Well that’s a depressing read. The American rot runs deep. It’s frankly disturbing how accurate that article still is.

The writer drops some great lines though.

Thanks.

I am reminded of two quotes from Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail '72 by Hunter S. Thompson:

How many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote FOR something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?

Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?

How low? Now, I guess we know. Voting for the lesser evil for 50 years has got you Trump. Twice. How much lower are you going to go?

I have no solutions. Things will probably have to break completely before the mending can begin.

Love that book and its descendants. The movie is an amazing piece of cinema. Rarely have I been so entranced by the back of someone’s head. Tarkovsky was a master of his craft. The movie is fairly different from the book in many ways, but possibly for the better.

Hope you enjoy the experience!

I’m working my way through Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History. It’s a good book for sure, but I think I’ve grown a bit numb to the constant horrors within. Even as long as this book is, I feel the subject is so vast that there’s a lot left unsaid. The more I read about USSR, the more questions arise. I have to read something lighter next.

Oh Kent, no. No Kent, no. Kent.

Perhaps Kent, being such an apparently difficult personality type, is just so lonely he has to think at least his chat bot loves him.

Kent is obviously a talented programmer, but that guy doesn’t seem to be right in the head.

It’s an old Czechoslovakian show called Pat & Mat. Took me a while to remember the name, it’s been a long time since I last saw them on TV. Really good and universal slapstick humor.

Oh, I like this. Nice.

Aww, it doesn’t have the open mouths of the original PC release. Phooey.

On a more serious note, it’s a great game and I love to see it on GOG. I still have my PSX discs somewhere.

Hah, the kids are alright.

One of the reasons I feel Debian isn’t quite new user friendly is definitely having to manually modify your sources list when there’s a new version release. It’s not exactly hard, but for a new user it can be intimidating. I do find it weird that Debian hasn’t created an automatic tool for that, unlike practically every other distro out there.

Debian is good, but sometimes its age shows.

For my desktop: openSUSE Tumbleweed/Slowroll. I like to keep my desktop as up-to-date as possible, and openSUSE is pretty good. Sure, there’s the occasional udev update that breaks inputs in the desktop environment, but that’s the other side of the coin.

For my laptop and other uses: Debian. The old reliable doesn’t mind if I don’t update as often, and unlike rolling releases, updates aren’t wont to break anything. In a pinch I could use it on the desktop too.

I have a cup of mate every morning, yes.

Mate is one of those desktops that I occasionally consider, and it’s definitely something I could see myself using. Mate is certainly a cool project and I hope it stays around. It reminds of my early days with GNOME - before the bad thing happened and darkness descended on that project.

I hope they get Wayland going eventually.

I may have won the George Game, but in doing so I lost the Game. Now I know how Pyrrhus felt.

I’m reading Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History. If you can’t tell, it’s about the history of the Gulag system, a collection of Soviet concentration camps. Interesting stuff, though gruesome.

I recently also read through IAEA’s INSAG-7 report on the Chernobyl accident. HBO’s Chernobyl is a wonderful series, but the last episode bothered me since I knew it gets a lot of things wrong. After digging around YouTube videos for a bit, I found a lot of them confused and contradictory. Eventually I decided to go to the source and read the report in an effort to understand what happened. It’s a surprisingly understandable and not terribly long, and pretty much the most authoritative source on the accident. It’s amazing how many people make videos about Chernobyl who clearly haven’t read it. What really boiled my coolant, however, was how it was clear the Soviet nuclear institutes knew about the design flaws that caused the accident and even knew how to fix them, but they chose to do nothing. They. Fucking. Knew. They just blamed the operators and got away with it.

The HBO series is great, but it is really inaccurate.

He did love eating every new animal he ran across.

I was actually making a joke about the hydrotherapy he used to treat his condition. It involved getting doused with cold water. I don’t think anyone caught my joke.

He sounds like he needs to take a cold shower.

Some of the missions weren’t great, but otherwise it was a fantastic game. I do prefer the first one, personally, but the second one had some awesome power-ups.

Yeah yeah, you got exactly what you voted for, Joe, no need to rub it in. Honestly, you guys are such sore winners.

It’s actually funny, I could never play Fallout & Fallout 2 as an evil character because it made me feel bad. At the same time, I’d fire up Carmageddon & Carmageddon 2 and just mow down everything that walked or drove with utter glee. I’m sure there’s a psychological explanation for this dichotomy, but I sure don’t know what it is, and I’m in no mood to make guesses.