Huh. The image was very weird to me, but I’ve played some version of this as a kid. Team one makes this structure against a wall, team two send people to jump and crawl forward, the goal being to break the “bridge”. I can’t even remember what we fucking called this game, this was in Lebanon in the late aughts/early tens.

There’s something about how most teenage boys are wired that made it feel exceptionally badass when your team was on the bottom and you didn’t crumple when it was the turn of one of the large gentlemen on the other team to jump.

Hey, thanks for the laptop IT guy! Yeah everyone around the office has been very welcoming, I’m happy to be here. I’m pretty handy with computers so hopefully I won’t be bothering you too much haha…. Yeah anyway, I know you just imaged this laptop, but the thing is, I really don’t like all the fluff in the Windows updates, can I instead provide my own Windows image? It’s straight from Microsoft but you get it through a site called MASS GRAVE. And then you can apply the group policies and enable the drive mapping scripts and reinstall the secure company network client infrastructure —

I think when most people mean work they mean corporate where you have zero control. I’m just happy they let me use PowerTools. At home, manually amputating pieces of Windows has been a bit fiddly but no less fiddly than what people think configuring is still like.

It’s annoying, but for most people, even among the technically inclined, it’s fine. For now. I’m more likely to pivot to Linux than to OSX eventually.

I don’t see the humor in it anymore. Whenever it comes to even admitting the crimes happening to/in Palestine, it’s always decent people getting the entire book thrown at them, while others who actually do something evil get off scott free.

You can’t just ask for accountability for crimes. You have to kiss the ring and you have to be made an example of. What we are seeing with the response to student action is actually unprecedented and it’s genuinely unhinged. And it’s not just the US, it’s most of Europe too.

It’s not enough that our brothers and sisters in Palestine are getting rounded up and massacred. You have to support it with every fiber of your being or you’re a terrorist. After planing my whole life to move to the West I’m now genuinely scared I’ll be jailed for thought crime if it keeps getting crazier.

On one hand, nice to have my country mentioned in a context where we’re not being warcrimed, on the other, I’m somewhat disappointed that our government actually lifted a finger in the investigation of a foreign intellectual property case.

I thought about that as I was writing but it would be a little contrived to a general audience, maybe.

I’ve commented about this link before. The gym bro thing is what made me wrap my mind around some things myself.

Honestly that could actually be interesting. Would probably be able to discuss some nuances and make the mainstream a bit more comfortable with some currently uncomfortable conversations. People can remember complicated things if they’re invested in the narrative.

I’m a cis-het potato. If any of this sounds insensitive, I can fix it:

Guy who doesn’t meet the stereotype of a “drug guy” has to cook up drugs to make ends meet. <Narrative device> makes him start making <common drug> for <uncontroversial illness>, which turns out to also be used by <some queer people> for <hormoney things>. At first he sees them as nothing more than the users he was profiting from in an hour of desperation, people who twist their sad lives around acquiring and consuming a substance, but over time as he gets further down this path he begins to understand them in a way that he (and most people) has never had to. “Upstanding-man-who-is-a-secret-chemical-man ally” can go in so many directions.

With all its many many faults, I remember seeing Dallas Buyers Club as a judgmental kid, and it was successfully able to split “queer identity” from “sexual perversion” for me. I think this understanding was beginning to spread before a tipping point in the past decade. Personally I think people saw a lot of (Western) companies really go all in on rainbow marketing, going directly from “queer identities exist” to “these are being celebrated openly” without the critical middle “this isn’t a sex thing”.

If you think it’s bad in the US or Europe (and it’s not always great, it’s not a competition) let me assure you the heightened negative attention has also made people who were able to be themselves under the radar here in the Middle East face more bullshit. The average person around me has gone from “This person gives me the ick but it has no effect on my life really, just stay away from me and my kids, it’s between them and God” to “This person should be fixed immediately before they shove their perversion down everyone’s throats.” The former is abysmal, but at that point they weren’t really seen as an active, growing threat. Unfortunately it’s not just “this isn’t a sex thing” that’s missing here, historically most people have thought “queer” = “perversion” = “pedophilia”, and this was fading slowly before being supercharged by all this torrent of negative attention.

Part of what drew me to the old site in ye olde 2013 was that it was the largest platform that wasn’t shitty about this specific subject.

Funny to see this is now the standard expectation for that place. Look how they massacred my boy

I swear that week has broken something and revealed so much pent up cruelty towards my part of the world from American shitheads specifically. Didn’t even know they’d care to remember where we are on a map.

And to think I’ve been eying the US as a possible new home not that long ago. Just so icky

Unfortunately as a kid with an iron and too much free time I’ve picked enough old PCBs clean to the point that I’ve collected so many single-purpose inductors I’ve had to throw a lot of them out.

I really think there should be more guides like this spread far and wide. Would have done me good to have a video like this ten years ago.

Unfortunately less and less parts are discrete now. I can understand what someone is doing on screen when I watch a NES repair but most current day devices use tiny SMDs. I understand why, but it is different.

I thought he was pretty middle of the road as far as fitness bros go, but I’m not surprised the bullshit-du-jour brought some cringe to the surface. Unfortunate. With these guys I can only hope they aren’t too far down the drain. I’ve watched a lot of insightful videos from this guy, even if they didn’t apply to me. I can only hope that some of the other guys I’ve gotten helpful advice from in the past (namely Mario Tomic and Sean Nalewanyj and James Nippard) aren’t like that.

You’d think bodybuilders could be the most empathetic people towards gender nonconforming folks, given their daily physical and mental effort re: body dysphoria. As someone outside the queer community it was ironically cis dude fitness talk that helped me wrap my head around the kind of thing trans people especially have to worry about on a daily basis.

Sometimes your body just can’t do what your mind says it must do and that’s a pretty crazy experience! Sometimes it’s a hormone or chemical thing. Sometimes people around you are dicks about things that they really shouldn’t be about. You bust your ass and sometimes go to extreme lengths to narrow the gap. The theoretical bodybuilder bro - transgender axis of solidarity seems very rational to me. It feels like the disconnect is purely cultural/artificial.