Get a 90s dance mix going and I’m killing it the whole time. C&C, en vogue, give me a running beat and a black lady singing and I’m a happy boy.

The Mars Volta.

Really any overly complex high energy progressive music, Yanni, Tool, Coheed, Bach, whatever. But to me, mars Volta ticks all the boxes and gets me going HARD.

Try blasting Meccamputechture and not rocking with it.

Drunkship of lanterns will make me finish EVERYTHING.

My tools. I’ve amassed quite the arsenal of hand and power tools from 1840-1970. I refurbish and rebuild them into much higher quality workhorses than you can get these days for a fraction of the cost. Even if the price of modern tools wasn’t of any concern, outside of two very premium niche manufacturers, you literally can not get good tools anymore. Nobody makes them. Home improvement stores are full of poorly designed, low quality garbage for people who have never used an actually good tool before. No one has made a made a good combination square in so long that most people have never used one. Chisels and saws are a goddamn tragedy. Power tools are all run with chips than burn out, are covered in plastic guards that break or melt, and are running entirely on brand favoritism from people that don’t know they’ve been had. My table saw is from 1953. It cost me 40$ and an hour of sanding rust and tuning. It has one mechanism and will eat through anything. My band saw is from 1968 and cost me 60$, plus 28 for new guides and tires. My favorite chisel is from 1884, and cost 5$. I still can’t find one I like nearly as well in any other size. My favorite block plane was 6$ and an hour of tuning. It’s from 1878 and kicks the hell out of the 40$ Irwin dogshit I picked up before I knew better. My panel saws have been used hard for 160 years, and will not only outlive the disposable garbage from home depot, but will do a better job and outlive me.

I’ve made a hobby of bringing anything I can find at thrift stores back to life. It prevents waste, and keeps a tool that had real care put into it’s development from ending up nailed to the wall in applebees. As a bonus, collectors generally hate refurbished tools, and I hate someone removing things from the shrinking pool of good, cheap tools so they can put it on a shelf or try to sell it for hundreds as a rarity.

My computer has been torn down for a while due to a move and renovations, but as soon as I set it up again, the first order of business is to migrate it to mint.

I put my hyperfixations on bargain hunting, antiques, and woodworking, so i don’t have any money, but I look like a real piece of shit when I say that.

I understand that the dems are dogshit and couldn’t get a rally behind them. But the fascists needed to be wiped out completely. We could have rallied against the rebublicans, and had more time to change the parties in power, but now we won’t be likely to get the chance to oust them ever again. We have been shown with every election for the last half a century that anytime conservatives get power, they make it harder to take away, and make the world a worse place.

I don’t blame the voters, but I’m unhappy with all the people who thought this was the time to try to make a point to the dems by convincing others they shouldn’t vote against fascism. They didn’t try it when it was romney. They didn’t try it when it was bush and Carey, they decided the correct time to sow infighting was an actual real fascist with a team of sycophants who want to make him a king.

And most who decided they didn’t want to support the dems probably didn’t go to the polls at all, since it’s far too common for dipshit Americans to thinknonly the presidential campaign matters, so now not only is the president a king, but the down ballot positions support him as well.

The christofascists were always going to vote en mass for one side, as they always have. We were supposed to try and stop them. Now antifa is a terrorist group. People are being arrested for wearing free palastine shirts. Being queer is considered a mental illness. Wearing a mask at a protest is a crime. The mass surveillance that never should have started in the first place is not only strengthened, it’s data is for sale.

Everything just got a lot worse, and changing it just got a lot harder.

That’s exactly what I’m saying. There are so many other issues to consider, but they were disregarded because of one issue that has not changed.

It’s still happening, and now we’re also building concentration camps.

Direct action does not mean “don’t also vote to make it harder for the fascists.” Only two options were valid for the majority of election positions. We could have bought more time to fill local positions with third parties and progressives, but instead we’re building concentration camps and cutting any progress we’ve made in the last 20 years.

