Useless Conversation

[Khaldun]

We had an original Vive base station fail the other day--I think it got dropped on the floor hard because it wasn't secured (so sue me)--and so I fiddled with it some, updated the firmware (already updated) and then just sent a support email that was "hey error message and red light, any thoughts?"

Day later they were like well that's a hardware fail and let's talk you through next steps.

I was like yeah, I already did the research, did the steps, concluded it's busted good and bought a new one, sorry to bother you man.

I would guess a lot of tech support is either people who know almost everything but they're just making sure and then it's people who know almost nothing who have to be walked through shit like "is the computer on?"

[HaemishM]

You'd be amazed how often "turn it off and turn it on again" works on even the most insanely expensive gear.

Most end users just want their problem solved without being made to feel like a complete idiot, even when everyone involved knows they really are a clueless fuckstick.

[Morat20]

13 hours without power from a Cat 1.

Jesus, they are really behind on maintenance. Over half a million lost power in Houston -- I mean it was fairly quick to repair (downed lines, downed trees, and slagged transformers) but this much outage over a Cat 1? They're REALLY behind on trimming along the lines and replacing aging transformers.

It should not have hit so hard.

[Tale]

Unintentionally funny text exchanges revealed at Theranos trial.

Elizabeth Holmes:
"You are the breeze in desert for me."
"My water."
"And ocean."
"Meant to be only together tiger."

Sunny Balwani: "OK"

-
Elizabeth Holmes:
“Madly in love with you and your strength.”

Sunny Balwani:
“I am tired today.”

[Khaldun]

It's hilarious that Holmes' team think this kind of stuff shows he was manipulating her, because they read the other way round (only she failed).

[Morat20]

It's hilarious that Holmes' team think this kind of stuff shows he was manipulating her, because they read the other way round (only she failed).

Is that what they were doing?

I mean it's text messages, but that either reads as "Guy incredibly disinterested in clingy woman" to "Guy totally not big on text messages, probably annoyed at having to read them every 5 minutes over this shit"

[Khaldun]

That's one of the cases they're going to make--that he was a cult leader who brainwashed her and made her do his evil bidding. Which is just fucking nonsense and everybody knows it (I hope).

[Chimpy]

Both her and Balwani are sociopaths.

[Khaldun]

100%.

[Khaldun]

So I grew a huge batch of different kinds of hot peppers this year, all of them too fucking hot to use in most food--like, habaneros, some ghost peppers, some carolina reapers, and some less ridiculously hot peppers as well. They're almost all ripe now so I had to do something.

Something #1 was slow-smoking some of them for 2 hours and then putting them in a dehydrator, then making a fine chile powder with that with some cumin, coriander and a teeny bit of fine ground dried lime zest as well. Even a tiny pinch of it in a spice rub today was strikingly spicy though it had some real flavor to it (the habaneros and reapers, I think)--I mean, more than even a pinch and I think we'd be incapacitated.

Being a glutton for punishment, I've decided to make a fermented chile paste with the rest of the currently ripe batch--cayennes, bishop heads, carolina reapers and tabascos. That has some distance to go, so we'll see how that comes out. I am guessing it will be nearly unusable though.

[01101010]

So I grew a huge batch of different kinds of hot peppers this year, all of them too fucking hot to use in most food--like, habaneros, some ghost peppers, some carolina reapers, and some less ridiculously hot peppers as well. They're almost all ripe now so I had to do something.

Something #1 was slow-smoking some of them for 2 hours and then putting them in a dehydrator, then making a fine chile powder with that with some cumin, coriander and a teeny bit of fine ground dried lime zest as well. Even a tiny pinch of it in a spice rub today was strikingly spicy though it had some real flavor to it (the habaneros and reapers, I think)--I mean, more than even a pinch and I think we'd be incapacitated.

Being a glutton for punishment, I've decided to make a fermented chile paste with the rest of the currently ripe batch--cayennes, bishop heads, carolina reapers and tabascos. That has some distance to go, so we'll see how that comes out. I am guessing it will be nearly unusable though.

Thin it out with some distilled water and use it in a super soaker next summer.

[Khaldun]

Honestly, the powder could be classed as a chemical weapon. When I first smoked and dried the carolina reapers and opened the dehydrator, I had to honest to god run away from it.

