eyechoirs's recent activity

  1. Comment on Tildes Minecraft Survival Weekly in ~games

    eyechoirs
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    So, the PVP arena is ready to be play-tested. I need four other players, but it's hard to predict exactly when a lot of people will be on the server. Right now it's just me and j0hn. This makes me...

    So, the PVP arena is ready to be play-tested. I need four other players, but it's hard to predict exactly when a lot of people will be on the server. Right now it's just me and j0hn.

    This makes me think in the future maybe we can do a regular, weekly series of battles. Or just have like a sign-up sheet of some kind. This would also help make sure that there's enough equipment handy for all of this.

    I'm also going to write-up a protocol for setting up arena games so that people can do that regardless of whether I'm online. I'll post that in the next weekly thread most likely, but I'll also put it in a book/lectern thing in game.

    7 votes

  2. Comment on TV Tuesdays Free Talk in ~tv

    eyechoirs
    Link Parent
    I disagree completely. Personally, I think the ending of the first season of Severance is one of its best aspects, and as you suggest, most people I know seem to agree with me. It's actually...
    • Exemplary

    I disagree completely. Personally, I think the ending of the first season of Severance is one of its best aspects, and as you suggest, most people I know seem to agree with me. It's actually really interesting to me that we can disagree so strongly about this.

    You're correct that the season ends right after the climax, without falling action, but to say there's no resolution is I think blatantly false. Using the roller coaster analogy, it would be more like if the ride ended immediately after the first drop. I can think of at least one wildly popular roller coaster with only one drop (Kingda Ka). I also don't think the ending is exactly a 'cliffhanger', though this depends more on how we define that word. I feel like a 'cliffhanger' has come to mean any ending that drives the viewer back to continue watching the next installment, regardless of the mechanism (in the case of Severance, it's sudden revelations that aren't elaborated on). But the word's original meaning is really more specific to unresolved actions - it evokes a serial movie's heroine hanging from a cliff, and the villain is sawing away at the rope she clings to. The big question (will the hero save the day?) is something that can be and often was answered in moments - a 10-second shot of the hero shooting the villain and pulling up the heroine that begins the next installment.

    So this brings us to the central issue which is whether there is unresolved action in the final episode of the first season of Severance.

    Obviously, lots of spoilers here.

    The main events of the last episode are the results of the group's plan to flip the master switch which controls who inhabits their bodies when said bodies are outside of Lumon, putting the 'innies' in contact with the outer world. Dylan defends the switch while Milchik tries to break in and stop him.

    The real questions on my mind at this point was 'will the group manage to make good use of their limited time in the outer world?' and 'what exactly are they will they find out?'. These questions are more or less completely answered. We get to see what Irving and Helly's outer lives are like, which the show has given us no information about until this part, including the very significant finding that Helly is the daughter of Lumon's CEO. In terms of what the group accomplishes, Irving gets a pretty clear picture of Burt's outie's life. Helly successfully disrupts a Lumon gala, revealing her innie's tortured existence to the public and destroying the company's official narrative about the severance procedure. Mark is able to find out about Mrs. Selvig/Mrs. Cobel's double life, successfully makes contact with his sister, apprising her of the entire situation, and then, at the last moment, sees a picture of his outie's wife, which he knows to in fact be still alive.

    I struggle to see how these events are unresolved. In fact, they serve to fill in the characters on both sides of the innie/outie divide of the other half's true existence. The episode ends just as Milchik stops Dylan and the characters return to their 'outie' state, and from here there is no need or even ability for the innies to accomplish anything else. They did what they set out to do, more or less, and now they pretty much need to wait and see how things play out - the ball is now totally in Lumon's court.

    Presumably Lumon will start trying to do damage control about the reality of the severance procedure, though with a room full of distinguished guests and journalists witnessing Helly's revelations, it seems unlikely they will be able to stop word from getting out. Even if they did, Mark's sister now knows everything, and she's been shown to have a good head on her shoulders and has a good chance at being able to make use of this information.

