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Endorsements from Thumbs Readers

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afaik, dibs worked in the dairy industry at the time, so like Jut said, he was probably concerned with the mechanics and integrity of the pipes and lines involved.

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Not quite! Cows and counting their milk yields!

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Hammocks. I got a camping hammock as a gift recently and have been getting a lot of use out of it. So much more comfortable than picnic blankets or lawn chairs. All you need is the hammock, two straps to hang it off of and two trees. Spent 7 hours in one on Saturday reading and just chilling by a lake. Most of them can comfortably fit two people as well.

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Top of the Pops Send-ups

 

Top of the Pops is the long-running pop music show in England and they have a mime/lip-syncing policy for their performances, which some artists have opposed and mocked. I was first exposed to this phenomenon by Nirvana's legendarily bad performance of Smells Like Teen Spirit, but when I went on Top of the Pops' wikipedia page I learned it had a long tradition.

 

This performance by Orbital, where they clearly don't have their keyboards plugged in are mostly just leaning in to touch random buttons every five seconds, is amazing. The audience doesn't really know what to do, so they just clap as a TotP dancer, the only performer in the room, raves out onstage.

 

 

 

 

EDIT: I am also a huge fan of this clean version of "Sandwitches" that Odd Future did on BBC radio. "Mess with me and I'll scratch your cat!"

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Oh man, I have a lot of endorsements to give, but I don't want to just spam the thread with products and experiences and all that.

 

I guess my first endorsement is MADD de-alcoholized white wine.  My wife and I tried it recently as she wanted some wine, but can't have alcohol due to some medication she's taking.  We tried both the red and the white - the red tastes a little bit too much like juice, but the white wine tastes surprisingly like a very smooth white wine.  It lacks the sharp punch of alcohol, but is otherwise fairly indistinguishable from a decent cheap white wine.  Strongly recommended.  Up in Canada, it sells at Loblaws for $10 CAD a bottle, which is pricey for a "cheap white wine", but it's nonetheless quite enjoyable!

 

For my American friends: http://usastore.maddvirgindrinks.com/category-s/1831.htm

 

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This feels like an incredibly boring software endorsement, especially as I'm about to talk about a Microsoft product, but I've recently become a big fan of OneNote. I've never clicked with cloud-based note taking apps like Evernote previously, but for some reason I've really taken to this since I started using it as part of Office 365 at work. The full version is now 100% free even if you don't have Office.

 

It's just a useful application for things I want to put down somewhere but can't think of where to put them. I really appreciate that the desktop client supports logging in from multiple Microsoft Exchange/Office/email accounts at the same time, so I can have access to my work and personal notebooks on the same computer in a way that's clearly differentiated. So I can save that recipe for dinner tonight to my personal notes that sync with my phone, in between clipping that useful work email to my work notebook, all with the same tool. It also makes for a pretty good bare-bones word processor.

 

The web extensions for Safari and Chrome work okay for clipping long articles, although I still find that some sites clip better than others (which I suppose is inevitable). The Mac client is a bit light on features compared to the Windows version, and I'm not a huge fan of the UX, but it's basically fine. Here's hoping Microsoft don't try to use it as a way to flog me Office - there's little to no advertising of that at the moment, but I can see it happening at some point..

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@marginalgloss I've been looking for something like this(?)

Basically I want a digital place that I can jot down an idea or event and that I then go back to. So I kinda need one single page I guess. I need to remember something because I see it when I write down something else. Is this a good app for that?

 

####

Also, I finally bought a bidet. I've wanted one for a long time but they are kinda expensive and I thought installation was going to be WAY more difficult than it actually was. Here is the one I ended up getting:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00UCIOWRM/ref=asc_df_B00UCIOWRM5031840/?tag=hyprod-20&creative=394997&creativeASIN=B00UCIOWRM&linkCode=df0&hvadid=167134152438&hvpos=1o3&hvnetw=g&hvrand=9885326261020640423&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=m&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9008737&hvtargid=pla-274573338601#featureBulletsAndDetailBullets_secondary_view_div_1497564917980

 

It is awesome. I had never used a bidet before ans I love it. Here are some things that would have cleared up misconceptions I had:

-If you have a free 120volt electrical outlet on your wall near the toilet, installation takes less than an hour. You turn off the water valve on the pipe that goes to your toilet (right under it) unscrew the hose to the toilet, screw in the T-adapter  (included) then screw in the old hose and the new one to the adapter. 

