Tequila Sunrise's page

In good news today, I just talked to an HR guy at a global megacorp and I'm being passed on to the hiring team! Still have to interview, but this is very promising. It's not my ideal job, but it would be a foot in the door to what I want, and the location and pay would be improvements!

What respectable interstellar civilization would bother with planetary gold mining when they could process much more gold-rich asteroids instead?

Didn't know there is so much gold in space!

Maybe the gold was only an excuse to get jiggy with prehistoric Humans. Kinda like dragons?

Watching a hilarious 'documentary' about ancient Sumer.

The whole topic of Mesopotamia is a super interesting topic in and of itself, but from the first episode it was sensationalist, with frequent snide remarks about academia and historical consensus. So I googled a review, almost couldn't believe what it said about the last episode, so I skipped ahead and yup! The culmination of the entire series is that aliens from outer space came to earth, interbred with prehistoric homo-species(or pre-lingual homo sapiens?) to produce us, specifically to use us to mine the gold they wanted, jumpstarted agriculture, writing, math, and everything else, and then...well I'm not quite done watching, I don't know if there will be a 'theory' about what happened to the 'shining ones.'

This watches like some college kid taking a history class got high and watched Stargate.

Drejk wrote:

*pokes American FAWTlies with a 10-ft. pole*

Yeah, yeah, politics.

But what disturbs me the most so far is that our contractors (who are finally here) think this whole thing is absolutely hilarious.

I can imagine many emotional reactions to current events. Mirth escapes me.

Macho working-man arrogance? Or maybe just privileged stupidity.

(And jesus h christ, NPR reporters are still calling the rioting mob "protestors." What's the point of the 1A if the press won't call things what they are?)

Discovered on today's job search within a DoD contracting firm: Mission Manager of Zombie Program

I could lead the apocalypse!

No.

The probability distribution wave function of the pierogi is scientific proof that there are never enough pierogis.

Not sure how interesting this is for the layperson, but I found it an enjoyable (if long) read.

I'm pretty sure that most of it went over my head, but big cosmological questions sure are fun. Didn't know there are two competing models of the universe's expansion -- I still don't even understand how there's no center of the universe.

Does the pandemic win if I found myself starting to rewatch Tiger King this week.

For the love of all the gods CY, there must be another way

NobodysHome wrote:

captain yesterday wrote:

captain yesterday wrote:

I'm getting ready for the first snow run of the season, should be fun!

It was not fun, the snow was ungodly heavy, they had us go out 5 hours too early, so I basically wasted five hours, I had five blowers break down, and then they had someone switch out my truck with one that didn't have a working heater. And on top of it all they expected 4 people to blow off 44 two or three car garage driveways by ourselves. I told them no and went back to the shop.

So, now I'm home, my back is sore, and I'm pretty pissed off.

On the plus side, everyone on my crew did an awesome job despite the near constant breakage and b%!@!@+%.

The kids keep talking about moving somewhere it snows. I say, "Then you'd have to shovel it."

"We wouldn't mind!"
"After the fifth or sixth snowfall? Yes, yes you would..."

They wouldn't even make it through the first shovelling before asking you to get a snow blower.

And the magic of new snow wears off pretty quick, as it gets muddy, slushy, and yellow.

Got a friend in Canada or the northeast? Send the kids on a 'winter wonderland' vacation, with explicit instructions to the friend that they're to do all the shoveling. :D

Jesus, LM, that's awful. Feel what you feel.

After failing to get a second interview four times, I dropped $222 on a month of AutoCAD. I spent a week on basic tutorials, now I'm digging into AutoCAD Electrical ones.

It's an amazing program, I can see why it's so popular in engineering and architectural industries. Hopefully it's a good boost to my resume.

I've given up on Van Helsing. It seemed like it might have been building up to a series climax and conclusion, but it's become apparent that they're just dragging it on as long as they can until it gets canceled.

*sigh*

Supernatural's ending was satisfying though, Mrs Sunrise even cried.

NobodysHome wrote:

"Well, when ARE you going to start drinking again?"

This is the kind of question only someone who has never in their life had to deal with addiction or mental illness could ask.

In this day and age, I feel like they also have to be willfully stupid to not recognize the nature of addiction.

Also, HAPPY TURKEY DAY EVERYONE!!!

Fun fact: there is one area code in the US that is cell phones only, and that is the 917 area code in NYC. Since NYC has the greatest density of phone numbers (with 7 or 8 area codes for landlines as it is), they set up a special cell phone area code before the rule came out about not doing that, so it is a grandfathered exception.

Oh wow, I still have my 917 number from ~10 years ago, and I never knew this.

