#this one is for shieldfoss

[crustacean-on-main]

In principle I should make a proper long form post here but I have severe Fried Attention Span syndrome and nobody has been wrong on the internet, so:

1. In industrialized economies with low fertility rates class is already functionally hereditary. The reason for this is that there’s a lot of families that did well during the 30 odd years of breakneck economic expansion coinciding with the rise of China, and that that economic expansion has now stopped, so that material expectations of the current generation are anchored on parental wealth, both as a function of career paths and, like, material prerequisites for marriage. Kvetching about boomers makes the most sense if your own boomer parents failed to do anything with this opportunity and you have only yourself to rely on in a much more diminished set of circumstances.

2. The political superstructure for all this is really what you would expect: there are too many people in the power structure to form a truly isolated oligarchy, so the only scalable barrier to entry is education, and the only scalable loyalty enforcement mechanism is ideology.

3. There’s a type of Complaining About Women that is largely based on the triple insult to the (middle-class) male self-esteem that the resultant political economy can present: if you didn’t make it, then you were simultaneously rejected, economically outcompeted and ideologically censured by the women you think of as being in your class. In other words, really it’s frustration with the rigidity of the system mischanneled into sexism because from that perspective the sharp edges tend to look female.

4. The irony is that the resulting demands would be counter-productive for these guys if implemented. The enduring legacy of the ‘68 revolution is that there are plenty of women who are willing to shack up with a man who is objectively a questionable choice because of vibes and you’re out here demanding her dad have the power to subpoena your bank accounts before approving her marriage. Really?

5. “But I’m also ugly�� “skill issue”

[jenlog]

trick or treat :3

some normal money

[shieldfoss]

I assume you did not see the original twitter post then, so let me tell you:

The problem is that they have bananas in Ohio. Nobody in Ohio would have bananas under socialism. Nobody anywhere except where they grow bananas.

I am aware that it is infuriating to have allies that are this stupid but you have allies that are this stupid, and when people see them, and say “this would ruin my life,” they are not being fools, they are reacting correctly to your incredibly stupid allies.

me when i have a reliable public transport network and guaranteed housing and food and water and electricity and healthcare and democratic control over my workplace and no boss who can threaten to fire me and destroy my life and no landlord who can threaten to evict me and do the same but i can't buy a banana at the grocery store: my life has been immeasurably ruined

[shieldfoss]

Found a bag of granulated soy protein at the back of one of my dry goods boxes so I'm making vegetarian lasagna tonight

Hey Shieldfoss that soy has one of those "must be sold" low price stickers on it, how long until it expires?

Don't... don't worry about it.

When did you even buy it?

Don't worry about it :)

It's fine :)

[andmaybegayer]

Last Monday of the Week 2025-05-05

Getting into the situation

Listening: Bandcamp Friday!

Perennial '65, I cannot thank @kelp-of-discontent for getting me into Perennial enough. I love big loud yelling lyrics and classic rock instruments.

Vestiges of Verumex Visidrome from Gnome, who I really hope I get to see sometime. Thudding, steady progressive rock. It just keeps going

Scatterling Empire from Acid Magus, a ZA band who put down heavy psychedelic metal. For the Lizzard Wizard lovers in your life.

Watching: Night of the Lepus at Bad Movie Night. It turns out that no matter how good you are at miniatures you cannot make rabbits look that scary.

Sinners, literally like an hour ago, with accompanying Q&A with a reviewer. It's great when a movie is two movies that's three movies. This is a story about power and eternity. This is a story about some pretty by the book vampires doing some very off-book things. This is a movie that werewolfbaited me goddammit am I the only one who thought Pearline was going to be a werewolf.

The Big Music Scene is obviously killer but I also adore the undercurrent of power that runs through any moment the vampires get involved in. Look at all this strength! It could be yours, if you just give up everything else..

Reading: Red Mars! Mostly reading this on lunch at work. I love stories about people in close quarters. Some of my most memorable teenage experiences are from Nerd Camp, a public/private pre-university skills development thing I landed up in that had you spending a couple weeks living and working with a hundred other students in your group and like a thousand across the entire program in a non-stop educational drill scenario and that combination of focus and forced familiarity is something I find really compelling.

Playing: Skin Deep, the new Blendo game. If you haven't played a Blendo game you won't know what it means for a game to be Extremely Blendo. There's a reliable but clunky UI, there's a richly decorated environment realized with like four megabytes of memory, there's cats.

