#auto-cluster

[narcissisticpdcultureis]

NPD culture is being autosexual/autoromantic/attracted to yourself in any way

.

[bbq-ishere]

yea sure i will post my brainrot

[nommedtail]

why do totter and stainless both require so many ROCKS

[techdriveplay]

2024 Hyundai i30 Sedan N - TDP review

The 2024 Hyundai i30 Sedan N continues to be a beacon of excitement in the performance sedan category, offering a potent blend of power, precision, and practicality. With its latest updates, this iteration seeks to refine an already thrilling driving experience, while still delivering the spirited performance that has made the i30 N series a favorite among enthusiasts. Whether you’re carving up a…

[lesbianchemicalplant]

If you're surrounded by people who call trans people by their deadnames, you're most likely in a hate group. But a possible alternate explanation is that you're in academia. And it's not because that many academics are openly transphobic -- they just don't know that the site they fully trust, Google Scholar, is telling them to do it. Google Scholar was developed in 2004 and has changed very little since then. It supplanted a lot of hard-to-use library search indices by providing a Google-style interface with a single search box. Now it's the most name-recognized site for searching for almost any paper by almost anyone. One aspect of the design was, authors are just a kind of search term. An author is a cluster of different ways to abbreviate a name, like Firstname Lastname, Firstname M. Lastname, and F Lastname, and you might see different forms in different places, but the underlying name will never change. This is because Google Scholar was built by, and for, cis men with unchanging Western-style names. The "almost anyone" who you can search for excludes trans people, among a lot of other people it represents poorly. And because Scholar will not change, it should perish.

I fought the goog, and the goog won I changed my name in research, retroactively. I broke the assumptions of Google Scholar, and Google Scholar hid my papers from search results when it couldn't model what was going on with them. It would particularly suppress search results for my new name, which were just confusing distractors for the results it really wanted to show, for my deadname. If you ask it how to cite me, it will auto-generate you a citation of my deadname. I fought hard to remove citations of my deadname, replace PDF files, take down papers I couldn't replace, take away all the evidence of my deadname that I possibly could. Not to keep it from the eyes of people, but to keep it out of the Google Scholar model. I partially succeeded in making my new name more searchable, and even got it to show up in the auto-generated citations in some circumstances. For a fleeting moment, I claimed victory. But Google Scholar countered by finding my absolute most obscure things that count as publications, ones that I can't kill because they were not really alive in the first place, and bringing them to the top of my search results, so it can use them to keep helpfully directing you to my deadname. Signing in and claiming papers on an "author page" doesn't help, because author pages are one tiny link in search results that nobody clicks through, because the papers are already right there. Most trans people quit research rather than deal with this, and even though I found myself with more energy and opportunity to fight for my name than most, I quit research too.

There! We fixed it for cis people Google knows about this. I raised the issue with them in February 2019. It became an internal bug report in July 2019, which I have never seen, but from what I've heard about it, it quickly went far astray from what I was trying to tell them. "Allies" inside Google came up with extremely dumbass theories of how to represent trans people in a way that fit Google's preconceptions. I've posted about the problem at various times on social media (mostly Twitter when that was a thing). I tweeted about how Google's name model doesn't even work for cis women, given that many women change their names at some point in their lives. This got some traction and led to an amazingly quick response, along the lines of "oh shit! We fixed it for cis women." The new feature they added allowed a person (who had claimed papers using a Google account) to link together their multiple names, as long as they were okay with all the names being shown at the top of their search results. The first trans person to try using the feature was extremely surprised and dismayed by the prominence it gave to their deadname, and asked "do you think they talked to even a single trans person about this feature?" Nobody has ever heard Anurag Acharya, the creator of Google Scholar, say anything about the problem of name changes on his platform, or really anything attributable to him at all. But I know he knows about it.

