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pixel skylines
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Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
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roma★
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🩵 avery cochrane 🩵
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Cookie Run:Kingdom Official!
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@misterjoshbear
George Tiller was murdered 13 years ago today (May 31 2022)
People noting this anniversary reminding me again that it is such an insane failure of the pro-choice movement that we do not as a nation think of George Tiller as a civil rights hero and additionally a martyr at the level of MLK Jr. or a Kennedy. So, you know, do your part, etc.
Anyway the funny thing about D&D 4e is that if you actually listen to both sides and compare what they're saying to what's actually written in the books, you will soon realize that its biggest fans have actually played it while its loudest critics have actually not :)
Like okay this will inevitably happen with almost any RPG: some people will simply choose to make hating a thing into their personality and insist on misinterpreting everything in the rules to support the Worst Possible Reading of the rules. And there are, in fact, people out there who have actually played D&D 4e and decided it's not for them. But D&D 4e, of pretty much any mainstream RPG of the past two decades, has attracted a disproportionate share of the former type of "critic."
one of the wildest things about a lot of '4e hate' is how many people criticising it seem to be parroting like, three sources. Like I understand that for people who disliked the game, those sources may well have crystallised their opinions and given them tools to express those opinions, but it is pretty weird, especially when those sources include flat-out mistakes.
It's like when you find out a huge body of Dark Souls opinions stem from literally one video, quoted verbatim.
Every anti 4e argument is the same three or four entirely incorrect and unfounded points flogged over and over again. If the critic's point contains the words "MMO, no role play, board game" I have no interest in discussing it further. I've started to tell people "You're wrong and you look silly trying to argue" which I've yet to see anyone know how to respond to.
Oh sorry I ENTIRELY FORGOT "isn't D&D."
That one I ask "well what's D&D" and invariably their answer also invalidates current or favorite editions. They really hate that one!
My 'favorite' anti-4E argument is "Disassociated mechanics" where someone complains that certain mechanics are abstract in a way they don't like. Where they're fine with like, hit points, but pretend that daily abilities for martial characters are some new abstraction that's a bridge too far despite existing forever. "But why does the player get to control this, it throws me out of the game!" etc. That one essay gave a bunch of people an easy turn of phrase to throw into their arguments and the guy who wrote it and coined the phrase makes publishing decisions for Feng Shui of all things.
I feel like it's not that surprising people who didn't like a thing haven't played it very much?
Like the correct reaction is to be a little sad about the loss of investment in the version you liked and move on with your day, but complaining is still better than investing hundreds of hours and then playing.
Having now played 4e for a while: I wouldn't walk away from a good GM over this, but I like it way less than 5 or 3.5
I have played 4e and it can be fun, but: 1) RAW it's 80% a skirmish wargame one designated person is expected to lose every week (Lancer is this but better).
2) I'm totally willing to bite the bullet that any edition of D&D (and it's related family of games like Pathfinder and the retroclones and OSR stuff) that doesn't give XP for treasure isn't "really" D&D. Without that core mechanic the behavior at the table totally changes, and since the oldest editions have that mechanic they get taxonomic priority and keep the name.
I feel that is a very silly standard, because it disqualifies four out of five of the "numbered" editions of D&D and makes it so that only three lines of D&D (Little brown books, AD&D 1e, Basic Set and it's descendants) count as "really" D&D, which also means disqualifies D&D for majority of its lifespan. And don't get me wrong, I like those older editions, especially the Basic/Expert set, but I think any assertion that only a small slice of the history of the game counts as "really" D&D is ultimately frivolous. You don't have to like the playstyles promoted by the other editions of D&D and you can just say that, but by saying that you don't think those other editions aren't "really" D&D you're making an ultimately immaterial argument that is also just kind of wrong.
Like, I don't like D&D 5th edition a whole lot, but it's just as D&D as my beloved B/X.
It's surely frivolous, but I don't think it's wrong. First, taxonomic priority. If we determine that current humans are not the same as past humans, the binomial "homo sapiens" is supposed to attach to the group that contains Carl Linnaeus, because he's the exemplar for the species. Analogously, the LBBs get priority over 5e. Second, it doesn't disqualify D&D for most of it's lifespan because the lifespan of older editions never ended and they are still widely in use; in fact they're quite vital and continue to have new variations published and played - the LBBs are still available and I have a boxed set updated in 2013. Further, the 1974-2000 period including experience for gold in official material (including 2e) is juuuuust barely longer than the 2000-2025 period kicked off by 3e.
