North Carolina is gerrymandered to hell.

We’re still new to the game, and we have no idea what we’re looking for.

There’s a new accessibility framework being started by a Gnome developer very recently.

Which means, best case scenario where it’s perfect and other desktops buy in, it will roll out to traditional desktop users in half a decade at the earliest.

No feelings either way, I started using X since the last millennium and have been on Wayland without problems (Gnome or sway, never anything more than integrated graphics card) for about four years now.

But I really wish there was an fvwm for Wayland. And Window Maker.

This gives Kryten vibes.

Deadpool

Koyaanisqatsi

Probably still Firefox. The web is shit.

There was a KDE theme recently that was deleting home folders

I used to prefer ThinkPads but I’ve moved on. I have had lots of reliability problems with them over the past few years. I had keys fall off a newer ThinkPad keyboard (which wasn’t user replaceable) and another new ThinkPad just die under warranty and the repair person damaged it further when trying to fix it.

I am on System76 now and have no issues and they do good things like right to repair and Coreboot.

If I had to choose a single laptop for everything, it would be the Toughbook 40. I have one for work and it has a 1200 nit display. It runs Ubuntu LTS perfectly. It costs several thousand dollars new but has swapable components, multiple batteries, and part availability is measured in decades. You can get an older CF-31 or CF-54 for a few hundred dollars and still find new components for it.

Swastikas painted on our house when I was a kid.

Kids yell in the public park tell me that I have to go back. When pushing my son in a stroller.

Getting told that I will have to pay for stuff when I pick it up at the store at Dollywood, like I don’t know how a merchant economy works.

Had to fight a lot in the feral public school system growing up. All the ching chong jokes.

Being referred to as “chowie” by a prominent basketball scout while in high school.

Being asked if I eat dogs by my boss. In 2023.

Being asked if my mom was an Asian whore by another boss. In 2018.

Being told that I’m not Asian and that some white girl looks more Asian than me and how can I even claim to be Asian when I don’t have squinty eyes?

Jokes about my ancestry when they can’t place me.

Being pulled into secondary every time I travel through Paris CDG because I always get flagged. And one Securitas security officer telling me that Americans will never accept me as American when I finished.

Dating scene as a teen, everything going well, then meeting the parents, then being told I wasn’t allowed to date their white daughter anymore. Like clockwork. Which is fine, they can’t handle the spice in my food anyway.

The last computer I built for my dad before he passed ran Xubuntu LTS exclusively for about half a decade. No problems. He did updates himself.

Endeavour sway edition was great at this.

Mess with the best, Die like the rest.

Debian.

If you want to try something different, maybe LMDE.

More time has passed since this song came out, than the “Back in the Day” span of time that 2004 Mustaine was singing about.

It’s funny that we buy these metal and glass phones and then protect them with rubber and plastic cases.

New phones are made to show wear so that they lose resale value.

There were/are some really good Asian and Asian-American communities on Reddit that didn’t follow typical discourse. IYKYK.

Some of those groups are replicated on Lemmy, but are completely empty of content.

Until recently, TikTok was filling that role for me, but it seems it is starting to get more “appropriate” for American audiences as I think they are finally playing the game. Lots of “Jesus” and “white guy with microphone” popping up on my feed there now. The same thing happened to Youtube about 15 years ago so there’s nothing new under the sun.

Gutenberg was a grifter. He stole money from people, sometime his own family, and ran up debts that he couldn’t pay.

The only reason that he started printing bibles and became religious was because he was going to be thrown in prison for swindling people out of money, and it’s a bad look to throw someone in prison who prints the word of God. In fact, most of what we know about Gutenberg comes from his court documents.

Also movable type and the printing press were already known in Europe and had already been invented in East Asia several hundred years earlier than Gutenberg. (the first printed texts date back to 700 CE and movable type prints around 1000 CE, both in modern China). It was nothing new.

People used their real names, and even posted where they were from on Usenet. There was a sense of community and there was a term – netequitte – that described how we would act towards one another. If you used a handle, watch out, you might be a troll, and you certainly weren’t going to be immediately trusted and had to build your reputation.

Replies went below the body, not above it, and everybody hated Microsoft Outlook for unilaterally deciding that replies go at the top of a message. Similarly, people hated WebTV users for just bringing the level of discourse to the gutter.

Web forums were fast and also a good place for community, kind of a gateway from Usenet to modern discussion forums. When people passed away we would all attend the funerals or whatever if we were close. There were 56k warnings in the subject line if a post had embedded images.

In the metal scene, maybe other places too, you would trade CDs. So like you had a burner and someone else had a burner and you would swap copies of CDs that you had for something they had. So you could build an entire huge collection of CDs and demo tapes cheaply. There were trading lists and people had reputations and who was reliable, who was a rip-off, and who was an idiot for burning 256kbps MP3s and selling them as CD quality (yes, you could tell a difference back then; something we still haven’t recovered from now that everyone is streaming). If you didn’t have anything to trade, you would pay like $8 for a CD. Black Friday 2000 was huge because burners only cost a couple hundred dollars that week, so it was a wise investment.

Sometimes the traders of new music were the band members themselves, and that was always fun to find out. I got Sons of Northern Darkness from a guy who was in the studio. I got a copy of another highly respected album from the bassist of that band who just wanted people to hear it. They would just mail it your house and you would receive a CD in an envelope with chicken scratch handwriting on it.

When Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia was leaked in the trading community, it blew people’s minds. People were like holy shit this meme band that everyone hates just got serious and took our entire genre to the next level. I cannot understate how big that album was.

People sent checks via the mail in exchange for goods. Online transactions were still done this way instead of all electronically. So you would purchase online, get an order number, put that order number on a certified check, and mail it off. And a week later you had your stuff.

Also everybody had a customized desktop. Not just the wallpaper, but the themes, the colors. There might be a talking cat that sat on the desktop and would get up and walk around and poop and tell you what time it was. Everybody had unique desktops. Everybody had different fonts. Maybe cursive, and in pink and yellow and that was what the entire interface looked like.

Slashdot was huge and the original Reddit. There was a Slashdot effect where if they linked a site, that site would suddenly get so much traffic that it might die. Also in those days you could tell if a webpage was using IIS or Apache because the Windows server was always slower to serve webpages. When Dell entered the server space people laughed because Dell was not an enterprise brand and who would ever seriously use x86 or Windows on a production server?

Online chat was a thing with a/s/l and everyone had an online significant other with whom they would chat about things daily, but who lived like 5 states away and no you would never, ever go meet them. Even suggesting such an idea would usually end the friendship. Everybody had an online diary with a guestbook and a stat counter – showing how many page hits you had.

There was less corporate ownership and more independence back then. It was okay to be different and unique. The Internet wasn’t just like 5 websites.

I think the Fediverse – Mastodon especially, comes closest to recreating that turn of the century feel.