In fairness common sense and forward thinking expenditures aren't exactly Weyland-Yutani's brand
Some fuckin' guy or another. Rollercoaster enjoyer, polytheistic weird fiction cultist, mediocre talent for self-deprecation.
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In fairness common sense and forward thinking expenditures aren't exactly Weyland-Yutani's brand
It's funny how clearly qualitatively different the once in a blue moon 'I'm going to try and hurt you, now' is from the vast majority of performative sports brawling. Like Harper charging Strickland back when; thank God his teammates got in the way.
I think a lot of us have had the stuffing knocked out of our more idealistic assumptions, is what I'm saying. What you're describing isn't idiocy, it's just relatable.
Hey man, the past five years have definitely altered some of my former ideological views; not just about politics, but I'm a broader social sense. I expected...more out of people, in light of a crisis like COVID. I wouldn't say I was an optimist exactly, but...well.
I'd go a step further and say that it felt basically inevitable at times.
It would have to include an afterword admonishing the reader against e-mailing Emily Post's estate to complain about the contents
What a time to be alive baby
A /pol/ poster would have had the balls to use the phrase 'white nationalism' at least
Too many John Brown pfps on this site and not enough Thaddeus Stevenses.
Entertaining COVID zero was a mistake. I'm not an epidemiologist, but everything reputable I've ever read on the subject suggests the opportunity to eliminate COVID ended after it stopped being a regional Chinese thing, at the VERY latest.
I honestly think part of this stems from the acute phase of the pandemic leaving a ton of unresolved psychological damage in its wake. It's obvious with the people who never made it past denial, less so when it's people still halfway stuck in that time.
covid deaths are underneath flu deaths.
God, just typing this actually makes me feel awful for the people who actually did have to have this conversation with a suicidal teenager.
I'd guess because the people making the decisions don't have to personally endure the anguished silence followed by the defeated, "OK, bye then."
Ok, because I need to post something not related to politics right now; I got this awesome traditional roguelike called Quasimorph on Steam sale yesterday, and it's awesome. Stylistically bleak, punishing, and still in active development. Still on sale! store.steampowered.com/app/2059170/...
Hey, it's normal within a certain corrosive, heavily online social milieu!
Last I checked in even he'd abandoned the premise on the basis he hadn't considered transhumanism as a complicating factor Coming up with reasons why the thesis is misguided is practically a whole hobby
Yeah it does feel like there's a distinction between communities forming around users vs. users forming communities there
Make sure not to set an alarm
Yeah but the enforcement over time is key, that's the point I'm really underlining here. Something like the nuclear block is a systemic change that alters user incentives; banning problem users really isn't. If you don't remain vigilant, they'll worm their way back in.
A not especially heartening example of this is how Reddit made it clear a couple years ago they're not willing to tolerate moderators using blackouts as a form of protest anymore. A few prominent sub handovers over time was enough to get the point across.
I tend to think platforms are stickier than this but I will say I do think you affect a change if you stay at war long enough. It is possible to change online cultures in this way. It's just not as easy as one banwave, and you have to swim against pressures to abandon the effort.
I don't think that's how it works at all, to be frank; either you just let the new aspiring power users move into their space and nothing changes, or you keep banning the replacements and you end up at war with your own userbase.
It really is a degree of 'tell your story with your username' that we should all aspire to
The real question here is how to convince people who only have a hammer that the problem is their own stupid faces
At risk of being a pedant, and because I think it's important to underline; if they ban the correct 100 people and everyone is mad about it, the culture hasn't really been fixed.
Honestly I think any framing that describes 99 percent of anything as similar is gonna run into serious issues fairly quickly At least when you're talking about the 1 percent you've got a stronger case that these are people who share a broad set of interests and circumstances
Honestly surprised he hasn't had an actual breakdown or gone off the deep end yet, he's got unusual stamina for the pure poaster life but you still gotta think it has an effect
Today's a nice reminder that, while Bluesky is the best available social media option, all social media is really bad.
At one point that was true though
Does he even have to do that anymore? I feel like his existence is so offensive to them he doesn't even have to try.
