#rustingbridges

[tototavros]

[andmaybegayer]

Beat the belltower gargoyles and it once again is easy if you just do it right instead of doing it wrong.

After a half dozen failed attempts where I could pretty reliably get the first gargoyle down to half only to get destroyed by the pair, I thought "hey I have a ton of titanite and it costs basically nothing to upgrade gear, I should do that" and maxed out the halberd. First run at the gargoyles after that I completely wiped out the first one before the second one could even get near me. Easy fight! Ignore that I had also finally learned their attack patterns after several attempts. Just a nice sharp axe.

I did briefly try running without armour before upgrading the halberd, since @rustingbridges said:

at some point a dark souls character has to ask themself. do I want to wear clothes? or do I want a fast roll?

earlier. You are a LOT faster and like. Getting hit is so bad in general that the cost doesn't seem very high! I might try it again, I put armour back on after a bit since I wasn't doing much better but it was fun having such instantaneous dodges. Armour is probably more useful when you're marathoning a run where you need to reduce attrition but the extra mobility around bosses might be useful.

Oh yeah I realized there was a staircase in Firelink that went down that I had missed? a) met a woman in a sewer who I gave the thing I found in the church and she upgraded my estus flask b) there's a ghost town down there and it is creepy and bad and there's ghosts? Ran away from ghosts figuring I would need a magic weapon, later read the description on the severed cursed arm that says hey you can use me to hit ghosts. Maybe later. Magic weapons still might be more reliable than. Cursed arms.

Magic Weapon/Cursed Arm is a real Hydraulic Ram/Water Sheep situation.

Came back up and the gold knight was there now. Still laughing suspiciously. Don't like that.

my repeated runs at the belltower gargoyles had one interesting upside which is that each time I made an effort to get to my bloodstain before I got got, so I built up like 6000 bonus souls on top of the gargoyle reward, so I had 17k souls to spend when I rang the bell. Used those to bump Vitality, Endurance, Strength and Dexterity.

Recording these reveals that I have absolutely no idea when my monologue is internal and when it is external, sometimes I expect to hear myself do some quip I remember making only to discover that I had done it completely silently in my head, and vice versa, I did not realize I made the Sesame Street Count joke at the end there out loud.

[max1461]

@rustingbridges said:

I’ll be honest I don’t actually know anything about the occupation but I have to imagine not deposing the emperor was a mistake

I can't imagine it would have been a good move—agreeing not to depose the Emperor was one of the major factors in securing Japan's surrender and thus the end of the war. Plus he's more of a figurehead than even the UK's monarch, the postwar constitution totally neuters imperial power and that was intentional. From both an ethical perspective in terms of ending the war and from a US realpolitik perspective, leaving the emperor nominally in power was a good decision.

But more importantly, even in places like China where the power of the aristocracy was (ostensibly) broken completely during half a century of war, old powerful families still dominate politics. Where's that quote about the Hu family (ancestors of Hu Jintao) having statues of themselves in their 500 year old estate that were illegal at the time because they glorified family members above the emperor? And one of the early architects of the EU was a Habsburg. Power is sticky.

[spraxinoscope]

tagged by @caesarsaladinn

Tag some friends you'd like to get to know better!

Last song: What else could it be but the haunting strains of bulgarian choir music

Currently watching: Sumo wrestling rebroadcasts on twitch. Did you know sumo is the greatest and most horrible sport of all time?

Currently reading: Book of the New Sun, along with the currently airing Ranged Touch podcast. It seems cool so far. Twig, by Wildbow. Addiction by Design, a nonfiction book about slot machines and people who use them. It's one of those books that makes you look at everything differently.

Current obsession: Kinda between obsessions atm. It was the most recent Gundam show but that fell into production hell and turned into a mess. They girlbossed too close to the sun. Not sure what I'll get into next. Contenders: Orion's Arm? Rally racing? PS1-era 3d modeling a la Lilith Walter? John le Carre? Sumo? Sumo is so fucked up you guys. You have no idea

tagging @businesstiramisu @rustingbridges @catsnuggler @eintheology @recursivecringe @fregolious @caprice-nisei-enjoyer @oscillatingheatpipe

[shacklesburst]

inspired by @rustingbridges here

[finestoftheflavors]

rustingbridges: when I buy a snack at work I am not buying calories

Yeah that’s a decent point. When you buy something from a vending machine you’re not paying for calories (or sustenance as a whole), and you’re not even paying for the taste of it. You’re paying for the convenience of not needing to plan ahead and bring a snack with you at the start of the day.

