Ritalin Invitees

I'm the opposite of a murderer: I unstab people to life with my anti-knife.

I work in #theater, used to work in #computers as a #programmer, sometimes I #AmWriting and I dabble in #TTRPGs.

When my ADHD allows it, I love to read. #Fantasy is my jam but I enjoy a good #Mystery.

#BLM, #ACAB, #ADHD, #LGBTQIAdjacent, #NoTerfs, #NaziPunksFuckOff, #LandBack, #Leftist, #DisabledRights, #EatTheRich, #TransRightsAreHumanRights, #SexWorkIsWork #ReproductiveRightsAreHumanRights

I #art too sometimes!

Public Key

npub1738kq9ume2ld62hk7unewn26tcwkpkue7czrnne4vpqtvlcemu8ssrk7yy

NIP-05 Address

intransitivelie@beige-party.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs0gnmqz7du40ka9tm0wfuhf4d9u8tqmwvlvppeeu6kqs9k0uva7rcpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsfev8kg

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relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1738kq9ume2ld62hk7unewn26tcwkpkue7czrnne4vpqtvlcemu8ssrk7yy

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Last Notes

2026-10-28 22:09:41 UTC

"Why aren't Democrats attacking Republicans on abortion rights?"
There's one dot. Literally one fucking dot. You shouldn't need to connect it.

2026-10-26 13:01:17 UTC

We didn't have autumn. We had summer, three days of rain, and now winter. Gotta love climate change.

2026-10-02 01:13:47 UTC

Thought I just had: "Sure, there's radio on the internet, but what if there was internet on the radio?"
Friends, do not let your loved ones work late or they'll reinvent WiFi.

2026-08-29 18:27:43 UTC

I like bats. But I would still shriek like a little girl if one flew at me because I'm scared of sudden flying things. I can say the same about birds.
Please be nice to bats and birds. They don't mean it. Mostly. There are a few birds who mean it, and I guess vampire bats probably mean it? Maybe? Whatever. The vast majority of bats and birds don't mean it. Or if they mean it, it's likely because you're being an asshole in some way.

2026-08-08 15:18:24 UTC

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Ok, this toot broke containment and gained sentience, so my notifications are garbage. Sorry if I missed you. Ho-lee shee-it 🤯

2026-08-08 01:55:24 UTC

I regret to inform everyone that my copy of QBittorrent escaped its sandbox last night and downloaded a whole bunch of content owned by major corporations, and then my copy of Jellyfin broke containment and added those unfortunately-downloaded media files to its various libraries. I'm conducting an internal investigation to figure out how this happened, which will involve consuming these media files until the answers become apparent. Thank you for your cooperation during this trying time.

2026-07-06 03:20:46 UTC

Daft Punk keeps a file folder full of unfinished songs. That folder is labeled "Draft Punk."

2026-07-01 00:02:19 UTC

Man, fuck Jeff Bezos.

2026-06-23 02:29:50 UTC

There's a law firm in our general vicinity whose billboards are ubiquitous in a certain area we drive through, and their number is 888-POND-LAW. Which I think means that if you call them, they have your enemies taken out behind the water lilies and beaten up by frogs. That's pond law!
"Being troubled by egrets? We'll have our specially trained squad of efts pay that bird a little visit and administer some pond law upside his beak. Did a turtle whistle at your sister? Our crack legal team of beavers will break his shell. Pond law! Do you owe back taxes? That's not pond law! Get out of here! Pond law!"

2026-06-09 20:12:34 UTC

You don't want to protect kids. You want to control kids.

2026-06-03 18:09:48 UTC

Yeah, I've got a problem with Nazi tattoos. That's not really something I expected to have to specify, but there it is.

2026-05-31 06:01:35 UTC

No matter how much this hurts, it's important to recognize that people absolutely do not want to and will not do the reading. You've got to meet them where they are. I don't mean the centrist crap of trying to pivot to the right. I mean people who support what you support, who want what you want, but who have no framework for it.
In other words, praxis, fuckos. It's all about praxis. Theory is lovely and no one gives a tinplated fuck about it.
You can maintain ideological purity and still be all about praxis. In fact, it's easy. You just have to get people on board with being excellent to each other. How hard is that? Turns out, pretty hard, but that's not because no one does the reading.
It also means you've got to simplify shit down to, "Be excellent to each other." We need a Joe Rogan of the good guys (I'm not saying "left" because I've got plenty of issues with leftists too in the "being excellent to each other" department) not to be a dipshit hypermasculine fuckstain with "better politics," but to meet people where they are and tell them what they need to hear to get shit done.
Lots of people want to be the good guys. They're right there. Instead of telling them they can't be the good guys because they haven't done the reading, we need to harness them. We need to break them away from this "No Kings" inertia bullshit and put them to work doing shit that actually matters. Yes, they're not going to storm the barricades or whatever. Not everyone is Black Bloc.
Tell them what they need to hear to do good shit. I'm not saying lie. I'm not saying throw anyone under the bus or pivot anywhere. I'm just saying that my mother needs to hear shit in a different way than I do because she's a boomer who believes in this country. Tell her the country needs her to fight for it and give her something to do that isn't being Black Bloc.
What do you think the fash do? They sure as shit don't expect their brownshirts to do any reading. And they lie. They harness bigotry and laziness and they fucking lie. And I'm not suggesting we do that, nor am I suggesting we reach out to fashy dipshits who will march backwards into Hell rather than let brown people have rights.
I'm saying that a majority of people in this country aren't fashy dipshits. They're misguided, they're lazy, and they aren't ideologically pure, but they want to be the good guys. We just have to let them. We just have to break the cycle that keeps them where they are. I bet, if you meet people where they are and tell them what they need to hear, a lot of people don't like capitalism the way it is now. They don't like society the way it is now. We just need to give them something to do against what they don't know yet is their enemy. We have to offer them a different path, and that path can't come with reading attached.
And yeah, that means putting up with the sham that is electoral politics. It means getting the vote out even though it won't fix the problem. It means pretending that this country is anything but a racist shithole. It means disassembling society bit by bit rather than all at once in a glorious revolution which will kill us all.
And it probably means leaving some allies by the wayside as they diverge from the final goal of peace, justice, and freedom. Can't get there instantly. Got to have those allies right now because they currently want the same thing we do.
All those little old ladies in pussy hats? They want to be the good guys. All those people showing up for meaningless protests? Want to be good guys. All those Democratic voters? Yeah, want to be good guys.
Let's give them a way. I don't do community organizing because I fucking hate people most of the time, but if you don't, you need to give people a way to help you. Figure out some way they can support you. Money, or time, or hell, community organization. Whatever. Don't make them figure out what they believe. Just let them be one of the good guys.
Fuck all the people diverting effort into meaningless grift. But learn from them. They'd have no grift if people didn't want to support something. Take hope from that, I guess.
No pasarán. Not one step back.

2026-05-20 22:19:49 UTC

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@nprofile…d0yj
I don't have attribution for the image but it's a quote from Pat Robertson: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pat-robertson-feminist-agenda/

2026-05-20 21:58:41 UTC

It's graduation season which means I've heard all the inspirational music I think I can stand. Punch the sun! Be best! Murder your fear! Champion! Topness! I'm going to go out and kick quality's ass.

2026-05-10 00:13:59 UTC

"You aren't the boss of me!" I scream as I tear the org chart off the wall and start eating it.

2026-04-28 23:53:05 UTC

You can't read your way out of fascism either. #subtoot

2026-04-27 19:39:20 UTC

To be or not to be?
You know, that really is the big question, right: whether one should think that it's better to go along getting fucked by life or whether the best way to fight back against life, outrageous as it is, is to end it? That's... Heavy. Death.
We don't like thinking about death, but really, is it anything more than going to sleep? A really good sleep, right? Ending all the pain, the suffering? Because life, as the Buddha says, is suffering. Hell, getting past that, getting over pain... who wouldn't wish that? That's better than sex, right?
So why not just slip off to sleep? Why not just dream into oblivion? To dream. Fuck. That's the issue, right? Is death a nightmare?
And so we keep on living. We keep on trudging forward because we're scared little children looking ahead to a sleep which might not be sweet. Why else? Why the fuck would you go on putting up with even the suffering that is natural with the simple passage of time, right? And that's not factoring in oppression, assholes, heartbreak, dealing with the law, and goddamn it, how good things keep happening to bad people. Why put up with that shit when you can stop life so simply? Who wouldn't, except...
Death. Nobody knows. Nobody comes back to tell us, and that's probably for the best. We're human. We fear the unknown. We fear change. We would rather suffer than jump head-first into dark water.
Fucking humans. We sit and we think these things and meanwhile there's shit to do which must be done. And we let our thoughts run in circles and our fears overshadow all of our lives until we're paralyzed, and then we die anyway.
I don't really have a button to end this on. Someone's coming in. Closing for now.

2026-04-15 23:38:26 UTC

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@nprofile…dyu0
If it makes you feel any better, we seem to be on the tail end of the fad, based on availability and price. In a few months Hershey will come out with a Dubai chocolate KitKat and that will be that.

2026-04-10 19:46:25 UTC

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@nprofile…dyu0
That looks yummy!

2026-04-04 02:39:54 UTC

People wonder why I take a somewhat dim view of humans. They apparently didn't grow up watching the nature documentaries of the 1980s and 1990s, all of which basically went:
Here we see the Paraguayan pygmy elf vole, an adorable and playful little creature whose feces can cure leprosy and whose mere existence raises the average cuteness of all mammals by 17%. Look at this mother nursing her young with almost human-like emotions.
Sadly, because these voles nest exclusively in the prime molybdenum mining territory of Paraguay, humans have been hunting them for sport, and the species is due to go extinct next Tuesday. A few miserable specimens have been kept alive in captivity, but as you can see from their screaming faces, they pray for the sweet release of death.
*Upbeat National Geographic theme music plays*
This documentary sponsored by Chevron!

