It's almost midnight in Moscow. Has Putin announced the winner yet?

@alienghic People are standing in vote lines because there's a shortage of democracy so everybody wants to get some.

@zinnia An underappreciated trigger of migraines (in some people) is dehydration.

@eniko FWIW, once you're capable of the minimal power output (which might take some practice, depending on your hills), it takes less total effort to pedal uphill with a bike than to walk without one. Consider that you won't have to go up the hill fast; you only need to go fast enough to be able to maintain balance — which can be a remarkably low speed. And putting the bike into a low gear to get up a hill is not cheating, either.

And after that point, unlike walking, your speed will get higher with practice, too.

@eniko This applies even though your winters may be mild, as they are here in Germany.

@eniko Ah, but consider that bikes get heavily discounted at the "end of season".

My point is, if that's the only reason, you shouldn't speculate about the costs without actually checking what the prices are. I got mine a couple of years ago from Marktkauf, which is basically a German big box store, for about 900 € after an end-of-season discount. The early season price for a branded basic commuter-oriented e-bike was then around 3000–4000 euros.

@eniko Consider getting an electric bike, then.

@RedCyberPandaz Did you get a provisional ballot?

The Deck of Many Things is clearly modelled after the real-world concept of a Kid Who Was Supposed to Be Many Things.

@amoroso As for the text material, the main points are: what this thing does, why it seemed like a good thing at the time, and which other ancient pieces of tech you need to connect to it if you want to play with it.

@amoroso Doesn't matter. The old manuals were written on a long-obsolete fibrous material called "pae-pah" somehow made by killing trees directly rather than using the civilised tree-killing technique of ruining the climate, and yet we can easily read them displayed on our futuristic visi-screens.

@revoluciana Even if the Nazis will come and ask if they have trans people hiding in their cellar, or attic, or disused priesthole.

Moby Dick is a cautionary tale about the dangers of harassing innocent whales.

It's kind of rude of people who used to write retromanuals for retrosoftware of retrocomputers invariably neglected to put in a section addressed to the Dear Reader from Distant Future of Thirty, Forty, or maybe even Fifty Years.

People who today write future retromanuals for computers and software that will be retro in the distant future: do better than the cave-tech writers.

#retrocomputing

For some non-costume-based horror, consider: snap-on, snap-off Pitot tubes.

Tirritate people who insist on "testing" being done before a trans child can access puberty blockers by gently suggesting that a standardised test be used for this purpose.

:blobcatgiggle:

When your heart has been blessed, the polite response is Bless your heart, too!

:blobcatupsidedown:

@welshpixie It says 'Butts', doesn't it.

@spv According to time-honoured journalism rules, dog biting man would not be news.

@tomjennings I don't think it's an LLM output, at least, not directly. Note how it repeats a multi-word phrase a number of times. This is old tech, done by template-based text generators.

The picture is from a recent generative AI, though.