Notices by Draken BlackKnight (drakenblackknight@mastodon.online)

@cwebber
Government's around the world have been told for decades that there is no such thing as a backdoor that only The Good Guys™ can access. Salt Typhoon proved this.

@tek
Anyone who owns an incEl Camino should be grateful no one's sabotaging them yet.

@nateb @tek
I'm not broken up over this, but this isn't the way. If we had meaningful privacy legislation (which won't happen, Schumer's daughters work for Big Tech), the gubbmint could legitimately block access in the US for everything ByteDance, Meta, the deadbirdsite, Google, Microshit, crApple, Amazon, et. al. does on an hourly basis.

@pluralistic connects Lars Ulrich's bullshit 25 years ago to today's surveillance media.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/14/contesting-popularity/#everybody-samba

@tek
A few years back...
Someone else: "Are you okay? I heard it was snowing pretty heavily in New York!"
Me: "Not here."
SE: "I just saw it on the news that it's snowing in Buffalo!"
Me: "Buffalo's at least 7 hours away from my place by train not including commute time to Penn Station."
SE: "...oh."

@tek
I keep hearing stories about people getting tired of "Oh, you're in SF? I'm going to be in LA for the weekend, we should hang out!" It'll take around 6 hours to drive from LA to SF, and it's roughly the same distance from NYC to Raleigh, NC.

@tek @nateb
Oof. At least the ships had internet access when I was in.

@tek @nateb
Ouch. I'm glad I got out while Clinton was still President.

@tek @nateb
THAT sounds exactly like the Eisenhower. Every other fucking week the XO wanted to field day the ship. It got to be a fucking joke that he'd want the ship looking good in the event it ever goes down.

@tek @nateb
Yeah. The Navy in particular seems to be magnetic to that type. The ones who get "dear John" letters in the middle of deployment and then end up having to keep reenlisting because they wouldn't otherwise be able to afford alimony (this actually happened to my squadron's CO).

@tek @nateb
I wish I could say that sounded like the Stennis (I was airwing so I was on a different carrier every 2 years when I was in) but the CO tried to have fun every once in a while. Didn't help we were stuck in the fucking Gulf for 4 months because Clinton swore up and down Saddam was hiding WMDs (sound familiar?).

@tek @nateb
The card I got was not only not laminated but also a miniature version of the certificate.

By the way, it's also possible to order replacements of the certificates if you can prove you were on the ship when it crossed the line.

@nateb @tek
That certificate looks bland. This is the one I was issued when I crossed the line on the Stennis in 1998.
https://www.tiffanypublishing.com/certificates/shellback/

@tek
Linux Mint, hands down. It's basically Ubuntu without Snap, and high end games run with only a slight stutter (it DOES have to run on a compatibility layer, after all).

If the games on Steam either crash or refuse to load at all, right-click on the Steam icon and select "run with dedicated GPU."

@tek
I don't know. Joining a drum circle cult after being infected with a Sumerian ur-virus seems preferable to living in this cyberpunk dystopia.

@thegibson @_elena
I've been trying to get my friends on Fedi for a while now because it soon won't be just the future, it'll be the only viable option that respects free speech, data ownership, and digital autonomy. I just feel like I'm on the Cerritos of Zion-based ships looking for people ready to unplug - I get razzed, but I keep on with the mission.

@pluralistic
It doesn't say "laser pointers."

@thegibson @tek
“If you are the smartest person in the room, then you are in the wrong room.” – Confucius

@catsalad
Having remembered who feeds them, the cats have proven themselves to be effective weapons against the Terminators.

@futurebird @llewelly
English does not "borrow" from other languages, it follows them down dark alleys, knocks them on the head with a blackjack, and rifles through their pockets for loose grammar and words.