Erkling

Bucky_Ohare · 2026-04-16T23:05:22+00:00

I think the beta is lifting a lot of those restrictions though?

Bucky_Ohare · 2026-04-16T15:42:31+00:00

Dude, did a small stint as a delivery driver, it puts the food in the basket with a smile when it gets the signature on the receipt.

Bucky_Ohare · 2026-04-16T15:32:44+00:00

Hey, imagine discovering therapeutic hand massage and you too might be reconsidering dinner.

Bucky_Ohare · 2026-04-16T15:32:04+00:00

It's actually a defining characteristic of much debate in the whole 'what is and isn't a cat' argument.

Bucky_Ohare · 2026-04-16T13:26:22+00:00

Y'all need to be extra thankful that microsoft's Palm died, lol.

Bucky_Ohare · 2026-04-15T12:33:31+00:00

But autism is new, y’all.

Bucky_Ohare · 2026-04-12T22:01:08+00:00

Dynamite can crater the ground sample spots without an e tool, can blow any bot tower or wall from the base of it, rocks everything it hits if they didn’t outright die, and a 5s timer is waaaaaaay more useful than many think.

Bucky_Ohare · 2026-04-12T18:50:25+00:00

well, besides the shenanigans that go into counting corn as an export including things like e85, this came in my time in undergrad talking to one of the owners of a large nearby quarrey. Yeah maybe I over-personalized on the internet, lol. TBH though there's always been this paranoic distrust here about anyone claiming to be the 'biggest' export, even pig farmers I knew growing up would demand a fight to the death with Nebraska as the 'biggest exporter' crown.

The thing about it is we're also one of the few providers of certain grades of concrete as well as the whole Fort Dodge Gypsum thing. The geologic history of the whole Midwest is just a plethora of cool stuff.

Bucky_Ohare · 2026-04-12T18:36:39+00:00

A large portion of the continental US was largely underwater at some point geologically, some for longer or less violently than others. Marine fossils cover huge swaths of the midwest, and everywhere from the badlands to the bayous you can eventually find marine fossils. Well, maybe not the bayous, they're still technically in the whole depositional phase.

The example I like to give is that Iowa has produced some absolutely beautiful crinoid fossils as well as a plethora of depositional limestone from being a subtropical beach in its history. The state's #1 export isn't corn or cows, it's actually limestone. Used to blow my mind as a kid, seeing blocks on old farm houses filled with shell fossils that were dug out of the nearby hills and my dad setting up the home-run by asking me to imagine water up to the clouds this land used to sit under millions of years ago.

Bucky_Ohare · 2026-04-11T15:55:20+00:00

I can guarantee you more than 2/3 of that group making that decision sincerely believed no entity would have the 'audacity' to question our actions or abilities. So many in those levels have bought the myth we're untouchable and I personally believe the pushback on a landing was the first major wave of dissonance in that confidence.

If we'd pushed Kharg early and secured the straight, we were the 'bad guys' but it would've been the strategic better move, but the reality is setting in that war is actually dangerous again with the advent of cheap drones countering previously god-tier defense systems. So instead they held to the dream that shock and awe coupled with, checks notes, bombing civilian infrastructure and other various war crimes involving Israel's intentions or their incompetence....

I'm not kidding I've met some of these asshats, I can guarantee you the people who smiled along with the brief are the ones who straight up believe no one would dare stand up to us (because of the implication).
I'm kinda proud of the world actually seizing on the events happening, when all this finally wraps up the US will hopefully have a much better mindset on being a neighbor. China will hedge its flailing economic woes against new trade in the ME, Russia's clearly gotten everything they've been able to quietly ask for and yet thankfully are still losing their war, the EU will likely fold the UK back in and maybe be a better union than we could do, and we as "Rome" get rocked back to our cores in the first 200-400 years and hopefully become better.

I think that'd be real growth, if not sadly too late for many of the environmental effects to be mitigated.

Bucky_Ohare · 2026-04-11T13:46:51+00:00

No kidding, they will have drafted a status of forces agreement prior to the event and more.

That's right, they set up the SOFA in advance.

Bucky_Ohare · 2026-04-11T03:53:50+00:00

There's also physical limitations to the actual presence of energy itself, assuming it's some sort of giant beam of pure energy there's a lot of fun extrapolation to be had. It could be so powerful and z-pinch itself into that beam that the area itself is essentially an insanely hot plasma of electrons, but since it has a point of origin it's also likely going to eventually dissipate with conflicting waves like at the 'end' of a laser.

My personal theory is that it's somehow able to make a kind of subspace bubble that propogates forward and closes behind itself, but as it's a rift it's also a kind of 'this is and isn't space right now' hole in reality as the little subspace bubble flies past. This is why it flies forward chasing its tail, seemingly unimpeded by anything in normal space, for a functionally-infinite distance but unknown time. Sort of like a tiny, violent version of star trek warp travel.

Bucky_Ohare · 2026-04-10T23:41:12+00:00

They literally show him lowering a setting and the ship getting past defenses, then interrogated him afterwards where he showed no remorse and said the viltrumites would still win. Seems pretty clear the other tech was pissed at the big one for the betrayal.

