Text-to-speech is your friend here.
I use a website called "speechify" but there are a lot of options.
Still helps to read along with it, but having that auditory input in tandem with visually reading will keep you on track like you've never experienced.
It's pretty wild to watch military footage through the lens of "what if those were cops, and what if the people they were engaging were civilians...?" and realizing that the military shows a relative shit-ton of restraint. Soo many times where the military folks see like a hand reach back into a pocket they can't see - and they'll react, by tensing up and getting a hand on their weapon or something... and that's it... and out comes a wallet from the other dude, military folks understand there's no threat, and the situation never escalates.
Cops? Dude would have 4 clips unloaded into him by 3 people.
I know cops have their own version of rules of engagement - probable cause and such - but they kinda just don't give a fuck.
Don't get me wrong, the military is fucked up in a lot of ways - I was there, it's fucking bad - but it's not that kind of bad.
I wish their children and grandchildren etc the best of luck in finding comfort in the hellscape we're building for them. I have a feeling they won't find it in the knowledge that their grandpappy owned a boat or some shit, but I'm sure they'll be able to science-miracle their way out of all the problems the generations before them allowed to bottle up to a breaking point.
My own children will be happily non-existing, cuz I love them far too much to cast them into this dumpsterfire, especially as pawns against a horde of morons doing their damnedest to strip everyone's rights.
Same page as catloaf - I already did my time and got my honorable discharge. If WW3 breaks out, pretty sure I'll be getting recalled. So, yes.
Then again, the alternative is wait for shit to destabilize until we get there anyway - again this shit won't end with Ukraine.
Call Russia's bluff. If we're wrong, it's not like we aren't fucked anyway. Might as well go down fighting evil, vs going down with evil's dick in our throat.
*looks at recent presidential election*
...oh yeah. Reality. Pass the lube, my throat is sore as fuck.
Intelligence pruning itself out of a malicious environment isn't really a great showcase of evolution.
It's not technically incorrect - we are changing, but a species actively taking steps backwards by inflating itself with idiots doesn't quite hit that stronger/faster/smarter progression that the concept of evolution implies.
These are darwinism's death throes.
Give em full air support. If it causes world war 3, it causes world war 3. Fuck it. Avoiding that isn't worth letting Russia just consume its neighbors on a whim - that shit certainly won't stop with Ukraine.
There's still the UCMJ and rules of engagement. No idea what it takes to change those.
Idk, I'm grasping at straws to find a flicker of hope in this shitstorm.
/shrug.
I'm in my mid 30s now: no idea if it's normal at this point to remember or forget that stage of childhood.
Yeah for sure - lawful orders only matter if the law is moral, and historically... yeah...
This is one of the examples where I don't think lawful order training will make a huge difference.
That said, illegal immigrants - even if they're just as bad a Fox paints them (WHICH IS BULLSHIT), they're still not a tactical threat, so if there's any hope from a military perspective of leadership not being on board, it'll be from a priority standpoint. ...which ofc hinges on military leadership not all being replaced with Trump loyalists, so even that's a short term hope.
Even with all that though, domestically I'm not really worried about the military; it's the cops I'm worried about. Trump already has a massive, religiously loyal, heavily armed goon squad in every single city in the US. And secondary to them are all the civilian Trumpanzees who'll respond without question to his stochastic domestic terrorism. This country's fucked well ahead of military involvement.
Soldiers are humans, and the average human is an evil sack of shit, so yeah there will always be new atrocities. The immigrant thing doesn't really come down to the individual soldier though, it comes down to military leadership acting on or ignoring an order from Trump... and that outlook doesn't leave me much hope, cuz military leadership doesn't give a fuck about doing the right thing, just the legal thing.
If we're pitching microtransactions as extremist content, I'm on board.
I hit a critical milestone on the way home from school today.
Made this for a comment reply to another thread; thought y'all would enjoy it too! ^_^
Skip to the tldr if you don't want the novel explaining the reasoning.
A friend gifted me their old Razer Kraken headset a while ago. The leather Razer uses is some CHEAP shit, so the couple years in a closet leading up to it landing on my noggin left it in a state of deterioration that would sprinkle my head and ears with little bits of black leather.
The speakers are good though, and free is free, so no complaints: I hit it with some duct tape and peeled it off repeatedly until all the leather bits were freed up - the cloth layer underneath the leather is now the outermost layer, and no more black sprinkles all over, so yay.
Unfortunately the tape pulling on the ear cushions was a bit too much for whatever adhesive Razer uses to stick em on to their mounting plate, and they pretty much just pulled off. Also no biggie - replacements are pretty cheap on Amazon, so I got a set and lived happily ever after...
...but now I've got the old mounting plates (minus the cushions) and an idea.
So... I do a lot of gaming, wife watches a lot of TV. We do this in the same room, so I pretty much always have my headset on, which blocks most TV noises from getting to me, and most gaming noises from getting to her. Works great until she says something, and all I hear is muffled gibberish until I lift a speaker off my ear and hit her with "What?".
-----------TLDR---------------
My idea is to put... idk... something... on the mounting plate of the side facing her that's stable enough to keep the headphone in the correct position (and not pressing directly on my ear) but basically leaves the space completely open to the environment so that external sound coming from that side isn't muffled.
I'm thinking something like a plastic spiral hair tie, but with an inner diameter large enough to encircle my ear, and the spiral diameter roughly the same as the cussion, at least when its under tension against my head.
something like this:
...but ofc not just a cylindrical spring, but a donut shape. I kinda suck at photoshop, but you get the gist.
The spiral hair tie is the closest actual product I can think of to what I'm picturing, but those are far too small... ideas?
...I vote we decide on a climate landmark to establish the initiation of the global end of the world party. Anything that's currently illegal due to longer term consequences goes into 'fuck it!' territory. Drugs of all kinds completely legalized; conditions that contraindicate using those drugs like pregnancy are ignored. Social standards around things like sex are dissolved (other than consent - that stays). Just nonstop hedonism, feasting, drinking, fucking, etc while supplies last.
Then when supplies run out, we all hit the big red button at the same time. Nukes. All of them. Detonated in as close a synchronization as we can get them, and our failure of species goes out in as painless as possible of an instant flash.
.....I mean, it's that or slow-burn to death anyway, we got nothing to lose.