Germany I'll give you. They've definitely been putting in a herculean effort on the American Poodle front of late. But they'll have to go some to beat the UK's decades' long subservience. When it comes to foreign policy, the UK is basically a US satellite state.>You described Germany! Britain and France are quite independent...France, on the other hand, were historically probably the Western European nation most likely to tell the US 'Non!' --although, that seems to be increasingly a thing of the past now too.
- I am an artist and these kind of articles and numerous similar videos on YouTube: 'How to draw faces... How to draw a cat... How to draw a horse...' annoy the hell out of me. As if 'learning to draw' consisted of following some formulaic recipe, without even having the object in question in front of you, or even having seen it.
The number one skill in learning to draw is learning to see properly. The vast majority of non-artistic people look at things without ever really seeing them. A classic example can be found on Gianluca Gimini's Velocipedia project:
https://www.gianlucagimini.it/portfolio-item/velocipedia/
Here's a another example:
https://www.boredpanda.com/famous-brand-logos-drawn-from-mem...
Mechanically filling a page with shapes or following some idiotic 'how to draw a...' tutorial on YouTube will only teach you how to fill a page with shapes or make a bad copy of someone else's bad drawing. Learning to really look at things and attempting to put down what you see [as opposed to what you thought the item looked like before you actually studied it] is a far far more useful exercise.
I take your point that this article might provide some useful exercises for loosening up your doodling technique, to people who find it awkward to manipulate a pen or pencil freely. But calling it 'learning to draw' is as hyperbolic as calling some warm-up stretches 'learning to run a marathon'.
- You got me there! -- I did read, but only down as far as the download links. As they came after a substantial amount of blurb, I assumed they were the last item on the page and didn't scroll any further.
I humbly withdraw my snidey comment [although not the bit in regards to the Fediverse!]
- I note there's no mention of importing your existing passwords from other password managers, which pretty much all the other password managers I've tried do allow. So yet another 'alternative' that expects us to abandon all our existing content/data and start over again from scratch [cf. The Fediverse]
- I use Bitwarden myself and it gets some kudos for being free for personal use and open source. But the browser extension usability is badly flawed and the app suffers from an arrogant "You're holding it wrong!" dev team, who refuse to address these problems.
Also, its autofill functionality is completely broken on Android, and has been since forever. So, while it's preferable to LastPass, it's still pretty mediocre.
Slightly veering away from the subject. But your comment reminded me of 'The Little Red Schoolbook' --which was the [supposedly banned] book that we all passed around in school. Although being sadly older than you, this would have been the early 80s. I wonder if anyone else remembers it?>I read a hard copy that was passed around my high school in the early 90s...As I recall it was pretty subversive in content, with sections on sex, drugs and anrachist politics.
EDIT: Seems it was quite well-known after all. Wikipaiedia has an article on it:
- I much prefer taking photos with my digital camera. The only thing where phone cameras have the edge is with the automatic GPS tagging. My inner nerd really likes to know the exact location where my photos were taken. The more so, the older they are.
Unfortunately, very few digital cameras have GPS tagging built itn. They nearly all require pairing with your smartphone to 'attach' GPS data via Bluetooth when you take a shot. But most of the time, I forget to activate this before going out with the camera.
If these kids want to really push the envelope of crappy digital imagery, they should get themselves an early Apple QuickTake. Now that was a dire camera. A mighty 640x480 resolution and colour rendering that made poeple look like they were made of clay.>They were terrible....I wonder whatever happened to the company that made them? Probably went bankrupt, soon after inflicting that monstrosity on an unsuspecting world.
Interesting to muse on people's various "Now I feel ancient" moments.>Oh my god this makes me feel ancient now.For me it occurred about 5 years ago when I used to teach at a university. The first time I picked up an application form from an 18 year old applicant, which had the year of birth filled in as '2000', I thought it was a typo. It barely seemed like a handful of years since I'd been seeing in the new millenium at some sleazy nightclub --and here I was interviewing 'adults', who weren't even born then.
- This sounds like the exact opposite of what I want. One of the [many!] things that annoys the hell out of me about eBay is that --no matter how many times I tick the box that says 'UK Only' for 'Item Location' it always defaults back to 'Default' [which shows results from international eBay sites] on my next search.
This is the same argument Royal Mail always trot out. It conveniently ignores the fact that, while it's true that people are writing and sending less letters than they used to, the volume of other 'stuff' being sent through the mail has gone up about eleventy billion percent in recent years, thanks to the amount of online shopping being done.>Royal Mail chairman Keith Williams... said first-class stamps will have to rise “considerably” to pay for Royal Mail deliveries on Saturday. >He said: “The cost to us is driven in part by [the fact that the] volume of letters has declined. You're delivering the same number of letters over six days when you could be doing it over five. So that is forcing up stamp prices.”If Royal Mail can't turn a profit in this kind of market, they shouldn't be in business.
- For Neovim users, see also Firenvim [0]. Which I've been using for quite a while now.
- Welcome to the real world! There are millions of people out there with broken dreams and failed ambitions. Life for most of us is a succession of diminishing aspirations...
I want to be rich and famous and loved by the world... I want a private jet... I want to be successful and admired by many... I want a big house... I want to be recognised as the best amongst my peers... I want a nice car... I want to get promotion and a pay rise... I want a house... I want to keep this job... I want to rent somewhere better... I want a job I don't hate... I want to afford to have the heating on...
Unfortunately, as you point out, the internet makes your own perceived 'failure' seen like an outlier, rather than the norm that it actually is. It's infuriating when you've worked hard at something --like a product or a written piece or some art-- and got no interest at all. And you look at YouTube and see some vaccuous fuckwitt with a million views for a video of them opening a box.
I know. I've 'Been there. Done that. Bought the T-shirt ' so many times I could open a T-shirt shop... which, naturally, wouldn't get any customers.
I'm guessing you're pretty young, as you're taking this failure to become the next Elon Musk pretty personally. You also need to learn to separate you as a person from your crazy schemes and, when they come crashing down round your ears, just shrug and move on.
As I've got older, I've come to terms with the fact I'm never going to amount to anything, if my yardstick for success is internet likes or upvotes. But I'm a decent person and, in the real world, my family and friends think I'm a good bloke. So fuck all that fake internet popularity shite.
I think it's going to be harder for people to take on board the idea that any amount of alcohol is bad for you as, intuitively, I still believe that, in moderation, it can have some positive affects such as de-stressing and aiding sleep. Mind you, I suppose you could say some of the same about smoking and I can intuitively accept that any amount of that is bad for you.
Well, I've never smoked [tobacco] and [apart from a bit of a 'sociable relapse' over Christmas] haven't drunk for over a year now. So I should live forever!