• 11 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 16th, 2024

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  • I lived in Rhode Island when The Station fire happened, and I was working in a restaurant.

    I guess one upside is that the fire Marshalls actually took their jobs seriously and the business owners actually listened to them. My boss had to get rid of a conveyor from the basement to the “back” exit, install new fire suppression systems, a larger hood over the grill, a new hood over the stove, and removed a pile of storage from in front of a door that I didn’t even know was there…it was the fire exit from the kitchen where I was working.

    A few years later when I was looking for an apartment in RI, I noticed how many had retrofitted sprinkler systems that definitely went in after the station.

    Of course, memories are short.







  • Exactly. It’s not so much that they even have to rewrite history, just bury it good enough. Make the real stories difficult to find and suck the desire to learn out of kids so they grow up ignorant and easy to control.

    Guaranteed there are tons of AI autobiographies being written by “slaves” who miss their mastuh and want to go back to the good life on the plantations, where everything was provided for them. As one example. And definitely tons more in the erotic category.




  • I always thought Winston’s job, of literally rewriting history, would be an impossible task.

    Nowadays? I’m not so sure. When we look at where most of the news comes from in America and follow the money up, you’ve got like 90% of it coming from about a couple dozen people.

    Some of those people control LLMs along the way. They control our social media and search engine and what posts and answers and advertisers we see. They control the servers through which most of the internet routes their traffic. They control the certificate authorities that all of our web browsers intrinsically trust. And most of them are friends with each other…or at least keep it cordial.

    And they’re patient. They play a long game. Half of them aren’t even middle-aged and are in peak physical health.

    Shit even that sounded like a crazy conspiracy theory like 15 years ago, and while I’m being hyperbolic…I’m really not being that hyperbolic.


  • Trump’s a litigious piece of shit. If he can prove libel, he’ll prove libel. BBC (and all news networks, really) need to tread lightly and keep him happy or they will get kneecapped with legal actions. Which, even if they win, and have every reason to win…it’s still an expensive and time consuming process, and they still have to tread lightly.

    Meanwhile, advertisers and shareholders get very nervous. Granted, this doesn’t apply so much to BBC.

    This is what civil justice has come down to. What’s “right” is decided by who can pay lawyers long enough to prove it. Stab each other with plastic forks and see who leaks to death first.




  • My MIL went to see Frankie Valli recently. Dude is 91 years old and still performing…but doesn’t have the stamina he used to. She said this show was like that…he’d do a couple songs, go backstage and rest, come back out.

    Side note…several years ago I had a season pass to the local theater all the Broadway shows tour at. Out of all the shows that season, Jersey Boys was the one I was least looking forward to.

    It ended up being my second favorite show of the season, behind Hamilton. Great show, highly recommend. Least favorite that year, iirc, was Miss Saigon. I think Anastasia was also that season, another really great show.


  • I have a few, some fractional shares in a company I used to work for (3-letter US pharmacy chain), that got lost in the ether when porting my 401k out to my next employer. Estimated value < $200

    They need a fucking proof of residence matching my address at the time…my early 20s bachelor pad, nearly 20 years ago. My old landlord is dead. My roommates at the time…one went off-grid and disappeared himself, other was and remains a deadbeat and I don’t think he was actually on any bills or the lease anyway.

    Is it even worth the effort of trying to track it down now? It’s almost just on principle at this point.





  • Reminds me of when I was getting pissed off that, on my work computer, Windows would randomly close Teams Windows and browser tabs, exactly every 59 seconds.

    Till I found out that the windows version of caffeine hits the F15 key every 59 seconds by default. I had previously set up PowerToys to map an “extra” key on my keyboard to do Ctrl+W. That “extra” key actually turned out to be F15.