Any good tool can be a weapon in a pinch!

Geologists get it.

Yes, it’s a shame fascists are so hell bent on doing that to us. But perhaps if they experience consequences, they may elect to do literally anything else with their life than harass queer people.

But I know I’m being too optimistic.

Some fascists would rather die than be better human beings… So it is only generous to oblige them.

And it’s happening again, right now, as we speak.

Knowledge is being set ablaze by the powers-that-be and nobody is stepping up to meaningfully prevent it from all being destroyed.

I want to get a book like this except when you open it all it says is “made ya look!”

Absolutely ABYSMAL branding and accessibility.

Social media relies, no matter how much we hate it and wish it weren’t the case, on things being “new”, “hot”, and “FAST” while this service’s name implies the absolute ANTITHESIS of what people need to disseminate information in real time: mastodons are frozen, dead, ancient, clumsy, and/or fossilized. And worse, that’s how it feels to use, too.

An extinct lumbering beast from the ice age.

Also its name is a clumsy dactyllic meter full of dull woody phonemes that doesn’t feel good to say. Its name lands with a dull wet thud. Mastodon’s name is so forgettable that nobody i ever tried to tell about it can even REMEMBER it, and even my best friend for some reason imprinted its name as “WalrusChat” (which is SO much worse but silly with that it stuck) and she can’t remember it any other way to this very day.

Gods, the mileage it could have done with just, JUST a better name. Two syllables with accent on the first just like Facebook Lemmy Twitter YouTube Snapchat Discord Ebay PayPal Google Apple Samsung TikTok WhatsApp Signal and LinkedIn. Even Pinterest and Instagram, in conversation I constantly hear people pronouncing them as pint-rest and truncating to In-sta.

If it were made of bright, sharp, tinny phonemes that POP on the two syllable meter it’d have been extra good. I would have liked Trunky. It’s bouncy and playful and fun and it keeps the pachyderm symbolism so posts could still be called toots.

The problems extend to the interface experience too: Instead of liking and bookmarking there’s only FAVORITING and that adds FRICTION because just because you like something doesn’t mean it’s your FAVORITE. Favorite implies permanence in an otherwise transient medium and people mistake it for BOOKMARKING which needs to be its own separate functionality. Instead people see posts they appreciate, go to like it, but then STOP and ask themselves “wait, I like this but is it really my ‘FAVORITE’??? No, that’s a bit too much…” And their minds have already moved on!

THIS IS WHY THERE IS SO MUCH LESS ENGAGEMENT EVEN ON MASSIVE INSTANCES WHERE THE CONTENT IS A FIRE HOSE

AND GUESS WHAT: LACK OF ENGAGEMENT IN A CONTENT DISSEMINATION SOCIAL MEDIA APP IS,
UH,
*CHECKS NOTES*
BAD, ACTUALLY!

They COULD have lent into the branding! For bookmarking, call it “remember” (because elephants never forget!) and their “like” analog could have been “trumpet” (like trumpeting praise) whereas “boost” should have JUST been called ReToot. But instead nothing feels right and it’s clunky as SHIT.

And if all that isn’t already BAD ENOUGH, Having created several profiles on several instances myself, the sheer disparity of content from instance to instance is VAST. You can’t just go on mastodon and see the same things everyone else sees! AND THAT’S A BIG FUCKING PROBLEM! You can’t just BE “on mastodon”, you gotta also know WHERE ON MASTODON something is and follow it. AND MAYBE YOU FOLLOWED THE WRONG ONE ON THE WRONG INSTANCE FROM THE WRONG INSTANCE.

so much

FUCKING

BULLSHIT.

AND ITS NAME WASN’T EVEN ORIGINAL! SEARCH RESULTS COLLIDED WITH A METAL BAND OF THE SAME NAME FOR YYYYEEEEAAAARRRRSSSS!

that’s why.

Mastodon ANYTHING < bsky, sadly.

The world ended like sixty times already this decade.

