Adderbox76

Congratulations America. You put the reins of power in the hands of toddlers coming up with cool names for made up comic book superheroes.

Somebody better alert the Girl Scouts.

Up here during COVID, a lot of grocery stores implemented arrows and traffic directions in their aisles so that no one aisle was two way. They basically became one way streets.

I desperately hoped that they would keep that, but nope. Quickly returned to the old jack-assery.

Can I just copy and paste this as my answer?

You think I have that much time in my life to list all of them!?

The one that pops into my head immediately is:

There is a special place in hell for people who don’t hug the curb when yielding to traffic before making a right hand turn. Instead they take up the half the through lane and half the turning lane, meaning that the person behind them can’t pull forward.

Onions

I don’t necessarily disagree. But I don’t exactly consider Latintimes as mainstream news. They have a decided lean to the left and are publishing a story that points to something they want to say. No different than when a conservative right leaning website with a name like “Patriot Page”, or “Freedom Force” or some other creepy MAGA bullshit name does the same thing.

There are main stream outlets, and then there are outlets that we can all tell, mostly from their content, don’t bother to hide their bent left or right.

This isn’t like CNN or CBS or BBC are broadcasting it. (Cue somebody linking to exactly that…making me look like an idiot.) Heck, AFAIK, even Fox News and MSNBC, the two “main stream media” sources that I would consider least biased in both directions, aren’t touching it as a story.

And why they seem to selectively think sexism is bad while denying women education

That’s not what they’re saying. They’re mocking American hypocrisy.

less internal European cooperation and a further move toward sovereign nation states

I call dibs on being assassinated in Kosovo this time around.

I live in Saskatchewan and I was just talking to a “right wing” friend of mine about this very issue. I had gone on a diatribe about right-wing conservatives in the US and she was getting a little upset thinking I was upset with her as a “Canadian right-winger”. So I pointed out to her that she isn’t actually “right-wing”. In fact very few people in Canada except for some nut-jobs who want to bring Trumpism to Canada are right-wing as the U.S. would describe it.

Our typical right-winger, including some very good friends of mine, are conservative, but not anti-abortion, hand-maid’s tale, anti-immigrant conservatives. Our right-wing would be considered liberal to the United States and the only reason most people here think they have to defend Trump is because they nominally share the adjective of “conservative” even though they’re VASTLY different levels of right-wing.

They’re innundated with American news 24-7 and don’t make any distinction between what they believe and what MAGA believes, but when you ask them specificially what they believe in, it’s far far far closer to an American’s concept of liberalism than of MAGA.

First choice would be a nordic country. They generally rank high up in metrics like health, happiness, etc…

Close second behind those would be New Zealand.

neither GIMP nor Krita is really capable of acting as a replacement for Photoshop yet

I would agree with that. But in all of their defence I’d add that they’re not trying to be. They are their own pieces of kit with their own roadmaps and goals.

The biggest frustration people from Photoshop have is that the expect Gimp or Krita to be a clone of Photoshop with feature to feature parity, and that’s never been the goal of either program.

Photoshop has spent decades basically merging the features of most of their products, so that it’s now basically a photo editor with features of Illustrator and a suite of advanced drawing tools. The only replacement for that would be a hypothetical program that combines Gimp, Krita & Inkscape. But that’s never been the goal of any of those programs. They’re separate kit and as far as I’m aware always will be.

Inkscape: Completely capable. I know many people who have used it instead of illustrator professionally for years.

GIMP: Depends on you. As someone who learned GIMP long before ever learning Photoshop, I find Photoshop unintuitive and frankly stupid. So it’s all about what you learned on. But GIMP relies on spending a few minutes setting it up for your own use case. Literally every window can be moved to anywhere. You can have whatever windows you want open all the time, or hidden behind right clicks, etc… Your tabs and tab groups are completely customizable to how you want to work. BUT the rub is that you have to be interested in doing that. GIMP is trashed for having a bad default UI because the expectation is that it doesn’t have a default UI. My GIMP would look entirely different from someone elses because I use different tools that I want front and centre than someone else might. If you’re not interested in that and just want something that you can learn a “default” setup and go with it (and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that) than you’re better off sticking with Photoshop.

As for Krita, whatever else people are telling you, Krita is NOT a replacement for GIMP if you’re doing design work. What it brings to the table in terms of having built in Vector capabilities it negates by having a very limited and basic suite of selection tools. Something that would take you two seconds in PS or Gimp to band select, paint the foreground, feather the selection, shrink it, etc… takes five extra steps in Krita because Krita is a drawing program not a graphic design program; what few “advanced” selection tools they’ve introduced is tacked on and hidden between three or four extra steps because it just wasn’t designed to have them at first and they were added later.

Just because it looks nicer out of the box than Gimp, doesn’t make it better. I’ve tried replacing Gimp with Krita because i like the KDE suite of apps in general. But I was pulling my hair out trying to do even a basic composition using it’s archaic selection tools.

Literally everything.

Maybe I’m just used to my comfortable parliamentary democracy.

You vote for your representative. Whichever party gets the most representatives gets power. It’s either a majority (meaning that they can do whatever they want because they got more representatives than all the other parties combined) or it’s a minority (meaning that to pursue their agenda they’ll need to cooperate and negotiate with the other parties because they don’t have enough representatives to do it themselves)

The leader of that ruling party becomes Prime Minister. He holds less power than a president because in reality he’s just the Prime Minister (First Minister among many) but he has more authority than the leaders of the other parties who didn’t win.

It just seems so simple compared to the lunacy to my south.

I literally couldn’t tell. Which is why I just Homered back into the bush rather than attempting to even reply. If it’s satire, it’s master class.

apoplectic

Legitimately one of my favourite words.

I used the phrase “tilting at windmills” when discussing current politics and got looked at like an insane person.

No one reads anymore, apparently.

A largely forgotten show from the late 90s called “Seven Days”.

How have we arrived in a world where a grandpa can’t tell a corny grandpa joke anymore.

Next you’re going to term me that pretending to take your kids nose is akin to threatening torture under the Geneva convention…

Josie and the Pussycats was lampooning our current celebrity obsessed, “influencer” obsessed, consumer lifestyle 20 years ago. Yes, there was certainly celebrity worship back then. But the way the movie portrayed it and the consumer greed that seeks to profit from it feels even more relevant today.