Andy @ andrewrgross @slrpnk.net

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41

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Thanks, I think so too.

I'm trying to expand on it a bit, because I think what's still missing is a sense of stakes and grandeur.

What if the backdrop is that Croft (or similar protagonist) is working with a team that is uncovering new and valuable discoveries that reveal the art and culture of ancient people that were largely absent from history. It's showing that some earlier group had settled an ancient valley prior to the arrival of a group that is culturally significant to a current regime. And as they're making these discoveries, it's becoming increasingly contentious politically among some faschy nationalist government (a la Orban, Erdogan, etc.)

Over time, they begin to face mounting pressure to secure the sites quickly before a rival team is sent in specifically with the goal of damaging them and stealing artifacts so that these finds aren't able to be studied. And the protagonist, as the first person who the team relies on to safely document and preserve the site, is soon persued by a goon squad, allowing us some urban platforming levels as you work towards a final confrontation.

I wonder what it would look like to try and resolve some of these problems in a way that still provides a satisfying platformer experience.

Like, what if instead of these ruins being a bunch of traps with some key magical artifact that she heavily disturbs while passing through, what if the game was a platformer where you had to essentially erect scaffolding and lay down tarps in advance of a larger team? And the goal is to basically use climbing and athleticism to navigate the environment without disturbing an incredibly fragile environment?

Can you demonstrate how you would have composed the question?

Auchtung:

Ze government of Deuchland has become very uncomfortable vith recent events, and have decided that we are going to focus on listening instead of talking.

Please do not ask us to opine further on ze ge-WAR.

Zat is all. Danke.

[Walks off without taking questions]

I think people overthink spending money on things they don't support. I think stealing it is justified, but If you're doing academic studies or learning how to deprogram people, go ahead and buy a Nazi's book if you have to.

That said, if you're looking to argue with Holocaust deniers, trying to defeat them by studying their arguments is a classic blunder.

Conspiratorial thinking is rooted in social maladies, and attachment to a theory is a downstream effect. You can no more talk a Holocaust denier out of their belief with evidence than you can fix a broken water main by sand-bagging the street. If you're trying to deprogram someone, you've got to learn how to get them to open up about the background experiences that led them to look for these answers and then usually find ways to help them find alternate communities that obviate their need for the conspiracy in a way that at least feels self-directed.

It's a much slower process, but if that's what you want to do, read up on that and don't bother wasting money on Irving's book.

From a journalistic perspective, this article is kind of meaningless.

The context here is that Randy Fine is an outspoken bigot. He is proudly extreme is in his endorsement of violence, threats, and genocidal rhetoric towards Muslims, Arabs, and really antifascists too.

Fox News is a propaganda outlet that monetizes conservative paranoia and hate by supplying stories to an addicted audience.

This event is newsworthy in that it's good for us to be aware of what figures are producing what content to what audience, but other than that it's not shocking or specifically meaningful that Fine went on Fox and said the things that are routinely said by Fine and on Fox News.

As far as I can tell, this article could've literally been written by having an LLM review transcripts of Fox primetime interviews, find the most outrageous comment of the day, clipping it, and then giving a summary to try and keep liberals clicking through their site.

I think all news should be viewed through the questions, 'What is this providing me?' and 'How does this guide my actions?' In this case, the answers are, 'It provides a check-in on Rep. Fine and Fox' and 'We need to continue to support the people who are doing the work of uplifting alternatives to fascism.'

This is an interesting observation. But honestly I don't think this is really hard to explain at all.

I think within the genre of comic books, your point makes sense. But if we're applying a lens of realism (which I think CA:WS did well, and I wish more Marvel movies would), Tony's network intrusion would not have been at all likely to have uncovered that SHIELD had been ideologically compromised.

What we see in Avengers is that Tony secured unauthorized access to read files to which he wasn't afforded access. First, it's not actually at all reasonable to assume that he had full access to all SHIELD data everywhere, ever. It's split across thousands of servers and departments. It wouldn't be universally accessible to anyone. This is true even for large institutions that aren't highly, highly sensitive intelligence operations. But it'd be doubly so for one that is. Most likely, he would've grabbed unencrypted traffic that was local to the helicarrier, recently accessed, and titled or contained notable text that was relevant to their current situation. That could certainly yield shipping manifests or operational plans to use the tesseract for weaponry.

But -- and this is really the key thing -- even if he had the ability to access all SHIELD records, and had the ability to meaningfully digest this enormous trove of information, it would still be incredibly hard to see that SHIELD was compromised. There aren't going to be any emails that say "Hey Bob: did you kill Mike for finding out that we're both Hydra foot soldiers? Hail Hydra, Lisa".

Infiltration is a process of persuasion and carefully installing dual loyalists in key positions to compromise decision making processes, as you describe. It consists of grooming intelligence assets and identifying who can be trained to groom additional assets. That all takes place primarily through interpersonal conversations. There's very, very, very little documentation of it in a file system that would reveal it if you didn't already know about some compromised asset. To the outside world, all of HYDRA's goals look so much like those of a modern international peacekeeping body that the only secret they need to keep is who the guns are pointed at and who has their fingers on the triggers. Which is fundamentally a key point of the movie.

