youtube is plagued with these bots that either copy someone else's comment (normally positive of the video creator in order to avoid being auto deleted) or use some chatbot to come up with phrases, the picture is always some attractive woman or sometimes just straight up images from porn, when you click on the profile the banner image or profile links will contain a link to either a scam site or an onlyfans page. They generally also bot upvotes on their comments in order to get better visibility

Ok, as someone who was genuinely interested in Scandinavian history during the Viking Age, this one pisses me off more than it should, we know the vikings at BARE MINIMUM LEVEL OF CONTACT traded with people who traded with the Arabs, we know this because several viking hoards have been discovered with Arab coins.

Additionally, the Viking era came about because the vikings had (generally) better boats than other countries at the time, and those boats could traverse both river and sea, allowing them to trade over great distance.

There's a ton of other stuff I wont go into about the steel (which, by the way, was not damascus, nobody who spent any time learning about it would claim so), the broad terminology of "vikings", and the Ulfbert sword, maybe I'll come back some day and type it out, but I just don't have the time or energy to write an essay right now

I'm pretty sure it's a reference to this: youtube.com/watch?v=NlZzftmtGJY

I saw that thread, there were some extremely weird and gross responses, one person wrote like 6 paragraphs on how they couldn't stop using it, with one of the reasons being they "liked the mouth feel"??? It's baffling the lengths people will go to to justify saying a slur.

Star forts existing despite their expensive construction because they are superior to other fort designs in the age of gunpowder due to their overlapping zones of fire and safe zones for defenders? No! Clearly its because we have aquatic ancestors with melon glands and long skulls that bread us into slaves by removing said melon glands! And we hid their skulls there! In some of the most interesting and eye catching structures to see! You know, to not draw attention to them!

I legitimately do not get the logic here.

Food deserts aren't just places where there aren't grocery stores, they also include places where there are abundant stores but fruits, veggies, and other vegan or healthy options cost drastically more, for example, there are parts of New York City considered to be food deserts because all the healthy options are too expensive for someone on a low income to reliably afford, forcing them to go for unhealthy, but cheaper options. This is something that, to the credit of whoever is in charge of the NYC health department, the city has been working on solving, doing things such as incentivizing "Green Carts", food carts with affordable healthy options like vegetables and fruits.

Also consider, you don't know too much about that person's life, maybe they live in a non-food desert location but have to travel frequently via car through food deserts, maybe they have to move a food desert in the future, maybe they have a dietary restriction preventing them from accessing several of those healthy vegan options, so they have to supplement their diet by using animal products.

Also, in my experience, most 'anti-vegans' tend to have no idea what a food desert is, the normal excuse is nutrients or iron intake, most of the non-vegans I've talked to that even know about food deserts have either tried to go vegan and found it too hard to do while also keeping up with their health and finances or work in an industry directly combating food deserts, just something to consider.

There's also the privilege of living in a location where vegan alternatives are readily and frequently available, vast swaths of the US are in what's known as "food deserts", locations where "residents’ access to affordable, healthy food options (especially fresh fruits and vegetables) is restricted or nonexistent due to the absence of grocery stores within convenient traveling distance" (https://foodispower.org/access-health/food-deserts/) these locations also tend to have high obesity or diabetes rates due to the fact that the only food easily and cheaply available is high in sugar. Add in things like the increased price for even simple vegan foods (like rice and beans) and you might be starting to see the picture, as much as some people would LIKE to be vegan it is literally not possible for them without either taking on substantial additional costs or completely upending their life.

A lot of the reason people who are otherwise pro-vegan (like myself) tend to dislike online vegans is that they will, consistently and smugly, while in a location and economic position where its easier to get vegan options, berate people for eating animal products without ever considering the possibility that its MUCH harder to get non-animal product based foods in certain areas

Not sure why this showed up in my "new" tab for lemmy when its 2 days old, but thank you for sharing, as someone who was very interested in Viking era Scandinavians in North America, its endlessly infuriating to STILL have people claim that there's "recent and clear evidence of Viking inhabitation of the area now known as the USA" and then just... link to this, something that was debunked practically the second it was discovered

That's a smart solution, I'll have to look into trying it on my work PC (where they force me to use windows 11), thank you for the recommend!

Windows 11 introduced start menu ads recently in update KB5036980, thankfully they can disabled, but I'm not 100% sure it will stay that way

relevant article from The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/24/24138949/microsoft-windows-11-start-menu-ads-recommendations-setting-disable