dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️ @ dual_sport_dork @lemmy.world

Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is "column" the rig

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I think it's more that hysterical moral guardians and corporate boobs only see the traditionally casino-like superficial imagery of cards, dice, spades, clubs, slots, etc. and instantly knee-jerk themselves into declaring it "immoral" without actually bothering to take the twelve seconds required to experience the gameplay. At which point they would immediately realize that they are wrong.

This is Kyle's Mom's version of only reading the headline, or not bothering to look beyond the dust jacket and only screeching about imaginary content that exists only inside their own assumptions and based purely on the picture on the cover.

That's really the rub. The notion that magic "knows" what technology is and draws the line at some arbitrary point where it suddenly rearranges the laws of reality around itself so that these devices won't work specifically in the way that humans expect them to raises the following two horrifying possibilities:

One, whatever force is actually behind magic must be intelligent in and of itself, even if only in a brutish and rudimentary way. It would take a staggering array of quite specific and tailor-made microspells or localized tweaks in physics to make all types of Muggle technology fail to work consistently. Like, it's not just enough to say "guns jam." Does magic physically grab the hammer and stop it from falling? Does it block the firing pin? Does it rearrange the laws of chemistry so that oxidation reactions don't happen? Does it stick its finger in the end of the barrel like Bugs Bunny?

Or, like, fountain pens. They work via exactly the same mechanism as quill pens, it's just that they contain their own store of ink. Is there any other reason why a quill would work within Hogwarts but a fountain pen wouldn't? Here in rational space, no. Absolutely not. So if that's how it is, there must be something more going on behind the scenes and the fact that these bozos either haven't noticed or worse, that they have noticed and just don't care enough to investigate in any way whatsoever is equal parts creepy and infuriating.

So point two, given all of the above the force behind magic is also probably actively malevolent. Who knows what its agenda is keeping wizards locked in a kind of medieval stasis, or if it's even doing so on purpose or just as a byproduct of its natural function, but either way it's clearly not working in humanity's best interest.

(There's a third option as well, which is that it works this way because the author has such a poor grasp on reality that she thinks that guns/electronics/cars/whatever also work via some kind of "magic" which can thus be disrupted, which is possibly likely but also so stupid it makes my right eyebrow twitch just thinking about it. So we'll leave it at that.)

RV's are hard to throw. I suggest dropping it from a great height instead.

Left field suggestion, also: Make sure there isn't anything trapped under your build plate. If you have any shreds of filament or flakes of old supports or whatever between the steel plate and its magnetic base, the surface won't be flat to a degree that the auto leveling probably won't be able to deal with it and you'll get all kinds of crazy unpredictable results.

I did this on my Qidi once. I'm glad I noticed before going crazy with troubleshooting. I had black filament scraps on the black magnetic base, which were practically invisible and I only found them by feel.

That's a rather impressive bit of automation in motion, but there is no way those parts were printed in that orientation. In other words this is art, not manufacturing.

I've seen that some dude on here has the Netscape throbber (for Gen Z: that's what the animated doohickey in the corner that shows your page is still loading and your computer has not frozen is called) as his profile icon.

Maybe you've just summoned him up, Beetlejuice style.

You can start with his video praising the "freedom convoy" shitshow plus ranting about the usual talking points re: vaccines, masks, etc. which kind of did it for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeYVyhhHY-Y

Honestly, I'm amazed he hasn't deleted it from his channel by now.

You'll be scouring cereal boxes for a pair of red/blue 3D shades in no time.

AvE (though I’m pretty sure he’s conservative)

You're right. AvE went completely off the deep end during the height of Covid, and revealed that his being a scumbag isn't just doing a bit for the camera.

Excite bike

We had endless hours of fun back in the day using the track builder and figuring out the exact spacing and combination of ramps to make your little dude crash out in a manner that flung his tumbling corpse the absolute maximum amount of distance. (Okay, so you never really die in Excitebike, but you know.) You can achieve significant hang time if you do it right.

Random unsolicited video game trivia: First run editions of Excitebike were actually Japanese Famicom cartridges bodged into Famicom-to-NES cartridge converters. They're literally Japanese copies of the game, verbatim. This includes the theoretical ability to save out your track to the Famicom Data Recorder, which has only the minor wrinkle of never having been released in the US. This was baffling to us at the time, not understanding why the option was there when it self-evidently didn't work (but your Zelda cartridge could save just fine).

