If you’re into visual arts, “The Art Spirit” by Robert Henri is pretty great.

So I quickly gave myself diabetes…

I really like this website for exploring all the options. Not sure how up to date it is with this latest ffmpeg.

https://ffmpeg.lav.io/

Read a horrific story once about one of those falling on a lineman. Like a modern-day version of boiling oil during a medieval siege. It’s pretty fucking crazy we just suspend them overhead all over the place in the right-of-way where trucks and shit can hit them.

If you don’t mind keeping a cookie around, DDG has search settings that let you turn off AI Assist and advertisements.

https://duckduckgo.com/settings

I’ve been getting annoying amdgpu crashes every now an then. I’ve tried all the various BIOS and kernel params but so far nothing has worked. Next step is rolling back a kernel version, at least that’s what I’ve gathered from all the threads about it. It’s bothersome but not frequent enough to be a real pain.

(This is an amd framework 13 with fedora 42 / wayland)

For the times it is down, the Freetube UI offers an easy way to “open in <video player of choice>” or “open embedded player”, both of which are much better than dealing with the default youtube UI.

Yeah, I’ve been fortunate enough to be offered those multiple times as well. I froze my credit with the big three agencies after the third or fourth breach. Recently learned there’s apparently a fourth agency now? Cool. And there’s hundreds of data broker sites…

As a settlement for the wrongful death of your parents you are entitled to 12 months of LifeLock’s DataScrub™ service!

If people want to fart around with ffmpeg filters this site is great: https://ffmpeg.lav.io/

This is probably just because it’s DC. The rules get really muddy there. For a long time the highest elected position in DC was head of the school board, and even though ostensibly there’s “home rule” now, Congress still loves to punish the local populace by overriding anything they think scores points with their base back in Idaho. If you get convicted of a felony in DC you actually get transferred to federal prison.

If you can find it, I keep a small bag of straight-up wheat gluten and I add a spoonful or two when I want to make stronger flour. A small bag lasts forever and a little goes a long way.

It’s not just tech. Gardening, DIY, cooking, and similar popular subjects have been completely destroyed by this crap. If I see an AI generated header image or thumbnail I immediately backpedal now because I assume that means the text is bullshit too.

The example stuck in my memory now is when I was trying to read about watermelon growing times and the article said they flower a week after germination.There’s now frequently this, “oh GOD DAMN IT *close tab*” moment when you realize it’s actually total slop. Like, “oh so this article is BULLSHIT bullshit.”

It’s the same as learning anything, really. A big part of learning to draw is making thousands of bad drawings. A big part of learning DIY skills is not being afraid to cut a hole in the wall. Plan to screw up. Take your time, be patient with yourself, and read ahead so none of the potential screw-ups hurt you. Don’t be afraid to look foolish, reality is absurd, it’s fine.

We give children largess to fail because they have everything to learn. Then, as adults, we don’t give ourselves permission to fail. But why should we be any better than children at new things? Many adults have forgotten how fraught the process of learning new skills is and when they fail they get scared and frustrated and quit. That’s just how learning feels. Kids cry a lot. Puttering around on a spare computer is an extremely safe way to become reacquainted with that feeling and that will serve you well even if you decide you don’t like Linux and never touch it again. Worst case you fucked up an old laptop that was collecting dust. That is way better than cutting a hole in the wall and hitting a pipe.

Maybe not dumb just dark and absurd, but called the cops.

Worked at a retail computer store with repair shop. Extremely assholish customer drops off his machine for an install of a “defective” piece of hardware he couldn’t manage to install on his own, arguing that install should be free because it’s our fault, somehow. Service manager cuts him a deal anyway just to make him happy.

He drops off his PC. Tech takes the machine, boots it up, bam… CSAM on his desktop. Cops came and got the PC, never saw the piece of shit again.

Actually this happened a few times but only once was the customer rude at first.

Retail is depressing.

Personally I haven’t had luck with diatomaceous earth and ants, they seemed willing to sacrifice a few ants to push a trail through the powder and then they were fine (I had to admire this strategy, something I would have never considered). I have had great luck with those ant baits that are a mix of sugar water and borax.

Yeah you should. Look into soil testing with your local city, county, or University Extension office. You send in a little sample of dry soil and they email you the results. It’s usually pretty cheap and will tell you if any soil is unsafe. My local library, for example, has sample boxes for free. Definitely a good idea for anyone in a place where lead paint could have been used, let alone other horrible stuff.

When I first started gardening I had this idealistic view of, “I will just grow a surplus, if the animals take some I will still have enough.” Nope. They eat everything, to the ground. They can do it in one night. There are different pests that specialize in eating the seeds, the roots, the stems, the leaves, and the fruit. Deer will “sample” entire plants just to confirm they don’t like them. Squirrels will take a single bite out of every tomato. Bears will push down an entire fruit tree just to get one fruit. Energy is scarce in nature and these organisms aren’t fucking around.

Took me awhile to finally admit that barriers aren’t just nice, they are required.

KDEnlive is improving, however Resolve is still more powerful and mature. That said, DaVinci’s business model seems precarious. It feels like they could, at any moment, enshittify Resolve and force users into a subscription just to maintain access to old edits. I think for that reason KDEnlive is better for almost all users. If you are a professional filmmaker then the color and vfx workflows of Resolve are probably worth paying for, but in that case it’s probably a FinalCut vs Resolve question anyway.

This one is pretty obscure but I feel like it fits this question.

For people who don’t know deep meme lore, YTMND was/is a site where people uploaded extremely short audio clips and images/gifs that went together. This all sprouted from a short clip of Sean Connery saying “You’re the man now, dog!” in the movie Finding Forester. Here’s the Know Your Meme page. Sometimes these were funny, sometimes they were artful and surreal, sometimes they were meta, usually they were just stupid.

One day back in the stone ages I was browsing the site and I found this one:

(CW racism):

I have to say it struck me. I reverse image searched the painting and discovered it’s by an artist named Slowinski whose work is explicitly about fucked up shit in American society. In this case obesity, lotteries, a terrible food supply, etc. are literally murdering a black man but its presented like a carnival attraction. The music seems so fitting to me because it mimicked both how “Black is Beautiful” and Black American art fights against the narrative but is also co opted by capitalism to push the exact same poison. I even thought, “Wow, the name is a play on the N word but also its homophone which means someone who is miserly, perhaps additional commentary?” Fucking excellent, especially for YTMND.

So I clicked the little “source” icon in the corner to see if the author had some insight on this and it’s literally just some kid who slowed down the song, thought it sounded like a “fat black guy”, and googled that then posted the image. Well fuck.

I wouldn’t say it’s a masterpiece but I still remember it, especially the irony of it, and it was a fucking YTMND of all things, so I guess that counts for something.