thomasjkenney
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
re: The End
Phish does a marvelous ‘medley’ mashup of The End and Careful With That Axe, Eugene, called This Is The End, Eugene. A quote:
MOTHER!!!
Mother…I wanna cook you breakfast!
And then? Then I wanna borrow the car…When I was a juvenile delinquent, we built a tiny cannon using a section of 1″ sprinkler pipe. We threaded a cap on one end, drilled a small hole for a fuse, and then filled and fired. Contents were powder from emptied ladyfingers, and the leftover paper as wadding. Ball was a Japanese ‘pinball’ (only remember the derogatory ‘pachinko’), about 8mm dia. We managed to kill a few old surfboards one afternoon before we lost interest.
It’s probably possible to build a functional flintlock using fired clay. Then you need to brew beer to ensure a good supply of salt peter. 🙂
The oak and the fir accidentally fall on the same patch. They struggle for centuries over the same square meter of surface. It’s a slow, ugly, brutal struggle that leaves each with half a life. John Q Hiker walks by and sees a loving embrace.
Hupa, Yurok, Modoc – These weren’t militarily defeated. They had to be surrounded and ‘put to siege’ until they were assimilated. But the mountains are still theirs, and they bent all interlopers to live as they do or miss the bus. There are many winners and losers on both sides of that conflict.
re: flying man
If you’re a Larry Niven fan, it’s a pretty funny joke! Or maybe a cargo cult call for help…hmmm…
re: obtaining gold
A friend-turned-enemy, 1/4 Hupa person to 3/4 Irish gobshite, once described to me his ‘placer’ technique. He’d take a denuded couch cushion, just the foam rubber part, and place it in the bottom of a gully with intermittent stream. Let it sit for a year, and go back and dig it up. Take it somewhere safe, and dissolve the foam rubber with acid. What’s left is a much higher percentage of gold than would normally be found by panning or sluicing.
————————————————————————————————-
Gomorrah – Jerry Garcia
@Red re: earth beams
Gerrard K O’Neill sleeps restless this night.
@Dr D Rich re: easter shenanigans
Another, very powerful, very hated country (name begins with ‘R’) also has a very strong attachment to Easter. Are the trolls that petty, myopic, panicked? I dunno… This almost seems like an inverted South Park, offend anyone/everyone kinda schtick. Draw thousands more cuts. Segway into…
re: mounting legal challenges
Is Gaza a gigantic ‘wrongful death’ suit in construction? Merely a bigger bite out of the bloated, floundering carcass?
@DB Smith: I believe the correct spelling is ‘foo-farraw’. 🙂
Russian technical expertise is superior, IMO, because they understand the cyclic nature of everything. Hence, much better signals tech (radio, encryption, system integration). ‘West’-ish thinking, at least what can be seen, has been trained linear. Happy ending to every story, or some definite ending of some kind. Do this, and that happens. Work toward a permanent steady state of some kind, and never ever ever allow that new equilibrium to be subverted.
—————————————————————————————-
Dersu Uzala – “Look around. All is people.”
re: weak bridge in a dumb location
We (Los Angeles) have one also… Vincent Thomas Bridge. It’s not vulnerable to direct strike, but it’s situated ‘outside’ about 60% of the capacity of the port. We’re one of 3 big port cities on the west coast.
I always considered it our Winchester Mansion, built in envy of the other great port cities that actually require bridges.
re: bear
That’s another beautiful being denied self-actualization. Look back on your own life and see if you spot the times when you had unrestricted frolic or gambol. “Frammin’ at the Jim-Jam! Frippin’ in the Krotz!”
re: open source gov
Bruce Schneier is your ‘nexus point’ for that. He’s written extensively on the subject, and attends conferences of like-minded for the purpose. Some is hogwash, some is dangerous, some very interesting, and some downright brilliant.
re: bird ball
Notice that the bird is throwing the ball at the pavement. Knowledge of physics, and that the ball has special properties not apparent at a glance. Cats do physics too.
———————————————————————–
It is my belief that Samoans are among the elite of human genetic material. Uneducated guesstimate, that.
Fish Stocking – Huell Howser witnesses aerial bombardment of Duck Lake, Sierra Nevada, CA. This is headwaters of Middle Fork San Joaquin River.
I watched half a day of this activity once, near Bishop, CA. There were 2 planes, arrive in tandem, dump in a large lake high in a drainage, then back to the airport for another batch. There are hatcheries that are open to public visit along the east Sierra, including Mount Whitney Fish Hatchery, near Manzanar.
