JimmyChezPants 🇨🇦

Neurodivergent Manitoba Interlake settler (Zone 3, Treaty One). He/Him/Hobbit. Consort to Lakelaur (npub1pp5…935s).
I do stuff and believe in sharing.
Pic is a m̶i̶d̶d̶l̶e̶ a̶g̶e̶d̶ b̶e̶a̶r̶d̶e̶d̶ w̶h̶i̶t̶e̶ d̶u̶d̶e̶ cat leaning in, a little bit sideways, with one eyebrow very raised, looking skeptical af
Very tired of fascists and their endless bullshit.
#HistoryNeverEnded #BlackLivesMatter If I'm missing a Hashtag that annoys Fascists and Neoliberals, please advise, but consider it here in my heart already.

github: https://github.com/jpaskaruk
Move Slow: Fix Things

Public Key

npub105khtk0mulzdkcln5pq7mx354cg84n5y32nslgf7grcragkyrh4qytjs0x

NIP-05 Address

jpaskaruk_at_growers.social@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs86tt4m8a703xmv0e6qs0dng62uyr6e6zg4fc05ylypup75tzpm6spz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsdf9drq

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub105khtk0mulzdkcln5pq7mx354cg84n5y32nslgf7grcragkyrh4qytjs0x

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Last Notes

2026-04-19 02:29:00 UTC

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General comment on the thread, intended to be completely not-critical, just observational
Actually nah I don't know enough to actually have an opinion on the issue at hand at all, but things like this are interesting is all, I guess - there will be those tempted to shoehorn the incident into their preconceived notions of what is happening here, and I was one of those for a few hot seconds,
but what I see is exactly what one should expect to see, in what is still the very early stages of a networking system and network that is still rapidly evolving. People start things with those things, you know the things... intentions. Maybe good, maybe bad, but intentions. Gotta keep an on eye on intentions, yep.
And a lot of em probably neurodivergent, which means that statistically, some of em are just gonna crash or disappear, those intentioned humans, whether it's depression, war, ADHD, loss of employment, gaining of employment (this has caused me to ghost more than one personal project or trajectory)... so many reasons why people have to pack their bags or pick up their SHTF backpack and go.
A neglected server can limp along for a long while, but if it's neglected with open signups, that's a problem for the whole network. That's as close as I'm gonna come to my personal axe.

2026-03-27 19:00:35 UTC

yergen dergen schmergen

2026-03-07 23:55:02 UTC

I will also fight you about Daylight Savings Time. I'm for it.
Fight me cmon
I'll beat you cause I will get a good night's sleep, while you've got the sun shining in your eyes at 11pm like a chump

2026-02-20 19:02:36 UTC

I've got a temporary driving gig, occasional, for a fella with one of those car breathalyzer thingies and restricted free time.
Not here to argue that he should be given a pass for whatever happened.
But I am here to say that these devices should at least be designed to not kill his battery within 24 hours of being parked. We have spent a huge number of hours dealing with his car going dead and the machine interpreting that as a hack attempt, so he's having to make phone calls and
Basically nobody gives a shit so he gets shit response times on the phone, it fucks with his ability to make appointments that could result in further tightening of the leash they've got on his neck
I'm for these devices existing, but this is some real fucking bullshit.
Bring back technical fucking competence to technology.

2026-02-18 02:33:35 UTC

A kid on the bus was showing me texts from his mom on his phone today, and I noticed that he has her contact name as "Spawn Point".
That kid is going places.

2026-01-31 17:55:20 UTC

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Yah, say HOT METAL!

2026-01-17 19:09:08 UTC

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One of em is in here. It's very smol and very cute and not very useful.
edit: like, it can't even hold still without I clamp it in something, it should've come with a weighted base to click into. It's a thick credit card with a scope on it. One of those electronics hobbyist sites convinced me this would do the job until I become a Serious electronics guy.
I have eyed older scopes more than once, but I have read they require a lot of calibration and then there's capacitors to think about with gear that old... didn't seem like a good bet, at any discount level.

2026-01-17 09:36:45 UTC

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Dear Future: when generative AI has sorted out its environment and ethical issues, please retcon this toot with a meme about scraping up what little you have and buying the cheapest "legit" oscilloscope you can find and thinking you're ready for the next oscilloscope challenge, and then finding that basically every use you want to do requires a two-channel scope. Make it very poignant. Thank you, year 4000.

2026-01-13 19:10:49 UTC

It is nobody's business, not yours, not mine, not Linus's, not even fucking RMS, to decide for you what you can and cannot do with your hardware. I don't care how much more you know than me, if I want Middle Click to do a Paste, that's my own fucking business.
It is of no surprise to me that Gnome, the DE that will only allow you use a tiny set of specific colours as your desktop background, is the project pushing for this absolutely ridiculous vandalism.
What a bunch of fuckheads.

2026-01-06 20:48:00 UTC

So are there any fun, casual, Free (as in Free Software, not gratis with spyware and shit) games that you can play with friends, either online or with bluetooth controllers? Like Mario Cart or Trivia challenges or even MMORPGs with modest graphics requirements and rich storytelling?

2025-12-30 17:28:36 UTC

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You use what is right for the application.
Servers with GUIs are just weird to me. If the thing just needs to interact with data or a web interface, running a bunch of resource-eating desktop overhead is absurd, unless you have lived under GUI limitations your whole life, I suppose, but even Windows Server people eventually have to learn Powershell.
I am privileged in this take; I started out on Commodore machines and occasional spurts of access to the local university's mainframe (so Adventure and the like); command line is my default. I feel for those who are still struggling to integrate command line work into their head, but it's worth it, folks.
But the machine I myself use throughout the day runs KDE, the overhead is well worth it to facilitate getting your own mental work done. All the work I do on those servers and Pis and whatnot happens in a Konsole terminal on that GUI pc. *You* are worth the overhead; serving a website is not.

2025-12-27 09:20:41 UTC

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Is Vegas taking bets on the Pop Day, I wonder, or is *all* the gambling happening on Wall St among the shortsellers of breath...

