Tootfinder

man, the entire Clipse tiny desk took me back to why we all fell for them right at the start, they are just such STARS, but I legit got emotional when they put the *desk* in Tiny Desk at the end of the set. This entire album rollout has been the coronation they've long deserved. https://youtu.be/f7gIBB7jKc0…

Speculative politics
As an anarchist (okay, maybe not in practice), I'm tired of hearing why we have to suffer X and Y indignity to "preserve the rule of law" or "maintain Democratic norms." So here's an example of what representative democracy (a form of government that I believe is inherently flawed) could look like if its proponents had even an ounce of imagination, and/or weren't actively trying to rig it to favor a rich donor class:
1. Unicameral legislature, where representatives pass laws directly. Each state elects 3 statewide representatives: the three most-popular candidates in a statewide race where each person votes for one candidate (ranked preference voting would be even better but might not be necessary, and is not a solution by itself). Instead of each representative getting one vote in the chamber, they get N votes, where N is the number of people who voted for them. This means that in a close race, instead of the winner getting all the power, the power is split. Having 3 representatives trades off between leisure size and ensuring that two parties can't dominate together.
2. Any individual citizen can contact their local election office to switch or withdraw their vote at any time (maybe with a 3-day delay or something). Voting power of representatives can thus shift even without an election. They are limited to choosing one of the three elected representatives, or "none of the above." If the "none of the above" fraction exceeds 20% of eligible voters, a new election is triggered for that state. If turnout is less than 80%, a second election happens immediately, with results being final even at lower turnout until 6 months later (some better mechanism for turnout management might be needed).
3. All elections allow mail-in ballots, and in-person voting happens Sunday-Tuesday with the Monday being a mandatory holiday. (Yes, election integrity is not better in this system and that's a big weakness.)
4. Separate nationwide elections elect three positions for head-of-state: one with diplomatic/administrative powers, another with military powers, and a third with veto power. For each position, the top three candidates serve together, with only the first-place winner having actual power until vote switches or withdrawals change who that is. Once one of these heads loses their first-place status, they cannot get it again until another election, even if voters switch preferences back (to avoid dithering). An election for one of these positions is triggered when 20% have withdrawn their votes, or if all three people initially elected have been disqualified by losing their lead in the vote count.
5. Laws that involve spending money are packaged with specific taxes to pay for them, and may only be paid for by those specific revenues. Each tax may be opted into or out of by each taxpayer; where possible opting out of the tax also opts you out of the service. (I'm well aware of a lot of the drawbacks of this, but also feel like they'd not necessarily be worse than the drawbacks of our current system.) A small mandatory tax would cover election expenses.
6. I'm running out of attention, but similar multi-winner elections could elect panels of judges from which a subset is chosen randomly to preside in each case.
Now I'll point out once again that this system, in not directly confronting capitalism, racism, patriarchy, etc., is probably doomed to the same failures as our current system. But if you profess to want a "representative democracy" as opposed to something more libratory, I hope you'll at least advocate for something like this that actually includes meaningful representation as opposed to the current US system that's engineered to quash it.
Key questions: "Why should we have winner-take-all elections when winners-take-proportionately-to-votes is right there?" and "Why should elected officials get to ignore their constituents' approval except during elections, when vote-withdrawal or -switching is possible?"
2/2
#Democracy

I wonder whether the developer took this restaurant owner for a ride, or the restaurant owner jilted the developer who got back at them. Either way…

Headway management is a net good, but it's no fun being on the bus that's being slowed down to maintain headway. You've got places to be and that bus is draaaagging, missing every light on purpose.
https://www.sfmta.com/media/42843/download?inline

A Look Back on Raiders' Bowers' Breakout Game https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/las-vegas-brock-bowers-davante-adams-baltimore-ravens

Series D, Episode 01 - Rescue
TARRANT: Ten seconds.
AVON: Main drives running true.
TARRANT: All drives on. Lift you scruffy bag of bolts. Lift.
[Planet Scorpio. Exterior. Scorpio lifts off.]
TARRANT: Orbital booster fired.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/401/205 B7B4

Cowboys’ Trade Interest in $12 Million Running Back Debunked: Report https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/dallas-cowboys/interest-in-12-million-running-back/?adt_ei=[email]

Jaguars unsure of Armstead's status for Week 1 https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/45915760/arik-armstead-week-1-status-jaguars-iffy-due-back

When I work out all the kinks in my back it’s…gonna be better than whatever this is right now 🥲

#Blakes7 Series B, Episode 11 - Gambit
KRANTOR: How much has he won?
TOISE: Nearly five million, Krantor.
KRANTOR: I want that money back, Toise. Have him picked up the moment he leaves.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/211/4…