IIRC, when I witnessed this (25-30 yrs ago?) it was Desolation Lake, in the Humphreys Basin, South Fork Jan Joaquin. It’s a large lake for alpine zone, and high in it’s drainage with only a few small tarns directly tributary. As a rule, highest lakes in a chain will be dead zone, no fish or very small. The second lake and downstream will have plenty. Not sure why this is the case, something to do with nutrient levels I’m sure (will read about in future). The guy who told me about this went on to distract me with fly tying and usage information, with a convincing demonstration of his skills.
@jb-hb re: loyalty, fealty, branches of spirituality
Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight – This is a translation, but has the original (??) text along-side. It’s quite engaging, but a slog.
re: “That lets the man play Chess and Civilization VI online, making his life much more fun.”
That is just f#(<ing amazing. Samuel R Delany story, Nova (1968), has some characters wired up to mining equipment, industrial machinery, etc.
Civ VI is a puke-inducing greenwash. The whole tech tree ushers you in to AGW, and the other NPCs won’t shut up about it. I played 2 games, and just stopped.
re: Ibogaine
Probably does work. I read some about it back in late ’80s. Very effective, but was said to induce a terrifying 3-day quasi-shamanic journey into your soul. Methadone continued to be popular, for some reason.
re: cultural revolution
Anecdote: Someone I know raised 2 kids to adulthood, and they’re rocketing off to better things. They’re twins. One son, one daughter. The daughter succumbed to the pressure, is a ‘person of alternate lifestyle’ in the most inoffensive way possible. The son has flatly rejected the programming, dropped out of colege, grown a manly beard, found a pike-smart hippie chick…damnest thin I ever saw! 🙂
—————————————————————–
@jb-hb: Remember (if you know, express it) that those ‘failings’ are not light-switch. I feel exactly those, but to different degrees. For instance, I am not ambitious, do not desire greatness. Recognition, of course! I can accept much change, in fact seek some just to see it, but I’m brittle in many areas, moreso with age.Thanks for Vinge rec. Read that (Zones of Thought Trilogy) years ago, and will second the rec. He can be as info-dense as Heinlein, really a treat!
I note that many recent actions look to me like attempt to set up Peace Authority (Peace War, Marooned). Anyone not in the club gets busted down to 100-watt-per-day lifestyle.
Relevant to cultural rev – I kinda lost interest in Benford and Vinge when they wrote some very ‘cardboard’ lesbians. No one, especially not lesbians, should forgive them for that. It seemed odd timing, and forced.
—————————————————————–
Uncle Jack – Dewa Budjana
re: kugel fountain
SOFIA Telescope – the unit is mounted in a kugel, a colossal gimbal of pressurized oil. This is the same principle used for a crank bearing in ICE. The crank rides on bushings with tiny oil ports. Likewise glacier transport downhill…meltwater bearing.
re: lazarus catfish
That’s a better trick than the antifreze-endowed amphibians of the Arctic.
Good resource for on-the-ground snow conditions in CA: ALERT Wildfire Cams
Bersepeda di hutan. “Everything’s so f#(+ing GREEN!!!“
Another one bites the dust:
CHP Incident 240301LA0293
Mar 1 2024 4:05AM
CFIRE-Car Fire
Big Tujunga Canyon Rd / Big Tujunga Dam RdMar 1 2024 8:58AM [12] [Rotation Request Comment] 1039 GIRARD and PETERSON TOW (XXX) XXX-XXXX ETA 30 OR LESS- COPYS FULLY BURNED ELECTRIC VEH BIG TUJUNGA CANYON MM 6.65
Mar 1 2024 8:56AM [11] LL 1185
Mar 1 2024 8:56AM [10] A98-065 COLA, PLS ROLL 1185 FOR FULLY BURNED ELECTRIC VEH
Mar 1 2024 8:55AM [9] Incident 240301LA0293 was reopened. Comment: Incident Reopened : REQ 1185 FOR FULLY BURNED ELECTRIC VEH
Mar 1 2024 5:57AM [8] C98-062 HEALTH INSPECTOR 97 ADV TO MONITOR VEH FOR 4 HOURS UNTIL 0930 HRS // NOT REQ CHP TO 1023 // JUST REQ TO RE-RESPOND AT 0930 W/ 1185
Mar 1 2024 4:43AM [7] C98-062 VEH 1124
Mar 1 2024 4:36AM [5] C98-062 ON BIG TUJUNGA CANYON RD AT MM 6.65 // FD 1023ING W/ ELECTRIC VEH FOR HEALTH- HAZMAT ETA 1-1.5 HORS
Mar 1 2024 4:06AM [2] ALL THEY CAN ADVS IS VEH FIREInformation courtesy of
Last updated: 03/01/2024 10:04am
Sarmat and the like have so much kinetic energy upon delivery that you likely get a satisfactory pop from an empty chassis. Maybe even approaching bunker buster levels. Now imagine 100kg of gold, completely passive warhead, delivered on Whitehall. Tumor excised, and something for the peasants to use in reconstruction efforts.
