Peddled by disaster capitalists and Russian money/propaganda.

And now the Tories want to pull us from the ECHR, to tear away workers rights and further privatise everything to funnel money into their own bank accounts.

It’s damn sad there will never be a “we fucking told you so” moment, because the useful idiots that were used as fodder in this whole mess are too fucking thick to ever understand the gravity of it all.

A very long time ago, a large group of us had a night of drinking around 3 miles from our small town. With a drunken adolescent sense of mob mentality, a sprinkle of rebellion, and a bucket load of mindless teenage stupidity, we descended upon the town to cause some trouble. We wanted to put our stealth skills to the test, and devised a plot to separate into multiple teams of 4. The name of the game was Gnome Hunt, and the aim was a heist that would make Danny Ocean shit his pants.

We agreed on a time limit of 2 hours where we would rendezvous back at the threshold of the town, count up scores, and fade back into the rural night from whence we emerged.

Quickly, the game evolved from simple gnomes, as drunken brains decided larger scores would net more points, so why settle?

After the 2 hours had passed we all met up again with our prizes. We had no scoring mechanic, of course, so we just all decided “good game”, shook hands, and sauntered back into the dark countryside.

Left behind, on a wall at the entrance to a housing estate, was a glorious display of all sorts of garden ornaments, arranged in a way that would make B&Qs seasonal team take pause.

The following weeks were a blaze of entertainment. The local paper had a photo of the full display, and a piece written as to the mystery of it all. Locals played along, with “wanted” and “have you seen this gnome?” Posters put up around town. All in all, the town seemed to enjoy a good laugh at the whole thing. None the wiser that it was simply reckless abandon from stupid, yet polite, drunken teens.

I remember reading that thread! Well, kindly asking my half-german wife to translate it for me. It was very helpful!

It’s just one of the culture war angles propagated by the rich to keep everyone angry with each other while they reap up as much of the world’s wealth as possible before any of the forthcoming disasters- whether that is climate crisis migration, the next financial crisis, AI unemployment crisis, further war, food and water shortages worldwide, etc…

The writing is on the wall, a majority of people can see it too if you ask them, but unfortunately people can’t help but get sucked in anyway. Probably because it’s a distraction from facing the uncertain future we all have.

OR, this is just a tinfoil hat getting the better of me. It feels like a logical conclusion, so maybe that’s the fallacy I’ve fallen for.

As a teacher, my concern is that our school went from a small group of about 10 smokers, to now just about every kid has a fancy colourful and flavourful disposable vape. It is crazy the sheer number of them. And the number of smokers has dropped significantly in the last 10 years as well.

I don’t know if replacing the small number of smokers in the school for a huge number of vaping children is better, if I’m honest. The amount of them that are addicted to nicotine and energy drinks now is really quite scary.

Music Producer input here. It’s sort of been a general rule of etiquette in production that piracy is fine if you intend to buy the product.

A lot of the better plugins can be very expensive and prior to subscription models, were limited in free trials. It can take some time to know if a particular plugin works with your workflow and gives you the results you like over multiple different projects.

I’ve always stuck with this. If I see something I like the look of, I’ll pirate it, use it over a bunch of projects and if I find myself relying on it then I’ll save up to buy it legitimately. Of course, there’s a fair bit of trust involved there, and a lot of people will be happy enough to keep the pirated version and try to find a new crack every time the DAW or plugin requires an update,

No chance I would have been able to afford half of the software I use in my workflow when I first started out, nobody can. But I eventually found my flow then caught up and paid it back.

I consider that ethical piracy. Or maybe I’m just justifying it to myself. But that’s how it was implied when I first started out in college and it’s a good system where you can still eventually support the small companies that make quality products that work for you.