39
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What is a subject you could talk for 2+ hours about with a great degree of accuracy and no preparation whatsoever?
I'll start: as a film major, I could talk in length about several aspects of filmmaking, especially writing and directing.
EDIT: I'm overwhelmed with such a high number of interesting responses. You guys and girls know a lot of interesting stuff that goes way beyond my intellectual abilities. This is not an attempt to be modest or to draw empty compliments, it's quite simply the truth. That is the reason I did not answer to any comment yet. I wanted to make a proportional effort (I also got a new dog and he's awesome, but that's unrelated hahaha). I will try to do so tonight, and probably create a related thread to you guys can speak a little more about your awesome obsessions. Cheers!
Is this an opportunity to brag? Because I can brag for many more than two hours with a very high degree of accuracy.
I can also talk about the jfk assassination, the joys and trials of using an apple //e clone, bicycling, various points of law, probably cooking, air cooled vw’s, and the good times before the internet got so commercialized (grooveshark, anyone?).
Brag away my friend
Care to give us a little taste? :)
I had a Laser 128 as a kid. Way less expensive than the //e, resembled a IIc. Actually, it was well built and ran any kind of software I threw at it, and had a //e compatible expansion slot, to which an external bus could be connected. It had standard serial and parallel ports and 5.25" drive, I later came across an apple 3.5" drive to which I connected (via centronics port? Maybe I remember less than I thought). Had composite video output, which at first I connected vi RF modulator to an old b&w tv, later I got a dedicated monochrome (green) monitor. Generic brand mouse.
IIRC, it was taiwanese manufacture, based on a a //e board and rom revision that had somehow squeezed through some IP loophole so it was a legal clone.
The big drawback was the keyboard. Wost keyboard I have ever typed on by a significant margin. Wasn't a chiclet, but definitely rivaled the awfulness of the Timex-Sinclair chiclet and the Atari 400 membrane.
The greatest joy of any Apple product in those days was Beagle Brothers software and catalogs.
I have a Grooveshark t-shirt that I still wear. I am not sure about Grooveshark existing in a time before Internet commercialization (maybe before it got to the point it is now) though. Thinking about music related online services, Napster and other stuff were or had been in legal battles with the RIAA, global music/entertainment conglomerates, etc, which I think is part of that commercialization process that also lead to the shutdown of Grooveshark. Do you mean something else?
I don't use Spotify but is it similar? I don't believe Spotify has the sheer volume of songs that Grooveshark did since users were able to upload their own music, but for a regular person that just wants to listen to popular music, I imagine it fills the same purpose.
For popular music, spotify is probably better than grooveshark ever was.
But for discovery and the satisfaction of eclectic tastes, grooveshark was much better. I don't understand why the discovery part worked so much better for me, but it did.
A recent example I ran across of the shortcomings of modern streaming music options is the Logan Lucky soundtrack. Apple music, Pandora, and spotify all listed the album, but with multiple tracks missing. Spotify had the most fwiw.
Also, Pandora radio stations used to be much better at variety and selection. I think it's about a decade since they lost their popular<->variety slider. They've just added something similar back, but only for in-browser use, and their catalog comes up short anyway (even on the premium version).
I was speaking more generally however. In The Beginning (tm), there seemed to be a lot more random websites, and a lot more websites with easy access to useful information. Also, Google used search operators, and the Yahoo "portal" was actually useful.
My experience is anecdotal and based on impressions, but it sure seems the web is much more, um, produced, today. I'm not sure the word, or even the concept. It's like there's a lot more of it overall, but somehow there's less content.
I know at least part of what drives this impression for me is that a lot of the biggest and most prolific "news" outlets are all focussing on the same stuff, and all quoting each other and the same dozen news items of the day, and I haven't found a useful or workable way to filter out the useless stuff.
I think I get it, and I feel similarly.
This is just an exaggeration, but I can see the Internet sort of parallels brick and mortar stores or smaller venues maybe. I get a sense that big corporations are buying up everything and feels like soon everything will just be owned by X (whatever X is). The content we get is cut up, sanitized, and regurgitated like things out of famous dystopian setting novels. Unfortunately I don't have a solution.
The funny thing is, I read a prediction back then about how commercial interests would take over, just like they did with TV in the 50's.
Where have all the
flowersweirdos gone?Olive Stone's
JFK
was very formative in my youth. One thing it thought me is how really truth - and reality - can be. Do you like this movie?The movie is very entertaining and does a good job of pointing out some of the shortcomings of the warren report.
A good place to start is the church committee.
Watches
Politics
Technology
Can you give me an example of a promising piece of tech?
