Ends

One side, or both, temporarily, closed the border crossing in case, for an undetermined period of time. They set down those blocks so people don’t simply open the gate and cross as they please (which they probably did before, even in case the bar wasn’t permanently standing upright anyway). Could be that they, in effect, just blocked it for personal travelers and commercial cargo vehicles, as it seems to me that tractor drivers or other locals just tend to go around it from time to time.

There’s lots of these little country roads in Europe which cross borders and never had real toll buildings, perhaps just a small booth or maybe never even that, only those red-white tollgate bars and a guard. But, since the creation of the Schengen area, it became common for crossings like these to never having been serviced by border personnel ever again…

Many of those rural streets and their crossings however, despite traversing factually open borders for ages, are just allowed for – yes, legal to use by, for crossing into the neighboring country – people who live in that area! Or rather: for cars with regional license plates.

I don’t know if that was the situation or what the deal was there before they put down these concrete blocks, but with the shift towards rightwing ideology all across Europe, the push for faschist bs and “concerns about immigration practices” whathaveyou, it doesn’t surprise me at all that they did.

Because keeping illegals out is easier that way. Or something. It would scare voters / the people™ if they/we didn’t! I’m pretty sure this came out of some politician’s promises. Yay! /s

That’s good news. I hope that trend persists then.

Got no “vintage” hardware sadly. In a VM it’s not the same. I still have a Floppy drive, but those disks were all corrupted eons ago. I wonder how long my heaps of gamer magazine and bundle-box (bought at Aldi for practically nothing ^_) CDs are still gonna last…

They were the best of times, that’s for sure!

I had never heard of that around here (Germany). Got my first PC '99, so I should have noticed; was looking everywhere for cheap Software deals. But there were some other companies which gave out free CD-ROMs as advertising with shareware and demo games. Some of those games were never finished, lol.

The Internet Archive has those Nestlé CDs btw :)

Proper Tofu, smoked. Press the water out, dice, shake in a bag with oil, sesame and flour, then stir-fry. Try that, just one more time (ofc you don’t have to), with matching sides, and see how you like that. Can be quite not-so-bad.

But I can understand that you don’t like it!

200+ Shareware games on a CD, played the shit outta those. And they came in magazines or were given out completely free.

I believe demos for games should still be the norm.

I fucked around so long that I failed the mission. It gave a prompt that I had 17 minutes left to do the last thing, and ran out by 20 seconds or sth.

Gotta give that game a whirl again soon, with proper textures & mods & fool around with ReShade for hours until my back hurts and I gotta lay down after an hour of actual gameplay, muhaha.

The idiots are taking over.

I’m sorry to hear that. I know it’s not your fault! Honestly, I find myself losing faith as well. Democracy is in danger all across Europe; ours is starting to get cracks too, and lots of citizens are voting for the fucks that are actively trying to undermine everything that’s common sense and important for a peaceful future. But your country/government, sadly, seems to be in the lead for the race to fascism in the EU. I can but hope that the people will wake up before it’s too late and violence’ll ravage all that is precious!

Damn Poland, time to get your shit together. Final call’s gonna be sooner than later.

I have ADHD, originally diagnosed as ADD, and I had a kind of choppy reading experience with the text in OP’s screenshot. Speed was about the same as with “regular” texts, but the bold syllables were a different/new type of distraction. I could imagine, however, that with the right font, the method might be practical for me.

When I was an apprentice, my vocational school also had a strict no-phone-use-on-school-grounds rule. Even in recess. Phones had to be off or on silent and zipped up | packed away in our rucksacks/bags. Absolute bs. One of my fellow students played The Sims mobile for hours every day; almost everybody wrote texts and used their calc apps all day. But, they concealed it; it wasn’t distracting or looking too busy at times. Not a bad rule per se. (¡Story time!)

I never used my phone in class, nor the building. I had a technical calculator, and I was eager.

There came the day when my fiancée was in the hospital and I didn’t think about anything else but how her operation went: I had to call her first chance. When I went on break, a good 20 minutes after she’d woken up from anesthesia, I exited the school complex through the entrance building’s main back doorway, phone in hand. I immediately realized that I was technically still on school grounds right after the dial tone. Had I exited through the other door, the front entrance 20 meters behind me, I would’ve been peachy.

But no, the fucking super-catholic, failed preacher, creepy religious studies teacher who was supervising saw me, and approached me with a smug-ass dweeby grin on his bitch-ass dumb fucking mug. Mind you, I was 24 at the time; most students were 16. I could’ve left the school for a smoke or even a beer or two in a free period at any fucking time. And I was so dumb to actually surrender and put my phone in a shoebox in the admin office. Didn’t even take out my SIM card, 'cause I was shaking and slightly dissociated, derealizing, after this stupid mistake, the reli teach’s sheer delight for having caught me in flagranti, and the unfairness of it all. I was told I could collect the phone after school.

(The guy didn’t even go with me all the way to the office, so I could’ve just pretended to go to there and do something. Everybody used tricks when they were caught, but I was toooo honest, and naïve af.)

I wasn’t attending the last 3 periods, so I asked if my mate who was standing next to me could pick the phone up instead, after the last period, because I just wanted to rush to the hospital, go see and bring home my girl.

The thing was, the religion teacher and the ladies in the secretariat immediatly forgot about the whole fuckin’ thing. My colleague wasn’t handed out my bloody phone. And then it was the weekend, and I wouldn’t be as near as 100 km to the school for the next 4 weeks.

I made it through the weekend (took care of my SO, cozy recuperating time), then I bought a new phone & card.

They had to look in a lot of drawers and cabinets when I finally went to get my trusty old brick back. I was glad I didn’t have to attend religion classes.

Wow. Die Cluster in Zentralafrika laufen wie ein Feuer oder eine Game of Life Simulation. Spannende Sache!

Edit: Sorry, in English: The clusters in Central Africa are moving along like a (wild)fire, or a Game of Life simulation. Intriguing new tech and data!