A friend of mine had an alarm clock with big rubberized wheels on it that would drive around the room as it went off, so you had to get out of bed to turn it off.

That lasted a few weeks before he grabbed it and chucked it as hard as he could against a wall while still half asleep, then went back to sleep.

A truly visionary work, alongside the greats such as Please Don’t Invent the Torment Nexus.

10 is the last version of Windows I’ll be using, and I don’t want to have more full screen ads for 11 pop up on top of whatever program I’m trying to use. The previous time it happened is what prompted me to do it in the first place, and I’m definitely not gonna let them force update my Windows version like they’ve done in the past.

Stuff like this is why I disabled the TPM on my computer. No TPM means that you’re “not eligible” for 11, meaning I don’t get nagged by the random full screen pop-ups.

A miserable pile of secrets and lies. But enough talk, have at you!

Interestingly, underground lines aren’t feasible in my hometown because of how close the water table is to the surface. Any trench deep enough to bury cables in would have to worry about flooding with groundwater or saltwater in some places.

The water table is so high that not only are there many places where basements would flood 100% of the year, but the majority of homes still have septic tanks instead of town sewage lines, and you can find houses where the lawn has been raised up with 3 or 4 feet of concrete to raise the septic tank to comply with modern regulations to avoid contaminating the groundwater supply.

Having seen plenty of pixels in my time, I can confirm that those are German pixels.

IIRC, people have previously reported that Windows 11(?) switched their default browser back to Edge after installing an update.

The moment you see people who voted for Harris assaulting third-party voters, you let me know. Some of the takes are over the top, but where they’re coming from is completely understandable. Dehumanization is an attempt to rationalize away empathy to prevent guilt and trauma from what people think is the fight to come.

The moral high road is littered with the corpses of people who tried to fight fair. In self-defense, there are 2 rules: a battle not fought is a battle won, and, if you have to hurt a man, hurt him so bad that you need never fear his vengeance.

If doxxing a couple of assholes like this is enough to intimidate the bigots who are now emboldened to attack and rape people and save even a few lives, then it’s worth it - we’ve solved things with rule number one. If it doesn’t stop them, then fyi: the back of the eye socket is thin enough to push through with your thumb and into the brain behind it. There’s no such thing as “fighting dirty” when it comes to survival. There’s no room for mercy when somebody is trying to kill you, and these people have tried before and say that they’re going to try again.

We all hope it doesn’t come to that, but it is better to be prepared and not need it than to wish you had it when the jackboots are stomping on you. And when somebody has told you who they are, you believe them. If it quacks like a Nazi, swims like a Nazi, and goose-steps like a Nazi, then it ain’t a duck.

There is an alternative that I wish I could think of the name of that communities have been using for a number of years now to set up cheap, small-scale satellite internet networks. I looked into it once as an alternative for my neighborhood to dealing with the bullshit that is Comcast and Verizon, and ended up getting an ad for milsec strategic level network infrastructure from Boeing or something. Regardless, it’s a known and proven alternative that’s cheaper than the big guys and has hit a point where some places have set it up as a part of local government run infrastructure.

Exactly what I was referring to. It’s one of the reasons that the CIA requested the FBI inquiry into Trump that resulted in the raid on Mar a Lago.

As somebody who was in middle school when 9/11 happened and was terrified then, and is terrified now, let me tell you why it’s different this time.

W was a warmonger and a figurehead for Cheney from a family of career politicians, but he was a politician and was limited in what he could do by things like the Supreme Court. Trump is none of those and has no checks or balances. He’s a failed businessman who has bankrupted every company he’s ever owned (except for the real estate empire he inherited from his father) who has no idea what the laws are, nor does he care. He doesn’t know what it takes to run a country, and he sure as hell won’t put anybody who does into a position of power. Those are reserved for his sycophants.

He’s a self-styled Mussolini who “wants generals like Hitler had,” keeps Hitler’s speeches next to his bed to read before falling asleep (according to one of his ex wives in the book she wrote in the 90s), and has both made loyalty to him the number one priority for the people in his party as well as said party having stacked all positions of power with his supporters. The Supreme Court has said that he cannot be held accountable for any crimes committed as President, and he has talked about imprisoning his political opponents.