Fedi meta-musings.
Just went to look at a Mastodon account I interacted with a little while back. Their follow requests require approval (which is fair enough) and the bio states
Got a blank or nonsensical avatar, no visible activity, no pointers to your identity? I'll ignore your follow request.
Well I guess that's me out. I have a good reason for wanting to be pseudonymous, as do many others here I imagine.
Of course it's every user's right to set whatever conditions they want on who follows them, but a blanket refusal on anyone not featuring a "real name" and a human-appearing avatar feels quite over-sensitive to me.
#fediverse #mastodon

I want to push back on the idea in the world of tech work that a PIP (performance improvement plan) is about getting rid of someone, that they're not intended to be survivable.
This is completely false. (I'm sure there's instances of it, of course, but the mode and vast majority are, in fact about performance improvement. Sometimes they're shadow layoffs, but that is cruel callous behavior that not everyone will exhibit.)
Now _most people do not survive the PIP process_. This is to be expected: if someone is in fact not performing, and more gentle remedies haven't worked, it's not looking good.
But here's where I get a bit spicy: most performance problems are constitutional problems with management and management style, not individual performance problems. However, since managers are as a class 'in power' somewhat, the individual contributor takes the fall for this structurally.
The intent of a PIP is not to get rid of people. It's to right performance.
However, as a system, PIPs do largely get rid of people who are constitutionally misaligned with management. Even when it's a management problem (and it usually is)

Surface cleaning archives may be considered mundane but for people who pay attention, one can see all kinds of interesting things like this early style of #paperclip.
#VintageStationery

How popular media gets love wrong
Okay, so what exactly are the details of the "engineered" model of love from my previous post? I'll try to summarize my thoughts and the experiences they're built on.
1. "Love" can be be thought of like a mechanism that's built by two (or more) people. In this case, no single person can build the thing alone, to work it needs contributions from multiple people (I suppose self-love might be an exception to that). In any case, the builders can intentionally choose how they build (and maintain) the mechanism, they can build it differently to suit their particular needs/wants, and they will need to maintain and repair it over time to keep it running. It may need winding, or fuel, or charging plus oil changes and bolt-tightening, etc.
2. Any two (or more) people can choose to start building love between them at any time. No need to "find your soulmate" or "wait for the right person." Now the caveat is that the mechanism is difficult to build and requires lots of cooperation, so there might indeed be "wrong people" to try to build love with. People in general might experience more failures than successes. The key component is slowly-escalating shared commitment to the project, which is negotiated between the partners so that neither one feels like they've been left to do all the work themselves. Since it's a big scary project though, it's very easy to decide it's too hard and give up, and so the builders need to encourage each other and pace themselves. The project can only succeed if there's mutual commitment, and that will certainly require compromise (sometimes even sacrifice, though not always). If the mechanism works well, the benefits (companionship; encouragement; praise; loving sex; hugs; etc.) will be well worth the compromises you make to build it, but this isn't always the case.
3. The mechanism is prone to falling apart if not maintained. In my view, the "fire" and "appeal" models of love don't adequately convey the need for this maintenance and lead to a lot of under-maintained relationships many of which fall apart. You'll need to do things together that make you happy, do things that make your partner happy (in some cases even if they annoy you, but never in a transactional or box-checking way), spend time with shared attention, spend time alone and/or apart, reassure each other through words (or deeds) of mutual beliefs (especially your continued commitment to the relationship), do things that comfort and/or excite each other physically (anywhere from hugs to hand-holding to sex) and probably other things I'm not thinking of. Not *every* relationship needs *all* of these maintenance techniques, but I think most will need most. Note especially that patriarchy teaches men that they don't need to bother with any of this, which harms primarily their romantic partners but secondarily them as their relationships fail due to their own (cultivated-by-patriarchy) incompetence. If a relationship evolves to a point where one person is doing all the maintenance (& improvement) work, it's been bent into a shape that no longer really qualifies as "love" in my book, and that's super unhealthy.
4. The key things to negotiate when trying to build a new love are first, how to work together in the first place, and how to be comfortable around each others' habits (or how to change those habits). Second, what level of commitment you have right now, and what how/when you want to increase that commitment. Additionally, I think it's worth checking in about what you're each putting into and getting out of the relationship, to ensure that it continues to be positive for all participants. To build a successful relationship, you need to be able to incrementally increase the level of commitment to one that you're both comfortable staying at long-term, while ensuring that for both partners, the relationship is both a net benefit and has manageable costs (those two things are not the same). Obviously it's not easy to actually have conversations about these things (congratulations if you can just talk about this stuff) because there's a huge fear of hearing an answer that you don't want to hear. I think the range of discouraging answers which actually spell doom for a relationship is smaller than people think and there's usually a reasonable "shoulder" you can fall into where things aren't on a good trajectory but could be brought back into one, but even so these conversations are scary. Still, I think only having honest conversations about these things when you're angry at each other is not a good plan. You can also try to communicate some of these things via non-conversational means, if that feels safer, and at least being aware that these are the objectives you're pursuing is probably helpful.
I'll post two more replies here about my own experiences that led me to this mental model and trying to distill this into advice, although it will take me a moment to get to those.
#relationships #love

