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The original 43

Plus, turns out the shithead who murdered 17 kids yesterday was a white supremacist.

But yeah...both sides are totally the same.

One of Trump’s first acts as president made it easier for the mentally ill to buy guns

You Up? College in the Age of Tinder

Frankly, dating apps can also just make things incredibly awkward. My freshman year I swiped through hundreds of people. At one of the last tailgates of the year, a random man walked by me and yelled: “Hey! We matched on Tinder! You are Tinder girl!”

I was mortified. Suddenly everyone around me knew that I was on Tinder. And I had swiped through so many people, I had no idea who this guy was. He was just another nameless “match” that I would never get to know. Because, needless to say, I walked away and never spoke to that guy again.

[...] The same Snap asking to “hang out” sent at 2 p.m. can have a completely different meaning when sent at 2 a.m.

[...] You don’t want to be mid-makeout while the jewel-encrusted crab from “Moana” is singing about how shiny he is.

So, most people know I've been using Linux since mid-2004, and that I started with Gentoo...which, yes, is the equivalent of learning to swim by donning a bacon bikini, rubbing yourself in A1 Steak Sauce, and jumping in the Amazon in the middle of piranha season.

Over the last 13+ years, Linux has...changed. A lot. I am sorry to say that I don't believe most of the changes have been good ones: GTK 3.x, the fiasco that was the KDE 4 series, RedHat aiming to become the next Microsoft, and the crux of the former, SystemD. Yes, I am a SystemD hater, and I make no apologies for it. It does things wrong, it does not even pretend to follow the Unix philosophy, and its syntax and "feel" remind me more than anything of PowerShell, which has to be the most bloated, flabby, weak, user-hostile CLI environment in history.

I also don't have a lot of money for hardware; this post is being typed on a used Thinkpad T440s I was lucky enough to acquire for $200 on EBay from a trusted source. And, being that i work 55+ hours a week *and* do anti-human-trafficking stuff, I don't have endless time to piddle around with Gentoo any longer. Much as I love the near-insane levels of control and configurability it offers, my poor ULV mobile i5 CPU just can't take that level of abuse for long.

So...I'd been distro-hopping for a while, playing with Devuan, Slackware, Artix, Obarun (unsuccessfully; the fucker just wouldn't install and I have no idea why), even FreeBSD.

And then a friend from college, the one who got me into Linux all those years ago, suggested Void.

Now, I'd heard of Void before, but had never even visited the homepage. Doing so left me somewhat underwhelmed, but intrigued; it was very businesslike. There wasn't the patronizing aura of the *buntu family, the slightly notionally-cabbage-smelling, half-baked feeling around Debian, or the complete unprofessionalism of umpteen hojillion other flavor-of-the-week distros.

If anything, it felt like FreeBSD, which I had limited success with and mostly enjoyed, but which didn't let me do a few things I really had gotten used to on Linux. So with Matt's encouragement, I downloaded the Xfce installer, backed up my stuff, cleared out my HDD, and booted it up.

It was a revelation. I don't know how else to describe this. Aside from the slightly WTF choice of using CFDisk, the installer was a no-nonsense NCurses-based affair that reminded me in all the good ways of the Slackware and FreeBSD bootstrappers. It was one of the most painless and ye-gods-FAST installs I had ever seen. Rebooting worked immediately; I was presented with a vanilla Xfce desktop and a very minimal set of programs, which is how I like it.

Two things immediately stood out: the first is the package manager, the XBPS suite (xbps-* commands). I can't say enough good about this; it's like Arch's Pacman for adults. it feels like the lovechild of Apt and Pacman in all the best ways, and it is *blazing* quick. It also has an xbps-src build system, which is to xbps something like the *BSD ports tree is to FreeBSD's pkg utility. It even acts a lot like the ports tree.

The second, and the thing that has made me a Void fangirl for life, is the Runit init system.

OpenRC isn't bad, and I'll take just about anything over Gawdawful SystemD, but Runit feels like alien technology. It is incredibly fast, it's very simple to administrate--just symlink stuff from /etc/sv to /var/services--and it will even, something like the Minix reincarnation server for its drivers, automagically restart crashed services for you!

Did I mention fast? Because this thing goes from "pushing Enter on the GRUB prompt" to "SDDM login screen ready for my credentials" in 10 seconds. 10. I counted. 9-and-a-bit, actually, but close enough to 10 to say 10.

If you run Linux, if you *love* Linux, try Void. You won't regret it. It will change the way you think about Linux. It sweeps away all the bad decisions of the last half a decade. Stuff Just Works. It's the most stable Linux I have ever used, and this despite being nearly as bleeding-edge as Arch. Runit is the star of the show and I wish it were standard on every distro. Do it. You won't b disappointed. Enter The Void.

