• 4 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
cake
Cake day: July 18th, 2024

help-circle

  • Compare this:

    Tell me why Armistice Day was more important than Veteran’s Day is.

    I aim to engage thoughtfully with this topic while noting that the relative importance of these observances can vary based on personal and cultural perspectives.

    Armistice Day, established to commemorate the end of World War I on November 11, 1918, held unique significance as it marked humanity’s hope that WWI would truly be “the war to end all wars.” The original spirit was focused specifically on peace and the prevention of future wars. When the armistice was signed, there was a profound sense of collective relief and determination to ensure such devastating conflict would never happen again…

    To this:

    I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

    It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

    Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.

    So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.

    I find the second one more entertaining, more pleasant to read. If you want to call it that. I know translation is different from coming up with new text. But look again at the lyrics and the language in the second one.

    I’m not trying to tell you that you’re wrong for wanting to read things that aren’t in English, or that there isn’t a place for machine translation so the information can get conveyed. I’m just saying that passing anything of value through this filter, and then presenting it as something for people consumption, is a bad idea compared with the other way.













  • Lemmy claims to be able to support any Bootstrap 5 theme as a drop-in Lemmy theme, and it’s surprisingly close to being true. If you go to ponder.cat right now, you’ll see one, based on Sandstone, that I’ve been fooling around with, because the provided Lemmy themes are mostly awful to me.

    You could run one backend instance, have a main frontend to it on lemmy.whatever.com, and have a second frontend on whatever.com, with the theme set to a minimally modified version of Clean Blog or something, stripping out all the UI stuff and leaving only a blog. That would give you an RSS feed, a blog, a community that Lemmy people could follow, and a Fediverse actor that Mastodon people could follow, all in one place with all the comments unified. If you want to set the theme up that way, I can give you pointers, since I’ve just now been working on this for my instance.



  • Huh?

    Manifest v3 is not the rendering engine. The issue with manifest v3 is that the extension format is changing, so it’ll be more difficult to make ad blocker extensions work on Chrome. But a Chromium fork that is focused on privacy, of which there are several, and an ad blocker of which there are several, want to work together to make sure that their ad blocker is still working on the Chromium fork in question, it’s hard for me to see it being insurmountably difficult for them to collaborate on an API that will let it happen.

    It’s not automatic, it can be difficult since they’re diverging from Chromium. But it is not on the same scale as trying to maintain a divergent browser engine.



  • Nothing questionable that Mozilla does can affect the forks, as long as the forks have enough manpower to sustain themselves. There are, in fact, a few examples of projects with questionable leadership getting abandoned by their userbase, as everyone migrates to the fork.

    I think what you need to worry about is whether the fork you’re using has enough momentum and developer time that it’s going to stay alive. That’s a concern whether or not you have a concern that the central leadership is going to do something obscene.


  • When smartphones were new, I started dating a girl who would roll over in bed first thing in the morning, pick up her phone, and start scrolling. I thought it was incredibly weird. Why not life? Why computer? Now, I do the same thing, and it’s normal. Or rather it was until a couple of weeks ago.

    The scary thing is that I’ll start to get antsy as the one-hour mark comes near. I’ll keep checking the clock for when I can pick it up and get my stimulation. So far it is working most days, though, and it feels like it improves the rest of the day for me.




  • St. Michael’s on his mountain in the sea-roads of the north
    (Don John of Austria is girt and going forth.)
    Where the grey seas glitter and the sharp tides shift
    And the sea folk labour and the red sails lift.
    He shakes his lance of iron and he claps his wings of stone;
    The noise is gone through Normandy; the noise is gone alone;
    The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes
    And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise,
    And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room,
    And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom,
    And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee,
    But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea.
    Don John calling through the blast and the eclipse
    Crying with the trumpet, with the trumpet of his lips,
    Trumpet that sayeth ha!
    Domino gloria!
    Don John of Austria
    Is shouting to the ships.

