When college aged, I modeled for a few art majors’ photo projects.

I caused a pizza delivery car to run off the road through the power of my pelvic thrusts. Thankfully they corrected quickly and no one was hurt.

My mental breakdown has their own Facebook page.

I started numerous traditions in my social circles.

I’m reasonably good at taking postcard quality photos with garbage equipment.

I’ve been on radio, as a PSA to get your bum fingered for prostate cancer. Edited the recording myself too. The cadence of saying “digital rectal exam” is burned into my memory, from listening to the audio so damn much while editing.

I made a Smash Bros Brawl hack that quickly became a local mainstay of gaming get togethers (even outside of my immediate social circle) and persisted after I left the area. Ton of custom stuff layered over Brawl Minus, long before infinite came around.

I’ve made a number of custom programs for making “glitch art”. Algorithms to screw with images. Toss in ~50 of my photos, run them through ~20 different functions that make psuedo-random changes, do ~10 runs per function to get even more results. Then delete the results down to ~10 worth keeping. More fun than it sounds.

I led a small marching group in an international parade on ~20 minutes of training while quite drunk. I directed them while holding a flagpole as an extension of my junk. They shouldn’t have let me, and I asked if they wanted a friend with actual marching experience to do it, but they said they wanted me to do it.

I’ve made multiple 6-10 hour drives, some on little sleep, to be there for friends and family in times of need.

Before I proposed to my wife, I spent a week smashing together existing romhacks of Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and getting them to work properly combined by fiddling with the code, then I did a handful of custom modifications myself to the graphics and script. End result is a special version of the game with Zelda and Link swapped, then replaced by my then gf and I, that asked my then gf out on a date when she beat the first dungeon.

She then proceeded to nearly trip over me when I got down on one knee at the end of that date.

For the job that started my career, I was one of three candidates out of 35 who didn’t wear a suit to the first round, and I was still hired.

I turned a seasonal internship plugging in computers into a full time sysadmin/engineering position in the span of three and a half years, skipping a few intermediate positions at that workplace.

I have scripted business critical systems integrations at my workplace, that have impact on literally every employee.

I was the first person in my social circle to be able to afford a house, and my wife and I are the first ones who wanted a kid and had one intentionally.

And a “secret”: I only have a list this big because I have to remind myself of reasons to be proud of myself. Left to my own devices, I don’t tend to think I’m worth much, so every few years I sit down and try to make a little mental list. This is the combination of multiple ones.

They don’t care because that isn’t anywhere near the actual goal or point. The point is to continue moving the needle for what is considered “the norm” to remove one of the few places left where you can be anonymous/untraceable.

It’s part of a much broader push to get real identity somehow inseparably merged with our tech, so everything you do can be traced back to your real life identity because it’s all connected to it by default.

Jesus Christ this blight has been around that long?

I get that per Wikipedia, the source of these is:

In the Spring 2003 issue of the secular humanist magazine Free Inquiry, Laurence W. Britt, who is described as “a retired international businessperson, writer, and commentator” published “Fascism Anyone?”, which included a list of 14 defining characteristics of fascism.

But you have to get that a random unsourced image of white text on a black background is some real “trust me bro” Facebook shares from Grandma type shit.

Getting tired of “it’s okay when our side does it because we’re right, but we’ll clown on it when the bad people do it because they’re wrong”. Just be better.

And while I’m complaining, the source of these is a fucking editorial by someone with no actual credentials or qualifications to declare this shit. Now it’s being passed around online like it’s certifiable fact because it sounds accurate.

All of those are problems. All of those are bad. What is happening in the USA is bad. But muddying the waters by taking random bullshit like this as certified fucking fact only makes talking about shit harder, as everyone has their own set of things they think are truth, most of which have been latched on to for no reason more than “it sounds right and reinforced my beliefs”.

Grumble grumble grumble

Why is Your Post Title Written Like a Clickbait Article Title? The Reasons May Surprise You

Blu-ray drives can be expensive, but USB DVD drives are only ~$20.

I’d also expect anyone who would care about the “physical” edition of the next GTA only being a download code in the box would have a disc drive on the device they wanted to install it on.

On paper, it’s an official government news app being pushed over MDM to phones that are definitionally government property. There’s not really ground to stand on here.

