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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • Khrux@ttrpg.networktoMemes@sopuli.xyzIt would get old fast
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    18 hours ago

    Coming from the UK is correct, it was literally an artistocratic flex at having literally useless land. I read a dissertation a few years back that also linked this to a Baudrillard style simulationist desire for the upper class not to see land with any practical value immediately besides their homes because they were resistant to accept that their wealth was exercised from any real action, and instead they’d pretend it was just a truth. But beyond the lawns were forests and fields, because they had to exist.

    When lawns were adopted by the bourgeoisie, who only had half an acre of property, it was already trendy to have the surrounding acres of the house be only lawn. The bourgeoisie simulation was to have the house surrounded by lawns as if it were to then give way to fields and forests, which of course did not exist, just your neighbours equally ugly plot of land.

    What I never understood about all of this though, is that gardens are equally cosmetic vanity. I have fond memories of the garden of my grandmother, which has a small greenhouse and two raised vegetable beds at the back, but everything else was flower beds, a pond, a summer pavillion, a small lawn, a shed and a scattering of trees and bushes. Other than the small sections for growing vegetables, it was all entirely for vanity. But it was beautiful. Hell, the small lawn was even pretty functional as the primary place to set up chairs in the sun and play ball games.

    I am British, and once this island was forest and mountains from shore to shore, with meadows and plains being rare. The lawn never made sense here, and caught on less in in the Soviet Bloc as plains become more common in nature. America is a land with far more natural plains, and the lawn is further removed from it’s original status. It’s imitating an imitation of a denial of reality, Baudrillard would have a field day.

    But I did mention, in my grandmother’s garden, playing ball games on the lawn. American sport is largely built on the suburban madness that is lawns. I’m not talking about sport born in urban centers like basketball, or sports from true rural areas, which I can only assume is rednecks drink driving, if watching US shows has told me anything, but Baseball, American Football and even golf are sports made for lawns. It’s hard to detangle lawns from middle class America without stopping middle class kids play sports in their gardens.

    One day they’ll add vegetable gardening to the Olympics and America will be saved, and Joseph McCarthy will be stuck in hell on his fucking lawn.


  • Khrux@ttrpg.networktomemes@lemmy.worldAmusement
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    2 days ago

    I work a lot of fancy events as a caterer and often have a drink behind the scenes, but often these events are in random offices with no bar support, resulting in us drinking strange concoctions.

    Spanish coke is popular, which is just red wine and coke. This is probably second only to white wine spritzers. Separately in day events, we’ve found putting espresso into coke over ice is surprisingly okay, I wouldn’t say it’s better than the sum of its parts, but probably on par with normal coke.

    So I had the wise idea of shaking espresso, coke, and red wine together, just to see what it tasted like. I’d truly give it a 5/10. Which isn’t bad if not for the fact that I’d give each ingredient alone a 6/10 or better.


  • Khrux@ttrpg.networktoMemes@sopuli.xyzOff topic
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    8 days ago

    At least I expect that from him and basically all his characters. It’s most irritating when it’s a character who should have eloquence, ht doesn’t.

    Also by extension, film / TV is the ideal medium for imperfect dialogue. The medium took queues from theatre and literature in it’s inception but there is truly no other medium suited to the imperfection of real dialogue like real life.

    Mediums which demand a high critical analysis like most paintings invite the viewer to study and puzzle over the narrative, but film has it’s roots in cinema, and lowbrow cinema at that. I don’t really mean that critically, it’s my preferred medium, but nothing expects an easily digestible narrative like film and TV.


    I don’t think it’s inherently the mediums flaw, duration and viewing time dictates a lot.

    • A good song is intended to be listened to by the same person a few times, and as such be meditated on.
    • A good painting or photograph is often displayed in a galleries or otherwise as part of some sort of exhibit that encourages reflection and analysis.
    • Traditional musical theatre can be shallow and vibes based, but in it’s structure, it’s intending to be viewed once or twice but listened to frequently.
    • Literature typically takes days, weeks, or even months to compete, which invites a degree of analysis via it’s inventment.

    Film and TV his a wired niche. Although mainstream TV also takes days, weeks of months to compete, the vast majority intentionally invites you to consume without analysis. Mainstream film fully invites the average viewer to see it once, and anything further than that is for chance or deeper fans.

    However film and modern high budget TV is mor* e venture capitalism than art, it’s just that in it’s method of consumerism, it poses as art. This gives it its own rules, and one of those rules is that comprehension is only a useful tool when it favours creating and retaining viewers/income.

    But as it’s rose to dominate all other media, there and many, many people who enjoy film and TV without any media literacy outside of it, and therefore their only touchstone is reality. That paired with the fact that we’ve largely cracked our ability for movies to direct focus via mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing sound etc, means it’s the ideal medium to not just emulate realistic performance, but focus on it and celebrate it. This often comes with unclear dialogue.

    Then the only way for deeper fans to enjoy this mediu BBm is to re-experience it By re-exploring rit. Each additional delve, albeit short - often just an episode or feature film length - gains that viewer status unlike other mediums.

    This forces realistic dialogue to be idolised by fans bove clarity, while being irrelevant to the casual viewer. At last in my opinion.

    This is a lunatic ramble, which I’m writing at 3am in my time zone after being unable to sleep. Beyond any typos, I apologize if this is entirely incoherent or just wrong and assumptive.


  • I’m trying to make my own smart watch as a hobby experiment at the moment, and one of my most important features is NFC payments. It’s a nightmare, although I understand why. Currently my plan is to buy another smart watch or smart ring and take the NFC chip from it, which is maddening, but more or less my only option due to contactless payment security.

