TootSweet

Coworker. I told him to fuck off with his conspiracy bullshit. But back when I patronized him, one thing he said was that he didn't consider belief a binary as in that you either believe something or don't. He viewed all beliefs as a continuum. You can believe one thing 10% and another thing 90%, but he wouldn't let me pin him down as to whether he "believed" any particular thing or not.

All while trying to convince me "tall white aliens" run the U.S. government and Sandy Hook was faked by a bunch of actors and the U.S. military had invisibility technology and planes that aren't dumping weather-controlling chemicals don't leave trails in the sky. Pretty standard QAnon-level bullshit. But if I asked him if he believed any of those things, he wouldn't answer. Honestly, it makes sense as a dishonest rhetorical tactic.

Dude also literally drinks borax in his juice cleanse drink.

Just as examples:

• I've never played a Pokemon game despite being just the right age where my peers were really into gen 1 as a kid.
• I have yet to watch any of the Alien or Predator franchise movies (except Prometheus, which I didn't realize was in the Alien franchise when I watched it long ago) but am planning on rectifying that when I can get a chance.
• Oh, and I've never seen the "hawk tuah" video.

I think I like the flakes better, actually. I microwave-bake bread with onion in it daily and the flakes are nicer.

Minced? Pure madness. Let alone powder.

Another source: https://isdown.app/status/hulu

I was logged out of Hulu on my streaming box and can't log back in on any device. I don't know if this is all of Hulu or just in certain regions or what.

And it bugs me a little, but apparently not enough that I've actually done something about it.

I.

Hate.

Country.

Music.

Or at least that's something I'd've said, say, maybe 5 or 6 years ago. And it was true! I hadn't heard a single song I could identify as "country" that I could stand, let alone "like".

But it all started with Lil' Nas X and "Old Town Road". I think the first time I heard it, I dismissed it without really "getting" it. But when I started hearing and liking other things by Lil' Nas X, and when one of my favorite YouTube content creators said good things about "Old Town Road" on a stream, I listened again. More out of curiosity than anything. But with more context, I understood "Old Town Road" better. And, dare I say, liked it.

"It's ironic country music", I told myself. "It's ok for me to like that. It's got the affectations of country music, but it's not country music in its bones. It's actually pop if you really think about it."

I.

Hate.

Country.

Music.

(Except "Old Town Road" because it's only "ironically" country.)

See? It's so simple. The world still made sense. And I could listen to it and like it, and admit to myself that I liked it.

And then came Jelly Roll.

It was New Year's Eve (I don't remember what year it was), and I was watching New Year's Rockin' Eve as I do every year (and plan to this year). And on comes a country artist. I groaned and reached for the mute button. But my friend wanted to hear it. So...

He sang "Need A Favor." And, it was... good. I liked it.

Try as I might, I couldn't think of an excuse why I was allowed to like it. And I didn't listen to anything else by him for a good while, gut when I did, I liked it too.

I.

Hate.

Country.

Music.

(Except that one song by Nas X. And I guess I like that one song by Jelly Roll. But that's it.)

And I did listen to a little more Jelly Roll and it was surprisingly enjoyable as well. And I still hadn't resolved the cognitive dissonance when...

Bam! The most recent episode of SNL came on. And the musical guest was Shaboozey.

And since then I have not been able to stop listening to "A Bar Song (Tipsy)" practically on repeat.

And it was a few days before I let the ~~intrusive thoughts~~YouTube algorithm win and play me another Shaboozey song. It was "Highway." And holy shit, it was... if anything better than "Tipsy".

And I've listened to a bunch of Shaboozey since, and his stuff ranges from "actually really good" to "I can't stop playing it."

I...

guess I...

kinda... maybe...

like...

country music...

actually?

It's really surreal. But it's clearly impossible to continue to believe that "I don't like country music".

The jury's still out on Post Malone's "I Had Some Help" featuring Morgan Wallen. But honestly, I'm listening to it as I write this to try to form a more solid opinion on it and I can feel it growing on me a bit.

I'm not sure whether I'm changing or country music is. This is all still very new to me.

Maybe I've just been racist against country music until I started seeing some less "traditional" country musicians. A part of me is worried the country music I've been enjoying lately is going to end up being a gateway drug to the harder stuff like Kenny Chesney's "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy" and Toby Keith's "As Good As I Once Was". But doing research for this Lemmy post, I just listened to a (small) part of each of those two, and I can report I'm at no risk of developing a habit of either of those.

...for now.

We all know about the linear_extrude(...) function that turns 2d things into 3d things.

I sometimes have found myself wishing for a similar function which could make a more rounded, result.

