I don’t really cross dress, but I have a pair of heels kicking around for a Halloween costume (Monty Python Lumberjack) and I occasionally trot that costume back out.

I basically went to payless (back when that existed, I guess the modern equivalent in probably mystery Amazon brand shoes) and found a pair that more-or-less fit. Staff was actually pretty helpful, apparently around October a lot of guys wandered into payless looking for heels for a Halloween costume. They pointed me right to where the biggest heels could be found.

I think getting a cheap pair was the right move, because they pretty quickly stretched out to better accommodate my feet. I have fairly wide feet even by male standards, and actually found them to be reasonably comfortable all things considered after they broke in (which didn’t take long, those shoes definitely weren’t designed for the stresses of a 200-whatever pound man moshing in them at a Halloween concert)

The harder part was trying to find a bra that even remotely fit my frame.

You know, it’s now occuring to me that I have absolutely no clue what Roblox actually is. It’s been around forever, I’ve been seeing gift cards for it in stores for I’m pretty sure well over a decade, I hear lots of talk about all of the dangers and how addictive it is for kids, etc.

But I haven’t the foggiest idea what the game is actually like. To the best of my knowledge I don’t think I’ve ever even seen a single screenshot of it, at least not one that was clearly labeled as being from Roblox.

And while I’m a childfree curmudgeon in my 30s, I do have a few friends with kids that I see with some regularity, and I’ve never heard any of them mention Roblox even in passing.

I feel like I’m in a really weird bubble of roblox-ignorance, I’m not exactly mad about it, but it feels weird that for as big as Roblox is supposed to be that I’ve never seen anyone talk about the actual game, just how big of a problem it is.

I think we’re going to need a little more context on who he is and how he’s using the word “goy”

It comes from Hebrew/Yiddish, so it’s a word used predominantly by Jewish people, and so not inherently antisemitic. It basically means non-jew, it’s roughly synonymous with the term “gentile” that you might be more familiar with if you’ve had a Christian upbringing.

How Jews use it of course varies a lot, plenty just use it without any particular deeper meaning, just a matter-of-fact statement that the person they’re referring to isn’t Jewish.

Some of course do use it with a bit of Malice if they value non-jews less highly than their fellow Jews.

I’ve also heard it used, usually somewhat jokingly, by Jews to refer to other Jews who aren’t acting in a way that they think is in accordance with Jewish customs. I remember one time my one Jewish friend who keeps kosher (kind of, he definitely bends the rules more than a bit) was teasing another Jewish friend who had ordered a bacon cheeseburger or something while we were out grabbing lunch, calling him a goy and lumping him in with the rest of the non-jews sitting around the table. It was all in good fun, just a bunch of guys joking around over a couple beers.

Again, I’m sure there’s some Jews out there who would do something like that and mean it as an actual insult.

If the person saying it isn’t Jewish themselves, that’s where you might have a case for their use being antisemitic.

I’m not Jewish, I could definitely see myself using goy or a handful handful of other jewish words and phrases I’ve picked up when I’m joking around with my Jewish friends. I might even call one of them a goy jokingly like in that bacon cheeseburger situation. Mostly though I’d probably use it to refer to myself, like if they were talking about, let’s say a Chanukah celebration, and I didn’t understand what they were talking about, I might tell them to need to explain it again in “goy” for me.

But if I’m not with friends that I have a good rapport with, I probably wouldn’t joke like that, I don’t want to give the wrong impression that I’m genuinely criticizing them for not being Jewish “enough,” as a non Jew I really don’t think it’s my place to be making that kind of judgement.

And I certainly wouldn’t be using it seriously to criticize Jews. I wouldn’t call Israeli Zionists goys (goyim I believe is actually the proper pluralization) based on their Zionist beliefs, there’s plenty of totally secular terms I can come up with to criticize them.

I could also see an antisemite using Jewish terms like goy in a mocking fashion, which, yeah that’s pretty antisemitic, basically the same thing as a white supremacist making fun of a black person for using AAVE.

