I’d say LOTR is far more ingrained in society. The Matrix gets lots of references within our cohort, but Tolkien set the rules and visuals of a vast amount of fantasy and myth that we now assume to have always existed. I’d also throw in Star Wars above Matrix. But yes, I’d definitely agree any of these rank far higher than a morsel of paranoia that already existed on the road

Holding hands implies they’re trying to have sex. A penis, in a vagina? How do I explain that to my 4 year old?

Which means it doesn’t seem like the limit has been hit yet. For standard devices, the general market has not moved to the current physical limitations

Only if storage density out paces storage demand. Eventually, physics will hit a limit

Coming from an LS2 and going to a Shoei RF-1400 was a larger improvement than I thought. Same for my wife going from a Sedici to an Arai in the same ~$600 range as my Shoei. Comfort, quietness, fidelity of external audio

In different words, I think we have a similar idea. I said completion, you said mastery. I said no way to apply the new knowledge, you said not enough room to house other topics of interest. So if you want to continuously expand your knowledge to a sufficient degree but don’t want to reach the end, what is the goal?

Lego is great. It gives you literal building blocks to skip the creation of building blocks and go straight to synthesis and assembly. It’s like if you made a painting with a book of stickers of common brush strokes. They’re limited in certain ways like being a square grid for the most part, but build until there’s a physical limitation. Either use some hinges, or start getting involved with other build materials.

General art is something I’ve enjoyed creating but my skill isn’t great. I’ve currently focused on building utilitarian things with a new home. Wish there was a shelf unit of these exact dimensions? Sounds like a trip to buy lumber then. Could be the perfect little monitor riser deck. You could say I’m bad at building things but I prefer to say I’m good at building bad things. They work, they’re just a little ugly.

But back to the main topic. While I certainly promote educational pursuits and productive use of time, if it causes this much stress every time, I think you should consider it might be some type of anxiety. I know the immediate goal is learn more, but where does it go from there? What’s the real underlying goal? It may not be obvious to you. Is it to create success in your career? To establish superiority over your peers? If it was purely a joyous pursuit, I don’t think you’d be posting about it like this. Don’t stop learning, but beware of burnout as well as be considerate towards yourself when you reach some end point in a topic.

The party of states rights (in areas they’re losing federally) makes yet another federal commandment in areas they want to gain ground on

What’s bad about performative actions in the form of executive orders applying rules to situations the president has clearly demonstrated he doesn’t understand?

I’m no psychologist, but I do have racing thoughts as an engineer type shell over an artistic skeleton with a consistent stream of visual ideas. If you’re anything like me, then I ask, what other intellectual and creative outlets do you have besides reading up on subjects? Could the fear of completing a topic stem from realization you have no way to apply it?

I can appreciate the personal part you added regarding losing faith. I left catholicism in my teens. Too many inconsistencies, too much abuse of power. It started by questioning how multiple christianities could have such different rules, followed by learning how most religion is abrahamic and even more diverse in interpretation, to finally saying fuck all this.

I got FC5 in 2020 and it became hard to stomach. It felt like a real potential reality of the US that year. Cults, vehement religious figures, gun fetish, and a classic Americana setting. The prior titles were all far away, imaginary lands offering even a small degree of dissociation. FC5 was just home. I’d relate it to Harry Potter villains in the sense that yeah, of course we know Voldemort is evil, but Umbridge is the most hated character. Not because she’s worse, but because we know a real-life Umbridge personally.

FC6 hit me kinda hard in a similar way. I got into it about a year ago, not long after the israel/Palestine conflict flared up. There’s a ton of genocidal themes there.

Why does a mirror flip north/south but not east/west then?

Intro to space travel and navigational queues: your up or my up?

I have a keychain with a tritium vial. It was advertised as a tent zipper locator. I just put it on my car keys and like looking at the light when it’s hanging up in the dark

I hear this every time I scroll past it in my library. I finished it about 4 hours after my bedtime one night and the ending felt uncomfortable

The Far Cry games pretty much always allow a sniper and/or stealth option. Some of the scripted mission sequences can be fast paced, but it’s largely open world. If you’re not familiar with them, stick to the games with numbers in the titles for starters. Probably not 6. Maybe not 2 this day and age. 3-6 all exist with a particular style in mind.

