Mitch Effendi (ميتش أفندي)

I like coffee, Philly, Pittsburgh, Arabic language, anything on two wheels, music, linux, theology, cats, computers, pacifism, art, unity, equity, etymology, the power of words, and getting high off airplane glue. Will use Adobe Illustrator for food.

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Joined 15 days ago
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Cake day: July 30th, 2025

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  • My unpopular opinion is that Flash was perhaps one of the greatest media standards of all time. Think about it — in 2002, people were packaging entire 15 minute animations with full audio and imagery, all encapsulated in a single file that could play in any browser, for under 10mb each. Not to mention, it was one of the earliest formats to support streaming. It used vectors for art, which meant that a SWF file would look just as good today on a 4k screen as it did in 2002.

    It only became awful once we started forcing it to be stuff it didn’t need to be, like a Web design platform, or a common platform for applets. This introduced more and more advanced versions of scripting that continually introduced new vulnerabilities.

    It was a beautiful way to spread culture back when the fastest Internet anyone could get was 1 MB/sec.





  • Hank: “Bobby, when I was little, we had 151 Pokémon, and that was plenty! We didn’t even have confirmation that Mew existed until maybe a decade later, and we were all so happy that we threw a party! Remember, Boomhauer?”

    Boomhauer: “Well I tell ya what man igottagetyaonthepokemonromhacksbecausebackthentheydidntknowgaddumnallaboutjapaneseso (chuckling) theyjustchangedthejapanesecharacterstoenglishones man andnobodycaredtheydjustsitthereonno$gbandmakeuppokemonnameslike ‘turt’ or ‘hors’ andwe’dalljustlikestumblethroughthebarelytranslatedgames tryingtofigureoutwhattodoman it was a joy to be included”

    Hank: “Yeah.”



  • the thing i keep seeing as a wrinkle is, he’s using the national guard, who are by-and-by-large the weekend contract kind who maintain jobs and have families in far-flings of the state.

    by deploying them and keeping them deployed, the longer they stay like that, the more guardsmen will lose the jobs they had waiting for them. i know there are protections and such, but, we’re in a capitalist-fascist hellscape now, money is gonna do the talking from now on, and a deployed soldier don’t make money. i also do not see this occupation ending any time soon, nor do i see any protestors being dumb enough to try and test the might of the world’s only global military hedgemon… so, i think they’re just gonna be sitting around playing fucking candy crush.

    like, is there a ceiling with guardsmen on how much bullshit they’ll tolerate before they start deserting? i am genuinely asking, if anyone is in the service and knows better.




  • i just wanted to drop my personal favorite self-hosted git alternative, Gogs (gogs.io). i have very modest git needs (i just need a place to host code and interact with the git client), and i think it fits the bill well.

    i am not associated with it at all, i just want folks to know that self-hosting your own git service has really never been easier or better; there are so many good options, like a similar project, gitea.

    if you are uncomfortable with exposing your home network to the internet, you can use tools like tailscale funnel or a reverse proxy server like caddy and a $5 VPS from any cloud host of your choosing to obscure your home IP, while still keeping the storage and the brains somewhere closeby.

    imo, the only way forward for all of us to stay safe is to keep repeating a simple mantra: “let’s go back to making websites.”