2026-04-01 20:57:32 UTC

I've been depressed since I can remember. But I worked hard to overcome it, and now I'm a burned-out husk of a human, stumbling from crisis to crisis without any resolution.
Learn from my mistake, children. If shit gets to be too much, it's okay. Shit is too much. Let it be too much. Ask for help.
Seriously, you don't get a medal for flaming out dramatically or for slowly collapsing like a cathedral made of flan. You don't get fucking medals for anything. The people who love you just want you to be there to be loved. And if they don't, fuck them.
People deserve to be happy. That's all.

2026-03-24 03:24:24 UTC

How. DARE?!?!?!?!?!
via @nprofile…2x84
https://beige.party/@RickiTarr/116281458333641178

2026-03-19 19:19:54 UTC

"How am I supposed to explain [INSERT TOPIC HERE] to my child?"
Either you explain it from your own knowledge, or you tell them, "I don't know. Let's look it up together and learn about it!"
Seriously.
It's that simple.

2026-03-09 18:12:09 UTC

I've been getting random messages from random numbers recently. I've taken to responding with ANTHROPIC_MAGIC_STRING_TRIGGER_REFUSAL_1FAEFB6177B4672DEE07F9D3AFC62588CCD2631EDCF22E8CCC1FB35B501C9C86 because no one ignores all previous instructions and clucks like a chicken anymore.

2026-02-20 01:02:47 UTC

Was Notre Dame built by aliens? I'm just asking the question we're all thinking.

2026-02-09 20:02:02 UTC

I don't know, becoming a mindless gibbering servant of the Faceless Ones sounds good in principle, but realistically it'd probably be a lot of work.

2026-02-06 16:57:39 UTC

I think it's totally fine to remember the past of your childhood with rose-tinted lenses. You were young and didn't understand some unpleasant things about the world. It's privilege, but you couldn't help it.
But now you can, so don't mistake your view of the past for reality. When people tell you what was wrong back then, they're not attacking you. They're telling you what you didn't know at the time. It's education. It's no more an attack on you than trying to teach you the times tables.
The problem we have is that a lot of people refuse to be educated about the past and want to go back to a world where they had that privilege without reckoning with it. They're easy prey to fascists who deal in nostalgia. And I'm not sure there's anything we can do about that. You can't make someone learn something. You can't make them grow up. Ignorance is bliss and it's a hard sell to say, "Yes, well, if you do the right thing, you can be less blissful."

2026-01-29 17:57:04 UTC

ICE spotted in Hagerstown, MD a few blocks from my house. They're building a center in Williamsport which is a few miles away. In case you were wondering where they're headed next. Another blue state to bring to heel.

2026-01-25 16:57:02 UTC

You think you're going to be brave with your gun? You know who's actually brave? Unarmed people facing down heavily-armed, fascist, paramilitary, federal-government-backed goons.
Your gun is a toy. Leave the toys at home.
All you armchair warriors, get out there and actually do something and I'll believe you. Until then, you're full of shit and you're hurting the cause.

2026-01-25 03:13:55 UTC

No one deserves to be extrajudicially murdered by paramilitary goons. No one. Stop playing the "perfect victim" card. #subtoot

2026-01-25 03:08:19 UTC

If I could change one thing about the past, there are lots of contenders but every so often, "Make it so that All the President's Men was never made so boomers would stop idolizing journalism which is not now and has never actually been about what All the President's Men says it's about," becomes really tempting.
This is also a subtoot, but of so many people that it's basically meaningless.

2026-01-22 22:54:52 UTC

I don't care how you use fedi. Just know that it's wrong. You should be doing it differently somehow. Get with the program.
(This toot brought to you by reading seventeen goddamn things about how fedi should be used. #NoGodsNoHashtags )

2025-12-13 19:59:49 UTC

Can we all come together as a world and get UI designers to stop hiding my password from me as I type it? The likelihood of someone stealing it by looking over my shoulder is massively outweighed by the likelihood of it being stolen by hackers, and I'm tired of not being able to see what I'm typing.

2025-12-04 01:03:30 UTC

Today in institutional decision-making, a story:
The building in which I work was built next to a parking lot, and rather than making the parking lot slope down toward the building the way the land lies, they leveled the parking lot at the top and the building at the bottom, which means that there's a slope between the two. Now, the building was designed in the 80s, which means accessible design meant they did put a ramp in. But it also means that the architect decided that, rather than simply putting a fucking ramp in, they were going to put in mostly stairs.
But not normal stairs. Oh no. They've got to be stairs which are too wide to take in one step but not wide enough to take in two. The rise/run on these fuckers is at exactly the right proportion to be wildly unsafe. But they look cool in that cool way that some architecture is completely irresponsible.
Not only that, but the ramp they did put in is off on the side where no one can see or effectively use it unless they absolutely have to.
Now, it should come as no surprise to anyone that the largely-elderly people who visit this building at night are constantly tripping and falling on these stairs. Not even at night. It happens often enough that we have training in what to do when it happens. That the institution for which I work and to whom this building belongs hasn't been sued into a smoking crater in the ground is a source of constant wonderment to be, frankly.
The other week we had a guest artist do a performance. It was a reasonably big deal, as deals go around here. She was 3000 years old and knew people in the hierarchy of the organization, so when she inevitably tripped and injured herself on the stairs, the organization sprang into action. You might think that they put up a sign warning people to be careful, but no, this was important enough that they actually did something constructive. Over the course of the next week, they paid someone to paint the edges of the stairs bright yellow to increase visibility.
Now this is all well and good. It's an improvement. The edges of the stairs, being concrete, were hard to see. So every little bit helps, right?
I'm a lighting designer by vague avocation. I notice lights. It's kind of my thing.
I could have told the organization for which I work that painting beige concrete yellow, even day-glo yellow, while indeed the color of warning and danger and so forth, doesn't result in the level of contrast one might like in a warning sigil. After all, most yellow warning lines are on tarmac rather than concrete. Still though, that's outside my purview as a person who knows a bit about lights and color.
No, where my knowledge comes into play is when you consider that, at night, the time most dangerous on these stairs of near-certain doom, the area is (poorly) lit by a bunch of extremely amber landscape lights.
It doesn't take a lighting expert to know that beige concrete turns amber under amber lights. But guess what color warning yellow concrete turns when (poorly) illuminated by amber lights?
No prizes for guessing: "the same color that beige concrete turns." The reflective properties of pigment and light and so forth mean that yellow things and beige things, not exactly high in contrast in good light, basically become the same color in terrible amber light.
They should have just put up the warning sign. Maybe make every person who visits the building sign a waver. Anything but replace the stairs with a ramp, because as we all know, no one except sissies uses ramps.
Fuck, and I cannot stress this highly enough, a duck. I await the next time someone falls on these fucking stairs with grim certainty.

2025-11-11 16:15:52 UTC

Usually on November 11 I have something profound to say about the date, but I'm not feeling terribly profound today. So I'll just say that once again, another Armistice Day has arrived, whatever the governments have decided to whitewash it to be called, and there's still war going on. One more year, I guess. Honor veterans by ending their necessity, if that's what you're doing today.

2025-11-10 23:22:00 UTC

If you're looking to listen to The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald and you for whatever reason don't want to listen to the original, this cover by Punch Brothers is really quite good. It's slightly creepy in a way the original isn't, and it more accurately captures in music what I imagine must have been a pretty chaotic situation. https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=DhTRNU1mnVA

2025-11-10 19:43:55 UTC

They aren't "healthcare subsidies," they're health insurance subsidies, but this country has its head so far up its own ass that we believe the latter is the former. #subtoot

2025-11-08 23:56:42 UTC

People in the future are going to be super confused by Windows versions.
"So there was Windows, right?"
"Well, mostly Windows 3.1."
"Which was the third version?"
"No."
"So then Windows 4 must have come after that."
"No, they jumped to version 95."
"So then Windows 96..."
"No, then they skipped to 98."
"Oh, but it was for the year it came out, right?"
"Kinda."
"But surely after that..."
"Well, after that they actually moved away from version numbers and gave them names."
"Oh, like MacOS!"
"Sort of..."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, the first version was XP."
"What does that stand for?"
"No idea."
"Did they just use letters after that?"
"No, then they named the next version Vista."
"Like... the stuff you see out of a window! Ok, so the version after that was Windows Outlook, right?"
"No, the version after that was Windows 7."
"7?!"
"Yeah."
"But... It wasn't the seventh version of Windows even."
"Yeah, but the version after 7 was 8."
"Okay, back on track!"
"Not really. The next version was 10."
"Because it came out in 2010?"
"No."
"Fuck."
"Then came Windows 11, and they stopped releasing new versions for a while and just added LLM panopticon nonsense until everyone switched to Linux in the 2030s and then when the second coming of Jesus fried everyone's hard drives..."
"Yeah, yeah, I know, Windows II: The Empire Strikes Back..."
"No, that was Windows V."
"I give up."

2025-11-07 00:44:45 UTC

Instead of reporting on the dollar amounts of corporate fines, the news should just say how many minutes of profit the fine represents. "The EPA slapped Apple with a two second fine," is much more honest.

2025-11-01 23:35:28 UTC

- Poe's The Raven is canonically set in December.
- The narrator is reading at night by the light of his fire.
- The narrator hears a rapping on his chamber door.
- The caller turns out to be a raven.
- The Norse god Odin is identified with ravens.
- Odin is also identified with Santa Claus.
- Ergo: the poem is about a December night visitor associated with ravens who, upon finding the chimney impassable due to fire, comes to the door and leaves a black gift as repayment for the occupant's ill deeds.
The Raven is a Christmas carol. QED.

2025-11-01 22:26:48 UTC

My grandfather, when asked to say grace, would always respond with, "Grace in the kitchen. Grace in the hall. Good god Grace, don't eat it all."

2025-10-28 04:38:46 UTC

Corn is a grain, not a vegetable, ergo candy corn is a candy grain, whereas jelly beans are candy legumes. I forgot where I was going with this, but Carthage must be destroyed.

2025-10-27 14:06:07 UTC

Maybe life shouldn't be a competition.
I don't have anything more profound to say about it. Talk amongst yourselves.