And of course, depending on the person, the tone, how they’re using it, their target audience, etc. it could be totally non-problematic.

I work in 911 dispatch, so getting people to calm down, stop what they’re doing, and listen to me is kind of a big part of my job. Things are of course a bit different in-person than over the phone, but here’s generally how I’d approach something like this.

If you know their name, use it. A lot. People respond to their name, that’s kind of the whole reason names exist. It will get their attention which is half the battle.

Getting them to calm down from there is the other half, and it’s not easy, especially if you don’t speak their language. Body language and tone of voice goes a long way though.

Not that they’re going to understand you in this situation anyway, but remember that no one in the entire history of calming down has anyone ever actually calmed down after being told to calm down. Don’t even bother trying that.

Try to get them to take some deep breaths, use some gestures.

Your hospital really should have access to some sort of translation service, either humans on location there in the room with you who speak the language, or some kind of service like languageline (not plugging them specifically, I have a lot of complaints about some of their interpreters, they just happen to be who we use at work) that you can call up and get on speakerphone. Google translate and such are wonderful tools, but they’re not perfect and sometimes you really want that bit of a human touch. I’ve also occasionally had some great interpretors who will chime in with some helpful bits like “they’re saying’this’ but in our culture that usually really means ‘this’”

If you can find an excuse to hand them something, maybe some paperwork, that can also sometimes kind of create a little bit of a break in whatever they’re doing for you to work with. They’ll probably stop screaming for a second to look at what was just handed to them, and then you can try to work on something.

Vaŭ

In Esperanto

My computer is basically the same computer my wife built around 12 years ago, as she did upgrades over the last decade or so I just saved her old components and eventually stuffed them into a new box. It was a beefy rig when she built it, and still runs most of what I throw at it with (what I think is) pretty acceptable performance and settings.

So that old motherboard and processor aren’t windows 11 compliant and with the windows 10 end of life I decided it was time to make the switch. Don’t quite have the wiggle room in the budget for a major upgrade right now.

And truth be told, even if I were to do a major upgrade, I probably was looking at Linux anyway. I don’t like the AI bullshit and a lot of the other dumb crap Microsoft has been pulling with 11. I want to get away from the corporate overlords in general. I’ve always been pretty big on FOSS, so really it was just gaming that’s been holding me back and I felt like proton and such the state of gaming on Linux has finally reached a place I can be happy with.

And not for nothing, it’s free, and I’ve always felt like MS charges too much for windows. I’m a bit of a cheapskate, if I can save a buck I’m going to. The F in FOSS is a huge draw for me.

And I’ve had half-baked plans to turn this current rig into a home server/NAS whenever I get around to building a new rig, so that meant Linux was in the cards for it at some point anyway, and I might as well start getting my hands dirty with that now in preparation.

Google photos has a date tag attached to this of 9/10/2008

A whole lot of stuff has traveled with me through the years swapping SD cards from one phone to another, and eventually things getting backed up to the cloud, etc. this is probably the oldest thing I have saved that can count as a meme. I don’t know if that date is when I actually first found it, when it first somehow got backed up, if maybe that’s just from some metadata left over from whoever made the meme originally, or something else entirely

But that date does generally feel about right, and the humor feels about right for high school-aged me.

As far as terminal tutorials, so far the best I’ve found is LabEx, but I feel like it’s lacking in a lot of ways.

First of all it definitely feels designed to push you towards paying for a subscription. And while their pricing honestly isn’t too terrible, it’s more than I want to spend on this. Nothing against companies and people being paid for making a product but it feels a little against the FOSS spirit to me.

Second I’ve mostly been trying to use it on my phone and that experience is just kind of shitty. Personally I kind of want to learn in short bursts here and there throughout the day when I have downtime at work or whatever. If I have time to sit down in front of my computer it’s probably because I want to be doing something fairly specific with it and it’s probably not to just practice my terminal use, so a better phone experience would be great.

