This is interesting because I haven’t so far seen widespread BDS support in Germany. Aldi is presumably doing this preemptively in the expectation that this is where things are going. So that’s a good sign.

Didn’t finish it. The city building aspect is barebones, doesn’t really feel like you have much creative freedom or strategic choice. They offer you narrative “choices” which I don’t think really affect the narrative, though I only played the thing once.

I don’t know anything about that. I’ve been using Debian since before even Ubuntu and Arch existed. Tried Gentoo once, it was stupid. I don’t really understand why so many other non-commercial community distros came into being since, Debian was already perfect perfectly fine in 1999. I think you’d need some sociological explanation. People seem to want do their own thing rather than engage with Debian’s structures.

Don’t install SteamOS, it’s not meant for arbitrary hardware. You don’t need a special gaming distro. You don’t need a bleeding edge distro either for gaming, despite what people may claim, unless you have very new hardware. Literally any stable distro, including say Debian or Ubuntu LTS, allows you play Steam games perfectly fine. In the past, Arch has broken stuff, including games, because it was too bleeding edge. Both “too new” and “too old” can cause issues in practice.

You can run pretty much any popular program on any distro, they usually come with them in fact, albeit sometimes with older versions. If you really care about having the newest Gimp or whatever, you can usually install that via flatpak on any distro. Some caveats apply, sometimes the flatpak version is worse in some way, e.g. annoyingly sandboxed off from the main system, meaning it doesn’t have access to certain folders or hardware. I would recommend using the distro packages first, if available, and only try other methods of installing software (like flatpak or manual download/install) if you are having issues with your distro package.

Linux supports all the file systems, any USB drive that works on Windows should work out of the box.

Whether you can copy settings over depends on the program. For some software, the native Linux and Windows version’s file formats are compatible, some are not (there are definitely native Linux games where e.g. the savegames are actually incompatible). For native Windows games that you run through translation layers (Wine/Proton), that’s not a problem of course. It’s sometimes not so easy to find where exactly the relevant folders are actually buried though.

Also now I’m at the point in the program where Ash is explaining that it’s just Netanyahu leading them all by the nose. I hate these people, they spend half the program complaining how the media and politicians are doing “industrial scale gaslighting” and then they come out with these bangers.

To summarize their shit takes:

• Iran should not respond, that’s dangerous.
• Trump doesn’t actually want to escalate.
• Obama did a great deal, it’s Trump’s fault for blowing it up.
• Iran shouldn’t have nukes, you can sort of see why they’d want them though. Also, Iran probably wasn’t totally transparent with the IAEA (source: the vibes coming out of Ash’s ass).
• Netanyahu is manipulating all of them, he’s the real problem.

.

They literally do not even for one second entertain any idea that the US has interest in the region, has geostrategic interests, and has for decades had plans to attack Iran.

Novara media had some peace studies professor on, and that guy (as well as interviewer) somehow think Iran has/had a chance to avoid a war (yes that’s basically how he phrased it) if they just keep quiet and don’t respond. How tf can you study this your whole life and think this whole escalation ladder wasn’t gamed out by a bunch of nerds, and that the US is following a plan here.

It’s so blatant in this instance especially, what with the US clearly constantly choosing to provoke an escalation and using diplomacy just as cover for sneak attacks. Obviously they’re not here to do a one-off bombing raid. If Iran doesn’t respond they’ll poke them more, and if they still don’t respond they’ll just cook up some narrative how they’re weak and this proves that regime change is just behind the corner next bombing run and why let this chance slip through our fingers, and how to be absolutely sure that Iran can’t get the bomb, regime change is definitely necessary, or maybe they’ll say they didn’t actually destroy Iran’s nuclear program and they’re definitely making a bomb right now under a children’s hospital or whatever they can come up with.

The only reason why Iran would respond cautiously is to make the US look bad, but at this point how much of difference does that make? People have already made up their mind, the spin doctors are already spinning, and they’ll ignore international and public opinion as best they can like they always do anyway.

I’m pretty sure Elon Musk is not so delusional that he wants to go to Mars. He’s just lying to market his grift. I support him doing this, it looks like he’s scamming the US out of billions while setting back their military space program with this vaporware rocket.