I think robotics have a good future if done right, currently they aren’t available to the general public until that happens they have limited uses, I hope in the not to distant future we see some consumer grade stuff
No offense, but NO ONE can talk about politics with a great degree of accuracy.
It's so full of bullshit nowadays that it's beyond sad.
Yea, that's a huge red flag and also a major symptom of being at the Dunning-Kruger peak
What is a good reasonably priced watch that I could buy today and my great-grandson would still be able to give to use with little to no maintenance?
What kind of price are you thinking
Bellow 300 USD. I realize it's not much in the US context, but that's because my currency has no value. 300 USD is a lot of money for a watch here.
Do you mind what movement is has for example a automatic or a quartz
Would you be able to point us at a nice writeup or provide one yourself for setting up an email server for personal use? Interested in this for personal use and a uni project
Firstly, apologies for the delay in this reply. There's a few things which need touching on and I wanted to make sure I had the time to do so.
There are a number of technologies you are going to want to be familiar with prior to firing anything up, as well as the basic components which make up a functioning email system.
Note that of course you can simply fire up a basic MTA and start sending/receiving email between your own hosts as you wish. The fundamental email protocols are very simple, but this simplicity is what has contributed to the abuse we see today [eg: spam]. As such, if you want your email server to talk to other email servers, you will need to implement the rest of the stack as discussed below.
First, consider where you will be hosting the system. Will it be in your own home? Or in a datacentre? Which OS do you wish to use? I would recommend starting off with a small VPS, which will give you lots of flexibility and access to what you need for a very low cost. You also don't have to worry about things like obtaining IP address space and the increased electricity bills ;-) I don't know what your OS familiarity is, but I highly recommend using a *nix based OS like Linux or BSD. The only reason for wanting to use windows would be if you want exchange support, but that gets super expensive very quickly. [and isn't necessarily good for learning the concepts] . I have personal experience using VPS' from Linode, but there are tonnes of other providers out there which may prove more to your liking [eg: digital ocean, vultr, skysilk etc...]. Choose one with servers close to you, as you will be operating it remotely.
Second, make sure you understand DNS. You don't have to become an expert, and you certainly don't need to be able to run your own DNS server, but read up on what DNS does and at least how to add your own DNS records to a provider somewhere. [Note: https://freedns.afraid.org/ is a good place to start out, though if you end up hosting email I recommend at least upgrading to a premium account there, or with another paid provider].
IP Addresses. You're going to need a publicly routable static IP address, and preferably one which is 'clean'. This can be difficult from a residential ISP, but most should be able to give you one for a small price each month. Otherwise, any decent VPS provider should have good IPv4 space. Run the IP through spam DBs first to make sure it hasn't been used previously by spammers. Something like https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx will do the job. Keep mxtoolbox in mind as a really great service for checking the various components of your mail server are configured correctly.
Also, make sure you know a bit about SSL/TLS and connection encryption. At the very least, be able to generate your own keys and CSRs, then get a signed cert from a commercial provider or something like letsencrypt. You don't necessarily have to have encryption on your mail server, but it would be irresponsible of me to have someone start a new server without it.
The mail server itself is made up of several components. Again, you don't need to be an expert on any one thing, but learn what they do and how they interact.
MTA: This is the core component of the email server. It is the part of the server which talks to other MTAs, and sends/receives your email. A popular MTA is postfix. Note, there's also other components like an MSA, but for the sake of keeping the introduction simple, you can just consider the MTA. Most MTA's like postfix also perform the MSA role as well anyway.
IMAP: This is how an email client [like thunderbird, outlook etc] communicates with the MTA. The client connects to an IMAP server, which then communicates with the MTA for sending/retrieving email. A popular IMAP server is dovecot. Also, don't use POP. Also, DON'T USE POP! It's 2019, please for the love of god do not even enable it as an option! ;-)
[anti]-SPAM: This is a complex one, because there is both many ways this is handled, and also different ways of approaching it on your end. And it goes both ways. You want to make sure you don't receive spam, and also want to ensure your outgoing email doesn't get flagged as spam.
INCOMING: Various methods of spam filtering exist. There are traditional software implementations which 'scan' incoming mail for spaminess and viruses etc. For example, amavisd and spamassassin. There are also protocols you can implement, such as greylisting. Greylisting isn't universally agreed upon, but I do support it's use and it cuts out an enormous amount of spam.
OUTGOING: The following four things will keep you on the good side.... SPF, DKIM, DMARC, PTR. They all involve DNS either partly or entirely.
