The only thing that I would miss is contactless payments via my phone.

I wonder if the poor legibility is part of the point. I would not wear an outrageous t-shirt such as this in public, but I would be even less likely to wear a more legible version — precisely because more people would be able to read it. Poor legibility may evoke curiosity in some people who are too far to read it, and perhaps even result in a humorous surprise when someone who could not originally read the text moves close enough to read it.

Smaller text feels like a whisper, and maybe that’s the effect the designer was going for

Archive link for anyone who finds this useful https://archive.ph/E7XFt

Edit: Have read the article and daaamn, this is ridiculous. Thanks for sharing this, I hadn’t seen it yet.

For me, it’s actually easier to trust sources like unionriot.ninja — though by “trust”, I don’t mean “take them at their word”. It’s more like a “I understand how to situate this journalism within its wider context”. Which is to say that I find them easier to vibe check.

I find smaller outlets like this are often pretty good with their sourcing. For the example, from these guys, I think I read some really good coverage of some specific issues in the prison system. The article was clearly written to persuade (and as you say, clearly left wing), but the way it was doing that felt transparent. In particular, I think there was a quote they used from a legal expert, but they also included links to that person’s work/full quote, which makes it easier for a keen reader to vibe check the person. I like their transparency.

I agree that it’s hard to place them on a “reliable” spectrum. My instinct would be to place them quite high, because the fact they’re open about their biases (i.e. left wing perspective) and they are good at citing sources makes it easier for me to evaluate their work. However, that doesn’t feel right when we consider what kind of news outlets would typically sit there — many of our heuristics for parsing media are still anchored in a more traditional model of news coverage, which these guys clearly aren’t.

Trophic Cascade would be a cool band namr

“looking for a woman to play out the guy’s MFF fantasy”

Sometimes the driving force is a bi-curious woman. What usually happens is that the boyfriend agrees to it because he sees a MDF threesome as being hot, and sapphic love as being less real or serious. Then he freaks out during/after the hookup because of insecurity he feels when seeing his girlfriend enthusiastically making out with a woman. I’ve learned the unpleasant way that it’s no fun to be unicorn hunted.

The worst part is when they try to hide what they’re doing. I once only found out a woman had a boyfriend and that they were looking for a MFF threesome on the third date. Trying to hide their intentions is gross because it shows they have some awareness of how people don’t like being instrumentalised in this way.

I hadn’t considered this, so thanks for the info

When you get a moment, you could try switching over to the tty again, login to the shell, and then try typing in the command btop (which I think is the Bazzite specific version of the default “top” command, and should be installed by default). Top is basically a task manager, and you can see what programs are running (and taking up resources) right there in the terminal. If your system freezes up, you can often unfreeze it by killing the unresponsive programs. It’s probably useful to familiarise yourself with that interface before you need it.

This isn’t really relevant to your question at all, but you reminded me of a (male) friend who is a gynecologist and married to a woman. I expected that the professional context would nullify any potential arousal towards his patients, but what I was curious about was whether this might bleed over into his personal life — i.e. did he still find his partner’s vulva arousing, or does it put him into doctor-headspace. Apparently his profession causes no problems whatsoever in his sex life, because the compartmentalisation is so strong.

He said that it feels almost like conceptual homonyms. For example, in the sentence “up past the river bank is the bank where I deposited my money”, the word “bank” appears twice but means two very different things. Similarly, a vulva is a vulva no matter the context, but the meaning of it differs so much depending on the context that his brain literally doesn’t parse them as being the same.

Like I say, it’s not related to your question, but I thought you might find it cool nonetheless. I would expect that firefighters would show a similar ability to compartmentalise, but perhaps the high-stress context of smelling human flesh may cause it to work differently.

I think that’s okay, because that just means your answer is something like “take some time to breathe and introspect about what I care about when I am given the space to care about stuff”, or “try out a bunch of stuff I didn’t have time or money for before, to see what seizes my passions”.

I mean, it’s not okay — it’s a fucking injustice that so many of us are deprived of the opportunity to explore what we would do if we were free to live as we chose, but it’s okay in the sense that it’s not your fault, in case that’s what you were feeling

I’m not at home at the moment, but I actually have this small one to hand. These three photos are the same tesselation, just viewed [from the front/from behind/backlit]

front back backlit

Yeah, Volition is usually the one telling me not to kill myself

Whilst automated tools can help on this, there is a heckton of human labour to be done in training those tools, or in reviewing moderation decisions that require a human’s eye. I think that in a world where we can’t eradicate that need, the least we can do is ensure that people are paid well, in non-exploitative conditions, with additional support to cope.

Actually securing these things in a way that’s more than just lipservice is part of that battle— I remember a harrowing article a while back about content moderators in Kenya, working for Sama, which was contracted to work for Facebook. There were so many layers of exploitation in that situation that it made me sick. If the “mental health support” you have access to is an on-site therapist who guilt trips you into going back to work asap, and you’re so hurried and stressed that you don’t have time to even take a breather after seeing something rough — conditions like that are going to cause a disproportionate amount of preventable human harm.

Even if we can’t solve this problem entirely, there’s so much needless harm being done, and that’s part of what this fight is about now.

I have a good friend who is Czech and I spent a couple weeks there with her family. One of my takeaways from this trip was that Czechs like mushroom picking, and are proud of how many castles there are (Czechia doesn’t have the absolute highest number of castles, but apparently it does have the highest castle density)

Water is so cool. I like how the hydrophobic effects drives protein folding

I share this view. Someone elsewhere on the thread said that the best covers are ones that recontextualise the original, and this song/cover feels like the perfect example of it. I just can’t directly compare the original to the cover because they’re going for such different things

Oh, I love this version of Bad Guy.

Your playlist sounds fun, would you be willing to share a link?

I love Avantasia’s “Lay All Your Love on Me” (Originally by ABBA). Metal covers can sometimes feel lazy, but this is an excellent rendition. It feels like the perfect coming together of two distinct parts of me: the me that daubs myself in rainbows to dance to ABBA at the gay club; and the metal/punk energy of the majority of my style and music taste. It always goes down well at parties.

Edit: I am having more songs coming to mind, but a weird one I can’t help mentioning is Edmund Welles cover of “Hallowed Be Thy Name”.. It’s a clarinet quartet (+vocals) cover that I didn’t know I needed until I heard it. So delightfully weird, and it has no right to go as hard as it does

Echoing Jubilant Jaguar’s sentiment about defaults mattering, I think that sometimes an excess amount of choice can be overwhelming such that a user is less empowered to make choices about things they do care about (Leading to a less steep learning curve). Sensible defaults need not remove anyone’s choice

I agree, but “slight” is the operative word here. I’m autistic and there are some cutlery that feel so unpleasant in my hand that I can barely force myself to use them. In the past, it has even resulted in me hardly eating (when the lack of good cutlery was due to the nice ones being missing rather than just dirty). I felt very silly that I was letting myself go hungry over an irrational preference, but I find that some battles aren’t worth fighting.

I have also found that other neurodivergent people often have strong opinions on cutlery, which has been a wee source of solidarity. I think that, in addition to the concrete reality of people’s preferences, there’s a reinforcing cycle where once a cultural thing becomes associated with a particular group, there will be in-group jokes made about that association, which reinforces the link. That is to say that the relevance of this meme somewhat transcends the reality of the relative frequency of neurodivergent people having strong opinions on cutlery