ReadFanon

Nope, but if I was so inclined it's a great place to start to do some OSINT work. Just sayin'.

Likewise for Ch*msky:

You can get a good measure of the sentiment of the masses towards the government based on how they feel when it comes to paying their taxes.

There are other, better people who have talked about why they support things like free education and welfare programs for early childhood development when they themselves do not have any children. Turns out that a well educated, well supported society makes the whole country safer, happier, more productive, and all round better for everyone in it regardless of whether or not they are receiving those benefits directly themselves.

I swear some of these people have a mentality so backwards that it's not even on the level of the Europeans living in the era of cholera who demanded better sanitation infrastructure. Though I guess that's obvious since American infrastructure is crumbling, septic tanks are a common feature over there, and they made a fucking folk hero out of a guy who went on a rampage because he was told multiple times over years that he couldn't dispose of his shit into the local groundwater supply because it was not Europe in the middle ages where you can just dump your shit in the streets.

Oh wow, look at all those donor names 👀

I'd love for them to explain how Taiwan is a country and how Taiwan understands the situation.

This is a matter of hard facts. It should be a cinch to prove that it's a country, right?

Bold of a monarch, of all people, to say such things. The last time a monarch produced anything was by producing conditions for revolution and a reason to research how to construct a guillotine.

Maternity leave, which directly benefits all of society by giving infants a good start at the most critical period of life and thus creates the foundations for a healthy society, isn't something that I personally can make use of so and that's a thing I take major issue with.

You can take an American out of a culture steeped in hyper-individualism but apparently you can't take the hyper-individualism out of an American.

The average person here wouldn't even recognize the name

Didn't have my ear to the ground on that one but I can only imagine that the average person where I live would only know what the mainstream media fed them - Assad is a dictator, the moderate rebels are freedom fighters, maybe something about Captagon or barrel bombs or the OPCW report. So I imagine they would have been supported by the average Joe here.

Yeah, same here. I'm a pretty staunch atheist and I live in a country that is quite atheist but this tendency still manifests in this reflexive support for the underdog, no matter who it is. (Reflexive as in "by reflex" here.)

If ISIS didn't have a bad name, plenty of people here would support them just because they're plucky upstarts fighting against the ruling powers of West Asia. Case in point is the exact thing happened with the Azov battalion. Yikes.

If I read that article when I first became radicalized I would have saved me years of wasted effort. I cannot emphasize how valuable that essay is.

I started playing the Shroom & Gloom demo again after forgetting about it for a long time.

It's been in development for quite a chunk of time now and, as long as the game has a decent amount of length to it and they don't phone in the latter parts of the game, it's going to be a contender for my GOTY when it drops.

It's a roguelike deckbuilder (sigh...) but there's a lot of love that has gone into the game - roguelikes and/deckbuilders are less like genres and more like signifiers of lazy gameplay mechanics these days but S&G feels very different to me, despite the structure of the gameplay being very familiar. There are a lot of nice touches to the game and the art style is fantastic. It's immersive in the way that Cloverpit is in comparison to Luck Be A Landlord, and there is a very different but somehow reminiscent feeling of horror to S&G, although S&G is more cosmic horror with elements of body horror.

I'm gonna need to put the demo down soon so I don't burn myself out on the game before it has even been released.

Full PDF available free here on Iskra Books

That's the legit publishing house so downloading it is legal. Support Iskra and Lauesen with a purchase if you appreciate the book, if it's within your budget, because both are really good and they deserve it.

Understandable. I think these days it's not such a big problem as long as you set it up correctly, although it's a bit of a convoluted process and it's not something that I'd recommend for people who aren't at least moderately tech savvy.

I have a handheld that runs dual-boot Bazzite and Windows, with a large shared partition between them where my games are stored. Would have been nice to not have Windows lurking ominously on the same drive, threatening to screw everything up, but it hasn't caused any problems (yet.) But I can understand why a handheld isn't gonna have two NVMe slots so I'll just keep my fingers crossed and hope for the best.

I'm gonna be heretical here and advise you to consider a dual boot setup, if you have the hard drive space to spare. I like indie games and some are really buggy or poorly optimized for Linux (small teams/solo devs that are amateurs often have these problems especially if it's a recent release - I understand and I'm not complaining.) There are a couple of games I boot into Windows for, same for the very occasional application.

It's nice to have the option to boot into Windows as a last resort, at least imo. More power to anyone who has managed to divorce themselves from Microslop permanently but I often wonder if Linux loses users who go all-in and make the full switch immediately, only to eventually get sick of encountering problems with compatibility where they eventually revert back. (Sidebar to mention that whenever I do boot to Windows I am immediately reviled by it

and honestly there was nothing quite as effective as convincing me that I'm sold on Linux than when I occasionally switch back to Windows because it's a reminder that sometimes the grass really isn't greener on that particular side.)

Glad you've found something that works well for you.

First off, congratulations on getting in to see a therapist! That's always a big step.

I imagine you weren't trying to convince your therapist that you had ADHD and there's a very good chance that if they didn't think that ADHD was a possibility then they would have steered you away from an assessment so that's a good indication that they think it's worth looking into further.

