I’m not even Australian and I support this.

Funnier names for all funny money!

A slightly less deranged and more wholesome way of putting this would be to basically describe the blood donor as the greatest wingman ever.

… The recepient most likely couldn’t have done it without him.

No I’ll be blocking you for being extremely annoying.

Oh look, a public figure!

Say hello to Mr. Flowers, everyone!

https://www.banderatx.gov/directory-listing/jeff-flowers

https://directory.tml.org/profile/individual/109994

Looks like he was basically dubiously appointed as a Concil Member, in an unusually short amount of time!

https://www.banderabulletin.com/article/2555,council-appoints-jankoski-flowers-to-edc

But don’t worry, he’s very enthusiastic about his opportunity to serve the city:

“I am excited to do my part. I know that they have had a struggle finding applicants,” Flowers said. “So, I just felt it was my duty to step in and serve and do what I can to get through their agenda items and some of the things we need for Bandera moving forward. Hard to do without a quorum.”

Here’s how that’s going lately ->

https://www.banderabulletin.com/article/3117,flowers-proposes-banning-phones-cameras

Bandera City Council member Jeff Flowers released a public statement May 13 defending the city’s Flock Safety camera program and proposing new agenda items that would ban smartphones, security cameras and other technology following public opposition to the license plate reader system.

…

The Bandera Declaration of Digital Independence To the Citizens of Bandera: “For months, I have listened to the outcry regarding License Plate Recognition (LPR) technology. I have seen the eyerolls, and I’ve even been met with ‘Nazi rhetoric’, the dangerous claim that believing in accountability and community safety is somehow equivalent to totalitarianism. Comparing a neighbor’s desire for a safe street to a dark chapter of history is a classic case of comparing apples to oranges; it is a distraction used to avoid the reality of the threats our town faces today.

“I’ve also read the social media comments suggesting that if I want a camera, I should ‘put one on my own house.’

“Funny thing is, I did. And that camera caught a gang of criminals from San Antonio who drove into our town in a stolen car to break into mine. My private camera caught them after the crime was done. But if we had LPR readers at our city limits, that stolen car would have been flagged the moment it entered Bandera, likely before those criminals ever reached my driveway, or yours.

“I now understand your concerns and I secede. Your outcry is just too logical to ignore. Since the Council has decided we are the ‘Free State of Bandera’, a place where the ‘rights’ of a car thief or human trafficker to remain anonymous apparently outweigh the right of a resident to protect their property and the safety of their family, then we must go all the way.

“To ensure our historic County Seat becomes the most ‘traditional’ sanctuary in Texas, I have requested the following for the next City Council agenda:

• A Modest Proposal for Digital Device Prohibition: A total ban on all cellular and GPS-capable devices for all operations within city limits. If we are to be truly ‘private,’ we must leave our smartphones at the city line.

• A Modest Proposal for Total Surveillance Abolition (Residential & Commercial): A total ban on all outward-facing cameras, including residential doorbells and all commercial CCTV or security camera technology. If municipal safety cameras are ‘invasive,’ then no business or homeowner should be allowed to ‘monitor’ the public. We will remove every lens in town.

• A Modest Proposal for Total Municipal and Commercial Decommissioning: A total termination of all internet services and electronic record-keeping. We are going back to 1880, paper ledgers and cash only. “The Fiscal Reality of ‘Freedom’: This decision didn’t just cost us our safety; it cost us our wallets. By canceling this project, the Council didn’t just throw away a state grant (free money); they spent $15,000 of your local tax dollars out of pocket to back out of the deal. Bragging about fiscal responsibility while paying $15,000 for nothing is a very bad deal for Bandera.

“A History Lesson: In the 1880s, privacy in this County Seat was non-existent. When a stranger rode into Bandera, the Marshal gave them an interview, not ‘space.’ The livery stable registered their horse’s brand, and the merchants watched their every move. Anonymity was for outlaws; accountability was for citizens.

“I even reached out to the Trump camp regarding our ‘Free State’ logic and the way we’re treating our Marshal’s office and the safety of our community. The response was classic: ‘Our police are being treated very, very unfairly. It’s a total disaster. We give them the tools, we get them the grants—and I love grants, we have the best grants, nobody gets grants like we do—and then these ‘eye-rollers’ say no? It’s unbelievable. They want the criminals to have the best technology, the newest technology, but they want our great police to have nothing. They want a ‘Free State’ for the bad guys. It’s very sad.’

“Let’s take Bandera back to 1880 properly. No double standards, no hypocrisy. If LPRs are ‘unconstitutional’ and invade our right to ‘public’ privacy, we need to be courageous enough to go all the way. I look forward to the ‘Privacy First’ crowd showing up to support these bans….just remember to leave your phones at home.

Jeff Flowers Bandera, TX”

Oh-hohoo… this sassy little corpo bitch is gonna be very famous soon, in all the wrong kinds of ways.

I mean, that’s what he’d want, right?

What a fucking manchild.

If you’re at that point, often, repeatedly… unless you’re with an Ace, your relationship is either over or wholly performative.

Probably best that you realize that.

IMO, consenting but unenthusiastic sex is worse than none, you should both have more respect for yourselves and either talk out what’s really bothering one or both of you, or just admit that you don’t even like each other.

The sort of converse of this is that if you do actually want to have sex with someone, but tell them you don’t, or never directly say yes… yeah you need to learn how to communicate directly instead of vaguely through extremely non objective innuendo.

Sure, yep, I’m a bold person.

