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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • It’s not so much the foods, though both were amazing cooks in their own ways, with some amazing standards meals they’d turn out. It’s them making it that really hits as a loss.

    Both of them contributed to me learning how to cook, and in some ways I ended up improving on what I learned from them by virtue of having both.

    But, if I had to nail down one specific meal/dish from each that I miss the hell out of, I think my paternal grandmother’s breakfasts are the most missed of hers. The woman could put on a spread! Eggs, grits, sausage, liver mush, biscuits, red-eye gravy, with her home made jams and jellies. Gods, you want to talk about feeding an army, when all of us grandkids would stay over at once, there would be her, my grandfather, one uncle, and eleven kids ranging from toddlers to teenagers at one point.

    And she never missed a step, while doing it all with us young’ns under foot. She was damm fine baker, and a master of country cooking/soul food, but her breakfasts were next level.

    My maternal grandmother could do that kind of cooking too, though not as well. Where she was a standout was with more of the suburban American cuisine. The roasts and casseroles and traditional holiday meals. I think those holiday meals are what I miss most, though her meatloaf and spaghetti were both amazeballs. My grandfather was a hunter, so some kind of bird would be featured often, be it goose, duck, or turkey. Sometimes as the only meat source, sometimes alongside a store bought turkey if a lot of the more distant family was showing up.

    Even after she decided she was done babysitting a bird and my uncle took over that part with a deep fryer, her sides still wreck those I’ve had with other people. Sweet potatoes, three-bean salad, seven layer salad, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, deviled eggs, asparagus, peas, all kinds of options, sometimes with all of those, plus others, plus desserts. Most of the veggies were from their garden, though they would be home canned fur Christmas, and some would be for Thanksgiving.

    It wasn’t that any given item was so good (though they were), it’s that all of everything either made was so consistently amazing. Never a flop, never a dud.


  • Well, calling it misogyny isn’t a directly accurate issue, though if you step back a ways, the connection is there. Part of why Hillary caught so much shit was the fact of her being a her in the first place.

    However, the joke has existed for decades, long before she was a relevant name in the public consciousness. I’ve heard or seen it applied to politicians since the eighties at least, sometimes with long ex presidents. Hillary wasn’t the first woman to catch that kind of generic joke, Geraldine Ferarra (spelling?) was the target of pretty much every cookie cutter joke like that, and she was nowhere near the hot target Clinton still is now (even after the collapse of her public influence). So there’s room for debate on the joke itself being misogynistic.

    But the mods in question definitely nailed that it’s a stupid, unfunny, cookie cutter joke. It’s the kind of unfunny crap people complain about being subjected to at holiday gatherings by an asshole relative that can’t drop their identity politics long enough to be decent company at fucking Christmas.

    Also, backhanding the back of someone’s head is an awkward movement when both people are seated close enough together to talk, and it makes this specific use of the joke format fail hard because it engages the logic filters, so if you’re going to use it in the future, consult a professional joke crafter.



  • Heck yeah!

    A very good friend gifted me one when he upgraded to the oled model, and it totally brought back my love of gaming. I hadn’t really been able to because of health issues, what with not being able to stay at my desk very long.

    But this sucker? It’s running everything I’ve thrown at it so far. Baldur’s gate 3, and 2. Genshin. Stuff like stardew valley.

    The worst one to get set up was genshin because they insist on having their own launcher. Makes updates a pain in the ass. Luckily, I don’t play it often, so I don’t care much lol.

    I can be in bed, on the couch, even in the john if I want to, and enjoy the hell out of the experience. Worst case, I might have to fiddle with settings if the game doesn’t have native controller support, or piddle with stuff like heroic or lutris if a game is pissy installing.






  • Well, I gotta point at PTB on this one, despite generally being okay with preemptive bans.

    I’m not saying that an admin shouldn’t be able to do this; they take the risks and hassles of making the fediverse function, so they get some leeway before PTB can be fully applied.

    But there is still a range of ways to execute this kind of decision that aren’t cool. Making it personal is right at the PTB side of that range.

    As an example, if I wanted to ban you from southsamurairocks.edu because I didn’t agree with your beliefs, and the hassles that might come from them, or your reputation, I think it would be my obligation to give that as the reason, not just the fact that it’s you. It crosses the line from making a measured policy decision into just being a dick without the guts to just be a dick outright and honestly.

