This is probably just because it’s DC. The rules get really muddy there. For a long time the highest elected position in DC was head of the school board, and even though ostensibly there’s “home rule” now, Congress still loves to punish the local populace by overriding anything they think scores points with their base back in Idaho. If you get convicted of a felony in DC you actually get transferred to federal prison.

Was also on Trump’s legal team for the classified documents scandal and defended the war criminal Navy seal. All these guys are like shits that won’t flush.

It would be nice if our jobs programs were like the CCC instead of security theater like the TSA, “Homeland Security”, or whatever this is. At least then, at the end of it, we would have a bunch of roads, railways, bridges, housing, canals, etc instead of trillions of dollars in circuit boards and machined aluminum rotting in a missile silo.

If you can find it, I keep a small bag of straight-up wheat gluten and I add a spoonful or two when I want to make stronger flour. A small bag lasts forever and a little goes a long way.

It’s not just tech. Gardening, DIY, cooking, and similar popular subjects have been completely destroyed by this crap. If I see an AI generated header image or thumbnail I immediately backpedal now because I assume that means the text is bullshit too.

The example stuck in my memory now is when I was trying to read about watermelon growing times and the article said they flower a week after germination.There’s now frequently this, “oh GOD DAMN IT *close tab*” moment when you realize it’s actually total slop. Like, “oh so this article is BULLSHIT bullshit.”

I found the original blog post more educational.

Looks like these may be typosquats, or at least “namespace obfuscation”, imitating more popular packages. So hopefully not too widespread. I think it’s easy to just search for a package name and copy/paste the first .git files, but it’s important to look at forks/stars/issue numbers too. Maybe I’m just paranoid but I always creep on the owners of git repos a little before I include their stuff, but I can’t say I do that for their includes and those includes etc. Like if this was included in hugo or something huge I would just be fucked.

A pack of six light bulbs. Five of them sheared right off the metal base like wet tissue when I screwed them in, just one right after the other. Fortunately the last one worked. I was a poor college kid with no transport then, so getting that pack of bulbs for my single lamp was a lot of effort, I was disappointed.

It’s the same as learning anything, really. A big part of learning to draw is making thousands of bad drawings. A big part of learning DIY skills is not being afraid to cut a hole in the wall. Plan to screw up. Take your time, be patient with yourself, and read ahead so none of the potential screw-ups hurt you. Don’t be afraid to look foolish, reality is absurd, it’s fine.

We give children largess to fail because they have everything to learn. Then, as adults, we don’t give ourselves permission to fail. But why should we be any better than children at new things? Many adults have forgotten how fraught the process of learning new skills is and when they fail they get scared and frustrated and quit. That’s just how learning feels. Kids cry a lot. Puttering around on a spare computer is an extremely safe way to become reacquainted with that feeling and that will serve you well even if you decide you don’t like Linux and never touch it again. Worst case you fucked up an old laptop that was collecting dust. That is way better than cutting a hole in the wall and hitting a pipe.

Maybe not dumb just dark and absurd, but called the cops.

Worked at a retail computer store with repair shop. Extremely assholish customer drops off his machine for an install of a “defective” piece of hardware he couldn’t manage to install on his own, arguing that install should be free because it’s our fault, somehow. Service manager cuts him a deal anyway just to make him happy.

He drops off his PC. Tech takes the machine, boots it up, bam… CSAM on his desktop. Cops came and got the PC, never saw the piece of shit again.

Actually this happened a few times but only once was the customer rude at first.

Retail is depressing.

Personally I haven’t had luck with diatomaceous earth and ants, they seemed willing to sacrifice a few ants to push a trail through the powder and then they were fine (I had to admire this strategy, something I would have never considered). I have had great luck with those ant baits that are a mix of sugar water and borax.

Yeah you should. Look into soil testing with your local city, county, or University Extension office. You send in a little sample of dry soil and they email you the results. It’s usually pretty cheap and will tell you if any soil is unsafe. My local library, for example, has sample boxes for free. Definitely a good idea for anyone in a place where lead paint could have been used, let alone other horrible stuff.

