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Cake day: March 7th, 2024

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  • Ask your friends and family as well. Someone has an old laptop/desktop from school or an old job stuck in a closet. A lot of people give up when their machines become too slow, but they don’t bother with basic maintenance to see if that will speed it up: virus checks, uninstalling un-needed programs, clearing caches, defragging the hard drive, etc. I have one friend ditched a PC because it ran too slowly and when I checked it out they had two antivirus programs competing with each other, making it impossible to do anything else. Other people take the fact that the battery or charging cable died as a signal to get a replacement.



  • The people who created imgur sold it to MediaLab. ML had been struggling with bills in general, and they lost a couple lawsuits regarding content. In a completely unrelated move, they banned NSFW content, fired the community moderators and local development teams and replaced them with AI and overseas workers, resulting in unequal rules enforcement and broken infrastructure. Videos wouldn’t upload, wouldn’t play, or freeze partway through. Uploads would disappear without notice. A barely-nsfw post would be deleted and the user warned, while other more NSFW posts made it to the front page. Etc, etc. In short, there’s been a lot of simmering discontent with the platform for a while now.

    So, you remember that video/gif of Nazi Richard Spencer that’s been circulating for a few years now? Back when that first came out, naturally some people posted it to imgur - and the content teams deleted the posts and warned the users, who promptly posted screenshots of the warnings, causing even more users to upload Richard Spencer getting punched in the face. They got deleted/warned, pretty much just causing a cascade of Nazi-punching content, until literally the entire popular feed was just Nazis getting punched.

    Well, later last week, notifications failed on imgur for some reason - no notifications when you got a reply, or your post reached the front page or got an award, or the people you were following posted something - just dead silence. We were patient, but it started to annoy people. A couple people uploaded images complaining about the lack of notifications, only to have their posts deleted or hidden and in a couple cases they got warned. And it’s pretty much spiralled exactly like the punching Nazis meme: notifications remained down, posts complaining about it got taken down, posts complaining about MediaLab’s censorship got taken down, and then the entire front page became this.

    Notifications are back on now, though they seem less frequent than normal, and new content is starting to reach the front page but users are still pissed. There have been repeated discussions about moving elsewhere, but no consensus has emerged yet. PixelFed doesn’t scratch the same itch, a bunch of people moved to discord but others don’t want to, some people just disappeared or stopped posting. And that’s where we are, as of this morning.







  • Wiping out? Like, entirely? Well, personal physical assault isn’t wise, so let’s take that off the table first. I wouldn’t suggest basic firearms, either: they’d likely just dent it or fly off and hurt something else.

    Running it over isn’t likely to damage it too badly, and trying to drown it just leads to rust. I think it’d be hard to get an “accidental” fire to have a high-enough heat sustained for a long enough to kill it. Dropping it from a height might bend or dent it.

    Honestly, I think your best chance would be some kind of high explosive. Not a dinky thing like a hand grenade - aside from being under-powered, there’s the extra shrapnel to worry about. Maybe some dynamite or C4, with a long enough detcord so you’re not near the explosion. Of course, that’ll likely just launch it upwards a bit, so you’d want to enclose it in something that ensures most of the damage is directed to the pan and not dispersed around the edges.

    Maybe ask the police to do a demolition demonstration with their little self-contained units that they blow things up in, would that be feasible? How much do you hate this pan, anyway?






  • So, I went and googled “Trump cheats at golf” stories from 2010-2020, and these are clips from the first three results that turned up - and there were a LOT of results!

    Yahoo Sports:

    Trump hit a ball into the lake. But when the other players weren’t looking, he got out another ball and hit another try, although that too went into the lake. “So he drives up,” Faxon said, “and drops where he should’ve dropped the first time and hits it on the green.” […]

    Tirico remembers hitting one of the best shots of his life squarely onto the green, but when he walked over, the ball was 50 feet away in a bunker. “Trump’s caddy came up to me and said, ‘You know that shot you hit on the par 5?’” Tirico says. “‘It was about 10 feet from the hole. Trump threw it in the bunker. I watched him do it.’”

    Golf.com:

    He throws it, boots it, and moves it. He lies about his lies. He fudges and foozles and fluffs. At Winged Foot, where Trump is a member, the caddies got so used to seeing him kick his ball back onto the fairway they came up with a nickname for him: “Pele.”