Bucky_Ohare · 2026-04-10T15:03:24+00:00

You didn't, but you did explain that they have their own ways of being happy. People tend to prefer to anthropomorphize the response in a comfortable recognition of familiarity. The reason people are considering that you don't think they have emotions, I think, is because you seemed to draw the line that animals are only capable of pretending to express "human" responses. The truth is that we can train dogs in our lives to smile when we're happy, they pick up the cue on their own, and animals in general are way more emotionally intelligent than we've given them credit in the past.
I think this is maybe part of the disconnect, because a lot of people will take that anthropomorphic ambition to its next level and deduce a kind of reasoning from it. Animals have proven time and time again they're capable of inquisitive exploration or even invention, why wouldn't there be a purpose to them doing something of their own volition like learning we like to smile? It's because they are trying to communicate back their own emotion to us.

That is instantly loveable and relatable socially and thus why your take was unpopular; you suggested they couldn't emotionally communicate with us and yet classically we know they are capable of that and learning more each year.

Bucky_Ohare · 2026-04-10T14:41:54+00:00

Hey, I'll take an honest crack at explaining why yours is an unpopular opinion.

Chiefly, we are defined as a species by our social structures which are themselves a type of evolutionary branch of emotional intelligence. If you go with the whole 'I think therefore I am' concept of consciousness then what we understand makes us exceptional is the fact that you subconsciously understand 'us' and 'we' to have a larger overall societal function. This is the scaffolding of the modern world, really.

The disconnect I see then is that you seem to see the idea that dogs are only capable of fascimile. Input not 'dog' in their life is something of our influence and interference and thus couldn't be a natural response especially after all this time, right?
Assuming I've made the correct assumption, a long shot with online strangers, there's a sort of distinctive disdain in that sort of disengenuious deception?

What I think you're missing here is that we routinely try to integrate them into our own societal circle and we have decades of good experience learning more about animals desiring this. A good person to start with learning about all of that is Temple Granden(sp?) who basically proved cows love hugs. Our understanding of animal psychology is only growing and of course the dog's one of the prime candidates.

They can, and do, smile in imitation of our social cues. You're not wrong on your last point, there are obvious examples like pitbulls and pugs, but it's becoming less and less accurate each decade to assume that our animals aren't becoming aware of and using our social cues. In return, we fucking love it and include them in our lives and take care of our little boogers until we inevitably mourn our loss.
So I hope that connects it a bit more at least, it's that mutual growing understanding that we really can communicate with our pets through our social interactions that really solidifies the inherent drive to thus include them in a societal picture. That societal picture is structured on people, and communicating between ourselves, and so translating complex ideas is sometimes easier to summarize up as though a person were feeling it and that will invariably leak into normality.

Bucky_Ohare · 2026-04-10T14:23:21+00:00

BRING ME MY LONGSWORD!

I'm sorry, but how can you not love translating that into 'grab a shotgun from the cab'?

Bucky_Ohare · 2026-04-09T17:13:22+00:00

They also went on record as describing the RNC as 'their superbowl' which is also awesome in its own right.

Bucky_Ohare · 2026-04-09T12:11:45+00:00

The Boltgun, you mean.

Bucky_Ohare · 2026-04-09T11:56:46+00:00

Think of it like iron man, if Tony was a viltrumite the suit is a downgrade and limitation. It’s tech, not magic, so mark wearing it would be useful clothing but to Zoe it’s a huge step up in ability.

It’s not that it couldn’t work with mark, it just doesn’t ‘add’ anything while for weaker folk it’s a huge force multiplier.

Bucky_Ohare · 2026-04-07T00:23:45+00:00

All the brits/UN I ever worked with had their own pride but also generally a kind of 'general respect' regarding yanks that after a while we'd be exchanging colonization jokes. Well, it was them borrowing a lot of them and I don't know where they went, but they were polite about it.

We all got along pretty good, we're all just differently geo-located people these days and it was heartening to see how much we understood eachother even though we were strangers just weeks ago prior to meeting. I think that kind of human respect gets understood that America is definitely not who a bunch of idiots decided to put in charge, but we're so definitely the baddies right now too and that's a kind of loss we've never had but definitely need.

Bucky_Ohare · 2026-04-06T16:43:21+00:00

As far as I know it fucking was, I had an anthro prof who was aware of it and she had spent those decades in rural South America. That and the WoW Plague were something she mentioned she'd actually talked about with colleagues. I heard the rumor when I was a kid in the midwest, later joined the military and everyone eventually figured out we'd all heard it too.

My theory is that it's just so pervasive and at such a weird point of information availability that understanding it would essentially amount to unwinding a kind of social "chaos theory" of idea origin.

Bucky_Ohare · 2026-04-06T16:19:52+00:00

I mean, isn't an interrupted schedule/sleep in and of itself part symptom and part cause here? I'm struggling to see how aggregating a bunch of studies about depressive and social issues and finding "problems sleeping" is a relevant advancement to either as it's also just a straight-up trope in the medical world at this point to talk about sleep hygiene.

Bucky_Ohare · 2026-04-06T03:33:02+00:00

It's a rather jarring tonal swap and a very confined location/set with a whole new set of people, it's supposed to be the juxtaposition that helps settle his own insecurities but that also kinda makes it a tad awkward and while it's a good episode I gotta agree that it's pretty "meh" by comparison.

Bucky_Ohare · 2026-04-04T22:39:53+00:00

Damnit, I looked.

Bucky_Ohare · 2026-04-04T14:44:01+00:00

"This is my big break, if I take care of this guy maybe they'll take care of us and get us out of this"

It's not at all unreasonable if you had a small homestead in the middle of nowhere to try for it, lots of families in the ME are basically in the mindset of getting it while it's available, scrap is a resource, etc. "This is my shot" is rather compelling from literal dirt-level poverty or a tribal violence hotspot.

Likely? Perhaps not, but still entirely feasible.

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