Congrats, Vid, so happy for you and the Ms!

Its a weird feeling when you beat the endgame boss, and realize that one or more earlier bosses were a lot tougher.

I feel like there's gotta be a slang word for this.

Yesterday Mrs Sunrise and I introduced Homunculus #1 to Kill Bill, and he loved it. As do I, it has two of my favorite villain monologues of all time:

The biggest R I feel is regret

Superman was born Superman

Oh, and the theme track by Chingon is a total earworm that's still stuck in my head.

I am pretty sure the talks about American health insurance are taking us dangerously close into politicis kill-zone.

Though I am not sure if mocking American health-care system counts as politicis or is merely unelegant as kicking someone who is down.

The fact that healthcare reform is controversial is much like the fact that punching nazis has become controversial: It's a horribly grim commentary in and of itself on U.S. politics, and that's all I'll say.

Wow, I guess if entire categories of food made me nauseous I'd be pickier too. :p

Y'all are way too picky about restaurants.

Or maybe I just love eating.

I vomited up my dinner tonight, so I am now in the ER to deal with my kidney stone. I was hoping it'd pass on its own, but my doctor was very specific about going to the ER if I started vomiting.

In better news, I got yet another interview!

Yesterday was very good-news/bad-news.

The good news is that a consulting firm I applied to last week called to set up an interview today!

The bad news is that I was diagnosed with a kidney stone later in the day. The pain is not excruciating, so I'm hoping it passes on its own in the next couple of days.

Limeylongears wrote:

Democracy in action.

I wish I had had the imagination and the talent to pull something like that when my father was on the city council. My friends and I would have died laughing about it for weeks.

I love all the people trying to be respectful, but totally losing it under their masks.

"Think of the children!!!"

Love it.

Mrs Sunrise and I are two sessions into a 5e campaign, and we've already 'derailed' it. Airquotes, because the DMs have said they can adapt the story to roll with it. And by 'we' I mean mostly me, as I was the one to turn on our NPC chaperone. In my defense, I thought that the plot was about fleeing from or killing him, it was just a question of when.

Roleplaying again has reignited my interest in DMing, and the speed at which we've derailed the game has me inspired to put together a sandbox. I've always run plot-based campaigns, yet I'm kinda in Mark's friend's position -- for one reason or another my campaigns never get terribly far, and I always end up exhausted and underwhelmed from planning my own story.

So I'm gonna try the 'dungeon plus three adventure hooks' sandbox model. Enough choices to give the players agency and direction, but not so many that it feels overwhelming and directionless. The story is what happens as the PCs push toward their chosen hooks.

My interview went mostly well, though I did definitely flub one technical question. Either way it's best to assume that every interview is a dead end until one isn't, so back to the job apps!

Got my first job interview on Monday!

Feeling more confident than I was job searching five years ago, but just the thought of the impending interview is stressing me out. Will be prepping through the weekend...

Speaking of superficial voters, I've been helping my sister research her ballot for the first time AND I AM SO PROUD OF HER!!! Our mother deserves all the credit for getting my sister to this point, she's been impressing upon my sister for years the importance of government and voting.

*sigh*

We got the ballot for Yellow, Mrs Sunrise's now-estranged friend who moved out last year, in the mail today. Which isn't surprising, as we've been getting Yellow's mail since, and normally I'm happy to just toss it but voting is too important. So I'm gonna deliver their ballot, along with a FFS CHANGE YOUR ADDRESS ALREADY note.

I began watching She-Ra purely because I thought it would be simple brain candy to watch while I'm stuck in front of the tv for my 2 hours every day. I never saw the original, so it wasn't even nostalgia.

But I'm pleasantly surprised that it's really good. I'm in season 2 and I'm loving the characters and the slowly-revealed history of the world.

In better news, I am not officially laid off until the end of Monday, but yesterday I handed in my office keys and laptop, then my boss and I wished each other well.

And so begins the job search...

NobodysHome wrote:

EDIT: It all starts with the photoelectric effect studied by Einstein that proved quantization of electrons (hence "quantum mechanics"). Once you show that there's a minimum allowable unit in the universe, everything else follows pretty quickly (and crazily). But every college kid repeats the experiment. I did it. Shiro's son is doing it now. One of those fundamental, "Change the universe" experiments that you can do in any college physics lab.

Interesting. I'll check it out.

So because I love visuals and I have nothing to do at work -- knock on wood -- I watched a vid of the Single-Slit Experiment, and then made google-drawings of it. Here and here.)

If I understand this right, many photons pass through a wide slit, in other words those photons' positional uncertainty is high. Which means their momentum (momental?) uncertainty is low. In other words, photons passing through a wide slit travel in more or less straight lines.

