Lust is not evil. The body is not hateful. Physical pleasure is a joyful thing and should not be hidden or denied. It is not true that women have no sexual hunger. There are other people who think about and do the things you dream about. Freedom is possible.
When I see people say "abolish copyright, it only serves big corporations," I imagine saying, "The whole system of employment only serves big corporations....so abolish wages. People appreciate service workers and will tip them even if they don't have to."
Like. Clearly you have not tried to pay the bills on book sales.
We definitely need to reform the copyright system so they actually protect small creators instead of Disney, but a state of total anarchy has never yet been demonstrated to protect the vulnerable. In the absence of regulation, the strong oppress the weak. Bad regulation only helps them oppress the weak more, but no regulation is not the answer.
How to do that is a complicated question. I have some ideas. But I feel like once the end goal is protecting the individual who does the creative work, it's not that hard to brainstorm better solutions.
it must be so freeing to be as stupid as a ceo. not a single thought echoing through that hollowed out skull. you get paid more money in 20 minutes than a handful of small countries make in a year combined to say the biggest number you can think of and if your company doesn’t hit that number you get to fire all of them
Y'know, I'm kinda surprised I haven't seen Jack Chains more in fantasy tbh, like it's a really interesting and low budget armor style, I'm legit surprised I've almost never seen it in media
Actually kind of! It's built with a very interesting principle behind it and I'm gonna explain it below because it's neat
So, say you've got a sword or axe or something and are fighting some guy who can't afford a full suit of armor, and like someone who thinks it's a good idea to protect their brain from harm, they go into battle with a real good helmet, but don't have enough money for a full breastplate
So, obviously, this guy's helmet is solid, well-built, and strong. You're absolutely not getting through that with anything short of a mace or warhammer, which you forgot at home or something. So, you want to instead throw some cuts at their torso and arms, since if you can't get at their brain or throat, the entire torso is a pretty good target, and without arms your opponent will have a much harder time both hitting you with their weapons and shielding that torso of theirs
So you start throwing cuts, probably like so, since these are usually the most common, instinctive, and usually efficient cuts to throw (or a rough MS Paint approximation of them lol)
Normally, on someone unarmored, those'd do a lot of damage! You'd probably even win the fight!
However, with even something as small as these weird little guys on, it just sort of...
Obviously these things are like, clearly less effective than most styles of armor, doing little to protect against things like thrusts or trebuchets, but even with as minimal as they are, the humble Jack Chains are bizarrely more effective than one would think just by looking at them!
They work because they close off the most common angles of attack, essentially trying to get the maximum value out of minimum materials. Despite their rarity in media they were pretty common, mostly because of their low cost, but also because they did their jobs surprisingly adequately
In a weird way, it kind of reminds me about that one post about army planes, actually
For the most part I dress fairly conventionally at the office - button up shirt, slacks or good jeans, nice coat, subtle pride pin on the lapel - but I do occasionally wonder if I should go with something a bit more out there. A bit flashier.
“I got a fan letter from a young lady. It was a suicide note.
So I called her, and I said, “Hey, this is Jimmy Doohan. Scotty, from Star Trek.” I said, “I’m doing a convention in Indianapolis. I wanna see you there.”
I saw her – boy, I’m telling you, I couldn’t believe what I saw. It was definitely suicide. Somebody had to help her, somehow. And obviously she wasn’t going to the right people.
I said to her, “I’m doing a convention two weeks from now in St. Louis.” And two weeks from then, in somewhere else, you know? She also came to New York - she was able to afford to got to these places. That went on for two or three years, maybe eighteen times. And all I did was talk positive things to her.
And then all of the sudden – nothing. I didn’t hear anything. I had no idea what had happened to her because I never really saved her address.
Eight years later, I get a letter saying, “I do want to thank you so much for what you did for me, because I just got my Master’s degree in electronic engineering.”
