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danceswithcrows

@crow202.com

110 followers 8 following 1.7K posts

Penguin-head, staff for a house panther, maintain a meme archive at https://crow202.com/2025/ , Farker, SCIENCE!..., whiskey, gyros, beer, and computers. Have snark, will travel.

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 6d

In many ways, Kull the Conqueror was Robert E. Howard's prototype or first draft for Conan. So it makes sense that they'd share similar themes and/or villains. Still a bit lazy of 1980s movie people though.

danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 7d

You need to have cattle, wheat, and tomatoes involved for most variants of burgers and pizza I know about. TomatoWheatCow™ is still a fictional product in 2025, though Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth invented cultured meat for 1953's The Space Merchants.

danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 7d

The Great Slow Kings, a short story Roger Zelazny wrote in 1963, takes place over decades. Some teachers could improve the profession by leaving it.

danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 8d

It'd probably run under Wine, given how old the game is. archive.org/details/3-d-... , extracting it followed by "wine Pinball.exe" worked though sound did not—I have a video paused in 1 tab though, should close that and see if it helps.

danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 10d

I read Star Surgeon 40 years ago, it's neat it's public domain in the USA. tl;dr: Humans in the setting developed better medical systems than most aliens and medicine is humanity's hat. Book follows an alien who's trying to become a surgeon, his struggles with prejudice, and his medical career.

danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 12d

This kind of makes sense. Have the initial VFS be <= 2M, if it gets bigger, separate individual parts into files that could be cached? IDK, this problem is too fuzzily characterized ATM for me to analyze it in fullness.

danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 12d

A modern x86_64 can read 1M of data quite quickly. Is this local, or remote? Disk is faster than network, usually. How complex will the VFS become? If it's always going to be simple, you'll be fine; if it could get quite complex, future-proofing may be a good idea. YMMV.

danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 12d

Some comic strips (Bloom County, Little Nemo, Thimble Theater*) lived their glorious day and died. Some others seem poised to shamble on zombie-like forever. The former is probably a kinder fate.

* Introduced Popeye, though not for a few years.

danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 12d

How many Dust Puppies are in the average computer, though?

The Dust Puppy from User Friendly, a small round black fuzzball with big eyes and feet, in an ASCII-art rendition.

danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 13d

Twitter has been a shitshow for 2.5 years. BlueSky has fewer bots, fewer spammers, and fewer idiots, which is why I try to encourage everyone to adopt it. YMMV.

danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 13d

literaturepage.com/read/mobydic... There's a lot going on here. But it's really freaking cool. www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2701 since it's now public domain.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville: Chapter 113 (continued) - The Literature Page

literaturepage.com

danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 13d

Biology does so many fascinating things. The Fine Article says that most spiders of this species are either male or female though. They got lucky finding this variant, I guess.

danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 13d

This is a sad commentary on the state of academic freedom. Students need to learn about all kinds of topics, including icky or controversial ones.

danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 13d

Creative writing takes more effort to grade, and most people will not be doing it for a job. I'd guess that's why it was soft-pedaled. Make the effects explicit, the internet is bad at inferring things.

danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 13d

I attended private school for a few years (K-2) and it was probably better than the public schools of Austin, TX in the 1980s. The school was quite liberal and had scholarship programs so not all the students were from rich families. Public from 3-12, no worries. YMMV.

danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 13d

Why not both? Because 2 packages of ramen is too much food to eat for dinner. I drive a computer for a living, so I don't need to eat massive quantities.

danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 14d

Chicken or Birria? You can Change My Mind! (Leaning towards birria, but your comments can affect my dinner!)

Tapatio chicken ramen, yellow cardboard container with a guy in a sombrero prominently in the front.

Tapatio birria ramen, black cardboard container with a guy in a sombrero prominently featured in front.

danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 14d

These two were self-contained sci-fi tales in 1983. 252 had an unusual layout. 253 had more pathos than average for the time as the FF couldn't actually help the aliens they found.

Fantastic Four vol 1 issue 252. The issue is entirely in landscape format, cover shows Ben, Reed, Sue, and Johnny (flamed on) in a destroyed urban environment.

Fantastic Four vol 1 issue 253. Cover shows space scene with a large green alien standing on a watery world. Headshots of Johnny, Ben, Reed, and Sue are below.

danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 15d

Python without venv is doable on hardware, provided the Python code being run is sane and not written to depend on *the super-latest Everything*. 1 guess as to how often that happens IRL.

danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 16d

Makes sense to me, but then I live in Arizona, where every place except the Navajo reservation is always UTC-7. No DST most places, that is.

danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 16d

I think a really cost-effective anti-heroin program would be to have a bunch of high school students read Naked Lunch. Burroughs told the truth about heroin, teenagers have pretty good bullshit detectors, and the book makes heroin look super un-sexy.

danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 18d

In the 1980s, we frequently had cube steak, gravy, and potatoes for dinner. I so want to re-create that right now but can't get to the store until tomorrow.

danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 18d

Just a screenshot (especially a twitter screenshot) is lazy. crow202.com/92 (goes to Slate) shows how links work and work well here.

danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 20d

The problem is that everything substantial these days is machine-processed. This message was processed by an x86_64, coax, and fiber optics, for example. Did you mean "GAN-processed"?

danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 20d

Convenience >> (security || freedom) in the real world based on how people behave though. I run my own VPS, but most people don't know enough or care enough to bother to learn how.