The clunkiness of Blendo games is essential to their tactility. If you need to unjam a switch, you need the code for the jammer mounted on the wall. The code is a four-letter code, and you have to punch it in by keying it in on a T9 predictive style keypad with your crosshair and if you fuck it up it buzzes at you and alerts the pirates. If you pick up a gun the only way to know whether it's loaded or if there are bullets in the magazine is to hold it up and check it. When you are covered in trash from crawling through a trash chute you have to hurry around and find a sink to clean off.

Making: Microphone holder for my audio recorder, I was trying to take some field recordings and I wanted some solutions for hooking my mini cardioid onto my recorder. Still working on a good printed shock mount but I'm getting there I think.

A bunch of photography, went to one of the big graveyards. Still sorting through that, and also some of the stuff from the past few weeks. Put some new bugs up on inaturalist.

Tools and Equipment: Budget vibrating toothbrush, a thing I was sold on by @shieldfoss, I've seen these around. The cheap kind that take a AAA and have a conventional head. They're like $15 and I've seen them around but it really is a nice step up without the expense and bulk of the big electric toothbrushes. Gets your teeth squeaky clean and basically fits in a normal toothbrush holder.

[samueldays]

@shieldfoss and similar people, please help me spot perverse incentives and failure modes in something I'm thinking of as "post-conviction bail".

The basic idea: you (generic) can get any convict released from jail by putting up a sort of bail money in escrow, except it's a much larger sum than regular bail, because it has to be enough to compensate any future victims who are harmed by the released convict during what would otherwise have been jail time.

If the convict does not reoffend or only minorly reoffends during this time (compensation smaller than bail), you get the remaining money back afterwards. Possibly with interest+subsidy to encourage accurate identification of rehabilitation cases.

The intended incentive: figure out rehabilitation programs and reoffense rates. Put your money where your mouth is, identify the "he was about to turn his life around" cases that actually can be turned around at the cost of some escrow interest, while keeping Rashid Brimmage the Twenty-Time Convict in jail because if you release him then you lose your money when he inevitably commits his 21st assault. Make fanatic decarceration enthusiasts pay some of the cost they're inflicting on bystanders, while sensible rehabilitators get to show their work and good judgment.

Moral complication: the general impression of 'buying' criminals out of jail, ugh. If the damages and compensation are large enough this is moving punishment around and converting a lot of punishments to fines, so it's not quite unpunished, but still.

Practical complication: it is very hard to estimate the amount of bail beforehand, and hard for an individual to put up the necessary amount that can run into the millions of dollars in escrow for years. Would probably need an insurance industry + actuaries backing it to be doable, but such things are isomorphic to a solved problem.

Exploit complication: deals poorly with rare one-off crimes that have low reoffense rates and pattern-match to "rehabilitated" but are actually "only wanted to murder exactly one specific guy and is unrepentant about that".

[mitigatedchaos]

Have you heard about chaosprime?

I drafted a short post about the incident, since it's both relevant to the scene and provides information about how ethics in the scene are doing. However, I declined to post it, as the seriousness of the allegations was quite severe relative to my level of certainty about the allegations, and I didn't want to go digging to verify (especially as chaosprime has already deleted his Twitter account).

Twitter user chaosprime was associated with TPOT / the rationalist community on Twitter.

Apparently, there were allegations that he engaged in three instances of consensual at the time, but bad somehow, sex. (It was pretty vague.) Given members of the community's history with questionable accusations and norms of evidence from conflict with the feminist movement in the 2014 era, he could have weathered this.

However, during the arguments surrounding the accusations, some twitter users reportedly dug up his arrest and conviction history, showing that he was previously accused and convicted of sex crimes against multiple individuals, including a minor.

It appears that he agreed that he had been charged with all of those crimes, except for the specific dates.

Another user posted a screenshot of a tweet in which chaosprime apparently said that he 'didn't mean to brag,' but his sexual orientation was too taboo to discuss on Twitter.

At some point following this, he deleted his Twitter account.

TracingWoodgrains (tw: tracewoodgrains), probably better known from TheMotte, said,

I appreciate the thread and always appreciate pushes to humanize and show general compassion. I also think as a matter of policy someone who has a history of sex crimes should probably stay away from any sort of weird sex stuff from that point forward.

How do we assess whether someone has truly reformed, or whether they're the Type of Guy who still represents a risk? I think TracingWoodgrains' approach here is a good one.

