supersquirrel
A big titty stylish AND nerdy girlfriend who has a stable, well paying job?
Yeah wait what was the part that was bad about this I am really confused…?
Gotta love all my friends who are really into music who happily use Spotify and don’t give a shit it is a weapon of class warfare being used on musicians disguised as a music player!
I basically lost all my drive to make something of my love of creating music seeing how little anyone in my society actually values music or musicians in terms of material support and reward, it is honestly pretty scary how broken music has become.
Big volcanoes look like this
(Mount Rainier, Washington)
The BIGGEST volcanoes look like this
Or this
Notice how they don’t have that nice big pretty volcano cone shape? It just looks like some drunk geologists scribbled on a map and drew circles around a low lying area with a lake or two in it and called it a “volcano” or a “volcanic zone”.
The reason though is that the BIGGEST and most destructive volcanic eruptions tend to happen with lava/magma that doesn’t flow very well and like when you get a stuffed nose, everything gets blocked up. Like many of us, these volcanos don’t solve the problem and go take a decongestant or blow their nose, they just sit there sniveling and stewing, failing to release the pressure that keeps building and building and building.
These eruptions are called felsic eruptions (the opposite of mafic, goopy eruptions you have seen footage of from Hawaii where the lava comes out like a fluid). An immense amount of gas is released by magma as it becomes exposed to the surface (which then we call it “lava”) as the gas is no longer kept in the magma at immense pressures. The magma can’t flow and “pass the gas” so to speak so a plug forms and what you get is a terrifyingly big pressure cooker that just builds and builds like that person on the plane next to you that just keeps sniffing and sniffing and never blowing their nose.
When the built up pressure finally overcomes the plug, the resulting explosion is so catastrophic it doesn’t leave a clean volcano shape. What you are left with is an uneven low topography dotted with lakes that marks the site of an incomprehensibly large explosion, hence the topography of Yellowstone, Wyoming and the Taupo Volcanic Zone on the North Island of New Zealand.
TIME FOR SOME STATS THAT WILL BREAK YOUR BRAIN
"The Taupō Volcanic Zone has produced in the last 350,000 years over 3,900 cubic kilometres (940 cu mi) material, more than anywhere else on Earth, from over 300 silicic eruptions [my edit: “Felsic” means “has lots of silica/silicic (silicic? seriously wikipedia?) and wants to form minerals high in silica like quartz and feldspar”], with 12 of these eruptions being caldera-forming. Detailed stratigraphy in the zone is only available from the Ōkataina Rotoiti eruption but including this event, the zone has been more productive than any other rhyolite predominant volcanic area [my edit: Rhyolite is a record of catastrophe, it is a Felsic, silica-rich igneous rock like Granite except it cooled FAST at the surface instead of in big underground “batholiths” (that make up a good portion of the Canadian Shield and the NE of the US among other places) where the minerals had time to grow into big pretty crystals, same ingredients as Granite but with much more exciting baking instructions] over the last 50,000 odd years at 12.8 km3 (3.1 cu mi) per thousand years. Comparison of large events in the Taupō volcanic zone over the last 1.6 million years at 3.8 km3 (0.91 cu mi) per thousand years versus with Yellowstone Caldera’s 2.1 million year productivity at 3.0 km3 (0.72 cu mi) per thousand years favours Taupo…
…The last major eruption from Lake Taupō, the Hatepe eruption, occurred in 232 CE. It is believed to have first emptied the lake, then followed that feat with a pyroclastic flow that covered about 20,000 km2 (7,700 sq mi) of land with volcanic ash. A total of 120 km3 (29 cu mi) of material expressed as dense-rock equivalent (DRE) is believed to have been ejected, and over 30 km3 (7.2 cu mi) of material is estimated to have been ejected in just a few minutes."…
^https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taupō_Volcanic_Zone
…“The main extremely violent pyroclastic flow travelled at close to the speed of sound and devastated the surrounding area, climbing over 1,500 m (4,900 ft) to overtop the nearby Kaimanawa Ranges and Mount Tongariro, and covering the land within 80 km (50 mi) with ignimbrite [my edit: the name for pyroclastic flow deposits, i.e. pumice and ash, that kind of thing]. Only Ruapehu was high enough to divert the flow. The power of the pyroclastic flow was so strong that in some places it eroded more material off the ground surface than it replaced with ignimbrite. There is evidence that it occurred on an autumn afternoon and its energy release was about 150 megatons of TNT equivalent. The eruption column penetrated the stratosphere as revealed by deposits in ice core samples in Greenland and Antarctica.”