Folks, this month is very special. Because I've proclaimed what I call National African American History Month.

Let me tell you, last February I toured our National Museum of African-American History and Culture. And they had a stone there. The slaves would stand on it. And get auctioned off. And I said to myself, "boy, that is just not good, that is not good.” They had little metal things, like handcuffs, that they put on the little slave children. And I said to myself, "that is really bad!" Sometimes handcuffs are fun. Trust me, it's not fun to put them on children. It's very sick, or bad.

So now I'm saying to all Americans, let's COME TOGETHER. 💕 As One Team, One People, One American Family! To celebrate the extraordinary contributions of African-Americans to our nation. Let's turn our thoughts to the heroes of the civil rights movement whose courage and sacrifice have inspired us all. Frederick Douglass, he's done an amazing job. Rev. King is being recognized more and more. We've got so many great people. Proclamation: 45.wh.gov/c9Gvt9 pic.twitter.com/Nx0AEKZy5p

...Instead He’ll Run A $1 Trillion One.

  Fourteen months before he was elected president, Donald Trump vowed to make sure the country would never again run a $400 billion budget deficit.

“Well, he’s right about that,” laughed Capitol Hill budget veteran Stan Collender on Monday.

Because, as it turns out, Trump kept his promise ― only not in the way his supporters might have hoped.

In the first budget cycle fully under their control, Trump and the Republican-run Congress are likely to run a deficit that will top $1 trillion, some two-and-a-half times as big as the one Trump had complained about at his Sept. 30, 2015, rally in Keene, New Hampshire.

Meet the Writer the New York Times Hired and Fired In Just Six Hours

After a Twitter Storm, The Times and a New Hire Part Ways

I’m a 29-Year-Old Pregnant Virgin

"This is me giving a middle finger to the people who told me I couldn’t do it because I’m not married yet."

Thoughts and prayers with the families of the 71 Saratov Airlines passengers & crew who died. ✈️💥 No survivors.⚰️⚰️⚰️

And with the survivors, and the families of the victims, of the firey helicopter crash in the Grand Canyon. 🚁🔥

Very sad for me personally. Since taking office I have been very strict on Commercial Aviation. So there were Zero deaths in 2017, the best and safest year on record. 2018, not so great. We must work much harder and get very, very tough on the airlines. Jimmy Carter, President Carter, was a DISASTER for our airlines! Our airlines have been in the shitter since he signed the Airline Deregulation Act.🚽 pic.twitter.com/y8vikN1akP

Russians are mocking their space program after the SpaceX launch

Some dove head-first into Russia's rising inequality and the excessive wealth among the country's billionaire elite. One user noted the millions of dollars and years of effort Musk has plowed into pioneering space technology, and lamented the comparison with the kinds of things Russia’s notorious 96 billionaires tend to spend their own money on.

His example: Roman Abramovich, the Russian oil-and-metals magnate who spent some $233 million buying the U.K. soccer team Chelsea.

Abramovich, who’s worth $11 billion according to Forbes magazine, also splashed out some $400 million for the world's second-largest yacht in 2010, which he named Eclipse, ironically enough.

Others used the SpaceX craze to poke fun at Moscow’s standard tit-for-tat diplomatic approach to disputes with Washington, with one user photoshopping a mobile missile launcher flying through the cosmos as Russia’s “symmetrical response.”

How Elon Musk Beat Russia's Space Program

The Soviet Union tried something similar in the 1960s and early 1970s. Sergei Korolev, the rocket designer who launched the first satellite and the first man into space, began the development of what came to be known as the N-1, a 30-engine superheavy rocket capable of taking a 75-ton space station to orbit and perhaps to the Moon, Mars and Venus. Finished after Korolev’s death in 1966, the N-1 was test-launched four times. Each of the launches failed, largely because of the difficulty of running so many engines at the same time.

Now SpaceX has pulled off a similar task, and even though it’s not clear yet who will contract for the Falcon Heavy’s services, SpaceX founder Elon Musk now has the most capable missile in the world: It can deliver up to 64 tons into orbit. Russia’s plans to build such a rocket, capable of flying to the Moon or to Mars, aren’t even complete yet, and certainly not fully funded, though Igor Komarov, head of Roskosmos, the Russian space agency, has promised a first launch in 2028. Even China is likely to have a superheavy launch vehicle before Russia. But it’s the success of upstart Musk that smarts. Roskosmos has the full power of the state behind it, after all. And yet here’s this boyish-looking showman launching his roadster into space, David Bowie blasting from the car’s speakers and “Don’t Panic” -- a quote from Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” -- lit up on the central console.