(Chaosprime and I are of no relation. My Twitter account is q-----md------k, as shieldfoss can confirm.)

[shieldfoss]

I think most of my posts (where I am OP) are in one of these categories:

programming/roleplaying stuff I'm currently working on or studying

humorous screenshot from twitter

dear @ mutual have you seen this shit?

barely anything else

("but shieldfoss I see you post something else all the time: politics!" yes but rarely as the op I think? Mainly in response to other people.)

Considering that this is the Blorbo site, it is very rare that I make an OP about some media - whether it be music, books, film, video games or __insert_here__. I don't feel like I have a lot to say, you know? "It's good I guess."

Which is why you are not currently drowning in posts about Disco Elysium even though Jesus Christ this game is good. My God.

Also hard to play! Very depressing in some places, infuriating in others.

But it is so good. It is so incredibly atmospheric, in a way I basically never see anywhere else. Easily one of the best games I've ever played.

Anyway I'm gonna dive back in now, I need Mr. Detective Man to take his shoes off so he can sink his toes into the beach sand and commune with the genius loci of revachol.

[andmaybegayer]

Last Monday of the Week 2024-03-25

Can't tell if this is allergies or if I'm sick because spring is in the air

Listening: I have been listening to The Layover podcast, the behind the scenes podcast for Jet Lag The Game. I only got into Jet Lag pretty recently because I had Nebula anyway and saw it come up. Great show, both because the premise is great (carefully designed games incorporating travel on the scale of countries) and because they can actually edit this incredibly difficult pile of footage into something readable.

The Behind The Scenes is an interesting mix of talk about the on-the-ground situation of playing the game and the filmmaking that goes on after the fact, there's some cool insight into how and why they edit the way they do and it shows why it works so well.

I think you have to have Nebula to listen to the podcast? It does just spit out an RSS feed if you ask nicely though. Thank you podcasts.

Watching: Actually watched The Gay And Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo, the video series that launched like two dozen reaction images.

It's funny, it's a well put together indie comedy series. You've probably seen most of the really standout bits already even if you don't know it already but it is worth watching as a time capsule of web comedy, it's less than two hours long all told.

Reading: Started Glory In The Thunder by 0xabad1dea. I don't know what her real name is. I've had GITT in my ebooks library forever, 0xabad1dea is the main reason I got on twitter back in like 2016 (her and a couple other software blogs) and is why my Fediverse feed is still like a quarter security researchers by weight. She's probably one of the most well known static analysis researchers in the world.

Anyway Glory In The Thunder is a gaslamp-ish fantasy, although leaning very fantasy on the gaslamps. Very teenage characters which is whiplash but only because it's been a moment. Lots of very loud characters who announce themselves and their intentions, some fun seven dimensional politics going on, and a lot of jumping back and forth in the histories of the various gods who are constantly hanging around in the plot.

I think @shieldfoss has bugged me to read this before so you'll be glad to know that I am now.

I like this, I'm about halfway through. It's easy to keep track of despite having enough fantasy names to choke a horse, although I should really stop worrying about that, I've read the Shadowdance series you really have to try to beat that one. It's also a free book, you can get it at @gloryinthethunder.

Playing: Got a VR headset. Fidgeting with said headset. Figured out how to do wireless linked VR from Linux and Windows which is good, I should have all the kinks worked out, I'll have to see how I square the onboard capabilities of the Quest 2 with having a PC and fast WiFi.

Making: Finally run through enough smaller prints on the new hotend to feel confident running off the final endcap, so that's done. The parts of the 3D printed NAS case are complete, and I have started my first pass sanding which is going to take a while because PETG is very slippery. Once that's sanded I'll take it in to the shared workshop and run through some primer layers and some paint.

Tools and Equipment: Flat network cable is a godsend if you're running it in open air in a house. Absolutely useless for pulling through walls or running in conduit, and completely bereft of shielding, but having a flat cord that can press up against frames and sideboards really does make it all neater. I ran flat cat6 for all of this.

[another-normal-anomaly]

Agree with Shieldfoss, but also: what if the underlying system is that there's some method for constructing elemental systems and imposing them on the world, and it was lost to history or only works once every five thousand years or something. And then the protagonists get to rediscover it and make an attempt to design a new system using their knowledge of the pros and cons of the existing ones. Or decide to give up the chance to do that for fear of xkcd_competing_standards.jpg.

