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Blade Runner was released in theaters on this day in 1982

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Salman Rushdie, played by Afzaal Ahmad, is portrayed in the film as a sadistic criminal mastermind, working for an international conspiracy devoted to destroying Islam (as the Muslim faith is an obstacle to his wishes of building casinos, nightclubs and brothels around the world). He is depicted as hiding in the Philippines, guarded by a private army led by an Israeli general. Saeed Khan Rangeela stars as "Chief Batu Batu", Rushdie's main Jewish henchman. Rushdie lives a life of hedonism and other excesses and routinely amuses himself by torturing and killing the mujaheddins who regularly try to hunt him down. He also enjoys torturing Muslims by making them listen to readings of The Satanic Verses.[2] [...] The film ends with a gunfight opposing the four "International Guerrillas" and Rushdie's army of Israeli henchmen. The heroes defeat the villains and, as Rushdie attempts to flee the scene, three giant Qur'ans appear in the sky and fire lightning bolts at the writer, incinerating him.[2][3]

lmao what

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A novice was trying to fix a broken PC by turning the power off and on. The master, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "You can not fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong." The master turned the machine off and on.

The machine worked.

adapted from "The Jargon Files"

Reasons why computer problems seem to mysteriously vanish as soon as a technician shows up:

You were spacing out and skipping a step somewhere without realising it, and you can’t reproduce it when you try to demonstrate it because now you’re paying attention to what you’re doing

It’s an intermittent electrical connection fault that’s being aggravated by movement/vibrations in your desk; you need to check your cables

The act of explaining the problem to someone caused you to figure out what you were doing wrong

The real cause of the problem was somewhere upstream of your terminal device – for example, at the network service provider – and it got fixed at the source while you were waiting

Your computer is in a location with poor airflow and is overheating; waiting for the technician to arrive gave it a chance to cool off

Despite all appearances to the contrary, modern computers actually have very good fault recovery, and most minor problems will sort themselves out on their own if you give it a minute

Magic

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i love when characters don't get to die

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I spent hours doodling jets of flame after seeing illustrations like this one in fantasy books of the era. Snouts, nostrils, teeth, and then a jet of flame going across half the page, over and over. It's a great little exercise.

Elfspire - art by Thomas Blackshear (1980)

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Forests tangled in disposable fiber optic cable, spooled out behind drones so they are able to be controlled without a radio link, and thus immune to jammers.

Anti-drone back-pack jammers

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It's because Western Russians (incl. Moscow) have always centered European-ness (or even Moscow-ness!) as the authentic way to Be Russian. Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Siberians, Mongols, the whole crowd -- even Ukrainians who are arguably more European than Muscovites! -- are "not Russian enough". The Russian Empire lives, and it lives on in its racist belief that eventually all true Russians will be Muscovites, and the folks from the outer territories will somehow morph into Muscovites or else be steamrolled under Muscovite boots. Really gifted ones will be brought to court and used for as long as they're useful... but they'll never be equal. Muscovite Russia has always been super racist about the outlying territories.

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Pedra do Leme - Rio de Janeiro

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A grey day || Drawings from I Shall Never Fall in Love

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Giant hermit crab (Petrochirus diogenes)

This specimen is relatively small. P. diogenes is the world’s second-largest hermit crab species, growing large enough to inhabit a full sized queen conch shell and beaten only by the terrestrial coconut crab, which is a hermit crab that stops using shells when it matures.

I can only assume that the the “diogenes” in its name comes from some parallel drawn between the hermit crab’s shell and the philosopher’s habit of sleeping in a large jar.

(Florida, 2/27/21)

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Oh, okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don’t know, that gaslight gatekeep girlboss meme, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you think modern feminism has been co-opted by corporations. But what you don’t know is that that meme is not from Instagram, it's not from Twitter, it's not from Tiktok, it’s actually from Tumblr. You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in January 2021, Tumblr user missnumber1111 posted, "today's agenda: gaslight gatekeep and most importantly girlboss." And then I think it was a-m-e-t-h-y-s-t-r-o-s-e, wasn’t it, who reblogged it with an image of the phrase edited over a piece of "Live, Laugh, Love" wall art? And then gaslight gatekeep girlboss showed up in the feeds of eight different Twitter repost accounts. Then it filtered down through Instagram and then trickled on down into some tragic “alt side of Tiktok” where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that meme represents millions of notes and countless Tumblr users and so it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from Tumblr when, in fact, you’re wearing the meme that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of “stuff.”

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I just got described as an "ad hating commie" by someone because I said a minute of youtube ads is unpleasant. fully spent 5 minutes arguing and defending youtube ads. insane stuff

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For me this comes down to "all models are wrong, but some are useful," and if you're going to have strong opinions on energy policy, they ought to be supported by a mental model of cause and effect that approximates the real world. Basic economics gets you first-order accuracy on a lot of other systemic models.

If your mental model of cause and effect is wrong, you start proposing policy interventions and then just declaring that they'll have the intended effect, which is not how that works... "cause and effect" doesn't mean you get to pick one of each.

A good hint that you don't understand these things is that your policy positions rhyme with "an outright worldwide ban on..." and the mechanism for replacing the banned thing, or making other things more accessible, etc. is a shrug emoticon.

Economists do have Econ Brain from being too into econ but if you're not enough into econ you can get something much worse

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If you are on mobile and hate that there are fewer good ad-blocking options, but you're willing to try something slightly more complicated, you can set up a **Pi-Hole** as your own **Domain Name Server** (DNS). DNS is how your computer translates a URL like analytics.carmax.com into 104.121.122.102 or whatever (we call this "resolving" the URL). Most DNS providers will resolve any URL that comes their way, but a Pi-Hole is a DNS that you control, and it's built to deliberately fail to resolve URLs for advertisers.

The steps are pretty simple:

Get a Raspberry Pi with enough horsepower to run the software (this kit is $110, but cheaper ones can still do the job)

Install the OS and software. I thought this would be a nightmare but the prompts are well written and mostly explain the consequences of what they're asking you to choose.

Configure your phone, laptop, etc. to use the Pi-Hole as their DNS when they're on your home Wi-Fi.

Optionally, go into your Wi-Fi router and have it make _everyone's_ DNS the Pi-Hole. (Super optionally: use the Pi for DHCP. I prefer not to do this.)

Once it's working, whenever your device tries to load an ad online, the web page will ask your local network "hey, where can I get a shitty ad ?" and your Pi Hole will reply "nah, don't worry about any of that, internet don't have no shitty ads no more."

I don't like ads

for anyone who doesn't know how to use tumblr without ads, the easiest way is to open firefox or whatever browser you use, download an adblocker extension, and log into tumblr through the browser. it will work on mobile as well. there are some other great extensions too like tumblr savior and xkit rewritten, but a basic ad blocker should work just fine :>