Getting involved in some local leftist groups has been the biggest infusion of hope in this respect for me. They’ve gotten two open socialists elected to nearby city councils (and are working on a 3rd!), run some successful salting / strike support campaigns, and are a growing problem for a local big business that I shan’t name because things are ongoing.

Talking to some of the older heads there, tons of recent events have been followed by waves of people signing up. The Bernie campaign, Trump’s presidency, the George Floyd protests, the recent overturning of Roe. Every one of these has moved more and more people to action. I won’t pretend to know if it’s enough to make meaningful change on a national / global scale, but it’s been good for my outlook on life to see it happen near me, especially in the American south.

Silly me, I thought you were trying to make a picture of an animal with a gun!

The receiver is backwards and there are two ejection ports.

In the US, there is a history of white performers using blackface to play caricatures of black people, leaning hard on racist ethnic stereotypes. From Wikipedia:

The minstrel show, also called minstrelsy, was an American form of theater developed in the early 19th century.[1] The shows were performed by mostly white actors wearing blackface makeup for the purpose of comically portraying racial stereotypes of African Americans. There were also some African-American performers and black-only minstrel groups that formed and toured. Minstrel shows stereotyped blacks as dimwitted, lazy, buffoonish, cowardly, superstitious, and happy-go-lucky.[2][3] Each show consisted of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music performances that depicted people specifically of African descent.

It’s Lemmy. We’ve got to have at least one “America Bad” comment per thread, no matter how irrelevant.

This video is my Atlas Shrugged in the sense that it’s far too long and inexplicably has crossover appeal despite being far worse than everything else I’ve ever made.

My sides are in orbit.

Relevant XKCD

GET IN HERE BOYS, KONSI IS BACK

I also do not have a bachelor’s degree, and here are the things that have helped me:

1. Certifications. I have CompTIA Security+ and Scrum Alliance Certified Scrum Master. Both can be had for a couple hundred dollars, both tests can be passed after a couple weeks of studying. YMMV on how much recruiters care about that kind of thing, but I think it helps show you know what you’re talking about when it comes to tech stuff.

2. List non-work projects on your resume. I have one of my projects from college (before I dropped out), an open-source video game mod I contributed to, and a helper GUI I wrote for a tabletop game all on my resume. A couple hours spent writing an automated D&D character sheet & fixing a bug in a Rimworld mod have landed me a few interviews.

3. Exaggerate. I count time spent using Java in highschool / college as years of Java experience, even though it wasn’t super rigorous or in-depth. Look, companies are gonna exaggerate their benefits while trying to get the most value out of you for the least salary. AFAIC, it’s fair game to, uh, “advertise” yourself to them.

Java. It’s familiar, it’s the one I use most at my job, and I’m not in love with any other language enough to choose something less pragmatic.

This is really cool! I like the first person perspective: very flavorful, makes the rules fun to read.

Ugh, yes!

I feel like there’s kind of an unspoken social pressure to be more or less non-chalant about most conversation topics. Like you’ve gotta know that someone is cool before you can let your guard down and show that you really care about something without it coming across as off-putting for whatever reason.

But not politics! Caring a lot about politics is responsible! And if you’re to a point where you’re already talking to someone about politics, it usually feels like that pressure to be chill has already passed anyway.

I did some numbers because it sounded fun.

Earth’s diameter is 41.804 million feet. I’m not sure if you meant that or Earth’s circumference when you said “Earth’s surface”, but I figure either one is gonna get us a really big number.

The first result I can find for string comes in a pack that weighs 2.89oz and contains 328 feet of string.

Using that as our standard, you would need 127,452 packs of string (assuming you find a way to perfectly attach them without wasting any length on knots).

127,452 * (2.89 / 16) = 23,021 lbs of string total.

So if we ignore the string stretching, compressing, or breaking, you’d only need to be able to pull 11ish tons of string to ring the bell!

EDIT:

Just for fun: Assuming the motion of the string travels at the speed of sound (I have no idea if it actually would, it just sounds right), there would be about 10.5 hours between you pulling the string and the bell ringing on the other side.

Sounds like something a nice bedroom would offset.

Tools that use a GUI are just as good (if not better) than their CLI equivalents in most cases. There’s a certain kind of dev that just gets a superiority complex about using CLI stuff.

Googling something is probably the most efficient way to find an answer, in the same way that flavorless nutrient shakes are probably the most efficient way to fuel your body. Asking questions and conversing about the answers is fun. It’s madness to abandon an entire genre of human conversation just because some search engine exists.