i used to think ai was bad and refused to use ai products because of how they require tons of data collection, but i've changed my mind on it a bit. i still try to use ai products that only use ethical data collection (if there is such a thing), but i think ai might be great for the internet, because maybe it'll get people to stop taking the internet so seriously.

we've all seen all the ai-produced memes and art that have exploded onto the internet, especially after the release of stable diffusion, and text content which can be generated with chatgpt. both of these have lead to a ton of creative uses (particularly stable diffusion over verbose, generic unhelpful chatgpt-written text), but also some talk on how it'll be harder to tell what is real on the internet after anyone can create realistic looking images and long-form text easily. but they're missing the point:

nothing on the internet is real

none of it. i don't care if it's “fact checked”, i don't care if it's certified by a real xyz professional, i don't care if it's self-evident, none of it is real.

when the internet started becoming popular, we would say to never talk about your real life on the internet, don't say your name online, don't share your birthday, don't trust anything you read on the internet, and we all somehow seemed to have forgotten this over years and years of the internet becoming normalized, mobile phones democratizing technology to even the most technologically-impaired. it's easy to think that the internet has made the lines between reality and online much more blurred. but they aren't, and it's easy to fix if you just consider everything online to not be real! now, this might seem to be an almost schizophrenic-level position to hold, but don't worry, there's lots of good reasons to believe so:

information on the internet isn't real

the internet has been described as bringing humanity into the informational age, as this vast store of human knowledge, but it's not. it's the accumulation of data, which can be and is often very different from objective reality. and the data on the internet has always been junk. we've known this from the beginning, search any argument and you will find a billion results affirming why something is one way, search the opposite and you will find another billion results affirming the other.

this problem isn't new, (imo) it's the fundamental question behind the philosophical question of postmodernism, and one that philosophers have been wrestling with for decades (and have made some interesting thoughts about). this isn't an insurmountable problem in many cases, one can generally find working conclusions from the data, but it isn't the case when things get muddier, which reality tends to do quite frequently. in those cases, it's easy to pick the easiest solution that explains most of the data, but it's easy to forget the main points: the data may or may not be real, and thus the conclusions from that data may or may not be real, because information from the internet works like we do: dreaming or hallucinating.

the human brain is an incredible thinking machine, but often times that thinking isn't done consciously, or even when we're awake. how many times have you had a problem you were thinking of, and the pieces seem to only come together after you've slept or dreamt of it? how many times have you found something just because you thought something else was the case and stumbled onto the true answer? we can have complete knowledge that something was a dream, or a mistake (a hallucination), but we can still use those to consciously discover real truths, make real conclusions, and create real artworks and content, without ever losing our ability what to distinguish what is real and what was just a dream, which would be the definition of psychosis. we just need to remember that internet content are like the dreams and the misconceptions (hallucinations) we have along the way, and that believing that internet content is real would be the real delusion.

i think ai can help in this regard. a really good description of ai-generated content is how ai “hallucinates” its results, it doesn't use logic or reason (obviously, it's like glorified markov chains, why the hell would you think it's real), and as ai proliferates, more of this hallucinated content will make it's way to the internet. i think being confronted with such obviously hallucinated content (people with 7 fingers, text content presenting obvious fallacies with complete confidence, etc) will force people to realize that not just some, but all internet content are basically just hallucinations!

“but!” you say, “i can read a guide on how to fix my car on the internet and gain the actual knowledge to actually fix my car! surely that can't be fake!”

unfortunately:

knowledge on the internet isn't real

while your fixed car might not be a delusion, believing you had the knowledge of fixing your car, until you actually fixed it would be. consider me: i don't know car maintenance as well as i wish i did, and i recently just got my tires changed by professionals. i could have watched youtube videos on how to change tires, read countless articles about what steps to follow when changing tires, even used virtual reality applications to simulate changing a tire, but would i have any actual knowledge on how to change a tire? i would say no, i wouldn't know the intricacies of how certain techniques in changing a tire can affect the other parts of the car, what quirks some models of cars have with lug nuts, the sensory feedback of physically changing a real tire in the real world on a real car, all of the things that a real tire professional has that makes them good at their job.

