Who was worse, George W. Bush or Donald Trump?
donuts @ donuts @kbin.social Posts 4Comments 673Joined 2 yr. ago

Worse for the world? Bush
I'll just leave this here:
Wait... you think Trump didn't commit war crimes?
We are a far cry from free travel between Gaza and the West Bank.
The likelihood of that is lower now than it's ever been.
Yeah...
The ultimate tragedy of the last few weeks is that the average Israeli will only be more radicalized against Palestine, while the average Palestinian will only be more radicalized against Israel. It's a perpetual cycle of anger and violence that has no end in sight, and I don't feel any hope for a better future for the region and the innocent people on either side of the conflict.
What should have happened, like yesterday, should be obvious to anyone with a brain and a heart: Hamas should free all of their hostages and turn over anybody who participated in the terrorist attack on Israeli civilians, and Israel should cease fire immediately, call all settlers back and return the Gaza borders back to what they were a month ago. Terrorism and genocide are inexcusable, and the simple fact is that both sides have the blood of the innocent on their hands, all because of the politics of greed.
I use Joplin and really like it. I sync it between my devices using nextcloud on my home server, but it seems like there are quite a few other options for syncing.
When your entire existence relies on exploiting the work of the people who are "under you", of course you want them to work harder, faster and more. They'd crack out the whip if they'd get away with it.
These rotten billionaires don't care about our little lives or how much we enjoy or very short time on this planet, they only care about maximizing share prices and filling their pockets with bonuses that the workers are earning for them.
Self-judgement; it sucks and is useless and generally bad for you.
Maybe you're judging yourself for not cooking, but a lot of otherwise functional people can't cook or simply don't want to after a busy or tiring day. Enjoy your easy dinner!
Maybe you're judging yourself for eating a cheap meal on your own, but not every day can be a big party or expensive feast. Don't compare yourself to other people, especially when so much of what people depict on social media is misleading or exaggerated. It's fine to eat on your own (loneliness is a separate issue) and it's good to save money or live within your means.
Maybe you're judging yourself for eating something that you know is low quality or unhealthy, but health and fitness are much more about long term behavior patterns than any single day. As long as we're trying to be active and eat healthy on a regular basis there's nothing wrong with occasional junk food.
Anyway, the point is this: if you feel bad or depressed about something as small as what you're eating for dinner, it might be a sign of deeper problems with depression and self-judgment. And if you find yourself judging yourself, it can be very helpful in my experience to really think about why you're doing it, whether it's a reasonable critique, and whether you'd judge someone else for doing the same thing in your shoes.
You probably wouldn't judge someone else for eating a microwave dinner, so why judge yourself?
Kid? Isn't he like 40?
Uh, yeah... So, basically I use an ubuntu:latest (LTS) distrobox container which has:
- Its own $HOME, specified using the
--home
parameter when making a distrobox container. - Wine-staging
- Yabridge
- Bitwig Studio 5 (the Linux .deb version, installed with dpkg to the default location)
- A whole bunch of Linux native plugins (like Modartt Pianoteq, installed wherever but then with the .so's symlinked into my /.vst dirs).
- A whole bunch of Windows plugins (like an old version of Kontakt, SampleTank, AudioModelling SWAM, MODO Drum/Bass, etc.), installing in the WINEPREFIXES that live in the distrobox container's $HOME. (I then use yabridge inside the container to bridge them all for Linux.)
- I think I also have Pipewire installed inside the audio production container, but I can't remember if that's necessary or not.
Finally, I use the distrobox-export command to export Bitwig Studio to my host system, so I can run it as you normally would, just hitting the start key and clicking on the Bitwig icon.
So it's kind of a complicated setup initially, but from day to day it's really easy to use. I just open Bitwig, load up whatever Linux or Windows VST (the Wine ones take a little longer to initialize that I'd like but it's not too bad), and just make music. :)
https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/usefultips.md#container-save-and-restore
I think I followed this. I think you have to do it through podman/docker (whichever your distrobox is using).
It almost just worked, but again I had to fix a couple of Wine symlinks to get all of my Windows VSTs working again... (I also had to reregister some VSTs in certain cases.)
Another unrelated but useful thing to look into wrt distrobox is distrobox-assemble, especially if you have a few different distrobox containers dedicated to different tasks. I could go on and on about this stuff, lmao.
This is seriously beyond fucking parody at this point, am I right?
Well, we clearly can't rely on some mass awakening and enlightenment of Republican voters to fix the problems of this country. Instead we're going to have to get the normal, sane and reasonable people of the country to overpower them at the voting booth.
I've heard good things about Studio1, but I haven't tried it myself.
Oh yeah, and speaking of Distrobox...
I also happen to have all of my audio production software (DAWs, Plugins, Wine, Yabridge, etc.) living in an Ubuntu-based distrobox container, which has the added benefit of allowing me to export save the entire container and drop it mostly painlessly onto a different machine. It's really cool to be able to pick up my entire music making environment and bring it with me, but it might be a bit overboard for some people. I don't have much of a choice other than to use distrobox since I run Fedora Silverblue as my daily driver. lol
It doesn't work flawlessly, because I sometimes have to fix some important Wine symlinks that break when doing this.
Yeah! Don't sleep on it! I can say without reservation that yabridge is essential for me. :)
The basic yabrigde workflow is:
- Install wine-staging and yabridge on your distro of choice.
- Use wine to install all of your Windows VSTs somewhere. (I prefer to use a separate WINEPREFIX for each plugin maker, but that's probably not fully necessary). If you don't know much about Wine this can be a bit hard to wrap your mind around, but that's another story.
