UKMT Winterval 2023/24 - Zero-Tolerance Zones in Hotpot Areas

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > UKMT Winterval 2023/24 - Zero-Tolerance Zones in Hotpot Areas

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(Thread IKs: OwlFancier)

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Jaeluni Asjil posted:

It's too cold to be revolting today.

Coward, I'm revolting in any weather

# ¿ Dec 1, 2023 21:37

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 10:36

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Jaeluni Asjil posted:

One of my cats used to like cucumber (slices if they fell on the floor).

I wonder what is going on in these cats' brains when they see whole cucumbers? Snake maybe?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBrZsgy4-SQ

Snake is the theory yeah.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2023 23:31

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

fuctifino posted:

My sentence is up!

A few things happened during my month of penance:

1. The twitter troll group that I helped formed turned out to be filled with a load of tankies, so I instantly killed it with fire and deactivated my twitter account. My faith in society diminished somewhat, as I can't understand how people can be so pro-Gaza and anti genocide, yet be pro-Russia and pro their genocide against Ukraine.

It's cause they consider America Bad to be an acceptable substitute for principles, hth

# ¿ Dec 3, 2023 20:41

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

NotJustANumber99 posted:

i was just trying to predictive text type poo poo on my phone and it brought up "owlfancier". wtf.

That's the power of AI. The machine god has spoken

# ¿ Dec 4, 2023 23:25

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Darth Walrus posted:

https://x.com/solhugheswriter/status/1733065736552055171?s=46&t=ARI_L-v32Oind1-d9B3a3Q

bleak lol

And for anyone who doesn't want to click a link to the nazi pedophile website to read a screenshot of a snippet of an article from the Morning Star:

"Solomon Hughes posted:

Rachel Reeves: investing in infrastructure?

Rachel Reeves convened a new British Infrastructure Council at the end of November, promising it would help Labour create a “once in a generation set of reforms to accelerate the building of our country’s critical infrastructure and to build housing too.”

This is how Reeves intends to “kick start growth.” But look closely at the company representatives on Reeves’s British Infrastructure Council and something stands out.

Reportedly, the businesses on the British Infrastructure Council are Lloyds — a British bank; HSBC, a British bank; Santander, a Spanish bank; Fidelity Investments, a US investment manager; Blackrock, a US Investment manager; M&G, a British investment manager; CPP Investments, a Canadian pensions investor; CDPQ, another Canadian pensions investor; Border to Coast, a British pensions investor and Phoenix Group, a British insurance and investment firm.

None of these firms build infrastructure. They are money managers. They don’t know how to dig a ditch or erect steel or lay cable. Instead, they know how to own firms that dig ditches, erect steel or lay cables: the infrastructure council is there to advise how a Labour government can work with private investors.

As Reeves says, this “infrastructure council” is about working with “key investors” — not key infrastructure builders or managers.

Reeves says that “through Labour’s new National Wealth Fund, we will work alongside the private sector to back the growth of British industry.” She wants these private investment advisers to tell her how to invest public wealth from her National Wealth Fund.

Reeves says this is a win-win, as public investment will stimulate private investment. According to Reeves “for every pound of public investment, we will leverage in three times as much private investment, while also getting a return for the taxpayer.”

But will the taxpayer do well? CPP for example, own 32 per cent of Anglian Water — the privatised firm fined millions of pounds for pumping filth into our rivers, while paying tens of millions to their shareholders, including CPP.

Blackrock is a — somewhat smaller — investor in Severn Trent, a water firm also known for simultaneously pumping dividends to shareholders and filth into rivers. HSBC and Lloyds history of investing in public sector infrastructure is a grim one — they were both major players in the PFI, a rip-off.

Lloyds representatives are currently suing London’s Whittington Hospital, demanding £56 million from the NHS. NHS bosses don’t want to pay for the PFI because the contractors wouldn’t agree to safety repairs after a fire in the hospital basement.

The big danger is that the financial firms on the “infrastructure council” will argue for publicly supported investment that, like PFI, leaves them with the profits and the public sector with the bill.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2023 16:22

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Looks like what you make in one of those train station management games Josh is always playing on Let's Game It Out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScCAI6MMi3U

# ¿ Dec 9, 2023 22:54

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Who is Johnny Adair

# ¿ Dec 10, 2023 04:34

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

OwlFancier posted:

That does sound weird then yeah...

