Context for anyone who is wondering: Lamine Yamal's parents won an UNICEF raffle for a charity photoshoot in which Barça players posed with kids, and 5 month old Lamine happened to get 20yo Messi. Which is like. Literally insane
“Pratchett went back to older throwaway jokes (like dwarves being apparently unisex) and used them as metaphors to discuss social change, racial assimilation, and other complex issues, while reexamining the species he’d thrown in at the margins of his world simply because they existed at the margins of every other fantasy universe. If goblins and orcs and trolls could think, then why were they always just there to be slaughtered by the heroes? And if the heroes slaughtered sentient beings en masse, how heroic exactly were they? It was a long overdue start on redressing issues long swept under the rug by a parade of Tolkien successors who never thought of anyone green and slimy as anything but a notch on the protagonist’s sword, and much of the urgency in Pratchett’s last few books seemed to be related to them. ‘There’s only one true evil in the world,’ he said through his characters. ‘And that’s treating people like they were things.’ And in the last of his ‘grown-up’ Discworld books, that idea is shouted with the ferocity of those who have only a few words left and want to make them count. Goblins are people. Golems are people. Dwarves are people, and they do not become any less people because they decide to go by the gender they know themselves to be instead of the one society forces on them. Even trains might be people, and you’ll never know one way or the other unless you ask them, because treating someone like they’re a person and not a thing should be your default. And the only people who cling to tradition at the expense of real people are sad, angry dwellers in the darkness who don’t even understand how pathetic they are, clutching and grasping at the things they remember without ever understanding that the world was never that simple to begin with. The future is bright, it is shining, and it belongs to everyone.”
— John Seavey, The Evolution of the Disc (via liquidlightandrunningtrees)
The prokopetz brain worm is reading a source book and thinking "this needs more huge lookup tables"
Most sourcebooks do need more big stupid tables.
(I'll freely grant that my preoccupation is partly an aesthetic thing, but it's not just that. One of my biggest pet peeves with indie tabletop RPGs is how many of them will put the player or GM in a position where they need to Make Something Up in order to render the thing functional, then not provide any worked examples of what that might look like. Like, who exactly is the game designer here, you or me? I strive to always provide at least a dozen worked examples – and more is better – in any situation where one of my games asks the player or GM to Make Something Up, and you know what's an engaging and high-utility way to concisely present a large number of worked examples? A big stupid table.)
There's also something to be said about the size of a table in relation to its expected frequency of use and how that affects the players perception of of how long a game is meant to last
A table with only six options that's supposed to be consulted once per session caps your games total play time at less than a dozen sessions before things start getting repetitive
Quite so. I've touched on this before, but random lookup tables that are far too small for their stated purpose are a frequent vice of indie RPGs. A table of Weird Shit that's ostensibly meant to be rolled on at least once per scene but only has a dozen total entries is just making the hypothetical GM do your work for you in a more roundabout way.
This has been a recurring theme in my Arden Vul Homework series. I think the idea was that listing the individual contents of 352 burial niches would be unwieldy to navigate - but also if there's over 300 of the things you probably need more than 30 entries on the "what's in this niche?" table.
Or, you know, scrap the idea of searching niche by agonizing niche entirely. There's no decisions being made except whether you happened to roll poorly for the first few and then decided to give up (missing multiple magic items and thousands of gp worth of valuables)
The necessary corollary to "make sure your random lookup tables are large and varied enough to sustain interest across the expected number of rolls without kicking out lots of potentially annoying duplicate results" is, of course, "consider carefully why you are expecting so many rolls to be made on this particular table in the first place".
Hey, UK folks! Waterstones is having a 3-day pre-order sale that includes the UK paperback of Enshittification (which drops on Sept 1). Use SUMMER26 to get 25% off.
One of 2026's better tech-related coinages is "dickover," John Gruber's term for
a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user with an unwanted, unnecessary, mandatory interaction; e.g. asking the user to accept “cookies”, subscribe to a newsletter, install the website’s mobile app, agree to terms of service, or anything else that the user couldn’t give two shits about.
