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hi im triple AAA game studio. Welcome to our game gunshitters 7. this is a 70$ USD game that is not finished but you can buy the DLC at launch for 50$USD. also theres a seprate in game currency where you can spend 200$USD to get diamonds to buy cosmetics. look at our roadmap. dont you want to pay 30$ for our first season pass? you will unlock special epic gear that will never ever come back so you can get a nice healthy dose of FOMO. the next season pass is next month and is also 30$. also we are locking 40% of the entire game behind our fun new feature 'present mechanics' so you can gift the rest of the game to yourself for the low low price of 40$ and you also get an epic gun skin if you pay for the GOLD season pass for 60$. also you know how the game was unfinished at launch? oh haha were sorry about that. were releasing it now but you need to pay 20$ for it. fuck you. fuck you. fuck you.

guy in a duplex living off of nothing but bread with a computer from 2009: hi everyone im so sorry im late to announce this but my game honeydew mayhem where you can conquer the universe as a bee is gonna release a month late because i still need time to work on making sure that everything works properly and i also need to make sure that the free content updates i will release over time for the next 10 years will be on their way. i need to make sure that you can do absolutely everything you can think of in this game and i still need to polish 20 boss fights and finalize 40 more in-game areas to explore. im sorry you guys will have to wait a bit longer. also my game will be 25$ i hope that isnt too much to ask. if it is i promise it will go on sale soon for 9$. i love all of you and hope you are having a good day

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For a bit we thought my sibling had an allergy to annatto, a coloring thing (it gives cheddar cheese its color and it is hard to have allergies that can be buried like that. I think even then you're supposed to label it specifically, though, but the USDA contradicts itself on that it appears. Even having a less common allergen (sunflower) was/is tough. Having an allergy to something innocuous like that must be really hard.

PS: Also, can we require having ingredients lists online updated when they're changed? Said sibling's family will often order food online and semifrequently discover that a food that was listed with only safe ingredients has changed (typically it's sesame, since due to annoying incentives it's easier to just add sesame to stuff than bother carefully going through figuring out what has sesame) and that sounds very annoying.

I am begging the FDA to require that companies CANNOT just put "spices" as an ingredient but have to label the spices.

"Spices" can mean "this has some oregano and black pepper in it" or it can mean "this has cumin cayenne and paprika and if you eat this you will be sick in bed in pain for a week" for me.

Seriously, this is an allergy issue and a huge oversight on the part of corporations.

Require detailed labeling of spices used in packaged foods NOW.

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Seconding all of this and adding that even if you're a cis woman/girl, that doesn't mean you can't use other pronouns too! It's totally valid. You don't need to identify as trans or queer or whatever. If pronouns feel right to you, say other people can use those! Experiment with pronouns -- there are some "pronoun dressing rooms" online where you can plug them into sentences to see how they sound.

PS: Also while writing this post I went off on a tangent and apparently gender neutral pronouns have a wayy longer history than I thought? And not just they/them, we had a neopronoun in 1789! And ze first appeared in 1864! e in 1878! To be fair, some sound a little...off (what's the accusative form of heesh? heesh'm? heesher?) but others could work (ou/oum, anyone?)

I see a lot of ‘cis’ women say they wish they were androgynous in the way men were or they wish they were pretty in the way men were. This is your sign to go try to do that. You may find you enjoy being an androgynous woman. You may find you no longer identify as a woman. You may find you don’t like androgyny. You will not know until you try. Cut your hair if you’ve always wanted to but have been afraid to. Shop in the men’s section if you’ve been too nervous to. Wear clothing with an androgynous  silhouette. Experiment with binding, take baby steps with compression bras if you want. Wear unisex scents. Live life. Try things you want to try. A lot of cis women do not understand the joys of mens pants and mens deodorant. I think everyone should try both of those things.

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because if you have a disc, you own it. they can't enshittify nearly as easily. they can't say "oh too bad you need to pay us a monthly fee to watch your damn movie" (yet)

Why on earth does my laptop not have a disc slot it’s not like we don’t use discs anymore 😭 what if I want to watch the movie I just bought??

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vaxophile

but. excuse me please because I have Data

LOOK AT THAT. 154 MILLION lives. That is massive.

Here's another graphic, of infant mortality rates with vaccines and in a hypothetical vaccineless scenario:

First of all, note the overall decline. Second of all, note that without vaccines, the rate is 1.6 times as high as with vaccines.

And people know this if it's in cultural memory. If a few generations ago, kids were dying, and then there were vaccines and now they're not, or at least dying less, people remember that. People are aware.

