Old videos like this getting frontpaged ALWAYS comes with dread. Followed by frantically googling the latest health news of the celebrity and then knowing if he/she's OK or not, then coming back and react accordingly.

We've known Willis battling with debilitating dementia in 2022. Alarm bells goes off mentally just seeing the video thumbnail.

don is gone.

rather turn the channel & watch sumin' else.

all those stories 'bout the GOP going on full fascist. those are stories that hint of happier endings.

TN Reds are cooking their own goose. The Christian right is being treated as wrong in many red states. FL's Mussolini wannabe Governor's vexation, over being (invariably) outfoxed by Disney, has revealed his reserve is that of a nest of jostled hornets. Flying spittle ain't a good look for a leader. Out of control is a big voter turn-off. Ask Don. 7 millions times.

Heck. Even Fox is going on record as an opportunistic conniving lie oriented enterprise. A simple boycott of 10% of cable subscribers has the possibility of Rupe changing the format to all children's programming.

Angery dumb men, doing dumb things in anger, has a high likelihood of causing a great deal of harm to others, & in return to themselves.

TN has handed the left the future (see WS). FL governor is given Disney free reign for the coming decades. Women & youth are nullifying the SCOTUS' best-laid plans.

Don is gone. Red is the land of dread.

I remember the first time I saw the Ring Nebula through my Dobsonian and thought "man, that thing is really far away". Then I swung my scope to Cassiopeia's "W" and looked at the ghostly smudge of the Andromeda Galaxy. I tried to fathom the distance and came up lacking. My eyes were better then and I could see things in the mid-6s, but even with full night vision and using averted vision, I couldn't make out any detail; it was just a little wisp of light where the middle was a touch brighter than the edges.
That was the day I fully became an atheist. It made no sense that God would put a smudge of light 2.5 million light years away that was actually a trillion purposeless stars. I had no answer for that. Standing on that runway in the Sierra mountains, enveloped in blackness and looking at Andromeda, I felt a direct link between myself, time and the universe. I didn't need heaven anymore and I never felt the existential dread of death ever again. I understood that I was part of infinity and that was enough.

“We are as forlorn as children lost in the woods. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours. And if I were to cast myself down before you and weep and tell you, what more would you know about me than you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful? For that reason alone we human beings ought to stand before one another as reverently, as reflectively, as lovingly, as we would before the entrance to Hell.” - Franz Kafka

You've apparently never driven in my neighborhood. There's a 6-way stop that leads into my section of Seattle and NO ONE knows how to work it. The people who actually live here do ok, but Uber/Lyft drivers encounter this traffic monstrosity with a mix of dread and WTF-ery.

See also: driving up and down 1-lane streets on the hills.

I dread to ask, but why should protesters be denied health care?

The worst DevOps mistake I ever made:

Assignment: On ~1,000 -physical- RHEL systems, change the default run level from command line to GUI (don't ask).

Solution: Hey, all our config files are controlled by Puppet, so this'll be easy!

(If you don't know what Puppet does, it enforces file configurations, so if you change a single file on the Puppetmaster, that change is pushed out to all servers running Puppet)

Ok, all I need to do it edit a single file, change a single number in said file and issue a single command: reboot. Easy-fuckin'-peasy.

The file I need to change is /etc/inittab -- this file tells a Linux system which "run level" it should initiate upon booting up. runlevel 3 is command line and runlevel 5 is a GUI like Gnome or some other tragic perversion of the whole reason you run Linux in the first place. All I had to do was change from runlevel 3 to runlevel 5. And reboot.

So simple; so stupidly simple.

So stupidly simple at 3:00am. When I hadn't slept all night. On a production network. When I'm working from home away from the office. On a Saturday when no one is in said office.

I make my change and save it, then push it to the version control system. Puppet picks it up and pushes the change to ~1,000 physical computers.

Done and done!

Remember I mentioned that I had to change a single file AND execute a single command: reboot?

Here's where things go tragically wrong.

My changes worked PERFECTLY. Everything did exactly what I told it to: Puppet changed the file, and rebooted the servers.

Only they keep rebooting. They keep rebooting over and over and over and over. I can't access any server on the network. Worse, while I'm trying to figure out WTF I did wrong, the 30 minute time-out I'd set on our alerting system, Nagios, expires.

Did I mention that I pushed this change to ~1,000 servers? ~1,000 servers that won't stop rebooting and aren't reporting into Nagios, thus being marked as down?

At 3:31am, on Saturday morning, the pages to ALL the on-call engineers began. One page per engineer per machine. About one every two seconds. And I'm getting paged, too -- except some of the pages are Nagios and some are utterly irate engineers who want to know exactly WTF is going on and I can't tell which is which because I'm getting text-spammed like crazy.

And those servers? They just keep right on rebooting.

At that point, I felt the kind of existential dread that only people who work in IT know -- the kind of dread that arises a picosecond after you've hit ENTER and realized you've type 'rm -rf /' or some-such -- because I knew at that very second exactly what I'd done wrong.

I'd typo'd "5" and made it "6" in the runlevel. And pushed it to ~1,000 -physical- servers. And then rebooted them ALL.

