I love in science fiction when something’s an array. The sensor array. The navigational array. Weapons array. Goddamn, yes. Get that shit in an array.
The most unambiguous flag and coat-of-arms in the world belong to Zheleznogorsk, formerly known as Krasnoyarsk-26, established by the USSR as a closed science-city for refining weapons-grade plutonium.
I mean, say what you want about the tenets of Soviet Communism, dude, at least they had some great graphic design
Stained glass windows in the administrative building of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.
The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was one of the largest in the Soviet Union and the poster child of the Soviet nuclear power industry. As such, little expense was spared on details like these windows.
The Soviet Union often used motifs in abstract art to promote Communism and laude their successes.
This is the exception to 'the USSR has nothing to teach us' rule, this should be in every building its possible to do it in.
the /hj tone indicator is worse than useless
As someone who has always found tone indicators confusing and irritating for exactly the reasons listed, I've been watching with some amusement as Jan Misali posted various polls which demonstrate the wildly varying interpretations of various 'obvious' uses of 'half joking'. But it wasn't until this video that I went OH. THEY'RE SLANG MASQUERADING AS AN ACCESSIBILITY TOOL.
As far as I can tell they DO make communication more accessible for many autistic etc people who happen to already hang out in circles where such slang is popular, because it is easier to talk to people using forms of communication you already know. But they are not very helpful for those of us who are used to different slang. Communities using text communication have developed slang and conventions to indicate tone and intent since well before the internet, and I can't see how tone indicators are inherently any more clear or helpful than lol, <joke>, (just kidding), etc.
They're sometimes more succinct, which I can see being useful for stuff like mobile messages, but I saw people earnestly suggest that everyone on a large, international discord server learn them, even though discord messages can be paragraphs long. I had to be one of several people saying "typing out '(sarcasm)' or '(this is sarcastic)' is 1000% more accessible and less work than typing '/s' and then linking to a guide to tone indicators" before the people arguing for them to be made official server policy backed down.
EDIT: Thinking about it, the extension of "it is easier to talk to people using forms of communication you already know" is that to be more accessible you should try as much as possible to only rely on words and terms etc that most people reading your words are likely to be already familiar with. As far as I can tell, people who speak moderately fluent English, regardless of dialect and culture, will generally be familiar with the concepts of sarcasm and parenthetical asides (putting extra information in round brackets). So if you add '(sarcasm)' to a sentence, they will probably be able to figure out what you mean, and if you add '(this is sarcastic)' they should definitely be able to figure it out, because that's just a standard, simple English sentence. Using tone indicators, or other subculturally specific slang like 'lmao', requires learning new terms, and is thus inherently less accessible.
At least the way I see it, maybe there's some overwhelming advantage to tone indicators I'm missing along with the OP.
Tone indicators as inaccessible accessibility tools are similar to text description reblogs of videos on tumblr is this regard. They are in-jokes for sighted people masquerading as accessibility.
Now, on to sarcasm. I had this type of conversation multiple times:
Alice: That's a great idea. Put the heater in the corner under the table. I see no way this thing would literally catch on fire, ignite the polyester sofa next to it, and burn down the house.
Bob: Are you serious or was that sarcasm? I can never tell with you people.
Alice: I wouldn't know. As you said before, I have bad people skills, so I can't tell when people are sarcastic, unlike you, who is "good with people", as you said earlier today.
Tone is for normies. Normies have trouble with getting deadpan sarcasm. Nerds are more likely than normies to use deadpan but lay it on thick. Autistic people are very much not the target audience for tone indicators! The correct solution is to make the sarcasm really obvious, no matter which voice it is read in.
Saying "Good job. (sarcasm)" is lame and mean. Saying "Good job. Very cool. I particularly liked the attention to detail when you painted even the inside, including the battery contacts." drives the point home. And if you think it's too mean either way, don't use sarcasm.
Not to derail a serious conversation, but
How my sibling and I dress when we're definitely not trans
I've noticed that more and more often my political opinion is,
"You've identified the problem fairly well but your proposed solution is terrible."
