I’d happily sit through and actually pay attention to ads if they were always and only in the language I’m trying to learn. I suppose that may be a hard sell for advertisers, but I’d counter that I don’t need much language skill to recognize most brands in any language.

Self-hosting is inherently not low effort. This isn’t memes or shitposts. This is people helping people that are trying to help themselves, a.k.a. people making an effort. Communities rely on the discretion of mods and rules specific to the community focus. If this community didn’t have some kind of bar to meet for low effort posts it would drive away participants and contributors more interested in higher effort and more interesting topics. It gets real old seeing people ask and answer the same basic questions about Plex, Jellyfin, *arrs, and docker all the time. Worrying about if this rule will be abused seems premature. Besides (as others have pointed out) there are other communities with similar interests, if you’re that concerned that your spammy no-context YouTube video got deleted, please go try your luck elsewhere.

Romp? That’s an interesting take. Kind of like whistling past the graveyard because the moral of the story for the motties (the civilization we contact) is basically that unchecked growth creates a cycle of unsustainable growth and apocalyptic collapse, which should be a familiar theme to anyone living through a capitalist dystopia.

I really like Niven and Pournelle individuallt, but the things they’ve collaborated on like this are even better.

This is basically the plot of “The Mote in God’s Eye” by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

Yes, that is the subversion of expectations that makes this a joke.

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The Hunger Games owes everything to Stephen King. They basically just took The Long Walk novel and glittered/mashed it up with The Running Man movie. Neither of those took place during or after any apocalypse. They were each just set in either the now, or the very near future, in an America that has gone fully corrupt as a result of being morally, politically, and economically bankrupt. King was (and always has) written very local and topical stories set in what is literally his here and now. When he lived in Maine, he wrote Maine stories. When he moved to Florida, he wrote Duma Key. So, it’s no surprise that a YA story as derivative as The Hunger Games would have the same blind spot for Global events as the inspirational works.

But, also if we were really going to descend into an apocalypse (or a dictatorship), news of the broader globe would be one of the first casualties. People inside most apocalypse (and fascist dystopian) stories don’t usually have a lot of knowledge about the “outside” world. If they do, it’s usually an unreliable narrative.

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The cardinal directions are north, east, south, and west, as on a map. They are not left, right, up, and down because the cardinal directions are not relative to the observer. The problem of differentiating D-Pad, Stick, shoulder, trigger, etc. can be frustrating too (especially when they are shown on screen as icons with confusingly minor differences instead of text), but that is another matter entirely.

It’s often framed as a system of moral philosophies and the way the impact our behavior and interactions with the world and society. So yes, in many ways, veganism is a religion, or at the very least religion adjacent. Religions aren’t limited to belief in a magical sky daddy.

To be clear, it is clearly bigotry to use “religion” as a label in an effort to be dismissive of anyone’s personal moral belief system or philosophy.

Those things fucking suck when you can get them to work and they are downright dangerous otherwise.

Whataboutism is a non-sequitor that disrupts and discourages productive discussion.

Whenever someone says, “Statistically…”, you know they’re about to say some dumb shit that is an ignorant misinterpretation of statistics.

I felt like Rachel Brosnahan’s performance as Lois Lane was either inspired by or an homage to Margot Kidder. They both seem to effortlessly balance smart, funny, feminine, and powerful in an apparently effortless way. Both have maad rizz, no cap.

Sorry for the rant. I long story short, I agree with you.

The quadratic formula.

When we learned to use it in algebra, it was just rote memorization that made little sense. We knew there was a proof for it, but we were told it was beyond our level and to just wait. When we finally touched on it again in Calculus, it was little more than a footnote. Since we had developed better tools for finding roots already, we did little more than note its existence and solve the problems more generally. I don’t think we got around to the real proof of the quadratic formula until later with Linear Algebra. Most people aren’t going to get that far. Most people don’t have any need to. The quadratic formula is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. You need upper level math skills to prove it, but we learn it early in order to practice algebraic skills to get to that level.

I just wish that we’d have been taught some of those calculus fundamentals and ideas earlier. It would have been like a light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe we wouldn’t be ready to rigorously work through limits and integrals before all that algebra practice, but even a child can understand acceleration and its relationship to changes in velocity. We have so many documentaries about special relativity, general relativity, and quantum mechanics. Almost no one watching these documentaries can do that math, but we don’t worry about that. Our society could benefit from everyone having more general knowledge about the very broad strokes of calculus, differential equations, statistics, and combinatorics long before we worry about teaching the mechanics of those maths to them. Not everyone needs to know HOW to do them, but everyone can be taught to appreciate WHAT they do and WHY they are important and a part of every facet of our lives.

My social anxiety combined with an ability to sing that is overshadowed by my ability to hear when people sing off key is exactly why I sing karaoke. I belt out the songs I know I can sing (at least a little) and songs that I love because it beats the thrill of any roller coaster around. My eyes may be closed. My hands might be shaking so bad I can barely hold the mic. But… I don’t know. Karaoke isn’t about being good. It’s not about talent. It’s not about looking good for the gram. It’s about being in the moment and not letting all of that bullshit silence the song in your heart. Fucking let it all out. It’s like jumping out of a plane BECAUSE you have a fear of heights instead of doing it in spite of that fear.

As much as I’d like that to be true, probably not. Automatic signature machines have been a thing, especially for presidential signatures, for a while now. This is more a hit to Trump’s ego than anything.

If that illusion makes you feel safer, then I don’t care enough to argue with you about it.

There’s no need to involve the courts when the social media networks are complicit. It’s not as if “how” they obtained the data will ever be tested in court, they only need the data for their own internal investigations. Courts and spy agencies don’t have anything to do with it.

I used to use fuckoff@aol.com or fuckyou@aol.com whenever some page forced an email address for access. Sadly, those don’t seem to work anymore, so I’ve transitioned to getfucked@hotmail.com or if I’m feeling spicy I just feed them whatever email address I can find listed on their own site.