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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: February 18th, 2024

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  • To be fair, I don’t think he’s actually a bad dude either. Again, flawed, but reasonably well intentioned.

    The “worst” thing they did was definitely developing feelings while she’s engaged to Roy, but most of that was the nature of working in close proximity. It’s inherently different than sneaking around to spend “platonic” time together for a bunch of hours by choice. He had feelings, but mostly didn’t cross the line. I don’t think he’s a terrible person for laying his feelings on the line when she’s engaged to someone he doesn’t like either. Actually married is the line where it moves to completely not OK.

    But yeah, the whole end thing really wasn’t anyone being awful. He unilaterally made some decisions that should have been a partnership, and he was wrong to put that much stress on her without talking to her and hearing her. Because they had kids, primarily. But he did recognize that and came back and made the commitment to their family. Then, once she had time to actually breathe again, she was ready to take the leap with him.

    That was longer than I meant it to be again lol. But I was surprised to hear the take (and that it was more popular than I’d guess) because it genuinely never occurred to me. She was in pretty deep and he was lashing out from the stress of the situation before she even vocalized her problems with it. (At least from what we see.)


  • For interaction? Pseudonyms with a ramp up into being able to interact fully is the middle ground. Your activity on that specific site will be monitored to kick you out if you behave inappropriately, but it shouldn’t carry across sites unless you voluntarily use a third party identity provider (which is a good option to have).

    Massive scale is a big part of the issue. It raises the barrier to entry for competing platforms (because being able to scale to rapid growth is a huge up front investment, and can easily cripple your platform if you don’t do so), and brings the moderation responsibilities beyond anything actually manageable. Small to mid sized communities being the norm is much more manageable, much easier to develop for, and much healthier generally.


  • Use the library. Find stuff you like. In the US, Libby and Hoopla are great digital borrowing options a lot of libraries support. I tend to actually buy fiction when it’s an author/series I want day one. (Mostly audiobooks, some ebooks). For nonfiction, I do the best research I can to determine that it’s evidence backed and well respected by other authors in the field (generally psychology-ish).

    In terms of the format, I mostly don’t do physical books. I can’t carry 1000 of those in my pocket. I mostly get a handful of favorites to have on a shelf and maybe talk someone else into reading, but I’ll still read on my ereader or audio. My preference is audiobook because I have a lot of time where I can listen while doing other stuff. I do get a fair number of ebooks as well, but a lot of those are programming books because audio doesn’t work for code and especially because there are a lot of awesome bundles through Humble Bundle for them.


  • I was listening to a football podcast (they go off topic in the offseason because there isn’t a lot to talk about), and they had a whole rant about how Pam Beasley is a monster.

    Because she was friends with Jim while dating Roy. (Yeah him having feelings for her wasn’t exactly a shocker, but it’s different when it’s you. And she shut him down clearly when he actually made a move.)

    Because she did the art school thing, I guess?

    Because she was sad when Jim was dating Karen. (She did genuinely try to be her friend despite that, and went to cry in a corner alone.)

    And because there was tension when Jim did Athlead. (Which if you actually watch, was him biting her head off when she messed up with a video of a recital, and him instigating a couple other times, presumably because of the stress of the situation, while she was being run ragged as almost a single mother at home.)

    And because apparently chasing your dreams going to New York to go to art school while in a relationship is the same as doing it when you’re actually married and have kids. But she didn’t bend over backward enough to support him I guess?

    It’s just really weird to me, and he’s not the only one with that weird twist on the character. (No she’s not perfect. Sitcoms are all characters who are kind of monsters. But her as the bad guy doesn’t make sense.)





  • Thanks for this. I don’t usually dive into longer format article stuff because I find it on my phone and reading on my phone sucks. I tried pocket, but it didn’t function at all on my reader.

    This solves that problem reasonably well.

    (Edit: also an RSS reader? Maybe I should start using RSS again. I do wish it offered paged navigation controls to better work on an ereader, but it’s definitely an improvement still.)


  • I would much rather pay full price than still pay for a DRMed version that’s effectively guaranteed to be supporting some sort of organized crime group. Mass distribution at scale, with DRM, by definition means Russian organized crime, or a drug cartel, or some other global bad actor on that scale that’s doing shit like trafficking humans, arms dealing, drugs, etc, as well.

    But ignoring that (and that I generally buy my content), I wouldn’t pay $.10 for an illegitimate copy that had an added layer of DRM on it. It’s fundamentally fucking repulsive for some subgroup whose whole business relies on bypassing someone else’s copy control to add their own.






  • Seriously.

    Yes, there’s an element of complexity that makes it hard to completely avoid bugs. But there’s way more arbitrary complexity that doesn’t serve a purpose and unnecessary dependencies that create more problems than they solve causing issues than there is just the inherent difficulty of what software actually needs to do.

    Also, maybe just don’t copy paste code from 20 different tracking tools wherever they tell you to.

    Edit: also cloud everything. The amount of overhead it takes to put 100 million users in the cloud when there’s nothing they need that can’t be done locally is stupid as hell.


  • I’m not into the subscription library thing (though I do have PS+ premium, because it was a reasonably cheap upgrade from the base package on Black Friday when I caved and bought a subscription), but I can see how some people find value in the subscription library that’s included.

    That said, fuck Luna specifically, because I tried the “included with prime” version with one of the legends of heroes games, got moderately hooked, and it will only let you export the saves when they remove the game from the paid library. So even your saves are held hostage to a paid subscription.