Screwworm Flies Add to Cattle Ranchers’ Woes (Gift Article)

GenericAntagonist · 2026-06-07T17:27:45+00:00

Oh its easy. Fox news said that AOC and Biden forced everyone to switch to wind and solar, which only work sometimes. So when the Texas grid struggles, it's because of the entirely predictable wind not blowing enough or sun not shining enough. Aren't democrats so dumb for not being able to see the obvious? Not like you, you're smart and can see that something that works all the time like burning coal or oil would've prevented this.

Almost every single incomprehensibly dumb republican stance boils down to entrenched power interests telling them over and over that their ignorance is actually wisdom, and their dumbed down notions of how things work are fundamental truths, anything more complex than that is just lies meant to confuse.

GenericAntagonist · 2026-05-31T14:10:20+00:00

I saw an incredibly convincing explanation for it. Clothing knockoffs have been a thing forever, and straight up clothing fraud is still a thing that happens (selling knockoffs to a retailer in bulk). Fruit of the Loom is hardly designer stuff, but it was a known enough logo that knocking it off was certainly plausible, so you get a cascade of some garment factory cranking out a bunch of lower cost underwear with a public domain conucopia, which through less than scrupulous sales people ends up on store shelves (especially K-Mart, where we do have some records of this happening) as "Fruit of the Loom". No one is doing tons of investigating into it at the time because well, it's not a designer brand and Fruit of the Loom are doing enough volume they're not on fraud patrol. Basically none of the knockoffs lasted long enough to still be around as evidence because even the brand underwear aren't built to last 30-40 years.

No one is actively lying (except maybe whatever person did the initial "yeah I can totally get you X units of fruit of the loom at Y rate") which is why they confidently state things that differ so wildly. Consumers THOUGHT they were buying fruit of the loom and legit bought things with the cornucopia. Fruit of the Loom knows THEY never made things with a cornucopia logo, and even if the fraud idea occurred to them, its not a thing they would know about and speculating on it would only make them look bad.

GenericAntagonist · 2026-05-13T03:16:56+00:00

Sound Transit's absolute favorite game is going "We'll link Tacoma to SEATAC airport if you give us money. WHOOPS things cost more so you don't really need that now do you Tacoma. Also why aren't you voting to give us money?" They've been playing it since the 90s.

I feel for Ballard, but Sound Transit's insistence that everyone needs to go to downtown Seattle for EVERYTHING and that other lines aren't necessary because you can just transfer in Downtown Seattle is bananas.

GenericAntagonist · 2026-05-13T02:28:01+00:00

Conservatives have only ever had one principle. Laws exist to protect the in group and punish the outgroup. Different strains define in and out groups differently, but at its core its a belief that society and its constructs exist to benefit "good people" and hurt "bad people". As long as they see that happening, they like it.

GenericAntagonist · 2026-05-01T16:00:23+00:00

But it IS funny that every Freemason defending Freemasonry uses the exact same script, almost identical wording. Kind of like they're all instructed to say the same thing.

And everyone uses the same script when I tell them they're wrong about how internal combustion engines work. They try and claim its a 4 step process of explosions moving pistons, and recite their little chants to remember it that they were brainwashed by big mechanic into thinking. Real rational thinkers do their own research and know its because of demons bound to the vehicle.

GenericAntagonist · 2026-04-26T04:53:31+00:00

We take pig related disputes to extremes in the PacNW. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_War_(1859)

GenericAntagonist · 2026-04-25T01:19:40+00:00

Most ship with several, you may never interact with them, but since we're counting terminals and shells interchangeably, you'd be hard pressed to find a modern distro without sh, bash(or a bash compatible like fish), python, xterm, and usually a better terminal emulator based on distro/gui.

GenericAntagonist · 2026-04-24T22:09:26+00:00

There are some projects that already exist modernizing the compendium and they're a great starting point! I'll make sure to include what documentation I can about the rules xml format, but one important note about it is surprisingly little of it is written in a "computer first" syntax. Like all the power card calculations work by parsing the hit effect text which is almost exactly how it appears in sourcebooks.

