Mike Ely

It's really irritating that now whenever I see an amusing cat video online the first thing I do is start looking for signs it was AI-generated. People who get that shit need to be wrapped in barbed wire and fired into the sun.

It's funny how people in the thick of it don't see why there's so much overlap between incel losers and #redpill asshats. It's like my dudes, you are being the worst kind of people in the world. Stop acting surprised that no woman wants to fuck you. You can either figure your shit out or go back to wanking off to your Joe Rogan or Tim Pool bullshit and blaming everyone else for your own inadequacies.

@ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org some great video there, like the 747 chasing the Bronco. Kent Porter of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat had some good photos of his white SUV painted pink by phos-chek a few years ago - luckily for him it was a soft drop that a bit of water and scrubbing was able to handle. But yeah, if you see that spotter plane coming and you're near the fireline it's time to GTFO.

@ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org when I lived in Tahoe every week through summer there would be a police blotter in the local paper that went something along the lines of "report of topless sunbathers at such-and-such beach. Officers responded and educated a group of European tourists on local customs." So much left unsaid lol

Because doing the easy stuff is a thing in opposite-land, my book has smoothly transitioned from a realistic depiction of the Victoria Era to hard sci-fi with a lot of particular constraints, and I've discovered that it's literally impossible to overthink world-building in that genre - except to the point that you only think and never write. #amwriting #books

Thanks to DOGE cuts American vegetables can now be categorized into two taxa: skid marks versus blast damage.

@ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org "PSPS, here... kitty kitty, here... kitty kitty. PSPS..." (can't help it, the abbreviation says what it says)

@ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org @cvvhrn@sfba.social somehow I'm thinking of several scenes from Boogie Nights and... yeah. Glad you had other plans :D

@pdiff1@mastodon.sdf.org @mattblaze@federate.social IIRC they used a boom lift and cherry picker for the install.

What a show this must have been. $3 at the door. #Music

Happy #pride

@danlyke@researchbuzz.masto.host lol that would make me lose my shit entirely.

@20002ist@thepit.social @mattblaze@federate.social when I was a wrestler, the coach-code for "slow it down without getting called for stalling" was "use your head!" These cats are using their heads.

In honor of the 4th, a classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62j2YQQ2BmA

Not bad for 4 people + luggage over numerous (and then some) mountain passes, much of it with the air conditioning cranked up. It's good to be home. #roadtrip

@pdiff1@mastodon.sdf.org @mattblaze@federate.social the degree to which they are ever-so-methodically draping the site suggests a lot of things that have little to nothing to do with proper site preparation and everything to do with comms people running the show.

@rocketsoup@mastodon.social as someone on a team that manages (among other things) email infrastructure for an ISP, I can't speak for why your ISP and bank scheduled things the way they did, but I can say that the number of highly critical security vulns hitting the CVE list right now is absolutely insane, worst I can remember in decades of doing this work. That said, the only time we would ever bring down customer-facing infra during the day would be a true emergency. We would never schedule it for the day.

RE: https://flipboard.com/@associatedpress/politics-h8vn14lnz/-/a-kwX3XAGkQy-Ne8SBfLkDDA%3Aa%3A3199720-%2F0 "Relatives of the ICE officer who shot a Colombian man in Maine this week told The Associated Press he struggled with serious mental health issues since early childhood and never should have been given a badge and gun to patrol American streets."

One of my favorite pastimes on social media is blocking Trump supporters. Say something that supports him, I block you. Click the like button on a post supporting Trump, I block you. So as you can imagine I see a lot of profiles of guys holding dead fish, wraparound sunglasses truck selfies, people who "Went to School of Hard Knocks," pronounce their name "Kizzma Ayuzz" and so on. Then there's the bots. I can tell you all about several families of bots - they're really easy to spot after a while. This profile stood out to me though. Not a bot, an actual person, likely descended from humans. When you see it you'll know what I mean.

Three times a week I go to a place where I engage in pointless movements of various limbs and appendages, often with the forces of gravity or large objects impeding them. And I pay money for the experience. And afterwards, I'm tired as hell. The only hope here is that when it's time to engage in pointed movements of various limbs and appendages, they will be capable.

@jwz@mastodon.social but can we call him Leroy?

It turns out that if it's hot at night and you just got a book you're excited for that turns out to be really good, you should under no circumstances do what I did last night and go to bed early so you can read more. There's an important difference between reading for fifteen minutes before you drift off and reading for a couple hours and when it's time to drift off your mind says "no, this is an important plot point, I have to read it" and then it's 5am and you're utterly screwed...

@msbellows@c.im ugh, that is absolutely dreadful weather.

Just in case anyone was unclear on the subject, the "no snitching" rule absolutely does have an exemption for arson. #cafire

@adhdeanasl@beige.party as a very sweat-prone chubby guy myself, I approve! It means something needed done and was.

Ah, provisioning wifi routers is fun!

