“Test Post, Please Ignore,” and that guy who took increasingly elaborate pictures of himself taking the previous picture of his camera were high points for me.

Russia would never threaten China with nukes, because 1) China ALSO has nukes, and 2) China has been the only thing keeping Russia afloat recently.

But it would have to be a scorched earth kind of invasion. The kind that pisses off basically everyone, because it leaves every single Russian, military, or citizen, dead. They’d have to come in, take everything, and kill everything. Take the land.

First of all, if you’re being invaded by an army planning to genocide your entire population, then you have no reason not to use every weapon in your arsenal. If the options are A: China kills 100% of your populace or B: Launch nukes and even 1% of your populace survives whatever follows, then B is the most rational choice.

Secondly, there’s no reason to assume that states will make rational decisions to begin with. I’d say the current state of affairs in Ukraine is a very good example of that in action. So even if China wasn’t planning to genocide all of Russia, even if it was some kind of “benevolent” invasion where they were going to tiptoe around the flower beds, gently pry Putin out of the Kremlin, and basically leave everything the same except that now Russians pay for groceries with renminbi instead of rubles… there’s still every reason to imagine that Putin and his top brass would still launch nukes on the mere principle of the thing.

So no, let’s not glibly plan for a fast forward on nuclear Armageddon, thank you very much.

I’ve got an Anbernic 353p and I LOVE it for handheld, but trying to use it as a console has proven tricky. I just want a device that I can plug into my TV and play games on with a minimum of tinkering. I shouldn’t need to remap controllers every time I turn the thing on. I don’t care to follow along with a three+ hour long tutorial to get all the settingsjust right. Plug into TV. Turn on. Play game.

This is where original hardware, or even those SNES Mini or Playstation Classic devices have appeal, because they aren’t tinkering hobby devices, they’re game systems first, last, and only. Everything above and beyond that should be very optional.

We’re cavemen on the Moon, we carry bone harpoons! But there ain’t no whales so we tell caveman tales and sing a whaling tune!

I like that Romero is bypassing LRG

Is there something wrong with LRG that we should know?

That tens of thousands number is always brought up, but it’s an average that is affected by the actions of Spiders Georg, an outlier who should not be counted.

We got a service. We’ve two cats, a dog, and a toddler, and no family closeby to help with child care. We did the math and decided we needed the help. It’s fantastic.

I’ve used the Shokz bone conducting headphones and love them. Not sure if OP can find a model that they can sleep in, but the principle is sound. I got mine because I wanted to be able to listen to music without waking up the baby.

Found it!

The essay is “Thinking About Thinking,” ©1989, collected in the book Magic: The Final Fantasy Collection.

games like Blood

Hot damn, but I loved Blood. Duke Nukem for H. P. Lovecraft dorks!

I’m wondering if I could obtain some kind of old/used android phone, remove all the apps so the home screen is completely empty, transfer via USB or ssh/scp the MP3 files (and metadata + cover art), then have some kind of music player app which would be the only app on the phone/device.

This is exactly what I did. I used an older Moto and uninstalled or disabled everything I didn’t want and only used BlackPlayer EX. It also has halfway decent external speakers so I can just play music directly off the device if I want to. The only thing that doesn’t thrill me is that it’s a full sized phone, which can be a bit awkwardly large at times. It’s been working great, but when the time comes for another device, I might go with one of the little Unihertz models.

There’s RiffTrax. They’re pretty much the only way I can stand to re-watch the Star Wars prequels at this point.

Open the recipe, with all the personal anecdotes and whatnot. Ctrl+F “Print”. This will take you to the print button that is nearly always right above the actual recipe. You can also download the printed recipe pdf for later reference.

I listened to an interview with a woman who did an in-depth study of the loose coalition of websites and social media personalities of which the incel movement is a part. She described it as “funnel shaped,” which is to say that they don’t start with the darkest, most unhinged language. They start by talking to young men who feel lonely and rejected, and they talk about how they shouldn’t feel bad about being men, how they deserve respect and status, and then it goes on from there down the rabbit hole into the really depraved stuff.

The reason this works is because a lot of young men don’t hear those initial encouraging words in a lot of other places. They hear a lot about toxic masculinity and the harm of the patriarchy, and they feel like their identities are being targeted, and they don’t have a lot of positive healthy male role models to turn to.

We need to have ways of talking to men, especially young men, about how they should feel good about themselves, how they should be proud of the good things they can do in the world, how they should be the best versions of themselves that they can be, and all of that in ways that don’t lead down that dark road to toxicity. It’s an incredibly wide ranging problem, and it’s not going to be easy to fix.

Isaac Asimov, a very intelligent person, wrote a lengthy essay to the effect that he had no idea what intelligence was. He talked about how society would generally consider him more intelligent than the nearly illiterate man who repaired his car, and yet whenever something went wrong with his car he would go to his mechanic and listen to his advice as if it was being handed down from the mountaintop by Moses himself, because Isaac Asimov knew fuck all about car repair. He talked about how he thought that supposedly objective IQ tests were generally a series of gates designed by people already considered intelligent to keep themselves in power, and that they totally disregarded huge swaths of indispensable human knowledge and talent. Isaac Asimov, who has been published in literally every section of the Dewey Decimal System, concluded that he had no firm idea as to what exactly “intelligence” even was.

In short, how could one even define “the dumbest 50%”?

And that’s why Thanos should have made everybody half as large as they once were.

Then you just move the planet slightly further away from the sun! Problem solved!