EponymousBosh

Free blocklist in the comments!

There's a promising treatment for Huntington's disease in the works, and we might have vaccines for allergies and/or asthma at some point!

Yarvin doesn’t think Trump has the guts to pull off a full fascist nightmare.

It physically pains me to say this, but I think Yarvin is correct here. What IS getting done is bad enough, but he's right that you can't really half-ass a hostile takeover, which is what Trump et al seem to be doing. Yes, they're fucking the US systems up, badly, but they're leaving the structures too intact. They're still bothering with things like court cases and gerrymandering. You don't bother with gerrymandering if you're not planning on still having elections, yknow?

I also think Yarvin is correct that Trump and crew will ultimately fail because of it. That's probably cold comfort to the people who have already lost loved ones, or who are dying or going to die because of this administration (and as a trans person myself, I may well be among that number), but it's not nothing.

Why do they call it oven when you of in the cold food of out hot eat the food?

Gaia Online still exists??

I use SpiralLinux (basically Debian with some tweaks). I like it a lot! If you want to stay in the Debian/*buntu lineage, consider it.

So basically, trying to figure out whether someone is actually being altruistic is just the poisoned chalice bit from The Princess Bride, forever

It might be another food allergy as well. I have skin reactions to dairy, and it took me years to figure it out because a) it's a slow reaction (6ish hours after I eat it), and b) I also assumed it was something my skin was coming into contact with

And in keeping with the OP, I also still eat dairy from time to time. Not a severe reaction, it won't become a severe reaction, and there's still no good replacement for actual cheese, dammit. (Daiya is close enough...sometimes...)

When Brood X happened, I think one of my cats thought I was responsible for the cicadas. They kept bonking against our windows and she'd look at them, then look at me and meow. I tried explaining but I don't think she understood :(

I don't think you're entirely wrong, but to me, the difference is that a good homage can stand apart as its own Thing, whereas something that's derivative has to lean hard on the the tropes and trappings of the original in order to be anything at all.

Example: Stardew Valley vs a bunch of really mid/mediocre farming life sims it shares a genre with. SV is deliberately an homage to the Harvest Moon/Song of Seasons series and is upfront about it. But you can still pick up SV and have a great time with it, because it's a well-designed and complete game on its own, regardless of whether you even know HM/SoS exists. Whereas with the copycats, the big selling point is "it's just like [Harvest Moon/Stardew Valley]!" There's not enough actual substance for these games to stand on their own.

Obviously, "quality" is a subjective measurement and all, but I think that's where I would draw the line between an "homage" and "derivative."

Back when I was a kid, The Simpsons was a really good show

Half of them probably were jaded (ex-)New Yorkers