And where am I ruling that out? I never said that this resistance would always be peaceful. But the sooner you start coordinating with the people around you, the better prepared for that violence we will be, and the better our chances are to prevent a lot of deaths. You can claim otherwise, but sitting alone while my neighbors and friends die is unconscionable to me.

But what am I deluding myself about? I have literally admitted that what we do may not be able to fix things entirely, but we doom ourselves more if we don’t take action. You obviously know that already, given your statement about your footprint, so why are you arguing against another person calling for direct action?

Even if that is true, why take out your frustration like this, by raging against those of us who are willing to do all the good we can?

I am not promising that we will be able to fix everything. Heck, I don’t even know if we can fully fix anything. But until every last living being is dead, there is something here that deserves every chance we can give or get.

You don’t have to participate, but to argue against this kind of work is like denying pain medication to someone who is dying and justifying it by saying ‘meds will not save you’. If we can’t save the life, we can at least save them from as much suffering as we can manage.

It is going to get worse, but that doesn’t mean we have to accept the full worst-case scenario.

Right now, a lot of people are hurt and scared, and the fascists know that. That is why they are making big waves right now, to try to capitalize on that feeling of dread and despair.

But they had to put in a LOT of work to suppress the will of the people. This is not the result of a single election season, this is the result of a coordinated effort spanning decades. The actions they are taking now are designed to make you think that it is hopeless, that nobody cares, and that the battle is lost.

In reality, the battle is never over. This is the moment that needs to push us to actually working together against them, instead of talking about what the right thing to do is. Talk won’t help, but local action will.

Join a mutual aid group and help safeguard your friends and neighbors from the economic hardship they are promising. Start talking your friends and family into attending boycotts, marches, and, above all, your local government and board meetings. Connect to the people around you, put up flyers, coordinate phone campaigns, and get people into these meetings to demand protections and change at the local level where it is most important.

Resistance doesn’t come from nowhere. It has to be grown, it has to be planted as a small seed and then watered and weeded and trellised and brought inside from the cold. You may even have to watch it die and then pick yourself up and start from a seed again.

But if we each dedicate ourselves, full time, to a single plant, then we will do far more good than running around frantically worrying about the forest dying. Because yes, the forest is dying, and it is up to us to determine what grows in its place.

We may not be able to save what we have now. But only we can set the stage, as best we can, for those who will come after us. And the more work we do now, the better they will be able to build off of that work, and the better things will be.

I was in NYC for Pride the other year and got a sample of a cannabis drink made by a new-at-the-time company Cycling Frog. Flavor is good for a seltzer type drink, and the inebriation level is tailored to be about equal to 1-2 alcoholic beverages, which makes it easy to dose. Hubby and I loved it and bought a couple of cans on the spot. They are now available in dispensaries near us, and we still pick up a case every few months.

When I was about 12 and searching the local paper to learn local rent costs. I was looking with the plan that I would move out at 16 and take my sister with me so we could escape the abuse we were suffering from our mom.

As a short dude (5’ 0"), you give short dudes a bad name.

You assume you know everything about everyone, you treat people like walking stereotypes instead of treating them like actual individuals, and you refuse to even consider that people are avoiding you for your personality instead of your height. All the while, you are blaming women for a problem that, even if it did exist as much as you insist, would largely be perpetuated by the men who run the clubs, not the women who can get in for free and usually just want to be left alone so they can dance with their friends.

Are there a lot of areas where we face actual discrimination because we fall outside standard height considerations? Sure, I can think of several. None of them have to do with whether I get into a club. And you don’t make your case by using discriminatory language and being a misogynistic ass.

I can guarantee you that your attitude is hindering your social life far more than your height. There are plenty of women who love short men, but so many of them end up needing to constantly worry about their man’s ego that they don’t think it is worth it.

In other words: men like you, no matter the height, are the reason women choose the bear. Grow up, solve your own insecurities, and stop assuming that you know what is going through people’s minds every minute of the day.

While you are correct that it will likely be expensive, it is important to note that Descovy is an existing PreP pill that Gilead makes. So the cost of the new shot is yet to be determined, but the company has been criticized for the cost of their current PreP medication option.

