Patch Arcana

[He/Him] Writer | 無☸️ | Junkyard Dog | Gizmo-mancer | This account not rated for consumption by minors or managers.

I like making things and witnessing other people make things. Myself I do #EmbeddedDev and #Programming alongside a fair amount of writing and TTRPG design. Dipping my toes into pixel art and eurorack modular synthesis.

I am actively trying to curate a feed of people who make things, build worlds, and spread peace.

Corona onus grave est; noli eam gerere.

portfolio site: https://www.arcanalabs.ca
books: https://www.sanityline.net
Ko-Fi: https://www.ko-fi.com/ArcLabs
everything else: https://www.zadammac.ca

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Last Notes

2026-08-24 00:15:51 UTC

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And like, at some point I must have known and acknowledged this in my bones before I started thinking about it seriously because I never *ever* considered moving my streaming away from Twitch.
Yeah obviously Bezos Bad but the alternative is to try to squeeze less blood from smaller stones *and* pay for all the infrastructure myself to do it.

2026-08-24 00:12:55 UTC

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Until the relevant principalities adopt UBI or somehow this federated stuff goes mainstream, I can't *not* have availability on amazon, I'd be a fool not to deal with at least a few of the metaplatforms, I have no real choice but to give Jack Dorsey the eyeballs, and at some point I should probably learn what the fuck booktok is.

2026-08-24 00:11:05 UTC

Something I'm slowly realizing and getting discouraged by/angry about is that as much as I love the fediverse and would love to do all my social mediaing on the open platforms, the things that I love about it make it *a significant impediment* to trying to earn a living as an artist.
I love all y'all to death, I truly do, but I'd be doing myself a disservice if I didn't have profiles in the places people would expect to find them.

2026-06-08 20:49:48 UTC

Concerned about having your chance to meet with people yanked out from under you by a social media ban?
Get your personal website up and join some webrings.
You will never regret a 1990s-style button exchange.

2026-03-25 21:32:06 UTC

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The part of me that can't get past the impulse to walk across your hood when you stop in the crosswalk *really* wants a punch-back solution like iocane or nepthenes though.

2026-03-25 21:23:41 UTC

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I mean, I have an nginx revproxy in front of *everything* I could just create a rule that drops a lot of user agents and IP ranges.
That would solve the actual problem I have more efficiently than tarpitting (I'm annoyed about bots being present, yes, on philosophical grounds, yes, but the problem's *urgency* comes from the load placed on the server)

2026-03-25 20:47:04 UTC

I am aware of Nepthenes; what else are all y'all using to protect your services from enshittification by trying to shed crawler load or make yourself unattractive to them or poison the dataset?
(If you're techish but not doing the above, consider boosting, though I suspect my general followers will have a preponderance of advice for me)

2026-03-23 12:51:45 UTC

Of course he blinked, he's not just a moron he's a pussy besides.

2026-03-10 13:45:40 UTC

I can't decide if it's a sign of my own inadequacies as an engineer, the age of the technology, or what, but I just cannot stop myself from going a little cross-eyed whenever I try to make a change to my email stack

2026-03-08 13:17:09 UTC

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Please, makers, I beg you: use the full stack of human technologies, not just the latest sexy toys.
In many disciplines, the good stuff is the oldest; the new stuff is just the fastest or cheapest.

2026-03-08 13:15:59 UTC

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Any craft process that finds a way to involve modern graphics software, carbon paper, and a knapped stone surface gets my vote for "good shit to know"

2026-03-08 13:11:36 UTC

Ah. Denis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvdBNTT3pqc
Sometime in the summer when a gap finally opens up in the budget I've gotta add him to my patreon set.

2026-03-05 02:05:10 UTC

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"Patch what the fuck is that"
Man portable RC2014 rig with a headless Pi and no meaningful network connection unless this wire gets plugged into that router.

2026-03-05 02:02:47 UTC

Spear of Longinus but it just bricks the local NPU, blackholes traffic to the needful endpoints, and sets a few registry keys.
Starting to think I should have bought the freewrite instead of a laptop last year when I had the chance.

2026-03-05 01:12:47 UTC

Where the hell did the domain block button go

2026-03-05 00:25:45 UTC

Am I the only adult human who remembers the jucero

2026-03-04 20:17:13 UTC

Canadians making fun of Japanese houses for being built to basically survive one generation cracks me the hell up when you hold our gypsum-board-and-toothpick construction up against the brick-and-concrete of broad swathes of europe.
I dunno which housing strategy is more appropriate, but I do know a glass house rock toss competition when I see one.

