Perhaps every gardener to attempt to grow a tomato, lettuce, or bean has had to contend with animals trying to enjoy the food before the gardener themselves can, whether it’s a groundhog, rab…
this is of a piece with the ban on trans people and the attacks on LGBT people. the fascist belief that human difference is weakness and that it must be destroyed means infinite rules of varying violence to force people to conform.
this is of a piece with the ban on trans people and the attacks on LGBT people. the fascist belief that human difference is weakness and that it must be destroyed means infinite rules of varying violence to force people to conform.
“Tim Walz is headed back out on the road – this time, for a tour of House districts represented by Republicans who have stopped holding in-person town halls amid the raucous receptions some of their colleagues have gotten across the country.” cnn.com/2025/03/12/politics/ti…
For those following my saga of ordering designer Godzilla shoes from Japan last June and guessing on size- they finally came! (And they mostly fit- aka one shoe is a little roomy but I think a size down would have been too small with the straps and the straps keep them on just fine.)
Read my former colleague Ruth Marcus, explaining why she left the Washington Post
https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/why-ruth-marcus-left-the-washington-post
instead of waiting for the united states to collapse naturally the government should start handing out states to long dead countries. illinois is joining the umayyad caliphate and florida will be eternally punished as part of zaire
"A cutting-edge project to test “fusion blanket” technologies is taking shape, with the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) leading the charge to create a critical component of a fusion reactor."
🔥 Pecinta Komik, Ini yang Kamu Tunggu! 🔥 Chapter terbaru dari Isekai Kaeri no Daikenja-sama wa Sore Demo Kossori Kurashite Iru Tsumori desu (Chapter 42) sudah hadir dalam Bahasa Indonesia! 🎉 📖 Gabung bersama ribuan pembaca lainnya dan nikmati kisah serunya. ✨ Jangan biarkan orang lain tahu kisah ini lebih dulu, baca sekarang dan rasakan sendiri keseruannya! 👉 Klik di sini untuk mulai membaca sekarang: e-komik.org/komik/220775 ⏳ Jadilah yang pertama tahu apa yang terjadi selanjutnya! #EKomik #Komik #Comic #Manga #Action #Fantasy #Harem #Seinen #SliceOfLife #Supernatural
"Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys wearing yarmulkes every day. Those are the kind of people I want counting my money. No one else." = Donald Trump
In the Oval Office today, Donald Trump used “Palestinian” as a slur and said the highest-ranking Jewish elected official, Chuck Schumer, is “not Jewish.” Tho...
Ahh the relationship between Cisco and Jadzia Dax is quite a thing.
Cisco: “She’s a married woman” Dax: “That would have never stopped Kurzon”
There’s a comfort with the previous hosts that… I have a… difficulty of making my own. But the comfort with her previous… nay still present masculinity is something I have much less difficulty with. While I always claim I have no insight into the male mind, it was just a disguise, I am quite comfortable and open about the masculinity I have, and Jadzia & Ciscos relationship feels very comfortable and natural, and mirroring my own relationship with many of the men I’m friends with from before. Even many I’ve met since.
I tell people I’m she/her, my birth certificate has an F, but I do consciously avoid the term “woman”, preferring “transfemme”. To the cis that push, I’ll pull out “trans woman”. But that’s all an unwillingness to describe my thoughts to cis folks.
My actual feelings, much mu
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Ahh the relationship between Cisco and Jadzia Dax is quite a thing.
Cisco: “She’s a married woman” Dax: “That would have never stopped Kurzon”
There’s a comfort with the previous hosts that… I have a… difficulty of making my own. But the comfort with her previous… nay still present masculinity is something I have much less difficulty with. While I always claim I have no insight into the male mind, it was just a disguise, I am quite comfortable and open about the masculinity I have, and Jadzia & Ciscos relationship feels very comfortable and natural, and mirroring my own relationship with many of the men I’m friends with from before. Even many I’ve met since.
I tell people I’m she/her, my birth certificate has an F, but I do consciously avoid the term “woman”, preferring “transfemme”. To the cis that push, I’ll pull out “trans woman”. But that’s all an unwillingness to describe my thoughts to cis folks.
