palordrolap

I’d bet a few of those actually do want to exclude people from the other UK nations. Not as many as are flying the flags, I grant you, but nonetheless. Colonialist mindset still runs deep in some of the English.

I’m not sure memes in the original Dawkins sense can be art, so I suppose we must be talking about the modern sense of “funny images and short videos”.

Elitists will say that for something to be art it has to be produced by someone who is capable of producing traditional kinds of art, but who for artistic reasons has chosen to do otherwise (see: Cubism), and there’s the whole problem of, at least for images, certain meme templates being recycled over and over which diminishes the artistic value of any specific instance.

But for specific rare instances? Sure. Art is often in the eye of the beholder, regardless of the intent of the creator.

And as for videos. See any Vine compilation. There’s bound to be at least couple in there.

Finally, if you really want to turn an existing meme into art, use those elitist traditional methods to imitate one. An oil-painting triptych of “OMG they were roommates” without captions would be both art and lean into the meme incredibly heavily.

Would that be a comic strip writ large? Maybe. But there’d be nothing inherently funny about two frames of a woman walking and then a man’s face in close up. But if you know the meme, buddy, that’s art.

Adopting IPA would be wrong because it would require that everyone talk exactly the same way.

Tricky. Microsoft currently use two different executable formats and only one of them is compatible with WINE. That still doesn’t mean that a compatible one will work properly though.

On the other hand, people who make ads want their ads to be literally everywhere, so they might make it Windows 3.11 compatible with all library functions baked in just to be safe. WINE would almost certainly run that.

Banksy is as much a person as Nicolas Bourbaki was. Although unlike Bourbaki, there is allegedly one guy who is kind of the main guy, but if that one guy goes to prison, I’m fairly certain Bansky artworks will continue to appear.

In fact I’d put money on the fact that one would appear in a prominent place soon after.

And if the establishment somehow manage to round up every single person associated with Banksy and manage to get something to stick to every single one of them, which I strongly doubt is possible, the rise in wannabe Banksy groups doing the same thing won’t be far off.

The artwork is almost always made with stencils and spray paints. Stencils can be prepared well in advance. A trained group could have one of these up in under a couple of minutes.

If I was Banksy - or one of them - I would almost certainly have distributed my art to trusted individuals for the event of my incarceration and beyond.

I thought Win2K was peak Windows, but I begrudgingly got comfortable with XP (using the classic Windows theme) then Win 7 after they ironed most of Vista’s kinks out.

Been on Linux since then.

But it would be unfair to say that masochist tendencies aren’t a requirement to be a Linux system owner.

All systems require some level of that. It’s just Linux has been rushing towards “less masochism” and Windows even quicker towards “more”, and we find ourselves at that sweet spot where they’ve the same level of requirement.

Frankly, I’d prefer this sweet spot to be more towards “less”, so I’m hoping Linux continues its trend.

Actual populists rarely call themselves populists, you got that right at least. Mainly because a good chunk of people they pander to aren’t bright enough to understand the term “populist”.

But the ones I can think of are all firmly right wing. Trump. Orbán. Farage. And not one of them is, or would call themselves “leftist”.

There was one guy back in the late 1930s who tried that and it didn’t go well for him, and I suspect that makes them nervous.

But then, you probably think that guy actually was a socialist.

This is odd in at least a couple of ways. Mandelson is well-known to be homosexual, so an association with a man known for arranging situations with underage girls doesn’t quite match up.

In the best case, this means that Epstein liked socialising with powerful people even if they didn’t want what he had to offer, but that raises the question of what Mandelson was getting out of it.

This kind of already happens there though. Video view counts are visible and often way below a channel’s sub count.

Sure, there are exceptions (viral video views often far exceeding the sub count), but by and large they’re a good metric for seeing how a channel is actually doing.

Hey, I don’t want my (albeit meagre) tax payments to go towards security for a war criminal. Would be far cheaper to leave him where he is.

Loosening the definition to “something I bought that I didn’t need, despite having thought about it for a while and waited for the price to come down”, probably the recent remaster of the original Quake. And I only wanted it because it was the only way to get the Dimension of the Machine level pack that it came with.

As it turns out, I’m not really much of a Quake-head any more, but at least I’m no longer wondering about those levels.

You know you’ve hit rock bottom when DJT is your only hope.

For wackier definitions and slang, I like UrbanDictionary. I’d say Wiktionary, but someone already suggested that one.

I’ve also used dictionary.com and thesaurus.com in the past. Obvious names, but they’re not terrible.

But back to UrbanDictionary - there’s a lot of craziness and dross on there, but there are also plenty of diamonds in the rough.

Each definition has a discussion page for pointing out errors and the like. And if you’re complete certain of something and can back that up with a source, you could even edit the entry itself.

Option 1 is a potential cause of “lost” revenue.

Late stage capitalism absolutely forbids anything that could cause that, even if the cost of implementation outweighs any potential gain.

Indigenous Peruvians: “Hey! You can’t do that!”

Peruvian Government: “Hey! How do you even know about this?!”

You mean, like, other than twice my age being statistically dead?

Many.

Let’s start with neo-Luddite tendencies, e.g. deep suspicion of, and wanting very little to do with: devices with planned obsolescence; devices that basically spy on the user; this push for LLMs and similar generative artificial “intelligence”.

Or rather, the people who are pulling the strings, so to speak, behind those technologies. The technologies themselves have great potential, but that cannot be reached under those who presently control them.

Also a strong dislike of people, usually kids, making noise or worse, actually being on my property because they have no respect for certain boundaries, or they don’t even know those boundaries exist. Classic “damn kids, get off my lawn” old man attitude.

And finally: I still have a flip-phone and have no other computing devices beyond the one desktop PC I’m writing this comment from.

Serious answer: A surprising number of people, especially those who still have Facebook accounts in 2025, are susceptible to scams where someone pretends to be a rich and/or famous person asking for favours or money.

They get a message from a fake Zuck, and because they are dangerously credulous, they believe it is the real Zuck.

Zuck says they’ve been selected, or won a prize, or should send a photo or some such, and then suddenly Zuck’s blackmailing for a compromising photo or otherwise requesting Amazon gift cards or Bitcoin to “unlock” the prize or whatever.

“Zuck’s a rich man who owns the platform. He knows what he’s doing. I’d better look into how to do this Bitcoin thing.”

Facebook knows all this and so any Zucks that are not the Zuck get flagged as scammers and have their accounts shut down.

As opposed to the current system where we don’t have enough doctors or teachers, and let’s face it, the prices that plumbers charge suggest there aren’t enough of those either. If free market economics were accurate, prices would tumble if there were more of them, right?

So your cross your fingers and ran it and got an error.

And eventually we learned to understand the programs we were typing in, knowing what those errors meant and how to fix them without looking back at the listing. Magical.