- Then you run
yabridgectl add
where all of your various Windows VST dll files are (instead of whatever Wine prefix you installed them in). - And then when you run
yabridgectl sync
yabridge will create a .so bridge library for each of your Windows VSTs and spit them out into~/.vst3
or whatever. - Finally you point your DAW of choice to
~/.vst3
or whatever, and your WIndows VSTs should hopefully show up and work just like they do on Windows (with the usual caveat of Wine being pretty great but not always perfect).
Sadly there's no good GUI frontend for it (that I know of at least), but as far as CLI tools it's pretty easy to learn and use. Also, you may want to make sure that you've got realtime privilages setup on your system, and you can find guides to doing that in the yabridge wiki.
But yeah, I've got a bunch of Windows VSTs from Native Instruments and IK Multimedia and a bunch of others too, and they are work very well when bridged these days, so I'm able to use Linux for music without sacrificing anything.
I do gaming and music production on Linux without much issue at all these days.
Most games are pretty easy to work with these days thanks to Steam, Lutris, and Bottles.
As for audio, there are 4 key ingredients to my setup: Pipewire, Bitwig Studio, Wine and Yabridge.
Pipewire is pretty easy to use and works in a low latency setting just fine, so imo you no longer have to juggle PulseAudio + JACK.
Bitwig isn't open source, but it's fantastic and inspiring and supports Linux natively. They've also been great about stuff like the new open source CLAP plugin format.
I've found that Wine (staging) does a pretty reasonable job handling any Windows VST I've thrown at it, but it's a bit of work getting it setup, especially if you're new to the concept.
And finally yabridge is a great CLI tool for turning all of your Windows plugin .dlls into Linux .so, that you can easily use in your DAW of choice.
So if you want to do music production on Linux then definitely check out Bitwig and Reaper (along with Ardour, like you mentioned). And personally, I think that if you have a decent chunk of Windows VSTs it's worth investing a bit of time learning how to getting them working in Wine and then bridged with yabridge.
Shameless plug, but if you're into retro gaming at all then come check out kbin.social/m/fpgagaming.
It's the spiritual successor to my old somewhat popular subreddit of the same name where we cover topics related to programmable logic-based retro game hardware. If using bespoke (i.e.: Analogue Pocket) or open source (i.e.: MiSTer) hardware for high-accuracy emulation of retro gaming systems is something that you might be into, then fpgagaming is the new place on the fediverse to go. :)
Mainly just emotionally growing up along with developing a general self-awareness that being a sore loser makes you look pathetic.
I used to get way too mad playing online fighting games like Street Fighter 4, but thankfully I got over it by realizing a few things:
- I wouldn't dream of reacting that way to losing in person, because I know that it's an embarrassing way for a grown ass man or woman to react to losing a game. It's fine to play games competitively and anyone who does knows that it can be frustrating to lose. But you only end up losing twice if you make yourself look like a petty little shithead. I'm guessing you're playing online games, but just ask yourself if you would act the same way in an offline setting--most people wouldn't, so you probably shouldn't.
- You're probably losing because you're doing a bad job, and lashing out at yourself, your opponent or your teammates robs you of any chance to learn or improve.
I'm mostly a fan of fighting games and solo RTS, but I've played my fair share of CS, Apex and other team-based games. Solo games are simple. If you're playing a fighting game and you're getting hit by stupid annoying shit, it's your fault for hitting buttons at the wrong time, for being on your back foot or not knowing how to block, plain and simple. If you're playing an RTS and you get cheesed with a canon rush or some gimmicky shit, that's also something that you need to be able to deal with.
If you're playing a team game you might be tempted to flame your teammates for losing a match, but you either need to play with people who have the same level of skill and dedication as you, become good enough alone to carry a team of randoms, or simply care less about winning and focus on your own individual performance. Don't waste your time and energy being a dick to your teammates whether you think they're bad or not, if you're not playing on an established team then you don't really have any business taking that game super seriously and it reflects more badly on you than being good at a game. If you're playing with random people, expect random results.
- If you care about actually being good, then long-time improvement is much more important than short-term wins and losses. Nobody can win every time and just because you lose once doesn't mean you're bad. Conversely, it's just as easy to get a fraudulent win off of a fluke or bad play from your opponent(s). So, if you really want to be good at a game you have to have other, better metrics for how well you're actually playing.
If I'm playing Street Fighter for example, instead of focusing on individual wins and loses in a single play session, I'd much rather focus on improving some aspect of my gameplay that I know is weak. Maybe I don't hit my anti-airs enough, so I want to focus on punishing jumps as much as possible. Maybe I'm not taking advantage of opening my opponent up enough, so I want to focus on consistently hitting bigger combos. I find that setting a goal for myself other than "just win as much as possible", helps me to keep my head in the right place while actually improving as a player.
So, TLDR: If you wouldn't act like a little bitch about losing in person, then you shouldn't do it at home either because it's a bad look and you're making yourself a bigger loser for no reason. If you lash out at your opponent or teammates for losing instead of reflecting on your own performance, then you're just doing yourself a disservice when it comes to getting better. And finally, winning and losing doesn't mean shit compared to actually making sure you're playing well, so change your metrics for success to things that you know are more meaningful.
More of that please.
Regardless of what happens to him and whether he's brought to justice, let's at the very least have more of that.
I'm not sure how you can claim with a straight face that Trump caused 0 economic crises when we're still in the process of recovering from a economic crisis tied to a massively bungled initial pandemic response. Remember how Trump and his cronies came out every day for about 4 months and pretended that there was no pandemic, that it was under control, and that it would magically disappear by easter 2020? That cost the world a lot of money and, much more importantly, a lot of human lives.
As for war and war crimes, Trump removed all transparency around drone strike operations that had been in place during the Obama administration, so...
Second source: https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/trumps-secret-rules-for-drone-strikes-and-presidents-unchecked-license-to-kill