IJBMer Updates

glennmagusharvey

okay, what the fuck is this squid game thing people keep talking about

> [Squid Game] revolves around a contest in which 456 players, all drawn from different walks of life but each deeply in debt, play a series of children's games with deadly penalties if they lose for the chance to win a ₩45.6 billion prize.[a]

so

it's like yu-gi-oh as a death game, but taken seriously

that's like, two stupid premises, taken together

glennmagusharvey

note to self: watch OCW lectures instead of YouTube videos when bored

Stormtroper

Yeh, Squid Game has been invading my surroundings too.
The problem with OCW videos is that nobody has ever learned anything during a lecture, so you still have to put in the work of doing assignments, readings, etc.

Stormtroper

Hey Glenn, wings told me to bid you a Happy Birthda, so... Happy Birthday!

Also tell gacek Happy Birthday because I have no idea when his birthday is so might as well

glennmagusharvey

I watched an OCW video, and amazingly I did just learn something, specifically how semiconductors work (at a basic level).

Tell fourteenwings thanks, and I should have wished him a happy birthday when LiveJournal reminds me but I keep forgetting.

glennmagusharvey

Also I am *this* close to launching a page hosting my music compositions and transcriptions but there are so many little things to iron out. I wanted to do it today but I am basically working all day today, so...

lrdgck

My birthday is a few months off, but aww, thanks guys!

glennmagusharvey

Challenge: attempt to remember lrdgck's approximate birthday a few months later.

lrdgck

My coffee machine broke down. Curiously enough I don't really like coffee, but the coffee from this one was for some reason an exception. Well, it was malfunctioning before, there remains some hope it will work next time I try to make it.

Stormtroper

Now you gotta liveblog your attempts at fixing it.
Today (well, Monday) I learned that vampire hunters were a real thing, and that some even subscribed to the Van Helsing school of demon slaying:

Some carried a kit that used mallet, stake, crucifix. If part of a church it included holy water, holy oil, etc. However the most important things it carried were items such as rope, crowbars, or even pistols.

lrdgck

Aaand, it works today. Looks like it needed to think on its actions and choices over the night.

I learned that vampire hunters were a real thing, and that some even subscribed to the Van Helsing school of demon slaying

On the other hand, vampires they hunted were hardly the Dracula kind. In many cases, they were more like a kind of mischievous zombie that needed the attention of the village vampire remover. Still a cool concept though, kind of like low-level witcher stuff rather than parkouring through Europe.

glennmagusharvey

It's occurred to me that a "bento box", to an English-speaking audience, is basically just a fancy name for a meal container.

Stormtroper

Aww man. Richard Kyanka, AKA Lowtax AKA the Something Awful founder, has taken his own life.

glennmagusharvey

Sad to hear that.

glennmagusharvey

https://onsheka.tumblr.com/post/667608087507730432/wtf-is-an-ntf-no-matter-how-many-times-ive-had

Stormtroper

The crypto world is dumb and especially so the image NFT scene, but you'd be doing yourself a favor not looking up explanations of them from people who are into habits like not distinguishing Bitcoin from other cryptocurrencies and things like that.

lrdgck

I think of it as an attempt to make rare pepe trade a real thing. That, or an attempt to launder money that accidentally made rare pepe trade a real thing.

Also, guys, I just had another of these 30 year-old boomer moments. It went like this: after watching some TV stuff (Shadow and Bone), I wanted to check out the bio of the actress playing lead role, and it said:

gender nonconforming, using both "she" and "they" pronouns

And my first thought was like, so what's the difference to a vanilla woman? You wear pants or something?

My second was that I probably just did the modern day equivalent to "have you tried not being gay".

I guess it's over for me. I've falled behind with the times, I don't get the modern world, I'm officially an old man. Now all that's left is getting used to the dirt.

(The rest of my thoughts was that Young Adult has so awfully generic plot setups that writing it must involve crossing off points on a list of tropes, but it's still better than the rest of fantasy because at least there aren't so many gratuitous sex scenes and the female protagonist isn't randomly raped every other page for cheap drama points.)

glennmagusharvey

Sidenote:

Personally I still find 'singular "they"' to be weird, because the conjugation just doesn't follow singular verb forms. For example, "Alice doesn't eat mushrooms, because they don't like mushrooms." This makes for inconsistencies, at least, and sometimes even makes the parsing confusing.

I know about the argument that it has been used since forever, but the counterargument is that it's also been proscribed since forever.

I'd much rather English-speakers just use a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun. Unfortunately there's no such pronoun in common use. I'd say "then make one!" though of course it's not that easy.

