daltotron @ daltotron @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

no, why do you ask?

"Dead in the middle of Little Italy, little did we know that we riddled some middlemen who didn't do diddily."

I dunno, I think my favorite insults are the ones that don't require any creativity or effort. There is something to be said of just using the old standbys because the person you are insulting is worth so little to you that you really can't even be assed to come up with anything specific for them, or because the subject you are insulting is so inherently devoid of originality that they're like a negative creativity vacuum. How many different ways can you really insult the same copy-pasted balding thumb headed shrimp dick moron? It gets tough after the one thousand three hundred and twelfth time. They make writers and dominatrices to insult people, there are careers. Me, I'm not gonna waste good material if I'm not paid for it.

I mean, how else do you propose to organize the sea of information that the internet is constantly swamped in? Individual personalities work as a pretty consistently navigable waypoint and information gatekeeper, a pretty decent filtration mechanism. Most other methods are somewhat vulnerable to corruption over time, or are less consistent, or demand higher maintenance for different tradeoffs.

I don't necessarily think so. Following individuals (granted that you are actually doing so, and not following just an individual's "brand") is kind of a better way to guarantee that you're going to get a consistent perspective. If you just followed topics, oh, here's this perspective, this perspective, this perspective, ahhh, and it all becomes so much noise. Now you have to engage with the kind of, surface level summation of so many people's cited sources and comments. It becomes harder to judge, potentially, harder to understand.

It's like if you were trying to find a good video game to play.

You could search by genre, right, or, by "topic", and that might get you some stuff that's similar, but if you've ever tried to browse the steam store by just tags alone, you'll find pretty quick how useless it is.

So, maybe you go by publisher, or, likewise, by magazine, by news site. That might be decent, for finding similar games, through a publisher, right, but it's kind of a toss-up. If you like street fighter 6, it's a toss up whether or not you like any of capcom's other games. Same thing could be said of most publishers. And I don't think you're going to find consistent perspectives, necessarily, from kotaku, or even really useful information. It is the kind of, MO of a news company to flatten every journalists' output into a kind of unified, easily consumable, inoffensive package, to bump up readership numbers and ensure they keep getting review copies, and ensure they keep hitting deadlines that line up with, or come a day or two before, release dates.

So, then you just go to one singular journalist. Now you can trust their perspective, now you can understand their tastes and where they line up with you and where they don't. What they are possibly more predisposed towards reviewing. This is easier if they're a private entity, rather than part of a larger model. Or, you could start following a single studio, or a single developer. Now you can understand what they are likely to produce in the future, as viewed through the lens of their past catalogue. Do they produce point and clicks? First person horror? Do they make games with particular subject matters that you find fascinating, or do they just have a kind of vibe that you like?

So that's kind of why it would make sense to follow specific people, instead of just kind of, crowdsourcing your topics, and then following those collectively defined topics. One will give you the more consistent set of answers about what you're looking for, one will give you a much broader net, and maybe will inform you more of the "cultural zeitgeist", insofar as it exists among people who also want to make posts on those topics, to people who only want to follow those topics, and not follow the posters themselves. And I would, broadly, say the consistency is more important than "accuracy", not that I think you're going to get either from following topics and not people.

You know I haven't seen a whole lot of anime, so sue me, but I'll kind of agree with this take. They're both pretty good anime, and probably even great, and an easy recommendation, right. At the same time, they really don't inspire me in any way, or bring up like, interesting philosophical subject matter really at all, which are things that are value in media more than like. Cool fight scenes, and an accessible story.

Also, an aside, but these shows don't have that great of fight scenes. They have pretty good "action", I guess, pretty good animation, but fight scenes? I wouldn't say they're well written or choreographed, they're about as basic as you can get. FMAB gets some points for having inventive solutions that crop up occasionally as a result of the setting's alchemy and real chemical reactions and stuff, but that's about it. Otherwise both of these shows are kind of extremely basic when it comes to their action. Both in the way that it's conventionally written, but also in their direction and choreography. I think stylistically I might be opposed to anime generally, in this regard, as a medium that has, almost inherently, no limitations (being animation, right), and as a kind of, general style, that tends to place the setup basically right before the payoff happens. Rather than sort of gradually building up to more well-founded action scenes. In action choreography, maybe I just have kind of, infamously high standards for this stuff, or have different tastes from the norm, cause every time I've seen "great anime action" it's always like, the most incomprehensible, stiffly animated, impact frame yutapon cube sakuga nonsense you could ever imagine.

