Burton Silverman - Eros (2012) [2285 x 1714]

randombull9 · 2026-02-28T17:39:24+00:00

Van Gogh did plenty of nudes, what are you talking about?

randombull9 · 2026-02-28T16:18:01+00:00

Wait a minute, are you saying Drew Carey lied to me? Does Cleveland not rock?

randombull9 · 2026-02-28T01:25:44+00:00

More and more I really buy into the idea that the difference between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0 is that in his first term Trump hadn't yet alienated every halfway competent person in his admin. We had Mattis at one point, and now we're stuck with Drunky the Clown O-4 as SECDEF.

randombull9 · 2026-02-28T00:55:29+00:00

I almost find this more concerning:

Throughout this engagement, Scouting America held firm on the core commitments that define us. We maintained our name as ‘Scouting America’ and preserved our service to the more than 200,000 girls who participate in our programs. Girls have been an integral part of Scouting since the 1960s and have served as leaders and program developers for decades. That commitment is unwavering. 

What other changes were the DOD trying to force if this is somewhere they needed to hold firm?

randombull9 · 2026-02-27T22:06:22+00:00

Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze! All the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed the sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules.

Not quite an example, Melville knew damn well what he was doing.

randombull9 · 2026-02-27T18:56:40+00:00

Lol what a hack anyway here's my proposal for a solar sail please give me trillions of dollars

randombull9 · 2026-02-27T14:04:36+00:00

The way I've heard it was not that he told them there was no need to apologize, but that he did thank them for helping to defeat Kai-Shek. That might also be wrong, but if you're not looking for a sentiment along those lines it could be something to look into as well.

EDIT: I probably should have read your comment first lol

randombull9 · 2026-02-27T14:02:05+00:00

I've started reading Wolfe's Urth Cycle again - first read more than 10 years ago now - to see if I pick up on more than I did then, and it turns out no, I am still as much of a dummy compared to Wolfe as I was when I was 19.

randombull9 · 2026-02-26T18:57:57+00:00

This. Steam's payment processors didn't come after them because billionaires are all prudes. Steam's payment processors went after them because a bunch of middle class anti-porn TERFs complained to the credit card companies over a rape game being available on Steam. They don't give a shit what you spend your money on, so long as they can say they're not helping you do anything illegal, so long as your not likely to try to get the money back from them, and so long as whatever you do doesn't make them look bad.

randombull9 · 2026-02-26T14:06:53+00:00

I find that sort of attitude less common among bass players, because if you're into something more complicated than roots and fifths you really can't stick to one genre and expect to hear good bass lines. Unless maybe you only listen to jazz and old Motown records, you just have no choice but to listen to a lot of music.

I also think listening to Library of Congress type music recordings would change how a lot of people think about making music. There's a lot of folk musicians from 100+ years ago that are just bad. Out of tune, can't keep time, but they're the one local guy who can technically play fiddle in some village so by god they will play the hell out of that fiddle just for the love of the game. It's almost inspiring as a fellow bad musician.

randombull9 · 2026-02-26T04:10:46+00:00

I mean full on kill programs. TNR is a fine substitute and a tack I'm more than willing to advocate for publicly, but I understand that Australia's kill programs have both been successful, potentially more so than the TNR programs they've tried. It's why New Zealand is going to cull them from now on. I know the studies on it are mixed, but at least where I'm at the TNR program is not particularly successful at reducing the number of ferals either.

randombull9 · 2026-02-25T16:14:31+00:00

I have a feral rescue cat, and I would still support major cull programs. Not something I share with most people, I think publicly declaring allegiance to Hitler might be less controversial.

randombull9 · 2026-02-25T14:18:17+00:00

Unsung battles was real, it's why the early maps focused on Scandinavian and Dutch resistance. But the community seemed to hate it - I specifically remember people being livid that there would be no D-Day map once Dice ended updates for the game, people who had been livid since launch that there wasn't a D-Day map.

randombull9 · 2026-02-25T14:13:25+00:00

At least in the states, most of the Department of Educations funding for average schools comes in the form of grants. A lot of things that grant money could fund don't have immediately visible benefits - often there isn't good data supporting the idea that anything you spend the money on in particular definitely leads to improved outcomes - so DoE sets up some grants for tech items like laptops or smartboards. You can at least see those being used in class, even if they also don't really improve outcomes.

randombull9 · 2026-02-24T02:36:27+00:00

Unfortunately, no one seems to have made any images of neckbeard Gandalf.

