Does programming count as a hobby? I waste my free time on it… There’s this funny stereotype, of a queer programmer with long, quirky socks, and maybe even a fursona. Despite being a small percentage, such types are often overrepresented online. It used to bother me a little.
Nowadays I’m so, so glad when someone I’m talking to is part of that group. It usually means I don’t need to worry about them being weirdly sexist, like women don’t suffer enough in the industry, or insisting that we need to keep politics out of tech (i.e. they want their politics to rule, unquestioned).
Silly feelings on my part? Perhaps. One less thing to worry about, though.
I’ve had to stop watching/reading a load of programming stuff because numerous times I’ve found out the creator was just horrifically racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic or transphobic. It got too tiring having to investigate every author (not that it was difficult, they’re usually VERY open about being bigots).
It’s wild how on the orange website I can read entirely sensible discussions about tricky Bash semantics or whatever, while people in a parallel thread are seriously arguing the Trump admin’s repressions are dwarfed by… whatever “repressions” they think happened during Covid. And I don’t even click on the threads about disabilities (especially autism) anymore because it’s so predictably sad.
The comment sections are frequently just exhausting. People who read PG blog posts and then make comments pretending to be serious. Lunatics.
I’m not in this picture, and I don’t like it. What about stapler collecting?
stapler collecting
You could set the building on fire.
You’re joking…
No… I’m not. Mostly Ace Fastener. The Scout, the Pilot, a long reach Pilot, an Aceliner. I have a Bostitch from the 20’s, back when it was still Boston Wire Stitching. One cool one is the Bates Model B, which is a wire feed stapler. It has a spool of wire, and it will feed it, cut it, bend it, and staple. All in one push.
Pretty boring, huh?
I actually have way more calculators than stapler. I’m a dull guy. Here are some of my favorites there.
89 Titanium FTW!
It’s powerful, for sure. The only reason I bought it, though, was for calc 3. Most of the time, I prefer the TI-86. Custom menus that are one button away, a great unit convertor that is two buttons. Super easy to program for. And, it just looks good.
I also really like the Casio FX-9750GIII.
Dang, now I feel like listening to ASMR of a nerd collecting calculators to fall asleep.
I’ve just been using 89s since I was in middle school. Always liked them. Always kept with them. My main calculator is a 20 year old 89 Titanium. Those things are built like tanks.
Though it may be a bit of a ship of Theseus. I’ve replaced the cover and battery cover 2-3 times, and I even replaced the tiny backup battery cover once.
😂 Duder, I don’t get this one bit, but keep doing what you’re doing. (That wire feed stapler does sound pretty interesting tho, not gonna lie)
Heyyy 😉
What if all of the above?
Well green is yellow and blue, and red is just another primary color. If you mix it together you get a black flag and it means ye be a pirate matey!
I’m a white, Christian, male firearms enthusiast from Texas.
That’s a tough combination when I’m also extremely leftist.
You are one mini stroke from switching teams aggressively.
I think Christian Leftists are based and cool, you’re basically THE Christians who care about what Christ actually wanted for us, but also because you’re on the Left you run into r/Atheist type chuds all the time, meaning you work with people who are hostile to you because you know that it’s the right thing to do.
That’s pretty based and cool.
I’m not Christian myself, I learn more Buddhist in my spirituality, and even then I’m more agnostic on my ideas about God, but there’s a lot I legitimately respect about the faith.
Buddhism isn’t a theological religion. There simply is no god in Buddhism. There are gods, yes, but they are just part of Samsara, the cycle of birth and rebirth, like everybody else.
So beeing agnostic is right in point in that regard, if not even completly atheistic.
I did differentiate my spirituality from my ideas on God for a reason.
In all fairness, male firearms are the shit 😉
You want a fun read look up the official ATF inquiry letters about the “tactical fleshlight” where they’re asking if it counts as a stock or a brace, making it either a short-barreled rifle or a pistol.
This is my rifle, this is my gun?
Why only a “male firearms enthusiast”, what about the female firearms? Maybe your not as big of a leftist as you thought.
One’s sex is not a political stance…
It’s an Oxford comma joke. The way it’s structured reads like “male-firearms” enthusiast, as in an enthusiast of “male firearms”.
If there’s no and is it still an oxford comma?
