I honestly have no idea how they pulled it off.

• 22 Sep (Sun) - Greg
• 23 Sep (Mon) - Ian
• 24 Sep (Tue) - Greg
• 25 Sep (Wed) - Ian
• 26 Sep (Thur) - Greg
• 27 Sep (Fri) - Ian
• 28 Sep (Sat) - Greg

...the Gregorian calendar!

HUGE collections of Spanish, Soviet, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean propaganda. Here are some samples.

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This is a very small sampling.

I already showed one of mine, but here's another. This is a 莫兰迪 (Mòlándí) brand and it's ... ah ... decidedly inexpensive. Everything you see in this picture (the brush with suction reservoir, 50 ink cartridges, ten copybook pages for calligraphy practice) cost the equivalent of about $1.40.

After shipping.

That being said, though cheap, the only part that's chintzy is the really badly plated plastic of the brush mount and the little plated plastic disks top and bottom. The cap and barrel are decent metal with fairly good what seems to be electrostatic vapour deposition coloration. (I chose "champagne" coloured.) Disappointingly, though the barrel is long enough for it, something inside of it prevents putting a spare ink cartridge inside of it. It will only hold one.

It has one advantage over the linked one, however: it's long enough that I can use the standard grip for Chinese calligraphy making it a perfect practice pen to carry with me. (Carrying a traditional pen and an inkstone is not practical.) This means I'm likely to start learning how to do it soon.

I've had this one for a while, but am looking to get some more because the entire concept tickles me pink.

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For me it was "Hollyhock God" from Nobilis.

Why do game designers do this? Does anybody, anywhere, actually use these weird terms while actually playing?

…because they take everything literally.

The funniest line from social media:

> "Maybe it's because we don't need a computer to automate mansplaining when there's already an excess supply produced by men," answers one woman.

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This is a Pixelfed post for further information. TL;DR summary: Wooden barrels with machined brass section adapters and caps.

The "ethnocentric" in the title is coded language¹. It was triggered by a paper² I just stumbled over but is the product of by now over two decades of observation (and, to be fair, festering resentment).

I bring attention to a key phrase in the conclusion of this otherwise meandering and unclear paper:

> Thus, we suggest that policymakers in China consider emphasizing more on the reciprocity benefits and build a collaborative effort across the scientific community.

What. A. Coincidence.

A study published in the (western) journal³ Humanities and Social Sciences Communications comes to the conclusion that the Chinese government needs to emphasize the benefits of open data sharing.

Yet the very same culture that preaches loudly "open data sharing" and other such nigh-utopian ideals, in a stunning example of "do what I say, not what I do" also practices the precise opposite. For example the Chinese are specifically barred from cooperation in space ventures⁴ with anything that NASA is affiliated with (which is, essentially, all space ventures and most such conferences).

This is not, however, just the USA and just China. Canada (my nation of citizenship), for example, routinely issues thundering condemnation of any nation that treats indigenous peoples badly (unless that nation is aligned with Canada, in which case Japan's treatment of the Ainu and Taiwan's treatment of their assorted indigenous groups gets passed over with an embarrassed cough) while it treats its own indigenous peoples in ways that are positively shocking even to this day, despite the facade of rapprochement. (Keep in mind that the last of Canada's horrific residential schools was closed in 1997—I was 31 years old at the time!—and that in Canada being a native means you are not a "visible minority", a term fraught with its own weird baggage.)

And you'll find similar ethnocentric, hypocritical bullshit all over the west, even down to all the (well-deserved!) official condemnation of Hamas over the October 2023 attacks while standing by in embarrassed silence as Israel commits open genocide both in and out of Gaza starting well before October 2023 and continuing to this day.

So... My current view is that western powers are a large collection of hypocritical twats whose views can and should be safely ignored by other peoples of the world as far as is possible when so many (chiefly) American guns and bombs are pointed at them threateningly.

Change my view.

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¹ Decoding it: "white supremacist".

² https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-024-03570-9

³ Yes the primary authors are Chinese in Chinese universities. There are reasons for this.

⁴ The fact that this has backfired, both directly and indirectly, on the USA multiple times is a never-ending source of amusement to me.

...that I didn't Nintendo.

Just in case that URL doesn't replicate the session properly I've added a screenshot of the session to the end.

A few things are obvious here. First the choice to trumpet the "strengths" of degenerative AI while qualifying the weaknesses is clearly a choice made in the programming of the system. In later interactions it claims that this was not specifically programmed into it but, as it says, it's a black box and there's no way to confirm nor deny anything it claims.

Which is, you know, pretty much the reason why degenerative AI can't be trusted.

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Can't they afford the real stuff?

It's 5050.

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Up until now I thought he was only a theoretical physicist!

That's a huge red flag, that is!