SPF defines which servers you are authorising to have mail sent from for your domain. When a mail server receives an email from you@youraddress.com, it looks up the DNS record for youraddress.com and finds the SPF record in which you list the IP address[es].
DKIM is another way to authorise outgoing email. Outgoing emails are signed with a private key on your mail server. When another server receives your email, it retrieves the public key from your DNS records and performs a signature verification.
DMARC extends DKIM and SPF by providing instructions to mail servers on how to handle incoming mail from your domain. When a mail server receives mail from your domain, it pulls your DMARC record from DNS, which specifies how strictly you want to enforce DKIM+SPF checks on your domain. This helps stop your domain from being spoofed.
PTR records are just reverse DNS records, and aren't necessarily email/spam related. But some of the big email providers [ie: google] use PTR records in their spam filtering algorithms. If you want to make sure your email is received, make sure you have set your PTR records for your IP address[es] to match the domain of your mail server.
This is a good start for the concepts which need addressing. If you want specific guides as far as installing/configuring each software component, I'll leave that for you to look up as it is well beyond the scope of a tildes post ;-) There are also countless tutorials and guides which already exist.
The ones I used to refer to have mostly vanished, but I found a pretty decent one which is up to date to get you started.
https://www.c0ffee.net/blog/mail-server-guide/
But feel free to hit me up if you want any more specific information of anything I've said or you find elsewhere. There may be a couple of things I have missed, and if so I'll edit as necessary. At the very least, I hope you find this information helpful :-)
oh my god <3
Thank you so much for such an indepth reply! Would you mind if I share this with some people in my circles?
No problem. Let me know if you would like any additional information along your journey.
As for sharing, absolutely. It's in the public domain now ;-)
I'm interested as well! I've got a wealth of old computers (well, 3, but they were fairly powerful in their day) from family that I'd like to put to use. An email server's at the top of my list for potential uses.
Hey! I just added a reply to the user above which you can check out.
I will add one note for your case though, in regards to the hardware. How old are we talking about here?
Now I am a huge proponent of using 'old' hardware and reducing e-waste. All of my servers are built from second hand components where appropriate. But make sure you keep in mind things like electricity usage and reliability. A mail server is generally pretty lightweight and doesn't need a lot of resources to run, so even something like a raspberry pi can be used and the electricity savings will be significant. I wouldn't recommend an actual raspberry pi for a mailserver with anything important on it, as the storage on them just isn't reliable enough, but the point is that something newer/more efficient may end up more economical in the long run.
Also keep in mind that the duty cycle of a server is different than a desktop computer. Consumer parts are fine but for a system running 24/7, how reliable are those old family hard drives and power supplies going to be? Evidently, in my aforementioned recycled computers the hard drives and PSUs are the two things I always swap out with new parts.
None of this is to stop you from jumping in though. Give it a go and see how you like it! Let me know if you need any assistance along the way.
The Go programming language, as well as topics close to it, like standard, portable C programming, POSIXly correct Unix tooling usage, and just how underappreciated Plan Nine From Bell Labs is.
Foreign language learning and language trivia. Although my paralinguistic knowledge is unfortunately very Eurocentric.
Can you explain why there is no verb form for the word "proprietor"?
As in “to own a thing”? Should there be? The word is listed in most etymological dictionaries as “probably” coming from the word “property”, so it was “probably” made from the very beginning to name a person and not an action. Considering how many Romance-rooted words in English exist just to be a fancier version of a Germanic or a Celtic word, somebody in the 1600s probably decided one day that the word “owner” just doesn't have enough class to it.
If I were to reverse-engineer one, it would probably be “propriet” (/prə-PREYE-ət/), and borrowing a bit from German (because why not), the appropriateheh preposition would be “over”:
This is the fifth or the sixth time in my life when I'm trying to summon a word in a language not native to me into existence. Should I be worried?
Thank you for some excellent insight. I feel lik ‘proprietor’ implies a degree of management/involvement that ‘owner’ does not. But as you suggest, it may be just to add some panache (or maybe faux nobility) to a bored landowner’s title.
I actually recently setup a plan9 (9front) vm, as I was curious about it - is it underappreciated? I always heard it talked about with a bit of reverence (I had a professor who described it as "better than unix, but unable to replace it because unix was 'good enough'"), but I admit haven't seen much mention/discussion of it in general
Yes, it is underappreciated in that most of its innovations are not used in practice. Stuff like the 9P file-system protocol, the process namespaces, the unique windowing system with the plumber infrastructure, actual everything-is-a-file-or-a-file-system philosophy, fossil+venti file-system and snapshot infrastructure… I'm pretty sure I'm forgetting a lot of stuff, but this list alone contains so many nice things.
