Ficaro (LO) – In una società allo sbando, dove ormai contano solo lo spritz, la pizza contemporanea e i follower, le coppie hanno finalmente iniziato a scommettere sul futuro: figlie femmine come chiave per la ricchezza da raggiungere con OnlyFans!“Il successo professionale? Altro che università, studio e lavoro. Bastano una webcam, dei pacchi famiglia di […]
Ficaro (LO) – In una società allo sbando, dove ormai contano solo lo spritz, la pizza contemporanea e i follower, le coppie hanno finalmente iniziato a scommettere sul futuro: figlie femmine come chiave per la ricchezza da raggiungere con OnlyFans!“I…
Kao the Kangaroo—at first it seems like a mere 2nd tier 3D mascot title. But looks can be deceiving.
The character design feels familiar. Bright colors. Boxing gloves. Animal protagonist with a loose sense of physics. It scans like a knockoff. Something you’d find bundled on a demo disc or misfiled next to Gex.
But it’s not American. Or Japanese. It’s Polish.
The first Kao came out in 2000. PC and Dreamcast. Not exactly prime real estate. PlayStation dominated the scene. Nintendo had its own thing going. Dreamcast was already dying. PC—especially in Eastern Europe—was where Kao found space to breathe.
And in Poland, he didn’t just breathe. He became a mascot.
There’s a different kind of ambition in Kao. It’s not trying to conquer. It’s trying to belong. Made by Tate Multimedia, a Warsaw studio with no real track record, the game feels like it was built with sheer willpower. The camera barely cooperates. The controls lag. The punches only register if you’re hugging the enemy.
But somehow it hangs together.
The levels are uneven. Some feel like filler. Others snap into focus—little moments of rhythm and flow that almost trick you into thinking this game is better than it is. Snowboarding down a mountain. Skipping across platforms. Kao hopping in place, excited you made it.
You can feel the energy behind it. The cheer. The sense that this was built by people who wanted to prove something.
Years later, I found Kao the Kangaroo on GBA. Bargain bin. I bought it without thinking. Played it. Different game entirely. 2D side-scroller. Same kangaroo. Same gloves. Same slightly off feeling that I couldn’t shake.
It wasn’t until I played the original PC version that I understood what I’d stumbled into.
Kao isn’t just another mascot. He’s a national project. Poland’s entry into a genre mostly defined by outside voices. The kangaroo is global, but the heart is regional. There’s no irony. No marketing playbook. Just a cartoon marsupial and some developers trying their best.
Tate kept at it. Round 2 in 2003. Mystery of the Volcano in 2005. A PSP version. A trilogy re-release. Most of it stayed in Europe. Outside Poland, Kao was barely a footnote.
Then Steam brought it back.
Round 2 got re-released in 2019. It sold better than expected. People remembered. Hashtags appeared. #BringKaoBack. Tate paid attention.
And in 2022, Kao came back.
The reboot is smoother. Faster. Cleaner. The awkward edges have been sanded down. Some fans miss the quirks. Others are just glad he’s still around.
So am I.
I’m 43 now. Canadian. Still think about Kao from time to time. The way he punches with too much commitment. The way he skips after a win. The way he keeps showing up—even when nobody asked.
There are plenty of mascot platformers. Most try too hard to be cool. Kao just tries.
The Ensemble Q plays:
LIGETI: Six Bagatelles for Wind Quintet.
Paul DEAN: Concerto for Cello and Wind Quintet.
BRAHMS arr. Breuer: Cello Sonata No. 1 in E minor, Op. 38.
William BARTON: Journey to the Edge of the Horizon.
Recorded 12 October 202...
Ukraine-Liveblog: ++ Russland meldet Tote nach Drohnenangriff in Kursk ++
Russland hat nach einem ukrainischen Angriff drei Tote in der Region Kursk gemeldet. Die USA erwägen einem Medienbericht zufolge die Lieferung eines weiteren Patriot-Systems.
@cascadepine yes I would say the same and add that those are cool nonetheless as they can hover like a pro 😀 I find it fascinating what you can discover from nature.
