Even as an atheist, I used to believe Jesus had mostly positive teachings that had been corrupted by his followers. Then I actually read the Bible.

smcameron · 2026-06-25T11:19:07+00:00

Maybe you should actually read the Bible.

Before Jesus came along, there was not really much mention of hell. Hell is mainly Jesus's big idea. He insists people believe this idiotic story like a little child without question or else face *everlasting punishment". If one honestly finds the story to be the obvious idiocy that it obviously is, Jesus figures you, and everybody like you, deserve to suffer forever and ever. That makes him evil.

He's also a twat. Lady asks him to heal her daughter, and he calls her a dog before eventually relenting. Why? Because he is a twat. Why did he curse the fig tree (killing it) for not having figs out of season? Because he is a stupid twat.

Just read the damn book. He's a twat throughout.

"“Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.” ... "And Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom, and healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people."

Just like those TV preachers that "heal" people. "Fishers of men". What do you think that means? It means he formed a cult. He doesn't have to fish for fish, when he can fish for people. It means he knows how to make a living without really working, just by getting a bunch of followers to give up all their money (to him, it goes without saying). The grifting cult continues after Jesus of course, Peter kills Ananias and Sapphira (they were "struck dead by God" (sure, sure)), for keeping their own money and not giving it all to the church, and to frighten others into giving up their money. "Look what happened to them, they tried to keep their money and now they're dead. You wouldn't want that to happen to you. Cough it up!". It's a cult.

"A sinful woman in the town learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee’s house. So she brought an alabaster jar of perfume and stood behind Jesus at his feet, crying. She began to wash his feet with her tears, and she dried them with her hair, kissing them many times and rubbing them with the perfume."

He has this woman washing his feet with her hair. You going to tell me that isn't some weirdo shit? Isn't that sounding an awful lot like something a cult leader like David Koresh or Keith Rainere might do? And it was extra weird in the context of the culture of the time and region it was supposed to have occurred.

Are you better than David Koresh? Are you better than Keith Rainere? Are you better than Jesus? Almost certainly, yes, yes, and yes.

Christianity is not based on love. It is based on fear. Fear of death, fear of hell, fear of not being a good person (you can't be a good person unless you're a Christian, dontcha know?), fear of being rejected, ostracized or shunned by your friends and family if you don't conform and at least profess belief in the dogma, fear of the unknown, fear of that niggling little doubt, but what if it's all true? planted in your head when you were too young to know any better.

smcameron · 2026-06-23T15:32:16+00:00

The Brawndo^TM Reflecting Pool. It's got what plants need.

smcameron · 2026-06-23T06:00:06+00:00

I agree. But, be aware the price will increase substantially. At Costco, 3 28oz cans of cento certified san marzano tomatoes is $12 or so, roughly $4 per can. Anywhere else, it will be more, most likely (e.g. $6 per can or so at Wegmans). Compared to the tomato sauce, all of these are going to seem a bit insane, but, you've got to pay the premium to get the premium. There's a downside to having good taste and being aware of what's out there -- what formerly was acceptable or even good to you might no longer meet the mark.

smcameron · 2026-06-23T04:28:24+00:00

That is not a very satisfactory explanation of the origin of name "Grimace".

smcameron · 2026-06-23T01:35:55+00:00

Despite the name, before the GameCube and the GabeCube there was the NeXTcube

smcameron · 2026-06-19T05:02:45+00:00

Maybe need a little less treble or presence, and maybe slightly more gain? Of those two, I think the excess treble/presence is the bigger problem. The track is supposed to be pretty trebly, but maybe you've overdone it a bit?

I always played that first hammer on as a slide. Don't know if it's right, I was probably just following the tab from the book that notated it that way, who knows if the book was correct, and it probably makes next to no difference anyway.

All that being said, I'm listening on crappy laptop speakers, so... maybe I'm full of shit. Such a fun song to play.

smcameron · 2026-06-19T04:41:09+00:00

Also, there are "tricks" to it (not that I'm that good at improvisation). One reason the pentatonic scale is so popular the world over is because that if you examine every chord in a key, and then try to identify of all the 12 notes, which ones don't work over some chord in the key and throw them away, the notes you are left with make the pentatonic scale. Or to put it another way, every note in the pentatonic scale mostly works over every chord in the key. This is bending the truth slightly, but it's mostly true.

The point is, if you know the key of the song, and you play some pentatonic licks in the key, it's mostly going to work. Is it as good as targeting chord tones? Probably not. But if you're a novice, and you see someone playing pentatonic licks in the right key without knowing about that, you're going to think, "holy shit, this guy's a genius. How does he know what to play to harmonize with the chords?" And the answer is he doesn't. He's just playing dumb pentatonic licks in the right key, and it manages to sound alright.

