the year is 2025 and donald trump is the president of the united states.
there is a famous quotation by an australian indigenous woman named lilla watson that changed my view of the world forever. it reads:
“If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
this is especially true in the international struggle for women's liberation.
lately, men, and especially young men, have become a key demographic in society driving the slide into fascism. these men think they are better than women, and that they should dominate, control, and silence them.
i want to say to them--be careful what you wish for, because you might just get it. even if they achieved their abhorrent mission, i do not think these men would be satisfied.
in fact it would be the opposite. we men would be lonelier, angrier, more immature, and just as lost existentially as ever.
why? because it is impossible for slaves and masters to be in communion. by definition, one is a person, and the other is their property. a man cannot simultaneously have a mother, a sister, an aunty, or a partner if they are also his complete possession.
for us to smash this system of patriarchy, we men are going to have to stop blaming women for our insecurities, and our own perceived inadequacies, and open our eyes to the fact that we have a lot in common with women.
this international women's day i want to signal that when it comes to the liberation of the other half of the global population, we men really, really owe it not just to women but also ourselves as men to do some (any!) personal reflection.
women's liberation is good for men. the far right movement, all dominated by men, are not going to get what they want by oppressing women. should they ever win even more power, it will not matter. their method, bloodthirsty and vengeful, is ultimately futile.
men will only win their own proper recognition in history by also recognising women. and by being enthusiastic about it.
someone once said, "women hold up half the sky". never a more true word was said. women are doing it right this very second. as far as i can tell, this sky-holding will continue for a long time, whether or not the fact is hidden, disparaged, or made a secret.
men owe it to themselves to acknowledge the sacrifice and suffering women go through their whole lives. they do it with such grace and composure. not a single man could withstand this way of living. every one of us would fold within seconds of being placed in a woman's position.
a sexist man is NOT a real man.
blair vidak.
8 march 2025.
Something I find fascinating that you really only see with religious books (well, for Abrahamic religions, and presumably also Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism), is the rich paratext you see surrounding them that you could only get from millions/billions of people from many cultural contexts analyzing this one particular book over the course of thousands of years.
For instance, the Talmud in particular is interesting because it is often laid out such that the original text is a tiny little section in the center of the page, and then the other 90% of each page is completely filled with various scholars' interpretations and discussions of the text (usually stuff is published out-of-band rather than becoming part of the book itself lol)
(1/3) PLEASE BOOST - Stolen First Nation's Land, Occupation Escalation
If you live in Boorloo (Perth) please come down to help at the occupation of the former Sister Kate's Mission in Queen's Park tomorrow at 9:00am.
Uniting Church likely know that the press will be too busy covering the election to pay attention to the occupation, so they have chosen to (on extremely short notice, with little to no communication with the Noongar yorgas) to have a meeting tomorrow morning to establish the former stolen generations' "Children's Home" as a "healing centre" without permission from
having worked ~9 months in this call centre job,
i feel like i have so many points in persuasion now.
show me a persuasion check--i can pass it 😂🤣
My dream computing environment is largely invisible, and centers users. I want something like an old Sony Memory Stick that’s the core; it holds my system, including OS and state. I don’t typically carry it raw, though — its purpose is to move from device to device.
I plug it in to a pocket tablet, and my system is mobile. Pop the stick out and click it into a desk terminal, and my system adapts its interface but keeps my tasks in progress — I get a more powerful machine with a big display and ergonomic entry points.
I can plug it into a cyberdeck or a laptop or a TV or whatever and I get the same experience of all my stuff being where I expect it, just having to accept the hardware constraints.
Just wherever I am, pop the core in and it’s just a different physical interface.
i decided to almost completely cut her out of my life sometime last year. this is the least contact i have ever had with her.
since distancing myself, my mental health has been the best it has ever been, since diagnosis in 2013.
mum never really took much notice or interest in what was important to me. maybe she hugged and kissed me at some points, but she usually always kicked me when i was down.
whenever i dropped out of something or collapsed in exhaustion from trying to fulfill her expectations, i received punishment. i was yelled at, and some comfort i liked was taken away from me. how many times has she made me feel useless, worthless?
when i heard the phrase, "doctor, lawyer, engineer, or dead to me", i instantly related. i am fairly certain i was mentally ill at all in the first place because of how much pressure was put on me.
she never listened to me talk about my passions. her eyes would glaze over. i look back now and feel like she must have wanted to get off the topic ASAP.
