Just some scenery and light commentary from mine and J's Elden Ring adventuring.

Invaders annoyingly love to hang out near NPC enemies so you have to fight both at the same time (and likely lose your runes in an inconvenient place). The even griefier ones simply run and hide, blocking your progress. Luckily you can just exit the game will likely have a good autosave for you.

We're well into the game now, but the epic scale of locations and enemies is still impressive.


And beyond the normal fantasy fare of soldiers, beasts, and soldier-beasts, there are creative enemies like flame chariots and hawks with frickin knives attached to their legs.


My most Elden Ring moment thus far? I fought to the tower of Fort Gael from the Smoldering Church, losing my co-op buddy in the process. Briefly out of danger, I searched desparately for a site of grace but only found a teleporter that took me to a bridge in an unexplored location (Redmane Castle). Rather than storm yet another castle, I cautiously crept back across the bridge, only to get lit up by the trebuchet. I reversed course, hoping there'd be a site of grace near the castle entrance. I wound through the battlements, picking up a few stealth kills, but then ran into a ballista. Stealth was out, so I ran past the ballista, roadblock, and soldiers, hoping to find a defensible location at the castle gate. Instead a troll dropped on me from the castle wall.

Source. Red: fighting. Blue: teleporting.

I used to be a tarnished just like you, then I took an arrow to the chest.

Until we meet again, this is John Henry Eden, signing off.

?

I haven't started a new playthrough of Dragon Age Origins, I just dug up an illustrative image.


'D80' is a Samsung dryer error code for exhaust issues (lint, blockage, whatever). I kinda knew this one was coming since my dryer is in the middle of the house, requiring a pretty long vent pipe. So I context switched briefly from backyard projects to install a booster fan.

Source.

I was happy to see that dryer booster fans are pressure-activated, rather than actuated by a hard wire to the dryer or something. That said, from a longevity perspective the latter might be better.


The dryer-adjacent bathroom was previously just venting into the (fairly large) basement area next to both. I connected the bathroom vent to the run of ducting already in place for the dryer using a wye junction. I affixed a backdraft damper (one-way door) to prevent the dryer from blowing into the bathroom. I'm not sure that's actually a concern with the booster creating a path of much less resistance to the outside of the house, but whatever.


I used joist hangers to install a piece of 2x6 under the subfloor. The fan bracket attached to that (rather than subfloor or joist). The ducting attached in the usual fashion.

No more D80 error and clothes dry faster.

Chris	We need a project name that is a semi-domesticated cat, ideally one that is kind of ferocious. I wanted to use 'Ocelot' but it was taken.
		Maybe an Egyptian cat like Abyssinian or a Mau?		Jes
	Hmmm...
		What about a Devon Rex or pixie bob?
		So cute.
	Maybe it's the photography but those don't strike me as fierce.
		Raaaaawr.
Chris	;) ;) ;)
				Jes
	"Welcome aboard, you guys will be on project Pixiebob."
	(How to get your interns to fuck off to Microsoft.)
	10/10 memeing I did not know my wife was capable of.
	Jon has decided to go with Lykoi.

Lykoi:

Source.

The Gentlemen's Beer Exploration Society reconstituted for an expedition to Thorn Street followed by nachos and wet 1lb burritos at La Puerta.



Spy has been drilling; upwards of 6% in the past five trading days. Tesla and Netflix have each shorn a couple hundred bucks off their respective share prices.

Chris	Coward exercised my Netflix put.
		My stonks keep getting hammered.		Zac
		I miss when this used to be fun.
		Agreed. This should just bottom out already so it can start going up again.		Kevin
	Yes.
	My inverses are looking mighty fine.
	The rest of my port is mega-guh.
	Fuck it. Commodities and energy. All aboard.
		Disney is still very much on sale.
		Everything is on sale.		Sants
		At this rate, my body will be on sale soon.
		Your body has been for sale for a long time. Just very few interested buyers.		Zac
		Well, everyone wants a rhino, but they just don't fit in a lot of hallways.		Sants
Chris	I wish I could trade as well as you guys can banter.

