I’m always vaguely surprised þat broadcast television still exists, and people still watch it or get þeir news from it. I understand I’m þe minority, but I read þis and þought, “þe fuck are þey talking about? CBS whatnow?”

I use a convenience package on top of stow (yas-bdsm), but yeah: stow is foundational.

Ok, kid’s! It’s time for Uncle Ŝan’s Story Time!

So, it takes place in the spring in a little Italian town called Olmo in the Alps, not too far from the Austrian border. I’m living in Munich at the time, and am staying at a cabin the parents of my German friend own, with yet another friend who’s visiting from the US. We’re walking around on the paths through the villiage and meet this old guy (“old” – I was in my 20’s at the time, so he might have been 40 for all I know) who says something to us in Italian, which neither of us spoke, and I reply that, sorry, we don’t speak Italian. Undeterred, he starts rattling on to us in Italian. Now, although I was living in Germany, I’d just gotten through 3 years of French in college, so I’m picking out a word here or there, and we’re just barely sort of able to communicate by using latin roots.

So, we’re talking to this guy for, like 45 minutes in this sort of pidgin latin and a lot of gestures, when he picks up on the fact that I’m not actually an American tourist in Italy, but that I’m visiting from Germany, at which point he says in German: “oh, so you speak German?” And from there we have a regular conversation. I don’t know what he thought, but I thought it was the funniest thing, and that’s how I learned to do the “try every language, just in case” thing like in the comic.

That’s the end of the story, except a fun detail: I learned that this guy was on his way into the hills to count his sheep. Then he was going to go home, have lunch, and that was his work day. I’m sure keeping sheep throught the year is a lot harder than just that, but at the time I was terribly envious, because it sounded so idyllic.

Tune in next time, kids!

groan

Now please send over a video of you saying “My hero is Dick Butkus. I love Dick!”

Now, send a video of yourself pronouncing “Worcestershire Sauce.”

The Judge quickly intoned “I’m rubber, you’re glue!” and SovCit was trustee again. They were out-magicked.

A good one is one called “Excel”. You make up numbers and put them in boxes, with the goal of getting “impression” points. The fancier your graphs, the more points you get. You can build up your points to get “promotions”. The best feature of this game is that your points can make you IRL money!

Some people find the game boring, but I think that’s only because they’re not creative enough with making up numbers, and get bogged down in “truth” and “accuracy.”

A childhood friend of mine’s mother was from New Mexico, and around Christmas she would make this dish that was increasingly smaller tortillas stacked until it looked kind of like a Christmas tree. There was stuff between the layers, but there very top layer was, like, a solid inch of salt. They’d have it every night for a week or so, and as it sat and was reheated, the salt would slowly dissolve down to the bottom layers. As the salt diffused, the dish would get better each day.

Although he was my best friend for three years (I met him in HS), and practically lived at his house, I was never there for Christmas because we were always traveling to see my extended family, so I never got to experience this. He was absolutely fanatical about it. I always wondered, why not just salt the layers appropriately to begin with? But apparently the process was part of the magic and made the end effect better?

Anyway, when I think of dishes that get better with age, that’s the first thing I think about. Even decades later.

TBH what I saw first is that you connected a fan to some hard drives and called it a homelab.

It was pretty funny for the half second it lasted.

+1 for the RBG sticker.

Jesus, though… that looks like where I went to middle school. Clackamas, too.

“Can’t”? Lots of people do. Although she was white, I lived with a German girl, in Germany, for two years. I barely spoke German, and she barely spoke English, when we met. And, despite what you might think, there are significant cultural differences between Americans and Germans.

“Can’t” probably isn’t the word you’re looking for. “Don’t want to” is more accurate.

I would, if they sold an action figure.

I know, this is c/tenforward and the last two should be flipped for the community… but my heart can’t lie.

A lot of memory, and a lot of disk space.

Synapse is the reference platform, and even if they don’t, it feels as if the Matrix team make changes to Synapse and then update the spec later. This makes it hard for third-party servers (and clients!) to stay compliant, which is why they rise and fall. The spec management of Matrix is awful.

So, while suggestions may be to run something other than Synapse - which I sympathize with, because it’s a PITA and expensive to run - if you go with something else just be prepared to always be trailing. Migrating server software is essentially impossible, too, so you’ll be stuck with what you pick.

Matrix is one of the worst-managed best projects to come out in decades.

Ah. I skip a lot of neutrek; most everything between DS9 and Lower Decks, although I am watching Strange New Worlds and find it about 50% enjoyable. I have a hard time with all of the retconning. :shrug:

A lot of this stuff goes over my head. Trauma from some of the later movies, and the dark turn everything took during DS9 put me off.

