as alive as you need me to be
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Easier yes, but also more confusing, causing terms to lose specificity and accuracy.
I am the kind of person that complains every time I see people incorrectly using any term adopted from another language, culture, academic field, whatever.
So... yes, I can and do complain about things lile that.
......
To pick a random example: Almost no one uses the term 'black swan event' properly.
Its from Nassim Taleb, meant to describe... a kind of risk of an event that would have been impossible to predict, due to said risk being completely unprecedented, outside of the possibility of conceiving.
But, most people just use 'black swan event' to mean... a thing that is fairly uncommon, but certainly has been studied, has a precedent, has known situations in which it arises.
Thats not a black swan event. Thats a predictable but uncommon event, not a wholly unprecedented and totally unpredictable event.
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The term Millenial orginally and specifically, academically and etymylogically in general usage... refers to generational cohorts of USAmericans.
As does Baby Boomers. As does Gen X.
You can maybe make an argument than Gen Z / Zoomers and Gen A / Alpha are more globalized, due to the massive proliferation and normalization of digital culture... but they are again still based off of a naming convention schema describing USAmericans.
So yes, I am using a US-centric definition for a US-centric term.
If ya'll want to come up with your own terms, I'm all for it, the US has long had and still does have waaaaayyy too much influence over many aspects of general internet culture, global culture in general, the other economies and societies of the world, etc.
So do I, friend, so do I.
Yep, we throw away, as USAsians... what, 40% of our food, with our insane JIT logistics/business model?
Uh yeah turns out globalized JIT is a highly efficient paradigm, in the sense of maximizing profits...
... But it is also extremely wasteful, fragile and shatters easily... the Trump tariffs and surrounding uncertainty, and mass destruction of the hierarchically lowest, but also most essential, foundational rung of the food production system, migrant labor...
That's basically just swinging at the knees of this paradigm with sledge hammers.
Yeah, the only logical way I see to evaluate this, assuming these people are not 100% comprised of totally incompetent, koolaid drinking morons...
Is that they are more or less deciding to formally enact and massively ramp up 'economic sacrifice zones'.
Its Bob Page from the intro to Deus Ex:
"Why contain it?"
.........
The insurance companies are already abadoning much of the US Deep Red South.
There is no real solution to that other than massively tax the wealthy and corporations, do massive government directed work and projects and funding schemes... which they obviously will not do, because that is ideologically antithetical to them.
So, instead:
Criminalize poverty, go back to mass slave labor, and just generally encourage and enable everyone to kill themselves and each other in a kind of laissez faire eugenecist free for all... as you squeeze the last drops out of areas that are basically guaranteed to be Mad Max in decade or two.
Shoring things up would require a lot of investment and not the greatest short term ROI, therefore, by C Suite Capitalist logic, uh, just let that branch of the company wither on the vine... maybe the smarter ones will manage to gather enough resources to escape and go be more productive as some other employee elsewhere.
Capitalism is a death cult.
EDIT:
Further evidence of this kind of mindset:
The mayor of Lancaster, Rex Parris, has ignited a controversy after musing during a council meeting that one approach to homelessness would be to “give them free fentanyl … all the fentanyl they want.”
...
He said that he didn’t think anyone had taken his comments literally, but that he did not regret them. In the interview, he said he wished for “a purge” of homeless people.
{"Give them all fentanyl so they will just kill themselves."}
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My personal cut off for 'are you a Millenial' is 'do you know in significant detail where you were and what you were doing when 9/11 happened?'
If no, because you were too young, you're a Zoomer, Gen A, etc.
Yep, my definition of Millenial is mass psychic trauma based.
This is basically correct imo, the typical definition is from '81 through '96, you could probably roughly have a decently vivid memory of your parents freaking the fuck out from yourself as a 5 year old.
But anyways, yeah, I was born when the Soviet Union existed, but I don't consider myself an 80s kid, as I was born at the tail end of that decade and ... don't really remember experiencing much of it, directly.
... Well, beyond mullets, 'big' female hair, and... 80s styled glasses.
I am just happy you actually know what it is, and even better, have really futzed about with it.
Yes, it is a bit of hassle to figure out how to set up properly... it would probably be quite helpful if somebody set up an 'idiots guide to using I2P', or some kind of 'input your use case -> heres what you need to do' type of instructional or autoconfig generator tool..
But I2P has so, so much potential to act as a secure and versatile sort of underweb, for all things that are not dependant on very low latency and high dl/ul speeds.
We can more or less just go back to the old, slower paced but highly efficient internet, but much more private and secure, if we want to build it ourselves.
I2P.
I2P.
How do more people not know about I2P?!
You can run your own darknet node today!
You can build a local meshnet with it, and/or connect it out to as far as you can reach any other I2P node.
