I have one 2025 #MagWest badge for sale. This video game themed-event is happening in San Jose, California August 8 - 10th.

It costs $95. That is what I paid for it online directly from MagWest. I'm unable to attend because of other obligations here at home. You can "privately mention" me through my mastodon here if you'd like to purchase my badge.

#indiegame #chiptune #magwest #music

I'm wondering if it's possible for other people to break through their own molds or self-perceptions that lead them to think they are unable to achieve more than the sum of their active lifestyles -- because of boss restrictions and economic constraints.

What's holding us back? Is it these geriatric Republican senators from the south who are doing their best to appease Donald J. Trump while making sure millions are screwed out of their _right_ to healthcare? <-- I'm calling it that and not looking back. We have arrived, further than what happened during the 1990s with HMO's.

I want to know, now. I really do. What else could it be that's wrong with American society besides only people taking off at 7:15 in the morning to go to work.

My pro-environment mission statement thought up as a question is this: Anyone want to tell me why doing that for around forty or so years could be a short term or medium term challenge for every other living thing on the planet while tens of millions do the same driving everyday in the USA on a planet with the finite resource called fossil fuels?

Some elements in working society will not rapidly change. Others could change more swiftly with AI continually making inroads. When I was younger, we had to some degree in several areas of the white collar world of technology administration, finance, and office work predicted more tasks only humans could do would become automated and that computers would eventually replace humans using the old ways of paper documents, filing cabinets, and paper ledgers. This has continued to happen.

What's happening now worldwide is certain jobs altogether are being rethought of in terms of scope and remade into... something a little different so that we lose less together on a collective basis. There is now a struggle between workers' rights, their inalienable right to exist and function as a person while at the same time thrive as an individual within the context of working in the job itself, and facing a business's own notion of efficiency or what /that business/ perceives through shareholder control to be generalized economic expediency. <-- This area is where I'm interested a little more all the time about what women, minorities, and foreigners are interested in changing about the American business landscape. The intersection of different cultures could still slow down the invasive pattern of white male egos or paternalism being prevalent in management so frequently in business (what others might call patriarchy I think of as advanced paternal thinking).

In American capitalism this has been a rough road. Many are not getting paid enough and corporations do not budge on their own positions at times which makes many situations frustrating for workers.

Is work their motivation? Or is it money? I was raised in a family that fit in with the American lifestyle during my childhood. My Dad had a few friends he could turn to for moral and spiritual support and he tried to get out with both me and my Mom.

The problem I found later was that the way in which I was treated by both my guardians was unevenly disproportionate to how I learned to finally get along with others -- first by being independent and the second was doing things that I liked when I was able to.

In my toot I've attached a graphic where I asked AI to compare paternalism and patriarchy. This is where I feel that ChatGPT is, in some way, hallucinating on just identifying exactly what the differences are between patriarchy and paternalism and why that's the way ChatGPT is reporting those definitions in this manner. There are both differences and similarities between paternal instincts in men and the definition of patriarchy, yes -- which maybe should be thought of as going hand-in-hand more often lately, than to a lesser extent.

"See them fighting for power..."

I hear Bob Marley's words just a little when I read about techbros such as Zuck throwing hundreds of millions at developers so they can assist Meta.

Meta makes up 7-13% of this country's IT/ICT annual revenue.

Meta is not important in the larger scheme of things, apart from making money from advertising and Facebook. This fact is not in dispute, especially as it relates to the development of #AI.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tech_bro

I'm glad the U.K. public is staying on top of this, even if their court system now stinks since they have ideologues sitting on the bench[1]. The U.K. Supreme Court sat in judgement and interpreted only through negative and arbitrary fashion on the subject of trans rights[2]. Their decision is perhaps similar to what America's Department of Defense did here in my own country with regard to how our military processes its recruits for future military service. Our now-biased DoD banned trans enlistees from all of US military's branches when the two-time rapist, former Fox News commentator, and drunken oaf, Secretary of Defense Pete #Hegseth, took charge.

Time will tell.

Here we have rich people and Boomers who engage in #whataboutism. I'm personally all too familiar with them trying to turn the argument around online by making everything about what the other side is doing improperly or "wrong." This is, of course, nothing new. We are going to forever have disagreements with conservatives. The problem is that the American right-wing has been bestowed all three branches of government. They are really mashing it up or stomping all over our shared right to be free. So, many of us are fighting back against their policies in government. We are resisting against the system, and winning in the process.

That is just Trumpian whataboutism. The glorious thing is that #whataboutism is already dying on its own sword. #Smart people such as you and me who write toots such as this one don't go for that, ever. Even when our psychologies (psyches?) are being tested or challenged by others -- the intelligent folks among us do know how to tell apart fiction from reality at all times. I'm not a parent myself but I know several parents from my generation (#GenX) and they are good at doing this with their children. It's because young adults lack the emotional and mental maturity to think like real adults. So, parents help guide their kids toward recognizing their own strengths and weaknesses; or their allowances and constraints, as it were.

#Transphobic hate and anti-gay behaviors are nasty habits which rich people such as Briton J.K. Rowling and most financially poorer MAGA types here in America all have in common. Uber-conservatives always make statements where they put themselves and their needs first, as if that precedence alone is the single condition which makes the whole world revolve on its axis.

The certifiable losers who support Donald J. Trump both think and feel in their own hearts that their individual right to hate someone else over who that other person loves supersedes any other's wisdom and logic.

It's one thing for both haters and people in general having the right to express their feelings to others within a democratic society. In the US (but not if you're serving in the US military) we are all protected by something called the First Amendment. It is really quite another thing for our feeble legal system to be lenient towards those voices who hold political office and who also channel hate publicly, online, or on TV.

https://www.comicsands.com/pascal-explains-rowling-loser?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=infeed&utm_campaign=linkprogram

[1] - https://uollb.com/blogs/uol/hierarchy-of-the-courts-of-england-and-wales

[2] - https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/05/09/uk-court-ruling-threatens-trans-people

I used to actively think in terms of #chiptunes a lot in my mind during my teens and mid-twenties. What I imagined sounded just like this (purposefully slowed down) song by FM-84 called Arcade Summer.

Later on, I became a lot more autistic. I'm more of a writer and part time coder now than a composer. I always thought of music as math.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7v0SDAId_BY

Here's the regular version of Arcade Summer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssdA6IiP3r4

Finally, we all now have found peace in letting go of "the specter of the Spectre" vulnerability, once and for all! The Intel Corporation was kind of holding their cards close to their chest after side-channel attacks were discovered back in 2018.

Now, Ubuntu's engineers are just dumping their Spectre mitigations in favor of #GPU performance.

"Ultimately, cryptography engineer Sophie Schmieg said, the benefit of the mitigations isn't worth the performance costs to GPU performance, where predicting instruction branches is more critical than for CPU performance."

https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/06/ubuntu-disables-intel-gpu-security-mitigations-promises-20-performance-boost/