The book is brilliant, even if it’s difficult to read and follow. The satire of art criticism is just so on point.

…And it’s hard to know if the Navidson record and house never really existed or not (in the context of the book) because of the way Johnny is slowly unraveling. It’s got strong elements of cosmic horror to it, along with razor-sharp satire, and the delineation in writings styles between Johnny’s personal narrative, Zampano, and the various journal articles are written really sells the entire piece.

Disagree on VR, depending. I use a VR dry fire training system, and it’s def. improved my real-world shooting.

Huh?

I loved Fallout 4, and I still play it. I’ve got it installed on this computer, but I don’t have Skyrim installed. I’m not as attached to the London mod for it, TBH.

Can’t say a lot about what Bethesda is going to do with the next Elder Scrolls games, but I’d love to see a return to the more complicated skill trees and level advancement that they used in Morrowind and Daggerfall. I also really loved the limitless number of randomly generate dungeons in Daggerfall, and how it took years (in real-time) to walk across the continent, but that’s probably not what most people want now.

That’s not necessarily valuable, exactly. Yes, companies charge a lot for consumer ink jet printer ink, but prices go down dramatically when you’re talking about commercial printing. A two liter bottle of high-end dye sublimation ink runs about $200 (might be up since I last bought in 2021), and the dye sublimation ink for the HP printer I operate costs about $700/10L.

If your printer has replaceable print heads that aren’t part of the ink cartridge, and if you can retrofit a bulk ink system, then you quickly find out that ink is pretty inexpensive.

Oxygen now stably bonds with three hydrogen atoms, not two. The new formula for water is H3O.

Good luck with any kind of life form that we would recognize as being alive evolving.

Nope. Still good for a few years.

But that’s because I always buy toilet paper and paper towels at Costco, and buy more when I’m down to two cases.

Two is one, one is none.

I’ve heard that packing gauze into a gunshot wound to stop the bleeding is pretty unpleasant. I’ve also heard that a tourniquet that’s on properly is unbearably painful as well.

Clearly y’all have never tried sounding.

(My urologist strongly warned against this; said that it could cause microscopic tears in the urethra that could lead to strictures.)

Three herniated discs in my back causing sciatic pain. It wasn’t that the pain was bad on a moment-to-moment basis, but that it just want on and on and on. It was agony to sit down, so I had to stand in my cubicle to work. It was painful to lie down, so I ended up getting about 4 hours of sleep each night. I was taking several grams of ibuprofen, acetaminophen (yes, I’m lucky I didn’t destroy my liver), and naproxen sodium daily, just to be functional. This went on for over a year.

The fun part is that when I first starting having sciatic pain, I was pretty sure that it was my back, because I hadn’t done anything that would have injured my leg. I had really good insurance at the time, but my doctor refused to order an MRI or even an x-ray; he thought I was trying to get a prescription for drugs. It took about 15 months of pain, and multiple visits to my doctor, an ER, and even attempting to see a chiropractor (who was at least self-aware enough to realize that he shouldn’t touch me without an MRI first), before a scheduling error got another doctor in the practice to look at me, order an x-ray, and then order an MRI on the basis of the x-ray. Within about two days of the MRI being read I had received a referral to a neurosurgeon, in less than a week he was asking me whether I wanted a laminectomy or a spinal fusion. (These days I’d be opting for disc replacement), and I was recovering from surgery about a month after that MRI.

While I’m at it, I would also like a pony.

Single payer healthcare.

Criminal justice reform (e.g., reform rather than punishment).

Overturning the NFA of 1934 and the GCA, strengthening the PLCAA.

Wealth taxes.

Returning the marginal tax rates to pre-1970 levels.

Eliminating SS tax caps.

Seriously address climate change.

Unwinding all book bans.

Enshrining reproductive rights in the constitution.

I’m not the one making the distinction.

There’s a reason that ASD is a disability.

One of the parts I was thinking of specifically revolved around sexual politics in 2nd wave feminism.

The basic idea was that consent to sex can only happen between equals; if one party has a higher social status than the other, then sex is coercive. 2nd wave feminism says that women always occupy a lower social status than men, and therefore sex can never be consensual, e.g., all sex is rape (except gay or lesbian sex, I guess?, but then there’s still relative social status between the participants to consider…). That discounts any agency for an individual person though; it says that women can’t freely consent.

Backlash against that line of thought is part of what drove the 3rd wave of feminism.

Did you fail to read what I said? Or do you not know what cognitive empathy is? Because an inability to read emotion and social cues is one of the basic diagnostic criteria for being on the autism spectrum. And that, by the way, includes NT people “masking” their emotions, using sarcasm, etc. A failure to understand those things IS a lack of cognitive empathy.

Signed, Level 1 ASD.

Reason alone rarely if ever supports only one side or the other. You choose how you are weighting things; that’s an emotional response, not a logical one.

Autistic people do have significantly reduced cognitive empathy. That’s literally part of being on the spectrum. Some will have better cognitive empathy than others. If a person is not capable of reading the emotion that an NT is projecting, then their reactions are going to appear to lack affective empathy as well.

I prefer MYYD/MYYD.

The problem with feminism is that there are multiple waves, and there are fringe ideas that are still ‘feminist’. Some of the well=-knon feminist theorists in the 2nd wave came up with some really crazy ideas. Some of that is still around.

I think that all my scores are up on Practiscore; I don’t usually bother checking, since I have a pretty good idea of how well I’m doing when I’m there.

I know, right? I have one of their sanders, and while it’s an absolutely amazing sander, the price was eye-watering, and the sanding discs are equally painful.

Oh, and i don’t think that they make a plate joiner; I think they only do a domino joiner, which is even cooler.