thebardingreen

thebardingreen, 1 month ago

Vorta Man, Vorta Man, Vorta Man loves Changling Man. They have a fight, Changling wins. Vorta Man.

thebardingreen, 1 month ago

I don’t really question my gay sadistic Odo headcannon

And that mental image of Odo as Quark’s dom is NEVER going away…

thebardingreen, 1 month ago

I mean, you’re definitely right about the women, but Odo is WAY too excited to lock up Quark…

thebardingreen, 1 month ago

I don’t know. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look at his “You’re in trouble now Quark” smile the same way again.

thebardingreen, 1 month ago

I began using Linux as my daily driver in 2001. I was 21. I think my story is pretty unique.

I lived in a house with 5 roommates, of which I was the second oldest. The others were 17, 18, 19 and 43. Except for the 43 year old we were basically all friends from Waldorf School (which is a fucking cult disguised as a liberal arts school, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise).

There were only two computers in the house. Mine was the only one with an ethernet card. I got a Cable Modem. No one else thought they needed fast internet.

It was a kind of disaster of a living situation… like the 17 year old was an emancipated minor who was stripping using a fake ID, the 18 year old was a stoner who worked at the local bagel shop and sold weed. The 19 year old was a kid who immigrated from Mexico City when his mom married a American and was into a BUNCH of sketchy shit. SUPER nice kid, but his friends were like, in retrospect, obviously a bunch of gangsters.

Before the 43 year old we had two other roommates. The first was a girl who was 20 who we knew from school, but then she left and went to college out of state. The second was a girl our stripper roommate knew who was ALSO a stripper and had an inoperable brain tumor. Poor girl was 19 years old and was told she had 18 months to live. She quit school, became a stripper and dedicated her life to sex, drugs and partying. She was a complete mess and her friends + the gangster guy’s friends turned our house into an absurd party flat that got the cops called on us (for noise or trash or sketchy people hanging around) like once or twice a month.

(yes… this IS the story of how I became a Linux user, I’m getting there).

So terminally ill stripper girl just disappeared one day. Never came home, never showed up to work, we never heard from her again. We needed to pay rent and we were all poor young people. Gangster guy has a legit job as a dish washer at a Mexican restaurant and he’s like “Hey, this dude who’s a server there needs a place to live.”

Enter the 43 year old who is a TOTAL creep ball (imagine that). Just to cut straight to the chase, one of the first things he does is start regularly fucking 17 year old stripper girl’s 16 (or possibly even 15) year old best friend from middle school, who starts spending the night at our house almost every night (and also ditching school all the time). They don’t just fuck in his room, they fuck all over the house and don’t clean up. Like I had clean up their used condoms and cum tissues from all over the house.

The other thing 43 year old creep ball does is fucking use my computer to download a shit ton of porn while I’m not around. Here’s how we caught him.

Some friends and I are messing with my computer and we notice that… for some goddamn reason… AOL has been installed. Why the FUCK would AOL be there? I have a goddamn cable modem! So my buddy, who’s also a computer nerd and is starting to get into Linux himself and I uninstall AOL and it asks if we want to save local files. When we say yes, it dumps… a bunch of AVI files of the hairiest 90s porn you can imagine onto my desktop and all I can think about is this creep ball who’s used condoms I’m cleaning up sitting in my chair in my room when I’m not there jerking off.

SO… my buddy and I nuke my OS and install Debian. I leave the house and leave the computer logged in leaving a virtual console running.

Creep ball comes in to watch porn on my computer and is faced with the linux terminal. He typed (I’m not kidding)

• dir
• win
• win.exe
• windows
• start windows
• motherfucker!

That’s the 100% true story of how I became a Linux user.

thebardingreen, 1 month ago

IKR? XD

thebardingreen, 1 month ago

Our political system is an old, poorly maintained computer that sits at your grandparents’ house. It’s so clogged up with malware it can’t function and the scammers and botnets are doing whatever they want with it. It’s the only computer that your family has access to, and technically it’s supposed to be shared but in practice your grandparents only let you use it when they’re out of the house. Your grandparents don’t understand it and think it “runs fine” and are more scared you’re going to put commie or terrorist stuff on it than they are about the huge amount of viruses and spyware it’s already clogged up with. Your parents are too tired from working 3 jobs just to survive to care about it or pay attention to it and they “don’t use it anyway” so trying to get their help fixing it is useless.

