hooray for broody girls! We can’t get mad when they are being such good guardians. :-)

I’ve been sick. My guess is covid, but a home test was negative … but it was also 2 years expired, so I don’t know if that was a valid test or if I did it right. Anyway, I’ve been exceptionally stupid and reactive between bouts of coughing and napping. Feeling a wee bit better now, though.

If you haven’t encountered it yet: bad eggs really do explode. I haven’t seen them explode any distance nor into tiny pieces, but we did have a nest with an egg that was turning color and I didn’t think to remove it. A day or so later, I heard a muffled POP and looked to see the mama with a look of stiff panic as she sat incredibly erect on her nest. I shooed her off and found a horrible , stinky mess. Mama got a bath, we put the whole next in tripled garbage bags, and wrote off the clutch as potentially infected. Mama was not happy.

What general geographic region are we talking?

No help here, but … is it the lighting or is this bird truly green? I’m used to grackles having pale yellow eyes that contrast with their dark plumage. I also look for a slightly long tail that becomes a blunt paddle as they land.

• https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Common_Grackle/overview
• https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Shiny_Cowbird/overview

That can work with ranked choice voting, but we don’t have that. Technically, we CAN vote for anyone over 35 and born in the U.S., but practically, this just splits the vote. This worked for Republicans when George Wallace split the Democratic vote such that Nixon won with 43%, and it worked for democrats when Ross Perot split the Republican vote such that Clinton also won with 43%.

Our system only allows 2 options. Any ‘3rd’ option is a vote against your best interests. So is not voting. That said, yeah, I’d vote for a replacement.

I just heard Steve Bannon doing that fascist thing where – when confronted with the fact that he said on his radio show that he wanted to see particular heads on spikes – Bannon acted like that was just rhetoric. He didn’t really mean it. Except he knows his followers DO mean it. And he’s still calling for dismantling the government and remaking it into a permanent dictatorship.

So if that is what it means to vote Republican this election, then I’m gonna be a yellow dog democrat about it.

Not the person you were replying to, but the “doom” spouter here. I realize you are 100% right that my post might make people less inspired to vote. I’m sorry for that. I was very distressed at the time. My intent was to emphasize that: while a rational person might complain about either candidate, one is substantially worse and we MUST vote in favor of democracy when the other choice (and his advisors) are openly saying they want to dismantle the institutional expertise that understand how stuff works (which materials are suitable for building roads on various substructures, or where groundwater migrates and how to prevent contamination, and yes, how to figure out how a virus works). They call these people “the deep state”, which minimizes the reason we want them to keep their apolitical jobs. Of course the experts – like everyone --will likely have political opinions, but that doesn’t mean they are partisan. As long as they look at data and derive truthful results regardless of their personal politics, it doesn’t matter. Obviously we should fire those who can’t do their job or hide/ignore/promote information such that their results are distorted to favor a personal agenda (also knowing that some data SHOULD be rejected if acquired by dubious means, isn’t reproduced in other trials, etc.).

Anyway, I apologize for the negativity. Thank you for calling me out! :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Democratic_National_Convention

The 2024 Democratic National Convention … is scheduled to be held August 19 to 22, 2024, at the United Center in Chicago, Illinois.

Keep it up! In fact, if you get criticized, you can point out that you’d rather have a leader you CAN criticize than one that gets treated like a God-ling. Point out that one of the differences in the generic liberal versus conservative thought is the idea that a leader might be flawed but generally good at leading versus the idea that everyone needs to support the leader (or the cause) no matter what – until their transgressions become too extreme and gets them ostracized. Please. Let’s criticize early and be ready to replace them sooner rather than later.

I hear you. A few years back I was rooting for Jeremy Corbin to be Prime Minister and could not understand how the populace didn’t choose him. More than that, I sympathize with people who dislike illegal immigration into their respective countries because, well, I can see how it FEELS like, “We built this country to be good and prosperous, and these folks want what WE built while they never built anything like it for themselves” – but that is a false perception for so many reasons (Was their home a colony or otherwise oppressed? Our ancestors built our countries, but we’re just born to them. Climate change is driving equatorial people to Northen climes – to countries complicit in the climate change that has made their homelands dry and cropless, etc.)

So I don’t have a solution for immigration (which Trump harped on constantly). Fixing the climate might help for the long term, but for the short term it won’t fix that immediate complaint.

I look at U.S. history and I don’t see a strong track record for austerity helping. More the reverse. In The Great Depression, one of the things that seemed to work was letting the government take on debt to give a bunch of people ‘stupid’ jobs so they could put that money into the economy. Of course, that came with stepp progressive tax rates, too. It was much harder to get rich when the highest brackets were up to/over 90% of income. I doubt the current crop of rich people would allow that to happen in the modern world, but I’d vote for it.

