Since you’ve said the use is gaming: It’ll depend on what your price point is. Here are my thoughts:

Start with a price point. Whatever it is. Make that, or a range around that, your limit. It’s very easy to succumb to “It’s only 50 more dollars” and suddenly find yourself 20% or more higher than you expected.

CPUs: Like others said, AMD is the generally recommended CPU brand these days. X3D chips are often highly recommended for gaming, but honestly of the AM5 series are good depending on your price point. 7700X, 9700X, 7800X3D, 9800X3D are all good.

Motherboards: Motherboards: Everyone has a horror story about motherboard [brand]. Recommend checking out reviews for a specific model. One thing your want to pay attention to is the number of VRMs it has, especially if you’re thinking of overclocking.

• ASUS: Fantastic boards, legendarily bad customer service.
• MSI, Gigabyte: Okay. Neither the best features per dollar, but individual boards are okay.
• ASRock: Well-priced, basic features, robust - but a bug that bricks X3D CPUs has tarnished their image.

RAM: 32GBs is the norm for higher-end gaming these days. 64 will keep you going for a long while. Do note that AMD AM5 CPUs work best with 2 sticks, even if the board has 4 sockets. RAM with a “6000 Mhz CL30” configuration is generally considered the “sweet spot”.

PSU: There’s a “tier list” of power supplies out there. Get something A or B tiered, with some overhead over your expected wattage consumption.

You’re already asking good questions, which means you’re doing a lot better than many of the people who adopt without thinking. You’re also looking for an adult cat, which means you aren’t going to have to deal with a kitten’s destructive exploratory phase (although, fair warning, adult cats can still be destructive if you don’t prepare properly).

One thing I would say is that you should consider two versus one cats. Some cats don’t handle being alone for a long time well and can become unhappy, while others prefer not having feline company and would be just fine alone for ~48 hours. A good shelter or adoption agency may be able to tell you whether a cat prefers company or solitary.

Like some other commenters, I would strongly suggest going to local shelters and discussing with them. They should entirely understand if you aren’t able to adopt immediately and be able to discuss particulars with you.

• Echoing the other post, ASRock has had issues with X3D chips, so another manufacturer might be a good bet for now.

• My understanding is that unless you win the Silicon Lottery, the AM5 memory driver has issues with speeds faster than 6000 Mhz. Your “sweet spot” for AM5 chips is allegedly 6000Mhz CL30, which can be had for about the same price as the kit you already have.

• Also… it’s not wrong, exactly, but since you’re using it for gaming and not media creation, 128GB is a lot of memory. YMMV; I don’t have experience at 4K. It may also depend on how long you expect to keep this machine going: If it’s less than several years, you may want to buy less now and upgrade sooner.

• That case doesn’t seem to come with any fans. Especially since you’ve got a smaller CPU cooler, airflow will be key. Recommend at least 3, maybe 4 or more.

Disclaimer, I am not a physicist, just a guy with interest in sci-fi, science, and too much free time.

is their any theory centered around our frame of reference having a past but not a future?

So, the answer is, yes, this is actually kind of a common theory on how time actually works. Maybe.

This has to do with physics, and the fact that no two observers have the same perfect frame of reference. For most of us humans, our frames of reference are close enough to be identical on a day-to-day basis. It’s even close enough for (most) science. But it’s not true on a perfect level. For instance, special relativity says that time passes differently for objects in motion; GPS satellites have to correct for the fact that their onboard clocks are experience “slower” time than us observers on Earth. Even astronauts “lose” about ~1/100th of a second for every year spent on the ISS.

What’s this got to do with the future not existing, though?

So we know no two observers have a perfectly identical frame of reference - there is no objective “truth” of when something occurred. Cool. Now what? Well, what we can talk about is historic light cones. Because the speed of light in a vacuum is a universal constant, we can determine how far from you a photon departing your actions would travel. Places that photon would reach at any given point in time following your action are said to be within your historic light cone, and in common parlance, the past. The boundary of how far that photon is reaching at any given moment is, from your frame of reference, “the present”. But since nothing can exceed the speed of light, it is impossible for an observer to view beyond the present, into the future.

The catch, of course, is reference frames. You used a plural - “our frame of reference”, “we’re blazing a trail forward” - but the reality is that each of us has a minutely different reference frame and is blazing a minutely different trail. Again, for almost any day-to-day purposes this is irrelevant… but there are certain scientific experiments which exploit or even rely on this absence of reference frame.

