Hegar @ Hegar @kbin.social

Mostly kind chonky weirdo. Gentle nerd freak of the pacific north west. All

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2 yr. ago

Bauxite is the obvious one. Bringing bauxite to Australia. How could you forget about bauxite?

Yeah wow that's incredible. That dog looks very alone and scared, I could see how people say drowning. Cresting a hill was my first thought.

Before anyone rushes to judgement about "suing 'Call of Duty'":

Families of the Uvalde victims have filed a lawsuit against Daniel Defense, the makers of the AR-15 assault rifle, and Activision, the publisher of the first-person shooter video game series "Call of Duty," and Meta, the parent company of Instagram, over what they claim was their role in promoting the gun used in the shooting.

The suit alleges the companies partnered to market the weapon to underage boys in the games and on social media.

They're alleging the AR-15 maker, activision and meta played a role in aggressively promoting the gun to underage boys. This isn't 'video games caused columbine'. Stealth marketing guns to kids is maybe not great. Meta's whole thing is shady intrusively targeted marketing. Everyone knows that Activision is capable of some truly scummy behaviour. I'm not 100% sold but that it seems worth hearing out to me.

"oppressed profitability" is a fucking brutal turn of phrase.

In case anyone was curious about what sort of politician has a daughter who's a full time missionary, yes he is exactly the cruel and corrupt grifter you'd expect, and a notably half assed one.

He introduced a bill to "regulate sexual content" in libraries, which he claimed was inspired by drag story hour, however drag story hours were not addressed in the bill.

He sponsored a bill to let parents sue schools if they don't like what their children are learning.

He's tried to pre-emptively block ranked-choice voting and forcibly de-transition adult prisoners as part of the "Missouri Child and Adolescent Protection Act."

My favourite is that he tried to pre-emptively block cities from banning pet store animals, at the request of Petland and others, after Petland was linked to bacterial infection outbreaks, puppy-mills and some fairly obvious cruelty. "He further acknowledged that he had not researched existing Missouri law on the matter." (per wikipedia)

If you're cruel or rich, Ben Baker's got your back.

There's a great Mac game from 1997 called Harry the Handsome Executive, where you zoom around on an office chair and weild a staple gun. The first level is you looking for a window so you can experience natural light again.

They'll swallow a 6% sales tax in exchange for joining the white ethnostate of their dreams idaho.

I share your frustration. Cars are dumb. New cars are shit and dumb. It's also super bad for the environment - the manufacturing is a huge part of the total carbon emission of a car.

Seems pretty clear to me that it's a status thing - you're displaying your access to resources by showing that you can waste them. That's why I think it's legitimately useful to insult people's new or expensive cars. Deny them the social reward they seek and it puts pressure to find a new status token. Maybe instead they can waste money on carbon fibre bikes or the latest overpriced micro-transportation.

Yeah, it's one of my favourites too. So immediately striking. I don't think it would've occurred to me to read up on it - what's to read about? There's just the figures and the act, nothing else. But then you find out that it's somehow even more goth.

I was just having a discussion with my family about recent union wins in the US, and when something good is a sign of how bad things must be. I suggested that there must be a german word for it, and my sister suggested maybe a chinese saying.

If you like the category of 'things that sound like german has a word for it', look into the 4-character chinese sayings called chengyu. One of my favourites is 'Melon Patch, Under Plum', meaning something that is completely innocent but should be avoided because it looks really sketchy. Don't tie your shoes in a melon patch or fix your hat under a plum tree.

Did this person depict lots of mythological figures?

Nope! It's been a few decades since my art history lectures but my memory is (and wikipedia agrees) that he did a lot of portraits and battle scenes. IIRC his battle paintings inspired Picasso's. His late work is especially dark - madness and horror type stuff. Sinister distorted figures. They're often called The Black Paintings.

if this is common knowledge

Quite the opposite. This painting was used in a slide in my greek mythology class during the lecture about the titans and chronos. Then in an art history class I learned the context, which I feel is much less known.

It's unbelievably dangerous to allow the people tasked with enforcing the state's monopoly on violence to access secretive private funding.

At least the republicans destroying US institutions are mostly working on behalf of other states. Allowing your police to be beholden to private money is such an own goal.

In case anyone missed the reference, this is based on a work found painted on the walls of Fransisco Goya's dining room after he died. You'll often hear it called "Saturn Devouring His Son", but the work was never titled or displayed publicly. There's really no good reason to believe that the devourer is Chronos/Saturn, that the devouree is even a child, or that either body is male.

I personally like to think of it as Untitled (Dining Room).

I read an article years ago, maybe like a decade ago, of some game industry person saying it was a cycle:

Incredible new graphics come out and people will buy the shiny regardless of anything else, then slowly they have to start making actually good games with those graphics to sell, then incredible new graphics come out and you don't need to bother with story for a while.

That headline really is a thing of beauty. It's like finding out that your trash is piling up because the city retasked all the sanitation workers to lie in fields of filth and create a heavenly host of garbage angels.

Being angry at voters and calling them idiots over choices the democratic party made doesn't help defeat trump.

Anyone not voting for Biden because of Gaza is a fucking idiot.

The democracts insist on maintaining this position despite the mountain of evidence that it's driving down turn out in their base, and does not represent the wishes of the electorate.

Why is it that voters have to swallow genocide, and not that democrats have to stop perpetuating electorally unpopular genocide?

Of course trump will be worse and i'll be holding my nose and voting for biden but it makes no sense to blame voters for the inevitable and foreseeable consequences of the imperial cowardice of the democratic party.

I generally recoil from comparing biden to putin but this really requires russian levels of post-truth politics.

Israel is committing war crimes like trump commits all his crimes - openly, in public and shielded by US elites.

Yep, once cyanobacteria flooded the world with oxygen, everything that couldn't hack it in an oxygen rich atmosphere died off never to return, and cyanobacteria and the chloroplast is still here, defining our world.

As bad as we fuck things up, we're better placed than many organisms to weather the consequences of our actions. Our numbers and harm done might go down for a while but like waves of the plague, we'll adapt to upset the new equilibrium in time.

on the way out.

This is overly optimistic. We humans are so resilient. We have every resource that's left at our disposal.

Even if there's full scale environmental collapse, we'll survive, rebuild, and be around to do it all over again.