Fantasy setting with magic neatly organised into elemental spheres, except each magic-using culture disagrees with all the others about what the primordial elements are, what their associations and correspondences are, and even how many of them there are. Spells always interact with other spells from the same magic system as though its elemental theory is complete, consistent, and correct, but when spells from two different magic systems come into contact it all goes a bit sideways, often in ways that require flowcharts to explain. Like, you think Ground Type vs. Rock Type is bad? There are five separate, mutually exclusive spheres of magic all called "Fire". The Sylvan Confederacy's "Water" magic explodes on contact with the Empire of the Five Pillars' "Water" magic and nobody knows why.

[mitigatedchaos]

In a dream, @shieldfoss visited the house I was living in. Apparently they didn't have regular knives in Denmark, because everyone there would only eat a few slices of a loaf of bread, and instead they would use 2-3 foot (60-76cm) long thin disposable rectangular blades. This was demonstrated by slicing a thin slice off the top of a baguette, lengthwise.

Anyhow, this suggests a solution to Britain's knife crime problem,

A heavy cutting board style appliance is placed on a counter. It mounts a rectangular blade with no handle that is moved up and down. For cutting meat, a serrated blade is used which is also moved back and forth, by cranking a handle for the poor and middle class Brits, and with a motor for the wealthy ones.

Obviously this is not safer for regular activities like cutting onions, but-

[serinemolecule]

have your Bread Opinions updated after seeing the slice of solid concrete @shieldfoss has been claiming is a piece of bread

(context: bread opinions)

Oh, by "indigestible brick of grain" you (or whoever that anon was) don't mean the flavorless flatbreads, but the breads where you just stuff lots of different grains into a loaf and call it bread.

shieldfoss's brick of concrete: https://shieldfoss.tumblr.com/post/657590211696558080/is-pumpernickel-grainy-enough-for-you-or-is-that

Look, if you ask if I like this kind of bread, the answer is no, it tastes horrible.

But this entire discourse started because @the-grey-tribe was talking about the existence of breads Americans were unaware of. And the reason I know this kind of bread tastes horrible is because I've had it in the US, so I stand by my original response.

The only times I've been mind-blown by the existence of a kind of bread outside of the US were in Asia.

For instance, in China 20 years ago, where I had a sandwich that was just ham and cheese between two slices of cake, because they had seen sandwiches on TV but apparently never tasted one.

[fruityyamenrunner]

praying to saints to intercede for you is doubtful because of the strange connotations of clientelism and courtier games it implies, but i think praying *with* the saints can be justified through molinism

if you petition god and ask him to take your prayer as being "with st perfecta", you are petitioning god to consult his scientia media about what would happen if the saint were indeed praying with you for your intention. and it is worthwhile to do this because by definition saints act according to grace and so their freely-willed answer might be better than yours.

a problem is what this means, to ask God to consider someone else's hypothetical prayer along with yours. the answer i think has the shape of something like: when you pray you are asking for grace to act, live and choose without sin, and the life of a saint is an answer to the question of "What Would Jesus Do" and so by collecting hagiographies one uncovers more and more of the scientia media that the Father has of the Son which one does not gain by simply reading the gospels over and over. in some way, praying with the saint is to reveal somehow this part of this scientia media.

I think this also connects to the insight had when I heard the Parable of the True Vine preached (alongside @shieldfoss at Liverpool iirc) that there was something occultly psychological in the image of Christ as a vine shooting off branches which were pruned or cut off by the Father, and that it was not as simple as the reading of one branch : one-person, but that what "the branches" (which we are) are is something stranger.

[businesstiramisu]

jumping back to @shieldfoss's point:

You get the vitamins we put in, and the industrial byproducts of the production. This is also true if you eat a berry, but those are side products our ancestors adapted to.

This is probably true for wild berries you find out foraging, but might not be true for many staple foods you buy in the grocery store. E.g. one speculated reason for increased in gluten intolerance in the past few decades is that we've bred new types of wheat with more gluten in it. (Though wikipedia cites another study that found that protein content isn't actually higher than it used to be so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

Charitably, this is one of the big things people are afraid about with GMOs [NB: not for wheat specifically, there's no GMO wheat on the market; GMO fear is about other things or just generalized anxiety], but I think evidence is that the pros far outweigh the cons so far.

you: eww, I don’t want chemicals in my food!

an intellectual: everything you eat is made of chemicals.

another intellectual: “chemicals” as used in colloquial speech typically refers to isolated compounds created by industrial processes that are not commonly found in the natural environment, some of which we know are toxic to humans and have been banned for use in food production and some of which we still use but suspect are not conducive to good health.

