It’s the same in my Eastern European country - Russians run two troll campaigns:

• to disenfranchise any pro-democratic voters, with slogans like “all candidates are shit and corrupt, you should hate them, politics, and the whole democratic process”

• to boost nationalist, far-right, anti-establishment parties - there are several of them to cast a wider net over the electorate, and they can assemble together to run their always pro-Russian politics after getting in Parliament

It’s the dame playbook everywhere they care to get results and undermine their enemies.

It really is a life-affirming movie, isn’t it? I don’t think any other film has affected me in such a positive way.

Children of Men (2006)

The Great Beauty (2013)

Amelie (2001)

Oldboy (2003)

I also like some of the films, so I tired to read “The Stand” as it was one of his more lauded books. My mistake was buying some anniversary edition which came in two tomes and was apparently a longer uncut version the author had initially written, that was then edited down to the produce the initial release.

Couldn’t finish even half of the first tome. King writes good, but loooves to write a lot. I quickly understood why the classic version of the book was cut down so much - I was screaming for all this exposition to cut to the action finally, and it just didn’t come, always being teased as being behind the corner.

Also I found out that as any classic his style has been immitated so much in literature and other media, that by now I’ve basically consumed a ton of Stephen King-like stories and I really don’t get much more from reading his books. So I just gave up on that front, while appreciating him as an author and perpetuum-idea-generator.

Also it is just next-door to the Baltic states, so it makes sense to book a short trip to there (for whoever was bribing Thomas with trips back then)

That’s a possible motivation as well, but his unwillingness to say ever anything bad Putin tells me he’s holding him with some kompromat.

I mean, Trump has never passed the opportunity to badmouth anyone else, with the exception of his crime family. Why is he making this exception also for Putin, going out of his way to always be on his good side and lick his boots?

There’s got to be some pretty damaging information about him, that would be beyond his usual shady business dealings or just Russia plain helping his campaign - people already know these and it hasn’t made a dent in his electability amongst his MAGA base. It’s got to be something amazingly awful even for Trump’s standards to keep him in line like that.

Jesus effing Christ, if this huge difference in energy was down just to some misfortunate cold at the time of the debate, it would be one of the most unfortunate timings. I don’t know if Trump would agree to a second debate now that he’s reaped some positives (or more like negatives for Biden), and also on another network that does any fact-checking. So sadly this failed debate might turn to be a pivotal point for the election.

VW really dropped the ball on software, no wonder they’re buying now into other car manufacturers like Rivian, in hopes to use someone else’s more developed software.

Oh, remember the good old Nexus 7. Had only a fraction of its performance 1-2 years down the line…

Meanwhile, my Samsung Galaxy Tab A 10.1 2016 still soldiers on with good performance, even if it hasn’t gotten updates in half a decade, and its internal 16GB space is beyond ridiculously small for today’s standards and has to be cleaned up revery few months.

I guess I just felt that “right” is my stronger hand direction, “left” is my weaker hand one. Now, after several years of recovery I feel it almost the same way as before, so my mind makes the same shortcut instead of thinking for a second about it. But if I ever feel the balance of my stronger-weaker side tipped (e.g. right hand has fallen asleep) I guess it’s thinking time again.

When they wrote this “promted explanation from the water body itself” I thought it was some funny wording for a water agency or sth, not that they’d actually attempt to word their answer as if it’s from the waterfall itself, lol.

The park later posted on behalf of the waterfall saying, “I didn’t expect to meet everyone this way”. “As a seasonal scenery I can’t guarantee that I will be in my most beautiful form everytime you come to see me,” it adds. “I made a small enhancement during the dry season only so I would look my best to meet my friends.”

Was surprised I started mixing up left and right after I broke my right-hand wrist while biking.

Turns out I subconsciously associated “right” for the direction my stronger hand was on, and once my left hand started feeling like the more dominant one during recovery - my brain would automatically choose that “right” should be on my left-hand side instead, until I actively thought about which direction is which.

This gradually decreased out as my right hand recovered and got back to being the dominant one over the next few years, but was eye-opening what shortcuts my brain uses for such basic things.

…is 20% owned by Toyota and they share some vehicles.

The Internet Archive has some.