I don't know if Slashdot is malfunctioning, functioning poorly as designed, or whether I'm outright being censored. Since I don't know, I'll list that possibility last. I'm trying to leave a response to This comment by Bruce Perens. This is that response:

If this is not important, why are you engaging me?

Open Source is a wave that you've ridden, not one which you've churned up with your splashing about. There are obvious benefits in the Open Source model to developers and even to corporate rightsholders.

The internet, just as it remembers that people were using "Open Source" before Christine's claim. Faintly, distantly, because archival was not a major concern at the time. Perhaps one day in our apparently inevitable future of surveillance societies, we will remember everything and we'll always be able to look up who did what and when.

The audience thinks I'm being a troll because it doesn't know what trolling is, and because some people have abused moderation by modding me as a troll. Trolling is saying things you may or may not even believe because you want to make people angry. My goal is not to make people angry, although it's okay if people become angry with what I say. My goal is to support the truth, in the form of facts. I and others have provided citations which support the view of events which I remember. I'm not alone, nor does the entire discussion hinge on a single press release, and your attempts to suggest otherwise seem disingenuous.

The truth? I've thought about it again and again, and I just can't comprehend any other explanation than those we've discussed upthread why you spend so much time supporting this nonsense. You say it's not important, then you spend a ton of time on it, then you criticize me for spending time on it. Why don't you make up your mind?

I got a solid scoop on the fact that OSI members did not invent the term "Open Source Software" and Slashdot's not interested.

Slashdot is having serious problems with forms. https://slashdot.org/journal only loads sometimes. After submitting a comment, the subsequent page load almost always fails (but the form submission works.) What did you guys break this time?

Why does it need to be so damned hard to tell the difference between a visited and non-visited link on Slashdot? I have color-calibrated my display, so it's not me.

Went to Fortuna for the beer fest, which was pretty good except that I didn't have any beer there which I liked much which I hadn't had before. Found out that, shock amazement, Hoparillo became Hop-Trio due to threat of lawsuit by a Texan brewery which might have been in or had a beer named Amarillo. (Hello Texas, I hope you don't get your asses kicked too bad, some of you are with me always.) Anyway, most of my comments got up-modded. I'm certainly going to combine beer with Slashdot a lot more.

A big part of the formula had to be that I was using my phone, though, and less is more. So with that thought in mind,

TL;DR version: 20 years ago today I started writing an enormous story, this year I finally started putting actual effort into it, and now it's almost kinda-sorta readable and I'd love it if anyone would acknowledge the fact that it even exists. It's called The Chronicles of Quelouva.

Way back in 1997, teenaged me and some internet friends set out to start a new video game company. Our founder had one game already in mind that we were going to start developing, but we all foolishly got ahead of our teenaged selves thinking about all the other games that we would make next. To that effect, I started writing a story for one of my game proposals... and then other stories for other, then-unrelated game proposals... and so on before we even had the first game barely begun.

That group of teenage wannabes quickly fell apart, of course, but different members of it kept reforming it with slightly different membership over the years that would follow, one attempt after another under different names. Within about five years the last of them fell apart as well and at that point I basically gave up on all dreams of ever doing any video game development.

But all the while I had continued developing all of those stories from what had once been unrelated game proposals, mutating them drastically over the years, tying them together with each other and with basically every other story idea that occurred to me into an extensive fictional universe.

After the last attempt at a game company died I didn't know what I was ever going to do with all of those ideas, and they mostly languished for about half a decade while I focused on other things, occasionally writing myself notes about further ideas for them. Eventually I started telling myself that some day, when life was all sorted out, I would spend my free time writing a series of books based on the stories, slowly over the course of my entire life. As soon as all of my real problems got fixed, I'd get right on that. It would be my life's work. Something small that I had done besides just struggling to barely survive.

Around 2008, after finally graduating university and subsequently having my entire life fall apart in every facet, I decided that I was going to start writing the basic story ideas down in a readable format because that mythic time of getting life sorted out was never going to come. I came up with a tentative name, "The Chronicles" of... something, eventually settling on "The Chronicles of Quelouva". I put up the bare-bones structure of an outline on my personal website, filled it out with tiny little unreadable scraps of story serving basically just as notes to myself to write more there later, and then started with the first story chronologically and tried to actually write something worth reading about it.

I barely got through one rough draft of that first story. Life kept getting harder and I just couldn't think clearly enough to write anything that sounded good. It was too much, I was too exhausted, I couldn't force myself to be creative enough after every long day of shit. At least that's what I told myself. Whenever I actually feel good for long enough, I told myself, I'll get back to it. Just start writing the next story. And keep going and eventually it will all be done. But of course I never felt good enough, and that never happened, and almost another decade went by with no progress besides the occasional further notes to myself to write something more later about an idea I'd just had whenever I could get around to it.

