Those early days (Quake, UT, CS). Grab a gun and go. No real levels, buying hats, or special equipment only the richest can afford.
Yeah, I’d get thrashes by good players, but not because they have different equipment or loyalty/grind/pay-to-play items. A level playing field where getting murdered was just. Those were good days.
Sometimes it’s about sending a message.
Not great, mostly because we don’t have close enough family in Canada. They’re all too many branches out on the family tree to count.
I might have filled things in wrong since I did it quickly, but it’s fun to see how governments try to balance different kinds of immigrations needs and skills.
No, graft is intended. As in:
graft
: the acquisition of gain (such as money) in dishonest or questionable ways also : illegal or unfair gain
From: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/graft
Grift is also a valid word as you implied and I considered it’s use here, but I felt that graft was more directly appropriate. Grift is more of a confidence trickster implication (see: Conman in Chief), but graft is a more common word for general leveraging of office or position to steal, so more of a classic politician move.
ANOTHER shutdown? The GOP can’t govern, only graft. At least the Dems keep the lights on while grafting.
The US needs a huge kick in the balls. We’ve become much much much too full of ourselves. Not just this one wanabee tyrant, but the whole country needs a shake down. We don’t own the world and the world doesn’t OWE us anything. We’re not better than others unless we earn it. Having a bunch of self righteous white supremacist religious nutjobs elect the world’ greediest narcissist to the presidency pretty much means we dun fucked up as a civilization and now the whole world gets to pay for it.
If someone actively wants it around they get to pick from that list as to why. Any other stated reason beyond academic study is just them being cowards in addition to their real reason from above.
You’re spot on here. The list there was heavily subsidized by government funding. NIH, DARPA, NSF, NASA, etc made those be discovered and initially refined. Many are still heavily subsidized by government funding.
There’s an initial investment stage that takes risk, but after that, it’s mostly about refinement and efficiency. Capitalism tries to exploit those government funds then spread the risk followed by retreading old ideas for new dollars. Capitalism invents few things because it’s risky. It’s really good at monopolizing existing things and eventually driving the efficiency of exploitation to the umpteenth degree.
Busses are great and should get a ton more protected lanes, signal priority, and shorter intervals.
That said,nthe only real long term win is more trains. Fast long range trains for commuters, local metros, and trams. It’ll take generations to build the infrastructure NYC needs, but the only good time to start is today.
But it does help if it’s against a famous name. For example saying “I had a better baseball career than Michael Jordan” can really draw headlines.
The US hasn’t seriously invested in its infrastructure in 50 years now. I’m glad that India is at least ahead of the US, so it’s a start.
Berlin’s S-Bahn is an anomaly in Germany. Normally S-Bahns are a form of light interurban rail networks. Not really metros (more classically within city subways and suburbs).
Across Germany there are S-Bahn networks between cities, but Berlin has grown so much that it absorbed other cities into a single metro area and the S-Bahn with it. They also added extra stations in places making it a bit more metro like.
It’s a weird beast for classification now.
I like that the U-Bahns and S-Bahns are different rail companies in the city. That way when there’s a strike it normally only shuts down one of the two systems and I can still get around, just a bit slower.
Given the current US leadership, it probably is.
That I can definitely agree with. US manufacturing is so crippled by capitalism that the results are squeezed into barely functional pieces of shit. Efficiency for the shareholders is king.
I’m always glad to see when someone like Canada has some pride in their products and not just making the shittiest thing that’ll still sell.
So far Canadians have been smart enough to hold the line. Don’t bend and don’t believe the liars in charge of the US. This administration would gladly invade anyone and subjugate them.
Never 51. Elbows Up, Canada. It’s time to line brawl on the ice.
I only do technical CAD design, so FreeCAD works fine. It’s no AutoDesk, but it has gotten good for my project scale.
Slicing is done with Cura.
Printing I’m mostly living off copying to SD card like a barbarian, but I’ve used Octoprint on a Raspberry Pi board in the past. I even had the time lapse camera videos working. It was a nice setup.
Some of my kids do more advanced sculpture work with Blender and other tools.
It’s all about attention. People need attention. They’re willing to do anything to get it. The question becomes whether they have positive and orderly means of getting attention or negative and chaotic means.
When were young we get shown what it takes. Our strategies are formed by our experiences. Unfortunately, there’s some very large cultural groups that only teach their children how to get attention via negative means. They’ll get angrier and order until you notice them. You don’t have to like them, only see them.
One route to getting attention is to just be a loud, angry, asshole in public. Generally do things to make people deal with you because you’ve got no other routes to validation or attention. The US loud car cultures are one of those strategies. Cara are anonymous, we live in isolating communities, and if you can make your presence loud enough people will be forced to give you the attentive n you crave. It’s pretty, childish, and spiteful, but at least you’re not nobody anymore.
Choosing loud cars is literally killing people. The research is finding that living in places with elevated noise levels is shortening lifespans through stresses from fight or flight reactions over time.
All of this are showing symptoms of much deeper societal trauma that will plague us for generations.
In the mean time, I vote we find cars that exceed a sound db rating and crush them immediately. No questions. Drag them to the machine and cube them.
“This could have been and email” I guess.
There’s still mail service happening, but it’s going to get ever more expensive to use analog.
Fingers crossed we can find a few more episodes of Doctor Who as well. The cache of tapes found a few years ago at a TV station were a wonderful find.
I finished translating Dragonball books 2 and 3. They help with some slang and the length of statements makes it easy to take in nibbles. I bought an omnibus book with books 4, 5, and 6 to do the next set.
We picked up a couple more children’s books from zu vershenken boxen am strasse and have been churning through those.
I managed a few more fully in German interactions in stores. It’s getting better, but if people could please stop slurring/muttering I’d be quite appreciative.
Still working on faster numbers. I can understand them, but it takes way too long to translate in my head. I’m trying to just listen and understand, not translate as a means of keeping up the pace.
Oh, and we’ve been singing the alphabet song in German more to remind us of the buchstaben (letters) so when people ask us to spell something or spell something out it’ll go faster.
I have until May 2027 to have my B1 zertifikat to get residency. Only 16 months left! Muss üben.
I managed a few more pages of my manga in German. It’s slow going when I’m not on the train to work with some spare time.
I did manage some more good small social interactions. Still need serious work on basics there.
Got complimented on my pronunciation by an IKEA staff member. The grammar was terrible, though.
I did make it through several banking menus and even some phone based help in German. Someday I’ll manage to be more comfortable with the flow of the language, I know it.