The Gaming Den

so, one big chicken and some nuggets to go with it?

When did experiments with artificial muscle fibers first begin? What was the first fiction with artificial muscle fibers (and not pistons or CO2 tubes and so on).

What's the state of artificial muscle fiber research?

Prak wrote:I really dislike pastel colors. I loathe pastels as an art medium and that probably transfers somewhat to the color category, but I really prefer deeper saturation colors.

Huh, I thought I pasted images of the colors I was looking at, but I guess not? I'm looking at these-

I like maroon for reading rooms or living areas with abundant natural light, but in bedrooms and bathrooms it creates a genuine reflective problem. It is, in short, not very flattering to the complexion. This isn't a splendid choice for a place where you'll be using mostly indirect light and then trying to convince people to fuck you.

If you desire a darker color, I advise something in a shade of green, which I judge to work well for the same reason that reds do not. I do not like it so much as a solid, though. You might consider doing one of your walls (like the one adjacent to your headboard) in a damask or marbleized green wallpaper, and paint the other three in a neutral beige. The mixed medium isn't necessarily a slam dunk unless you have a coffered wall or built-in shelves to serve as a frame, but those aren't strict requisites, either.

Solid blue is rarely a bad bedroom decision. Goes great with white baseboards and ceiling. If you ever desire black walls for some reason, navy or midnight blues will probably serve you infinitely better. The darker the shade, however, the more you'll want to hang prints and posters with white space, to break it all up. My inclinations with purple are also as a certain sort of blue and my druthers are to lean away from lavender and actually shoot the moon with something more saturated and imperial and to break it up aggressively with accents.

I was considering doing the purple as the main wall color with the red a single accent wall behind the bed.

eikre wrote:This isn't a splendid choice for a place where you'll be using mostly indirect light and then trying to convince people to fuck you.

You greatly overestimate the success of my life.

But I had been thinking about a darker purple, too. I can look at them.

Red and purple. Prak, you are down to clown.

I'm not going to tell you to settle on those particular colors when I know that the ones you're seeing on your screen are different from both the ones on my screen and the Pantone shades. But, I mean... Fuck it, I guess. Throw down a Persian rug and a four-post bed. Do you have a wing-chair? No, forget it, the answer is the same either way- you need a wing-chair. Also a velvet robe, a werewolf mask, and a tripod-mounted DSLR. We're looking at a moderate-to-respectable fetlife following, here, but I am going to need you to get aggressive with this. Half-measures will not be tolerated.

Eh, I lived wearing all black for like 24 years, finally got tired of it, and expanded my preferred colors to dark purple, red and green. By which I mean I now wear black pants and an overshirt with a colored shirt.

I've never gotten a chance to decorate a room with other than framed prints and stuff, so picking room paint colors is new. I guess the traditional wisdom is to use light colors in bedrooms, but when I look online there seems to be a growing acceptance of using dark colors? Fuck if I know. Mostly I'm just trying to figure out if an accent wall should be lighter or darker than the other walls or what.

edit: also, no one wants to see me in that kind of context, eikre.

I finally got her out. Now I just need to know how to get chicken poop out of carpet.

hyzmarca wrote:I finally got her out. Now I just need to know how to get chicken poop out of carpet.

I've used Resolve (and possibly other brands) of pet stain cleaners that you just spray on and scrub with a rag. It's worked well for cat messes, but I also don't let them sit there for days or weeks, and I don't know if chicken crap is chemically different in a way that would make it not work.

I guess I'd suggest try scrubbing it with a rag and lots of water to see if you can get it mostly clean, and see if you can draw the stain out with a standard pet stain cleaner.

Ok, the "refusing to do bespoke work for gay weddings" thing.

As an LGBT person, I get why it would be annoying for a baker to say "I'm a bigot, so I'm not going to bake your wedding cake."

And I sort of get the "we don't allow people to refuse to do work for black people the basis of them being black" argument.

But... what is the actual legal... thing that a gay couple if using for their suit? Because if these douche buckets just politely declined the work, citing inability to take on more work if anything, then... I mean, it's their choice to not make money.

Fuck, as a baker, if I had a business, is have put out a giant sign the day Prop 8 was repealed welcoming gay weddings.

