I place the blame squarely on booksellers (mostly Amazon) for this. By refusing to have any sort of consistency or transparency about what kinds of cover content will result in authors being "dungeoned" on their platforms, it essentially forces explicit content to have cover imagery and blurbs that obfuscate the content to such a degree that misunderstandings like this can happen.
Words like "sweltering", "sizzling", "swoonworthy" in combination with "romance" are meant to be a clue that there is sex in the writing, but the cover simply can not be obvious about that without risking the book (and the author's entire account) being unlisted without communication or recourse.
I think it's pretty much a given that someone who criticizes the DNC stance on Palestine is also opposed to the GOP stance. Why do they need to list out all the other horrific people when they make a critique? You're engaging in whataboutism here.
If someone critiques the GOP for being blatantly racist, do you similarly ask them why they aren't mentioning the KKK directly? No, it's fucking assumed. Stop being a jackass.
Yeah technically you aren't supposed to ride on the sidewalks here (USA) but there's barely any safe infrastructure to do otherwise, and I'm sure as hell not going to ride on the street with the death machines honking all over the place, so the sidewalk it is until city infrastructure is less car-brained.
Thank you for providing a non lethal alternative method. I'm uncomfortable with how much death humans gleefully visit upon the insect kingdom when they don't have to.
I haven't seen anyone mention nutritional yeast yet, but that's become my go-to seasoning for almost everything; popcorn, pizza, scrambled eggs, bread, ramen, soft pretzels, and of course on fries. So damn good!
(Yes, I realize the name "nutritional yeast" sounds vaguely unpleasant and unappetizing, but I promise it's incredible if you like savory flavors, and it can also be used as a cheese powder substitute in vegan recipes.)
Your statement did leave some wiggle room to quibble over what exactly "very popular" means, though I don't see how popularity is a useful metric when we're talking about free software which doesn't rely on user purchases for revenue. Ultimately it comes down to how funding the development of each software is accomplished, and whether that can be done effectively without selling out.
However, if we must compare funding strategies based on popularity, then we can. I'm not sure where you got your usage numbers from, but I'll use your percentage to normalize for the number of employees paid through the funding strategies of both examples to compare the effectiveness of the approaches:
Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation together have roughly 840 employees as of 2020 (the latest numbers available on Wikipedia). I'm not sure how they split up who does what for developing the software, but I seriously doubt the vast majority of those 840 employees are developers.
For purposes of discussion, I'll assume that you are correct that Blender has 2% of the popularity of Firefox. Normalizing that for comparison, 2% of 840 Mozilla employees is 16.8 employees (round down because you can't have 0.8 of a person).
In other words, if Firefox were only 2% as popular as it is now (thus making it equally as popular as you say Blender is), Mozilla would be paying 16 developers with it's funding strategy.
Conversely, Blender is able to pay 31 developers using their funding strategy. This means that, even when accounting for popularity, Blender's funding strategy is 2x more effective than Mozilla's at paying developers to work on their software.
Again, I don't agree that popularity is an important metric to compare here, but even when we do so, it's clear that it is entirely possible to fund software without resorting to tired old capitalistic funding models that result in the increasingly objectionable violations of user privacy that Mozilla engages in lately. They could choose to do things differently, and we ought not to excuse them for their failure of imagination about how to fund their business more ethically. Especially when perfectly workable alternative funding models are right there in public view for anyone to emulate.
it's simply not possible for something to get very popular without being taken over by a corporation
Please don't excuse unethical and exploitative behavior by pretending that it's unavoidable.
There are examples of other funding models available; for example, what the Blender Foundation does. It turns out, if a FOSS effort focuses on their community, makes users feel involved and important, asks in good faith for contributions and suggestions, treats people with respect, maintains funding and organizational transparency, and has consistent ethical standards.. it can work out very well for them. No selling out required. No data harvesting required. No shady deals with Google required.
It's better than Season 8, which is of course just about the lowest bar in existence, but worth noting when talking GoT.
The plot was kind of just a borderline uninteresting version of Downton Abbey with way more blood and incest, but the characters felt correct for the world and the acting and production was on point. Definitely worth a watch, but just don't expect it to be anything on the level of Seasons 1-4 of the original show.
You got all that when you didn't even finish the first episode? Damn, you are a tough audience.
I thought the show was pretty decent. It wasn't literally perfect, but it was entertaining and beautifully shot. Some of the acting was kinda underwhelming, but some others did a great job IMO.
Especially Morfydd Clark, Joseph Mawle, and Ismael Cruz Córdova as Galadriel, Adar, and Arondir, respectively. Sophia Nomvete as Disa gave one of my favorite performances yet of a Dwarven character, and I enjoyed her scenes immensely.
I'll probably rewatch that show more often than I will the Hobbit movies, which makes it a solid entry by my reckoning, and it's okay that it wasn't perfect.
Happily, that's no longer the case these days. TDM was originally a mod, but despite keeping the name, it's now a standalone game using the open-sourced Doom 3 engine. The whole game is currently free without any purchases necessary!
Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock is what I think of as an example of turning a good character into a Mary Sue. He's always pulling things out of his ass that he's inexplicably been planning all along, or surprise he's incredible at some random thing that just happens to be crucial at the moment.
Every Sherlock is like that to an extent, but that version was the worst.
Give it a shot again, something changed recently in Proton (I assume) that made Vortex "just work" for me on my Steam Deck. I didn't even need to do any fiddling, I just ran the installer exe from desktop mode using Lutris and whatever Proton was latest, and it installed perfectly. Vortex now runs entirely as expected, even from game mode.
No idea if this is a useful suggestion, but I saw it spoken of in another thread about CAD software: there's a free and open source plugin called BlenderBIM that is apparently a decent option.
I place the blame squarely on booksellers (mostly Amazon) for this. By refusing to have any sort of consistency or transparency about what kinds of cover content will result in authors being "dungeoned" on their platforms, it essentially forces explicit content to have cover imagery and blurbs that obfuscate the content to such a degree that misunderstandings like this can happen.
Words like "sweltering", "sizzling", "swoonworthy" in combination with "romance" are meant to be a clue that there is sex in the writing, but the cover simply can not be obvious about that without risking the book (and the author's entire account) being unlisted without communication or recourse.