Anomander @ Anomander @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

I normally hate turning to Youtube when there's a text resource available, but I've definitely found there are some situations where explaining a trick or a location in text is massively harder than just watching someone do it in a video.

I'm always so torn on him; he makes interesting videos about compelling topics that are reasonably well researched ... but as nitpicky as it is, I cannot deal with his accent for very long. I'm completely willing to believe it's actually genuine, but it sounds like an American doing a bad impression of a posh British lordling.

my family can euthanize me even if I object?

No.

There's no law that allows killing of the unwilling; even a living will addressing assisted suicide or euthanization due to incapability assumes that you would still consent at the later date, but lack either physical or intellectual ability to communicate that. If you can clearly communicate that you've changed your mind, they have to respect that, even if that changed mind has reduced capability due to dementia.

Your best hope would be to go with assisted suicide while you still have enough faculties to make the decision and execute on your portions of the act.

Also, on the subject of this song being “breakout/viral” - how hard is it to manipulate streaming numbers?

It's seemed like the numbers there are 'semi-'manipulated in the way that Kpop can be - hugely inflated by deliberate rewatching and multi-platform streaming, but by individuals who genuinely want the song to do well, rather than bots or purchased fake stats.

It's really seemed like 'the right' sees Oliver Anthony as "their guy" and rallied behind him and his song in order to push it up the charts as an imagined way of 'owning the libs' - and I think OA's industry backing worked hard to seed that narrative among those circles in order to elicit that sort of boosterism from them.

There's the necessary info, thank you! - I've heard horror stories about hosting exit nodes, and was immediately spooked this would result in the same issues.

I really enjoyed some darker content in terms of establishing that humans aren't always the good, wise, enlightened people of the galaxy, consistently The Good Guys in nearly every encounter.

But shifting to that "oh there's a dark side to all the optimism" as the consistent ongoing tone for the show rings wrong as much as the always good guys tone did with older trek.

Yeah, I had to un-quit Whatsapp when my siblings-in-law moved to Argentina - because Whatsapp is the main communication platform for a lot of Argentina and that's where all the various family chats moved to once the in-laws no longer had local phone numbers or reliable SMS service.

The person you're responding to is basically making the, "steal a loaf of bread to feed your family" argument. It's complicated by the fact that loaf of bread was already reserved for saving others,

That's a spurious argument here, though. This is like not buying groceries for two months, having the cash to buy groceries, then stealing a loaf of bread to feed the family.

These people shouldn't be there, they're on evacuation order, and they have safe routes to leave. Not one of their lives is in danger that they haven't chosen. But they did choose - to put their property ahead of their own lives, and in stealing fire equipment they're putting their own property ahead of the lives of fire response teams and ahead of all the other properties in the same area. They're willing to have the whole neighborhood burn around them, to cut off safe evacuation routes, all to try and save their own home.

but it's stupid to act like they're a deranged person without a point.

They're engaging in sophistry and misrepresenting the situation to try and make hindering firefighting efforts into something personally justifiable. It isn't.

Could kind of see how someone facing down an impending roaring wildfire, then stealing from the same people they want help from, might be counterproductive. The people telling them not to steal fire equipment are there. They're the ones fighting the fire.

No private resident needs that equipment "to save their own life". They're on evacuation order, there are safe routes out, they should not be there, and they chose to stay in order to protect their property. The bridge that sprinklers are getting stolen from, for instance, is protected so there will be a safe passage out of the area consistently even if the fire shifts in that direction.

This is about wealth - not health. Stealing that equipment is choosing to fuck over the entire region and everyone else who needs fire protection, just to better preserve their own home, is selfish and stupid.

I remember the G4 with great fondness; my dad's G4 was what I did homework and gamed on as a highschooler, and then when he retired it I brought it to college and it served as our living room 'jukebox' for another five years.

Yeah there's two 'main' kinds of people who want a platform where users are able to post hate speech and reach "everyone" with it.

• People who want to be hateful and want access to the targets of their hate. They want to upset people, they want to 'own the libs' or be able to toss slurs at minorities, and those things are unrewarding for them if they don't get to see how upset they've made their targets.
• People who want to recruit people to being hateful. They want to convince normal people to share their prejudices and their biases, they want "debates" or would like to share "statistics" and are seeking a soapbox that can reach people who might find their views convincing.

This is a huge part of why defederation works, why platforms like Voat or Gab rarely thrive for very long. Being hateful in an echo chamber towards people who are outside the room is rarely fun for those folks, and very often results in in-fighting and fragmenting of the movement. Moderates and 'normies' are driven off because now they're a target rather than a participant or spectator.

