Pigeon @ Lowbird @beehaw.org

Posts

10

Comments

205

Joined

2 yr. ago

The person who recommended actual de-escalation courses is right and is more knowledgeable on the topic than me and has already answered this thoroughly.

However, I highly recommend looking up "conflict resolution" workshops, specifically for the "mirror, empathize, validate" ideas. It's really worth going through a whole workshop/watching a whole video on this, even though it might seem like it'd be trite on the surface. Similarly, "active listening" is another term one might look up.

And for what it's worth, I have found the "nonviolent communication" philosophy to be helpful on a personal level. I don't fully buy into all of it - for one, at least in its original form it disregards the reality of societal level problems, racism, sexism, institutional hierarchies under capitalism, and disabilities - but even so, I find some of it really compelling. Here's a series of youtube videos about it, by the philosophy's founder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZnXBnz2kwk&list=PLPNVcESwoWu4lI9C3bhkYIWB8-dphbzJ3. Again, I don't know if there is any research done to support or contradict the various parts of this (if anyone knows, I'd be interested to learn more, either way), but on a personal level I have found it very helpful to consider, especially because it questions some assumptions that are so universal I hadn't previously thought to question them.

I wonder, also, if it might be possible to find resources to learn about how to more accurately assess whether a situation/person is threatening or not in the first place. And of course being aware of your own potential biases is important here.

Also, if you find yourself, say, alone in a waiting room with a creepy seeming person, or on a sidewalk at night with some random other person(s) who is probably totally innocent but is giving you the heebie jeebies for whatever reason - never forget you can fake a phone call. Or really call someone, and talk about whatever. People are less likely to attack someone who is talking on the phone since that adds a witness, though a distant one. And as a bonus, it'll make you seem less threatening to the other people, too, in case they have the same problem.

Hey, I realize this is aaaages after you replied (sorry), but I did eventually dig up that fan-read The Hobbit version and holy crap is it ever something. I'm blown away by it. Thank you!

I'm going to give the Thrawn trilogy a go soon via audiobook, too. :)

I want an alternative to youtube as much as anyone, but I just don't see how peertube can be viable in a world where child abuse materials and nazi propaganda exist and can be posted there.

I mean, at least as of when I last looked at peertube, it works sort of like torrenting does, yeah? But it doesn't require you to whitelist the channels or instances you seed. Therefore: random people are going to end up seeding child abuse materials, revenge porn, hate screed videos, and so on, unknowingly and without intending to.

Lemmy already has had issues with child abuse materials because of federation and poor moderation tools. An image will get posted on one instance, then it automatically gets copied to other instances, and even if the original instances delete the image that doesn't automatically delete it off other instances. Admins have to manually contact other admins, who then each have go in and painstakingly delete it manually, and that's if all those different admins see and respond to the message. This is a problem that has been growing as lemmy gets bigger and more popular. And this is just with instance hosts - with peertube, you have individuals seeding/contributing to the hosting.

So it seems to me that peertube as it is involves a degree of moral and legal (since people can and have been deemed legally responsible for seeding torrents before) risk that is just not worth it a compared to the privacy-invading but blessedly safe option of youtube.

And even if individuals decided that risk was fine, advertisers absolutely won't, which makes the platform a no-go for channels that depend on ads rather than patreon or merch for their livelihoods.

I'll be happy if there's a reliable way around this problem that doesn't completely break the mechanism whereby peertube is supposed to work, but as of now I can't see one.

Privacy isn't normally my primary concern but with VR I find it to be a bigger deal than I usually would, particularly because the headsets can hypothetically gather data about what you're looking at exactly (especially once eye tracking becomes more of a thing - then it'll be exact, and that's kinda terrifying at that point).

And this is Meta/facebook, so. They'll 100% do it and say they aren't.

And you seem to be suggesting that Israel should now invade - which will mean slaughtering and displacing and injuring innocents as well as Hamas members - because Hamas slaughtered innocents. People have and will die for things Hamas did that they had nothing to do with. This is a "Hamas did it, therefore it's fine or even morally right for Israel to do it" argument.

Which is the sort of revenge-first argument that will inevitably just fuel the same argument going back the other direction, and around we all go again, and innocents keep dying the entire time.

There won't be any stopping the cycle of violence while the root issues that caused it in the first place - the Nakba displacement and slaughter of Palestinians from their homeland, and Israel's subsequent apartheid government and occupation - is acknowledged and addressed.

However and whenever it stops, there will be people who did evil who will go free. Just like there were low-level Nazis and people who helped put the Nazis in power who went consequence-free when WWII ended. It's a legistic impossibility to deliver perfect justice to ever evildoer. If we make that the goal and try anyway, then all we get is more evil-doing, more revenge-seeking, more blood, and no real ultimate justice to show for it.

So, in my opinion, achieving peace, an end to systemic injustices, and compensating victims as much as possible (e.g. making sure the families of those lost on both sides have food, shelter, safety and education), should take predecence far above and beyond making sure everyone who deserves punishment is punished.

Especially since history's previous examples of invading a country to stamp out a terrorist organization (cough cough Afghanistan...) didn't exactly work to end the target organization, let alone the terrorism and violence and so on in yhe region as a whole.

