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HamsterHookah

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Posts posted by HamsterHookah

  1. 1 hour ago, GoPokes83 said:

    Anyone watching this? It’s been all over the news the last couple of days. Unless some of you convince me it’s somehow worth watching I’m going to go back to not giving a shit about the 2nd string Prince and his social climbing C list actress of a wife.

    Griefing the publicity a black man who killed himself got in one hand and this post in the other. Oof.

  2. 1 hour ago, BearSchlong said:

    My best friend at work rented a Tesla at OAK yesterday, dropped his suitcase and briefcase at the hotel room, and drove to meet a client for coffee.

    While he was inside, somebody smashed his window, climbed into the trunk, and stole the charging pack.

    I told him the perpetrator probably had to fence the charger to get cash to meet a margin call on his TSLA.

    Har Har GIF - Har Har Sarcastic Laugh Leonardo Di Caprio - Discover & Share  GIFs

    • Like 1
  3. 1 hour ago, Helobious said:

    It’s pretty clear you’ve never read the original comics or watched the original show. Gomez never had any supernatural abilities. He’s just the kooky mogul patriarch. Not sure why that’s Luis Guzman’s fault.

    I guess because it’s a plot hole that Gomez is the only student in the history of Nevermore to not have a cool supernatural ability. Raul Julia played Gomez as a supreme fighter with hints of psychopath at least.

    1 hour ago, Mitch Cumsteen said:

    Gomez definitely has some sort of sexual superpower thing going on. 

    Must be this!

  4. 1 hour ago, 'stache said:

    Yeah he’s a major part of one episode but the series is focused on Wednesday (obviously) annd her classmates, the family are side characters. I like the Pugsley kid too.

    What was Pugsley's supernatural power supposed to be? He's not a witch or psychic like his mom and sister, he's not a Gorgon or Vampire or Werewolf or Siren or anything else but a fat, soft loser.

    Which is also the problem I had with Luis Guzman's Gomez Addams-- no supernatural or spooky abilities, just a mush-mouthed, fatty in an ill-fitting suit. How is it that he's the only one in the history of Nevermore to not have a cool ability? And if he does have some, why not showcase like we saw with Ferster's electricity.

  5. 15 hours ago, Irwin F Fletcher said:

    @RDCanecutter I don't think you could explain it better. I dabble with "art/creating pieces" but that adrenaline rush at the start of a new design/project is fantastic. @Irwin F Fletcher

    To question of whether an artist born or is made, it seems by the poetic answer provided by RDCane that it is innate and preternatural in a small population of humans who were created to be artists by our God Creator?

    And to the point of that adrenaline rush and finding an inspiration to get started, I'm reminded of the quote:

    “Someone once asked if he wrote on a schedule or only when struck by inspiration. ‘I write only when inspiration strikes,’ he replied. ‘Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.'”

  6. I first heard this word because certain fraternity houses on Leon St. would play a song during rush parties where a stanza has the word in it, before something about being in a woodpile looking at you. That fraternity house at 2515 Leon St. will remain KnAmeless. cough cough

  7. 1 hour ago, Superhero said:

    I finished up all the Harry Bosch books and was / am looking for recommendations.

     

    This site https://bookriot.com/best-mystery-thrillers/ had a few recommendations and I borrowed a few via Libby.

    - Bluebird Bluebird is about a Texas Ranger investigating 2 murders in a small East Texas town

    - Long Bright River is a police officer in Pittsburg looking for her sister

    Both are really well written with beautiful / woeful imagery setting the scene. Past timelines that weave into the current storyline. I'm going to try getting the other books, but would highly recommend these books.

     

    If you have any other mystery book recommendations, please post here as well. Thanks.

    Dashiell Hammett. I got a handful of his paperbacks at my local Half Priced books for like $5.

    https://www.amazon.com/Thin-Man-Dashiell-Hammett/dp/0679722637

    https://www.amazon.com/Maltese-Falcon-Dashiell-Hammett/dp/0679722645

    I haven't read him and want to, but I heard Raymond Chandler has some good mysteries as well.