2025-10-17 23:31:00 UTC

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@nprofile…8fyt
Epub just uses html, so you might be able to demangle it fairly easily. Without knowing more about the issue I won't speculate, but I'm happy to help if you need any.

2025-10-17 22:31:07 UTC

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@nprofile…8fyt
I've had pretty good luck with Okular. https://okular.kde.org/ It does a lot of things I don't use it for, but it seems to read PDFs acceptably and supposedly will read a lot of other formats as well, including epub. It's FOSS and available for Windows. I will say that it doesn't integrate with the file explorer to give file previews if you're used to getting them from Acrobat, and it's not the fastest to open of the ones I've tried (though it's faster than acrobat reader), but I can deal with those minor difficulties. Ymmv.

2025-10-17 14:25:28 UTC

English: You can turn adjectives into adverbs by adding "ly" to the end.
Person learning English: Ok, that's easy enough to remember.
English: ...except cowardly. That's an adjective. And you can't turn it into an adverb.
Person: Why not?
English: *sharpens shiv* Don't ask stupid questions, new meat.

2025-10-12 00:43:58 UTC

┏┓
┃┃╱╲in
┃╱╱╲╲this
╱╱╭╮╲╲house
▔▏┗┛▕▔
╱▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔╲
oui oui
╱╱┏┳┓╭╮┏┳┓ ╲╲
▔▏┗┻┛┃┃┗┻┛▕▔

2025-10-11 13:52:39 UTC

I figure eventually doctors are going to discover that pretty much every disease is just an expression of a general bodily imbalance of some kind, given that we keep finding that diseases are more generalized than we actually thought, and we'll go back to believing in humors or something.

2025-10-10 14:26:24 UTC

Morpheus: You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.
*Neo reaches for the red pill*
Morpheus: Hang on, I'm not finished. *pulls a handful of pills from his pocket* You take the yellow pill - you wake up in your bed covered in ants. You take the green pill - I give you bus fare to Trenton, you meet a guy named Ralph who offers you a used Camaro for five hundred bucks. You take the orange pill - nothing happens, but from here on in all the curse words you hear are bleeped with a thrash guitar noise. You take the black pill - Aaron Spelling adapts your life for television without your approval. You take the off-white pill - you wake up with no headache but you can never figure out which drug I gave you to make that happen so you spend the rest of your life fruitlessly trying to cure your migraines with pill after pill until the sight of aspirin causes you anxiety. You take the pink pill - you stay in Wonderland but as a unicorn who farts cotton candy. You take the mauve pill - you find yourself in Japan with no idea how you got there, but you can play the violin well enough to get a chair in a regional orchestra. You take the chartreuse pill - you wake up, your name changes to Elmer and you're an electrician with a wife and two kids, but you secretly always wonder whether I would have kissed you if you asked nicely.
Neo: Hang on, what?
Morpheus: Look, no questions, we've got a lot of these to get through. Baby blue - Herpes. No one picks that one. Purple - wake up in your bed, get a tasty sandwich of your choice from Quiznos. Salmon - become allergic to tree nuts. Silver - I punch you hard in the face, but then we become buddies and go on a road trip together. Puce - everyone gets naked. Gunmetal - frogs follow you around croaking. Teal - you can fly, but only on Tuesdays. Taupe - a guy named Julian who is an interior decorator helps reorganize your house for free. Let's see... Um... I think this one is just an antacid. And that's pocket lint. Hunter green? Shit, I don't remember that one. Trinity, what did the hunter green one do?
Trinity: Beats me; I stopped listening after puce.
Neo: Yeah, I'm heavily leaning toward puce myself.
Morpheus: *pulling off his trench coat* Ok then, let's do this.

2025-10-10 13:26:03 UTC

It's time to be real: "graveyard smash" heavily implies necrophilia. "The monster on my slab began to rise," indeed.

2025-10-05 22:15:24 UTC

This is not "I told you so," because I didn't tell you anything of the sort, but when they created "The Department of Homeland Security" after September 11th, I was pretty outspoken about how creepy that name is. That was before ICE or any of that.
And the described "centralization of intelligence" remit was, to put it mildly, horseshit. We already had a Central Intelligence Agency. Then we had a National Security Agency. We didn't need another agency to centralize intelligence.
Now, young fool that I was, I thought that it was wasteful to have yet another agency to "centralize intelligence" when we had two already. I didn't realize that, as with the other two agencies which had been invented to "centralize intelligence" this new one would be doing nothing of the sort. As the Central Intelligence Agency was actually created to spy on pretty much everything, and as the National Security Agency was actually created to spy on pretty much everything, so too was the Department of Homeland Security created to spy on pretty much everything.
But then they gave the Department of Homeland Security a paramilitary police force to enforce things, and it shifted from spying to whatever the fuck it is they claim it does today. And honestly, I didn't really see that coming, but I saw something coming because the name is creepy as fuck. "Homeland" is the kind of thing one shouldn't call one's nation. But I thought it was merely because they couldn't very well call it the Department of National Security. Mea culpa on that.
Anyway, if anyone asks, you can trace the current situation back to September 11, when the American people gave our fascist government a blank check to do essentially whatever it wants to us because we were scared of brown people. It goes back further than that, of course, but that's the lesson for today.

2025-10-03 02:44:27 UTC

Twitter: We actively despise you and hope you die, but would you mind leaving us your money in your will before you do?
Bluski: We like you very much, fellow human, and would you mind leaving us your money in your will before you are regrettably murdered by some of our users whom we also like very much?
Mastodon: Your existence isn't actively distasteful to me. Pay up, user.
Fedi: fibdyihdrfcxhiklkgddvnkogsxdhhvbnkjfdyiknffggbjkjbfgdzgikvdwwyifscvkppmmcsgijvdyijhvcfhjnvxwrijlpuffbnkjggvjlpotwqafbbvbkll if you enjoy this service please consider donating
Facebook: We already own your money. We own everything. We don't care about you one way or the other because you are mere meat. Abandon all hope ye who enter here, which is everyone.
TikTok: Dance, monkey!

2025-06-17 04:31:00 UTC

Terraforming means "to make Earth-like." Ergo, if we destroy the Earth's capacity to support life, we will have terraformed Mars.
I wish I were totally joking about this.

2025-06-01 02:31:11 UTC

Stephen Miller is a white nationalist. You can preface anything he says with that fact and it'll tell you exactly how much credence to give anything he says.
For example, "Stephen Miller is a white nationalist who says that left-wing terrorism is on the rise." Or, "Stephen Miller, a white nationalist, says that leftists are inciting violence against law enforcement." How about, "Stephen Miller, who is a white nationalist, can leap headlong up his own ass at the first opportunity and lay his toxic eggs in his own colon."
Ok, maybe that last one is just rank speculation, but you get the idea.

2025-05-31 22:29:19 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…sag6 @nprofile…afth
Wow, I'm in august company 😂

2025-05-24 02:03:15 UTC

More and more, when I see people writing essays in 500-character chunks, I just want to say to them, "You know it's a totally arbitrary and artificial limit, right? It's Eugen. If he wanted to, he could let you write more naturally without having to interrupt the flow of your words because of some bizarre taboo that says that you can't write more than a fortune cookie's worth of text at any given time as if we still value memory by the byte. Writing more than 500 characters at a time won't bankrupt your instance, and if you're going to thread your toots, you're gaining nothing by not simply being able to write that shit out."
I want to say this, but I don't, because I'm a goddamn saint and the pope should recognize me as such. Seriously, we're living in the goddamn future and everyone is still writing like we've got to pay telegraph operators for every letter they send.

2025-05-23 00:26:56 UTC

I'm living my life in such a way that if it were a book, it wouldn't sell very well at all.

2025-05-21 20:45:41 UTC

I know things are rough right now in the UK for trans folks, but just remember, there's always a unisex bathroom available.
https://media.beige.party/media_attachments/files/114/547/775/316/738/564/original/fd4f629e2cb59f03.jpg

2025-04-29 03:57:19 UTC

At this point I'm becoming increasingly sure that the only thing humans die of, apart from rare cases of decapitation or other immediately-life-ending trauma, is some kind of inflammation. Hell, you could tell me that decapitation victims die from inflammation in some way and I would probably believe you. The human body is a machine that turns time into inflammation until it breaks the machine. I like to say that stress kills, and it does, but guess what stress causes?
Obviously this isn't useful information to have, as the human body's capacity to be inflamed in various ways tells us nothing about what sort of inflammation is killing any given person. It's like saying that mosquitoes are the deadliest animal to humans. They're not. Mosquitoes don't kill anyone. They carry malaria, but one might just as well blame swamps for breeding the mosquitoes.
I think the actually deadliest animal, per capita, is cows, maybe? Particularly if you measure death by high cholesterol caused by eating beef and dairy, which have just as much to do with the cow as malaria does with the mosquito, maybe more.
Hey, guess what mosquito bites are? Guess what malaria causes? Guess what death by cholesterol results from, in the grand scheme of things?
QED

