o well

If you have ever had a dream where you can’t get something right. Like, in your dream you know you need to do something - you even know exactly what it is that you need to do. You have no excuse for not doing it - maybe you actually try to do it - and yet you keep finding it is as yet undone.

You eventually wake up, because you are alive and you are dreaming. But if you are dead, you are not alive, you cannot wake up. You have all of the agency that you had when you were dreaming, which is none. Until you woke up - you were helpless in your dream, try as you might. The dead are helpless in their dream as well, but they do not have the luxury of waking up.

So have some pity for the dead.

Same, Slackware, went over to Red Hate for a while then Debian - am using Ubuntu now. I’ll never forget (in 1998) setting up Slackware as a server on an old spare 486 the company I worked for had laying around. It had a SCSI hard drive. Oh the pain. USENET was the only good reference, and you’d sometimes have to post and wait a day for a response if you just couldn’t figure it out.

Got that server running and saved the company hundreds of dollars a month - they had been paying egregious fees to host brochureware. They thought I was Superman.

This is worthless because it’s not the children whose use of social media is destroying the world.

I wish this worked for me. I don’t get paranoid or anxious, but it just doesn’t relax me at all. I basically feel no actual body effect, except my heart starts racing. Like, for hours. My eyes get like in the picture, but it’s not cute, it’s painful. I also get ravenously hungry. Like if it wasn’t for my racing heart and bleary eyes I couldn’t focus on anything else but shoving shit into my mouth. I get confused of course, which - duh - but I can’t even focus on enjoying the daze because of all the suffering.

Guess I’m stuck with booze on the holidays.

Why would this be a wake up call for the music industry? This shows they are operating at peak efficiency!

Man what a weird coincidence I ran into this right after finding out John Fugelsang was in Coyote Ugly lol. I didn’t even know he was an actor. I do know he is awesome.

This isn’t funny.

Wow, so Something Awful was being very prescient 20 years ago when they came up with the name for their cooking forum.

Reminder for Windows 10 users who can’t upgrade to Windows 11

/s/can’t/won’t

Democrats sit here and use memes to beat themselves up over being such a shit bunch of losers and Republicans would have claimed victory even if Trump lost and very likely would have had their followers shooting guns about it. Yeah there’s a disconnect somewhere.

Well, I mean… not much better.

I thought Trump was a shoo-in? Christ knows that’s the message these people are getting over and over again, drummed into their heads so they can get good and pissed off when they’re told the truth.

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Windows 10 users, I’ve been using kill-update.exe for years now to only update Windows when I damn well want to.

Disclaimer: before the inevitable dogpile, yes, this is bad practice. Yes there are many reasons why you might not want to do this. Yes, allowing your software to update itself whenever it wants is safer. No, I don’t care. If you don’t care either, this software might be for you.

Huh. Well, everybody I hung out with knew about it. IIRC moderation was tacked on after USENET had already taken off. If a newsgroup wasn’t proposed with moderation then it couldn’t be moderated, so most of them weren’t. It’s pretty wild that they didn’t understand how desperately necessary it would be. In order to get a group to be moderated you’d have to get a proposal for an entirely new group through the committee, which was nearly impossible. The process was so slow and bureaucratic that the web literally just showed up and stole it all in what seemed like overnight. I remember when I switched over… it was like 2002, 2003? I’ve never had as much fun on any web forum as I had on USENET though. Those were fun times. And don’t get me started on the web’s lack of threaded discussions. Drove me NUTS.

I asked my SO what she thought his wallpaper might be. First answer: himself.

Yes pardon me I left off the word “largely” before “unmoderated.” We all knew it was possible, but it didn’t matter because, as you point out - nobody really did.

Which doesn’t really change the point does it. These people are de-facto kings ruling us; their wealth subverts the entire idea of democracy. You can’t tax them out of existence without taxing their wealth because none of them have any actual income. Banks fall all over themselves to fund anything they care to do.

In any case, 2% isn’t going to do fuck-all even if it gets passed which is hardly a certainty.

Google buying Dejanews, the largest archive of all messages, and merging it with the travesty that was (and still is) Google Groups just about killed the whole thing.

Well that and the fact that it was unmoderated which eventually led to it being populated almost exclusively with mentally ill troll savants. USENET by the end was the digital equivalent of a horror zoo of abused monkeys slinging shit all over everyone and themselves.