When I first started gardening I had this idealistic view of, “I will just grow a surplus, if the animals take some I will still have enough.” Nope. They eat everything, to the ground. They can do it in one night. There are different pests that specialize in eating the seeds, the roots, the stems, the leaves, and the fruit. Deer will “sample” entire plants just to confirm they don’t like them. Squirrels will take a single bite out of every tomato. Bears will push down an entire fruit tree just to get one fruit. Energy is scarce in nature and these organisms aren’t fucking around.

Took me awhile to finally admit that barriers aren’t just nice, they are required.

Which is a shame because state law has a much bigger impact on the actual day-to-day lives of people than federal law. If there aren’t actual journalists then nobody is hanging out at the state house, let alone the local courthouse, to report on what’s going on. So the news is just outrage at federal politics and corporate/political press releases published verbatim.

For people not familiar, each US state has its own legislature. As bat-shit crazy as the federal legislators are, the state ones are even worse. They’re wild. Salaries across states range from low six figures to literally $100 a year. In many states its not even a full-time job. Each representative is the guy who owns the biggest car wash in his small town and thinks Bigfoot keeps breaking the gas pump. Most Americans probably couldn’t even name their state reps and probably aren’t even aware there’s government apparatus at all between the level of local school board and governor.

This one is pretty obscure but I feel like it fits this question.

For people who don’t know deep meme lore, YTMND was/is a site where people uploaded extremely short audio clips and images/gifs that went together. This all sprouted from a short clip of Sean Connery saying “You’re the man now, dog!” in the movie Finding Forester. Here’s the Know Your Meme page. Sometimes these were funny, sometimes they were artful and surreal, sometimes they were meta, usually they were just stupid.

One day back in the stone ages I was browsing the site and I found this one:

(CW racism):

I have to say it struck me. I reverse image searched the painting and discovered it’s by an artist named Slowinski whose work is explicitly about fucked up shit in American society. In this case obesity, lotteries, a terrible food supply, etc. are literally murdering a black man but its presented like a carnival attraction. The music seems so fitting to me because it mimicked both how “Black is Beautiful” and Black American art fights against the narrative but is also co opted by capitalism to push the exact same poison. I even thought, “Wow, the name is a play on the N word but also its homophone which means someone who is miserly, perhaps additional commentary?” Fucking excellent, especially for YTMND.

So I clicked the little “source” icon in the corner to see if the author had some insight on this and it’s literally just some kid who slowed down the song, thought it sounded like a “fat black guy”, and googled that then posted the image. Well fuck.

I wouldn’t say it’s a masterpiece but I still remember it, especially the irony of it, and it was a fucking YTMND of all things, so I guess that counts for something.

It’s just a grift so I doubt that will happen unfortunately. They’re just going to be used for military parades, Elon will have one with humongous fascist flags on the front, and the rest will sit rusting in some field on an army base.

The movie “The Peanut Butter Solution”.

Apparently the whole thing in on Youtube. Here is a link specifically to the scene that was in my memories but I couldn’t remember what it was from, or if it was real (32:47): https://youtu.be/pDGyweCl7ik?t=1967

Warning it’s bizarre and gross. It’s a kids film so nothing about it is actually obscene or violent, but something about the texture of this movie makes everything bizarre and gross. It’s like a shag rug in a barber shop.

In Luke, when Jesus says (again) to love thy neighbor literally the next question someone poses to him is “but who is my neighbor?” Jesus responds with the tale of the Good Samaritan. In this story there is a man, a traveler from a foreign land, who was robbed and beaten and left on the roadside, suffering and ignored by passing strangers (including a priest). The Good Samaritan feeds him, fixes him up, and puts him up at an inn.

There’s two laws… two. The first is to love God, the second is to “go and do likewise” as the Good Samaritan did. I’m a godless commie and I know this shit.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke+10%3A25-37&version=NIV

Back when corporations were first really being invented a judge complained they had “no body to kick and no soul to damn”. That was 18th c. England when 12 guys would form a corporation to build a bridge, or whatever, and that was basically it.

I think the last time I celebrated any holiday was buying some champagne when Kissinger died.