Something I ran across just the other day expressed a similar sentiment:
Personally I think I oscillate between feeling like that and "...but I have no idea what a good solution is, and anybody who says they do is probably full of it."
i'm finally watching eva and like, the show is pretty good but i don't think you people understand it at all tbh
hell yeah, youre already getting the hang of the universal eva discourse format
Finnster posts are the best posts because you get to see a really cute guy and the inevitable deranged discourse in the notes, all in the same post. It's such a time-saver.
and here's the reason i ask this sort of question.
If the characters are speaking some fantasy language that is being translated, as the majority of you with any opinion agree, why can't you just call it French toast?
Like. they are having some food that resembles French toast. There is some fantasy language word or phrase for this. That fantasy word is obviously not going to mention France, but you're not transcribing the words in the dialogue, you're translating them (in the conceit. you're not literally actually translating anything). And the translation of this hypothetical fantasy language word to English is 'French toast', so, call it that.
It's only a problem that the characters use words whose etymology references real-world concepts that don't exist in the fantasy if you think the words on the page are the same words the characters are using. which y'all claim, for the most part, isn't what you think is going on.
The awkward thing about this is that there's not any underlying logic to it, it's all about the vibes you give to your readers. Like the kind of person who gets annoyed to see "French toast" in a fantasy story usually won't get annoyed if you talk about turkeys, even though turkeys are named after Turkey, because they don't think about Turkey when they see the word. Which is a very arbitrary and unpredictable stylistic distinction. On the other hand, I'm not sure you can just say "I'm just going to ignore arbitrary and unpredictable stylistic distinctions" either, if you're a writer, since it's technically the job.
Probably the question most relevant to the author is "do I expect this to interrupt the reader's suspension of disbelief?"
Whether that actually turns out to be true for one particular reader or another may vary, but my guess would be that it's not too hard to avoid overt real-world references, and the deeper etymological ones aren't going to jar people out of the story in the same way.
But maybe it's harder than it seems. I do remember one heated online discussion way back when the first Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movie came out, with someone taking issue with Sam saying "Back you devils!" to the Nazgul as being inappropriate to the setting, on the basis that devils are part of Christian mythology, and that doesn't exist in Middle-earth. Given that Sam refers to Orcs as devils at one point in the books, and that Gandalf's dragon firework flying by at Bilbo's birthday is described as passing "like an express train", that seemed like a weird hill to die on even by internet standards.
You could actually have a really interesting conversation about something like The Female Man through the lens of another 50 years of learning about culture and psychology. If someone wants to argue that Russ is a radfem whose visions of an ideal world are sort of gratuitously violent, you know, you could probably make that argument competently? But you'd also have to engage with the book's other themes, or possibly even... bear with me, this will sound strange... actually read the fucking book. I'd discuss it more, but guess what I haven't read because I've never seen it before and I somehow doubt it's still in print?
Shame, because wikipedia makes it sound actually sort of interesting. Like, I don't think I'd agree with it, but it was definitely a good example of interesting science fiction.
It's a book I may or may not have read (I have read some of Russ's work and I don't remember which ones I've read and which ones I've read analyses of. I do recommend her Alix the Thief stories, which are the ones I'm most familiar with. Time displaced Ancient Greek Thief written so she's the exact opposite of the pulp sf heroine! That is, short, dark, kinda butch, and has the empathy of a bowl of oatmeal.) Maga guy was severely misrepresenting the book, mostly based on the sensational cover (which is not accurate to the contents as per usual for many sf covers of the time. Especially if the book was feminist sf.)
Shouldn't be too hard to find if you go to a used bookstore.
I have read it and before going to find the post, I thought you’d perhaps got an anon talking about the transphobia (one of the alternate realities is divided into all-male and all-female sections, where some of the men in the all-male sections are made to dress and act the way they assume women do, although none of them have seen a woman). It’s a sci-fi story talking about the gender politics of the 1970s and how they’d look through alien eyes, not a manifesto.
Yeah, I was skimming descriptions of it and... I think anyone viewing scifi as exclusively being "what the author thinks the world should be like" has just very basically failed at reading comprehension.
