After my trip to the gulags, I hopped back in to The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan with the eleventh book, Knife of Dreams. It’s the last book he wrote before his death. I actually liked the previous - tenth - book, though it had very little plot. I think maybe two chapters in the whole book moved the story along, so practically you could skip the whole of it and not miss much. Luckily the one I’m currently reading actually starts moving things towards the climax. As ever, I am terribly conflicted with Jordan’s writing.

I also some time ago watched the movie The Death of Stalin and quite enjoyed it, so inspired by that I picked up the original comic book by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin. It was a good comic book, though perhaps somewhat more sombre in tone than the film. I heartily recommend both though.

I really liked McGurdy’s book. Her mother was a piece of work, but it’s obvious she’s done the work and is in a better head space now. Good for her. And yeah, the writing isn’t exactly complex, but it gets the point across.

I want to be mean to her, but unlike her compatriots there, she has at least some insight. Good for her. Now stop being an idiot.

I don’t think I have it in me to love anyone who likes GNOME. It’s just not natural.

This is great advice and why I find URL shortening services really annoying. I really do want to see what I’m clicking.

What a nakedly thin skinned and insecure little man.

Back in the day you could catch malware from online ads. And the pop-ups, the damn pop-ups, so annoying. For me, the final straw was when ads got sound. That got real old real fast, kind of like web pages with embedded MIDIs. I installed an ad blocker and haven’t looked back. Any time I browse Internet without a blocker it’s a horror show that kills me inside. If ads were reasonably sized static images I could manage it, but advertisers shot themselves in the foot by making their ads so obnoxious and went all-in on tracking. The trust is gone forever. Ads and advertisers can burn in hell.

The early Internet had a few simple rules:

• Never feed a troll
• Never trust anything written online
• Never tell anyone your real name or address
• There are no girls online (i.e. people are not who they claim to be)
• Online is not IRL

And most people knew these rules. The proliferation of the Internet has brought a lot of people who don’t understand these rules in to the fold and it has made the Internet a worse place. “Normies” seemingly think the Internet world works like your normal social interactions - it does not. The anonymity of the Internet brings out the worst in people. We really need to bring back the rules of the early Internet for the safety of everyone.

Feel free to comment more rules if you remember any.

As much as I miss the early Internet though, I genuinely do wish I’d had more protection from the seedier sites. I am not better off for having seen the gore and shock sites.

A stunt so nice he filmed it twice.

Jackie is a crazy mofo.

Yeah, it’s a patchwork of sources.

It warms my heart to see the cyberpunk film get some love. It’s an entertaining film. I even have the book version of that one!

Check the Morton Jankel Cut.

Very little. If I’m being honest with myself, I have a slight preference for how DOS/Windows handled mounting drives. I’ve never been a huge fan of the UNIX directory structure anyway. I’d like to see some sort of filesystem hierarchy reform for a clearer format.

But of course, using Linux is a relief in most ways. There’s no going back.

Since everyone already mentioned it, I recommend Debian.

Flash was trash that made the web almost unusable for a time. I was glad it died. Shit never properly worked anyway.

Oh no, I pick a different distro for different needs. On my desktop I run openSUSE Tumbleweed for that rolling release goodness (and the occasional hiccup). It’s my main computer and I like to keep it as up-to-date as possible.

On my laptop and media PC I use Debian, because I don’t update those as often and “stale” software is fine, preferred even, and because I don’t want to troubleshoot updates on the run with my laptop. I also used Debian (well, Raspbian) on my Raspberry Pi, but I retired that one. In general, I prefer Debian for servers.

I also have a PinePhone with postmarketOS, but I rarely use that these days. Still, I just recently re-installed it to have a small Linux tablet computer just in case. pmOS is the best OS I’ve used on the PinePhone, though it can’t really fix the PP’s inherent issues.

I gave up after one episode and deleted my Netflix account.

That is where all the best ancient philosophy comes from!

“Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.”

-Perineum

Those darn dastardly Democrats trying to make Trump look bad by Bidening the price of gas!