Yeah, that was clearly just the group having fun, sounds like it might have been some kind of in-joke. Stuff like keygen music and adding extra fun stuff to your cracks has always been part of the culture. For the most part, while I’m not saying there is zero risk, but as long as it’s from verified groups with good reputation, your pirated software will be safe to use - also part of the culture.

Mayo + Ketchup combined, the classic “Rot-Weis”-combo in Germany.

That or, preferrably, mayo + a good chilli sauce

Yeah, I am too attached to my account because it’s several years old and was made when there were next to no instances running. But I can only shake my head at the amount of Marxist-Leninist nonsense that is at times pushed there, that unironically elevates what was a development of “Marxism” out of the material conditions of the Eastern Bloc as an imperialist sphere bent on market expansion and accumulation of national capital, into a religion-like orthodoxy.

No, ideology that is nominally Marxist, and having an educated caste of decision-makers highly trained in your interpretation of it at the top won’t prevent capitalist dynamics and bring about communism, only the material base and changing it will, and your ideology will follow what your material base demands. And that had been expansion of national capital for the Eastern sphere since the revolution failed to link up with any industrialised nations in the 1920s. The elevation of Marxism into a basically teleological ideology, claiming that with subservience to the interests of national capital, there will be communism at the end (a promise broken over and over again), is completely understandable by looking at the Soviet and Chinese spheres of influence from a Marxist perspective.

And even the structures put into place by Lenin were explicitly designed as for his own time and the conditions within the Russian Empire, not as an infallible orthodoxy, and things like Democratic Centralism explicitly contained open and free discussion before unity of action, which was just completely pushed away. Urgh, it’s sad to me, because I think a new, invigorated and organised communist movement is needed more than ever, but by redirecting it to the national interest of states like China (and even Russia, which isn’t even nominally communist, and just opposes western imperialism to impose its own imperialism - like choosing Germany over France in WWI, the exact shit Lenin fought against) instead of the international proletariat, just weakens it overall.

Basically this, but usually the best ideas come to me during smoke breaks instead. (Still trying to kick that addiction, don’t smoke, kids, I’ve managed to get rid of alcohol and other drugs I experimented with in the past, nicotine just won’t fucking stop with the fucking urges, even when you manage to “quit” for months at a time.)

Current projections for the parliament:

Mélenchon seems to be aiming to be the head of a left minority government, the question would be, what can be done with a parliament split into thirds, but it is a good sign for the moment

Let’s do an EU4 Dithmarschen world conquest run from here on out.

Yes, you raise a very important point that I completely glanced over with sleep-deprived tunnel vision brain. Young males are a group, where ideological factors are a lot more prevalent. A constant barrage of presenting the desirable thing to be succesful - everything from sexual gratification to security in life depends on it - is given to, well, actually everyone, but even today still predominately young males. In addition, the ideological explanation presents no proper “out” that has analytical value: If you don’t succeed, you are just some sort of beta cuck or whatever. How about you buy this course by this YouTube influencer, on how to get money and pussy by changing your own inadequacy, which of course in reality throws the vast majority of their fans into dependence and diminishes any resources they had.

This demand to be succesful, dominant, happy and stoic, weighing on the superego as basically an old dream of success that is becoming more and more unattainable but is still presented everywhere, is also in conflict with material reality. Being the breadwinner of a household where you have a wife that delivers reproductive labour and sexual gratification to you, while you earn the money and keep her dependent? Even with chauvinists that are deep into that ideological prison, households being able to earn enough money without both people working (often even more than two jobs) is not what we are seeing in the present and the future. So, this discrepancy has to be explained in a way, that is compatible with their ideology.

As a side note: parts of the liberal, more well-off “left” (a very relative term here) will basically just give them the answer “well, you are a stupid, low-IQ chud loser, so its your own fault” - basically reinforcing the very “sink or swim, be succesful, if you can’t be, it means something about you is wrong” ideology that creates this whole mess to begin with.

But of course, the answer many will then land on is a variant of my previous post: It worked in the past, right? An outside malevolent force must have corrupted this. It’s the feminists. It’s the Jews. It’s the insert enemy here. That is the core of it again - discrepancy between material reality and ideological demands and dreams within society. Concerning young men, the extreme right also has good illusionary ways to provide them with a sense of being powerful when they are in reality not, through violence that doesn’t threaten the upper classes, and relative privilege within their ideological stratified view of reality.

Ironically, that material reality of proletarisation can even fuel “tradwife” romanticism for some women - basically, the dream of being a loved and loving housewife, being submissive to and dependent on their husband and his income, anything, just to escape the dread of having to work under current conditions without any of the security of the past. (Note that actual submissive impulses that people potentially have as a fetish are a whole other thing in that discussion, but it is relevant, that for some submissive people at least, that can of course also add to the allure of that fantasy, just as the idea of being a breadwinner that has a dependent person giving them sexual gratification and admiration is alluring to people with dominant fetishisations)

So, I am heading to bed for the night, because I have been awake all night and day and the day before to catch the debate - but the short answer is: The decline of the middle class and the petite burgeoisie - which I in this case view not in the traditional definition, but also broader, as all the people owning a little bit of capital i.e. savings for old age in some fond or maybe a house of their own. Also the disappearance of job security and stable work relations.

