Don’t drag the rest of us into her shit. Being trans has nothing to do with why she’s a shitty person. We’re not here to beg for your approval before we get to be who we are, and we don’t need it. Pick another hill.

Well if a professional condescending hate-monger says it, it must be true!

Oh fuck off, Sam.

404 demanding my private information to access their article about how I shouldn’t give my private information to companies.

Good to hear! Thanks!

Good riddance. I hope they succeed.

Does this extend to not discussing plans, posting information about which states may be taking measures to protect their citizens or how effective those measures might be, or discussing things like resistance or mutual aid? Those seem like pretty important topics to be able to discuss.

Spam G in support.

Meow meow meow.

I literally changed my discord profile to a Tank Girl theme hours before Trump was elected when I was still pretty sure it’d be Harris. Yeesh.

Imagine straddling the Gen X/Millennial line. We doubly don’t exist.

What did we get out of it, though? Kind of a lot, actually.

We legalized marijuana in a lot of places, got marriage equality in a lot of places, and did actually push some positive changes in general. How long they’ll last? How many survive even now? Eh… Well, that depends on how well we manage to get out from under the shadow of the boomers and bring our ideals to the next generations.

I’ve been watching a lot of old 80s and 90s movies recently, and I noticed something starkly different from most of the movies I’ve seen coming out in the past decade or so, particularly the glut of superhero movies we had for a while there. With very few exceptions, all the protagonists were anti-establishment.

Star Wars, Ghostbusters, the Mario Movie, the Breakfast Club, the Princess Bride, it goes on and on and on. The heroes were all rebelling against some ignorant authority that either didn’t understand the damage it was able to do or didn’t care about hurting those who had no power. As a result, when I was coming up my generation felt very much against the established status quo. Even the kid-targeted stuff in the early 90s, it was all gross-out humor and struggling against adult authority in favor of personal autonomy. Nickelodeon takes over your school. As a teenager it was grunge and punk and everything being ‘extreme’.

The impression I get from a lot of the late 00s and 2010s fictional media, though, and much of what I’ve seen in the 20s so far, has been stories that are on-side with some big establishment. Even Peter Parker was turned into a suck-up for some billionaire. There are still instances of anti-authoritarianism, but it doesn’t seem to be the prevailing narrative the way it was. Instead it largely seems to be about going along with society and not bucking the system.

Maybe what we need, if we want to change things, is to instill that pushing against the establishment in the next generation again. That 70s and 80s era Muppets vibe. Turtles that live in the sewers because if they lived on the surface, the powers that be wouldn’t understand them. Otters living in poverty and being exploited by hoity-toity customers who decide not to pay them for their laundry services on Christmas in the first five minutes of the movie.

Did Chris Pratt Mario get into a chase with Koopa cops while fighting a corrupt authoritarian government? No he did not. He was on the side of a social order that was being disrupted by an evil musician.

Artists need to change the narrative and be intentional about it.

I’m looking at moving to the Netherlands! I have somewhere to stay, I’ve been starting to learn Dutch, and I’m in the process of getting all my plans sorted out! I do have some friends in Germany that I want to come visit at some point once I’m settled in, though, so maybe we could meet up at some point! It definitely would be good to sort of build some community in Europe!

I spent this morning getting the paperwork ready to get my passport and learning what I need to do to get out. I’m going to need to figure out some financial stuff and either sell or ship my vehicle, but the more I look the more appealing it seems. This has been a wakeup call for me. Things in the US are really screwed up, even before a second Trump term, and I absolutely can go live a better life somewhere else.

I guess everyone needs a hobby.

Ah, fair.

So, what? Just report on it with no further commentary than “Yeesh.”?

There’s a world of difference between interconnectedness and an enforced monoculture of dependencies on a wide range of insecure repos maintained by hobbyists.

It’s not, though. It’s a much wider potential for failure, as there are a great number of dependencies that are often left to individual developers to maintain. That may be a somewhat reasonable amount of risk when you’ve got multiple options for dependencies and no major target, but when the entire EU relies on single individual maintainers? That’s a massively exploitable threat vector. It would be absurd to assume no one will take advantage given what we’ve already seen.

It would be an extremely foolish move to put the whole EU’s security on one single set of open source dependencies. Microsoft at least has a financial and legal incentive to try to prevent straight up breaches by state actors, shitty as they may be. There’s no such resource allocation or responsibility when it comes to open source repos.

Push a switch to Linux, by all means, but security monoculture is as big a mistake as putting your eggs in any other single basket, especially one as exposed as one single distro.

Okay, but when’s the last time someone created a security vulnerability by sneakily taking over a Windows dependency controlled by a single developer after pressuring them into handing the keys over with a bunch of sockpuppets?

It also means the entirety of the EU’s governments would be susceptible to the same vulnerabilities and bugs, and would share the same dependencies. Given recent issues with bad actors taking control of small but essential repos, this seems like a potentially dangerous security flaw.