I miss the good times. I don’t miss the incredible jealousy, having to slowly shed all my female friends. I don’t miss arguments because some girl heart reacted my fb post. I don’t miss the gaslighting. I don’t miss just having to give her her way because she would never compromise, or see something from someone else’s perspective.

I miss the year where I thought she was honest about being over her jealousy issues, when she wanted to be Poly. Where I could at least have healthy friendships again, while still being with her. Where I thought maybe I could fix things, turn our relationship around. But all of that was a mirage. She didn’t stop being jealous because she had changed. She stopped being jealous because she was done, and just leaving me slowly, and wanted to date another guy so she’d have another relationship to catch her when she left.

When was the last time there was a conservative president in the US who didn’t cause tremendous lasting damage to the country?

Given that small typed one, it sounds like they’ve had troubles where there wasn’t enough toilet paper so people waddled out to get a paper towel to use. But who exactly is going to stop mid poop to kindly ask a staff member for more toilet paper? If they don’t want people to flush paper towels, get a toilet paper dispenser with two rolls.

I’ve been using Kagi for 2 months and swear by it. It might feel silly paying for a search engine, but I’m now the customer instead of the product, and I can customize my searches the way I want.

They’ll steal the territory after they’ve starved out anyone who was able to resist it.

Right. If the UK tries to rejoin they’re going to get no favors from the rest of the EU, as an example to other member states that you can’t just play hokey pokey with a continental union. The UK will be miffed as a response. It’ll potentially take decades for a deal to work out for the UK to rejoin the EU, if that’s even its form at that point.

On the other side, Free and Open Source Software leveled the playing field for software development by quite a lot. Before FOSS you had proprietary databases, proprietary OSes, proprietary web servers, etc, at every level of the chain. Without FOSS Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office would rule the roost. Without FOSS smart phones might’ve taken years longer, and have far less choices. Without FOSS the web would be drastically different. Without FOSS development would be harder to break into, and anything you tried to produce would involve 15 different licensing fees.

I also played games off floppies, sure. And there were anti-piracy measures there too. I remember playing a pirated copy of Leisure Suit Larry as a kid, and you had to answer questions about pop culture kids wouldn’t know, followed by specific questions about wording in the manual. Before CDs, manuals were the anti-piracy measure.

Do people forget that games used to require you to have the CD-ROM in the drive before they would run? Even though most of the time the entire game was installed on your hard drive? It was an anti-piracy measure, but incredibly annoying. Even for games I owned, I would find patched no cd exes to avoid it.

Before I figured that out, if you lost or damaged your CD, you were just screwed. Buy the game again. My dad had a lot of character flaws, but at least when I was a kid he would take the time to call game companies and get a new CD for a few dollars if the disk stopped working.

Using Steam is incredibly more useful than what came before. Almost every game I owned in the era before Steam is just plain lost. There’s only one set of games I still have easy access to – Half Life, because you could register your CD key in Steam. I have a bin full of old game CDs, and I’m sure none of them work. But any game I’ve bought through Steam, in the last 20 years, I can click to download and play right now.

Add on to that that, no, lots of games did not actually work well out of the box, and needed updates to work. And you had to hunt down those updates. And a lot of those update sites do not exist anymore. Any game I install from Steam is the latest version of the game, and will auto-update if there’s a new one.

The global south is largely a terrible place because of the wealthy north. Especially the US. First they had to throw off their colonizers. Then they had to suffer the punishments of their former colonizers. Then the US took it upon themselves to attempt to overthrow every socialist leading government in the western hemisphere, elected or not, and replace them with a dictator. Then in the Western Hemisphere the US War on Drugs have made Mexico, Central, and South America a war zone run by cartels.

So yeah, much of the world is much worse to live in than the US. Mostly because of the US. Western Europe is still a far better place to live.

There just isn’t. It was great in the same way the British Empire, the French Empire, the Spanish Empire, the American Empire, were “great”. Big? Yes. Powerful? Yes. Forces of mass oppression and murder? Also yes. Praising Imperialists is going to win no favors.

The Bolshevik revolution was a blood bath of royals, but that was because Russia was the only major power to make it out of the revolutions of 1848 without losing their absolute monarchy. Russia still had friggin peasants prior to the Bolsheviks.

If the USSR hadn’t gone the route of “permanent revolution” (ie permanent authoritarian government), there could have been a past to look bad fondly on. But instead the boot changed color, and they decided to make their neighbors learn of their peaceful ways, by force.

Someone played too much True Crime: Streets of LA

If there’s a crime in progress in the area, let’s say a little old lady getting mugged, you can either:

1. Get out of your car, kung fu the assailant into submission, and handcuff them (you get good karma)
2. Drive over everyone involved (you get bad karma)

Either way, you get points for it and the message “Crime successfully resolved”

The only way this makes any sense is if there’s an active coup against Putin, Lukashenko is in on it, and convinced him to pause while the Kremlin takes out Putin, to avoid him having to fight other Russians.