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Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is “column” the right word? Anyway, apparently I also coined the Very Specific Object nomenclature now sporadically used in the 3D printing community. Yeah, that was me. This must be how Cory Doctorow feels all the time these days.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • You used the magic word, “modern.”

    Lots of houses in this world are not modern, and some of them are old enough that they were retrofitted to have electricity, as mine was, rather than even being built with it to begin with. And done so in a haphazard manner when electrical codes were either much more lax than now or didn’t exist. And further when the expected power draw for a household was considerably lower, because basically all of it in the 1920’s or whatever was only used for lighting and we didn’t have all of our current appliances, TV’s, computers, 3D printers, or even indoor space heaters.

    So moaning about what ought to be rather than what is really doesn’t accomplish anything, especially in OP’s case.

    My small house has basically the entire ground floor wired to only two 15 amp circuits.


  • Let’s not kid ourselves, most people will not start looking at Linux. They should, but they won’t. They’ll continue to use the version of Windows their machine came with, becoming a botnet petri dish in the process, forever, until it breaks or becomes unusable. If Microsoft actually forces their machine to become unbootable they’ll rush off to the mall and replace it with a Mac.

    And in the meantime they’ll click off any nags and warnings Microsoft sends them without reading them.

    Just like happened with XP.

    Just like what happened with Vista.

    Just like what happened with 7.

    Etc.

    Most users are clueless, barely understand how to use their computers except by rote, and therefore are extremely afraid of change. Microsoft could offer a free puppy with your updrade to Win11 and I think about 75% of users would still refuse to take it.





  • And here’s the thing with the Marauders, too. They were just in the wrong game.

    If having to play silly distance and timing games with solitary enemies were Doom’s jam – If this were ever Doom’s jam – it would be one thing. But it’s not, and it never has been. The fuckers would fit right in the Dark Souls universe and nobody would even notice. But that’s just not how the rest of the game is structured.

    The telltale heart thumping under the floorboard here is that the game feels the need to literally give you a popup that pauses the action the first time you encounter one for the explicit purpose of teaching you how to work the fight. If your mechanics are so non-discoverable that this is necessary, maybe that’s a clue that a stop and rethink is in order.

    Doom Eternal was actually really bad at that across the board. You will recall that almost every new mechanic was preceded by an action stopping popup and in some cases an incongruous teleportation to a tutorial room to force-feed you the correct course of action (and the only correct course of action, which is my other gripe) for that monster or situation. Very few of its mechanics beyond stick-shotgun-down-monster’s-throat-pull-trigger are organically discoverable, and even the ones that could have been aren’t because of the tutorial popups.

    I guess at least you can turn them off… If you know about them in advance.





  • Because this was many, many years ago and back then I was naive and thought contributing might have actually made the world a safer and better place. I know better now thanks to experience.

    The issue is that it’s a case of the boy who cried wolf. Yes, there likely are “actual” crimes out there that need to be solved. But they are in the tiny minority of what the police pursue and prosecute overall compared to petty drug bullshit, harassing people for existing while black, writing speeding tickets, busting homeless people, and jailing people who need to steal to eat on behalf of megacorporations – crimes for which the police will show up for near instantly when called, whereas if someone victimizes you, Mr. private citizen, they generally can’t be bothered.

    That’s how the cops operate here. I know how the cops work here because I live here. I don’t know what to tell you about where you might happen to live, but I’ll bet you if you look at it hard it isn’t that much different.


  • …And even if you are not the perpetrator, that doesn’t matter. The police are pressured to arrest somebody. At the end of the day it really doesn’t matter to them who it is, and the perp got a way while in the meantime you’re standing right here. It’s much easier to harass you.

    Do you have warrants? Are you sure? Do you have parking tickets? Is your name similar to someone else they want for something else? Do they smell weed? Are you black? Etc., etc., etc.

    It’s not worth it. Don’t interact.


  • I did not testify because the accused took a plea deal, which the state kindly did not inform me of (although they wasted in total about $4 in postage threatening to arrest me for no reason) until the day of the trial after it had been rescheduled for the fourth time. The charges were indeed dumb shit. Nobody got murdered.

    It has nothing to do with my busy life, it has to do with not enabling bad behavior from the police and state. The police demand respect but give none in return. You do you, but that doesn’t fly on my doorstep.

    I will not be bullied. By anyone.


  • Do you know what? I helped the cops once with some security camera footage many years ago, for something that didn’t involve me.

    You want to know what I got in return? I got subpoenaed, and this turned into the state jerking me around on the trial date when I was supposed to show up with the dates changing after the fact without them informing me, but every single letter they sent me started in its opening paragraph with a threat to prosecute me if I did not instantly comply.

    So yeah, I don’t “help” the police anymore. They can fuck off and come back after they learn to do better.

    If you want the footage, that’s different. But if they cops come to talk to me about it (or anything else) they ain’t getting nothing.




  • The cops should have thought of that before they started abusing their authority and needlessly victimizing people. If they didn’t act the way they do, people would trust them enough to talk to them.

    Don’t hate the players, hate the game.

    Pro tip: They’re not going to find your car anyway, and even if they do the only reason was because whoever stole it abandoned it somewhere after wrecking it. In my area they take about 4 to 24 hours to even show up for such calls, so for this example the chances of them actually catching the perp in the act and getting your car back before it’s trashed are zero.