Captain Aggravated

I SAID RAM THE FUCKER. I DON’T CARE IF THE ENGINES ARE GONE, GET OUT AND PUSH IF YOU HAVE TO.

That right there is the millennial experience.

So many culturally defining movies came out before the 1980s that by the time you’re being raised in the 90’s, they’re making children’s media that references it. I knew the plot of Star Wars long before I saw it.

My favorite example is The Mask of Zorro, which…not an old film, but it came out when I was slightly young for it. A few years go by, I’m in high school, and Shrek comes out. Then it’s sequel, with a swashbuckling orange cat voiced by Antonio Banderas. And then I eventually catch Mask of Zorro, and laugh through the entire thing because holy shit the main character sounds exactly like Puss In Boots.

Yes, along with Ram pickup trucks and IIRC Fiat, somehow.

It’s almost English jibberish. They link to the script in the description.

“So I ran to york round the wash today.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. That doll’s areen blunderface.”

You can almost latch onto it.

Reminds me of Skwerl

I’m going to go down with my ship, bellowing orders to my crew until the last.

Just simply, why was it ready to fire? I suppose I’m of a Glock kind of mindset, unless you’re seconds from killing something the chamber should be empty.

Surprisingly Irish.

I’m a Tarheel, I’m pretty used to most of them, including my own piney woods rhotic drawl. If you’ve lived here long enough, which most people living here haven’t, you could tell within a county where I’m from if you heard me say this paragraph aloud.

Fun story: back when I was working as a flight instructor, a couple guys flew their plane down from Long Island to have us work on their plane, we were the dealership they bought it from so they brought it to us for a service. I had nothing to do with the maintenance department so I wasn’t on that project, I was there tending to my own flight students and these two yankees were also there.

Round about noon, I walked into our classroom to use the computer in there to check the weather, and from behind me I hear a very aggressive “Hey, you wanna sandwich?!” And I reflexively ducked. Because if a southerner had said that with that inflection, that sandwich was already on its way through the air toward the back of your head, and its thrower is probably coming over the table.

I turned around to find this guy holding out an Arby’s roast beef sandwich with a smile on his face. Turns out a Long Island accent…just sounds like that.

Oh is that that Italian guy who liked the aesthetic of American rock & roll but didn’t speak a syllable of English so he sings nonsense with an impeccably imitated California accent?

Bixby is the 8th or 9th best kitchen timer I’ve ever accidentally bought.

“PLEASE use our hilariously power inefficient wrongness machine.”

…Great job, Europe?

No, we’ve definitely gotten dumber as time has gone on. Especially socially; interpersonal skills have basically vanished since I was in high school.

Lemmy, and I guess mbin and piefed, seem to be their own little island. I’ve used a Pixelfed account to comment on a Peertube video, I tried that from my Lemmy account and it threw an error. That “ActivityPub services even of different formats can interact with each other” thing seems to break down with the Reddit clones. I genuinely can’t tell if I’ve never interacted with an Mbin instance or if they just look exactly like Lemmy from a Lemmy account.

People still use Lemmy exactly like they use Reddit, they fill it with screenshots of or links to other platforms. If there is direct interoperability with Pixelfed or Peertube or Mastodon, no one seems to know how to use it. I’ve heard but not played with Kbin/Mbin’s microblogging capability, so your mbin account is kind of also a Mastodon account in a way your Lemmy account isn’t?

Hell, commenting on that Peertube video from Pixelfed was done ass-first. Go to a Peertube instance’s website not logged into an account there, choose a video, then under that video click in the comment field, a pop-up appears that asks you to sign in or “remote interact” in which you input your account@instance.lol name, which opens a separate window for you to log into that account on that instance, where you are then given a form to write the comment. It doesn’t feel like a design feature, it feels like a thing that is technically possible.

I have seen this conversation play out a lot:

“We need to do [something] if we want the Fediverse to grow!” “Who says we want the Fediverse to grow?”

There are those who are perfectly fine with this being their little corner of the internet, somewhere they can personally escape to, and there are those who think they’re leading a revolution, overthrowing the oligarchs and creating a new paradigm for the world where we run on solar power and eat vegetables and other “better for you” wholesomeness.

As you say, it’s working fine right now while servers and their admins and moderators can handle the relatively small load. Just the legitimate traffic of Reddit would collapse the infrastructure pretty quickly.

A day or two ago I saw someone in a thread about “What actually stops the Fediverse from going the way of Reddit” acting actually offended at the idea that hosting your own instance would require owning server hardware or paying to rent one.

If the goal is to replace commercial social media with federated systems…where’s the funding going to come from?

I suppose the most straightforward and general answer to this is: understanding is a process, and alchemy is from a much earlier stage of that process than chemistry and electricity.

Kid, you are nothing short of adorable.

How long were the Nazis in power in Germany? About ten years, fifteen? 1930’s to the Mid-1940’s? During how much of that time were Jews discriminated against, subjugated and slaughtered? Even if it started on day one, fifteen years is a fraction of one human lifetime. How would you describe the relationship between ethnic Germans and Jews today, given that little incident 80 years ago? Any grudges or awkwardness there?

Now I want you to imagine it was allowed to go on for a century, followed by another century of “the law says we’re merely allowed to treat you as a second-class citizen now, so get to the back of the fucking bus.”

Segregation in the United States lasted long enough for separate dialects of English to form. Turns out that wounds that took generations to carve are taking generations to heal. Imagine that for a moment.

A double eagle weighed in at almost an ounce of solid gold. The US dollar has really gone the way of the ruble.

an Eagle is a $10 coin. A $20ncoin is a double eagle.

On public highways. I remember they made a fairly big point of Dubya driving a pickup truck while visiting his ranch in Texas.