Cool, what about time travel again?

In my first comment above, I mentioned something called closed timelike curves. Those are an actual thing: By severely bending spacetime, you can theoretically cause a photon to “curve” around and end up at the same point in time it was produced, now in its subjective past, while mathematically not violating quantum physics.

This is where things get kind of freaky and headachy; if a photon can be sent into its subjective past, doesn’t that imply a future now existing, in which that photon will be generated? The answer is, not in the frame of reference of that particular photon. A historic light cone of that photon being generated, now in that photon’s future, still exists; but that photon is now generating a new, detached lightcone…

Like I said, headachy. I also have to emphasize that while the math holds up, there’s ample reason to believe CTCs don’t exist, chief among them that our mathematical understanding of quantum physics may still be imperfect.

tl;dr: Yes, absence of reference frames means that each distinct observer is blazing their own trail, which spreads into the “past” at the speed of light. The future, exceeding the speed of light, is unobservable. This framework does provide a mathematical concept of how you could send something into your subjective past, but such a means is still theoretical at best.

This is fundamentally a variation on the question of a Temporal Paradox, also known as a Grandfather Paradox (“You go back in time and kill your grandfather. What happens?”). Although no killing happens in this variation, the basic idea is the same: Information is transmitted to the past from the future, but results in a situation where it cannot be transmitted in the first place.

Accordingly, there are several hypotheses to cover this. This isn’t even all of them:

• The closed loop theory: To maintain the loop, you will in the future build a time machine which will allow you to activate the machine in the past, maintaining the loop. Past you may even be unaware it was activated from the future.
• The Parallel Universe theory: When future-you sent information into the past, they did not send it into their own past but rather into a universe in which you do not send the information back in the first place.
• The Timelike Curve theory: Because there is no common reference frame for “time”, each quanta of “you” is experiencing a different reference frame. The historic light cone of your future self sending the information back exists, and if you could follow those photons backwards you would find him doing this. But future you, in your frame of reference, will never see the machine activate.
• The Emergent Time theory: Time is not a linear path, but a function of entropy. By inverting entropy, you have caused a reconfiguration of the universe into a version in which the machine is inactive.

Haha, holy shit. Somehow I had never connected that Piratesoftware was Maldavius. Yeah, that explains so, so very much of this entire SKG debacle.

It really is an interesting question, yes! Fires started by frictional heating are pretty uncommon in nature, but early humans could pretty readily see that objects placed near a fire would begin to smolder and burn just from radiant heat.

It really depends on when we were able to take intellectual leap of realizing that all heat is equivalent, and fire is not a prerequisite of making new fire.

We don’t know. Hell, we can’t even narrow it down to a specific place with certainty. There is strong evidence in human settlements for use of fire anywhere from a few hundred thousand to 1 million years ago. When, exactly, is hard to ascertain; for instance, some sites which are claimed to hold the oldest evidence have been criticized as resembling the aftermath of wildfires.

It is also depends on what you mean by “discovered”: Early proto-hominids were almost certainly aware of fire and the concept of burning, so are we counting from when they realized “hey, I can take a burning thing and put it where I want it, and it will spread burning there?” Or are we only counting from when fire began to be used as a tool (e.g., for clearing brush or cooking)? Or when humans discovered how to start fires in the absence of a natural source?

When it’s posts you agree with, it’s honest users. When it’s posts you disagree with, it’s astroturfing.

I joke, but unfortunately that seems to be the most common metric for a lot of people. If it’s a position “no one would really support” (in their view), then support for it must be astroturfed.

Sorry, I think maybe my point was misunderstood. Trust me, I’m in full agreement with you: Like the comment I was responding to was saying, trying to simply frame “positive” masculinity in terms of feminine traits doesn’t seem like a good idea. There needs to be a positive reference for actually masculine role models and ideals.

Like, literally everything you said is something I totally agree with.

My concern is that, specifically, initiatives which idealize working-class providers and fail to recognize the way automation and computerization have significantly flattened the jobs market (especially well-paying, working-class jobs), are intrinsically doomed because we don’t have an economy which widely supports men acting as supporters for a family. If we idealize a working provider but simultaneously leave things in a state where a man can’t provide for his family, what I fear we’re actually left with is swaths of men feeling unfulfilled and angry at those in charge for bringing them to this point.

W-Wait, what is this? A well-thought out, constructive, sympathetic comment? Here? I don’t believe it!

