I didn't get it until I started trying to say "hot potato" in the middle of a sentence, like "Look out! Hot potato incoming!"

The 't' in "hot" became more and more like a glottal stop as my tongue started to touch the gums of my top front teeth less and less.

There's this saying “a fish is caught through its mouth,” and this is an illustration of what it means. This pope might present this ‘cool’, ‘modern’ image to the public, but his words spoken in private amongst his peers reveals his real stance about these things.

Edit:‌ proofreading.

There are other options other than this one that requires permission. The article mentions her reasons to choose this method.

From the article:

She had thought about taking her own life but the violent death by suicide of a schoolfriend and its impact on the girl’s family deterred her.

Whether we agree with her or not, it's her decision.

"If I can't have you, no one will." -- China, apparently.

And as usual, no one will do something decisive about it because China is a huge bully and is using its reputation as the world's factory and its economic heft to intimidate anyone who thinks of doing anything about it.

Fortunately, there's a modlog for communities here in Lemmy.

Looking at it (currently the third in the list for removed posts), an admin removed it with the reason of “bad news source”. Not saying whether or not it's justified though, but at least we would know who to blame and why.

Because my day isn't shitty enough, I went over there to see what's the vibe. Sure enough, people are complaining. There's also a surprising amount of bootlickers who parrot the "argument" that people have been saying things have been going downhill, but Reddit still is popular so it can't be going downhill. As if shitty things can't be popular.

I've seen a couple of people who saw this as the last straw, which is better than nothing, but I feel that those remaining in that site, no matter how they kvetch about it, deserves to be frog stew (as in that boiling frog metaphor). I'd love to be proven wrong though.

I remember when I first heard the rumours and I immediately thought of how sensitive one's anal linings would be to perceive Morse code via a butt plug. Then pondered upon the max possible bandwidth of buttplug-mediated information transfer. Finally, I thought about how to send back information via rythmic anal clenching.

Only then did I conclude that it's probably easier to get better at chess.

I dabbled in a bit of neography (creating your own writing system) and a hint of conlanging (creating your own language). I think I've managed to create a fairly decent writing system for myself, but the conlang went nowhere fast as I underestimated the effort required to even get started with it. I also attempted making fantasy maps, but it was all in paper and quite a while ago.

That's it, I suppose: neography, conlanging, and fantasy mapping.

I also spent an embarrassing amount of time looking at maps and making virtual road trips via Google street view, but that's way more mainstream.

Iraq's Media and Communications Commission has issued a directive instructing all media and social media platforms in the country to refrain from using the terms "homosexual" or "homosexuality" and instead use "sexual deviancy."

The decision, reported widely by Iraq's state and private news outlets, was made to safeguard societal values and public order, the commission said, noting that the terms "homosexuality, homosexual, and Gender" hold undesirable connotations within Iraqi society.

What? They think calling someone a sexual deviant is better than calling someone a homosexual?

I can't even give them the leeway and say it's just meant to say “you're a minority.” They chose the word ‘deviant’ here: which implies there's a ‘correct’ sex

Maybe that's the point though. You're not allowed to be anything other than a straight male in Iraq.

I think of the misery each individual must have experienced in order to come to the conclusion that death was better.

That someone not only have decided that death is better, but also have gone through all the steps to act on it is a measure of their resolve, if anything. And as you've said, they're still a rarity. On the spectrum of entertaining occasional thoughts to taking steps to actually doing it, the further you go, the less common it is!

That a lot of people have already gone this far, just how many more are mulling about it, questioning whether or not life is worth it, whether or not to do anything about it? And this "it gets better" mantra keeps some people from even speaking up! Why speak up when you're just going to be slapped with a thought-terminating-cliché? It makes it harder to know how many people are miserable enough to entertain "bad thoughts", and that the only objective measure we'd have is the number of people who've gone to the very end.

This will be a hot take for some but people opt out of a life that's pointless, miserable, painful, and hopeless. Preventing people from access to methods of opting out is but a palliative measure.

Sure, people can be dissuaded from making an attempt by making it difficult, but isn't it far better to address why people want to opt out in the first place? And of course, it's best to do both: prevent people from making attempts, and address any issues they might be having in their lives. Even better, provide "end-of-life" care for those who really have had it enough for whatever reason.

Why lock people into a miserable existence anyways? Someone might have been prevented from opting out, but if conditions don't change (and no, it doesn't always "get better"), you've got a person will just resent even being kept alive. What good does that do?

Now, for the trash take: I suspect suicide is a problem because suits can't make the line go up if people are killing themselves. The suits need people to consume and not kill themselves.

The following sums up my experience with Linux thus far: "It's never been easier for the newb to jump right in, but heavens help them if they ever stray from the straight path".

There's been a lot of effort to make things easier for a newb (used to Windows and all that shit) to do what they need to do in most cases. There's been all sorts of GUI-based stuff that means for the 'average' user, there's really no need for them to interact with the command line. That's all well and good until you need to do something that wasn't accounted for by the devs or contributors.

All of a sudden, you'd have not only to use the command line, you may also have to consult one of the following:

• Well-meaning, easy to understand, but ultimately unhelpfully shallow help pages (looking at you, Libre Office), or the opposite: deep, dense, and confusing (Arch) Wiki pages.
• One of the myriads of forum pages each telling the user to RTFM, "program the damned thing yourself", "go back to Windows", all of the above, or something else that delivers the same unhelpful message.
• Ultra-dense and technical man pages of a command that might possibly be of help.

And that's already assuming you've got a good idea of what the problem was, or what it is that you are to do. Trouble-shooting is another thing entirely. While it's true that Linux has tons of ways to make troubleshooting a lot easier, such as logs, reading through them is a skill a lot of us don't have, and can't be expected of some newb coming from Windows.

To be fair to Linux though, 90% of the time, things are well and good. 9% of the time, there's a problem here and there, but you're able to resolve it with a little bit of (online) help, despite how aggravating some of that "help" might be. 1% of the time, however, Linux will really test your patience, tolerance, and overall character.

Unfortunately, it's that 10% that gives Linux its "hard to use" reputation, and the 1% gives enough scary stories for people to share.