baltakatei
/ˈbɑːltəkʊteɪ/. Knows some chemistry and piping stuff. TeXmacs user.
Website: reboil.com
Mastodon: baltakatei@twit.social
- 41 Posts
- 271 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 12th, 2023
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21·14 days agoWinter solstice sacrifice mythology reminds me of Hogfather (1996) by Terry Pratchett about a fantasy world’s equivalent to Santa Claus who also wore red and white (blood on the snow) and was associated with gift giving/sacrifice:
Excerpt
… Images ribboned across her senses—wet fur, sweat, pine, soot, iced air, the tang of damp ash, pig…manure, her governess mind hastily corrected. There was blood…and the taste of…beans? It was all images without words. Almost…animal.
“But none of this is right! Everyone knows he’s a jolly old fat man who hands out presents to kids!” she said aloud.
“Is. Is. Not was. You know how it is,” said the raven.
“Do I?”
“It’s like, you know, industrial retraining,” said the bird. “Even gods have to move with the times, am I right? He was probably quite different thousands of years ago. Stands to reason. No one wore stockings, for one thing.” He scratched at his beak.
“Yersss,” he continued expansively, “he was probably just your basic winter demi-urge. You know…blood on the snow, making the sun come up. Starts off with animal sacrifice, y’know, hunt some big hairy animal to death, that kind of stuff. You know there’s some people up on the Ramtops who kill a wren at Hogswatch and walk around from house to house singing about it? With a whack-fol-oh-diddle-dildo. Very folkloric, very myffic.”
“A wren? Why?”
“I dunno. Maybe someone said, hey, how’d you like to hunt this evil bastard of an eagle with his big sharp beak and great ripping talons, sort of thing, or how about instead you hunt this wren, which is basically about the size of a pea and goes “twit”? Go on, you choose. Anyway, then later on it sinks to the level of religion and then they start this business where some poor bugger finds a special bean in his tucker, oho, everyone says, you’re king, mate, and he thinks “This is a bit of all right” only they don’t say it wouldn’t be a good idea to start any long books, ’cos next thing he’s legging it over the snow with a dozen other buggers chasing him with holy sickles so’s the earth’ll come to life again and all this snow’ll go away. Very, you know…ethnic. Then some bright spark thought, hey, looks like that damn sun comes up anyway, so how come we’re giving those druids all this free grub? Next thing you know, there’s a job vacancy. That’s the thing about gods. They’ll always find a way to, you know…hang on.”
This is why you keep the same person assigned to perform the same test for the duration of a study. If there’s going to be deviations from protocol, they should at least be consistent.
4·19 days agoThe only peaceful way I see wealth being redistributed is if Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg use regulatory capture to reform government in order to raise their own taxes. Such a scale of philanthropy hasn’t been seen since the robber barons Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller donated to build libraries and improve public education. Had those Guilded Age monopolists they also used their wealth to compel the US’s legislative branch to raise taxes, bolster anti-trust laws, and prevent the acceptance of consumer welfare doctrine over plain anti-monopoly policy, then I’d argue their donations to improve public education would have gone much farther.
That said, plenty of non-peaceful ways exist much like there are many ways for an iceberg to flip over.
51·21 days agoAsimov was a sexist pig, so if you vibe with that, his writing is enjoyable. Otherwise, reading his works is a chore. Often prescient, but still a chore.
You don’t need to play Eve Online to know Market PvP is cutthroat, but it helps.
The Secret of NIMH lore.
I feel like putting a Mentos in there.
1·25 days agoThanks!
5·26 days agoAudioAnchor. Audiobook player. Works great with Syncthing. Hasn’t been updated in 3 years and doesn’t need to be.
61·26 days agoIt is not a novel about good things or a good future.
If I recall correctly, Snow Crash expands upon Stephenson’s short The Great Simoleon Caper in which the US Government tries and fails to delay its inevitable bankrupting as its citizens evade taxes en masse by using cryptocurrency. The full anarcho-capitalistic collapse and dissolving of centralized powers continues in the sequel Diamond Age when automated education at-scale finally becomes creative enough to invent machines capable of bypassing the last technological barriers against printing weapons of mass destruction. Usually, I’m in support of stories in which centralized power is decentralized and fewer people are in command; Stephenson’s works of fiction explore this space but with armchair passivity, neither arguing for or against the politics of their fictional characters. In this sense Stephenson is conservative; post-cyberpunk instead of solarpunk. Stephenson is more likely to blow up the Moon, kill all the main characters, or fast-forward three thousand years than to try and dream up a plausible pathway for us, the readers, to live in a world not controlled by billionaires. This is why you hear so much of Stephenson from the likes of Microsoft or Facebook; socialist alternative stories such as those by Kim Stanley Robinson tend to recommend assassinating billionaires or purposefully collapsing the housing market for the sake of preventing billions of deaths from climate change, all prospects that are not profitable to the ultra wealthy such as Jeff Bezos who hired Stephenson as a consultant for their rocket company, Blue Origin.
Book title and author? I’m always looking for interesting new reads and a similar lore existed in a comedy isekai anime some years ago.
21·26 days agoMods, this provocateur right here.
2·27 days agoActual hot take.
Random JRPG that we’ll devote 100 hours to over the course of a semester then never touch again but obsess over the rest of our lives, buying merchandise, music, cookbooks, manga, gatcha credits, and recurring online game subscriptions?
“It is February 27th 1933 and I am Marinus van der Lubbe, a somewhat slow young man who was just asked by some very brave good protestors to help set a small fire in a strangely unguarded nice building they doused with flammable liquids. What should I do?”
12·30 days agoRight? If it were an unencrypted HTTP GET request, then every router on the way would see the plaintext string
boobsin the URL and therefore intercept it.If I had to guess, Iran has so few landline connections that they man-in-the-middle every TLS connection they can by either forcing every server to hand over their private key files (difficult) or by forcing a certificate authority trusted by default Web browsers (there’s a lot of them) to issue certificates for every top level domain they see in SNI data attached to encrypted packet headers; the latter method need not even require participation by Iranian servers, so long as the traffic is bottlenecked for man-in-the-middle attacks and outsiders don’t question unusual certificate authorities being used.
Voting to break up monopolies via anti-trust law enforcement will have more effect. “Voting with your wallet” is useless when oligarchs buy out their competitors on this hypothetical voting ballot.