It is also important to note that anyone with insurance in the United States will pay nothing, as the Affordable Care Act requires insurance to cover all PreP medications at no cost to patients. The pricing will only affect those who have no insurance at all, which makes this criticism all the more important to help this new medication reach those who would be the worst affected if they were to contract HIV.

Two or three years, I think. So far the price has stayed exactly the same, they still have no ads, and they haven’t made any changes to the app to try to advertise features or anything like that. It was (and still is) a nice change from Spotify, Apple Music, and even YouTube to be honest.

I do have the family plan actually, I forgot about that!

And I do occasionally. Certain live albums and more niche stuff can be hard to find, and one hit wonders can be tricky depending on the genre and time the song is from. The song I’m Blue by Eiffel 65 is only available in a longer club mix and not the radio edit, for example.

I will say that, in my experience, it has a slightly larger selection than Spotify for classic stuff and different versions of the same song (covers, remakes, remixes, etc). For example, my husband was very excited that they had the whole readout of How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Boris Karloff (in two parts, but still) because they used to play it on certain radio stations every year around Christmas. On Spotify I was only ever able to find the same version of the song from several different albums of Christmas mixes.

No actually! Napster bought Rhapsody and now runs a music streaming platform.

I get the reaction though lol. That was my reaction too when a friend of mine recommended it. But I tried it and it is actually really nice, and the price hasn’t gone up in the years I have had it.

I pay about that already (~$14 a month), but for Napster, which afaik gives the biggest cut of any streaming service to artists. They also have really good custom playlist management, I never get intrusive popups or emails, and premium means no ads, even with hours of listening. I switched after the Joe Rogan thing happened with Spotify and never looked back honestly.

Interesting. I have not had any issues using their engine even with the issue with Bing’s API, but you are correct that they use Bing’s index. Given that there are only four indexes to choose from, that isn’t too surprising.

I actually switched to them when I saw that DuckDuckGo was about to start providing ‘AI assisted results’. I wanted to ensure I was using an engine that actually respected my privacy and didn’t harvest my data for slop.

Anecdotally, I can confirm that the results I get from SwissCows are very different and usually better than the ones I got from DDG. So I wonder how much of Bing’s API they use.

I picked a good day to switch to SwissCow lol

https://swisscows.com/en/web?query=%s

Free, uses it’s own index, focus on privacy. If there is anything bad about it though, please let me know. It can be hard to find unbiased data on search engines when you ultimately need to use a search engine to find the info, ime.

Disturbed’s cover of Sound of Silence is not only awful, it is an antithesis of the meaning of the song. Anyone who likes that version better than S&G’s arguably doesn’t understand the point of the song, and the fact that everyone holds it up as the gold standard of “covers better than the original” is even worse.

A close second is Postmodern Jukebox and their horrendous tendencies to take tempos to an opposite extreme instead of finding more meaningful ways of changing the genre of a song. I like some of their stuff, but the number of people who love their cover of Welcome to the Jungle is mind-boggling to me.

There are plenty of songs that I prefer the cover of to the original (Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’), or ones that just give the original a modern coat of paint without changing much else (Smash Mouth’s ‘I’m a Believer’), but these songs in particular are just awful imo.

Obviously this is a joke, but there used to be an important reason we kept the flags wrinkled like that: it meant that you never knew who had bought a flag at a Pride event and who brought one they owned.

This meant that people who were ‘caught’ at an event by friends or family they weren’t out to, they could say they just bought the flag to support the cause. It also meant there was no way to tell who had been there longer than others.

Yes! I make my own salad with fresh dill, onion and garlic powder, homemade mayo or olive oil, a bit of fresh basil, and baby spinach leaves to add some crunch. I just don’t call it pasta salad or macaroni salad because the name is forever associated with blandness to me lol.

My most hated was macaroni salad. Bowtie noodles with Miracle Whip, peas, shredded carrot, dill, and salt. Occasionally other items would make an appearance, but the main recipe was the most common.

It was so bland and mushy, and it wasn’t helped by the fact that it was made every few weeks during the summer, and in a quantity that meant I was eating it for lunch and dinner for almost a whole week every time it was made.