Anyone who pushes jira is a waste of fucking carbon, and I hope they never find happiness.

If you want twenty minutes of rage-filled ranting, ask me about vscode-server sometime.

Nonsense. Where do you think lawyers come from?

Why do you only frame the issue in terms of the voters’ responsibilities, and never in terms of the candidate’s responsibilities?

Why aren’t the politicians the ones who need to make hard choices? Why can’t they get wedged on the issues for once?

That’s not the question.

The question should be what choice does Harris have, except to stop Israel?

If (as I strongly agree) trump is the worst human on the planet who will cause irreparable damage to :gestures wildly: fucking everything, then why doesn’t his opponent have the responsibility to do whatever the hell it takes, within the law to keep him out of power?

Especially as in this instance his opponent is currently sworn to be responsible for the ongoing welfare of the nation.

Imagine being so fucking intent on enabling genocide half a planet away that you’d rather let your own country fall into the hands of Camacho Harkonnen rather than attract progressive voters.

Why is it always ‘voters need to lower their standards’, and never ‘candidates need to be decent human beings’?

Paging Dr. Streetmentioner

Two things I need to ask:

• What inspired this question, exactly, and
• Can I have some, please?

Congratulations you just invented magenta

Have they tried fucking off?

Lack of spez

What do you get when you cross Kim Jong Un and Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg?

Because this isn’t a Spot The Dog book, and we don’t need little picture of all the nouns.

On their own they’re ambiguous and vague; with the matching word they’re completely redundant.

What good does it do to say “I had pizza [little picture of pizza] for lunch”?

I’ll use the occasional :) or such as befits the tone, but pointless hieroglyphics are pointless and annoying.

Mirrors can totally reverse top-to-bottom, you just have to bend over to see it. The left-right bias is based on the way we look behind us, not any property of the mirror.

This takes a little explaining.

A rotation is a reversal through two dimensions at once.

If you turn around to look behind you, you’re swapping front-and-back, AND left-and-right.

If you stand on your head, you’re swapping front-and-back AND top-and-bottom.

Stand facing the way the mirror does, then turn to look into it. You have to do some kind of rotation - a two-dimension reversal - to get there. If you’re a normal human, you’ll twist around, swapping left-and-right as you swap back-and-front. Your left and right ear swap places, your nose and the back of your head swap places too.

But your reflection doesn’t do that.

A mirror only reverses ONE dimension: front-and-back. It’s the equivalent of punching your face out the back of your head: its ears are still on their original sides. You have swapped left and right in order to face in the opposite direction, but your reflection hasn’t - so it’s ears are on opposite sides to yours.

But you can do it the other way.

Stand with your back to the mirror, and bend over and look under your arm (or between your legs) to see your reflection, instead of twisting around.

Hold something with writing on it, and you’ll see: the letters in the reflection are upside-down, but they face in the right direction.

The only reason you don’t see this very often is that it’s a fucking weird thing to do and nobody ever does it.

Fandom is endorsement; the HP IP has become a huge anti-trans flag.

Every time people invoke it, they wave that flag some more, and mark it as an acceptable thing to stand under.

Let it die, both financially and culturally.

Cut bits of a girl baby’s genitals: jail.

Cut bits off a boy baby’s genitals: An occasion for a fucking party.

I’ve often said “What do we want? Police to face accountability when they commit crimes! What do we actually get? We’re going to use the term ‘main’ instead of ‘master’ for programming things!”

The other thing is that the big stuff is shored up by all the small stuff.

The reason you can’t get police held accountable for crimes, ferinstance, is because there’s a hundred shitty racist / sexist / classist / etc attitudes locking down the idea that the police are both besieged by and protecting us from an underclass of people who deserve neither compassion, rights or justice. Look at the people leaping on the ‘he was no angel’ bandwagon, for god’s sake.

If you want to topple the big overt heinous idea, you need to wash away the soil its roots are sunk into and that’s banked up round its trunk making it look like an inherent part of the landscape.

A spoonful at a time, if need be. It all helps.

Until a couple of years ago, we had a brand of cheese called ‘Coon’, here in Australia.

The word isn’t used as a slur over here, and the brand was simply named after the founder about 150 years back.

But it was getting increasingly on the nose as cultural influences from the US and everywhere kept seeping in, and it reached a point where it pretty much needed an excuse or at least an explanation.

So they renamed it; now it’s ‘Cheer’.

And at the time, there was all kinds of pearl-clutching about the malicious / disingenuous / officious / vapidly-offended / white-knighting / attention-seeking / etc / etc ‘woke crowd’ stomping in and making them change everything when it was perfectly good and harmless and stuff.

Six months later, nobody gave a single shit any more. Nobody died as a result or was even mildly inconvenienced, no great cultural traditions were lost, and contrary to several predictionsm newly-empowered wokeocrats have not risen from the shadows to re-gender everyone or whatever. It’s that cheese with the blue white and green label, nobody reads it anyway.

My point is that small token changes cost virtually nothing, and even if they achieve little in and of themselves, the mere fact of people being willing to make them is of benefit. Small courtesies, you know? Returning your shopping cart. Smiling at passing dogs. It models kindness and consideration, and promotes the idea that those things have value.

Which is not to suggest that we must avoid giving offense at all consts; far from it. I’m one of those stereotypicallly abrasive genX types raised on ideals of free speech, punk rock, uncomfortable truths and loudly pointing out the elephant in the room no matter how many toes get stepped on. But when there isn’t some burning issue that needs to be addressed, niceties be damned… then yeah, small courtesies. Give people that extra bit of room even if they don’t strictly needed. It’s nice to be nice.

Look back a handful of decades at all those cultural relics that your grandparents considered harmless and invisible. Asking people to drop them may have attracted ridicule and suspicion at the time, but looking back at some of them… oh dear god, really?

Hell, I remember The Black And White Minstrel Show on TV, and if you don’t remember it yourself, it’s far worse than you’re imagining.

I like the world better without things like that, even the little seemingly-trivial ones, and even if it seems like empy virtue-signalling while you’re cleaning them up.

I am all about keeping it sustainable; nobody has willpower longterm. Any fool can come up with a diet of rabbit food and have amazing results for a month before their brain goes postal on them and they start inhaling cheeseburgers nonstop. Trust me, I totally get that. We always attribute vast reserves of motivation and discipline to ourselves that we just don’t have, and the results aren’t pretty.

But on the other side of the coin, your brain can get stuck in a short-term reward loop, and it howls blue murder when you first try to break out of it.

I’m an stress-eater and a boredom-eater, and if the loop gets out of control, not constantly snacking becomes stressful in and of itself, and yeah that’s a complete trainwreck.

But what I’ve found is that after a surprisingly short time of acclimating yourself to controlled amounts of hunger, you can break that loop. Your brain re-learns the difference between not-full and actually-need-calories, and only sees the latter as a problem.

What started out feeling like a catastrophe that you had to white-knuckle through just turns into a boring fact that takes little to no willpower at all to put up with at all.

It’s a really good investment of effort, and makes the whole process a lot easier.

Better: just learn to live with not feeling satiated all the time.

Not that you shouldn’t make vegies a significant part of your diet, just that a big part of the lifestyle change is learning to be hungry between meals as a normal and non-distressing thing.