[brazenautomaton]

Fixing Afterlives: the Shadowlands

This is my “fixing stories” for WoW’s latest expansion, Shadowlands. Due to overwhelming popular demand, by which I mean @shieldfoss and @bhikshu I’ll go into why this is dumb and how they could have done something instead of choosing to do nothing.

I will work under similar constraints to my Heart of the Swarm rework. I magically became Creative Director of WoW just for Shadowlands, so I cannot alter any of the plot of BFA or Legion or anything that came before. The concept art is done and asset creation is proceeding and I can’t change the overall structure or aesthetics of anything, just how the story is implemented. 

Minute one, what you need to do to make this expansion work is sit down and figure out what it’s About. Now, a MMO expansion doesn’t really need a driving central theme, though it can help, and it’s allowed to be “a bunch of stuff that happened” because it needs random-ass side plot bullshit going on. But the tagline is “Brave the Beyond”, this is the AFTERLIFE, this is where we go when we die and the world of the soul -- we need to be dealing with things bigger than us, bigger than the concept of us. Fundamental and About something because they are mythic incarnations of what kind of life you can live and what kind of world exists. 

We’ll still have an About in the traditional sense though. It doesn’t have to unify everything, but it’s good to have a bit of a through-line to define the main conflict. And also, there’s a certain point where characters need to stop saying “The Jailer… speaks true…” and fucking tell us what he says and WoW passed it long ago. Our About is a central question about the Jailer, and the broader notion of Hell represented by the Maw: “Is it possible for someone to do something so horrific that they deserve infinite punishment?”

And it’s funny, you know, you see JJ Abrams talk about the “mystery box”, and when he explains it, it makes perfect sense: a mystery that is central to the story but is never answered because it represents infinite possibility until it is revealed. And told in that way, that makes sense, that can be very good! Except Abrams never does that, he always ends up having to reveal the contents of the mystery box which by his own logic can never end in anything but disappointment. So I can’t say we will have a mystery box, but we will have a central mystery that we know will never be answered: what did the Jailer do to deserve the Maw? All we know is it is incomprehensibly horrible. Like our mortal minds would literally be unable to process it, even trying to understand it would harm us. So this isn’t “nah he’s bad trust us” we need characters who DO know to really, really sell it. Emotional reactions of anger and revulsion and helplessness, and absolutely nobody whether opposed or allied with the Jailer can deny his evil or say it wasn’t that bad. When you ask Devos about it, Devos shudders in fear and disgust, but says it doesn’t matter. If the question was “how bad was the Jailer’s crime” then we’d need to know what it is; if the question is “is it possible to have ANY crime bad enough to warrant his punishment” then we don’t.

Minute two, you need to know how the Shadowlands works. Because they made it just another continent and that doesn’t make any sense at all. What kind of candy-ass warrior afterlife gives you one life and then your soul is destroyed? How does it make sense for characters to call you “mortal” when they die just as hard and in fact you are superior because you haven’t used your extra life yet? Fuck how are necromancers a thing in Maldraxxus, if your soul is obliterated when you die in the Shadowlands WHAT ARE THEY CALLING BACK?

So none of that bullshit. You don’t die in the Shadowlands, at least not without a lot of work. Souls are anima, and the tide of dead souls flowing into the realms of the Shadowlands is a flow of anima, because everything is anima. Anima is the force of significance and permanence.  Anima is what makes up shadow and substance, things and ideas. Anima is the weight of being About something, anything. You don’t die in the Shadowlands by having your body stabbed to death. You will continue to exist, slightly weaker. You die in the Shadowlands when there is nothing left to the concept of “you”. When you are utterly forgotten and what you are is “nothing”. This is how we get those Unraveling Soul Fragments in Torghast: they are souls tortured so much there is no longer a self there, just a concept of misery. That’s extremely, extremely evil. Is it possible to commit a crime so heinous it deserves infinite punishment? If not, is there a crime so awful that it would be unimaginable to inflict it even on its perpetrator?

We also have three major antagonists we need to know.

One of them is Sire Denathrius, who is just fucking perfect the way he is, we love you Denny.