I wonder if he's actually just becoming a career scapegoat, taking the fall + a nice severance package(?) for decisions that were made by groups.

This might be a non-food-bearing shelf, like from one of those rolling plastic drawer sets? I think? It's hard to tell, admittedly.

I do like let's plays like that too sometimes - I'll give those channels a try. Thanks! Though I may have to wait til I finish with BG3 myself, which could be a while :p

I mentioned single player games specifically partly because I personally tend to like those games best, and I like to watch let's plays after playing the game through myself first, then seeing how different people interact with the game differently. I love watching people discover a game I enjoyed (which for me means mostly single player titles) in kind of the same way I might enjoy showing the game to a friend.

And anecdotally, I tend to feel like groups playing a single player game together tend to talk more about the game in a deep-read kind of way, or to talk about their lives, whereas groups playing multiplayer games seem more likely to talk about whatever is currently happening in the game in that instant, or it becomes mostly them joking and trolling each other. This is just my personal experience though, so it could be a function of the particular let's players and streamers I'm familiar with. I'm sure there are exceptions to this.

Sounds good! Thank you. I'll give them a try

Will do! Thank you for the suggestion :) I hadn't heard of them before.

Any size group is good! Thanks for the suggestion - sounds good. I'll give them a try :)

Agreed. It is though an example of a game breaking out into the mainstream from a normally more niche genre (this particular type of dense, top-down, turn-based RPG). I'm curious to see if its subgenre will grow more popular in its wake, too, and by how much.

I find it particularly interesting that it became such a hit because its systems can be rather overwhelming for people who aren't already familiar with 5e/tabletop rules. The sheer amount of rules to learn, the volume of specific items and text bubbles to read, the fact that some aspects of the interface aren't really tutorialized well, etc.

This article is about the "AI chips" Nvidia makes that undergird the major cloud services though, not the cloud services themselves. So I think it's a hardware issue, more akin to a monopoly of GPU or CPU markets? Especially since Nvidia's competitors in most spaces seem to be limited to AMD and sometimes Intel.

I can certainly imagine Nvidia having anticompetitive practices with their hardware and/or the software for their hardware, as they have done so many times with GPUs, though this particular article really doesn't go into any detail.

A lot of people in rural areas find themselves in situations like being 10 minutes from a walmart and an hour from any other option. So then anything besides walmart costs gas and time, on top of the product cost difference to begin with.

Nobody wants to drive extra after 8 hours of shitty minimum wage work and/or taking care of children.

Not like other grocery stores are any good for workers, either.

RedReader still works. If you're gonna look at reddit, I recommend it. You can even turn off all the interaction buttons, so it's like a "look, don't touch" museum.

I uninstalled it though. Reddit is in too terrible a state to bother with any longer, except sometimes as a search result, imo.

Edit: I'm speaking of android though. Idk if redreader has an ios version or not.

This may add a longer pause than is wanted in some situations, like in the middle of what's supposed to be a speech or a breathless ramble. I think sometimes uninterrupted paragraphs of dialogue are warranted.

But otherwise, yeah, action beats with the dialogue is a good tool to have in the box, and to use often.

It's also handy for people who don't want to write "said" all the time, since you can indicate who is speaking with an action beat followed immediately by otherwise unmarked dialogue, or by context alone (e.g. there are only two people in the convo and they're taking turns.) It can add variety to your sentence structures.

Attempted example:

He sat back and sighed. "That's quite a story. But I can't say it's an especially believable one."

"Well," she said, pulling a sheaf of papers out of her purse. "Have a look at this."

He took the papers and shuffled through them slowly, frowning. Halfway through the pile, he paused. Reread something. He looked up and met her eyes.

She held his gaze, then nodded. "I think you can see why this might be a problem for both of us."

It's important that the action means something besides just the pause, imo. You can use actions like that to show something about the character or how they're feeling - like, in OP's example, a character leaning back and looking up like that would imply they are relaxed and casual. If you had them in a different situation or wanted to show a different personality, you might have them do a similar but different thing, like leaning forward and steepling their fingers, or fiddling with a knife (will there be stabbing?!), or taking a slow sip of water, or interrupting themself to make a comment about the food, or clearing their throat. It can be a way to multitask and show something about the character even while they're having a conversation about something else. Whereas not thinking of it as anything but a pause in dialogue might lead to accidentally implying something about the charactee you don't intend to, like making them appear relaxed when they're supposed to be tense, or interested in a conversation when they're supposed to be bored or distracted.

I also wonder if they controlled for the fact younger people are online more often in the first place.

Oh no, someone is having a thought you've already had before. The world ends. 🙄

Yeah. In a world where lawyers cost money, corporations can and will squash small artists without hesitation, with cease and desists, DMCA takedowns via youtube and similar platforms, and by threatening lawsuits they won't even have to persue because most people can't afford to fight it.

Even companies often can't afford to fight bigger companies. Like, the makers of Kimba the White Lion had a very clear case that Disney plagiarized them in making The Lion King (if you go on youtube you can find shot-for-shot scene comparisons, it's bonkers) but couldn't afford to fight it at all. And that was a company - individual artists have no chance vs disney & etc.

We'll see if their claims pan out, but the taste of palm oil vs other oils was never the point, anyways. It may not matter if it tastes different.