I like to treat every standard like a limbo bar and see how much lower I can go.

That’s an episode of “Will It Blend?” I didn’t think we’d ever get in real life.

The only things I don’t like about pooping at work is when there’s no private restrooms or when they don’t have some sort of white noise in the bathrooms (in the case of public restrooms). Inevitably, there’s people who don’t care about shitting in the stall next to mine, which I absolutely hate, I don’t want to hear you shit. I only want to shit when nobody else is around or when the sound of a fan or something blocks out the noise. It’s like some sort of instinctual feeling. Otherwise, pooping at work is great.

We’re going to have to get used to regions of the world becoming permanently uninhabitable.

You might even say they’re sieg heiling this victory.

Real science or faked science?

I’d be happy to write you a poem about meters:

In every line, a rhythm beats,
A pulse that guides our wandering feet,
From soft iambs that gently sway,
To trochees bold that lead the way.

Anapests with a quickened pace,
Gallop through with urgent grace,
While dactyls, with their falling sound,
Plant roots deep in the fertile ground.

The syllables dance in measured time,
A metronome of verse and rhyme,
Counting out the poet’s heart,
Where every beat becomes an art.

In meters, life’s cadence is found,
A melody both soft and profound,
For in each measure, strong or sweet,
Resides the music of our feet.

Sure! I’d be happy to help with that:

In the forest, where the shadows play,
Among the leaves of gold and gray,
A squirrel leaps from branch to branch,
A tiny acrobat in a woodland dance.

With eyes aglow and tail held high,
It races beneath the autumn sky,
Gathering acorns, one by one,
A treasure trove before winter’s done.

The wind may howl, the trees may bend,
But the squirrel’s journey will never end.
With nimble feet and a heart so light,
It chases the day into the night.

For in this world of bark and pine,
The squirrel knows the forest’s rhyme,
It lives in the moment, wild and free,
A tiny soul in a grand oak tree.

I misread that as “German worship blasts Darth Vader anthem in heart of London,” then realized how similarly spelled warship and worship are.

“Doubts grow” implies that anybody believed it in the first place. I don’t doubt that the administration preferred a ceasefire, but Netanyahu has pretty much no incentive to even try for one. If anything, his motivation would be to keep stringing along the current administration and make the war as bloody and nasty as possible, since that will peal away support for Harris. If Trump wins, he doesn’t have to worry about getting nagged anymore, he may even get increased support from Trump and carte blanche to go all out.

As a western liberal, I would feel so owned if conservatives started heading over to Russia en masse. Just the thought of not being able to convert their children into Satanic, transgender bisexuals and forcing abortions on them makes me want to puke. Please stay, stop, don’t go.

I have a Kenyan friend with a conspiracy theory that the people killed were from the protests that Kenyan had not too long ago, that it was actually the Kenyan police who killed them and that the serial killer was just an actor or somebody paid to confess to a made-up serial killer story. Maybe they even added some older missing persons into the mix to clear up some old cases. Crazy theory, but I’m sure they’d say that this new development was just them covering their tracks. Either the killer disappears, never to be seen again, or they wind up dead, never to talk again.

327.36 football fields

I wish they would break apart events like this vs “serious” competitive sports away from each other and the Olympics. Some events/sports have verifiable results, like somebody ran this fast in this amount of time, somebody lifted this amount of kg of weights, actual results that are in some sense pushing the limits of what humans are capable of.

Then you have the artistic, interpretive events, though they still require alot of talent and skill, you can’t quantify them, you can’t measure them in any meaningful way. They’re judged subjectively using whatever standards were developed probably decades ago. I’m sure they’re great to watch for fans of those events, but they don’t feel like they’re pushing any limits of human expression or anything, the Olympics is way too sanitized for anything like that.

I don’t know what the solution though is, hold two sets of Olympics, the Sports Olympics and the Artsy Olympics (four total with seasonal olympics)? I think it’s too much of a world tradition at this point, but it bothers me that they’re all considered at the “same level”.

Yeah, they were about to run out of steam on their offensive and were about to convert to a defensive footing, which would give them an advantage. Taking Russian territory forces the Russians to keep going on the offensive, which could strain them and prevent them from building up their manpower/equipment as much while on the defensive. There’s no way Putin can allow sovereign Russian territory to be taken by another country. It’s a bold move and I hope it pays off.