You also have to remove the old toilet seat and replace it with the mount for this one. 

 

-I still use toilet-paper but I use much less of it. The dryer is completely useless so even though this thing consistently cleans my asshole to satisfying standards, I need 2-3 squares of TP to dry my crack.

 

-You want the oscillating function.

 

-You can turn off the seat-warmer.

 

-There is a difference between round and elongated seats, get the right one.

 

It's awesome and I calculate that it will pay for itself in 5-6 years in a two-person home due to the reduction of toilet-paper. 

If anyone has questions feel free to ask here or DM me if embarassed. I feel the need to evangelize this thing. I'm never going back.

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18 hours ago, marginalgloss said:

This feels like an incredibly boring software endorsement, especially as I'm about to talk about a Microsoft product, but I've recently become a big fan of OneNote. I've never clicked with cloud-based note taking apps like Evernote previously, but for some reason I've really taken to this since I started using it as part of Office 365 at work. The full version is now 100% free even if you don't have Office.

 

It's just a useful application for things I want to put down somewhere but can't think of where to put them. I really appreciate that the desktop client supports logging in from multiple Microsoft Exchange/Office/email accounts at the same time, so I can have access to my work and personal notebooks on the same computer in a way that's clearly differentiated. So I can save that recipe for dinner tonight to my personal notes that sync with my phone, in between clipping that useful work email to my work notebook, all with the same tool. It also makes for a pretty good bare-bones word processor.

 

Will second this.  I've been using OneNote a lot at work too and it's a pretty handy tool for things that don't fit completely into Word or Excel.  I create new notebooks for each of the projects I'm working on and it really helps keep me organized given the amount of stuff I have going on.  One neat trick I've been using it for is to extract text from a screenshot.  If you take a screen clipping and send it to OneNote, you can right click on it and copy the text from the image and paste it somewhere else.  You can also make the text searchable and leave the image where it is.

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19 hours ago, clyde said:

Basically I want a digital place that I can jot down an idea or event and that I then go back to. So I kinda need one single page I guess. I need to remember something because I see it when I write down something else. Is this a good app for that?

 

 

Yeah it's exactly that. It's designed somewhat towards 'one page per thing', so then you file the pages into sections, and the sections into notebooks; but you could certainly just write in one page forever. In fact Microsoft claim that each OneNote page is infinitely large, which is enough to make me wonder about the potential for a Borgesian page which is a 1:1 scale map of the world...

 

We had a bidet in the house where I grew up. I lived there for 18+ years and never used it once. Nobody told me how, I suppose? They seem eminently sensible; I hope one day to be washing my bum like a pro.

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@RubixsQube god damn what good use of emphasis. :tup:

 

I'd like to recommend the book Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. 

 

I'm currently a bit too drunk and generally too stupid to summarize it succinctly. Also I'm only 1/3 through it.

But the general gist of it is that Dr. Diamond argues the source of inequality between first world and third world countries is not based in cultural or genetic factors, but rather environmental ones. White privilege didn't occur because white people are inherently superior, but rather because their civilizations originated in areas abundant with wheat, horses, iron, salt, and fresh water. 

 

This is a video game forum, so I will make the assumption that most of us are familiar with playing a Civilization game and getting steamrolled by a neighboring civ that had their starting city next to 3 wheat and 2 horses. It essentially boils down to that. 

 

I know there are very smart people on this forum who are scholars of history and geography who probably have very good arguments about some fine points of his thesis. But as someone with a very poor base level education in history and who was largely ignorant of social inequality until my mid 20's I find this book quite illuminating. I think it's a very good broad strokes introduction of world history that is quite relevant to contemporary politics. 

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I read Guns, Germs, and Steel in college and it changed the way I think about basically everything. I don't remember if he used the word 'privilege' but he frames the concept of privilege and systemic inequity in a way that I had not only never considered but had never even been introduced to the concepts prior to that point.  I should go back and reread it.

