insurgenRat

@[email protected]

pronouns: she/her is fine.

I am a conniving rat with plans of an international uprising against tyranny! I keep getting distracted by tasty food, gardening, gadgets, games, and books though.

Inside me are two wolves, I desperately need surgery.

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insurgenRat,

Drugs are great, you take them too most like (caffeine, ethanol, theanine etc). It’s the power that fucked that shit head up.

Loads of people take ketamine and just like appreciate jazz or some other banal shit.

insurgenRat,

Everyone is getting stupider except you right? Like you’re not one of the dumbed down lazy people are you? or your loved ones?

People have said this shit since we have written records.The whole idea of fallen man is the foundation of the Abrahamic religions, probably others I don’t know of too.

People are doing alright, actually go talk to some. Yeah yeah a lot aren’t crazy educated but even the most educated intellectual titans of our age are uneducated in the overwhelming majority of things.

We do alright, there are many problems but they’re not because people are getting less intelligent. We are no smarter or stupider than the first humans, or at least we have no reason to believe otherwise. We have better access to information and we’re also facing some very large problems, but so did bronze age people.

Read the epic of Gilgamesh, it’ll chill you out some.

insurgenRat,

My one resolve, as I enter my greying, is to never become one of those dipshits.

The kids are alright, a little straight edge for my tastes but they’re alright.

insurgenRat,

There might be but keep in mind longer arms needs more force to drive and trans women generally don’t have the testosterone to grow large muscles.

Also like all sport is unfair, it’s inherently the point. When a tall, muscular, woman wins a swimming contest nobody is waiting in the wings to measure her serium testosterone level and determine whether it was legitimate. We accept that people have physiological variations, different economic opportunities, and different mental capacities. We are interested in exploring what a person can do within rough approximately fair bands of competition.

Trans people generally want to transition early, so there’s not a huge amount of time for puberty growth or lack thereof (remember trans men dammit!) given proper support for most people. Even later transitioners don’t seem to have any significant advantage, given the lack of winning they’re doing. I suspect any advantage that may exist is massively, massively, dwarfed by being wealthy enough to hire competent coaches/take the time to train + good childhood for high likelihood of positive psychological coping with stress.

Trans people generally lose on both those fronts.

insurgenRat,

hey man, we exported the fascist cooker that got their fascist cookers into power.

It’s an ouroboros! yaaaaaaaaaaay

insurgenRat,

This ban will allow the Israeli state to continue murdering an entire people unchecked

insurgenRat,

While it is true that insane propaganda is off the charts, for example in my own country Australia we’re chaining ourselves to the fading star of the usa and the UK militarily despite having:

  • different trade interests
  • different geopolitical interests
  • different cultural interests

all while the usa government tries it’s hardest to undermine our economic policy, erase our culture, and distort our politics towards their own demended lines.

There is zero evidence the chinese government does not want to do the same. They have interfered in our media, our education systems, there has been stupid petty trade squabbles with both “sides” using us for their own ends.

When chinese diplomats speak to our media, even in excruciatingly fair interviews, the pattern is the same slimey deny deny deny and legal quibble that usa diplomats engage in. Their media is insanely critical of Australian life too.

There are no good guys in this power struggle and looking for one is childish thinking.

Even this article refuses to address the notion that the chinese government has ever conducted itself in a condemnable manner.

insurgenRat,

we elected a socialist in the 70s. It ended in a constitutional crisis and his successor was groomed by the CIA. rhymes with certain things no?

we had a publicly owned transport system, telephony, healthcare system, a thriving public service. Then we started getting leaned on.

We had a collectivist culture, government funding for our own media with our own values, then we started getting leaned on.

It goes on.

Even our slang is being replaced, people are pronouncing things your way, the media of the usa is replacing everything and that’s intentional government policy.

insurgenRat,

Everything is feedback cycles. Yes there’s homegrown bullshit but it’s naive to ignore how that is encouraged by for example the usa exporting neoliberalism and encouraging/bullying other countries to deregulate their own markets (like media ownership that lets people like Murdoch rise) for favourable political treatment.

It’s naive to ignore that when usa media, usa products, usa megacorps all arrive somewhere that they wont swing the culture.

The usa has almost certainly interfered in our elections ffs.

Being a country the usa has military interest in is incredible corrosive. It’s not just Australia where this has happened.

insurgenRat,

A lot of the Aussies you’ll chat to on the internet don’t realise how recent there was heavy segregation even among people broadly considered white now.

If you look at the last names of powerful people even now you’ll find that while they’re general all white dudes Irish last names are underrepresented, despite being around as long as English ones. A lot of migrants from Greece/Italy/Poland etc were heavily sidelined too.