My actual feelings, much murkier. I’m devoting a lot of energy to exploring the femme side, it’s so very overdue. The masc side is coming out a lot more, curiously concomitant with my wearing exclusively dresses. But “side” isn’t the right word. It’s a very homogeneous blend… the word blend is one I’m troubled by, as they’re not separate ingredients mixed, they’re an inseparable medium, uniform, uncuttable. And there is another thing in there, that is neither, both. The programmer that hid from the world, that tried to understand, using tools that are unable to parse many of these concepts. The love for a flower, or a stick insect, or a trigonometric ratio.
My non-binary-ness is not a thing I’ve really got around to understanding. I know there’s a me, and there’s aspects of the femme and the masc, and I’m not sure where the borders are, and I’m leaning towards not wanting to draw borders. I know I lean femme, even as the mirror leans quite masc. The me that is… of these 3 things, finds describing them as 3 things offensive. The will to dissect and understand is dwarfed by the will to… be me. A whole.
I don't really count calories but try to stick to one meal a day
I went to target today to get some suncream and bought this packet of cookies but I ate them all and it's like 840 calories total and now i don't feel hungry so no like dinner, just cookies today
Google served me up a page from worldatlas.com that talks about cute small towns in #Hawaii but someone forgot to tell the LLM that wrote it that place names are used repeatedly in Hawaii on different islands. Their entry for Waimea has mashed together attractions near two towns 300 miles apart. Good luck travelers! You've been enshittified.
We have always prioritized data residency in Canada for the open social services we provide. To date we have made no distinction about the ownership of the
Festnahmen nach Krawallen bei Renten-Protest in Buenos Aires
Seit Wochen protestieren ältere Menschen in Argentinien wegen niedriger Renten. Nun eskalierte die Lage in Buenos Aires. Nach Krawallen, an denen Fußballfangruppen beteiligt waren, wurden mindestens 150 Menschen festgenommen.
Nikko is a popular tourist destination in the mountains north of #Tokyo . The town with a population of 84,000 formed around 2 temples that were built in 766 and 784. Read about the best things to see and do here. How do you like Nikko? backpackandsnorkel.com/Nikko/
Nikko is a popular tourist destination in the mountains north of Tokyo. We show you the best things to see in Nikko and, as always, we provide lots of photos so you can decide where you want to go.
Harry reports on outrage following Trump's intense attack on a top law firm–TALKING FEDS PODCAST is a roundtable discussion that brings together prominent fo...
I started reverse engineering Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego (Enhanced DOS edition) and I'm trying to find how it generates its random seeds so I search on int 1a and the first thing I find is it's doing TANDY SOUNDS?
Funny fact: I was trying to get an online assembler to spit out the machine code for "int 1a" but couldn't get it to, so I just went "fuck it, I can probably just do that in my head!"
Here's something I didn't know existed until just now: Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego checks your name against the list dossier list and rejects you if you use any of those names.
stretch goal: hack in at least on enby criminal with appropriate pronouns. maybe I'll just put myself in the game as one of the criminals you can apprehend
I think I might be able to do the hack I want by changing one byte.
I'm trying to change it so it has "daily challenges", and I think I can fix that by just switching a INT 1A from subfunction 00 to 04, making it seed the random function with the date instead of the ticks-since-midnight
why does ghidra's "search by instruction pattern" default to BINARY? what kind of a freak remembers the machine code for INT 21 on x86 in BINARY? it's CD21h, not 1100110100100001!
it's like "aww, did someone have second thoughts about making PRINT always take a length, and got tired of having to manually calculate lengths so you just wrapped it?
okay so when you start a game (well, technically when you restart), the game rolls 3 dice: 0-31: where the shit was stolen from 0-2: which item it is from that location 0-8: whodunnit
and select_string is a confusing function to reverse engineer, but knowing the name I gave it gives it away: it advances through the list until it's on the nth string and returns it
they have invented a Pronoun Markup Language. It's \x80 for He/She It's \x81 for he/she It's \x82 for his/her
so a string will be "\x80 mentioned \x81 liked seafood and offered me a ride in \x82 motorcycle" and it'll fill it out based on the pronouns of the suspect
I'm thinking I might do a "full"(ish) disassembly of this game. I've thought for a long while (basically ever since I knew Where In North Dakota is Carmen Sandiego? existed) that there should be an SDK for making your own version of this game, for whatever arbitrary geographical area you want.
