Shout out to the librarians in Gulfport, MS. They were really helpful and friendly when some dork with a weird foreign accent showed up out of the blue in desperate need for a printer to deal with visa issues.

Agreed. I am in the process of creating a lemmy instance (mostly for testing), with the core tenets being free speech and freedom of information. I just need to find a way of rewording it so that people don’t think it means endorsement of assholery.

I think invite-only and “Don’t make me ban you!” as the only rule could work.

Ksp2 was severely botched by Take2… but if you’re into the genre you might want to check out Juno. In addition you might want to keep an eye out for KSA which is currently in early stages of development.

It’s all mysterious and important, I assume?

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Yeah, that’s why I stopped watching: It became apparent that there was no interesting story other than the soap opera playing out in rich people circles.

The first season at least had the hint of something interesting; that estranged stoner being promoted from theme park furry to inner circle. But they barely did anything with it.

Destiny Potato

Kind of, yeah. We vote for parties, and the parties (yes, plural) with the most votes build a coalition that have enough of the votes between them to form a government. And the head honchos like prime minister and similar, are usually the party leaders. If they were to die or quit or whatever, the government agrees on a replacement.

“You’re the pope?? I didn’t vote for you…”

• Benjamin Franklin, probably. Or whoever it was that said “Not everything quoted on the internet is real”

Honestly I don’t care (well, beyond making this pope post), as I am not catholic. I am technically a protestant by heritage, but the truth is that I find even the term “agnostic” to be too religiously loaded to the point where I usually refer to myself as areligious instead.

As for the pope. Well, he’s… there… well, not right now. But he will be soon-ish. I’ll just accept whoevers named announced while venting smoke from the cardinal thunderdome as being the new pope. And then he’ll be there again.

Beyond that, he doesn’t affect my life in any way. Nor do I affect his life in any way. Unless he accepts my challenge to an offroad and uphill car race. Yes, he’s gonna have to drive the popemobile himself for this. I’ll be driving my new AWD Lolvo. I’m sure it’ll be fun for anyone involved, no matter who wins.

But having said all of that: I think Robbie Coltrane would do well as a pope.

Norway here. Election campaigns are usually around a month, and they’re almost fully focused on parties and their platforms, as opposed to the representatives themselves.

Succession. I stopped watching somewhere in the 2nd season.

Yes. China’s great firewall mostly handles content filtering and deals with low hanging fruit. Getting around it is fairly simple, and the censorship is mostly focused on stuff that would otherwise be easily accessible by the broader population.

VPN is your obvious choice here. CCP blocks most public VPN providers, so you’d have to roll your own.

You can set up a VPN concentrator somewhere in the world, and you would be able to reach it. As far as I’ve noticed, they don’t block VPN as a whole, and default port should work fine - the reason for this is probably that VPN has many commercial uses that they don’t want to harm.

Source: I run a (work-related) VPN accessible from inside china.

When I visit the US I find that I usually set it in the mid to high 60s for optimal comfort.

Windows 3.11 startup fanfare

Only English. The words are entirely different in the other languages I know.

I recommend looking at businesses that are closing moving or upgrading. I have a literal stack of old switches retired from work. 48 ports, gigabit, and free.

Well, cavemen also need tech support, just a different kind of tech.

Gork: “Stick go thud. I want go stab”
Pepsison: “Have you tried rebooting it?”
Gork: “?”
Pepsison: “Sorry, old habit” Sharpens his spear “try it now”
Gork: “Gork happy. Gork bring you mammoth”

And with Gork happy I’m sure he can help you find the right twigs twine and logs to make a primitive cart. Soon you and Gork can haul all the mammoth you’d ever need.

Engineering and chemistry. You know, sharpening knives/arrows and distilling seawater into salt for food preservation.

(Disregard previous reply I wrote, I made a brainfart).

Is it correct that the name is pronounced more like Fong? He’s from somewhere east if Beijing, there’s a dialect component to it.