First and foremost: at this juncture, I would implore everyone to keep OPSEC firmly in mind, and to take preemptive precautions.

Use a phone with Graphene OS, and use encrypted communication (preferably XMPP, but Signal at the very least. No technology is best)

with that said,

Mutual aid will be more important than ever, join and build up your local groups if you’re able, it will pay off in dividends in the coming years.

• Search your local area + ‘mutual aid’.
• Help your local food not bombs.
• Create a worker owned cooperative with your friends if possible, or join an existing one.
• Help spread the meshtastic network to build up communication resilience in your community.
• Plant trees in your community to help reduce the heat island effect for the coming heatwaves.
• Create or join a community garden near you to bolster food availability and foster connections with those around you.
• engage in guerrilla urbanism, make your community safer to walk or bike
• encourage your coworkers to unionize under the IWW, contact them for help on how to unionize your workplace.
• vote in your local elections to try and have a state or city government that is less hostile to the above actions, but continue to build decentralized power independently of them regardless. Do not make the mistake of handing off the responsibility to make things better to them, it’s up to YOU, and your community, and hopefully other nearby communities doing the same, but that is all.
• consider having the means to defend yourself and the skills needed to do so effectively. But do not neglect medical equipment or its use either.

We have tremendous collective power if we just use it, and hopefully this outcome will result in us coming together and building that world in the shell of the old. Collective solidarity is our only solution left.

Alan Carr’s stop smoking book is highly regarded, and encourages you to smoke as you read along, until by the end you won’t want to.

Combine that with a NAC supplement (which doesn’t do anything for withdrawals, but studies show it makes trying smoking again far more unpleasant for your brain which helps you stay off them.

When I was a kid, I played a lot of Runescape. I loved that the quests were all unique and had their own, sometimes genuinely well written and engaging stories, with point’n’click style puzzles, reminiscent of Sierra games. It was the most fun I’ve ever had in an mmo.

But my god is there a lot of repetitive grinding. I tried to get back into it a few years ago, but my patience for killing the same mob for 3 hours straight, or cutting and burning trees like a giant line of cocaine, simply isn’t there anymore.

I wish I could play a version of it without the grind, and just the quests.

How do you define the destinction? I assume you’re only counting ‘in’ as officially recognized by the republican party, the political entity?

While I agree civil war is unlikely, there are paramilitary groups in the republican party, which Frontline investigated.

I could see a more minor version of The Troubles taking place.

Before I edited the comment, it said vegan meat alternatives, without stipulating impossible beef, so I thought maybe the vegan part triggered people? Though I still got downvotes even after. Ah well 🤷‍♂️

That might’ve happened in the sequel? I don’t think you ever see the main character’s parents in the first game, but I do recall visiting them when you come back from WWII in the second game.

I wasn’t a big fan of the sequel, since I found the main characters to be unsympathetic assholes.

I think Mafia received that criticism because of its surface level similarity to GTA, which is known for packing a ton of random side content in its open world.

In Mafia there is genuinely nothing to do out in the world when driving around outside of the main story missions, except for occasionally a mechanic at a garage will offer you some small mission to steal a newer and faster car. Because of that, people complained that the open-world part was pointless and a waste.

In the case of rdr2, it has a linear story, but a plethora of side content the player can engage with outside of the main missions. In Mafia, there was a single person that would sometimes offer you little missions to steal faster and better cars, but otherwise had no side activities whatsoever in between driving to and from the story missions. The lack of side content was the main complaint.

The Original Mafia game is generally criticized for being a linear game in an open-world, but I think its linear nature is one of its strengths, because it gives the narrative a tight, driving focus that open world games tend to lack.

meat alternatives, like impossible beef and chicken patties.

For minor things it works alright. For slightly advanced things, like making making curved text, it’s not intuitive compared to Photoshop. Though personally, even for minor things I found Krita more pleasant.

A UI designer made this little short about Gimp, which I think captures the sorta things that can be frustrating.

I’m extremely pleased to hear they will be taking UI seriously.

The Documentary ‘Take Me To Pitcairn’ fits the bill, I think. It’s about a guy who really wants to visit a super remote island that’s difficult to get passage to. Some private boat captain plans to go there, and signs up a bunch of tourists to fund the trip, including the filmmaker.

The whole trip is a giant shitshow from start to finish, and it’s oddly compelling to watch.

That’s extremely sad to hear, I hope they recover someday :(

There’s a few areas where it’s lacking, the text tool being one of them, and it also can’t export to PDF for professional book cover printing. But I’m not a professional photo editer either, and almost exclusively use Krita for editing anyway, since it’s so my h easier to use.

gimp isn’t being held back by money, they have over a million in bitcoin just sitting there from an old donation that grew in value. In over a decade, no one has figured out how to pay the taxes on it if they start using it to fund developers.

I read on reddit a long time ago that a UI designer tried to help improve gimp, but the devs were hostile to it (i may be remembering that wrong though). Considering how long its been with no UI improvements, I don’t think gimp will ever revamp its UI. Instead, I think Krita has a good chance of moving into photo editing with enough funding.

Ha, cool! Hope you enjoy it 😄

Oh man, I adore the tripods, so I’ll be giving that a read for sure. Cheers for sharing!

The only Philip K. Dick I’ve read is Flow my tears the policeman said (epic title for a book). It’s pretty linear and coherent until one point towards the end where, without question, 'ol Dick popped some acid.

The Book of Rack the Healer by Zach Hughes was pretty wild.

It’s ‘New wave’ sci-fi from the 1970’s, and revolves around these mutated humans in a deeply poisonous and radioactive world where it’s forbidden to dig into the earth.

The humans have evolved a carapice and internal air sacks that they fill to hold their breath before leaving their safe organic dome homes that change color depending on their mood. Some of the domes have women in them that don’t seem capable of complex thought, and live purely through sensory input, are telepathic, and are basically constantly edging themselves all day.

It’s a drug fueled fever dream, for sure.