Then buddy do I have a gun to sell her! This lovely little Ruger 22/45 right here is pre-Cerberus, rust-free, barely used (because good luck getting more than two rounds through it), well-maintained, well-oiled, and ready to GOOOOOO!

I know of Rihanna and Taylor Swift. I could name songs of theirs if I heard them. I have literally no idea what they look like. I do not care.

I’m sorry. I’m old AF. Who the absolute fuck are the two clowns on the bottom? Serious question. Are those the “good billionaires?” Straight to the fucking wall, the both of them. Nobody on Earth has ever in the history of human civilization “earned” a billion dollars. The wall. Now.

Lady, that’s a Hi-Point. It only generates problems. You’d be better off with a zip-gun. You’ll only get one shot before it catastrophically jams either way.

Good. Can we also do that in the US? Asking for a friend.

Is there anything TNG can’t do? Cat’s are very much sentient though. They’re just dumb as hell. XD

Holy shit, that’s real? I thought that was just memes. I never actually bothered to check.

Fuuuuuuuuck! Firefox has been my go-to for over a decade. Now wtf am I supposed to do? I hate this timeline.

Writing prompt: And long after the humans had thoroughly extinctified themselves with through silly, frivolous pursuits like “AI data centers” and “shareholder value,” nature had returned itself to a pre-industrial state. Eventually, Felis catus rose to evolutionary prominence, despite their largely decorative brains. They had mastered the solar system, and decided to look inwards towards the Earth. A seemingly alien archive from time immemorial was discovered, buried under countless layers of deep strata. Within the facility, they found a trove of billions upon billions of pictures and videos of their primitive ancestors etched within the structure of silicon crystals.

“Found this in my son’s room. What is it? Is he on drugs?”

Oooof. Sorry bud. You wish it was drugs. No, your son is into Warhammer. Drugs would be a lot cheaper.

Fair. May have been a bit much.

I kind of lost control of my own narrative around the fourth paragraph and started whinging about hypothetical extra-terrestrial civilizations. My B.

Critique is always welcome.

Trump admin recognizes their own criminality and self-arrests…

Same shit different decade. USA PATRIOT Act covered 2001 until now. Reagan bullshit before that. McCarthyism before that. And on and on. US has always shit on leftists even though leftists are, historically, the only thing that actually keeps this shit pile functioning.

We’re right on track for hitting another Great Depression almost exactly a hundred years to the date. We’re in the Guilded Age again right now; a thin veneer of gold over the most cheaply made solid core of pocked and porous cast-lead. History doesn’t even rhyme. We just do the same exact stupid shit over and over and over.

We’ll weather this. The leftists will come to the rescue again, undo the fascism again, put us back where we were (not where we should be; two steps back, two point one steps forward) again, then we’ll slowly forget again. In another hundred years everyone who could remember will be dead and we’ll do this exact same stupid shit again.

The problem is capital. That’s why we’re stuck in this loop. We don’t see any extra-terrestrial civilizations because they all get trapped in the same Great Filter. Nothing so lofty as utter self-destruction. Reaching out to the greater universe is a long distance phone call. Ma-Bell needs that scratch. Pay up. We need a PowerPoint explaining why contacting distant alien civilizations directly benefits the shareholders. The Great Filter is capitalism. Not one single species has ever overcome it. If we were capable of learning anything we would make sure to be the first, but instead of letting scientists and engineers and dreamers control things we let rich tech-bros make all the calls.

I’m tired, boss.

“Engaging in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism:”

Let’s see…

✅ Opposition to law and immigration enforcement

✅ “Extreme” views in favor of mass migration and open borders

✅ Adherence to “radical gender ideology”

✅ “Anti-Americanism”

✅ “Anti-capitalism”

✅ “Anti-christianity”

Awwww… I’m on the naughty list.

I noticed the things like “doing an actual terrorism” and “being a literal fucking neo-nazi” were not among her list though. Curious…

Just going to leave this here for the other old heads:

So cozy. Never knew what adventure you would find while that animation played and your tiny dial-up modem struggled away.

They should fear prosecution. It’s unfortunate that their no-show “boss” won’t face the same. Who am I kidding though? A convicted felon and pedophile is the president. Nothing will happen to them.

Damn… I can’t find a link, but I read somewhere that there was an internal bumbling at the FBI (shocker, I know) and they sent the link to their repository to everyone at the bureau instead of just the redaction team loyalists. If true, then there is certainly someone at the FBI with an unredacted set of files. If someone has a link that can confirm, I would love to bookmark it.

It does not require the Senate. Congress can vote to force the DOJ to release all the files on its own. It’s speculated that the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, was using the government shutdown to stall the congressional vote, as well as using the shutdown as an excuse to not swear in the newly elected representative from Arizona.

My take? I think his brain has completely turned into pudding. He’s been saying that line for so long that he actually believes it now. Yes there was a huge contingent at the FBI tasked with redacting the files, but the un-edited ones exist. Once Congress votes to publicize them, it becomes a lot less risky for a whistleblower to send the un-redacted copy to a sympathetic congress-weasel. Just my POV as an idiot.

Not necessarily. Many off-shelf desktops are, let’s put it nicely, “highly optimized for mass production.” They may not have open slots required for upgrades. In the case of a GPU or CPU upgrade, the slot may be incompatible altogether, or, the mainboard may not have the proper bus to support the upgrade. I’ve had to sunset old machines that I built because I couldn’t upgrade them. Not because they were incapable, but because the supported hardware was no longer in production. The only option for a RAM upgrade was paying some dingus on eBay $500 for a stick that would have been $60 if it was still in production.

As I said: You’re a builder. It is not a value-add for you. You are not in their target demographic. I know a lot of people that would very much like to buy a gaming-ready PC that isn’t loaded with crapware though. The Steambox is an actual PC. It’s running SteamOS, which is just a Linux port. It has all the same functionality as a PC. If you don’t like SteamOS, then go install Wine, or Ubuntu, or whatever flavor of Linux you prefer. Nobody is stopping you.