Hey, fair. I know the overall political left has always been plagued with infighting and purity testing. I’d like to at least do my part in bridging the gap between leftists and liberals by not getting in your face about not panicking over this shit if you’ll still allow me the same space to entertain my concern without calling me hysterical. Deal?

There have been growing criticisms of him coming from the left for a bit now on how some of his tendencies to diffuse situations learns more towards liberalism than leftism. This isn’t an outright attack on him or to say he’s moving rightward overall. I need to watch this video again but I think this is the one that touches on a bunch of the points, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hCxHvogsTY

From a comment on the video, “Jon Stewart made me a liberal as a child, adulthood made me a leftist.”

If you like Jon Stewart I’m not trying to say you shouldn’t. But as someone who has continually been moving left, I do feel more distance from him than I used to is all.

After everything, I do still generally respect and like Jon Stewart, but even I found his piece this week on the Daily Show to be some real weak ass shit. I try my best to keep ahold of myself, not run away too much with assumptions or conspiratorial thinking. But you don’t have to wait for them to do 100% fascist shit to start calling them fascists.

The White House defended the firing of Fong and the other inspectors general, saying “these rogue, partisan bureaucrats … have been relieved of their duties in order to make room for qualified individuals who will uphold the rule of law and protect Democracy.”

This. This right here. They are screaming their intent at us and we don’t need to wait for them to do it to respectably call them fascists. Like to be clear I guess he can do this but the way he did it is potentially incorrect? Regardless, that’s not what I want to hear you say when you do it to a 22-year veteran of the department.

Real talk: so do I. Part of it is just being a computer nerd, part of it is working in IT, part of it has just been curiously testing Linux.

I have had more stability doing this over the course of a year than I had running the monthly Microsoft updates on Windows 10. On the rare occasions something broke (usually my own tinkering and not the update process) simply reinstalling it actually fixed the problem 90%+. I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but I was legit surprised and thought I would have slightly more problems with a bleeding edge distro.

As well, it’s great to be able to just update everything with one simple command on the command line rather than having each application install an updater task that sometimes sits down in the system tray doing nothing but nagging you. Or having a program prompt you for an upgrade only to take you to the download page and make you basically reinstall the app over the old version with questionable results every time …

staring at save screen

Wait, did I just save, or do I still need to save?

zones out while processing save again

I don’t even know what to say about this mess, but yes: that’s enterprise pricing. It doesn’t need to be that way, but it can be because those are the kind of prices you can charge businesses. And really, just as a pleasant capitalistic side effect of this, is that the lower classes are completely locked off form this technology. It’s not a mystery, it’s not a conspiracy, it’s business. And I hate it.

We were so aggrieved by the lack of communication that we decided to proceed with our incredibly drastic reaction without communicating to anyone …

History from someone who moved to the platform early on:

A lot of the early adopters were the queer and trans community, first to leave Twitter after Musk’s meddling and most sensitive to the changes he was making. (In this context I don’t mean sensitive as in “snowflake”, I mean sensitive as in “aware of inevitable changes and resultant catastrophe” - when someone shits in the pool you don’t wait wait for the water to turn brown). They took the gross out humor and used it as a ward to keep some of the other elements from following over. Now they defend the term as history.

I don’t particularly agree, I understand the basis for it but ugh, it’s still gross. I keep advocating for “bleats” which kind of works as “Bluesky tweet” and leans into us all being sheep; something I find cute and take no offense at because it’s a toothless insult wielded by deeply unserious people. Alternatively, I think we should’ve just straight stolen tweet since the trademark or whatever has been abandoned at this point (???). Failing that, I’ll probably resort to just calling them posts, there’s no point in fighting momentum like this and I imagine it’ll probably settle down onto something else once the platform gets over its first wave of serious growing pains … if it lives that long.

Of course you’ll still meet individuals with a wide range of beliefs and I don’t think you can boil a complex group down to a simple answer; but yes.

A few years back now it came out that Violent J’s daughter was a furry, and like a good dad he supported her and at least tangentially got into the furry community which is very LGBTQ+. This opened up a really weird friendship between the groups, but from what I understand the Juggalos also have a history of being very anti-fascist which also jived with the progressive furries.

While I haven’t met many myself, I fully accept the alliance. They’re both alternative cultures which can look odd from the outside, but as you pointed out I think they both heavily focus on acceptance, respect, and support. It’s a good unifying thread! Juggalos and furries will show you who they are without shame, I trust and respect that.

With the Switch 2 announcement, it’s kind of clear that they aren’t even trying to be a tech company anymore. While not every last one of their consoles released was a true innovation, it did feel like something that was built into part of their brand. Now we just have the Switch 2 which is mostly what you’d expect with some decent QoL upgrades.

Nintendo is pursuing the walled garden approach. You’re barely even buying a console anymore, a lot of this hardware has more or less converged. What you’re buying is access to the cultivated ecosystem. Like everything else these days, they entice you in with the big, recognizable brands and hope there’s enough else to keep you there. Emulators straight pierce that veil and it’s why they went so hard on them.

I’m not criticizing (too heavily) the people that choose to hold on to the franchises they love, but once you step outside and choose alternatives, there’s very little to bring you back. Pokemon lost me a few gens ago, honestly not the biggest Zelda fan, and Mario alone won’t do it for me. Metroid and Starfox are scattershot … Personally I’ll stick with the Steam Deck and wait for Switch 2 emulation to roll around. And if it doesn’t, there are just so many other games to play these days.

