WesternInfidels

Maybe the way to fight GMail’s outsized power is to stop using GMail. You can do that without going all the way to self-hosting.

Flat Earther: Sheesh, looks like somebody’s never heard of the Great Jurassic Shake-Up

You made it very clear that you’re talking about your fears. Not your actual experiences, but your imagined ones.

I’m put in mind of MRA Men, of self described “incels,” who are fond of claiming that even a single accusation of sexual impropriety can “ruin their lives.” But as far as I can tell, that just doesn’t happen.

Believe it or not, you can’t die of embarrassment. If one person decides (if a dozen people decide) they don’t want to hang out with you (whether they call you a “creep” or not), that’s not “ruining your life.”

Do you imagine that, given the billions of people who have lived and died before you, you are really a unique outlier, of such exquisite psychological delicacy that even the slightest embarrassment will create permanent psychic scars? It’s a fantastically egotistical point of view.

participating could ruin your life

I’m not going to tell you that flirting is easy or that there’s no wrong way to do it, but this is unreasonable. Hyperbolic.

I’m perpetually amazed that cheap packing tape is so bad, “optimized” to the point of becoming almost, but not quite, completely useless. And the good packing tape costs so much, considering it’s just a one-time-use strip of plastic. It’s a little thicker than the cheap stuff, it costs ~5x as much. Worth it, I guess. Ugh.

Maybe, in the best possible future, we’ve moved away from tape entirely.

I’ve had a Debian install brick itself on update / restart. As annoying as Windows is, it hasn’t done that to me. Nothing is perfect, there are horrible software crimes hiding under every system you could name.

What is the Venn diagram of “People who can’t stop arguing in online forums” and “People who have become addicted to obsequious, flattering LLM chats?”

Is there any overlap? Is it perfect overlap? Is it some boring in-between answer?

Star drive and Torx are so much better I can’t believe they haven’t taken over the whole world

Traininisation

I used to do this but I got burned once or twice, wound up with cracked eggs that hadn’t leaked enough to stick or hadn’t stuck, for whatever reason.

There’s a pickup truck in my neighborhood sporting a gigantic custom bumper sticker / sign railing against socialism and communism. The owner drives his truck, on public roads, to the municipal community center, which is where I’ve seen it parked.

It’s a good thing that guy doesn’t have any capacity for self-reflection, I guess, because he’d probably die of embarrassment.

Like everything else, podcasts were better back in the good old days before they were cool.

You cannot just stand there at the hibachi grill and look at your watch

Please, please, please.

“Chronometer.”

You know what they say about a man with big … certificates.

Don’t you judge me, stranger

I’m only a stranger until you read my manifesto on the Oxford comma

What’s up with the strange “RJ II” scrawl on the source painting?

Maybe I’m taking things way too seriously for c/memes, but this painting is so, uh … racy? It got me curious. It’s called “The Reading,” by an Italian painter named Vittorio Reggianini, who was far more modern than I had expected (1858-1939). Those clothing styles are (I think) from before his own time; he was painting the flirtations of rich youngsters from a century before his day. Historical fiction, really.

I showed this to my wife and now she’s leaving me for Taika Waititi.

Where is the line between 1) dealing with our frustrations with these fascist murder clowns by rendering them as trivial and ridiculous, and 2) normalizing these fascist murder clowns by making them funny and relatable?

I don’t know the answer.

I feel this happens to me a lot, that I see the best sunsets from some stupid parking lot.

I think there may be actual geographical reasons. The land where I live is flat, the horizon is generally obscured by trees or buildings. But in the middle of the suburban Buy-n-Large parking lot, 10x bigger than it has any need to be, I can almost see the horizon for once. I can see so much more sky than I can from most other places.