    But here's the critical part for me: there is no way to further resolve these events with any sort of brevity. They are bound to ramify in all sort of ways that are only going to lead to further questions. Ending where it did, the show gives us no information about Lumon's response to the situation - perhaps the only thing we're given no information about. But this is not a cliffhanger. How much more time would we need to feel resolved about whatever will happen next? Ten minutes wouldn't do the trick - it would feel rushed, incomplete. In fact, I'm willing to bet this is why there's no tenth episode - they probably realized that even with as much as they can cram into a whole hour, any further action would not feel resolved, in fact even less resolved than the current ending point, because the more that happens, the more we'd want to know. As it stands, the season ends at the perfect inflection point, where we are given everything we'd been asking for all season, and have a minimum of questions.

    The minimum of questions in this case might be quite a lot - as you seem to be experiencing. But I fail to see a better point of departure within the first season that would not compromise the pace of the storytelling. I mean, theoretically, they could have taken the entire second season and boil it down to a CliffsNotes version of itself and inserted it as a final episode, but that would obviously be unsatisfying.

    2 votes

  3. Comment on How an apple from a rejected tree became the Honeycrisp in ~food

    eyechoirs
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    Honeycrisp are generally good apples, but I think people overrate them a bit just because of availability. For a lot of grocery stores with limited selections, Honeycrisp are the only good apples,...
    • Exemplary

    Honeycrisp are generally good apples, but I think people overrate them a bit just because of availability. For a lot of grocery stores with limited selections, Honeycrisp are the only good apples, because the remainder are C-tier varieties like Fuji, Gala, Jazz, etc. But if you go to an orchard or specialty supermarket there are apple varieties that absolutely blow Honeycrisp out of the water.

    My old standby favorite is the Braeburn. More muted sweetness than Honeycrisp, but with crisp flesh and a strong, juicy tartness that makes your mouth water on the first bite. The flavor, I think of as the Platonic ideal of an apple - freshly fruity, maybe a floral note. I feel like Braeburns used to be everywhere (I remember getting them all the time as a kid) but for some reason I have trouble finding them these days. What a shame.

    In my opinion, the absolute cream of the crop in apple varieties is the Stayman Winesap. This is an apple for apple enthusiasts. Much like the Braeburn it's more tart than sweet, slightly tannic, with very crisp flesh, but the flavor is something else: a rich, cidery fruitiness, and a strong, fresh, almost earthy note that makes you feel like you are standing in the middle of an orchard. There's also this slight vegetal quality, kind of like how ivy smells in the rain. I'm sure there's some variation in the overall quality (as is true of any variety) but I've had multiple seasons of this apple and it has been insanely good every time.

    A couple other apples worth mentioning... The Mutsu Crispin is an interesting one, leaning on the sweet side but not as penetratingly sweet as a Honeycrisp, with flesh that is neither especially crisp or soft. The flavor is quite unique though, with notes of honey, melon, Riesling wine. There's also the Macoun, which is probably not to everyone's taste. The texture is quite soft, almost melts in your mouth, but not mealy. Has a bit of a pear-like, rounded fruity flavor.

    10 votes

  4. Comment on How accurate is the conventional wisdom about dopamine? in ~health.mental

    eyechoirs
    Link
    Dopamine certainly can induce pleasurable feelings, but its role in the brain is quite complicated and it's not so simple as dopamine = pleasure. Really, a more critical function of dopamine is to...

    Dopamine certainly can induce pleasurable feelings, but its role in the brain is quite complicated and it's not so simple as dopamine = pleasure. Really, a more critical function of dopamine is to enact a feeling of 'reward salience' - in other words, pointing the brain's attention toward a reward. I remember seeing a study where they observed the brains of tobacco users during the act of smoking, and they began releasing dopamine even prior to the first hit, pretty much as soon as the user opened the pack of cigarettes. Indeed, many drug users report that the ritual of obtaining and preparing their drug of choice is practically as enjoyable as using the drug itself.

    For some dopaminergic drugs, disproportionately little euphoria is produced compared to compulsion and craving. This is sometimes said about crack cocaine, but there are worse ones, many from the substituted cathinone family. I have no personal experience with those, but from people I've talked to, really only the first few hits are pleasurable, and from that point it's an increasingly terrible experience, like trying to scratch and unscratchable itch, practically being forced to continue using the drug by the dopamine circuits of your brain despite frightening cardiovascular symptoms, paranoid delusions, formication, etc.

    When you feel a 'dopamine' hit, whether it be from a more typical and benign drug or a life experience of some kind, there's usually actually a multifactorial response that involves other neurotransmitters like serotonin, GABA, endorphins, as well as higher psychological responses like emotions, memories, and beliefs that aren't intrinsically tied to a single neurotransmitter.

    11 votes

  5. Comment on Tildes Minecraft Survival Weekly in ~games

    eyechoirs
    Link Parent
    I've already incorporated lava pits. If you were taking a look and don't see them, it's because they're closed on the control panel.

    I've already incorporated lava pits. If you were taking a look and don't see them, it's because they're closed on the control panel.

    4 votes

  6. Comment on Tildes Minecraft Survival Weekly in ~games

    eyechoirs
    Link
    Thought I'd update everyone on the PVP arena. Right now it is more or less functional. The only bits I need to finish are the mob ejectors and associated controller (which I am currently working...

    Thought I'd update everyone on the PVP arena.

    Right now it is more or less functional. The only bits I need to finish are the mob ejectors and associated controller (which I am currently working on) and crafting all equipment. The mob ejectors have been taking forever and I'm not sure I will be able to get them to work exactly how I want. Not sure if it's due to insufficient spawnproofing or I screwed up some aspect of the design. It's also difficult to troubleshoot because just like in quantum physics, you change the system by observing it - physically going down into the spawner changes mob spawning patterns and mob behavior. I think I'll ultimately just accept the imperfections and move on, in the end.

    Anyway, I will go back and test each module again, and if it's all working, I would like to do a test run of actual combat. I figure might uncover some more issues and it's better to look at them before I go through the effort of building the 'shell' around all the outlying redstone

    Finally there's the matter of constructing the 'shell', and decorating everything. I have a decent idea for the general outer building - I'm going to need calcite, white concrete powder, some diorite, spruce logs (unstripped), some dark oak planks to match the unstripped spruce color, and a whole bunch of waxed copper slabs for the roof. I have no idea how much of each is necessary but if you have a few stacks to donate, it will certainly help me out. I've never been much good at interior design, so if someone feels like they could pretty up the locker rooms, spawn rooms, hallways, entrances, etc. I would appreciate the help.

    10 votes

  7. Comment on The rise of DIY, pirated medicine: Four Thieves Vinegar Collective has made DIY medicine cheaper and more accessible to the masses in ~health

    eyechoirs
    Link Parent
    For what it's worth, the link you provided allows exemptions for a "medical condition that prevents them from receiving a vaccine" - my IVIG therapy doesn't prevent me from receiving a vaccine, it...

    I understand where you're coming from, but I just don't see the issues you're describing in any of the rules or regulations around vaccine mandates. All of the ones I'm aware of have medical exemptions which your situation should fall under.

    For what it's worth, the link you provided allows exemptions for a "medical condition that prevents them from receiving a vaccine" - my IVIG therapy doesn't prevent me from receiving a vaccine, it just makes it redundant to do so. This is what I was referring to by 'doomed task', because in my experience, people take rules at face value and will not take small logical leaps to uphold the spirit of a rule beyond how its written. Separately, while my ME/CFS does prevent me from receiving the vaccine, I assume there is a list of qualifying medical conditions and it's unclear whether ME/CFS would be on it (it almost certainly would not have been 10 years ago ).

    Now in fairness, as the guidance points out, all but three states allow exemptions for 'religious or philosophical reasons', which in practice means there is no vaccine mandate because anyone can claim a philosophical exemption (assuming it works how I think it does). But in my earlier post I was trying to examine how far we can alter a person's medical choices against their will - an actual vaccine mandate which does not allow arbitrary exemptions is something I could easily imagine happening, and I think it's worth seriously considering your stance on that now in service of my broader point about medical rights.

    Because the foremost principle in medical ethics is "do no harm", and any medical intervention carries risks. Especially when a treatment is off-label, there are serious liability issues involved. It's not a profit incentive issue; the ethical principle predates capitalism by centuries.

