@sxan@midwest.social
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

sxan

@sxan@midwest.social 

<span style="color:#323232;">       🅸 🅰🅼 🆃🅷🅴 🅻🅰🆆. 
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍 𝖋𝖊𝖆𝖙𝖍𝖊𝖗𝖘𝖙𝖔𝖓𝖊𝖍𝖆𝖚𝖌𝖍 
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sxan,
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TIL that being an actor requires a law degree if you don’t want to potentially end up in jail.

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

I went into it expecting it to have nothing to do with the books. I found all the characters’ behaviors irrational and frustrating, with the exception of the emperor.

And I’m getting really sick of incompetent protagonists and impossibly flawless antagonists. I think that’s just a reflection of the zeitgeist of the world’s masses, but that’s another discussion. Suffice to say I’m tired of it being the only trope used in SciFi TV anymore.

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

This is brilliant, and it would explain so much! And I agree that the most interesting story arch is the one that has nothing to do with the novels (and the entire show shared very little with the novels, outside of some names).

I said that I liked few of the characters; I don’t know if that improves after the first season, but like you, I’m traumatized enough by S1 to be uninterested in watcing S2. I realized I’d spent the last 3 episodes literally shouting at the TV because of characters being so unreasonably stupid, and if there’s a literary sin I can’t forgive it’s characters doing stupid things as a plot device. “We need tension in this scene, so we’ll have this character refuse to get in the escape pod until the last minute, for some trivial reason.” It is infuriating, sloppy, weak writing, and I refuse to watch it.

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

Brood! Shit, the Brood, not The Swarm. Brain fart while posting.

https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zvC1gZKX4QI/U4UVnwONFXI/AAAAAAAALk8/DvhsT0w4EgY/s1600/01.jpg

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

The Venom illustrations always remind me of that Brood cover.

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

Eh. I didn’t personally find that the upheaval added much, and it interfered with my muscle memory working with FHS systems… which are everything else. It didn’t add, like, BeOS-levels of drastic benefit in exchange for being so divergent. And it obviously never caught on anywhere else.

Just my experience.

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

Hyprland is one of the ones I tried, and it may be closest to what I’m looking for. I’ve heard the community is extremely toxic, though. Software projects having “conmunities” is a relatively recent thing, for me, so it’s not a big deal, but what’s been your experience?

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

Me too, mostly, but popping into a forum to ask questions is a thing. I stopped using bspwm largely because the one responsive person in the Matrix channel was a first-class self-righteous turd; that alone wouldn’t have been so bae, but none of the admins called them on it, and, well, herbstluftwm turned out to be better software anyway. The hlwm community has avoided being toxic mainly by not existing, AFAICT.

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

Contactless payment works only half the timeon actual registers. What magic do scammers have that makes their readers work so well, and why aren’t stores using it?

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

NGL, that’s the one thing that stood out to me at the first panel.

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

The EU, despite (valid) criticisms and pravacy mis-steps, is right now the only large, powerful organization fighting for consumer rights. I wish I, as an American, could support them, because the laws the EU is passing benefit me as well.

Go EU, indeed!

How to fool a laptop into thinking a monitor is connected?

Hello! I converted an old laptop with a broken screen into a home server, and it all works well except for one thing: when I reboot it (via ssh), if no screen is connected, it will get stuck and refuse to boot. as soon as I connect an HDMI monitor, the fans will start spinning and it will start booting as usual. Then I can...

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

It could be Linux, too. Some distros have fancy boot graphics - look for something called “plasma” - not the KDE one, but a different one - and uninstall or disable that. It’s a common thing that hides the boot log behind a logo-and-progress bar. Arch doesn’t use it, so I haven’t seen it in years, but IIRC it can cause problems on headless systems.

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

I think they’re referring to the mag, not the indictment.

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

Less reliably with today’s LED TVs. They don’t have the same satisfying “pop” that old CRTs did.

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

Lucky you.

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

He’s the one endorsed by the NRA, and they’re still dominant in the gun community. It’s hard to find ranges that aren’t just a sea of MAGA caps.

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

That’s good to know. TBH most of what I was talking about was my experiences at ranges and gun shops in Eastern PA, a little N of Philadelphia. A few years ago I moved to a large city in the mid-West and haven’t had a chance to visit many ranges; and the ones close to me are indoor – I’d have to travel a bit to get rural enough to find an outdoor range. So I honestly don’t know how things have changed in the past 5 years, and things tend to be more liberal it large metro areas anyway.

It’s encouraging to hear that tha NRA is losing support. I still feel that Trump is considered safer for 2A than Biden; if he’s (Trump) not actively defending 2A, he’s at least not talking about strengthening gun laws. And that hasn’t changed: 2A is still a single-issue voting decider. Relatively few of us gun owners are not passionate about gun ownership, where it’s a hobby, not a lifestyle.