I say "full" in quotes because I don't think I need to reverse the whole game to make it customizable, just enough to let you customize the locations, bad guys, hints, search types, etc.
sadly they didn't design the game as a completely empty husk that just loads datafiles. That would have been the smart thing to do, since they could then trivially make new versions.
turns out this version of the game has impressive support for older video cards. Here's Hercules support, which looks horrible without aspect ratio correction!
this blit function seems to take a useless first argument, a second argument that's the height, a third argument that's the width, and a fourth argument that doesn't seem to do anything.
I've been working on cities.dat. I can now confirm that this game (Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego Enhanced (DOS, 1990)) has 30 cities, and they're the same 30 cities as the 1985 original.
why in the fuck is loading the data for Paris suddenly grabbing some random data out of Kigali? this implies some weird things about the compression, or the data normalization
they seek to position X read 1 byte read 99 more bytes then seek to position X+100
now if you know how both math and random access files work, you'll realize something the programmers of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? Enhanced (1990, DOS) did not:
THEY'RE SEEKING TO THE POSITION THEY'RE ALREADY AT
the way this game does the investigations is interesting. so the basic gameplay is that you're in location X, you get 3 hints, which lead you to location Y, where the whole process repeats.
But if you savescum to experience the same pursuit again, they'll always go through the same places... but if you don't get the hints, they won't be there.
Hah! the game apparently calculates some info ahead of time, but only a few steps. I changed who the suspect was by memory editing, and it didn't take effect... until I got to the third location.
Since I went from a robbery by Fast Eddie B to one by Merey LaRoc, it means the pronouns changed when I got to London.
ok I ran my dosspin tool to gibberish every byte of the save game file (it's only 102 bytes, so this is easy!) and none of them change where you start. very interesting... I'm guessing either the values are spread out too much for my gibberishing to reach, or you need to modify multiple bytes at once
looking at interrupts, and I think I found a bug. they set handlers for various CPU errors, but they accidentally set 10 (COPROCESSOR ERROR) twice, instead of the 05 (BOUND check)/10 (COPRPOCESSOR) interrupts they save
okay I've figured out there's a shared format they're using here. it chunks the file into chunks, which have a 16-bit ID (unique per file, but not globally), an offset, and 16-bit length
so like, midisnd.dat will have 12 entries, and the first 11 are 200-500 bytes each, and then the last is 3k. presumably it's each song and then some config info?
idea for a test: it's easy to spot which chunk in a city is the image, because it's the biggest. Here's a way to determine if it's looking up by IDs or offsets/indices: swap the IDs of two images
okay I think it has a very simple 1-byte CRC check on the chunks, which are optionally not run. I can't make the math work but I'm reasonably sure that's what it is
ugh. TODO for my eventual Good DOS Debugger: Instant Video display. I don't know exactly how DOSBox-X is doing it, but while single-stepping the debugger, the display never updates. I can dump the ram at A000:0000 and see what updated, but not on the screen in DOSBox
I think this compression is specifically designed for ASCII text, which is annoying because they've also got compressed images... which probably use a DIFFERENT COMPRESSION!
"vs ses oa is isgit's tc eital and largest t u anhtA ttggh os nnotosnhrdsmarosogdn ss drte tishoth's isdhsceohtsnthminder of isgit's t nuorhdhtpast\x00 geru is slightltsn oaller than ndhd na and is o nnsgtgstbtst oa dotlalssaaolootbiaoht Sal gh, sonuhvia and sl ghh\x00isgit, ontvdn ss nhsiaalgarsnadlfnaatawlarst oadrlhrs i is a rugged land dooousr'casrbhe nrdsgs fountainsnht iah"
that's supposed to read: "\x03Lima is Peru's capital and largest city. A well-known landmark is the Archbishop's Palace, a reminder of Peru's colonial past\x00Peru is slightly smaller than Alaska and is bordered by Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia and Chile\x00Peru, once the center of the mighty Incan Empire, is a rugged land dominated by the Andes Mountains. Forests and jungles cover half its land area\x00"
C:\DOSBox-X\drive_c\carmen\py>python datfile.py cities.dat --dump=12803 --decompress "\x03Sydney, with a population of more than 3.3 million people, is Australia's largest city. A well-known sight is Sydney's distinctively designed Opera House\x00An island continent, Australia is nearly as large as the United States but has only one-fifteenth the population\x00The capital of Australia is Canberra, located in the southeast corner of the country between Sydney and Melbourne\x00"
It starts with \x03 to indicate there's three strings: then it describes the city three times. at runtime it uses select_string function with a random input to select one of the three strings
b'\x05asked about the exchange rate for yen\x00was practicing Japanese characters\x00said\x81planned to take photographs of Mount Fuji\x00asked about tours of the Imperial Palace\x00was interested in visiting Shinto shrines\x00'
tool that'd really be handy right now: a "live" version of binxelview, so I can step through the DOSBox-x debugger and see how memory is changing in real time, as an image.