And finally, it just seems a bit over-engineered, at least for what I want to use it for. It seems like it’s spinning up a whole Linux VM with a desktop environment and such for me to interact with through my browser just for me to type stuff into a terminal and read their tutorial. It does have other courses and maybe all of that is more useful there, but it seems like a bit much for me.

Which kind of shows how easy it is to take certain things as “obvious.”

I’m a new convert to Linux. I played around with it a bit probably about 15 years ago, but never did much seriously with it. Finally bit the bullet about a week ago between the windows 10 EOL and deciding that Linux gaming is finally in a place I can live with.

I’m a reasonable tech-literate person, I’m no sys admin but I’m the family “guy who’s good with computers” I did a few semesters as a computer science student and was reasonably good at it before deciding to go in a different direction.

And while things are working just fine for most of my general computing needs, I feel like I’m in a bit of a weird place right now, kind of like I’m back to being a kid with my family’s first Compaq in the 90s. I can play games and do my homework and make my computer do some cool things, but I know there’s more cool stuff I can make it do but I don’t know how yet.

I have about 30 years of know-how and tips and tricks built up on how to make windows bend to my will, but I don’t have that for Linux yet, and it’s not exactly a great feeling.

And I feel like there’s sort of a gap in the Linux community to help the slightly-above-average-computer-person Linux-convert like me to build up to where they were as a windows user.

Like there’s a wealth of knowledge on choosing a distro and installing it, alternatives to common windows programs, etc.

And then a big gap

And then people who have a whole home computer lab, self-hosting everything, doing serious programming as a hobby, etc.

And in the middle are a bunch of forum posts where someone asks a question, and some kind of computer sage emerges from the ether, tells you to transcribe a magic spell into your terminal, and all your problems will be solved, then vanishes in a puff of smoke.

And don’t get me wrong, I’m glad those magical Linux wizards exist to fix my problems. But I have almost no idea what the hell what the magical commands they told me to run are actually doing.

And I’m slowly piecing some of it together, googling things as I go, and that’s a fine way to learn things, but it is slow and I wish there was a better way to power through learning some of this stuff without needing to go take a whole actual course on it. I think my ideal would be sort of a Duolingo-type app for terminal commands.

Also at the lower end of the spectrum, I feel like maybe there’s a need for sort of a basic tutorial program for the kind of people who are not computer people to learn the absolute basics. I feel like back in the 90s I encountered a few introduction-to-windows sort of programs that would walk you through “this is your start menu,” “here’s what click/double-check/right click/etc” means," “here’s how you turn your computer off” kind of stuff.

And while that kind of thing is almost insultingly basic for anyone who’s going to install Linux for themselves, I think that kind of hand-holding might be needed for some other people we might try to convert.

Also don’t get me wrong, I like doing stuff in the terminal and don’t want it to go anywhere, when I know what I’m doing it is really efficient, but that shit is straight-up intimidating for a lot of average and below-average computer people, not to mention how truly abysmal a lot of their typing skills are. I feel like a little less emphasis on the terminal and building out some more control panel -like GUI menus would go a long way to getting people to switch.

Maybe these sorts of resources exist and I haven’t found them yet. If they do please point me towards them. If they actually don’t exist, maybe one of those wise Linux sages will see this and take up the task of building it.

Married for 7 years, together for probably about 10 total

Can’t really think of a time we wouldn’t have had that sort of exchange.

She’s also been jokingly threatening me with divorce since we got married. I’m pretty sure we left the courthouse holding the receipt for our marriage license joking that we needed to hold onto it in case we needed it for a return. Still have it around somewhere, someday we’re gonna put it in a little shadowbox with “in case of irreconcilable differences break glass” stenciled on it.

I understand that oil isn’t just sitting around in big empty voids in the rock, and that those voids are full of gravel and such, and that we’re also injecting water and such into the wells to maintain pressure, etc.

But I’d be willing to bet (a small amount, maybe like $50 tops) that out of the thousands of oil wells we’ve drilled over the years, that through some quirk of geology, some void has opened up somewhere down there with just enough liquid oil and open space that you could probably get a kayak on it and paddle around in a small circle.

