L4D2.

$0.

Christmas of 2013.

Yes, I am the Ghost of Christmas Present…

I think this gal has a better chance at making it to Mars than Liz…

Great. Plague bears. Didn’t have that on the 2026 bingo card…

Not gonna be impressed until they teach it to fetch.

There’s a couple of reasons. It’s easy to learn, especially in comparison with what came before (I still have nightmares about CGI). If you already had HTML locked down, it’s wasn’t a big jump to coding PHP, whereas Javascript was less noob friendly. This meant that a lot of opensource web content management systems got built first on PHP. Wordpress has been mentioned, but that’s ignoring the larger structural CMS systems like Joomla and Drupal.

At the time these projects were really hitting their stride (2005 - 2010), opensource systems built on a LAMP architecture were out-competing any proprietary language of similar capacity. The only one that came close to PHP’s use was ASP and that was just because it had Microslop behind it. By 2010, PHP had pretty much dominated the existing opensource CMS community, which in turn meant most non-commercial websites and a fair chunk of commercial ones as well had their core interfaces written in PHP.

Does it have flaws? Absofuckinglutely. But it was the first widespread web programming language that was free, easy to learn, and worked well over 80% of the time across all browsers. Nothing since has really hit that sweet spot of being the right software for the right problem at exactly the right time, which is why its still in heavy use today.

I wouldn’t. I’d let the community decide via voting. You don’t engender discussion by silencing speakers because they don’t meet your requirements of legitimacy. If there’s a question of legitimacy or bad faith discussion, identify it, talk about it, and downvote the hell out of it if needed.

But don’t remove it. Once you do, you’re no longer curating a discussion. You’re promoting an agenda.

Rejecting a voice out of hand because of whom its coming from is blatant censorship, and a tacit admission that your ideas can’t compete with theirs in the arena of public discourse.

/c/politics is a hive of scum and pedantry, with a healthy dose of hypocrisy. If you say:

Social Media adjacent hosts like Substack are allowed, but ONLY if they tie back to a company/subsidiary. No personal or friend group blogs and no self-promotion. Articles should be worth reading

…while allowing articles that are blatant AI summaries from trash rags like the DailyBeast and Business Insider simply because they’re tied to a company, you’re not fostering political discussion. You’re advancing a corporate agenda.

Culture = your Cult

The decentralized design of the Fediverse intentionally allows differing cultures to interact, while preventing any single one from dominating the means of communication. The attempt to define cultural rules is a fools errand without centralized control.

The Fediverse has no centralized control, and thus will never be subject to a single set of cultural rules - nor should it be.

Agreed. GW2 is the most accessible of MMOs when it comes to group content. The open world events are especially nice, as you can just wander into a massive battle, join the attack, and automatically get XP / loot. PvP in their World vs World mode works pretty much the same way.

I was a WoW refugee when I picked up GW2 about five years ago and never looked back. It’s an objectively superior MMO in almost every category. The only other MMO that comes close is ESO, but GW2 combat and horizontal progression absolutely trounces ESO hands down.

People have been prophesying the end of the world for about as long as we have written records.

Yet the world never ends. It changes.

Often suddenly, violently, and without warning - but it does not end.

What we are experiencing is the beginnings of a violent change, one in which most of our familiar world can be ripped away from us at any time.

But it is not an end. It’s evolutionary pressure. And if you look at speed of human ingenuity and advancement within the course of just a century, we’re on course to keep up and survive this change.

Not all of us, of course, but as a species, absolutely - although we’ll likely look very different as a species once the change we’re going through is complete.

Now I’m not talking out my ass here. I’m an early climate refugee - wildfire took my family home five years ago, and I’ve seen the forests I’ve walked through as a child burnt to ash. The entire neighborhood was erased.

It’s now regrowing. Not the same, but the lilies my mother planted still bloom in the empty lot where the house used to be. There are young oaks sprouting that are now 7’ tall, and along with the lilies, my mother’s rosebush survived. People have started to rebuild, and in another 5 years the neighborhood and surrounding forest will be thriving again.

I don’t believe in endings anymore. I believe in change. And this gives me hope for the future because I know that no matter how bad things get, they will eventually change for the better.

Of course, this also means that no matter how good things get, they’ll eventually change for the worse - so you may as well savor and appreciate the good things in your life while they’re here.

Or as the Buddhists like to say:

“This too shall pass”

Or as I like to sing:

“Wabababa!”