pretext /prē′tĕkst″/

noun

• A reason or excuse given to hide the real reason for something.
• Ostensible reason or motive assigned or assumed as a color or cover for the real reason or motive>

That tribes in Africa smoke it before a battle because it causes psychosis. My dad used to smoke weed, so you’d think his own experience would have had him think twice about that one. But no, he’s just a fucking idiot.

I’ll throw my hat in for starting with DS9. I’m just finishing the final season with my partner now - her first watch - and it’s really cemented why its my favourite Trek. It holds up incredibly well.

Is there a major difference between the newer Spiderman games, mechanically, or are they just longer stories/campaigns in some? (and by “newer” I mean since 2018, the last one I played was on the PS2 I think 😅)

The death of local news plays into this too as it becomes much more difficult to stay informed about the people and politics of those smaller local elections.

Case in point: my county had a bunch of judges up for election and when I did my reading on them I found out about a huge corruption scandal playing out right now. Nothing that will make national headlines, probably. If I’d just read the recommendations I’d not have heard, and voted those bastards back in. Local news is super important.

He won’t, though.

I think that’s quite a stretch.

I assure you, it is not.

Za-zoom.

Great, now all those good-looking emergency personnel are going to be tied up answering marketing calls instead of driving out in their nicer vans to help up elderly people who’ve fallen.

It’s funny you say that, because in my experience what you’re describing is Arch. Mint, meanwhile, was the first time I’d used Linux and had it “just work”. What distro are you using that you don’t have to “fiddle-fuck around” with it at all?

No joke, that’s the distro I’m going with 🙌 Mint is great!

Even if all the processing remained on my devices, I still wouldn’t want or trust it. Microsoft could change that policy at any time, claim something like my logging in to my local account constituted agreeing to their new terms, and expose screenshots of my password manager in an unsecured public data store.

Fuck Windows Recall, and fuck Microsoft generally for being so fucking awful to their customers but mainly fuck them for forcing me to finally make good on my threat to switch to Linux. I’ve been using Windows for over thirty years and switching off their spyware for ten, but this is the final straw.

My eyes and ears revealed the double standard, for it was glaring.

It’s because you care more about the truth than being accepted as part of the group. Humans are wired to value being accepted, generally, so most people fall for the idea that consensus is a fact-based exercise.

California and Nevada finally contemplate an end to slavery

Oh, it’s not just your pet peeve - The Queen really hates it, too!

Source code was leaked?

TFW it’s just Pokemon Red copied and pasted 35 times, in Word 2003, with mail merge tokens to replace character, location, and skill names:

1. He’s going to court without a lawyer, which is always always always a bad idea (I wish that weren’t the case but it is a fact);
2. He’s tried to claim he doesn’t own or operate the business in question;
3. His defenses are spaghetti thrown at the wall:

His defenses include fair use, invalid copyrights, a lack of standing, fraudulent inducement, an arbitration clause, failure to state a claim, and unjust enrichment.

Many of these (in fact, all but the arbitration clause; that’s probably from their TOS but won’t save him) are SovCit arguments and simply do not apply. They’re going to be dismantled in seconds in court, and I know that with at best a slightly-better-than-layperson understanding of the law. This guy is going to get thoroughly Bowser’d.

As reported by Torrent Freak, Ryan Daly, the alleged owner of modding company Modded Hardware, has denied any wrongdoing in court — even that he owns and operates the business at all.

Daly mostly responded to the lawsuit’s claims by saying “denied” and otherwise claimed he lacked “sufficient information to either admit or deny the allegations.” His defenses include fair use, invalid copyrights, a lack of standing, fraudulent inducement, an arbitration clause, failure to state a claim, and unjust enrichment.

This guy sounds halfway to SovCit and entirely fucked.