Real talk, though: This is an incredibly solid post and I really appreciate you taking the time to actually write all of these points out. It’s rare (or, subjectively, it feels rare) to see an admission that a major shift in how this topic is approached is needed, and I feel just a bit more hopeful seeing someone else put in the time to go this deep on it.

I would only make two add-on comments to your points:

• With regard to point #6, I agree with the concept - but we have to be careful of how we phrase this. Unless it comes with a major effort to utterly restructure our economy in such a way that either a man’s value is no longer measured in his ability to be successful in a paid position, and/or we restructure our economy to make success more viable, I fear that efforts to support “working class heros” are doomed to become awkward failures as automation continues to steamroll the viability of those positions.

• One point I don’t see brought up here, though it is touched at in (1) and (8), is that we’ve got to modulate how we discuss so-called “toxic” behavior. When so many seemingly minor behaviors are met with the same levels of disdain, villainization, and even punishment as things like actual sexual assault, it ends up feeling deeply isolating, undermines the point that is trying to be made, and pushes men towards the worst actors.

I cannot express enough how true this is. The key animators in a lot of Anime studios are overworked, but there are also “grunt farms” which handle the heavy work of filling in the animations. Even US (and really, everyone else) studios farm out a lot of work to these houses, who take the barebones stuff the main staff have assembled and turn it into a polished product.

Yeah, I struggle with Organic modeling. I think it’s because I was trained in parametric for engineering, but I just mind-blank when approaching “how do I make this complex shape?” in Blender. CAD’s approach feels very straightforward and intuitive; I know where each feature is defined and can tweak it fairly easily. Blender… doesn’t. And I know it’s definitely not me, because I’ve seen people do very powerful things with it.

Like, I’ve run through a lot of the tutorials, and every time they get to “Okay, time for you to make this simple shape on your own!”, I immediately slip back into CAD modeling mindset, which isn’t really compatible with Blender.

I’m in a similar boat right now - I use the Student Edition ($60-100 a year, depending on sales, locally installed vs. using the cloud-based 3Dexperience).

It’s not a bad deal by any means, but I do wish I didn’t have to deal with annual reinstalls and perpetually worrying Dassault is going to decide to take it away.

3D CAD software. There are a few options out there (FreeCAD, LibreCAD, etc) and Blender is a thing that exists for more artistic 3D modeling. But they simply don’t hold a candle to the features and capabilities of the paid packages, which typically have costs in the 4-to-5-digit range. And I’m not talking the crazy high-end simulation options - those I understand, they’re hard - but basic modeling features.

Hell, I’d even settle for a CAD package that had some solid basic features and had a reasonable purchase cost. Unfortunately the few providers have the industry by the throat, and so your options are “free but terrible” and “you need a mortgage to use this”.

There’s a submarine comedy called Down Periscope from the 90s. The story is, of course, absolute ridiculousness (albeit highly entertaining ridiculousness).

I’ve repeatedly been told by navy veterans, however, that it comes closest to portraying actual life in the navy - in particular, that virtually every character in the film is someone you can (and likely will) actually encounter in the navy.

“But you just like… screw stuff together, right? Cut the basic materials to make the parts, put it together, box it up, ship it out, right?”

• Someone I legitimately spoke to once. We were talking about assembling TVs.

I find that people who’ve never assembled anything more complex than Ikea furniture or something more technical than changed a pipe or switch in their home, tend to think production exists in exactly two levels: Low-tech, hand-tools-at-most labor which can be easily spun up because “anyone can do it”, and ultra-high-tech stuff like computer chips which need highly specialized factories, but where a few factories can mostly satisfy nationwide demand.

Park, Reverse, Neutral, Drive, Low (gear). The 5 “standard” positions the standard automatic gearshift levers could be set to. Versus the weird stuff like dials or push-buttons that are incredibly hard to operate by muscle-memory if you aren’t looking right at them.

Similarly, the Great Pyramid of Khafre (the tallest of the 3 greats at Giza) was once clad in a smooth exterior. The outermost cladding was taken by locals needing stone over the years, leaving only its peak still holding the original cladding.

Worked briefly in the waste management industry. Guns in the garbage were rare, but a problem. Policy was to call the local police to wherever they were found and turn them over. Police would take perfunctory statements from facility staff and review camera footage to verify someone hadn’t dumped it and claimed it “found”, then take the gun.

The real problem is we weren’t supposed to touch it until police showed up, so the garbage just had to kind of sit there waiting for them.