The one time we got their attention Google got banned as a sponsor of Queer in AI, partially because of Google Scholar, though if you ask most people now they'll say it's because they profit from AI weapons systems. Which is also a thing. But Google Scholar was enough of a part of the issue that an exec actually got on the phone with non-Googlers about it for the first time. The exec was Jeff Dean, head of AI, whose organization does not actually include Google Scholar. When pressed on the issue by Queer in AI, he defended Scholar's lack of name changes, saying -- I believe this to be a direct quote -- "we have to ensure accurate information". Calling trans people by their names does not fall under the category of "accurate information" to the latently transphobic Jeff Dean. In another rare instance of public communication, a couple of painfully assimilationist trans Google FTEs promoted a horrible idea where publishers would have an API for informing Google that someone's name had changed in their archives. That's right, you wouldn't control your own name, dozens of publishers would, all with their own processes ranging from gatekeepy to nonexistent, and you'd have to out yourself and beg to every one of them to press the Here's A Trans Person button. The only good thing about this proposal is that it was so obviously unworkable that they didn't do it. Aside: If you are a Google full time employee, and you are trans, you are assimilationist. I'm sorry. I know your life circumstances mean you have to be. There used to be non-assimilationists there, and they joined the union and got illegally fired in 2019, or they quit in solidarity with the people who were fired in 2019 or 2021, and that leaves you, keeping your head down and keeping your job. You're still reading this paragraph, and that's amazing, so here's what I need you to know: from your position, you cannot advocate for the needs of trans non-Googlers, unless you allow trans non-Googlers into the conversation. Contract workers, though, you're cool. You fought for a trans man, working at a Google data center, to stop having to wear his deadname on his badge, and you won.

There is a solution I know that Google would not invest a lot of development effort into fixing a pet project like Google Scholar (though, again, "we fixed it for cis women" came remarkably quickly). I know that Google is institutionally incapable of letting people control their own identity without being a gatekeeper, that it's just not in the realm of things they dream of. There is still a solution. It's so easy. It plays to Google's strengths. There's even a business argument for it. They just need to shut it down. Google Scholar can have a plot in the Google graveyard next to Hangouts, Picasa, AngularJS, Cardboard, Inbox, Orkut, Knol, and the dearly departed Reader. It will be missed, for a bit, and then real librarians and archivists can get back to doing the job that Google monopolized. They'll know how to do it better this time. The Internet Archive is already doing it, and they let trans people change their names. I made a site about all this, scholar.hasfailed.us. I haven't been raising the issue enough since the fall of Twitter, and I think it's time that I get back to it.

[wheelsgoroundincircles]

Custom 1953 Muntz Jet Convertible

This 1953 Muntz Jet convertible underwent a three-year custom build under previous ownership, and it was purchased by the seller in 2021. The car is powered by a fuel-injected 5.7-liter LT1 V8 engine paired with a four-speed automatic transmission and a Ford 9″ rear end, and it is finished in Apple Pearl with a white Carson-style removable top over gray snakeskin-style Naugahyde upholstery. Features include custom bodywork, an Art Morrison frame, power-assisted steering, four-wheel disc brakes, airbag suspension, Painless Performance wiring, and more modified and fabricated details. This custom-built Muntz is now offered with a copy of Rodder’s Journal magazine featuring a story on the build and a clean California title in the name of the seller’s business.

Custom 1953 Muntz Jet Convertible

The steel, aluminum, and fiberglass body is mounted on an Art Morrison ladder frame that was boxed and finished in semi-gloss black, and the floor was raised 3″. The exterior was repainted in a Sherwin Williams two-stage Apple Pearl mixed by the late Stan Betz. Features include a chopped Duvall-style windshield, 1950 Chevrolet headlights, dual Appleton spotlights, 1951 Ford Victoria side windows, and a white removable Carson-style top fabricated to match the height of the chopped windshield. Additional equipment includes color-matched rear fender skirts and chrome bumpers. Wear from fitting the top is noted on the rear deck.

Custom 1953 Muntz Jet Convertible

Steel wheels sourced from a 1976 Dodge measure 15″ and are mounted with Cadillac Sombrero-style covers and whitewall tires. A matching spare fitted with a BFGoodrich Silvertown tire is mounted within a rear-mounted Continental-style chrome carrier. A Mustang II front end accommodates power rack-and-pinion steering , and the car rides on an electronically-adjustable Air Ride Technologies airbag suspension system along with 2” lowered front spindles, Strange Engineering tube shocks, a rear Panhard bar, and front and rear sway bars. The seller reports that the front control arm bushings were recently replaced.

Custom 1953 Muntz Jet Convertible

Custom 1953 Muntz Jet Convertible

Braking is handled by GM G-body-sourced calipers matched with Ford Granada discs up front and Ford SVO-specification calipers and discs at the rear.