People who go to restaurants aren’t paying for sustenance either. They’re paying for the convenience of having the meal prepared for them, or the luxury of being served by a servant, or occasionally the novelty of having a food that can’t be easily made at home for one reason or another.

[queenlua]

rustingbridges said: wat dat

I’M GLAD YOU ASKED

(i say, after four hours of meetings)

muhammara is this delicious dip with something like the consistency of hummus,

but instead of being made with chickpeas & garlic,

it’s made with ground walnuts, red peppers, breadcrumbs & pomegranate molasses

which seems like it shouldn’t work but is fantastic???

it’s wonderfully rich & savory & just the right level of spicy for starting out a meal.  or, you know, to eat as your entire meal.  whichever.

the lebanese-syrian restaurant near me basically bullies you into ordering it if you’ve never had it before, and after i tried it i was like: “actually, please cancel my entree, i just want several enormous bowls of this glorious substance”

here’s an #aesthetic-but-accurate photo from the first page of google image search results to tempt you further, please try this delicious thing if it is within your power

[tanadrin]

rustingbridges replied to your post: I thought that the National Guard subsumed the old...

which states have these? how different are they from state police organizations?

the wiki page has a list of states with extant/active state guards, and they seem to be fairly minor even in states that do have them, since they can’t be sent outside the state to do anything, and, y’know, the US rarely gets invaded. Idk what they actually get used for--the wiki indicates they can duplicate the function of a state’s national guard if it’s deployed elsewhere, and they seem to get employed in disaster relief occasionally.

[brin-bellway]

@rustingbridges​ replied to your post:

“under normal conditions a substantial fraction of influenza cases are "asymptomatic", whatever that means in that context, so I'd presume there's also a contingent of very mildly symptomatic cases”

---

Meta-Boss is dragging me back into the restaurant tomorrow now that he is no longer legally forbidden from doing so. If I *am* carrying something, I hope I don’t fuck anybody over too hard. We *will* be taking the now-standard precautions, so that’s something.

(And as for hugging my mom, unlike me she’s finished her flu-vaccination ramp-up period, so that tilts her odds favourably.)

---

TBH, if this was influenza, chalk another one up on the board of “we should just wear masks all the time by default”. I’ll gladly dull my sense of smell while outside the house and be unable to read customers’ lips if it means turning the horrific suffering of a flu into *this*.

(and if you have to talk to someone who really needs to read your lips (and you can’t just write to each other like civilised people), wearing a mask except when around them would still beat not wearing one at all)

[earlgraytay]

rustingbridges

replied to your post

“I agree with @morlock-holmes tbh.  in fact you know what let’s go a...”

requiring a button up seems to me to be strictly less of an imposition than requiring a button up + jacket + matched trousers

@rustingbridges The trouble is... okay, I ranted a bunch about the practical side of this under the cut, but it’s a long long rant. 

WAY TOO LONG, DR: polos and khakis were created as sportswear for goddamn rich people. they were DESIGNED to be shapeless and easy to move in, conspicuously consumed (”dash it all, I got grass stains on my khakis! time to get new ones”), and not particularly appealing (because you’re not gonna be wearing them on a date unless it’s a tennis date).

everything about them is a bad idea. everything about them is heinous. making them the preferred Business Casual Uniform is just adding insult to injury at this point.

