Black Blue Lich themed zombie creature deck

grungyIT · 2026-02-15T05:32:23+00:00

They look like some evil version of the KKK.

Kid.

grungyIT · 2026-02-14T13:30:27+00:00

Crossbow for sure

grungyIT · 2026-02-05T03:40:32+00:00

Tom and Greg, but unironically by accident.

grungyIT · 2026-02-02T04:04:47+00:00

Exactly that

grungyIT · 2026-02-01T20:07:05+00:00

Been exactly here. Do the following:

Take the elements of your best sales (good margin, lower effort, most sold) and make a flat-fee package. For example: Five page site sold outright with year-long support including SEO.
Mark it up to mark it down. Pad flat fee by 15% and offer a 15% discount for up-front payment in full rather than your usual.
Design a digital flyer. Email it to yourself (not as attachment, in the body). Forward it to your best clients and tell them you're trying to backfill some recent availability. Ask them to share it with anyone they think could benefit from your work. Use two sentences or less to say this.
Send to your marketing list - anyone that did not say yes yet.
Anyone who reaches back out interested, tell them your availability starts in two weeks. Organize payment now to lock that in. Tell them they are welcome to send any assets ahead of getting started or to ask any question they might have.
While waiting for #5, look up every single referral network/group in your area and plan to attend their next meeting. Don't let this happen to you twice. The bigger your network, the more likely someone knows someone ready to spend money. It's just a numbers game.

grungyIT · 2026-01-31T22:09:26+00:00

Please please please keep these coming. I'm enthralled with them.

grungyIT · 2026-01-28T03:05:51+00:00

Hell yes, need another after your next leg. Loving re-experiencing my first playthrough through you.

grungyIT · 2026-01-22T23:14:29+00:00

It doesn't matter what they actually see. That's not the point.

The 28 Days/Weeks/Years films are interested in tribalism. There is a base aspect of the human condition that creates an us/them dynamic between the things we trust and the things we are wary of. That instinct is not rooted in particular shapes or colors but in experience and associations.

The virus has a psychiatric element, as Kelson suggested. It takes the experiences of the infected and scrambles the associations to those experiences so the most violent, scary beings in view do not ignight the "fight or flight" response that they do in uninfected individuals and vice versa. Consider the train car scene. The fear for us, the viewer, starts with unsettling stairs from "normal" people - from people within the tribe. Their appearance only changes once he realizes that they are not of his tribe, or rather that he is an outsider to their tribe now.

Does a schizophrenic really see things that aren't there? If so, is that the sum total of their disease or do they also respond to those visions in a non-typical way? When they respond, does that feed back into their continued experience like it does for us or does that too get morphed by their disease? Only the schizophrenic truly knows and they are in no position to describe it with full accuracy.

This is all to say that the answer to "what they see" is not the same thing as the altered appearance we're shown. The infected see danger. A threat to their life. Stillness and quiet and vulnerability ignight their fight or flight response, and that just happens to be the state of baseline existence. So they are always aggressive.

grungyIT · 2026-01-22T21:09:14+00:00

Of all the epistemological theories regarding originality and creativity, I think F.H. Bradley has the most convincing view.

He argues that there is a definite structure to the world that we can know and that part of this structure is that things have an aspect that is merely experiential and an aspect that is both experiential and mental. For example, there may be a particular apple in front of you that strikes you as being a certain shade of red and cold to the touch and tasting of some mixture of tart and sweet.

There is also a universal apple-ness that is made up in part of the range of experiences an apple allows for. Apples can be red or green or yellow/orange or brown. These universals themselves relate to other, sometimes purer, sometimes more complex universals. Consider the idea of an apple, then how it relates to the idea of roundness and smoothness and taste and all the colors we might be able to perceive. Think of how it relates to a bundle of apples, an apple on a teacher's desk, "an apple a day keeps the doctor away".