Just to illustrate what I'm hoping to achieve, my dream solution would, given this 2d outline:

would give me something like the following:

Just to further illustrate, the code I used to generate outline above:

hull() {
	for (i=[-1:1])
		translate([i*15, 0])
			circle(d=10);
}

And the "pillowed" version that shows the desired result giving the above outline:

$fn=64;
rotate([0, 90, 0])
	linear_extrude(30, center=true)
		scale([4, 10])
			difference() {
				circle(d=1);
				translate([0.5, 0])
					square(1, center=true);
			}
for (i = [-1, 1])
	translate([i*15, 0, 0])
		scale([10, 10, 4])
			difference() {
				sphere(d=1);
				translate([0, 0, -0.5])
					cube(1, center=true);
			}

The outline I actually want to pillow for my particular current use case looks like this:

(Credit to this person on Printables for the Talavera tile pattern.)

I'm hoping there's a way to do this I'm not thinking of, or a library I'm not familiar with. The example above makes an elliptical curve, but I'm not married to elliptical in particular. Anything somewhat similar would be fine.

Thanks in advance for any help!

He's a convicted felon, right? And that means he isn't eligible to vote, right? So he didn't/couldn't vote, right?

A friend/coworker of mine and his wife hosted a weekly boardgame night that I attended. Most of the other guests were kinda flaky, and this one particular day, I was the only one who showed up. So it was just me, my friend, and his wife.

Someone suggested Dixit, which I had never played before, but it sounded fun and I was down to play. So we broke it out, shuffled, and started the game.

Now, if you don't know how Dixit works, it's basically a deck of cards with pictures on them. One of a toy abacus. Another of a child pointing a toy sword at a dragon. Another of a winding staircase with a snail at the bottom. Etc.

In one version of the game similar to Apples to Apples or Scategories, everyone gets a hand of cards which they keep hidden. The dealer announces a clue and everyone (including the dealer) contributes a card from their hands face-down to the center of the table and the dealer shuffles them together and reveals them all at once without revealing whose card is whose. Then players vote which one they think matches the clue. You get points as a player if others vote for your card or if you vote for the one the dealer picked. As a dealer, you get points if close to 50% of the players vote for yours.

I was the dealer this round. One of the cards in my hand was of a ship's anchor. That's when it came to me.

See, the friend/coworker and I both worked in web software development. His wife didn't. And I came up with the perfect play. I gave the clue "hyperlink." Hyperlinks on web pages are created using the HTML <a> tag. The "a" stands for "anchor." And any web developer would know that.

When the vote came in, I got one vote for my card from my friend and his wife failed to select the correct card and so didn't get any points. It was a slam dunk move. But I felt a little bad for excluding my friend's wife from an inside-knowledge thing.

The next round, my friend was the dealer and he picked a rule/card that was an inside-knowledge thing between the two of them. (A line from a poem they both knew well, the next line of which related to the picture of the card.) So I was glad of that.

So, there's this guy at work, right? And I've been working with him for probably a year or so by the time this story takes place. Same team and everything. Kindof elbow-to-elbow. Good guy.

The company would take us all out to lunch occasionally. And this one time, 15 or so of us are all sat down at the chain restaurant and shooting the shit about whatever.

And the music playing at the restaurant plays a song by Imagine Dragons. And then some other random song. And then another one by Imagine Dragons.

I don't remember specifically how many Imagine Dragons songs they played before we even got our food, but it was enough in a short enough period that someone commented "huh, they're playing a lot of Imagine Dragons today."

And this was in the period when it was in vogue to dunk on Imagine Dragons, right? And so I'm like "yeah, at least they're playing Imagine Dragons songs from back when Imagine Dragons was good."

And I expect folks to banter back at me and maybe some folks would defend Imagine Dragons, but probably more would agree, or even take the position that Imagine Dragons was never good. (Again, that was in vogue at the time.)

But everyone just kind of looks at me awkwardly.

And I have no idea what's going on until the guy next to me leans over and lets me in on it.

Apparently the guy directly across from me grew up with the Imagine Dragons band members and nearly ended up in the band at one point in his life.

And I worked with the guy for a year and never knew that. And I kindof looked like an asshole over it. What are the chances! I don't live anywhere near Las Vegas where Imagine Dragons came from or anything.

I appologised, of course. He kindof laughed it off, but I still felt bad about it.

In retrospect, a piece of me wonders if the boss hadn't called ahead and asked the restaurant to play a lot of Imagine Dragons just to make the guy across from me feel special or something. But then again, the vibe this chain restaurant gave off was that probably the restaurant didn't really control the playlist at all. Probably it was just some XM station or something. (It didn't have a DJ or any speaking between songs or anything. Just music. So maybe that gives some credence to the boss-called-ahead theory? Dunno. Dunno.)

Maybe some day I should call the restaurant and ask if they're able to take music requests or whatever just to get some closure. Lol.