sysop408

sysop408, 7 hours ago (edited 6 hours ago)

If anyone remembers the American Gladiators "reality sport" TV show, they had a clever way of ensuring that the contestants that got on the show wouldn't be massive hulks who could just plow right through their gladiators.

I tried out for the show and felt out of place from the second I got there. I was the tiniest guy in my tryout group of 20. I couldn't even see with all that beef surrounding me.

I was also one of only two people to emerge from that group. On the first test, they made us do 50 fingertip push-ups in 60 seconds with a task master on us to make sure nobody got any freebies. All the way down and all the way up on the tips of your fingers.

The only people who could support their body weight on their fingertips were lightweight athletes.

In the next round, everyone was close to my size. I didn't make it on the show, but I made it farther than over 90% of the try-outs largely because they designed it specifically to select people like me.

@Free_Press

sysop408, 4 hours ago (edited 2 hours ago)

@TonyStark being active on Twitter in the OSINT circles in February 2022 and October 2023 was an eye opening experience.

October 2023 was deja vu with some of the exact same disinfo plays used to sow confusion about Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Videos from Ukraine and other conflicts were hastily relabeled to represent something else with some to rile up hate against Israel and some to rile up hate against Palestine or hate against students.

Many of the accounts were the same accounts pushing Ukraine disinfo just 24 hours before and their post history showed it. Now they were suddenly chirping in unison to muddy the waters on Israel-Palestine.

Israel-Palestine is a much more complex conflict and way harder to parse. It's ripe pickings for chaos agents and it's not just Twitter that's failing the test. I keep seeing people here platform fake peace activists like Caitlin Johnstone and Code Pink who somehow have rather pro-aggression positions when it's Russia or China instead of the US.

@Snowshadow

sysop408, 10 hours ago

@Alice anxiety attacks landing as workouts actually did happen to me before!

sysop408, 1 day ago

@burritojustice oh that’s so bad it’s good!

sysop408, 2 days ago

@Wileymiller the Times reached out to the worm for comment, but we did not get a response probably because it had starved to death.

sysop408, 2 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

@ATLeagle @ai6yr ugh yeah, if I had to choose to wear a mask in only one place, it'd be on planes. My dad just went to Taiwan for a month and didn't wear a mask on the plane.

"How was your trip" I asked when I picked him up at the airport.

"Terrible. We had a severe cold the entire time."

Even if it was just a cold, if I'm traveling halfway around the world, I don't want to spend my entire time there sick.

sysop408, 2 days ago

@anthrocypher
"Don't be fair to unfair people."

If I ever get a tattoo, that's what it's going to say.

sysop408, 2 days ago

@beardedtechguy I’m gonna guess you get asked to repair stuff?

I always wonder how plumbers and fixture installers ever get anything done on time because they tell you to buy something and I’m like “there are 12 types of them!”

sysop408, 2 days ago

@tess +1 for Vienna Teng and to add some additional intrigue, she's a Bay Area girl! Her song City Hall is a reference to San Francisco's City Hall when gay people were first given the right to marry in California.

We actually attended the same high school, but not at the same time and never crossed paths except for me and my wife going to her shows.

Her songwriting is tremendous and she's terrific to see live, but very rarely performs anymore and may have stopped by now. Every now and then she plays the Freight and Salvage in Berkeley when she's back in the Bay Area.

@skinnylatte

sysop408, 3 days ago

Do you use your iPad as your only computer?

@WarnerCrocker

sysop408, 3 days ago

@decryption impressive!

I can believe it… only because there are people who are now drawing stuff like that using nothing but CSS!

sysop408, 3 days ago

@kurtsh just get Metamucil instead.

I’m T2D, but I have an A1C below prediabetic levels mostly due to diet.

Soluable fiber wasn’t very effective for me, but your mileage may vary. Similarly the difference between white bread and whole grain wheat was small in blood glucose effects.

I resorted to rigorous “post-prandial testing.” Search for that if you’re not familiar with that approach.

From that I discovered what works for me:

Never eat more than 60g of white rice & always with fat or protein.

Rice cooked in fats absorb much slower and sometimes I can eat 140g of things like Mexican rice.

I add fat and protein to everything I can. Lactaid is my friend bc I add cheese to everything possible.

If I ever want candy, I’ll have ice cream instead.

Lots of my favorite foods are still OK, it’s just a question of how much of it. For 5 years I weighed everything I ate which is how I came up with 60g of rice.

Learning to eat diabetic is hard, but you get used to it and stop craving your old foods.

sysop408, 3 days ago

@kurtsh the kitchen scale is really important. I never like to tell anyone that they need to do this or that, but understanding portion sizes is something you have to do.

There’s a massive long and short term difference between having a cheat day and eating a whole family size bag of chips and eating exactly 28g of the chips everyday for 2 weeks as a 2pm snack.