I wonder if there's some opt in/out thing?

When I was a kid I went to the doctor about a bollock lump and after he had a squeeze he called in a junior doctor and had him do it too for some practical experience.

So the NHS is in my opinion slightly odd about how wide your invitation to bollock fondling is, literally and/or metaphorically.

I had that just a few years ago. Not my bollock, something on my foot, the doctor said it was a textbook example of whatever harmless thing it was and got the students in to check it out.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2023 19:52

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Parliament has always been pro rogues

# ¿ Dec 12, 2023 17:12

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Who

# ¿ Dec 13, 2023 12:48

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

You can't say you've tried spicy food until you've run a dozen habaneros through a meat grinder and fried them as a sausage

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYuQSr34yvk

# ¿ Dec 16, 2023 17:29

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

The Question IRL posted:

The late 90's produced a whole bunch of 3D FPS which are objectively better than the 2D FPS of the mid 90's, but also somehow, not as fun or as memorable.

Like there is an article that could be written about why games like Blood, Day of the Triad, Shadow Warrior and Redneck Rampage are better than Blood II, SiN, Kingpin or Jurrasic Park: Trespasser.

Sorry, Blood 2 is objectively better than what exactly?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcuBwXFk5lM

# ¿ Dec 19, 2023 15:46

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

What was that thing that said we're paying California prices on Alabama wages

# ¿ Dec 20, 2023 14:13

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Even as late as 2007, I remember Supreme Commander's manual being pretty chunky, and it came with a fold-out poster with all three factions' tech trees on the other side.

# ¿ Dec 20, 2023 19:16

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

kingturnip posted:

I think I've said before that the anthropomorphising of Henrys (and the rest in the range) can cause a few problems with autistic kids who can get a bit over-attached, but it's a lot less harmful in the long-run than anything Dyson or Elon have been involved with, so there's something.

just makes me angry tbh. The number of times I've been pulling a Henry around a large room for work, only to have it get caught on something behind me, and I look around and it's got that cheeky loving smirk peeking around whatever corner it got stuck on

# ¿ Dec 23, 2023 20:53

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

DesperateDan posted:

we got a shark a few years ago and it sucks!

which is really good cause that's what we bought it for. cleans right to the edges, easy to clean and change filters/dustbin, hasn't needed any parts and will literally rip carpet up on the right settings

only arseache is that using the attachment pipe/hose thingy requires you to take all the power cable off

if you really need a cordless then get a makita 2x18V backpack one and become the appliance

Straddling the line between dustbusting and ghostbusting

# ¿ Dec 24, 2023 12:20

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

OwlFancier posted:

The 70's obsession with putting everything in gelatin is baffling.

It's pretty explicable. Fridges were becoming common, so gelatin was now easy for anyone to make but hadn't consequently lost its status as a symbol of wealth yet. Give it a few years, it stops being novel and everyone realises how vile it actually is

# ¿ Dec 25, 2023 00:03

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

There's a billion and one nakedly unappealing trends throughout recent history that I could point you to if I could remember them. If you think back very hard over your life you can probably think of at least one very stupid thing you got in on that seemed like a good idea at the time.

# ¿ Dec 25, 2023 00:09

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Aren't there enough containment threads for AI, we have to have it in here too?

# ¿ Dec 26, 2023 03:56

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Wachter posted:

Oh we've got one of those. 10 or so derelict flats on the high street. AFAIK the actual owner is overseas and uncontactable/doesn't give a poo poo so it has just sat there gradually falling apart for going on 20 years now

A good use for eminent domain at last

# ¿ Dec 26, 2023 12:56

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Doctor_Fruitbat posted:

I remember Only Connect once had four Sonic characters in that round where you pick the four related things and I don't even think Sonic was one of them, so that's a start I guess.

But at this point videogames are so absurdly popular and part of the cultural zeitgeist that we should just sneer at them for being so uncultured.

