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Comments
You mean me.
Actually I don't remember you acting this way, at least not to the point of aggravating me.
I've just found that I wonk a lot these days.
Watching coverage of election results in an extremely close election is different when you live in the places that the stories mention.
I regularly drive on Chain Bridge Road, and the Chain Bridge Precinct was mentioned. Also mentioned was something in Chantilly, which is where the big used videogames store is in the area, as well as an Aldi supermarket. I've been meaning to go to both of them in the same day.
It's been a while since I've done an update thing.
* A newspaper was prosecuted for reporting on gasoline scarcity thus supposedly fomenting societal anxiety, and later a group of that same newsaper's journalists were doing a report on an official event as a group of customers at a nearby state food retailer started revolting, the journalists focused on it, prompting the Nazional Gorillarian Guard to break their cameras and arrest them (since released), injuring one. Perhaps stuff like this is why I've felt non-official news haven't been as forthcoming.
* Oh yeah, gasoline is becoming scarce.
* The socialists have made a Vice-Ministry of Supreme Happiness. December 8th is now the Day of Loyalty to Chávez, the day he went to Havana never to be seen again (*raspberry*), which also happens to be municipal elections day. See anything? According to the reds, that's chabes' face.
* Socialists recently announced a bunch of economic measures, or rather, administrative measures. Of note is a foreign trade center and a center for price controls on everything, i.e. full-on socialism. I hope it's just noise pretending they're working, which wouldn't be the first time they do so recently, but stuff like the item below suggests otherwise.
* There is (was?) this electronics chain store selling "overpriced" (unregulated) products at about ten times its "fair" price at the official exchange rate**, so socialists intervened the store to force it to sell everything at such rates, thus extremely cheap and making a huge deal about this, presumably for electoral purposes and to keep harping on "economic war" scapegoat bullshit. Unsurprisingly a load of opportunistic people gathered to get cheap shit in what's been called a metaphorical government-sponsored looting, best exemplified by this image of a New Socialist Woman, and eventually devolving into literal looting. So you know, socialists incite to looting both while in and outside power. This might've been due to red infighting, however, as the store owners have important government contacts, but the consequences for everyone else are still there.
* On a much needed positive note, the three most notable MUD heads Henrique Capriles, María Corina Machado and Leopoldo López (the Trilogy of Evil) have been touring around campaigning for municipal candidates and it really seems like it's picked up, it's like night and day compared to last years' regional elections when the MUD felt dead, now they have Capriles as an electoral aircraft carrier while the reds' is well gone, they can still make themselves heard despite lockout crap, and the government's bullshit (like the rampant scapegoating or those posters) really does look like desperately trying to get enough bread and circus to make up for patience quickly running thin. If the ongoings and winds of change in the electoral arena work as a projection for the country at large, well, that's a good sign.
** This needs an explanation on socialist economics: Venezuela is under currency control. It's illegal to trade in foreign currency or even mention its parallel (black market) rate so as to hide its value (earning nicknames such as "green lettuce", "unspeakable" and "Voldemort"), and income from private exports is to be exchanged into bolivars (Bs. or Bs. F.). Its official exchange rate, difficult to get by, is 1$ = 6.3 Bs. F., while the parallel rate is 1$ ~ 60.88 Bs F. (and quickly increasing), so you can guess where the store gets its prices. Also I just broke the law. There's also an alternate minor auction currency distribution with a price ceiling of 1$ ~ 11 Bs. F. (and thus not an auction). If you've heard some bullshit statistic like Venezuela having the largest minimum wage in Latin America or similar, it's based on the charitable official rate. A more fitting, unique, "real" rate if you aren't a bolibourgeois would be around 1$ = 15 Bs. F. If you're wonderig why money is subsidized, it's for populist purposes, political control over private companies, elimination of private exports, and a shitload of corruption, plus they lost their chance at dismantling it without causing a mess while it was under a sane rate breach until sometime last year. One of the main reasons for our current economic crisis (the others being low income from oil due to lower production and gifts to the foreign left, a gargantuan fiscal deficit filled in good part by money printing, and low inversion due to lack of judicial security caused by shit like the above.)
All that interventionist shit reminds me... Noim, if you're still there, what's president Cristina like? (She's terrible, right?)
http://shitmystudentswrite.tumblr.com/page/15
"Christians usually marry only one person for life. This is called monotony."
Welp, this tumblr looks supremely bingable.
Tumblr is either really good or really, well, otherwise.
^Or really good in a really otherwise way!
When sleep-deprived, I remember meanings and forget names.
For example:
actual term: starting point bias
what I recall: initializing bias
I get the feeling I'll be updating much more often from now on. I guess I'll end up making that thread.
To nobody's surprise, Maduro's "don't leave anything on storeshelves" caused a wave of looting throughout the country, officially referred to as "mishap" or "buying without paying". So far they've been isolated, very localized, and haven't escalated to anything more than looting, but they've been going on since November 9th when they began (Kristallnacht's anniversary, just saying). Things have been calm in Maracaibo where I live, but being the incident's epicenter, things got really nasty at Valencia, according to daltar who lives there. Maduro toned down on the aggressive rethoric, but is maintaining his red Robin Hood policy of intervening and selling off stores. Reportedly, some looters are sent by the PSUV. If things get really out of hand I'll let you guys know as soon as possible.