Around the end of 2016 and the start of this year, I ended up writing myself surprisingly many neat ideas to write more about later, and I was subsequently reflecting on how what I had online was such an unreadable mess that nobody could even just take in the big picture of what it was I was aiming to create without wading through the crap excuse for an outline I had managed to create so far. If I were to just die right then, nobody would even have the vaguest idea what it was in my head that I had once dreamt of "spending my life creating". So despite being busier and more beat down by life than ever, I forced myself to find some time to write at least a highest-level summary of the big picture, all on one (albeit long) page.

And then I thought, you know what, I'll write some little three-paragraph summaries of each of the three sagas that the whole project is divided into, just writing like a paragraph a night every other night (ish), over the course of less than a month. Something slow, and manageable, just so that people can see on a high level what it was that I once dreamt of making -- so that like, maybe, if I died and people found all of my notes to myself, someone might find it worth sorting through them and assembling it all into what the summary painted a rough picture of.

But then after that month of fairly easy slow high-level summarizing was past, I thought to myself, this is easy enough, maybe I can expand each of those three paragraphs per saga into three paragraphs of its own, so that each of the 27 core stories (nine trilogies across the three sagas) has its own one-paragraph summary. I can keep up this pace for a few more months and do that, and that would be a better summary than what I have so far. So I did that.

And then, after that wasn't too hard either, I did the math and realized that if I split each of those paragraphs into three again, working at the same slow pace, I could flesh out each story into its own full page, three-paragraph summary by the end of the year. As kind of a challenge to myself, I decided to try that. And so far, I've been keeping it up. I'm about two thirds of the way done (almost 40,000 words in), right about to begin the climactic final stretch of it, and on schedule to have these summaries finished by the end of the year.

Not only that, but I realized I was having difficulty keeping most "paragraphs" down under a full screen of text, so I started automatically splitting them into threes again (and went back and split up the ones I'd already done), giving each part of each tripartite story its own page with its own three-paragraph summary. And then my English-major girlfriend pointed out to me that the figure I had looked up for an average paragraph was actually about a full page of double spaced text, and I could do well to split each of them in turn into three smaller, more readable paragraphs.

So now the whole thing is structured into "Episodes" (summed up in this phase into three short paragraphs each), three of them per "Part" of each tripartite "Story" of each trilogy "Series", of which there are three per each of the three "Sagas" of the overall Chronicles. That adds up to about the equivalent of nine full-length (27-episode) television seasons' worth of story, with a word count for just these summaries approximating what Google tells me is about that of a small novel (almost 60,000 words), once it's done by the end of the year.

Of course these are only summaries, not full scripts, and I've basically put no effort at all into making them look or sound pretty, just putting the ideas down in a minimally coherent form. But I've already done more to bring this thing that was once going to be my "life's work" into some kind of readable form this year than in all the twenty years that I was "working" on it before.

And that's why I'm telling you about it now. A month or two ago I realized, thinking that maybe I would remember this as the year I finally did something about the Chronicles, that I've been sitting on all of this for about twenty years now. And because I'm a digital pack rat, I still have the original text document in which I wrote the first draft of the very first game proposal that eventually grew into this project, with a creation date of August 25th, 1997 -- exactly a month after my fifteenth birthday, and twenty years ago today.

I just wanted to commemorate that anniversary somewhere.

If you want to see the very rough work still in progress, I'm posting it to my personal website as I go. If anyone wants to ask questions or point out typos or anything like that, I'd love just to know that anyone at all even looked at it:

The Chronicles of Quelouva.

Looking for sysadm or auto electrical work, willing to tone down online rhetoric if it's a dealbreaker

There are many times in history that are a turning point. A time when there is enough people with enough resources to call forth action that will impact millions more. The time to focus on these things is always, but with limited time it becomes something that's brushed aside until a point that people see that action must be taken. They seek a solution and the seek salvation in leaders who act as if they know what to do.

But often enough, leaders have their own agenda. They see a world that does not work in they way they think it should. There is a belief that even so, the world works in certain ways and they somehow can fulfill that form through their actions. Yet this is a contradiction. Instead of seeing things for what they are, they wish to mold the world into a way they want it to be no matter how impossible those actions are.

