Yeah. It’s a poorly-compressed 6.5 MB GIF. I’m running it through my instance’s proxy to not overwhelm catbox where it’s hosted. Not part of the joke lol.

Ah, lol. Weirdly, I warmed the proxy and it worked for me (so should have worked for everyone after). Should be fixed.

I don’t even know how to boycott them without doing some minor/major plumbing work to install a bidet. They own like every brand of toilet paper and paper towel you can buy.

In DIS, it’s stated that Starfleet

discovered a chimeric strain on the subatomic level in the Terran stem cell, implying that this could explain the Terran inclination towards malevolence.

Georgiou described the Terrans as “untroubled by pesky motivations”, other than revenge. Kovich observed that they created the Terran Empire for no particular reason beyond simply feeling like it.

So it’s possible (and on-screen appearances don’t really seem to dispute this) that Terrans are just mean and, subsequently, emotionally immature leading to the Hunger Games-esque line of succession you’re describing.

I feel like this is some kind of monkey’s paw wish fulfillment. Like, what’s the catch / angle?

It’s been a while, but the troll in question was spamming Jordan’s avatar image all over the place with a lot of unflattering (and false) accusations (I’ll just leave it at that).

They did the same to Jordan Lund in politics as they did to squid in Word news. So yeah, most likely.

I don’t disagree, but it’s not quite as easy as that especially for admins of a large instance. It’s just a lot of voices, some legitimate, some part of a hydra campaign, and others legitimate but only spouting the hydra narrative because they heard it so much and bought into it (forgive the term, but “useful idiots”).

For as many as I banned myself (I run a small instance), I probably let 10 slide because I couldn’t prove they were one of the hydra heads.

My instance is small enough to fly under the radar, but for larger instances, the hydra heads will absolutely flood the YePowerTrippingBastards-esque communities and screech they’re being censored, [Big instance] is censoring [blank], [Big instance] wants genocide, etc in an attempt to spread their message via a corrupted version of the Streisand Effect.

TL;DR is it’s an easy game for the bad actors to play and a very unlevel playing field for everyone else. I wish there were an easy answer, but there really isn’t. The only way I’ve found to combat it on my own instance is to just disallow “agenda posting” (which I realize is a very blunt instrument, but it’s the best I can do given the platform limitations).

A lot of the people evaporated between then and now. A lot of what they had to say was just endlessly repeating technically-true context free statements like “Biden deported more people than Trump” instead of explicitly stating the argument that Biden was just as bad. And what’s the point?

Yep. I banned soooo many “concern troll” / agenda posting accounts like that. Wish more instances would have done that (not that I think Lemmy had that much of an impact on the election, but just a general kind of thing).

It’s incredibly easy to spot these accounts by just clicking their username and looking at their one-track histories. Even the most ardent online activist (which would be a potential false positive here) takes the occasional break and engages in other interests or cracks a joke or two.

And many of those accounts were boosted by vote manipulation accounts. Right now, community mods can technically see votes in their communities, but Lemmy-UI doesn’t have that exposed to them. I think only Tesseract has that capability at the moment. But that’s definitely something mods need to be aware of.

Hopefully we’ve learned something from this past election re: sockpuppet agenda accounts.

My friend group used to be very big on “pass the aux cord” when we’re hanging out. It was incredibly easy to switch out our phones (or iPods and portable CD players before that) to let all of us contribute music for the gathering.

Now? Ok, I disconnected from the BT speaker. Do you see it yet? Lemme try turning the BT speaker off and on again. [BING BONG!; “Connected”] Ugh, it reconnected to my phone. Let me just turn BT off on my phone and you try again.

It’s just such a PITA with BT, and having to keep USB-C and Lightning adapters on hand is even more annoying than that. If only there were a reliable and dedicated connection for audio devices…oh well.

You may!

🤘🏻 I see your Kate Bush and raise you a Billy Idol.

I’ve got a decent handful of songs from the 60s in my playlist rotation, but it’s not my “era” for sure. The important thing, I guess, is that the community is there and can expose the young’uns to some great classics.

Between this, the Spanish language White House site, and the CBP app, there were obviously people just waiting to hit the “off” switch.

I like the vibe here and appreciate the curation.

Definitely agree that only concrete “will happen” or “is happening” articles should be posted. News outlets should take note of that.

So many criminals returning to the scene of the crime. I wish I could laugh.

Wool socks if it’s winter and/or you live in a cold climate.

One thing I left out of my response, and am unsure of, is if duplicate memories would be “louder” when they’re brought back.

e.g. if there are 2 Dax symbionts that contribute the memories twice (up until the point they were duplicated), would those memories de-duplicate upon return or would they be more vivid because they were contributed twice?

I think the TSC would take a pragmatic approach to it.

They already hide the fact that nearly 50% of the population is suitable to act as a host while only ~500 symbionts are available each year (e.g. a severe shortage of symbionts to initiates) . I think they would welcome the additional symbiont(s). Even if it’s a duplicate, it would still be able to bring unique experiences back once it starts rotating through new hosts.

Lol, yeah. Though the exhaust heat from the refrigerator does warm the house (good in winter, not good in the summer).

Definitely have had the thought about a thermostat controlled vent that would utilize outdoor air when the temperature permits. Might be one of those ideas that’s nice but impractical.