Slay and serve are part of the drag/queer community lexicon that were made popular (iirc) in the NY ballroom scene. No one cares when 6th graders use them or if they stop.

If you watch queer media or hang out with The Gays, you’ll hear them all the time. They’re a bit campy, but not cringe.

Just to get it out of the way, I picked Capital because it’s extremely popular as well as being legendarily difficult to read. You could probably do Origin of Species pretty easily - I think it’s actually pretty accessible - but there’s no reason to read it at this point unless you’re a biology nerd with a fetish for history. Evolutionary biology, fortunately, has advanced significantly in the past couple of centuries. If you actually are interested in Capital (both as an artifact of its time as well as being a brilliant critique of the system that was starting to hit its stride), I recommend David Harvey. Harvey has several video and text based courses on Capital that make the ideas accessible and make sense both in the context in which they were written and for our more modern understanding. A lot of his work is freely available on YouTube and the web. 

But moving on from Marx, you might benefit from a course in literary analysis. Again, it could be an ebook or a video, but it might help to develop a framework for understanding literature around either a specific period (eg early 20th century versus post war writings) or topics or literary movements. What I’m saying is that if you read scholars who studied Walt Whitman in addition to actually reading his writings, I think you would get closer to what I think your goal is.

In any case, I wish you all the luck in the world and hope you make some remarkable discoveries. I’ve taken multi-year sabbaticals where I did little outside of reading, and I always came out of them with far better growth than a decade of work at a desk.

I’m going to make a couple of recommendations, but I do have a question - why are you looking for free/out of copyright books? These have a couple of issues that may get in the way of your primary goal of getting g better at reading and, I assume, learning about new subjects. I’m also going to make the assumption that we’re talking primarily about English language books, but note that you didn’t specify a set of topics.

Many of the books that you can find on, eg, Gutenberg, suffer from being poor or outdated translations. If you’re really looking to understand Marx’s Capital (to take an extreme example) I could not recommend a resource less than Gutenberg. It is atrocious. If you want to read Dickens or something, it is at best plain unflavored oatmeal. I’d like to suggest a couple of alternatives.

When I had zero income for a while and was simply burning through my savings to live from day to day but still needed to read and learn - both to feel human and to move on to my next phase in life - I found torrents of ebooks. Some of them were just crappy PDF scans where the pages were just images (I think my first Zizek book was like that), while others were available in or translatable to an e-book format. The ones I tended to grab (and this is 20+ years ago) were things like the entire collection of Oxford University Press books for a span of years, which would cover science, philosophy, literature, and so on. Each one was gigs in size, and I used an ebook program to catalog them.

The other option, depending on where you are or where you can manage to appear to be, is the public library system. This lets you borrow many books, and libraries aren’t all that strict (generally speaking) about validating addresses and such.

My suggestion overall is to read about reading, and in general to read more modern books. If you’re interested in Jack London, don’t just read Jack London. Read about how he fits into English literature by people who have dedicated their lives to the subject. Read about the world he inhabited, what his metaphors mean, and how he compares to writers in his genre who preceded and followed him.

Oscar Wilde is a darling author, but again you need the full literary context to really appreciate gay history and literature, you’ll want the additional history and context of his contemporaries, his historical conditions, and how his work influenced future authors.

While it’s easier to appreciate Sherlock Holmes than Shakespeare, you won’t get as much out of it out of either without a bit more digging.

Also, those are not all separate paths. They are all one, and they lead to the same place.

California.

That removed knows who’s in charge.

Edit: Hey, removed bot - that term is considered high praise in the LGBT community, and I’m about to report you for being homophobic.

I want to be clear. I do not blame Ghana’s people for these laws. I do not blame Africans for the many nations that have enacted similar laws.

Christian church organizations, acting under the rubric of evangelical outreach or even more offensively charitable giving have backed religious and political leaders with LGBT-phobic agendas up to and including execution for being gay. Of course they’re going to do it - they get power and money for doing so.

The US needs to extend the Logan Act to apply to these situations and make the crime a felony that can lead to the arrest of the people involved and the legal dissolution of the organizations.

Also, this is literally their job. The surprising bit would be if US intel services weren’t doing a thing about a Russian invasion of an independent European nation.

I mean, sure, if a Trumpist gets offended by it because they want the fascists to win, I get how they’d get in a bind, but other than electing Trump and making sure fascism becomes the rule of the day around the world, I’m not sure what they expect to expect.

This is entirely subjective - I haven’t gone around counting things up - but I’ve noticed both more pro-Tesla and pro-SpaceX posts and increased arguments on the anti-Musk posts. It seemed (on lemmy) to be coming from the same small number of accounts, so it could just be an enthusiastic handful of fanboys.

If one of them became a mod, that might explain it. They were very active in the Tesla and SpaceX subs with multiple articles posted within minutes of each other within the past couple of days.

Sure, unless there was a correlation between the technologies deployed by the individual companies and their vulnerabilities.

I’m not saying there is in this case, but it’s a phenomenon we see all the time in systems ranging from technological to immunological. When network (social, computer, whatever) connect systems with correlated vulnerabilities, there can be cascading failures that do not spread outside those networks. It’s been so long (over 30 years) since I’ve even thought about RF and related systems that I have no idea what specific or proprietary technologies the major companies have, so I just shrugged it off as I was unaffected, and penciled in that there may have been a correlation with solar activity.

I’m a manager at a FAANG and have been involved in tech and scientific research for commercial, governmental, and military applications for about 35 years now, and have been through a lot of different careers in the course of things.

