I unplugged the bassist but noone noticed cared.

+1 for The Terror. That and Carrion Comfort are my two favourite Dan Simmons novels.

Notice how its the only copy? All the others on that table have small stacks. It’s like someone got it off the shelves deeper into the shop and then their nerve failed them.

There was some talk awhile ago of the devs maybe extending feeds beyond Communities to Posts and Comments too but I don’t think it ever got off the ground. Would certainly be way easier to do what I think you want if they did exist.

Come on its obvious! Sedan - see Dan. Staring at a man called Dan.

Also ‘red’ has 3 letters, just like ‘gay’.

Not sure that its a must have and possibly uBO could handle it if I could be bothered to check but I like LocalCDN too.

I agree, mostly, young people start with tiktok (or whatever the platform du jour is) and the algo pushes Andrew Tate at them. Xitter is now a cesspit of hate. There are FB Groups and Insta accounts monetising ‘news’ and YT accounts pushing hate as ‘news’.

Simplistic populism is easy to digest and easy to understand. No matter how ludicrous it is, the idea that the root of your problems is muslims/the dems/women/trans folks/the gays/whatever is simple, easy to understand and easy to communicate. Its made for algorithm driven content.

I don’t want to be that old cunt at the back of the room harping on about the good old days but we live in an age when truth is irrelevant and easy to understand but utterly wrong information gets spread far and wide. Facts are usually complex, nuanced and not easy to present in a soundbite type way and nobody listens to explanations that last more than 5mins.

People of my generation invented this info hellscape and are profiting from it. The young are the ones paying the price.

Is he quite a big cat, sort of a burnt orange colour, white underbelly with a very, very bushy tail?

I’m approaching my sixties now. I’ve been through a lot of the messes of recent history. The world today (and it is the world, its not just the US although that is the most flagrant example) feels genuinely different. Just the sheer amount of misinformed hate and self-destructive uber capitalism feels like its reaching a crescendo. What comes after that is worrying to think about.

His lies/alternate reality are not so much believed as embraced - the people who support him already loathe and hate the things he’s talking about. All he’s doing is lending them legitimacy. Most people are, by and large, reactionary and seek out things and people that confirm their own beliefs. Nothing here is new apart from the scale of it and the new technical ability to increase that scale.

I pay Bitwarden the tenner a year as I have no reason to distrust them and they’re definitely providing a more reliable, securer service than I can self-host.

I also do an encrypted export once per week and store that export to an encrypted cloud based service and an encrypted USB stick. Takes 2 minutes.

Bandcamp is still OK for me and I listen to some fairly obscure stuff.

Just to offer a heads up - there’s a new solution/site which is currently in Beta but is backed by good people (musicians). It needs an influx of music diversity (lots of metal at the moment) but if it gets that when it comes out of beta then it could very well be a good Bandcamp replacament - Ampwall

A fascist party coming to power.

Led by a man who wants to call himself Chancellor.

In Austria.

We do tell people. For example, when you get off the train at Reading station it clearly says “Welcome to Reading”.

A is definitely the lesser of two weevils.

Dear Earth, apart from the many terrible things we have done historically, we, the British, are most recently sorry for David Icke, Andrew Wakefield and now Graham Hancock. We have tried to balance this out but one David Attenborough only goes so far.

One of his kids is a Netflix exec apparently.

I’m not arguing that fighting religion with religion is a bad idea - I’m saying they’re not very good at it. The last time I checked they’d won 3 rulings out of a possible 32. That’s across all cases, not just abortion. In the meantime, religious groups that are not inept are winning cases. And the more headlines TST generate, the more posts like this one pop up across all forms of social media and the less attention people pay to legitimate groups that actually can - and do make a difference.

I would urge you to look further into the histories of the owners of TST, one of who wanted to launch TST by publishing a sequel to Might Is Right a protofascist screed that Anton LaVey cribbed from for the Church of Satan.

I also don’t think they’re entirely about taking people’s money. But they sure do do a lot of that and no one seems to know exactly where that money goes.

Which would be fine if they were actually effective at anything besides trying to get money from people. They’ve lost every abortion related legal action they’ve started so far.

By contrast, a religious group (the so-called ‘Hoosier Jews for Choice’) that aren’t inept and can actually be effective and aren’t more interested in your bank balance than your politics secured a landmark ruling for abortion rights in April this year.

TST’'s finances are utterly opaque - only their two owners (because it is a business) know what comes in and what goes out and they aren’t telling. There are much better groups to donate both time, effort and money to instead of some very dodgy group with a worrying reputation.

Lucien Greaves.