Lets not even get into treatment of native peoples and non white migrants cause we’ll fucking be here all day.

This country is definitely heavily divided by class, last oecd report I read found 4 generation median time for bottom quartile income to next quartile up. That’s bonkers.

insurgenRat,

Just don’t do what I did. You start with some basic mix right? good old 20/80/trace and you’re happy. But you wonder, who doesn’t wonder, so you try some different stuff right? I mean it’s there, can’t hurt to know cannit?

Maybe you try a little high/low humidity. you think hehe this feels a bit funny. Then it’s just a small step to puffing clouds at high altitude right? next think you know you’re chasing that forever. It’s strange and weird but then breathing down on the ground feels so exhilarating. Nothing can stop the road you’re on now.

You’ll be trying diving mixes, pure oxxy, vox mods with helium and shit. You’re sleeping among empty gas tanks. It’s no life man, no life at all.

Make better choices, it’s too late for me.

insurgenRat,

agree with all of these, although sadly liquid smoke is probably not a healthy thing to have a lot of.

That said I eat onions all the time and they make me ill. Everyone makes their own judgement on the blandness for longevity trade

What is something you do at work to make your day a little nicer for yourself?

I’ll answer first: One thing that I do that helps my work environment feel a little nicer is I have a stuffed Totoro on my desk, a nice-smelling candle, and a few tasty snacks in my drawer. I also very quietly play video game music or ambience to remind myself of my hobbies that I like 😊...

insurgenRat,

Find a sense engaging ritual and do it regularly.

For me it was having elaborate spice teas or herbal teas. I’d mix up batches and keep it in the office, when I needed some sanity taking the time to just focus on a damn good cup of tea helped me relax some.

A treat you enjoy, a stretching routine whatever you can do that is highly engaging would be a good choice. Force work out of your head even for 5 minutes. We aren’t meant to work like a steam engine.

insurgenRat,

How dark do rooms need to be for them to work? Are there issues with shared spaces where someone might want a well lit workspace?

insurgenRat,

Thanks, that’s a lot to think about. We currently use an oled computer monitor as a TV (hooked up to a pi) and it’s beautiful but there are limits on screen size and it’s crazy expensive (you’re paying for stupid fast refresh rates and the Gamer™ markup)

our house is very bright during the day, lots of glass in sunny Australia, so it’s probably not a great candidate for a projector generally but it does have me thinking about one in the bedroom for late night movies. Probably a lot cheaper and neater than another absurd monitor.

insurgenRat,

The lengths people will go to in order to avoid eating a plant based diet are insane.

insurgenRat,

Problem: farming animals is inefficienct, cruel, expensive, and destroying the earth which gives us life life

Solution 1: learn to cook dhal

eww no veggies, I am 12 and refuse to eat them

solution 2: convince the arrogant fussy and cruel hedonist that rejected 1 to eat crickets?

solution 3: keep all of the horror of farming but make it marginally more efficient?

Mmm yay, pigs screaming in terror while they die in gas chambers makes me hungries.

insurgenRat,

Bugs probably feel pain given they modify their behaviour after injuries and seek to avoid them.

insurgenRat,

I’m gonna need your bingo card and your debate links. We’ve no room for bigotry like that on the force.

You’re back to eating grass.

insurgenRat,

Ok, but the person I’m replying to is stating things they clearly don’t believe in order to gotcha me. How am I to respond to that?

insurgenRat,

If the ways we killed non humans were not cruel then we would use them on our loved ones at end of life for euthanasia etc.

we don’t because they’re cruel.

insurgenRat,

I take it you eat plant based to minimise suffering then, as well as cry when a lawn is being mowed?

insurgenRat,

It sounds like you are basing how fine it is to hurt someone for pleasure (and that is all it is at this point) on how similar they look to you rather than any principled understanding of behaviour and neurology.

This is called speciesism and is just another manifestation of the cognitive failures that lead to most evil in the world.

It is absurd to equate grass releasing hormones that cause the production of bitter compounds with electrocuting a chicken. That is like saying steel feels pain because because it emits sparks when ground or that an amputated foot feels pain because nerves send signals for a while. Pain requires perception, we obviously have no test for an inner listener but we can compare behaviour.

This is after all why you believe I am a real person and not a sophisticated automaton.

The only real behavioural difference we can find between us and birds for example is possibly language. Parrots and corvids there is some evidence they can do language, rather than communication. Even so it’s absurd to use this as a line for acceptable suffering as you would essentially be arguing that human infants and humans with certain cognitive differences were acceptable to kill for meat.

