IJBMer Updates

fourteenwings

Sidenote: I wonder how fast different kinds of products move in a given bookstore. For example, how fast does the average famous-person-nonfiction-commentary-book-that's-not-the-talk-of-the-town move compared to, say, the average test prep book, or the average manga, or the average baby-book-with-attached-toys.

Bookstores here are primarily for books but I've heard American bookstores are dying and have to subsist off of Funko Pops or cribbing Hot Topic style concepts.

I've been messing with AI Art for a while now and whilst Stable Diffusion is basically amazing for creating things that are close to what you imagine, DALL-E can create amazing, amazing things... 30% of the time.

I might post some of my stuff here but I kind of also want to post it elsewhere where nobody knows me.

so people can in fact read what's inside before purchasing

Ah, the true Citizen Test.

Speaking of; I've been reading a bit more lately (just being stuck at work at inopportune times) and wow Something New Under the Sun is like the definition of a letdown.

Basically; clearly the author believes climate alarmism is more important than a coherent story. The annoying thing is that the characters were so good and compelling.

glennmagusharvey

Ah, the true Citizen Test.

If you mean "will you cheat by reading the book instead of buying it", there's frankly various reasons to own a book even after reading it. I'd guess that folks who would read a book at a bookstore without buying it are mainly the kind who don't have the budget or the liberty to actually buy the book.

fourteenwings

I don't think many people read anymore (there's a Pew survey or Gallup poll suggesting like 1 in 12 Americans read more than one book a year and I seriously doubt that could ever be a thing) and for those without the budget there's always a library.

Also I mainly mean "reading the ending or middle bit". I guess I won't 100% judge reading pages 1-10 but I still think it's bad form.

glennmagusharvey

Given that even Amazon (or sellers thereon) is known to go out of its way to provide previews of the interior of a book, I think reading something in order to get a sense of the contents is quite reasonable behavior.

fourteenwings

Well I still don't think it's right and wouldn't do it personally, and I'd probably be slightly judgey if somebody did.

glennmagusharvey

I can't believe this has a Wikipedia article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoggoLingo

...well, I mean, I "can't believe" it in the same way "I can't believe it's not butter".

lrdgck

TIL apustaja speech is actually dog lover speech

I don't quite know what to do with it.

fourteenwings

I'm going to try really hard to post here (IJBM) at least once a day, because it feels like we're actually letting this thing go right now.

We should at least outlive one of the big social media companies of now (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram).

lrdgck

please let this not just be rightie wackery

fourteenwings

I have no idea what you mean.

I just mean "Social media companies surely come and go and we can be stronger than that" rather than "We need to defeat the big evil social media companies!!!" or something.

Plus if anybody really has something against any social media right now it's GMH and twitter.

glennmagusharvey

lol, I just started making a thread chronicling the stupid crap going on there and now I'm stuck with it.

Honestly, I was never a big twitter user in the first place, though now that I have a set of Mastodon accounts I find myself using them (combined or even individually) more often than I ever used Twitter before. In my opinion, Twitter was just unwieldy in ways that Mastodon isn't, even before Musk's takeover.

And that's not including any of the bad business decisions. Or the political ones, and I'm quite aware of the many ways Musk keeps trying to "own the libs" and otherwise be bad on various other issues (e.g. Ukraine). Though I've preferred to keep them out of that thread and focus on the business failings. (Though on the political side, his latest spat with Matt Taibbi "betraying" him is particularly hilarious.)

Would I prefer it if Twitter were less of a thing (probably in the sense of being smaller)? Given its current state, sure, and even given its previous pre-Musk state, because I strongly prefer open-source platforms on principle. That said, this isn't really a condemnation of social media; if anything it's just that I don't like how major platforms are centrally-controlled entities run by big commercial firms, some of which are at this point basically too big to fail (though Mr. Musk is certainly testing the limits of this).

(And yes, I'll use Discord while also railing against it. On Discord. Because I can recognize, practically, that there isn't yet some big motivator for people to switch off of that and onto Matrix or something, unlike what's happening on Discord, so everyone and their mom is on Discord these days.)

(Though I was just reminded to fire up Element (i.e. a Matrix client) to say hi to a friend I've been talking to through it.)

Stormtroper

Social media was a mistake, we should go back to GeoCities.
I sometimes actively try to come up with something interesting to post here but often come up short. *shrug*

fourteenwings

I sometimes actively try to come up with something interesting to post here but often come up short.

Exactly.

(Though on the political side, his latest spat with Matt Taibbi "betraying" him is particularly hilarious.)

If this was a few years ago I'd know exactly what you're talking about but I'm glad I only barely know what this is.

I'm really confused as to why people prefer Discord to like, IRC. Discord basically killed IRC and that bothers me a lot.

I need to do some big, organized posts about LEGO but time+motivation.

glennmagusharvey

Honestly I barely know about what happened before the their spat, too, but it was probably stupid anyway.

I think Discord got a lot of traction because there's one go-to way to pick up Discord (i.e. the official Discord site, or technically two because there's the app but it's basically just a browser anyway), and once you're in it you join all your Discord-based social groups from it. I don't like how this means that all my social groups are in one place, and I don't like being stuck with only one app's or UI's way of doing things, but this may be a perk for others.

