howdy

a parallel concurrent on-the-fly grey-stack Dijkstra accurate non-moving garbage collector

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

OP: How to fold a flying pig. (cr简开JK)

(The name flying pig/feizhu飞猪 is inspired by Nezha’s mount the Wind-Fire Wheels. In the animated film, the Wind-Fire Wheels normally take the form of a flying pig.)

[filmnoirsbian]

[dragongirlbunny]

saw a post on bluesky about reimagining The Iliad as a mecha war and that idea goes unbelievably hard. achilles in his legally distinct gundam cutting through dozens of enemy suits. aggamemnon in his gold-plated mech. paris using a long range sniper rifle to exploit a design flaw in achilles' armor. the gods are all various megacorps who have a stake in the war bc it'll impact their profits.

[gudamor]

H. E. L. E. N. by TroyCorp

[phaeton-flier]

Achilles posting the schematics for Hector's mech all around the forums of Troy, so that his family cannot license copies to other soldiers.

[phaeton-flier]

Achilles digging out Hector's pneumatic cortical stack and melting it, so his pattern can never be uploaded to the servers of Hades

[phaeton-flier]

Achilles dragging Hector's mech behind him as he matches his mech around the walls of Troy, so that all may see that Hector's corpse is still inside, slowly warming, never to be cryonically preserved. But the gods intervened, and vitrified his body as it sat in the mech, so no part of his brain was lost

[boycritter]

sorry man im all booked

[boycritter]

some people seem to be under the impression that i am taking 6 hours to do a single sudoku. this is not the case. i am doing more sudokus than you could possibly comprehend in those 6 hours.

[worldmovingslow]

husband: I'm so glad we finally have our own place! You did such a great job decorating it, honey

fujo wife: Really? You don't think it's kind of...chintzy?

[marinella-ela]

[leafstem]

lets lay down with baby

lets lay down with mama

lets lay down with mama

lets lay down with mama

[velvetmasonry]

Tigers by Antoine-Louis Barye, c. 1850-69

[slopforhogs]

Bornean bearded pig (Sus barbatus)

“Bornean bearded pig family” by Kate Tann, CC BY-SA 2.0

(x)

[aorish]

sometimes i gotta remind myself that im still economically to the left of the average democratic politician. and while I'm often ideologically at odds with the progressives we usually support the same social policies.

[aorish]

probably my biggest break with the average democratic voter is my "support" of drug patents as probably the least-bad system you could come up with. I mean, they expire after 20 years from filing, which in practice is usually less than half that time on the market; we've effectively socialized the benefits while privatizing risk! The profits that pharmaceutical companies make on successful drugs fund all of the ventures that either didn't work at all or weren't safe or more effective than current options, or ran into some other regulatory hurdle.

An entirely publicly funded research system would ensure that everyone could afford drugs, sure, even in the first decade or so that they become available. But because most drug research doesn't pan out, it would also likely be far more risk-averse, meaning far fewer drugs would be developed to begin with! If someone dies now because they can't afford a new drug that's still under patent, that is quite unfortunate, but they would have died anyway if that drug never existed in the first place! Meanwhile, everyone who needs that drug a decade from now will be able to afford it the same as if it was never patented, and they also would have died if it was never developed.

I think the real solution here isn't abolishing drug patents or more publicly funded pharma research, it's socialized health insurance. If some patients can afford a drug and others can't, it makes far more sense to have everyone pay into the same system and have that system shoulder the cost of those new cutting-edge pharmaceuticals that necessarily only some of those people will need while they're still under patent. That way, we get the maximum amount of new drugs discovered and everyone who needs them benefits from them immediately.

[tim-official]

neopronouns are all well and good but as long as we're adding words to the english language there's much cooler things we could add too. lets add inclusive and exclusive "we." a variant of "we" that distinguishes between "we (including listener)" and "we (including the speaker but not the listener)". other languages have this. Let's add the obviative case to our third-person pronouns so that we can distinguish between two people of the same gender - a him-[salient] and a him-[less salient]. this would make it much easier to write sex scenes where two people use the same pronouns. why aren't our proud pronoun warriors working on this

[tanadrin]

personally i think if you need electronic amplification or a prerecorded backing track you're not ready to be a busker. go back to busker school until you are, or play those bagpipes with fervor like god intended

[tanadrin]

@yeebles

genuinely interested in elaboration on this take!!

ok i'm not exactly a neutral party here bc i cordially loathe buskers but as long as you're going to do obnoxious noise pollution with your crappy music there should be a point to the whole exercise, right?

and the conceptual value add of the busker is, i suppose, the romance of live music: if you just stood there playing your stereo and asking for tips in return you'd be like any old asshole in he subway and one who demanded remuneration to boot. busking is a performance, albeit a low stakes one. so the more you depart from that live performance aspect the more you cheapen that notional romance, the point of the whole thing

if you cannot perform to your desired standard with the instrument you have chosen, you either need to pick a different instrument, pick different music, or engage with the constraints on the medium as they actually exist, rather than trying to replicate the in-concert/cabana/scottish highlands vibe that this subway station is most certainly not going to provide. it's like painting one cloud on a photograph and calling yourself a landscape painter. they're not even like. sampling and remixing to change the context/vibe of a piece of prerecorded music. it's just a shitty recording of a drumbeat! the only thing i hate more than a shitty busker is a lazy one!

