Eh, I mean, clearly I’m not OKAY with what happened. It was a goddamned tragedy. But apart from initial shock and disbelief, it didn’t really affect me psychologically at all. It had been 4+ years since I had last spoken to him, and I wasn’t actually involved in any way apart from getting updates from my mom when she’d talk to his mom. So it didn’t leave any lasting effect. Not on me at least. I feel terrible for Maddie’s family and completely understand why they’d want him to rot in prison forever.

I’ve got two kids now, and if somebody did that to one of them… there’s a good chance I’D be the one in prison forever once I got ahold of the guy who did it.

Link works for me. I think the parens in the link target are borking it for some people.

As for what it’s like…. It’s weird. I knew him when we were both like 10 or so. My mom and his mom were pretty good friends, so I’d go over to his house any time they wanted to hang out.

He was a normal kid. He liked Nintendo and was trying to learn to play guitar.

His dad though… his dad was a raving psychopath. He used to beat the shit out of both him and his mom. I damn near caught a beating from him once until mom declared that if he was there, we wouldn’t be.

Eventually, I moved to another state, and his family moved to Florida.

A few years later, I was in freshman English class in high school (year 9 for the Brits), and an office runner came and told me I had a phone call.

It was my mom. “Josh killed a girl.” I’m not sure why she thought it was necessary to tell me at school since there was nothing to be done about it, but I guess she wanted to break the news to me before I saw it online or something.

The story on Wiki is pretty accurate from there. His mom was cleaning his room while he was at school because it was starting to smell when she noticed a wet spot under his bed, investigated, and found the body of a missing neighbor girl.

She had been missing for a week or so, I think; it’s been a while. While she was missing, he had even participated in the neighborhood searches for her.

I remember following the story as it developed. It was weird af to be reading about the kid I used to play Mario with on cnn. There was a whole media circus about him. We weren’t involved in any way since we had been moved apart for years.

In hindsight, knowing what I know now, there’s still ZERO indication that he would do something like that. He wasn’t a problem kid, he never let on about any weird sexual things (even hints of budding weirdness), if anything, I was a bad influence on him - he was a well behaved kid and I was the friend that was always like “hey, let’s go throw rocks at cars” or something because I was a little shithead.

I 100% believe the “scared dumbass kid” story the defense put out. I don’t for a second believe any of the “sexually motivated” shit. Every 14 year old had porn hidden in their room in those days. That doesn’t make him a crazed sex killer.

He was a scared kid with a terrifying abusive father that panicked and did something horrifying that can never be taken back.

Did he murder a child? Yes. Is he to blame? 100%.

I do not condone, approve of, or support what he did in any way whatsoever. But knowing his dad, I understand WHY it happened.

Good point. Edited. Thanks for the lookout homie.

I knew two that have their own pages, and know one mentioned in a Wikipedia page but doesn’t actually have his own dedicated page.

I knew:

Lee Vincent, my best friend’s dad when I was a kid.

And

Josh Phillips, another childhood friend, who, later on after we both moved away, murdered an eight year old girl and hid the body under his bed for several days. His mom found the body when it started to smell.

Currently:

My wife is a second cousin of the lead guitarist for a major international rock/metal band I guarantee you’ve heard of. We’ve hung out with him a few times. Really nice guy. I’m not putting the name because some of y’all creepy and might be able to identify us based on info in this post.

(Edited to remove potentially identifying familial relation)

Even if you’re using wireless devices, you almost certainly have a master device that DOES connect via a wire. Wireless thermostats are a recent invention, so if you have a non-newly-constructed home, it’s almost certain that at least one of your thermostats has a hardwire connection.

Pull each off the wall and look behind it. The wires are small, not like household power lines. They only carry 24v, so they look closer to phone wires than anything else, though not exactly.

When you find the wired thermostat, you can replace that one with a nest or ecobee. They come with directions on how to wire them up. The downside is that the other thermostats without a wire will become decorative and not function anymore without the master.

And I was making a joke about the D&D spider goddess.

But the word is “loath,” which has an accepted alternate spelling of “loth”. “Lolth” is the Dungeons and Dragons spider goddess, commonly worshiped by Drow.

What? This is system programming, not web development.

It’s a point raised in the movie. There were no people in the buildings because the bombings were done at night and the only people that would be in the buildings were a part of the group and knew to be out of them.

Our local Sam’s is disgusting. I was considering joining a while back during a $10 membership sale.

Everything was a mess, the employees all looked like they wanted to kill themselves, and the was a literal pile of human shit in the middle of the bathroom floor - not even in a stall or near a toilet - just a big ol dookie right in the middle of the bathroom.

Did not join. Wasn’t even worth $10 to me.

The door from my driveway opens into my office. The light switch in my office is in a really shitty place. When coming into my office at night, I have to navigate to the light switch in the dark to turn on the light.

Or, at least I did. Now when the door opens at night, the light in my office comes on at 10%.

Stuff like that is why.

Dungeons and Daddies (not a BDSM podcast)
A D&D podcast about 4 dads from our world that get tossed into the Forgotten Realms on a quest to find their missing kids. It’s fucking hilarious.