These are bad everywhere, but they are especially terrible in the UK and EU, where websites practice a form of malicious compliance to the GDPR, Europe's landmark privacy law. Under the GDPR, websites are required to secure your affirmative consent to process your data. The obvious way that websites should respond to this is by not collecting your data unless there's a damned good reason for it, but the actual response is to repeatedly shove cookie-consent dialogs in your face before letting you use the site.
These are absolutely unnecessary. Your browser can be configured to transmit a "global privacy control signal" by default that tells websites you don't consent to be spied on while you look at their pages:
But many websites punish you by throwing up a "Global Privacy Control detected" dickover that forces you to click through to affirm their confirmation of your confirmation that you don't want to be spied on.
If you don't have the GPC set, websites will demand that you tell them whether you want to be spied on – and they'll do it again, every time you visit them. The website operators falsely claim that they have to do this under the terms of the GDPR (or other laws, like California's CCPA). This is a lie. Every privacy law contains an exception that allows websites to store data about you for a "legitimate interest," and that obviously includes setting a cookie that says, "don't ever spy on this user."
What's a legit interest? Well, I can tell you what it isn't. Facebook claimed that they had to spy on you, even if you opted out by laboriously clicking through one of their dickovers or by transmitting a GPC signal to their servers, because you had also clicked through their terms of service, which say, "Facebook is going to spy on you with every hour that god sends, from asshole to appetite, abandon hope all ye who enter here" (a direct quote). Facebook claims that this is a contract with you, whereby the company has promised to spy on you, and if they stop, they would be violating the contract, which might make you mad, so they are legally required to eavesdrop on every conversation you have and follow you everywhere you go:
This is bullshit, and the European Court of Justice affirmed it. But despite the fact that surveillance advertising companies are happy to stretch the definition of "legitimate interest" to cover "spying on you because our ToS say we will," these same companies insist that "legitimate purpose" can't possibly include "remembering the fact that you told us not to spy on you the last time you were here," and so every time you click through to one of many popular websites, you get a dickover, and the only way to make it stop is to "consent" to being spied upon.
But it doesn't have to be this way. While the right answer to this kind of rampant lawlessness is stonking fines and even the corporate death penalty for repeat offenders, internet users have a myriad of options available to them for banishing dickovers to the scrapheap of history. These measures aren't difficult to avail yourself of, and using them will make your life infinitely better, so I'm going to tell you about some of them.
Before I start, one note: these measures only work on browsers, not apps. An app is a webpage wrapped in the right kind of IP law to make it a felony to change how it works, which is why companies are infinitely horny to get you to use their apps, not their websites:
What's more, these measures really only work on desktop browsers, because mobile browsers are apps, and are severely limited by law and mobile operating systems, making it hard-to-impossible to customize them so that they'll respect your rights. This is true of all mobile browsers, but it goes triple for iOS (iPhones and iPads):
Finally, this mostly only works on Firefox, and it works worst on Chrome, Google's monopolistic browser. When it comes to customizing your browsing experience to get rid of annoyances like dickovers and ads, Chrome is hands-down the worst choice, and Google is about to make it much, much worse, forcing a change that will kill the most popular blockers. Stop using Chrome, switch to Firefox:
So, once you're on your actual computer, using Firefox, how can you disenshittify your internet experience? The first thing to familiarize yourself with is Reader Mode, a built-in Firefox feature that switches any webpage to a black type/white background column of text. Just click the little "page view" icon next to the Firefox location bar or use the key combo "ctrl-alt-r."
Some power tips for Reader Mode: Firefox tries to guess whether a given page should have a Reader Mode option based on its layout. This sometimes blocks Reader Mode on pages that badly need it. You can force Firefox to always allow you to try Reader Mode by going to "about:config" in your location bar, then searching for "reader.parse-on-load.force-enabled" and toggling it to "true". If you switch to Reader Mode and the page breaks, you can switch back by hitting ctrl-alt-r again.