Custom 1953 Muntz Jet Convertible

The cabin was customized by Jim’s Auto Trim of San Diego, California, and features Glide bucket seats and a rear bench trimmed in gray snakeskin-style Naugahyde upholstery, along with matching treatments for the dash trim, headliner, and door panels. Additional equipment includes a 1952 Lincoln steering wheel mounted to a shortened Lincoln steering column, gray cut-pile carpet, and a Pioneer stereo housed within a custom center cubby.

The engine-turned “Hollywood” instrument cluster houses Stewart Warner gauges consisting of an 8k-rpm tachometer, a 160-mph speedometer, and auxiliary readings for fuel level, battery charge, oil pressure, and water temperature. The five-digit odometer displays 25k miles, though total chassis mileage is unknown. A Lokar pedal assembly was fitted during the build.

Custom 1953 Muntz Jet Convertible

The Corvette-sourced 5.7-liter LT1 V8 features a polished fuel intake manifold along with billet aluminum valve covers, and additional features include an Opti-Spark distributor, a Griffin aluminum radiator, and a wiring loom sourced from Painless Performance Wiring. A set of long-tube headers are connected to a 2.5″ exhaust system equipped with dual Dynaflow mufflers. The seller reports that the oil was recently changed.

Custom 1953 Muntz Jet Convertible

Power is routed to the rear wheels via a four-speed 4L60E automatic transmission and a Ford 9″ rear end with with 3.55:1 gears and Strange Engineering 31-spline axles. Additional photos of the underside, drivetrain, and suspension components are presented in the gallery below.

Custom 1953 Muntz Jet Convertible

The car was featured in issue #36 of Rodders Journal magazine

[vexwerewolf]

hmmm...artillery balor...

I could tell you about how completely unsuited the Balor is to this task, but you know what? Fuck it. Okay. Remember: you asked for this.

-- HORUS Balor @ LL6 -- [ LICENSES ] HORUS Balor 2, HA Barbarossa 3, SSC Metalmark 1 [ CORE BONUSES ] Auto-Stabilizing Hardpoints, Superior by Design [ TALENTS ] Leader 3, Siege Specialist 3, Engineer 3 [ STATS ] HULL:2 AGI:2 SYS:0 ENGI:4 STRUCTURE:4 HP:21 ARMOR:0 STRESS:4 HEATCAP:10 REPAIR:5 TECH ATK:+1 LIMITED:+2 SPD:4 EVA:8 EDEF:10 SENSE:5 SAVE:13 [ WEAPONS ] Integrated: Prototype Weapon III MAIN MOUNT: SUPERHEAVY WEAPON BRACING HEAVY MOUNT: Siege Cannon (Nanocomposite Adaptation) // Auto-Stabilizing Hardpoints [ SYSTEMS ] Hive Drone, Personalizations, Armament Redundancy, Reactive Weave, Type-3 Projected Shield

I call this One Trick Man.

You pick a target you don't want to deal with today and hit them with Type-3 Projected Shield. You pick a firing position out of line of sight of your enemies, preferably with hard cover, and put down your Hive Drone. You wait until your second turn.

At the start of your second turn, you observe the state of the battlefield from your artillery nest. If there's a large cluster of enemies, you fire the Siege Cannon in Siege Mode, and if there's just one target you particularly want obliterated, you use Direct Fire Mode.

You never worry about cover or even line of sight because your Siege Cannon has Nanocomposite Adaptation, meaning that as long as the shell has some path onto target it will always get there, and with Auto-Stabilizing Hardpoints your shots will rarely miss. If you use Siege Mode, you'll have to Stabilize next turn to reload it, but that'll also clear your heat so it's fine. If you use Direct Fire Mode, you can just do the exact same thing again for several turns before you need to stabilize.

Literally everything else about this mech is a contingency to stop you from losing your Siege Cannon. We have Armament Redundancy to let you ignore the first weapon loss. We have Reactive Weave to make you invisible if you need to brace. We have Hive Drone to make you harder to hit. We have Type-3 Projected Shield if an enemy ever gets within visual range of you. You have 21 HP and regenerate 5 every time you take a turn.

And, in your darkest hour, if ever there comes a situation in which you cannot use the Siege Cannon, you have the Engineer Prototype III, which can still deal damage in an area and be accurate about it.

