In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.

I love dogs

[filmphotofranz]

source

[anton--rayne]

A random white boy there is indeed historically accurate Chinese Civil War

[zitongzi]

Thats just norman bethune

[agnesmontague]

ive invented (note: dubious claim) something i call the bear diet which is mostly fruits and vegetables with fish as the main protein source and something like once a month you eat a few hyperprocessed foods of your liking because that is when you, the bear, raid a dumpster in the suburbs

[stellarskyes]

after the hyperprocessed foods, do you take tranquilizers to simulate getting captured by animal control and returned to the wild?

[agnesmontague]

i would settle for melatonin gummies but well. knock yourself out

[banchie]

i've been phasing the phrase 'google it' out of my vocabulary and going back to 'look it up'. fuck you youve lost your generic trademark privileges

[abyssalcollective]

You know what? Correct. Google chooses to use AI, so we drop the recommendation to Google it too. A fair trade off.

[depsidase]

[theomaru]

HAPPY PRIDE !!!

[opencharacters]

Standard Ebooks

You've probably seen me preach about Standard Ebooks because they standardize a lot of public domain books into a standard epub format with nice fonts, chapters and and so on, making it very nice to read on tablets and e-readers.

They've released some of the new books that just became public domain so I thought I'd compile the standouts and link directly to them for the ease of my followers here. All these books became public domain today and these versions are also public domain as stated on their site.

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (the earlier serialized version became public domain last year but the main version that the movies are based on became public domain today)

The first four Nancy Drew mystery novels by Carolyn Keene

The Secret of the Old Clock

The Hidden Staircase

The Bungalow Mystery

The Mystery at Lilac Inn

Others include

End of the World by Geoffrey Dennis

Ash Wednesday by T.S Eliot

As I Lay Dying by William Faulner

and many more, they in fact have a whole public domain day write up

They do work, get yourself a free book or two and if you can spare the coin consider donating to them, this is a volunteer thing thats been going on for well over a decade.

[hthrrloooo]

Catastrophize Benedictine

[dumbthinmint]

Forgetful Ice Cream Sandwich

[bugwars]

It is imperative that the customer remain unaware that employees drink water, it frightens and scares them to think of an employee as having human needs

[subrosa03]

Textposts from everyone’s favourite space station😽

[tpwrtrmnky]

A lot of the time when I point out that some right-wing policy is proven to not achieve the thing it purports to have as a goal, people rightly point out that the real goal is the negative outcomes that do happen.

Which is correct!

But this is often framed as me approaching the right wing naively by the respondent.

That's not the case at all. I know they're evil. The goal is to demonstrate that they're lying by exposing the way the rhetoric fails to line up with reality.

This has to be ongoing work because someone new has their political awakening every day. Every day, someone needs to learn that the right wing position is wrong on all levels, not just the obvious ones.

[realflaminglily]

there will be people out there who still think the war on drugs (as the absolute first thing that comes to mind) is a legitimate social cause against an antisocial blight on society. if you come out the gate with (the very true statement) that it's actually been a deliberate campaign to target minorities and other undesirable groups to the ruling class, you're going to sound like a clueless conspiracy nut

whereas if you come with a very defensible, statistically supported point of "it doesn't work and has never worked" you can open the door to the follow up question of "why did the government do it in the first place, and (in many cases) why are they still doing it?"

[tpwrtrmnky]

This, exactly.

The play is to:

Demonstrate that the policy doesn't work

Demonstrate that the people enforcing the policy have everything they need to know it doesn't work

Provide the context of what the policy achieves in the absence of its "intended" outcome.

Remind people that the purpose of a system is what it does.

Then, instead of being a non-sequitur claim you're just pulling out of thin air, the conclusion is the most reasonable way to assemble the provided puzzle pieces.

[qi-mera]

More of you need to learn about these ☝️

[jadenebula]

[ot3]

The video game history foundation has just finished scanning every copy of the neopets magazine and added it to their archive. Super cool!

Why we scanned every issue of Neopets The Official Magazine | Video Game History Foundation

It might be a little silly, but Neopets Magazine is an important slice of a different part of gaming culture.

During its four-year run, Neopets Magazine covered the latest news and strategies for the influential 2000s-era web game. It also had a lot of articles about Neopets merchandise and trading cards. In fact, it’s mostly ads for Neopets products. Or long articles about Neopets lore. At best, it is mostly an off-topic magazine. So why did we focus on this magazine of our archive? Simple: it’s about the game’s audience. Neopets was, arguably, the defining girl game of the 2000s. An entire microgeneration of girls got their start in the world of digital entertainment by raising virtual pets and playing Flash games to get Neopoints. [...] Notably, many of the magazine’s articles are about creativity and customization. There’s shades in here of the gameplay styles that have become more popular in the last decade with the rise of cozy games and farming sims. My favorite quirk of Neopets Magazine is in the audience survey that came with some issues. In one survey question, they asked whether readers bought this magazine at a clothing store! That would have reached a completely different audience than we usually associate with game magazines. Can you imagine PC Gamer being sold at a Charlotte Russe? The point is that Neopets The Official Magazine represents a different slice of gaming culture, one that we know matters to researchers and to our extended community.

[melonwah]

[gregtom]

[k-simplex-deactivated20241001]

Happy Pride

[readpinned-deactivated20230904]

when an npc in a sneak games goes “What was that” babygirl dont worry about it 

[daveedmee]

explosion at health potion factory 0 dead 0 injured

[beaft]

google help me

[beaft]

the thing is, stephen king is generally pretty good at creating complex, well-rounded characters, which makes it all the more jarring when one of those characters abruptly comes out with what i'll term a "kingism". i don't know how best to define a kingism other than "you'll know it when you see it". it's the voice of the author intruding on the voice of the character, and in this case the voice of the author has a bad sense of humour and is ravenously, inexplicably horny

[beaft]

random example of a kingism aka "he would not fucking say that"

[beaft]

this too is a kingism

[beaft]

one of the hallmarks of a kingism is that when a character is being Horny On Main (or In Maine), they can never do it in a normal way. they have to come up with a sequence of words that nobody has ever said before in the history of the english language. here's another example:

[beaft]

i'm starting a collection

[mikkeneko]