wjrii

joined 9 months ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 19 hours ago

It's a little pricy, but we absolutely love this Cuisinart Air Fryer/Toaster Over thing for anything that was properly cooked elsewhere, though I've used it for halfway decent roasted potato wedges straight from the knife. Basket Air Fryers hold so little as to be more frustrating than anything, and stacking deep defeats the purpose half the time. I have no idea if the grill setting works well, though.

Bake setting, 325, 2-3 minutes is all you need for most pizza reheatings.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 days ago

Incoming Chinese carmaker Xpeng

Australian firm Pegasus Aerospace Corp received airworthiness certification from CASA for its driveable Pegasus E flying police car last year

you would need a pilot’s licence – not simply a car licence – to be able to eventually fly the X2 in Australia.

likely to be bungled in red tape for some time before it could take to the skies

We can take orders.... you can secure one with a fully refundable $100 deposit.

So I guess a more accurate headline would be this:

"Australia's" "first" "flying car" "now" "on sale."

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Sweet Tea. The Southern US kind, black tea brewed with more and more sugar until, ideally, it’s actually a supersaturated solution. Then served cold over ice. Literal diabetes juice.

I don’t have it often, but it’s the best tea in the world because, on the whole, tea is garbage water.

Fight me. 😂

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

I'm pretty basic, but Tetris and Duck Tales come to mind.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

Why not keep it simple? [email protected] or [email protected] seem like they'd be welcoming.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Top-two primary and/or ranked choice voting to start. I'd also like to see the popular vote compact come into play for the presidential election. Eventually, for Congress I'd like a hybrid system that accepts the existence of parties so it can manage their worst impulses and give representation to smaller constituencies.

For the remaining geographic regions, set a certain standard for mathematical compactness; this doesn't have to be too aggressive, as a long thin district can be completely sensible, but we don't need the devil's fractals many places have now. Also/or require districting committees to try to draw districts that would roughly approximate the state's popular vote percentages. We know they're excellent at isolating voters by party, so let them, but force them to play around on the edges to get one seat here, or get out front of some changing demographics here, not the wholesale cracking and packing we see from both parties now.

It also all needs to be legislated at the federal level or even by constitutional amendment, but honestly we're kind of fucked. The people who need to be reined in the most very much live in states where they are overrepresented in voting power, and I don't see them giving it up.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

As long as you know what it is, consensus as to okay-ness or better, then it's still a decent metric. Still, "universally okay" is not always what I'm after, nor is it quite the achievement the studios will proclaim.

If you're inclined to take reviews seriously (and it's a whole other discussion, but I very much believe criticism and analysis are worthwhile when done well in their own right) , still better to find a few sources whose takes tend to line up with your own.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Shit, man, I dunno. I already voted. I fly my blue-team flag in a red town. I hope that most of the people voting for him are just insensitive clods who aren't as personally hateful as the jokes they'll laugh at, or that they're somehow stupid enough to have been genuinely convinced that our creaky business-friendly center-left coalition is some sort of economy-dooming experiment in socialism. So yeah, I'm reduced to hoping that a large percentage of my fellow citizens are idiots and/or assholes, rather than actual fascists.

It's too close to know who will win, so things could turn out kinda okay if the Democrats pull it off. If Trump wins, maybe they don't manage the Senate and little of longstanding legislative harm gets passed. Sotomayor should be okay for the next four years, so for SCOTUS itself the damage is likely already done. Finally, I still mostly think that Trump will be content to line his pockets for four years and then pardon himself on the way out. He's too old to inspire any energy to repeal the 22nd amendment, and I don't see anyone behind him ready to slot in as an heir apparent, so maybe the less intensely awful republicans will reclaim some measure of control, or a gaggle of pretenders fragments their base and they can't really get organized to win nationally. A second Trump term is going to fucking suck, though, and a lot of innocent people are going to get hurt all across the world, many more than in a Harris administration, IMHO.