Strictly speaking, yes, requiring a button-up is less of an imposition. But in practice, a lot of the time, what’s required isn’t just “can you wear a shirt that buttons down with jeans and sneakers”, it’s “can you wear a polo shirt with khakis or chinos”.  and that is, in terms of upkeep/maintenance/general brainspace spent on clothing, actually a lot more work.

first off: upkeep. i own a couple nice suits and a whole bunch of blazers, mostly for Gender Reasons. got them from the thrift store, but they’ve lasted me well, even second-hand.      

there’s a reason that anything but the cheapest, shittiest polyester suits are Dry Clean Only, and it’s because you don’t actually have to clean them all that often.  if you get two reasonably nice suits in a dark colour, provided that you wear an undershirt and aren’t prone to spilling things on yourself... you can get away with dry-cleaning each one every two months or so, even if you’re wearing one every day. 

assuming you’re a man working a white-collar job, you need maybe four suits total - a super nice, barely-worn “weddings and funerals” suit, a “sunday best/Important Meetings” suit, and two “wear to work every day” suits. you dry-clean your suits every 2-3 months - which is, honestly? about as expensive as 2-3 months’ laundry detergent. you buy a new suit every couple years, when one of them starts to get manky. you keep maybe 10-12 button-downs in a colour to match your suits, 10-12 undershirts,  and 10-12 ties, and you’re golden. 

if you go with polos and khakis... you need a lot more of them, you need to clean them a lot more often, and they’re honestly harder to maintain. you still need that 10-12 shirts and undershirts (unless you wear your polo right against your skin, and that has its own drawbacks) but now you need 10-12 pairs of pants, too. those pants stain much more easily, hide stains much less easily, and are difficult to get stains out of- probably even more difficult than a suit, tbh, because you’re sending those to get dry cleaned. it costs a lot more to send 10-12 polos and 10-12 pairs of chinos to be dry-cleaned, so you’ll probably have to take care of them yourself at home. 

and khakis are light coloured. you look like a red-hot mess unless you’re spending a lot of time making sure there’s not a fleck of dust on the damn things, and good luck if you have an affectionate cat.  

there’s the added “bonus” that a nice suit is honestly? more breathable than a crappy polo? good fabric is good fabric, and polos are almost always made out of fucking polyester or something equally awful. if you’re wearing a decent button-down and undershirt, you’ll be more comfortable in a suit, even if the weather’s hot. you’ll have less Sweat Issues to deal with, and even if you do have nasty sweat issues, you’re way less likely to stain anything that’s showing. 

so like. provided you have the money to send a suit for drycleaning every couple months- and if you’re working the kind of job where you need a suit, you probably do- it is genuinely, legitimately easier to take care of a nice suit than it is to take care of a bunch of crappy polos.

in addition you honestly have to think more about what you’re wearing if you’re wearing polos/button-downs and khakis because the ~fAsHiOn eXpEcTaTiOnS~ around them are different.    

if you are wearing a suit, people know there is a cost factor involved. people know you are going to be wearing the same two suits every day and that is socially acceptable. if you go with basic colours for your suits and button-downs and don’t try anything fancy- which, as a work uniform, you probably shouldn’t be doing anyway unless you work for Vogue- you’re honestly not going to have to think about what you’re wearing in any meaningful way, once you’ve bought your first suits. you replace your white button-down with another white button-down, get some neutral-coloured ties every so often, and you’re golden. 

if you’re wearing a polo and khakis, on the other hand, the expectation is that you have to wear something slightly different every day. if you buy 10 of the exact same polo and khakis, people will make fun of you. you’re The Guy Who Wears The Same Thing Every Day. so you need to at least pick out a different coloured polo. even if you buy 10 of the same pair of slacks and put in the absolute minimum effort-- you’ve still got to think about what matches what; when you’re replacing them you’ve got to think about what you already have and whether the New Polo will make your Old Pants look puke-green; you’ve got to weigh the benefits of wearing company-provided swag vs. looking like you don’t own clothes of your own.  

finally- and this is personal taste talking, I did an Informal Survey of people who are attracted to men and opinions are mixed- I think polos are poorly fitting, unattractive on just about everyone, and intentionally designed as such. 

look at this picture, and at this:   

if you are looking for a generic Sexy-To-Androphiles Man you will probably pick a Marvel Chris. they have the advantage of having personal stylists, wardrobe consultants, and tailors who fit their clothes to them better than your “average” person. 

do you see how baggy and shapeless the polo is on him. do you see how much it disguises his features, how much it hangs off him like a sack? do you see how it looks too tight on him at the chest and shoulders and too loose at the stomach?  do you see how it kinda pools at his waist and messes with his silhouette? do you see how the suit emphasizes and works with his body, in a way the polo just doesn’t?  how it brings out his shoulders and chest and hips, and emphasizes what makes him attractive rather than disguising it?

if a Marvel Chris cannot pull off a polo and make it look good, maybe we should make them an eccentricity rather than a rule, no?  