Elon and Netflix

		Maybe [Elon] will buy Walmart just to fuck with Bezos.		Zac
		Waltons are practically old money compared to Musk. They've been billionaires forever. He's gonna have to show up in a Count-of-Monte-Cristo carriage full of pirate gold.		Sants
		Seems like something Musk would do.		Zac
		The TRUTH comes out:
		I knew the financial collapse had to do with wokeness.
		I'm not even sure what that means.		Kevin
		Netflix did jump on the failing company documentary. "White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch". That about sums it up.
		I want to see From Thriller to Horror: The Rise & Fall of Netflix As It's Happening.		Sants
Me	Like the Formula 1 thing.
		I would pay so much to watch a realty show of the inner workings at TRUTH Social.		Zac

... and then...

Chris	He did it.
		When you typed that I thought, "Musk bought Twitter?" And I was right.		Sants
		So, how can we make money on this, Chris?
		Find out how to buy Twitter stock last week.		Kevin
		Already priced in from when he announced it.		Sants
		Maybe I should still buy.
		You know he's gonna make it make money.
	Bought some yang in case Beijing locks down.
	Twitter is halted.
		Dang.
		I just put my buy in.
		My entire portfolio is now doge and twtr.
		Greatest investor ever.
		I'm already up .27%.
		Jealous?
Chris	.27% daily gains ain't too shabby.
	Ffs how did we let a paypal guy become the richest man in the world? They're a glorified escrow company.
		He red paperclipped his way to the top.		Sants
		Doesn't the PayPal Mafia run the world?		Zac
		Even TRUTH Social is essentially being floated by Peter Theil who pulled the strings at Facebook.
		From Wikipedia: The "PayPal Mafia" is a group of former PayPal employees and founders who have since founded and developed additional technology companies such as Tesla, Inc., LinkedIn, Palantir Technologies, SpaceX, Affirm, Slide, Kiva, YouTube, Yelp, and Yammer.
		And now that Musk is a Twitter founder, you can add that to the list.

From Courtney.

After fourteen years of service, my Hayward 0.75 hp pump died. It wasn't an especially dramatic malfunction - the pump would pull water slowly but then trip the heat switch. It may be a repairable problem (e.g. seals) but I decided to go nuclear. I was concerned that the pump was fine but my intake lines were leaking, causing the pump to suck mostly air. With no small effort, I ran a separate pipe directly to the pool to all-but-confirm that it was the pump that needed replacing.


When I moved in there was a heater, a DE filter, and no pump, so the required pvc work was pump -> DE filter. Then in 2014 I worked on the enclosure and replaced the DE filter. The new filter had a really sweet valve for redirecting water between the filter, return, and waste, but the angles required a lot of 90-degree turns in the piping.


After some deliberation, I relocated the DE filter to a more convenient position and orientation. While there's a 45-ish-degree pool return, it's far more reasonable than a bunch of u-bends.

With pumping and filtration out of service for a bit, everything green had settled to the bottom and left clear water above. I was hoping to run the vac over the bottom with the valve set to 'Waste' and then refill what had been removed. Unfortunately the green stuff was joined by leaves (requiring frequent filter basket changes) and sticks (requiring frequent vac fiddling) so there was no way to just evacuate the detritus on the bottom.


I combined a couple of elements of my site generator to create a widget showing most-visited content from a given timespan. E.g. above is the highest-traffic graphics from 2001-2006. It's a combination of the gallery/thumbnail widget and the log parsing that is rolled into the "Hot/Top" image and post lists in the nav bar on the right.

I put the yearly synopses on my lists metapage.

Last year I started using alt text for images, but hadn't propagated that to thumbnails or the slideshow pages found by clicking the '[+]' next to each month. Thumbnails and slideshow images now have alt text. It makes no difference to the user, but search engines love it.

Source.

So Rob always spams everyone with Hacker News and Reddit links so he recently passed this one on to me:

Inspired by the "Ask HN: Share your personal site" last week, I finally came around and built a thing I wanted for a long time: a simple website to randomly explore all the awesome personal blogs without having to subscribe to them all. So this is what I built over the weekend. You click a button and indieblog.page will redirect you to a random page from a personal page...

I guess since I'm Rob's one blog friend, I get links to the many HN posts about personal blogs. I asked him about the post and he shrugged, saying something like, "I didn't read it, I just send people links and figure they'll mention them if they're interesting."

