How do you feel about Linux and leftist infighting?

It's an end of an era. I've been on reddit for over a decade, and on youtube for even longer. Crazy to think I might be giving up both of those services within a few months of each other. Feels like the internet is dying. Oh well. Maybe I'll go back to reading a shitload.

Baby Boomers practically invented the participation trophy. It's why millennials got so many. And I've literally never heard a Baby Boomer complain about them. I've only ever heard about Gen X folks and below complain about them.

I'm actually a huge fan of scalping and hope it happens more. Here's why: many of your more dim-witted, more or less middle-class "free market" bros will gladly tell you that the value of a good is set by supply and demand. Hospital care is so expensive because there are comparatively few doctors, MRI machines, etc. in comparison with the entire population. Houses are so expensive because everyone wants a house and it's an appreciable asset. I've seen these people my entire life. They'll decry socialism and make the age old joke that "socialism is when no potato." But the second a PS5 gets a street price of 700 bucks, suddenly they become walking "Homer Simpson fading into the hedge and coming back out wearing a different outfit" memes. They'll say things like "scalping should be illegal" or "the government should step in to make sure that the actual consumers who want one can get one - nobody should be allowed to buy 500 of them and just sit on them forever." Suddenly, market economics produces a state of inequality that doesn't directly benefit them, and the guiding hand of the government should be used to ensure equitable distribution of resources. Not that they'd ever reflect on this in any way or consider how their personal experiences indicates a larger set of structural problems with the economic systems that produce such a state of affairs.

Not the guy you responded to initially, but according to one study the average WoW player's age is 28, and 84% are male. So...yeah, at least a little surprising.

Dress codes serve as class signifiers. Like most rules of decorum, they're cultural artifacts used to delineate the haves from the have-nots. They don't dislike the fact that Fetterman refuses to wear a suit. They dislike the fact that he dresses like the common people he actually represents. Whereas they dress like the people they represent - capitalist oligarchs. They're wanting to close ranks and keep people from realizing that not everyone in the senate serves the same masters.

follows Velma who is an amazing girl-boss who solves all the mysteries

Velma as a character was a lot of things, but she was mostly an insufferable, pathologically egotistical narcissist with hallucinatory delusions and severe mommy issues. Like, the show was horribly written, don't get me wrong, but let's not act like she was a Mary Sue.

picture of handwritten note taped to a window that criticizes Gen Z and praises Baby Boomers.

I'm not the brightest cookie in the toolshed but I know bait when I see it.

Edit: The top left hand corner of this is also dated 4/20. As the Brits would say "Someone's taking the piss."

From a narrative standpoint, Spider-Man's entire thing is thematically tied to the idea that "no good deed goes unpunished." Peter Parker's academic, professional, and social life all pay a price to enable his crime fighting. Spider-Man 2 does a good job of portraying that. After he stops the train that was about to crash in his fight with Doc Ock, he gets lifted up, arms outstretched, looking like a crucified Jesus. He suffers for the sake of others. It's honestly a nice contrast to people like Tony Stark for whom being a billionaire playboy superhero has historically (if not in the Marvel movies) been depicted as coming with a fairly comfortable life. Well, at least ignoring the part of his backstory where he went homeless because of his alcoholism. But that was in the eighties, I think.

I miss the weird edginess of the internet. The reality is that the internet was a place that kids got warned about being full of weirdos and dangerous types. And they weren't wrong. The thing is, that also made it interesting and full of fascinating content. And it was largely unregulated and uncensored because the people in power were too old to understand or care about it. Now with things like KOSA and the centralization of the internet around a few megaplatforms, there's less variety and creativity. The internet has become an endless soup of banal, milquetoast content. Vaguely appealing to everyone, but not greatly appealing to anyone.

Remember when shootings were so rare that a shooting happening one time at one place was enough to spawn a lasting phrase in American English? Simply fascinating how the times have changed.

Nowhere in the actual post was it implied that this was a recent event

Context clues suggest it's recent. The image in question is a twitter screenshot from 2/7/2024. The current date is 2/10/2024. People are going to assume the twitter screenshot is in reference to current events, instead of an old fucking news article from over a decade ago. It's called a lie of omission.

10% of Tennessee is so high on hillbilly heroin they don't know which question they got asked and just said "yes" on the off chance it was "would you like some free oxy?"

I love that the underlying implication of "freedom of speech includes the freedom to offend" is that you presumably aren't free to respond to things that offend you by electing to not expose yourself to it any further. Like, you apparently aren't allowed to say "oh, that's really gross. I don't like that and am not going to voluntarily expose myself to it any further and when someone asks me my opinion I will indicate that I dislike it." You have to sit there and take it. Honestly, defederating is a great choice for lemmy instances. What's the alternative? Trying to convince whatever service a lemmy instance is hosted on to deplatform them like people did with Amazon and Parler? I think the posts linked here about exploding-heads are vile, but I don't want them or any other instance to be subject to the whims of some kind of internet police force, and especially not to whatever service or services are used to keep them up. Just leave them in the dust and be done with it, I say.

