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Cake day: January 23rd, 2022

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  • When I was around 10-11 my dad sat me down to watch Mulholland Drive with him (because a coworker got it confused with another, more wholesome movie)

    For the most part, my neurons were plastic enough to just accept the weird surreal dream logic, but for some reason my subconscious drew the line at sex. I must have been flushing, because my dad turned to me after the movie was over and started apologizing profusely.

    The only time I remember feeling that much stunned embarassment/shame at watching a movie was when I got my sister Enter The Void as a gift, having never seen it. (Great movie, but the incestual implications make it hard to watch with family).

    Now I’m a lesbian. Mulholland Drive got to me young enough to forever warp my sexuality. (Enter The Void, luckily, did not).





  • You intentionally do not want people that you consider “below” you to use Linux or even be present in your communities.

    No, but I do want my communities to stay on-topic and not be derailed by Discourse™

    Who I consider beneath me is wholly unrelated to their ability to use a computer, and entirely related to their ability to engage with others in a mature fashion, especially those they disagree with.

    Most people use computers to get something done. Be it development, gaming, consuming multimedia, or just “web browsing”

    I realize most people use computers for more than web-browsing, but ask anybody who games, uses multimedia software, or develops how often they have issues with their workflow.

    (which you intentionally use to degrade people “just” doing that)

    No I don’t. Can you quote where I did so, or is it just a vibe you got when reading in the pretentious dickwad tone you seem to be projecting onto me?

    But stop trying to gatekeep people out of it

    I’m not, you’re projecting that onto me again. If you want to use Linux, use Linux. Come here and talk about how you use Linux, or ask whatever questions about Linux you want. If you don’t want to use Linux, or don’t want to to talk about Linux, take it to the appropriate community.

    If keeping communities on-topic and troll-free is “gatekeeping,” then I don’t give a fuck how you feel about it.


  • I don’t think we do, but that’s a feature, not a bug. Here’s why:

    1. There was a great post a few days ago about how Linux is a digital 3rd Space. It’s about spending time cultivating the system and building a relationship with it, instead of expecting it to be transparent while you use it. This creates a positive relationship with your computer and OS, seeing it as more a labor of love than an impediment to being as productive as possible (the capitalist mindset).

    2. Nothing “just works.” That’s a marketing phrase. Windows and Mac only “just work” if the most you ever do is web-browsing and note-taking in notepad. Anything else and you incite cognitive dissonance: hold onto the delusion at the price of doing what you’re trying to do, or accept that these systems aren’t as good as their marketing? The same thread I mentioned earlier talked about how we give Linux more lenience because of the relationship we have with it, instead of seeing it as just a tool for productivity.

    3. Having a barrier of entry keeps general purpose communities like this from being flooded with off-topic discourse that achieves nothing. And no, I’m not just talking about the Yahoo Answers-level questions like “how to change volume Linux???” Think stuff like “What’s the most stargender-friendly Linux distro?” and “How do we make Linux profitable?” and “what Linux distro would Daddy Trump use?” and “where my other Linux simping /pol/t*rds at (socialist Stallman****rs BTFO)???” Even if there is absolutely perfect moderation and you never see these posts directly, these people would still be coming in and finding ways that skirt the rules to inject this discourse into these communities; and instead of being dismissed as trolls, there would be many, many people who think we should hear them out (or at least defend their right to Free Speech).

    4. Finally, it already “just works” for the aforementioned note-taking and web-browsing. The only thing that’s stopping more not so tech-savvy people is that it’s not the de facto pre-installed OS on the PC you pick up from Best Buy (and not Walmart, because you want people to think you’re tech-savvy, so you go to the place with a dedicated “geek squad”). The only way it starts combating Windows in this domain is by marketing agreements with mainstream hardware manufacturers (like Dell and HP); this means that the organization responsible for representing Linux would need the money to make such agreements… Which would mean turning it into a for-profit OS. Which would necessitate closing the source. Which would mean it just becomes another proprietary OS that stands for all that Linux is against.










  • You’ve defined yourself into an impossible bind: you want something extremely portable, universal but with a small disk imprint, and you want it to be general purpose and versatile.

    The problem is that to be universal and general purpose, you need a lot of libraries to interact with whatever type of systems you might have it on (and the peculiarities of each), and you need libraries that do whatever type of interactions with those systems that you specify.

    E.g. under-the-hood, python’s open("<filename>", 'r') is a systemcall to the kernel. But is that Linux? BSD? Windows NT? Android? Mach?

    What if you want your script to run a CLI command in a subshell? Should it call “cmd”? or “sh”? or “powershell”? Okay, okay, now all you need it to do is show the contents of a file… But is the command “cat” or “type” or “Get-FileContents”?

    Or maybe you want to do more than simple read/write to files and string operations. Want to have graphics? That’s a library. Want serialization for data? That’s a library. Want to read from spreadsheets? That’s a library. Want to parse XML? That’s a library.

    So you’re looking at a single binary that’s several GBs in size, either as a standalone or a self-extracting installer.

    Okay, maybe you’ll only ever need a small subset of libraries (basic arithmetic, string manipulation, and file ops, all on standard glibc gnu systems ofc), so it’s not really “general purpose” anymore. So you find one that’s small, but it doesn’t completely fit your use case (for example, it can’t parse uci config files); you find another that does what you need it to, but also way too much and has a huge footprint; you find that perfect medium and it has a small, niche userbase… so the documentation is meager and it’s not easy to learn.

    At this point you realize that any language that’s both easy to learn and powerful enough to manage all instances of some vague notion of “computer” will necessarily evolve to being general purpose. And being general purpose requires dependencies. And dependencies reduce portability.

    At this point your options are: make your own language and interpreter that does exactly what you want and nothing more (so all the dependencies can be compiled in), or decide which criteria you are willing to compromise on.


  • Ni No Kuni 2. Looking for a new RPG, missing that anime aesthetic so I searched up “best JRPGs” (yes, yes I know now that it’s supposed to be perjorative); kept seeing this recommended, including by randos on Reddit (so not just paid review sites).

    After 45 minutes of the most cliche-filled cutscenes and a prolonged tutorial for basic gameplay, I finally can just try it out and… It’s the most boring, generic gameplay ever. Dull story, bland characters, bland gameplay, too long of intro. 2/10

    The only other game that comes close is Assassin’s Creed 3. Finished the tutorial mission, made it to Boston, started chasing collectibles and trying to 100% the first map. Sunk in about 5 hours and can’t find the rest of the collectibles, so I decide to move on and come back later.

    That’s when it hits you with “PSYCH! That was just the Prologue, and all that time and effort invested in this character is MEANINGLESS. Here’s a brand new character to build up.”

    I hate that. I don’t mind when the game begins with an OP character to show you the ropes only to take all of it away, but please make it short. I loved Metroid Prime, for example. Investing 5 hours to have all of it mean nothing to your character, and next to nothing for the story fucking sucks. 4/10, would probably still finish just because I loved 1+2.