The last thread hit 300 posts, so here's a third installment.

Sadly I don't have an oddity to share, but I wanted to make sure there was a thread present when someone did.

U.S. politician George Santos expelled from Congress

It used to be that somebody needed to commit treason to get kicked out of Congress -- 17 Congressmen were expelled for supporting the Confederacy in the early 1860s, and one was expelled for trying to incite natives to conquer West Florida for the British back in 1797.

Now all it takes is financial malfeasance.

Shows how Congress' priorities have changed between the 1860s and the 1980s.

Give us a passage that could have come from a work of 20th or 21st century pop culture, if only the passage wasn't in iambic pentameter and concluding with a rhyming couplet.

For example:

Tyler:
For first, thou dost not talk of our Fight Club.
Second, thou dost not talk of our Fight Club!
Now let you be about your varied tasks
To kill all the lawyers is all we ask.

Yesterday, I had a working Manjaro Linux installation. I'm far from being a guru, barely more than a luser, but I've been getting by for a few years.

Yesterday evening I tried to rnu a .bat file with mkvmerge through WINE to strip the other audio tracks out of a set of multi-language fansubs, and the screen went black. Rebooted, still black. hit CTL-ALT-F2 to get a terminal, nothing. Tried a live USB stick, still black. Found that I can hit the xase power button, then right arrow and Enter to reboot, so it thinks it's got a GUI, but is not actually displaying anything. Faffed about doing internet searches to at least find a way to get a terminal and identify the problem.

That, at least, was successful. For a bit. Found how to edit the GRUB boot settings to boot at runlevel 3, which nasically means networking on, GUI off. Did a system update as reccommended, no change. Tried uninstalling the nvidia drivers to use the generic fallback, the only change is that now I can no longer hit the case button, right arrow, and enter to reboot from the black screen. Did a system restore from last year-ish. No change but the lower kernel version number, and GRUB being harder to access since it had zero delay at that point and just flashes past unless you're mashing ESC/Del or (I later found mentioned in yet aanother forum post) holding down Shift.

Speaking of forums, the Manjaro.org forums insist they've sent me a conformation email so I can get on there and ask for help, but none has showed up even close to 24 hours later.

Tried the Live UB for a different Arch-based distro. Same problem. Tried an Ubuntu stick, and that at last would boot. Installed it on my second "play around with other distros/installs" SSD, same problem back again unless I go into Grub and boot in safe-graphics mode, using the fallback driver that I had originally hoiped to get into my Manjaro install with to further troubleshoot. It's what I've got up right now, but it's bastardly slow even aside from only using the GPU like integrated graphics on a business PC, and I hate the Cinnamon UI. Also, it can't open the NVME with my Manjaro install or the external HDD with my 3d models (and most other creative output since 2006 or so, where it wasn't already lost somehow,) music files and browser bookmark backups.

At least I haven't given in to the "auto-generate and fill in random jumble passwords when I use a local master password" fad, so I actually know and can enter them myself for the sites I actually use. Less secure, sure, but so is having a door in your wall, and for the same reason.

Spent most of this afternoon poking at various information-reporting commands after looking up how to get the results to be shown in pages instead of dumping everything to the terminal window at once, when there is no scrollback without a working GUI. So far the best result is Xorg reporting that the Nvidia kernel module failed to initialize, which at least confirms what I thought the problem was, but still gives me no useful leads on why it broke, what specifically is wrong, or how to fix it, and without another working computer to keep the various forum pasts open on to refer to I've been having to memorize a command line, reboot, try it, and then reboot back to Ubuntu each time, which is maddeningly slowly as well as being a colossal pain in the first place due to the "memorize each command line" part.

I am just super done for the day. Arrrgh.

In case anybody has been wondering what I've been working on for this project...

Quote:"I can provide proof that you're all considered to be fictional characters in this reality," replied Cassiopée. "But that proof is upstairs and I'd have to get a television set as well as the media. For now, all I can say is that I'm well aware of who you are, who and what the four Heroic Spirits in your group are, and that the Servants were called to fight a Grail War."

Suddenly both Saber and Archer had swords drawn and were advancing on Cassiopée, while Caster was preparing a spell. Rider pronounced, "Outsiders who know of the Grail Wars must not be allowed to live."

This morning my sister-in-law and I were talking about books which we'd read as kids, and which we had been looking for and rereading again as adults. There was one which she'd so far had no luck finding, mainly because her memory of it was so fragmentary. I offered to post a query here, in the hopes someone in the greater international DW Forums community might just recognize the few scraps she remembers and let us know what it actually is. So...

She thinks the title was something like "Rhodium Robots" or "Rhodium-Plated Robots". What little she recalls of the plot revolves around someone creating robots which were so good at what doing everything that humanity essentially died off from ennui or pointlessness or the like. I'm pretty sure I'm forgetting one or two other points; I'll have to check with her and if I did forget something, I'll add it here. In the mean time, I'll just note that she's already done all the common-sense first steps, like google and the like. This is a last-resort, throw a line out at random kind of thing.

Thanks.

https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/202...-detained/

So, some prick knifed a bunch of kids outside a school.
The crowd jumped on him and 'subdued' him. He's now going to hospital.
Apparently an American wan stuck her nose in it and insisted he get arrested and not beaten to within an inch of his life.
Apparently someone spread the rumour that it was a foreigner
And somehow this turns into a riot of scumbags because, why the fuck not when all these police are in the street.


It's just human trash looking for an excuse to break shit and rob a foot locker.



----

I blame the fucking judiciary. I do. The cops used to arrest them but then - well - nothing happened. They go to court, get their conviction and be spat right back out with another 'suspended' sentence. None of these scrotes will ever see the inside of a jail cell.

I wish a happy Thanksgiving to you all.

Hello all, I'm Drez, and per my life, I'm 10 years late to the party. I found Fenspace a few years ago, and for the last year, I've been staring at the wall. Three days ago, my Muse finally grabbed hold of me and wouldn't let go until I had written my intro story. Then my Muse grabbed me again and made me write Rei's inception, from her point of view.

Up There (Intro Story)


Incept (Rei's POV)

Comments and suggestions are welcome. This is the first time I've written anything over about 2K characters.

Drezzer