I dunno, am I insane for the take the the vast majority of action choreography is better done when it's grounded into an actual physicality, and implicit physical ruleset, rather than like, appreciating the tradeoff that comes with not doing that, the tradeoff of spectacle and absurdity?

You know, it's been pretty good so far, I'd even say, really good, probably, and it has an advantage over FMA:B in that I don't find the comedy kind of, grating and annoying, and I find it actually funny sometimes, even if it's mostly just weird and kind of pervy or whatever. Not like, fanservicey, but it does feel like the comedy is just, sex-based, or something? I dunno. I might just be like overblowing it in my brain.

With all that being said, FMA:B is definitely better still. Frieren has specific arcs, FMA:B just straight up has an overarching story that basically never stops and never really falls into, like, specific sections. I dunno, I guess that's mostly a pacing thing, but if you were to ask me which one I liked more on that basis, I would say FMA:B every time. There are some other anime that can match that pacing, right, but most of the time they end up being kind of older more adult-oriented animation, and they don't really have as broad of appeal as FMA:B, so I think it still takes the GOAT position.

Frieren is really good though, I will give it that.

Yeah, but I like physical keyboards because they're cool, and non-physical keyboards are lame. They reduce my hardware experience to a joyless, abstracted, sterile experience, where I don't have the ability to click any buttons, turn any knobs, flip any hinges. Then, on top of that, the software experience also ends up being standardized and sterile.

It is more practically efficient, sure. But I like the inefficiency. It's like driving a stick-shift, it's less convenient, but the tactility and inconvenience, the physicality, makes the object more real, less confined to cyberspace. I am forced to become a more conscious driver, I can't drink a drink while I drive, or drive one-handed. Old phones are like portable games consoles. New phones are magic mirrors that steal your soul.

There's also probably something to be said that there's a sort of two-way causal relationship, where the phones becoming more practical devices enables more reliance upon them, and phones becoming more practical devices is driven by a need from private interests to make these devices more reliable and frictionless. More joyless. Cars used to be a simple toy and a fool's replacement for the horse and buggy. In many ways, I would've much preferred if they had remained confined to that use case, rather than evolving to take over american civic infrastructure and life.

It's sort of like, dwarf fortress has an appeal, not just in playing the "game", right, not just in doing the things in the game, but also in memorizing the layouts and how to interface with the horrible UI, where it makes you feel smart for understanding how to parse it, even if in reality it's a fairly useless skill, and it's not actually that complicated.

to kind of sum it up, I think "not all men" tends to be kind of a red flag in the same vein as "all lives matter". Not quite as bad, and obviously it's contextually different as "not all men" refers to feminism rather than race relations, but I think it kind of makes the point as a metaphor.

You could try these, if they're available in your area, seems pretty similar and I always liked em.

I've never seen anyone bring it up, so there's probably no chance it ever gets brought back. How come banana ice cream is so uncommon? It's the obvious secret fourth flavor, and this one was good. Why do we live on hellworld?

I will take on every animal at once, and win.

By being elected president on a platform of bog-standard normal liberalism, FDR style, behind a remotely charismatic personality rather than a shambling horrid human corpse. I will legislate the space force to create huge satellites that catch solar energy and funnel that energy down to the surface with big microwaves. I will take this opportunity to equip the space stations with hypersonic aircraft that will drop normal supersonic personnel carriers, ensuring a global response time of only a few hours. This will probably be less monetarily intensive than putting a US military base everywhere on the planet, so I'd use those savings to expand the nuclear arsenal, and possibly deploy some of those weapons to space in secret under the guise of some commercial wi-fi satellite ventures. I will reveal this fact to everyone later on once they have all been globally deployed and nobody has any countermeasures, and then I'll start performing a bloody hostile takeover of the planet.

