It’s a fair point. It’s also much easier to be all Billy Big-Balls “just kick them out” when it’s Hungary - but what about when Germany elects AfD or France elects Le Pen; do we kick them out too?

A federation of democracies needs to be resilient to the fact that democracies don’t always elect people we like. Kicking members out every time that happens is not reslience, it’s a deathwish.

The important thing is this: can you still deliver lectures to the rest of the world on the Importance of Freedom Of Speech, and the fact that only Yanks have it because Elon can worship Hitler on the Internet?

And the answer is, yes. Yes you can, and always will. So the actual reality isn’t really important. Because all you actually learned from 1984 is that of the government tells you that you have freedom of speech, and also tells you that Eastasia and Eurasia don’t, That’s Good Enough For You and you’re The Free-est People In The World.

Probably because it is not confirmed yet? The first drone was definitively confirmed to be a Russian Shahed, the second drone I’m not sure an announcement has been made yet (It was only shot down a few hours ago.)

I don’t think it requires a genius to guess, but it’s not really the job of news to promulgate guesses as facts. Not outside the US, anyway.

I don’t buy the Epstein files distraction, because it’s pretty clear the US public don’t give a shit. What would the Epstein files even prove?

You could release an authentic video of Trump fucking an 8 year old and then throwing the lifeless body down a laundry chute and most Yanks would just shrug and say “whaddaguy”. Hell, if the kid was an immigrant’s, his ratings would probably go up.

There is nothing in the Epstein files that could possibly touch Trump. It’s all already priced in and you elected him anyway.

I turned kitty’s bed - that she slept in as a kitten, but then spent about 5 years refusing to acknowledge - back into a bed by putting an electric heating mat under it. Hey presto, it’s back in favour!

Cretin.

plonk, as we used to say in the good old days.

No, they’re not.

Next idiotic question?

At least a half dozen countries will block Ukraine joining the EU in its current state, and another dozen will secretly be glad they don’t have to take the flack.

Ukraine is decades away from EU membership. Anyone suggesting otherwise is doing all concerned a disservice (yes, looking at you UVdL.)

Hey now, can’t you tell? He Does Hid Own Research.

No idea why the downvotes here.

I mean, someone up there just unironically called someone else a “class traitor”.

This is not a crowd that’s hanging straight on its hinges.

A brigade of yanks with “you just can’t understand how many solar systems fit in Texas, though” is incoming…

Thank you! I see it has a Linux version, so I will genuinely check that out - as soon as I get home. (As I write I’m waiting to board the first of 13 hours or so of flights - that’s why I happened to be checking out gaming reviews yesterday ;-). I’m hoping the 7th Guest remake will keep me sane…)

Genuinely, thank you both for the suggestions. I’m just wary of falling down the YouTube rabbithole - I refuse to even log-in to the damned site - so if I start watching one of them it’s going to have to be one I can remember the name of to search ;-).

(I thought Facebook was a bad idea from the get-go and never signed up, quit Instagram when FB bought them, quit Twitter when that asshole bought them… Lemmy and (sorry to say) Reddit are literally my only social media, and I question both of them fairly regularly. I do not claim to be normal ;-).)

The only reason I make an exception for Yahtzee is that having had a Steam account since Half-Life 2, Steam nevertheless remains comically bad at recommending games I’d be remotely interested in. Yahtzee’s reviews I often don’t agree with, but they do at least give me a hint of things I should check out.

Don’t include Romania in this - we already have AC. The weather currently getting everyone in north-west Europe highly exercised is a mild summer day in Romania. I assume this is also true of Bulgaria.

Air conditioners are heat pumps.

Air-to-Air heatpumps (i.e. AC) are trivial to install in apartments (drill one inch hole in wall, mount compressor on one side and head unit on other, done,) and make for very efficient heating in winter just as much as they can be used for cooling in summer.

Literally the only reason I ever use YouTube other than KPop^* videos is very occasionally, if I’m bored, to watch Yahtzee’s reviews. Last night I tuned in and a game I’ve not heard of before, Mixtape, got mentioned.

I thought “sounds curious, maybe I’ll search for some full reviews of that to see what it’s like”…

Ho. Lee. Hell.

There seems to be an entire genre on YouTube of absolutely godawful human beings just being fucking horrible in the guise of “game reviews”. I mean, just really unpleasant people who within about 30 seconds you know would be domestic abusers if they ever met a girl. Is this the edge of the manosphere? It’s absolutely revolting, whatever it is.

On the bright side, my “never, ever use YouTube for anything other than music videos” commitment is redoubled. I am so glad I’m old enough that this shit wasn’t ubiquitous when I was impressionable.

Be fair though, “saving from a GUI app” is not exactly Linux’s strong point either.

Click “save”; wonder which badly written save dialog this app is going to use; is it the one with the save button at the top? Or the bottom? Will it actually appear, or will it pop up below the window for Reasons, making you think the dammed thing has crashed? Maybe it’s one with a list of favourite locations in the left maybe it’s not… Maybe they’re actually my favourite locations, or maybe it’s an entirely different set of the developer’s. If I’m lucky, there’s a way to navigate to my home directory without going all the eay to the root and working up from there, more than likely not…

Best of all, it’s one of those Save dialogues that thinks it’s smart to enumerate the entire goddamned filesystem, network mounts and all, before it will respond to any input at all, leading to the window manager eventually fretting that maybe the application has crashed… Or perhaps it’s one of those ones related to Dolphin that thinks it understands WebDAV mounts better than davfs, except that it actually doesn’t and you end up saving to a temporary directory just so you can move the file where you actually wanted it from the commandline…

aaaaaargh

Don’t get me wrong, I use Linux on all my machines and have been a Unix user since NetBSD 0.8 (33 years, fml…) But clicking “save” or “open” is one of those things that has me shaking my head thinking “how can it STILL be this bad” every time.

TL;DR: “I had a child and now that makes me THE MOST SPECIAL PERSON IN THE WORLD and why doesn’t anyone RECOGNISE how special I am for God’s sake PLEASE VALIDATE ME”

Either it wears off or the brat ends up a serial killer…

If only it was just heat…

200mm of rain fell in about an hour last night, as measured from the weather sensor on my balcony in Bucharest. Maybe more, I can’t tell because the ppwer went out when the water flooding down the block stairs tripped the breakers (I’m currently abroad, now waiting until morning there for a friend to go round and assess the damage…)

Honestly? Let the wave of neo-ludditism pass?

Is it necessary to respond to every Internet fad? Ignore it and eventually it will go away. Pretending otherwise is like thinking King Cnut can hold back the tide.

(Or, if that’s not good enough - just ban promotion entirely. I don’t give a rat’s arse if code was AI generated or artisanally hand-woven onto magnetic cores by Jeff Minter in a kaftan - the real problem is spam, so just stop all promotional posts and the problem goes away.)