JustSo

joined 1 year ago
[–] JustSo@hexbear.net 23 points 5 months ago

How do you do, fellow radicals?

[–] JustSo@hexbear.net 13 points 5 months ago

I wish I could get my mother to consider a megadose of ketamine. She deserves peace from her neuroses. :(

[–] JustSo@hexbear.net 16 points 5 months ago

There's something really disconcertingly sad about losing someone to recovery. I completely understand the necessity for some people to "get with the program" so to speak, in order to survive, but it can get hauntingly lonely if you manage to avoid going over the edge yourself and still find value in substances that challenge consensual reality (and so on.)

You're doing Super Dangerous Drugs in their eyes no matter what your actual reality is, so the gap in understanding just continues to widen.

[–] JustSo@hexbear.net 19 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I bet they aren't even a real owl. angery

[–] JustSo@hexbear.net 10 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

on government devices

phew. wait, does this effect you, comrade? (jk jk)

edit for being serious: such a stupid country. Ridiculous.

[–] JustSo@hexbear.net 9 points 5 months ago

One time after I went out clubbing I was chilling with this big squad of extended friends of my housemates, coming down off've drugs and one of the dudes was a PHD researcher in quantum computing. His specific project was using blood plasma as some sort of substrate for creating qubits or some shit. I literally had no idea what the fuck this dude was talking about, but I know they were making quantum blood computers lmao.

We played Operation while this one thwacked out dude was running a M.A.S.H style commentary on the "surgery" process while we tried to extract organs from the little robot man with our hands shaking real bad from the dopamine deficiency and general fatigue of partying all night. Fucking BRUTAL the way that game's buzzer goes off when you're coming down hard.

Obviously this all imprinted deeply into my psyche and I will never forget that they were making fucking QUANTUM BLOOD COMPUTERS. agony-shivering

[–] JustSo@hexbear.net 6 points 5 months ago

Counterpoint: line go down. smuglord

[–] JustSo@hexbear.net 16 points 5 months ago

Can't we just like, skibidi-sidestep tradition for a second and keep trading. agony-deep

[–] JustSo@hexbear.net 17 points 5 months ago (7 children)

Heh, check out these Americans dude.

[–] JustSo@hexbear.net 4 points 5 months ago

You can do e2e encryption over IRC iirc. SASL (or something newer at this point for all I know.) Can't really recommend it when defederated matrix servers exist as a modern alternative.

Buuuut you can run no-log encrypted IRC over TOR without hitting an exit node last time I checked, which is pretty comfy. Gotta trust your admins tho. Still super suboptimal compared to defed matrix using a non-default ident server.

 

Hello HB!

I've been struggling with something a little silly. I was hoping for some input, guidance, thoughts and/or good resources on this situation. Sorry for the longpost in advance.

I recently bought an imported, very cool, powerful and relatively affordable small android tablet originally from China. It's been ages since I had a nice device like this. I used to use a tablet to keep my life organised and do casual media consumption. This device can handle all of that and is arguably powerful enough to do creative work on it too.

The thing is this. When I bought this thing I was envisioning something that would add convenience to organising my life, keep me from using a hot running laptop in bed and let me do pretty much whatever I want to do that doesn't require gamer-grade PC type hardware.

But I am also fairly privacy conscious and I don't like tech that makes me fear that my data is being harvested by the usual suspects with their connections and contracts with the western states etc.

Fortunately, thanks to the wonderful regulations in China, and running the stock Chinese ROM, I have never activated play services or installed play store. I don't use location services because it doesn't have a GSM modem / GPS in it, so any location stuff would use weird wifi network and IP based geo-approximation techniques that seem suss to me.

All of this is good. I have mostly installed just FOSS apps from fdroid. And where I need to run proprietary stuff I install it from the play store using the Aurora frontend in anonymous mode.

My browsers are FOSS forks and I can run the usual stack of necessary browser extensions.

My keyboards are FOSS of course.

When I use discord I use work profile cloning to create a sandboxed instance of kiwi with the browser extensions and access the webapp. I don't like discord so even this is hopefully a temporary state of affairs, but the point is, even with Android 14's granular permissions and built-in app sandboxing, I've got this extra layer of privacy protection.

Netflix is basically the only "serious" proprietary app I currently have installed. It doesn't mind not having play services running and because it uses its own account management to verify that I am a paying customer, the free app downloadable via Aurora is full featured and it doesn't ask for any perms to speak of. I am comfortable with it for now.

All good right?

But it is not all convenient.

It is almost good enough, hell it IS good enough that I do use this device a lot.

