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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Dungeons and Daddies (not a BDSM podcast)
    A D&D podcast about 4 dads from our world that get tossed into the Forgotten Realms on a quest to find their missing kids. It’s fucking hilarious.

    Old Gods of Appalachia
    Many eons ago, Earth was a prison for things that shouldn’t be. Buried under what we now call the Appalachian Mountains, long they waited. But time weathers all things, and what were once gigantic mountains have eroded to mere nubs of what they once were. Then man, in his quest for coal, cracked open that black prison and things started leaking out… Set in “alternate Appalachia” in the late 1800s and early 1900s. A great, dark story.

    Scared To Death
    Think of all those scary stories you’ve ever heard… urban legends, ghost stories, monsters, cryptids, aliens… Of course, most of them are just stories right? But what if one of them was true? And, if one of them was true, what does that mean for the rest of them? Each week, they take two stories found on the internet and two-four listener-submitted stories, tell them, and assuming they’re true, discuss what that would mean. Take care while listening.


  • Web developer here. A “cookie” is just a piece of information stored on your machine. A cookie can be a setting, saved app data, or a tracking id.

    The reason you keep seeing the banner is because by saying “no” to cookies, you’re telling them they don’t have permission to store ANYTHING on your computer. Which is fine. Your computer your call.

    But if they can’t store anything on your computer, there’s no way to remember that setting next time you come to the website. No local setting storage means they don’t have the stored “no cookies” setting to load. Likewise there’s no tracking id they could potentially look your setting up in their own database by.

    Web site requests are “stateless”. That means that, to a web server, each and every single request to a server is its own brand new, separate connection with no link to any other connection. The only way to share data between individual requests is via some kind of stored “state”. That state can come from your computer in the form of cookies, or from the server in the form of sessions. But linking a connection to a session requires your computer providing a session id; and guess how your computer has to store a session id? If you guessed “in a cookie” you win.

    Are cookie popups annoying? Oh holy Christ yes, both from a web user standpoint and from the stand point of having to implement them as a developer. But by outright rejecting cookies (and/or auto-wiping your cache/cookies when you close the browser), you’re telling the website it’s not allowed to store your preferences for not having cookies and eliminating the websites ability to recall that preference at all.




  • In the US, “liberal” and “conservative” come from different interpretations of the constitution. A “liberal” is somebody who interprets it liberally, that is, that the people who wrote it couldn’t account for every possibility, so interpretations of it should take into account the “spirit” of the work and try to interpret what they wanted when they wrote it. A “conservative” interprets it conservatively, that is, that they only concern themselves with the “letter” of what it says, and that the law is limited to EXACTLY what the document says based on the language at the time it was written.

    Without taking obvious sides on this argument in this post, this is part of where the argument over the 2nd amendment comes from - The exact wording of the amendment isn’t up for debate - it’s written down right over there and anybody can read it. But what the two sides differ on is:

    1. What that wording actually means.
    2. Whether or not that wording is still relevant.
    3. Whether or not that section should be repealed by amendment.

    The literal exact wording is: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

    But what does that actually mean?

    To a conservative, it is interpreted using the original meanings of the words with no room for error. The words are sacrosanct and not up for revision or reinterpretation. “well regulated” in 1700s vocabulary means “well equipped and maintained”, and a militia was a group of citizens that organized themselves outside of military control. “to keep” means to own “and bear” means to have something in their possession at any time in any situation. So taken together, translated to modern language using the original meanings of the words, it means “A country’s security and freedom depend upon citizens coming together with proper equipment, maintenance, and training, so people shall always have the right to own and carry weapons.”

    But to a liberal, there’s room for interpretation and modification. In modern parlance, “well regulated” means “subject to rules and regulations”. A “militia” is a volunteer military organization. Taken together, they mean “A military organization with stringent rules.” So if the sentence starts with “A well regulated militia…”, then does the sentence only apply to those in the military? Combined with the next clause, it goes “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of the free state…”. At the time of the writing, militias were the primary system of civilian security. But now we have military and civilian police for security, so do we still need civilian firearm ownership / public carry? If not, then is this clause even necessary anymore? Should an amendment eliminate it?

    Again, I’m not taking a side in this post. That’s not my goal here. Of course I have my own opinion, but to maintain neutrality, I’m not going to share it on this thread. I’m just trying to illustrate how the terms “conservative” and “liberal” grew out of different interpretations and thoughts regarding the US constitution.