When the slit is narrowed, the photons' positional uncertainty shrinks way down, which forces their momental uncertainty way up. In other words, the few photons which make it through the slit scatter in a cone pattern. But because space itself is quantized, those few photons can't just blur into wider photons or split into more photons as they go, each photon has to probabilistically exist in more and more 'holes' as they go.

Do I have it right?

(Almost certainly apocryphal, but what I've "heard" is that the atom was dreamed up precisely to deal with Zeno's dichotomy paradox. But Zeno was a fun guy, as you can tell from the rest of the entries. And the version of Zeno's paradox presented to me was significantly different: It takes a finite amount of time to get halfway to your destination. Once you're there, it takes a finite amount of time to get halfway again. And so on, and so forth, until you're adding up an infinite amount of time which must be infinite and therefore you never get there...)

Philosophize This! mentioned the halfway-there paradox in an early episode, and I still don't see how it's a problem. I mean we walk for example in roughly equivalent strides, not in halfway-there strides.

EDIT: It all starts with the photoelectric effect studied by Einstein that proved quantization of electrons (hence "quantum mechanics"). Once you show that there's a minimum allowable unit in the universe, everything else follows pretty quickly (and crazily). But every college kid repeats the experiment. I did it. Shiro's son is doing it now. One of those fundamental, "Change the universe" experiments that you can do in any college physics lab.

Interesting. I'll check it out.

Tequila Sunrise wrote:

Loving this conversation though!

(1) Heisenberg's just the tip of the iceberg, and the one most people relate to. "We can't even measure where something is with perfect precision!"

The other relevant one is particle decay: Every second of existence, a particle may or may not decay. Space isn't "empty", it's a vast sea of particles spontaneously appearing and just as spontaneously disappearing. In a single cubic meter of space you'd have trouble measuring it, but across the vastness of space the entire cosmos is eternally "frothing" with creation and destruction. At the macroscopic level, everything's predictable and measurable to any degree of precision you'd care to apply. Even something as small as a DNA molecule is unlikely to be affected by any quantum effect. You have to get much, much smaller, down to the scale of electrons to even have a hope of detecting this eternal random nonsense. Here's a nice BBC article on it.

(2) Next, we get to the most-overhyped theory ever developed in Mathematics (though it was actually a weather forecaster who found it): The Butterfly Effect. Short (and probably off by a bit) story: A forecaster was running the same simulation over and over again to measure different things. Growing tired, he omitted a decimal place, putting in something like 275 instead of 275.1. The entire predicted weather pattern changed, and a whole new branch of mathematics (chaos theory) was born: In extremely complicated situations, a teensy change to the starting conditions leads to massive differences in the final outcome.

So, you see where I'm going here. By quantum noise, nothing is absolutely deterministic; there is always an iota of chance, and if you put the same exact person in the same exact starting position making the same exact decision, their starting state will not be exactly the same as it was before; it's impossible. And even if you did, there's a finite probability that quantum physics would go ahead and mess up your "perfect state", because why not?
Now you have the human brain, an incredibly complex decision-making machine, firing millions of neurons to make a single decision. If the starting conditions were off by even the slightest amount, a different decision might arise.

So in the realm of physics and mathematics, I see nothing preventing free will. And I'm no theologian.

Though one of my best lower-division teachers was a rabbi teaching logic...

1. I understand that Heisenberg's isn't just about the effect of observation on quantum particles -- although I did at first think so, thanks to that classic electron/photon example. Very misleading.

Anyway, what I'm getting at is: I'm not reading anything which rules out the possibility of some deterministic mechanic(s) underlying that quantum 'noise.' What I'm reading is "Quantum particles sometimes act in unexpected ways, and currently we can't explain why."

2. Likewise, the butterfly effect doesn't have anything to say about our topic -- it just says that minute differences can deterministically cause huge effects.

Sure, Woran and others may have piles of unpainted minis; I do too. But, do you ALSO have piles of unpainted (and sometimes unassembled) molded dungeon pieces?

Also, to paraphrase Lucile Bluth: "I don't CARE much for D&D 5e"

The game was... meh. The people are fun. The actual system just made me feel like an old 2e game with kits all over again... which is to say, reminded me why I went to 3x and beyond for systems that allowed me to BUILD a character from the ground up and have a tad more agency/expectations if my GM said they're running by RAW.

I won't bother you all with a rant. Suffice it to say, PF 1e still feels like my "safe place" in TTRPGs. Used to be Marvel Super Heroes, for a brief time it was Werewolf, then 3x and now PF for like, 10 years.