Then, I will attempt to quintuple global fossil fuel output. I don't know what we'll use all this excess energy for, probably we'd just use it to build more horrible weapons of war, or huge impenetrable underground citadels, or whatever. I will get rid of regulation for industry, ensuring massive environmental disasters. I will even tell the CIA to do some of them probably, nord stream pipeline style, and they'll probably do it cause they're crazy. Maybe I'll use the microwave power grid to blow up some of my enemies by boiling them until they explode.

At the end of my term as god emperor dictator, a disgrace and shell of my former self, I will use the nuclear football to ensure no life on the planet survives, except for maybe basic viruses, bacteria, and maybe a couple different insects. I will arise from my presidential super-bunker to face a barren world. A perfect world, free from sin. Thus concludes the 2nd Global Emu War.

If I wasn't going to do any of that and I just had to give like the least dangerous animal I personally could take on, I'd probably say like. Maybe a stray ant. That might be too sad, though, because that's just a lonely ant and it's sort of too pathetic to kill it. Maybe like a really evil guy that's about to die anyways? But that's also too sad, because that's just a meat-puppet automaton of life that has shambled around until it's shut down. Maybe I could just kill like, dick cheney, or something, someone super evil. He looks too much like george costanza for me to do that though, I think.

Edit: actually I think I could take on any invasive species of animal barehanded, with a combination of my extremely tough fists that I have been spraying with dog medicine, and tai chi exercise DVD training regimen.

Can't we just have both, and teach both? But like, in a more committed fashion than we currently do. Probably swapping out road signs and textbooks as they naturally need to be swapped out, to include both sets of measurements and the conversions between them.

I mean, the US was just a colonial state that broke ties to the british monarchy, and that shit happens all the time, so I think through that method, there's still a pretty good chance. If you're talking more about like, the establishment of the US as a state through the genocide of the native peoples, intentional or otherwise, I'd say, sure, yeah, that's hopefully never gonna happen again, but general independence movements happen all the time.

Needs more limitations on investment in the stock market, more investment into co-ops and employee owned businesses, and more investment into rail infrastructure and other good civic infrastructure at the federal level. Also, change from general ranked choice voting, to the schulze method.

Also I wanna see a real move towards taco tuesday. We think it's a meme or whatever, but like an experimental free food day, or free single meal, for at least one day a week, seems totally achievable, and like it would do some good. Maybe try to integrate some community gardening into it or something, set up some federal system for that, that would be fucking sick dude hoo lee.

Edit: If you're getting rid of states, or like, trying to rethink them, I think I remember seeing some maps redrawn with states if they all had totally equal population, which you could do, and I've also seen some maps that allocate states based more on natural resources, than just having like, a lot of the western states be shitty squares and stuff. I think I saw one based on water tables, but I can't seem to find it or remember the name of it. You'd probably wanna go in for stuff like that, if you wanted to still retain the idea of states, and give them a reason to exist but also be fair and not lame.

Yeah, there's not really a great solution that's going to be reliable and also be fast. The best case scenario I can think of for a smart gun is maybe a car gun, or something that people might otherwise have kept in a safe, but gun safes and locks aren't really expensive enough to justify these kinds of purchases, and obviously they're going to be more reliable than any digital security you might wanna go for. These sorts of things are also somewhat spoofable, even just with modification to the gun, so I don't really think smart gun systems would really help cut down on gun trafficking, either. At least, not with any actually feasible, normal solution.

BTW - I generally avoid anything with Ian McCollum, since he’s been pretty clear that he doesn’t support 2A rights for everyone (e.g., the poors, LGBTQ+ people, non-white people, etc.), and has generally been acting like a right-wing grifter. Which is unfortunate.

Yeah I saw the whole uhh, brownells thing that happened between him and inrangeTV, and that kinda sucked, plus the azov battalion book which seemed like pure grift. Also the HEAT rig collab he released sucked. I dunno that I'd call him a right wing grifter too much on that front, as much as just, a pure grifter, which is maybe right wing depending on how you're judging your personal overton window. I don't really think whatever his political beliefs are tend to infect his actual content much, if at all. It does kinda suck, though, just generally. Luckily I have adblock so I don't really have to be supporting his grift while I learn about cool historical stuff, and he's a pretty good resource with his disassemblies of obscure stuff. Overall, he sucks more than I like.