Congratulations. You will spend the rest of your piloting career like a washed-up Tory: lurking in the backbenches, hurling abuse at people you've never even seen.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:

Sheldon Auto Wrecking is a local institution in southwestern Wisconsin’s Vernon County. It’s tucked in a lush valley just downstream of a 50-foot earthen dam, locally known as “Maple Dale.” 

The salvage yard, which buys used vehicles and farm machinery in this rural area to sell for parts, has been in business for nearly 70 years. For most of those years, the dam—less than a half-mile up the road—has protected its yard of hundreds of old cars and broken-down equipment from frequent and sometimes severe flooding in the area.

The dam “was put in place for a reason,” said owner Greg Sheldon.

But it might soon go away. 

Maple Dale is one of thousands of dams constructed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, beginning in the mid-20th century, for the purposes of flood control. 

In 2018, five similar dams in the region failed during a massive rainstorm that caused property damage in the tens of millions of dollars. A study determined that several other dams in the watersheds hit hardest by the flood, including Maple Dale, were also vulnerable to failure but would be too expensive to replace. 

As a result, local officials are voting on whether to dismantle the dams by cutting large notches in them, allowing the water to flow again, in a process called decommissioning. Experts say it could be the most dams ever decommissioned in a single county in the U.S. 

And it could be a harbinger for other communities.

Although the county may be the first to take on a project of this size, it’s unlikely to be the last. Dams across the country are aging, and also facing pressures from urban sprawl and intensifying floods wrought by climate change. The price tag to fix what’s broken, though, is estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars, meaning dam owners could face hard questions about what to do with them. 

In Viroqua, it’s also leaving the people who own property below the dams uneasy about what comes next—including Sheldon.

“To come along and just rip a big hole out and let the water run is a mistake,” he said.

Removal Plan Controversial

The southwest Wisconsin dams are among nearly 12,000 that have been built under the USDA’s Watershed Programs. Generally smaller and set in rural agricultural areas, they’re mostly clustered from the center of the country eastward. Oklahoma has the most, followed by Texas, Iowa and Missouri. 

The idea for the watershed program dams arose during the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. Because there was little vegetation left on the landscape to soak up rain when it fell, there were several severe floods during that time, prompting federal agencies to look for a way to control the water. 

To get the dams built, the Natural Resources Conservation Service entered into a contract with a local sponsor, such as a county. NRCS covered all the construction costs and helped the sponsor with inspections and repairs. In return, the sponsor maintained the dam for a certain number of years—under most contracts, 50—to ensure taxpayers got their money’s worth out of the project. 

Since many of the dams were built in the 1960s and 1970s, said Steve Becker, Wisconsin’s state conservation engineer for NRCS, their contracts are now up. 

“We pretty much told the counties, ‘You have full autonomy to do whatever you want with those dams,” Becker said. “You can maintain, you can rehab, you can repair. It doesn’t really matter. We’re out.” 

[sapphia]

Much of the internet is bots.

There are more bots every day. Every site that's in any way bot-trainable has bots scraping posts and chats.

We have AI. It can auto-recognise voices. It can mine text for information which it can categorise and file, but cannot process it or use to further its own ideas. It can compile and compartmentalise and label everything ever written, everything being spoken, all words in the world if we let it. But it can't think.

Neither can the bots on Reddit, Facebook, Twitter. They can write arguments. They can repeat arguments flawlessly. They can argue with themselves and you wouldn't know it. They are as advanced as ChatGPT.

It's 2010. Much of the internet is bots.

Reddit is a cesspit. I don't use reddit, except to find useful information. Many users are bots. There are more bots joining everyday.

We have AI. It can autorecogise voices. It can create AI generated photos that are indistinguishable from humans most of the time. A human trained to detect AI-generated faces who had spent ten+ hours learning this skill could identify an AI generated photo 90% of the time. But no one does this, and most of the tiny profile pictures are of dead people anyway.

On Reddit there are people piloting bots to generate targeted discourse. The bots analyse arguments and reply as if they were users. The good answers attract upvotes and downvotes and bots iterate accordingly. A New Zealand journalist notices they are being used for election interference and writes a book on it. We say 'That's terrible!'.

We do not read the book.

