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This may have something to do with which states do all-mail voting:

Eight states—California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont and Washington and the District of Columbia—allow all elections to be conducted entirely by mail.

Utah is deep red, but the others are quite blue. Especially with California in there, that’s a pretty good chunk of the US that votes early by default (there are same-day options in these states, but I suspect that option is often utilized due to procrastination rather than intentionally waiting until election day to vote).

In Washington State (where most voting is done by mail) it doesn’t matter when officials receive your ballot, all that matters is that it’s postmarked by election day. This does mean that any race that’s even remotely close can take days to call (as ballots continue to arrive days after election day), but you never have to worry about how long the post office is going to take to get your ballot delivered.

In neighboring Oregon on the other hand (also primarily mail-in voting) they won’t count your ballot if it’s not received by election day, so every election they have to throw out stacks of otherwise legitimate ballots just because the voter either underestimated how long it would take for them to arrive, or because all they heard was “XX is election day” and didn’t know to consider mailing time.

I think Washington’s system is superior, and should be how it’s done everywhere. Washington also has same-day registration for the super-procrastinators! Literally no excuse to not vote here.

The difference is if the primary (sometimes only) admin of your instance loses interest, goes to jail, or gets hit by a truck, your entire instance could be dead in the water, whereas there are way more safeguards to “established” social media like Reddit and Twitter. Plus the issue of “well shit my instance got defederated from most of the fediverse because it turns out the admin is an asshat” is completely nonsensical on platforms without instances. Example: before I knew that Lemmy had a tankie problem, I almost signed up on lemmygrad because I thought it was just a witty pun…

Plus when you say “point them to lem.ee” what scenario are you imagining? Because “you should join reddit” or “our business is on Facebook” or “Twitter is a great resource for artists” are all straightforward and easy pieces of information to convey and pick up. “Join Lemmy, a subset of the fediverse, I signed up via lemmy.world although I hear lem.ee is also good, but don’t let that stop you from picking another instance” is like… Dude, people just want to go to [site].com, click on “sign up”, enter a username and password (and maybe email) and that’s it. Just having to explain to people that “lemmy.com” isn’t a thing is already too complicated for most folks.

Lemmy (or at least lemmy.world) was bonkers levels of buggy last summer during the reddit blackout. Like, literally unusable levels of buggy. Getting the word out that it’s (mostly) bug-free now would probably be good, because I’m sure there were many redditors who tried it and quickly swore it off as a pile of shit.

Otherwise I’m in agreement that the instance-selection part of sign-up is a huge barrier, because what instance you choose is actually really important but it’s overwhelming when you’re just getting started. Plus not being able to migrate your account/communities/posts to another instance if yours goes to shit/shuts down/turns out to not fit your needs makes the fediverse feel really unstable.

There is plenty of grain-free food out there; it’s even a search option on chewy. The problem is the grain filler is often replaced by something else that’s either not nutritious for cats or possibly even harmful (like potato and peas), and that still doesn’t resolve the moisture content issue.

My cat gets both with every meal. My understanding is that wet food is much more nutritious, if for no other reason than the moisture content. Fortunately my cat is pretty good about drinking water, but getting enough hydration can be a problem for some individuals. My cat will usually eat the wet food first, then snack on the dry food over the next few hours.

I’ve watched family cats rack up huge vet bills and cause much heartache because they received improper nutrition; wet food may be way more expensive and inconvenient, but it’s a worthwhile investment (same as with humans!)

For the curious, the first Native American governor was Johnston Murray, Oklahoma governor from 1951-1955.

No, property tax is basically the only direct motivation in place for home owners to vote for politicians and policies that will keep housing affordable for future generations and people who don’t already own a home. Otherwise why wouldn’t home owners want to see housing prices skyrocket in value if there’s no financial downside for them (and a giant payout when they do sell)? As mentioned in other comments, some states have tried property tax caps, and the result is creating a system of haves and have nots based entirely around who was lucky enough to buy into the market before it shot to the moon.

That just puts an insane value premium on older housing stock

Ten or fifteen years ago I almost certainly would not have found the girls as bland and annoying as I do watching this today. I think a combination of having read/watched dozens of series with similar characters, as well as aging out of the teenage/young adult demographic, made me completely uninterested in these characters… to the point that watching TEW felt like I was unironically “watching it for the plot”: I’m just here for the trains, bizarre setting, and surreal vibe!