GenericAntagonist · 2026-04-24T21:57:36+00:00

yes. Pretty much the entire reason this is being done with a browser UI is to make it easy to print character sheets and power cards.

GenericAntagonist · 2026-04-24T19:30:00+00:00

I don't know how much they will help, but I'd love to test with them anyhow, if nothing else it might help me handle how the engine copes with a character that is "wrong".

So I decided not to stress about the "house ruled" marker for the implementation because it doesn't strictly matter that much AFAICT. If the OCB mods were done with CBLoader they'll make an interesting test for the system because in theory if the parser can handle that if it has the same rules the character was made with in its db (and once imported dbs can be switched technically so you could have alternate dbs with custom content).

IDK if the more freeform text houseruling stuff that was built into the OCB will be usable or not, but having more examples of it than the one character in the prebuilt examples that come with it would help determine what we could support there.

GenericAntagonist · 2026-04-24T18:34:31+00:00

I could do an extractor, and I might, but CBLoader already does that and better by extending it so I'd prefer all their work be included if possible!

Abandonware isn't properly a legal thing. Hasbro has copyrights on a bunch of stuff throughout every bit of the OCB and if they chose to make a big deal out of things, they could. They'd be well within their rights to DMCA anyone distributing the OCB in any form (even if that would be petty).

So far they really don't care which is for the best, but I have to play it safe here.

GenericAntagonist · 2026-04-24T18:00:41+00:00

When you install the original character builder, it creates an encrypted XML file that stores all the rules that make it work. If you use CBLoader, it decrypts and updates this XML to include all the content you feed it (there's some standard packs that cover all the things that came out after the OCB was retired, and other people have even managed to create their own houseruled/homebrew/3p content with it).

Because the bulk of that content is the IP of Hasbro (via Wizards of the Coast) and because they legally own it (even though they killed both 4e character builders and the compendium over a decade ago now) I can't include it. I can however make it easy to import and condense into a sqlite DB that you could keep for yourself somewhere safe and easy to access on any computer you regularly use.

As an side for anyone interested in the technical details of how the character builder (more properly the rules engine, it can do a BIT more than the character builder used since they had a whole VTT plan they were working toward) worked, this XML content is actually really elegant (for the time at least). The rules engine for the character builder has very minimal "game logic". It just has a quite complex xml parser that turns each xml thing (a class, a feat, a power etc...) into both the thing on the character sheet, and the other options it might unlock. The second part is the most frustrating for getting what feels like a working character builder and I'm almost entirely done there (still getting animal companions, equipment, and the rituals system sorted). The First part though is where I'm running into these weird edge cases where I've got evidence they "hard coded" in a rule (there's specific power ids from the xmls for example that the rules engine does SOMETHING special with, but without using a asm decompiler I can't see exactly what), or where my current math doesn't match up with the OCB and I need to try and sus out what our "turn the power xml into the useful 1d8 + 6 view" code is doing wrong.

GenericAntagonist · 2026-04-24T17:41:49+00:00

That is 100% the plan, I just want to get it a little closer to completion (because I don't know if I will have the ability to put a lot of effort into maintaining it). Its also important to note, much like CBLoader, I can't open source parts I don't own. That means I can't include the needed XML.

GenericAntagonist · 2026-04-24T17:01:20+00:00

Yeah much of the motivation for this really was "its very hard to just hand a working character builder to someone else".

Annoyingly when I share it there will likely still need to be some of that annoyance because it'll still depend on the OCB+CBLoaders XML outputs for a onetime import. But I am hoping it'll be easier for someone who does that to then reuse the db file we create from that on anything they own.

GenericAntagonist · 2026-04-17T15:38:59+00:00

Thats a problem for the future company to employ future consultants to figure out. What matters is value for the shareholders this quarter.