Many websites' "soft paywalls" (which allow you to read an article or two before getting a demand to register and/or pay) can be defeated with Reader Mode. Just hit ctrl-alt-r and see if the whole article appears. If it doesn't, try one or both of: a) reloading the page while still in Reader Mode, and/or; b) Clearing cookies for the page (click the shield next to the site's URL in Firefox's location bar, then click "Clear cookies and site data"), and then reload.
That's Reader Mode, and it comes built into Firefox, and can be installed via various extensions on other browsers. Now let's move on to more advanced techniques, starting with "Kill Sticky," a bookmarklet that deletes any "static" elements in a web-page you've loaded (broadly, this is anything that won't change position when you scroll your browser).
Just click the "Kill Sticky" bookmarklet and all the static elements in the current tab go away. This includes things like navigation bars, which are often (but not always) useless annoyances. The original Kill Sticky, created by Alisdair McDiarmid, is 13 years old, and it still works great, but eight years ago, gala8y created a new version that caught some outliers that the original Kill Sticky missed. I've been running gala8y's version for a year now with no problems, and I recommend it as your second line of dickover defense (after Reader Mode):
https://github.com/gala8y/kill-sticky–forked
Kill Sticky is great for getting rid of the dickovers on a website you're not planning to visit more than once. But if you visit a dickover website regularly, you can permanently block its dickovers by using the Adblock Plus (ABP) browser extension:
https://adblockplus.org/
Once you have Adblock Plus installed, you can instruct your browser never to render a given website's dickover. Just load the website, hover your pointer over the dickover, and click your right mouse-button (Mac users need to ctrl-click). This will pop up a Firefox context menu, and at the bottom of that menu is "Block Element…".
Select "Block Element," then move your mouse around the screen. Different regions of the screen will glow pink, showing you which element (part of the page) ABP can access there. Once you've highlighted the dickover, click the "Preview" button on the ABP dialog in the bottom right corner. This will show you how the page looks after you've banished that element.
If it's an element you want to delete forever, click "Create" and ABP will create a new rule for that page that blocks that element. Note that many dickovers consist of several elements, each atop the other, and after you block one element, you might have to repeat the process to delete the element "behind" it, digging your way down to the actual webpage. Each element you block is listed in the top pane of the ABP dialog box. For example, here's Wired.com's UK dickover:
If you block an element by accident and want to restore it, just delete its corresponding line in the Block Element dialog. When websites change their layouts and their dickovers come back, just add the new one to the Block Element for that page. No need to delete the old entries.
Finally, if all else fails, there's Remove Paywall, a website that tries several different ways to load a page without its interrupters, nag screens, regwalls and paywalls:
https://www.removepaywall.com/
It's also available as a browser plugin, so you can just right-click on any page and select "Remove Paywall" from the pop-up menu. Remove Paywall often loads a page with all of its dickovers, and you can use all the techniques enumerated above – Reader Mode, Kill Sticky and Block Element – with Remove Paywall versions of pages.
Back in 2024, Ed Zitron tried an experiment: he bought Amazon's bestselling laptop and tried to use it, discovering it to be a horror-show of shovelware, including processor-devouring preinstalled spyware that rendered it all but unusable:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/
Zitron's (excellent) point is that technically proficient people have better computers than most users, and these computers are configured in better ways, and as a result, we participate in a fundamentally different internet to the one that normies are forced to use.
It's an excellent observation, and Zitron's point – that these laptops were actively enshittified by hardware makers and OS vendors – is an important one (the essay is called "Never Forgive Them").
But to this point, I would like to add another: we have a duty and obligation to the people we love to show them how to seize the means of computation. The normies in your life need the tips and tricks I lay out in this article more than anyone. Sure, it takes some doing to install Firefox, Kill Sticky, Adblock Plus and Bypass Paywalls; it takes a minute to figure out Reader Mode.