Also, as much as I really like having everything in plaintext for maximum ease of accessibility with minimum computer resource usage, people like their image embeds and link previews and emoji reacts, sadly. There is Matrix, which is basically Discord but open source, but it has yet to gain much traction.

lrdgck

Sometimes I have a random odd thought to share in here, but feels bit awkward to post right after your previous post, so, yeah. Sometimes I also figure out it's not really worthy of sharing before it's too late.

fourteenwings

I really don't get people who turn their whole lives (well, their free time at least) obsessing over all the bad things happening to their favorite media forms; the people who call themselves the 'Fandom Menace'.

ie people that were mad that Captain Marvel turned the Marvel movies into some 'you go girl' thing and are still, to this day obsessing over every detail of the upcoming Kamala Khan movie.

Like, Captain Marvel was like 5-7 years ago now, aren't you over it yet? Why do you still care?

I literally stopped watching Disney Channel movies ages ago because I didn't agree with the messaging in them and while I still do get news about them when looking at doll/toy stuff, I don't spend any of my time actively getting mad about it or watching trailers or keeping up with news about them.

lrdgck

TIL - well, not T, more like It's Been A While Since IL (IBAWSIL?):

Bim-Bom was a celebrated Russian circus clown duo.

[...]

After the October Revolution of 1917 the duo continued with their satires of the new government. One skit involved Bim appearing on stage with framed portraits of Trotsky and Lenin and being asked what he was planning on doing with them. “I’ll hang one, and put the other against the wall” was the reply. Naturally these jokes did not go down too well with the Bolsheviks.

[...]

During one of the reprises the duo began one of their customary skits of the new regime. The Chekists took umbrage and came on stage to arrest Bom. The audience thought this was part of the fun but Bom realised what was happening and fled [...] The next day the duo, still in their costumes, were questioned by the Cheka

(Here's the source: linky)

fourteenwings

Yeah reading about the Romanovs you get the sense that Chekists were all sorts of trigger-happy.

lrdgck

Heh, reading about the Cheka you get the sense that Chekists were all sorts of trigger-happy.

Come to think of it, the Romanov stuff was pretty straightforward have-the-other-claimant-strangled-in-prison kind of stuff rulers did all the time. It's just, when your dashing aristocrat is offed for stone-cold cynical reasons by another dashing aristocrat, it's not the same kind of Romantic stuff we all know and love.

Stormtroper

So I decided to take a look at TV Tropes to look for an example that I remember there, I promised myself I wouldn't get stuck reading stuff there for hours like how you know happens. I succeeded, but only because it instead led me to look up a Secret of Mana thing and I got stuck for hours watching videos from the Mana Series. Apparently I remember Seiken Densetsu 3 way too well. I kinda want to play Trials of Mana now.
Also I found out about The True Size Of (countries).

Stormtroper

Earlier: So if M is a projection matrix that can be used to project points in the world onto a view plane, with a bit of tweaking its inverse can be used to project points in a view plane onto the world. Should be easy and fun.
Later: I now long for the sweet release of death.

lrdgck

Vaguely relatedly: I have developed this odd form of procrastination where instead of doing anything productive, I try to solve some math/physics problem and fail miserably over the next few hours. Why just procrastinate when you can do it while also developing an inferiority complex?

glennmagusharvey

I have a hunch that procrastination basically just involves the brain wanting to do something that feels familiar and immediately doable, even if it is pointless and/or likely results in failure. Like, it's still something to do.

Stormtroper

^^ I can't look at math olympiad problems without getting a hard case of inferiority complex. It's one thing to not be familiar with some math thing, but it's another to draw a blank on something that can be done by literal children.

lrdgck

And yet another if your personal and professional identity is kind of built on your supposed capacity to do that. sadfrog.meme

Fake it till you make it, or barring that, fake it till they find out.

glennmagusharvey

I have a feeling that the Chinese knew of snakes before they encountered lizards.

This is because multiple Chinese terms for lizards are basically the root word for snake plus other words.

lrdgck

Personally, I always found it amusing that like anything that lives in the water was a fish to the English. Crayfish, starfish, shellfish. Now, I'm not sure if these can really be separated, but it could be that fish were known before the rest of the lot, or that they settled on fish as the default and everything else required a qualifier.

glennmagusharvey

...I never even thought of that before for English.

You're quite right with that observation.

To be fair, it's also possible that the Chinese word I'm thinking of just generally means any reptile, and the differentiation happened later, like you pointed out is possible with English too. It's really just my personal hunch that the reason for the choice of default is seeing that thing first and that thing becoming the archetypal "fish" (for example) from which other words were derived; I'm not actually learned in linguistics.

Stormtroper

Names for aquatic animals are all over the place, regardless. Sea lions, catfish, goldfish, jellyfish, rays, sea horses. Clearly they were named by people who lived on the sea and never touched land.

glennmagusharvey

you won't believe this

i just got an e-mail from Aisha Gaddafi

that's Muammar Gaddafi's daughter, FYI





you'd be right to not believe it because the next thing she did was to offer me money =P