You have to be quite the special guy to lose a knife fight and still be the one who gets fired. Of course, if you started the fight in the first place in a hazy drunken rage…

That’s his major value-add. With any luck he’ll sputter in the primary versus someone with actual charisma and decent ideas.

Certainly possible, but I tend to think something else, assuming the quote is real. I think it’s literally about bad poetry. In the collective grief after the sinking, undoubtedly many people who were not and would never be professional poets attempted to write something in memoriam. Some of these were undoubtedly published in various papers. This blurb has the feel of a Twain or Bierce or especially a Mencken, where an educated cynic is calling out the earnest-but-unskilled for their lack of self-awareness in thinking they had a quality contribution to the public discussion.

He believes something incredibly toxic and nuts, but I’m not sure it’s exactly that Christianity is “true,” but rather that it’s just so incredibly useful that it might as well be, and therefore it’s not hypocritical to espouse it with gusto, regardless of what you personally think about the supernatural.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-real-stakes-real-story-peter-thiels-antichrist-obsession/

I don’t recall the link for now, but there was a fairly long piece a couple of weeks (months?) ago that went into the Thiel religious awakening. The short version is that he doesn’t necessarily believe in Jesus so much as he believes that organized religion is so important as a binding agent in society that you’re better off pretending to believe in it, advocating for it, and imposing it by force if it seems necessary, all to satisfy the human need for mimesis, or imitative desires and behaviors.

Society’s movement away from Christianity in particular as a uniquely humane and sophisticated global-ready religion means it’s okay to fall back on older “tribal” religious patterns like assertive scapegoating to reimpose the world order. There is room for regions of the world with independent traditions to impose them as a means of having a safe and orderly society, because it allows the Christian region to interact with a relatively small number of competing ideologies, which satisfy similar psychological needs for their populations, and therefore a balance can be maintained. It’s better for the system if most people hold sincere beliefs about the supernatural aspects, but it’s not utterly critical, particularly for elites, as long as folks legitimately buy into the societal repercussions of failing to rely on religion for social control. It’s like Pascal’s wager on meth, which is appropriate because a lot of it dates back to a German guy who was a Nazi apologist through most of the thirties until being discarded by them right before WW2. Some of this is strictly IIRC, so be on notice, LOL.

Conveniently, all this allows the Christianized advocates for this worldview to declare any systemic threat to the triumph of their vision for world peace to be accurately-enough referred to as the Antichrist, and the things you’re allowed to do to oppose the Antichrist are quite broad.

JD Vance is thought to be well-ensconced in the ideology.

EDIT: Found it, plus a couple of others that discuss the same thing. Thiel is absolutely nuts, but not quite the way he’s sometimes portrayed.

• https://www.wired.com/story/the-real-stakes-real-story-peter-thiels-antichrist-obsession/
• https://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/desconstructing_thiel/
• https://salmagundi.skidmore.edu/articles/1176-from-philosophy-to-power

No worries, and I added a “TL;DR”, LOL. I’ve found them intriguing ever since I first played Centipede, and it’s always nice to have something that breaks up the “repetitive” that leads to RSI.

The Basilisk is a traditional mouse. I get a flare up of mild RSI every few months from using regular mice, even though I prefer them, and that’s when the Kensington comes out for daily use. I also like the trackball when I know (or suspect) I won’t have all the flat space I might like.

Those two are good. I’d also add Black Panther 2 and Dr. Strange 2. Both were hyped, and both of them got saddled with “backdoor pilot” and stage-setting duties for multiple properties at the expense of their own narratives. Marvel’s done that all the way back to the first post-credit Avengers stinger, but in those two cases it was a lot and really kneecapped two promising projects. Then of course BP got dealt a very rough hand with Chadwick Boseman’s passing, but I’m not sure they played that hand very well, either.

But it is money they’re perfectly happy not to give you if you can’t or won’t set an equal amount aside.

This. Real sweet tea is like if caramel and diabetes had a baby and tea was just the midwife. It’s not really tea in any sense except the academic, but when you want it you want it, and it’s definitely sweet.

I assume you mean the lack of a “`/~” key? If so, I just have it on a layer, accessed with the FN key, and mapped to its usual spot. So to get to it, I just hold down shift and FN instead of only shift. My F row is just FN+1 through FN+‘=’, and a few other goodies are hiding various places as well.

Okay, I’m willing to accept that we generally shouldn’t decide that our personal lines in the sand can serve as meaningful differentiators between art and not-art. By the same token, don’t expect me to be particularly impressed by a (mostly) photorealistic composition just because you spent 30 minutes fine-tuning your prompt. If I’m not appreciating your skill and the time you committed to your vision, the bar for the impact you need to make is that much higher. For me, most AI art falls flat on that front as well.

Maybe someone will be the breakthrough artist that shows the rest of us luddites what a genuinely beautiful interplay between drafting a prompt and massaging an engine will look like, but (1) even that person is something other than a painter or a photographer, and (2) I don’t think we’re there yet and may never be.

My summary of MCAD suites is getting pretty long in the tooth these days, and IIRC one or two of the niche ones are simply not available anymore, but it still might be useful.

For what it’s worth, I use Alibre Design in Windows, and do STEP touchups and smaller projects in Linux (where I spend most of my time) on FreeCAD. I just really like the timeline and workflow in Alibre, and it very rarely crashes.

I like that, though I might consider that rhyme, alliteration, and especially repetition also aid retention by requiring less data to be committed to memory as-is. References to other works are also very much a shorthand for cramming pre-existing memes (in the Dawkins sense) into less “word-doing.”

I dunno. The whole thing breaks down pretty quickly, as most analogies between mental and computational process do, but it’s fun to think about.

Adults also make a face with how much it’s a copy of Frozen’s premise.

Definitely very similar, but it’s different enough, I’d say. It sort of makes explicit that there are cultural repercussions to imposing Elsa’s burden on everyone, that embracing individuality can ironically create a stronger sense of community, and then, in splitting Elsa into Rumi and Jinu, it allows for parallel redemptive tracks, one who never had a “Let it Go” first act moment at all and suffered because of it, and one who really thoroughly bought into the anti-social aspects of it but is then gaslit into thinking they can never be anything better.

If we can do the Hero’s Journey a thousand times, we can do Elsa’s every few years, especially when the rest of it is changed up and fun. I do think there’s a world where K-Pop Demon Hunters comes and goes without making any waves, but the songs are all earworms and it hit at just the right moment, apparently.

Holy shit. Sicko bowl champs! Go Jags!

Trevor Lawrence’s legs: Fuck you, arm, We’ll do it ourselves.

Like two pimply cheeks on one ass.

Seriously. Who knows?

I am, unfortunately, a north Florida native and OG Jags fan.

I am still fairly optimistic about the arc of the new regime, but the quick start was a bit of fool’s gold.