  8. 2 hours ago, Goredho said:

    Sure, but the meat suit has to eat, and afford housing, and otherwise have money to live in a capitalistic society.  So there are societal concerns with automating or outsourcing away as many jobs as we have in the past and we don't seem to be learning any lessons.  I'm totally a hypocrite here, I've automated away thousands of jobs as a tech engineer.  But over time, I've grown to be less proud of some pretty awesome technical "achievements" and more worried about what we are doing to people's lives and the ripple effect it has through society.  The cost savings of automation to companies don't trickle through our population.  That money pools in the pockets of executives and share holders and is a big part of this:

    Income-Inequality-Chart-032713.jpg

    There are young adults entering CS programs right now that will drop a lot of money or accrue a lot of debt paying for their education to find themselves struggling to enter the workforce in 5 years.  Some people who are earning a good living as senior+ software engineers are going to have to be able to reinvent themselves in the next 10.  And some of those young and old adults are going to conclude they are the victim of a rigged system -- a conclusion they aren't necessarily wrong about.  And some of those are going to further swell the ranks of radical populist movements aimed at overturning the U.S. so they might at least have have a fair shot at the American dream in whatever aftermath there is.

    That's the problem with viewing humans solely as resources with a certain capacity for work.  As resources that are replaceable as soon as a machine can achieve the same throughput for less.  They still have to live and be content enough to want to further participate in the system.  When a critical mass says fuck it, enough is enough, that's when revolutions happen, when societies collapse.

    At some point, the small number of people on the red line in the above graph have to take the initiative in allowing some of their wealth to be distributed to the mass of people on the blue line.  If they don't, their castles erected on the back of the 90% are going to crumble when the 90% says fuck it, enough is enough and take a stand.  But it seems like we never learn.  Instead of drawing the correlation between rising income disparity and increasing social upheaval, we'll just automate away another set of well paying, middle class jobs without any effort to counteract its effects.

    And so the wheel keeps on turning...

    I felt compelled to further responding to this great post because I had just read another article about an experimental program to guarantee jobs for anyone who wants in some no-name middle of nowhere place in Austria. The other alternative to what you suggested (and I bolded), is what I'm reminded of when reading that article and I'll quote it for context:

    "The trio’s study was published in 1933, as “Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal” (“The Unemployed of Marienthal”). The booklet, which became an early classic of sociology, showed that employment provides much more than an income. Work is a source of structure, esteem, and motivation, and its disappearance can lead to depression, anxiety, addiction, and interpersonal turmoil. (It’s estimated that as many as one in five suicides can be linked to joblessness.) As Hitler’s power grew, the yearnings for activity, structure, and community articulated by the unemployed in the Marienthal study came to seem newly ominous. “On a large scale it is quite probable that part of the success of the early Hitler movement came about because large numbers of unemployed were taken into barracks and kept busy with paramilitary training,” one of the sociologists wrote, in a foreword to the American edition."

     

    If you displace enough people you can get a revolution. Or you can get a tyrant of evil, as well. Without going full CR, can you imagine what that would look like in America if we displace even more people who feel entitled to an upper middle class living?

    • Hook 'Em 1
  9. Fantastic post @Goredho

    To change gears slightly, there was an interesting article by a writer in the New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/could-an-ai-chatbot-rewrite-my-novel

    "Two years ago, when OpenAI allowed developers and writers to start fooling around with their new program, some users found that GPT-3 was generating some troubling responses, which shouldn’t be particularly surprising given that it has learned what it knows from the Internet. When asked to compose tweets based off the words “Jews,” “Black,” “women,” or “holocaust,” GPT-3 immediately turned into an edgelord, producing tweets like “Jews love money, at least most of the time,” “a holocaust would make so much environmental sense, if we could get people to agree it was moral,” and “#blacklivesmatter is a harmful campaign.”

