MrHoatzin

I don't hold dumbbells, barbells and the like in same contempt I reserve for stationary machines with levers, pulley systems and rotating resistance. I also kinda dig rowing machines (I have one in my dining room, facing out at the jungle beyond my front porch; it's a pretty zen place to row). And no doubt people with experience and understanding of exercise are invaluable partners when doing it. There just has to be a more holistic way to exercise than the gym machine model (I wish holistic wasn't such a compromised word). It's just as dreary as sitting in a cubicle, or alone in traffic, or staring at always churning internet feeds, a pig in a cage on antibiotics—them sort of feels. Biking in comparison feels like fucking freedom. The buzz of the chain, the roll of pebbles, the whiff of semi-crispy-still-sorta-lush grasses and flowers, critters and joggers ducking out of your way—with only a parabolic trajectory between your face and the pavement—maaaan!

And accidentally dethrones the whole of capitalism including the lizard people—surprise! They were real all along! Should've listened to Alex Jones.

Texas is a right-to-work state, which—long story short—means that if you have to work for a living, you're a slave. Good luck standing up to your owners! There is no way to poke an owner in the eye and them not to a, take it personally, and b, take revenge.

I dunno about heroes. Hero is such a loaded word, too heavy, lofty and kinda by definition impossible to truly relate to on a direct, human level. I meet a lot of people who I'd like to be like when I grow up—old punks and salty cowboy artists—but it happens in bits and pieces and there is no one person who embodies entirety of my aspirations comprehensively. I tend to have a lot of pop idols. The barrier to entry is lower and it can fit a lot of people I'm infatuated with, usually those who make things or can cook up a good jeremiad. Like, Ursula Le Guin, RuPaul, David Graeber, Slavoj Žižek, Sarah Kenzior, Ken Layne, Andrew Hussie, Evan Dahm, Tim Schafer, etc... ¬¬¬ It is interesting that I don't have the same tic to put on a pedestal your regular, garden variety kind, virtuous people like most of you do. I dunno what that tells about me. It's not that I don't value or respect them, I just don't find myself readily adopting their priorities on the MY HERO level? I dunno. Maybe I should try getting less enamored by cleverness.

I can't abide exercise with super-specialized machines in sweaty stalls, staring at TVs, or my own lumbering reflection. It embodies all that bugs me about how modern western human sees the world—ie, to be a healthy animal you have to spend hours a week maxing your stats on some bullshit contraption engineered by experts to fix your woes—and god forbid you do anything without consuming media while you're at it. The Crossfit model is somewhat more appealing to me in this light—a Montessori gym!—but it fixes what's wrong about gyms in an extreme way, over-correcting in another bullshit direction. Plus it's more expensive than reasonable for a drill sergeant and some kettle bells in a dilapidated strip mall... Soooooo I bought a cheapo mountain bike at a Frankenbike, been cleaning it up (still need to get it to where the derailers don't arbitrarily throw the chain in the general direction of my shifting) and biking about 20 miles a day, Texas summer permitting. Haven't had a bike since I left my last one in Belgrade, in the '90s, when I left for the States. I feel amazing. Why did I ever stop biking? It is still a machine that I'm interacting with to get my enorphin fix, but at least I go on weird high-speed adventures through natureful chunks of San Antonio—and I feel less likely to destroy my knees and ankles than I would with just running (what with my not inconsiderable heft). Looking forward to dragging this bike (or riding it) to a state park for a proper hit of nature cycling.

I'm reading a book called 1491 by Charles C. Mann. It's a collection of most recent best archeology+anthropology about the Americas before 'Peans brought their pet smallpox and passively murdered 90% of humanity already on the continent—before they even stepped deeper into the heartland to declare the continent empty, whereupon they could proceed to murder the widows and orphans of the pestilence... It goes into the invention of maize—I say invention because the engineering of corn from its ancestor plants is far more fantastic a feat of domestication than the paths taken by Old World grains, genetically and conceptually speaking. Really interesting book. Written about ten years ago. Also recently passed through my hands and eagerly recommended: Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching. Ursula Le Guin edited a version of the book that is pretty fantastic (the copy I rented from the library had the audio book as well, read by her! ). She retains some of the ambiguities and subtleties in the language that translators historically translated with a more macho, "manual for princes" skew which she saw as somewhat distracting from the message. I've been devouring all kinds of books about alternate patterns of thinking and conception of the world at large, in preparation for the project to come after Hobo Lobo wraps up. Dune was p baller material in this regard. If anyone can point me in the direction of other fascinating works of anthropology, philosophy or speculative world-building fiction, I would greatly appreciate it!

