Run? Or perhaps more like crawl...

I'm talking to like minded people overseas about preparing resources to help at-risk people evacuate the United States. I'm also accumulating an emergency fund and arming myself. I will continue to masquerade as a cis white dude so I can move mostly unimpeded. I plan to help people get to New England as a staging point--it will remain RELATIVELY less dangerous than most other parts of the country here--where they might have a chance of SURVIVING LONG ENOUGH to cobble their shit together enough that they can legally get overseas from here without violating a visa and getting deported back to this shithole.

I will also continue attempting to practice the art of not tipping off the enemy by giving them any warning that I might be a threat to them. I must swaddle myself in the flayed skin of civility. I must smile politely and patiently to their faces. I must lull them into feeling safe around me. I must wait until their back is turned. And then I can personally drag them to hell by the neck. Hopefully when nobody else will witness it.

There needs to be fewer fascists in America. One way or another. I'd rather see them convinced rationally to peacefully change their minds and stop being fascists. If they remove that option, well, they get lie in the beds they've shat.

some were! The rest were useful idiots--just totally unwitting dupes who had no idea who they were REALLY working for. The groups that handled transportation and logistics took "donations" as "non-profit" organizations but the Koch brothers absolutely did appoint individuals to set it up on their behalf AND provided basically all of the funding. The organizers themselves or the people feeding instructions to them were either class traitors if they knew the resources were coming from one source OR they weren't even legitimate members of the working class in the first place but only pretended to be so as to blend in with their marks.

Hmmm. Actually maybe it can be leveraged.

There should perhaps be a default instance that it funnels everyone into but makes a "power user" option available from a drop down where they can CHOOSE an instance. Make it an opt-in thing instead of a mandatory hurdle.

If they don't like the way the default instance is managed (content moderation, defederation) they can think "oh wait, there's a solution for this! Well, now that I know what I'm getting into it's not intimidating anymore"

Mastodon needs this too.

...

Mastodon needs this ESPECIALLY.

Linux devs will NEVER suffer kernel level anticheat, so all games that require it will refuse to run. This is more of a problem with gaming industry culture at large, really. But it's still only going to affect people who use Linux at the end of the day.

The tea party, however, turned out to be an entirely artificial astroturfed "movement" that got its funding from the Koch brothers. They only came to exist because they were deemed a potentially profitable investment to the one percent. Same goes for Kerry getting "swiftboated". It was always about money.

I have mint running on my laptop now.

Pro tip for anyone who wants to try Linux and maybe attempt to set up dual boot with Windows:

TURN OFF BITLOCKER ENCRYPTION IN WINDOWS FIRST.

IF you don't, here's what happened to me:

Mint live USB instance booted easily at first. I started the install process and selected dual boot. Mint setup then proceeded to prompt me to enroll a MACHINE OWNER KEY... And then realized that bitlocker encryption would prevent it from setting up dual boot.

It said, to paraphrase, "exit mint setup, log back into Windows, disable bitlocker, then you can come back and install"

Well that was a fucking lie because YOU CANNOT GET BACK INTO MINT!

WHY? Because mint FORGOT the MOK!

When you try to get back into mint from the boot selection menu, it says

Something has gone seriously wrong: import_mok_state() failed: Not Found

the upshot is that you computer will never let mint live USB session ever boot again UNLESS you disable secure boot in BIOS and rename grub to mmx64.efi in the ISO image.

And if you DO those things chances are mint will never present you with the option to detect and set up dual boot with you extant windows instance ever again.

I went ahead and nuked my windows 11 instance on my laptop because it was being a bitch and clearly was never going to be a good neighbor to mint. I have no major regrets because mint is nice and I like it. It just didn't turn out how I would've ideally intended. But one way or another Windows 11 HAD TO GO. So, in the broad sense, I wanted to switch to mint... And I have! All good.

I could swear this shit is like the plot from The Producers. They've monetized their incompetence and realized that they can make more money from losing elections than from winning. They collect billions in donations from desperate people and then launder it, squandering it on ineffectual "vote blue" spam while awarding lucrative no bid consultancy contracts with friendly party aristocracy insiders for massive kick backs and "speaking fees".

Kamala "I'm Speaking" Harris never intended to do anything OTHER than speaking. Seems the democrat establishment doesn't want any of us remembering that TALK IS CHEAP.

Better get fucking used to it bluedogs.

it happened with etcher, and then continued to happen with rufus. i didn't even try dd flash mode at first.

what's crazy is, it WORKED ONCE. ONCE!

I almost wonder if windows somehow detected that another OS ran on the silicon and said "ohhhh no you fucking don't, FUCK YOU ONLY I GET TO BE YOUR OPERATING SYSTEM!!!"

... okay so uh

i'm probably gonna have to go somewhere more help-focused and immediate than this but

something weird happened.

i bought a brand new USB drive to act as my linux mint boot media and flashed the iso onto it.

it booted into the temporary instance easily! instantly! I started to install thinking i could just set up dual boot with the extant windows instance.

well... it got to the point where it said "hey wait you have to disable secureboot or you have to reformat your entire windows installation"

okay maybe i want to check ONE MORE TIME to see if there's anything in this windows instance that I still want.

so i halt the linux mint installation process and go back into windows. I take one last catalogue of stuff i'd want to reference later, and then try to boot back into the linux mint live session straight from the usb stick

.... nope.

it says 'something has gone terribly wrong' and 'failed to load UEFI' or something

but that's not the thing that really spooked me because I thought I could go back into windows, reformat the USB key, and just re-flash the linux mint iso and start over from scratch

that's all background stuff, here's the important crazy thing:

the USB key is now reading that it only has a size of FIVE. MEGABYTES. FIVE.

EVEN IF I TRY TO REFORMAT IT, IT STILL IS CONVINCED IT'S ONLY FIVE MEGABYTES

the linux mint iso can't even FIT on it now

i can't even reflash it

i ... but ... how do i even ...

WAT

yeah that ancient Sony Vaio is loooong gone. it was manufactured in 2008 or something and was a hand me down from my aunt. we haven't had it since like 2021

but i do have a laptop outside my main rig and I'm gonna try booting mint off an external drive just to try it out and see how i like the feel again!

i appreciate the encouragement ^_ you know, maybe. I'm haunted by this fear (I try to tell myself it's an irrational one) that attempting to get into linux now would mess things up for me and that i'd end up stranded and unable to get back but ... mint is admittedly VERY APPROACHABLE... hm. Maybe I can drop by staples and buy a spare thumbdrive, put a mint boot image on it, and try it on my battlestation today.

i tried mint on an old laptop for a little while and it was nice. i'm thinking of adopting linux for daily-driving when windows 10 stops being supported entirely. But i'm considering going with Bazzite when that time comes, maybe...

If someone accused you of being an internal combustion engine and their only supporting evidence was posting a wikipedia article about internal combustion engines it would be equally as irrelevant as you pointing at someone, saying "You're a tankie!" and then posting the wikipedia article about tankies.

I'm not gonna be equipped to make a nuanced and detailed take right now but in my experience hexbears are alright, fun to talk to, I can learn things from them, and at worst they're spicy.

what works for me is quietly telling one person that i'm leaving, just in case anyone notices, with the understanding that i don't expect anyone to notice.

I realized shortly after I posted and before I even saw your response that I was not being rational. I apologize.