    Trump said, “So, where does everybody stand here?" [Trump then claimed he was at] “Four for a three.” Faxon had to laugh because Trump was actually putting for a seven, but he was claiming it was for a four,

    They call him on it, but he just shrugs and cheats some more. It’s ruined his reputation in the golf world. Ninety percent of the people I interviewed — on and off the record — say he openly cheats.

    he was right of the green but a little bit down the hill. He didn’t think anybody was watching, but I was. I saw him make a chipping motion from the side of the hill but no ball came up. Then he walked up the hill, stuck his hand in the hole and pulled a ball out. It must’ve been a ball he had in his hand the whole time.

    He makes sure to hit first off every tee box and then jumps in the cart, so he’s halfway down the fairway before the other three are done driving. That way he can get up there quick and mess with his ball. So this one time — we were on the 18th — he hits first, kind of blocks it right, and jumps in his cart and starts driving away. My guy pures one right down the middle. I mean, I SAW it go right down the middle. One of his best drives of the day. But by the time we get to my guy’s ball, it’s not there. We can’t find it anywhere. And Trump is now ON the green already putting! Where’s our ball? And then Trump starts yelling back at us, “Hey guys! I made a birdie!” He’s holding up his ball and celebrating. And that’s when we realized. He stole our ball!

    Trump, his partner, came over and secretly knocked the ball on to a part of the green where Dunleavy could putt it. Dunleavy picked it up and put it back where it was. “That’s when Donald starts yelling to the other two,” Dunleavy recalls. “He goes, ‘Guys, guys! I wanna tell you how great a guy Coach is. I knocked his ball over here so he could have a putt at it. But then he put it back! And that’s why he’s an unemployed coach and I’m worth $13 billion.”

    The New Yorker:

    “He’d declared that the [Bedminster] club should start having senior club championships for those 50 and up, but he forgot that one of the best players at the club had just turned 50,” Reilly writes. “Having zero chance of beating the guy, he went up to his Trump Philadelphia course on the day of the tournament and played with a friend there. Afterward, according to a source inside the Bedminster club, he called the Bedminster pro shop and announced he’d shot 73 and should be declared the winner. The pro, wanting to stay employed, agreed. His name went up on the plaque.” This turned out to be a double con. When someone from the Bedminster club called up Trump’s caddy at the course in Philadelphia and asked what he’d shot there, the caddy replied, “Maybe 82. And that might be generous.”

    well-known sportswriter, Michael Bamberger, reported that Trump won the 2018 club championship at his West Palm Beach club without playing in that tournament, either. And Trump admitted to Reilly that at least some of those eighteen club championships weren’t championships at all. “Whenever I open a new golf course, I play the official opening round and then I just call that the first club championship,” Reilly recounts Trump as saying. “There you go! I’m the first club champion!"

    “If you’ll cheat to win at golf, is it that much further to cheat to win an election? To turn a Congressional vote? To stop an investigation? If you’ll lie about every aspect of the game, is that much further to lie about your taxes, your relationship with Russians, your groping of women?"





  • In this thread, so many people who misunderstand the meaning of “Believe women”.

    Brett Kavanaugh raped a woman in high school, and had three additional accusations of sexual assault, yet all of that was ignored to put him on the Supreme Court. Donald Trump has a 67-page Wikipedia article on all the sexual assault claims against him, yet he was still a reality tv star, a popular media figure, and now president. Allegations and rumors against Kevin Spacey and Harvey Weinstein circulated for years before anyone took things seriously enough to bother doing something about it. Brock Turner raped an unconscious woman and was let off with six months because the judge didn’t want to “ruin such a promising future” (or similar words), served it in county jail, and was released after 3 months.

    “Believe women” means taking each allegation seriously instead of doubting women with questions like “are you sure you want to report this”, “are you sure it wasn’t just a misunderstanding”, “are you sure you weren’t drunk”, etc. “Believe women” means stop trying to dismiss or downplay behavior with things like “why would he do that” (Trump’s assault on the plane), or “she’s not that pretty”, or “she was asking for it”, and actually investigating the crime instead of brushing it off as a college prank, or the casting couch, or someone trying to get 15 minutes of game by accusing someone famous.

    “Believe women” doesn’t mean automatically accepting every claim, but believing it enough to accept that it might have happened and conducting a thorough investigation of the alleged incident.