• 0 Posts
  • 159 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

help-circle
  • Yes, I read your comment. It’s okay if you didn’t understand my comment. Clearly you don’t understand how filesystems and drive mounting works under Linux or the role of desktop environments in managing filesystems, mounting, and permissions. I don’t doubt that you’re genuinely struggling here, but there is no call for that kind of hostility. You might have some hope for figuring it out if you open your mind to the fact that you don’t fully understand what your problem is.

    Steam expects the games to be in a particular place with a particular set of permissions and ownership relative to the user(s) and/or group(s) expected to use those game files. I’m telling that Linux doesn’t care where those files physically reside. You can tell Steam that those files are exactly where Steam expects them to be at the filesystem level, without messing with Steam configs, nautilus, gnome, or KDE. There are several ways to do this, but without understanding the requirements of your machine no one here will be able to give you effective advice.

    I’ve seen some other comments from you about running something or other as root or just blanket chmods to 777 and I can tell you from experience that those are rarely effective solutions and can sometimes make things worse (just try something like that when configuring ssh configs, keys, and permissions).


  • What does any of this have to do with KDE, Gnome, or nautilus? If symlinks aren’t working, I’d dedicate an entire drive to Steam by mounting that drive (with matching permissions) right where Steam expects to find them. You can mount a filesystem/disc/ISO/drive/network share practically anywhere you want. If your network is fast enough, I bet you could even access your games over NFS, though I wouldn’t recommend it.


  • They remember at time when we weren’t all within reach of our own personal phone line 24/7. During that forgotten time, they were mostly children and expected to answer the landline and play the respectful secretary for the family. Sure, you MIGHT call someone’s house if you cared or dared to run the gauntlet of dealing with whomever answered the home phone and it wasn’t so private that you’d risk someone listening in from another room of your house or theirs. Party lines were even still a thing in some places. You could listen in to wireless handset phone with a baby monitor. Phone conversations carried a lot of emotion baggage.

    The dotcom bubble burst just after we all got cell phones. As a result of this quirk of timing, most millennials grew up socializing a lot with people remotely via text based conversations over the Internet using things like Bulletin Board Services/Forums, IRC, ICQ, newsgroups, etc. These were free and far from the prying eyes of parents or easily hidden. But, that would have all been done at the home or school computer just like the landline (usually sharing the same literal line), not a thing you carried with you.

    Millennials spent vast oceans of time being completely and utterly unreachable unless physically present and together, learning to converse face to face or in paragraphs of text from a box at home. Even emojis were text. Images were slow, small, and low quality, so the memes were rare and crafted with care.

    When millennials got their first phone, it would have been likely for most that they’d most often be used by parents checking in. Cell phones were still mostly an in case of emergency type communication device, not your daily driver. That battery was limited and charging was slow. Even though text messages of the time carried a stiff financial cost, millennials stuck in class could converse by tapping out messages on the phones physical number pad buttons while pretending to pay attention.

    TLDR: Millennials grew up during a communication technology revolution and as a result they’ve got some hang ups about always with you communication devices. Voice and video calls are an intrusion. For many, a ringing phone signals only parents, authority, or debt collectors.



  • This should be always. We could easily have 13 months with an even 28 days, or four weeks, every year. But, you’re going to say, “What about that last day?” That’s new year’s day, it’s once a year, not ever a regular day of the week, and every leap year we get 2 of them and make a weekend of it. Those remainder calendar days don’t need to be a particular day of the week, we can just make them holidays and stop worrying about it. Or we do keep them as regular days of the week and the calendar shifts by a day or two every year. I don’t really care. I just want the months and weeks to be at least a little less chaotic. And if there is going to be a chaotic little remainder weekend every year, it might as well be a party.


  • For me good country music is about growing up rural poor and making rebellious music with heart and soul. You can’t authentically make that music while hating people (be they women, brown, queer, trans, foreign etc.). You can’t make that music without being against cops and corporations like Nestle and United Health.

    I had typed out an overly long rant about modern country losing its soul and just being pop music with a guitar twang veneer and classic country shit heels like David Allen Coe who still managed to make some memorable songs. Instead I’ll just list some contemporary artists that I’d put on the same playlist and call it country.

    In no particular order: Jesse Welles, Sturgill Simpson, Lil Nas X, Robert Ellis, Father John Misty, Old Crow Medicine Show, Courtney Barnett, Kurt Vile, The Texas Gentlemen, etc. I’m sure others can suggest more and some will dispute some of these. I make no claims that any of these people won’t turn out to be bad guys later. After all, I do still kind of like that David Allen Coe song about being drunk the day his mom got out of prison and he went to pick her up in the rain, but before he could get to the station in his pickup truck she got run over by a damned old train.




  • You seem to have almost completely missed the point of allegory and metaphor in TOS. “Time after humanity has dealt with” as you put it is just a literary device to soften the impact when the show was inevitably confronted or viewed by real racists. It was never a really view of the future. It was always a reflection of our present through the lens of futurism, a clever narrative framing device. That narrative framing device could not possibly remain unchangeable through multiple generations without loosing everything that made it work. Attempting to do so, i.e. keeping the storytelling framework completely unchanged and not adapting to new generations and new social dynamics, would have shown a lack of creativity and imagination.

    The show was from a time when the U.S. thought they had beaten fascism (past tense, done, a part of the past) and would soon beat racism, classism, etc. From a time when imperialism was seen as a fundamentally good social force by most of the imperialist public. Today we (mostly) know better. We will probably never truly erase any of them. They are things we’ll have to remain vigilant for. A show today patronizing us with their perfected utopian society which remains VERY imperialist without shining a light on that contradiction just would not work. A show lacking any interpersonal drama also would not work and it’s not even something that was really true for TOS, just a weird kink Roddenberry got into when producing TNG. That’s the context of the way Star Trek has changed and it matters.







  • Sorry for the rant. I long story short, I agree with you.

    The quadratic formula.

    When we learned to use it in algebra, it was just rote memorization that made little sense. We knew there was a proof for it, but we were told it was beyond our level and to just wait. When we finally touched on it again in Calculus, it was little more than a footnote. Since we had developed better tools for finding roots already, we did little more than note its existence and solve the problems more generally. I don’t think we got around to the real proof of the quadratic formula until later with Linear Algebra. Most people aren’t going to get that far. Most people don’t have any need to. The quadratic formula is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. You need upper level math skills to prove it, but we learn it early in order to practice algebraic skills to get to that level.

    I just wish that we’d have been taught some of those calculus fundamentals and ideas earlier. It would have been like a light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe we wouldn’t be ready to rigorously work through limits and integrals before all that algebra practice, but even a child can understand acceleration and its relationship to changes in velocity. We have so many documentaries about special relativity, general relativity, and quantum mechanics. Almost no one watching these documentaries can do that math, but we don’t worry about that. Our society could benefit from everyone having more general knowledge about the very broad strokes of calculus, differential equations, statistics, and combinatorics long before we worry about teaching the mechanics of those maths to them. Not everyone needs to know HOW to do them, but everyone can be taught to appreciate WHAT they do and WHY they are important and a part of every facet of our lives.