While I don’t think it does us any favors to front-load any plans for the future with “just send <group> to <place>”, it’s also good to point out that a chunk of them are originally from Libya in the first place.

I’m now thinking of that classic post from the old site that shows someone’s painstakingly cursive-written note of the entire text of a bluescreen (the old bluescreen with a lot of characters on screen) for tech support.

And thinking of a slightly more tech inclined grandma who doesn’t quite get all of it having a problem with a torrent and just reading the infohash/magnet link to the ISP’s support call center.

Posy is my spirit animal.

This happened to me too and the Ublock filter fixed it. I dread to think of the day YouTube is made to be completely unfixable.

Punchline Situation is Diabolical

@SomeDude • 8 hours ago

2.8M Views

I could maybe see connecting it to Home Assistant to deliver a silent notification, instead of waking everyone up at night for example.

This is the only use case I could possibly think of for networking a microwave. An enhanced mute feature.

But, being real, after 5 blades, all the satires jumped to unrealistic numbers and more extreme silliness. It was like the various comedy writers figured out that the various razor companies would be glad to slap one more on there, and sell it as an entirely new thing that needed a new handle as well. So they said (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ and went hard.

Are you telling me the Gillette Facefuckerupper of legend isn’t real?

(The Wenger Giant was a real novelty product. Yes I hate consumerism yes I hate “collector” culture but it tickles my brain just right to imagine that I’ll be able to snag one someday. They’re really expensive rarities now and serve no practical purpose but they do reveal that stodgy old Swiss executives can still have a sense of humor. Until then, the trusty no-name gas station multi tool is perfectly usable.)

Libre will really only ever be a French word to me so that’s how I always thought it would be pronounced. With an Americanish R sound.

Leeb-roffice

librɔfəs / librɑfəs for you IPA enjoyers

The one on the right seems to be slightly edited into further uncanny valley territory.

Here’s a comment I remember from months ago saying something like “it’s real omg” while replying to it with an unedited (or less edited idk) photo that is clearly different. It’s subtle at a glance.

She still looks like an uncanny caricature in the real one. But yes, people will go into surgery for one niggling insecurity, even people you wouldn’t consider bad looking, and a small number do get hooked on that feeling of “fixing” their appearance, first to diminishing returns, and then to outright becoming uncomfortable to look at.

Thankfully, this is a piece of irredeemable human excrement we’re discussing, and every dollar she spends reinforcing an unscrupulous surgeon’s yacht is one she’s not using to spread her message. Even if I never end up moving to the US, this environment of evil rhetoric has been poisoning a lot of potential places that people like me would want to immigrate to.

EDIT:

That’s enough devil’s advocate from me. I hope she chokes on whatever disgusting creature she starts “gaining rapport” with next.

Huh. The image was very weird to me, but I’ve played some version of this as a kid. Team one makes this structure against a wall, team two send people to jump and crawl forward, the goal being to break the “bridge”. I can’t even remember what we fucking called this game, this was in Lebanon in the late aughts/early tens.

There’s something about how most teenage boys are wired that made it feel exceptionally badass when your team was on the bottom and you didn’t crumple when it was the turn of one of the large gentlemen on the other team to jump.

These were no less atrocious than current Wojak format comics.

FWIW I liked that people scribbled out their shitty ideas, often with zero artfulness in MS Paint, giving it just enough effort to get the idea across. I’m seeing a lot of lazy AI images being passed around using the Twitter image generator and it’s like there’s no threshold for something to actually be funny before being posted.

I’ve been reflecting on this a lot lately, especially after watching a video by an internet funny man I enjoy (Eddie Burback) about him locking his phone away for a month (not a feasible strategy for most people.)

I also enjoy pretty much anything online much more on the desktop. When things started pivoting to app-only it felt very weird at the time - the phone access was always the clunkier secondary backup nice-to-have.

That said, 80% of my browsing happens on my phone. It’s less fun and it’s more mindless, but that’s the truth. I think I’ll hit a point where I find my phone just too magnetic but as a dopamine crutch it’s cripplingly convenient.

Hey, thanks for the laptop IT guy! Yeah everyone around the office has been very welcoming, I’m happy to be here. I’m pretty handy with computers so hopefully I won’t be bothering you too much haha…. Yeah anyway, I know you just imaged this laptop, but the thing is, I really don’t like all the fluff in the Windows updates, can I instead provide my own Windows image? It’s straight from Microsoft but you get it through a site called MASS GRAVE. And then you can apply the group policies and enable the drive mapping scripts and reinstall the secure company network client infrastructure —

I think when most people mean work they mean corporate where you have zero control. I’m just happy they let me use PowerTools. At home, manually amputating pieces of Windows has been a bit fiddly but no less fiddly than what people think configuring is still like.

