Can’t whistle loudly. I can barely do it quietly. I certainly can’t do that badass thing where you put fingers from both hands into your mouth and blow.

Me when my keys tumbled out of my breast pocket into a fire I was poking and I instinctively snatched them back out.

I feel bad that his children had to witness that, and even if they hadn’t been there (which they were) they’d undoubtedly have the video clip shoved in their faces eventually. That’s a hell of a way to lose a parent.

The fact that he died while in the middle of talking about trans mass shooters being a huge problem certainly makes it feel like cosmic karma at work. I struggle to give a shit about the man himself being shot dead. But I do worry about political violence… it’s a very rare occasion when murdering someone sitting in a chair talking is a good idea. Not a single person in his right-wing sphere of repugnance is going to do any self-reflection and change their ways, they’ll just become even more rabidly anti-everything left of Hitler. Shit like this doesn’t go unanswered too often. Violence is a contagion with no cure except time, and the clock gets set back another decade every time someone retaliates. I’m sure we could chain all of these assassinations together into a causal sequence. But even if they’re all independent events, the narrative-makers will be hard at work making it sound like a grand battle of the ages, so the result is the same either way.

Source: History, memory…

P.S. Any bets that the shooter was a MAGA nut? Seems to be the trend 👀

I was an early adopter of No Man’s Sky (long before the shift in public perception), and I fucking loved it back then, and love it now as well. But admitting that in public a few years back was tantamount to saying that stapling your child to a rabid badger was a great alternative to hiring a babysitter.

I instantly and impulsively pre-ordered a special superduper collector’s edition of Lake Mungo for ~£80. I probably shouldn’t have done that. I love the film and will no doubt love the goodies and bonus features, but 80 fucking quid…

https://shop.umbrellaent.com.au/products/lake-mungo-2008-4k-blu-ray-collectors-edition

Arbitrary choice, but Wherever I May Roam by Metallica never gets old for me.

Did you forget to microwave it first?

The locations of past atrocities (N. Ireland).

Not even joking. It’s a huge part of our tourism industry. It’s like those Jack the Ripper tours in Whitechapel. Living here, you barely even think about them, but visitors act like they’re meeting Taylor Swift when they spot a bullet hole, bless 'em.

Any non-cunts in the EV manufacturing space? Or is that a prerequisite?

The nihilist school shooters of the world are way more litigious than I thought possible.

I am so terminally carless and unautomobile pilled that I have literally no clue what this is about.

I have it on good authority that love is

I agree with this sentiment. It’s insane to me that people need to cough up thousands of dollars to see their loved one off. It’s so wrong, although I do accept that funeral providers can’t simply give away their services for free. I would support a taxation that had a provision for funerary needs for all citizens. Universal death care. I mean, we’re all gonna die. It’s not like you can say “oh boo hoo I’m paying all this tax just for some other cunt to die on my dime??” because your day will come soon enough and you don’t want your family having to blow their savings on putting you in a hole.

I wanna be harvested for organs like a Chinese dissident, and whatever is left can be mulched and used to grow trees or something.

But if we’re talking “cheapest”, in the UK and Ireland there’s a pauper’s grave thing where the state will put you in a very basic grave and with a very basic marker. Not sure if you need to be poor to qualify, or if they’ll just do it when asked.

Honestly, I don’t. I came up in the '80s, wasn’t diagnosed with autism until 2022. My life would have been so different if I had known about it when I was a child, and if autism was as well-understood as it is today so that I had the support I needed. Kids today who have issue like that are identified much earlier and helped more. The steady march of knowledge and science is almost always a good thing. So, the present and the future are always the place to be for most people most of the time. Of course a Gazan isn’t feeling the giddy excitement of scientific discovery at this moment, but for the human species as a whole, things have never been better. There is always someone suffering immense, unimaginable hardship. The human project is overwhelmingly not that.

Every generation has existential concerns, too. Climate change and the rise of fascism is on the cards right now. When I was a kid and adolescent in the '80s and '90s, I was in the middle of the N. Irish ‘Troubles’. Before that, people had the Cold War to worry about. Before that, WWII and WWI. But things are always better than they were ‘yesterday’ if you take stock of everyone as a whole and not just those suffering the worst in any given moment.

If you took the average kid born today in an average society, and transplanted them into the 1970s with the same socioeconomic starting point, it would be tantamount to gross child abuse given the vast ocean of stuff they could have had, but now will never have (in their childhood, at least). And I’m not even talking about technology and the internet; just the treatment of children by the state and schools alone would be night-and-day different. Kids are individuals today, in the ‘70s you were your parents’ property and didn’t develop a sense-of-self worth respecting until you were old enough to get drunk.

I still wouldn’t bring a kid into existence, but for those that are here already, 2025 is the best time to be born. Like if I were my parents, I would not have had me while the country was tearing itself apart with bombings and shootings every day. But I’m glad I was born when I was and not when my parents were kids.

There’s a legendary family story from my childhood in the early '80s where my dad rented a direct-to-video Snow White sequel for me and my brothers (aged 1 - 10), but it turned out he had absentmindedly picked up a porno parody, shoved it in the VCR and immediately left the room to attend to other things. He didn’t realise until we were a good 10 minutes in and were laughing hysterically at the willies and boobs.

Literally no one on this green earth asked for this shit. In fact, we’ve been pretty direct about how much we don’t want it.

It’s exhausting.

Would be funny if the Wikimedia Foundation developed an AI that is trained on all the major AI models, and uses that to detect AI slop.

A VPN is a must if you wanna go down this route

Soulseek (and I recommend the Nicotine+ client over the official one) is a fantastic source for all music in all formats, and particularly obscure off-label shit you won’t get anywhere else. You’ll even have some success finding audiobooks there, although this is very hit-and-miss. I wish audiobook pirates would use it more heavily. It’s P2P, like Napster used to be. You’ll have to share something or you’ll get auto-ignored by most users.

RuTracker is a great non-private/non-ratio-monitoring torrent site for music (does require a free account though). I’ve never had a single torrent from there that wasn’t seemingly seeded by a Godzilla’s dick. Obviously it’s in Russian, but there’s really no difficulty navigating around. The only thing you might struggle with is signing up for an account, but just have your favourite translation tool open in another tab 👍

If you don’t mind slow download speeds (from the likes of RapidGator), I enjoy Exystence. It’s a blog that shares link to the latest albums and offers both lossy and lossless versions. Nice RSS subscription to have.

If you do find yourself using RapidGator a lot, don’t waste money buying a sub directly from them, it’s insanely pricey. Instead, get a reseller like Real Debrid, which costs like 10% as much and also covers you for about two-dozen other file hosters. I highly recommend putting as much distance between your credit card and the company as possible, just for safety reasons. Using PaySafeCard is fine, as Real Debrid will never see your details in that case. I don’t have any specific reason to be weary of them, I just don’t trust random/small/hitherto unheard of companies as a rule.

RedCandleGames watching this situation like:

Wikipedia has an unusually high hit rate for me. I start reading about a band, a genre, or something music-related, then before I know it, the wiki rabbit hole of blue links has introduced me to 50 other bands. Some of my favourite bands were found this way. If you’re averse to using anything web-based at all, maybe you could get your hands on a music encyclopaedia from the library or something. If you’re into a specific genre, you can probably narrow down the scope with a book just about that genre.

I have never, not once in my entire life, been recommended an artist by an algorithm that I ended up liking. Not on Spotify, not on Last.fm, not on Bandcamp, it just doesn’t happen for me 🤷‍