I don't want to say "none", but I think of the film "Captain America: Winter Soldier" as having some of the tightest writing in superhero comic book movies. It's something of an outlier a case study imo of strong storytelling that the whole thing is so competently put together. There are far fewer suspensions of disbelief than most superhero movies, imo.

Oof.

I remember when reading this story this was something that had confused me. The articles reported the IDF killing an entire squad of medics, and then the article had this one guy saying, 'We had our lights on! They knew who we were!' And I was wondering why and how there was an entire group of medics slaughtered, and just one survivor somehow speaking to the press. It was never really mentioned in the articles I read why or how this guy wasn't decomposing in a shallow grave with the rest of his group.

I guess this is why. He pleaded convincingly, and they weren't certain if he might be an Israeli citizen, so they arrested him instead of executing him. That is fucked all to hell, but at least now I have the answer. Shit.

Agreed.

There's also not much reason not to use supports. A tree support wouldn't as much time or material at all.

Everyone needs a little support sometimes.

Yeah, I feel like that's a good deal. Especially if I get credit. I mean, I'd still do it if it was anonymous, but can you imagine the popularity of being the guy who cut off his fingers for world peace? Frankly you'd be kind of a monster not to do it. So many people lose hands for nothing at all. But being the guy with the robot fingers who gave the world peace and joy? Sure, sign me up. Sounds rad af.

I want to second this, and go further with a hot take: I liked Graber's answers a lot.

I think skepticism of her and the entire artifice of VC and big tech is totally warranted. But a lot of people in this section seem to basically say, 'no matter what she says I don't trust her and I'm certain that BlueSky will be another bad actor.' And I think that's an overly simplistic take.

It's true that there are no trustworthy CEOs. You shouldn't trust Graber. It will always be a mistake to pin hopes of good management of a platform on the magnanimity of any business leader. However if we want to see a new era of decentralization but are honest about the fact that most users are more likely to join big, corporate-styled platforms (in the short term, at least) then the ideal platform is one that attempts to build their business model around portability.

It's totally true that BlueSky isn't there yet. But they're basically building a set of escape hatches for users. Cory Doctorow talks a lot about how restricting users from leaving a platform is a key requirement to enshitify. So if BlueSky uses a protocol that at least has the potential for this, they're creating an incentive structure that really does serve a purpose. They may later on try to reverse course. But at least for now, they're doing the thing that gives users and the third party developers the best chance of escape if things go bad. And that is exactly what I want to see from a big tech platform.

I thought it was built on activity pub.

I'm gonna go over to my Mastodon account and try to reply to you. One sec.

Overall, I like the options today a lot better than what we had 10 or even 5 years ago.

I am glad that both Mastodon and Blue Sky exist. I would like both to be successful.

Oy. I really don't want to see what happens when we're faced with an actual challenge. This is... yikes.

The words and actions described in this article are so bewilderingly, shockingly evil that I had to check them against the sources in Israeli news. I already know Dropsite News is credible and reputable, but I still couldn't believe that Netanyahu and Smotrich would just say the quite part out loud like this. This is so, so, distrubing.

I guess the silver lining is that Netanyahu has acknowledged that there is some kind of red line. Apparently, if he put on a swastika armband and started shouting 'Gas them all!', there are senators in the US who would actually apply some kind of sanctions on Israel. I wonder who they are. Lindsay Graham, for instance, would cheer like a banshee. Fetterman would surely jizz his dirty gym shorts. But Schumer or someone called him and actually said that there's something he could do that would cost him an actual price.

It's... it's head spinning. Yesterday, I returned from a quick grocery run, and my five year old son ran out giggling to see what I'd brought home. He was just filled with effervescent joy that I'd gotten blueberries, blackberries, and rice crispy treats. And it just broke my heart because I couldn't not think about children dying from starvation who are fundamentally no different from my son. There but for the grace of god go all our children. It's like drowning in slow motion. It just haunts me that these people are capable of exterminationism of this kind.

But yeah... apparently, they're only allowed to exterminate the Palestinians if they don't say overtly 'We will kill them all with starvation'. They still need to say 'We are fighting a war of defense' in order to get permission from their US backers. Good to know, I suppose.

Keep up the pressure. Even they know that they can't achieve their final solution if the world rises up and stops them.

I just want to give credit for the excellent writing in this article:

The demonstrations took place following the announcement earlier this month that Israel would launch a full military occupation of the entire Gaza Strip and impose the mass internment of the population in concentration camps under armed guard, as a prelude to forced marches through the desert or deportation by sea. This is backed by US President Donald Trump, who concluded his Middle East tour in Qatar Thursday by reiterating his administration’s plan to annex the Gaza Strip.

Every newspaper should be using the words annexation, forced displacement, genocide, etc without qualifiers.

Yeah, seems like a pretty big oversight for the author... [Checks byline]... no author credited.

Great. Very real. Much news.

Yeah, I came to say this same thing.

I had several classes during different years, but what I recall from the first, in middle school during the mid 90s, was our teacher, Bunny Morris. She was memorizable because her son was nationally renowned pop artist Burton Morris.

She was fine. I recall that she started her class with the statement that "we are all sexual beings", which sounded cheesey to me at the time but in hindsight seems like a very lucid mission statement for introducing preteens to sexual education.

I don't remember the specifics, but I have great sexual health as an adult, so I suppose she did her job. It definitely wasn't the shamey kind.