@lain@kaia@phnt@rin German politics of the late 20th century essentially intended for passenger rail in Germany to die the same slow death through managed neglect like what happened in the UK, but then did a U-turn because early 21st century German politics committed to climate protection and realized that a convenient and cheap sci-fi alternative to railways won't materialize and every service running right now is in the middle of a it-needs-to-get-worse-before-it-can-get-better phase. It might actually get better on the other side, but politics could just do a U-turn again and then things will just remain fucked.
@lain@kaia@phnt@rin We just had two weeks of literally no trains coming into or out of Cologne at all because they're putting in a new railway interlocking system ... and they're already planning for the next major outage later in the year when they plan on actually putting it in production.
Since moving, I've been making a point to actively try and use every piece of clothing and every towel that I brought, so I can weed out the stuff that's either bad, ugly or doesn't fit anymore.
Today, I came across this old towel that's styled like a beach towel, but is sort of way too small for one.
So I use it to dry my face and something in the smell of the towel activates a memory of four-to-five year old me on a pebbly beach on the island of Krk in Croatia on vacation with my parents (the name of the island also is contained in this memory, if you had asked me to name a Croatian island, any Croatian island at all, in a quiz show, before today, I couldn't have named one) - and lying on this towel, which was comfortably big enough for smol-bean 4.5 yo me.
Knowing what I (rationally) know about memory and from my life-long experience with the quality and accuracy of my visual memory in particular (- it's abysmal), I'm pretty sure the beach that see in my head now actually is an amalgam of the thousands of beach images I've seen since and only bears the faintest resemblance to the actual place that this memory was made at.
But still - my conscious memories that I can summon at will basically only start at the age of 6, right when I started primary school.
Before that, there's basically nothing. But now there's this beach. And it was all unlocked by how this particular piece of terry cloth smells.
It is a pretty old towel however, I'm not sure about keeping it.
Today's victim is the left index finger, the weapon was the bread knife and with just a little worse luck and a bit more force this really could have been a trip to the emergency room ... anyway ... time to add my left middle finger to the phone's fingerprint sensor database, I guess
@kaia My mom made me listen to him wheeze out the easter blessing live on the radio yesterday, it sounded bad but I had no idea it was famous-last-words bad
That's some impressively idiotic drivel IMHO, but my point was that you literally cannot know or find a definite or even approximate cause-and-effect for these things.
Of course anybody is free to make up a story to try and make sense of it all and/or use as a lore repository for a political project, but nobody should ever actually believe in any of that bullshit, especially not the bullshit of one's own creation.
@nerthos@kaia You could just as well construct an opposite narrative where, if left to their own devices, the peoples of Europe will organically incorporate loanwords and phrasing from neighboring countries and cultures, slowly working to overcome the artificial language and political divisions of the continent (autocratically upheld for centuries first by feudal fiefdoms and then by their successors, the modern nation states) and any "purification" efforts are almost always chauvinist theater imposed by political elites.
@sun@kaia@ageha There's a couple of specialized TOR search engines (all in various states of disrepair and neglect), and it's almost guaranteed that the all actually working search engines for hidden services are developed, maintained and reserved for the exclusive use of feds and spooks.
So any blogger who would like to address that particular audience really should put their site on there. :)
@sun@kaia@ageha TOR has pretty much finally become the thing that the TOR devs from 10-15 years ago always showed off in the "State of the Onion" talks at various congresses - internet with additional privacy layers, whereas 10-15 years ago, everyone who watched those presentations was like "mate, it's just spooks, pedos and addicts on there, what are you even on about".
The New York Times has an .onion site. Some search engines have an .onion site, too (for example DuckDuckGo, Kagi).
Notably, no mainstream search engine has yet committed to actually crawling and indexing hidden services, that seems to be the last line in the sand between onion-land and full normalization into the rest of the web.
@sun@kaia@ageha The old world of pedodrug-TOR was basically wiped out in 2021 when TOR-Browser stopped supporting V2 onion services (16 character long address) and all the dipshit perverts/addicts who could barely manage to access this stuff in the first place had all their bookmarks invalidated.
The few remaining big dodgy hidden services were mopped up in a series of big raids, mostly because the service operators believed their own bullshit about TOR+Crypto being untraceable and untouchable, but as it turns out, if the numbers become big enough to get feds from all over the globe to coordinate investigations, they're very much not.
@sun@raccoon Last time they got mega-pwn'd it was down for a week and they gave away free games and a free month of PS+ as an apology, will be interesting to contrast and compare.
I can't remember what free games I picked though, it's been 14 years.
Posts random brain sneezes, the occasional poll, almost no memes. Occasional tech rants, for which I would like to apologize in advance. Follows back. The most unlikely Beastars fan on Fedi.Please reply to my posts whenever you feel like it. I don't like to shout into the void.I have Steam set up to allow anybody to watch me play video games, click on https://steamcommunity.com/broadcast/watch/76561197970817795 and have a lookaridoo, maybe I'm playing right now!(Pick your own pronouns)