85% of this site is people digging up insane opinions from cranks and then dunking on them. Cool! Glad to be kept up to date with the latest in crank thought!

85% of this site is people digging up insane opinions from cranks and then dunking on them. Cool! Glad to be kept up to date with the latest in crank thought!

Anyone ever done the math to describe the acoustic lensing effect that makes dropping the toilet seat akin to being flash banged during a swat raid?

Pro tip if you have a massive dome or know someone who does: some North Face baseball caps fit larger than every other brand I’ve tried and actually fit comfortably. Eg: sides of bill don’t dig into forehead, etc.

I feel like I own three jackets that can only be work in narrow 2-week periods in the spring and fall.

Just watched A Serious Man, and it totally fucked me up. I’ve never watched a movie that made me more self-conscious

Value for money, getting a Starz subscription through Apple TV costs like $6/month and their catalogue is loaded with banger movies.

Testing different AI models by asking which breed of dog is considered most 'hardcore' by dog scientists. Turns out Opus 4.6 is more willing to entertain this idea than Sonnet 4.6. For the record, I agree with Opus that Huskies are the most hardcore

Bugs on Halloween dressing up as skeletons by just standing perfectly still.

If I could magically gain a skill, I’d love to be able to carve a bowl on a skateboard. That shit looks so fun

Perhaps he meant ‘worse for him’?

Having now finished Dune Messiah, I still feel like it was never satisfactorily explained why Paul believed he couldn’t command the jihad to stop. There were many vague allusions to worse futures if he strayed from his path, but it’s hard to imagine a future worse than 5 sterilized planets.

Something kind of frivolous, right? Like build an international city under the ocean, or dig a hole to the earth’s mantle, or fund a competition to genetically engineer a new breed of dog that has special powers. I’m for it

Flies only care about one thing, and it’s disgusting

Reading about the evolution of organelles in eukaryotic cells, and it’s so crazy. It’s like if we incorporated dogs into our bodies, and the endosymbiotic dogs lived free-floating inside us until they eventually evolved into olfactory organs.

Pulling out the ol’ vernier callipers to make sure this damn moustache is symmetrical

Sphinx cat goes missing for several days then comes back with elaborate sleeve tattoos

I don’t know what marketing people think “ocean mist” smells like, but having grown up by the ocean, that does not sound like an attractive smell for my laundry.

But then the question is: how could things be made worse by Paul demanding that the jihad stop? Got me there. Thats why I’m not buying this novel so far.

Option A is sort of ruled out since Edric is the one who asks why Paul can’t stop it, and the unseen narrator keeps reminding us how stupid Edric is. In answering, Scytale says the jihad is a chaotic process that can’t be controlled, so I’m leaning toward B.

The more compelling explanations of what Herbert is getting at are A) Paul is stuck in analysis paralysis and has convinced himself he’s powerless when he’s not, or B) The jihad was going to happen no matter what, and will somehow be worse if Paul asks that it stop.

…there are a lot of dumb guys with tons of power who are clearly operating mainly on ego. So, Herbert’s insecure, dopey politicians could be part of a point about how power attracts that type of person, but this book doesn’t seem to have the subtlety to make that point without saying it outright.

Everyone who is ostensibly a canny political operator is constantly getting flustered and losing their cool in a way that’s very different in character from the first book. I’m wrestling with whether that’s purposeful or not. Like, in some ways it feels like the world today, where …

My opinion could change, but I’m really not seeing Herbert’s vision. The forward by Herbert’s son talks about how heroic leaders make mistakes. But nothing Paul or Alia are doing are treated as mistakes, and they don’t seem any dumber than the characters surrounding them.

On p159 of Dune Messiah someone finally asks my question: Why doesn’t Paul use his power as emperor to stop the jihad?

But the framing is like: ‘Edric, in characteristically stupid fashion, asked…’ and he’s cut off and called a simpleton before he can finish. I’m being owned from beyond the grave.

Thanks for the tip! I haven’t tried the social features yet. Maybe that’s the next thing I’ll experiment with

Anyway, I'm curious if anyone has any other setup hacks or tips they've found useful, so please let me know

Technical stuff:
- I started with Garmin Tacx instead of Zwift, and I found its communication with my trainer very spotty. Zwift has none of those issues.
- Resistance feels more realistic when 'power display' is set to 'instant'. Specifically, hills feel much better.

For my setup, I bought a used Elite Direto X for $400. It mounts to my bike by replacing the rear wheel and also functions as a decently attractive bike stand. I usually watch TV or a movie as I'm riding with Zwift on the second screen. The fan is 100% NECESSARY!

What made it click for me was the self-paced 'routes'. They do a decent job capturing freedom and open-endedness of a real bike ride, and you can set challenges for yourself. For eg. a month ago I rode up a virtual mountain and did 1000 m of climbing. (In the GTA, a big hill is ~80m). Pretty cool!