But it's faded from our memory in the West. We don't really remember such high rates of child mortality, so we don't think it could be that bad.

How far back do you need to go in your family tree to find infant mortality? I don't know. I know about a hundred years ago a kid did die in my family, but he technically lived over a year, so technically not infant mortality.

Since 1980, when they started keeping track of this for high-income countries, there have never been more than ~0.1 children per woman who died in the first five years of life in high income countries.

The US and UK haven't exceeded it since the thirties. Sweden since 1920. France takes longer--that's what world wars will do to you--but their streak's still been going since 1952. If I had to guess high-income countries would probably be in the thirties, but it's possible they'll look more like France. If it was the thirties, that means that in high-income countries children dying are, mercifully, a fairly distant cultural memory.

And we see that in the data.

The list of countries with 95+ percent agreement in at least one year in the period 2022-25 (they don't survey all or even most countries every year) [Linked on the word "Data" up above] reads like a list of the poorest countries, countries with high infant mortality rates a generation ago (and often today): Niger, India, Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Somalia. And those with the least agreement? Countries like Hungary, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Japan -- countries that didn't really need to worry about that a generation ago. Admittedly, there are exceptions in both directions (Papua New Guinea not liking vaccines, for instance) but the image is clear.

(Also: Can we talk, South and Eastern Europe? You are full of people disagreeing vaccines are good. Like. The share of people who think vaccines aren't effective in the US is 18 percent. Excluding Scandinavia, once you go east of Germany, not a single country with data in Europe even ties the US. Similarly, in the US, 18 percent of the population thinks vaccines aren't safe. East of Germany, barring Scandinavia, there are, again, no countries that do better in Europe. Like. Are you okay?? What's wrong?)

As someone who works with social history for a living, I feel like I’m the aggressive opposite of an anti-vaxxer

I fucking LOVE vaccines, friends. Give me the science stab. I’m so ready. it’s a beautiful day to not die of a Bajillion and one diseases that carried off like half the population before they had even reached age 10, and a significant portion before they made it to old age, 150 years ago

I go to the old cemetery. I see the vast numbers of infant and child and young adult graves. And then I go to my doctor and get injected with Potion of Fuck That Noise. This is beautiful and miraculous and I do not remotely understand how some people can reject it – not just for themselves, but for their children

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I know we shouldn't diagnose people from the past with current psychological conditions and making this stuff is hard, but if the crafter took 631 years to make it I'm gonna go out and say they had ADHD.

it is very nice though.

To everyone who is feeling a little sad right now... close your eyes. Hold out your hands.

I am gently offering you Ring with Cat and Kittens, 1295–664 BCE.

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what the hell is going on with texel sheep

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And they're releasing an ALBUM? What are the songs gonna be? "Boom"? "Boom part XXI"? "AAAAAAA!!!!"?

Can’t wait to not sleep at all on September 11th

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You know, this would be a lot more compelling if the image you're using didn't surface in *checks TinEye* April 2023

If you don't believe them (they can mess up!), how about a source that can't even bring itself to call Israel by name?

🔴 BREAKING — One of the hardest nights we’ve endured:

Relentless artillery and airstrikes, with dust and the smell of gunpowder filling the air.

Children, women, and the elderly running through the streets fleeing the bombardment, not knowing where to go — a scene that feels like doomsday itself.

The occupation forces people to leave their homes by sheer pressure, but displacement itself is another tragedy:

Costs that most families in Gaza — already living below zero — simply cannot bear.

Crippling overcrowding in unsafe, tiny areas.

Endless suffering with no way out.

✋ In the middle of all this, my family — like most Palestinian families in Gaza — is starving and stripped of everything.

👉 Your support is the only lifeline helping us survive hunger and endure these endless horrors.

Vetted:

(#167 on the verified fundraiser list by el-shab-hussein and nabulsi).

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More than 99 Less-than-Legal-But-Ah-Fuck-It Sites to Download Literature:

Some other stuff is at Educational and Downloading

99 legal sites to download literature

The Classics

Browse works by Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad and other famous authors here.

Classic Bookshelf: This site has put classic novels online, from Charles Dickens to Charlotte Bronte.

The Online Books Page: The University of Pennsylvania hosts this book search and database.

Project Gutenberg: This famous site has over 27,000 free books online.

Page by Page Books: Find books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells, as well as speeches from George W. Bush on this site.

Classic Book Library: Genres here include historical fiction, history, science fiction, mystery, romance and children’s literature, but they’re all classics.

Classic Reader: Here you can read Shakespeare, young adult fiction and more.