Yay!

What type(s) of ducks do you raise? I used to raise ducks, but never had abandoned eggs/ducklings. We did have cases where our neighbors lost an offspring (chick, gosling, duckling), and all the girls in our yard gave the visitors extremely wide berth. I also had a drake that objected to his own kids and tried to kill them, so we had to give him away. Ours were: Indian Runners, Black Swedes, and Pekins.

I agree! And I’m thankful that lots of games build that in.

I hate using AWSD as direction keys. I don’t understand why some games refuse to map the arrow keys to the same commands, but some don’t and it becomes up to me to manually set that right before playing anything.

It irritates me so much to me that if a game doesn’t let me change the key mappings, I’m probably going for a refund rather than play at all.

Back in 2021, indie developer Wolfire filed an antitrust lawsuit against Valve that accused the gaming giant of anti-competitive business practices—including a long-standing habit of taking unfair cuts from game developers on its store. Valve’s 30% fees have come under criticism before—and they are notably high when compared to some other online platforms.

Ouch. I didn’t realize they took such a big cut. On the other hand, authors trying to publish to Amazon’s kindle get hit with commissions from 30%-65% before any other fees, so Steam seems downright reasonable for that particular comparison.

From where I’m sitting, though, I’ve plenty of complicated feelings. Steam might be the best option out there, but monopolies aren’t great for anybody—at the same time, business is business.

Steam’s absurd efficiency could be a product of merciless penny-pinching from indie devs, but it’s just as likely we’re watching a well-oiled machine continue to belch out cash in an expected fashion.

Is it really a monopoly with everyone from EA to GoG delivering games? I guess it is dominant enough to count. I have a hard time complaining when employees are getting good pay and I’ve continued to get good service from them. It might get scarey if/when Gabe steps down, but this all feels pretty fair for now.

Recent big sites that closed down: Jezebel, Pitchfork, Vice, Popular Science, and my hopes for the Messenger were dashed when they announced their demise: https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4440773-news-startup-the-messenger-shutting-down/

LA Times and the like are hit with layoffs and – worse – Sinclair heavyweight added the Balitmore Sun to the list of ‘compromised’ media outlets: https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2024/01/15/baltimore-sun-sold-david-smith-sinclair/

That said, there are always new sites, but gaining trust and reputation takes time.

Social sites seem doomed to crest and then fall. Digg? MySpace? Friendster? Who remembers the good old days of (moderated) UseNet? Do we want any of those back? Would any of them have remained were it not for spam/bad-actors?

I’m not the lego person, but I am not taking that selfie because: 1) I don’t want to clean the house to make it look all nice before judgey relatives critique the pic, 2) my phone is old and all its pics are kinda fish-eyed, 3) I don’t actually want to spend the time doing the task right now when AI can get me an image in seconds.

I appreciate that the “Gradient Canopy” roof is covered in solar cells and collects rainwater while also letting in natural light, so maybe the problem is they didn’t do enough by not adding in some shielding, too.

NOTE: I just downloaded the game and on my first attempted launch, it complained that the port it wanted was not open. My only option was to close the game. I ran netstat and did not see the port listed, so I tried again. THAT time, it complained about my older video card :-/ The warning is clunky and there’s a typo, too (within -> withing). It says (if I transcribed accurately):

You are using an: NVIDIA GEOFORCE GTX 1080. This video card is currently not recognized withing the recommended specs. We only support a limited amount of NVIDIA GTX graphics cards, all NVIDIA RTX graphics cards or all AMD RX graphics cards since the local AI requires a lot of performance.

So please note that the game might not work properly. Refer to the Steam guide for more information.

When I closed that warning, the game loaded.

I’m thinking the ruling HAS to lead to conversations and demands to change the law. Yes, there’s a religious right that wants women barefoot and pregnant, but this ruling is going to prevent rich white religious women from getting pregnant. They’re going to complain.

Tonight’s “Alex Wagner” show on MSNBC had guest Michelle Goldberg hypothesizing that even ultra-conservative Alabama politicians are probably going to back off this ruling. She supposed they might decide embryos don’t count as a people unless they are attached to a uterus in a particular way … but the rich white religious wives might still have a problem with that limit when such embryos spontaneously fail later on in the pregnancy and everyone is back to being a murderer. Of course, those women are unlikely to realize how likely that is until it happens to each one of them individually (if it happens to someone else, that other person is obviously a ‘bad’ person or it would not have happened – so the only one who can be ‘good’ and still miscarry is oneself).

So how do we get the courts out of our bodies?