You know, it's kind of interesting, because I kind of wonder, and I'm sure someone could educate me to, the differences between philosophical outlooks that drive these different ideals.

If you were like, a windows or mac purist, you'd maybe just be gunning for as much mass adoption as possible, meaning that you have as much interoperability, or, accessibility, as possible, and maybe you're just biting the bullet in terms of like, corporate shenanigans and control. Basically you'd just be like, admitting defeat, to some extent, it'd be a compromise ideology. It's sort of like the same ideology that pushes one big centralized set of servers for everything, compared to everyone running their own little instances. Sure, you're getting a lack of security, lack of flexibility, and thus, potentially, the functionality of the app ends up sucking depending on what you're doing, yadda yadda. But in return, you get mass adoption. This is kinda flip-flopped with like, Linux purism, right? And then the natural use cases and market adoption for it tends to just be the more niche uses, that demand such flexibility.

So, which is more important for free access. Actual legal freedom, which even works itself into the structure of the app itself, right, or just, straight mercenary mass adoption, under any means necessary? I dunno.

On one hand, within the current structure of the economy and political landscape, globally, it's kind of impossible to achieve mass adoption with Linux, and I think mass adoption of it is almost kind of antithetical to the anarchism of the project itself, as is mass adoption of most anarchist political projects. It's just kind of impossible to win in a head-to-head competition with larger corporations, or with more short-term gains focused ideologies.

I'm still just running windows 10 LTSC with MAS, and it works fine for me, so that's obviously where my ideological line is kind of threaded, just having everybody have the best free version of windows, maybe with some sort of increased privacy modifications to cut down on telemetry and shit like that, but I kinda doubt people could actually do that without destroying the usability of the system like all of those tend to do, or else someone would've probably done it by now.

The problem is that I don't know whether or not it's gonna be worthwhile until I read the comment, and by that point, it's already too late, because I've already read it.

People have definitely tried.

You have This., and This. Like everything, it seems like it's mostly just a political issue. You'd probably get more gas out of a smart holster, honestly, but there's just not very much demand from the people who buy guns for actual safety measures, including police departments and militaries. The closest I think you'll find that gun owners commonly want is access to suppressors, mostly out of the convenience of not having to wear hearing protection, and also maybe that it makes them feel like a cool epic black ops guy.

Couple different factors there, but it mostly just comes down to some easily explainable things. A shooter without a motive isn't a story that sells well, and it isn't a story that people generally want to read. Your highest profile american crimes tend to be perpetrated by extreme weirdos. I think it's probably just that this guy was kind of a sad old dude, and probably a pedo to boot, so it doesn't really make for a nice, harrowing story. It's just depressing, mostly.

Most readers, I think, want a kind of, narrative, or meta-narrative, around their media consumption. You can see people in this thread, trying to stamp one onto this shooting with the whole bump-stock thing, which I think is mostly just a minor aside, but for the fact that it kind of ties into a larger narrative about gun control, a larger meta-narrative, that serves political ends. Even in that, though, it's not a very good grafting subject for those stories. The fact that it was passed by a republican president means that it can't really serve mainstream political party end-goals, and bump stocks aren't really a significant concern, despite how people might want to make them out to be. Basically their only tactical use case is something like this, otherwise, they're mostly a toy. They don't really have the same use-case for gang violence, like you might see with glock switches. So they don't really present a highly defensible instance of gun control going wrong, and they don't present a high-priority target in terms of gun control legislation.

It is almost impossible for most places to do reporting in a way where you are ever given the full scope, the full picture. It's hard to report sobering data which might give you the larger picture, because it's uncertain, up for contestation, boring, and unrelatable. It's hard to report on everything in an indiscriminate way, if you're just reporting everything without any bigger picture questions, then you're liable to simply serving stories with no external context that would ground the reader, and you lead the reader to only ground themselves. If you do this enough, in combination with the A-B testing that might tell you what to actually report on, you'll just end up becoming 24 hour nightly news, where you just report on murder and rapes and serve political agendas without any real knowledge of what you're doing. Things have to inherently be passed through the filter of a meta-narrative in order for them to make any sense, to have any meaning at all. If you can't really do that, if all you're left with is meaningless violence, you will probably just see people ignore it.