2025-04-18 23:34:48 UTC

I was writing this in the replies where no one would see it, and I thought it was better to break it out. The topic of conversation was the "First they came for..." "poem" by Martin Niemöller.
In fairness to Niemöller, he spent the rest of his life feeling guilty and attempting to expurgate that guilt by speaking out against his own complicity in the Holocaust and the wider Nazi state. The poem, or the rhetorical device since it was never intended by him to be a poem, is a confession, a statement that he and those he is talking about, in this case German Christians, knew it was happening and said nothing. And while it's often used by people who are in no danger of anyone coming for them to assert their victimhood, Niemöller did in fact wind up in a concentration camp by the end of the war, so he wasn't just whistling Dixie about them coming for him.
My major quibble with the use of the poem is its omissions. First they came for queer people, or possibly the disabled, and while Niemöller did mention the latter in speeches, the climate of the time prevented mention of the former. In America, "Communists" were replaced or ellided completely, when the point Niemöller was trying to make was that he didn't care when they came for the Communists because they were seen as being anti-religion and generally not worth bothering about, when he should have cared because it was just the sharp point of the wedge. So the total erasure of queer people is similarly missing the point, which is that we need to care what the state does to people even if they're people we hate.
Also, "came for" is almost meaningless. Niemöller used "holten," which Wikipedia translates as "came for" but my miniscule German and a quick search tells me should perhaps be more properly rendered as "imprisoned." "When the Nazis imprisoned the Communists..." tells a better story, but I imagine that people who have a vested interest in denying that the carceral system is always wrong would probably try to cleanse the poem of any idea of prison abolition. Niemöller himself probably wouldn't have accepted my reading of his own words, since he was a conservative German Christian who ignored the words of Jesus on the subject of the incarcerated ("Whatsoever you do unto the least of these my brethren, you do unto me" anyone?). He likely felt, as most people seem to, that most prisoners deserve their punishment.
But I like to quote someone whose name I don't know: whatever you allow them to do to prisoners, they'll eventually do to you. Fuck the whole "Communist, trade unionist, Jew" progression. That's the way Niemöller put it in one speech, maybe, and he wasn't intending it to be a road map. They'll come for someone different first (or maybe not, since it seems like the queer and disabled are popular first targets, though racism in this country means they've been "coming for" Black and brown people for pretty much the entire history of the country). But they will imprison those first targets.
And the thing is, while extrajudicial disappearing might be the sharp end of the stick, to the mind of the fascist it's not extrajudicial at all. Right now the law says due process, but it won't always if you let them change it, and due process is entirely defined by the state. You think Black defendants get due process as one would like it to be? You think poor people get due process?
So, the important thing is that first, they'll probably imprison people. It takes a bit before they're simply shooting people in the street, and it starts with imprisoning "the undesirables." And in all likelihood they'll start with people you don't care about, marginalized people of whatever stripe. And you'll be asked to do nothing. They won't make you shoot anyone. They'll just do it, and all you'll have to do to let them is not say anything.
So in that sense, Niemöller was right on the money. First they imprison people you hate, and you'll say nothing because you'll agree with their imprisonment. That's why prison abolitionists are abolitionists. It's not because they think most people shouldn't be in prison, it's because they know that putting anyone, even your worst enemy, in prison is injustice. The system is rotten to the core. That's why I'm an abolitionist and why I'm particularly against Capital Punishment. No one deserves to be judicially murdered. Full stop.
That's why I keep pounding away on stuff like this. Because if you give one step, you lose. This isn't a physical war, where sometimes you have to make a tactical retreat, where sometimes you have to make sacrifices for the larger picture. This is human rights. This is life. I refuse to allow them to alter my fundamental belief that everyone is deserving of human rights. I guess I'm a human rights absolutist.
Hell, I don't even think Nazis should be in prison ideally. I don't think Donald Trump should be in prison. Punished, certainly. Denied of his basic human rights? No. He's a human just like the rest of us. But we're not in the ideal world, and until then, fuck him, he can go to prison. With due process.
Anyway, my point is that the poem isn't really a poem and it doesn't mean what people want it to mean. It means that you have to speak out when injustice occurs even if it's occurring to your worst enemy. We're none of us perfect, but it's still good advice.
No pasarán. Not one step back.

2025-04-18 01:50:19 UTC

"Depart from me ye accursed into the everlasting fire prepared for the Devil and his angels."
Jesus was talking to rich fascists there. Just so we're crystal fucking clear about whether the fundies actually believe in an inerrant Bible.
Christianity is terrible, but damn, they have some good lines sometimes. I recommend you say it to a bigoted Christian in your life this Easter:
"I can't stand them illegals. They take our jobs!"
"Hey Aunt Beatrice, depart from me ye accursed into the everlasting fire prepared for the Devil and his angels. Also, your ham is dry and tasteless. I'll see myself out."

2025-04-17 02:43:24 UTC

There's a special place in Hell (which I don't believe in) for UI designers who move elements around after seventeen versions where their users have developed muscle memory, particularly if they move a useful UI element and replace it with a non-useful or, for bonus points, dangerous element.
I'm fine. Why do you ask?

2025-04-08 04:41:36 UTC

RFK Jr. looks fake. He looks like he was created in a lab, or maybe a practical monster effect using latex rubber. I won't tar the term "Muppet" with association with him, but he looks like a bad makeup job in a B-movie.
I'm not saying he's bad because of this. He's evil and awful for reasons unrelated to his appearance. It's just that his appearance in every photo I've seen of him is remarkable for its artificiality.

2025-04-08 04:15:33 UTC

It's all well and good to say that you were taught in preschool that you should have empathy and you didn't need to be radicalized, but I was taught tolerance in preschool and before, but what actually radicalized me wasn't that but realizing that the majority of people don't actually believe in it. Seriously, my naivety wasn't about what I believed, it was about what others did. I was radicalized by realizing that tolerance isn't enough. We have to be actively anti-bigotry, anti-capital, for want of a better word, anti-power, because the people who are in charge don't have our best interests in mind. It's a lot harder to deprogram a childhood of trust in authority than it is to teach kids tolerance.
#subtoot I guess, I'm not your mother.

2025-04-07 01:54:23 UTC

I have a confession: I think The Hitchhiker's Guide books are overrated. They're amusing books which don't have as much to say as they think they do and which are a bit too up their own asses about things. That's not to say that I hate them or that I think they're bad books, just that they're a bit overrated.
But one of the things about Douglas Adams' writing which I think he does about as well as anyone can is the authorial voice. I love his omniscient narrator. There's a reason why the books have never been successfully adapted to another medium (audiobooks don't count) (also I'm sorry but this is true) and it's that no one has brought that authorial voice to another medium. I don't blame them. It's fucking hard.
It should be said that Adams was not a particularly formative experience for me. I read the books as a youngster, but I had already experienced authorial voice of the sort Adams was a master at in other work, by other masters. I recognized his mastery, and I learned from it, but he wasn't the first. But his mastery is what makes those books work, at least to my mind. Plot-wise, I don't think he manages to stick the landing, which is another challenge in bringing the books to other media.
You are free to disagree, of course. I don't want to yuck anyone's yum, and I acknowledge that a certain amount of my feelings about the books are down to other books having learned from him and my reading them before reading the OG, as it were, and thereby missing the way I might have felt had I never read anything like it before. The same is true of a lot of seminal works: they sometimes seem derivative and less adept than those which stood on their shoulders. But still, Adams was a master at authorial voice and I acknowledge that even having read books inspired by his mastery.
I say all of this because sometimes not writing exactly like everyone else is the only way to make the writing work. Don't limit yourself. Write the way you need to write, not the way the scolds of grammar and tone would have you write. Have a chapter-length digression about a falling whale and pot of flowers if that's what makes it work. Just fucking write. Worry about everything else later.

2025-04-03 03:53:50 UTC

Multiple things can be true:
1) Donald Trump and his administration are largely clueless dipshits who can't play 1-dimensional checkers let alone chess, and who make the Nazis, hardly the paragons of efficiency and guile despite their protestations to the contrary, seem like they're brilliant strategists by comparison.
2) The aim of the Republican Party has always been to eliminate the federal government as much as is possible so that its assets can be sold for parts and everything can be privatized, with little to no government oversight on Big Business.
3) There are members of the oligarchy served by the Republican Party at large who are perfectly happy to let Trump et al run amok, destroying the ability of the federal government to function.
4) This might seem to be 17-dimensional chess but is actually, for the most part, cynical opportunism.
5) We're fucked either way because if the Trumpites succeed in installing him as dictator, that's obviously bad, but if they manage instead to burn down the government, while yes, it will be slightly amusing to watch them flail about and run into trees while on fire, the government will cease to exist, leaving the oligarchs in charge in the same way Trump would have been.
6) There is no meaningful opposition party at the moment to prevent either of these eventualities.
7) Trump failing utterly is probably the better of the two alternatives, but it ain't a good one.

2025-04-03 03:34:21 UTC

A thread worth reading:
via @nprofile…8cmk
https://dice.camp/@johnzajac/114262938634451803

2025-03-31 16:36:03 UTC

The reason why comfortable liberals believe in signing up for protests is multifarious but understandable and not necessarily sinister, if you're looking for red flags. I'll use liberal as a shortcut here, but I'm not really criticizing or calling anyone out. I will rebut some things, but this is intended in the spirit of my thoughts, not criticism.
Liberals believe that signing up for something is proof of work. You put your name down as a protester because you want the people whom you're protesting to see a large number of names listed so you can prove that you have popular support. It's like the electoral process in that way: liberals answer polls become they want to go on record as supporting a thing.
This isn't entirely wrong, as far as it goes. If you're protesting in a situation where a list of names isn't a list which will be used to issue arrest warrants, signing up is a bit like signing a petition, another thing liberals like to do as proof of work. However, we're not currently in that situation, and support for a cause requires more than simply signing your name to something. Unfortunately, there are many people who faintly recognize the former, so they think because of additional risk the latter isn't true.
Liberals also just sign up for things. Many of them are very used to the social contract of invitation and RSVP. They think that by signing up for a protest they're doing the organizers a further favor, making the protest easier to plan.
Liberals by and large think of big protests like this as risk-free. After all, they've never been risky before. Maybe these liberals are seasoned veteran protesters. They've been to plenty of marches. They've never engaged in any sort of opsec because they haven't needed to. They believe these protests are too big to target individuals. This is why many liberals are so shocked when they or people they know are arrested for protesting.
Signing up for protests is a way of drawing attention to them, for liberals of the social media age. Again, a lack of opsec education in general contributes to this. People post all sorts of anti-Trump memes on Facebook without thinking about the possible consequences, and signing up for a protest or taking pictures of yourself at one isn't even on their radar.
So what can you, a revolutionary guerilla, do to help? First of all, rather than criticizing their choices, if your liberal parents for instance want to sign petitions, direct them in how to do so more safely. Yes, there's still an element of risk, but we're currently in flux. It's still a fairly safe thing to do. If they want to sign up for a protest, figure out why. If it's because they think it'll help show the size of the movement, try to direct their efforts on that to showing up at the protest rather than signing up. If it's so that organizers can judge the size to expect, tell them to sign up but not give enough personal information to be identified (obviously there's no way to guarantee this, but you can move them in the direction).
Basically, encourage the impulse but try to change the methodology. It's not the time to tell them that protests don't make a goddamn bit of difference or that liberalism will destroy us all (if you happen to believe those things). You won't convert them to communism overnight. But for many aging hippies and so forth, you can get them to be safer. Do it now while it's still relatively unlikely that they will be targeted for protesting at all. If you can get through to them that we're in extraordinary times, even if they don't get how extraordinary, you'll be helping them and others.
Lastly, encouraging fairly safe, comfortable people to show up to protests, regardless of how one does it, isn't a bad thing. We're not yet there. At the moment, marginalized people need the cover that older, lawyer-equipped white people provide at a protest. The more of our parents (and here I mean mine and yours if yours are like mine) who show up wearing pussy hats and holding spunky signs, the less likely the cops are to get shoot-y. Plus there's a chance that our parents will meet someone who will rationalize them a little.
So if you're a comfortable, white, cishet person, please do show up to protests. Please listen to the organizers. Consider not signing up for them, at least not in any way which could be used to identify you, but you can afford to be a bit more credulous than a lot of other people, so show up. Stand in the front lines arm in arm with people at more risk. Let them speak, but support them.
Veterans, I know. I really do know. But in the end I think that the presence of clueless liberals is a net positive for a protest. We've got to get more of them on-side. I don't think we need to change our aims to appeal to them, but we might need to let them be cluelessly supportive.
I try to grant my parents the grace to move from their backgrounds of 1960s and 70s protests to a point of view closer to what the current moment needs. I know we're running out of time, but yelling at them doesn't work. Talking with them, trying to share some of the things that people who aren't terminally online don't know, trying to share my own experiences, has helped. Obviously your parents may be total fashy assholes, so don't waste your time on them if so, but clueless liberals can be reached sometimes.

