That’s objectively bullshit.

The only other option is trump. Are you trying to get people to vote for trump? If so, why?

I don’t disagree. But we’re living in interesting times.

I don’t like most of the people on the ticket I’ll be given in November, but you know what’s objectively worse? Actual fascism. Fascism always ends in genocide, and these white Christian nationalists aren’t even trying to hide it, going mask-off even before they have the power to back it up.

When fascists can be this bold and still keep their seats of power, that’s quite worrying.

As I saw someone say earlier, we’re in democracy triage.

I’d vote for Biden’s corpse before trump or not voting. We must wrest all power from the fascists before we can squabble about who’s more left.

I hope people stop believing the bullshit that’s trying to get progressives to not vote or to vote for 3rd parties. Progressives absolutely can win democrat tickets, and that’s exactly why there’s so much propaganda trying to convince people otherwise. Progressives have a lot of political power right now, and the whole system can swing left if people don’t just give up. Progressives giving up is the only play the right has.

Jpg for photos, png for everything else.

It’s an easy rule of thumb, it hurts that 20 years of repeating it seems to have had zero effect.

Maybe this helps: Jpg fucks up your image, and png doesn’t.

Or: jpg is lossy, png is lossless.

Or: It’s better to save photos as png than cartoons as jpg.

Seriously, I hope some of this breaks through because deep fried images are so fucking unnecessary.

The chicken vs egg question has never been about chronology or science.

It’s been about religion vs science.

Science says the egg came first: something nearly imperceptibly not quite a chicken laid an egg that hatched a chicken. That’s how evolution works, with the egg coming first.

Religion says a god poofed a chicken into existence. The chicken came first, and only ever laid pure chicken eggs. The eggs will forever hatch a chicken and nothing but a chicken.

That’s the chicken vs egg thing. It’s not a puzzle at all, it’s just science vs religion.

e: simplified. I’m too wordy by default.

Organised religion is a cancer of the mind.

Those of us who grew up without it literally can’t imagine scenarios like this, though I’ve heard disturbing things from people who seem otherwise sane that make me understand what drives some to do these things. When you’ve internalised fables of good vs evil and that’s how you define reality, it’s a small step to think you have to commit atrocities to save the innocent. You don’t have to have a very divergent mentality to convince yourself of this.

We will all be better off when the vast majority of people give up these fables and begin to live in the real world.

Or ‘I dunno what was wrong, but banging it helped’ as ‘percussive maintenance’.

Mhm. Ask all the scientists whose work has been suppressed by corporations claiming IP but not doing anything with it because it competes with their main product lines. Ask those whose work would be of wide public interest but is paywalled by the for-profit journals they’re required by their institutions to publish in.

The ‘capatalism breeds innovation’ thing is a massive lie. In reality, brilliant people drive innovation, and capitalism beats them to death then scavenges their corpses.

eta: This applies to the military version of this argument, too. No, the military doesn’t drive innovations and achievements; it hides them from the public so that society is constantly two or more decades behind what’s possible. Again, people are doing it, but we’re not allowed to benefit from many things until they have no real strategic value. It’s bonkers to think about. Even more bonkers to realise we’re paying them to do this to us.

Minor niggle: the ‘deep fried effect’ isn’t because jpg throws away information every time, it’s because the compression algorithm averages pixel boundaries, and that averaging multiplies with each compression pass.

It can actually bloat the size of the file by adding information – adding data to previously null pixels, whereas png would keep them clean.

e: it achieves this through pixel averaging (fuzzing), which is why you’ll see grey artefacts bleeding into the pixels around line art. This is magnified with each compression.

I never stopped wearing masks since the beginning, and get boosted every time it’s available.

I’ve always taken Covid seriously, same as the flu for which we get yearly boosters.

I’ll always be angry at antivaxxers that this thing that could have been contained like SARS was turned globally endemic because morons refuse to live in reality, so I’ll probably have to mask for the rest of my life (I have autoimmune issues that don’t play nice with Covid and I’d likely die very, very horribly, slowly and painfully drowning alone in an isolation room).

So yeah, I won’t forget who’s fault this is.

Pall Malls were marketed to pregnant women for stress control by people who played doctors on television as late as the early 1980s. You could even smoke in your hospital room.

We’ve come a long way, baby.

I’ve got this weird disease where my body can’t process fruits or veg, only meat, rice, pasta, and dairy.

I’m so excited for sustainable, lab-grown meat, I can’t even tell you. Living on rice and pasta alone sucks (even with dietary supplements), so I can’t ditch animal products.

They keep promising it, but every related headline is this bullshit. Hey corporate meat scientists: stop trying to make animal farming a thing in the future and start growing cloned steaks, please.

They spelled ‘eat’ wrong.