Y'all remember when back in the day, Google's motto was "don't be evil." And then at some point somebody told them how much money there was in being evil and then they just pivoted to being a functional parody of a giant evil megacorporation from a cyberpunk novel? Cuz I remember that.

Yes, and from most of the people I know who believe themselves to be mildly autistic or to have behaviors commonly identified as autism symptoms, if you said to them "everyone's a little bit gay," they would almost certainly say "Yes! Exactly!"

2015

A classic.

That's a good analogy. The internet's kind of like a gen-Xer, super into anti-establishment punk and grunge music, wearing nothing but Nirvana t-shirts well into its twenties, who woke up one day to find itself a NIMBY-esque middle-manager who votes every election for either corporate democrats or your mildly less homophobic Republican candidates and who cares about no issue beyond getting his taxes lowered. And the sad thing is, that's the internet people wanted. We/they wanted it banal, tame, sanitized, and, ultimately, lifeless. All the porn is sequestered into its own little corner of things, where it used to just be everywhere (you couldn't go to the front page of reddit without just seeing a ton of T and A) and all the media is hyper-sanitized because corporate sponsors want everything family friendly so they can feed the same advertising to kids that they do adults. And instead of interesting, new websites cropping up every other week that you find with Stumbleupon, it's just screenshots of comments from 4 social media websites reposted ad-nauseam on each other and the same mundane youtube videos you've been watching on repeat the past 6 years. And now corporations like Google and Reddit are starting to go the extra mile and box people out of even quietly bypassing the web of bullshit they've put around the content they host, dictating not just what kind of content is available, but how you interact with it.

It kind of reminds me of this passage from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, where Hunter S. Thompson is talking about the sixties. You can read it here. He talks about strange memories, about this feeling like you were a part of an important time that meant something. The internet of the early 2010s was a special place. Alive and vibrant and strange and perfect for weirdo loners who couldn't figure out how to interact with people in real life. I don't think I'll ever be able to fully quantify or describe how much of that time shaped me into who I am, or about what ideas and thoughts and beliefs that live within me that all those moments, aimlessly frittered away in some little corner of cyberspace gave rise to. Maybe I would have been better off if I never was an "internet person." I know the changing of the time and the end of this era would hurt less. I know I wouldn't feel so old seeing the internet, which was once something that felt like a good friend, dying of cancer-like greed and the pathological centralization of all its myriad services.

Perhaps this is the story of all history: of how new frontiers, like the "Wild West," always become settled, and how we remember the best parts of what we experienced and try to forget all the bad parts of it, or forgive those flaws because they didn't really affect us. I know the new internet is certainly kinder to women, LGBT persons, and people of color today than it was back then. And that's good. And I know that the myths of history, of the Wild West, or the Gold Rush, or the early internet, or any other period of rapid settlement and development is never as neat and clean or as kind or even as "real" as we care to remember. And for the people who come afterwards, the way things are now will be all they know. They'll never even think to wish the internet was different or better, because they weren't there and they didn't experience the internet with all its raw potential before it became a digital stripmall. And for all our lamenting, nothing will really change. There might be holdout places, small corners where nostalgia lives on. Virtual retirement homes for the internet's senior citizens. And maybe that's fine. Because nothing lasts forever. Things, people, places, ideas, they all die, and you just have to appreciate the time you had with them. And even the internet as it is now will die and give way to something new, even if it takes decades or centuries to happen.

But even with all that said, you just can't help but wish the thing it became, in this moment, held more of the dreams of the people who actually helped make it.

This actually reminds me of a book by Charles Stross called Accelerando. Human explorers during a time in which people upload their minds to computer systems travel to (and this part is fuzzy in my memory), a world orbiting a brown dwarf. The world is just a giant computer and it's inhabited almost entirely by superintelligent banking scams and viruses. It turns out that almost all "life" in the universe is like this, just parasitic AI that serves no real purpose other than to fuck over other people for short-term gains. Anyway, I've been thinking about that book more and more in recent years.

As a note, the Israelites would in later generations go on to kill a shitload of people. It's one of those things where it seems like the Bible only really considers it murder if God doesn't sanction it. It's honestly one of the many sticking points that makes Abrahamic religions a hard sell for modern individuals. That said, if you look at it from a historical perspective, it really comes across more like a religious version of the Code of Hammurabi. It's less "don't kill" as a philosophical or religious position and more about sanctions against killing in a practical legal sense. A functioning society has laws that formally govern behavior and the Israelites were essentially an ecclesiarchy, with Moses being both head of state and high priest. The same laws that governed social life were always going to intersect with laws that governed spiritual life.