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CocaKoala

1,084 karma · joined February 19, 2014

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CocaKoala··on A coffee shop owner used AI to make a menu poster. Then came the angry DMs
If making posters is outside of the scope of their normal job duties as it had previously been defined, then yes, absolutely I'd expect them to be paid extra.

Just because they're on payroll and being paid for their time doesn't mean you can instruct them to do anything you ask.

CocaKoala··on I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers
The full term is "thickheaded" but it can be abbreviated, as in "He's a bit thick, isn't he?"
CocaKoala··on The Lost Treasure of Sid Meier's Pirates
The author, Bruno Dias, has a blog[1] where he often discusses games and game design, especially from a narrative perspective; he worked as a Narrative Designer for Failbetter, the studio that did the Fallen London/Sunless Seas/Sunless Skies games. I check in on it somewhat regularly, he organizes his thoughts on the topic quite well.

[1]: https://azhdarchid.com/

CocaKoala··on I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers
Another really good and interesting film adaptation of Shakespeare is "Scotland, PA" - Macbeth, set against the backdrop of a 1970s fast food restaurant featuring a soundtrack that consists entirely of Bad Company songs (apparently the library was shockingly inexpensive?) and Christopher Walken as an inspired Detective Macduff.

I think there's a lot of value in going back to examine the original text in school, but adaptations can do a lot to help students connect the idea that this story has characters and motivations that are human and resonate even outside the context of whatever the setting of the original play is.

CocaKoala··on I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers
I think I like the term "thickness" over "depth" here because thickness implies a sort of solidity, an ability to stand up to being held and examined, turned over and and handled. Depth can feel unapproachable (the ocean is pretty deep and it is famously challenging to explore) while something which has thickness intuitively feels like you can walk right up to it and try to learn something.

This doesn't hold for all things - I would, for example, describe a wine as having "depth" but probably not "thickness" because in the case of potables "thickness" also implies a particular sort of textural feel, but I do like the idea of a piece of art as being thick with meaning as opposed to deep. A book which is deep can be reread multiple times, but a book which has thickness just sounds like a book that can live on your bookshelf and be paged through year after year for decades, with not only the content to support it but also the sturdiness to hold up to the use.

CocaKoala··on I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers
Something I learned recently and which this article sort of hints at - look at the three drafts of Under The Wave Off Kanagawa. The composition is different, but also the colours are much more muted. In the first draft, the only colours highlighted are the people in the corner; in the second, the cliffs. The third draft finally colours the wave, but it's a sedate grey-blue. It's not until the fourth draft that everybody recognizes that we get this brilliant dark blue wave rising up over the the boat, dwarfing the mountain in the background.

And that's because when Hokusai sat down to print that fourth draft, people had recently started exporting prussian blue dye to Japan; prior to that point, he just straight up didn't have access to that striking blue colour that dominates the print.

CocaKoala··on Being ambitious and being a dad
I think it comes mostly naturally.

Babies have no guile or instinct to deceive; they literally can't even conceive of doing so because their worldview just isn't developed enough. So when your baby cries, you can have absolute faith that it's because there's some problem that needs solving or need that is unmet, and then you can go and solve the problem, fill the need, and the baby is happy. And when the baby's happy, you have absolute faith that it's because you were there doing the thing. There's no pretense to the relationship at all, and it's a sort of unusual honesty that can be really hard to find in relationships where both parties understand basic facts like "there is a world of people outside myself" and "people don't have special insight into my interior being and I can give them information that doesn't fully reflect the state of the world".

So that kind of honest exchange does a lot to foster love and adoration from you to the child, and the fact that you're there providing food, shelter, comfort et all to the baby fosters love and adoration from them to you.

My kid is just under 18 months old now. He's old enough to have distinct ideas about what he wants to do, and when he wants to do it, and he's old enough to understand that not getting to do the thing that he wants is really upsetting, so he cries. That's hard sometimes. But if I'm relaxing on the couch and he brings a book over to me, I can know with absolute faith that it's because right now, what he wants more than anything in the world is to sit in my lap and have me read a book to him, and that feels amazing. When he goes and hides behind the kitchen island and then jumps out, it's because the thing he wants to do more than anything else is play peekaboo with me, and that feels amazing too.

CocaKoala··on Tl;dv: Over 180k meetings left wide open
Merriam-Webster seems to specifically disagree with you on both points: the usage of "a" vs "an" is based on the sound of the following word, and "hour" is preceded by "an" since it sounds like a vowel despite starting with a consonant.

