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Well, looks like I owe Fallout 76 an apology. I got uppity tonight and insisted on following up on one of the quests the rest of the group made me skip. It took me to a town they'd said "takes too long".
Yep. An entire tutorial questline and city. Right there. Amazingly well-done and poignant. Not as good now as when the game was first released because... spoilers.
But yes, there ARE tutorials. I was just instructed to skip them all. *sigh*.
EDIT: Speaking of getting uppity tonight...
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When I heard the protesters of quarantine called the Flu Clux Clan it made me laugh a little; when I saw that picture afterwards, it made me laugh a lot.
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I f#+@ing hate having room mates.
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Put more tiles into the garden and only f++#ed up one finger in a minor way.
Also f*ck whomever put all those stones and pieces of glass in the soil.
I know! Right?!?
Whilst digging up the front of my house (formerly the 'Bushes of DOOM' area) I have found,
LArge rocks, (?)
Pieces of bricks, presumably from when they built the house,
Pieces of glass, Dark green and brown, pretty obviously from beer bottles,
Roofing nails, From the morons that replaced my roof. (a LOT of these)
A rusted screwdriver,
A "Y" shaped tool with a HEX driver on each end. I think its brass, cuz I scrubbed it and it came out clean but dark, no rust, (as opposed to the screwdriver, which was a lost cause) ;P
And of course the usual assortment of bottle caps, old balls (from neighbors dogs) etc etc.
But really?!? GLASS?!? The rocks at least make a little sense, they probably tried to have an actual 'garden' there once, but glass,... sheeesh.
;P
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Hey, at least YOU probably don't have a house built in 1929 that had a "handyman" owner in the 1950s who felt that ALL repairs were better with scrap wood:
- Termite damage to a 18"x6" joist? Nail some scrap 2"x4"s to it to hold it up!
- Need a new studio? Build the frame and roof out of scrap wood. Rafters aren't long enough? Nail some shorter 2"x4"s together to make up the distance! Roof sags? Add more roofing until it doesn't!
- Need wiring? All this hot/neutral/ground stuff doesn't matter! Just twist some copper together, wrap it in electrical tape, and call it good!
- Need to extend the garage by 6'? Scrap wood and corrugated plastic! Yeah!
Seriously. The entire studio had hot and neutral reversed on grounded outlets. The electric ovens and stovetop they put in had junctions that were just great balls of electric tape. Every time I open a wall I have to wince because I know 90% of my work is going to be fixing whatever the 1950s owner did in THAT wall.
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Impus Major: Oh, yeah, baby! Happiness is contagious, and I'm patient zero!
How can you NOT love the boy?
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Put more tiles into the garden and only f++#ed up one finger in a minor way.
Also f*ck whomever put all those stones and pieces of glass in the soil.
I know! Right?!?
Whilst digging up the front of my house (formerly the 'Bushes of DOOM' area) I have found,
LArge rocks, (?)
Pieces of bricks, presumably from when they built the house,
Pieces of glass, Dark green and brown, pretty obviously from beer bottles,
Roofing nails, From the morons that replaced my roof. (a LOT of these)
A rusted screwdriver,
A "Y" shaped tool with a HEX driver on each end. I think its brass, cuz I scrubbed it and it came out clean but dark, no rust, (as opposed to the screwdriver, which was a lost cause) ;P
And of course the usual assortment of bottle caps, old balls (from neighbors dogs) etc etc.But really?!? GLASS?!? The rocks at least make a little sense, they probably tried to have an actual 'garden' there once, but glass,... sheeesh.
;P
The street where I live used to have a brick factory on it, back in t'day. Guess what I run into every couple of feet every time I try digging in my garden?
Yes, that's right!
WORMS.
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Impus Major: Oh, yeah, baby! Happiness is contagious, and I'm patient zero!
How can you NOT love the boy?
Now I want to write a cheery '60s sunshine pop song with that line it.
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On the plus side, suddenly I'm not a weirdo for avoiding crowded events.
Linux is alive and running on a partition of my desktop again, and geez...
- Sorting and clearing my old backups? No problem! Linux can read disks from MacOS 7-10, plus Windows 95, XP, and beyond, so I've got one system that can read every backup disk I've ever created and help me sort the nonsense. Plus unpack tarballs and rars without having to explain in horrific detail to Windows what the heck I'm talking about.
- Everything just runs faster, from downloads to page loads on web browsers. It's like having a new computer without actually spending any money. Win!
- I can use this avatar again! Woot!
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Put more tiles into the garden and only f++#ed up one finger in a minor way.
Also f*ck whomever put all those stones and pieces of glass in the soil.
I know! Right?!?
Whilst digging up the front of my house (formerly the 'Bushes of DOOM' area) I have found,
LArge rocks, (?)