We interact with bots every day. We ignore most of them. We are used to these low-quality accounts by now. Because of how many there are, the bots often interact with themselves. It is like a cluster theory of bots, like colliding molecules in the air.

It's 2015. Much of the internet is bots. There are more bots everyday.

Reddit is a cesspit. I have a reddit account for hobbies and history and tv shows and local content. I make posts there, and they get karma. There is a lot of noise. Posting comments in the big subs get you more karma. I spend hours writing answers to ethical social dilemmas in Am I The Asshole?. I get better at ethical social dilemmas. I get better at writing answers.

It's 2022. Much of the internet is bots. Except for Gen Z, we use the internet how we've been using it since 2010. We play stupid games that take more of your money and time. We use the same social media sites. We post memes and vent and chat. We comment. We talk the same politics. We have the same politics. We are the same as we were a decade ago.

So are the social media sites.

We have AI. It can autorecognise voices. It can mine text for information which it can categorise and file, but cannot process or use to further its own ideas. It can compile and compartmentalise and label everything ever written, everything being spoken, all words in the world if we let it.

It can't think. But doesn't need to.

We are 'using' AI via ChatGPT, feeding instructions and questions and conversation into it. It is frequently wrong about easy-to-google answers, even though its conversation is perfect. We laugh at it.

We are worried that students will use chat GPT to write university essays. It is able to do this easily and mostly unidentifiably with a mere modicum of human editing. Some students still do not manage to evade human detection. But many do. Even when the humans are looking for it.

Reddit is a cesspit. I help start a NZ politics sub. Reddit has bots so good it's impossible to fully distinguish between bots and human, even when looking closely at profiles or trends.

I am banned from Reddit.

It's 2024. Much of the internet is bots.

[narcissisticpdcultureis]

NPD culture is thinking, ‘gyah, why can’t I date myself? I’m so hot and interesting and fuckable’

.

[phoenixyfriend]

Ko-fi prompt from @thisarenotarealblog:

There's a street near me that has eight car dealerships all on the same lot- i counted. it mystifies me that even one gets enough sales to keep going- but 8?? is there something you can tell me that demystifies this aspect of capitalism for me?

I had a few theories going in, but had to do some research. Here is my primary hypothesis, and then I'll run through what they mean and whether research agrees with me:

Sales make up only part of a dealership's income, so whether or not the dealership sells much is secondary to other factors.

Dealerships are put near each other for similar reasons to grouping clothing stores in a mall or restaurants on a single street.

Zoning laws impact where a car dealership can exist.

Let's start with how revenue works for a car dealership, as you mentioned 'that even one gets enough sales to keep going' is confusing. For this, I'm going to be using the Sharpsheets finance example, this NYU spreadsheet, and this Motor1 article.

This example notes that the profit margin (i.e. the percentage of revenue that comes out after paying all salaries, rent, supply, etc) for a car dealership is comparatively low, which is confirmed by the NYC sheet. The gross profit margin (that is to say, profits on the car sale before salaries, rent, taxes) is under 15% in both sources, which is significantly lower than, say, the 50% or so that one sees in apparel or cable tv.

Cars are expensive to purchase, and can't be sold for much more than you did purchase them. However, a low gross profit margin on an item that costs tens of thousands of dollars is still a hefty chunk of cash. 15% gross profit of a $20,000 car is still $3,000 profit. On top of that, the dealership will charge fees, sell warranties, and offer upgrades. They may also have paid deals to advertise or push certain brands of tire, maintenance fluids, and of course, banks that offer auto loans. So if a dealership sells one car a day, well, that's still several thousand dollars coming in, which is enough to pay the salaries of most of the employees. According to the Motor1 article, "the average gross profit per new vehicle sits at $6,244" in early 2022.

There is also a much less volatile, if also much smaller, source of revenue in attaching a repairs and checkup service to a dealership. If the location offers repairs (either under warranty or at a 'discounted' rate compared to a local, non-dealership mechanic), state inspections, and software updates, that's a recurring source of revenue from customers that aren't interested in purchasing a car more than once a decade.

This also all varies based on whether it's a brand location, used vs new, luxury vs standards, and so on.

I was mistaken as to how large a part of the revenue is the repairs and services section, but the income for a single dealership, on average, does work out math-wise. Hypothesis disproven, but we've learned something, and confirmed that income across the field does seem to be holding steady.

