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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • I once gave a player a ring that did something similar. It was a cursed ring of jumping. The player was able to jump 16 feet into the air, and/or 30 feet in distance… The curse was that the player was only able to jump 16 feet high/30 feet long.

    Just need to hop over a small 5 foot wide pitfall trap? You’re taking a flying leap and slamming into the wall that is 10 feet behind it. Want to hop over a table during a tavern brawl? You’re slamming into the 12 foot ceiling of the tavern, hard enough for everyone to stop fighting and stare for a split second before resuming the brawl.


  • He’s cooked.

    For the unaware, Japan has like a 99.9% conviction rate after arrests, because they basically don’t arrest unless they’re absolutely 100% positive that they can secure a conviction. The suspect also has no right to an attorney, and police abuse is common; Even if you’re innocent, they’ll just keep you in an interrogation room without any food or water for 72 hours until you “confess”. They’ll literally just rotate cops into the interrogation room, without giving you a break for food or sleep.

    And Japanese prisons are some of the strictest. You’re basically expected to remain silent, and every moment of your time is accounted for. You get like 20 minutes to eat each meal (in your cell) and then like 30 minutes of “recreational” time outside, where you’re expected to kneel in place in an empty courtyard. Moving to and from your cell is akin to old elementary schools where everyone would have to line up single file and silently walk from one place to the next while following the teacher. And that’s pretty much your daily routine for the entire time you’re in. You sit in your cell, slam down what little food you get, silently walk to the courtyard, silently kneel for 30 minutes, silently walk back to your cell, and slam down dinner before bedtime. Any deviation is dealt with swiftly and violently by the guards.

    Japan has a very skewed idea of criminal justice, because the prevailing attitude is that if you’re in prison, you must have done something to deserve it. It’s sort of a cyclical problem, where their insanely high conviction rate means that the public already assumes suspects are guilty before they have even been convicted.




  • That’s because employees are seen as a liability, while holdings are seen as value.

    Basically, employees need to be paid, so having a lot of employees hurts your company value. But owning immaterial things helps company value, because you don’t need to pay for ideas beyond the initial investment.

    So headlines like these are common any time a company is looking to boost their stock. Lay off a bunch of employees to reduce cash out, use that freshly gained cash to buy intellectual properties (or buy the companies that own that IP) and then sit on the IP because actually using it would require employees like the ones you just laid off. You don’t care about actually leveraging the IP, because simply owning it is what gives you the value bump. You’re not worried about income from those IPs yet, because you’re just trying to make the company larger with the existing cash you have access to.


  • It’s an old meme that states the first 30% of every YouTube video is useless and can be skipped without consequence. It’s a constant because it doesn’t matter if the video is 3 or 300 seconds long; The first 30% can always be skipped without missing anything important.

    IIRC, it started on Reddit when a user named Wadsworth wrote about it in one of the AskReddit threads about life hacks.



  • Yeah, Ryobi had a bad reputation for a long time, because they’re old (dark blue) tools were hot garbage. But when they were bought out by TTI (and they changed the color to the bright green) all the tools started getting made on the same production line as Milwaukee (also owned by TTI). The QA is a little looser on the Ryobi stuff, but it’s all sourced from the same place as the (much more expensive) Milwaukee tools that many people swear by. If I remember correctly, TTI also owns Ridgid.

    It’s basically the Lexus/Toyota thing, where they’re both owned and manufactured by the same parent company, but the Lexus brand is much more expensive just because it’s marketed as luxury. You can get a Toyota for half the price of a Lexus, and find the same quality as a Lexus. And for the insanely cheap price and wide range of available tools, it’s hard to go wrong with Ryobi.



  • If you’re a musician or audio tech trying to get started, the Shure SM58 and SM57 are the first two mics you should grab. 58 for vocals, and 57 for anything that doesn’t need a screen (like an instrument or guitar amp.) Both have the exact same mic capsule, but the 58 has a larger filter that will make it a little warmer and less prone to popping on plosives.

    Are there fancier mics out there that sound better, or are made for specific purposes? Yeah. But there’s diminishing returns on audio quality, you can’t use them for as many things, and more sensitive mics are also more fragile. For $100 each, you can get some mics that will be passed down to your grandchildren. If you’re trying to cover the widest possible range of uses, the 58 and 57 are your go-to mics.

    Whenever you think of a stereotypical 🎤 microphone, you’re 100% thinking of a Shure SM58.




  • Here, I fixed it:

