That’s some beautiful language there- “particularly fashionable scars.”

I do wonder about the nature of some toxic fandoms. Are they not aware that their behaviour harms the overall fandom? Or are they so committed to self-satisfaction that they don’t care? Or do they see themselves as an isolated outcrop, that their actions shouldn’t affect the whole community?

WRT Pokemon, how much of the franchise’s Flanderization was actual response to objections of touchy content, and how much is due to risk-averse people being handed a huge money printer, fueled by parents who are easily mobilized against “problematic” content. It’s interesting that they never tried to manufacture a Palworld-style product themselves-- a deliberately independent universe where they don’t need to worry about keeping it rated “E for Everyone”, but using their proven engines and mechanics.

I thought the two states were Donetsk and Lukhansk.

“Ten Bits” seems viable, although nobody cares much about the Spanish real anymore.

Not even an isekai.

Arguably, one of the best possible worlds.

What’s Argentina? Do you mean Falklands West?

I put out one of those big plastic storage units with like 30 little drawers recently, figuring although 2 were missing, someone could still use it. I stood it next to the dustbin, on trash day where it would be optimally visible for anyone who wanted to scrounge it.

The bloody HOA took a picture and sent a nastygram.

It’s a seasonal product that drives added purchases, not the core line.

You bring out six exotic flavours a year and 3 million people buy 6 more bags of crisps each year. 5,000 of them get obsessed and buy 50 bags of Cinnamon and Prawn crisps because they’re only here for a two-month window. Sales of plain and Sour Cream and Onion crisps are largely unchanged.

Check a local coin dealer/show.

Silver ounce rounds come in infinitely many designs, and there are a lot of right-wingers in those interest groups.

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen them done up with his ugly maw on. I think sometines as copper too.

I think 3D printing has potential because it can close the gap between hobbyist crafts and commercial grade manufacturing. Print the item for a run of 25, then you can move up to a real mould for 25,000.

It also leans into repairability-- replacement parts that might not be feasible to whittle one at a time from wood can be reliably made in a plastic comparable of strength to the original, and tge designs shared widely

“Us versus them” politics are asking for a complete washout on the international stage.

In the end, when the shit hits the fan, are you going to align yourself with the country that makes All the Things, or the one that can’t even pass a budget? COVID proved that it wasn’t just good-times, low-stakes gridlock: even existential crises weren’t enough to get America to cooperate and discipline herself.

If real life were a survival movie, we’d be getting to the scene where the secondary characters decide whether to follow Grandpa Sticky, who’s in the midst of full-blown dementia and was at best a vaguely racist philosophy professor when lucid, or the 22-year-old trained soldier with a fully stocked supply line. And we’d be throwing popcorn at the screen and deriding how terrible the writing is.

Discussion: you can have an “extinction event” in any ecosystem-- not just biological ones.

For example, the abandonment of steam locomotives in the mid-20th-century, or the Home Computer crash of the 1980s.

Similar to a biological mass extinction, you have:

• A discernable ecosystem change, either a sudden event (the introduction of reliable, mass-produced diesel locomotives), or a measurable decline of “habitability factors” (as hundreds of firms brought cheap 8-bit computers to market, retail space and overall consumer interest saturated)
• a rapid diversification of new and exotic types to fill the vacated niches (the cabless “B-unit” and flexible “road-switcher” locomotive types didn’t exist in the steam era. The post-crash computer market brought in new entrants like cheap IBM clones, the C128 and Atari 130XE, all chasing a sub-$1000 market that was now free of Sinclair, Coleco, and Texas Instruments)
• followed by a shake out and consolidation of the survivors/winners as they select for fitness in the new world (ALCO was a strong #2 in the diesel locomotive market in 1950, but didn’t make it to 1970. The C128 never became the world-beater its predecessor did.)
• a few niches largely untouched (China was still building steam locomotives into the 1990s. The Apple II series lasted about as long.)

A month or so ago; I had a 32G card, and bought a 128G card.

If there’s such a fear of third parties cleaving off votes from the Democrats, why have they never tried to mobilize similar forces on the right?

We had the Libertarians right there, before they imploded.

My objections:

1. It doesn’t adequately indicate “confidence”. It could return “foo” or “!foo” just as easily, and if that’s one term in a nested structure, you could spend hours chasing it.
2. So many hallucinations-- inventing methods and fields from nowhere, even in an IDE where they’re tagged and searchable.

Instead of writing the code now, you end up having to review and debug it, which is more work IMO.

Isn’t that Perona’s attack in One Piece?

Not to mention the Xbox Box, and the shipping cintainer full of 'em, the Xbox Box Box

When do we get people wearing calendars to finish the crew though?

What are you using now? Every few months I go on a binge of trying new text editors and file managers.

I seriously switched because I was fed up with the choice of messaging. Xnedit isn’t great, but it does have a delightfully 1994 aesthetic.

Legit multipolarization?

NATO, in particular, is highly coupled to the American/anti-Russian agenda. How much chance did Europe get to discuss the pros and cons of bankrolling a long-term conflict in Ukraine vs getting railroaded into it with the insinuations of being the next Chamberlain?

Even Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin don’t wake up every morning asking “how can I be evil today?” They may have a different agenda than the West, but it still comes from a place of caring for their country, legacy, and position. These are not wholesale foreign concepts. They can be understood and worked with. But I suspect the sort of organizations that would get the best out of them would require certain countries to acknowledge their place among equals and be willing to comptomise their sphere of influence.