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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • Something definitely broke in society around that time though, and “access to guns” only describes an outlet or mechanism, and not the underlying problem.

    Pre-1968, civilians could buy full auto machineguns. At one point in the 1930s the Sears catalog would send a full auto Tommy Gun straight to your house via mail order with no background check. And yet in those eras the idea of a grand spectacle suicide/homicide event would have been absolutely unthinkable, even among the most disposessed in society.

    The root problem is something more like cultural narcissm, for lack of a better word.

    The concept of a deep cynical anti-hero move like publicly murdering pseudo-random aquaintances is a relatively modern problem. Maybe we need to do a better job suppressing “main character vibes” and narcissism, the acting out and sociopathy that is prevalent now.


  • Purely strategically, the best bet is for NATO to fund and lend/lease materiel to Ukraine sufficient to make the Russian effort protracted and expensive. Maybe Ukraine can solidify some territorial gains in Russian oblasts enough to have bargaining chips. From there it is just a game of finding acceptable off-ramps. Maybe a treaty gets signed that trades territory back to something like the “original” borders circa the beginning to the current conflict.

    Russia clearly doesn’t care about personnel losses (and historically never has). But maybe if it drags on, the conflict will become economically and politically costly enough that Putin is looking for offramps.



  • The temp is low but it is a vacuum. Vacuums are bad at dissipating heat. Think of the vacuum walled drinking vessels. They are so efficient at keeping beverages hot/cool because the vacuum insulates the majority of the surface area that heat can move across.

    Likewise a cooling tank of water (typical nuclear reactor design) itself surrounded by vacuum, will not cool efficiently at all. Presumably they’d have to use piping to circulate the water over a large surface area of some other medium like the moon rock itself.





  • If you are paranoid you can literally just take one of those Ring indoor cameras and put it on top of your safe. The app includes custom notifications on detected motion.

    Now, the kid could still go out of their way to disable the home WiFi or something but that level of premeditation is a different problem entirely.

    First preference would be educating your kids on the safe handling of guns from an early age and inculcating in them a set of values that shows guns are for defensive purposes and not for interpersonal conflict resolution.

    The secondary strategy is storing your firearms in a locked safe the kids do not know the combination to, in a locked room to which they don’t have a key.






  • She posted about this. Basically the party aparatchiks came to her house and told her to stop her “subversive” activities (posting on YouTube, talking about devices useful to protestors, mentioning being a lesbian in public media) or she would not like the consequences. She said she would leave the country entirely, except her romantic partner cannot leave (I assume this is due to political travel restrictions or family reasons).

    I think her content was awesome and it showed someone defying expectations of who can do product design, fabrication, electrical engineering, etc.

    China should very much get roasted for silencing speech.




  • Superman 64.

    Weeks and months of hype (the era of print gaming journalism), Blockbuster stocking 100 copies on launch day for “guaranteed availability” etc.

    Then I finally popped the cart in, and this thing was so bad it just defied all logic. Horrific controls, shitty graphics, unclear user interface and objectives, terrible draw distance. Timed level segments and insane difficulty.

    There might be “worse” games but I have never been more disappointed in a release than Superman 64.