The screaming twenties just have no brakes.

It is a mistake to assume that “shit jobs” disappearing will coincide with better jobs becoming available.

I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less to pay more to compensate actual human beings doing actual work and I’m not kidding.

Nah fuck that, the machines are scabs, I want someone to earn a paycheck for work.

Autopilot literally switched ITSELF off less than half a second from the moment of impact. it didn’t try to stop the car, it just shut itself off so it couldn’t be blamed.

Imagine if someone whipped throwing knives at your back and then tried to argue “but your honor I was not holding any knives at the time of the stabbing”

Fuck Tesla, fuck Elon, fuck every simp who shits excuses out their mouths for him

(I mean, not YOU, you aren’t doing any of those things; I’m just saying, those people. In general.)

right now is my year of the linux laptop :3

Feels like a pyramid to me. If I don’t have good sleep and good hydration I struggle mightily to control my food intake, and if I’m eating too much then I’m aching so badly and feeling so sluggish that I barely get anywhere at the gym.

Eating that will not make you happy.

It will give you at best a brief moment of pleasure, but the pain it will bring later is not worth it!

It’s not just ONE burger–that is yet another burger. An element of self-harm, another step on a journey that takes you FURTHER away from who you want to be! Don’t take it! Draw the line! Let this be the moment you STOPPED the trek toward ruin!

Skipping this one is not depriving you, you’ve had them before; they’re old news. You know what’s GREAT news though? Being able to tie your own shoe laces. Being able to WIPE YOUR OWN ASS. Being able to climb a set of stairs without feeling like you’re about to die. Being able to stand in place without becoming out of breath. Be grateful that you have not crossed those thresholds because YOU STOPPED NOW.

Oh indeed! And that’s why I love GOG! I actually try to check GOG first just in case I can buy a game I want there before I go through with buying it on steam. I would actually gladly pay MORE for the GOG version because it removes bullshit like DRM!

Removed by mod

You know sometimes I actually straight up FORGET that Steam is run by the same company that created Half-Life?

They:

1. identified a gradient of human wants
   (Video games exist; I want them on my computer)
2. Created a vector for that want to be satisfied
   (Digital distribution that conveys the games I want to my computer)
3. Stayed the FUCK OUT OF THE WAY

When you do something well, people don’t notice you’ve done anything at all.

Linux devs will NEVER suffer kernel level anticheat, so all games that require it will refuse to run. This is more of a problem with gaming industry culture at large, really. But it’s still only going to affect people who use Linux at the end of the day.

I have mint running on my laptop now.

Pro tip for anyone who wants to try Linux and maybe attempt to set up dual boot with Windows:

TURN OFF BITLOCKER ENCRYPTION IN WINDOWS FIRST.

IF you don’t, here’s what happened to me:

Mint live USB instance booted easily at first. I started the install process and selected dual boot. Mint setup then proceeded to prompt me to enroll a MACHINE OWNER KEY… And then realized that bitlocker encryption would prevent it from setting up dual boot.

It said, to paraphrase, “exit mint setup, log back into Windows, disable bitlocker, then you can come back and install”

Well that was a fucking lie because YOU CANNOT GET BACK INTO MINT!

WHY? Because mint FORGOT the MOK!

When you try to get back into mint from the boot selection menu, it says

Something has gone seriously wrong: import_mok_state() failed: Not Found

the upshot is that you computer will never let mint live USB session ever boot again UNLESS you disable secure boot in BIOS and rename grub to mmx64.efi in the ISO image.

And if you DO those things chances are mint will never present you with the option to detect and set up dual boot with you extant windows instance ever again.

I went ahead and nuked my windows 11 instance on my laptop because it was being a bitch and clearly was never going to be a good neighbor to mint. I have no major regrets because mint is nice and I like it. It just didn’t turn out how I would’ve ideally intended. But one way or another Windows 11 HAD TO GO. So, in the broad sense, I wanted to switch to mint… And I have! All good.