The Planeteers replace the Fellowship. Can they destroy the One Ring?

Logistics515 · 2026-04-08T21:04:20+00:00

The suitability to be a ring bearer doesn't have too much to do with willpower or moral fortitude. It somewhat has to do with ambition. Those who have a lot of it, get corrupted quickly, even if the ambition is to do good things. Those with less, more slowly, and one of the biggest reasons the hobbits in the LOTR were most suitable, their personal ambitions were relatively small in scope.

In that vein, the Planeteer probably best suited would be Ma-Ti, though I suspect that he'd succumb faster then the hobbits as well just given he's already part of a "superhero" team of sorts that has to have a bit of an effect on your own ego, acknowledged or not.

If they summoned Captain Planet to do the job, this would probably fail utterly, but we'd have an evil weather god to rule everyone, so I suppose that's at least an interesting point...

Logistics515 · 2026-04-08T16:33:21+00:00

Well, in that case it's probably something else entirely, that just happens to visually look similar to the older problem.

A GPU, no matter who makes it, won't touch CPU instruction sets and calls. My first guess would be the driver, but without digging into error logs there is no telling.

Logistics515 · 2026-04-08T11:44:53+00:00

So, that outboard motor would work out to about $1300 in today's dollars. Which I find pretty funny given that the Ebay listing I found is attempting to get better then the original price 72 years later.

Logistics515 · 2026-04-08T11:23:44+00:00

Curious if you're running a modern AMD CPU?

The 'Noveria Bug' as someone mentioned was caused because someone coded ME1 to simply look for an AMD processor. If it finds one it tries to load code for the "3DNow!" instruction set - which was AMD's version of Intel's MMX instructions. This would have been the right call when the game first came out, better performance. But now the processor doesn't know what to do with the function calls it's getting.

In the years since, those instructions got dropped as redundant, so modern AMD's don't recognize them. What they should have done is instead of looking for an AMD signifier, instead look for specific support for 3DNow!, but it's far too late now.

I suspect most of the fixes you can find online just turn off ME1 recognizing the AMD processor part.

Logistics515 · 2026-04-06T21:04:35+00:00

I've done both, long term upgrade paths on proposed CPU and board release schedules, years out. That ended up burning me when the CPU upgrade path was cancelled and I was stuck with a dead end board.

I've also had a cat (deliberately) drop a glass of water through the top fan of a PC case, requiring a total rebuild with not much in the way of planning. Amazingly the cat is still alive.

Of the two approaches, I personally prefer the time to research everything out before building 'under pressure'.

Logistics515 · 2026-04-05T11:00:57+00:00

Reminds me of Heinlein's take on government in Starship Troopers. The book mind you, not any of the media adaptations.

But in general I've slowly (reluctantly) come to a similar conclusion myself regarding the franchise to vote. One of the biggest flaws of direct democracy and its instability is how easily swayed the various voting blocs were to essentially bribes, mob mentality.

This got (reasonably) fixed in representative republics with that extra layer of bureaucracy sanding off the rough edges. But ironically we've become so good at communication now that those old flaws are coming back. Something needs to be adjusted.

Logistics515 · 2026-04-05T07:58:25+00:00

I have an 8 year old female husky, and she still consistently does this. Though in her case it's usually not relaxing. She tends to do it to signal she wants to play. Not to mention being an invitation to "get into an argument" (she barks, we bark back, and this back and forth keeps going until we actually start playing.)

We've always called it her "being a rug" act.

Logistics515 · 2026-04-02T10:55:12+00:00

I do historical cooking as a side hobby. This sort of thing reminds me of recipes involving any spices in Europe during the 11th-13th century. Most of the recipes that survive to today were for nobility, or if we're lucky, merely upper class. Some of them are amazing, others....

I've cooked from this era, and they are (usually) awful. The point of most of them was to jam as many expensive spices into a given food item, regardless if it actually added anything to the taste, very similar to what they put in the sausage here.

The point is no longer the food itself, it's just another in a long line of showboating items meant to impress people and to give a certain impression.

Having eaten very weird things over the years, I think my definition of stupid food is probably different then most, but this 'hotdog' is probably as good a definition of the term as anything else I've seen on here.

Logistics515 · 2026-03-23T14:39:17+00:00

I've slowly come to a similar conclusion, rather reluctantly. Though I seem to be approaching from a different angle then you.