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

I mean, it’s not my talking point. 2A is a key plank of the Rebublican platform, regardless of how little they can control Orange Putin. While addressing gun violence is a key plank in the Democrat one. Maybe discerning voters like yourself will change their votes based on this - I doubt any “gun nut” in central PA will. Trump doesn’t talk about guns, Biden does. Words speak louder than actions in American politics.

Frankly, I don’t think 2A is a topic Trump has an opinion about, or gives much thought to. He’ll pass whatever gun legislation he thinks will make him more popular, and after Las Vegas, throwing his weight behind legislation that the NRA itself had advocated and had been in the works for 2 years before he was elected (thanks, Obama!) was an easy win.

To be clear, I’m not a proponent of 2A. While I enjoy the hobby and indulge in ownership, I believe the 2A is anachronistic and unable to satisfy the purbose for which it was made. And we do have a gun violence issue in the US; if it were at all feasible to eliminate the 2A and all guns, I’d support it. I’m just saying that if you ask a random 2A MAGA which candidate is their choice on this point, they’ll say “Trump.”

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

You might like to consider a job in system administration. It’s like that, only with the added hell of users.

sxan, (edited )
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

Noooo! If Return of the Living Dead taught us anything, it’s that you don’t burn the bodies!

I'm so frustrated rn.

I have been distro hopping for about 2 weeks now, there’s always something that doesn’t work. I thought I would stick with Debian and now I haven’t been able to make my printer work in it, I think I tried in another distro and it just worked out of the box, but there’s always something that’s broken in every distro....

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

Are you updating with eos-update, or yay? TBH, I only use yay, or pacman. I don’t imagine it makes any difference, but… IDK. I happened to upgrade and reboot two EOS machine yesterday, with again no issues. Are you running an NVidia card? I’m an Radeon guy, won’t touch NVidia, myself. How about Wayland? I’ve alwayw found Wayland to be super flakey, which keeps me on X.

I dunno. I wonder why you’re having so many issues, while for me EOS has just been Arch with an easier install.

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

Ah. K, I think the differrence is that I’m the outlier. Your system has far larger components, with more moving parts, which I think is more common:

On most of my systems, I’m not running any graphical system; they’re all servers. That eliminates a huge amount of stack that can fail. On all but non-servers I run X, which is very stable (in that upgrades almost never impact it) on non-Nvidia GPUs. And of those, all but one run herbstluftwm - Gnome and KDE are both large systems with a lot of moving parts, any of which can break (or be broken) – in your case, it was Plasma, a KDE component. And the last desktop is running Budgie which, while still Gnome, is a lighter one based on the older GTK3. All of these things tend to make for more stable systems.

But, most people are probably running fancier, full desktop software. Larger, more complex, more development, more frequent changes. And, consequently, more prone to cascading packaging breakages, like the Plasma one.

I think if I were using software like that, I’d consider either giving up Arch and using an immutable distro, or using something like snapper or timeshift that allows boot-time system roll-backs.

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

Oh, that plasma. Yeah, that naming conflict is totally not confusing.

You could switch all your repos to the core Arch ones. I did that by accident once, and it was fine (although, I did switch them back eventually). Maybe it’d add release stability? I’m not really clear how the EOS repos vary off the baseline, except by adding some custom packages.

Inspired by our discussion, I installed snapper on two boxen. I included snap-pac and snapper-support to get system change and grub integration; there’s probably also a utility out there that adds visudo-like snapshot-before-manual-edit of anything in /etc. If not, it’d be an easy script. snapper-gui and btrfs-assistant both look useful. While I’m comfortable with rescue SDs and restic backups, what I’m seeing with Arch’s snapper package is pretty nice, and super easy.

I suppose anything that borks grub is going to be a PITA no matter how immutable your OS, or how fancy your rollback. Or - god forbid - fucks up your BIOS firmware. I have never had that last happen, yet (knock on wood).

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

NGL, this one used to worry me.

But then I discovered Nair!

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

Everyone who has ever served in any branch of the US military knows this fact.

In 2020, US gvmnt estimates were 19.4m living vets in the nation. With a population of around 331m, that’s around 6%. If you include the number of non-vets civilians who’s jobs directly support the military, and who therefore are also required to use metric in their jobs, this number will be higher - I couldn’t find population estimates, but it’s at least a couple percent as the DoD alone employs a million civilians. NASA employs around 17k, and anyone working for a company who works with NASA is going to have to use metric. I’d be shocked if the number of Americans who aren’t having to use metric at work, and are therefore aware that it’s a standard here, wasn’t at least 10%.

Nowhere near a majority, but certainly significant; over 20m people warrants “many,” surely?

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