ancaps: “muh NAP”

ancoms: “please get away from our commune, thank you”

Honestly, fair enough.

As far as I know, the USSR collapsed because Gorbachev’s reforms weakened existing institutions and power structures, without providing replacements.

oh fuck

Honestly I’m more of an ebook guy. However, there is something you can do with audiobooks that you can’t really do with ebooks — experience them together with a small group of other people.

My first time listening to a book together with friends was over a car ride. But then, me and my friends got into this book series, and we listened to it together over Discord.

There’s probably a neat parallel to be made with listening to a story around a campfire.

Nonetheless, mostly I stick to ebooks. There is something to be said for reading at your own pace, not the pace of the narrator.

Keeping an open dialogue is important. I can’t help but feel that there are other ways of doing that.

If they have the balls to ban the US, then yeah, they should.

I love capitalism

Everyone should be allowed… except countries currently actively invading one. Or currently enaged in warfare in general.

libgen

I’m torn between “oh yeah? that’s crazy” and “oh god we’re all going to nuke each other”

The “as geography permits” part is a big obstacle, unfortunately.

According to the article, the researchers concluded that nuclear reactors are not a good fit for that role.

Overwatch has a lot of the same sci-fi elements, but I don’t think cyberpunk would be an accurate way to describe it. In a way, it’s a patchwork of a bunch of different stuff; for example, you might say Sombra is cyberpunk. But I don’t think it generalizes well.

One of the main things in cyberpunk (and in a lot of punk genres) is economic inequality and the flaws of capitalism. In Overwatch, large corporations are part of the setting (and so is poverty, I would guess), but that’s all they are — background set pieces.

this is very accurate. however:

collectively pregnant

0_o

based

It would be nice if it was just Putin. And it’s true that lots of Russians are opposed to the war. It’s even probably true that lots of them are as apolitical as they can be, just doing whatever they have to do to survive day by day.

But there are lots of Russians who support him. Even outside of Russia. There is, in fact, a large portion of the population that approves of him, despite the invasion into Ukraine. A lot of it is retired people, of course, but also shit-tons of people who listen mainly to Russian news sources, and therefore believe Putin’s propaganda.

Even if Putin were assassinated the next day, his replacement wouldn’t be much better. Hopefully they’d pull out of Ukraine, but they would likely be just as chauvinist and nationalist as Putin. Russia’s political spectrum is, unfortunately, very close to “50 shades of nationalism”, to the point where even Navalny had to curry favor with them to build up sufficient support. And nationalists (and fascists) tend to do stupid shit like invading neighboring countries.

I would agree that “fuck Russians” is going a step too far. But if Russia’s international reputation is shit right now, it’s no one’s fault but Putin’s, and it is unfortunately well-deserved. And, whether we like it or not, when you say “I’m from [country]”, that country’s reputation will affect how people see you. So if individual Russians around the world are facing stigma, that’s really unfortunate, but it’s the inevitable outcome of shit like this. It’s nothing new — after WWII, Germans had to deal with the exact same shit.

wait, the steam browser is chromium? no way

fucking Azure

hey look it’s me

I don’t like it