I did not know that. But I’m also an American, so…

“But isn’t Albany in New York?” - Average American

This part. I live in a rural area near a city; lots of people commute into town, and the main road there is flat, wide, straight, not residential, not even any livestock near the road, just open fields. The limit is 35, and half the people I know have gotten at least one $375 ticket for doing 40. It’s literally just a cash grab designed to take money from poor people trying to get to work.

If you thought USians were stupid already, give it a few more years of AI usage! You can just see people’s eyes glassing over when you try to discuss anything of import.

Yuuuup. I’m an American, and I’m particularly scared for Gen Alpha. The amount of times I’ve seen my nieces and nephews stop mid-sentence, pull out their phone and have ChatGPT complete their thought is… Idk man. I’m a millennial, and a significant part of this is my generation’s fault, cuz we’re the “hand them an iPad so they’ll leave you alone” parents (though not me personally because I have zero interest in bearing any crotchfruit). But damn, it’s scary. And sad.

I do like videogames, including ones with NPCs, but the difference there is that an NPC isn’t pretending to be a person, it’s pretending to be a character in a fiction that was definitively written by a person. And even so, I very much don’t like hyper-realism in games, much prefer stylized and/or cartoony.

And yeah the fake person at a drive thru thing started up where I am in California sometime last year (or at least that I first noticed). The irritatingly realistic voice is bad enough, but it’s really the obsequious responses that bug me there. A lot of, “great choice! The orange chicken is really tasty”, like bitch you literally don’t have a mouth, please stop.

Yeah but see that freaks me tf out too. A few nights ago, the moon was shining through the leaves of the oak tree in my backyard in such a way that it vaguely looked like a little kid’s face, and I literally said out loud “absolutely not” and went back inside.

Hanged. Ain’t no way this textbook case of overcompensating masculine fragility is hung, lbr.

+1 for GrapheneOS. I wasn’t particularly privacy conscious when I installed it; I was just super bothered by the Google/Apple duopoly in mobile OSes and wanted literally anything else. Came across GrapheneOS and a few others, but Graphene looked the easiest to install (and it was!) so I went with that. Barely a year later, Google’s out here trying to lock Android down and harvest literally every piece of personal data they can find, and I feel like I dodged a bullet.

Everyone with a brain knew what you meant, don’t worry.

Nah I don’t buy it. Ain’t no way this mf is 6’4".

If this is a genuine question, then my answer would be: a whole bunch of stuff I was taught that wasn’t actually true.

The way American history was presented to me (and I assume lots of other Americans) in school was the rosiest tinted glasses version of our history that could possibly be constructed. We spent a whole lot more time talking about “breaking bread” with the native Americans rather than slaughtering them, and focused more on our early economic growth rather than the slaves on whose backs it was earned. Our involvement in various wars was characterized as “aid” or “ally-ship”, or even stepping in as the “savior” who made sure the good guys won. Our sociopolitical progress (women’s suffrage, the Civil Rights movement, etc) was framed as the goodhearted majority fighting against a smaller group of hateful bad actors, who all sort of magically disappeared whenever progressive legislation won out.

Simply put, it’s revisionist history designed to retroactively affirm all the “land of the free, home of the brave” shit, when in reality this is a nation whose economy was built on the backs of slaves from all over the world, and whose sociopolitical ideology has always been steered by a small group of cruel and cowardly men who want endless personal power and wealth, to the direct detriment of their fellow country-folk.

There are things I’m genuinely proud of. Like all those who came before me who made it possible for me to vote/get an education/walk down the street while black, female, and queer. There are great American artists, academics, inventors—all sorts of people who’ve made meaningful contributions to the world. Like any other people, we are not all the worst of us.

But holy shit the worst of us are SO worst. And they’re so loud, and they’re so rich, and they’ve stolen so many of our resources, and they’re doing so much fucking damage to practically everyone on earth, not to mention to the earth itself. And they’ve controlled the narrative for a very long time, have taught us (sold us) so much bullshit for so long that a lot of the things the average American is proud of are almost entirely fictional.

It’s… disheartening.

D you think they’ll stay that way?

Until we get robot cats. Or robot squirrels. Maybe a well-placed Furby.

Yes, friend, I read the post. But frankly I don’t like keeping all my eggs in one basket, particularly considering how shit went down with Booklore.

I joined the new discord, and will make a donation once there’s a means to do so, but I’m not sure how long it will take them to get something up and running. The original dev also joined their discord and immediately started talking shit to everyone in there, so that was interesting. And the mods there also asked for logo ideas, and it pretty quickly devolved into an AI slop fest, which was disappointing. So. We’ll see how it goes.

I’ve been using Calibre (not the web version tho) to fetch metadata and better covers and create .opf files before I upload to my server anyway. Kavita’s documentation says it will import metadata from an opf in the same folder, so it should work out of the box, yes?

Honestly Calibre has a LOT of features that I don’t ever use, which is why I wasn’t planning on running CWA. I don’t have any comics, but between Komga and Kavita, which would you say is better for books (most of mine are epub format)?

Oh goddamn it, I deployed this like five days ago. Been working on digitizing my whole collection for the past week cuz I liked it so much. Fuck lol.

Uh, anyone know any good alternatives???

Another thing is that people don’t seem to understand how ingrained bigotry is in America. I actually am willing to die for democracy, but I’m black and female. Me getting gunned down in the street by ICE wouldn’t even make local news because Americans are trained to disacknowledge the person-hood of anyone who isn’t an ablebodied cishet white man. I won’t have died “for the cause”, I’d have died to fill an empty hole in the ground.

Not necessarily saying that I and others aren’t willing to, just that it’ll be a lot more like throwing ourselves into a meatgrinder than like being hung on a cross.

I don’t doubt it. Just offering a piece of factual information. If it doesn’t mean anything to you, then there’s not much I can do about that.

Edit: Oh right, Orbán. You’re commiserating lmao. Well. Yup. Sorry, friend.

I mean, do you actually believe every German was a Nazi?

Completely unrelated, but Simple Sabotage Field Manual was a fun little read.