    Like, if we had beef, and that’s why I ban you, I’m going to publicly state that I don’t like you, and thus don’t want you in my instance. Not just be snarky by using your name as shorthand for it.

    It’s the smugness of it that makes it PTB instead of a legitimate preemptive ban. Nobody has to let anyone onto their instance if they don’t want to. But you gotta be up front and detailed about it if you don’t want to be the asshole.


  • It really does require non scientific information to address.

    Consciousness is not fully understood. Without that, anything regarding consciousness is still at least a little unanswerable. You can’t point to when and where consciousness ends if you don’t know what it is, what defines it in the first place. Death isn’t exactly at consensus either.

    That means NDEs can’t be pinned down with 100% accuracy yet.

    Here’s what I know. Nobody that has had the cells of their brain break down, as in begin decomposition, has ever come back.

    So, based on that, I think the NDE experience is going to be based in some kind of brain activity. If the neurons are “melting”, they can’t function if enough of them aren’t melting and you can jump start things again, they weren’t dead at all. That, to me, is the definition of death that matters: if you can come back, it ain’t death.

    Considering the general amount of precise experimentation in measuring the brain and body during the process of dying is extremely thin and limited by the very process, I don’t think we have the right tools to measure anything that would “prove” anything about NDEs, only indicate some probabilities.

    But those probabilities lean much harder to it being a chemical and/or electrical event.

    Now, if you want to bring souls into it, you aren’t dealing with science in the first place because it is currently impossible to even detect whether or not souls exist, it is a matter of faith. It’s essentially impossible to prove they don’t exist, but there’s absolutely nothing ever measured that points to anything resembling credible proof that they do. So souls just don’t matter for NDE discussions in a framework of science. You might as well factor in what granfaloon a person is mixed up with as a soul.

    I’m not saying you can’t believe in souls and still attempt science regarding death, just that souls aren’t studyable with science.

    Since nothing in any NDE has ever been unique to NDEs, it does make it harder to put faith in them as something other than a physical process. Everything anyone has ever described (at least in any useful setting) as happening has also happened with the influence of drugs, magnetic fields, meditation, or spiritual practices. Probably others my brain isn’t pulling up as well that aren’t under one of those headings, but I think it shows what I mean well enough.

    And that point is that if the experiences aren’t different from things you can experience while alive, why would they be useful for determining if the person had died?





  • Edit: I went back further. Based solely on this account, your @pro@reddthat.com account, I lean PTB on this specific preemptive ban. I don’t have the level of patience required to dig up your main account and see if anything there would justify you the user behind the accounts being banned based on a pattern of behavior. I will say that using the ban reason as given is what pushes it back over the PTB line. Your Pro account didn’t make comments or posts that indicate intentionally breaking a rule regarding the israel situation, nor making comments that did so. And I went back 3 weeks.

    So, I’m leaving the previous comment made here instead of deleting or overwriting it, since this edit wouldn’t make sense without the original context.


    Eh, it’s generally a divisive issue when preemptive bans occur, and I didn’t see recent posts on that community, only elsewhere. Same with comments over the last two days. So I suspect this is a preemptive ban rather than one for immediate cause.

    Keep that in mind during the rest of this.

    I’m not certain this is power tripping, but I can’t say for sure that your account that you posted this with fully deserved a ban purely on the reason given. There are reasons based on behavior in other ways, but that comes back to whether or not any given individual believes preemptive bans are a useful and acceptable tool, and every time it comes up, the community tends to devolve into arguing about that rather than whatever an OP did.

    Now, I’m in the camp that believes preemptive bans can be a useful tool. I just believe they need to be used rarely and surgically.

    In this case, it comes down not to the post that started the whole thing, but how you handled everything after that.

    The removal reason shown in this post doesn’t match what you did. Again, I only went back a little through the user history of this account, not any others you may use or have used in the past.

    From this side of the screen, your comments are on the borderline of justifying a preemptive ban. I wouldn’t have done one, not without more than what’s visible in the last two days. If I had, I wouldn’t have used that reason at all.

    That’s why I think this specific ban from the gaming community is really on the knife edge. Unless there was more to see that I didn’t scroll back far enough to see, or there are factors I’m unaware of, it does lean a little closer to PTB, but you really gotta recognize that you were either crossing civility line, or walking right up to them and spitting on the other side of it. Yeah, some of what you were responding to did as well, but two wrongs don’t make a right.

