In Team Fortress 2, the Scout can replace his default melee weapon (a baseball bat) with a “Holy Mackerel”, a fish wrapped in newspaper. While having similar stats, it announces in the kill feed every time the scout hits an enemy with it, and if he defeats that enemy it will show a “FISH KILL!” message.

I think “halibut” would work there.

If I can rant a bit…

I used to do my daily journal as plaintext in Vim. I wanted something that was a little more capable and in RedNotebook I almost got it. It stores plaintext markup (I think yaml?), the thing is it has an edit and a display mode, and you can’t edit it in display mode. Inserting a picture is pasting a file path to where that picture is stored. If I linked to where the pictures are stored in my ~/Pictures directory, if I ever migrated from Rednotebook or Linux or anything like that, the links to those pictures would break. So I store teh pictures I link in my journal in a subdirectory alongside the journal itself, so the pics should go with it and it should survive a transfer easier.

This is, of course, extremely user unfriendly to do, because it would mean copying pictures, reducing their resolution so they don’t take up the entire damn journal window, and then working through RedNotebook’s interface to navigate to where I just stored that picture to generate the link.

Or, I wrote a couple lines of Bash that did most of that for me and put the file path link in the primary buffer so I could open my file browser, right click, select Add To Journal, and then middle click in my journal. Felt kind of clever coming up with that one, and I kind of wish A) it was a bit easier and B) we lived more in a world where we did that kind of thing where things interoperated more than trying to silo things.

As someone who lusts after Dirk Pitt’s studio apartment over a private hangar, I see absolutely nothing wrong with this.

Well, if you would like to learn about and explore Linux as an alternative to Windows, I would be glad to answer any questions you have. I’ve been using Linux as my main or only operating system for all of my work and play for 12 years now.

I’m pretty sure no one else has my shell script that takes a picture, uses imagemagick to copy a scaled down version of it to a special folder, and then build a string that allows me to just middle click paste the image into Rednotebook so it appears correctly.

There are a tremendous number of people out there who do dislike Windows, but have no idea what to do about it. They see their computer’s operating system as an intrinsic part of it kind of how iOS is kind of immutably baked into an iPhone. They don’t really have a grasp on what an operating system is or how to install one, and even if told they’d be paralyzed with fear over the risk of breaking something.

git: 'gud' is not a git command. See 'git --help'.

i already own my tools though.

I think “forums” is what Lemmy kinda shoulda been. I’ve had people argue against me at this point, but…

lemmy.nsfw and the other couple of porn instances are the only ones that are focused by topic. Everybody else tries to be a general purpose instance, which results in that “Which instance do I pick? Will it matter being on sh.itjust.works or lemmy.world?” issue and the “there are currently 94 communities with the name Linux, 20 with more than 250 subscribers and 12 that have seen some kind of activity in the last month” issues.

Lemmy could be used like a good old forum engine. Create an instance around a particular branch of discussion, but now they’re federated.

I’m dubious about that last one.

Advertisers have ways of measuring which ads are effective. I’m most familiar with how it works on Youtube, click on a link in a bio or use offer code AGGRAVATED to get 10% off your first purchase, and they can identify which creator they’re sponsoring generated that sale. Part of the point of targeted advertising is avoid spending money to advertise to incompatible audiences.

“Hey look, Facebook has 4 billion users!” “Great. Here, we represent McDonald’s, users who click this link will get coupons for combo meals. Run it in the United States.” soon “The McDonald’s ad was clicked on 94 billion times, yet the coupons from this campaign were redeemed in restaurants a total of 164 times nationwide. Can you explain to me how you achieved complete and total failure to sell cheap cheeseburgers to Americans?” “Yes I can, see, practically none of our active user accounts are owned or operated by organisms.”

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I genuinely don’t understand the business model they’re going for here. Which means one of three things: 1. Meta knows something I don’t know and this is going to work spectacularly, 2. It’s one of those engineering decisions made by MBAs moments and it’s going to come crashing down, or 3. it’s an Enron moment and within 18 months the name of the crime they’re committing is going to suddenly become a household phrase.

It’s kinda funny, the 2 meter amateur radio band (in the United States this is 144 to 148 MHz, right in the middle of VHF) is 4 MHz wide. If you add up ALL of the available bandwidth allocated to amateurs from 10 meters down, it adds up to less than 4 MHz. The 70cm band is tens of MHz wide.

More practical for hobbyists to launch satellites. Which some have. There are amateur radio satellites in orbit.

You consider an ESB, an Extra Special Bitter, a sweet beer?

In the book The Martian, the computers built into the rovers apparently run Linux, or at least some *Nix. At one point they have Watney run hexedit on /usr/lib/habcomm.so and change a number of bytes to hack it to talk to Pathfinder.

Good for you I guess, but why’d the variety have to disappear? I want my ESBs and barleywines back. I haven’t seen a locally made wheat beer since before the pandemic.

The Democrat party is structured a lot like the Republican party at this point.

There’s a lot of old guard establishment members that were in Washington when Kennedy was shot, the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden. They’re old, they’re corrupt, the only thing they will ever vote for is the interests of large business. They have 100% control over party policy, what they actually vote for and do.

Then you’ve got the radical social progressives. They tend to either be college gender studies majors or you get into the Hollywood performative Prius driving types. They’re as uncompromising on their issues as the red hat crowd, they talk about men the same way MAGAts talk about Mexicans. They have basically no power over the way the party votes or behaves but they’ve got almost total control over the party’s voice and messaging.

Labor, once a mainstay of the Democrats, is unrepresented in Washington. The old guard establishment on both sides of the aisle are pro-corporation and anti-union, the right wing MAGAts are “the only ethical union is my union” and the far left are so used to taking clean running water, sewer, electricity and gasoline for granted that they ask questions like “Why should I have to pay to live?” The people who fix power lines, drill for oil, mine for coal, repair, maintain and operate power plants, water treatment plants, sewer systems, pave roads etc. are so invisible to them they think they’re already in that post-scarcity world.

So you’ve got a Democratic party that speaks for the feminists and votes for the Fortune 500. They don’t have much to say to or for me.

It’s a thing that happened and I’m not sure by what mechanism. 2018, lots of microbreweries and brewpubs most offering a wide variety, by 2021 you’ve got seven IPAs and one token stout on the menu.

For a hot minute there near the end of the Obama administration, craft beer was a thing in this country and we had some excellent beers. Then Trump got elected and I haven’t seen a craft beer that wasn’t an IPA or a token jet black “oatmeal stout” since.

So, the first thing you need to know about alcohol is it’s an intoxicating drug. It is a depressant, its short-term effects include reduced inhibitions which in the moment can feel like increased confidence, and overall reduction in physical motor skills, plus a mild euphoria. Also makes your face feel slightly numb. That’s most of alcohol’s selling point.

Alcohol on its own is rather unpleasant to have in your face. A lot of cocktail culture sprung up around hiding alcohol with other flavorings so they’re in any way pleasant to swallow.

You might try something like whiskey and coke, I’d specifically go with American or Canadian whiskies here; scotch doesn’t really bring the right flavors for this. There’s a reason Jack Daniels or Crown Royal are stereotypes. Vodka can also be a way in; it doesn’t bring a lot of flavor of its own so adding it to fruit juices can get you used to booze within familiar flavor profiles. Don’t worry about sticking to posted recipes, drop a tablespoon of vodka into a tall glass of orange juice and see what it does, then start upping the ratio.

Get used to that, you may then start exploring cocktails, getting into wine or beer, or neat spirits.