instead, by using all that internet content, i might have some idea of what changing a tire is like in reality like how some parts of a dream might match up to reality, in truth i have only tricked myself into believing that i might have some knowledge of how to change tires, until I did it myself, and probably realized that no, i should've made sure the lug nuts were perfectly clean, that my torque wrench needs to be adjusted 10% more because it's a cheap one from harbor freight, oh god i missed the click and just snapped the bolt completely off and i forgot to chock the car and now it's fallen off the jack stands and-

in other words, i would've been confronted with the actual reality that i didn't have the real-world knowledge, the real-world experience that i paid a real-world professional to do it for instead. and it's even clearer to see when considering something as banal as entering all your symptoms onto webmd (don't worry, we've all done it). the age old story of “oh god, i have appendicitis, i have an ulcur, i have stomach cancer”, when a doctor with real world knowledge goes “no, you had taco bell and have gas” is one that you might have to live for yourself if you don't agree.

“but!” you might say, “even if i can't get the real experience of changing a tire through the internet, i can still get real experiences through the internet, the emotions and actions that i experience using online spaces is happening in the real world and is real!”

even more unfortunately:

experiences on the internet aren't real

this might be a bitter pill to swallow, considering how much some of us have invested our lives onto the internet at this point. and this isn't to say that so many people's lives haven't been irrefutably improved by the internet. but to assert that the experiences on the internet are the same as real life would be a grave mistake.

and it's easy to understand by hanging out with people online. being an introvert, i've always had internet friends, and the fact that i can connect with so many people i could otherwise never have even known at all is a great blessing. if you've seen my profile, you probably know that i'm a rather large gun nut, and maintaining the tools and abilities needed for my personal protection is a personal aim that i've had for a long time. and because of that, i've surprisingly (for an extreme introvert) have not shied away from meeting internet people in real life, and have always enjoyed it very much! (try it, it's really not that scary as you might think, even though telling someone else and carrying pepper spray at the very least is probably still a good idea).

for me, it's always fascinating how different people might be in person from what you might have in your head from their online persona. but more importantly, how different of an experience it might be to hanging out with them online. even if they're exactly the same as how they are online (which imo is not very often the case), the experience can still be completely different (and very rarely the case in a bad way).

on it's own, an online experience being different than the real-world one might not be enough to convince you that an online experience isn't real. however, i just ask you to consider the difference between watching a pov video of someone jumping out of an airplane and actually jumping out of an airplane, and why we're so hesitant to apply the same logic to all of our online interactions, not just the really fun paramotoring videos i could watch so much of. while dreams can be fun, there are definitely some dreams that i'm glad i could wake up from. while the assurance that something is a dream might be nice to have, the realization that a lifetime was is most assuredly not.

so, the internet isn't real

and that's ok. the internet doesn't have to be real, just like dreams don't need to be real, but that doesn't mean that the things you read online, your misconceptions (remember, hallucinations), online friends, the fun video and voice calls, the group chats, the online discussions and arguments, that one person who really pisses you off, that one really funny comment, the sometimes disturbing memes people share, the big-boobied ai-generated anime girls, the overly niche micro-communities, the embarrassing parasocial attachments, that one person you were so scared to talk to but turned out to be really nice, the tear-jerkers, the “it's so over”s, all the “we're so back”, the vicarous experiences and all the rest aren't any less valuable to the only thing that truly matters and uses all of it for better or worse, whether you want it to or not:

reality!

and that's really something worth being real about (fr fr no cap on god)

I'm alive!! I think? Is this thing still on? Hello? Does anyone still follow this?

Well whatever time to serve up some fresh content™ for the blog readers at home.

where the fuck i've been

My last blog post was a Japanese learning update, and good gods did I drop the ball on that. I've taken to doing the bare minimum of Japanese refolding, which involved some content watching and keeping up my Anki streak. Even then, I think I got so burnt out on refolding that some days I couldn't even do Anki right.

I then picked up a comfy slice-of-life show and realized “maybe I should be watching things I enjoy instead of trying to min-max comprehension”. So now I'm watching whatever the fuck anime and youtube vids I wanna watch. Sue me.

At the same time, I'm in my final semester of college! Surreal I've been at this degree program for five years (don't ask why I'm delayed) and I'm still not done. One more sem though. Then I can finally join the corporate world as a codemonkey.

the key realization

I am going to infodump on the blog.

Seriously, I have a whole second brain full of notes and junk on various things I'm interested in. I wanna keep that second brain up but I also wanna express what I'm collecting, hence this blog becomes my dumping ground. No one asked for this but I'll be damned if I let that stop me.

More posts soon, unless I forget and/or run out of steam. Peace.

p.s.

Writefreely does not come with image hosting. Shame, as I planned to style my posts with extensive images, in the style of some bloggers I follow. This can be solved by externally hosting my images, but I'm not sure where I can do that with little to no cost that would also respect my privacy. If anyone knows any service like that, I'm all ears.

this shit should be called liquid gold because it's fucking amazing and i have no idea how i've never heard of it until now.

i've talked a bit before how i have problems with hyperhidrosis (aka sweaty hands) but liquid chalk is now my go to for this issue over gloves for activities like weightlifting and here's why:

• when applying to your hands, it looks and feels like a typical hand lotion, even though it uses an alcohol base to quickly evaporate after 20-30 seconds or so. after being rinsed off, it leaves my hands feeling better than before, while providing all the benefits of chalk
• by using liquid, the chalk is applied incredibly evenly and only to the areas that you need it. no more chalk in between the crevices of your fingers or whatnot, it looks exactly like a handprint outline
• the biggest benefit: no extra powdery chalk. since it's applied by evaporation, all the applied chalk is properly bound to your hand and there's no loose powder. this means there's no excess chalk that can fall off, get into the air, or be brushed off.
• since the chalk is firmly attached to your hand, much less of it will be transferred to whatever you touch. there will still be some white transfer from the chalk to whatever you're touching, but it's like 90% less of what you'd find from regular chalk. this means that more chalk is staying on your hands to actually be used and it's easier to clean up
• kind of side point: some gyms and other places that dislike chalk may be ok with liquid chalk if you show how it doesn't get into the air and how much cleaner it is than regular chalk, but i doubt this benefit is really realized very often

so, you might say, what's the catch? and there's only one: the price. liquid chalk is more expensive than regular chalk, but for the above benefits you're getting, i say that it's very well worth the cost.

this review is based off of sportmediq liquid chalk i got but i bet they're all pretty similar. anyways i love this shit lol

Hey y'all!

So it's been 3 months since i've been learning japanese via the refold method, and here's the updates.

the daily routine

I've strived to at least do the following two things:

• do my flashcards
• watch some Japanese content

So far, I can still count on one had the times I've missed a day of flashcard reviews. Japanese content, on the other hand, is still a challenge to get through. I find my attention wandering most often, since the content doesn't yet engage me and I'm still trying to make my way out of that cave of “not understanding most of anything”. There are small victories here and there, but so far, I still need more time.

what to improve next

I need to study grammar more intensively, and clock more hours per day into Japanese content as a whole. Right now, I barely watch content, around 20 minutes per day, but I want to get that up to at least 1 hour of Japanese content immersion daily. As for grammar study, this should be as simple as watching this playlist every day until I finish it, then repeat if necessary.

conclusion

Lots of stuff to review, still more time I need to clock in. The process is overall, still very simple, I just need to refocus and keep logging those hours into content immersion. See you all 6 months in, roughly 2022-10-20.

A fire has been stoked in me.

A long term project has begun.

This post marks my third day of learning Japanese.

(inb4 filthy weaboo)

What?

Yeah! I'm learning Japanese. This all started because of a YouTube video I randomly picked to listen to while working out. The video in question was an interview where the interviewee, Matt vs Japan, gave his experience and thoughts on learning the language. The more I listened to it, the more his methods and hypothesis on language acquisition made sense. In particular, the “immersion in content in the target language” bit resonated hard with me, as that's how I learned English.

The method

So the method is outlined better over at Refold (link to website), but here's the jist of it:

1. Work on vocab through Anki.
2. Casually study basic grammar, enough to recognize the grammar in regular use.
3. Rack up hours upon hours of immersion in the target language.

Where I'm at

Since it's only been day 3, I've very, very low comprehension. About 2% of stuff I can actually understand, mostly greetings, and some statements about temperature (when a character says “too warm/cold!”). My main immersion comes from rewatching Yuru Camp with Japanese subs only, with some additional immersion coming from various Japanese youtubers that I've subscribed to. I've been consistent in Anki and grammar study, and I intend to keep that consistency up for the long term.

Next time, on “gen learns Japanese”

I intend to update on the 3 month mark, roughly 2022-07-20. See you then!

(This is a rant, YMMV.)

There's an ongoing narrative that goes a little something like this:

As a student, if you're burnt out, that's a result of poor planning and lifestyle on your part. You should have planned well the classes you took this semester, and you should have good time management skills so as to balance your school work and your life.

This is the common narrative thrown in the face of countless burnt out, tired students when they begin to complain that “college is too difficult” or “the professors are too demanding”. And while there are those lazy students who simply join in the choir hoping for some easy passes, a majority of these students actually experience overload in their course requirements. Overload that is justified by the ongoing narrative of “students should take responsibility for their workload”. I say, yes indeed, students should take responsibility for their workload. But at what point are students even made aware of their workload? When does a student get to know how much time is required weekly for a specific class? Is this information provided before the sign up period for classes? During the sign up period? Or, as is the case most often, only when the classes begin?

Unfortunately, there is no time metric for classes, or at least not one that's standard across most universities. There exist systems within specific universities that attempt to measure the weight of a class, but they're often unspecific or just plain wrong. Take my university for example. Each class is given a number of “units”. These “units” range from 1 up to 4, and every student must take a minimum number of “units” per semester. The thing is, “units” are inconsistent. There are physical fitness classes that, while being an essential part of the curriculum and are not optional, are given a 1 “unit” score, and aren't even counted towards the total number of units. Meanwhile, there are classes that essentially are two-in-one, theory and practice, lecture and laboratory work classes, that are only given a measly 3 “units”, despite functionally being two different classes. No functional standard exists.

There is an even worse problem perpetuated by the ongoing narrative. The narrative puts all the responsibility on the student, and none on the professors who preside over and teach the classes. Professors are absolved of any responsibility to respect the time of students. They're under no obligation to provide a reasonable amount of time per day or week to spend on their classes. Professors aren't made to make their lectures concise or accessible, instead they are allowed to pad their lecture out with as much fluff and noise as possible. Did you think to ask a professor for their syllabus before signing up to the class? Good luck getting a response, much less a response with any respect. This lack of responsibility makes the job of the student much less about actually learning, and more on navigating and slogging through hours and hours of coursework that the student didn't even know they were signing up for. While time management skills and good planning can help, especially if you ask previous students of class you plan to take, only so much of that can help in the face of professors who blatantly take up more and more time for no real good reason.

(Oh, and I don't even want to hear the classic excuse of “but professors have it hard too!” I don't give a shit about your shitty situation if you insist on passing on your shitty luck to us students in the form of shitty time wasting work.)

Given all of this, what is there to be done? The system certainly won't change, but student behaviors can, and there are a few strategies to be able to cope with professors wasting time. I've listed a few suggestions below, but use these wisely. I ain't about to be blamed if you start harassing the person who grades you.

