rockercoaster

If that's actually beneficial to Trump then none of this matters, because the Republicans can just shut it down themselves no matter what the democrats want or do.

Meanwhile, what power might this give him that he hasn't already seized without resistance from Congress? He's taken spending power and partially claimed taxation power already. He's been illegally firing people his entire term so far, often en masse. So what's the "more power"?

Tons of federal employees (maybe all?) received an official email blaming Democrats for the shutdown, too. Also a violation.

It's not clear how distinctive a lot of mental health conditions are. For the most part we're just making up labels for groups of signs and symptoms, after all. To the extent the labels are "real" things mostly rests in their utility—I mean, that's sort of true of all labels for everything (what's a chair?) but these are far more fluid than most.

It could be that autism really is, exactly as we describe it and conceive of it, in some meaningful way defined by actual reality, a thing.

It could be that it's ten different things that aren't actually connected at all, but happen to look kinda similar. Some of which either are a variant of ADHD (or vice-versa, doesn't much matter) or just happen to include similar symptoms and behaviors that respond well to the same drugs and therapies we use to tread ADHD.

(now, to some degree we do have real tests we can do to pick up e.g. genetic markers of certain disorders, but these largely remain just another clue, not exactly solid proof, with some exceptions)

To illustrate: imagine we couldn't ever see the inside of a human body and just had to guess at what was going on when something went wrong. We'd probably have something we just called "bad kidney" that was actually several different problems, and we'd just throw drugs and other therapies at it until (often, but not always) some set of those relieved the symptoms. Meanwhile, sometimes it's a kidney stone, sometimes it's cancer, et c. And maybe we even have a whole step that's trying to figure out if it's "bad kidney" or "bad bladder" and sometimes we'd get that right, but sometimes wrong, but also some of the same medicines work for either (depending on the actual cause) so we might incorrectly diagnose "bad kidney" then accidentally correctly treat "bad bladder", and think we were right all along.

A bunch of medications are commonly used to help manage it, though. And it's so often co-morbid with other diagnoses (these are all just classifications we made up anyway, so that they're two "different" things is basically just semantics, it's all happening in one brain, like we could easily and no-less-reasonably halve or double the number of labels we apply to these same situations and the underlying reality would be unaffected) that it's common to be diagnosed autistic but also taking ADHD meds or mood stabilizers or antidepressants or what have you, under other diagnoses.

Way, way too much of the value of Linux for me comes from Wine/Proton for me to ever want a Linux arm64 desktop.

A server? Sure, I guess.

Labor costs remain the limiting factor for me. The numbers only work out well if I DIY most of the work, despite being in one of the two or three most expensive electricity markets in the US. Like, the panels could be free and it'd barely change this, the labor's so expensive.

The other discouraging part is that as I understand it it's tricky to build the systems out a little at a time, e.g. start with five panels and no battery, add another five panels and batteries to the mix a few months later, add another ten panels another year later, stuff like that, without ending up with a lot of duplicated equipment and kind of a mess of an installation.

"Comes from money" (often, but not always, coupled with family having an "in" with people in whatever artistic business their kid goes on to succeed in) is the secret to the success of an enormous proportion of artists in general.

Taylor Swift works hard and has talent and all, but also her parents could afford both the money and time required to get her to music and acting lessons in NYC, get her to auditions in Nashville to try to get a foot in the door, et c. They were a rich enough family that they "summered" in an expensive shoreline New Jersey zip code and her dad had a Christmas tree farm as a hobby. One wonders how many might-have-beens as good as her, or better, are instead waiting tables at Waffle House because they grew up in a mobile home and their parents couldn't even afford once-a-week piano lessons from the old lady who plays for services at the local Methodist church. I don't mean to knock her—it's not like it's her fault she had advantages. Parents with money are a key ingredient in tons of stories like hers, is all, and she's a good example of that in action.

Tons of successful actors are children of parents who were in the business. Actors themselves, directors, producers. Money, connections, and maybe existing name recognition go a long way. You can see the extreme (and extremely forced) version of this pretty often, with famous and/or rich parents playing key, credited roles in financing and putting together lead role debut vehicles for their actor kids.

> Andromeda had its issues no doubt about it but I am still mad at a certain website deciding that they were going to just go hard on attacking it. It was a fun game, it had some development issues and some nasty bugs at launch. But was still fun.

My wife and I have played through the trilogy twice together. I've played it solo separately once. We're talking about a third joint play through soon, I expect we'll start it before the end of the year.

We made it six or so hours into Andromeda and dropped it, with no desire to ever revisit. Characters, gameplay, and story, all three failed to appeal to us at all. Trying to get into it was a chore, and after three or four feature-films worth of time with zero fun experienced, we cut our losses.

(agreed about ME3's ending, but to be fair we didn't play that until they fixed it, the original presentation does seem really bad from what I've read about it)

NBA Jam; NFL 2K (and 2K1, 2K2) on the Dreamcast; the first three Tony Hawk games, the THQ "pro wrestling" games on the N64; Ice Hockey, Punch Out!, World Cup, Dodgeball (really, any of those Kunio Kun sports games) and Bases Loaded (first one only) on the NES; the Mutant League games on the Sega (especially Hockey). What the Golf?, Golf Story, the Mario Golf games. Mario Tennis (any of them, they're pretty much all good, the latest one on the Switch is great). Super Baseball 2020 on the Neo Geo.

There are two big audiences for sports games, I think, and I'm in the one that doesn't give a shit about realism or real team names or real-world rosters. I have no interest whatsoever in modern EA-type sports games, and most (not quite all) of my favorites for any give sport are from the '90s or '00s. I would characterize myself as a pretty big fan of sports games, actually (look at that list! I have put lots of time into pretty much all of those! I didn't even list all of them, like snowboarding games) but don't have any interest whatsoever in the latest EA NFL games and such.