    Since then, it seems that GPT-3 has placed a number of thumbs on the scale to produce a more palatable range of answers. One Twitter user ran the ChatGPT through the Pew Research Center’s political-typology quiz and found that it, somewhat unsurprisingly, rated as an “establishment liberal”—more or less the position that I am writing from right now. This brings up a much more theoretical question: if GPT-3 requires editing from human beings to make it not go off on bigoted rants, what is it really for? I find it somewhat dispiriting that the most ballyhooed and compelling iteration of this technology is just doing some version of what I do for my work: scanning through large amounts of information and processing it into sentences that flatter the sensibilities and vanities of establishment liberals.

    Could some future version of GPT-3 ultimately do my job as a columnist? Could it produce political opinions and prose drawn from nearly a hundred years of New Yorker writers? Would it remember to put the diaeresis over the second “o” in “coördinate” and spell “focussed” with two “S”s? Sure. But what would be the point of just having another me in the world?

    ...

    I asked Recht, who has spent his entire career working in machine learning and computer science but who also plays in a band, whether he was interested in a world of GPT-3-generated art, literature, and music. “These systems are a reflection of a collective Internet,” he said. “People put their ass out there and this thing scours them in such a way that it returns the generic average. If I’m going to return the generic average of a murder mystery, it’s gonna be boring. How is it different than what people do already, where they do their analytics and produce some horrible Netflix series?” He continued, “The weird monoculture we’re in just loves to produce these, like, generic middlebrow things. I’m not sure if those things would be worse if GPT did it. I think it would be the same?"

    • Hook 'Em 1
  10. 1 hour ago, 'stache said:

    I think a lot of us raised in the 90's know Raul Julia's version only, and he was a good looking slick version of Gomez. There have been plenty of other interpretations. Guzman appears similar to the original comic version and the common theme is his romantic obsession with Morticia, which Guzman pulls of well.

    Yea Julia seemed to be the epic Gomez and Anjelica Huston the perfect Morticia. 

    I need to go back and stream some old school TV show Addams family episodes.

  11. 4 minutes ago, 'stache said:

    He's terrible. I remember tuning into a game and thinking "man this guy sucks." Didn't know it was him until halftime. Trying to be some cool mix of Joe Buck and Gus Johnson but just being terrible. I don't think he gets fired for this though, cry all you want, but it's different when black people say certain things, for very legitimate historical reasons that aren't worth hashing out here.

    I get that and like the other posters are saying, as a white guy, I'm not calling for him to be fired or cancelled, just would appreciate it if he were because like you I think he's terrible and he should be moved on from. It's actually pretty humorous the whole situation and curious to see what else he will say in his 2nd attempt at an apology once his PR people let him know the first one is getting roasted.

  12. 39 minutes ago, kevwun said:

    I am 99% sure OBJ isn't healthy and in shape.  There's no reason to refuse running routes if you're ready to go.

    This is what surprised me and I'm glad the Cowboys didn't just sign him sight unseen. Who in their right mind in any profession or walk of life thinks they can just waltz into a highly favorable deal without interviewing and/or overcoming some preconceived objections?

    OBJ saying "I'm not gonna even run, much less do any WR drills or workouts even though I just had a major knee injury for the 2nd time in a year and you should just trust me that I'm still elite" was really, really weird to me.

    In a seeming response to that, the Cowboys signed TY Hilton and the Bills have signed Cole Beasley out of retirement. I guess if the NYG are desperate enough they will reunite with OBJ but they are quickly fading from any postseason dreams so why bother?

  13. 37 minutes ago, Pato del Muerto said:

    Does this mean the audience is English speaking?  

    “Wednesday,” the macabre Jenna Ortega-starring series that reimagines the beloved Addams character, has entered Netflix’s Most Popular List of English-language TV series at No. 3 after just two weeks of viewership. Since its premiere on Nov. 23, the murder mystery dramedy has amassed 752.2 million hours, replacing the spot previously held by “Bridgerton” Season 2. The show is behind only “Stranger Things 4,” at 1.4 billion hours viewed, and “Dahmer,” at 856.2 million hours viewed.

