Fair points. Yeah, I hope it was clear that that last bit wasn't addressed to you, but rather the person reporting me. I appreciate your actually being civil and responding to the points I'm making. I wish that was more the norm.

I thought the Kansas side was cute, but I also only didn't leave my car except to go into my hotel.

Düsseldorf is ugly and boring. Lots of big companies are there, so there are good jobs, but it's a cultural and aesthetic wasteland. Sorry, Kraftwerk.

Yeah, I've no doubt that Höcke is pursuing this for extremely cynical and gross reasons, but the broken clock is right twice a day. “Inclusion" is one of those policies that sounds so self-evidently positive and reasonable at a glance, that people's brains shut down and nobody thinks of potential downsides to it as a universal policy. A majority of kids who require special education fare much, much better in smaller classes taught by a special education teacher who can move through material more slowly and boil it down to easier-to-grasp concepts. Sticking them in a large classroom with 20-30 non-disabled peers, even with a SpEd teacher present, rarely has a positive effect, and more often than not leads to worse outcomes for all students present. Inclusion is at its core a cost-saving measure (it's cheaper to stick the SpEd kids in a GenEd classroom than making a dedicated class for them), but it wraps itself in progressive ideology so well that it's almost impossible for parents or teachers to argue against.

It's fine. Websites break on it less often than I would have expected and the “nuke your cookies and history" button is a fun feature. I've mostly moved to Firefox, though, just to get away from Chromium (although I realize the irony in that; my fingerprint is almost assuredly far more unique than if I stuck to Chromium).

Townsends is phenomenal!

The Demi Lovato talk was hilarious to watch. She's an utterly charmless narcissist and literally asked a guest the question, "How bad would you have felt if I really had killed myself?". It's incredible no executive pulled the plug on it at any point during its production.

This is art.

Starcade absolutely rules. Protip: don't watch the first season; the host didn't give a toss about video games and it's pretty hard to watch. In seasons 2+, he was replaced by the utterly fantastic Mr. Jeff Edwards, who is proof that no one is ever too old to be enthusiastic and knowledgeable about an exciting new technology. He's seriously the best game show host I've ever seen, and he makes the episodes feel really wholesome and fun, even when contestants are mismatched in terms of age or ability. The whole series is available online, but please don't slam their servers; it's a one-person passion project from somebody who used to work on the show.

The 125 can figure came from the methodology used in some of the low quality rat studies frequently cited to demonstrate the dangers of aspartame back in the day. I'll see if I can find the specific studies.

This page by the National Cancer Institute provides a pretty decent overview of research on a variety of artificial sweeteners. https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/diet/artificial-sweeteners-fact-sheet

One very recent study (Debras et al., 2022) suggested a link between aspartame consumption and cancer, which I suspect is behind the recent hysteria. Pretty much every other high quality study over the past 50 years found no correlation. If aspartame is indeed a dangerous carcinogen, that fact should be clear through epidemiological data alone, like the 2013 study by Marinovich et al. cited in the article. I lend that study and those like it much greater credibility than one-off cohort studies like Debras.

Total nonsense. If you consume enough of any substance, it will eventually kill you. Aspartame is THE most heavily studied food additive in human history and every well-conducted study has found it to be harmless. You need to consume the equivalent of 125+ cans of Diet soda per day to see an even slightly elevated risk of cancer or any other serious disease. This is disgusting, misprepresentative fear-mongering that will steer people away from low-calorie alternatives to sugary soft drinks, thereby contributing to increasing rates of obesity and diabetes and playing right into the sugar lobby's interests.

Bollywood Torrents used to be a thing. Haven't used it in a few years, so I don't know if it's still around.