MudMan

After today, of all days, I will be taking no memes/strips about this from anybody that doesn’t keep blood-soaked ties, scalped hair inserts and shattered cufflinks as serial killer trophies.

Or is running for office, at the absolute least. But bloody ties are better.

Any normal install of W11 can be cleaned up a fair bit just by manually refusing permissions and disabling unwanted features. For all the memes, very few of the features people complain about are forced on.

After that the biggest fixes I’d recommend are editing the registry to remove online search in the Start Menu, which makes it very workable (although there is a redesign incoming, not sure how that’ll interact) and installing PowerToys to get a universal search shortcut and a bunch of really nice QoL features.

W11 is actually perfectly usable after some customization, honestly.

Good to know. In fairness, I don’t think you can get that much Coke in anything but plastic. They don’t do 1L cans and there are thick plastic bottles starting at 500ml, so thin plastic may actually be better.

I do think there’s a 1L glass bottle, but it’s more of a special edition thing. I don’t think it’s easy to find in supermarkets and I havent’ seen it anywhere else. And for any soft drink other than specifically Coca Cola it’s mostly just plastic for anything above 500 mil.

Is there anybody on Lemmy that isn’t a software engineer of some description? No? Anyone?

I can do 1L over a period of time… in a plastic bottle. If US cups are like they are elsewhere they eventually get eaten away by the liquid and start dripping, which seems to go against the implied notion that you can just order a big one and take it with you to keep drinking elsewhere.

Isn’t that the idea?

I used to live in a place where they just don’t do ice in soda at all, and it’s like licking a can of dried out syrup. In the local Imax they didn’t even have ice at all as an option. They looked at me like I was insane when I asked, then calmly pointed out that the soda comes out of the machine chilled. I just had to learn to watch two hour movies while sucking on a tub of lukewarm, full-strength soda like a deviant.

Waterbeds also not a thing.

Not being American gets you 3 extra… years? decades? life units? Which does seem still accurate.

See, there’s a lot of online chatter about how much sense Linux folder structures make, with everything grouped by type all over the filesystem. And then this happens.

DOS 5.1 folder structure or bust, I say. Home directories are evil, if your filename doesn’t fit in 8.3 characters you’re doing it wrong and if you can’t find it with dir . /w it shouldn’t exist.

I did not remember that and I still remember “Los pollos hermanos”, so that tells you how weird that one is.

Also, this dogpile works better if you understand what you’re reading. The comedic effect bit was about the title of the thread, not about my own typo. Now you made it weird by trying to outpedant a pedant but not having the reading comprehension to pedant properly.

Goddamn it.

NOW it’s fixed. Two typos. It was two typos. Point stands.

I mean… no, mine’s a typo (fixed now, thanks for the poke), the other one is a deliberate spelling for comedic effect that accidentally uncovers an endless loop of abject multilingual terror.

This is a Gus Frink meme type of situation.

He also, incidentally, couldn’t speak Spanish for shit. That whole show was a nightmare. “Los Pollos Hermanos” as a phrase haunts me. I genuinely, and I’m not joking about this, sometimes find myself having intrusive thoughts about it after all this time.

You’d be surprised. Spanish countries often dub movies, particularly back then.

But if you want to know what it felt like later in life I can help.

…

The ouroboros of bad pronunciation the headline implies is throwing me for a massive loop.

I mean, you carry on with your American politics things, I just saw this on my feed and had an existential crisis.

Does that read as justifying it? It sure seems like he’s providing a workaround, same as all the people who used to point at the simple shortcut to work around the requirement when that worked smoothly.

I mean, I, for one, hadn’t thought about it. It’s not a terrible way to go about it. Doesn’t help me, I need a MS account to do Office stuff so I may as well, but if you’re really hung up on this and can’t avoid Windows it’s a decent solution.

I mean, I appreciate the gumption but, honestly? This mentality is probably why Americans can’t have decent public services.

Boycotts, yes.

“I was on the fence about buying this and I want to sound engaged on the Internet, may still get it later” voting-with-your-wallet nonsense? No.