Stop being silly and inventing hypothetical things you’ve haven’t done. That’s not mystique, its pretentiousness and being annoying, it’s being fake, inauthentic.

I really don’t think any car ever has been as rock solid of indicator of ‘I am a mentally impaired douchebag with far more money than sense’.

Like… sure, pick your class of car that’s just wildly unnecessary, pick your brand of car that’s actually notorious for incredible maintenance costs, pick your model of car that’s just plauged by recalls…

Cybertruck trumps everything as the ultimate poser douchebag vehicle.

They’re also literally death traps.

If the battery pops, starts burning?

You now have to scramble to find the extremely awkward hidden emergency manual door release.

Because the main door handles, both internal and external, are fucking fly by wire, they rely on the electronics, they’re not directly mechanical.

Oh and the ‘bullet proof glass’ that makes up the windows… well its not very bullet proof, but it is significantly harder for a human to break than normal car glass.

Like this guy is unironically lucky he did not drown and also burn to death at the same time.

… I legitimately did not know that nearly all of those are LLCs. Ridiculous.

Ok let me break this down for you.

Paper towels + kitchen cleaner applied to rough porous concrete = not going to clean very much.

Kitchen cleaner in an enclosed space = you’re going to poison yourself.

Hauling plywood while mostly naked = you’re going to get splinters and cut yourself.

I’ve also recently seen, but not personally used->

https://anvil-organizer.net/

Its an AppImage, not a flatpak, but it seems to also essentially be ‘MO2 but Linux Native’, possibly with more features than Limo, at this point.

So, YMMV, and I have yet to try it, but probably also worth checking out.

I guess also I had to autotranslate the site from German, so, be aware of that.

Well sure if you wanna take the angle that game mechanics being patentable is in and of itself a problem then… yeah, ok.

What is anybody gonna do about that?

Best case scenario I can possibly think of is… maybe if SKG remains an actual political entity and score some actual wins, maybe something like 5 years down the line they could draw up draft reforms for patent and copyright laws, but…

… even just assuming that you could come up with a new framework that people would actually well understand and also broadly support… not gonna be easy to balance the idea of a small upstart trying to secure a wedge of a market, vs a giant megacorp that owns all neat ideas…

…that would be an even more insane battle than going up against just video game companies.

At that point, you’d be taking on essentially all of the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet.

People have been arguing for reforming the DMCA for decades, its never gone anywhere.

It is barely realistically concievable to me that anything could actually be done about this.

Wow I am now very tempted to come up with the ‘dialogue nonagon’ or ‘dialogue septagon’.

Like… are you kidding me?

At what point, how many n’s does the polygon need before it legally becomes a circle?

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20070226648A1/en

I actually think you coukd get around this via using a polygon with an odd number of sides, and not use a moving ‘selection box’ to indicate the selected category, but instead, just overdraw/shadow/highlight/bold/animate/colorchange/font change the text.

Then, then all you have to do is not offer ‘classes’ (ie set categories that define a static dialogue tree) as the primary options.

So you could just make those ‘classes’ dynamic within themselves, a full web or mesh, not a tree of boxes, and then just offer ‘mesh entry points’, not ‘category descriptors’.

To me the most insane thing about this is that they appear to patenting not just the visual style of a dailogue wheel… but also the concept of a dialogue tree, combined with the visual elements.

Its less terrible than you think, Nintendo has been suffering setback after setback in the totality of their legal battle with PalWorld, in both Japan and the US.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/technology/amid-palworld-lawsuit-nintendo-tries-and-fails-to-secure-new-patent-on-monster-capturing-mechanics/ar-AA23uWgi

https://www.eurogamer.net/nintendos-palworld-lawsuit-suffers-another-potential-blow-as-us-takes-rare-step-of-re-examining-previously-granted-pokemon-patent

https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2025/11/it-is-ever-more-likely-that-nintendo-will-lose-firm-faces-another-setback-in-battle-against-palworld

Basically… both the US and Japanese versions of the patent battles are having things like… Japan just actually rejects a Nintendo patent as being too vague and non novel… the USPTO does a thing it almost never does and re-reviews a patent it had previously given to Nintendo as possibly being vague bullshit as well… Niintendo just completely rewrites the lawsuit in the middle of pre-trial, while also claiming violations of patents that it filed for after the lawsuit started.

…thats actually largely a bunch of bullshit, that has a decent likelihood of pissing off the judges and arbiters involved as essentially being legal misconduct.

I’ve been locally running Qwen 3 and lately Qwen 3.5 on my SteamDeck for over a year now.

That’s an APU, which is basically an NPU but can do more things and is less expensive, pretty sure that’s what those acronyms mean.

See now this, this is what you call ‘long term strategic thinking’.

… from your… mind bicycle… that … is only for entertainment purposes… and is also your entire operating system.

Only the dead can not lose the game.

Perhaps ironically, the trick to flirting might be the exact opposite of ‘gotta go fast’.

Fast. Cheap. Good.

At best, pick 2.

This applies to code and coders as well, despite management’s inability to comprehend reality.

Ahaha, and Kenshi still defies meaningful classification.

Oh yeah sure, sure, its an open world sandbox survival rpg.

Sure, yep, just like all the others.

Hahahah!

You could apply Wuxia and Samurai and Cult and Animals to it, arguably also Xianxia.

Oh and they’ve apparently reworked some older tags, so we would also have Consversation and Difficult.

I believe they coined their own aesthetic as ‘Swordpunk’, but it’s currently just got ‘Steampunk’ and ‘Post-Apocalyptic’… sure, that’s kinda close, why not.

… ain’t nothin quite like Kenshi.