I'm stepping through a high-level loading routine I don't understand yet, trying to figure out when it decompresses an image by watching the RAM it uses for file loading and decompression and spotting when the image appears
I'm in Paris, I look at work ram, I see the image of the Eiffel. I head to Rome, and before I load the next image, I can see that the Eiffle tower in workram now has the wrong stride. That's odd, because it means it had to rewrite the image in memory, the image it's about to unload.
I think this might be the GUI system doing a screenshot of the image under a window, so it can restore it at the end. And it still does that here, even though we'll never need to restore that image: we're about to overwrite it
Here's what I want a tool to do: I hit a breakpoint in the debugger, I turn it on, set another breakpoint, and hit go. between those two breakpoints, every time a CALL instruction is hit, it dumps my selected memory region. If it's identical to the last dump, it's ignored. At the end, each dump is rendered as an image, and the combined set are an animation I can scroll through.
wait no, the colors are wrong... I bet I'm seeing it decompress the binary, but that's using the full width of the bytes. it then gets expanded out to a 16-color image.
I think the memory allocation system here is that every malloc returns 2 extra bytes, which is a pointer to the previous block. unless it's an odd number, in which case it's a free block. and pointer to the previous block, once you make it even again
the only problem with using Ghidra to hack children's games instead of, like, Serious Things like firmwares or malware or whatever, is sometimes you have to make a label named NUM_MOUNTAIN_CLIMBING_HINTS
man, running on 4 hours of sleep is killing me. I can't even remember the MS-DOS interrupt to open a file!
I know reading it is int 21 ah=3f, closing it is int 21 ah=3d, and I'll never forget that seeking is int 21 ah=42, but how do you open a file? I mean, not the int 21 ax=6c00 way, that one is only for DOS 4.0+, and obviously a game released in 1990 isn't gonna use that.
the annoying thing is that MS C Compiler 5.1 is the most mundane-ass DOS application. If I had a 32bit windows install rather than 64bit, it would probably just run natively on my system
a fun kind of reverse engineering tactic that I practice probably more than I should is a version of The Scream Test (which is the principle that the easiest way to find who "owns" a server is to turn it off and see who screams): if you don't know what some code does, break it. and see what screams.
I think I may have found unused graphics for a feature that'd change the Acme Detective Agency at the beginning to be season-specific. There's summer, fall, winter, and spring variants, but the game seems to be hardcoded to summer
I accidentally applied a patch backwards and put the detective to sleep, forever. They're in Rome and they've just slept through about two months of nothing
I finally figured out how it calculates travel times. It's the difference in X coordinate between the two cities, plus the difference between the Y coordinate, plus one. that quantity divided by 40, then has 2 added. if the result is over 7, it's set to 7.
Weird! that's not how you measure distance, Carmen.
also, it's the 90s, I can afford a sqrt(). I should fix it up for my version.
or use a squared lookup table. you could do this REAL easy by making it a table search: there's only 6 possible results: 2,3,4,5,6,7. each entry in the lookup table contains the maximum squared distance that can generate that number of hours
@foone I did it lol https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTr5GBfUNkxzVN7RoAiMg081ihERAFs93oE_m_1dPj67IxG-pkMQ41zoVVDlK0DJQepfeRe3NcA-9z8/pubhtml
hope this answered any questions you had
I'm confused by the graphics detection routines. I thought it was returning 0 for "no graphics" or something, but it turns out 0 means MCGA. So the GraphicsMode enum goes: 0: MCGA 1: CGA 2: Hercules 3: EGA 4: Tandy 5: VGA 6: ???
I just realized the portable Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? is based on the same version I'm hacking, meaning it's in-scope for me to get this, dump the ROM, and compare.