I'm going to handle the zoning and consolidation together, since they overlap:

Consolidation is a pretty easy one: this is a tactic called clustering. The expectation is that if you're going to, say, a Honda dealership to look at a midsize sedan, and there's a Nissan right next door, and a Ford across the street, and a Honda right around the corner, you might as well hit up the others to see if they have better deals. This tactic works for some businesses but not others. In the case of auto dealerships, the marketing advantage of clustering mixes with the restrictions of zoning laws.

Zoning laws vary by state, county, and township. Auto dealerships can generally only be opened on commercially zoned property.

I am going to use an area I have been to as an example/case study.

This pdf is a set of zoning regulations for Suffolk County, New York, published 2018, reviewing land use in the county during 2016. I'm going to paste in the map of the Town of Huntington, page 62, a region I worked in sporadically a few years ago, and know mostly for its mall and cutesy town center.

Those red sections are Commercially Zoned areas, and they largely follow some large stroads, most notably Jericho Turnpike (the horizontal line halfway down) and Walt Whitman Road (the vertical line on the left). The bulge where they intersect is Walt Whitman Mall, and the big red chunk in the bottom left is... mostly parking. That central strip, Jericho Turnpike, and its intersection with Walt Whitman... looks like this:

All those red spots are auto dealerships, one after another.

So zoning laws indicate that a dealership (and many other types of commercial properties) can only exist in that little red strip on the land use map, and dealerships take up a lot of space. Not only do they need places to put all of the cars they are selling, but they also need places to park all their customers and employees.

This is where we get into the issue of parking minimums. There is a recent video from Climate Town, with a guest spot by NotJustBikes. If you want to know more about this aspect of zoning law, I'd recommend watching this video and the one linked in the description.

Suffolk county does not have parking minimums. Those are decided on a town or village level. In this case, this means we are looking at the code set for the town of Huntington. (I was originally looking on the county level, and then cut the knot by just asking my real estate agent mom if she knew where I could find minimum parking regulations. She said to look up e360 by town, and lo and behold! There they are.)

(There is also this arcgis map, which shows that they are all within the C6 subset of commercial districting, the General Business District.)

Furniture or appliance store, machinery or new auto sales - 1 per 500 square feet of gross floor area

Used auto sales, boat sales, commercial nurseries selling at retail - 5 spaces for each use (to be specifically designated for customer parking) - Plus 1 for each 5,000 square feet of lot area

This is a bit odd, at first glance, as the requirements are actually much lower than that of other businesses, like drive-in restaurants (1 per 35 sqft) or department stores (1 per 200 sqft). I could not find confirmation on whether the 'gross floor area' of the dealership included only indoor spaces or also the parking lot space allotted to the objects for sale, but I think we can assume that any parking spaces used by merchandise do not qualify as part of the minimum. Some dealerships can have up to 20,000 gross sqft, so those would require 40 parking spaces reserved solely for customers and employees. Smaller dealerships would naturally need less. One dealership in this area is currently offering 65 cars of varying makes and models; some may be held inside the building, but most will be on the lot, and the number may go higher in other seasons. If we assume they need 30 parking spaces for customers and employees, and can have up to 70 cars in the lot itself, they are likely to have 100 parking spaces total.

That's a lot of parking.

Other businesses that require that kind of parking requirement are generally seeing much higher visitation. Consider this wider section of the map:

The other buildings with comparative parking are a grocery store (Lidl) and a post office (can get some pretty high visitation in the holiday season, but also just at random).

Compare them, then, to the "old town" section of the same town.

There are a handful of public parking areas nearby (lined in blue), whereas the bulk of the businesses are put together along this set of streets. While there is a lot of foot traffic and vehicle passage, which is appealing for almost any business, opening a car dealership in this area would require not only buying a building, but also the buildings surrounding it. You would need to bulldoze them for the necessary parking, which would be prohibitively expensive due to the cost of local real estate... and would probably get shot down in the application process by city planners and town councils and so on. Much easier to just buy land over in the strip where everyone's got giant parking lots and you can just add a few extra cramped lanes for the merchandise.

Car dealerships also tend to be very brightly lit, which hits a lot of NIMBY sore spots. It's much easier to go to sleep if you aren't right next to a glaring floodlight at a car dealership, so it's best if we just shove them all away from expensive residential, which means towards the loud stroads, which means... all along these two major roads/highways.

