Not that I’m aware. Probably Baader-Meinhof.

To wit, coincidences are more noticeable than non-coincidences, and once you’ve noticed one it’ll be much easier to notice others you might have missed.

I myself once spent about a week seeing Curta hand-held mechanical calculators everywhere. Books, magazines, blog posts, youtube… I wasn’t complaining, of course, the Curta is an amazing piece of engineering, but still, it was a bit weird.

That I really want? Replicators. Man think about a life not having to cook or clean dishes.

Drug addicted, Mafia made, trash fed makers from Transmetropolitan, specifically.

Yeah, some Catalan politicians say “els ciutadans i les ciutadanes”, much like some Spanish politicians say “los ciudadanos y las ciudadanas”. Romance languages tend to have gendered nouns (and by extension articles). 🤷‍♂️

Dragon 32, if I recall correctly.

Mostly try to learn some basic (probably was too young for that), play some games, and try to get the cassette to work. It almost certainly wasn’t the right computer for a kid my age.

Later, if I recall correctly, some model of Atari ST, which again was mostly wasted, though it introduced me to graphics editing, and some 16MHz (with turbo on!) 286 computer with a 65MB hard drive and CGA graphics (later upgraded to EGA and eventually VGA, though that might have been with a later 486), which introduced me to DOS (and extended and expanded memory), WordStar, dBASE 3, Lotus123, LucasArts and Sierra adventures, Wing Commander, a multitude of CRPGs, and eventually Windows 3.x.

I didn’t really get online until I went to the university, back in the glorious days of Yahoo, and the much superior Altavista, surfing on Netscape, before Internet Explorer ruined everything.

There were some great SGI Indigo machines (my first contact with a Unix type OS) and a prehistoric VAX machine with actual dumb terminals (never saw the actual server, sadly) for us to practice with there at the university, though, so that was great (though it didn’t make up for the Pascal).

Judging by the pictures I’ve seen of the US, and google maps street view, more road, or parking lots. Sometimes, but not often, short stretches of sidewalk, often not wide enough to walk on safely, regularly interrupted by lampposts and whatnot.

Why have grass or dirt when you can have roads…? Grass and dirt sell no cars.

If it only was dihydrogen monoxide… these days they’re putting all kinds of chemicals in water… oxidane, hidrol, hydric acid, oxygen hydride, hydroxylic acid, hydrohydroxic acid (and a bunch of other acids, really), μ-oxidodihydrogen…

Not if the American automotive industry has anything to say about it. The whole country has been built around making walking impossible or too dangerous to attempt, just to maximise car sales at the expense of citizens’ freedoms.

You’d need more than two parties for that.

By any civilized standard democrat politicians are far right extremists (a few token exceptions are closer to right or even center-right on some points, but they have little effect on the whole). Republicans are outright deranged lunatics, mixed with a worryingly increasing percentage of fascists.

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Majestic.

(Though probably not as much if you could smell it.)

Sounds more like an enlightened centrist to me, but same difference really.

If a maniac wanted to shoot someone ten times, and the victim wated not to be shot, the enlightened centrist would smugly proclaim that the maniac shooting the victim five times would be a just middle ground that’d be fair to both parties, and that the victim would be unreasonable, intolerant, and antidemocratic for not agreeing to it.

Same result, orders of magnitude more hypocrisy and idiocy, and of course you can’t criticise them, since by enabling the maniacs they’re just debating and trying to find a compromise, and disagreeing with them is being hostile and going against the very principles of democracy itself.

Malignant asshats, the whole lot of them, wouldn’t recognize the paradox of tolerance if you violently hit them in the head with it.

I’m not sure Townscaper can be called a game either, but it certainly is an excellent relaxing and enjoyable way to waste one’s time.

Horoscopes. Fortune cookies. Political speeches.

I got glasses. That definitely changed the way I saw things. Everything suddenly became more focused.

“…And that’s what your holy men discuss, is it?” [asked Granny Weatherwax.]

“Not usually. There is a very interesting debate raging at the moment on the nature of sin, for example.” [answered Mightily Oats.]

“And what do they think? Against it, are they?”

“It’s not as simple as that. It’s not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray.”

“Nope.”

“Pardon?”

“There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”

“It’s a lot more complicated than that–”

“No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”

“Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes–”

“But they starts with thinking about people as things…”

—from Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett.

It was inspired by Thatcher’s Britain, which is what the current breed of British fascists are trying to recreate and “improve” on, so… yeah, they probably see Norsfire as a good inspiration for what they want to achieve. Sadly, wizard as he might claim to be, Moore’s curses seem to be mostly ineffectual…

Is this bot going to get sued by boomer luddites, too?

And the very concept of “pirated” textbooks is itself monstrous. Textbooks should be free, in universities, schools, and everywhere. I can see some arguments for copyright maybe possibly being somewhat beneficial for artists (with reasonable limits… for five or maybe even ten years, say, and most definitely no longer than the author’s lifespan, and of course not applicable to companies), but copyrighting learning tools can only be harmful to society.