• 2 Posts
  • 17 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • It depends. Is there a voicemail box I can wait for? Around 5-6 rings, I start hoping to hear that so I can hang up and try again (or in rare cases, I might leave an actual voicemail - i know ao many people who don’t check theirs though…)

    If there is none, and I really wanna get through to someone, then I’ll let their phone ring off the hook, especially at work where our users have landlines at their desk. Hey, if you put a phone number on a ticket and then come back and have your boss contact my boss to escalate the ticket, then you better answer your phone when I have follow-up questions about your poorly-written ticket. After ~10 rings, I’ll put my phone on speaker and turn the volume down as I turn back to my computer and resume working, the ring barely audible in the background…


  • Good riddance. I hate that so many communities moved from forums to using Discord. It’s such a ratty little pigeon hole for communications to go and get lost in forever. It’s a shitshow for anything other than instant, live messaging. And so many communities use it as their only real forum. The day that private equity and public investors liquidate the servers and sell off Discord’s IP after their future bankruptcy will be a very happy day.





  • I mean, I pretty regularly have to debunk the idea that Hitler was a leftist. My dad firmly believes it, because “he was anti-gun and hated freedom, and called himself a national Socialist!”

    I’ve explained, until I’m blue in the face, that restricting freedom is right-wing, yes even restricting gun rights can be right-wing, and that Hitler deliberately chose the name “National Socialist” to fool leftists into coming ti meetings - like he straight up admits that in Mein Kampf.
    My dad is not somebody who ever learns new information or changes his mind easily, though, so I’ll probably never successfully convince him that nazism was a right wing movement and not even slightly leftist.



  • I get that’s what they’re saying right now. And I even get how one might be able to go along with labeling “violent” rhetoric from trans people (with the particular example being those who believe that opposition to their existence is a violent threat) as terrorist. But I also have studied history and understand very well that this is one of the more common ways that the path towards atrocities begins, and that it’s not just coincidentally possible for these policy proposals to be abused, it’s likely the intent.

    Why else would they also seek a blanket revocation of our right to bear arms?

    I would also suggest looking at some of the talking heads who cheerlead for this sort of thing: people like Nancy Mace who use the word “Tranny” to refer to us, makes no distinction when calling all of us a threat, and openly call for us all to be institutionalized. Two sitting members of Congress have called for that, by the way. They’re going well past the Heritage Program’s proposal, because those mouthpieces’ purpose in the propaganda machine is to prime the public for the next steps on the ladder. First the targets are rhetorically marked with rhetoric that depicts us as a risk to others, then we are subtly pushed out of public life - through things like bathroom bans and the repeal of discrimination protections, making it more and more difficult to go out in public or hold down a job; Then, the rhetoric begins depicting us as not just a risk, but as violent and dangerous, and the laws proposed are things that a “moderate” could feasibly entertain - just arresting members of the target group who might have used violent language, or might be involved in resistance activities against the government. Simultaneously, the loudest mouths start ramping up rhetoric calling for the removal of all of the target group from society, either by putting them in prisons or institutions or “camps”. <— you are here.

    Not calling it what it is, is either a shameful act of cowardice or a pitiful display of ignorance. I just hope more people figure out what’s going on before we start getting put in institutions.

    By the way, by admitting that what I see happening looks a lot like historical examples of the steps towards genocide, it is possible to paint me as a terrorist under the proposed TIVE categorization. Just because I have an interest in staying alive and use my first amendment rights to call out this shit.



  • There’s people who think parts of my lifestyle are a mental disorder. That’s their problem, not mine tho.

    It must be nice that there’s not a dedicated ideological movement hell-bent on making it your problem.

    Who did he want eradicated from public life?

    Transgender people.

    Honestly it seems like you’re pretty dedicated to just defending this guy’s ideas and ideology, so you know exactly what you’re doing and why it’s wrong, and it’s a waste of time to talk to you.




  • His videos where he called empathy a sickness, said homosexuality is a disease, or the ones where he said that People of Color were less capable than white people? Or maybe you haven’t stumbled across him saying that Black people were better off under slavery. Idk, I might just be biased, as someone who he wanted to see eradicated from public life. Maybe if you have a friend who’s black or gay or trans, they might help you out with being able to spot plain and open bigotry that is apparently going right over your head.


    1. A shitton of people have lived economic realities that don’t allow them to splurge on a phone at all, even if they’d really like digital freedom or privacy. See: half of the global smartphone market, where Android Go and KaiOS enabling cheap smartphones lead to millions of sales.

    2. People who can and want to don’t even make the jump because the reality of owning a non-iOS/Android phone is that it requires sacrifices. I went to a concert last night that required me to have the Ticketmaster app to even get in. Everyone at that concert had to have either an iOS or Android phone, myself included. I’m testing Ubuntu Touch on a second phone, but if I make it my daily driver, I’m going to have to keep a second phone around for stuff like that. Ecosystems are too locked down now, and unfortunately you will have to either miss out on some things, or adapt hard-core.

    3. The devices and software have to be there. Right now there are only a handful of truly modern devices thar you can load Ubuntu Touch or another Linux distro on, and they’re… not quite straightforward for non-techy people to get up and running. Which is, believe it or not, the vast majority of users.

    2025 being the year of the alternative smartphone OS seems just about as likely as any other year being the year of the Linux desktop.


  • Allowing a MAGA forum to coexist here isn’t simply allowing “differing opinions” - their “opinion” is known, and it invariably moves us up the rungs on the ladder toward genocide. I say this as someone whose own parents are in the MAGA cult: defederate. Don’t allow that ideology to fester in your community. Have individual discussions with the people in your own life to pull them back from the brink, if you feel safe doing so, but don’t allow that growth in the petri dish that is your collective, or you will wake up with an infection. Set boundaries or get taken over.


  • The comment alluded to Transracial identities as a (very cherry-picked and extreme) example. I do really, genuinely wonder whether we should uncritically accept the validity of people who identify as transracial, especially people who benefit from whiteness but self-identify as a member of a marginalized race. What is the instances stance on transracial identities? Another question- do you have racially marginalized mods, and how do they feel about the subject?


  • Oh Gods, I learned the hard way to never roll back a package unless you really know what you’re doing. And I learned that lesson way back in 2013 or 2014, when I’d only been using Linux for a year or two full-time. Now I’m on a rolling distro and have everything as purely the latest version, and if I come across some weird thing that involves rolling back a package to an older version, I will simply not do that and will look for other solutions instead. Sometimes it’s as simple as creating a symlink so that when a program looks for libWhatever2.1.5 it gets quietly redirected to libWhatever2.6.0