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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I agree that “not voting for the Tories” was pretty much the main driver, but these are not “new options”.

    The Brexit Party’s “surprise” increase this year, was in many ways just returning to the 10-15% that they received as UKIP in 2015.

    In the two elections in between, they agreed to not contest many of the Tory seats, to not risk “splitting the vote” to help keep “evil Jeremy” out of power.

    The Tory vote + Brexit Party vote, added together, is lower than the number who voted for either Boris Johnson, Theresa May or 2017 Jeremy Corbyn. Fewer people voted for Keir Starmer than Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 or 2019 - so technically the biggest change in vote is probably “did not/unable to vote this year”, with an increase of 3 million.

    As ever, “didn’t/unable to vote this year” won yet another successive landslide victory of about 20 million, or about the same as the top three parties added together.

    Anyway, apologies for the tangent. The graph is particularly looking at younger people, who are on average more left leaning, and have become more so in the last 40 years. Though the recent mainstream politics/media shift towards the far right is absolutely terrifying, I don’t think it’s reflected in the young people shown in this graph.



  • I suddenly picked up “allergies*” in my late 30s - couldn’t work out what they were, other than antihistamines (cetirizine or loratidine) made them “not as bad”, and I also needed to avoid certain things in particular (breathing in dust, aerosols, perfumes, other chemical fumes, car fumes, cigarette fumes, wood dust and drinking alcohol).

    Turned out to be Nasal Polyps. I was due for surgery to remove them in 2020, but then Covid happened and I’ve been on a waiting list since. Surgery may completely remove the problem, or at least lessen it - but they could grow back within five years.

    Basically every day is like I’ve got cold or sometimes flu. Sometimes I feel like I’m drowning in phlegm. If I take antihistamines, it’s pretty mild or controllable, as long as I can reasonably avoid those triggers. Sometimes I have to drink lemsip in the morning (powdered hot drink of paracetamol, lemon flavour & decongestant). It’s there every day, permanently, but how severe it is varies between “slightly inconvenient” and “too unwell to work”.

    Antihistamines are essential for me to function at all, and make a huge difference - though I feel they’ve become less effective in the last year or so. Thankfully they’re very cheap over the counter (~£1.30 for 30 days’ worth). I also use a saltwater nasal spray sometimes, and I sometimes eat a lot of menthol sweets. I have to be careful with decongestants to avoid “rebound congestion” where your nose adjusts to life with decongestants, then becomes twice as blocked up if you stop.

    If I drink alcohol or breathe perfume etc, my sinuses block up within half an hour, I can get an asthmatic response, and I get crippling arthritic pain in my hands and joints. Sometimes perfume and other sprays can cause severe, possibly dangerous breathing problems. I have an asthma inhaler for these emergencies, and always have to carry it with me, in case someone sprays perfume in an enclosed space (which might cause me to die).

    If I keep reasonable control over these things, I can live pretty “normally”. If I actually get a cold, it’s like I’ve got a “double cold”, and it can make me too ill to go to work.

    When it’s bad, it’s a pretty miserable existence to be honest, but in the larger scale of things it’s not a serious or life-threatening illness, so you feel guilty for complaining.

    When it’s not so bad, I can normally ignore it for most of the day - and I have a pretty active job and am otherwise fairly healthy. It’s worst in the morning/night when I’m horizontal.

    Your case outlined in the original post sounds particularly upsetting and you have my sympathies. You’re not being a baby.


    *technically it’s an intolerance or hypersensitivity, and not truly an allergy, though it behaves in much the same way, and symptoms can be controlled in much the same way.





  • For your first time, either is definitely good enough. They’re both pretty full featured, and they both follow “normal” editing conventions - so if you want/need to use a different program in future, you already know how to use 90% of it, you’re just looking for where the buttons are. It’s all very transferable learning.

    As mentioned by another reply, there’s currently a lack of hardware acceleration for timeline playback in Kdenlive which means if you’re really stacking the effects up, you won’t be able to play back in the timeline at full frame rate until you pre-render. It won’t make any difference in simple edits.








  • I never really bothered with the multiplayer mode in it - I know the game was built with a multiplayer back end, but they did promise a single player mode, and they do present the game as having a single player/solo mode.

    Obviously different things annoy different people, and I do get what you mean about quitting and restarting etc, but it was enough for me to stop bothering to play it and play X4:Foundations instead. I did still get over a hundred hours play out of it, so I don’t exactly feel hard done by, but if quitting to the main menu works, then it’s clearly mechanically possible for them to let you pause it, they just didn’t want to.



  • I hate not being able to pause a game, particularly a single player game. I think Elite Dangerous solidified my hatred of this, by not telling you the game is still running when you’re on the “pause” menu.

    “B-B-BU-BUT it’s a simulation and you can’t pause real life so it makes it more real”

    It’s a game, even if it’s a simulation game. It’s a toy for grown-ups. A very nice and fun and relaxing toy, but a toy nonetheless. It’s not more important than a phone call, call at the door, crying child, hungry cat, partner who needs a hand with something etc.

    This probably extends to being able to save anywhere and rejoin later, but I think that one is covered pretty well by everyone else :)




  • You might find a few video tutorials to help work out the settings - I feel like I had to try things several times before I could make sense of it.

    I was trying to smooth out some panning shots taken on an unsuitable tripod, which kept sticking and jumping, or changing speed. I think I had it zoomed in a bit and cropped, which gave it the space to shuffle the image up/down/left/right a bit. Beyond that, I can’t remember the settings. It didn’t make the footage perfect, but it made it watchable and usable.

    Anyway, let us know how well it works (if at all).

    Good luck!