To say nothing about the OS creators' radical minimalism and no less radical composability in the tooling. Them removing stuff was sometimes as important or more important than them adding stuff.
Yes, we still have UTF-8 and procfs, which is nice and all, but when you really think about all the stuff that we didn't get, it's honestly baffling.
What are some very different languages that sound very alike for the uneducated?
See, this is very much dependent on what native language these “uneducated” have and what kind of language education, if any, they've got. For example, a lot of people say that European Portuguese sounds like Russian, but as a native Russian speaker I don't see any resemblance besides Portuguese having lots of /ʃ/ (“sh” in “sheep”) and /t͡ʃ/ (“ch” in “cheek”) sounds and Portuguese nasals kind of sounding like the Russian “ы” (/ɨ/) sound.
If you knew nothing about Germanic and Semitic languages, you could probably mix-up Dutch and Hebrew, because of how they both use the /x~χ/ (“ch” in the German “Bach” or in the Scottish “loch”) sound.
If you know nothing about Romance and Slavic languages, then Romanian becomes kind of interesting, because depending on the choice of words in the Romanian text, you could mix it up with either Russian (because of “da” [“yes” in both Romanian and Russian], “â” and “î” [both are /ɨ/], and palatalised consonants) or Italian (lots of /t͡ʃ/ and /d͡ʒ/ [“j” in “judge”] sounds).
Metal
Linux
Are you talking about minerals or heavy rock music?
Or maybe the graphics API that Apple made?
Jesus Christ, Marie! They're minerals!
I was talking about music.
I hate to be that guy, but metal and rock aren't the same thing, really. I mean, some bands may blur genre lines, but calling metal heavy rock would be like calling rock heavy blues music.
I am also someone who can talk about metal for hours and I guess this is kind of one of my pet peeves. It's all semantics I know, so don't mind me, friend.
How is Metal defined, exactly? I listened a lot of it in my youth and my best friend still does. Nowadays the term "Metal" seems so vast that I wonder if the word means anything at all.
I think metal is the style of music with most variants. Maybe because it was started by geeks and for geeks. It helps because most metalheads are into some specifics styles while hating others and while there is a lot of styles, when you know what they are you can have an idea if you'll like something or not.
How metal is defined? It is a genre of rock music. It originated in blues rock (Cream, Yardbirds, Deep Purple).
The best definition is heavily distorted guitars, loudness and an overall thickness in the sound.
But yes, the term means something. Metal is probably the most succesfull subgenre of rock. There are bands that muddles the water (you can hear the blues psychedelic rock influence clearly here) between styles, but one thing they have in common is that they are metal first.
Photography, surely. Especially art photography. It’s something I’ve been doing seriously for a decade and studied formally.
Programming language implementation and theory, probably. Although the more technical a topic becomes, the harder it is to maintain a high degree of accuracy without preparation, unless you’re willing to hand-wave away the interesting bits.
I’ve tried to read Camera Lucida and found it to be uninspired and overhyped. Barthes was not a photographer and it really shows. He was a superstar theorist who wrote an anti-theoretical book on photography that’s as much a eulogy to his mother, and obsessed with death. I don’t think his book deserves its reputation, but perhaps because it appeals to emotion and elevates naive intuition (in direct opposition to prevailing theory), and because its author was already well-known, it’s captured the imagination of a lot of people who have little exposure to the theory of photography.
I’m far from the only photographer to be unimpressed: here is a largely critical review from the New York Times at the time it was first released.
My favorite photographic theorist is John Szarkowski. He was Director of Photography at MoMa in New York for three decades starting in the early 1960s, and is probably the most influential curator in the history of the medium. His The Photographer’s Eye (1966) deserves to have every citation handed to Barthes on photography. Where Barthes snarkily remarks that ‘color is a coating applied later on to the original truth of the black and white photograph’, an ultra-conservative and stubborn view, Szarkowski had already championed color photography as legitimate art years before. In the introduction to William Eggleston’s Guide, the exhibition and book that more than anything else forced people to take color photography seriously in art, Szarkowski writes:
How delightful! Barthes champions a delightfully naive (delightful to the average reader unversed in theory) notion of a direct line between photography and truth. He’s obsessed with it, which was then and is now extremely unfashionable, as postmodernist reflections on the relativity of truth in art (and elsewhere) have gained currency. It is delightful because it establishes something we long for, an uncomplicated, unironic line between the thing itself and the depiction thereof. Unfortunately, it’s never that simple. I’m a documentary photographer and I’m very much concerned with truth. I do not subscribe to the idea that everything is subjective. But it would be naive and wrong to think that in art, or even in science, we’re in direct contact with some truth unvarnished by theory or interpretation. Anything, including a very straightforward photograph of a real thing, is meaningless unless we supply additional context. What would a blind man have to say about what is to him a piece of paper? Presumably, to a blind person, the texture of the paper would be more real than whatever is depicted. We don’t have to abandon the obvious observation that there is a relationship between photographs and truth; but we have to be aware of the muddy waters that lie between that truth and us.