For the first time in my life, I have a #dog who cares far less about fireworks than I do. Happy for him, truly. Also the people blowing off said #fireworks can go unfuck themselves, thanks.

If I knew any religious Trump supporters I would be having so much fun razzing them about the weather in DC right now... "surely it's a sign from God, right?" :D

My daughter asked me if I was still at the gym. My reply:

It occurs to me that the news station may be using heat index interchangeably with actual temperature - the official forecast high (dry) temp is 102: https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=38.8920621&lon=-77.0199124

This is hilariously accurate social commentary disguised as something else: https://brokeassstuart.com/p/why-gta-iv-should-ve-been-set-in-san-francisco

Started Abbott Elementary tonight, and the thing that just absolutely sent me (in a "you know somebody worked in schools" way) was when the lead character put "right-handed scissors" on her wish list. IYKYK #teachers

Anyone who has hitchhiked any amount of distance will tell you that the insane stories (which we ALL have) are so deeply buried within days or weeks of being pretty much totally miserable most of the time that when the crazy part happens you barely even notice at first. You're just like "oh, this is also miserable, but in a different way." Of course, this isn't always the case - some of the crazy stuff was also epic fun - but mostly you're just cold, tired, wet, hungry, scared, or being actively threatened by someone with a badge and a gun. But I did, despite the best efforts of various people whose intentions were or were not malign, make it to Blaine, Washington. This being the northernmost town along I-5, I elected to walk along the frontage road rather than walk on the freeway. Only the "frontage road" started sprouting various businesses, and dead-ended into a big grassy park. I walked through it, still heading north, and crossed what was only the hint of a ditch at the far end before I found myself in a residential neighborhood. I headed back toward the freeway and on the way there noticed that all of the cars now had British Columbia license plates. Oops. So I walked back toward the freeway and soon came to a really tall chain-link fence, across which was the Canadian customs office where they had cars queued up for inspection. I walked along this fence looking for a way through and found none. Eventually the fence gave way to BC-99, which is what folks call I-5 once you cross the border. I briefly considered walking back against traffic to the customs office, but it was kind of a ways and the traffic was intimidating. "If they don't care I don't care," I reasoned, and continued north to the next exit and eventually found myself in Vancouver proper, where I placed a phone call to a very surprised local resident. It didn't work out with the girl. Apparently I wasn't the only person in this situation who was young, so when I said what I intended to do she took it as a joke and responded accordingly. No shade though - she was pretty cool - but there were... circumstances. So once I had run out of money I decided to return to the United States where I could get a job. And here's the half-crossing I mentioned earlier. I caught a ride south out of Surrey with someone who was actually willing to drive me through, but I demurred. I didn't want him to get mixed up in my business, nor I his. He dropped me off at the US Border Patrol station (I think that's what it was called back then - this was a good decade before 9/11 changed everything). I walked in, there was a bench. I took my backpack off and sat on the bench. There was nobody in the office. Everybody was out in the booths inspecting cars. I leaned over the desk, called out a few times, looked around. The only movement I could see was the coffee burning in the pot. After about fifteen minutes or so I figured if they don't care I don't care, hoisted my backpack over my shoulders, and started walking down the road. I probably made it about a hundred yards before I heard "Hey BUDDY!" I turned around. There were at least four officers running at me, hands on their holsters although I think this was more to keep things from bouncing around too much than anything else. Nevertheless, I raised my hands. What I did not know at the time was that according to Houston v. Hill (482 U.S. 451, 1987), the US Supreme Court has held that "the First Amendment protects a significant amount of verbal criticism and challenge directed at police officers." As it happens, I did not need to know that, as the officer who did most of the talking and I got into a solid argument about the relative merits of crossing an international border without proper authorization, best effort attempts at doing so, the rights of a country to protect its borders, the responsibility incumbent upon those charged with protecting those borders to actually do their job and, at the end of the day, the fact that I was a United States citizen who had done nothing wrong. So, after some time while my ID was run and the security tapes proving I had tried to gain someone's attention had been reviewed, I was finally released into the rather cold embrace of my home country. That was the almost the third time. Technically I was a football field away from the border, but it probably doesn't count since I had to head back. This might be a good time to warn folks that there was true mortal danger involved in these trips and I was confronted with it several times that I was aware of and probably a few times I wasn't. But was it the right thing to do? I survived. Nobody was harmed. Much was learned and many sights were seen. So if someone you know is planning to go off to see about a girl, I say let 'em. Prepare them if you can, but let them go. END

Your 40 seconds of wisdom for this Friday evening: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/lDDIYxF9g3g

Beancounter: "We can save buckets of money by using AI to pick thumbnails for news headlines." Bari Weiss: "Ship it!"

This felt really good to do, and I waited way too long to get around to it. Next up, flatpak. Quit with the fucking bogus packaging systems, #ubuntu - also while you're at it fuck AppArmor. What, selinux is too hard for your dumb ass devs? # systemctl stop snapd.* # apt purge snapd