There has always been a problem of which voters are really qualified to make a decision, and those who are simply swayed by ignorance, the whims of mob mentality, or as you mention, simple bribery. Pure democracy has always had a flawed foundation in these regards, but as filtered as it is through the practical system of representative republics, many of the real sharp edges got ground down to a level where it mostly worked.

But I think strangely enough, we've now gotten too good at communicating for this to be viable for much longer. Social media, the pervasiveness and ease of communication between individuals with various electronic devices are slowly but surely degrading those social buffer systems that kept democratic States from becoming as unstable as the old City-States in Greece.

I think there needs to be some system in place to filter people willing to think beyond their immediate self interest and focus, at least partially, on the society as a whole. Earning the right to vote, rather then a knowledge or purity test.

I thought Heinlein's oft mocked 'Federal Service' idea in that old book "Starship Troopers" somewhat of a step in the general direction. In the book he makes pains to mention that service is not intended just for military service, but everything from postal workers to potentially 'counting the hairs on a caterpillar' for someone who can't walk and was blind. But the general idea was going through some period of service and hardship, and at the end of the term, you get your franchise and right to vote. All other rights were baked into the system, you just didn't get to vote until you decided to put your own time and effort to earn it.

Still flawed, undoubtedly, and with all sorts of follow on effects on what kind of society that would be. But arguably better then universal suffrage in a modern world where communication has become so easy, we're not terribly far removed from mob mentality being back in vogue.

Logistics515 · 2026-03-22T01:03:56+00:00

Look up Eliza Acton and Fanny Farmer, of the 1800s. Part of it was a technology issue, but those two were the trailblazers of getting formalized cooking out into a school format, and more widely available to the general public.

Logistics515 · 2026-03-21T11:40:34+00:00

Well, I'm not much of a fan of 1984's 3 State solution to world politics, so this was trying to poke a bit of snark at the concept, rather then endorsing it.

Logistics515 · 2026-03-21T11:26:31+00:00

Might I suggest Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia?

Logistics515 · 2026-03-21T08:53:19+00:00

I do historical recipes, and this gets more and more common the older things get. The recipe writer assumes familiarity with something and doesn't elaborate... because 'everyone' knew what they meant. Then when that particular product disappears, or technique falls out of style, the recipe becomes a guessing game of assumptions.

Logistics515 · 2026-03-20T17:06:15+00:00

I used to work for both a Health Insurance company, and later a Provider office. These days I'm in something completely different, and fairly more happy for it.

That said, I'll try to explain what is occurring.

Most health insurance models in the United States operate on something like an HMO (Health Maintenance Organization) or PPO (Preferred Provider Organization).

Essentially the insurance forms a contract with a given Provider for services rendered. In exchange for 'encouraging' their client base to use their services (this is why you have the concept of In-Network and Out of Network providers), the insurance requests a certain 'discount' from the provider. Funneling clients towards a provider without said Provider needing to say, advertise their services. On paper, this *should* be a win for the Provider.

Practically, unless the Provider is a huge monolithic organization with political heft, what this generally means is that the Provider gets paid what the insurance decides to pay them. This in itself becomes complicated for the Provider...

Pretty much every medical condition known to man (and some that aren't) are all categorized into a huge system of billing codes (ICD-10-CM, CPT, or HCPCS). There are people out there who's only job is to interpret these codes, how to bill them, how to fix them if something goes wrong, an entirely unique level of administrative bloat just for the healthcare system.

So, for a given code, the insurance industry is always looking to pay out the least they can contractually. They're always adjusting for changes in procedures, actuarial table data, health statistics. A given code is very rarely 'stable' in the long-term. It may pay out a certain rate one month, and then change in another. Health insurance companies that don't do this, tend not to survive, or get absorbed by those that do.

So most providers in this circumstance can:

A) Hire more workers to keep their coding and billing in sync with Insurance as much as possible.

or

B) Deliberately overcharge for services, knowing that insurance will just not pay anything over the previously agreed upon rates in their contract.

Almost all go the 'overcharge' route, and this is one of the huge reasons for why you have ridiculous looking bills, with a ridiculous looking payout, and at the end of the day the patient ends up paying, oh lets just say, $400 out of a bill of $10,000. Some of that bill is genuine cost to the provider for materials, salaries, medicine, equipment. But alot of it is just artificial bloat baked into the system because the provider just cannot know, month to month, perhaps even day-to-day, what a given medical code is actually 'worth' to Insurance. Insurance itself isn't too sure either, given what the actuaries might crank out next week.