• When given a task, don't be afraid to ask the professor “how much time should we spend on this?”. You can make the question more specific, by asking how much time per day or per week, or how much time the professor thinks we should take to finish. If they give a non answer, ask for a suggestion. Press this matter as far as you can reasonably get it.
• Ask around for higher level students or alumni that have taken the same class under the same professor. Ask them about their experience, and how much time the class ended up eating from their weeks and days.
• Abuse attendance checking and absence rules. As soon as a class takes your attendance, that's your signal to be able to leave when you feel you're not getting anything more out of being physically there. If a class is online, you don't necessarily have to be paying attention, or even be attending. If accosted by the professor, simply state that you have other matters that need taking care of, or respectfully state that you are needed elsewhere unexpectedly. You don't have to give a reason if you don't want to, unless there's some weird rule that allows professors to be particularly personally invasive.
• Work in parallel with your professor. Instead of complaining about them and asking them to change, team up with your fellow classmates and collect resources that are more time efficient, but cover the same material. Don't be afraid to push the boundaries of collaboration. As long as you know what constitutes plagiarism, cheating, or whatever bullshit offense the university has, you can work with your classmates at a level just below that, and offer a parallel, more time efficient way to learn the same material.

In the end, while the system is broken and professors are still going to be mostly shit at doing the teaching part of their jobs, there are ways to counteract their bullshit.

I hope my rant and suggestions help you. If you have any comments about this article, thoughts to share with me, or violent reactions for me to ignore if you're a professor, just reach out to me on Fedi.

the world has gotten pretty interconnected, and i think pretty clearly evident by the extended supply-chain issues in the wake of covid-19's effect on the global economy. we take it for granted that the grocery store has eggs from who knows where, bananas probably shipped from afar, and peanut butter that's spent who knows how long in processing and storage, until it's made its way to the shelf for your perusal. sure, the egg came from a chicken somewhere, the bananas were grown on a tree somewhere, peanuts processed somewhere, but it's become so second nature that we might not stop to think about this arrangement until something gives us pause.

having an interconnected network of free trade has definitely given us many benefits in technological progress and standard of living in spite of popular critics like kaczynski (better known for other work) et al. and yet, in spite of the grand achievement of getting to pick between 18 slightly different formulations of ketchup at the grocery store, it does feel like we've lost something, hasn't it? this isn't as sarcastic of a question as you might think, there are many people who don't particularly care or believe that it's necessary for everyone know exactly where their egg came from.

i was having an interesting conversation with someone with a strong self-professed love of communism and labor theory, and i'm going to attempt to recreate their argument as accurately as possible, but most likely completely butcher it 😩. much of modern day technology, such as vaccines or semiconductors, is so complex that it necessarily requires extensive and highly reliant supply chains to be viable. by objective metrics, this has proven to substantially increase quality of life, and regression from this ideal, as suggested by critics such as kaczynski (again, better known for other work) is either malicious or misguided at best. instead, efforts should be made towards improving overall system trust, efficiency and resiliency; just because a system grows beyond a single person's scale doesn't make it inherently bad, there just needs more work to be done.

i can appreciate this argument, but as you can guess, i beg to differ: supply chains need to be community-sized because the egg matters, for several reasons:

