Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

A consequence of cucumbers

Not all heroes wear capes.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

Second rate reporter says what?

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

I’m sure you banged some questionable people yourself.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

We still have time to mess this up!

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

Come on, man.

This fight is for everything.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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Reader Interactions

102Comments

  1. 1.

    The prophet Nostradumbass

    I watched Santa Clara pull a choke job in the WCC tournament, blech.

  3. 3.

    Mnemosyne

    I ordered my new Macbook Air, so hopefully that will be here next week. Been tired and run-down all week, probably because it suddenly occurred to me on Monday that it has only been two months since my dad died. Plus it’s been cold and rainy all day and I’ve felt all day like I could not get warm. Blech.

  6. 6.

    opie jeanne

    @Mnemosyne: I’m sorry to hear about your dad. I lost mine in September and I still catch myself wanting to call him up to ask him stuff or tell him a joke.

  11. 11.

    Mnemosyne

    @eemom:

    I think the phrase you’re searching for is “troll fight.”

    I’ll probably read it tomorrow because I really love a good troll fight (Matoko-loco vs. mclaren was EPIC), but I’m not in the mood at the moment.

  13. 13.

    FridayNext

    And I am looking forward to The Americans. Finally, someone decided to dramatize the wonderful Kent family chronicles by John Jakes. But shouldn’t they have started with the first, rather than the last volume?

    Wait, what is this again?

  14. 14.

    Mnemosyne

    @BillinGlendaleCA:

    I’ve been a Mac user so long that I could wear this t-shirt with pride if I wanted. I think I bought my first one in 1991 (Mac Classic, represent!) and never went with anything different.

    Not only is my iBook over 5 years old, I think it’s not happy with the number of times I’ve accidentally dropped it from the chair arm onto the floor. Solid state drive is going to be a good move for me.

  15. 15.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @Mnemosyne: Piker. I got my first IBM PC 30 years ago. My old HP is still running, it couldn’t really handle all the stuff I had on it and was, as a consequence of all the crap I had on it, really loud(fan noise). The new one is water cooled(also a HP), and both are now quiet. I hear the old one’s fan when it does a Media Center download, but all is quiet here now. Both would be difficult to drop from a chair, being that their desktops. I did get my 8 yo laptop/tablet working and now I’m trying to figure out what to do with it as far as OS upgrades, it’s got Vista now and’s a tad slow.

  19. 19.

    Mnemosyne

    @BillinGlendaleCA:

    I don’t think you want me to do the math and tell you how old I was 30 years ago. ;-) I bought my first Mac in college, FWIW.

    @The prophet Nostradumbass:

    I think I had the real, genuine Mac Classic. Then I had a Performa, then the last G3 before the Bondi Beach iMacs debuted, then I started getting laptops.

    The one and only time I ever triggered the “Chimes of Doom” was on an old Powerbook 145 that overheated on me. That was seriously freaky.

  20. 20.

    AHH onna Droid

    @ Mnemosyne: JJ Abrams? Fuck that guy. Killed off Mira Furlan, fucked up Star Trek. Collects awesome talent and blows it on projects that never quite pull it off. Needs a collaborator to rein in his excesses, but that will never happen as long as his sloppy hot messes that would embarrass Verhoevens (aotk) turn decent profits. Iow, fuck movies.

  21. 21.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @Mnemosyne: I put a SSD on my old HP last year, the speed improvement is impressive. I was thinking of getting one for the old laptop, but it’s IDE and it doesn’t look like it’d be worth it. A faster and bigger HD is one of my options now.

    @The prophet Nostradumbass: Believe it or not, I almost bought a Mac once. I was thinking of writing for the Mac platform.

  22. 22.

    scav

    Well, if we’re trending thataways, an Apple II (with casette drive) rolled through chez scav, but as a gift for the local school — scavdad originally built the house machines and then had mostly IBMs, but there were probably some HPs and compaqs in there. Certainly the luggables later. Peanut for scav college, joy oh joy, which dates me. we were jealous of Scavdad’s friend/business partner that had an Alto.

  23. 23.

