Ghosting is a normal part of life. It happens, and 95% of the time it’s inadvertent and not a slight. People come in and leave your life. That’s just how it works.

If someone isn’t worth the hassle, move on. It doesn’t even deserve an explanation or second thought.

Only you get to determine how your time is spent. Nobody deserves a monopoly over your emotions or effort, and anybody who demands an explanation is just manipulating you because they don’t respect your agency as a person as much as they value their own pride. Don’t fall for the toxicity.

There are eight billion people out there. It would take 250 years to high-five them all. Lots of noise, very little signal.

Yeah, better vantage point.

The most recent commercial game using the modified 2.5D Doom engine, was released in May 2024 on Steam. It is called Selaco.

Dalí was a huge Alice Cooper fan

US Civil war vets who lived to be 90 married little girls at the end of their life. Usually it was an arrangement. The little girls would then be eligible for the pension and it transferred to them when the veteran died. Some of these girls themselves lived to their 90s, hence you had state governments still pay civil war annuities in the era of TikTok.

+1 Singapore. Good food, I don’t stand out in a crowd, future city.

SiS 6326 with 8MB.

It was 1999 but I had a very limited budget, around $400, for the entire system. This was my first AGP card.

The Wikipedia article says that this was not supported well by Linux but that’s just not the case. It was the first card for Linux and FreeBSD that I had which let me view more than 256 colors. I ran KDE 1.x and then XFce.

Something happened between then and 2001 where I got a GeForce 2 MX 400 which ran fine with FreeBSD for many years.

This has been the story of Linux since the 1990s.

BSD does the same thing. They famously stuck at the gcc 4.2 series about a decade too long because of licenses.

Nothing new under the sun.

In my state, getting at least 2% of the vote for either Governor or President in a general election keeps the Party on the ballot for the next election.

Without hitting that 2% threshold, the party loses its official status and has to go back to petitioning status, which means resources are tied up both canvassing for tens of thousands of signatures and fighting in courts to get reinstated. So it’s a perpetual ground game and prevents the party from taking off.

The Libertarian Party has remained above that threshold for about a decade now, the only third party to do so consistently, and that’s pretty scary.

JC Penney decided to show the actual price on clothing instead of what clothing retailers usually do, which is a grossly inflated price and then a slash through it and another sticker that reads like 30% off and bullshit events like “store credit” and discount sales every weekend. It was called “Fair and Square Pricing” and was quite competitive price wise with other retailers.

It nearly bankrupted them because nobody wanted to shop at a place where they weren’t getting a deal.

https://www.nbcnews.com/technolog/fair-square-pricing-thatll-never-work-jc-penney-we-being-794530

Yeah, I remember almost 20 years ago, an older dude telling me that jet fuel can’t melt steel beams, and giving me a copy of a movie called Zeitgeist on CD-R. That dude would be in his 60’s or late 50’s now.

Before that, people like Art Bell made a living on AM radio late at night with things like the Taos Hum and UFO’s and paranormal stuff.

Like, a lot of early US settlers got sent there because they were batshit crazy and a danger to society. The Puritans were kicked out of England, and then they were kicked out of the Netherlands of all places, how does that even happen, before they ran off to America and did a bunch of crazy shit. We think of the “Salem Witch Trials” with horror and then sing “Land of the Pilgrims’ Pride” without batting an eye, who do you even think the Pilgrims were?

So a bunch of criminals and wackos settled the United States, and when they got too crazy for their village, they just moved west, killed the native men, fucked a bunch of children, and made another crazy village. Pocahantas was like 12. And then if someone got kicked out of that village for being crazy, rinse and repeat until you get shit like Mormonism in Utah and Branch Davidians in Waco Texas and bombing the Olympics and speaking in tongues and sponsoring genocide through Biblical Tourism of the Holy Land.

America is a land of crazy people who have been rewarded for generations for being batshit crazy, and have an ability to not see things clearly in front of their face. This is really nothing new.

