I’ve heard the sound of a Lancaster bomber with all 4 Merlin engines flying over my rural home many times.

I don’t think there’s ever been an US election between people so unpopular.

I think it’s the news media exploiting people’s desire for something cathartic in lieu of having any meaningful politics to change anything. US politics right now is like a show/spectacle that people react to from opposite sides. Posting the same fucking articles and memes is like a way to manufacture and participate in a simulation of your individual political views having some significance, outside of any popular politics where they could actually change something. This is clearly the case with Trump too, for all the insane shit he governed like a milquetoast Republican.

This article and every one like it have been on repeat since 2016, I dunno how people still have the attention span for “today’s Trump insanity” after 8 years. It should be obvious to anyone this has no effect on politics and only makes news orgs money.

Problem I have with calling this a feudal arrangement is a lot of serfs actually had family rights to their land/means of production under land tenure agreements. It’s more the notion of private ownership of land and production that has led to these private technology increasingly mediating more of our lives. I’ve seen the concept of technofeudalism used in good ways but the overall thing is capitalism and they are more elements of feudal type arrangement within that.

Lua is so friendly, I’ve run in to it in a few instances in different contexts. Currently have a “sound computer” shield for rpi that uses Lua to run community scripts, which turn the thing in to anything from synths to sequencers to loopers and some really esoteric stuff. Lua is so intuitive I’m able to tweak stuff and even add functionality to existing scripts without much effort.

Reminds me of how many times outages to corporate software has been caused by some bullshit with the licensing management.

Understanding the historical circumstances I find myself in and devoting the majority of my effort in to things I can control.

Well the one that keeps me needing a Windows machine for on… Ableton Live + VST plug-ins.

Musicbrains Picard is also the best metadata autotag app I’ve used.

“Reclaim Windows” type powershell scripts, feel like group policy and powershell are underutilized by average desktop users. A lot of the things people complain about with windows you can control with it. Primarily a debain user myself but I need Windows to run Ableton on custom hardware so it is what it is.

Yup this is how we do it, don’t count anything lower than gp either. Game time passes but not real time, and if you bargain you make corresponding roles, DM can decide if you get advantage or disadvantage depending on the context.

Yeah I’m a huge pirate but I also have subscriptions to publications, buy a bunch of games, buy music and even have almost every release from a few labels, go to concerts as much as I can. It’s not about the money for me at all

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I think it’s more what happened under the cover of Trump, ie what Republicans do, which is where the damage was in Trump’s presidency. He was basically a smokescreen and scapegoat for all manner of interests, but as an individual almost completely vapid aside from his narcissistic drive for attention, which all mainstream politics was more than happy to provide him with.

The “good war” is always an alarm bell for me, the real losers are always civilians, and what America did in Afghanistan and Iraq dwarfs what’s going on in Gaza now.

I think Dubya hands down if we’re reducing to the presidency. To me Trump represents the absurd spectacle American politics has become, but the worst thing about Trump winning was that the Republicans were able to pass legislation. Trump as an individual wasn’t very successful as a politician once he was in power. Trump, Hillary, and Biden are so widely unpopular in general, and Trump barely losing to someone like Biden after one term really drives the point home how meaningless so much of these politics are right now apart from the spectacle they provide. Trump was the spectacle in a pure form, and when the mainstream liberal media was covering him as a frontrunner in early 2016 and reacting to every tweet, that was my first realization this presidency could potentially happen.

Bush and the post-9/11 world I view as the sort of last doubling-down towards the political situation we live in today, and Obama represented the best we can hope for within this system. While Obama was insanely likable as a personality and speaker I never really supported the politics he stood for. Adolph Reed Jr. had the best take on Obama in 1996, now an infamous article since it was really validated post-Obama:

“In Chicago, for instance, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program — the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics, as in Haiti and wherever else the International Monetary Fund has sway. So far the black activist response hasn’t been up to the challenge. We have to do better.”

The decrepit political landscape today is a perfect fit for Trump but I don’t think he controls it, he’s just a mirror that reflects back on itself, it’s what goes on in his shadow that’s the real danger. I think progressives being so enraptured by Trump’s terribleness is another serious issue because of this. Just being “not Trump” has allowed the Democrats to be lax on anything that would upset their donor base. Biden was always a darling of the Israel lobby for instance (why Obama picked him as VP) and we’re seeing the effects of this right now. Bernie was a real mobilization and hope for the left and the attacks about him being soft on race etc from liberal progressives was basically an indication of where the Democrat party is. They want the “do-good” version of the same economic system the Republican’s want to hand to the barons, and there’s no political alternative to this system being offered, just the form it takes. Now there’s hope in the increasing labor actions and strikes, an encouraging trend as people are pushed further and further being offered nothing by mainstream politicians.

I think a lot of the worst presidents basically embodied the historical time they were in and were just the ones at the helm of the presidency. Other’s like Johnson, I’d say with the issue of reconstruction specifically, that was a true hinge point that just went to absolute shit and we’re still living with it.

Crohns? That’s what I have and “invisible disability” is an apt description.

Now watch this drive

Andrew Johnson

I try and schedule my “collaboration” time then because conversation helps, and a lot of times it’s not entirely work related. For real though my focus is gone until later at night by this point, so it is what it is. My coworkers and managers are fine with it.