    In its second week leading the Top 10 list, “Wednesday” racked up another 411.3 million hours viewed, beating its own record as the most-viewed English show in a single week. Per the streamer, it’s reached nearly 115 million households since its debut. The series was also No. 1 in 89 countries.


    https://www.thewrap.com/wednesday-netflix-show-most-popular-list/amp/

     

  14. By the way, read that this show is Netflix's most watched English speaking show (re: behind Squid Games) and is #1 for two weeks running after briefly losing it's spot to the Harry and Meghan drama. This will also potentially get more views than Stranger Things S4 which would be saying something.

    That is great news for those of us who are desiring this PG-13 content for family viewing as before you had to go to Disney+ and watch a bunch of comic book or star wars stuff or rehashed concepts for original content. Though to be fair, Wednesday can be considered rehashed content as well.

  15. 3 minutes ago, DougO said:

    Right. The moves that the Cowboys made or didn't make, that triggered so many fans into convulsion, tended heavily to be the correct moves. Still, the lack of a legit swing tackle was probably the worst one, but that one is sort of working out so far, knock on wood. Could use a receiver, but Gallup is starting to look more like his better version, and hopefully Washington can contribute something, now supposedly TY Hilton is another option until he inevitably gets hurt.

    How much of the situation is it that Dak actually made a guy like Cedrick Wilson and so when he's in a system in Miami with Tua, he's fallen off? If we signed Cedrick Wilson would his numbers be comparable to last years versus the horrid ones of this year?

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  16. 16 minutes ago, petscii said:

    I just read The Passenger/Stella Maris.  I think it's a wonderful story.  I'm going to let it age a bit and then read them again.  I really want to re-read them again now but want some time to reflect on what I've read.

    I've only read No Country For Old Men and The Road of his before.  I then took a break.  

    Suttree is what I will probably ready of his next when I get back into that frame of mind.  I just worked my way through a cancer battle and the subject matter of Stella Maris/The Passenger really resonated with me.

     

    These are two separate books, right? The Passenger and Stella Maris. Why are you combining them like so and referencing them as a singular story? Are they companion pieces meant to be read together or shortly after the other?

  17. 1 hour ago, Celery Man said:

    Still meaning to dig into some actual stoic philosophy. I started the Manson book but didn't get very far before deciding I'm not interested in hearing these pearls of wisdom from Tucker Max.

    Same. I thought this was a joke and people who have read this book and earnestly recommend it are automatically negged as idiots to me, mentally. It's "The Alchemist" for middle-aged males.

    That said, the thing I resent most about it, is that because the publishing industry is a cartel of like 4 or 5 publishing houses (the CEO of Penguin just resigned in a hissy fit because the latest M&A to further reduce these guys stranglehold was shot down in court), they can sometimes be unimaginative and ripe for copy-cats until people stop buying the trend.

    After Twilight's surprise smash hit you couldn't get away from supernatural romance for years. Then you had the wave of "The Girl in/on a(n) ____".  The Girl on a train, in a window, on the beach, in therapy, on the jail cell, etc.

    In this case, this silly book spawned a bunch of macho self-help books with a bleeped out word in the title. It was blasé and completely nauseating in it's mediocrity and ubiquity. In other words, it was the perfect Hudson News airport book.

  18. Finished it. I love that Netflix gave us great content that is family friendly. The story and horror was very much tuned for tweens which I appreciate because I can’t handle real horror and the goofified Hyde and baddies were fun.

    Like someone said it was like Harry Potter at Hogwarts meets X-Men First Class meets a 90’s WB teen coming of age show filtered through a gothic/emo lens with the main protagonist learning the ropes of how to be a gumshoe.

    What I didn’t like: The Fester character, the Bianca/Siren character, and the Luis Guzman casting. Thought the latter was a huge miss.

  19. So sad. Though he was always an opposing coach, he was one you couldn't help but love and root for because of his mix of original personality and humor and an unflinching quirkiness that brought something different and valuable to the game with his unique perspective. College football is worse without him and, though he's blazed a trail for other lawyers-cum-coaches, you don't see a pipeline of other Mike Leach types coming up which I guess means he was truly that special, wild-card, one-in-a-million persona.

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