2025-12-24 09:42:24 UTC

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I remember when Windows first tried to make me stop using the root directory of the drive and herd me into their stupid user folders
I remember when we were free

2025-12-21 14:51:21 UTC

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I had no idea rednecks could be pretentious.

2025-12-21 14:45:03 UTC

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Any suggestions on a good non-US bourbon? It's not my main whiskey (Scotch) or even my second main whiskey (Irish), but I do like a bourbon now and then...

2025-12-18 20:35:13 UTC

Hey #Winnipeg #Manitoba and other wintry locales in Canada...
I was considering a set of heated gloves from #Costco when I'm in the city on Monday, cause my diabetic fingers cannot keep the circulation up fast enough. My snowblower has heated handles, but even with that,
my mitts... are the shits
I did not like the reviews I read on reddit about those gloves tho, and I see that heated gloves from the brands that are beloved on r/skiing (I figure, skiers are gonna know, right?) run quite a bit higher. Specifically, someone said that they warmed their palms, but not their fingertips, so that tells me that I'm gonna have a bad, and expensive, time with those.
I don't really care about whether they're battery-heated in the final analysis, I just need my hands to stay warm for more than five minutes outside so I can do the necessaries of life here. I used to just kozak it out, but I am now weak and old I guess. My widdle fingas need pwotection fwom de nawth winds
Given a *top* budget of $120, the cost of those Costco gloves (this is all going on the credit because I can't do life without *something* that works), can anyone recommend a set from local stores that will solve my tootsie problem?
Mitts are also acceptable, stipulating that the damn things work, and I think mitts just do better at warming fingers, but *if* there are gloves that work for bad hands like mine within that price range, I like to have finger-type action on my waldoes.
...Costco does sell heated mittens, I think, and they were about half the price, so might give those a go.

2025-12-08 13:18:43 UTC

Hey #KDE
KDE is one of the most configurable DEs I've encountered - is there a way to prevent popups from *ever* popping up in front of Konsole? Other apps I might not care about, and I don't want to use Keep Above Others because they I would need to minimize it rather than Alt-Tab between it and the browser.
Cause I was typing away and a popup came and went in a flash of my frenetically typing fingers and I am entirely irked about the matter.

2025-11-29 17:54:38 UTC

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and like @npub1fdr…lvhs said and got quoted yesterday by me, most "impossible" things are just fights you'd rather not have.

2025-10-12 21:30:48 UTC

It has been true for as long as there have been alternatives to Windows for x86 hardware, that Microsoft's latest OS release has obscene requirements.
When they released NT, the suggested system in terms of RAM and CPU was obscenely high relative to a Win95 machine, and this pattern has always held, with the numbers changing but the relative scale of their hardware demands has always been pretty obnoxious. Win95 was obscene compared to DOS/3.11 too.
In spite of this, I stayed on Windoze because I liked games, and when I did finally switch, because of who I am I couldn't risk dual booting, so I just had to decide to not play games.
Today, someone switching need not be concerned about that, thanks to Valve. Their emulation game is strong - I do not know the comparisons, I'm sure Windows is still better at it, but that's not a given by any stretch, these days.
Now here is my prognostication: Because AI is ever-greedier for CPU cycles, part of Microsoft's Win11 plan is to distribute their AI farm to your machines. Perhaps they will only ever use your GPU for stuff that you use it for, but more likely they're gonna use you for their purposes, just like they use the data of our lives.
Either way though, their OS is going to be *more* greedy about resources than ever, and it will affect gaming performance. Unless they are smart enough to completely leave the processors alone when a game is loaded, but I don't think they will be, there will be surveillance and such they have to run all the time.
The upshot will be that Linux, which runs lean at all times, will at some point in the next year or two, *become the technically superior platform* for games. Gamers pay attention, and they will abandon Microsoft almost overnight, once it tips.
Games have always been the weakness that nobody really saw, and it required a giant company with resources to fix that. Thanks Valve.
Bookmark this and come jeer at me in a couple years if it hasn't happened, I'm fine.

2025-09-18 17:49:40 UTC

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I've never liked him much based on nothing but vibes more or less, and while I do have a couple of other "vibe" reactions that turned out to be true, I also failed to vibe on some truly heinous individuals.
But most notably seeing a picture of Gary Glitter sometime in the early 80s and being physically repulsed to the point that I (potentially a victim at the time) would have fled if I'd seen him anywhere in the real world. I still hatewatch his old TOTP appearances. Don't be like me.
That's not Kimmel mind you, he just gives me "rat pack wannabe" type stuff which is probably not remotely at Gary Glitter level.
Anyways it's annoying that I more or less have to defend him if anyone brings him up this week...

2025-09-05 22:24:21 UTC

Hey #Airbrush people of the fedi, who own one of those fancy quiet compressors
I have a compressor (and a bunch of airbrushes but that's another story) that my dead uncle gimme, and I was attempting to abuse an airbrush as compressed air to blow out an eavestrough, but I could not, because I noticed the thing's oil bulb is empty. I hope I didn't kill it already.
Anyways, I can sort out the process of adding it myself, but exactly what sort of oil would I want to use here? Would 3-in-1 be fine, or is that the words of a man who demands a Big Mac while sitting in a fine steakhouse?

2025-08-24 16:03:13 UTC

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I think White North Americans have been softened by a lack of participation in the wars that basically every other country in the world are directly affected by. We are a rich nation, but our wealth is exploited by private interests that don't pay enough taxes to reflect that in our national services, military and otherwise.
I think we have to start living in the same world as the rest of the world, and that includes participating in security actions.
But fucked if he's gonna do it on the backs of our working poor. Which includes me. The talk of army stuff is just another excuse for the coming "austerity measures" while the billionaries continue to dine out on our taxes.

2025-08-20 15:54:21 UTC

Hey #MPD #RaspberryPi
I am using a combination of MPD and snapcast round the place right now, but others in the house are not quite ready to let go of their streaming addiction lol
But we cannot stomach giving money to Joe Rogan, so we are trying out #Tidal today. What I'm wondering is, what's the most pain-free way to cast Tidal from her desktop to a Raspberry Pi that's across the room and connected to the good speakers?
I have a number of DLNA renderers on the network as well, and for some reason the desktop Tidal client cannot see any of them, or simply installing a renderer on that Pi would be the solution. But perhaps there's an alternative desktop client for Tidal or something? I don't have time today for a protracted lesson in Tidal's interface and unncessary weird language ad stuff.