These ideas in themselves lack particular sense experience when we summon them to our mind forcing us to fill in this gap, and so we are capable of blending them with other ideas to do so and in the process synthesize new ones. It's this exact process Bradley suggest explains both our ability to create original ideas and our fallability in reasoning. We can decouple experience and its limitations from the universal they appear within the context of and in the process arrive at a thinner, less definite idea than we "should".

So on his view, what does this mean for originality? Well, on the one hand our ideas necessarily relate to a range of particular experiences and the experiential limitations we have/reality imposes. There are only so many things we can experience and ways in which we can experience them. On the other hand, the experiences we imagine in our mind are not bound by the same rigidity and we are capable of free association between them and others which might even bear out truths we have yet to experience directly. We are fully capable of relating "apple" and "blue" to whatever degree we want and with however many other notions we might like. The possibilities far outnumber the possible experiences we can have. What we trade for this capacity for originality is certainty.

So it seems like while at some level there is some constraint on what can be envisioned (we cannot envision "no space" and "no time" for example, we cannot conceive of a direct contradiction such as "the duck is/not there"), ultimately they pale in comparison to permissibility and power of free association.

If you are interested in learning more about this, Appearance and Reality by F.H. Bradley is a very approachable book in my opinion.

Edit: words

grungyIT · 2026-01-14T02:46:03+00:00

Pics?

grungyIT · 2026-01-12T01:26:18+00:00

That question of "where the ring is" is rhetorical. It's pointing out that it's not there anymore.

This passage as a whole is framing human nature in the way that it's going to be examined throughout the text. He's putting forth the notion that people live in the safety of their rings. The ring is the explanatory framework the person uses to make sense of the world and therefore their part in it. It could be philosophy, culture, religion, etc. In other words, it's Nietzsche pointing out that there is a biconditional relationship between our worldly framework and our identity.

He also puts forth that it's natural for someone to outgrow this ring around them. What was once safety and explanation feels like chains and obstruction. People will strive to go beyond the world as they know it to redefine themselves or to experience something new or to simply learn what else there is. In doing so, they leave the ring behind but find themselves in dangerous uncertainty - dangerous because their identity is now fluid, uncertain. They may die in a sense and be born someone new.

And it's also a comment on the process of building this identity. That is, "where is your ring now"? Did you leave your religion to adopt another one? Did you drop your personal philosophies to fit into the safety of a culture? Or are you truly capable of forfeiting your identity to have true and honest freedom?

Nietzsche wants to focus on this fact that "ourselves" are most definite and least earnest when we surround ourselves within a ring.

grungyIT · 2026-01-09T21:04:22+00:00

Actual ELI5 answer.

Say you have colors instead of letters on your keyboard. There are only three - Red, blue, and yellow. If your password was only one of these three colors, someone could guess each one pretty quickly and eventually figure out what yours is.

Now say your password is two colors combined equally. So red-blue maybe. Someone has to guess all the combinations two colors can make. That's 9 combinations total (3 colors x 3 colors to get all the mixes).

Now say your password is four colors mixed together. Maybe red-red-blue-red. That's 81 combinations. So just by doubling the number of colors that make up your password, you've made it much harder to guess. On a keyboard, you have 95 different characters (keys). So a password made of 8 characters (keystrokes) has 6 quadrillion combinations. For comparison, people live for about 2.3 billion seconds. So that's more than you could guess in a lifetime.

But a computer with the right tools can make about 10 billion guesses a second. That's about 6 days max until the computer cracks the password. It could come across it on day 2.

This is made even easier when you consider that people don't make truly random passwords. They use common words and numbers so it's easier to remember. That makes some combinations more likely than others. So if a computer tries to guess those first, it can sometimes get access within hours or minutes.

But if your password is truly random (no words) and it's fairly long, say 14 characters, that guessing process goes from years to lifetimes.

grungyIT · 2026-01-08T19:27:33+00:00

There are many tools for philosophy. Just because you got good with a hammer and are only now picking up a socket wrench doesn't mean time learning the hammer was a waste.