    As far as I know, 'do no harm' applies only to medical professionals. If I want to pursue a medical treatment without prescription, I am not asking a doctor to violate their principles. At best I am asking someone who produces drugs (for instance) to provide them for me - are they beholden to those principles? If we take the original article about medical piracy seriously, then I'm not asking anyone for anything. The only liability is of myself to myself. 'Do no harm' is kind of weirdly facile anyway, because what constitutes harm is so subjective. Ultimately the principle becomes beholden to what is legally considered harmful, which is subject to the same bureaucratic false incentives that I've already brought up.

    1 vote

  8. Comment on The rise of DIY, pirated medicine: Four Thieves Vinegar Collective has made DIY medicine cheaper and more accessible to the masses in ~health

    eyechoirs
    Link Parent
    You seem to already realize that as a whole, the healthcare industry and regulatory state currently have heavily compromised interests, so it's surprising to me that you want them to be...

    You seem to already realize that as a whole, the healthcare industry and regulatory state currently have heavily compromised interests, so it's surprising to me that you want them to be gatekeepers. The notion that 'they should be allowed to gatekeep now, and I promise we'll fix the system of incentives and quality of care as time goes on' is not at all convincing to me, or to a lot of people. This attitude towards the broken system is one of the major reasons people have become skeptical of mainstream medicine.

    People have a fundamental right to determine what happens to their own body. I understand the temptation to simply force everyone to do what you know is best for their health, but political channels required to do so also open up the possibility that someone malevolent will end up in that position. This is true of any other aspect of a person's private life, why wouldn't it be true of medicine as well?

    I agree that medical misinformation (and disinformation) is a problem, but we should be looking upstream, not downstream. You don't fix that problem by gatekeeping potentially 'dangerous' medical decisions, you do it by figuring out why people keep falling for lies and quackery. I think vaccine skepticism is a good case study for this. It's pretty easy to trace the sociopolitical antecedents here, and there are a lot of people who essentially have been inculcated with an adult form of oppositional defiant disorder who are just going to reject anything the government recommends that they do. But how far are you willing to exercise the power of the state to railroad these people into vaccinating themselves or their children? Would you support a vaccine mandate?

    Back when COVID-19 first mushroomed into a massive political conflict, a lot of my friend group (who lean liberal/left) were open to the idea of a vaccine mandate. For the public good, right? But as I went to them, I'm coming to you and asking you to set aside your preconceptions about vaccines for a moment. Consider this.

    I am not an anti-vaxxer. If I had a child I would vaccinate them for all major diseases, in line with what the establishment currently considers best practice. However - I suffer from severe ME/CFS. I am seriously disabled as a result of this disease, a neuroimmune disease which is barely understood by doctors and affects between 1 and 3 million people in the USA alone. I did not receive the COVID vaccine. The pattern of immune hypo/hyper-reactivity and inflammation in ME/CFS causes many sufferers to have severe adverse reactions to vaccines in general, not least of which the vaccine for COVID ('long COVID' being essentially isomorphic with ME/CFS). In the patient support forums I hang out in, this is a tale I've seen told over and over again: someone has mild ME/CFS, they can still go have a regular or part time job, a social life. They may not even be formally diagnosed. Then they get the COVID vaccine, and all of a sudden they can no function. Severe myalgia, exertion intolerance, brain fog. Often this is why these people are first joining these support groups.

    There's no research available to clarify what are technically anecdotal experiences. But among experts in ME/CFS, most would agree that vaccines are potentially dangerous to ME/CFS sufferers. The immunologist I see, who is a leading expert in the ME/CFS field, told me point blank not to get vaccinated. Still, this disease is only just beginning to get any sort of recognition from organizations like the CDC, and there is a strong stigma against research into it (as their is against any research which questions the prevailing institutional narratives about vaccines in general). It is extremely difficult to fund ME/CFS research - right now it has one of the lowest ratios of NIH funding to disease burden. Back when Fauci first became director of the NIAID, he basically torched the ME/CFS program. Of course now he won't shut up about the importance of investigating post-viral diseases, after COVID made the topic unavoidable, and now that he's retired and isn't obligated to do anything about it.

    So in light of the above, do you think a vaccine mandate would take ME/CFS into account? Do you think expanding the influence of an already mismanaged bureaucracy is likely to lead to a more accurate appraisal of these highly politicized issues? Furthermore, even in the unlikely event that we manage to carve out an exception somewhere, how do you think things would play out on the ground, among officials and professionals who are not perfectly apprised of every exception?