But if you install these tools for the people you love and show them how to use them (or just reconfigure the sites they visit most frequently to block dickovers and other annoyances), you will permanently improve their internet experience, clawing back hours of annoyances every week, while also protecting their privacy.
Anyone who is confused by switching to Firefox is also going to be confused by the deceptive language and practices that go along with dickovers. By leaving your unsophisticated loved ones exposed to dickovers, you're not decreasing the amount of technological confusion they're likely to experience in a day – you're vastly increasing the amount of danger they face as a result of that confusion.
There's never been a better time to disenshittify your cherished normies' computers. The AI companies' illegal monopolization of the memory market has sent the price of new computers, RAM and storage skyrocketing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BORRBce5TGw
All of us – but especially normies – are having to do more with less. The best way to squeeze extra performance out of any computer (but especially an aged and underpowered computer) is by switching to a free/open operating system like GNU/Linux and replacing your proprietary, resource-gobbling apps with free/open alternatives:
Seizing the means of computation isn't theft, it's bargaining. Commercial surveillance companies will tell you that by spying on you, they are simply engaged in a marketplace exchange in which you swap your privacy for access to online services. But they are running a very curious sort of market: it's a "market" where as soon as you stop to browse someone's wares, the stallholder gets to reach into your pocket and clean out your wallet. In "markets," prices are announced and bargained over, not set unilaterally and extracted from anyone unwise enough to cross the threshold.
Adblocking, dickover blocking and other customizations are a way for you to bargain back, to answer the opening bid of "How about you give me all of your data forever and let me do anything I want with it?" with "How about 'nah?'"
Dickovers are companies' illegal response to privacy laws. Privacy laws are the public response to companies' out-of-control data theft and weaponization. They call us thieves, but they're the ones who embarked upon a generation-long campaign of unrestricted data plunder. What they call "theft" is just self-defense.
A generation ago, publishers and advertisers fell in love with pop-up ads. Early pop-ups were virulent in ways that are hardly imaginable today: visiting a website summoned dozens of pop-ups, some of them employing dirty tricks like spawning as an invisible 1×1 pixel, or running away from your cursor when you tried to close them. They auto-played sound and music. They were Satanic.
We got rid of pop-ups by installing pop-up blockers. Browser vendors (starting with Opera, then Mozilla) blocked pop-ups by default. Soon, pop-ups simply ceased to exist for the majority of internet users, and at that point, the same companies who'd insisted that they would go out of business unless they could fill your screen with pop-ups quietly gave up on them and found another way to advertise.
No one should ever have to look at another dickover. If dickovers become invisible for everyone on the web, there won't be any dickovers. Companies claim they need dickovers to survive. It's bullshit. They want dickovers, but if dickovers cease to be rendered on their target audience's screens, they'll switch to less invasive tactics, just like they've always done.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
What a great point. Let me highlight and copy that particular piece of text off the Tumblr app; a function built into my phone that you'd have to go out of your way to break-
Maybe I'll stop using the Tumblr app. Feels bad.
An app is a webpage wrapped in the right kind of IP law to make it a felony to change how it works, which is why companies are infinitely horny to get you to use their apps, not their websites
I had to write that out. By hand. LIKE A SAVAGE. On my magic handheld supercomputer. Because of corporate clowns.
Free service with ads: Well, if I'm not paying for it they have to foot the bill somehow.
Paid service with no ads: Well, if they're not funding it with ad revenue, they need to charge us something.
Paid service with ads: Well that's bullshit.
"We used to be a paid service without ads, but now we're putting ads in it! If you want the ad-free version you have to pay more for preeeeemium": Fuck you fuck you fuck you
How to Take Care of Yourself When You Have A Stomach Bug
A lot of you have been asking me to do a "how to take care of yourself when you're sick" post. There's a lot to that ask, so I'm going to be breaking it up. You can read the one I did on colds here.
