I still can’t believe Ghislane was a literal reddit power mod, of many major subreddits.

Sorry to link to the bad place but… yeah.

https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/r45a5n/here_is_the_evidence_that_reddit_user_maxwellhill/

Right back at you, you are always pleasant and reasonable as well, and your username sticks out with the _ underscores, haha!

=D

Hah, well, there are basically much, much smaller scale ‘tornadoes’ that we call ‘dust devils’, or other terms… they’re usually only the size of about a person, maybe as tall as two people, they’re formed by other kinds of climate/weather conditions, and tend to dissapate in under a minute.

You could probably ‘pet’ one of those, though you may lose your hat, ‘get your feathers ruffled’, so to say.

I mean, yeah, but the pigs do much of the uh, subject disassembly for you.

Its possible you could get a usable DNA result from hair or teeth that’s gone through a digestive system, but… less likely.

Where does pig shit normally go?

Usually into some kind of composting mixture for your own small garden/farm, or even sold to some kind of local co-op or something for the same thing on a larger scale.

That much exposure to a very active biological situation is gonna mess up and degrade dna even more.

I guess if you are super paranoid, run the stuff through a mulcher first, pick out anything that looks like teeth and just put em in a rock tumbler or smash em with a hammer or something?

Yeah… that sounds (hah) just completely terrifying.

I’ve been in a few very high high speed, sustained windstorms, over in the PNW, but nothing approaching an actual tornado.

I’md glad you find the metaphor apt!

As to decoy trailer parks… lol.

That would at least be a better usage of FEMA funds than concentration camps for farmer / field workers…

It also explains their being in rather good shape.

I initially looked at this and went damn, these people are fit and muscular, quite low body fat for midwesterners… and near a tornado, just at the threshold between the ‘we can safely run away’ and ‘we are fucked’ distance from a tornado… yep, probably storm chasers.

Actual, literal pigs, swine, are also rather good at eating pretty much anything.

I’ve not personally encountered a tornado that close, but I’ve personally met and talked to some old timers from the Plains States… who’ve actually got personal experience of having to hide in the cellar while a tornado barely misses their house by 1000 feet.

The freight train / constant bombs going off descriptions come from them, and I find them pretty reasonably good analogies, with myself having a bit of experience with audio engineering for video game mods, looked into some of the physics of sound to tweak things around.

You could maybe replicate parts of the sound element with… basically a massive subwoofer that literally registers on the Richter scale… but another element that can’t really be replicated is the massive and rapid changes in ambient air pressure very close to a tornado… that changes the properties of how sound propagates… and there is such a high magnitude/volume, low frequency nature of all of it that… its where ‘hearing’ and ‘feeling’ blend into the same thing.

Ever been right near a freight train crossing as one blazes by at high speed?

Imagine ten or twenty at the same time.

Tornadoes are incredibly loud, and just… sound like destruction… the ground, the air…everything is shaking, rippling, like bombs going off continuously.

It is difficult to capture this with video or audio, because… they are so loud, and hit so many frequency ranges, that you’d basically have to be sitting inside of an arena concert subwoofer to… get the audio experience replicated.

That and… basically everything fairly close to them has a tendency to be obliterated.

They can rip a telephone pole (basically shaved down tree trunks in areas of America tornadoes often hit) out of the ground, and then throw it through a house, like, clean through, and then clean through the next house, and then embedded 5 to 10 feet into the ground, at an oblique angle.

Tornadoes move around fairly quickly, and … basically everything that gets too close is… blenderized.

If you’re within say 500 meters of one, you should either be hiding in a cellar or bunker, or you should be driving away from it as fast as possible.

Notice how this tree… is nowhere near where it got uprooted from.

This tree managed to get broken off, thrown just so that it landed upright, braced against a power line.

Nearly 2 metric ton vehicle thrown about a kilometer through the air, hit the town water tower, bounced off, kept going for another ~ half kilometer.

…

Please do not walk up to a tornado.

I almost entirely agree with what you’ve said here, I just didn’t feel like writing out all the nuances, and was trying to just do a surface level analogy.

The only part where I even sort of maybe disagree is… there are actually good tech news sources, they just tend to be either fairly or highly specialized, and/or pretty niche, literally just a guy, or a couple people, running a website basically like its still Web 1.0 days.