If you do nothing else, start to consume food in real single portion sizes according to a scale until you figure out an ideal diet plan for you.

sysop408, 4 days ago

@_8S7L29VUEbgZ_ when you buy the item on eBay and get it from Amazon, you’re really just paying someone a markup to borrow their Prime account. Next time that happens search Amazon for that exact item.

Someone has simply collected your money and then placed an order on your behalf and had it sent to your address instead of their own. There’s even commercial software that helps them do this painlessly.

Most of the time this is harmless, but you’re still paying Bezos.

Some of the time, this is disastrous for the smaller businesses because drop shipped items are often returned when the buyer notices the Amazon packaging and realizes they overpaid. The business may end up saddled with tainted inventory and the cost of processing a return even though they technically weren’t the seller.

@pluralistic

sysop408, 4 days ago

@_8S7L29VUEbgZ_ you’re benefitting the drop shipper’s business, which isn’t the small business I’m talking about.

If a mom and pop operation makes high end cat trees that gets purchased via this arrangement, the costs of those returned trees is enough to destroy the business… plus you are still paying Amazon all along.

To avoid doing so always search Amazon for the same item. Often it’s with the exact same name punctuation and all. If you find it and the cost is at least 10% higher on eBay, you are probably buying it from a drop shipper.

Especially if it’s a high volume product and the product photos look the same or actually are exactly the same, chances are you’re still buying from Amazon.

If you can’t find that item on Amazon, or the price differential wouldn’t be enough to cover seller fees, it’s probably a real seller and not a drop ship operation.

@pluralistic

sysop408, 4 days ago

@thomholwerda we don't really know how large that contingent is. It's a well worn tradition for people who weren't likely to vote anyway to brandish their indifference. In America, young voters have always been unreliable even if they're disproportionately loud, especially now with social media.

They're being called nihilists. A subset of them them really are and were never going to be persuaded to be anything else.

The nihilist camp is surely filled with glee right now that they're doing such a good job widening the wedges in society. It's important to take threats like this seriously, but not overreact and actually push more people into the nihilist camp.

We used to talk about the silent majority. Now it seems like all I hear about are the omnipresent fringes.

We're for sure in a shitty time in history. Fighting anger with anger, especially with 20-something's isn't going to work. Taking the temperature down might.

sysop408, 5 days ago

Canadians, I regret to inform you that Google is entirely American... or maybe I should be congratulating you.

When I do a search autocomplete for the phrase "Was Tim Horton involved in h..."

Hockey Player turns up last after hamas, hacking, and hurricane katrina.

Now to be fair, if I VPN through a Canadian IP address, hockey does become the first option, but I then also get "hiroshima bombing".

sysop408, 5 days ago

@Cat_LeFey 7. I favorited all 8 of the toots before yours so I automatically favorited yours too.

sysop408, 5 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

Movement strategies have always been a key asset in my #photography techniques.

I was a physiotherapist and did #MartialArts. Understanding how humans moved was a chunk of my life. I developed camera techniques to leverage that background.

I use my legs to position the camera. This isn't "zooming with your feet." It's more like being a human tripod or camera rig. Putting your whole body into the camera makes it easier to keep the lens steady, get set, and then reset for unexpected action happening.

Here's a shot a friend took of me taking a photo with other photographers. I'm the guy in the classic Kung Fu/Tai Chi "horse stance" squat.

Which one of us three is best situated to quickly react if something exciting happened off camera? Much of the way I shoot comes from classic Kung Fu... questionable for fighting, but great for photography.

I'm not suggesting you need to learn Kung Fu to be a better photographer, but to be physically creative with movement strategies you already know.

#streetphotography

sysop408, 4 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

@grizolda hey I'd be interested to hear how your Yoga practice influenced ways you do photography.

I think because I started my career as a physiotherapist, I can't not see how physical aspects affect the way we approach everything we do (including things that aren't at all physical in nature).

Our capacity to process motor skills and intellectual things are separate. When I was first learning photography, I had just switched careers. My brain was overloaded and my ability to process intellectual things was maxed out so I made a conscious decision to develop an athletic photography style because while my brain was maxed out, my motor learning ability still had plenty of capacity.

sysop408, 4 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

@blindcoder by your bio, I presume you have a severe visual impairment?

Let me know how you find this. This is very much a 5 senses way to do photography and I started doing it because I realized that there were situations in which I couldn’t rely only on my sight to get the shot I wanted.

In 3 of my example photos it’s also very dark. I’m using a speedlight at low power to bring out the people, but it’s actually too dark in all those shots for autofocus to work well. That’s another reason for choosing fixed focus and using footwork to keep the shot in focus.

Also sometimes when I do this, it’s so dark that I can barely see so trying for a perfect shot is a fool’s errand. I’m just setting up the conditions to allow me to take a higher volume of imperfect shots and maximize my chances of landing a perfect shot through luck.

sysop408, 2 days ago

@Holberg my favorite Kinkades are the Star Wars ones.

https://www.deviantart.com/rolanddeschane