As someone that lives outside the US, this is not a real friction point.

What do you think all the rest of the Boomers in the world do?

Ugh…Just laying on that couch… Can’t defeat natural causes with a wooden stake.

The gut punch was Gina Torres, and Zoe not being allowed to grieve and be with Wash.

I watched Serenity again a couple years ago, and it was just as harsh and abrupt as I remember it. It’s a hard emotional jab at anyone who has ever loved a partner that’s a part of their everyday life.

Depends on the origin, but a freshly fermented and dried whole bean from the farm is like light drugs. Your heart skips a beat, you inhale, you smile, and life gets noticeably better.

Finally, my tax dollars going to things I want!

Thinking this through, they probably filled the car with gas until they couldn’t breathe and then hit the firework mortar to set it all off. Also gives them a higher chance of ending it all then, as opposed to the “oops, all fire!” version, which would have been a lingering way to go.

There are reports of a firework mortar and gas canister in the back. Looks very intentional and showy from the video. Stupid way to end one’s life, but that was part of it I think as well.

“Let me check for the address and a map in this phone book.”

The Red Sea is actually just another rift valley along the same edge of the plate. It just filled in with water first.

A friend of mine went from a school in the US to a French school, and when she said there were 7 continents, everyone including the teacher made fun of her.

Dogmatism goes both ways.

We separate Europe, Asia, and Africa because the Ancient Greeks invented the boundaries and terms, and the Romans kept them up.

They lived in the area, so for them, these boundaries were just names given to land on either side of major bodies of water: the Nile, the Black Sea and Rioni river, and the Mediterranean.

They considered Egypt part of Asia for a while, and anything south of the Med as the landmass “Libya.” The Romans kept up the same definitions as maps expanded, and just extrapolated from there.

😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

Well, I’m here now. So there’s that.

You’re welcome. /s

There’s a few other categories to consider.

Of small niche subs I’ve moderated, there’s maybe a 10 to 1 or higher ratio of non-active users to active. Look at the highest voted posts of all time or the last year in a sub. If the sub as 10K subscribers, the highest number of votes on any post might be 1K or so. Maybe far less.

I saw on a couple of the sub’s metrics that we would consistently gain 10-20 users a day, and maybe lose 1-3 subscribers daily. But with very little increased engagement. But so we would gain sometimes 500 or even 1000 users in a month, and nothing changes. Why? Always drove me crazy.

A lot of real people start up accounts and quickly abandon them. A lot of bots sub every subreddit and do stupid things like comment when you’re comment is a haiku. Every script kiddie that ever coded a broken bot that never worked right might still have 4 or 5 axcounts out there as a dead subscribers.

And let’s not forget the massive amount of people with multiple accounts (hi!) and the ones with sometimes severe mental health problems, wannabe trolls, and straight up Aholes trying to evade bans. There’s likely more of these out there than actual malicious and active bots.

As for actual malicious bots posting, it’s likely very few, and limited to engagement on larger subs to drop parts of a larger group of talking points. But the places that normally go for that kind of thing also don’t mind hiring a bunch of Nigerian 419 scammers to be real humans posting from the bot accounts sometimes.

Friend of mine said this when JP 2 came out. Ruined the whole series for me after that.

The first one had some of the plot from the book. Everything after has about as much plot as a porno where instead of butts or dicks or boobs, it’s screams.

Globally, this is becoming a thing. Many states have digital IDs already.

Realistically, both paper with a chip or QR code should be valid for a while.

The color blue is not for rent, they’re giving that shit away.

Yes, I understand the difference between communicable and noncommunicable disease.

The point is that media also rarely talk about these things, and people are not great at taking steps to mitigate their risk. Lots of things we can prevent, or not, still cause us lasting harm. But because those things are mundane, they are not clickbait-y enough to warrant regular coverage.

I made the same journey during COVID, ultimately arriving at a similar place that the Nicene Creed was the first in a long line of obvious retconned political and human decisions. For what is worth, I also feel like it’s in the same vein as most of what Paul did, codifying and standardizing to the detriment of the source material and to the benefit of anyone willing to take charge.

I’m still genuinely shocked that anyone can read the Gospels and then not see the record-scratch pivot in tone for everything else afterwards. Well, shocked in as far as to then be disappointed at how easily a mess of addenda created something antithetical to a bunch of nebulous good vibes with no clear avenue to monetize it all.

Which, oddly enough, Buddhism does as well, but owns it as part of the process.

If a company is publicly traded, then all leaked individuals are given 50.1% controlling stock in the company, split among the victims with new stocks created for them, with unclaimed stocks held in a trust controlled by anyone that did respond to claim stocks. They can sell the stocks, or drive the company into the ground out of spite. Maybe even both.

Companies not publicly traded have 3 months to make all code used, trademarked material, and patents open source in perpetuity, and 1 year to convert their corporate structure into a non-profit.

Regardless of the size of the company, the CEO, CTO, and board must eat their weight in fried bugs. They get to pick the type of bug from a list of 5 options, and any seasoning they want. Live streams of the bug eating will be monetized and the proceeds given to orphans, under the title of “It’s not a bug, its a feature.”