If you have the time and flexibility, you can also try out libreoffice.

Just did this on November 14th, 2024, so this is very current!

THIS!!! REBLOG IT EVERYONE, IT COULD SAVE LIFES ☝️☝️☝️☝️

I've been seeing that quote go around and while making this I think I managed to track it back to "An Oresteia" by Anne Carson

"All this digital art stuff, you know, it goes way over my head. But my wife, y'see, she has this cousin Lou. Now Lou's a real smart cookie, knows everything from Blender to Clip Studio, but the one thing they won't touch is AI. Says it wastes a whole lot of electricity for something that only looks good at a glance.

See, a computer, it can't think through things like a human can. You or I, when we look at a drawing of an apple, we can compare it to real apples we've seen. If you show us a drawing of some orange thing with spikes coming out every which way, well, we can tell you that sure doesn't look like an apple.

But a computer? All a computer can do is look at pictures of apples. And if you give that computer enough pictures of apples that are a little bit orange, or a little bit bumpy, well. It might just decide that spiky orange thing is an apple too. It takes a whole lot of pictures of apples to get the computer mostly good at guessing when things are apples or not.

Now, that's bad enough when you just want your computer to tell you what it sees. When you want a computer to make an image, though, that's where Lou says you really run into trouble. You put a piece of paper in front of me, give me a pencil, and tell me to draw an apple, it won't win any awards. But it'll be a new drawing. Nobody's ever drawn that exact same drawing the exact same way before.

But if you take your computer that's gotten pretty good at guessing when things are apples, and you tell it "okay, draw me an apple", it can't make a completely new drawing of an apple. Instead, it'll take the pictures you've given it and mash 'em together. Maybe, at the end, you won't be able to tell which pictures it used, but if you ask it for enough drawings of apples, you'll start seeing patterns...

I'm sorry, I'll get out of your hair. I know you have to get back to your painting.

Just one more thing... how many fingers does that man in the corner have?"

pratchett will write an entire book about the grim reaper pretending to be santa claus while the grim reaper’s granddaughter goes about hunting down the dumbass who decided to kill santa, and then right when you think you’re done and the oddly pointed shenanigans are winding down he hits you with “humans need fantasy to be human. to be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape,” and knocks you into next wednesday

#YOU NEED TO BELIEVE IN THINGS THAT ARENT TRUE#HOW ELSE CAN THEY BECOME#god those words are engraved on my heart#gnu terry pratchett

“Why does the third of the three brothers, who shares his food with the old woman in the wood, go on to become king of the country? Why does James Bond manage to disarm the nuclear bomb a few seconds before it goes off rather than, as it were, a few seconds afterwards? Because a universe where that did not happen would be a dark and hostile place. Let there be goblin hordes, let there be terrible environmental threats, let there be giant mutated slugs if you really must, but let there also be hope. It may be a grim, thin hope, an Arthurian sword at sunset, but let us know that we do not live in vain.”

GNU TERRY PRATCHETT

Gnu Terry Pratchett

i have to do everything myself around here

I still am, even if it's old.

Questions I think to myself a lot when confronted with certain kinds of Online Posting:

Also, Do you care more about accomplishing something or getting credit?

A lot can be done if you don't care who gets the credit

i say this with love: yall will make yourselves feel bad about fucking anything, i swear to god. you feel bad about feeling too much. you feel bad about feeling too little. you feel bad about what makes you feel good. you feel bad about not knowing what you like. you feel bad for not being able to survive easily in a world hostile to you. you feel bad for the tactics that you use to survive. you feel bad for how you identify. you feel bad for being unique. you feel bad for experiences that you share with millions of people. you suspect that every feeling, experience, desire, fear, and question in your brain is somehow evidence that you don't deserve to exist.

i can be so so reassuring about all of these things but ultimately you are the one that's gonna have to make a conscious choice to stop measuring yourself in these ways. there is no authority who gets to determine whether you have the right to exist or not. you already do. there is no body that votes on whether you get to feel, identify, or think as you do. you already do. your existence as it is is non-negotiable. stop trying to justify yourself. you're already here. the world is going to have to deal with it anyway.

#also like - a small piece of advice to take or leave#read some classic literature - learn (or remind yourself) that you can relate to the feelings of authors of past generations#that dealing with the human condition is not new#and find comfort in knowing that you aren’t alone in what you’re feeling (via @painted-irises)

"how are the democrats so good at losing?" why don't you ask how the republicans are so good at winning?? stop acting like democrats are the only political party with agency. republicans do things on purpose.

