Suppose you would rather be dead, but keep laughing until then (channel 4, deal 1, trick M)
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Suppose your life depended upon some medication which could only be obtained from a small group of medicine-makers. Suppose the small group of medicine-makers did not really care about anybody's health or anybody's life-and-death circumstances, at least: not as much as the medicine-makers cared about their multi-billion dollar profits. Suppose the billions of dollars are a far more enormous concern than the smaller topic of the lives of a few sick people who need some medicine.
Suppose the medication is designed to prevent a particular disease from killing the patient. Suppose the disease is fatal if the patient does not take the medicine. Suppose the medicine does not actually cure anything, does not actually make the disease go away: suppose all the medicine actually does is control the rate of progression of the disease so it probably will take a couple decades to kill the patient (instead of just a few months or a year). Suppose the medicine is designed to keep the patient alive during these couple decades but also kept infected with the disease at a sufficiently virulent level to cause the patient to continue being infectious to other people.
Suppose this causes the disease to be able to continue spreading contagiously through particular social communities, always ensuring an ongoing supply of newly-infected patients to whom the medicine-makers can market their medicines. Suppose this causes the disease to never be controlled sufficiently to prevent it from sickening and eventually killing millions of people in those communities, but most of those people don't die until they've consumed a large amount of the expensive medications, enriching the medicine-makers who are becoming bigger billionaires, and continuing to infect a neverending multitude of millions of people.
Suppose the communities through which this disease spread like a holocaust were devastated and they lost between ten and thirty percent of their population right away, then continued to slowly decline during the subsequent decades as the progression of the disease was gradually killing more and more of them. Suppose the communities who lost the most millions of people were typically described as populations consisting of the diseased queers, faggots, whores, prostitutes, junkies, druggies, niggers, spics, trannies, and other such groups who can be conveniently designated as belonging to the Undesirable Castes.
Suppose the medicine-makers who made billions of dollars of profits by selling these drugs in the nations where there is sufficient healthcare infrastructure to support those multi-billion-dollar price-tags were the sort of medicine-makers who did not really care about queers, whores, niggers, faggots, junkies, and so forth. In fact, suppose some of the ownership of those medicine-making corporations were overt in their hatred towards the faggots and the junkies. Suppose the ownership of those corporations took a lot of those billions of dollars and spent them intentionally on causes which are dedicated to the genocide and eradication of those Undesirable Castes full of queers and druggies? Suppose those causes had very friendly sounding names with words like "Family" and "America" and "Concerned" in their titles, and suppose some of them even felt so strongly about their religious need to kill all the faggots and eradicate the Undesirables, they boldly displayed their anti-queer credentials. Suppose the corporate medicine-makers were often extremely religious and so it is part of their religious duty to destroy all the queers? Suppose they even give their corporations religious names, such as "Gilead"? Suppose they are so powerful, they don't even feel the need to be subtle about their genocidal profiteering? Suppose they openly and brazenly tell the world on a daily basis they are going to take billions of dollars of profits and they are not going to cure any diseases which kill faggots and junkies, and in fact they'll be taking some of the profits and using them to kill the faggots and junkies at a much more efficient rate?
Suppose that made you not want to take the medicines. Suppose you'd been telling your doctors for many years how this medicine situation is just plain wrong from the start, and you want to stay alive so you have been taking the medicine but you don't want those corporations to continue profiting from your sickness. Suppose you don't want anybody to continue profiting from the genocide of your queer community?
Suppose then you tell the doctor you are going to refuse to participate in this scandalous state of affairs, and that would mean you are going to stop taking the medicines. Suppose you decide the medicine-makers should not be receiving thirty or forty thousand dollars every year from your insurance company as the price of keeping you alive with their perverse medicines. Suppose the decision is going to accelerate your fatality. Suppose it's pretty much the same thing as when a cancer patient tells their doctor they aren't going to continue with the chemotherapy, even if that means the disease is fatal sooner.
But suppose you would rather be dead, having lived with a clear conscience, instead of being alive at the price of seeing your friends' communities destroyed and murdered by a few greedy billionaires who hate queers.
It's not easy getting to sleep with either choice on one's conscience. It's not easy getting to sleep with a couple decades of AIDS and HIV medications causing complications and side-effects and a complex of aggravating conditions.
But i'd prefer death rather than a comfortable sleep at the expense of my friends, the expense of the future consequenses to my communities, the expense of compromise to my principles. There are few principles which seem obviously worth a price of death, but i would guess this might be such a situation.
Suppose you would rather be dead, but keep laughing until then.
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Suppose you have a couple of doctors who help you with the progression of the disease and with healthcare in general. Suppose you like these doctors, but beyond the scope of their small practises the rest of the healthcare infrastructure of the entire region within a fifty-mile radius is run by a larger organization. Suppose the larger organization is a religious organization, a branch of a religion which has spent the last two thousand years committing genocide against queers.
Suppose that religious organization has been killing queers for millennia, but recently some communities have been interfering with the genocide against the queers. Suppose there are some communities which have decided to disallow the genocide against the queers, but still have not decided to stop the religious organization from being a large powerful part of the infrastructure of the region. Suppose that religious organization controls almost all of the healthcare: laboratories, hospital services, blood-testing, pulmonary treatments, scanning diagnostics; just about everything except for some of the doctors' offices and some of the retail pharmacies, almost all entirely coming under the control of a certain religious organization. All of this control over the health and well-being of the population within a fifty-mile radius is maintained by the religious organization. That organization fiercely strives to economically attack anybody who interferes with their local healthcare monopoly, and that organization spends a large amount of its money, manpower, and other resources to actively persecute and discriminate and commit genocide against the queers in the community.
