I bailed on Netflix when I realized that damn, I’m going like a month with this on my phone and haven’t really watched much, maybe one anime? Can I get something other than shitty anime, Netflix? Fun action flick from the last 5 years maybe? No? Never the good one, always the knockoff, the shitty sequel, nothing at all? Canceled Mindhunter? Because of course. Okay, no more pay money, and then I didn’t miss it. That decision took a shameful amount of time to make.

This was way before the password share thing. I don’t know what the rest of you are even doing. Stuff for the kids I guess.

I guess I do this bullshit, now, for entertainment, but this Suuuuuucks with a capital S, so the next step is to find the government chip that makes me scroll and metaphorically remove it. Fuck socials, too. Fuck all this shit anymore.

This sounds like the battery and the charger’s problem to handle, not mine.

All this tech, all this automation for every damn thing, and people keep coming at me like I’m supposed to do everything manually with my fingers and eyes and maybe an alarm or something to keep me on schedule. No. Stop it.

Make the charger handle it, or shut up. Make the phone, the charger, and the battery handle it together, you know, with digital automation. Do not even mention it to me.

This type of relationship is pretty common in war. You and the squad end up “in the shit” and now you have all crossed the boundaries of what civilians call “manliness”. You are free, unimpeachable, the manliest thing, a real warrior, a soldier in battle. The things you do now define manliness, you are writing the rules. They can call you whatever, you will reply with the sort of laughter that silences fools.

People die around you. The sound of another man’s voice becomes poetry to you. How much longer will you hear his voice? Who knows, tell him a shitty joke. Sit on his lap for a gag, do whatever. Drink in his presence, press his flesh against yours, be alive together, try to keep him in your memory, tomorrow we all may die. Has anybody seen those pictures of soldiers from the American Civil War all hanging out and mugging for the camera? Acting all “gay” with each other? That’s what war does to men, sometimes, probably not that often, I fear.

Somebody online with a military background once remarked about the safest he’s ever felt, including in civilian life, was when he was in some tent in a war zone with the rest of the platoon, everyone in their sleeping bags, crammed in the tent together like a litter of kittens in a box. Sure, they were in the death zone, for real, but he was warm and snug, surrounded by armed badasses who would come to his aid at once if anything nasty went down. He said he slept like a baby, that he’s never felt that sense of security since, not even safe in bed as a civilian, later.

It means a lot to me that this book, TLOR, was pretty much written by the Great War. Tolkien went to that war, against his own will, compelled by shame campaigns, not even the law, in spite of his own convictions, and he did not have some safe posting at the base, no, he was at the Somme. He saw the worst of it, probably missed death by inches several times, saw mud and blood, was deafened and battered, only to survive at last, coming home as changed as Frodo.

He watched men charge into machine guns like mice into a blender, watched them die of trench foot and the stupid ways war kills you without even glory or honor to show for it, saw that sometimes courage is just hiding in your little hole and not screaming when the tanks roll over. He saw Mordor in person. No man’s land.

Then he came home, and did he write some edgy darkness? No. He wrote this thing, this fantasy, with its message of hope that evil can be vanquished, and that men can be good, yes, even when they seem utterly lost to goodness. This is somehow the lesson that the War to End All Wars had taught him. He had nothing left to prove, so he made a pretty, frivolous thing, for children, but couldn’t help it, he couldn’t help making something bigger than that. He knew how intimate men become with each other under fire, and it ended up in the book.

That is the only thing he wanted to remember, that unexpected love when suffering and death are right on top of you. I wonder who Legolas was to him? Somebody young and beautiful, who deserved to live a thousand years, but didn’t, probably. They shall not grow old.

We shouldn’t need the machine guns coming at us to hug our friends, that’s probably what he wanted the world to know.

I wonder if it works like IRC. The “plague” this entire time has been servers. As soon as the idea only works because somebody, somewhere, is maintaining a server, cloud or hardware, then you’re kinda sunk. The server is the bottleneck. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a AAA game launch only for the servers to be inadequate. It happens again and again and again, so I assume the business considerations push them toward having just enough server and maybe a little less, never extra, which costs money and cuts margins.

Somewhere there are a bunch of servers howling away in a room that are actually Discord, and Discord spends money to make them howl, so there’s never as much server as you want, which is why things start bogging down with too many people in the chat room at once.

Most importantly to a corporation, if you have to interact with their servers in order to do anything, then they can own the platform by owning the servers. So there’s always going to be a server, even if it’s not strictly needed. The same consideration goes through the head of the streamer who always wants to launch a Discord because it’s “free” but they can sell it to you and then have top level control of an entire community as an asset that can be sold to others. There’s always a server. There will be a server if the actual application doesn’t really need it.