That just increased the cost and complexity of this project by bunch
WAIT HOLD ALL THE PHONES. Here's a photo from a MS-DOS version. It does that thing some companies (like Sierra) did back in the day, and included both 3.5" and 5.25" disks in the package.
I don't want to go through a million platforms but all the other ports of this game tweaked some art here and there or put in different location-photos, but all of them have the same basic tall-window-on-the-left, smaller-window-in-the-top-right, four-buttons-in-lower-right design
The answer for "what's wrong with these floppies?" is that they're double-notched. That's needed for double-sided disks... on systems which have single-sided drives! The PC has basically always been double-sided, so they only need one notch, on the top/a side.
here's why they shipped it on a double-notched disk anyway: Broderbund was releasing games on a bunch of other systems that DID have single-sided drives. For simplicity they just bought Xty-thousand double-notched disks
is it gonna matter? not in the slightest (assuming there's no format-mismatching, which their shouldn't be: these are all the same density of disks, I think).
The PC doesn't check for a notch there, so it won't notice either.
also after all this wondering about "how many disks does Carmen Sandiego Enhanced (1990, DOS) come on?" is even sillier because I ALREADY KNEW THE ANSWER, I JUST FORGOT I KNEW IT
just looking at the files, not the code (and not having seen original disk images yet that I can recall), I bet the answer is that they put CITIES.DAT on DISK2. the whole game - cities.dat is ~300kb, with cities.dat being 168kb.
They could do the whole game - carmen.dat and cities.dat in only 200kb, which'd give them 160kb (luxury!) for a fancy installer.
This game autodetects everything (video and audio modes) and you can install it by just doing "copy A:*.* C:\CARMEN" on each disk, so I don't think they would have needed a fancy installer.
I should just check. I'm sure disk images can be tracked down in places.
the video and audio detection seems to be excellent, by the way. it just silently figures it out, without asking questions or requiring special arguments or configuration. Perfect for a game aimed at the little childrens.
I did not realize they implemented a file browser in this program! I only found it by hiding all the DAT files from the EXE, to see if it'd ask me to put in floppies in.
similar things in the test.com file. I moved stuff around in the memory map and it's not erroring now. I've probably created endless glitches elsewhere though
okay I reverted back to my old mapping, then created a new memory mapping: I made up some bytes at 2000:xxxx where it incorrectly thinks it's going, and set up a JMP $CORRECT_ADDRESS there by editing the bytes, then telling Ghidra it's a thunk.
so the program has three main code segments, as it has approximately 111kb of code The problem is that ghidra gets confused when the relative addresses are too big.
so the first one is at 1000:0000 and the second was at 1fb7:0009. I moved it to 5000:7000, and the second segment seems to be working fine now.
the problem is that I was only able to do that because the segment is only 82a7h long. the first segment, the 1000:0000 one, is FB79 long. So I can't just move it so it's in the middle of a segment, since it'll end up spanning into the next 64k chunk, which is where ghidra fucks up
well, if nothing else, I think this has caused it to stop thinking there's jumps into the middle of functions. so now I can just manually thunk every cross-segment call, by creating the 2000:0000 segment that ghidra is imagining exists
I'm kinda surprised they're so dithered. with the support for EGA/MCGA/VGA monitors, they could have pulled something like sierra did and encoded the dithering into their compression. Then when they're displaying on higher-colordepth displays they could swap it out for an intermediate color.
Since they devoted an entire word to gender, we can truthfully state that Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? (enhanced, DOS, 1990) believes there are 65536 genders.
BTW, my plan for expanding the program is simple: I'm gonna bypass a lot of code/data, by stuffing my own allocation into the memory space of carmen, which'll load extra data off the disk, in a CUSTOM.DAT file
this'll be (relatively) easy to do, since it turns out this program only needs 432 KB, since it targets a 512 KB RAM machine. Since it's no longer 1990, I think I can safely bump that up a bit? I won't need more than another 64 KB, which means I'll just bump the game up to 496 KB memory required. Completely doable in any 640 KB or more machine!
The way it actually works is the game uses "He/he/Him/him" for the pronouns, so \x80 is uppercase "He", \x81 is lowercase, \x82 is uppercase "Him", and \x83 is lowercase.
trying to figure out how to properly decode the fonts in this game is REALLY reminding me why I constantly cheat with The Death Generator. Staring at a decompilation/disassembly and hex editor is no fun
I got my floppy copy in the mail, I just need to image it.