^https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taupō_Volcanic_Zone
why the did I make this stupid meme in feet instead of metric, I am such an asshole -facepalm
In a U.S. context, it is actually really simple. Racism and the age old practice of othering types of people by associating them with a drug (cocaine = rich and white, crack = poor, black and dangerous). That’s it, the full answer is of course a lot more complicated but in the end it is exactly still this dumb and cruel.
politicians across the political divide spent much of the 20th century using marijuana as a means of dividing America. By painting the drug as a scourge from south of the border to a “jazz drug” to the corruptive intoxicant of choice for beatniks and hippies, marijuana as a drug and the laws that sought to control it played on some of America’s worst tendencies around race, ethnicity, civil disobedience, and otherness.
I actually think examining the rise of crack in the US and how it was used as a political wedge and xenophobic tool of fear mongering helps explain why marijuana is illegal in the US the easiest, because the forces and structures are the same for crack being highly illegal as they are for marijuana, just much less thinly veiled and dialed up to 11.
Bluesky is a corporate hedge to delay the social network business from becoming not a business, it is headed by variously naive or disengenous tech people who believe they are creating the future when they are mercenaries for the past.
You know when you see oil company commercials and they have lots of footage of wind turbines, solar panels and other ecofriendly crap? That is bluesky.
As a musician and composer it really took the life out of my identity as a composer seeing an alternative to bandcamp never really form and then one day waking up to it bought by Epic.
I didn’t cry that day, but I might as well have, it made me extraordinarily sad to see that headline and I imagine there are actually countless talented musicians out there who will never actuate on their creative vision because the environment for music production is at this point, downright hostile towards artists and musicians considering the amount of work music production is.
It takes an obscene amount of work to take a song from something that has promise to being as polished as listeners demand nowadays, and listeners won’t even give your song a chance on actual speakers. You have to twist and warp your music so it sounds good on essentially monophonic phone speakers with shitty frequency coverage or otherwise nobody will give it a try on speakers for actually listening to music. Doesn’t matter though, nobody is going to actually support you for the art you make.
🙃
It seems like https://resonate.coop/ is still around tho which seems like a cool idea (a coop owned streaming service where listeners can stream-to-own a song).
American car companies honestly deserve to get obliterated here, sorry it is capitalism shrugs.
If you make shitty cars that are totally out of sync with what the world needs and that makes you massively lose against a country that is willing to actually make practical EVs… then your company deserves to go out of business.
Xonotic by far and away!
Xonotic is like if you took the inspired weapon alt-fire modes from Unreal Tournament (video rundown of weapons) and bolted them onto the downright spiritual movement of Quake (I feel my soul drawing closer to the Flying Spaghetti Monster with every strafe jump I make). You might wonder how the hell you play one of the fastest Quake multiplayer derived shooters in existence using the joysticks on the Steam Deck (the answer is Gyroscope massively complements Joystick aiming once you get used to it). Check out my post on the Xonotic forums detailing the important bits of the control scheme.
https://forums.xonotic.org/showthread.php?tid=9846
Xonotic cont.
I am dead serious the Steam Deck should just come preinstalled with Xonotic and a control scheme like this, it is brilliant and Xonotic is probably the most resource efficient 3D competitive multiplayer game in existence so your Steam Deck battery will love it too… your deck’s fan can take a nap while you play, it is never needed with this game outside of one little brief whir to load a level.
yes that is a restaurant POS machine running objectively the best FPS ever, suck it DOOM
As a last note the bots in Xonotic can be set up to BRUTALLY hard difficulties but the bots are fun to play against so long as you set the difficulty right for you, they move how players should in a strafe jumping game, they push for good items when they spawn on the map and they try to escape when you pin them into a corner with a decisive advantage. It makes a superb pick up and play experience with no internet connection required that you can jump in and out of as chaotically as you want while you are on the go with your deck.
Beyond All Reason
https://www.beyondallreason.info/
Beyond All Reason is the latest in over a decade of Total Annihilation inspired games made on the open source Spring Engine (though I believe most energy is behind a recent fork of the Spring Engine called the Recoil Engine). The RTS genre picking to hedge it’s bets on StarCraft style rts games and not Total Annihilation style rts games I think is a tragedy (though understandable) and in my opinion helped lead to the stagnation of the genre (well except Forged Alliance Forever/SupCom 1 and well… Planetary Annihilation got pretty decent after I stopped paying attention it seems like). Thankfully the open source Spring Engine has been a perennial source of refinement and innovation on full scale RTS games, and the various TA inspired projects over the years have taken ideas originally introduced in TA and elevated them to a level that is honestly pretty shocking for a series of open source community projects in an essentially dead genre of games (classic RTS games).
Beyond All Reason cont.
Brilliant game and like the original Total Annihilation being able to hold shift and que up many commands as well as easily instruct units into formations makes playing BAR so much less of a headache than trying to micro the shit out of everything in a game like StarCraft (see 6:50 in this video). Also unlike StarCraft the fighters and bombers actually fly around like planes instead of being exactly the same as land units except they hover.
