TheBananaKing

fuck me I'm old. I still remember this one

Most useful thing was actually a $2 key wallet. Stupid, but it was actually really hard to find the most basic keyring-with-wrap that wasn't trying to be a card wallet or have fancy dangly bits or whatever. Just an oblong of fake leather, two studs and a split ring, so my keys don't chew holes in my pocket.

The issue is the coverups and deliberate efforts of the organisation to protect the people doing it and keep them in business.

5% of the general populace with the tendency isn't nearly the same kind of problem as 5% of a group that has extended access to children, the power to blackmail both the victims and the parents, and the knowledge that they'll get safely moved on to pastures greener if their stomping ground starts getting risky.

Weird guy on the corner is a risk.

Person you're forced to spend entire days with unsupervised, and who claims the ability to have your entire family tortured forever if there's any trouble, and has an entire global organisation watching his back, rather a lot more of one.

Give people power, and they will seek transgression as proof of that power. What's the point of being supreme earthly authority over people if you have to just sit there and follow the rules? Rules are for little people, are you calling me a little person? Watch me prove my status by committing abominations and not getting punished!

This is especially the case when you load up the stakes with anxieties and resentments and jockeying for power with others and cognitive dissonance and all that jazz. Now they don't just want to prove their made-man status, they need to. And that's not even including malignant narcissism in the mix.

And the thing is, there's a whole category of people who are legitimately impressed by this, who see rule-following as a hallmark of losers, and rule-flouting as a hallmark of winners.

See also: trump voters, cart narcs, anti-maskers, karens etc etc.

The priesthood is an absolute magnet for these kinds of people - and also a magnet for people struggling with shame, hoping to overcome it by being all holy-like, for instance, existing pedophiles.

And on top of that, corrupt power structures like this very often have a culture of mutually-assured destruction: people end up required to do something horribly incriminating themselves so they can't blow the whistle on others - and once they start down that road, the justifications start piling up. See also David Cameron and the pig, and police in general.

Layer on a teaching that the reputation of the organisation must be protected even at the cost of people's own children, and yeah, perfect storm.

No way in hell has this only been happening for the last few decades; it's only in that timeframe that the church's power has diminished enough for word to get out.

well, and the frying part. The idea was to end up with texture, similar to lao gan ma.

I think imma have to try it.

I am all about keeping it sustainable; nobody has willpower longterm. Any fool can come up with a diet of rabbit food and have amazing results for a month before their brain goes postal on them and they start inhaling cheeseburgers nonstop. Trust me, I totally get that. We always attribute vast reserves of motivation and discipline to ourselves that we just don't have, and the results aren't pretty.

But on the other side of the coin, your brain can get stuck in a short-term reward loop, and it howls blue murder when you first try to break out of it.

I'm an stress-eater and a boredom-eater, and if the loop gets out of control, not constantly snacking becomes stressful in and of itself, and yeah that's a complete trainwreck.

But what I've found is that after a surprisingly short time of acclimating yourself to controlled amounts of hunger, you can break that loop. Your brain re-learns the difference between not-full and actually-need-calories, and only sees the latter as a problem.

What started out feeling like a catastrophe that you had to white-knuckle through just turns into a boring fact that takes little to no willpower at all to put up with at all.

It's a really good investment of effort, and makes the whole process a lot easier.

Scratch an E inside your glasses. Now you don't have tinnitus, it's just really intense reading. Chaotic stoicism for the win.

Tinnitus sucks.

Better: just learn to live with not feeling satiated all the time.

Not that you shouldn't make vegies a significant part of your diet, just that a big part of the lifestyle change is learning to be hungry between meals as a normal and non-distressing thing.

You left out the part where he called him sir.

I do know about window managers, thanks.

And that's part of the problem: they all have their own slightly different infrastructure that relies on slightly intricate and not-quite-standard plumbing.

Dialogs not opening, or those weird invisible 30-second timeouts opening an application becasue dbus isn't happy because one of the xorg init scripts messed some XDG path or set the wrong GTK_* option, or XAUTHORITY is pointing somewhere weird.

Whichever user is logged in locally should be allowed to talk to the device they plugged in via usb? Well that's just an unreasonable thing to expect to happen by default, let me spend 20 minutes cooking up a udev script to chown it on creation.

Users managing to set their default terminal to some random script they were working on (seriously, how?). Or they initialised their xfce4 profile with the blank-toolbar option and now can't work out how to launch anything.

Notification popups? Sure, the toolbar will let you add one, but nothing communicates with it by default lol.

also jesus christ kde.

And I'm talking about the built-in functionality of the desktop environment wrt package management, not separate applications.

Sure, it's nice to be able to apt-get upgrade and just get everything all at once - when everything is happy with everything else.

But when you get conflicting dependencies and you have to take time out to track down what libpyzongo0-util is used for or what is going to break later on if you just purge it because people use cutesy package names that are worse than Ruby libraries in terms of communicating what they're actually for, and do we need this thing for the core platform or it it form some random crap that was installed ad-hoc and used precisely once, it gets old.

Like I say you need this amount of flexibility and complexity for development and deployment and network services and all the rest. Anyone using Windows for much more than file-print-office-browser-gaming has more masochism in them than I can comprehend.

But for that same very minimal set of core use-cases, you don't need (or, I'd argue, want) flexibility or complexity, you want it to be simple and robust with JOWTDI. And for everything else, you ssh into your linux box and do it there. I was amazed to discover that Windows Terminal is actually really nice; combine that with an X server and maybe a VNC client, and you've got the best of both worlds.

And yes, Windows has all kinds of annoying shit of its own - but that mostly pops up when you want to do interesting things on it, not when you just want to look at cat videos on the internet.

I'm a sysadmin. We're a Linux shop, I spend my life deep in the guts of Linux boxes, both server and desktop.

And for my daily-driver both at work and at home, I use windows.

The UI and overall UX are just better. The annoying bullshit I make a living knowing my way around, I don't have to think about.

For actual development or backend services, of course you want a Linux box. Proper logging, proper tools, build shit, pipe it together, automate stuff and get down and technical when it breaks. Doing that on windows is absolutely hell.

But on windows, the volume control just works, I never have to delete lockfiles to get my browser to open, my desktop login doesn't terminate if something in .profile returned nonzero, I can play every video game out there without having to fuck around, I can use native versions of real apps, I don't have package-management dependency hell, all the pieces were designed to work with each other, and the baseline cognitive load needed to just use my computer is zero, which frees up my brain to focus on my actual work, or for playing games and fucking around on the internets.

Still less than your mum