^^ It seems to me that I haven’t seen many people acknowledging that republicans are good at winning because they lie and because they have a multimillion dollar industry committing to getting them elected and backing up their lies.

I’ve seen statistics correlating misinformed views to voting choice, a study about how respondents preferred Kamala’s policies over Trump’s when they weren’t told who had which set of policies, people discussing ‘vibes-based politics’—but in my opinion all this analysis is incomplete without confronting how republicans have a veritable propaganda machine working for them. It’s pretty hard for democrats to fight that. We have to rely on average donations from normal people when corporations/rich individuals can invest millions into networks who will try to get people elected who will give them tax breaks.

#seriously I want more people to talk about the sheer amount of damage rupert murdoch has done to this country#fox news is the most viewed cable news network in the country.#i remember a few months back harris’ campaign had success bringing project 2025 to the public’s attention#but democrats still don’t have anything comparable @choppywaterswiftboats

Fun fact that I will tell literally everyone all the time!!! A former Nixon staffer said they would have survived Watergate if they had their own news network. And that staffer's name was Roger Ailes!

Books to read:

Dark Money: An examination of the Koch Empire, and its patronage and entanglement in Right wing media, politics, and lobbying.

Messengers of the Right: A history of the conservative media landscape, beginning with talk radio (Clarence Manion, before the era of Rush Limbaugh), through periodicals like the National Review, and notable books, like God and Man at Yale. I'm sorry, but you don't know half as much as you think you do about American political history if you don't know who William F Buckley is. All of this walked, so Fox News could run.

Let Them Eat Tweets: A political synthesis of history, economics, and communication scholarship that posits wedge-issue-identity-politics as the method by which contemporary conservative parties drive their white working class bases away from class-based solidarity toward a party that serves only economic elites. That, Hacker and Pierson argue, is how you explain the escalation of billionaire oligopoly, rising economic inequality, and fanatic racism/other bigotries.

If you can understand these patterns and these histories, you'll begin to see why the GOP has nosedived into overtly fascist rhetoric, while STILL successfully courting voters who vote against their material economic interests.

There are no surprises here.

You can even see the ripples of that abroad. My parents watch the Canadian equivalent to the conservative channel and this summer were telling me about how “both parties are the same and Biden is sooooooo old”. They are people who would usually consider themselves aligned a bit left of the center (CANADIAN center). And yet they knew nothing of what Trump actually said or did at any point in this campaign or during his last term.

Two weeks ago, a firmly leftist friend, a queer person of colour, told me “but the democrats are financed by all the big evil corporations”. And then he named checked all the corporations that Biden and the DOJ have been raking over the coals because of their monopolies. And I was just like “you think AMAZON wants the dems to win??? You think FACEBOOK wants them to win??? GOOGLE??”

The propaganda is real and it’s everywhere.

#since moving here ​it is absolutely insane to me how little the average Canadian knows about current events#someone asked me last week what Gaza was @foreign-dorian

In 2016 we had a guy running for president in the US who asked "what's Aleppo?" when he was asked about a crisis in Syria. That wasn't even Trump, it was Gary Johnson. So, you know, at least the person you talked to wasn't running for prime minister.

recently learned that the "UNDERSTAND THE CONCEPT OF LOVE" sample from jet set radio future is legendary Black activist Kwame Ture denouncing the apartheid state of israel

hideki naganuma would later sample malcolm x in Wrapped in Black, the boss fight theme for sonic rush. in bomb rush cyberfunk he once again samples the same speech from concept of love, this time for his newest track DA PEOPLE.

remembering when the something awful forums made a word filter that changed the word "females" so it was surrounded by Ferengi emoji (we called em 'smilies' not emoji back in the day) so it looked like this:

because someone was sick of incels using the word to refer to women

no i don't want to use your ai assistant. no i don't want your ai search results. no i don't want your ai summary of reviews. no i don't want your ai feature in my social media search bar (???). no i don't want ai to do my work for me in adobe. no i don't want ai to write my paper. no i don't want ai to make my art. no i don't want ai to edit my pictures. no i don't want ai to learn my shopping habits. no i don't want ai to analyze my data. i don't want it i don't want it i don't want it i don't fucking want it i am going to go feral and eat my own teeth stop itttt

"You got any Top Gun flavour ? I have a fond memory of it"