I prefer my mental image.

How so? Why is the alternative killing?

The thing that completely takes me out of the movie / show whenever I see it is people who get knocked backwards by bullets / shotgun blasts. The maximum amount of momentum transferred by a bullet or pack of shotgun pellets is the same amount as the shove it gives to the shooter’s hands or shoulder.

If it’s in a Chinese Gun Fu, Wire Fu, Gun Wuxia type movie where everything is slightly fantastical, I can accept it as a kind of over-the-top element of that style. But, it really bothers me when it happens in something that’s otherwise fairly realistic.

The movie version of being “knocked out”.

Someone is knocked unconscious for long enough to be moved to a new location and probably tied up. And they wake up just fine. They’re able to engage in witty banter with their captor. If they manage to break free they’re able to fight effectively.

The reality? A massive concussion. Extreme disorientation. Likely to puke if they have to move much.

If you ever watch a “knockout” in boxing or MMA, the unconsciousness lasts a seconds at most, mostly not even a second. Someone’s knees go wobbly then they recover, but they’re still disoriented and uncoordinated. If they’re out for longer than a second or two, everyone’s concerned and the fighter is rushed to the hospital.

No one secures the neck strap on motorcycles

It’s been a while since I rode a motorcycle, but apparently things have changed a lot.

Great comment. And you have to acknowledge that it’s really hard to actually have these conversations. You might actually find out you’re wrong about something because you hadn’t considered something that’s fundamental to their view of the world. And, doing it the way you suggest is even harder than just arguing about it. Because you have to swallow your pride/anger when they talk about stealing the statue of liberty, and instead try to get the conversation back to something more reasonable.

My mom has become a crazy conspiracy theorist, but for most of my life she was a lefty. The result is that she’s not fully right wing, and instead has this weird jumble of beliefs that often clash with each-other. And it’s obvious that a lot of the time she’s just parroting the last thing she heard, without ever having thought about it. I have to admit that often I just dodge it when she brings up her latest conspiracy. It just takes too much energy to engage. Other times I get drawn in and actually just shoot down the ridiculous conspiracy. But, the most productive times are when I can put in the energy and effort to try to understand her underlying fears and why she wants to accept these fantastical stories.

It’s easy to forget that no one is the villain in their own book.

Incidentally, why I hate a lot of movies where the villain is Dr. Evil who is part of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, or something. Also why I think the Good / Evil alignment axis in D&D is bullshit.

ultra racist uncle as a man that’s simply absolutely frightened of change

Or just someone who grew up in a different time and was taught different things and doesn’t believe that what they were taught is out of date. Similarly, a kid might think they know everything but doesn’t have the wisdom and experience to know that things are more complicated than they seem on the surface. Both can be pretty obnoxious at a thanksgiving dinner table.

Take, for example, a discussion about how voting is done. The racist uncle might think that mail-in voting is a scam, and that the only way to vote should be in-person. He might not understand that poor people in cities sometimes have to wait in line for hours to vote, and that some might not be able to do that while holding down 2 jobs. He might not believe that the small number of polling places was a deliberate choice by a past government to discourage these people from voting.

But, at the same time, the kid might think that online voting is the obvious answer. The kid lives her entire life online and often votes on things. She knows a bit about encryption and has heard of blockchains and thinks that the only people against online voting are luddites who are afraid of technology. She might not understand the danger of being able to prove that you voted and who you voted for. She might not appreciate how sometimes low tech things are much harder to manipulate and fake.

So, there’s “cautious of change happening too quickly” vs. “too eager to embrace change without considering the consequences”. Everybody likes to think that they’re smack dab in the sweet spot between those two things, but everyone else is going to judge them as being too far to one side.

The modern red-hat wearer would probably use terms like woke, libtard, communist, etc.

But, I would bet that if this same kind of confrontation happened a quarter century ago, the conservatives might be saying “He’s super irrational and emotional”. Like, I think conservatives believe that they see the world as it is, and that liberals are blind to the realities of life. They believe that liberals want to change the world, but don’t understand that it is the way it is for a good reason.

