And a big part of why they support Israel so much is that it’s a way to get all the Jews out of America.

Geography and circumstance.

I’d recommend reading Why the West Rules - For Now by Ian Morris. The book is controversial and definitely not the last word, but is worthwhile for its grappling with the big picture.

Relevant to your question, Morris makes the case that there was economic pressure on Europeans to sail west. Everybody wanted silk and spices from India and China. For Europeans, this meant trading with Arab, Iranian, and Turkish merchants, and so spices were expensive. Finding direct routes to China and India meant people would be able to buy silk and spices more cheaply, which would make people rich. So lots of people were very interested in sailing all the way around Africa, or going west to get to the East.

Hence Columbus stumbling onto the Americas. And then colonialism happened.

But this isn’t a uniquely European thing. When Columbus arrived, the Quechua were already doing very European-style colonialism, and the Aztecs had a form on imperialism quite similar to the ancient Greeks. Carthage, Greece, Iran, and tge Arabs all engaged in imperialism and colonialism, but the European powers won.

Which, to be clear, doesn’t mean it’s right for anybody to do it.

I thought that too, because in motion there are lots of magic sparks coming off it. But then someone on another forum said there was a gun and yeah, it’s a gun. I expect it will be replaced with a more fantastical design in the final game, but the lady has a holster on her shoulder, so it’s definitely a gun of some sort.

Check out 01:51.

This game has guns in it.

In my experience, it’s actually a little easier; Wii hacks sometimes need multiple attempts, but the Wii U hack works first time.

Alas, there is much less Wii U homebrew, but you can hack the vWii just like a Wii to get all that goodness.

Wii U for me. It has all the Wii stuff, plus Wii U games.

Maurice tends to have connotations of effeminacy.

Perhaps a gender-neutral name like Sam or Alex would work. Hilary is also technically unisex, even though you won’t find many men named Hilary nowadays.

Francis is a masculine name that in most modern English dialects is pronounced the same as the feminine form, Frances. Francisco might also work if you want to be more clear it’s a masculine name; Francisco also calls to mind an expensive city in California with a very prominent queer community, and you can always shorten it to Francis.

This year is also the 40th anniversary of Super Mario Bros, so I’d be surprised if there was nothing Mario-related.

Evidence is that the next Fire Emblem game will be a Genealogy of the Holy War remake.

Thank you.

Please don’t impugn illiteracy. Being able to read is entirely uncorrelated with being a good person.

[About 21% if Americans are functionally illiterate] (https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp), and most have perfectly good reasons, including learning disabilities, poverty, lack of decent education, and domestic abuse.

That’s the whole point of this magazine.

Bread and Circuses is a tricky phrase, but no. This isn’t for the People, it’s for the Emperor. (The Emperor also wants to take people’s bread away)

It even has two Frances!

Mine was a NES. My dad had a 286 running DOS. I remember when my primary school got a PC with Windows 95, and I was gobsmacked that it booted to Windows directly.

Write your journal by hand, with a pen or pencil on paper. You’ll know you wrote it because it’s your handwriting.

Perhaps.

But the ICE agents on the ground are just following orders™. You know, like the OG Nazis.

The enemy of your enemy is your enemy’s enemy. No more, no less.

I use it to follow several ladies who post to multiple communities on lemmynsfw.com.

Let me get this straight. Herbivores shouldn’t eat meat‽ Holy crap! this changes everything!

Depends on how you define social media.

Some people say it refers to any online social interaction platform, including forums, Usenet, IRC, and even email; the logical conclusion of this point of view is that the phone network is social media, and one can make the case that so is the postal service. This definition strikes me as too broad; I feel like it was dreamt up by people who have never known a world without facebook.com and try to force predecessors into a bucket where they don’t belong.

Personally, I would define social media as online communication systems which are account-oriented rather than conversation-oriented. Forums and pre-web communication systems are conversation-oriented. Yes, you have an account on a forum, but the forum is structured around threads. You can get notified of replies to a thread, and you might be able to follow individual threads, but you don’t follow individual accounts. Same with Usenet; there are some workarounds to follow individual people, but the entire network is based around threads. IRC doesn’t even need an account.

Social media is all about accounts; the whole idea is that you follow individual people rather than threads. I would further divide social media into post-based and file-based. Post-based social media is built around text posts. Replies to posts are the same as the post they reply to. Posts can have other media attached, but are still text posts with pictures, videos, or sound files stuck on. This includes MySpace, Facebook, the website formerly known as Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, BlueSky, Mastodon, Sharkey, Akkoma, Friendica, Threads.net, and so forth.

In file-based social media, posts consist of non-text files; responses and replies to posts are not the same as the posts themselves. This is things like YouTube, PeerTube (video), Instagram, Pixelfed (pictures), and Castopod (audio files).

ActivityPub allows post-based and file-based social media to interact with each other. Somebody can post a video with PeerTube, and get replies with Mastodon and Sharkey.

Then there’s what might be called the Slashdot model, which covers Slashdot, Fark, Digg, Reddit, Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed, and Substrings. Reddit is an interesting case of something which was not originally social media, but became social media when the people in charge added the ability to follow individual accounts, and have been trying their darndest to add in more and more features from traditional social media.

And that brings us to the threadiverse. Threadiverse programmes are built on ActivityPub, the same protocol that powers Mastodon, Sharkey, Akkoma, Friendica, PeerTube, and Pixelfed, all of which are social media. You use Lemmy, specifically, lemmy.world, and posted this question to a community on the same instance. Lemmy does not currently allow users to follow individual accounts, and thus under my definition, it does not qualify as social media.

However. I use Mbin, and thus I would refer to @NoStupidQuestions@lemmy.world as a magazine rather than a community. (Actually, I mostly use Mastodon, but I’m posting this with my Mbin account). Mbin does allow users to follow individual accounts; in fact, I follow several Lemmy accounts, and I can directly follow your account as well, right from the web interface. I could also follow your account with my Mastodon account. This means that even if Lemmy fails the definition of social media, it looks and acts just like social media to a bunch of things that do.

So is Lemmy social media? Honestly, yeah, I’d say so. Maybe it isn’t social media to Lemmy users, but it is to most of the rest of the Fediverse.