NielsBohron

I have tons of playlists and saved music on spotify; how is Tidal at importing data from other services? It’s not really a deal breaker, but I’m really picky about my music (so I don’t really care about “radio” features or curated playlists), so it’d be a real pain in the ass to start from scratch.

Goodnight sweet prince.

I read somewhere that for some reason grip strength is one of the only muscle groups where the Bell curves of male strength vs. female strength has essentially zero overlap. It was something like “the weakest 2% of men have stronger grip strength than 98% of women,” or maybe even more extreme. IDK, I can’t remember the source and I can’t be bothered to look for it on a Saturday morning, but I thought I’d throw it out there anyway. ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

I wish this was true for me, but I only have one record shop within 45-drive of my house (and their prices and selection are far from competitive), so I wind up buying pretty much all my records online through Discogs. Frequently, the new represses are just flat-out cheaper than the vintage vinyl, especially for a lot of the more esoteric albums I buy. For instance, even though they’re not really hard to find, for Black Sabbath’s first four albums I paid just as much for mediocre, water-damaged copies of Sabbath and Volume 4 as I did for brand-new represses of Paranoid and Master of Reality. If you actually buy your vinyl to listen to, buying used online can be a pretty big gamble as far as quality, so for the same price, I frequently wind up consciously choosing the new vinyl over the used copy.

Even though I do frequently manage to package one or two cheap used albums with each new album purchased to take advantage of that sweet “media mail” shipping, it’s not even close to a 10:1 used:new ratio.

Edit: I suppose now that I think about it, I’m starting from a pretty decent used vinyl collection from my days in the early 2000’s as a hipster music snob before used vinyl got nearly so expensive, so my collection overall has much more used vinyl than my current buying habits would indicate (I probably have 200 albums, of which 30-40 were purchased new in the past 3-4 years)

To-may-to, to-mah-to

Except that was the whole point of American Psycho. People miss the subtext (not that it’s subtle) and think it’s about glorifying Patrick Bateman, but the whole point is that he’s pathetic and overestimates his own importance on every possible level.

I agree that people that see obviously evil protagonists as antiheros need to be given a reality check, but American Psycho is a weird film to use as an example of “glorifying psychos.” Joker would have been a better example, IMHO.

I think there are some editions of the second book done by Ken Liu, aren’t there? I haven’t read it yet, but I got a copy from a used book shop, and remember thinking that it was the same translator. At least, I thought I thought it was…now I’ve gotta go home and check

It’s a common problem with lots of classic sci-fi authors. Heinlein, Asimov, Philip K Dick, Larry Niven etc. are all terrible at writing believable dialogue and compelling characters. There are some exceptions, but most of their characters are cardboard cutouts so they have a way to move along a story or give exposition about the ideas.

The Expanse did a pretty good job with characterization (in the books), and Kim Stanley Robinson is decent (but is still pretty “hit or miss,” IMHO), but in general, the weakest part of sci-fi writing is almost universally characterization and dialogue.

Someone what mentioned Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars trilogy, and that is really good, but his book Aurora is almost exactly what you are describing.

Highly recommend.

Bozeman, MT for me, apparently because I listen to a fair bit of Jason Isbell and other new-ish alt-country and Americana. Despite the fact that none of my top 5 artists are alt country, the rest of my listening is apparently eclectic enough that nothing else really came close.

I would have thought that having 60-70% of my listening all in a small cluster of esoteric doom-metal-related subgenres would have placed me somewhere with some sort of a metal scene, but apparently not.

In their defense, they provided some specific details that help to paint a very clear picture of the scene. You get very different rumors at “a beer bar in the pnw” vs. “wine bar in California” vs. “martini bar in Toronto” vs. “dive bar in Chicago” (that one also has the entrance to the Thieves Guild)

I have read it, but I forgot about that detail until you reminded me. I probably have to reread now :)

Haha, I'm just glad at least some people enjoy reading them, since I can't help but write them (and listening to my endless digressions down Wikipedia rabbit holes is exhausting for my partner).

I agree with everything you said, except I would argue that capitalism is the Sixth Horseman of the Apocalypse, seeing as one of the original four was already replaced during a translation. The original text were interpreted as "Conquest, War, Famine, and Death," and the story I remember from my New Testament course in college was that in the early 1900's, it was thought that Conquest was too similar to War, so they used one of the later passages that specified that the horsemen would bring death by "sword, famine, plague, and the wild beasts of the earth" to rebrand Conquest as Pestilence. In fact, now reading up on it from Wikipedia, apparently the first two horsemen were likely both supposed to represent war, with the white rider (Conquest) representing "righteous/justified war" and the red rider (War) supposed to represent "civil war," which is interesting.

