directed angst week, so that's good. This documentation thing is still an issue but I'm not going to let nihilism win out and I'm doing everything I can think of to put together a good proposal and get a lot of buy in. People seem tentatively excited but there's still a long way to go. I also got a Surface Book. I haven't been a windows fan in a long time but damn is it a nice machine. Lastly, I need a productive hobby. I've been talking a lot but doing nothing around this whiteness site. My wife is working a workshop about the role of women in the propagation of white supremacy, and if she can tackle the issue so can I. So yeah, I'm going to go do that now.
I had this idea for my training site at work and decided to remake the whole thing. I'm on week three of the redesign and greatly regretting the decision. But it's also a great decision - I'm using a lot of the theories from Understanding Comics to add some personality to the self-paced training modules. I don't know how well it'll work, but it already feels a lot more personable. I think this project is also heavily tied to my feeling of worth. With everyone leaving, I feel like things are uneasy here and I need to be prepared for anything. It's time to turn my 3 years of experiments into a unified product that I can peddle internally or externally. Home life is pretty good. My wife has been doing freelance grant writing for almost a year now. She's amazingly brave for striking out on her own and I'm super proud of her. The business is doing well, but the social aspect of being so solitary is starting to get to her. I'm not quite sure how to help with that. Things are good though.
I think millennial is a really bad way to group people into cohorts - we consider horoscopes to be a bunch of malarkey, but if you make the grouping years instead of months you're suddenly working with a legitimate categorization.
So all you have is a paperclip maximizer fear.
I'm pretty sure I've said this before and I'm pretty sure I'll say this again - hubski is an insular community. Any small community is insular because you get to know people. You notice when a new, active person comes in and you notice when an old, active person goes out because at this scale screen names do not provide anonymity - they provide a fresh start. As time goes on, who you are becomes associated with your new name and you lose your sense of anonymity and gain a sense of vulnerability. It seems like the people who publicly leave hubski do so as a result of some crushing vulnerability. I think that's the nature of the site at this size. As long as it remains a small community where you know every active contributor, it won't feel like a place you can escape to and the social obligation will become overwhelming to a few - as it does in all small communities.
If you're going through NC, we're in Durham and have a spare bed. We'll be there tomorrow night, but we're going to be in the Appalachian Mountains doing hikes near Highlands NC for the rest of the long weekend.
I'm leaving for a long weekend and had to make bread for 25. This was the result. I'm really pleased with how they look and the bottoms are no longer burning!
Just read about Forever Labs - that is some sci-fi stuff you're working on there.
Congratulations on bombing! I used to do stand up and I always did my best work after bombing. There's some kind of freedom around hitting rock bottom in front of a dozen people that can help make you fearless. Though right now I'm sure it just feels shitty.
Whenever I see these fear of the future pieces, I'm always amazed at the author's in ability to think about the future in any kind of practical terms. Like, if we no longer died of old age, it wouldn't just be some switch that got flipped in everyone. It would be a long, drawn out, cost prohibitive change that would take years if not generations to trickle out. In that time, legislation would certainly be passed to deal with major issues, but minor issues would be addressed by shifting cultural norms or individual psychological changes. It's like the people who write these things claim to be imagining a world that's completely different, but it's really exactly the same except this one thing that would change everything. On another note, I really hope Zuck doesn't run for office. The idea of the head (or former head) of facebook being any kind of public official just raises all kinds of privacy flags for me.
Man, I can't work after reading things like this. It seems like the upheaval is getting very real and it's terrifying.
So I have a question this week. For the past 5 or 6 months now, I've been tackling the task of organizing education and documentation in my company. It's sucked because there's not really a simple pre-existing solution to the problems we're having - an easy to update central repository. I see this as a gap in the market and I think a product that could fill it would be great, but I'm not a developer and can't make it myself. So I've been banging my head against this question - how do I find a developer? I know that once a developer tells anyone about their skill, they're instantly told "well I have this idea for an app..." so I don't want to be just another unprepared person. I have folders of information on the market and competition and the hole they leave, but every time I try to explain it, people's eyes glaze over. So I guess I'm trying to figure out - how do I, as a single individual, present an idea in a way that results in forward movement? (P.S. Sorry to make a "me" post after so long in radio silence.)
DOCUMENTS: VOYAGER PERMITS It seems safe to say this all started when the GC started selling lunar lots to the highest bidder. The people got what they were promised on earth, prosperity by all accounts boomed, but I don’t think anyone really knew what opening the heavens to private individuals would actually mean. The universe was so massive, how could a handful of interests find conflict in such a massive chasm? Attached are the permits. All in all they’re pretty simple. -Name of sponsor organization -name of leader -proposed settlement location -proposed purpose in space -proposed long term vision -Information about initial fleet Nothing too fancy, and maybe not even entirely honest, but at least it’s a starting point.
5Mbps is also for 720p. For anything above that you'll need more (ultra HD, which I think is 4k?, would need 25). But that's also assuming that this is where you want data flows to stagnate. With a bigger pipeline companies could start to stream more interesting stuff, like 360 videos in 4k. That's like saying, "the roads are big enough for the sedans of the average family, so why would we make them bigger for the 18 wheelers of a few companies?" I think though, what's the most interesting, is that once homes start to get fiber speeds and more home network wireless devices, we're going to have to come up with new solutions to an over populated wireless spectrum. Should be neat.
I don't think I conveyed myself correctly but, yes, this is all about what I'm trying to say. The thing I was really trying to ask was, if another devoted set of 50 people came to the site, could they exist in the same place but as a different circle? If yes (and the site seems to be set up to allow it) is there a way for that community to grow, and do the first 50 really want a dark hubski to grow or do they use their implicit moderation to force it out? I'm not really looking for answers to this, and it's not really about hubski. It's an interesting plateau problem that every area of congregation should naturally reach at some point in its growth. It's particularly interesting for me because my fiance's church is running into the same situation, so this gives me an opportunity to reword the problem and maybe get some new insights.
That's an interesting observation about fallout. The weird one that I noticed was people getting upset about the radiant quests piling up in their quest log. I'm not sure, but it feels like they're saying they can't cope with having something on their to-do list that won't get done. I understand the desire for a clean interface, but I also think it says something about the mindset of players to want to be able to check everything off.
ON the subject of shouting. I've noticed that a lot of people that are around me get their daily dose of racial conversation from second hand sources, from the news, or viral videos, or forum posts, instead of one on one conversations or physical interactions with individuals in their own community. Those distanced conversations are decidedly one sided - you hear someone shouting and you naturally get rampped up, but you have no outlet to let out your ire. The conversation revolves only around discussions that conversations which have become heated enough to be yelling matches, and they generally only start at the most heated part of the conversation. You go from cat video to yelling match in a matter of seconds and it seems to make the human psyche get really boiled up. Recently, we did a tour of churches in our town - going to about two dozen churches in two dozen weeks, and listening to what they have to say. We heard from all kind of people with all kind of opinions about the state of the moral world, and listening to those groups was much more calm and informative because we weren't just having the conversation, we we're getting the context. I am sure the majority of people won't want to compensate for the discrepancy in effort expenditure between watching a 4 minute video and going and meeting people and learning their culture, but the people who do have the best chance of implementing real change (in my opinion at least).