It may appear to be looking empty and quiet at the MPS Göttingen right now - but we have been bustling about and are very busy getting everything ready for our visitors at the Night of Science tomorrow! Care for a few sneak previews in today's thread?
@…
#ndwgoe

Homan, who doesn't have a Senate-approved position and no formal authority over any agency, is a giant trial balloon, right?
Not being sarcastic.
I feel like that is his job: say something outrageous ("Of course we stop you for being brown!") and then see how it goes over, walk back what fails.
-- John Pfaff
htt…

"When we trace any royal line back to its progenitor... that first king always turns out to be a swaggering thug, a bully whom no one in their right mind would follow. Resigning oneself to life under such a person’s authority would be bad enough, but hereditary #monarchy makes things infinitely worse: the generation that crowns him also sacrifices their descendants to his, trading away the f…

Inventing the American Revolution: On Thomas Paine’s Guide to Fighting Dictatorship
Back in 2018, two years into the first Trump presidency, when the ground was shifting beneath our feet in ways that, today, might barely register on our wearied internal seismographs, political ana…

What a goal! Difficult header to finish, leaning backwards to get the connection right. But Russo delivers and places it perfectly back to the near post.
Kelly, yet again, shows she can be the spark England need. Creative and calm.
Game on!
#engesp #EURO2025

Cards' Murray: Knee back to feeling like pre-injury https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/45845885/arizona-cardinals-qb-kyler-murray-says-knee-back-feeling-did-acl-tear

Typical #Mastodon (Fediverse?) moment:

• a supportive video on the #Fediverse is referenced in a post. In this case the video is on YouTube...
• one person in the comments saying that the video should really be on PeerTube instead
• @…

Addiction (Speculatve)
Kind of a fucked-up metaphor, but I was thinking yesterday that parenting is a lot like addiction. If you separate me from my child, I'll take completely irrational and desperate actions to get them back, driven by a deep instinct that goes well beyond "love." I'll also make self-disadvantageous long-term decisions like forgoing sleep, working an extra job, or quitting a job to do some combination of providing for and/or being present with my child.
Even in parenting situations where love is absent, and beyond, I think, the possessiveness that sometimes festers in those situations, there's often (although not always) a craving for simple presence of the child.
In a healthy relationship, there's a whole lot more than this, but it's interesting to me that the same obsessive craving and absolute priority that we think of as diseased and/or monstrous in someone addicted to a hard drug can be healthy in the right context (that is, when it doesn't contribute to abusive or twisted parental relationships but instead exists alongside a healthy amount of love and respect).
Makes me wonder if there are ways to have a truly healthy drug addiction, although I recognize the answer might well be "no" and that even if it's "technically/theoretically yes" it might still be harmful to hype up or even merely discuss that possibility since it might help addicted people in harmful addictions more easily justify inaction. At minimum I think any "yes" answer here involves assuming utopian-level differences from our current society.
#Parenting #Addiction

The white flowers in the new “alt-grass” have started to pop up in the front of the driveway (bottom right) and middle. Still patchy bits but nbd. And the taller stuff is now shading/protecting/cooling the smaller.
The front (bottom) that we seeded a few weeks after the initial planting is growing in nicely.
In a few weeks maybe we will get some poppies in the oldest areas.
Love this stuff!
We can start to walk on the older now, gently. Feels nice barefoot. Down to watering once a day, morning, unless it is over 30°C.
Intending to get more slate slabs next week, so I’ll put in a fourth step stone and probably move the one on the left back a few inches. I’ll try to be careful so I can transplant the grass to some of the patchy areas.
That will also be a first try at backing the trailer over the hump onto the new paths with a lot of weight.
#yard #diy #grass #noconcrete #diy #bloomscrolling

Series D, Episode 09 - Sand
SOOLIN: Keller was right again.
AVON: Vila, try and bring Tarrant back up.
VILA: [He tries.] Nonoperational.
AVON: Well now, none of us is going to faint with amazement at that. Are we?
SOOLIN: What's the next move?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/409/147

Blakes7Bot | Search
Companion site to the Blakes7Bot Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky accounts. Automated lines of Blakes 7 dialog. Includes a script search facility.