You can use it as a sort of distributed VPN to access the clearnet, and/or acquire yaaaarrgh matey content, and, though it is slow, it is more secure than Tor, and would be faster if more people used it.
It probably is due to your fancy robot liter box literally being a shit disturber.
Your inkling is almost certainly correct; cats instinctively bury their shit because they are by nature solo stealth hunters... having a very pungent smell reveals your location to prey, and predators.
The process of totally covering the surface area of the poo pile in litter is what makes it work... if it gets flipped over or unburied in a way that now a surface of the poo is... uncovered, just exposed?
Yep, gonna smell real bad.
Cat pee and poo odor often has a strong component of ammonia.
... You are almost certainly going noseblind to this smell, as a smoker does with cigarrettes.
Somewhat like cigarette smoke, though probably less rapidly/intensely... enough gaseous ammonia, regularly released in a confined space, with poor ventilation, will slowly begin to just... seep into everything porous enough to absorb it....fabrics, carpets, possibly even wall paint.
.........
Without trying to figure out how to fix your robot shit box that cant do its job right...
....Consider a coffee ground based cat liter, or just make your own out of used, decaf coffee grounds, or augment your existing litter with a layer of used decaf coffee grounds.
Introduce in progressively larger amounts over time, to familiarize kitty kat.
Used coffee grounds + a bit of baking soda is better than traditional cat litter at absorbing smells, full stop.
There is potentially a danger of a cat ingesting too much caffiene and poisoning themself, should they lick their paws or just eat the litter ... this is why you use decaf.
But, other than that:
Coffee ground based or inclusive litter clumps better than normal litter, it adheres to the poo and itself better, when wet.
It absorbs and neutralizes smells much better, because of its chemical composition and porous nature.
It does not have the problem of making clouds of particulate dust when the cat kicks about to try to bury the poo, which can irritate both cats and people.
It isn't tiny rocks that you can step on like lego pieces after your cat flings them around, and is also thus less likely to damage a vaccuum cleaner.
It doesn't contribute to ....digging rocks and clay out of the ground and then throwing them back into landfills.
It also does not have any artificial masking smells which can be irritating to both cats and people.
Also, you can use it in compost, post poo saturation.
......
Pidan, Eticat and Dofu make cat safe, decaf coffee ground based litter, or if you want to make your own out of decaf grounds or beans, here's a pretty decent guide on how to do it safely:
https://recommendedproductsreviewed.com/coffee-grounds-cat-litter/
just imagine his bowtie spinning whenever he gets 'flustered'.
Persistent and extreme sleep deprivation is literally a form of torture.
https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/sleep-human-right-and-its-deprivation-torture/2024-10
Gee I wonder why so many Americans act literally insane so often.
Warning!
3DS OoT remake runs great!
The touchscreen even works!
Well, beyond a few slight audio sync hiccups in a few cinematic cutscenese... but I think most of that was/is from the shader render compiler suddenly jumping into overdrive upon seeing something new for the first time....seems to be better on subsequent renders with those shaders now already compiled.
BotW is however... a bit more finnicky.
I would probably have to figure out how to ....somehow manually decrease the draw distance in the overworld, or possibly make or acquire some kind of lower res texture pack, to get it to run at at least 30 fps consistently.
And/or just always have half res/rate shading going on... this kinda works, technically, but often looks like ass because of how much of BotW appears to basically be made out of emmisive textures / bloom-like shaders, as opposed to proper lighting sources.
Or maybe run it at like 1/2 or 3/4 res and rely on a huge amount of FSR upscaling?
... I have literally 0 experience modding emulated games... my brain is thinking in pc game modding mode, from about 25 years of experience fucking around with that.
It sure would be neat if there was just an actual graphics option menu in the game...
... But also, afaik, a Switch can also barely maintain BotW at 30 fps, soooo ... ?
Other than BotW... literally everything I've tried from the PS2/360/GC+Wii era backward runs fine.
(Beyond me realizing how utterly ass many of the control schemes of older games are, hahah!)
For other Switch games... SSBrawl runs well, latest Animal Crossing runs well (55 to 60 fps, generally).
......
The Deck also has something of a neat trick where if you can get a solid 45 fps in anything...well, lock the fps to that, and the screen refresh to 90hz, and it often ends up feeling as visually smooth as actual 90 fps, in everything other than very fast paced games.
(You could also do this with 30/90, as thats a clean 1 to 3 ratio... but 30 fps is still... quite noticeably slow, imo, but it may make sense for some people/in some games),
I've managed to fiddle around with Cyberpunk 77 and get it to almost always hold 45 fps, via fucking about with settings, using DeckyFrameGen to get better FrameGen and Upscaling... and also basically by just turning off ambient occlusion and volumetric fog, which allows many other settings I find more impactful to be higher than the graphics preset for Deck... and then using the 45/90 thing, it looks and feels quite smooth.