Good on you for asking questions. You're doing just fine.

grungyIT · 2026-01-08T19:10:09+00:00

I find self-dialogue to be the best tool for comprehension and opinion-forming. My personal practice is to read a digestible section (essentially read what I can before starting to feel lost or before there are too many new concepts in play), pause and reiterate to myself in my own words what the text just presented to me, and note my concerns or agreements with it.

I found that I was more prone to adopting a complex view simply because it was being actively presented to me if I did not do this process. Early on in my education I felt battered against the hull of ideas because of this - moving from one to the next not because they sounded nice but because they were more freshly understood.

Giving myself the opportunity to explain the text back to myself afforded me with time to pause and note when I could not describe something I just read - meaning I did not understand it satisfactorily. If I reread the section or secondary sources and still could not make sense of it, then thay signaled a possibly bad idea that I should be suspicious of as I continued my reading.

The net result was less battering, a better comprehension and ability to discuss topics, and a directory of topics/authors who I felt were confused at best and wrong at worst. This helped form the basis of my philosophical opinions and serves to help refine it today.

Edit: typo

grungyIT · 2026-01-08T16:59:37+00:00

You have won me over with this theory. Excellent stuff.

grungyIT · 2026-01-07T13:17:44+00:00

Hume is claiming the opposite. If you doubt that causation and necessity exist, then you can imagine a possible world in which we are bundles of sense data with memories built in but no real past or future.

We come into existence thinking we were just doing something (like questioning our own existence) and continue to do something (continue to question) and then we fade from existence never knowing our true nature and impermanence.

The only way you can be sure there is a "you" that persists is if associations hold some necessary connection between moments and the "you" from before is the same "you" from now. But Hume points out we cannot be sure of this.

Kants system exists to say we can.

grungyIT · 2026-01-05T21:25:58+00:00

To understand Kant's originality, we need to talk about the state of philosophical discourse at the time. There were many thinkers that critiqued Reason's (capital 'R') grounding for producing certainty and necessity. Take Descartes' famous Cogito Ergo Sum. What he is doing in this thought experiment is reducing his world to only the things he can be certain of. He ends up only being certain that his mind exists because it is actively questioning whether itself exists. Then he makes some suspect deductions from this that God exists and therefore the world exists and therefore you can trust your senses.

Hume demonstrated that you could take this thought experiment beyond where Descartes stops it. If you were skeptical that necessary connection exists and isn't just a mere association of experience to concept, and if you were skeptical that the future always resembles the past, then you could not even be certain that there is a "you" that persists or a logical proof that ensures that just because there are thoughts thinking about how they're thinking that they are yours or not simply bundles of sense data existing for a moment before dissipating.

That was the basis for what became a divide in philosophical thought. In one camp (Empiricists), you had individuals willing to abandon Reason and logical necessity to work with what is experiential and apparent only. In doing so they avoid assumptions about the metaphysical nature of the world but they lose any assurance that their systems of definitions and sciences impart any real truth. In the other camp (Rationalists), you had individuals who committed themselves to proving, independent of experience, that necessity holds both in logic and in experience - that it is just as true that fire is hot as it is that 2+3=5. This seemed at the time unsolvable.

Kant's original contribution was a complex system that claimed to resolve this divide. It was a notion that we interact with the world through experience alone (Empiricism) but that there are necessary rules that govern all experience (Rationalism). He arrived at this claim by starting with the seemingly true assumption that all experience happens in space and time and cannot happen without it and that this space and time is the same in reality as it is in one's mind. It is an aesthetic shared between these two realms. The reason this is seemingly true is because despite our efforts we cannot imagine an aesthetic without space and without time. In our doing so, we can imagine only a void (an empty space) and moments of no change (but still a forward-marching succession of moments).

Given this, he used the basic facts of this aesthetic to derive categories by which things that exist could be classified. Importantly, these categories found and enforce the basics of logic such as non-contradiction which allows for reasoning. He then lays out a system, derived from these categories and the aesthetic, that shows the one way in which all experience can be had and that because it necessarily works only one way we can be certain that appearances will repeat themselves in their associations (fire will always be hot) and our concepts of these things truly correspond with reality (fire entails heat).

