Her short story “The Day Before The Revolution” is a good add-on to this too, and the preface is interesting IMO.

My novel The Dispossessed is about a small worldful of people who call themselves Odonians. The name is taken from the founder of their society, Odo, who lived several generations before the time of the novel, and who therefore doesn’t get into the action-- except implicitly, in that all the action started with her.

Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with; not the social-Darwinist economic “libertarianism” of the far right; but anarchism. as prefigured in early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman. Anarchism’s principal target is the authoritarian State (capitalist or socialist); its principal moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories.

Hopefully we can keep Doug Ford away from it this time.

It’s one of those things I’d love to see done as an experiment as long as it could be done ethically. Build a little town somewhere and have no prescribed jobs, just let everyone do what they want and see how it pans out.

Another one I’d like to see is to have two areas as identical as possible - same geography, climate, resources etc. and populate one fully with left-wing people and one with right-wing people and see which one does better. Unfetterd Socialist Utopia vs Unrestricted Ayn Rand Libertarian Boot-strappery or whatever. Settle it once and for all lol.

I too have been to a comic con.

I’m a big fan of it in concept, but TBH the pandemic made me think twice about it. By that I mean, I watched quite a lot of people get put on furlough, so essentially having their needs met while not having to work, and they went fucking crazy, like screaming fights in the shared hallway over literally nothing at 6am crazy. And it happened really fast too. I think a lot of people are so indoctrinated into the concept of having to show up to work and be told what to do that they kind of short-circuit when left to work it out for themselves.

Not that I think we shouldn’t do it necessarily, and I’d hope over time it would even out as people got used to it, but it would need to be done very carefully I think. Even if the math and the politics of it make sense, you also have to sort of account for the irrationality of people as well, which I don’t often hear a lot of discussion about.

I worked retail for a decade. There is no bottom to the barrel. There are people driving around in cars who genuinely shouldn’t be left unsupervised with metal utensils.

Coworker: Hi

Me: [Waits for more info, nothing comes.]

Me: Hello

Coworker: So

[Several seconds pass]

Coworker: What’s up with that file from yesterday?

Me: [Waits for more info, nothing comes.]

Me: Which file

[No response for literally 10 minutes]

Coworker: The one we sent to client B

Me: [Rather than keep trying to extract information, search through history and find file which was sent to client B yesterday, find nothing obviously wrong with it, and it was nothing to do with me anyway]

Me: [Sends link to file] You mean this one?

[5 minutes pass]

Coworker: NM I figured it out. Thanks!

My other favourite is the coworker who does the same thing but instead of saying hey types “Pssst” and if you don’t respond within about 5 seconds they start sending GIFS of people knocking on doors and stuff.

Civil War. Pretty good movie IMO that is sadly becoming more relevant as time goes on.

Edit: Not a movie about Linux though lol

Dictionary definition of terrorism:

(Noun) the unlawful use of violence or threats to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or government, with the goal of furthering political, social, or ideological objectives.

Best I could find was a reddit AMA from the cofounders of the company, who say in one of the replies that you can request a code to unlock the bootloader. (Ctrl + F bootloader should show it up.)

They’re also pretty fucking comfortable wearing masks now, when a couple of years ago they were treating it as like the equivalent of being waterboarded.

We really need to stop letting Microsoft add shit to keyboards TBH.

And also paid for with hypothetical money that doesn’t exist lol

It’s always baffled me how Microslop’s entire business model as far back as I can remember seems to be “Make the shittiest possible version of every product imaginable, then watch it for some reason become the global standard, then make it even worse and suffer no consequences.”

The extinction of the Neanderthals, or any of the other extinct human-like species. It’d be so fascinating to live in a world where there was another species that was close to us in intelligence but also so different. We’d be awful to them though.

There’s a book called The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson that kind of explores this idea. It’s an alternate history book where the black death kills 99% of the European population instead of about a third, and the world progresses essentially without any European people. It’s really good!

I have an ungodly amount of time logged in Civ V, and CIv VI is catching up. I don’t want to even think about adding up all the Civ games as one thing lol

I ended up settling on Betterbird. It’s… fine lol

I’m in a similar boat, as a 2D animator. Which admittedly is pretty niche but if Linux had something like Moho Pro or Toon Boom then I could delete my Windows partition forever. You can do 2D animation in Blender, but IMO it’s not quite up there compared to a dedicated 2D software like Toon Boom Harmony.

The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now – with somebody – and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.

It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy. Osama bin Laden may be a primitive “figurehead” – or even dead, for all we know – but whoever put those All-American jet planes loaded with All-American fuel into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon did it with chilling precision and accuracy.

We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them.

This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed – for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it Now. He will declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why. If the guilty won’t hold up their hands and confess, he and the Generals will ferret them out by force.

I always think it’s wild that he published this on September 12, 2001, and he essentially called the next 2 decades of American foreign policy, correctly named the perpetrator of the attacks and named the three primary countries that the US would retaliate against, less than 24 hours after the attacks happened. The dude knew how the US system works.