It’s annoying, but for most people, even among the technically inclined, it’s fine. For now. I’m more likely to pivot to Linux than to OSX eventually.

I don’t see the humor in it anymore. Whenever it comes to even admitting the crimes happening to/in Palestine, it’s always decent people getting the entire book thrown at them, while others who actually do something evil get off scott free.

You can’t just ask for accountability for crimes. You have to kiss the ring and you have to be made an example of. What we are seeing with the response to student action is actually unprecedented and it’s genuinely unhinged. And it’s not just the US, it’s most of Europe too.

It’s not enough that our brothers and sisters in Palestine are getting rounded up and massacred. You have to support it with every fiber of your being or you’re a terrorist. After planing my whole life to move to the West I’m now genuinely scared I’ll be jailed for thought crime if it keeps getting crazier.

It’s because the latest Reddit refugee wave have been exposed to uncensored news for more than five days, breaking a personal best.

When one side unironically complains that the other has kidnapped a soldier from his tank… We’ve been conditioned to ignore atrocities I think, as humans, because those of us who survive still have to live. And further out, people have no sympathy for people they’ve never been shown are people too. But the tank soldier kidnapping thing is just making fun of their own sympathizers to their face. I’m sure there’s a kind of person who picks up on these things and goes from being a “reasonable” “centrist” to looking at both sides and understanding what they’re really looking at. It’s really not complicated

Proud of you, new joiners, I see you.

I learned it maybe this week and I’m now upset that I can’t remember from where.

Edit: I have bikeshedded my way into finding where I heard it instead of doing something else. It’s this Zack Freedman video, and here’s a transcript screenshot.

On one hand, nice to have my country mentioned in a context where we’re not being warcrimed, on the other, I’m somewhat disappointed that our government actually lifted a finger in the investigation of a foreign intellectual property case.

Gregorz Brzeczyszczykiewicz would like a word

I thought about that as I was writing but it would be a little contrived to a general audience, maybe.

I’ve commented about this link before. The gym bro thing is what made me wrap my mind around some things myself.

Honestly that could actually be interesting. Would probably be able to discuss some nuances and make the mainstream a bit more comfortable with some currently uncomfortable conversations. People can remember complicated things if they’re invested in the narrative.

I’m a cis-het potato. If any of this sounds insensitive, I can fix it:

Guy who doesn’t meet the stereotype of a “drug guy” has to cook up drugs to make ends meet. <Narrative device> makes him start making <common drug> for <uncontroversial illness>, which turns out to also be used by <some queer people> for <hormoney things>. At first he sees them as nothing more than the users he was profiting from in an hour of desperation, people who twist their sad lives around acquiring and consuming a substance, but over time as he gets further down this path he begins to understand them in a way that he (and most people) has never had to. “Upstanding-man-who-is-a-secret-chemical-man ally” can go in so many directions.

With all its many many faults, I remember seeing Dallas Buyers Club as a judgmental kid, and it was successfully able to split “queer identity” from “sexual perversion” for me. I think this understanding was beginning to spread before a tipping point in the past decade. Personally I think people saw a lot of (Western) companies really go all in on rainbow marketing, going directly from “queer identities exist” to “these are being celebrated openly” without the critical middle “this isn’t a sex thing”.

If you think it’s bad in the US or Europe (and it’s not always great, it’s not a competition) let me assure you the heightened negative attention has also made people who were able to be themselves under the radar here in the Middle East face more bullshit. The average person around me has gone from “This person gives me the ick but it has no effect on my life really, just stay away from me and my kids, it’s between them and God” to “This person should be fixed immediately before they shove their perversion down everyone’s throats.” The former is abysmal, but at that point they weren’t really seen as an active, growing threat. Unfortunately it’s not just “this isn’t a sex thing” that’s missing here, historically most people have thought “queer” = “perversion” = “pedophilia”, and this was fading slowly before being supercharged by all this torrent of negative attention.

Part of what drew me to the old site in ye olde 2013 was that it was the largest platform that wasn’t shitty about this specific subject.

Funny to see this is now the standard expectation for that place. Look how they massacred my boy