Bags

Maybe they have indeed been dead for several minutes and it’s a sign they need to be brought back to life

I leave for Paris tomorrow and while I’ve been planning the trip I had the strangest urge to smoke a cigarette at a streetside cafe sipping some coffee… and I have never smoked in my life. Feels like a real deep cultural meme has gripped me.

I don’t usually pay attention to usernames, but I just laughed out loud when I checked their post history. Very rarely do I see a truly shit take on here, but most of the recent posts I remember being real stinkers are all from this same user.

Also the recent obsession with age is very strange.

Can you talk with the IT team?
I was able to switch my MFA to a Yubikey.
They rolled out the MFA policy quite recently and I immediately sent an email like “Hello. I do not have a smartphone. What are my options?”
They also had the option for SMS verification, but I had been looking at getting a Yubikey for myself anyway so might as well get work to pay for it.

I’m currently reading a book (A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge) where 2 voyages get stranded at the same faraway star system, one is a totalitarian autocracy and the other is a free trading culture. The totalitarian regime gets the upper hand, takes over via manipulation and sabotage, and tries to stifle and outlaw all money and trade. They end up spying on the underground black market trade that pops up and manipulates people into trading and doing work for the regimes benefit without their knowledge… If not money, then goods and services, or any other analog for such. Certain people will always try to accumulate “wealth”, whatever that wealth may be, it doesn’t necessarily have to be legal tender.

The book feels extremely relevant to current events, as the autocratic regime employs a ubiquitous police state and uses an even less ethical analog for AI to control it all. It was published in 1999.

I was looking for someone else to mention this.

The karma system on Reddit trapped me hard and the constant validation seeking was really a drag on my mental health. Getting one negative score comment would ruin my day, I really just want to be understood. I realize how unhealthy that is, but I’m not really sure what to do about it besides just not interacting with that place anymore. I don’t have as much of a problem with being wrong in real life, it’s more the fact that online I have the opportunity to take my time, be meticulous, edit my post to make sure it’s perfect and I have said exactly what I wanted to in the exact way I wanted to…

Coming here and being able to disable the counts has been an absolute dream.

Still doin’ their thing, they released a new album last year! They went on a small new-album tour and that’s when I was able to catch their show.

I found the source of the quote on the bookmark, and it was a quote by Plato out of Phaedrus so it definitely is real lol. It’s somewhat different on the bookmark, but depending on what translation you look at the quote will probably be slightly different anyway. It’s sections 274e to 275b

But when he came to writing, Theuth said, “This branch of learning, O King, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories, for I have discovered an elixir of both memory and wisdom.” The king replied, “Oh most ingenious Theuth, one man is able to invent these skills, but a different person is capable of judging their benefit or harm to those who will use them. And you, as the father of writing, on account of your positive attitude, are now saying that it does the opposite of what it is able to do. This subject will engender forgetfulness in the souls of those who learn it, for they will not make use of memory. Because of their faith in writing, they will be reminded externally by means of unfamiliar marks, and not from within themselves by means of themselves. So, you have discovered an elixir not of memory but of reminding. You will provide the students with a semblance of wisdom, not true wisdom. For having heard a great deal without any teaching they will seem to be extremely knowledgeable, when for the most part they are ignorant, and are difficult people to be with because they have attained a seeming wisdom without being wise.”

I have my font set to Atkinson Hyperlegible, so the lowercase L has a little tail to differentiate it from the capital i, which has its serifs… but in the quote block, the font isn’t enforced for some reason so I had to copy/paste it into this textbox to even see what letter that was.

Interesting stuff that I would have never noticed or thought about otherwise…

I have a bookmark made by the band Sleepytime Gorilla Museum that was sneakily tucked into my merch haul last time I saw them live, and it has a quote on it that I will need to wait until I get home to properly remember, and I also want to do more diligence to figure out if it is an actual quote. At the top it says “A WARNING ABOUT READING”, and the quote says something like:

Beware the written language, man was never destined to record their every thought. How will we continue to remember ourselves when we are now able to cast our essence into this new medium, to remove the memories from ourselves so that we are wrought into perpetual forgetfulness?
-Allegedly some ancient guy from the dawn of books

The “Boops Boops in a bucket” photo used to be the main article image on Wikipedia and it tickled me in just the right way, I screenshotted it in 2021.

I went to check on it a couple years later after telling someone about it, and the photo was completely gone from the article! I was so sad. But I still had my screenshot.

Looking now, the bucket photo has returned further down the page!

Looking at the Wikipedia history for this page is funny, there are so many edits for one page for a small little goofy fish. Really shows how much work goes into maintaining that encyclopedia! And looking at the little spats about such things as the color of the bucket, and whether or not it is appropriate to mention such in the caption… Fascinating. EDIT: I keep going deeper. The caption for this exact image has been HOTLY contested. Also it has been said that the bucket is blue, and also that the bucket is turquoise. Also it can’t be decided on if “Boops boops in a bucket” is an appropriate caption because it is literally correct, or if it is “roflcopter nonsense” simply because the name of the fish happens to be silly…