What if I told you… that’s a feature, not a bug?

It’s far too much to type and way too philosophical for anyone to give a shit about, but, tldr: the US (and arguably the world) is on a freight train speeding at absolute destruction. No one in power is pushing the stop button. (In the US) one party is (sometimes) pushing a slowdown button but the other party is always slamming any button they can find that doesn’t say stop on it. They know where it leads, and this is what they want. Everyone “knows” the current institutions and systems are failing, but the only politically relevant (so, in the US, not the actual left) force with power is the far right wingers who desire destruction and their only resistance is the left and right wing liberals in the middle going “noooo the institutions!” but no one actually cares about the institutions, besides other liberals. They lack any ability though, due to their political ideology, to actually fight for the beloved institutions. They can only rely on the powerful far right to “come to their senses” and stop pushing the death button. Unfortunately for them, the far right will not stop without someone stopping them- forcefully. And since the far right and liberals effectively eliminated the far left and even the center left for the most part… there’s no one to counter that far right fascistic death drive.

But you don’t even need that accurate assessment of things to understand the situation. Just know they want to abolish public education, medicine, doctors, anything related to “science” broadly, any non-Christian religions, non-white people, LGBTQ+ people and anything tangentially related to gay stuff (imagined or real), etc. pretty much infinitely.

These people are the proto-Nazis of our time. Not everything will align perfectly, but it doesn’t have to. They want to burn medical information, they want to destroy what they see as “perverted secular society” burn it all away and cleanse the land for some great rebirth of a Christian Nationalist theocracy where white men are elevated above everyone and your white male status plus property owning status is all that matters. I know this all sounds cliche and overstated at this point… but they keep proving it true every chance they get.

The worst part is that ultimately they’re the only side making progress towards their goal because their goal is aligned with the way things are going and must go. But the difference is we can arrive at that destructive moment, whenever it is, and come out the other side in some Christian theocracy nightmare world or something much better than we can currently imagine possible. As it stands right now, that nightmare vision seems to be the only viable conclusion. Which is rather depressing…

(Not that person)

1 File transfers can be done via apps like localsend, pairdrop/snapdrop (selfhosted, I wouldn’t use the public servers), or simply putting files on a shared server, etc.

2 This is impossible to correctly answer until the new phones are actually out. Reason being we don’t know the restrictions (or hopefully not) that Apple will arbitrarily apply to the port. The iPad, for what it’s worth, can easily mount USB C drives and other accessories, so, hopefully Apple continues in that vein of sanity

3 no

4 my iPhone is my actual phone phone and the pixel is wifi only.

I think he’s just incredibly stupid. When trying to figure out someone’s actions just consider what motivates them. Elon desperately wants people to adore him. He probably really thought he could buy a giant media-adjacent outlet and turn it into a machine to churn out pro-him propaganda. Obviously he misunderstood many variables though, the first of which being that unlike a newspaper or TV network, the owner of Twitter doesn’t create or really control the content created and put out. I mean, he can and does censor certain stuff now, and Twitter always has but in the past it did lean more towards banning Nazi shit which was better. But in general, people are gonna do what they and no matter how much he boosts his dedicated blue psychos it can’t overcome the that right wing shit just isn’t popular outside of a small subset of the people. You can’t make an entire website dedicated to advocating for the deaths of transkids and expect it to be popular. He bought into the BS hype around the right wing in general. They mistake rigging “democratic elections” (gerrymandering, voter suppression, etc.) as proof of their popularity. No, it just proves they can rig shit and people are ignorant and/or apathetic. Polling proves repeatedly that even burger munching Americans are pro-socialist type programs when not poisoned with the word itself (poisoned due to a life of indoctrination to get a knee jerk NO if they hear it).

I think this is correct.

Also, it’s incredibly ironic because him and all those weirdos like him. The altright, or whatever the fuck they are, “freedom of speech brother!” “Socialism is slavery!” “Crypto will free us!” “Covid was a Chinese hoax!” types of dipshits. They’re like the far right version of what they imagine “woke” liberals to be. I’m not drawing equivalency in the ideologies (obviously), just pointing out that they are, literally, the overly performative, loud, obnoxious virtue signaling people they imagine “woke liberals” to be and mock constantly. Almost like… they’re projecting. Hmm.

And there’s another saying amongst the right wingers… “go woke, go broke.” Welp. It turns out they were their own snake eating their own ass on that one. They smoked too of their own stash. Drank their own Koolaid. Shot themselves in the fucking head.

I let people play on my lawn just to bring balance to the universe. Unless they don’t clean up their dog’s shit. Then old man mode erupts.

Normie is incredibly common online in general. It’s not just relegated to weird right wing sites either.

I’m in my mid 30s and even I gotta say… you sound a bit like “old man yells at cloud” with this take. Just chill out a little bit. You’re making the rest of us approaching-middle-agers look bad.

And if you’re somehow younger than me then I gotta say… actually, keep it up. Your apparent lack of being terminally-online (oh no, I used a recently coined term…) is definitely healthier than whatever the fuck the rest of us are doing.

Revanced has sponsorblock though and has for a while

I was using Heimdall and it was having some weird corruption(?) issues. Switched to homarr when I saw it the other day and it’s great. It has small icons (for phones) medium (for like tablets) and large (for desktops/laptops) all can be changed independently so you can optimize for mobile and desktop usage. Très bien

Which is annoying tbh.