It’s similar to how when women were campaigning for the right to vote, men who didn’t support hat would say things like “I love my wife, but she’s a woman so she’s not capable of making the hard choices.” Or, “My mother is a wonderful person, and full of love, but her emotion clouds her judgment.” Or, “I love my daughter, but she’s too unstable, she jumps on any new trend, running a country requires a steady hand.”

Yes, the reality is that the racist uncle is super racist. But, it’s still worth trying to understand how they see the world. If for no other reason than it’s easier to defeat your enemy if you understand them.

This is amazing. PDFs full of redacted legal docs are so far from people’s daily experiences. Even if they’re printouts of emails, it’s hard to slog through them. Pretending you’re logged into gmail as Epstein and can just browse around in his emails, that’s just a brilliant way to make this information more easily accessible.

I’ve noticed some glitches in how it presents things. It often doesn’t get the order of things right , like in one case one of Epstein’s flunkies emailed him asking “Have you seen this?” forwarding an email from someone else. The jmail site rendered it as Epstein receiving the forwarded email, then lots of replies to that. Often the order of things is wrong too. But, you can always click on “view original document” to see what it actually looked like.

Regardless of the content, whoever came up with this way of presenting the information deserves some kind of UI/UX award.

You wouldn’t even need to encourage people to use it. A lot of previous innovations in the tech world were primarily spread by word of mouth. The usefulness was so obvious that as soon as a friend showed you, you wanted to try it out for yourself.

e-ink is a wonderful thing. But, it’s really only useful for e-readers and maybe price displays in stores. It has a frame rate in seconds-per-frame rather than frames-per-second. That’s fine if what you’re looking at is pretty static, but for general purpose displays it’s pretty useless. But man, it is just great for e-readers.

^ Canadian

Mr. Munroe probably didn’t intend it, but the diagram also shows the problem with monopolies, duopolies and similar concentrations of stuff. The original design for the Internet was something that was so distributed that it could survive even if some key nodes were nuked. But, the modern Internet depends way too much on just a few companies: cloudflare, google, meta, amazon, etc.

Except AWS-US-EAST-1 is one of the big boxes, and so is cloudflare.

Maybe, but OP’s found the ideal site if you just want husky bloopers.

X is pretty small.

Elon Musk bought Twitter for something like $41b, and now it’s worth maybe half that. Cloudflare alone is worth almost double the pre-Musk market cap of Twitter. Spotify is a relatively small player in the “Internet Content and Information” space, dominated by companies like Google and Meta, but it’s still worth more than triple the pre-Musk market cap, at more than $120b. Current X is about the size of Zillow, currently valued at about $16b.

As a small company that is focused on spreading propaganda and hate speech, building a robust CDN isn’t a core part of X’s business, so it’s normal they’d outsource that. Companies like Meta and Google are big enough to justify doing that in-house.

Yeah, the other fat chunky leg could be AWS. But neither is that tiny pillar supporting everything.

Whether intentional or not, that XKCD comic also pointed out a problem that even when some of the other things holding up the entire modern internet are huge, they’re still a problem because there aren’t very many of them, so half the Internet depends on them.

You are to be compared with tech billionaires, with their immense wealth and layered support systems, but with none of the money or resources. It manifests in what people expect of you, and how people talk about you.

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/my-next-chapter-with-mastodon/

People need to realize that open source projects don’t create billionaires. In fact, they actually block billionaires from forming.

Tech deci-millionaires get rich by creating a moat around something, then put a toll booth at the drawbridge. Tech billionaires do that but make sure to enclose something essential they have a monopoly on within the moat, and then capture any and all regulators who might try to interfere. Open Source software either makes it illegal to build a moat or allows anybody who’s interested to build their own drawbridge. It’s orders of magnitude harder to get rich with open source or free software. You basically have to put up a toll booth that’s fully optional and somehow still get people to pay.

We should all thank #JohnMastodon for his selfless acts, both starting Mastodon but also now knowing when to step down.

A number of high-profile websites, including X and ChatGPT, went down for many on Tuesday, due to problems affecting major internet infrastructure firm, Cloudflare.

Blusky: the social media site where people post bloopers of pet videos featuring huskies. It’s a very small niche.