    That’s my take on it. I suspect there’s more going on with the decision to ban you like that, or I’d lean heavier to the PTB side, but there’s a limit to how far back I’m willing to scroll looking for a specific comment that may or may not be relevant. That’s another personal peeve for me with the mod log; there should be more than an accusation in it when it’s a preemptive ban, and that’s not a one click process to make happen. So it doesn’t happen often.

    Makes guesstimating for this community a slog.




  • You sound like me!

    We have a household rule: don’t talk to south until he’s awake. How can you tell he’s awake? Has he been moving for at least an hour? If yes, then he may be awake, but there’s no promises. If not, then treat him like you would a manbearpig freshly out of hibernation.

    The grunts and croaks that pass as communication from me that first bit are a passable caveman shtick.



  • No worries man, we all have days like that. I certainly do!

    I’m the same way with food snobbery tbh. I see even jokes about it, and it just gets under my skin, even when I am fully awake and can tell it’s a joke. There’s that flash of “this motherfucker” before I exert control of my brain. So I totally get it.

    I’m just sorry I picked a bad joke to try. Like I said, they can’t all be winners, but looking back at it, it was a lame attempt.


  • Hey, sorry that didn’t hit right.

    Since the post was in a meme community, I didn’t take the post as a serious complaint. Memes bring out jokes, that’s part of the point of them. I intended it as a form of commiseration with a bit of tongue in cheek playfulness. If I’d known you were making a real complaint rather than playing with a trope for laughs, I would have made a totally different comment.

    So, here’s what I would have said if I had known you were experiencing distress over the issue.

    I get it. Back when 3.x was a thing, the old ad&d diehards made the same kind of statements. Now, 5e devotees make the same kind of statements about 3.x, and even ad&d, as well as the ongoing new version coming out. It’s a fairly universal thing.

    When it’s said in a lighthearted, unserious way, it can even help bridge players and DMs that are more entrenched with one version or another because it acknowledges that there’s not always compatibility between versions, making play groups harder to arrange since very few people really enjoy learning a new system to play what is (at its core) the same game.

    Me and my kid make the same joke to each other, both of us aware that we have played both systems and have a different preference. Me and the DM of my kid’s group talk shit about our preferred versions too. And we piss and moan about the difficulties of running games with players that are most familiar with one edition and having trouble adapting years of play experience in one to a different one.

    Like, I’ve got over a grand in 3.x books. At least that, maybe more, I lost track. So I’m not going to pony up a dime to get the equivalent library in 5e, or any future editions. But I’ve had players from 5e, and ad&d in my games (though I haven’t DMed in years at this point). There’s always a learning curve to a different edition. It places an artificial barrier of entry to the underlying game. So most people will commit to one version and stick with it.

    When they do try others, what they see is changes that are a pain in the ass for fairly minor benefits, along with one or two great ideas. Us 3.x folks look at bounded accuracy, or advantage/disadvantage and drool a little, but there’s no way we’d switch just for that when the rest of the edition is just different, not better. 5e folks look at the 3.x prestige classes and how easy they are to home brew and really make a unique character but look at all the imbalances in the base classes and nope the fuck out

    And don’t even ask about how newer players stare blankly at you while you try to explain thac0. Or how a black hole of despair forms and sucks your brain in trying to explain a truly awkward and counterintuitive system like thac0 in the first place.

    There’s no such thing as a perfect system. They’re all approximations of fantasy settings (I’m talking about standard d&d here, but there’s no perfect system in other types of games either), and approximations simply can’t fit every situation every time.

    So, when some asshole is being serious about “your edition sucks, play a better one”, fuck them. It’s bullshit, and if they don’t know it, they’re going to be a shitty player or DM anyway. They’re not worth the time and effort. But the rest of us kinda have the shorthand of the trope as a way to say “the problem exists, but we can’t fix it”. You either put the effort in to learn the details of each edition, or you stick to the one you like best and deal with having more trouble finding stable groups.

    No bullshit Stamets, my entire goal was to join in on what I thought was your joke along that same line. I thought you were poking fun at the trope of it, and that’s what I was doing. The little winky face ;) didn’t do enough to convey that, or maybe your stress over the subject meant nothing would have conveyed the intent of shared recognition of how silly it all is to edition snob. But it definitely failed to convey the intent, no matter why it failed.

    Sorry about that. They can’t all be winners ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ but I swear it was meant to be something we’d both have a chuckle over.