Well, history shows leftists have been known to use firearms plenty
I read an interesting article about 40K Space Marines last year, the problem with them is that some people just don’t get satire no matter how glaringly obvious it is
Starship Troopers is so badass!
My dad legitimately thinks that’s a great action movie. And to be fair, it is.
But he doesn’t understand the deeper meanings.
More meat for the grinder is totally just a bad ass thing to say! Not at all like an orphan crushing machine, for sure.
“The mobile infantry made me the man I am today” shows off two missing legs and one missing arm
All the teachers are injured and in need of prosthetics and assisting devices, all of them served.
As Rico’s dad said, it should be illegal to use schools as recruiting centers.
And while they all need a prosthetic, none of them have one unless it specifically pertains to something that will benefit their military job.
The front desk guy needs 2 legs and an arm, but only has an arm and is in a wheel chair. The arm helps his job stamping new recruits in. The legs serve no purpose but to make his life better, but unnecessary for the job.
Ricos teacher needs an arm, but while he’s teaching, he doesn’t have one. Once he’s back on active duty, he’s allowed a prosthetic arm because it helps the Federation. He doesn’t require an arm to teach.
If it’s not required for your specific position, you don’t deserve to be made whole. It’s a pretty fucked up society overall, and not nearly enough people understand that the humans aren’t the good guys.
Wut?! How can someone not understand Starship Troopers is satire? What about all of the propaganda cut ins?!
There really is no limit to how dense some dipshits can be. Hell, there are even fascist Star Trek fans, despite the show beating them over the head with stuff like this all the time!
Unfortunately that’s rather understandable. A largely ‘white’ and mostly male cast of mostly humans running around saving the day and ‘defeating/ enlightening’ backwards ‘alien’ cultures in what are basically military ships.
So if you ignore the messages and the actual stories being told and only look at the superficial stuff (as MAGA Morons are wont to do) it does, sadly, pass the facist vibe check.
“star trek went woke”
BITCH STAR TREK WAS WOKE FROM DAY ONE GET BENT
A lot of - I dare say most - people reach for fiction as a form of escapism, and they do need a suspense of disbelief to enjoy it. So if someone points out that in-fiction events are obvious caricatures of real ones, they don’t like it because they don’t want to see it, that’s why they are there and not in the real world.
Honestly I don’t know. Even when I point out super obvious ones, I’m “reaching to make a point”
I have no doubt it’s satire, but for me it’s always been more of a fun escape into a ridiculous, militarized sci fi fantasy world. I’d never want to genuinely set foot in that world though. Except the sexy coed showers. Booyah!
I really blame the games industry as a whole for this. They keep making games with Space Marines as the protagonists, where their violence is presented as justified, when a lore-friendly space marine game should be like “No Russian” missions all the time and the resulting failure this causes to their Empire. This constant “whitewashing” of the lore, is what has attracted a ton of people.
I would LOVE to see a WH40k setting where the space marines are lore-accurate murdering an entire multi-billion hive-city for some minor heresy by a few thousand of the people on the 925th-sub-basement, and you’re playing random ganger Scumface Mc Spikearms who’s just trying to survive.
Apropos , the Necromunda video game was such a disappointment :(
yeah, agreed. But Rogue Trader was remarkably on brand.
There were a LOT of parts where you basically had to decide the life and death of tens to hundreds of thousands. And often, the ethical thing was NOT the in-game right choice. For example, you could allow refugees aboard, it gets you nothing, but some of them will try to sabotage you. If you kill them all, you even get piety points for killing (some) heretics.
I recall one of the developer replying to a comment that said “If I’m evil, I get cool items, if I’m good, I get nothing, why is that?” and they replied with “If you’re doing it for a rewards, you’re not really being good, are you now?”
“If you’re doing it for a rewards, you’re not really being good, are you now?”
This is moon logic. Yes, that’s how it works in the real world, but you aren’t in the real world. You’re playing a game.
So a WH40K/Spec-Ops: The Line mashup.
The Line was an anti-shooter, in the sense that it felt like a generic third-person shooter while constantly hammering the “you shouldn’t be having fun playing this because war is awful and full of atrocities” messaging. It was actually a fairly decent critique of the shooters that were prevalent when the game was developed. It came out when games like Gears of War, Resident Evil, Mass Effect, and Red Dead Redemption were dominating the third-person shooter market, while the FPS market was dominated by Halo and COD.
