I feel like the modder must've been some sort of gambling purist who thinks that only your personal cosmic luck/your personal relationship with the god of Games should influence the outcome of your gambling, not the Gamebryo engine.
See also this post where celebrated liberal novelist Joyce Carol Oates claims that her opinion on genocide doesn't matter because she is just a smol bean twitter user.
An update on celebrated liberal novelist Joyce Carol Oates's anxieties regarding the Palestinian keffiyeh:
After being informed by an angry mob of Twitter users that an American airport worker wearing the Palestinian keffiyeh is engaged in an act of resistance and solidarity with a group of people being genocided and her floating the idea that airport workers shouldn't be allowed to wear "political symbols such as the swastika, a Trump hat, or a keffiyeh" was tantamount to her standing with those people who are genociding the Palestinians, celebrated liberal novelist Joyce Carol Oates posted this cowardly nonsense to her twitter profile:
JCO: (wokely promoting the silencing of pro-Palestinian voices) I'm just asking questions. I don't really believe anything and therefore can do no wrong.
(CW for anti-Palestinian sentiment and also big-brained political takes) celebrated liberal novelist Joyce Carol Oates has just compared seeing someone wearing a keffiyeh to seeing someone with a swastika tattoo or wearing a Trump hat. In fact she found the mention of Trump so odious that she felt compelled to censor his name as “T***p”.
2035
Dying under the glorious banner of Comrade Kardashian in the USA's People's War.
Personally I'm excited, much better than dying in the Great Lakes Water Wars of 2034 as feudal lords of old midwest battle for access to ports and fresh water as I previously expected.
Saw A Complete Unknown, the Bob Dylan biopic. I was surprised, not a bad movie, not a hagiography of Dylan. I think he comes off in a pretty bad light, really.
Wish the movie would've been more explicit with what Seeger and Guthrie and Baez and their particular sort of folk music were trying to do, politically. The movie sort of prevaricates on this, when Dylan betrays the Folk movement. It wants to have it both ways. That Seeger and his cohort are stuck in the past, trying to control the movement. And also that Dylan betrays them for his own ego. When really Seeger and Baez and Guthrie are people of conviction, trying to use music as a tool as part of a political project. And Dylan, rootless and believing in nothing, betrays them out of both ego and also a petulant, directionless sort of rebellion.
I'm just learning that there is a rumored The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion remake. Skyrim coming out multiple times is one thing, if Oblivion comes out again before TES VI is concretely announced people will go insane.
Also, if they're going to remake any TES game I wish they'd do Morrowind. Didn't play it when it was current, love Oblivion (and Skyrim to a lesser extent), have tried to get into Morrowind a couple times (with the aid of some mods) but can't quite manage it. I'm sure I could learn to love it, but in the modern age it's the kind of thing one has to be willing to struggle through for a dozen hours or so before it clicks. Haven't been willing to put in the time, maybe someday.
Joyce Carol Oates has decided to do battle with the Twitter Marxists.
Update: celebrated liberal novelist Joyce Carol Oates is now arguing that society as a construct arises from genetics and seems to imply that American society and capitalism as it exists right now is the genetic destiny of all mankind.
I liked too many tweets of Arcane fanart and I got a post from the intra-fandom pro- and anti-shipper wars. And I just hope all the people I saw in the replies of that tweet, and the OP, and the screenshot the OP was mad about were all literally children. Not even adult teens who’ve graduated high school. Only high schoolers should be so involved with fandom. Because I cannot imagine a bigger waste of time or a more unfathomable thing to care about.
LA is 500 square miles. 45 square miles have burned. But the burned areas so far haven't been very densely populated, parts of the city that merge with surrounding forested landscape.
Check out this map from the NYT:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/01/08/weather/los-angeles-fire-maps-california.html
I was reading the NYT update on the LA fires and I came across this quote:
So far, about 29,000 acres, roughly the size of 22,000 football fields, have burned.
A completely unhelpful visualization. 22,000 football fields means nothing to me. I can imagine, maybe, ten football fields. Maybe I could even roughly understand 100 football fields. But 22,000 might as well be infinite. It would be better to say something like "So far 29,000 acres have burned, an area equal to slightly more than half the size of Baltimore."
Is it possible that the apartments above Costco would actually be too expensive for most Costco employees to afford rent?
If elected President, my first act will be to illegally exhume the body of Karl Popper from its resting place in Vienna, throw his bones into the Danube, and then have his name stricken from history.
Man I have got to stop using computer. If I was rich enough to hire someone to transcribe all my writings into text documents I’d still use the computer because I like video games and am hopelessly addicted to doomscrolling, but it’s nice to imagine a world where I no longer had to use it. I really think we’re going to reach a point where personal computering is more bad than good, if we haven’t already passed that point.
Saw a poster on Twitter seemingly genuinely worried that referring to someone as a Philistine was a slur. I dunno man, the Philistines were an Ancient Canaanite people that died out like 2500 years ago. They aren't around to insult anymore. And if you look at its etymology into modern English you could object to it being elitist or classist but it's less of a slur than hillbilly.
Worrying about slights against peoples who died out right at the start of antiquity is actually too woke for me.
Every fucking time. I swear I always double check to make sure I get the right mega and I still fuck it up like 30% of time. Oh well.
I'm definitely interested in Severance, it's on my vague and worryingly long and growing list of shows I need to watch.
Started watching the show Silo on AppleTV a couple weeks ago, maybe 3/4ths of the way through season one now. On the whole a really well-made show, maybe a few pacing issues or the occasionally poorly constructed/lit/shot set that keeps it from being at the same level as the best prestige TV of the last 25 years. But for a sci-fi production that must require a fair bit of CGI or The Volume or just expensive sets it's one of the best I've seen. But then there's Common, who plays the main antagonist in the episodes I've watched, and who's operating at a level far below the rest of his castmates. Every scene he's in just drags down the quality of the show around him.
It's like Common was cast in the CW or old SfyFy channel schlock version of this production that would've existed twenty years ago, but everyone else is in Apple's post-GOT post-Westworld "we have to compete with The Boys and Rings of Power and Dune and The Last of Us" show.
Having to hear liberals tell me for the rest of my life that Biden really was a great President, the best America has had since FDR, it's just that Congress was deadlocked, blame Trump/Republicans; then foreign policy-wise Netanyahu, President Xi, and Putin had him by the balls nothing to do there; his economy was actually great, inflation was right where it should be; and of course he single-handedly ended the War in Afghanistan (maybe the only good thing Biden's done in his entire life, and ironically Trump kicked it off), passed some infrastructure bill, and did a photo op on a UAW picket line (after he made sure that the rail workers couldn't get sick days) is something I'm dreading.
I guess choosing broadly labor-friendly NLRB picks is something, they did a few good things, but it looks like that's not going to amount to much compared to the colossal evil and mismanagement of the Biden admin. And I guess in a sense doing a photo op with the UAW might be the most pro-labor move any President has done since FDR but was also a totally meaningless and baldfaced attempt at scoring an easy win without doing anything.