    Infuriatingly, even if I could get the COVID vaccine, I don't actually even need one. I receive weekly IVIG therapy, which is basically just an infusion of a wide range of antibodies pooled from the general population of blood donors. I already have antibodies from the COVID vaccine (and from COVID itself!) in excess, since I am administered a hyperphysiological dose. But in my experience, trying to explain this to anyone (especially bureaucrats) is a doomed task.

    This all seems like a bit of a digression, since originally the topic was gatekeeping of medical treatments. But in the ontology of medical ethics, right to refuse a treatment is essentially the same as right to access a treatment. Either a person has autonomy, the right to choose, or they don't. It's one of the insane hypocrisies of the medical establishment that 'right to refuse', regardless of outcome, is still a hallowed principle (despite considerable political pressure), when its mirror image 'right to access', regardless of outcome, is essentially ignored. We recognize that the ultimate responsibility for a medical choice lies on a patient - except when that entails accessing a non-prescribed treatment, in which case fuck 'em. Why exactly the establishment chose to embrace one and not the other should be pretty obvious - only the 'access' half of the binary really impinges on the monopolistic economic role of medical regulation.

    5 votes

  9. Comment on Tildes Minecraft Survival Weekly in ~games

    eyechoirs
    Link Parent
    Ah yeah, I think that's the one I broke into the other day. Is it an issue? I mean it's all lit up, and I don't think the spawners would activate from the surface, so I doubt it contributes to the...

    Ah yeah, I think that's the one I broke into the other day. Is it an issue? I mean it's all lit up, and I don't think the spawners would activate from the surface, so I doubt it contributes to the mob cap. Is there some mechanic I'm not aware of?

    2 votes

  10. Comment on The rise of DIY, pirated medicine: Four Thieves Vinegar Collective has made DIY medicine cheaper and more accessible to the masses in ~health

    eyechoirs
    Link Parent
    It's true, there are always the idiots. But I think the 'average person' you mention isn't going to want to independently manage their healthcare. As I stated, the vast majority of people are...

    Based on the experience of doctors during COVID with idiots showing up incontinent due to self-medicating with ivermectin from farm supply stores, I'm wholly unconvinced that the average person can be trusted to independently manage their healthcare.

    It's true, there are always the idiots. But I think the 'average person' you mention isn't going to want to independently manage their healthcare. As I stated, the vast majority of people are really mentally checked out from this sort of thing. The prevalence of people poisoning themselves with ivermectin is quite low, it's just a phenomenon that got overblown by the media. And if anything, the root cause there is terrible messaging from the Trump administration and right-wing media, which is probably more worthy of your attention than people's right to self medicate.

    Also, and I feel like I have to bring this up every time someone mentions ivermectin, but ivermectin will probably be ultimately shown to have efficacy against long COVID (not the acute or post-acute phases of the disease) - not as an anti-viral, but as a TLR-4 antagonist. Depending on the exact manifestation of long COVID, ivermectin could be a useful immunomodulator. I think low-dose naltrexone is probably slightly safer with a similar mechanism of action, but it can be hard to find a compounding pharmacy to provide that, and for some ivermectin might be more accessible.

    There's not just an individual risk from someone going into cardiac arrest due to accidental overdose or giving themselves a lifelong ailment from rare side effects.
    Every self-medicating patient that shows up to a hospital is wasting limited public resources. Widespread over-the-counter antibiotic use in some countries is creating deadly superbugs which threaten everyone.

    Ever non-self medicating patient that has to show up to the hospital for something that should be over the counter is also wasting limited public resources. If I have another kidney stone, I'd really love to be able to pick up some subcutaneous ketorolac and ondansetron, but instead I have to haul myself into the ER to get an IV. Antibiotics are also frequently widespread due to overprescription, including systemic practices that would be greatly ameliorated by developing treatments that are currently gray/black-market. Doctors were content to throw round after round of vancomycin at my C. Diff instead of using FMT, for instance.

    The average person is in no way qualified to self-medicate or even find the right resources to treat their own conditions. There are good reasons it's considered unethical for doctors to self-medicate. If highly educated doctors regularly get diagnoses wrong, why would the average uneducated person fare any better?