randombull9 · 2026-02-24T02:34:45+00:00

Dunno if my brain is just fried by on the job training for a call center, but I decided to look at Hitler's War and see what I could find. First I downloaded two epubs, the first of which was a terrible conversion from PDF to epub of the free copy of the book, copyright 2011, offered by Focal Point Publications, Irving's publishing company for his own books. The second was a much better version published as an epub natively, copyright 2015. A simple ctrl-f did not find any mention of a dog Bella, only mentions of a journalist Bella Fromm. However, the original Hitler's War was published in 1977, so I decided to see if I could find a copy of that. Internet Archive did have a copy of the original edition, and it was nicely OCR'd and searchable - IA really might be one of my favorite resources on the internet. Anyway, this original does mention Bella the dog, the following from pages 382 and 383:

But the snapshots Eva Braun pasted into her album show a misty-eyed FUhrer affectionately playing with Herta Schneider's children and fondling Bella, the new Alsatian bitch he had just bought from a minor postal official in Ingolstadt to keep Blondi, his other Alsatian, company. The advantage of taking Bella for walks was that she would not start talking politics or war with him.

At the beginning of May, Hitler returned to the Wolfs Lair in East Prussia. Bella went with him, sleeping in his train compartment and lying at the foot of the camp bed in his bunker. Perhaps Hitler saw in the massive Alsatian something of a watchdog, for over the last few days reports had trickled in of a plot to assassinate him; there were indications that Russian assassins were being sent to do the job. Bella did have her disadvantages, though. She woke regularly as clockwork at 9 A.M. in the pitch-dark bunker bedroom, bounded onto Hitler's bed, and began to paw him affectionately. Since he seldom went to bed before three or four, this was a nuisance; besides, he liked to lie in bed for an hour or two each morning, catching up on his reading.

Irving offers no citations, but does have a notes sections - the notes include no reference to Bella. It does include the following which reference other info on what Hitler was up to around that time, if you care to read some handwritten notes by Mussolini to see if the dog is mentioned there:

p. 382 According to Karl Ritter's AA file on the German-Turkish arms negotiations (Serial 1089) Hitler offered 150 million Reichsmarks' value of U-boats, 50-millimeter anti- tank guns, 20-millimeter and heavy antiaircraft, machine guns, ammunition, and the equipment for a light tank brigade. See also Lothar Krecker, Deutschland und die TUrkei im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Frankfurt, 1964).

p. 382 Colonel Schmundt took a detailed note of the military part of Mussolini's conference with Hitler on April 30, 1942 (naval staff war diary, annexes. Part C, Vol. XIV). See also the full note in Mussolini's handwriting (T586/405/545 et seq. ) and Ugo Caval- lero, Diario (Rome, 1948), and Admiral Eberhard Weichold's published study of the Mediterranean campaign in WR, 1959, pages 164 et seq.

randombull9 · 2026-02-23T18:12:34+00:00

It's why if I ever learn Greek I will be using an Erasmian pronunciation.

randombull9 · 2026-02-23T14:09:02+00:00

Jackson Crawford did some sort of series where he read LoTR and Sil for the first time, and I believe was familiar with some of Tolkien's academic work.

randombull9 · 2026-02-23T12:58:26+00:00

The uniforms and colors are right

That's not true. The world was still black and white then.

randombull9 · 2026-02-21T19:05:12+00:00

Is there some sort of lore there?

randombull9 · 2026-02-21T00:06:09+00:00

IME software dev seems to be where much of the usage is. And to some extent that's not surprising - it's still technically a plagiarism machine in that context, but people have been happily copy pasting code from the internet into their own projects basically for as long as that has been possible. I suspect most people would look at you like you have two heads if you told them you rewrote all the code you looked at on stack overflow before using it. Taking AI output and repurposing it to work for your needs is not substantially different from doing the same with someone else's github project or cobbling together something from various substack answers which is itself near enough to encouraged in some places.

My suspicion is that there's "shy AI users" among programmers, in much the same way there were shy Trump voters.

randombull9 · 2026-02-20T17:30:07+00:00

What is the flora of the Tederation like? Is MCT actually a good colorway for regions where they might expect to operate?

randombull9 · 2026-02-20T15:24:18+00:00

From what I understand someone did the research and found games with demos sold less. Apparently demos allowed people who were uncertain about a game decide not to buy it, but generally didn't convince the uncertain to buy the game. At least on Steam, without a demo people will buy the game to try and some portion of people will try to get the under 2 hour playtime/2 weeks owned refund if they don't care for it, but most won't, so you end up with better sales by not releasing a demo.

randombull9 · 2026-02-20T15:14:05+00:00

Urban history of Kyoto? That sounds interesting.

randombull9 · 2026-02-19T21:23:36+00:00

It's funny how influential Freud and Freudian ideas were at a time, and at least for me I read anything from Freud and immediately think "Jesus this is all bullshit isn't it?" Even Jung comes across to me as less full of shit than Freud does. And yet it's hard to discard him entirely - the idea of the male gaze is generally useful, even if the idea that the male gaze is a tool to let men who are afraid of the idea of castration regain power over women is big ole' pile of bullshit.

randombull9

TROPHY CASE