2025-08-12 15:30:26 UTC

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Indeed. I go so far as to [indicate] the correction with brackets, and if it's a post-facto thought, I put it at the bottom with "edit: " as the prefix.
Normalize reconsidering what you said for truth, eloquence and appropriateness, and coming back to fix your mistakes as best you can.

2025-08-08 18:31:37 UTC

Alt text later out at the thrift
Edit: was gonna make this a pop quiz about what this is meant to hold, but the alt will give that away.
https://assets.growers.social/media_attachments/files/114/994/570/250/282/307/original/1b89070c1db721ff.jpg

2025-07-19 19:44:27 UTC

I need help finding this product.
Laurie is from Kenora, which was a mill town when she grew up. The mill has long since been liquidated by private equity, so it's strictly a tourist town for rich Americans now, but her ex, her dad and many friends were all mill workers.
And all these millworkers used this stuff (see photo), apparently called "Carystrap," which is this weird sort of waxy best-of-both-worlds tape/string combination. She has a roll because the stuff was just always kicking around, where she came from, and as I said, it's extremely handy stuff - you can tear off an individual string or any number at a time, so as to get whatever strength you need, and whatever it's coated or mixed with makes it tie up real easy.
We've tried to find somewhere to order a fresh roll or three, but the internet doesn't seem to know this stuff exists. Any ideas, Fedi?
https://assets.growers.social/media_attachments/files/114/881/610/586/614/486/original/f6bfbe32f85ff9c0.jpg

2025-06-26 14:55:44 UTC

Ok so I'm gonna have another go at #Falafel - I am better-armed with information about technique than the last time I tried it, in which the falafel balls just evaporated into bottom sludge in the grease, like cotton candy dropped in water.
My sticking point at the moment is fresh parsley - we don't have any, nor any fresh cilantro/coriander, so I don't know whether to substitute dried, or just omit, as one Reddit commenter on a post I read suggested.
I also found one suggestion to use a lesser amount of celery top leaves, which are similar to parsley but more bitter.
I attempted to google a recipe without any fresh herbs - I have to think, in the middle east where this food comes from, people *must* be making themselves delicious falafels every day, even when they don't have access to fresh herbs.
I have also noticed that most restaurant falafel I've had is *not* dayglo green inside, so it seems to me that these fresh herbs must be be optional on some level - I just can't find any trace of what you do instead, on this modern internet.
Any #cooking people, especially from the #MiddleEast have any opinions/info on this?
I'm just about to put the chickpeas on to soak, so I will be collecting opinions for the next 24 hours.
And speaking of that, anyone got a good Pita Bread recipe?

2025-06-17 21:55:51 UTC

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Ay yi. And I guess they didn't keep older versions on Bookwo- oh wait, you're still on Buster. Ayyyyy Yi. You got behind the 8 ball on this one lol
I have, not so much experience of Ceph, but I kinda jumped ship from the IT department to a dev-focused role right before they brought in Ceph to replace a thing I had in place using ZFS Send and DFS trickery, and which worked fine, it was strictly a matter of replicating one overloaded server (very easy with ZFS) to a second, and then pointing all the render farm machines at that one.
Anyways, ceph was brought in to replace it via an expensive vendor who did not send actual technical people to talk to us, I had one meeting with someone who was Sales through and through. So when the opportunity presented itself, I fled.
And sure enough, the new ceph system started introducing corrupted files to our mix at some point in the next year. I do not envy your task, but godspeed, good Sysadmin, godspeed.

2025-06-17 12:20:38 UTC

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Seems like it's worth the effort to build the current (stable) version of Ceph yourself, rather than rely on Debian's capricious release cycle?
Don't get me wrong, I'm an avid Debian fan, but it seems to me that part of being a Debian user is accepting that you're gonna have to learn git and so forth, and build some things yourself to be properly functional. :>

2025-06-13 21:37:58 UTC

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I've said before, you can vote your way into fascism, but you cannot vote your way back out.
The implications are numerous, but among them: the Democratic party is not going to be particularly useful to those who do the actual fixing, over the next while.
The excommunication of David Hogg indicates to me that they are determined to prevent anyone from fixing the party without a major action; they may be the only game available, but they are another one of the problems currently faced.
Again though, this is not an anti vote toot, cause anytime someone criticizes the millionaire party that seems to be the conclusion jumped to. But the voting isn't gonna move the needle anymore.
@npub1379…hcyl @npub1d5d…sm0d @npub1fdr…lvhs

2025-06-13 19:15:13 UTC

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Cory didn't say anything about how one should vote. He said some accurate things about the actions and character the current Democratic party.
@npub1d5d…sm0d @npub1fdr…lvhs @npub1xw7…r9m5

2025-06-09 21:35:58 UTC

Who owns GEOS nowadays anyway?

2025-06-09 14:38:45 UTC

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I don't see how you avoid that, not that I'm especially enamored of the current system either, but I know that there are people who are very concerned with electing their local rep. If the seats are distributed according to percentages rather than winning your riding, you cannot have always-local reps.
I'm not fundamentally in love FPTP, to be clear, but the belief that it will fundamentally change our country's politics is wishful, at best.
When I run the scenario in my head, I see a return of the Reform Party, with enough support that every supposedly-normal Conservative government will have to caucus with them to form that government, leading to pounds of flesh paid to the Christian Fascists all over again. You can't tool the ballot system to make people stop being fascists.
I suppose many of the left-leaning proponents believe that we will never have a right wing government again under PR, cause that's the only prize that I can see being worth risking a complete overhaul of our electoral system *during a moment of fascist insurgency*. It's a big canvas on which everyone paints their dreams. And which the "long ballot" scumbags are using to actively subvert the current system, as though bringing more chaos, which fascism feeds off, was ever the right move.

