Here’s the fantasy I had during term 1:

We nab the fucker, re-open alcatraz, tar & feather him, toss him in a cell, make it a tourist attraction where citizens visit, jeer, and throw corn kernels at the piece of shit.

Then, he went and proposed we re-open alcatraz. It’s fated.

Happy to hear his turtle genes didn’t select for longevity.

I’m rather surprised at the audacity of leaders, thinking they can contain the chaos they are stoking. I suppose Iran and Gaza may give them hope, but I think they are way too confident in the propaganda machine despite its successes to date.

Perhaps our best chance of spurring change without careening into civil war is to encourage folks to move to battleground states. That’s what I did during term 1.

Sounds like you consume useful information. I wager she uses socials as many: to compare herself to others, perusing a mix of ego-affirming and ego-damning content. These are powerful emotional hooks and oscillating between those states can be confounding. Add a dash of fatalism, which is not hard to come by in this culture, when at a low, and I think it easy to see how one might capitulate.

There are a lot of people out there that think their personality traits are inherent and that their physical attributes are static. In fact, my brother was one of these people, to an extent. He passed away at 40 years old due to morbid obesity. I attribute his downfall to capitulation by way of comparison. He came to think the hole was too big and that his genetics were too poor to make changes, despite me providing an example to the contrary. Sadly, my parents fanned the flames of his dissonance with their own identity-bound delusions.

So, my guess is that you have developed a healthy personal philosophy and have not surrounded yourself with the type of people or digital content that renders that philosophy dissonant.

And, void for binaries.

Yeah, the reactive group signaling stuff does more harm than good, just further perpetuating the conditions that allow propaganda to proliferate. This includes intentionally using the wrong words, for dramatic effect. Wholly agree that more, rational conversation and LESS insularity is the best path forward.

I stocked up on rk3566/rk3588 boards during the pandemic. They make excellent little network appliances or light-duty workstations. Mainline kernel support is now solid for both chipsets.

This post motivated me to check in on minetest and its various games. I fired up a mineclonia world. First time I’ve played a minecraft-like game in some years, and I’m happy to report that it’s quite good, especially with controls mapped to my steam controller.

I think I might even start hosting a persistent server.

Also, fuck Microsoft. I had tried to transfer my Mojang account back in the day only to be met with various obscure errors. Never managed to get it to work.

I grew up in the country where lots of people are like this. As an adult, I’ve always lived in cities. I’m some odd amalgamation of the two, perfectly content in not chasing goals but also hyper vigilant in avoiding people that enable poor health decisions. It’s quite a zen life, to be honest, but I often come upon people who work both extremes: pushing me toward unhealthy habits or pushing me toward more prestigious paths, assuming depression. I don’t know; I’m just happy to be healthy, competent, and well fed.

And, I’ve always been single, having never been compelled to try. When you don’t intend to have children, the calculus changes. I would enjoy having the full human experience, but my outlook prevents me from making that choice.

Not directly related to the original comment, but generally, I must disagree with the assertion that caring about differences in intensity is problematic or warrants the assumption of “justifying bad behavior”. I’d argue, that in most cases, failure to juxtapose two distal scenarios is more dubious and spurs a breakdown in communication. It seems commonplace now, amongst a set of the population, to cast all loosely related things into one bucket, details be damned. This is a dangerous mode of groupthink. It represents an over-correction that pushes the pendulum-of-social-discord to new heights. I also think it emblematic of the current political divide. Assuming intent, and classifying it as akin to some greater evil, only “highlights” that one party is tugging emotional hooks to make an obscure point seem clear. That’s religious bollocks. Words matter and differences are important. Good-bad binaries are born from our ideological past, to assert control or prepare us for battle.

“why are you defending bad behavior from being compared”

He quite clearly is comparing them and saying one isn’t as bad, in his tongue-in-cheek opinion.

“why do you care?”

