🥚-xactly.

Slavery 2: It won’t matter if you’re black or white

If I may be a centrist about this.

OP is being silly wanting a year-cutoff. Geeenerally people who are whole-hog on AI are very proud of that and will yell about it to the four winds. And even if they didn’t, reputation is a real thing one can rely on for knowing who are the goodies and the baddies. (… though if they do feel that’s the only way… 2023. That’s the date. November 2023 is when ChatGPT became something the public could use, and the floodgates opened for businesspeople wanting to replace all artists with robots. Before that, Generative AI was used mostly either by scientists for research into AI itself… Or by internet dorks like me for shitposting. It wasn’t good enough for anything else either way.)

With that said, y’all are being unreasonable to them too: Literature is art, and when it comes to art, “I don’t like the way it feels” is more than enough reason to not want to engage with something. If OP says “I don’t want to touch anything AI related, I don’t care if it is quote-unquote good” then that should be a complete sentence, and require no belaboured justification whatsoever.

Ah but there is my cartoon villain gambit: If my sentiment gets popular, THEN–

Either the USians that still have braincells finally nut up and take their country back. Which would be good for friends of mine that live there.

Or

The US government finally gets their shit together and starts doing something about the fact that any old idiot can have the sort of weapon most countries reserve for their armies. And this would ALSO be good for friends of mine that live there.

Either way, I win. [evil gay horse noises]

See

You’re describing the MAGA crowd.

All I’m saying is that there are plenty of non-MAGA Americans out there. Like 55% of the country or something? And that those people can get guns just as easily as the MAGAts do – And that “terrified children and minorities” are not the only human persons that can be targeted by a firearm.

I know they won’t

They lack the spine for it (or the spinal injuries?)

But that’s precisely what makes this a case of ‘thing they aren’t ready to hear’

The gun rights y’all have?

Now, most people would tell you that Gun Control Works and that you should just do that and get less dead kids per month which is a generally good thing.

… But here’s another thing to consider. As long as you’re allowed to purchase weapons for cheap and easy.

You do realise you can in fact do something about the assholes in your government and your oligarchies with those guns, right? That they can be used for more than just killing children?

Luigi Mangione seemed to get it.

I honestly think the US and China might be neck and neck

Both are empires Both are very concerned with both their outward image and with what the peasantry is up to, lest they get too antsy.

And both have very advanced technology and a very well developed media ecosystem at their disposal.

They both probably push out about as much propaganda by weight.

Yeah the US only became…

… The US.

Because of the World Wars.

Europe, the then-seat of every worldwide empire, was killing itself and dragging all of Asia and Africa down with them.

The Americas in general were “safe”. Isolated from this chaos. Every country in the New World got a boost from the wars.

… But the US had a nation that was a. Fully Independent b. Relatively Stable and c. Rich in resources – So they basically got a decade-and-change of time to develop themselves while everyone who had previosly been rich and powerful was getting fucked, and by the time the dust settled, they were the top dogs just because they were lucky.

batcat

It’s like cat but better. Great for when you just want to look at the contents of a file, without loading a whole text editor.

Oh also, tldr

My procedure for learning how to use a cli command goes tldr page -> --help if the tldr fails to help me -> THEN the full manpage

Most of these steps can be skipped by installing the Lutris flatpak on the deck itself and using desktop mode (… Plus an external mouse and keyboard) to set up your pirated games directly from the deck.

Additionally, if you’re smart about it you can use syncthing as a ghetto “cloud” solution to synch your progress between PC and deck.

A lot of ceremony-like events confuse me.

They seem designed to be as tedious and gruelling as possible. Consider Graduation Ceremonies, or the ceremonial part of Weddings. Just hours in a hard chair, listening to some old motherfucker blabber on and on about random bullshit. (the parties afterwards I understand and respect, even if I’m the opposite of a party person. The only thing I like about parties is the excuse to dress up and eat cake. But hey, people enjoy dancing and drinking and stuff, that makes sense to me.)

Is this some Neurotypical thing I’m too Autistic to understand? Like do people actually enjoy this?

EDIT: Actually, since I brought up drinking when talking about parties.

… I don’t comprehend people that like alcoholic drinks. It’s one thing to enjoy the feeling of being buzzed, we all want to turn off our brains sometimes, and of course it is literally addicting.

But I am talking about people who apparently enjoy the taste. Every type of booze I tried tasted like something between “medicine” and “actual poison”.

People will spend a fortune in Wines and Beers and they all just taste bad. Then they’ll swear up and down “no no dude, this wine is super sweet” and then you try it and it tastes like every other wine, which is to say it tastes like you took grape juice and sucked out all the joy.

Sonic 06 is the OG of “trashy games you can’t look away from because in all the ways it sucks, it is NEVER BORING”

… This is why it had such a powerful reputation-ruining impact, by the way.

If it had been boring bad (like Sonic Blast in the 90s or Sonic Boom a few years later) no one would have cared – Instead it is such a glorious trainwreck that it is basically The Room of video games.

Lord of the Rings.

I understand and respect the seminal role LotR (Book) has as a fantasy work. I have to, as a fantasy nerd myself.

I also believe that those three movies that everyone loves could be edited down into one and not much would be lost.

God DAMN do those films drag ON and ON and ON.

The books, too, drag on like Tolkien was being paid by the individual word. Thankfully with books I can set the pace at which things go.

No keep going, I like what you’re cooking.

Those newfangled immutable distros might benefit them, since they’re unlikely to want to or care about modification, and it’s extra security.

Set up the web browser with a strong ad-blocker, maybe whitelisting YouTube since non-techy people are unlikely to know what to do if youtube throws up a stink about the adblocker.

Set up auto-updates maybe. For safety and such.

Otherwise make sure it looks like a dead ringer for whatever they are already used to (usually Windows) – Same background, icons in the same places and looking similar if not the same, panels set up the same way, etc. – This is easier with Cinnamon or KDE Plasma. Gnome… Even if you like it, it’s too different, yanno? Unless they’re coming from Mac, and even then it’s not the same.

P.S.: Lovely background of a gay bird prince. <3

I find it amusing when people refer to their spouse as “THE wife”

It’s like they’re all married to the same immortal and omnipresent gestalt entity.

Comfort Eating.

I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I tried weed and found it uninteresting and never did anything harder. I exercise regularly.

But I’ll still never be the platonic ideal of a “healthy person”, because whenever I’m sad, I need processed sugar to feel like a person again. And brother, does life give me reasons to be sad.

Call it a reverse curb-cut effect, I first discovered it when I was a teenager, and back then I’d sometimes use it out of laziness or because it was quicker (ah how I miss being young and immune to pain)

Then when time happened and I started having arthritis flareups, it was there to help me, and I was like “heck, that’s a neat thing for accessibility”

Eh?

I don’t paste things as often as I scroll. Plus, my brain associates copying and pasting with the keyboard commands, from 20+ years of doing – That.

Edit-to-answer-your-edit: My mouse has 7 buttons, I’m golden.

Not quite what I was hoping for… But it does help.