Jackass.

Anyway, the link was kind of neat, basically blogroulette.

I haven't decided on any firm rules. If it's a personal site with an RSS feed, it is probably welcome. No illegal stuff, no corporate blogs, no nazis.

The "no corporate blogs" thing really helps keep the Amazon referral and tech marketing junk out - based on my modest sampling, anyway. As one HN commenter mentioned, most of the content is tech-oriented. Here's some of the stuff I encountered...

Results: sysadmin and web programmer snooze

Source.

Full disclosure: web programming and IT stuff isn't my cup of tea but they appear to be the most prolific bloggers. Some post titles:

• How to create a custom hook to change status bar styles for every screen using React Navigation
• Things mode and strings mode in Google Trends
• Zzzzz-(no offense)-zzzzz.
• How to create a simple redirect from Blogspot to your new blog

Wait, go back one. I got off Blogger once upon a time. Maybe some of these would be useful, just not the node/angular/kubernetes nonsense.

Results: garbage and nonsense

I won't link them because that's mean, but some of the low quality stuff included:

• Someone whose only post is a self-described thought experiment.
• A post that is just links to popular media.
• Someone who discusses "Hacker questioning vs human questioning".

Results: the good stuff

Source.

Collections: The Roman Dictatorship: How Did It Work? Did It Work? Dr. Bret C. Devereaux is an ancient and military historian who currently teaches as a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

History lectures from a dude who plays and writes about Warhammer and Crusader Kings. I haven't played either of those, but the blog could be a good read for its historical content. Kind of like a podcast, except podcasts are for degenerates.

Another:

Anyway I have finished the ELDEN RING and fucked off to the stars with the witch hat doll or whatever. Tarnished out.

I quite enjoy well-written and humorous video game commentary though now the end of Elden Ring has been spoiled for me. I might have to start ending my gaming sessions with J with, "Tarnished, out."

Source.

Someone on HN was pretty stoked to find a blog with a photo of the Wendy's drive-thru menu, describing the (contemporary) site as very much like the "old web". I enjoyed it ironically and unironically.

Whatever the subject, I was happy to find that the blog hadn't been entirely destroyed by StackOverflow, Facebook, and Amazon referrals.

Results: kilroyesque

Source.

A few paragraphs up I mentioned one blogger (small b) who posted about getting off Blogger (large B). I saw some more content that landed close to home.

I use the Hugo website generator to create this website out of a bunch of Markdown fils. A lot has been written about this approach, but the main advantages are that the site can load quickly even when it's serving a lot of traffic, and you don't have to worry about bugs in the blog software when there isn't any.

Hey, I do static page generation using markdown, just not with this Hugo tool. I got some more giggles when the blog linking to Hugo had a voter guide with some information and some snark:

Prop 18: Primary Voting for 17-Year-Olds Amendment Mildly support. It seems goofy to allow a 17 year old to vote in the primary for someone they can?t vote for in the actual election, but it?s probably not the end of the world First time we have a record turnout because a YouTuber urges everyone to support Deez Nuts for the CA Democrat nomination, I?ll protest this with a pitchfork.

... and my axe! For comparison, the kilroy voter guides from 2016 and 2018.

Source.

Another post had tips for optimizing a statically-generated website that were surprisingly similar to rules for creating a website circa 1997. A few good ones:

• Try to keep page load smaller than 50KB per request if you're not dealing with images, a webpage should never be larger than a copy of Doom. Don't add 10MB images to your website, generate thumbnails
• Self-host everything
• DO NOT use Javascript to manage links. Linking in HTML is a solved problem, don't add an extra unnecessary layer.
• Keep in mind that some people have Javascript disabled in their browser; plan accordingly for a failsafe and do not greet them with a blank page. It's rude.
• First of all, a static website doesn?t need to be served over HTTPS but for the "health of the Internet" let's say you want to do that. It's not a bad idea to enable HTTPS and get a SSL certificate from LetsEncrypt

Won me over with Javascript awareness and took me back to my own adoption of Let's Encrypt.

Source.

I was going to skip the whole Elon/Twitter episode - both on this site and as a personal goal - but it precipitated an interesting megapost by former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong.