Sisko was killed in TNG’s universe. Sisko survived in DS9’s universe due to the prophets saving him. The Trek universe diverged at Wolf 359.

The Dominion War has drastically different outcomes. Existential crisis in one universe where Sisko does a lot of meddling; barely mentioned in the other.

The biggest change to the cast is that Worf marries Jadzia Dax and becomes Ambassador to the Klingon Empire in one universe; in the other universe, he does a brief inconsequential stint at DS9 (without Sisko), never marries, then returns to the Enterprise E as pretty much the same character from TNG, and at some later point, he gets the Enterprise E destroyed.

The Picard timeline is set in the universe where Sisko died at Wolf 359.

I don’t disagree. It comes fast. Take care of yourself my friend.

We used Linux a long time ago so it’s not that big of a deal. Linux made the throw away computer that I had (486) usable. We could not afford newer hardware, so my mom and siblings got used to the “penguin.” That was when I was in middle school.

So I have always been able to just use older hardware that I know works with Linux.

When my father was getting older and I was early in my career, I thanked him by building for him a new computer, a dual core i3 with 8GB of RAM. I put Kubuntu on it, but it was still in the KDE 4.x days and it ended up being unusable. Somehow he always found a way to crash the panel, or drag things to make the panel unusable. It was the worst thing ever, and I had to switch him from KDE because even when I locked the plasmoids in place, he would find a way to inadvertently drag something wrong and make it unusable. I ended up being tech support for him and it was as bad as fixing malware Windows ME installs back at the turn of the century. Even after KDE 5.x it was the devil and so I stopped supporting it and moved to something simpler.

I installed Xubuntu and later Ubuntu MATE and both were fine for him for the few years before he faded.

The kids have grown up on Gnome on Debian and understand it well. The only extension is Caffeine. It’s very simple and consistent and clean. Having the super key as a consistent way to get around is convenient for them. They started with Bam Bam and then moved to Tux Paint and GCompris. Now they are getting older and play Steam games. They have never used a Windows or Mac. They started with buster.

I put my mom on Fedora Silverblue for her touchscreen laptop because the out of box Pinyin support was great and works everywhere (such a chore to set up in Debian). She also has an iPhone and that is what she uses mostly. I also put my youngest son on Silverblue because of the Pinyin support.

My wife uses Pop!_OS because she likes tiling and hates dark mode that everything has trended towards. But Pop!_OS finds unique ways to break itself on updates and I’m finding I need to intervene more often than I like, so we are exploring a shift to Debian and a tiling plugin maybe next year when Trixie comes out with the newest Gnome.

I stopped distro hopping and started hopping around Mastodon instances instead.

I currently have two active accounts. One is more established but the server goes down for days at a time.

The other is pretty robust but I’m still establishing myself there.

I echo the sentiment that there aren’t a lot of Asian people on Mastodon. Although it seems that vivaldi.net is mostly Japanese people.

The movie Hackers.

I just don’t understand it. I see some people with $1000 car payments and nothing toward retirement. What ever happened to looking for good deals? We had a kind of “rugged ingenuity” thing growing up where you respected people who took care of their older stuff, and I guess that still holds true today. $1000 car payments, I would have paid off my car in under a year.

Honestly, I’m scared to spend. Which I guess is okay because I’m comfortable with how we live and sometimes you have to spend on life events out of your control.

Camry

Yeah, thanks. Between ThinkPads and system76 and Fairphone, it’s pretty easy to maintain. Monitor is a Dell U3014. It was over a thousand dollars new but these days it’s under $200 used and I’ve replaced the mainboard in it twice for about $145 each time. Everything was purchased slightly used so that saves a lot.

I kind of don’t really drive much. Between biking and living close to a lot of things, I’ve put about 40,000 miles on the car in 7 years. Car is in its third decade and has about 70k miles on it.