[0player]

Ok but why aren't amps fair game? Some instruments don't even function without one, and I feel like that's preferable to straining even the poor acoustic ones for more volume.

[tanadrin]

they make it harder for me to escape the shitty music by walking to the other end of the platform

[kinglermew]

I saw a cool girl busking on the Seattle subway and she had like 18 different synth boards and a hundred wires and was putting out pretty good techno.

[shima-draws]

Everybody stop what you’re doing RIGHT NOW and celebrate the last Out of Touch Thursday of 2020

[cannibalcaprine-deactivated2024]

OUTTA TOUCH THURSDAY!

[analog-machine]

The last Out of Touch Thursday of 2021

[mrtylers]

The last Out of Touch Thursday of 2022!

[transgendercyborg-deactivated20]

The Final Out Of Touch Thursday 2023!

[stosb]

The last Out of Touch Thursday of 2024

[prokopetz]

I know this is due to my particular constellation of interests, but for me the funniest thing about the "everything in a given century happened simultaneously" view of history being applied to the 1900s is bumping into increasing numbers of people who are genuinely unclear on whether Dungeons & Dragons pre-dates or post-dates The Lord of the Rings.

[appendingfic]

tolkien had to call them hobbits to avoid running afoul of Hasbro's trademark of the word 'halfling'

[luarien]

It was TSR's trademark of the word 'halfling', Hasbro didn't get control of D&D until after the end of WW2.

[sufficientlylargen]

The character of Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings was based on a half-elf ranger that JRR Tolkien played in a campaign with CS Lewis.

[kinglermew]

@zealot311

[sabertoothwalrus]

I’m not going to explain myself

[magicratfingers]

the og

[themysteriousmurasamecastle]

hey.. two people were asking about you… so i gave them your address and phone number… their names were Skeletal Warrior and Skeletal Ice Mage

[st-just]

📂 Avatar: The Last Airbender

Comparing the architecture and population densities of the northern and southern water tribes (even given the 100-year-war, Katara and Sokka's family history doesn't sound like refugees forced into the hinterland after the de facto genocide of a centralized and urbanized civilization) we can assume some combination of a) the Arctic is in this world significantly more habitable and friendly to long-term settled agrarian/urban development than the antarctic and b) the northern water tribe controlled a significant imperial hinterland prior to the Fire Nation's wars of conquest supplying raw materials (food, fuel, metal and bone, etc) for use in the capital.

Which is also the only way to make characterizing the world as 'the four nations' and not 'the two nations, a loosely organized nomadic confederacy, and like a city and a half on the oppisite ends of the planet' make sense tbh.

[phaeton-flier]

Similarly, I have long assumed the Air Nomads we see thru the eyes of Aang are in fact the noble or ecclesiastical caste who rule over a larger, non-nomadic peasant class who do all the farming and construction and such; they too died during the genocide despite not being airbenders (airbending being a sign of higher birth, any airbending children are taken to the temples)

But yeah, "we all meditate and fly around on sky bison and practice airbending" does not a society make; Aang thinking his people's main export was fruit pies is a side effect of him being 12 when he ran off.

[txttletale]

if you've followed me for a while, you've probably seen me mention Underside, my dark cape TTRPG inspired by deconstructive superhero stories like Worm, Astro City, Watchmen, and the first season of Gen V.

it's a project i've spent a lot of time on, trying to build a system that tells the kind of superhero stories i like; the shit that treats them as a subculture with a body count, that digs into the dissociative tension of the secret identity, that asks what it means to feel so completely ejected from regular society that you can only go out in a mask and costume.

for a while now, a playtest edition of Underside has been available on my patreon; now, as it's slowly become more and more complete over the course of a year, i'm putting the most recent one up on itch.io

i want to be clear: while this playtest edition is enough to play a full campaign and contains all the mechanics that are going to be in the finished book, it's still a playtest. there's no fancy layout and an entire section (guidance for the Administrator, the game's GM-equivalent role) hasn't been written yet. but for a while, every time i talk about Underside i get the question: "where can i get my hands on it?". so here's an answer to that question; right now, while it's still in beta--if you want to support the project and help me get it over the finish line, or you just can't wait until it's out For Real, you can get it here.

UNDERSIDE Playtest Edition by the HORIZON MACHINE

costumed violence in the dark