Advertising. At what point did we as a society decide that it was perfectly acceptable for companies to manipulate us - especially children - into buying shit we don't need and didn't even want until the ad sold us on it? It's fucking wild.
Been playing Diablo 2 Resurrected again, so.. Diablo 2. Especially on higher difficulties some of those areas (Durance of Hate, f.ex) are extremely maze-like and the only reliable way to navigate it is to just follow the left wall no matter what.
Otherwise, I played a demo for a game years ago that I can't remember the name of anymore that was built around non-Euclidian geometry, so walking through a door in one direction would take you to one place, but walking back in the other would take you somewhere else instead of back to where you came from and such.
I have been reading The Onion for decades, and it's bad when even I can't tell the difference between legit stupid shit Trump says and made up stupid shit.
That country doesn't exist anymore, and it hasn't in generations. Anyone who believes otherwise has been drinking a bit too much of the kool-aid. What we have left is a bunch of rednecks who trot out that line about tyranny to justify holding onto their guns, and otherwise a bunch of fat, happy people who have little to no real idea about what's going on at home, much less around the world.
Mind you, as you pointed out in my comment elsewhere, I agree that it's hypocrisy and cowardice, but that doesn't mean I'm okay with expecting people to sacrifice themselves (especially when you're not willing to put yourself on the line too) for some heavily-propagandized patriotic ideal that is pure fabrication at this point. Especially when the reality is that tyranny has been winning here for a long time and most people seem fine with it as long as things aren't too uncomfortable for them (which amounts to: they get to drive their big stupid SUVs and watch football and pretend that they're temporarily-embarrassed millionaires.) The idea of 'rugged individualism' has been drilled into this country's head for at least the last 40 years I've been paying attention to politics, not because it comes from the core of our national identity, but because it divides us and hampers efforts to engender class consciousness.
What I'm trying to do here is thread the needle: yes there is hypocrisy and it should be called out, but, as the rest of the sentence you quoted says, it's also a little bit hypocritical to expect others to do what you aren't here doing too. I understand the frustration non-Americans feel at the direction this country is going and the implications it has for them, and trust me when I say that some of us feel the same way too. But I'm a disabled man in my 50s, I'm more useful on the information/ideas/inspiration side of things than on the front line.
Person of Interest. A friend recommended it and I bounced off the first season hard (s1 is kind of a crime-of-the-week thing which is very not my jam). Twice. On the third try (the friend was very persistent) I got to the second season and the character of the show changed radically and became about AI and shit and that was directly up my alley and I loved it.
You are conflating civilization with empire, the two words have different definitions for a reason. Imperialism is, according to Miriam-Webster, 'the policy, practice, or advocacy of extending the power and dominion of a nation especially by direct territorial acquisitions or by gaining indirect control over the political or economic life of other areas'. New Zealand qualifies as civilization in most peoples' books, it's not an empire, and there are lots of other similar examples out there.
You know, I just realized I don't get it (or at least not as much) with Voyager on mobile, and I didn't even think about it. I'm using the Alexandrite UI on desktop and it's bad about it, I haven't found any options for it in the settings or anything. I noticed it a few times on reddit, but I was subbed to so many communities and they were so much more active that it almost never happened. Oh well.
I find the right balance (for me) to be actively seeking out conversations that challenge my beliefs and worldview, being open to being wrong, and developing a good bullshit detector. I guess growing up during the Cold War helped instill in me a fair amount of distrust for authority of any kind helped. Even still I believed the propaganda about the US being a beacon of freedom and democracy until I was exposed to the truth of the matter, but still, I sought out counter-narratives and listened to the weight of evidence and was willing to admit to being wrong and changing my views, so.. shrug
Aliens didn't exactly break new ground in strong female characters (except perhaps with Ripley as lead), but it was an early very popular movie that had strong female characters who weren't dependent upon men to save them so it was pretty good for representing women as something other than Hollywood's standard of the time. Not great mind you because the only way either of them managed to achieve that is by making both of them (especially Vasquez, Ripley at least had some nuance) act like traditional male characters, but it was a big step.
That's a fair point actually, and one I've not heard before. I'm not sure it's worth trying to convert all (checks notes) 174 countries/territories to right-hand drive, but that's reasonable.
Yeah, I like Scaled, I've switched to using that now. Thanks!
And yeah with Active I've noticed it seems to put the same posts at the top if I check it multiple times a day (I'll often pop in for 20-30 minutes while waiting on something else or whatever), so hopefully Scaled does a better job about mixing that up.
As an aside: I am subbed to several political/news communities and I keep seeing the same post cross-posted to all 3 of them back to back, do you know of a way to avoid that? I want the other content from those subs but seeing the same 'human fire hose of shit spews some more shit' article 2-3 times in a row is annoying.
Yeah, I think after reading a couple replies in here I'm gonna go make an account on lemmy.ml and see how it goes. I just don't want to be account-hopping every 5 minutes or whatever, I want a place where I can get the posts I want without the bullshit. I left reddit for many of the reasons comfy mentioned, so lemmy.world does not seem to be the place for that.
I'm not all that keen on Samsung myself, but the 'and shit' here is a stand-in for the other makers of android phones for the US market. I'm sure google would be happy to supply a list, but I can't be fucked to go find it.
Libra00 @ libra00 @lemmy.world Posts 1Comments 659Joined 4 mo. ago 
Advertising. At what point did we as a society decide that it was perfectly acceptable for companies to manipulate us - especially children - into buying shit we don't need and didn't even want until the ad sold us on it? It's fucking wild.