Smashed together a production-company logo in Canva last night. To do so, I picked a couple of bits of clip art, color-corrected them into a silhouette, snagged the first font in the list that seemed good-enough, and eyeballed the layout. It's not professional-quality but it's good enough for a […]

Nothing makes you realize how amateur-hour professional games are quite like doing a full disk copy and watching the filenames scroll by. "Oh, is that... A PDB file for every DLL in the `core` directory of this published game I downloaded from the Epic Games Store? Why yes it is! Boy howdy, I […]

I had a silly idea for a Halloween shirt, so if anyone wants to buy one, here's the link. https://www.zazzle.com/skeleton_storage_t_shirt-256165552486062680

Good cop, Timecop. "Look, I want to believe you. I do. But my partner... He wants to go back to when your parents met and introduce them to other people at that New Year's party. And I know we both hate paradoxes. So help me help you not be not you." #shitpost

[Not for kids] Sometimes I'm compelled to make awful things. #bluey #saw

I don't think I'm living my life right. ... but I have seen this weird string of news stories of the form "Something culturally important that you haven't been plugged into for like ten years just went MAGA and now we have to boycott it." And I'm like... Well I must be doing _something_ right […]

_gets turned into a dodecahedron and crushed by a demigod_

Meat brain: _Neuromancer_ is a story about the dystopia to which we cosign ourselves if we continue asking this trajectory of individualism, capitalism, and consumption. AI brain: _Neuromancer_ is a story about our perpetual striving to overcome our limitations and control that which we are […]

The perf template kind of breaks down when your manager is at the top of the ladder for your division. What am I supposed to say here for growth and improvement? "Manager's best opportunity to improve their career would be to quit this job and work at another company that will be willing to […]

Went to a little place called The Space Bar this evening. If you find yourself in downtown Pittsburgh on some night and you want to treat yourself, can recommend. It is absolutely delightful. Science fiction themed bar done up like the inside of a spaceship; excellent decor, great drinks and […]

They should do blood drives at metal concerts. Because what could be more metal than doing a blood ritual so another warrior can keep fighting? #donate #giveblood

Feeling a bit of regret that I cut Disney+ before I remembered I hadn't watched all the _Guardians of the Galaxy_ movies. Oh well. I suppose I'll have to console myself with the _infinite entertainment media_ available on and offline.

Guys will see this and just think "Hell yeah."

Sure, Roko's Basilisk _could_ create an identical clone of you (which, of course, is therefore morally you) to plug into the Torment Nexus for eternity if you don't help it get built. ... But that sounds like it would cut into its valuable paperclip making time. Surely it's easier to just tell […]

Personal admission: It's not that I don't have a problem with immigration because I don't fear immigrants. Of course I fear immigrants. ... it's that I don't fear them more than citizens. Because, person-for-person, when a human is causing a problem in my life, it's been a citizen way the hell […]

Hypothesis: besides just the humor of subversion, the meme of "villain grinding the day-to-day and being inspirational" (inspirational Skeletor e.g.) is catching on because people increasingly feel like their labor goes towards absurdity, and there is no better example of absurd labor than a […]

[#history #uspol #blech] This can be a rough time to know history (even as much as I do, and I'm not a deep scholar by any means). But there is some odd comfort in knowing that both (a) these patterns have repeated, meaning there's some expected outcomes (even if they're unpalatable, better the […]

"Imposter syndrome is real," a story in two acts. _Act 1_ "Oh, Goddammit, the super-critical team member from the other coast put a 1-on-1 on my calendar. This is not what I need. It's perf week and I'm already asking if I'm good enough to do this job or whether I even want to and I _do not […]

_slamming Tylenol like candy so I can understand this distributed services framework I'm using_ #shitpost

[Charlie Kirk, uspol, Christianity] When I have time, I should make this into a flag. It says a lot more than I think the subject of the photo knows it says. Let's talk a bit about Simon. There are two Simons in the gospel. Simon the apostle is […] [Original post on mastodon.fixermark.com]

Me: "Hey, I wonder what happened to that one kid in high school, the super-brilliant one?" _Quick Googling_ _Link to her two TED talks_ "... Ah, that's as it should be."

Alexander and Eliza Hamilton, in _Hamilton_ : "Oh, we have lost our son, we have no child anymore, we are distraught forever." Alexander and Eliza's _seven other children,_ watching from the afterlife: "Aye, this Miranda fellow's kind of a right prick, i'nne?"

_Takes a huge bong rip_ Numbers are just, like, a made-up idea, man.

_The X-Files_ is, indirectly, a show about the benefits of government-backed preparatory action. 95% of the time, the Mysteries Mulder and Scully are chasing, while intriguing, do not have any long-term, large impact bearing. They could just as well remain Mysteries and nobody would really be […]

Random sci-fi idea. Public domain, feel free to use. The Thing, but it's invading a radiotelescope astronomy station. The "tell" is that the superorganism cells communicate by some kind of wifi while they are assimilating (once they finish doing their thing, they can "close up" the signal and […]

Turning Point USA registered a lot of voters this weekend. ... Just a reminder that people who agreed with Kirk are showing up to vote. Will we?