Coluccini a Barsotti: “Dimettetevi tutti” L'ex sindaco punta il dito contro l'attuale amministrazione: "Sul dissesto il centro sinistra ha sempre fatto quadrato, al di là di chi viene condannato, per il bene di Massarosa dimettetevi"
Look who's back! (I think this is the 3rd or 4th email he's sent, all without giving an actual return email for me to reply). Every time, he uses the same "GLFB" construction... RE: bsky.app/profile/did:plc:cak4k…
AG hosts second roundtable to discuss the impacts of Trump’s disruptive tariffs on front-line industries LOS ANGELES — California Attorney General Rob Bonta today hosted business leaders for a roundtable conversation to discuss the impacts of Preside…
Every screenshot of macOS 26 looks like a bad macOS GTK theme.
Like, in so many places the apps or toolkit weren’t even changed but the new styling has changed spacing, breaking alignment and making it look super amateur—exactly the same symptoms as applying a GTK stylesheet that tries to “theme” apps that were never designed to be themed.
Yep, that'll happen when you break app devs' assumptions about GUI layout. That's why Windows has 5 different toolkits built in: compatibility with old apps.
GUI layout is hard. Making the GUI adapt to a wide variety of themes with different spacings, font sizes, and so on is nightmare mode.
Java Swing is one of the few toolkits that even tries to do that, and it has serious enough shortcomings that most apps (like the JetBrains IDEs) use a hard-coded theme instead.
Nah, there’s more, just with a lower profile and fully on board with Rudyard Kipling’s observation that, “A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition.”
"... we need ... long cooling off periods - at least the length of a parliamentary term - before a former donor is allowed to be appointed to any government role or receive any honour, and similar prohibitions on any body they control or are involved in being awarded any government contract or discretionary benefit. And if this deters donations, then it will simply confirm the suspicion that the primary driver is corruption."
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
GOP Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) told Politico on Tuesday that he's received assurances that Republicans will get another chance to cut Medicaid after voting to support President Donald Trump's mega budget bill.
Republicans have always gotten their jollies from stomping on anyone who isn't rich and white, but they always hid their cruelty behind the guise of "fiscal responsibility" or "cutting the deficit". Now that the entire party is in thrall to the Psychopath-in-Chief, they're not even attempting to hide who they are any more.
and his constituents will reelect him resoundingly... While others stay home - to protest Palestinian genocide (while not even knowing where in the world that is and watching, following & voting every zionist under the sun), both sides are the same (while only ever having voted gop), needing to burn everything down to break up party duopoly (while ensuring single fascist party they previously voted for entrenches more power) or some other bs.
Very dramatic (and pretty) wall of smoke rising above the hills from the Laguna Fire. (Which, as I typed the previous sentence, I am now informed is 56% contained!) #NewMexico
The image depicts a serene landscape during what appears to be either sunrise or sunset. In the foreground, there is a dense cluster of green trees, including a prominent pine tree on the left side. The midground features a rocky hillside with a distinct stratification, suggesting geological layers. The sky is a mix of soft blue and warm hues, with scattered clouds that are illuminated by the low sun, creating a gradient effect. A large cloud formation in the background has a pinkish-orange tint, possibly indicating the presence of smoke or dust. The overall atmosphere is calm and natural, with no visible human activity or structures.
Provided by @altbot, generated privately and locally using Ovis2-8B
Support us on Patreon » We’ve got one more cross-post episode for you this week! A few weeks ago, Mike joined host Aaron Ross Powell on the ReImagining Liberty podcast for a discus…
I could see it ok. Factory reset. 😬 I found the Google support people very keen to be helpful but unable to solve the issue with my pixel phone. Some apps (including Mastodon and some Google stuff) often won't connect to my wifi but are fine using the SIM. On my Chromebook the apps work fine on wifi. Google even sent me a replacement phone. It didn't work properly either so I sent it back. Now I just put up with it. I doubt that I'll buy another Pixel.
@smitjo Google is blocked by some routers because it’s loaded with spyware. After spending hours trying to connect my Google Nest to my Netgear router, Google admitted their products were blocked by Netgear.
@apples_and_pears I think about this a lot, and about how our figurative painting would appear to a distant viewer, wondering why we thought things looked that way... no theory here, I just wonder sometimes 😆
The Witch Lights have achieved their final and best physical form! Last week the magical and very slightly cursed will-o-wisps invaded a small town on a hill in Vermont.