Also also… why do some DM's have such an issue with player agency? This is now the third DM I've had who basically sits on a throne and leads the party by the nose. I grudgingly accept such a playstyle if we're running an AP but he bragged about this being a homebrewed adventure and setting.

There weren't clues for us to follow; there was no choice in the matter. Elder guy in the village is sick; our starting characters aren't from said village so we have no stake in the fight other than to be dogooders; paladin uses lay on hands/cure ANY disease, fails. Rando in the room says "there's a healing font in a cave past some ruins. You'll go there now to save the elder" and boom; we're on the job.

Anyway... please GUIDE your players unless they ask to be led like sheep. That's my commentary.

"Rulings, not rules" /s

Tequila Sunrise wrote:

NobodysHome wrote:

Tequila Sunrise wrote:

I've been listening to the Philosophize This! podcast, and I'm feeling particularly philosophical today so I google-drew a flowchart of how (I think) will, choice, and consequences work.

I'm sure many of us are aware that two of the perennial questions of philosophy are (1) In what sense are our wills free or deterministic, and (2) If they're deterministic, how can we justify holding each other responsible for our choices?

And to detour into theology,
** spoiler omitted **

So anyway, feel free to take a look and tell me to keep my day job!

Interestingly enough, for me, taking quantum physics resolved any issue of free will.

If you measure the momentum and velocity of a muon traveling through space to the best of your ability, and you have the computing power to predict every single interaction and influence that that muon will experience in the next billion years, there's still a significant chance you'll be wrong about its final position. Quantum mechanics says so. Heck, you can't even tell me whether or not it'll decay in that time span.

So if fundamental particles can't be entirely deterministic, how can the human brain be so?

I've always been skeptical of considering quantum mechanics with regards to will, because:

1) Do very tiny particles truly have a degree of spontaneity, or is our current understanding of them simply incomplete? Or does our current technology simply lack the fine precision necessary to predict deterministic behavior at that scale? Admittedly I've never taken quantum physics, so maybe these questions have been answered.

2) Even if very tiny particles do have a degree of true spontaneity, does that really matter on the scale of our brains' chemistry and electrical signals? To make an analogy, we can't practically predict a single water molecule's

...

1. I read a couple articles to try once again to wrap my head around the uncertainty principle. (The wikipedia page is incomprehensible, though probably much more exhaustive.) As I understand it, Heisenberg's says that our ability to precisely know location and momentum of a particle is limited, not that there is inherent spontaneity in particle behavior. In other words, our observations are practically limited so particles sometimes appear to act erratically, but there may be some underlying deterministic mechanism that we're simply not aware of. Am I mistaken?

2. I did a little research, and from my calculations even a single neuron firing means hundreds of billions of electrons moving across a synapse. So even if once in a while an electron goes haywire and leaps to a nearby neuron, that might be...a momentary itch in my toe? I remain skeptical.

Loving this conversation though!

Tequila Sunrise wrote:

I've been listening to the Philosophize This! podcast, and I'm feeling particularly philosophical today so I google-drew a flowchart of how (I think) will, choice, and consequences work.

I'm sure many of us are aware that two of the perennial questions of philosophy are (1) In what sense are our wills free or deterministic, and (2) If they're deterministic, how can we justify holding each other responsible for our choices?

And to detour into theology,
** spoiler omitted **

So anyway, feel free to take a look and tell me to keep my day job!

Interestingly enough, for me, taking quantum physics resolved any issue of free will.

If you measure the momentum and velocity of a muon traveling through space to the best of your ability, and you have the computing power to predict every single interaction and influence that that muon will experience in the next billion years, there's still a significant chance you'll be wrong about its final position. Quantum mechanics says so. Heck, you can't even tell me whether or not it'll decay in that time span.

So if fundamental particles can't be entirely deterministic, how can the human brain be so?

I've always been skeptical of considering quantum mechanics with regards to will, because:

1) Do very tiny particles truly have a degree of spontaneity, or is our current understanding of them simply incomplete? Or does our current technology simply lack the fine precision necessary to predict deterministic behavior at that scale? Admittedly I've never taken quantum physics, so maybe these questions have been answered.

2) Even if very tiny particles do have a degree of true spontaneity, does that really matter on the scale of our brains' chemistry and electrical signals? To make an analogy, we can't practically predict a single water molecule's position as it vibrates at X degrees or the position of that molecule's electrons. But there are ~1.67 sextillion water molecules in a single drop of water, so that atomic (quantum?) uncertainty gets averaged out into very deterministic behavior when we apply heat or voltage to that drop of water.