Third, I've played every major edition under the official D&D branding and had fun playing every one of them; the playstyle isn't"wrong" or even unlikable, but there was a very fundamental change in how the game was played without XP for treasure (which also coincides with other really important changes, like not having henchmen as a fundamental function of Charisma). Later editions are more like every other game that isn't D&D (like V:tM or Lancer) than they are like classic D&D (plus retroclones, OSR games, and other rare similar games like Pendragon). But really, what I always think of is running Hero Quest at a board game night and a person that has never played any RPG ends up joining in. When the fighting gets rough they ask if they can ditch the rest of the party and run off with the loot recovered so far. I point to that person and say, "ah-ha, there's the D&D player at this table". We can call it something else, but they had the spirit.
Anyway the funny thing about D&D 4e is that if you actually listen to both sides and compare what they're saying to what's actually written in the books, you will soon realize that its biggest fans have actually played it while its loudest critics have actually not :)
Like okay this will inevitably happen with almost any RPG: some people will simply choose to make hating a thing into their personality and insist on misinterpreting everything in the rules to support the Worst Possible Reading of the rules. And there are, in fact, people out there who have actually played D&D 4e and decided it's not for them. But D&D 4e, of pretty much any mainstream RPG of the past two decades, has attracted a disproportionate share of the former type of "critic."
one of the wildest things about a lot of '4e hate' is how many people criticising it seem to be parroting like, three sources. Like I understand that for people who disliked the game, those sources may well have crystallised their opinions and given them tools to express those opinions, but it is pretty weird, especially when those sources include flat-out mistakes.
It's like when you find out a huge body of Dark Souls opinions stem from literally one video, quoted verbatim.
Every anti 4e argument is the same three or four entirely incorrect and unfounded points flogged over and over again. If the critic's point contains the words "MMO, no role play, board game" I have no interest in discussing it further. I've started to tell people "You're wrong and you look silly trying to argue" which I've yet to see anyone know how to respond to.
Oh sorry I ENTIRELY FORGOT "isn't D&D."
That one I ask "well what's D&D" and invariably their answer also invalidates current or favorite editions. They really hate that one!
My 'favorite' anti-4E argument is "Disassociated mechanics" where someone complains that certain mechanics are abstract in a way they don't like. Where they're fine with like, hit points, but pretend that daily abilities for martial characters are some new abstraction that's a bridge too far despite existing forever. "But why does the player get to control this, it throws me out of the game!" etc. That one essay gave a bunch of people an easy turn of phrase to throw into their arguments and the guy who wrote it and coined the phrase makes publishing decisions for Feng Shui of all things.
I feel like it's not that surprising people who didn't like a thing haven't played it very much?
Like the correct reaction is to be a little sad about the loss of investment in the version you liked and move on with your day, but complaining is still better than investing hundreds of hours and then playing.
Having now played 4e for a while: I wouldn't walk away from a good GM over this, but I like it way less than 5 or 3.5
I have played 4e and it can be fun, but: 1) RAW it's 80% a skirmish wargame one designated person is expected to lose every week (Lancer is this but better).
2) I'm totally willing to bite the bullet that any edition of D&D (and it's related family of games like Pathfinder and the retroclones and OSR stuff) that doesn't give XP for treasure isn't "really" D&D. Without that core mechanic the behavior at the table totally changes, and since the oldest editions have that mechanic they get taxonomic priority and keep the name.
Prev. Prev don't leave this in tags the people should know
If you think those are comparable numbers you're a dumbass.
You know what revenue is? It's all the money you ever touch. If I collect $10,000 in cash a second, keep one penny, and pass the rest on to other people to pay them for $9,999 worth of goods and services I pass back the other way, it will take me 28 hours to accumulate $1 billion in revenue and 316 years to make $1 billion in profit, i.e. money which is actually mine.