> You should use a when the word that follows sounds like it begins with a consonant (‘a dog,’ ‘a balloon’). You should use an if the word that follows sounds like it begins with a vowel (‘an ant,’ ‘an elevator’). Remember that sometimes a word will begin with a vowel but it sounds like a consonant (‘a one-time deal’); in this case you should still use a, rather than an. And in some cases a word will start with a consonant but it sounds like a vowel (’an hour’); in this case you should still use an, rather than a. [1]

[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/is-it-a-or-an

CocaKoala··on Read the novels and forget everything else
You may be interested in the novella "The Ballad of Black Tom", which is a re-telling of "The Horror at Red Hook" from the perspective of the immigrants in the New York slum, and why they decide that maybe dealing with eldritch horrors is a better alternative than trying to reason with this detective that keeps on hassling them for no reason.
CocaKoala··on My midlife crisis Corolla is fast, furious, and modded
A lift would be rad, but I think we'd have to completely redo the garage doors to get enough vertical clearance for it. In a couple years I think we're planning to redo the garage so that it's more effective as a workshop, maybe we can include a lift as part of that.
CocaKoala··on My midlife crisis Corolla is fast, furious, and modded
It looks like all three Borla ATAK catbacks for the GR Corolla are active exhuasts[0], so you can dynamically switch between quiet operation and loud operation.

[0]: https://www.borla.com/2023-2026-toyota-gr-corolla-exhaust-sy...

CocaKoala··on My midlife crisis Corolla is fast, furious, and modded
When my wife was pregnant, our garage had an ND Miata (mine), a BRZ (hers) and an Elise (also hers). We pretty quickly decided that we were going to need some kind of car that we could reasonably put a car seat in, and while the BRZ nominally had a back seat, neither of us were interested in trying to fit a car seat and child into it.

We actually did consider a GR corolla, but ended up getting a used evo x that's been pretty fun instead.

CocaKoala··on Fender escalates legal campaign against S-style guitars
A quick browse of Sweetwater shows 689 different s-style body guitars, four of which are made by Fender under the Squier label. The other 685 different varients are made by companies that I'm not immediately identifying as Fender or Fender-owned. Anecdotally, that doesn't seem significantly different from the status quo I remember 10-15 years ago when I was actively guitar shopping. The body style has been widely used and generic for decades.
CocaKoala··on How did IRC ping timeouts end up in a lawsuit?
I think it is imprecise to say that the facts were not argued - they were! As the judge writes in paragraph 58,

> The authorship or control of these accounts has consistently been strenuously denied by Dr Garrett. I have no evidence from the Defendants to support it. Instead, they necessarily rely on an inferential case built on a limited number of pleaded facts, some of which are undisputed. I consider them in turn.

There were not _witness statements_ presented by the defense in support of myriad facts, but it's not like the case for the defense wasn't made at all.

CocaKoala··on The effect of shingles vaccination at different stages of dementia
More specifically, it's highly doctor-dependent. The FDA hasn't approved shingrix for people under 50; some doctors are willing to prescribe it without FDA approval, others are not. I personally had shingles in my early thirties and have thus far been unable to have my doctor prescribe shingrix.

Also, I would like to point out that having shingles was possibly the single most physically unpleasant experience of my life and boy it sure would have been fantastic to have been able to get the shingles vaccine before I got shingles, as opposed to sometime after! because wow, having shingles sucks.

CocaKoala··on The Golden Age of Japanese Pencils, 1952-1967
Pilot Precise V2 got me through grad school and when I started journaling recently, a set of those was the first thing I went and picked up. Great pens.
CocaKoala··on More men are addicted to the 'crack cocaine' of the stock market
I remember at one point a couple years ago, I saw a thread on the Bogleheads forum where people could basically call their shot on market crashes; they would post and timestamp when they exited the market and when they re-entered, so that people could go and calculate if the timing was correct or if they lost money by missing out on market growth.

I might not have the dates correct, but I remember the general strokes of one guy who decided in like 2017 or something that the market had topped out, the crash was coming any moment now, and he sold everything and called his shot. He missed out on three years of incredible gains, and then the market absolutely _crashed_ in early 2020. He got it right, by a very small amount; he had gotten more selling his positions than he would have gotten selling in march 2020. He buys back in at what ended up being the absolute nadir of the market in like april 2020 or something. The rare success story of timing the market, you love to see it.

And then a few days later, he decides that actually, no, the market still has more to drop, and he sells again. Oh well.

CocaKoala··on Ghost artists on Spotify
Ah, see, my experience is exactly the opposite of yours; I don't listen to the ChilledCow streams, but I do listen to the Chillhop playlists (and in fact purchase the seasonal essentials collections on vinyl) and one of the reasons I like them is because there's a lot of curation that goes into the playlist and they tend to feature artists that I end up liking - Blue Wednesday, Purple Cat, Joey Pecararo are all reliable artists in the genre for me.
CocaKoala··on FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't
If cooking involves boiling, what are you doing when you put a steak in a hot cast-iron pan?

