PicoBlog

Hi friends and happy new year! I hope the end of 2023 was kind to you and the start of 2024 feels good. I spent the end of the year in California with my best friends and I can’t think of anything better. Maybe I’ll write about friendship one of these days? In the meantime, here are some views I got to see: And also a quick note that I cooked and ate so many fun things on my trip, including dinner for my BFF’s kids one night that seemed to be a hit and it was SO FAST AND EASY I thought it was worth telling you about.

Today, The New Yorker published a heart-breaking piece about Yeniifer Alvarez-Estrada Glick, a 29 year-old woman who died a few weeks after Roe was overturned. In the headline, the magazine asks, “Did An Abortion Ban Cost a Young Texas Woman Her Life?” The answer, without a doubt, is yes. So why is it so hard to say so? Anyone who works in the abortion rights world knows that bans have killed multiple people since Roe was overturned.

My name is Francesca, and I’m a romantic. In my teens and twenties, I thought romance belonged to romantic relationships (I mean, the clue’s in the name). And so I sought it in the embryonic stages of every one I had. Everything was exciting, from the sharing of brunch plates, half of my Eggs Benedict for a slice of your avocado toast loveyousomuch, to the dangled carrot of a first holiday together (Rome… or Paris?

UPDATED 6/24/2024: New Java version and server jar URL. TUTORIAL WARNING: This article is a tutorial. If you like tutorials, cool. If you do not like tutorials, move along. Embark on an exciting journey with me as I take you through the process of setting up your very own Minecraft server using Ubuntu 22.04. In this hands-on tutorial, I'll run through how to get a Vanilla Minecraft server up and running on Ubuntu 22.

Believe it or not, I never planned or thought to myself; “I’m going to start a porn company”. I started my company during my last year of university, and it’s fair to say that when I did I knew absolutely nothing about how to start a company, let alone how to run an adult entertainment company. Like the majority of startup founders I just learnt as I went. Here are some of the main things that I wish I had known before starting a company in the adult entertainment space to help you if you ever think about starting a company in this space: 

A was slightly horrified by a recent New Yorker article called Why You Can’t Get a Restaurant Reservation. Tables at hot restaurants in NYC are being snapped up, it seems, by bots and professional scalpers. In some cases, they’re being held for clients who who agree to pre-pay in egregious amounts ($1000 for a meal that should cost $300) or for clients … ncG1vNJzZmiokae2tK7YpqaurJhjwLau0q2YnKNemLyue89on6ivXam8br%2FCqKmeZaKawKa%2B1ZqroqeeqHqquoypmKuho3TCtbm%2BppydoaWiiqa5wKKjX5mTqbawupysn5qqlQ%3D%3D

If you long for the ability to successfully seduce women, you have to learn how to properly listen. Listening, despite it being a mindless activity performed without thought, is unequivocally and emphatically the most powerful seduction technique that exists. It is a tool that, when done correctly, has the ability to make women obsessed with you. If you are on a date with a romantic interest, and you demonstrate that you are actually listening to them, they will be substantially more attracted to you.

Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter about science, curiosity, wonder, and how ancient people weren’t as daft as we might think. If this kind of “wow, I never knew that!” sciencey stuff is your thing, pluease sign up for free below to get more of it: Okay. Let’s bend your mind until it breaks. Warning: if trying the following makes you feel genuinely uncomfortable - say, the sudden urge to puke, or perhaps track me down and kick me in the unmentionables - then please stop doing it!

Since a local organization is currently under attack from false allegations of a social justice nature, crybullies have been on my mind, and it’s come to my attention that not everyone knows what the term means. Although autocorrect has not caught up, “crybully” was added to Dictionary.com in 2019, and has also made it into the Oxford English Dictionary as well as the Collins Dictionary. The latter has my favourite definition: