The right (or far right) will probably win the next Spanish elections, which might rekindle independentist sentiment (both left and right have traditionally fucked with Catalonia, but the right has worse excuses), but personally I think we lost our best opportunity when we didn’t follow up on the 2017 declaration of independence.

The far righ would straight try to genocide us, so there might be an opportunity there. We need to be uncomfortable enough to get off our fat arses and work for our freedom, like back in the 2010s.

Gibbons’ The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, all six volumes of it.

It’s supposed to be kind of sort of federal(ish) (federalish enough, in theory, to keep Catalonia and Euskadi happy enough that we won’t want to leave). “States” are called autonomías (autonomies) and have their own government, laws, and institutions, though they still have to obey the Spanish government and most of its laws. It isn’t really working.

The article is still wrong when it uses “feds”, though, because the cops doing this are the mossos d’esquadra, the Catalan autonomic police, not the “federal(ish)” policía nacional (the Spanish police proper) or guardia civil (despite the name, the military Spanish police, a relic from Franco’s dictatorship, like most of the country and its institutions).

It’s supposed to be kind of sort of federal(ish) (federalish enough, in theory, to keep Catalonia and Euskadi happy enough that we won’t want to leave). “States” are called autonomías (autonomies) and have their own government, laws, and institutions, though they still have to obey the Spanish government and most of its laws. It isn’t really working.

The article is still wrong when it uses “feds”, though, because the cops doing this are the mossos d’esquadra, the Catalan autonomic police, not the “federal(ish)” policía nacional (the Spanish police proper) or guardia civil (despite the name, the military Spanish police, a relic from Franco’s dictatorship, like most of the country and its institutions).

Bird skeletons (or simply plucked birds) are seriously disturbing.

It’s incredible how much work feathers do when it comes to bird appearance.

Owls are cute and fluffy. Plucked owls are horrific alien nightmares from the outer dimensions.

Makes one wonder.

if dinosaurs are similar in breathing to humans

Current living dinosaurs are much more efficient at extracting oxygen from air than practically anything else in the planet.

Birds’ve got a unidirectional respiratory system that ensures oxygenated air is constantly flowing through their lungs (unlike, for instance, us mammals, who must empty our lungs of spent air before we can fill them again), and a system of air sacs to keep the air constantly flowing.

While fossil records of the earliest dinosaurs show no evidence of air sacs, later ones do, suggesting that bird-like respiratory systems evolved multiple times in parallel in different branches.

Sauropods in particular might have had even more complex air sac systems than modern birds, which could explain how they managed to grow so large (i.e., they were full of air, and might have been even more efficient when it comes to breathing, though their long necks might have offset the balance in the opposite direction).

Dinosaurs would have been perfectly fine with current oxygen levels.

We’re not talking dogs here.

We’re taking something much closer to birds. I.e., utter evil bastards. Probably smart, too.

No one in their right mind keeps cassowaries as pets, with very good reason.

Are haemorrhoids considered a bad omen…?

Thinking back on it, we had book stores back then, so people could have gotten encyclopedias from there, so how did encyclopedia salesmen make any sales??

If I recall correctly you couldn’t buy the big encyclopaedias in bookstores (dictionaries and single book encyclopedias, sure, but not the big multiple volume ones), only through their sellers or by phone.

And they often came with a subscription to get new update appendixes and the like.

(Also most of these door to door salespeople probably also carried other products, like subscriptions to magazines and whatnot; and, an average encyclopedia being at least ten volumes, going up to twenty or so, they weren’t cheap, so they didn’t need that many sales.)

programmers

They don’t program, therefore they’re not programmers (and they’ll probably never be again, since using LLMs has been proven to damage one’s ability to reason and learn, probably permanently).

Vibe coders, maybe.

Victims of the LLM scam, definitely.

I still have a fondness for TARGA (.TGA) from back in the day…

I live close to the central area of an ~80,000 population city.

Looking at Google maps I’ve got about 10 general stores within 300 meters, probably thrice that within 500m, plus plenty of smaller specialised stores.

300 to 600m seems like a reasonable distance to walk to and back with four to six bags of groceries.

For smaller more specialised shopping trips one or two kilometres would be fine too.

Three might be a bit much, though I’ve often walked that to go to the cinema.

Atlanta!!!

Atlatl. Or simply spear-thrower.

It’s a bit like a fing-longer, but for your whole arm, and therefore more useful.

Same principle as the sling: they make your arm longer so the “hand” moves faster when you swing it, allowing you to throw stuff at higher and more lethal speeds, and farther.

We’re still quite lethal even without these tools though, just look at baseball pitchers.

Also our accuracy and reach when throwing stuff.

Especially when combined with our ability to make stuff sharp by banging it against other stuff and breaking it just the right way.

Of course it’s limiting your options!

Screwing up the customer should not be an option you’re allowed to take!

Which one?

Pym, I’d assume. I mean, the guy beat his wife, created Ultron, and is generally even more of an asshole than Stark…

I did warn you.

Krokodil, probably.

(Seriously, don’t look up images of its effects, it’s extremely NSFL shit.)

Only thing I can think of is Aquarela do Brasil, but that’s only because of Terry Gilliam…

Anything else would be in flagrant violation of the GDPR (and this too, probably, though not as flagrantly).