• awareness: without awareness of the entire production of a product, of course we will naturally underestimate the labor and material cost involved. at best, this can just be a benign lapse, like forgetting an ingredient in a recipe after making it. more often, it can lead to dramatic amnesia, such as when naysayers of electric cars love to point out the heavy effects of lithium mining or the burning of coal to power the electrical grid. at worst, corporations, with a vested interest to make their product seem greener than it might actually be, might maliciously mislead consumers and obfuscate its components.
• value: with increased awareness, we can begin to appreciate products beyond a simple market-priced monetary value, but with the full wonder of the sum of its whole production. what was once an egg that magically popped into existence moments before arriving on the grocery store shelf suddenly becomes an egg grown by one of Jim's chickens, transported and stored by Cheryll, who was then purchased by you. in this model, the social value of a egg can change dramatically if sourced from a farm known for unethical practices for example, even while the market value remains the same. the same cannot be said of the magical egg, stripped of any social or communal value, which could be replaced by a farm halfway across the country without you even realizing it.
• conscientiousness: this may seem self-evident, as a natural consequence of increased awareness and value. and yet, its importance can not be understated. only with increased awareness can consumers produce fully accurate valuations of products, which you might be more inclined to use before it goes bad than a magically instantiated egg. in this way, decreases in consumption occurs naturally and effortlessly from the bottom up, rather than a top-down method of gating consumption at the time of purchase. the psychological benefits of such a less cognitively-intensive model shouldn't be ignored.
• decentralization: shortened supply chains may not be able to service as many people, but with less dependencies, they can be proliferated in a more decentralized way. while there may still be common, traditionally-produced materials used in these local supply chains, most of the supply chain being distributed means that consumers won't just have more options in total, but also that producers will have the chance to uniquely tailor their products directly for their local community.
• resiliency: by promoting decentralization in supply chains, they will naturally be more fault-tolerant to remote instability due to their local nature, and will also have more decentralized options to source alternatives from. recovery will be less bottlenecked by singular outages, improving responsiveness.
• participation: finally, with more local production, consumers will have more opportunities to shape products with their consumer habits, and even get directly involved with producers. where personal relationships were once impossible, now has the opportunity to help communities grow stronger as they can work to better meet each other's needs.

so how do we do this? it's easy, and doesn't require changing how technological progress occurs, only where we apply it. instead of only applying technological improvements to the total efficiency of production, we can target towards a combined heuristic of efficiency given scope. while this may decrease total efficiency on paper, i believe that the listed benefits will greatly reduce consumption, waste, impact and emissions more than any marginal increase in efficiency could ever bring.

however, there's one final benefit that i believe might be one of the most valuable of all. as focus shifts from incremental improvements in efficiency to that of self-sufficiency and versatility, singular technological advancements can be applied exponentially through decentralized supply chains, resulting in massive improvements to overall production that aren't even possible with marginal efficiency increases of conventional supply chains. (computer scientists will groan as i reference big o notation. don't lie, you were thinking of it)

3d printing is a good example of this in action in recent history. on the surface, it may seem like a less efficient method of production that generally results in weaker materials than an equivalent one milled from metal or wood. however, where before you might have had to ship materials out to a dedicated milling facility where they used incredibly expensive and complicated machines to create custom objects, or buy lots of specialized tooling to carve things out of wood, things can now can be flexibly and easily printed with the touch of a button. far from being useless or simple toys, i think the ingenuity of the 3d printing community can speak for itself, as they've found so many ways to produce replacement parts for complex machinery like tractors, or even full, resilient tools like guns. the value of technological advances like 3d printing doesn't just come from easier creation of individual bespoke components, but instead from allowing these previously-prohibitive production chains to become more accessible, since one object no longer requires expensive/special machinery which all have their own dependency chains on their own.

there's a lot to be gained from shorter supply chains and luckily, each of us has the power to make this a reality by buying locally, or from companies committed to keeping their production as local as possible. as you might begin to think about the production chains in your life, i urge you to consider not just total efficiency, but overall scale and structure as well. and then you might agree with me, that those eggs could be so much more valuable if they just had a little less magic.

this post was originally found on my fediverse account. it has been reposted here for easier reading and visibility.

we've surely all had people that, when you attempt to talk to them, it takes them a very long time to respond if at all. i've had several people like this in my life. while sometimes it's not quite their fault, differing timezones or life gets busy, it shouldn't also be my problem that they don't contact me when i want them to.

in the past, i'd harbor resentment to these people. “why won't they respond” or “why won't they talk to me”. very unhealthy, but now i've made a way to deal with this.

match priority. if it seems that they don't make any effort to try and keep in touch, just lower their priority in your life. you don't have to be friends with everyone. if i am not enough of a priority to be responded to, i should match that and lower or stop attempting to contact them.

