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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • Charisma will affect how well the idea is communicated, but isn’t necessary just to give fairly basic insults. A low charisma character can easily come up with the idea of saying someone has a little dick and that his wife and mother sleep around. He’s just a lot more likely to stumble over his words and sound unsure about it. He’ll deliver it in the classic style of a 12 year old playing call of duty rather than with the effortless wit of an insult comic.





  • Which directly contradicts the statement in episode 2:

    Obi-Wan: “Well if droids could think, there’d be none of us here, would there?”

    If we accept Obi-Wan’s characterization, then those droids may be able to operate independently, but they aren’t actually thinking.

    Again, I think a lot of Star Wars media has leaned towards making droids people and not just walking computers with a friendly ui. It’s convenient for storytelling because it’s easier to write and allows for droid characters to play larger roles and be more relatable to the audience.

    But from a world building perspective it creates a lot of unfortunate implications and just makes less sense. The existence of truly intelligent robots should fundamentally alter the world but it never does.


  • I grew up poor in a fairly cosmopolitan city, and I still felt like I was going to crawl out of my own skin the first time I went to a slightly dressy business event. I have no fucks to give anymore, but back in the day, this would have probably been a fairly reasonable disaster preparedness plan if I had to be invited to something formal with a lot of social expectations that I was not familiar with.

    It’s walking into a different culture, and while the hosts should be understanding, it can be reasonable to prepare someone who isn’t familiar with the culture before sending them in. Still, no need to be a dick about it.


  • Reminds me of my cousin. Her parents are lovely people, but they are not exactly… refined. Her dad in particular makes a first impression that I’d describe as a somewhat toned down Earnest P Worrell. And while he isn’t stupid he never learned a lot of important life skills and his past mistakes have have caused a fair amount of hardship, and that only fuels the resentment.

    By the time she was in high school it was clear my cousin was ashamed to be associated with her family. She kept her home life and social life as far apart as possible, and she was always excited to spend time with members of our extended family that she saw as much more normal. (Especially funny to me since my mom made that list and I’ve seen that woman scratch herself with the cutlery while dining out). She was also pretty fucking rude to her parents, openly talking crap about them while they were in the room. Very shitty, but not exactly shocking for a teenager in her position.

    Fast forward to today when my aunt and uncle own a hipstery restaurant, while my cousin got knocked up ended marrying a contractor / meth head.




  • Or like that list of scenarios I mentioned in the post you replied to.

    flashing a gun, brandishing, showing off to their friends, or even selling.

    These things don’t happen very often, but then, neither do fires.

    Let me put it like this: If someone was looking at the security cameras and saw a person waving a gun around, do you think that they should say something, or should they just ignore it? If the answer is that they should say something, then there is at least some value in detecting the presence of a gun. After that, it’s just a matter of how effective and reliable the system would be, and what it costs to implement. But I’m not arguing that there are any worthwhile systems in existence, only that such a system could have value.


  • My first car had some faulty wiring or might have been possessed. The radio didn’t work, the front passenger window had to be disabled because it rolled down but not up, and it locked the doors any time you opened or closed the front driver side door. Hell, sometimes it would lock the doors for no apparent reason, just because you looked at it funny or something. I carried three keys in different pockets because I learned the hard way that only having one backup isn’t enough, and also just how easy it is to not notice a hole in your pocket.

    The entire lower half of the body had been rusting out, so the previous owner patched it with fiber glass screen and driveway patching material then spray painted over that with a bright silver that didn’t even remotely match the dark grey of the rest of the car. There was also a hole in the trunk that had been partially covered with some plywood and foam insulation.

    The muffler fell off and dragged behind me while I was driving. I replaced it but kept the original on the floor of the back seat and before giving anyone a ride I’d pick it up and ask if it looked important to them while they were still taking in the sight of my car’s exterior and wondering if they just made a huge mistake.

    The hood latch broke while I was on the highway, causing the hood to pop up and try to kill me. Had to make an emergency stop and duct tape the thing down. I did eventually fix it.



  • The basic concept isn’t a bad idea, assuming it works and you already have the cameras. If it ran locally at a negligible cost, I’d say it would be a potentially useful tool. But even then, it wouldn’t solve the problems, just help identify them more quickly, especially in situations where a gun is in the school but isn’t being fired yet. Less useful for an active shooter, more useful for spotting someone flashing a gun, brandishing, showing off to their friends, or even selling.

    It would be like a smoke detector, good to have but only as part of a larger plan, and also not something you should be dumping a ton of money into.



  • If there’s one thing that should be clear from Trump’s reelection it’s that there is no limit to what the Republican voters will support.

    Anyone who was going to leave the Republicans has probably done so by now. All that’s left are the MAGA true believers, single issue voters, the echo chamber dwellers who would be outraged if they were aware of news from the real world, and compartmentalists who block out all warning signs coming from their own side as no true Scotsman conservative supports that stuff and even if they did it’s still better than the other side.

    And of course, there’s also the low information voters who don’t know about any of this stuff and just want egg prices to go down or something.