The thing is, I do have a bunch of paid versions of apps from previous devices that would be quite useful on this tablet, but which I haven't installed. Like, take the Nova Launcher, I'm running the free version, but I've paid for the full fat version and I miss some of its features. I have some drawing and music creation apps I haven't installed, but which I do have a license to. There's other stuff, but those are what immediately come to mind.

I'm feel like I'm being unreasonably anxious about all of this. But I just hate feeling like a device isn't at least MOSTLY under my control and doing what I want and not much else.

Am I being ridiculous?

Is Android 14+ actually "good enough" given that I don't actually believe nefarious actors desperately want to watch me and that the permissions should prevent proprietary stuff from snooping where it shouldn't?

Is it rational to use Aurora to log in with my various google accounts to install the software I've paid for and, say, install microg to try handle whatever google shit might be required to verify that I have a "right" to use the software?

I've been eating cheap af to afford to get a modern device that can do All Of The Things, but these mental blocks are preventing me from getting the best experience and convenience and functionality and so on that it offers.

I feel like I'm just defaulting to Fully Paranoid and that this is causing me to overestimate the risks that installing the best software I "own" on the device might pose.

Dumping APKs from other devices and sideloading is obviously an option. But then I would need to remain hypervigilant to keep those apps updated manually or risk missing out on patches that might be critical for security etc.

Does anyone else relate to this struggle with the inner paranoiac? What's your approach?

Is Android 14 really going to have my back if I loosen my approach a little?

Where and how do I draw the line?

 

you think mutual aid would buy me a bravia?

joker-troll

54
On Juggalos (hexbear.net)
submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by JustSo@hexbear.net to c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net
 

I've been eternally amused since my fellow comrades at r/CTH expressed surprise learning about a subset of Juggalos abandoning the March on Washington (to protest and eventually overturn the FBI gang designation of our family) to march with the Black Lives Matter protestors. If that was you, you shouldn't have been surprised.

But it's not your fault, we're for everybody down and out, against everybody rich and cruel. But we're for each other first, it makes it hard to see past the culture, the language and the undeniably problematic misogyny in much of the first half of ICP's body of work. Most of us were outcasts before we found each other so we embraced the abrasive and so we tend to embody the concept of "fuck your optics."

I've collected a few lil links here in case you don't remember or were never aware of the event I'm talking about. I recommend you read them and look for the inherent class consciousness in our subculture. Read the reportage of the testimony of a woman who had her children taken away by the state simply for being a fan of a band. Read about the difficulty in keeping our scene alive and appreciate the work that our people put in to keep us together. Juggalos practically have their own economy now, there are people who survive entirely off serving up fresh shit to each other within the culture. It might not be a classic dual power structure but it's pretty fucking nice.

Unfortunately, we've entered an era where all the old subcultures are picked over like corpses under vultures. There continue to be foul human beings passing themselves off as Juggalos and predators in the scene (like any music scene) with narcissistic and sociopathic tendancies to seek and find small pockets of power for themselves to predate within. Family remains the best analogy for what we are. You can probably relate, most families have creepy uncles and ignorant cousins and yes, sadly, narcissistic parent figures.

Younger Juggalo-identifying-people now (and forever, I suppose) are often "trying on the costume" while they figure out their identities. Where people used to phase in and out of a scene, often now people are picking and choosing pieces of their identities from the limited selection of organic subcultures that formed before we reached the later stages of capitalism, alienation goes further than just that of the worker and their labor's value.

The internet has been an accelerant poured on this situation, both driving us further away from organic human connection and making it easier to pick and choose what you take from each scene as a whole, equally it promotes self-promotion and the creation new "unique" personas often created like a patchwork quilt from the most convenient, low effort and high-vibe bits and pieces of something that used to promote solidarity and a degree of conformity that enabled a group to self-police.

A quote from the second article above, reminds me of this state of affairs:

I asked her why Juggalos shock people if they actually operate as a friendly community. She exhaled. “People don’t do that anymore,” she lamented. “There’s no human connection in people anymore.”

If you're a Juggalo reading this, hell even if you're not, let me politely remind you of the rant in Jumpsteady's track Mad Mad World, which I've just posted in the music community w/ lyrics:


Yo Juggalos

It's a mad, mad world out there, ya'll

We gotta stick together cause we family

You see a fellow juggalo out there about to throw down or fight or something?

That's you

That's your fight

Cause we like that, yo
We together

Unity means strength

We can handle anything in this fucked up world

Anything at all, ya'll

Squall

We Juggalos


I think we can all benefit from this message.

I suppose I wrote this because I'm not going to make excuses for the shitty behaviour from some people calling themselves juggalos. I don't claim them even if I recognise them.