 

Also, it heavily informs how I go about worldbuilding in my comics.

 

Also also re: bidet, we got a $35 barebones water stream only bidet off amazon last year and now I'm spoiled, any toilet without one feels like I'm living in the fucking dark ages.

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I don't have the background to go into it with any kind of authority, but I've read quite a few authoritative accounts of how mr. Diamond does not do the whole picture justice at all. I think @Gormongous may have a can of links for us?

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$35 bidet sounds like it would be too good to be true! Glad it works.

 

Regarding that Octavia Butler letter, survival-bias is so misleading. 

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8 hours ago, osmosisch said:

I don't have the background to go into it with any kind of authority, but I've read quite a few authoritative accounts of how mr. Diamond does not do the whole picture justice at all. I think @Gormongous may have a can of links for us?

 

1 hour ago, TychoCelchuuu said:

I've heard Guns, Germs, and Steel is basically wrong about everything, but I've never read the book (because I've heard it's wrong about everything) so I can't really say more. There is this collection of reddit posts which might be relevant.

 

I don't want to rain on anyone's parade, but... yeah, I don't like Jared Diamond. He's basically the Malcolm Gladwell of history. Guns, Germs, and Steel is probably his least problematic work, in terms of being composed of geographic/environmental/demographic "just so" stories, but it's the prototype for Diamond taking a result (the West rapidly became the dominant political and economic culture in the world over the course of a handful of centuries) and working backwards to find a plausible cause (people are people, so geographic and climatological factors must have differentiated the West from East Asia or South Asia or the Near and Middle East), then tracking down historical anecdotes that "prove" the correlative relationship to be causal (and disparaging those anecdotes that don't as chance or noise or "the exception that proves the rule"). At the end of the day, particularly in his more recent works, Diamond has fallen into a fairly deep rut of monocausotaxophilia (just-one-explanation-for-everything-itis) that tends to deny human agency in favor of environmental determinism, an environmental determinism that have miraculously favored the West in almost all respects, and that's no good, especially when many early modern and modern societies have "failed" as much because they have been colonized and brutalized by the West as because they didn't have Diamond's magical combination of maximal coastline, latitudinal orientation, labor-capable domestic fauna, and so on.

 

As Tycho says, he's a common punching bag on /r/AskHistorians and /r/badhistory, with his "if the research doesn't fit with 'common sense' then the research is wrong" article being the perennial favorite (although he's said enough dumb shit that they've devoted an entire page of their wiki to him). In my experience, the best work to read to explode Diamond's arguments, as well as a lot of other arguments from pop-history worthies, is the late J.M. Blaut's Eight Eurocentric Historians, a collection of essays showing that the vast majority of assumptions about how nations of the past became powerful are based on, at best, lazy thinking legitimizing the status quo and, at worst, lightly coded white supremacy. It's economical, blunt, and totally explosive in its arguments (as is the first volume in the two-volume "trilogy" that was cut short by Blaut's death). I can't recommend it enough.

 

Anyway, the good that I've found in Jared Diamond is that he encourages you to think about history in terms of environmental factors as much as human factors. Just be careful about placing one over the other, because a large number of the things that he states as fact have been disproven by research from actual historians (whom Diamond's fans often attack as "the establishment" just looking to protect itself, since Diamond is apparently an "outsider" with his physiology/ecology/geography training), sometimes years or decades before Diamond even started writing. Treat his works skeptically as thought exercises for how history might be, not how history is, and you should be find.

 

EDIT: Hah, looking through old /r/badhistory threads, this one applying Diamond's arguments to wigs instead of geography is pretty good, too.

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I endorse the chris remo endorsement of cold shower cappers.

 

Re: History, as far as I can tell it's pretty much guesswork all the time. There's no more contested history than the 20th century, which is telling? I did enjoy GGS for what it's worth.

 

 

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3 minutes ago, mjukis said:

Re: History, as far as I can tell it's pretty much guesswork all the time. There's no more contested history than the 20th century, which is telling? I did enjoy GGS for what it's worth.

