It’s like Mad Cow Disease, except most of the Christians around here have no brains.

THE STARS AT NIGHT!

I can haz cheezburger?

1. I love it when real, groundbreaking space-science gets on its way without a hitch.

2. The artists’ conception of Europa looks like it was copied from a cross section diagram of skin, complete with acne getting ready to erupt.

Only degreed meteorologists are allowed to control the weather, Jimmy!

I’d kill for some fresh, virginal blood right about now.

ISWYDT. Congratulations to you for your dark cleverness, fellow leftist devil!

Unfortunately, it’s not much better here. The annoyingly heroic Governor Abbott has heroically deployed the heroic Texas Military Department and is disrupting our usual channels along the Rio Grande, both for commodity Catholics, and for nefarious agents to procure high-end evangelical targets in Sugar Land and Southlake. On the plus side, the lack of fresh victims is stressing our natural rivals the Chupacabras, so once we stuff the ballot box and then eliminate all those who stand in our way, Stanley in logistics says things will be back to normal fairly soon, as the extraction facilities in the Planned Parenthood clinics have not yet been seized. Remember to keep an eye out for the distribution points marked out with the “Y’all means All” Pride flags!

Oof. I checked mine three times this cycle to be sure. Never know when some awful mistake, like voting in a Democratic primary, will get your TX Voter info deleted.

You know, though, since we’re mostly left-leaning around these parts, just tell me the secret code and I’ll meet you at a basement in the People’s Republic of Austin and we’ll discuss getting three non-citizens to vote however you’d like, and then we can dine on the flesh of Christians to celebrate!

If anyone ever needed evidence that here at Lemmy we’re all a bunch of Gen-X olds, a zero-context Mama’s Family reference would be sufficient for summary judgment. 🤣

Seems like it was pretty analogous, though it seems like there was a ritual value to hieroglyphics and the older forms of the language that’s a few steps beyond even what ecclesiastical Latin is today. I would say there would be a certain sense that something could only have top-tier religious import if it was set down in Medut Netjeru (“the Words of the Gods”). I thought this article by an Egyptologist was pretty interesting.

Nothing quite so explicit as that I think, though obviously preserving something is always the intent when carving shit into stone.

Ptolemaic Egypt was a culture populated by Greek and Egyptian speakers. Of those who were literate, many would only be able to read Demotic or Greek, but meanwhile there is a 2500 year history (at THAT time. Egypt is ridiculously old) of Hieroglyphics being the “official” way to write things down, and the scribal and priestly classes would be part of the cultural elites. Combine that with the Ptolemies attempting to situate themselves as both continuing Alexander’s legacy and being fully Egyptian, and there will be a place for all three scripts. Engraving laws onto stones and placing them in prominent public spaces would have been a pretty common way to “publish” them in a way that’s meant to be durable and secure. See the Code of Hammurabi and Draco’s code for just a couple of examples.

The fact that Alexandria was cosmopolitan and had a sophisticated regime ruled by elites who were foreign but invested in the local traditions created a situation where this was done often enough for some to survive, several in fact, although the Rosetta Stone was the first found/identified.

Yes. The system set up by the US Constitution was a reasonably good attempt for a country of several million people with different practical needs, entirely along the eastern seaboard, and with 1790s technology, knowledge, and attitudes.

The problem is that it has evolved pretty much the bare minimum amount to allow it to (mostly) continue to function. We are limping along on “Constitutional Republic version 2.27,” after version 1.0 was an immediate bust, but we need to be running 2.30 at least, and maybe even 3.0. We’re no longer feature competitive with many other Human Governance suites. :-)

There are many issues, but an “upgrade” to install Ranked Choice Voting, rebalance Congressional Representation, and maybe remove the Electoral College (depending on how the congressional representation thing goes) would go a long way towards keeping it viable.

Yeah, I think the MAGAs will run mostly with the unfortunate garbled school shooter phrase, mostly because the eternally 12 year old bully Donald Trump seems to think it was some sort of fatal gotcha moment and not a facially nonsensical mis-speak. Ironically, I think this will mostly squander some generally skillful sanewashing BS from Vance.

Kamala’s campaign on the other hand will get very good mileage out of the refusal to concede that Trump lost on 2020. Somebody on CNN said it would be the best “campaign ad” moment of the debate.

Overall, it is what it is, and it will be impossible to tell how many people will really be swayed by the debate, but I doubt it’s a particularly large number. In particular, “leave abortion to the states” is unlikely to resonate with women in any state with a Republican legislature, including GA, AZ, and NC.

I did it. I opened a private tab and checked Truth Social. Trump is obsessed with Walz misspeaking on school shooters. He also screamed in all caps that he would veto a national abortion ban. Also his usual weird fixation with the moderators’ ratings in other shows, and still asserting that anyone who said he lost in 2020 is lying.

Meanwhile I’m over here playing in the through-hole kiddie pool or dead-bug handwiring keyboards.

It’s okay guys. You can just call it a Tempest 2000 emulator. Don’t feel bad.

Tres comas, indeed.

Well Labour wanted a leader who could appeal to Tory voters…

So, he modded a GBA either to accept control input from modded controllers, or he stuffed a SBC emulator with two USB-C ports into a GBA case.

Pretty cool, and a clever concept to work towards, but hardly revolutionary. I wouldn’t be “drooling” until it was past prototype stage and didn’t look like a it was stuck together with a piece of tape or that a single bump on the train would snap the ports right off those control pads.

“White” has always been more about fitting a certain narrative than a specific shade of skin. Ask any black soccer player who’s ever missed an easy shot whether there’s a problem with racism in Europe. Or anyone of Roma descent.

Most of their countries do not have the same issues of structural racism that the US does (largely because there weren’t enough people with recent non-European origins to make a viable political constituency to target), and they don’t have the legacy of dealing with a country that was involuntarily multicultural from the beginning, but in some sense that has allowed casual and personal racism to fester in a way that most Americans would find disconcerting.

I’m generally of the opinion that most people, even stupid people, are fairly chill when there’s only a one visible minority in their town, even if clueless and rude. Where things get dicey is when you combine economic insecurity from any source whatsoever with whatever number of visible minorities is enough to make a particular stupid person think, “hmm, that’s a lot of visible minorities.” Bonus racism/xenophobia points if any significant percentage of the minorities are gainfully employed. Double bonus points if any of them has ever committed a street crime.