A tornado almost wiped out Greensburg KS. They chose to build back green. That should get more attention if for no other reason than this: “People might be against some of this stuff, but when I tell them the library I work at has no utility bills, they can’t really argue with that,” Morton […]

[Uspol, Charlie Kirk] I just can't get over that while people laud Charlie Kirk's legacy as a "free speech warrior," his ostensible allies and supporters with actual political power are following his example by... Bringing the weight of the government to bear to kick a comedian off the air for […]

Thesis: GOTO is bad for managing complex code. Antithesis: GOTO put humans on the moon. Synthesis: going to the moon required less software complexity than modern frameworks require of "apps." https://mastodon.social/@hynek/115236967047216841

So it turns out if you let the gas run on the stove for a couple seconds before you remember that it's a gas stove and has to actually go through the lighter cycle and then you panic and turn the knob back to trigger the ignition... You really feel that heat on the back of your hand where all […]

I gotta say... I'm not s fan of most AI but I'm pretty excited about turning my browser loose on the grocery store with a shopping list and having it navigate that website for me to order bread and milk. ... This is more a condemnation of every grocery website than praise for Gemini. Worst user […]

Sometimes, a thought smashes together in my brain and it makes so much sense that I can't believe I didn't see it before. So talk about a General Strike is going around. What if we had it on election day? Make the general strike _be_ "The only people who work today are pollworkers and […]

Honestly the hack I'm proudest of that I've done in emacs is a keyboard shortcut that, given an undefined symbol in Python, adds an import for that symbol to the top of the file. ❌ - complicated algorithm for finding all possible valid symbols in all packages visible in this Python project ✅ - […]

Let me take one or two paragraphs to talk about fighting in Hockey. This is a post about social networks. Here's the secret about fights in hockey: almost all of them are mutually-consensual. They will occasionally do the sound-cone-pointed-at-the-players thing to players about to fight. You […]

Maybe it's the wrong time to mention it, but the FCC has always applied soft power to network TV to fit the government's image of what television media should be, and it's one of the reasons so many of us don't watch network television anymore. It stinks of guardrails. It has carried the stench […]

One of the not-frequently-talked-about downsides of monopoly is that everything's your fault because you're doing everything. #disney #jimmykimmel ... #google

Linux: "This is the most hyper-flexible system in existence. You can cobble together software written by eighteen strangers to run on a toaster if you want." Also Linux: "You can't _read a key from the keyboard_ unless you are a member of two permission groups and manually override […]

Me: "Well, I mean, eventually we have to adopt new technologies. It's important to move forward, even if the current solution is working, because the upgraded solution solves more problems for more people." Also me: "Localhost is bound to IPv6 in Raspberry Pi by default? _I will bloody_ […]

US Post Office has put up an online vote for what Forever Stamp design it should bring back. https://www.stampsforever.com/vote ... many good choices. I'm a'clickin' on Fred Rogers, but you do you. 😉

I'm seeing more BlueSky reshares or quote-links in my feed that go to an account I can't read unless I'm logged in. Not telling anyone what to do with their timeline (I'm still a firm believer in using Postel's Law as a philosophical grounding for using Mastodon), but as a meta-thought […]

The more I use Mastodon the more sense I get that most social networks are just... over-engineered. (Geordi waving no) Some algorithm deciding who to recommend you should follow based upon a special sauce applied atop the social graph. (Geordi pointing "maybe") New accounts make "Hello […]

The most "effective" altruism is whatever you didn't talk yourself out of doing to help today.

I should write a quine in Rockstar that actually outputs itself in reverse, i.e. a quine that only works via back-masking.

[Charlie Kirk, uspol existential threats] I'm going to say the quiet part loud. It's ill-advised but I don't think I care. Half the reason people are reeling from the Kirk assassination is that we actually did think those guys were untouchable. All of them. Rush Limbaugh made a comfortable […]

I'm like one of those Dwarf Fortress dwarves, except when I'm taken my a strange mood, I don't make steins. I make memes. #myneighbortotoro

Dear lazy-mastodon: I could use a recommendation for a multiple-machines-to-one-monitor-keyboard-mouse HDMI / USB switch. The one I currently have is unpowered and hilariously responsive to the desktop it is attached to; it loses lock on the laptop I have connected every time the desktop sleeps […]

OH in the library: "So these are all just to read?" "Yep, you can borrow them. Just need a card." "How much does that cost a month?" ... If you tried to invent libraries today, they'd be illegal. #library

[Charlie Kirk uspol Hamilton] It's days like this that I remember the legacy of Alexander Hamilton, another famous American who advocated strongly for the necessity of protection of a right to keep and bear firearms. ... of course, there are some differences. Hamilton was a war hero, for […]