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  • Hijacked a party of Flemish nationalist at the city's main square with Palestinian flags after the right wing city government banned some pro Palestinian artists from attending

    Can'stop the people singing you shits fuck you

  • https://brickipedia.fandom.com/wiki/21349_Tuxedo_Cat

    I saw this in a magazine and got it as a holiday present for my uncle yesteryear. This thing has been a pain in the ass since I got it. I remember the evening when it was lethally cold outside and we slowly walked into the shopping mall (which was playing abysmal music) to pick up a copy. I was annoyed being in the LEGO shop and bringing it home, but whatever. That was just ill luck.

    I started assembling it a day or two later. It was very boring: the process of assembling it takes several hours, and at one point I had to stop working on it for a day because I was so bored (and sweaty) putting it together. Seriously, has anybody ever noticed how boring it is to assemble a LEGO set that has over a thousand pieces? I don’t mind a few hundred pieces, but a thousand or more is obscenely excessive.

    Anyway, after I finished assembling it and giving it to my mom so that she could gift it, I thought that that would be the end of it. Nope. Some prick released a third-party add-on that hooks lights up to the set and my mom insisted on buying that. We returned to my uncle’s house and I thought that applying the add-on would be easy enough, but the vague instruction book (written in broken English) and my uncle’s real cat whining repeatedly caused me to leave his house in anger.

    It was in-between this and the time when I finally installed the add-on that I learned that one of my uncle’s students knocked over the set before trying to reassemble it, making the add-on’s instructions even harder to follow, and somehow my mom or my uncle lost a few LEGO pieces in his car. That thing is almost as fragile as glass.

    So after procrastinating for several days, I finally installed the fucking lights on the imperfectly reassembled and incomplete set and my mom takes it back to my uncle’s house. (She insisted that the add-on installation be secret because she wanted to ‘surprise’ him, but he undoubtedly wondered why it suddenly went missing, so my mom must have spoiled the surprise.)

    Fast-forward a few months and I get a text from my mom asking where the instruction manual is because they somehow lost it (WHAT‽); the set needs to be reassembled again and this time she is going to use glue even though the LEGO Group discourages that, and I’m not doing it myself because she knows that I’m fucking sick and tired of handling that overpriced heap of plastic.

    I am so sorry that I ever got that set and I wish that I never got into LEGO. I hate LEGO now. Overpriced boxes of shit.

    Come to think of it, I hate toys in general now, basically. Tom Hodgkinson can explain it for me.

  • Being a vegan activist might unironically be harder than being a communist one. You'd have the most rational people losing all critical thinking ability the second you say vegan.

    • The struggle is real. Although in my experience I would say that doing vegan activism generally is "activism on easy mode" compared to communist agitation.

      If you start the conversations off the right way and with context that gets people to think about animals, whether it's a video, VR experience, information about the animal agriculture industry, etc. it's a very straightforward A --> B for a lot of people. If you think animal abuse is bad --> don't support animal abuse.

      Of course there is the background of misconceptions about everything from health and nutrition, sustainability concerns (somehow), believing it's more expensive to be vegan, thinking there must be a "right" way to murder an animal, etc. But in my outreach conversations I make a conscious effort to not argue with people.

      The main goal is to get them to express their empathy for animals and confront the contradictions in their actions and values. Once they understand this, understand what veganism actually is and that it's not a diet, it becomes much easier for them to address the information part as they're already motivated by the "why". From that point I don't spoonfeed them information or argue with them, I just give them resources that they can look into on their own time.

      Maybe for me it's also a difference in experience because I haven't had that many conversations regarding communism with many people. I feel that it's impossibly hard. For veganism, all I needed to realise was this one contradiction regarding animal exploitation and abuse, and just inform myself mostly about diet stuff. For communism, it's a process that took years, a lot of reading, a lot of correcting misconceptions about communism itself, a lot of history, a very large change in worldview, even though I would've described myself as an "anti-capitalist" for a long time before that.

  • Just got back from a trip to Japan and South Korea. Was originally supposed to go to China but there were issues that stopped that from being feasible.

    Japan was surprisingly awesome. Such friendly people and so respectful. SK is definitely worst Korea though. It's basically the US in another language.

  • Genuine question; Why, “Juche - Week 114”? What does this thread have to do with Juche?

    • it's the Juche calendar

      • I see, thanks. Also; why was the Juche calendar abolished? Every source I could find on the matter routed back to NK News and RFA, which say it was done to elevate Kim-Jong Un’s influence over his predecessors. This question probably deserves its own post, but I figured this would be a good opportunity to ask this.

  • Went out with my van to an in law family gathering on a camping this weekend, away from the busy city. When playing football with the kids present I sprained my ankle lmao. It's thick and blue now. Still had fun though.

    Ever since the Iran attack I have been spiralling downward with my mental health a bit. I guess it's a combination of the events going on and the ever increasing workload at my job. Took today off in order not to burn myself out soon.

    After the intense heat a couple of days ago came the intense rain right now. Overall the weather feels all over the place.

  • I believe I'm on Day #12 of going through my four withdrawals (dramatic lowering of Guanfacine dosage; Zoloft instead of Lexapro; no more caffeine pills amounting to 1,000 mg, just tea and coffee every now and then; and recovering from overtaking vitamins for the past 1 or 2 years).

    There does seem to be a marked improvement from, say, a week ago.

    • Oh damn hope you feel better. Honestly electrolytes rich diet & b12 will have you way higher energy than the caffeine pills after a while. Is it cool if I infodump about substances that revivify me? I wish you guys had tianeptine in your pharma system in the states

      • But sure, shoot, go ahead.

      • I am trying to not take B12, but maybe electrolytes are fine.

        I probably have hypervitaminosis and have to dial down in the coming months.

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