In fact, given how vaccines and modern medicine have dramatically lowered the death by infectious disease in the 20th century, it's likely time for another rebranding (relevant xkcd), so I'd replace "pestilence" with "capitalism" or even "profit" if I were feeling flowery.

edit: Upon further reading, apparently the third horseman (Famine) could also be interpreted as a form of capitalistic excess, since it's accompanied by a voice that describes rising market prices for staples such as bread and is carrying market scales. Traditionally, this is thought to indicate Famine as loaves of bread would be weighed during food shortages, but the accompanying voice seems to indicate that luxuries are still available, so I could easily make the argument that the passage is about the rich tending to their own needs while ignoring the needs of the poor (which sounds an awful lot like modern US politics/capitalism).

Edit 2: So I guess I'd rebrand all three of the riders preceding Death so that I'd interpret things as "Imperialism, Extremism, Capitalism, and Death," or put a little more poetically, "Conquest, Discord, Avarice, and Death"

Correct. However, there are many ways to get glucose into the brain that are not dependent on eating glucose directly. For example, starch and cellulose are both big long chains of glucose molecules linked together, although no multicellular organisms have the necessary enzymes to break down cellulose into glucose (at least none of which I’m aware, anyway).

For the most part, getting your glucose by breaking down starch is healthier than eating it directly, because it slows down the introduction of starch into the bloodstream which keeps your blood sugar levels more stable, since the enzymes that break down starch (α and β amylase, IIRC) don’t do it instantly. Plus, other simple sugars can easily be converted by the buddy into glucose by a variety of enzymes find naturally in the body.

But even without eating any carbohydrates, the human body had the ability to create its own glucose via a process called gluconeogenesis, which occurs mainly in the liver. So, it’s not generally advisable to eat too much sugar directly, as there are plenty of other avenues through which the body can get its glucose, and eating the glucose directly leads to a much higher chance of developing diabetes later in life, even if you remain at a healthy weight.

Source: I’m a chemist who teaches college-level biochemistry and nutrition. If you want a source with more details, LMK your educational background and I’d be happy to provide some reading material.

Depends on what you mean by “basic groceries.” Produce and generally anything that is not processed or prepackaged is ok, but most anything ready to eat, including any baked goods is likely to be pretty high in sugar.

And just FYI, since glucose, fructose, and sucrose are all naturally occurring, they (and HFCS) are considered organic legally

Except “high fructose corn syrup” doesn’t really have that high of a concentration of fructose. Standard corn syrup and most fruits have glucose and fructose in a ratio that’s roughly 50:50. HFCS is about 55:45 in favor of fructose, mustn’t because both sugars are roughly the same stability from a chemical sense, so the enzyme that is used to convert one to the other (glucofructoisomerase, IIRC) can’t really get that far from that 50:50 ratio. There are lots of natural sources that are way higher in fructose (agave nectar is like 90:10 fructose, again IIRC).

And fructose isn’t added to everything because the sugar is cheaper than other sugars (although the government subsidies for corn farmers do make HFCS ridiculously cheap); it’s because our taste buds perceive fructose as sweeter than a similar amount of other simple sugars. So it’s actually cheaper to use HFCS than raw corn syrup or other sugar sources, because your actually need less sugar to get the same taste. It’s really similar to how artificial sweeteners work; a synthetic molecule can trick our taste buds into sending signals to the brain that say “this is sweet” at a rate that’s 80-300x more effective per molecule. A lot of artificial sweeteners do actually have calories when digested, but such a small amount of sweetener gets used that the caloric content gets rounded down to zero. But I digress.

The real issue is that simple sugars are being added in large amounts to EVERYTHING (because they taste good), and processed and prepackaged foods are cheaper to buy and easier than preparing food yourself. HFCS ships easily, had a long shelf life, and puts money in the pockets of corporate farms that prefer to grow one (maybe two) crops over vast swathes of land in the US, which is why it’s everywhere. Not that corn is anything special! You can make a high fructose syrup from nearly any starchy crop. Corn was just in the right place at the right time.

Like with most problems in the US, the real underlying cause is the corporations and government subsidies that ignore sustainability (economic and environmental), as well as the health of the population in favor of profit. Unfortunately, that’s a tougher problem to solve and political and economic reform is a tougher sell for Middle America than making one specific ingredient into a Boogeyman.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

Edit: cleaned up autocorrect typos and grammar