tal

What is the use case you expect where people are going to need a Rubik's Cube character on a regular basis?

I guess maybe it could be used to symbolize "puzzle", and maybe there'd be some limited use for that, but there's already a Unicode "jigsaw puzzle piece" that I think pretty much fills that role:

goes to find it in emacs

C-x 8 RET j i g TAB  

U+0x1F9E9 JIGSAW PUZZLE PIECE (🧩)

I have not done so in the traditional sense in quite some years. My experience was that it was an increasing headache due to crashing into a wide variety of anti-spam efforts. Get email past one and crash into another.

Depending upon your use case -- using the "forward to a smarthost" feature in some mail server packages to forward to a mailserver run by a SMTP service provider with whom you have an account might work for you. Then it still looks to local software like you have a local mailserver.

If I were going to do a conventional, no-smarthost mailserver today, I think that I would probably start out by setting up a bunch of spam-filtering stuff

SpamAssassin, I dunno what-all gets used these days on a "regular" account

and then emailing stuff from my server and seeing what throws up red flags. That'd let me actually see the scoring and stuff that's killing email. Once I had it as clean as I could get it, I'd get a variety of people I know on different mail servers and ask them to respond back to a test email, and see what made it out.

I remember the first time I tried jalepeno fudge chocolate cake. I guess it's not necessarily that oddball

and if you go back to how the Aztecs drank their chocolate, doing so with spices was a thing

but I remember being really surprised that mixing sweet with something that I normally thought of as savory would work so well.

I'd also add, for people who feel that they don't have a good way to "hang up" on a conversation that they don't want to be participating any further without making it look like they agree with the other user, the convention is to comment something like this:

"I don't think that we're likely to agree on this point, so I'm afraid that we're going to have to agree to disagree."

That way, it's clear to everyone else reading the thread that the breaking-off user isn't simply conceding the point, but it also doesn't prevent the other user from responding (or, for that matter, other users from taking up the thread).

EDIT: Also, on Reddit, I remember a lot of users who had been subjected to the "one more comment and a block" stuff then going to try to find random other comments in the thread where other users might see their comment, responding to those comments complaining that the other user had blocked them, and then posting their comment there, which tended to turn the whole thread into an ugly soup.

Also, with Reddit's new system, at least with some clients and if I remember correctly, the old Web UI, there was no clear indication as to why the comment didn't take effect

it looked like some sort of internal error, which tended to frustrate users. Obviously, that's not a fundamental problem with a "blocking a user also prevents responding" system, but it was a pretty frustrating aspect of Reddit's implementation of it.

Sure, no dispute there.

When did an appreciation for free speech become the exclusive domain of the Libertarians? I don't want you to be able to unilaterally silence me, therefore I'm a Libertarian?

Minor nitpick with your comment: there's a semantic difference between "Libertarian" and "libertarian", and I suspect you want the latter.

Small-l "libertarian" is used to refer to the political ideology.

Big-L "Libertarian" is used to refer to the Libertarian Party.

The same sort of convention also shows up elsewhere, like "democrat" and "Democrat", "republican" and "Republican", etc.

How the Threadiverse works today

blocking hides content from blocked users, but doesn't affect their ability to comment

is how Reddit originally worked, and I think that it was by far a better system.

Reddit only adopted the "you can't reply to a comment from someone who has blocked you" system later. What it produced was people getting into fights, adding one more comment, and then blocking the other person so that they'd be unable to respond, so it looked like the other person had conceded the point.

I think a more interesting question is why there aren't major US TV news sources between Fox News and the center, occupying the area that the three-more-liberal-kids wanted to take Fox News.

To the right of Fox News, you have upstarts One America News Network and Newsmax.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsmax

During the 2020 United States presidential election, President Trump began to promote Newsmax over its rival, Fox News.[80][81][82][83] Trump's preference for Newsmax over Fox News became clearer after the latter became the first news outlet to call Arizona for Democratic challenger Joe Biden.[42] Newsmax has made their more conservative leanings a selling point to disaffected Fox News viewers, as well as employing Fox News alumni to join their lineup on Newsmax TV, such as Rob Schmitt and Greg Kelly.[42][84][43] Emily VanDerWerff of Vox reported that the outlet "spent lots of time arguing that other media outlets jumped the gun in calling the election for Biden and that Trump still has a path to win this thing", and that it was one of the only networks that didn't call the election for Biden, citing the Trump campaign's legal challenges. However, she did write that "Newsmax doesn't go full arch-conservative" and "doesn't give airtime to QAnon paranoiacs".[46]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_America_News_Network

OAN saw growth in its audience as a result of its election coverage. It was boosted in particular by Donald Trump, who expressed disapproval of Fox News' reporting on the presidential election and encouraged his supporters to instead watch OAN or Newsmax TV, another conservative channel promoting election falsehoods.[150][151][152]

In the US, there there are a pretty broad range of media outlets on the left. On the right, things are considerably more concentrated. There's a bunch of data out there on this, but just to dig up a quick recent Pew survey:

https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2025/06/10/the-political-gap-in-americans-news-sources/pj_2025-06-10_news-media-sources_0-02/

You'd think that there'd be space for a center-right TV channel to the left of Fox News.