Let’s say everyone who isn’t Maga voted third party. What does the electoral college do?

If only two candidates had the possibility of winning, and neither of them were going to change that particular issue, then it held no bearing on the election. Pretending that it could be changed and sowing apathy in voters gave full power to the fascists.

So, is the world a better place now? Or is everyone worse off than we could have been while the genocide is still happening regardless?

1. We haven’t been a democracy since we allowed companies to buy politicians. We’ve had two sides to choose from, kind of, which are: ‘hardly does anything’ and ‘actively makes everything worse for everyone immediately’.

2. Genocide wasn’t on the ballot. Anyone who thought trump would stop it was wrong, as anyone who thought about it for a second had been telling them.

So now that those are out of the way, how does that idealistic high horse help every person whose life is now actively worse now?

Yeah I bet we’d be in exactly the same position right now if non fascist infighting hadn’t handed republicans the house, senate, and presidency.

I’m sure kamala would have cut funding to everything useful and given executive power to elon musk and sold our national parks to the oil companies and built a private gestapo and legalized stopping brown people for being brown and put massive tariffs on everything and given the CDC to an evil dipshit and I’m sure a blue majority senate and house would have approved all of that.

Good thing everyone screaming about the genocide made so many people lose hope or it might still be going on.

Wait, trump did end the palastinian conflict, right?

A gas powered fire machine shouldn’t be able to lock up because an update was hanging.

My washer is also a fucking liar. I consider that a sepparate issue though, which is every appliance sucks shit whether it’s smart or not.

I don’t have a solution for that one yet.

I have no judgement for accessibility needs, but for the vast majority of consumers who need a shortcut for everything. There can be a good reason for someone to have a specific feature, but there is no reason for everyone to have every feature. Wheelchairs serve a purpose, but if everyone quit walking because wheelchairs were cheap, it would be a silly place.

on top of privacy, technical, and advertisement issues, I would bet that a house full of smart devices idly uses more power than leaving an led light on all night every once in a while.

“Alongside the jokes, the discovery prompted conversation around the trade-offs between privacy and convenience as our lives become increasingly connected with data and data collection.”

What fucking convenience can come from a smart washer. Three settings and a bell. That’s it. There is nothing an app can do that offsets the complication of having an app and more settings for a washing machine.

Here we go:

Speed

Temperature

Time

Ding

Nothing else. No other setting is necessary or convienient.

How the fuck are people falling for all this dumb shit.

“Oh the fridge texts me when I need milk”. You’re right opening the door was too difficult. Almost as difficult as remembering you finished the fucking milk. Better get a smart fridge.

“I can program and adjust the thermostat from my phone” thermostats have been programable for 30 years and didn’t need the internet and an app to do it. Who adjusts the device so often they have to be able to do it on the fly from anywhere? The entire purpose of a thermostat is to adjust the tempurature AUTOMATICALLY SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO.

“I can turn on the oven before I’m home and read the tempurature from anywhere” was preheating time a major problem before? At least you have another reason to look at your phone while driving home. And by the way, my oven tells me the tempurature too. By beeping when it’s at the tempurature I fucking set it to. I don’t need to have a live feed, because if it’s not exactly where I set it, it’s fucking broken.

“I can control every light in the house from my phone.” You don’t need to control lights in rooms you aren’t in. Just say you’re too fucking lazy and the seven steps to the switch will wind you.

Smart appliances are the dumbest shit and you’re dumb for buying them.

More concerning is how they got that database.

Piefedophiles

I appreciate the consistency of the PA controller, but I can not for the life of me remember which side is square and circle. Been fuckin me up since 2002

The Xbox layaout should be the standard. Nintendo changes their controllers drastically every generation, so they have no standard, and even on the GameCube, A was the “default” button. The Xbox controller hasn’t changed the four main buttons in 24 years, and PC followed suit. It’s already the standard, and anyone who would be bothered by a set standard only hurts unification, and will get over it eventually.