Eh, I feel the message of Spec Ops was really sabotaged by the poor in-game systems.
There’s a mission where you have to defend a point, and you get the option to drop white phosphorus. But that mission is really easy, and you can easily play it for hours and hours, killing an infinite number of enemies. It doesn’t progress without pushing the button.
And then it berates you, the player, for pushing the button.
This feels really weird to me. I can see the point in the distance, but it really doesn’t work for me, since you can obviously just murder people till eternity as well.
And the game has several hidden “better ways”, like shooting the rope at the hanging, where it will reward you for doing it better. But it doesn’t have that option elsewhere, like the white phosphorus option.
Honestly, there’s a big disconnect between some of the scenes, and the heavyhanded message.
Contrast it with “no Russian”, which is a map that’s offered with zero commentary, letting you shoot unarmed civilians, but not punishing you at all if you don’t. And no matter what you do, the end result is the same. That’s a system that fits with everything in the game, it doesn’t have to swing a message in your face, and it doesn’t have to break with normal gameplay to insert elements required for the message.
I always hear people talk about the white phosphorus part of the game, but the game doesn’t give you a choice there. I much prefer the parts where you are actually given a choice. The one that I remember the best is the civilians, you don’t have to kill them and I just fired a warning shot and they quickly dispersed. Apparently some people will gun them down.
You hear people talk about it, because it’s so bad and jarring and forced. People keep bringing up specops as some great writing inversion of a shooter trope, when it really just doesn’t get what agency is.
If you don’t give a player agency, you can’t then berate them for doing something wrong, because they didn’t actually do a thing. The phosphorous part of the game is a thing you don’t get a say in, but the game blames you as a player.
It’s like me blaming you for reading the word phosphorus, when you had basically no choice in that.
If you don’t give agency, you can only ever blame the character. And the writer made the characters, not the player.
I think it forms part of bigger meta narrative, and the end of the day you still go through with the white phosphur attack as the game is forcing the choice on you to proceed as the only way to solve the problem - which is what the character believed in
Its message is,to me, “are you having fun” playing a game of murder -it forced, albeit clumsily, the reality of war when you feel you have no other option - a choice you are forced to make like pulling the trigger of a gun. You can leave the game and not do it or you pull the trigger.
You are still killing after that point soon after, with character quick to stat blaming others and you are still going on for the ride by playing- to finish the game, to get to Komrad- it comes off pretentious i admit, but the wp was acting as a turning point and was using a blunt force narrative to make you start asking questions about the character’ sanity
Could it have been done better - sure, but the thing is you, the player, still went through with it and pressed the button instead of putting the game down and refusing - it is trying to sell the point of view of the player’s character you are playing decided that it was the “only way” and by continuing to play the game you have accepted the condition forced upon you and continued to be complicit in the events that unfold because you wanted to see the story through.
“No Russian is shock value, but there really isn’t much player consequence as it doesn’t matter what you do so long as you keep up, you could even skip it”
If you wanted to avoid the nastiness of what you were doing you could in No russian, specs ops decided to comfront the player with deciding for the player to either accept the nastiness or don’t and if you want to see the story to completion you better get your hands proper dirty and not half ass it.
Again, conveying that is not easy and what they did could have been conveyed better. You are seeing things from the perspective of a dude with severe ptsd and you have been murdering people up to that point on fragile pretense
spoiler
Especially since the whole point was to scout for survivors and head back - and that turned into a quest for Konrad that destroys whats left of Dubai on the orders of a broken man
Could it have been done better - sure, but the thing is you, the player, still went through with it and pressed the button instead of putting the game down and refusing - it is trying to sell the point of view of the player’s character you are playing decided that it was the “only way” and by continuing to play the game you have accepted the condition forced upon you and continued to be complicit in the events that unfold because you wanted to see the story through.
My problem is that the game does tries to do it both ways. It tries to give you in-game options to “be less bad”, in the crowd scene and the hanging scene, doing a very game-y thing by going straight. But then it ALSO does the WP scene where it’s going for “The only winning move is not to play” thing by breaking outside the game.
