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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • The decision to use Adobe suite is more likely to be a company wide decision. Part of Adobe suite lock-in is also familiarity making things faster. By promoting others, that may help future generations avoid at least part of the problem.

    Google services may be much more piecemeal. Even if the boss personally happens to think there’s a productivity benefit to using a given search engine, it would be unusual to block others.

    Practicing what you preach is sometimes important, but I’m not sure how much it bears on these issues. A single company eschewing either won’t make a difference. Getting the public to slowly consider alternatives may.


  • I think that’s part of the point. It’s someone’s job to make the original comic.

    Removing the titular protagonist should ruin a work. Removing them here does absolutely nothing. It makes no more or less sense, despite losing a core component. One would hope a comic in widespread syndication would fare better.

    At least with memes when they’re inevitably bad, it’s probably someone fucking around, not a paid professional.


  • It really depends what sort of recipes you’re making, but for cooking very loose approximations are often fine.

    I often have to convert to weight/mass in order to find out how much of an ingredient to buy. I have no idea how many cups an eggplant is. But once I get it home the recipe might as well say “however much eggplant you have.”

    If I’m truly off, I will typically scale up the recipe adjusting for the extra meat or vegetable content. I’ll more or less assume that 1lb of meat is interchangeable with 1lb of veggies. That’s not quite true, in particular with salt.

    Your mileage may vary though. Some recipes and ingredients are much more sensitive to deviations.













  • I don’t know that I mind a doomed revolution, as long as it avoids or subverts themes like heroism.

    I could also see a revolution inconveniencing the protagonist.

    But yes, being hopeful for things to change at the societal level is probably too much.

    It’s also worth noting that execution trumps most other factors. A Scanner Darkly reads as cyberpunk to me, despite missing a lot of the aesthetics of the genre. Infinite Jest also reads as cyberpunk, even though most of the sci-fi elements are hiding most of the time. That last one might be a hot take, I haven’t been able to find anyone else talking about it as cyberpunk.


  • I was thinking of the Expanse as I wrote that. The Belt maybe feels closer to cyberpunk because the Belters are trapped. They can move around in space, but can never go planetside.

    I think that’s maybe the crux of it: Characters in cyberpunk are trapped. By circumstance, definitely, but I think there’s a physical element as well. Sure you can go anywhere you want in the Sprawl, you can even leave and go to Chiba City. But they’re not meaningfully different. You can trade one urban hellscape for another, but you can’t escape. The life you lead is very close to the life you will always lead. Interplanetary travel removes that limitation. Being a space trucker might not be better, but it’s different. That’s too fancy for a cyberpunk protagonist.

    The Churn, one of the Expanse novellas, is cyberpunk. It’s Amos’ backstory in Baltimore. Of course then he makes it off-planet and it’s no longer cyberpunk.


  • It’s certainly related, and Alien is richer for the connections, but no.

    Cyberpunk for me has always been primarily terrestrial, or at least planetside. Off-world can exist, but it should probably remain somewhere off to stage left (i.e. the protagonist should remain grounded).

    I know Neuromancer has a space scene, but it feels jarring and doesn’t fit well with the rest of the book. I love space, but for whatever reason, it doesn’t mix with cyberpunk for me.