I know it’s just a meme, but every time I see DHMO I think of heavy water.

My reading has declined as I've aged, generally, and the number of books I want to read is expanding exponentially with each passing day (and the rate at which I buy books that pile up unread is a within striking distance of being a problem. I'm a pack-rat by nature and always have been however it's becoming a bit much but also I'll never be able to resell or give away a book I bought and then didn't read. What if I get around to reading i some day? For instance I subscribed to a fiction magazine in 2018, read two of the issues. The rest are sandwiched in the middle of a pile of books which I also haven't read and have been sitting on the corner of my desk since at least 2018) so most of my re-reading was something I did as a teenager.

I also established a habit in those years that continues to this day. As a teenager I loved Harry Potter. I probably read all the physical books twice. But I owned all the audiobooks (at that time on cassette) narrated by Jim Dale and I listened to those many times. I have no idea how many. I might've listened to the whole series ten times (except Deathly Hollows, which I never owned as a physical audiobook, and I think I read it once at release and then listened to it on audible a few years later). The only other books I can remember re-reading during this time was Brian Jacques (of Redwall fame) Castaways of the Flying Dutchman trilogy, and Nancy Farmer's YA Norse mythology-inspired Fantasy series Sea of Trolls. I guess I read and re-read some of R.A Salvatore's Forgotten Realms novels. Probably a few others along the same line that I'm forgetting now.

In my 20s my favorite books were still fantasy, but now they were Glen Cook's The Black Company then-nine-book series (now ten books) of '80s-'90s trippy dark military fantasy and Joe Abercrombie's then-six-book The First Law series of '00s cynical dark heroic fantasy (now ten books). I've only actually read each of these once. But I like the audiobook narrators for each series, so I've listened to each at least three times.

The one outlier is ASOIAF. I'd read most of the books as a teenager (A Dance With Dragons wasn't out yet). Then after the show ended I re-read the books. It probably helps that I can't stand the narrator of those books, the late Roy Dotrice. Though Harry Lloyd, who played Daenerys's brother Viserys in season one of GOT, read Martin's A Knight of the Seven Kingdom novella series, and he's very good. I guess I've re-read that one too, in that I've read it and listened to the audiobook.

Me: laughing at the European nanny states and the Oriental Authoritarian Socialist Regimes

Also Me: dying as a direct result of my precious Occidental Freedoms.

Oh you thought you could just slather fertilizer on your field every year and get infinite gains? Fucking loser modern farmers.

Three field system stay winning (I don't know literally anything about agriculture).

Alright I pulled the trigger and ordered a 32 GB RAM kit plus a 1 TB M.2 SSD and also a pack of M.2 screws. If something goes wrong or I’ve done a bad job ordering I should be covered by the return policy.

Thanks everybody for the advice.

That’s the awkward thing about this. I’ve got a pre-built, so the motherboard is special made for the PC building companies. In my case it’s the ASROCK B450M pro4s/ac.

If it’s the same as the consumer model(B450M pro4/AC, no s) then it has a max of 128 GB RAM, which must mean up to 32 GB per slot. But has cyperpowerpc decided to fuck me? Haven’t been able to find any manual or any info online. Kept the box all these years but they didn’t include a manual anyway.

Edit: also I want to put in an M.2 SSD but I can’t tell if the port on my motherboard is for a SATA III connection or a PCIe gen 3 connection. Most consumer models of B450s seem to either have a gen 3 or a gen 3 plus a SATA. On the pictures on ASROCK’s websites gen 3’s are labeled with a sticker that reads ULTRA M.2 and SATA’s aren’t. Mine has no sticker. But that could just be their mockup and not what real ones look like. It’s possible that it’s printed on the Motherboard itself, but if that’s the case it would be underneath the CPU fan which I don’t want to remove. Might try to buy a gen 3 and just return it if it doesn’t work. But online returns always make me nervous, if they are refused for some reason then I’m left in the lurch.

Can my motherboard take any RAM so long as the speed and type is compatible?

Right now my PC has one stick of 8 GB 3000 MHz DDR4 RAM. Can I buy and slot in any stick of 3000 MHz DDR4 RAM? Does it have to be the same capacity, or can I buy 2 x 16 sticks and bring myself up to 40 GB of RAM? Or could I buy the new stuff, remove my old stick, and just have 32 GB? What about brand, does that matter?

I can’t buy more of the existing model of RAM stick because they’re out of stock everywhere.

I know this isn’t really the forum for this question and I should find a PC building subreddit to ask this. But I find the thought of entering a den of technomancers only to reveal my fundamental ignorance about their trade to be quite intimidating.

I’m enjoying seeing chud dipshits complaining that Witcher 4 is woke because woman protagonist. I just love it when people complain “now the Witcher has gone woke.” I saw similar complaints with 3, saying they’d given in to woke (probably still using SJW back then) when compared to 1. And of course people complaining about the Witcher show’s race blind casting (I also don’t like the show but that’s just because every clip I’ve seen from it makes it look poorly designed, produced, acted, and written). But if you read the books Sapkowski is not subtle about his feminist worldview. He’ll basically have characters address the reader and say “women should have access to abortion and contraceptives. No one should ever beremovedd. Look, over there, a woman of equal athletic prowess to her male peers.” The lodge of sorceresses are all manipulative schemers. But the sorcerers are all worse. The big bad is literally a sorcerer who decides to run a eugenics program on women he’s captured and imprisoned and he is killed with prejudice for it. One of his first short stories is a dark feminist retelling of the original Sleeping Beauty folktale. I’m not even saying his portrayal of women is flawless (Geralt is clearly, usually, a stand-in for Sapkowski’s view. Also nearly every woman he meets really wants to fuck him) but I would say one of the biggest themes of the Witcher books are that men and women should be equals, that male violence against woman is a horror, that women are kept from the tools they need to resist that violence and oppression by patriarchal systems of control, and that women should seize these systems and use them against their oppressors.

