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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I enjoy these types of movies. The most recent one I watched was Terry Gilliams Days of Heaven. I saw it described as a visual poem (This is accurate) about a boy running from his past with his girlfriend and sister, arrives to work as a farmhand on a Texas farm during harvest season.

    I enjoy Tarkovskys films, those are generally quite slow but philosophically dense. Stalker, Solaris, and Andrei Rublev. I haven’t seen the rest.

    I also enjoy abstract documentaries. Baraka is a dialogue-less epic showcasing the alienness of human culture. Amazing visuals and music. Life changing for me. In this genre, I also love Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil – a directors reflections on memory and time. A more serious, focused documentary following several men responsible for the mass execution of communists in Indonesia in the 60s as they act out their atrocities for what they believe will be a great action movie, called The Act of Killing directed by Joshua Oppenheimer, is also powerful and surreal. These three films had a drastic effect on me personally are the greatest documentaries I’ve seen, though not much happens in them.

    More recent slow movies I’ve enjoyed: Past Lives, about childhood love. Scored by Daniel Rossen of the indie band Grizzly Bear, it is a beautiful and different outlook on love. Very touching. Not much happens.

    The other is The Brutalist, an epic about a Jewish architect escaping the Holocaust and moving to America, seeking the American dream. Haunting, looming.

    Edit: Richard Linklaters films generally have very loose plots. I’ve only seen School of Rock and Boyhood though. Love Boyhood.








  • Every few years I get the customization bug and trick out my desktop. Then things start breaking down slowly. Then I get frustrated and reinstall vanilla gnome, swear off customization forever, and feel better.

    For gaming its Plasma.

    Knowing the default DE’s idiosyncrasies also helps with work – I’m never surprised when I reinstall/install a new machine. Same goes for aliases. No for me, knowing the commands themselves, however cumbersome or verbose, helps me better deal with freshly installed machines.


  • I help people do science and math with their computers. I make around 100k, double the median income in my area. My commute is an hour and a half each way, at least, and sometimes I only have around 3 hours to myself after I get back from work before I need to go to bed. Still, I have it better than most (although, with the current attack on science in the US, uncertainty about clients is rising…)








  • I think you might misunderstand me. I’m not saying that the only way to attain power is through wealth. Im pushing back against your idea that since an individuals wealth isn’t cash, it’s not worth accounting for. It may stop making sense to count, but only in the sense that it literally becomes incomprehensible to, and at that point it is long overdue to say it is too much. The vast power those people have is due to their net worth. Because someone else has vast power without the wealth doesn’t contradict that fact.

    Also I don’t really see why you’re tying up your freedom with billionaires, as if it is a binary choice between billionaires and personal freedom or no billionaires and tyranny. That’s a bit of a strange equivalency you draw. In any case, and in practical terms, you* probably don’t even have the freedom to be in the presence of the wealthiest of wealthy, let alone fart in front of them.

    *assuming you are not ultra wealthy or somehow related personally to a member of the ultra rich

    Edit: in other words, billionaires don’t grant you your freedom – and their freedom to extract capital and accumulate vast amounts of wealth probably has little bearing on your right to your house or personal property. In fact, they are far more equipped to seize things like your land, your data, your means of subsistence, than you are to defend them.


  • Untill I grew up and realised it’s not money they’ve got, it’s estimated net worth. It’s hard to turn that into cash.

    I used to think that, too. But just because its not cash doesn’t mean it doesn’t still translate to wealth or power. They essentially park their money in investments, liquidate when they need to, but otherwise use their assets to extract further wealth exert further influence.