Department of Gastric Enclosures?

Is that your own imagery, from drone footage for example, or are you basically copying Google Earth?

Are the night trains in Ukraine inspired by that Elf on a shelf thing?

Of course not, it’s just Spez sucking up to the billionaires in the hope that one of them will be dumb enough to toss him a few million for his shitpile.

So tempting to name a country that rhymes with Erika. But I won’t.

Posteo was the winner when I last looked over the alternatives, although I haven’t switched yet. Tuta, mailbox.org and Runbox were runners up.

Various reasons (mostly price, provider getting blocked too much, and being in the USA) led to a hard “no” for CounterMail, Soverin, Mailfence, StartMail, Fastmail, Proton, RiseUp, Hushmail, Skiff and Mail.com.

It’s likely you don’t need a VPN. You’re putting a lot of trust in that company; make sure it’s well founded. I just use my ISP for normal stuff, then when I want to surf under the radar for one reason or another I open up Tor.

I don’t remember how many hours I sank into that game on my Amiga. Loved it.

how does housing come into being?

Well one “simple” way is for all the builders to be rolled up into the civil service: the government pays them to do their job, i.e. build houses, which the government then owns and allows people to live in. This must necessarily be rent-free, otherwise the government becomes one massive landlord therefore not solving the problem, and also takes the bottom out of the mortgage market because why would anyone buy when they can just move into government-provided housing without a 25-year millstone tied round their necks. It also creates a ton of job security because it means you can just walk away from a shitty employer without fear of becoming homeless.

It also drops anyone with a mortgage into the worst possible negative equity problem, which will be a massive problem for a massive number of people, therefore has zero chance of ever being voted in. So for this to work there has to be a solution to the mortgage problem, e.g. the government buys all that housing stock for the current outstanding mortgage amount, but that’s a massive investment into something that now necessarily has zero value, which would likely crash the economy. IANAE so it’d be interesting to get a real economist’s view on how this might all work in practice.

I was surprised to find out that ******* gets censored everywhere.

You’ll love the way we do tyres then. Two of the dimensions are metric and the third is imperial.

What flag is that?

It looks similar to an inverted Union flag but one of the red stripes is in the wrong place.

Twit is a light hearted jibe, much like calling someone a muppet or a dingbat. It’s not a word you would use if you really wanted to insult them.

OK so how do I easily buy a house 30 years ago?

Yes of course. Nobody wants someone walking the streets who thinks it’s their right to dish out the death penalty without due process. Who’s he going to pick next?

That said, obviously with limited resources the police have to pick what cases take priority over others. For example Sheffield police don’t do anything about motorbike theft (even if there’s a tracker installed) because they’re too busy chasing down all those people who hurt others’ fee-fees by misgendering them.

Another friend once thought twat was a synonym of twit. First time she called someone a twat in my presence I was gobsmacked but thought I must have misheard; there was definitely nothing twattish going on.

The next time it happened I made a note to raise it privately with her later. “You do know what twat means don’t you?” “Yeah, it’s another word for twit.” “Er, no.”

I mentioned once giving a person of the female persuasion a wide berth (meaning to avoid that person. I can’t remember why, maybe she was particularly annoying or something).

My friends face made me realise he didn’t know that particular word and couldn’t work out what a wide birth was.

Bthoth, due to the cycylic nature of the caclendadar.

Honestly I don’t care what you want to eat. It’s your body, you can shove whatever you like into it.

Where vegans become a problem is where they’re being evangelical about their beliefs and trying to force their audience to feel the same shock and horror as they feel when contemplating the meat industry. If all I hear from you is restricted to when I offer you food and ask if you have any dietary requirements, and is of the form “I’m vegan”, that’s absolutely fine. If we’re friends I’ll adjust the menu for you, although you might have to accept it’s only your plate that gets veganified.

You going “eww” and talking about “rotting corpses” or whatever is where it becomes a problem. If I’ve asked, obviously I’ve brought your response upon myself but you should still tone it down for the non-vegans. “I’ve looked into the meat industry and I didn’t like what I saw” would be a good first response; make sure not to release any gory details unless people are really pressing you for that level of detail.

That said, none of this is based on actual experience of offensively evangelical vegans. I’ve heard they exist but haven’t met one yet. I’ve known some people for quite a while before finding out they’re vegan, veggie or whatever.

I’ve seen a wasp unscrew a screw I thought was in pretty tight.

Not a business plan because business=money, but how about creators host their own videos and share them through BitTorrent. No need to deliver real time video, users just download what they want to watch then watch them as they become available. Funding occurs through Kofi or Patreon etc. They’ll need to publish the magnet links somewhere but that’s a whole load cheaper than publishing RT video.