_NetNomad

forums face a lot of the same issues federated platforms do, chiefly- why the hell would the proverbial i join it when reddit and discord already exist? i already have an account there, there’s already a community there… i think for some people that’s just never gonna change. there’s no closing pandora’s box. i run an online community with a small but fairly active discord and we have a forum as well in anticipation of discord going full enshittification, but it’s just impossible to get younger people onto it. the fedi at least has the advantage of looking like the monolithic platforms people are leaving, but forums are such a foreign concept

getting a community going is a bit of a catch 22. the best way to get users is to already have users and appear active. if i recall correctly, early on reddit had a ton of staff sock puppet accounts to do just that. i’m certainly not advocating for it but it goes to show how tricky the problem is. the only real answer on an individual level is to pick a platform and stick with it through the thin years and try to recruit a few friends- after that MAYBE hopefully it eventually gets some momentum

i’m gonna level with you, i completely forgot IBM cloud was a thing and just thought this was MS pointing fingers at system Z or system . thanks for catching that!

so Delta’s non-Windows machines were the ones that suffered the most from a Windows software malfunction? that makes sense

it must have been weird for Hayden to return to a role he’s synonymous with to put a capstone on a long and emotional story arc that he had nothing to do with, but you never would have been able to tell by the way he sold it

“No, you should totally go on this one, captain. Take the XO too. We’ll be fine. We’re all far too busy, uh, reversing the polarity of the deflector dish, and we definitely deleted the template for Romulan ale from the replicators for good this time. Also the transporter is on the fritz so you should probably take a shuttle, and then stay down there and see the sights to make it worth it.”

of course the movie franchise about killing space nazis famously had no woke agenda whatsoever until they gave a woman a laser sword

he was doing his civic duty

if you combine the ratings for Discovery and Knuckles, you get to the third position on the chart. Paramount, you know what must be done…

you’ll pry my END command from my cold, dead hands…

Tales of the Jedi did a really good job fleshing Dooku out. many star wars villains are unambigiously evil- that’s what happens when dark wizardry is very real and a viable career path i guess- but Dooku really thought he was doing the right thing at first, like a more selfless Anakin. a lot of Star Wars media does a great job illustrating that the Republic and the Jedi were deeply flawed, but don’t make the jump to saying that many if not most planets joined the CIS in good faith for that reason- i guess because the new non-droids we see in the CIS are all asshats or aforementioned evil wizards, but still! the fight against the republic and the rebellion against the empire were essentially the same conflict from a certain point of view…

if i had a nickel for every time Spock faced off against a unique species of cat-like predator from Vulcan, i’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice

many retro systems have implementations of a language called BASIC, which is about as easy as it sounds. it has some quirks that aren’t transferable to newer languages and you won’t be able to make anything nearly as sophisticated as retail games for the same hardware but if you find modern engines intimidating, it can be a good place to start

that said, +1 for godot if you want to learn a more modern tool. it’s way simpler than it may seem at first and there is a huge wealth of beginner-friendly tutorials available online

rexx is my favorite programming language. it’s an interpreted language similar to python but it has actual visible block delimiters instead of going by indentation. the error handling system is also very convienent. the reason it probably faded into obscurity is it’s wild cowboy take on typing- EVERYTHING is a string until you try to use a math function on it. i get that it’s unrealistic for writing anything performance-sensitive but for writing shell scripts and utilities it is unmatched in it’s simplicity. it definitely comes closer than anything else i’ve ever seen to the COBOL ideal of resembling natural speech. the rexx interpreter was a default feature on the amiga and i think also os/2 but these days it’s really only ever used on mainframes and the few open source implementations for desktops and servers are a bit clumsy which is a real shame

they don’t advertize it because they don’t think its sexy or whatever but their mainframe business is still going strong if only because they’re the last player left in the market

segmentation fault (c and c++ dumped)