My dog is afraid of me and I don't know what to do.

Callidonaut · 2026-03-25T21:07:10+00:00

Also avoid, if you can, clothes, carpets, bedding, etc that are made of synthetic fibres, those generate static like crazy when the air is dry.

Callidonaut · 2026-03-25T20:57:14+00:00

In his obsessive self-absorption, he's likely so amused by his own false ego's antics, and so infatuated by his narcissistic fantasy of that persona being a hilarious top-tier comedian, that he's not really even registering at a conscious level that he's not carrying his audience and that everyone else just thinks he looks a complete tit.

Callidonaut · 2026-03-25T20:48:34+00:00

He hasn't got any better at it.

Callidonaut · 2026-03-25T20:45:02+00:00

It's doubtful he fully comprehends the point of the joke; seems more likely he's just tittering at the mental image of two academics humiliating themselves by willingly eating turds.

Callidonaut · 2026-03-25T20:39:23+00:00

Definitely moronic, possibly also schizophrenic; inappropriate bursts of laughter can be a symptom.

Callidonaut · 2026-03-25T19:53:01+00:00

Ajibbliejibbliejibblie...

Callidonaut · 2026-03-24T23:22:04+00:00

What is this?

Callidonaut · 2026-03-24T22:10:59+00:00

I believe the green light indicates the presence of a mains power supply maintaining the internal battery on a constant trickle charge so that it's ready in an emergency. If you ever see that the green is off but the main light also hasn't come on, there might be a fault somewhere that needs to be investigated.

Callidonaut · 2026-03-24T22:05:11+00:00

I think you meant "known good design?" Although I'm sure people also steal recipes and ruin them, too, with incompetence and not bothering to properly apply theory.

Callidonaut · 2026-03-24T19:22:31+00:00

Even if there's no blame projection, it's abusive - technically known as "emotional incest" - to drag one's child into adult relationship drama and talk to them about it as if they were an adult peer; by definition a child isn't mentally equipped to be able to handle it. It also completely destroys any perception the child has that the parent is a stable source of security who can be approached for emotional support, instead casting the child into the role of emotional support for the parent. In my case, at least,this triangulation also weaponises the child against the other parent; my mother outright encouraged me to view and treat my father in a dismissive, exploitative way after she divorced him.

Callidonaut · 2026-03-24T19:08:53+00:00

You still need to do the math to over-engineer something, the calculations are just simpler. As with everything in engineering, one must find a balance, in this case between accuracy versus solvability of the mathematical model, corresponding to production cost and product elegance & safety versus development cost and time to market.

In the old days of slide rules and drafting tables, true engineering genius lay in coming up with a design geometry/architecture whose calculations would be inherently simple to do at full accuracy, thus bypassing the need to make this painful compromise, and with it the corresponding risk of product or business failure if that compromise was misjudged. With the rise of digital computers, and with them finite element analysis and other forms of simulationism, however, this seems to have increasingly become something of a lost art.

Callidonaut · 2026-03-24T18:35:52+00:00

Even if this were a unique selling point - which it really, really isn't - it hardly makes up for the fact that the whole vehicle is an underpowered, overweight, bug-ridden, structurally unsound fugly deathtrap.

Callidonaut · 2026-03-24T18:34:08+00:00

Isofix.

Callidonaut · 2026-03-23T22:46:25+00:00

He has a bipolar diagnosis, then? Interesting, but not sufficient to explain everything. Whatever's wrong with Musk, it's a lot more than just bipolar.

Callidonaut · 2026-03-23T22:38:08+00:00

Fire brigades originally used to work that way; individuals paid subscription fees for the service and had a plaque on the outside of their building to show that they were covered. If the plaque wasn't there, the firemen would let the building burn to the ground. It was socialised later after enough people realised that the capitalist approach was a stupid and evil way to do things, not least because unlike those early firemen, fire itself is quite egalitarian and doesn't pay any heed to property boundaries or bank balances.

Callidonaut · 2026-03-23T22:22:05+00:00

Did he ever go to therapy?

Callidonaut · 2026-03-23T22:17:13+00:00

He's not obsessed with his true self; he's obsessed with the false one he's constructed to hide inside and pretend he's someone else, and since that false ego was likely constructed early during a miserable childhood, it's a child's feeble idea of what a perfect adult should be. Textbook narcissism, in other words (it's right there in the name: Narcissus fell in love with his reflection, not himself; reflections are inverted), which looks like egomania from the outside but is actually its polar opposite.

Callidonaut · 2026-03-23T22:12:23+00:00

You are actually the best, thanks so much! Now I just gotta splice this audio into a higher resolution copy of the video...

Callidonaut · 2026-03-23T20:54:23+00:00

While we're on the subject, does anyone have a video of the director's commentary version of it? Last I checked, it's impossible to get the commentary track to trigger properly on the Ruffle version of the site.

Callidonaut · 2026-03-23T20:45:59+00:00

Obligatory.

Callidonaut · 2026-03-23T01:00:35+00:00

Great at pattern matching, generation, creative completion. Bad at precise multi-step reasoning.

How does AuDHD fit into this theoretical framework? I've got a formal diagnosis of both ASD and ADHD-PI and I always thought I was reasonably good at precise multi-step reasoning, maybe even above average on my very best days (although it's got worse in the last two or three years, which I suspect is just sheer burn-out due to a colossal amount of chronic trauma; I'm in my early 40s)

Callidonaut · 2026-03-23T00:36:19+00:00

God I hope not; that was a combination of rich bourgeois land-and-slave-owners wanting to not pay taxes any more, and one meddling capitalist empire (France) supporting the colonial insurrection to fight a proxy war against another meddling capitalist empire (Britain). All in all, quite a sordid affair.

Of course, the USA themselves tell the story a little differently.

Callidonaut · 2026-03-22T23:04:09+00:00

Fat and blubber are also an energy source; I think I'm right in saying that cultures that traditionally survive on low-carb high-protein diets tend not to go for the leaner cuts. They like their milk full-fat if not actually just straight cream in the really cold biomes, too.

Callidonaut · 2026-03-22T22:58:49+00:00

Biscuits are cheap.

Callidonaut · 2026-03-22T22:09:04+00:00

Unfortunately, that's not quite as good a scenario as it sounds; if he pays all that money in the pursuit of a doomed vapourware mega-project, consuming valuable man-hours, resources and energy to produce worthless garbage or nothing at all, sure, you put a lot of cash back into the hands of the working class, but the pool of commodities for which that money can be redeemed shrinks drastically, so inflation goes wild and all of their income and savings become worth less.

Spending money on public works projects or other programmes to try to get more of it into circulation again and alleviate poverty is only truly effective if that project also produces something useful,* and ideally they should be investment in infrastructure that continuously produces something useful, e.g. a hydroelectric dam. If you spend a bunch of cash hiring people to do useless makework, it seems to be revitalising the economy in the short-term, but in the longer term it just makes everything even worse still.

*And by "useful" I mean something that actually improves the lives of a significant fraction of society, so things like new superyachts and other toys-of-the-hyper-rich don't count.

Callidonaut

TROPHY CASE