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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • I don’t have the patience to keep it up for a long time but I barely get any scam calls after pushing the button to talk to someone and then just asking about the plot holes in their script. Like the one claiming there’s going to be a warrant for me, why does the guy need to ask for my name and other information? Why would revenue Canada (of anyone who isn’t a scammer of some sort) ever want any kind of payment in gift cards? I’ll use a tone of voice on the verge of laughter, too.

    One time, after I asked, the guy just asked me why I even pressed the button to talk to a person and then hung up. Most of the time they just hang up. Sometimes the English option seems to only be there to make it seem more realistic for those who would pick the Chinese option because the call disconnects right after picking English.

    Though more recently I’ve just been hanging up early in the recording when I do get the odd scam call. They might filter that, too, because even the volume of those calls stays low. Which makes sense because even just making the calls probably costs them something, even if it’s just pennies.



  • I had to spend an annoying amount of time finding all of the settings to make it so that my windows machine would never wake up on its own, spread out over an even longer period of time because some of them aren’t easy to trigger on my own so it was a matter of trying something and then trying more things if I find it awake on its own again.

    Even disabling the wake on mouse movement was a pain because it doesn’t properly label mice and keyboards and doesn’t have a global setting. I wanted to keep wake on keyboard but not have it wake if my mouse moved a nm because a butterfly flapped its wings too vigorously as it flew by the closed window.

    After I installed Linux, I went to do the same thing there only to find it already had sensible defaults set.


  • I remember the very first time I saw that was a thing and wondering why the fuck would anyone ever want that? Can’t remember if that was before or after I started the habit of disabling autorun on any inserted media, too, though I do know that that was my reaction to learning about Sony’s rootkit.

    Though I might be one of the few that didn’t like UAC because it wasn’t strict enough instead of because it was annoying. I wish it had a setting where every action required permission and the dialog included the specific thing it was currently tying to do instead of the vague “it wants to change things on your computer”.

    An installer is likely going to trigger that prompt whether it’s legit or not, I’d like to know if it’s triggered because it’s trying to associate its filetype with its application or trying to overwrite a dll in an unrelated program’s files.


  • Tbf that could have been done by tenants who figured the landlord would use that damage to argue they should lose their entire deposit despite not costing nearly that much to repair properly.

    Not that it wouldn’t be plausible that the landlord did it themselves or hired someone who didn’t know what they were doing but were willing to do it cheap, like Ricky.


  • And the major action item is to do some internet videos with whatever video games are popular with those millennial kids these days playing in the background. Shot in Nancy Pelosi’s beautiful home–oh nm, she doesn’t want any dirty YouTube filmographers in her home but W is willing to let them use his ranch and his copy of EA Football Game 202425. See if we can get Joe Rogan to make a guest appearance, and we’re sure to recapture the millennial under 30 crowd!

    Oh good, the corporate sponsorship money arrived, let’s split that up and go home. Don’t forget to set aside the King’s fifth!


  • I just did the switch myself on a new PC and getting gaming working wasn’t even that hard. I picked fedora cinnamon.

    Difficulties I had:

    1. When trying the initial live boot, it failed checksum… Because windows fucked with the drive after it saw the utility that wrote the image to it left it “unmounted” (and autoplay would had also fucked with it if I hadn’t turned that off ages ago).
    2. Wired ethernet wasn’t working. Wifi does work, currently using that until I get around to working on that again, though it might just work now that it’s updated.
    3. After installing steam, many games said they were windows games only. Had to enable a setting inside steam to get it to just run them all via proton. Only tried two games so far, but haven’t seen any issues yet. My saves are usable on the one game I was already playing on windows.
    4. Optical audio wasn’t working. Worked around that by plugging in my soundbar to usb, though I’ve also confirmed that the analog port does work. This one might also have been resolved by updating.
    5. Had to set up permissions for steam to use my games partition instead of my home dir for installing games, though I think this was because I missed a step during the install.

