Hell yeah. Exo one was kinda what I had in mind, something with stupidly simple mechanics. But I am definitely intrigued by POOLS. Looks spooky. Thanks!

This particular attack probably had nothing to do with any of this, but she could probably be described as offensive from the economic equality standpoint, because she is a billionaire, from the environmental justice standpoint, because she is a frequent private-jet user, and from the music scene standpoint, because she seemingly intentionally pushes out other female artists from billboard spots by re-releasing albums in specific locations/time periods during which her peers are releasing their albums.

If you aren’t comfortable doing that then you aren’t comfortable “working on” your car.

You’ve written a whole lotta junk to essentially end on, “if you can’t jack up your car and remove the wheel, you shouldn’t be changing your headlight in the first place.”

Which is quite a dumb take.

Would you cancel a trip with your family that was already booked, that your mom completely planned out each activity in depth, that you already paid for, that you’ve been looking forward to, collectively, for over a year, because you found out you’d be contributing to a systemic problem for a week day?

You just might be a better person than me, at the end of the day.

I wasn’t sure whether hotels had already been booked or whether they cheaped out, that’s why I worded it like that. Could be.

No no you’re good, I didn’t take it that way. I think saying “next time” instead of “you should have” is a good way to help people realize that what they are doing might be destructive, without condemning them to the eternal pits of hell, so I appreciate you saying it that way.

I didn’t plan the trip myself, and I think there was some reason or another they chose AirBNB instead of a hotel. But yeah, if I ever do a trip like this again (unlikely), fuck an AirBNB

I’m going to Barcelona this week on a family trip. We’re staying in an AirBnb for a day. I think they’ve got a legitimate cause to spray people like me, who pretty much across the board don’t realize how much their privilege hurts regular working people.

I got an OLED the other day and splurged hard during the summer sale.

I got Stray and Little Kitty, Big City to show off to my cat-loving GF, and for me I got Dave the Diver, Sifu, and Babu is You. Also picked up Hollow Knight for good measure, but have yet to start it. 9 Sols, Mullet Madjack, Warhammer Boltgun, Baldurs Gate 3, and Return of the Obra Dinn all on my wishlist.

Thanks, I’ll check out strange horticulture. I’m looking for arthouse games in a sense. Outer Wilds completely changed me, for example, and I want to try to recreate that feeling, but I don’t want an Outer Wilds clone, like how Lords of the Fallen is to Dark Souls.

I want something that’s going to destroy me and make me think, or just be ultra fun and different from anything else I’ve played.

It took me a bunch of tries, too. It’s not really a “fun” game, more like a visual and interactive novel. Once I got the hang of the dice rolls being the biggest part of the game, and knowing/remembering where to seek them out, and getting used to the map, it became easy to pick up and put back down. It’s amazing, but not easy to get going.

My OLED is coming in today, so hyped. Will definitely help with the commute. First off is finishing up Disco Elysium, then maybe playing Edith Finch? Anyone have any other recs? Besides Hades 1, I guess.

The top comment on this thread contains a conversation (argument) about Chomsky’s view on the term “genocide,” as well as his verbiage discussing Serbian-run concentration camps.

I listened to Understanding Power fairly recently and it definitely changed my outlook and broke me out of the lull of neoliberal self-satisfaction, and helped introduce me to other leftist writers. So I’m a fan of Chomsky’s, but it doesn’t sound like he had that good of a take on the Bosnian genocide. He seems to only reserve the word genocide for the Holocaust so as to keep its significance, and despite supporting a UN fact-finding commission that did find Serbia was running concentration camps, he refers to said camps as “refugee camps,” instead, and seems to infer people had the freedom to stay or leave as they please (even if this was technically true, I doubt it was practically true).

So, not a good look for him, even though he had other viewpoints that I’ve been strongly influenced by.

Have you happened to read the book? He has a chapter dedicated to his decision to call it technofeudalism rather than capitalism, hypercapitalism, technocapitalism, etc. Basically he’s saying profits have been decoupled from a company’s value, and that it’s no longer about creating a product to exchange for profit (which, in his words, are beholden to market competition) but instead about extracting rent (which is not beholden to competition – his example is while a landowner’s neighbors increase the values of their properties, the landowner’s property value also increases).

Anyways he describes Amazon, Apple store, Google Play, cloud service providers, as fiefdoms that collect rent from actual producers of products (physical goods, but also applications), and don’t actually produce anything, themselves, besides access to customers, while also extracting value from users of their technologies through personal information. They’re effectively leasing consumer attention in the same way landowners leased their lands to workers.

It sounds pretty accurate to me, but I haven’t had much time to chew on it. What’s your take on that idea?

Sorry, buy-it-for-life

I kinda like the idea of a phone that is usually small, but I can make big by unfolding it if I want to. But I do agree that the fewer moving parts, the sturdier and more BIFL. It’s just that BIFL is not really attainable anyways in the current state of the phone market due to software support obsoletion.

I’d like to see a small eink phone or the tiny matchbook from Her.

I gotchu, it happens. No worries. You’ve definitely piqued my (admittedly gross) interest – I’m gonna do some more research after work and I’ll look out for your link.

Good luck on zoom!

That’s not very nice to say. I’m not being obtuse – the writers of the article you linked it even said themselves they were surprised that the bidet-users had more fecal matter. I don’t poop on my bidet, and regularly clean it. You’d think that the jet of water plus wiping would get more fecal matter off your butt rather than wiping, alone. Dang. I’m just trying to have a conversation.

Can you post the link to that study? I wanna read it. Here’s one that says almost the opposite:

Normal use of the bidet toilet by pregnant women poses no clinical health risk for preterm birth and bacterial vaginosis.

Curious why you feel its absurd people need to be told this? Even in the the study you linked, they note in the discussion

It is of great surprise to find that detection of fecal bacteria was prejudiced against the bidet toilet users.

Still a concerning study to me, since I’m a habitual bidet user. Fortunately I don’t need to worry about vaginal microflora. Furthermore, I could only find this one small study that shows correlation (not necessarily causation), so I’d be hesitant to immediately regard bidets as less sanitary than wiping, especially for men.