pixelscript

I can't think of a time before this I've seen the word 'meanacing' used as a verb and not an adjective.

Choice is an irritating speed bump to people who don't care to choose, which unfortunately is most of them.

Python is the only programming language that has forced me to question what the difference is between an egg and a wheel.

The two apps are identical and built from the same codebase anyway. K-9 is just a branding asset swap.

I've seen conflicting info from Thunderbird devs on how long they actually intend to keep both branding packages active. I've heard no longer than a year. I've heard only as long as it takes to get Thunderbird out of beta. I've heard they have some sort of agreement with FDroid that obligates them to keep it listed for some minimum duration of time (???). I've most recently heard indefinitely, because their build script is just a toggle now and it costs them nothing. Which one do I believe? I have no idea. I doubt K-9 will be kept around in perpetuity, though.

I'd be more than happy to sacrifice a distro I don't care about like Ubuntu to the mainstream if it means Microsoft's market cap gets a sizeable chunk taken out of it.

Aww... That Marnie cover is one-of-a-kind.

Pity. It's far and away the nicest one I've seen.

I love cats. Other peoples' cats.

I will never own my own cat because I don't want to accept the burden of responsibility that responsible pet ownership demands.

I guess, in a very liberal definition of the term, "cloud gaming". Specifically the old LodgeNet systems in hotels where you could rent Nintendo games by the hour to be streamed to your room from a physical console somewhere behind the front desk. Every room had a special controller with oodles of extra buttons on it hardwired to the television that also functioned as television remotes.

The service was objectively awful, of course, when factoring in how much the hotel charged compared to what little you got for it. But I've always found it fascinating.

My true hell would be instances only federating explicitly through whitelist. If what the other reply I received about Mastodon is correct, and if Lemmy behaves similary, then they operate on an implicit auto-federation with every other instance. Actual transaction of data needs to be triggered by some user on that instance reaching out to the other instance, but there's no need for the instances involved to whitelist one another first. They just do it. To stop the transfer, they have to explicitly defed, which effectively makes it an opt-out system.

The root comment I initially replied to made it sound, to me, like Mastodon instances choose not to federate with one another. Obviously they aren't preemptively banning one another, so, I interpreted that to mean Mastodon instances must whitelist one another to connect. But apparently what they actually meant was, "users of Mastodon instances rarely explore outward"? The instances would auto-federate, but in practice, the "crawlers" (the users) aren't leaving their bubbles often enough to create a critical mass of interconnectedness across the Fediverse?

The fact we have to have this discussion at all is more proof to my original point regardless. Federation is pure faffery to people who just want a platform that has everything in one place.

That sounds worse than I thought it was. I just assumed Mastodon was like Lemmy, where every instance federates with every other instance basically by default and there's only some high-profile defed exceptions.

A Fediverse where federations are opt-in instead of opt-out sounds like actual hell. Yeah, more control to instances, hooray, but far less seamless usability for people. The only people you will attract with that model are the ones who think having upwards of seven alts for being in seven different communities isn't remotely strange or cumbersome. That, and/or self-hosting your own individual instances. Neither of these describe the behavior of the vast majority of Internet users who want to sign up on a platform that just works with one account that can see and interact with everything.

Season's the reason!

Art supplies were historically not cheap. If you wanted to do this for a living, you were probably needing to aim for selling your art to the rich upper class. That implicitly meant catering to their fickle tastes and working on commission. You didn't make art for you and find your audience later, you made art for the customers you had or you starved.

And to put it bluntly, realism wasn't the fashionable hotness for most of human history. The more "crude" styles you may think of as objectively inferior to and less technically impressive as realism were in fact the styles in demand at their respective times. Fashion existed in ancient and medeival times just like it does today, and those styles were the fashion.

The idea of the independent eccentric artist who lives secluded in their ideas cave producing masterpieces for no one in particular leaving the world in awe at their genius every time they come out with something to show is a very modern concept. If any artist wanted to make a realism painting in an era where it was not popular, they'd be doing it purely for themselves at their own expense. So virtually no one did. Or if they did, their works largely didn't survive.