there was a mural of this nearby where i lived in austin, but i could never find out who did it because my google searches just showed seemingly random results when i searched for “hi, how are you”

adding in “daniel johnston” into the search terms has finally made me aware of it’s background and the wikipedia article about it is bizarre considering that i first became of aware of it when i witnessed the austin police beat up and harass homeless and clearly mentally unwell people nearby an advertisement version saying “thai how are you” and the wiki article says this:

In 2018, the Mayor of Austin, Texas, declared January 22 (Johnston’s birthday) to be “Hi, How Are You Day”, a day dedicated to mental health awareness funded by the non-profit organisation of the same name.

now knowing that it gained widespread popularity due to kurt cobain makes it feel like a formerly niche cultural reference has been co-opted by the mainstream and now its original intention is so far gone that it has become an advertisement vehicle where basic civil rights can be seen abused by an authority that pretended to embraced it less than a decade ago.

it’s more fun for me over here. lol

something like this happened to be too circa 2005 and it made me switch to debian; which stayed rocked solid until 2016 when the motherboard died.

what’s ESO?

google suggests it’s elder scrolls online, but i’ve never heard this before

i used to answer honestly like because this and i never understood; and still don’t (i’m on the spectrum); why some people got angry/frustrated and it almost always eventually germinated into a full blown fire-this-asshole-already movement in the places i worked at until my therapist made me aware that people don’t really expect a true answer and will only accept certain responses.

i call it the social handshake now and i allot an extra 10 minutes every single time i schedule a work meeting an wait to hear certain key words/phrases before continuing on for the actual reason why i scheduled the meeting. lol

my old managers used to call it “being productive” and i’ve been catching myself saying it lately.

it makes me feel like it need to wash our my mouth with soap. :p

when i delete a post or comment, it’s usually because i realized that i responded to the wrong comment or that i posted in the wrong community; will it still show in such circumstances?

is the point of this comic to express how a single point of failure can bring a system down and the dns here definitely feels like a single point.

pure grade colOmbian shit! lol

why wait; i’m doing them now. lol

then you’re in luck because it’s old news. (circa 2016 iirc).

tldr: they decided to pull away active development on some foss projects because they conflicted with their profit motive.

it’s easy to appreciate why a for-profit company would want to protect its revenue stream and it would seem that the waters would get really murky when their products rely on free and open sourced work; but i know from personal experience that much bigger fish like google and oracle have made it work REALLY well for themselves and in much better fashion (atleast publicly) than system76 has.

i suspect that “messaging” only works if you’re sufficiently conservative.

liberals and leftists alike agree (to different levels) that conservatives; especially maga; are less educated and entitled and that’s why easy messaging slogans like “stop the steal” and “there are only 2 genders” works so well for them since it doesn’t require them to get off their asses to do sufficientlyvigorous research to educate themselves on how that messaging oversimplifies the issue.

also, liberals complain that the democratic party needs to improve it’s messaging to broaden their appeal to american voters. the problem with this seems to be that that american voters share some degree of academic laziness when it comes to understanding the issues, but they’re still generally more educated than maga so slogans don’t work as well. you can see examples of this over and over again on social media when people complain that nobody “reads beyond the headlines.”

i’m learning that one of the key differences between leftists and liberals is the effort to self-educate with ANY kind of academic rigor (ie more than google searches) and doing so enables them to see past any sort of messaging and that most of the messaging that has been successfully adopted has been created by people with with a political agenda in mind.

i think that pushing the democrats to improve their messaging is a misdirection because any messaging for liberals is going to automatically contradict the education any better educated crowd (compared to maga) has received.

i also think that the biggest barrier for any liberal to understand why they’re stuck in neo-liberal fascist late-stage capitalist world is doing their own research with SOME kind of academic rigor since it take A LOT of effort to not only change the way most of us have been taught to live, but also been educated and inculcated since birth.

There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party… and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. — Gore Vidal

part of me wishes i hadn’t read through this because the way you’re taught to read-between-the-lines in any literature in the west combined with the american narrative of chinese authoritarianism that all of us have been swallowing since birth makes some of the wording read like copy-pastes from some propaganda that you would expect to encounter from a dystopian novel like 1984.

these in particular are cringe worthy::

Nearly 60,000 participants attended the sessions, including … susceptible individuals aged 16-45 …

Director Abduwaiiti actively guided them to bear in mind the General Secretary’s instructions, focusing on the overarching goal of social stability and lasting peace. He emphasized taking the lead in four areas: loving the country and its people, enhancing religious knowledge, abiding by laws and regulations, and resisting extremism.

Subsequently, two inmates took the stage to share their personal stories of repentance, recounting their journey of remorse.

the entire basis of 60,000 people willing taking in a lecture from government officials also sounds suspicious AF to westerners. we popular regard anyone willingly doing so as subversively intellectual or socially bizarre in some way because it’s assumed that any “normal person” would naturally rather pursue something more entertaining if they’re not coerced to do so otherwise.

this is a bit of cultural double standard because all western cultures universally regard these sorts of lectures as fundamental and important; but at the same time we popularly only expect people with an agenda or “odd balls” to engage with it willingly.

it’s pretty clear to me that there’s a cultural disconnect between westerners and the chinese; with the latter exhibiting cultural norms so lofty that westerners regard it as unrealistic or unachievable and that makes the entire episode seem suspicious to us and now i think i can now understand how the “Uyghur genocide” propaganda took root.

i wish he did that 25 years ago; this world would be a better state if he had.

it’s missing the words “authoritarian” and “dictator” lol

i was going to argue that there’s no way that it was ten years ago before i realized that the tropico i liked was released 11 years ago. lol

afterall: 1999 was only 15 years ago too. lol

npr did a short segment a few years ago of people with smart homes that had problems like this, water stopped running; lights wouldn’t turn on; people forgot passwords to security systems and entry ways.

some things shouldn’t be connected like this.

yes and not the way you’re probably thinking: the last windows rig had a dedicated nvidia card (i forget which) while the linux rig had a cheapo integrated intel gpu and the intel gpu it performed MUCH better like i described.

it could also have been the maturity of the nvidia driver back then, but then again it was the same game on both machines so it wasn’t that far apart in age-wise.

OMFG I wished I knew about this years ago! Thank you!