If we’re going fictional characters, then Havelock Vetinari from the Discworld novels.

As someone who has done a lot of distro hopping in the past, I’ve found that going for a stable release that is widely used as a daily driver is superior for gaming than “gaming specific” linux distros, largely on the basis that the gaming distros have routinely had buggy UIs, driver issues, and a variety of unexpected and undesired behavioral problems tied to the array of “gaming adjacent” software installed, most of which you can install yourself with little to no effort and most of which you probably don’t want or need in the first place.

The coalition of the ascendant concept is kind of insane when you remember for a moment that the popular vote is kinda worthless in winning elections. The electoral college is structured in such a way that conservative whites have a larger share of the electorate relative to their minority peers. It doesn’t matter if you’re a lock for California and New York (enclaves of coastal elites and minorities alike) if you lose the entirety of the South, Southwest, and Midwest, enclaves of…the opposite of those things, really. This 538 article on it has links to other discussions related to this and represents a fascinating look into the relationship between popular votes and electoral votes. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-a-difference-2-percentage-points-makes/

Democrats suffer from a condition that I’ve come to call “Democratic Realism,” named after Capitalist Realism. No matter how much they get their shit kicked in. No matter how badly they do. No matter how little they accomplish. No matter how badly they look or do in debates. Democrats always believe, beyond a shred of doubt, that they’ll win elections without trying. Not because of their own merits, but because they’re just the only “real” choice; they simply can’t fathom anyone willingly voting for their opponents.

Hillary barely campaigned in the “flyover states” that she needed to win because she couldn’t be fucking bothered to actually try. It wasn’t worth the effort to try and persuade people she thought of as her lessers. And the DNC just went “well, it’s obviously her turn. She’s been waiting for the chance at the presidency for 20 years now. We should go ahead and let her be president.” Because that’s the mentality. They don’t have to “win” elections. They just pick a candidate and they get to win, because there is no “real” alternative. That Bush and Trump won don’t indicate that, yeah, actually, you do have to fight for the people who are voting for you, otherwise they’ll vote for the schmuck that appeals to their basest and most venal instincts. Those were just flukes…right? And you don’t have to inspire confidence and admiration in others, because they should just recognize how smart and accomplished and inoffensive their candidates are, and that they’re told to vote for them by people that are smarter than they are, so they should just shut up and do it.

It’s a party driven less by any kind of ideological goals and more by a pervasive sense of smug, impotent, lazy egotism. And, yeah, they’ll get a shitload of votes in the elections because the alternative always seems to be someone who is one goose-step shy of a literal Nazi. Biden will probably even win the popular vote. Y’know…just like Hillary did…

Okay, hear me out. Yes, Hilldog got the DNC nomination and lost what was supposed to be the most softball Democratic presidential victory in American history, giving us 4 years of Trump. But! But…what if we get her on the ticket with Biden, Biden secures the re-election. Hillary is Vice President for 4 years. Does a great job, makes a lot of people at Goldman Sachs very wealthy, pushes for new legislation to have black teenagers officially outlawed, etc. Then, at the ripe old age of 80, we get a Hillary Clinton presidential bid once a motherfucking 'gain. And then she loses to, oh, I’m gonna say…David Duke.

Fuck, the original Pacific Rim wasn’t even good. Like, how you gonna set such a low bar and somehow slide under it with room to spare?

“My daughter Murph. I keep gettin’ older. She stays the same age.”

Also, I love how he had a son who just wanted to be a farmer and that meant that Matthew McConaughey’s character was justified in being totally emotionally disinterested in him, compared to his genius daughter. Seriously, at a certain point I think Nolan forgot he wrote this guy with two kids. His entire character was defined by his relationship with his daughter. Why even give him a son in the first place?

“This woman, who suffers from body dysphoria and constantly gets more and more plastic surgery (a behavior which harms no one but herself) is the same as this fictional serial killer who tortured hundreds of people to death.”

But in all seriousness, I don’t think it’s nice to make fun of people’s appearance.

“quick call?”

“sure, I’ve got time for the two hour meeting this is going to be.”

Don’t Bother Reading

“I guess this is why real companies do regression testing.”

It’s an interesting idea, though, that one’s preference for a particular design or aesthetic, especially when that design or aesthetic is emblematic of a particular historical or cultural moment, is never wholly isolated to its visual or material components, but also innately tied to our memory and understanding of that moment. I personally don’t think you can extricate a particular aesthetic from the psychic background noise surrounding it. Our minds don’t work that way. It’s always forming these subconscious or unconscious connections, binding events and memory to abstract signifiers.

We don’t like the 90s aesthetic because it’s “better” or even attractive. I mean, nobody has wallpaper in their home with those pastel and neon triangles. Many of us like it because it reminds us of childhood, of not having responsibilities other than waking up early enough on Saturday to catch all your cartoons and of not complaining too much when you have to go visit your grandparents who can never remember your birthday and who always ask you how old you are this year, of finishing Super Mario on the SNES before your friend does so you can brag about being better at video games than him. It’s of a simpler time and place, because we were simpler. And it was, in retrospect, of an America briefly sandwiched between the end of the original “Forever War” that was the Cold War, and the beginning of the 20th Century’s new “Forever War,” that is the War on Terror.

First time?

Churchill was a master of historical non-fiction. Not “history books,” per se, but basically books about historical topics pertaining to England that interested him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_the_English-Speaking_Peoples. They were very popular during his day.

Ah, yes, Drawn Together. The perfect show for people in the early oughts who thought South Park was both too clever and not nearly crude or mean-spirited enough. I’ve seen every episode at least twice.

Great thing is that since it’s open source someone can just fork the project and continue development in a different direction.

On reddit, there’s a subreddit called r/lrcast, which is the dedicated subreddit for the Limited Resources podcast. The primary purpose of the subreddit, however, is not to discuss the podcast, but to discuss the “limited” format of Magic: the Gathering, which constitutes draft and sealed. It’s a very difficult, very expensive format of Magic to play and is a niche subsection of an already fairly niche hobby.

Extrapolating from this, we can say that Youtube hosts around 2.5 to 3 exabytes (2.5 to 3 million terabytes) of data. Interestingly, the total volume of data on the internet is, as of the end of 2023, around 120 zettabytes, so Youtube only makes up around 0.0025% of the total volume of all that data.

I’ve heard nothing but good things about HTMX

I’ve only ever heard anything “bad” about HTMX and it was here on Lemmy, actually. I ran into someone who was absolutely certain that HTMX was unsafe by design because it leveraged HTML over the wire and was therefore susceptible to HTML injection attacks, specifically by injecting malicious scripts that could be ran from domains you didn’t control. I tried explaining that proper utilization of access-control headers innately prevented this because they worked on the browser level and couldn’t be intercepted or interfered with by HTML injection by design, but he kept insisting it was unsafe while refusing to elaborate. He was very wrong, of course, but also very confident.

I do a lot of systems and backend programming and HTMX is the only way I can actually be productive with frontend work when I have to do it. It’s so simple and straightforward.