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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • He was TOO good at the satire. On the left dum-dums thought he was actually right, while on the right dum-dums thought he was on their side.

    Also, I think people are hitting their limit of joking about the collapse of democracy and civil society. I know I am. I know there are now movies, TV, and books that I might have found interesting in less interesting times; now it all just hits too close to home. John Oliver can hit those “too close to home” topics and move on to other things. But it always felt like when Colbert was doing his conservative pundit schtick, he was trapped in it. It was harder to laugh along with him about other things that weren’t specifically about that kind of satire. He might have had some more material of a particular idiom if he’d stuck with it, but that idiom can wear thin.


  • Oh yeah, I’m aware. I don’t really disagree in general, but that dependency on devices is problematic. Also, I think that dependency is almost entirely a fiction. The only vendors I’ve ever met that don’t take cash, weren’t selling anything I’d generally need in an emergency or miss if I couldn’t get it immediately, e.g. craft/art fair vendors and fly by night food trucks. And I mostly managed to navigate everywhere without a map, even though I kept one in the glove box. The U.S. (I assume we’re talking about the U.S. because carbrained) is fairly easy to navigate without either as long as you can find a highway and you can read road signs. Maps helped sometimes sure, but the lack of one never made me feel unsafe. Sure, things can go badly, but that’s due to a lack of ingenuity and knowledge (street smarts as we used to call it), not the lack of a phone. In fact, I’ve gotten just as lost while looking at a map and trying to follow a friend’s directions. Maps, physical or digital, are almost always wrong or outdated to some degree.

    You’re only as dependent on your phone as you make yourself. That crutch is the real danger.



  • With no more due process, an ID and proof of citizenship do not matter at all. They’re not checking ID’s before hauling people away. And given ICE is going around masked and without uniforms there is no way to verify their authority either. I absolutely loath violence to a point, and that tipping point is the safety of the people in my family and community, regardless of their citizenship. If a group of unidentified masked gunman are attempting to kidnap someone, the only truly patriotic American response is to defend their liberty with all necessary force. Given the murder happy training of our law enforcement, that will obviously result in tragic deaths. But that, protecting the people (all the people, not just citizens) from a corrupt government, is the fundamental justification for the 2nd amendment, always has been.



  • Have you checked your blood pressure lately? Salt intake? Hydrating okay? Hormones? Allergies?

    Could be an early warning sign of something more serious.

    A little swelling and water retention especially on hot days is normal. But, if your shoes stop fitting due to a little water retention, they probably didn’t fit very well to begin with. It’s easier than you’d think to get used to shoes that are too small. Your feet adapt, but suffer.





  • The best part is the random bill.

    • Go to the doctor. Get blood drawn.
    • Doctor send the blood to a lab for the test. Doesn’t tell me who. I don’t care who. It’s their subcontractor, let them worry about it. *Go back to the doctor or get a call for results. Pay the doctor the standard co-pay. *Months later a random company sends me a bill. This is a company that I have never interacted with or entered into any contract with, for work that somebody else (presumably my doctor, but who the fuck knows for sure) asked them to do for them, sending the results to that other person and NOT to me.

    The system is broken. If any other company subcontracted a part of their work to a third party, you as the client would reasonably expect that work to be paid through the original contract, not get a bill directly from the subcontractor. I didn’t hire them, the doctor hired them. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the doctor’s subcontractor and their debt, not mine. I paid the doctor already.

    Or another variant.

    • Go to the emergency room.
    • Get separate bills FOR THE SAME SERVICE from the hospital, the doctor, and somehow the hospital again but this time it’s the emergency room (which is somehow separate with a different billing company).

    The system is not just broken. It is designed to fleece us and train us to always accept whatever debt the institutions decide to levy on us without question.




  • Mpd + a frontend of your choosing, I prefer ncmpcpp, will run on just about anything and is remotely controlled through apps or ssh. Mpd is great when the server is physically connected to the audio output device. I use it to remotely control a speaker connected server that can also run Plex (because I prefer plexamp for streaming and syncing to my phone, other android devices, and smart speakers). They both look at the same directory of a collection near 30 years in the making with hundreds of thousands of files and a wide array of formats.



  • It didn’t come together like a granny knot, which I understand to be just a square knot with the orientation of one half flipped. The knot I learned wrapped the free end around the base of a loop and pulling a section of that free end through it to create another loop. It was unbalanced for the same reasons as a granny knot though and probably very similar.

    The knot I tie now is basically a square knot where the “top” half is formed from two loops. Admittedly the knot I tie now, would have been much more difficult for toddler fingers than the knot I learned as that toddler.


  • I bought SUSE Linux once upon a time. It was a physical CD and the packaging that I paid for. Maybe a little support was bundled, probably not. That was a time when the internet was slow for most and not an option for others, wifi wasn’t ubiquitous (and if it existed, good luck getting the proper drivers loaded without internet), live distributions weren’t really a thing yet, booting from usb was finicky and unreliable, and the install CDs would have the entire OS and basically all the software you could want to install bundled. These would have been the days before the fall of Napster and the rise in other “Linux ISO sharing tools”. Ubuntu would even mail you like a half dozen physical CDs and some stickers just for asking and promising to share them in your community.

    There’s nothing wrong with buying the physical things or paying for support. That’s not what this meme is showing though.