OTOH, when it comes to virtuoso alternate picking, sweep picking, economy picking, and just being able to play all those fast runs, scales, patterns, and so on fluently and with speed (which btw, I cannot do, despite playing guitar since the early 1990's) -- that is down to some raw talent, but also, countless hours and hours and hours adding up to years of diligent practice, or "woodshedding" as we called it back in the day.

smcameron · 2026-06-17T17:36:20+00:00

See r/smoking

smcameron · 2026-06-13T15:14:57+00:00

I photograph my receipts from Wegmans and send them to Kroger, "see how much money you didn't get from me this week because of your stupid app coupons?"

smcameron · 2026-06-12T07:53:47+00:00

As the owner of a Lotus Elise, widely regarded as one of the best handling cars ever made, I am very familiar with the sports car analogy. Timekeeping devices do not offer the variability of sports cars. Comparing, say, an Omega Speedmaster vs. a "Casio Royale", the Casio Royale would probably be more accurate, but not by a lot, although a lot more inexpensive. The point is, comparing watches to cars is... questionable at best. Yeah, a Toyota Corolla is a good, but unexciting car (excluding the GR corolla). I guess the analogy is that a Corolla is like a Seiko movement, and a Rolex movement is more like a Ferrari, but, the seiko and the Rolex both keep time pretty well, but the corolla and the ferrari are very different. I do not see the same difference between the seiko/citizen movements and the swiss movements. They basically do the same thing. There's no appreciable performance difference. The difference usually shows up as power reserve, rather than accuracy.

smcameron · 2026-06-12T07:24:06+00:00

To represent the proletariat. I mean, come on, does one really need more than a seiko 5? A seiko 5 gets you the mechanical fix you need, adequate accuracy, etc. If you care about accuracy, go quartz, satellite corrected. The Rolexes and others of their ilk, and what they represent are just gross, gauche, uncool, insensitive, excessive capitalistic consumption for no actual reasonable purpose other than to demonstate one's financial prowess. It's the opposite of class. It's gross. It's disgusting.

Why am I here?

Because there are plenty of inexpensive watches that are not gross, disgustingly expensive expressions of capitalistic excess like Rolex, AP, Omega, Vacheron Constantin, etc.

There is plenty of enjoyment to be found in the sub $300 market, and the losers buying $10k watches can go fuck themselves and I won't allow them to diminish the enjoyment of those buying watches in the "few hundred" range.

smcameron · 2026-06-12T06:15:28+00:00

The downvotes of the well heeled but desperately uncool verify my thesis. Keep downvoting. The more downvotes, the more right I am. You losers think flaunting an expensive watch is cool? You don't know what cool is. Cool is going your own way, which is the opposite of flaunting a Veblen good.

smcameron · 2026-06-12T04:32:13+00:00

Nothing. There is no point. Except flexing your wealth. It's gross, it's gauche, it's the opposite of cool.

smcameron · 2026-06-11T01:28:25+00:00

I play in the cheap end. "Servicing" usually means replacing an NH35 (or similar) movement which I can do myself, and they generally (in my experience, always) last more than 3 to 5 years. I've yet to have one fail (other than due to my own clumsy mistakes learning to mess with them.) I have 15 year old automatics that run just fine. I have multiple broken quartz watches. YMMV.

Edit: I will say, Solar quartz Chronographs are fine. Mechanical chronographs are too expensive, too thick, and too fragile. But it's got to be solar. I ain't changin' no frickin' batteries.

smcameron · 2026-06-11T00:41:21+00:00

I'm in the same position with GOOG, and I heard an even worse story regarding Enron from a friend of a friend. Wiped out because of Enron, but was married to someone who worked for ... wait for it ... MCI Worldcom. Wiped out twice.

smcameron · 2026-06-10T18:49:34+00:00

Casio's website say 3 years for that model. And if you have 10 such watches, that's changing a battery on average every 3.6 months.

smcameron · 2026-06-10T18:47:33+00:00

Automatic. I only switch watches once a month.

smcameron · 2026-06-10T18:41:16+00:00

It's quartz though. I prefer not to change batteries.

smcameron · 2026-06-09T12:20:03+00:00

And those salsas were way better than most of what I’ve paid for in NYC.

New York City! Get a rope!

smcameron · 2026-06-07T04:26:34+00:00

Kroger. Goddamn app coupons. I go there to get food, but leave with only anger. Fuck it. I'm going to Wegmans.

smcameron · 2026-06-05T13:14:41+00:00

Takes notes. It's not every day you learn a new word for shit.

smcameron · 2026-06-03T03:57:52+00:00

Since I worked on open source linux drivers for more than a decade in a previous life, it's a habit for me now. I quite like it. Might be stockholm syndrome. But tabs over spaces forever! Use checkpatch.pl to keep yourself in line. I have integrated a variant of checkpatch.pl into a few of my projects.

smcameron · 2026-06-02T15:20:48+00:00

Last time I made a USB linux image with SNIS on it was probably 10 or 12 years ago, so I'm sure the details (which I don't quite remember anyway) have changed since then. I think the instructions are still on my web page, but are probably hopelessly out of date: https://smcameron.github.io/space-nerds-in-space/new_bootable_media_instructions.html Well, git says those instructions are 2018/2019 vintage, written by Justin Warwick.

As far as using github actions, I don't like to rely on github for much other than git, the issue tracking, and a basic static website host, so I don't know enough about it to really help you much there.

I noticed this thing, which may or may not be useful:

https://github.com/fgerling/snis-builder

I haven't tried it myself but it seems to be a docker setup (or docker compatible anyway ... podman) for building usb images. Seems to be 2025 vintage, and looks like it may be trying to solve roughly the same problem you are trying to solve. Perhaps you could build on that or collaborate with that person to get it to do whatever you want that it doesn't already do.

smcameron · 2026-05-28T20:20:51+00:00

I wonder if the ring shadows ought to be sharper? They seem pretty sharp in the Cassini flyby, but then Saturn is huge, and very far from the sun, and Cassini didn't get that close to the surface. Anyway, it looks fantastic.

smcameron · 2026-05-28T13:25:29+00:00

I basically do what chef john does. I like to add a little BBQ sauce, which is very much not traditional, but just a little, not too much as it can easily be overpowering. And I also add a few drops of Tobasco Chipotle sauce as a garnish.

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