I'm getting between 3100 and 3200 actually rendered frames in the built in benchmark, and I think the default Deck preset, pre fuckery, I was getting more like 2300 ish... so thats roughly a 30% boost compared to stock... and imo, this also just looks better, and somehow also has a bit less power draw.
I have always fucking hated ambient occlusion, making blob corner shadows that often just do not make physical sense given the actual scene, and also often fuck up badly whenever very thin geometry or mesh/fence like textures are involved...
Volumetric fog on the other hand looks great, but has always been massively compute expensive.... and if you can just actually have higher lighting and shadow quality settings, and higher texture res on the rest of the scene... imo thats a good tradeoff.
.........
Whoop, so doubling back a bit:
Apparently the FPS problem is worse for BotW... in docked mode. Dropping down to near 20 fps in the scenarios they described is....exactly what I experienced as well.
... The other Switch games.I've messed with tend to be a bit faster and more stable in docked mode.
So... maybe, apparently, I should just emulate BotW in... portable mode?
?????
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So, for starters, I am describing people by where they live, not how many live where.
Yes, of course, many more people live in major urban areas than other wise.
But it is still true that by area, there are many areas in WA and OR that are very highly Republican... presumably you have noticed the dramatic cultural difference between two of such of those areas.
Again, go actually look into the Greater Idaho project, a lot of these people are very serious about ... seceeding their counties from Dem dominant WA and OR state governments, to join ID's Rep dominant government.
This is a concerted political campaign that has been going on for over a decade and has gotten quite a lot of popular support in those counties via county level referendums.
.......
Further... the other point I am making is that the red areas are often quite extreme in their affinity for firearms.
It... does not take too many armed terrorists, militia cells, patriots, whatever you want to call them, to effectively terrorize or act as an insurgency in an area... especially if the official police are generally amenable to your movement... cops tend to be right wing authoritarians.
If you have ever lived in Portland or Seattle, I am sure you have observed the regular flooding in of non locals, from environs, whenever some kind major sport event, or public event occurs, or even just generally during work hours, good times to go shopping or clubbing or w/e.
Now just imagine that including some domestic terrorists.
........
This almost certainly would not play out as simply as the red and blue areas just... becoming their own nation states and then raising their own formal militaries to do battle with each other, where the red areas would lose simply by having less people or less industrial base.
No, civil wars, balkanization, sectarian violence, insurgency, occupation... is way way way more complicated than that.
Maybe go read up on how that went/is going in Iraq and Afghanistan or Syria or Ukraine... for some recently case studies on how complicated this can get.
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The problem... or complication with this...
Is that basically every part of WA and OR east of the Cascades will ... counter-seceede.
Go look up the Greater Idaho project.
There is, and has been for a while now, an effort to ... have the eastern counties of WA and OR leave their respective states and join Idaho.
From a legal/constitutional perspective... this is completely unprecedented, as best I can tell this has never before happened in US history, states redrawing their own borders, via counties which largely actually have democratically voted to do so via popular referendums.
Northern/Eastern CA + Southern OR will possibly form into something like the old attempts at the proposed state of 'Jackson'.
There is an absolutely huge political polarization within all these states between urban and rural areas, roughly also by which side of the Cascades you are on.
I've hastily cropped that image from this source:
https://brilliantmaps.com/county-1992-v-2024/
So... yeah... if the governors of WA OR and CA formally seceeded and formed Cascadia? Came 'too close' to functionally doing that?
Well the rightwingers have an arguably legit legal counter move for that (or so they will argue, the whole point is different sides do not agree) and then basically the West Coast explodes into functionally a civil war of some kind, probably involving both partisan and 'official' state forces, and federal forces, roughly breaking apart along the Cascades, but it could easily be way more chaotic than that, depending on what say, forces at JBLM and Kitsap, and other major West Coast bases decide to do, as well as major city/regional/state police.
Let me personally tell you that Eastern WA/OR and Idaho still very, very much remember Ruby Ridge, the militia movement never died, it just went dormant till Trump, and uh, skipping up to present day, is now basically being formally recruited into ICE... ICE now has more funding than the United States Marine Corps.
Fucking yeehaw is what I very much fear would happen if either side makes significant moves toward anything resembling actual secession.
It is totally true that things are even more complex than just resolution, but that is why I linked the much more exhaustive write up.
Its even more complicated in practice than all the things they bring up, they are focusing on mainly a movie watching experience, not a video game playing experience.
They do not go into LED vs QLED vs OLED vs other actual display techs, don't go into response latency times, refresh rates, as you say all the different kinds of HDR color gamut support... I am sure I am forgetting things...