    Origuy

    I mentioned before that I’m in Moscow. Of course, I’m getting Russian ads here, including one that was NSFW. The latest one was for something called “Wall Street Institute”. Along with the conversion of GUM to a high end shopping mall and the creation of the underground mall at Okhotny Ryad next to Red Square, Lenin should be spinning fast enough to power the entire Kremlin, if not all of Moscow.

  24. 24.

    TheMightyTrowel

    @Yutsano: Awesome and brave young woman. Quitting your job sounds like such a small protest, but in the scope of a human life it is enormous.

  28. 28.

    dance around in your bones

    @Mnemosyne:

    So sorry. It hits you like a ton of bricks at odd moments. The first year ‘anniversary’ of my husband’s death was pretty brutal. But every now and then I get this “Oh, he’ll come around the corner/into the room/talk to me again” and then I remember. Not gonna happen.

    It sucks. Whoever it was who said ‘you don’t get over it, you just get through it’ on this board was right. You just keep on keeping on.

  33. 33.

    Yutsano

    @TheMightyTrowel: @Mnemosyne: The funny thing is I never would have guessed she had it in her. She’s very much a sweetheart, but she is a bit of a don’t make too many waves type. I doubt she’ll stay unemployed long.

  34. 34.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @MikeJ: 64k was actually an upgrade from the 16k standard. There were so many different programs that came out, mid-80’s trying to get around the 8088’s 1mb address space.

    scav: No flying pizzas, these were 5 1/4in diskettes.

  39. 39.

    dance around in your bones

    @Yutsano: Hahahaha!

    I have grandkids, so I have watched that movie about eleventy billion times, and I love it every time. Especially Dory. Short-term memory loss, I know it!

    (The kids all go “Ack! Darla, the fish-killer!” when she shows up. Freaks them out).

  40. 40.

    mai naem

    @Yutsano: I saw the original story in the Slog. I find it hard to believe that the couple were going there for nine years and the owner didn’t realize that they were gay. I am assuming if she’s against them marrying, she against them being together… kind of follows. Part of me wished they would sue her, the other part of me just says her business will die on its own without a lawsuit.

  41. 41.

    Steeplejack

    @piratedan:

    That may be the longest link I’ve ever seen here. And it went nowhere. Unless you want to let us all log in to your Gmail account.

  42. 42.

    bago

    I just got my surface pro properly configured for desktop mode touch. Chrome is useless on it, and by default the controls are too small for the win32 desktop. When properly configured it works quite well, but you can say that about Linux shells as well.

  43. 43.

    Amir Khalid

    @BillinGlendaleCA:
    In another lifetime, I worked in IT at a plantation company. Its early 1980s network technology consisted of two guys who drove up and down Peninsular Malaysia every month — the company had 40 rubber and/or oil palm plantations — to swap out 8″ floppies full of production data and employee work records. The estates’ computers weren’t desktop machines. They were desk-size machines.

  45. 45.

    fuckwit

    OK, computers.

    Apple II in 1981
    IBM PC in 1983
    Atari 1040 ST in 1988
    Mac Classic in 1991
    Mac Portable (hah!) in 1992
    Apple Newton 100 in 1993
    Apple Duo in 1994 (not mine, actually, company’s, but I could take it home!
    Apple PowerMac 7500 in 1997
    NEC Laptop in 1998 (company’s, but I took it home, so it was mine)
    Apple Newton 2000 in 1998
    FreeBSD no-name PC in 1999
    Sony Vaio laptop in 1999 (linux)
    Various dumpster-diving PC’s running FreeBSD, NetBSD, and Solaris (all converted to linux after 2003), 2000-2006
    Another replacement Sony Vaio in 2003 (linux)
    IBM Stinkpad in 2004 (linux)
    Mac Mini in 2006 (linux)
    Asus Z96 built-from-parts Core 2 Duo laptop in 2007 (linux)
    Asus EEE in 2008 (linux)
    Asus Q400a in 2012 (linux)
    Asus Transformer in 2012 (Android and Debian linux overlay)

    Basically, I started out as an Apple Fanboi, then became a Linux geek running throwaway/homemade franken-PCs, then fell in love with Asus hardware for linux.