Pieces of bricks, presumably from when they built the house,
Pieces of glass, Dark green and brown, pretty obviously from beer bottles,
Roofing nails, From the morons that replaced my roof. (a LOT of these)
A rusted screwdriver,
A "Y" shaped tool with a HEX driver on each end. I think its brass, cuz I scrubbed it and it came out clean but dark, no rust, (as opposed to the screwdriver, which was a lost cause) ;P
And of course the usual assortment of bottle caps, old balls (from neighbors dogs) etc etc.But really?!? GLASS?!? The rocks at least make a little sense, they probably tried to have an actual 'garden' there once, but glass,... sheeesh.
;P
There are a s$## ton of roots but I've been using big pliers to help me pull them out.
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Hey, at least YOU probably don't have a house built in 1929 that had a "handyman" owner in the 1950s who felt that ALL repairs were better with scrap wood:
- Termite damage to a 18"x6" joist? Nail some scrap 2"x4"s to it to hold it up!
- Need a new studio? Build the frame and roof out of scrap wood. Rafters aren't long enough? Nail some shorter 2"x4"s together to make up the distance! Roof sags? Add more roofing until it doesn't!
- Need wiring? All this hot/neutral/ground stuff doesn't matter! Just twist some copper together, wrap it in electrical tape, and call it good!
- Need to extend the garage by 6'? Scrap wood and corrugated plastic! Yeah!Seriously. The entire studio had hot and neutral reversed on grounded outlets. The electric ovens and stovetop they put in had junctions that were just great balls of electric tape. Every time I open a wall I have to wince because I know 90% of my work is going to be fixing whatever the 1950s owner did in THAT wall.
Not that bad but there upstairs floor is angled that if you put a marble on one end of the house it will easily go to the other end. Also, most walls arent straight (as in, no 90 degre angles)
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Linux is alive and running on a partition of my desktop again, and geez...
- Sorting and clearing my old backups? No problem! Linux can read disks from MacOS 7-10, plus Windows 95, XP, and beyond, so I've got one system that can read every backup disk I've ever created and help me sort the nonsense. Plus unpack tarballs and rars without having to explain in horrific detail to Windows what the heck I'm talking about.
- Everything just runs faster, from downloads to page loads on web browsers. It's like having a new computer without actually spending any money. Win!
- I can use this avatar again! Woot!
Running a whole corporate enviroment on linux is one of the more fun challenges I've had. Its not bug free, but the bugs are a a lot more interesting then on windows.
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Yes, facts and lies are both political. That said, dammed if I'm gonna call fritzy.
TL:DR - nobody ever changes their minds, and those who agree already agree, so what's the actual, practical purpose of political debate?This question is a favorite of mine. Are you familiar with the Enlightenment idea of reason and debate?Nope. I could probably Google it.
The very few people who are open minded enough to change their mind tend to do their own research anyway, and thus you're usually telling people things they either already know or obstinately don't care about.
But then I'm a cynical bastard who assumes the worst of people...not because it is in my nature, but because over almost 40 years it's been forced upon me through experiencing intetaction with humanity. I used to be an optimist, but I kept being proven wrong.
As far as I can tell, the only people open minded and ignorant enough to benefit from debate are minors, who usually parrot their family opinions anyway, with exceedingly rare exceptions like Orthos, who are as scarce as liveborn snakes.
I think you're further along the jaded path than I am, but I'm a natural optimist as well and I'm continually flabbergasted at the way people cling to nonsense beliefs. Anyway, take the following as you will -- it's become a favorite topic of mine, so I just like talking about it. Some of it is probably old news for you and others, maybe all of it is, but it helps to put thoughts into words.
Mostly about brain science, spoilered for length:
The age of enlightenment gave rise to the idea that there is an objective reality, that reality can be tested to weed out false beliefs from true ones, and that people are essentially rational. This idea worked well, in that it produced the scientific method, which really is an amazing sieve for finding accurate theories. But this enlightenment idea also assumes that ideas are ethereal things that can be accepted or rejected at will. Combine this with the assumption that people are essentially rational, and you end up with the belief that if you just give everyone all the information, we'll all eventually reason ourselves to the same conclusions.
Without putting it into so many words, I believed all this until 2016. People are basically rational and good, and things are inevitably headed in the right general direction...but obviously, November was a huge wakeup call.
Some time in 2017 I was listening to NPR and I heard George Lakoff being interviewed about his work -- brain science and politics. That day I ordered his famous book Don't Think of an Elephant! And it was mind-blowing.
It turns out that enlightenment reason is a myth. Ideas are actually the neurons that make up our brains and the connections between them -- i.e., physical objects, not immaterial spirits. And neurons are like muscles -- use or disuse makes them stronger or weaker. This is why it's so incredibly rare to see anyone change their opinion in the moment -- because those encounters are just the very final bench press that makes a given neuron/idea strong enough to overpower a previous idea.
