Today’s t-shirt:
I have nothing to say, really. My one big idea of the day was to free the guy who sold smack to Phillip Seymour Hoffman under the condition that he immediately begin selling ketamine to Elon Musk.
Going to go play cataclysm in WOW and forget about the real world.
geg6
Or sentence the Mathew Perry doctor to be Musk’s primary physician!
lowtechcyclist
I’m gonna read and go to bed early.
No One of Consequence
Wizard needs food.
Badly.
-NOoC
HinTN
You want grandma’s prize daffofils this spring, John?
Gloria DryGarden
@lowtechcyclist: happy belated birthday. You’re in your prime again, based on the number…
lowtechcyclist
Via TPM:
We really need to be fighting Ebola over there, so we don’t have to fight it over here. Stupid fucking DOGiEs.
zhena gogolia
I guess I don’t get the T-shirt.
Suzanne
My toxic trait is thinking that there’s a perfect pair of black pants.
What am I thinking?! Pants are terrible.
lowtechcyclist
@Gloria DryGarden:
Why thanks! 71 is prime, but there are lots of those. (Infinitely many!) Now 72, that’s a cool number: 2^3 * 3^2. I’m looking forward to having that as my age.
Besides, I’m always in my prime, whether or not my age is one!
lowtechcyclist
@zhena gogolia:
Neither do I. I think you need to be a player of one of those games with the many-sided dice in order to understand it. I figure it’s OK if some of this stuff goes right over my head.
Jay
@zhena gogolia:
It’s a D&D reference.
“Initiative
“Initiative determines the order of turns during combat. When combat starts, every participant makes a Dexterity check to determine their place in the initiative order. The DM makes one roll for an entire group of identical creatures, so each member of the group acts at the same time.
“The DM ranks the combatants in order from the one with the highest Dexterity check total to the one with the lowest. This is the order (called the initiative order) in which they act during each round. The initiative order remains the same from round to round.”
Basically, when one comes at a team mate, turns are taken in shit kicking the attacker, dice are rolled to see who gets to go first.
Scamp Dog
@zhena gogolia: It’s a D&D reference, since at the start of combat in D&D (and similar role playing games) the players roll for initiative to determine who takes action next. Note that the 20-sided dice have different pride fist emblems, I think for blacks and gays and others that I can’t identify.
So the shirt is saying if you come after one of us, we all come after you.
Yeah, explaining the joke takes all the life out of it, sorry. :)
ETA: And apparently Jay is ahead of me in the initiative order, I see.
mrmoshpotato
@Suzanne: Are you and Baud trying to start a revolt against pants?
Kirk
And always remember, don’t split the party.
Gloria DryGarden
@Scamp Dog: love this part of your explanation in particular:
A Ghost to Most
Dude, “Roll for initiative” was Will Wheaton’s techbro hustle line.
ArchTeryx
@Gloria DryGarden: That’s the real point: They’re a party. And attacking one means they ALL come at you fangs bared. That almost never ends well for the monster.
schrodingers_cat
In other news. Old blog favorite Matt Taibbi has gone full MAGA. And he loves Musk and DOGE.
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: Yeah neither did I. Not a gamer.
BlueGuitarist
@lowtechcyclist:
Happy birthday!
missed it if anyone mentioned Tom Lehrer calculating birthdays in centigrade recently.
Martin
@Scamp Dog: Yeah, BLM, pride, then women rights, trans rights. The last is very similar to the 60s antiwar iconography so I’d assume that’s Ukrainian/Palestinian support.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@lowtechcyclist: remember when the press, the gop and lots of other people were attacking the Dallas health department and President Obama ferociously over Ebola? Over bird flu, too?
HopefullyNotcassandra
That T-shirt rules.
Trivia Man
@Gloria DryGarden: that joke is always fresh. From age 2 to 97
HopefullyNotcassandra
@schrodingers_cat: dungeons and dragons is a board game. It is a remarkable game with dungeon masters, but a board game nonetheless.
it was the board game that some parents went slightly insane over at one time. Something something devil something
It is also kind of the spine (?) of the series Stranger Things.
Trivia Man
@lowtechcyclist: my brother is of that school of thought … he told me to donate personally if im worried. Literally said, “its easily contained even if it does get here.”
HopefullyNotcassandra
@lowtechcyclist: Happy birthday!
Trivia Man
@Gloria DryGarden: it pains me to say it, but a piece of Qanon resonated with me.
WWGOWGA
where we go one, we go all
So sad the places they were going was Insane and Over the Edge. But an admirable call for unity.
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat: I’m so bad I didn’t even know what those things were. I thought they were dreidels.
Thanks everyone for the explanations. Still don’t understand, but that’s okay!
Martin
So, Air Traffic Controllers almost never come from a place like MIT. You need to pass a training program hosted in Oklahoma City. It’s MUCH easier to complete an MIT degree than that program
Just FYI.
zhena gogolia
@HopefullyNotcassandra: There was a great TV movie where baby Tom Hanks fell victim to it.
