Just because I'm curious: I have chronic sarcoidosis in both lungs, and lifelong asthma. I've by some miracle survived 4 years, but at the cost of almost all the stamina I used to have. COVID still circulates around the daycares, youth clubs and workplaces here and I have children.

I don't have an option to not wear a mask when I leave the room I've spent these 4 years in. Does that bother you?

Be honest and tell us you don't give a shit about the people around you.

Edit: Not surprised at your lack of an answer.

Similar. Åland is predominantly Swedish-speaking (we're a minority on the mainland), and they have fairly extensive legal autonomy as well.

In practice Åland is also a legally demilitarized zone, though I doubt Russia would give a fuck.

From someone who studied graphic design using Adobe products ~15 years ago but just can't stand what they've become; thank you, sincerely.

Krita is pretty awesome, but I've had trouble getting rid of Lightroom.

I've had this sinister feeling in the back of my head ever since I saw Extrapolations that it was far more of a documentary of what's to come than even the creators intended.

It's been a year since I watched it the first time, and that feeling has only gotten worse since.

Åland is still a part of Finland, even though they have a certain degree of autonomy.

I sincerely wish you were wrong, but it's easy for anyone living in any relatively developed and safe country and scoff at people risking their lives for amounts of money they'd never be able to earn otherwise.

Doubly so if their family gets a payout if they fall. People might wonder why all these russians seem to willfully subject themselves to this shit, and this is probably the answer more often than not. Likewise with the convicts in Wagner. From their point of view it was probably a decent deal, even if it is complete insanity in our reality.

Nobody's fucking happy about any of this. They killed a person for speaking up about something that affects almost everyone.

Oh for fucks sake..

Relatively early on (can't remember the date) Himmler gave a somewhat notorious speech about eventually recruiting far flung "true Aryans" from the US into the SS, much like they eventually did from several other countries.

Luckily history played out a bit differently.

You yourself are certainly easily enough to detect with that username, lol.

Other than that, FlyingSquid, mostly because of the specific shade of color on his or her avatar. The fact that I agree with 98% of what he or she posts probably helps as well.

I don't always agree with your statements but god damn if you didn't nail this one.

Him being a pretty smart guy overall surely has at least some sort of continuity planned.

At least there's two three four of us.

"Grok" really says everything that needs to be said about this farce, isn't it?

You want me to be civil towards Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson et. al.?

I say fuck that, and fuck them.

The only media you seem to consume is Fox News and whatever that fat fucks podcast is called. They think they're smart, too, just like you.

My pleasure. The great thing about The Guardian especially, besides the fact that they do try to cover the negative sides as well, is that they tend to separate ongoing events into their own pages. You can bookmark only Ukraine and check what has happened recently easily.

Granted, these days it's mostly whatever bombings Russia has done during the night sprinkled with whatever counter attacks Ukraine manages, but still. In my opinion they've been quite quick with the updates when something major has happened. They covered Prigozhin's road trip to Moscow last year very well, almost minute to minute.

That's true, I'm sorry.

There were some twitter accounts worth following, but after what happened over there I don't know if any of them are still active. Likewise there were some subs in Reddit that had decent amounts of factual posts, but I don't know about them anymore either.

Other than that, what's wrong with piecing together news from the most reliable sources? The Guardian has excellent coverage of the war. Anything that goes on for this long will obviously suffer from some story-fatigue but they're at least more trustworthy than anything from Russia.

It's called fog of war for a reason though, you're never going to get 100% unbiased and correct information about ongoing battles, for opsec reasons if nothing else.

The only relevant answer is that nobody knows for sure. Ukraine is doing their very best but they're fighting not only Russia but also the combined effort of all the fuckwits that support Russia materially, i.e. China, Iran and North Korea etc. it's not exactly an easy position to be in, even if their tech is of lower quality than what we have in the west they're also able to churn out a lot more, and that shows.

On the other hand, it's pretty telling that Russia is resorting to what amounts to long range terror bombing in between human wave attacks. They used up a lot of manpower last summer, and it can't be easy to replace those losses. They do have access to a lot more human resources, but again, of dubious quality.

Russia is certainty hoping for another 4 years of the orange fuckwit in the White House though. That's where the real danger is. If that happens all bets are off.

You're kinda outing yourself as the russian troll that you are with this shit. It didn't take all that long in the end.

Now fuck off, vatnik.