Admittedly I lack any real background in quantum physics though, so I'm open to modifying my skepticism.

I've been listening to the Philosophize This! podcast, and I'm feeling particularly philosophical today so I google-drew a flowchart of how (I think) will, choice, and consequences work.

I'm sure many of us are aware that two of the perennial questions of philosophy are (1) In what sense are our wills free or deterministic, and (2) If they're deterministic, how can we justify holding each other responsible for our choices?

And to detour into theology,

So anyway, feel free to take a look and tell me to keep my day job!

Hope it's a false alarm, NH!

Completing my very last equipment inspection before my layoff.

The boss and I have serious senioritis.

Orthos wrote:

Tacticslion wrote:

Orthos wrote:

And I know Scint and a few other people who are always set to Invisible so people don't know if they're on or not.

Sheesh! Just call me out by name, next time, why don't you?!

>:I

:D

Gonna be honest, I thought you were just legit not online most of the time I was. So,I wasnt including you in that at all, at least not intentionally. ;)

I so often am that I always forget to change it when I'm not.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

...Discord has statuses?

(I like discord, but I find it busy and confusing.)

So, having a daughter of my own, I am able to empathize more with other parents now. Consequently, despite knowing I'm 100% in the right to cut her off from her granddaughter, because she's a toxic b~#!! I don't want influencing my kid, I wanted to give C$#@zilla another chance. I can only imagine how hard it would be to have my child cut me off thirty years from now, and even though it was Tala's choice (and I told her she's free to see her mom as much as she wants without me or our daughter), Tala's pissed enough at her mom for making her choose between her new family and old that she too is avoiding her mom.

So I called and told her to start talking.
** spoiler omitted **...

My father in law refused to come to our wiccan wedding two years ago, saying he "didn't want to dis the one true god," and Mrs Sunrise hasn't talked to him since. He's a pleasant enough guy, I met him while we were dating, but I'm totally happy to never see or hear from him again. When someone shows you their bad character, especially if in your MIL's case over and over again, you have to draw a line. Forgiveness is one thing, endless second chances is another.

Love the Cloisters.

Mrs Sunrise's favorite book is The Last Unicorn, and she also loves the old 80s animated film of it. In the opening credits, they use that famous unicorn tapestry, among other imagery.

A couple years ago we went to the Cloisters on the way to the airport, and all of a sudden Mrs. Sunrise gets super excited and even cried a little IIRC. Turns out she hadn't known the unicorn image in the opening credits came from a real tapestry, the one she found in the Cloisters. (See the second image in the wikipedia link above.)

An old college buddy invited me and Mrs Sunrise to a campaign DMed by herself and her husband.

My character is a shifter druid, which are apparently high powered again in 5e.

Oh and it's an evil campaign set in the underdark, what could go wrong? I have darkvision, don't know about those other suckers.

This looks good.

Frederick Douglas was a boss.

EDIT: Yessir, may I have another?

I don't know what "I got third partied!" means but judging by how pissed Tiny T-Rex is I'm guessing it's dastardly.

Maybe it's the dark side of being the most popular dinosaur in town?

I've already accepted VIPs to two parties, how am I going to make time for a third one?!

NobodysHome wrote:

Orthos wrote:

** spoiler omitted **

** spoiler omitted **

** spoiler omitted **

Barely political:

EDIT: The emperor has new clothes?

Tequila Sunrise wrote:

captain yesterday wrote:

Freehold DM wrote:

Its old DC RPGs for me. Terrible system, but perfectly researched each character and their powers and flaws.

Palladium Books RPGs for me, I can't help myself.

Back in the 90s as a kid/teen, I was under the mistaken assumption that all D&D supplements were part of some cohesive whole, that there was an overarching vision of the D&D multiverse, and so of course I had to have them all.

Sort of true, if you buy into the idea that every multiverse, somewhere, connects to the city of Sigil in Planescape somehow.

I once had a team go from Forgotten Realms to Dragonlance by traveling through there.

Looove Planescape, even the faux-London slang. They did as well as could be done in tying other settings into one multiverse, but there were details that inevitably conflicted. And then there was that one creature from a completely different multiverse that made my left eye twitch. (The Keepers?)

But overall great setting! DiTerlizzi was the high point of D&D artwork, IMO.

Freehold DM wrote:

Its old DC RPGs for me. Terrible system, but perfectly researched each character and their powers and flaws.

Palladium Books RPGs for me, I can't help myself.

Back in the 90s as a kid/teen, I was under the mistaken assumption that all D&D supplements were part of some cohesive whole, that there was an overarching vision of the D&D multiverse, and so of course I had to have them all.