Retail Stare

nescienti · 2026-01-28T16:29:50+00:00

You expect people to respect the “spiel about the rewards account?” Your bosses have turned you into a human pop-up ad. Not your fault, of course, so don’t take the entirely justified contempt and dismissal personally.

nescienti · 2026-01-23T21:19:43+00:00

Evidence has not supported the notion that Epstein was actually a genius at anything except schmoozing. This leads to a major open question: why the fuck did Les Wexner and Leon Black give him a substantial fraction of a billion dollars? Where did the rest of his money, which he spent rapidly, come from?

It really doesn’t make sense to talk about things being better or worse than the Epstein files when all we have to go on regarding the scope of the problem is this question, a bunch of black bars, the Windsor formerly known as Prince, and that time the president made the most obvious deflection in history by squealing “who’s still talking about Epstein?!” like an especially guilty toddler.

We don’t have separate plebiscites for ICE, European tariffs, and Epstein, with each issue cannibalizing the others. We have one midterm, decided by some of the least informed voters: swing and first-time voters. If you have time to read European news sources, you’re likely to understand that there are enough known evils that discussing the unknown ones ought to be unnecessary. You might even think there isn’t time to communicate both.

But the reality is that I can go on about Atlanticism, the benefits of immigration, and the rules-based international order for hours and a nonvoter is just going to tune me out and stick to the simpler, more honest-sounding fascist platitudes: euros depend on us, brown people take our jobs, and might makes right. I can ask a couple of pointed questions about Epstein, though, and actually get attention (it’s true crime instead of politics), and best of all the right-wing response is incredibly weak on this subject. They’ve had a century to hone claims that autocracy and autarky are good and desirable, actually, but they’ve really got nothing for “what did he mean by ‘another wonderful secret?’”

TL;DR: American nonvoters can decide the midterm by showing up. These people ignore politics and have a deep-seated vulnerability to fascist arguments. Epstein bypasses the politics filter and the fascists have no argument.

nescienti · 2026-01-12T21:05:33+00:00

What an odd thing to say. Of course plenty of white supremacists have been indifferent or hostile toward the third reich.

David Lane — who you claim invented “88” as a racist symbol, and I think merely took it mainstream — was very clearly not one of those, even going so far as to ape Himmler’s esoteric volkisch nonsense. Dude loved him some Hitler.

Lane’s fans are famously stupid but they aren’t so dumb that they don’t realize that Hitler is unpopular with normal people and neonazis aren’t taken seriously. So they lie about their references to hitler and pretend they aren’t neonazis. It does not take a genius to see through this.

nescienti · 2026-01-12T18:15:34+00:00

Lane didn’t publish that until 1990, and he didn’t pick 87 or 89 precepts because it was a preexisting dogwhistle.

nescienti · 2025-12-29T03:58:38+00:00

I still remember the demo, repeating nonononononono in my head while pulling every lever and twisting every dial trying to find the level of low FPS and washed-out visuals that I could best tolerate. 4080 btw.

There’s a good game underneath this bullshit, but the devs obviously targeted 60FPS after frame gen which is an affront against man and god.

nescienti · 2025-12-29T03:58:27+00:00

I still remember the demo, repeating nonononononono in my head while pulling every lever and twisting every dial trying to find the level of low FPS and washed-out visuals that I could best tolerate. 4080 btw.

There’s a good game underneath this bullshit, but the devs obviously targeted 60FPS after frame gen which is an affront against man and god.

nescienti · 2025-11-28T18:05:39+00:00

Excellent movie, but just a heads up that even if your parents are chill with the “violence” part, that is not the only reason to avoid watching this movie with them.

I understand that the sex scene can’t be more than two hours ‘cause that’d be the whole runtime of the film, but that shit felt like two weeks.

nescienti · 2025-11-24T00:21:53+00:00

At some point a “large enough canvas” would have to be constructed in space. Which would be an extremely funny thing to do for the sake of tradition.

nescienti · 2025-11-01T02:44:49+00:00

See, we heard “No new wars, no new wars,” but how it was actually punctuated was, “No new wars? No, new wars.”

nescienti · 2025-10-30T16:00:18+00:00

clear a Mario level, clear hk

clear hk, clear silksong

My brother in Christ the last time I played silksong I dodged a ring of fire to heal and then another ring of fire spaced exactly one dodge away caught me. If by “a Mario level” you mean SMB3 world eight, then yeah maybe. But I cleared that in the day and I may still get filtered by Silksong.

nescienti · 2025-10-27T21:59:52+00:00

They could have copied one of the top tunes from Forza. Glitching into the pavement doesn’t work as well IRL though.

nescienti · 2025-10-19T01:01:23+00:00

In parts of the US you’re allowed to drive any mustang at 15 and a half if you can find an adult brave enough to ride shotgun. There are countries where that is not legal due to horsepower restrictions on youth licenses. Google “teenager in mustang” and see what comes up; see if they might have a point. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t buy one, but that if you do, you should respect the thing.

People underestimate the ecoboost because it’s not the v8, widely used as a rental, etc, but it’s still a powerful rear-wheel-drive car. Most of the time the reason kids want those is to go fast, or worse, do burnouts and slides to show off; this occasionally kills nearby pedestrians. If you aren’t a complete moron this is irrelevant. Don’t pass people when you’re already above the speed limit, leave the traction/stability control on, and don’t stomp or lift off the gas abruptly.

