No, it’s not entirely awful. There are awful things in it for sure, but there are also amazing things, which is how it’s always been.

People growing up today live under the threat of climate change, fascism, rampant inequality etc. These threats are real. But there’s a lot of good stuff happening too - crime rates are falling constantly, and we’re on the verge of some big medical breakthroughs such as being able to treat cancer with CRISPR and Oncolytic viruses to give a couple of examples. We might be about to double the lifespan of cats.

Every generation grows up under some sort of threat - nuclear annihilation in the 80s, WW2 before that, WW1 before that etc. Mad kings, dictators, plagues, wars… you’re dealt the hand you’re dealt. But everything is cyclical - fascism flares up and then gets squashed, the economy booms and busts, politics swings right, then left again. Because of that, sometimes the cycles line up so that a few things suck at once. But nothing is permanent.

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.

• Ursula Le Guin

That’s not to say everything will be fine, or that we’re doomed. Most likely some people who don’t deserve it will suffer and die, some people who don’t deserve it will live charmed and privileged lives and learn nothing, and some people will just be fine. As it has always been.

Would anybody like a selection of Doctor Who facts by any chance

Reminder that Boy George went to prison for handcuffing an escort to a radiator and beating him with a metal chain, so therefore might not be the best person to be judging who is doing the imprisoning and torturing.

According to the estimates of Brooke Nichols, DOGE cuts to foreign aid programs had led to some 300,000 deaths by May 2025, mostly of children. By February 2026, when her counter that estimated the number of deaths was retired, the numbers were kept at the one-year mark from when the cuts began: 781,343 deaths caused by the funding discontinuation.

Source

Fuck him.

781,343 deaths.

You don’t just get to go “oops!” and walk away.

Nearly eight hundred thousand dead in the first year. Probably much more by now.

This is a trial run for how long they can run AI Trump once he finally shits himself to death lol.

I’d go so far as to say it doesn’t even really matter at this point. If he’s alive, he’s 84 years old and from previous videos we’ve seen him fall over multiple times and blank out for long stretches mid-sentence, and he’s currently been hospitalized for over a month. He’s not physically or mentally fit to hold office. Or, he’s dead which is also traditionally a barrier to employment.

I think trying to apply logic to Musk’s ramblings is not a winnable game lol

There were some where the hit single on the album wasn’t even good, 'cause the version you liked turned out to be the radio edit!

I luckily stocked up on storage before the prices got crazy so I’m good there (although my RAID is gonna have to sit unfinished for a while), but I didn’t upgrade my RAM when I should have.

I’ve been saying for a while, IMO the thing with AI is that it is actually pretty useful in certain circumstances. The problem I think is, we’ve taken something that’s a handy tool and blown it up to world-altering proportions. This has also made everyone very polarized - there’s the camp of “It’s going to take over the world and do everything” vs. the camp of “I can’t wait for AI to go away” and I don’t think either of those will fully happen. I think when the dust settles it’ll just be more of a correction back to where it should have been in the first place, which as I say is more of just a handy tool in the toolbox.

I think some of it is how you apply it personally too. Like I’m an arts person, but I don’t let AI do any actual art stuff, because that’s what I want to do. What I think it can be useful for is all the paperwork like grant applications, form letters etc. AKA the sort of mindless paperwork clutter that doesn’t need a lot of brain power but still needs to be done and eats up time. I’m fine to let AI do that stuff, so I can spend more time doing the actual art myself.

high horse

I see what you did there

Favourite/Current Distro/Distro I’ve used the most: Arch btw.

Distro liked the least: Ubuntu

First Distro Used: Corel Linux (I am old lol)

Honourable Mention: Pop!OS with the COSMIC desktop is pretty nice considering how new it is IMO.

Future Distro: I’ve messed around with NixOS a bit and I kind of want to try it. I like to tinker a lot though so sometimes immutable OS-es kind of interfere with that.

I’m up to Wyrd Sisters!

I happens as a Brit too. Recently I casually used the phrase “use your loaf” around some North Americans. I then had to explain that loaf = loaf of bread = head. They were like “why” and then I had to try to explain the concept of Cockney Rhyming Slang, and then there was a barrage of questions about the origin of Cockney Rhyming Slang and all the other examples. I don’t know, I’m not even Cockney!

I hope he receives the same amount of respect and care that he showed to others throughout his life.

Having his twitching, lifeless carcass hooked up to a machine to keep it functional enough to be used as a ghoulish puppet to subvert democracy one last time.

Maybe for an encore he can have his corpse injected with Ebola and launched at a food bank lineup from a catapult.

One I always find weird is how often we reuse the exact same word with the same spelling and pronunciation to mean wildly different things. For example, the word ‘jam’ can mean:

• a fruit preserve
• to play music
• heavy traffic
• a door that won’t open
• to cram something into something else
• a difficult situation

Or ‘saw’, which can be to look at something in the past tense or to cut wood. The word ‘run’ apparently has over 600 different meanings!

We also have contronyms, which is when a word also means the opposite of itself. For example ‘dust’, which can mean to add dust or remove it. Or ‘left’, which can mean remaining (“I only have three left”) or departing (“They left.”)

Chinese has something a bit like this too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den

I also tried to learn German and I remember this about gendered nouns:

The man = der mann (masculine)

The woman = die frau (feminine)

The boy = der junge (masculine)

The girl = das mädchen (neutral)

Not even genders themselves have the genders you’d expect lol

Also in French once you get past about 60 the numbers turn insane. E.g. 97 = Quatre-vingt-dix-sept, or literally Four-twenty-ten-seven.

I did an experiment with this - knowing nothing about this guy, I was like “I bet he either worked or currently still works for the oil industry.” Then went to Wikipedia and the second sentence of his article is:

Before leading the U.S. Department of Energy, Wright served as the CEO of Liberty Energy, North America’s second largest hydraulic fracturing company

Nailed it lol