To recap the Elon part, he bought a bunch of Twitter shares and then supposedly offered a total buyout to the board. World news fatigue probably made this blow up more than it should have. WSB was filled with posts about Musk and TWTR. The conservasphere was in stitches over the woke mob's outrage, expecting that their favorite insurrectionists and pillow executives would soon be replatformed.

It seemed to be exactly the controversy Elon likes to stir up and he seemed to need it after some recent PR/meme whiffs. On the other hand, imho Twitter is a leading horse in the race for social media dominance. Facebook's metaverse play seems to be going up in flames or, at least, losing the younger generation. TikTok is (I guess) great for scrolling but still lacks some mainstream appeal and isn't as portable as a Tweet.

That said, Yishan's lengthy commentary about the Elon saga hilariously stretches the Twitter text post medium well beyond usability. So here's a distilled version with some discussion. I'm mainly skipping over the parts where Yishan cries about how hard it is to be a social media CEO.

Yishan

Reddit was born in the last years of the "old internet" when free speech meant "freedom from religious conservatives trying to take down porn and sometimes first-person shooters." And so we tried to preserve that ideal. That is not what free speech is about today. The internet is not a "frontier" where people can go "to be free," it's where the entire world is now, and every culture war is being fought on it. It's the MAIN battlefield for our culture wars.

Huh, this is the first I'm hearing of this internet porn thing but let's move on, nostalgia for the old internet is pretty common among my gen-x compatriots. The normies and megacorps did take it over. But the internet is infinitely deep, so the invasion of microblogging influencers doesn't have to be a problem unless you're trying to dominate a crowded space.

Yishan

Free speech may be noble, but here's what's it's like these days: All my left-wing woke friends are CONVINCED that the social media platforms uphold the white supremacist misogynistic patriarchy, and they have plenty of screenshots and evidence of times when the platform has made enforcement decisions unfairly against innocuous things they've said, and let far more egregious sexist/racist violations by the other side pass. All my alt/center-right/libertarian friends are CONVINCED the social media platforms uphold the woke BLM/Marxist/LGBTQ agenda and they ALSO have plenty of screenshots and evidence of times when the platforms have made enforcement decisions unfair against them for innocuous things they've said merely questioning (in good faith) the woke orthodoxy, and let far more egregious violations by the other side stand. Neither side is lying. Both sides think the platform is institutionally biased against them.

And so the discussion these days is less about things that matter and more about deplatforming and safe spaces and freedom of speech and private companies.

Yishan

Mostly, it's really because enforcement is hard, and there are LOTS of errors. There's a separate emerging problem (more FB than Twitter) where AI models make inhumane/dystopian judgments that can't be appealed, but that's a separate issue.

Reddit started off so well with its community moderation approach, then outsourced its Orwellian Anti-Evil Operations to broken machine learning and third world reviewers. I guess Yishan knows it failed miserably. Given the option of being more or less trigger-happy, the platforms seem to have favored censorship:

Yishan

Example: the "lab leak" theory (a controversial theory that is now probably true; I personally believe so) was "censored" at a certain time in the history of the pandemic because the "debate" included massive amounts of horrible behavior, spam-level posting, and abuse that spilled over into the real world - e.g. harrassment of public officials and doctors, racially-motivated crimes, etc. It was "censored" not because it was a wrong idea, but because ideas really can - at certain times and places - become lightning rods for actual, physical, kinetic mob behavior. It would have been perfectly acceptable if the lab leak theory were being discussed in a rational, evidence-based manner by scientists on Twitter, but that is not what happened.

I remember this one. Twitter (and others?) removed content that suggested covid came from that infectious disease lab near Wuhan. Questions/accusations of a "lab leak" were bundled in the hoax and microchip claims for being misinformation and xenophobic. Most of the interactions I read went like this:

Person A: I heard covid-19 originated in an infectious disease laboratory.
Person B: YOU MEAN YOU THINK IT'S A BIOWEAPON???

Despite the amount of daylight between those two statements, that'd be the end of it. Either because Person A indeed thought it was a bioweapon or because Person B's response caused Person A's comment to be buried or crowded out. What was missing was:

Source.