    This is probably true for some conditions, especially emergent ones. But often, highly educated doctors get diagnoses wrong because they are only spending ten minutes thinking about the patient. If you live with a chronic illness, there is a good chance you're already more familiar with what is usual or unusual for your condition, perhaps more self-educated on potential alternative treatments that a doctor in an overly litigious society is afraid to pursue. It's easy to look at self-medication is foolish, but the risk-reward calculus is different than you'd expect when you're the one living in constant pain, debility, etc.

    4 votes

  11. Comment on The rise of DIY, pirated medicine: Four Thieves Vinegar Collective has made DIY medicine cheaper and more accessible to the masses in ~health

    eyechoirs
    Link Parent
    Yeah, I agree that synthesis is generally a lot messier/inexact than these dude are portraying it. But then again, it's highly dependent on the particular reaction. Sometimes in synthetic...

    Yeah, I agree that synthesis is generally a lot messier/inexact than these dude are portraying it. But then again, it's highly dependent on the particular reaction. Sometimes in synthetic chemistry, you run into reactions that just work, with few significant side products and good tolerance for varying conditions. As long as these reactions are sufficiently validated I don't see the problem. Ultimately, there are some drugs that are totally unfeasible for home-synthesis, and others that happen to be a perfect fit, with many more that occupy some space in the middle.

    I also think its possible to incorporate purification and assay steps in the whole picture. I've done a little home synthesis in my day and using a combination of reagent testing and thin-layer chromatography, I felt like I was able to get a decent albeit crude picture of how the reactions went. Both of those techniques are cheap, accessible and easy to operate.

    6 votes

  12. Comment on The rise of DIY, pirated medicine: Four Thieves Vinegar Collective has made DIY medicine cheaper and more accessible to the masses in ~health

    eyechoirs
    Link Parent
    For what it's worth, a little L-amphetamine mixed in with D-amphetamine provides significant benefit in some subtypes of ADHD. While it has some cardiovascular side effects, L-amphetamine is...

    For what it's worth, a little L-amphetamine mixed in with D-amphetamine provides significant benefit in some subtypes of ADHD. While it has some cardiovascular side effects, L-amphetamine is somewhat better at promoting wakefulness and sensory attentiveness, and reducing fatigue, which are predominant issues with the sluggish/inattentive subtype of ADHD, as well as for things like treatment resistant depression and fibromyalgia for which amphetamines are sometimes prescribed off-label. I'd say even racemic (1:1 D:L) amphetamine has certain use cases.

    4 votes

  13. Comment on The rise of DIY, pirated medicine: Four Thieves Vinegar Collective has made DIY medicine cheaper and more accessible to the masses in ~health

    eyechoirs
    Link Parent
    I suspect that the existence of those last two things are good reasons to remove the checks. For too long, we have nurtured an attitude that individuals do not need to be responsible for their own...

    I suspect that the existence of those last two things are good reasons to remove the checks. For too long, we have nurtured an attitude that individuals do not need to be responsible for their own medical treatment. Far, far too many people never bother to learn anything about their illnesses and simply defer mindlessly to whatever pills or procedures their doctors throw at them. These people are like children with helicopter parents. On a societal level, the only remedy is to remove these 'safety' barriers and let people make medical decisions for themselves.

    This probably sounds kind of harsh, and I can appreciate that there is more or less a certainty that those on the low end of the Dunning-Kruger curve will harm themselves if allowed to pursue medical treatment without regulation. But I think most people who have thought about these issues focus too much on this explicit harm, and ignore the implicit harm that comes from gatekeeping valuable medications behind ridiculously conservative safety precautions, inattentive or incompetent doctors, and a culture of patient helplessness. It's easy to say 'well, fix those issues then', but then again, those issues are subtle, systemic issues with no easy solution. Liberating medical care, particularly drug access, from regulation is something that can be achieved much more easily. With sufficient political will it could happen right now. Without sufficient political will, counter-economics will have to suffice.

    I'm probably a little bit biased due to my experience with chronic illness, but fundamentally, we should all be able to act as our own doctors in a pinch. This requires a certain degree of education, and to the extent that it's not provided by secondary school (it's crazy to me what passes for 'health' education in the US, how little I learned from those classes, but I digress), it can be taught outside of school or accrued for oneself through books and online research.

