Comments

wjrii, 1 year ago to risa in What would be Gorn's callsign? wrong answers only

Wrong answers only?

Fuzzy
Nurture
Vegan
Morn
Iceman

wjrii, 1 year ago to science_memes in abandonware empires

I'm sure some do, but there's also a certain simplicity to "back up the Win95 machine" and "collect working Pentium 2's from eBay," particularly for fields that are not interested in IT for its own sake. A virtual machine adds an extra layer of abstraction and complexity, though I'm sure there's a slow trickle as entities have trouble replacing hardware or luck into technically savvy and ambitious staff. I've certainly seen my share of data being entered into a Windows 10 app that sure as shit seems to be a terminal emulator running some green-text dinosaur, or else it's got a set of Visual Basic widgets that seem like they'd be compatible with one.

wjrii, 1 year ago to AskKbin in What is Kbin’s identity?

At the most barebones level, I think kbin was meant to be "Lemmy and mastodon with a cohesive UI on one account." So far it has ended up being, "Lemmy but for people who were eeshy about tankies when they were trying to figure all this out to get away from Reddit."

wjrii, 1 year ago to starwarsmemes in Welp, Saturday's here. Time to get drunk and watch Zach Snyder's Rebel Moon, I suppose

I thought Jupiter Ascending was kinda half decent, though super uneven and sometimes distractingly bonkers. I thought Valerian had its moments and different casting could have made it into something. I even liked "65" once I realized it was just a small-scale rumination on fatherhood and loss, an acting exercise that happened to have dinosaurs and a light glaze of bad sci-fi.

I made it through 45 minutes of Rebel Moon.

wjrii, 1 year ago to risa in Forget Elf on the Shelf. It's...

Tangentially, the DS9 shapeshifter makeup looks EXACTLY like the people who go way too hard on their plastic surgery. You know, the 60yo people who want so badly for me to think they're thirty that they get enough fillers that they no longer look how humans of any age are supposed to look so my brain resets and I mentally assume they're seventy.

I'm not even completely opposed to cosmetic procedures. People have different priorities and psychological needs, but you've got to accept that you can only shave off so many years and approach your vanity with some strategy. We're all fighting a rear-guard action here.

wjrii, 1 year ago to risa in Don't be like Gworon

Where's the typo? My horse is glorious, and she is my personal heroin.

wjrii, 1 year ago to asklemmy in Am i the a**hole for telling my coworkers no?

You think that's not WORK? 🤣

wjrii, 1 year ago to risa in I think I know why this episode was set in Toronto

Star Trek must have got annoyed when I repeatedly referred to The Expanse as "the apotheosis of Toronto warehouse sci-fi."

wjrii, 1 year ago to asklemmy in Where on the globe would you best be able to sail a very large ship without being detected?

The Pacific Ocean is massive and if a ship turns off its transponder it is invisible unless you have satellites in your game.

So it seems like the key will be some combination of deactivating the transponder, getting away from other ships, being low profile in various EM wavelengths (difficult if it's also large), traveling with a significant cloud cover (hurricane?), escaping detection by military submarines and other sonar sources, and ending up in a place and condition where they're sheltered from all of the above. This seems very nearly impossible if everyone is already hunting for our intrepid vessel, but if there's some reason for people not to be looking right away, I can imagine plausible scenarios where the data takes long enough to come together for the necessary storytelling beats to play out.

wjrii, 1 year ago to risa in Excuse me, Vhat?

Chekup.

wjrii, 1 year ago to risa in best recruitment campaign I've seen so far

Is that President Ra-ghoratreii under that top hat?!?!?

wjrii, 1 year ago to risa in 24 hours and the ketracel white memes show no sign of slowing down

Between Kai Winn and Nurse Ratched, Louise Fletcher was "gentle menace" personified and a national treasure.

wjrii, 1 year ago to asklemmy in Is there an artist so horrible that no matter how hard you try that you cannot separate their art from them?

if we assume the historical records are true

This is actually a pretty big assumption for some of the more outlandish claims. When you dig in a bit, you find many of them are kind of repetitive tropes and generally come from Senatorial-class writers about emperors whose policies were less friendly to that class.

Not to say they couldn't have happened, and even in those days better to exaggerate than to invent from whole cloth, but it seems like an unusually large number of "bad" emperors had the same kinks as each other or the same traits that the literature had always considered "unmanly."

wjrii, 1 year ago to asklemmy in Former religious lemmings, what made you quit religion or stop being a believer?

Well hello fellow exmo. I gave it up in my late teens. Found myself playing "devil's advocate" too much in discussions with my friends. Tried to pray about it all Joseph Smith style, but just got absolutely nothing. Realized that I had never enjoyed Church, never felt at peace there, and just generally came to the conclusion that the essential problem of free will and comparative religion and the extremely specific truth claims that Mormonism requires weren't holding up. I was also completely eeshed out by the thought of a patriarchal blessing, and I felt no calling whatsoever to go on a mission. I wasn't as traumatized as some, growing up in the Mormon hinterlands of the American south (NE Florida) meant the LDS were a little less high and mighty and I had a circle outside of the church, but the pressure to conform and stay is very real.

I only resigned formally when my mom sicced the missionaries on my never-Mo wife and me after I moved to Texas.

Ultimately, even as religions go, its theology is very silly and its most ardent adherents are real jerks.

wjrii, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago) to asklemmy in Which items/products were you once able to get from local shops on a whim that you now more or less have to order online?

On the flip side, the variety and market segments that are open to fountain pen people are as good as they've ever been (since ballpoints became a mature technology), both for ink and pens. Sure, the Sheaffer School pens and Waterman Phileases and Cross Whatevers aren't hiding in Office Depot anymore, but you can still find a Varsity or a wick-feed Zebra pretty easily, and the Internet is so much faster than it used to be. I guess I'll never pop into the cigar shop by the office to pick up a spare Lamy Safari though.