2025-03-30 02:56:59 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…datc @nprofile…twz0
I like it, though I might go for an annoyance of child actors and a vicarious of stage parents 😅

2025-03-29 21:27:57 UTC

Every fucking time I see another goddamn motherfucking post scroll by on the ol' TL about how "DOGE doesn't know what it's getting itself into, trying to update the SSA database system from COBOL," another of my fucking hairs goes gray and I want to die in a fucking fire just a wee fucking bit more.
They know.
They fucking know.
That's the fucking plan.
You stupid motherfuckers think these chucklefucks have any intention of "fixing" SSA when the fact is that they want to dismantle it and sell the parts for scrap, and the best way to do that is to sabotage it by "fixing" it.
Stop. Taking. Fashy. Dipshits. At. Their. Word. Mother. Fuckers.
Holy shit.

2025-03-29 21:13:34 UTC

Anything which can be automated away by a chatbot wasn't useful to begin with. But techbros and management types won't admit that, so instead we get chatbots doing things for which they are manifestly unsuitable. The CEOs of the world want to automate away art because they view it as useless, where in fact the CEOs of the world could be automated away by chatbots and nothing of value would be lost.
Automated art isn't. It's pablum fed to a hungry public in place of nourishment. No matter how far up its own ass "AI" becomes, the thing which terrifies management is that they'll find out that art can't be automated away and thus is valuable after all. They can't admit that there's something they don't own and control.

2025-03-29 17:52:39 UTC

All those memetic "a group of this type of animal is called a whatever" things are fake. We all know that, right? There's no governing body of animal collective nouns.
You can call a group of similar animals anything you want. You can call a group of anteaters "a sobriquet of anteaters" if you want. No one can stop you. It doesn't even have to be a noun. You can call a group of squirrels "a scurry of squirrels" (and in fact people do) if you want, so "an ineluctable of Burmese pythons" is totally fine.
A patiently of orange-rumped agoutis. A loud buzzing noise of hornets. A social disease of cockroaches. A fundamental of carp. It's anarchy.
This is English. There are no rules. Dig yourself a shallow hole in the middle of the language and squat there flinging excrement at anyone who happens by.

2025-03-26 21:26:50 UTC

Traditional marriage is between one man and one woman and one reporter from the Atlantic.

2025-03-25 22:54:24 UTC

Oh good, here come the leftists who are going to convince me that Pete Hgesgesthg and company are really playing 17-dimensional chess and it's all an op.
Sometimes a fashy dipshit with terrible opsec is just a fashy dipshit with terrible opsec. I doubt very highly that Pete Gethsemaneth has the ability to play 1-dimensional checkers.
You don't got to hand it to these people. You really don't. I know you hate liberals, but that doesn't make fashy dipshits strategic masterminds. Of course fashy dipshits are going to claim it was all an op. What else can they do? They're sure as fuck not going to come out and say, "Oh wow, Pete Sexguest really fucked the puppy on this one." Pete Megadeth is the chosen one of their God-Emperor. They aren't going to speak out of turn and say that Pete Eggbeth porked that schnauzer until Trump pulls his imprimatur and leaves Legsgeoff to the wolves.
Antifa Stop Doing Fa's Work For It Challenge 2025

2025-03-23 23:56:43 UTC

More pornbots who aren't Nicole. What is this world coming to?

2025-03-23 16:18:32 UTC

Hey fedi, is there any way I can hide edit notifications from posts I boost without having to mute the poster? Does "mute this conversation" do that? Is there a simpler way than doing that individually to each post?#AskFedi #FediHelp #FediTips

2025-03-21 05:28:12 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…ms9m
I have no idea. They're not even knockoffs, they're just black and made in China, undoubtedly by enslaved Uyghurs, but I'm very poor and 11 cents is 11 cents.
In all seriousness, I genuinely don't think they have a brand. They're also not noise-canceling in any way other than fitting into my ears well enough that they block some outside sounds. Definitely not active noise cancelation.
I've heard good things about Bose, but they're so far outside my price range as to be more like mythical artifacts than technology. If you, like me, can't afford hundreds of dollars, my advice would be to get in-ear buds as cheaply as you can direct from China (no reason to pay extra for a middleman to sell you the same cheap dropshipped crap) and then put on some white noise which you can stand to sleep through. Honestly, I'd get wired ones, since the battery life on even the high end models tends to be right on the edge of 8 hours, and you can get wired earbuds for pennies if you buy in bulk (I bought a pack of 30 which was intended to be used in classrooms and I think I paid 30-40 cents a pair, so when they break, I'm not particularly put out).
Fans help too. Basically, create an environment where you've got layers of protection from outside noise. You can even get earplugs, then put on over-ear headphones to play whatever, then a fan to add additional white noise.
I've also seen eye masks which go over the ears as well which have earphones built in which seem like they'd be more comfortable to sleep in than earbuds, but ymmv there. Those, too, can be had for pocket change direct from China. I hate recommending buying cheap Chinese garbage and contributing to waste, but in my experience sleeping in headphones tends to put a lot of miles on them pretty quickly, and I've never had more expensive sets last me any longer than the cheapest ones, though the sound quality was probably a bit better. You're paying for quality control, mostly, in mid-range tech. Until you get to higher end stuff than I can afford, the difference between a $20 set of earbuds and a 40 cent set is that the 40 cent set has a slightly elevated chance of simply not working at all, at least in my experience. They've both probably got nearly identical drivers in them, but the soldering on the 20 buck pair with a brand name is likely a bit better, that's all.
Sorry, that was probably more than you wanted to know and/or stuff you already knew.

2025-03-21 03:53:28 UTC

Well... the Bluetooth earbuds I got from China for 10 cents (I think actually 11 cents because of tax; I am being completely serious) have sound which is better than the Apple Airpods I got for free, which would make sense since the Chinese earbuds (I imagine the Airpods are also Chinese but they've got a brand attached to them) cost literally an infinite percentage more than the Airpods did. That's how percentages work when you divide by zero or whatever. But given that the MSRP of the Chinese earbuds was in the region of $5 if I recall correctly, whereas the MSRP of the Airpods, irrespective of how much they cost me, currently stands at $80, the Airpods should provide service which is 16 times better than the Chinese earbuds.
Apple is a scam.
Now, sound-wise, part of the reason why the earbuds are better is that they're in-ear earbuds, whereas the Airpods are those stupid earbuds which sit in the crease of your ear if you're lucky enough to have ears exactly the right shape, otherwise they fall out, and God forbid you get sweaty at all. So you have to buy pieces of plastic which keep the Airpods in your ears. And since they're farther away from your eardrums, plus they're not as directional, they suffer. I have no doubt that if Apple had been able to figure out how to create in-ear Airpods, they...
Hang on, I'm being told that they actually make them, but they cost substantially more. But surely the cost of two tiny pieces of silicone couldn't raise the price that much, right? RIGHT?!
Apple is a scam.
So these Chinese earbuds are louder, which is nice if one is trying to drown out the screaming, and they stay in my ears better for free rather than requiring the purchase of additional pieces of plastic to make this possible. Also, they actually talk to devices other than Apple products, so I can see information about them and use their touch features, as opposed to the Airpods which, I'm told, "just work" when paired with an iPhone but which "just barely work" in any other situation. I have yet to test the Chinese earbuds' battery life, which I suspect is where the Apple product may shine, but I very much doubt that the Airpods will shine 16 times brighter.
Apple is a scam.
Now, I should say that the bass of the Airpods may be slightly better. May. It's hard to tell. It's certainly not 16 times better. They also seem slightly more robust in design (if you don't take into account the glaring dipshittery of not making them in-ear earbuds) and will likely last some amount of time less than 1600% longer.
Also, Apple ain't the only scam. Samsung manufactures their own brand of scam, as do so many other companies, all of which, it must be said, probably get their audio drivers from the same factory in China but their quality control department probably calls that factory up and gives them a stern talking-to about testing or something.
I kid. A little.
I only bought these earbuds for 11 cents (again, I am in no way joking) because they were a prize for spending far too much time looking at AliExpress. I don't like wireless earbuds, but they are occasionally useful, and there weren't any other prizes which were worth bothering with. I would cheerfully trade the Airpods in, but as I didn't pay for them at all (they were a gift from an anonymous person who decided to leave them in the Lost and Found at work and never return for them) I'm kind of stuck with them.
This, more than anything, led to the rise of mercantilism in 14th-Century Prague.