The reason IRC works fine with 1500 people in a chat is because IRC uses the user’s machine for any sort of computation power it needs, and then everything else it is doing is just sending data across wires. There is no central server farm. I haven’t used IRC in a really, really long time, but if it hasn’t changed, then it also doesn’t support lots of picture posting, which helps. Most of the memory usage on my machine at idle is just too many Discord channels all needing to use my local RAM memory to store the umpteen thousand photos everyone has uploaded, all the memes and etc. The IRC I remember was text, and text uses so little data that it can be treated like zero data.

Lots of pictures are probably non-negotiable in the modern era. Heck, they’re pretty important for serious work tasks, like putting up a shot of the broken gadget, so the engineering team can get an eyeball on the failure, that means pictures are in, text-only isn’t viable. I don’t know if modern IRC supports this or not, it probably does if people are still using it at all.

But IRC is a piece of open-source software that you install on your machine, free to the user. It’s not a web app, it doesn’t live in a browser. The data of you interacting with others is being sent out to them and also back to you, where it shows up in your IRC client and the chat room. If 1500 people are using it, then 1500 people have each added some of their machine power to making it all work, so it scales, it always has as much hardware as it needs. Again, there’s no server in the middle to run out of capacity, so that problem is just bypassed.

Everything used to work like this, circa the late 1990s and early 2010s. Everyone was assumed to be on a PC of their own, and the only problem was how to connect them together to do stuff, like have deranged fan wars about shows. BBSs were already kind of old hat, and there’s that damn server again, every BBS has one. All the most clever apps of the 90s, even the web, managed to jump through hoops to avoid the necessity of a central server to get things done because then somebody has to pay for it, run it, maintain it and own it. We just want the wires, the lovely, lovely cables dragged across the sea at somebody else’s unthinkable expense. If you can eliminate the server somehow, then you win. And they did. Things like IRC and ICQ blew the hell up from using that model.

We really need to dig that entire concept back up and brush the dust off of it. I wonder if that’s what Matrix is.

Now if you’ll excuse me I need to go prune some pointless Discord channels. Oh, by the by, fucking nobody uses Slack, or knows what it is. Dudes on the internet all think it’s normal because tech offices seem to use it a lot, the rest of the world has never used Slack. Up until right now I was assuming that Discord and Slack are the same thing, owned by the same company, and Slack is just the “business casual” version of Discord. This doesn’t seem to be true, but that’s how unfamiliar I am with Slack, while being chronically online. There are probably more people around who still remember ICQ than have ever used Slack in their lives.

I love the Church of the Subgenius reference built into Slack’s name. From what I can tell, nobody who uses that thing actually gets any slack, it actively removes slack from your life and makes boss surveillance really, really easy for the boss, but you must always act as though Big Brother can hear, or you’re fucked. Good work Bob, nice joke. Anyway, I shut up now.

I gave it some thought and decided that yes, while it’s nice to get out in nature, an afternoon in the park does just as well, walking around, no need to sleep there, so the reason people are camping is that we are practicing homelessness, just in case.

I just want to say that I appreciate the truly fractal nature of these memes

Sharks have flooded Shark Infested Waters with shark asshole stink but this time the asshole stink is AI generated and Taylor Swift has a billion dollars for lawyers.

Please tell me you made it talk to a bot.

And then she made a bunch of Jade eggs for your puss puss and sold them.

Hobbits walking past the hobbit hole in the pic like motherfuckin gentrification buildings brah, this rent is already too high, I gotta use my gun more

People certainly are polishing this meme to a high sheen. Anyway, tell it to the pothos ivy.

If there was just some obnoxious little T-notch I had to line up on the connector, then I would fumble with it once and after that I could probably get it done in the dark, but apparently it doesn’t matter how many times I use a USB, I’ll never learn to use it on the first try, with the lights on and a flashlight pointed at the situation.

I like that getting it wrong and forcing it also destroys the port, so if it’s a crucial connection, and you’re in a hurry in poor light it’s a great way to kill the whole show trying to insist on that USB going in first try.

Great design, Crowley, you really are a professional. I think it’s better than that awful motorway, this one has touched the world, I can see why that angel loves you so much, what an artist.

Sorry wrong fandom

Oh so sorry we misplaced your paperwork very badly for you Mr Navalny, I cannot say that we have a death certificate for you but I’m sure we could find one if necessary.

That guy’s red jacket was truly something.

God he was bad at being inconspicuous. Too king to grey man properly or something.

Oh well, guess I’m still happy about this magic bag i got for going places I don’t want Google knowing about.

The Ford F650 is part of a platform that, as you can see, is heavy-duty enough that you can put a proper dump bed on the back. It can be built many different ways, and the way that Ford will sell the vast majority of these trucks is that it will sell a cab and empty frame to another company, who will then build something else around it, some sort of heavy-duty thing that will see quite a lot of professional use, probably off-road more often than not. The massive ground clearance will look a lot more appropriate when this truck ends up where it belongs.