You know that the ONLY WAY to fix this situation is to wipe the hard drive and reinstall, but grandma is worried she’d lose all her emails and grandpa says if there’s something wrong with it, he’ll fix it. You do see him messing around in settings all the time, but he clearly doesn’t know what he’s doing. He also talks to “Microsoft tech support” a couple times a week and sends them money. You’ve told him it’s a scam and he told you to “Shut up, you don’t know anything about computers.”

This isn’t even an analogy… it’s literally what’s happening. Legal systems are just complex code that runs on human beings. The constitution is the kernel, the US govt and all it’s bureaucracies are the OS and you could even think of the states as containers or virtual environments that run within the context of the bigger system. The OS has been completely hijacked by scammers (no, seriously, I’ve done subcontracting for big defence contractors), the users with the power to fix things don’t understand, don’t have the skills to fix it and are more scared of the people who want to fix the system than they are of the scammers. The other users who could help deal with the situation are too exhausted and burned out to care.

thebardingreen, 1 month ago

I would not be surprised if the real target market is rich preppers who want this thing to patrol their bunker.

thebardingreen, 1 month ago

Hear someone powerful told Musk off for being arrogant. :D

Hear it’s about government’s right to censor content they don’t like. D:

thebardingreen, 1 month ago

Some of these really remind me of Nobilis. The Prince of Blades especially.

thebardingreen, 1 month ago

Nobilis has been the source of the best role playing experiences of my life. Imagine a party basically playing these gods you’ve created as a group of PCs.

thebardingreen, 1 month ago

Given your requirements, why not just accept Bitcoin or other crypto? It sounds like you want to self host it semi anonymously.

thebardingreen, 1 month ago

I got to play this character for several sessions, but he deserved more.

A lesser Devil modified bard chef. D&D Pirate Game with a drow captain of a haunted ship.

My bard powers were all based on cooking. In order to buff the crew I had to feed them. I had a constant supply of hors d’oeuvres, tiny deserts, etc. After combat, I would heal the party by cooking 5 star gourmet meals. I fought with a meat cleaver.

My back story: I was basically on the run. I was Gold Star Master of Sauces and Boilings, 3rd Degree Initiate of the Sulfur Ovens and Bonded Sous-chef of the School of Flesh and Broth in the City of Dis, 87 years into a 500 year Sous-chef contract that I was AWOL from. I got summoned to the Prime Material Plane in order to cater a wedding party for the daughter of a shady wizard and I managed to exploit a loop hole in the contract I signed with him to leave to get ingredients and never come back. He was pissed at me for ruining his daughter’s wedding reception and my masters at the School of Flesh and Broth told him “Capture and return our Sous-chef, or else!” So he was my primary antagonist.

But I had a plan! I wrote up a contract for people to sign to try to get them to be my apprentices. By Prime Material Plane standards, I was a genuine gold star level chef. All those poor sods you see competing on Hell’s Kitchen would kill to study under someone of my skill level. Basically, the contract was structured such that if they managed to complete an apprenticeship with me, they should be able to obtain employment with kings, popes and sultans. However, if they failed to complete their apprenticeship, I would own their soul. My goal was to be a complete dick to my apprentices to the point that they would give up and run away and fail to complete their training. Then, when I had a small collection of souls, I could return to the 9 Hells and buy out my contract and get them to stop chasing me.

Sadly, the campaign only lasted three sessions.

A few of my favourite clauses from the contract:

Apprentice certifies that, to the best of their knowledge, their Mortal Soul is in sound and original condition, not bound into their body through any enchantments, curses or blessings of undeath or deathlessness (or other mystical bindings), not owed to any other being of the Lower Planes or other Outer Planar Origin, not claimed by any deity or near-deity for any purpose and in no other ways is it’s transfer into Chef’s lawful possession in the event of a breach (5.0). impeded. Furthermore, that they will NOT promise, commit, sell, license or gift their soul to any third party during the terms of this contract.

Neither party shall be liable for any failure to perform their obligations under this agreement if prevented from doing so by a cause or causes reasonably beyond their control. Without limiting the generality of the foregoing, such causes include Acts of deities or near-deities, disruptions to the structure of the planes of existence, infernal war operations (the Blood War), temporal disruptions, Wishes made by third parties or other similar cause or causes which could not with reasonable diligence be controlled or prevented by the party. This clause IN NO WAY waives the obligations of the Apprentice with respect to clause clause 1.1 i.