Suppose you couldn't get any kind of healthcare in this region without having some of the profits go directly to that religious organization, while that religious organization is attacking your community and committing genocide against your brethren. Suppose you felt it was wrong for that religious organization to use your illness as a source of profit so they could continue attacking and killing and destroying the lives of your queer community?
Perhaps you would decide, as i have decided, to change these circumstances. Perhaps you would decide, as i am deciding, to deal with the necessary changes even if that means dealing with death. Perhaps.
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After passing a "tipping-point" as they dance halfway thru the tricking, the three Cosmic Tribe members on the cards of this tierce represent a sort of triangulation of viewpoints onto a decision-making process. The three cards can take the viewpoints of "impervious present", "examination of the past", and "courage for the future".
The Clown Of Wands (Chevalier de Trèfles, Cavalier of Batons, and sometimes Jack or Knight of Clubs) in the court of Fire is the card which represents an impervious ability to laugh in the face of adversity, the character which continues dancing and giggling and singing although aware that everything is going up in flames at the present moment.
The Producer (number 3 in the Void, cunty the Progenitor) is the card of looking toward the Past, as contrasted with the 4 of trumps (attention on the Present) or the 5 of trumps (vision of the Future). The card talks about all the sources from which the current circumstances have arisen. The card suggests careful examination of the history which leads up to the current bricolage.
The Courageous Lion (7 Wands, seven of clubs, 7e de Trèfles) is the card of bravery. It's the card which says, "Despite the flames flickering around your face, you're going to need to stick your head right in here and proceed with intrepidity." The card says to be daring and bold when taking steps forward into future efforts.
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Strategy:
Medium = leading into this trick (M), he wishes to keep his Cups in a strong position over the contractor, so he must choose betwixt Swords or Wands. Swords will be trumped by the contract-taker, and Wands might be trumped also; either might, in fact, be overtrumped by his collaborator, depending on how many of those elemental cards the taker had allocated to his Discards. The Wands could theoretically still take a trick, although it is very unlikely; so they might be a better lead than the sWords. It's not worth gambling the 2 tête points on the higher face card in hand, but it's worth trying with the face card worth 1 tête point (the Clown) rather than the pip card (Ace). The Clown of Fire is bold, risky, probably doomed, but probably the smartest move.
Dealer (Contractor) = having already utilized the Ω Archon and the 6 Wands of Fire, and having discarded the 5 and 8 Wands before the tricking, the Contractor has now fallen into the void of fire. Trump is mandatory, so he selects his lowest of the void: the 3 Producer which had been prognosticated by the Bitch.
Initiate = the only remaining Wands in his hand are the 7 and the 9, so he must acquiesce with an empty pip card.
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Scansion:
Medium = Π Pion of Wands.
Dealer (contractor) = void, 3 Producer.
Initiate = 7 of Wands.
Contractor scores 1 tricky point for the tierce +1 point for the face card; these 2 are added to his previous 16 so his new subtotal is 18 tricky points at the end of this trick (M).
Star Trek fans at Compaq
Image by AutomaticDefence
The Compaq QVision 2000+ is build around the IS-ATHENA graphics processing unit as well and to my knowledge the single third-party design to utilize this chipset. Layout and memory extension connectors don't follow the corresponding Matrox counterpart, there is no version for any interface except PCI and the RAMDAC is clocked at only 135 Mhz, commonly supplied by Cirrus Logic. At least concerning the international market, the above statement is presumably in the same way true for the later Compaq Mystique 220, although NEC manufactured a few unusual video cards for Japanese PC-98 systems, which are hardware-wise significantly different from the x86 architecture. The emblem of interest was printed on some PCB revisions and should be familiar to anyone watching the first six Star Trek movies - the TNG combadge is more oval.
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My desk
Image by mag3737
Tenuous Link: sharpie
ATi Rage Fury MAXX
Image by AutomaticDefence
While the Rage 128 Pro generally offered performance levels comparable to Nvidia's TNT2 and Matrox' G400, ATi desperately needed a product to compete with the then-new GeForce 256. Since its successor (code name Rage 6C), which eventually became the Radeon R100, was not going to be ready in time, the company introduced the Fury MAXX dual-chip video card as a kind of stopgap solution. The result could in higher resolutions and 32-bit colour depth keep up with the GeForce 256 SDR in contemporary benchmarks, but was plagued by a number of issues. For one thing, the DDR version was still beyond the card's capabilities and compatibility with the marketable AGP 2.0 is to my knowledge simply pretended, in that the MAXX will fit into an accordingly coded slot, but unlike a single Rage 128 Pro can't operate on an 1.5 V supply voltage nor use the 4x mode.
Worse still, due to the way ATi realized the dual-GPU implementation, both chips can be used under Windows 98/ME only. If the second core is set to be disabled via an onboard jumper, the card will however work under Windows 2000/XP and practically behave like a single R128 Pro restricted to AGP 2x. I'm unsure whether ATi alone is responsible for this situation, but at least the so-so driver quality improved significantly after the introduction of the Radeon family. All things considered, the Fury MAXX is a rather curious, yet interesting card that didn't achieved notable success or long life-span by sensible criteria.
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