She had a (non-cancerous) brain tumor, which she did a few videos about treating. I hope that’s behind her forever as well. :(

I don’t know how much Impossible Meat is because nobody around here carries it, but I would imagine it’s a bit pricey just for the name being so popular.

Having tried a fairly wide variety of vegan meat replacements, I personally found that Impossible meat was the most impressive. Their beef imitation is quite literally indistinguishable from the real thing. If anything, it’s beefier than real ground beef. I can sometimes find it on sale at my local store for about $7 or $8 a pound, but usually it’s more around $10 or $11. I always stock up on the beef or sausage when it’s on sale, as my non-vegan family has fully embraced it, whereas they have been less receptive of other beef imitations (though they’ll enjoy any old imitation chicken, which appears to be easier to replicate).

XMPP would be the best choice at this point in time, as it doesn’t suffer the downfalls of Matrix (though even Matrix would be better than Discord).

The article is pretty well laid out, IMO. It sets up the story with background information of who Ken Williams is, the history of the Police Quest series and the Sierra hacker/stoner culture, then goes into Daryl Gates and his background, and finally how Ken hobnobbed with him and pushed hard for him to be involved despite the resistance of the game devs. It then goes into how the game that Daryl advised on was deeply influenced by his racist views, which Ken had no trouble publishing, and even hoped would generate controversy for profit.

It gives all the context needed for non-sierra fans and for people not familiar with Daryl Gates, and doesn’t really have any fluff or repeating points.

Not sure what you mean by skewing the facts? Could you give an example?

Article’s kinda crap, really; the whole point is “a prick hired a prick to be involved in a prickish game.”

Ken Williams has generally been pretty well regarded, especially by Sierra fans. He was even included in the old Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy, so I think it comes as somewhat surprising that he was so easily swayed by Rush Limbaugh back then, and shifted so far right wing to the point of purposefully working with a cop so heavily associated with systemic racism and the Rodney King beating.

It certainly was news to me, as someone who grew up with those games.

Not everyone has the ability or spare time to become skilled in every field. Calling them lazy and illiterate for not learning a complicated thing (when they may already be learning some other complex subject) is kinda the definition of elitism.

Don’t be an elitist bung hole, dude.

But doesn’t this mean that geoengineering is also effective at giving us extra time? We’d start using safer gases that have the same cooling effect while we try and go carbon negative worldwide

Personally, I think that’d actually have an overall negative effect. Governments and corporations desperately don’t want to do anything about climate change, and giving them more time with cooler temperatures will (my opinion) just allow the world to further delay doing anything about it, allowing them to bake in even worse temps if they ever had to stop geoengineering for whatever reason.

This is a really morbid take, but all these big heatwaves, radical weather, and rise in weather related deaths cannot be ignored, and that’s unfortunately damn useful. It makes it harder to be a climate denier/skeptic, makes people more angry when nothing is being done about curbing emissions (hopefully leading to more climate protests), and really forces society to place a skeptical eye at all the new fossil fuels being brought online around the world, all because they can personally feel it.

If it could be made to be business as usual, I think we’d see the “Gosh darn it guys, we reaaaallly should do something about all this. Eventually.” mentality just continue until it once again becomes too hot physically to ignore.

Yeah they’re great, always look forward to the skit at the end :)

At least the CCP is open to criticism and debate about their actions back then. If you go to Tiananmen today, you will see and hear a lot of discussion of this troubling time in China’s recent history.

Yes, that’s one of the CCP’s best qualities, to be sure. It’s so rare to see a government actively encourage their citizens to discuss such major events,

You will need to create a new account, but it is possible to export all of your subscriptions to a new account. There should be a thing you can click for that in your settings menu to download the export file, which you would then import into your new account.

Your old comments will not transfer, however.

The errors occurred on standard Firefox running on Windows 10 LTSC, and for mobile on Graphene OS using mull, a hardened version of Firefox mobile.

Both were using ublock origin and localCDN extensions.

Interesting project!

Seems to be giving an error on both Firefox mobile and desktop, but I was able to use it on Chrome.

Firefox error page:

GNU Taler could replace Paypal, we can only hope.

Apparently a few coop banks somewhere are adopting/have adopted taler, so hopefully it takes off.

All the iterations of Communism as enacted in the world with its various flavors (not as described by Marx himself, which I have less issue with) tend to have fundamental structural power issues that cannot be resolved, and inevitably become authoritarian and eventually corrupt. Relying on who is steering the boat to have a positive outcome means that even if lucky enough to get a good person, it’s easy enough to replace them with a bad actor.

History has clearly shown centralized power cannot be wrangled reliably, which I think strongly necessitates the need for decentralizing power at a fundamental level to prevent the failings of the past.

I won’t dispute that some communist dictatorships did result in some benefits to the poor and disadvantaged, but at a needlessly great cost to liberties and innocent lives. I don’t personally agree with the Michael Parenti viewpoint that we shouldn’t be so harsh on previous communist regimes because of those gains. I think in the end, Capitalism and Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, etc. are ultimately horrific for the soul, and we have better solutions that mitigate the possibility of those extreme negatives.

Which would then lead to the conclusion that both are terrible. Investigation into solutions will usually then reveal that the most promising one is Anarchism, as demonstrated in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War, which is where George Orwell became fully soured on Communist Totalitarianism, and witnessed the extreme promise of Socialist Anarchist society.

The hostile attitude and accusations will not be conducive to changing minds or furthering meaningful discussion, there’s room for nuance here.

Biden is ultimately a typical neoliberal bastard, with all the negatives that brings. None of us want him, but realistically, no third party has a snowball’s chance in hell of winning with our current voting system. I don’t think any of us would blame you for sticking with your ideals in your vote regardless of that fact, but I don’t think it’s right to denigrate those who would opt for a practical harm reduction vote over an idealistic one that would ultimately result in a dictator taking power and absolutely wreaking even worse havoc on both people and the environment, especially as we are living in a period where there is no time left for the environment.

We’re still not sure if there are extreme tipping points of no return climate-wise. If we assume for safety’s sake that there is, then it’s critical to prevent further warming, and I can’t blame anyone for choosing a lesser evil that has allowed meaningful climate legislation to pass, over one that is shopping around his willingness to destroy the planet for his own personal gain, and who has publically advocated for going full steam ahead with Palestinian Genocide.

Ultimately we’re voting for scraps, and that’s all that’ll ever be, since no meaningful reform can come from within the system. But I don’t see any benefit to giving up those scraps for something far worse unless one advocates for accelerationism, which I personally don’t since it means massively increased suffering with no guarantee of better outcomes long-term.

Saying all that, I do think doing anything beyond just tossing in a vote when the time comes, like volunteering for or financially supporting a political campaign is a waste of time and money that could be better spent outside of the political system.

Incidentally, Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil war as well under the POUM, and went on to write a book about it. What he saw in Catalonia solidified him as a Democratic Socialist for the rest of his life, and soured him on totalitarian communism after seeing how the communists betrayed the Anarchists and the POUM, which inspired him to write Animal Farm.

For a deeper history on the Spanish Civil War, I’d highly recommend this excellent documentary series.

It may have been the ultimate list 4 years ago, but I haven’t updated it in so long I would’ve been embarrassed to call it the ultimate now :p