With it, the conservative “lets keep things as they were” mindset of people who had a decent enough life, i.e. mostly boomers that lived through the economic growth phase of the post-war era, but also younger people dreaming of that time or having profited from it through their parents, comes into crisis. But as this mindset argues from its own experience, it dreams of the past (“Things worked back then, right?”), while missing, that the very same “working” system was what had within it, already the inherent nature that eventually led to it decaying around us. So they need to explain the decline as something caused by an outsider, a malevolent force.

At the same time, this decline of the middle class leads them to try and grasp to divisions that might “save” them from proletarisation - becoming properly dependend on paycheck to paycheck and owning nothing but their own labour power to sell on the market. So, racism for example - if you are white, you might just be spared from the above fate. And you can kick down, targeting all those brown people below instead of punching up - the latter is a lot more risky after all. And the people up above can’t be at fault, after all, you (or the people you heard about from the past) had a great life when those were around, right? It just have to be the “right” people, like you and the people of your nationality/race/religion/other ingroup - often depressingly arbitrary.

This is still a very reductive summary, a lot is missing, globalisation, how it relates to the net rate of profit, how consolidation happens, details about the ideology of our current times. But broken down to it’s basics it can be summarised as such. The middle class is disappearing as a consequence of capitalist development, which leads to them becoming panicky and diving headfirst into ideology.

Well, anyway, good night, hope it was possible to understand what I was trying to bring across in my rambling

Yeah, while the republicans have basically openly moved to reactionary and fascist politics, thus implicitly accepting the status quo is over, the influential parts of the Democrats seem to have been clinging completely to the idea that the status quo is what is to be preserved - even though material reality will not make that possible.

Right now, we seem to be in a historical moment, where old privileges are breaking away from a continuing crisis in capitalism that basically has been smouldering since the (late) 70s and kept stable through neoliberal policies thus far. Old privileges being lost results in a reactionary shift worldwide at the moment. It will be harrowing, but there is at least always the possibility of the pendulum swinging the other way - right now, in the coming years, organisation, connecting people, openly presenting radical alternatives to prepare for that moment seems to be the most important work to me.

You know, as much as one has to keep Machiavellian machinations and Realpolitik in mind… Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Biden did not do well. They report about it in a way that gives them clicks. There is no plan.

I do wonder what differences in philosophy and development led to something like Blender to be pretty accepted even in pro circles?

For me, personally, the moment I found out you can easily install a version of gimp that doesn’t distribute it’s tools and canvas across a dozen windows was when it began to feel “right” for me. Granted, I am only using it as an amateur for meme and touching up on graphics for game dev, but it feels right to me at least.

Ah, sad, thank you for researching! Here’s hoping it will come back in some form.

Life itself, the propagation and continuation of it, the creation of conscious structures capable of experience, reflection and influence over their nature - and ultimately defiance against a cold and dead, seemingly endless universe.

Or, for people that like the cold universe, there’s a quote I forgot who it came from: “The purpose of life is to waste the energy of the sun”

Oooh, wait, that isn’t how it works in other programs? I really like that behaviour in GIMP to be perfectly honest, have used it in editing stuff deliberately.

Spring. Not too hot, sun is out, things are green, lovely time of the year. Autumn is also nice, similar stuff to like, but overall, I don’t like the muddy ground and weather as much. Winter is nice temperature-wise, but the lack of sun messes with me. Summer is… unavoidable, unfortunately :/

For its time, it was a real classic, and it still has a lot of good elements (English localization is lackluster though, from what I heard.) Back when it was new, I remember all my friends playing it here in Germany.

If you enjoy an open world RPG with a very immersive, believable world, that has basically every character with schedules, motivations and personality, this still delivers more than even most modern games. Controls are… from a time when control schemes weren’t yet standardized and fully figured out. And combat, while appearing like an action-RPG, is actually above all stats-based, armor and weapons being the most important things to unlock content.

But overall, I’d recommend Gothic 2 more, it’s basically “the same but better and more”. It’s definitely worth a look to anyone interested in retro RPGs .

By now, Lemmy, hands down. I do sometimes end up on reddit from searching for stuff, and I check every now and then if I got any messages on my old accounts just in case someone wants to reach out, but overall - even without niche communities, Lemmy is just the better experience for me, personally.

Every source on the history of Google seems to implicate imply that their growth and development went:

Using their university resources -> surviving off of investor money -> starting monetization with targeted ads and raking in money

So it seems they had a phase of cornering their market with both public resources and off risky investments, then capitalised on having that exclusive appeal. Seems all too familiar, considering every damn tech startup under the sun now seems to go “trick investors or public funds” -> “corner market” -> “enshittifcation”

If someone else has some better info - go ahead and correct me, but there seems to be no mention of monetisation of Google before their targeted ad rollout.

I can basically go wth any kind of jam, blackberry is really good. Something like Sriracha or a similar kind-of sweet chili sauce can also be amazing. Oh, and honey is also a really good taste experience.

Satohi Kon’s “Paprika” is still my favourite movie, and there is a lot to discover and reflect on, on second and third and umpteenth watches.