And that's assuming I own the whole company doing it - if it's more typical of a founder-or dynasty-controlled company (Bezos, one of the Waltons) I own maybe 10% and so I get to keep $1 billion per 3168 years. I mean, that's better than minimum wage, at least - 5x faster than the number given in that tag. (Which is wrong, but if you can't bother to get your math right I won't correct your error for you.) But it's not a path to easy wealth; I'm making enough for an okay house in a medium city (say, Pittsburgh) or a good one in a cheap city (say, Des Moines).
And if anything goes wrong with the $10k per second I'm touching and fucks up the flow, the amount of money I'm going to owe is going to be a fuck of a lot bigger than $0.001/second. I'll see thirty years of profit wiped out in one hour if I'm lucky, more like three centuries, which is why no one runs a business like that. (Trying this anyway is known as 'picking up pennies in front of a steamroller.' Some finance people do it in a slightly complicated way. There's a reason finance people have the kind of confidence you get from cocaine - no one else will try this stupid shit, because everyone but traders and leftists looks at it and says 'Free money? That's obvious bullshit.')
Supermarkets make enormous amounts of revenue on incredibly thin margins. They close down stores when shoplifting gets too high, because they lose money despite still making enormous amounts of revenue.
Big tech companies make lots of revenue, which they pour almost entirely into paying programmer salaries.
Boeing is constantly losing money. They have struggled to make a profit at all since 2020. In 2024 they lost almost $2 billion. $66 billion in revenue though, so they must be rich, right? (Side note: five and a half days, not four. 2023 was their only good year since 2020, so it might have been correct at the time.)
Revenue is not a measure of wealth. Revenue is a measure of... well, nothing in particular, really.
It's a reasonably good proxy for how essential you are, in that if you're touching goods and services worth that much money, a lot of people are going to be affected if you crap out and stop being able to move those goods and services from the people who have them to the people who want and need them.
But it absolutely does not tell you how rich anyone is. It certainly doesn't tell you anything about whether someone's making money 'unfairly.'
Do you think Microsoft understands consent?
Yes
Remind me in 3 days
Do you think Microsoft understands consent?
Yes
Remind me in 3 days
Sometimes the cruelty is just a happy accident of the rent-seeking behavior
geopolitically, i think it's about time for the transgender community to have nuclear deterrence
today of all days is the day you're gonna defend the right to write fanfic for jkr. after what happened today. god you're a fucking ghoul. give the first trans perosn you see on your dash all your money
Every day is a good day to stand up for freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and freedom to enjoy things without worrying about whether they're loosely associated with something evil. On a day when people are shaming harmless things, it is the most important time of all to defend it.
In Anglish, it can be hard to talk about science worldken, technology workingcraft, organization bookkeeping, and government lawcraft. It can be yet-harder to talk about tongues themselves, and the workings of them. The throughline is seen: The more unworldly a thing, the harder it is about which to talk. But the hardest...
The hardest thing about which to talk, is the thing done with ones and twos and so forth. Of putting them together, and all the other doings with them. As you see, I haven't even a word (yet!) for the kind of thing that ones and twos are.
i was gonna suggest "countings" maybe but oops thats from latin too :(
"tell" seems like it'd be too confusing
Little child! You think I didn't think of all the words like "count"!
But, yes, since we cannot "count", or "add", only togetherput, nor have we a word for that thingkind which we would togetherput... The odds are against us!
German for "number" is Zahl, and its English cognate is tale, which is attested as meaning "count", but that's not that different from tell. (Both of which, weirdly enough, are unrelated to tally. Too bad, because "tallying" would have worked pretty well.)
https://anglish.miraheze.org/wiki/Tale
honestly it wasn't my impression that it was our reference point for state *violence*, but rather *censorship*. basically every reference to tiananmen I see on the internet is centered around chinese state censorship.
Hundreds, possibly thousands of people died at Tiananmen. We won’t ever know how many the government killed because, unlike literally every other event mentioned, the state continues to threaten violence as a punishment for even talking about what happened.
When I was studying at BeiDa literally only people whose families were from Beijing knew that “something” had happened at Tiananmen.
You know what you get when you search for “the June Fourth Incident” (aka the Tiananmen Massacre) on the Chinese internet?
You get this:
The entirety of Weibo. 600 million active users. And there is nothing.
On Baidu, the Chinese equivalent of Google, you get a jumble of random unrelated crap:
(The scene with blood is a photo from a Baghdad market.)
