Dismissive dickwad behavior is good, actually - if you’re dismissing Nazis. Or anyone else who deserves a blunt rejection. It is fine and valid to deny people civility, when their rhetoric is inherently abusive. Respect and patience have limits.

Swearing at people absofuckinglutely has its place in online discourse. If not for the assholes themselves - then for the people they’re trying to fool.

Anyway.

Discworld has a few parallel threads. Release order starts with The Colour Of Magic, which is fun and short, but not exactly top-notch material. See explanatory flowchart. Those first few novels have a real Season One vibe.

The traditional introduction seems to be whichever book catches your eye. Or whichever you happened to find first, if you’d heard good things about the series. That’s how I wound up reading Ringworld by Larry Niven, because cultivating your interests in the 90s was a much fuzzier experience.

Apropos of little - how long ago did Sean Hannity say he’d get waterboarded?

And those are the only two options.

Good old ethical Microsoft.

Honestly I miss reddit circa 2015. Obviously before The Idiot and half the world lurching toward fascism - but also back when “fuck off, Nazi” was treated better than being a goddamn Nazi.

The proliferation of “civility” is poisonous to online discourse. It is always the wrong metric. Trolls love being polite monsters. r/Politics even went a step further and demanded all opinions be taken in good faith. Do those idiots know what trolling is? Do they not understand bad faith… as a concept? It only works because people mistake it for good faith. Demanding everyone do that is a gift to trolls.

Moderation requires common-sense identification of who’s being an asshole. It’s never about no-no words. If a script could handle the job, we would let it.

Lemmy has far too many communities with rules going ‘never be rude to anyone ever!!!’ and then zero enforcement when someone calls you a cunt for gently correcting their grammar. That is the worst of both worlds. Anyone sincerely trying is going to hold back from just dealing with assholes appropriately, like an adult, but those people are then left with no recourse against pointlessly toxic shitheads. I don’t want a screaming match. I want words to matter.

Also if you enjoy Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett has a similar deep snark. Discworld’s a whole mess of books but you can kinda jump in anywhere. I recommend Guards! Guards! or Going Postal. He did Good Omens with baby Neal Gaiman, and they’d write chapters separately, then throw out every joke they’d bought thought of.

It is a right bitch that the reason to leave is 100% the bastards in charge. The community was fine. (Okay, giant asterisks all over that, but you know what I mean. The community was not the cause for masses walking away with a sea of middle fingers lit by burning bridges.)

I’m not here because it’s better. I’m here because fuck Spez. And fuck enshittification. Fifteen years and these greedy incompetents made it impossible to come back without feeling like betrayal. The only reason I’m not deleting anything is that I don’t do that shit. Nothing any human being put effort into deserves to be lost forever.

Elmo did us the favor of turning his stolen harassment engine into an all-stick-no-carrot experience in a fucking hurry.

Oh no, the condemnation of a narcissistic felon.

God damn, do I want to live in the reality where bad press exists. Or have you not watched these exact assholes fail upwards for the last seven years?

All these criminals keep getting arrested… it must be a conspiracy!

Please learn to live in reality. Please start caring what words mean.

Thumbnail looks like he hired Bat Boy.

Kind of a shame it’s just weird lighting on a normal-looking dude, versus being the sign that this is all a fever dream you can wake up from. I say you because my coma delirium wouldn’t involve this many false starts. Comey’s gonna charge him, whoops, nevermind. Mueller’s gonna charge him, whoops, nevermind. We’re going to war with Iran, whoops, nevermind. We’re holding cops accountable, whoops, nevermind. The plague means UBI, whoops, nevermind. Roger Stone’s going to jail, whoops, nevermind. A mob invaded the capitol, whoops, nevermind. Russia’s seizing Ukraine, whoops, nevermind. Ukraine’s expelling Russia, whoops, nevermind. Wagner’s conquering Moscow, whoops, nevermind. The last seven years have been like a story told by a toddler. “And then… and then… but nuh-uh… and then…”

Seeing the figure of highest ridicule - whom I remember reading about in Bloom County collections when they were far from new - fail his way into the clumsiest autocracy imaginable, would not be followed up by this much inaction. Hallucinations don’t start with “Carrot Top became the Pope!” and then level out. He’s declaring a crusade on Gallagher, the Swiss Guard develop laser-pikes, and your childhood dog kills the emperor of Australia. So whichever one of you is having this nightmare, I want you to know your subconscious is fucking boring.

Putting in appropriate effort for a job where the pay is exposure.

I feel like I’m about to get texted some emoji clusterfuck conveying a well and seven days.

… which is still an absurd abuse of power, made clear by treating inanimate objects as persons. Literally lumps of clay.

“Forfeiture” is how cops excuse stealing cash. They can just take it, and make you sue to get it back, because there’s no presumption of innocence. You were not charged with a crime. Your money was. And that’s different, somehow, because go fuck yourself.

The head mod of r/EnoughLibertarianSpam wedged this into my brain years ago:

The whole idea of free market forces is that corporations will be motivated to be good based on reputation alone, which assumes that reputation can’t be falsified.

Don’t recall mentioning price as an obstacle.

The fact people are buying expensive-ass phones is an obstacle to any console trying to be a cell phone or vice-versa. Phones already play modern-ass video games. Any new iPhone is surely more capable than a Switch. Who’s going to be swayed into buying some custom Sony bullshit just to access an entirely separate wallet vacuum?

If Sony was going to release a handheld, it’d just be an under-powered PS5 variant, as a Nintendo Switch knockoff. AMD would be happy to provide appropriate chips.

Look at this thing and tell me any great deal of innovation occurred.

Genuinely as hard as “bring back the NGage.” Nobody wants to buy a smartphone that’s also a console platform. There’s no three-year contract required, and AT&T doesn’t get to micromanage the dashboard, but it’s still two wildly different commitments for no sufficient benefit. It means being stuck with a wonky smartphone on a longer console lifecycle and overpaying for a console with all the limitations of a smartphone.

By contrast - this is a controller with a screen in it. That’s all. Why wouldn’t they sell that? What’s the downside, for them? You buy another accessory priced well beyond its material costs, you provide all the electricity and electronics necessary for it to do anything, and they don’t care if you ever play games on it. It’s not lashed to the success of yet another online store. It’s not even a vehicle for recurring subscription fees. It’s a dongle for another toy. They have no incentive to force it to catch on. If it doesn’t sell - they’ll just stop.

Honestly, dumb as this sounds, they can’t lose. It’s not a platform. There’s no infrastructure. It doesn’t even do cloud streaming, for some reason; it is 100.0% dependent on your hardware and your network. If Sony went bankrupt tomorrow, this gizmo would still work. If the hardware’s sold at a comfortable profit and they’re not gambling anything on its success, why wouldn’t they launch this ridiculous object? They don’t care if you don’t buy it.

It’s not a handheld. It’s an accessory.

Scansion, people.

Practicing the forbidden art of nex-mex.