You mean a Protestant? We already have a word for that. MLK took care of that for everyone.

I think you might be confusing Martin Luther, a priest who lived in what is now Germany in the 15th century and started the Protestant Reformation, with Martin Luther King, Jr., a Baptist minister who played an influential role in the American civil rights movement in the 20th century.

Worked for Henry VIII, but Henry wasn’t going to be out of office in less than three years, either…

But it wouldn’t be as funny as excommunicating Vance.

Mmm…debatable. I would be laughing if Trump managed to get a national interdict from the first US-born pope.

thinks

It’d create a stupendous political shitstorm. Like, back when Catholic immigration to the US started to increase, there used to be a national frenzy from the (then-much-more-Protestant) American population worried that the Pope would control the government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Catholicism_in_the_United_States

Puck, 1894:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Udo_J.%2CKeppler_The_American_Pope_1894_Cornell_CUL_PJM_1118_01.jpg

Harper’s Weekly, 1871:

https://thomasnast.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/15TW-TheAmericanRiverGanges.jpg

I’d venture to say that starting a Protestant-Catholic split would be an extremely bad move in terms of the Republican Party’s fortunes, given that it’s presently the social conservative party.

In all seriousness, while I am confident that it wouldn’t get to that level, if the Pope and Trump actually do get in a pissing match…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interdict

In Catholic canon law, an interdict (/ˈɪntərdɪkt/) is an ecclesiastical censure, or ban that prohibits certain persons or groups from participating in particular rites, or that the rites and services of the church are prohibited in certain territories for a limited or extended time.

France

Pope Innocent III put the whole Kingdom of France under interdict on 13 January 1200 to force Philip II of France to take his wife Ingeborg of Denmark back. After a reconciliation ceremony, the interdict was lifted on 12 September 1200.

England

Pope Innocent III also placed the kingdom of England under an interdict for six years between March 1208 and July 1214, after King John refused to accept the pope’s appointee Stephen Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury.[15]

Like, it isn’t the Middle Ages any more, but the Pope could probably put a considerable amount of political pressure in if he really wanted to.

Realistically, people could probably pretty dramatically reduce fuel usage on a short-term basis, even without running out and getting full-size BEVs.

Carpooling

https://energyhistory.yale.edu/when-you-ride-alone-you-ride-with-hitler-u-s-government-propaganda-poster-1943/

Use of small two-wheeled vehicles like ebikes, electric scooters, or mopeds for some local travel

Even for fossil fuel-based ones, they require a lot less fuel than do vehicles. For electric ones, the constraint to use oil goes away (though I assume that electricity rates in Ireland may be up soon if not already, because LNG shipments are disrupted too); I’d still expect it to be cheaper.

For areas where it’s relevant, increase bus use

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_transport_in_Ireland

I mean, all of those have quality-of-life costs, but they’re probably near-term accessible to most people.

especially as their tax refunds get eaten up by higher prices.

To the extent that those are driven by tariffs, those are taxes. It’s the importer paying the tariff rather than the consumer, but it’s the consumer’s money that goes to the importers, who then sends it to the government.

Followed by a lot of Jira.

It was clear that more use of Bugzilla would cure many of society’s ills.

Biodiesel might actually be meaningful, given that diesel prices in particular are way up and soy exports are down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel_in_the_United_States

Biodiesel is commercially available in most oilseed-producing states in the United States. As of 2023, it is less expensive than petroleum-diesel,[1] though it is still commonly produced in relatively small quantities (in comparison to petroleum products and ethanol fuel).

I don’t know how practical it is to scale up production, though. And fertilizer’s probably a global market, so fertilizer prices in the US are going to be up, even aside from Trump’s trade restrictions.

searches

It sounds like some places are looking into it.

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/brazil-weighs-fast-tracking-biodiesel-tests-diesel-prices-spike-2026-04-08/

Brazil weighs fast-tracking biodiesel tests as diesel prices spike

BRASILIA, April 8 (Reuters) - Brazil’s government is looking at ways to accelerate testing of higher biodiesel blends in diesel, aiming to reach a conclusion this year, the head of ​a soy crushers association said on Wednesday, amid a spike in fuel prices ‌due to the Iran war.
The measure could boost soybean demand in the world’s largest producer of the oilseed, most of which is shipped to China for animal feed. Brazil’s biofuels industry has seized on ​the disruptions to oil and gas supplies in the Middle East as a ​chance to push for higher mandated blends of soy-based diesel and ethanol in ⁠gasoline.

