I've spent the last six months editing a book. Phil Sandifer found himself writing about "A genre dominated by, in effect, an AI crank, an extremist technolibertarian, and whatever the fuck Nick Land is" and I begged to preview it. I ended up researching, editing, copyediting and helping with the publicity. It has been six months of solid and ( Read more... )

installing and setting up xubuntu 16.04. why the hell does vim-gtk have apache2 as a “suggested package”.
to make capslock a control key, run /usr/bin/setxkbmap -option "ctrl:nocaps" from Session and Startup->Application Autostart, and fuck you xubuntu for still not including an interface for this basic x11 config shit. you’re darned lucky you ( Read more... )

(posting this here so future generations can Google for it)
My work Lenovo X230 has been overheating and abruptly shutting down a bit of late. This creates problems if I'm running e.g a long compile from source. When I start again I may get an error like:

/home/fun/libreoffice/workdir/CxxObject/sd/source/filter/eppt/escherex.o: file not ( Read more... )

My most and least favourite system that I have ever had to administer involved an embedded copy of OpenOffice.org (originally a Solaris SPARC binary of 3.1, later the Ubuntu 10.04 package of 3.2), started from a cgi-bin Perl script as needed, to convert MS Word .doc files to PDFs.

This is because MS Word .doc is such an utter shower (specification ( Read more... )

i am about to be mean and ranty. please look away if these books are special to you, i have unresolved literary trauma to work through.
( Read more... )

a tumblr querent asks:
the question of why there haven't been any sociological studies of tumblr social justice culture is a good question- and why hasn't there been a news report on like, tumblr communists as a subculture? you'd think at least fox news would have something to say about that.

over on this post, someone notes “Sociology as a ( Read more... )

“HEY DIVA IS THE SERVER DOWN”
“it’s dead dave”
“WHAT IS”
“everything dave”
“WHAT THE DEV SERVER”
“everything’s dead dave”
"WHAT THE PG SERVER”
“they’re all dead, everything’s dead dave”
“WHAT THE FILE SHARES”
"Gordon Bennet, yes the file shares, everything, everything’s dead dave. everything’s dead, everything is dead dave”
“WAIT ARE YOU ( Read more... )

the nascent rationalwiki article on the term “social justice warrior” is going great. main thing it needs is firmer detail on the earliest coinage of the term.

the earliest pejorative usage we can find (and knowyourmeme concurs) is will shetterly’s blog tone-policing “social justice warriors” versus “social justice activists”.

in the sort of “5 ( Read more... )

that's literally the official name of a new public holiday in victoria.
i used to live here, about 500 metres from the mcg. every friday night, saturday (twice) and sunday (twice) in winter, people desperate for parking for the footy would literally park in the middle of the street just ‘cos they could, and never mind anyone who e.g. lived there ( Read more... )

( Read more... )