Doh! Should have read the full Wikipedia article.

Pfft. Real hoopy froods play Heroclix.

I do not play Heroclix but I bought some about 20 years ago.

Jesus christ 20 years? Huh. Also I didn’t notice but it was discontinued in 2008.

Yeah that was my read of the game from my first exposure to it. “You have to buy cards sight-unseen hoping to get good ones? That’s a scam.”

It’s like they looked at Dungeons and Dragons product churn and thought “No, that’s not shitty enough”

Welcome to Alcor Towers.

Someone send Roko a copy of James K. Morrow’s novel “Towing Jehovah” which involves the enormous corpse of God being towed, by a (much smaller) oil tanker, from near the Equator north to a fijord for burial in a cave. (I lost interest toward the end).

It’s not strictly relevant - I don’t think the crew sets up on the corpse itself - but it’d be fun to watch where Roko’s head goes.

“Step One: We kill God. Step Two: We harvest the cadaver, plastinate it, and build our city.”

A million red-hot tungsten balls.

Just program the godlike AI to turn everything into pykrete instead of paperclips.

Problem solved.

All you need to know about Gruber is in this claim of his about phone photography, in a critique of a NY Times tech journalist who deigned to acknowledge that readers could just use flash to get better low-light photos:

A mainstream technology columnist should be explaining to readers why they should not use flash, and how best to capture low-light photographs without it. “You could always just use flash” is technology malpractice.

In reality, a mainstream technology columnist’s job isn’t to encourage readers to cough up hundreds of dollars to buy the newest phone for the sake of something that might be of negligible importance to most of them.

Gruber clearly thinks his job is to always encourage readers to buy the latest Apple phone. At least when his job isn’t to sniff his own farts.

Flash is also technology! Most photography and videography is done using artificial light! There aren’t many people walking around with spy satellite lenses like fucking Kubrick to do natural light camera work.

Also I think he’s a bit of a fancy watch douchebag.

• came in a deck of cards

I hate the energy of That Guy that barges into the room and shouts “I solved X!” without researching for 5 minutes what all the people that were actually hard at work solving X came up with, what hurdles they identified, and which paths were already explored.

Reminds me of the time I was at Barnes & Noble and this lady comes in with her little boy (4-6 maybe?) and they head for the children’s section. At the entry to the children’s section she tells him to go find a book, and they separate. He walks a step to the first display in the center of the entry area, grabs something, and shouts “Momma I found a BOOK.”

I guess we’ll just punish random people for random things.

I’m fairly sure some parts of Australia are still pretty Victorian. Editorial pages, much of the parliament thingy, etc.

“And then I made the demons build a half pipe the size of the grand canyon, and I did tricks that have never been done before, and the girls all watched and were impressed.”

For all the talk about “sticking it to Wall Street”, it’s quite likely that most of the biggest “winners” in the GameStop mess were Wall Street types. Either trading for their employers or trading in their personal accounts.

I didn’t exactly imagine them being a demographic big into a big box furniture and interior decoration store. Ikea, maybe.

Not even furniture, really. It’s more like sheet sets, comforters, bed skirts, faddish kitchen utensils, small cheap appliances, towels, toothbrush racks, etc.

I expect a lot of BBBY nuts are the “mattress on the floor with no fitted sheet” type, but they probably spend money on desk/chair and living room media furniture.

I’m glad I’ve never been a good enough programmer to believe I was a genius programmer.

It’s kind of a shame that Linens 'n Things wasn’t still around for contrarians to “support”. It could have been a meme stock lunatic battle royale.

Testing EQ would probably be opposed as “woke” by conservative parents in the school district.