But absolutely yes, the broader audience that an outfit appeals to, the broader scope of things they try to cover… its a joke, doing comprehensive reviews of everything would take a whole bunch if teams of specialists, so… most don’t even bother, and just link to somebody else who did that, and try to summarize it … and thats a best case scenario.

It is truly horrendous with video game journalism.

Beyond the surface level stuff of seemingly arbitrary and nonsensical review scores, the incestuous access journalism aspect of it that turns most of them into just advertising…

Almost none of these people offer a meaningful critique of like, the business strategy, the corporate culture, the deals between companies, the astoundingly high usage of contractors and just endemic, obvious galactic levels of incompetence management shows all the time.

Again, there are a few exceptions to this, they’ll cover some obviously heinous shit like sexual harassment and absurd crunch seasons, they’ll report on unions trying to form, and there are a few actually decent investigators…

… but by and large, there is basically no investigative journalism into say, an utterly collapsed, decade spanning, $400 million dollar game that just flops in a month… not on the level that I feel is journalistically called for there, which would be roughly ‘this is Enron’, ‘this is Lehman Brothers’.

They live in this silly nonsense world where the gaming industry is fucking huge and important, but they still mostly cover it like disaffected former fanboys/girls, rather than taking it as seriously as it should be taken.

Because there is no meaningful dissection of how truly idiotic and evil just now routine AAA corpo game publisher logic works, at like a macro to microeconomic comprehensive analysis level… we instead get the masses dramatically oversimplifying things on that front, and then focusing waaaaay too much on whether or not its ok for characters to have pronouns.

Like, me, I am the only person I am aware of who has been saying:

Kernel level anti cheat is not actually necessary, it doesn’t even achieve what it purports to, thus, it just serves as a way to to maintain a corporate grip over the platform (Windows) of the PC gaming market.

Similarly, the entire real time ray tracing paradigm of Nvidia/Unreal Engine is also a fucking scam, though I am at least seeing more people do comprehensive breakdowns on why that is the case, of course the PC hardware reviewers are very fed up with this by now… but still only a few go into the massive economic impacts of that and thus broad societal implications.

…

There, your essay provoked my own rant-essay, lol.

I could write on this for days if my wrist was so fucked, bleck.

I mean, if you keep nearly or actually ODing on Ivermectin, you’ll shit your guts out, could lose weight that way, probably cheaper.

… probably a lot more unsafe, there’s a lot more OD sideeffects than diarrhea… but… cheaper!

It used to be common for uh, writers, journalists, to have at least basic familiarity with what they’re writing or reporting on.

Its not like this is journalistic malpractice, spreading lies, fabricating a quote, supporting a bs narrative by being very selective with context and such…

… but it is pretty embarrassing.

People seem to constantly confuse ‘i use computer technology’ with ‘i understand how computer technology works’.

Like uh, Gen Z and A are the most digital, online generations yet… but many of them can’t type on a keyboard, have no idea what a file/folder structure is.

Yes, but if they can’t actually pull off the last part… uh… that doesn’t end well.

You make good points, my view is obviously America centric.

As I literally used to work for MSFT, in various parts of their city sized corporate HQ outside of Seattle, and a few ‘smaller’, though still massive by the standards of any non megacorp, ‘satellite’ campuses in other parts of the broader Seattle area.

…

I completely agree that refusal to do reasonable location specific pricing is a huge problem, and I’d say that basically stems from MSFT being astoundingly myopic, to the point of the management culture being cult-like.

Perhaps a sort of saving grace for international customers is that uh, the US dollar is currently crashing against basically every other currency?

Or perhaps that is an actual cause of why AAA game prices go up in USD: MSFTs costs are primarily in USD, so they figure out a way to smudge costs over the whole system in a way that trickles up to them in USD, by using their influence to functionally make everything else somewhat subsidize their attempt to grow or maintain market share.

MSFT gaming seems to be transitioning to pretty much abandoning being a ‘console maker’, and moving toward ‘we are an uber publisher’.

…

But anyway… I get that from the consumer perspective, yes, it makes sense to go with GamesPass…

The problem is that from a business perspective, what this does is destroy the economics of actually making a game.

