Hot take, if shit and broken glass is one of the options my waiter offers me I’m gonna have some fucking questions about any alternative options
Biden says Hamas is the only group preventing peace after describing a deal Hamas agreed to and Israel rejected
Trump calls out that actually Israel is the one preventing peace
“And they’re right to do so and should finish the job”
Or could it possibly be that being wishywashy on Gaza is actually the problem? An overwhelming majority of Americans believe this is a genocide, the majority of democrats are anti-Israel.
Saying “Israel had a right to defend itself after October 7th but it needs to slow down” like Bernie did at rallies for him just pisses off both sides, you’d be better off calling for bombing Tel Aviv.
Academia can be really chill as long as you don’t have aspirations for greatness
As someone who just likes doing bench work and absolutely never wants to be a PI I’d much rather stay in academia. No profit motive means much less pressure and no one checking too closely on what I’m doing.
My PI tells me what she wants, I tell her how long that will take and if I’ll need extra assistance, and then I give her the results when I have them. Then I fuck off whenever I want and as long as my rats get fed no one really questions it.
Honestly transcription in general is the only use I’ve seen for LLMs that I’m like “Yeah actually that’s pretty good”
2020 radicalized my mom and her politics now are “let the streets run red with the blood of the bankers” and she just sorta assumes I know what I’m talking about but we still frequently find new anti-communist brainworms just because the shit she was taught growing up is absolutely insane.
People talk about how Gen Aloha isn’t learning how to read and that’s a problem but fuck, Gen X got no history education whatsoever, they just threw a bunch of McCarthyism into the history shaped hole in the curriculum.
She listened to blowback season 4 and was blown away, she had absolutely no idea what happened in Korea
Tbf I always thought Dishonored was specifically thinking about this fucking guy
Who did in fact suck dick
Our intrepid hero just watched as a group of rebels executed some of the tyrannical leader's soldiers. They're shocked! How could they do this? Don't they know that killing is what the tyrant does? The rebels laugh it off. It had to be done, they would've done the same to them
A More Civilized Age discussed this exact point recently; There’s a very valid reason for resistance fighters to not take prisoners. One, keeping prisoners requires resources you may not have. But more importantly, the goals of a resistance group and the goals of the occupier are not the same.
As a resistance group your goal is not total military victory and occupation, your goal is to make continuing the occupation as painful and expensive as possible, to convince the occupying force that continued occupation isn’t worth it. Taking prisoners directly goes against this goal, unless you plan on using those prisoners as some sort of bargaining chip. Especially in a sci-fi setting where wounds can be healed quite quickly and thoroughly and so the wounded can be back in action very quickly.
And YES! They would have done the same to you! Without hesitation! And they still might try if you don’t kill them!
I’m looking at you, Avatar The Last Airbender
Spend the finale rightfully knocking Fire Nation airships out of the sky, killing everyone onboard, only to let Ozai live.
And that’s after Aang went fishing around for anyone that would tell him it was okay to spare Ozai because literally everyone around him including his past lives were like “No man you really gotta kill this guy”
As mid as that movie was it left such a great setup for a third movie and instead of letting Rian or even a third director stick the landing they gave it back to JJ to have a childlike tantrum and spend the first 20 minutes undoing the bits he didn’t like
The tacit acceptance of monarchism and aristocracy as normal and legitimate things
Something that I thought dealt with this well was The Magicians.
spoiler
After becoming kings and queens of legally-distinct Narnia the protagonists decide “Hey this is real fucking weird” and decide to hold elections, at which point the high king is booted back to Earth because the creature that created legally-distinct Narnia is insane and made it a fundamental law of the universe that the rulers must be from Earth.
cybernetics makes you evil
I love Star Wars but this is so core to it and I hate it. “He’s more machine now than man; twisted and evil.”
I don’t really see how this can be true outside of parent companies dissolving studios and looting them for parts if they have one flop.
Like Arkane, the studios that made Dishonored, Prey, and Deathloop, some incredibly successful games especially for their budgets, didn’t go bankrupt when Redfall flopped, they were dissolved by Bethesda. If Bethesda hadn’t done anything they probably would’ve recovered from their one flop, and likely they wouldn’t have pushed it in that state in the first place without Bethesda’s influence.
It’s not that something has changed in the gaming market, it’s just like every other industry right now; The capitalists are stripping the copper out of the walls
It’s looking more and more likely honestly
on the hunt for violent criminals
Should’ve looked in a mirror Jesus fucking Christ
When WW2 ended the unification of Germany was still in living memory. It would’ve been so reasonable to split it up. Like not into West and East Germany but into multiple actual separate states.
My partner and I recently started playing again and are looking for a guild or just a smaller group to play with who don’t suck
Give me suggestions for mobile games that don’t suck ass
Currently the only games on my phone are
Reigns: Her Majesty - Card based roguelike, you’re the Queen pick between decisions to balance the favor of different groups, progressing through a larger story over multiple lives. Sequel to Reigns which is also great.
Baba is You - Puzzle game, push words and objects around to change the rules of the world the puzzle is in to complete the puzzle.
Polytopia - What if Civ was so simple it wasn’t very fun
Pokémon GO - !hillgasm
Was making coffee and considering throwing out my K-cup coffee maker because I almost exclusively use a French press now, and got curious what other people did
And the answer is…….
drumroll please
White South Africans!
You do not, in fact, “gotta hand it to him”
This started as a comment in the megathread but got long so I decided to make it it’s own post. Obviously covid makes this different, but for general purposes, I’ve said it before and I’ll repeat it till I die, please don’t homeschool your kids
I was homeschooled from early in elementary school until halfway through my sophomore year of high school. The reason I joined high school is because I was so depressed and lonely I wanted to die, and I knew my education had been neglected for years, so I begged my parents to put me in public school. Basically the only thing my parents kept up with was math and that’s only because they had me in online math classes.
And of the homeschooling parents I knew, mine were some of the best ones as far as actually educating their children go. Mild neglect with some basic math and science from atheist parents is worlds better than the psycho Christian “education” some people I knew got.
But even with all that the education was the smaller problem. Turns out math is the only thing that actually builds on itself over time in the American education system, everything else just restarts but slightly more complicated when you get to high school.
The bigger problem was how alone I was and how stunted it made my social skills, something I’m still dealing with now and I’m in fucking grad school. Kids and teenagers need to be around people their own age. I straight up did not learn how to function properly in social situations. I almost got the shit beat out of me in my first week in high school for calling a football player a dumbass. If adults said things to me that were mildly accusatory I’d cry, but also I had no concept of not saying shit so I’d call out adults for any minor system issue or other problem completely out of their control which most people just found annoying. I had so much trouble understanding fairly basic social interactions.
My younger brother was homeschooled from after kindergarten all the way until his senior year of high school, which he then dropped out of. He was more stunted both socially and educationally than I was, and started smoking weed nearly every day when he was around 15 to cope. It also definitely didn’t help that my whole family is chock full of mental illness. I think he did just start at community college though, which I’m super proud of.
So yeah. Rant over. Don’t home school your kids. It’s shitty.
Social democracy moderate wing scratch a liberal something something
ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them] @hexbear.net 20,000 years of this, 7 more to go