Got Ori and the will of the wisps as part of a humble bundle a couple of weeks back. Such a good game. Runs great on the steamdeck as well. Apparently I'm 31% through it. Should be done with it by the time silksong is out. Just hope this rumor is right. 😇 https://fandomwire.com/did-we-just-get-a-hollow-knight-silksong-release-window-major-leak-says-yes/

What's this "transit method" that the #ESA #PLATOmission team will be using to detect extrasolar planets? Experience transits firsthand in our pendulum experiment that models how a planet passes in front of its star and changes the brightness that we can observe, as René Hel…

Why AI can't possibly make you more productive; long
#AI and "productivity", some thoughts:
Edit: fixed some typos.
Productivity is a concept that isn't entirely meaningless outside the context of capitalism, but it's a concept that is heavily inflected in a capitalist context. In many uses today it effectively means "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations." This is not really what it should mean: even in an anarchist utopia, people would care about things like how many shirts they can produce in a week, although in an "I'd like to voluntarily help more people" way rather than an "I need to meet this quota to earn my survival" way. But let's roll with this definition for a second, because it's almost certainly what your boss means when they say "productivity", and understanding that word in a different (even if truer) sense is therefore inherently dangerous.
Accepting "productivity" to mean "satisfying your boss' expectations," I will now claim: the use of generative AI cannot increase your productivity.
Before I dive in, it's imperative to note that the big generative models which most people think of as constituting "AI" today are evil. They are 1: pouring fuel on our burning planet, 2: psychologically strip-mining a class of data laborers who are exploited for their precarity, 3: enclosing, exploiting, and polluting the digital commons, and 4: stealing labor from broad classes of people many of whom are otherwise glad to give that labor away for free provided they get a simple acknowledgement in return. Any of these four "ethical issues" should be enough *alone* to cause everyone to simply not use the technology. These ethical issues are the reason that I do not use generative AI right now, except for in extremely extenuating circumstances. These issues are also convincing for a wide range of people I talk to, from experts to those with no computer science background. So before I launch into a critique of the effectiveness of generative AI, I want to emphasize that such a critique should be entirely unnecessary.
But back to my thesis: generative AI cannot increase your productivity, where "productivity" has been defined as "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations."
Why? In fact, what the fuck? Every AI booster I've met has claimed the opposite. They've given me personal examples of time saved by using generative AI. Some of them even truly believe this. Sometimes I even believe they saved time without horribly compromising on quality (and often, your boss doesn't care about quality anyways if the lack of quality is hard to measure of doesn't seem likely to impact short-term sales/feedback/revenue). So if generative AI genuinely lets you write more emails in a shorter period of time, or close more tickets, or something else along these lines, how can I say it isn't increasing your ability to meet your boss' expectations?
The problem is simple: your boss' expectations are not a fixed target. Never have been. In virtue of being someone who oversees and pays wages to others under capitalism, your boss' game has always been: pay you less than the worth of your labor, so that they can accumulate profit and thus more capital to remain in charge instead of being forced into working for a wage themselves. Sure, there are layers of management caught in between who aren't fully in this mode, but they are irrelevant to this analysis. It matters not how much you please your manager if your CEO thinks your work is not worth the wages you are being paid. And using AI actively lowers the value of your work relative to your wages.
Why do I say that? It's actually true in several ways. The most obvious: using generative AI lowers the quality of your work, because the work it produces is shot through with errors, and when your job is reduced to proofreading slop, you are bound to tire a bit, relax your diligence, and let some mistakes through. More than you would have if you are actually doing and taking pride in the work. Examples are innumerable and frequent, from journalists to lawyers to programmers, and we laugh at them "haha how stupid to not check whether the books the AI reviewed for you actually existed!" but on a deeper level if we're honest we know we'd eventually make the same mistake ourselves (bonus game: spot the swipe-typing typos I missed in this post; I'm sure there will be some).
But using generative AI also lowers the value of your work in another much more frightening way: in this era of hype, it demonstrates to your boss that you could be replaced by AI. The more you use it, and no matter how much you can see that your human skills are really necessary to correct its mistakes, the more it appears to your boss that they should hire the AI instead of you. Or perhaps retain 10% of the people in roles like yours to manage the AI doing the other 90% of the work. Paradoxically, the *more* you get done in terms of raw output using generative AI, the more it looks to your boss as if there's an opportunity to get enough work done with even fewer expensive humans. Of course, the decision to fire you and lean more heavily into AI isn't really a good one for long-term profits and success, but the modern boss did not get where they are by considering long-term profits. By using AI, you are merely demonstrating your redundancy, and the more you get done with it, the more redundant you seem.
In fact, there's even a third dimension to this: by using generative AI, you're also providing its purveyors with invaluable training data that allows them to make it better at replacing you. It's generally quite shitty right now, but the more use it gets by competent & clever people, the better it can become at the tasks those specific people use it for. Using the currently-popular algorithm family, there are limits to this; I'm not saying it will eventually transcend the mediocrity it's entwined with. But it can absolutely go from underwhelmingly mediocre to almost-reasonably mediocre with the right training data, and data from prompting sessions is both rarer and more useful than the base datasets it's built on.
For all of these reasons, using generative AI in your job is a mistake that will likely lead to your future unemployment. To reiterate, you should already not be using it because it is evil and causes specific and inexcusable harms, but in case like so many you just don't care about those harms, I've just explained to you why for entirely selfish reasons you should not use it.
If you're in a position where your boss is forcing you to use it, my condolences. I suggest leaning into its failures instead of trying to get the most out of it, and as much as possible, showing your boss very clearly how it wastes your time and makes things slower. Also, point out the dangers of legal liability for its mistakes, and make sure your boss is aware of the degree to which any of your AI-eager coworkers are producing low-quality work that harms organizational goals.
Also, if you've read this far and aren't yet of an anarchist mindset, I encourage you to think about the implications of firing 75% of (at least the white-collar) workforce in order to make more profit while fueling the climate crisis and in most cases also propping up dictatorial figureheads in government. When *either* the AI bubble bursts *or* if the techbros get to live out the beginnings of their worker-replacement fantasies, there are going to be an unimaginable number of economically desperate people living in increasingly expensive times. I'm the kind of optimist who thinks that the resulting social crucible, though perhaps through terrible violence, will lead to deep social changes that effectively unseat from power the ultra-rich that continue to drag us all down this destructive path, and I think its worth some thinking now about what you might want the succeeding stable social configuration to look like so you can advocate towards that during points of malleability.
As others have said more eloquently, generative AI *should* be a technology that makes human lives on average easier, and it would be were it developed & controlled by humanists. The only reason that it's not, is that it's developed and controlled by terrible greedy people who use their unfairly hoarded wealth to immiserate the rest of us in order to maintain their dominance. In the long run, for our very survival, we need to depose them, and I look forward to what the term "generative AI" will mean after that finally happens.