  48. 48.

    hamletta

    Well, since everybody’s nerding out, I’m gonna vent: I’ve been mucking about with databases since my work machine was a Kaypro that ran on kerosene.

    And I’m switching my parish over to a new church management system, and I almost cried earlier this evening.

    I have to switch over to a system that’s built for huge non-denominational churches, and I’m running a small Lutheran parish. The one attendance-related thing I am Constitutionally Required to do…I cannot do.

    Oh, since we’re sharing, Kaypro > Apple IIe (with email! in 1986!) > Mac SE > Performa whatever > Blue G3 > G4 Dualie > Ice iBook > MacBook Pro.

  49. 49.

    MikeJ

    @BillinGlendaleCA:

    There were so many different programs that came out, mid-80′s trying to get around the 8088′s 1mb address space.

    I remember when MS started including Phar Lap’s memory management software with their C compiler.

  50. 50.

    YellowJournalism

    Husband and I put on Justified about a week ago to see what te fuss was about, plus Hubby is a big fan of Olyphant. We binged through the first season before the week was over and are well into Season 2. Sadly, I’ve seen at least three characters that resemble family members back home. And, no, not in a good way.

  51. 51.

    PurpleGirl

    @scav: When dating an IBM OS researcher some time back, I used a variety of IBM computers when at his house. The luggable was an interesting machine. And the laptop-style one with the two floppy drives was fun to use.

  52. 52.

    PurpleGirl

    @scav: My friend still the machine that takes 8-inch floppies. I know it still worked in late 1980s; I wonder if he has fired it up lately.

  53. 53.

    ruemara

    I had some good news. I may have won a rather nice software prize in a contest. I would have been over the moon for Cinema 4D, but this is all motion graphics software I could use too. Torn between selling it (which would help with some cash) and using it to do some whiz bang work. Plus, the ex has 2 interviews. I’m pulling for him to be having a real reversal on his luck. Then again, I’m also pulling for me too, so yay for reversals! Is it wrong to wish I win the Cinema 4D too? Or is it being greediguts?

  54. 54.

    kdaug

    @fuckwit: First was a TI 99/4A. No monitor, you hooked it up to a TV through the rabbit-ear antenna jacks.

    (Was talking to one of you jackals about this Tuesday night).

  55. 55.

    eemom

    Jeezus HQ Christ, a computer dick-measuring thread, of all things.

    Lemme confess, I am not exaggerating when I say I’m a technotard. I have no idea what y’all are talking about in any of the above comments.

    I have a Mac, but only because eedad deals with all that shit and he insists on them. I wouldn’t even know what kind of Mac it is, except it says MacBook Pro on it.

    It’s just like cars — give me something that works, is all I ask.

  56. 56.

    Steeplejack

    @YellowJournalism:

    Reminder to me to start hacking through the DVR backlog. I’m about 13-15 episodes behind. I saw a promo spot the other night and thought, “Oh, I need to see that.” Followed by “Wait . . . what?” Nothing’s stopping me!

  58. 58.

    Steeplejack

    @ruemara:

    Congratulations! And it’s not wrong to still want the Oscar after winning the Golden Globe. More! More!

  59. 59.

    Yutsano

    @ruemara: I declare this FRABJOUS!! And I’d say hold on to the software if you can, maybe you can get a productive usage out of it.

  61. 61.

    kdaug

    @ruemara: You could do Blender. It’s free and capable. I’m locked into the Autodesk borg for workflow reasons, but Blender can certainly get the job done.

  62. 62.

    hamletta

    @ruemara: I vote for the whiz-bang work!

    If it truly does whiz and bang, it will be more beneficial in the long run than the cashish you might get for the software now.

    Plus, I want to see it.

  64. 64.

    opie jeanne

    @BillinGlendaleCA: PIker yourself. I got an Apple II+ in 1979 and we still have it, in a box in the garage. 64k, what a dream! We played Zork on it that Christmas and would wake up in the middle of the night and yell “I know how to get into Hades!”

