Before I even knew to hate Adobe, they were my favorite company to pirate from in college. Them and ChaosGroup

I am admittedly not a super-user, I basically only use vector and raster editing maybe once every 6 months, but for what it’s worth I’ve managed to survive using affinity for most of my needs. I work in the AEC industry so we have a different PDF editor (thankfully)

I think affinity avoids getting under Adobe’s skin by omitting certain popular features (for example, Designer still does not have image trace, which was probably 50% of what i used illustrator for), but otherwise they’re serviceable

for what it’s worth - I’ve heard some people have limited success running affinity software on linux

Haven’t tried it myself, and they’re upfront about some features being broken, but it might check enough boxes to work.

Here’s a repo

Who can really blame him, every time he steps foot in public he’s either being yelled or shot at.

Having to do you rallies in a bulletproof glass box because people keep pointing guns at you is kinda like having to wear a condom because your partner has an active STD flareup.

This is excellent, thanks for sharing

I feel like “diet mountain dew” is a dig at Hasan

Lmao isn’t that allegedly his soc account?

Is he just manufacturing political commentary about himself?

My SIL just left a job like that. It was a wife and husband, and the wife would routinely stiff the warehouse workers and then ghost them, and my sister in law would answer the angry calls from the warehouse and have to pretend like the owners weren’t there.

Fucking awful. Small business owners have this tendency to behave like entitled children.

I’m very lucky that my boss is as respectable/considerate a person as I could hope for, but he’s incapable of telling clients ‘no’ so we’re completely drowning in the shit.

I’m very lucky in that my boss is nearly as broke as I am. He didn’t pay himself a salary when I first started, which is fucking admirable, but it also means that I’m not really in a position to ask for my value.

If the guy was a prick I would feel less inclined to work my ass off lol

I’m definitely missing my last job at a big firm.

Granted, a job is still a job, and the threat of being fired is always there, but there was a certain ambivalence that came with it when things went to shit that I could cope with.

With this small company I am emotionally invested and it’s hard to detach from it at the end of the day. Shit sucks.

We’re at a sports bar. All sports lead to gambling, and Wall Street has always been about gambling, too. So I thought, why not combine the two? If you’re watching football or baseball and you’ve got money riding on it, it’s the same thing with stocks. People get attached to these things for better or worse. It’s the way our times work.

Gamba and finance bros, name a more iconic duo.

It is so hard for cishets to break free from this thinking. They almost grasp the concept when they nominally understand ‘gender’ to be constructed and distinct from ‘sex’, but then make the same mistake as reactionaries by lumping some non-biological aspect of ‘gender’ back into ‘sex’ in a trans-exclusionary way. At-best they end up misunderstanding the trans experience in a deeply bigoted way, and at-worst they cynically use ‘sex’ as a biologically deterministic justification for transphobia and sexism.

‘Sex’ is almost not even worth preserving as a classification in people, except in some very specific medical treatment questions - but even then, to someone who is transitioned/transitioning many of those medical distinctions become blurred and nonrigid again.

This person sounds like a TERF to me, they can fuck off.

Imo it’s not as unpleasant as tree jizz in the spring

I highly recommend his concerts, you leave feeling very uplifted

All my hobbies only last a couple months before I lose interest. That’s why gaming is good, though; I can usually satisfy my need for change by picking a different game

FNV is the other one in my library I bought thinking I’d like it because it’s so fondly talked about.

I keep thinking about trying BG3 but I have a feeling it’ll end the same way

Why the fuck did they think rolling him put was a good idea??

Hes not even popular in his home state

it’s just a gully, that’s all. Just nerves

I’m not sure i’ve gotten far enough to appreciate the octopi just yet.

My fear of the slime mold reminds me a lot of my revulsion for the Alien movies with the Xenomorphs and face huggers. Which makes sense, because the intent of those aliens was to horrify via a kind of sexual violation. It forces a spawn into an unwilling host and compels them to carry something not-of-them. But the slime mold is scarier to me, because it isn’t just a physical violation but a cognitive/psychological one. It brings self-determination into question (at least more than human nature already does). How much of your thoughts are yours? How much of your subjective experience is yours? Do you have any choice in resisting the alien, or could you even decide to resist at all?

That’s why I think Kern and Meshner’s storyline strikes me as very similar, but it’s still absent that slight physical component of the slime mold physically living in the host brain. That, to me, is just beyond-the-pail terrifying.

I’ve just gotten to the part where the portiads are about to meet the slime molds and I’m just as anxious as I was the first time lol. It definitely reminds me of Alien, now that the setting is an actual derelict space station. Wish me luck

I’m really enjoying the thematic symmetry with her and the parasitic alien species

The last book touched a bit on continuity of self and consciousness, but I’m really intrigued with how this one is exploring those boundaries more. I like the parallels between space colonization and terraforming and the parasitic species colonizing hosts and Kern doing the same through neural implants…

It’s horrific and great