Well, I wouldn't hold the Lincoln-Douglas debates up as a paragon of civil discourse. They were rife with race-baiting, fallacies, text walls, and unruly crowds ("hit him again!"). Regardless, it's a reasonable point. I'm just not sure (heavily-automated) moderation can effectively enforce standards of civility or quality.


Earlier in the Ukraine saga, I lamented about the weird state of journalism and mis/information:

Me

"Per Twitter". Right? It's both a source of unfiltered (but localized) primary information and a hub of propaganda. It's also rife with uninformed speculation. And it seems both the platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit) and journalists (who cannot easily validate the source data) either ignore these posts/videos or present them with a heavy "as is" disclaimer. Kind of a shame that all this live information is lost to the fact that it's difficult to validate.

This was echoed recently on the No Stupid Questions subreddit:

Ultomatoe

Is Russia truly doing such a poor job in the invasion of Ukraine or are we just being fed propaganda? Propaganda is certainly in full swing on both sides but the narrative, from a western perspective, is that Russia has royally screwed the pooch during this invasion. If we are to believe what is being spoken it seems like they are just throwing meat and materials into the grinder in Ukraine and getting obliterated. Are the Russians truly taking such monumental losses and is their economy soon to be as fucked as people claim?

One of the responses:

audigex

There's an element of the fact that the west is generally on Ukraine's side, and that we're therefore seeing a Ukraine-centric perspective But at the same time, the maps don't lie: Russia was expected to roll Ukraine over in a matter of days or weeks, yet is now 7 weeks into the war and have clearly not steamrolled Ukraine or even achieved their likely/apparent goals There's no way around the fact that Russia clearly wanted to take Kyiv and enforce regime change. And not only did they not achieve that in the first few days as they clearly expected, and not only have they not achieved it at all... but they've even retreated away from the area and given up on the objective entirely. There's no way to realistically paint that as anything other than an abjact failure Even if this had been a near-peer conflict (a war between two sides expected to be of roughly equal strength) then the attacker would expected to achieve some major objectives, otherwise why are they attacking at all? But Russia was one of the most feared militaries on the planet and Ukraine barely even a blip on the regional map, and Ukraine fought them to a standstill well short of Russia's objectives. That's not to say Russia can't get anything out of this war or will have entirely failed - but thus far they've tanked their economy and killed 5-10k of their own men, shattered their military reputation on the world stage, united NATO and the EU, started Germany on a re-militarization path, pushed Finland and Sweden into NATO's hands, and is still nowhere near to even achieving their "fallback" goals of taking the entirety of Donbas.

It's a little short on concrete information, but most of it could be independently verified.

Breakfast tacos, corned beef hash, and sourdough.

The Unnatural Ones have a bit of an ooze problem, but it's great to be back in action.

Hank and Shar both visited again.

... and a few more of Courtney's vball shots:


Tarnished, out.

Whether or not covid is truly in our rearview, everything has returned to the pre-2020 norm (more or less).


So let's start with a pandemic. Pandemic Legacy Season 0 came out in 2020, but my crew from seasons 1 and 2 just now managed to get a session in.


S0 has a repurposed infection/player card mechanic like the other games but it's definitely a new experience. Most obviously, there are face and beard and hat stickers.

Also, as of April-ish, season 0 doesn't have an outbreak tracker mechanic - you know, eight incidents and you lose. This is actually a huge relief but balanced by the fact that monthly objectives almost always run you close to the end of the player deck (you lose).


The board a neat but presently lacks some of the dynamic geographical elements of the other games; discovering map regions, charting sea lanes, etc.

Derrick wanted to create an homage to the Horizon character Sylens but couldn't resist adding a mustache and dreads.

I replaced a breaker. Exciting, I know. But since I expect to do this again in the future, it goes into the blog. (If you've wandered here from the internet, FYI I am not an electrician and high-wattage electrical work isn't something to be taken lightly).

I guess Zinsco panels aren't super common and electricians always want to replace them. For what it's worth, I've had no problems with mine and somebody in the business once told me that electricians always want to replace them because money.


I shut off the main (100A) breaker, unscrewed the wires, ensuring not to mix up the left and right ones. Removing the breaker was kind of a pain (and seemed to be so with the youtube video I watched). With some wiggling it eventually came loose. The bottom of the breaker sits in a channel, so it has to be rotated down as depicted above.