Old Gods of Appalachia
Many eons ago, Earth was a prison for things that shouldn’t be. Buried under what we now call the Appalachian Mountains, long they waited. But time weathers all things, and what were once gigantic mountains have eroded to mere nubs of what they once were. Then man, in his quest for coal, cracked open that black prison and things started leaking out… Set in “alternate Appalachia” in the late 1800s and early 1900s. A great, dark story.

Scared To Death
Think of all those scary stories you’ve ever heard… urban legends, ghost stories, monsters, cryptids, aliens… Of course, most of them are just stories right? But what if one of them was true? And, if one of them was true, what does that mean for the rest of them? Each week, they take two stories found on the internet and two-four listener-submitted stories, tell them, and assuming they’re true, discuss what that would mean. Take care while listening.

Web developer here. A “cookie” is just a piece of information stored on your machine. A cookie can be a setting, saved app data, or a tracking id.

The reason you keep seeing the banner is because by saying “no” to cookies, you’re telling them they don’t have permission to store ANYTHING on your computer. Which is fine. Your computer your call.

But if they can’t store anything on your computer, there’s no way to remember that setting next time you come to the website. No local setting storage means they don’t have the stored “no cookies” setting to load. Likewise there’s no tracking id they could potentially look your setting up in their own database by.

Web site requests are “stateless”. That means that, to a web server, each and every single request to a server is its own brand new, separate connection with no link to any other connection. The only way to share data between individual requests is via some kind of stored “state”. That state can come from your computer in the form of cookies, or from the server in the form of sessions. But linking a connection to a session requires your computer providing a session id; and guess how your computer has to store a session id? If you guessed “in a cookie” you win.

Are cookie popups annoying? Oh holy Christ yes, both from a web user standpoint and from the stand point of having to implement them as a developer. But by outright rejecting cookies (and/or auto-wiping your cache/cookies when you close the browser), you’re telling the website it’s not allowed to store your preferences for not having cookies and eliminating the websites ability to recall that preference at all.

This would mean a lot of good jobs being cut

Oh, no! We eliminated useless positions that accomplish nothing but sucking the life out of the system. However will we go on?

In the US, “liberal” and “conservative” come from different interpretations of the constitution. A “liberal” is somebody who interprets it liberally, that is, that the people who wrote it couldn’t account for every possibility, so interpretations of it should take into account the “spirit” of the work and try to interpret what they wanted when they wrote it. A “conservative” interprets it conservatively, that is, that they only concern themselves with the “letter” of what it says, and that the law is limited to EXACTLY what the document says based on the language at the time it was written.

Without taking obvious sides on this argument in this post, this is part of where the argument over the 2nd amendment comes from - The exact wording of the amendment isn’t up for debate - it’s written down right over there and anybody can read it. But what the two sides differ on is:

1. What that wording actually means.
2. Whether or not that wording is still relevant.
3. Whether or not that section should be repealed by amendment.

The literal exact wording is: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

But what does that actually mean?

To a conservative, it is interpreted using the original meanings of the words with no room for error. The words are sacrosanct and not up for revision or reinterpretation. “well regulated” in 1700s vocabulary means “well equipped and maintained”, and a militia was a group of citizens that organized themselves outside of military control. “to keep” means to own “and bear” means to have something in their possession at any time in any situation. So taken together, translated to modern language using the original meanings of the words, it means “A country’s security and freedom depend upon citizens coming together with proper equipment, maintenance, and training, so people shall always have the right to own and carry weapons.”

But to a liberal, there’s room for interpretation and modification. In modern parlance, “well regulated” means “subject to rules and regulations”. A “militia” is a volunteer military organization. Taken together, they mean “A military organization with stringent rules.” So if the sentence starts with “A well regulated militia…”, then does the sentence only apply to those in the military? Combined with the next clause, it goes “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of the free state…”. At the time of the writing, militias were the primary system of civilian security. But now we have military and civilian police for security, so do we still need civilian firearm ownership / public carry? If not, then is this clause even necessary anymore? Should an amendment eliminate it?

Again, I’m not taking a side in this post. That’s not my goal here. Of course I have my own opinion, but to maintain neutrality, I’m not going to share it on this thread. I’m just trying to illustrate how the terms “conservative” and “liberal” grew out of different interpretations and thoughts regarding the US constitution.

In one age, called the third age by some, a windbag rose in the west. This windbag was not the first, nor would he be the last. There are no first or last windbags in the wheel of bullshit, but he was A windbag.

Boogaloo

Open source hardware is a thing. See: raspberry pi, pine64, etc.

In hardware, open source means the schematics are available and the device is built with commonly available components; eg: no proprietary chips, standard discrete components, pcb schematics and plans available.

I love how this was somehow both the next line of the song AND snarkily correcting their spelling.

I have an older Roku tv. I recently got a nice roku streambar and hooked it up to the older Roku tv.

The tv displayed a popup with a message along the lines of “Oh hey, we see you connected a newer Roku device. No worries. Well just use it instead of the older built in one and you’ll never know the difference.”

More of this please.

I recently saw a 94 corolla with like 2400 miles on it while car shopping online. I guess it just got bought, parked, and forgotten about. It was in spectacular condition.

It was also $26,000.