It reduces sales, which reduces profit, which means now game publishers force game studios to cut costs, so they fire half their staff or reassign them, which destroys all the undocumented knowledge of the game studio, and then they are replaced with cheaper per hour paid contractors who don’t know that information, which results in sloppier, buggier games that ironically always go overbudget, overschedule, and don’t sell as well.

…

Maybe think if it as an infrasctucture style situation, with game devs as the road maintenance crews, and consumers of games as car drivers:

If you skimp on road maintenance, and then also make everyone drive much much more, by making public transit very expensive/shitty, and cars are now all a cheap personal rental service…

… eventually the roads give out, pot holes everywhere, bridges falling apart… and the entire system grinds to a halt rather rapidly, because now, a decade later, there aren’t any more talented road maintenance crews, they all quit from the shit wages and shit working conditions, their specialized vehicles sre in disrepair, and there is also not enough money to hire and train a massive new workforce to fix all the roads.

Hey, uh, is Uber still cheaper than a taxi?

Oh, no, it isn’t, and also taxis, largely don’t exist anymore, and also public transit (the much cheaper to the ‘consumer’ option) is now 10 to 15 years behind where it should be.

Roughly the same business model there.

You’re trading short term low cost and convenience and broad array of choices for long term higher prices and the broad stagnation/destruction of the entire industry, fucking over all the people who work in said industry.

Yet another example of:

C Suite / Upper Management doesn’t listen when a seasoned software engineer of some kind points out an extremely obvious medium/long-run problem with the business model they’re being asked to either functionally invent, or massively contribute to.

I’d fuckin watch that.

Yes, it will restrict developer… well, really, mostly publisher choice, in 99% of the scenarios this will actually affect, if you go by amount of money involved.

Specifically their choice to Thanos snap all of your MTX purchased items out of existence, their choice to EoL a game without having some kind of at least mostly functional final patch and/or release of a stripped down dedi server binary.

Yep.

They’re right.

It would restrict those choices.

Like how we have lemon laws that restrict the choice of a car dealer/mfg to sell you a catastrophically broken piece of crap.

Yeah, not 100% sure but that looks like maybe… 4 .410 barrels and one 12 gauge, possibly 10 gauge as you say?

My guess would be this thing has at least two triggers, its got two visible … percussion cap? hammers?

I… I think this is like, a modern, custom, ‘reproduction’ type thing…

I guess its possible it could be an actual like… 150+ yo custom gun?

That… seems less likely though?

Also… presumably that little flipper like thing on the right of this image, and… probably at least one other lever, maybe further down the butt stock, out of frame… would be needed to switch between different 410 barrels or the 12 gauge barrel, or … something?

Unless it just fires … everything at once.

Which… is possible, but that’d knock probably most people on their ass or fly out of their hands or break your collarbone/face lol.

But yeah, a total of 5 barrels is so uncommon I am inclined to think it is at this point basically a one of a kind heirloom, or more likely a more modern custom job by a gunsmith who specializes in wacky shit, lol.

Could be percussion caps, could have a stiker firing mechanism that just looks like the old school percussion cap style hammers externally…?

…

My family had at one point an over-under rifle/shotgun combo, but it was just .22lr and .410, just two barrels, break open… but from like the 1950s or 60s, with more modern firing mechanisms.

It had one trigger, and a sort of switch/lever to change the single hammer from striking either chamber, and then a button, kinda like a mag release on a pistol, to allow you to break it open to extract and reload.

Think it might have been a Savage 24, wood housing… but the stock actually developed a nasty crack and iirc, we just sold it at a discount to some gunshop who would replace the stock and then sell it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savage_Model_24

Yep, am autistic, can confirm.

As with Union of Kobolds, I eventually got into the ‘gifted’ program… they even had me as a 2nd and 3rd grader basically being an unpaid tutor for 4th and 5th graders, sitting in the hallway, helping kids with reading difficulties (in all liklihood, undiagnosed dyslexia) read through kids books.

But, there’s always classes and teachers not part of the gifted program, and they’re often difficult and wrong and rude for no reason.

I still remember a chemistry teacher getting very angry with me for even bringing up quantum scale electron clouds as a model of atoms.

Not allowed to go beyond the Rutherford-Bohr model, even in discussion, always dismissive and rude, incapable of saying just ‘yes that is a more accurate model, but it is far too complex to go over without understanding Rutherford-Bohr first’.