And I posted it here because I've lost a lot of my juggalo fam connections due to some straight up snake behaviour in the spaces that helped keep me from offing myself. So instead you guys get to read about it. Thank you for your time.

And for the few of you juggalos, struggalos and thuggalos reading this, whoop whoop MMFWCL stay up. Stay fucking cool. Be ready. If you have a crew you have an affinity group: get to work.

 

Bit of a long shot, if you don't know anything about Nexus 7s or can't provide hints on things like system logging on android and how to force-reload drivers/modules, might as well just ignore this thread.

I'm back on my bullshit and working on old tablets. I love these old Nexus 7 devices. The 2012s had that basically irreparable issue with the flash storage incrementally shitting the bed with successive writes, but they BOTH ('12 & '13) have touchscreen problems. And I am dealing with all of them, across a couple of devices.

The issues are like, maybe you have a digitiser that goes completely unresponsive even on boot, or you'll have dead zones, or you have touchscreen functionality that works, but then after using the device for a random length of time, it'll either lock up completely or go intermittent.

Sometimes you'll have it in a locked up state, but it will come alive just enough to register a touch input on the power menu when you want to reboot. Sometimes you won't.

Then there's the phantom touch iteration of the problem. I have one 2012 that's going totally wild with that at the moment.

And there's the double/triple/quintuple registering on touches on the keyboard that you sometimes get making typing a real pain.

I had one yesterday that looked like it had suddenly decided to become completely unresponsive constantly, but came to life once I plugged it into a computer to do ADB stuff.

I have another one that had issues and seemed to have come good, but it's back to failing after a certain amount of time, but sleeping and waking it fixes it as though it were a software issue.

I've done the basic hardware mod of adding some additional foam over the ZIF connector so the backplate provides more pressure on the contacts. This seems to be only a partial solution. Maybe even total cargo cult stuff on the 2013 which uses a different type of cable connection using a proper socket on the end. (hm, on ONE end, I need to dig in and look at the other end.)

I haven't yet worked on shielding mods, which are supposed to help with phantom touches.

I've also been finding old news articles and forum posts from when these were brand new, where people had these problems fresh out of the box and on pre-retail promotional giveaway versions. Many of these articles mention that users were finding major issues using the device while resting it on a desk and using it with one hand, where the issues didn't occur if it was held in both hands.

In any case there's several suggestions that grounding issues were a big part of the problem.

As for this post, my questions:

Does anyone have arcane knowledge about these devices? About, say, cable decay or ways in which heat from use might cause the thing to behave badly then resolve rapidly when the processor drops frequency due to being slept?

And does anybody know where I would look for system logs that would collect any errors thrown by driver modules during entry into or out of failure states?

Any advice on force-reloading the drivers for the digitizer to see if I could write a script might help unfuck the device when it decides to play dead?

If you've got one of these old devices and it still works well, you might not be aware that ROMs are back on the menu. DivestOS, LineageOS, crDroid, all seem to have very recent builds available with pretty recent security patches applied. I've got one 2013 here running Android 13 at the moment. It's not even as bad as you'd expect. I'm not sure I'll keep it on 13, but it's wild that it works as well as it does at stock clock speeds.

 

Preface: I was curious about this so I did some research. I read some rather upsetting and disgusting things. I noticed some comrades were also uninformed on this stuff so I am sharing what I have learned. I have done my best to treat this topic respectfully. Links at the bottom if you don't care to read my rambling effortpost. If, like me, your reaction to being told the dunk tank has "racist roots" was a lib'd out "yeah, but reeeeally tho?" I suggest you go read the Jim Crow Museum links and hopefully you too will be revolted by what you see and will also recognise the importance of the community name change.

I assume this has already been discussed here, since I didn't really see anyone go ???? about that aspect of the c/*_tank critique. I didn't ask for infoz or clarity on this in the midst of the recent strugglebrawl because that's not really what everyone was fighting about. But while I've been catching up on some spin-off threads discussing the recent turmoil I've seen some of my fellow uninformeds express skepticism over whether that "long ago" history was really relevant, whether anyone would really associate dunk tanks with their apparent and maybe obscure racist history, that sort of thing.

long self indulgent rambling about my experience with dunk tanks irl and reflecting on my knee-jerk assumptionsI was mildly skeptical myself, like "I guess they had black people on the receiving end of the humiliation originally/in some places" "probably problematic, but also probably we're just erring on the side of abundance of caution for the most vulnerable people" "heh, amerikkkans."

Maybe skeptical isn't the right word- good people with more knowledge than me were saying it was problematic/tone-deaf/hurtful and that was/is good enough for me.