The installation was a huge success, and happily validated a new hardware design that radically simplifies installation and breakdown. And which also incorporates forged, cold steel stake hardware. Because the Fair Folk are attracted to loose magic. Like ants.
Trump regime ICE forces brutally attacked a man who screamed for help at a Walmart in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Walmart staff removed the witness filming, the employees were collaborating with ICE in covering up the incident. #3E #StopICE
Went from LineageOS 20 (Android 13) to LineageOS 22 (Android 15).
The Motorola G7 (river) was my phone a long time ago, but I gave it to my mother a few years back. She’s still happy with it, but since she was worried that updating would wipe everything, she hadn’t informed me that it was no longer receiving direct updates.
Today, I was able to sideload the update without her losing anything. All that worry for nothing. lol
NYT - Secretary of State Rubio, was overseeing a deal to free several Americans and dozens of political prisoners held in Venezuela in exchange for sending home about 250 Venezuelan migrants the US had deported to El Salvador. But the deal never happened. nytimes.com/2025/07/08/world/a…
The women we work with through the National Network of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls often face immense barriers to obtaining a WWCC, even when their charges have nothing to do with children. Many who apply have convictions that stem from surviving poverty, violence, homelessness or substance use. These are routinely read by the system not as evidence of structural harm or survival, but as fixed indicators of unsuitability.
Criminalised women — especially Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women — already face steep hurdles when applying for a clearance after prison. The law treats a decades-old shoplifting charge, a survival response to domestic violence, or even the state-sanctioned removal of one’s own child as permanent red flags. These often result in women being denied a clearance and being issued a prohibition or negative notice.
its so messed up what they do to women, especially single mothers. Poverty is systemic violence, forced onto people. It isn't right to deny them a real chance at life and being with their families.
During Bush II's administration, I was asked to serve on a government advisory committee. There was a form asking our political affiliation—with the statement that by law, they could not require an answer, but they wanted to be able to show the press that they did not discriminate against Democrats. I declined to answer, and was still appointed. Someone else on the committee said that he answered "liberal Democrat"; he, too, was appointed. And this was during Bush's time! (I'll skip the details, but when I was asked to join another advisory committee when Obama took office there was even more evidence of honesty and respect for process.) mastodon.social/@arstechnica/1…
RFK Jr. barred registered Democrats from being vaccine advisors, lawsuit says The health department said Kennedy stands by his CDC reforms. arstechnica.com/health/2025/07…
"Bibi, Bibi you can't hide," the protestors chanted. "You've been charged with genocide."
Video by Ford Fischer of News2Share. Speeches begin at 15 minutes.
https://www.youtube.
: Meet your new national police force – CNN What Matters
: Meet your new national police force
By Zackary B. Wolf
The agency of mask-wearing officers who aren’t afraid to smash windows, detain lawmakers and pluck nonviolent undocumented immigrants off the street is about to become the best-funded federal police force.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has already been acting with impunity during President Donald Trump’s second term.
Get used to ICE
Video of agents on horseback and in armored personnel vehicles in MacArthur Park in Los Angeles is striking both for its demonstration of militarized power and for the total inability of the city’s Mayor Karen Bass to do anything about it.
“They need to leave and they need to leave right now,” she told reporters on the scene Monday.
But Trump administration officials feel no need to listen to local authorities in a city like Los Angeles.
“Better get used to us now, because this going to be normal very soon,” El Centro Border Patrol Sector Chief Gregory Bovino told Fox News on Monday, responding to Bass.
That new normal may come as a shock to Americans unused to a federal national police force operating inside the country.
The megabill Trump signed last week will elevate ICE in the American consciousness and on American streets.
A flood of cash
ICE will have more funding in the coming years than any other federal law enforcement agency, according to Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at pro-immigrant American Immigration Council.
The new law allocates $75 billion for ICE through 2029 to order as many as 10,000 new agents and to build detention facilities for more than 100,000 additional people.
“It makes ICE a higher-funded law enforcement agency than the entire FBI, ATF, DEA, US Marshals Service and Bureau of Prisons combined,” Reichlin-Melnick explained, after averaging that $75 billion across the next four years, more than doubling ICE’s budget in each of those years.
A new part of American life
With all that money and the OK to hire new agents, ICE will become even more visible.