Shit's grim, and the Christian Nationalists see this as their time, possibly their last good chance in their current form, to really seize the reins of power.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

You just get an upvote for Chris Smither. Leave the Light On, Time Stands Still, his cover of Visions of Johanna, plus a dozen others... all brilliant.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I'd like to do a proper split as a project, but I don't properly touch-type, so there's a pretty large learning curve that I'm not particularly interested in overcoming. Before I accepted my truth, my second handwire was a permanent split that just bundled the matrix wires into a ratchet-ass cable. It works fine, but I just never used it, even enough to want to do a refined version.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I've been making mechanical keyboards "from scratch" for the last year or so. I leverage a lot of pre-built parts and existing tools of course, but I tweak the standard layouts to fit what I want to do, fabricate the plates and cases with my laser engraver and 3D printer, assemble everything, wire them up to the switches and the microcontroller (usually "dead bug" hand-wiring, but I have done a very basic PCB in KiCAD as well), and configure the firmware. It leverages a lot of my other interests, provides an opportunity to improve incrementally between projects, and results in a product that is legitimately pleasant to use.

Little bastards are piling up, though.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

It's sort of inherent to scrabble-like apps, where there's so many ways you could mess something up. I am not above taking a flyer on things, but I try not to do it any more than I assume my opponents would. Anyway, having played a lot by now, I know most of the common and medium-weird words, so there's not a lot for me to guess at, and I'm only rarely surprised when something an opponent plays is a word.

 

As a child, we had a book of scary stories that included some absolutely ghastly but entrancing pen-and-ink art. I'm 99% sure they're not "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark". I don't remember much, but a few things stuck with me:

  • a picture of a diver in an old-timey deep sea diving suit and maybe a sea-witch type character draped in seaweed.
  • at least one really creepy drawing of a willow tree
  • one or more of the pictures also involved a classically gothic cliffside along the sea.
  • I want to say the binding was green or teal
  • no dust jacket that I recall, but it could have been missing
  • as a child, it struck me as old but not ancient, so I'm guessing it was from the late 60s or early 70s maybe
  • my parents let me read it, and they were Mormons and frankly not really readers, so I'm guessing it was sort of vaguely considered age appropriate in those days if parents didn't look too close.

Style-wise, as I recall it kind of split the difference between Edward Gorey (thanks, @[email protected] for unearthing my nightmare fuel) and the semi-famous Darth Maul concept art from Iain McCaig. I have downloaded the first two volumes of SStTitD, as they are technically old enough to be the ones, but while they're definitely in the same milieu they're not what I'm thinking of. The art in this had heavier linework and IIRC used pen-and-ink crosshatching instead of shading; I also can't find any images in those two that hit me as "THAT'S IT!".

This could absolutely be a wild goose chase down memory lane, but any suggestions?

 

"We've almost got some of their telecommunications cracked; the front end even runs on a laptop!" The Mac that sunk a thousand ships could have been merely clunky product placement, not a bafflingly stupid tech-on-film moment.

"Senator Amidala is in a coma. Even if she recovers, she will never be the same and may not live long." But no.... George had to have his god-damned funeral scene, even if it demanded Simone Biles levels of mental gymnastics to save Carrie Fisher's most emotionally resonant moment from ROTJ, as well as one of the more intriguing OT lore dumps.

Bonus points if a scene was scripted or filmed and got cut.

52
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

So I saw THIS Atlantic article linked on Bluesky and I found myself conflicted, nodding in agreement with almost everything the author wrote, yet simultaneously thinking he sounded exhausting and pretentious himself.

It made me think though, that while this absolutely jibes with everything I've thought after hearing from my acquaintances who have gone on them -- and from extrapolating based on my own understanding of their personalities -- I've never really asked "peers" what they think. Have you been? How was it? Why would you agree to be trapped inside a compacted hotel where you will literally die if you leave at the wrong time?

...also I didn't think I could post the link in [email protected]

EDIT:

After 44 comments, here's where we stand:

  • 28 (including me) responding to the questions

  • 21 have been, 7 (including me) have not.

  • Of the 21, 15 liked it, and 6 didn't (some answers were a bit ambivalent, so I made a judgment call)

  • Of the 7, 5 didn't think they'd like it and 2 implied they might in very specific circumstances. I guess technically I could make 3, but I don't really want to "camp" on a personal family history reenactment.

So, of those who have been, the vast majority saw value in it. The people who haven't been either know themselves or have some serious sour grapes; I choose to believe it's the former, for completely scientifically objective reasons.

 

Hail corporate and all that.

With a garage full of cheap-to-not-cheap tools, many made by Stanley-Black & Decker, and many of those dremeled to use the same batteries because I specifically researched their brands and market segmentation, I'm a bit nonplussed that I was today years old when I figured it out.

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