Reminds me of an old story about the game director Chris Taylor. He wanted to make a second iteration to bis game “Total Annihilation” since he promised to do so to his fans. However the current rightsholder, Atari, refused to sell the rights to him and instead took it as a business opportunity. They announced they’d do it themselves (without Taylor). The project got immediately canceled after the public reaction exploded in their faces (this was before social media).

Taylor still didn’t get the rights to his creation back and proceeded to do it anyway with a new name, “Supreme Commander” (with great success). Atari only lost both money and public good will. This still worked though since there wasn’t that much of a public mass manipulation machinery. With social media Atari could’ve potentially gotten through with it.

I mean, that’s a whole different topic. Documents and info material everyone should have access to need to be inclusive so even your average Fox News viewer can read it.

There are about 675 million pigs worldwide.

I’ve read the fastest as Pepsi Co.

Ah yes, I love when people do that. Especially since it perfectly circumvents word-based personal filters.

Youtube/Google is known to bully and lash out against Firefox users first, they use that as a hybrid strategy to make people use Google Chrome more (other market, same corposcum). Not surprised.

Naah. For me both Newpipe on mobile and Freetube on desktop still work fine, aside from rare IP blocks (which can be easily circumvented with a VPN). Going to set up a JellyFin with auto-download for my favourite creators in the future. It’ll work out somehow, like always. Should they go full ham and lock all creators behind some subscription wall or whatever people will just code and set up relays and torrents automatically being fed with new videos to free them, or setting up hundreds of Peertube instances that get auto-filled or sth.

These big companies can’t win in this regard, especially not now when the tide is already shifting and even the mainstream increasingly starts hating them. The moment large creators see a viable alternative that isn’t as awful (some already post their uncut videos to other platforms only due to all the word censoring etc) they’re screwed, so locking it down and enshittificating it even further is increasingly dangerous for them by now.

Branch Education. Rare videos, but so good!

“Normal people”

I have one of those Eierschalensollbruchstellenverursacher. They’re really useless.

Welcome to Zangendeutsch, where we (mostly) take words and translate them literally. Works the other way as well btw, I often see stuff like that in those “funny german words” memes. Birth control pill = Antibabypille = Antibabypill

Tangled cables = Kabelsalat = Cablesalad

(excess weight gained due to sadness) = Kummerspeck = Griefbacon

and bullying (or how survive it).

My over a decade long therapeutic history, scars and damage to sensory organs say differently. You’re right about the shootings though. Since the bullying at my schools was so bad I can guarantee there would have been at least one shooting if it was in the US. Back then I would’ve probably celebrated the idea even, I was saddened when an actual shooting happened somewhere because it wasn’t at my school, but specifically not because it was a shooting (just to give you an idea how bad the bullying was).

Heard the US schools got a really weird sports team thingy going. Never fully got that; there’s no comparable culture over here. Of course schools love to work with Sports Clubs whenever possible, they’re not “the same” though (and it’s about the sport itself, very rarely the Clubs’ identity). There definitely aren’t state- or nationwide sport tournaments organized around school teams in the same fashion the US celebrates it.

Latin as first (second) language sounds so phenomenally weird to me. How late in school did you start learning? For me it was third grade in primary school, I can still remember that first sheet with pictures of “tree” and “umbrella” as it felt so alien to me for things to suddenly be called differently.

There was a choice for second (third) language in sixth class, I chose Latin there as well (there were only 2 choices, Latin and French). Unfortunately had to change school 2 years later and they only had French, so now I can’t speak either. 🥴

English however never was optional (your post make it sound like it was for you, pretty sure no state does it that way though…?). In fact for all I know it’s one of the primary classes everywhere in Germany, together with German and math.

DU

Do you imply that ancestors building concentration camps is somehow boosting education?

…so Trump’s decisions actually are long-term educational policy? Little genocide today, big brains tomorrow? 🧐

This meme couldn’t have been made by a German. Nobody in their right mind would say something so outlandish as Germany having a great education system. I literally got taught with a smashed blackboard, next to a cabinet that collapsed during class and with “books” that began identifying as a stack of papers (still had to wrap them though for protection! …somehow!).

On the upside, my school didn’t have mold… that we knew off. And we constantly had classes canceled since there weren’t enough teachers once a single one was missing.

Imagine putting your name on AI slop. That doesn’t even make legal sense, you can’t claim to have “made” it. Since you didn’t, effectively nobody did.

This. Nintendo went so far to try patenting relative physics in games (I think that one failed, but they do hold a patent for throwing balls at someone to catch them). And if you wonder why you never see smaller round menus in games for conversation selection (but mostly a rather clunky list instead), that patent is held by EA or Bioware due to Mass Effecr. For a fucking circular conversation menu.

I can’t eat as much as I want to vomit. This whole system is just perverted to the core and completely stifles both culture AND economy. They just register all this shit because patent trolling is also a business to them. It’s both profitable and weaponizable.

Luckily there is active work on things, both on protocol level as well as with some kind of “federated moderation system”, aimed to reduce workload for mods and admins and increase consistency without weakening the strengths of a federated system (like that rules and moderation styles can differ).

In general the Mastodon gGmbh was simply overrun by demand (and they REALLY didn’t make things better by funneling people towards them with that awful Mastodon app), and both them losing tax exemptions due to bad german governments as well as bad decisions by Eugen (like working with Meta / Threads) lead to Mastodon underperforming. That shit sucks.

It can get better though, and people are working on that.