Beautiful work … I really don’t mind the long wait between releases … the previous Gimp 2.0 versions were so robust and practical that they have lasted for close to 20 years

In the early 2000s, I started off with cracked version of photoshop before I discovered GIMP and as soon as I did, I stuck with them since. They’ve saved me several thousand dollars in software costs over the past 20 years that I really don’t mind waiting for the latest major release.

They can take their time releasing 3.0 for all I care. I’m still using 2.10 and I probably will for the next long while until 3.0 becomes stable. They’ve done a mountainous amount of work already and I congratulate them on everything.

This makes me realize too that I should probably donate something to their community for all the money they’ve saved me over the years.

Polar Bear on the Hudson Bay coast in northern Ontario.

I’m Indigenous and I’ve gone hunting and trapping with my relatives a few times in my life. On one of those trips we happened on a polar bear on the mud flats of the bay during the late autumn. We drove by in our freighter canoe (a very large oversized canoe with a 60 HP outboard motor) and the bear swam near us and then walked by a few hundred feet away. It wasn’t afraid but we were. We watched for a while and then fired rifle shot into the mud next to it to scare it away. From the moment it started to run to the point it disappeared as a speck on the horizon was about a minute or two. I went up later to look at the prints and the clay mud looked like a tractor had driven over it. I couldn’t believe how fast it could move on the mud. I quickly sank in my boots and could barely walk around.

One paw print was about the size of my head. I never left camp without someone nearby or a rifle in my hands.

Most people won’t take climate change or global warming seriously until it directly affects them.

In a sane functioning world, our political leaders should be sounding alarm bells and reigning in big major corporations to try to gain some control over the problem. Because even if we did shut down everything right now and started actively working towards cooling down the planet, it would take a generation or two before everything went back to what it was a hundred years ago.

The biggest effect that most of us will feel in the coming years is mass migration. We’ll start seeing people moving around to places where they are unwanted and uninvited, first temporarily and later permanently … and then we will start seeing how we will all live with global warming.

The fact that most of the world has decent access to food. And the fact that here in the first world (I’m in Canada), just about everyone has access to some kind of food.

I know it isn’t perfect and there are still a small percentage of people that may have difficulty with access to proper food, plentiful food or enough food … but everyone everywhere here has something to eat.

I’m Indigenous and when I was growing up in the 80s, mom and dad had enough for us to eat but we weren’t starving or anything.

However, my parents were born in the 40s and they said they had to live through famines as children … in modern Canada! They remembered a severe famine that swept through northern Ontario in the 50s where every hunter and trapper just couldn’t find enough wild food anywhere to feed people. It was a normal cycle that happens in our part of the world that takes place at least once a decade - most times it is just small decline in animal populations but other times, everything just disappears for one reason or another (disease, migration, weather, temperature, animal movements, etc)

In my grandparents time … starvation was a normal part of life to the point where lots of our old legends are filled with stories of cannibalism and murder because people were starving to death.

It all just means that in our modern era over the past hundred years … food has become plentiful for the majority of the world and that starvation has become less prevalent than it ever was in human history.

In our modern world of interconnected finances, services, governments and systems … it is all hinging on a very delicate balance … because as Will Durant put it …

“From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day”

Our easy access to food for everyone is only possible if we maintain a functioning world order of cooperation.

Isn’t this basically how Taylor Swift got her start … her millionaire father just buying thousands of her debut album at the beginning.

It’s also a sign of things to come

We will reinforce our false and superficial ideas of the past or even present with the help of AI

All the vague uneducated and ill informed ideas we all have about anything and everything will all be magnified and exaggerated a hundred fold.

People want to only believe what they want because they hate being wrong … and they never believe or want to believe that their side, their group, their community no matter what it is can ever be wrong.

I’m not immune to it myself and I constantly have to remind myself that I can easily fall into that same mentality.

Most of us are never taught to be self-critical or to properly question the world or the people around us.

This is thing I keep pointing out about AI

We’re like teenaged trailer trash parents who just gave birth to a genius at the trailer park where we’re all dysfunctional alcoholics and meth addicts …

… now we’re acting surprised that our genius baby talks like an idiot after listening to us for ten years.

Anyone that can be funded endlessly by a corporate and capitalist elite can become president.

If billionaires and corporate leaders decided tomorrow that you should be president, they could dump millions of dollars and a few years worth of hired professional help and they’d make you president.

It’s not the will of an individual person or a personality that makes a president … it’s whichever group of wealthy backers who decide to fund the campaign … after that it is j just a matter of how much money they are willing to spend to make it happen.

Yes a call or a even a regular talk with someone in the normal sense is not sexual at all

But if you both lay on the floor with your heads next to one another in an upside position from one another … where you placed your mouth very close to your listener’s ear and they did the same to you … and both of you are so close that your cheeks touch one another as you talked … you might not be tonguing their ear but you are close and intimate enough that it does become something else and may even start becoming something close to being sexual or sensual.

It was just a silly thought and image that came to me the other day while talking on the phone … we’re basically whispering into each other’s ears when we use a phone in the traditional sense.

topologically, though, isn’t that just the same as all speaking and listening? it’s all mouth to ear.

True … if we were standing together in the same room and having a conversation, it would just be a normal chat where we would both be standing about arms length away from each other.

But I thought the idea of a phone conversation was weird a few days ago. You speak into a mic that is very close to your mouth and your voice is transmitted to a speaker that is pressed up against the ear of the listener … and they are doing the same from their perspective.

It would be like if we were both in the same room again and having a conversation … except this time, we decide to lie on the floor … where I would be upside down from you and you the same to me … and you position your head really close to mine and I speak really close into your ear and you do the same with mine … we have this conversation so intimately that our cheeks touch the entire time.

Phone rings

decide to answer call

muffled noises … ??? …

can’t hear the caller because they put saran wrap over their phone as they tried to provide a safe 69 phone conversation

They are in the same group of people that insist on playing music on their tinny device or little boom box while walking down the street.

Beautiful … disrupt an election and tie up the explanation long enough that everyone forgets about it all and the next election comes along so that they can do it all again.

The power of money is that you can do whatever you want and whenever you’re actions are challenged or made accountable, you just throw everything in court long enough to the point where no one pays attention, no one remembers and no one cares any more.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

… time again throughout history, bad things and terrible ideas only come about due to the ignorance and inaction of individuals who think that a movement may be good for them but deep down know that they are not morally right, so instead they choose to do nothing in the hopes that their most secret thoughts and beliefs might come true but if they don’t, they can plausibly deny everything.

I think he ended up being Rasputin and invented vodka

Snap fries need updating … again

But after our national ship we were living on hit that Middle Eastern iceberg and sank, you died because I didn’t want to help you and I survived with a million dollar necklace that I could have used to pay for a good life … but I just threw it away into the ocean after keeping it doing nothing with it for 60 years.

Isn’t this just a replay of the late Roman empire?

Wealth, power and control gets concentrated to smaller and smaller groups of people … they get desperate for more power and co opt and manipulate the existing system to get their way … they don’t get their way and do even more extreme changes and create chaos

Everything falls apart and everyone loses everything.

When it comes to global thresholds … if you think you are close to the threshold … you’re probably past the point of no return and you’re in danger.