2025-06-08 18:20:12 UTC

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> FPtP can elect an extremist majority gov like in the US but > [> #> ProportionalRepresentation](https://growers.social/tags/ProportionalRepresentation )> cannot.
Israel would like a word.

2025-06-06 15:52:28 UTC

So, time for another round of #GetFediHired
I am a very experienced Unix/Linux admin who can dip into Windows stuff as necessary; the whole point of Microsoft's stuff is that a semi-educated numpty can handle it.
Sorry not sorry, their stuff sucks and costs too much, but a lot of employers use it and I can work with it, it makes my job a ton easier, and the overall work experience very bad, but that's the money person's prerogative.
I can handle Powershell, Bash and Python scripts, and have spent several years as a Python dev, so I understand their lifestyles and tools (git, kanban software, etc) as well.
My instinctive focus is on doing things as cheaply as possible, and avoiding expensive vendors as a solution, when generally 10-100 lines of any of the aforementioned scripting languages will get the same problem handled. I believe that the day is coming when technology jobs will look more like that as a default, because the infinite growth brainworm has already failed us. In my case, multiple times.
I also once held a CCNA, long since lapsed of course, but the logistics of network switching and routing doesn't really change very much. So my ideal role is a jack-of-all-techs handling most or all tasks for a small-to-medium size company, though ideally, with a redundant staffer - I have no interest in being some sort of irreplaceable person, and I would be actively training people.
It is looking more and more like a return to city life is going to be inevitable, because I just don't see the type of tech economy that got me the fully remote jobs that evaporated before our eyes coming back soon enough that we can maintain our current life in the country.
That said, Winnipeg is not the only city we could move to. Montreal is a pretty good musical town, for instance...
Anyways, if you need a technology fixer for your company who will equip you with good working systems that are secure and reliable and based on rational budgets, hit me up for a resume.
I am really enjoying what I'm doing at this point, but the odds of finding another solid 20 hour job locally are not that high.

2025-06-05 11:48:46 UTC

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This you?
https://assets.growers.social/media_attachments/files/114/630/593/746/617/424/original/8ac98e1eae0ebd7d.png

2025-06-05 11:38:52 UTC

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With the post down, and the rest of his content seemingly in German, not sure how useful this post in English is at this point.

2025-06-01 12:05:02 UTC

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It's acceptable to post the link I suppose, but you should verify first that one can read it without an account, which one cannot, so this becomes pointless, because asking people to create an account there is a bit much.
@npub1me9…z28v @npub1ny7…uv57

2025-05-28 17:24:54 UTC

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Then let me tell you another story: I had four 8TB disks and made two mirrors like you just said. Some time later, after a lot of pain moving the data around to the old server's ever-shrinking raidz1 array, those are now a 4-disk z1.
You always run out of space, my friend, always. 🤣

2025-05-28 16:07:56 UTC

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I would probably do a mirror for the moment. Since you're talking about growing to four, that means when you get the other two, you can setup the raidz as described, copy the data over, then destroy the mirror and add those disks (or even pull and add them one at a time).
I don't actually know whether there's a performance difference between a two-disk raidz1 and a mirror, if there isn't then maybe just go with the z. I also wonder if a raidz1 would work with only the parity disk available.
But again, I don't know the deep magic well enough to say any of this for sure, it's more of a "play it safe" than anything...

2025-05-28 15:58:20 UTC

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I'm basically continuing to try to learn this thing, on the assumption that once I understand it, there will be reliable and reproducible ways to do whatever I need to, no matter how weird. Cause music apps get real weird, for whatever reason...

2025-05-28 15:35:51 UTC

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Just getting back to this, but to be sure I understand correctly:
I have changed my main 'nixos' channel to 25.05, but I also have the 'unstable' channel available via the usual way (I haven't switched to using flakes yet, it's on the agenda but I have thus far gotten weird errors and failed to understand them).
So it follows, I suppose, that I could also add the old 24.11 channel alongside the other two, set it up as an alternate the same as unstable, and then install OSC from that channel?
Will this work in perpetuity? Cause I also lost an obscure library when I switched that one of my VST apps relies on.

2025-05-26 12:32:05 UTC

https://assets.growers.social/media_attachments/files/114/574/138/745/782/411/original/1b625e319aee29d7.jpg

2025-05-25 11:44:14 UTC

Hey #NixOS
I get that using packages from unstable is a dice roll, and I fully accept that those packages will sometimes be broken, but what is the deal with allowing broken packages into the mainstream stable channel?
I just switched to 25.05 and now open-stage-control won't update.
Why not have the most recent non-broken version in the stable channel?
This is incredibly not-smooth and not-easy to deal with, I have to comment out the package and then remember to add it back in later. This is absolute doom for an ADHD like me. I've already reverted my servers back to Debian, and I'm strongly considering the same for my laptop, because this is unreliable, I use OSC for live performances, I cannot have the package break randomly and then need to be removed while it gets fixed if I want to update anything at all.

2025-05-13 21:35:23 UTC

I had no idea how appreciated we school bus drivers are in the community. Two neighbour ladies were out walking, and stopped by (I was working on yard stuff) to say that I'm earning my way to heaven.
I don't think I'm doing anything that difficult, anyone who finds what I do hard, I mean, what kind of monster are you anyways, they're kids.
You could be working alongside nazi truckers. True story.

2025-05-08 18:36:00 UTC

Has anyone ordered one of these rechargeable 12v battery packs off of Aliexpress? I have a couple of Hifiberry-Amp cards which can accept 12v to power the whole shebang, and we need some outdoor music for the summer; this seems most expedient.
They all claim 5A continuous available current, which ought to be plenty for a Raspberry Pi music player, I'd think. Less certain about, can you leave it plugged in and in use, and have it function like a UPS?
"Marktita" is quite cute.
https://assets.growers.social/media_attachments/files/114/473/647/618/634/562/original/984dab83fd2f2043.png

2025-05-08 12:26:19 UTC

All these Free Software projects that need more labour support should start having training sessions for capable people who want to help, have the necessary aptitude but not the specific skills, yet.
For instance, I decided to leave Debian on my servers rather than to go #NixOS because two projects in a row that I wanted to deploy failed to install because the packages were broken.
I was told on here that it was probably an easy fix, but I am not even clear how to work on them, even though I could probably figure it out.
If yall ever decide to take willing newbs in hand for a bit of mentoring from veteran coders or maintainers, I could definitely help maintain packages, after having some of that help sorting it all out and loading it into my brain.

