We used to play Halo CE and Minecraft at school with copies saved on thumb drives. Before that I installed Zoo Tycoon on one of the computers in my elementary school library.

I got a brief but good look at a wild Jaguarundi in south Texas nearly twenty years ago. I thought it was a bobcat at first, but it turned so I could see its tail and profile, and there was no mistaking it.

I remember the internet before Google, and how game changing it was to have all of the internet indexed in one place (even if that wasn’t actually quite true back then). If you had asked me 15, 10, even 5 years ago if I would be cheering its downfall and yearning for a return to a simpler, far less centralized internet, I would have called you crazy. And yet here we are.

They are building an American Freikorps.

All of this is accurate, but it is still hilarious seeing NPR of all organizations act aghast at the idea of a supposedly “independent” media organization serving as the mouthpiece for Empire.

It might have something to do with both countries being founded and governed by Fascists. It bears remembering that the KMT colonized the island of Taiwan in much the same way that Israel colonized Palestine; with a swift and brutal round of ethnic cleansing to secure their local hegemony, followed by decades of military support from Fascists in the West.

I don’t think China should invade Taiwan but it drives me up the wall that so many people think that they are some plucky little democracy standing up to the big, bad, commies, when the reality is that they are just another hyper-capitalist settler-colonial project in the same vein as the US, Israel, Canada, etc.

https://www.opentech.fund/news/february-2018-monthly-report/

It’s not a secret. It’s on their website. Note: the Open Technology Fund is the CIA. Just like Radio Free Asia (or Radio Free X, they’re all CIA-run appendages of the US state department) which the fund grew out of. The US government very often funds technologies and startups that have the potential surveillance applications (among other things) and Signal was one of them. The people calling this a conspiracy theory have no idea what they are talking about, but that’s not uncommon when it comes to Americans and swallowing their own propaganda whole.

Signal was developed with financial backing by the CIA, so do with that information what you will. I use Teleguard which is very similar to Telegram but run out of Switzerland, and with 2-way encryption automatically enabled, unlike signal or telegram.

Having lived in Austin and seen movies at the original handful of Drafthouse theaters for decades now, every time the brand has expanded, quality has dropped. I’m not expecting this change to be any different.

There’s a whole lot of different takes here already, so I’m just going to plug this very excellent book: Practical Anarchism: A Guide for Daily Life and bounce.

Please do not solicit medical advice from the internet. If you are concerned, go to a minute-clinic or other doc-in-a-box. It’s much cheaper than the ER, and they’ll tell you if there’s anything to worry about.

I used to watch Mary-Lou’s Flip-Flop Shop every Saturday morning as a kid. Apparently it was locally produced in Houston, where I lived, so I wonder if it was even known about elsewhere? Basically she had a Saturday morning kids’ show that ran for one season, and it aired at like 6:30am. For some reason I was obsessed with it (despite being slightly older than the target demographic by the time it was airing) and I would wake up ungodly early on Saturdays to watch Mary Lou do somersaults and tell jokes.

If you are in a situation where needing to barricade your door to prevent your parent’s entry is a regular occurrence, it is probably time to involve child protective services. You don’t need to give details of your situation to strangers on the internet, but I would highly encourage you to go to a trusted friend or family member’s home and contact the authorities.

It has certainly been hard to find a good place to discuss current events with a leftist crowd. I’ve migrated to Spacebattles, SufficientVelocity, and RPG.net and already been banned permanently from SB by an admin with a personal grievance, and the other two sites are simply too small and slow to have much worthwhile discussion. Now I’m checking out Lemmy, but we’ll see how that goes.