Slartibartfast

Slartibartfast, 8 months ago

I know it's not nice to be piling onto an ailing old man who probably isn't going to be around much longer, but yeah when he was in good health he was an awful person who didn't give a single fuck about anyone else who was having a hard time, and had literally decades filled with opportunities to help people who were worse off and squandered them all just to accumulate more worthless power and money for himself.

Keeping him in power does nothing but harm other people and the country in general IMO, although to be fair that was also true before his health started to go south as well.

Slartibartfast, 8 months ago

I agree it is sad but also when he was well, if he'd seen someone else in the condition he's in now and had the choice to either cure them or make $1 for himself that he didn't even need, I'm 100% convinced he'd have walked away a dollar richer.

Slartibartfast, 9 months ago

The first season I thought was a bit of a mess, and it had this weird thing where it felt like two different shows bolted together - the Foundation stuff was like a mid-level CW show and not very good, whereas the Empire stuff is like this grand space opera and was really cool. And they frustratingly have Jared Harris in the bad half.

The second season seems to be smoothing it out a bit though, it just feels a bit more cohesive all around so far. Overall I'd say it's worth sticking with, or at least I am.

Also Lee Pace is fucking awesome and probably has a bad back from carrying the entire show for so long lol.

Slartibartfast, 9 months ago

I'm not sure which other Republican candidates could really step up. Aside from Trump there's DeSantis, who seems to be imploding and I think hates Trump anyway, Chris Christie (who called him a 'One Man Crime Wave' lol) and most of the others I haven't even heard of before.

But there is also Mike Pence who is truly a wild card - there's a reasonable chance Trump literally tried to have him killed and yet he still defends him for some reason - so if anyone is bonkers enough to make it to the White House and then set Trump loose, it'd probably be him.

Slartibartfast, 9 months ago

Also if there's any chance of a Fly situation happening I'm not going. Even if it's like a .00000001% chance then fuck that lol

Slartibartfast, 9 months ago

This is how I feel about lab grown meat. I'm sure it's probably fine, but I don't want to be one of the first to try it out. I'll give it a couple of years and see how the first adopters get on lol.

Slartibartfast, 9 months ago

Note to self: check on DJKJuicy in a couple of years before trying this

Slartibartfast, 9 months ago

I tend to prefer KDE because I'm a tinkerer, but I don't hate GNOME or anything. I think it's good for someone who wants the UI to just work and generally get out of the way without much fiddling, although last time I tried it I did find it needed a few extensions to add some basic stuff for whatever reason.

But ultimately, I think it's good to have choices for both sides of the spectrum, that's kind of what FOSS is all about in the end.

Slartibartfast, 9 months ago

It's got a learning curve to it, but the sheer amount of stuff you can do in Blender is actually kind of mind-blowing.

Slartibartfast, 10 months ago

You also get the "I must make the simplest transaction absurdly difficult for no apparent reason" shopper:

Hi Alice, I want one of your pies, I'm situated at <location 40km from where you are> and I have $2.98 in cash. Would it be possible for you to meet me 26.7km away from my house where I'll give you the $2.98 in cash, and then the remaining balance in a series of travelers cheques, one of which is from a country which no longer exists but I assure you it can still be converted to legal tender if you're willing to make a quick stop at the Belarusian Embassy? Also what kind of apples are in the pie? If the amount of baking apples relative to other apples is above 68.7% I can't eat it or I'll die, but anything below that amount is fine.

Slartibartfast, 10 months ago

Peter Molyneux is by quite a wide margin one of the biggest bullshitters in the gaming industry lol.

Flashback to that time when he was at Microsoft in charge of selling the Kinect and he tried to make everyone believe that you could use it to hang out with an AI boy.

Slartibartfast, 10 months ago

Honestly, the Steam Deck is my favourite bit of tech that I've bought in a long time. For one thing, my SO has a Switch, so now we can both game on the couch together instead of sitting across the room. But also, between Steam, being able to run Epic and GOG through Heroic Launcher, and being able to emulate all the consoles I grew up with, it's like having my entire gaming history all in one portable device. Plus it's amazing for travel.

Also being familiar with Linux, in Desktop Mode it's just a regular Linux PC, so with a bluetooth mouse & keyboard and a dock/monitor (and maybe a bigger hard drive) I genuinely think I could probably get away with just using it as my daily driver PC if I really had to.

Slartibartfast, 10 months ago

I've done a bit of this for TV/film stuff, and yeah there's basically two copyrights on a piece of music - there's the rights to the song in general, and the performance rights. That's why you've got to be careful with public domain recordings and check the date of the performance - if you use a song that's old enough to be public domain but a more recent recording of it that isn't, you can be in trouble.

I'm pretty sure that's also why so many trailers have weird covers of famous songs on them (usually a woman doing a slow acoustic version of a rock song for some reason) - that way they can pay for the song rights, and get some aspiring singer to record it for next to nothing so they don't have to also pay the performance rights for it.

Slartibartfast, 10 months ago

I'd have to agree. Facebook polluted up the social media landscape with their gross business tactics, to the point where many people ditched traditional social media entirely and created/moved to the fediverse. Now they're getting ready to start dumping their toxic sludge here too, and I'd hope that most of the popular areas of the fediverse would just shut them out entirely. They deserve zero goodwill from anybody and are almost guaranteed to be bad-faith actors IMO.

I'm not holding out hope, however. I assume they'll play nice for the first year or two, integrate with everything, and then enshittify this as well. It's just the way things go.

Slartibartfast, 10 months ago

I hope so! Just from personal experience, my whole online life so far has been a loop of moving to a cool platform with a good community, watching it slowly degrade into a toxic cesspool as more and more corporations fiddle with it, then hopping ship to the next one and watching that one gradually collapse too.

It'd be nice to get out of that cycle and find a good place to just hang out.

Slartibartfast, 10 months ago

Respawning would be cool under the right conditions. By that I mean, if I die at 100 I don't want to then respawn as a 100 year old in my bed from that morning just to die again.

But if I could pick a previous save point that'd be good.

Slartibartfast, 10 months ago

Yeah Occam's Razor and all that, he's probably just a fucking idiot.

Slartibartfast, 10 months ago

I get what you're saying, but at the same time, we can't start fucking around with nazis and letting them creep in. We just can't.

Remember, the nazis taking power in Germany in the 40s was done democratically, and everything they did after that was "legal."

I'm not anti-democratic, but just because something's done democratically or legally doesn't necessarily mean it's right.

Slartibartfast, 10 months ago

It's been cancelled three times by three different networks but It refuses to die! Hulu is the fourth separate TV network to produce new Futurama episodes lol.

Slartibartfast, 10 months ago

I was watching one of those videos once where a non-religious person debates a religious person (which are always good to angry up the blood lol) and when asked about fossils that proved the world was more than 6000 years old the guy was like "well you weren't there to see that happen so how do you know it's true?" And the other person just let that go by instead of being like "Motherfucker, are you 2000 years old? Did you meet Jesus?" which still bothers me a bit to this day.

Slartibartfast, 10 months ago

And don't skip over reading things! I also run Arch with KDE and honestly with almost all problems I have, if I carefully read through either the Arch Wiki (this will probably be your most valuable tool) or the error message that comes up, the answer is usually in there somewhere, it just needs digging up.

Also: if something with a GUI crashes and doesn't give an error message, try running it in the terminal. So like, if Firefox crashes and doesn't give any info, try opening up a terminal and running firefox from there and the terminal will tell you everything that's going on. (It'll be a different command if you're using a flatpak but that's the general idea.)

Slartibartfast, 10 months ago

Yes! I have an entire folder in Joplin that's just lists of what broke and how I fixed it so I can refer back to it later. It's saved my ass so many times.

Slartibartfast, 10 months ago

Your system will almost certainly get irrevocably broken by something at some point and you'll have to reinstall. This isn't a failure on your part though, it's a rite of passage that everyone goes through at least once, especially if you have Nvidia drivers lol. It'll happen less and less over time the more you learn how to fix stuff though.

Also back up often!

Slartibartfast, 11 months ago

I clicked the link so I could block it, it went to a 404. The system works!

Slartibartfast, 11 months ago

• Pay off debts
• Sort family and friends out for life
• Build an utterly monstrous PC
• Park the rest in the highest interest account that'll have me and live off the interest without touching the principal as much as as I can, do whatever the fuck I want for the rest of my days.