    6 votes

  14. Comment on Midweek Movie Free Talk in ~movies

    eyechoirs
    Link Parent
    I haven't seen the remake, but I can't think of a film that needs a remake less than the original. Of course Jake Gyllenhaal is a good actor, and I am a little curious as to how he'd carry the...

    I haven't seen the remake, but I can't think of a film that needs a remake less than the original. Of course Jake Gyllenhaal is a good actor, and I am a little curious as to how he'd carry the main role. And in a way, the film is a bit like a play, so maybe that was the rationale for remaking it. Still, I think out of principle I'd probably skip the remake myself. You're fully spoiled on the plot now, but I'd still recommend checking out the original at some point.

    1 vote

  15. Comment on Midweek Movie Free Talk in ~movies

    eyechoirs
    Link
    I've been working my way through a large backlog. Here are some things I've seen recently that I felt stood out in some way. After Hours (1985) - dir. Martin Scorsese - Has very few of the...

    I've been working my way through a large backlog. Here are some things I've seen recently that I felt stood out in some way.

    After Hours (1985) - dir. Martin Scorsese - Has very few of the trappings of Scorsese's more typical style. A farcical dark comedy which follows one man's Kafka-esque encounters over a single rainy night in Manhattan. Starts kind of slow but quickly becomes absurd and pretty damn funny to boot.

    The Guilty (2018) - dir. Gustav Möller - This movie absolutely slaps. A Danish chamber piece about an emergency line operator. Well-acted and incredibly tense, and just when you think you know what's happening, you're blindsided by yet another disturbing twist. There's no fat on this one, only 80 minutes long.

    Ghostlight (2024) - dir. Kelly O'Sullivan and Alex Thompson - A rather family-centric drama that follows a construction worker as he unwittingly joins an amateur theater troupe. The way that this film conveys background information, in little dribs and drabs just when it helps to clarify some new dimension of the characters themselves, is fascinating. It also makes this movie incredibly easy to spoil - if you like a slightly dark but ultimately heart-warming drama, go into this knowing nothing.

    Greener Grass (2019) - dir. Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe - Super weird movie right here. Inhabits a surreal, cringy parody of suburban American, and drunkenly stumbles between moments of shamelessly gross humor, clever, winking irony, and nightmarish revelations. Almost no coherent plot to speak of, but frankly, it doesn't need one.

    Moonlighting (1982) - dir. Jerzy Skolimowski - Jeremy Irons stars as a Polish contractor who brings his team to the U.K. to illegally refinish a house. Blends cultural fish-out-of-water comedy with compelling dramatic elements. No one else on the team speaks English, and none of what they say is subtitled, but they are men of few words and the meaning is always perfectly apparent. Kind of a fascinating movie that doesn't seem like it should work on the deeper level that it ultimately does.

    The Coffee Table (2022) - dir. Caye Casas - A bad marriage. A gaudy coffee table. Something terrible happens. Any more would be a spoiler. You might honestly figure out what's going to happen the moment the movie reveals its basic starting facts. But the real magic isn't in the twist, it's in the grueling developments after the twist, what sickening despair results from keeping an un-keepable secret. Kind of a horror movie, but if you can manage to keep your lunch down, it's actually more of a pitch black comedy.

    4 votes

  16. Comment on What is a software you wish existed? in ~comp

    eyechoirs
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    There's a really specific VST that I wish existed. It's pretty simple (at least how I'm thinking about it), but I know next to nothing about coding. Ideally, a person taking on this project would...

    There's a really specific VST that I wish existed. It's pretty simple (at least how I'm thinking about it), but I know next to nothing about coding. Ideally, a person taking on this project would know a little bit about music and VST programming, but even this may not be a hard requirement.

    I enjoy playing microtonal music. I've wrote about the subject on Tildes before if you wanted a lot more detail, but basically it is a type of music where notes are tuned to different frequencies (and more importantly, ratios of frequencies) compared to normal '12-equal' tuning. Now, most in-the-flesh instruments do not support microtonal tunings, but if you have a MIDI keyboard, it can be linked to any instrument VST, and some of those do support microtonal tunings, by way of custom 'tuning files' like .scl and .tun.