Barthes flippantly asserts that removing information from a depiction of reality (namely, color, or in physics terms, the wavelengths of light) brings it closer to the truth. He seems entirely unconcerned with, and uninformed of, the physics and chemistry of photography. Is he aware that different black and white films have varying sensitivities to different wavelengths of light, that in fact even a B/W photograph is not in any way a ‘neutral’ referent of light intensity? If so, he seems curiously certain that this does not matter. Modern digital sensors have twice the resolution of the green part of the spectrum as red or blue, because human eyes are more sensitive to green light.
This sort of thing is symptomatic of Barthes’ approach. One gets the sense that he has little interest in learning about the actual practice of photography, and he deals with other theorists primarily by summarily dismissing their approach in order to continue on in his wilfully naive approach. I prefer to read theorists who have actually picked up a camera in a serious capacity; failing that, they should at least engage with the body of theory that precedes them.
Unfortunately, it seems like studium and punctum are more applicable outside photography than in photography.
Do you think there's still artistic value to film photography?
Absolutely! I think the artistic value of a photograph is largely independent of the exact nature of the recording medium. And if you want to experiment with the medium itself, there's so much stuff you can do with analog photography that you can't easily do with digital! You can't create your own digital camera, but you can quite easily make your own pinhole camera. Large-format cameras naturally have the movements which you need a special tilt-shift lens to recreate on digital, no matter the lens. Cross-processing can create interesting artistic options that you can only create a discount version of in Photoshop. And despite the fact that presets exist to mimic pretty much any analog film digitally, none of them, in my opinion, achieve the actual look of those films. I haven't been able to replicate the colors of my favorite film, Kodak Portra, digitally despite trying many different presets that purport to mimick it. In addition, there is a special look and a special way of working with medium and large format film that can only be done digitally if you have the kind of money that the vast majority of photographers don't.
(A note on "tilt-shift": the well-known effect you can fake in Photoshop only partially replicates what you can do with tilt, and doesn't replicate shift at all. It's also quite gimmicky and not what camera movements were designed for.)
Negative film has distinct disadvantages compared to modern digital cameras. It's far noisier in low light. Once you load a film into your camera, you can't change your ISO until you're done with that roll of film. You can't "gimp" i.e. take a photo, look at it on the screen, and adjust your composition or your settings. (This can be a bad habit that disrupts flow, though, so that's a mixed blessing.) But negative film also has advantages. It has a comparable dynamic range to digital cameras, but it's more located in the highlights whereas digital sensors have more DR in the shadows. The "shoulder" of negative film, that is its response to the highlights, is much smoother and more pleasing to the idea than digital. You can underexpose a digital photograph quite far and still recover a usable image with a modern camera, which you can't really do with film, but you can overexpose film a lot more than digital without blowing your highlights.
I think there's no clear "winner" when it comes to the choice of digital versus analog for art photography. They each come with their own advantages and disadvantages, distinct techniques and approaches which are easier or harder to do (or sometimes outright impossible) with one or the other. It's all down to how you use it.
Many aspects of medicine, unfortunately, but first and foremost is Nephrology.
Because I didn't know what it meant myself. ;)
I guess GP's username makes a lot of sense with that context!
Hah. Indeed. I didn't even notice that. Well chosen, @PeeingRedAgain. :P
I though for sure that was a person who just ate a lot of beets.
Does that actually happen if you eat too many beets? O_o
Yes it does! Sometimes it can get really red too. I've heard there have been many panicked 911/doctor calls about it.
Actually, googling this just made me learn more details about the condition, and its variability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeturia
Why do you consider it be too unfortunate to know about medicine? Does knowing some shit mess with your mind? Are you unsatisfied with your career, or is that more of a philosophical statement?
It's funny: with the death of reddit is fun I just logged into Tildes for the first time in 4 years and saw this comment. I'm pretty sure I was using "unfortunately" playfully here (since being a wonk in medicine is not super exciting).
But in the interim since this discussion we had the pandemic and it feels more like this was inadvertent foreshadowing now....
Common practice period music theory. Preferably with a keyboard or guitar on hand.
Kind of a weird combination of items, But I definitely am very knowledgeable in all of them and could easily talk forever.
