Remember the meltdown over “Obamaphones”?

DRMless digital is great - I have a calibre library of thousands - but still more vulnerable.

Canticle of Lebowitz is a great post apocalyptic novel. After the nukes, Catholic monasteries preserve the ancient tradition of copying down manuscripts. Text doesn’t require any form of infrastructure.

There are also many texts/other media that are not available in any digital format. Obscure or older. For as much of an Information Age we are in, a lot of knowledge is being lost through neglect.

Amazon’s ebook store front (as well as the internet in general) is flooded with AI slop. The internet is a place where the signal to noise ratio is dropping rapidly.

Physical media is necessary. Especially books. Especially the kinds of books regimes might want to ban. When it’s time to rebuild, we’ll need firm ground to stand on, and physical books work as long as you can hold them.

“Anonymous” isn’t like a formal group. The entire point is that anyone can say that they are anonymous. So yeah, people talk a lot. You can do whatever you like as anonymous.

Having a real grand time adding a song from any musician I hit to a play list. I fucking love Awaz now.

Then, instead of hiring teachers, you can hire unqualified babysitters. Pay them nothing, and there’s no need to comply with IDEA, IEPs, unions…

I bought a non working one a while back to try to repair! None of my local stores have any games though.

Funnily enough, the Sims 2 shipped with SecureROM which really pissed the community off then. A literal root kit which could interfere with legitimate software. I get a desire for anti piracy measures - but the game was offered for free officially for like 5+ years.

I distantly remember a guy who was dying of cancer, but kept up an absolute tirade against EA. There was so much ill will then, it would be funny if they made the same mistake.

The Sims series is itself a story of how fucking shit EA is. Killing Maxis, driving off the original creators… even in Sims 2 days you had the IKEA and H&M expansion packs - ads that you paid for (even if tbh the furniture and clothes are good). Sims 3 had features stripped and added back in expansion packs. Getting all of the expansions is ridiculously expensive and running all of them at the same time will wreck your game. Sims 3 also started putting micro transaction ads into your fucking build/buy mode.

Sims 4 shipped without toddlers and every expansion pack seems to have made the game actively worse. The base game is so bare that it isn’t worth playing, but the expansions and stuff are often released entirely broken, and then never fixed. “Wedding Stories” was so disastrous even the Pollyanna YouTubers were pissed.

And now - folks realizing that there is nothing to be had in the new garbage game, that the Sims 5/Project Renee is never going to come out (or be some kind of mobile shit) - they try an easy cash grab of rereleasing two games with zero improvements and even more broken. When the Sims 2 had been legally available for free for the better part of a decade and you could download and install a Sims 1 iso in less time than I’ve spent writing this comment.

The release is broken. There are several complaints that folks aren’t even able to get the game to launch. Considering that it isn’t a remaster or remake, just the same game with a copyright update, that’s ridiculous.

The Sims 2 + all expansions was available for free on Origin for years until it was removed. Most fans already have that version, and most modding guides are going to assume that version. One wonders if the community launcher will even work with the new releases - or mod compatibility. The Sims 1 has been considered abandonware for a while and I imagine most who want to play it already acquired a copy online.

The legal system is essentially purchased at this point (remember everyone gloating about how the Onion bought InfoWars?)

There’s a chance he might find a toadie judge and get something out of this. Or at least be obnoxious enough that others might preemptively comply with something.

Facebook was taking down links talking about Linux as cybersecurity risks a week or so ago.

Middle English usage of Turkye or Turkeye is found in The Book of the Duchess (written in 1369–1372) to refer to Anatolia or the Ottoman Empire.[45] The modern spelling Turkey dates back to at least 1719.[46] The bird called turkey was named as such due to trade of guineafowl from Turkey to England.[36] The name Turkey has been used in international treaties referring to the Ottoman Empire.[47] With the Treaty of Alexandropol, the name Türkiye entered international documents for the first time. In the treaty signed with Afghanistan in 1921, the expression Devlet-i Âliyye-i Türkiyye (“Sublime Turkish State”) was used, likened to the Ottoman Empire’s name.

Türkiye had historical usage and precedent; “the Gulf of America” does not. Admittedly, Erdoğan was probably motivated by the same base nativist urges. But there’s something substantially different in saying “we want our nation to be called this” versus “we want to rename international territory.”

Is this another of those things where someone wrote some mild Substack post about “maybe the phrase black list does imply black = bad” that maybe five people read before conservatives decided that it represents the ideological position of all leftists?

mostly guys says “hey” or the worse be :hey baby"

Can you perhaps understand why that might be as bad as getting no messages at all? How many dick pictures were mixed in? Many, many, many men use these apps to spam matching with everyone. Those “hi”’s rarely lead to actual connection.

You bring in a female CEO to take the fall. The narrative gets to be about her weak leadership.

Ellen Pao wasn’t even CEO for a full year. Reddit clearly put her in charge to take the heat - which they knew would be ample based on her sex alone.

The United States, being the bastion of free speech it is, has absolutely no censorship of its history.

The article is about a bookstore in Manhattan, called “Little Red Books” though. Your link is an abbreviated translation of this article, which you might notice from the link at the bottom. I don’t know if that serves as the kind of linguistic evidence that’s called for here.

I thought it was hilarious for the same reason, but I don’t think anyone in Chinese refers to that book as 小红书. It’s the 红宝书. I’ve never been to China and perhaps google/Baidu/Pleco isn’t going to perhaps pick up that kind of usage, but I think it is more of a cross cultural accident.

After I was outed at the middle school I worked at (and it is currently illegal for me to use a men’s restroom - which I do, because if you put a fedora on me I’d look like a professional 2010s r/atheism “quote maker”), I found another job. I went through a week of training; after my background check came in the fired me. Not only fired me, but tried to not pay me for the training. Spent months fighting to get a check. Was pretty desperate too - the divorce process was also wonderful cognizant of my status as a queer/second class American.

When I was in college, I worked a bunch of odd jobs. I had to give my drivers license to the day labor director once for a W2 or something - it still said “F” because surgery was $5500 (insurance don’t cover - lol) - I never got a gig again after that. Turned to sex work to make rent. Have genuine PTSD, but it’s not the kind you can talk about in polite company.

I think I’m pretty fucking bright and capable - but living in a world where someone digging up a picture of me in my high fucking prom dress could get me fired is kinda breaking my brain at this point. I’d love to be able to move to a place where the fact that I have a vagina isn’t a massive handicap and I can do the job I love and was born to do and am really fucking good at - but wait, the resources to be able to do that are based on hiding, being exploited, or that case where I am too fucking useful to let go. I’m just going to have to burn myself out until I can afford to move to someplace where I’m not terrified that my pharmacy will stop filling my hormone prescriptions.

Psychiatry has not always been kind to the LGBTQ community. Homosexuality was considered a mental illness in many countries as late as the mid-20th century—if it was not classified as an outright crime. Even Sweden, that Scandinavian bastion of openness and equality, identified being gay as a disorder as late as 1979.

That year, a group of Swedes took advantage of the legal framework that made being gay an illness and called in sick to work, claiming their homosexuality as the reason. One woman, from the southern province of Smålandeven, managed to get Social Security benefits for calling in gay.

Source

I think having been repeatedly fired/getting chased out of my career field for being trans should qualify me for some kind of benefit. When the fascism stops, will there be reparations?