Fun fact from the box: It has a letter from the player character to their cousin, and I believe this is the only place in the game and associated media that they name your character.
well my "ignore the problem" solution of using bochscpu to embed a 16bit x86 emulator has failed. it's somehow broken and it's broken in the rust library or C core, not the python, and I really don't want to have to deal with debugging this.
time to switch to a completely different x86 emulator? PROBABLY!
I'm implementing unicorn as an x86 emulator to do the decompression, but I'm single-stepping the processor and I'm aiding debugging by showing what instruction I'm on.
but instead of having to set up an x86 disassembly engine, I'm just parsing a plain text ghidra dump of the disassembly. I'm parsing it with regexes
to avoid the complexity of generating functions and mapping them into the address space of the emulated PC, I instead designed a simple syntax:
a 16bit segmented address plus a number. that function is emulated as if it returned that number in AX. There are no other options. I suspect I'll be able to emulate up to 80% of complex subfunctions with this one bit of functionality
I forgot about callee cleanup. fucking stdcall is callee cleanup. I can't have a generic int blah(){return 0x1234;} function because it needs to know how many words of arguments were pushed.
I took a look at the 1985 version to see if it had any other graphics command line options (it doesn't), but I did discover in passing that it uses a different pronoun system than the 1990 Enhanced version!
hacking a computer system by changing my pronouns to they/them so that it'll use up more memory composing strings referring to me and overflow the buffer
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? (1985) has an invert-y-axis option for the joystick, just in case you want to use flight simulator controls to navigate a menu
My best guess is that this game has between 4-6 compression algorithms, depending on how you count them. Possibly more are hidden in the bowels of this program.
this is not the game to do it with, but I really wanna try swapping out the drawing routines for one of these games once. go into a VESA mode where I can run at 1024x768 or something, and just make the drawing write to that buffer instead. Could I make BIGSCREEN DOS GAMES?
maybe I'll try it with railroad tycoon sometime. that game has loadable graphics modules. if I figure out enough of how it works, I could write my own driver for VESA Railroads
You also have to remember that it's not going to succeed more than, like, 6-8 times? There's just not that much memory in the system that this can touch, since it's not supporting any of the endless varieties of breaking the 640k barrier
there's a story on Old New Thing somewhere about Windows 95 accidentally breaking a DOS game, because it did this same trick of allocating all the memory, but since Win95 was running as the DPMS, it meant it had access to all of windows 95's virtual memory. including the swap.
So instead of mallocing all 8mb or whatever your 486 had, it malloced all that and then tried to use up YOUR ENTIRE HARD DRIVE, slowly.
And then it crashed because it didn't expect to succeed that many times. It had a fixed array of handles to memory, and it overflowed because it was run on a system with HUNDREDS OF MEGABYTES OF RAM, which is clearly impossible and unthinkable
I think the solution was that win95 just defaults DOS programs to maxing out at 16mb. It won't let them allocate more than that unless you adjust the EXE options
I'm not sure if anyone has ever designed a paletted graphics system that uses more than 256 colors. Probably at some point someone thought it was a good idea.
This game was released in 1990 but it has a hint that refers to the currency of Brazil as the "cruzado". But in 1989, it had been replaced by the cruzado novo. Clearly someone was using an out of date encyclopedia!
so I fly into Reykjavík, and immediately sleep for 8 hours. In the morning, I can go to either the airport or the hotel, but it'll take 3 hours to get to either.
Question: where am I right now, if I'm not at the hotel or the airport?
I mean, if your hotel is near Reykjavik or Keflavik, then you could be in one of the "wild" hot springs out in rural Iceland, like the one near Hella. That's where I'd go, anyway!
in a bed at the hotel attached to the airport. You could theoretically walk to the hotel lobby or the airport terminal in, at most, 15 minutes. You just have ADHD and are attempting to be realistic in your expectations. (don’t worry, me too)
Ah, now, that one I can answer from personal experience - interviewing for my first job, the company put me up in a hotel overnight beforehand. Problem: they accidentally booked me into the hotel chain's branch in [suburb], and were then confused when they arrived at the airport hotel to interview me. The shuttlebus back to the airport had just left when we twigged it, too, so it took a good hour+ to make my way over there...