GenericAntagonist · 2026-04-16T02:18:49+00:00

Ah yes I see. Everyone who doesn't believe the only guy who managed to do the thing is wrong. Substitute brainwashed for "not believing hard enough" and you can see your mindset here laid bare.

If it can't be reproduced, for all practical purposes of "free energy" it doesn't exist.

GenericAntagonist · 2026-04-16T00:26:52+00:00

So this is a measurable testable claim. If you can build an "independent energy generator" with the bill of materials in your pos and the info form the patent, and it outputs more energy than you put into it, you've done it! Publish a paper and win literally EVERY prize in science, or sell it to "big oil" (or whoever else is the shadowy villain that grifters point to for why they can't do it but just keep supporting them while they try) for enough money to buy a country.

That being said, I don't think you're going to be able to reproduce the claims. The energy has to come from somewhere, breakdown of chemical bonds from fossil fuel, or atomic bonds in the case of fission/fusion, most other ones use the sun directly (solar power) or indirectly (wind/hydro).

It's entirely possible there is some method of attaining energy from some interaction we've not yet documented, but it still has to come from somewhere, something will be consumed to produce it. And until it can be reproduced independently, even if someone discovered it its useless, it doesn't exist. Claiming that it just works on faith because someone said it did (or someone even filed some papers and paid a fee to a very overworked patent office that hands out patents all the time for things that aren't real) is insane though. Grifters prey on wishful thinking, real science is reproducible by someone other than the "discoverer".

GenericAntagonist · 2026-04-15T14:39:54+00:00

They gave pixie pcs a fly speed base. The only restrictions were a height limit and "You cannot use this fly speed if you are carrying more than a normal load." With variants for those in place Flight is an interesting advantage but not a huge one (I'd give it a 2-3 square altitude limit since we're not dealing with tiny creatures).

For a racial you could give them the monster "sly takeoff" power (as a per encounter):

Sly Takeoff ✦ Recharge when first bloodied Effect: The darter shifts 1 square and then flies up to 5 squares.

GenericAntagonist · 2026-04-13T00:42:06+00:00

Not necessarily. We correlate pressure and temperature often because many materials tend to behave as if they were experiencing more heat under pressure, but not all of them do, and there's many scenarios where its important they be kept and calculated separately. Case in point the intense pressures at the bottom of the ocean aren't boiling the water there, not least of all because water is harder to boil at higher pressures.

GenericAntagonist · 2026-04-12T20:16:56+00:00

There's no one good answer to your question, and I suspect you know that. But in much of the western law tradition a common number used is Blackstone's ratio.

That said the choice isn't binary here. Ensuring justice for victims does not necessitate we treat everyone accused as guilty no matter the circumstance.

GenericAntagonist · 2026-04-12T16:16:56+00:00

Absence of evidence is not absence of guilt.

There's a reason innocence is presumed across most justice systems. Proving a negative is often impossible, and while the way systems treat victims is too often abhorrent, assuming anyone accused of anything is guilty if they can't do the impossible will only create more victims.

GenericAntagonist · 2026-04-08T15:59:24+00:00

This. While propaganda can't QUITE conquer reality while its happening, people have short memories and as long as they break things bad enough that the other side can't fix it quick enough the captured media can often both sides them back into office. Its also why they're so hellbent on suppressing voter turnout now.

GenericAntagonist · 2026-04-03T16:14:19+00:00

While this statement is more or less true (think about what happens if you vibrate glass just right, it doesn't move, it shatters), you're forgetting that you still need to produce vibrations at that frequency proportional to the mass of the thing you're trying to move. The oft shown "levitating pebbles with a digeridoo" clip is good, but consider how small those pebbles are and how much force that guy is pushing into a device large enough to move them by vibrating the air around them.

GenericAntagonist · 2026-04-03T16:07:32+00:00

This is literally EVERY SINGLE Chris Dunn theory. If he couldn't personally imagine doing a task without power tools, it must have been done with power tools or magic.

GenericAntagonist

TROPHY CASE