KobaCumTribute

Certain news sites and video hosts get embedded like this. I don't know if those sites are returning a different sort of embed data when hexbear tries to fetch something about them or if they're being handled in a special way, but it's been like this for a while now. I kind of trust that the lemmy/hexbear fork devs have done something to stop the embedding from being a security risk since I'd expect an outcry and the feature to be disabled otherwise, but it does kind of sketch me out every time I see it.

Well that answers the question of "is this a cynical grift or just earnest stupidity?" I posed in the other thread.

You know, I assume they've done something to replace the Greenbrier, but at the same time the odds are it's just been a crony contractor money pit with no oversight because everyone stopped caring after the USSR was dissolved by Yeltsin's coup but they still kept throwing money at doomsday bunkers because what else were they gonna do?

But this in particular is just crank shit.

What do you think is a bigger factor there: being stupid enough to think its historical fame makes it somehow actually useful despite being a tiny and inconvenient that's worth more as a museum than a prison, or because it presents another opportunity to throw endless piles of money at private contractors tied to his family and allies?

I mean it's obviously both of those things because literally everything the regime does is both the dumbest thing possible and also just open graft and other crimes, but which is bigger here? Earnest stupidity, or cynical corruption?

I've managed to do WILD before, but I have a hard time falling asleep while maintaining that sort of focus. I kind of rely on doing a sort of story-scene visualization thing to fall asleep in the first place, building out a detailed worldspace and characters and playing through some story like I would when trying to form a scene when writing although in practice it's more like falling back on a handful of rote scenes that just get iterated over and refined over time some of which are bits from things I'm working on and others are just nonsense. That is also a technique for priming lucid dreams, but it's never carried anything through into actual dreams for me, it just knocks me out almost immediately.

The most I've been able to prime dreams is when something inadvertently induces the tetris effect and I get a disjointed, fitful loop of related nonsense until I wake up.

In the comment above I was just saying that I know I'm not asleep because I can read things and they work right, so I never doubt that I am awake when I am in fact awake. Dreams have a way of making problems like text not working just confusing rather than immediately alarming, although I've gotten sharper at jumping from text being broken to recognizing that something's a dream.

Nope. Text doesn't work right in dreams. I'm almost constantly reading something so I'd notice if the text was suddenly inscrutable or kept changing as my eyes ran over it.

I've never gotten the trick of inducing lucid dreaming, though as I've gotten older I've gotten better at not letting it destabilize when I randomly become lucid and then managing to take some limited amount of control at times, often by sort of prompt-hijacking it with a spoken statement of what's going to happen and the forcing a change of scenery by walking through a door or something. Although sometimes I've gotten into a weird loop of realizing I'm asleep, false-awakening, realizing I'm still asleep, false-awakening again, and so on.

I remember the first time I had sleep paralysis was sometime in my early twenties too. Weirdly I didn't panic then: I recognized what was happening and at the time my old dog was still alive so there was a huge, hundred plus pound dog laying across the only door to the room so I felt entirely safe and secure; I distinctly remember fighting as hard as I could to lift one arm and flip off the shadow hallucinations (I probably didn't actually manage that, but it felt like I did) while laughing maniacally in my own head; I knew the figures were hallucinations and felt such complete contempt for them because of that lmao.

I don't get it often, and I don't usually feel the terror people typically describe, but this is the first time it's gone along with auditory hallucinations and merged seamlessly into dreaming that I got up to investigate them. I guess lately I've been on edge and becoming hyper alert at weird sounds that are usually just my fan clicking a bit or one of my cats hopping onto something in the hall by my bedroom.

From what I've heard, the KMT are weirdly the more moderate and pro peaceful cooperation and commerce with the rest of China party now despite their history, and the DPP are the fully US aligned extreme right party that's more like the old KMT. AFAIK the KMT are still US-aligned nationalists like they always were, but they're less warhawkish and just want the status quo to peacefully continue.

Oh it's not just that, the normal numbers that they claim to be taking into account for their models are also made up because their models just don't work in the first place. Like the basic tenets of their economic theory don't actually work or apply to real world data so they have to heavily manipulate and massage the inputs just to get the "intuitively correct" output that reaffirms their beliefs.

It's bullshit from the very beginning: it's not just flawed and myopic it's actively fraudulent and ideologically driven at its very core. Some of the high priests are in on the con, which is why the neoliberals tend to fall back on Keynesian-lite policies in times of crisis even while otherwise preaching austerity and kleptocracy as the saviors sent by the holy line, but most of its priests are true believers who can only perform the rites they were taught and say what their tenets demand they say while twisting themselves into knots trying to insist that their bullshit is in any way tied to reality.

4-people tweek the numbers to reaffirm the idea

This is also the step before the first. The entire foundation of neoliberal economics is literally built on "well, uh, the real numbers didn't make the model work so I made up these fake numbers that made it look nice, at least. Don't worry, they're intuitively correct!" and pure vibes.

I'm just reflecting on the reality of our current existence, NASA spent a lot of money on rockets, It would have been the best possible outcome if NASA "offered things at the lowest possible cost". But they didn't, and our timeline missed the miracle where they did that.

NASA has always been used to funnel money to arms dealer companies who actually make rockets for them. Like it never had its own factories or production pipeline, it was always just big handouts to corporate MIC contractors who were further financially incentivized to delay and drive up costs even more since the contracts let them do that completely unchecked.

It was also kept pretty tangential to what the US military wanted: they wanted ICBMs, so NASA did rocket research for them; they wanted satellites, so NASA did satellite launch research for them; they wanted some nonsense contraption for "space commandos" to steal Soviet satellites with, so NASA had to incorporate that into the Space Shuttle program which was further gutted to the point of barely being functional at all.

My friends, sobbing: "Nooo, build a real house for once, don't just burrow into the nearest hill like a rodent and dig an inscrutable warren of crawlspaces and deadly pitfalls every fucking time we start a new minecraft server."

Me, wordlessly humming diggy diggy hole: