Shareholders own the company. Their private ownership is only “public” in that they can sell off their share, to anyone.

It’s a joint-stock company. Of course that’s capitalism. Jesus fucking Christ.

Dismissive dickwad behavior is good, actually - if you’re dismissing Nazis. Or anyone else who deserves a blunt rejection. It is fine and valid to deny people civility, when their rhetoric is inherently abusive. Respect and patience have limits.

Swearing at people absofuckinglutely has its place in online discourse. If not for the assholes themselves - then for the people they’re trying to fool.

Anyway.

Discworld has a few parallel threads. Release order starts with The Colour Of Magic, which is fun and short, but not exactly top-notch material. See explanatory flowchart. Those first few novels have a real Season One vibe.

The traditional introduction seems to be whichever book catches your eye. Or whichever you happened to find first, if you’d heard good things about the series. That’s how I wound up reading Ringworld by Larry Niven, because cultivating your interests in the 90s was a much fuzzier experience.

Apropos of little - how long ago did Sean Hannity say he’d get waterboarded?

Honestly I miss reddit circa 2015. Obviously before The Idiot and half the world lurching toward fascism - but also back when “fuck off, Nazi” was treated better than being a goddamn Nazi.

The proliferation of “civility” is poisonous to online discourse. It is always the wrong metric. Trolls love being polite monsters. r/Politics even went a step further and demanded all opinions be taken in good faith. Do those idiots know what trolling is? Do they not understand bad faith… as a concept? It only works because people mistake it for good faith. Demanding everyone do that is a gift to trolls.

Moderation requires common-sense identification of who’s being an asshole. It’s never about no-no words. If a script could handle the job, we would let it.

Lemmy has far too many communities with rules going ‘never be rude to anyone ever!!!’ and then zero enforcement when someone calls you a cunt for gently correcting their grammar. That is the worst of both worlds. Anyone sincerely trying is going to hold back from just dealing with assholes appropriately, like an adult, but those people are then left with no recourse against pointlessly toxic shitheads. I don’t want a screaming match. I want words to matter.

Also if you enjoy Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett has a similar deep snark. Discworld’s a whole mess of books but you can kinda jump in anywhere. I recommend Guards! Guards! or Going Postal. He did Good Omens with baby Neal Gaiman, and they’d write chapters separately, then throw out every joke they’d bought thought of.

It is a right bitch that the reason to leave is 100% the bastards in charge. The community was fine. (Okay, giant asterisks all over that, but you know what I mean. The community was not the cause for masses walking away with a sea of middle fingers lit by burning bridges.)

I’m not here because it’s better. I’m here because fuck Spez. And fuck enshittification. Fifteen years and these greedy incompetents made it impossible to come back without feeling like betrayal. The only reason I’m not deleting anything is that I don’t do that shit. Nothing any human being put effort into deserves to be lost forever.

Elmo did us the favor of turning his stolen harassment engine into an all-stick-no-carrot experience in a fucking hurry.

Does he have a watch up his ass?

Please don’t give Adobe money.

They’re not Oracle. But they’re trying.

If we ditch latin for IPA, maybe.

Maybe.

The more likely outcome is that some words would adopt those revised pronunciations, but most wouldn’t, fracturing the rules by creating arbitrary exceptions. This has of course happened over and over and over. That is the shape of the hole we are in.

English is a creole gone feral.

Some poor sheep farmers who thought the Thames was a lovely bit of river spent one thousand years getting rolled by the Picts, the Romans, the Angles, the Normans, the Saxons, the Franks, the Danes… and half of those were just the French wearing different hats. Most of these conquerors, heirs, and particularly rowdy tourists left a significant linguistic impact this mongrel archipelago of mayonnaise-filled peasants.

I’m in south Florida. Doctors’ offices usually have multilingual signs. Haitian Creole always looks goofy, but you immediately realize - that’s what English would look like if we fixed the fucking spelling. They look at French’s oodles of rules that all matter, and English’s very simple rules we don’t follow, and said “Sa trè estipid, nou ka fè pi byen.”

Hilarious, after the tortuously long road Xenia took to get there.

Rio is a pinwheel!

You could finger-gun this guy in the back of the head and he’d still go nuh-uh, you didn’t get me, I teleported.

Dude is just fully incapable of imagining a situation where he’s fucked. He’s the protagonist of reality. Legitimately thinks he could fall off a skyscraper and land on his feet. Which is a million times less ridiculous than this submarine, where incomprehensible pressures forced the interior contents to the size of a gumball in a matter of microseconds.

Every human being in that tin can briefly occupied the same cubic inch. You can’t shrug that off. Not even a blue whale is “built different” enough to survive those pressures, let alone the force of having those pressures applied all-at-once. Especially when pV=nRT, meaning the air temperature inside the cabin - and inside its former occupants - was raised several thousand degrees. Not for long, though. That glowing-hot paste of organic matter was immediately slapped against a wall of ice-cold seawater, sluicing it through cracks in the opposite end of the wreckage, leaving a small cloudy region surrounded by pitch darkness.

To which that guy would say, “I’d have dodged.”

Okay well listen.

That dude’s personal fable is a straight-up Damien Hirst title.

… and it will hurt the entire time you are disintegrating!

Also available in diet, as Mountain Inadvisable.

Seems needlessly complicated, when the number of sexual assaults committed by trans high schoolers must be approximately fuck-all.

You missed that CSA states weren’t allowed to end slavery.

So if conservatives meant things when they say words - the civil war was coincidentally about slavery-having states seeking new slavery-having allies to continue doing slavery together, after flipping out when an anti-slavery party took the white house.

But it was totes mcgoats about states’ rights. Except the right to end slavery.

What the fuck did Elon buy, at this point?

He fired the employees.

He threw out the code.

He yanked plugs on the physical servers.

He forgot to pay for the virtual servers.

He started rent protest for the office space.

He deleted the brand the way Malcolm X deleted his surname.

If he’d just started a Twitter competitor, with blackjack and doxxing, the only difference would be that Twitter was a bit quieter.

If he’d bought Twitter, the hellsite, and then burned it to the ground as a weird flex, the only difference would be slightly more people using Mastodon.

And in both cases nobody would know he’s a complete crybaby. We’d just harbor strong suspicions.

Jesus Christ, the usability nightmare of this website is worse than the goofy animated GIF they think is an exaggeration.

www.wired.com##.sticky-box to get rid of the autoplaying video go fuck yourselves, www.wired.com##.journey-unit__container to get rid of the assorted gigantic flyover bullshit.