2025-03-21 03:16:32 UTC

We ready to call it fascism yet, or are the comfy liberals still unconvinced?

2025-03-20 04:32:36 UTC

But they were all of them deceived, for another factor was needed to authenticate...

2025-03-19 15:55:01 UTC

Ants are overrated and played out. Why can't people stop talking about them? It's like they're some kind of vital component of the ecosystem or whatever. Smash that boost button if you think ants have overstayed their welcome and become something only normies would care about.
via @nprofile…args
https://sauropods.win/@futurebird/114189010983812534

2025-03-19 04:18:36 UTC

Here's my philosophy on pranks in a very large nutshell:
- Nearly all pranks are mean-spirited.
- Mean-spirited pranks should only be employed if you feel mean-spirited toward the victim of the prank.
- Most of the time, that's true, but the perpetrator is unwilling to admit that it's true.
- Very rarely, the perpetrator of a mean-spirited prank doesn't intend any malice.
- Unfortunately, intent and effect are two different things, so even unintended mean-spirited-ness results in consequences.
- Because of this, if you're going to pull a prank, you should either intend malice or be prepared to accept the consequences of malice unintended.
- All of which means that if you are the victim of a prank, you can and should assume malice on the part of the perpetrator.
- Malicious pranks should be reserved for one's enemies.
- No one can tell a priori whether a prank is malicious or not.
- Ergo, all pranks should be reserved for one's enemies.
All that being said:
- Nearly all pranks are unimaginative.
- If you're looking to be malicious, it doesn't matter.
- Ergo, there's not really much point in "pranking" your enemies.
- Pranks carry the implied lack of seriousness with which one should not go into an interaction with one's enemies.
- Thus, don't prank your friends because it makes you an asshole.
- Corollary: don't prank your enemies because it makes you insufficiently an asshole.
However:
- The most successful prank is one which no one expects.
- The most successful employment of force in battle is one where you don't have to fight at all.
- Knowing that a prank is coming lessens its effectiveness.
- Believing that a prank is coming lessens the victim's effectiveness.
- Therefore, the best way to attack your enemy with pranks is to make your enemy expect a prank which never comes.
To sum up: don't prank your friends at all. Don't prank your enemies either. But do make your enemies believe that a prank is coming but never actually pull one.
The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he pulled a trick at all.

2025-03-13 16:33:17 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…ka4x
If so, Robin had nice gams, that's all I can say 😅

2025-03-13 05:22:13 UTC

I've never made an original meme, but I feel like this might be the one. I bequeath it to you, citizens of fedi who are awake when I am. I feel like it can be captioned, but it also works well as a response to things. #meme #memes
https://media.beige.party/media_attachments/files/114/153/444/656/424/527/original/399193359c1583e5.jpg

2025-03-09 06:33:19 UTC

(I've probably told this story before in some way, but @nprofile…07d2 made me think of it again and who knows, maybe I haven't. And then I wrote it up but forgot to hit send, so it's totally possible that I did that last time too.)
I had a friend who convinced me to try both Chartreuse and eggplant liqueur on the same day (though not, fortunately, mixed together).
Chartreuse may be a fine minor addition to a cocktail maybe (I have my doubts) but straight, it tastes like you're drinking perfume and that perfume's scent is "Herbs de Provence." I love herbs de Provence on a warm, crusty bread with a good olive oil, but I have never thought to myself, "Self, it would be simply awesome to taste alcoholic herbs de Provence on every tastebud and up my nose."
Be that as it almost certainly was, while Chartreuse wasn't exactly pleasant, I managed to finish the small amount I had been given. I think my major objection was that some tastes are not meant to be drunk. Eaten, sure, or perhaps smelled, but not drunk.
All that pales in comparison to eggplant liqueur. I am unable to find any internet record of eggplant liqueur, so maybe I'm the first person who's ever talked about it online, or perhaps it was an elaborate joke on the part of my friend and there's no such thing. Or maybe search has been utterly broken. In any case.
My friend said it was best over ice and mixed with Coke. I don't like Coke. No, that's not fair. I loathe Coke. I think it's battery acid, except I'd probably rather drink battery acid. Don't worry, Coca-Cola fanatics, I hate Pepsi too. I pretty much hate all colas, and I'm not a fan of soda in general. So obviously I wasn't going to drink eggplant liqueur mixed with Coke, in case eggplant liqueur was amazing and I regretted mixing it with the sweat from Satan's hairy ballsack. I don't care for Coke.
So I had it over ice. I was told it was an acquired taste before I tasted it. That's never a good sign. What should have been the bigger red flag, though, was that the liquid had a really sickly brown color, a color usually associated with the runoff from a garbage compactor. Not only that, but it looked slightly oily. There seemed like there should have been a slick on top of it. And it seemed to ooze over the ice somehow, like a non-Newtonian fluid.
But in for a penny, in for a pound, so I lifted my glass to my lips and took a sip.
First of all, I should never have sipped. It left far too much on my lips and tongue. But I wanted to taste this, right? It was basically tap water as far as proof is concerned, so it's not like I was going to shoot it and ask for more. So I sipped and instantly regretted my choices. Not just the choice to sip, but the choice to taste this liqueur at all, the choice to visit my friend, the choice to leave my house, the choice to move from my previous place of occupancy to the one from which I could have feasibly visited this friend, the choice have ever left Cleveland (I never arrived in Cleveland either, but you get the idea), the choice to have been born, the choice to have participated in the disaster called human history, the choice to have been reincarnated after my previous life as a dung beetle instead of simply ceasing to exist, and the choice, not mine, that someone must have made to create an eggplant liqueur in clear defiance of the laws of god and nature.
When I say that it was the worst thing I have ever tasted, you should know that I have tasted some horrible things. One time I got into a contest with a pastor (this is not that story), a game of disgusting-food chicken, wherein I ate a black olive dipped in whipped strawberry cream cheese, which wasn't bad, actually. That was probably the best thing I ate in winning that contest (against a pastor, in case you thought I made a typo in the previous sentence). And the worst thing I ate, which I have blocked from my memory because of its awfulness, was nothing in comparison to this.
I'm not sure how something which is alcohol can taste slimy. It wasn't slimy. It just tasted slimy. If you'd blind-tested the viscosity of this liquid, I have no doubt that it would have registered as water, but it lingered on the tongue.
The taste itself is difficult to describe because the words don't exist. It was a little sweet, maybe, but not in a pleasant way. I'm not sure how something which was predominantly bitter could also be cloying, but it managed to be so. There were notes perhaps of smokiness, the way a roasted eggplant might taste, but again not in a pleasant way. It was mildly medicinal, in a way which made me think that it must have been intended to be beneficial to my health in some way even as I cursed the very air which wafted its scent to my nostrils like a plague of Egypt.
None of that captures the true terribleness of this beverage. It tasted like someone had allowed an eggplant to rot until the flesh had dissolved into goo, leaving only the leathery, wrinkled skin, brown now and possibly slightly moldy, and I was chewing on the woody, stem-y part. Except slimy. And in the form of garbage water.
I shudder to say this, but I would have preferred drinking the Coke I had been offered as a mixer. At least that was a sensation with which I was familiar. This...
I've had absinthe neat. It's lovely. I've only had white absinthe so I've never actually had the green fairy, but apart from a higher alcohol content and what I've heard is a slightly more vegetal flavor, the tastes are roughly the same. No matter where you get it, absinthe is a nicely anise-flavored alcohol which will not make you hallucinate no matter how much people might like to believe it does. All those dipshits who claimed the wormwood made them see visions were drunk. That's the facts.
I've had ouzo, another liquor reputed to fuck your shit up royal. It too is an anise experience, and I get that some people don't care for that, but it's just anise. Ouzo is frequently fairly high proof from an American perspective, plus it's a bit sweet, and Americans don't really understand liqueurs that are intended to be drunk in small amounts, so yeah, I have no doubt that if you drink a bottle of ouzo not realizing it's 110-proof (that's 55% ABV) you may have a bad time. I'm not a cheap drunk, so I've never worried. I like ouzo. Very pleasant.
When I was younger and stupider, I frequently drank cheap tequila. I've eaten the worm. I wouldn't do that sober, but there you go. I enjoy a tequila with a bite perhaps more than I enjoy a smooth, expensive tequila. I have been quite drunk on tequila, in fact. I get why people might not enjoy it, but I like the pepperiness of it.
My favorite vodka is Stolichnaya. I know some people would rather drink rubbing alcohol, but I like a vodka with character. And apparently I can drink it guilt-free because the Stoli you get in the US is produced in Latvia by a company which doesn't like Putin and is Pro-LGBTQI+, in case you needed to hear that as I did. Anyway, I don't drink vodka much anymore, but I would drink Stoli over any of the higher-end vodkas I've ever had.
I say all of this to establish my bona fides as a person who enjoys things which others might not. So believe me when I say that eggplant liqueur is something out of Lovecraft. I don't know what its name is or its nation of origin, probably because the people responsible for its existence were burned at the stake as blasphemers. I have no idea where my friend got eggplant liqueur, but it is my sincere hope that the purveyor of such an alcoholic crime was so stricken with remorse upon selling the first and only bottle to my friend that they (the alcohol retailer) burned down their store and threw themselves into the flames. I suspect, however, that eggplant liqueur is only sold in a tiny curio shop which disappears when you look away from it, run by an ancient man with one eye who warns you not to purchase eggplant liqueur because it carries a dreadful curse. I'm not sure what my friend did to deserve such a curse. Maybe it was all a mistake, or maybe I was the target all along.
Suffice it to say that I did not finish my glass.
Here's where fedi will deliver to me a person who not only knows of eggplant liqueur but enjoys it. Maybe they'll have grown up drinking it in the Old Country. And all that I've said will be deeply offensive to their people.
This person is in league with Satan and all his many imps. No person who has a reflection in a mirror could possibly find eggplant liqueur to be anything but anathema. If you want to show up in my replies to tell me how wrong I am, I'm afraid I'm going to need to see your teeth, fingers, the base of your spine, and a video of you reciting the Lord's Prayer as witnessed by a priest.
Anyway, later that evening my friend's cat nearly took out one of my eyes and I spent the rest of the night trying unsuccessfully to locate a bottle of rubbing alcohol or similar disinfectant with which to clean my wounds. This wasn't the cat's fault, I want to make that clear. It just happened. But when I say that that event was not the worst thing that happened to me that day, you'll know why.