    To do contactless payments, your bank must effectively permit the specific device, otherwise go through GPay or Apple Pay, who in turn just do the permitting themselves. Anything outside of the standard ecosystem just gets overlooked.

    The best workaround while avoiding these companies is to find a smart watch or ring that has compatibility with a proxy card, such as Curve. But beyond halving the price of the accessory, this is pretty much an arbitrary decision.



  • Microsoft has absolutely been preparing for the end of traditional consoles more or less since the flop of the Xbox One. Their entire push a few years back to make “Everything Xbox” was a bit mistimed and disloyal to their console war cultists but they’re right that it’s the natural end point.

    I think we’ll probably see streaming games from their servers reoccur in popularity pretty soon, as much as I’m not a fan of it, because it’s the total end point for non tech savvy consumers, they just pay a subscription, get a controller which can connect to the TV or phone and download an app, no hardware required. Meanwhile every consumer who is resisting the death of tech literacy (everyone else), is going in this direction. The physical console will reduce in popularity year by year as it fills a niche that nobody needs anymore.

    That being said, the popularity of the switch and steam deck interests me, because it’s a third direction away from traditional consoles that I’d not have predicted.




  • I’d really really like a phone with cameras that are flush with the back of the case, and don’t care whatsoever how thin my phone is once it’s under 1cm.

    It feels like the entire ethos of smartphone design (led by apple) had sleek minimal design as it’s guiding light, but keeps adding exceptions. As much as I enjoy a versatile, bulky laptop and photography camera, I really enjoy the style of a smartphone being a piece of glass in my pocket.


  • I’d have preferred a click lock of sorts, because in the cases I’m wanting to swap my battery, I’m probably on the move with no access to power / charging, such as hiking, coach rides, camping etc.

    Currently I’m pretty happy with a portable charger but I’d much rather have one or two fully charged batteries, both for the speed of getting back to full charge and reducing the speed of battery degradation.

    I’m already a big fan of having a minimalist daily carry, I have my phones with my bank cards on it, my house keys and maybe my camera or water bottle, and that’s all. If be happy to shove a few spare batteries in a little case when I know I’ll be out the house for some time, but a screwdriver is something I’d prefer to not have to carry every day.


  • I 90% agree, I swapped to wireless earbuds about a decade ago when my aux port on whatever phone I had then broke, and I immediately preferred it. I went from buying £10 wired earphones from a supermarket what sounded shit and broke every month to £25 wireless earphones that sounded shit and broke every 6 months, so for me it was am improvement. I was also a chronic “catch headphone cable on every handle” victim, to the point that I immediately preferred the wireless solution. Another thing is when my wireless headphones break, they fucking break; I go with one earbud for about a month then inevitably buy a new pair. When my wired headphones started to degrade, I always fought it, ending up in a losing battle of finding that perfect way to hold them to make them still work. The only downside I have nowadays is when I’m listening to music or a video and realise I’ve misplaced my phone, which isn’t really an issue, just that it was impossible when it was tethered to my ears.

    But I’m probably part of a very small minority when it comes to my preference. I carry a compact camera any day I leave the house intending to take photos, so my ideal phone would have one rear camera that prioritises efficiency over quality. I’d have no headphone port, and to be honest, I could live with no ports and wireless charging and data transfer. I’ve had two smartphones in the last that had their USB-C ports fail as chargers (both galaxy S8s), and I could go years without needing to use the port for anything else. My dream phone would have no ports, one rear camera without a bump, no front camera, minimal tactile side buttons, be pretty slim, have a swappable battery and run a FOSS OS and mostly FOSS apps.

    I respect the voices that want a smartphone equivalent to a ThinkPad a lot, but I don’t really think it’s anywhere near as necessary as a ThinkPad would be, because for most tasks that need something like that, I’d just use that.

    That being said, there’s two reasons I don’t 100% agree. The first is to do with the fairphone specifically. More battery space and better waterproofing don’t really apply to a phone where I can swap the battery and it comes apart so much that it’s not really competitively waterproof. The second is larger, which is that I can just not use a headphone jack if I prefer wireless, while people who prefer wired are having increasingly few options available on the market.


  • I’m actually quite fond of a large screen, but it’s not enough of a selling point for me to not go for this as my next phone. I have large enough hands that I don’t struggle with reach on a large phone, so the main drawback is the additional battery power. But the fairphone has a swappable battery anyway, so that issue is more or less nullified.

    My pet peeve is the front camera, I cannot wrap my head around the lunacy of having a large dead spot on the front of the phone, to the point I’d rather have a phone with no front facing camera than a big dead spot. People throw out screens for less.

    Fairphone is almost the ideal phone for me, except this, and although I can probably remove the camera module, I can’t swap the screen for one without the dead patch.





  • The pentagon knew Israel was about to attack, they said so themselves, but denied any support or involvement. This seems to a valid reason for the pizza party, just to track, observe and be ready for any unexpected counter response.

    I am in the camp where I believe the USA hasn’t actively been involved yet but fully intend to be in the coming days. We have a seen Israel do anything they weren’t already capable of, and the massive shift of US jets, missiles and an aircraft carrier to the middle east has largely happened after the initial attack.


  • Khrux@ttrpg.networkto196@lemmy.blahaj.zonerule away Rowling
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    2 months ago

    Also I actually have less of an issue with other people buying Gaiman’s work. I have no love for the man and won’t buy anything myself again, but if you buy something of his, the money goes to him, and stops there. Rowling directly funds bigotry; the money people spend on Harry Potter is in a direct pipeline to funding the suffering of innocent people.

    At the very least, before everything happened with Gaiman, he was known for having positive philanthropic ventures. Even if you gave him money, a sizable portion went to him, another portion went on to better the world. I’d presume he still supports these trusts and charities too.