Shocking news: people are people everywhere, not just on 'rival' platforms.

Edit: if you’re downvoting me without a rebuttal, you’re part of the problem that I’m referring to – a complete dismissal of dissenting opinion on the war. If you disagree with what I’ve said, please comment why

People on the internet don't owe you a debate.

Especially when the prompt is a somewhat sanctimonious effort-dump sealioning "we should let Russia have Ukraine" as if its a reasonable liberal imperative, all in response to a stupid one-liner.

UPS is being UPS here.

They're abandoning packages, then sending her a bill for COD as if she accepted the package but didn't pay.

The fact that if she digs in and fights it she can eventually dispute each charge is somewhat separate from UPS and their collections contractors harassing her about the 'debt', or the new packages that keep showing up.

Whole lot of people here have cut off other people, but no one's yet shared a story about what got them cut off. This one's mine.

I was unceremoniously removed from The List by a group of folks I was close with for years, after clashing with a couple of new additions to the group for a few months. We collectively ran a bit of a sketchy party scene and had been hosting stuff out of the weird end of town for a year or two when it all blew up - we weren't quite on the scale of underground warehouse raves, but we were like the training-wheels version. We'd get a lead on a place that was slated to be vacant for a month or a commercial building gone dark, arrange a couple bands and an escape plan, and pull a couple hundred bucks each in entry charge and dodgy beer.

They were great friends in addition to being sort-of in business together, and we had some absolutely great times.

Except one couple who'd been with us from the start and were OG team members met a new crowd of people. They wanted to bring their friends, we said sure, and ... shit started going downhill. The couple weren't bad. Their friends weren't bad. Their friends' friends were awful. I didn't like the new crowd's vibe, I didn't like who they were bringing in, what they were up to, and I didn't get along with the initial connections in the slightest. I thought they were assholes, they thought I was an asshole, and in hindsight we were both correct.

As much as each new member of our little scene was more money at the end of an event, I didn't want them there. I spent a lot of time and everyone's patience arguing why I felt these specific new people needed to be shown a door and firmly told to be on the other side of it, and I definitely went out of my way to cut them out of anything I had control over. My friends were frustrated, I was frustrated, and everyone was on edge - I was convinced these people were going absolutely ruin what we'd built, my friends were frustrated I wouldn't drop the grudge and didn't see the problem I was focused on.

In my defense, the new people were bringing in their crowd, and their crowd was bad news. It was like they were the scene where all the people other parties didn't want wound up congregating. There was the sketchy "why are you here?" old dudes, there were the people who did too much of many drugs even for our standards, there was the massive collection of edgy at-risk middleschoolers, there were the aggro bros and the dealers with Connections ... to me, inviting those people in the door was a massive heat score and absolutely ruining the vibe for the kind of people we wanted to attract. That said, in my friends' defense - we had agreed we'd make decisions as a team, and I was outvoted but unwilling to let it go; and we didn't have a problem with drugs or kids or even weird old dudes in general - half of us started in that community young and most absolutely dabbled in chemicals. We all were those kids a few years prior. My concerns read as hypocritical or gatekeep-y, rather than genuine, because I'd never been concerned about that shit prior.

The last straw? I paid a guy I knew from the other side of town to drive his dad's charger slowly past our venue a couple times, for several different events, so that people thought we might be about to get raided. Because the people I didn't care for were pretty dodgy, they fucked off at the faintest hint of trouble.

The other people in our crew found out, and I was excised from that group.

In hindsight, we were both right. I was petty and sabotaged the group to get my way - and those new people did absolutely ruin shit for that scene within a couple years. I've connected individually with a few members of that group over the many years since, but am very formally persona non grata at shit they do as a group - I don't think any of the people I still talk to even admit to the rest that they see me sometimes.

I don't want this to read like I was booted for taking some moral highground. I absolutely wasn't. I took the low road and went behind my friends' backs to undermine what we were doing, all because I wanted a specific group of people gone from our scene. As much as an adult's perspective would make it easy to spin this as if I had moral objections to bringing hard drugs and hard druggies and middleschoolers into the same place for underground parties - I wasn't concerned about those things, morally. Having middleschoolers get wasted at parties wasn't a problem to me, or even having creepy dudes trying to pick them up, or people shooting hard shit in the living room ... I just didn't like how there was more of "them" than "us" and our events were slowly becoming that scene, instead of just having a little bit of it off in one corner.

This would make excellent satire, but it's pretty dismal journalism.

Ever since that day, I’ve consistently correlated success with the fluctuating number in my follower count. In fact, I would argue that every millennial who works on the internet has internalized the belief that resonance on Twitter is the only way to unlock progressively more illustrious opportunities—it somehow seems more relevant than your degree, your scoops, and even your endorsements.