Peter Scholl-Latour (1924-2014), a prominent German journalist and middle east expert, worked for the BND (German foreign intelligence), newly released archive files reveal.

Scholl-Latour, as can be seen from the 70 or so pages of the BND archive, is said to have repeatedly reported on his travels and people he met to the BND in the 1980s. He is also said to have made film and photo material from war zones available to the BND even before it was published.

The historical documents also mention assignments for the BND: for example, it is said that Scholl-Latour was supposed to meet a BND source in Lebanon. Elsewhere it is noted that Scholl-Latour wanted to help identify a person from the GDR who was working for the International Red Cross in Africa.

German article: tagesschau (ARD/WDR) | archive

I remember running a transparent* terminal like 20 years ago. I stopped that shit real quick because it affects readability.

* technically it was fake transparency back then, it would just display the wallpaper, but darkened

Overengineered by Germans , over-complex UI and unstable (I blame the C++). Little vision except “similar to Windows but with more options”.

Originally, Qt (the GUI library KDE uses) was proprietary and it still (I think) is corporate and not community-run, though it is now free software and has been for a long while. The people who started the project apparently didn’t care much about that, though I guess some people put in significant effort later to convince whatever corporate entity was in charge of Qt at the time (I think Trolltech) to release under dual LGPL/proprietary license. Gnome was basically started as a fully free software alternative to KDE.

Otherwise it’s fine, definitely has a target audience who love that shit, and it also doesn’t deserve being called KKKDE.

Brave is proprietary, and they have some sort of ad scheme to make money. Also the head of that operation is a known homophobe.

Mozilla are bought and paid for, controlled opposition. And everybody working there has about the same worldview as your average Facebook employee.

LibreWolf is just a couple of tweaks to Firefox to improve the situation a little bit. So let’s say there is no good option.

As per his husband on facebook:

Statement from Tristan Kern de Gonzales

Husband of Jonathan Joss

My husband Jonathan Joss and I were involved in a shooting while checking the mail at the site of our former home. That home was burned down after over two years of threats from people in the area who repeatedly told us they would set it on fire. We reported these threats to law enforcement multiple times and nothing was done.

Throughout that time we were harassed regularly by individuals who made it clear they did not accept our relationship. Much of the harassment was openly homophobic.

When we returned to the site to check our mail we discovered the skull of one of our dogs and its harness placed in clear view. This caused both of us severe emotional distress. We began yelling and crying in response to the pain of what we saw.

While we were doing this a man approached us. He started yelling violent homophobic slurs at us. He then raised a gun from his lap and fired.

Jonathan and I had no weapons. We were not threatening anyone. We were grieving. We were standing side by side. When the man fired Jonathan pushed me out of the way. He saved my life.

Jonathan is my husband. He gave me more love in our time together than most people ever get. We were newlyweds. We picked Valentines Day. We were in the process of looking for a trailer and planning our future.

He was murdered by someone who could not stand the sight of two men loving each other.

I was with him when he passed. I told him how much he was loved.

To everyone who supported him, his fans, his friends, know that he valued you deeply. He saw you as family.

My focus now is on protecting Jonathan’s legacy and honoring the life we built together.

If your concern is how someone coped with trauma or how loudly they speak when recounting injustice and being ignored by authorities then you never truly cared about my husband.

Jonathan saved my life. I will carry that forward. I will protect what he built.

– Tristan Kern de Gonzales

(got this off a reddit r/television comment)

Something like that. I don’t believe the universe is a simulation, but as a hobby programmer, a sort of mechanical or computational model of the how the universe works appeals to me.

Then you have the idea that gravity may be an emergent statistical phenomenon, which is true for many things (e.g. thermodynamics) and I think a fairly common thought that many people have. Then the idea that, maybe, if you assume local time slowdown, the gravitational attraction force might be derivable from that somehow, due to stuff getting stuck in the slow regions of space. As I “understand” (which I don’t really), in general relativity, the gravitational “force” is just some emergent property of the the curvature of spacetime. So maybe spacetime gets curved by some local computational limit of the universe?

