MudMan

In retrospect, that Encarta had its moment and MS didn’t realize that they could have just turned it into a website before Wikipedia made it entirely redundant is a major loss. It could have been a for-profit staple like Facebook, but nope.

FWIW, I am looking at the encyclopaedia my family owned before the Internet. It’s still here on my shelves, along with other collections of books in bulk. People would show up to your door and sell you these sometimes, and it wasn’t always a scam. It served us well.

There was a trivia game show over here when I was a kid where the final round included a very obscure question (think “what was the name of the cousin of Stalin that was a film director in the 80s” or whatever) and were given ten minutes and an encyclopaedia to look it up. It was considered very hard and most episodes it resulted in failure.

You could ABSOLUTELY resurrect that format by cutting the time significantly and giving people access to Wikipedia. That’s easy money right there.

Right. I actually assumed he was running for AUR and only realized he was running as an independent after this whole mess. Knocking him out on the enrolment requirement makes sense, but I still don’t understand how the legal and constitutional framework of the whole thing is supposed to work.

It sure sounds like this is how you make a renegade Trump. But then, he was already leading in the first round, so I suppose that ship has sailed. I’m afraid this may just be the beginning of this nonsense.

So, to the best of my understanding (people over there correct me where I make mistakes), the first run of the presidential election returned this surprise Russian-backed fascistoid in first and the liberal centre-right USR second. Then there was a legislative election that instead yielded the… eh… nominally socialdemocrat PSD as first, democrhistian PNL second and USR third.

There was meant to be a second run on the presidentials where only the two first would be eligible, so USR’s Elena Lasconi versus Georgescu. Now that the first run has been annulled, the process for the presidentials starts over. That seems… like a huge gamble, but it creates a situation where instead of collecting all the votes from PSD and PNL as a… well, non-fascist, pro-EU candidate, Lasconi may not be in the top two anymore or be there against someone else as opposed to running as the common sense national union candidate. From the quotes I see on the press she’s… not pleased about that.

What I don’t know is what the rules are to handle this, and what this means for a re-run when it comes to Georgescu. Is he able to run again? I’ve read that all candidates need to re-enroll and get reviewed for eligibility again, but I have no idea what consequences the ruling has on their eligibility in the first place, if any. It’d seem bizarre that someone gets the entire election annulled on account of seemingly breaking financing and campaigning laws and just… gets to go again?

But I also don’t know what happens if he doesn’t run. Surely even if all those people voted for him out of spite they did so on purpose. And don’t underestimate how many people there are genuinely fringe-right. The “they’re all the same” and “drain the swamp” crap that got Trump elected is no US-only.

No, hey, I’m on board. If the court says there were campaign finance violations I’ll accept that. Not shocked.

The questions is more how come the remedy is to run the election again. If Georgescu’s campaign was found to have done all that, is that not invalidating or cause for criminal liability for members of the campaign? Will they get to run again? What happens regarding the bunch of people who voted for him on purpose?

I feel like a lot of the conversation is either about the Russian interference or about USR being pissed about the eventuality of running against PSD instead of being a national unity front for the second run, but there’s so little info on the legal framework around the decision.

Wait, how does that work? If the influence was social media messaging it’s not like… you now, they are reversing the messaging. The voters who got convinced presumably remain… you know, influenced.

The worry would be that this would prompt people to double down, while normies would stay home because revoting is a hassle, which could backfire.

Of course, Romanians are remarkably detached and cynical about their own democratic process and participation is typically very low, so who the hell knows what happens next. Man, this stupid century sucks.

19.5 on the thermostat, which I’m not sure is accurate. In my opinion comfortable indoor clothes include a sweater or a hoodie, so 26C isn’t just wasteful, it’s very uncomfortable.

To put this in perspective, it fell by 0.48%

Windows 10 grew by 0.89%

Linux actually dropped by 0.26% in that same period.

Not that I’d be too concerned about any of that, because that’s all data from reported OS in website visits, so all those are well within the margin of error.

I deamericanized my social media on the wake of the Trump electoral win. Desubbed from US Youtube channels, blocked magazines here that mostly deal with US politics while keeping world politics, unfollowed Masto and Bluesky accounts using similar rules.

I thought it may be an empty gesture, but… no, no it wasn’t. My social media is healthier, I’m more keyed in to domestic news. Apparently somebody shot an American CEO and I’m not sure when it happened or what’s up with that because all my feeds are about France and South Korea, which are objectively way more important.

If you’re not American, consider it. Walk away from the cultural imperialism. It’ll only become a better choice over time now.

Hah. I remember Sextris. The great thing about it is that it was entirely unsexy, mostly just for laughs and actually not a bad version to play, for the standards of the time.

Well, I already bought an Intel Arc card on purpose, unironically and not for review, so… your move, nerds.

Yeah, for sure. The real answer is the question is superfluous. There is no number one. I’d say you can’t even put together a top 10. It’s just not a thing you need to do or can do.

You’re kinda making my point, that’s another absurd choice to have to make.

But no, it’s Tetris.

Weirdly, better sex scenes in Tetris.

This is such an absurd question. I mean, it’s weird in movies and books, weirder in music… but games?

I mean, Tetris. It’s Tetris, isn’t it?

But then you’re out there going “so is Tetris better than Baldur’s Gate III”, which is a nonsensical sentence.

Man, that show was so likable, but I could never get over the pro-Confederate vibes, even with all the staff denials.

Call me crazy, but if I was going to bring back a series doomed by its association with Joss Whedon I’d give The Nevers another shot. I thought it was fun and then the Whedon thing happened and Covid happened and people seem to just have agreed it wasn’t worth it and gone home.

Command and Conquer 4 was not as bad as people say and now here we are.

The remastered collection was so good, though. I wonder if people just didn’t buy it, because you’d think they’d have given that team permission to just make a new one, but it hasn’t happened.

Yeah, I’m not sure where they are with that. Earlier leaks did have a couple of higher specs and the mid-size spec matches some of the 580 numbers. You’d also think they’d have called the 580 “780” for consistency if they weren’t doing any higher end parts. But then, it’s 2024 Intel, so whether they come later or don’t come at all is anybody’s guess.

I’ll say that it sure looks like there’s room for a bit more juice in the architecture, given the power draw and the specs. The 4070 is the sweet spot GPU for midrange, and it’s a bit too expensive, so I’d be happy to see more solid competition in that range, which is a bit harder than this 4060-ish space.

Look, I don’t trust Statista numbers at all.

People are free to disagree on that one, Statista most of all. But what I think is undeniable is that these sub-percentage point changes are entirely within their margin of error (same goes for Steam, incidentally). You can look at trends over time, -and I think it’s pretty undeniable Win11 has struggled to onboard the Win10 userbase-, but I wouldn’t overreact to these short term updates.

I installed Mint this week.

It did install more smoothly than the others I tried on this run of “I wonder if Linux is viable now” (Fedora 41, Pop, Bazzite, if you’re wondering). It, however, does not support HDR yet and it, like every other one, won’t do proper 5.1 audio out of my ASUS MB, which has no official Linux drivers.

So Windows it is, then, because all the other distros had bigger problems. Fedora is the one that has all the features I need, and it still has the audio bug and it crashed a bunch after I went through all the hoops to set up an Nvidia card.

Their promo benchmarks have it beating the 770, though, whcih is still a viable card at this price point. It’ll be interesting to see if that pans out on reviews with independent tests.

Not in the market for one of these, but very curious to see how the 780 fares later. Definitely good to have more midrange options.