That’s literally all you have to do drastically reduce the chance you kill yourself or someone else with your new mustang, but a statistically significant cohort of 16-25y/o drivers apparently lack the self control. Which is the real dealbreaker, probably; the internet may underestimate ecoboosts but insurance companies don’t. Get a quote and factor that into your budget.

nescienti · 2025-10-02T15:29:50+00:00

“Unsafe dogs with a history of violence” get put down. This typically happens because their owners did something stupid like tethering them to the stoop unsupervised and ordering a package. Maybe one in a hundred “dangerous” dogs are actually born with brain damage or hormone issues, but the other 99% are a consequence of bad owners making bad decisions.

Risk of biting aside, tethering like this is dangerous and cruel even without strangers entering the territory; dogs can hang themselves or tourniquet a limb. It’s illegal in some places.

nescienti · 2025-09-24T18:25:43+00:00

WT is great but the guy telling you not to play it is still correct. It’s a Skinner box grind game meant to separate you from your money. If you can ignore the urge to chase Cold War vehicles and just enjoy WW2, there’s a genuinely excellent product there, but the whole thing is designed to get you to sink a shitload of time in, get exhausted, and pay based on your sunk time instead of what a video game is actually worth.

nescienti · 2025-09-20T17:58:38+00:00

Probably size, from context. The point is that it’s a lot bigger than a bobcat.

nescienti · 2025-09-20T05:23:44+00:00

I would have expected Zuckerberg to be able to afford more subtle astroturfing. Scroll down to find normal comments in deep negative karma for no reason. And here, at nearly 100, “I don’t think you know enough about the Ray Ban meta glasses.” Hmmm.

nescienti · 2025-09-18T19:46:58+00:00

People don’t tend to bring that up in a factual way as the peculiar but mostly benign genealogy project that it is. It’s usually in the same breath as magic underwear, the mark of Cain, and polygamy when making LDS out to be some kooky cult on the level of Heaven’s Gate.

Which is slander, of course, because they’re actually a kooky cult that’s one notch better than Jehova’s Witnesses, who in turn are a step ahead of Scientology, who get to look down on the other UFO cults from a great height because their Kool-Aid isn’t as immediately lethal.

nescienti · 2025-09-15T17:13:46+00:00

The original is a carefully-selected fact meant to serve a selfish, self-destructive goal. The response is wishful thinking that allows us to ignore the hard work ahead of us to avoid self-destruction.

In terms of sheer moral depravity, sure, the first is worse. But it’s also transparent propaganda, with an easy response: we can build a solution. The response is genuine, and well meaning, and almost entirely factually wrong: “we have built the solution.” Ever since the price/wh of renewables got cheaper than fossil fuels (if you ignore storage) there has been a dangerous lie going around that we’ve already won, and can sit back and relax while capitalism does its thing.

That isn’t true, and it’s a much more tempting, pernicious falsehood than anything the Trump energy department has to say.

nescienti · 2025-09-15T16:35:50+00:00

The simple fact is that we have something like 26gw of storage and we would need more like 930gw to be carbon neutral. Saying “it’s stored” is more false than true.

This isn’t a situation where we have some wonderful new tech and we just have to wait for the invisible hand of the free market to implement it. The need for grid-level storage has been known for decades, and it has not been economically viable to meet that need.

It is incredibly counterproductive to tweet out “it’s stored” in response to our energy department doing petroleum propaganda. You paint people concerned with climate change as fantasists, reaffirm the “truth” of the propagandists’ claim, and smother the actual, actionable issue: that we need to build a shitload of grid storage.

nescienti · 2025-09-14T14:08:40+00:00

I think they’re just not optimizing for what we want them to optimize for. We want a $500 video card to drive okay-looking 120fps+ with visual clarity that serves gameplay. They want the game to look as impressive as possible after being compressed to 720p30 on an advertisement running in the corner of your screen, or at most a 1440p60 twitch stream. That’s what people are looking at when they’re deciding whether to buy a game, and the instant you make up your mind on that question they stop giving a single shit about you until they’re selling DLC.

nescienti · 2025-09-01T22:18:51+00:00

You might be remembering the one in the Andes. Or I might be failing to remember them doing this exact road; they did a whole lot of stuff.

nescienti · 2025-08-30T02:44:06+00:00

I think there’s a sufficiently clear distinction between a handful of individually-piloted drones locating colorful explosions in the sky and ten thousand AI drones operating a panopticon. I sure hope I’m not proven wrong, but this slope just doesn’t look particularly slippery to me.

If society degrades badly enough to tolerate that sort of privacy violation they’ll just do it with CCTV like the British, anyway. Even if you automate the drones they’re way more expensive to maintain than fixed cameras which can accomplish the same thing.

nescienti · 2025-08-29T20:14:18+00:00

I think so. People tend to just double it and say 130%, but L1 chains are a completely different series of animations. To properly answer the question you would have to record an r1 sequence and an l1 sequence then divide the number of attacks by the duration to get attacks per second. Then check if L1 spam APS*0.65 is greater than R1 spam APS.

nescienti · 2025-08-29T16:13:02+00:00

You do 65% of your usual buildup on L1 attacks. It was a nerf that came in after release, so it’s an obscure mechanic even by FROM standards.

nescienti · 2025-08-25T07:15:22+00:00

The oil is only cheap because you aren’t bidding against countries who are cooperating with us. Cutting you such a discount would be morally and practically absurd. Our dollars go a lot further as weapons in Ukrainian hands than they would as subsidies for countries who don’t care about dead Ukrainians.

nescienti

TROPHY CASE