man_in_space

HowlinMadSnake, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Duncan Idaho from Dune. Wouldn’t be surprised if it was originally a name Frank Herbert used on a fake ID

jasondj, 7 months ago

Funny story, specifically on the name “Idaho”, from Wikipedia’s article on the state, “Etymology” Section:

The name’s origin remains a mystery.[9] In the early 1860s, when the U.S. Congress was considering organizing a new territory in the Rocky Mountains, the name “Idaho” was suggested by George M. Willing, a politician posing as an unrecognized delegate from the unofficial Jefferson Territory.[10] Willing claimed that the name was derived from a Shoshone term meaning “the sun comes from the mountains” or “gem of the mountains”,[11] but it was revealed later that there was no such term and Willing claimed that he had been inspired to coin the name when he met a little girl named Ida.[12] Since the name appeared to be fabricated, the U.S. Congress ultimately decided to name the area Colorado Territory instead when it was created in February 1861, but by the time this decision was made, the town of Idaho Springs, Colorado had already been named after Willing’s proposal.

The same year Congress created Colorado Territory, a county called Idaho County was created in eastern Washington Territory. The county was named after a steamship named Idaho, which was launched on the Columbia River in 1860. It is unclear whether the steamship was named before or after Willing’s claim was revealed. Regardless, part of Washington Territory, including Idaho County, was used to create Idaho Territory in 1863.[13] Idaho Territory would later change its boundaries to the area that became the U.S. state.[14]

burntbutterbiscuits, 7 months ago

I think boys and men have serious issues in our society that are not getting the attention they need. This along with changing social structures leaves some men behind. And they turn to the dark corners of the internet where other men just like them seem to care about them, and seem to have the same problems as them.

Boys and men are falling behind in schools and universities. Many colleges that have affirmative action are now having to use it to boost enrollment for men. Many of these rules were originally meant to increase numbers for women.

Women and girls have issues that society needs to help them with, and often times these issues get a lot more attention and are met with sympathy and understanding.

Whereas sometimes for men’s issues, the base reaction of society is to say stop crying and be a man. Men asking for help in and of itself is generally seen as not a manly thing to do.

This is an oversimplification of the issues, but just making fun of incels without trying to understand where they are coming from is probably not the best strategy to get them the help they need.

This in turn, leads them to start listening to men like Andrew Tate and other asshats.

JimmyBigSausage, 7 months ago

Apollo 🥲

Oh well.

miss_brainfart, 7 months ago

I’m a big fan of cosmic latte, it’s #FFF8E7

federalreverse, 7 months ago

So, 20kB is not that much, honestly (even considering you probably need 4*20=80kB for regular/bold/italic/bold italic). I would just set a suitable caching policy in the server software and leave it at that. Regarding fonts being overused — unfortunately pretty much all the higher-quality ones from Google Fonts are. If you find another suitable font from Google Fonts, you may not be happy for too long.

(I used to maintain a website at work that delivered 1.5MB of CSS (600kB compressed), consisting of Bootstrap, Bootstrap extras, and then the previous two designs of the website layered on top of each other. That is sad.)

DirigibleProtein, 8 months ago

I was in class in high school, and I found a pen under the desk. Not an ordinary cheap plastic throwaway pen, it was one of those expensive metal pens that telescoped together to pop in and out, with gold trim and enamel cloisonne all along the barrel, the sort that you would give someone for an expensive birthday present. Eager to do the right thing, I put my hand up and told Mr Schulz, asked if I should take it to the lost-and-found at the front office. “No,” said Mr Schulz, “give it to me and I’ll keep it in my desk here”. It occurred to me that he uncharitably thought that I was going to get “lost” on the way there or back, instead of sitting in his lesson; I thought that he would hand it in to the front office on my behalf.

The policy at school was that if no-one collected an item from the lost-and-found, you could go and claim it. So a few weeks later, when I asked at the front office, I was surprised that the pen hadn’t been handed in. I asked Mr Schulz about it, and he took the pen out of his drawer, and used his Swiss Army Knife to etch my name into it, saying that I might as well keep it, because no-one had claimed it.

Of course, within a few days one of the other boys saw me using it, and decided that I had stolen it from him. Before I could find Mr Schulz to get him to verify my version of events, he and several of his friends caught me in the corridor between lessons and beat me black and blue. Two black eyes, and so many bruises that I couldn’t walk properly or stand up straight for weeks. My parents said “You must have done something to deserve it”, took no action against the school, and made me go back to school the next day anyway.

I was summoned to the deputy headmaster’s office. He told me that since I had stolen this pen from the other boy and put my name on it to make sure everyone thought it was mine, I was a disgrace to the school and would be put on detention (picking up litter before and after school, and at lunchtime, no canteen privileges, no excursions) for the rest of the year. I protested my innocence, so Mr Schulz was summoned, he promptly denied all knowledge and involvement, and straight up called me a liar.

Word had got around to all the teachers; by hearsay they also all decided that I was a thief and a liar, and gave me extra work to punish me, on top of my regular homework. I was now doing homework from the moment I got home until way past midnight, and in the mornings at 6am when my parents woke me up until 8:30 when I had to ride my bike to school.

I pretty much gave up on schoolwork, because if the teachers were going to lie, there was no way to know if what they were teaching was the truth, and if I asked questions about the problems I was having, especially in maths and physics, I was told to stop disrupting the class, because they had decided without evidence that I was a “juvenile delinquent” and not worth helping.

I had several serious bicycle accidents riding to and from school during this time, and I’m absolutely certain that it was because I fell asleep from pure exhaustion. I still have scars from those accidents, and I’ll always remember how I got them.

I left school at the earliest opportunity, left my parents and lived on the streets for a few years, and thanks to a charity helping street kids, got an apprenticeship and a place to live. A few years after that, I sort-of-almost reconciled with my parents, who still believed the teacher’s version of events, because “all teachers are good, honest, respectable people”.

Throughout my own children’s education, I always had anxiety attacks when I had to take them to school, or go to school for parent-teacher meetings etc, even though they attended a different school and we now live several states away.

That was over forty years ago, and I still feel like Mr Schulz both derailed my education, and ruined my plans for further education.