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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Yup! The ones I clicked with genuine motives were all Project Wonderful ads. Project Wonderful was an ad service that catered specifically to creative projects, mainly webcomics. People running webcomics would host a Project Wonderful ad widget on their site to make a little extra money, and when they had some money to burn they’d pay to have ads for their own comic run on other people’s sites. I often discovered fun new comics this way. It’s the only ad service I’ve ever actually appreciated. I was sad when they shut down.

    I’ve also clicked some other ads in an un-genuine manner. These were all advertisements for dresses, swimsuits, skirts, etc. The purpose here was to convince the advertising agencies to stop plastering random shit all over the internet and instead decorate it with a bunch of pretty clothes and sometimes pretty models wearing those clothes. Worked pretty well, as long as I remembered to click an ad or two every few months.

    I haven’t done this in a while though. I wound up house-sitting for family members a lot in the last couple years, meaning I’d end up stuck using my laptop for a few days or a week instead of my real computer. The laptop has a lot less ram and runs into problems browsing the web sometimes due to ad company programmers being incompetent fuckwits who write leaky code. I finally got fed up with this and installed uBlock Origin on my laptop to make it more usable while away from home.

    That was all I’d intended to do; I was fine coexisting with most ads on my desktop and just using custom scripting to nuke individual specific ad slots that were being nuisances (e.g. jerking the page around on wikis I frequented). But since I have Firefox set up to synchronize between my laptop and desktop, I incidentally wound up with uBlock Origin on my desktop as well. I’m not sure if there’s a way to have that be asymmetric while still having all the other browser extensions continue to synchronize (because I would prefer if websites kept getting paid for my traffic when I browse on PC, especially webcomics), but for now I’ve just happily enjoyed not having ads anymore. The internet is so much more peaceful this way. Though I do sometimes miss all the pretty dresses.


  • I did not define the word magic. Society did that. My choice is to communicate effectively, which means largely respecting the established consensus on which words mean what. If you’d rather render yourself ineffectual by using your own personal alternate definitions for established words, that is your choice, but it’s not a choice that aligns with my or most other people’s priorities.

    Besides, “magic” only has whimsy associated with it because we restrict it to fake things. If we’d been calling electricity “magic” all along, “magic” would be mundane and you’d be over here complaining that we don’t use a more whimsical term like “etherics” or “thaumaturgy” or “electricity.”

    As for wonder… what the flippity floppity fuck are you even talking about? The scientific world is full of wonder. Wonder is what drives science in the first place, and it has nothing at all to do with terminology. If you look up at the night sky and are too distracted by vocabulary to feel wonder at the pretty lights shining across unfathomable temporal and spatial distances, well, that seems more like a deficiency in you than any sort of flaw in which arbitrary sounds and squiggles we’ve picked out to describe things with.


  • Look in /var/log/Xorg.0.log for Xorg errors.

    Check if OpenGL is okay by running glxinfo (from the package mesa-utils) and checking in the first few lines for “direct rendering: Yes”.

    Check if Vulkan is okay by running vulkaninfo (from the package vulkan-tools) and seeing… if it throws errors at you, I guess. There are probably some specific things you could look for but I’m not familiar enough with Vulkan yet.

    You could sudo dmesg and read through looking for problems, but there might be a lot of noise to sift through. I’d start by piping it through grep -i nvidia to look for driver-specific stuff.

    Might be worth running nvidia-settings and poking around to see if anything seems amiss. Not sure what you’d actually be looking for, but yeah.

    Sometimes switching from linux and nvidia to linux-lts and nvidia-lts can help if the problem is in the kernel or driver. Remember to switch both of these at the same time, since drivers need to match the kernel.

    You could also try switching from the nvidia drivers to nouveau. Might offer temporary relief and help narrow down where the problem is, at the expense of probably worse performance in heavy games. Ought to be fine for 2D gaming and general desktopping.

    Trying a different window manager is always an option. Don’t know how much hassle that is when you use a full DE; I’ve always been the “just grab individual lightweight pieces and slap 'em together” sort so I don’t have any real experience with KDE. But yeah. Find out what the right way to change WM is for your system, then try swapping over to Openbox or something minimal like that and see what happens.

    Related to WM/DE, it could be an issue with the compositor maybe. Look up whatever KDE’s compositor is and see if you can turn it off and run a different one?


  • If I recall, 40% is the domestic violence coming from either member in the household. Not just the police officer.

    You recall incorrectly. The 40% does in fact refer specifically to the officers. You are correct about the definition of violence being vague though, which is why I included the second quotation in my TLDR. The rate of physical violence was around 10% according to the spouses of the officers, with the other 30% apparently consisting of verbal abuse and threatening but non-physical behavior.

    The actual document transcribing the hearing I quoted from is here: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED338997.pdf For convenience I will be referencing the page numbers in the pdf file and at the bottoms of pages, not the original numbers at the tops of pages (which are five behind). Dr. Leanor Boulin Johnson’s part of the hearing begins near the end of page 37, and she addresses congress for two and half pages. Then in pages 41-53 her prepared statement is included.

    In her oral statement, she said the following (page 39) :

    We found that 10 percent of the spouses said they were physically abused by their mates at least once during the last six months prior to our survey. Another 10 percent said that their children were physically abused by their mate in the same last six months.

    How these figures compare to the national average is unclear. However, regardless of national data, it is disturbing to note that 40 percent of the officers stated that in the last six months prior to the survey they had gotten out of control and behaved violently against their spouse and children.

    The written report says the same thing, with a bit of elaboration (page 47):

    Ten percent of the spouses reported being physically abused by their mates at least once; the same percentage claim that their children were physically abused. The officers were asked a less direct question, that is, if they had ever gotten out of control and behaved violently against their spouse and children in the last six months. We did not define the type of violence. Thus, violence could have been interpreted as verbal or physical threats or actual physical abuse.

    Approximately, 40 percent said that in the last six months prior to the survey they had behaved violently towards their spouse or children. Given that 20-30 percent of the spouses claimed that their mate frequently became verbally abusive towards them or their children, I suspect that a significant number of police officers defined violent as both verbal and physical abuse. Further analyses showed that years on the force were not associated with violent spouse behavior. However, among male officers violence towards children jumped 12 percent after the first three years (i.e., 28 percent in the first three years and 40 percent in years four to seven); another nine percent leap occurred after eight years of service. Although the relationship between tenure and violence was not statistically significant for females, four to seven years showed the highest frequency of violence toward their spouses and children. However, unlike the males the frequency of reported violence subsided after the seventh year.


  • TLDR, during a 1983 survey of 728 officers and 479 police spouses, “Approximately, 40 percent [of the officers] said that in the last six months prior to the survey they had behaved violently towards their spouse or children.” Also, “Ten percent of the spouses reported being physically abused by their mates at least once; the same percentage claim that their children were physically abused.”