I bailed on Netflix when I realized that damn, I’m going like a month with this on my phone and haven’t really watched much, maybe one anime? Can I get something other than shitty anime, Netflix? Fun action flick from the last 5 years maybe? No? Never the good one, always the knockoff, the shitty sequel, nothing at all? Canceled Mindhunter? Because of course. Okay, no more pay money, and then I didn’t miss it. That decision took a shameful amount of time to make.

This was way before the password share thing. I don’t know what the rest of you are even doing. Stuff for the kids I guess.

I guess I do this bullshit, now, for entertainment, but this Suuuuuucks with a capital S, so the next step is to find the government chip that makes me scroll and metaphorically remove it. Fuck socials, too. Fuck all this shit anymore.

This sounds like the battery and the charger’s problem to handle, not mine.

All this tech, all this automation for every damn thing, and people keep coming at me like I’m supposed to do everything manually with my fingers and eyes and maybe an alarm or something to keep me on schedule. No. Stop it.

Make the charger handle it, or shut up. Make the phone, the charger, and the battery handle it together, you know, with digital automation. Do not even mention it to me.

This type of relationship is pretty common in war. You and the squad end up “in the shit” and now you have all crossed the boundaries of what civilians call “manliness”. You are free, unimpeachable, the manliest thing, a real warrior, a soldier in battle. The things you do now define manliness, you are writing the rules. They can call you whatever, you will reply with the sort of laughter that silences fools.

People die around you. The sound of another man’s voice becomes poetry to you. How much longer will you hear his voice? Who knows, tell him a shitty joke. Sit on his lap for a gag, do whatever. Drink in his presence, press his flesh against yours, be alive together, try to keep him in your memory, tomorrow we all may die. Has anybody seen those pictures of soldiers from the American Civil War all hanging out and mugging for the camera? Acting all “gay” with each other? That’s what war does to men, sometimes, probably not that often, I fear.

Somebody online with a military background once remarked about the safest he’s ever felt, including in civilian life, was when he was in some tent in a war zone with the rest of the platoon, everyone in their sleeping bags, crammed in the tent together like a litter of kittens in a box. Sure, they were in the death zone, for real, but he was warm and snug, surrounded by armed badasses who would come to his aid at once if anything nasty went down. He said he slept like a baby, that he’s never felt that sense of security since, not even safe in bed as a civilian, later.

It means a lot to me that this book, TLOR, was pretty much written by the Great War. Tolkien went to that war, against his own will, compelled by shame campaigns, not even the law, in spite of his own convictions, and he did not have some safe posting at the base, no, he was at the Somme. He saw the worst of it, probably missed death by inches several times, saw mud and blood, was deafened and battered, only to survive at last, coming home as changed as Frodo.

He watched men charge into machine guns like mice into a blender, watched them die of trench foot and the stupid ways war kills you without even glory or honor to show for it, saw that sometimes courage is just hiding in your little hole and not screaming when the tanks roll over. He saw Mordor in person. No man’s land.

Then he came home, and did he write some edgy darkness? No. He wrote this thing, this fantasy, with its message of hope that evil can be vanquished, and that men can be good, yes, even when they seem utterly lost to goodness. This is somehow the lesson that the War to End All Wars had taught him. He had nothing left to prove, so he made a pretty, frivolous thing, for children, but couldn’t help it, he couldn’t help making something bigger than that. He knew how intimate men become with each other under fire, and it ended up in the book.

That is the only thing he wanted to remember, that unexpected love when suffering and death are right on top of you. I wonder who Legolas was to him? Somebody young and beautiful, who deserved to live a thousand years, but didn’t, probably. They shall not grow old.

We shouldn’t need the machine guns coming at us to hug our friends, that’s probably what he wanted the world to know.

I wonder if it works like IRC. The “plague” this entire time has been servers. As soon as the idea only works because somebody, somewhere, is maintaining a server, cloud or hardware, then you’re kinda sunk. The server is the bottleneck. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a AAA game launch only for the servers to be inadequate. It happens again and again and again, so I assume the business considerations push them toward having just enough server and maybe a little less, never extra, which costs money and cuts margins.

Somewhere there are a bunch of servers howling away in a room that are actually Discord, and Discord spends money to make them howl, so there’s never as much server as you want, which is why things start bogging down with too many people in the chat room at once.

Most importantly to a corporation, if you have to interact with their servers in order to do anything, then they can own the platform by owning the servers. So there’s always going to be a server, even if it’s not strictly needed. The same consideration goes through the head of the streamer who always wants to launch a Discord because it’s “free” but they can sell it to you and then have top level control of an entire community as an asset that can be sold to others. There’s always a server. There will be a server if the actual application doesn’t really need it.

