Going to the doctor half the time feels like a waste anyways. No matter how sick I am, I’m never given medicine or antibiotics and I’m always told to wait a week to see if it gets worse. It already had to be a big deal for me to go the first time around, I’m basically done after that and resigned to suffering without help. The worst was when I had been perpetually sick with something for 5+ weeks right before Covid first hit, never got anything and doctor was just like, “Yeah, some colds or flus can go for that long.”

For physical injuries though, that shit is important and that seems like something they can treat, but anything else it’s just, “You’re on your own, good luck!”

I don’t recall feeling overly impressed with content on Mastodon, it’s just social media, but with a small userbase, I’m guessing more tech-saavy. I think what ultimately “wins” in the social media space is wherever “everybody” ends up going. Right now, Bluesky seems to have the momentum going for it as people are flocking to it in droves, but it’s hard to tell how sustainable it is long-term as the hype settles down. Right now everybody is excited and seems like they’re trying to make it a positive, creative, liberal space, but eventually trolls will start invading the space and it’ll be like every other social media site unless it’s somehow structured in a way as to avoid that.

Those are precisely why I like BlueSky. I don’t know if this was normal for twitter or what, but I learned you can search for a hashtag of your kinks (exp. #bigboobs) and you can see porn from people that have posted pics or posts about it. You can also hide other tags from ever showing up in the results, which lets you finetune what you’re looking for. I know the search works relatively the same as twitter with respect to hashtags, but was porn on twitter this whole time?

These are apparently called “Desire Paths”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path

Americans are watching this too and wondering what the fuck is wrong with our fellow Americans. This should not even be close.

Joker’s boner is no joke

“Nobody has ever hated their boss.”

Just got over that portion of being sick, but it’s evolved into a persistent cough now that’s hurting my abdomen I’m coughing so much. At one point I had to have two “stations” set up, a hot station for cooling down and cold station for warming back up. I would just bounce back and forth between the two as my temperature swung around wildly.

Oh shit, were we supposed to be fucking our Xboxes this whole time? Is that how you get more games? <unziiiips>

I think that third one down is actually how they’re teaching it at my kids’ schools now. It’s called “making a 10” I think, basically that same idea, add up to 10 first, then do the rest.

Because it’s considered “lewd” and “indecent” when I do it and I’m not allowed within 500 yards of schools anymore.

Creating the very nanny state they were accusing Democrats of wanting.

If anything, society collapses and the very wealthy carve out fiefdoms for themselves and re-create medieval feudalism. They tell people they have a God-ordained to rule over the “small folk” and they continue on living like kings, albeit in a post-apocalyptic setting.

Is everyone just going to ignore the history this guy has? Pretty shameful.

When people tell you there’s only 24 hours in a day, work 48 hours in a day instead.

I think the first two hours was her going over Star Trek, then through season 1 in detail (probably too much), then realizing how long she’d been on it and flying through seasons 2 & 3 in an hour, and then finally about 3 hours in actually getting to the title subject.

She makes some good points about season 3 being about just as dumb as the other seasons, despite being “the better” season. Having every young officer in Starfleet simultaneously assimilated by the Borg and turning on/killing a large number of older officers has given a huge number of them PTSD for years and created a large number of older officers who now hate anyone younger that turned. They hand-waved the solution and it’s just like, “Hey, it’s all cool now!”, but the mental damage would traumatize a good portion of Starfleet for a generation or more.

I’ve run into exactly the same issue with my large ttrpg ebook/pdf collection (+100k file data hoarding… it’s not a problem, I swear) and I’ve not really found a good option I’m entirely happy with. Calibre duplicates everything and I don’t like the thought of having my collection’s organization tied to a specific piece of software if I just delete my duplicates. Plus I’m elitist and think the UI/logo are gross to look at.

Zotero is the least worst option I’ve found, but it’s geared towards scholarly journals and such, so not great, but serviceable. Not sure if it’s on linux though.

Jellyfin is apparently able to handle ebooks with a plugin, though I didn’t particularly care for it when I tried it months ago.

There’s a handful of other ebook software out there, mostly geared towards comics/manga, so depending on what you have those might be worth looking for.

I’d like to use Obsidian for it and just turn the directory into a vault and let it automatically scan the folders for files, but that doesn’t work great either.

The best piece of software I’ve seen that could potentially handle it is an app called Stashapp… which is unfortunately geared towards adult film. But it’s feature-set if it could be applied to PDFs seems like it would be ideal.

Except for southern “blue dog” Democrats, Abortion is a relatively “safe” topic to pander to single-issue voters on because the only people hyper-opposed to it are single-issue voters on the other side who were never going to vote liberal anyways. There’s virtually no down-side.

Israel is a more thorny & nuanced issue for Democrats though and not as clear cut. Israel is committing genocide and we shouldn’t be supporting them, but there’s alot of Jewish-American voters in key states, you’ve got AIPAC and a plethora of other Jewish/Israeli lobbies with alot of influence, you’ve got big military contractors who like Israeli money, and then you’ve got bigwigs in the military who see Israel as a strategic partner. Completely dropping support for Israel risks upsetting alot of interests and handing them over to Republicans to be used against Democrats. It’s shitty, but I’m assuming that’s the calculus going on with Democratic leadership.

Also, Israel is much much less reliant on the US for aid than in times past, and I think there’s a fear that if we stop supplying them, somebody else will and then we’ll have absolutely no influence over anything they do. We have much less influence over them than alot of people think. If they saddle up with China or Russia, the gloves come off and I think we’d see it much worse than it is now. As hard as that is to imagine, it can always get worse. And if we let Republicans get control, it will get worse.

Wow, an incredibly basic feature only available to Premium subscribers? How far the mighty have fallen.

I think AI art is comparable to photography. Photographers do a lot of work behind the scenes to get everything set up, the equipment, lighting, angles, lenses, etc, But at the end of the day, the only action they’re taking to capture the art is they press a button, it’s not nearly the same amount of work that a painter or a musician puts into their art. So I think the idea of “capturing” art is still a valid thing. Sometimes a photographer can capture an award-winning masterpiece with a spur-of-the-moment photo on some shitty disposable camera. Maybe it took them 1000 bad photos to get that one photo, but they still just captured it from somewhere else, they didn’t create the work.

Similarly with AI, a person may have to work with the AI software to setup and craft the prompt that will eventually generate the art, then there may be dozens of iterations of that and fine-tuning to get the result they’re imagining, and even after that there may be some photoshopping involved to get it to where they want it. They’re capturing artwork from a source that may not be their own creation, just the same as photographers. I think AI art is just as legitimate as other forms of art, it’s just open to a wider range of people that can participate because many of the physical hurdles (equipment, space, time, lighting, etc) are not as much of an issue.