@poppie: That’s pretty darn close to my view. Kewl!
Skidoo – full movie
Groucho Marx plays God, a mobster gone anational, taken to the high seas with a supermodel concubine. Cast of thousands, including Carol Channing, Jackie Gleason, George Kennedy in a prison guard acid trip scene!.
@tkd re: authoritative cat
The cat knows any being can only experience a finite set of points on a continuum of reality. That’s why they can knock stuff of the shelves and give you the “I didn’t do it.” look. “Wasn’t me! It was Schrodinger’s cat whot dunnit!”
You cannot see the sharpness of my blade
You can glimpse only the vague outline of my armor
But, sadly, these things are true for my as well.———————————————————————-
Black hole function/purpose, hmmm….interesting. On one hand, we have the heat death of the universe, entropy allowing everything to go to s#!+ in a fog of spun-down particles. On the other hand, black holes accreting a weird kind of potential energy, a reverse kinesis, where they don’t do the falling, you do. “Why did you hit my fist with your face?!?” My guess is they, too, see their deaths. But it may be something very anticlimactic, or traces of these events would be everywhere. Dark matter, maybe? Spun-down particles?
Black hole is analogous to financial bubble, as are other celestial bodies. Entropy allows complex structures to emerge because those structures are better capable of removing energy from matter.
@Dr D re: “Like I said, this can spread contamination fast, faster than a computer virus, which it is. Post-Truth world. Perhaps already past-tense.”
So everybody keep posting those videos and tweets… ’cause they are totally true and above reproach.
Here are some of my early (last year) attempts to use Stable Diffusion to generate images. These are among only a few of the darker stuff I attempted, and didn’t push in this direction. The first image is pretty innocuous, artsy, not even Bosch weird. The second image, for example, did not require much push but yielded rather vivid results. NOTE: In ‘prompt-speak’ the by-line is a request for work in the style of that artist, in this case the well-known SciFi/fantasy illustrator Michael Whelan.
———————————————————————————–
Prompt: allah opposes shaitan over a churning sea of human activity, by breugel
Negative Prompt:
Seed: 2677739723
Stable Diffusion model: E:\EasyDiffusion\models\stable-diffusion\sd-v1-4.ckpt
VAE model: E:\EasyDiffusion\models\vae\vae-ft-mse-840000-ema-pruned.ckpt
Sampler: euler_a
Width: 512
Height: 512
Steps: 25
Guidance Scale: 7.5
Hypernetwork model: None
Use Face Correction: E:\EasyDiffusion\models\gfpgan\GFPGANv1.3.pth
Use Upscaling: None
Prompt: allah opposes shaitan over a churning sea of human activity, by michael whelan
Negative Prompt:
Seed: 458661970
Stable Diffusion model: E:\EasyDiffusion\models\stable-diffusion\sd-v1-4.ckpt
VAE model: E:\EasyDiffusion\models\vae\vae-ft-mse-840000-ema-pruned.ckpt
Sampler: euler_a
Width: 512
Height: 512
Steps: 25
Guidance Scale: 7.5
Hypernetwork model: None
Use Face Correction: E:\EasyDiffusion\models\gfpgan\GFPGANv1.3.pth
Use Upscaling: E:\EasyDiffusion\models\realesrgan\RealESRGAN_x4plus.pth
Upscale By: 4
@oroboros re: catturd
What’s the problem? Picture of a bear, photographed through a polarized filter. You certainly got one of myriad possible matches for the terms you supplied.
Ask it what’s best to feed your 4-month-old baby.
re: cowboy appeal
Nobody I know,
Cowboy or no,
Would seize that dough
And vote for Joe!…yeah, I know where the exit is. Stop kicking me!
