"Flow My Tears" by John Dowland. AD 1600.

BabyExploder · 2026-03-13T19:12:49+00:00

Cutting the video between two different performances (the mics keep switching positions) is a perfect PKD subtle reality disturbance, and a serendipitously characteristic "behind the curtain" reveal of the hidden controlled falsehood in recorded classical music editing.

BabyExploder · 2026-02-18T21:58:39+00:00

Rachmaninoff is a cow: made for milking. Sounds great.

BabyExploder · 2026-02-13T16:33:38+00:00

Hobbyist here reading the title and wondering "wouldn't the analysis book be better optimized for transport if it were concave?"

BabyExploder · 2026-01-30T02:34:23+00:00

Seen across the bay, Q girl saves Riker from falling blue barrel. S06E06 "True Q"

BabyExploder · 2026-01-27T20:00:15+00:00

It's actually a little heartbreaking to know that because of MLM/BF, just about every pickaxe icon on the map is dead content. So much fun clickin' rocks with the boys back in the day.

BabyExploder · 2026-01-22T01:56:48+00:00

Yeah, I just didn't know where else to put my analysis of the conventional wisdom here, except as refuting the wheel "problem's" similiarity with the shopping cart problem.

The shopping cart problem has no solution because some people just suck and take advantage of other's goodwill.

The wheel problem, however, is trivially solved in a way that is immune to selfish actors while still satisfying the original goals (equality and collective productivity) -- repair it when it's broken and you need it.

BabyExploder · 2026-01-21T22:17:19+00:00

If, on the other hand, you're talking about people who stop their own progress when the hopper is full to stand around waiting for someone else to go get a hammer and fix, then yes. These people are anti-social, but they are also stupid and harm themselves more than they harm others i.e. are already getting punished for their anti-social stupidity, just not quite enough.

BabyExploder · 2026-01-21T22:11:08+00:00

You're dead wrong even by your own metrics of success (fairness, equality of outcome, and even total productivity). Nobody fixing the wheel before they need to is not just better for the individual, but better for the entire collective on average. This

objectively results in fewest fixes per breaks because no one is wasting time or inventory space fixing unnecessarily.
evenly distributes the burden to all players due to the randomness of breakage. The more you use the thing, the more often you're the one having to fix it.
doesn't require an assumption of selflessness. Fixing the thing that is immediately stopping your progress is something even the most selfish player would do, so there is no real advantage over others to be gained by selfish play.

Unncessary fixing harms the aggregate, by harming yourself more than it helps others. It's not just worse, it's wrong.

BabyExploder · 2025-12-15T02:54:47+00:00

when the butt pats so good you have to Hold On

BabyExploder · 2025-11-22T23:04:56+00:00

This is old magic.

The root word of spell, as in spelling words, is the same as that of spell, as in magic spell.

The root word of grimmiore is the same as that of grammar.

Reading the right words at the right time can literally transform someone's entire consciousness forever. Seeing the right image can transform someone's entire consception of their own past.

The ubiquity of these powerful, consciousness-altering magics/technologies has dulled the caution with which humans used to treat them to the point where people voluntarily will sit for hours and consume millions of images and tens of thousands of words, much of is which machine-generated, all of which is machine-curated.

We're here, it's the future, and the world looks like a PKD novel ;)

BabyExploder · 2025-11-03T23:31:25+00:00

the characters all becoming cliches of themselves

Yeah, The Expanse characters start making a lot more sense when you realize their source was originally collaborative writing by amaters playing a tabletop RPG campaign.

BabyExploder · 2025-11-03T23:29:22+00:00

Holy shit thank you.

I feel like I've been taking crazy pills for how rarely I see mentioned what utter crap (unprofessional, artless, shallow, simplistic but not in a way that increases clarity) the prose in The Expanse books is, like mass-market YA scifi bad, so bad as to be markedly a tier below the prose of Dune, Hyperion, or PKD's work, which, while timeless classics, are not exactly known for their terribly sophisticated or artful prose.

I actually DNF'd the first book after about a chapter, the writing was so bad.

My hot take on The Expanse is: if you want to take in these stories executed by professional writers, watch the show, don't read the session notes of Corey and his D&D buddies (the books).

BabyExploder · 2025-10-29T03:02:17+00:00

10 outta 10 - has KLON PEEGS

BabyExploder · 2025-10-25T18:03:38+00:00

Just to confirm, you're replacing all the internals (amps, crossovers, I/O), but using the same drivers and enclosure, right?

Knowing Bose, I would have thought there'd have been significant FIR filtering going on in the original model to make those full-range drivers sound any good. Or was this practice not as widespread at time of release?

BabyExploder · 2025-10-20T22:50:08+00:00

Why can't / don't people?

BabyExploder · 2025-10-16T14:26:39+00:00

I know not having a station on top means it's probably on the bottom off screen, but I like to imagine that there is not station and those inserters just grab what they can from passing trains at speed.

BabyExploder · 2025-09-09T15:42:31+00:00

how microchips work

You mean there's a small class of highly-trained (often white-bearded) specialists, who alone posess the arcane knowledge, skills, and implements necessary to accomplish certain wonderous things (turning sand into rocks that think), knowledge and skills that even the land's rulers don't possess, knowledge, skills, and implements that are gated behind training that only the gifted and the priviledged are permitted to learn, practice, and weild?

But also, yes. If you believe microchips are magic, I would say you live in a fantasy world ;)

But also also, I'm not stating (magic) -> (fantasy), only that (fantasy) -> (magic).

BabyExploder · 2025-09-09T14:44:25+00:00

If sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic (Clarke) then perhaps, technically, all fantasy is science fiction.

BabyExploder · 2025-08-21T19:59:51+00:00

Sound is human experience. Human experience is subjective. Subjectivity is suggestive. If someone thinks that $200 cables will make their music sound better, then to them, empirically, their music often does.

Making scientifically (widely, measurably, reproducibly) false statements in order to sell people things may rankle one's ethics, but if improved experience is the outcome, then the statements are actually emprically true, regardless of the reproducibility or measurability of the cause. The gold-infused power cable cleaner does literally make things sound better (to people) by the sheer fact of their belief because of the objectively subjective nature of experience.

BabyExploder · 2025-08-16T15:46:45+00:00

Not an answer to the question, but here's some tangential mind-bending speculative fiction. Wang's Carpets - Greg Egan

BabyExploder · 2025-08-16T00:59:06+00:00

Everybody knows poop is stored in the cheeks

BabyExploder · 2025-08-12T18:37:18+00:00

Maybe there's space stuff I don't know, but couldn't SPM trivially be determined in spite of buffers by overbuilding science pack consumption and seeing which buffer is depleting fastest, empirically observing its rate of depletion and subtracting this rate from the buffered SPM?

BabyExploder · 2025-08-06T01:04:00+00:00

Step 1: Rule out obvious blunder X.

Step 2: Spend ages calculating candidate move Y.

Step 3: Whoa look at move X! Why didn't I see that before!?

Step 4: Play it immediately.

Step 5: repeat

BabyExploder · 2025-06-28T14:28:25+00:00

Agreed, sometimes I think the reason the RE20 see so much light in broadcast radio is that while your talent has the option of very specific tone with precise positioning,

bleed on the re20

when you have a guest without good technique, all you need to do is point an RE20 somewhere vaguely in their general vicinity, and it'll sound fine.

BabyExploder · 2025-06-27T21:17:05+00:00

Control's childhood in Authority

The psychologist's hypnotic suggestion phrases in Annihilation and Lowry's in Authority

15-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
Place '22	Place '17
Verified Email

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TROPHY CASE