This is the best opportunity to dial back the influences of out-of-touch billionaires and corporations.
When our plan works,
Montana will be the blueprint for combatting corporate greed in every state’s elections
— and it all starts with our ballot initiative process.
We are going straight to the people with a constitutional initiative on our 2026 ballot.
Right now, we’re hammering out the final wording of the initiative. Next, it will go to the Secretary of Sta…

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Epstein shit and adjacent, Rural America, Poverty, Abuse
Everyone who's not a pedophile thinks pedophiles are bad, but there's this special obsessed hatred you'll find among poor rural Americans. The whole QAnon/Epstein obsession may not really make sense to folks raised in cities. Like, why do these people think *so much* about pedophiles? Why do they think that everyone in power is a pedophile? Why would the Pizzagate thing make sense to anyone? What is this unhinged shit? A lot of folks (who aren't anarchists) might be inclined to ask "why can't these people just let the cops take care of it?"
I was watching Legal Eagle's run down on the Trump Epstein thing earlier today and I woke up thinking about something I don't know if I've ever talked about. Now that I'm not in the US, I'm not at any risk of talking about it. I don't know how much I would have been before, but that's not something I'm gonna dig into right now. So let me tell you a story that might explain a few things.
I'm like 16, maybe 17. I have my license, so this girl I was dating/not dating/just friends with/whatever would regularly convince me to drive her and her friends around. I think she's like 15 at the time. Her friends are younger than her.
She tells me that there's a party we can go to where they have beer. She was told to invite her friends, so I can come too. We're going to pick her friends up (we regularly fill the VW Golf well beyond the legal limit and drive places) and head to the party.
So I take these girls, at least is 13 years old, down to this party. I'm already a bit sketched out bringing a 13 year old to a party. We drive out for a while. It's in the country. We drive down a long dark road. Three are some barrel fires and a shack. This is all a bit strange, but not too abnormal for this area. We're a little ways outside of a place called Mill City (in Oregon).
We park and walk towards the shack. This dude who looks like a rat comes up and offers us beer. He laughs and talks to the girl who invited me, "What's he doing here? You're supposed to bring your girl friends." She's like, "He's our ride." I don't remember if he offered me a beer or not.
We go over to this shed and everyone starts smoking, except me because I didn't smoke until I turned 18. The other girls start talking about the rat face dude, who's wandered over by the fire with some other guys. They're mainly teasing one of the 13 year old girls about having sex with him a bunch of times. They say he's like, 32 or something. The other girls joke about him only having sex with 13 year olds because he's too ugly to have sex with anyone closer to his own age.
Somewhere along the line it comes out that he's a cop. I never forgot that, it's absolutely seared in to my memory. I can picture his face perfectly still, decades later, and them talking about how he's a deputy, he was in his 30's, and he was having sex with a 13 year old girl. I was the only boy there, but there were a few older men. This was a chunk of the good ol' boys club of the town. I think there were a couple of cops besides the one deputy, and a judge or the mayor or some kind of big local VIP.
I kept trying to get my friend to leave, but she wanted to stay. Turns out under age drinking with cops seems like a great deal if you're a kid because you know you won't get busted. I left alone, creeped the fuck out.
I was told later that I wasn't invited and that I couldn't talk about it, I've always been good at compartmentalization, so I never did.
Decades later it occurred to me what was actually happening. I'm pretty sure that cop was giving meth he'd seized as evidence to these kids. This wasn't some one-off thing. It was regular. Who knows how many decades it went on after I left, or how many decades it had been going on before I found out. I knew this type of thing had happened at least a few times before because that's how that 13 year old girl and that 32 year old cop had hooked up in the first place.
Hearing about Epstein's MO, targeting these teenage girls from fucked up backgrounds, it's right there for me. I wouldn't be surprised if they were involved in sex trafficking of minors or some shit like that... but who would you call if you found out? Half the sheriff's department was there and the other half would cover for them.
You live in the city and shit like that doesn't happen, or at least you don't think it happens. But rural poor folks have this intuition about power and abuse. It's right there and you know it.
Trump is such a familiar character for me, because he's exactly that small town mayor or sheriff. He'll will talk about being tough on crime and hunting down pedophiles, while hanging out at a party that exists so people can fuck 8th graders.
The problem with the whole thing is that rural folks will never break the cognitive dissonance between "kill the peods" and "back the blue." They'll never go kill those cops. No, the pedos must be somewhere else. It must be the elites. It must be outsiders. It can't be the cops and good ol' boys everyone respects. It can't be the mayor who rigs the election to win every time. It can't be the "good upstanding" sheriff. Nah, it's the Clintons.
To be fair, it's probably also the Clitnons, a bunch of other politicians, billionaires, etc. Epstein was exactly who everyone thought he was, and he didn't get away with it for so long without a whole lot of really powerful help.
There are still powerful people who got away with involvement with #Epstein. #Trump is one of them, but I don't really believe that he's the only one.
#USPol #ACAB

A while ago, I've followed the example given by #Fedora and unbundled ensurepip wheels from #Python in #Gentoo (just checked — "a while ago" was 3 years ago). This had the important advantage that it enabled us to update these wheels along with the actual pip and setuptools packages, meaning new virtual environments would get fresh versions rather than whatever CPython happened to bundle at the time of release.
I had considered using our system packages to prepare these wheels, but since we were already unbundling dependencies back then, that couldn't work. So I just went with fetching upstream wheels from PyPI. Why not build them from source instead? Well, besides feeling unnecessary (it's not like the PyPI wheels are actually binary packages), we probably didn't have the right kind of eclass support for that at the time.
Inspired by @…, today I've tried preparing new revisions of ensurepip packages that actually do build everything from source. So what changed, and why should building from source matter now? Firstly, as part of the wheel reuse patches, we do have a reasonably clean architecture to grab the wheels created as part of the PEP517 build. Secondly, since we're unbundling dependencies from pip and setuptools, we're effectively testing different packages than these installed as ensurepip wheels — and so it would be meaningful to test both variants. Thirdly, building from source is going to make patching easier, and at the very least enable user patching.
While at it, I've refreshed the test suite runs in all three regular packages (pip, setuptools and wheel — we need an "ensurepip" wheel for the last because of test suites). And of course, I hit some test failures in testing the versions with bundled dependencies, and I've discovered a random bug in #PyPy.
https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/pull/42882 (yes, we haven't moved yet)
https://github.com/pypy/pypy/issues/5306