I cannot believe Grok spent days regurgitating violent fantasies about him and he's still on Xitter lol. It's gotta be like the dozenth time he's been subject to organized harassment over there. I'm not sure whether that's brave or stupid but it's definitely something lol
God how much of it just comes back to finding someone who it's socially acceptable to hurt
Yeah the issue is that this gets framed as a Bluesky exclusive issue when it's very much an 'all of social media' issue. Aside from the actual sewer pits like Xitter or 4chan I'm not really interested in creating a hierarchy of dysfunction and I'm not sure anyone else should be either
Just so I can prepare myself, how many posts are we out before the Lolthposting starts
...is there somewhere I can read more about this that doesn't require me Googling things I'm not really comfortably Googling? I'm already not crazy about having done 'Aella sex zoo slutcon'
what about a child with a temporary tattoo of a burger
No. This is somewhere to be. This is all you have, but it's still something. Streets and sodium lights. The sky, the world. You're still alive.
Honestly, I struggle to tell who knows that and who's being serious. Maybe my brain just can't parse that many textual levels at once.
It's thoroughly unsurprising that unhinged people turn them into grudge and cope lists but I was also kinda hoping I was just being characteristically overly pessimistic about my expectations for them
I have to make a conscious effort not to look myself up on Clearsky; it's a useful tool for a lot of people, but I sort of personally wish it didn't exist.
I wonder if Silver would tell him to 'update his priors'
Yeah that's a fair point
Does JQA get bonus points for his SecState/Congressional work? I feel like that affects the ranking.
Everybody Hurts, and I don't care how basic that makes me.
I didn't realize it was the first and not subscription anniversary! TIL
Do they reset on the first? I thought it was subscription anniversary
Nadler. He did an exit interview with NYT but I'm out of gift links, sorry.
Explicitly conceding a need for generational change and saying he can't defend what Israel is doing admittedly makes this significantly easier
HOW characters fight in shonen action anime and manga is far, far more important than who wins. The most beloved fight in Naruto (a series with no shortage of them) is between two side characters of middling power, at a tournament. The stakes themselves are very limited.
It only really works if it happens the day after he talks to Vance.
*Singalled
It's a special kind of toxicity that gets you Signalled around here. For all the circlejerking about how there's no diversity of thought, lots of people are still willing to at least tolerate Mark Cuban and such. Do we need to re-iterate what happens when you put a trans flag in your Xitter bio?
Dave's thread on this book honestly made a lot of things clear to me about Silver that I'd been struggling to reconcile. Gambling addiction cooked the man's brain.
USING ALMOST TWICE IN THE SAME SENTENCE IS BAD COMPOSITION FUCKFACE
Near as I can tell the entire basis of Conrad Black's appeal as a pundit is that he's willing and able to use words like avaricious in places where they clearly don't belong. Hell, I saw him drop antediluvian in a column, once. Why did we give his citizenship back, anyway?
Tbh posting that stuff under a still from First Reformed is especially ridiculous; that movie is somewhere between longest darkest night of the soul and fuck it let's just bring back Russian nihilism because who cares
ok
...do we have a cute little portmanteau for this one yet?
Well see the thing is, I don't want to read too much into a headline from an editorial, but also don't think an actual Butlerian Jihad is stopping with LLMs, so I do get a little antsy about it
I mean, 'Butlerian Jihad Now' admittedly implies a broader platform of action than simply the United States, so there's that.
As good of a takedown as I have ever seen.
It's feasible to take the train places in the US if you are in a major location on the eastern seaboard, taking a train to another major location on the eastern seaboard, and it's not going to take you 36 hours to do so. That's a lot of ifs.
I can't imagine being invested enough to ambush GRRM at a con and make a fool and asshole out of myself, but like, I sorta do feel like you lost yourself as a storyteller somewhere along the way, dude.
IIRC the Others are probably something closer to the fair folk in the book series, but either way; that's really where the story feels like it's building. Low political fantasy climaxes with epic high fantasy battle between good and evil. Rad. And yet we resolved the former in episode 2? What?
I'd honestly be OK with Essos being much closer to the sort of cryptic, New Weird style 'Hey, lotsa strange stuff going on over there, huh? ...anyway...' style of storytelling if we didn't know now the main plot is building towards 'this is how Bran becomes King.' I don't care who gets to be King!
Hmm. That's true. Maybe it's not as solid a hypothesis as I thought.
It's this. It's absolutely this. When did you start doing it? When you were a teenager. Didn't have your own place, barely had your own space; maybe didn't at all, if you were particularly unfortunate. Old habits die hard.
Poor guy accidentally wrote a climate change allegory when all he wanted to write about was who gets to be King of the Seven Kingdoms. My dude, I do not fucking care. When you're done telling me about the inhuman monstrosities from the north, maybe we can talk about why there's no kids in Asshai.
