Knuckledragger

Probably won't embed right: https://gfycat.com/ashamedzestyicelandgull

Shitposting for stress relief.

Vladimir Putin Says Russia Has 'No Ill Intentions,' Pleads for No More Sanctions. Also, Kremlin staff didn't expect Putin to invade Ukraine and were shocked by the severity of Western sanctions, report says.

Good thing it wasn't Woob's 1194.

The Polandball has been stepping up its content. Lukashenko is a clown.

I don't know if any of you HCers took off your headphones stopped listening to your speaker rig long enough to notice, but the totally-in-his-right-mind, totally-a-rational-actor, totally-legitimately-elected, totally-not-a-warmongering-despot "President" of Russia invaded one his country's neighbors and may have kicked off the third installment of the much-delayed Word War series (srlsy even George R. R. Martin isn't this slow between volumes.) I've made a couple posts in Slow, but there's more going and at such a pace that a shitpost or two isn't going to cover it. In the MicS Discord we've been discussing it (well, shitposting about it) at great lenght. Even one of our most famously clownish member chimed in with: He's not wrong. Europe's largest nuclear power plant on fire after Russian attack. In ZoomerSpeak, that's a yikes.

As the title says. For those of you living under a rock, Bandcamp has been the single best site for artists to sell their music to discering fans for many years now. The artists get their payment immediately and the fans get their choice of DRM-free downloads formats (which is to say, FLACs). Epic Games is an at-best questionable entity that owns the money printing machine known as Fortnite and the Unreal game engine (which can be used for good or evil, but usually the latter). Epic is partially owned by Tencent, who are an arm of the Chinese government. This is a bit like ...ca 2001 Microsoft buying mp3.com, but worse. It's like Yum! Brands buying Five Guys Burgers and Fries. I do not understand it, but I really don't like the sound of it.

Voltskool gets it. My tank is 275 gallons, but "out is out." I discovered I was quite low when I got back from Gloucester two weeks ago. Many phonecalls and much runaround from my oil company and they said "we can't add you to the schedule this week" which turned into "over two weeks" when all was said and done. That had the negative side effect of pushing any potential deliverly to the far side of this little blizzard we had here. I don't have a regular plow guy. I haven't in years. Trying to find one mid-season is the stuff of nightmares, especially as I live in the northern tip of a large (by MA) standards town and many outfits that claim to service my area see my address and say "lol too far away." I'm lucky to find the guy I did. I've used the same company for over 20 years. In the first half of the 00s, I had them install a new boiler (this house still had its original 1967 unit at that point) to the tune of 8000 Dubya-era bucks. They have taken a huge hit in terms of competence in the last few years. They delivered the previous tank of oil I ordered to the wrong house. My next door neighbor got himself an unexpected fill up (how that got paid for is still a mystery to me.) That little kerfuffle lead to a day and a half of back and forth phone calls where I slowly got moved up the chain of staff at the oil company until I reached someone who had a clue what was going on. "It was a new driver. He said he had the right house because he heard the dogs barking and was on the brick paito. Are you sure you tank meter works?" I have a concrete patio and ...zero dogs. Also, the house has been here for over five decades and hasn't, you know, moved from that spot. This is to say nothing of me being a customer for over two decades. Last time I was in the oil company office to pay a bill I noticed they had wooden American flags for sale, made by some local craftsman. These flags were quite huge and quite expensive. One of them was the "thin blue line" bootlicker flag. TBH I should have taken that as a warning sign and jumped ship right after. It's a good thing I'm moving out of this house.

Ended my 5 day "IRL surivial horror" run on less than 1/4 of a tank of heating oil. I successfully got my driveway plowered and a full tank of oil delivered this morning. I had my thermostats set to 53 degrees since Friday and was running a pair of 1500W electric heaters just to keep the space manageable. Would not wish it on my worst enemy.

This heavyset fella seems familiar for some reason.

This has been going through my head for days now: Original: What it's based on:

Y'all remember slow posts? Older news but to be fair I've been laptop-less since this happened. Meow. Couple at an outdoor swimming pool. Original colour photograph. Stockholm, Sweden in 1941.

Just got Traktor to run without locking up for the first time on the M1 Mac. Had to edit a text file and disabled multicore processing (and a fuckin' BeatPort nag screen) to get it to load.

Well, my shit is fucked. I'm OUT of heating oil, below 1/4 tank. Oil co said "lol, we can deliver on Monday." We're getting, uh, a foot of snow and ballfreeze cold between now and then. I've got my two electric space heaters plugged in. My sainted, octogenarian mother sent me a super helpful text encouraging me to turn up the head in case the power goes out. It's going to be an interesting weekend. Personally, I'm blaming Putin.

Currently a chilly 64 degrees in scenic B'town. We might get 6-12" of snow by the end of the week. I rate that a solid New England/10.

The new machine is certainly shiny. This 16" display is pure pleasure after 6 mos of staring at the three ghetto-ass panels I have attatched to my Wintendo. Also everything is amazingly fast and responsive. With that said, this has been the bumpiest ride in a new Mac I've ever had. I have mostly sorted out 1Password (NOT the SaaS version, KTHX) now. Mostly. AgileBits are downright malicious with their browser extensions. I sorted out a weird "log in to you Apple account to continue" issue that had been resulting in an endless gear icon yesterday. I even got notoriously finicky Mixlr up and running./ Where I have not been so lucky is Traktor. I installed a fresh version of Native Instruments's utility "Native Access" and through that a fresh version of Traktor. So far it launches and immediately beachballs. I've done a number of google searches and NI swear up and down that the latest version of Traktor Pro 3 (3.5.2) works just fine with OS X Monterey. Not for me, it doesn't. I haven't even attempted to import my 6000+ tracks, nor gotten to the point where I can try.

Yikes. I just heard that one of my mum's oldest friends (named Susan, like half the women from her generation are) died of Covid. Her husband was very sick with it, but has survived so far. Neither were vaccinated. Robert, the husband, was a Vineyard native. He was a good friend of my father's growing up. He was an odd character for his entire life, but very mechanically inclined. He fixed everything from 2 cycle lawn mowers to large yacht engines. Over the last ...35ish years, he withdrew into right wing media, mostly via AM radio. In a less divided time than our current one (that post-9/11 idyll known as 2005) he confided to my mother that his only source of news was "right wing radio." I hadn't seen either of them in over a decade. Certainly not in the Trump or "post" (MFer ain't exactly gone) Trump era. At no point going back to the 1980s did I ever discuss politics with Robert. I strongly suspect he was hugely anti-vax and therefore Susan had to be as well. This marks the first time that someone I've known personally (and for my entire life, I might add) has died to covid due to their anti-vax stance. I'm gonna be "Knuckles at the end of his radio show" real here for a second: I can be friends with people with whom I have massive disagreements. We can have irreconcilable differences on tax or military policy, gay rights, what the fuck ever. As long as I don't have to hear about it, we're good. I'd like to ammend one my precvious statements:" This anti-vax bullshit isn't "pants-on-head" retarded. It's beyond that. It's "what are pants?" Water boils at 212 degrees Freedom and 100 degrees Communist. Reality is what remains when you stop believing in it. Get fucking vaccinated, you are a danger to yourself and others. When did we collectively lose 2/3 of our IQ points? Good fucking LORD.

#ScottishPeopleTwitter

Man, AAPL has just sure made using the Migration Assistant (formally one of the platform's greatest strenghts) into an absolute nightmare to use.

TL;DW: Would anyone like to buy a Synology NAS?