Large outlet center on interstate 40 in North Carolina between two metropolitan areas needed a Spanish translator. I applied and interviewed, having spent significant time working IT jobs in South America. They asked if I spoke Mexican. I said no, I am working proficient in Spanish. They said sorry, they were looking for someone who spoke Mexican.

Ghosting is a normal part of life. It happens, and 95% of the time it’s inadvertent and not a slight. People come in and leave your life. That’s just how it works.

If someone isn’t worth the hassle, move on. It doesn’t even deserve an explanation or second thought.

Only you get to determine how your time is spent. Nobody deserves a monopoly over your emotions or effort, and anybody who demands an explanation is just manipulating you because they don’t respect your agency as a person as much as they value their own pride. Don’t fall for the toxicity.

There are eight billion people out there. It would take 250 years to high-five them all. Lots of noise, very little signal.

The most recent commercial game using the modified 2.5D Doom engine, was released in May 2024 on Steam. It is called Selaco.

Dalí was a huge Alice Cooper fan

US Civil war vets who lived to be 90 married little girls at the end of their life. Usually it was an arrangement. The little girls would then be eligible for the pension and it transferred to them when the veteran died. Some of these girls themselves lived to their 90s, hence you had state governments still pay civil war annuities in the era of TikTok.

I guess the world burning was worth sticking it to Kamala for Gaza.

–Gnome Web from Flathub

–Chromium in the Debian repo

–Chromium in the CalyxOS build

I would love to use Vivaldi and this is likely the best option left since it’s all the old Opera devs, but FFS just make it libre software guys. They seem to be financially stable with their team of like 30 people and run one of the largest Mastodon instances and have a great community.

Its got the best interface out of any of the Chrome reskins, especially with the left side tabs. They are trolling Mozilla right now with the whole, “we are the only browser not run by a marketing company or trying to build AI into the browser.”

But for me it being closed is a non-starter.

Like for fucks sake just make it libre software. Brave is open and literally nobody is building on top of it (morally bankrupt company though), what does Vivaldi have to lose by becoming libre software? They have nothing to lose and a competitive advantage to gain by becoming libre. There’s literally a community waiting to embrace you.

FWIW, I am kind of behind the curve. I used the Mozilla Suite from Milestone 18 all the way until it was SeaMonkey and didn’t switch until 2009 or so; then Firefox/Thunderbird until earlier this month. So if you have suggestions, I’m open.

Never heard of it.

Haha j/k, of course Safari too, good catch. Just a non-starter for me since I don’t use any of the platforms it’s on.

Geary from Flathub for all the day to day, manage my life and family and financial stuff.

And Alpine for my personal email account from 25 years ago.

Floorp and Zen are to Firefox what Vivaldi is to Chrome.

They provide a better UI and other features and strip out a lot of the bad stuff from the parent browser.

But fundamentally, Floorp and Zen and Vivaldi would not continue very long if the upstream decided to suddenly stop producing code, or altered their codebase in a significant manner. (This is what killed Palemoon and Seamonkey). This is always a threat.

So really, it’s a shit situation for browsers right now. Just choose a browser engine and then pick whatever UI you like the most on top of it.

I’m optimistic that Servo turns out to be the new Mozilla without repeating its mistakes. It should be the reference implementation browser upon which everything will rebase and it should remain non-profit. This was the original goal of open source Mozilla 25 years ago but then the techbro crew rolled in and started grifting.

(I’m also aware that WebKit still exists but Gnome Web is seemingly the only browser built with it and there are no extensions).

Today the Mozilla Corporation is just a place for the already wealthy to funnel money into their golden parachutes. It’s a grift. Personally I think it’s time to move on. Last week I pulled the plug, deleted my ~/.mozilla directory, so for the first time in a quarter century I don’t have anything Mozilla-related installed.

About 25 years ago, I used something called mlvwm which was designed to look like System 7.

I ran this on a 486 and later on a Duron system with something called “bochs” that let me run a full System 7 in a container.

A quick search shows that it is still around and has been forked by a couple of people.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers

Deep Space Nine

Nova

“Fuck around and find out.” -The Boy Who Cried Wolf

Me either. My longest install is about to turn 5, but that’s an OpenBSD closet laptop server that gets upgraded remotely with every release.

I’m doing okay on this laptop; just hit 1 year on bookworm. But I’m also bandwidth constrained (kilo-bits per second) and can’t really distrohop like I used to.

Congrats. First of all this really made me feel old … Skylake seems recent to me and that’s the year my kid was born. But secondly, this reminds me of those people who used to post in /r/debian about having like 20 years on the same install and they just kept changing the hardware and if a drive ever got replaced they used dd to clone from one drive to another without reinstalling. So when they would do something like stat /, it would be something like 2002 that the filesystem was created. I think those people/stories are awesome.

I think our expectations are pretty jacked up here because that’s how all the operating systems I remember are. Just pull the drive and plug it in another computer. From the DOS days to the BSD world. It’s only Windows and macOS that are the outliers here with their “trusted computing” bullshit. They created the problem with tying the install to the hardware, and then they sold the solution of backing up to their cloud for a monthly subscription if your hardware ever just died.

Koyaanisqatsi

Swastikas painted on our house when I was a kid.

Kids yell in the public park tell me that I have to go back. When pushing my son in a stroller.

Getting told that I will have to pay for stuff when I pick it up at the store at Dollywood, like I don’t know how a merchant economy works.

Had to fight a lot in the feral public school system growing up. All the ching chong jokes.

Being referred to as “chowie” by a prominent basketball scout while in high school.

Being asked if I eat dogs by my boss. In 2023.

Being asked if my mom was an Asian whore by another boss. In 2018.

Being told that I’m not Asian and that some white girl looks more Asian than me and how can I even claim to be Asian when I don’t have squinty eyes?

Jokes about my ancestry when they can’t place me.

Being pulled into secondary every time I travel through Paris CDG because I always get flagged. And one Securitas security officer telling me that Americans will never accept me as American when I finished.

Dating scene as a teen, everything going well, then meeting the parents, then being told I wasn’t allowed to date their white daughter anymore. Like clockwork. Which is fine, they can’t handle the spice in my food anyway.

• MS-DOS 6.22 / Windows for Workgroups 3.11
• Red Hat Linux 5.2
• Slackware Linux 3.5
• FreeBSD 3.2 -> FreeBSD 6.0
• Kubuntu 6.06
• Linux Mint Darnya
• Arch Linux with KDEmod and oss4, later with awesome window manager
• Fedora Leonidas, Constantine
• Microsoft Windows 7
• Fedora Goddard, Lovelock (this time with KDE)
• OpenBSD 4.9 -> OpenBSD 7.0
• Debian stable (buster, then bullseye, now bookworm)

I left OpenBSD reluctantly when I found that it wasn’t meeting my needs anymore. I needed an iPad Pro and an iPhone to fill in the missing functionality and they don’t play nice with OpenBSD for things like transferring files, photos, etc.

I’ve since converted the family to Debian stable. Backports and flatpak make it incredibly reliable. We can do everything from here and its well documented for every use case. Video chats, zoom conference calls, file sync/sharing, bluetooth music through Spotify, etc. Started with buster when it was the stable distro; jumped early to bullseye during the freeze; and now holding onto bookworm.

Since mangoes are in season now:

Green mangoes (still crunchy) with crushed Thai pepper and sugar and a tiny pinch of salt.

Or just go all out and make the crack sauce.

I like the smells of tiger balm, kimchi, and fish sauce.

I think this is an outlier because I’ve been asked to never bring that stuff in the office anymore.