Coraline is pretty intense.

A quote from Neil Gaiman about his editor’s daughter, who served as the book’s first audience

I told her, “You know, we kind of have you to thank for all this, because you weren’t scared by it.” And she said, “Actually, I was terrified. But I wanted to know what happened next. I knew if I let anybody know I was scared, I wouldn’t find out.”

Because propaganda works

complains about capitalism

Is this communism?

Yes, we have one party here. But so does America. Except, with typical extravagance, they have two of them!

-Julius Nyerere

100% this. Pure propaganda.

It’s brutal. It also just kind of becomes normal, eventually. Do what you can to protect your hearing going forward to prevent it from getting worse. Good luck.

Makerspaces? Maybe just hang around at bars near your local conference/convention center?

Just a big “fuck you” to entropy. Yes please.

No?

Phrenology folks, we’re bringing it back

These have kind of been the bane of my existence. I’m an old C programmer who luckily stumbled into a primarily C++ role after being stuck doing web frontend for way too long, but the language we’re using is not the language I once learned and it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks. I hope the younger guys don’t get fed up with correcting my screw ups in code reviews. Like, during an interview question I was asked “why didn’t you use smart pointers instead of manually allocating memory?” And I just had to go “C++ has smart pointers now?”

I feel like such a dinosaur. Maybe I should just go find a COBOL maintenance job.

Ha, and judging by the avatar you play video games with trains too! I adore Satisfactory

I am going to disengage at this point.

that’s a lot of text for someone who’s wrong. neoliberal governments worship their leaders, capitalism captures the state apparatus, and minorities are violently suppressed. Fascism.

Hey look, buddy. I’m an engineer, that means I solve problems.

Not problems like “What is beauty?”, 'cause that would fall within the purview of your conundrums of !philosophy@hexbear.net.

Mechanical adept here too. I am very good at holding and manipulating 3d objects in my brain, so I can kinda always just tell how something goes together to work.

We love our lizardfolk comrades!

This is also why it is so weird and unnecessary to me when people just say that liberal democracy is the same thing as fascism. The fact that two things are linked or that one has tendencies that lead it to transform into, produce, be replaced by the other does not mean that they’re the same. Actually it implies the opposite, otherwise there would be no transformation to begin with.

Would you prefer “liberal democracy nearly inevitably leads to fascism”? Stage 1 cancer and stage 4 cancer are both cancer.

-163C is still pretty cold, but at least it is superconducting