Powderhorn @ Powderhorn @beehaw.org

Unemployed journalist, burner, raver, graphic artist and vandweller.

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I saw the second in "5D" ... which is to say the rollercoaster chairs watching a 2D movie while water occasionally spritzes (ironic, given the setting) and scent bursts pop out, not smelling like anything relevant, just a vaguely unpleasant but otherwise anodyne smell. I think I'd have better been able to actually watch the movie without all the distractions people pay more to get.

Way too much Jesus for me. I was court-ordered to go to AA meetings after a 2005 DUI, and there is nothing in the world that makes me want to drink more than an AA meeting. It's a fucking cult.

Any sort of public assistance for substance abuse here that includes housing comes with a laundry list of demands and restrictions, up to and including being locked up like you're in jail while claiming you can leave at any time (nice words, but when you say you want to leave, up come the roadblocks, stonewalling and gaslighting).

I have more agency and freedom roasting in my van than attempting any sort of help given how demeaning it is. As such, I've stopped bothering and am relying exclusively on networking through all possible channels to get out of this mess.

The first two were great cinematic works, so I have high hopes for the third. Shame it's still a year and a half out.

You can always check the modlog.

The reason I provided was "Blaming falling fertility rates on Covid vaccines via a preprint is not appropriate for this community."

You provided no context for irrelevant links. That's not how Beehaw works.

I went to a conference for college newspaper editors at the University of Georgia in 2000. The goodie bag included a copy of a UGA professor's book When MBAs Run the Newsroom. And prescient. Now they run everything and have no fucking clue what the business actually does.

Golden parachute time! They can take some time off while figuring out what to fuck up next.

I was on a VPN well before Texas pulled this shit, simply because I don't care to have the ISP that I'm already paying double-dip by selling my history to data brokers. Honestly, I think a VPN is necessary for basic online hygiene at this point.

So far, so meh. Talked with my mom yesterday and got an update about how my dad is doing in his nursing home. Apparently badly, as he's been banned from the dining room for spitting up food on his way out and refusing to use a napkin.

Sorta feels like the endgame. In lighter news, mom realized she'd sent half the expected amount to start the month, so I live to eat another day. It's so weird, being accustomed to having all manner of food in the pantry in a previous life, to realize that there really isn't anything left.

I turn 46 on Friday, but I have nothing to celebrate.

Agreed. Luckily, they don't seem to have the full list of Mullvad IPs, so if I really want to read something, I just try another tunnel.

I got fixed the same year I had a cervical spine fusion. Since I'd well met my deductible, getting snipped ran $35.

Welcome! I suspect you'll find what you're looking for here. This is a great group of Beeple who will challenge you while respecting you.

But why not Firefox or a fork? Vivaldi is Chromium. I use Vivaldi, but only for my less-savoury links.

I saw this pop up in the YouTube post-play grid a couple of days ago and didn't bother clicking, because so often after watching a climate-impact video, it'll suggest eight-year-old videos in said grid.

After living off of solar for a year and a half, the idea of going back to paying an absurd amount monthly is unpalatable. Even two years ago, when I bought my panels, each 100W panel cost less than the base fees before usage over two months. With 1200W installed, that's some 20 months to break even, and fees and rates have now gone up five times since I went off grid, meaning I'm in the black by now.

But seriously: Five rate increases in less than two years? This from a city-owned utility that generates and purchases fossil-fuel electricity.

Now, solar alone only does so much if one cares to do anything at night, and 600Ah of LFP cost twice what the panels did, and once I got the rest of the pieces together, I was at about $4,000. But that amount of battery allows me to deal with three days of clouds and rain, and I specced the solar to be able to completely charge my battery in a single sunny day.

I think the main problem is inertia. I was paying usually $60 per month for 20kWh. That's three fucking dollars per kWh. When people post on r/Austin about electric rate hikes and I point out the usury, I get brigaded by people saying it's somehow disingenuous to look at the whole bill and instead can only count power and distribution.