If Apprentice abandons the apprenticeship due to unanticipated death (2.5), a grace period of 3 days will be granted, during which time Apprentice may be resurrected or otherwise returned to life (including as an undead being), upon which event Apprentice agrees to immediately and without delay return to their Apprenticeship. Failure to do so shall be considered a breach of this contract.

thebardingreen, 1 month ago

Defiant 10 / 10

thebardingreen, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Typed “rm -r” in “/home/myuser” instead of “/home/myuser/Documents/ThingINoLongerNeed”

Used gparted to wipe and format the device mounted at “/” instead of the external drive I meant to reformat. I’ve done this one TWO WHOLE TIMES in my life, three if you count wiping a device that was mounted at “/home/myuser/MyTwoTBDrive4DocsPicsMusicGamesEtc”.

thebardingreen, 1 month ago

That’s the most adorable howl I’ve ever heard.

thebardingreen, 1 month ago

“Responsibility”, “empathy” and “ethics” must never be allowed to stand in the way of profit, religion or old people not having to change.

thebardingreen, 1 month ago

We gave my son a smart phone at 8, because his mother and I lived in different states and he flew as an unaccompanied minor a LOT. I also lived in Oakland and I wanted to be able to reach him and to know where he was when he was with me.

We had strict rules about when he was allowed to have it on and when he was not allowed to NOT have it. We also didn’t get him a data plan and made him use Wifi.

As a result of him actually being impressively responsible with that phone, we turned on the data and relaxed the rules probably years earlier than we would have under other circumstances.

thebardingreen, 1 month ago

I wonder what letter goes after HIS name? Gee, let me guess.

thebardingreen, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

I disliked the books and haven’t tried to watch the show.

But I think I disagree that our civilization is no longer capable of solving it’s own problems. Rather, I think our civilization is going through one of the crappy parts of common cycles that civilizations go through. Frighteningly, this part usually comes right before really scary crappy parts.

Civilizations aren’t static and the patterns don’t always happen the same way, but I think we can predict that

1. Things get really shitty. People pull together for survival and build to a place of stability and prosperity.
2. The rich and powerful (being short sighted idiots just like the rest of us, but ALSO insulated from and out of touch with reality), start looting society for their own selfish, short term benefit. This destabilizes the institutions and systems creating the stability and prosperity. The population at large doesn’t really understand what’s happening or why, but they DO know that while they’re still relatively comfortable, they’re scared and they don’t like it. They get more conservative and eventually turn to fascists, strongmen and authoritarians to try to get stability back.
3. This doesn’t work out. It exacerbates the existing problems, makes things even more scary and less stable. Eventually war and rebellion break out.
4. When the dust settles, things are really shitty. People pull together for survival and build back to a place of stability and prosperity.

These steps aren’t exact. They’re trends. Lots of things can disrupt them (including famine, plague and barbarian invasions). But in step 1/4, we (humans) are actually REALLY good at collectively solving problems. In step 2 we’re TERRIBLE at collectively doing anything. In step 3 we (collectively) are trying to solve all the WRONG problems… then back to step 1/4.

We seem to globally be right at the tail end of step 2. Which SUCKS.

tl:dr; This has all happened before and will surely happen again. Hostile aliens are just a modern take on the “barbarian invasion” disrupter. Beware of strangers bearing gifts.

thebardingreen, 1 month ago

Drink her essence!

thebardingreen, 1 month ago

“Don’t be evil.”

thebardingreen, 1 month ago

I mean, Outlaws of Thunder Junction is actually pretty cool…

But in general… yeah.

thebardingreen, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

4 separate set symbols in one release?

I don’t care.

How do you feel about play boxes being worse than set boxes but more expensive?

I didn’t know that. Seems like a bizarre choice, but I don’t know that it affects my enjoyment of the game. I understand why people would be pissed about that.

And those powers keep on creepin.

That’s been a problem for decades and yes, it’s bad game design (and not the only bad game design going on with MTG by a long shot).

I’m running an outlaw deck in Arena right now and I haven’t had this much fun playing MTG since I built a mech deck after the Kamigawa release and insisted on putting on the Pacific Rim theme when I first played it.

thebardingreen, 1 month ago

Last year, we had a major problem with homeless people into this shit in Boulder. You may recall there was a homeless encampment with Nazi and Christian Nationalist flags in South Boulder that went viral on Reddit and Redditors went and stole the flags. Those same assholes were also selling lots of meth.

The long time homeless folks in Boulder HATED it because it was reflecting badly on them and was causing public spaces to be closed to them. So they teamed up and ran the Nazi meth heads out of town. I wouldn’t be surprised if that just meant “they moved to Denver.”