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  • 45 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: September 1st, 2023
  • TrenchcoatFullOfBats@belfry.riptoToday I Learned@lemmy.world•TIL a lot of different famous people are or were ham radio enthusiastsEnglish
    2·
    20 days ago

    No, it was definitely him. I was just paying tribute to him as an aficionado of a democratizing system of long range communication.

    The GNU thing is a reference to author Terry Pratchett, who wrote about a democratizing system of long range communication similar to the telegraph but with semaphore towers, called the “clacks” (because of the clacking sounds the semaphore flags made when they moved). Each clacks tower was in visual range of another clacks tower, and each one was manned by an operator who would read the incoming message and then send the same message on to the next tower in the line until the message reached the intended destination. This system is one of the main subplots in the book “Going Postal”, which is a critique of unchecked capitalism, corporate greed and privatization of profit over public service and worker safety.

    In the book, the clacks system is the victim of a hostile takeover by a rich capitalist named Reacher Gilt, who either directly via one of his agents (similar to the Pinkertons), or indirectly via cost-cutting that leads to safety issues, murders/kills the creator and previous owner of the clacks system, John Dearheart.

    After his death, clacks operators up and down the line of towers memorialize him with the message “GNU John Dearheart”, which was inserted into the “overhead” of the messages (also literally over their heads in the towers), which were sent in every single clacks message on all lines as additional information for operators about the message.

    “G” meant “send the message on” “N” meant “do not log the message” “U” meant “at the end of the line, turn the message around”

    In the book, the reason they did this is because “A man’s not dead while his name is still spoken”.

    When Pratchett himself died, GNU Terry Pratchett became a thing as a way for fans to remember him. Some even created the “X-Clacks-Overhead” code, which can be inserted into the header of websites as a tribute to those who should not be forgotten.

    So GNU Terry Pratchett and GNU Garry Shandling.

  • TrenchcoatFullOfBats@belfry.riptoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•What movie have you rewatched the most?
    3·
    2 months ago

    It’s more that it challenged me so much that the gut-wrenching horror has been burned into my memory to the extent that I don’t need to watch it ever again.

    The reality was much worse. The movie was based on a short story written by “Seita” (Akiyuki Nosaka) as a fantasy, apologetic version of what actually happened, in that in the fantasy, he actually gave his starving sister some of his food, but in reality, he ate it himself:

    Nosaka said that in the story, Seita “got increasingly transformed into a better human being” since he was trying to “compensate for everything I couldn’t do myself” and that he was never “kind like the main character.”

    Nosaka explained that “I always thought I wanted to perform those generous acts in my head, but I couldn’t do so.” He believed that he would always give food to his sister, but when he obtained food, he ate it. The food tasted very good when it was scarce, but he felt remorse afterwards. Nosaka concluded, “I’d think there is no one more hopeless in the world than me. I didn’t put anything about this in the novel.”

    There Will Be Blood is another one-and-done for me, for similar reasons; the human cost of human selfishness and greed. Also, the atonal, discordant soundtrack of TWBB is amazing, and fits the story perfectly, but is also really, really uncomfortable.