Which is fine, but I couldn't just pay the $15 in usage and keep getting service. So people bend themselves into pretzels to defend absurd pricing structures (there's of course a fair amount of "stop being poor, and things look reasonable ... bootstraps!")

Of course, going off-grid introduces new concerns. I have to lug my two batteries to a friend's place twice a year to keep them in balance by individually charging from mains (this is not an issue with a single battery, but 300Ah is about as much as I can lug). It's a bitch to disconnect them from the full system, and of course there are breakers and switches that need to be thrown such that I don't return to a charred shell of a van.

But I always chuckle when I see people talking on Reddit about power or internet being out. The tipping point for me to want to get off grid was what we lovingly call 2021's Snowmaggedon, that time where everyone not on a critical circuit was down for days instead of the advertised "rolling blackouts" -- and by days, for some it was nine; I was at the top of the bell curve with six.

And meanwhile, the empty skyscrapers downtown stayed on like a beacon in the night.

Not only is the grid expensive, not only is it polluting ... it's also really fucking expensive for what it is. Oh, and unreliable. Just what I'm looking for when highs don't break 20F and I'm boiling snow on my gas stove (I taught a neighbour how to light her stove manually; she'd never considered it) just to stay alive by bundling up.

People being unwilling to consider alternatives and look at ROI timelines because "that's work" just confuses me. I was paying $75 per month just to have access to electric and natural gas, and again, there have been several increases since. Granted, I do use diesel for heat (the heater uses about a cup an hour) as needed, because I'm input bound -- 1200W of solar that will never perform to top spec so produces about 6kWh per day doesn't solve that a space heater will burn through that in four hours.

We don't expect anyone laying cables for phone service anymore, and I'm of the same mindset for power at this point. Sure, building your own microgrid is a large upfront cost, but a lot of places (at least two years ago) were offering 0% financing for six months to a year, so "upfront" is squishy.

We put up with the state of the power industry and grid because we've been conditioned to believe there are no alternatives. And even five years ago, that was true -- rolling your own was prohibitively expensive for most. But you don't buy a house expecting a return in three months, so why does it persist that burning dinosaurs should only be compared on that timeframe?

I'm not sure this is generative rather than really shitty Photoshopping (no reason it can't be both). That it's a square makes the former a distinct possibility, but the level of sharpening in the condiment cup tops alongside the blurry fries where the effect spills over to the cup bases is jarring.

For the dogs themselves, that looks like standard food staging for a shoot. If this is generated, the model certainly was trained on using Elmer's glue with food dye for mustard. It's absurd that we've hit the point of needing art with every story, but at least this isn't a filer of crime scene tape in front of police cars with the lights going.

Great. So subsisting off nothing but bologna sandwiches isn't the best of ideas. But at $1.50 per pound, it's protein yielding eight two-slice meals.

The Wire (I think it's the final season) does the best job of accurately showing a newsroom in the era it was created of any show I've seen.

I was actually finishing bingeing Hornblower as you were posting. I just did a full writeup over on Entertainment after concluding the series.

Not the ruling itself, but corporations file all sorts of motions before and during the initial trial specifically so that if a motion is denied, voila! Now the jury verdict and compensation decision isn't what they're challenging, but rather technical aspects from rulings by the judge overseeing the trial court ... admission or inadmission of evidence is always a popular one.

To suggest that anyone else has the sort of law firms on retainer to play this game all the way to the top is folly. It's just another way in which the system is rigged.

Not at all ... it's just that corporations, unwilling to take no for an answer, have functionally unlimited funds to throw toward several rounds of escalating court cases while defendants ... don't. It creates an inherently lopsided situation the legal system wasn't explicitly designed for, but now this is just standard.

Companies walk into these trials essentially seeing the first round as a rehearsal.

It's sort of weird to have a "transcript" of a written document.