The friend whose spare room I’m staying in right now. Honestly, my mental health gets so rocky that it sometimes feels inevitable that I’ll end up dying by my own hand, but assuming that doesn’t happen, then I can confidently say this friend has saved my life.

They have been there supporting me during rocky mental health stuff in the past (and I likewise there for them during similar), but the most powerful thing is just having space to exist and try to get my shit together after my life somewhat blew up.

Capitalism sucks, and the oppressiveness of the system is a not insignificant part of my frequent dips into despair, but my resolve is bolstered by knowing that supporting people in need is our best way to get through life while retaining our souls. Today, I am far more the recipient of support than the provider, but perhaps in enduring, I’ll be able to be there for people who are like how I am right now

I hope it’s an entertaining trash fire for you, at the very least

People who like long video essays may appreciate this awesome video by Dr Fatima (2h51m long). It’s long, but it’s excellent

I hope you have a nice weekend that gives you opportunity to think about something other than this awful stuff. You deserve good things.

I liked that although Knights of Guinevere was clearly ragging on Disney, it felt like it wasn’t just a cathartic trauma dump from Dana Terrace and crew — it was actually being used to say something meaningful. It’s a good sign when the pilot episode of a show has such a strong sense of themes.

I’d heard a lot of hype when the pilot was released, but didn’t get around to watching it until I randomly thought “I wonder what Dana Terrace is up to nowadays? Hopefully she’s working somewhere better than Disney, because surely there must be someone with power out there who recognised how Disney was squandering her potential”. When I saw that it was her and some of the Owl House team who made Knights of Guinevere, that caused me to immediately go watch it. The only disappointment was that we don’t know when new episodes will be available, but hopefully things will be regular once we do start getting episodes.

Exactly this. I don’t own any Steam hardware, nor do I expect to any time soon. However, I don’t know if I’d be running Linux as my main daily driver if not for how straightforward it is to game on Linux nowadays, thanks largely to Valve’s efforts in this area.

I did dual boot with Windows for a while, but I found that the inertia of rebooting made me more likely to just use Windows. When I discovered that basically all of my games were runnable through Proton, I got rid of Windows entirely.

I feel a lot of gratitude for the Steam Deck existing, because it makes things way easier. It’s not down to Valve’s efforts alone, but providing the solid starting point has lead to the coagulation of a lot of community efforts and resources. For instance, there have been a couple of times where I’ve had issues running games, but found the solution in adjusting the launch options, according to what helpful people on protondb suggest. I also remember struggling for a while to figure out how to mod Baldur’s Gate 3, until I found a super useful guide that was written by and for Steam Deck users. The informational infrastructure around gaming on Linux is so much better than it used to be.

I didn’t know about this, and I thank you for sharing it.

I go to a weekly philosophy discussion group, and in a few weeks, a friend is running a session on the ethics of animal research. She is doing a PhD and recently did the animal handling training course because her research will involve mice, and she really enjoyed the seminar that covered the legal and ethical aspects of animal research — so much so that it inspired her to volunteer to run a session for the philosophy group.

This is depressing to learn about, but might be an interesting case study for that discussion

Something that I’m disproportionately proud of is that my contributions to open source software are a few minor documentation improvements. One of those times, the docs were wrong and it took me ages to figure out how to do the thing I was trying to do. After I solved it, I was annoyed at the documentation being wrong, and fixed it before submitting a pull request.

I’ve not yet made any code contributions to open source, but there have been a few people on Lemmy who helped me to realise I shouldn’t diminish my contribution because good documentation is essential, but often neglected.

Glad to see People Make Games cover this. They have a lot of reach

“more weed per weed”

We can write that as “weed/weed”, which obviously reduces down to 1, because dividing something by itself = 1

1 = True

So therefore you are right. Congratulations.

“He blew the doors off of something we already knew was happening.”

Usually when an investigation blows the doors off of something, it’s because although many people were aware of what was happening inside, not enough did. Even if the primary gain is bringing awareness to an issue, investigative journalism like this is still important. After all, the doors were closed for a reason

Did you design the interface? I like it a lot; it’s really elegant

Cats are anarchist as hell

I’m going to go to a philosophy discussion group that I go to on Tuesdays. It initially didn’t seem much like an achievement, given that it’s one of the few things I regularly go to, but that’s why it’s an achievement; I’ve been struggling with lack of structure in my life over the last year or so, and though I have now firmly established this as a thing I do each Tuesday, it’s still an achievement. The fact that it was the only thing I could think of when I contemplated the week ahead speaks to that

I like that you describe the fondue slices as “heretic”. That immediately diffused any irrational outrage I may have felt at your choice of cheese, and is also quite a funny way to describe it

What does OC mean in this context?

Speaking as someone who’s not American, I lost hope for her campaign when she made a show of getting endorsements from some pretty reprehensible Republicans (including but not limited to Dick Cheney).

I’m not sure how well this works for a bingo square, but something that I thought of was about how nigh every paywalled article has an archive link either in the post body itself, or in the comments.

I find it heartwarming that such considerate behaviour seems to be the norm here. It inspires me to be one of those helpful people adding an unpaywalled link in the comments in the rare case of finding an interesting post where that hasn’t been done yet. It makes me feel like I’m part of a community.

Hallo, Queen (yes, I mean you)

My brain is now imagining a world where a woman is so intrigued by her vampy saviour of the night that she ends up going out late at night and feigns vulnerability to draw the attraction of another predatory man, who ends up being the prey for the actual predator — the vampire lady.

They fall in love and repeat this schtick as a regular hunting strategy. This way, there’s less chance of women walking home being freaked out, and both women in the hunter team feel empowered by their bizarre date nights.