First - and I really don’t want to come off like a dick here - you’re two years in. Some people take off, and others stay at the same level for a decade or more. I am the absolute last person to argue that we live in a meritocracy - it’s a combination of the luck of landing with the right group on the right projects - but there’s also something to be said about tenacity in making yourself heard or moving on. You can’t know a whole lot with two years of experience. When I hire someone, I expect to hold their hand for six months and gradually turn more responsibility over as they develop both their technical and personal/project skills.

That said, if you really hate it, it’s probably time to move on. If you’re looking to move into a PM style role, make sure that you have an idea of what that all involves, and make sure you know the career path - even if the current offer pays more, PMs in my experience cap out at a lower level for compensation than engineers. Getting a $10k bump might seem like you’re moving up, but a) it doesn’t sound like you’re comparing it to other engineering offers and b) we’re in a down market and I’d be hesitant to advise anyone to make a jump right now if their current position is secure. Historically speaking, I’m expecting demand to start to climb back to high levels in the next 1-2 years.

Honestly, it just sounds like your job sucks. I have regularly had students, interns, and mentees in my career because that’s important to me. One thing I regularly tell people is that if there’s something that they choose to read about rather than watching Netflix on a Saturday, that’s something they should be considering doing for a living. Obviously that doesn’t cover Harry Potter, but if you’re reading about ants or neural networks or Bayesian models or software design patterns, that’s a pretty good hint as to where you should be steering. If you’d rather work on space systems, or weapons, or games, or robots, or LLMs, or whatever - you can slide over with side and hobby projects. If you’re too depressed to even do that, take the other job. I’d rather hire a person who quit their job to drive for Uber while they worked on their own AI project than someone who was a full stack engineer at a startup that went under.

Anyway, that’s my advice. Let me know if I can clarify anything.

You’re absolutely right. In my memory, though, the ones that stick out the most are the ones where the hero is pro-corporate but in an anti-corporate way. I’m thinking about movies like Working Girl, 9 to 5, and Secret of My Success, and even Other People’s Money. The villains were the very straight and square boss types and the heroes were the young(er) upstarts who could out-business them. OPM was a little different but I think it fits the theme.

The main difference I’m seeing is that even in the pro-capitalism shows, it was still all about sticking it to the man. If the good guys were cops, the man was the chief of police. If the good guys were businessmen, the man was their boss. If the good guys were soldiers, the man was their CO, or the generals or politicians back in Washington.

Maybe it’s purely subjective on my part, but it seems like there’s a lot more pro-authority movies being made now. You can’t take a movie like Top Gun (which still had the shaggy haired rebel as well as one of the most homoerotic themes in mainstream cinema at the time) with something like Bill Murray in Stripes. Stripes is great comedy that I’d place almost at the level of Caddyshack, but even though both movies could have been shown by recruiters to get people to enlist, Stripes was still a goofball comedy of the slobs against the snobs (with the snobs in this case being their leadership).

I’d really like to get back into that kind of default cultural image. Cops were mostly corrupt (Serpico) or idiots (Cannonball Run), or else inept (Escape from New York, or all of those stupid Charles Bronson movies).

It just feels like we hit that point where the default is to love Big Brother.

Wasn’t there also a report today (I think) about an unusual level of sunspot activity? Without digging into it, I think I sort of just assumed they were related.

I have AT&T fiber and a Verizon iPhone and I didn’t notice disruptions on either. My partner has an AT&T iPhone and didn’t notice any issues.

Ironically, Robocop would have defended him from the terminators.

I really do miss the 80s/90s era anti-capitalist dystopian future movies. We have the Purge series now, which has been pretty good (at least 3 and 4), but nothing approaching the massive numbers of productions ranging from They Live to Rollerboys to Robocop to Running Man and so many others.

It feels like we’ve hit a tipping point where subconsciously at least we’ve figured out we’re actually the bad guys from Red Dawn and the Wolverines are the people we’re killing, and just decided to lean into it. I’m waiting for Handmaid’s Tale to get a Birth of a Nation makeover in the next ten years.

Not to scale.

It’s going to be a glorious disaster. Didn’t they slash the initial IPO estimate about six months after announcing it and shortly before the whole API thing? I haven’t cared enough to follow it closely, especially since abandoning the platform, but it really seems like the stakeholders wanting to cash in on a sinking ship before it finally goes down.

I have a few honest questions for anyone who supports this kind of legislation.

First, what problem specifically is this trying to address? Have teen pregnancies gone up since the advent of kids being able to access porn on the internet? Kids with STDs? Sexual assaults on children? What specific metric has changed that makes this kind of legislation a priority right now? Is there a model that shows a correlation between the behaviors this legislation intends to address and the social ills you believe are associated with it?

Second is the related question of what metrics you think will improve with the introduction of this legislation? How long do you think it will take for that change to come about? If it does not, would you support removing this legislation?

Third, if a social ill were to be associated as per the above with online content, would you support similar legislation to regulate access (eg, if hate speech or LGBT-phobia posted online were to show a positive correlation with intolerance or violence), would you require online services to monitor access to sites hosting that kind of content, such as requiring a government issued ID to be kept on record and associated with specific user accounts?

I already control technology with my thoughts. I just use my fingers to do it.

I don’t know how this works for help desk level jobs, but I do know that big tech companies generally avoid the massive job sites and recruiters. They also frequently have at home advisors. Have you tried hitting up the individual company sites?

I clicked thinking it was an Elon Musk thing…

Thanks! I will check back.