Someone on Only Connect is a Sonic fan for sure then, this is from last week's

Only registered members can see post attachments!

# ¿ Dec 28, 2023 00:29

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Of course it's corny, that's what makes it good

# ¿ Dec 28, 2023 01:08

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Bobstar posted:

That's not really fair though, he was smarter than the average

Terrible. I love it

# ¿ Dec 30, 2023 12:08

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Albinator posted:

How, in 2023, do you look at that at think that's just what we need?

Even if it was, Steven Moffat is the last person I want to write it or indeed anything else

# ¿ Dec 31, 2023 22:07

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Where do DS9 and Strange New Worlds fit into this analysis

# ¿ Jan 1, 2024 14:25

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Bobby Deluxe posted:

They'll forget that in about a series time though. Like how the borg went from 'one drone touches you once and now your ship and crew are infested with nanites you can never get rid of' to Voyager's 'ehh it's fine, we'll just reverse the polarity on the gel packs and do some hyposprays after half the ship was taken over by a cubeful.'

The Borg were never that. The nanoprobes aren't a magic techno virus, they're a tool directed by the will of the collective. The closest the Borg came to acting as that kind of infestation was First Contact, and as soon as the queen and all her drones were dead the leftover tech was inert. If nanoprobes did half the things Lore Guys have deluded themselves into thinking they do, the Borg wouldn't even need to move drones around, they'd just beam a blob of nanoprobes into a ship and the walls would start giving people the neck stab. At that point you're just describing Homeworld Cataclysm.

# ¿ Jan 1, 2024 16:16

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Jedit posted:

It's not exactly a deep cut. She was going by her original name in Picard.

Who the hell watched that dreck long enough to get to the episodes with her in

# ¿ Jan 2, 2024 13:45

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Voyager was the worst because it just wasn't very good and we had high standards. Its badness came partly from context and it's kind of quaint that people got up in arms about them. Oh no, a bunch of episodes where the writer gets to minute 43, realised they haven't finished the plot yet and just writes "Captain's log: We solved the problem" instead of doing a second draft. The horror.

Enterprise was the worst because it took a compelling premise and wasted it on a really lovely overarching story, then took a hard right into being 24 In Space when 9/11 happened. And the episodes that aren't about that are even less good than Voyager, and some of them have the worst kind of lore pedant fan wank like the two parter wasted on explaining the change in Klingon makeup between TOS and TNG. That kinda stink is forever.

Discovery is the worst because between spinning cameras, the visual overload of Star Wars lasers and infinite turbolift dimensions, and the hideous alien makeup, it's genuinely physically sickening to even look at, and that's before you try to engage with the crew of supposed professionals with the personalities of excitable teenagers flying around crying at everything because the only thing the writers can agree on is that having trauma is deep.

Picard is the worst because it's just miserable television for nobody, except season 3, which is about how young people have a mind virus and it's up to the boomers to save the day.

# ¿ Jan 2, 2024 14:56

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Danger - Octopus! posted:

Thomas Jane's dumb-rear end hat was almost enough to make me turn off the Expanse in its own right. If I wanted to see a fedora-wearing dork, I'd obviously just turn off my monitor.

TBH I think event-of-the-week shows or ones with an arc interspersed with other side stuff benefit from being watched with one of those guides that tells you which episodes you can safely skip over. I love Deep Space 9 and while there are some really good early eps, there are also some incredibly terrible episodes in the early seasons. If I wasn't wallowing in nostalgia about it when I started rewatching recently, I'd have stopped watching before it gets great because there are some that are just so bad.

Move Along Home is a great episode and only cowards skip it

Microplastics posted:

Seconding this, but I have to give a special shout out to the episode where the captain and the pilot hyper-evolve into salamanders and have babies. Just the absolute balls of doing that plot

It won an Emmy for makeup!

# ¿ Jan 2, 2024 20:22

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Mega Comrade posted:

Season 1 of TNG is notoriously poor. There are like 2 episodes worth your time.

What happened between season 1 and 2 I have no idea.

When I watched through it with my sister I picked out about 16 of them, and most of that was because they introduced things that would come up later. Like, I feel like you need to have a decent idea who Tasha Yar is for Yesterday's Enterprise to make emotional sense.