Would a good, dedicated 18-years-old boy scout be able to survive alone in the wilderness (for which he/she trained for, of course) for 1-year straight?
Easily.
If you are a Scout and you are 18 it means you are either a Life Scout or an Eagle Scout, it takes a lot to get there and without a doubt those kids would be survivors.
When I was a Life Scout (over ten years ago) we did a few week long solo trips, leaders were near by just in case but we were on our own. I brought some food (clif bars, trail mix, dried fruit etc etc) and a water filter. Otherwise I forested berries and some edible plants. It was an amazing experience.
I also got my degree in filmmaking, so I could talk to you for hours about filmmaking. I've always loved movies and now I get to make short form videos for a living. It's fantastic.
Are you focused more on the theory or production side of things?
If I was to watch one movie just for it's cinematography, what would it be?
If we’re talking purely cinematography-wise, I’d say Peeping Tom by Michael Powell.
It’s one of the first (if not the first) horror movie to put the viewer in the killer’s shoes. It’s very well done and extremely interesting.
The description of this movie is tantilizingly terrifying. I'll be sure to check it out the next time I get the chance.
What's your favorite movie that taught you something about making movies?
That's a good one. I'd say the original King Kong from 1933. I was very little when I saw it and I wanted to learn how they managed to make an ape seem so massive.
Young me thought, "Surely there isn't an ape that's really that big?!" So I started reading books and finding making of photos to learn how they did all of the effects. My mind was blown when I found out that it was really just an eighteen inch tall sculpture that someone moved by hand...
From a filmmaking perspective, I started studying how all of the shots were composed and how all of the different pieces were put together.
It's really one of the best examples of how to put together a great story and direction.
Let's make an AMA together, what you think? Not joking!
That could be fun!
I'd say I'm more focused in theory, but not for lack of trying to make it otherwise.
Oh man...
Microsoft based infrastructures
ServiceNow
ITIL
94-96 B-Bodies
95 Maxima SE
Lego
Commodore computers (PET to Amiga, even the PC line).
Star Trek
AD&D 1st ED.
Big Foot
Crohn's Disease
Pancreatectomy and non-cancerous pancreatic illness
stupid people... ;)
I'm 50, so I when I think of "regular" tabletop gaming, I think of cards (normal cards), Monopoly, Othello, Parcheesi, Connect-Four, Battleship, etc. I was introduced to pencil & paper RPG's back in the early days (mid-late 70's). My older brothers took me to a local game gathering. It wasn't until a number of years later that it sunk in, I actually played early D&D with Gary Gygax as the DM. He was very patient with the handful of us who were under ten. And I was hooked.
About the same time my dad bought our first computer. A Commodore PET 2001. He went to Canada to get it, totally pissing off my mom because it cost more than the new stationwagon he promised to buy her that year. First time I heard my mom drop the F-bomb. Good thing for him, he had already ordered the wagon and it was delivered two weeks after he came back with the PET. Why is this relevant? Because some of the early games were text adventures (Like Crystal Caverns, Zork, Etc.) and also then ASCII graphics based games like Hellfire Warrior, Temple Of Apshai, etc. So literally grown up playing RPGs from the start both on paper and computer.
Short of the long of it, I never felt shock.
What's the differences? Two major things stand out between 1st Ed and 5th Ed for me. 1. Where the heck did all the monsters go? Seriously, I have the MM, MM2, FF, D&DG's, over a hundred Dragon Magazines, etc. And from what I can see, 5th Ed has the MM and that's pretty much it. 2. The rules are much more complicated. Personally, overly so. Of all the people I played with, very few were rule mongers. Follow the basics and then maybe a bit more. About the most complicated we got was creating attack charts specific to weapons. 3. OK, the Armor Class chart still weirds me out. Full Plate is supposed to be AC 2. :)
I played almost every pen/paper RPG from 1976 up to 1992 when life got in the way. There were so many then and most were total crap (IMHO). I still have a few dozen sets of rules, but my most memorable are D&D, Role/Space Master, GURPS, Top Secret, Boot Hill, Palladium (talk about complicated!), Mustangs & Messerschmidts (not really RPG, but it's a blast to play), Champions and Morrow Project (I so want a HAAM suit in real life!).
D&D (Basic and 1st Ed) are just so much easier to play. All later versions of D&D just seem overly complicated. I really tried to get into 2nd-4th and just hated every moment. Too much mental energy required to have fun. I'd say the games I listed have just enough rules to not take away from the role playing experience.
You work at or own an MSP?
Thank god no. I've managed to stay away from that hell.
