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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 21st, 2023

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  • My journey was Windows-> Ubuntu -> Mint -> Fedora -> Arch.

    (Infuriatingly i still use windows for gaming, but nothing else.)

    Did i mention that i use arch?

    More importantly:

    fucked up all my data with no backup.

    One time i messed up a script and accidentally copied 40,000 mp3s to the same filename. 20 years of music collecting, literally going back to Napster, all gone.

    Well, not completely gone. I’ve got everything uploaded to iBroadcast, and I’m pretty sure i can download my library. But I’m not sure i deserve to.





  • Hi everyone, JP here. This person is making a reference to the Weird Al biopic, and if you haven’t seen it, you should.

    Weird Al is an incredible person and has been through so much. I had no idea what a roller coaster his life has been! I always knew he was talented but i definitely didn’t know how strong he is.

    His autobiography will go down in history as one of the most powerful and compelling and honest stories ever told. If you haven’t seen it, you really, really should.

    ITT NO SPOILERS PLS





  • The enumeration on the losing side of that debate is probably correct. But as a person who was in my early 20s in 2000, I’d like to offer what I will characterize as The Historical Context and Definitive Conclusion to This Debate.

    No one actually gave a shit about that debate. Sure, it came up, but it did not alter anyone’s party planning. We weren’t actually celebrating the changing of the millennium, we were celebrating because we had a permission slip to do so. Any attempt to withdraw that permission was unwelcome.

    In Paris on December 31st, 1999, at around 11pm local time, someone threw themselves in front of a metro. The trains were free that night (because it was the 100 year anniversary of their opening iirc), but because of that suicide, at least one of the train lines was substantially delayed. The streets from the center of the city to the north side were crowded well toward dawn as everyone chose to walk home instead of wait indefinitely in a stinky train station.

    That person, who chose to end their life on the tracks that night, holds the core truth of the debate within his death: it’s a ridiculous debate and those who would fight for it should just stay the hell home and let the rest of us drink a lot and dance.






  • Edit: tldr: I think I probably could’ve saved myself a lot of time by just saying that discord is like slack but for friends/fun.


    I didn’t think people use it like lemmy/Reddit. People use it like IRC. That’s the analogous tech. IRC is better in almost every way, but not in the most important ways: ease of use, and voice chat.

    I know only a handful of people who could set up a server for IRC, but in discord, it’s a one-button process. Sure, you can use a public IRC server, but then your channels are harder to organize and you don’t have as much moderation control. I dn’t think

    I would vastly prefer IRC, but even if it was easy to set up, I would still need something for voice chat, and, sure, there are plenty of voice chat tools, but not ones that integrate with text chat so well.

    I think a lot of people like the API and the bots built from it, tho personally that’s not something I use much.

    I’m in probably ~50 servers: groups of friends, video game guilds, tech chat (eg HTMX, Lit, Svelte), random interests (eg mechanical keyboards), and community servers for video games (eg a couple of LFG servers, a couple servers where I can ask questions to tryhards, streamers’ communities, etc).

    I would vastly prefer to use something FOSS, but there just isn’t something that does it so well and so easily – and even then, I’d probably have to use discord for a bunch of these things.






  • You’re right, I’ll concede that – but only because BSG is an amazing show and very few characters can be reduced to “good” and “bad” – even the “antagonists” (in the traditional sense of those characters working against the stories’ progression) have pretty valid reasons for doing what they do.

    Gaius (sp?) is one of the closest characters to “bad” – but not because of the bad things he does, but because of the bad things he is – ie, vain, selfish, etc – and the fact that he lets those negative characteristics drive his actions.

    All the characters have flaws, but the “good” characters do their best to mitigate their flaws, and let their positive traits motivate them. For example, Adama often acts before he thinks, a trait that is awesome in combat, but can be less positive other times – and he (as best he can) seeks advice and counsel from the people he trusts (eg Saul Tigh) – he knows he can be impulsive and he knows his “instant judgement” decision making isn’t perfect.

    Cavil (that’s his name I think) is close to “evil” but he does have reasons for his actions – preservation of his “species” (though really it’s just himself) – but he’s evil because of the fact that he doesn’t listen and acts with disloyalty and dishonor.

    (There’s an amazing comeuppance for the titular character of the show Nathan Barley that epitomizes this idea: Barley doesn’t actually do anything wrong, but his motivations are repugnant, and his motivations are what’s revealed… Shit I should write a whole essay on that…)

    Are there contemporary shows that are as good as BSG? I kind of gave up on TV after Firefly.


  • Cylons being manipulated by other cylons doesn’t absolve them of guilt.

    BSG did have a few instances of the reverse of OP’s question tho – where the “good guys” turned out to be bad" – trying to say this without spoilers; it’s a 20 year old show but ffs of you haven’t seen it, go see it now.

    • the (temporary) new admiral
    • several main characters during the part where they live on the dirty planet
    • a very specific set of seven main characters (wink wink) … .and more,…

    And there’s one specific example of the full 360 – a character that starts good, turns bad, but turns out they were actually good all along. I won’t give the name, but they were passing messages to the resistance.

    That show was awesome.

    One note tho, on the topic generally: flipping character alignments is a frequent pre-shark-jump thing, and is often bad writing. In BSG, tho, all of the “flips” are pre-planned, or at least 100% true to their character (eg the 360 example above).