“Papers, please” - just like Soviet Russia and the other Soviet-bloc countries.

A mirror of Anna’s Archive.

Information is meant to be free.

…And it’s bound to be stupidly expensive.

Wish I could afford 20 of them, but not without winning the Powerball.

Another tool is yWriter.

This isn’t a tool for everyone, because it is research-first focused.

What I mean by that is that it’s a little clunky because background/research data is meant to go into it first, and then you are supposed to lean on that content to write your book second.

So for a non-fiction book, you would add all the data and facts and references, for a fiction book you would put in all of the important characters and plot points and things that the characters interact with.

This is so you always have a body of references to work off of so you don’t introduce inconsistencies.

Some people might find this software useful because assembling and fleshing out the underlying data is loads of fun and/or how they prep. Others might need this feature just to keep track of everything that goes into their book, as they might not be able to keep track of things like character quirks very easily in their head.

YMMV.

ACAB.

Sometimes criminals also shoot back at the police that come after them with guns.

In the heat of the moment, the only difference between a vigilante and a cop is the level of training, the assigned equipment, and the choice for the cop to follow well-established procedural rules. It’s only when you zoom out do you see the legal system supporting the cop. But when zoomed in and examining the individual incidents, nothing says the cop can’t come away with added lead, either.

Vigelanty justice only works when target deserved like the dead CEO, otherwise it just crime.

You clearly see the world in black-and-white, when it really is made up of shades of grey.

Which means that since you haven’t already gotten the point, all the crayons and construction paper in the world isn’t going to help.

The point I was making… Is that the article brought a red herring fact that has nothing to do with anything

Why did they bring it up?

It was not a red herring in the least, and it struck to the very core of my own criticisms: while some vigilantes may be very stringent about their own investigations and targets, others may not.

In this example, these vigilantes artificially engineered a target where none was likely to ever exist. They drew the target in using the profile of a perfectly legal 18yo woman, but then turned around and claimed that the target was actually chasing the profile of an 17yo - and illegally young - girl, when he was in fact not doing so.

This was a very clear situation of entrapment by false pretenses.

Who said there is anything wrong with this?

How is tbsi even example of pedophile rape? It is two adults.

that’s a weird thing to bring NYT tbh

Tell me you completely failed to grok my criticisms without saying that they flew clear over your head at 10,000m

I don’t have a problem with actual pedophiles that are caught in these dragnets.

My problem arises from the lack of rigorous and well-documented investigation into the target before shite starts popping off. As the article pointed out, there is nothing wrong with a 22yo dating an 18yo. And the problem here is a sense of vindictiveness trying to manufacture targets where not all targets are guilty of pedophilia.

So: you want to take a pipe wrench to warm over a pedophile? Make sure there is oodles of evidence that clearly and unambiguously makes the person a pedophile, and sure as shite I will look the other way. But the problem is that there is no self-reinforcing framework in place within the vigilante system to ensure and enforce this threshold of evidence. And without this system, innocent people are going to get hurt or killed.

So how long until the first underground railroads for young women are set up?

I mean, I am already talking with American LGBQT about being on the Canadian side to receive them. But it looks like we’ll need to set one up for women, as well.

Looks like I’ll finally be migrating my final workstation off of Windows 11.

I mean, I still have a while. The Dell T7910 still meets all of the Windows 11 Workstation 24H2 requirements, so Rufus only needs to modify that one part of the installer. And once I have Windows installed, I can do upgrades over Windows Update.

But once the machine gets too old for that…

At least OpenSUSE meets most of my needs.

I think this will be a coercive leverage to “encourage” military conscription.

Massive student loans? Sign on the line for 10 years fighting to kill citizens of other countries like Panama and Canada, and your loans will be discharged!

Specific loans like student loans could also act as triggers to deny passports and other ways of escaping the country.

VM

That still doesn’t solve 99.9% of my issues, it just tries to solve a problem for which I already have a solution actively in-place: a KVM.

In that way it’s become adversarial.

Back in the 2000s, I was able to say that while a fundamental install took only about a half hour to set up, usability tweaks and a full fleshing out of functionality took another 4-8 hours depending on what the user was going to use the machine for.

I just did a Win11 24h2 install. It took nearly 24 working hours before I considered it even minimally functional for my needs. Cycling through Win10Privacy two or three times was particularly frustrating. Registry work alone took me a good 8-10 hours of trying stuff a step at a time and then rebooting to see how it worked.

At this point, the only reason why I am still running with a Windows rig is for those half-dozen programs that don’t have appropriate non-Windows variants. It’s why I’m also running a Mac Mini and an OpenSUSE tower through the same 4-port, 6-head KVM.

When the cost of disobeying a direct order during “wartime” is prison or even execution, most soldiers will obey.

Especially since most of the American military is deeply conservative and ChristoFascist in the first place.

And so his purge of bipartisan and democratic leaders of the military allows him to ensconce lackeys that won’t question or refuse orders to invade other countries, like Canada.

People keep on saying that America won’t invade other countries, like Panama or Canada. THIS IS WHY THEY WILL BE ABLE TO DO SO.

Canada might need these sooner rather than later.

With the breakdown of democracy and the rule of law in America, the Constitution just became wholly unenforceable and therefore irrelevant. That means that Trump could make good on his fever dream of invading Canada.

And there are many Americans who would jump at the chance to obey his command to slaughter Canadians. With only 40M against America’s 334M - and 0.097M military personnel against America’s 2.1M - it would be absolutely no contest.

Our only way of making such a fascist act of aggression as painful as possible would be with asymmetrical warfare using tiny, hard-to-defeat drones that could act independently and strike without warning. Deploy 10k of these suckers onto a battlefield, and the only survivors would be those within sealed armour or flying at high altitude. Because even an A10 Warthog loitering low over the field can be taken out if it unexpectedly ingests a half-dozen of the explosive buggers.

Canadian phone on a Canadian carrier, freshly updated to iOS 18.3.1. Looks like the correct and proper name is still being used by Apple Maps.

Why not a national police force, such that a disgraced cop can’t just mosey on to the next town over and get hired there?

One of the big problems with America is that it is so frictionless for cops to just city-hop whenever they fuck up.

At least in Canada, with the RCMP being in most cities and towns, it is damn difficult for any RCMP officer to job-hop. Especially when the RCMP is a clear cut above in training, and anyone who tries to job-hop from them to a city cop will be intensely questioned as to why they are downgrading so significantly.

Yes, the RCMP has some pretty bad apples; power doesn’t corrupt so much as it attracts the corruptible like flies to excrement. And the RCMP gives its officers plenty of power, for sure.

But in just the last few years alone, I have seen RCMP officers disciplined for behaviour that wouldn’t have even raised an eyebrow in any U.S. police force.