And that ruins both angles for me, it feels really lazy, like they just kinda shoehorned the angle in and felt super smart afterwards, when to me it just feels like they’re covering up for bad writing. They didn’t commit.
“No Russian is shock value, but there really isn’t much player consequence as it doesn’t matter what you do so long as you keep up, you could even skip it”
If you wanted to avoid the nastiness of what you were doing you could in No russian, specs ops decided to comfront the player with deciding for the player to either accept the nastiness or don’t and if you want to see the story to completion you better get your hands proper dirty and not half ass it.
You couldn’t skip No Russian way back when it first released, that was patched in later because of the massive public outcry over that map. That’s not really my point, my point is that as a writer, it’s fine to engage inside the game with the characters OR place it on the reader/player, but doing both makes both miss the mark.
GW constantly pushes Space Marines and to a lesser extent the Imperial Guard as a majority of time as the protagonist. People don’t have the media literacy to understand that protagonist does not equal the hero. The protagonist is just the main character of the story and they can be evil or good or anything in between.
I feel like the satire is being washed out to support the line that shall always go up.
But hey, Space Marines goes “Pew! Pew! Pew!”
The article discusses this; basically the video games want you to at least slightly like the protagonist you’re playing as, which means they can’t entirely be the monstrous caricatures they were designed to be.
I don’t get it why not though, Spec Ops The Line was not a technical marvel or an outstanding gameplay experience even for its time, but we are still talking about it for its message.
Meanwhile stellaris exists with multiple different options for genocide.
Dude, you can genetically modify a race to live shorter lives, taste good and make them more subservient and weaker. That shit is beyond genocide. From chattel to cattle.
God-Emperor (mostly dead sitting on a cybernetic throne preserving his life, requires like 100 psychics a day to feed on to live) wants to spread his Religious-no-religion religion across the cosmos, and the brutality with which is required is a small price to pay for industry.
And then they choose to like the guy unironically. But if they’re really into Slaneesh then they just get a special brand of weird.
requires like 100 psychics a day
1,000 per day. Every day. For Ten. Thousand. Years.
So you know, just a drop in the bucket, no big deal.
And to be fairrrrrrr… The emperor himself wants no religion at all, and it’s the corrupt and zealous officials that spread the “the emperor is a god” thing, he straight up destroyed a planet because a chapter of marines converted it to Emperorism once. That was before he got stuck on his death throne, obviously.
Anyone who genuinely admires ANY of the factions in 40k just doesn’t understand it.
They all suck. There are no good guys. Honestly I’d say the closest thing to good guys there are would be the tyanids, because they’re just doing what tyanids do. You don’t get mad at cows for being cows. Or wolves for being wolves. They are what they are and they do what they do. It isn’t malicious intent.
It’the A̴l̴l̴ C̶̳̑ọ̷̓͂n̴̼͕͂̄ṡ̴̹̕u̶̘̿m̶̜̿͜ȋ̵̲́͜n̴͈̜̎g̴̰̝̈̇ Ḩ̴̛͖͚̣̯̟̗̮͔͓̝̜͆̓̈́̈́̇̓͒̕Ừ̶̲̓̃̂̉̎͛̀̒̕̚N̵̨̳͈͙̘̭̩̹͈̙͈͙͕̮͋̿̆͐̅̇͆̅̋̈G̵̛̛͇̗̘͓̐̓̆̓̌̓̃̀̂͛́̉͘͘͝Ę̸̙̩͈͕̒̄̋́̍́̔̔̉͝͠R̸̛͇͚̜͍͉̺̋̽̀̎͌̈́͗̀͌̓̊̂͜
The tyranids are an expression of entropy more than they are a species, they’re very nearly a force of nature. They’re not really “good” or “bad” in the same way that gravity isn’t good or bad.
Now the Orkz I think are just fun and good dudes. They don’t really hate anybody in particular, they just LOVE to FIGHT and will keep doing that unless stopped. They will gladly fight amongst themselves if no one else appears to fight with them. They don’t really have grand dreams of conquest beyond swarming over the horizon to fight whatever is on the other side of it. The optimal end state of Ork supremacy isn’t galactic domination, it’s one big WAAGH cloud that rips across the galaxy in a giant loop and takes long enough doing it that the survivors can settle back down and bunker back up before the Boyz come back to town. They don’t even necessarily want to win, they just love to fight, they think it’s the best activity that you can do, and they want to share that with any and everyone.
