I think that pretty much sums up the entire ethos of Silicon Valley these days.

I think a big problem is a lot of the explainers for new users, at least the ones that were around back when I first joined Mastodon, were or are absolute dog shit. They were all existential explanations rather than practical ones. I was trying to figure out which instance to join, and why one might be better for me than another, and every explainer I saw was basically a variation on, “iT’s JuSt LikE EmAiL. wHy Is tHaT hArD? sToP bEiNg So sTuPid, DuMmY.” None of them really explained the user experience, and how different instances might affect it, let alone the existence of the local and global feeds and how your instance choice affects those. It was like asking someone how to use chopsticks and them telling you, “It’s easy. Just put food in your mouth with them. Works just like a fork.”

Technically true, but it omits some pretty crucial information.

Once you’re into it and have the lay of the land, it seems really simple in retrospect. But if you’re coming in cold with no idea how any of it works, and the only help you get is some dickhead shouting, “EmAiL! iT’s LiKe EmAiL!” then the learning curve seems a lot steeper than it actually is.

Much like the word “woke,” MAGA conservatives have stripped DEI of its original meaning. As conservatives use it now it’s basically just a socially acceptable stand-in for the N-word (or the F-word, depending on context). Like just a couple of days ago I was at a burrito place and the guy a couple spots ahead of me in line said, “This DEI cashier better not fuck up my order again.” It was very clear what he meant was, “This N-word better not piss me off.”

Any time you hear conservatives say “woke” or “DEI,” you can almost always mentally swap it with the N-word or the F-word and what they’re saying will make a lot more sense.

Not really. I have some old friends that are still pretty active on it, but I only check in every few months to see what they’re up to. I usually have to go directly to their profile because my main timeline hardly has anything I actually follow in it anymore. I fell off using it regularly back when they broke the chronology of the timeline, but now it’s just so much worse. There’s almost nothing in my feed that I actually want to see anymore, it’s all ads and bullshit posts injected by some algorithm.

This needs a line going up the Appalachians for the “You-uns” belt.

I don’t know if they officially count as grindhouse, but when I was a kid I loved a ton of the B-grade action movies that the Cannon Film Group put out in the 1980s. American Ninja, Delta Force, Cobra, Bloodsport, the Death Wish movies, Enter the Ninja, Revenge of the Ninja, etc. And, of course, the greatest ninja movie ever made:

Ninja III: The Domination.

Just gonna leave this here.

I keep getting served some supremely mediocre eastern European hip-hop in Release Radar and other Spotify-generated playlists because of some guy who performs as Devo. Same with guys performing as Slayer, Poe, etc.

A lot of the time they’re listed on the track along with two or three other people, so I go to the pages of those associated acts and tap the “don’t play this artist” option in the three dots menu, and that usually cuts down on how much I see them in my feeds. At least until they do a new collab.

And while we’re on the subject, if Spotify could also stop lumping several artists of the same name together on the same profile, that’d be great. There’s an old surf-rock band called the Astronauts that I listen to sometimes, and at one point there were albums from at least four different bands included on their discography page. There’s still at least two.

Given Tesla’s usual build quality I feel like it’s pretty much inevitable that there are going to be an enormous amount of skull and limb injuries from those gullwing doors.

Maybe you need something like a motorized tie rack.

Patriot cells.

Hitchhiker’s guide to the Galaxy. Both the books and the radio shows.

Did the mushroom learn to control a robot, or did the scientists figure out how to connect a robot to a mushroom in such a way as to make the regular processes happening inside the mushroom trigger a set of robot legs? Because the article makes it seem like the mushroom is intelligent and has agency, and was thus far only lacking the proper robot body in order to express that; but the video makes it look like the legs were all pumping in unison, and the resulting movement was more or less coincidental.

Yeah, the saltpeter (potassium nitrate) is really the key ingredient here. It’s the rapid oxidizer compound that gives your anti-Gorn cannon its boom boom. Without that, mixing all the other stuff together is just going to be smelly and disappointing.

Usually breading meat starts with dipping the meat into an egg wash before you dip it in the bread crumbs, so the yellow probably comes from egg yolk.

Rom-coms are aspirational fantasies. They’re modern-day fairy tales of getting swept off your feet by a handsome prince and living happily ever after, never wanting for anything ever again. Material comfort is always a factor in these stories. If it’s not overt, as in Pride and Prejudice where the main character betters their station by ending up with the mega-rich guy who seemed like a dick but turned out to have a heart of gold, then it has to be implied by the setting and the lifestyles of the characters. If the material wealth of the love interest isn’t going to be a factor in the story then it has to be demonstrated that those financial needs are met in some other way.

You’re probably never going to see a rom-com where the main character gets their one true love, but being with them condemns them to a life of struggle and poverty. No matter how you try to spin it so it’s ok because at least they have each other, that would never be a truly satisfying ending in this type of movie. Material needs to be taken care of too. Even in movies like Overboard where the whole point of the movie is Goldie Hawn learning to be a human being by struggling through a working class lifestyle, they still have to end up rich at the end for the story to feel fully resolved.

It’s polite to pretend that money doesn’t matter, and a lot of rom-coms try to down-play it, but it does. It does matter. And it always shows up in one way or another.

I don’t know that I’d consider myself an audiophile, but I am a musician. I run a pair of powered studio monitors out of the back of a Focusrite Scarlett usb audio interface for recording, and it’s way better than any computer speakers I’ve ever owned in terms of sound quality and fidelity. Of course, I’m also not trying to have a dance club setup that’s going to rattle the windows on my nextdoor neighbor’s house with super-ultra-mega bass, but it’s an avenue to consider.

I mean specifically a cloud storage account. Setting up the computer required me to supply an email address and set a password for microsoft.com. There was nothing in that process that I recall mentioning OneDrive, or that would have suggested every file on my C drive was about to be indiscriminately uploaded to a Microsoft server somewhere. I didn’t even know OneDrive was a thing until I had to google how to stop it.

Thankfully I noticed what was going on before it got to that point, but when they start vacuuming up all your files and data like that without telling you and without giving you control over it, you kind of have to assume that whatever is going on is not being done for your benefit.