Ian @im@mastodon.sdf.org

This is by far the longest sequence I’ve ever calculated in an actual #chess game; maybe I’m finally starting to not suck. Black to move, mate in 8.

Of course the people who complain most about forced captures are also the ones who are most likely to say checkers is a mindless, "easy" game with no depth. There is something really special about refusing to play a game by its rules and then complaining that your simplified version is too shallow.

Literally every checkers app in Play Store is inundated with 1-2 star reviews, comments being along the lines of "this app is so stupid, it forces you to make bad moves"

Checkers is probably the only game that rivals Monopoly in the "games where people think they know the rules but don't" department

So lidraughts.org is a thing... too bad there are maybe a dozen people on there at any given time, and I can never actually find a game. (I suck at draughts but I'd like to learn to suck less at it.)

For insight into the dynamics of my social circle, consider the following exchange between me (I) and girlfriend (L).

I. Do you think it’s okay to send [person] a friend request?

L. Hmm. Have you actually interacted with her in person at all?

I. We kissed at [another person]’s party, does that count?

L. *considers* You should probably still ask her first.

THEY'RE CLOSING MY H-E-B

http://austin.culturemap.com/news/city-life/10-04-19-h-e-b-oak-hill-southwest-austin-y-store-closing/

"There's an H-E-B practically across the street" was one of the factors in my renting this place, may have to reconsider renewing the lease even though I'm sick of moving.

(To clarify: these days I mostly just refuse to answer the question of whether I'm a feminist or not. My usual answer to that question is "tell me what a feminist is and I'll tell you whether I am one")

In this way the SJfems are in a way the slightly more accepting group. They've given up on the idea that gender-words might actually mean something and not just be emotive sounds, but if manhood is just an epiphenomenal caste then at least it's possible to deny one is in it.

Of course, this is one thing TERFs and social justice libfems have in common, and the reason they find this topic so fascinating that they can barely find time to talk about anything else. Having decided that Cishet Men are intrinsically oppressors, and can be accepted in society only insofar as they admit their sinful nature and spend their lives in penitent service, it is existentially important that they be able to identify exactly who these Cishet Men are.

It becomes a lot harder to care about any side of pedantic arguments about the nature of gender, and whether certain people are Women or Female-Presenting or Femme or some other word, when you actually have the same standards of decent behavior and treatment for everyone. Whether someone is actually "a man" or "a nonbinary masc with he/him pronouns" is only really important to know if you feel a need to treat men different from nbs in some way.

This is why I don’t hang out in public poly-specific groups any more: because they’re just an endless stream of either new or bad-at-poly people with the same four questions over and over again, and it gets really boring.
“I'm jealous, what do I do”
“My partner is jealous, what do I do”
“My partner’s partner is jealous, what do I do”
“How do I, a hetero man, find a third for a triad with me and my bisexual wife”

One of the hazards of being good at #polyamory is that I have basically no useful advice for most people on the subject. Like, occasionally someone I know will be like “hey, you’ve been at this a while, how do you control the raging fires of jealousy every time your partner is out with someone else” and I’m just like “uh... have you tried playing Crash Bandicoot and going to bed early? Works great for me”

Ran across an interesting issue after using #Veracrypt to encrypt my system partition:
• I get an “internal hard disk not found” error on boot.
• If I then open and close the BIOS setup menu, I get the VeraCrypt password prompt I should have gotten in the first place.

Not sure what would cause this... has anyone seen it before? It’s not a serious problem but it is weird and annoying.

#firstworldproblems: my flight is arriving twenty minutes early, so I’ll have to wait a bit for my free ride home.