@tdk and the erosion of language
Yep. Sigh…
The ‘JEW=BAD’ thing is a meme, a generalization. Memes are the Diet Coke of conversation. People who rant on about JEW=BAD are, in my eyes, meme-ing themselves into irrelevancy.
I saw MQ9 on a tour of Edwards AFB once. It’s an interesting piece of equipment. The side of the ‘head’ that was open to us contained 2 half-height racks of computer gear, looked mostly standard with some fancy custom bits. No eyes, had a very HR Giger/Alien appearance, probably intentional. They were proud of it, sitting in a spotless room with a view of the tarmac, where many F22s sat undergoing maintenance under cabanas.
If They are listening to smart folks, these could be distraction. Vinge had conceptualized drones that were microscopic, or nearly, and would be used in vast clouds. Each only had enough power to say “Here I am, and here’s a few environmental params like incoming photons…” with a tiny bit of calculation power that could be ‘collectivized’ for big tasks. So, not drone swarm, but drone dust.
A similar concept was explored by another author (name escapes me) with spray-on photodetector paint. Spray a splotch in the corner of a room, and it spies for you.
re: missing music, that is a tragedy.
I have a recording of Shostakovitch #8, only tried to listen a couple times, can’t finish. It’s harrowing, like you can listen to an Otto Dix painting. That’s the terror of war. Bartok’s Miraculous Mandarin is the terror of corruption and degeneracy, also pretty harrowing, but closer to a good movie soundtrack.
@WES re: difficulty
My brother is dyslexic. He almost got his pilot’s license, and is now also almost through airframe mechanic school. Difficult, sheesh! But for a motivated person, it’s called ‘just living.’
More, because 33km of bike ride did not scratch surface…
The thing about Terrapin Station is odd. Over time, I’ve come to view it as a ‘place’ one can go to, or may end up in, when something unknown is needed to move forward in life. It’s a very Vonnegut-ian concept. You go there unaware of the direction, almost always accidental.
A thing is found there, or experienced, that allows you to move forward in your life. Or maybe you don’t find it and you’re stuck in twilight for a while or for the duration. This thing may be specific to you, or it may be a general thing you suddenly can detect. The thing is sometimes an epiphany, sometimes mercy, sometimes freedom, sometimes justice. Maybe you found something in which you lost faith actually exists.
All roads to Terrapin are cryptic. Most don’t know and it’s serendipity. Of those who do know, seldom is the journey undertaken because the need makes itself known to them, and only then. To return is not forbidden, and some may require frequent visits. Many people may ride the same train at once! (Whether that’s a karass or a granfaloon, that’s maybe out-of-phase speculation, sorry.)
Anyway, kinda vague. I’m finding I have a thread of strong spirituality throughout my life, but I’ve never given 2 fermented figs for tales of Sky Faeries gonna bless my Cadillac. It’s been a much more energy-flow focused spirituality.
Love and Peace – Quincy Jones, Walking in Space
@DB Smith re: “Most good whores will be anyone you pay them to be.”
They will also tell you their safe word, and show you the gun.
re: death of America
All around are people who watch for that star, that beacon, a screaming in the night that announces the birth of the new nation. Come and see!
————————————————————————————————-
With nothing to believe in
The compass always points to Terrapinalso Hunter
@low-flow showers
Shower heads for US markets have a restrictor plate installed. Ditto most faucets intended for home install. It’s easy to remove in the faucets, can be trickier in the shower heads. If you order from Amazon, it is very likely (my last 3) the fixture arrives without a restrictor plate… i.e. intended for non-US sale.
There was a time, mid ’70s, drought mitigation was rage. Friends down the street from me were peeing in a bottle (a ‘proto-woke’ family). Bulletins were published about how to put an object in your toilet tank to reduce the amount of water per flush.
@DB Smith re: possible betrayal
Always the possibility. I view him as ‘just another personality’ on a stage. His questions showed a kind of US-bred linearity of thought. “If we do this, then Problem X is done, right?” I thoroughly appreciate his adversarial approach to some things, true journalism not ‘gotcha’ crap.
My hope, if/when ‘everybody and his dog Spot’ sees this and gets a chance to read it and really digest, that it will make a lot of folks feel not so lonely. Much of this isn’t new to folks in these parts, but the ripples will flow through former MSM viewers. I wish he’d pursued some other stuff re: energy. The war is bad, but is a freakshow distraction, but maybe necessary so some history can be properly aired.
May a few more BTU now flow into the goose…