Read Print: From George Orwell to Alexandre Dumas to George Eliot to Charles Darwin, this online library is stocked with the best classics.

Planet eBook: Download free classic literature titles here, from Dostoevsky to D.H. Lawrence to Joseph Conrad.

The Spectator Project: Montclair State University’s project features full-text, online versions of The Spectator and The Tatler.

Bibliomania: This site has more than 2,000 classic texts, plus study guides and reference books.

Online Library of Literature: Find full and unabridged texts of classic literature, including the Bronte sisters, Mark Twain and more.

Bartleby: Bartleby has much more than just the classics, but its collection of anthologies and other important novels made it famous.

Fiction.us: Fiction.us has a huge selection of novels, including works by Lewis Carroll, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Flaubert, George Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others.

Free Classic Literature: Find British authors like Shakespeare and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, plus other authors like Jules Verne, Mark Twain, and more.

Textbooks

If you don’t absolutely need to pay for your textbooks, save yourself a few hundred dollars by reviewing these sites.

Textbook Revolution: Find biology, business, engineering, mathematics and world history textbooks here.

Wikibooks: From cookbooks to the computing department, find instructional and educational materials here.

KnowThis Free Online Textbooks: Get directed to stats textbooks and more.

Online Medical Textbooks: Find books about plastic surgery, anatomy and more here.

Online Science and Math Textbooks: Access biochemistry, chemistry, aeronautics, medical manuals and other textbooks here.

MIT Open Courseware Supplemental Resources: Find free videos, textbooks and more on the subjects of mechanical engineering, mathematics, chemistry and more.

Flat World Knowledge: This innovative site has created an open college textbooks platform that will launch in January 2009.

Free Business Textbooks: Find free books to go along with accounting, economics and other business classes.

Light and Matter: Here you can access open source physics textbooks.

eMedicine: This project from WebMD is continuously updated and has articles and references on surgery, pediatrics and more.

Keep reading

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EPUB format (also on Z-Lib, Libgen.rs and Libgen.li -- I'm not linking to that last one as it's more of an option of last resort, their ads can contain malware, if you must go to it, use adblock). Liber3 also has it in EPUB. Ocean of PDF allegedly has it in PDF format but that's probably just an annoying converted EPUB with arbitrary page breaks.

If you want it legally it appears it was serially published in Australia long enough ago to be public domain.

okay so I finished Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriet Jacobs, and here are my takeaways, because it was AMAZING and I can't believe all US students aren't required to read it in school:

shows how slavery actually worked in nuanced ways i'd never thought much about

example: Jacobs's grandmother would work making goods like crackers and preserves after she was done with her work day (so imagine boiling jars at like 3 a.m.) so that she could sell them in the local market

through this her grandmother actually earned enough money, over many years, to buy herself and earn her freedom

BUT her "mistress" needed to borrow money from her. :)))) Yeah. Seriously. And never paid her back, and there was obviously no legal recourse for your "owner" stealing your life's savings, so all those years of laboring to buy her freedom were just ****ing wasted. like.

But also! Her grandmother met a lot of white women by selling them her homemade goods, and she cultivated so much good will in the community that she was able to essentially peer pressure the family that "owned" her into freeing her when she was elderly (because otherwise her so-called owners' white neighbors would have judged them for being total assholes, which they were)

She was free and lived in her own home, but she had to watch her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren all continue to be enslaved. She tried to buy her family but their "owners" wouldn't allow it.

Enslaved people celebrated Christmas. they feasted, and men went around caroling as a way to ask white people in the community for money.

But Christmas made enslaved people incredibly anxious because New Years was a common time for them to be sold, so mothers giving their children homemade dolls on Christmas might, in just a few days' time, be separated from their children forever

over and over again, families were deliberately ripped apart in just the one community that Harriet Jacobs lived in. so many parents kept from their children. just insane to think of that happening everywhere across the slave states for almost 200 years

Harriet Jacobs was kept from marrying a free Black man she loved because her "owner" wouldn't let her

Jacobs also shows numerous ways slavery made white people powerless

for example: a white politician had some kind of relationship with her outside of marriage, obviously very questionably consensual (she didn't hate him but couldn't have safely said no), and she had 2 children by him--but he wasn't her "master," so her "master" was allowed to legally "own" his children, even though he was an influential and wealthy man and tried for years to buy his children's freedom

she also gives examples of white men raping Black women and, when the Black women gave birth to children who resembled their "masters," the wives of those "masters" would be devastated--like, their husbands were (from their POV) cheating on them, committing violent sexual acts in their own house, and the wives couldn't do anything about it (except take out their anger on the enslaved women who were already rape victims)

just to emphasize: rape was LEGALLY INCENTIVIZED BY US LAW LESS THAN 200 YEARS AGO. It was a legal decision that made children slaves like their mothers were, meaning that a slaveowner who was a serial rapist would "own" more "property" and be better off financially than a man who would not commit rape.