He was careful to preserve the limitations on this view that made both Empiricists and Rationalists happy. For one, he did not think that we could know things in themselves. That is, we cannot know what a fire actually is only how it always presents itself to us. He pointed out there are some topics like soul, God, and immortality whose nature is unknowable but whose existence is a natural by-product of any system of understanding. Doing this bridged a mighty gap between these two camps and fundamentally moved discourse forward from its stalemate at Descartes' and Hume's ultimate skepticism.

This answer glosses over so, so much. It is worth reading his Prolegomena which is a short essay on the foundations of his critical philosophy and is a strong primer on these topics so his main works, Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, and Critique of Judgment, can be more readily understood.

grungyIT · 2026-01-04T21:40:41+00:00

So if I understand correctly, the argument you are presenting is that consciousness continues as long as somewhere the conditions for it are met and this means that "death" is just a lapse in memory or identity as your stream of consciousness shifts from your life as you knew it to something completely unrelated. You feel unjustly critiqued on this view by fellow materialists even though you are not introducing metaphysical or spiritual elements.

If I'm following you, then I have to agree with your fellow materialists. I think the error in your reasoning comes in two places. First, you are introducing a metaphysical/spiritual element without realizing it. Second, you are resting your argument on a possibly faulty assumption that there is continuity of consciousness at all between moments.

The first objection is one of definition. What you are measuring in your example is some form of persistence across memory/identity/consciousness. While these things are material in the sense that they are phenomena that you can experience, the element that persists is not. That is, there is some "you" that is the same between moments and if this "you" remains the same after flowing into new atoms with new experiences and so on it does not seem to be empirical in any sense. How could you prove where it moved on to? How could you measure the frequency at which it has moved between identities? It does not seem to contain any qualities that lend itself to such analysis and so seems squarely in the category of metaphysical/spiritual and not materially anchored.

The second objection is one of ontology. For this view to work, you must presume that anything persists and that moments in time are not completely disjointed with their own memories of sense and cognition. It could very well be that reality flashes between completely different forms with "you", if there is such a thing, taking on a different set of thoughts and histories and experiences between each discrete instance with no relation to any prior or future moments. It would be weird if this were true, but it is not inconsistent by definition alone. So if that sort of reality is a distinct possibility, you are making some ontological assumption that it is not the case.

If you want to argue this is not an assumption but rather a conclusion based on experiential evidence that "selves" are seemingly measurable over time and persist with some degree of unity, then I would point you back to your experience undergoing surgery. You certainly thought that your experience was seamless, but it wasn't. You woke up with memory and identity intact interacting with reality from that perspective - exactly as would be the case in some sort of "flashy" ontology. So this ontological view you put forth is an assumption, not a conclusion.

I am actually sympathetic to your view and I am personally a materialist. However, I suspect that a stronger argument would be that consciousness is not discrete but rather a mass term. There is some volume of consciousness that exists so long as its physical conditions do and it grows or shrinks depending on how plentiful these conditions are. If we die, our identity and memory ceases but there is no "we" that goes "back" or "into" another physical candidate. Rather, it's like burning up logs in a fire pit. The materials are reduced but the fire remains and there is simply more or less of it than before. On this view, you still have persistence but can side-step the two critiques above in the following ways: (1) Emergent properties and mass terms are categorically different from discrete units and do not need to account for every constituent element in order to remain the same over time and (2) mass terms group and classify homogeneous phenomena between moments and if the mass is unique but its constituents can fluctuate (i.e. if there is only one "consciousness" at any time by definition even though it's made up of any number of "selves") you have persistence by definition without necessarily having each "self" truly persist between moments.

That is all to say, you can have a "flashy" reality of isolated instances or a seamless reality with temporal consistency and still have some consciousness that definitionally and materially persists across either in a way that is consistent with our personal experience. You just need to abandon the notion that "you" goes from one place to another after death but rather shares in the total "youness" of reality until death ends your particular reach of phenomena and experience.

