I have size M shirts from high school that fit like an L on the rack today.

Get your daughter way from that kid as fast as you can.

| I don’t even understand if it’s an actual religion or one of those pay-to-level-up self-care courses.

yes, at about a ratio of 1 to 8. There’s a mythology that these people fervently believe in, but pay-to-level-up is the core tenet. Distilling this down a bit, they believe that any problem you have is a ghost of long dead aliens clinging to you, and with enough abuse they can be scared away leaving behind the pure human.

When first you encounter them they seem to be offering self help courses or books. “Having trouble quitting smoking? Buy our book, join our class.” For some these do genuinely help, if through no other mechanism than peer pressure. Then they pull out a bullshit device called an E meter and start talking about alternative therapies to realize your true potential, and then they’ve got you.

They are a high control group; they’re like Mormons on amphetamines. Your life is centered on the church, people are kept in line through threats of destroying their families and support groups. They’re particularly vindictive and are well documented to attack anyone critical of them.

Avoid these people with extreme prejudice, they are genuinely dangerous.

Men’s clothing sizes are a little dumb sometimes but I can usually take a tape measure to my waist and correctly order pants. Your guess is as good as mine what the difference between “boot cut” and “relaxed fit” are, and I would swear T-shirt sizes have shrunk since I was a teenager. As in, I can compare a Medium I’ve had since the Dubya administration to an XL today. But getting fitted for a suit, they measure me in inches and the clothing is more or less sized in inches.

Women’s clothing sizes have had two different ice pick lobotomies. Women come in a wider range of sizes and aspect ratios, women’s clothing is pretty much universally designed to fit tighter, but on the rack they’re given one meaningless size number. a 12 is bigger than a 10, who knows by how much, and there’s nothing on the girl you can measure with a tape to get that number, and there is no standard here at all. Why they haven’t revolted I have no idea.

Yeah I’ve got absolutely nothing for ya. Nothing works, you’ll never get ahead and it’s worse now than when I was your age.

Sort of. What that page describes is in the same building as what I’m thinking about.

The thing I’m more nostalgic for was the time when everything had to be a glistening amorphous translucent blob, a bit like the Cingular Wireless logo or the MusicMatch Jukebox logo. And I’m in that era where you can just play MSN messenger sounds and you’ll get an OH MY GOD out of me.

Captain Disillusion explains it way better than I ever could.

If you want there to be a lot of your species, the best thing to do is become delicious to humans.

“Normal people” sit all the way through ads and are having receptacles installed in their carotid arteries for Amazon to pipe petrochemical runoff directly into their blood-brain barriers.

Me? I don’t own a working television, I haven’t turned on a radio in years, and all of my digital devices run a FOSS operating system I installed on them with layers of ad blockers.

I’ve seen a few seconds of gameplay, but I’m not sure what that game “is.” Is it fun?

I have persuaded The Sims to run on Linux; though if the game wasn’t purchased through Steam it can take some doing. No experience with Cities Skylines. Stardew Valley runs very well, I think ConcernedApe releases Linux native versions. My understanding is Roblox deliberately prevents itself from running on Linux. Minecraft Java edition runs on Linux and you’ll find launchers for it in most package managers. An open source alternative called Minetest or recently changed to Luanti exists, but I know it’s not the one his friends play and that’s mostly the point. Can’t say for Stellaris or Slime Rancher.

I like his two co-conspirators back there. Ocean’s Three.

I think the relevant context here is it’s a recognizable shot of the cast of Stargate SG-1, as the text over both images contrasts the two shows’ attitudes.

As I listed elsewhere in the thread I’ve seen it several times, but I think Hollywood’s use of laundromats (or apartment building communal laundry rooms) are used for 3 scenarios:

• The meet cute. It’s a plausible place for people in different social circles to interact. The manic pixie dream girl and the uptight single lawyer both need to do laundry, so that’s where they first meet. Easily contrived shenanigans with the props, underwear jokes etc. write themselves. It can also play with a dynamic that you don’t often see in a dating environment: You meet someone in the bar or the club or at school or at work or whatever and you get to present the most polished version of yourself. Meet in the laundry room and now we get to see if you have some domestic skills which can indicate where in life the characters are.

• The domestic date. Characters that already know each other decide to visit the laundromat together because one or both has to do laundry and it’s the only time they can have free. Thinking about the production side, I bet it’s less of a pain in the ass to film than a dinner date, because you don’t have to worry about continuity of the food etc. Easy reason for two people to be sitting in an environment together with nothing better to do than just talk, maybe you can busy their hands folding laundry or emptying/filling machines. Lots of opportunities for movie language, too. You can look down the rows of machines to frame the two in closer, you can look at them through the clear washer doors, either with it open or as if from inside one of the machines, etc.

• The excuse to be mutually half naked. At least two people and almost always mixed company are going to wash the clothes on their backs with nothing to change into, so they’re going to sit around together in their underwear pretending very hard this is normal. This is mostly just a recipe for cheap cheesecake.

This is fun. Hey can we talk about some more weirdly common TV and movie scenes?