W was a continuation of Reagan politicians. Trump is a fascist who talks the same way that Jim Jones did while praising people like Putin and Kim Jong Un and has already attempted a violent coup without any real repercussions. The Republicans of Bush’s era have been labeled as cowards, traitors, and communists by Trump’s party.

The only things today’s Republican care about are gaining and keeping power and hurting anybody their bigoted egos demand.

Trump has been a Russian asset since the 80s. His ties to Russian criminal organizations have been known since then, but the FBI has never been able to get any charges to stick.

The CIA believed that he gave Putin information about current intelligence operations and agents against Russia during his presidency enough to request an inquiry which led to the FBI raid on Mar a Lago, where they found confidential documents on CIA activity amongst all the other confidential documents illegally held there after his term.

He will side with Russia, guaranteed.

The short answer is that Trump said that the President can’t be held accountable for criminal acts done while in office, and the Supreme Court agreed. I believe he went as far as to say that the President is immune to prosecution for having political opponents assassinated, but I can’t remember if that’s true or not. Regardless, the implication here is that Biden should do whatever is necessary to prevent another Trump presidency since he has presidential immunity.

The best a resistance group can hope for is being damaging enough to choke their enemy little by little while also being hard to root out without causing collateral damage. Because what are AR-15s or whatever else you can get your hands on going to do against the army’s helicopter drones armed with sniper rifles and 360 degree cameras that can detect a target within milliseconds in a kilometer radius just through the reflection on their eye.

As George Washington once said, “A bunch of farmers armed with guns will never win against a trained army.”

This is what they said about Hitler, too. “He’s just saying that to get elected, he’ll quiet down once he’s in office.”

As terrified as I am for my own safety, I’m equally as terrified for the consequences for the globe.

Yep. See also: sea-lioning, the gish gallop, and a myriad of other tactics used by the far-right.

Also, another of my favorite quotes:

I’m not doing homework for you. I’ve known you for 30 seconds and enjoyed exactly none of them.

Self-curating my social media experience is self-care.

I’m reminded of a quote that goes something like this:

I’ve been thinking about the free exchange of ideas recently and come to the conclusion that it isn’t an open market - it’s a potluck.

Everybody brings something to the table and you’re free to pick and choose the things that you want to try, but you’re not obligated to try everything. Just because Karen put a piece of shit on the table and calls it a sandwich doesn’t mean that you have to take a bite to know that it’s shit. Similarly, we are not obligated to take white supremacists and other extremists’ ideas and seriously debate their value. They’re shit and can and should be treated as such.

The beauty of a self-curated experience is that you’re free to engage with the things that you want and can ignore the things that you don’t want to deal with. The risk of people isolating themselves is simply a part of having the freedom to choose your own experiences, the same as the real world.

Personally, one of the reasons that I’m here is because I have no choice but to deal with right-wing extremism in my daily life, and I don’t want to deal with it online as well. Reading news articles? That’s fine, but I don’t want to see chuds screaming about DEI or woke or whatever in the comments.

There’s a nuance here that you’re missing - self-curating your social media experience is vastly different from the algorithm hellhole that is the modern corporate social media landscape. You can filter out any dissenting opinions or facts, but you can in real life, too. And like in real life, it takes a lot of active effort to get to that point. Whereas the algorithm will do that for you without you even knowing it.

I’d say that self-curated social media is like going off to college or moving to a new city while the algorithm is like living in the town you grew up in. I grew up in a very liberal state, but there were about 3 non-white kids in my entire high school the year I graduated, and it wasn’t until I was introduced to Tumblr in college in the late 2000s that I first heard words like “transgender.” And Tumblr is the most self-curated social media that I’ve ever seen. Back then, you couldn’t even follow hashtags - just people. So your front page was exclusively people that you followed and the posts that they reblogged from people that they followed.

Big Carrot is coming for your stew