Fondots @ Fondots @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Horses kind of suck

I encounter horses a lot when I'm hiking. I'm a backpacker, I'm often carrying a fairly large backpack to prepare for a trip. Horses get really spooked by it. You'd think that of all animals fucking horses would be able to understand the concept of carrying something on your back, but nope.

I also hear endless stories about horses being spooked by shit like plastic bags, leaves, fans, even the person riding on their back that they somehow forgot was there. How we ever managed to convince horses to ride into battle is beyond me. I can only assume that they were too fucking stupid to understand what was going on around them, because as far as I can tell if the Ottomans had just put a couple dudes in backpacks outside of Vienna, the Winged Hussars never would have been able to get near the city.

Also almost no one who has a horse ever actually seems to live anywhere that is actually conducive to owning, let alone riding a horse. Unless you're rich and have a decent plot of land you have to pay some stable somewhere to let you keep your horse there, and odds are that it's not particularly close to your house and if you want to actually ride that horse anywhere besides basically just going in circles around the yard at the stable, you're going to need a gas guzzling truck and trailer to go take your horse somewhere else because actually riding a horse for transportation isn't really a thing anymore in the developed world.

And of course, wherever your keeping those horses is going to be worthless trampled down dirt and grass and such instead of trees, shrubs, wildflowers, etc. that are actually good for the environment.

Horse riders don't pick up after their horses, and they jump through so many mental hoops trying to justify it you'd think they're trying to do a whole show jumping competition but forgot to bring the horse they're trying to justify.

If nothing else, it's unsightly and not part of nature. We don't have horses in this part of the world, they haven't existed here in the wild since before the last ice age, I shouldn't be seeing horse crap around.

I don't care if it's biodegradable and doesn't stink like dog shit, and doesn't carry diseases (which is horseshit, there is absolutely bacteria is horse dropping and there's no reason it can't carry communicable diseases) I don't throw banana peels and apple cores around in the woods either. Leave no trace, pack it in, pack it out.

And look, I'm not gonna pretend that my local parks are such delicate ecosystems that a little horse shit is going to throw things out of balance and cause an ecological disaster, but some environments are very delicate, and you really don't want to be adding extra nitrogen or carbon or whatever into it if you can avoid it, and you should be using your best practices all around.

"Well we can't carry a shovel with us to pick it up" like hell you can't, that's the reason humans started keeping horses in the first place. If people could ride around in a suit of armor, with a bedroll, food, water, a sword, a rifle, etc you can find a way to carry a little avalanche shovel and a trash bag with you.

"Well it's not always safe to get on and off the horse on the trail" well then maybe you shouldn't be riding a horse on that fucking trail then.

Horses and horse-people kind of suck.

Went after a worm on a hook, easily the biggest mistake of many fishes lives.

I actually looked up the actual (alleged) French quote, and it's "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche"

So I actually hit the nail on the head, it's literally "let them eat brioche"

Still can't really be attributed to Marie Antoinette, and it's not unlikely that the entire anecdotal was just made up entirely

It's actually not terribly uncommon for people to take roadkill if it's fresh and in decent shape.

In my state (PA) you're supposed to report it to the game commission within 24 hours, and you're supposed to surrender the hide and antlers to them unless you pay for a separate permit.

Same boat, my computer is basically the computer my wife built probably about 12 years ago before we got together, it was pretty beefy for its time. I basically stuck her old components in a new box (and also stuck a newer graphics card in it because I got a really good deal on a used 2060)

Still manages to run most games out there on acceptable (to me) settings.

Made the switch to Linux about a week ago, no major issues, some things are arguably running better now. It's not without its hiccups but so far things have gone pretty smoothly.

EDIT: went with Mint over Zorin though.

Google photos has a date tag attached to this of 9/10/2008

A whole lot of stuff has traveled with me through the years swapping SD cards from one phone to another, and eventually things getting backed up to the cloud, etc. this is probably the oldest thing I have saved that can count as a meme. I don't know if that date is when I actually first found it, when it first somehow got backed up, if maybe that's just from some metadata left over from whoever made the meme originally, or something else entirely

But that date does generally feel about right, and the humor feels about right for high school-aged me.

As far as terminal tutorials, so far the best I've found is LabEx, but I feel like it's lacking in a lot of ways.

First of all it definitely feels designed to push you towards paying for a subscription. And while their pricing honestly isn't too terrible, it's more than I want to spend on this. Nothing against companies and people being paid for making a product but it feels a little against the FOSS spirit to me.

Second I've mostly been trying to use it on my phone and that experience is just kind of shitty. Personally I kind of want to learn in short bursts here and there throughout the day when I have downtime at work or whatever. If I have time to sit down in front of my computer it's probably because I want to be doing something fairly specific with it and it's probably not to just practice my terminal use, so a better phone experience would be great.

And finally, it just seems a bit over-engineered, at least for what I want to use it for. It seems like it's spinning up a whole Linux VM with a desktop environment and such for me to interact with through my browser just for me to type stuff into a terminal and read their tutorial. It does have other courses and maybe all of that is more useful there, but it seems like a bit much for me.

