Pizzasgood

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.

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?

I heard both growing up. To me they were just synonyms for the same game. Well, almost the same. Duck Duck Gray Duck is a little more fun because you assign colors to all of the ducks, so you have to pay a little more attention. But when not actually playing the game, the two versions live in the same pigeon hole within my brain.

True. However, thanks to the magic of virtual machines you can run multiple instances of arch on each device! Just be careful you don’t run too many overlapping arches or they’ll transform into domelinux and the HOA will fine you for architectural mismatch.

That does rule out the creators, yeah.

When you say it happens instantly, do you mean that you instantly get a “Post deleted” notification of some sort, or just that you hit “Reply” and the post never shows up?

I ask because there’s a blog I comment on sometimes that occasionally pretends like it’s posting my comment, but then the comment doesn’t appear. My first assumption was that I was encountering some kind of moderation filter, but it turns out I wasn’t. That blog just has poorly designed error handling. If I take too long to write my comment, the session expires. That’s fine and normal, but the problem is that the blog software doesn’t bother to warn me before posting, and it doesn’t explain itself after the post fails, so it creates confusion. Once I realized what was going on though, I realized I could just hit “Back” to recover and copy the comment I wrote, reload the page to get a fresh session, paste the comment, and hit “Reply.” Works totally fine that way.

Maybe YouTube is doing something similar and dropping attempted comments due to expired tokens or shoddy networking? It would explain why it seems so random and nonsensical.

If it really is bad auto-mod systems, there probably isn’t much you can do about it besides complain to YouTube. Any workaround that would be easy for you to use would be equally easy for the spammers and trolls to use, and is therefor not likely to remain a usable workaround for long.

As far as I know, none of my (very few) comments have been deleted yet, so I’m curious how that works and how you know who was responsible. Do they notify you when it happens and explain who made the decision?

Don’t ease into it at all. Wait for a moment where it would be funny, then go whole hog with it. Treat it like a joke… but then just keep going. Never go back. Don’t even acknowledge there is a back. Pretend this is how you’ve always talked and they’re insane if they think otherwise.

The article’s title presents this in a misleading way. The bill in question wouldn’t prevent people from using their preferred names and pronouns. What it would do is prohibit the government from spending federal funds to implement or enforce any rules or recommendations encouraging its employees and contractors to respect those names and pronouns.

So in other words this is an attempt at protecting hate-speech, not at restricting free-speech. Shitty, but probably not unconstitutional.

Twas a tubular time.

He sees you when you’re crashing,
He knows you’ve locked your brakes.
He’s there when you back into folks
And when your lead fuel gives you shakes.

So, until you buckle up,
Until you burn clean,
Until you limit drunks
And embrace the green:

Grandpa Clause is saving your Ford

I don’t know if this is the case for other people, but I have to be careful about using slurs in any context because the more I see or use a word the more likely it is to slip out in other situations. I’d never purposefully use a slur on somebody, but my word-choices are largely running on automatic when I’m angry. I just push intent at my mouth and then my subconscious picks out words matching that intent and feeds them into my tongue. If I push the intent “strong targeted insult” into that system, a slur could match those parameters and make it out my mouth before my conscious mind can catch and filter it. Entirely avoiding using slurs, and ideally avoiding even thinking slurs helps to avoid this happening (both by avoiding them entering my vocabulary-supply in the first place, and by building the mental reflex to immediately drop them like they’re hot if they do pop into my brain).

A more society-level reason to discourage people from publicly using slurs even in discussions about them is to make it harder for bigots to stage “discussions” as excuses to loudly use slurs while in earshot of the people they’d like to use those slurs at.

People also get paranoid about automated (or braindead) moderation, or trolls who shame people based purely on the fact that a quick and context-free search of their post history turns up N uses of a slur. It’s often easier to just dodge these kinds of problems than to fight them.

Wrap it in the wire, then spin one of them. That part’s important! Won’t do anything if you don’t spin it.

It doesn’t say “a female behind.” That would be fine. It says “a female’s behind,” using the noun form of female to refer to a woman. Normal people don’t refer to a woman as “a female” outside of technical contexts like medicine or science. In casual speech it comes across as dehumanizing to call a person “a female,” and this is a speech pattern that is primarily used by misogynists, especially the incel variety.

The preferred phrasing would have been “a woman’s behind.”

That said, giving the person a permaban over this seems pretty excessive unless there’s additional context.

I’m one of the few here who seem to understand how people actually communicate in the real world

Nah. People in the real world don’t use the noun phrase “a female” when referring respectfully to women. They say woman, lady, girl, gal, or something along those lines. The only times a woman is called “a female” are in technical contexts or when the speaker is a misogynist.