    The ability to use custom tunings has really opened up my musical explorations, but it does have some inconveniences that I suspect would very easy to work around. To begin with, I've never found a VST that allows you to swap tuning files using a bound hotkey or external controller. The ability to do this would make it a lot easier to perform something that requires using multiple different tunings without having to interrupt performance to navigate a file system.

    Another issue, and perhaps the more important one, is that creating tuning files is kind of a headache. There are websites that expedite the process, though frankly I've always resorted to just editing the file in notepad, because the format is pretty simple and I've mostly worked using the 24-edo tuning system, which is pretty easy to describe in the 'cents' measurement that .scl files use. However, there have been many times where I've been using a specific tuning, and thought 'hey, I bet this would sound a lot better if I played a G half-sharp instead of a G'. So now I need to go find the tuning file, copy it (if I feel like the tuning I was just using was worth preserving), edit it to match my new idea, and load it into the instrument VST anew.

    My idea to fix these inconveniences is to have a standalone VST that you use to manage custom tunings. You can point other instrument VSTs to a single tuning file, and when the new VST makes changes to this file, it pings other VSTs to reload that same tuning file so the changes take effect. The new VST could have a much more sleek graphic interface that allows you to select a key (or more typically, all keys that are separated by octaves, e.g. A1, A2, A3, A4 etc.) and change its tuning. All of this would need to be relative to a 'root note' which can also be specified (instrument VSTs that support .scl tunings usually have this feature themselves). Input could be formatted to support 'equal division of the octave' tunings - where you might type '5edo22' pick out the fifth note of 22-equal - as well as just intonation tunings, where you could type something like ji7/4 to pick out the harmonic seventh interval. A final option would be type '1057c' to select a note 1057 cents above the root, which would be useful for free intonation type music.

    1 vote

  17. Comment on Tildes Minecraft Survival Weekly in ~games

    eyechoirs
    Link Parent
    I won't need it for a while - it's basically for all the armor that will be used during gameplay, so not until the build is basically done. No rush on setting up bartering.

    I won't need it for a while - it's basically for all the armor that will be used during gameplay, so not until the build is basically done. No rush on setting up bartering.

    1 vote

  18. Comment on Tildes Minecraft Survival Weekly in ~games

    eyechoirs
    Link Parent
    Awesome! That went quicker than expected. Just intalled Litematica and started construction. So begins the slog.

    Awesome! That went quicker than expected. Just intalled Litematica and started construction. So begins the slog.

    1 vote

  19. Comment on Tildes Minecraft Survival Weekly in ~games

    eyechoirs
    Link Parent
    Thanks for all of that! The wood type doesn't matter btw, this is wood is earmarked entirely for crafting stuff like pistons, hoppers, redstone torches, levers, etc.

    Thanks for all of that! The wood type doesn't matter btw, this is wood is earmarked entirely for crafting stuff like pistons, hoppers, redstone torches, levers, etc.

    2 votes

  20. Comment on Tildes Minecraft Survival Weekly in ~games

    eyechoirs
    Link Parent
    Looks like a few more people voted since then... and the winner is Steppe/Alpine Highlands! Not what I voted for, but the people have spoken and it is a good choice nonetheless. I will set up a...

    Looks like a few more people voted since then... and the winner is Steppe/Alpine Highlands! Not what I voted for, but the people have spoken and it is a good choice nonetheless. I will set up a drop off point at (200, 1000) for the materials. I already got all the redstone (if I remember correctly it was tman who dropped it off), but here's what remains to be collected. I'll strike through the items as people contribute them.

    • 80 shulker boxes
    • 81 stacks of redstone dust
    • 23 stacks of iron
    • 60 stacks of cobblestone
    • 23 stacks of stone
    • 24 stacks of wood
    • 41 stacks of leather
    • 32 stacks of slime balls
    • 7 stacks of string
    • 6 stacks of nether quartz
    • 5 stacks of glowstone dust
    • 1 stack of obsidian
    • a bevy of items whose quantities are too small to bother listing right now

    Also, now that we know the biome, I've been thinking about what building materials to use. I think stone/stone bricks would be simple and elegant for most stuff. But maybe dirt for the arena floor? Spruce wood as an auxiliary building material and for stuff like signs/fences? Also what should the team colors be? Maybe yellow and red or pink? Taking suggestions.

    2 votes