I took the old one to the hardware store, just in case. The replacement isn't identical, but it's the right one.


The video recommended screwing the wires in before installing the breaker, it was probably the right way to go. Once the replacement was latched in, I tested the voltage with the breaker in each position.


I watched some robots shoot hoops.


More recently, the family took a trip up to Julian. We started at the California Wolf Center where we saw some wolves resting in the afternoon sun, waiting for the ranger to toss meat over the fence.


It's pretty a pretty low-key attaction, the center is ostensibly more about research and population management. But seeing wolves up close isn't a bad way to spend 45 minutes in the middle of nowhere.


Jes and Dani stepped into the gift shop to find some water and we emerged with the biggest stuffed wolf in the joint.

After the wolf viewing we headed down to the Quiet Mind lodge by the lake where Jes had a massage appointment. I guess she enjoyed it, Dani and I hung out on the patio and watched the motorcycles go by. Next was the Blue Door winery where I only really liked their sangiovese, but the tasting room and staff were awesome. Then we zonked at the Julian Lodge after stuffing ourselves with bbq.


The last month has seen the Ukraine saga grind on. Russia pivoted away from Kyiv and appears to be consolidating in (or settling for) the breakaway territories near its own border. Biden said Russia needs to depose Putin. There's been a pervasive PR struggle about war crimes that has been largely settled by some recent videos.

Anonymous	I'm in a meeting right now learning about how our team in China is upset about [NASDAQ 100 company] publicly banning sales in Russia
	It's actually really interesting
	They see Ukraine as the Taiwan that won't fall in line and are worried that [company] will punish them if China ever took action in Taiwan
	Spoiler: [company] totally would

The implications of this conflict are difficult to understate.

Early in the conflict there was (apparently) a Russian helicopter with a hand-painted sign, "Onward to Berlin". Whether or not that was the actual plan, it doesn't seemed to have worked out for that particular aircraft.

The market is in the midst of a totally-predictable pullback right now. There's not a lot to say about it so I'll post some of the interesting/funny bits from Jon Stewart's recent investing/meme stock AMA. It's also an opportunity to show off my new threaded conversation html thingy:

/u/JonStewart Like I was saying to u/ButtFarm69, as the great Dr. King said, the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. What they don?t tell you is there will be very powerful forces trying to bend it back. Even incremental change in a positive direction for a fairer market is arduous but worthwhile. Building those coalitions and having the clarity of vision and tenacity of temperament to see them through is an enormous challenge. So when I say stamina, I don?t mean investing strategies. I mean the larger goal of creating a free market system that is more efficient at generating wealth at all levels, not just the top, and minimizing the collateral damage for those caught in its wake, not just a protection racket for those whose carelessness creates so much of the hazard. What you guys are doing is brilliant and important and fragile. Your voices, the voices of the average investor, have shifted the conversation in positive ways. Don?t let the institutions speak for you. Looking forward to seeing what happens next!

/u/brittalaneh How can we stop the stock market from being the benchline for how well the economy is doing and start making it be employee wages and quality of life? Shareholders don't produce value, employees do.

/u/JonStewart Power to the People, Mother Fuckers! Let?s do this! I feel like for the longest time this country has treated capital better than labor. It would be a huge plus if the country could swing that pendulum back a little bit.

/u/jango_bets What do you think of the media's coverage of GameStop in regards to short selling?

/u/JonStewart Look, I like my news like I like my coffee, with a tremendous amount of condescension. Any disruptive movement of proles shaking up the status quo, you have to remember the financial media are in many ways more aligned with the interests they cover. The GameStop movement was always going to be viewed through the lens of it being an oddity, even without all the jizz memes.

DWAC

I'm not an iphone person so I don't know much about it, but DWAC has been in investing headlines.

				Kevin
		Checking out my morning Truths and Pizzagate is trending hard.
		I also like how they screenshot Twitter for their sources.
		This app is crazy. Anyone who says anything contrary to what's posted gets reemed so hard. Everyone blocks them.
Chris	For real?
		One guy posted that people need to post things other than politics in order for Truth to live on. Then he posted something about rebuilding a car and everyone told him to STFU.
		Haha		Zac
		I was hopeful this would get big and implode spectacularly.