The fact that it’s pure propaganda rather than an actually useful source of executive branch news is more a problem of the “White House News feed” or whatever you want to call it. It’s a big fucking important problem.

But this is effectively whining that the fleet car you borrowed from work phones it’s GPS location home. Oh no, a phone your work bought and paid for runs apps your work auto installs to it? Then only use it for work shit bozo, it’s not your personal device.

There’s no hard facts about what the hell they’re actually planning, it’s just a fluff press release.

They claim that PACTs will be some sort of token that sites and services that can confirm you are a human or “trusted AI agent” can grant you to allow other sites to better identify you as good, but that these tokens will also somehow be entirely anonymous and unable to be used to track an identity across multiple sites and services. At absolute best this will create a sort of “chain of trust” hierarchy where people who use more popular services tied to their real identity would gather more PACTs or have “higher trust” ones, just consolidating digital power further.

Also, the first quote from Cloudflare’s CTO has them claiming that people are starting to use AI agents to order them meal deliveries. Lmao, in what universe?

It helped that there were used and rental markets for relatively “modern” titles that are now almost entirely non-existent.

You worked places with style guides? Did… Did you have a real testing environment that wasn’t prod too?

I got taken off a project recently for being too direct about how the rest of the team was just spray and praying entirely AI generated code with no standards or review whatsoever, and they were charging ahead like it was a race to implement features we hadn’t even discussed if we wanted/needed.

If you can’t tell me how it works, you can’t confirm that we actually need it, you can’t tell me the upstream and downstream effects (or confirm they don’t exist), and you can’t even confirm that we even want it to do the thing it only supposedly does, then we have better things to do than go on a wild goose chase trying to debug it when there’s a looming deadline for things that legitimately do not work that we need. Stop vibe coding and actually review the existing shit for fucks sake. If the requirements have never been clear, solve that instead of generating more slop. Maybe update some of the existing documentation instead of having AI wholesale hallucinate entirely new not quite right ones over and over.

Anyway, please tell me more happy development bedtime stories. I need to chase away the nightmares.

Trump’s too dumb to even consider wearing a mask to hide his racism, and his real face is far more grotesque than this drawing.

I struggle to even understand the point of this as an image, let alone as a meme. Just feels like pointless “preaching to the choir” shit to me.

Updoots on the left I guess? You’re so brave?

The eye icon in the bottom left should get you a “normal” one. The headphones get you an audio captcha.

But yeah, this is just Google trying to correlate your PC with your phone, and all the personal info across both.

Depending on the legality and safety of doing so, you may also want to look into tech for avoiding censorship and oppresive regimes.

Things like TOR, running your own DNS server, etc.

Edit: I didn’t want to just leave this vague, so I looked up the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Surveillance Self-Defense guide hoping for some better specifics, but unfortunately it looks like it’s mainly about making security plans, understanding your risk profile, using secure settings on your personal devices, using signal, using TOR, and selecting “the VPN that’s right for you”.

Like you really have a choice of “the VPN right for you” when they shut down things to only approved in/out IPs.

There might be useful info there, but it wasn’t quite what I was hoping to point you at, sorry.

Considering the risks involved with hosting something like this, I would probably start with research on how you could host this safely/anonymously. That would be my first priority. Can’t help people if they take you out.

Next step would be looking at piefed/Lemmy or whatever systems you’re thinking about hosting and identifying what features/logs/etc you would need to disable, modify, or set up to clear themselves automatically so that you wouldn’t have information worth going after in the first place.

Better dry yourself off before you start to grow mold, big boy

Entire GitHub repo is brand new. Set up 6 minutes before this post, with only one commit, uploading all the files.

Make of that what you will.

Hooray seaman! Have a se-

I did when I was younger. Had better fine motor skills with my “primary” hand. Eventually as I started playing more PC games and using computers at school more I got tired of always having to move the mouse around and having to reconfigure keybinds for every game (where it was even possible to do so). So I adapted to right handed mouse somewhere around 14 years old.

Beyond that, in my time in IT support, I think I encountered only three people who did left handed mice.

Fuck those guys for soiling the term “grand wizard”.

I’ve got the vague frame of a joke somewhere around that involving the only orbs they’ve ever pondered being their own testicles, but good wording for it isn’t coming to me.

Pfeces, purine, and ptoilet ptissue

Or just let the replies sit unopened.