• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • I’m not a liberal — I’m a leftist — and I consider a Tankie to be someone who gets so wrapped up in hating the U.S. or West in general that they start defending the likes of Stalin and others who used a facade of Marx/Lenin to consolidate power and do horrible things. Like, you do not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to Stalin.

    Incidentally, here’s Thomas the Tankie Engine:

    I made that for a shitpost in 5 minutes using Midjourney so don’t judge all the obvious A.I. flaws or that I used machine learning. I’d pay a real artist if it wasn’t a throwaway bit.







  • I love it but even in high school, I knew I didn’t want kids. People told me seeing my friends have kids would cause me to change my mind but it only reinforced my preference. Having kids is a huge amount of work and commitment (not to mention the expense). I love to travel and I’ve been able to go to places and do things you can’t (or just wouldn’t want to) do with kids. I also like that I was able to take risks with my career. It’s much easier to start a business or join an early stage company or whatever if you don’t need the stability kids need.

    So, for me, it’s amazing. I feel for people who want kids but never had them, though. I know a few and they’re happy — freedom is a nice consolation prize — but it wasn’t their dream.




  • Scam attempts. This may be better elsewhere but in the U.S., every phone call I get is either a scam attempt or my mom (who is old enough that I worry about her getting elder scammed like when my grandma paid a stupid amount for silver coins).

    I’ve never gotten scammed (except small stuff like carnival games or whatever) but if I were president I’d make ending scams — even false advertising ones — my top priority. You’ll be able to pick up a call from and unknown number after my first 100 days: that’s my promise to the people of America.



  • It might be as close to a perfect game as it gets. I love that you can turn off the HUD and it’s still completely playable. Nintendo is one of the few companies that puts so much care into their open world that you can just explore and talk to people and get all the information you need to complete the game.

    For modern games, I also love Nier: Automata and Horizon Zero Dawn for the complex stories and creativity but Breath of the Wild is just so perfectly executed. It’s sort of like classic Pixar movies where it might be rated G but still manages to appeal to adults.



  • I’m American and probably know more about the Bengal famine. I know the effects of the Munich Agreement and Ribbentrop Pact but they were sort of a “sidebar explanation” in a textbook explaining the rise of Hitler.

    I went to high school in the late 90’s and took AP World History but I also majored in International Political Economy, basically, so I read books and wrote a lot of papers on things that would be obscure to most Americans. I’m not sure when I first learned about it. (My high school World History professor was a bit of a hippie.)

    A classic economics blunder is also about when the British offered Indians bounties for cobras and some enterprising Indians started breeding them and it all just made everything worse. But stupid mistakes — and often colonial ones — are a big part of Economic history.

    Edit: I should probably add that I liked economic history more than military history or whatever so I may have read about some things on my own.


  • Things like planned obsolescence and software blocks on things like farmers fixing tractors without John Deere’s software permission almost makes me think the bad guys won the Cold War.

    Between me and a mechanic friend, we can fix my car but we can’t turn off the (wholly unnecessary) “inspection needed” noise without me spending $1000 on software. Apparently, the inspection needed warning isn’t even related to anything. It just comes on every x miles. The car doesn’t have a detected issue or anything. That beep is radicalizing me.


  • These things go in cycles. I remember when “Fedora Core” — they dropped the “Core” part of the name — was the cool new distro. I remember when Ubuntu was the cool new distro. Just ignore it and play around with distros until you find one you like.

    In my opinion, new users should use a very popular distro so they have documentation and message boards. After a few years, you get your legs under you. At that point, start distro hopping using weird desktop environments. Then, someday, you get a lot of experience and use a very popular distro because software is a tool and you don’t care. (If something has buzz, I throw it in a VM and go “Huh, that’s interesting.”)

    It’s sort of like how the target audience for Nike Air Monarchs is people buying their first pair of Nike Airs and dads who aren’t trying to hear the word “colorway” and just want some shoes.