2025-05-04 13:03:04 UTC

People are being shipped to South American prisons with no hope of return, but sure, go off about the AI pope suit.

2025-05-01 11:34:30 UTC

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It's All Hands On Deck this summer or yall are over. Big march not good enough.
Big Wildcat Strike, everyone shows up. Three days later you've got a country again.

2025-04-30 12:24:29 UTC

First, my opinion about the instance that existed before: I hate "FOSS" the acronym. It places Free Software, the original and useful idea, on the same level as Open Source, the corporate bullshit that they made up to justify using Free software and attempt to steal its mojo while keeping the hoarder mentality intact.
Not that I never use it, this is a newer opinion that I'm still working on integrating into my rhetoric.
I'm not here to defend the now-threatened instance, whatever the case. But I will say, this one *does* look like a pointless witchhunt to me.
Nobody can point to a single moderation decision made *on fosstodon* that is of concern, by this fellow or anyone else.
That should have been the end of the story, IMO.
But that's not even the story I'm here to tell today. I'm here to fix the Internet.
The Gist: #Fosstodon has 60k-70k users, and that is too many for a Fediverse Internet Server.
For the Fediverse Internet to work, all servers need to be operated on a human scale. 60k users, with 9k daily active, clearly a few humans are were operating it, but it turns out they are quitting because they are burnt out from all that work, real friggin work, on something that probably started as a lark on some level.
The witchfinder generals believed they were delivering retribution here, taking something away from the accused, but look how quickly and without regret the witch acceded; he was getting just about nothing from being a mod there, is my conclusion. And same goes, it turns out, for the operators of the site.
The takeaway here has nothing to do with social justice, and everything to do with the fact that *some* of the #Fediverse is being operated at scales similar to the silos, with the main instance being presumably still the worst example - this is not sustainable, and the admins of a sufficiently large instance will pull the plug on many, many users if they get burnt out from not having the rather extraordinary levels of support they need.
There is an ongoing tension these days about open registration and large instances, that many have not yet noticed, maybe, but the conflict is coming. We all agree on one thing: The Fedi is not in its final form. The death of Fosstodon, I argue, is a bit of Darwinian evolution happening before our eyes.
Getting rid of this "go big and go bigger" mindset, which is leftover from the fact that this protocol is serving as the conduit for imitations of the large sites that were built by Capital, is a big part of reaching the sustainable, robust form that we need.
Gotta go pick up the kids, to be continued...

2025-04-29 18:12:30 UTC

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Also the many new datacentres
If it is not burning a whole bunch more power, how are they pulling that off while setting up whole new datacentres? Are they magical fairypower datacentres?
You might be mistaking me for a simple poopoohead, but I don't trust math that tells me to ignore new power plants, and new server plants, being built in the name of this supposedly environmentally neutral tech.
My actual opposition to it is rooted in a far deeper place: Leftism, where I cannot buy into the idea that capitalists obeying their infinite growth brainworm is ever a good thing, *especially* when they're essentially promising that if we just put *enough* monkeys on enough typewriters we'll cure cancer and solve fusion, based on inputs that are replete with tumors and U235.
Machine Learning is useful, yes, in cases where it runs on local hardware with highly focused, highly trained models that do stuff like spot rare mushrooms in the forest and nothing else, yes, that sort of thing is highly useful.
Server rooms and extra nuclear waste so that people can make action figures of themselves and have glasses that lie to them about the world, it's just bad from top to bottom, and a single drop of water is not acceptable. Minimize, rationalize, enjoy yaself buddy.

2025-04-29 17:56:06 UTC

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Why all the nuclear power plants and revived coal then
for action figure pictures

2025-04-20 10:47:39 UTC

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Can relate. It has been a long, long time since I read the books, but, Marvin's encounter with a tank is the scene that will never leave my head.
I like Rickman, but his Marvin was not as good as the original BBC show. I do not remember if the same actor played him on the actual original radio play but afaic they nailed his portrayal on the BBC show.
@npub1ahj…kakq @npub1ny7…uv57

2025-04-03 18:10:27 UTC

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So this is kinda like using aptitude instead of apt-get on a Debian distro? It still connects to the real nix repos, with their godlike rolling schedules and whatnot?
I'm what you might call a conservative about this sort of thing - I'm not against these side versions, but as long as the majority of the community is using regular nix, the most likely scenario is that I'm gonna stay there as well, strictly because it is easier to find help and guidance from the largest user community.
As long as they are not giving up essential things for their mainstream choice, of course, and it seems to me that nix decides what's mainstream.
I remain a highly enthusiastic #NixOS user but I know I am not the first to complain about their atrocious documentation practices. I am still working on fully understanding the beast, but once I do I expect I'll try to help out with that, as my main contribution.
Main thing is nixos.wiki has to fucking go. It's just fucking embarrassing.

2025-04-03 17:51:23 UTC

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Lix?
https://assets.growers.social/media_attachments/files/114/275/295/075/958/347/original/c8d9f219a8c1a79c.mp4

2025-04-03 16:47:29 UTC

Oh how I do love the docs at #NixOS.
I am attempting to do the "System wide vim/nvim configuration" example at https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Vim and rebuild is giving me this error:
> error: attempt to call something which is not a function but a set
I read on one forum that removing the { } you see there, the set in question, from the override line, that would fix it, but then I of course get
> error: expected a set but found a function
Since this is coming straight from the wiki and my syntax is correct, this is what you might call
> Annoying

2025-03-29 16:15:43 UTC

Hey #Canada
I've been using Ivory soap and deodorant for years, and they are USA. I have reverted to my old preference of my teens, Irish Spring, which is not made in Ireland but here in Canada. Cue the young lasses passing by my outdoor shower saying "And we like it too!"
But what about pit stick? Ivory pit stick is that white powdery type stuff, and I like unscented, but is there a Canadian pit stick like that made in Canada?

