I think it’s a great idea, if the type of work in question calls for that sort of creativity.

Prescribed languages are so boring. English is a glorious chaotic fun practical mutt of a language. It’s a language that gleefully creates, adopts, adapts, mutates, and discards words and grammar and spelling and sentence structure to fit the speaker/writer’s needs. A language whose most-loved authors tend to be the ones who break grammatical rules on a whim. A language whose most revered poet, the Bard himself, damn near invented half the modern English lexicon. (It’s my firm belief that Shakespeare would have loved modern rap music. It’s right up his alley, it’s his kind of word play.)

How the hell such a fun and flexible language came from class-obsessed tradition-obsessed bureaucracy-obsessed England of all countries is the real mystery.

May you live in high-comment-count times.

Israel faces defeat due to its military rampage.

Now that is a really funny bit I can’t wait to do IRL. Feign obliviousness and congratulate Catholic school officials and supporters for their openness in raising fetish-specific flags.

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This is the first time I ever clicked a Bluesky link and I’m not terribly impressed about this. Is there a non-Bluesky link to a download or post somewhere else about this?

Apparently there’s a “pro life flag”. I knew it would be awful before even seeing it, but it was worse than I could imagine. It’s ridiculously traditionally-gender-coded in a way that would be too on-the-nose for satire.

So according to the Israeli government, Hamas is both strong and weak at the same time?

What are the odds that Canada would be allowed to develop an independent nuclear weapons program today?

I’ve been doing an IRL bit on this for several years. Whenever some chuds start up with “more military spending to defend Canada” shit, I pipe up with “Let’s abolish the regular military and build nuclear ICBMs instead. Anyone invades, we nuke’em. We avoid all that soldiers-dying-in-deserts-for-oil-companies shit but stay un-invade-able.” It confuses the hell out of them.

As a cis man, I’ve found hexbear to be an incredible resource on how to be a better ally to a close relative who is trans.

As someone who’s been exclusively Linux-at-home for about a quarter-century, I am constantly disappointed in the chuds who infest the various subcultures in the broader Linux community. Trying to explain basic fucking empathy to these people is an uphill battle. Honestly it’s made me leery of contributing code to established projects. Instead I just do small from-scratch projects for myself. At least then I know the project founder isn’t a bigot.

A Turner’s test.

A co-worker (#1) thought I was making a dirty joke in an inappropriately public setting today. I was telling co-worker #2 that #2’s workstation would need a USB hub, because all the ports are occupied and they couldn’t plug in their USB headset until they did get a hub. When asked by #2 how many ports the workstation already had, passing #1 apparently thought that “four in the back, one in the front” was a sex act.

an ominous omen for various western democracies who are entering elections this year

I’m expecting vote-suppression trickery among countries that have (1) governments currently loyal to the US government, and (2) significant demographics that are historically friendly to anyone that the Israeli government has pissed off lately. Quietly de-registering voters, enforcing strict ID requirements, misinformation on polling station locations and times, bans on social media services that aren’t toeing the suppression line themselves, all the usual nasty games.

So their target market is wealthy people who want to travel just 600Km, overnight, between two heavily-car-dependent cities? Is the terrain at least interesting to look at while taking a train through it?

Fortunately the people at SpaceX who actually do the real engineering work have to follow aerospace regulatory obligations, and the people there making business decisions need to live up to contractual obligations to agencies like NASA who have contracted with them. SpaceX isn’t like Twitter where the asshole-in-chief’s whims have to be implemented. They actually have to follow legal requirements and the laws of physics.

American rocketry has always been largely privatized, alas. NASA doesn’t, and never has, built non-prototype rockets, nor did its predecesor NACA. Even way back in WW2, the US military hired Chrysler (yes, the car company) to do the engineering work on captured V-2 rockets.

“It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time”

“A Polite Society”

“The Federation Starship S.S. Buttcrack”

I made nearly the same trip length for the same thing. It was truly an incredible experience. The sky going pitch black incredibly fast, the sun’s corona shining out, the sparkles of light as the sun shone through gaps in lunar mountain ranges. No video or photo can do the experience justice.

That argument is based on two erroneous assumptions.

1. That the venn diagram of “the left” and “Democratic party policymakers” isn’t two circles separated by a gulf traversable in our lifetime only by warp drive.

2. That there’s any real distinction between Republicans with red lawn signs and Republicans with blue lawn signs besides which geopolitical rival they’re more terrified by.

I’m looking forward to seeing this next week with some others. It looks like a lot of fun.

I’ve never “killed” anyone.