Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.

Really hoping he hasn’t brought the jinx with him.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2024

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  • LMDE Cinnamon user here. There’s a setting in the power options that tells the computer to switch to hibernate if it remains in suspend for a certain amount of time. Hibernated computers suspend to disk rather than RAM and are basically switched off, so need to POST to come back online.

    It took me a while to find that setting, and it might be the same case with whatever you’re using.

    What’s more, it only took effect if I used the GUI to put the computer into suspend mode. I usually use a keyboard combo to suspend the computer at night, but occasionally I’d use the GUI and come back in the morning to a hibernated computer.

    Thought I’d been taking crazy pills or that there was something wrong.

    My main gripes are that inconsistency between suspend methods and also that there’s no setting for how long to stay in suspend before hibernating. I have no idea if that’s a UEFI thing or something that could be set elsewhere, but I’d probably use that feature if I could set it.

    As it is I’m giving the hybrid option a try. Basically it suspends like normal, but also sets up a hibernated restart for if the power goes out. That hasn’t happened yet, so can only assume it’ll work when the time comes.


  • Maybe I should have said “White decides that the pawn retires rather than being promoted to anything.”

    They tried to take their own queen. They’re probably going to try something else equally wacky.

    Heck, maybe the (player decides that the) pawn stays on the back rank figuratively smashing its head into the wall until a black piece is forced to take it. An interesting, if otherwise illegal, way to gain tempo.

    Maybe the (player decides that the) pawn promotes to “10 square radius regicide”. The rules are gone. Anything is possible. The people are free of both kings! Vive la révolution!


  • He was an imminent threat to comfortable and familiar ways of life of the rich. Had he not been a threat to them and their interests, we would not have gone to war with him.

    Likewise anyone else on the current world stage who is obnoxious, outrageous, egregious or other adjectives of that ilk.

    Sure, he was also a threat to the comfort and happiness of people other than the rich, and hey, the fact that fascism is legitimately terrible is an excellent propaganda point, but that only made it easier to recruit those less well-off to go fight the battles of the rich.

    And then there’s that a significant part of the reason people outside of Germany hated him is because he was foreign. Nothing more, nothing less. Pick any country, and if he’d been one of their own instead, the haters would have liked him just fine and would have been “Roman saluting” just like the Germans did.

    (Yes, I know he was an Austrian accepted by Germans. Call that the exception that proves the rule. Countries further away couldn’t care less. He was still foreign to them.)










  • So there’s this funny thing about colour. I’m not talking about race here. Actual colours. Wherein certain languages always seem to have the same colours when they only have a certain number of base words for colours. When the language has words for only two colours, these usually correspond to light and dark. Black and white.

    I’m still not talking about race.

    And when there’s three, the third is always red.

    Then if there’s another it’s yellow or green.

    Then if there’s five, they’re generally the other one from above and then blue.

    Then you get an old and heavily moulded language like English with hundreds of colour names.

    But there are languages which only discern only two colours.

    Has the penny dropped yet?

    Decrying gender ideology is like saying that there’s only light and dark. “What’s all this ‘red’ business? And don’t get me started on green.”

    Now I’m certainly not going to tell people whose languages lack words for primary colours that they’re backward, because they have other ways of describing those things, or can learn names from other languages.

    But if someone from one of those cultures was to insist that there’s only two and can’t accept that other languages break things up into separate categories, that’s denying a fact, and that’s a problem.

    And if they get violent and start painting things black and white because “that’s all there is”, that’s an even bigger problem.

    Do you understand yet?

    “But black can’t change to white and white can’t change to black!!1!”

    Not all things are the same colour all the way through. What’s on the outside is not necessarily representative of what’s going on on the inside. This here red apple, sorry, dark apple, is light on the inside.

    And now it’s illegal to peel an apple.


  • It’s kind of easy to forget about or ignore any experience they might have if they’re asking questions like that. Sure, maybe it was a brain fart from a panicked intern who’s having orders barked at them from a powerful individual that they want to impress, but that doesn’t make it any better, does it?




  • There’s not much closure here because I do not know where any of these people are now, and I don’t care to look.

    At school, if you don’t count the bullies, probably the kid who thought it was amusing to take rabbits apart after hunting them. I have another story in my head about something awful that happened to a cat which may also have been him, now that I think about it. He had an odd monotone to his voice and a dead look in his eyes, like he was elsewhere or sleeping and something else was running the show. He didn’t seem all that terrifying either, which is probably worse.

    There was at least one teacher who I’m pretty sure had far-right leanings, with a couple of glaring red flags, but I didn’t notice until I was much older.

    Then, in an echo of that, there was the smug CEO of the company that bought the one I was working for, who came up with the magical slogan “One company, one workforce, one leader”. I’m surprised he didn’t throw in a “Work sets you free” along with it. (This was in the early '00s, and is almost certainly not known to anyone reading this.)

    But as far as shitty behaviour goes, I can’t count myself as completely innocent. There are many things I’ve done, that I won’t go into, where my conscience has since reasserted itself (or ignorance lost, or both) and I cringe pretty much every day. I can only hope the people on the receiving end are doing great and aren’t too badly affected by it.

    It’s for this reason I’d hope that each of the above, and a lot more people besides, would have their consciences do the same thing.



  • “Quick example” might be the key here. I was making some notes on something earlier today and my brain was putting out letters faster than my hand could keep up and I got letterforms not entirely unlike yours. Far too used to typing where each letter takes almost exactly the same amount of time to “write”.

    I had to remind myself to s-l-o-w d-o-w-n. Letter by letter. Make them neat. If you have attention span issues like me, it’s painful, but when the letters take shape it almost soothes that beast. But not quite in my case and so back to rushing again.

    But it’s plain as day on the page where I slowed down. The letters look almost machine-printed by comparison. Next to an actual machine print, they’re still pretty bad, but you know. Better than the middle of that wide gap between perfect machine and rushed squiggles.

    The other thing with typing in the computer age is that there’s this wonderful invention called the backspace key. When you’re hurriedly writing with pen or pencil, backspace isn’t a thing, so a writer is more likely to think “eh, close enough” and plough on. There are definitely a few full words crossed out and rewritten in my notes where it really bothered me though.