I made a thing. In deep into finishing up the survival guide for Adventure! The Quack of Dawn. In the manual I have included images of characters from the demo game for the tutorial, and other things.
I am not an artist. However, I can manipulate images. So, as I don’t have a budget for art, I’m rolling my own combining public domain images and filters in Gimp. I briefly considered using generated images but believe it’s an abuse of fair use.
I'm posting this infographic as an excuse to (briefly) talk to people who, despite all the evidence, are having a hard time believing that a bunch of rich politicians and billionaire donors really are just hateful fascists willing to spend infinite monies on policing, persecuting, and even eliminating people they don't like for wholly arbitrary (white supremacy, xenophobia, anti-LGBTQ animus, ableism, misogyny, etc), irrational, or conspiratorial reasons.
First of all, let me assure you that they really are just a bunch of fundamentalists, hatemongers, and fascists. This isn't some sort of secret, the larger establishment right in America and the fascist Trump political machine have been caught saying the quiet parts out loud repeatedly when they think nobody is listening or has the courage to hold them to account; this is documented heavily in even mainstream media sources and then instantly memory-holed by the Very Serious PeopleTM in American public discourse. If you're struggling to comprehend how hate could be such a powerful motivating factor even for a class of people
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I'm posting this infographic as an excuse to (briefly) talk to people who, despite all the evidence, are having a hard time believing that a bunch of rich politicians and billionaire donors really are just hateful fascists willing to spend infinite monies on policing, persecuting, and even eliminating people they don't like for wholly arbitrary (white supremacy, xenophobia, anti-LGBTQ animus, ableism, misogyny, etc), irrational, or conspiratorial reasons.
First of all, let me assure you that they really are just a bunch of fundamentalists, hatemongers, and fascists. This isn't some sort of secret, the larger establishment right in America and the fascist Trump political machine have been caught saying the quiet parts out loud repeatedly when they think nobody is listening or has the courage to hold them to account; this is documented heavily in even mainstream media sources and then instantly memory-holed by the Very Serious PeopleTM in American public discourse. If you're struggling to comprehend how hate could be such a powerful motivating factor even for a class of people with enough "fuck you" money to last for generations, it's probably because you're not a hateful little nazi, and that's objectively a good thing.
Setting that aside however, I need you to understand that operating a militarized fascist police state is a highly-lucrative endeavor - for *some* people. Naturally, I don't mean its profitable for you, or the larger society you live in; in fact you'll effectively be billed for all this fascist repression in the form of taxes. But someone gets paid to install and operate the mass surveillance panopticon. Someone gets paid to violently disrupt legally-protected protests. Someone gets paid to arm and train the murderpigs. Someone gets paid to build the prisons and guard the incarcerated. Hell a bunch of besuited minions even get paid to catalogue all of this and write glowing reports about what an effective expenditure it is. There's so much money flowing through the U.S. carceral state that the larger industry that exists to serve it is a whole plank in the modern capitalist economy. Furthermore, the people getting rich off a fascist police state have more than enough money and power to bribe politicians to expand that fascist police state; which is why doing so has largely been a bipartisan position in American politics for decades and decades now. Even though he's using it in horrifying ways, it's important to remember that Trump did not build the already massive fascist police state he inherited when he became president; it was built by generations of American politicians before him, both Republican and Democrat; many of whom were trying to secure donor money, or make a quick buck regardless of who that ultimately harmed.
All of which brings us to Trump and the rapid expansion of the carceral complex necessary to enact his fascist agenda. When Downmarket Mussolini moves to conduct the mass deportation of millions of people, that creates an *enormous* pot of money that can be looted by his rich donors in various ways. Are these folks motivated by white supremacy? Yes, definitely, but even if they weren't we're talking about billions, if not trillions of dollars worth of government contracts at stake here - a whole lot of people are going to get very rich off Trump's ethno-nationalist policies, regardless of what they believe in their hearts. To varying degrees, the same holds true of surveilling, suppressing, and hunting down anti-genocide protestors, conducting a pogrom against trans people as part of a made up "war on gender ideology," spying on every woman in America to make sure she's not trying to get an abortion, and so forth. Maybe I won't ever be able to convince you that the establishment fascists, doing fascism, have hate in their hearts, but surely you're already familiar with some of the awful, inhumane, and tyrannical shit rich people and the politicians they own are already willing to do for fuckpiles of money in our society, right? As far as the donors behind Trump are concerned, a rapid expansion in the number of state "enemies" and targets for repression, along with the corresponding expansion of the apparatus necessary to conduct that repression, is potentially one of the most profitable business opportunities in American history.
