sp3ctr4l

… Can the replicator produce a cubic meter of this?

I think I agree with you but maybe didn’t explain my stance so well.

Putin and his immediate orbit are … largely, but not entirely, successfully creating a hyperreality for everyone else to live in and experience, they purposefully engage in it as an intentional tactic, to sow confusion and chaos around everything, and then at least project into that chaos that they are stability.

Trump and his immediate circle… are too fucking incompotent to engage in creating a hyperreality as an intentional tactic… in the sense that they actually believe in half of the insane bullshit they throw out into the world, and they are not actually capable of projecting themselves as that island of stability.

Putin and co largely do not live in the hyperreality they create, at least not anywhere near to the extent Trump and co do.

Putin usually knows when he’s lying or promoting an utterly dubious notion.

Of course there are some utter nonsense ideas that Putin seems to truly believe, what with his personal idea of how Russo/Slavic history, and identity actually work, and his initial vast overestimation of the capability of the Russian military.

But Trump… doesn’t even know enough, in most instances, to even know if he is intentionally lying or not.

Trump himself is to a much greater extent, completely lost in the hyperreality he initially created, and can no longer wield it as a political/psychological weapon/tactic with intentionality.

To torture a metaphor:

Trump is lost in the sauce, utterly drowning in it, Putin just has a daily foot bath in the sauce.

My only income is Social Security Disability Income.

I am quite literally having a call with a pro bono lawyer from a non profit law firm that specializes in Social Security matters in a few hours, after having gone through their application process last week.

I am just trying to pre emptively set myself for at least some kind of legal counsel… as it now seems inevitable that I will need one, given the insanity going at Social Security, thanks to Musk and DOGE not being able to understand how any of their databases work, and taking a hatchet to staff headcount and shutting down Soc Sec physical locations.

Its hyperreality, as Adam Curtis shows in his documentary mostly focusing on Putin… but the Trump admin is actually too stupid to realize … that that is what it is, they fell for their own bs, sheltered and curated worldviews because they are so, so skilled at (really, privileged enough to be able to) surrounding themselves with yes men and sycophants and cult members.

I mean, a big element of it is falling for much of Putin’s actually intentionally constructed hyperreality… but the Trump admin and MAGA people are actually too stupid to even been correctly just… generally cynical, and the result is honestly more akin to a 1944/45 Nazi movement that has leaders and followers mostly just still in denial/cognitive dissonance and grandiose cult like faith at the same time.

But the MAGA hyperreality … isn’t centrally planned or directed. Its … basically an accidental consensus of a bunch of idiots screaming different kinds of idiocy into the void loud enough, and the kinda sorta generally agreed on hyperreality is whatever ends up echoing the loudest and most clearly.

They can’t even project stability or competency, even as hollow suits, even as a false but semi-convincing front.

Just go look at the last two weeks ish of public appearances of Trump and his cabinet and Elon.

Half of them are having emotional breakdowns, manic episodes live on air, Hohman, whatever, the DHS goon leading deportations… either he was fucking drunk, or his dentures were falling out of his mouth, a reporter/news host asks him a question and he gives like a 75 word rambling response, maybe 10 of the words actually intelligible.

The inmates are running the asylum.

… Oh well, at least I’ve personally passed through the intense despair and depression phase of knowing this was coming, and am now just laughing at how truly stupid and farsical this all is, and how it is honestly, precisely what Americans deserve for either being idiot cult members, apathetic, or placing their faith in an utterly incompetent Democratic party that just still thinks its 1992, or squabbling over inane idpol differences.

We are apparently actually so stupid, irresponsible and/or more concerned with petty nonsense issues that we are just actually going to have to go through the fire of either overthrowing these malevolent morons, or just acquiesce to all becoming true debt serfs and burn to a crisp.

I’ve been saying that Trump and his ‘ideas’ on tariffs are just… completely, fundamentally broken and self contradictory, at every possible level.

He literally just doesn’t get it, he doesn’t grasp what you’d be taught in AP Macroecon or a first quarter of Macroecon at a college or uni.

Yes, of course, more competent oligarchs can profit from an engineered economic collapse…

But Trump and his immediate orbit are literally too stupid to understand why what they are doing won’t work the way they think it will.

These idiots are very largely at the peak of the dunning kruger confidence vs actual knowledge curve, right before you fall off into the abyss of ‘oh shit this is actually really conplicated and i am a moron.’

Of course, they’ll never admit they are morons or were ever wrong, they’ll just keep lying, misdirecting, and inventing new insane conspiracy theories with secret enemies thaf explain why they failed

Yeah, you are right that it could just be a coincidence, and the image is based off of an actual corpse… but it could also be intentionally altered off of the actual real world source image to extentuate the seeming stoppage of the burn damage to stop roughly where the mask/faceplate/helmet segments are.

My face when the Combine roll up:

Notice how the … dermis is stripped off, right up until about the area the faceplate of a CP/OW stops, and connects into the rear/neck part of their headgear?

This guy is either a dead, former CP/OW, or an early attempt at making a human into a CP/OW that… didn’t work out so well.

… This is basically confirmed in HL Alyx, you can find some OW with… very similarly fucked up faces.

Once the mask goes on… taking it off will almost certainly kill you.

Oh dear, I am reasonably confident I do not want to exist in the world of Kenshi.

I haven’t had a dream I remembered in years, but I do distinctly remember a dream I had as a kid.

Some… Dr Suess book? Features basically an animated, living pair of pants.

The night after I read it, I basically had a horror movie dream (hadn’t seen any horror movies yet)… basically I tried to open my dresser and get ready for school, the pants burst out of the dresser, knocked me over, and I ran through an infinite hallway with the pants chasing me.