Latin America’s ​largest economy imports about a quarter of the diesel it consumes. ​As Brazilian biodiesel ⁠is now cheaper than diesel, higher blends enhance energy security, Nassar said.
“We have an asset that guarantees energy security and will never be in short supply, as Brazil has abundant feedstock,” he ⁠said. “This ​war could drag on … We need a much shorter ​timeline to complete the tests.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-01/indonesia-s-b50-pivot-shows-war-is-stoking-global-biofuel-demand

Indonesia’s B50 Pivot Shows War Is Stoking Global Biofuel Demand

Indonesia’s abrupt pivot to expand its biodiesel mandate is the latest sign of how the war in Iran is reshaping energy policy, tightening global vegetable oil supplies as more gets funneled into fuel.

The world’s top palm oil producer will implement its B50 program — an ambitious target to boost the level of biodiesel blended in its fuel to 50% — starting from July 1, Airlangga Hartarto, coordinating minister for economic affairs announced late Tuesday. The move is part of efforts to mitigate energy supply disruptions wrought by the conflict, with Airlangga saying it could reduce fossil fuel consumption by 4 million kiloliters annually.

Yall know that ‘Fallout’ was originally turn-based?

And there’s still the Wasteland series, which is what the isometric Fallout games heavily derived from.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jo2BKNtKDI

This guy recommends Overload. I haven’t played it, but…

If someone can plant a camera somewhere that they can see your keyboard, they can probably obtain your password.

It kills Iran’s ability to extract tolls from ships that want to get past. Assuming that it’s enforced, which I am not at all sure it will be. Like, are we honestly going to, say, put an anti-ship missile into a China-flagged merchant ship because they paid off Iran?

My main requirement was for the touchpad to actually have physical tactile buttons, fuck that whole solid slab of touch thing, I want 2 proper clicky buttons.

I’m in the same boat, except I want three for Linux, where the third button is more-useful than in Windows, and there are very, very few laptops that have that any more — a few Thinkpad models. I finally gave up on it, just accepted that I was going to have a laptop without same, though you can get USB touchpads with physical buttons if you want to haul one around (and I keep one in my car for just this reason — sometimes it’s worth hauling out).

But I want a Kenshi like game set in Morrowind.

Honestly, I’d like a Kenshi-like game set in damn near any setting.

Like, the Kenshi setting is interesting, but in terms of gameplay…it’s essentially unique from a gameplay standpoint. I’m still a bit amazed that nobody has made other games in the genre.

There is a sequel that is being worked on and will come out someday…

I think that part of the problem is that there aren’t that many settings where it makes sense. Descent worked because you were supposed to be on low-gravity asteroids to justify the zero-G environment. That also means that it has to be in space and in the future. It had to be in mines, to justify the scale — most human-created environments are going to be smaller.

I was playing Starfield and one of the moments there that I was impressed — most of the combat isn’t all that new — was in a zero-G gunfight on a space station (the Almagest or whatever the space casino is), where gunfire was sending objects flying around and riccocheting all over. I was thinking “it’s odd that more games haven’t done zero-G first-person shooters”. But…when you think about how limited the settings are where it really makes sense, I think it’s understandable.

I mean, I guess you could create a fantasy world and just throw up your hands and say, “it’s all magic” or something, but…

Some games that I like thematically, but don’t enjoy the gameplay on:

• Elden Ring. If it was more RPG-like, avoided respawning enemies and reliance on learning patterns, I think I’d like it more.

• Sunless Sea. Neat setting and writing. I don’t like the gameplay — simple combat, not very interesting choices, hunt-the-item stuff.

• Cyberpunk 2077. This isn’t bad, but I wanted something like a Bethesda game, and I got something like a Grand Theft Auto game. I think that it’d be much better as a Bethesda-like game. Oh, though I never really liked Johnny Silverhand as a character much.

• Fallout 76 — well, I don’t have a problem with the franchise — but on that particular game, I’d rather it wasn’t an online game, were a single-player open-world RPG. It’s more like that than when it launched, but…

• To expand on that: a whole slew of games that are really intended to be played multiplayer, but where I only want to play against the computer. I don’t like playing games multiplayer. I would buy an expansion for these that went back and put in some major single-player improvements and good game AI. Carrier Command 2 can be played single-player, but it’s kinda repetitive and not balanced well for single-player teams. Wargame: Red Dragon. I like the game and the setting, but the AI is very difficult to enjoy playing against; just too primitive. Steel Division 2, later in Eugen’s series, really improved on the AI. Defense of the Ancients 2; the whole MOBA genre is really oriented towards playing with real humans.