2025-03-28 08:10:21 UTC

Hey #Linux newbs
You're probably spending a lot of time beating your head against stubborn errors that just won't go away, and feeling very down and frustrated about it. Statistically speaking, based on my own experience becoming "expert" at this, you're probably feeling this way a lot of the time, and that is not for no reason.
You're probably also wondering when you no longer will have to spend hours hitting yourself in the head with a hammer. How many years of this intense pain will it require?
Well, I'm here to assure you, it never ends. You never stop having this happen. I just spent an hour fighting a samba share to let me write to the shared drive. I did everything friggin right. It was just like the first time I tried to do this. I even did everything "correctly" this time, created a special user for the credentials, made sure it had group writing access by joining it to my user's group... still, permission denied every time I try to create a file.
So turns out that I added james to the movieUser group, rather than adding the movieUser to the james group. all it needed, an hour ago, was that I put those two words in the correct order in my usermod command.
So basically, as you sit there stewing in anger and befuddlement, let this be the moment that you realize that the developers of this chimera are all apes doing whatever they want, and therefore, it is entirely impossible to become an actual "expert" at this, because whatever you take the time to become expert at will be immediately deprecated and moved on from in favour of some other, equivalent drek with whollly different command structures and conventions.
Or you'll just flip a group/user assignment and spend an hour beating your head against your own idiocy.
Either way, the skill you are actually building up is not technical, but emotional: You are learning to feel this incoherent rage and urge to quit, to let it have its way with you, *but to continue working through it and trying new things until it does what you tell it to do, even as you feel this horrific emotional state*.
That's it, that's the trick to becoming an elite #sysadmin. You forego movies and sports events with your friends, you forego watching that movie or show, you eliminate all fun and sunshine from your life, and you spend all the time you can get putting yourself into this rage, until you don't notice the rage anymore.
Now you are l33t, and vaguely resemble an angry goblin most of the time. One of us! One of us! One of us!

2025-03-23 16:33:47 UTC

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D Batteries 🤣

2025-03-21 16:17:55 UTC

#NixOS is so cool!

2025-03-21 11:58:48 UTC

So it seems to me that #Bluesky is doing things internally exactly the same way that any other SV startup does, with the exception that they are claiming to be "billionaire proof" based on... nothing. They say they won't do it. Trust them.
They have already taken money from kleptocurrency bros, and when they run out of money, which they inevitably will unless they apply all the usual trackers, ads, algos etc, they will need to get money from somewhere.
Now, the operating costs of a basic social network of that type, it seems to me, could easily be covered by taxes and nobody would even notice it. But that would mean a lot of imagination and good faith in places where you simply cannot find those things.
So sooner or later, some "benevolent" Bezos will "save" Bluesky from fiscal ruin, much like the Washington Post was saved by him. Perhaps they will have fully implemented completely independent, code-audited independent AT servers by then, and it won't matter anymore than Threads matters to us.
Perhaps.
Meanwhile, #ActivityPub is already here, *fully* billionaire-proof (again, as Threads demonstrates), completely federated from day one, and proving to be *extremely* resilient against the ongoing assault of trolls, nazis, etc, attempting to flood this zone with the same shit they've filled the rest of the internet with.
And, this was accomplished without a single "Round" of funding from capitalist scumbags. We are even well-protected from a renegade BEDFL selling, say, Mastodon, to those same scumbags, because we have GoToSocial, Iceshrimp, etc, many other server projects that do the same thing with slightly different spins, arguably better in some cases, and all the federated admins could easily switch to another server project, and the Fedi chugs on.
The scumbags, in fact, if they wanted this, would have to approach thousands of admins to buy their servers, as well as all the fedi software projects, all at once, and have a critical mass of users and all the servers say yes.
Good luck with that, Musk.
How did all this come to be?
The people creating Bluesky want money. They show up every day to make a cheque.
The people who created the Fedi wanted a social network.

2025-03-20 09:09:06 UTC

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I just use my phone. My favorite reader ever was my Palm IIIxe.
@npub1ny7…uv57

2025-03-15 13:17:36 UTC

Hey #GenX I'm a bit worried that a lot of you aren't clear about #Measles vs #Rubella
And it's still bloody confusing to me because another name for measles is apparently Rubeola and when I searched "Measles" just now I saw that and I thought there was just confusion on someone's part about how to spell a weird latin disease name.
But anyways, we all most of us got Rubella as kids, and the grownups called it Measles, or else German Measles, but that was Rubella. Little red rashies everywhere for a few days, no further ill effects. One of those "harmless childhood diseases" that antivax crew love to deathcult about.
Measles or "Red Measles" or Rubeola, on the other hand, that shit is bad. Real fuckin bad. And as I understand it, that's what is on the spread.
Rubella = German Measles = don't panic.
Measles = Rubeola = antivaxxers are participants in multiple homicides.
So my *concern* is, that a lot of you are brushing off the Measles outbreaks, because you think it's Rubella.

2025-03-08 21:59:26 UTC

Along with our now-terminal erstwhile ally and friend, it is important that we also bury the toxic assumptions it forced on us all this time.
Down with instant pudding culture.
Down with IP laws that are cast aside to suit capital's needs after decades of persecution/prosecutions.
Down with supply chains that send goods on diesel-fuming container ships which could indeed be built locally, because that is somehow the only way to prevent war under capitalism.
Down with anyone who takes seriously the notion that wealth indicates anything virtuous or useful.
Down with nationalists who want you to ignore the inevitable result of leaning into it for just long enough to make their lines go up before they flee to the caymans or wherever.
Money speaks for money, the devil for his own
who'll come to speak for the skin and bone?
With our brothers and our sisters, together we will stand

2025-03-06 00:27:24 UTC

What do with lots of egg whites
GO

2025-02-26 20:35:14 UTC

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The boring one where we can't sacrifice our fundamental ethics is more compelling, but this one is more satisfying.
I signed it but I've stepped back, but only a treason trial or a simple barbecue of his gizzard will do instead.