And if they're all limited to a narrow type of zoning already, they might as well take advantage of cluster marketing and just all set up shop near each other in hopes of stealing one of the other's customers.

As consumers, it's also better for us, because if we want to try out a few different cars from a few different brands, it's pretty easy to just go one building down to try out the Hyundai and see if it's better than a Chevy in the same price group.

(Prompt me on ko-fi!)

[pinkrelish]

👀 i'm so curious! where would you put the auto shop and miss mouse's new apartment?

behold! my ms paint skills.

the old motel-turned-apartment is off cherry street, near proximity to the laundromat, and the mechanic shop is on the edge of the clustered shops making up the heart of downtown.

[mswyrr]

re: Ballad and histories of musical genres

Why does Lucy Gray have that accent? A lot of Latinas and people of color have Southern accents! Why is she singing "country" music? The division of folk music in the US into some exclusively white/WASP genres is a racist invention of the 1920s - musician and historian of the topic Rhiannon Giddens has done deep research into that which has raised awareness on it:

A final explanation for Johnson’s absence from the historical record may be the most significant. It involves not his reputation but that of the music he played, with which he became literally synonymous—more than one generation of Southerners would refer to popular dance music simply as “old Frank Johnson music.” And yet, in the course of the twentieth century, the cluster of styles in which Johnson specialized––namely, string band, square dance, hoedown––came to be associated with the folk music of the white South and even, by a bizarre warping of American cultural memory, with white racial purity. In the nineteen-twenties, the auto magnate Henry Ford started proselytizing (successfully) for a square-dancing revival precisely because the music that accompanied it was not black. Had he known the deeper history of square dancing, he might have fainted. (source)

And - specific to Latine identities in the southern US - popular Mexican and Mexican American genres like corrido ballads (which often were highly critical of US imperialism and racism! Telling stories of resistance to Anglo/white supremacist authorities) and Ranchera songs are country music.

Corridos were fast-paced ballads that told culturally significant stories. To the sound of a guitar or a bajo sexto, a twelve-string guitar popular in the Southwest, corridos recounted epic events and retold the story of the cultural conflicts between Anglos and Mexican Americans... Corridos not only provide a graphic record of the injustices that Mexican American suffered—including land loss, cattle and horse theft, and lynchings—but also celebrated outlaws who stood up to defend the honor of the Mexican American community. (source)

Not only is the current rightwing concept of "country music" on highly commercialized radio deeply manufactured, white supremacist, anti-labor justice and a rejection of the kind of pro-equality, class and racial equality conscious music of some earlier white musicians like Johnny Cash, but the whole history of US folk music has been whitewashed and divided up dishonestly.

Lucy Gray played by Rachel Zegler makes total sense! I get why people wanted to see a Roma actress cast, but the people saying it's "weird" to see a Latina with a Southern accent singing country music are just not aware of this history.

I really like these genres and I find this history fascinating and powerful, so the way Collins has written a love letter (or love ballad?? lol) to them and their diversity is exciting and delightful to me.

[beefrobeefcal]

Fellow scout beefroooooo!!

🌪️ asknado in a trailer park time! 🫡

What Pedro boy haven't you created for, are you intimidated by, or feel like your HC is so niche or different that you can't find the muse to create for him? (Bonus points for an explanation!)

Hello Scout Mar!

I like this... it's a dozy of a question. I think the P-boy I am the the least likely to write is...

Oberyn Martell. Why? While I think he's just peachy keen, I have no want or need to delve into beefing him up. I will read the heck out of OM fics if I feel called to it, but the inspo I would have had for him died in May 2019 with the way GOT ended.

Call me shallow, but that whole cluster fuck of a series finale left a terrible taste in my mouth.

Now, you're lucky, @marisferasiop, bc this is a multi P-boy answer for me (even if you never intended it to be). Because now I'm going to sound off who I have yet to give a good beefening to and whether you can expect them or not. See below the cut!

Yours in sin,

Beefro👌🥩💜

Jack 'Whiskey' Daniels ✅ yes! eventually. I had nearly 4k words written for him but lost it all because I apparently had to learn a lesson about using auto-save correctly.

Tim Rockford ✅ He's so far only appeared in a HeftyThrowaway, but I have a delightful thot or two in mind for our 46 second crime solving king.

