I bailed on Netflix when I realized that damn, I’m going like a month with this on my phone and haven’t really watched much, maybe one anime? Can I get something other than shitty anime, Netflix? Fun action flick from the last 5 years maybe? No? Never the good one, always the knockoff, the shitty sequel, nothing at all? Canceled Mindhunter? Because of course. Okay, no more pay money, and then I didn’t miss it. That decision took a shameful amount of time to make.

This was way before the password share thing. I don’t know what the rest of you are even doing. Stuff for the kids I guess.

I guess I do this bullshit, now, for entertainment, but this Suuuuuucks with a capital S, so the next step is to find the government chip that makes me scroll and metaphorically remove it. Fuck socials, too. Fuck all this shit anymore.

Sorry, I haven’t been stealing from Tumblr like I should.

This type of relationship is pretty common in war. You and the squad end up “in the shit” and now you have all crossed the boundaries of what civilians call “manliness”. You are free, unimpeachable, the manliest thing, a real warrior, a soldier in battle. The things you do now define manliness, you are writing the rules. They can call you whatever, you will reply with the sort of laughter that silences fools.

People die around you. The sound of another man’s voice becomes poetry to you. How much longer will you hear his voice? Who knows, tell him a shitty joke. Sit on his lap for a gag, do whatever. Drink in his presence, press his flesh against yours, be alive together, try to keep him in your memory, tomorrow we all may die. Has anybody seen those pictures of soldiers from the American Civil War all hanging out and mugging for the camera? Acting all “gay” with each other? That’s what war does to men, sometimes, probably not that often, I fear.

Somebody online with a military background once remarked about the safest he’s ever felt, including in civilian life, was when he was in some tent in a war zone with the rest of the platoon, everyone in their sleeping bags, crammed in the tent together like a litter of kittens in a box. Sure, they were in the death zone, for real, but he was warm and snug, surrounded by armed badasses who would come to his aid at once if anything nasty went down. He said he slept like a baby, that he’s never felt that sense of security since, not even safe in bed as a civilian, later.

It means a lot to me that this book, TLOR, was pretty much written by the Great War. Tolkien went to that war, against his own will, compelled by shame campaigns, not even the law, in spite of his own convictions, and he did not have some safe posting at the base, no, he was at the Somme. He saw the worst of it, probably missed death by inches several times, saw mud and blood, was deafened and battered, only to survive at last, coming home as changed as Frodo.

He watched men charge into machine guns like mice into a blender, watched them die of trench foot and the stupid ways war kills you without even glory or honor to show for it, saw that sometimes courage is just hiding in your little hole and not screaming when the tanks roll over. He saw Mordor in person. No man’s land.

Then he came home, and did he write some edgy darkness? No. He wrote this thing, this fantasy, with its message of hope that evil can be vanquished, and that men can be good, yes, even when they seem utterly lost to goodness. This is somehow the lesson that the War to End All Wars had taught him. He had nothing left to prove, so he made a pretty, frivolous thing, for children, but couldn’t help it, he couldn’t help making something bigger than that. He knew how intimate men become with each other under fire, and it ended up in the book.

That is the only thing he wanted to remember, that unexpected love when suffering and death are right on top of you. I wonder who Legolas was to him? Somebody young and beautiful, who deserved to live a thousand years, but didn’t, probably. They shall not grow old.

We shouldn’t need the machine guns coming at us to hug our friends, that’s probably what he wanted the world to know.

I wonder if it works like IRC. The “plague” this entire time has been servers. As soon as the idea only works because somebody, somewhere, is maintaining a server, cloud or hardware, then you’re kinda sunk. The server is the bottleneck. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a AAA game launch only for the servers to be inadequate. It happens again and again and again, so I assume the business considerations push them toward having just enough server and maybe a little less, never extra, which costs money and cuts margins.

Somewhere there are a bunch of servers howling away in a room that are actually Discord, and Discord spends money to make them howl, so there’s never as much server as you want, which is why things start bogging down with too many people in the chat room at once.

Most importantly to a corporation, if you have to interact with their servers in order to do anything, then they can own the platform by owning the servers. So there’s always going to be a server, even if it’s not strictly needed. The same consideration goes through the head of the streamer who always wants to launch a Discord because it’s “free” but they can sell it to you and then have top level control of an entire community as an asset that can be sold to others. There’s always a server. There will be a server if the actual application doesn’t really need it.

The reason IRC works fine with 1500 people in a chat is because IRC uses the user’s machine for any sort of computation power it needs, and then everything else it is doing is just sending data across wires. There is no central server farm. I haven’t used IRC in a really, really long time, but if it hasn’t changed, then it also doesn’t support lots of picture posting, which helps. Most of the memory usage on my machine at idle is just too many Discord channels all needing to use my local RAM memory to store the umpteen thousand photos everyone has uploaded, all the memes and etc. The IRC I remember was text, and text uses so little data that it can be treated like zero data.

Lots of pictures are probably non-negotiable in the modern era. Heck, they’re pretty important for serious work tasks, like putting up a shot of the broken gadget, so the engineering team can get an eyeball on the failure, that means pictures are in, text-only isn’t viable. I don’t know if modern IRC supports this or not, it probably does if people are still using it at all.

But IRC is a piece of open-source software that you install on your machine, free to the user. It’s not a web app, it doesn’t live in a browser. The data of you interacting with others is being sent out to them and also back to you, where it shows up in your IRC client and the chat room. If 1500 people are using it, then 1500 people have each added some of their machine power to making it all work, so it scales, it always has as much hardware as it needs. Again, there’s no server in the middle to run out of capacity, so that problem is just bypassed.