2026-03-03 20:28:25 UTC

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Certainly nothing presently extant, which was absolutely the point of the post.

2026-03-03 20:16:37 UTC

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I don't believe I said anything about purely digital sentience or biology functioning in a digital manner.

2026-03-03 15:00:34 UTC

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Could a machine have Mind?
Sure. There's a few different product lines in earth's biosphere that all have Mind and they're just big piles of chaotically-assembled protein nanomachines.
But do *these* ones? No. That you would ask that demonstrates you don't understand the technologies you are attempting to use.

2026-03-03 14:59:13 UTC

Boy it's weird to be alive right now as a person who believes a sentient program is probably possible and should be afforded personhood, but also that *none of this shit even comes close to qualifying*.

2026-03-01 17:43:34 UTC

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not me reading this as I eat a late lunch of an instant ramen and a poached egg.
I gotta get my shit together

2026-02-27 18:26:46 UTC

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Anyway it's super easy to game an LLM to give you a passing grade on just about any course if you've ever had even a passing interest in rhetoric. I've somehow convinced the company superbot that I, the SRE Department's Most Obstinate Soldier, am somehow a paragon of willingness.
Mostly by arguing with it for 20 minutes about what its definition of "best effort" is but still.

2026-02-27 18:23:22 UTC

Forced myself today to do some "talk to the chatbot" training exercises and the annoying takeaway from about an hour of that is "Wow, I'm a lot more polite to machines than I am to people".
I'm not sure I like that.

2026-02-26 23:43:26 UTC

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*holds up a soviet style illustration of a librarian/* This person is your comrade. They fight for you.

2026-02-26 20:49:58 UTC

Hear me out, but Generative AI has created boundless opportunity in FOSS spaces by creating chances to start over solved problems from a "without all that pesky AI" perspective.
But nowhere is this truer than replacing the application Libby, which is ebook lending software used by libraries all over the damn planet.
Libraries. With Librarians. Who by and large seem even more decided against Generative AI than *the fucking fediverse is*.
The first person to get a clean version of alt-Libby onto app stores everywhere and in front of library boards is going to make a very reasonable living for themselves and many additional colleagues.

2026-02-22 17:57:00 UTC

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By changing the display manager aren't I also changing the whole desktop at once or have I missed something about OS components here?

2026-02-22 17:54:10 UTC

I don't know if it's even possible without replacing your whole desktop environment, but I absolutely hate the login screen that comes with Ubuntu out of the box and need to figure out how to change it.
So many bullshit default behaviours baked in.

2026-02-21 19:29:05 UTC

Ooh yay Anhedonia my favourite fucking symptom.
Someone send garlic fingers and donair.

2026-02-05 19:20:52 UTC

Reminder, since I had to be shown a thing: the moderate position on Trans and Queer Rights is that they are human rights and not up for debate.
That's the *middle path* on that topic.

2026-02-05 00:44:01 UTC

"If I may compare the to a sunset, it's every *fucking day* with you."

2026-02-01 22:56:05 UTC

You cannot convince me that the basically universal concept of monasticism in all its varieties and flavours isn't just *what happens* when religion tries to organize and the Autism Spectrum gets involved.

2026-01-31 18:41:42 UTC

Y'all please explain to the devs *why* full-screen with display capture means the mouse disappears, and why that's a them problem.

2026-01-21 22:11:26 UTC

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Like, I know that the sun is very large and very far away and that the barycenter of the system isn't where you think it is and that all those numbers matter but I can't actually articulate *why* I know the mass of the sun is so large, so I feel like an idiot even though I'm arguing with something mildly smarter than chatgpt.

2026-01-21 21:53:40 UTC

I think what gets me fired up about flat earther arguments is that I know they're wrong but I learned this shit *so long ago* that I can rarely correctly articulate why they're wrong.

2026-01-19 23:03:18 UTC

The hilarious thing about the plot of Foundation is that you can take Hari Seldon's first premonition and apply it to literally any period in history and be correct.
After N further years Imperial Power Y will fall and in the interregnum shit will suck.
Literally true of any point in human history. Because empire is both (for some reason) the direction in which all human governance tries to move and the least stable way to govern something.