So, I guess my annoying question is- when bigots refuse to do work to order for gay people, why do we care beyond "wow, that guy's a douche" and what exactly are gay couples suing for when it happens. Also, can the government actually anything to prevent it?

In some states, LGBT are a protected class - you can't discriminate based on someone's sexuality. This means you can't fire them for being gay, you can't deny them housing because they're gay, and you can't refuse service to them for being gay.

Those bakers and such could have totally said they had too many clients and couldn't do the task asked of them, and no one would have ever batted an eye, but instead, they said no based on the cockamamie notion that a baker is actually part of a wedding and that to make a cake for teh gayz means they're putting Jesus' OK stamp on the wedding, and He wouldn't approve. Translation: they discriminated based on sexuality, which is illegal (in some states - esp. Oregon and Colorado). And they are defending their bigotry by claiming religious freedom, when a business is supposed to be serving the general public, including all the classes that are protected.

Segregation was a bad thing. We don't want to go back to that.

Prak wrote:
edit: also, no one wants to see me in that kind of context, eikre.

Wuss. After reading that I'm saving up for the velvet robe and the camera because that sounds awesome. I'm hoping my horse mask will make for a reasonable substitute for a werewolf mask.

Prak wrote:But... what is the actual legal... thing that a gay couple if using for their suit? Because if these douche buckets just politely declined the work, citing inability to take on more work if anything, then... I mean, it's their choice to not make money.

Unlike douchebuckets engaging in systemic discrimination which significantly impacts and even ruins people's lives (housing, employment), individual bakers are near-powerless now that the Kenyan Usurper forced everyone to gay-marry on pain of FEMA camps. Property values can actually fall when "those people" move into the neighborhood, because they are visible and a not-insignificant number of customers are fucking racist. Similarly, for tech execs "culture fitness" (the level of racism and sexism) increases the valuation of the company, which is meant to sell well to similarly racist and sexist fucks, not to make a profit.

On the other hand, saying "sorry, we'd love to bake you a cake, but we're swamped with work" defeats the point of discrimination, because it hurts the gay couple (happy, accomplished people ordering a luxury product) way less than it hurts the baker (a small businessperson). "Sincerely held religious beliefs" are only satisfactorily expressed by hurting other people. Remember, the Hobby Lobby family invested in contraception. So they can't help but shout "lololol ur gay no cake for u" regardless of whether it's legal or not.

It is also illegal to say "sorry, we're swamped with work" as an excuse to not serve gay people; it's just hard to prove in court that they're deliberately refusing to serve gay people.

Allowing buisnesses to refuse to serve some customers on the theory that they can go elsewhere has assorted problems that boil down to "there might not be an elsewhere." It could be the only cake shop in a hundred miles. The others might be too busy catering everyone else's gay weddings and can't cleanly expand their capacity. We also generally disapprove of bigotry, but of course if there weren't actual harm caused then the restriction would be "we won't let you act on your beliefs because we don't like them" and then we'd be hard-pressed to explain why legislatures shouldn't be allowed to forbid gay marriage.

Given the choice, I would force these bakers to write "hail Mammon" a thousand times on a blackboard, because that sort of behavior offends my religious sensibilities. If they can pay, I don't care if they want to to draw a a picture of a man getting double teamed by a honey badger and the pope, green is green.

But basically, if you're a business that is open to the public (as opposed to a private club that only serves members) you can't discriminate against a protected class. Though you can discriminate for any other reason. In Oregon, sexual orientation is a protected class. You'd be able get the exact same lawsuits if anti-straight gay bakers refused to bake wedding cakes are heterosexual couples.

On the other hand, if a bakery refuses to bake a wedding cake for a couple because they ship Olicity instead of Saliver, then there is nothing that anyone can do. Because television series shipping preferences aren't a protected class.

They would still get massive protests, though. Probably bigger protests. Olicity fans can be intense.

name_here wrote:It is also illegal to say "sorry, we're swamped with work" as an excuse to not serve gay people; it's just hard to prove in court that they're deliberately refusing to serve gay people.

I didn't make that clear in my post. Thank you for adding the clarification. Yes, it's illegal, but no one would think twice about the excuse. And pretty much the only way to prove it was discrimination is by showing a pattern of refusing to do work for gay people, combined with records of comments about their beliefs, or something. It would be incredibly difficult.