The reason IRC works fine with 1500 people in a chat is because IRC uses the user’s machine for any sort of computation power it needs, and then everything else it is doing is just sending data across wires. There is no central server farm. I haven’t used IRC in a really, really long time, but if it hasn’t changed, then it also doesn’t support lots of picture posting, which helps. Most of the memory usage on my machine at idle is just too many Discord channels all needing to use my local RAM memory to store the umpteen thousand photos everyone has uploaded, all the memes and etc. The IRC I remember was text, and text uses so little data that it can be treated like zero data.

Lots of pictures are probably non-negotiable in the modern era. Heck, they’re pretty important for serious work tasks, like putting up a shot of the broken gadget, so the engineering team can get an eyeball on the failure, that means pictures are in, text-only isn’t viable. I don’t know if modern IRC supports this or not, it probably does if people are still using it at all.

But IRC is a piece of open-source software that you install on your machine, free to the user. It’s not a web app, it doesn’t live in a browser. The data of you interacting with others is being sent out to them and also back to you, where it shows up in your IRC client and the chat room. If 1500 people are using it, then 1500 people have each added some of their machine power to making it all work, so it scales, it always has as much hardware as it needs. Again, there’s no server in the middle to run out of capacity, so that problem is just bypassed.

Everything used to work like this, circa the late 1990s and early 2010s. Everyone was assumed to be on a PC of their own, and the only problem was how to connect them together to do stuff, like have deranged fan wars about shows. BBSs were already kind of old hat, and there’s that damn server again, every BBS has one. All the most clever apps of the 90s, even the web, managed to jump through hoops to avoid the necessity of a central server to get things done because then somebody has to pay for it, run it, maintain it and own it. We just want the wires, the lovely, lovely cables dragged across the sea at somebody else’s unthinkable expense. If you can eliminate the server somehow, then you win. And they did. Things like IRC and ICQ blew the hell up from using that model.

We really need to dig that entire concept back up and brush the dust off of it. I wonder if that’s what Matrix is.

Now if you’ll excuse me I need to go prune some pointless Discord channels. Oh, by the by, fucking nobody uses Slack, or knows what it is. Dudes on the internet all think it’s normal because tech offices seem to use it a lot, the rest of the world has never used Slack. Up until right now I was assuming that Discord and Slack are the same thing, owned by the same company, and Slack is just the “business casual” version of Discord. This doesn’t seem to be true, but that’s how unfamiliar I am with Slack, while being chronically online. There are probably more people around who still remember ICQ than have ever used Slack in their lives.

I love the Church of the Subgenius reference built into Slack’s name. From what I can tell, nobody who uses that thing actually gets any slack, it actively removes slack from your life and makes boss surveillance really, really easy for the boss, but you must always act as though Big Brother can hear, or you’re fucked. Good work Bob, nice joke. Anyway, I shut up now.

I gave it some thought and decided that yes, while it’s nice to get out in nature, an afternoon in the park does just as well, walking around, no need to sleep there, so the reason people are camping is that we are practicing homelessness, just in case.

Half the Boomers didn’t, either. It was they who got everyone started talking about the environment. They also built this fucking thing we’re typing on. Shit, the ability to divorce people if you need to was one of their biggest breakthroughs. I have no business kissing their butts, but you millennials? are fascist about this stuff and it has to end, now. Nobody has the luxury of your bullshit.

Millennials are what, 40 now? Some freelancers writing sniveling articles about avocado toast 20 years ago does not allow you to desperately look for scapegoats to blame for everything that happens to you. Nobody cares if your parents are bad people, everyone else alive does not pay for that.

Don’t fucking talk about voting until every last one of you is doing it. Fuck you for refusing to show for Clinton, THAT is on your head, so worry about your own crimes, you killed a lot of people by letting Trump through at the worst possible time, plus slacking off on all the other elections you didn’t even know existed, and if you don’t like that framing of responsibility, then fuck OFF about the baby boomers.

How many times now have I seen you little bitches no-show? How many chuds have you made wealthy? Rogan and a bunch of these other right-wing fucks becoming wealthy for stupid podcasts is on your generation for listening to them. How many times have you stepped up for anything but self-pity? How many more excuses? I don’t care if you never get to buy a house, shut the FUCK up about it. Welcome to reality for, like, 99% of the global population.

It ends. The next time I catch one of you talking about your “struggle” making 140k a year in stupid fucking Frisco, I swear to fuckin god. Everyone understands your living expenses just fine, you NEVER shut up about it, across what? 7 platforms? Somebody is making 25k in the same fuckin town, in a restaurant you’re too special to eat at, fuck your whining.

Scapegoating is a bad, bad, bad habit that your entire generation seems to share, I think it’s a trauma thing. Don’t care. I just got done hoping that COVID didn’t kill me and my whole family over some trash job that exists so you and your family can bang the order button from safety. Fuuuuck you and your victimhood, you expected us to be all cool about that while you decided to have yourself a worker’s rights movement that we weren’t invited to unless we stayed obedient to your ideas for FUCK sake. It’s your responsibility to process your trauma, it’s nobody else’s responsibility to put up with your failure to do so.

