I’ve correctly predicted the result of every US & UK election (plus the brexit referendum) since 2016, based mostly on vibes

For the nervousness, I started commenting here a couple of weeks ago for the same reasons of wanting to help keep places like this active but it was daunting after probably going a full decade without commenting on anything online. Starting with no-risk things helped a lot, so just posting my daily game results in !dailygames@lemmy.zip was a nice way to get going without the possibility of things getting misconstrued. After that, it just gets easier with time. I probably spent half an hour redrafting my first proper comment on here that wasn’t a games post and just a couple of weeks in now it feels natural enough to only take a couple of minutes!

They should copy the blank paper protests that happened in China. I wouldn’t put it past this government to claim that holding up a blank piece of paper outside parliament is somehow terrorism at this stage and it would show how ridiculous this is.

I’ve been here! Clubbing isn’t really my thing but it was a fun night. Haven’t been since covid happened, and it’s supposedly more of a tourist trap for straight people these days. I remember some Eurovision act got a lot of shit for “performing at the Kremlin” but it was actually this one in Belfast.

My favourite tidbit of queer history in Northern Ireland happened here after our former first minister’s wife, Iris Robinson, was caught having an extra marital affair with someone 40 years her junior, a 19 year old that she bribed to try and hush it all up. She was disgustingly homophobic to the point that there’s a whole section of her Wikipedia dedicated to her homophobic remarks. After the story broke of her affair, the DJ in the Kremlin stuck on the song Mrs Robinson by Simon and Garfunkel.

The OA and Sense8 for me. I don’t even start any Netflix shows any more unless they’ve completed their run without being cancelled on a cliffhanger.

Also in the guardian today is an article on how the combo of proscribing Palestine Action and introducing the online safety act is causing platforms to censor information about Gaza. His counter-argument in this article is that Meta were censoring information on Palestine already, but Meta had always been overzealous in their content moderation, now it’s every platform.

He says in this that he’s worried being too specific would be more authoritarian but I would say the opposite is true - if what needs censoring is too vague, platforms are gonna be extreme in what they block and put behind age verification because the fines are so high. And vague guidance can be used to justify blocking anything. It only entrenches big tech further because small sites can’t afford the age verification or the risk of a £10 million fines.

It looks like the British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, which would make sense because Wikipedia are in a court battle with the UK government at the minute over age verification rules to protect the privacy of their users. They might end up geoblocking the whole country rather than remove anonymity from the site

To your last paragraph, I think it’s a mixture of two things. The first being that the UK has become increasingly horrifically transphobic over the past decade, and this current bunch in Labour are opportunists who will just go where they think the votes are. He once said “trans women are women, trans men are men” but several years later changed his view to “men have penises, women have vaginas.” The party has no courage or backbone now to stick up for anyone, because they think conceding to the right wing will win them votes.

The second being that Wes Streeting is known to be one of the more conservative members of the Labour party, both economically and socially. There’s some genuinely upsetting stuff on his Wikipedia page under political beliefs, such as his support for conversion therapy organisations.

If it makes the transition easier for people and improves accessibility then it’s worth putting up with comments from meat eaters I think. When people have said it’s hypocritical to eat fake meat before I’ve pointed out that I still like the taste, I just don’t want an animal to die for it. I wish I could do completely whole foods but some health issues mean I can’t eat certain things and I don’t have the energy to cook from scratch, so the plant meats are great for that reason. Although I’ve been trying to eat healthier protein sources the past while like tofu, lentils, and chickpeas, and I much prefer it both for the taste and for the feeling of fullness afterwards that the plant meats sometimes lack.

In restaurants I’d go for something unprocessed over a plant meat everytime, restaurants mess up the order enough for it not to be worth the risk.