Unless you’re anti ubisoft

I wasn’t aware! I saw Dogma many years ago along with half of Clerks 1 and half of Jay and Silent Bob. However, I watched through the entire Askewniverse over the last 3 years. Dogma is my favorite. George Carlin as a priest? Fuck yeah. Alan Rickman with Ken doll crotch? Why not! I thought it was the most clever of the bunch

Somehow I forgot Little Nicky was a Sandler movie given that I don’t really like him. Now you’ve got me wondering if it holds up because it was supposed to be more vulgar in the first place. I probably conflate it with Dogma, too.

Nah my bad for refusing to Google this shit for actual details

Then I misinterpreted something from your comment saying Trump’s promise to increase water pressure (disregarding the impossibility) wouldn’t increase flow. Maybe you’re specifically talking about shower heads, but somewhere else trump talked about flushing toilets over and over. It all blends together in the insanity. Did he mention shower heads being too efficient, but in worse words?

I agree, we’re generally in agreement then. I did specify stream vs shower setting though, and a kinda large jet outlet at that. Maybe more like a Full setting, in my experience, but I certainly am not including all the settings. Mist, vertical, center, etc are too restrictive. I’ve filled a couple dozen car wash buckets on various settings and shower/jet/full flow comparably then, but somehow always slower than my bladder can handle.

I started reading your comment and was going to add something about how I always see a deep misunderstanding of Bernoulli’s principle and… Well you have the same misunderstanding.

Increasing pressure, with no other changes, absolutely changes flow rate. Bernoulli’s principle that effectively states as flow increases, pressure decreases (and vice versa) when the source is not changed. If the pressure at the source is increased and the flow rate is the same, then the entire system has more energy. Since the bottleneck is more likely to be the miles of pipes and hundreds of bends, flow rate can’t really be inherently increased but pressure can. I, in no way, am endorsing this EO or the insanity surrounding it.

The proper application of the principle is at the outlet with a steady source. It’s best explained with a multi-setting garden hose. This is because the variable restrictor is exactly at the outlet. You can choose the stream setting which is high velocity but low flow rate - a single stream shoots across the street. You can choose the shower setting which is low velocity but high flow rate - a wide stream that only travels a few feet away. However, if you try to fill a bucket, you’ll likely find they fill at nearly the same rate, allowing for minor differences in nozzle drag and assuming the stream doesn’t cause too much drag (like a 1/8" outlet rather than a pin hole). Why? Because the system energy is the same, say 40psi with ample water supply for a garden hose where the faucet and preceeding piping is the restrictor rather than the outlet. At any point prior to the outlet, the pressure is the same and any setting would fill a very tall column to the same point at which pressure from the column equals pressure form the hose. So yes, realistically, bumping up the pressure would result in greater flow at the outlet, just as enlarging pipes, smoothing bends, and swapping high flow valves.

But this is fucking batshit because the pressure has not been reduced and it’s not like we just have pumps we can tune to any pressure. The primary source is simply the height of water towers - the water towers that have been here for decades already. The most logical explanation I can give is the slow market change to high efficiency devices. But I’m gonna stick to the thought that the believers are retconning their memories. I mean, the fucking Simpsons have a scene where Bart fluctuates the shower temperature with just the sink faucet. Season 12, episode 12, Tennis the Menace, aired 2001.

Your expat acquaintance couldn’t fix the situation because he wasn’t addressing the choke points. So many possibilities. Shitting routing in the house, shitty rerouting after a renovation, mineral deposits inside older pipes, longer routing in modern houses that are bigger with more bathrooms, false memories of the “before times” invented by Trump’s rambling, insufficient infrastructure as neighborhoods expand, or poor delivery system maintenance. Friendly reminder that there is a non-zero number of people buying into this while using household wells.

That was clear in 2020