I've been Microsoft Certified since NT4.0. Also have old defunct things like Compaq, IBM, HP, Netware, 3Com, etc. And added some Cisco, NetApp, VMware, ITIL. I was even an MCT for eight years and taught the 2003 MCSE and 2008 MCITP Enterprise tracks over five years. Teaching was awesome, but I found I was working to much for the money I made and went back to the professional services world.
I've worked for many world wide consulting firms, a few fortune 100 companies and even smaller public companies. Was directly involved in all things my certs were for and many things I never got certs for or where certs never existed.
I'm definitely at a point in my life now, that I don't want to be the guy everyone calls at who knows what hour of the night/weekend/vacation when no one else can figure out how to fix something. So I'm happy to have moved away from support as my primary role.
Plants! I'm nearly done with my B.S. in Plant Science and am enrolled in a fantastic program. I'm hoping to continue my education and go into graduate school for my Ph.D. I can tell you a about:
I could go on and on... My focus is horticulture but I've tried to dip my toes in a little of everything. It's a world unexplored by most (including myself for the longest time). It's beautiful and amazing, I only wish I could open everyone's eyes to it.
I've just started a degree in horticulture! Any tips on making ID more natural? Currently I'm doing great, but damn I feel like I spend so much time using rote memorization as a tool.
Lord of the Rings and other stories from the mythopoeia. Or cosmology.
Welding
3D Printing
Unique firearm mechanisms
Performance vehicle modifications
Semi-professional automobile racing
The wonders of space, in our nearby solar system or elsewhere
Mathematics
Are you ready at all times with fun facts about math?
No, but if you need me to I can construct the complex numbers or give you some unusual constructive number theory proofs using lattice points.
Can you break down a theory proof in layman terms?
I think this depends entirely on the proof. To do this would in part be to share an intuitive understanding of something, but that isn't as easy as it sounds for certain topics. There are statements that are equivalent but mathematicians feel various amounts of intuition about, and things like that aren't easy to work around when it comes to sharing intuition. See the Well Ordering Principle, Axiom of Choice, and Zorn's Lemma for an example. Another issue is that certain things require too much previous theory to easily explain. For instance, it's fairly easy to explain how it can be found that the probability of picking two relatively prime integers from all integers is six over pi squared (supposing that the layman understood lines on the plane well enough and there was something to draw on), but it would be far more difficult to explain nearly any entry to mid level complex analysis proofs. I suspect that to properly explain something to a layman, it would have to be somewhere in-between what you might call foundational and advanced - that is, not "down in the weeds" and within the realm of things that a layman might be able to visualize. Of course this absolutely depends on the person explaining it, and a complete understanding (to the point of being part of their mathematical intuition) of the topic is required. I think that if this was easy to do, mathematics would be a far more accessible field of study.
Is there any person that has contributed to mathematics where the story about how they contributed is as interesting as what they contributed?
Oh this one is easy. Galois is the common example. The story goes that he knew he would probably die in an upcoming duel with a renowned duelist, and wrote down the foundations of an extremely important field of algebra in the nights leading up to the duel. He was only 20, and the problem he solved during those few days was 350 years old.
Personally though, I like Fourier's absolutely insane life during the French Revolution more. The Wikipedia page is inadequate for this one, but is a good starting point. Another interesting point is that he was never able to formalize Fourier Series in his lifetime, and his contemporaries refused to belive that they were correct. I find them to be extremely unintuitive from an informal perspective, and it amazes me that he had the intuition to work with them.
Oh my gosh, Galois had such a chaotic short life! That was definitely worth the read, thank you.
I'll go for the classic ones:
I think you mean "is it created or discovered?" ; )
And that depends on the piece of math in my observation. I would say that most math feels like it's discovered, but there's hardly ever one way to get there. That said, I wouldn't discount the creativity needed for actually getting there either - to the point where I may say that theorems are discovered while proofs are created. I would also suggest that algorithms are created. I have mixed feelings on where axioms fall though.
I think there's distinction between formal logic and math, though you can probably call math a use of deductive logic if you wanted to. I haven't actually considered this question much.
Same, my record unprepped math lecturing is about 6 hours for an REU.
I'm rusty on some of this stuff and can't be absolutely certain of my present accuracy, but I could certainly speak fluently on these topics for a couple of hours.
Who are the gods of world cuisines?
In your opinion, what is the best definition of what is and what is not cyberpunk?
Sorry for no response - just had surgery and I'm not firing on all cylinders yet (there's my steampunk reference for the day).
Mind if I start a separate thread when I'm in a better position to reply coherently?
Sure! Have a good recovery. Don't forget to ping me.
Reformed theology!