The problem with isms is that you can’t draw meaningful lines around the world if you start from a conclusion and work backwards (in this case, animals other than humans are sometimes ok to eat). The moment you start trying to defend it you are forced to confront that the position isn’t reasonable but rationalised.

I suspect you know this, because you feel some degree of guilt and are throwing out statements like “plants feel pain” which have the objective of winning an argument rather than finding truth.

insurgenRat,

This doesn’t really apply because harm to a pedestrian during an impact isn’t a linear scale.

There are sharp decreases in fatalities and permanent injuries, particularly to children who are often the ones hit in neighbourhood streets, below about 30 km/h so there’s a strong incentive to have drivers travelling at speeds no higher than that to avoid child murder and maiming due to inattention.

Below those speeds, and given that people do often belatedly apply the brakes when they’re driving recklessly there is a much weaker case for further reduction in speed limits. At least until car geometry changes again to make them even deadlier /shrug shrug

insurgenRat,

I was like 12 but it was funny as shit. I think now a lot of the humour might fall flat now the zeitgeist has moved on but that storming of the beach against the teddybears still cracks me up remembering it.

insurgenRat,

You’re gonna have to start by pinning down terminology a bit.

Change is a term often used which I think most people would feel is a usefully distinct word for example if I said: said:

  • “I created a sandcastle”
  • “I changed a sandcastle”
  • “I destroyed a sandcastle”

I think those would mean something different to most people despite all reductively applying to the literal rearrangement of a pile of sand.

So the obvious potential confusion here is in the case where I changed a sandcastle how would you decribe it? adding a turret could be taken as destroying the old one and creating a new one but it seems strange to me to argue for the throwing out of change as a concept since what I did seems meaningfully different from smashing a sandcastle, walking 100 meters, and building a new one.

So could you elaborate on what you take creation and destruction to entail?

insurgenRat,

Ok so we can take that stance. I would disagree that these are useful semantics because of the case I mentioned where I feel like adding a turret to a sandcaste is something meaningfully distinct from reducing a sandcastle to a pile of sand, walking 100 meters down the beach, and making a new one with the turret.

Do you disagree that this is meaningfully distinct? If you do would you feel that it’s equivalent to do those two things? That you feel the same way about them?

If you agree that it’s meaningfully distinct then why insist on framing it in the same concepts instead of using the concept of change?

insurgenRat,

I might be misunderstanding but what you’re talking about is basically just failures of a DM.

DMing osr style games requires being more than a simple automaton applying the rules. The systems are simple to allow you to spend your energy elsewhere. I’ll use OSE as an example as that’s what I’m currently DMing.

Let’s take perception. Firstly if something matters from a fun perspective it should be obvious. For example, if overcoming a trap is fun then the overcoming should involve play, not dice rolls which are there to abstract over tedious or uncertain play. For example a large magical fire blocking the corridor requires no perception but will involve a lot of experimentation to find a way past.

Or if we are wanting a perception roll like event: Lets say players are stuck and have no ideas for finding a secret door they think is likely there. Who are the characters? not their stats who are they? Ok someone was a farmer prior? huh ok. Give them a clue to follow like “hey Jake the farmer, you notice the air in this room smells familiar, there’s a maddening scent of petrichor which has no place on a dry stone chamber like this one” see what happens. Alternative if Jake asks for a clue ask Jake to describe some way in which who he is applies to the context and set an ability check for a true or false clue. Suddenly a lack of rules is freedom for players to build up their character mythos on the fly.

Likewise for player skill stuff. No reason a player needs to narrate a conversation anymore than swing an actual sword. If a player asks me if they can make an impassioned arguement based on legal precedent, a sense of justice, and the illegitimacy of a ruler who cannot protect their vassels to the King’s guard then they make such an argument as appropriate to their character’s level of skill.

insurgenRat,

I’m not experienced at all! I’m dming my first campaign at the moment. I did play as a teenager in the 2000s but that was pathfinder which worked quite differently.

It does ask more of players, and it wont work with a group that doesn’t have the confidence to ask meta questions about the game but you can definitely foster that! when disputes come up there are multiple ways of handling things, I haven’t had any bad ones but 2 come to mind.

In one I didn’t adequately communicate to the players the threat of a foe and they felt frustrated, we just rewound time and tried again after a brief chat about non combat options. In another I just asked a player what they thought was fair and they ended up coming up with something reasonable.

I think there’s a harmful view that ttrpgs are like a meal the GM cooks and delivers to the players which they either enjoy or not rather than a collaboratory effort of mutual play. Players should add to scenes etc (e.g. “Is there/could there be a window we could jump from?”), be part of adjudication when it wont kill pacing or during tricky situations.