Well, off the top of my head:

• There was an episode of Dr. Who during…I think David Tennant’s career? It was one of those that didn’t actually have much of The Doctor in it, some guy had noticed The Doctor appearing throughout history and wanted to try and meet him, so he managed to run into Rose’s mother, at a laundromat. Who proceeded to flirt with him as she loaded her underwear into the wash by saying ‘and here I am flashing you me knickers.’

• There was a show from the 90’s that no one remembers called Relic Hunter. In one episode miss relic hunter, her assistant and I think the client of the week duck into a laundromat as a place they can look through a dossier, but the owner insists that they have to wash something to remain on the premises, because they needed an excuse to peel Tia Carrere to her skivvies.

• The episode of Futurama where…let’s see if I remember this right? Bender gets mangled and paralyzed, meets Beck, hires him as a washboard player(?) and then the rest of the cast follow him around on tour, there’s a scene where the crew is hanging around in their underwear while all their clothes wash, and it accidentally tie dyes them because of Amy’s pink track suit.

• Early in Friends, there’s an episode where Ross…again let’s see if I remember this correctly…Rachel was a rich girl and thus had no domestic skills, and Ross offered to teach her how to do laundry, kind of as an excuse to hang around with her to flirt. They also manage to accidentally dye her clothes pink by leaving something red in with them. IIRC Joey mocked him for his choice of Totally Not Snuggle, so he bought a detergent called Uberweisse or something. I think this was in their building’s laundry room rather than a laundromat but meh.

• I think there’s a scene in Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog where Dr. Horrible and whatever Felicia Day’s character was named where they flirt in a laundromat. My memory of that show has kind of faded to just the Bad Horse song.

I went to decent schools in a decent district, they had “Academically Gifted” programs for elementary and middle school students, with “honors” and “AP” classes for high schoolers. A structural problem I think they had is they were operating kind of on video game logic: “You’re smart so for you we’re going to make classes harder for you.” You’re doing too well on Medium, we’re bumping you up to Hard.

Which basically did the opposite of what I really needed. I didn’t need more and longer assignments. In most subjects you could go a little deeper in detail with me and I’d keep up. In math class, I needed more concrete explanations of what the numbers meant. Math class is so often just “Here is how you do this algortihm. Follow these rules and you get the answer.” “Okay, I got 7.” “No, you were supposed to get -2, you forgot the transistational property of non-equal equality. You need to talk to the guidance counselor about your future because at this rate you’re not going to pass this class.” Funny how I did extremely well in chemistry and physics where they explained the math in concrete terms that I could build an intuitive relationship with.

I think there’s also a problem where…Picture a mathematician. What do you see? A man in a sweater vest in an ivy covered building filling a chalkboard with greek letters and arcane symbols that prove some deep truth about reality, right? That’s what it looks like to be good at math, so that’s what we’re going to make math class look like for every single citizen. Never mind that administrators rarely do math at all, a lot of office workers are fine with a 4-function calculator, meanwhile a carpenter needs a functioning understanding of trigonometry. In academia, aesthetics is more important than reality.

My understanding of things like the IME is that its reason for being is mostly benign, it lets enterprise-level IT departments do things like boot computers from across the network and stuff like that. It has no real use to home customers on their private PCs, but it’s included on all systems to simplify engineering; it handles a lot of the early boot process. And it’s always running. The privacy enthusiasts out there who carry a copy of TAILS on their keychains just in case aren’t fond of the fact that there’s a proprietary OS with unrestricted access to memory and networking just sitting there with no way of auditing or monitoring what it was doing.

This has been a thing for AWHILE now, and the whole coreboot thing…Intel, board manufacturers etc. keep their data so locked up that it’s a challenge to build anything that works, so it’s a miracle we have things like Coreboot at all. They largely concentrate on laptops IIRC, and it’s rare to see full fat desktop motherboards that work with Coreboot.

I do know that Linus is on record with low opinion of C++. I have heard of him compare the cult-like following Rust has with the whole Vim/Emacs tribalism thing.

By “desirable motherboard” in this context I mean a standard ATX (or standard size variants) motherboard with a currently supported socket and chipset commonly available on the consumer market. To run Intel 13th or 14th gen, or Ryzen 7000 or 9000. I don’t know if you can just buy an MSI or Asrock etc. board and expect to run Coreboot on them.

What’s the advantage of coreboot? Soothes paranoia mainly. Both Intel and AMD platforms have little black boxes in them that run a separate little OS beneath Windows or Linux that has Ring 0 or similar low-level access to the hardware and could theoretically man in the middle anything done on the machine. Intel’s is MINIX based, it’s called the Intel Management Engine, and it genuinely is a little bit bile inducing reading what it has access to. AMD does have a simlar technology.

In terms of performance, system stability etc? Very little. Once the kernel is loaded and in control of the hardware the BIOS doesn’t effect much AFAIK.

I’m not very familiar with it but I’ve not heard much about even AM4 boards being supported. I think of Coreboot (or it’s completely binary blob free fork LibreBoot) and I think of either Purism or System76 and in both cases for their laptops.

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This kind of thing (the “main” operating system is built atop a secret basement full of god knows what) isn’t restricted to x86 either. On a Raspberry Pi, Linux running on the ARM cores is a second class citizen to ThreadX running on the VideoCore processor.

My understanding is there are few desirable motherboards that support Coreboot.

Don’t like Intel Management Engine? or processors that shit themselves? go AMD.