Really all you have to do to get the Steam Deck’s controls working well is start with the default WASD and Mouse template and bind a key to toggle gyroscope so you can use it for making your quick fiddly mouse movements with the joysticks perfectly precise and then figure out what key you want to bind shift to in order to make queuing orders up for a unit easy to do (with that template it defaults to a joystick click which for something you will do a bazillion times over the course of a battle ain’t gonna do it chief).
…and sure I wouldn’t jump into competitive games with mouse and keyboard players who have been munching on TA-style RTS mechanics for a good portion of their lives at this point but the reason I recommend this game is over the last 5 years or so the AI has gotten REALLY good, it isn’t like you are playing a dumb unit spamming algorithm that gets an upper hand over you by just cheating on eco, the AI plays fair (at least on moderate settings) and will probe your defenses, tech up and react to your choices. There is also a mode where you fight dinosaurs (called chickens) in a co-op horde survival fashion.
sigh it looks like most of the community has moved to discord though, I fear it will end up killing the community long term if the community only really gathers there to interact. Now is the time for a fediverse Beyond All Reason & Spring/Recoil Engine community on a fediverse reddit-like such as lemmy, kbin etc…!!!
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Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead taught me that in the apocalypse bicycles and slings (NOT slingshots) will be your two most useful tools.
…Or roller skates lol. Seriously though I love this game and the community around it from the bottom of my heart, what a stunning tour de force of an open world survival game. Check out the Sky Islands Mod (included in the vanilla game as an option) if the main game doesn’t feel focused enough to you. Also please join the Lemmy community around Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead, there is a decent amount of activity and it would be a perfect place to ask new questions as a newbie!
https://sopuli.xyz/c/cataclysmdda@lemmy.ml
I don’t have a control scheme for this one yet, but I have no doubt it will be easier to play this game on a Steam Deck than a normal laptop without the number pad (we can just use one of the joysticks!). One of the very very nice things about CDDA is that as overwhelming of a game as it is to learn the control scheme is actually very thoughtfully laid out and when you forget a command just press ? and you can search for commands by describing what they do. You just gotta remember ? and you can learn the rest of the keybindings on the fly.
**Edit: I just finished creating a Steam Deck mapping for Cataclysm DDA that maps the full keyboard to the Steam Deck in an intuitive (in my opinion lol) fashion.
https://sopuli.xyz/post/12374907
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Rigs Of Rods An odd one, an old one, it is an open source driving game with advanced physics.
If the point of the Steam Deck is to play games in contexts that you otherwise would never have been able to, having a game you can mindlessly drive around and crash into things while watching how pretty and cool it looks is a no brainer. This game has years and years of updates and is a quasi-predecessor to BeamNG which is another superb game (though not as resource efficient I believe). It also actually has a more generalist, capable engine than BeamNG appears to (with vehicles being able to have fully articulating parts like cranes that interact with the world).
I really think this game will just keep chugging along doing it’s own thing long into the foreseeable future and it makes a great companion to the deck especially if you have a kid that you might want to give them something to play that is more a simple physics toy than some complex game with lots of rules to memorize or comprehend. Bonus points, the realistic physics emulation of crashes will make it so your kid will never doubt how dangerous driving in reality is :)
“What you think about them, they think about you”
No, this is precisely the issue. Any leftist worth their salt can’t fucking stand conservatives and YET we will still protect their basic human rights and accept them into a collective society.
Conservatives on the other hand are perpetrating violence every single day against leftists and minorities they LOUDLY do not accept into a collective society. They deny abortions for women who are on the verge of death, they advocate for draconian health care policy that massively raises the suicide rates of trans kids because they hate trans kids and they believe deep down in their racism with an unshakable fervor that makes their meager spiritual practice of christianity look sad and pathetic in comparison.
It is far past the point of having a debate with rightwing conservatives, what is left is to intimidate them into shutting up, drowning out their voices and laughing at their tiny hateful visions of the universe.
The social fabric of the US is being ripped apart by conservative white men because they can’t handle how scary using pronouns is and frankly the solution is to activate everybody else, not humor these people yet again with another discussion they are going to approach in a fundamentally disengenous way.
Kind of hilarious how there must be tons of google employees who aren’t in support of unionizing that think this kind of thing is actually going to do shit without a union.
Google employees need to unionize before they will have ANY impact on the direction of their company, period, end of story. I absolutely wouldn’t be surprised if the AWU was involved in this, there are really cool people at Google but it is astounding that the AWU hasn’t reached a critical mass at the company so far given the incredible amount of enshittification going on at the company.
Not faulting AWU people for this, more like pointing the finger at the other employees who think resistance is an individual negotiation with your employer not a collective expression of solidarity.