[RhyssaFireheart]

*sigh*

Husband is having a PET scan next week to assess a mass where his left kidney used to be.  It's been present on previous scans and had even shrunk somewhat but has now increased in size and it's time to get it looked at.  I guess this scan can assess how metabolically active the mass is and if it just needs to be biopsied or removed. 

Just.. fuck cancer.

I'd finally gone to the dentist this month and scheduled time to have some work done (need a crown on a tooth I cracked a good 5 years ago along with at least two small fillings done) because he'd not had any issues for almost the whole year and then this happens.  I always feel like I can't do anything for myself because I'm always worried about him and his health, which I know isn't the right way to handle things but what else can I do?  It's a good thing I'm generally healthy overall.

[Khaldun]

Fuck cancer. Hope this goes as well as possible for you both.

[Endie]

That Zuckerberg video about Facebook's rushed (and probably premature) attempt to shed their horribly damaged brand and become "Meta" is so painful to watch, especially in light of the fact that it'll probably work out for them anyway. Everything in his room is so artfully curated by their head of digital marketing and a team of design professionals, while getting him to deliver it is so stupid in the face of his oft-remarked upon but nonetheless absolute inability to emote plausibly ("OK Mark, look up and give us marvel and awe!")

I do applaud the honesty at the 1.17 mark, though, where Mark's minions summon their dark master Yog Sothoth into the heart of Soho: https://youtu.be/SAL2JZxpoGY?t=77 (warning: the commentary is almost unbearably awful).

As a side note, if the folks at Second Life can tear themselves away from their misery at having messed up 18 years of headstart then they should be hunting through their patents file as we speak.

[Khaldun]

Raph must be looking through his file cabinets too, I assume.

[Zetor]

Wasn't Raph's Metaplace intended to be a facebook platform? Maybe it has iterated itself out of control to result in the summoning of the aforementioned Yog Sothoth...

[Endie]

Wasn't Raph's Metaplace intended to be a facebook platform? Maybe it has iterated itself out of control to result in the summoning of the aforementioned Yog Sothoth...

Wasn't the FB element a later pivot?  His head tech person saw some stuff I was experimenting with with a couple of different open source MMO engines on my first blog at the time and contacted me to see if I might want to interview. But there was absolutely nothing related to FB in what I was doing and I am sure that the FB bit came later around the time they swapped to Metaplace.  Also, in 2006 FB wasn't actually a huge deal: they only opened up to the general public in late Q3 '06.  As it was, Areae were west coast US - I seem to remember that they were based out of San Diego? - and I had a close family member here in Scotland that was given a pretty limited time to live* so I declined. Working for Koster was a dream of mine so that was hard, and I actually suggested to the guy that I could work remotely, but that being normal was a long time in the future...

Does Raph still post here? I'd be super-interested to hear what he thinks of the Meta announcement, at least beyond "it's a massive and transparent piece of deadcatting to distract from the growing evidence of Facebook emphasising Jesuitical 'give me the child' tactics to feed their pipeline."


*Happily/miraculously that person is still very much alive and I saw them today.

[Khaldun]

You can get some sense of what Raph thinks of the metaverse *idea* independent of FB by reading his blog or if you follow him on social media; I kind of feel as if he got tipped off somewhere around August/early Sept., maybe by aggressive trademark queries that the people who actually own the name Meta have also reported. I also really thought Metaplace was first and foremost intended to be a successful social media platform in its own right, in its own way, from the outset.

[Endie]

You can get some sense of what Raph thinks of the metaverse *idea* independent of FB by reading his blog or if you follow him on social media

Oh good reminder: I fell out of the habit of reading his blog during one of his poetry-and-guitar periods - I read poetry and play guitar but blogs about them are not my thing - and now I have several years of interesting stuff to pick up on. And with the zeal of the ex-smoker I'll toss in that I stopped reading twitter and deleted all my posts a while back, and boy did that feel good, but it does leave me out the loop on that sort of thing.

[01101010]

Just got back from a short overnight trip to Grand Lake, CO just for the hell of it and I am now acutely aware I need to start looking into getting a 4 wheel drive truck. Really want to start being able to hit up some of the trails I saw along the way.

Cool town and really glad we could explore it off season avoiding the crowds. Only drawback was most of the shops there are seasonal as well and thus not a lot open. However, all the local haunts were open and only around 25% capacity so that was nice.