“There is a technical, literary term for those who mistake the opinions and beliefs of characters in a novel for those of the author. The term is ‘idiot’.”
— Larry Niven
The whole thing where pointing out logical fallacies in someone's argument is like cringe or possibly fascist, is a psy-op by dipshits to allow them to present word salad nonsense as if it were an argument containing meaningful information. It's a shameful disgrace to the online left that we collectively let that shit happen.
The problem with “Logical Fallacy!!!” wasn’t that ppl were pointing out flaws in logic, it’s that the “guides to logical fallacies” broke their fans’ ability to interact with arguments they didn’t care for by playing association games in which they’d pick some roughly defined pattern with a catchy fallacy name from the guide bearing some tenuous relation to the text being presented to them if you kind of squinted, and then smugly take this as decisive reason to ignore anything else the writer said. It was like watching the collective internet feeding poison to their critical thinking in the proud assurance it was a magical fortification formula
The problem with the “muh epic logic and reason!!” crowd was not that they were into logic and reason, it’s that they erected a sort of cargo cult of Rationality(tm) principally around buzzwords passed down ultimately from some sorry freshman “intro to critical thinking course” that bore an at best totemistic relation to the actual all-encompassing art of discerning truth from falsehood. The Rationalists(tm) were like, the best and most intellectually serious version of this collective meme, and it’s an utterly trite observation at this point that they are capable of being… pretty irrational at times, actually. This goes like fiftyfold for their more amateur fellow-travelers back in the day
You shouldn't be talking to conservatives and/ or fascists online or in person. They're not going to change their mind. They didn't logically arrive at their conclusions. They think you personally should die, and they get off on wasting your finite time. It's pointless.
Chinese livestream fashion companies are swapping out female lingerie models for male models because China has banned women from modelling undergarments online.
gentlemen we cannot allow a femboy gap
Have never gotten closer to installing Linux than I have just now when the act of restarting my computer resulted in 3 separate prompts to spend money with my only 'no' option being 'maybe later'
It Will Only Get Worse
Linux: Because— let’s be honest— all you use is the web browser anyway.
also like - i use steam! i play video games! i use various pieces of coding-related software! it all runs fine!
I have a few modulos for fine:
- (bluetooth) audio is flaky, even compared to how lackluster it is on Windows.
- lol nVidia drivers.
- Games can get worse the further off the beaten path you go. FFXIV works fine in Mint, FFXIV TexTools runs but something goes horribly wrong with the window manager so everything turns black a second after rendering. ARK took some finangling because nVidia Drivers and can’t run their anti-cheat, fine, but also I’ve run into no less than three mods that caused it to crash on world load, somehow, never with a meaningful crashlog (and often not even with a log, thank you WildCard). But only on the client, Linux ARK servers run fine, with some fighting since WildCard’s abominable config model is only documented correctly for Linux (or just use ArkManager). Sometimes small indie games have great support -- Iji had music problems until someone just outright ported the game -- but there's a reason that ProtonDB has a category for 'borked', and there's an even worse category of 'not on ProtonDB'. Lutris and Steam’s ProtonDB has made this a massively easier than it was even five years ago, and support is vastly more existent in mainline game developer tools, but in turn some DRM just doesn’t work period.
- Same goes for hardware.
- When things don’t work, gfl. I have had a kernel upgrade go smoothly once, and I’m not sure I want to know what price I paid for that to happen. Sometimes it’s fixable and not even that much of a hassle, sometimes it’s a mess that’s usually just not worth the time to fix, and sometimes it’s a fractal hellscape of problems that you can’t even evaluate how fucked up it is. It’s not even consistently irrecoverably broken for a given error; there’s a series of bugs related to GRUB and certain drivers that you can sometimes fix with a couple changes to config files, or sometimes requires different drivers, and sometimes just means wipe the system and starting again. a) make sure your data partition isn’t your OS partition, and b) develop patience as a virtue.