These things end up with buckets on the back, and used for powerline maintenance, or the entire back end becomes a steel locker for a bunch of welding and fabrication equipment. Once it is specced out properly, the size of it will make sense.

This model of truck is large and serious enough to also come with a proper, grown up diesel engine comparable to other heavy equipment engines in both weight and general durability. That it is the true purpose of the Ford F650, it is big and heavy enough to accept a respectable diesel engine for a proper dump truck, not the little baby diesels in the F150s, but one that is probably not available in anything smaller, a diesel that will actually last for 1 million km if maintained. It won’t even be a Ford engine, it will probably be a Cummins or another brand common in American heavy equipment, not passenger cars.

I am not trying to flex when I say this thing isn’t a toy. The transmission for it probably isn’t available in any other Ford pickup. They’re too small. Most of them will not spend a lot of time in the commuter lane, they’ll be on job sites all day. Even Americans don’t really drive the truck in the picture. The thing is in a class by itself.

Ford may as well sell a civilian version in case any Texas oil boys want the biggest truck on the block, but that just means adding a pickup truck bed to it, which goes with the rest of the cab in front. It certainly looks ridiculous. But somebody will want it to pull a really long horse trailer, so the bed back there is just a place to install a fifth wheel, the attachment point for a goose neck trailer. The owner will probably be somebody with a successful contracting business, somebody who can justify this thing as a proper business expense, since their other vehicle will say Caterpillar on it somewhere and has to also be towed on a trailer from job site to job site.

That is what the Ford F650 is for, and can do, it tows other heavy equipment around on public roads. It looks a lot less ridiculous with a skid loader and heavy trailer behind it. Park it next to a piece of proper construction equipment and it looks like a baby toy. It is small by heavy equipment standards, so that makes it maneuverable on construction sites.

The size of the current F150, the truck meant for average office workers to buy, that is the problem. It is unreasonable and no longer even fit for its original utility purpose. The modern F150 is too big, too expensive, and too cushy to be a farm truck, or a work truck on a job site. It is extremely common, overtall, and perfect for killing pedestrians.

The size of this thing, the F650, is not actually an issue. It is huge for defensible reasons, and it just looks crazy when you try to spec it out for civilian pickup use, because that’s fuckng crazy. It looks striking in the marketing material, for sure. We’re discussing the beast right now. Victory achieved for the marketing guy who insisted on offering this spec. Now even the Germans are aware of the truck.

But, oops, I can only assume that this entire “fuck cars” community is just the online version of those Just Stop Oil pricks, it’s all the idea of some PR firm who want to make public transport advocacy look like a position for shitty assholes with no respect for the needs of others. So I assume you don’t care about a proper explanation. I didn’t realize I was here when I started typing. Too late now.

I wish Reddit would stay on Reddit, instead of growing into completely different websites like some sort of mold. But anyway, the F650 is not actually a problem.

Throw them in black olives and bring it here.

I’m not sure how many lost their jobs to the machines at all. At a glance there appear to be about 4 attendants per self-checkout area, which is at least a dozen self-checkout machines at our local Walmart, so they all stay busy enough what with telling the machine I’m old enough to buy beer and such.

Minus the self-checkout machines I could imagine 2 of the 4 clerks running the usual “not enough cashiers” play that stores got famous for, with the other 2 being sent to the back for whatever duties. Possibly they aren’t hired at all.

If my questionable observations are accurate, then that means that maybe Walmart is getting more throughput, with everyone ringing themselves up, but maybe they aren’t spending a bunch less on labor.

I can’t see anybody going back on the self-check machines, though. Not after all that money spent, and the decade that retailers have spent waiting for customers to learn how to do the job themselves, especially the older folks. That was a bitter change to buy, so it’s wishful thinking that we’re going right back to human checkout only.

Hell, Aldi just installed a couple self checkout machines here. They were the one holding out, too, since an Aldi cashier zooms the groceries through so fast it’s tough to justify. Oh, and they’re trying to have that one person, with shoppers in front of them, also be the attendant for the self-check machines. I double scanned something by accident and the clerk had to stop their own line to help me by pushing a button from way over there and then back to scanning they went.

Come on, Aldi.

I think you’re expecting some women to show up and argue with you like this is drive time FM radio with Wacky Bob the DJ but all you’re going to get is dudes trying to act like they won because they get mad at the word hygiene and piss on the seat when they leave just to spite you.

Yes, when they leave. They won’t put the lid down without a gun to their heads, but they’ll hold one last bit of tinkle just for you.

This joke needs a more appropriate venue, is what I’m saying . Nobody here actually cares about the subject.