I’m thinking probably more like the size of a smallish above ground swimming pool, not a decent sized lake that would actually be worth paddling around on.

Of course there’s also the issue of the pressure at that depth, and the fact that any atmosphere down there is probably gonna be natural gas and not breathable air, so you’d probably have to do it in a hard diving suit

I put a more detailed explanation of what I did up in the original post, but I ended up needing to turn iommu on

Which sort of flipped things around so that the 3.0 ports no longer worked but the 2.0 ones did

And I had to make a small edit to get/default/grub

Thank you for your help!

I put a more detailed explanation of what I did up in the original post, but I ended up needing to turn iommu on

Which sort of flipped things around so that the 3.0 ports no longer worked but the 2.0 ones did

And I had to make a small edit to get/default/grub

And everything went off without a hitch from there

Thank you for your help!

From the gigabyte website, so hopefully this is the info you’re looking for

North Bridge: AMD 990FX South Bridge: AMD SB950

My google-fu definitely seems to be pointing to it being a IOMMU issue.

Not currently home with the computer, I’ll play with a couple settings when I get in and if it doesn’t get me anywhere I’ll definitely share that output

They’re directly on the motherboard

The ones on the front of the case are working, and I’m 99% sure they’re connected to a 3.0 header

I’m not currently home so not able to confirm that right now

I can’t offer a comparison with the other options, but I have a sofa baton U2, and I’m not really a fan. I haven’t spent too much time messing with it so maybe with a little extra setup it might work great, but the scroll wheel seems to skip around when trying to select different devices, a lot of buttons don’t seem to do quite what I’d expect no matter how I try setting it up, the IR seems to have a really narrow beam and is really picky about being pointed right at the device you’re trying to use it with, Bluetooth controls seem pretty unreliable, and I’ve never been able to get it to work work with my PC in a way that feels right.

I only judged people in a handful of cases

If you ordered fountain drinks instead of bottled sodas when we had both available, that’s kind of a dick move.

One lady once ordered a few cups of milk (in her defense, she did tell me when I delivered it that she was injured or her car was in the shop or something so it was an easy way for her to get milk without needing to go to the store. This was before grocery delivery really took off)

And I judged you if you gave a shitty tip or took too long to answer your door.

I’m also in the process of learning Esperanto (there’s actually a decent amount of us on Lemmy)

I don’t foresee it ever being particularly useful on its own, but it is a really easy language to learn, and I think it’s a great way to learn how to learn languages. I feel like after casually teaching myself it for a few years I’m a lot better prepared to learn another language somewhere down the road

There’s a few Esperanto clubs and such out there, I’m not a part of any of them so I can’t really comment on the community all that much.

One thing that does kind of interest me is Pasporta Servo, which is sort of a free Airbnb/couchsurfing thing for esperantists. Seems like that could be a cool way to travel around on the cheap and probably a good way to get more involved in the Esperanto community. Unfortunately most of my traveling is done with my wife and I haven’t been able to convince her to learn Esperanto with me so I doubt she’s gonna want to go hang out with me chatting with someone in a made up language in a foreign land.

Mostly I talk to my dog in it. She knows most of her basic commands in both English and Esperanto.

BotW and TotK are such weird games to me

They built these big beautiful worlds, and designed some really cool mechanics

And just kind of did nothing with them.

TotK was a bit better, but still fell pretty short.

Also it’s so weird that TotK is clearly a direct sequel to BotW, but there’s almost no actual continuity between the games. There’s a handful of characters that are missing without much of an explanation, and other characters from the previous game act as if you’ve never met them before. I get that for gameplay reasons you kind of have to start things over from square one in some ways, but it just felt weird.

And the weapon degradation never really felt fun to me. I feel like at the very least once you get the master sword and recharge it to its full power or whatever you should have that as an option that just doesn’t wear down, even if other weapons that do break might be better suited for the task.

And having to go out and farm a thousand different fish and master parts and whatever else to upgrade your armor is just bullshit.