None of this has been about money, it’s all about ego.

How apropos.

Dwayne Johnson plays an excellent Dwayne Johnson. Don’t know if he really has any other roles in him.

Can I post more than one image at a time? Share your wisdom!!! SHARRRREEEEE

Always welcome!

Happy to help! I’ve been through the process several times for myself, and family members, and it’s never been very clear or easy to navigate the process. For example, the initial issuance of a passport does start with an in-person visit, but you basically need a federal employee to say, “yes, this is the right packet of information,” then it’s shipped off to central processing. Subsequent issuance can be done with out the in-person visit, but requires you to send in the old passport, along with any supporting forms/documents.

Exactly. “This sux,” is not the same as “it’s a TRAP,” hence the accusation of trolling.

It’s a small step from “robotic guard dogs,” to “armed robotic guard dogs.”

https://fortune.com/2026/03/17/robot-dog-patrols-data-centers-ai-infrastructure-buildout/

Saying “it feels like a trap” is what prompts the comments about trolling. “This is dumb,” or “this is regressive and adds a tax on poor people who want to get a passport, requiring them to spend money to get copies,” are legit complaints. Some kind of nefarious plot? Unlikely in the extreme.

Yes. You need to send in a packet of information. The issuance of a passport isn’t done locally.

I mean, I like that you’re attempting to troll, but it kind of falls apart with a simple internet search for “state certified birth certificate copy,” if that’s the “physical document to prove your citizenship,” you’re talking about.

Well, almost all “new” media is just repackaging the “old” media to make a buck off of a combination of nostalgia and a pivot to a different platform. No one will care because no one will feel compelled to watch the fourth or fifth reboot of Harry Potter.

Heck, even death is hella expensive.

All the while claiming that they’re doing what they should and satisfying the letter of their remit.

“Investigation” should be “looks left, looks right, sees obvious conclusion.”

Less “reduce the number,” and more “make the poor more tractable.” The rich still need human carpet to walk on, they just need it to be uneducated, fecund, and desperate to get under their feet.

Are there any online spaces that aren’t filled with bots and clankers?

I guess that’s one way to get taller.

Not yet. I ran Calibre + Calibre Web for a while before I found booklore, and the key thing I wanted from my setup was for things to work. I was experimenting with Booklore as a “new direction,” and spent a significant amount of time troubleshooting and fixing various broken things from crashes of the ingestion job due to long file names, failure of metadata being written, OPDS problems, etc. I’ve been reading some web novels (2000+ chapters) for a while, so I didn’t check in with the state of Booklore until recently, and now that I’m coming to the end of my most recent long story, I was going to pick back up in my TBR.

Honestly, I like self-hosting and experimenting, but I do recognize that “bleeding edge” isn’t always compatible with having a relaxing experience. In this case, I want to go back to “easy,” rather than “clever,” or “new.”