Where is the Random Thread of Randomness stuff that doesn't belong in other threads thread?

[Volpone]

Simultaneously sad, funny, and true:

 

[Volpone]

MovieSphere has been showing "Dirty Dancing" pretty regularly. I've yammered on about it enough here, but as I get ready to head out to tackle a chore I keep thinking about the one fight between Baby and Johnny, where he goes "You're not scared of anything!" and she says "I'm scared of EVERYTHING." That is life. I go out and do things because they need to get done, but even fairly routine things scare the crap out of me. Every time.

...and that is the key to good leadership, particularly in combat: Do something insanely brave while managing to communicate to the people you're leading that you're scared silly--just like them.

 

[Volpone]

The thing I've got to hand to Micro$oft is, the aren't just content to make a mediocre product that people have become familiar with. They put in the effort to find new ways to make ancient interfaces shitty and unusable.

This post brought to you by an attempt to make a basic photo edit using screencap and M$ Paint, the way I have for literally decades, and it being frustrating and completely unusable.

 

[Eggs Mayonnaise]

The thing I've got to hand to Micro$oft is, the aren't just content to make a mediocre product that people have become familiar with. They put in the effort to find new ways to make ancient interfaces shitty and unusable.

This post brought to you by an attempt to make a basic photo edit using screencap and M$ Paint, the way I have for literally decades, and it being frustrating and completely unusable.

Try GIMP, a lovely open-source Photoshop knockoff...

GIMP

GIMP - The GNU Image Manipulation Program: The Free and Open Source Image Editor

www.gimp.org

 

[Volpone]

Interesting Great Truth that has been rolling in my head a bit but only just clarified: Computer/tech companies used to make money indirectly by providing a great, useful product that made their customers' lives better, easier, and more enjoyable. Now computer/tech companies just make money directly off the consumer. And the only reason the haven't killed the goose that laid the golden egg (well the ones that haven't yet, anyway) is that they did it from such a dominant position that there is no less shitty alternative to continuing to use their product.

 

[Eggs Mayonnaise]

Interesting Great Truth that has been rolling in my head a bit but only just clarified: Computer/tech companies used to make money indirectly by providing a great, useful product that made their customers' lives better, easier, and more enjoyable. Now computer/tech companies just make money directly off the consumer. And the only reason the haven't killed the goose that laid the golden egg (well the ones that haven't yet, anyway) is that they did it from such a dominant position that there is no less shitty alternative to continuing to use their product.

You're right. Their whole business model changed in the course of a generation... their "products" (OS, devices) are no longer the biggest source of revenue. Now it's subscriptions, and data mining. The more they destroy the idea of consumer ownership, the more they can institutionalize their revenue streams. And somehow, they are being allowed to destroy individual privacy without consequences (at least in America -- Europe is catching up).

I hear the speeches Bill Gates is making now about how people's medical and personal data needs to be in one central source (out of their control), and I just want to vomit.

 

[Colonel Kira's Left Tit]

I don't like the whole OS war thing at all, but Microsoft has been on this downward spiral probably since XP was released 25 years ago. 7 was actually pretty okay, but that's another story. Apple, alright, there's that but also the whole walled garden idea surrounding it. And I don't want to bang on the Linux drum either because all the distros have their own problems one way or another, but it seems to me that it's the only reasonable way forward.

 

[whisky]

The brake in put car is a button, today we broke the break.

 

[Eggs Mayonnaise]

I haven't owned a car in 35 years, so I missed the complete computerization of cars. I've only experienced how dashboards became 757 cockpits from the passenger side.

I'm confident if I tried to learn to drive again now, I'd fail and give up.

 

[Colonel Kira's Left Tit]

Cars kind of lost me when Dodge and probably others turned the automatic transmission selector into a knob on the dashboard.

 

[Loktar]

I haven't owned a car in 35 years, so I missed the complete computerization of cars. I've only experienced how dashboards became 757 cockpits from the passenger side.

I'm confident if I tried to learn to drive again now, I'd fail and give up.

The few days I used a 2025 Chevy Malibu rental car with push button start and back camera, made me appreciate my 2017 Hyundai Accent low tech POS even more.

 

[Cassie]

I bought a computer with a much more memory than I can ever use, Microsoft insists on backing everything up to onedrive and making it difficult to actually save anything to the computer. It is very annoying.

 

[Cassie]

Two years ago, my brother was cutting down a tree and tied off to his fancy fucking truck. I was to gently drive the truck away as the tree fell. Neither of us realized the truck would not drive with the door open. Fortunately the rope was long enough and the truck was already out of the reach of the falling tree. I don't like all the computer shit in the vehicles!

 

[Volpone]

I say again, I got in a fender bender with my '09 Mustang in 2023. But my shitty then-insurance company valued her below the cut-off for totaling it and a week of driving the 2023 rental was enough to not only make me fight to get her fixed but to realize that I can never let her die because modern cars are so terrible.