But, yes; the path Windows is driving down has pushed me increasingly far from it for personal use whenever possible. Despite all of the above, I think dual-booting at least is increasingly worth it to even weakly technical users.
My experience with Pop!_OS has been that every unreasonable extremely {linux} thing I’ve had to do, I’ve done because I’m an idiot who’s not satisfied with defaults + also I am a masochist so I’m doing C# dev on Linux.
But I would actually not feel uncomfortable giving e.g. my mom a computer with this OS on it. (Though in fairness it must be said here, my mother is incredibly intelligent even if she isn’t technically interested)
I've used Linux off and on for close to 20 years now, but I've only recently installed and started using it (Debian, specifically) as my primary everyday OS due to these same sorts of Windows frustrations. It's by no means a perfect solution either, and I say that as a professional Computer Person, but at least if something isn't working the way I want, there's probably some way in principle to fix it or try something different. It might take more effort, but that's still less fundamentally aggravating to me than having to go "oh, it just sucks by design ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" and giving up.
Most of the games I've tried to play have worked fine on Lutris, although that's a pretty small list so far. The main thing I still haven't found a satisfying workaround for yet is playing HD streaming content from Prime Video, but that's what piracy is for, I guess.
That being said I also still can't get my desktop machine to hibernate or sleep, so 😞
Have never gotten closer to installing Linux than I have just now when the act of restarting my computer resulted in 3 separate prompts to spend money with my only 'no' option being 'maybe later'
It Will Only Get Worse
Linux: Because— let’s be honest— all you use is the web browser anyway.
also like - i use steam! i play video games! i use various pieces of coding-related software! it all runs fine!
I have a few modulos for fine:
- (bluetooth) audio is flaky, even compared to how lackluster it is on Windows.
- lol nVidia drivers.
- Games can get worse the further off the beaten path you go. FFXIV works fine in Mint, FFXIV TexTools runs but something goes horribly wrong with the window manager so everything turns black a second after rendering. ARK took some finangling because nVidia Drivers and can’t run their anti-cheat, fine, but also I’ve run into no less than three mods that caused it to crash on world load, somehow, never with a meaningful crashlog (and often not even with a log, thank you WildCard). But only on the client, Linux ARK servers run fine, with some fighting since WildCard’s abominable config model is only documented correctly for Linux (or just use ArkManager). Sometimes small indie games have great support -- Iji had music problems until someone just outright ported the game -- but there's a reason that ProtonDB has a category for 'borked', and there's an even worse category of 'not on ProtonDB'. Lutris and Steam’s ProtonDB has made this a massively easier than it was even five years ago, and support is vastly more existent in mainline game developer tools, but in turn some DRM just doesn’t work period.
- Same goes for hardware.
- When things don’t work, gfl. I have had a kernel upgrade go smoothly once, and I’m not sure I want to know what price I paid for that to happen. Sometimes it’s fixable and not even that much of a hassle, sometimes it’s a mess that’s usually just not worth the time to fix, and sometimes it’s a fractal hellscape of problems that you can’t even evaluate how fucked up it is. It’s not even consistently irrecoverably broken for a given error; there’s a series of bugs related to GRUB and certain drivers that you can sometimes fix with a couple changes to config files, or sometimes requires different drivers, and sometimes just means wipe the system and starting again. a) make sure your data partition isn’t your OS partition, and b) develop patience as a virtue.
But, yes; the path Windows is driving down has pushed me increasingly far from it for personal use whenever possible. Despite all of the above, I think dual-booting at least is increasingly worth it to even weakly technical users.
My experience with Pop!_OS has been that every unreasonable extremely {linux} thing I’ve had to do, I’ve done because I’m an idiot who’s not satisfied with defaults + also I am a masochist so I’m doing C# dev on Linux.
But I would actually not feel uncomfortable giving e.g. my mom a computer with this OS on it. (Though in fairness it must be said here, my mother is incredibly intelligent even if she isn’t technically interested)
I've used Linux off and on for close to 20 years now, but I've only recently installed and started using it (Debian, specifically) as my primary everyday OS due to these same sorts of Windows frustrations. It's by no means a perfect solution either, and I say that as a professional Computer Person, but at least if something isn't working the way I want, there's probably some way in principle to fix it or try something different. It might take more effort, but that's still less fundamentally aggravating to me than having to go "oh, it just sucks by design ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" and giving up.