 

I guess this is true in that in a philosophical sense what is truly knowable? But like Gormongous is in a PhD program in History, so I'm pretty inclined to take his word on this. My fiancee who is pursing a Geography PhD said this after reading Gorm's post "I could give some geographer perspective, but it's a lot of the same stuff with different words."

 

20th century history being contested tells me that 1. we're not that far out from it as a series of events and 2. more people got to tell their histories by increased access to written documentation than previous centuries.

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35 minutes ago, mjukis said:

Re: History, as far as I can tell it's pretty much guesswork all the time. There's no more contested history than the 20th century, which is telling? I did enjoy GGS for what it's worth.

 

I mean, like Jenna said, everything is pretty much guesswork all the time, if you think about it. We made up these things called numbers and then made up laws about how they interact. What's the point of physics when we're just going to discover that there's a more fundamental level of reality where none of our findings apply?

 

In all seriousness, there is going to be some conjecture in the social sciences, especially history, but that doesn't mean that there aren't best practices that have come about through rigorous and peer-reviewed methodologies. I've spent a big chunk of my adult life learning how to read diverse sources, ascertain and account for biases, and synthesize narratives of human experience that are authentic to often-alien mindsets of past peoples. Sure, coming up with a definitive and authoritative set of conclusions in historical research is difficult to the point of practical impossibility, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be attempted and those attempts don't have value. Math isn't useless because there are unsolvable theorems and paradoxes out there.

 

And yeah, on a separate note, the challenges for twentieth-century historiography are largely a matter of temporal proximity, source proliferation, and the ubiquity of living memory as one avenue for those sources, as well as the fact that most of its actors still exist and have an interest in the resultant narrative. When you work in a field where the principal epistemological challenge is that your data is unreproducible and unfalsifiable, not to mention that it's hard to say exactly what happened a hundred years ago when you can't remember when and what you ate for lunch on the first Thursday of last month, there are going to be compromises, but the answer is a research process that accounts for and integrates compromise into its conclusions. If guesswork is an absence of absolute certainty, then history is inarguably guesswork, but given the nature of reality, I don't think that being absent of absolute certainty is a meaningful critique, at least not of an entire field.

 

Incidentally, this is why I dislike physicists, ornithologists, neurologists, etc. coming at history from the outside, with no professional training on how to handle historical sources, and trying to "solve" the big questions in the field by applying data-driven, agency-agnostic models that tend to try and cancel out the "noise" of human experience. Human experience, especially in aggregate via society and culture, is possibly the most complex subject to exist, and the problems of uncertainty and ambiguity are inherent to it, not a problem of improper methodology. I've said as much many times, usually whenever I come across any "Big History" or "Big Data" scholarship.

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Thanks for the long reply, I need to go to bed though and I got a wedding/festival/volonteer work to go to this weekend so I might not get to responding until next week maybe

 

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This feels more like an endorsement than a movie recommendation, I guess because it never got released; Cracked put me onto this really interesting documentary about the making of Emperor's New Groove:

 

https://archive.org/details/SweatboxDocumentaryUneditedVersion

 

Sting was initially hired to write a bunch of songs when the film had a different name, director, supporting actor etc, and as part of his contract his wife was allowed access to document the production. So even as Sting's role gets majorly reduced, the doc continues to give a pretty honest look at the sometimes painful Disney process where if the story isn't working they quickly replace anything and anyone to get it going.

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You know when you're filling out a web form and you accidentally hit back on the page, or close the tab, and all the text you entered is lost? Lazarus Form Recovery saves all the text you entered so you can instantly refill the form. If you use any software like JIRA then this thing is an absolute lifesaver. There are firefox and safari versions as well.

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1 hour ago, Vasari said:

You know when you're filling out a web form and you accidentally hit back on the page, or close the tab, and all the text you entered is lost? Lazarus Form Recovery saves all the text you entered so you can instantly refill the form. If you use any software like JIRA then this thing is an absolute lifesaver. There are firefox and safari versions as well.

 

Not compatible with the latest version of Firefox :(

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3 hours ago, Professor Video Games said:

 

Not compatible with the latest version of Firefox :(

 

New Firefox requires all extensions to be signed, its super annoying. 

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