To the rice cooker point, I'd argue that an oven uses a heating element of some form (electric coils, gas flame, wood fire) to heat the air in a closed environment, and the air transfers heat into an item. In contrast, a rice cooker uses a heating element to directly heat a metal pot, and the metal pot transfers heat into an item. Usually that's going to be a combination of rice and water, but you can e.g. pour pancake batter into the pot and get a large souffle pancake, or put bread dough into the pot and get a loaf of bread. The trick is that the metal pot is much more efficient at transferring heat than the air is, so the rice cooker doesn't need to be at the same temperature as an oven to get the same amount of heat into whatever you're cooking.

CocaKoala··on FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't
What's the difference between baking and cooking in your understanding? You can make bread in a rice cooker, which nobody has ever called a "rice baker".

edit: and a rice cooker is definitely not a small oven.

CocaKoala··on 24 Hours of Lemons
With the caveat that I haven't done any sessions run by SpeedSF, the description for their AutoX events at Sonoma usually says something like "Show up and drive, we have dedicated course workers, you can expect to have 20-30 runs in a day".

For something run by a group like TrackMasters or GGLC or PCA, then you're definitely correct, you'll have somewhere between five and ten runs depending on how smoothly it goes, you'll work the course for a while, and you should view it as a fun day of hanging out with people who like cars and you'll get to drive a bit.

You're also definitely correct that autocross is a lot of fun and anybody who is interested in driving their car for the joy of it should try it out.

CocaKoala··on Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)
You're imagining the Guilty Gear series, which gives you a variety of defensive options in the system - you can jump, double jump, or super jump to avoid something with different take-off timings, jump arcs, and speeds; you can block, instant block, or faultless defend to change the amount of chip damage, block stun, and pushback in an effort to throw off your opponent's timing; you can dead angle while blocking to try and recover initiative; you can backdash or throw out a move that's invulnerable on startup in an attempt to get your opponent to whiff.
CocaKoala··on You have a right to know why a health insurer denied your claim
Eh, we're currently fighting to get some claims covered. Before a certain date, all the claims are denied; after a certain date, all the claims are approved. The claims are all for the same thing, related to the same procedure (physical therapy after a joint replacement).

Could the claims have been rejected due to a simple human error? Sure, it's plausible. Was there another human error that caused the claims to be rejected after we appealed? Maybe, but probably not. Could a third human error cause the claims to be rejected again after our second appeal? Seems pretty unlikely.

CocaKoala··on Own-goal football (2022)
Ball is rolling towards the goal - if the attacking player touches it, it will be offsides: A player in an offside position has entered active play by "interfering with play by playing or touching a ball passed or touched by a team-mate".

Goalkeeper makes a save, since the ball is rolling towards the goal. If the attacking player touches it, it will be offsides: A player in an offside position has entered active play by "challenging an opponent for the ball" or "gaining an advantage by playing the ball or interfering with an opponent when it has [...] been deliberately saved by any opponent".

The goalkeeper deliberately plays the ball. Immediately afterwards, the attacking player receives the ball played by the goalkeeper - this is not offsides, since "a player in an offside position receiving the ball from an opponent who deliberately plays the ball, including by deliberate handball, is not considered to have gained an advantage, unless it was a deliberate save by any opponent."

https://www.thefa.com/football-rules-governance/lawsandrules...

CocaKoala··on Own-goal football (2022)
Interfering with the ball is sufficient to be called for off-side - you need to be in active play, but you can do that when your team doesn't have possession.
CocaKoala··on Own-goal football (2022)
As long as a nominal defender (not counting the goalie) is in between you and the goal, I don't think you're off-side. So presumably it means you have to a) maintain possession of the ball or 2) clear the ball before all other defenders are able to make it past whoever currently has possession. A) sounds a lot easier than 2), though.
CocaKoala··on “Inside-out Wankel” rotary engine delivers 5X the power of a diesel
Mazda's also one of the few carmakers that's independent, as opposed to being part of a much larger conglomeration!
CocaKoala··on How to pack a stereo signal in one record groove
You can indeed encode digital data onto a vinyl and then play it back meaningfully to a computer - http://boginjr.com/it/sw/dev/vinyl-boot/ is somebody making a vinyl boot disk and using it to boot DOS.
CocaKoala··on Why Is Everyone So Boring?
As a teen I thought adults were boring because they didn't do any of the things I wanted to spend my time doing - as an adult, I have a bunch of hobbies that are pretty inaccessible to children and I think they're very neat hobbies, but I would also forgive a child for thinking that I'm boring because I like to drive my car or go on wine tastings instead of watching cartoons on saturday morning.
CocaKoala··on Why do new cars look like wet putty?
The current Miata (ND) has some fairly aggressive headlight styling but still maintains the wide grin "mouth" for the front grill: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazda_MX-5_%28ND%29#/media/Fil...

They look pretty neat in person, it's a very nicely designed car.

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