I thought doubting God was a sin and I’d go to hell if I died with doubt in my heart, so I avoided atheist material out of fear that it was Satan working through them to tempt me to doubt.

But eventually I just couldn’t resist, and figured the atheist arguments would clearly be false, and God’s truth or whatever would show through and then I could always refer to that event to shake any doubts.

The first video I watched was a debate between a pastor and Christopher Hitchens.

Absolutely shook my faith to the core. For a couple days afterward, no matter how I tried to twist it, I couldn’t find the fault in Hitchens arguments.

After that, I began to research the history of Christianity with a more open mind, and it became clear what a shit show the whole thing was. I became agnostic, and I suppose in a way I still am a bit, in the sense that the existence of reality itself is quite puzzling, but I can say with certainty that no religion on earth has any answers toward that end.

I think it’s a grassroots effort here, as 50501 seems to only be targeting mainstream social media according to their website.

There’s also a national protest on march 4th, check out !50501@piefed.social for more info!

Personally I’d recommend Linux Mint, as you’re likely to have a very positive experience with it.

Fedora hasn’t been all roses for my particular setup either, since they fully dropped X11 in the latest version, but my hardware combo isn’t viable yet with Wayland, ultimately making me land on Linux Mint (which has been pretty dang nice).

I also tried OpenSUSE slowroll before trying Fedora, which I love the concept of, but an update on that seemed to bork my system (second monitor would remain blank upon booting), which made me a bit skeptical of its claims of extra stability over normal Tumbleweed.

I haven’t experienced any friction from DNF, so personally I don’t see it as a con. I just think Fedora has a useful middle ground between new packages and stability.

Fedora is a solid middle ground between Arch and Debian.

Even with the automated testing, Tumbleweed will still sometimes introduce problems with updates. They mitigate the risk of that with Snapper, so you can rollback to a previous state if things get borked.

Personally, though I’ve tried it a few times, I just can’t get on with openSuse distros.

1. Updating is really slow since Zypper does one task at a time, compared to DNF or Apt which can download and install multiple packages at once
2. Updating is particularly slow in the US, since most opensuse servers are in the EU
3. Yast is powerful for enterprise/sysadmins, but is damn clunky to use for everyday normal stuff (IMHO).

I’d honestly just go for Fedora if you want up-to-date packages, perhaps Nobara if you want it more pre-setup for gaming and codecs. It’s much more slick overall.

In case it’s not obvious, this is an educational game to teach how the oil industry is able to control our governments and destroy the planet.

For those needs, an old used thinkpad off ebay would be pretty ideal. Affordable, well built and reliable. Only downside is I think the smallest model is a 12"

Perhaps a Chromebook known for being compatible with being flashed with Linux?

There’s a community for these now over at !sillydrawingrequests@sopuli.xyz

I believe the Australian is Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox news and The Daily Mail

The Exclamation makes the theoretical anxious person imagine the other person as excited, but ending with a period makes the anxious person imagine the other person hates them.

An excerpt from “They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45”, an interview with a German after WWII on why they didn’t rise up:

Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk alone; you don’t want to “go out of your way to make trouble.” Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, “everyone” is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, “It’s not so bad” or “You’re seeing things” or “You’re an alarmist.”

And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions, would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all of the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jewish swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early morning meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

Dude.

This is the same guy who, just a couple weeks ago, publically endorsed the AfD (the far right nazi party in germany), saying “Only the AfD can save Germany.”

For context, this AfD (That is a real ad by them). Look familar?

Surely you must see these aren’t just a series of unfortunate coincedences?

Soda Fountains from that time period are not strictly describing the device that dispenses the soda itself, it refers to the entire establishment. A soda fountain was like a Starbucks if it was entirely dedicated soda. There were Soda Fountain manuals teaching how to combine different essential oils and herbs to form hundreds of unique and interesting flavors, making it an interesting craft in itself. What we have now, where the machines just dispense a few select flavors that have the most market appeal is a pathetic shadow of what soda could be.

Boomer nostalgia aside, soda fountains were genuinely badass and it’s a shame they disappeared except for a handful of specialty shops.

Apparently Photoshop CC 2017 has a gold rating on winedb, so that could be viable if you are willing to sail the high seas and apply the tweaks for that app listing.

Otherwise I’d stick with Krita, and then GIMP if you find Krita lacking.

The Mystic Crystal by Ninja Sex Party is a great story song.

Also most of TWRP has songs that tell stories, like Starlight Brigade or Black Swan

Thief: The Dark Project.

It’s everything I could ever want.

• Excellent story perfectly meshed with the gameplay.
• A strange high-technology medieval world.
• Incredible level design combined with realistic roughly drawn maps, forcing you to take in your surroundings and build your own map.
• Variety of gameplay, ranging from infiltrating a rich baron’s mansion to rob them blind, to delving into ancient crypts filled with odd creatures and an alien culture for some adventurous tomb raiding, to some of the most terrifying pants filling survival horror I’ve yet encountered.

It is, in my opinion, perfection.

A co-op campaign I’d be down for, but I can’t say I’m excited for this. I’m just not feeling the vibe.