Definitely a bokeh effect. Shallow DOF would still have captured the whiskers.
But I don’t doubt it’s a ‘real’ photo. I don’t generally like the iPhone portrait mode because of its artificial DOF. I mean, unless I’m going for that — but it’s tricky because it pulls nonsense like the above photo.
[Bevis chuckle]
Yeah! Show us your kitty, OP! Show us all your holes!
He’s a sweet guy. … Mostly. Very much in need of a lot of attention. Sometimes he just sits next to you on the couch and puts his paw on you if you’re not giving him enough attention.
Here he is posing with his sister as a prop:
This made me laugh so hard one of the dogs came to check in on me.
For the U.S., the decisive blow came with the Citizens United ruling, although it’s not unreasonable to suggest the refusal to punish Nixon during watergate signaled that the rule of law was merely a suggestion. That kicked off a whole cascade of political and legal maneuvering to get both the legislative and societal landscape into such a contortion that it would willingly hand away the entire nation to vulture-capitalists.
Because they don’t believe in choice, freedom, or even democracy. They merely support the ideal and facilitate the illusion.
Anything that empowers voters to either dilute the two-party hegemony (where both parties are accountable to the same pool of donors) or elect party members that haven’t been carefully vetted by insiders is a threat to entrenched power structures. Adding roadblocks now ensures that transitions to better systems are made that much more challenging via peaceful and lawful means.
That’s a great answer, but I’d like to proffer “Why don’t you find out?” as a response - assuming appropriate context, situation, and preferences, of course.
People will know you as the man with swagger as big as your … feet!
Oh, snap, bringing me the magic I need, but didn’t know to look for.
I’ve been refusing to update because of video station. Looks like I’m saving your comment for later.
Back then the internet was a bunch of coffee shops. Not literally, of course - but for me it was about 30 people on messenger, my favorite chatroom, a random message board, a small but far flung group of people on LiveJournal, and sometimes even my Neopets guild.
Each was my own retreat. The weird and funny stuff we shared there was created and shared because people had a passion for whatever. It also was great in that you could learn about something, and share it with another group that had not seen it yet.
Today the internet is the infinite cul-de-sacs of meme pages, political messaging groups, and disinformation rings on Facebook, along with approximately 6 people that keep showing up from your friends list of hundreds. Or it’s the screaming gladiatorial stadium of Reddit, where the sheer volume of noise smothers any particular voice. Maybe it’s the infinite lawless Walmart of X or even the carefully manicured Target that is BlueSky.
From mining your attention, to hawking trinkets amidst the spectacle, or attempting to sell a little bit of everything to anyone, the new internet lacks third places. It’s all business, all the time, and you can feel it. Every meme is created to engage with that platform’s broadest audience. Everything is homogenized and lacks uniqueness. All the content has been aggregated and reshared, and in the endless and futile search for validation from the algorithm it’s lost something that makes it meaningful.
And that’s why I like Lemmy. It’s a digital third place.
The advice I needed and have not been able to find. I could kiss you. Or at least give you a fond nod.
My desk wireless charger is magnetic, and my keyboard is wireless and can be switched between devices. So I can switch to my phone and bang out a message on my keyboard while my phone is held up comfortably.
That’s sort of the funny thing. They were disapproving of him, not because they understood he was making a caricature of them, but that he was saying the quiet part out loud.
Right. I know someone who works for a unit of government. They hated that their contact info was publicly available because I guess LinkedIn headhunters kept finding their work email and mailing them there. I think they wound up deleting LinkedIn.
But anyway. It’s public information, because it’s a public job. That’s what it is. Same reason that government websites can’t/shouldn’t say “copyright 2025 the government” because all their materials are property of the public.
But then, as now, it won’t understand what it’s supposed to do, and will merely attempt to apply stolen code - ahem - training data in random permutations until it roughly matches what it interprets the end goal to be.
We’ve moved beyond a thousand monkeys with typewriters and a thousand years to write Shakespeare, and have moved into several million monkeys with copy and paste and only a few milliseconds to write “Hello, SEGFAULT”
Article is less bad than headline. Looks like DOE didn’t officially grant access, but someone gave the guy access anyway.
DOE caught it, and wants to know what the fuck happened.
DOE is big. They regulate all sorts of stuff and the likely target is not nukes, but personnel information. That gives them the power to fire climate researchers, replace regulators and decision makers with stooges, and ensure the DOE derails the shift to greener tech - as much as they can.
There’s currently big DOE-funded projects ongoing that will allow for Texas to connect to the national grid, and will connect giant solar and wind farms in Oklahoma and Maine to long distance lines that connect all the way to the Hoover Dam — something that makes the drought in that area less impactful should they have to shut off the turbines due to falling water levels.
No sir, you’re cured by edict of the government.
Hope you don’t need accommodations or assistance, because if you do, RFK might ship you off to a slave labor camp until your disability is no longer an issue.
Most likely. Unless you have testicles, in which case you may have testicular cancer.
In either situation, take another test or two, and then prepare to speak to medical professionals.
I think specifically they are referencing this:
In heavily Arab-American areas of Michigan, where disfavor with Biden’s handling with the war is at its highest, purportedly pro-Israel billboards have for weeks trumpeted Harris’s commitment to Israel and featured her Jewish husband Doug Emhoff; online ads with the same message have also targeted these constituencies. Meanwhile, the same PAC has also funded mailers sent to Jewish households in Pennsylvania declaring that Harris not pro-Israel enough.
The above article also discusses how this was not merely the effort of one PAC, but that multiple PACs were engaged in this sort of disinformation.
However - I think I understand what you mean, and Harris should have immediately broken with Biden on Palestine. Make no mistake, I’m not thinking of this as some sort of dispassionate politics-as-baseball strategy.
The right thing to do was and always will be to stop a genocide.
Addiction has a medical definition, not a connotation.
As previously shown, SSRI’s do not cause addiction, even if they can cause withdrawal or physical dependence for some people.
I guess I’m wondering if support of this policy has to be riddled with asterisks and accompanied by statements that express hopes of how the programs will be run, then why express any support at all for them?
And finally: There are safe places available for people to go if they feel they are having mental health issues that require more intensive care.
Mind you, these are really only available to people with health insurance - Regan largely killed off federal and community mental health care in the 80’s. Care that cannot be replaced with a labor camp.
The only proper replacement for that care is rebuilding that/those system(s), and that is not what RFK is proposing. He’s proposing a labor camp to take advantage of and imprison away vulnerable populations.
I have dogs. (And a cat that hisses at the mailman, so - a dog.)
We all sleep naked. Not under the same blanket.