[Khaldun]

I increasingly want to retire to somewhere in the Rockies between Southern Colorado and Glacier National Park. Not sure that will be affordable when the time comes, but we'll see.

[Teleku]

Yeah, I've spent my entire adult hood fleeing it since I grew up in it.  But I increasingly imagine myself getting old and retiring to some random mountain/coastal town in California to live out my final days away from civilization. 

[Khaldun]

I mostly don't want to be in the situation where as an addled 75-year old I'm having to drive 30 minutes for groceries and 90 minutes for health care, and I'd love at least a decent coffee place and a decent bar. I don't need a book store or a movie theater any more, so that much has changed. One good restaurant would be great.

[Cyrrex]

I mostly don't want to be in the situation where as an addled 75-year old I'm having to drive 30 minutes for groceries and 90 minutes for health care,

Oh hi, dad.  My dad basically moved to a remote island in Puget Sound a few years ago, and his body was already in shambles.  But luckily it was also a fixer-upper so there was plenty for him to be totally unable to deal with.

[Khaldun]

Yeah. Post-70, even in good health, you want a condo or a really simple ranch house and you do not want to be way the fuck out in the boonies somewhere.

[Endie]

I do tons of work on my house and garden now just so I don't have to be up a two-storey ladder or the like in 20 years time.

[Rasix]

I had my parents over for lunch on Sunday (they live a couple hours away). They informed me that my brother is really into crypto. He had a good run of "not being a fucking idiot" going. Ohh well. This is at least 10 years clear of his "anti-depressants are a scam and don't work" spiel.

 

[Engels]

My condolences. Also, does he think there's just some sort of collective placebo effect going on with antidepressants or has he just not really thought it through very far?

[NowhereMan]

My guess would be he's tapping into some Alex Jones type conspiracy thing where anti-depressants are some scheme of big pharma to brainwash people.

[Sir T]

Scientology has for a long time been a constant source of anti-psychiatry propaganda on the intertubes. They throw out every story they can. It al started when Phychiatrists told us that Scientology didn't work and the Hon. Hubbard got pissed off about it.

[Rasix]

My condolences. Also, does he think there's just some sort of collective placebo effect going on with antidepressants or has he just not really thought it through very far?

He was a psychology major in college at ASU  This after failing at getting into the architecture program and switching from Computer Information Systems.

He's just very impressionable. He had some sort of inner conviction that depresession could be cured purely through therapy and that anti-depressants didn't work because a side effect of them was depression.  He just cherry picked some drug side effects, some shit a professor said, and added his own lack of critical thinking to try and say something he thought was profound. Probably to try into impress everyone that was over including his girlfriend at the time.

I told him what he was saying was incredibly dumb and basically discounted the struggles of people suffering with depression. I also stressed to him that I thought what he was saying was offensive, and he's trying to score points by actively insulting the experience of someone very close to me. It shut him up. If nothing else, he's at least capable having some empathy for family. No idea if it actually changed his mind.

The crypto thing.. I think he's day trading shitcoins. Apparently there's a whole group of his friends with a text message chain coordinating this stuff. FFS.

[NowhereMan]

Well he's far from alone in that. Ultimately I've been downplaying crypto as an investment since Bitcoin was like $50 per bitcoin but then you never know when a bubble is going to burst and there's always going to be a stretch when people who aren't buying into it are feeling they've missed out. Until suddenly they're very glad they didn't have their life savings invested.

[Morat20]

So....

I'm a grandfather now. WTF is that even.

Of course I'm a granddad several states AWAY from said grandkid. When we're going to be able to see them is still in the air.

Maybe next week, maybe January. Huzzah.

Not that I should rag on my kid too much for poor planning, it's not like he's not been distracted.

Looking forward to actually meeting him, though. Whenever that is.

[01101010]

So....

I'm a grandfather now. WTF is that even.

Of course I'm a granddad several states AWAY from said grandkid. When we're going to be able to see them is still in the air.

Maybe next week, maybe January. Huzzah.

Not that I should rag on my kid too much for poor planning, it's not like he's not been distracted.

Looking forward to actually meeting him, though. Whenever that is.

As someone who really doesn't like kids and will never have any - I still say congrats. You now have a kid that you can indulge and teach but without the main responsibility. Soak it in, I hear being a grandparent is just about as good as being the uncle/aunt.