Funny thing about TNG and SG1. The worst episode by a long way in TNG's first season is Code of Honor, which is basically just 45 minutes of stereotyped tribal Africans treating women as property. The worst episode of SG1's first season is also that episode. As in, same writer, same story, just as racist, a decade later. And it's the first story of SG1 after the opening two parter.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2024 13:19

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Also Zack Snyder just sucks as a film maker. Overwrought overlong garbage films that keep accidentally sucking off fascists. He's like if Chris Nolan had even less talent, subtlety and taste

OF surely you've heard of 300? The THIS IS SPARTA meme at least? You've been on the internet long enough you can't have dodged that

# ¿ Jan 3, 2024 13:24

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

WhatEvil posted:

Haha yeah and coming across all these civilizations that had "ultra-warp" technology or whatever but never saying "Hey maybe you could hook us up with that poo poo?". The whole "Warp Ten" episode where they're like "Oh Tom just travelled through the entire universe instantaneously and now the shuttle's logs have 180 bajillion gigaquads of new data", then never being mentioned again, was one of the most egregious and definitely the worst episode of the whole run, and that's even WITHOUT Janeway and Paris turning into salamanders and loving, which I'll stress is a thing that actually happened in Voyager.

Another one was "Blink of an eye" where they discovered a planet that was under the influence of extreme gravity from a black hole (I think) and it meant that time for them passed at several years per hour of time for voyager... and so they watched this whole planet go from like, pre-history, oral storytelling tradition, to developing antimatter cannons and tech to rival Voyager's. Presumably if they'd stuck around for another few days they could have waited until that civilization developed trans-warp technology etc., but hey-ho.

Overall Voyager was really good though, you just have to be able to ignore a few plot holes like the above and pretend they were some sort of fever dream of one of the crew when they came down with space-dysentery.

Star Trek, Voyager included, is at its best when it does the more small-stakes "character study" episodes where it's mainly about one character's particular emotional struggle with some aspect of their situation or broader existence, IMO.

In Blink of an Eye, their presence was tearing the planet apart both culturally and literally. The real egregious one was that time they got a quantum slipstream thing, and it worked for a short distance but then they had to stop because they miscalibrated slightly, and they immediately threw it into storage never to be used again.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2024 20:28

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

PriorMarcus posted:

I'm surprised we're not discussing Nonce Island documents right now actually.

But we talk about UK politics all the time?

# ¿ Jan 4, 2024 14:50

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

fuctifino posted:

Hahaha, I genuinely didn't see him for a good 10 seconds. He blends in so well

Really? Lee's pretty obvi- waaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiit :aaaaa:

# ¿ Jan 5, 2024 14:40

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

being autistic has never let me off for being a stupid rear end in a top hat in here

# ¿ Jan 10, 2024 00:31

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

There's plenty we have proof she's actually done that you can bully her over

# ¿ Jan 10, 2024 21:16

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Have you considered that west bad

# ¿ Jan 12, 2024 09:31

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Are the Houthis actually helping anyone other than themselves with these attacks? And if not, are they actually trying to? And before anyone accuses me of being some kind of liberal hypocrite, the reason I'm not asking these questions of the Tories' response is that I already know the answer in that case is no, and no.

# ¿ Jan 13, 2024 19:56

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Gonzo McFee posted:

What are they gaining? As far as I can tell they've made themselves targets for every Western Country to slaughter and there's only one road that leads to.

Support. The same way that Hamas were deliberately trying to provoke a disproportionate response, because it creates new supporters for them.

# ¿ Jan 13, 2024 20:11

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 10:36

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

Gonzo McFee posted:

Cool, it worked. They've proven their enemies are far more evil than they are.

Well... yeah. Of course it worked. The US worked with Israel to write a big manual decades ago about how it works and what you should do instead. I'd suggest you to go read it if you're interested, only I can't remember what it's called. They're just incapable of following it themselves, for a number of reasons, like the Israeli government being a bunch of genocidal fascists.

# ¿ Jan 13, 2024 20:24

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > UKMT Winterval 2023/24 - Zero-Tolerance Zones in Hotpot Areas

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