you’re doomed, then.

Do a shot of vinegar. Works every time.

Malazan / Discworld.

Just about any pair of characters would be amazing.

The Malazan Book of the Fallen, by Steven Erikson.

Ten brick-thick volumes that will alternately fill your heart to bursting then stomp on it until you’re wrung out like a rag. It is one HELL of a ride. It does have a steep immersion curve, so be prepared to take a couple of attempts to finish the first one.

When you find yourself laughing at the tragedy and crying at the jokes, you’ll know.

Also, the Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir. Adorkable romance, badass as hell, will break you. Gets increasingly weird as it goes along. Is good, has massive cult following.

And by no means least, the Machineries of Empire series by Yoon Ha Lee. Ostensibly weird Korean military space opera, but with a real gut punch; you won’t forget this one.

One at the white house, one at the sun.

NPD and BPD are both driven by an eternal sucking void of insecurity and negative self-esteem that can never be filled.

Narcissists try to fill it with praise and social status, or failing that, power and subjugation.

Borderlines try to fill it with limerence and victimhood or failing that, revenge.

But it can’t ever be filled - it’s worse than addiction, worse than being underwater in some shitty MLM scheme. It takes and takes and takes because fuck you, pay me.

So they don’t have friends or loved ones, they have hosts. They suck out all the goodness until there’s nothing left to give, then they start in on the pain.

Assholes, in the other hand, are just driven by simple greed, callousness and lack of consideration. They can and do still hurt people of course, but it’s not an all-consuming obsessive need.

I use bullet points; they probably learned it from me. Sorry.

It was from another username that I don’t hugely want to link to here, sorry. It only had a handful of votes iirc.

I have a bash quote about me.

… or did. bash is gone now.

Always assume your data is in N-1 places at all times.

Any drive can and will fail at any time, no matter how well it was working yesterday.

I’ve had people in with their entire PhD and years of research on one single drive, with no backup - just gone.

If your data is only in one place, it will be in zero places soon enough.

Disposable or replaceable data - which honestly is going to be 90% of your stuff - meh.

But anything that you need and couldn’t replace, that shit needs backing up to AT LEAST one other place.

As for the rest - drives can fail slowly, or they can fail fast. When they fail slowly, you start getting a couple of disk errors here and there, and you may just be able to order one in time to replace it.

When they fail fast, they just drop like a heart attack.

There’s no way to know in advance. If your data is safe, then you’ll either be out a few days while a replacement arrives, or you’ll be just about able to copy stuff across. At that age, I wouldn’t trust it farther than I could spit it. It could work fine for years more, but the moment you rely on it for something important, it’ll give out on you.

I would have kicked ass at emergency medicine.

Unfortunately, the first lull that came along, I’d fuck up and people would die.

It isn’t fun.

Yeah, all the stereotypes of the wacky ADHD guy squirrel lol, but it’s not like that on the inside.

We are lost in the goddamn fog, chasing phantoms and mirages that disappear when you look at them too long. We are constantly running to catch up and flailing for context. What looks capricious and funny is mostly just desperation. We aren’t bursting with unlimited energy, it’s as exhausting as it looks. Taking five attempts to actually get a task done because you just forget halfway through. Forgetting where you put the thing, every time. Feeling your working memory slip away like waking from a dream. Fucking up all the time, then having to work twice as hard to fix it, and feeling like shit because you can’t get anything right.

It gets old, man.

You’re missing a critical distinction.

People can not care about (topic), while caring a lot about (disruptive discussion of (topic)).

The two aren’t mutually exclusive.

It’s like I don’t have a particular opinion about cornflakes, but if you keep waving a box of them in people’s face and hitting them with it, then i’mma ask you to stop.

It can be annoying to have to deal with someone going into excessive detail, making inappropriately-fine distinctions, or taking a strong position on one side or other of an argument that nobody’s making - since in all of those cases, nobody is willing or able to engage with the topic, and it’s just taking up conversation-space with (effectively) a monologue that they find boring and exhausting.

If someone says ‘hey look at that funny-shaped tree’ because it looks like something else, it’s usually worth a ‘heh’ in the moment and you move on.

If you start going into great detail of whether or not it actually counts as a tree, or just infodumping neat tree facts, or start ranting about which genus it properly belongs to despite what some people think… then someone will shut you down with ‘Dude. No one cares’.

This is an important point.

All texts (writing, film, other media) are constructed against their contemporary cultural context, and rely on that context to give them meaning.