That’s…to me, the best thing I’ve ever done in my life.“
So a guy I went to middle school with now works in the vatican and according to Cam, the rules on:
Whether you can leave emoji reacts in the groupchat
Whether you can leave regular messages in the groupchat
Whether you can HAVE a groupchat
Whether you can have Electronic Devices
-vary from one silent monastic order to another, but none of them have ever successfully banned "Long trail of increasingly hostile post-it messages on the fridge".
"All drugs are drugs" = a surprisingly radical position that will upset people right across the political spectrum
This means:
If you draw a hard line between "drug" and "medicine" based on current legality where you live (or any other criteria) you've gone wrong somewhere,
If you think legality and/or prescription status tells you all you need about a substance's capacity to do massive harm to someone's body, mind or well-being you've gone wrong somewhere,
If you think legality and/or prescription status tells you all you need about a substance's capacity to contribute meaningfully to someone's healing, function or happiness you've gone wrong somewhere,
If you think certain substances should be excluded from informed consent (either withheld or forcibly administered) you've gone wrong somewhere.
Highlights of the America 250 event (shitshow) in Washington, DC for July 4th:
- Due to storms, they had to evacuate the National Mall grounds. But the MAGA crowd didn't want to leave. They just stood around chanting "USA! USA!" They were convinced liberals were messing with the weather. Reportedly, one of the security guards got so fed up that he threw a chair at them.
- Fox News didn't have anything to share while they were waiting for Trump's delayed speech, so they just showed a feed of him staring at the TV. And he was watching Fox News.
- A bunch of the crowd that was evacuated wasn't even let back in, and they were raging about it on social media. Some of them waited 10 to 12 hours in record-setting heat (102°F) and never got to see anything. All special passes were canceled. So much for money privilege.
- Because the program was running so far behind, several performers were cancelled.
- Trump's speech began at 11:15 p.m., after a sizeable amount of his followers had abandoned the event. It was unremarkable in just like all of his other ones- a bunch of "America is the greatest nation," blaming Democrats for everything bad, and general gibberish.
- The fireworks didn't begin until almost midnight, so they ended on July 5th.
- They wanted to have more fireworks than ever before, but they set off so many that the sky was covered in light, and it just looked like everything was on fire. The finale was not visible due to the smoke.
- Trump appeared to fall asleep during the show.
- The immense amount of pyrotechnics fucked up the air in DC
Okay so actually letting a serious topic be vague and confusing is much more scary for a child than explaining it in calm language they can understand.
The other day my work had a session on "how could AI be useful in our workplace," and I thought that sounded gross so I didn't go,
but I am also in the Union teams chat, and it was very funny to see all the bitching. I almost wish I'd watched the presentation so I had context, but on the other hand comments like "can't wait for all these company savings to be passed on in our wages 🙃" don't need a whole lot of context to unravel, hey
Been playing BSG: Scattered Hopes, and it's pretty good! I'm enjoying how the cascading crises really match the energy of the show ("It's not one damned thing after another – the damned things overlap," or however the saying goes), and I'm having fun with the combat now that I've gotten more of a hang on it.
I do wish faction relationships were handled slightly differently. They've got an interesting core – there are three factions you have to deal with, and each of them can help or hurt you depending on your relationship to them. But it's not a single scale, instead each faction has Influence and Relationship, which is to say, how much power they have and how much they like you. Most choices regarding factions will make you choose between two, making one more powerful, and making the other like you less.
It's a cool concept, and there are nuances to it (even a faction that likes you will become a problem if you give them too much power), but overall I've found the choices a bit too easy to make – if a choice benefits my pet faction, I make it, and if not, I don't.
But overall I'm having a good time! So far I've made it to the final boss twice, and both times been about ten seconds from victory when I died. Fingers crossed that next time I can make it!
"What do we learn from all this? Mostly the same thing we learned when the crypto bros repeatedly rediscovered financial fraud, or when effective altruists decided the most effective altruism was to buy themselves a castle, or when ride share companies kept accidentally reïnventing the bus. If you start by ignoring everything that we already know, the best you can ever hope for is to accidentally rediscover the already-known."