"So," you're asking, "Whyfor is runlevel 6 a big deal?"

Because of this:

runlevel 3: command line.
runlevel 5: GUI
runlevel 6: REBOOT THE FUCKING COMPUTER.

What I'd done was told every production server on our network to reboot as soon as it rebooted, which leads to another reboot, which leads to another reboot, lather rinse repeat.

At 3:45am on Saturday morning, I knew that every person in IT would have to drive into the office, visit every production server with a bootable USB key, change the BIOS to boot off the key, boot the server into Single User Mode, change the damned file by hand, then reboot the server. This takes about 10 minutes per server -- times ~1,000.

I learned a number of valuable lessons that day:

1. DOUBLE CHECK YOUR FUCKING WORK.
2. See lesson #1
addendum: filing for unemployment insurance in Washington state is amazingly easy.

And that was the very last time I ever worked on physical hardware. To this day, if it's not in the cloud, I ain't fucking touching it.

Here endth the lesson.

We'll begin with box, and the plural is boxes;
But the plural of ox should be oxen, not oxes.

Then one fowl is goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.

You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice,
Yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.

If the plural of man is always called men,
Why shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen?

The cow in the plural may be cows or kine,
But the plural of vow is vows, not vine.

I speak of my foot and show you my feet,
If I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?

If one is a tooth, and a whole set are teeth,
Why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth?

If the singular is this and the plural is these,
Why shouldn't the plural of kiss be named kese?

Then one may be that, and three may be those,
Yet the plural of hat would never be hose;

We speak of a brother, and also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.

The masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine she, shis, and shim!

So our English, I think, you all will agree,
Is the craziest language you ever did see.

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?

Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, slough, and through?

Well done! And now you wish, perhaps
To learn of less familiar traps?

Beware of heard, a dreadful word,
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.

And dead; it's said like bed, not bead;
For goodness sake, don't call it deed!

Watch out for meat and great and threat;
They rhyme with suite and straight and debt.

A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother.

And here is not a match for there,
Or dear and fear for bear and pear.

And then there's dose and rose and lose,
Just look them up, and goose and choose.

And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword.

And do and go, then thwart and cart.
Come, come, I've hardly made a start.

A dreadful language? Why, man alive,
I'd learned to talk it when I was five,
And yet to write it, the more I tried,
I hadn't learned it at fifty-five!

The scariest water park slide is the one that decapitated that young boy.

Fucking dreadful.

Well, things are not as rosy as folks like Steven Pinker would like us to believe. As much as I dislike resorting to Hollywood for philosophical insights, True Detective was absolutely on point in this quote:

„Transference of fear and self-loathing to an authoritarian vessel. It's catharsis. He absorbs their dread with his narrative. Because of this, he's effective in proportion to the amount of certainty he can project.“

Now, they were talking about a preacher. But I'd argue this applies to scapegoats as well. And if your arguments undermine the scapegoat, it starts losing its efficiency as a focal point of people's discontent.

Most of us have so much day-to-day shit to deal with that outsourcing the macro-shit to a boogeyman, any boogeyman, helps us get through the day without wanting to bash our head against the wall. Or bash someone else's head in, for that matter.

This doesn't excuse this level of self-delusion, but maybe it explains it to some degree. I'd say keep doing what I know you've been doing for many years: present your case in a respectful manner.

Is there some kind of requirement in capoeira that there must be a minimum of one dude with dreads? I don't think I've ever seen it without one

Awesome body control.

They must have skipped the part where he started to masturbate, every teenage boy dreads the arrival of the closet monkey of shame.

You mean the dreaded Dog Sothoth?

Is this sweet fish just lonely? Not much entertainment value in that environment ... looks to me anyway.

I've had a variety of fish several times in my life. Many have displayed distinctive personality traits and would be amazingly interactive with me. Elvis and Costello [Oscars] were my favorites as was Jambi [goldfish ... old vids still on YT]. Too bad I dreaded cleaning those tanks though [ugg]. Coupled with the heartache of the eventual/inevitable burial at 'sea' [in most cases], my urge for serenity on that front has been satiated for good.

So

I don't know how it is in the states, but in this country if you want to go through gender reassignment you will get it for free on the NHS. Its a long road, it isn't easy, they make it hard etc, but like anything else that poses a risk to somebodies health it is paid for by the state. I feel like a lot of people consider reassignment a sort of frivolous sex thing but being unable to escape the body in which you are born is, you know, desperately depressing. I don't think I am exaggerating when I say that surgery and hormone treatment are potentially lifesaving, and certainly greatly improve the quality of life in most cases.

Couple of things I don't understand - Is this the military saying they will no longer pay for treatments associated with gender reassignment, or is this a blanket ban on transgender men and women from serving in the military? One wonders why the military can't spend even a fraction of the amount is spends on toys on its servicemen/women...

Anyhoo. It's a distraction. Not trying to suggest that it is a minor thing for those affected, but I really think this is to divert the left and win back support from the right. It sucks dreadfully that a minority group is again used as target for political maneuvering and it is worthy of resistance but I can't help but feel we are playing into their hand by doing so.

@bobknight33 I pity you.