Ever watch stand-up comedy from a decade ago? Even if you laughed yourself sick at it at the time… it ages extremely badly, since it’s so intimately tied into the whole vibe of the time.

The more generic the work, the longer its use-by date - but of course, the less likely it is to be memorable.

After a time, all things die. And that’s okay.

Like I said, people deserve to know what they’re signing up for, and there need to be well-established boundaries agreed to in advance. I wouldn’t recommend it personally, but different people may choose differently.

And yeah - if someone just isn’t safe to be around, even for reasons they didn’t choose, don’t want and can’t change, then that’s correct, they shouldn’t be around people. Yes, that’s horribly unfair, but existence just sucks. If you have no moral qualms concealing that danger so you can keep exposing people to it in secret… then you’ve just proved my point.

As for the absusers in my life, kindly go fuck yourself.

What I see online? I spent the first twenty years of my life as a target of cluster-B abuse, trust me I know firsthand.

My advice to all people in range is drop everything and fucking run. Things are replaceable. Jobs and friends are replaceable. Your wellbeing isn’t.

It sucks, you didn’t choose it, it’s not fair - I totally get that, believe me. I have ADHD, it’s a bitch, and it can suck for the people around me.

But the thing is, the fact that it’s not your fault doesn’t make you safe to be around. People can be a danger to others completely involuntarily, despite their greatest wish not to be. And yes, that’s completely fucking unfair.

NPD and BPD are both driven by a great sucking vortex of need-for-validation that can never be filled, and that tortures people if left unfed. NPD is when the vortex demands power or status, BPD is when it demands extravagant emotional connection, but they’re the same basic model underneath. It’s as vicious and relentless as any drug addiction, it doesn’t go away, and it will eventually overpower any amount of good intent. When the monkey’s on their back, all bets are off and the nearest available victim will be preyed upon.

I don’t think there’s a safe way to be in a relationship with that - though I suppose with extremely open communication and amazingly well-defined and enforced boundaries, it could be doable. But this is very much a case of informed consent - it would be supremely shitty not to let your partner know the deal.

M.A.S.H

4k. Give me pixels.

Okay:

In 1948, just after WWII, the UK decided to carve a chunk out of Palestine and create a new state there, called Israel - as a Jewish homeland that would take all the refugees that the rest of Europe didn’t want to deal with.

Palestine was not happy about this - the land was taken without their consent, a great chunk of their country just taken from them by decree, backed up by a still highly militarized Europe.

Over the following decades, Palestine tried several times to take their country back, and each time got slapped down (since Israel had vast backing from UK/USA/Europe, both from postwar guilt and because Israel had a lot of strategic value as a platform from which to project military power in the middle east).

Cut to today, and Israel has expanded to take virtually the entire area, apart from some tiny scattered patches of land, and the Gaza strip - a strip of land 40km by 10km, containing most of the Palestinian population, blockaded by sea and land by the Israeli military.

Israel also runs an apartheid regime very similar to the old South African one - Palestinians have very few human or civil rights, generally get no protection from the Israeli police or military, while being treated as hostile outsiders that can be assaulted or have their land ‘settled’ at will by Israelis.

It has been decades since Palestine has had any kind of organised military, and it’s also not recognised as its own country by most of the world, so there’s virtually no way for it to push back, or to call on assistance.

In a situation like that, the only recourse is guerilla warfare, which often descends into (and is exploited by bad actors as) terrorist attacks. It’s a damn good way to farm martyrs, and this hugely serves Israel’s ends, since it can keep pointing to terrorim as justification for their ongoing oppression. Israel in fact provided a great deal of ongoing funding for Hamas, while blocking more moderate groups.

Back in October, a small organised group raided across the border from Gaza into Israel, killing about 1200 people and taking a couple of hundred hostages.

In response, Israel has killed over 40,000 Palestinans in Gaza - mainly women and children - systematically destroying the city’s infrastructure, water, power, food production and distribution, hospitals, universities and schools, bombing refugee camps and destroying the majority of all housing and shelter in the area. It’s also bombing humanitarian aid convoys, preventing food and medicine from reaching the people there. The death toll is expected to reach many hundreds of thousands, since people are already starving and there is no medical care available.

The rest of the world is wringing their hands about the ‘regrettable’ loss of life, while continuing to sell Israel all the weapons and bombs it needs to continue the genocide.

Fuck Israel.

NVIDIA RIVA 128