Fortunately, the schmucks just say, "No. I don't wanna 'cause you're gay." That makes it really simple.

I wonder though, it may be worth it to be bigots because the baker that wouldn't make the cake for the gay couple got showered by riches by other bigots. It's like the lottery, except you have to be a genuinely terrible person instead of merely just stupid.

I keep seeing this as a Cake making version of Seinfeld's Soup Nazi.

Prak wrote:Mostly I'm just trying to figure out if an accent wall should be lighter or darker than the other walls or what.

It's typically the darker and/or warmer color. Wall color is mostly good for manipulating light and depth. People usually pick mostly lighter colors so the room doesn't feel oppressive and then use a darker color to draw the eye or establish boundaries. As Eikre pointed out with the blue example it can get pretty dramatic if you're using contrasting baseboard or trim.

Are they fucking around with youtube again?
i can't get my subscriptions into list view anymore.
only grid seems to be working right now <.<

Why do people nominally on the same political side get into such bloody sectarian conflicts over different shades of the same thing? Take the primary: Sanders and Clinton didn't differ all that much on key issues (especially after Clinton shifted leftward) but you have this horrible clusterfuck of the past few months where you just want to shoot both candidates.

More locally, most of the people on this board are very left leaning, but they hatefuck each over on speculative progress.

If someone's batshit crazy, you can't expect much from them. If someone seems relatively sane, you expect them to align with you on everything, and every time they don't, it is because they just don't see what you see/it's because they have personally betrayed you.

Sanders and Clinton, despite have worked together in the past, aren't really that bad, and in fact, Sanders is being a crazy old man, but Clinton has actually done well enough through most of this. But their collective supporters are people who were on the same side for everything for the last 8 years, uniting behind Obama, so now, having been on the same side, they see the disagreements amongst each other as betrayal, where it just isn't the same when random repub number 12 continues to be a racist cockface.

Political structures, especially when you have first past the post voting in a distributed federalized system like the US, leads to strange bedfellows. Hillary and Sanders aren't really on the same side. Hillary Clinton is a left-leaning technocrat capitalist and Bernie Sanders is a democratic socialist. In a country with many political parties, like Israel, they would be in different parties. Those parties would still be in the same coalition and would vote together a lot, but the end goals are not the same. Bernie genuinely wants to turn the US into a really big, somewhat warmer version of Denmark. Hillary doesn't actually want that. Those differences are quite real and significant, it's just that they look stupidly tiny on a spectrum that happens to include Donald Trump at the same time.

Also, both campaigns spent much of the primary season thinking that if the Republicans were insane enough to actually nominate Trump then the Democratic nominee had this in the bag, which allowed for an exaggeration of the differences. Clinton supporters have largely woken up to the idea that that isn't the case and have switched into 'US+USSR vs. Germany' mode, while the Sanders camp hasn't gotten there yet.

Mechalich wrote:Clinton supporters have largely woken up to the idea that that isn't the case and have switched into 'US+USSR vs. Germany' mode, while the Sanders camp hasn't gotten there yet.

This is not particularly accurate. Polls and political experts forecast a defeat for the Republicans in both a hypothetical Clinton vs Trump election and a Sanders vs Trump election. Sanders is forecasted to win by a larger margin, but in either case a Trump victory is a long shot at best.

Grek wrote:

Mechalich wrote:Clinton supporters have largely woken up to the idea that that isn't the case and have switched into 'US+USSR vs. Germany' mode, while the Sanders camp hasn't gotten there yet.

This is not particularly accurate. Polls and political experts forecast a defeat for the Republicans in both a hypothetical Clinton vs Trump election and a Sanders vs Trump election. Sanders is forecasted to win by a larger margin, but in either case a Trump victory is a long shot at best.

Also, while the Clinton campaign is trying to realine, my person experience with Clinton supporters, is that they are still waging war against anyone who would dare support Sanders. And I'm not just talking about the crazy centrist robot that replaced Frank either, my step mother is mad at her favorite daughter, and a bunch of lawyery people I hang out with elsewhere are still constantly railing about Bernie Bros and pretending Trump doesn't exist.

Yeah, this primary season has been baffling. It is fucking insane that the Democrats might end up walking away from their primary with a bigger bruise than the Republicans, but we won't really know whether or not that's true until the shitshow is over.