In summary, my Freddy Kruger is a pair of jeans.

=P

If you go back far enough, you’d be coding the ENIAC via punchcards.

… Or maybe today you could write code on paper and have an AI augmented OCR system try to run it?

I mean, the entirety of Steam’s code could maybe be described as an obfuscated version of

while(true){ print(money); }

You know, apparently this is heresy in Seattle, but I’m not a big fan of Sriracha.

Its… ok?

Too sugary for me.

The Seattle Dog.

Basically, a hot dog with cream cheese and sauteed onions.

Its not as common as it once was, afaik you can only get it from street vendors in a few spots, or maybe way overpay for one at a restaurant or two.

… It is from Seattle, Washington State, USA.

Used to make $80k a year (before taxes) as Co-Lead of a Data Analytics department.

Managed databases, did analytics (regular, structured and custom one off SQL queries), reporting, general software development (basically my team and IT, 2 or 3 people, were the only people in the whole org more computer literate than ‘can respond to an email, maybe’), API construction/management, process documentation, coordinated with every other team.

I enjoyed the work, loved my team, though the technical and general incompetence of many other employees was challenging to deal with.

As an example:

In doing process documentation with one team, I interviewed 5 different people on that other team, including their lead, and all of them described completely different processes with maybe 20% agreement…

But, then I got assaulted, crippled, lost my job, got evicted, car got stolen, eventually got SSDI payments to kick in after spending a year homeless (my family are abusive and dysfunctional, my ‘friends’ didn’t care) and now live off of about $22k a year, still recovering, still doing PT.

If Elon and Trump gut Social Security, I’ll die homeless and starving.

The place I used to work at was a non profit housing and aiding the homeless, by the way.

Go Team America.

Hey now, when you test in production…

… you gotta aim for the stars.

You can’t freeze a credit score.

The scores can and usually will still change even while frozen.

What you can do is enable a security freeze on your credit account, which disallows a credit score from being provided to a bank for assessing your credit worthiness of a loan or credit card or mortgage or afterpay/klarna/microloan type thing.

Freezing your credit is mostly a way of making it so that someone with your personal info can’t open a fraudulent account in your name.

There are three companies, credit bureaus, in the US that keep giant permanent records of everyone’s credit history.

TransUnion, Equifax and Experian.

Your credit history and other info can differ between all three of them, if there are errors, you have to get them resolved with each one seperately.

There are many different algorithms / scoring models that each of these 3 will use to calculate your actual score.

VantageScore and FICO are the main ones, and the algorithm for each gets updated every few years.

https://www.creditkarma.com/advice/i/vantagescore-vs-fico

So… you can have a FICO or VantageScore from TransUnion, Equifax and Experian.

Different banks or apartments or car loans will all use different scores from different bureaus, and there is usually no way to tell exactly scoring model they’ll use before hand… and actually fully applying for anything that requires a ‘hard inquiry’ into your credit history… that in and of itself will hurt your credit score.

CreditKarma and KikOff will give you your Vantage Scores for free, but not FICO scores.

CreditKarma will only give you TransUnion and Equifax scores, but KikOff also gives you Experian.

Beyond that, other companies have other apps that may give you scores not provided by CK or KO, but you generally have to pay a monthly subscription for that.

…

If this all sounds like a giant confusing mess, ripe for scamming opportunities, that’s because it is, and it will only get worse now that Trump and Elon are completely destroying all kinds of financial regulation agencies.

I mean… probably yes, but in the case of much of the Torah, the mythical characters and stories first appear textually in Sumerian cuneiform.

The Sumerian culture and written language (cuneiform) was located basically in modern Iraq, near the Tigris and Euphrates. The written language and stories can be dated to about 3000 BC, the actual culture itself, even further.

Then you can trace the evolution of the mythic/legendary characters and stories into the Ugartitic texts, located in Ugarit, modern day Syria, dated to about 1200 BC, with the Ugaritic written language itself being an evolution of Sumerian cuneiform.

The Torah itself, in early Hebrew, wasn’t actually written and compiled as such untill roughly 400 BC, despite the tradtitional insistance it is many hundreds of of years older, and is largely based off of the Ugaritic texts.

If you look at the actual archaelogical and linguistic history of peoples, languages, texts and stories, its quite clear that the ultimate origin of many of the characters and stories in the Torah is Sumeria. Those stories then migrated and mutated as they spread from Sumeria to Canaan, where the Hebrews and Israel/Judah later arose.

I’d say a ‘reality check’ is not always negative.

Say you’re very, very self conscious in public, always nervous about how others percieve you.

But then, one day, a friend pulls you aside and ‘reality checks’ you with:

“Look, in 90% of situations you’ll ever be in, if you can follow a few basic dress and behavioral rules, you’ll be fine. Barring situations where the whole idea is you making a good first impression… most people, most of the time, in most situations… really don’t care that much.”

Things like that are arguably ‘positive’ reality checks.

The reason why ‘reality check’ is often connotated negatively is because most of the time, cognitive dissonance develops as a way of excusing or justifying harmful or irresponsible behavior or inaction, all things that mean you are living in a mild to serious delusion which can no longer be maintained, and will require a lot more effort to grapple with.

But it can be the case that reality is in someway better than it is perceived by someone who is overly critical or peasimistic in some way.

In some sense, the initial realization that you’ve been incorrect about something is negative in that you may be embarassed about being wrong in the past, but if it actually means a more realistic outlook going forward, which is actually less troublesome, easier to exist with/in, then I’d say thats overall a ‘positive’ reality check.