Could have a couple of potential objectives:

• Punch in the face that makes Russia & especially Putin look bad/weak, so it may hurt Russian/help Ukraine morale
• May peel Russia’s forces away from the fight in Ukraine, since not only do they have to retake it (it’s not an option), but they may have to commit more forces across the rest of their border in areas that were once considered “safe”
• If they’re able to secure the territory long-term, it could help in potential future peace talks as a bargaining chip
• Makes the effects of the war more widely felt by average Russians, since it’s likely conscripted middle-class soldiers there vs the volunteer peons that are sent to die in Ukraine.
• There is a supply route and a nuclear facility close by to that area, so potentially they’re trying to hit supplies behind enemy lines.

Hopefully it works out well for them, as it is a big risk given that Russia is still on the offensive.

Yep, I really enjoy his viewpoint on the Ukraine war, it seems a bit more balanced than alot of the other channels out there. Youtube commenters seem to run the gamut of either Russia is on the brink of collapse and the Ukrainians are achieving victory at every turn, or the opposite, that Ukraine is on the edge of collapse any day now. I just want something closer to the truth, I don’t want cheer-leading or hype, just an assessment based on what we know. I get the sense from Nielsens that that’s what I’m getting. He’s a military analyst at the Royal Danish Defense College, which seems to suggest that he has at least some knowledge about how these things work.

I heard one analysis of this attack has to do with the ebb and flow of offensives/counter-offensives and also about Russia’s volunteer vs conscript troops.

Militaries can usually only support big offensive operations for so long before they need to go back on the defensive, build up reserves, and equipment again, while the other side goes on the offensive. And it goes back and forth like this, almost cyclical. Russia has recently been on the offensive for weeks/months now, but they’re coming close to reaching the end of this “offensive cycle”, they’re about to transition back to being on the defensive and waiting out Ukraine’s counter-offensive. So what this attack seems like it may have been designed to do is to keep Russia on the offensive, since taking territory inside of Russia is NOT something Russia will back down on. Ukraine taking their own territory back is whatever, but taking Russian territory? Putin can’t lose territory and will have to respond. All this basically keeps Russia on the offensive, which gives Ukraine a slight advantage as a defender while Russia throws more troops against them. The idea is to wear down and split Russia’s forces.

The other thing is the idea that Russia’s military is basically a two-tiered military, with Volunteer troops coming from the poorer, outer regions of Russia, they’re joining for money and it’s not as big of a deal when they die in droves in Ukraine, whatever. Conscripts, on the other hand, are drawn from the inner, more middle-class areas of Russia, but those aren’t the troops that typically go out to Ukraine. Those are the troops that most Russians in the more well-to-do regions know and they’re not typically put in the line of fire, they get the “safe” jobs defending Russian territory. So they’re probably not as battle-hardened, and if Russia has to start using Conscript troops in the fighting, it starts getting felt by the average Russian. War is no longer this far-off thing that doesn’t affect them, it’s their family members that start dying now and potentially pushes the Russian public more to start caring about the war.

Still early though, so maybe it doesn’t do much to push the needle, but it’ll be interesting to see how it all pans out.

I have encountered this issue before when I tried using Obsidian my RPG pdf collection (10,000s of files), would not recommend. I do still like Obsidian and will keep using it, but would something like Trillium work as a sort of PDF library software for a massive amount of files like that? The main need is to be able sort/categorize game systems using tags, link to pdfs, and maybe have some sort of Dataview-esque query capabilities. Zotero is the least worst option, but it still has some annoyances for me and I’ve still been looking for something that could help me organize better. I know this is billed as a note-taking app, so it’s a weird use-case, but Obsidian was pretty close to being a decent solution, if not for the slow speed issues.

I think Israeli leadership has already made the decision that all of that region is their land and they’re not sharing it with anybody, or if they do, it’ll be smaller reservations, similar to American Indian reservations in the US. They just want the Palestinians to eventually fade away. Violent groups like Hamas just help them more than anything because it gets Israelis riled up and gives their military an excuse to go in and carve out even more territory, so I’m sure they don’t even care about this, they’re like, “Why would we want you to lay down your arms?”