2026-01-15 19:31:00 UTC

You know, when I said "3D printed whistles will be essential to the rebellion", I was being a bit more, uh... poetic.
I meant something else by whistle, but hey, whatever works.

2025-12-23 23:56:41 UTC

Last Boost: Considering how Reverse Bastardized Colonially Misunderstood most of modern writing and practice on pagainsm and the occult is, it's not surprising the same grifters are bowing down to the plagiarism machine.

2025-12-12 19:16:46 UTC

iD Software Unionized?
Shit, maybe I *should* go sideways into the gaming industry.

2025-12-08 00:58:13 UTC

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If this is an OR list rather than an AND list I'd recommend [@mos_8502](https://studio8502.ca/@mos_8502 ) on the tech side. Their hardware dev projects are *fascinating* and they post about them often.

2025-12-06 14:03:43 UTC

So, we know that NAND flash/SSD doesn't tolerate offline well. This is going to be a problem for DS/3DS/Switch/Switch2 game carts long-term, and is a problem for some offline backup models.
So what is the minimum viable "wake up" to keep the drive alive? What could be built, like a VHS rewinder, that you could slot a card/thumbdrive/ssd into and force the "refresh"?

2025-12-02 21:30:56 UTC

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I mean, it's arguable if it's retro or not, but [PETI](https://www.arcanalabs.ca/hardware/PETI.html ) is certainly retro-inspired. I'm building a 90s-style virtual pet around more modern components, starring my favourite adversary, the MSP430 microcontroller.
It's in a "shockingly close to firmware-complete" state but the hardware needs at least one more revision on the dev kit version, notwithstanding the goes-in-your-pocket toy version.

2025-11-28 21:52:00 UTC

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"The sandboxing is a security control!"
If I cared about installed applications staying out of the filesystem, I would install/run them as a privilege-controlled user or switch to Qubes.
My security posture is not meaningfully fucked with if skype can see my SSHFS mounts.

2025-11-28 21:44:00 UTC

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Huh. Another way of thinking this, "schedule time for maintenance or your equipment will schedule it for you" doesn't just apply to your physical and mental health, or your equipment.
But it's also the Litany for Distro Shopping.

2025-11-28 21:00:33 UTC

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What was it, few years back, I think either mednafen specifically or retroarch in general had to be authorized to connect to *individual controllers* through snap commands.
And after an afternoon fucking around wit that and only sorta getting it working, I said balls to it and just blew the dust off the retropi.
I should have known *then* that staying on a distro that was moving to having (a) split package managers and (b) that one in particular was the Luser Move, but NOOOOOO, I didn't want to waste time fucking around....
WELL WHOS WASTING TIME NOW, DUMBASS

2025-11-28 20:56:05 UTC

"Nah Patch you're an idiot, snap is great and it keeps things on the most current version."
Yeah, I must just be hallucinating how often that behaviour causes unexpected glitches, and how the bullshit default sandboxing it uses does dumb shit like not letting discord see files in your steam library.
I clearly have no actual idea why the computer I spend most of my day *on* annoys me. I must just be fucking stupid.

2025-11-19 17:52:34 UTC

Since I can't quote the previous boost, I'll just add this:
TI's microcontroller development ecosystem is at least as robust as arduino's.
And you don't have to use their (frankly quite shitty) IDE to use it.

2025-11-18 20:45:41 UTC

You know, when you consider that the hardest problems in computer science are naming things and cache invalidation, it's amazing DNS ever actually works.

2025-10-27 19:13:42 UTC

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Well, I should pack up my toys and go home, then.
Too slow for what, though? Is there a risk that something in the system comes out of manufacture.
(You know, besides the SNES controller port connectors...)

2025-10-27 19:08:49 UTC

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Really excited by - and envious of - your iteration velocity with this project.

2025-10-22 19:36:58 UTC

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"But the postal service loses-"
You don't pay enough tolls to pay for the road system, but you will be the first to bitch when the roads go to shit. Public services should not be expected to be profitable.

2025-10-22 19:32:19 UTC

Why is my official position on CUPW that Canada Post management should shut the fuck up and give them everything they could possibly ask for?
I'm holding my backlog of letters and postcards in my hand and nothing ever feels quite as correct as a fat stack of mail, a cup of coffee (or tea), and a heavy sweater.

