Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.

Really hoping he hasn’t brought the jinx with him.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2024

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  • Is “actually Earth” some idealised version of Earth where the greedy and the corrupt don’t inevitably end up ruining everything for everyone but themselves? Because otherwise “actually Earth” and Hell could well be the same damn thing.

    Or if you subscribe to the Catholic fanfic that is Dante’s Inferno, we can talk about circles of hell, each one worse than the last. And where we are right now clearly isn’t the bottom one. It definitely feels like it’s dropped a layer or two in recent years, but we haven’t hit rock bottom.

    I could add a “yet” to that, but for some in this wondrous circle, it definitely already feels like it, and some feel like they’re thundering towards it with no way to stop it.

    But, I guess I’m feeling philosophical at the moment, because this just occurred to me: If there’s a fly in the ointment, it means we have ointment.

    These words will probably ring hollow in a few days when the ointment catches fire. (I’m not sure what that means in terms of translating back from metaphor into reality, but ointment catching fire definitely feels like something that could happen.)




  • There’s that bit in an episode of Red Dwarf, that may or may not have been a collective hallucinated memory of the crew, where they talk about a series of mechanoids (servant androids) that were “too human” looking and which unnerved customers.

    The result of that was that they made their next series of mechanoids look like Kryten, with the low-poly heads on a similarly angular body.

    Even if it was a false memory, the logic is absolutely sound. You want your 'bots to be at the other side of the uncanny valley, not at the bottom, creeping all horror-show-like up the side towards us.




  • Instead of compiling a kernel, try to make do with what your distro provides whenever there’s an update. Yes, there’s compilation, but it’s all done automatically. Then come to realise that the last two updates have had a subtle problem that caused the graphics driver to have a debilitating stroke whenever you try to watch a video in VLC, and have the whole system to go unresponsive as a result. Everything else works fine. YouTube. Games. But a cat video downloaded from Discord because (foreshadowing) the video won’t play in-browser for some reason? Too far, man. How dare.

    Booting with another of those kernels is when you find out that’s also broken despite having used it for a while previously. Learn that, by sheer luck, one still-good kernel is still installed.

    Hope that someone with more brains and energy with a similar setup will be able to report the problem properly to wherever that needs to be reported so that the next update doesn’t have the same problem. Things like this have been magically fixed before. You wait.

    (Search the error message from the logs online. No close matches. Learn a bit, but the only advice was “try a different kernel”. You already thought of that)

    In the meantime, remove the problem kernels and update GRUB with boot USB on standby in case you hose the system. Manage not to need it.





  • You have at least a couple of things that make it not quite the scenario I described in my comment. Yes, warm-up acts are kind of an ad, but they’re the pre-show ad. People who watch movies prefer the “trailers” before the movie, not interspersed within it.

    And trailers work. Sometimes. Lots of parallels with support acts there.

    Secondly, the main band being terrible is not the norm. You went there expecting them to be good and to hear your old favourites, not their new stuff. Maybe you would have liked some of their new stuff if they hadn’t been hopeless at everything else as well, but that isn’t the main thing you were there for.


  • palordrolap@fedia.iotoComic Strips@lemmy.worldFrom our new album
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    4 days ago

    People who go to concerts want to see their favourite singles and favourite tracks from the albums they already own played by the band who created them (or a really good tribute band). The concert-goer might also want to relive the past and feel like they did when they first heard that music. Note that you don’t get many youngsters going to see old bands when they do a comeback tour. Nostalgia is a really big part of it.

    When the band pulls out a new song, it doesn’t touch any of those desires whatsoever. From the nostalgic’s perspective, it’s basically an ad break between all the good stuff, and people hate being pulled out of their reverie to listen to an ad.

    Here’s a silly sketch from Big Train where they call this sort of thing out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1YNEtaHbzA






  • The Wikipedia article I got the info from basically says that mid-month was considered a good time for religious celebrations. With St. Nick being a literal religious entity, that’s probably why his “birthday” was put there.

    The mid-month habit goes a lot further back than St. Nick too. For similar reasons to St. Nick’s birthday, Julius Caesar’s assassination is/was said to have been on that date (aka the ides of March). It might even have been. There’s no way to be sure.