Shaleesh [she/her, comrade/them]

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2021

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  • The physical books can be had on secondhand bookstores for significantly less, albeit they’re still sold for more than they aught to be, usually. Thriftbooks is an online reseller that has them for around $25 USD but local thrift stores and library book sales have them sometimes and will sell them for next to nothing.

    There are some inexpensive/free programs/websites that exist to automate and simplify basically everything in the game. IME the only advantages the manuals have over the apps is that the manuals convey the bigger picture of how the game works.



  • The trail out behind my parents house wasn’t really /x/ material but the mixture of fields, woods, and raised levees meant that you could see just about everything from some spots. It’s really eerie looking out into a clear winter night and seeing the bobbing of flashlights a mile away, only for them to turn off all at once. I liked to take late night walks out there when I was a kid, preferring to do away with a flashlight to enjoy the glow of the moon. One night a group of men in a pair of trucks drove up the old dirt road by the trail where they got out and talked or argued with each other. I couldn’t make out what they were saying but I remember them leaving very quickly. I think they might have seen me and bolted. I ran home after they left. Didn’t like that one bit.

    Animal Death

    Not that long ago on a crisp November evening I found a neat little pile of guts (with a heart stacked on top) next to another neat little pile of guts (without a heart stacked on top). It took a minute to register what I was even looking at, then I freaked out a little, then I remembered it was deer season and someone must have done a field dressing. You’re not supposed to hunt in that place so it was kinda neat to see evidence of poaching.


  • I’ve spent the past week or so modding STALKER Anomaly the oldschool way (making a compatible mod manager work with it on Linux Mint has been less of a nightmare than sorting out compatibilities) with the intention of making a pacifistic run more rewarding and enjoyable. It has been less successful than I would have hoped, many of the artifact and task mods just aren’t what I’m looking for and roleplaying as an ecologist might just be a boring experience at its core. I want Roadside Picnic: The Game rather than “Tarkov but single player and free” like the rest of the modding community seems to want.

    I have a lot of feelings about killing people innazone and would prefer to keep that to a bare minimum you know?






  • Loves me an Aldis. I kinda like the limited choices? Sure it can be annoying when I gotta add a couple stops to get the less common indredients or the “no really you gotta get the name brand” stuff but are many fewer avenues for self-doubt in one of those places. They have lots of nifty useful things in that limited time offer aisle, I got a sonic toothbrush for 20 bucks there, so that was neat. The frozen pizzas are pretty good but like actually why are there 20-25 varieties there? Its kinda fucking insane like pizza is the easiest thing to add your own shit to why are there so many different kinds?

    I will say, that a lot of the produce is very hit or miss and the bread all kinda sucks dick unless its that cinnamon swirl dessert shit.



  • Two things actually. My first grade teacher explained (in gentlest terms possible) that some people opposed Columbus Day because he was an enslaver and initiated the genocide of the native americans. She also talked about why people took issue with thanksgiving and why doing that thing where you ululate while putting your hand over your mouth was deeply racist. “Huh, it seems like something fucky is going on” is the impression she left on me.

    The other thing was that at some point in time when I was a kid I started to question the purpose of money and why there were rich and poor people, my mother cautioned me to not think or talk like that because “that’s called communism, it’s bad, and you’ll get beat up at bars if you say that to people.” This struck me as rather odd at the time but I did ultimately drop that vision of a better, more just world for a good long while.

    The path to leftist thought is similar to my gender journey, where after many misdirections and much confusion I have come back to the place I started from. That initial “this seems strange, but this feels right” was the truth all along.



  • I’m not exactly up to date on the current market but I can offer this:

    Most eReaders have .epub capability, with the notable exception of the ones made by Amazon so you have a pretty wide selection to choose from. I have a Nook Glowlight 4e which serves me well. It’s very barebones and has downright abysmal notetaking features but it has a backlight, physical buttons (super underrated), a long battery life, and font options so it’s fine for lesiure reading. More modern devices have things like higher screen refresh rates, higher resolution, and more app connectivity. Note that some devices are compatible with ebook lending systems run through public libraries, if that interests you then by all means look into it, one of the best ways to support your local library is to use their services.

    All that being said, if you’re anticipating only loading books on manually then you would be fine with getting an older secondhand device on the cheap. IMO the most meaningful difference between “obsolete” and modern devices is access to online bookstores.


  • My trusty ereader is the reason I’ve read more books in the past two years than I had in the prior ten before that. This is kinda hard to describe but my favorite feature is the ergonomic freedom they provide. I like to curl up in weird positions when reading or phonescrolling and traditional books aren’t really conducive to that. With a bookybook you have to use both hands, you have to get them in the light, and they tend to require me to sit upright. With an ereader I can lie on my side in bed at night with the lights off while hugging a pillow and that shit is so fucking cozy.

    All that being said, things like cookbooks, manuals, field guides and such basically require physical books to be useful IMO.






  • I like to use this question as an ice breaker when meeting new people, it’s simple but it has a lot to it and learning learning what someone considers to be “bad” is just as interesting as their media preferences.

    So yeah the worst movie I’ve ever seen was Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012). It was based off of a 2010 novel by Seth Grahame-Smith that retells the life of Abraham Lincoln as if his sole motivation was vengeance against vampires (one of whom killed his mom). Its a fun story and the author utilizes the premise wonderfully. While its not an allegory by any means it gives a glimpse into the worldview of white USAian liberals in the post-Obama era as the book seems to be centered on the belief that white supremacy is not systemic, but a bad habit propped up by a small group of evil racist people.

    So anyways I read that book and I got my whole family to read the book because “wtf why is this actually good” and everyone liked it so we got hyped for the movie and we get there and we are the only ones in the theatre. It was a total piece of shit.

    The premise was the only point of commonality with the novel. It was a lot more like Blade, if Blade was white and also the 16th president of the united states. Bad CGI, bad actors, and it was little more than a series of scenes of violence interspersed with vaguely historical scenes followed by time skips, I remember it being boring too. I hold a personal grudge against this film because it has overtaken the novel in the collective memory and that is a crime I cannot ever forgive.