Literally nowhere can you find this image:
To even show my roommates this picture, I had to get a VPN to get through the Great Firewall of China. And one of them frankly told me she was pretty sure it was Western propaganda hoax and that the event had not occurred.
And it happened at Tiananmen fucking Square! That is the stage for political symbolism! Imagine if the U.S. government used Black Hawk helicopters to kill hundreds of protestors who’d been inside the torch of the Statue of Liberty and Americans couldn’t even google it. And the consequences have been with China ever since. Not just the politics, but even the physical space: they put you through TSA-level security now before you can even step out onto the Square because they need to control speech acts on that symbolic stage.
The protestors wanted freedom of speech. And even the fact that they spoke up has been obliterated from history.
By contrast, the American government lets you google every single one of those American incidents. I have heard Neil Young’s “Ohio” at the fucking grocery store. We are all here talking about these events! We don’t even need to come up with coded alternatives!
Tiananmen should be remembered as a reference point of state violence. The subsequent blackout censorship is a direct result of the threat of state violence backed up with tanks. Until people are afraid to mention Ferguson on social media for fear of getting harmonised, I don’t see why we need to belittle the heroism of Chinese students and workers by making false comparisons.
Talk about American atrocities. Talk about Wounded Knee in both 1890 and 1973, while we’re at it. But there is a reason we talk about Tiananmen as state violence.
People talk about the funniest pop culture moments of all time but "pre-fame David Bowie opens for T.Rex by doing a mime routine in support of a free Tibet, gets booed off stage by white maoists" will always make me laugh
wait wait i looked into more details
For ‘Jetsun and the Eagle’ David and I prepared a soundtrack containing what we thought might pass for Tibetan music, played on a Moroccan guitar-like instrument I’d bought in Portobello Road. We added improvised sound effects with saucepans (they were the ceremonial cymbals) and I read a narration written by David. For some reason he decided my American accent made it sound more like a documentary – maybe it was Ken Nordine’s Word Jazz that influenced his thinking. At the performance it was not all peace and love; as the tape began, David came out and mimed the whole thing. He portrayed the Chinese going into Tibet and banning everything, including kissing; David had just learned how to turn his back to the audience and pretend he was two people kissing, then he tapped himself on the shoulder as if he was a Red Guard. This was the point at which the audience lost it; Communist sympathizers booed David. During this heckling two Asian gentlemen, standing at the side of the audience, dressed in smart suits and looking remarkably like Japanese businessmen from TDK or Sony, fled quickly. David later told me that they were Trungpa Rinpoche and Chime Rinpoche – Tibetan Lamas in civvies. Years later I would study meditation with Chime
I'm asking you to put your dominant humor in your bio (FAQ)
What does that mean? Your dominant humor should be visible in your blog description or blog title. I’m not asking you to tell me your humor by sending me a private message, I want to be able to see it on your blog.
What? According to the well-regarded four temperament theory, there are four fundamental personality types. sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic. I need to know which one you are. Sometimes people are a mix of two. I guess that's fine
Why do I have to share my humor? Because I don't want anyone who's me******lic following me. I find them fundamentally unfuckable
But it’s private information! Whatever. It's fine if you share your pronouns instead. Same thing. You're sharing your pronouns right? I need to know. It makes me uncomfortable if I don't know. You might be some kind of freak
But I still don’t wanna do it… Then I'm happy to block you.
One thing that stands out to me about the DODGE layoffs/grant cuts resulting in layoffs is that government employees and grant beneficiaries apparently think they’re more sympathetic than people who work in the private sector; they are telling journalists about the harrowing and traumatic experience of… being in a large workforce reduction.
And yeah, layoffs suck, but they’re a fact of life. A good percentage of the population has been laid off at some point in their careers, and often as part of mass layoffs. There’s a perception that the blue tribe/bluecheck types that are treating the government layoffs as just horrible and unthinkable have treated laid off private sector workers poorly in the past too.
It’s sad for these people that they got laid off, but it’s an ordinary personal tragedy that the employer they thought they’d work at forever cut their dream job, not some special unique trauma.
A large part of the reason that people are willing to accept the much lower pay of public sector jobs is because of the job security. There's been an implicit agreement "we will pay you well below market rate, but we won't ever lay you off without cause" that the government is now violating.
So...