It's also given much to talk about our society's decay, unsurprisingly, though it also allowed for recording people loudly repudiating looters and other civilized acts, and some questionable ones like taking looters' loot to smash them. Also, the National Bolivarian Guard was involved in some of these lootings.
Anyhow, all this is going to be economically devastating beyond property damage due to the utter lack of trust inversionists must have by now, which may be exactly what the government is aiming for...
Besides all that, an opposition deputee had her parliamentary immunity revoked, and her substitute might become Deputee 99 this saturday, so...
*shudders*
(Also, rereading my last post, I wasn't being fair in implying only the bolibourgeois get to benefit from our overvalued currency. Normal merchants and manufacturers do get access to them (currency scarcity aside) and corruption cases aren't limited to red collar crime.)
Ugh, my net's slow again. Doing anything on Steam -- such as responding to trade offers -- sucks when my net is slow.
In other news, someone offered me a Terraria: The Hallow (foil) card for 2x eXceed 3rd: Lugh Ciel cards. Current market price of The Hallow (foil): 39 cents. Current market price of Lugh Ciel: 30 cents.
It boggles my mind that Steam trading cards have market prices.
^If you're at all familiar with the TF2 hat economy, then you wouldn't be surprised that people will place value on ANYTHING as long as perceived scarcity exists.
It's beginning to extend to other games like DOTA and Counterstrike GO.
I don't play TF2, but at least you can, you know, wear the hats, right? Steam trading cards don't do anything.
^And badges are used to craft stuff into wallpapers, emoticons, more badges, and other cosmetic shit. Really it's all the same thing: epeen.
Though most people sell cards so they can get money to buy more games and then get more cards then buy more games and...
It's simple, really.
1. Create something that has differential desirability between different people.
2. Create a way for it to be exchanged for some sort of currency, directly or indirectly.
Heck, a market would have existed even if there were no Steam Community Market, as long as the cards are tradable. But creating the SCM just made them even more marketable, by reducing the barriers to entry.
Horrible, horrible assignment...finally done.
> LinkedIn group of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Alumni
> discussion board
Were you ever worried that the level of discourse from alumni of a prestigious and famous postsecondary institution would be significantly higher than the usual?
> most popular thread: Collectivism is back! ...and BAD!: Wisconsin State Budget Battle
> second most popular thread: A Cleantech VC Who is Unconvinced of Man-Made Climate Change
Fear no more!
I only just now realized an aunt, an uncle and their three children, one of their daughter's husband (the only married one) and their one child, all have names starting with J.
Assignment #10 (final assignment for this class)
I completely missed the class and only barely got my work in on time. So I have the least idea of how to do this, of all the assignments thus far.
Let's turn on some "final level" music, shall we?
> Dark Land music for Super Mario Bros. 3
Nah, too depressing. Let's try that again.
> Synchrogazer
That works.
...Hello?
Is IJBM dying?
Well, depends on what you mean by dying. If you're asking whether it's getting less traffic than it used to, yes. If you're asking whether it's on its way to disappearing from the internet, no, I don't see a reason to project the site's hosting going away, and as long as @Longfellow keeps the domain name registered, the site will be (1) accessible and (2) accessible from http://itjustbugsme.com/ . And ready for you to post on it.
I thought this place starts dying pretty much whenever inter-site drama (*cough*TVTropes*cough*) quiets down.
I think it's dying, too.
^ Do we still get TVT drama? Like, if some crazy shit were to happen there tomorrow, would we notice? (Or maybe it's happened and we haven't noticed?)
Well, it's not too surprising that TVT craziness would give IJBM and BTL flare-ups in activity, given that the initial raison d'etre of BTL and to some extent IJBM was some sort of dissatisfaction or "doing what we can't do there" with TVT, and almost all of us are tropers or former tropers.
What kinda surprises me more is that Heapers' Hangout has lately been thriving, albeit in part because some users have migrated from IJBM (and presumably BTL too?) to HH. HH had even less of an initial raison d'etre -- basically, just shitposting, as far as I know -- though maybe the fact that people could engage in it and just general conversation as a form of (mostly) stress-free entertainment has been attractive.
HH began as an antithesis to TVT's Old Folks' Home subforum (which itself spun off of The Totally Radical Thread for Crotchety Old Bitches), as I knew Eddie would never host a Trash Heap forum. I'm not sure it would exist if not for CA.
> Old Folks' Home suforum
wait
why have I
wait
what the f--
...
...
...this is a subforum on TVT?
......ahh, I guess it has existed for a while.
Somehow its existence escaped my radar.
Well, I find the name vaguely familiar...though probably only because it's been mentioned elsewhere...
Then again I didn't really invest much in my TVT news and activity radar.
...yeah, I think I prefer HH over cobbies.
If you need I can supply some minor TVT drama, but in honesty, that's more my vanity having me call it drama than anything real. I didn't mention it before because I opted to stay on the safe side of no import rule.
In another news: went to a convention. In retrospect, I should have expected that anime porn shit would be sold over the counter.