  65. 65.

    kdaug

    @srv: Ah-ha, that was you.
    I spent many hungover mornings in the lab at Taylor Hall.
    Bzzt-bzzt, whirrrr. I can still smell the place.

  66. 66.

    kdaug

    @opie jeanne: I’ve stood in front of that house. And I know what a grue is (now).

    I actually still have copies of Hitchhiker’s Guide and Leather Goddess of Phobos. Infocom was formative.

  68. 68.

    scav

    @srv: Never personally had to use punchcards, but I’m currently off being nostalgic about scavdad who would let us play with the paper tapes at work. Entire sandwich bags of tiny little pink chads to drive mom insane with. And, while we’re being nostalgic of things that attached to the TV, I’m still baffled by my father actually buying pong. “Computers are Tools!” was usually his mantra.

  69. 69.

    opie jeanne

    @fuckwit: I’ve got a Compaq from 2001 running even as we speak. It’s the computer at our cabin, but I’m on the laptop because of the noise it makes: my husband is trying to sleep and it’s in the bedroom with him.

  70. 70.

    Ruckus

    @dance around in your bones:
    That may have been me.
    My parents, aunts/uncles, oldest sister, all gone now. It starts to feel a little grim some days, but then I remember that I am, as I overheard the other day at the VA, looking down at the flowers not up at the roots.
    It’s not in any way a good part of life but still, it is in store for all of us. Make the most of what you have and hope that people will miss you as much as you miss those that went before. That’s really the only mark that most of us make here.

  72. 72.

    ? Martin

    First computer was TI-99. 16K RAM. Used every byte of it writing programs on many occasions. Enjoying my Retina MBP with 16GB RAM. A million times more than I started with, and I’m pretty sure I could still use every byte, but I’d have to work a hell of a lot harder to do it (and still use it productively).

    We’re trying to roll out a laptop program and it’s fucking infuriating. The PC industry is in absolute ruins – I’m not exaggerating. OEMs won’t talk to us. Half won’t send us evaluation units. They won’t do returns. They can’t guarantee shipments in our window. They won’t guarantee the models will even be made in our window. They won’t let us do warranty service. Even our resellers are getting nowhere. 80% of the software is Windows only, but we’re just about ready to throw up our arms and to go Apple. They have an engineer on site once a week to talk to us, and they pay an employee to be available 20hrs/week on site. We can do warranty repairs. They’ll take returns. They’ll prioritize our orders. They won’t tell us their product cycle, but we know it already because they’re so consistent about it. And they are so consistent with their specs that whatever image we come up with will work across their whole product line instead of only on a handful of machines before drivers force us to redo the image. We can make a universal VirtualBox image with software and Apple will have their staff help set up BootCamp on all of the machines. We can’t find anyway to reliably do that with a PC, not knowing exactly what the specs will be. It takes longer to set the Mac up, but it’s almost foolproof and we can very reliably predict what the overall cost in time will be, where with the standard PCs is might be less, and it might be much more. Who fucking knows? We’re not eager to just roll the dice.

    I like my Apple stuff, but it really shouldn’t be the right solution here, and we don’t want to put the extra cost out there. (My partner in this effort despises Macs) But when we factor in how much time we’ve invested trying to get ANYONE else to do anything rational, what our potential cost might be if we can’t get product, if the product changes 3 weeks before our window, if the installs go sideways, with no onsite warranty, it’s starting to look like Apple might be the cheapest option in the long run – and it’s my partner now arguing that maybe we should just go with Macs, where I keep shoving her back in for another go with Lenovo or Asus. That’s just wrong, and it pisses me off that an industry that used to know what the fuck they were doing is now in this situation. My wife organized these kinds of laptop programs 15 years ago and it was completely different. She’s shocked at how bad it’s gotten, and shocked that our bottom line costs are coming out in Apple’s favor for laptops running Windows.

    It’s going to get worse, and I don’t think efforts like Surface Pro are going to be enough to turn it around. They’ve poisoned their own well.