    A group of people Nazis carrying Nazi flags demonstrated outside a community theater performance of “The Diary of Anne Frank” in Livingston County, Michigan, in a display of antisemitism.
    Several masked men Nazis showed up waving Nazi flags and reportedly shouted antisemitic and racist slurs outside the American Legion Post 141 in Howell on Saturday during the play, according to CNN affiliate WXYZ.
    “People were shocked. They were appalled,” Army veteran Bobby Brite told WXYZ. “Everything you would expect.”
    Brite said many of the 75 people who watched the play were afraid to leave the building and had to be escorted to their cars.
    “Nobody in America should feel like that,” he said.
    Demonstrators Nazis were also seen in the nearby town of Fowlerville, according to eyewitnesses.
    Alex Sutliff and his wife were driving home through downtown Fowlerville when they came across a group of masked men Nazis waving Nazi flags.
    “They were saying awful antisemitic things that I don’t even feel comfortable repeating myself,” Sutliff told CNN on Tuesday.
    Sutliff, who filmed the brief encounter, said the group of Nazis “all stuck their hands up” and chanted “Heil Hitler, Heil Trump.”
    Sutliff’s interaction with the demonstrators Nazis took place at a stoplight, and when the light turned green, he drove away before things could escalate.
    He and his wife called local police to report what they saw, and then circled back to let the demonstrators Nazis know that authorities were on their way.
    “The second that they heard that they were on the way, they all packed up their stuff and ran away.”
    CNN has reached out to the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office for further details.
    The Fowlerville Community Theatre, which put on the production, said in a statement the play “centers on real people who lost their lives in the Holocaust” and added the cast and crew “endeavored to tell their story with as much realism as possible.”
    “On Saturday evening, things became more real than we expected,” the group said. “The presence of protesters Nazis (this one I may be willing to let slide if it’s a direct quote) outside gave us a small glimpse of the fear and uncertainty felt by those in hiding.”
    “As a theatre, we want to make people feel and think. We hope by presenting Anne’s story, we can help prevent the atrocities of the past from happening again.”
    Citing the sheriff’s office, The Detroit News reported the demonstrators Nazis left after being told to vacate the legion post’s parking lot, then ensued in a brief exchange of words with patrons while across the street.
    The Anti-Defamation League’s regional office in Michigan said on social media it was “disgusted by the far-right extremists Nazis (again, this may be a direct quote?) who praised Hitler and waved Nazi flags outside of an American Legion hosting the play.”
    The county has faced similar displays of racism this year. In July, White supremacists Nazis marched through Howell, located roughly 40 miles northwest of Detroit.
    Threats to Jews in the US tripled in the one-year period since the deadly October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, preliminary data provided to CNN by the ADL showed. In the weeks following October 7, reports of hate crimes and bias incidents targeting Jews, Muslims and Arabs all surged.
    “The Diary of Anne Frank” was published posthumously and has been translated into more than 70 languages in more than 60 nations, with several film and stage adaptations. Her diary is often a teen’s first introduction to the horrors of the Holocaust caused by Nazis during World War II.
    She and seven others, all Jewish, hiding in a secret annex above a canal-side warehouse in Amsterdam for nearly two years were detained and deported in 1944. Anne later died in the Bergen Belsen concentration camp at age 15.
    Growing fears of antisemitism remains a present issue – including in Amsterdam. In July, a statue of Anne in a local park was vandalized with the word “Gaza” scrawled in red paint. More recently, people were beaten and injured in violent clashes between fans of an Israeli soccer team and counter-protesters in the city over the weekend, which Dutch authorities condemned as antisemitic.



  • The Kobo and Kindle are functionally identical in terms of hardware, except for a few things that are specific to Amazon. But Amazon has been increasingly hostile towards Calibre in recent years. It used to be supported almost natively, but it seems like each update from Amazon locks down something that used to be accessible, or breaks existing functionality.

    For instance, you used to be able to edit collections directly in Calibre, but Amazon broke that because they want everyone to use their collections (which are only included on books purchased directly from amazon) instead. So for instance, if you uploaded the entire Harry Potter series, you used to be able to tag all of them with the series and they’d be added to a collection together. You can’t do that anymore, and have to add them manually one by one on the Kindle’s laggy touchscreen.

    They have also started breaking included cover art, because the Kindle automatically polls Amazon to download art instead. And when it doesn’t find any, (because the book isn’t from Amazon,) it wipes the included art instead of just falling back to it. Luckily this has a fairly simple fix (just unplug your kindle, let it index and break the cover art, then plug it back in so Calibre can push the cover art back to the Kindle,) but that means you need to actually take the extra time to do that every time you upload something new.

    The Send To Kindle email functionality has recently been broken to where every .epub file you email just gets sent to Documents instead of Books or Newsstand. So if you have Calibre set up to grab news every Sunday, or to send new books to your Kindle, they won’t actually land in the News or Books sections like they’re supposed to. The only way to fix that is to plug it in and upload them via USB. Additionally, they have the same issue with broken cover art. So you need to plug your Kindle in to update the cover art, even when emailing your books. Which kind of defeats the purpose of emailing them, because you’d most likely do that if you don’t want to plug your device in every time.

    The kindle’s indexer also has some weird issues, where certain books will just crash it and new books will stop appearing entirely. And there’s no way to see which book is the issue. So if you uploaded a bunch of books to your kindle, you’ll have to play guess-and-check to see which one is the issue. This may not be exclusive to the Kindle, but I haven’t experienced the same issue on the Kobo.


  • Something something Dunning-Kruger Effect. Dumb people who know very little about a topic will tend to overestimate their knowledge about said topic. As you gain more knowledge about the topic, the more you realize you don’t know, and the less confident you are about it.

    In extreme cases, it ends with the person having Imposter Syndrome. When a person is very knowledgeable and experienced in a certain topic, but believes they aren’t qualified enough to be considered an expert. They feel like an imposter who will inevitably get outed by someone more knowledgeable than they are. So they have a lot of anxiety about speaking on the topic, because they’re afraid it will result in them being outed as an imposter.