[youarenotthewalrus]

rustingbridges replied to your post “You know, I enjoyed the Good Place finale a lot, but it’s kind of...”

how was the show overall. I heard good things about the early eps and so so things about the middle eps

It’s good! I do think the earlier parts are generally stronger (the first two seasons are noticeably more tightly plotted and focused than the last two), but it remains funny and entertaining throughout. It’s also quite intelligent for a network television comedy, although the qualifier of “for a network television comedy” is important and the show is sometimes (as the post you replied to talks about) frustratingly unwilling to dig into things as deeply as one wishes it would. Definitely worth a watch, IMO.

[tototavros]

from @rustingbridges: we had mandatory review? when was that? and yeah I would on priors believe FDR's court got up to some shit

tl;dr from 1910, increased in 1937, mostly removed in 1976 but still in place, via three judge district court

from a law review article called Three-Judge District Courts, Direct Appeals, and Reforming the Supreme Court’s Shadow Docket by Michael Solimne, professor at Cincinnati

Since Congress established the Courts of Appeals in 1891, and given subsequent statutory developments, most civil and criminal cases in the federal courts have been litigated in the familiar pattern of proceedings before a single district judge; followed by an appeal as of right to a regional Court of Appeals; and followed by a writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court, which has the discretion to grant or deny the petition. A notable exception to this pattern came in the wake of the Supreme Court’s then-controversial decision in 1908 in Ex parte Young, which recognized an exception to state sovereign immunity by permitting plaintiffs to bring constitutional challenges to state statutes in federal court by suing not the state, but the state official charged with enforcing the law. The decision was controversial because it enabled plaintiffs (a railroad in Ex parte Young) to more easily challenge Progressive Era regulatory laws in federal court, and empowered one federal district judge to enjoin the operation of a statewide law. Congress responded to Ex parte Young in 1910 by enacting legislation, which required such suits to be brought before a three-judge district court, with a direct appeal available to the Supreme Court. The statute required that the court consist of one district judge and at least one court of appeals judge, with the third judge being appointed by the Chief Judge of the circuit (typically, though not always, another district judge). Supporters of the statute thought three judges, rather than one, would bring greater thought to the important issue of the constitutionality of a state law, and the result would arouse less public controversy as compared to the decision of a single judge. The direct appeal provision would make it more probable that any appeal would be more rapidly resolved as contrasted to the usual appellate process. Constitutional challenges to federal statutes were added to the ambit of the three-judge district court in 1937. That legislation was a small part of the fabled and failed Court-packing plan proposed by President Franklin Roosevelt in that year. The plan was primarily a reaction to a majority of the Supreme Court holding New Deal legislation unconstitutional, but the President and his supporters in Congress were also concerned with the many suits in the district courts leading to no less than 1600 separate injunctions of legislation. They argued that constitutional challenges to federal statutes should be treated with “equal dignity” to that of state statutes,and largely tracking the rationale for the 1910 Act, the amendment was passed with relatively little fanfare in August of 1937, after the Court-packing plan had been rejected. ...

The impetus for the 1910 and 1937 legislation eventually faded, and Congress severely cut back the jurisdiction of the three-judge district court in 1976. In part, the reforms were a victim of their own success. By the 1960s and 1970s, hundreds of three-judge district courts were being convened each year, and scores of direct appeals were being lodged in the Supreme Court. Most of each were challenges to state statutes, with not coincidentally many related to the burgeoning Civil Rights era and attendant litigation. Influential figures and organizations in the legal community, not least of whom were Justices on the Court itself, came to conclude that the virtual flood of litigation was a burden on both district courts (given the time-consuming logistics of assembling three judges rather than one to decide a case at the trial level) and on the Supreme Court (given that the direct appeals were ostensibly mandatory and had to be decided on the merits). Moreover, many argued that the original perceived need for the three-judge district court process had largely faded, and that even controversial and important litigation could be handled appropriately by a single district judge with the normal appeal process. ... Despite the almost complete abolishment in 1976, the three-judge district court has enjoyed a robust afterlife. Left standing was a separate such court established by the 1965 Voting Rights Act, to decide declaratory judgment actions regarding whether certain States and political subdivisions were, in making changes to election laws, subject to preclearance by the Department of Justice. Since the 1976 repeal, several federal statutes have been passed in the past several decades with judicial review provisions for that particular law, mandating that any constitutional challenges thereto are litigated before a three-judge district court, with a direct appeal to the Supreme Court.