My buddy works security at a bar. Last night he sends me a picture of a guy sitting there with some SS lightning bolts on his shirt. Bar manager wouldn't let my friend kick him out because he wasn't otherwise causing a problem.

I hatch a plan, I pull up the jukebox app on my phone, turns out you don't actually have to be at the bar to queue up music there (I'm pretty sure that used to be the case, I'm pretty sure at one point a decade ago I had to spoof my location on a rooted phone to pull this kind of thing)

And I start queuing up as many anti-fascist songs as I could think of. Cost me a few bucks but I considered it money well-spent.

This and a few other woody Guthrie songs were of course some of the first things I thought of but sadly were not available on the jukebox.

But I managed to find a good handful.

According to my friend, he got visibly frustrated when the Billy Bragg & Wilco cover of All You Fascists came on and left the bar to have a cigarette.

And when he came back in he was greeted with Youth Against Fascism my Sonic Youth

Only took about an hour of that before he packed up and left.

Apparently someone also left a review online complaining about Nazi boy, and after the owner saw it my friend now has more authority to take out the trash.

Which kind of shows how easy it is to take certain things as "obvious."

I'm a new convert to Linux. I played around with it a bit probably about 15 years ago, but never did much seriously with it. Finally bit the bullet about a week ago between the windows 10 EOL and deciding that Linux gaming is finally in a place I can live with.

I'm a reasonable tech-literate person, I'm no sys admin but I'm the family "guy who's good with computers" I did a few semesters as a computer science student and was reasonably good at it before deciding to go in a different direction.

And while things are working just fine for most of my general computing needs, I feel like I'm in a bit of a weird place right now, kind of like I'm back to being a kid with my family's first Compaq in the 90s. I can play games and do my homework and make my computer do some cool things, but I know there's more cool stuff I can make it do but I don't know how yet.

I have about 30 years of know-how and tips and tricks built up on how to make windows bend to my will, but I don't have that for Linux yet, and it's not exactly a great feeling.

And I feel like there's sort of a gap in the Linux community to help the slightly-above-average-computer-person Linux-convert like me to build up to where they were as a windows user.

Like there's a wealth of knowledge on choosing a distro and installing it, alternatives to common windows programs, etc.

And then a big gap

And then people who have a whole home computer lab, self-hosting everything, doing serious programming as a hobby, etc.

And in the middle are a bunch of forum posts where someone asks a question, and some kind of computer sage emerges from the ether, tells you to transcribe a magic spell into your terminal, and all your problems will be solved, then vanishes in a puff of smoke.

And don't get me wrong, I'm glad those magical Linux wizards exist to fix my problems. But I have almost no idea what the hell what the magical commands they told me to run are actually doing.

And I'm slowly piecing some of it together, googling things as I go, and that's a fine way to learn things, but it is slow and I wish there was a better way to power through learning some of this stuff without needing to go take a whole actual course on it. I think my ideal would be sort of a Duolingo-type app for terminal commands.

Also at the lower end of the spectrum, I feel like maybe there's a need for sort of a basic tutorial program for the kind of people who are not computer people to learn the absolute basics. I feel like back in the 90s I encountered a few introduction-to-windows sort of programs that would walk you through "this is your start menu," "here's what click/double-check/right click/etc" means," "here's how you turn your computer off" kind of stuff.

And while that kind of thing is almost insultingly basic for anyone who's going to install Linux for themselves, I think that kind of hand-holding might be needed for some other people we might try to convert.

Also don't get me wrong, I like doing stuff in the terminal and don't want it to go anywhere, when I know what I'm doing it is really efficient, but that shit is straight-up intimidating for a lot of average and below-average computer people, not to mention how truly abysmal a lot of their typing skills are. I feel like a little less emphasis on the terminal and building out some more control panel -like GUI menus would go a long way to getting people to switch.

Maybe these sorts of resources exist and I haven't found them yet. If they do please point me towards them. If they actually don't exist, maybe one of those wise Linux sages will see this and take up the task of building it.

I had a French teacher who claimed that "let them eat cake" was a bit of a mistranslation and that "cake" was just a different, maybe fancier, type of bread.

Like the situation was more like someone said "Marie, the people don't have any baguettes to eat." And she replied "Well then let them eat brioche"

Still probably apocryphal, but I think maybe a little more believable if it were true while still showing the tone-deafness.

It also just feels very French to me.

What they were actually using prior to the space pen, and what the soviets used, were grease pencils, which really basically are crayons

It's really all over the place depending on the student, the parents, the homeschooling program they're using, etc.

I once worked with a guy who homeschooled his kids because their housing situation was a little unstable. It probably provided them a bit of stability they wouldn't have had otherwise since they probably would have had to change schools a lot with all of the moving around.

Other kids may benefit from it if they're not doing well in a regular school environment, have disabilities, are gifted, etc.

In other cases it can be very isolating and they miss out on a lot of socialization with other kids their age

And some parents use it to control what their kids are learning to force political or religious agendas on them.

Married for 7 years, together for probably about 10 total

Can't really think of a time we wouldn't have had that sort of exchange.