Gloria DryGarden
@HopefullyNotcassandra: I have friends who play D&D, but I never have.
same with SCA, Society fir Creative Anachronism. I never went. Lots of dress ups in renaissance clothing. Nice clothes for the nobility. Fabulous music, too.
but now YY is mentioning the end goal of this USA dismantling as perhaps a system of feudalism. That’s not so desireble.
Gloria DryGarden
@zhena gogolia: see comment 12, and 15. I think that’s the point of the T-shirt message. I have seen those multi-sided dice.
If you come after one of us… we’ll all make a stand together, it seems to mean.
Martin, thanks for clarifying what some of those symbols were. I knew most, but not all.
cain
@lowtechcyclist:
It’s coming here.
Should be fun watching Trump get same washed when Obama handled that shit like a boss but the press acted like it was coming at any time.
cain
@Jay:
It was good that they separated wisdom from intelligence when it came to character stats.
You can tell that maga may have variable intelligence but low wisdom.
Ohio Mom
@Martin: To be an air traffic controller, you need a certain sort of brain wiring, one that processes visual info rapidly, has strong spatial reasoning skills, and can react quickly and calmly under pressure. You need physical endurance ti stay at high attention levels for an entire shift. Not everybody is built that way.
If you have that sort of neurology, air traffic control school would be a more natural fit than MIT. But I wouldn’t discount the intelligence of MIT students, they can figure out things that air traffic controllers can’t.
cain
@Gloria DryGarden:
Highly suggest you buy the game Baldurs Gate. (If you game) So good. Just perfection.
eclare
I have no idea what that shirt’s message is. Maybe it’s me.
Ohio Mom
@eclare: Scroll through the thread, several have provided explanations for non-gamers like us.
Steve in the ATL
@eclare:
That’s because you dated in high school
eclare
@Steve in the ATL:
Hahaha…you have no idea.
Matt McIrvin
@schrodingers_cat: Taibbi has been moving in that direction for many years now. Flipping MAGA is the natural endpoint of “civil rights and feminism are corporatist distractions from class war”; I’ve seen it over and over.
Sister Golden Bear
@lowtechcyclist: Happy birthday!
seefleur
@Suzanne: There’s a reason why Scotsmen wear kilts… and I have yet to see a man in a kilt who doesn’t look great. If a skirt is good enough for a guy, it works for me too!
NotMax
FYI.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Steve in the ATL: okay. That gets you half a point.
Steve in the ATL
@HopefullyNotcassandra: add it to my charisma—it’s even lower than my intelligence!
YY_Sima Qian
The assault on free speech & academic freedom has begun:
Steve in the ATL
@YY_Sima Qian: I suppose there’s no point in mentioning that Christianity and Islam are Semitic religions as well?
Jay
@YY_Sima Qian:
As I posted a couple of day’s ago, T’s Institution has a long list of schools and Universities in the US, where applications are failed (underGrad and Grad programs) because the applicants are not considered “educated”.
cintibud
@NotMax: That’s great news. Hope more car makers follow
NotMax
Good reporting from Canada.
Tariff war: Does Trump actually know what he’s doing?
YY_Sima Qian
@NotMax:
@cintibud:
Depends on the market. This kind of mentality is a sure loser in the PRC & developing world markets, which do treat EVs & PHEVs as consumer electronic devices on wheels.
NotMax
@YY_Sima Qian
From the same article linked above:
prostratedragon
Maurice Ravel, still going strong at 150.
YY_Sima Qian
@NotMax: As an option, it’s a great idea. The baseline Xiaomi cars have very few buttons.
divF
@NotMax: I’ve driven VW’s since my first car in 1973. This is one of the reasons why – they know their engineering, and they listen to their customers. Even when they try to pull a fast one (diesel emissions fraud) they do so in a solid technical fashion.
I’m holding out until VW has a EV sedan to say farewell to driving a stick shift.
cain
@YY_Sima Qian:
This is from the administration whose president used the word ‘Globalist’ on TV from the oval office.
Kayla Rudbek
@zhena gogolia: D&D thing, one party member is attacked, everyone else takes action to fight back.
TBone
Josh Marshall of TPM was on with Chris Hayes tonight.
https://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/new-email-reveals-trump-s-aggressive-new-claim-of-executive-power-tpm-233841733963
Gloria DryGarden
@prostratedragon:Ravel’s Bolero on cello
4 cellists, one cello. Amusing, yet musically correct
TBone
@TBone: Jeff Tiedrich covers that topic also, as well as background and more
https://www.jefftiedrich.com/p/which-fucking-imbecile-is-running
Elno gave out a batphone number to Commissioner Gordon 🙄
prostratedragon
@Gloria DryGarden: Always thought there oughtta be a solo piano version. Will check this out now.
….
Wonderful! The jockeying position … and the wrist on the first guy! By his break he was running out of ways to offset the resonance waves.
