Senator elect Dr. Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan was quoted on the election trail on his definition of Shawarma Law.

"If you get a shawarma and it's got lettuce in it, it's not shawarma, it's just a sandwich. Someone has lied to you."

As a corollary, a shawarma can be made into a sandwich by the addition of lettuce where it was not one before. A traditional shawarma does not have two defined bread buns which contain the rest of the sandwich, but use an flatbread as one defined piece surrounding it. Similarly, a hotdog bun is one defined piece of bread, surrounding the contents of the dog. Can we now use Dr. El-Sayed's definition of Shawarma Law to confirm that a hotdog is a sandwich and put to rest one of the greatest arguments of our generation?

The blaze has officially ignited!

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Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like 2026 midterm elections, electoral college and proton. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was perplexed.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

I hope I am blind to something here... but every time I want to wipe a USB that had a linux distro on it (Mint, in this case) I have to hop into Windows and use DISKPART. Just now the stupid thing didn't say it was read only (by flags), but I had to clear that anyway before it would clean

I am wiping this to create a macOS installer. I tried to clear it on MacOS, EndeavourOS (with partitionmanager), and Windows (Explorer before DISKPART)

All this said, I love DISKPART and I will never speak ill of it. Its simple and effective and just works.

It appears obvious by now that freedom of the press and freedom of speech is under attack in the EU and the US both.

In the EU, critics of Israels genocide in Gaza are being met with sanctions, closing bank accounts and imposing extra-legal status of civil death, under the odd pretext of this criticism of Israel is weakening the EU's war efforts in Ukraine. Blatant repression of political expression.
https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/weaponizing-civil-death-to-crush

In the US, well we got Orange Man and with Microsoft willing to close the accounts of the International Criminal Court in the Hague, account and data safety is beholden to state and corporate interests:
https://apnews.com/article/icc-trump-sanctions-karim-khan-court-a4b4c02751ab84c09718b1b95cbd5db3

These developments have me considering a contingency plan for my email and webhosting needs. I was wondering what would be the least fragile, long-term choice of DNS and hosting outside EU and US. For a website with political content critical of the EU-US, Russia would be an obvious hedge against political repression. Any recommendations/experiences for providers in Russia? Other locations to consider?

Recent website closures appear to have been targeting DNS resolvers, to make website unavailable. How to protect against this?

The one semi-viable option I know of - that would still be beholden to EU sanctions, I think - is 1984.is based in Iceland. They have a history of fighting spurious take-down claims. https://litigation.1984.hosting

It might sound like I'm some sort of hosting wizard. I'm not. Please consider this if giving a technical response. Thanks for any input and thoughts.

I know we have a few VR veterans around the site, and given that the Steam Frame has finally materialized, we likely have some people who are soon to be new to VR.

This is a topic for people to ask any questions they have about VR, as well as for people who are familiar to share recommendations, tips, tricks, and any other thoughts they have.

after the latest round of reporting from 404 media on Andy Chen's very un-leader-like and hostile attitude, I would like to start exploring my options for a way to have an email service that is not to beholden to other services.

my current mindset is:

1. I have to either be OK with the fact that a service I use starts out with good aspirations but that can all change in the blink of an eye depending entirely upon the current moods of the C-level executives of the company
   OR
2. I have to be OK with changing my email address every-time a service I use goes a bit nuts. In my view, this is unsustainable and will confuse the fuck out of anyone who likes to keep in contact with me.

so I view "better" the third option as:

3. get my own email FQDN [probably something like everyone_is_beautiful.net or something] and that way, I can solve 2 birds with 1 stone
   1. I can make my inbox even more organized, i.e. connect amazon account to amazon@everyone_is_beautiful.net and counseling services to counselling@everyone_is_beautiful.net AND
   2. even setup joint accounts that forward to any number of people and my personal email [which would be joe@everyone_is_beautiful.net for example] (thereby solving this issue too) and everything can be very organized.

However, it's not like I am going to host my own email hosting service, or at least I imagine that's not advisable probably and I will need to hook my FQDN to some other service that manages all that for me.

Which gets me back to square 1 of being stuck on some external services, but I imagine, it's better to be dependent at that level cause switching email hosting service is much easier to maintain cause the my email address itself wont change

But I don't pretend to know what's full involved and was wondering if

1. if there's faulty logic in my mindset AND
2. what are the common irritants/nuances of getting down my FQDN and connecting it to an email hosting service and ensure everything works as expected and any emails I send don't wind up going to people's spam
3. if I do wind up going the third route, I imagine it wont be possible to migrate all my emails with me when I have to do a migration cause a service is starting to go down the drain? Is there a way around that? I'd like to have access to all my emails in 1 places.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

More or less an year ago I decided to learn japanese for various reasons.

It mostly boils down to the desire I want to challenge myself but also because i have grown up reading manga, watching anime (before they were called anime in the mainstream so this reveals a bit of my age i suppose...) and I thought "how cool would it be to just pick a manga and read it in the language it was originally written? and wouldn't it be even cooler one day to go to Japan and speak with them in their language?"
That's more or less... it. That's the reason i have decided to take this "hobby".

Actually a couple of months after learning the first grammar rules i also thought "how hard could that be?" and i just got crushed by a little doraemon story. I understood the word "Nobita" :\

Anyway, so here i am now... In a month I'll try to pass the JLPT N5, the very super basic exam I'd like to pass just to prove myself that I can do it and I can move on to the next level.
I know that i could just skip it and keep on studying but after an year i feel i need a sort of... I dunno... a sort of token given from others. And if doraemon has proved something is that my mind alone cannot be trusted :)

I have seen that some of you know this language and I suppose, some of you have already tried and passed this exam.
So... any suggestion?
Is there anything i need to pay attention in particular? Anything i need to consider? Some hidden rule i do not have to break?
Something i should focus on in the last few weeks?

I'm open to suggestions because i keep on studying after dinner for an hour or so but, honestly, i am starting to feel a bit of tension.

p.s. I suppose my Achilles heel is the listening and comprehension. While i can read at a normal speed, I understand them only when they speak slow and sometimes, when a word is not immediately recognized boom... i just lose the flow trying to remember what that word meant and if i have ever heard it before.