Max Lord ❓ Other than how chunky he looked in WW1984, I just cannot get on the hype train with this character. Maybe in the future? or if a really good thot comes into the THOT TANK...

Max Philips ✅ Yes. I feel like he and Dave York are two sides of the same cookie. There's gotta be something there, right?

Marcus Moreno 🚫 I've only ever seen gifs and screenshots of this film and while I enjoy the view, I am just not interested (for now).

Penis Collector ❓ I saw Drive Away Dolls in the theatre - went to see Pedro on the big screen - and if I can somehow figure out a way to incorporate random, drug fueled side notes through out, this is a strong maybe.

Silva 🚫 I have read enough Silva fics to know when to step away and let the masters do their work.

Din Djarin ✅ BEEFRO IN SPACE 🌌🚀🧑‍🚀

Javi Gutierrez ✅ Oh heckin heck yes! Currently working on his debut!

Pero Tovar ✅ I did not understand the hype for this character until I watched this man's grumpy ass yearn for food and roll his eyes at Matt Damon.

[riflebrass]

A problem I'm having with Helldivers is a good weapon for closing bot fabricators.

I was using the grenade pistol for a while but I just can't get the hang of arcing the round into the vents. Even like 5 meters away I struggle. Also ammo is a problem. Ammo boxes only give you one pistol grenade so you either need to die and respawn or grab a LOT of ammo boxes. On the bright side hitting a scout strider in the hips is an easier shot and it can insta-kill them.

My other big choice is the crossbow. I love the crossbow. It has a much flatter trajectory so it's a lot easier to thread the needle. It's not quite as powerful as the grenade pistol. It can't one-shot an illegal broadcast tower. Still it can two-shot a scout strider if you hit it in the hips. The real downside to this is that it has an incredibly slow rate of fire and only holds 6 shots so you have to reload frequently. Because of this it's not a very good choice for general combat because you're really outgunned against even modest clusters of enemies.

The auto-cannon is a solid choice. It hits pretty hard against moderately armored enemies and comes with a lot of ammo. Unfortunately it requires a backpack so I can't use the jump pack I've come to love and I prefer a heavier support weapon for bigger enemies.

The quasar cannon is my preferred support. It will easily take down a fab but there's a couple reasons why I hate it for that role. First of all I have to stand perfectly still for about 4 seconds to charge up the shot before it will fire. Not ideal with hit and run tactics. Secondly with the long cooldown I hate to use the shot on a fab when there could be a hulk around the corner.

Against bugs it's a lot easier. The target for bug holes is a lot bigger so the grenade pistol is a lot easier to lob rounds in. I prefer the crossbow though since there's a lot of bug holes and the extra ammo is important.

[sulky-star-cluster]

All of you who keep up with the sulky star cluster.

We are going to have a time jump!

Those of you who are wondering why the hell we would do a time jump. Remember this. The sulky star cluster is crossover sensitive. It is one of my only ask series that is crossover sensitive. And although this might be strange to some. The crossovers I do outside of silky star cluster continue on without it. And so it needs a bit of time to catch up with some events.

So we are going to perform a little time jump. Here's all the things that happened during said time jump.

Glam Freddy is able to remove the bomb from Algol.

Any characters that had a chance of moving in have moved in. Black Star is slightly grumping about this but is happy about it otherwise. (Here's a tag for all the possible people with AUs that could move in. @digimonlover09 @sigery @madcatdaderpydrawer-blog artoutoftheblue shattered-sparks @churchydragon @eclipsedcrystalstar )

List of my characters that have moved in.

Sundown, runaway, chased, actual dad, story created in ash, empty cup (These are all alternatives not ones that have been adopted before.)

Algol is able to avoid Black Star for the entirety of the time. Although he has gained the courage to run around elsewhere.

Cygnus has attempted slight repairs. Mostly for his chest area. (This might internally be so I don't have to draw the scars on his chest anymore because I forget them too much)

Rigel has made the garage into an auto place. Basically holds there vehicles. He has also officially opened a wall in Roxy raceway so that his salon can be more public.

All the characters will it be exploring outside of the pizza place now. They might be in different places. Such as Antares visiting the library.

And I think that's basically it. There might be smaller things here and there but that's the essentials of the time skip.

Onwards to the scheduled programming!