Many ideas are mutually inhibiting, like muscles. For example, the stronger our "people are basically rational" neurons are, the weaker our "people are basically irrational" neurons are. Strengthen one, and the other is weakened.
And people think, largely without even conscious awareness, using metaphors -- we don't see facts in some contextless "just how they are" state. We use metaphors to make sense of facts, and there are a few nearly-universal metaphors to demonstrate this. My favorite example that Lakoff uses is the emotion = temperature metaphor: love is warm, and isolation is cold. And this is because we feel love when we're safe and warm in a parent's arms as a baby, and we feel lonely when we've been left in a cool crib to kick off our blankets. This is why people from nearly all cultures say that loving people are warm, and aloof people are cold.
Further, every word conjures up a mental frame -- a collection of associations and images framed by that word. For example when someone says "elephant," our neurons fire and without will, many ideas are conjured -- long trunks, tusks, Dumbo, long memory, the republican party, David Attenborough, etc.. The particulars might be different from person to person, but just the passive act of reading or hearing a word spoken can strengthen an idea, and weaken the opposing idea. This is where Lakoff's book's title comes from -- tell anyone "Don't think of an elephant," and they can't help but think of an elephant and all the ideas included within their elephant-frame.
The upshot of all of this is that swaying opinions and beliefs can be done reliably and repeatedly...over long stretched of years, with massive leadership coordination, using proper language savvy. We see this in action everyday, where the basically honest yet unsavvy news media and progressive-leaning leaders are still operating on the myth of enlightenment myth -- still just throwing lone facts and statistics at the public and expecting everyone to reason ourselves to a single conclusion, still trying to report "just the facts" and thus falling directly into conservative language traps -- while the massive conservative ecosystem of think tanks, infotainment, and elites are winning America's soul inch by slow yet steady inch.
Facts are important, and facts need to be called upon -- but facts alone are impotent. People need to be told over and over and over again how and why the facts matter. That's how opinions change.
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...spoilered stuff...
So, none of your stuff was political, just spoilered for length, but I think one of the really fundamental things lacking in the overall discussion of impression versus reality versus neurons versus learning is the fundamental importance of the single idea, "I could be wrong..."
And THAT is why the scientific method and scientific training is so vitally important worldwide, and, unfortunately (too short to spoiler), why so many governments and organizations fight so vehemently against scientific training.
Every point you make is a valid one. Yet I spent every formative year of my life, from being raised by a physics professor who ruthlessly used the Socratic method on me, through degrees in math and physics at Berkeley where a rabbi turned my entire understanding of the universe on its head (look up Gödel's incompleteness theorems and imagine being an idealistic young mathematician/physicist and getting hit by those and Heisenberg at the same time), to grad school, to being a teacher with the philosophy, "When you start to believe that you have nothing left to learn from your students, it's time for you to retire..."
...and that vastness of experience is solely sufficient to allow me to step back when someone questions a belief of mine and ask, "Is it possible that I'm wrong here?"
Decades of mental training, and my limit is to actually question myself. (OK, yeah. I've been known to change my opinion. Look at Gavin Newsom. But I'll be the first to admit that I am VERY slow and require a LARGE amount of evidence to change my mind.)
That's pretty darned impressive ingraining.
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Impus Major: Oh, yeah, baby! Happiness is contagious, and I'm patient zero!
How can you NOT love the boy?
That is freaking adorable.
Sharoth post some of the most interesting things.
My Dad always said that we should celebrate our mistakes, which is why he never failed to throw me a birthday party every year.
Ouch...
Ofcourse we all know dogs are fine communicators.
Indubidibubidibly.
Don't knock it if it works. Not our fault your noses don't.
Sharoth post some of the most interesting things.
Thanks. Of course, I am also watching this right now.
Sharoth post some of the most interesting things.Thanks. Of course, I am also watching this right now.
Well I did say some so that is fair. XD
Well I did say some so that is fair. XDSharoth post some of the most interesting things.Thanks. Of course, I am also watching this right now.
~laughter~ Thanks! /s
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It seems one of my favorite places is in trouble
There is a forbidden planet in birmingham.
When we were there last we ended up with nearly enough stuff to fill a suitcase.
It is so quiet....
Also WTF gran?
What do you mean what? "Quote of the day: "My adrenal gland excreted all over itself." I just don't understand why?
From the Great British Baking Show.
"For dessert week you need to make a layered meringue cake that you can share with your friends"
And we're the ones that supposedly eat too much sugar!
So, according to the product page forum the new ancestry in book 3 of Extinction Curse (the Shoony) the new ancestry resemble Pug people.
Except they look like bulldogs.
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I f$~&ing hate having room mates.
My last housecat used to say that to me all the time.
...
HEY!
Impus Major: Oh, yeah, baby! Happiness is contagious, and I'm patient zero!
How can you NOT love the boy?
{sticks head out of hole}
ಠ_ಠ
Nope, too early for that much happiness. I'll try again in six more. {disappears}