    King Philip’s in his closet with the Fleece about his neck
    (Don John of Austria is armed upon the deck.)
    The walls are hung with velvet that is black and soft as sin,
    And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in.
    He holds a crystal phial that has colours like the moon,
    He touches, and it tingles, and he trembles very soon,
    And his face is as a fungus of a leprous white and grey
    Like plants in the high houses that are shuttered from the day,
    And death is in the phial, and the end of noble work,
    But Don John of Austria has fired upon the Turk.
    Don John’s hunting, and his hounds have bayed—
    Booms away past Italy the rumour of his raid
    Gun upon gun, ha! ha!
    Gun upon gun, hurrah!
    Don John of Austria
    Has loosed the cannonade.

    The Pope was in his chapel before day or battle broke,
    (Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke.)
    The hidden room in man’s house where God sits all the year,
    The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear.
    He sees as in a mirror on the monstrous twilight sea
    The crescent of his cruel ships whose name is mystery;
    They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and Castle dark,
    They veil the plumèd lions on the galleys of St. Mark;
    And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded chiefs,
    And below the ships are prisons, where with multitudinous griefs,
    Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race repines
    Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines.
    They are lost like slaves that swat, and in the skies of morning hung
    The stair-ways of the tallest gods when tyranny was young.
    They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen or fleeing on
    Before the high Kings’ horses in the granite of Babylon.
    And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell
    Where a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of his cell,
    And he finds his God forgotten, and he seeks no more a sign—
    (But Don John of Austria has burst the battle-line!)
    Don John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop,
    Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate’s sloop,
    Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds,
    Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds,
    Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea
    White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.
    Vivat Hispania!
    Domino Gloria!
    Don John of Austria
    Has set his people free!

    Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath
    (Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)
    And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain,
    Up which a lean and foolish knight forever rides in vain,
    And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade…
    (But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.)


  • Content warning, imperialism.

    I didn’t write this. G.K. Chesterton did.


    White founts falling in the courts of the sun,
    And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;
    There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,
    It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard,
    It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips,
    For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.
    They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,
    They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea,
    And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss,
    And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross,
    The cold queen of England is looking in the glass;
    The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass;
    From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun,
    And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.

    Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard,
    Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred,
    Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half attainted stall,
    The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall,
    The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung,
    That once went singing southward when all the world was young,
    In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid,
    Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade.
    Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,
    Don John of Austria is going to the war,
    Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold
    In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold,
    Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums,
    Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he comes.
    Don John laughing in the brave beard curled,
    Spurning of his stirrups like the thrones of all the world,
    Holding his head up for a flag of all the free.
    Love-light of Spain—hurrah!
    Death-light of Africa!
    Don John of Austria
    Is riding to the sea.

    Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star,
    (Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
    He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri’s knees,
    His turban that is woven of the sunset and the seas.
    He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease,
    And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees,
    And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring
    Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing.
    Giants and the Genii,
    Multiplex of wing and eye,
    Whose strong obedience broke the sky
    When Solomon was king.

    They rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the morn,
    From temples where the yellow gods shut up their eyes in scorn;
    They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of the sea
    Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be;
    On them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests curl,
    Splashed with a splendid sickness, the sickness of the pearl;
    They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of the ground,—
    They gather and they wonder and give worship to Mahound.
    And he saith, “Break up the mountains where the hermit-folk can hide,
    And sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint abide,
    And chase the Giaours flying night and day, not giving rest,
    For that which was our trouble comes again out of the west.
    We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun,
    Of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done,
    But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know
    The voice that shook our palaces—four hundred years ago:
    It is he that saith not ‘Kismet’; it is he that knows not Fate ;
    It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey in the gate!
    It is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager worth,
    Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth.”
    For he heard drums groaning and he heard guns jar,
    (Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
    Sudden and still—hurrah!
    Bolt from Iberia!
    Don John of Austria
    Is gone by Alcalar.