This post will be about taking care of yourself when you have nausea/vomiting/diarrhea. Those symptoms aren't limited to just the infectious kind of stomach bug, so take this as more general knowledge.
When we are talking about the infectious kind of stomach bug, you want to be very careful about cleanliness. Wash your hands with soap and water (notably, not hand sanitizer in this case- many GI pathogens just laugh at hand sanitizer) every time you go to the bathroom or vomit. If you are sick, do not handle food other people will eat. If you are the only person who can possibly handle food and there is no way around it, wash your hands extremely well, wear nitrile gloves, and cook any food you have touched thoroughly.
Nausea/Vomiting:
Nausea is the sense of discomfort in the abdomen, chest, or throat that often accompanies vomiting. You can have nausea without vomiting too. It can come from things like infectious stomach bugs, but it can also come from things like motion sickness, chronic GI illness, emotional distress, or side effects from medications. Nausea is multipurpose like that.
Generally the biggest thing with anything GI is that you want to stay hydrated. With vomiting, it can be hard, especially if you are vomiting frequently. Always start by waiting about 30-60 minutes since the last episode of vomiting, then taking very small sips of plain water every ten minutes or so. If you vomit again, start over. If you can't hold down plain water for 24 hours (or less if you have other symptoms of dehydration like very dark, infrequent urine, or your skin stays tented when pinched) seek medical care. You should also seek medical care if there is blood in your vomit (red or "coffee grounds" appearance) or if you have a fever.
If you have nausea/vomiting often you should also see a healthcare provider about that. It's not normal to have nausea/vomiting regularly.
Once you're tolerating water though, branch out to other clear liquids. Clear liquids are things you can see through (or theoretically see through) and are liquid at body temperature. This includes black coffee and tea, juice without pulp, soda, broths, sports/electrolyte drinks without resin (not cloudy), gelatin, and popsicles.
Once you're doing well on clear liquids, move to full liquids. These include everything listed above and also milks, puddings, thin yogurts, ice creams, and custards without chunks.
Once you're doing well with full liquids, move on to pureed foods (like pureed soups without chunks, juices with pulp, and smoothies), or if you're really feeling good move on to soft foods like mashed vegetables.
This progression helps give your stomach time to rest and gradually build up tolerance to foods. Most people can go for a many days as long as they're getting fluids with calories and electrolytes, so don't worry about protein/fiber/vegetables/vitamins as much in the acute phase of nausea/vomiting.
There are a lot of things you can do to reduce nausea and make you more likely to tolerate liquids.
Tasting/smelling things:
Ginger is pretty good for nausea. You can chew or suck on raw ginger (which is pretty intense for most people) or get ginger chews or tablets. You can also consume strong ginger tea hot or iced. Notably, you generally have to taste the ginger instead of just swallowing it.
Mint is also a good option. You can eat mint candy or smell peppermint oil.
Smelling isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol works well too. They sell alcohol wipes for prepping skin prior to injections, and these are super convenient (and often pretty cheap) ways to carry around isopropyl alcohol.
Coca Cola. This one is less about taste and more about the phosphoric acid content and carbonation in Coke. Because of this, it does need to be brand name or it won't work. Phosphoric acid is a great nausea reducer. Do not flatten the Coke prior to drinking. The bubbles are actually really good for nausea too. You do have to basically continually sip it for it to work.
Other sodas/Seltzer water. For the bubbles.
Other strategies:
Hot water. Sipping water or tea that is as hot as you can stand can very temporarily relieve nausea. Like with the Coke, you have to do this pretty much continuously.
Pressure points: pressing on the inside of your wrist can help. Generally the bands designed to do this don't put enough pressure on the spot, so try on your own and experiment with how much pressure you need.
Heating pad: this is more for abdominal pain/cramping, but having a sensation like heat or cold can provide some physical distraction and improve nausea.
Cool damp wash cloth: On the face or back of the neck.
Very hot baths/showers: This is mostly useful for cannabis hyperemesis syndrome.