38/M/US

Home is a very complicated question that’s going to mean a lot of different things to people emotionally, so I try not to get too prescriptive about my own definition. I moved away from my rural upbringing as soon as I could and I never really looked back. It was not a place I enjoyed or felt like I belonged either. I kind of lost my sense of home and I can’t say it’s something I really look for anymore. It feels too permanent for me. To me, home is a treasure that must be hard fought, then protected, and can therefore always be lost. I don’t think I want a home anymore.

What I want is a sense of belonging. That seems a lot easier to manage because it’s built out of the values and interests I’ve made for myself. I bring it with me wherever I go. I’m free to change it or grow as I like. I try to match it to the people and places around me to see if I like them and if it works for me and if I’m happy. I moved from the rural town I grew up in to a larger city in my state. Then I moved several thousands of miles across the country and spent most of my 20’s and 30’s here. During that time I’ve moved to several small towns and suburbs around the larger city. I’m thinking of moving again, this time outside the country. I’m still excited by the prospect, and afraid.

I assume a lot of this is probably just some psychological phenomenon that is inducing a fake/unreal fantasy. I assume even if I could move to some other country I might not feel as joyful like when I was a kid and even if I do, at some point it might not feel special anymore and it might not be like I hoped.

So maybe this is just this classic “the grass seems always greener on the other side” thing and in reality it might not be like that.

I do think these things are at least partly true and it’s perceptive of you to point that out, but it shouldn’t discourage you either. It’s a very human thing to want to try. Just set your expectations, I don’t know that you’ll simply find a new home. You’re going to have to bring some of it with you, you’re going to have to make some of it on your own, and you’re going to have to ask for help along the way.

I remember we used to house a bunch of balls together, just when they were young and didn’t mind as much. My favorite thing about them was any time you’d touch one and it would panic, they’d all tense up, so you ended up with this snake ball with 5 heads and 5 tails. I love them, they’re adorable.

I was brought up on this harsh truth by my parents just like a lot of people, I assume, but I no longer believe it.

Sure, I believe we all owe it to ourselves and others to put hard work into the system, but there should be an inherent sense of fairness (or call it equality if you will, I don’t want to get bogged down in the tedium of definitions right now). If the system is unfair, we should be working to make it more fair. It’s not satisfactory to simply leave it as it is, broken, and tell everyone else to deal with it when they may not have the resources to do so.

I’m not saying you’re wrong. I say I refuse. I do not believe.

If you haven’t played Sorry We’re Closed yet, it’s a fantastic queer horror survival RPG. Features music from Okumura Music Group, checked them out and this one has been going in my head all week, https://okumuramusicgroup.bandcamp.com/track/basic-human-rights

If you’ve got Logitech, check out Piper (which is really just a GUI wrapper for libratbag). After a lot of searching, this ended up being the solution I went with.

EDIT: pulled up the link but then forgot to paste it, sorry! https://github.com/libratbag/piper

KDE is Windows 98, full of fun customizations, but unpolished in odd ways no matter what you do.

Absolutely perfect. And part of why I’ve grown to love it.

You know I’m honestly not sure. Mostly good I think?

Sidestepping the issue entirely of the act itself - strictly speaking more about the news cycle around it. I don’t know that it needed much more extensive, exhausting coverage. Just given the nature of the news currently, you gotta admit, surprising right? I’m not even trying to imply any sort of conspiracy about why it wasn’t more popular. I’m just saying, I think news cycle would’ve latched on harder if they could have, but the public gagged and said no thanks, we’re simply not interested, causing them to shift focus.

I’m still absolutely flabbergasted at how quickly we all moved on from Trump literally getting clipped in an attempt on his life.

They tried to muster some outrage and solidarity, but most of us just shrugged and went, “Damn. Oh well, maybe next time.”

I’m always thinking about how bad humans are when thinking about numbers rationally. Of course we understand what a “billion” is, we know how many 0’s it has and can do basic mathematical operations on it. But how much is it really? One of my favorite analogies for putting it in perspective is seconds.

A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds is … 31,688 years.

The analogy already breaks down, because while most people could understand 12 days and a lot of adults can understand 31 years for having lived it (some even twice or more!), 31,688 years is completely incomprehensible again. How many human generations is that? All of recorded human history is only like 5,000 years. It’s utterly, mind-numbingly insane. No trillionaires, ever! No billionaires!!!

https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/17/business/elon-musk-richest-person-trillionaire/index.html

This was published on September 17th of this year, after most of the nonsense of Twitter and utter things. He’s still on track, by 2027 no less.

I remember finding Keen Dreams and the original Duke Nukem on 5¼ at a dollar store and having to use my grandma’s old computer to copy them onto 3½. Think I had a 150Mhz Packard Bell running Windows 3.1 at the time. I still think Keen Dreams sucks, I cannot reckon with that game having already played Secret of the Oracle. Original Nukem holds up though, chunky retro fun.

I also remember getting fitted for my first pair of glasses and then running across the mall to get Space Quest V from a Babbages or some place. I was enthused the whole ride home about how clear I’d be able to see my video games.

… I was always destined for Lemmy.