Most of the games I've tried to play have worked fine on Lutris, although that's a pretty small list so far. The main thing I still haven't found a satisfying workaround for yet is playing HD streaming content from Prime Video, but that's what piracy is for, I guess.
usb drives you find lying on the ground are modern day cursed amulets
just over a decade ago, i was a student at a big state university and i worked at a computer lab on campus. and people would leave flash drives there every fuckin day we're talkin like dozens of flash drives a week. and what's really wild to me is that they generally would NEVER come back and ask for their flash drive. like, maybe 1 in a 100 came to the desk and asked for their flash drive back so we'd just have boxes and boxes of flash drives. hundreds of them. and let me tell you, people would leave all sorts of crazy shit on those (it was my job to check). mostly homework of course but also, like, entire music and movie collections, games, personal photos, extremely personal photos, and, like, tax documents. do u know how many times i found a flash drive with someone's complete tax return and academic record on it? with like their social security number and everything? it's a good thing i'm not into identity theft because working there was easy mode. anyway about once a month i'd wipe all the drives less than 256MB in size, load em up with furry porn, and leave them around parties like easter eggs
I’ve finished Hogwarts Legacy, and I want to address some rumors.
Myth: This game involves crushing a slave rebellion.
Fact: The goblins are not slaves, and the rebellion never happens. There is a minority faction of goblins with dreams of a violent revolution that will not only free them from wizards but subjugate all wizards to them, and of course put the individual goblins in the movement at the top of goblin society as well. They kill multiple goblins for not agreeing with them. They are not a social justice movement. They are a totalitarian minority group trying to overthrow one oppressive regime in order to create another. The vast majority of goblins do not support Ranrok’s rebellion or want him in charge; not because they are okay with being oppressed by wizards, but because they realize that Ranrok isn’t going to be any better and may even be worse, since he’s a lot more violent toward dissenters. The only people who would interpret Ranrok’s rebellion as a social justice movement are the braindread boycotters who think that telling Jews to kill ourselves and sending graphic rape threats to trans men are social justice acts.
Myth: You commit genocide against the goblins.
Fact: No, you do not. You kill goblins under the exact same circumstances you kill wizards: they are part of an evil group that has inserted itself into your affairs and decided of its own accord that they wanted to hurt you. You were just trying to get to school when Ranrok first attacked you. At no point does anyone in this game have the goal of wiping out goblins, and there are numerous goblins that you help throughout the game. Additionally, most protagonists are pro-goblin rights. There is only one companion who is anti-goblin, and you defend goblins to him (the game does not even give you a choice; you defend the goblins) and he is completely invalidated by the narrative.
Myth: The goblins kidnap wizard children and steal their blood.
Fact: The only wizard “child” that Ranrok is after is the protagonist of the game. I’m pretty sure he needs that teenager alive, not for their blood but for their sight, because they can see ancient magic that most other wizards can’t, and Ranrok needs someone who can do that in order to find the ancient artifact he’s seeking. I feel like I’d remember a scene where he stole my blood, and I don’t. I can’t even imagine what his motivation for doing that would be, since at no point in the game was my blood needed to unlock or control anything; just my sight. (Even Salazar Slytherin didn’t put a blood-key lock on the door that he explicitly only wanted his own descendants to be able to get through.)
Myth: The only Jews in this game are goblins.
Fact: This game doubled the number of Jews in the Harry Potter series with recognizable faces. That’s not saying much, but still. Abraham Ronen and Ruth Singer are both extremely Jewish-coded names, and they’re names that will actually register as Jewish-coded for a lot of gentiles. Personally, I find Officer Singer absolutely useless, but not in any way that I don’t expect from an adult cop in a narrative with a teenage protagonist. If she were good at her job, what would we do? Abraham Ronen is extremely likable and a wonderful teacher, and I am very pleased to be able to say that Hogwarts has Jewish professors.