Gifs
Do any of y'all at HQG still make actual, oldschool gifs these days, or has everyone switched over to MP4/WebM now?
For gifs that are large in file size and/or length sites like imgur require you to submit it via .gif format and then they convert it to mp4/WebM on their site. Also, one of the regular gif makers (at least he was when I was still active) made a plugin for After Effects that outputs direct .gif, and I know lots of regulars gif makers on HQG use.
I'm pretty much the only one who still posts normal, smaller reaction gifs (that are actually real GIF files). Actual reaction gifs will always be my one true love.
A couple of recent examples from my new favorite show ever, Fleabag:
https://i.imgur.com/pIk3Fl6.gif
https://i.imgur.com/s9vhrKR.gif
Board Games!
Mostly focusing on the design process, but also playtesting, board game development, quoting, manufacturing, crowdfunding, logistics, the state of the tabletop industry.
Is the oft-touted idea that the tabletop industry is experiencing a revival true, in your eyes?
Definitely. The quality of the ideas coming out each year is what got me into the industry. The passion people have for tabletop games, the amount of games being put out each year, and the amount of games people are buying... all speak to a lot of people out there doing a lot of great things.
Drugs and how they act on the brain, how to safely ingest and experiment, how they build tolerance relative to similar chemicals, the history and politics surrounding various substances, and the economic impact decriminalization has had in international communities.
That being said, I myself have been clean and sober for some time now, but the world of recreational drugs has always interested me.
Did you try Salvia? That's the only psychoactive drug that I would like to try sometimes, just because it is so strange and works different to basically every other similar drugs.
I have, quite a few times. Salvia is more of a deliriant than anything, which essentially has you forgetting that you took a drug while you're on it. It also comes in different "X" profiles, which describe the relative concentration of the leaves, but there is no standard way of doing this so it's very difficult to assess how potent your batch will be. On top of that, Salvia is known to have a "reverse tolerance," meaning you can start with a concentration of 100x and work down to say 5x while still maintaining the same, if not more intense trip.
Personally I stay away from psychs altogether now and have for awhile just because it doesn't work well with my bipolar and various medications I'm on, but Salvia especially is a different beast. I always recommend Salvia to anyone planning on tripping on LSD or shrooms for the first time as it's a lot more intense than those two. Imagine an entire LSD trip condensed into just a 5 minute trip, or vice versa, an LSD trip being a Salvia trip that has been stretched over the course of 8-10 hours. Salvia will prepare you for longer psychedelics, but people often underestimate it's potency because of it's legal nature.
All that being said, it's safe to say you should always have a trip-sitter and be in a safe environment when doing Salvia, as you will more than likely be crawling on the ground and drooling or something along those lines. Also, if you plan on doing it, make sure you use a blowtorch and not just a lighter when lighting the Salvia; it requires a much greater temperature to activate than something like marijuana.
Cricket (the sports)
Fitness. Nutrition.
Lots of things, but I can't think of any other than those two. I tend to ramble too so chances are mid-two hours I'd get side tracked and start talking about something else for another (attempt at) two hours, then return to the original subject, etc.
Chemistry! Specifically how the bent geometry of water is unique among simple molecules and is the reason that water-based life is possible in the universe. As water freezes, it traps small amounts of empty space in the structure of ice - making ice less dense than water, allowing it to float. This geometry is also important for the localized partial charges present in the hydrogen and the oxygen, which allow for cohesion and adhesion of water to function and allows plants to passively trandport water throughout their bodies without expending energy!
There's really only 3 things that fit the bill for me:
I could complain about Microsoft's products for hours I think ha.
I can talk about Subaru's for hours. Yamaha two stroke motorcycles. Really just cars/motorcycles in general.
I could talk about IT and it's relation to business operations and efficiencies.
I could quite easily talk about:
Cats. Although I have to give credit to Jackson Galaxy and my mom for raising me in a house full of cats.
I feel like I understand their language like a second nature now. It's telling when someone is new around cars or just hasn't paid much attention to the ones they've been around.
Tail swishing, them walking away from you when trying to avoid overstimulation, learning where each cat likes and dislikes to be petted (and being okay with that and not trying to force the cat to change into a lap cat when theyre aloof, or a calmed down senior-esque cat when they're still a kitten), the slow blink ofc, the "what's up?" head tilt, the finger nose greeting/check in, and so much more about play, routines, water and food, passive entertainment, indoor vs outdoor debate... I could ofc go on and on.
I could go a easy 2 hours on Magic the Gathering, at pretty much any level of the game.
Chess as well. While I'm no master, I know enough to teach for 2 hours.