No, no, Jeff Ennis worked as an actual superhero briefly in the 1970s you’re thinking of John Ennis, who created The Boys as a musical in the 90s, but he was mad about his working conditions.

No, it’s much more interesting than that.

It’s an accurate representation of Garth Ennis being mad about having to work with superheroes despite not liking that at all and being a bit of a petty bitch with a bit of a dudebro sense of humor that, frankly, we all overrated at the time because when you were a teenager in the 90s you thought Preacher was hilarious and much smarter than it is, and it got to his head a bit.

And then it’s an accurate representation of Eric Kripke who was very much the right age to have gone through that, taking the material and going “well, that Trump guy sure was a thing, huh?” and “aren’t you kind of over all those MCU movies, also?” because superheroes in film were at the same point in 2019 than they were in comic books in 2006.

Don’t be the teenager we all were in the 90s and assume that “edgy and mean and over the top” is the same as “smart and realistic”. It’s not.

I’ll say that the show is at least less callous than the original material and it’s at least trying to be political, which makes it slightly more plausible and internally consistent than Ennis’ HR complaint of a comic book. Hollywood has a history of taking this edgelord crap (see also: every single Mark Millar adaptation) and making it palatable by applying the same mainstreaming and dumbing down that kills every Alan Moore adaptation. Turns out if the original material isn’t that smart to begin with that’s actually a good thing to do.

Most of that is entirely absurd and not worth getting into. I’m sure a pedantic historian can nitpick it if that’s the way everybody wants to go.

However, let me revisit your accusation of “contradicting my point”. At no stage here have I conflated unarmed protest with peaceful protest. All along I’ve been frustrated by the US mindrot tendency of accepting no nuance between some My Little Pony version of political action and outright armed confrontation. The worldwide protests that show how bonkers the US perception of the issue is were not peaceful, but neither were they an armed confrontation where protestors attempted to use their armed might to deter police forces. They were… you know, political action. Civil unrest. “Civil” being the key word.

The way you and US leftists in general tend to parse stuff like this is nonsense. The fact that mass protests can escalate to the point they went in Nepal, Madagascar or any of the countries in the general “Gen Z spring” movement and prior protest waves disproves the US perspective because a) it has nothing to do with the level of access to weapons, and b) it shows sufficiently commited public action doesn’t have to be either fully nonviolent or an armed insurrection.

Americans look at this as some form ot guarantee their success by either intimidating the other into submission or hoping that the other side will fold immediately. That’s not how this goes. “The cops may charge at us, we should bring guns” is some weird overlap of thinking protestors are entitled to painless victory and that there is no possible pressure beyond violent pressure. It makes no sense to me. And yet, here we are, a bunch of posts down the line.

See, and there it is. Zero to a hundred. It’s either popcorn or civil war, no gradient.

I mean, for one thing Nazi Germany also wasn’t defeated by military cosplayers flashing their gun collection at them, and clearly neither was MAGA America. The first one was defeated by a borderline apocalyptic global war, so… in the grand scheme both the military cosplay and the sternly worded letters are pretty much about just as effective there. We’re still waiting and seeing on the MAGA America part.

But for another, plenty of nonviolent and/or unarmed protest has achieved its goals, historically. From Europe to India to South Africa to the actual United States. The “sternly worded letter” derision is pure action movie fantasy. This month alone the governments of Madagascar and Nepal came down after mass protests. Not a single set of camo pants in sight, just… you know, students organizing on social media and One Piece flags for some reason because this is a weird timeline.

They weren’t even fully nonviolent, either. There were clashes, there was enforcement violence and dozens of people, mostly protestors, were killed in both countries. And still two governments came down and the situations continue to evolve and push for full regime change.

Meanwhile the example I’m being given is some American fascists standing on a street while cops that agree with them wait for them to get sleepy at their military cosplay convention and go home.

I don’t get Americans. I don’t think the way they see the world as a culture makes sense, and I am terrified at how much they export it successfully through places like this. Nepal just held a full-on election over Discord and I still understand how that went down better than middle class America’s political views.