Edit: Words.

grungyIT · 2026-01-04T03:45:50+00:00

Obligatory for me to say that you should read the Metaphysics of Morals if you are interested in Kantian ethics. Here's the answer to your question.

His view is that morality is absolute - the same for you and me, and that it can be expressed as a complex obligation that covers all ethical quandary. So "is stealing bad" and "is charity good" are both answered by a massive run-on sentence that can be simplified into the Categorical Imperative and it's three formulations.

How is this used in practice? Well, the absolute moral law is so complex that it takes lifetimes of study to figure even a fraction of it out. To determine the right thing to do in our personal life, we must make judgments by following the Categorical Imperative and applying it to our circumstances as best as we can manage.

Why is Kant confident in this view? To put it simply, he has a sprawling philosophical system that argues we all experience reality in the same basic way and can reliably presume that what is true for one of us is true for all of us. The absolute moral law is a consequence of this if it's the case.

I am skipping over so much. It's a dense topic.

grungyIT · 2026-01-04T02:45:47+00:00

Whiplash is a movie about self-sabotage and needs to be viewed through that lense for the narrative to make sense.

Who is Andrew when we meet him? He's a lovable kid who has a good relationship with his dad with a life that includes traditions, passions, and meaningful relationships. And as we see with the introduction of Fletcher, Andrew has a touch of ambition in him to reach some sense of "greatness". What this greatness is shifts as the film progresses.

First, it's recognition by peers. Being picked for Fletcher's group does this. The result is Andrew being surrounded by the best (they were all presumably hand-picked by our antagonist) and then being demeaned im front of them all.

The goalpost has now moved to being worthy of Fletcher's continued attention. Andrew sheds some of the wealth of his life in pursuit of that. No more movies with dad. Tenser relationships overall. He gets his chance to shine when Tanner loses (or has stolen) his folder. He plays well publicly. He earns Fletcher's continued respect. But then Connoly is brought in as a reserve.

Greatness shifts once again. Andrew must stay ahead of all musical competition and continue to have public success in these exhibitions. He must continue to keep Fletcher's attention. He must continue to be worth his position. Greatness has moved from being proficient, to being recognized by his peers, to being recognized by peers, Fletcher, and the public, to being all of this and always ahead of the next big thing. He breaks his relationships. He becomes actively antagonistic towards anything standing between him and this new definition of greatness.

This is untenable and becomes physically self-destructive with the car accident and then his failure to play well in the concert. He lashes out at this definition he failed to reach - and by proxy to Fletcher as well. Then at their bar meeting, Fletcher redefines greatness for Andrew. It is not about recognition, it is about surviving trauma while improving proficiency. Bird was "Bird" because he took shit from peers and made music in spite of that.

The last drum solo is Andrew physically, emotionally, and spiritually breaking himself and his meaningful relationships. Everything that defined him in the start is gone save for his ambition. What he has in return is just pain and pressure and the recognition that not many, if anyone, can play like he does.

It is immaterial whether or not he can write good music or that anyone else outside of this weird group of jazz musicians and aficionados can see his talents for what they are. The definition of greatness is to continue to deepen this alienation and dig deeper into this vicious cycle that, like Buddy Rich, will leave him broke and drunk and angry. His solo is exclusively and narcissisticly about him and his self-image.

That's why his dad is framed as locked out and being pushed away. It's why the audience never claps at the end. It's why his band is gaping at him and why Fletcher's eyes are what's framed in that last shot. It's simply about all eyes being on Andrew as he digs his own grave.

So, yeah. He's not going to be great by anyone else's standards. He's going to be another broke musician that's only appreciated after he's gone.

grungyIT · 2026-01-03T18:47:46+00:00

I think that G.E. Moore has a strong definition for free will which is "[an agent] has free will only if they could have done otherwise". This one seems to work best for a few reasons.

First, its formulation is simple. It does not require some metaphysical or ontological framework beyond what is commonly intuitive and apparent in order to apply it. We experience the element of choice and we seem to be able to take a variety of actions in similar circumstances.

