In the UK a few years back, Boris Johnson refused to show up to a debate on climate change, so Channel 4 replaced him with a slowly melting block of ice.

It annoyed him so much he tried to privatise the entire TV station lol.

As a non-American, sometimes you open your phone and there’s a meme with no context about a candidate being shot in the ear, or people eating cats, or transgender aliens or babies being aborted after they’re born or the president trying to buy Greenland and you just kind of go “Oh, America” and go about your day lol.

I once tried to get a conspiracy theory going that Flat Earth was a fake conspiracy started by the government to cover up the real conspiracy - that the moon is flat. That’s why we only ever see one side of it and why we were able to land on it. It didn’t take lol.

I ended up just making an alias for s=kitten ssh and then added my desktop to .ssh/config so now typing s desktop does the trick!

Yeah every once in a while I get restless and start thinking I should learn how to use Mutt or something, but I always end up going back to Thunderbird/Betterbird lol

I had the opposite for some reason! Thunderbird started giving lots of weird errors, especially with Gmail, but Betterbird worked fine so I just ended up switching over.

I’ve been using Filen, seems to work pretty well, it’s got a Linux version of the desktop sync client (comes as an AppImage IIRC) and I dunno if they’re still doing it but they used to have a good price on lifetime plans that were ~100GB that you could stack, so I got a good amount of storage without having to pay a monthly fee.

Yeah you can’t go wrong with Ursula Le Guin IMO. I loved The Left Hand of Darkness too.

Also 'cause I love sharing it, her 2014 book award speech is worth a read as well:

We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

+1 for the whole Culture series of books. My personal favourite is Look to Windward but they’re all good.

The best five-book trilogy you’ll ever read, even though there are six of them.

The only thing I can think of is sending actors out to pretend to be Americans in American TV shows. Australia & New Zealand are strong in this field too, but I think we’ve still just about got the edge on it.

According to this, it’s been around since the 70’s and was originally just a catch-all for files that didn’t fit in the other default directories, but over time has come to be mostly used for config files. I assume it would cause utter mayhem to try and change the name now so I guess it just sticks. Someone suggested “Edit To Configure” as a backronym to try and make it make more sense if that helps anyone lol.

I think they’re falling into the same trap Bioware fell into, whereby they have a couple of critically acclaimed franchises under their belt and are universally praised and all is well, but then obviously that can’t last forever so as soon as the wheels start to wobble a bit, they start over-thinking, over-developing and over-managing their games because the next one needs to be a massive hit, but then what inevitably happens is they end up sabotaging development as they keep throwing out ideas and polishing all the rough edges off. So you actually end up with something that feels under-developed and bland because it’s all designed by committees and middle-managers, and built by underpaid devs on a crunch who just want to be done with it.

Also Microsoft bought them in the meantime, which can’t be helpful.

When using Windows, I occasionally encounter this weird phenomena that I never experience using any other type of OS, whereby it generates a problem that’s so stupid on such a fundamental level that there’s no way to really work around it.

Like when I recently tried out Windows 11, I made a manual restore point in case it fucked itself up doing a big update. Which it did, and then when I tried to restore it I found out that it only keeps one restore point, and that after it broke itself doing the update it overwrote my manual restore point with its own automatic restore point, ensuring that the fuckup it just did was the only thing to restore to. I tried restoring it anyway to see what would happen, and it said it couldn’t do it but didn’t explain why.

Like when an allegedly modern OS so utterly misses the point of both system restore and basic error messages, I don’t know what to do with it really.

Yeah it’d be nice if there was a really standardized Linux distro that gave developers a baseline to aim for, and then those of us who use the nerdier distros could just figure out our own stuff from there. I think Ubuntu was on track for that for a while, but they tend to go off on these tangents (Unity, Mir, Snaps etc.) which sometimes work against them, and now distros like Pop!OS and Mint are starting to fill that space a bit more.

Basically it’s this lol

Yeah Windows out of the box is really dumb/myopic. If it’s not Fat32 or NTFS, it doesn’t exist lol.

I remember being really surprised when I learned this lol. My SO had an old Windows work laptop that they’d forgotten the password for, and just out of curiosity I tried running a live Linux USB to see if we could access anything, and discovered that we could see everything from every user on there, and that login passwords really didn’t do anything at all. It was a real “we should encrypt all our drives” moment.

Yeah that was my first thought too. While I kind of get the spirit of it, in practice this is so absurdly dangerous IMO. Even if someone has the best possible intentions, there are so many things that could go wrong with this, especially if you include things like long-term effects that aren’t immediately apparent, or interactions with other drugs, especially if you’re taking other home-made pills with potentially unknown ingredients. While it can be frustrating to hear about a promising new medicine that won’t be available for years, there’s a reason why they spend so long testing these things.

IMO the better (but much more difficult) solution is reforming the medical industry so that it’s easier for people to see a doctor and actually afford to get medicine. I’m not usually a fan of big government stuff, but medicine is one of those things that just needs to be kept under supervision I think.

The A is for “Actually this game is $90 now instead of $60.”

I could, but even the base version here is $90. I’m good to just wait, honestly.