I just wanted to confirm from our meeting just now, did you want me to (some crazy shit that could cause problems)?

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Cake day: January 9th, 2024

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  • It became associated with aggressive internet shutins bleating about Pickle Rick and the szechuan sauce, although it’s hard to tell where exactly the line was between “these guys are losers yelling and being obnoxious at McDonalds,” and “stop cyberbullying we’re all just internet weirdos who like a funny cartoon and that is fine.” And then, Justin Roiland had some kind of sex abuse allegations and the worm turned and the world is officially supposed to hate Rick and Morty now, I think.

    I mean, allegedly. I’m with you; some of it is still some great funny shit.







  • I have a private theory, for which I have absolutely 0 evidence, that the forces of the establishment have some way of sneaking stupid unpopular things or phrases into the left’s discourse which the left then seizes and runs with, much to the establishments’s delight. E.g. renaming the Green Party the Green-Rainbow Party, climate activists attacking famous artworks, things like that.

    I have 0 evidence for this, as applied to “defund the police” or anything else. Actually I sort of suspect that “defund the police” was an original creation of the ACAB contingent which meant exactly what it sounds like, that got retconned by more sensible but still reform-minded people into meaning “more properly fund everything else” for exactly the reasons we’re discussing. But as a general rule I suspect (again, with 0 evidence) that some of what you’re talking about actually comes from deliberate sabotage.





  • So that’s not the full story about the movie… from memory but the best that I remember it, they originally shot the line from the book. The studio came back with some notes, among them being hey that thing with the abortion is pretty over the top. So, they shot the line that made it into the movie instead, and the studio lost their damn minds and said that is way worse, please change it back to the abortion one at least, but they stuck to their guns and said nope, you wanted it changed so we changed it, we’re doin this one now. And, apparently, they won, because that’s what’s in the movie, even though it is objectively quite a bit worse.



  • Yeah. That part makes perfect sense to me. It’s a little different from what you were saying, but someone on Lemmy was actually telling me about their experience with someplace where something like this had been implemented – mental health people going on certain calls instead of cops, with cops assisting in cases that might turn violent, and it sounds like it works out great from all people involved’s perspective. The callers are happier because people come who are better at handling the problems, the cops are happier because they don’t have to deal with calls they are less qualified to deal with, the mental health people are happier because they have cops on standby for violent calls but they also get to deal with things right from the jump, instead of coming in after the cops came and just tackled and cuffed the person or whatever and now they have to come into the middle of the wreckage.

    I know you were talking about things at an even much earlier level than when the 911 call happens; that sounds good to me too. The only part I was objecting to was the vindictive framing of it. Like if you want to fund mental health and homeless services that sounds great, we should do that. Coupling that idea up with punishing the police because they were bad (not saying you’re doing that, but definitely some people have that in mind saying “defund the police” I think) I don’t think is the way to produce progress though.



  • 100% agree with this

    I should make clear I am not an ACAB person by any means. The whole mentality that the police are automatically the enemy makes just as little sense to me as that the police are never the enemy.

    But no one in the world should simply have unaccountable power. Body cams, judicial oversight, warrants, charges when they abuse their power, get rid of police unions or anything else that makes it difficult for a department to fire an officer who they feel is causing problems. Just like some percentage of non police people do bad stuff and we need a system to watch them and try to protect everyone else from them, we need it 10 times more for police people.




  • Haha yeah I did some tapes. There was some crazy thing that hooked up to my TV at home that used cassette tapes.

    And yeah, BBS culture, and programming on some of the old school machines, PEEK and POKE and pre-OSX Macs, and segmented memory in the 8088-286 era. To this day I have never really understood what the point of segmented memory was, but that was what we had back in the day, and we were grateful.

    I also got to do some programming at a place that had one of the massive Onyx2 machines. It lived in a whole separate room and was the size of a refrigerator. Good stuff.



  • One of the really notable things about war is that it’s so rare (if you aren’t the US military or else actively engaged in some ongoing conflict), and the rate of people dying and having to be replaced with brand new people is so high, that almost all the time it’s being done for real life-or-death stakes by people who are learning on the job as they go and have no real experience in what they are doing.

    A lot of things about military decisions and events don’t completely make sense why they happened the way they do, until you imagine a whole airline being run by people most of whom it’s their first week on the job, and then you say oh okay I get it now; that’s why that happened that way.