2025-02-23 17:54:12 UTC

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With great sadness, I do not believe we have the luxury of three years.
BUT, I will take your hopeful vision of a general strike happening when it's far too late, over the numpties talking about the midterms in 2026.

2025-02-23 15:47:05 UTC

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Mostly, don't help a billionaire if you don't have to. If Amazon is your only way to get healthy food or toilet paper, I am not here to shame you.
If you're sharing links to Amazon sales on discretionary stuff like fiction books on the fedi, you should not.
I tried to explain this to people about Walmart in the 90s, so I'm not expecting a lot of comprehension, but it bears pointing out.
Resistance is a lifestyle, not a rhetorical stance to get the most likes.

2025-02-23 14:29:09 UTC

FFS
You know what a scumbag business operator is gonna do when a boycott is in the air?
They're gonna put a sale on. They're gonna get real nice, and charming, and fair, and even *generous*, on a pretty big scale... for as long as it takes for the anger to settle back down.
So no, just because you found an amazing sale on Amazon, one that cannot possibly be making them a profit, don't buy the thing from Amazon.
And sure as shit don't post a link to Amazon here.
Some people are still not clear on the assignment, at all.

2025-02-22 20:53:13 UTC

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Like really, it shouldn't be that hard to do a script, actually, that takes some kind of touchstone object in the model that serves as "1" (float not int) and just find every possible e2e and v2v that doesn't pierce the outer shell. Maybe I'll have a go.

2025-02-22 20:51:06 UTC

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I have frequently wanted a good way to do edge-to-edge and vert-to-vert measurements on models. I keep my eye out for it, but have not found anything especially good yet in terms of ease of use.

2025-02-22 20:39:19 UTC

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Peak Nasty for Heinlein, IMO, would be
Farnham's Freehold, in which he envisions a USA ruled by black people, and in which white people are subject to Jim Crow laws. In this black-led America, their black emperor figure eats white babies.
He pretty much lost me with that novel, sadly after reading more or less everything else, FF was one of the "well, it's almost over" reads. Helped me deal with the loss pretty good, actually.
and
The Door Into Summer, in which a grown man ends up as the caretaker of a small girl, and goes into hibernation so he can marry her when she's legal.

2025-02-22 16:38:27 UTC

So do I have anyone besides me in #Manitoba #Gardening yet? I would really love to sit for a while at the feet of someone who understands the process of seed sprouting for our season, when to do it, how to do it, etc.
I have a couple of higher-watt LED lights, and generally I sprout very early and keep them alive under the lights until it's time to bring them outside. It gives my plants a good headstart on rooting and early resilience, to be sure, but it's *not* energy-efficient whatsoever, and I don't expect the price of Hydro to be going down much at this point, so I'd like to get a better handle on timing and technique for sprouting your own seeds.

2025-02-21 16:40:35 UTC

"Personally, I have yet to see a groundswell of Trump voters expressing anguish and regret because random people who may or may not have committed any crime are being shipped to a concentration camp on Guantanamo. No, the very few who are upset are upset at extremely specific ways in which they themselves have been hurt: they lost their federal job, or their spouse was deported, or, most frequently of all, the price of eggs is still too high. These are not, and never will be, my allies. Because they haven’t learned any lesson. They have not developed empathy. They still support Donald Trump hurting people other than themselves."
https://skepchick.org/2025/02/no-i-will-not-welcome-ex-maga-to-the-resistance/
Good one from @npub1tln…7e9l
She makes BlueSky sound like all the bougie liberals are congregating there. So that place will be for Democrats, while the GOP gets Twitter, I guess?
I like it here.

2025-02-18 17:14:20 UTC

So, #Fedihired
I am officially a school bus driver now. So far it's just fine - kids are much less stressful to deal with than ignorant redneck truck drivers.
But, it's half-time by nature. If not for our mortgage it could actually be *almost* enough, but it's not, and our mortgage definitely is. There's field trips to add a bit to that, but I still need another twenty hours of paid work a week, ideally on the skilled end of things.
I am highly skilled at *nix servers, both #BSD and #Linux based, and have a couple years in as a #Python dev (nominally an Animation Technical Director, but Python Dev is the correct descriptor).
I am also a holder of a BA in English, which formally credentials me to read and write on your behalf, and I am generally quite competent at stringing words together in a way that accomplishes a desired rhetorical effect.
These services are available at highly discounted rates, relative to what you might expect from the market. Our needs are not extravagant.

2025-02-18 01:07:33 UTC

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That was more or less Plan A 🤣
I strongly expect it was that simple, or nearly that simple. It was simpler times, the 70s.

2025-02-18 00:37:47 UTC

Hey #oldpeopleofmastodon who remember #FrozenYogurt of the 1970s - longshot question
Since mid-80s, I would say, what has been sold as "frozen yogurt" has not actually been yogurt-based at all, that I can see.
In fact, here in Canada at the time I remember reading a Nutrition Facts pamphlet and was surprised to learn that in order to legally call a frozen product "Frozen Yogurt," it was not actually required that there be any sort of yogurt in it - it was strictly to do with how much fat it contained.
T'was not always thus. When I was quite small, in the 70s, there was a pizza place down the street from me in #Winnipeg called Tubby's, and my grandma and I used to walk down there for FY. What they served there at that time, that was *definitely* yogurt-based, and served from a soft serve machine. It is difficult to describe the taste, but I have not found it in a store.
Any tips on making that old-style FY in an ice cream maker?

2025-02-15 21:47:49 UTC

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We officially have reached the Freedom Fries stage of grief.

2025-02-06 17:31:35 UTC

So #NixOS, I installed the crosswords app, and I have acquired a supply of .puz files, but I cannot for the life of me figure out where to add them. Screenshot shows what I have available in the gui, and no matter where I look or click, at no point is there a place for me to specify the directory I have downloaded. Also cannot find a config file in /etc/ or my .config or anywhere else I've looked so far.
https://assets.growers.social/media_attachments/files/113/958/120/979/841/830/original/2d356f6552564176.png

2025-02-05 05:00:04 UTC

Say what you will about whatever you want, I seriously doubt Harris OR Biden would've gone with "the USA is taking Gaza" at any point in their villain arc

2025-02-04 22:15:29 UTC

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I don't recall hating it, neither the tv show nor the source text, just... there's something that is tickled by Dick in the Dick fan, and I am just (haha) not a fan of that type of Dick, it fails to tingle my dingle.
Any literary exploration of Fascism and its discontents is better written and published than censored and forgotten, in the final analysis.