Everything used to work like this, circa the late 1990s and early 2010s. Everyone was assumed to be on a PC of their own, and the only problem was how to connect them together to do stuff, like have deranged fan wars about shows. BBSs were already kind of old hat, and there’s that damn server again, every BBS has one. All the most clever apps of the 90s, even the web, managed to jump through hoops to avoid the necessity of a central server to get things done because then somebody has to pay for it, run it, maintain it and own it. We just want the wires, the lovely, lovely cables dragged across the sea at somebody else’s unthinkable expense. If you can eliminate the server somehow, then you win. And they did. Things like IRC and ICQ blew the hell up from using that model.

We really need to dig that entire concept back up and brush the dust off of it. I wonder if that’s what Matrix is.

Now if you’ll excuse me I need to go prune some pointless Discord channels. Oh, by the by, fucking nobody uses Slack, or knows what it is. Dudes on the internet all think it’s normal because tech offices seem to use it a lot, the rest of the world has never used Slack. Up until right now I was assuming that Discord and Slack are the same thing, owned by the same company, and Slack is just the “business casual” version of Discord. This doesn’t seem to be true, but that’s how unfamiliar I am with Slack, while being chronically online. There are probably more people around who still remember ICQ than have ever used Slack in their lives.

I love the Church of the Subgenius reference built into Slack’s name. From what I can tell, nobody who uses that thing actually gets any slack, it actively removes slack from your life and makes boss surveillance really, really easy for the boss, but you must always act as though Big Brother can hear, or you’re fucked. Good work Bob, nice joke. Anyway, I shut up now.

I gave it some thought and decided that yes, while it’s nice to get out in nature, an afternoon in the park does just as well, walking around, no need to sleep there, so the reason people are camping is that we are practicing homelessness, just in case.

I just want to say that I appreciate the truly fractal nature of these memes

Please tell me you made it talk to a bot.

And then she made a bunch of Jade eggs for your puss puss and sold them.

Hobbits walking past the hobbit hole in the pic like motherfuckin gentrification buildings brah, this rent is already too high, I gotta use my gun more

People certainly are polishing this meme to a high sheen. Anyway, tell it to the pothos ivy.

So it’s just another clickable lie, because of course it is, it’s too perfect. I can’t fact-check everything and it’s a bad use of time if I have to.

I gotta get off of social media entirely, I can work with fiction presented as fiction but it’s just an endless firehose of lies from people who think they have a god-given right to lie as much as they need to, on every platform. The AI thing is just getting started. I lost track of reality several months ago, and that’s not supposed to be some sort of jokey joke.

If there was just some obnoxious little T-notch I had to line up on the connector, then I would fumble with it once and after that I could probably get it done in the dark, but apparently it doesn’t matter how many times I use a USB, I’ll never learn to use it on the first try, with the lights on and a flashlight pointed at the situation.

I like that getting it wrong and forcing it also destroys the port, so if it’s a crucial connection, and you’re in a hurry in poor light it’s a great way to kill the whole show trying to insist on that USB going in first try.

Great design, Crowley, you really are a professional. I think it’s better than that awful motorway, this one has touched the world, I can see why that angel loves you so much, what an artist.

Sorry wrong fandom

Oh so sorry we misplaced your paperwork very badly for you Mr Navalny, I cannot say that we have a death certificate for you but I’m sure we could find one if necessary.

That guy’s red jacket was truly something.

God he was bad at being inconspicuous. Too king to grey man properly or something.

Oh well, guess I’m still happy about this magic bag i got for going places I don’t want Google knowing about.

It’s not my educate to job you.

I really don’t want to make a thing of it, but it’s nice to hear the original voice acting. I kinda want to hear that Japanese voice actress who’s probably famous for all sorts of roles, it seems unfair to consume everyone else’s work but not hers, so I want to pick up the OG vibe from the dubbed anime if I can. I bet undubbed Cowboy Bebop is good stuff, I should find that and watch it.

It can get crazy though. US DBZ gives fairly masculine voices to all male characters who are not obviously children, even if most of them sound like young men and aren’t all that bassy, save, of course, Piccolo and Vegeta. Vegeta always sounds like he’s trying to put some bass in his voice, but he’s all nasal. Still. Man voices. Even Krillen gets a grown man voice, even if he’s reedy and is supposed to sound like a pipsqueak.

I watched 10 minutes of the show once that was in notEnglish and absolutely the fuck not. Everyone had extremely high-pitched little boy voices which was fucking weird, and I kept waiting for them to drop the gag, but no, that’s their voices for that version. Goku sounding like a chipmunk squeaker yelling in some other language. No thanks. To this day I have no idea what language that was.

So sometimes you just want subbed anime. Sometimes you want to watch Tenchi Muyo with a Ryoko who sounds right. My strong opinion is that I shouldn’t have one when it comes to subs v dubs, that’s internet clown stuff for people who think arguing is a fun sport.

Ah, the late 1900s when you could still pretend that Apple was the choice of the counterculture for no credible reason except for Apple marketing. Slacktivism, my dude. Worthless.

This meme is truly ancient. I bet those little iMacs go for a pretty penny on eBay now after everyone tossed them in the garbage circa 2003.

Lemmy needs a community dedicated to pointless debate over which flashlight is best. I’m about to permanently borrow somebody’s ThruNite T1 but it’s too heavy, I miss the mini Maglite I used to carry. Phone flash is fine, yes, but I miss a flashlight/torch without a fucking login procedure involved for fuck sake.