I feel embarrassed that every time I want to compare strings or numbers in bash or zsh, I have to look up the extremely fiddly syntax to make sure I don't dig myself a new grave. But really, the shells should be embarrassed to be so unintuitive about this stuff.

I'm not a huge fan of the military in general, but I have incredible respect for the brave aviators of the crow early warning & air defense network which keeps our neighborhood free of raptors and safe for our pet parrot. Thank you for your service. o7

There are no wikis or forums any more — if you want information about a project, you need to join one of two chat clients. Slack, the corporate one owned by Salesforce, will sometimes send you a surprise bill for like two hundred thousand dollars. Discord, the gamer one, is microtransaction hell.

42 years ago today, on September 26 1983, Lt. Colonel Stanislav Petrov of the Soviet Air Defense Forces made the incredibly brave choice to disobey the letter of his orders and ignore the early warning system he oversaw. By declining to report an apparent US launch of five missiles, he likely […]

I'm enjoying The Pitt — very much the prestige TV successor to ER. But they just featured a spider bite. My suspension of disbelief is forever ruined.

Why should resistance be constrained by non-violence when oppression has no such limits?

I hate when tech tells me to check with my system administrator. It's just rude (and often lazy). It's like a plumber asking "Is there a man around I could talk to?" because they don't want to have to explain themself. Just show me the actual information you notionally want me to pass along to […]

OH via the Frontline Fifth Podcast: > People think that th Pulitzer Prize is the highest award in journalism. Incorrect! The highest award is getting killed by the CIA.

My favorite sailboat racing class has got to be “Use as much contemporary sail theory and engineering design as you’d like, but your vessel has to (1) be _assembled_ with materials and processes in use before the 20th century*, & (2) carry at least this much simulated cargo. Before the use of […]

In a show I'm watching, a supernatural entity just prophesied a divine weapon "more powerful than ten thousand swords", and this monologue is superimposed over apocalyptic imagery which resembles the aftermath of a nuclear war. A weapon more powerful than ten thousand swords, huh? So… a single […]

My favorite way to enjoy excellent art is by looking at screenshots of screenshots of it without any links back to the original. That slaps actually and is very healthy.

Go off, I guess, but I would simply not attack Poland even if I was planning a dead-eyed denial hours later.

Apple demonstrated three very impressive technical accomplishments in yesterday's announcement and I think that they really illustrate a spectrum of the sort of engineering which is often on display with new & improved gadgets. #1 A full-featured smartwatch which runs for like a week or […]

People criticize the Star Wars prequels for heavy-handed writing about oblivious idiots, naïve caricatures, and unnecessary obsession with a couple of families and some marginal institutions. But have you seen the news? Those bland scripts and often-wooden performances look sparkling by comparison.

If we were a serious species we’d have spent the last 5 years getting to the point where everyone could wake up, spit into a tube and go about their morning routine before getting a readout whether they were infected with flu/covid/RSV and if they were they could stay home until they were no […]

It is truly amazing what you can achieve when you work hard and believe in yourself instead of actually checking your work.

Based on the magnitude of the manosphere's freakout, I was really expecting Superman (2025) to be much woker? Just felt like basic bog-standard by-the-numbers Superman with a bit of Gunn flair and a perfect sublime impeccable Luthor.

Being unemployed gives me much more time do deal with the day-to-day administriva which so often gets put on the backburner. But coping with my own personal tech debt really makes me miss working with specialists who can work through this stuff ten times faster than I can.

I'm beginning to wonder whether having a handful of surveillance organizations which hoard everything they can learn about everyone's finances whether you want them to or not and suffer zero meaningful consequences for losing it every couple of years might not be a great way to run an economy […]

I'm gad to see that Sam did, in fact, finally get the horns.

I'm trying to backup an IMAP server to a local maildir using isync/mbsync. A perfectly normal and reasonable thing to do, you might imagine. Absolutely wrong. How could you be so utterly mistaken. Install from Homebrew. Write a config file. Run the binary. Get an error: `Assertion failed […]

Remember when you were a kid and you learned about Superman and thought it was totally ridiculous that Krypton was going to be destroyed but nobody did anything about it? I miss feeling that way.

It was DNS. And — worse — it was mostly my fault.

Samalamadingdong!

Sometimes, an item will come bundled with screws. And I think to myself: well, obviously _I_ wouldn't use a Philips or Pozidriv bit for this; I don't think that would stand up to the force needed to properly bind tightly into the stud. But surely designers know what they're doing and picked the […]

Sure, sex is good. But have you ever spent a beautiful day cycling around listening to books while you acquiring additional library cards? Seven. I have _seven_ different ways to place holds on Libby now. And I received no less than four (4) unprompted compliments. What a day!