  73. 73.

    ruemara

    @kdaug: I’ve worked with Blender for months. The last project I attempted in it, I would up having a rage meltdown, smashing the keys of my laptop and screaming til hoarse. Free is awesome, but Blender is torture.

    @kdaug: Ha ha! I had one of those too. The hilight of my teen years was writing a basic program to draw a lightsaber on my screen. And then I had to turn it off. 3 weeks of work and no ability to save. but it was awesome.

  74. 74.

    opie jeanne

    @kdaug: We have all of the Zorks as well as Hitch-Hikers, and that one about being a Young Wizard. That old computer still works, or did the last time we checked in 2001. There was no internal battery for a clock so that helped, plus we packed it back into the original box and packing. It was all green letters on a black background.

    I never did solder that bit on the keyboard so that I could capitalize without doing all that weird work-around stuff. I think we still have a copy of Broderbund’s word processing program, which was terrible but my son was in jr high and used it for school a lot.

    I rejoiced when I finally got a printer for it, I think the company was Orange Plus. I was doing some typing work and their booklet claimed it had a command in the word processing software that would let you do footnotes. I couldn’t find it on the computer so I called the company, in Orange County. I was in Riverside. The tech guy had no idea what a footnote was. Not a freakin’ clue.

  75. 75.

    opie jeanne

    @scav: The first computer I ever used was in 1969, made by Singer. It punched holes in a very long paper tape to record the entries we made on a keyboard. The thing was next to useless, but someone at that paint company where I was temping had to have a toy.

  76. 76.

    scav

    So how similar is this Zork to Adventure? (Somehow Adventure also snuck in past the Computers are Tools! Diktat.)

  77. 77.

    kdaug

    @ruemara:

    Free is awesome, but Blender is torture.

    What, specifically, is wrong with it? I’m interested to know.
    I’ve never used it (always been a Max/Maya [Mudbox/ZBrush] shut-in), but I’ve got a vested interest in knowing, and I might be able to help.

  79. 79.

    Ruckus

    @opie jeanne:
    We used a teletype machine in 1973 to create paper tapes for our milling machines. I’m not sure it was better than punch cards except that you couldn’t get things out of order which would have been a disaster. Moved on to a apple IIe as soon as they came out. What a novel idea, being able to enter and edit a program before punching the tape so you didn’t have to stand at the machine to enter code.

  81. 81.

    Yutsano

    @opie jeanne: Two words: Oregon. Trail. I used to live off that game when I was in high school. I actually even made it a couple of times, although I had my share of deaths by cholera as well.

  82. 82.

    Alison

    @Yutsano: One of the best days I had in recent years was discovering a site where you could play that game online, but it looked just like the old game. I will not admit how many hours I probably spent on it :P

    ………………..I should find it again.

  83. 83.

    ? Martin

    @Yutsano: They ported it to the iPad so I gave it to my daughter to play, which she enjoyed. Then we updated it and they had added in-game purchases and totally fucked it up.

    Ah well. I still have Carmageddon and Bards Tale and Neverwinter Nights on the iPad, and they all work great.

  84. 84.

    Yutsano

    @Alison: I can’t recall where I came across it recently, but it was just as interesting as I remembered. And the events were so random, you’d have this great run of luck then BOOM! out of water or something. It made it feel exactly as the old settlers must have felt, although I’m told historically it exaggerates the hardships.

    @? Martin: I still can’t justify getting an iPad, especially now that my salary’s about to get cut. I’m hoping the CR deal does something positive, otherwise I’m either unemployed or working for free. Not fun.

  85. 85.

    Gian

    @FlipYrWhig:

    I had a commodore amiga that could be hacked into a mac with the eeproms… (back in the late 80s early 90s…

    to me the whole mac/pc fight is kinda fun to watch. I used to know programing languages and can still do a decent guess how the code writers were thinking, so really for me the cheaper option is better ’cause I can use it and it’s cheaper. the Mac/Apple focus (other than fighting the beatles over the name for a music company) is more on having the code writers focus on what the user is thinking. For a user that’s a shorter learning curve and time not spent learning how to use an expensive machine can be time well spent doing something like playing or reading with kids or walking a pet…

    gotta run, lost my torch and I’m afraid of grues

  89. 89.