Meanwhile though I'm willing to use "they" if someone asks me to use it to refer to them, just as a common courtesy.

I don't know what I'd do if someone asks me to use some neopronoun like "ze". Though, technically, I've arguably suggested my own neopronoun, "'ey" (an intentional and direct clipping of "they").

But I'll figure this out when I need to cross this bridge. Hopefully I don't need to.

glennmagusharvey

Hugely subverted in the late Soviet Union. When the Soviet authorities started to allot the general city population small plots of land for hobby farming (and small means small — they were usually 600 square meters, or about 0.15 acre), the city population, armed by the hundreds of tomes on modern agriculture, a desire to escape the dreary boredom and horrible quality of official produce and general interest, took to the farming with such gusto that within a decade the (unofficial) output of these plots begun to outstrip the output of the official, state-managed agriculture in some areas, especially vegetable production, despite most of these people having a day job and tending their suburban plots only on weekends. It spells volumes on the inefficiency of the official Soviet agriculture, but also about the intensity with which these City Mouses cultivated their land.

source: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheSimpleLifeIsSimple

This is pretty interesting.

lrdgck

For what it's worth I think I know what this entry speaks of, they're in my city too. "Garden plots" seems to be a decent enough translation. Picture a lot of small vegetable garden patches, most of them with a small hut in the middle, visible through a fence from a major city street. I was once told of some foreigner taking all the huts for a slum, but no, they're, like, Saturday lodges. Often some juicy real estate, too, but gardeners' unions that run them essentially seem politically untouchable.

glennmagusharvey

meanwhile in America: https://modernfarmer.com/2014/06/stop-romanticizing-farms/

lrdgck

ITT: we bash cottagecore

Stormtroper

I believe I posted about it already, but years ago there was this political push for "urban agriculture" here, having a bunch of flower pots or a metal barrel in your closet or something and grow tomatoes from there.
Eventually I learned agricultural farming is an actual thing and much less crass than what it was shown as.
I've also daydreamed about having a veggie orchard at home (in the yard), but, issues.

glennmagusharvey

You can do meaningful amounts of small-scale agriculture with rooftops or small open plots even in a dense city, and you can do hydroponics, though I have some unsettled questions regarding economies of scale. Still, though, there's a lot of space that could be used to grow crops but isn't. (Like all the freaking lawns in suburban yards for example, which are currently growing "crops" (often fertilized, even) of turf grass.) And there are potential additional benefits in some places, such as making healthier foods more accessible to some low-income areas that lack supermarkets with a decent stock of things like veggies.

Anyhow, what do you mean by "agricultural farming"? (This seems like a redundant description.)

Stormtroper

Anyhow, what do you mean by "agricultural farming"?

I meant "urban agriculture also I'm sleep-deprived".

glennmagusharvey

Heh. Get some sleep.



@lrdgck someone just wonderposted the following on a Steam forum thread:

CHUJ KURWA DAWAJ KURWA JARANIE KURWA

What does this translate to and why does Google Translate give

FUCK FUCK GIVE FUCK JARANA FUCK

lrdgck

It's more like:

phallus whore go on whore blazing whore

"Blazing" as in "4/20 BLAZE IT". (edit: as in, "the act or practice of smoking weed".) "Dawaj" is literally "give" (the grammatical form used here makes it more like "give it to me right now or else", but still, "give" is technically correct), but it's colloquially used as a term of encouragement along the lines of "go on" or "go ahead". Also, the first two words can be reasonably approximated with "fuck", as long as the spirit of the phrase is more important than its literal meaning.

Stormtroper

A paper for your crank-repelling needs.
It bothers me that reference 2 is used before reference 1.

lrdgck

This one is to repel overly touchy editors, I take it.

glennmagusharvey

The green heron (Butorides virescens) always confuses me.

My idea of a "heron" is this tall bird with long legs and a long neck and a long beak.

The green heron has a long beak, and...that's about it. Its neck, while it can be held long, is often kinda folded up. And its legs are way short. Well, they're long if you compare them to songbird legs, but they're short compared to typical heron/egret legs.

And so while you might find your usual herons/egrets towering over the water surface, wading through it, stabbing at stuff, this little bird, the green heron, will perch on something above the water and then just peer into the water looking for food. (They've even been known to throw bait into the water.)

So, yeah. It looks nothing like a heron, basically.



The classification of wading birds is kinda funky in general. So, for example, you have your genus Egretta, the so-called "typical egrets", a group which includes the little egret (Egretta garzetta), and...those big birds known as great egrets (Ardea alba) aren't part of it.

for reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_heron
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egretta
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_egret