From anyone else’s perspective this is a horrifying wall of green skinned, brutal cunning monsters that will sprout up out of literal nowhere and reproduce faster than you can print more bullets for them. But from the Orkz perspective they’re basically just asking you to join their football game. They’re fun guys.
But from the Orkz perspective they’re basically just asking you to join their football game. They’re fun guys.
Different cultures I guess but in my neck of the woods, the hooligans down at the local football club don’t rip my arms off if I refuse.
Oh sorry, I just realized I’m whispering.
OI YA GIT, HUMIES AIN’T GOOD KRUMPIN’, MOST OF EMS IS TOO SMALL FER PROPPA FIGHTINZ, CEPT THE BIG BOYZ WITH THE BIG DAKKAS
Yeah, this was on full display when Helldivers 2 launched. So many people just didn’t get the satire, and unironically leaned into the messaging.
For the unaware, Helldivers 2 is basically a Starship Troopers video game.
Starship Troopers the book was flat out propaganda. It’s only the movie that is satire.
The book is an exploration of and presents an argument for militarism. That alone doesn’t make it propaganda. While many of the sentiments, implications, premises in the book carry a clear bias, the book nevertheless invites the reader to engage with and reflect on the ideology rather than aiming to manipulate and indoctrinate the reader.
I’d say the earnest argument presented by Heinlein in ST is flawed and morally objectionable, but not a piece of propaganda.
What’s funny is that while Vikings are mostly remembered for their warrior culture, their success as a diaspora came more from their merchant and sailing culture. THEY were the ‘immigrants.’
Merchants in this case translates to slavers, so Nazis can feel right at home in that regard. Your point still stands tough.
We come from the land of the ice and snow
From the midnight sun where the hot springs flow
The hammer of the gods
Will drive our ships to new lands
I do home canning and a fair deal of baking. There’s a lot of trad bullshit around this that makes me just go “I’m canning cause I love me some candied jalapeños, not because my husband demands I do”
I would auto translate articles / blogs from other languages. In Estonia we mostly have advice literature like that free of bull. I imagine the same is roughly true for most countries besides the US. I’m trying to collect materials about everything DIY and write down what I know. Ask me if you ever try woodworking, construction, plant related stuff or anything that needs doing around the house, like snow removal or firewood. There’s lots of tricks to everything. I’m take my time about it as I need to get stuff done so I haven’t organized it as a blog yet.
Do you own lots of ankle-length skirts?
I use to because skirts are fun to wear! I also wear long sleeves shirts because they’re warm and look I know
I look the part which is why people assume but I just like baking bread, canning apple butter, and being cozy!
…how do you feel about homeschooling?
(jk)
HATRED FOR IT
You just reminded me I need to get a good lemon marmalade recipe
Offroading.
Like, I just want to spend too much money breaking my truck to go play in the mud or camping in the middle of nowhere on the weekend, not throw massive alcohol fueled frat parties in the desert and annihilate the environment in my jacked-up, curb princess of a Ram covered in a thousand miniature suns and “
Don’t tread on mePlease tread on me, daddy” stickersOld school games enjoyer: “Games used to be awesome… modern games are garbage”
🚨
Morrowind is better than Skyrim
😎
I particularly enjoy the telvanni lore
🚨
If they enjoy saying N’wah a little too much, that might be a red flag.
To be honest dark elves are either bloodthirsty capitalists, bigoted isolationists, conservative acolytes or all of the above. What a wonderful people <3… ekhm of course, how outrageous
Great you’re going to make me install Morrowind again
Whyd you ever uninstall it?
Hard to swallow pill that not all ESIII fans are cool
You see, this is the crux. They are cool. They are cooler than you. Also, they identify as Dunmer so they are inherently superior racially than the farming tools in particular but also any other race really
Airsoft.
It’s so fun but also run mostly by straight up Nazis.
Isn’t that only because they use it to practice live shooter scenarios?
Yeah, so they can practice being the live shooter.
“Well, I like Immigrant Song.”
People who like Rick and Morty.
People who look up to Rick.
People who like American Psycho because it is a brilliant satire of the sociopathy of the elite.
vs
People who like American Psycho because ‘I’m just like Patrick Bateman, fr fr.’