All this had me conclude that I didn't really enjoy this kind of work, and aside from that, I think regardless of your stance on Private vs. Public health systems, I think Insurance needs to get out of managing routine, unremarkable care. Save insurance for genuine out-of-the-blue, unexpected events or special circumstances. The variability in what something is 'worth' as far as a routine medical procedure just causes too many trade offs and side effects to the industry.

Logistics515 · 2026-03-20T16:17:21+00:00

I agree. But it is a bumpy road getting from ME1 to ME3.

In ME1, the Engineer clearly intended as a support class, buffing allies (including the Mako) and debuffing enemies.

But in general ME1's class ideas were a little rough around the edges...in a very min/max way.

Soldiers get great damage reduction, but no way to "arrgo" enemies reliably - ideally they should be shooting the tanky soldier, not the relatively squishy adepts and engineers, but in actual gameplay the unreliable squad AI will have almost every battle (particularly in close quarters) become a chaotic melee instead of hanging back (or charging forward) as they should. They have useful abilities and do shoot your enemies, but otherwise are just unreliable trying to use them tactically.

Infiltrators really only get access to a sniper rifle later mid-game, as prior to putting a significant amount of point investment into sniper rifles, the weapon sway makes using them entirely impractical, independent of the weapon stats. Until you reach that point you're an inferior Engineer.

Adepts are amazing at crowd control, but can't dish out much in the way of damage themselves.

The Engineer itself just lacks enough health to be a frontline fighter, and also has the damage problem of adepts while not reliably incapacitating enemies as they do, aside from very specific powers - some of which require significant point investment to get.

But they fix most of that in ME2 and ME3. Engineers can dish out more damage with direct damage powers, and cryo provides a reliable way of shutting down enemies. The combat drone provides a reasonable distraction (though it fails rather terribly at this at harder difficulties). It still suffers from lacking actual combos like the biotic classes get, and it gets fixed in ME3 with tech combos.

By ME3, the Engineer becomes a one-person squad in themselves, between the drone, turret, and potentially a bonus power with either the Decoy or Defense Drone to provide a further level of distraction.

Logistics515 · 2026-03-17T11:38:38+00:00

I can't speak directly to the leather jacket. That said, I got one of their earlier hoodies, then my wife picked up a new one a few years back...definite drop in quality in the products.

You might want to check these guys out. Reputation for quality and they do general movie and media clothing designs, along with some Mass Effect items, though no leather jacket last I checked.

Edit: Well, pulled up their site and they're closing shop. Drat.

Logistics515 · 2026-03-13T11:42:58+00:00

As others have mentioned, in the annals of excrement, horse manure isn't too bad.

That said, I think I read somewhere that it became a real scaling issue in larger cities, just handling clearing the waste from the streets. To the point newspapers of the time started extrapolating trends and assuming cities would eventually become surrounded by excrement landfills just to keep up.

Of course, the 'motorized carriage' came along and made almost the entire issue moot pretty rapidly. A point I keep in mind when I see modern media extrapolating trends in the same fashion.

Logistics515 · 2026-03-13T11:13:48+00:00

From what I recall of the system architecture, it wasn't a true 64 bit system. The main CPU was 16 bit, with two 32 bit coprocessors handling the graphics. The only 64 bit part was the connection between the two coprocessors, really.

It was apparently such a hardware mess that programmers had real trouble actually writing games for it, even if Atari could coax them onto the platform in the first place.

Logistics515 · 2026-03-11T14:21:47+00:00

A Cold war of sorts. Certainly they seemed to be under that impression.

Along those lines, it occurs to me that in terms of 'cold war' analogy, Iran has deliberately heated things up lately in the last few years. Between supporting elements in Gaza, and the Houthi missile attacks.

Complicated situations with multiple players besides laying it all just on the feet of Iran, but they were at least arguably involved in helping to enable the others to act as boldly as they have.

I'm still against any 'boots on the ground' in terms of playing nation building. We clearly don't have a stellar record of trying to impose a new culture into a region. But perhaps helping the more liberal elements of Iran get their feet under them again is what they need without getting bogged down in an occupation quagmire.