I guess from here out I'd encourage you to consider what happens next - either you are going to get diagnosed with ADHD or you aren't. Either prospect is challenging in its own unique way but just remember that whatever happens you will have made progress and that's the most important thing. Here's how I see it:

You get diagnosed and it opens up a bunch of things - the grief of what could have been if you had the right sorts of support and medical interventions, actually getting the right supports and accommodations and meds, and starting on new ways to relate to yourself and to make life work better for you. Usually you get a stopover in imposter syndrome on this journey (lol) but try not to worry because there will be signs. (As an example here, a late-diagnosed friend of mine lost their ADHD meds. Couldn't find them anywhere, turned their place upside down. Eventually, days later, while they were doing yard work they found their meds sitting in a bush. They had zero idea how they got there and couldn't piece together how it could have happened.)
You don't get diagnosed and you have to confront that "But what if I don't have ADHD and there's nothing wrong with me and I'm just lazy?" fear - which is understandable but just because one psychiatrist doesn't diagnose you doesn't mean that you don't have it, it just means they didn't see symptoms of it. If there are people in your life who are pretty convinced of you having ADHD and especially if your therapist thinks it's likely then it's worth pursuing a second opinion with another psychiatrist.
You don't get diagnosed and you don't have ADHD, which means confronting the same fear above, but remember that it's still crossing something off the list. I was lowkirkenuienly worried about this when it came to my adult diagnosis of autism. I tried to look at it this way - either I'm autistic and it's going to explain a lot or I'm not autistic and I can cross that off the list of possibilities and I'll be one step closer to having the correct understanding of what I'm working with by process of elimination and this is also a really positive step because it puts me closer to what supports and interventions will be helpful for me. (Spoiler alert though, in my autism assessment the assessor basically all but says that straight off the bat they could spot the autistic traits, and that's before we even got into anything in the assessment itself. A different friend went in to get their ADHD assessment and their assessor basically pulled the same thing on them. It's more common than you might think.)

My advice for the assessment is to approach it with a strong "Yes, and..." or "No, and..." angle - being an adult you will have had to develop a lot of mechanisms to cope and to compensate, probably more than you're really consciously aware of. When you do any sort of assessment (questionnaire or formal medical assessment) try to speak about why you do or don't experience a thing. For example, I don't run late all the time because most of the time I use public transport and that requires that I arrive early. But if I drive then I'm either rushing because I'm running late or I arrive like an hour early so I don't end up running late. So in pure terms, me being late for things is rarely a problem but tardiness is the bane of my existence and I'm constantly battling against it. Another example is that I use an electronic diary on my phone so at any point I can check what I have to do and what time it's happening. I don't forget appointments and things like that because I have the calendar in front of my face all the time. But if I ever lost access to my electronic diary my life would immediately become an unmitigated disaster. So I don't have problems with remembering events and appointments but only because I have a strict system and if I ever diverge from it, I'm a wreck - if I ever forget to add an event into my electronic calendar it might as well not exist. This is the kind of thing that's really important to elaborate on in an assessment. I'm sure you'll have your own personal examples here.

Other things to try to bring into the assessment are what people close to you have said you about what they have noticed. This might be a partner reminding you to put your keys in their place so you don't lose them or it could be reminding you of important dates or noting that they tell you that you are leaving the house half an hour earlier than you need to because they know you won't be ready on time. Or what parents, bosses, friends etc. have said. If you have any friends with ADHD, there's a 99% chance they have either laughed at an ADHD trait you have displayed that they identify with or they've told you that you seriously need to consider getting a diagnosis. Also try to recall what you were like as a child and think about what happens when you are exhausted or when you haven't had enough sleep - those times where your ability to compensate is compromised and you get closer to being at your baseline when those ADHD traits appear to manifest much more strongly. Report on these things to the assessor as appropriate.

You'll be fine, just be open and honest. Give your own perspective on things and don't be afraid to elaborate on what your internal experience is. Whatever the outcome is, you're going to be one step closer and it's worth focusing on that and celebrating it regardless of the outcome, if that's a possibility for you.

Good luck and remember to report back if you want!

It needs to go further. The UK and EU need to threaten to ban the iOS and Android app stores for permitting this app in the first place.

They won't because they're spineless, except when they're dealing with peaceful grandparents who dare to protest the genocide of West Asians, but that's what they should do if they actually gave a shit about anything except neocolonialism and protecting the interests of capital.

It'd be a real shame if your shithole nation failed to demonstrate even the most basic level of respect for the sovereignty of other countries, not to mention international law, and you didn't take action to protect the national sovereignty being violated by the US (whether historical or so recent that it happened only mere days ago) and then those chickens come home to roost and you found your shithole nation being the next in the firing line of a (more) rabid dog pariah state who has come to violate your own sovereignty.

Even Kyle Kulinsky gets it

Don't let yourself get outflanked on the left by a pro-DNC shill who proudly displays an Amer*can flag on his wall.

Linux irritates me. A lot less than windows. And Microslop has to find alternative ways to spy on me and get my money. And it's much snappier and less demanding on my system resources. And I don't get in-OS advertisements. And searching for settings and applications actually works. But it's still irritating.

I get why people stick with windows. Transitioning is hard. Windows isn't on a trajectory that I like one single bit though and for me, I needed out of the sunk cost fallacy of many years that was holding me captive. I'm intermediate in what I can do in Linux and advanced in what I'd like to be able to. If you're a basic/mostly basic user of a PC then it's going to be less irritating for you than it is for me.

If you aren't married to certain workflows or particular applications that aren't supported on Linux (Adobe, anti-cheat games) then it's really a matter of picking your poison.

Have you seen the regular watch sessions that get posted here in Hexbear? Users here hang out virtually and watch all sorts of things while chatting. It might be something to consider.

If you read this message soon after I've posted it, they're actually in the middle of the watch session right now. Check out the movies comm to keep an eye on when the next screening comes up if you're interested.