OTC Meds: Emetrol. This is just phosphoric acid. If Coke is working for you, just use that, it's cheaper and you can take it more often.
Bismuth subsalicylate: Pepto-Bismol. Works by reinforcing the mucous layer in the lining of the stomach and reducing inflammation. It also "collects" (adsorbs) bacteria like H. pylori and prevents it from doing damage. It also thickens poop to treat diarrhea. Don't take with aspirin or if you're allergic to aspirin. Ask before taking with other NSAIDs like ibuprofen.
Dimenhydrinate: Dramamine. This is a first generation antihistamine, which blocks histamine in the part of the brain that causes nausea. Contrary to popular belief this works for all kinds of nausea, not just motion sickness. Don't take it with other antihistamines, but you can take it with phosphoric acid or bismuth subsalicylate.
Diarrhea:
Diarrhea excessive liquid or very loose stools.
You can lose a lot of fluids very fast with diarrhea, so it's important to consume more fluids than you're losing. Drink a cup or two of electrolyte drink with every stool, if your stomach can tolerate it, and watch out for signs of dehydration.
A lot of people are afraid that if they stop diarrhea with diet or meds they won't "flush out" the bacteria, virus or parasite causing it. Because any infection is in the lining of the GI system and can't be flushed out, that's not how diarrhea works. That said, before starting an antidarrheal for acute diarrhea (diarrhea that comes on due to an infection or immediate problem), talk to a healthcare provider. Slowing the diarrhea has advantages in that it prevents dehydration and prevents the spread of certain pathogens. But if the diarrhea is caused by a pathogen that produces a toxin (like C. difficile) or if the diarrhea is caused by a food intolerance or allergy, you do want to get rid of the toxin or offending food. So you need to see a healthcare provider to rule this out.
If you have more than about 24 hours of severe diarrhea or can't stay hydrated, you should see a healthcare provider. They can give you better meds for diarrhea than over the counter, and antibiotics/antiparasitics if you need them. Other reasons to see a healthcare provider include blood your stool (which can be red or very dark black), a fever, a lot of mucous in the stool, pain in the abdomen that is sharp or hurts when you move, or significant changes to the color of the stool (like turning orange or white).
There are a number of things you can do about diarrhea:
Diet:
The BRAT diet is a diet to help make diarrhea more manageable. It is primarily a low-fat, low-fiber diet that classically includes Bananas, (white) Rice, Applesauce, and (white) plain Toast. You can also include things like skinless potatoes, white flour noodles, and lean meats without skin.
Caring for the Skin Around Your Anus:
One of the problems with diarrhea is that your butt hurts due to the constant irritation from the diarrhea itself and the wiping. There are a couple of things you can do here, and you can do basically one or the other at any given time. You can alternate them, though:
Protect the skin: Get zinc oxide cream and apply it after every stool. This protects the skin around the anus from moisture.
Soothe the skin: Use witch hazel or pramoxime pads to make the skin feel better. This makes the blood vessels in the area smaller and prevents pain.
Additionally to one of the above, try using baby wipes or water to clean yourself after pooping instead of dry toilet paper.
OTC Meds:
Bismuth Subsalicylate: Pepto-Bismol. Thickens stools. Don't take with aspirin or if you're allergic to aspirin. Ask before taking with other NSAIDs like ibuprofen.
Loperamide: This is an opioid that doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier. So it doesn't help with pain, but does slow down how fast food/liquids move through the digestive system. Ask a healthcare provider before taking this with other opioids.
Shortcuts to determine if an integer is divisible by:
This is a given.
If the last digit is divisible by 2 (a.k.a. even), then so is the whole number.
If the sum of the digits is divisible by 3, then so is the whole number. The recursivity of this means that if the sum has multiple digits, you can add them up again until you get a single digit and see if it's 3, 6, or 9.
Like the rule for 2, but check if the last two digits are divisible by 4.
If it ends in 5 or 0.
