As the parent of a toddler, there have been a lot of these lately between Ukraine, Gaza, the earthquake in Turkey and any of a dozen other natural disasters and brutal wars of ethnic cleansing, and I don’t expect the pace to slow down soon.

It’s the first clip in this compilation, but they’re all pretty good… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Wgwtc1U6c4

In @GreenTacklebox’s defense, I’ve had a couple awful landlords (see the post in my comment history about being charged for carpet cleaning in a house with all wood floors… I could tell some stories about that shithole, too) but when I’ve rented directly from a human being, who had a personal connection to and investment in the building, it’s been great. I lived in an old “bachelor’s apartment” building several years ago which was purchased by a well-to-do commercial real estate developer who just wanted a nice penthouse unit in the neighborhood, and she was the best landlord I’ve ever had. Hired one of the longtime residents as a live-in super, got to know her tenants, and put a lot of effort into fixing the place up while keep rents very reasonable. One month I forgot to drop off my rent check, and two weeks after it was due, she called to ask not where her money was, but if I was okay or if I needed any help. She wasn’t exactly a mom-n-pop operation, but I’d classify her as quite decent.

Was she the exception that proves the rule? Possibly. On the other hand, I think that in this field as in many others it’s the corrupting presence of megacorporations seeking yottabucks of ROI off the backs of the little people that distort the healthy functioning of the marketplace. If we could get Wall Street out of the residential real estate market things wouldn’t be so insane as they are now.

Folks, there’s a difference between a slumlord and a decent landlord. I’ve owned a house for ten years now, and in addition to the mortgage and taxes and insurance I pay every month for the privelege, I’ve had to spend tens of thousands replacing the roof and doing other regular maintenance tasks. I’m actually about to dump thirty percent of the original purchase price into more deferred repairs and maintenance to get it back to a point where all the finished space is habitable again. Owning a house is expensive in ways that I did not fully understand until I bought mine, and decent property managers are taking care of all that for you, and if that’s not a job I honestly don’t know what is.

Slumlords and corporate landlords can fuck right the hell off, though.

I’m a bit squeamish, so I arranged myself so as to be seated basically next to my wife’s head, facing the wall, and was laser focused on holding her hand and maintaining eye contact with her.

Meanwhile, the delivering doctor was narrating a play by play as our kid went from just barely crowning to head fully out in three contractions, and then she just had to maneuver his shoulder free and he popped out on the fourth push. Three random things I will never forget from that night:

• The doctor seeing the umbilical cord and announcing “That’s a man that likes to eat!”
• The doctor further complimenting my wife that she “rocked that thing out like it was her job”
• One of the nurses looking into the hazmat bucket they’d packed the placenta into and muttering “Jesus Christ…”

Overall, 10/10, never doing it ever again.

I remember some of these discussions around the time of the Twitter and Reddit exodii and the mindset of many of these folks was essentially that they’d used this social media protocol to create a nice, quiet safe space for like-minded tech-savvy queer leftists, and felt that the explosion in interest threatened to expose their posts to people outside of the community that they had come to know and trust – which is a point of view I can understand, but as a counterargument, you’re on a public social media platform, and specifically one that is designed to spread content broadly and indiscriminately to servers outside of your control. If you wanted to keep things out of the view of the larger Internet there were other, better solutions for a community platform that you probably should have picked instead.

Banned from Lemmygrad Lite? What a terrible loss!

I still participate in a few small subs that Lemmy doesn’t have the critical mass to replicate, and even in many of those there has been a marked decline in the quality of posts and discussion. It’s painfully clear that the mods who left during the API protest were putting in serious effort, and the scabs that replaced them aren’t up to the prior standard. Makes it a lot easier to leave most of Reddit behind, at least.

Super disappointing, yeah. I’ve worked a bit with Dave McCarty during a previous Worldcon and this sort of ham-handed self-censorhip is not what I would have expected of him. Even if something like that was more or less a foregone conclusion from the moment Chengdu won the bid, I would have at hoped that he’d at least let the local Worldcon committee bear responsibilty, rather than being a willing and proactive partner.

That said, as the report that this article is based on points out, that the premier award in SF and fantasy literature is joined at the hip with Worldcon is a bit awkward, and even when the hosting country doesn’t have repressive and omnipresent government censorship, the local mores and tastes are going to have an impact on voting. Not that it’s bad for non-American or non-Western viewpoints and fandoms to carry weight in the voting, but maybe it’d be better to separate the administration of the Hugos from that of Worldcon, and develop a vetting and voting process that can be consistently and deliberately inclusive, rather than being at the mercy of whose hosting bid wins in a given year? Seems like it would be important to resolve this sooner rather than later, given that Egypt is in the running to host in 2026 and Saudi Arabia has made perennial bids for the convention as well.

Haven’t seen it suggested yet, so I’ll throw out Linda Nagata’s Inverted Frontier series. Without giving away too much, explorers on the periphery of a collapsed posthuman civilization launch an expedition back towards its center, and along the way find various eldritch monstrosities – of human origin and otherwise – as they try to solve the mystery of the collapse. It’s more thriller than horror in tone, but it checks your other boxes quite well.

I appreciate how quickly this has mutated from a jab about how frequently she flies on her private jet to “Taylor Swift is jet, like if true”

But it did give us a damn fine concert movie from Muse, and that’s indisputable.

I mean, neither was he, and given that the Saudis bankrolled his purchase and he’s apparently reduced the value of their investment by half, you have to wonder what he’s giving them that has saved him from a one-way trip to a Saudi consulate.

I mean, you don’t really have to wonder that hard. But still, somebody loses you multiple billions in an extended ketamine-fueled rampage, you start to wonder if you should make an example of them…

I appreciate the “explain the movie plot badly” energy of this post.

Joke’s on you, creep, I have a toddler. All my algorithm serves up now is Blippi videos, steam locomotives, and construction equipment!

I was a longtime Debian/apt diehard but I’m coming down on the same side of late. My homelab runs Proxmox (Debian based) with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS containers for more up-to-date packages, but my attempt to use KDE Neon (Ubuntu-based) for my desktop PC was a disaster. I’ve switched to Nobara (Fedora-based), and other than having to switch from Wayland back X11 because Wayland on NVidia breaks a bunch of things I need for work it’s been relatively smooth sailing.

It’s like a suburban tract home developer with a case of brain worms tried to build townhomes based solely on a verbal description he got from space alien visiting Brooklyn for the first time, relayed over a cell phone with one bar of reception.

The old Trackmans have very limited inputs relative to modern gaming mice. There are some trackballs with scroll wheels, but they have different ergonomics (you rotate the ball with your thumb rather than your index, middle, and ring fingers) that my buddies aren’t fond of.

Given that theirs is a very niche use case, I don’t think anybody’s gonna make a trackball to suit them that also has a scroll wheel, but I guess if somebody was motivated enough, there’s an opportunity for some sort of ESP-based open source hardware.

I have a couple friends that play PC games on old-school Trackman trackballs. The amount of griping when we play a game with something bound by default to the mousewheel is INCREDIBLE.

“ArE yOu TrIgGeReD, LiB?”

“No, just feeling pity for you in spite of myself.”