2025-10-07 19:41:11 UTC

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"Too impatient for ads, you're going to HATE 10-15 seconds of silence."
-- Some google dept head who fundamentally misunderstands the reason people don't like ads, apparently.

2025-09-19 17:02:45 UTC

Rip Bozo, I guess.

2025-09-09 18:47:03 UTC

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Stroganoff.

2025-09-09 16:08:13 UTC

"For most skills you can usually trade time for experience"
*looks at his project pile*
No, that math checks out.

2025-09-08 12:11:57 UTC

I'm sure it'd be unnecessarily complicated but I'd really like to add a big fat toggle switch as a microphone-level mute to my audio stack, without having to go so far as to insert a mixer.
I could *probably* mod my Yeti with some kind of flipflop solution to replace the existing momentary but ehhhhhhhhhh.

2025-09-05 12:31:38 UTC

HOA's should be illegal.
Condo Associations, I get.
HOA officers are just people who want to be landlords and cops without ownership or risk.

2025-09-03 20:19:51 UTC

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"Patch you have an unnecessarily-low pucker threshold"
Boiling acetone is the *low water mark* for batshit ideas in this plan.

2025-09-03 20:15:23 UTC

So, NileRed videos have conditioned me to accept a certain level of jank. Mans likes to eat things in the lab, which is a general no.
But oh my god, the strange fear-laughs this specific process has brought me:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzP3vx8XadU

2025-08-27 23:09:58 UTC

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Thank you.
If I'm being honest (or a little self-deprecating) it's also voice-salad. I can always tell what I'd been reading around the time I was drafting when I'm later revising.

2025-08-27 14:00:13 UTC

#WritersCoffeeClub for August 27:
> How traditional is your writing?
Haven't a clue, but probably more than I'd be comfortable admitting, but still not "traditional" enough to be thought of as literature.
I write the story I find. Usually in a bit of a tone salad that has to be revised repeatedly to become uniform.

2025-08-08 23:00:50 UTC

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Fuck it might as well watch covenant too why not

2025-08-08 22:56:27 UTC

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Look man, I'm just sayin'.
You always know a working joe.

2025-08-08 22:49:04 UTC

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Oh cool she made it to the lifeboat.
Bet that squid thing is on it.

2025-08-08 22:44:45 UTC

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David's beheaded head craning around to look at the space jockey console is almost comical.
I do enjoy the surviving crew preferring to spend their time with Janek than Vickers though.

2025-08-08 22:34:02 UTC

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Alright, plot twists aside: they could have worked a lot harder to match the original tech aesthtics.
The cassettepunk of it *is* the point.

2025-08-08 22:26:10 UTC

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Oh cool this is just going off the rails as fast as possible now huh?

2025-08-08 22:18:14 UTC

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Woah, even for an "it's too late for me" that would not be my chosen Assistive Out.
Do you mean to tell me there's not a single kinetic weapon aboard this ship?

2025-08-08 21:59:34 UTC

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I wonder why they decided to have American Idris Elba and not Default Settings Idris Elba on this one.

2025-08-08 21:57:51 UTC

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RIP howling geologist, you were funny for a few minutes.

2025-08-08 21:50:47 UTC

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Pitcher plants on a spaceship is a HELL of a flex.
Those sons of bitches don't like growing in their *OWN* habitat nevermind adverse conditions.

2025-08-08 21:40:39 UTC

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"Let's try electrocuting the brain of this invaluable xenobiological sample" did one single fucking scientist come on this mission or

2025-08-08 21:39:11 UTC

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If Michael Fassbender had not been around they could have used Matthew Goode and I could stop having Uncanny Valley moments every time David walks onto screen.

2025-08-08 21:19:23 UTC

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Alright after a rough start I like Fifield too. I can get with mercenary engineer who howls at his probes.
Might could even call such a thing "kin".

2025-08-08 21:13:16 UTC

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Aw, these suits SUCK.

2025-08-08 21:04:11 UTC

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I really like David. It's a damn shame I'm going to almost certainly regret Really Liking David.

2025-08-08 20:53:59 UTC

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I share your scepticism, Biologist and Engineer whose names I've already forgotten.

2025-08-08 20:52:57 UTC

Oh Jesus it's just Ridley Scott's take on *von Däniken*!?

2025-07-31 19:48:47 UTC

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I'd pay for it rather than having to reboot into windows and piggyback off my wife's indesign license.