After @redqueen, I'm once again available for work under capitalism. There are some things that I'm very good at, but they aren't always well-expressed by the way we tend to write job descriptions and resumes. Just because a position puts the words "product" or "management" next to the spectrum […]

Lizard! Lizard! Lizard, lizard, lizard! Lizard, lizard! www.instagram.com/p/DNWCqadTDh7

It's always a good day when you're recompiling ffmpeg from source.

I listen to the news on a regular basis (a mistake, I know). It is just bananas how utterly incomprehensible the Trump/Republican rejection of the status quo is. Some of the basics which don't surprise us any more are nonetheless pretty weird. But just because […]

I got to bring out the full bisexual lighting rig for the portrait booth at a Locked Tomb larp yesterday. I managed to sneak in a few selfies at the end because of course I did. It was perfect timing, because I also just had my hair recolored last week. Yay for my new profile pic!

Is Rhys Darby playing his exact character from Our Flag Means Death as Q in Strange New Worlds? 🍿

TIL that the NYT can't spell "enshittification" right. archive.is/BtZD0

I just rewatched everyone’s favorite artsy-ay-eff zombie movie _28 Days Later_ , and finally saw the sequel (which is tragically not directed by Danny Boyle). For a 2002 movie, _Days_ holds up incredibly well — it’s clearly older, but not dated, if that makes sense. _Weeks_ on the other hand is […]

I regret to inform you, but I did a poll over here, and the results are very clear: both Zords and EVA Units are classified as Gundams.

In the beginning, Hasbro/Wizards released a new Magic set roughly every eighteen months. Then then twelve, then six, then every quarter. The last ones have been every other month. In six months we could be seeing a new Magic set every other week until they're arriving every day […]

It's an unpopular opinion but I'm just going to come out and say it. I don't think I should have to pay the soda tax on LaCroix just because someone once whispered the word "grapefruit" somewhere near it.

Forget straws, please stop including cables. I don't mean if your thing has weird pogo pins or a magnetic whatever, you're fine keep it up. But if your gizmo has a standard USB port, there's no need to include a six-inch flimsy cable with a micro/mini/C one one end and USB A/C on the other […]

Y'all probably know some of the more popular administrative antigenders. Things like "prefer not to disclose", "none of the above", "tax entity only", "APO/FPO mail". Well, I raise you: "reserved for official use only". Dang, if that isn't me, I don't know what is. Of course none of these are as […]

Forget namby pamby Eurotrash wands made from the heartwood of an ancient oak and the mane of a majestic unicorn. This wand is made from a good old-fashioned all-American railroad spike with a core made from the heartstrings of a high priest struck down by Cortés himself on the steps of the […]

Victim blaming is wrong and bad. Unless you were bitten/scratched by an animal or a child, in which case it was entirely your fault and you should think long and hard about what you did to provoke it so that you can avoid being a bad mean jerk like that ever again.

So sad that Netflix cancelled the sequel to the fun queer action movie _The Old Guard_. Too bad we'll never get to see Uma Thurman & Charlize Theron's witty banter during their climactic battle, or finally realize the onscreen chemistry between Theron & her long-lost wife Veronica Ngô.

Next time someone tells me that they asked an LLM, I'm going to tell them that I received an obscure prophecy from a divine oracle which disagrees. I think that this will be more effective than just giving them facts — **which I also have** — because clearly that didn't work the first time.

Serious question: do any of the current Civilization or Civ-like games have rules/mechanics which might be a reasonable model for any of the following? I'm not looking for precise simulation — I'd just like the system to support these sort of dynamics & the possible ways they might play out […]

They have since changed the headline because they are cowards, but for a single shining moment the NYT and The Onion were indistinguishable. (Via: bsky.app/profile/bencollins.bsky.social/post/3lv5gsuyils2k )

Some people say that Evangelion is a worthless pile of trash, but I don't think that's true. Evangelion (1) helped give people from western Christocentric societies a taste of what cultural appropriation feels like, (2) has a theme song and credit sequence which absolutely slaps, (3) is an […]

It feels like a personal attack that _Arissana Rocha Nahu_ , the Netrunner character/ID wearing a literal frog shirt isn't canonically nonbinary.

Ads aren't great. Ads for crowdfunding campaigns are somehow more annoying because — what? — you're telling me you haven't even made it yet? But now I've started getting ads for crowdfunding campaigns which are "coming soon". We have fully abstracted advertising into its most rarified form. No […]

Apple Music is a pretty solid streaming service — as streaming services go. It's a convenient way to start listening to a new album immediately after someone suggests it. But the fact that it can't keep metadata information consistent is infuriating! Why do albums unpredictably split themselves […]

Is there anything sluttier than the way someone in masc period costume rests their palm on the pommel of their rapier and dangles their limp wrist casually over it? Sure, they might be wearing the tightest of pants which leave absolutely nothing to the imagination when they lean forward. And […]