One of them is Sylvanas Windrunner. Sylvanas needs to stay in character: an absolutely remorseless piece of shit with no sense of right and wrong but who does productive things because they benefit her and who is extremely cunning to know how to work an angle to her ends. She’s too smart to get lied to by the Jailer and she’s too smart to go Full Evil but not only is anything less than that completely fair game, she doesn’t get why you have a problem with it. She has allied with the Jailer because there is one thing she absolutely wants to do and only she can do and she can only do with the Jailer: she wants to break him out because in doing so the hold of the Maw is shattered and now anyone can escape. The Maw stops being a prison once the Jailer escapes. And she wants that because she knows she’s got a one-way express ticket to the Maw when she finally runs out of extra lives. She knows she is a selfish, terrible, murderous, monstrous person. Does that warrant infinite punishment? In her heart she is convinced it does, so she’d prefer to make the question irrelevant before she has to find out. She is sympathetic to the pain she is inflicting on others, because it is like the pain she has felt. But she won’t stop. She knew she endured it, so you can take one for the team.

The Jailer is super super super super evil. If we remake him to be obviously in pain and lashing out in fear, he won’t WORK. He needs to be ominous and menacing and say “your soul is mine” and that kind of shit. We will be able to generate sympathy for Sylvanas, we shouldn’t try to do it to the Jailer. He is the victim of the ultimate injustice, but also perpetrator of the ultimate atrocity. He’s not sorry at all. The fact that he has raised a philosophical question about the nature of punishment is just a nice side effect of him saying things to people to get what he wants, which is to break out and inflict tyranny and suffering. Sylvanas is not tricked by him into thinking he only wants freedom, she has a plan that has his true motives in mind. What dimension do we give him so he won’t be flat while still being completely one-dimensionally evil? He resents you. He doesn’t lash out and scream his emotions and say it’s not fair that you have what he was denied freedom. But he resents you. A little ribbon of resentment threaded through his speech to you. He’s subtly insulted by the fact you exist. He doesn’t merely relish your suffering, he relishes your failure, your realization of weakness. He doesn’t pull an Azmodan and say “okay well NOW this trap is inescapable despite you escaping the last twenty!”, he knows you’re probably going to break free of things and escape. But he doesn’t care that this trap didn’t catch you, catching you would just be a bonus. He cares that he hurt you and made you feel inferior and the inevitable doom encroaches just a bit more on you. That is the source of his sinister satisfaction and confidence. He doesn’t announce an ambush and say “now you will never escape and your soul is mine,” he announces it by saying how weak and stupid you are to fall for it.

His victory is inevitable because Death is inevitable. He doesn’t care what temporary victories you earn; he doesn’t bother trying to convince you they are only a setback. He’s going to have you eventually and you’re going to suffer on the way. What a fucking dick.

[literallymechanical]

Could you perhaps elaborate on the force-voltage, spring-capacitor etc. analogies? They sound very interesting, but I'm not an engineer and find it hard to conceptualise it.

I’m going to do a two-for-one here, and also answer a question @shieldfoss​ asked in another reblog!

Behold this table. I couldn’t find a good version of that was nicely condensed with all the math stripped out, so I just made it myself.  These are a few of the most common systems you might encounter, and how you can mathematically relate different concepts.

For example, force, voltage, hydraulic pressure, and temperature are all examples of the abstract concept we call “effort.” Current, velocity, volumetric flow, and heat flow are all types of abstract “flow.”  You can make similar analogies between the different types of physical devices we use to store “effort” and “flow” energy—or as we call them in a mechanical system, potential and kinetic energy.

This means that you can use mathematical (and physical) “transformers” to translate between concepts (e.g. water flows through a pipe that spins a turbine that generates electricity that heats a coil). Then you use the same set of differential equations to model the entire system! It’s all the same math!

Now to answer @shieldfoss‘s question:  Why are there no thermal inductors?

Well, mathematically, when we use these analogies to describe heat, we’re actually describing entropy.  Heat is a nice intuitive shortcut to use, because we have trouble thinking about what “entropy flow” means irl.

But the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that it is impossible for the flow of entropy to reverse direction.  Another way of framing this is to say that heat can never spontaneously flow backwards from a low temperature to a higher one.  Mathematically speaking, that's what inertant storage does—that is to say, you can have “flow” move backwards along “effort.” However, the universe says that when it comes to heat, this is impossible.

Now, this is an extremely simplified explanation, because I literally just took an entire graduate level course about this stuff and the final exam was yesterday, so I don’t want to think about it anymore.  Hope this answered your question though!