[andmaybegayer]

@rustingbridges replied to your post: I present for your viewing pleasure: every...

I assume the rand is a currency backed by warehouses full of copies of the fountainhead

Living the neoliberal dream!

Of course, it’s a fractional currency, so if you go to the bank and try to exchange it they’ll just laugh at you.

[cthulhubert]

rustingbridges replied to your post

“In my quiver I have a coping method for executive dysfunction; I came...”

do you have any examples of what braking vs emergency stopping looks like for some concrete thing?

That’s a good question.

If you mean what I’m talking about when I wrote, “’...if I’m still going 15 minutes on, emergency braking procedures,’” I guess I don’t. It’s some internal process that’s not fully legible to me. I’m honestly not sure if it’s just, “braking but harder” or some distinct “mental action”. Actually, perhaps it’s a small set of potential actions that some lower level of consciousness picks from, because sometimes it does just feel like “bearing down”, but others like I “distract” or even “startle” myself out of focus lock.

Or if you mean more like user stories of my coping method versus how it usually went:

How it used to go: “I’m going to tumbl for a while, I want to stop at 7pm so I can read some of that book I’ve been meaning to.” And then at some point past 7 I’d look at the clock and a great majority of the time I would simply not. I’d say to myself, “Well, a little bit more, 15 minutes maybe,” and a part of me would always feel just bad that I hadn’t stuck to my plan. But I’d quickly forget about it as I’d kept scrolling, and then it’d happen again in 15 minutes, except often with even weaker internal protest. Whenever I ended up stopping, it was rarely at one of my intentional stopping points.

At some point, an image popped into my head of me in a pinewood derby rolling downhill at speed, and me, wanting to get off, sticking my arm out and grabbing at trees or lamp posts and getting my arm wrenched for the trouble.

Now: “I’m going to tumbl for a while, I want to start slowing down at 6:40.” And sometime a little before or after 6:40 I’d look at the clock (I have a large one set up near my monitor so it’s easy to look at) and now there’s a little “voice” or “motion” in the back of my head mentally preparing me to actually stop in 10 or 15 minutes. And it still fails sometimes, but I lose fewer whole evenings to distractions.

(Of course, I’ve also got to be aware of the chance that this meager success is actually the result of life circumstances, or age, or something else, and the interoception an unrelated coincidence. But I’m betting against it for now.)

[illidanstr]

rustingbridges mentioned you in a post

@illidanstr does that... does that help

yeah so epicor is a p famous immune support product 

<https://www.amazon.com/Healthy-Origins-Clinically-Support-Capsules/dp/B0010YAFCI>

it’s a processed version of nutritional yeast, otherwise known as saccharomyces cerevisiae.  versions are widely used to keep farmed animals from getting sick; if you wanna know the effect on fish, pigs, cows, whatever, feel free:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C2&q=Saccharomyces+cerevisiae++immune&btnG=

myasd just found that the method that medicinal mushrooms like reishi, cordyceps, etc use is the same as nutritional yeast https://www.reddit.com/r/NootropicsDepot/comments/cjsjh3/functional_yeast_extract_vs_epicor/evg50qh/

https://nootropicsdepot.com/functional-yeast-extract-powder/ he now sells his own cheap epicor

[shacklesburst]

rustingbridges replied to your post “What is it that makes Tumblr tags a place for people to add thoughts...”

is there a recommended tag viewer, I did not realize this was a thing although I suppose I should have

I’m honestly just using the standard XKit TagViewer.