The only northern lights I’ve ever seen were in Iceland. Honestly, the conditions were less than ideal and what I did see was very dim to the naked eye.

What a lot of people don’t know is that a camera (like on your phone) picks up even the faintest aurora with ease. I have pictures that make the whole thing look many times more vibrant than what I could see.

Thank you for your service.

Make no mistake, the oligarchs see the personal computer as a 40-year-old experiment that has failed, or needs to fail. They want their mainframes and CPU/hr billing back. Server hosting for enterprise uses has already gone this way for the most part. Small consumers are next.

As far as I recall, that’s how it went.

I was gonna say this is at least Digg 3.0.

Oooh, rocking an HP? I too like to live dangerously.

But seriously, that’s good to know. Those are probably easier to come by out in the wild. It really looks like Thinkpads go from office deployments straight to refurb companies these days. I never see them at thrift stores, and I’m not brave enough to dumpster-dive at e-waste.

Sometimes, old machines are survivors. Beware of confirmation bias when trash/thrift-picking cheap systems though. IMO, Thinkpads can be tough as a coffin nail. Including work systems, I’m on number 8 at this point with no hardware failures in sight.

That said, I have a very lightweight Acer that’s about a decade old with the worst keyboard and trackpad ever manufactured. It also performs like a slug, even with Linux on it. Still, it refuses to break so I can get rid of it.

This essay is brought to you by Raid: Shadow Legends.

Ooooh, yeeeeaahhhh.

I’m no big-time wrestling fan or anything, so real fans can correct me here.

Hogan did a (surprise?) heel-turn late career and joined NWO: a bunch of other heels (bad guys). “Hogan as the bad guy” was clearly a WCW PR/drama move to grab some eyeballs and make some noise, especially after being a face (good guy) for so long.

Exactly. That and the “they came for us” poem is too Nazi/Germany coded for a lot of folks, and they fail to see how it applies.

I’ll go as far as to say that 40% of everyone has never been bullied, or did/does try to avoid it by conforming.

This was a lesson I learned at age 9. You get bullied for whatever reason, so you try and change your behavior on the basis of the bullying. Hair, clothes, accent, likes, dislikes, whatever. The following week, the reason you get bullied changes or you outright get bullied for changing. Why? It’s about power, exercising that power, and abusing others; the bully has a bottomless pit somewhere in their psychology and abuse makes them feel better about it. It was never about the stated reason. You can never make this stop by accommodation, and by all accounts, can only make things worse.

Same here. And it’s most certainly not a case of dodging copyright since the show not only proudly uses D&D by name, but there is a heavy amount of cross-promotion going on between the two: https://www.dndbeyond.com/en/strangerthings

It’s worth adding that, if you are arrested, that phone is a treasure-trove of potential liability that will absolutely get used against you. Also, you’re probably not getting it back, so you’re better off without it. Carry cash, a map if you must, and coordinate rally points and fallback locations with your friends ahead of time.

A proper camera is a good tip, but make sure the camera memory and storage card are wiped ahead of time.

just living your life without a phone is getting harder

This is a bigger problem than most realize. Consider the barrier-to-entry for phones, internet access, and charging. Then add cashless payment on top of that. Combined, it creates a new red-line between economic classes, and a rather ugly one at that. At some point, this mode of commerce is going to get selected not for the convenience it provides, but for whom it excludes.

I’ll also add that getting access to a smartphone with total anonymity is impressively hard to do.

True, but what about the “two legs good, four legs bad” variety?

Other than “because of BLM”, cooperation with local law enforcement would be a good reason for ICE to focus efforts there.

I mean, that happens with CloudWatch all the time. It’s the most plausible part about this.

I haven’t always been a fan of Go. It launched with some iffy design decisions that have since been patched, either by the project maintainers or the community. It’s a much better experience now, which suggests that maybe there’s some long-range vision at work that I wasn’t privy to.

That said, Pike clearly has a lot of good ideas and I’m glad Google funded him to bring those to light.

I’ll also say that after finally wrapping my head around Python and JavaScript async/await, I actually much prefer the Goroutine and channel model for concurrency. I got to those languages after surviving C++, and believe me when I say that it’s a bad time when your software develops a bad case of warts. Better to not contract them in the first place.

You’re welcome.

I’m not sure if this is c/bmoviebonanza material, but it’s up there. Anyway, that’s a solid community if you enjoy shlocky “how did this happen?!” movies.

Also, just dig through the Cannon Group movie list for more “throw crazy shit at the wall” gems like this. Some are hits, most are misses, and a few are really incredible misses.

Best I can do is Lou Ferrigno as Hercules. Just watch the whole trailer. The monster designs and other set pieces are pretty far out there for the time.