So we see calls to replace Obamacare. Obamacare is a failure. It is a failure of vision to see the systemic problems we have in the US. We have too few doctors and too much willingness to coddle the AMA's desire to limit licensing the doctors we need. We embrace a system that would prefer 100 well-trained US trained doctors--native born and foreign immigrant doctors--over 150 US mostly well-trained doctors and another 50 or 100 questionable trained foreign immigrant doctors. We give license to drive to most anyone to one of the leading causes of death--cars--but we put much higher standards on licensed doctors from eastern and western countries of comparable (or even superior) medical systems. We push the burden to train new doctors on government spending instead of mandating it to hospitals in the same way we mandate emergency care. We allow monopolistic pricing on drugs and advertising meant to manipulate the public, rather than educate, instead of coming down hard on abuse of patents--a government monopoly only Constitutional so long as it promotes Science and useful Arts (hint: fraud, con artistry, and ever higher profit margins are not useful arts). We allow middle men insurers to negotiate prices and limit access to medicine all the while with their focus to skim as much money out of the public as possible.

We've created a system where every step of the way, the focus is on more waste in profit than treatment of people. We've become most focused on just enough emergency care to not cause the poor and elderly to not physically riot while treating the idea of actual, regular health care as a job perk that only last so long as you're healthy enough to keep going to the same job--as health insurance is tied to work as COBRA insurance is no substitute and making continued payments is unrealistic in a society built on debt.

The answers are there. Remove the middle men. Make legislation that focuses on health care, not health insurance. Mandate the residency of more doctors by hospitals. Reduce or eliminate, as warranted, the restriction of foreign doctors to practice. Punish drug companies that inflate prices beyond the reasonable to cover R&D of more drugs. Ban advertising of drugs to patients entirely and limit it to doctors to the medically important information, not to the possible side-uses or to a system of explicit or implicit kickbacks. Cut the red tape on FDA approval of drugs or devices where it is more about laborious paperwork rather than proper documentation.

Above all, do not put forth legislation that imagines a continuation of the current system is some sort of solution. Do not believe that shifting money out of Medicare and Medicaid into tax cuts is going to magically make people health when even conservative estimates spell out that thousand more will die because of those actions.

If winning means to through willful inaction let people die, I want to lose. What makes America great is the American dream: the idea that you can take huge risks, go bankrupt many times, and repeatedly get back on your feet because never will it be the lack of money to pay for an operation that will take you down. It will be a lack of determination that will make you fail. Only in a system where everyone will be treated when sick and every injured person knows that the moral hazard of risk will not inherently be met with death can we strive forward to the greatness that is America. We support those who strive to the Moon and beyond. Or we turn inward and eviscerate ourselves like a pack of dogs that see a bone and would kill all others to live. What do you want to win?

It has been a while since Trump's win, has there been any evidence of the foretold uptick of hate-crimes by his supporters? And I mean, actual crimes — not just speech — that are real, reported to police and investigated?..

So I'm playing with this antique iMac because whee shit and I'm trying to download the 1GB developer tools DMG and Apple sure makes it a gigantic pain in the arsehole, don't they? You can't just download the URL with wget without rigamarole which I haven't gone through yet. I can't actually load the site in Safari at all because of some kind of https error. And my download just failed somehow in the last seconds, which means I get to download it all over again. And then it may fail again. Other downloads are working fine, it's just Apple that's incompetent here somehow.

This is the kind of thing that convinces me that anyone who gives Apple money is either a moron or a masochist. Luckily, I got this machine for free, so all I'm wasting is time.

Is not his death — so symbolic of the world-wide decline of Leftism — a great opportunity for TV-anchors and other journalists to demand, the various politicians (from Obama all the way down to "progressive" mayors) and other celebrities (such as Mr. Kaepernick) disavow the late tyrant and the oppressive regime he created?

And, when they do it, grill them over not being sufficiently enthusiastic about it and waiting too long?

I realized that I had not topped up my /. subscription in some time and went to do so. Saw this:

"Please Note: Buying or gifting of a new subscription is not available
at the moment. We apologize for the inconvenience. This downtime though
does not effect your current active subscription in any way. We will
keep you posted on the latest"

Any idea what's going on? Are they sticking to a pure ad model (all blocked anyhow, but I did like to subscribe as I like the ol' barn.)

That may not be a good way to describe it but... I have a C64 I never use and I think I shall desolder its SID before consigning it to recycling since they are now officially hard to come by. What can I put it on that will let me use it efficiently?

The above quote rendered one of my comments unpostable...

Surely someone around here knows where's the best slightly-reputable site to buy some knockoffs of the Oakley M2 XLs. I want to try them out for a while and see how they feel on my head. The sites I've found so far are registered straight outta China. Oakley has successfully driven the fakes off eBay and Amazon... the problem is, I'm not going to drop two hundred bucks on some glasses that might give me a headache, like most glasses do.