Many are quite simply fatigued with the torrent of false equivalencies plaguing modern discourse, whether for dramatic effect or not. I think it sometimes comes from a good place, but more often, I suspect it to be self-serving, group-selection, othering behavior. The sanctimony with which some connect the dots clouds broader context. Effective communication requires giving the other party some grace.

I speak to some folks who have worked on university campuses over the past 20 years. Beginning, in earnest, around the year 2010, this type of behavior has run amok. I do think it started with good, well-reasoned intentions but metastasized into a nebulous search-for-meaning, a weary reaction to the declining state-of-the-world. Yes, identifying bad behavior can be a positive, to move society away from our more basal instincts, but oversimplifying in this manner is not helpful; it’s inflammatory. It’s like fighting fire with fire, which may work for a time, but ultimately, it’s a stopgap, feel-good, short-term solution that runs the risk of exacerbating the original problem.

Fact of the matter is, we are living during a time of extinction. Siloing into groups is probably inevitable, and I think manifestations of the culture war are a symptom, driven by environmental factors and bad actors. But, humans should be intelligent enough to maintain a broad context window and resist the temptation to reduce the complexities of cause-and-effect into emotional binaries. Mapping differences is how we truly improve and avoid thinking in binaries.

TLDR: I drank some coffee and wrote some stuff. No offense intended. For more about “thinking in binaries” check out the essays of Montaigne.

Probably too unsightly for many, but I use gooseneck arms from snakeclamp.com. I use them for many things, like making helping hands for soldering, bike maintenance, and mounting monitors. You need to get one rated for the intended load. There are a ton of mounting base options and plenty of attachments, including one for holding tablets.

Sounds like it’d not be you ideal solution but thought I’d mention it on behalf of others.

Exactly. I wager we’re headed toward more of a steampunk dystopia, where the last remnants of civilization choke on our own detritus.

Doublespeak has always been their bread and butter, like “trickle down”. Add the mindrot of “faith”, and bang, you have the reigns. My birth family ate that Reagan-era shit up.

edit: heh, I didn’t notice your username until after

i.e.: Eternal September amplified by the host of knock-on effects stemming from overshoot and the resultant insecurity

Factorio devs are goated for their no-bullshit, high-quality product. I make damn sure I have a recent copy secured on my server, just in case. Inspirational humans like this keep me from the doldrums.

It’s a vestige of our culture war, where the sanctimonious blame individuals for behaviors that were normal in the recent past, heralding a couple data points as supreme truth, while ignoring the broader context and their own hypocrisies. In my opinion, if we are so overpopulated with cats and dogs, such that they cannot roam, people should not have cats or dogs. I’d argue that keeping a cat or dog locked up also makes one an asshole.

The road to extinction is pretty well set, so I don’t see the sense in casting ire upon understandable behaviors. Might as well try to get along on the descent, though I get why such a large subset of the population are salty. For the record, I don’t have a pet, because: overshoot.

4/5g card in mPCIE slot until I source a more portable device to do phone things. Yes, there are m.2 options as well. If the supply chain eventually dries up, for expansion cards and/or FOSS phones, then I’ll only communicate via my ISP or local mesh nets, until my computers break.

Off with your head!

Another good example of low quality information streams culminating in an explosive brand of dissonance. I expect more chaos of this sort, as we deepen the idiocracy, and people go mad trying to reconcile their ideologies with reality.

I do see the logic in those atop the hierarchy pushing faith-based ideologies ahead of climate calamity. Should Project 2025 continue apace, I’m very curious to see how the various denominations respond to rapid environmental change. I expect a lot of them to lose it like this guy and fight it out. On the other hand, I could also see “faith” providing the blinders needed for a larger population to persist a bit longer. The faithful are also more likely to sacrifice themselves, so it could be an effective population control lever to pull at some point, i.e. Snow Crash.

Steam controller plus ‘sc-controller’ for linux. It supports other controllers too. There may be an android fork out there.

I also use it for most steam games, as I abhor steam input. I always launch steam with --nojoy.