Or two wooden coffee stirring sticks

When I lived in Paris my dad came to visit and made me take him to Père-Lachaise to see the site of the commune and teach me about it.

Wow my dad is kinda based now that I think about it

They balk at looking like they’re the aggressors when bullying the defenceless, but can’t stand the thought of any compromise made by the west against states of comparable power level. It’s all just insecurity and angst that maybe America isn’t, after all, number one anymore

After hanging out here for a few months it is starting to feel like the mainstream liberal discourse is just collectively insane?? Like. Mass delusion level. I was always skeptical of western lib talking points but thought at least some of them were decent on welfare / social progressiveness etc. but now I just feel like I’m watching an increasingly unhinged horrorshow carousel that everyone I know is clinging onto for dear life

Missing a heritage university campus area, but other than that pretty good

BO1 isn’t real Magic tbh. Losing the ability to sideboard and adapt against your opponent makes it so much less of a skill game and variance matters more. But it’s profitable for wotc when worse players can win more against better ones, so there we go.

I think MH3 is a great limited format fwiw, I just mostly play on MTGO where I can play real matches and sell the cards I open to make it more affordable.

Agreed. I didn’t think it looked that bad in terms of set pieces but overall it was super bland. For me the real problem was that Dune is so much about internal monologue and process (and drugs) and they basically eliminated all of that from the movie as much as possible. It just became another GoT-style fantasy power struggle.

What an incredibly succinct illustration of imperialism.

Beijing didn’t limit its global influence efforts to propaganda. It announced an ambitious COVID assistance program, which included sending masks, ventilators and its own vaccines – still being tested at the time – to struggling countries. In May 2020, Xi announced that the vaccine China was developing would be made available as a “global public good,” and would ensure “vaccine accessibility and affordability in developing countries.” Sinovac was the primary vaccine available in the Philippines for about a year until U.S.-made vaccines became more widely available there in early 2022.

Washington’s plan, called Operation Warp Speed, was different. It favored inoculating Americans first, and it placed no restrictions on what pharmaceutical companies could charge developing countries for the remaining vaccines not used by the United States. The deal allowed the companies to “play hardball” with developing countries, forcing them to accept high prices, said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of medicine at Georgetown University who has worked with the World Health Organization.

The deal “sucked most of the supply out of the global market,” Gostin said. “The United States took a very determined America First approach.”

To Washington’s alarm, China’s offers of assistance were tilting the geopolitical playing field across the developing world, including in the Philippines, where the government faced upwards of 100,000 infections in the early months of the pandemic.

I actually watched Zelenskyy’s show “Servant of the People” and at the end of that he makes a reference to Ukraine “being always stuck between the orcs and the elves”. So I guess it was in common usage at least in Ukraine prior to the war

Did they?? I had stopped following. But iirc they basically defrauded the competitions out of hundreds of thousands of dollars of prizes

I don’t know but they had the most unhinged cheating scandal in competitive sports ever. The top fisher was found to be cheating by putting lead weights into his catches.

The video of when they were caught is extremely worth watching (CW: dead fish)

True! She’s such a ghoul though she unwittingly helped out by condescendingly backing his leadership bid “because he’ll never win” and they used to just let a leftie run for appearances’ sake

I went to a Labour event in North Islington once where Jeremy and Starmer both spoke (this was back in… 2015 or so, when Jeremy was first campaigning for leader I believe?). Starmer was extremely boring and entirely forgettable, though there was some polite applause. The crowd was hollering and chanting Corbyn’s name when he spoke. And in the years since seeing how he has treated our Jez I have always wondered whether it’s been motivated by the petty insecurity of knowing that he will never have true popular appeal

Also, I am the leader of a community for people of marginalised genders in MTG, we have kind folks posting Arena codes to our server all the time. DM me if you’re interested in joining :)

Distance and distraction. It’s hard to see when you’re in the grip of it, but you can overcome the attraction I promise.

On Arena make sure you’re cashing in all the codes you can - there are a ton of older ones that will give you packs and help build up your collection. You can also get codes in the physical booster packs but if you don’t have a reason to play paper that’s probably not helpful.

The MTGA economy sucks ass for new players for sure. If you get decently good at draft though you can “go infinite” but it’s def learning curve for new players.

I have only just realised the emoji is a hand wanking, somehow I thought it was clutching a tissue in a tragic, self-pitying way with a similar vibe to

Incredible. Now do Shen Yun

Does anyone else find the catchphrase “let’s finish the job” somewhat ominous

I put unsure, which is true, though I’m AFAB and cis presenting. A lot of online spaces (whether leftist or otherwise) are just hard to interact with when you’ve grown up conditioned to femininity. At least on Twitter, TikTok etc there is some amount of accountability with people’s accounts but in more anonymised spaces the language and discourse is often just very… dismissive, cynical, violent, etc. and it’s not that it’s not warranted, but cis women are often raised to be repelled by that kind of tone so it can be a shock/difficult to fit in even if the space isn’t overtly or implicitly misogynist.