If you expect the millions of people who went under the bus for your convenience to just “get over it” and be all cool, then you will get the fuck over whatever is your problem and STOP trying to build solidarity with each other through scapegoating one group after the other. Who’s next after enough Boomers are dead? We know you won’t just drop that shit, it’s how you are, so who has to be your scapegoat next?

None of us, globally, are ever going to be free of the conservatism that seems to be baked into roughly half of humanity, that causes all this grief.

You think Boomers are bad? Some of the people on this Earth, we can’t discuss their evil without getting called xenophobic, good thing they’re all moving to live closer to you, so rise the fuck above, get over yourselves, and prepare your souls for that situation.

Maybe, with some sort of coherent political will, we might be able to get a fucking leash on the wealthy, who are always at the root of our suffering, but not so long as you and your kind get played like a fucking harp, constantly spewing casual hatred on a generation of people who ultimately had no more control than yours does, and who aren’t anymore or less fashy than you fucks clearly are. THEY show up to vote, YOU bitch and do nothing.

You’re 40! Fuck sake! This is teenage bullshit. You should have figured this out on your own by now. Enough.

Get the fuck over it, now. Tell your fucking friends. People are holding YOU personally responsible for the Palestinian genocide because you aren’t doing enough about it, so see how you feel about being in the hot seat over shit you can’t control. Motherfuckers, goddamn.

I just want to say that I appreciate the truly fractal nature of these memes

Sharks have flooded Shark Infested Waters with shark asshole stink but this time the asshole stink is AI generated and Taylor Swift has a billion dollars for lawyers.

Does anybody know what’s up with that crazy link? There appears to be an instance of some kind on the other end and that’s why it looks like alphabet soup.

Also the lead acid batteries in the old cars don’t like this very much, either. It is nice to be powered by fire when the cold hits, not gonna lie.

Please tell me you made it talk to a bot.

And then she made a bunch of Jade eggs for your puss puss and sold them.

It’s a video loop of cartoon Spiderman grasping at a disappearing mist. I guess it’s a gif but it also has a play/pause function so who knows what format it is.

It’s hard to tell what will actually function on Lemmy. I think WebP files that aren’t jpegs have been causing grief too, I see a lot of blank posts that are probably that format. A ton of pictures are WebP now even though you’d expect an older format.

Also I’m on desktop, so if you’re mobile that might explain things.

Hobbits walking past the hobbit hole in the pic like motherfuckin gentrification buildings brah, this rent is already too high, I gotta use my gun more

People certainly are polishing this meme to a high sheen. Anyway, tell it to the pothos ivy.

If there was just some obnoxious little T-notch I had to line up on the connector, then I would fumble with it once and after that I could probably get it done in the dark, but apparently it doesn’t matter how many times I use a USB, I’ll never learn to use it on the first try, with the lights on and a flashlight pointed at the situation.

I like that getting it wrong and forcing it also destroys the port, so if it’s a crucial connection, and you’re in a hurry in poor light it’s a great way to kill the whole show trying to insist on that USB going in first try.

Great design, Crowley, you really are a professional. I think it’s better than that awful motorway, this one has touched the world, I can see why that angel loves you so much, what an artist.

Sorry wrong fandom

Oh so sorry we misplaced your paperwork very badly for you Mr Navalny, I cannot say that we have a death certificate for you but I’m sure we could find one if necessary.

That guy’s red jacket was truly something.

God he was bad at being inconspicuous. Too king to grey man properly or something.

Oh well, guess I’m still happy about this magic bag i got for going places I don’t want Google knowing about.

I’m not sure how many lost their jobs to the machines at all. At a glance there appear to be about 4 attendants per self-checkout area, which is at least a dozen self-checkout machines at our local Walmart, so they all stay busy enough what with telling the machine I’m old enough to buy beer and such.

Minus the self-checkout machines I could imagine 2 of the 4 clerks running the usual “not enough cashiers” play that stores got famous for, with the other 2 being sent to the back for whatever duties. Possibly they aren’t hired at all.

If my questionable observations are accurate, then that means that maybe Walmart is getting more throughput, with everyone ringing themselves up, but maybe they aren’t spending a bunch less on labor.

I can’t see anybody going back on the self-check machines, though. Not after all that money spent, and the decade that retailers have spent waiting for customers to learn how to do the job themselves, especially the older folks. That was a bitter change to buy, so it’s wishful thinking that we’re going right back to human checkout only.

Hell, Aldi just installed a couple self checkout machines here. They were the one holding out, too, since an Aldi cashier zooms the groceries through so fast it’s tough to justify. Oh, and they’re trying to have that one person, with shoppers in front of them, also be the attendant for the self-check machines. I double scanned something by accident and the clerk had to stop their own line to help me by pushing a button from way over there and then back to scanning they went.

Come on, Aldi.