…
Its the same with Fight Club, Falling Down, Taxi Driver…
Its possible to enjoy and be a fan of these movies without actually idolizing a psycopath… maybe you sympathize or empathize with them to varying degrees, but you don’t hold them up as idealized character role models, you realize these are all very flawed, often tragic characters who … basically become villains in (semi?) plausible ways, that showcase how brutal and broken society is…
But, so many people do actually idolize these trainwreck characters that now we’ve spent basically the entire era of internet based cultural dominance/exchange where any kind of admiration of these ‘cautionary morality tale about a disaffected man’ type movies is just immediately, often instantly viewed as a red flag by a whole lot of people.
American Psycho satirization of the cold and unfeeling aspects of 1980’s yuppie culture. Bateman might have hallucinated the entire thing and Paul Owen really could have been in London given how frequently Bateman is mistaken for another person by colleagues. It’s not about the sociopathy of the rich.
I mean… your plot notes are on point… but ‘yuppie’ derives from ‘YUP’, which means ‘Young Urban Professional’.
At the time, the 80s and 90s, yuppie was synonymous with … the people making huge incomes in white collar jobs, in large corporations, by being cutthroat businessmen, usually earning their keep by orchestrating deals, layoffs, mergers, downsizing/rightsizing, etc… stuff that was good for the shareholders and execs, but bad for pretty much everyone else.
Maybe I am misunderstanding what you are saying?
I don’t see how you think yuppie culture and sociopathy of the rich… are any different, I don’t get why you are drawing a distinction there, or what the boundary is.
Yuppie culture is sociopathic, and the young rich people of the era … were largely yuppies.
Bateman is a yuppie, he is a rich person, and he is a violent sociopath/psycopath… or at least, he seems to think he is… he may just be utterly delusional.
The way I see it is … he is a hollow person, a husk, with no actual values, but is a brilliant actor, acting out the fake corporate/socialite norms… which are fundamentally built on a kind of sociopathy: Nothing matters other than the pursuit of profit and status, superiority in all aspects is the goal, any means to achieve this are justified.
Thus he is the uber yuppie, the ur yuppie, the ‘perfect’ yuppie… and he cannot maintain sanity as a ‘perfect’ yuppie.
When Bateman snaps, we’re seeing the violence that is normally done indirectly, sanitized through the layers of corporate governance and influence upon government and society as a whole… all of the complications of politics and economics are removed, and we see a disintermediated, rich corporate mad man in a suit (or his birthday suit) just directly doing the violence that is normally obfuscated and done via societal systems and layers of bureacracy.
You show the truth with a lie, kind of idea.
Maybe a more succinct way of saying what I’m trying to say:
Yuppie culture was the culture of the rich, or at least a prominent subculture of a prominent subset of the rich, in the 80s and 90s. Bateman is basically a cariacature of this, thus the movie is a character study of a person who represents an entire class… of wealthy people. (We also get to just see the culture outright via Bateman’s interactions with others in that culture)
I love Rick and Morty but all the main characters are not good people. I don’t blame Morty or Summer since what else can you expect growing up surrounded by that family?
Rick and Morty bangs and had some subtle anti-capitalist elements to it.
But yeah Rick is a nihilist with severe empathy problems. Although he is showing some very minor character development.
Honestly all the characters in that show suck. Except that one girl morty time-looped himself out of marrying. She seemed normal.
Oh and Planetina. There is only one solution to earth’s pollution.
I’ve only seen a few episodes, but isn’t that part of the joke of the show?
Weirdly, I haven’t seen a lot of people who think The Gang in It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia are cool role models. I guess the difference might be that Rick is canonically a genius where The Gang are canonically morons.
I quite liked her methods tbh. Morty was just not willing to solve pollution.
He wasn’t willing to do the things that need to be done to save the biosphere for as many creatures as possible.
I am interested in survivalism but it seems like most survivalists are a bunch of god-fearing crazy racist motherfuckers.
I remember when survivalists were predominately hippie types who feared a right-wing generated apocalypse - like corporatism collapsing the economy, or warmongers starting WW3. The back-to-nature ones learned self-sufficient organic farming, the tech ones bought nitrogen-filled plastic bins of grain, and they all grew weed. Then when rednecks joined the club it became more about homemade ammunition and defending the perimeter.
