I’m sure he would say think you by cheeping sweetly, then hissing like an asthmatic snake.

I should make him pay rent!

Yes, I work from home, but he’s been to workplaces before, and nothing so boring as a simple office. My wife got him as a chick in college, and he still needed a little bit of syringe feeding, so for a week or two she took him to the restaurant where she was a server and got her manager to put him in the business office away from any food prep areas. I’ve known him since he was around 5, and I’m not entirely sure whether my being able to get him to fly to me made her jealous or made her love me more. Maybe both. :-)

He’s finally, in the last year or so, visually showing his age just a bit, though he’s still got the energy to molt and grow new feathers, and he’s also still loud and an active climber, although he doesn’t like to come out of his cage anymore, even when the door is open. “Flying” is also more “falling with style” these days, but he gets quite the attitude when he needs help to get back to the cage. I feel pretty good that we’ve still got a year or more with him, though you never really know with birds. I’m just glad his vain little self has decided to grace us with his presence for so long.

The best moment in our current house was the day a local hawk caught sight/ear of him through the cracked-open window, then perched on that black fence you can just see in the background, and finally lazily swooped in for an easy meal, only to thump into the “force field” of glass. Hawky boi was fine after a few minutes resting back on the fence, but I wouldn’t have thought you could identify “WTF” as a bird emotion before that day. He’s returned once, though he didn’t try the swoop again.

I mean yes, in a certain sense mbin is exactly how open source is supposed to work when things go sideways: fork the code, change the name, leverage the original work, leave Ernest in peace, whatever he’s dealing with.

Probably a nest up in the corner of the bus stop. The only time I’ve ever been dive-bombed was by some swallows when they had a nest up in the corner of the house’s porch.

Yup. I know cats can do better roaming free than most pets, but that doesn’t mean it’s safe for them, and it’s certainly not safe for the local bird population.

I mostly play older games on my Ryzen 5 2400g with 16gb of RAM and an RX 580 I bought off a crypto miner, though I did manage to get Starfield running at 1080P in Win10 with a framerate and detail level that doesn’t make me want to gouge my eyes out. Still, I think I should be pretty undemanding for the current state of Linux gaming, and I’m just about ready to bail on Windows but haven’t yet. Currently dual booting with Kubuntu.

Beyond a few stubborn games, I have Windows CAD software I think I could run in a VM with maybe 8GB of RAM and access to my GPU. What’s the easiest way for a motivated amateur to get that set up? Having come up with MS-DOS, I am comfortable with a CLI conceptually, and I can copy and paste commands like a mofo, but I generally don’t know the exact use and flags well enough to do much on my own beyond apt and mkdir. :-)

Harness for walks, collar for ID.

I’d be all for that, and I’m on several. That scene has so many people on Discord though, which is disheartening because Discord is awful.

He suggested that the company might experiment with paywalled subreddits as it looks to monetize new features. “I think the existing, altruistic, free version of Reddit will continue to exist and grow and thrive just the way it has,” Huffman said. “But now we will unlock the door for new use cases, new types of subreddits that can be built that may have exclusive content or private areas, things of that nature.”

Frankly, it sounds like he wants to take on OnlyFans, or more prosaically, Patreon? I guess? I suppose as a platform to host paid interactions with people who think they have unique content and interesting takes, Reddit’s as good as any, but the upside seems limited here.

So I still hang out on reddit a bit, mostly for mechanical keyboards and sports stuff, and they are very clearly letting old.reddit, and therefore RES along with it, die on the vine. You have to pop over to new reddit to do certain administrative things, and you (or at least I) can only upload a single picture on a post, and you have to use the new interface to upload a gallery. Clicking on images now often takes you to a weird new-interface landing page instead of the image itself or a page with the old interface. I think they’re going to erode the functionality until people give up and then say, “whelp… nobody was using it! Time to pull the plug!”

At which point I’m probably done. Then, Dystopia is almost the last iOS app standing but I don’t think they’re updating it much, so I’m probably out if/when they go too.

I’ve sort of accepted as a middle aged man with middle aged friends and senior citizen relatives that being tracked across mainstream social media is a thing that will be in my life, so it’s not even ideological, really. Reddit is just a lot less pleasant to use on the new interfaces, with the new monetization mindset, and doesn’t have the “killer app” of my actual friends and family, so it needs to be a pleasant experience and community, and not feel like I’m navigating a bot-farm ad-soaked beatdown every time I use it.