• Scanner Sombre. This is a mostly-psychological horror game, where the gimmick is that you can only see something that you’ve scanned with this LIDAR-type gizmo. You’re walking through a cave complex, and the mechanic of things slowly emerging and having to manage your visibility really works in a horror environment. But…the game isn’t really very replayable, and I like replayable games. I wish that someone would basically take the stumbling-around-in-a-cave-with-a-scanner thing and make a different sort of game out of it. (Note: If you play this, I played the Windows version in Proton. The Linux-native build was extremely unstable for me.)

And just for the hell of it, the opposite — some where I like the gameplay, but not the theme:

• The Binding of Isaac. I love the action roguelike gameplay. I don’t like the gore/fetus/abuse/scatological stuff all that much. I’ll deal with it, but I’d have liked the game more if it had a different theme.

I think that he’s wanting a physically-rotating-at-runtime mount. Like, where you can just swivel the monitor and use it in another orientation.

You can get VESA mounts that rotate, but there has to be some way to automatically tell the OS to change orientation.

Radius used to make monitors like this for the Mac.

Canda:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g2y7969gyo

Mark Carney’s Liberals have won Canada’s federal election - riding a backlash of anti-Trump sentiment to form the next government.

It is a stunning political turnaround for a party who were widely considered dead and buried just a few months ago.

1. Trump’s threats became the defining issue

There is no doubt the US president’s tariff threats and comments undermining Canada’s sovereignty played an outsized role in this election, suddenly making leadership and the country’s economic survival the defining issues of the campaign.

Mark Carney used it to his advantage, running as much against Trump as he did against his main opposition rival, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre.

Australia:

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/559852/trump-may-have-aided-australian-pm-s-election-victory-analysts-say

Donald Trump’s stinging trade tariffs may have helped Australia’s left-leaning prime minister snatch a resounding election victory on Saturday, analysts say.

Unlike Canada’s Trump-swayed vote three days earlier, the US president was far from the biggest concern for voters who backed Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, academics said.

But some said Trump nevertheless appeared to have a significant impact on the governing Labor Party’s late turnaround in the opinion polls, and the emphatic election result.

Then there’s the elevated fuel prices reducing carbon emissions…

Hope things work out better moving forward for Hungary than they had been.

Others are more sanguine. Paul Eckloff, a former Secret Service agent who served on Trump’s detail and previously on Barack Obama’s, argued that what has emerged in court so far does not amount to a ‘genuine security breach,’ saying operationally sensitive information remains classified.

He was more worried about the practical effect of having a giant dig site inside a secure perimeter. An open pit next to the Executive Residence, he said, inevitably alters the calculus for agents tasked with keeping intruders out and the president alive. ‘The longer this is an active construction site, the more concerning it is from a general security posture,’ Eckloff said.

I don’t think it matters much from a national security standpoint, specifically because of this:

Judge Leon has not hidden his scepticism. At an earlier hearing, he dismissed the idea that Trump’s safety required the ballroom to go ahead, describing the ‘large hole’ next to the White House as a ‘problem of the President’s own making.’

We don’t protect the President because the President is some sort of exceptional, irreplaceable figure. The President is just some guy. If Trump gets shot, then Vance gets dropped into the slot and things keep on trucking. Hell, personally I think that the US would very probably be better-off with just about any other major politician at the wheel.

We protect the President because we don’t want it to be viable to coerce the President via physical threat. We don’t want a country to say “do X on Policy Y or maybe we kill you” and have that be something that can affect the President’s policy-making.

In this case, Trump decided that he was going to go right ahead and create the security risk, so he’s probably not especially concerned about it. If he wanted it to stop, which presumably he would if he were worried about being killed, he could stop it. Ergo, cocercion isn’t a factor.

If Trump decides tomorrow that he wants to go wingsuit BASE jumping or something, I mean, okay, sure, whatever. The Secret Service can just sit around and munch popcorn and watch him face-plant into a hillside, as far as I’m concerned. The problem isn’t the President dying, but him being affected by threats of him being killed.

That’s also why we have lifetime Secret Service protection for the President after he leaves office. It’s not like he’s being President then, not like we’d lose whatever he’s bringing to the table. But you don’t want other parties to be able to threaten the guy in office with retribution after he leaves office.