Whenever right-wingers show the slightest interest in anything the left-wingers flee with their tails between their legs.
Sadly there’s some truth to that. Moral perfectionism is so common among liberals, publicly expressing your interests can be a minefield.
left tends to be pro-social for solutions, right tends to be pro-violence for solutions, so… yeah…
I think hippie ‘survivalist’ material can be foundbunder ‘homesteading’ more easily. Still a portion of exclusionary-supremacists and superstitious-dogmatics, but somewhat fewer in my experience. More sustainable growing techniques, with the guns chapter further back in the book. More mutual aid networking, less barrel frotting.
I clearly relate more to this first batch than the second one but for me it is about being able to survive in Nature no matter why. I do not fear a right-wing apocalypse either, I only want to survive no matter what happens.
Good luck with surviving no matter what happens. Most of us are highly dependent on services we take for granted - reliable electricity and water, stores stocked with food, open roads, a monetary system, communications, nearby doctors, firefighters, police, etc. As in, “What have the Romans ever done for us?”
If you go far enough left or right, you end up in the same spot.
If you insist on putting everything on a one dimensional scale, you come up with stupid, obviously false conclusions.
Hitler was 🤏 this close to a classless, stateless, moneyless society. /s
The prepper response to covid absolutely broke my heart. I already had an emergency pandemic kit good to go and my whole family in N95 masks from day 1 (in America). We had plenty of canned food and water. I thought, “This is it. We’re ready for this.” And then all the others sided with the fucking virus. 🤮😭
Man, I was really invested in that in like 2016 but in 2018 was the election of Bolsonaro. Some time before, during the election and until now every fucking content creator or community around this hobby became a cesspool of right wing dickheads worshipping this fascist.
As someone from a small town in the pacific northwest, it feels like they always have been. It was just a case of the quiet part not being said out loud or them masking it enough those with lower exposure didn’t see it.
I drive a pickup, grew up hunting and fishing and I’m tall, pretty thick, tattooed all to hell and bearded… the amount of “hell yeah brother” followed by some vial, racist, homo/transphobic shit I have said to me is staggering. The moment of pushback has become a high for me. I’m almost baiting them from a conversation about tree stands and elk piss formulas into some fucked statement about trans athlete’s just too feel something.
That said, it isn’t all of us so I don’t want to gate keep survivalism and general outdoorsiness. Always willing to teach a flytie, how to dig a shit hole and the easiest way to catch water with a tarp.
One thing I get a trill from when I receive these kinds of comments is to act like I do not get what the person means so, as an exemple, they need to go from a veiled reference to “darker people” to an outright racist statement. Then, I keep on acting like I don’t understand what they mean, This is often very funny although sad at the same time but having someone trying to explain their racist/*phobic joke while they realize how much they need to expose themselves is pretty fun to me.
Heck yes friend. This is also a fantastic strategy. Likely the same perverse curiosity that makes Clint Eastwoods rants compelling in Gran Turino. Standing there making mental notes about what the hell that means but knowing its foul.
Same boat here (PNW big bearded dude). I actually got handed a 'White Pride’s card last week. Before I had the full beard nobody ever said racists shit to me unless it was accusatory. Now they think I’m on their side.
Doesn’t help that I’m into survivalism, permaculture, and off-grid living. I’m constantly fighting the algorithm that wants to feed me ultra conservative bullshit.
Bushcrafting content has a fine line when it pushes over into doomsday prepper. I can get the ideas of having a bit of food/water stocked up for a normal emergency. But if you are preparing industrial quantities of things to survive for years in a bunker you should seek help.
“prepper” vs “Prepper” with a capital “P”.
The first learns and practices actual useful skills – gardening, food preservation, repairing their own things, etc. The later are dorks buying a ton of unnecessary shit shilled by right-wing influencers cosplaying as “entirely self-sufficient”.
Gardening, sewing, soldering, and communication are the most important doomsday skills
Well if you just get a commercial freeze dryer, generator and alcohol fuel distillation setup you can be completely self sufficient!
Freeze drying on a large scale takes a LOT of time. You need to be ready to treat food prep like a full time job for it to make serious financial sense.
