uralsolo [he/him]

Russia is not an altruistic actor here

Always worth bearing in mind. The reason Crimea got taken over in 2014 and Donbas didn’t is pretty clearly because of its relatively higher strategic importance - it took a lot of provocation from NATO and Azov for Putin to change his mind about that calculation, I’ll never forget how bloodthirsty the media was especially in the month leading up to the invasion.

How many countries has China invaded or bombed from afar in the last forty years? How do China’s loan conditions compare to those of the World Bank and IMF? The notion that they’re “colonizing” anyone is completely daffy - they have long-running border disputes with some of their neighbors and a long-running leadership dispute with what remains of the previous government of China, those are completely different types of conflict.

As for Russia and Israel, the difference is that the people in the Donbas who seceded from Ukraine back in 2014 weren’t placed there to displace Ukrainians as a Russian colonial project. They’re the same people who lived in Donbas going back to the USSR’s dissolution, and they had a series of legitimate grievances when the rest of Ukraine elected a government that was actively hostile to them.

Broke: Giving someone a pet as a gift.

Woke: Making someone your pet as a gift.

That was mostly by accident. IMO America’s actions in and around WW2 are better understood as the result of two expanding empires bumping into one another (America and Japan)

I don’t remember which Surface I have, but power issues are the biggest bugbear that have followed me with it the entire time I’ve had it. Firstly chargers for the thing are really fucking sketchy - if it’s not in basically perfect, out-of-the-box condition it simply refuses to connect. And even if the little indicator light turns on that doesn’t mean that the bios “sees” it, which is pretty annoying.

Lately it’s been doing this thing where when I try to wake it up from sleep it takes about a full minute to turn the screen on. This wasn’t an issue until like a week ago, I’ve tried updating everything, reverting back to windows/stock settings - nothing.

Nowadays my surface is just a second screen on my desk that I use to run Stremio, because it just can’t handle anything else - and this is after me being pretty positive on it for most of the time I’ve had it. I guess I’ve had it for a few years, but damn if it wasn’t such a compact design I could probably swap out the power supply or something.

Sponsorblock is unfortunately just as mandatory as uBlock these days. That said I won’t critique video creators for doing what they need to do to get paid, my critique is leveled squarely at the system itself for making their only recourse for payment “produce propaganda for capitalists”.

I last updated my uBlock yesterday and I haven’t seen a popup since, I might be lucky or maybe Google has backed off for now.

edit: nevermind just got another one

I don’t bother with a two piece rain suit, I just throw a bright yellow poncho on over my usual jacket and secure it around my waist. My pants are a lost cause though.

Perhaps the ethnic cleansing that started in 1948 had something to do with it.

That final boss fight song still gets me pumped up like nothing else. There’s a reason UT’s fanbase got so huge, and it’s not because the game is mid.

The creator of Missile Command allegedly had this very same revelation while creating it, and suffered nightmares about nuclear annihilation. I like how the game just gets harder and harder, meaning that no matter how good you are at it, once the bombs start dropping then eventually every city will be destroyed anyway.

The ending of the communism vision quest might be my favorite moment in any game ever.

Motorcycle. If I’m going to be forced to drive to and from work, I might as well enjoy it.

It’s also funny because he also denounced Hamas’ attack even though resisting a military occupation/blockade is allowed by international law.

I have to think Bernie is smart enough to understand this, but American politics requires countless of these sorts of genuflections from those who want to be taken “seriously” by it. Can’t talk about the Cubann blockade without being all “of course their highly popular democratically elected government is evil, but”, etc etc.

I don’t think a guide is really needed to install Linux

I had a guide and it was still a big learning curve. Linus had a guide and he still bricked his machine trying to install Steam. Imagine your parents or grandparents being told without context to mount an ISO to a USB and set up their BIOS - for 90% of people there is no way in hell they’re installing Linux without a guide unless they can double click an exe and have an install wizard do it for them.

The maintenance manual for your vehicle.

Do the cutscenes in any given MMORPG count? It’s a similar amount of text to a book, but nobody fukken reads that shit.

The Ultima series, especially U4, 5, and 6. To this day they are some of the best stories told in gaming history, but their appeal is limited by the fact that they came out in the DOS era - remake them with Baldur’s Gate 3 levels of production value and some QOL updates but otherwise don’t change a thing and they would contend for the best RPGs of all time.

Neither North Korea nor Qatar are fascist. The former is communist and the latter is an absolute monarchy.

Unless you’re saying FIFA is fascist which might be true idk.