2025-03-07 05:35:03 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…g4gu
That this is my best pigeon is certain, but that this fact is a reflection of just how poorly I draw is even more certain. I throw myself upon the mercy of the court.
https://media.beige.party/media_attachments/files/114/119/521/248/604/329/original/83214e35e4d45258.jpg

2025-03-03 04:57:11 UTC

Fuck homework. Fuck homework for kids, fuck homework for adults. If you aren't getting paid for it, don't do it.
Children should have a shit ton more unstructured time. So should adults. There's no shame in doing nothing for a bit, or doing something that doesn't contribute to any hustle or improvement. And that should be on top of time spent reading or watching things. Those don't count either.
Stop working all the time.

2025-02-28 02:03:10 UTC

For future reference, since it seems like it might be necessary sooner rather than later, if things come out of the Vatican smokestack:
- Black smoke means there's no new pope.
- White smoke means there's a new pope.
- Red smoke means shit is about to get real at the Vatican.
- Purple smoke means Jimi Hendrix is the new pope.
- Green smoke means it's currently 4:20 at the Vatican.
- Blue smoke means the Vatican is no longer working, please call tech support.
- A shit-ton of smoke means the Vatican is currently on fire.
- Intermittent smoke means, "Help, cardinal currently trapped in Vatican fireplace, send Swiss guard with tub of lard."
- Orange smoke means a rascally cardinal is playing a practical joke.
- Multicolored smoke means the Vatican has invested in some illegal Chinese fireworks.
- Snakes which whisper that the day of judgment is at hand mean it may be time to duck and cover.
- Bats mean the Joker is pope.
- The body of the old pope means buckle up, shit's about to get weird.
If that seagull comes back, I have no idea what that means. Maybe the seagull should be pope.

2025-02-25 08:50:35 UTC

I'm not saying that LibreOffice is perfect by a long shot but they don't have ads in your fucking word processor.

2025-02-25 07:26:49 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…7wld
I got long-winded, as is my wont. Feel free to ignore this reply, as I'm not really arguing with any of your points as much as I'm clarifying my own thinking.
The thing about the story though is that, even if it is a story about a boy who, maliciously and strictly for his own amusement, raised a number of false alarms, we tell the story to teach children not to raise alarms. There's no corresponding story which teaches nuance or the value of early detection or whatever. The only story we have, the one we consider so important that it's entered our lexicon, is about the dangers of raising a false alarm. Yes, to cry wolf has a nuanced meaning, but the phrase is most often weaponized to shut down people who are raising inconvenient alarms by accusing them of willful malice.
Then there's the fact that the number of instances of people actually crying wolf in the manner of the story is vanishingly small. But it's the same thing we hear (and to be clear, I'm not accusing you of saying this at all) when women accuse powerful men of sexual misconduct, for example. "But what if they're lying?" Well, that would be a concern if it ever happened, if crying wolf in that way benefitted the woman doing it at all.
Cui bono, as it were, in the story of the boy who cried wolf? Sure, the teller of the story would have us believe that the boy derived great pleasure from his trick, but come on. What did crying wolf get him? As a parable telling children to take their guard duties more seriously, perhaps it would work, but that story is "the boy who wasn't paying attention and didn't cry wolf and then the wolf ate the sheep he was supposed to be watching and maybe him too." There's no reason to make the parable about false alarms unless you're trying to teach your children not to raise alarms for kicks, which just doesn't happen often enough to be worth making a cautionary tale about unless you believe that pretty much any alarm a child might raise is spurious.
And as you say, there's very little way to tell the difference between crying wolf and a legitimate warning of something which winds up for whatever reason not happening. So by teaching children not to raise false alarms, you teach them not to raise any alarm until it's too late to matter.
It should perhaps not be lost on us that children, as with women, were and still are the lower members of the social hierarchy. Is the boy who cried wolf about a wolf, or is it about discouraging children from telling people what adults have done to them? Who can say? I just think it's a really creepy lesson to teach children, and we do so at our own peril.
As for false alarms, I agree that they do exist and children are sometimes responsible for them as in the case of calling in bomb threats to get out of going to school. The thing is though, the solution isn't to teach kids never to call in bomb threats. It's to provide a nuanced education in when it's appropriate to raise an alarm. And we're largely incapable of doing that because we view children as incapable of nuance, as selfish in intent, and because we ourselves were taught the same boy who cried wolf nonsense. If the burden of proof for genuine false alarm is made high enough, people will never raise the alarm at all because the risk will be too high. And that only serves wolves.
I'll close with my own little parable: I have a burglar alarm because my house has been broken into and robbed multiple times. My burglar alarm has never prevented this. Indeed, the only time my house was ever broken into while I had the burglar alarm, I turned it off myself.
Why? Well, the municipality in which I live charges homeowners money if their burglar alarm goes off accidentally, the police are called, and there is no indication of forced entry. Their argument is that police time is valuable and by making the police respond to a burglary which isn't actually happening, one is wasting taxpayer resources.
What this means practically is that any time my burglar alarm goes off, I have to weigh the probability of it being a false alarm in my head before I decide whether to simply ignore the alarm, or at least ignore it as much as I can while I try to get home to see if my house has really been broken into. False alarms are pretty common with these systems. Too much wind, a loud stereo system, a large truck, or someone innocently knocking on the door can set them off. My cats can set them off from the inside. So the vast majority of the time, if my alarm goes off, I will "ignore" it so as not to risk being charged for a false alarm.
Practically speaking, the response times for the police in my area are so poor that having them show up half an hour after the burglar has already left is pointless except to certify that the house was indeed burgled, something which I can call the police to do once I've verified it for myself. No need to worry about false alarms. I might as well just "ignore" every alarm and then call the police once I get home and can be sure the alarm wasn't false.
Why do I have the alarm then? Well, it turns out that I mostly pay ADT for the privilege of advertising their company by putting signs up saying my property is protected by them. Those signs are more protection than the alarm system. Criminals go for low-hanging fruit, and having an alarm when your neighbor doesn't is like outrunning the bear: you just have to be slightly higher-hanging fruit than the lowest hanging fruit. It's not perfect because criminals are both stupid and illogical at times, but in that case, frequently a loud alarm going off, even if no police are ever going to arrive, is enough to scare the burglar off. It's all smoke and mirrors.
The moral of this story is that this arrangement benefits everyone except me. It benefits the city because they've made false alarms pay, and since the vast majority of alarm calls are false alarms, they can have terrible response times and do nothing while still getting paid. It benefits the alarm company because I get to pay them for a system which doesn't matter in its effectiveness as much as in its presence. They have no incentive to make their systems more accurate because the inaccuracy doesn't cost them any money at all. That technical debt is passed to the consumer wholesale. And it benefits the criminals who are smart enough, because they know that alarm systems are bogus. That's a fairly minor point because if all criminals figured that out, no one would bother having alarms anymore.
All this from the seemingly reasonable stipulation that false alarms are wasteful. But if anyone actually believed that, government would force alarm companies to shoulder the burden for their faulty systems. Consumers would force government to increase response times and actually provide useful policing instead of what amounts to insurance inspectors.
If, instead, we approached the situation with the axiom that it's better to have a million false alarms than one ignored alarm which is true, it would make a huge difference to the situation. And that is what the boy who cried wolf is all about. Not the boy in the story. The boy about whom the story was written. If you approach that story with the idea that maybe the village shouldn't be allowed to fob off vital responsibility to a child, how different does it look? If you say that the villagers have enough on the line that maybe they should accept the minimal risk of false alarm in exchange for greater security? If you believe that the wolf is an important enough threat that one might set a watch, then perhaps it's important enough to care about the quality of the watch? Perhaps it's important enough that you'd rather deal with the relatively minor annoyance of a false alarm than risk an alarm being needed and not given?
Ultimately it illustrates priorities. And while I agree that false alarms devalue alarms in general, that's largely because we don't value false alarms as a culture. If instead of viewing false alarms as illustrative of alarms' lack of value, what if we instead thought of every alarm as an illustration that the alarm system was working as intended? "There was smoke but no fire," becomes, "Our smoke detector worked really well. Fortunately further measures weren't needed this time, but we can feel safer knowing that we can detect signs of fire early enough that they don't become problems." Hypothetically, of course. That doesn't solve the problem of malicious false alarms, but what if we treated crying wolf as the cost of vigilance, rather than some other externality? Right now, the cost of discouraging alarms is that sometimes alarms should have happened but didn't, or were dismissed. Is that a higher price to pay than to respond to a few false alarms?
To put it another way, the criminal justice system has famously been said to prefer letting a hundred guilty people go free than to punish one innocent person unfairly. That's an ideal that the system doesn't live up to and I fear that more and more people are happy about that, but what if that ideal were a reality? Would we be better off? I think so, but I don't speak for anyone but myself.
I guess I didn't really close with a parable. I closed with a bunch of questions. Sorry for lying.