    Alison

    @Yutsano: It always seemed like the game didn’t want you to do *too* well. No matter how careful you were about rest, food, etc, some motherfucker always got exhaustion or measles.

    We used to like naming the people so that the illness messages would be funny. “Your face has dysentery”, “The President has died of cholera”.

  90. 90.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @Yutsano:

    otherwise I’m either unemployed or working for free. Not fun.

    I’ve been watching the TV machine, and I’ve been told by the Republicans that the biggest problem right now is that the White House has canceled tours.

    Young Ezra was hosting ‘The Last Word’ had a segment about the White House tours, it wasn’t ‘both sides do it’.

  91. 91.

    scav

    Online Hammurabi for those that that enjoy starving citizens. So is the original Oregon Trail still available or not? I seem to have missed out on the dysentery and wish to remedy that stat.

  92. 92.

    Yutsano

    @BillinGlendaleCA: Yeah. I know Imani did a thread on this earlier, but it could seriously fuck up my life at a time when I really need it to be not-fucked up. And I’m not the only Fed on here that this will make life hell for. Happy I iz not.

  93. 93.

    ? Martin

    @BillinGlendaleCA: The demon sheep certainly didn’t help. HP was our first stop in the hopes that they were in some way digging out of their hole (and we don’t mind keeping our business in CA given that we’re doing this for the state). Nope. Dell. No. Samsung! They’re knocking it out of the park on all kinds of things? No, they came and took two eval units from someone we were going to get advice from, and wouldn’t return them or give us any. It’s like they were actively avoiding our business. Acer? No. Asus? No. Neither of those guys do anything out of the retail channel. Lenovo? Sorta – but they can’t ship product, and won’t do returns. Fucking Chinese manufacturer can’t make product?

    We started investigating this almost a year ago, and if anything we’ve gotten more discouraged with every month. Need to make a decision in 3 weeks. No matter what, we feel it’s going to be a bad decision. Oh well.

    @Yutsano: Yeah, I saw that. Need to show it to the daughter tomorrow. There will be much squeeing. Meanwhile my corgi is flopped up against the wall showing me his junk. You think the queen’s corgis give her that kind of a show?

  94. 94.

    Yutsano

    @? Martin: Considering she has several children, it would be fair to assume she is not delicate about such matters. Lizzie is a tough old broad.

    PS: kan I haz reincarnation as one of her corgis? I don’t really ask for much.

  95. 95.

    The prophet Nostradumbass

    I’m sure I’ll open myself up to ridicule for this question, but I’ll go ahead anyway:

    I have a 2008 Prius with an XM Radio unit in it. I am considering dropping my XM subscription, but would like to have something where I can plug my phone into it. I know there is an iPhone thing for it; does anyone know if there’s anything for an Android phone?

  97. 97.

    The prophet Nostradumbass

    @BillinGlendaleCA: well, there’s an AUX jack, but you need to fiddle with the phone and the Prius’ audio to get it to work; touching the phone while you’re driving is illegal in California. Doing things on the Prius’ monitor/buttons is not. There’s an iPhone module that allows you to plug it into the car, and you can control it from the car’s monitor.

  99. 99.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @BillinGlendaleCA: If you don’t have Bluetooth, how about getting some earbuds that have a button that will pause/next track. Cut off the ear buds and wire it to a plug that would go into the aux. Not the most elegant method but might work and would be legal.

    Failing that, a Bluetooth radio, maybe?

  101. 101.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    My solution last year was a new radio, then again the old one was purchased early in the first Clinton administration. It was pretty easy to install on my old Jetta, on a Prius I haven’t a clue. The ‘Bluetooth Audio System’, they’re not called a stereo anymore, is a Sony and ran 135 plus tax.

  102. 102.

    JoyfulA

    @scav: My first computer was a Burroughs papertape, about the size of an upright piano. The front end of the papertape kept fraying, thus requiring a call to tech support.

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