Long post, game design
Crungle is a game designed to be a simple test of general reasoning skills that's difficult to play by rote memory, since there are many possible rule sets, but it should be easy to play if one can understand and extrapolate from rules. The game is not necessarily fair, with the first player often having an advantage or a forced win. The game is entirely deterministic, although a variant determines the rule set randomly.
This is version 0.1, and has not yet been tested at all.
Crungle is a competitive game for two players, each of whom controls a single piece on a 3x3 grid. The cells of the grid are numbered from 1 to 9, starting at the top left and proceeding across each row and then down to the next row, so the top three cells are 1, 2, and 3 from left to right, then the next three are 4, 5, and 6 and the final row is cells 7, 8, and 9.
The two players decide who shall play as purple and who shall play as orange. Purple goes first, starting the rules phase by picking one goal rule from the table of goal rules. Next, orange picks a goal rule. These two goal rules determine the two winning conditions. Then each player, starting with orange, alternate picking a movement rule until four movement rules have been selected. During this process, at most one indirect movement rule may be selected. Finally, purple picks a starting location for orange (1-9), with 5 (the center) not allowed. Then orange picks the starting location for purple, which may not be adjacent to orange's starting position.
Alternatively, the goal rules, movement rules, and starting positions may be determined randomly, or a pre-determined ruleset may be selected.
If the ruleset makes it impossible to win, the players should agree to a draw. Either player could instead "bet" their opponent. If the opponent agrees to the bet, the opponent must demonstrate a series of moves by both players that would result in a win for either player. If they can do this, they win, but if they submit an invalid demonstration or cannot submit a demonstration, the player who "bet" wins.
Now that starting positions, movement rules, and goals have been decided, the play phase proceeds with each player taking a turn, starting with purple, until one player wins by satisfying one of the two goals, or until the players agree to a draw. Note that it's possible for both players to occupy the same space.
During each player's turn, that player identifies one of the four movement rules to use and names the square they move to using that rule, then they move their piece into that square and their turn ends. Neither player may use the same movement rule twice in a row (but it's okay to use the same rule your opponent just did unless another rule disallows that). If the movement rule a player picks moves their opponent's piece, they need to state where their opponent's piece ends up. Pieces that would move off the board instead stay in place; it's okay to select a rule that causes your piece to stay in place because of this rule. However, if a rule says "pick a square" or "move to a square" with some additional criteria, but there are no squares that meet those criteria, then that rule may not be used, and a player who picks that rule must pick a different one instead.
Any player who incorrectly states a destination for either their piece or their opponent's piece, picks an invalid square, or chooses an invalid rule has made a violation, as long as their opponent objects before selecting their next move. A player who makes at least three violations immediately forfeits and their opponent wins by default. However, if a player violates a rule but their opponent does not object before picking their next move, the stated destination(s) of the invalid move still stand, and the violation does not count. If a player objects to a valid move, their objection is ignored, and if they do this at least three times, they forfeit and their opponent wins by default.
Goal rules (each player picks one; either player can win using either chosen rule):
End your turn in the same space as your opponent three turns in a row.
End at least one turn in each of the 9 cells.
End five consecutive turns in the three cells in any single row, ending at least one turn on each of the three.
End five consecutive turns in the three cells in any single column, ending at least one turn on each of the three.
Within the span of 8 consecutive turns, end at least one turn in each of cells 1, 3, 7, and 9 (the four corners of the grid).
