I read primary scientific literature for work. If I am reading for leisure, fantasy is the absolute best. I can’t waste my time reading nonfiction.

Yay, more instability!

I missed that. Seems like they are already using it to send anybody they don’t like.

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/guantanamo-bay-immigration-detainees-asia-africa-europe/

Sure.

https://henryjenkins.org/blog/2009/08/district_9_part_two_out_of_afr.html

District 9 and Chappie were both before it.

The displays at pretty much every bookstore I have been to recently are pretty massive. And kids still like the stories. It is hard to argue against a small child who is begging to read a massive book, as opposed to a kid wanting to stare at a screen all day.

Paywall?

Like when our dog died, my dad tanned the hide, wore it as a cape, and played with the other dog?

And even with that, you are glossing over the Spanish Flu. The “peaceful” time since the '50s included numerous massive wars, not least of which was the Vietnam war.

The idea that every time period has its own chaos is the whole point of the song We Didn’t Start the Fire, written in 1989.

As in the famous documentary Blazing Saddles

I mainly use Lemmy. Reddit for search results, haven’t seen the home page in years. Never had Twitter or Instagram or TikTok. Still watch a lot of YouTube, mostly for either chess content or movie reviews, sometimes tutorials or professional lectures. Use Facebook for talking to exactly two friends.

Logged into Facebook the other day and saw a friend request. The name was familiar, but not exactly, so I checked the profile. Soon realized he was my ex-girlfriend.

Anybody else remember Cheyney singing “bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran?”

I have been to many Nelson Mandela museums, and spoken with a lot of people who lived through the end of Apartheid. When he took power, both the black and white populations were gearing up for civil war. One guy told me that there were charts up at his school showing the likely kinds of grenades that could be thrown at him. Anyway, Mandela managed to calm things down. He might have been the only guy who could have navigated that exact time period. He did it through a series of policy changes, meetings with key leaders, and speeches. Entirely peaceful, but importantly, there had also been huge amounts of violence leading up to his release from prison and becoming president.

Did the racists change their minds? I don’t know. But the transition to the new government was peaceful.

Thousands of dollars for your books? Three books hardly counts as a collection.

I just finished marking student reports. There are some sections clearly written without AI, some that clearly are written by AI, and then some sections where the ideas are correct, the grammar is perfect, and it is on topic, but it doesn’t seem like it is written in the student’s voice. Could be AI, could be a friend editing, could be plagiarism, could be written long before or after the surrounding paragraphs. It is not always obvious, and the edge cases are the problem.

Perfect grammar and slightly unusual words in a paragraph. Could be a weird formulation from a student’s mind, could be AI. No way to really know.

I am nearly twice your age. Pretty much everybody has been through a version of what you are experiencing. Two things you must know.

1: You had a relationship that was valuable enough to you that losing it hurt. That is special in itself, and you need to consider the good thing that you had. Seeing a concert is ephemeral, but you remember the music and performance positively. Think of the relationship this way, also.

2: Give yourself time to mourn. Mourning is natural, and it is a process, but there is an endpoint. Many have walked this path and come out on the other end.

You are young, and you will have many more experiences in your life. Some positive, some negative. But your life is far from over.

Take a day, go for a long walk at the beach or park or nature trail. Cry, weep, wail, knash your teeth. Then move on.

South Africa doesn’t want him.

Yeah, that is terrible! Spending $50k on something that might be helpful or useful in the future! We should have used that money to purchase one JDAM kit so we can bomb more people.

A few years before WWI, Russia had a disastrous war against the Japanese, whom they had considered an inferior, small opponent that would be defeated quickly.

Time is a flat circle.