also so many examples of white people promising to free the enslaved but then dying too soon, or marrying a spouse who wouldn't allow it, or going bankrupt and deciding to sell the enslaved person as a last resort instead

A lot of white people who seemed to feel that they would make morally better decisions if not for the fact that they were suffering financially and needed the enslaved to give them some kind of net worth; reminds me of people who buy Shein and other slave-made products because they just "can"t" afford fairly traded stuff

but also there were white people who helped Harriet Jacobs, including a ship captain whose brother was a slavetrader, but he himself felt slavery was wrong, so he agreed to sail Harriet to a free state; later, her white employer did everything she could to help Harriet when Harriet was being hunted by her "owner"

^so clearly the excuse that "people were just racist back then" doesn't hold any water; there were plenty of folks who found it just as insane and wrongminded as we do now

Harriet Jacobs making it to the "free" north and being surprised that she wasn't legally entitled to sit first-class on the train. Again: segregation wasn't this natural thing that seemed normal to people in the 1800s. it was weird and fucked up and it felt weird and fucked up!

Also how valued literacy skills were for the enslaved! Just one example: Harriet Jacobs at one point needed to trick the "slaveowner" who was hunting her into thinking she was in New York, and she used an NYC newspaper to research the names of streets and avenues so that she could send him a letter from a fake New York address

I don't wanna give away the book, because even though it's an autobiography, it has a strangely thrilling plot. But these were some of the points that made a big impression on me.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl also inspired the first novel written by a Black American woman, Frances Harper, who penned Iola Leroy. And Iola Leroy, in turn, helped inspire books by writers like Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston. Harriet Jacob is also credited in Colson Whitehead's acknowledgments page for informing the plot of The Underground Railroad. so this book is a pivotal work in the US literary canon and, again, it's weird that we don't all read it as a matter of course.

(also P.S. it's free on project gutenberg and i personally read it [also free] on the app Serial Reader)

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Devoted Teachers: Preschool stays open basically no matter what because the kids look forward to being there because that way they get to play with friends. Every child is perfectly well-fed at home because their parents can afford basic things.

Uplifting News: This new mom's coworkers decided to work together and coordinate days off to give her a really fun time and help adjusting to the new baby. She already has maternity leave.

Inspirational: This woman with Down Syndrome couldn't get hired so she went into something other than accounting because she's bad at math. It wasn't that she had Down Syndrome.

So uplifting: This teacher was worried about school shootings, so she told her students about what it's living having intrusive thoughts and OCD because having issues with your mental health isn't stigmatized and also there aren't school shootings because there are basic gun control laws.

Heartwarming story: Little girl doesn’t have to do anything to fund her dad’s surgery because his expenses are covered by his country’s universal healthcare.

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He truly is the man described so beautifully in Proverbs 2:12-15!

A fun but admittedly petty thing I do is when I see a post on social media where someone is saying “God bless Trump!! Pray for Trump!!”and suchlike, I comment, “Amen! Psalm 109:8-17!” And depending on the platform I’ll get likes/hearts/prayer hands emojis etc. but I’ve been doing this for months and so far no one has actually read the verse, I don’t think. Lol.

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aren't they in pirkei avot as an example of unconditional love?

The Bible describes the love of Jonathan and David, two young princes who could have fought over the throne of Israel, but instead chose to share an intimate relationship. Many consider this to be one of the first accounts of gay love in history.

According to the Books of Samuel, the prince Jonathan was the son of the king of Israel, but David had been anointed as the next king, despite him not being part of the royal family. When David defeated the giant Goliath, he was received by Jonathan, who disrobed himself and dressed David with his own armor.

"The soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul", says the Bible.

After Jonathan died, David composed this beautiful song for him:

I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan;

very pleasant have you been to me;

your love to me was extraordinary,

surpassing the love of women.

Click here to see prints of "Jonathan and David" in my store!

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first day in the time loop it is not a loop yet. i go about my day and its a pretty good day and when i make my evening cup of tea i wish all days were like this

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all politics about ai aside if you use it to create fanwork you're just a fucking dweeb

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Jewish culture is being so happy at watching other Jews succeed, even if you don't know them personally <3

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