2025-02-04 22:07:51 UTC

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I also did not like that adaptation, but, I also don't tend to like Dick's writing that much either. Blade Runner has barely a thing to do with its inspiration.

2025-02-04 20:49:05 UTC

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Oh hey also
If you haven't seen it, the recent miniseries of The Fall Of The House Of Usher is delicious, just delicious. It's both a fantastic contemporary adaptation, and a subtle tribute to Poe.

2025-01-26 16:40:00 UTC

Hey uhh... I'm not gonna harp on this too long but I have to say it once.
If you pushed the #GenocideJoe narrative last year, fuck you. Your feelings of superiority came at the expense of every single Gazan.
This time next year, it will be Israel, just Israel. Gaza, like your democracy, has ceased to exist.
People at the helm of a nation state cannot pivot as quickly as people shitposting on social media, *unless* they are dictators with no concern for what came before or might come after.

2025-01-23 18:51:00 UTC

That's #GorgeyTheGolden in the middle there. #DogsOfMastodon
https://assets.growers.social/media_attachments/files/113/879/113/573/964/182/original/8f53e8f34dd14d51.png

2025-01-23 17:38:07 UTC

I have a few #blind followers, and I'm having a meeting tonight about choosing what forum software to use in a group I joined.
Is there a specific project that does accessibility better than the rest, in your experiences?

2025-01-19 17:12:15 UTC

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I'm pretty sure there is not a hope in hell that they can reduce the situation to anywhere near as bad as it was in, say, 1850.
Yall sorted that shit out, you'll sort this shit out.
History teaches us (via Churchill) that you can always trust the yanks to do the right thing... after they have exhausted every other option.

2025-01-18 16:24:24 UTC

I have four egg whites left over from the Hollandaise yesterday. What do you do with four egg whites?
Meringues I guess? Italian nougat?
If you say omelet you're blocked and cursed.

2025-01-18 15:50:50 UTC

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With Americans, and the small group of urban middle class Chinese who have time to sit around doing social media on technology they own, and have enough social credit points to do so.
They're not interacting with the Uyghurs, I'm pretty sure, nor anyone who has said anything against the dictator.

2025-01-16 15:10:18 UTC

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Basically Proton posted a fawning praise of the incoming Fascist, and then doubled down, saying that things are more likely to get better for "the little guy" under GOP, because the Dems are "captured".
The part about the Dems is true; believing the far-worse option is somehow better is, as OP said, unhinged.

2025-01-12 00:24:50 UTC

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That does sound like an interesting read - I sound harsh about him, but I've read absolutely everything fiction that he wrote, and a number of his nonfiction, which is when I went "whoa..."
So it's kind of a "extremely disappointed in him" kinda vibe more than cancellation kinda thing.
Some of his work is very dear and important to me. "The Man Who Was Too Lazy To Fail" really rewired my brain for success, seriously.

2025-01-12 00:12:53 UTC

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It would've been quite mind-expanding stuff for the boomers who made Stranger almost a counterculture bible. If they had had a clue what his actual opinions were...
I've heard it alleged that all the sex-mad stuff was the result of a brain hemmorage. I think he just looked around at all the "free love" and wanted some.
Asimov was a boundary-disregarding fuckboy also.

2025-01-12 00:08:57 UTC

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Also The Chrysalids by Wyndham. Real good stuff.

2025-01-11 21:23:55 UTC

Ok so if you, like me, are pissed off by bad or no alt-text, my latest move is what I just did with the firefighter meme: Just steal the fucker, add the alt text, post to your timeline, and then post a link back to your version in the comments.
Feels kinda good actually 😜

2025-01-11 20:39:22 UTC

#Capitalism #Socialism #Explained
https://assets.growers.social/media_attachments/files/113/811/638/749/262/683/original/e3985bcef41c528c.png

2025-01-09 20:35:17 UTC

Note to self: when blocking, leave yourself a note why.
I came upon a toot I like on someone else's feed, looked up the tooter and I have them blocked. Nothing on their page makes it obvious why.
It's entirely possible I was just feeling grumpy or something, quite honestly, but because I didn't take notes I don't know.

2025-01-08 20:51:27 UTC

He's a Gelded Retriever now. #GorgeyTheGolden #DogsOfMastodon
https://assets.growers.social/media_attachments/files/113/794/709/923/686/135/original/649e45d0dc9d9844.jpg
https://assets.growers.social/media_attachments/files/113/794/710/379/593/390/original/2e48eac4c30edfb0.jpg

2025-01-08 16:32:01 UTC

Dear rest of the Fedi, on behalf of #Canada
Do not share Rebel News. Don't watch it. Don't touch it. Whatever you do, don't boost it.
If they are showing a clip from a politician you like, find the clip on CBC or literally *any* other Canadian source.
Rebel News was the propaganda arm of our version of Jan6. The fascist running our right wing scumbag party only performs for Rebel News, he doesn't do interviews with other networks.
You are opening the door to our nazi pipeline. Stop.

2025-01-07 20:40:45 UTC

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There's a lot we could be doing about money, but we are all still in thrall to the one-house-one-family-one-car Performative Prosperity social paradigm, here in North America, and that will push many of us into voluntary bankruptcy in the coming years.
Multiple families could handle the shelter problem by living in larger or extended family groups, if they had the consciousness or imagination to change their lifestyle.
It's all so fucking unnecessary.

2025-01-07 14:56:31 UTC

Historically, not very many Germans remained in Germany from 1933-1939 and come out of it... untarnished.
Certainly, many had no agency for a public fight. But there's other ways. We joke about every German being a nazi in 1945, but I don't believe every one of them was sleeping through the nightmare.
Good time to read up on the good Germans of the 1930s, what they did, how they did it, how they earned history's approval.