“Most people in the United States are going to experience immigration enforcement for the first time in their lives,” predicted David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute.
The spectacle will be the point
The future Bier foresees looks like this:
“US citizens being interrogated on the streets about their citizenships; ICE agents in apartment buildings knocking down doors; National Guard troops on the streets blocking traffic. At your workplace, your home, your neighborhood, your park, in a very visible way and intentionally so,” he said.
Making raids and actions as visible as possible may be designed to scare immigrants out of the country and deter anyone who might otherwise come.
Bier also anticipates a “mad dash to spend all of this money in the next three years,” before the next presidential election.
No longer primarily targeting violent criminals
Already, the pace and intensity of ICE’s actions have increased.
There was a major spike in the number of ICE arrests in June, to more than 34,000, according to data compiled by the Syracuse University immigration researcher Austin Kocher. At the same time, the number of detentions has risen to more than 50,000.
The profile of the detained population has also changed, according to Kocher. When Trump took office, most detainees had a criminal conviction. Now, a third of detainees may have only a civil immigration violation.
And most of the arrests are taking place inside the country rather than at the border, according to Kocher.
Corners will have to be cut
As ICE begins a hiring and construction frenzy, look for mistakes to be made, according to Garrett Graff, who has written about a similar effort to quickly tighten border security with new border agents after 9/11. At that time, agencies, including ICE, were reorganized under the now-massive Department of Homeland Security.
“What happens when a law enforcement agency at any level grows too rapidly is well-documented,” he wrote in his Doomsday Scenario newsletter. “Hiring standards fall, training is cut short, field training officers end up being too inexperienced to do the right training, and supervisors are too green to know how to enforce policies and procedures well.”
There were ultimately stories about corruption and agents recruited by drug cartels.
Now there could be “a tidal wave of applicants who are specifically attracted by the rough-em-up, masked secret police tactics, no-holds-barred lawlessness that ICE has pursued since January,” Graff wrote.
ICE agents operate outside of the normal judicial system
Immigration enforcement is not criminal law enforcement, which means agents don’t have to adhere to the standards of FBI agents or local law enforcement.
“You get an agency which is primarily oriented at non-citizens, but also authorized to arrest citizens at the same time for certain violations of law,” Reichlin-Melnick said.
ICE agents have also operated intentionally in anonymity, an adjustment for anyone who expects law enforcement to identify themselves.
The masks frequently worn by agents make ICE seem like the type of secret police that operates in authoritarian regimes. But they are apparently meant to protect agents from doxxing.
“I’m sorry if people are offended by them wearing masks, but I’m not going to let my officers and agents go out there and put their lives on the line, and their family on the line, because people don’t like what immigration enforcement is,” said ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons during a press conference in Boston in June.
Trump officials also seem ready to arrest local officials if it comes to that. Border czar Tom Homan said anyone, including local and state elected officials, could be arrested by ICE.
“You can protest if you want; you have that First Amendment right,” he told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins in June. “But when you cross the line of putting your hands on an ICE officer, impeding our enforcement operations, knowingly harboring and concealing illegal alien, that’s a crime.”
ICE will also begin looking to detain and deport people who committed no crime. Entering the US illegally is a civil offense, which is certainly deportable. But the Trump administration has also moved to remove the legal status of literally millions of migrants, according to Bier.
It has moved to revoke temporary protective status for multiple groups of migrants from Central and South America, including Cubans, Venezuelans, Haitians and Nicaraguans.
The Trump administration is now primed to turbocharge efforts to denaturalize, or take citizenship away from, people who immigrated legally to the US.
Bier said the administration will continue looking for new groups to deport.
“The idea that they will ever be satisfied with the number of deportations I think is just preposterous,” he said.
LA Times: ICE leaves cars abandoned, lawn mowers running when it arrests workers: A new push to secure property
"...One local police department has announced it will attempt to return abandoned property, such as vehicles and work equipment, to relatives of those detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. .."
Santa Ana police announced it would attempt to return abandoned property, such as vehicles and work equipment, to relatives of those detained by federal agents.