It is not immediately obvious that these jobs are lower-pay until you get to 90th percentile or so. Particularly when you notice the healthcare and the pensions.
2. It is a point of concern to the American people that, to pick one, techbros who are actually good at their jobs start in the $120K range and quickly go up to $220K with reasonable optionality on $700K, that's not a joke, that right tail is loooooong.
"Why are Elon's DOGE people making the highest legal salary for a government employee". Uh, because that way they only took a 40% paycut.
Why does your DMV website suck? Because it's built by people making half of market who never had to pass a single technical screen. And by that I mean that I got two job offers from those people without ever passing a technical screen.
I took a $30k pay cut to go from private sector to public, and gave up basically all future possibility to get large salary increases
>Why does your DMV website suck? Because it's built by people making half of market who never had to pass a single technical screen. And because we have ADA requirements we need to meet that the private sector does not, among other things
Oh really? Would you mind saying more?
I was born cross-eyed and blew up my left knee biking a few years back and I'm genetically cursed to go deaf in my 40s.
And interestingly, none of that (so far; Deaf is going to be fun in 5-10) impacts my work output.
The theory is that ADA requires every webpage to be available for every user whenever practical regardless of disability. It's kinda hairy about whether the strict text of the statute is really stricter for private entities, but for various judicial reasons (and the fedgov being a giant piggy bank for lawyers), state and federal governments are much more aware of the matter.
((There are some other paperwork requirements in regards to changing information or forms that can also be a big deal, eg the Paperwork Reduction Act. And there's some really dumb stuff involving policy decisions; the federal government's regs for password cycling are awful.))
... but it's also kinda a convenient answer to a different question.
These requirements might explain why government websites are less able to use The Fanciest New Animation Suite or Reactive Design Principles or HTML5.1.v2_final_final or constantly spend dev time changing buttons for A/B testing. None of those things are what people consider as being good design, though. In many cases, they're what's bad in mainstream private web dev.
A website being compatible with screenreaders can explain what it took three times as long to code and doesn't have a bajillion iframes; it doesn't explain why a page h-scrolls on a 2k monitor for text that's split to 80 characters per line.
girl help they're putting "modern people under capitalism work more than medieval peasants" posts on my dash again
your rented hovel:
indoor plumbing
windows with glass panes to keep the weather out
electricity
probably a carpet or a rug or two
building codes
medieval peasant's owned hovel:
dirt floor
cooking and heat rely on a single fireplace that you have to chop your own wood for
have to choose between keeping the cold out in winter or letting light in because windows are just holes in the wall
shit in a hole in the ground outside
medieval peasant obligations for lord: 200 days
medieval peasant obligations for own subsistence: 200 days
length of year: 365 days
somebody who is got at the economy please help me my family has rickets
How much of your time is spent spinning thread? Sewing and repairing clothes? How often are you pregnant? How long does it take you to prepare a meal? How many of your babies have you watched die before age five?
Outside of “medieval obligations to Lord” you have to actually…work for your own survival. Like oh great, only 55% of your time goes to fattening up your Lord! Now winter is here and you have zero food in your stores because you gave it away to your Lord but at least you got a nice two month vacation!
And the number of girls/women who buy into this is hilarious. Oh baby no, that 200 day thing doesn’t apply to you. You have to work from sunup to sundown, 365 days a year, or the entire household falls apart. Rise before everyone else to get the fire and breakfast started, break your back lugging water and heating it and scrubbing laundry over and over and over again.
My great grandmother lived her entire life in a rural Ukrainian homestead with zero running water, heat, or plumbing. There is NO such thing as free time. If you are not actively farming or feeding animals or cooking/cleaning, you are sewing or mending or weaving or canning or salting to prepare for winter. And it had absolutely nothing to do with the structure of the government either; she did all of this through an empire, a soviet dictatorship, and eventually a democratic capitalist nation. Turns out, when you have no nearby stores or infrastructure, it doesn’t matter a damn if you live under communism or feudalism or capitalism. Someone’s gotta do the cooking and washing and mending and it’s probably gonna be you.
Look, I have men in the family with goodwill and chainsaws and carts that connect to cars and circular saws ... and still,heating up a room and cooking on a firestove is still So Much Hassle and So Much Hard Work just carrying the Shitton of Wood it takes to just cook a lunch.