Myth: One of the lead devs was a Nazi.
Fact: Troy Leavitt, who left the project two years ago, was a head designer whose duties mostly included animating NPCs and designing the castle. He had a youtube account which expressed pretty mainstream Republican views and some gamergate sympathies. I disagree with him about a lot, but I’ve seen no evidence so far that he’s a Nazi or that he has any ill intentions toward Jews. If someone can show me evidence to the contrary, I will amend my views accordingly.
Myth: The shofar is a collectable item in the game and they call it annoying.
Fact:
This is the horn in the game:
These are shofars:
I don’t think there’s a strong resemblance, personally. I don’t even think the horn in the game is ram’s horn. Granted, not all shofars are or have to be ram’s horn, but I think it’s hard to make the argument that that is “clearly a shofar” when it’s not shaped like shofar and probably isn’t made out of the same material. Bone horns were used around the world, on every continent, for centuries. Not all bone horns are Jewish.
Also, the average gentile does not know what a shofar is. I’m telling you, I have asked multiple different gentiles of various educational backgrounds, and not a single one knew what a shofar was or connected the image from the game to Jews at all. Using shofars to signify that Jews are evil and bad when the average gentile cannot identify them or connect them to Jews is some pretty inept propaganda writing.
Myth: 1612 is a reference to a Jewish rebellion that ended with a pogrom in 1614.
Fact: First of all, it’s weird to use the date 1612 to signify a pogrom that took place in 1614. Second of all, the date 1612 is from a list of goblin rebellions that was included in the original series. I’m pretty sure JK Rowling was not slipping secret messages to kill Jews into her books and then going on twitter and denouncing antisemitism in UK politics. JK Rowling has gone out of her way to be an ally to Jews on multiple occasions. Not a perfect one; I stand by my criticisms of antisemitism in the Fantastic Beasts series. But in the absence of literally any other evidence that she secretly wants Jews dead, I think–and I know this is an extremely unpopular thing to say right now–I think JK Rowling deserves the benefit of the doubt about this. Especially since there is so much doubt. If 1612 is an obvious message to kill Jews, why was no one talking about it when it first appeared in the original Harry Potter series?
Myth: The boycotters are just politely stating their opinion.
Fact: The boycotters are telling people to kill themselves, doxing people and threatening them, and sending them graphic rape threats. I’ve received several myself. I know numerous other people who have received death and rape threats from boycotters. It’s why I do not wish to associate with anyone who is still openly supporting this boycott. If you think playing a video game is violence, but sending real people death and rape threats isn’t, there is something deeply wrong with your moral compass. You can deny that it’s happening all you want, but that’s not going to change how bad supporting this makes you look to everyone who knows what’s been happening. (Which is… really the entire internet outside of your echo chamber. Your movement came out on Day 1 strongly in favor of rape and murder for everyone who disagree with you, and everyone knows. Denying it doesn’t change that.)
Good post, OP
also, ling mao at the absolute galaxy-brains on this hellsite:
"Too many non-anti-Semitic things at the same time? 🤔 I dunno man, seems kinda anti-Semitic"
the "came back wrong" trope except like... they didnt. like this mad scientists wife died, and so he studied necromancy, brought her back, and she came back and it all worked. like she came back exactly the same as she was before with literally no difference. but the scientist guy is like "oh no... what have i done.... shes Different now!!!! she came back Wrong!!!!" and shes just like. chilling. reading a book. cooking dinner. shes just so so normal but in the guys mind hes like "oh shes soooo weird" but shes just normal
Peer reviewed tags from @somanyofthekids
NO its a JOKE and YOU DONT GET IT. ITS NOT THAT DEEP
While she was dead he put his memory of her on such a high pedestal that she could never live up to it alive
alternatively‚ she came back perfectly fine but he thinks she came back wrong‚ because the tragic reality is that he never actually knew his wife
im going INSANE thats MY POST.
It's your post but the journey to posting it changed it to such a degree that even its closest intimacies are now foreign to you. Sorry dude.