Perhaps lousy might be a suitable replacement?

I don’t think someone heavily opposed to gaming would be considered a normie, they would be in their own separate extremist camp also apart from the average person.

I’ve usually just walked into a local pharmacy and asked if they have the booster. My local pharmacy just has a standard paper form for all vaccination (flu, shingles, covid, etc) walk ins, there is no website or arbitration clause or even specific covid form. You might want to try a different pharmacy if that has been your experience.

I just hope they don’t cost an exorbitant price now that the national health emergency has ended here. It was really nice being able to get them for free because I am poor.

I like Levar Burton Reads. His voice is so soothing. You can pick a story with a topic you are less interested in for nighttime listening since there are plenty to choose from.

Russia has a reputation for suspicious deaths by defenestration.

Example: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/russian-tycoon-pavel-antov-dies-putin-ukraine/672601/

Yes, let’s see all those fired Twitter employees get their legal bills covered for daring to criticize him in their tweets.

Well, on the plus side, one of the admins of firefish.social (not the one at the center of this art drama) has been very public about his belief that there need to be lobby servers that do federate with Threads to help provide a path for Threads users to escape the Facebook ecosystem and transition over to the fediverse. He thinks some Threads users will find other servers more appealing in the end. He picked up a second domain, notmeta.social, to eventually set up as a separate fedipact option, but that hasn’t even been upgraded from Calckey to Firefish yet so I don’t know how seriously they take it.

You won’t have access to mastodon.art from firefish.social, but you can access the threads-welcoming side of the fediverse.

Honestly, I was hoping to find a fedipact firefish server that doesn’t have meta in the name (why would I want to advertise for them in my server name?), but the information on which servers are in the fedipact is so poorly organized that I gave up on that entirely for now.

Microsoft lost an antitrust lawsuit a long time ago regarding making internet explorer a required part of Windows, so they had to allow other browsers in Windows for competition’s sake, but they didn’t get broken up. That might be what you are thinking of. I can’t think of anything Intel related though.

There’s already an entire Star Trek instance, startrek.website. Niche instances may end up being a way some communities get around the issue of big servers defederating from each other over their different administration policies. With that topic having its own instance, Trek fans on Beehaw and Lemmy.world can unite in nerdy fandom across the divide. I’m not quite sure how the defederation works through a third party instance though, if posts/comments from Lemmy.world users to startrek.website will still show up when viewed through beehaw’s display of the communities there or if they will be filtered out of the feed locally.