Go and keep yourself warm and fed in a house with a wood stove and a solid fuel boiler for a weekend and then come and tell me how much easier life was before the invention of powered saws.
All these modern things are great yeah none of this is actually engaging with the criticism that bringing up medieval working hours is meant to point to, other than the "hours worked for lord bit" which is frankly just talking out of one's ass. The statistics for working hours comparison do try to account for hours working for subsistence, making clothes, etc.
The point of this criticism is not that medieval peasants had it so much better than us and we should go back to that exactly. The point is there are real ways in which we are less free and more exploited than fucking medieval pesants. The point is that we're supposed to be living in some kind of futuristic society were machines and computers do tons of the work and instead of that letting us rest more or spend more time doing things we care about, it's all being used to force the average persons face to the grindstone to work god awful, Victorian sweatshop fucking hours. The point is that modern technology is not inherently freeing, that just because you shit in a toilet instead of a hole, that doesn't mean your life is better in ways that are important and we should be pissed off about.
I'm a medievalist. You're a dipshit.
There are no ways where we are "less free and more exploited than fucking medieval peasants." None. We have not been forced to maintain subsistence pescatarian diets as a class or status divider from our meat-eating overlords, nor have we been beheaded and used as grave goods.
We do not undergo torture and facial mutilation for minor property crimes.
We do not all live in obligate high carbon monoxide environments that are so toxic from wood smoke that they decrease lung capacity within days.
Jewish people are no longer the direct property of the Crown.
Any quibbling about the exact numbers of the lord/personal workday misses the fucking point, which is that subsistence agricultural labor is backbreaking 12-14 hour workdays during the warm seasons and starvation during the cold, and the slightest fuckup in subsistence productivity - such as needing to dedicate more hours working the lord's fields - could kill. The yield of medieval livestock and farmland was greatly truncated compared to today, the grain-based medieval European diet was so abnormally high in fiber that it caused chronic diarrhea, and none of the annals from the sixth to the eleventh century mention more than one year of "great bounty."
Women do objectively have more rights nowadays than the average peasant of the Middle Ages and to act like this is not the case is so stupid that it's not even worth entertaining. Hey, did you know that one of the theories for the start of the Viking Age is that there was so much female infanticide among the elite that aristocratic young men had to raid in then-untouched areas to acquire enough of a bride-price to pay for the increasingly scarce resource that was wives?
And I'm not a Victorianist, but it is easy to find evidence that the typical Victorian sweatshop workday length was 9-16 hours and included the labor of children as young as four. It's almost like the 8 hour day was the culmination of decades of protest and campaigning, or something
And ah, the bucket. Have you heard of this thing called cholera? Dysentery? Norovirus? Typhus? Did you know that access to toilets is a key concern of every developing country? Lack of toilets is a major public health issue and poor sanitation kills 1.4 million people a year.
If you truly think that modern technology isn't freeing, then maybe the problem is that you don't see things like washing machines or space heaters or IV saline or synthetic insulin as technological innovations.
You are 30. At this age, you are choosing to be ignorant. Maybe work on that and don't do this stupid, fascist-friendly nostalgia wishcasting. You can point out that aspects of modern life are bad and advocate for change without cheapening your argument by insisting they're the Exact Same as being a peasant in 1092. If you are having problems with time management or depression, perhaps see a mental health professional instead of wallowing fruitlessly in the idea that you are a serf. You're not. I can tell you're not, because you're not riddled with parasites
truly some people have no genre savviness whatsoever. A girl came back from the dead the other day and fresh out of the grave she laughed and laughed and lay down on the grass nearby to watch the sky, dirt still under her nails. I asked her if she’s sad about anything and she asked me why she should be. I asked her if she’s perhaps worried she’s a shadow of who she used to be and she said that if she is a shadow she is a joyous one, and anyway whoever she was she is her, now, and that’s enough. I inquired about revenge, about unfinished business, about what had filled her with the incessant need to claw her way out from beneath but she just said she’s here to live. I told her about ghosts, about zombies, tried to explain to her how her options lie between horror and tragedy but she just said if those are the stories meant for her then she’ll make another one. I said “isn’t it terribly lonely how in your triumph over death nobody was here to greet you?” and she just looked at me funny and said “what do you mean? The whole world was here, waiting”. Some people, I tell you.
What a copycat