2025-07-29 19:31:44 UTC

Personally, I don't think natural language programming is desirable.
I think the strictures of formal languages forcing you to think in slightly more narrow and constrained ways drives you toward the understanding to *think like the computer*.
I think for this reason, something of value was lost when we started moving away from the 8-bit machines era, where your introduction to computing was a bit of BASIC and then having to put your machine's ASM into the interpreter typed out of a magazine.
I learned more about making the computer do a thing from working with PETI's microcontroller than I did in 20 years of casual computing or the 6 years of python I wrote before that.

2025-07-24 12:04:05 UTC

Pst.
You don't need "privacy-preserving age verification".
Age verification solves exactly zero problems and creates several new ones.
On the internet, nobody is meant to know you're a dog.

2025-07-16 16:09:12 UTC

I joke a lot about how much of working in the tech business is being a techpriest enginseer and just following the rites, but I need to be clear...
At least the *adeptus mechanicum* **are orgainzed**.

2025-07-15 20:38:51 UTC

Oh cool, I thik someone made off with my pharmacy order.
Have fun with a bag of ricola and a covid rapid tests, shithead. If you didn't need that more than I did, may an unbanishable pebble spawn in your left shoe.

2025-07-15 17:50:56 UTC

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So I've only seen bits and pieces about this, but it's claiming to... basically be a drop-in replacement, BUT BETTA. Think I saw HDMI output, and I definitely saw a claim that it should work with any preexisting carts and peripherals.
So the objection to the use of the FPGA as an economic replacement to *trying to reboot foundary operations for chip designs that don't get minted anymore is*... what, a perverse ideological purity?
Granted, retro has *always* had weird internal purity crusades (I have OPPINIONS about tamagotchi clones, knockoffs, and replacements) but like... c'mon, the alternative was really no machine at all and the slow death of the legacy fleet as more and more inevitably failed.

2025-07-15 17:44:05 UTC

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I'm going to guess the angry falls into the same general camp as people who kvetch about "emulation not being real retro" and "FPGA BAD".

2025-07-15 17:35:47 UTC

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Is this the C64 rebake that just came out?

2025-07-14 19:50:39 UTC

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dumpster fire take from that guy who said everyone who preserved, linked to, or boosted the posts should be fed to the fuckin' FBI

2025-06-19 15:16:29 UTC

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That makes *some* sense, I mean the Galactic Civil War would have had perpetually moving conceptual borders for *decades* after the Battle of Endor. What is sensible one week might be painfully remote the next.

2025-06-19 15:13:03 UTC

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Though I suppose in that timeline the New Republic eventually holds its capital there so screw it.
... Weirdly enough though, I think the canon timeline puts them on Chandrilla, so... back to "WTF" for me.

2025-06-19 15:12:17 UTC

OMFG so I'd never seen the newest most recent recut of Return of the Jedi. I was not expecting random scenes of Naboo and Coruscant.
TBH, I don't like the celebrations on coruscant. It doesn't fit with my mental model of the fall of the empire being several years later when Rukh fuckin' ganks Thrawn.

2025-06-16 14:09:28 UTC

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"Knock knock."
"Who's there?"
"God."
"If you say so, right this way sir!"

2025-06-16 14:05:11 UTC

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The hivis and clipboard of invisibility aren't meant to get you C-suite permissions!

2025-06-13 19:12:15 UTC

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If you're curious, the take that broke me was "Nostalgia is inherently fascist coded", an absolute cart-horse that is best responded to by asking to see some ID.

2025-06-13 19:11:00 UTC

Just had a sort of epiphany or segfault where my brain went "In person I would take none of these people seriously, why do I care what a bunch of kids are saying online?"
I guess I'm finally an Old.

2025-06-04 15:21:37 UTC

Wait, did they just straight up pull the Gold leader clip out of A New hope?

2025-06-04 15:12:01 UTC

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What the hell is Krennek the director of anyway? The ISB?

2025-06-04 15:10:58 UTC

I too like to put key state archives on water worlds where one weird tide could destroy my shit.

2025-06-04 14:14:58 UTC

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Street Fighting in an AT-ST would not have been my first choice.
But then, I would not have chosen to start an empire in the first place.
... Why to western directors always cast Donnie Yen *blind*?

2025-06-04 14:05:27 UTC

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My brother has just reminded me that Donnie Yen is in this movie.
How I managed to hold of watching it for this long with him AND Mads in it is a testament to how shitty I am about Heir