Still, I had no idea about this history and I was curious about it, so I did some searches to catch myself up. I am not from the United Snakes, but dunk tanks were (are?) a thing in my settler country too. I remember them at school fairs and rural easter shows (etc) growing up.

Usually the person in the tank was a "respected" member of the community- at a school fair it might have been the principle or vice principle, at a local show it was often a fellow student volunteer/worker, or a local council person. Or it was a professional clown.

My experiences were in a shithole so infested with cracker bigotry that I copped years of bullying for being a different type of white person. I'm not sure we had any people of colour to do cruelty to. (Mild exaggeration, there were two (2) racial minority families and they copped brutal bald faced racist abuse and violence.)

Dunk tanks also featured on kids TV in those zany slime and ooze based obstacle course game shows. Very normalised. There was no apparent racial component in my experience, so I assumed that this was not an inherent part of the dunk tank game.


All that to say: my personal experience is totally irrelevant and my assumptions couldn't have been more wrong.

This is my current understanding:

Firstly: The genesis of the Dunk Tank WAS inextricably linked to brutal, sometimes fatal, often disfiguring and brain damaging racial violence for the entertainment of white people.

When the Dunk Tank was created in America it was part of a progressive-for-the-time reform that replaced a hugely popular game that went by several names, the only one of which I'm comfortable typing out is "African Dodger" - the aim of the game was to throw a baseball (allegedly, usually, a lighter ball than was used in actual baseball) or eggs at a black man poking his head out between some curtains.

Ball for African Dodger

It appears that it was not uncommon for people to bring their own heavy balls to the game to use instead. There are multiple stories sourced from newspaper articles of the time that report on local professional baseball players attending to pitch at the victim. Some assholes just threw rocks.

There are a number of upsetting stories detailing the damage done to the victims. Horrible stuff to read- the degree of physical damage to teeth, eyes, faces and heads. Multiple deaths.

The Dunk Tank did not (immediately) replace African Dodger everywhere, but where it was introduced it was more or less a stand-in for the earlier "game" trading physical violence for humiliation. It was still about doing cruel shit to black men for fun at the carnival.

African Dodger continued to be a thing until at least the 1950s, overlapping the introduction of the Dunk Tank by about 40 years. During that time, whether the white-people-do cruelty-to-black-people game was about inflicting physical damage or inflicting humiliation (dodge or dunk) depended on where you lived and whether locals were still comfortable smashing people's faces in and cracking skulls to impress their girlfriends.

Both games were a vehicle for violence, abuse and degradation of black men for sport.

If you want to subject yourself to the gory details, slurs, offensive promotional posters etc, these are my sources for this part:
https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/question/2012/october.htm
https://freedium.cfd/https://dalebrumfield.medium.com/non-lethal-lynching-f9ee5bbbfbcc (medium post, paywall bypassed)
https://ameripics.wordpress.com/2016/01/10/the-african-dodger/
https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/question/2019/september.htm


Secondly: Yes, people do still know this history and associate dunk tanks with white supremacy and racial violence. This issue is not just concern trolling / a convenient cover excuse to modify hexbear culture as I have seen suggested or implied in the wake of the happening.

School district bans dunk tanks this year, presumably because people were upset with and/or alienated by the continuation of this foul legacy into the modern age after the black victim was generally replaced with a clown.
https://www.mapleridgenews.com/community/no-more-dunk-tanks-for-maple-ridge-and-pitt-meadows-schools-7374988

2019 article about dunk tanks being phased out. It's wishy washy on whether that is because people are uncomfortable with its legacy or because people are bothered by the modern dunk tank clown heckling and insulting them to bark customers to the game, but still, this has evidently been a subject of modern mainstream discourse:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/07/style/insult-clowns.html

2019 Jim Crow Museum website responding to a reader query about the retirement of the dunk tank from "polite society" (hah..) https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/question/2019/september.htm

2022 article about the same thing, mentions NAACP helping to ban the explicitly racial implementation of the dunk tank by the end of the 1950s: https://www.pushblack.us/news/troubling-history-dunk-tank-carnival-games

2023 blog post: https://allthatsinteresting.com/african-dodger

2024 EXCELLENT blog post, loss of urban amusement parks and carnivals as third places. Segregation in those venues etc. ctrl-f Drop the Chocolate, or a Black man in a dunk tank to jump to the part most relevant to this effortpost, with an interesting observations about the awkwardness of continuing these sorts of games while black men were dying in the trenches of WW1.
https://www.melaninbasecamp.com/trip-reports/2024/3/29/third-places-lost-to-racism-urban-amusement-parks

Random other interesting post about dunk tanks not making it into the San Fran 1915 expo. Interesting/challenging photos: http://davegilson.com/african-dip.html

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