Somehow my dad figured this out using the early Internet or Usenet or something, and then I had the actual answer. Still not actually being able to save, mind you, but at least I knew why you couldn't. Except nobody in the schoolyard would believe me.

We have like eight food trucks in the region and they're all Taco trucks.

And you can press select and everything goes to anaglyph 3D...

A random piece of trivia you can use to blow certain people's minds is that Rad Racer was developed by Square. Yes, that Square.

Well, we'll have to ignore the gaping plot-induced stupidity on display by practically everyone throughout the entire story, because without it the books would have been quite short. So setting that aside, because I'm sure it's been trampled to death already.

The complete unwillingness for the wizarding world to utilize even basic Muggle technologies and knowledge is absolutely baffling. It's insinuated that they don't need Muggle things because they can substitute them with magic which is "equivalent." This is self-evidently hokum.

These idiots still write with quills, read by candlelight, don't use the Internet, and despite having literal magic at their disposal their communication systems (such as they are) are laughably inferior to common Muggle ones even in the context of the time period in which the story is supposedly set. Come on. Owls?

Magic users demonstrate basically no understanding of science and are all demonstrably the worse off for it, still having a nearly medieval understanding of how the world works, and rely on magic as a crutch to weakly compensate. This even when it's obvious to an outside observer that a basic piece of mundane knowledge or technology would be not only easier and significantly less dangerous than whatever the fuck their homegrown solution is, but also more effective. This is treated in supplementary works by Rowling as if it's a point of pride by wizards and witches who deliberately eschew anything of Muggle origin -- even if this means going to great lengths to shoot themselves in the foot simply to maintain that attitude of aloofness, which only serves to underscore the sheer stupidity apparently heavily ingrained into magical culture.

The fact that neither Harry nor none of the other Muggleborn kids are puzzled by this, nor why they apparently deliberately fail to bring so much as a common yellow #2 pencil with them from the mundane world out of sheer habit makes zero sense. (And yes, this is touched upon in the already recommended Methods of Rationality.)

Magical consumer goods are also seriously customer hostile. Who the fuck thought even half of those things were a desirable marketable product? Is there an evil wizard version of Willy Wonka lurking around someplace? Think of all the pocket change a Muggleborn lad could make by bringing a case of jelly beans with him to school to sell to his classmates where you don't have a one in twenty chance of one of them tasting like earwax. Or chocolates that can't hop away from you when you aren't looking. I mean, for fuck's sake.

And following from the above, everyone is so concerned about the damage to the karma done by the unforgivable spells, or whatever, which is supposedly why nobody goes to all-out war with the Death Eaters. But then no one gets the brain cells together to realize that Voldemort and especially his goons are surely vulnerable to conventional weapons. All anyone has to do is camp in a corner with a shotgun and then call out they-who-must-not-be-named, enticing them to appear to simply get Swiss Cheesed before having clue one what's going on. Maybe Voldy can't be truly killed by any form of physical harm, but the entire premise of the story begins with the observation that he can be put to considerable inconvenience, putting him down for quite some time, and thus buy the protagonists plenty of time to figure out his stupid riddles and find all his horcruxes. Then simply drive over whatever's left of him with a steamroller.

I know this might be a difficult concept for you to grasp, but when you post something... in the comments... in public, it prompts people to respond to your comment. Especially if what you said was nonsense.

.world has been doing server maintenace today. There was a sticky about it and everything. So there are probably federation delays and timeouts to contend with but your inmediate go-to is to start spouting nonsense about "rogue admins."

Yeah, okay. Sure.

I am literally on lemmy.world right now, it is my only instance, and I'm commenting on this thread because it appeared on my front page. I don't know what to tell you other than you don't seem to understand how this works.

I imagine you can, but a dehydrator is surely cheaper and will also have the tangible benefit of already coming with shelves in it designed for the express purpose of dehydrating food. You can't just plop stuff on the floor of the machine and expect passable results; airflow around the entire surface of the food item is required and thus dehydrators come with mesh shelving.

This is one of those deals were you ought to instruct your scientists to think about whether they should, not whether they could.

I tend to stand there like a chump and feed the new roll in behind the tail end of the last little bit of the old roll, pressing against it until the extruder gears take up the slack so as to fool the filament sensor...

It's tedious, but it works.

I am really much more interested in why all the food trucks seem to be taco trucks. It's like it's some kind of national conspiracy.

Where is the pasta truck, the stir fry wok truck, the BLT truck, the foie gras truck, etc.?