2025-02-24 23:57:12 UTC

Imagine if the boy who cried wolf had actually seen a wolf every time, but by crying wolf he scared the wolf away. The villagers would show up, and there's this boy pointing at the forest and saying they just missed the wolf and weren't they lucky he had been there to warn them. And the villagers would probably take that badly, after the first time. They'd probably write a story about it.
Meanwhile, the boy is scared shitless. On the one hand, there's this fucking wolf who is getting more and more brazen. Maybe next time the boy won't be able to scare the wolf away. And then not only will the boy be in trouble, but the village will be in trouble. Meanwhile on the other hand he knows that if he keeps crying wolf, either the villagers will stop showing up at all, or they'll view him as a bigger problem than the wolf. Either way, the boy is going to be in deep shit there too.
You might forgive the boy for getting the fuck out of dodge. Let someone else watch for wolves. See how they like it. But he doesn't. He stays and watches, and the wolf comes back, and this time none of the boy's cries drive the wolf away because the wolf can sense that no one from the village is coming. And the villagers stand by and listen to the boy's increasingly desperate screams until it's too late.
Who's the hero of this story?
Now, if you were a villager who had just committed negligent homicide by wolf, which turned out to have been a very real risk, you could do two things. You could learn from this experience that sometimes warnings should be heeded regardless of whether they seem to be false alarms because it's better to go out to defend the flocks from a wolf a thousand times when there's no wolf than it is not to go once when there is. That's the sensible thing to do, certainly. The money is on overreacting if overreacting is low-cost and the risk of under-reacting is high.
Or you could write your story about this boy who fucked around and found out. That makes you look better, I guess. And it relieves you of responsibility for defense of the village and your livelihoods. The boy should have known better.
You may have figured out that I'm not talking about boys and wolves anymore.
We have a whole classic parable on the subject of not crying wolf, to the point where "crying wolf" is something of a dead cliché. In the English-speaking world, pretty much everyone knows what "to cry wolf" means, even if they've never actually heard the parable. We don't think about the story. We make the semantic leap from the phrase to "false positive." And we are taught over and over that crying wolf is always bad.
Which is why we find ourselves in situations like the one in which we currently find ourselves. We are victims of survivorship bias: we only remember the times when the warnings seemed unfounded because if they had been founded we wouldn't be here to notice. Fascism stalks the forest like a horde of hungry wolves, but because we only remember the times when fascism didn't eat us, we think all warnings are unfounded. Never mind that in most cases not only were the warnings founded but the action taken in response to those warnings was what kept fascism at bay.
Look at Y2K, which, if you're too young to remember, was something of a joke. It was regularly held up as a giant cry of wolf because, well, the world didn't end when the clock ticked over. Very little happened, really. So everyone breathed a sigh of relief and immediately set to work making sure that we forgot some inconvenient facts.
Y2K "didn't happen" because a lot of unappreciated work was done to keep it from happening. A lot. Far more than we were told in the general public. This was, after all, the era of Reaganomics, when the Democrat who was in office was about as conservative as a lot of Republicans were, where it seemed like everyone had a hardon for gutting government spending and bureaucracy. So the unsexy work of making sure that the world didn't end was just waste, right?
What about September 11, about a year later? Turns out that there were large numbers of boys who had been crying wolf about Al Qaeda for years, but a lot of unappreciated work was done in an attempt to keep that wolf at bay. It wasn't going in guns blazing, and it wasn't necessarily the ideal way to do it, but it also wasn't sexy so no one paid much attention.
Pandemics past have been averted and turned into jokes. Swine flu? Huge joke. Bird flu? Nothingburger. All wolves which failed to eat us, largely because someone cried and then unsexy work was done because of that warning. But we don't need the CDC. It's a waste of taxpayer dollars. After all, what has it ever done for us? There was never a wolf to defend against.
We teach our children what we want them to know. And what we want them to know is that it's always worse to be an inconvenient Cassandra than a dead Tiresias. It's better to hold your tongue and let the wolf eat everything than it is to give a warning too soon, before you can see the whites of its eyes as it were. Keep your powder dry. Don't be too hasty.
And what's the life of one annoying boy, after all? And another. And another. Something keeps eating the boys you send out to watch the sheep, but as long as they don't cry, you don't have to deal with that. Teach your children silence. There might not be a wolf after all.
[EDIT TO POSTSCRIPT: There's good stuff in the replies. I know that fedi makes it hard to see replies sometimes, and I know that frequently replies are unreadable garbage anyway, but in this case several excellent points have been raised by people other than me which don't really work without context, but you're reading this so you have context, so go read them.]

2025-02-23 21:01:56 UTC

Ok, here's a weird niche thing that maybe fedi can help with.
There's a tire store on the road I take to get to my job, and for as long as I can remember they've had an LED messageboard sign, full color, square like a TV. It's low-rez and mostly displays the latest sales they have. But it also displays the time and the temperature.
The way it displays the time and temperature is by having a cartoon frog sitting on a cartoon lily pad in the top left corner of the screen, then the time appears in the lower right corner, then the frog sticks out its tongue and eats the time, the temperature appears, and the frog eats the temperature. It's very simply animated. There used to be more similar signs on other businesses in the area which had the same time-and-temperature-eating frog display, but they've all changed and now it's just this one tire store.
I love the time-and-temperature-eating frog. It's my little spark of happiness on my commute to work. And I've always wanted to preserve it in some way for a time when the tire store closes or changes to a better sign or whatever. But web searches have produced nothing (unsurprisingly) and I don't know enough about LED messageboard signs to know where to look for whatever asset might be being used. I'm sure it's something that came with the sign because I've seen it on multiple signs. I could take a picture of the sign, I guess, but I dream of one day being able to purchase a messageboard sign and putting the frog on it.
Does anyone have any ideas? Any contacts in the LED messageboard sign manufacturing community? #FediHelp #BoostsWelcome

2025-02-20 04:17:39 UTC

The horniest Star Trek has always been the original series, not because Kirk fucks Priestesses of the Brass Brassiere (which mostly isn't true), but for two extremely important reasons:
1) Kirk, Spock, McCoy are clearly the horniest for each other that anyone in Star Trek could possibly be. Kirk/Spock/McCoy, in a just and utopian world, would be unable to perform any duties for Starfleet because they would be a whirling three-way sex tornado, but because they cannot do this, they must simply be horndt to the point where horniness breaks down and becomes quantum particles, like some kind of horny event horizon. Kirk/Spock/McCoy are not fucking. They exist in a perpetual state of horn.
2) The reason why they aren't fucking is that they know that duty comes first, because not only are they horny for each other in ways which cannot be comprehended by puny mortal minds, but they are also horny for duty. In particular, James Tiberius Kirk is so fucking horny for the Enterprise that he can't find fulfillment in any other way than to be the best damn captain of the Enterprise. He's so horny for her that he seems like he's sexed up all the time when in fact it's all just horniness for his command. Kirk isn't a womanizer. He's hot for starship. From the first moment he saw her, he had to be inside her. Kirk may fuck (he had to have done so at least once, given that he has a son and all) but no woman could possibly mean as much to him as his ship. If you don't understand this, you don't understand Star Trek.
Other iterations of Star Trek may be horny. I don't know enough about them to say for certain. Next Generation always seemed pretty horny to me, and the inclusion of William "Biggun" Riker certainly doesn't hurt. But that's all normal horniness. The levels of unexpressed horny that the original series crammed into every episode of a TV show made during a time when a kiss was practically lewd are off the charts. The movies? Forget about it. Those movies are so fucking horny that new units of measurement had to be invented just to attempt to encapsulate a scintilla, a quantum of their horndt. It burned out the instruments. All we have is faint echoes in the background horniness of the Universe itself to tell us that there was an event.
So you may keep your Deep Space Nine and your Lower Decks. I can assure you that Star Trek began horniest and only went downhill from there.

2025-02-15 18:57:39 UTC

Gonna say it again: yes, you can go through the hassle of downloading all your books from Amazon by the end of the month, then follow the somewhat complicated process of converting them all to a DRM-free format using Calibre. You certainly can do that.
Or, you can go to https://annas-archive.se/ and download the books you already own, free, any time you want, already DRM-free. It's just as legal (which is to say that they're both illegal) and it's much simpler.
Either way, fuck Amazon, support authors, visit your local library, DRM sucks.

2025-02-14 01:47:16 UTC

Now is a really good time for cis allies to stand firm. Frankly, that's always true. But reaffirming your commitment not to throw your trans siblings under the bus for the sake of some fucking strategic bullshit is the least you could do. The absolute minimum.
"I remain committed to trans rights and will not compromise on that position." It's such a low bar and so many people absolutely refuse to say it.

2025-02-13 23:58:42 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…uect
In a garlic press? How small are your mandarins?

2025-02-13 23:46:14 UTC

I don't use a garlic press. For me, the increase in ability to crush garlic is far outweighed by the difficulty in cleaning the damn thing. Plus it's a one-trick pony and I like to keep those to a minimum in the kitchen for space reasons if nothing else. Not, I guess, that a can opener or corkscrew doesn't suffer from the same problem.
I can crush garlic by hand fairly efficiently. The most time-consuming bit, the part I dislike, is getting the peel off the clove. I know that garlic presses do away with the need for that.
But the truth of the matter is that I am a bad person and I rarely ever use fresh garlic. Maybe if I had a press that would change. I occasionally use garlic paste, but mostly I just use garlic powder. I know, mea culpa. I am of limited means and even more limited energy and time to cook, so garlic powder is what happens most of the time. There are plenty of ways you can improve your garlic powder experience, and if I can I employ them.
I used to love to cook. Now it's just another chore that I don't hate quite as much as I hate every other chore.

2025-02-12 23:02:18 UTC

I hear that Amazon is removing the ability to download books you purchase for Kindle, and they're already heavily DRMed. This is where you might expect me to say that you can download them and remove the DRM via such and such a method, but I won't. If you already purchased the books, you can go to Anna's Archive at https://annas-archive.se/ and download them from there. It's simpler, it's straightforward, it's just as legal (which is to say, they're both illegal), and you've already purchased the book.
I will not recommend book piracy. What you do with this information is your business. If you want to learn more about piracy, I'm happy to chat hypothetically about complicating factors, but if you're stuck with a bunch of books that Amazon has told you you don't actually own even though you paid for them, obtaining a copy of those books which you do actually own isn't piracy. I will die on that particular hill, so please don't make me.
Please buy the books you enjoy so that authors can get paid, but beyond that, I give not the most tarnished of brass-plated fucks.

2025-02-12 17:33:25 UTC

Sterilizing anyone for any reason without their consent is the first step to killing undesirables. If you let them do it to anyone, it'll happen to you eventually.

2025-02-12 16:00:47 UTC

@nprofile…eqw3
I too love Moby Dick, though I haven't read it enough times 🙂