I don't know what you mean about not being excited for the new games, I'm waiting with bated breath for the sure to disappoint Witcher sequel and The Last of Us Part 2 again this time for PC and the fucking The Outer Worlds 2 the sequel to The Outer Worlds. What an incredible panoply for Gamers to choose from. Now if only Bethesda would announce another version of Skyrim, maybe this time playable only as in-flight entertainment.

I hate having dreams of the internet, or work. Both are places that do not belong in dreams.

I'm not a complicated man. Witcher IV good.

I like his famous “The Man Who Would be King” short story and even that one is pretty racist.

Only mentioning it because it was cited on Wikipedia, but a former SEAL named Jocko Willick has a version online, which is just embarrassing. I won't link it here. I might even give the thumb looking motherfucker his due (though he's quite obviously heard Holmes's reading and is doing a worse version of it) but the video is titled "the most INTENSE poem ever" and it's got this awful background suspenseful music. Truly a mediocre effort from some asshole who spent most of his life murdering Iraqi civilians and has spent the last 14 years grifting. The guy's got a podcast, not super popular based on YouTube views, and in the last six days he's put out three episodes totaling nearly 8 hours.

Hadn't read the poem "Boots" by Rudyard Kipling until the 28 Years Later trailer (which is a very good trailer, btw) featured a performance of it.

"Boots" recorded in 1915 by the American actor Taylor Holmes (actual poem starts about 30 seconds in)

And then there's this version, arranged to music by the Australian baritone Peter Dawson in 1929.

I could link all the recordings of this poem, but Leslie Fish's 1985 version as a folk ballad is fun.

It's interesting how utterly different these recitations are. And none of them really sounds like what I imagined the poem was supposed to sound like when I read it (silently) for the first time. Which is like this, a marching song, recorded by some guy on YouTube in 2011. Assuming that's right and that's roughly what Kipling was invoking, Holmes's reading is especially inspired. Incredible stuff.

Also I guess when they are trying to get you to be able to resist torture by torturing you in the Armed Forces one of their tactics is to blast Holmes's reading at you on a loop 24/7, so that's funny.

there was some embezzlement thing where Brian defrauded 17M, Steven Hemsley (executive chariman) defrauded 102M, and Witty defrauded a few million. Brian was set to testify soon. Hemsley took home almost all of the money.

I've been enjoying concocting farcical conspiracy scenarios in my mind since Luigi was collared. It's not so hard to imagine that he could've fallen down the gladio well. Easy to set him up as a patsy. But that also seems like an enormously risky move that, if you assume the powers that be don't know who the real shooter is, leaves them open to embarrassment. And if they do know who the real shooter is why bother creating a fake one? Seems like a lot of work, that could still backfire on them, when it all would've been forgotten about in a few weeks anyway. And the official line is believable. Promising kid from a rich family runs afoul of the health insurance industry, realizes his life will never be the same again, and decides to kill a guy for it. Escapes one of the most surveilled cities in the world as a result of police incompetence and some good planning on his part. Gets caught because a cop lives in the mind of every American over the age of 45.

Anyway, I assume that Luigi is the guy, partly out of "nothing ever happens" brain and partly out of fear that a sophisticated gladio network could really exist, has existed other places in ways that are provable, but I want to believe it's all paranoid delusion, that the State couldn't really be that powerful, because that's too frightening to contemplate. There's that line you see skeptics trot out all the time with regard to conspiracy adjacent stuff, that conspiracy theorists are just looking to believe in something bigger than themselves that has control, because the random and chaotic nature of life can be too hard to take. I hope that's true of all the gladio shit.

This insider trading case does give me pause, though. Suddenly, with that much money on the line, shit that I would normally think is impossible doesn't sound that farfetched.

It really is facile as criticism of the hard Left, isn't it? Also the original post was made by Basil (@LinkofSunshine), I believe, who's very young and generally smug and wrongheaded about basically everything. One of the worst posters with a following of his size.

He's the Medicare for All guy. They should at least make a post like "while I don't condone gunning down health insurance CEOs in the street, the cabal of insurers, hospitals, and Big Pharma is bad and should be broken up."

They're arguing about settler colonialism on twitter.com

Has anyone here read the Delay Deny Defend book? Is it any good? Should I read it?

The top amazon review says "a must read for personal injury attorneys" which makes it sound like some extremely dry errata more suited for a paralegal's desk than some know-nothing nerd like myself.

Love this show to death but if I think too long about the both-sides politics I start to go crazy.

Bizarre that when some of the Zaunites agree to fight alongside the topsiders to stop the techbro-dystopian/feudal-warlord alliance that's trying to bring about the apocalypse the Zaunites wear the uniform of the Enforcers, the local cops/occupying army that has killed and terrorized the Zaunites for- What? Centuries? At least decades. I could accept them fighting together to stave off a worse enemy, but as depicted I thought it was more than a little distasteful.

It's just weird how often the show seems to expect viewers to have sympathy for Piltover's position when it's shown over and over that they are depriving the Zaunites of all dignity. It's at least implied that the generation before Vi and Jinx were born as a slave caste in mines underneath Piltover and narrowly won the precarious freedoms we see them with at the start of the show. Though I'm not entirely clear on the lore there.

It's even reinforced in Episode 7 of Season 2 that in a world where Hextech never exists and also Heimerdinger gives even a little bit of a shit about the people of the Undercity that the entire situation is much much better, though nowhere near parity. But I'm supposed to feel bad that Jinx blew the council to hell?