And you’re absolutely starving, yes.

Got my bachelor’s and wanted to go to PhD, but realizing this has me strongly considering skipping it. I want to do the research, but holy shit, there’s so much other bullshit, and it’s so fucking competitive for funding. Since I’m considering an international move, I also have to consider how stable my position will be so I don’t get deported. I want to push science forward, but I dunno if I can wade through all the bullshit to get my chance to…

If it was worth stressing about, it was worth discussing with me when I was on the clock. The entire premise of a job is that I work in direct exchange for money. No money? No work. Pay me or wait until next shift.

So it seems like if you’re using Office on desktop, not SaaS, but they do offer it in a browser, so would that count? Technically, if it’s in JavaScript or something like that, computing is handled locally, but it still feels close enough to count.

These apps aren’t SaaS, but their alternatives are in at least some cases. LibreOffice competes with Microsoft Office, for example, and Microsoft wants people to pay a subscription for it, although I think you can still buy it outright. Pretty sure I’ve heard similar for Adobe products. Not super familiar with all the options, so can’t say if it’s true for all of them.

QuakeWorld and old school Doom for FPS, Beyond All Reason for RTS, Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup for roguelikes, Hedgewars for a Worms-like.

Running a server is very doable. There are packages to deploy and configure almost everything for you and removing a ton of headache.

Getting your email recognized as not spam by the major providers is pretty much impossible. You need all sorts of stuff to help verify integrity including special DNS records and public identity keys, but even if you do everything right, your mail can very easily get black holed before it even reaches a user’s inbox because of stupid shit like someone abused your rented server’s IP years ago, and you can’t seem to get it off everyone’s lists.

Email as a decentralized tool has effectively been ruined by spam and anti-spam measures. You’re effectively forced to use a provider because it’s near impossible to make your outgoing mail work as an individual. I think some of those anti-spam measures are anticompetitive, but I do think some are just desperate attempts to reduce the massive flow of spam.

I don’t see that as a viable path forward. If lack of voters decide the election in favor of the opposition (from your perspective), the party most aligned with you will move away from you to stay competitive. If sufficient votes for third party decide in favor of the opposition, you might get some decent movement towards the third party. If there are so many third party votes that your favored main party loses and the third party rises, the dying party may want to enact change, but they’re out of power, and the newly entrenched party won’t want to do it because it’s now helping them.

Note that none of these result in voting reform. We know because it’s happened. It wasn’t always the Democrats and the Republicans, but it has pretty much always been a two party system once we got through a few elections.

If you want voting reform, unfortunately, the only way to make that a serious possibility is by making it a serious campaign issue and by fighting to enact it locally and work our way up to the federal level. It’ll be hard to go straight for the top, but some areas are starting to experiment and prove it’s viable. Next step is to go a little bigger or expand into new areas.

Unfortunately, a first past the post voting system always eventually results in a two party system. Rarely, a third party can rise, but always ushering the demise of one of the previous two. The only way we can escape a two party system is by reforming our voting systems to something like ranked choice or approval voting.

Classic Doom 1 and 2. There’s gotta be over 100 levels if you count TNT and Plutonia, which I think were sold as Final Doom? Anyway, if you just get the base games for 1 and 2, there are thousands upon thousands of community made maps, including some total conversions, so you can play new Doom content until it physically pains you to continue.

Of course, I feel obligated to mention that even though it would be super easy to pirate the WAD files and play with a free modern source port like GZDoom, like absolutely trivial to find copies of DOOM.WAD and DOOM2.WAD floating around the net, probably showing up easily on Archive.org, but… Um… Where was I going with this? Oh, right, don’t pirate. Cheap on GOG last I knew.

It’s always been a class war. It takes a lot of effort and violence to maintain a ruling class.

Sure there will. They’ll just be freak weather events that today would be considered just a bit cooler than average and unworthy of notice.

It does limit choice, but so long as you aren’t retaining the generation list somewhere an attacker can find it, how are they to know your list? As long as your list is incorporating less common words, your attacker can’t even simplify the problem by focusing on the most common words. Just one rare word can expand the list they need to use by tens of thousands of words.

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Aw poor corporate behemoth doesn’t want to spend the pennies (compared to profits) to do things right. If we’re being fair, fuck them for cheaping out at our expense.

For real, was like damn, McDonald’s charging that much for uniforms? Because that’s a McDonald’s unif- oh.

Yeah, the core plot idea was pretty much the same, but the way it played out was pretty different. The whole thing stays way more low key, and I wanna say the whole jail thing never happened. It’s been a long time since I read either version, so I’m fuzzy on the details, but it definitely got a significant rework for publication.

I’ve tried to find a copy of the original before, and I think I found a poorly cloned website with the original links a few years ago, not updated to point at the new clone so I had to tweak it every time to continue. I’d love to get it converted to an ebook so I could archive it, but I haven’t tried in years now.

Tangentially, John Dies at the End is fucking great, easily one of my top book series. Kinda prefer the original online version of the sequel, but that’s hard to find these days, and the print version is still good. The movie’s pretty good, although it’s a shame they cut so much. I get why, movies can only be so long, but would have been cool to see all the stories from the book get told.

Kinda looks like Todd Howard’s face on Henry Cavill’s body and skull.

I’m still disappointed we never got the Dr. Horrible sequel…