Within the span of 8 consecutive turns at least one turn in each of cells 2, 4, 6, and 8 (the central cells on each side).
Within the span of 8 consecutive turns, end at least one turn in the cell directly above your opponent, and end at least one turn in the cell directly below your opponent (in either order).
Within the span of 8 consecutive turns at least one turn in the cell directly to the left of your opponent, and end at least one turn in the cell directly to the right of your opponent (in either order).
End 12 turns in a row without ending any of them in cell 5.
End 8 turns in a row in 8 different cells.
Movement rules (each player picks two; either player may move using any of the four):
Move to any cell on the board that's diagonally adjacent to your current position.
Move to any cell on the board that's orthogonally adjacent to your current position.
Move up one cell. Also move your opponent up one cell.
Move down one cell. Also move your opponent down one cell.
Move left one cell. Also move your opponent left one cell.
Move right one cell. Also move your opponent right one cell.
Move up one cell. Move your opponent down one cell.
Move down one cell. Move your opponent up one cell.
Move left one cell. Move your opponent right one cell.
Move right one cell. Move your opponent left one cell.
Move any pieces that aren't in square 5 clockwise around the edge of the board 1 step (for example, from 1 to 2 or 3 to 6 or 9 to 8).
Move any pieces that aren't in square 5 counter-clockwise around the edge of the board 1 step (for example, from 1 to 4 or 6 to 3 or 7 to 8).
Move to any square reachable from your current position by a knight's move in chess (in other words, a square that's in an adjacent column and two rows up or down, or that's in an adjacent row and two columns left or right).
Stay in the same place.
Swap places with your opponent's piece.
Move back to the position that you started at on your previous turn.
If you are on an odd-numbered square, move to any other odd-numbered square. Otherwise, move to any even-numbered square.
Move to any square in the same column as your current position.
Move to any square in the same row as your current position.
Move to any square in the same column as your opponent's position.
Move to any square in the same row as your opponent's position.
Pick a square that's neither in the same row as your piece nor in the same row as your opponent's piece. Move to that square.
Pick a square that's neither in the same column as your piece nor in the same column as your opponent's piece. Move to that square.
Move to one of the squares orthogonally adjacent to your opponent's piece.
Move to one of the squares diagonally adjacent to your opponent's piece.
Move to the square opposite your current position across the middle square, or stay in place if you're in the middle square.
Pick any square that's closer to your opponent's piece than the square you're in now, measured using straight-line distance between square centers (this includes the square your opponent is in). Move to that square.
Pick any square that's further from your opponent's piece than the square you're in now, measured using straight-line distance between square centers. Move to that square.
If you are on a corner square (1, 3, 7, or 9) move to any other corner square. Otherwise, move to square 5.
If you are on an edge square (2, 4, 6, or 8) move to any other edge square. Otherwise, move to square 5.
Indirect movement rules (may be chosen instead of a direct movement rule; at most one per game):
Move using one of the other three movement rules selected in your game, and in addition, your opponent may not use that rule on their next turn (nor may they select it via an indirect rule like this one).
Select two of the other three movement rules, declare them, and then move as if you had used one and then the other, applying any additional effects of both rules in order.
Move using one of the other three movement rules selected in your game, but if the move would cause your piece to move off the board, instead of staying in place move to square 5 (in the middle).
Pick one of the other three movement rules selected in your game and apply it, but move your opponent's piece instead of your own piece. If that movement rule says to move "your opponent's piece," instead apply that movement to your own piece. References to "your position" and "your opponent's position" are swapped when applying the chosen rule, as are references to "your turn" and "your opponent's turn" and do on.
#Game #GameDesign