If the rules for both 2 and 3 apply.
No shortcut. Alas.
Like the rules for 2 and 4, but check if the last three digits are divisible by 8. (Yes, this pattern keeps going for 16, 32, etc.)
Like the rule for 3, but the sum of the digits (or the sum of the sum of the digits, etc.) must be 9.
So! This is a perfect case study in situations where you should be wary of misinformation.
Take a moment and ask yourself, a project like this requires a lot of time, money and dedication of resources, why would scientists dedicate that time to something that could just be done by a tree?
The answer is they wouldn't. So that means this claim requires further investigation!
This project is called LIQUID 3, and it's not meant for cities with wide open spaces, it's meant for cities like Belgrade in Serbia. These cities are densely populated and heavily polluted, to the point where pollution actually chokes out current trees and makes creating green spaces difficult.
Liquid 3 was a PhD scientists answer to these problems. The microalgae tank is intended for spaces where you either:
Don't have enough space to plant full trees, or
Don't have enough time to plant trees and wait for them to grow up.
The tank is extremely efficient when you consider the amount of space needed compared to the amount of CO2 turned into oxygen. The tank can operate throughout the winter. And most importantly, it can be quickly set up in areas that desperately need relief from air pollution NOW not in 10 years when trees are done growing. Children currently suffocating on polluted air can't wait for trees to grow, they need to be taken care of now, and Liquid 3 is one of the ways to take care of them. Depending on the species of microalgea used, a number have shown a pretty amazing capacity to pull heavy metals out of the air which is something trees can get choked up by.
The tanks aren't just tanks either! Liquid 3 have solar panels placed on top, they have lighting and mobile phone charging, and they work as public benches. The designers of it want to encourage green spaces where there's room, but where there isn't room or time, Liquid 3 can step in. Realistically, this isn't a replacement for trees. It's replacing boring metal city benches with new, cooler benches that also clean the air (and have at least some heating during the winter).
Not only that, but the microalgea that grows is native to Serbia and all that microalgea has a ton of great uses! It makes for great fertilizer, compost, wastewater treatment, cleaner biofuels and even for helping create new tanks for further air purification. They only require a quick algae divide once a month, and the produced algae can be carted off to where ever it's needed. This makes them effective solutions for areas that can't sustain complex installations.
So yeah, there's actually quite a lot of places that would like these. Lots of people currently breathing in terrible quality air would much rather have their boring city benches replaced with really fucking cool algae tanks that clean the air and can be used to help create + sustain future green spaces in cities. I dunno about you, but I'd take that over a dumb metal bench any day. Put these at every bus stop and I'd be delighted.
Serbian here living in Belgrade! This is all true and I've actually seen some of these around the city a few times. They're amazing at what they do and really cool to watch up close because you can see pretty swirling inside them. It's not only functional but aesthetically pretty nice as well!
Goodmorning to the Anthropic Claude AI training scraper that suddenly decided to request 660 thousand pages (exactly the number I had remaining on the starter plan) and brought Pikiwedia down.
Sudden switch from diverse user agents like chrome, safari, messenger preview to Just Claudebot. I'm not even mad though, this is maybe the funniest thing possible, because I've inadvertently poisoned their training data with thousands of fucked up articles with normal urls.
Pikiwedia perseveres, back up with a better robots.txt. I hope Anthropic has a gery vood time with Pikiwedia's data :))
if anyone wishes to support pikiwedia i would instead donate to the wikimedia foundation !! they are doing far more to fight for a free and unslopped internet.
also, i directly use their free (!!!!) api. pikiwedia relies directly on the wisdom and hard work of millions of wikipedia authors. protect this amazing source of collaborative open source knowledge for the many, many obvious reasons, but also so that pikiwedia can continue to scrongle it.
“my father is a boy and my mother is a girl so i’m mixed” is the funniest possible response to someone asking your gender and it came from 6’5 Viking footballer and notable weird little guy Erling Haaland on a Snapchat
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