this "blood is thicker than water" saying is bullshit. if i saw a happy and loving family in my day-to-day life now, it would honestly feel jarring and uncomfortable. i don't think anyone got out of childhood in the 1990s undamaged.
i don't doubt a nuclear family can be loving and nurturing, but... yeah. i don't know any of those...
it has been kicking my arse. my first video game was the sequel, crash bandicoot 2. i used to have these enormous meltdowns as a child every time i got a game over and had to redo entire levels only to get game over again.
my parents had no fucking clue what was going on, and had even less of a clue about how to play a video game.
i think i was stuck on the first world of crash bandicoot 2 for a few years until my cousins from overseas beat the first boss for me.
the first crash bandicoot is even harder. in the original PS1 version, if i recall correctly, you could only save after getting a bonus level. that usually required collecting three hidden tokens in a level's crates. if you failed a bonus level, you could not save. if you couldn't find the tokens, you couldn't even get to the bonus level in the first place.
i suppose back then you would just have to keep your PS1 on permanently and hope it didn't freeze while you were away.
this crash bandicoot 1 remake is _still_ abso-fucking-lutely punishing. i had to pause the game every now and then after losing my nerve, causing me to make silly errors. i had to do breathing exercises to centre myself from how this game traumatises me.
honestly? i wish my dad had gotten an N64 instead of a PS1. i got my first N64 from a flea market on holiday and i remember thinking that it was instantly better. the first game i for it was rayman 2.
even the basic first party N64 titles had me engrossed. i remember playing ocarina of time and feeling like hyrule field as soooooo big and expansive. mario 64 impressed me way more than crash bandicoot.
tldr:
1. crash bandicoot was way too difficult to give to a child. it is infuriating as a 34 year old.
2. big regrets about having a playstation and not a nintendo. years of my childhood wasted and ruined.
@vidak @permacomputer I swear, people make jokes and memes about how we sent people to the moon and back on half a bit of ram but they forget the immense sociological implications of this shit as it pertains to planned obsolescence and centralization of the digital infrastructure
I can only handle six hours or so of running headlong into invisible MacOS walls before I have to stop working and do something fun.
so hard to find examples and documentation on how to do stuff on a 20+ year old abandoned platform, hopefully i can provide more examples and some extra documentation while im at it!
just updated to pleroma 2.9.0
https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma/-/releases/v2.9.0
Sonic Unleashed from the Xbox 360 has made its way onto PC, although not by SEGA. This is a fan-made port created through the process of static recompilation.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/03/sonic-unleashed-gets-a-full-fan-made-pc-port-with-linux-steam-deck-support/
Me: this is how bikes get repaired and recycled in this one small town.
- The junkyard guy leaves nice ones out by his gate for a day or two before dismantling them for scrap.
- there are several people in the town who know they can come past regularly and take anything by the gate
- there's a guy who takes any bikes he thinks we can salvage, they are almost always kids' bikes, there are just more of those
- a rotating group of friends and people who want to learn about bikes work on them
- when they're finished we distribute them by word of mouth: is there anyone around 6-8yo who wants a purple bike?
- the bikes seem to come with lifetime servicing. No one mentions this until the bike needs servicing, then they just say 'we better get onto servicing your bike, hey?' and it happens
- you can do a trade-in/upgrade. Kids swap their bikes for bigger bikes, people service the little bike and give it to another kid
-there is no name, no official location, no contact details for this, it's an ephemeral property that emerges from the community every day that the community has capacity to do it. It is fascinating and I am glad to have witnessed it.
Sustainability tutor: so first off this could never happen without NGO administration, start there
As a reminder, I'm hosting the service https://openports.pl to easily search stuff in #OpenBSD ports/packages collection.
The server is running -current and is publishing the list of all snapshots it went through. This can be useful if you are looking for information about working / defective snapshots.
https://openports.pl/snaps.txt
Thanks @OpenBSDAms for the free hosting VM
ok. so once upon a time Midori was the most promising of the lightweight WebkitGTK browsers
then it became an Electron app for a while, iirc
and now it's a Firefox skin...
that's quite the rollercoaster ride, folks!
Void Linux still supplies the original Midori browser, but it seems to have succumbed to bitrot at some point - specifically, keyboard handling has changed beneath it, with the result that you can no longer type / into the url bar (it starts an in-page search instead), which is a bit of a problem for a web browser!