In the last week, I have seen two videos of groups of men punching and puting to flight TCC officers. And one video that supposedly shows a TCC office going up in flames. Previously, this stuff was rare; you’d usually see mainly women shoving and berating the TCC pressgangs, and obviously the guys being kidnapped trying to escape. The TCC wasn’t getting attacked though, that seems new.

I would like a row of sittings ducks please.

Best I can do are sitting duck related meetings with expensive consultants.

Perfect!

https://old.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/1kst198/ru_pov_a_decision_has_been_made_to_create_a/

But that’s what I’m asking. Assuming the quote is correct, and he really did say a decision has been made to create a security zone and they’re currently solving this problem, what does that mean?

Security zone is vague af (which I guess is the point), but people have been speculating about quite a large area potentially. Something about getting Moscow out StormShadow range, everything east of the Dnieper, stuff like that. And whatever forces crossed into Sumi chasing the Ukrainians out of Kursk, that’ll not be enough to achieve that. So must be an offensive, am I wrong? They would not announce this before starting, so they would have started already. It’s also about time for a spring/summer offensive, assuming they had one planned. Supposedly they built up two new armies.

But who knows I guess we’ll see in the next few days.

Did Putin just announce an offensive to take half of Ukraine?

Ok, I have another one. Radi (“Rettich”), which is long white radish and quite big. It tastes similar to the small red round radishes.

You cut it into an accordion-like strip, salt the insides lots, then wait at least 20 minutes while it weeps. You then rip off bits with your hands, squeeze some of the salty liquid out, and eat it with a buttered pretzel or bread in a beer garden, as Brotzeit (“bread time”, basically an irregular snack pause between meals), or for dinner.

Kohlrabi is also really good just eaten raw with some bread and cold cuts. You need to cut the outer gummy-like parts off. It’s nice and crunchy and subtly spicy not unlike mustard somehow.

When I was a kid, my mom used to boil (or steam?) Kohlrabi and then serve it with a creamy dill sauce. I hated it. All the crunchiness is gone, the spiciness is gone, there’s only a hint of Kohlrabi left. It’s like she somehow managed make the water it was cooked in into a gel-like solid.

Man I have never even heard of any of these, the vegetables in the shops here suck.

Having said that, we have a fairly common one here that I think might not be that well known internationally, called Wirsing (pronounced like “were-sing” or “were-jing”, think werewolf), apparently it is called savoy cabbage in English. It’s a big round head with big leaves like white cabbage, but they’re green and wrinkly. In my opinion the taste and texture is a bit like kale, but I haven’t had that much kale tbh. Kale is common in the north of Germany but not here in the south.

Wirsing is not my favorite, but maybe it’s niche? Anyway, it’s not eaten raw, it’s blanched (for e.g. a salad), steamed or put into a stew.

The Bavarian Cookbook* has this basic recipe for a steamed Wirsing, which I assume is lifted from the French somehow (CW: meat and butter are optional, but they’re mentioned in this recipe):

• 1 kg savoy cabbage
• (optionally) salt water for blanching
• 30 g oil, or optionally bacon, cubed
• a half onion
• salt
• 250 ml liquid [it just says “liquid”, by which they mean pretty much anything: water, stock, even wine; I have seen milk, but probably best to dilute and add the milk later so it doesn’t burn]
• (optionally) 20 g of flour as a “dough-ling” [unsure about that one, I assume they mean mix the flour with some water, probably like a starch slurry], or with 20 g butter as a beurre manié [1:1 flour and butter kneaded together]
• a little bit of nutmeg
• (optionally) 10 g butter

Wash, remove stalk and very large ribs. Cut into eighths and then into wide strips. Optionally, for old Wirsing, blanch in salt water [I think this is to remove bitterness]. Fry onion in oil or use rendered bacon. Add salt, Wirsing, and only a little bit of liquid. Cover with lid and let steam on moderate heat until soft, add a bit more liquid when necessary. The cooked Wirsing can optionally be thickened using flour “dough-ling” or a beurre manié, bring to a short boil while stirring lightly [this is to get the flour taste out]. Add a little nutmeg, add salt and seasoning to taste, optionally improve using butter or fried bacon cubes. Cooking time about 45 minutes.