Would be nice if the smart whatever (see I forgot their app name already while typing) team would… team up somehow with the revanced team and they agree on one name, one app. Having two apps for what is essentially the same OS with a different skin is… silly. Like an app for Apple TV and a different app that does essentially the same thing for iOS.

I see updates from as recent as last week on github?

On that note, if anyone sees this comment or another and wants to try YouTube revanced (or extended) DO NOT JUST BLINDLY GOOGLE AND CLICK THE WEBSITE THAT COMES UP FIRST

I have no idea if that site is owned by a legit dev or not. What I do know is the legit devs directly say on github, where the source code can be reviewed, to NOT download from any other place than github.

Sorry for the PSA but I just don’t want people downloading possibly malicious code from random sites. It’s easy to fall into the blindly search, blindly install hole.

I think it’s just the ease of GUI for people. This isn’t to shit on anyone, btw. A lot of people don’t like dealing with the keys and IPs involved, few as there may be, with setting up wireguard.

If someone else has a compelling difference or reason to use tailscale then I’d be happy to hear it. I tried it once and it worked fine enough. But wireguard works just as fine and takes the same time to setup if you already know what to do. Like wireguard seriously takes 2 minutes.

Americans: just remember for rough mental computations. Keyword rough

1M ≈ 1yard ≈ 3feet 1Kg ≈ 2lb

You can almost basically just convert yards to meters directly. For kilos just 2x in your head for easy math. 2.2 is the actual multiplier, but for estimations, 2x works for most cases.

He managed to build a weird cult of preteens and divorced dads but soon it seems he’ll be thrown in a hole for at least a decade. I’m generally anti-prison, but this dude certainly deserves whatever is coming his way.

If you talking about a test at like a DMV, I would guess it’s more simply just employees don’t want to bother to pull questions up and review with possibly annoyed people or they’re understaffed and the higher ups “solve” part of the issue by saying don’t talk to people, just shove the papers in their hand and move on.

Yes. I went from shitty tv and a gf to great tv and no gf. Not sure how to measure this.

Pretty sure it either QVC (the sales channel) or some cartoon with those colors for art. Probably the former. Shit was a long time ago.

Goddamnit.

Now you’re getting a followup story of how such a small incident fucked with me years later.

I was with my (at the time) gf in our apartment and I don’t remember the exact specifics, but I was sitting looking at the TV straight-on ie the proper viewing angle. She was sitting on our floor looking up at the TV at like maybe a 45 degree angle.

I can’t remember the show or what it was, but on the screen there were some pastel colors. All I mentioned was like “oh, pastel colors. You like those colors.” She was drawing at the time, so it was somewhat relevant. Anyway she looks at the TV, from the bad angle still, and snaps at me “those aren’t pastel you fucking idiot!” And it was like that spinning shit in a movie of me in my head like “no…no…that test was wrong!” Normally we kinda went back and forth like this. Kinda like Vinny and his gf in that movie “my cousin Vinny” but less toxic and less Italian (same thing?). This time though I was just like “but… uh… the angle…” she kinda kept saying I was wrong for a few minutes before I finally tested it myself and then told her to stand and all was revealed. I was not an idiot after all.

And that goddamn test was wrong!

That 74 is kind of tricky and my vision is “normal”

This reminds me of a time I was taking one of these colorblind tests. The person administering it was flipping (way too fast) through the numbers and I was reading them fine. A trickier one came up which I could very clearly read, like this 71/74 one, and I said (because fucker was flipping way too fast) “71… no, 74 actually.” He marked it wrong. It felt like a real life Seinfeld incident after that where I kind of stopped the whole test and was saying basically, as nicely as I could, “hey. I said 74. Mark that correct.” MFer didn’t even vocalize a response. I can’t remember but I think he did like two more numbers, said I passed with whatever number of tests with one incorrect. I had to get my eyesight examined after that (this was for some pilot shit. Like a physical) and I told the doctor and he kind of shrugged it off too like “you passed it. It doesn’t matter.” IT MATTERS TO ME GODDAMNIT

Thanks for triggering this random traumatic event from over a decade ago.

Gonna be captain obvious here by saying “maybe because the world is spiraling into shit?”

And everything is, absolutely by definition, political. Everything. People who think they can escape politics are delusional and privileged. If you’re reading about some horrible new law banning encryption then yes that’s fucking political. Instead of head in sanding… I dunno. Do something?

Is there a reason why? I was doing a joke or bit originally, but I do wonder these random things.

In my own life I basically took to smartphone app usage over desktop browsers (or laptops) nearly immediately when I got my first in my early 20s. I’ve now come to the point where I find browsing written forums on non-mobile almost painful and only do it for troubleshooting type purposes. Same for consuming media like news or YouTube videos and such. Some things just seem to take to using as background, distracting scrolling and now that I know that I can’t go back. Although one desktop I had years back for about two years was boring as fuck and the IT somehow didn’t block reddit so I used that on desktop just so my bosses thought I was doing stuff and not on my phone (bad service there anyway and IT never seemed to care unless it was incredibly over the line nsfw stuff)