Speak for yourself, please.

Many millennials who 'work on the internet' have understood in the past that Twitter follower counts did constitute a sort of abstracted measure of relevance, like pop culture equivalent of how often an academic article is cited by other academics. There was quite a while where that was, unfortunately, true: for example, your measure as a PR professional was tied to your ability to use your professional skills to boost your personal accounts. It was far from the only thing that counted, but it was certainly an excellent networking tool and having impressive high scores would result in more opportunities, better opportunities, and less hunting for them. There absolutely was an expectation that communications or marketing people would leverage their skills for their accounts, that they would show off what they could do for potential employers within the confines of their own internet footprint.

You could still get work without that, I still got work without that - but work would come to you if you had an impressive social portfolio, not just on raw follower counts but on things like content and engagement as well. The total sum of your social media and online presence was the portfolio of communications or media field, same way designers are asked to provide examples of past work.

And that's still true - it's just less and less likely to include someone's twitter in that assessment.

I think that’s why Elon’s reign of terror has been so bitterly ironic: Everything we’ve been taught about Twitter—and, frankly, social media in general—has proven to be an enormous lie. It was always volatile, and regrettably, we made it the locus of our careers.

Things can be true in the past and false in the present. What this particular person was taught in the past was true at the time of teaching. And then this crazy thing called "change" occurred and it's no longer true. Except, what he was taught - that conventional wisdom holds that journalists need their own personal brands - remains true. The secondary coaching, that a Twitter presence is part of that branding, is not necessarily true but also not abstractly false either.

That the author struggles with the very concept of change, feels they were promised that Twitter would be permanent, and seems to believe that people who are successful now because of twitter activity then are somehow going to wind up on the streets is hilarious, if perhaps in a not particularly kind way.

Everyone he talked to has a secure career or market position. Sure, they got there via twitter, or they feel twitter helped them achieve that - but they will be fine. Some of them might take earnings hits or need to make some uncomfortable pivots to off-twitter platforms, but none of those folks are teetering on the edge of a cardboard mansion lifestyle after sinking clearly-fruitless hours into twitter boosterism.

Lorenz predicts something of a “Great Clout Reset” on the horizon—everyone emerging from the rubble, starting over at square one—and frankly, she can’t wait to see what happens. [...] Maybe that’s the silver lining. Twitter might be dying, but maybe afterwards, we can try to become superstars all over again.

Oh look, we can see how the author wound up thinking that Twitter was all-important and utterly permanent. They're doing it all over again; and in ten years we'll get the exact same article about whatever platform they think is actually the Real Deal right now, complaining about how it inevitably failed and Lorenz steered them wrong with bad career tips.

Honestly, I take the opposite view - to me that's one of the best changes they've made in ages and I'm glad it propagated to old.reddit as well as showing up in new reddit; it's been an occasional frustration to hit 'hide' by mistake on something I wanted to see, then need to navigate to the far corners of the profile just to un-hide it again was always extra-silly. Next up maybe they can turn off auto-hide when reporting a post.

I feel like there is space for talking about games besides actually playing them, similar to sports.

To refine further, I think there exists demand for a "middle ground" of games discourse that is talking about games as a whole, or as entries into their genre, in detail and with consideration - but without being a hyper-focused discussion of one specific game by it's die-hards. We have both poles - there is lots of relatively superficial discussion of games, or game reviews, that aren't giving a particularly detailed discussion of each game ... and there's lots of posts in a specific games' space with ultra-specific and supremely detailed discourse from a highly-invested players' perspective.

But there's not been a successful venue or single leading voice that's really filling that niche. TB did for ages, and I don't think anyone has come close to filling those shoes since.

I personally want the kind of insights that come from putting a week into a game and playing a lot of other similar games, but not necessarily being a hardcore fan or hater of the game or the genre. Like, I'll get a week into a game and start noticing that the core gameplay is good, but the economy seems off, or that gunplay is just a little jank when playing near obstacles - deeper than "better/worse than GAME1, while slower not as twitchy as COMPETITOR".

In similar sense, talking about games as a media and as offering within a media landscape - in that sense you talk about asking "what is fun"; looking at game systems and mechanics from a lens of media critique and systems design. How does this work, how do competitors solve this problem, what other problems does it introduce - how does the sum picture mesh and how cohesive is the end product.

Yeah, I just learned about these folks' existence from this post - but I'm saving their name for later for sure.

While googling trying to get a sense of who they are - they have a hour-long concert on youtube that's really dope already.

Their official bio on their website doesn't even directly acknowledge it, so it doesn't seem like something they front-load per se.