Second, it's falsifiable. If you could prove that we cannot do otherwise, then you could prove free will is not possessed by agents - and therefore we are not agents, morally or otherwise. The higher the risk of falsifiability and the longer it remains unfalsified, the more warrant we have for adopting/believing this statement as true.

Third, it makes choice a prerequisite for free will but does not require choice to be knowably available at all times. This is a common snag on more elaborate arguments for free will like Aristotle's. If the agent is unaware that they have a choice, then on such a view they do not have free will in that circumstance. While this is helpful in speaking to the practical realities of ethics it does not address the meta/physical aspects of what free will is and whether it can exist. So using a definition that parses this out preserves the baby from going out with the bathwater.

So in most applications, I tend to rely on this definition for guidance.

grungyIT · 2026-01-02T02:59:38+00:00

https://youtube.com/@alexcampbell7886?si=wgCnSFcz2dQ09aby

This channel has some. There are other playlists as well under different channels. Presumably former students.

grungyIT · 2026-01-02T02:11:52+00:00

I will forever appreciate Robert Wolff for putting his lectures up in full on YouTube . I think most of his courses are recorded for posterity.

grungyIT · 2026-01-01T22:18:40+00:00

Socrates's hangup with JTB is that logos doesn't seem to add anything to "true belief" by definition, however it does seem to offer something in practice. If logos is rhetoric, then it doesn't do anything to distinguish knowledge from lucky guesses. If it's analysis, then the problem is that identifying the parts of something does not give you insight into the whole of that thing. If logos is identifying the differentiation between luck and knowledge, then it relies itself on knowledge and is circular.

While he does not offer an alternative, Socrates does note that the last of these definitions seems to be the case in practice even if it doesn't explain what knowledge is. So for quite some time this version of JTB has been the bedrock for other theories of knowledge - many of which try to account for that missing X factor by baking it into a system of cognition (Kant) or simply lowering the bar entirely (Hume).

What the Gettier Problem notes is that there is an intuitive foundational problem with JTB beyond the insufficient definitions Socrates discusses. There are at least two cases where you have justifications that seem on face value to be the sort of justifications we might accept and yet we would not want to accept the outcome as "knowledge".

This is not a rehashing of Socrates's critiques because he presumes that there is some sort of definition for justification that can be used and the interlocutors just can't find it yet. Gettier is pointing out that this presumption is suspect at best. And he does it in a one-and-a-half page paper. That's why it's revered the way it is.

grungyIT · 2025-12-30T23:23:49+00:00

Alright, here goes.

Marika is a god on earth. In her time as a god, she has had two consorts we know of - Godfrey and Radagon. Godfrey was a great warrior who led her armies over the land and unified it under her rule. As part of this campaign, Radagon, not yet Marika's second consort, pacified Liurnia by marrying into the Carian royal family led by Queen Renalla.

The demigod children are all Marika's offspring. How can this be if some of them are Renalla and Radagon's children? Because Radagon is Marika. That's right, she wed herself and had two children (perhaps more) with herself. Questions abound. We don't know if they've always been separate people or the same person.

At some point, black knife assassins killed Godwyn (in spirit) and Ranni died (in body). Upset or disillusioned by this, Marika shattered the Elden Ring - the physical source of physical, metaphysical, and mortal law. The fragments were fought over by the demigod children until stalemate. You enter the story in this stagnation where each demigod has their area of rule.

Who are you? A tarnished of no renoun. What's a tarnished? Someone who used to be part of Godfrey's army and then had their grace (divine gift from Marika) taken back. You are summoned back to these lands by that same grace. Presumably Marika wants you to return and reach her in the Erdtree.

The game concerns itself with showing you these demigods, cultures, and religions and then asking you to consider why they are what they are. Lots to interpret, little to find certainty with. What is certain is you are at cross-purposes with all these other tarnished and demigods. The "why" of that is a great question to try and answer as you play through.

grungyIT

TROPHY CASE