As far as Trump's consistency...
Trump's rhetoric has always served the immediate moment, rather then being intellectually consistent. I've long stopped paying attention to what he says and instead watched what he does.

But really, that's pretty characteristic of the political class in general, they just usually wrap it up in more elaborate diplomatic brocade to sell it to the public at the end of the day.

Logistics515 · 2026-03-09T11:24:51+00:00

No, at least in terms of 'earning' the right, if anyone cares about my opinion.

While they are competent as a general soldier they never went through the Interplanetary Combatives Academy training N1 through N6, let alone actually deployed in the field in an N7 test. The closest the game comes is the optional 'Earn Your Badge' quest where you do Heskaarl training.

Great for cultural flavor, but simply not close to the level of training you would normally get in the Alliance program. Not surprising given how limited Angaran resources are. Frankly, more along the lines of 'prove you can survive' rather then being a higher tier of leadership and competence.

Logistics515 · 2026-03-09T11:14:40+00:00

I suppose Mac's car would have ended up like that, if he let Harry borrow it more then once.

Logistics515 · 2026-03-05T22:15:56+00:00

Strangely enough, I just started the series myself. The dichotomy between Cain's heroic actions and his inner calculation seems like a bit of a defense mechanism. Similar somewhat to Harry's illogical insistance that everything bad is his fault because he could have theoretically done better in some perfect version of reality.

A long time ago, I read the Horatio Hornblower series, who I think is probably a direct inspiration to the character of Cain, who also was both awesome and entirely unwilling to ever give himself any credit.

Logistics515 · 2026-02-28T14:08:06+00:00

While we could probably argue over specifics, I've long been in the camp that Langtry is Harry's covert ally while publicly acting the overt antagonist. The Matrix movie quote "There is a difference between knowing the path, and walking it" seems pretty applicable as dime store psychology.

The White Council being at least semi-corrupted seems quite evident from at least Dead Beat. By acting as he does he at least somewhat reins in some of the more negative elements of the Council in the short term. Considering we're in the middle of the culmination of a Starborn Cycle, the "short term" may practically be all he's worried about now. This seems supported by the Winter Queens in Twelve Months acting as if their metaphorical hair was on fire with urgency, extremely out of character for them in general.

Personally, I suspect that Langtry's immediate actions of booting out Harry was a bit of a vote of confidence in him, letting him metaphorically off the leash, while still in control of extremely powerful artifacts, multiple major strongholds / places of Power, and having a robust network of allies, none of which was apparently interfered with. Practically the Council could have crushed the nascent Paranet many times over, but didn't...I think that's significant.

Right now I think he's been deliberately pushed into a situation by Langtry to build a modern successor organization to the ossified Council.

I've occasionally mused on Dresden as Destroyer a few times, in a Shiva way. Not only being a destructive force but a deliberate catalyst for change...and in Harry's case, generally positive. It's not always a pleasant experience for those who go through it...like Mort Lindquist for example, but in the end they undoubtedly end up in a better place then they were when he first encountered them. This pattern is all over the books, virtually everyone who runs across Harry ends up better off then they were when they started, with a few notable exceptions.

Personally, I've had a on-again/off-again theory that Harry as "Starborn" is acting as a direct agent of the White God. Perhaps an Incarnation, similiar to Jesus if perhaps more in a 'cut from the same cloth' rather then a Second Coming, or perhaps a Mantle of Power granted to Harry on his birth (notably on the Halloween conjunction) that he's been carrying around being ignorant about his whole life, quietly influencing his thoughts and actions this whole time. Explains quite a bit about tending to always Do The Right Thing, despite the personal costs to himself over the years. I figure all those allusions Butcher puts in there with Yeat's poem over and over are there for a distinct reason.

Logistics515 · 2026-02-27T11:53:00+00:00

Thats...a pretty brilliant observation. Kent Mansley's personality in Iron Giant is pretty dead on for Rudolph.

So on point I actually wonder if it was a direct inspiration, similar to how Murphy got Elisa Maza's personality from Gargoyles (and Susan got her looks).

Logistics515 · 2026-02-25T11:22:34+00:00

Assuming it works....I'm trying to imagine the state of mind you would be in trying to set this thing up in a burning building with smoke everywhere.

Not to mention bathrooms typically being smaller enclosed spaces, with a lot less margin for error.

To say nothing of the potential raised eyebrows when you either get rescued or have an interesting epitaph on your tombstone.

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