She's also been jokingly threatening me with divorce since we got married. I'm pretty sure we left the courthouse holding the receipt for our marriage license joking that we needed to hold onto it in case we needed it for a return. Still have it around somewhere, someday we're gonna put it in a little shadowbox with "in case of irreconcilable differences break glass" stenciled on it.

I understand that oil isn't just sitting around in big empty voids in the rock, and that those voids are full of gravel and such, and that we're also injecting water and such into the wells to maintain pressure, etc.

But I'd be willing to bet (a small amount, maybe like $50 tops) that out of the thousands of oil wells we've drilled over the years, that through some quirk of geology, some void has opened up somewhere down there with just enough liquid oil and open space that you could probably get a kayak on it and paddle around in a small circle.

I'm thinking probably more like the size of a smallish above ground swimming pool, not a decent sized lake that would actually be worth paddling around on.

Of course there's also the issue of the pressure at that depth, and the fact that any atmosphere down there is probably gonna be natural gas and not breathable air, so you'd probably have to do it in a hard diving suit

I'm all for splitting hairs over semantics, and I'll agree with you that "fascist" probably isn't the best label for Iran

But if you take a step back and look at the big picture, it does look a hell of a lot like fascism.

Extreme right wing, militaristic government, social and economic regimentation, charismatic, authoritarian dictators, focusing a whole lot of hatred and blame on people in the nation who don't conform and towards external enemies, etc.

I don't know that they're exactly nationalistic, but they do have religion filling pretty much that same role, and let's be real, the line's pretty damn blurry between religion and government there.

And they don't exactly make racial/ethnic superiority a centerpiece of their identity, but they're certainly not exactly sitting around singing "Kumbaya" with their minorities either, and again we have religion filling a pretty similar role in other ways.

You can get into the weeds about the specific philosophies at play here and about the history that led them to their current situation, and there's certainly merit in doing that, but as far as the casual observer is concerned, they do look and quack a hell of a lot like fascists, and while it's not the best label for what they have going on it's certainly not the worst either. I'd maybe prefer to slap a qualifier on it- something like pseudo-fascist, islamo-fascist, maybe something like "Farscism" if we want to get a little cutesy with the wordplay to separate it from "classic" fascism.

And similarly I'd probably want to slap a few qualifiers onto the term "theocracy" as well before applying it to Iran, I don't think that just that one word really points the whole picture.

And now that I'm looking at it, "fascist theocracy" might be a contender for how I'd label them.

If you’re going to give it, you have to be able to take.

Any reporter, media personality, and random schmuck who has an opportunity to interact with trump had better seize this opportunity to only address him as "Piggy" from here on out.

If we want to get a little nitpicky, the Moroccans kind of have it right

Sure there's advent leading up to Christmas

But "christmastide" really begins on Christmas day and continues on into January (January 5th for Epiphany, or slightly longer if your Catholic because they technically count the feast of the baptism of the lord as part of christmastime.) When you talk about the "twelve days of Christmas" the first day is Christmas.

The lyrics to "Good King Wenceslas" (otherwise known as "that Christmas carol whose tune you recognize, but have no idea what the lyrics are if you even know that it has lyrics") starts with the titular king looking out his window "on the feast of Stephen" which is the day after Christmas.

Different branches of Christianity, countries, cultures, etc. of course do things in all kinds of different ways, and I'll be the first to admit that I don't know much about Moroccan Christians, nor much about Islamic attitudes towards Christmas there (though since they were doing Christmas events, I think it's fair to assume that these weren't exactly hard-liners who believe that no Muslim should ever have anything to do with Christmas) so I can't really say why they do their Christmas stuff the way they do there, but it could be they just never got the memo that how we celebrate Christmas has changed a bit over the last few centuries.

Honestly, even when I was in middle and high school (so we're going back around 20 years now) I don't remember a whole lot of that

The main topics of conversation I remember were sports, video games, music, movies, TV, weed if you were a stoner, vacations, parties, and other plans you had and things you'd done recently, etc.

Pretty much the same shit I'd talk about now.

My personal experiences of course may not be representative of everyone, and like I said, it's been about 20 years so it's very possible my memory is faulty.

"locker room talk"

Most of my friends and I are pretty traditionally "manly" men. The kinds of guys you turn to if you need to build something, fix something, need to cut down a tree, want to drink beer and smoke cigars, shoot guns (not after drinking the beer,) go fishing (beer is ok for that,) etc.

I have basically no clue what's going on in any of their sex lives. We never really comment on women's appearances, and when we do it's kept to just a very quick observation, "man, she's hot" kind of thing.

Damn near any time some sort of sex talk comes up it's our female friends stoking the fires.

I'm pretty sure my wife and her friends talk more about sex in an afternoon than I have in my whole lifetime.

Maybe it's because we very rarely find ourselves in a locker room, most of aren't exactly the gym or team sports type.

And what came of any of that?

The (wrong) lesson that much of the US took away from the cold war is that we're basically untouchable. For all the fear of nuclear war, it never happened, and we came out on top. We never had war on our country, or even on our borders, and probably the tensest moment of the whole cold war, the Cuban missile crisis, we were able to diffuse peacefully and in a way that from many angles made Khrushchev look weak and like we came out on top.