a lot of my hobbies are stupid. evolutionarily, objectively, rationally, whatever.

it makes no sense to leave the safety of civilization and intentionally subject yourself to the whims of nature, wild animals, and whatever else unknowns that may be lurking, moreso to do so solo, with only what you can carry on your back. and yet, talk to almost any backpacker you know and they can probably confirm that backpacking can be one of the most meaningful experiences of your life.

it's a peculiar kind of risk, because most backpackers will probably say they aren't in it for the adrenaline rush or to prove that they can survive by themselves (bushcrafting remains niche, after all). it's not what you might expect from other kinds of risk-taking; there's no thrill, no gain to be had when you return from a trail, yet the payoff still remains large.

a more rational person might say that this risk is unnecessary and a walk around the paved paths of a national parking lot seems a lot more comfortable instead. why go through all the trouble of backpacking when you can get better photos from national parks for instagram anyways? or why not book a camping site on a concrete foundation, i hear they even have wifi nowadays! just seems a bit stupid, maybe.

motorcycling is a bit more negatively-fetishized when the risk is roughly comparable to.... swimming. don't get me wrong, it's pretty easy to thrill-seek on a motorcycle. yet ask a motorcyclist for they truly enjoy about motorcycle rides, and it could just be the simple pleasure of riding, sure. but i'd wager that you might get an anecdote that sounds similar to the backpacker, as they try to explain about the beauty of riding through gorgeous mountains or the feeling of freedom from a long road trip, instead.

none of which require the motorcycle, says the rationalist, really. a car ride is much safer, can carry more, and isn't as susceptible to the weather, anyways. motorcycling is dangerous and unnecessary when cars exist, just seems a bit stupid, maybe.

this isn't to insult those who enjoy camping sites with hookups, or with no interest in motorcycles. some have families or responsibilities that they aren't comfortable with jeopardizing, which is a perfectly valid and reasonable decision. but it would be an insult to equate the value of a national park campsite to roaming the backcountry or motorcycling to that of a car ride. and it's just wrong to say that increased risk is just thrill-seeking or unnecessary.

some activities are inherently more risky, yes. i don't take risks lightly, and if there's a way to offset it, then i will go the extra mile (heh) every time.

but the real risk might be to the sealed bubble of your car with the a/c and radio set exactly to how you like it, to the daily routine of your 9-5 cubicle, to every whim and desire easily accessible with the swipe of a credit card, to the comfort that has so easily rotten countless lives from the inside out until it's too late.

so i'm not afraid to be a bit stupid, maybe.

i think shooting gloves are kind of unnecessary for most people, but for me at least, they're a pretty important piece.

i have super sweaty hands and feet, so much so that i have literally always set up fans aimed at my hands on keyboards (tech or piano) for my whole life. without them, i would actually get small pools of sweat on whatever i touch if i'm using it for a while, and i am prone to getting athlete's foot in warmer weather.

i've literally had sweat drip off my hands without doing super strenuous activities before, and i've tried antiperspirants and even hyperhydrosis remedies like odaban (which basically adds a layer to your skin to prevent sweating, but i'd literally sweat it off, helped a little didn't really work for me). personally, i find that like wearing socks is the best way to help regulate bodyheat and prevent me sweating through my hands more.

i find that shooting gloves definitely help with aforementioned issue a lot, but also let me just manipulate stuff harder. @awl@shitposter.club helpfully pointed out that features on older weapons (like AKM style mag release levers, charging handles, safety devices on Mosins, or some 1911 slides) may have sharper edges that can almost require gloves unless you don't care about little scrapes here and there.

you may find gloves unnecessary, but if you have hyperhydrosis or even just sweat a lot, i highly recommend you at least just try it out!

personally i thought my 5.11 gloves were slightly nicer than generic mechanix gloves, but that might be personal preference. @purple@nya.social also helpfully pointed out that they only last a season or two anyways, so definitely just go with whatever fits and feels the best for you!