As bad as American prisons are, they are not on the scale as being deported (is that even the right word in this case?) to what amounts to a concentration camp in a foreign country without any process.

While there must certainly be some devout Muslims who try their best to keep the “rules”, as I’d expect in any group, a lot of Muslims are not so different frombthe rest of us non-Muslims.

My coworker is a former Muslim who had to leave his home country due to persecution when he became a Christian. Here, he’s made Muslim friends who regularly invite him over for dinner and they serve… Pork. They say because he is not a Muslim, they respect that and don’t force him to eat halal. But why does not forcing him to eat halal equate to them eating pork?

They are genuinely his friends, but he is also their “excuse” to break halal.

BBC series Merlin was a little like this. King Uther hated magic, Prince Arthur was kinda against it because he was told it was dangerous, but didn’t exactly hate it himself. Meanwhile Merlin took a job as a servant, doing magic-y things to protect him. Wasn’t a great series (writing), but it had enjoyable aspects.

This guy reviews all kinds of e-ink devices. https://www.youtube.com/c/MyDeepGuide/videos

I watched his videos before deciding to get a large format BOOX Max Lumi (13") for PDF reading and note taking. I wanted the large one to split screen a PDF textbook on the left and notebook on the right. That was a few years ago, though, and I suggest reviewing some more recent videos to get an idea of what the current devices are like.

You can download Signal APK directly from their website.

In some different countries, WhatsApp is how people conduct business. I am anti WhatsApp in my regular life, but I used it with a VOIP number when I was traveling abroad.

It’s one thing to tell your friends and family you use Signal, you can’t tell literally every business. Well, you can, they just won’t to do business with you.

I miss flip phones for similar reasons. I loved flicking them open and snapping them shut.

Mostly just Discovery and Picard is kind of halfway there.

SNW is a really fun watch once they’ve dealt with Pike’s future (which they kind of really have to). Personally I like that they go for different genres, but I can see why some people might not like that if.

Lower Decks is a riot and a half and I think it’s my favourite Star Trek, but it might be kind of cheating because it stands on the shoulders of all the other shows.

Prodigy is quite a bit different from the other shows, but it’s full of optimism, hope, and friendship. It doesn’t start out that way, they’re all very suspicious of each other at first. They grow into it as they learn more about themselves and each other, and aspire to be part of the Federation and Starfleet.

Netflix literally will not take my money anymore. I had cancelled my subscription during covid because money was tight, but I was willing to temporarily re-subscribe when the next season of select shows came out. I tried to re-enable my original account, but I couldn’t because they wouldn’t accept my credit card. I tried different cards, then tried to make new accounts with different emails and different credit cards, but still couldn’t. Netflix kept rejecting all my cards. I ran out of credit cards.

Look, I was willing to give Netflix my money, it’s not my fault they were unwilling to take it.

I’ll have you know that Queen Elizabeth and her father were both stamp collectors! Really, there’s really a royal stamp collection and its considered (likely) the best (the wisest in breath) in the world.

I used to provide some user support at a previous job. (It wasn’t exactly my job, but people would ask for help.) And it’d be easy to get frustrated, thinking people were stupid or incompetent, but I’d remind myself that being good at computers isn’t part of their job, it’s part of my job. These people were hired for other areas of expertise. If I had to do take on parts of their jobs, I’d look stupid and incompetent too.

That said… sometimes the level of incomprehension people have really is incomprehensible to me. There’s a level where you’re reaching wilful ignorance. When I point at something on the screen and tell the person to click on that… and they can’t or won’t move the mouse there and click on it…