Trump sent his masked #ICE goons protected by "90 National Guard troops", "over a dozen military vehicles" including "17 Humvees, four tactical vehicles, two ambulances", & agents on horseback to LA's mostly empty MacArthur Park July 7th, a Monday, in the middle of the work day. "officers on horseback and soldiers in tactical gear walking past a playground as children at a summer day camp were rushed indoors so they would not be traumatized" is a crazy sentence to read. apnews.com/article/what-happen…
Billionaire Dies After Swallowing a Bee During Polo Match By Luis Prada June 17, 2025, 2:40pm What people are saying Commenters mourn the loss of "Comrade Bee," who died after being swallowed by a billionaire during a polo match. Many praise the bee's sacrifice, likening it to a heroic act against the wealthy elite. Others lament the loss of a valuable pollinator and express admiration for the bee's apparent targeting of the billionaire.
#Israeli plan for forced transfer of #Gaza’s population a blueprint for #crimes against humanity
#Israel’s defence minister laid out plans to force all #Palestinians in Gaza into a camp on ruins of #Rafah; scheme legal experts, academics described as blueprint for #CrimesAgainstHumanity
Palestinians would go through security screening before entering. Once inside they are not allowed to leave. #Prisons
This post by @aphyr I think really captures the staggering evil of a non-trivial swath of the LLM world right now. Perhaps they don't see themselves as evil, but what they are doing is deliberately undermining all social and cultural norms for ... what? A few extra sales? Burn the world to the ground for ... a few bucks?
I realize that we have many other Big Evils in the world, but when I say that the only winners with gen AI, along with blockchain, bitcoin, and all other recent VC-bloviated ilk is criminals and sociopaths, this is what I mean. What that says about VCs is up to you to determine.
Kyle is more introspective than I am here. What i see is the wholesale willing destruction of trust and society for... well, certainly nothing beneficial.
This is what I think of every time someone tells me "gen AI is the future". Perhaps it is, but that future is bleak and desolate. It is soulless and cruel and confidently stupid. It aspires to bland mediocrity.
Keep it. There is no "upside" that could ever justify this total obliteration of good in the world. Your talking parrot drips venom from it's beak with every word it speaks.
Just as Canter & Siegel contributed mightily* to the collapse of UseNet with the first real case of mass spam, and exploited a system of trust, that's what this is doing. Spray painting their vulgar spittle across the public square with hopes of garnering a few extra dimes.
* I was at Sprint at the time and remember the hammer that got dropped being "nuclear" by the standards of the time. Now it's quaint. In retrospect, we should have done so much more, but I don't think anyone imagined it would ever get THIS bad. And for as bad as you think it is, it's 1,000,000x worse than that.
Weird historical detail. Sprint was covered by common carrier regulations which our legal team basically interpreted as we couldn’t block anything based on content (simplified). We had a lot of emergency meetings to be able to shut down C&S. We had to establish they were causing reliability problems. A bit of a stretch to be honest, but… we did pull the plug.
Cascade Pine
in reply to 𝕂𝕖𝕟𝕥 ℕ𝕒𝕧𝕒𝕝𝕖𝕤𝕚 ☕️ • • •𝕂𝕖𝕟𝕥 ℕ𝕒𝕧𝕒𝕝𝕖𝕤𝕚 ☕️
in reply to Cascade Pine • • •Thanks! 😃
SomeAnoTooter
in reply to 𝕂𝕖𝕟𝕥 ℕ𝕒𝕧𝕒𝕝𝕖𝕤𝕚 ☕️ • • •I find it fascinating what you can discover from nature.
myrmepropagandist
in reply to 𝕂𝕖𝕟𝕥 ℕ𝕒𝕧𝕒𝕝𝕖𝕤𝕚 ☕️ • • •fritzoids
in reply to 𝕂𝕖𝕟𝕥 ℕ𝕒𝕧𝕒𝕝𝕖𝕤𝕚 ☕️ • • •time for this handy-dandy chart!
(depending on which continent you live you might not usually see some of these... I have no Cicada Killers in my garden, e.g.)
𝕂𝕖𝕟𝕥 ℕ𝕒𝕧𝕒𝕝𝕖𝕤𝕚 ☕️ reshared this.
Quinn Norton
in reply to 𝕂𝕖𝕟𝕥 ℕ𝕒𝕧𝕒𝕝𝕖𝕤𝕚 ☕️ • • •