They gave the entire Frey revenge plot to Arya, so there's just no reason to go there.
Well, anecdotally hyperstereotyping seems a lot less prevalent than it was when I was growing up. Meanwhile, I can still go into a WoW private server and read a bunch of people insulting each other by calling each other 'gay'. I guess every generation makes its own hell lol
It doesn't appear in the TV series so most people aren't even aware it exists lol
White Harbor in the North, held by the Manderlys.
Five. Oldtown enjoys a degree of political independence, the other four are subjects of their respective kingdoms.
Yeah I'm not saying that to be like 'kids these days are so stupid' or anything, I get it.
It's fascinating to contemplate having the self-consciousness to understand how a phone free space could be liberating while also subscribing to social norms like this
I'm just gonna toss out the idea here that if anything we probably need more adult spaces where phone use is off-limits than 'a darkened theatre'. Although in fairness, some people seem to struggle with that one enough.
Not to mention there's a reasonable argument most of those regime soldiers were probably more loyal to their legions than they were the abstract idea of 'Rome'.
It was an actual literal legal principle called pater familias; patriarch rules (at least in theory). Sure, they didn't really have a standing, professional class of law enforcement officers the way we do, which is to say, they never had cops. Great. Does this sound like a better system to anyone?
Years ago I read about a retired guy who lived alone, and he installed a second dishwasher next to the first. That way he could just use dishes straight out of the dishwasher, put the dirty ones in the other machine, and never have to put away dishes. This man is a genius. I think about him a lot.
I guess if it was metallic enough you could do that with magnets, maybe. Interesting science-fantasu conceit.
I mean I was thinking it was impossible because what kind of container would you put the universal solvent in, but this is a much less stupid way of conceptualizing it lol
imagine the kind of person you have to be to still be a business partner of giuliani’s and then imagine that person making medical decisions on your behalf
Damn, I had to Google alkahest. Shame we never found one of those; seems like it'd be useful!
I feel like this scenario results in some degree of actual balkanization. Like, a proportion of dealership principalities kneeling to someone other than the Lord President.
IIRC there's some nationalist bullshit finagling involved in whether China or the United States is 3rd
I suspect this has pretty much always been true, but it still does raise the question of how the body image there broke containment. (I have some theories, personally!)
2012 was a lot of 'one leader after the other' nonsense. I think it was tempting to believe Trump was the same, that he'd flame out any day.
Nor I. Kinda shocked to see the occasional neocon who turns out to have actually believed in something rallying to the flag but yeah, sure, everyone should welcome you to the coalition for as long as the alternative is fascism lol
I suppose I'd narrow that to 'that's ONE of the reasons capitalism is successful', but yeah, sure. Either way; I'm just advancing a hypothesis as to why the conversation hasn't veered in a more pragmatic direction, not really trying to argue anything in particular about capitalism.
the reason I’ve been so vocal about the water use of AI thing is that the most commonly cited stuff saying it’s bad doesn’t add up & I think it’s important to be accurate about the negative impacts of this tech. if 1/3 of your cited issues are wrong, an informed listener may doubt the remaining 2.
Butterfly on Amazon Prime has been very enjoyable if only as a framing for solid performances by its leads. Also it turns out there's a lot of English speaking Asian talent out there if you want it.
As far as here and similarly ideologically inclined spheres, maybe because capitalism is predicated on self-interest, and the left is broadly hostile to capitalism at the moment. We are talking about political philosophies, after all.
Yeah, the thing is colder climates tend to code for more insulation; depending on the building the temperature outside can equal or even exceed the temperature inside. And lots of people don't have AC. Also 105 F is just too high a threshold for vulnerable people generally
I'm inclined to suggest that the pandemic accelerated this, that partisan coding vaccines empowered antivaxxers to recruit from the right more easily. Left leaning health crankery still exists, but it seems like it's been eclipsed.
Honestly, American news coverage and interest eclipsing domestic coverage is a real problem for the information environment here in Canada. I'm certainly guilty of enabling it myself at times.
I kinda miss when Bluesky was about ten times hornier, tbh
Holy shit, I saw someone say it was Jews and assumed that's what it said. Wow. Between this and 'Nazis are kinda cool!', at least she's not leaving anything more than token ambiguity.
That was nice. No finds, but still nice.
You know, I was never much of a fan and I knew she'd gone off the deep end but I don't think I realized how far until right about this second.