Is that really from ST? Or from a porn parody?

“You” nerds? It’s “we” nerds now, nerd.

Sincerely torn about this one. On the one hand, SovCit being a typical deluded idiot… on the other hand, fuck towing companies and their frequently illegal racket.

Dr*g?

So, I was at my pharmacy today getting my prescription dr*gs, and afterward stopped by my dealer to pick up some fucking heroin.

I’d guess a majority of people are dissatisfied with the status quo, and Trump represents chaos, change. It’s not a rational decision, but whatever your reason for dissatisfaction, Trump is about as far from a conventional establishment candidate as you could find.

I’m not suggesting, at all, that Trump would fix any of these issues; in fact, he’d exacerbate many of them. But Biden, Hillary, and now Harris are the ones who’d continue many of them. And I’m also not saying that all of these are real issues, but his base thinks they are:

• wealth inequality. The rich have provably, measurably, been getting richer, social movement has all but stopped, and many middle class are losing ground
• the loss of traditional jobs, and thereby, ways of life. Midwest small town life, where everyone knows everyone, has been dying as the jobs that support them fade away through automaton and consolidation under corporations. The faces you see in town are often strangers, and worse, strangers who look different from you, are a different color, and often are speaking a language with their buddies that you don’t understand.
• healthcare in this country is abysmal
• all you read about in the news is about people fighting for things you find disgusting: children wanting to be a different gender, people wanting to marry their own gender (which forces you to imagine what the sex is like, and this makes you uncomfortable), even more people who don’t look like you or who talk differently coming into the country - overrunning and irreversibly changing your way of life.
• the climate is changing, and is making things worse, and is noticeable within living memory. This isn’t gramps remembering everything as the glory days; this is you, remembering that there used to be more snow in the winters, or we didn’t used to have to fight with so much drought.
• if you’re gen-z or younger, the future looks bleak. You can’t afford housing, healthcare, or many of the things your parents enjoyed.
• the past 50 years have been a constant slide into a culture you don’t understand. Every few months, you’re told you can’t use words that you did when you were kids. It used to be “cowboys and Indians;” and then you couldn’t call them Indians, it had to be “native Americans;” and then, once you got used to that, you were told you couldn’t call them “native Americans” anymore, and it had to be “indigenous people.” Gays had to be homosexuals, and then LGBT, then LGBTQ, then LGBTQIA or LGBTQ+ or god knows what it is this week. And it’s all you hear about in the news anymore.
• not only are the Blacks still upset about slavery, but now they’re talking about making you pay them for it?
• whenever you see cops on TV, they look more and more like police in some banana republic, with military gear… almost as if they’re paramilitary, and that makes you uncomfortable
• all that stuff crazy Eddy talks about - tinfoil hat stuff - keeps getting confirmed by the news. Your computer is spying on you, tracking you, watching everything you do and reporting it to some corporation, selling it - and the government only has to ask and they can get all of that. There’s no privacy anymore.
• it seems as if there are fewer small businesses and more giant corporations. The local grocer shut down when Walmart put in a store - heck, a lot of mainstreet stores did - leaving mainstreet a hallow shell. I mean, sure, you shop at Walmart, but you aren’t really connecting the dots or take responsibility. It’s easier just to blame The Corporations.
• but there’s also a new generation who does nothing except bitch about how they can’t get any good jobs that pay a living wage or provide healthcare, the greedy little bastards
• women are uppity, and don’t know their place. They’re not making babies, like they should, they’re competing with you for jobs.
• vegans want to take your hamburgers away

The country just isn’t as good as it used to be, and it’s not because of your behaviors - shopping at Walmart, shopping at Amazon, joining Facebook and using GMail and Google search, driving your gas-guzzling hemi pickup (which is actually a work truck because you helped your buddy move his couch once) - it’s because of some indistinct them: immigrants, politicians, corporations, gays, blacks, Millenials, The Media. And here’s a guy who says he’s going to fix all that, and boy did he piss off all those people who represent everything you hate. He turned the Supreme Court around! Things were finally going the way you wanted.

And above all of that are the Christians. They’ve been indoctrinated to believe in hierarchy: woman above child, man above women, and God above man. Having a king just feels right, an earthly authority who, with a wave of a pen, can turn the tide against progressives. I honestly believe that having a dictator - a sympathetic dictator - is a subconscious desire for most people brought up as Christians. They believe in hierarchy; it feels right.

“Improved mental state”?

“Improved self-confidence”?

I think the person who made this list did not grow up as a girl. This coming hard on the heels of man/bear.