Gloria DryGarden
@prostratedragon: moré ravel on YouTube. Xylophone duet, other stuff. But I enjoyed the cellist ensemble.
Martin
@Ohio Mom: Not discounting MIT students intelligence, but ATC isn’t really a matter of intelligence. Pattern recognition isn’t particularly correlated to the ability to learn new things, and temperament is completely orthogonal to that.
I had some involvement with our NRC training program because we had a research nuclear reactor and the screening program for that was in some ways modeled on the ATC one, and being the strongest student wasn’t particularly correlated to being suitable to that program.
WTFGhost
@zhena gogolia: You can’t attack one member of a party – you can only attack them all.
Anyone who isn’t rolling for initiative is off sneaking a smoke, saying “I supported you guys when the fighting started (I just bailed immediately afterward)!!!”
Rolling for initiative is determining when you can either act, or wait to react. You might not be fighting – you might have the job of body-guarding the magic users (who traditionally are less armored) – but you’re in the battle, and doing your job, whatever it might be.
WTFGhost
@BlueGuitarist: Yeah, but then you have to calculate 9/5 birthdays. I suppose as long as you restrict yourself to *whole* days, that’s enough.
@HopefullyNotcassandra: A “board game” is not too far from the truth. It’s a mix of “Murder Mystery Party” and a board game, except, nominally, the “party” – the players – are a team, with a goal that they want. Especially in the 80s, there was a lot of backstabbing (literally, and figuratively), and a lot of bullying in-game to match out-of-game, and… look, D&D was the social media of its day.
One interesting thing about D&D is, cooperation is far, far, more powerful than competition – I used to love to trap the character who sneaks ahead, hoping for some additional treasures, solely for embarrassment reasons, with a trap that’s trivially avoided with assistance. An early form of game-based social engineering… keep the party together, so the dungeon master (or game master) doesn’t get exhausted (says the guy with me/CFS).
@Trivia Man: Randall Munroe once turned “if all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?” on its head. “Sure, mom, my friends are all sensible, thoughtful people. What, do I think they all went crazy? Or do I think the bridge is on fire?” Alas, with QANON, we learned that all of one’s soi disant friends might go crazy, and insist that the bridge is just fine, as the snapping suspension cables do… (maybe time to allude to it instead of describing the after effects with engineer-like precision)… what suspension cables released from intense tension *do* and….
@Martin: Hee. Friend of mine is a veterinarian said she’d never trust *her* life to some poor schlub who’d never get into veterinarian school. I knew just enough to know what she meant, and ATC sounds similar. Dear lord, if I was in my prime, I’m two years too old to be ATC.
@cain: Some have their primary stat as CHA, but don’t know how to use it.
(Non-gamer note: Charisma, CHA in D&D, is a combination of appearance, attitude, personality, and other such stuff, that makes people more likely to follow, if you show yourself willing to lead. Military leaders, where everyone would die for any of the senior leadership (they’d rather kill, but they’re willing to die), that’s good/high CHA. Note that Jesus is considered to have *lower* Charisma than some famous figures of history – St. Pete denied him three times, Judas Iscariot betrayed him, and all! – but if you were Christian, you’d revere Jesus’ wisdom, not his CHA. CHA is a “dull” stat for most adventurers, but if you’ve seen White Collar, you’ll notice the Special Agent is nothing compared to the CI, even though Mr. FBI is a bigger badass. That’s how stats play out in fiction.)
@Ohio Mom: You are wise in noting that difference, but more people *can* handle MIT than can handle ATCing. During my more pacifistic-leaning youth, I realized that if there are people who need to get physical and kick some ass sometimes, it’s better they’re in the military and the police forces, and kept under proper discipline (in the finest, most honorable sense), so that they get a bigger commendation for *not* shooting, when the gun was a toy, but the situation seemed to warrant use of deadly force, than they get for taking down a gunman. Nobody sane seeks a bigger gong for not shooting when deadly force seems necessary, but plenty of people will hold their fire an instant longer, to be sure the situation warrants it, if they’re seeing things that don’t look right, like “he has a gun, 911 says he was threatening people – why is no one acting like there’s an active shooter?”
@Steve in the ATL: If college me could have gone back to high school me, and said “women will let you give them backrubs, once they trust you’re not trying to feel them up,” then *I* would have dated in *high school*. Okay, but, fair cop.
@Matt McIrvin: There’s big money to be had for any good, corruptible writer, on the right. Makes me wish my disability was less severe – I’d write news articles decrying *me*.
@Steve in the ATL: I think mentioning they’re all “Abrahamic” is less likely to get lawyers to eat your clothes off.
@Gloria DryGarden: Damn, but I wish I had the energy to chase stuff like that down.
WTFGhost
@WTFGhost: Y’all can delete the last comment. I’ll take a break like a good, neurodivergent, broken-brained whatever-the-fuck-I-am.