Like all play it requires trust, but that’s true in modern DnD too with all sorts of broken interpretations of rules and zany magic items etc. All games where players and DMs are adversaries break down.

insurgenRat,

But I’m an insecure person. I speak maybe 100 words aloud a week outside of gaming.

It’s not easy to enforce rules without confience, much easier to build consensus than be a dictator

insurgenRat,

Yep you can! Just make sure you don’t work on it plugged in and be careful around any capacitors if you’ve run it recently. They can hold charge

Wolves and dogs recruit human partners in the cooperative string-pulling task (www.nature.com)

Abstract In comparison to non-human animals, humans are highly flexible in cooperative tasks, which may be a result of their ability to understand a partner’s role in such interactions. Here, we tested if wolves and dogs could flexibly adjust their behaviour according to whether they needed a partner to solve a cooperative...

insurgenRat,

It’s just accurate?

insurgenRat,

This series will make you laugh and cry at train stations. It’s truly some of the best fantasy ever written.

I’m not saying that you have to like it, but you’d be doing yourself a disservice if you didn’t at least check it out.

insurgenRat,

Kinda! I am a bit overloaded atm. Never finished elden ring due to an arthritis flare, absorbed with persona 5 atm, haven’t played disco Elysium yet either.

Trying to find more time for non gaming hobbies and even so a new update for oxygen not included just game out!

There’s been a glut of excellent games lately. Even stuff like Dave the diver is pretty absorbing. I’m keen to give it a go eventually though! after mechwarrior 5 proved too sloggy I’ve been a bit starved of mech games, so much so I’ll settle for weeb samuri suit shit ;p (I kid I kid it’s very silly aesthetically but we all squeeled with glee at the Pacific rim rocket punch)

I’m glad it’s not multiplayer so I can enjoy it at my leisure.

insurgenRat,

Lucky for me my kink is explaining awkward situations to professionals obligated to help you out >:D

insurgenRat,

Not just the USA. Here in Australia (which amusingly was seen as a weird totalitarian state in the usa?) our politicians dragged their feet, encouraged people to go out to large events, discouraged masks, insisted schools stay open because “children couldn’t spread it” amongst other things.

Eventually we had action but it is still like the leading cause of death AFAIK so uhhh good job I suppose.

insurgenRat,

definitionally you aren’t vegan if environmental impact is your terminal goal. It would be like saying you’re Christian for the cathedrals or something.

Veganism is a philosophy and life practice of trying to minimise harm to other earthlings. It can involve environmentalism as an instrumental goal, that is protecting the environment to avoid mass suffering, but a world of perfect environmental preservation where all ants have depression would be unacceptable to a vegan but not to an environmentalist.

Many people with environmental goals adopt a plant based diet and/or lifestyle.

insurgenRat,

The definition privileges action, which is why vegan philosophy is generally fine with stuff like foxes hunting birds but not humans hunting foxes to save birds.

Taking action to depress ants to save others would go against the ethos as defined:

“Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.”

insurgenRat, (edited )

Some freaks have a mutation while allows us to unlock a secret additional flavour that you regs just can’t taste. That’s what the post references.

Unfortunately that flavour is pretty much analogous to hand soap.

So it tastes nice, and also like soap. Generally soap is considered a food ruining condiment.

Also ruined are things like Thai Basil. Seriously I would cut off my left pinky to not have this wretched sense.

insurgenRat,

This sounds like a giant security risk?

insurgenRat,

Maybe, it depends how it works.

Memory is often unencrypted and/or contains encryption keys. Many programs rely on the assumption that it’s cleared on powerdown for security.

Depending on how this memory enters the long term state it seems that a lot of legacy software might become vulnerable to a really simple attack.

Pulling the plug might no longer be something that forces someone to engage in rubber hose analysis.

insurgenRat,

Sure of course of course but umm have you seen software?

There are still windows xp computers on the internet.

It’s not insurmountable, and of course I have no idea if/how this will roll out.

Just it seems to mess with a rather deep assumption we have about how computers operate when we develop software and threat models.

insurgenRat,

I admit to being out of the game for a while but how common is RAM encryption?

wouldn’t the overhead violate half the point of RAM?

insurgenRat,

This article is a stupid nothing Burger but on principal I support food anarchy so let’s hope it catches on :p

insurgenRat,

eeeyyyyy baby. Want sum fuck?

insurgenRat,

Literally a dude hit me up with that once. That’s all I know.

Just since you’re looking for a vegan and it’s such a winning line hahahaha

insurgenRat,

haha got me I suppose?

insurgenRat,

the smell of frying onions

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