Game development and teaching.

Two industries that would be right up my alley. Two industries that prey on and exploit people who have a strong passion for their work. Two industries that I have stayed far away from. :/

Don’t celebrate dodging the quicksand too long, or else the Africanized killer bees will catch up with us!

Lemmy is so much better for actual commenting and discussion. It’s like our threads range from a small room full of people to an auditorium full, while that other place most of us left was like a professional sports stadium full of people who all have a bullhorn and one rich weasel with camera who gets to decide who is on the Jumbotron.

Not just him but undoubtedly millions of fellow Americans.

When one is dead and broken inside, they look to external quantitative factors for validation. They convince themselves that the more measurable & “objective” those factors are, the more they must be representing some underlying truth. They represent the meaning of life.

And the shitty thing is that those who only care about money and power see the worst of humanity getting rewarded with more money and more power.

Their fucked up personal lives aren’t evidence of something wrong with them. They are evidence that such silly feel-good nonsense is unnecessary at best, and a terrible weakness at worst. You know, the kind of shit you’d expect from a cartoon villain in a children’s movie.

Edit to add an anecdote: I’m sure people from conservative families will feel this one. Say in front of one of the broken people that Musk is an idiot and a bad father, and the reply will be something like “well he’s made a million times as much money as you, so that shows how smart you are!” Or maybe “his kids are set for life - have you done something like that for your kids?”

Restricting it to food is probably what allowed it to get passed in the first place in this country. And likewise, it is way easier to get food stamps than any kind of “cash assistance” welfare.

Like in my case, I have a good job and my previous good job got eliminated during the first year of COVID. When temporarily having no income, we could easily sign up for food stamps to help while looking for the next job. It’s nice to help stretch any money you might still have in the bank, or be able to feed your family day to day if you don’t really have anything in the bank. Like others said it’s a debit card that works at the grocery store.

But if you want medical coverage or cash assistance to bridge the gap? Not until you have lost everything substantial that you own except for a place to live and a vehicle if it’s necessary to get to work.

Have a family with two parents and a couple of kids, in a typical US neighborhood where leaving your house to go any real distance away is via car and nothing else? I hope your cars weren’t made in the past 15 years or else you’ll probably have to lose one of them.

And if you’ve been trying to save for a purchase or just be financially responsible? Nah we’re going to need you broke and penniless first. You don’t have to be literally at $0, but in my state I think the asset limit is $2000 and that includes any cash, your second vehicle, your first vehicle if it’s not “necessary” to get to work, and I think even retirement accounts.

Fortunately my kid is always going to have his own Linux desktop at home. Even though the hardware is older than he is, the PC still runs better than most Windows machines I’ve used recently.

I commented elsewhere that his school laptop (for 2nd grade, 8 years old) is at least a lightweight Windows PC. And while Windows is much more relevant to the PC & professional world than chromebooks or iPads, it’s still important to not get pigeonholed into that one proprietary thing.

My second grader’s school laptop is a cheap lightweight Lenovo Windows machine. So not ideal, but better than many options. At least it’s something I’d be willing to call a PC.

The password situation is just as funny though. His login and password are on a nice printed label stuck right below the keyboard. The login is typical, lastname-firstinitial-middleinitial, but the password is just his 6-digit student ID number. So not only is it the classic “post-it on the monitor” situation, but it would be pretty trivial to log in as any student.

Though so far in elementary school the laptops have been a teaching tool and occasionally a remote learning tool. Somebody couldn’t log in and mess with his homework or whatever.

OneDrive and all of M365 is much nicer on Linux. It’s all just webpages that I use when I need them (pretty regularly) but that don’t interfere with anything else going on with my system.

Definitely, because the issue is not with the words but with the people who are different that they don’t want to be nice to, lol.

I still don’t get why people have such an issue calling people what they want to be called.

Why?

Normally I’m the type to wax philosophical for a few paragraphs about what the heck may be going on in their heads, but honestly I think it’s assholes being proud to be assholes. Punching down just feels so good. That and people who are suffering enough that they don’t care about others, but don’t realize they need to work on their mental health. Or they’ve been conditioned to see doing that as a character flaw or weakness. And of course the snowball effect of those people raising the next generation of assholes, building up some inertia behind the generational trauma.

Because underlying it all, regardless of which impactful arguments they think they are making or refuting, they just don’t want to be nice to people that are different.

It’s just really cold outside, ok?

Once I installed Linux Mint on my home desktop, I’m pretty sure I never booted into windows again. It was only a few weeks before I made a copy of everything on that windows SSD then formatted it to ext4 to have some additional fast storage for editing stuff.

I find Linux Mint so much nicer to use than windows. It is one of the most full-featured distros yet it moves like lightning in comparison. You can feel the difference you get when decades of development are driven by the desire to make good software rather than 37 different battling priorities within one of the world’s largest corporations.

And being full-featured does not mean it is dumbed down. It is good for experienced users too. I’m a software engineer that works on embedded Linux systems. On my work laptop I’ve been running Mint for over a year and it works beautifully. It’s still Linux, the command line is still there, and you can customize whatever you want to.

Ditto!

Worth it. Some of those dim bulbs are still kind people who are great to be around.

But that would break the first rule of Usenet.

Well that explains why my psychiatrist’s nickname for me is “Peter, Philip, and Johnny in a trenchcoat.”

And they match up perfectly with the two sexual orientations. Cisgendered heterosexual and political.

(Said by a cishet white male in the US, damn it)

I get the sentiment, and yes rule of law is what we should strive for.

But if somebody murders an active serial killer, my internal desire for practical improvements to human well being keeps me from getting too upset about it.

And yes it’s illegal, and if the system is working as intended, the assassin will go to prison. Maybe the people intervene via jury nullification, maybe not. But if conditions are bad enough, individuals can choose to live as a hero in prison rather than as a desperate anonymous poor person.

I don’t want to see children lose their parents even if their parent is a scumbag CEO, but I want human civilization to heal and flourish even more.

Willow and Tremors are S-tier

The brown person thing was me referring to them being “socially liberal,” so they would share the same water fountain – or boot – as somebody of another race.

That quote refers to the “socially liberal and fiscally conservative” label that they like to use. Because part of the fun is saying that you love everybody and have no hate in your heart, but you definitely don’t want to spend any money or enforce any regulations to help people’s lives.