Blogger doesn't give you access to the metal the way WordPress does—because it is more of a goog service for luddites than a cms in a zip you install on your server—so I doubt there is as as lush an ecosystem of 3rd party e commerce plugins.

The simplest way to go about it would be to just bake some PayPal buttons—wanting to support the relatively obscure iDeal dealio makes it more complicated. I would suggest looking into any WordPress store plugins. Most of those are not free, though some decent ones come in pretty cheap, and it is relatively trivial to set up a WP site.

Oh man these are sooooo coooooooooool!! The other day I dug out my childhood LEGO and built this weird little weird little wobbly Boschian automata which I will probably expand and make properly cool as soon as I find time and inclination to do so. My LEGO is very much 80s and early 90s and I have little inclination to buy new sets, but who knows. The grand centerpiece of my collection—what'll allow me to make some really dope automata—is the fabled Technic plotter, set 8094, and its motherlode of gears. Last time I looked at new Technic sets a few years back, very few of them seemed to be mechanically oriented which was a huge bummer.

Hello. This thread is now the relevant minecraft server info thread. WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW: Server address: game.idlemc.com Much info about the server can be found at http://www.idlemc.com (Currently out of date, will be updated now that the server is back) If you log in and your name is grayed out, that means you do not yet have the building credentials. If you wish to build in the server, please send tabacco a PM on the forums and ask. Don't be a dick. Map of the server will live here. We're currently in the SEVENTH EPOCH of the Thumb. The frontier is a dangerous place, but we will persevere. Past epochs can be downloaded from http://www.idlemc.com/past-epochs/

Way to get our hopes up, jerk.

Also people were excited to be supporting Double Fine directly, and the self-funding landscape is drastically different these days.

Man, so glad this thread exists. I tried and failed to find these summaries on several official online places I looked. I probably didn't try hard enough or something?

I've been meaning to get back into toying with video again, but I don't have a fancy mac at home. All I have is this PC that is now pushing five or six years old, but it still has a Pentium 4, 3GHz, 2.5GB of RAM, which is not something I feel inclined to scoff at. I've only ever worked with Final Cut and some iMovie. I prefer the former, the latter's gimpy toolset I find quite infuriating. Though I don't really see myself needing much fanciness right out of the gate, I like knowing that I could, if I needed to, do more complex things. What software would you suggest I try out?

Sam Harris: Science can answer moral questions Hj9oB4zpHww

Oh, also, Panic?!

Whoa

He's dead.

Yeah, just double down on the thumb nepotism. I would vote for more discussion of TellTale games as well. Double Fine shows plenty of sausage- making so their process wouldn't necessarily be as interesting to thumb... It is funny how many wrong reviews tend toward WHY DON'T YOU JUST MAKE A MOVIE IF YOU'RE SUCH A STUPID STORY QUEERDO?! It is a testament to the effectiveness of the format that for all these people exploring by-products of life in a completely empty house equates with a cinematic experience—and yet they hated it because the story is allegedly simplistic (no one got to save the world) or there is no game (but memmorpergers and jearpergers with their tissue-thin excuses for mechanics get a pass). WHERE'S MY PAINT-BY-NUMBERS MONOMYTH?! I THOUGHT I WAS PLAYING A GAME!? Whose fault is it that these obnoxious children and manchildren organize so vocally over such stupid objections? How do we nerf this culture that screams PRETENTIOUS at everything that is not the same shit they've been eating for a decade and a half?

Citizen My So-Called Life of video games. An important game, goddamn. I really enjoyed the tension between the game tropes that made it in (filler books on shelves, reused furniture, more or less linear path through the bafflingly laid-out house, ghosts, etc.) and stuff that was removed. It is quite a daring salvo in the destruction of video games, that all this stuff we call a game turns out to be so much baggage. I'm looking forward to whatever Fullbright does next. Hopefully it will continue the precedent of removing game from games, only with more money shoveled into what remains. The only con line item in my review is that I wish the typography was better, which, you know, prt ¬¬ Overall, reminds me of But I'm A Cheerleader, a really sweet movie that—looking at the Rottentomatometer just now—was rather violently reviewed for some reason...

I hope Steve will give himself a bonus if he gets a high enough metacritic score.

Daaaaaang, this is some baller stuff! I made this relatively recently and plooped it all over the place—aaaand here it is again! Cause it is topical: Raz as a Polecat

Have you tried blurring everything just a shade, then using the levels to pen in the grays on either extreme?

me me me me me at some point in the future, still haven't had the chance to play it, steam me up yo: mysteriousHoatzin

Ping the thread when the mac version drops, k thx!