I would think other preservation methods are easier to go with really. Salt, dehydrate, smoke, pickle, fermemt.
For many things, yes. Canning can be done for some things (although you want to be really sure about what you’re doing; you can kill yourself pretty fast with botulism if you do it wrong), freezing is good for other things (although not great if you have power outages). If you’re trying to live off the land, you do need to be aware that certain parasites are not adequately dealt with by salt curing, smoking, dehydration, or even freezing; feral pigs and bear both have trichinosis, and must be thoroughly cooked to be safe. In wild populations, the parasite has been demonstrated to be highly resistant to freezing, etc.
Dried, etc. things should be vacuum sealed with desiccants and oxygen absorbers for maximum preservation. I test the e.g. apples that I’ve dried every so often (I live in an area with a lot of orchards; apples can be very cheap when you buy them by the bushel directly from the orchard), and as of this year, the apples I dried six years ago are still good.
One thing that freeze drying can be very good for is complete meals. E.g., if you make a stock pot full of jambalaya, you can freeze dry it in individual portion sizes, vacuum seal it in 9mil mylar, and you’ve got a meal that should be good for 10+ years.
For anyone that’s seriously considering a freeze dryer, check this video out. Yeah, I still want one, but seriously, it can take a lot to make it practical. I’m not enamored of the control system that they use; a blended automatic and manual control system would probably work better than something that supposedly takes the guesswork out of it for you.
I will point out that we’re right now entering a time when basic foodstuffs are going to become very expensive, and a lot of day to day items are likely going to rise sharply in price, or become unavailable. Having industrial amounts of these day-to-day things is a hedge against that.
Then buy grains, they already come in a form you can store long term. Honey, jam and tinned goods too.
'Course, the good news about the reciprocal tariffs is that soybeans are gonna be very cheap domestically. You can make a very functional flour out of soybeans with a good grain mill/stone grinder, although you’ll want to add gluten to it if you’re going to try to make bread. And soy is very high in proteins (compared to most grain flour), so you can live off it when other protein sources are too expensive.
California’s lost their water reserves for the year and potash is being tariffed.
Water is the hard one; the amount of water that people go through in a day, even in desert communities where people are very aware of the amount of water they consume–drinking, cooking, cleaning–is quite high. Storing enough for a full year for a household of four is functionally impossible. If I lived in California, I’d be looking for high-volume desalination systems.
maybe the best part of being trans is that your trans friend group can buy a ranch in the mountains and stock up on guns and alpaca and you never get mistaken for a race war wisher
Guns and Alpacas, the two most precious resources in the world! We should combine them a a single element since an Alpaca without a gun is totally useless! /s
Brings a new meaning to ‘pack animal’
Amateur Radio.
The first video I found on Baofeng Radio guides is on a youtube channel run by some right winger that sounds like a SovCit, who makes “jokes” about people who wear mask and have this “gay humor”.
Like bruh
(I mean, I guess it makes sense. Right-wing “anarchists” are skeptical of “government control” and are the type of people to want to use radios instead of smartphones. Buts its ironic that encryption is illegal… But I assume they probably just ignore the “no encryption” rule anyways since they are a SovCit.)
Not only that, but they’re the ones ignoring getting licensed at all.
It’s not quite the same thing, but Meshtastic tends to be more lefty, or at least not outright sovcit. Don’t need a license and getting started is relatively cheap.
Cryptography.
Some people just think we should let the dead sleep, what can you say.
That’s necromancy. Cryptography is just taking rubbings of tombstones.
Anytime someone starts dropping Warhammer lore, or shows a love of Boomer Shooters, I know I’m going to despise that person or they’ll be my best friend, no middle ground, and I don’t even like Warhammer.
What’s wrong with boomer shooters?? The whole genre was founded on killing nazis
Tell that to the nazi enjoyers
Yes let’s let assholes poison our views of innocuous hobbies. That will show them. /s
We shouldn’t reinforce their echo chamber. Better to just do whatever makes you happy and deal with the assholes as they reveal themselves.
I hear Nazis enjoy breathing too! Whelp, guess we have to suffocate now!
What the fuck is wrong with boomer shooters?
Boomer Shooters themselves are great.
The problem are the people who “Only play games before they got all woke!”
Lmao, I gotcha. 😂