My brother, my fellow American, my friend, rugby is the more intense athletic endeavor.

You have definitely zeroed in on the point that makes football more intense, the big impacts.

Despite rugby having 2-3x higher injury rates, football dwarfs it in fatality rates by like 6x.

However, when you account for the deaths from heat stroke and heart attack caused by overworking a bunch of hypertensive fat dudes (“indirect causes”), they’re about equal.

Football just isn’t as athletically demanding and doesn’t inflict as much constant punishment. It’s entirely about that one big BOOM

The power of voodoo

“Why don’t you come back to my place and sample the seventh leche?”

Brother, may I ponder the orb now?

No no no. I gave them CULTURE! A wonderful work culture.

And security! Sure, not the security I decided I need for myself, and it’s only really present as long as they’re profitable to me, but security nonetheless.

After all, I had the idea and stuck my neck out to secure the financing, which is far more important than the actual daily labor that keeps things running.

We’re like a family, see.

You were head-butting children off the ship!

That, uh… that must’ve been horrifying to watch!

Then you started making out with the ice sculptures!

Well thank God that the children weren’t on board to see it.

PENGUINS

Maybe keep a little critical information on a dead man’s switch and let that be known when revealing the rest.

Idk if actually wise, but it seems like you might want to keep some leverage for self protection

The vacuum sealer reminds me: a handheld electric pump.

Some are strong enough to blow up car tires. Especially if you have kids, they’re great for inflating water toys and balls and whatnot.

Second the warm white Christmas lights.

They can quickly make a depressing apartment feel like a warm home.

LAN tester.

I thought of it as fancy electrician / network equipment. Not anymore. Now it’s basic troubleshooting / procedure.

On a particularly frustrating switch installation, I picked one up for like $20 on Amazon, and it’s made me much less annoyed by network changes.

For context, I’m one of those people who hoards any electronic bits that might prove useful on a hobby project later, so lots of old patch cables and cable reels with unknown breaks, so maybe a LAN tester is really only worth it for others like that, but I’d recommend it to any level of tech enthusiast at least.

People keep asking if I’m back, and I haven’t really had an answer. But now, yeah, I’m thinking po-tay-toes!

To satisfy the curiosity, just download Ollama. You can run your interactions locally, no feeding the demon and full privacy.

Set up a modelfile with system prompts for the kind of personality you want to create. Do some googling, may want to tweak settings to get response creativity just right. Higher parameter base models generally better and more hardware costly.

If you want pics, you can use StableDiffusion. I recommend using docker images because it’s really complicated and environment sensitive.

You can tie the two together with a little Python logic and have the core bot prompt the image generator at certain chat moments. Ironically, if you’re not comfortable writing code, you could just get VSCode and Gemini and spit out some pretty okay Python code without strong understanding.

There are also tools for local audio generation I’m less familiar with but am sure Google could get you there.

Maybe start with a basic Ollama setup and see if it feels like it’s working for you.