Quite frankly, we *could* take this discussion a lot further; for example, I could point out that capitalism itself is dependent on the marginalization, otherization, and dehumanization of minority or out groups in our society to create whole classes of people it's legally acceptable to ruthlessly exploit. For now however, just keep in mind that there's potentially trillions of dollars available for folks who want to help transform Trump's fascist vision for America into reality, and for that reason (among many others), it doesn't actually matter what's in their hearts.
And just what does that rapid expansion of the fascist police state look like even in the infancy of the Trump administration? As this March 9th piece published on Truthout notes, it's already a fascist nightmare where migrants are kept in inhumane conditions and their human rights are routinely violated in violent, even lethal ways - and Downmarket Mussolini's regime is only getting started:
As Mass Incarceration of Immigrants Rises, Detention Centers Eye New Contracts
"That crisis is set to grow as detention expansion continues. Last week, ICE signed a $1 billion, 15-year contract with the private prison company GEO Group to reopen an empty jailhouse in Newark to incarcerate up to 1,000 immigration prisoners at a time, the first large detention expansion under Trump’s crackdown.
GEO Group pushed hard for the contract and sued New Jersey in 2024 to s
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And just what does that rapid expansion of the fascist police state look like even in the infancy of the Trump administration? As this March 9th piece published on Truthout notes, it's already a fascist nightmare where migrants are kept in inhumane conditions and their human rights are routinely violated in violent, even lethal ways - and Downmarket Mussolini's regime is only getting started:
As Mass Incarceration of Immigrants Rises, Detention Centers Eye New Contracts
"That crisis is set to grow as detention expansion continues. Last week, ICE signed a $1 billion, 15-year contract with the private prison company GEO Group to reopen an empty jailhouse in Newark to incarcerate up to 1,000 immigration prisoners at a time, the first large detention expansion under Trump’s crackdown.
GEO Group pushed hard for the contract and sued New Jersey in 2024 to successfully overturn a state law originally supported by racial justice activists that banned private companies from contracting with ICE to house immigrants. Now, GEO Group reportedly has plans to increase the facility’s capacity to incarcerate people and potentially generate an additional $500 to $600 million in annual profit. The company has faced multiple lawsuits after immigrants were subjected to what attorneys describe as underpaid and forced labor. Most recently, a federal court upheld a ruling requiring GEO Group to pay $23 million in damages after the company paid ICE detainees $1 a day for labor at a detention center in Tacoma, Washington."
Like most honest reporting about America's horrifying migrant carceral complex, this is a hard story to read for folks who aren't already familiar with the cruelty, depravity, and casual disregard for human life with which Americans conduct their one-sided war on migrants. The testimony from formerly-incarcerated individuals provided in just this single story should be enough for most people to understand that this has nothing to do with so-called responsible policing, or keeping anyone safe, while the dollar figures involved make it clear that broadly speaking the US government is heavily-funding a whole lot of odious people in the business of torturing migrants for profit. Furthermore, as Trump works to expand the hunting, detention, and deportation of migrants, the piles of money, flow of human rights violations, and atrocities committed in the name of protecting Americans from the lady who works at your local nail salon, will only expand correspondingly.
From that Times piece about the bromance between Gavin Newsom and the far Right:
"Their fast-paced, hourlong discussion was both good-natured and peppered with predictable disagreements. But the conversation revealed some curious policy overlap and potentially exposed each man’s views to supporters of the other."
WE ARE SO COOKED.
omg I'm about to turn into a crazy crank, I'm so mad.
My sister was running down the hallway of our ranch-style suburban house, and had a Lincoln Log get shoved down her throat at a high rate of speed as she fell on the vinyl runner. Over 45 years later, that was still memorable.
Vladimir Putin does not typically dress in military fatigues, and the main reason for this, I can only assume, is that he looks absolutely terrible in them.
![Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego:
showing the printer, which is reading "[Y]OURSELF:" vertically along the left side of the paper](https://friendica.rogueproject.org/photo/preview/640/204329 "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego:
showing the printer, which is reading \"[Y]OURSELF:\" vertically along the left side of the paper")
ellie
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