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BLAKE: No drugs!
HAVANT: A mild sedative to help you to sleep. You must rest.
BLAKE: No! No drugs.
HAVANT: All right, no drugs. Now try not to think anymore. Don't worry, we'll get it sorted out.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/101/117

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Series C, Episode 07 - Children of Auron
AVON: You are forgetting that the Aurons rejected her. They sent her into exile.
TARRANT: You were exiled from Earth.
AVON: I go back as an executioner.
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I'm pretty sure all the white folks (and anyone else who didn't learn the underlying lessons first hand) were assigned to learn about Red Summer, the Chinese Exclusion Acts, Wilmington 1898, and more than a few other things that came up in cultural conversation during the last Trump presidency. This is all on the test, and you're taking it now.
But in case anyone missed the assignment, I'll give you the TL;DR: ethnic cleansing has been central to American politics basically forever, which shouldn't be surprising given it's a nation founded on genocide and the belief in the right to commit it without constraint.
If you haven't done the math yet, I'll help you out. The "Haitian Immigrants" lets them grab black folks, they've been grabbing folks from Mexico south and lumping in indigenous Americans (just so they don't skip out on the oldest American genocide), and the Muslim ban/Hamas rhetoric lets them grab anyone who else they see fit.
The lack of due process lets them grab anyone and they don't have to prove anything. They're talking about deporting "one million" and possibly"millions" of people. So how do they get those numbers?
There are already reports that they're just grabbing random brown folks, trying to take 3k people per day. They fly to blue cities and grab as many black and brown people as they can, then send them to death camps in foreign countries and pretend they have no way to get them back. That's it. That's the game.
This isn't new. The big difference now is that the cops aren't hiding their uniforms under white hoods this time. Do you get it yet?

Series B, Episode 11 - Gambit
JENNA: Did you find him?
BLAKE: I missed him by a couple of minutes. There's a back entrance. Something must have scared him.
CALLY: Cevedic, presumably.
JENNA: Well he could be anywhere by now.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/211/330 B7B6

Series A, Episode 12 - Deliverance
TRAVIS: I've told you, I want my command back. It's the only way I can catch -
SERVALAN: You really are obsessed with Blake, aren't you?
TRAVIS: It's my right.
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