This is entirely a matter of opinion, of course. However of the people I know aged 30 and up who watch anime, I don’t think most of them would particularly enjoy the girls, and most likely would shy away from the series specifically because of their presence. That’s generally the type of audience I write reviews for; these reviews are posted to the “Animation and Comics after 30” community first and cross-posted here when relevant. Once upon a time I was into “cute girls find cute things series” (I re-watched Lucky Star at least once), but tastes change as you age, and while some older viewers may still enjoy these characters, I definitely did not.

One series I am really interested in this season is Dead Dead Demon’s Dededededestruction, in part because the teenage girl cast don’t look or act like stereotypical anime girls. Compared to most anime girls, it’s almost as if the manga author pulled an Alien and wrote the characters to be gender neutral, since they often act more how I’d expect teenage boys in anime to act. Watching this series reminds me of watching the live action series Derry Girls: here’s a cast that compared to most media feels like a real-life group of teenagers, awkward and weird. I don’t think the manga quite translates to the animated format, but that’s a topic for a separate review.

I’ll add in that Kino’s Journey was originally a light novel series, キノの旅 (Kino no Tabi). I never actually saw the anime, but really enjoyed the light novels (I read them in Japanese; hopefully the English translation is equally good).

I think Kino is a great series for anyone who enjoys dystopias and social commentary. It’s a bit like The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror with its episodic premise of “imagine if there were a society that functioned like [concept of the week]; wouldn’t that be interesting/weird/fucked up?” Definitely not your standard anime/light novel! And yes, the tone of TEW and Kino is completely different; as mentioned in another comment, the similarity is in the setting/premise of exploring different isolated communities that each have some bizarre unique feature.

Thanks, I’ll hop over and see what others said

For sure, the tone of TEW is nothing like Kino (I only read the light novels, but I’m assuming the anime is similarly dark). However I thought the setting hit similar notes: visiting isolated city-state-like communities separated by vast, unpopulated expanses, each dramatically different from the others in some strange, unfortunate manner. I loved this world-building premise in Kino, and was happy to see it again but with a different twist in TEW.

Vigano referred to the pope only by his surname, “Bergoglio”, and accused him of representing an “inclusive, immigrationist, eco-sustainable, and gay-friendly” Church

First time I’ve ever heard the words “inclusive” and “eco-sustainable” used with the intent of condemnation.

It depends on what your likes/dislikes are when it comes to languages. I much preferred learning kanji to memorizing noun genders and verb conjugations of European languages.

Japanese has significantly fewer sounds than many languages, so homonyms are inevitable. Thanks to kanji this isn’t much of an issue in written Japanese, but spoken Japanese (and Japanese written without the use of kanji) relies heavily on context.

The alternative would be ridiculously long words. Example: the English word “extra” (five letters, two syllables) is pronounced “ekisutora” in Japanese (still five letters, but also five syllables); this is a result of every consonant needing to be followed by a vowel (except for “n” and a short list of compounds like “sh”). Additionally, Japanese only has five vowel sounds, plus a few that you can force out (e.g. “ka” can be slightly modified to “kya” to approximate the “a” sound in “cat”). Japanese also contains fewer consonant sounds than a number of other languages.

So initially I thought AOC was too young to be president, but she turns 35 in October, so I think that means she’d qualify?

Historically most presidents were in their 50s or 60s when inaugurated; I struggle to see anyone who barely made the cutoff even being considered for nomination.

Yeah I kinda suspect these anti-mask laws are going to be a disability lawsuit bonanza

Once upon a time you could entice youngsters to the countryside with promises of low cost of living, but then rural housing got super fucking expensive super fucking fast during the covid years. Like sure, maybe rural housing is still cheaper than suburban/urban housing (although this is HIGHLY location-specific), but gone are the days where you could buy a pretty nice house (or an iffy house on a sizable chunk of land) for less than the down payment on a house in a “desirable” area. You might be able to convince a middle-class 30- or 40-something American to live in the middle of nowhere in exchange for a good house they’re able to pay for in cash with change to spare (and with it the opportunity to retire a decade or so early). But once rural housing started needing mortgages to afford and buyers still had to deal with crap like bidding wars and sparse inventory, where’s the draw? At least in my state (Washington) rural housing inventory is finally going up and prices are starting to come down (although monthly payments are still at near-record highs if you need a mortgage), but it’s going to either be many years of incremental decline or a very sharp, very painful crash to return rural housing affordability to how it was.