The hard part would be doing it in a way that pulls in the kind of people who listened to Alex Jones.

The funniest thing to do would be to turn it into either a legitimate leftist new site or a leftist themed nujob conspiracy mill (though I don’t know how that would work).

I think Facebook had an advantage in originally being targeted at college kids (I think you even needed a school ID to make an account originally) before becoming open to everyone. This meant that the userbase was a little older than that of most social media at the time and it worked as a way to stay in touch with people after you graduated. Then, when they opened it up, it became a way to stay in touch with family as well, which got the parents onboard with something that they had just considered a fad before, like MySpace.

A friend of mine had an alarm clock with big rubberized wheels on it that would drive around the room as it went off, so you had to get out of bed to turn it off.

That lasted a few weeks before he grabbed it and chucked it as hard as he could against a wall while still half asleep, then went back to sleep.

10 is the last version of Windows I’ll be using, and I don’t want to have more full screen ads for 11 pop up on top of whatever program I’m trying to use. The previous time it happened is what prompted me to do it in the first place, and I’m definitely not gonna let them force update my Windows version like they’ve done in the past.

Stuff like this is why I disabled the TPM on my computer. No TPM means that you’re “not eligible” for 11, meaning I don’t get nagged by the random full screen pop-ups.

Interestingly, underground lines aren’t feasible in my hometown because of how close the water table is to the surface. Any trench deep enough to bury cables in would have to worry about flooding with groundwater or saltwater in some places.

The water table is so high that not only are there many places where basements would flood 100% of the year, but the majority of homes still have septic tanks instead of town sewage lines, and you can find houses where the lawn has been raised up with 3 or 4 feet of concrete to raise the septic tank to comply with modern regulations to avoid contaminating the groundwater supply.

Having seen plenty of pixels in my time, I can confirm that those are German pixels.

IIRC, people have previously reported that Windows 11(?) switched their default browser back to Edge after installing an update.

There is an alternative that I wish I could think of the name of that communities have been using for a number of years now to set up cheap, small-scale satellite internet networks. I looked into it once as an alternative for my neighborhood to dealing with the bullshit that is Comcast and Verizon, and ended up getting an ad for milsec strategic level network infrastructure from Boeing or something. Regardless, it’s a known and proven alternative that’s cheaper than the big guys and has hit a point where some places have set it up as a part of local government run infrastructure.

I’ve been thinking about spending a few years dead for tax reasons.

Thanks, I fucking love it.

Reminds me of a story from when I was younger of a guy who killed 3 people with a katana at a drug deal gone bad at a local motel. The courts ruled it was self-defense.

The most cyberpunk “street samurai” shit I’ve ever heard. Just needs to have the dude deflecting bullets to seal the deal.

Aye, as an American, I have only a limited view of the big picture, but my understanding of it is that while it was definitely a politicized issue across the globe, a lot of the far right extremists were emboldened to make it such a big issue by the actions of Trump and the Republican party in the US.

Like that convoy of Canadian Trump rioters who can’t even vote for him if they wanted to because they live in Canada. Trump’s been a poster-boy for crazies all across the globe.

You can always check out the e-book version even if you go find a physical copy to read instead. I saw a librarian asking people to do stuff like that since the active use of library services let’s them argue for better funding and services.

Also, see if they have a physical copy at another branch. My local library is part of a network that spans across multiple towns, and they can often get books sent to them from other branches if they don’t have a copy themswlves.

The best a resistance group can hope for is being damaging enough to choke their enemy little by little while also being hard to root out without causing collateral damage. Because what are AR-15s or whatever else you can get your hands on going to do against the army’s helicopter drones armed with sniper rifles and 360 degree cameras that can detect a target within milliseconds in a kilometer radius just through the reflection on their eye.

As George Washington once said, “A bunch of farmers armed with guns will never win against a trained army.”

Trump made masks political, so wearing one is a political statement to these people.

They have made their political beliefs their entire personality to compensate for their low self confidence and so have to aggressively display their beliefs like a peacock anytime they think somebody is challenging those beliefs, regardless of how benign or irrelevant it is.

Yep. See also: sea-lioning, the gish gallop, and a myriad of other tactics used by the far-right.

Also, another of my favorite quotes:

I’m not doing homework for you. I’ve known you for 30 seconds and enjoyed exactly none of them.

Self-curating my social media experience is self-care.

Optimism, realism, and pessimism.