Power consumption may be a significant thing for you, image quality at various viewing angles...
Oh right, FreeSync vs GSync, VRR... blargh there are so many fucking things that can be different about displays...
https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/by-size/size-to-distance-relationship
Extensive write up on this whole issue, even includes a calculator tool.
But, basically:
Yeah, going by angular resolution, even leaving the 8K content drought aside....
8K might make sense for a computer monitor you sit about 2 feet / 0.6m away from, if the diagonal size is 35 inches / ~89cm, or greater.
Take your viewing distance up to 8 feet / 2.4m away?
Your screen diagonal now has to be about 125 inches / ~318cm, or larger, for you to be able to maybe notice a difference with a jump from 4K to 8K.
........
The largest 8K TV that I can see available for purchase anywhere near myself... that costs ~$5,000 USD... is 85 inches.
I see a single one of 98 inches that is listed for $35,000. That's the largest one I can see, but its... uh, wildly more expensive.
So with a $5,000, 85 inch TV, that works out to...
You would have to be sitting closer than about 5 feet / ~1.5 meters to notice a difference.
And that's assuming you have 20/20 vision.
........
So yeah, VR goggle displays... seem to me to be the only really possibly practical use case for 8K ... other than basically being the kind of person who owns a home with a dedicated theater room.
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Many ancient societies had recurring debt jubilees on approximately that time scale... for basically this reason.
Debt jubilee season comes, everyone's debts are wiped clean.
Sucks for the lenders, great for the borrowers, but also everyone knows when it is scheduled.
That is pretty close to a reset of the playing field of your economy in many ways...
... though of course slavery did also exist in many of these societies, so... far from a perfect reset.
One of your progeny is destined to be a key advisor to President Camacho, head of 'The Department of Agriculture; Brought to you by KFC/PizzaHut'
'Triple B' could be a decent, non horrible nickname, I agree, could ... be ... a lot worse.
Yep, the baby boom happened in many places... the term 'baby boom' and 'baby boomer' and then 'boomer' are very much US-centric if you look through newspapers, academic publications.
Also... you're telling me your French speaking parents referred to them as 'baby boomers', as in... a loan word, from English, as opposed to something that might more naturally arise from French?
bébé d'expansion?
Granted, I do not speak French, that particular guess may be wildly unrealistic in some way, but I would think that general linguistic and etymylogical concepts apply generally.
https://www.etymonline.com/fr/word/baby%20boom
Assuming google translate is doing a decent job of translating that to English for me, I am fairly confident this literally says the French term "baby-boom(er)" is a loan term, from English, specifically from the US.
Anyway, I am not saying that people should not be free to use or adapt terms from other languages, that would be stupid and also impossible to enforce, especially stupid coming from an English speaker such as myself, with English essentially being a bastard mutant step child of at least three different languages smashing into each other.
I would be unable to go to the karaoke bar, sing a song about a latent gestalt consciousness, grab a bahn mi to much on, and then further discuss the relative 'lingua franca' status of varying languages of the world, all whilst doing my best to stave off ennui.
What I am saying is that criticizing my US Centric definition of a US Centric term on the grounds that the definition itself is too US Centric... that is stupid.
.........
Is 'millennial' a commonly used generational cohort word present in many languages right now?
Of course.
However... I would argue my definition still holds.
If you can remember 9/11 happening, generally, you are some kind of a millenial, you would identify as such, you would use that term.
Yep, 9/11 happened to the US.
And it was the biggest news story on the planet at the time.
Governments around the world reached out to the US with formal announcements of sympathy.
Newscasters and print media ran the story for days, weeks, in many countries.
It was a pretty big deal, the world hegemon having its financial center directly attacked.
Markets all the world freaked out, to varying degrees.
And I could casually argue that generally, roughly, though of course not as directly traumatizing to non USAmericans, it was a bigger deal in countries that were culturally/economically connected to the US, and thus inhabitants of those countries were/are more likely to later use a fairly direct equivalent of 'millennial' as a generational cohort term... as a loan word, from our media's intial popularization of the term, to decry our avocado toast habits and whichever stagnant and poorly operated line of shitty franchise restaurants we are apparently responsible for murdering.
Why not use the local language word for 'millenium' as a basis, instead of adopting one from English?
But to further nuance this, I am sure you would point out that the English word millennial is of French origin, and you would be correct.
So sure, this obviously makes more sense as a wholly and truly French word, we English speakers did after all, more or less borrow something like 70% of our vocabulary from French.
But then we can refer back to my actual proposed definition:
I bet you do actually remember 9/11 being on the TV, in the papers, being discussed, to at least degree, if you are a millennial, who speaks French, and was roughly 5 years old or older, in France, when it happened.
If I am wrong about that, please let me know.