    It took more effort getting YouTube (well porn but apparently the same issue affects YouTube) working (netflix just worked, quality seems to even be better, like it doesn’t seem to default to a low quality stream before moving up as the video plays like it would in windows). And even that was only because the desktop I picked didn’t use the same software as instructions for enabling 3rd party repositories and I for some reason decided to search for a GUI option instead of just running the command I could have run from the start.

    The only difficult part is that with all of the available desktops out there that do things a bit differently, it can be hard to find solutions specific to the one you’re using. Like I might have caused some future issues by installing gnome-software since cinnamon uses a different tool for that. But at this point, I feel like making the jump to a different desktop (or even distro) will be much easier, so don’t feel like I’m committed to the one I did pick.

    Which is so much better than windows because on that platform I had to struggle to not be committed to things I didn’t and wouldn’t pick. And it made me avoid updating often because I didn’t want to commit to whatever nagware ms added this time to try to get me to use some software I wasn’t interested in using.





  • Yeah, watching those three makes it seem pretty clear that they where made by different people who didn’t like what the previous one had done and had an entirely different vision of where star wars should go. Plus a dose of “we want to bring back old characters for fan service, but those characters need to gtfo of the way of these new stars”. And then for the two of the biggest ones, they had them die in the dumbest ways.


  • FWIW, Palpatine also came back in the original storyline past ROTJ before Disney retconned the EU. Though they didn’t gloss over the “how” bit (he always intended to survive forever and had a clone factory hidden on some planet and used something similar to the force ghost, only he was able to posses his clones).

    In the original story, he threatens Luke and his friends while Luke is alone, so Luke goes, “ok I’ll join the dark side”, gets some training, then switches back the first time he gets ordered to do something he didn’t like.

    The basic message was “turning to the dark side was only so final for some Jedi because the order itself considered it something that couldn’t he undone, while Luke did it easily”. Some of the video games touched on this, too, where the light side and dark side were just tools and it was how you used them that determined good and evil. It was also a big theme in ROTJ itself, though not heavily explored after Vader turns back.

    There’s hints of this in the sequels, but IMO they didn’t handle it that well, especially with Luke and Kylo.





  • He punched a guy in 2015 over available food options, which got him fired from BBC. His popularity didn’t take that much of a hit from this incident despite him clearly being in the wrong (Hammond and May both left BBC with him and they started a new show The Grand Tour, which wasn’t as popular as Top Gear, but was still popular.

    Then, in 2022, he wrote an opinion piece for the Sun about how much he hates Megan Merkle and included a bit where he said she should be paraded naked through the town. Amazon decided to not start any new projects with him after this, though they continued with the plans to wind down The Grand Tour which had already been established.

    He’s got a farming show now, so he wasn’t cancelled over this, despite burning some bridges.


  • There was an observatory that was picking up these mysterious spikes in radiation that they couldn’t explain. They thought it might be something new but couldn’t see any events on other spectrums that would go along with this random event.

    Eventually they figured out that the spikes were caused by people opening the microwave in the break room while it was still going.

    So I don’t do that anymore after hearing that story.


  • Lol back when games were simpler, they were harder because one of the few ways they could make a game harder was to reduce the amount of leeway you had from needing to do pixel perfect moves.

    Plus a lot of older games didn’t even have save points, so you either beat it in one sitting, left it on and hoped the power didn’t go out or no one else wanted to use the system.

    Oh and arcade games were often tuned to let you have fun for a bit then suddenly get way harder so you’d lose and need to put quarters in if you didn’t want to start over from the beginning and ports to consoles often kept these mechanics. I remember noticing the pattern in mortal Kombat, where I wasn’t very good at the game (in hindsight) but could consistently win one match only to lose the next one, continue and repeat until I ran out of continues.



  • That’s the worst when your cycle time is very long. You fix a bug in the code, start your test running again and come back to check the next day only to see the exact same bug again and might think that your fix didn’t work and something more esoteric is going on (“maybe it’s a compiler or hardware bug!” (It almost never is)).

    Then you add a bunch of debug prints to really get a good idea of what’s going on and rerun the test. Either you remembered to save and suddenly the mystery bug is gone because the fix is still in the code. Or maybe you forgot to save again and now it looks like it’s not even reaching any of the code you added the prints to.