If chess made you smarter, every Paradox grand strategy game player would be a genius. Victoria 3 is much more intricate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryukyu_flying_fox

They’re a fruit bat in the Southeast Asian tropics. Absolutely massive bats. You walk under a palm tree and there are a dozen large puppies looking down at you. The fruit farmers of the region are ecocidal toward them, despite deforestation being the reason why they’re congregating in the only reliable food source left. They’re a great generalist pollinator with a similar ecological niche as squirrels, shitting out edible plant seeds over an almost 2km range.

https://teachmecommunism.podbean.com/

https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/

I really like these two podcasts for breaking down concepts, history, and significant figures. The second one has two spinoffs, Red Menace for individual works of theory and Guerilla History for historical events, which are both also great.

Genocide Joe 2024- “Bring the Boomerang Back”

https://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/articles/snowflake-method/

I like the Snowflake Method. You start with the core idea and branch out in a fractal-ish pattern to develop different elements and plot points. Mindmapping software helps keep it organised: https://xmind.app/

Pretty much. What got me is that he was an aviation officer with a pretty high rank. They have extremely strict entry requirements, regular psychological screenings, constant checks by flight surgeons. He was around 20 years beyond when a lot of psychiatric illnesses start presenting and as far as I know we never established an etiology for it. The only trigger I could ever think of was the needle piercing him but until that moment he showed absolutely no anxiety about the blood draw and I thoroughly explained why we were drawing two separate chest panels over the next few hours. One moment he fully understood what was happening and was discussing it, the next it was chaos. After really fine-tuning my sense of shit about to kick off from that line of work, I had zero indication anything was off about the situation.

A patient came into the ER for chest pain. He was uncomfortable and a bit anxious but otherwise normal. The guy was a military officer and very athletic. I go in to draw his blood and get some background information, we’re chatting as I get my supplies ready, and as I’m putting the needle in his arm he says “you’re from the government.” in a very cold voice. I look up and his face has completely changed. He’s furious and looks like a cornered animal. Before I can ask “what?”, he screams it again and rips the needle out of his arm. He kicked me backward and then stood up while screaming “you’re from the government” repeatedly. I get to my feet and he charges, easily twice my size and probably trained to kill. I run to the far end of the ward, he keeps running after me, and the only thing that saved me was having my paramedic boots on. I managed to get one good kick with the steel toe into his shin and brought him down after which I got him into a restraint position and the doc sedated him. I had never seen psychosis suddenly come on like that from a completely neurotypical presentation. A switch flipped mid-conversation and he was determined to kill me without any ability to perceive pain or limit the strength of his muscles. I broke his leg and he was unaffected, still trying to get up and attack me again.

Interlingua: Da nos hodie nostre pan quotidian,

Esperanto: Nian panon ĉiutagan donu al ni hodiaŭ

English: Give us this day our daily bread;

We have our choice between Spanish Latin, Romanian Latin, or super complicated Latin that contradicts itself and absorbed things from everywhere at random.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F-1oF6sXEAAylQy?format=jpg&name=large

Orca JDPON stay winning.

I really like esperanto as a project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

It had a lot of support with early 20th century anarchists who saw it as a way to make people less nationalistic and prone to their domestic propaganda.

Looking forward to a repeat of the 420th Epic Reddit Brigade immediately having their barracks bombed.

Well the noble defenders are currently in need of more soldiers. Go enlist now if this is the war you think it is. Do you need help finding out how to?

Two birds, one poisoned stone.

/r/chapotraphouse was the best socialist subreddit and it got banned over saying “death to slave masters”. The intense censorship campaign, at one point consisting of being site banned if you upvoted a comment in the subreddit, was so disgusting that I wanted to take the Reddit out of reddit. Chapo.chat-turned-hexbear was its direct continuation.

He had to be fleecing the private sponsor of the expedition. Even when he was making the sci-fi youtube circuit during the planning stages of it, particularly with Event Horizon, it seemed so absurd from the start. To pinpoint a location like that and find what you’re looking for immediately at the bottom of the sea doesn’t otherwise happen and he was absolutely confident in the anticipated result of a hypothesis with no basis. There was one conclusion right from the outset and that’s so wildly divorced from how science works.

Hopefully it ruins his career.

Joe Biden: The Lesser of Two Evils

CCP’s CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson was a lot more down-to-Earth when Jeremy spoke to him last October. In particular, he offered the following, spirited defence of the game’s blockchain functionality, which can sort of be boiled down to “trust me, bro”, but is at least upfront about the many bad uses to which blockchain and cryptography technologies have been put.

“People do stupid things with everything. Like in the 1700s in Holland, people made [speculative] bubbles with tulips. Are tulips bad? The tulips are not to blame. People are to blame. People do stupid shit with new things all the time. It’s just what we do. Look at any industry; there are people doing bad things, people doing nefarious things, people doing stupid things, and people doing very cool and wholesome things. I just don’t care how bad people have used [blockchain] in the past. If people hate me for something they’re assuming I’m going to do that I’m not doing. Not my problem; it’s their problem.”

I love when crypto dipshits can describe how irrational it is but are so blinded by greed that they’re oblivious to that. Yes, the blockchain is analogous to the tulip mania. What happened to the people who built their business off tulip speculation? At least the farmers had a pretty flower to sell for a few pennies after the bubble burst and all the fetish value was lost. Anything crypto is completely alienating to normal people because it’s a clear scam being artificially hyped by the most obnoxious weirdos on the internet. I won’t want to play a blockchain game because it’s a game despite the blockchain features, and I won’t want to engage with the blockchain features because you’re selling me overpriced tulips through an overly-convoluted system. If all crypto and NFT shit is stripped out and it’s selling the blockchain to non-crypto people as a public ledger, that has no use to me in a survival game and I’d just play EVE if I wanted to look at numbers.

I’m curious how rigidly they define bread. An ice cream sandwich with two cookies would be an option, but it isn’t bread. Is a pastry bread or the kind of excessively gourmet food they restrict? Could it just be jam on raisin bread?

Swiss offered appetizer sandwiches, an entree sandwich, and two dessert sandwiches.

I try to cross-reference things and then look at the critical angles. Public media generally has higher editorial standards for me. I don’t trust right-wing sources or the New York Times because they lack editorial standards. State media I don’t trust for domestic issues, but while I don’t go to Al Jazeera for news about Qatar I trust their coverage of Palestine and France. I try to avoid sources that have an involved stake in the conflict, so something like Ukraine means no RT/Pravda but I’ll watch the primary footage coming off Telegram and then compare it to multiple countries’ coverage of it. I try to stay dialectical with all of it, so I’m cognizant of the history and material/social angles which create the issue and the biases of those covering it. I’ll read a socialist article but I don’t want to uncritically agree with news so that’s more supplemental unless the media hasn’t yet/won’t cover it.

Otherwise I listen to a lot of podcasts that are leftist or left-liberal, keep a critical eye on social media coverage, and follow scientific journals/niche science websites that summarise those journal articles without editorialising.